Today is Labor Day – the day when Union members pat themselves on the back for another year of doing their jobs and getting paid for it, and when the rest of us hit the picnic grounds and ponder buying weatherstripping.

And this year, the time when the political season starts to reach out to people who aren’t wonks, party hacks and political junkies.

Tomorrow on Shot In The Dark, I plan on spending pretty much the entire day focusing on the Dayton Dustbowl.

How badly are Dayton’s budget cuts going to hamper business?

How many (private sector) jobs are they going to destroy?

How much otherwise-useful money are they going to take out of the economy?

How short will they fall at the goal of “closing the deficit?”

How far down will Dayton have to push the definition of “the rich” to actually accomplish his putative goal of “closing the deficit?”

What kind of a Hungarian Clusterhug is Dayton going to present to our next Legislature, if – heaven forfend – he’s elected to office?

Coming tomorrow on Shot In The Dark.

All.  Day.  Long.

Yesterday during the final Northern Alliance broadcast from the MN State Fair, I referred you to a slew of websites:

• Phil Krinkie is with the Taxpayers League of Minnesota.
• Dan “Doc” Severson is running for Secretary of State
• Chris Barden is running for Attorney General
• Mark Martin is running for MN House in District 45A
• Of course, I spent Thursday and Friday talking with Andy Cilek of the Minnesota Voters Alliance
• And on Friday, we talked with Angie Schottmuller, who’s running for City Council in North Oaks.  Here’s her Twitter feed; you’ll hear about her website there first!

The Minnesota Public Radio/Humphrey Institute “Poligraph”feature did provide some thorough fact checking on Dayton’s income tax proposals and found they came up short on revenue.

The report called Dayton’s plan to raise $4 billion from raising taxes “wishful thinking”; the plan doesn’t account for the fact that people with money will likely change their behavior to pay less taxes.  People react in their own best interests, generally; it’s human nature.  Even DFLers.

That leads, of course, to an ever-expanding game of fiscal cat and mouse; the “rich” – all those cops and teachers and pharmacists and entrepreneurs and mid-level business analysts – work harder and harder to shift money out of taxable status, which causes less revenue to come in, which further drops the revenue projections, which requires the state to further lower the definition of “rich”.

It was, of course, beyond the MPR/HHHI scope to calculate exactly how short the projections will actually fall.  The fact is, Dayton himself thinks one needs a “supercomputer” to figure it out; he hasn’t figured it out either.

Dayton has changed the rhetoric on his tax plan and now claims the $130,000 for individuals and $150,000 for couples was adjusted income, not gross income.

I’m being charitable when I say “change”, by the way – on this blog, I busted Dayton a few weeks back, contradicting his own website, in a piece aptly entitled “Blowing Sunshine Up Minnesota’s Skirt”.

All those fact checkers who’ll be queuing up to go over Tom Emmer plan, which should start coming out in the next week or so, would never allow this type of flip flop (or fumble? We may never know!) to go unnoticed. Why hasn’t Dayton added this important clarification to the budget plan on his website? (PDF file)

And here’s a question: I’m presuming Dayton’s assumptions about revenues were based on the original statement – that it was based on gross income, rather than adjusted income.  How does that change that $4 billion figure that Dayton claims the state will extract from those “rich” cops, nurses, programmers, pharmacists, entrepreneurs…

…and all the other families who have the misfortune to have worked hard and earned a decent living?

If you are an above average nurse and police officer, or a couple of modestly-successful project managers, or an airline mechanic and a school teacher, or a business analyst and a modestly-successful sanitation equipment salesman, or whatever combination of hard-working Minnesotans you can imagine that are making a combined $150,000 a year, your taxes are going up.

We use the term “average” advisedly;  when Margaret Anderson Kelliher asked Mark Dayton why he wanted to raise taxes on a nurse and police officer, Dayton replied that the average nurse and police officer do not make enough money to reach his definition of “rich.”

So above average nurses and cops and anyone else making $130,000 per year – you need to pay your “fair share” to the government.

And by “Fair Share”, that means when you and your spouse – or you alone, if you’re a fairly successful computer programmer or project manager or small-but-hardworking intrepreneur, or a cop that works lots of overtime and security gigs, or a nurse that picks up a bunch of extra hourly shifts – are going to take a big, nasty hit when you creep above that $130K income line.

Whichever one it is.

And that’s on top of all the nasty hits you’re going to get after January 1 from the Feds.

So keep plugging away, Minnesota.   I’m sure the state will appreciate all that hard work.

Almost eighty years ago, the Great Plains – where I was born, a generation later – were pummeled by back-to-back catastrophes.  The first one, the Great Depression, was manmade – a deflating credit bubble whose effects were exacerbated by government intervention in trade (the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which indirectly crippled farm exports) and the market (the entire New Deal, whose price controls had unintended consequences that rippled through ag markets for generations, as well as land management practices that exacerbated the later Dust Bowl) that kept the Depression going long after it would have healed itself after 1929.

The second was natural – an epic drought.  Either would have been bad enough – and either would have been bearable on its own.  Together, the two sets of circumstances – an unavoidable natural disaster and an avoidable man-made one – combined to create an epic human cataclysm, perhaps the worst in American history other than the Civil War.

Minnesota doesn’t face that exact level of gravity today – but the idea is the same.  Our state faces an epic disaster that’s out of our state government’s direct control – the Great Recession, in whatever form it eventually takes.

And we face the “plan” from one of our candidates for Governor – a man-made disaster that, combined with unavoidable circumstances, will be an epic disaster for Minnesota’s economy.

The Mark Dayton budget plan will, for the Minnesota economy, usher in an epic economic Dust Bowl.

Unlike the Dust Bowl of Steinbeck novels and Guthrie songs, California is sending the problem rather than providing a destination.  The Mark Dayton budget will institutionalize all of the same problems that are gutting the California economy – and that of Greece – right before our eyes.

The media is asking no questions of Mark Dayton about his budget; they’re saving all their energy, apparently, for Emmer’s plan, coming out over the next few weeks.

So it’s up to us.

Starting tomorrow – a long, involved series on Mark Dayton’s “Minnesota Dust Bowl” plan.  I’ll be doing what the media won’t; dissecting the Dayton plan, point by point, piece by piece, and spelling out its impact on you, the citizen.

