I like this…

…because it also works for Mark Dayton’s various attempts at budgets.

…by the latest round of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” ads, the “state workers” castigating the legislature for the shutdown (being planned by and for Governor Dayton’s political benefit).

Are road crews actually going to go out and remove all the guard rails from the highways before the shutdown happens?

That seems just a little…bitchy?  I mean, we paid for ’em once, right?

I had a conversation last night with an acquaintance in the healthcare industry – someone who works in finance for a Twin Cities healthcare provider, and who has been attending “a ton of meetings” lately with officials from the State of Minnesota about the upcoming shutdown.  My source wants to remain anonymous for reasons that’ll be obvious to anyone who knows the Minnesota bureaucracy.

The memo I and several other conservative bloggers ran earlier this week is fairly common knowledge among upper management in regional healthcare; it’s fairly well known that the Administration’s goal is to create, as the memo said, “angst” which will impel people to pressure their legislators to demand passage of Governor Dayton’s budget.

“[The government healthcare administrators and bureaurcrats]  understand what we’re supposed to be doing; we’re supposed to be parading sick children and dying people, getting folks whipped up”, my souce observed.   “[The state wants]  to create pandemonium out there; they want to cut everything cut to the bone; saying that starting July 1, create the impression that nothing (in terms of state payments) will get paid for”.

He added “One of my lefty friends, who hasn’t really been involved in all the legislative stuff, said “the Governor can’t do that…” I don’t think he’d gotten the message!”

But my source related that his source went on to say “I gotta talk to people in the department (Health and Human Services); there’s all sort federal laws; this is crazy!”  In other words, not everyone in the regional healthcare industry believes Dayton’s move to defund health and human services for political leverage is legal at all.  My source notes that while different states handle Medicare payments in different ways, Minnesota splits its payments 50/50 with the Feds.   “If the State of Minnesota took its money up front, there’s no way Dayton can [unilaterally withhold the payments].

“One of our lawyers in DC said the same thing – the Governor can’t do that!”

Beyond the legalities, my source says we should take all “impact” numbers from the administration with big block of salt.

“I [was talking with] the to unions today – we  have no plans to shut down.  But I had to give admin a number of employees affected; all us finance people had to do this. We don’t knowwhat to do – I suspect we’ll see people talking about a big number of layoffs; it’s all bullshit”.  He noted, as an example, that the shut down could affect up to [a very large number of full time equivalent employees] at his clinic. ” I suspect [the administration] will list these as people who will be laid off by the cuts, but it’s just not true…we’re staying open during the shutdown.  If we do, we’ll recoup 95% of the money eventually; if we shut down, we’ll never see any of it”.  But he adds “Every clinic I personally know is going to stay open – we figure we’ll get paid eventually”.

He works at a larger clinic, of course; smaller ones, he allows, will likely face some serious cash flow problems; “they don’t know what to do now”.

The county governments seem, according to my source, to be joining in the stonewalling.  “”I was telling [my source’s county government] to get lawyered up.  we better have lawsuits going on July 1.  I copied county on seeing outside counsel; I was politely told to back off.  Powers that be are going to hype this.  Liberals in [my source’s] County want to strike fear into peoples’ hearts”.   The goal, said a highly-placed source to my own source, is to ” peel off a couple of moderate Republicans” to get them to support the Governor’s all-tax-hike budget.

The most frustrating part, according to my source? “Trying to get some traction”.  He’s frustrated; “why isn’t the media covering this?”

We’re all asking that.

“I’m shocked, shocked that we have no solution…”, says Governor Dayton…

Minnesota’s budget talks are at an impasse and two weeks before a potential state government shutdown, Gov. Mark Dayton said he does not know how the problem can be resolved.

…to the shutdown he and his cronies have been planning all along.

The only real solution is to find some terrorists to phone in a threat to Saint Paul.

Dayton planned the shutdown all along.

As that great observer of Minnesota political nature Nick Coleman used to say (and say, and say, and say, and say…), “connect the dots, people”.

