In every engineering company in America, stuck on a bulletin board or taped to someone’s cube, is this cartoon:

Everyone who’s worked in engineering or any kind of analysis has seen this sort of reasoning on projects; you start with parameters, end with a conclusion – and the details will get filled in later, once the stakeholders conquer than whole “Miraculous” thing.

It totally applies today.

——–

The Governor announced his new stadium plan today.

And if you, like me, have been adamant about not spending any public money on enriching Zygi Wilf – well, it’s mostly bad:

The officials were quick to announce the plan does not include any new taxes and includes a hefty contribution from the team.

Dayton said Rosen described the package as “the best deal available that’s possible.”

Dayton said the Legislature and the city must decide whether the state wants to be involved with professional football.

“I believe it does,” Dayton said.

Dayton said he will communicate with the Minneapolis City Council about the package shortly.

Under the “term sheet” announced today, the costs are divided 56 percent public, 44 percent private to put the facility up.

The problem?

For starters, as Gary Gross has been reporting for some weeks now, the public portion of the plan not only relies heavily on electronic gambling proceeds.  The plan presumes that revenue from these sources is going to boom – but it’s been drastically down in the past decade, over 20%.  The plan is to take all the new revenue and hand it over to the Vikes.

And that’s just on the state side.  The other public pillar of the plan involves the City of Minneapolis.

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak explained the sales tax structure and urged approval of the package.

But Doug Belden and Dennis Lien didn’t explain it.  It involves diverting the city’s convention center tax – and the City Council has already said no, no, a thousand times no, well, a thousand times.  Rybak is talking, as they say in Latin, de anus.

(Which may be one of very few cases where phrasing something in Latin is actually more gauche than the Englsh original, “out his butt”).

And like the cartoon above, this deal requires several miracles to occur.

The Minneapolis City Council needs a 180 degree change of heart on the “sales tax structure” that Mayor Rybak glossed over.

The charitable gambling market needs to counter its recent history, and not only expand, but hit a major boom.

And, by the bye, the Tribes need to not send squadrons of DFL assassin ninjas out to exact revenge for further eroding their monopoly on gaming in the state.  Which you know, if you follow the interactions between the tribes and the government at all, is about as likely as Ryan Winkler winning an arm-wrestling match with Jared Allen.

This “Deal” is no deal. It is vapor.  It counts on a miracle occurring.

And the City of Minneapolis, the Tribes, and the laws of economics have all outlawed miracles.

UPDATE:  A Capitol Hill wag wrote me: “it would be interesting to track the history of revenue projections from electronic pull tabs. seems rather variable, as in it seems to grow to fit whatever dayton wants to use it for. funny that estimates for gop initiatives never do that.”

I’m sure MPR’s “Poligraph” will get right on that.

The Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance sends us this reminder:
“You’ve sure been posting a lot of calls for people to call people, Mitch”.

Yep.  That’s grassroots politics.  You get your people to show up – on the phone lines and in the mail bags while the sausage is being made, and then again at the polls when it’s time to give your politicians their thumbs up or thumbs down.

So let’s do this.

Remind the Governor that he ran as a “pro-Second Amendment” guy two years ago.  And not just as some chucklehead hunter; no, he sold himself as a self-defense shooter.

And tactfully remind him that his ‘law enforcement” sources are uniformly filled to capacity with sh*t are in error about the whole “legalizing murder” bit, and that we all know it.

We’re here.  We’re shooters.  We’ve swung elections before; we’re why Rod Grams went to DC, and why the GOP took the House ten years ago.

And we’re not going away.

And we prove that by, well, not going away.  By being his worst f*****g nightmare, on the phones today, and at the polls this fall.

You just knew the DFL had this one planned either way.

If the budget forecast had come in in the red, there would have been caterwauling about how the state needed to raise taxes to make the state’s economy stronger.  The incongruity would have escaped the media.

Of course, it came in in the black; about a third of a billion.

And the regional DFL-prop media was quick to pee in the Legislature’s Wheaties; “It’s All Spoken For!”, they were quick to append to the news.

Dayton’s Management and Budget commissioner was quick with the Administraiton’s spin:

Management and Budget Commissioner Jim Schowalter said the $323 million surplus is already spent. By law, $5 million will go to refill the state’s budget reserve. The rest will start paying back the schools. At this rate, Schowalter said it could be quite some time before the state breaks even.

“It’s going to be a while before we have a positive forecast balance even if we have good news rolling forward for years to come,” he said.

That’s going to be the DFL’s line about the surplus: “it’s not really a surplus!  We owe!”

And when it comes up around he water cooler, every Republican, every conservative, every Real Minnesotan should have two responses:

• “Duh.  No kidding?  The DFL spent us into a deep, deep hole between 2006 and 2010, larding up the budget with entitlements that were bound to leave us with a deep hole once the economy went south – and it eventually always goes south, at least for a while.  And when it did, the DFL just asked for more – like, six billion over previous budgets!  Have you learned your lesson yet?”
• “Remember how all the DFL’s talking heads were saying “it’s going to take a lot of work to get out of this deficit?”  Well, welcome to “lot of work”.  Just like when your family falls behind on bills and spends some time playing catch-up; your tax refund and bonus from work go into paying old bills, rather than fun stuff.  Suck it up, little camper.  This is the “hard work”.  Put up or shut up”.

And one thing that is as predictable as the Alliance for a Better Minnesota lying about something; the Dems will call for whatever “surplus” there is to be added to permanent entitlement spending.  And “paid back” to the schools.

Because in the world of the Democrat, or “Republicans” like Arne Carlson, “surplus” is just another word for “money to spend spend spend!”

And if there’s one thing Minnesotans showed us in 2010, it’s that they’re tired of that piece of business as usual.

Was it the money the DFL spent over the past twenty-odd years pushing for the appointment of left-leaning judges?

Was it the money they spent pressuring largely DFL and moderate GOP-controlled legislatures to confirm DFL-friendly judges?

Or was in the money the national left poured into astroturf pressure groups like “Draw The Line” and “Common Cause“, which spent years and millions putting a non-partisan, politic face on the DFL’s naked push for power at any cost?

Or was it all the money that Darth Lillehaug billed?

Who cares?  The DFL got what they needed; another ten year reprieve from irrelevancy:

Most observers surprised that lege map didn’t yield bigger Republican advantageIn the first hours and days after the state’s new redistricting maps landed at the Capitol Tuesday, the collective sense of relief among Minnesota Democrats was unmistakable. Many DFLers admitted to being pleasantly surprised by the final rendering of the state’s new political boundaries, which will help determine the outcome of elections for the next decade. “What was it Churchill said?” smiled one suburban House Democrat. “There’s nothing as exhilarating as being shot at and missed?”Republicans were not so pleased.

The piece is by Briana Biersbach at PIM, and it’s very much worth a read.

Let’s be clear here; the biggest news in the redistricting was that it didn’t reflect what most credible observers on both sides saw  as the inevitable; that rapid growth in healthy, well-run GOP-represented areas wasn’t reflected in the new map, while the mismanaged, needy, sclerotic DFL parts of the state are now disproportionally represented.