Load granny on the back of the truck; Shot In The Dark is where all us Okies will be going.

Sheila Corbett Kihne from the excellent blog “Activist Next Door” did something nobody else in the Twin Cities media seems to feel the need to do; she started asking questions about Mark Dayton’s biography:

Mark Dayton’s current website biography reads:

After college, I taught 9th grade general science for two years in a New York City public school. It was the toughest job I’ve ever had!

Sheila thought she’d do a little simple fact-checking, and sent a “Freedom of Information Act” request to the New York Public Schools:

This was my request (in addition to standard template language for a FOI request)

Please email the following records:

confirmation of employment of:

Mark B. Dayton (birthdate 1/26/47) by the New York City Dept of Education/NYC Public Schools

dates of employment (believe them to be approximately July 1969-July 1971)

job title at the time of employment

school of employment

home address during the period of employment

The NYC Dept. of Education came back zilch; Sheila has scanned the NYCDOE’s response.  Follow the link and check it out.

Now, it’s quite possible that Mr. Dayton never took a salary while teaching, however there would still be some record of his employment. Why doesn’t the NYC public schools have any record of Mark Dayton working there when he says he did?

With an insanely left-leaning Minneapolis media establishment– with long-standing ties to the Dayton family– it’s unlikely that any will bother to ask Mark Dayton about it nor likely that this post will make any news.

I’m certain it’s just a bureaucratic snafu.

Perhaps the Dayton campaign could release some sort of documentary evidence to put this to rest?

I have a quick question for the Twin Cities’ leftyblog buildup.

Since gay marriage has emerged, at least for the DFL, as the most important issue in the gubernatorial election – at least as re the perceived record of the GOP’s candidate – I think it’s only fair to ask “why has the DFL been such an utter waste of time when it comes to passing gay marriage?”  If there really is an outcry for gay marriage, then why didn’t the DFL-controlled legislature use their four years of absolute legislative hegemony to push the issue?

Because if there genuinely is popular support for a measure  then there is no such thing as a “wasted vote”.

Here’s how it works; Representative A (DFL – Spike Lake) brings up a gay marriage bill.  Representative B (GOP – Mud Lake) bottles it up in committee and it dies.  DFL candidate C runs for Represenative B’s job, and uses the vote to stir up popular anger at Mr. B, who is turned out of office by the voters who are demanding gay marriage.

In the next session, Representative A and C and fifty other DFLers (and GOPers, scared by the demise of Representative B) pass the bill through the House , and send it to the Senate.  There, Senator D (GOP – Ham Prairie) bottles the bill up in committee.  That fall, GOP candidate E runs against Senator D in the primary, capitalizing on the growing grass-roots realization that gay marriage is what the people want, and gets the endorsement, and wins the vote in Ham Prairie, a reliably GOP district that, like all Minnesotans, really do support gay marriage.

The next session, the House and Senate both pass gay marriage bills.  They are carried to Governor F.  Ms. F vetoes the bill.  In the following gubernatorial election, the popular support for gay marriage sends Governor F. packing; pro-gay marriage former state insurance commissioner G is elected governor. And in his first session, when presented with a gay marriage bill, he signs it, just as he promised in the keynote to his winning campaign.

——–

Is the example above a fanciful hypothetical?  Yes and no.  It was, more or less, how “Concealed Carry” was passed in Minnesota. Pat Pariseau and Linda Boudreaux proposed “Shall Issue” legislation for four or five different sessions (if I remember correctly, and I may well not) before the votes were there to get the victory in 2003.  It wasn’t because they thought they could win every single time – in 1997, they certainly could not.  It was because they knew they wanted the issue in front of the legislature, because the process surrounding the debate would eventually win legislators over (and see to the electoral firing of legislators who opposed the popular measure). And this was in a Legislature that was not controlled by Republicans, much less conservatives.

The MNGOP’s gubernatorial candidate opposes gay marriage. So, by the way, do most Americans, in one form or another; while many support civil unions (myself included), Gay Marriage proposals keep losing in referendum after referendum.

“Why waste the votes?”, one DFL wag asked me when I brought it up once.

I dunno – because if you believe in the rightness of your cause, that’s what you do; if you believe in the democratic process and you believe that the people really do support your cause, then there is no such thing as a “wasted vote”.

The DFL knows this, because while they are fine using gay marriage as a cudgel against conservative politicians to fire up, or shore up, their base, they have spent their last four years of absolute hegemony in the Legislature pushing exactly zero gay marriage legislation to Governor Pawlenty.

“Shall issue” handgun laws survived and grew during at least seven consecutive legislative tests against nominally hostile legislatures.  Why doesn’t gay marriage get even one test in a relentlessly friendly legisature?

I’ve been saying that Michele Bachmann will win re-election in the Sixth Congressional District by eight points.

After seeing Tarryl Clark’s performance in the primaries – getting just under 2/3 of the vote against an opponent that dropped out two months ago – I’m thinking I was too pessimistic.

I’m predicting Bachmann by 10.

Conservative have been claiming for decades that the press is biased toward the left.

It’s hard to look at the Twin Cities’ media’s record of mangled context, selective reporting and generalized ennui this past three months and reach any conclusion other than this; the Twin Cities media has an agenda.

Let’s go over the past few months’ campaign events and the coverage – or lack of it – from the regional mainstream media.

Lies?  What Lies?:  Factcheck.org determined that Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s entire ad campaign is essentially untrue.

Not a word in the Twin Cities media.

Bad For Business: Last week, the Sorosphere began claiming that Target was suffering financially due to its support for Emmer’s campaign.

A simple check of the Dow Jones for that week showed that all mid-to-upper-range retailers had trouble that week, contemporaneously with a bad consumer confidence report.

No Lie Left Challenged: the Entenza campaign tried to make hay over Emmer’s “support for No Child Left Behind”.

Emmer was opposing NCLB before it was cool – not that you’d know it from our media.