The MNGOP will help you connect them.

Evidence of Dayton Administration’s Efforts To “Create Chaos” & “Greatest Possible Pain” During Shutdown

Spread the word.

As the Attorney General files to get the courts to determine what workers are “essential”…:

In her petition, Swanson asked the court to fund a broad expanse of state services and appoint a “special master” — essentially a shutdown referee, to sort the details.

…Governor Dayton goes back to his old dodge:

Dayton offered a different solution in his petition.

“Order the parties to mediate,” Dayton asked the court. He suggested former Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz or former Associate Justice James Gilbert to act as court-appointed mediators. Swanson had asked that Gilbert be appointed special master.

Only if mediation fails, Dayton’s brief said, should the court infringe “on the constitutional powers of the legislative and executive departments.”

For starters – ask any lawyer:   Mediation only works when both sides are entering into the discussion in good faith.  As Gary Gross, Janet Beihoffer and I have all shown this week,  Dayton is not.  He has been staging the shutdown from the word go.

(Leftybloggers will chime in around this point: “But the GOP was talking about a shutdown right after the election!”.  Yep.  Many of us expected that Dayton, facing an overwhelming legislative deficit with a real mandate, unlike his near-record weak plurality and feckless Legislative contingent, would head straight for the shutdown, and let his buddies in the DFL-allied media do the hard work for him – a prediction that is, as always, correct.  The GOP said “bring on the shutdown”; Dayton actively sought, planned for, and ensured it would happen).

Mark Dayton, in a letter to state contractors, Governor Daytons…well, lies through his teeth:

Dayton Administration Distributes False Information

Dayton, of course, vetoed a perfectly fine balanced budget – several of them, in fact, many of them so close together that there can be no reason other than Dayton having planned for a shutdown at any cost if he didn’t get his way on his curious fixation on hiking taxes at all costs.

You depend on government.

You are a government worker.  You’re looking at the budget negotiations, and noticing that at the Department of Transportation, even though the Governor and the Legislature were eight tenths of a percent apart on their budgets – something even the Hatfields could have negotiated with the McCoys – Dayton vetoed the Transportation budget.

Dayton is holding you hostage.

You depend on government.  You are a walking, talking country western song, only it’s just not funny; you’ve been laid off, your significant other bailed leaving you with three kids to feed and clothe and try to insure.  One of them has chronic, serious health problems – and in your current state, you have no choice but to try to get help from the state.  But Mark Dayton has opted to stop all payments via Health and Human Services to health-care providers during the shutdown – indeed, he has specifically engineered that result from the budget battle.

Governor Dayton is holding you hostage.

The Republicans offered a budget that, by any rational measure, is a useful compromise; a 6% raise.  Too much for conservatives, but certainly more than enough to run the government at a time when none of the rest of us are getting 6% raises.   If a solution was what he wanted – for your benefit, Mr State Worker, and you, Ms. State Insurance customer – he’d have signed the Legislature’s budget.

Governor Dayton, on the other hand, has offered a budget that is still a billion dollars from balanced; he’s lying about not taxing 98% of Minnesotans, and he wants to commit us to endless autopilot increases; the bureaucracy will ask for $40 Billion next biennium, $46 B the budget after that.

He cares not one iota about compromise.

He doesn’t care about your job.

He doesn’t care about your kid.

He cares about raising taxes, and no more.

To protect a tax hike, he is shutting the government down.

Which doesn’t harm most of us; the vast majority of GOP voters only notice the state government on payday, or when we see a Highway Patrol car out on the road.  We may or may not notice at all if the government shuts down.

But you will, Mr Employee and Ms. Client.

And it’s you he’s holding hostage.

It’s you he’s warning; “dont’ break ranks with the unions and your DFL, or this will hurt you baaaad”.

Yesterday, we discussed the email in the Department of Human Services that indicated that it’s common knowledge among higher ups in the DHS that Governor Dayton is actively promoting the government shutdown to cause all the misery it can, to try to turn it toward the Legislative majority.

