Category Archives: Minnesota’s Ministry Of Truth

It’s not that the DFL’s messaging partners – the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Common Cause and so on – lie. It’s just that they say so much that is not so.

Strib: “2+2=38 Billion, Winston!”

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The Star Tribune Editorial board, in a piece that reads like Lori Sturdevant, holds forth on the DFL budget proposal, such as it is - and illustrates the Strib’s deep institutional hypocrisy along the way.

The editorial is stupid, hypocritical, and awash in institutional self-interest disguised – like all of Sturdevant’s work – as populist dooo-goodism:

No sales tax on clothing or haircuts. No alcohol tax hike. No income tax increase for 98 percent of filers. On Sunday, after four months of launching a flotilla of tax ideas, the Legislature’s DFL majorities and Gov. Mark Dayton unveiled a final 2014-15 state budget outline that, on the revenue side of the ledger, is more notable for its omissions than its contents.

Well, no.  It’s notable for about two billion of its contents.  Nowhere in the Strib’s editorial does the number “$38,000,000,000″ occur.

The Strib doesn’t want to give its few readers who actually follow numbers a nasty sticker shock.

There’s plenty to like on the spending side of their balance sheet. The DFL plan pumps an additional $725 million into public education from preschool through graduate school. That’s enough to reverse the deep higher-education cuts of the past two years; ease the squeeze that has some of the state’s public schools operating only four days a week; pay for all-day kindergarten, and offer preschool scholarships to low-income families.

Read:  It’s a big kickback to Education Minnesota; they paid good money for that Governor and Legislature, it’s time for them to get their piece of the action.  

The plan also includes measures to close a nagging $627 million budget gap, the residue not only of the Great Recession but also of a dozen years of legislative failure to balance the budget in a lasting way.

Further proof that  Lori Sturdevant wrote this.  Remember 2010?

A Six Billion Dollar Deficit?  

The Strib editorial board is rewriting history for the benefit of the smug and the stupid.

But remember – they have their own self-interest at heart:

But the plan’s tax features are a disappointment. They raise revenue in a way that puts Minnesota’s economic competitiveness at risk.

Particularly worrisome is a new marginal tax bracket that will apply to the state’s top 2 percent of incomes. The rate attached to that bracket remains to be set by a House-Senate conference committee, but it is almost certain to be among the nation’s highest, especially after an anticipated temporary surcharge for top earners “blinks on” to get state aid payments to schools back to their normal schedule…While that decision is true to Dayton’s 2010 campaign promises, it comes at an economic price. Making Minnesota an income tax outlier among the states won’t be helpful in attracting and sustaining private-sector investment.

Especially the next round of investors the Strib will need to stave off bankruptcy.

Right?

It gets worse:

In addition, like a bad penny, a bad tax policy idea that disappeared two months ago turned up again Sunday. Applying the state sales tax to some currently untaxed business-to-business purchases will be part of the plan, Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk announced. He was not specific about which items or services would become taxable, nor about how the revenue thus raised would be used, other than for “significant economic development.”

Oh, well, then.  Good enough for me!

The Strib is worried that taxing business to business purchases – which could include advertising, as well as pretty much anything in the supply chain – is going to hit their bottom line.  It’s a legitimate worry; businesses of all size, from the Strib all the way down to lil’ ol’ me, are going to see some arbitrary percentage come out of our revenues; we can pass it along and hope that our goods and services continue to get purchased, or we can eat a percentage – 5.5%?  6%? – lopped out of our revenues and try to ride it out.

Or move.

Regardless of how the money would be used, taxing business inputs is not sound policy. It layers hidden taxes into the cost of goods and services and takes a toll on wages and job creation in the affected industries. Those costs will affect low- and middle-class Minnesotans as surely as a clothing sales tax would. But the spurned clothing tax would have had the virtue of transparency, and could have been offset for low-income earners by a refundable tax credit, as the Senate tax bill provided.

Waaaah.

In for a bad penny, in for a poo-streaked pound, Strib.  This is the government that you wanted.  You did whatever it took to get this government; you served as an adjunct PR firm for the DFL, you covered up their transgressions, you whinged about “ALEC” while laughing over cocktails with “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, you did whatever it took to get them into power, and you do your best to cover up the train wreck that is Mark Dayton.

To be sure, businesses will benefit from some of the property tax relief measures that total a hefty $400 million over two years in the DFL plan. But low- and middle-income homeowners and renters ought to be favored as the tax conference committee allocates that sizable sum.

This is Minnesota’s source of information.  Good lord.

Where does the Strib think that “relief” comes from?

It’s money that’s redistributed from the parts of the state whose votes the DFL doesn’t need, to the parts whose votes they need to protect.

Who do you suppose that is, Strib?

Republicans have offered no alternative budget plan this session, evidently preferring to stand aside and criticize DFL decisions.

Further proof it’s Sturdevant.

The DFL offered no alternative budget in 2011.  The Strib editorial board had not a word to say about it.

They should know that if they scuttle a bonding bill, they will deserve to be seen by this session’s critics as part of the problem.

And the Strib will do its’ level best to make sure they do.

I can not wait for the Strib to go bankrupt again.

Doug Grow, Narrative-Fluffer

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I was down at the State Capitol yesterday for a press conference, as Representative Deb Hilstrom (DFL Brooklyn Park) introduced the gun bill/s we talked about yesterday.

The bills, as we noted yesterday, would exert the state to solve actual problems – close gaps in the background check system, add mandatory penalties for using guns in crimes or possessing them illegally…

…y’know.  Controversial stuff.

At the presser, I saw a big group of legislators from both chambers and both parties lining up to support Hilstrom’s proposal.  Reps, Senators, Democrats, Republicans – it was probably the most bipartisan assembly I’ve seen that wasn’t in the lounge at the Kelly Inn after hours.

Not just legislators; guys in uniform.  They weren’t just there for the fun of it – guys in uniform never are.  No, they were from the Minnesota Sheriff’s Association.

And I saw media.  Oh, lord, did I see media.

And Heather Martens was there, naturally; where there is truth about the Second Amendment, Martens will be there.  To lie.  And lie and lie and lie (note to the media who bothered to speak to her; she has uttered not one substantial word of truth in her years at the capitol.  Ask me).

And the “groups” she represents put out a call for their “membership” to turn out in force to oppose this bill – probably remembering the hundreds of Second Amendment supporters who turned out daily to oppose the DFL’s gun grab bills a few weeks ago.

We’ll come back to them.

One person who was not there was Doug Grow, from the MInnPost.

To be fair, I haven’t seen Grow in person in over 20 years; I might not recognize him.

But judging by the story he wrote about the conference, and the bill itself, even if Grow was there, his story was pre-written, and would have appeared in exactly the same form had Mothra emerged from the Supreme Court chamber shooting flame from wherever Mothra did whatever he did, since I never watched the movie.

Rep. Debra Hilstrom, DFL-Brooklyn Center, has discovered again that there is no comfortable middle ground when the subject is guns.

At noon at the Capitol, Hilstrom, standing with Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek and Rep. Tony Cornish, the gun-toting legislator from Good Thunder, introduced a gun bill that she said “can bring people together’’ on the volatile subject of guns.

“Gun-toting”.

Scare quotes.

No, no bias here.

The Astroturf Consensus

Grow, like most of the Twin Cities mainstream media, labors under the delusion that there’s a large, organized mass of people supporting gun control, and that they were out in force yesterday.

Her words were still echoing in the Capitol when critics, who had hoped for much stronger actions from the Minnesota Legislature, lambasted the effort of Hilstrom and a bipartisan group of 69 other legislators to “close gaps’’ in current state gun law.

“This is just a band-aid over a huge problem,’’ said Jane Kay of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, an organization formed in the days following the mass shooting of school children in Newtown, Conn.

Only in America can a two-month old pressure group with fewer members than there were legislators standing behind Hilstrom get the breathless adoration of the media.  Which is what “Moms Demand Action” and “Protect Minnesota” both are; astroturf checkbook advocacy groups funded by liberal plutocrats with deep pockets – with “membership” numbers in the single digits.

Provided they share the goal of fluffing the left’s withering narrative on gun control.

Of course, Grow wasn’t the only offender; Pat Kessler of Channel 4 asked Hilstrom why the bill included no universal background check which, he asserted, “70% of Minnesotans oppose”.

The correct answer – the polls ask people about background checks without explaining the consequences of those checks as the DFL and Governor Messinger Dayton currently propose them; they will result in a de facto gun registry, which is a necessary first step to universal confiscation.

More on gun-related media polls in another piece soon.

The Pre-Written Story

But Grow himself is the real problem here.  His piece, while short on the sort of insight that actually engaging people on both sides of the issue might have given it, is long on  evidence that Grow wrote the story long before yesterday’s press conference.

There’s the inflammatory reference to every leftymedia member’s favorite boogyman:

 The bill has the support of the National Rifle Association, presumably because it does nothing to require background checks on all gun sales and because it does nothing to restrict sales of military-style weapons or even the quantity of rounds in ammunition magazines.

Well, no.

The bill has the support of gun-rights organizations because instead of wasting time and effort putting niggling restrictions on the rights of the law-abiding that didn’t affect crime in any way the first ten years they were tried, they actually address the real problem; criminals, the insane, the addled, and the holes in the data the state sends to the Feds for the background check system.

(And while the NRA makes a nice, recognizable, stereotyped boogeyman for the lazy propagandist, the NRA actually has very little to do with the day to day heavy lifting of the gun rights movement in Minnesota.  It’s the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance that turned out 500 or more people a day to attend the gun grab hearings a couple of weeks back.  Grow either doesn’t know that, or doesn’t want people to know that.  You know where my money is).

More evidence that Grow wrote the story entirely off of DFL and “Protect Minnesota” chanting points?

Despite the fact that it’s a bill that authors hoped would unite people, it seems to be dividing. Yes, there was a mix of Republican and DFL representatives standing with Hilstrom, Cornish and Stanek. But there were no law-enforcement organizations represented at the news conference where the proposal was unveiled.

That’s false.

Here’s the video of the press conference: 

 

See all those guys in uniforms?

Scroll in to 1:12.  That’s Sheriff Rich Stanek, Hennepin County Sheriff, speaking on behalf of the Minnesota Sheriff’s Association.

Either Grow is lying, or he wrote the entire story with no knowledge of the facts of the story.

Short On Fact, Long On Jamming Words Into Peoples’ Mouths

Grow follows by saying…:

There also were no DFL senators, though presumably the bill will be as attractive to outstate senators as it appears to be to many outstate DFL representatives.

Grow throws that in there as if it’s a substantive fact related to the bill itself.  It’s not.  While most outstate legislators no doubt remember the DFL debacle of 2002, it’s also more than plausible Tom Bakk wants to keep his powder dry.

In other words, presence of no DFL senators is a non-factor, unless you’re a low-information reader.

Grow next swerves through fact – and in so doing, undercuts his own premise.  I’ll add emphasis:

Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, and the chairman of the House public safety committee, has indicated he has no desire to have the bill heard by his committee. Paymar is pushing a bill that would require purchasers of guns at flea markets and gun shows to go through background checks.

Yet, given the large number of co-authors with Hilstrom, there likely are ways for the bill to weave its way through the legislative process.

Yes.  There are a large number of co-authors; so many they had to submit it not one, not two, but three times to get them all on.  Over half of the House is signed on as authors of the bill.

Michael Paymar wants to thwart the will of the representatives of over half of Minnesota’s voters?

Putting Thirty Shots From An AR15 Into A Strawman

Finally, Grow takes his whacks at some of the legislators who’ve violated the DFL’s narrative:

[Representative Tony] Cornish, usually a lightning rod in the gun debate, said he was taking a different role regarding the fate of this bill.

“Several of my statements (in the past) have been controversial,’’ he said. “Today my role is to be a peacemaker.’’

No sooner had he said that than he uttered a statement that raises the hackles of those hoping for stronger gun measures.

“I want to thank the NRA for helping (on the bill),’’ he said. He went on to say that the bill “contains nothing for gun owners to fear.’’

Er, who’s “hackles” got “raised”, here?  And why?

Was it the involvement of the NRA?  Your dog whistles aren’t our problem.

Or was it the quote about gun owners having nothing to fear?  Is that the actual goal, here?

Hilstrom, in her seventh term, refused to talk about her true feelings of the bill. Rather, she kept speaking of the importance of “passing a bill that will solve real problems.’’

She did point out that she never has sought the endorsement of the NRA and that in the past she has received a “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ from the NRA.

OK.

So what?

If she’s doing the right thing – which, for a majority of Minnesotans, is “solving problems”, rather than attacking the law-abiding gun owner – then I don’t care if she’s a life-time “F” rating.  And I don’t care about her true feelings; I don’t care if she’s being used as an escape hatch by the DFL to get out of the embarassment of the Paymar/Hausman gun grab bills.

Guess Who!