The “DUI”s:  The media dutifully reported twice that Tom Emmer had two “DWI” convictions – once in close conjunction with a smear ad from Alliance for a Better Minnesota.  They also ran with ABM’s claims that this was directly connected to Emmer “sponsoring legislation to reduce punishment for drunk drivers”, at the alleged behest of “DWI Defense Attorneys”.

The media couldn’t be bothered to fact-check the story.  The facts are:

• Emmer was never convicted of DUI.  It was “Careless Driving” in both cases.  Emmer openly admits that both cases were alcohol-related; he’s quite publicly taken responsibility for his mistakes which were, let’s recall, 20 and 30 years ago, when Emmer was in his teens and late twenties.
• Emmer’s main piece of legislation was to eliminate prior consent hearings – the civil procedure by which accused drunk drivers get their licenses returned while going through the criminal system on the DWI charge.  These cases add a huge burden to the legal system, especially in the metro area; former Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Judge Magnuson supported the bill, as did groups within the Attorney General’s office.
• Emmer’s other piece would have allowed convicted DWIs to get some of their rights back after ten years of good behavior.  Neither bill would have “lessened punishments” in any way.
• The “DWI Defense attorneys” were also prosecutors, who also did personal injury and wrongful death litigation against convicted drunk drivers.  Nobody in the Twin Cities media could be bothered to note that the claim was absurd; a DWI defense attorney should want stricter penalties, which would generate more markets for their services!

“The Corrosive Effect of Money in Politics”: In mid-July, I posted some findings from research into campaign finance records that showed that the Alliance for a Better Minnesota was largely funded by a PAC called “Win Minnesota” – which, in turn, was largely funded by contributions from the Dayton family, and especially Dayton’s ex-wife Alida Messinger, an heir to the Rockefeller fortune.

This happened about a week before the Target flap – at which point the narrative turned to hand-wringing about the corrosive effect of (corporate) money in politics.

Although MPR’s Tom Scheck noted the findings obliquely at the time, and WCCO’s Pat Kessler ran a story on the subject this past week, the mainstream media in the Twin Cities has been largely uninterested.

Perhaps they’re too busy reporting on Target to note that Alida Messinger alone has given three times more money than Target, and almost as much as the entire MNForward PAC.

ABM’s Lies: By early July, the Alliance for a Better Minnesota was kicking its epic ad buy into high gear.  Their first rounds of ads was found to be almost completely devoid of fact – although that apparently never rated a mention in the regional media.

Emmer’s Legal Record – Or At Least The Parts Of It That Make Good Smear Material:  On June 28, the Strib’s Pat Doyle ran a piece about a few episodes from Tom Emmer’s legal past; an office manager what swindled Emmer’s law firm, a suit over a disputed car crash (which Emmer won), another in which Emmer had been injured, and a suit against a landscaper.

Doyle’s “reporting” was notable for the meticulousness with which it omitted any shred of information from the record that might have portrayed Emmer as anything but a heartless pushy bully.   Nobody in the Twin Cities’ media reported that…:

• ….the office manager, who took a plea deal that involved an apology and restitution to Emmer in exchange for not being prosecuted for much more serious charges, violated the terms of her plea bargain by talking to Doyle.
• That the legal wrangling in Emmer’s accident litigation was the norm rather than the exception
• That the landscaper who sued Emmer only did so because he had no case against Jacquie Emmer, and tried to sue Tom Emmer under a novel and ultimately specious theory that Emmer had “unjustly enriched” himself – in a suit that was thrown out with prejudice, with the judge requiring the landscaper to pay Emmer’s legal bills; the case had no merit whatsoever, although neither the Strib nor any other Twin Cities media outlet apparently felt the need to set the story straight.

The Detailed Plan – For a brief few weeks in June, the media and chattering classes asked almost as one “where is Emmer’s plan?” This, of course, without asking the same of any of the Democrats, whose primary race was just starting to (ahem) “heat up”.

Oddly, this would have been right during the planning phase for Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s biggest-in-history smear campaign against Emmer;  I’ll speculate that someone was trolling for material.

“He Wants To Cut How Much?”:  Much of the Twin Cities media and the leftyblog chatterbots beneath them ran with the “story” that Emmer said he’d cut the state budget by 30%.

This was, of course, based on a brief “mis-speak” during a live radio interview, which Emmer corrected immediately. This, however, remained largely unreported.

Nonetheless, radio spots for Matt Entenza after last week were still claiming that “Emmer would cut the budget a devastating 30%!”.  Perhaps nobody cares because Entenza was DOA from week one – but one needs to ask “do facts matter at all?”

“Emmer Hates Gays”:  The crux of the meme that the Dayton campaign has used to nationalize the governor’s race is the fallacy that “Emmer is rabidly anti-gay” – based on his support for a gay marriage amendment supported by a majority of Minnesotans, and I suspect a majority of legislators on both sides of the aisle – and his alleged “support” of punkdamentalist preacher Bradlee Dean and his controversial “You Can Run But You Can Not Hide” street ministry.

Nobody in the Twin Cities media bothered to fact-check the claim at the root of this meme – a story by Andy Birkey at the Soros-bankrolled Minnesota “Independent” that, a cursory examination by an amateur hobby hack showed, was built on clumsily-mangled context and some circumstantial gossip fodder.

“Local Government Aid Cuts Are Destroying Minnesota!”:  When Alliance for a Better Minnesota launched a campaign claiming that Governor Pawlenty’s cuts to Local Government Aid had caused huge problems, nobody in the Twin Cities media seemed to have the time to fact-check the claims.  It took a lowly blogger not one, not two, not three, not four, but five articles to do the sort of fact-checking that we ostensibly have a regional media that gets paid to do fulltime.

“Uncertified Teachers“:  One of the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s first claims was that Tom Emmer favors “uncertified teachers”.

A fairly detemined search didn’t show that any regional media fact-checked this story which,  of course, was a lie – Emmer favors alternative licensing, so that we can actually get enough teachers in fields like science and math where our humanities-glutted Educational-Industrial Complex isn’t producing enough candidates.

“Extreme“:  The left’s chanting point from the very beginning was that “Emmer is Extreme”.

To Rachel Stassen-Berger’s credit, she did report that Emmer’s record, at least on a range of key selected issues, is a virtual mirror of that of Margaret Anderson-Kelliher – who, Kelliher reminded us in the debate, is more centrist than Dayton.