The real losers? All of you people who moved to the exurbs and central MN to get away from the DFL.

Just before the 2010 elections, Monty Jensen of Brainerd saw what he believed to be extreme irregularities in voting in Crow Wing County; a busload of adults from a group home having their ballots filled out for them by group home workers, he alleged.

Since then, Jensen’s story has been taken up by Eric Shawn of Fox News; it’s shown that at least four adults who were not legally entitled to vote, and in one case had no awareness of political whatsoever, voted at exactly the time Monty Jensen said they did, and has been the subject of a grand jury “probe” that was too fraught with irregularities to be called a “farce” with a straight face.  It’s also brought Jensen and some of his supporters in for some fairly ugly and irresponsible criticism from DFL activists in the Brainerd area as well as some elements of the Minnesota lefty alt-media.

And today, the case – or rather, the “investigation” of the case – is going to be the subject of a complaint by the Minnesota Voters Alliance.

Here’s an outline of the complaint:

Plaintiffs

Plaintiffs are the Minnesota Voters Alliance, the Minnesota Freedom Council, State Representative Sondra Erickson, Montgomery Jenson, Ron Kaus, Jodi Lyn Nelson, and Sharon Stene

Defendants
Mark Ritchie, Minnesota Secretary of State

Lori Swanson, Minnesota Attorney General

Joe Mansky, Ramsey County Elections Manager

John Choi, Ramsey County Attorney

Laureen E. Borden, Crow Wing Auditor-Treasurer

Donald F. Ryan, Crow Wing County Attorney

Minnesota Constitution

One basis for our claims is that Article VII, Section 1 of the Minnesota Constitution requires the state to confirm the eligibility-to-vote of every person it permits to vote, in every election:

Section 1. ELIGIBILITY; PLACE OF VOTING; INELIGIBLE PERSONS. Every person 18 years of age or more who has been a citizen of the United States for three months and who has resided in the precinct for 30 days next preceding an election shall be entitled to vote in that precinct. The place of voting by one otherwise qualified who has changed his residence within 30 days preceding the election shall be prescribed by law. The following persons shall not be entitled or permitted to vote at any election in this state: A person not meeting the above requirements; a person who has been convicted of treason or felony, unless restored to civil rights; a person under guardianship, or a person who is insane or not mentally competent.

The State fails to meet its Constitutional duty to confirm the eligibility of election-day registrants.

In 2008, for example, the state “waived” the eligibility requirements for more than 500,000 election-day registrants by not confirming their eligibility to vote.

The State fails to confirm eligibility of voters even after the election.

As of today, there are still more than 48,000 persons listed in the State’s voter registration database who registered on election-day 2008 and whose eligibility to vote have not been confirmed.

In fact, persons who are known to be positively ineligible to vote had their ballots counted in 2008.

At least 1,500 ineligible felons voted in 2008.

Minnesota has a history of close elections.

The Complaint describes the 1916 presidential election in Minnesota won by 392 votes, the 1962 race for governor won by 91 votes, several state races won by less than 90 votes including a loss by Plaintiff Sondra Erickson by 89 votes in 2008, and the 2001 school board race in which Plaintiff Jody Lyn Nelson lost by one vote.

Both the U.S. and the Minnesota Constitution afford individuals the right to “associate” for political purposes.

When the state waives the eligibility requirements for election-day registrants, it allows unconfirmed, and potentially ineligible, voters to interfere with the constitutional right of the candidate and his or her supporters to come together for political purposes. In effect, the ineligible voter illegally associates himself with the candidate by affecting the candidate’s opportunity to be elected.

Both the U.S. and the Minnesota Constitution afford individuals the right to “due process” by which they can defend their other rights.

The State does not allow eligible voters a means to defend the interference with their right of association created when ineligible persons vote on election day.  Eligible voters have no way to know who is ineligible but the State does have the means and does not deploy it for the purpose of enabling eligible voters the opportunity to challenge those persons who are harming their right to vote.

Both the U.S. and the Minnesota Constitution afford individuals the right to “equal protection” under the law.

Minnesota’s statutes which require the confirmation of eligibility for some voters and which, at the same time, allow other voters to have their ballots counted without being confirmed, treat voters unequally.

The “guardianship” and “not mentally competent” parts of Article Vii, Section 1 are unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution.

These statements in the Minnesota Constitution that prohibit all persons under guardianship or declared to be mentally incompetent are too broad because they do not afford the person (the ward) the right to challenge having his voting rights stripped away.

The state statutes regarding procedures for guardianships are also constitutionally defective because they violate the ward’s right to due process.

Under current state law, the person under guardianship retains his right to vote unless the court takes it away.  The involvement of the court provides, in principle, the ward with a process (that satisfies his rights under the U.S. Constitution) for challenging any attempt to remove his right to vote.

Notwithstanding, current statutes do not provide for testing the capacity of the ward to understand the nature and effect of voting.  Further, the current statutes do not provide for informing the ward that his right to vote has been abrogated.

This effort, like most anything conservatives do on the subject, has been portrayed as “voter intimidation” by bloggers and others more concerned with upholding DFL dogma than the law.  It’s rubbish, of course; the proximate issue is the exploitation of vulnerable adults.  If a group home forces vulnerable adults to vote, what else will they do?

(Now, if the group home in question were owned by a GOP sympathizer, and the ballot was allegedly being stuffed for, I dunno, Tom Emmer, you just know the story would be different, don’t you?)

Not long before the 35W bridge collapsed, the bridge was inspected by an engineering company that gave the bridge – and its ailing gussets – a clean bill of heath.

And we know how that turned out.

Last week, a couple of cables on the Sabo pedestrian/bike bridge snapped, closing the bridge and, for several days, the Ventura Trolley.

The incidents have one thing in common; the inspectors on the old 35W bridge and the engineering consultants on the Sabo were URS Corporation of San Francisco.

What better way to hold an engineering company with this kind of track record accountable than award it a consulting contract for the state’s next big make-work money pit project?

That’s right – Mark Dayton’s Met Council is in negotiations with URS to consult on their Southwest Light Rail line   According to a source in the engineering industry with direct knowledge of the Southwest LRT bidding process, the Met has gone through a round of cuts in selecting engineers, andURS is one of the contenders, if not the finalist, to get the job; the source used the term “final negotiations”.

I sent a request for information to the Met Council over the weekend, specifically asking what stage the Council was at, what firms were in contention, and if URS was one of them.  I got the following response on Sunday afternoon:

The Metropolitan Council is in the midst of evaluating proposals for the preliminary engineering contract for Southwest LRT with a recommendation to the Met Council targeted for mid-March.

I’ll give ’em points for speed.  But it didn’t really answer the question.

Let’s leave aside for a moment whether the SWLRT is a good idea (although it’s not); With the collapse of so much civil and government infrastructure work, local civil engineering firms are hurting; those firms employ a lot of good people.  At least one local firm was counted out of the race to work on the new LRT project, while San Francisco’s URS, with its record of failure on local projects, is apparently still in the running.

Why is the Dayton Administration denying work to local firms in favor of a San Francisco firm with two strikes against it in local civil engineering circles?