But that’s just the beginning.

A highly-placed source with intimate knowledge of Minnesota’s public heath system contacted me over the weekend. (A similar source contacted Janet Beihoffer; she ran the email at Freedom Dogs).   My source an assortment of high-ranking officials in state public-health agencies and non-profits received the email last week from one Michael Scandrett, a lawyer with the firm of Halleland and Habicht, a term that works in health-care policy consulting.

Accoring to my source, Scandrett’s email said that – I’m paraphrasing, here, so feel free to read the whole thing over at the Dogs – Governor Dayton’s shutdown plan will involve terminating payments to health care providers working with all government programs, as of July 1.

Also according to my source, the email said that the intent of this action appears to be – my source quoted the email – “to create create the greatest possible pain and resulting pressure on the Legislature to resolve the dispute“.

In other words, the Governor is using the executive branch to ratchet up the pain of the shutdown on the state’s workers and those dependent on the state – his supporters – to feed his mania with raising taxes at all costs.

I’ll be seeking comment from Mr. Scandrett, as well as other top DHS officials on this email.

The upshot, though?  If you depend on the state of Minnesota – as an employee or as a client – Governor Dayton is holding you hostage.

This email – purportedly from a State Department of Human Services employee – surfaced over the weekend, and has been making the rounds of the conservative blogs in Minnesota:

Click to expand.

In other words, if the leak is accurate, Dayton has been inducing the government shutdown for the DFL’s political gain.  He’s sandbagged the budget process to try to beat on the GOP.

Dayton, if this checks out, is holding state goverment workers, schools, the U and our state university system, those that depend on government for health care, and the entire state government hostage…

…to pursue his curious mania for raising taxes on the not-very-“rich”, to try to whip up the forces of class envy to his, and his cronies’, benefit, and to defend a an unsustainable status quo.

And you know what else?

I think I may have happened upon an even bigger, more damning smoking gun.

Tomorrow morning at 7AM on Shot In The Dark.

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

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

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

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

And Baker is unimpressed by either Hale or Governor Dayton:

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

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

Blam.

The “progressives” never, never get that.

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

A majority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer: fewer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baker gets this:

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

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

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

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

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

With name-calling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need more freshmen in the GOP caucus.

There are some in Minnesota – think the Independence Party and the wonky class who love tinkering with the machinery of government (pardon the redundancy) who believe in “compromise” because to them, the process of goverment is the goal of government.  Principle be damned – Process is the golden idol.

There are others in Minnesota who believe that compromise is just what parties in Minnesota tradtionally do. It’s BS, of course.  The traditional Minnesota political “compromise” involves seettling on some version of DFL/”progressive” policy or another.

And there are others who pimp for compromise because otherwise, they lose.

But they all have one thing in common; anyone who says the MNGOP hasn’t compromisedon the budget…

Comparison Budget Offers In General Spending

…is lying.

Or – let’s be charitable – parroting DFL chanting points.

Not that compromise with the DFL is in and of itself a good thing, much less a worthy goal.  But facts are facts.

The governor s it a freeze vetoed the K12 Education budget bill…

In his letter vetoing the Republican K-12 budget, Dayton criticized the bill’s “freezing of compensatory revenue.” The state doles out that money, sometimes more than $400 million a year, based on the number of poor students in each school district.

If you suspect that the Dayton administration’s responses to every GOP initiative were written last December, here’s your evidence:

But there’s one problem. Dayton and the Republicans both want spend the same amount on compensatory revenue over the next two years. Each side proposes leaving it at levels set in current law.

Senate Republicans once proposed freezing compensatory revenue, but that provision was eliminated when lawmakers crafted the final version of the K-12 bill (known as the “conference report”).

What Republicans did instead was separate the compensatory revenue from the basic per-pupil formula allowance. That means future Legislatures will have to specifically increase the compensatory revenue formula, rather than just boosting the basic formula.

