Category Archives: Chanting Points Memo

Taking on the DFL’s Chanting Points – like “Talking Points”, only not intended for cognitive thought.

Chanting Points Memo: “My Client Is Obviously Guilty”

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Courtesy of XKCD, here‘s one of my favorite comic strips ever:

I think about it every time a DFL chantingpointbot starts talking about things like “proof” and “evidence”.

Which brings us to this piece in MNPublius, which gurgitates one of the most alarmingly cynical memes the DFL and media (pardon the redundancy) are trying to foist on the less-literate:

It’s been well-documented that cuts to local government aid cause property taxes to rise.

Now, I spent the weekend going through the text of every piece of legislation that led to a freeze, reallocation or cut in Local Government Aid in the past ten years [1], looking for a passage that read like “Local Governments are required to raise taxes to make up for the change in the aid formula”.

Because there is none.

Local Government Aid, for the umpteenth time, was originally intended to redistribute money state tax money to poor outstate school districts and cities, so that towns like Hibbing could rebuild old schools, or Thief River Falls could have a waste-water treatment plant, or Osage could get a new police car.

It’s become a vehicle for the state’s largest (and most DFL-addled) cities, Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth, to launder their own rapacious spending throug the state budget without having to account to city and county taxpayers.

My own analysis ([in the original MNPublius posting – Ed]) shows that property taxes have steadily risen as state aid has dropped.

But Jeff’s piece doesn’t show where the causation, the coercion, the cause is.  Because yes – as Local Government Aid has slowed, cities have had to decide whether to make their own tax base cover the difference, or to do without.  Some cities, like west-metro Mound (which hasn’t gotten LGA in years) made the tough choices, cut the budgets, and learned to make do.

Others, like Minneapolis and Saint Paul and Brainerd – addled by DFL mayors and/or city councils – raised property taxes by far more than the cuts to LGA.

At any rate – Rosenberg’s premise , that “cuts to LGA force property tax hikes”, is a canard, a shrill chanting point that is based in no fact whatsoever.

A local government can opt to keep taxes rock-steady no matter what happens to LGA, and trim what’s needed; they can also make the case to their citizens and taxpayers to keep paying the bills that were formerly paid by taxpayers around the rest of the state, and let the chips fall come election time; in cities like Mound, it’s a dodgy proposition; in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the DFL will keep getting elected no matter what.

There’s a simple reason for that: Cities provide essential services that residents don’t want cut. So instead of cutting back on public safety or filling potholes, local governments are forced to make up for lost revenues by increasing property taxes.

There’s a non-sequitur there – one the DFL is counting on The People not to notice; cities do provide essential services.  They also provide plenty of non-essentials.  In Saint Paul, I pay for the best urban fire department in the US; I’m happy to do it.  We have a decent police department; there’s room for improvement, but they’d OK.

We have a lot of libraries. I love libraries – I practically grew up in one.  But as libraries become home to fewer and fewer books, it pains me to say we could perhaps do with just a tad fewer of them and not make them any less available.

We have a public works department.  I pay them to fill in potholes.  They get to it – eventually.  Clearly there is fat to be cut here. They also plow the streets.  They do an adequate job – one that could easily be privatized, along with many other city-paid services.

We have a park and rec department. I love parks. I love recreation.  The city has dozens of “Community Centers” which serve as public service catchalls for every variety of recreation and social program imaginable.  There would seem to be room for some consolidation.  And frankly, mowing the grass in the parks could be cut waaaay back.

I also pay for a city Human Rights office that fully duplicates the functions of the Ramsey County and State human rights offices, all located within a few blocks of each other in downtown Saint Paul. I pay for a mayoral staff with nineteen along with a phalanx of assistants and other hangers-on.

Could any of these be trimmed before we start laying off cops and firemen?  I think so.

Will it happen?  In Saint Paul, probably not. For all the Mayor’s whinging, the city’s government-dependence-addled electorate will likely increase property taxes to cover whatever they lose from LGA.  Most of the people who care about tax rates have already fled the cities to places with more responsible, responsive governments.

Now – if you live in a city with a more responsible government, the answer may be different.  The mayor may not be able to justify the expense.

But it’s a matter of choice.  Not “force”, as Jeff, the media and the DFL (pardon the redundancy) would like you to think.

Fortunately, the MNGOP has a “solution” for that: take away the right of local governments to make their own decisions and force them to cut essential services. That’s the impact of HF481, a bill by House Republicans that would make local governments’ budget decisions for them by outlawing any property tax increases in the 2012 fiscal year.

That sounds nice, except for one thing — if property taxes are frozen, that means services must be cut. Apparently, an all-cuts budget that slashes $6.2 billion in state funding for things like education isn’t good enough for the MNGOP. They want to force your city government to cut even more services.

The merits of HF481 notwithstanding – it’s worth a discussion – Rosenberg’s wrong.  Not all “services” are essential.  We, the taxpayers of our DFL=-addled cities, can do without $50,000 drinking fountains and misappropriation of city staff to political ends and all the other worthless patronage our cities pay for.

The point is, cuts in LGA do not lead inexorably to property tax hikes.  It is entirely voluntary – dependent entirely on the addiction of local government to spending, their success in selling those compensatory hikes to their voters, and how fed-up the voters are.

Why should voters in Bemidji pay for Saint Paul’s human rights office?

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Chanting Points Memo: Parade Of Memes

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Mount Everest isn’t that big – if you’re looking from the top of K2.

Las Vegas is “back east” – if you’re in Los Angeles.

Mark Dayton’s budget is a reasonable set of compromises, and the GOP is being pigheaded and intransigent – if your entire frame of reference is the world according to the DFL and the mushy Minnesota left.

And while I don’t know that that can be entirely fairly said about Hamline University professor and contender for Larry Jacobs’ post as “the most quoted academic pundit in the Twin Cities”, Dave Schultz.

But reading his Schultz Take post on the budget squabble, it doesn’t seem all that terribly unfair, either. When you read the piece, you can’t help but notice that he’s built his case on the entire parade of current DFLer memes:

Meme 1: “Where’s The GOP’s Plan? Huh?  Huh?  Huh?  Huh?”

Job killing and detached from reality. This is the core argument of the GOP against the Dayton budget. Yet behind the name calling one looks in desperation for the Republican alternative and it has yet to emerge.

It’s sort of like last summer, when the DFL spent three months chanting “where’s Tom Emmer’s budget?”.  They knew as well as we did that it’d be stupid for Emmer to release his budget early, and play into the DFL’s hands.

The legislature has the same leeway today; they can, and, politically, should, bide their time.   They gain nothing by giving the Governor, the DFL minority and their media enablers time and space to try to re-spin the GOP’s effort; the DFL knows this, too, but they’re counting on The People not knowing it.

Meme #2: “A “Budget Forecast” is just another word for “Budget”.  Really.  Honest.”

Schultz:

Just last week Dayton vetoed the $1 billion in cuts the GOP had already suggested. Yet that $1 billion was more than $5 billion short of what is needed, and the GOP has yet to propose how they plan to find the additional money.

And there’s #2; because there is no $6.2 billion deficit.  There was the forecast wish list the DFL kicked down the road for what they assumed would be a DFL-dominated legislature this biennium.

Schultz’s entire piece operates on the assumption that the DFL wish list is a foundational document, and that the GOP is obligated to do the DFL’s political work for it.

Meme 3: “Spending is essential for a healthy economy!”

The truth is they do not have a solution. Yes they will rant and rave about tax hurting the state economy (little evidence that is true), that there is waste and fraud (little evidence that is true), and that the budget is a job killer (even less evidence that is true).

“Little evidence that this is true” – other than the examples of California, New York, Illinois, and for that matter Greece and Ireland – states that became addicted to spending first and assuming the revenues would be there to take care of it later.

Which, if you think about it, was precisely what has led to every huge economic crash, from the Tulip bubble to the Housing bubble to the coming Higher Ed bubble.

Other than that?  Nope, no evidence at all.

However, they do not have a solution and are afraid to offer one.

Now, there, there’s no evidence, other than “we haven’t seen it yet”.

Meme #4: “Our only choices are taxes or cuts. Nothing else!”

Schultz again:

Why? Two reasons.

First, education, health, and public safety constitute 70%+ of the state budget. Any solution that seeks to address the deficit without cutting these items will not work. As Willie Sutton said when asked why he robs banks: “That is where the money is.” These items include K-12 and other popular programs for health. Cuts to them will be unpopular and the GOP does not want to be the party proposing them.

Schultz presumes (as the DFL wants you all to presume) that there are only two choices; spend more, or cut.

It’s not true, even if we don’t change the current budgeting system; “keeping funding at its current levels” is a perfectly acceptable option.  Not the one that the state’s HHS and education bureaucracies want, certainly, but acceptable in times like these.

Especially after the next revenue forecast comes out, and likely shows that revenues will grow by at least $2 billion – making the current budget completely tenable, while letting the state’s private sector try to start recovering, too…

Meme #5: “Failure to honor the DFL’s forecast will throw grandma into the street”.

This is among the most cynical, thud-witted memes there is – the idea that government is like a light switch; you can only have too much, or none.  That any cuts, or even a sober reassessment of spending priorities, or re-engineering of the budgeting process, automatically must take things away from the mythical Grandma or the eternal Child.

You’d think a professor would hold out for a more sophisticated argument.

You’d be wrong:

They want to be a majority party beyond 2012 and if they get tagged as the ones who threw grandma out of the nursing home and took books away from Suzie, they are dead.

The GOP knows, of course, that there is a middle way – indeed, an infinite number of middle ways.   Programs and spending aren’t a light switch; they’re a hose.  You can control how much comes out of the hose.  It can be a little, it can be a lot, depending on who controls the faucet, and who’s just getting hosed.

The DFL knows this too.  Which is why they – the DFL, their stooges in the media, and their allies like Schultz – are working so hard to obfuscate it.

They are hoping Dayton and the DFL take the lead on these cuts and then the GOP can escape blame. Moreover, the $1 billion cuts they suggested so far? Simply trial balloons on programs such as LGA to see how Dayton would react. So far, none of their proposals inflict clear pain upon voters.

So what – the GOP is supposed to be stupid?

Meme #6: “The DFL owns sanity, reason and reality. The Tea Party and the GOP base is an insane mob”

The other reason they cannot swallow taxes? Their core constituency seems dead set against it. Tax opposition is the cornerstone of the GOP and the Tea party.

So far, so good.

To raise taxes is to violate a core belief no matter the reality. [I added the emphasis]

And there it is; the leftist conceit that they are the custodians of “reality” – and that reality is “spending must rise, and you must float it with taxes”.

We reject that “reality” – or as we call it, “conceit”.

To raise taxes means the GOP is no different than the Democrats. To raise taxes also risks alienating many fiscal conservatives who might go elsewhere or not vote if the GOP supports taxes.

Right.

The voters that flipped the GOP from a rump minority to a solid majority in one cycle.

Why would we want to offend them, after all?

Meme #7: “If the GOP doesn’t play the game the way our hallowed anscestors, from Hubert H. Humphrey through Arne Carlson, played it then they are screwed!”

Schultz:

Thus the rock and hard place for the MN GOP: Be responsible, compromise, and accept some tax increases on the wealthy along with some spending cuts and risk alienating their base. Oppose tax increases and cut spending to popular programs and lose your majority in 2012. All Dayton and the DFL need to do is figure out how make this GOP dilemma work to their advantage.