I’ll try the Met Council again later today, to see if they want the public to know what firms are in, what firms are out, and where they’re from.

To: Rachel Stassen-Berger, Tom Scheck, Pat Kessler, Bill Salisbury, Tim Pugmire, John Cronan, Tom Leyden, David Brauer, Erik Black, and all of the various other Deans Of The Capitol Press Corps their respective news directors and editors:

From: Mitch Berg, noisome peasant

Re: Huh?

All,

When covering the “Stand Your Ground” bill at the legislature, you all continue to quote the likes of Heather Martens, David Kolb and Jim Backstrom.

And yet everything any of them has ever said on the subject of gun control, the Second Amendment, and above all the consequences of “liberalizing” gun laws for the law abiding has been, always and with no exceptions, not only wrong, but completely the opposite of the truth.  As in, devoid of not just fact, but truth.  Nothing.  Zip.  Bupkes.  Never one iota of fact.

They are “sources” that have burned you, as reporters, every single time you’ve cited them on Second Amendment issues.  No exceptions.

Now, I was a reporter.  Not a great one – serviceable is the word – but even I knew that if you had a source that  never, ever, not once, did anything but discredit your reporting on an issue, you stopped using the source, or at least corroborated everything they said with a reliable one.   Even if I didn’t know better, my editors would usually insist on it.   I mean, if there were three sources that consistently either botched the story or just plain lied to you about, say, the budget or a Senator’s affair, you’d drop ’em off your Rolodex – right?

So is there some exception to this for Second Amendment issues, or are you all that genuinely incurious about the facts on this issue?

I’m genuinely curious.  Have your people call my people.

That is all.

Thank you, anonymous preliterate wannabe-class-warrior union droog, whoever you were…

In fact, the most confrontational moment came when Rep. Banaian was answering another right-to-work question. Jerry Albertine interrupted, saying “Don’t sit there with your hairspray and your tie, you’ve never worked labor, and say you know what the unions are about.”

…for giving Learned Foot the best straight line he’s had all year:

Heh.

Did you know Minnesota had a Lieutenant Governor?

Gotta confess, I’d pretty much forgotten about Yvette Prosser Sorum.  A long-time legislator from Duluth, she served Governor Dayton’s need for a politician with ovaries and a relentlessly party-line record, to try to shore up DFL support after defying the DFL endorsement process and beating Margaret Anderson-Kelliher.

Wait – it’s Yvonne Prettner Solon?  Whew.  That coulda been embarrassing.

But not as embarrassing as this bit here, where our “Lieutenant Govenror” tries to talk economics:

Lt. Gov. Yvonne Prettner Solon said the governor’s office wants all who are eligible to enroll in the program, which not only ensures Minnesotans have enough to eat and be healthy, but also helps the state’s economy.

“Every dollar of use of the SNAP program, there’s $1.73 that’s generated for our economy, which helps our grocery stores,” Prettner Solon said. “It helps our farmers. It helps everybody along the food supply chain.”

That’s right – food stamps help the economy!

Because the money that goes into food stamps comes from unicorns, brought to us in golden boxes.

It’s not like anyone had to pay for those food stamps (and the administrators who , well, administrate them) out of money taken from what they or their business had earned, right?

Well, not in DFL world, anyway.

This is a DFLer’s education at work.

There are a lot of stupid reasons to oppose Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill; most of them are outright lies, as with pretty much anything Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom has written on the subject.

You rarely get the one slightly less-dumb question: “is there any real need for this bill?”  I’ve had a few earnest and not-unintelligent lefties ask over the years.  “Can you name a single case of an otherwise law-abiding shooter that’s in jail strictly because they didn’t retreat enough to satisfy a county attorney?”

There’ve been a few examples in Minnesota over the years – but none quite as dramatic as  this perversion of “justice” in Iowa that’s just gotten “resolved”< after a fashion.  Jay Lewis – an Afro-American man from West Des Moines – shot a man who attacked him

A former security guard and law enforcement officer, Lewis also is a hunter and gun collector and came to Iowa with a permit to carry a concealed weapon…Ludwick, a former soldier and convicted felon, was driving four people home from a Halloween party. Documents say Ludwick slowed; Lewis passed him. Ludwick sped up, and the cars raced down 11th Street until they came to Regency Woods. They collided when Lewis, in front and on the right, started to turn left.

Lewis said Ludwick and a passenger, Justin Lossner, got out of the Taurus and began punching the Mustang’s windows.

They backed off when Lewis pulled out his .380-caliber pistol. But they came back.

Lewis said he was outside his car, evaluating its damage, when he caught Ludwick and Lossner trying to sneak up on him from two different directions.

There’s one mistake, of course; it behooves one to maintain a zen-like calm when you’re carrying. If the story went as the article says it did, and had it occurred in Minnesota, Lewis might be lucky he didn’t get dinged for being a willing participant.

But that’s irrelevant – as we’ll see in a bit:

The recording of a 911 call made by Lewis begins with Lewis yelling at the two to “just stay where you are. Get back! Get back! I’m going to start shooting!”

There are exchanges of profanities while Lewis explains the situation to a police dispatcher. Then, “Get away from me. Get away from me!” And a bang.

Ludwick was shot, Lewis said, when Ludwick turned away as if to retreat, then spun back and charged. Records say the bullet hit Ludwick in his chest above the right pectoral muscle, then tore through his right bicep.

Now, here’s the important part; a jury backed him up:

Jurors found Lewis’ actions entirely appropriate.

“He gave them fair warning,” jury forewoman Nancy Alberts said. “Normally, anybody that would pull a gun on someone, you would think that they would stop. … That wasn’t the case here. You could clearly hear on the 911 call where he warned Mr. Ludwick.”

Ludwick, who had a blood-alcohol level of 0.189 when tested at the hospital that night, did not return phone calls requesting comment. Court records show his history includes multiple convictions for felony theft.

So here’s the situation so far:  after an altercation on the road, two drunk men attacked Lewis. damaging his car (the article didn’t note if the car was driveable).  Lewis drew, and when the two perps kept attacking him, fired, wounding the guy.

No, it’s even more ludicrous than that (emphasis added):

West Des Moines police arrested Lewis for failing to back off and avoid the gunplay. He was charged with two counts of intimidation with a dangerous weapon and one of going armed with intent.

And if he’d left, would they have booked him for “leaving the scene?”  And how on earth did they show “intent?”

The initial bail asked Lewis to post $225,000 cash.

Lewis, who made $32,359 a year at the IRS, didn’t have the money. So he sat in jail.

In other words, for a shooting that was in every way completely justified except for failing to run away (the article doesn’t tell us if he could have driven – away from the scene of an accident with significant damage, mind you), but in which a pencil-necked county attorney, working in a warm, well-lit office surrounded by deputies and metal detectors, decided that he should have found some way to run away from two attackers.

He lost his apartment (not for failure to pay, but because the case, and the attendant publicity, defamed him with his landlord to the point where he got evicted essentially on a morals clause) and his job.  His landlord filed for eviction while he was in jail; the court system, in all its passive-aggressive glory, didn’t notify him of the action until all of his property was sitting out on his curb, where the deputies confiscated his small weapons collection, and his neighbors confiscated the rest of his property.

