It’s become a Democrat cliché; any move to touch any government spending will “destroy” the program in question, inevitably starving the elderly and freezing the children, or something.

Lost in much of the barbering and protesting over GOP public-spending reforms – DC, Wisconsin, Minnesota and everywhere else – is that without conservative reform, the programs the lefty is yapping about will collapse under their own weight; it’s only through significant reform that the programs will be sustainable at all.

We’re seeing that in Wisconsin already:

Emily Koczela had been anxiously waiting for months for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s controversial budget repair bill to take effect. Koczela, the finance director for the Brown Deer school district, had been negotiating with the local union, trying to get it to accept concessions in order to make up for a $1 million budget shortfall. But the union wouldn’t budge.

“We laid off 27 [teachers] as a precautionary measure,” Koczela told me. “They were crying. Some of these people are my friends.”

And what happened?

On June 29 at 12:01 a.m., Koczela could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The budget repair bill​—​delayed for months by protests, runaway state senators, and a legal challenge that made its way to the state’s supreme court​—​was law. The 27 teachers on the chopping block were spared.

It was the reforms – the ones that were going to “destroy” education – that saved the teachers.

Not the unions and their screeching about Madison last winter.

With “collective bargaining rights” limited to wages, Koczela was able to change the teachers’ benefits package to fill the budget gap. Requiring teachers to contribute 5.8 percent of their salary toward pensions saved $600,000. Changes to their health care plan​—​such as a $10 office visit co-pay (up from nothing)​—​saved $200,000. Upping the workload from five classes, a study hall, and two prep periods to six classes and two prep periods saved another $200,000. The budget was balanced.

I wonder how many of those 27 teachers called in sick to go to Madison last winter?

Two things that make me think “something’s just not right here”, and warrant some investigation:

• Teenagers asking “so, are you going out Friday night?”
• Liberals citing Reagan.

Lately, there’s been a plague of liberals, in print/blogs/on Twitter, stating without fear of contradiction (because, if you’re a Twin Cities liberal, nobody has ever contradicted you) that “today’s conservatives would never nominate Ronald Reagan”.

It’s a claim based on two dubious premises:

As to the abortion issue – that, again,shows how little the left understands the Tea Party.  Abortion is a key conservative issue – but when the economy is in the tank, it’s not the most important issue facing the Chief Executive.  As Reagan allocated political capital among his key priorities – the economy, defeating communism – his metaphorical “abortion” budget was squeezed down to “using the bully pulpit against the practice”…

…which is pretty much where today’s Tea Partiers are with the issue; mortally opposed, but focused on other things at the moment.

The lesson?  As your liberal friends start parrotting these memes, by all means set ’em straight.

(Closed-circuit to liberal commenters: Go ahead.  Point out that “Reagan legalized abortion in California”.  I dare you)

Ever since I was a kid – hell, ever since I was a liberal – I remember Republicans running for Congress (among other offices) promising to “do something” about the deficit. 

And “nothing” usually ended up being the “something” they did, because our budget situation has not only not improved, it’s gotten worse.

And over the decades, we conservatives – as opposed to Republicans – dreamed about Republicans, or conservatives really, who’d put principle ahead of political expediency.

And according to that conservative tool the NYTimes, we may just finally have them:

“Re-election is the farthest thing from my mind,” said Representative Tom Reed, a freshman Republican from upstate New York. “Like many of my colleagues in the freshman class, I came down here to get our fiscal house in order and take care of the threat to national security that we see in the federal debt. We came here not to have long careers. We came here to do something. We don’t care about re-election.”

The Times – committed as they are to the David Brooks school of “conservatism” – is cautious…:

It is not clear how genuine or widespread that sentiment is in Congress, but regardless, it has upended what President Obama said on Friday had been a “difficult but routine process” in past years.

…but notes a key factor in the evolution of the GOP; it’s become a conservative party with a mission. 

The sheer size of the debt and its rapid growth in recent years have emboldened fiscal conservatives in the House, prompting some of them to pledge not to vote for a higher debt ceiling even if a compromise can be reached before Aug. 2, when the Treasury Department says it will hit the $14.3 trillion debt cap and run out of borrowing authority.

And that’s what’s really got the Democrats scared.

It’s become a chanting point on the left lately.

Liberals – many of whom are not capable of carrying Reagan’s jellybean jar – are chanting “Reagan, the [Jon Stewart-issue snark turned on] “Godfather of conservatism”, raised taxes!”

The occasionally-unspoken coda to that? “So you have to do it too!”

But is it true?

Silly people.  It’s on lefty blogs.  What is the rule with leftyblogs?  Always assume it’s a lie, or at least grossly omitted context, until you can prove otherwise.  And you can almost never prove otherwise.

If you look into the details – and your liberal friends certainly hope you don’t, because none of them really have (because the whole meme is something they got from Media Matters, that has been passed down from the higher-ranking ranking blogs to the lower-ranking local blogs.  It’s the way they roll), you’ll see “no”.

Here’s a year by year walk through the major tax legislation of the Reagan administration, and the cuts (black) or hikes (red) they made in terms of percent of gross revenue.

So the table shows us a couple of key facts:

Reagan’s Tax Cuts Were Greater Than The Hikes:  Reagan’s total tax cuts outstripped his hikes by over 50%.  But even more importantly…

When The Economy Needed Cuts, Reagan Cut Them: During Reagan’s first term, when the economy was reeling from the seventies, Reagan by an average of 2% of revenues per year.  The result?  The economy boomed.  The cuts led directly to one of the greatest economic expansions in history.

Now, if you’ve been listening to your liberal friends, you are intellectually poorer you might say “But in his second term, he turned into a tax-hiking machine, didn’t he?”

Focus, people.  This is leftybloggers we’re talking about.  Because even if they’re not outright lying (the numbers are right there, so they’re not), they’re leaving out key context.

And so too with this issue.  Because…

The Tax Hikes In The Second Term Were A Result Of Democrat Perfidy: Remember – Reagan always faced Democrat legislative majorities.  And eventually Reagan had to deal.  Part of the deal was that in exchange for some tax hikes, the O’Neill Congress would cut spending.

The Democrat Congress naturally reneged on the deal (as commenter Kermit pointed out yesterday).

So when your liberal friends stand by the water cooler and chant with their glassy eyes and Jon Stewart smirks “Reagan raised taxes”, you can respond “it’s true.  Reagan raised taxes – after cutting them much more, and only as part of a deal on which the Democrats cheated”.