In other words, they took it off the “autopilot” that drives so much of our biennial budget discussion.  The autopilot that drives up proposed spending, leading to “$5 billion deficits” and 20-odd percent spending hikes in every budget, and that legislatures will have to do their jobs.

Is that a freeze?

“How on God’s green earth do you argue that it’s a freeze?” said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, the Republican sponsor of the bill. He noted that not only have Dayton and the GOP both left the formula at current law levels, but spending will also increase automatically if there are more poor students.

The Administration let out a rare honest emission:

At first, Department of Education spokeswoman Charlene Briner agreed the letter got it wrong.

“It is incorrect to say that compensatory was frozen in the conference report,” Briner said in an interview. Soon after, Briner sent Hot Dish e-mails backtracking that statement and adding  “I think I was incorrect to say that.”

“The net effect is a freeze,” she wrote, “unless future legislatures act.” In other words, delinking it from the basic formula could mean future legislatures choose not to increase the compensatory revenue formula.

What?  Requiring that spending be justified?  The nerve of those peasants!

Dayton spokeswoman Katie Tinucci said they stand by the veto letter. “It is our interpretation that the effect of delinking compensatory revenue is the same as freezing it—we cannot rely on the actions of future legislatures.”

In other words – “spending is the goal; shut up and pay up”.

The regional leftysphere is tweeting up a busy little storm today; as the MNDFL noted on Twitter, “Former head of the MN Business Partnership: the @mngop budget is a “job-killer””.

The uninitiated might think “Wow. That’s quite an indictment of the GOP budget!”

And the tweet linked to a Strib article, entitled “The governor’s budget plan won’t send businesses scurrying“, by one Roger L. Hale, which didn’t do much to disturb that conclusion.  I’ll let you read it yourself; if you’re observant, you’ll note the subtle red herring; tax hikes might not send businesses “scurrying”, but it’ll inhibit them from forming in the first place, or hiring more Minnesota workers.  What good does having 3M or Best Buy or Ecolab plopping their headquarters here do us if they’re not expanding, building and hiring?

But the DFL and Strib (pardon the redundancy) are even less transparent and more perfidious than meets the eye.

The Strib piece notes that Hale is “…a former: CEO of Tennant Co, director of five NYSE companies, chairman of the Minnesota Business Partnership and the Governor’s Workforce Development Council, and successful start-up investor.

And to those who don’t pay much attention, a businessman is a businessman is a businessman.  And probably a Republican.  Right?

Wrong.

Roger Hale, as I noted last summer, contributed six figures to “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”; $110,000 as of this time last year, and tens of thousands more to other DFL candidates and organizations.

But the Strib didn’t see fit to let the reader know that.

The fix is in.

The DFL and media (pardon the redundancy) have got a new buzz phrase, “quality negotiation”.  It’s what they supposedly want out of the current impasse in Saint Paul.

Let me just say for the record that if the DFL aren’t whinging like a bunch spoiled ten year olds, it’s not a “quality negotiation”.

Speaking of which, the Strib adds to the “quality” of the negotiation – my definition of it, at least- with via Min this piece by one Brian Rusche, the “executive director of the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition”, a group that is to religious group what the association of chiefs of police or Alliance for a Better Minnesota are to cops and Minnesotans – a DFL pressure group.

Rusche apparently thinks his churches own the trademark on “princple”:

Minnesota’s legislative leaders are locked in a protracted dispute with the governor, not about the quantity or quality of government output, but out of devotion to a single number: $34 billion.

Legislative leaders insist that all other policy considerations must take a back seat to the singular goal of keeping general-fund revenues and expenses at that amount for the next biennium.

Bla bla bla.

This next bit is the irritating part, the part that needs to be refudiated with prejudice; the part where Rusche abuses his cachet as a “religious ” leader:

This is numerology without principle. It treats one general-fund number like an idol, a number to be prized above the concerns and needs of our citizenry.

This is a mind-numbingly, corrosively stupid statement.