Finally:  I owe the Twin Cities media an apology.  I’ve said that Larry Jacobs is the most over-quoted person in the Twin Cities media.  And he is.  David Schultz is right up there.

But in the “single-issue” category, Heather Martens – “Executive Director” and, near as we can tell, one of less than a half-dozen members of “Protect Minnesota” (and de facto representative of House District 66A) and a woman whose entire body of public assertions is lies, dwarfs them all:

Heather Martens, executive director of Protect Minnesota, derided the bill as “NRA-approved.’’

Boo!  Boogeyman!  Hiss!

Listen, MinnPost-reading dogs!  There’s your whistle!

“Any bill that fails to address the gaping holes in our background check law falls far short of the public’s demand for the right to be safe in our communities,’’ Martens said in a statement.

And there’s another lie.  The bill does address the gaping hole that exists in the background check laws.

No, not the misnamed “gun show loophole”, which is another media myth.   The real gap is  the data that the state isn’t sending to the feds; the Hilstrom bill fixes it.

GOCRA’s Mountain, Grow And Martens’ Molehill

Leaving aside the fact that Grow got pretty much everything in this story wrong – and wrong in a way that suggests not only that he wasn’t at Hilstrom’s press conference but that he wrote the whole thing straight from chanting points long before Hilstrom took to the microphone – the most pernicious thing about Grow’s story is that it tries to create the impression that there’s a genuine battle between two titanically-powerful sides to this debate.

There’s not.

In terms of legislators?  A bipartisan sample of over half of the House is on board co-authoring Hilstrom’s bill(s).  A thin, runny film of metro-DFL extremists is backing the Paymar/Hausman/Simonson gun grab bills.

In terms of the public?  Last month, GOCRA put out a call for people to come to the Capitol.  And they did.

No, really:

“Protect Minnesota” and “Moms Demand Action” put out a call yesterday for people to come out and protest against Hilstrom’s bill.

Here they are:

 

Well, not literally.  But no, other than Heather Martens, nobody showed up.

There are literally more DFL legislators co-authoring Hilstrom’s bill than there are members of “Protect Minnesota” and the “Moms Demand Action” put together.

Sturdevant: The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves, Part II

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In her column over the weekend, the Strib’s Lori Sturdevant does what she’s paid to do; paint the DFL’s toenails.

Yesterday, we noted the highly selective set of “facts” she used to praise Governor Messinger’s Dayton’s budget proposal.

Sturdevant’s column echoed the DFL’s current regimen of happy talk for the people, in obligingly noting that the current plan cuts the sales tax from 6.874% to 5.5% (before the local taxes that your city, like mine, may have larded on top of it all) while extending the sales tax to other goods and services.

Lots of other goods and services.

The DFL has to “Pay” for a half a billion dollar pay-off to renters, as well as a shopping list of goodies for Governor Messinger’s Dayton’s other lienholders constituents.

What Sturdevant doesn’t tell the reader:  the “broadening” will take a lot more money out of the state economy.

Page 10 of the “Budget for a Better Minnesota” shows that the net result of the changes to the sales tax will forcibly extract 2.1 billion more dollars from the “economy” (because apparently cranking up taxes on “the rich” isn’t enough to pay for A Better Minnesota.

Slide Ten from the “Budget for a Better Minnesota”, Click for a full-sized version.

In terms of specific changes to specific taxes?  That’s on Page eight of the “Budget for a Better Minnesota”:

From the “Budget for a Better Minnesota”, page 8. Click for a larger view.

The Democrats’ big chanting points – “fairer” income taxes, the cuts in state property taxes – are farts in the wind.

The two big sources of revenue to pay for all of that”Better Minnesota” are, according to the slide above…

  • $4.2 Billion in new sales tax revenue (offset by $2.1 Billion from the rate cut), for a net hike of $2.1 Billion
  • $370 million in cigarette taxes which, as we showed on Monday, will most likely not be collected.

So the sales tax “rate cut” is a smokescreen to cover the fact that the state will be exacting much, much more from this state’s economy (and more still, once the cigarette tax inevitably flops).

Governor Messinger Dayton phrases this as something inevitable – and Sturdevant, like any good stenographer, passes it on that way:

But Dayton wouldn’t consider asking households to pay a tax when they hire a lawyer or tax accountant unless he asked businesses to do the same. Fairness demands as much, he argues.

“This is going to be a tough decade,” Dayton told the Star Tribune Editorial Board last week. “If people understand that we’ve got a fair system, they’re going to be a lot more accepting of what we’ll have to do” to meet a rising demand for government services while federal help shrinks.

Notice how “leaving more money in everyone’s hands and cutting spending” never crosses anyone’s minds, even obliquely?  Even though that’s plenty fair?

The DFL’s had a standard dodge for that for the past forty years; “yes, you pay a lot of taxes, but they’re high quality taxes!”

He’s right: Tax fairness is important in a democracy. But competitiveness matters, too, in a place that aspires to be a player in the global economy — doesn’t it?

“Yes, but that needs to be measured in terms of value, not just taxes,” advised economist Art Rolnick, late of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve…the 50-year Minnesota success formula has been to invest in high-return “public goods” like a well-educated workforce, transportation and public safety. “We offer a great public environment,” Rolnick said. “That’s our edge.”

That’s been the DFL’s line – and, at the risk of sounding redundant, Sturdevant’s – for those entire fifty years.

But the world has changed a lot in those fifty years – and so has the upper Midwest.

In 1963, when the DFL was developing the tax policy that Mark Dayton just re-introduced with a huge arthritic groan last week, the Twin Cities were the unquestioned economic, political, educational, educational and social center of the upper Midwest.  And the United States was the world’s only functioning economy; Japan and Germany were still rebuilding; China and India were third-world nations in the middle of disastrous socialist experiments; South Korea was ravaged by war and underperforming the communist North.  Ours was the only economy that had the resources to both innovate and produce and export anything of value.   We could afford to give union workers a wage double the going rate and a lifetime defined-benefit pension!

And Minnesota was an industrial, financial and educational hub of an agrarian region.  The U of M was a big, powerful land grant research university surrounded by teacher colleges and ag schools.

Today North Dakota is kicking our ass economically – and even before Big Oil, Fargo was out-growing the Twin Cities based on medical and high-tech development.  Wisconsin’s growth (especially after adjusting for Milwaukee) is better than ours (more later this week).  And the education system in North Dakota has always rivaled and by some measures beaten Minnesota’s fabled system, at a fraction of the cost, while the University of Minnesota has become both a money vortex and a mediocre participant in the education price bubble.

And last week’s budget has more than a few businesses eyeing the environment across the borders – or around the globe.

So when Lori Sturdevant writes…:

When business folk come to the Capitol, they would do well to acknowledge that their competitive edge depends not only on how Minnesota ranks on taxes, but also on what those taxes buy.

…she, and the DFL for whom she shills, should not be in the least surprised if people start asking that.

They might not get the answers she and the Strib and the DFL have spent the last fifty years programming people to give.

Sturdevant: The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves, Part I

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The fact that Lori Sturdevant is a relentless shill for the DFL is one of those things that Minnesota conservatives have come to accept as background noise.

Her column from this past weekend – it’s entitled “Mark Dayton — A Man With A Plan“, and it paints Governor Messinger’s Dayton’s toenails about as much as you’d suspect from the title – almost serves to give you context as to why she’s such a DFL up-sucker.  Sturdevant is apparently too innumerate and ignorant of basic economics to even pass as a moderate Republican.

Give Gov. Mark Dayton this much: He’s found a way to raise taxes that the business community appears to hate more than an income tax hike for the rich.

Dayton’s proposal to impose the state’s sales tax on the services businesses buy — legal, advertising, accounting, computing and the like — had by week’s end become Competitiveness Enemy No. 1. In volume and vitriol, business condemnation of that proposal was outstripping the reaction two years ago to Dayton’s unsuccessful bid for a new income tax bracket for top incomes.

(“Vitriol” has apparently become “any criticism of any Democrat”)

Sturdevant’s propaganda piece column faithfully passes on what have become the DFL’s big rhetorical bludgeons in this campaign:

  • Blame “the rich” who aren’t named Dayton, Messinger, Opperman, Mondale, Cramer…
  • Lie about the economy – those of Minnesota and other states
  • Give people a misleadingly incomplete picture of their own proposal
  • Promise wondrous things someday in exchange for metric poo-tons of your money now.

It’s Those Darned Indecisive Rich Businesspeople!: Sturdevant starts by trying to portray Minnesota’s small businesspeople as flighty petty tyrants who just can’t decide what it is they want.

What keeping up with the competition requires of a state, it seems, is a changeable, eye-of-the-corporate-beholder sort of thing.

Sturdevant would have you believe that the business community can’t make up its mind; while two years ago Governor Messinger Dayton’s entire message was a class-war-baiting tax assault on “the rich”, Dayton has broadened the attack to every business, everywhere.

Sturdevant writes:

Dayton’s new plan still raises the income tax by about $1 billion on the top-earning 2 percent of filers. But the marginal rate he proposes now, 9.85 percent, is down from 10.95 percent two years ago. Instead of tied for highest in the country, it would be fourth-highest, up from eighth-highest today.

Sturdevant misleadingly presents this as an either-or.  It’s not.  Both taxes were burdens on business, especially small businesses.

On the one hand, Dayton’s “fourth tier” tax would have had a huge impact on a massive swath of small businesspeople, especially successful small entrepreneurs running “Subchapter S” corporations who may have had incomes over $250,000 – dentists, consultants, salespeople, and a fair number of high-tech recruiters of my acquaintance (while not affecting liberal plutocrats like the Dayton family, most of whose income isn’t earned).

On the other?  This round of increases hits nearly every business at every level; it combines a piddly decrease in business tax rates…:

Dayton seemed to be responding to some of the business lobby’s old anticompetitiveness complaints. He offered to reduce the state’s corporate tax rate from 9.8 percent to 8.4 percent, taking it from fourth in the nation to 12th.

…with a 5.5% increase in many of the costs of doing business and, for many service-related businesses, a 5.5% decrease in business (which is what adding a 5.5% tax hike does to any good or service, all other things being equal).

“Be happy to pay for a Better Minnesota”, Sturdevant says, “and shut up about it”.

“The Dakotas Do It Too!”:  Liberal water-carriers have been painstakingly scouring Google for examples of taxes that the Dakotas have that Minnesota doesn’t yet, but that Governor Messinger Dayton is proposing.

And they’ve gotten the chanting points to Sturdevant, who throws on a little unearned contempt:

“It’s the most damaging thing we could do for competitiveness,” Minnesota Business Partnership exec Charlie Weaver said of taxing sales of business-to-business services. Minnesota would join just five other states — including South Dakota — in tacking the sales tax on so wide a range of business inputs…For 46 years, apparently, there’s been a Minnesota tax policy that this state’s businesses liked better than South Dakota’s version. Before Dayton flushed that out, who knew?

Sturdevant should leave the snark to Sally Jo Sorenson.  Not that it’d improve her point, but Sturdevant trying to go Jon Stewart is a little like Judi Dench donning a “Hollister” hoodie and a sideways baseball cap.

Oh, she’s wrong.  It’s one of many disconnected factoids that the left has been passing off this past week; “SoDak has business service taxes!”  ”North Dakota taxes clothing!”.  Yes, both are true; but those taxes are parts of overall tax burdens that are much lower than in Minnesota.

According to the Tax Foundation, as of 2010, Minnesota had the seventh-highest overall state and local tax burden in the US.  South Dakota was #49.  My native North Dakota was #35 – more on that later – and is, as of the 2013 session, working on slashing state  taxes.

Sturdevant niggles and nit-picks and snarks with all the grace of a German jazz band about individual taxes to dodge the real point; both the Dakotas have lower overall taxes than Minnesota.  And better economies.

Focus On The Luxuries, And The Necessities Will Take Care Of Themselves!:  One of the left’s most damning and damnable conceits is that all economic economic activity, the “fruits of all our labors” – both of them fancy-schmantzy ways of saying “the money all of us work for” – are first and foremost government property, for government to use, and use as much, as it sees fit and then leave what’s left to the rest of us.

No, really:

The governor has come around to the realization that compared with other states, Minnesota underutilizes its sales tax.

Or, put another way, the Governor Messinger Dayton sees that there is productivity in the state that could be further sapped.

 He endorsed extending it to services when he saw that doing so would permit a drop in the overall sales tax rate from 6.875percent to 5.5 percent. That would move the rate from seventh-highest to 27th among the states, to the benefit of businesses and consumers who buy already-taxed goods.

Yay, a tax cut.  It amounts to about a 20% cut to the sales tax rate.  That’s a good thing, right?

Sure – but only if if you’re not getting…

An Incomplete Picture: Just as Governor Messinger Dayton sold the state bills of goods with electronic pull tabs, the “repayment of the school funding shift” and the cigarette tax, he’s doing it again.

So what does that mean?

It means Sturdevant is abetting Governor Messinger Dayton in yet another lie.