Which disqualified him from being released early, as a first-time offender with a job and therefore a low flight risk, because – wait for it – he had no place to go!

So for 112 days, he languished in jail – due to a bitchy decision by a bitchy county attorney, the passive-aggression of the county court system and his landlord, and being too poor to post $20,000+ in bail.  His life was ruined.

And what happened?

Prosecutors eventually dropped most of the charges. Trial on the sole remaining count, reckless use of a firearm causing injury, began on Feb. 6. and ended late on Feb. 8.

It was over early the following morning.

Let’s reiterate that; prosecutors – working in safe, warm, comfy environments with nobody attacking them – took their sweet time to decide maaaaayabe they didn’t have a case; they lost the one charge they ended up bringing to trial.

Not for shooting, or even injuring, the attacker; that was never in legal question.  Merely for failing to run away from the accident scene and his car, being chased by 2-4 angry men.

A man’s freedom, and entire life, have been destroyed over a couple of lawyers’ bobbleheaded passive-aggressive canoodling over an abstruse legalistic quibble over whether he ran away fast enough.

Polk County Attorney John Sarcone said that he accepted the jury’s verdict but that the case deserved to go to trial because Lewis’ actions raised a sufficient number of questions.

“We just don’t allow people to go shoot people,” he said. “Using deadly force is a last resort. It shouldn’t be the first resort.”

Which is not just a strawman, but a stupid one; at no point did anyone suggest it was Lewis’ first action.

What Lewis’ case shows is that current law works, [Polk County Attorney] Sarcone said: “I don’t know why people are afraid of jury trials. I’m not.”

I had to sit back and let my brain try to wrap itself around the arrogance, presumption and stupidity of that question.

Not just in the “of course you’re not afraid, it’s your job” sense of the term.  More like “I’ll just bet you’re not, asshole!  You have all the taxpayer money in the world to fight your cases; I, citizen, might be lucky to make bail, much less fight against your entire department and all its resources…

…over a case that wasn’t about the rightfulness of the shooting at all – merely about whether I should have run away, and run away fast enough to satisfy you”.

I’m less worried about Mr. Lewis’ gun than I am about prosecutors like Jim Backstrom’s lying demigoguery or Sarcone’s legal onanism.

That’s why we need Rep. Cornish’s bill.

Have you called your Senator yet?  Maybe a few of ’em?  If not, why not?

(And I know it makes me a bad person, but whenever I hear prosecutors look at cases like this and say “the system worked”, I really really do want to see them go through a perverse miscarriage of justice themselves, just to see how the rest of us live).

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.

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.

I got this from the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance this morning; Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill comes up for debate in the Senate tomorrow.

I’m going to start with the call to action, and let you read the rest of it later.

Here’s What We Need To Do:  If you are a Minnesotan who supports the human right of self-defense, here’s where it starts:

• Call Your Senator – Or send them a snail mail.  Or at the very least, an email. Here’s a full list.  Tell them, politely and concisely, that you support the human right of self-defense, and that you want them to support SF1357.  For the Republicans, remember – we shooters supported the GOP in 2010; they need to earn that support.  For Democrats outside the Metro, remind them how many shooters are in their district (lots!).   For Metrocrats?  Call anyway.  And then call a real Senator.
• Join the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance – GOCRA is the single best source of information on Minnesota gun issues there is.  They were fighting for Minnesotans’ gun rights long before most Minnesotans knew it was cool.  And they have been among the most effective grass-roots (as in real grass-roots) political groups anywhere.  And it’s because of people like us.  So join the group.

What’s So Important About The Bill? – This is from Andrew Rothman at GOCRA:

HF1467/SF1357 Summary

HF1467/SF1357, the Defense of Dwelling and Person Act of 2011, brings “Stand Your Ground” protections to Minnesota, restores the presumption that a person using self defense is innocent until proven guilty, enhances Castle Doctrine, prevents the state from seizing guns during an emergency (remember Hurricane Katrina?), improves carry reciprocity with other states and requires the government to do its job to serve law-abiding citizens.

The full text of the bill can be found here: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bin/bldbill.php?bill=H1467.2.html&session=ls87

Here’s some more detail about the bill:

Adds Stand Your Ground

HF1467 brings “Stand Your Ground” protections to Minnesota, removing the requirement that an intended victim of violent crime must retreat from a place where he has a right to be before using deadly force in self defense.

Enhances Castle Doctrine

The bill also strengthens Minnesota’s “Castle Doctrine,” clarifying when and under what circumstances individuals can legally use deadly force to protect themselves in their homes and vehicles. In addition, it creates a presumption that, when faced with an apparent home invasion, carjacking or kidnapping attempt, a person may use deadly force in self defense.

Adds Universal Carry Permit Acceptance

Of particular interest to carry permit holders, the final article of the bill updates our carry permit reciprocity standards, allowing people holding carry permits from any other state to carry in Minnesota (under Minnesota law, of course). This should result in a large increase in the number of states where Minnesota permit holders can carry, since many states allow other states’ permit holders to carry on a reciprocal basis.

Prevents Gun Seizures During a State of Emergency

Taking a lesson from the problems in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the bill also bans government agencies from seizing guns or ammo, revoking permits to purchase or carry, closing gun shops, or otherwise suspending our constitutional rights during a civil emergency — or at any other time. It also prohibits law enforcement officers from seizing a person’s gun, unless the person is arrested, or the gun is evidence of a crime.

Enhances Purchase Permit Rights

The bill also borrows a page from the Permit to Carry law, providing a more robust appeal process for denied purchase permits, and requiring that police chiefs and sheriffs whose purchase permit denials are overturned must pay the applicants’ legal costs.

This important stuff.

Oh, yeah – one more thing:  We shooters used to be really, really good at focusing our votes.  When Concealed Carry Reform was wending its way through the legislature for those nine long sessions (1995 through 2003), we voted a lot of soft-on-guns outstate legislators out of office; literally, we shooters (organized by GOCRA), swung Minnesota politics.

We need to do it again.  Minnesota’s anti-gun crowd is getting restless. We need to slap them down at the ballot box.  Anti-gun legislators – and other elected officials – need to find out how serious we are by being sent into political retirement.  Which is another reason to please, please join GOCRA.

I went through redistricting, and all I got was this lousy “Foul-Mouthed” Sandy Pappas and  Rena “Voter ID is a Jim Crow Law” Moran.  If you’re a Republican in Saint Paul, “redistricting” is like, well, moving from Pyongyang to Pyongyin.

It could have been worse; I’m across the street from my old 66B, which is now the turf of John Lesch.

Overall?  It wasn’t a horrible map for the GOP – there are a slew of outstate open seats that broadly seem to favor the GOP (I’ll do some analysis over the weekend when I have some time, here).

But the more I talk with activists around the state, the more I realize that the DFL got its money’s worth for everything they’ve spent on judges over the decades.  Gary Gross at the Examiner writes:

Representative Sarah Anderson [who led the Legislative redistricting effort] said that the court-drawn is troubling in that the courts didn’t appear to follow the rulings they handed down prior to their final maps.