The Big Green Stiff: Right after the convention, the DFL candidates gathered to hold a “Green Issues Summit”.  Dayton and Entenza gamboled about the fact that Emmer never showed up at the event-  which the media duly carried.

Unreported:  That Emmer had quite publicly declined to attend because it was his youngest child’s first communion.

Speed Gibson has probably the best summary I’ve seen of the DFL’s endorsed slate in the primaries tomorrow.

Granted, Speed’s a conservative – but even with that understood, he’s not impressed:

In a game of poker looking at these five jokers, I’d draw five.

Margaret Anderson Kelliher (Governor):  “Margaret” as she seems to be calling herself now is just plain inauthentic.  She certainly didn’t learn her big city liberal values from that farm upbringing she keeps mentioning and that’s the point.  She doesn’t want us to think she’s a big city liberal.  Neither does Matt Entenza, whose campaign is following the same theme, poor boy from Worthington.  Mark Dayton is also a big city liberal, but at least he doesn’t deny it, in fact, doubling down by promising the largest tax increase by far of these three Primary contenders.

Finally – a pundit who correctly uses the phrase “doubling down”!

Dayton has two other advantages, family money and superior political skills.  Margaret is a big city liberal, but not quite yet at least, a big city liberal politician as she’ll likely find out this Tuesday.

John Gunyou (Lt. Governor): You’ve met this type of individual many times I bet even if you haven’t met Mr. Gunyou or seen his presentations as I have.  These people make lists of problems, then sit back and wait for you to solve them.

No kidding.  Watching John Gunyou talk reminded me of watching former Saint Paul mayor Jim Scheibel, after he’d left office to become a “housing advocate”.  I sat for half an hour watching him speak; his message was “the poor need attractive, comfortable housing near mass transit”; when asked “Um, how do we afford it?”, his response was basically “If you care, you’ll figure it out”.  The audience cared deeply enougn, naturally, to universally endorse spending other peoples’ money on it.

Mark Ritchie (Secretary of State): In just one term, Mr. Ritchie has undone this office’s sterling national reputation built by Joan Growe (1975-1999) and Mary Kiffmeyer (1999-2007).  He was soon caught lying about misuse of his office’s resources, then went on to be materially involved in swaying a tight election toward now Senator Al Franken.  Mind you, former Senator Norm Coleman deserves full blame for losing this election.  It shouldn’t have been this close against an arrogant buffoon like Franken.  But most damning for Mark Ritchie is that he has done absolutely nothing since then to tighten up the many lapses and inconsistencies that left many on both sides concerned about our state’s ability to run fair elections going forward.

The next liberal hamster who chants “our electoral system is the best in the nation” is going to wish they hadn’t.

Rebecca Otto (State Auditor): Let me put it this way: if Rebecca Otto can competently perform these duties, the office should be abolished.

Hah!

Lori Swanson (State Attorney General): The sudden opening with then incumbent Mike Hatch running for Governor in 2006 probably thrust the decision to run upon Lori Swanson sooner than she wanted and it has certainly showed these past 3+ years.  The staff was unhappy day one.  She had to bring Hatch back initially because she so obviously couldn’t handle the job initially.  Those things have settled down, but she remains a Hatch clone who envisions her office as primarily consumer protection bureau.  It’s easier work and you get to fawn before the media, right or wrong.

I used to think our DFL constitutional officers were underachievers.  I was wrong, of course; they were just overpromoted.

This is the weakest slate of state office candidates the DFL has put up that I can remember, all of them people who can’t or won’t competently do those jobs.  I’ll include Dayton and Entenza when I further clarify that raising taxes in this economy alone is job-killing inc

Wednesday morning is going to be Day One of the golden age of Minnesota conservative blogging.

…I’ll be on AM1100 The Flag with Rob Port at 6:35 or so to talk about the Governor’s race.

You can listen in here:
Live video by Ustream

There’s nothing a tyrant hates worse than an apostate.

When the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – a radical fascist and anti-semite who hob-nobbed with Hitler and rooted for the Final Solution – first started agitating against Jewish immigration to “Palestine” before World War 2, he turned his goons loose on…

…moderate Arabs.  Not the Jews.  Because like tinpot tyrants the world over, the Grand Mufti knew that while virtually none of his people were going to convert to Judaism, plenty would be perfectly happy to seek accomodation with them; radicalism had to be made safer than peace, to keep his base in line behind him.

And tyrants, petty and otherwise, the world over have repeated the pattern; Lenin killed the Socialists and Mensheviks to consolidate his power before going after the Czarists.  Franco killed the moderates and accomodationists, as did his communist opponents.

I’m not going to say that the DFL and its friends at the various PACs – Alliance for a Better Minnesota and so on – are in that league.  Perish the thought.

Over the past week or two, the regional and, now, national left have been in high dudgeon over Target’s donation of $150,000 to MNForward, a political action committee that seeks to send gays to re-orientation camps in Colorado.

{scrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatch}

Wait.  That can’t be right.  Let me look…

Whew.  OK, I had that wrong.  MNForward is a pro business PAC.

But you’d never know it from the left’s response to Target’s donation of $150,000 to MNForward, a Political Action Committee whose entire focus is on business, and the notion that a DFL governor would be a disaster for Minnesota businesses already suffering from a lagging economy and among the highest corporate taxes in the nation.

Of course, Target is far from the only company giving money to MNForward.  Best Buy and Hubbard Broadcasting (both former employers of mine), Polaris, Davisco, Red Wing Shoes, Regis (whose founder, Myron Kunin, gave $5K to “Win Minnesota”, which is the money-laundering cutoff for “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”), Securian, Pentair, Federated Insurance, the Insurance Federation of Minnesota, and Cold Spring Granite have so far ponied up something around $900,000, which is a few bucks more than the Daytons and Alida Messinger have contributed all by themselves, and less than half than what they, their plutocrat cronies, and their union supporters have given to A4aBM and “Win Minnesota” alone, so far in this race (and sources tell me A4aBM will eventually spend ten million, mostly in Dayton and union money, this cycle).  That’s less than a quarter of what Matt Entenza has spent so far, most of it attacking Emmer.