 More tomorrow – including slides from that noted conservative tool, the State of Minnesota.

Not So Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota

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Minnesota newspapers, largely, supported Governor Messinger Dayton and the DFL.  They largely not only bought the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota’s” bill of goods hook line and sinker, but most of them worked tirelessly to propagate it, and to squelch dissent from it.

They studiously avoided, almost completely, any reporting that would have impeded the DFL’s rise to power.

The Minnesota media, at large, were among the DFL’s most valuable players this past two electoral cycles.  At the highest levels - the Strib, the PiPress, and at least the programming arm of MPR – they serve as the DFL’s Praetorian Guard.

But now?  Now that the governor is tacking 5.5% sales taxes (for starters) onto print services, advertising and retail newspaper sales?

Not so much:

Business groups and retailers complain that the proposal would cost jobs. As he spoke to the Minnesota Newspaper Association, several editors and newspaper owners complained that a sales tax on newspapers would hurt their industry.

Tom West, the managing editor of the Morrison County Record in Little Falls, spoke about his concerns during a question and answer session.

“We are the ones who cover local government and state government, and we are wondering why you would think it would be a good idea to have less information about government and what government is up to,” West said.

(Cynical answer: “Because you’ve served your purpose”.  See also The Minnesota Independent).

(Slightly less cynical answer: “While your contributions to DFL hegemony were vital, you don’t have the same political clout as AFSCME, the SEIU or MPR).

(Cynical and partisan but realistic answer: “How about not just “covering local government”, but turnin a critical eye on the DFL?  For once?”)

Others said that expanding the sales tax to newspaper ink, paper and advertising would result in job losses. Dayton said he understood the concern but did not back away from his plan.

Job losses only matter if they’re union.

Small papers aren’t union.

Big papers are – and we’ll see what happens there.

As to the rest of you newspapers?  You got the government you mostly worked for, largely shilled for, and for the most part operated as in-the-bag PR agents for.  Most of your editorial stances praised Dayton and the DFL’s return to power.

So now you’re saying you’re not Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota?

Suck it.

BONUS QUESTION FOR DFLers: What do you think happens when you tack 5.5% onto the price of something?

All other things being equal, people buy 5.5% less of it.

Ponder losing 5.5% of your business overnight.  Ponder hard.

Klobuchar And Franken Have Always Opposed The Medical Device Tax, Winston!

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Right in the nick of time as even non-political Americans start to get concerned about tax hikes and the “fiscal cliff”, some good news from the Strib!

Yes, Senators Klobuchar and Franken both oppose the Medical Device Tax!

Minnesota’s two senators sought Monday to delay a tax on medical devices that was expected to add $28 billion over the next decade to help pay for health care reform.

Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken pointed to thousands of high-paying jobs that device companies support in Minnesota, headquarters to such giant devicemakers as Medtronic and St. Jude Medical. The industry has painted the tax as a job killer that would hurt innovation.

“The delay would give us the opportunity to repeal or reduce that tax,” said Klobuchar, co-author of a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seeking the delay.

So that means the Senators will join 3rd CD Congressman Erik Paulsen and support his bill in the House to repeal the tax, right?

Franken is among the letter’s signers who would not support Paulsen’s plan. “I felt the offset in the Paulsen bill would have undermined the architecture of the Affordable Care Act,” Franken said.

Oh, don’t bother us with details!  Franken and Klobuchar – and say, doesn’t she just look stunning in the photo the Strib opted to use? – are coming out strongly in favor of delaying the tax!

So what’s missing from the Strib story, bylined to Jim Spencer?

Look it over.  Carefully.  Carefully…

How about any mention that both Senators voted for the tax initially?  

Both Franken and Klobuchar participated eagerly in jamming Obamacare down the American people’s collective throat; both have timidly objected via friendly media in the least obtusive way possible; never bucking their caucus, never ruffling the Administration’s narrative, never standing up for the thousands of constituents that are already being harmed by the tax in any way that would bring them any risk whatsoever.  Both of our Senators have invested facile lip service to delaying or repealing the tax – but neither of them have ever put a vote, or any substantive political capital, on the line.

Spencer’s loathsome Strib piece is what we call “public relations”.  It’s what the Strib and most of the rest of the Twin Cities media is there for.

 

Paging Major Renault

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Over at MPR, Tom Scheck brings us the latest DFL chanting point; the “links” between two GOP legislators (Rep. Gottwalt and Sen. Hann) who pushed a healthcare privatization bill in the last session, and the insurance industry.

 State Rep. Steve Gottwalt, R-St. Cloud, led the GOP effort to cut spending in the state’s Health and Human Services budget when the Republicans controlled the Legislature. Now, both he and his Senate counterpart [Hann] have business links to the insurance industry, which has some other lawmakers asking whether the arrangement violates ethics rules.

This is a chanting point that the DFL’s been working up for a while here.  The DFL’s beef is that…

…some Democratic lawmakers are raising questions about the arrangement.

“I can see why the owner of the business was pushing for the bill. It’s more business for him,” said Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville. “The fact that [Gottwalt] is now working for him, I’m disappointed in that.”

Health insurance brokers backed the legislation, championed by Gotttwalt’s counterpart in the other chamber, state Sen. David Hann, R-Eden Prairie.

The incoming chairman of the House ethics committee, Rep. Tom Huntley, DFL-Duluth, said: “If these are payoffs, then the ethics committee needs to look at it.”

And if there are not payoffs – and there aren’t – then will Huntley, Marty, and the idiot leftyblogger chanting point bots apologize to Hann and Gottwalt?

Read Scheck’s piece for the details.

But I have a few questions, here:

Who else are you going to have working on healthcare finance policy? A bunch of lawyers and social workers?  Who knows the financial side of the healthcare industry better than people who, y’know, work on the financial side of the healthcare industry?

Aren’t we cherrypicking the outrage we choose to feed to the media, DFL?  Shouldn’t we bar teachers from committees on education appropriations?  .  Union activists oughtta be at least recusing themselves from votes on Right to Work and unionizing daycare and personal care workers!   Do we want lawyers writing laws?  And don’t be trying to hide, there, Erin Murphy; I’m told you were the executive director of a nursing lobby group, and became the ranking DFLer on the Healthcare Committee.  Or Ryan Winkler, who is employed (heh) at Ted Mondale’s government-data-mining software company, sounding off about legislation that’d involve another data-mining company?

Of course, the DFL finds these kinds of non-corrupt “corruption” all the time, while practicing it themselves.

If only we had some institution – maybe with printing presses and transmitters, and people whose job it was to run down little facts like this?  Perhaps those people working for that institution could think of themselves as a holy, truth-seeking monastic order?  Call themselves “high priests of gatekeeping”, perhaps?

Just a thought.

By the way – lost in the contrived, DFL-agenda-driven “hubbub”:  the program that Gottwalt and Hann developed has been a huge improvement for the Minnesotans it was intended to serve.  ”Healthy Minnesota” gives its participants vouchers enabling them to buy a standard insurance plan on the open market; it’s cheaper than UCare, and the participants get better, more personally-focused coverage than provided by the state. There are gaps – every insurance plan has ‘em – but it was, as advertised, a huge improvement over UCare at lower cost.

In other words, it’s a government program that does what it’s supposed to do, and saves money to boot.

But “big business” is invovled, and that thought apparently gives DFLers explosive diarrhea.

Media Lip Prints on Mark Dayton’s Butt, Part III

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Yesterday and Monday, we went over the chronology of the last-minute negotiations and back-and-forth leading up to the State Government shutdown, which started seventeen months ago last night.  The abbreviated time-line:

  1. On June 29, the GOP made an offer.  It traded giving some ground on revenue for some movement on social issues.
  2. On the morning of June 30, the DFL leadership – Dayton, Senate minority leader Bakk and House minority leader Thissen – demanded $1.4 billion in new revenues.
  3. Much discussion ensued.  It ensued under the “cone of silence”; the participants really didn’t let on much about what was going on.
  4. At noonish on the 30th, Dayton – without Bakk and Thissen – made an offer that dropped most of the revenue demands, and was pretty close – almost dead-on – with the GOP’s letter.  The letter mentioned no social issues – because they were off the table at this time.
  5. More discussion.  More cone.
  6. Mid-afternoon, the Legislature sent its counteroffer, including revenue from the “school funding shift” and the tobacco bond money.  This should have settled it – and indeed, was substantially the same as the offer that Dayton finally accepted to end the shutdown.
  7. Late-afternoon, the DFL ratcheted back to their morning demands.
  8. More cone.
  9. At 10PM, the Governor essentially claimed that he was shutting down the government because the GOP had rejected the offer in 7, above, and was unwilling to compromise.

And that was that.

———-

In the hour or so after the shutdown, the GOP Caucus released the contents of the letters that had transpired on the 29th and 30th.  The release included pages 2-4 of this document here:

All Offers

No mention of social policy in there.  it was not an issue.

So the government shut down.  DFL and media narratives aside, it was a disaster for the governor.  Government actually saved money; hardly anyone outside of government missed it; the people largely were apathetic, as the Governor learned on a tour of the state to attempt to rally support that drew nothing but dispirited SEIU goons.   He returned to the  Capitol, and returned to the GOP’s last offer.

And not long after, he gave this talk in WCCO-TV with Esme Murphy – which we’ve featured a time or two:

Dayton lied:

I was unaware on June 30, in fact I was clearly aware to the contrary, that all these social policy issues, from banning stem cell research and everything else, and just really reactionary social policy, was taken off the table.

Esme Murphy let that line pass without comment – as, in fact, she always does, as her mission seems to be to make sure DFL pols get a nice massage on the air.

But nobody else noted the contradiction; of course he was aware.

  • The GOP mentioned no policy issues in its June 30 proposal!  As we noted above, it was nearly identical to the governor’s previous offer, differing on a few fiscal tweaks!
  • His rejection of that offer mentioned no social policy issues.  Because they were off the table.
  • Read the speech he gave as the shutdown started.  Nary a peep about social issues.
No, “social issues” only came up well  the shutdown was settled.

Mark Dayton was shot down completely on the shutdown.  And yet the media have allowed him to carry on with the “social policy” canard.

Why?

If I were a cynic, you’d think it was because the media was in the bag for Dayton, and wanted to give him cover.  You’d also think the media were even more in the bag for the DFL – and chanting the governor’s version of the shutodwn is a key part of the DFL’s attempt to retake the legislature, which a good chunk of the media (at least at the management and editorial-board level) clearly wants.

And I am a cynic.

Because the alternate explanation is that the media just isn’t as smart and attentive to details as I am.

And that just beggars the imagination.

So when will the media start “fact-checking” Dayton’s story?  Or their own, for that matter?

Media Lip-Prints On Mark Dayton’s Butt, Part II

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Seventeen months ago yesterday, in the midst of negotiations about the budget, the GOP-led Legislature sent Governor Dayton a proposed budget.  It offered some concessions on revenue, and asked for some ground on social issues.

First thing the next morning, June 30 – 17 months ago today – the DFL came out with a counter-offer.

Labeled the “Dayton-Bakk-Thissen Compromise Budget Proposal”, it demanded $1.4 billion in new revenues.  It was a further negotiation, just like the Legislature’s letter the day before.

And – this is important – it had all three DFL leaders on board.  Governor Dayton, Senate minority leader Bakk and House minority leader Thissen all signed off on this proposal.

We’ll refer to this as “The Morning Letter” from now on.

And as the government coursed toward the midnight shutdown, that apparently was where things stayed.

The rest of this article uses this Scribd file, originally from Dayton’s chief of staff Bob Hume, as its source.

All Offers

It’s been popping up around the Twin Cities media off and on ever since the shutdown.

The Morning Letter

Now, much of what went on over the next 6-7 hours is shrouded in mystery; it took place in off-the-record conversations and phone calls and communications that aren’t available to the general public if they’re recorded at all.

Noon: Dayton’s Offer

But the upshot of those conversations – whatever they were – was that at 3PM on the 30th of June, the Governor – alone, without Thissen or Bakk – released a proposal that dropped all tax increases.

There were three significant things about this letter, which we’ll call “Dayton’s Offer”.

One was that Dayton dropped demands for tax increases, in return, Dayton proposed a 50% shift in school funding to the following biennium – the “borrowing from the children” that the DFL and media have worked so hard to pin on the GOP this past year.   It was a major concession by the Governor.  According to sources on Capitol Hill familiar with the negotiations, this was seen by the GOP majority in the Legislature as a key step toward reaching a “lights-on” agreement to prevent the shutdown.

But the other two significant things were actually things missing from the proposal:

  1. Bakk and Thissen:  Their names had been on the Morning Letter – but were absent at 3PM.   Sources at the Capitol indicate that that’s because – well, Bakk and Thissen didn’t support it!
  2. Any mention of GOP policy proposals:  The Dayton Offer includes no reference to GOP “Social Policy” proposals – because Dayton knew at noon on the 30th that the GOP had taken them off the table.  This is an inference, both by my sources and myself.  It’s also the only logical conclusion.