The American left today is a complex network of conspiracy theorists.

For example, there are the “Truthers” – people who believe that George W. Bush set up 9/11.  There are also “Triggers” – those who believe that Sarah, not Bristol, Palin begat little Trig.   There are many others – check ’em out.

The latest addition:  “Grovers”.  The “Grover” believes that the wheels of the GOP are being spun by Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Freedom.

In a move that should prompt deja vu on the part of Minnesotans who pay attnetion (admittedly mostly conservatives),

Brian Rosenberg is the president of Macalester College in Saint Paul.  The place makes fewer bones that most post-secondary schools about the fact that its mission is to train “progressives”; according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, it’s got the “progressive”-friendly, anti-dissent speech code to match (FIRE gave Mac a “Red” rating for atrocious commitment to free speech).

And if you’re a parent who’s spending, or pondering spending, over $100,000 to send a kid to Mac, you might want to read Rosenberg’s Strib op-ed, and ask yourself “is this the level of commitment to intellectual honesty, to say nothing of rigor, that my kid can expect at Mac?”

Because Rosenberg exhibits the great trifecta of modern “progressive” “thought”in an op-ed in yesterdays’ Strib:

• Crushing  Illogic: we’ll see plenty of that below.
• The exploitation of ignorance.
• The belief that government is our society’s most important enterprise

These lead liberals to some bizarre conclusions.

He’s got a thesis = and if you follow Minnesota politics, it’ll all sound very familiar:

The most powerful figure in today’s Republican Party is not John Boehner or Mitch McConnell. It is not Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan. It is not even Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin.

It is, of course, Grover Norquist, the man with The Pledge.

Sound familiar, Minnesotans?  It’s like David Strom and the Taxpayers League’s “No New Taxes” pledge .

Norquist, who has never held elected office…

Isn’t it funny how liberals toss that out when it suits them?

Martin Luther King never held elective office.  Either did Keith Olbermann, James Carville or Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, and each of them is every bit as involved in setting policy as is Norquist is – where “involvement” means “using their God-given right to tell legislators what they expect of them”.

Remember my first point?  Crushing Illogic?   Rosenberg indulges in the strawman first:

…is the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, a group whose pledge not to raise taxes under any circumstances has now been signed by hundreds of Republican candidates and officials at both state and national levels.

And they do mean “any circumstances.” Enormous budget deficits? No. A country at war? Nope. Famine and plague? Sorry.

It’s not just a strawman, it’s a dumb one.  We’re at war – but it’s not a war for our very existence, like World War 2 or the Civil War.  And we’re not suffering famine.

Indeed, our country’s only plague is government that regards spending as a greater “right” than the peoples’ right to keep the money they earn.  That’s the plague that Norquist is trying to  address.

If the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, get back to us.

Our grandmothers kidnapped and threatened with death until and unless we raise taxes, as Norquist was asked recently by Stephen Colbert? Well, answered the unflappable Norquist, we always have our memories and our photographs.

(Colbert was being characteristically satiric. There appeared to be nothing satiric about the response.)

There’s point two, “playing on ignorance”.  A shocking number of self-described liberals believe that “The Daily Show” is a news show; it’s not a stretch to think they think the same of Colbert.

Norquist isn’t one of them.

I want to set aside for now the political and economic wisdom of raising or not raising taxes and focus instead on an even more fundamental question: How prudent is it to take an irrevocable pledge about how to govern before one begins the actual work of governing?

Again with the strawman.

If pledges were “irrevocable”, then Alcoholics Anonymous could make Step One “I pledge to quit drinking”, and dispense with steps two through twelve.

The politicians aren’t making the pledge to Grover Norquist.  They are making it to the voters.

Just as George H. W. Bush did, famously pledging “Read my lips!  No new taxes!”.  He broke the pledge.  It helped cost him the 1992 election.

Conservatives remember this.

How wise is it to remove from the legislative toolbox one of the most important tools before one knows what particular challenges one will face?

The “toolbox” is a dumb analogy.  Taxation isn’t government’s tool.  It’s government saying “I’m going to take your tool”.

A better analogy?  The credit card. It can be an important and useful tool in running a home – unless the homeowner starts believing it’s the credit card company’s obligation to support her spending no matter what.

Credit card companies don’t do that.  Why should we?

Up next?  Rosenberg shows – for those who might have doubted it – that he’s from Planet Academia:

How many employers in any industry would hire someone into a leadership position who declared, prior to beginning work, that he or she would under no circumstances employ a commonly used strategy or compromise with those with whom he or she disagreed?

Would a retailer hire a manager who asserted that he would never under any circumstances raise prices?

Would a manufacturer hire a vice president who insisted that under no conditions would layoffs be permissible?

No, no and no – but all of those analogies are wrong.

Nobody would hire a leader who promised to run the business according to a spending target.  And that’s exactly what the “progressives” have done to the state and federal government; make spending the measure of “good government”.

It’s why the DFL scolds us every year about “budget deficits” that are, in fact, based on nothing but bureaucratic spending targets; it’s the same at the national level, only moreso.

Even the most basic primers on leadership note that the ability to listen, the ability to learn and the willingness to compromise are among the essential characteristics of any successful leader.

True.  But Rosenberg missed the most important lesson in those “primers”; a leader leads people toward a goal.

Oh, liberals get it when it’s their goals – desired outcomes for their constituents, and above all that government itself remain fat and happy – and their leaders.

Norquist is asking that the main goal for would-be leaders that seek conservative votes,  at at a time when the greatest scourge facing our nation is an inability to continue long-term government entitlement spending, be to stop spending so much.

It’s a worthy goal.

Because conservatives don’t believe that keeping government fat and happy is the main goal of life – or, for that matter, of government.

Which brings us to the bizarre conclusion:

Many of these newcomers to public office appear also to believe that the mere fact of being elected constitutes a “mandate” for how they should subsequently act — as if the business of governing ended rather than began with being chosen for office.

That would make sense if we elected people to be bureaucrats – to follow pre-set, tested procedures to do a job whose parameters everyone already agrees on.

We don’t agree on those parameters, though.  Which is why we have elections – as an alternative to fighting a civil war over how that job is supposed to be done.

This is a new, peculiar, and destructive way to think about representative government. It ultimately would lead to the elimination of representative government altogether and, instead, to public ballot initiatives on every issue large and small. And we know how well that is working in California.