Of course, Hubbard Broadcasting is the #4 TV station in a four station market; they’re so desperate for ratings, they’ve begun experimenting with the radical notion of not appearing relentlessly left-of-center – the experiment is only partial, and the jury is still out.  Polaris and RedWing pretty much serve blue-collar clienteles; you don’t find a lot of urban “progressives” on snowmobiles or wearing steel-t0ed work boots.  Most people have no idea food processor Davisco exists, but they’re rural and thus off the radar for the urban progressives.  And most people can get a vague idea from their titles what Securian, Federated, Cold Spring and IFM do – but none of them are linked with “progressive” ideas or, to most people, any ideas at all.  (I know what Pentair does, but the odds are pretty good you don’t…)

But Target, and to a lesser extent Best Buy?  In addition to immense charitable giving to a very eclectic array of community groups and schools (Target in Minnesota’s leading corporate charitable donor, and their money helps support dozens of public, charter and alternative schools), both led the way on “diversity” in the Twin Cities.  They are widely regarded as “progressive’ companies, and both have long put their money where their corporate mouths were when it came to acting “progressive”.  Both actively worked to support GLBT employees; I knew not a few gay managers at Best Buy, and their orientation seemed not to harm their careers in the least; I’ve never worked for Target, but friends who have tell me it’s at the very least the same.  And that’s a good thing – because both companies led the way in recognizing that a person’s orientation has nothing to do with his or her productivity, talent or merit.

So what happens when a “progressive” company donates to a candidate that dissents from the economic policies of the party that has tried to seize the word “progressive?”

They’re seen as apostates – “traitors”.  And Big Progressive – that combination of Big DFL, Big Labor, Big Gay, Big Open Border, Big Academia and so forth – know that they must destroy apostates.

So A4aBM and its cronies in the “Human Rights Coalition” – a Big Gay group – have spent the past week painting Target, that most progressive of companies in that most progressive of places, Minneapolis – as “anti-gay”.  Because of a contribution to help Minnesota’s business climate, supporting a candidate who Big Progressive wants – needs – to paint as “anti-gay”.

(Is Emmer “anti-gay”?  He’s been on record supporting traditional marriage amendments; he’s also said on the Northern Alliance that it’s really a side issue for the governor – as it in fact is.  Is supporting traditional marriage “hate”?  Is it “rabidly anti-gay”, as a gay co-worker of mind called it?  I think it devalues the term “hate”, but as PJ O’Rourke said, I’m not a liberal, so I’m not an expert at stuff I know nothing about…)

And so Target and Best Buy, the “apostate” “progressives”, must be destroyed, while the Polarises and the Hubbards and the Securians and Pentairs get left alone; no “progressive” is ever going to start doubting the mother faith because a snowmobile manufacturer or a rural food processor or a granite company supports Tom Emmer.

But “progressive” Target and Best Buy?  That’s a threat.

And so the thoughtcrime must be punished.

I’ll be on AM1100 The Flag with Rob Port at 6:35 to talk about the Governor’s race.

You can listen in here:
Streaming live video by Ustream

A:  Their fingers are moving over a keyboard.

The Dayton-family-funded attack-PAC ran this on Twitter last night – and, as with most lefty memes, when you see it one place, you see it everywhere:

.@TomEmmer says he never sponsored a law to lessen penalties for DWIs… Here’s his signature: http://twitpic.com/29rwsk #stribpol #mn2010

Um, no.  He didn’t vote to “lessen penalties”.  He voted to allow convicted drunk drivers to get some of their rights back after ten years’ good behavior, and voted for a provision that would allow accused drunk driver the radical right to be considered innocent until proven guilty.

Alliance for a Better Minnesota has no shame – but we should all be ashamed of them anyway.

I saw this bit on CBS News yesterday – entitled “Target Boycott Movement Grows Following Donation to Support “Antigay” Candidate” – and I thought “Wow.  Sounds like there’s a wave of spontaneous anti-Target fervor out there!”

Then I – or “we”, actually – looked a little deeper.

The piece – featuring someone named “Roadie Roaring” or “Rudy Rattan” or something’; the woman’s diction is less-than-ideal – shows her walking into a Target, exchanging a bunch of goods, and demanding that her Target card be cut up.

It’s presented as if it were a spontaneous bit of reportage.  Look at it, you be the judge.

We’ll come back to Ronnie Roller in a bit.

With about three seconds to go in the piece, it notes that it was “Produced for the Uptake by Bill Sorem”.  I got an email from someone who follows these things:

Bill Sorem has records on Mn Campaign finance of giving a couple hundred bucks to the SD42 DFL (which includes Eden Prairie, the city where the faux boycott took place), and a $2300 contribution to The Obamanation.  So…a known DFL supporter just accidentally has his video camera and tapes this bit of faux news that is designed to threaten businesses into not contributing to causes that might benefit GOP candidates, helping his DFL party.
 
But of course, Bill has no unclean motives….NOOOOOOOOOO!

So – Bill Sorem just may not have  been a random passerby with a camera. 

The Uptake, by the way, is a left-leaning “citizen journalism” videoblog that spent the last year trying to convince the Legislature that they were a “news” organization worthy of credentials to cover the Legislature.  Now, they are participating in an attack ad run by “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”. 

So who is “Roofie Raygun?”

Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring emails me:

Phil said that Rondy Raiton “sounds strangely similar to Randi Reitan, a gay activist mother who frequently is on the op ed page of the Strib.”
 
I googled Randy Reitan & clicked on her images page. BINGO!!! So much for this being a chance happening. Rest assured that I’ll be posting about this this afternoon.

So when you google Randi Reitan, you get – voila!  The picture of someone who is not only not just some random Target customer, but in fact is someone who is relishing her fifteen minutes in the spotlight.

A skim through the Federal Electi0ns Commission database shows that Mrs. Reitan has given over $10,000 to various Democratic candidates over the past decade or so (Patty Wetterling in ’04 and 05, Tim Walz, Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenberg, several to the DFL, a bundle to America Coming Together, a grand to Al Franken, a thou for Paul Wellstone, and much, much more.  Plus another $300 to Mark Ritchie and $200 to the House DFL Caucus, according to the MN Campaign Finance board.