Rep. Anderson said that the court-drawn maps split up more cities and counties than did the legislative maps.

Rep. Anderson that the court-drawn map drives up the costs cities will incur in administering elections. They’ll have to order multiple versions of ballots. They’ll have to put more polling places together to guarantee that the ballots don’t get mixed together, thus creating an election night nightmare.

The legislative maps stuck to the rules handed down by the Minnesota Supreme Court in 2002. This court didn’t adhere to those rules, thereby destabilizing the redistricting process. That essentially means that this court has put itself above the political branches. Their final maps puts them essentially in charge.

This was a redistricting cycle that should have gone a lot worse for the DFL.  Their turf shrank catastrophically, and the GOP’s territory boomed.  The judges seemed to have bent over backwards to keep the DFL from losing any unnecessary influence.

The Judicial Redistricting Panel has released the Minnesota maps.

Here they are.

More analysis when I have time, probably this evening.

…but we hope you’ll find it.

It’s the “Map Party”, and it’s tonight at Poor Richards in Bloomington, starting at 7PM tonight:

View Larger Map

And the subject?  What else – today’s release of the redistricting maps, and what they mean to you, the parties, Minnesota’s political “balance” and the state at large.

The party is sponsored by a grab bag of conservative organizations, including the Northern Alliance Radio Network.

And it features an all-star panel:

• Ken Kaiser, of the “Citizens Commission” on redistricting, who favored us with a lot of very important insights on how “Draw The Line Minnesota’s” process worked and, ultimately, didn’t work.
• Dave Fitzsimmons, one of the GOP’s prime numbers guys
• Rep. Sara Anderson, who led the GOP’s redistricting effort and, basically, drew the GOP’s map.

You can go to Minnesota Public Radio for  h news today…

…that was on Shot In The Dark two years ago.

I fully expect to see Tom Scheck and Rachel Stassen-Berger write a piece raising questions about the accuracy, methodogy and timing of the Star/Tribune “Minnesota” Poll and the Humprhey Institute poll, and how curious it is that they all have the same statistical error at exactly the same time favoring exactly the same party, in such a way as would just happen to promote a “Bandwagon” effect.

And I expect to see it next January or February.  After the election.

Unlike most Democrats, I’ve been a union member.  I grew up in a union household.  I’ve got less against unions that most people.

Of course, in the private sector unions are largely irrelevant, especially outside of manufacturing and the large-scale trades.  I’ve been in the private sector my whole career, and I’ve only encountered a few union shops, much less members.  I was in a union for the duration of my only government job (a semester as a community college adjunct instructor), which is in keeping with most Americans’ experience; while unions are under 8% of the private sector workforce, they’re around 40% in government, mostly AFSCME, SEIU and the various teachers and academic unions.  About one in nine Americans overall are involved in unions.

And a large part of even that is because of the “closed shop”; in about half of American states, unions are allowed to require that industries only hire union workers.

And that’s what “Right to Work” is all about.  Under the closed-shop system, the unions never have to make a case to the workers for why they should join the union; it’s like it or lump it.  In Right to Work states, they have to prove their value to the workers.

The closed shop is all about the money, of course;  your dues money goes where the union wants it to go; while a little under half of union members identify as Republicans, 92% of their political donations go to Democrats, who in turn keep passing laws (when they’re in power) to make unions more powerful.  It’s a mutual back-scratching arrangement between the Democrat party and its biggest institutional supporters.

Minnesota is a “closed shop” state, meaning that legislators who owed their election to union money passed laws allowing industries, and government, to establish closed shops – legal monopolies, if you will, in the labor market.  In exchange, naturally, for keeping the money coming.

Republicans in the Minnesota Legislature are working to abolish the “closed shop” laws, which do very little to represent workers, and even less to create jobs (as a rule they cost jobs), but plenty to keep one political party awash in involuntary contributions.

The bill is currently in play:

St. Paul- Senator Dave Thompson (R-Lakeville) and Representative Steve Drazkowski (R-Mazeppa) announced the introduction of a constitutional amendment that would give Minnesotans the opportunity to vote on whether or not Minnesota workers should have the freedom to join a union or not. Currently, if someone is hired by a company with a collective bargaining agreement in place, that person is required to join the union or pay fair share dues.

“In Minnesota law, if a worker refuses to pay union dues, they are fired. This isn’t fair and it’s definitely not free,” Representative Drazkowski said. “To me, this is the most important pro-jobs bill we can pass this session. It’s estimated that had Minnesota passed this amendment 30 years ago, the average Minnesota working family would be earning an additional $7,000 or more every year. Nearly 70% of Minnesotans support employee freedom – let’s allow the people to decide whether they want to guarantee this fundamental right in our constitution.”

Minnesota’s left – the unions, and the DFL and “non-profits” they own, like “Take Action Minnesota” – are telling you that most Minnesotans oppose the amendment.  It’s a bald-faced lie, of course; Minnesotans support “right to work” legislation by a 2:1 margin according to Survey USA, and closer to 3:1 according to Rasmussen.

Unions make sense – but only as an element of a free market, a means of helping labor market and price its services.  But there is no reason that unions should be a de-facto arm of government (or, as they are in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, vice versa).

So it makes sense, right?

Here’s the problem.  Some Republicans in the Minnesota Senate are going squishy.  It’s understandable, to an extent; going after the closed shop is going to stir up a hornets nest of union activism and money.  No legislator, least of all one in a “Moderate” district, wants to face that.  But with right-to-work legislation popping up all over the Midwest, even the unions, rich as they are, have their limits. The time to go after the Closed Shop and push for Right to Work is now, because for the first time, we won’t be alone.  

If not now. when?

So if you support Right to Work, you need to do two things:

Contact your State Senator and encourage them to support Right to Work.  You can bet they’re getting an earful from people in purple T-shirts; if the unions do one thing well, it’s make their people put on t-shirts and go out and wave signs and chant and stomp their feet and act like they care about politics.  They need to hear from the vast majority of Minnesotans who speak for the rest of us.  Find your Senator; drop them an email, or (much) better yet, call or write a paper letter.  Encourage them to support the Right to Work amendment.

Contact the Senators on the Jobs And Economic Growth Committee.  They’ll be holding hearings on the bill, mostly likely this week.  They break out into three groups:

• Conservative Republicans who need to be encouraged to remember that there’s a lot of support for Right to Work out there: Senators   Lillie,   Daley,  DeKruif,   Howe,  Miller, and  Nelson are all first-term freshmen; they could use calls to make they know where voters stand.  Senator John C. Pederson is a freshman, but under intense union pressure in a GOP district with a big knot of DFL/union support in the middle; he could use a lot of moral support.
• Upperclass and “Moderate” Republicans who need to know that there’s a tailwind behind this amendment: We’re talking about committee chair Geoff Michel; a moderate from a “purple” district who is always targeted not only from the DFL but from conservatives in the GOP, he also has extra clout as the chair; he needs to know that Minnesotans will support him in supporting the amendment.
• Metrocrats: Don’t bother.  None of them are doing anything this session but riding out time to try and earn that pension.  Senators Metzen, Dziedzic, Kelash, Tomassoni and Torres-Ray are fully owned by the unions; trying to change their vote might actually be chargeable as a property crime in Ramsey County.