If Rosenberg were an undergrad writing an English or history paper, and he used such a broad, unsupported conclusion for his thesis, a teacher worthy of them name would knock him down a couple of letter grades and send it back for a rewrite.

Minnesota was once a place known for the exceptional ability of its leaders to place the common good above polarizing ideology.

No.  Minnesota was once a one-party state.  It had two “parties”, of course – but intellectually, there really was only one party.

Life changes.  Wear a helmet, Rosenberg.

Americans for Tax Reform asks every candidate for elected office on the state or federal level to make a written commitment to their constituents to “oppose and vote against all tax increases.”

Every member of Congress, upon taking office, is asked to swear an oath to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.”

Here is my simple question: Which “pledge” takes precedence?

That Rosenberg thinks “making government live within its means” is not “part of the duties of the office” shows us where part of Minneosta’s problem is.

I decided I’d try to write a song.  It’s sung to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine:”

Imagine a right-winger,
in John Lennon’s skin?
A hard-core tax-protester,
rooting for Reagan to win…
Imagine all the moonbats
whose worldview would come unglued…

John Lennon was a closet Republican, who felt a little embarrassed by his former radicalism, at the time of his death – according to the tragic Beatles star’s last personal assistant.

Imagine him and Yoko
protesting in their bed.
Their Revolution was Hayek,
rattling round his head.
Imagine all the moonbats
stepping to the ledge…

Fred Seaman worked alongside the music legend from 1979 to Lennon’s death at the end of 1980 and he reveals the star was a Ronald Reagan fan who enjoyed arguing with left-wing radicals who reminded him of his former self.

You may say I’ve got delusions,
but it’s on the Internet!
So I picture him and Thatcher…
And we haven’t heard it all yet!

In new documentary Beatles Stories, Seaman tells filmmaker Seth Swirsky Lennon wasn’t the peace-loving militant fans thought he was while he was his assistant.

He says, “John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on (Democrat) Jimmy Carter.

Imagine John and Yoko
standing proud and tall.
Standing next to Reagan,
Saying “all you need’s to tear down the wall!”
Imagine all the lefties
swallowing their nines…oh ooooooh….

“He’d met Reagan back, I think, in the 70s at some sporting event… Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young (peace) demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that… He did express support for Reagan, which shocked me.

“He was a very different person back in 1979 and 80 than he’d been when he wrote Imagine. By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy’s naivete.”

You may say that I’m a wingnut,
But seems that John was, too.
I hope someday someone will find out
that George Harrison was one too…

Last week, we took a look at the Strib op-ed by Roger Hale that supported Governor Dayton’s budget plan, whom the Strib felt it was important to remind you was a former CEO at Tennant Corporation…

…but not that he was a large-scale DFL donor who’d given $110,000 in the last gubernatorial race alone to Alliance for a Better Minnesota, the Dayton-family-supported attack-PAC that launched the most epic sleaze campaign in Minnesota history against Tom Emmer.  That, apparently, the Strib didn’t believe was relevant.

“But what about what he said about business?”, some leftybloggers responded.

Doug Baker, CEO of St. Paul-based Ecolab, responded in the Strib over the weekend.  (Full disclosure:  I worked for Ecolab for four years. A good chunk of my retirement is still in Ecolab stock – and it’s performing better than most of my portfolio at the moment.  Their IT department would give Scott Adams a year worth of material, but it’s a good company – as it happens, 20 times the size of Roger Hale’s Tennant).

And Baker is unimpressed by either Hale or Governor Dayton:

I have two reactions to [Hale’s piece]: First, many in the business community strongly disagree — and second, focusing on revenue generation misses the point and delays action on the more important issue — unsustainable increases in government spending.

It’s no secret that Minnesota always has been a high-tax state. An April 2010 report from the Itasca Project, which highlighted our region’s strengths and weaknesses, identified Minnesota’s uncompetitive tax structure as one of the main barriers to job creation.

Blam.

The “progressives” never, never get that.

My experience, which is shared by the majority of my fellow business leaders in Minnesota, is that personal taxes do matter. It’s an issue that frequently comes up when recruiting people or transferring people to Minnesota.

A majority.

And that’s when it comes to getting talent to come to Ecolab Tower in downtown Saint Paul, or the R&D center in Eagan.   Like most big Minnesota companies, Ecolab has created no manufacturing, distribution or non-sales jobs in Minnesota in years.

Following Gov. Mark Dayton and enacting the second-highest tax rate in the nation would hurt our state.

This is especially true today when state and national borders no longer constrain the movement of labor, capital and intellectual property. In this digital age, people can and do work from anywhere — and they can and will choose to work where they can keep more of their income.

And that’s just speaking of people who work for major corporations.

Ecolab started in the 1920’s, back when the barriers to enter business were very, very low.  The corporation was able to build its business during decades when Minnesota’s taxes were blissfully unintrusive.

How about people starting the next generation of businesses?  The little S-corporations that are the big C-corporations of tomorrow?

They’re moving to Hudson, or Fargo, or Sioux Falls, or Dallas/Fort Worth.

Bring this up to a progressive.  Note that North Dakota is lowering taxes as their revenues boom; they’ll respond “but how many Fortune 500 companies have?”  The response is “that’s a function of population density, but nice try.  Still – how many jobs are those Fortune 500 companies creating in MN?”

The answer: fewer:

There also have been recent headquarters moves that cost Minnesota thousands of jobs — MoneyGram comes to mind — which I strongly believe was motivated more by personal income tax rates than anything else (in my opinion).

But you don’t have to take my word for it. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, Minnesota employment growth has lagged the U.S. rate for a decade. More than 1,200 small and medium-sized businesses left the state from 1997 to 2008.

Baker gets the real problem – the one Hale glossed right past:

More important than the tax issue, though, is Dayton’s proposed double-digit increase in state spending. The legislative majorities have offered a 6 percent increase in spending over last year’s budget — this includes a substantial increase in spending on both K-12 education and health care.

For any family or anyone who owns a business in this state, a 6 percent increase in revenue would be considered very good news and would be considered a budget they could live with. However, in government-speak, a 6 percent increase is considered a “cut” because it represents less than the government wanted to spend.

Baker notes the same thing I did in shredding Hale last week; back in the seventies, Japan and Germany were getting done with recovering from World War 2. China and India were mired in experiments with various degrees of extreme socialism, and starving and riven with political contortions and very much third world countries.

Back in the sixties and seventies – which is where Dayton’s entire strategy came from, and when Roger Hale was an active CEO – it was a very different world.