The GOP is operating from set of principles. To be fair, these are fairly new to Minnesota government; government is our servant, not our master.  Government needs to live within its means; it needs to prioritize, just like we taxpayers need to.  If “citizenry” “needs” some parts of government, we need to cut back on the parts the “citizenry” doesn’t need.

Rusche illustrates – no doubt unintentionally –

Finding a worthy general-fund baseline number with which to base all policy decisions is very, very tricky. Minnesota has relied on one-time strategies to prop up general-fund revenues, especially during recessions.

We’ve drained reserves, cashed out the tobacco endowment and spent federal stimulus dollars in efforts to address a structural deficit that has haunted us for a decade. Add accounting shifts and gimmicks, and we’ve been able to disguise revenue shortfalls and delay a true reckoning, until now.

That’s because government has been run by people – Republicans as well as Democrats – who regarded government as a big  fun machine with lots of levers and knobs to play with.   A big huge benefit machine where, if you hit just the right combination of those buttons and levers, you’d get all sorts of good and wonderful things for the people.

And after a generation or two of that, we’re broke.

And the principle has changed. It has to.  Government the way Arne Carlson practiced it – spending money like a crack whore with a stolen gold card during the cha-cha times, turning surpluses into permanent spending, and making up for it with taxes when things turn ugly – is utterly unsustainable.

And – are you listeniong, Mr. Rusche? – it’s immoral and stupid to carry stupid, thick-necked profligacy on the backs of the taxpayer.

Lori Sturdevant complaints that “It’s hard to get a fix on today’s politics”:

Duane Benson — former NFL player, former state Senate GOP leader, former CEO of the Minnesota Business Partnership, now head of the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation (MELF) — was describing the “funny thing” he was experiencing this year as a lobbyist for smarter state spending on early childhood education.

He’d come to the Capitol with a passel of proven ideas that spring from traditional Republican philosophy. They had substantial business backing.

Among them: Don’t start a new government program. Make use of existing private-sector providers. Engage them in a purely voluntary rating system. Take advantage of market forces. Empower poor parents to be informed consumers. Trust them to make preschool choices, in the same way affluent parents routinely do.

So far, so good.

“I thought the Republicans would love this stuff,” Benson told me. “Instead, the Democrats are the ones who love it. A lot of Republicans don’t want anything to do with it.” In the new GOP view, government ought to have no role in the prekindergarten education of children, he explained.

I’ll make a not-very-long story short; Benson was plugging a tax-responsible, revenue-neutral way to push choice in early childhood education.  Better than a DFL proposal would have been – and either (from Sturdevant) very much against the current mood, a temporal temper tantrum that’s making children’s education its victims, or (for conservatives) pumping money into something that starts the process of weeding kids into educational haves and have nots – people who are adapted to the the academic chase and those who don’t – bright and early, and at best does no good.

If you read Sturdevant – or her many, many critics on the right – you know where this goes.  It’s a template, really:

1. Republican from the Carlson era and of the pre-1998 school of GOP state politics bemoans a change – inevitably in the GOP.
2. Sturdevant broadens it into a generalized conclusion on how our “state conversation” is being sullied by uppity conservatives.
3. By the way – did you know the DFL is really the center?

Let’s carry on here:

It’s often said that Minnesota’s two big political parties have grown more polarized because they have moved in opposite directions from an ill-defined midpoint.

Indeed, it is.

Not least by Sturdevant herself.

Benson got me thinking that the notion needs rethinking. A case can be made that the ideological shift of both big parties has been to the right, and that a lot of DFL ideas now occupy what not long ago was considered Republican territory.

DFLers seldom frame their policy arguments in social-justice terms. They talk about “jobs, jobs, jobs” and seem increasingly keen on employing market forces to do public work. Witness their friendly response to MELF’s early ed quality rating system and its plan to convert early childhood subsidies into (dare I say) a voucher program.

The lefty lines of an earlier era are heard no more. I can’t recall when I heard a DFL politician openly question the merit of capitalism.

Then Phyllis Kahn must not have happened by the press room lately.