And her husband Phil?   Around $4,000 more.  Son, Jacob?  Another thou and change.

At the beginning, where Mrs. Reitan introduces herself, perhaps it would have been helpful and honest if she’d called herself “a mother, grandmother, and DFL uber-activist“.  Just saying.

So to summarize:  Alliance for a Better Minnesota (and CBS News) want us to swallow the following:

That Bill Sorem Just Happened To Videotape A Random Outraged Customer:  It’s hard to say if the producer wanted this event to look like a candid camera incident; it certainly looks staged.  But it was presented by the Uptake, by A4aBM, and by CBS as an organic, grassroots, random protest against Tom Emmer and against Target’s donation to the “MNForward” PAC, which supports Emmer in the gubernatorial election.  This is bad journalism.

That The Uptake Is Anything But An Arm Of The DFL: After participating in an ABM attack campaign – which, as we noted two weeks ago, is funded by unions and, mostly, Mark Dayton and his relatiives – future protestations of being “journalists” should be taken with a large block of salt.

Long story short; the Uptake is staging the news for the ABM’s, and the DFL’s, benefit.

This is not journalism.

UPDATE:  Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring does some more checking on Randi “Random Customer” Reitan.

UPDATE 2: An emailer writes:

Let’s see if I have this straight (pardon the pun):
 
Some little old granny, after seeing Target giving money to a group that supports Tom Emmer, who might not support gay marriage, goes down to her local Target store, where she just happens to run into an Uptake ‘reporter’, who just happened to have his video equipment on hand to witness the events that transpired.
 
Of course, there is no “CONTEXT” to the event.  What you don’t see:
 
#1  “Granny”, her husband, and her gay son have given well over $10,000 to DFL causes over the years.  $0 to GOP
 
#2   The gay son founded “Equality Ride”  http://www.soulforce.org/article/1024  which spreads the message:  “to empower young activists and challenge the unfair school policies that discriminate against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students.” [We’ve covered SoulForce’s odd mission here]
 
#3   The husband of “Granny” is on the Board of “Soulforce”  http://www.soulforce.org/article/891  whose Vision Statement is:  “We seek freedom from religious and political oppression for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning people.”
 
Nope. “Granny” has no bias…no vested interest…no hidden motives.  She just happened to bump into the guy with the camera at Target.

It would have been different, to an extent, had Reitan not gone to such pains to set herself up as just another woman off the street – “a mother and grandmother” – in the setup.  But she did!

Why?

And why would “journalists” like the Uptake misrepresent a staged shoot as “news?”

We get it – the “elite” of the regional left has the victorian vapours that some “Tenthers” would suggest that local pre-emption of federal laws, to say nothing of secession, might be legitimate manifestations of popular revulsion at government overreach.

So – does DFLer Matt Entenza’s plan to “get rid of No Child Left Behind” – a federal program – mean that he is the moral equal of a slave-owner?

It gets hard to follow these people.

(Note:  I oppose NCLB too – but not the same reasons Entenza does.  The teachers unions hate NCLB because it holds them accountable for their failures; I oppose it because, among other things, it holds them accountable for the wrong things)

I’ve often wondered how senior citizens pay our various cities’ rampant and always-rising property taxes on fixed incomes.

The House DFL doesn’t!

May 5, 2008 – the House was debating HF3149, regarding property tax reform.  Laura Brod proposed an amendment that would have had the state refund a portion of a property owner’s property taxes, provided he/she was eligible for property tax relief, on a sliding scale depending on their (low, low) income.  The end result – a person would pay no more than 5% of their income in property taxes.

The amendment came to a vote (see page 11323).  Tom Emmer (and Brod, naturally) voted to help struggling property owners.

Margaret Anderson Kelliher voted against it, along with most of the DFL; the amendment failed 71-58.

Later in the day, Brod offered a similar amendment, limiting the refunds to people over 65 (scroll down to page 11325)

Emmer and Brod voted for it.  Kelliher voted against it.

Apparently she’d rather get publicity for talking about capping property taxes than actually do ot.

I suppose that DFLers voting against squeezing revenue out of people would be a little like vampires voting agianst free blood.

As we Republicans look at yet another year of selective reporting and overt bias in action (who needs Journolist in a media hive like the Twin Cities?), it’s important to remember that that are those who believe the media is conservative.

It’s Eric Pusey from MN “Progressive” Project:

I found it interesting that the editors of the Star Tribune thought that the employment statuses of the MN-02 DFL candidates running against Rep. John Kline were newsworthy while a national story about Rep. Michele Bachmann wasn’t.

Let’s look at the allegations:

The essence of the story is that Dan Powers (DFL-endorsed) was a contractor and collected unemployment while Shelley Madore’s contract wasn’t renewed.  Eric Roper and the editors of the Strib think something is fishy.  They consider this more newsworthy than Bachmann stating “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another” if Republicans regain the House and “we don’t have to fund any of these programs and that’s exactly what we need to do – defund all of this nonsense and then unwind it.”

So let’s look at this from the perspective of an editor:

News: Two congressional candidates have financial irregularities (provided that they’re not Obama cabinet nominees).

Not News: Michele Bachmann says something that gets liberals exercised, but is really no different from a zillion other such incidents.

What is also interesting about the Strib’s political coverage is that they very rarely (verging on never) cover Kline.  The latest news (1 week old) is that Kline opposed funding child nutritional programs with the following hypocritical excuse:

“The debt crisis is the greatest national security threat we face,” ranking Republican John Kline of Minnesota said. “The cost of this legislation cannot be ignored.”

If the Strib did cover this story about Kline’s vote, what do you think the chances are the someone like Roper would note that Kline supported the Bush agenda of tax cuts and borrowing to pay for two wars?

News: Er, Kline voted against a bill?   No, the only news here is that the word “hypocritical” has been devalued to the point of meaninglessness; hypocrisy is holding someone to a moral standard to which you yourself are not willing to adhere.   Think John Kline is inconsistent on deficit spending?

Not News: Kline voted with the Bush Administration – while the Bush administration was in office.  Two to eight years ago.