Schultz is acting as a part of the DFL’s most treasured response to a “GOP dilemma”; the use of the DFL, union, academic and media establishments (pardon the serial redundancy) t0 try to convince people that 2+2=”blue”; that the traditional, DFL/RINO way is the only way.

Which involves convincing people that a “budget forecaset” is a “budget”.

That the only way to raise revenue is via taxes.

That reassessing spending is the same as killing grandma.

That a freeze is a cut, and that a cut is a zeroing.

That budgets must grow on top of past budgets, rather than start from zero every year.

That King Banaian’s bill, HF2, requiring state agencies to justify their spending and existence, isn’t itself an answer to a huge part of the problem.

Meme #8: “History favors us!”

Some will argue the GOP can make all these cuts without tax increases, without hurting the state, while also making additional tax cuts, and in the process grow the economy. Sound familiar? About 30 years ago Reagan said he could cut taxes, increase defense spending, and grow the economy without hurting the poor.

And in every case, he did – hampered only by the O’Neill Congress’ unwillingness to touch social spending.

The basic GOP message on the economy, taxes, and the budget has been smoke and mirrors for 30 years. It has been about cost shifting, fund raiding, program bleeding, living on past spending approaches. It has been about blaming government waste, immigrants, and lazy welfare cheats as the cause of the financial problems we face. It has been about ignoring how the demand for tax cuts to benefit the wealthy have forced a hemorrhaging of the deficit at the national level. It has been about Pawlenty pushing through a law counting inflation for revenue purposes but not for the purposes of state expenditures.

And for all that, the GOP’s approach – left undiluted by statist fripperies – works.

The DFL’s approach, on the other hand, has for eighty years revolved around…

  • Picking scapegoats – “the rich”
  • Sending armies of strawmen – “immigrants”, “welfare cheats” and “Grandma” – to try to dilute the argument into meaninglessness
  • Demand “compromise” from the GOP, while rejecting giving way on any but the most cosmetic changes to their own agenda, unless dragged to it by force.

We deserve better.

Schultz – and the DFL, the media, the academic establishment, the unions – don’t want you to know that.

Pardon the redundancy.

Chanting Points Memo: The Boy Who Cried Armageddon

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Remember the last Metro Transit strike?

The left and media (pardon the redundancy) predicted Armageddon. The poor, deprived of buses and – so the DFL and media (ptr) seemed to believe) – too stupid to adapt, would starve in their public housing.

“If you don’t get Happy To Pay For A Bigger MCTC Contract, the blood of the innocents will be on you!”

Now, in the first line of this piece, I ask if you “remember the transit strike”; it occurs to me that while it’s a rhetorical question, there might be a literal answer. The strike went (I had to look it up)  six weeks, and by about week three it was pretty clear that Metro Transit really didn’t command either the love or the market share that their press told them they did; people adapted, congestion lessened, and petty crime actually dropped.

The Teamsters wound up settling for less of a contract than they’d asked for – largely because far from the predicted Armageddon, the strike showed how generally superfluous they were in most peoples’ lives.

———-

I’m not the first to make the observation; a conservative sees government as a means to an end.  To have a free market, we need government to enforce the rule of law; to enforce contracts, to protect private property from the depredations of criminals (unofficial and otherwise), and to provide those precious few services that the private sector can not (defense, law enforcement) or, through decades or centuries of possibly-misguided tradition, just doesn’t (roads, schools) do.

Liberals see government as the end; the One Big Eternal that makes all subsidiary things possible.  Over the years, I’ve seen liberals characterize government as everything from a parent presiding over its’ children, society (that’d be us), or as the beating heart and ticking brain of society’s body.

And exactly where, in theory, these two currents collide and interact is, in normal times, the sort of thing Craig Westover and Dave Schultz can debate about in front of a packed room full of wonks, with a cash bar and hors d’oeuvres to make the whole thing more palatable.

But these aren’t normal times.  Perhaps you’ve heard – not only is our national economy a mess (our state economy a little less so, thanks to eight years of Tim  Pawlenty – not that the DFL didn’t try their darnedest), but we have a sharply split government – all the sharper because the two sides, the GOP legislative majority and Governor Dayton, were sent to Saint Paul with clear mandates from their constituencies; “tame government” and “make people give us stuff for free”, respectively.

And the two sides, platitudes about “reaching across the aisle” notwithstanding, are showing no interest in compromise; Mark Dayton vetoed cutting money from the current budget to help deal with the current crisis, for crying out loud.

So there is a chance that, if the two can’t reach a compromise – and it’ll be difficult – tbe government may shut down.

If you’re a conservative, you probably suspect that’ll end up more or less like the transnit strike.

If you’re a liberal – well, you probably already read Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius.  Jeff is, naturally, less sanguine about the whole “Shutdown” thing– and he thinks we conservatives should be, too:

Less then two weeks into the legislative session, the MNGOP held a hearing about a possible government shutdown, a clear sign of how they see this legislative session ending.

Well, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see that a strike is possible, given the circumstances.  I’d be mildly surprised if Dayton hasn’t done some contingency planning himself (although as out-of-his-depth as he seems, it’d only be a mild surprise).  The GOP contingent is drawn from people – businessmen, cops and the like – who actually have to plan for contingencies.  Cut ’em a break.

Governor Dayton, in a clear sign of his priorities, used his State of the State speech to ask that legislators pledge not to shut down the government:

I ask you, legislators; I invite you; I implore you — to join with me now, right here in our Capitol and pledge to the people of Minnesota that we will NOT shut down their government, our government — not next July 1st, not any July 1st, not any day ever.

Let’s let that one sink in a bit; the governor, “as a clear sign of his priorities” (Jeff’s phrase, not mine) asked the GOP to pledge…

…to blink.

In other words, when push comes to shove – and it likely will – to shut up and give the Governor his way.

Not a word on his own commitment to compromise.  Not a word on deferring to the wisdom of the legislature, directly elected by the people, over that of the union bosses and special interests.

As their hearing early in the session shows, Republican lawmakers don’t seem at all interested in making that pledge. In fact, they seem to be looking forward to the shutdown. Why? Conservative blogger Mitch Berg expressed their thoughts succinctly:

Long story short, DFL: We don’t NEED to compromise; if gov’t shuts down, *you* lose. Not us.

Jeff is nothing if not reliably imprecise; not “Jeff Fecke”-style “comically wrong”, but just not quite right.

The GOP majority was sent to Saint Paul on a mission; tame government.   Taking the governor’s “pledge” – saying “forget about our voters!  Forget our constituents! We’re her for you, Lord Fauntelroy!” before the Governor had released a single (workable) budget! – would be a deeply stupid thing to do under normal circumstances.

And the circumstances are not normal.  The GOP majority is faced by a very weak governor – whose strings are being pulled by a very powerful clacque of sponsors; the teachers’, government and service unions, the media, the state’s academic establishment from K through PhD, the whole phalanx of non-profits.  The weak governor is being inveigled to boost state spending by a solid 25%, and balance the spending orgy on the backs of the state’s most productive citizens.

And they’re supposed to take “the pledge” – and give up their ultimate bargaining chip, and basically tell their voters “sorry about all that “taming government” rhetoric, we didn’t really mean it that much!”?

But is he right? I think he’s miscalculating the potential impact of a shutdown.

Of course, to some extent, it depends on how Berg defines “lose.” Does he mean politically, or ideologically?

I mean, of course, both.

In terms of policy and the impact on the state, the DFL would lose. We believe the government is a force for good in many people’s lives [!!! – Ed]. So we would certainly see it as a loss if road maintenance stopped, if aid to the poor dried up, if thousands of people were denied healthcare, and so on. Today’s Republican party, on the other hand, would welcome that.

But that’s not what I think he means.

Well, not in the sense Jeff seems to intend – “Today’s GOP hates the poor and wants to destroy infrastructure and kill grandma while they’re at it!”.  Of course not.

But Jeff’s case  – and it is that of the DFL and its minions – is based on a couple of fundamental bits of rhetoric that are utterly illogical, but are being spun to try to inflame the maximum possible emotional response from voters.   They want the GOP to fold its hand now, before the budget is released (actually, it will have been released a few hours before this post appears – it is currently 5:30AM), and at all costs avoid all mention that the real choice – the choice that the Governor and his minions, Jeff included, are trying so hard to keep the voter from comprehending – is not between a 25% tax and spending hike and complete desolation, but between a 25% hike and a 6% hike – the $32 billion 2010-2011 budget that we’re living under, plus the forecast $2 billion in new revenue coming in from the Minnesota economy – combined with a fundamental realignment of how Minnesota government does its budgeting, so that we stop pretending that we, the taxpayers, were put on this earth to be the DFL’s ATM machine.

The Governor, the DFL, and all of their minions and stakeholders and hangers-on and Jeff Rosenberg too, want to make damn sure you, the voter, don’t see it that way.

I think he’s talking about the political fallout of a shutdown. And it’s not at all clear to me that the MNGOP would win that battle. The people of Minnesota have shown time and time again that they believe government has a vital role to play. Not only do they support that, they’re willing to pay for it.

Willing to pay?  Perhaps – to a point.

Willing to have that bill jacked up by 20+% per biennium? By 2-10x as fast as the economy grows?

Does Jeff think the people are that willing to pay?

You do remember how many DFLers got sent home last November, don’t you?

Actually, they already do pay for it. It’s the rich in Minnesota that still aren’t paying their fair share. Will Minnesotans support the Republican party going to the mat to keep the rich from having to pay the same percentage of their income in taxes as the rest of us do?

That paragraph is the consummate chanting point (“Chanting Point:  (Noun)  Similar to a “talking point”, but intended to be recited by rote (often as part of large real or virtual crowds) rather than critically analyzed”).   What it’s saying is “you people – the “rich” who make over $130K a year – have something we want; we want your hard work to benefit us – never mind that you already pay most of the cost of government at all levels from local through federal, while over a third of us pay nothing but sales taxes; you should feel shame, and donate your hard work to filling our needs”.

Do “the people” get that?  See last November 2 again.

Remember, although Americans often express our desire to cut government spending, there’s very little we actually support cutting when it comes to specifics. That’s why a shutdown is so overwhelmingly unpopular: everybody has programs they support, none of which are spared.

Leaving aside that it’s not true – the last “shutdown” actually only shut down around a third of state government operations – I think that’s one of the lessons of this past election; people, especially the ones that pay attention, are willing to do with less government, including “their” programs – and especially “their” programs staffed by people who get paid more than they do, and with gold-plated pensions who bitch to high heaven about being asked to pay a $5 copay to visit a doctor.

(“But wait – the people also elected Dayton!  They must like paying more taxes!” Well, some of them do – maybe the 20-25% that are genuine hard-core DFLers.  Dayton won on name ID, and as an uninformed response to the DFL’s toxic, sleazy anti-Emmer campaign, and most likely by not a few fraudulent votes; the voters “voted for taxes” with Dayton as much as they “voted for crazy and petulant” with Jesse Ventura).

Add to that a side of incompetence for allowing the government to shut down, and it’s a recipe for unpleasantness.

Just like the transit strike was.

So there certainly will be consequences. But on whom will they fall? They’ll fall on the party that refuses to budge, that protects the rich at the expense of the rest of us, and that chortles in glee as the government shuts down.

Nobody’s “chortling with glee”.

Just refusing to blink.