So as of a little after lunch on 6/30, the Legislature and the Governor – but not Bakk and Thissen – were in basic agreement; no tax hikes, no social policy concessions.

The 3PM Letter

A couple of hours later, at 3PM, the GOP sent a counter-offer.  It involved two tweaks to Dayton’s proposal:

  • Cutting the size of the education shift (at the recommendation of Dayton’s Education Commissioner)
  • Making up the difference with tobacco bonding

This letter – we’ll call it “The 3PM Letter” – involved accepting the concessions in The Dayton Offer with a few on the GOP’s part.  Otherwise, the two offers were just about identical.

As of 3PM, then, it looked as if the Governor and the Legislature were in agreement, and the shutdown could be averted.

The 4:06PM Letter

Dayton responded about an hour later, at 4:06PM.  Dayton accepted the changes to the education shift – it was his administration’s idea, after all – but tossed the tobacco bonding proposal and renewed the demand for new taxes…

…that he himself had taken off the table earlier in the afternoon!

The GOP’s response expressed dismay at the sudden – I believe the term of art in the Age of Obama is “unexpected” – flip-flop on Dayton’s part – and proposed a “lights-on” bill.

So To Recap…

Just to make sure we’re clear, here:

  1. The DFL – Dayton, Bakk and Thissen – demanded $1.4B.
  2. Negotiation ensued under the “cone of silence”.
  3. Dayton offered to drop the tax demands, and by omission showed that the GOP had dropped their social policy demands.
  4. The GOP accepted this proposal, with a few fine tweaks, including one from Dayton’s own administration.
  5. Dayton spun on his heels and rejected that offer – ignored it, really – and countered with a flip-flop on taxes.

The “cone of silence” remained in effect for the next five or six hours.  Nobody exactly knows what transpired on the way to Dayton’s big speech at 10PM.

Dayton’s Presser at 10PM

Just in time for the 10PM news, Dayton called a press conference.  Here’s the transcript.

It’s full of prevarications, and one outright lie:

  • “Therefore, a $1.4 billion gap remains between our last respective offers.”  But the GOP’s proposal on the 29th offered to compromise with the DFL on revenue.  The conservative base – myself included – would have howled at this, but the GOP was clearly looking to keep the government open.
  • “Republicans have offered only to forego their $200 million tax cut and add that amount of spending. While welcomed, $200 million is only a small step toward resolving a $5 billion deficit.”  The 3PM Letter shows that the GOP was willing to go along with some sort of revenue hikes.
  • “Today, Representative Thissen, Senator Bakk, and I made two proposals which contained revenues to be raised by increasing taxes only on people who make more than $1 million per year. The Department of Revenue reports that there are only 7,700 of them, less than 0.3% of all Minnesota tax filers.”   Well, no.  Dayton made two offers; Bakk and Thissen only participated in the first one.

The Administration started out demanding tax hikes; the GOP expressed a willingness to compromise.  The Administration then flip-flopped and went back to their first set of demands, ignoring the GOP concessions (for purposes of presenting the media a narrative), with Dayton contradicting himself in the process.

And Here’s Where The Media Tush-Smooching Comes In

The Governor contradicted himself and rejected a proposal that was one minor tweak removed from his own, Bakk-And-Thissen-less offer (“Dayton’s Offer”), leading directly to the government shutdown.

And yet today, 17 months later, the DFL’s PACs and pressure groups refer to it as “the Republican shutdown”.  It’s a Big Lie.  But nobody’s countering it.

I’ve often wondered; what if our society had an institution, maybe even an industry, with printing presses and transmitters, staffed with people whose job and training involves checking up on things that government officials say – and maybe even holding them accountable for the things they say and do?  Heck, even allow this institution to see itself as an aescetic elite who “comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted”, in exchange for, you know, actually comforting and afflicting.

We could use this in Minnesota.

Remember where we started yesterday – with Esme Murphy giving Mark Dayton her usual deep-tongue-kiss on her Sunday Morning Show:

Notwithstanding the contradictions in Dayton’s own proposals that are part of the public record timeline of the negotiations on June 29-30, Dayton runs with the “Social Issues” canard.

The Strib also served, then as now, as Dayton’s de facto stenographer in their “coverage” of the chain of events.

The Star-Tribune also bought Dayton’s line – that the “requested concessions” brought on the shutdown – completely uncritically, without noting the evolution, and then abrupt de-evolution, on Dayton’s position.  The Strib mentioned not a word about the “flip-flop”.

Tomorrow – appropriately, Halloween – the way the shutdown went down, and conclusions about “journalism” and Governor Dayton.

In Which I Paint Mark Dayton’s Gubernatorial Portrait

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Mark Dayton gave a speech the other day.

John Gilmore at MN Conservatives heard the audio.

And we’ll get to that.  But first, the review:

Gov. Dayton’s first two years have been abysmal. What was it he wanted to do as governor anyway? Wouldn’t a house and senate controlled by republicans offer him the perfect opportunity to lead? To show compromise? To get things done as these political types like to pretend they can? If one was a real leader instead of a lost soul looking for external housing to shore up the inner, yes. But a leader is not who Gov. Dayton is and it is not who he will be in the coming two years, either.

John’s a good friend of this blog.  But I’m not sure whether he’s overestimating Dayton, or underestimating him.

On the one hand, the entire body of evidence that Mark Dayton has ever been that kind of politician is…the body of Mark Dayton’s spoken record claiming it.

On the other hand?  Mark Dayton, his beliefs, his “ideas” and “ideals” and “policy initiatives” – are about as relevant as mine are to the job – because Mark Dayton isn’t really the governor.  Indeed, when they paint Mark Dayton’s official gubernatorial portrait – hopefully in two years – it should look a little like this:

It’s an intercom speaker.  Dayton occupies a seat with the sole mission of repeating, like that intercom speaker, what Alita Messinger and Elliot Seid and Javier Morillo and Tom Dooher to say.

And when he doesn’t have electric cables tied to him, figuratively, to carry their messages, he may as well be that intercom speaker; he’s about as fluent a public speaker as a disconnected intercom.

Back to Gilmore:

Last week the Governor, sounding like a vaguely fascist mandarin, simply insisted without any intellectual depth or sustained engagement that taxes must increase because of his perceived need of all that government must do. His idea of the size & scope of government is not open to discussion. There is no opting out from it because he knows best. What’s that called again?

He made his statement at what, until just yesterday, I had been led to believe was simply a speech reported on by the press. Instead, as MinnPost reported the day before (as did the Pioneer Press), it was a University Lecture. MinnPost polished the knob by saying that the title “university lecturer” could be added to Mark Dayton’s resume. No, really.

Yet what shocked is that this was a lecture grandly titled: “Minnesota’s Future: Challenges and Opportunities” given to the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs Policy Fellows (there’s more intellectual diversity among supporters of Ron Paul by orders of magnitude; the Fellows are the stuff of David Mamet’s nightmares). This was a liberal/progressive/left confab with Little Lord Fauntleroy in attendance.

Now, listening to Mark Dayton speak is, to this speech teacher’s kid, a singularly masochistic thought.  The guy has the diction of Michael Stipe circa 1984.  He’s not a monotone – he’s got two or three tones, really.

And that’s just style points:

I listened to the audio of the Governor’s 25 minute speech. It is appallingly bad. To learn only after the fact that it was a university lecture proper for a set of fellows was mind boggling. He spoke from notes as best from what I could tell. Meandering, at times pointless, at others a non-sequitur minefield, his speech revealed that there is serious trouble with our Chief Executive.

Here’s the problem:

But wait there’s more! The event was closed to the public.

Pardon? Is this possible? Is Common Cause Minnesota on it? From whence shall our help come? Surely the event was taped and surely I will get my hands on it. Try making it private. The entire speech and question and answer session should be posted on the Humphrey School’s website without delay. This event was not a private function.

Huh.  Odd, that.

Where are Common Cause?  The ACLU?  All the usual watchdogs?  MPR’s “Poligraph?”

But here’s the real question:

Why would the press acquiesce in this? Access? Or just the usual hot dish politics? Both?

That’s easy.  For some of the media, it’s access.

For others, it’s that they see themselves as the DFL’s Praetorian Guard.

Remember – after over a decade of hearing about the Governor’s history of alcohol abuse and treatment, of mental illness and concomitant prescriptions for various psychotropic medication, the sum total of the Twin Cities mainstream media’s coverage of Candidate Dayton’s chemical and psychological history was one, single, solitary piece in the Strib by Rachel Stassen-Berger, in January 2010 – roughly nine months before anyone outside the wonk class gave a crap about the election.

Our Governor’s visual performance at this public event is what is being deliberately withheld from the public. What an odd thing to say about Minnesota politics.

Nothing odd about it.

Nothing new, either.

It May Be An Idle Question…

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…but I wonder if any of the major-media “fact check” operations are going to go the new ad from “Alida Buys The Legislature” “A “Better” Legislature” that claims…:

  • The Republicans shut down the state government (it was Dayton)
  • Republicans protected tax breaks for the wealthy (it was for everyone)
  • The GOP “passed a law that raised taxes for 95% of homeowners” (property taxes are local government’s job, and the 95% number reeks of fakeness)
  • The GOP blocked a job bill (Er, no – they blocked a Dayton bonding proposal that was nothing but a bone for the public employee’s unions that we couldn’t pay for).

Here’s a job for Minnesota’s “professional fact-checkers”; do a story on Alida Messinger’s entire attack-PR operation.

No, I’m not holding my breath either.

Soros Cried

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Democrats who a few months back were praising Chief Justice Roberts for his judicial restraint in respecting the intent of Congress are sniveling like stuck cats that the Supreme Court of Minnesota (SCOM) didn’t find a penumbra emanating from Alida Messinger’s visage forcing them to accept their masters’ complaints without question.

The lawsuits by the ACLU, the League of Women Voters and Alida’s Cause Common Cause  claimed on the one hand that the Voter ID law was just too complicated and not clear enough for public-educated Minnesotans to understand, and on the other than Mark Ritchie had the right to make both measures more complicated and less clear.

I may be a cynic, but I’m frankly amazed the judges disagreed.

And now, the pro-gay-marriage and pro-vote-corruption forces need to do something neither has been able to do:

  • The anti-Marriage-Amendment forces need to show the voters a case for changing the definition of traditional marriage a little more convincing than “vote no or you are teh bigot”.
  • The pro-fraud forces need to convince Minnesotans that while buying cigarettes or getting a job or buying ammunition or starting a bank account requires that we know someone is exactly who they say they are, exercising our supposedly-precious franchise does not.

It’s a good day.

I’ll await the usual logic-free liberal arguments on both.

UPDATE: Mir. D has an excellent piece on the subject at True North and over at the Neighborhood:

I’ll be honest with you — the Photo ID amendment matters a lot more to me. We’ve been round and round on gay marriage and as I’ve written before, this is a battle that ultimately conservatives are going to lose, mostly because young people are being taught that it is a civil rights issue, especially in the public schools. While I don’t agree with that, the view will prevail and most of the constitutional amendments that are passing in the various states will eventually go away, probably within 10-20 years. At that point we’ll begin the unwitting longitudinal study that will eventually reveal, years after most readers of this feature are pushing up daisies, whether or not gay marriage is a good idea or not. My future grandchildren and great-grandchildren (God willing) will get to suss that one out.

The Photo ID amendment is much more important, because it goes the integrity of elections. Voter suppression is the usual charge you hear, but as a practical matter the real issue is multiple votes and illegal votes. The challenge is getting local election officials and prosecutors, who are partisans, to take such things seriously. Minnesota Majority identified 1,099 cases of felons voting in the Franken/Coleman election and over 200 cases have been either adjudicated or are in the process of being investigated. The rest aren’t going to see the light of day because the local prosecutors can’t be bothered. Franken won the election by on 312 votes…Now the amendments go for a vote. I expect Photo ID to win easily. The marriage amendment will be close. Opponents of both amendments will have ample opportunity to state their case. They just can’t depend on Mark Ritchie to keep his thumb on the scale this time.

And there’s the victory for real justice.

And I never believed the SCOM or Minnesota law had it in ‘em.

So Simple A DFLer Could Figure It Out

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Joe Doakes from Como Park writes in re Al Sharpton’s Strib op-ed:

Civil Rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton writes in the Star Tribune to oppose Voter ID because 1 in 4 Blacks, 1 in 5 elderly and 1 in 6 Hispanics don’t have the proper credentials and apparently can’t get them.

Oddly, others can.

The Ramsey County Elections office is next door to the Property Records room where deeds are stored and I spend a fair amount of time working with real estate. I have seen an endless parade of Asian voters the past two weeks. They’re showing up by the van-load. They have guides who speak English directing them to the right office. Older folks are assisted by younger ones. They’re showing up to register and to vote absentee for the primary.