On the one hand – ta daaa.  The state is getting more conservative, and even the DFL has to adapt.

On the other hand – Sturdevant is picking and choosing.  You can’t listen to the likes of the reps of the various unions and hear anything you didn’t in the 1970’s.  And the urban metrocrat left, while displaying the odd bit of pragmatic adaptation, is still your grandparents’ DFL (and, with the likes of Linda Berglin and Phyllis Kahn, is still sending your grandparents’ legislators to St. Paul).

If there’s a change, it’s this; the DFL is twigging to the fact that Minnesota is moving to the right under their feet.

Let’s go back in time:

2005: Confronted with a nonspecific threat of terrorism, then-Senator Mark Dayton shuts down his Senate office in DC, leaving the job of doing the nation’s business to the 534 other Congresspeople who, for whatever reason, didn’t.

His idea of leadership – to lead the run away from doing his job.

2011: Confronted by a GOP majority that outpolled him in the 2010 elections, and propped up only by a series of meaningless, potemkin polls, Governor Dayton does…

…well, more or less the same thing, asking for a “mediator” to work toward a compromise give him political cover for the fact that he holds absolutely no cards.

Remember – he’s been calling the GOP “obstructionist” (I’ve added emphasis):

At a press conference, Dayton said he has asked key cabinet members not to appear before the Legislative Commission on Planning and Fiscal Policy. The joint legislative panel is scheduled to meet at 2 p.m. today to seek details on the governor’s latest budget proposal.

Dayton said his administration was not given adequate notice of the meeting, and would not participate. He said there is no point in discussing the details of a budget agreement until Republicans agree to compromise on some kind of revenue increase to help balance the budget.

“We’re not at the beck and call of the Legislature. They’re not in session. They had their five months,” he said.

They had five months dealing with a Governor whose only concept of “compromise” is “I get everything I asked for even though I’m in the weaker position”.

By the way – ask your lawyer (or any lawyer) about the wisdom of “getting a mediator” when your opponent is dealing in bad faith.  There is none.

And fortunately, at least this time the MNGOP knows it.

Moving MN Forward just released an ad to counter “A Better Minnesota’s” latest round of Dayton family and union-fundeed “spend more or we kill this dog! ads:

Pass it around.

In anticipation of tonight’s game against the Detroit Tigers, who are ten games ahead of the Twins in the AL Central, Twins manager Ron Gardenhire gave a press conference early this morning.

“We’ve done our best to be bipartisan in the run-up to the game”, said Gardenhire, whose team has a .321 record so far this season.  “The Tigers need to compromise!”

As the team tries to avert a sweep at Detroit’s “Filth and Crime Stadium”, Gardenhire noted “the Tigers’ manager is being boorish and intransigent; the people overwhelmingly support compromise in tonight’s game”, he said, citing a Star Tribune Minnesota poll showing fifty random Minneapolis adults support the Tigers forfeiting tonight’s game.

“We’ve reached out and given enough”, Gardenhire concluded.  “It’s time for the Tigers to give a little”.

———-

Dayton’s case for “compromise” is about the same as Gardenhire’s.  Let’s get clear on a couple of facts here:

1. Dayton’s mandate is nonexistent:  Dayton backed into office with 43% of the vote (DFLers will respond “But Horner favored raising taxes, too!”  Perhaps, but you can not assume Horner’s voters supported him because of taxes; indeed, the DFL’s propaganda machine couldn’t stop reminding people what a “Republican” Horner was during the campaign; it’d be pretty funny for the DFL to try to have it both ways, but hardly unprecedented. It’s every bit as likely that 10% voted for Horner out of blind hatred of Mark Dayton as because taxes make them tingly), the second-lowest in history.  He’s weak.
2. The GOP ‘s mandate is real: The GOP majority in the Legislature, on the other hand, won big, with a broad mandate made even more lopsided by the fact that a disproportionate number of the DFL’s votes came from blowout races in the Metro.  There was no mistaking it; it was the biggest turnaround in state political history, from the dismal 2008 race to crushing majorities in both chambers.  The GOP is not only entitled to govern like they won – they’d be disingenuous not to.