And so if you’re a Minnesotan who supports the Right to Work, there’s your mission for this week.

Be polite.  Whether by email or (much better) by phone or snail mail, be concise and to the point; the staffer that takes the call is very busy, and we’re going to make them busier.  Make your point, wish ’em a nice day, and move along to the next Senator.

There’ll be more – Voter ID, Stand Your Ground – in coming days and weeks. But for this week, if you want to actually do something useful for a better, less-expensive Minnesota, that’s a big chunk of the job, right there.

So let’s get on it!

Minnesota government employee unions are running very, very scared of the proposed “Right to Work” constitutional amendment, which voters favor by a 55-24 margin.  And in those rare union strongholds represented by Republicans in the Legislature, they are coming out in force

Gary Gross was at a town hall in Saint Cloud, whose two House and one Senate seat have all gone GOP (including the 15B seat held by my friend and radio colleague King Banaian).

There were approximately 100 people in the room, with approximately 60-70 of those people union members. AFSCME had a strong presence at the meeting. AFSCME was clearly visible in their bright colored logo on the back of their windbreakers.

Several times, Rep. Gottwalt mentioned how union members, many of whom are nurses, have told him that they want the choice of whether to be in a union or not. At one point, a person in the audience suggested that Rep. Gottwalt was lying, saying that it was convenient that these union members didn’t have names and that they wouldn’t come forward.

Some of the discussion apparently got pretty ugly:

After that, the meeting went downhill fast. When Rep. Gottwalt attempted to respond to a different question posed by a union member, a different union member interrupted, asking “Are you wearing your legislator’s hat or your Coborn’s hat”? When Rep. Gottwalt replied that he’s no longer employed by Coborn’s, the man who interrupted quickly apologized.

That was the first time union members in the audience interrupted. It certainly wasn’t the last time. In fact, union members in the audience made interrupting the rule, not the exception.

In fact, the most confrontational moment came when Rep. Banaian was answering another right-to-work question. Jerry Albertine interrupted, saying “Don’t sit there with your hairspray and your tie, you’ve never worked labor, and say you know what the unions are about.”

That was a statement Rep. Banaian forcefully responded to, saying that he’s a college professor who’s paid union dues to the IFO [Inter-Faculty Organization, the faculty union for MNSCU faculty] for over a quarter century.

This sort of thing is of a piece with the DFL’s only apparent strategy this cycle; find some inchoate chanting points to repeat endlessly, regardless of truth, and repeat them until you get enough dumb people to take the ideas to the polls.

More on that last tomorrow.  Probably. .

Over at Kool Aid Report, Learned Foot not only agrees with Keith Ellison, but goes him one better.

The MinnPost has a new design.  It’s a lot more readable, so kudos to them (or to whoever did the redesign).

Of course, with the new design comes what seems to this long-time reader a renewed commitment to passive-aggressively support the DFL even more.

Jay Nord asks if W voters will mind that Voter ID will delay election results:

Are Minnesotans willing to wait up to 10 days after the election to find out who won in races ranging from governor to local officials?

That prospect was raised at Wednesday’s Senate Local Government and Elections Committee meeting during discussion of the proposed Voter ID constitutional amendment.

The measure passed 8 to 6 on a party-line vote after an hour and a half of discussion. That action drew a round of boos from the hearing room filled with protesters.

At the session, the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office expressed concern that implementing provisional balloting could stretch the amount of time needed to count election results and that it could force earlier primary dates.

“Nobody’s going to know who won any of the elections until at least 10 days or more afterwards,” Secretary of State staff member Beth Fraser told the committee. “I know that people are on pins and needles on election night. That feeling is going to last for quite a while if we don’t know for more than 10 days who won anything in Minnesota from governor down to school board.”

Speaking just for myself here?  Who cares.  Oh, I think the “ten days” figure is a sign of the Secretary of State is sandbagging to try to gin up yet another public meme to give the pro-corruption forces something to chant about.

Outside the media – including the MinnPost  – who want to sell lots of papers and have lots of eyeballs tuned in to their election-night coverage or websites?  I’d be amazed if you found anyone that cared about a wait (and if Mark Ritchie’s office says “Ten days”, assume it means “two days”).   Outside the media?  Most of our lives don’t hinge, day by day, on any of these races – even those of us who follow this stuff closely.

But let’s take Ritchie at his word (always dangerous) and answer the question.

Yes.  I’ll trade a “ten day” wait for actual election integrity (which’ll involve a lot more than just voter ID, but it’s a start).  Every time.

But let’s stop for a moment here.  Apparently in the world of the liberal “alternative” media, some delays are better than others.

I don’t recall the MinnPost caterwauling over the delays forced on election results by “Instant Runoff Voting”, which has led to long, pointless delays to getting election results, and to a system with a byzantine, convoluted vote-counting formula that is both opaque to most voters and which admits up front that it disenfranchises voters.

So let’s summarize:  results delayed due to a system blessed by one-party DFL governments that obfuscates the election process and guarantees a certain percentage of votes will end up not being counted?  Just hunky-dory to the MinnPost.

Results delayed (maybe, according to a Secretary of State who reports to George Soros) due to a “GOP plan” that will be a solid first step to ensure our elections have integrity and don’t disenfranchise legitimate voters with a wave of illegitimate ones?

Oh, what do you think?

I’m not much of a gambler, personally – but I support legalizing it more broadly at a state level.  I support it because it’s a tax on people other than me.

Cynical?  Sure.  Pass the ketchup.

Seriously?  For better or worse, gambling has its place in Minnesota.  For over two decades, proceeds from pull tabs – the most pointless form of gambling in history, but I digress – have gone to supporting Minnesota non-profits and charities.  Everything from youth hockey to local job training programs benefit from pull tabs.

And now, Tom Bakk and Mark Dayton want to raid that pile of money to give it to Zygi Wilf, according to Gary Gross at LFR.

The clinker?  Bakk’s proposal – “E-tabs”, a zippier, more IPod-enabled version of pulltabs to attract the kids – will take money from a pot that’s already dwindling; charitable gambling is already off by a huge margin in Minnesota:

There’s more reason for concern than those mentioned by Wilson. This House Research report offers a stunning opinion. The title speaks for itself:

2006-2010: Industry under Stress

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. This information is troubling:

• Since fiscal year 2004, gross receipts from lawful gambling have declined by over 20 percent
• For fiscal year 2008, the industry reported its biggest drop in state gambling taxes paid—a 12.8 percent decrease from the previous year due to the drop in gross receipts
• Total receipts have gone from $1.500 billion in 2000 to $1.032 billion in 2009, a decrease of about 31 percent

Let’s remember that Sen. Bakk, then the chairman of the Senate Tax Committee, knew this information when he proposed this ‘solution’ to the Vikings stadium situation. This information raises important questions, more than I can address in a single post. The biggest questions go to politicians like Gov. Dayton and Sen. Bakk.

The first question I’d want answered is this: why would Gov. Dayton and Sen. Bakk propose using revenues from an “industry under stress” the last 5 years?

Because gambling is a unicorn.