Chanting Points Memo: “Piecemeal”

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The region’s DFL, media (pardon the redundancy) and the leftyblogs that fill in the very, very few gaps between them have been spending the past few weeks grousing impotently about the Legislature’s GOP majorities’ “piecemeal” approach to tackling the budget, including the $6.2 billion deficit that is not.

The chanting point campaign reached its peak last week, with Governor  Dayton demanding in his State of the State that the GOP majority send him a unified budget proposal.

The DFL/media/leftyblog (ptr) chanting has coalesced been commissioned along three lines:

  1. Let’s just tackle the budget in one fell swoop!
  2. The GOP needs to get their budget in front of the governor now (in the aforementioned fell swoop)
  3. Governor Pawlenty didn’t let the DFL submit a piecemeal budget!

All three lines are, of course, absurd – the sort of thing you expect from a group fighting a rear-guard battle against logic itself.

Let’s break it down:

The Journey Of A Thousand Miles Begins With A Single Step:  If you hear a rattling under your car’s hood, what do you do?  Hoist the engine out of the frame and start whacking it with a sledgehammer?  Or start taking it apart, piece by piece, until you find what’s broken?

If you’re a DFLer, apparently, “A”.

The “one big budget” approach is of a piece with the Democrat strategy from DC all the way down to your local city council; submit spending bills that are so unimaginably huge that, to closely paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, “you have to pass them to know what’s in them”.

We don’t have to do that.  The MNGOP caucuses could do it, but they do not have to.   There is no legal, ethical, moral or traditional requirement that the GOP submit a budget in one big, ready-to-veto blob.

Indeed, since the GOP was sent to Saint Paul to kick ass and take names, it makes perfect sense for them to tear the budget, and its reforms, down into its component parts.  We’ve discussed this, and we will no doubt discuss it again.

Long story short; it makes zero difference if the GOP puts forth a bill with a $34 billion budget, or (hypothetically) 34 billion $1 bills.  Or something in between.

Zero.

And if your co-workers or relatives say that there is, please ask them why.  And watch them melt down.

Patience: The DFL is trying to pull the same infantile trick on the GOP majority (and, more germane, on The People) that they tried to pull on the Emmer campaign (and The People); trying to browbeat the GOP into putting its budget proposal (in the form of one and only one bill, thankewverymuch) in front of the governor now.

There is no statutory reason for this.  There is no reason at all – save a political one.  The DFL knows that they are over a barrel.  They are facing an energized majority operating with a crystal clear mandate; cut taxes and spending.  And that majority has come out of the gate this past five weeks like the Green Bay Packers’ pass rush, and focused on the goal – balancing the budget through cuts and revenue growth.

Against that, what do they have?  Browbeating and playing the spin game via their friends (and, often as not, future employees) in the media.

The only requirement?  That the budget be in place this summer.

And, caterwauling aside, the GOP was tackling budget issues the moment the first gavel dropped; King Banaian’s HF2 – the second bill on the agenda – will be, if not a revolutionary change in the way our government works, at least a walloping kick in the evolutionary pants.  It will set the status quo on its ear.  More on that in a separate post.

The DFL’s bellyaching about the GOP’s timing is nothing but a diversion for the not-very-well-informed – and they already vote DFL.

Get The Waaaaaahmbulance: “Governor Pawlenty didn’t allow a piecemeal budget – why should Governor Dayton?” is the other line of “reasoning”.

The situations could hardly be different, of course.

The DFL majorities in the last two sessions didn’t really try to submit “piecemeal” plans, as such; there were really two pieces.  The first, the DFL’s budgetary wish list.  They wanted to get that wish list passed first, to get it written into law bright and early.

Then, later in the session, they wanted to actually come up with the money to pay for it all.

Sort of like trying to buy a house first, and submitting your income documentation later.  We tried that in this country.  Notice how well it worked?  Governor Pawlenty sure did.  That’s why he sent the DFL majority back to the woodshed.

The GOP is doing the exact opposite.  The majority is figuring out the money first, and winnowing down the “wish list” to fit inside it – trying to start, indeed, with money from the current budget that hasn’t even been spent yet (a proposal that the Governor vetoed last week, citing his disdain for “piecemeal” budgeting, and showing his fundamental unseriousness when it comes to really controlling the deficit as opposed to trying to buy time for the DFL).

The rhetoric of the governor and the DFL minority is not the rhetoric of people who are interested in getting serious about this state’s economy.  Your job, and your childrens’ economic future in this state, comes in well behind making sure government wants for not the slightest thing.

Chanting Points Memo: The DFL Hides The Sausage Making Process

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The Dems latest sweeping meme – predating the State of the State, although it certainly appeared in it – is “why won’t the GOP send one big budget bill.

This is a meme – a chanting point – that can only be aimed at the ill-informed and not-well-read.

Draw your own conclusions.

At any rate, you see this from Democrats all up and down the food chain.  Small Democrats, like  Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius, are carrying their masters’ water by telling us “Why A Piecemeal Budget Is Unacceptable“:

A piecemeal approach limits our ability to negotiate. That, of course, is the Republicans’ goal. They hope to trap Dayton into agreeing to their cuts so they don’t have to negotiate. But that sort of political strategy is a terrible way to make policy.

This is, of course, “2+2=5” material.  A piecemeal approach requires negotiation – on every bit and piece of the budget.

The “piecemeal” approach – what Rep. Holberg calls “how you eat a hippo – one bite at a time” – takes the budget apart, down to all of its 32 billion pieces, or as close to it as has been done in recent years. It shines the light of legislative scrutiny on parts of our budget that have been on autopilot for generations.

It requires stakeholders in every single piece of that budget to negotiate for it.

The DFL, on the other hand, wants to take the Nancy Pelosi approach; they want to bundle up their whole, noxious $39 billion proposal and go at the whole festering mess.  Like Obamacare, it’ll be such a thick book of gibberish that “we’ll have to pass it to see what’s in it”.  And since nobody will read it all down to its most infinitesimal detail (other than King Banaian), and no legislative body can possibly sustain a debate on it, the “debate” will turn from the need for every single item in the budget to the imperative – invariably emotional (“why do you hate children and single mothyrs?  Why do you want to put dioxin in their formula?”), invariably ill-informed, invariably trite – all traits that favor easy media consumption,and hence the DFL.

The DFL, above all, doesn’t want you to see how the budgetary sausage is made. They know the skeletons that are hidden deep inside the budget.  They want You, The People, to remain blissfully, bovinely ignorant, and just shut up and be Happy to Pay For A Better Minnesota.

The GOP way shows Minnesotans how the sausage is made. That’s just gonna kill the DFL.

Chanting Points Memo: The DFL And The Black Knight

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Remember the movie Monty Python And The Holy Grail?  The part where King Arthur (Graham Chapman) battles the Black Knight (the voice of John Cleese) for the right to pass through the Knight’s land?

The solemn lesson; taunting is no substitute for action.

The DFL is hoping Minnesota’s voters haven’t learned that lesson.  On three issues this past week, the DFL has donned a red shirt to cover the bleeding and asked the GOP why they’re such a bunch of pansies about completely re-engineering government and turning the dominant taxpayer/government paradigm upside down.

Jobs: One reads more than a few leftybloggers who are chanting “The GOP said they were going to create jobs!  And yet it’s four weeks into the session, and they haven’t had a jobs bill yet!  Why’s that?  Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh?Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh?”

Being DFLers, they may not be clear on the concept that the GOP is not going to write a bill – call it “House File 666”, just for our purposes here – saying “Employers must create jobs and  hire people, or the State Patrol will arrest them and a judge will give them an eleventy-billion dollar fine and take their business away from them”.

Silly?  Sure – but no dumber than what the Dems really think a job bill is:  government construction or entitlement projects hiring lots of (union) labor (to pay off the  markers the DFL owes them).

The GOP will cut spending and its attendant taxe and, as Tom Emmer proposed during his campaign, greatly streamline regulations.  The market will respond by starting new projects, hiring new labor.  That’s how it works in the real world.

The DFL is betting the typical voter doesn’t know that.

The Budget: Representative Ryan “Eddie” Winkler tweeted:

GOP so far has not passed a job bill, and are wimping out on their big budget cuts bill. But, they’ll deliver voter ID, guns and abortion.

Jeff Rosenberg of MNPublius – which is basically the same as Ryan Winkler, without the snazzy office – writes:

…this bill doesn’t solve our budget deficit. In fact, it barely even makes a dent, despite committing us to painful cuts.

Winkler’s idea of “wimping out” is tackling the behemoth $32 Billion budget, and its potemkin “$6.2 Billion deficit”, is filing one big honkin’ bill that does everything, in one, huge, conveniently veto-able package.

The Democrats are given to these sorts of things, of course – 2,300 page health care bills that nobody can possibly read in time and the like.  And such an omnibus spending-cut proposal  would make things really easy for the Governor and the DFL, which means it’d be pretty stupid.

Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch, speaking at a blogger conference call last night, said “that’s just absurd”.

The GOP majority (aaaaah) is doing this the right way; exposing every single piece of budgetary lard; making the DFL work to justify it in the harsh glare of public scrutiny.

It may make the DFL’s kept talking heads, Winkler and the various bloggers, itchy and nervous at the death of a thousand cuts t hey’re suffereing.  But that’s their problem. Their only priority is to keep government fat and happy, on the backs of the taxpayer.

Koch notes the madness of the approach: “If we hold taxes harmless, we become less competitive.  Other states – like Wisconsin- are working to be more competitive – cutting spending”, she said.

Exactly how we get more competitive – one huge unwieldy bill, or many smaller ones – is irrelevant, as long as we actually do.

Voter ID:  It’s pretty much been reduced to a chant; “Republicans want to keep people from the polls”.

The response, of course, is rubbish; the GOP wants to provide our dismal election system the tools it needs to ensure people only vote once, where they’re supposed to.  The GOP slso wants to provide voters the ID they need to be able to vote.  For free.  On us.  Gratis.

The DFL’s response is “It’s more complicated than that – what about the homeless?”  To which the GOP responds “we’ll have to figure something out; in the meantime, for the other 99.99% of the voting population, let us press ahead”.

To which the DFL’s  chanting heads respond…well, who knows?  The bottom line is, the DFL is fighting to keep voting anonymous and un-controlled, to their benefit.  They are not fighting to ensure the right of every Minnesotan to vote; they are fighting to keep the rules opaque enough to hide more abuses that benefit the DFL.  They should be ashamed.

But that’s never been their long suit, now, has it?

Chanting Points Memo: Disintegration

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Remember last session’s’ spending debate?

When the DFL – which had a crushing majority in the Minnesota State House, pushed through a massive $435 million dollar tax hike.

They squeedged the increase through on a couple of very close votes; the final vote in the House was 71-63.  Bear in mind that the DFL controlled 87 seats up until this month.  Tha’ts 87/47 in favor of the DFL; almost, but not quite, veto-proof.

And in the Minnesota Senate?  Much worse; the DFL  had a 47-21 veto-proof majority in the Senate.

So when it came time for up-and-down votes on the Dems’ pet tax proposal, you’d think – given not only the DFL’s fabled unity, but the power of the mandate with which they’d been sent to Saint Paul to refudiate the Pawlenty government the previous fall, that the votes in favor of the bill might have been 87/47 in the House (or maybe 93/44, given the power of the “moderate Republicans”), and 47/21 in the Senate.

To have performed any worse would certainly have been a sign that the DFL was splintering under the pressure of working with their mandate.