Charlie Quimby accepts State Auditor Rebecca Otto’s explanation about her expense reporting (my jury is still out) – and skips from that to “showing” how the GOP really isn’t the party of business.

(Whereas the party of top-five-in-nation corporate taxes, “tax the working rich”, and the $20K/year minimum wage, apparently, is…)

Go over and read it if you like.

But I’ll take things to the next level.  Let’s move the debate out of hooting about numbers and name-calling, and focus on the issues.

Let’s start with Rebecca Otto’s record in office.  Let’s start with all of her accomplishments in her four years as State Auditor.

For starters…

…er…

…um…

(scratches head)

Love the rain, doncha….

…OH, I got it!  She filed an amicus brief in support of McDonald…

…no, that was Attorney-General Swanson.  OK…

…um…

 …gosh, I’m kinda…

…OK.  Perhaps we need to go back to namecalling.

(In the interest of fairness:  If, indeed, Rebecca Otto did not, in fact, overbill for her on-the-road per diems, she can use “Otto For Auditor:  She Didn’t Really Overcharge You!” as a campaign slogan.  Uninspiring, but really, the best thing she’s got so far).

Mark Dayton (via his “surrogates”) spent a million dollars on advertising and trumping up a phony controversy over the past month – and got bupkes for it:

According to the latest FOX News-Rasmussen Poll , Mark Dayton would beat Republican Tom Emmer 40 to 36 percent, with the Independence Party candidate Tom Horner [dropping to] 10 percent.

Now, there’s a lesson in this for all of us; be careful of what you wish for.  For years, I wished that U of M Professor Larry Jacobs weren’t the most overquoted person in the Twin Cities media.  And in response, we get Hamline University …

Political analyst David Schultz said it looked like Emmer was clearly ahead back in May. He believes two things have changed. He believes the democrats are now better known than a few months ago and Emmer’s recent dispute with waiters and waitresses didn’t help.

Mr. Schultz; in May, Emmer had his post-convention bounce.  And yes, generally having concurrent advertising blitzes for a month while Emmer didn’t run ads (til the past few days) will mean the Dems are “better known”.  Of course, having the DFL-leaning media engineer two straight hit jobs – Pat Doyle’s squib and the waiter bit – will bring out the negatives; that’s what they were designed to do.

Let’s put the facts in order here.

Rebecca Otto, one of the nastiest little people in Minnesota politics,  defeated Pat Anderson, one of the most proactive and competent state auditors this state has ever had, in 2006, partly on a promise to “make sure rules are followed”, but mostly on a wave of anti-incumbent fervor that swept out all the GOP constitutional officers except the Governor and Lieutentant Governor.

She then proceeded to do a very spotty job of auditing, but did manage to spend money like a sailor on leave.

She did, however, get very pissy when people tried to hold her accountable for her office’s counterintuitively spendthrift ways.

“State Auditor Rebecca Otto’s re-election campaign this morning accused the Minnesota GOP Party of making ‘sweeping’ data requests in search of information to smear her campaign. She said the state GOP and an aligned group are using the Minnesota Public Data Practices Act to make ‘open ended, burdensome data requests of at least one constitutional office on the taxpayers’ dime.’”  (Charley Shaw, “Otto accuses Minnesota GOP Party of ‘burdensome’ public data request.” Legal Ledger, June 30, 2010)

Not that there was any doubt I was voting to return Pat Anderson to the Auditor’s office this fall, I realize – but seriously, Otto’s regime at the Auditor’s office almost reads like a parody.

Read the MDE story.

“Anoka County Conservative Examiner”, writing at Examiner.com, does a detailed takedown of Dayton and Kelliher’s “plans” for the economy.

The whole things is essential; go and read it, please.   I could pullquote nearly every paragraph, and maybe sometime soon here I will.

But I cut to the conclusion:

Looking back at the chart showing the most productive companies in Minnesota, how would [Dayton and Kelliher’s] policies help prosper Minnesota business? Another proposal by Dayton is to enforce preference to Women-owned, Minority-owned, and Veteran-owned businesses. Why would a special preference be needed and implemented, when organizations should be judged on performance of the free market economy? Creating additional bureaucracy with the forced “Star Cities for Economic Development” program where mayors, city councils, chambers of commerce, and other civic leaders would be forced “in their efforts to attract new and expanding businesses in their communities.”

That’s the way to prosperity; force people to prosper!

     According to the Minnesota Progressive Project,” Minnesota Republican Gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer and his fellow Republicans have one real goal with our economy, which is to “Reduce salaries so that corporations can make larger profits. I call this the Wal-Martization of our economy”. It would seem reasonable to argue that this particular blogger has failed to use critical thinking.

Perhaps ACCE has never dealt with MPP before. 

Here’s the big finish:

     Dayton and Kelliher have failed to add new insight or substantive ideas to fix the Minnesota economy; in fact, their ideas have nothing to do with how a basic business model functions, and may further harm the Minnesota economy with more dysfunction.

I already said “go read the whole thing”.  Don’t make me beg.

A few weeks back, Tom Emmer appeared on MPR’s “Mid-Morning with Keri Miller”.

Now, while I have credited MPR’s Newsroom with making a game attempt at providing balance, MPR’s programming is pretty much a pro-DFL morass.  Miller is less overtly a DFL flak than her predecessor, future former “Air America” prop Catherine Lanpher, but only barely.

Her interview with Emmer should have been an embarassment.    Tough questioning is one thing – and a good thing! – but Miller’s stock questions were accompanied with condescention, badgering and hectoring.

So all three DFLers are going to be on Miller’s show today.  Think Miller will be as concerned about specifics as she was with Emmer?

Think we’ll see questions like “Mr. Dayton, if we end state contracting, will we just stop doing the work, or will the work go to more-expensive unionized state employees?”, or “let’s say you tax “the rich” at confiscatory rates; how much of that five billion deficit your DFL caucus ran up; how much of the deficit will it kill off?  Be specific!”  “Mr. Entenza, you talk a lot about “Green Jobs” – but the record of “Green Jobs” in the US at large and in Spain has been dismal at best.   How is your plan not doomed?”  “Speaker Kelliher – so get specific here;  your “plan” makes a lot of vague blandishments about squeezing money out of people; how exactly do you close the deficit and spend as much as you’ve promised?’