Not literally, like a flying horse with a horn.  But DFL financing is always built on the idea that some sort of magical unicorn – “gamblers”, or “the rich” – will bring money to them for their grandest plans, and all they have to do is say “heeeeeer, unicorn!”

So Tom Bakk hears “gambling”, and thinks “money for nothing”!

Conservatives know that there is no such thing as money for nothing.

And Gary would like to point that out:

The next question I’d have for Gov. Dayton and Sen. Bakk is equally simple: Why would they put funding for charities and school sports programs at risk?

Good question.

Well, Senator Bakk?  Governor åDayton?  What’s the answer?  And there really are only two choices.  And one of them is “screw the kids, if I don’t keep the Vikes here, my voters will have a cow”‘.

Governor Dayton will give the official State of the State address tomorrrow.

I figured I’d grab a jump on him, and – in my constitutional position as a freaking taxpayer – give the real state of this state.

You’re welcome.

Now – all rise.

———-

My fellow Minnesotans,

Thanks to eight years of responsible Republican – and conservative-enough – governorship, the state of Minnesota is doing…OK.   Unemployment is well below the national average.  Our schools, on a state-wide basis, don’t suck as bad as those in some other states.  As any good Scandinavian would put it, “we could be doing worse”.

But there is so much room for improvement.

Oh – you may be seated.  Sorry.

A good chunk of Minnesota’s establishment – government, educational, union and media – is stuck in the 1970’s.  It was an era when America had no economic competition – Germany and Japan were just starting to find their legs after World War II; China was still a Maoist dystopia; academic experts like Paul Ehrlich thought that India would be so wracked by starvation that it would always be what Somalia is today.

And in that environment, everyone got spoiled and fat.  The unions got used to demanding and getting pay and benefits around the country that were easy to support – provided we had no competition.  And American government, after three decades of aiming toward cradle-to-grave welfare, finally achieved it.

We did the same here in Minnesota.  Our business climate settled to favor big businesses, the kind that “partner” with big government the way that remora fish “partner” with sharks.  Our welfare state turned our cities into warehouses for the poor – an endless homework project for the state’s social service system, for which they’re always taking a grade of “incomplete”, claiming “the dog ate my homework”.

That, unfortunately, is exactly where one of our major parties, the DFL, is stuck.  They have not had a new idea since 1974.  Their entire worldview is centered around the idea “if we pretend it’s still 1978, maybe it’ll all be OK!”.

Minnesotans took a huge step toward reality in 2010.  We elected two chambers full of people who know that times have changed, and we have to stay ahead of the changes in the world around us, rather than just ignore them.

Oh, 8,000 Minnesotans who should have known better believed what the Alliance For A Better Minnesota told them rather than their own lying eyes.  And that’s being charitable; if I were a betting man, I’d say that if you left out all the ineligible voters, repeat voters and felons, it would have been Mark Dayton looking at an 8,000 vote deficit.  But that’s just a hunch.

So today we have a split government; a legislature with a powerful mandate, dividing power with a weak governor whose own party basically treats him like a coffee enema; he did beat their endorsed candidate, after all.

And so the DFL does what it always does when it’s up against the ropes; it lies.  The Alliance For A Better Minnesota – essentially a PR agency for what the “Occupy” movement, if you remember them, call “The One Percent” – has basically taken over the DFL.  And you can tell they’re lying when you see their fingers moving over keyboards, or whenever you see Denise Cardinal or Carrie Lucking on the TV.

And have any of you actually seen Denise Cardinal or Carrie Lucking in the same place?

And the media does what it always does when the DFL is up against the ropes; its editorialists declaim endlessly on the virtue of compromise.

My fellow Minnesotans, in response I say two things.

Number one?  Doy.  Compromise is part and parcel of politics.  But it’s something you do after you have the debate.  And when you debate, you bring the strengths of your own case, and explore and exploit the weaknesses in your enemy’s case. And you do your best to work the compromise in your favor – meaning, obviously, in favor of the agenda for which you were sent to office.  In other words, compromise is a negotiationl. And negotiations are always best made from a position of strength.

And so the GOP must use our strength – numbers, evolving demographics, mindshare – to make sure the “compromise” we get reflects the fact that we won.

And number two?   Bull pucks.  We won.  And we’re going to legislate like we won – like a a party with a vision for a much much better Minnesota – a Minnesota that’s not dependent on state handouts, a Minnesota that works and prospers.  A Minnesota that keeps Big Brother’s passive-aggressive benevolence in its place – there to take care of its allotted business, and there for emergencies, doing its mandated job.  And no more.

So what do we do this session?

The agenda is simple.

First – pass Reform 2.0.  Make government more user-friendly, especially for business.  Our permitting process is a sham.

Second – pass Zero Based Budgeting.  Our current cost-plus budgeting not only guarantees that we will soon not be able to afford our government, it also puts the our government – our “servant”  – in a position of being in arrogant, hectoring control of the whole state; of saying “you, the peasants, serve us first, and yourselves last”.  We need to flip that around.

Third – No budget increase.  We’re at 35 Billion. That is plenty.  Not one dime more.  Not even if the revenue forecast rises.  Minnesotans are working hard – and if the economy grows, the temptation is there to turn that into more revenue for government spending.  No.  Bullshit.  Rebate all surpluses.  And not via the DFL’s convoluted targeted rebates; rebate them in exact proportion of state income taxes paid.  If you pay in, you get back.  If  you don’t, then you already got lucky once; give someone else their turn.

Fourth – Reform our voting system.  It’s not just Voter ID – although that’d be a great start.  Abolishing vouching would also be a great next step.  Isn’t the franchise – for which so many hundreds of thousands of our ancestors fought and died – and the integrity of the election system that determines who runs our democracy, worth a tiny little bit of administrative conscientiousness on the part of someone claiming to be a “citizen” today?

Yes.  Yes, it is.

Fifth – Pass Representative Cornish’s Stand Your Ground bill.  I put it in my State of the State address for a reason; it’s not that it’s necessarily the fifth most important bill on the entire raft of legislation facing this state.  But symbolically, it’s a vital priority.  After reforming our government and our budgeting process and  holding the line on spending, letting government know, once and forever, that we the people are sovereign, and that our right to defend our lives and families supersedes both criminals’ peace of mind and prosecutors’ convenience, is vital.  Criminals should be afraid to go out at night – not we, the people.  And it’ll be a lovely thumb in the eye of the Metrocrats.  They deserve it.

Sixth – get the Met Council out of the rail baron and utopia-planning businesses.  In a metro with cheap land and horizontal sprawl, light rail makes no, zero, nada sense.  And forcing people into high-density developments to justify those rail lines is downright stupid – not just a waste of money, but a vile overreach on the part of government.

In Mitch Berg’s Minnesota, the government is the servant, not the master – and we, the people, continually affirm it.  Just like training a dog; if we, the people, give the government constant, consistent discipline, it might just learn its place and be useful enough not to put down.

Although government, like any dog, must know that if it craps on our carpet again, it’s going in the car for that drive “out to the country”.

In Mitch Berg’s Minnesota, government scrimps and saves, and the people keep most of what they work for.  We have the government we need, not the government the governing class wants.