Right?

Well, of course it didn’t work out that way.  The DFL carried the bill through the House by 71.  Sixteen DFLers crossed over to vote against the bill.

And before that?  In an epic bit of political theater, the Senate had to do all but send the Mounties out to find Tarryl Clark to drag her into the Senate chamber to get the bill passed by one vote.  A total of twelve DFL senators crossed over to vote against the bill.

And this, at the height of the post-Obama afterglow.  When people seemed Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota.  Less than a month after the first appearance of the Tea Party, when it still seemed (because the media was trying to paint it)  like a fringe-y little brushfire.

Quiz Question:  Did this loss of 16 votes in the House, and 12 in the Senate, mean that…:

a) The DFL was fragmenting?: The DFL legislators saw the Tea Party rallies, three weeks early, anticipated the upcoming summer of anger at the Obamacare Town Halls, and were consumed with a wave of originalist fervor, which Larry Pogemiller and Margaret Anderson Kelliher managed to hold together by only the barest of margins, in an epic feat of legislative engineering?

b) That was the plan?: Some DFLers from outstate and outer-tier suburban districts felt nervous about piling taxes on their already-disgruntling districts; they made their reservations known to their caucus’  House and Senate leadership, which did the math – not only for the bill, but for the next round of elections.  They figured out how many votes were safe, not only for the bill, but for future elections; they realized that some DFLers  – especially some of the ones that had just won squeaker elections in the previous two cycles  in usually-GOP-districts – were going to need to be able to deny association with the bill to their voters.  The did the math, and made sure they had the votes to both pass the bills and give their more potentially-vulnerable members the out they knew they were going to need?

Answer? B, mostly; of course there were DFLers who had objections – but for the most part,notwithstanding the media’s push to impart drama on the proceedings,  the votes came as no surprise to anyone in legislative leadership.

Of course, drama sells newspapers.

Last week, the House voted on the GOP’s billion dollar budget cut bill.  And the regional DFL and media (pardon the redundancy) hopped around like a toddler who’d just made a good pants – because four Republicans broke with the GOP.

Doug Grow wrote about it at the Minnpost:

Republican legislative leaders quickly are learning that it’s easier to hold the caucus together when they’re in the minority rather than the majority.

On the first big economic vote of the still-new session, four Republicans joined a united DFL minority in opposing a $1 billion budget-cutting bill that Republican leadership claimed was the “easy part” of cutting into the state’s $6.2 billion deficit.

Well, actually, there were 3.5 Republicans joining the DFL in opposing the bill. Freshman Rep. Rich Murray voted for the budget cuts but then, after voting had closed, switched to vote against the measure, which passed 68-63.

The biggest Republican defector was freshman Rep. King Banaian a St. Cloud State University economics professor and a conservative blogger.

Just a couple of weeks ago, beaming House Republican leaders described Banaian as the caucus’s “Wayne Gretzky” on economic issues.

For non-hockey followers, that means that Banaian was being described as the majority’s economics superstar, its guru, its leader.

Now, right out of the box he said “no” to the first Republican plan.

What happened?

What would Doug Grow suppose happened?

Is it that…:

a) The GOP majority is falling apart, with members – including my radio colleague Banaian, who had heretofore authored and sponsored HF2, a step toward instituting Zero-Based Budgeting, one of the most transformatively fiscally-conservative ideas – already souring on fiscal conservatism, to the immense surprise and shock of the MNGOP’s leadership?  Or is it…:

b) Those devilish details that caused the DFL’s leadership to let 16 Reps and 12 Senators seek a little cover, after making sure that they had the votes to pass their tax bill two years earlier?   Details that had been discussed between members and leadership for weeks – even since before the session began?   Details that made the GOP’s leadership do the math, and figure that they could afford to let three potentially-vulnerable Representatives flake off and still leave plenty of votes to pass the vital bill?

What do you think?

I don’t talk with a lot of legislators, so it’s not like I know any details.  But do you suppose that Banaian – who represents an area that includes Saint Cloud State University, which already went through some serious budget cuts, and which would take more with the proposed bill, and who won his seat by 13 votes, the closest margin of victory in the entire United States last November – just might have had a talk or two with Kurt Zellers, who might have gone over the votes one way or the other, and rationed out a few “no” votes to GOPers that might need ’em?

What do you think?

When the DFL needs heavy buckets hauled from the well to the corral, Doug Grow is always there:

Reality crossed paths with rhetoric…

…If Republican leadership can’t hold its caucus together on this first budget vote, imagine how difficult it will be to find conformity as it attempts to cut the remaining $5.2 billion with a cuts-only approach.

Grow taking part in the DFL’s strategy in the legislature; trying to paint the GOP majority as divided in the run-up to Mark Dayton – the weakest governor in recent memory – releasing a budget that is sure to be a big tax-clogged monstrosity.  They are trying to find a wedge to pound in between the new majority and the newly-minted activists who put them into office.

To some extent, it’s drawn some blood; a few conservative activists are making disgruntled noises.

We’ll talk about that later on here.

The point being this:  relax, everyone.  The procedure of getting votes lined up, and handing out some exemptions from party  mandates for purposes of planning for future elections, is the very definition of  “politics as usual”, and not even in a necessarily bad way.

The larger point is that the agenda is moving ahead – and needs to, in advance of Dayton dropping his fiscal duke in two weeks.

More on the big picture later today or tomorrow.

Chanting Points Memo: Berg’s Seventh Law Is Immutable

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Remember – whenever lefties attack conservatives practices or ethics, it’s to cover up their own, er, shortcomings.

Katherine Kersten – just about the only decent columnist at the Strib these days – notes the bleeding obvious and, of course, Berg’s Seventh rearing its head:

Since Nov. 2, we’ve heard lots of grumbling from Minnesota Democrats. In a year of unprecedented GOP gains across America, they’re not satisfied that their candidates won every statewide office in our state (subject to a recount in the governor’s race).

DFLers, it seems, are sore that they didn’t win the Minnesota House and Senate as well — completing their sweep. They don’t seem to grasp that the tide that washed through the Minnesota Legislature was a nationwide phenomenon, as voters shouted “enough” to a Democrat-led glut of taxes, spending and deficits. Today, Republicans hold more legislative seats across the country than at any time since 1928.

DFLers should be counting their blessings. Instead, from their blinkered perspective, the GOP’s capture of the Minnesota Legislature appears aberrant and dreadful. And they’ve found a bogeyman to blame: Minnesota businesses. Their gripe seems twofold. First, business, through independent groups like the Coalition of Minnesota Businesses, spent too much — i.e., “bought and paid for” the Legislature. And, second, business groups unconscionably exploited voters with negative advertising.

Kersten caught it.

I caught it.

A good chunk of Minnesota’s voters caught it.

The DFL doesn’t want people to catch it (emphasis added):

We hear this so much that the reality comes as a surprise: Minnesota Democrats and their allies actually outspent Republicans and their allies in 2010 roughly 2 to 1, though final totals won’t be known for some time.

The Senate DFL caucus raised four times more than the Senate GOP caucus, and the House DFL caucus raised two times more than its GOP counterpart. The DFL state party raised over three times more than the state GOP. Mark Dayton raised more than one and a half times what Tom Emmer did.

But Dayton, the DFL and their benefactors, just don’t want you to know that:

Contrary to the DFL mantra, voters’ attention to business groups’ message was perfectly logical. On Nov. 2, the No. 1 issue was jobs — how to grow them, how to keep them here, and how to attract new, job-creating businesses to our state…Without business’ involvement, Minnesota’s electoral field would largely have been left to Democrats and their biggest donors: public employee unions such as Education Minnesota, AFSCME and SEIU, and Indian tribes with big-bucks casino interests.

Look for a huge PR and media campaign against corporate and business spending, including solemn “analysis” pieces at the Strib and MPR.

Chanting Points Memo: Potemkin Outrage

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The smaller story (from my admittedly and temporarily parochial perspective): lefty protests in Europe have much moo, little political cow:

Throw your Euro stereotypes out the window: Last weekend, a Greek government that has cut public-sector pay and lowered pensions won a clear victory in local elections. Despite strikes and violence, despite the fact that Greece’s debt is still growing and more cuts are coming, there will be a Socialist mayor of Athens for the first time in 24 years. (And, yes, in Greece, the Socialists favor budget cuts, and the conservatives oppose them.)

Nor are the Greeks alone. Last month, voters re-elected a Latvian government that cut public-sector workers’ pay by 50 percent. The British government coalition, which is also trying to eliminate benefits and cut spending, remains strangely popular, too. Although—contrary to my previous observation—London witnessed its first Continental-style, anti-austerity riot last week, there wasn’t much general enthusiasm for the protesters. Some of their leaders wound up denouncing the riots, and they haven’t hurt the government’s poll numbers yet, either.

It’s saying too much to call it a pattern, and it may well not be a permanent change: I’m sure there are plenty of European politicians who won’t survive their next encounter with the voters. But there is something in the air. It almost seems as if at least a few Europeans have actually drawn some lessons from the recent recession and accompanying turbulence in the bond markets. They have realized, or are about to realize, that their state sectors are too big.

So the takeaway: despite the left’s sturm und drang and immense fury, the people support conservative (by Eurozone standards) reforms.

I say that to set up what is (by my, again, parochial and situational standards) the big story; Target Corporation – the, er, “target” of an astroturf smear campaign over the summer after donating money to MNForward, a pro-business PAC – has seen same-store sales rise.

The left’s astroturf campaign – the boycotts,  the ofay little videos of planted DFL harpies cutting up their Target cards, the “flash mobs” of smug  jagoffs – all of it was a flop.

Chanting Points Memo: Balancing The Books

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As we speak, the MNGOP is announcing that it plans to seek “reconciliation” of the state’s vote totals before the recount begins.

The DFL is going to spread a lot of, frankly, BS about this process.  Here are the facts.  For starters…:

It’s The Law: The DFL is going to portray this to the uniformed (which the media will do their best to ensure the entire state is) as a wholesale disenfranchisement of voters.

The simple fact is, it is the law.

Under Minnesota law, the vote totals and the total number of actual, identified voters – the registered voters that signed in at the polling station – are supposed to be “reconciled”, or  shown to be equal, by about six weeks after the election.  The deadline this year is December 15.

Naturally, Mark Ritchie has bobbled that job as badly as he has every other facet of his job as Secretary of State and chief executive of our election system.  In 2008, it took close to eight months for the reconciliation process to happen.

Which has potentially dire consequences, if you want a clean, accurate recount of an election.

We’ll come back to that.

How Reconciliation Works:  If  your precinct had 100 voters sign in, and there are 110 ballots, then ten ballots are picked out at random and discarded.

Really.  That’s the state law.

Now, you might say “but that disenfranchises the ten voters that got picked out of the pile”.  And there’s something to that.  But by another token the ten extra votes disenfranchise ten voters in and of themselves; if it happened through fraud, then ten legitimate voters were negated; if through administrative incompetence (because precinct election staff don’t know how to do simple things like tally numbers or test ballot-counters before the election), then those ten ballots are equally disenfranchised, not by decree of Tony Sutton or Tom Emmer, but under state law.

Stupid?  Maybe.  We’ll come back to that later.

So why bother?  Because there very well may be…

More Votes Than People: In 2008, the Minnesota Majority claimed that there were about 40,000 more votes cast than there were identified, signed-in voters in Minnesota.   Mark Ritchie – Minnesota’s Secretary of State – said in effect “No, no no!” – it was only somewhere under 30,000 votes.