Baker gets this:

Raising taxes and double-digit increases in government spending may have been a manageable strategy in the 1980s and 1990s, when our competition for jobs came primarily from Wisconsin and Iowa.

But the reality our state faces today is a very different one.

Our global competitors and the majority of U.S. states — led by a number of prominent Democrat governors — are moving toward lowering taxes, prioritizing government spending and building a more supportive business environment in order to attract jobs.

Minnesota must do the same if we hope to grow jobs in the future and compete in the 21st century.

Baker’s piece utterly shreds Hale.  You can tell it hurt the DFLers who were defending Hale last week.  They’re responding.

With name-calling.

Setting a single, no-haggle price was a great publicity point for the late, great Saturn marque of cars.

Of course, they are a late, great marque of cars.

I’m not sure if no-haggle pricing was the issue; GM’s bad management had a lot more to do with it.

But whatever no-haggle pricing had or had not to do with Saturn’s demise, it may have been a mistake in this past legislative session.

John “Shabbosgoy” Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives would have preferred some smash-mouth haggling; I”m inclined to agree:

…[R]epublicans find themselves boxed into a budget corner of their own making. Having won both the House and Senate, the latter for the first time since the 1970’s, they should have been able to advance their core principles in a manner that consistently gave them the upper hand, despite the executive branch being controlled by the opposition. Instead, republicans find themselves on the defensive and playing a poor hand largely dealt to them by themselves.

The shortest analysis is that the republicans erred badly in sending only one “this is it we really mean it!” budget to the Governor and expecting him to roll over.

I’m also not a bit puzzled by the fact that the GOP jumped immediately to the “spend the available revenue/live within our means” budgets, expecting to put it out there and then hold on through the gale of union-and-Dayton-family-funded astroturf advertising and pro-DFL, biased media coverage.   The current proposal – the $34 billion budget that uses new revenue from the February forecast – would have been an acceptable ending point, the place the DFL would fall back to to compromise.

Even that truncated analysis, however, obscures other problems with the manner in which the republican majority has performed. For example, running uniformly on a platform of bringing down government spending while not increasing taxes, one might plausibly have expected them to produce a budget that actually cut spending. Not a budget that was signed into law by the Governor, mind you. No, one that actually required of the majority some intestinal fortitude and made cuts to the bloated mess that is Minnesota state government. The idea that there isn’t largess is laughable. The fact that the Minnesota government is the state’s single largest employer is shameful.

We need more freshmen in the GOP caucus.

Nate Silver talks a little history, noting that well into the 1980 campaign, Jimmy Carter seemed to be defying the bad economy.  Carter was…:

…holding his own against Ronald Reagan. Some polls, even well after Labor Day (that’s Labor Day 1980, not 1979), showed the horse race to be tied or even had Mr. Carter with a slim lead.

Mr. Reagan would win overwhelmingly, however, claiming 44 states (even Massachusetts and New York) while limiting Mr. Carter to just 41 percent of the vote. He surged in the final week of the campaign after he posed the following question to Americans in the presidential debate of October 28, the first and only such event in which he and Mr. Carter participated together:

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Where was the unemployment rate four years ago? Four points lower.

Where was our national debt? Bad, but not this bad.

Where was our budget? Settled, and while waaaaay too big (Bad Bush!), much smaller than today.

How was our standing in the world? Leftymedia yammering aside, about the same as it’d always been.

One could argue in a macroeconomic sense that I’m better off because my house doesn’t have all that mortgage-bubble-based false valuation on it. Someday I’ll look back on that had laugh.

Otherwise?

Nope. Worse off.

One day last winter, I went out to eat at this Vietnamese joint I’ve been eyeing for years.

The next day, there was an epic earthquake in Japan; the quake led to a tsunami killing thousoands, and the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactor.

I guess I won’t eat at that restaurant again.  God only knows what’ll happen.

In related news, Joan Walsh at Salon “reports on” yesterday’s tenth anniversary of the Bush Tax Cuts:

I know, a congressman confessed to Tweeting a crotch shot to a woman who is not his wife, along with other online indiscretions that may wreck his marriage. That’s big news. [Or is it? – Ed.] The 10th anniversary of tax cuts that helped wreck the economy? Not so much.

That’s been the left’s chanting point. I heard Dick “Turban” “Let’s Bring Back The Fairness Doctrine” Durbin saying much the same yesterday, something to the effect of “you want tax cuts?  Look at how the Bush Administration turned out!”.

And Durbin, like Walsh, does it in terms that make just as much sense as the connection between the Vietnamese restaurant and the Japanese earthquake:

But it’s worth remembering how badly tax cuts worked in stimulating economic growth, as Republicans continue to claim more tax cuts will revive the economy. Most big economic indicators moved in the wrong direction since then, some horrifically.

Under the Bush-Cheney administration, the U.S. saw a series of historic economic lows, and overall, the slowest overall rate of economic growth since World War II.

Right.

Bush cut taxes.

The tax cuts were responsible for the violent deflation of the tech bubble (which seemed like a big deal, back before the Housing bubble), which began months before Bush was even elected.

Meanwhile on another continent, 8,000 miles away, Osama Bin Laden, outraged at the invocation of Reaganism, organized a revenge attack that, three months later, would kill 3,000 Americans and stick another fork in the economy, driving another recession (whose effects were muted by the tax cuts – Ed).

And of course, two years before Bush was elected, the tax cuts prompted the Clinton administration to impel Fannie and Freddie to socialize the risks of the mortgage industry on the backs of the taxpayer while simultaneously easing up home-buying credit.

The lesson is clear.

Stop eating Vietnamese food.

Dutifully, the Strib carries the short version of the DFL’s current party line; it’s the governor who’s being the “moderate”:

“Here I am in the middle, and they haven’t moved,” Dayton said of Republican lawmakers.

It’s BS, of course; the GOP started the session committed to holding the line at 2010-2011 budget levels; as projected revenues rose, they increased the spending to match – keeping us “within our means”, against the wishes of some conservatives who pushed to cut services back to 2009 levels.

That – when you’re dealing with a legislature with a decisive mandate, as opposed to a governor who backed into office with the tiniest plurality since Jesse Ventura – is more than enough.