In Mitch Berg’s Minnesota, the people work out a compromise with government from a position of strength, and the government knows its place.

And that’s the state of the State of Minnesota.  It could be worse.  It should be much better. And only Mark Dayton and his one-percenter minions stand in the way.

So to sum up the whole address; let’s show this state who’s boss.

Thank you.  God Bless Minnesota, and God Bless America.

The video that’s swept the nation…

…and kept the DFL/media (pardon the redundancy) spin machine up all weekend.

I was out of town last week during Governor Dayton’s frankly weird performance, referring to supporters of the “Right To Work” amendment as “Extreme”.

More on that – it ties in closely with my piece on the DFL’s new PR effort to flood the state with unsupportable memes on wedge issues designed to fool the uninformed and gullible – later this week.

It’s just interesting to note how many “extremists” there are out there, according this SurveyUSA poll covering Minnesotans’ attitudes on the Gay Marriage, Right To Work and Voter ID amendments seem to show that a majority of Minnesotans are, by Governor Dayton’s self-indulgent standard, “Extremists”.

Let’s go through the numbers one issue at a time:

Marriage Amendment

This is the weakest of the bunch so far; it’s winning by 47-39, and over the top in most of the cross tabs (other than 18-34 year olds, cell phone users, Democrats, Liberals and people making over $80K a year).

This is in line – and maybe a little better – than the results I found in the fall of 2010, when a Lawrence Poll showed that Minnesotans’ preferences swung strongly to Tom Emmer when they were clear that Emmer supported referenda or legislative rulings on the issue, while Dayton and Horner both supported legislating the issue from the bench.

The problem is that these numbers aren’t nearly good enough to pass the bill, given one quirk in Minnesota’s law when voting on constitutional amendments; blank votes are counted as “no” votes.  Everyone who supports an amendment must vote affirmatively “yes”.

So let’s assume the numbers in this poll’s “Not Sures” – 4% overall – break evenly between Yes and No on election day, bringing the actual results to 49-41 in favor; then “Not Votes” stay on the sidelines, becoming “No” votes, making the final vote a bare 51-49 against.  That’s not counting “Ritchie Votes”: the dead, people being vouched into multiple districts, people who aren’t legally entitled to vote, and the like.

Even without that, the measure loses by default. By this count, the Marriage Amendment needs to arf up at least three more points – five as insurance against “Ritchie Votes”.

With a state this polarized, it’s a tall order.

Right To Work

Minnesota is much less polarized here – and it shows.  Governor Dayton’s memes on the subject have been more fact-free and desperate than usual – “right to work states have lower wages!”, he declared, ignoring the other context (closed shop states tend to be more urban, coastal and have much higher costs of living as well as wages) – showing how hard the DFL is going to have to dig for votes on this issue.

“Right To Work” leads 55-24% overall.  It leads in every single cross tab – the narrowest is 35-32 among identified liberals.  Bad news for the DFL – it leads among women even more than among men; more among the young than the old;

More importantly?   Even if you take the 12% “not sure” vote and split it evenly among “Yes”, “No” and “Not Voting” , the numbers become 59-28-13, which really means 59-41 (remember, blank votes become “No”, as noted above).  Even if every undecided voter decides to side with the unions – in other words, the hopelessly unrealistic breaks, things about as likely as me getting a third date with Amy Adams – or just sit the issue out, the issue ends up at 55-45.

It’ll take a lot of “Ritchie Votes” to beat “the extremists” on this issue.

Photo ID

Perhaps the best news of the poll is that the left’s idiot memes about Voter ID – “it disenfranchises the poor, the elderly and college students – are falling not so much on deaf ears, but ears that mock their idiocy.

During the 2010 campaign, the meme of the right was that Voter ID had 2-1 support in Minnesota.  The SUSA poll shows it’s actually 3-1 with a bullet; the measure currently leads 70-23.

The cross tabs?  Again – the measure is more popular among women than men (73% of women favor it, vs. 66% of men); more among younger voters, with a 77-20 lead among 35-49 year old voters); more among the educated (71-24 among college grads ys 63-23 among high school grads); about evenly across all income bands; even by 69-24 in the Twin Cities.

Most significantly?  Only 4% of Minnesotans are undecided on the subject, and 4% more claimed they’ll “not vote” on the issue.  Even if every single undecided voter is convinced to vote against the issue or sit it out, the measure passes 70-31%.

Even Mark Ritchie will have a hard time rigging this one.

Takeaways

Caveat up front; the conclusions below presume the SUSA poll is accurate.  The poll is of registered voters, rather than likely voters, which is inherently less accurate on the one hand, but traditionally skews things to the left on the other hand; for purposes of the conclusions below, I’ll presume those two factors roughly cancel each other out.

GOP legislative candidates need to closely align themselves with the Right To Work and Photo ID issues.  They need to hammer on their support for Right to Work and Voter ID, and the positive things that both bring to this state – more jobs, and an election system with actual integrity (although Voter ID is only one of many reforms needed).

The Marriage Amendment strikes me as a loser for GOP candidates – not because it’s off the ideological beam (although as a libertarian conservative, I’m less enthusiastic about it than some Republicans), but because presuming that this poll is accurate, candidates will spend more time and effort supporting the amendment than being supported by it.  By tying themselves to amendments that seem likely to pass overwhelmingly and which show the deep wedge between the DFL and the GOP, on issues where the DFL is both wrong and diametrically opposed to a crushing majority of Minnesotans, the GOP wins free votes; the Marriage Amendment will cost time and effort to prop up at the polls.  Not to say the votes can’t be found, but it’s going to take a lot of time and effort – which is the job of the various pro-marriage groups, not candidates.

The other takeaway, in light of the Governor’s prate and gabble on the subject(s)?  In every case, with all three of these amendments, the conservative, “extreme” position is the mainstream.

But we knew that.

See more on the subject from Ed Morrissey.

Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill – which would make legal self-defense a more tenable option for law-abiding Minnesotans – is coming up for another hearing in the Senate tomorrow.

For the second straight day, I’m going to urge all Second-Amendment supporting Minnesotans to get on the phone.  These Senators are all pretty much in line to support HF1467/SF1357:

• Michelle L. Fischbach, (651) 296-2084
• David W. Hann, 651) 296-1749
• Ingebrigtsen, Bill, 651) 297-8063
• Magnus, Doug, (651) 296-5650
• Scott J. Newman, 651) 296-4131
• Gen Olson, (651) 296-1282
• Mike Parry, (651) 296-9457

They could use a call to encourage them, but mainly thank them for their continued support for Civil Liberties in Minnesota.

Three more Senators on the committee – Terri E. Bonoff, Barb Goodwin and Linda Higgins – are worthless Metrocrats.  Rust-encrusted enemies of civil liberty, none of them is worth the time it’d take to contact them.

The last two…

• Keith Langseth (651) 296-3205
• LeRoy A. Stumpf. (651) 296-8660

So please – take a moment to email or (especially) call today; the hearing is tomorrow.

Remember – have them support HF1467/SF1357.

[1] Yeah, I went there.  Whatchagonnadoabout it?