That’s right.  Even Mark Ritchie, the chief executive of our electoral system, admitted that that out of a little over 2.75 million voters, there were nearly 30,000 more votes cast than there were identified, signed-in voters.  That’s a little over a percent of the entire voting pool.  Over one in a hundred.

That’s over double the margin between the candidates in this year’s governor race.

That’s an awful lot of votes that, at first glance – via incompetence or fraud, and it really doesn’t matter which at this point – seem to have no connection with real, signed-in humans that showed up at the polls.

By Minnesota law, this needs to be taken care of.  And it needs to be done before any recount takes place, to make sure that we’re dealing with real numbers, not inflated/mistake-driven/fraudulent ones.

Let’s make sure we re-iterate two things here:

  1. Discrepancies may or may not be fraud, and it really doesn’t matter what the cause is, because…
  2. Reconciliation is a legal requirement, regardless.

Are there more votes than identified, actual voters?  We don’t know yet.  And before we recount the votes for the office of this state’s chief executive, we need to find out.

If there is a surplus of voters, is it fraud? We don’t know – and in a sense, it’s irrelevant to the question.  Reconciliation is not a legal tactic; it is the law.

But the recount effort – led by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Eric Magnusson – has noticed that there seems to be an…

Odd Pattern: There appear to be quite a number of precincts – concentrated in Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis Counties – where Tom Emmer grossly underperformed the rest of the GOP ticket, and Mark Dayton significantly overperformed the rest of the DFL’s floundering line-up.

There also are reportedly a very large number of ballots listing nobody but Mark Dayton.  As in someone went in to the polls, registered, stood in line…and filled in only Mark Dayton.  Nobody else.

So the law calls for reconciliation.  Let’s reconcile!

“What a stupid system!”: Perhaps, but you don’t get to pick and choose the laws you want to follow (unless you have really good lawyers and your opposition doesn’t; see OJ Simpson.  Or if you fight a legal battle with furious intensity and your opponent does not; see Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman).

Don’t like the law?  Change it.  Better yet, replace it – with a photo ID system by which poll staff can match real voters with real registrations.  And get rid of vouching, and maybe same-day registration.  Why shouldn’t voting, the  most important of our civil rights, be reserved for those who pay enough attention to voting to actually register in advance?

But that’s a discussion for another day.

Chanting Points Memo: Everyone’s Extreme!

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If A Conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear him, is he still an “extremist?”

Over this past eight years or so, the Minnesota DFL has deprived the word “extremist” of all meaning.

“Blue Man In A Red District” writes about Glenn Gruenhagen, who won a close race in House District 25A over DFL apparatchik Mick McGuire.

Blue, not unpredictably, refers to Gruenhagen as “extreme“. 

But what does that mean?

How extreme is Gruenhagen?
At a statewide school board association meeting Gruenhagen pushed his extremist agenda.
Resolutions:

Let’s run through the list of “extreme” resolutions and their vote totals from the “State School Board Association” – of whom more later:

Stop labeling and drugging students – 2 for; 103 against.  The empowerment of teachers to make sweeping mental health and behavioral judgments with a power that borders on a medical diagnosis – with none of the expertise or experience or judgment required to make those “diagnoses” – has been an unmitigated disaster for a generation of children, especially boys.  Especially mine.  Anyone who voted against that resolution can rot in hell. 

Emphasize rote learning – 2 for; 130 against: Not sure what Blue means by this; he doesn’t favor us with a link to any original context.  Most of us agree “Rote Learning” – regurgitating factoids on command – is a Bad Thing.  But students today are woefully deficient in some just plain basic facts; I learned the multiplication tables by “rote” – as in, endless hours of drills in fourth grade; my kids did not.   Are they better off for having to find a calculator to find that 9 times 7 is 63?

Implement phonics reading – 8 for; 94 against. It seems to work for many kids.  So sue us.

Teach principles of patriotism – 13 for; 88 against.  THE HORROR.  Seriously –  would it kill kids to know that there’s a reason most of the world wants (or wanted, until 2008) to come to the US?  The changes we wrought and the good we brought to this world?  It’d spawn fewer little DFL drones, but other than that, what’d be the problem?

Oh, wait.

Implement abstinence – 7 for; 95 against.  Wouldn’t wanna stop encouraging teenage effing pregnancy, would we?

Separate classes by gender – 16 for; 86 against. Never mind that it works.  There are not a few charter, and even public, programs that get excellent results by separating the genders.  It’s a politically inconvenient truth that boys and girls are differnet.  They learn differently.  Girls are verbal and social; boys, spatial and competitive.  Both genders do better when they learn in environments that play to those strengths.   The only reasons not to separate genders, indeed, are the inconvenience of teaching teachers who came up through the feminized education academy to deal with boys as boys, and the PC imperative.

Teach fallacies of macro evolution – 7 for; 100 against. That’s one of those extreeeeeemly broad subjects where, again, context might be useful.  Does it mean “teach creationism?”  Or does it mean “show them that the scientific method really has nothing to say about philosophy”, and “science still has no idea how life as we know it really originated”?  We dont’ know.  Is it because the original resolution really was the single line “Teach fallacies of macroevolution”, or was it because Blue didn’t bother to favor us with the original context? 

It’d be fun to know.

All children are gifted – 12 for; 89 against.  Again, not sure about specifics.  Clearly, all children are not “gifted”.  But all children have some “gift” or another.  The public schools aren’t interested in “gifts” that go much beyond “sitting on ones seat and doing homework really really well”, other than tolerating a well-regulated interest in music or art or sports.  The kid whose “gift” is mechanics?   Cooking?  Raising his/her siblings while the parents are at work, and doing it really really well?  Not as much.

Blue:

At his best, 14% of school board association members supported his proposals. And this guy is going to get things done for Greater Minnesota?

Looking at the eight “extreme” resolutions, I’d almost respond “I wonder who the real extremists are…”

…until I remember that in Saint Paul, the monolithic politburo that is the Saint Paul School Board probably would have voted a straight ticket against all of those – and most Minnesotans on the street would have supported five or six without breaking a sweat.

If you’re not an EdMinn/SEIU/DFL drone, your mainstream is what they call “extreme”.

Chanting Points Memo: Numbers

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The DFL’s been trying to make a lot out of the last few polls released on the Minnesota Gubernatorial race.  Most of them show Dayton leading Emmer by one margin or another – from the tight to the ludicrous.

Ed and I were discussing the polls on our show over the weekend, and we noticed something.

Look at the likely voter percentages in the last few “major” polls”

  • Strib/”Minnesota” Poll – D+4 (meaning they figure that Democrats will make up four percent more of the electorate than Republicans on election day.
  • Rasmussen Poll: D+5

Now, this is a function of how these polls determine “likely voters”.  This formula varies among polling services, but – since it’s a form of science, however imprecise – is hypothetically based on some kind of math, derived from experience.

And what has “experience” been in Minnesota, especially recently?

In the 2008 election, Minnesotans’ spread was D+4.

In other words, Democrats made up 4% more of the electorate than Republicans did.

The pollsters are honestly suggesting that Democrats are going to turn out in the same number as in the Democrat landslide of 2008?

Or that Independents are going to break the same way they did two and four years ago?

Chanting Points Memo: They Hate You. They Really Really Hate You

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It’s about jobs and the economy, stupid.

Let me repeat that: Jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy.  That sorta sums it up.

Well, not to the DFL and their various paid, unpaid and indirectly-paid hangers-on on the left.   Over there, it’s about “dirt”.  Because it’s all Mark Dayton – bumbling underachieving trust-fund baby and former Worst Senator in America – has.  He was a failure as an Economic Development director. He was non-entitity as Auditor.  He was a spectacular failure as a Senator.

“Dirt” is all these hamsters have.

Now, Sally Jo Sorenson isn’t one of the dumber, more venal leftybloggers in Minnesota.  Indeed, in and among the various bits of moral and intellectual cat-box effluvia one meets at “Drinking Liberally”, she may well be one of the better ones.

But the DFL machine needs dirt:

Last month, Sally Jo Sorensen posted on her Bluestem Prairie site that Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer had taken out seven mortgages on his Delano home since 2002.

[Yesterday], the Minnesota DFL gave that tidbit a much bigger megaphone, blasting Emmer in a press conference for unconventional borrowing that most Minnesotans wouldn’t recognize.

So what exactly is the problem, here?

It appears that Emmer bought his Delano home in 2002 for $425,000 with the help of a $300,000 mortgage. He then took out a series of (very) short-term mortgages,each to pay off the previous one.

Ah.  So in other words, he used the financing the market made available to handle financing his house.  Just like a huge preponderance of other American home owners did, via one means or another.

At one point, he was threatened with foreclosure.

So he’s unique, then?

And this is…what?  Illegal?

Nothing illegal is alleged. But the DFL, and Sorenson, have pointed out that the creative financing runs counter to Emmer’s sloganeering about state government having to live within its means.

And the DFL and Sorenson are wrong.

Emmer’s finances are between him and his family.  We the people are not paying Tom Emmer’s mortgage.  If Tom Emmer comes up short on his payments, it’s up to him; give the house back, or solicit more business at his law firm, or get the kids out there working.  It’s his business.

The state budget is not a personal matter.  It’s all of our money.  And if Emmer has had to do some juggling to make the mortgage work…

…well, he can join the damn club.  Many of us are doing the same these days; working harder, scrimping, doing what we have to to keep the roof over our kids’ heads.  Wealthy Minnesotans, poor ones, and whole lot of us in the middle…

…who are not a bunch of trust-fund babies who inherited real estate from grampa, anyway.

Emmer spokesman Cullen Sheehan in a teleconference insisted that his boss’s refinancing deals were nothing unusual for a Minnesotan and that he’s paid his bills.

Unmentioned in any of Sorenson’s or the City Pages’ intrepid reporting:  is Emmer paid up now?  Has he shafted anyone?

And how is that different that what tens of thousands of Minnesotans are doing to make things work out?

And how is Brian Melendez’ little scorched-earth attack anything but a finger in the eye of all of us who weren’t born to the manor, like the hamster his party is stuck trying to prop up?

Has Emmer, indeed, done anything in his personal finances quite as dim and incompetent as release two consecutive budgets that on their face fail to resolve the budget issue, and have absolutely zero chance of ever passing the Legislature?

Because as near as I can tell, while his family may have had to do some mad fiscal juggling over the past eight years, just like the rest of us, Emmer’s got his family’s budget balanced today.

Has Dayton managed the same, even on paper?

If you think so, you may be qualified to be a City Pages reporter.

Chanting Points Memo: “Anti-Gay”

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One of Big Left’s attacks against Tom Emmer in this election is that he’s “anti-gay”.  It drove the most egregious tempest in this election’s teapot – the mass PR mau-mauing of the relentlessly-“Diversity”-hugging Target Corporation on behalf of Big Gay for donating money to “MN Forward”, a PAC that promotes pelting gays with rocks and garbage.

No, no, no.  I’m a kidder.  I kid.  MN Forward was a purely pro-business PAC, supported by businesses alarmed at Mark Dayton and Tom Horner’s anti-business policies.  But you’d never have known that from the hype surrounding the incident.  (And comparing stock prices with other major retailers, you’d never know there was an incident.  I did call it a tempest in a teapot for a reason).