The DFL’s only real support on this issue is astroturf, bogus polls, and endless browbeating.

Which is noisy and showy, but doesn’t mean a whole lot.

Mark Dayton’s budget – and worse, what his budget would mean for the state’s long-term fiscal viability – is a disaster waiting to happen; the equivalent of going out and buying a new Beemer when you’re four months behind on the house payments.

Senator Roger Chamberlain of White Bear Lake has been an inspiration this session; he’s one of the freshmen firebrands that just plain gets it, the fact that if we don’t tame the beat now, there will not be a fiscal tomorrow.

He’s circulating the following email.  Read it, and forward it to your friends; it is that important.  I’ve added some emphasis:

This may be a bit unconventional but it is time to be heard. I know many of you have done much already, but we all need to do more. This will not be easy, it was always a possibility that we would be on this path. If we are to win this struggle with the governor and the progressives, we need all of you. We need to mobilize the troops to answer and counter the lies of our opponents. For 5 months the governor has not made a single difficult decision. He has had the luxury of standing on the sideline; doing nothing but criticizing and name calling. Now the ads have started. Much is at stake.

Our struggle is not only against a destructive progressive ideology but also against an entrenched bureaucracy and a complacent media.

Some facts:

1. $30.1 billion – Mn dollars spent during 2010-2011 biennium

2. $34 billion – Our balanced budget proposal to the governor. this is the amount in the checkbook.

3. $37 billion – the governors budget proposal

4. Revenue projected to increase by 8.5% next budget cycle

5. $400 million increase in K-12

6. Almost $600 million increase HHS spending

7. All other areas receive CUTS and reforms

8. I and other legislators will meet with any of you to discuss ideas, etc.

All of these numbers are supported by MMB, our spreadsheets and the governors published proposal. Those are the FACTS.

Share with your family, friends, co-workers; post on blogs, comment on blogs, letters to the editors, post on telephone polls and message boards, call MPR, call or write to the governor and his commissioners. Work with Taxpayers League, MN Majority, Free Market institute, et. al.

The governors plan will destroy this state. If we were to accept his plan, what will we do next year or in two years when expenses will increase another 10-25%?

Thank you and God Bless!

Sincerely,

Roger Chamberlain

The worst thing about the Dayton budget isn’t that it increases spending by the levels Arne Carlson did back during the cha-cha boom years of the nineties – although that’s bad.  The worst thing is that his budgets will continue the “autopilot” for budget increases, with no end in sight.

Which means that in the next biennium, “the rich” will be everyone earning over, who knows, maybe $75,000?   There will be no way for revenue to keep up with spending…

…and the spending is not , by and large, to benefits students or the poor, but to keep state government workers in benefits like most of our employers can’t afford.   The spending will require you to keep working until you’re 70 so they can retire at 55.

Stop the madness.

Kwama Heaton of Richfield wanted to sign his kids up for basketball camp.  But when he got laid off from his job as a car salesman, due to a lack of used cars (due to Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program and cost cutting for Obamacare), he had to cancel those plans.

Cynthia DelAmitri of Woodbury told her family that their annual trip to visit her parents for a week of camping and fishing in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan were on ice because the small recruiting company for which she works is cutting staff (they can’t afford the taxes) and she couldn’t afford to take time off; the big national recruiters would eat her lunch.

Rey Jimenez, your grandmother’s oncologist, quietly decided that added onto the state’s confiscatory business tax rates and absurd healthcare mandates, the added income on couples who earn over $135,000 (he and his wife, your grandmother’s internist) was the last straw. He’s moving to Phoenix.

The media doesn’t cover those sorts of stories (and yes, mine are fictional, but only literally).

But let the government suddenly feel not all fat and happy, and “human interest” is the order of the day for the Twin Cities media:

Camille Miller hasn’t signed her daughter up for Girl Scout camp this summer. The state health care analyst from Woodbury is not sure she’ll have the $500 to pay for it.