So what we have here is…:

• A legislature that’s done exactly what they were sent, and sent in overwhelming numbers, to Saint Paul to do, up against…
• A Governor who is willing to risk a government shutdown to support the only policy initiatives he has; stick it to the state’s most productive citizens, and force us non-government employees to work ’til we’re 70 so his union supporters can retire at 55.  He can do this, because he can count on…
• …the media.  Part of which is actively carrying water for the DFL (I”m looking at you, Esme Murphy and John Cronan), and the rest of which worships at the Cult of Process, believing that negotiation and compomise themselves are the overriding goals of all legislative government, worthy of frittering away all manner of princple and, for that matter, fiscal common sense.

Let the spinning begin!

Governor Dayton tells the legislature to “suck it”:

Gov. Mark Dayton says Republican legislative leaders are underestimating his resolve if they think he’ll back off his plan to raise taxes on Minnesota’s top earners.

Fewer than three weeks remain in the legislative session, and Dayton and legislative leaders aren’t close to reaching agreement on a plan to erase a $5 billion budget deficit.

Dayton seems to be counting on the GOP reverting to its traditional behavior – bowing to media pressure and DFL browbeating.  Their most recent model – the “Gang of Six”, the GOP “moderates” two years ago who caved in on a DFL tax and spend bill.

And we know what happened there, don’t we?

It’s not the same GOP as it was two and four years ago.

Dayton said the Republican budget is more than $1 billion out of balance, and that they should agree on spending cuts instead of relying on budget savings that will never materialize…

…according to a Management and Budget director that serves at his discretion, using formulas that are not designed to account in any way for savings.

“This is real to so many thousands of Minnesotans and they won’t now, two months away from the beginning of the next biennium, even tell the people of Minnesota what it is they’re willing to do to them. And that I do not respect,” Dayton said.

Dayton is, of course, unwillling to point out that down his path lies madness; 20% spending hikes in this biennium will be followed by 20% more in 2013, and more after that.  And if the economy improves, and tax receipts climb with it?  All of that will be spent too.

Dayton doesn’t want to talk about that.

Dayton said there’s enough time to reach a deal but worries that Republicans aren’t going to budge on their opposition to tax increases. He said Minnesotans want them to compromise.

“They want us to work out our differences. So it seems to me that they have that responsibility. I have that responsibility,” he said.

57% of Minnesotans voted against Dayton.  He’s the one that needs to compromise.

The GOP?   No way.  They got sent there with a mandate.  They had best follow it.

Polls are showing the GOP didn’t nake nearly as big a hit from Ryan’s budget plan as the Dems hoped:

Ryan and other Republican House members already have faced hostile questions at town-hall-style meetings in their home districts from seniors and others about the GOP proposal to turn the nation’s health care program for the elderly into what would essentially be a voucher system. The GOP budget blueprint would overhaul Medicare, turn Medicaid into block grants for the states and trim trillions of dollars in spending on discretionary programs. It would lower tax rates for top earners and corporations.

“The bad news for the Democrats is that even after the Ryan budget comes out and has been attacked for a little while, the Republicans have an advantage,” says Joseph White, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University who studies budget politics and policy.

Republicans have held their political base intact, he says, but the nation is still polarized along partisan lines, and spending cuts are easier when they’re discussed in the abstract. “Everybody can find something they don’t like,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean there’s a majority to cut anything in particular.”

The Dems so hoped there’d be a free-fall.

Thesis:  When leftybloggers can’t manage a logical argument or, often as not, when the DFL’s press releases haven’t told them how to respond in any other way, then it’s off to the name-calling.

They’re not even especially creative about it.  Have you noticed how many conservatives are “Whiners!”, are “Having a Meltdown!” or are “Freaking Out!”, or “Having a Cow”, in the leftybloggers’ odd little language?

When I saw that “Phoenix Woman” from Mercury Rising had written snivelled like a “Real Housewife of Orange County” who’d gotten a Cadillac instead of a Bentley that “Republicans Are Whiners“, referring to my post the other day that noted that Tea Party turnout last Saturday was low, likely, because it was 33 degrees at noon with a howling north wind, I did what I do whenever “Phoenix” writes something; checked Cucking Stool.  Because there seems to be an incredible degree of synchronicity between the two blogs’ efforts.  Simply incredible.

Sure enough, Kackel Dackel “Spotty” at The Stool had – mirabile dictu – nearly the same premise.  He wrote sniveled like a  prison shower-room boytoy that’d just been passed around a bunch of Aryan Brothers:

With all the whining and bleating bla bla bla teabagger teabagger teabagger bla bla lawn-chair patriots yadda yadda…

The leftyblogs and the media – pardon the redundancy – are taking off their clothes and smearing themselves with excrement and falling into catatonic states because they’ve been told that the movement that destroyed them at the polls five months ago, and that all  the GOP candidates are courting, and that has Amy “Ms. Safe Seat” Klobuchar and Barack “The One” Obama making all sorts of fiscally-responsble, spending-hawk-y noises, has somehow “died”.

Now, “Spotty” pointed out shrieked his larynx into hamburger while bashing his head against the sidewalk that while “only” 150-200 conservatives braved the “cold” to come to the Saint Paul protest, and 300 people turned out to see Michele Bachmann in gorgeous weather in South Carolina, the union protesters in Wisconsin turned out in huge numbers on some mighty cold days in Wisconsin.

He probably didn’t realize it, but he pretty much proved my point.

If you believe in stereotypes – and let’s consider the targets of this post, hey?  – then you accept that conservatives are not “demonstrators”.  We just don’t naturally gravitate toward group protests.  So when 600,000 turned out on Tax Day right after the Obamascenscion, and millions last year after the passing of Obamacare, it was big news; conservatives motivated to come out by an immediate crisis.

Sort of like Wisconsin‘s Madison and Milwaukee’s protesters.   People react to immediate events.

So you can assume, against all actual political evidence, that the movement is collapsing.  Or you can remember that in Saint Paul and South Carolina and across the nation conservatives – the Tea Party – had just won crushing victories, flipping both houses and leaving Mark Dayton impotent and adrift in Saint Paul and likely setting the stage for bigger victories after redistricting, and taking the trifecta in South Carolina.  The crisis isn’t over, not by a long shot, but we blunted it.  And so as of last Saturday, there was just no immediate crisis at hand, and people did other things with their Saturday.   Does it mean they won’t turn up at the polls next year?

You could remember, if you can accept a little more “whining”, that some of the same people were doing their end-zone happy dances about this time last year; the Tea Party rally in Saint Paul was about 1/3 the size of the 2009 rally.

And we know how that turned out, right?

(No, it’s a serious question.  For all I know, they think last November was just a bunch of whining too…)

The Strib’s Bob Van Sternberg apparently was at the Tea Party on Saturday.