I’ve also seen a few Black immigrants, Somalis or Ethiopians from the way they dress and talk. No “American” Blacks, though. None of the people whose pants are stitched to their underwear, whose caps are on sideways, who have time in the afternoon to prowl the streets looking for 14-year-old girls in Frogtown and who learned to talk from rap videos. Those people can’t seem to make it to the Voter Registration Office.

Plainly, this is not a cultural thing. It’s not a matter of White and Asian people being conscientious and law-abiding while recent illegal immigrant Hispanics (and Blacks whose families have lived in this country for generations) are neither conscientious nor law-abiding.

Plainly, it’s just racissss. And that’s a crying shame.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

And I’ll add that it’s not even a matter of Afro-Americans and Latinos not being conscientious or law-abiding so much as it is the DFL, Sharpton, and their camp-followers in the Media wanting you to believe it; to believe that Black, Latino, elderly and young voters are just too stupid to handle bringing an ID to the polls.

We know better.  Right?

Polling shows that a fairly decisive majority of Minnesotans agree, and support Voter ID.  The left’s response – other than chanting “Disenfranchisement” and “Racism” – is to claim that the process of getting a free ID is juuuust toooo complicated for voters.  And since their strategy does seem to involve trying to win over “low-information” voters – people they can gull into thinking Mitt Romney is a felon who hasn’t filed taxes, that Bain killed a woman, that they’re out of work in 2012 because of what George W. Bush did (or really didn’t) do in 2007), that would be a concern.

As Joe points out, many groups – groups that actually take democracy seriously – are making the logical connection; they’re getting their people registered.    Expect not a few legitimate groups across the political spectrum to extend their ‘Get out the Vote” efforts to getting voters registered as well.

Clearly, for the DFL, it’s easier to manufacture bogus votes than to get their low-information rank-and-file to vote legitimately.

Buying Minnesota – 2012 Edition

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Two years ago, this blog led the Twin Cities media in documenting the extent to which liberal plutocrats and government employee unions were buying the gubernatorial race.

Because remember – money in politics is baaaad, unless it’s from a liberal plutocrat…

…like Alita Messinger, billionaire and scion of the Rockefeller fortune and, need we mention, ex-wife and chief bankroller of Mark Dayton.  She is the prime financier of a network of little-publicized groups – “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”, “Common Cause Minnesota” – that funnel vast sums of money into epic, toxic sleaze campaigns against Republican candidates.

And Alita Messinger is back with a vengeance.  While her epic sleaze campaign against Tom Emmer was able to eke out a win for her ex in 2010,. the uppity peasants went and elected a Tea Party legislature.

And uppity peasants are one thing up with which she will not put:

Philanthropist  [!!!!!!!!] Alida Messinger, the ex-wife of Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton, is putting big money into overturning Republican control of the Minnesota Legislature.

Fundraising reports released Tuesday showed that Messinger gave $500,000 to the WIN Minnesota political fund. That group funneled money to the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, a Democratic-supporting independent expenditure group expected to sink significant amounts into key legislative races.

Among others, they are pouring money into trying to unseat Doug Wardlow in Eagan and Dave Hancock in Bemidji.

Dayton is asking voters to give Democrats control of the Legislature for the second half of his term.

This story is Berg’s Seventh Law in action; months of caterwauling about the Koch Brothers and “ALEC” have been done, entirely and without exception, to either distract attention from Messinger and her fellow plutocrats’ flow of money, or at least to let them say “Yeah, but you do it too!”:

Messinger’s donations dwarfed all others to independent groups so far this year. Three Republican-oriented funds combined had $380,000 on hand.

In 2010, Messinger was a major donor to funds that ran ads attacking Republican Tom Emmer in the governor’s race, which Dayton won by less than 1 percentage point.

On the one hand, this election is the national debate writ small:  Dayton, like Obama, depends almost entirely on big donors – Obama on Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Dayton on the Hamptons and the government unions – to cling to relevance.

On the other?  The Democrats know they can count on at least 43% of the voters to be ill-informed enough to fall for their propaganda machine’s slop.

The GOP’s freshman class in the legislature brought a lot of good, hard-nosed, idealistic conservatives into office – Wardlow and Hancock and Roger Chamberlain and Mary Franson and King Banaian and many others included, many of whom are on Messinger’s hit list.  They’re counting on the disarray in the state party to help them.

The GOP – especially its freshmen, who largely kept their promises – need your support more than ever.  If there were ever a time for Minnesota’s conservatives – a true Army of Davids – to pull off an upset against the DFL’s League of Plutocrats, this is the time.

Because the GOP Freshmen are all that stand between us and Minnesota becoming a cold Greece.

Strib: “This Duck Is A Buffalo”

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I’m going to start a new TV show.  I’m going to call it “Profiles in Leadership”.

I’ve got a few episodes all plotted out.

Episode 1:  After decades of weak mayors who futzed around with “due process” and “the limits of government”, Boss Tweed finally did more than pay lip service to the office of “Chief Executive”, and actually used the office of mayor to lead the City of New York!

Episode 2: Putting lesser religions with their notions of “spiritual commitment” to shame, Revered Jim Jones put the leader back into “leadership”, when by the strength of his example he led his followers to put the “Ded” in “Dedication”.

Episode 3:  Unsatisfied to be a regular businessman, Bernard Madoff led his organization to excel beyond all others in its category!

Episode 4: Mark Dayton truly led “his” state in the quest to stick the bill for a billion-dollar spiff to Zygmund Wilf’s real estate investment on Minnesota’s taxpayers in an example of “leadership” for the ages.

No, the Strib say so:

Gov. Mark Dayton’s savvy and indefatigable advocacy for a new Vikings stadium represents the kind of executive leadership Minnesotans should applaud.

In much the same way that Chicagoans should have “applauded” Al Capone getting the prostitution rackets lined up and paying him tribute.

Unlike his predecessor, Dayton did more than occasionally lead cheers for the Vikings — he delivered on a key campaign promise to the people of Minnesota despite significant political risks.

Unlike his predecessor, Mark Dayton makes no pretense of being fiscally responsible, except where that means “taking other peoples’ money to pay off your campaign chits”.

And make no mistake about it; this was a payoff – to the Strib as well as many others.

The Strib needs the Vikings to be in downtown Minneapolis, to be paying big money on that fallow land the Strib owns near the current ‘dome, and to give it another ready market for selling newspapers.  So do the rest of the Twin Cities media, to a lesser degree.  They knew Dayton was a willing stooge for the downtown Minneapolis business interests that want that state subsidy every bit as bad as Wilf did.

And so the Star/Tribune’s coverage of the election race that led Dayton to office resembled  DFL public relations more than journalism – from their careful white-washing of Dayton’s political record to the election-eve “Minnesota Poll” showing Tom Emmer trailing by an improbable margin that certainly induced not a few Republicans to stay home.

The threat that the Vikings would have left Minnesota without a stadium deal this year was real, although to their credit the team and NFL leadership negotiated in good faith.

The negotiations were done in the same “good faith” the Mob uses when “negotiating” with a shopkeeper who is threatening not to pony up protection money fast enough.

Had this market lost the franchise, we no doubt would have seen an expensive reprise of the effort to bring big-league hockey back to the state after the North Stars left for Dallas.

Right!

And we all know how that loss devastated the State of Minnesota…

…well, no.  It devastated hockey fans, who were upset that “their” team got moved elsewhere by an owner that, like Zygi Wilf, wanted better tribute from the local government.

And it devastated the TV and radio stations and newspaper reporters and (especially) ad execs that covered, and sold ads for coverage of, North Stars games.

Other than that?  The loss of the North Stars had much less impact on this city than the loss of, say, the Ford plant.

Thursday’s passage of a stadium bill ends years of debate over the future of the team and the outdated Metrodome.

And the debate will be “ended” for another twenty years.  Until the next round of NFL owners wants their investments buffed up on other peoples’ money.

Or until someone tells them “no”.

Which would devastate nobody…

…but WCCO, KSTP, KARE, Fox Sports North, the PiPress and the Strib.  

Which, to be fair, at least discloses part of their vast interest in this bit of racketeering:

(Disclosure: The current stadium development plan includes one of five blocks owned by the Star Tribune near the Metrodome.)

But they graze up against the truth at least briefly:

The stadium bill, and the bonding bill that went before it this week, were exercises in effective bipartisan lawmaking,

And there you.

“Bipartisan” legislation.  Everybody wins…

…but the taxpayer.

And that, as they say, is all.

Can’t You Suckers See That It’s Me, Me Me?

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Faced with an amendment that will likely pass 2:1 this fall that will also peel off enough fraudulent votes to cost them some of the close elections (like the last Governor and Senate races), the Democrats are turning on the spin.

Emphasis added to this bit here from the MinnPost:

But opponents say it will make voting more difficult for those who don’t have  the right ID, such as seniors who no longer drive, college students, soldiers overseas and homeless people. And they argue that there’s no evidence that voter fraud is a big problem, and that there are laws in place already.

Dave Thul – regional blogger, activist and senior non-commissioned officer – pointed out in the comment section yesterday:

Every member of the US military on active duty is required to have and carry a photo ID. Every member of the military overseas is required to have said photo ID on them at all times.

Also, every US military member has in his or her unit an appointed Voting Assistance Officer, responsible for implementing the DOD directive that every member of the military will have the ability to vote. Voting assistance officers have the same legal authority as a notary public to sign off on a ballot to certify that the voter provided photo ID.

Huh.  I don’t recall anyone in the media checking on that.  Catherine Richert?  You out there?

Another one’s been making the rounds, this time from the MinnPost article linked above, with emphasis added::

…many voters do not realize that it is not just any government-issued (or approved) i.d. they would need to present at their voting place. It will be a special i.d. for voting only and those who want one will have to purchase and present a government-issued birth certificate or perhaps passport in order to get the voter i.d. card. I’m not sure of the current price of a birth certificate, but a passport cost $100 a few years ago.

The Pro-Voter Fraud crowd – the DFL, the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Common Cause and so on – are passing this meme around (or at least not saying it’s not wrong; they’re telling the students, the poor, and especially seniors that their driver’s license, state ID or existing passport won’t suffice for voting.

I expect the DFL to start telling that same crowd that Mary Kiffmeyer wants to collect bone marrow samples before voting.  Indeed, expect that previous sentence to pop up on at least one leftyblog.

Because Ken Martin Says So, That’s Why

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When I saw that Eric Black – formerly of the Strib, now at the Minnpost - had written a piece entitled “Redistricting maps give DFL advantage in legislative races, but …”, I went “uh oh”.

I mean, Eric Black is no leftyblogging bobblehead.  He’s one of the Deans Of Minnesota Political Journalism (although to be fair Minnesota Political Journalism has more deans than the MNSCU system).

And while I don’t want to frame the redistricting in especially partisan terms, the fact is that the maps didn’t really adequately reflect Minnesota’s most important current demographic trend – people fleeing the failed DFL-controlled Twin Cities and Duluth, and moving to areas that actually work, which are universally and without exception GOP-controlled.   They bent over backwards to maintain the Twin Cities’ control over Minnesota politics, especially at the Congressional level.

Now – before I get into Black’s actual piece, here – let’s go over a tiny little bit of the theory of journalism.

Print journos know that the number of people who actually read any given point in a story drops, almost geometrically, the further into the story you get.  If 1000 eyeballs scan the headline, 100 might read the opening paragraph or two.  Of those 100, 10 might plod through the middle.  If there’s a jump, or if it takes longer than a few minutes to plod through, barring some immediate personal interest, 1 might get to the end of the piece (the numbers are made-up, but they’re neither gratuitously far-off nor conceptually wrong).

So copy editors write headlines that try to lure as many eyeballs as possible into the story – and generations of editors have groused at reporters “don’t bury the lede” – because in print news (and its red-headed stepchild, online journalism), the first impression may be the only impression you get.

And with that headline and its key message- DFL ADVANTAGE!!!! - ringing in my mind, I tucked into the rest of the story:

When the new decennial map of Minnesota’s legislative districts was unveiled in late February, most neutral observers said the DFL had won the battle for a favorable map. But the degree of the DFL victory may have been understated. If the map is destiny (which it isn’t, but it can change the odds), the DFL may have a decent shot at taking back control of both houses of the Minnesota Legislature in the 2012 election.

The degree of DFL victory “may have been understated”.

That’s the lede.  And ledes are important for that portion of Minnesota’s population that reads past the headline – which, as we established in the headline, says the maps were a big win for the DFL (“but…”).

And who – other than those “neutral sources” – is behind this claim (and I’ll add emphasis):

DFL State Chair Ken Martin recently told me that the way his party scores the partisan lean of the new districts, the DFL has at least a slight advantage in 73 House districts and 34 Senate districts. If (a big “if” unless and until it happens) the DFL candidates were to prevail in those districts, it would give the party a substantial (73-61) majority in the House and a bare (34-33) single vote majority in the Senate.