The case for Emmer being “anti-gay” is based around two pieces of “evidence”:

  • He supported, along with a wide swath of legislative Republicans, a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a dude and a chick.
  • He voted against a bill that would have banned bullying.  Really.  It purported to enjoin all “forms of harassment based on actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, disability, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, physical characteristics, and association with anyone with one or more of these characteristics”

As to the former?  Most Minnesotans oppose same-sex marriage.  Most Minnesotans oppose allowing courts to mandate its legalization.  The way to jump ahead of the courts is to enact valid, sound law which, in theory, the court has no legislative authority to overturn.  That’s how separation of powers works, even when it’s inconvenient to your beliefs.

The latter?  It’s a stupid law that, as written, would have made bullying against Black or Zoroastrian or Buddhist or female or blind or poor or gay or transgendered or elderly or amputee-Minnesotans really really double-dog bad , as opposed to the merely single-dog bad act of bullying, say, a white, straight able-bodied straight 19-year-old Methodist boy.

It’s just plain bad law.  Of course, it was never intended as law.  It was introduced so that conservatives could vote against it, thereby to give lefties a cite when they bellow “TOM EMMER WANTS GAY KIDS TO GET KILLED” on their cowardly, illiterate, lobotomized little blogs.

But let’s cut the crap.  Who do you think is more anti-gay?  Is it:

  • Tom Emmer – regular guy, who reflects the point of view of the vast majority of Minnesotans, but freely admits that the focus of his governorship is jobs, the economy, jobs, the economy, and more jobs and the economy some more?  Or is it…
  • Barack Obama, who, like Paul Wellstone before him, actively courted the gay vote in the most cynical terms, and then supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which is no further to the left of the MN House GOP Caucus in point of fact?  Or is it…
  • The vast majority of black and latino voters, who vote Democrat but oppose gay marriage much, much more vocally than even conservative Republicans?

I love asking this question of liberals in face to face discussion.

You can practically see the gears stripping in their heads as they try to process a conundrum that can not be processed via any means short of stuffing logic down the garbage disposal.

Chanting Points Memo: Garbage In, Garbage Out

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Mark Dayton has run one of the single dumbest campaigns in Minnesota history.

Dayton himself has been a virtual non-entity, relying on the Twin Cities’ media’s inability and/or unwillingness to question him on  his background, the immense gaps in his budget “plan”, his history of erratic behavior…anything.

His surrogates have been another matter entirely; “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – whose financing, almost exclusively from big union donors and members and ex-members of Mark Dayton’s family of trust fund babies – has run the slimiest, most defamatory campaign in Minnesota political history.   From mischaracterizing Emmer’s “DUI” record and slandering his efforts to reform Minnesota DUI laws, to their outright lies about his budget, ABM has profaned this state’s politics in a way that I only hope can be salvaged in the future – although I doubt this will happen until the DFL decays to third-party status.

If it were a Republican group doing it, the Dems would be whining about “voter intimidation”.

The Dayton campaign, in short, has been not so much a campaign as an attempt to orchestrate negative projected PR, social inertia and the ignorance of most voters to their advantage.  It hasn’t been a dumb campaign, per se;  when your job is to sell Mark Dayton, “The Bumbler”, desperate situations call for desperate measures.  And as we saw in 1998, there are enough stupid people do make anything possible.

A big part of Dayton’s under-the-table campaign has been to portray the impression that Dayton’s coronation is inevitable.  If your nature is to be suspicious of institutions with long, arguably circumstantial records of bias, one might see the Minnesota Poll as an instrument toward that aim – given its three-decade record of showing DFLers doing an average of 7.5% better than they ended up doing.   (If you favor the Democrats, you might say the same about Rasmussen – if you ignored the fact that they’ve been consistently the most accurate major pollster for the last couple of cycles.  Other than that, just the same thing).

The latest chapter in this campaign has been the regional DFLbloggers’ chanting the latest results from Nate Silver’s “Five Thirty Eight”, a political stats-blog that was bought out by the NYTimes a while back.

Silver’s latest look at the Minnesota gubernatorial race gives Dayton an 83% chance of winning, in a six point race.

And that’s where the Sorosbloggers leave it.

Of course, Silver’s analysis on its face has a margin of error of a little over eight points – which is  – considerably larger than the forecast margin.

Of course, with any statistical, numerical output, you have to ask yourself – “are the inputs correct?”

Here are Silver’s inputs:

Courtesy 538/New York Times

Courtesy 538/New York Times

The important column is the “538 Poll Weight” column, the third from the right.  It shows how much weight Silver gives each poll in his final calculation.  The number is at least partly tied to time – but not completely; for some reason, the five-week old Survey USA poll gets 20% more weight than the four week old Rasmussen poll; the October 6 Rasmussen poll that showed Emmer with a one point lead gets about 3/4 the oomph of the latest Survey USA poll, which showed Dayton with a five point lead…

…and whose “likely voter model” seemed to think that Democrats are four points more likely to show up at the polls that Republicans.  This year.

Pollsters – and Silver – are fairly cagey about their methodology.  I’m not a statistics wiz.  I dropped the class after one week, in fact.  But I can tell when something isn’t passing the stink test.  Any poll that gives Democrats a four point edge in turnout this year may or may not be wishful thinking (we’ll find out in less than two weeks, won’t we?), but does seem to be based more on history than current behavior which, I should point out, involves a lot of hocus-pocus to predict during a normal election.

And this is not a normal election.

I’m not going to impugn Nate Silver, per se – if only because I haven’t the statistical evidence.  Yet.

I will, impugn the NYTimes, but then that’s what I do.  They very much do want to drive down Republican turnout.

And that is the main reason the DFL machine – including the ranks of more-or-less kept leftybloggers in this state – are parrotting this “story” so dutifully.  They want to convince Republicans that all is lost.

Pass the word, folks.  We’re gonna win this thing.

Chanting Points Memo: Dayton’s Dash

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With my years of blogging experience and keen blogging instincts, I’ve learned a thing or two.

Maybe three.

One of them is “when you see a bunch of DFL-linked leftybloggers start ridiculing something in the kind of unison that’d impress a synchonized swimming team, you know there’s something they’re trying to get people to ignore.

This is the piece of the video they’re hooting and hollering about:

It’s after a gubernatorial debate yesterday during which Dayton had taken questions about his settlement with Brad Hanson.

Now, he didn’t necessarily answer the questions; even Pat Kessler notes the paucity of detail:


Dayton – the candidate of the party of “champions of the working fella” – had to settle with a former staffer after appealing his wrongful termination case all the way to the Supreme Court.

So what is he running from?

What about the case is so nasty that Dayton can’t even talk about it with reporters?

And – Kessler’s observations aside – when is the media going to seriously question him?

After all, the “malpractice” suit against Emmer – likely as not just a money grab that uses the election for leverage – got slavering coverage from the regional media.  It was the most important story there was.

And yet we have a gubernatorial candidate who uses his boundless wealth to drag a suit through the courts and…almost nothing?

Kudos to Kessler and WCCO for running it.

Who’ll follow up?

Chanting Points Memo: The Mythical Moderate Republican

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Remember the mid-summer of 2009?  When people first started talking seriously about the gubernatorial campaign?  When Republicans just started talking about the race, and when Mark Dayton started pawning his Renoirs?

You remember the phalanx of moderate candidates who came out to the various party get-togethers, like the SD54 picnic in August of 2009, and who tried to give their stump speeches, calling for the return of the policies of Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger, poo-poohing the Reagan legacy and demanding we balance the budget through “responsible” tax hikes?

And the way that they  were rudely booed from the stage by the small conservative minority?  And their supporters, 3/4 of the audience, who stalked away after their candidates were snubbed, leaving the events looking like the after-party at a Vanilla Ice gig?

And the way those same moderates took their campaigns to the State Convention, and fought it out to eight ballots to get on the ticket, flaunting their platform of “Responsible Revenues” and “Getting On Board With Hope And Change”, only getting beaten after a tiny minority of conservatives jiggered the rules to exclude them from the votes?

Of course you don’t.

Because there was no such movement.

And yet to hear the media discussing it, there’s a huge mass of “moderate Republicans” floating around out there, feeling all “disenfranchised” by Tom Emmer, caterwauling about how far the party has fallen, pining for the glory days of Al Quie and Arne Carlson.

But if there were any such movement actually within the party, you might think the would show some sign of, I dunno, existing in the party.  By fielding candidates and making their presence known.

And yet look at the field of serious, and even not-so-serious, candidates that started out the campaign back in the late summer of 2009.  I met them all at the aforementioned SD54 Picnic; all nine of them spoke!  There were…:

  1. Tim Utz – who is from the libertarian side of “conservative”.  Not a “moderate” at all.
  2. Phil Herwig – who makes Tom Emmer look like Christopher Dodd.
  3. Paul Kolls, a thoroughgoing conservative
  4. Dave Hann, a solid conservative
  5. Pat Anderson, who may have been the closest thing to “moderate” in the field, and I mean that only in the most hair-splitting sense of the term
  6. Leslie Davis, who may be a lot of things, but isn’t “moderate”. Or Republican.  Or the leader of a movement.
  7. Dave Haas, a former legislator from Bemidji with a strongly-conservative pro-business platform
  8. Marty Seifert, who has been a conservative throughout his career, and reiterated that pretty sharply during the campaign
  9. Emmer.

That was it!  Among the nine of them, Emmer, Seifert and Anderson may have been the closest to the “Center!”

There was no “moderate conservative” movement in the MNGOP, begging to be heard.

None.

“Well, that’s because the conservative drove them out and marginalized the party!”

Er, did you take a look at caucuses this year?  Or looked at the enthusiasm numbers?  The GOP is blowing the records off the stops.  Congressional races that never raise over $30,000 – the 7th and 8th Districts – are raising ten to fifteen times the usual amounts, with no end in sight.  Even in the DFL gulag, the 4th and 5th, there are active State House camapaigns in districts that have had “warm bodies” (inactive place-holder campaigns) or nobody at all on the ballot for a generation.

So if there was a big mass of “Moderate Republicans” out there that are sitting out this election because Tom Emmer is too conservative, they’ve been concealing themselves for a long, long time.

Oh, there are “moderate Republicans” who are disenfranchised and angry about it, all right.  Arne Carlson.  Dave Durenberger.  Tom Horner.  People who committed themselves to the pre-1980 version of the GOP (that held sway in Minnesota Republican circles well into the nineties), the “moderate”, pro-choice, anti-gun, pro-tax-and-spending “GOP” that gave us the biggest tax and spending hikes in Minnesota history.   People who got left behind when the party moved to the right, and are endlessly bitter about it.  People who are taking out their anger by stabbing the new GOP – the one that had done with them – in the back, condemning their candidates, assaulting conservatism, voting for Barack Obama, making a public spectacle of breaking with the current GOP.

They are a non-factor in the GOP.  If they were not, they would make some kind of showing someplace other than as part of the anti-conservative chanting points of the in-the-bag-for-the-DFL mainstream media.

They don’t.

Chanting Points Memo: “The Cell Phone Voter”

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Every time a poll comes out favoring Tom Emmer, the leftybloggers chime in “But wait!  The poll was a phone survey! Phone surveys always miss cell phone users!  Nobody under the age of 40 has a land line!  The poll underpolls Democrats!”

Well, maybe not:

A poll released today by the tech policy group CALinnovates.org reveals that iPhone users — whom we would have firmly placed in the same consumer class as those who sip lattes and munch arugula — are twice as likely to be influenced by Tea Party ideology as other smartphone customers.