He noted correctly that the attendance was down a bit; while there were 5-7,000 at the rally in 2009 and close to 2,000 last year.  There were a couple hundreds there on Saturday:

A mere shadow of its showing in recent years, the annual “tax day” rally at the state Capitol attracted only a smattering of adherents on a cold, wet afternoon Saturday.

Van Sternberg is too modest.

Cold and wet is a May drizzle.

It was 33 degrees at noon, when I spoke, and there was snow on the ground, and a cold wet wind was howling from the north giving wind chills in the teens.  Not prime rallying weather.  More like Valley Forge.

And it’s an off year.  No imminent elections, no serious presidential or Senate campaigning, the Legislature is settled for another year.

But he noted I was there:

“Is the Tea Party dead because it could only bring out a couple hundred people on a cold, snowy day?” asked radio talker Mitch Berg, adding, “No, the Tea Party is watching them. The Tea Party is coming for them.”

After the 2010 Tea Party, some in the media and left (ptr) said “look at the turnout!”.  They were wrong, of course; they multiplied by a couple orders of magnitude and showed up at the polls in November.

By the way, an observer at the Capitol told me that attendance at the annual LGBT rally with Governor Dayton was “way down” from previous years.

Is it because the gay rights movement is dead?

Or is it because it’s an off-year, and the weather was  in the fifties and “wind-swept?”

The President wants to shave the edges off the ruinous debt by taxing us back to the stone age and turning us into a bigger Portugal.

The Governor wants to tax this state into prosperity, by determining that “the rich” are “anyone who still has money we can seize”.
And all of this after the people spoke last November and resoundingly demanded real hope and change.

It’s high time those who didn’t get the message last time, did.

Saturday is the Twin Cities Tea Party rally at the Capitol.  Check out the itinerary; it’ll be a lot more concise than last years’ Tax Day rally, and a great event.

The President serves up liberal leftovers in an effort the wrest the national fiscal agenda from Congressman Paul Ryan in his campaign speech this week.

Just one thing Mr. President:

According to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans—most of whom are far from wealthy—were taxed at 100%, it wouldn’t cover Mr. Obama’s deficit for this year.

These are desperate times for a Democratic President that can’t even keep Pennsylvania in the fold, a state where the last Republican who won it was George H. W. Bush.

At least Jimmy Carter had the good sense to turn apologetic, rather than imperious, when his policies tipped over the cliff.

Perhaps it’ll be Obama’s “Oberstar Moment”.

Hm.  Just in time for the Tea Party Tax Day Rally!

The Donald leads the field.  I blame women and independents.

Are his 15 minutes of this election cycle up yet? 

It may only be a poll of 385 Republicans nation-wide, but carrying the increasingly limited gravatis of CNN as the poll’s sponsor, few news outlets will miss the opportunity to write the following headline: “Trump GOP’s frontrunner.”

CNN/Opinion Research 2012 Republican Nomination Survey

• Donald Trump 19% [10%]
• Mike Huckabee 19% [19%] {21%} (21%) [14%] {24%} (17%)
• Sarah Palin 12% [12%] {19%} (14%) [18%] {15%} (18%)
• Newt Gingrich 11% [14%] {10%} (12%) [15%] {14%} (8%)
• Mitt Romney 11% [18%] {18%} (20%) [21%] {20%} (22%)
• Ron Paul 7% [8%] {7%} (7%) [10%] {8%} (8%)
• Michele Bachmann 5%
• Mitch Daniels 3% [3%] {3%}
• Tim Pawlenty 2% [3%] {3%} (3%) [3%] {2%} (5%)
• Rick Santorum 2% [3%] {1%} (2%) [2%] {3%} (5%)
• Haley Barbour 0% [1%] {3%} (3%) [3%] {1%} (1%)
• Someone else (vol.) 3% [4%] {5%} (7%) [6%] {5%} (8%)
• None/No one (vol.) 4% [3%] {4%} (4%) [0%] {5%} (2%)

Trump may be nothing more in the current field than a name ID with an awful comb-over, but the Trump Brand apparently has some political value – especially with Republican-leaning independents and women.  Trump is the first choice of both demographics in the poll, with 24% and 23% respectively. 

The poll may well represent the zenith of Trump’s 2012 candidacy.  On the same day that Trump may capture headlines with his likely dubious polling “lead”, the real estate mogul of New York City politically shot himself in the foot – twice.  First, by publicly claiming that he’d run as an independent if the GOP didn’t nominate him and secondly, by writing scathing notes to a Vanity Fair blogger over a profile.

Harry Truman once wrote an angry letter that caught the public’s eye.  Of course Truman, writing to Washington Post music critic Paul Hume, was defending his daughter against what he believed to be an unfair assault.  Truman’s critique was equal parts Oscar Wilde and Rocky Marciano in it’s prose.  And to channel Lloyd Bentsen: Mr. Trump, you’re no Harry Truman.

Donald’s “Trumpisms” have only continued in recent interviews.  In addition to his “birtherism” fetish, he’s “only interested in Libya if we take the oil,” “I would not leave Iraq and let Iran take over the oil,” and “I would tell China that you’re either going to shape up, or I’m going to tax you at 25% for all the products you send into this country.”

Trump has said he’ll wait until June to make a decision – or perhaps until “The Apprentice” gets off the TV renewal bubble and signed for another season on NBC.

There’s a reason that most sound bites in the news are less than seven seconds long; in the modern media, that’s considered the limit of the typical viewer’s  attention span.

Ditto for political slogans and memes.  It’s easy for someone to say, for example, “Tom Emmer’s opposition to gay marriage means he hates gays” – it’s a simple little line that takes mere seconds to ingrain itself into the minds of the susceptible; un-ingraining it takes long, detailed, attention-span-burning minutes to debunk.

The budget battle is one of those things.

The Tea Party was based – as it should have been – around a couple of simple but vital ideas; cut spending, reduce taxes, reduce the size of government.

It was those ideas that, as a matter of fact, won the Novembe 2010 election for the GOP.

Now, there are a lot of conservatives complaining that the GOP – in Saint Paul and in DC – have lost the way lit by those simple directions.

The complicated answer:  we only control the House of Representatives in Washington; any legislation favorite by the Tea Party needs to pass a hostile Senate and a president who, if he shows up for work, will veto it if it’s too far outside his comfort zone.   Much as it irritates Tea Partiers, it’s taken some old-fashioned politics to get things this far.