Wow.

Not sure I ever paid $500 for kids camp…

Jim Ullmer has told his extended family to forget their annual July 4th get-together at Lake Itasca State Park. Ullmer, a state truck inspector from Crystal, is unsure if the campground will be open.

Because everyone knows family get togethers in local or national parks, or private camp areas, just aren’t the same.  There’s something about that patina of “state ownership” that brings people together, right?

They are just two of more than 54,000 state workers bracing for an uncertain summer as the Capitol budget impasse threatens to shut down government services on July 1.

To which the roughly two million of us in the private sector say “welcome to every day in our world, government worker”.

And half of us add “so quit electing obstructionist DFL governors”.  The GOP submitted a budget – one that’d keep government running, increase most spending that “needs” it and demand some new efficiencies.

Look for the same cavalcade of woe to accelerate; the Strib seems to be even more in the bag for the DFL this year than they did in 2005.

“Compromise”.

That’s what the Dayton Administration says it wants (when it’s not calling the GOP “extremists” – which is kind of funny, “extremists” getting the majority of the vote last November, but I digress).

Of course, the GOP did compromise; it hiked the budget, adding the money from the upgraded February revenue forecast to the budget, rather than leaving it in the economy where it might have done some good.  That’s all the compromise the GOP needs to do.

Dayton – or, more accurately, “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, the attack PAC funded entirely by Dayton, his family, his friends, and the unions who are renting him until 2014 with an option ’til 2018 – are doing their best to cow Minnesotans into believing “cutting government” means “attacking the middle class”.

Dayton and his minions are lying, of course.

Here’s how it really works:

2011:  “Compromises” with the MNGOP to lower a 22% increase down to something a little less immediately catastrophic.  Somehow, he bullies the GOP into acquiescing.

2012:  Minnesota’s economy falters, as small-business hiring flags.  “It’s because of the GOP budget thefts!”, every single media outlet and DFL blog (pardon the redundancy) opines.  Disgusted by the GOP’s budget cave-in, swing voters stay home in droves, cutting the GOP’s majority in the Legislature.

2013: Emboldened by his “success” in cowing Minnesotans into taking a tax hit and pinning it, putatively, on “the rich”, Dayton proposes another “my way or the highway” budget, with another 20% increase to over $40 billion, to “pay Minnesota back for what the extremists stole”.  To pay for this, “the Rich” are redefined as anyone with an Adjusted Gross Income of over $90,000.

2014: Minnesota’s economy falls still further, as mid-sized businesses flee the state in accelerating numbers.   Dayton, having vetoed Voter Id, wins re-election by a 5 million to 1 million margin.

2015: Dayton’s budget rockets up another 20%, to $48 billion; “you must be happy to pay for a bigger Minnesota”, he mumbles, as he notes that “the rich” are now any Minnesotan with an adjusted gross income of over $60,000.

And so on.

Pass the word to your neighbors; all they have is fear.

Mark Dayton, from a bit on the TV news yesterday, on his veto of the GOP’s budget bills:

“The problem…apparently…seems to lie with some of the extreme right wing members, especially the new ones, who don’t seem to know how government works”.

So Tom Bakk’s stupid remark about the GOP freshmen not being part of the government club…

…is the official DFL party line?

Along with the whole “everyone who opposes Dayton is an “extremist”” schtick?

Governor Dayton vetoed all the GOP  budget bills, casting his vote for continued autopilot budget increases, an eternal burden on the state’s productive class, and forcing the rest of us to work ’til we’re 70 so that Dayton’s union supporters can retire at 55.

But at least Minnesota’s brewers got their money’s worth:

On the same day he vetoed most of the GOP-backed budget bills, Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill allowing beer sales at a proposed new brewery and restaurant.

Minnesotans; broke, getting broker, force to be “happy to be paid for a better Minnesota” – but at least we can drink.

Keep ’em drunk and dependent.  Could be a state motto.