The poll, conducted by the respected Zogby group, found that one in five iPhone users are influenced by the Tea Party — twice as many as users of the Android or BlackBerry. Subscribers to iPhones are also twice as likely to say Sarah Palin “speaks for them,” and 60 percent predict a Republican takeover of Congress this year — a 15 point margin above other smartphone users.

And even the other “smartphone” users are pretty evenly divided.

Chanting Points Memo: Republicans For Horner

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The Dems have turned up the “heat” on the idea that Tom Horner was a Republican this past week.  My theory is that the DFL has internal polling showing that Horner is taking more – a lot more – Democrat votes than Republicans.

First, it was the big endorsement from Obama-voting, tax hiking, free-spending “Republicans” Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger, who are as “Republican” as Randy Kelly ended up “DFLer”.

And yesterday, it was the endorsement by thirteen “Republican” former legislators.

Now, I thought it was fair to guess that these “Republicans” weren’t necessarily the post-Pawlenty, or even post-1980, type – the type that actually try to be an alternative to the DFL, the type that scare the DFL.

But I had no idea how far out of the past the Horner campaign had to dig to find these “Republicans”.  Here’s the list, with their respective ages:

Searle (90)

Pillsbury (89)

Belanger (82)

Bishop (81)

Oliver (80)

Scherer (75)

Seaberg (74)

Schrieber (69)

Peterson (68)

Leppik (67)

Ozment (65)

Jennings (62)

Not only were most of these people “Republicans” when “Minnesota Republican” meant “Democxrat with a nice suit”, some of them even date back to when Democrats actually put America first.

Up next – Whigs, Grangers and Know-Nothings for Horner!

Chanting Points Memo: “The Wrong Candidate”

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Let’s be clear on this right up front; Tom Emmer’s gonna win this thing.  I still say three points.

Nothing I write below should be read in such a way as to imply I really think anything else.  It’s just not true.

Some of my DFL acquaintances occasionally jibe “If you’d only picked Seifert, you wouldn’t be having the problems you’re having now”.

I’m a polite guy.  I usually change the subject.

I need to.

Let’s backtrack in our minds for a bit.  Say that Marty Seifert had carried his early lead in the GOP endorsement process through to the convention, and gotten the nomination.

Think for a moment:  what parts of the DFL’s campaign against Tom Emmer aren’t perfectly transferable to Marty Seifert?  Or Dave Haan?  Or Pat Anderson, or Paul Kolls, or Sue Jeffers or Tim Palwenty or even Tom Horner, for that matter?

What has the DFL campaign been for the past five months?

  • [fill in the blank] wants to slash infrastructure: Any conservative that favors dialing back state union construction jobs would get hit with this one.
  • [fill in the blank] is for profits over people: Ihe DFL’s special little world, businesses are self-sustaining predators whose interests  – profit – are always opposed to people.
  • [fill in the blank] is anti-gay: Because conservatism itself, goes the left’s conventional wisdom, is anti-gay.
  • [fill in the blank] will freeze the poor!: The DFL paints anyone who seeks sanity – even a little – in Health and Human Service spending as Ebenezer Scrooge, pre-ghosts.
  • [fill in the blank] wants to slash education: Cutting the  projected increase is a cut, by the way; if the union wants 2 billion more, and you give them a billion more, they’ll cry “you’re cutting us by a billion!”
  • [fill in the blank] is against womyn: Because abortion is the sine qua non of being a woman.  To the DFL.
  • [fill in the blank] hasn’t given us all the details of his campaign yet: Because it’d be stupid to do when campaigning against someone with three times as much money as you’ve got, of course, but no matter.

There is nothing in the DFL campaign book that’s been used against Tom Emmer this past five months that couldn’t have just swapped in Seifert’s name and and unflattering photo.

The only differences?  Oh, the personal attacks would be different; Tom Emmer had his careless driving convictions, but if Marty Seifert ever so much as jaywalked, you can bet Alliance for a Better Minnesota would have run a million dollars worth of ads; “Marty Seifert thinks Laws are for Other People”.

Chanting Points Memo: 2+2=Fudge, Winston

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MNDFL chair Brian Melendez sent this out to the faithful yesterday:

The more Minnesotans hear from Tom Horner, the clearer it becomes that he is just another Republican insider, and his only plan is to continue Governor Pawlenty’s failed policies.

Insider?  A guy who hasn’t darkened the doorstep of a GOP caucus since Arne Carlson was in office?

By that standard, Mitch Berg is “just another Libertarian Party insider”.

As far as that bit about “continu[ing] Governor Pawlenty’s failed (sic) policies”?  Let’s take a brief march back through time:

2002

CANDIDATE PAWLENTY: “No new taxes!

2004

GOVERNOR PAWLENTY:  Nope.  No new taxes!

2006

GOVERNOR PAWLENTY: Ixnay on the Axestay!

2008

GOVERNOR PAWLENTY:  You shall not pass…taxes!

2010

TOM HORNER: We need over two billion in new taxes!

I’d think even Brian Melendez could detect the pattern, here.

Tom Horner wants to raise sales taxes on almost everything we buy, which will hit middle-class families twice as hard as others. And while Minnesota’s middle-class families are struggling, Tom Horner’s priority is to cut taxes for big businesses.

As opposed to Mark Dayton – who’ll raise taxes on everyone, directly or indirectly – and Tom Emmer, who …won’t!

With less than five weeks left until the election, we wanted to make sure all Minnesota’s voters know exactly what Tom Horner stands for.

Who is Tom Horner? Just another Republican.

Read:  “Internal polling shows he’s taking a lot more Democrat than GOP votes”

Chanting Points Memo: All Moo, No Cow

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It’s been two months now that the Twin CAdd Videoities and national left has been flexing its proverbial muscles over Target’s donation to MNForward.

It got to the point over the summer where the Twin Cities left and media (pardon the redundancy) thought they’d made a huuuuuge dent on Target’s market capitalization.

Indeed even today you can read leftybloggers chortling “Omigod, I have to go to Target!  I feel teh icky! LOLCATZ”, and hear about Big Gay staging protests at Targets all over the country, and even throwing “Flashmobs”, which seems to be something the kids today call “big groups of noisy douchebags”, at Target stores.

Because Target – one of the most socially liberal, with-it, pr0-gay companies in American business, dared to donate to a politician who’d support the interests of Minnesota businesses.  Because they hate gays, we’re supposed to believe.

Target must be really hurting.  Right?

Not so much:

Blue is Target.  Red is the Dow.

Target was already at a low due to bad consumer confidence numbers at that point (the week before July 23 or so).

So  how did Target’s performance stack up next to companies that, ahem, don’t “hate gays?”  Companies like Dollar Tree (darker blue), Family Dollar (Green), Costco (yellow) and Target (the lighter blue)?

Costco apparently hates gays even more!  And board at WalMart were apparently riding in the Pride Parade on a gigantic motorized sex aid wearing leather S and M wear!

Or perhaps it’s simpler than that; perhaps Big Gay and the left aren’t nearly as powerful as they think, and Target is doing juuuuust fine, with or without protests.

Chanting Points Memo: Much Ado About Bupkes

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Remember last week?  When former Emmer campaign chair Mark Buesgens was arrested for suspected DUI?

The biggest offense that had the local leftybloggers howling, naturally, wasn’t the alleged DUI; it was that although Buesgens had left (or “Emmer claimed he’d left”, according to the local leftyblogs) the Emmer campaign, it could not have been, said they, based on a copy of a fax to the Campaign Finance Board dated the day of Buesgens’ arrest.

We discussed this last week; to the Leftybloggers, perhaps weaned Jesse Ventura’s version of logic,  absence of any evidence of their claim whatsoever means there’s a coverup.  I debunked that, of course; the campaign and the party confirmed Buesgens had left the campaign and joined the party a solid week early.

“Well”, some leftyblogger sputtered, “do we want someone that bad at paperwork running the government?”

My jaw dropped.  Governors have people – well-paid union people in many cases, who are supremely competent at their jobs – to do paperwork.

But is the fact that the Emmer Campaign faxed the change in the name of its chairman to the Campaign Finance Board, to amend the CFB website, a week after the actual change even an offense on even the most niggling administrative level?

I called the Campaign Finance Board.  A very friendly representative (whose permission to speak on the record I was not able to get, so I”ll leave him unnamed for now) left me a voicemail message saying that the general rule is ten days, although “we occasionally allow some flexibility on that”.

Ten days.

The CFB staffer even left me a Minnesota statute that includes that statutory deadline – 10A.025 Subdivision 4 (emphasis added):

Subd. 4.Changes and corrections. Material changes in information previously submitted and corrections to a report or statement must be reported in writing to the board within ten days following the date of the event prompting the change or the date upon which the person filing became aware of the inaccuracy. The change or correction must identify the form and the paragraph containing the information to be changed or corrected

So let’s sum up here; Emmer’s campaign faxed the update to the CFB three days inside the deadline. The motivations – Buesgens’ arrest – are irrelevant.  The Emmer campaign followed the law in every respect.

The DFL/leftyblogs’ whispering campaign is – let’s call a spade a spade – a calculated lie intended to mislead voters not familiar with the law.

Chanting Points Memo: “Emmer Lied About LGA!”

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Some background:  Local Government Aid was started in the late sixties/early seventies to help poorer cities in outstate Minnesota afford some of the newer infrastructure – schools, roads, police, water treatment, etc – that they couldn’t have on their own tax bases.

The local leftyblogbuildup has been carping about this piece in Polinaut, which “fact-checked” one of Tom Emmer’s off-handed statements in a recent debate:

“I don’t know how many of your viewers understand that only about half the cities in this state get any local government aid and frankly only a handful get the lion’s share,” he said during a debate Sept. 17, 2010.

Now, Emmer is a hip-shooter; on many bedrock conservative issues, the infinitesimal details are less important than the high level vision.

But the left – and Minnesota Public Radio’s “Poligraph” – took umbrage; some 85% of Minnesota cities get some form of LGA, and, MPR’s Catherine Richert pointed out, many smaller cities get more money per capita than the “Big Three”, Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth.  Richert concluded:

Emmer’s claim is fraught with inaccuracies. He’s wrong that only half of Minnesota communities are getting aid. It’s far more than that. And while Minneapolis and St. Paul come out on top in terms of dollars of aid, it’s the smallest cities in the state that are getting the most aid per person – precisely the aim of the local government aid program.

This claim is false.

Well, no.  It’s not.

I mean, yes – some smaller cities get very, very high per-capita Local Aid numbers.  The highest per-capita numbers in the state are, in fact, from some of our smallest towns (and Hibbing).

But who really gets LGA in Minnesota?  Using the exact same figures MPR used in their story, let’s go through MPR’s “fact-check”.

Emmer’s campaign said it could not back-up his claim that only half the cities in the state get aid. In fact, most do. This year, 85 percent of communities – or 727 out of 854 communities — will get local government aid after unallotment cuts, according to data supplied by the Minnesota State Legislature House Research Department, which tracks these payments annually.

But if you count the populations of cities and towns that get zero LGA (about 1.7 million) and the people who don’t live in incorporated cities, it adds up to about half the people in Minnesota.

Should Emmer have distinguished between people and cities?

Enh.  Maybe, maybe not.  We’ll come back to that.