In fact, the complicated part is that last week’s budget wasn’t really “the budget”; the debate was over, and the cuts were to, the discrtionary spending budget, which is a small fraction of the government’s multi-trillion dollar behemoth.  The bad news: the GOP had to hold off on some cuts.  The good news?  Commitments to up-or-down votes that’ll be useful in next year’s campaign to take the Senate. Because without the Senate and, hopefully, the Presidency, real reform is costly-to-impossible.

So the just-shy-of-$40 bilion of cuts were to a small fracion of the budget. Now – things will heat up with the introduction of Rep. Ryan’s plan to reform non-discretionary spending in a little bit here.   That’s where the real money is.

The real points are these:

• Until conservatives control the government, some compromise is inevitable. That’s why we warned you after the last election – the work has really only begun; we have to take the Senate.  And keep it.
• No one single vote is going to be the litmus test of reform. It’s a process.  Processes are boing, and they take years, and in the long run that’s a good thing.  Of course, we’re worried if there’s going to be a “long run”.
• The media knows this.  They will use the time it’s taking as a wedge to try to drive the Tea Party away from the GOP.  Expect a raft of “Tea Partiers fret that things are just going too slow” manufactured outrage in coming weeks.

All the more reason the Tea Party rallies this weekend are so vital.

More later.

P.T. Barnum runs for president. 

He’s vowed that he’s taking a presidential bid seriously.   He’s sent aides on “exploratory trips” for his nascent campaign.  He’s pledged millions of dollars towards his candidacy.  And what’s more, he’s taken seriously – by the media, the punditry, and the polls. 

Of course, all of that was in 2000.

When it comes to the media’s political fascination with eccentric billionaire millionaire massive debt holder Donald Trump, few could argue that the Donald is the rightful heir to 19th century showman P.T. Barnum.  For Trump’s multiple aborted presidential candidacies, ranging from 1988, to 2000, and now, prove Barnum’s misattributed cultural epitaph that indeed a sucker is born every minute.

Like Charlie Brown convincing himself that this time Lucy will not pull away the football, much of the media has engaged Trump’s third would-be presidential bid with increasing seriousness.  And why not?  Trump polls surprisingly well against the expected Republican field, placing fourth with 11% just days ago in a Fox News national poll.  Even Trump seems to be taking his latest political dalliance seriously enough to risk his most important attribute – his brand – by claiming to seek the nomination of one of the two major parties rather than another circa 2000 independent bid.

What remains harder to fathom is Trump’s appeal in the first place.  For a man known for his super ego, getting to the id of Donald Trump is vexing for many in the punditry.  Some view Trump as a symptom of the weak Republican field.  George Will likewise dismissed Trump as part of the gaggle of “spotlight-chasing candidates of 2012.”  Charles Krauthammer looked pained to even have to discuss Trump’s candidacy.  Others view Trump as the closing argument in their case of the failure of the political class:

Trump is suddenly “winning” as a political figure because the political class has failed. The authority of our political institutions is weak and getting weaker; it’s not that Americans ‘lack trust’ in them, as blue ribbon pundits and sociologists often lament, so much as they lack respect for the people inside them.

There is a lot of crazy surrounding the Trump phenomenon — some excellent, some embarrassing. But the massive fact dominating it all is that never before has such a famous outsider jumped into national politics with such an aggressive critique of a sitting president and the direction of the country — and never before has the response been so immediate and positive.

Um, not quite.

The novelty of Trump 2012 isn’t that novel.  The celebrity politician is nothing new – nor is Trump’s anti-Obama bravado.  Trump’s “aggressive critique” has largely been an ad hoc foreign policy mixing neo-conservative bluster and paleo-conservative isolationism with a chaser of paranoia that Obama is the country’s first super secret Nigerian sleeper agent.  Perhaps the only true novelty of Trump’s “candidacy” is that he would link his image to “birtherism.”  Or maybe Trump is merely projecting and he’s the sleeper agent sent to undermine the GOP.  After all, he did call Nancy Pelosi “the best.”

Understanding how an arrogant, over-the-top self-promoter has risen in the polling ranks of the GOP field doesn’t require searching for some sort of meta answer.  After a number of political cycles in which the presidential race started incredible early, for once the field is not settled nor is any candidate dashing out of the gates.  Trump represents a known name whose actively in the news – for better or for worse.  Few other contenders or pretenders can claim the same. 

The Donald wouldn’t mind being president but would rather use his candidacy as a perpetual trump card whenever his media image needs a boost.  Once the more serious candidates get underway and the early measures of success – fundraising, debate performances, endorsements and volunteers – become the most important yard markers, attention towards Trump will shrink.  With fewer and fewer onlookers to his latest political act, in Barnum like fashion, Trump will fold his tent and move on to his next show.

Since there is talk that the federal government will shut down this weekend, it’s Shot In The Dark’s job, as the Twin Cities’ best source of news, to tell you what to expect.

With Austan Goolsbee and the Council of Economic Advisors busy looking for work at McDonalds, President Obama will go on a deficit spending spree four times as huge and damaging as that of his predecessor.

With the Department of the Treasury shut down, US currency will cease to have any value.  All sales and purchases in the United States, from the transfer of Mortgage Backed Derivatives to buying Tic Tacs at the gas station, will be transacted by old-fashioned barter of goods or services.  Cigarettes will become the primary unit of currency…

…except that without the Department of Health and Human Services to mandate the warning labels, there will be no cigarettes.

With the Department of Education furloughed, all schools (public and private) in the US will be sold at sheriff sales and turned into union-staffed Community Centers.

With the Department of Housing and Urban Development wandering the streets from bar to bar, public housing in the United States may become blighted and undesirable.

With the Attorney General looking for work as a community organizer with ACORN,  brigades of government lawyers will be forced to seek honest work.  As prostitutes.

With the Department of the Interior not functioning, national parks will become covered with grass and animals.

Vice President Joe Biden will actually have to seek work in a coal mine.

If you’re a veteran?  Without Veteran’s affairs, you won’t be anymore!  All that service to the country…gone!

With Commerce closed for business, no business can take place.  But that won’t matter, because with the Department of Labor closed, nobody will do any work at all.

With Hillary Clinton’s State Department sitting on the beach in Norfolk, the United States will become reviled around the world.

With the Department of Agriculture lying fallow, there will be no more food.  We will all starve.