So after a headline and a lede that proclaim that the DFL was the big winner, we get the source – Ken Martin.  The Chair of the DFL, after coming from “Win Minnesoita“, which is part of the DFL money shell-game that pays for all the DFL’s attack ads (and thus, all of its messaging, period).

That’s it.

So to the reader’s perception, the story really says THE DFL HAS A HUGE ADVANTAGE (according to the head of the DFL).

And we know this…

To be precise for the total political wonks in the audience, the DFL has developed a methodology that looks – precinct by precinct – at DFL votes across the last many elections. (As you can imagine, the partisan breakdown of a precinct can vary from year to year and from race to race within a given year.) The DFL method massages the numbers into what it called the DPI (Democratic Performance Index) of each precinct. And now that they know which precincts go with which state House and Senate districts, they can calculate which districts have a DPI of greater than 50 percent, which means that the DFL should have an advantage in winning and hold that seat.

…because the DFL did a bunch of math…

Before you get too excited (or upset, depending on your partisan preference) you should know that:

a) Martin didn’t release the map of the DFL-leaning districts nor the numbers on which the calculation is based, so skeptics cannot check his statement;

b) The Pioneer Press, which published a similar calculation, reached a significantly less favorable DFL number on the Senate map. (The Pi-Press analysis did indicate that the DFL has the map potential to take back control of the House and gain ground – but enough for control – in the Senate); and

c) Everyone that I interviewed for this post assured me that, while the map is important, it is neither the only nor even the most important thing.

…which was likely b*llsh*t, and even the media knows it.

But it’s worth, apparently, putting as an unvarnished headline and lede.

Why?

Because it’s one of the narratives the DFL wants spread far and wide; their success is inevitable.  Don’t ask why – they won’t tell you.  Just keep repeating it, Dems.  Just interenalize it, conservatives!

The DFL’s main hope this election is to drive down conservative enthusiasm – which slaughtered them two years ago – and try to create some sort of bandwagon effect on the left.

Prediction:  An upcoming Minnesota Poll or Humphrey Institute survey will show that A MAJORITY OF MINNESOTANS (from a sample that over-counts DFLers 3:2) APPROVE OF DAYTON’S JOB AS GOVERNOR.

The Real War Against Women

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Last week, Rep, Mary Franson released a video response to constituent questions.  One of the questions was about welfare.

In the video (since removed, unfortunately), Franson compared welfare to treating people like animals – by creating dependence, making it impossible for them to live without help.  In other words, government treats them like pets, zoo creatures, livestock – creatures of whom they are the master.

Now, food stamp recipients aren’t animals – but the DFL chanting point machine, Carrie Lucking and Denise Cardinal of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, Greta Bergstrom of “Take Action Minnesota” and most of Minnesota’s lumpen gray mass of leftybloggers – are certainly a bunch of rhetorical hyenas.  They took Franson’s statement, water-boarded it until all the context went away, and put it out there as ‘Mary Franson Compares People On Food Stamps To Animals“.

And that’s how the media – in the bag for the DFL as they almost universally are – ran with it.

It was a lie, of couse; the DFL, being intellectually and morally bankrupt, has had nothing but lies for the past 30 years.

But since misogyny – Rush’s misguided statement about Sandra Fluke, not Bill Maher saying Sarah Palin would diddle Rick Perry if he were black, or Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a “slut”, or Maher calling Palin a “c*nt”, naturally – is in the news, let’s look at the biggest case of misogyny going on in Minnesota right now.

Because lies have consequences.

Franson has been a lighting rod for Minnesota’s demented left for a long time now.  A Central Minnesota teacher and leftyblogger apparently expressly condoned some of the local droogs-in-the-making in bullying one of Franson’s children in school because, in his role as moral judge, jury and executioner, he figured it served her right, having a parent who opposed gay marriage (LL has the audio; it’s a fairly searing indictment of the “Clockwork Orange”-y inner id of way too much of public education today, not to mention the dingo-like morality of a good 80% of Minnesota leftybloggers).  By extension, it served her right, being a conservative woman.

Because women, like blacks and latinos and gays, are supposed to be liberals.  And if they wander off the reservation, there need to be consequences.

And DFLers are promising consequences for Franson’s latest remark (as filtered through the Hyenas and the media).  Franson has received death threats, crude-to-the-point-of-prehensile attacks, and giggly snarks from the loathsome Paul Thissen, and, Saturday morning, a protest on her front lawn - prompting even some of the less-depraved leftybloggers to urge juuuust a smidge of caution.   (Can you imagine the furor if someone like this - who does, by the way, represent the DFL – turned up at a Tea Party?)  Incredibly, House Minority leader Paul Thissen disavowed any knowledge of the threats of violence, and tried to turn it into another snark.

So the story is this:  the hyenas of the Ministry of Truth twist Franson’s statement far out of context to whip up hysteria – part of a long-running campaign to harass Franson and, indeed, all conservative women, to make being involved in politics too emotionally draining for all but the supernaturally-toughest conservative women (and by God, your leading conservative women could make a Navy SEAL cry uncle).  Hysteria duly ensues, with less-mentally-gifted DFLers promising one of their made-to-order mini-riots on Saturday.

The media wants to know…

…if Franson really thinks food stamp recipients are reeeeealy animals?

Franson, fortunately, responded:

The real news story is the death threats and vicious, sexual, misogynist emails I have received in connection with the video that has been taken down and for which I have apologized. I’ve never compared people with animals as I think too highly of the human person. This is why it’s immoral for government to enable dependency, a subject my critics are fierce to avoid. Democrats are content with

the poverty status quo; republicans are not.

I’d be happy to forward to you some of the emails if you are interested. Otherwise, the subject that I understand you wish to interview me about is both stale & dated and

has been eclipsed by violence from the left. I think your viewers would be more interested in the latter than the former.

Best regards,

Mary Franson

It’s more than a little tempting to drive to Alex this weekend with a camera.  Indeed, if there are any conservative activists in the neighborhood, it’d be good to get the festivities on tape.  This blog will run your footage for you.

And I have a feeling I won’t have to shave any context to make it shame the DFL.

PS:  I implied above that there is a concerted rhetorical campaign to so intensely harass conservative women, blacks, latinos and gays to the point that they stay out of politics.  I’m wondering – can you imagine how some DFL hamster like Betty McCollum or Sandy Pappas would melt down if they were the target of the constant misogynistic hatred that the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Laura Ingraham, Mary Franson or any other conservative women are?

Imagining is all we can do, of course.  Because it just.  Doesn’t.  Happen.   Not like this.

An Editorial Without A Word Of Truth

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The Strib finally did it.

The Strib’s editorial board, in serving in its unstated capacity as stenographers for the DFL and its agenda, have written some howlers over the years; countering them has provided a constant source of material for Minnesota’s large, thriving center-right alternative media for a solid decade now.

But over the weekend, they pulled off the unthinkable – the triple three-peat, the three-minute mile, winning 164 games in a regular season of editorial writing.

They wrote an editorial that was absolutely devoid of truth, or of objective fact.  Literally, not one assertion in the entire column about Representative Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill is true, or not presented in a context that isn’t 180 degrees misleading.

An editorial that is, to a moral and ethical “T”, perfectly untrue beyond simple things like “the legislature passed…” or “Jim Backstrom is…”, obviously).

The thought of cataloging all the individual lies in this editorial is almost too daunting.  But if not me, who?

Now that the Legislature has passed a bill that would allow gun owners to use deadly force anywhere they feel threatened, only Gov. Mark Dayton can prevent it from becoming law.

This statement starts out with a bang (as it were), proving the stenographer writer’s absolute ignorance on the subject.  Minnesota law currently says you can use lethal force when you feel threatened.  The bill doesn’t change the justifications for lethal force.  Not at all.   It has nothing to do with how the law-abiding shooter “Feels”.

It has to do with the burden of proof in judging their motives, and only under certain circumstnces.

More later.

Known as an expanded version of the “castle doctrine,” the bill would allow Minnesotans to shoot to kill even if they aren’t at home. The state’s current castle law already allows citizens to use deadly force in their homes to protect themselves.

This statement is proof that the writer is just re-writing a press release from Heather Martens.

Minnesotans – and residents of any state, for that matter – can already use lethal force to defend themselves, in or out of their homes.   Self-defense has been an accepted part of the law since before there was a United States.

The problem in MInnesota is that self defense is called an “affirmative defense”; you plead guilty to shooting someone, with an explanation.  You are then guilty until you prove yourself innocent, and show to the court’s and jury’s satisfaction that you were…:

  • An unwilling participant
  • in reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm
  • that lethal force was justified
  • that you made a reasonable effort to disengage.

The “Stand  Your Ground” law would make one change; if you shoot someone on your property – your house, your yard, your garage, in your car or a business you own – the burden of proof switches to the county attorney.   The law-abiding shooter on their own property will be innocent until proven guilty.

And that is all.

But the proposed law, more appropriately called the “shoot first” bill by opponents,

And there’s more proof that the editorial is just a rewrite of a Heather Martens press release.

“Shoot First” bill?

Has anyone on the Strib editorial board’s band of logicians ever pondered what happens if you shoot second?

would let gun owners fire at people they perceive as threats — without the expectation that they should first attempt to avoid trouble if possible.

Another lie, another direct crib from Heather Martens’ chanting points.  Self-defense shooting is always shooting at “perceived threats”.  The bill merely means that, while you’re on your property, the county attorney has the burden of proving that your perception was wrong.

In particular, ‘Shooting people without first trying to avoid trouble” is legal suicide now, and it would be if the law passes.

Minnesota doesn’t need this change. The state already has a conceal-and-carry law, and citizens who choose to arm themselves can already use firearms for protection anywhere within reasonable limits.

Which is true – and irrelevant to the subject of the editorial.

The bill is not about the right to keep and bear arms; that’s in the Constitution.  It’s about the right to use them in legitimate self-defense without an undue legal burden.

And as we saw in last month’s story from Iowa, the burden – being considered guilty until proven innocent – can truly be an undue one.

For years, shoot-first expansion has been among the top legislative priorities for the National Rifle Association. The organization believes that gun owners should have unfettered rights to defend themselves whenever and wherever they feel threatened.

That paragraph is more Heather Martens, from the callow, demonizing reference to the NRA, to the weasel-word that barely camouflages a lie (nobody, neither Cornish nor the NRA, supports an “unfettered” right to kill in self-defense; merely reasonable legal protections for everyone, including the shooter) and the face-palming illogic (again – self-defense is always about whether one “feels threatened”; the devil is in the details; they help determine whether that “feeling” reasonable?)

That’s part of the problem: Defining a threat can be very personal — and mistakes can be deadly. Some gun owners may feel nervous because of the way a group of youths is dressed. Others might find members of a different race or culture to pose a threat.

Heather Martens has been my rhetorical kick-toy for most of the past decade – but to the best of my knowledge, she’s never tried to play the race card.  I suspect this is the Strib’s editorial board taking some editorial license with Martens’ press release.

You can shoot someone today because you don’t like their clothes, or their race, or their “culture”.  You merely have to prove to a jury that you feared being killed or maimed, that lethal force was justified, that you made a reasonable effort to escape the threat of imminent death or mutilation, and that you didn’t seek out the fight.

And the only thing that’ll change – the only thing – under the proposal is that if you are on your property, the county attorney will have to prove that it was wrong.

And the editorial board apparently has no confidence whatsoever in Minnesota’s police or prosecutors’ ability to tell if a shooting is illegitimate – that a shooting was because of fear of the victim’s “race” or “clothes” or “culture” rather than legitimate fear of death.

Whichever is the case, the conclusion – the editorial board is lying – is the same.

And what about those occasions when a person hears a noise and worries that it could be someone who would do them harm? Then there’s the issue of defending one’s life vs. protecting property.

Absolutely none of which changes from current law.  If the police and county attorney investigate and believe that there was no legitimate threat to the property owner, the property owner still has a problem.  The editorial board – like Heather Martens – is lying about this.

The proposed law allows deadly force to be used against anyone who enters a garage, for example, “by stealth or force.” That means a homeowner could injure someone or take a life over the theft of a car, bicycle or lawn mower.

Let’s take this statement at face value – more than it deserves – and compare and contrast.

An unarmed black Somali youth sneaks into a garage to steal a bike.  Homeowner runs to garage and shoots him.  The homeowner claims self-defense – that he “felt threatened”.

Current Law: Since the youth was unarmed and there was no evidence that he was a lethal threat to the homeowner, the homeowner’s affirmative defense fails and he’s convicted of murder or manslaughter.

Proposed Law: Since the police investigation shows the youth was unarmed and there was no evidence that he was a lethal threat to the homeowner, the county charges him with murder or manslaughter, and easily proves him guilty.

That’s it.

As Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom pointed out in a Feb. 15 commentary on these pages (“A bill for the trigger-happy? Bull’s-eye”), the modified law would allow people to shoot first and ask questions later whenever they believed they were threatened, regardless of how a reasonable person would have responded under the same circumstances.