Emmer’s second point, that a handful of commun ities get the most money, is more complicated. This year, the state will give out $426,535,440 in local government aid. Nearly half of that – about $200 million – goes to 14 cities, including Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Cloud, St. Paul, and Winona.

That much is true, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story.

The top 14 cities in terms of Local Government Aid – Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Duluth, Saint Cloud, Winona, Hibbing, Austin, Moorhead, Mankato, Rochester, Faribault, Albert Lea, New Ulm and Virginia – do indeed soak up over half of the state’s entire LGA budget.

More interestingly, the top thirty cities  in population – from Minneapolis (population 390131) down through Brooklyn Center (30330) get a grand total of about 172 million dollars from LGA.

But twenty of the top thirty cities – Bloomington, Brooklyn Park, Plymouth, Eagan, Eden Prairie, Burnsville, Maple Grove, Woodbury, Blaine, Lakeville, Minnetonka, Apple Valley, Edina, Saint Louis Park, Maplewood, Roseville, Cottage Grove, Shakopee, Inver Grove Heights and Andover – receive absolutely no local government aid.

Every one of them is a metro-area suburb.  Most, if not all, of them are successful cities with more-or-less thriving business communities.   Each of them has between 30,000 and 85,000 people; 1.05 million people altogether, a fifth of the entire population of Minnesota.

We’ll come back to that too.

However, Emmer’s statement glosses over some important context. Local Government Aid was created to help towns with limited tax bases provide services to its residents. Funding is doled out based on a city’s fiscal needs and its ability to pay for them, as well as other factors, including population.

This brings us to the part of the story that doesn’t get contained in a spreadsheet – much.  LGA isn’t just a bit of help to parts of the state that can’t afford the better things in governmental life on their own.  It’s not even merely a program forcing the parts of this state that don’t work to subsidize spending on the parts of the state that either can’t afford them, or spend more than they want to account for to their own voters.  It’s a political football.

But let’s go back to the numbers.

So on one hand, it makes sense that large cities, like St. Paul or Minneapolis, would be getting a lot of money.

But dollar amounts don’t reveal much. To really understand how the state is spending the cash, it makes more sense to look at aid per capita. By this measure, some of the state’s smallest towns are getting the most money per person. For instance, Leonidas, population 57, got $35,240 this year, which breaks down to about $618 per person. By comparison, Minneapolis, population 390,000, got $63,986,731 in local government aid – or about $164 per person.

So far, so good.  Minneapolis gets $164 a person; Saint Paul, closer to $175.  Duluth, a whopping $322 per person.

If you take the Big Three cities together, the average Local Government Aid comes to almost $186 per person.

If you take those “Top Fourteen” cities with a fifth of Minnesota’s population that the MPR report talked about up above the fourteen cities that soak up half the LGA, the average is about the same; $187 per person, ranging from a low of $49 in Rochester to an incredible $495 and change for each of Hibbing’s 16,000-odd residents.

Indeed, some of Minnesota’s smallest cities do get the most money per capita; tiny Leonidas, population 57, got a grand total of $35,000; that’ll buy you two-third of one of RT Rybak’s drinking fountains in Minneapolis.

So let’s compare and contrast the average populations of cities outside the “Top Fourteen” – Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Duluth and the eleven other cities listed above that soak up half the budget – that actually get above the average of the Top Fourteen in LGA receipts (I took every city that got over $188 per capita) with those that don’t.  They account for a total of 397 cities – a little less than half of Minnesota’s cities – with a combined population of almost exactly 540,000 people.  They soak up $157,319,854 – a total of $290.79 per capita.  And their average population is 1363.

We are talking small towns, here.

Compare that to the 383 cities that get less than $186 per capita – the average for the Big Fourteen recipients and the Big Three population centers.  They total 2,621,451 people – about half the population of the state – and get $55,550,284, or a little over a ninth of the total LGA budget.  They have an average population of 6844 – almost five times the size of the cities that get above-average aid.

So the pattern so far is this:

  • The big fourteen LGA recipients, and the three largest cities in population, all get $186 per capita in LGA.
  • The smaller towns and cities that get more than that average are quite small indeed.
  • The larger towns and cities that get below that average are considerably larger.

But what about the large number of cities that get no aid?  The MPR report points out that some cities get no money whatsoever from LGA.

Those 127 cities total 1,770,912 people – about a third of the state’s population – and have an average population just shy of 14,000.

So here’s how LGA breaks out:

  • the 14 biggest recipients, and 300-odd cities averaging just over a thousand people eat up almost $370 million in LGA ($141 million to the Twin Cities and Duluth); that is 87 percent of all LGA.
  • The remaining just-shy-of-half of Minnesota towns and cities – those in the middle of the pack, averaging around 6,000 people – get what’s left.
  • 15% of Minnesota towns and cities holding about a third of the people get no LGA.  Zip.  Nada.  Zilch.

Had enough yet?

Tough.  There’s more.

I split out the cities that make up the Twin Cities metro area – 101 total cities and towns (I may have missed a few, but they’re useful for comparison purposes).

Of the 101 total cities in the Metro, from huge Minneapolis to tiny Coates (population 177), averaging 28,500-odd people receiving a total of $158664,026 of LGA, averaging $57.20 per capita.

But only 28 cities in the Metro area actually get Local Government Aid.  So if you leave out Minneapolis and Saint Paul, with their 678,186 total people and roughly $170/person allotment, you get a total of 99 cities with 2,010,299 people, averaging a minuscule $8.31 per capita.

Conclusion

Local Government Aid gives immensely disproportionate aid to Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth, as well as the smaller towns that the program was originally intended to aid.  It takes money from the parts of the state that are prospering – the Metro suburbs.

There is, in between the lavishly funded Twin Cities and Duluth and the smaller communities where a small contribution translates into a huge per-capita expenditure, a large donut hole of Minnesota communities, largely prosperous, heavily outer-tier Metro or from the southern part of the state, between 5,000 and the mid-five figures that get nothing – but most definitely pay in.

And Minnesota Public Radio stopped looking for conclusions when they found something they could use to bag on Tom Emmer.

Chanting Points Memo: Overpowered By Innocuous

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I have this friend; let’s call her “Lydia”.  “Literal Lydia”, we called her in high school.  She was a little anal-retentive.  She sorted her sock drawer by thickness.   She reportedly brushed her teeth before and after giving a talk in speech class.  She pronounced the “g” in words like “Knowing” and “Sailing” and “Talking”; “if it’s in writing, that’s how it’s supposed to be”, she always said.

Back when we were filling out our high school yearbooks, I made the mistake of writing “Thanks a Million!” to one of our other classmates.  She saw my yearbook, and looked at me.  “You neither said nor wrote thank you a million times!  You are a liar!”

“But it’s just a figure of spee…” I started to try to explain.

“What’s in writing is the only reality!” she bellowed.

A few years later – ten, to be exact, since I long since learned one must be exact when talking about, to, or in reference to Literal Lydia – I called her to tell her that my oldest had been born.

“What’s the name?”, Lydia asked.

“Bun [*]”, I responded.

“Did you file a birth certificate yet?” Lydia demanded.

“Well, not yet…”

“Then she has no name!”, Lydia bellowed.  “Because the written word is the only reality there is!”

Lydia worked as an actualry for about ten years after college, but she got fired for harshing the other actuaries’ mellow.

She might be a liberal blogger today.

———-

You’re running for governor.

You’re facing an opponent who can outspend you 3-1 just out of his own personal checkbook, who can finance a campaign by unloading a Renoir or two for more money than you will ever make in your life, your spouse’s life, and your kids’ lives.  Your opponent’s campaign is backstopped by a media that is thoroughly in the bag for your opponent.  You are on the road eight days a week, between debates, campaign stops and fundraisers.  Your staff – small, young, underpaid and and running more on Red Bull than cash – is doing the work of a couple of staffs.

So given the above, triage the following activities:

  1. Make it to your campaign events on time.
  2. Get to your fundraising events on time and rarin’ to go.
  3. Update niggling paperwork, especially paperwork that has no legal requirement for the timeliness of any updates.

Which of the above a) must you do, which will you b) do the best you can, and c) which miiiiiight just fall through the cracks?

If “3” is anything but “c”, you have no future as a shoestring underdog campaigner.  However, I know a chick named Lydia who might dig you…

Lydia would dig Jeff Rosenberg of MnPublius. Jeffthinks he’s onto something; he and his blog-mate Zack Stevenson appearently noticed that while Mark Buesgens had left the Emmer Campaign on September 13, the state Campaign Finance Board website still showed Buesgens as the campaign’s chairman.

The Emmer campaign had apparently had the temerity to insist that Buesgens had left the campaign on the 13th to take a position at the Minnesota GOP.

The Emmer campaign, instead of just telling the truth and admitting that its campaign chair made a mistake, fell back on its time-honored practice of trying to mislead Minnesotans. They claimed Buesgens was no longer the campaign chair, when in fact he had been attending functions as campaign chair just the day before.

Now, Rosenberg presents no evidence of any such appearances, so I have no real way of running this down; I don’t attend many campaign events. But apparently the Star/Tribune, in covering Buesgens’ arrest, was under the same “delusion“:

Emmer and Buesgens were together briefly earlier that day at a campaign event, Emmer’s campaign said. [The Strib writers, Baird Helgeson and Paul Walsh, apparently didn’t notice anything about Buesgens being introduced as a chairman]

Buesgens was Emmer’s campaign manager from June through the weekend before the primary in August.

Buesgens also served as a consultant for Emmer, but a campaign spokesman said his last day was Sept. 12. Buesgens now works as a consultant for the state Republican Party, said Mark Drake, a party spokesman.

Seems pretty clear-cut to me.

It does to Rosenberg, too – but not in the same way that most of us think:

When the news broke yesterday, Emmer sent a letter to the Campaign Finance and Disclosure Board asking that his registration be changed, and backdated by a week.

Did Emmer really think nobody would find out that he did this? He could have told the truth and admitted Rep Buesgens made a mistake, and that would have been the end. Instead, his first inclination was apparently to lie about it.

And here’s the “smoking gun”; a fax from the Emmer campaign to the Campaign Finance Board:

So – we have a fax, sent a week after the effective date of Buesgens’ job change, to a state bureaucracy, asking them to change the Campaign Chair listing.

Obviously there’s a coverup.

Well, if you presume that everything the Emmer campaign told the Strib, and sent out in their press release on Buesgen’s departure, was false.

The problem is, it’s not.

I talked with MN GOP spokesman Mark Drake.  On the record.  Mark Buegens started with the party on September 13 – exactly as the Strib was told.  Exactly as the press release said.  “These conspiracy theories are just wrong”, Drake added with a chuckle.

Speaking on background, another source at the Minnesota GOP said that while the party isn’t giong to release payroll records to the public, they do in fact show that Buesgens started with the party on…

…September 13.

Just like the campaign said.

It’s also only an issue if there’s any statutory deadline for reporting staff changes to the Campaign Finance Board.  Did the campaign stretch any rules, much less break any laws, by waiting a week to notify them, inadvertently or not?

I don’t know the rules on this – and I’m going to guess Rosenberg and Stevenson don’t either – but I’m gonna guess the answer is no.

Oh, and the one-week-late, “smoking gun” fax?

So why would the DFL and their affiiliated bloggers be carping about this – words fail me – mind-numbingly trivial paperwork bobble, when their candidate Mark Dayton just released another budget that falls billions short of balancing the budget even as it mercilessly punishes initiative and merit…

…oh, yeah.  Never mind.

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