You might think the price of oil will drop, since without the Dept. of  Transportation, we will all be utterly immobile.   But it won’t matter, since without the Department of Energy, there will be no oil.

With Homeland Security shuttered, only the terrorists will be able to mindlessly vex and grope you.

The the entire chain of command on the unemployment line, the Army’s tanks will immediately rust away, the Navy’s ships will careen out of control into bridge abutments, and all nuclear missiles will spontaneously fire, plunging the world into nuclear winter.

Whew.  Could be ugly!

If you listen to some conservatives, you might almost forget we won the elections last November.

The GOP House in DC isn’t cutting fast enough.  The GOP majorities in the Minnesota Legislature are living within the state’s means, not slashing the budget.

Some of the complaints are the  mark of the kind of people I used to run into the Libertarian Party; people for whom principle is blessedly unblemished by the need to actually deal with an opposition and still eke legislation out of the mess and have it turn out, if not perfect, at least better, often much better, than what you have.

Still, as I told people the last time I spoke at a Tea Party, the real job for we The People started last November 3.  It’s our job to  light up the switchboards, to fill up the inboxes electronic and literal, and to show our elected representatives that the vast wellspring of discontent that tossed much of the sitting Democrat government – and not a few RINOs – under the bus is still alive and well.

And it’s high time we made sure they knew it.

So I’m happy to report there’ll be another Tea Party rally on Saturday, April 16 at noon at the State Capitol.  And I’m equally happy to report I’ll be the lead-off speaker again (before dashing down to the station).

And I do hope you show up.  Because government is too important to leave to government.

To: US Senate Republicans

From: Mitch Berg, Pissed-Off Conservative

Re: Get off the can, get on the stick.

Senators,

I get the need for compromise.

I get the fact that the Democrats still control the Senate, and they’re not going to get their way for the asking.

I get that.

What I do not get is how none of you establishment Republicans ever seems to learn from history.    It was six  years ago when you had a majority, and a sitting President, and you – many of you occupying space in the Senate right now – blinked, and gave the Democrat minority everything they wanted – a legislative Manhattan, in exchange for some meaningless procedural trinkets.

And you’re doing it again, cutting a “deal” with the President to pass a continuing resolution in exchange for a vote on a Constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment.

A vote.

Erick Erickson (with emphasis added by me):

The GOP is not telling the Democrats they actually want the Balanced Budget Amendment, just a vote. This is wholly unacceptable. If Barack Obama wants to increase the debt ceiling, the GOP should go all or nothing — they must have their Balanced Budget Amendment in exchange for it. A vote is utter nonsense without a commitment from the Democrats to pass it by a two-thirds vote from both Houses.

But it gets more insane from there. Everything we feared, everything we knew would happen, is coming to fruition.

Why?

Because you, the “Senate GOP Leadership”, the ones who’ve been there forever, fear another government shutdown.  You remember – and have created a mid-level “leadership” that remembers – how badly the last shutdown cost you at the polls.

But that was in the cha-cha nineties, when things were generally awesome and the greatest crisis facing this nation was a lothario President, when the stock market was booming and people were generally fat ‘n happy, and the media was only too happy to tell them so.

But – I’ll emphasize this – it’s 2011 now.  The Obama Recession is underway.  A vast movement of Americans has had enough.  They reversed the Obamascenscion and put your – our – party back in power twenty years earlier than anyone thought it would be possible in 2009.  Because we are that pissed off!  There is a blogosphere, and talk radio, and Fox News; the mainstream media don’t have the stage all to themselves.  We can control our own narrative this time – if you are bold enough to seize the opportunity.

You, the “leadership”, apparently don’t get that.  Erickson (again, emphasis added):

Why? Because the GOP is finally being forced by the base to push for actual, substantive spending cuts instead of the death by a thousand paper cuts strategy of the leadership…Luckily for us, conservatives made such a stink about the last short term CR being, in fact, the last short term CR, the GOP is now forced to be a leader. The leaders are, however, reluctant.

Look, it is very simple — demand passage of a balanced budget amendment, defund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood, and if the Democrats balk, shut the government down.

Unfortunately for you and me, the GOP leadership is scared to death of and hell bent on avoiding a government shutdown. They may have no choice, so they better get ready.

Look – here’s the deal; we sent you there to kick ass, and kick Ass.  We sent you there to repeal Obamacare, to slash spending, to roll back tax hikes.

And we – the people who sent you to Washington in the greatest electoral turnaround in decades – are hungry for exactly that.

And if you don’t have the cojones to do the job, we will send someone to DC that does.

Cut the budget.  Shut down the government if you need to.  We’ll be there if you do.  The situation is different than in the nineties;  the media that covered the Democrats’ behinds back then doesn’t have a complete stranglehold now.  So do it.  Do what we sent you there to do.

And if you don’t?  You can join your constituents on the unemployment line.  Soon.

Do it.

That is all.

Sheila Kihne has a request for the GOP and, I suspect, those of us who support it:

One note though to the GOP–Can we PLEASE, PLEASE get rid of this talking point “Government should live within its means.”  The government–via its power to tax– has unlimted means.

That’s true.  “Means” change.  If you get laid off, your “means” change.  If the economy tanks, government’s “means” change as well – or at least they should.

If I were a Dem, I’d throw that back so easily and argue for tax hikes.  They’re doing just that by the way.  I’m on the Organizing for America email list and Obama issued a message today about “government living within its means.”  STOP.  Educate people about the conservative worldview which takes things much farther down the path than year to year, biennium to biennium budget cycles.  When we explain how we think to people, we can change minds.  When we play the Dem game of coordinated talking points, then let’s at least ensure they’re a bit more bulletproof.

That’s the problem with the legislative process – it forces people to think one election cycle at a time.  It’s worse than normal in Minnesota, where our “deliberative chamber”, the Senate, is merely a smaller House that runs a little less often, and is tied to demographic districts just like the House (rather than the US Senate, in which small states get the same representation as the big ones).

The Republicans are chipping away as fast as they can with their little chisels against this monstrosity of a government.  Believe me- I’m frustrated that they’re not using sandblasters because time’s a ticking.  But small victories still matter in the larger battle of ideas.

And that’s the big conundrum of this next few weeks.  Some are getting impatient with the GOP, in St. Paul and in DC.  They want to see the Tea Party Mandate exercised NOW.  And there’s a point to that; John Boehner is almost certainly being too timid in his budget cutting; we’d likely win a budget shutdown this year.

But we took a long time to get into this mess; one budget bill isn’t going to get us out.