And as I showed, then and above, Backstrom was lying and misrepresenting the law.

It speaks volumes that Backstrom and most other state and national prosecutors, as well as law enforcement groups, oppose the proposal.

Yes; it shows, yet again, that they are in the bag for the DFL.  Which is a fact – urban “law enforcement groups” like the MN Police Chiefs’ association are primarily political organizations; the chiefs, especially those in the bigger cities, are mainly political offices, appointed by and serving at the pleasure of the (always DFL) governments.

More importantly?  These same groups all come out against all Second Amendment expansions.  All of them.  They all predict dire consequences.

And they are always wrong.

They’re on the front lines and understand that deadly force should be the last resort.

And the bill will not change that one iota.  It’ll merely mean prosecutors will have the same burden of proof they have against real criminals.

Rep. Tony Cornish, R-Good Thunder, has supported expanded castle legislation for years, arguing that the change would codify that law-abiding people “have the brains” [love those scare quotes, huh?  - Ed] to understand the seriousness of deadly force.

And the record, nationwide, has shown Cornish’s argument to be resoundingly correct.

Cornish, a former police chief, believes the bill is a logical extension of current law and that the change is needed because citizens need to know that they won’t be prosecuted for defending themselves.

But Cornish can’t point to a single case in Minnesota in which someone acting in self-defense was convicted of anything or sent to jail.

It’s deceptive rhetoric – and it’s untrue.  I sure can.

Thomas McCuiston – a 125-pound black man – fatally shot a 6’1, drunk, racist attacker with a 50-pound weight advantage who was breaking into his home; he was defending his five year old son.  At trial the judge refused to include the part of the statute that referred to “defending ones’ dwelling” into his instructions; they sentenced McCuiston to 15 years.  The appellate judge found that the jury instruction was a reversible error; McCuiston was granted a new trial, where the jury got the right instruction and acquitted McCuiston.

There’s one.  Want another?

Martin Treptow, who shot at a man who’d been road-raging at him and had him blocked in at a stoplight on Highway 10.  The man pointed a gun at Treptow’s pregnant wife as she sat in the passenger seat; Treptow shot the man, who turned out to be an “undercover cop” and member of the now-disgraced Gang Strike Force.  Although Treptow was released without even having his carry permit revoked by the Anoka cops, the Anoka County Attorney leaned on Treptow, promising endless prosecution unless he accepted a deal.  An unemployed security guard, he didn’t have the resources to fight the case; he pled guilty to lesser charges.  It was as complete a miscarriage of justice as I’ve ever seen – and as clear a justification of the Cornish Bill as exists.

Those two cases (and I’ll bank on there being more) distract from the real point, which isn’t necessarily that anyone “goes to jail” because they had to prove their innocence (unlike virtually any real criminal); it’s that they had to spend an average of $50,000 in legal bills against the  unlimited resources of the county attorney to  defeat a presumption of guilt until proven innocent – a financial hit the county attorney’s office can absorb without a second thought, but which breaks many poorer defendants…

…who plead guilty to lesser charges, and thus don’t count as people “sitting in jail because they were wrongly convicted”, because, hey, they confessed to the lesser crime – and the lesser included charge of being too poor to fight the County Attorney!  Indeed, those are the victims of the current system of law; smug upper-middle-class liberals can afford lawyers to fight their way through the system and prove themselves innocent; working class and poor people, like Treptow and McCuiston and Ray Lewis, people who live in lousyh neighborhoods (gutted by DFL policy) who need to defend themselves (against criminals against which the DFL-run city is powerless), but don’t have the resources to fight the county attorney.

So while the editorial is utterly devoid of fact, it is racist, in the way that Strib editorials always are; the racism of “good intentions”, of trying to do the little peoples’ thinking for them.  Even if it means you have to doctor the facts to do it.

So why is the Strib editorial board lying?  Why is it doing a glossy rewrite of an (I’ll guess, with authority) Heather Martens press release and calling it the institutional voice of the newspaper?

The Strib is lying to the people. Where is the accountability?

Other than the slow dripping of market forces pushing it into irrelevance?  There is none.

EXTRA CREDIT QUESTION:  How long until Catherine Richert at MPR’s “Poligraph” “fact-checks” this editorial?


Minnesota’s Ministry Of Truth: “People, Shmeeple!”

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One of the DFL’s more comical devices is calling themselves “the party of the people”.

It’s always been a mixed bag, of course; currently, it’s the party of the people who try to make a career out of giving other people handouts, and the people who can exploit that system for more power for themselves.  Which, admittedly, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so I’ll give ‘em a pass for not using it.

But still, for “the party of the people”, the DFL is committed to quite a few stances this cycle that are diametrically opposed to what “the people” seem to want.   As a result, they and the astroturf groups that do all of the DFL’s actual messaging these days – Alliance For A Better Minnesota, Take Action MN, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the unions and such – are busily cranking out a PR campaign to try to show that a minority, sometimes a teeeeeny tiny little minority, of the people are really a majority.

Here are some of the issues on which the DFL and its astroturf hench-groups don’t want you to believe your lying eyes:

Opposed to Election Integrity - The DFL opposes Voter ID.  The DFL’s Astroturf Cabinet is making a lot of noise to cover the fact that between seventy and eighty percent of Minnesotans believe that voters should have to present some form of ID.  There is no way to do this without lying, of course; Mark Ritchie’s statement that “700,000 voters would be disenfranchised” is baked wind; even if the number is accurate (and it is no more accurate than a Mark Ritchie election), the vast majority of them would be same-day registrants who could fill out provisional ballots while their identities were validated.

And most people know that.  And even if they don’t, they do smell a rat, and think Voter ID just plain makes sense – just as it does when you cash a check, buy beer, rent an apartment, get a job, start a savings account, use a credit card at a store…

…which, apparently, 700,000 Minnesotans are unable to do.

That seems like a problem we’d hear about, doesn’t it?

Right To Work: According to the Survey USA poll from a few weeks back, the vast majority of Minnesotans – 55-24% – support “Right to Work”, which essentially means that unions have to make a case to the worker for their dues; they won’t be required to pay dues to a union.

The Astroturf Cabinet is trying to spin out of the jam two different ways; by comparing “right to work” states to “union” states in terms of straight-up per-capita income (as if New Yorkers earn more than Arkansans solely or even significantly because of unions), and the notion that wages drop in “right to work” states, which is very inconclusive at best, and offset by the fact that “Right to Work” states grow faster (which, again, isn’t entirely because they’re “Right to Work”; they tend to be red states, and they DO grow more).

Stand Your Ground - earlier this week, four Democrats (Tom Saxhaug, Rod Skoe, David Tomassoni and Dan Sparks). broke with the Metrocrat majority to vote with the GOP on the “Stand Your Ground” bill, which would allow self-defense shooters to be innocent until proven guilty while on their property or in their cars.

Some county attorneys and “police chiefs”, apparently unsure that they or their staffs could prove an unjust shooter broke the law, oppose the bill, saying it’d “legalize cold blooded murder”.  The DFL’s handmaidens in the media are, on this issue, apparently too incurious to prod into some of the people they use as sources.

And yet Saxhaug, Tomassoni, Skoe and Sparks no doubt remember ten years ago – the last time the DFL put itself on the opposite side of the Second Amendment movement – it cost the DFL, least outstate, dearly.  The DFL’s opposition to Concealed Carry reform ten years ago played a pivotal role in costing it the House, and in driving the Senate strongly to the right; DFLers played a key role in passing the Minnesota Personal Protection Act. They did it because real Minnesotans supported it, and showed it at the polls.  Nine DFLers crossed over to pass the original bill in 2003; it was much more than that in 2005 when the bill re-passed after it was struck down by a DFL pet judge in 2004.

But the DFL is much more extreme today than ten years ago.   And the right of the law-abiding to defend themselves is anathema to them.  So they’ll oppose Stand Your Ground,  and try to scare people away from it…

…even though the vast majority of informed people support it.

Wilfare - Minnesotans oppose raising their taxes to increase the value of Zygi Wilf’s investment (or, in some cases, oppose raising their own taxes).  But the DFL wants to divert money from the charities that get funding from charitable gambling to, again, give Wilfare to a billionaire whose only real goal is to inflate the value of his investment!

But it’s not being talked about – anywhere.  Least of all in the mainstream media, which profits handsomely from pro sports.

How do you think Minnesotans feel about that?

On issue after issue, the only consensus behind the DFL is the one their minions in the astroturf “Ministry of Truth” manufacture for them, and that their flaks in the media try to portray, provided one pays no attention to the Messinger behind the curtain.

TakeAction Minnesota Thinks People Of Color Are Too Stupid To Keep Track Of IDs

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Between 70% and 80% of Minnesota voters favor the Voter ID proposal.

Some of us favor it because it’s the first step in a series of election reforms that will help us ensure that our election system in fact has integrity; there are increasingly strong suspicions that the election system in Minnesota, with its reports of fraudulent election-day un-identified vouched registrations (among other abuses), lacks that integrity.

Others have the common sense to know that 32 states currently require some degree of voter ID, and elections work just fine; the elderly and students register and vote, just like adults (significantly, most of the non-ID states are Democrat, including states renowned for dirty elections, like Illinois, New York, New Jersey and California)

But for whatever reason, Minnesota voters overwhelmingly favor the measure.  Even in the most “conservative” poll on the subject, the Survey USA poll which showed a 71-23 margin of support overall, the measure even wins among declared liberals, 35-32.

So the anti-ID crowd is getting desperate.

And to paraphrase Gandhi, when you’re fighting the DFL machine on a subject like this, first they ignore you.

Then they mock you.

And  then they call you a racist.

The site was sponsored – apparently – by “Take Action Minnesota”, an astroturf group thats is basically what all of the various non-profit Wellstone cults became over the last decade or so.

And – oboy.  A black guy in a striped suit.  Not good.  Tone deaf.  Politically-incorrect.

And, in the special little world of the liberal astroturf group, I suppose it,  all by itself, invalidates the entire move to bring integrity back to our voting system.

BAD MN Majority.

MN Majority came out with another – which also aroused TakeAction’s drearily predictable ire:

Lest you think all TakeActionMN does is do screenshots, there was some writing and stuff too:

This image is on a Minnesota Majority website. It is trying to scare us into changing our state constitution to require a photo ID to vote. Photo ID would restrict voting rights for over half a million Minnesotans – especially people of color. Photo ID is voter suppression. And it stops here.

I’m always puzzled by the notion that requiring an ID to vote – like we require them for lesser “rights” like cashing a check, using a credit card, setting up a bank account, getting a Social Security Card, getting a copy of your birth certificate, buying Sudafed, getting into a bar, buying a firearm or ammunition, buying a car, taking out a loan, dropping your kids off and picking them up at drop-in daycare, buy alcohol or cigarettes, apply for welfare, food stamps or any sort of medical assistance, rent an apartment, get admitted to a hospital, or get a marriage license – “disenfranchises” anyone, much less ten percent of all Minnesotans, as “Take Action MN” claims.   Or, for that matter, that VoterID infringes, in and of itself, on the right to vote.  It doesn’t; it merely means you need an ID to do it.

Indeed, once you get past cartoon pratfalls, it’s TakeAction that makes the genuinely racist claim - the ludicrous and frankly offensive notion that ten percent of Minneostans – apparently, all minorities, students and the elderly, although nobody has any idea where they got that number, and next month it could very well be “eleventy-teen percent” and nobody will say “boo”.   But to me, their claims sound a lot like “minorities and people of color are too dumb to keep track of their paperwork and ID cards”.

I’m sure that’s not what they meant.

But what they do mean is “if you support Voter ID, we’re going to call you the worst thing there is in modern discourse; the R word”.  It’s the nuclear option – for people who don’t have a factual or ethical argument.

At any rate – we know how Gandhi’s bromide ends; “Then you win”.

TakeAction and the rest of the Minnesota astroturf cult are getting increasingly desperate on this issue, as well as the other big wedge issue likely headed for the ballot this fall, an amendment to make Minnesota a Right to Work state.  Without fraudulent votes and endless union money, the DFL’s position in Minnesota will get a lot weaker.

And that’s a big win for everyone, no matter what your race, ethnicity, or relentless political correctness.

MN-MOT/Chanting Points Memo: Securing The Incurious Vote

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We’re getting close to election season.

And Minnesota’s left-”leaning” “grassroots” astroturf organizations – Common Cause, Take Action Minnesota, Alliance For A Better Minnesota, and the various unions are following suit with doing what their various funders are paying them to do; trying to spin news, facts and info to get people to vote DFL in the upcoming elections.

Now, as we noted during the 2010 election cycle, these groups – especially Alliance for a Better Minnesota – are lavishly funded by liberal plutocrats, and always have been…

…even back before Citizens United started evening the playing field and allowing conservatives the same access to soft money that the Dems have always gotten from their union and 527 supporters.

Which is like complaining about plate tectonics; what are you going to do about it, one would be right to ask.  Political money is speech; we conservatives live by that ideal, and we’ll have to learn to prevail by it.

It’s not that the money buys so much messaging that is so very very irritating – indeed, depressing, if one cares for the future of this society, beyond narrow partisan politics.

It’s that the messaging it buys is so often not merely devoid of fact or defining context, but so cynically so that one can only think their only motivation for the entire campaign is “to repeat enough complete bullshit often enough to fool enough of the stupid and gullible to keep us in power”.

We saw this in 2010 in Minnesota, when these groups and their “useful idiots” (Lenin’s term, not mine) in the Twin Cities media and lefty “alternative” media, pounded a couple of non-factual or almost criminally-context-deprived points home with almost experimental-psych-class-material mania; the idea that “Tom Emmer had two DUIs” (he hadn’t; he’d been arrested and pled down to “Careless Driving”, 20 and 30 years earlier) and that he’d (campaigned for lax punishment for drunk drivers” (also a lie; Emmer was proposing a change in the implied consent law that is supported by a broad, and bipartisan, range of figures, at least in part because current law discriminates so completely against people who can’t afford lawyers.  Emmer would have changed that).  The campaign helped convinced, I’m going to guess, just a shade over 8,000 of our stupidest, most incurious, lemming-like neighbors to vote for a superannuated playboy with drinking, drug and depression problems and a record as America’s worst senator instead.

In other words, slathering Minnesota’s dimmest, least-curious citizens with b*llsh*t worked.

And they’re going long on the tactic this year.

Under the dual rubrics of my “Minnesota’s Ministry of Truth” and “Chanting Points Memo” categories, I’m going to start cataloging the broad, rich, lavishly-funded vein of pure fiction (at best) that the DFL is banking on to try to stem GOP fortunes in Minnesota this fall.

“Most Minnesotans oppose Voter ID” - This one came from Greta Bergstrom, a spokes-bot for “Take Action Minnesota”, an activist non-profit that claims a Wellstone-ian pedigree, but whose inner workings (say an acquaintance with knowledge of their front office) would fit in better in Pyongyang; “Nobody wants photo ID”, she tweeted not too long ago.  That was about the time – go figure – that Survey USA was showing Voter ID with 3:1 support (71-29) among Minnesotans, even among self-identified liberals.  Which was, by the way, the poll with the best news for Voter ID opponents.   Ms. Bergstrom apparently believes that if she and her group repeat it often enough, just enough of the addled will buy in.  It’s worked before, after all; it’s why we have a Governor Dayton!

“The Stand Your Ground Bill” would allow citizens to shoot people because they felt like it” - It’s bad enough that pathetically addled leftybloggers grind their way through this bit of nonsense; they have no power even among lefty media types.  But when you have Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom - words fail me – misrepresenting the law in re Stand Your Ground, to try to draw out a wedge (to try to counter all the various wedges that the GOP have identified for this coming season), you know that the idiocy moves depressingly high on the food chain.  Backstrom may or may not be taking orders from Alliance For A Better Minnesota (and thence, likely as not, Media Matters) like the likes of Bergstrom, Carrie Lucking, Ken Martin and Denise Cardinal – but he’s basically playing from their one-note sheet music.

“Right To Work States Have Lower Per-Capita Incomes Than Union States!” – This, you hear from any number of different lefty-bots, is a great reason to oppose the “Right To Work” Amendment, which (says Survey USA) Minnesotans favor by a 55-24 margin.  Of course, they never mention that non-Right-to-Work states are, inevitably, coastal “Blue” states with – it’s true – higher standards of living, but much higher costs of living as well.  Of course wages are higher in New York City!  But do you think a carpenter in New York buys himself a better quality of life for his money in NYC than does one in, say, Dallas?   A carpenter in Texas will actually be working, as opposed to the New Yorker – but I’m on a tangent now.  The fact is, unions don’t make overall wages across an entire geographical region bigger or better than the same wages in the same jobs elsewhere (beyond the obvious job-by-job wage comparisons).  They do, however, contribute to the higher cost of living.

It’s a stupid argument – but since it’s aimed at stupid people, it works.  Depressingly enough.

“Republicans Are Waging A War Against Women!” - Notwithstanding the fact that no significant Republican has said word-boo about the subject on any sort of policy level.  Apparently it’s one of those things where Republicans want to ban contraception even if they don’t even know it.

Just as we do – we’re told this by our betters at Minnesota Public Radio – with race!  Because…

“Republicans speak in racist code words!” - And those words are so coded that we apparently haven’t the foggiest we’re saying about them.  This one got on Minnesota Public Radio on Thurday morning, on the Keri Miller show.  Miller – who is becoming the Lori Sturdevant of MPR – ran for an hour with the premise that the GOP’s racist message is so very tightly wound into the very language that Republicans (but not Democrats, natch) use that we don’t even realize we’re doing it!.  Because when Democrats talk about “urban” problems, they mean problems that occur to collections of buildings, apparently, but when Republicans talk about pizza, it’s because Italians in New York used to hate blacks, and white people use “pizza” as a code for that sort of hatred.  Or something.

“Voter ID would disenfranchise masses of voters” - I hate paperwork as much as much more than the next guy – government paperwork more than most.   And this really is a tangent, but isn’t it reasonable for society to expect someone to exercise the most absolutely de minimis requirement for personal administration – the precise paperwork one needs to have to cash a check, pick up a prescription, get a drivers license, hold a job legally, set up a bank account, buy Sudafed, get a cell phone, get into a bar before you “look over 21″ – to exercise a right for which over a million Americans have died?

But that is a tangent, because many states do require voter ID, and they vote just fine.

Anyway – it’s a lie.

“Voter ID is like Jim Crow” - That predictable little apertif is from my new “representative”, Rena Moran.  Moran may or may not be a perfectly fine person, but she’s oblivious (or has not be told to be blivious, or she just flat-out knows she benefits from ongoing fraud) to the Democrat party’s history of election rigging – but she is in fact exactly wrong. Voter ID – along with a vigilant electorate – helps prevent the sort of sham elections that characterized Jim Crow.

“Governor Dayton has a Jerbs Bill!  The Republicans don’t! They must not want to put people to work!” - Because as everyone knows, jobs come from government!  If Tim Pawlenty and George W. Bush had just pushed laws requiring companies to hire people, there’d have been no recession!

Of course, even many Democrats know better than that.  They believe that a bonding bill that’ll pay for a few billion in construction work – or Obama’s “Shovel Ready” jobs, as if even a sizeable minority of Americans still work with shovels, or even in construction – is the answer!

Of course, the GOP is pushing legislation to cut business taxes and regulations and make Minnesota’s business climate healthier for business, especially small business, which is battered and bleeding from Obama’s regulatory orgy

And Onward!  - What else have you heard?

 

The DFL’s Ministry Of Truth

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Check out Carrie Lucking of the Alliance For A Better Minnesota Ministry Of Truth, essentially admitting that Governor Dayton’s Jerbs Plan is exactly what I said it was – a sound bite that isn’t intended to pass the legislature, merely to give the DFL a chanting point designed to give the DFL something to wave in front of ill-informed voters this fall (“Look!  The GOP voted down a jerbs program! They’re taking yer jerbs!”)

Can I call ‘em or what?

The DFL has turned its entire messaging operation over to the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, which – as we showed in 2010 – is owned and operated by the unions and “The 1%”,  liberal plutocrats with very deep pockets.

In the 2010 campaign, they raised lying, disingenuity, intellectual dishonesty and cowardice to amazing new levels. They are testimony to the liberal ideal that the ends justify your means – and the only end that matters is gaining and retaining power.  Minnesota’s last gubernatorial election was swung entirely by the fact that ABM was able to find at least 8,000 Minnesotans who don’t read blogs and who took anything they heard from a mainstream media just would not, cou.

There is one rule to remember when reading or watching any ABM production; they are padding the facts, bludgeoning context.  If they say it, it’s a lie – or at the very least, it’s wrong, and anyone who bothers to check knows it.   If Denise Cardinal or Carrie Lucking (ABM’s current and former executive directors stenos for Alita Messinger and Elliot Seid) tell you their names are Denise Cardinal and Carrie Lucking, double-check them. There is an oops buried in there somewhere.  Not sure how, but bank on it.

Their ideal – and the mission for which they are so very well-paid – is to find the Big Lies that will spin the election, and tell them often enough so that just enough dim-witted and gullible Minnesotans buy it.

And this blog’s mission in this coming election is to make sure everyone with a brain to think knows exactly what ABM is; the Big Lie Factory.  The DFL’s “Ministry Of Truth”

It’s what passes for messaging in the DFL these days.  Bankrupt of any real ideas, it’s probably the best they can do.

Can Minnesota do better?

We’re 8,000 votes away.

One Day At The Ministry Of Truth

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SCENE:  At the executive offices of the Alliance For A Better Minnesota.  Executive Director Carrie LUCKING sits near the center of the head table, next to an absurdly-large fake throne.  Her research director , Stephanie FORSTER, sits on the other side.

LUCKNIG:  It’s a gorgeous day out there, isn’t it?

FORSTER:  Um…(steals a glance out the window)…it’s below zero, and the wind is howling…

LUCKING:  (Glares chillingly at FORSTER):  Why do you hate the children?   I SAID it’s a beautiful day.

FORSTER:  It’s a beautiful day. (She slumps silently into her seat, looking abashed).

(Deputy Director Joe DAVIS opens the door into the chamber)

DAVIS:  Our Board!   Announcing Mr. Grebner, Mizz Beadle, Mizz Bergstrom, Mr. Elliott, Mister Blodgett, Mzz Lewis and Mister Goldfarb.

(Jon Grebner (AFSCME),  Kelly Beadle (America Votes), Greta Bergstrom (TakeAction) MN), Brian Elliot (SEIU), Jeff Blodgett (Win Minnesota), Connie Lewis (Planned Parenthood) and Ben Goldfarb (Wellstone Action) file silently into the room.   They file into small seats at small tables arranged  diagonally on either side of a central aisle).

(DAVIS again announces)

DAVIS:  Our legislative guests, Senator Bakk and Representatives Thissen and Dinkler!

(BAKK, THISSEN and WINKLER file into the room.  WINKLER steps over to DAVIS)

WINKLER: Um, it’s “Winkler”, not “Dinkler”.

LUCKING (leaping to her feet) SILENCE!

(DAVIS backhands WINKLER, who sits silently, rubbing a sore jaw)

DAVIS:  Womyn and Gentlemyn, Alita Messinger.  All rise!

(The doors swing open, and Alita Messinger enters the room, borne on a sedan chair carried by eight purple-shirted SEIU employees.  They maneuver careful up the aisle and set the sedan chair on the ground.  LUCKING motions to BAKK, THISSEN and WINKLER, who leap to their feet and lay on the ground between the sedan chair and the makeshift throne at the head table.  MESSINGER steps across them and takes her seat).

DAVIS:  You may be seated!

(All sit).

(Purple-jacketed Latino waiters maneuver through the room, filling glasses in front of each seat with a clear liquid).

(LUCKING rises)

LUCKING:  A toast!  To rigorous grassroots independence.

ALL (in unison): “To rigorous grassroots independence!”

DAVIS:  Miss Messinger, I present to you our new executive director, Carrie Lucking.

LUCKING: My name’s not Carrie Lucking.

FORSTER: Actually it is.

LUCKING:  Yes, it is.  Yes, Ma’am?

MESSINGER:  Very well, Mizz Lucking.  Proceed to the…

(MESSINGER glares at DAVIS).  Ahem.

(DAVIS grabs palm front, begins fanning MESSINGER)

MESSINGER:  Very well.  It reports on the progress!

LUCKING:  We are telling the people that a $3,000 one-time tax credit will create 25,000 jobs.

MESSINGER:  That’s absurd.  Only an idiot would believe that.

CARDINAL: Precisely!  It is useless and has no chance of passing – but if it gets voted down, we accuse the Republicans of killing jobs.

MESSINGER:  Only a moron would believe that.

LUCKING:  We know.  I even admitted as much on Almanac last week!

MESSINGER:  This is a campaign that could appeal only to morons.

(ALL are silent).

MESSINGER: And as your 2010 campaign showed, there are 8,000 more gullible morons than smart people in this state.  Well done!  You may kiss my ring.

(CARDINAL and LUCKING kneel at MESSINGER’S feet kissing her pinky ring as SCENE fades to black).

———-

It’s almost time for another campaign season – which means it’s time for another wave of misleading, usually lying, always context-mangled propoaganda from “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” (ABM) – the people who brought you the false claims that “Target Hates Gays” and “Tom Emmer campaigned to reduce penalties for drunk drivers”.

The thesis is this: you can tell ABM is lying when their lips are moving or their fingers are touching keyboards.

And we will be dedicating a good chunk of this next nine months to making sure that none of ABM’s lies goes undebunked.

It’s gonna keep all of us conservative bloggers busy.

Stephanie Fenner

 

Founding Director

 

Denise Cardinal