How often will Miller sharply, mockingly purr “That won’t save much!”?

Any bets?

And when, not if, the DFLers squeeze by without any serious challenge, will Erik Black sniff about how vague they all were?

I’ll be an interesting day.

Do I envy people in places like the Second District, where John Kline will win by forty points over whatever hapless stooge the DFL puts forth this November?

Or even the Sixth, where Michele Bachmann will endure a full court press from the national (also local) Democraticicicic party to win by (I predict) eight this fall?

Heck – I envy people who live in districts with functioning two-party systems.

I do not live in a place with a functioning two-party system, of course.  I live in Saint Paul; Ramsey County; the Fourth Congressional District.  The place is controlled with Cominternish efficiency by the DFL; so much of city and county is either employed by or dependent on the government, its unions, its contractors and its social welfare that it really is a company town.

And so we are “represented” by Betty McCollum.

I have in the past said things about Rep. McCollum that have been less than flattering; “the dumbest person in Congress” and that sort of thing. And as I’ve attacked that sort of ad-hominem when directed against conservative women (although, to be fair to me, ad-hominem is the first and largely only tactic most liberals have against conservative women), it’d be disingenuous of me to do it myself.  So I won’t.

I’ll just let you listen to the person who “represents” me yourself :

She’s right in the thick of the BP disaster, doncha know:

“We need to be doing due diligence so that the taxpayer isn’t cleaning up British Petroleum’s mess, and we don’t have more job loss, more environmental loss in the Gulf that goes un-cleaned up…”

Ah.  So BettyMac opposes the Administration’s various demands for moritoriums on drilling, then?

On the economy, Esme Murphy – who isn’t a DFL hack in the sense that Lori Sturdevant is, but whose sympathies seem generally pretty clear – asks about the economy.  I’m not going to “fisk” McCollum – address each point in line – but rather let the full trascribed glory of her oratory stand on its own and answer each point afterward:

Murphy:  There’s been some criticism from Republicans that the recovery isn’t enough, and what the president has done with the stimulus package, while it did make some improvements in thers of the economy, it’s pust us in the position of a trillion dollar deficit.   Your thoughts about whether or not there needs to be second wave of stimulus spending.”

McCollum:  “Well first, the defiict was caused by the un-paid-for Bush Tax Cuts, by two wars, both Afghanistan and Iraq, being put on a credit card with no shared responsibility for the American public to pay for the wars, as our servicemen and women have given their all and maxde huge sacrifices . So that’s the big bulk we inherited that mess. and then you add the Wall Street crisis, being unregulated for all those years, andt the failure of our financial institutions to protect consumers investments and peoples retirements and the rest.  So if you look at that, that is the big part of our debt.

Now what do we do in the meantime?  Well, stimulus, finunding to keep Americans working and keep the economy moving forward and create confidence is what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was about, that’s what I voted for, and we’re going to see some big things happening for instance in Saint Paulfor example with Central Corridor being the largest work project in the state of Minnesota , with state and local and government funding, investing in our community um so I’m very pleased that people’re going to see more of those projects moving forward  there’s a lot of the traffic inconvenience we’re all suffering, our investments make putting Minnesotans to work through the recovery act and um I’m not gonna be apologetic for making sure that americans have a chance get up annd go to work in the morning peole in Minnesota do, there’s still too many people without jobs.

Rep. McCollum:

1. I wasn’t aware that FDR fought World War II on a cash and carry basis!  Oh, wait – he didn’t.  In the interest of national security, he ran a deficit, like Wilson and Lincoln before him, during wartime.  Of course, FDR institutionalized deficit spending for peacetime “emergencies”, although it was LBJ that made it a regular feature of peacetime life.  But you didn’t know that, Rep. McCollum.  Did you?  Be honest.
2. Well, thanks for noting the troops’ sacrifice (although never, ever their achievements).  Now – how many more would have died had the US followed your spectacularly uninformed advice in Iraq?
3. No, Rep. McCollum; leaving the financial sector “unregulated” (by, for instance, compelling them to make sub-prime loans and then subsidizing the lending) did not cause the debt or the deficit; believing that any financial institution is “too big to fail”, and then subsidizing the non-failure, and finally pretending that “stimulus” subsidies and rampant socialization and higher spending can revive an economy (even ignoring the higher taxes to pay for it all) is doing it.  Thanks for nothing.
4. The Central Corridor is “putting people to work”, all right – your union constituents, anyway.  Not so much all the little businesspeople up and down the street.  But they’re non-union, so they don’t count, do they?

Murphy on the potential Dem losses this fall, asking how many Bettymac thinks Dems will lose:

Well, I don’t have a crystal ball in front of me, I don’t know what’s going to happen, I’m working really hard for my seat, I take nothing for granted, I’m out doorknocking, visiting with condsitutients and heaging the direction they wan tot see the country go in, and what I’m hearing is that they don’t want to go backwards, they don’t want to  to the failed policies uh that got us in this economic jam we’re in, that got us in the  war we’re in in Iraq unjustifiably, they want to see our country moving forward. So what Democrats have to do here and nationally is talk about how we’re still on a road to recovery, we have a plan to put America first, to make America competitive, to educate our children to be the best and brightest in the world, and the voters will judge us on those  messages.  I’ve heard nothing from our colleagues about going forward, it’s all about going back,  repealing health care, going back and putting the Bush tax cuts in place and we need to be moving forward, not backward.

Rep. McCollum:

1. Since you’re working so hard for that seat of yours, perhaps you can take me up on my two-year-old invitation to come on the Northern Alliance Radio Network to defend all your claims?
2. You have a “plan” to “put America first?”  Really?  Excellent!  Let’s see it!
3. You have a plan to educate our children to be the best and the brightest?  Wow!  So since the Minnesota Federation of Teachers and Education Minnesota are two of your biggest supporters, by all means tell us – why they haven’t been doing that all along?

Listen.  And compare her to the smart, articulate Teresa Collett (whom Ed and I interviewed last Saturday – after the halfway point of this hour), running her underdog battle against McCollum in the Fourth.

It’s what “moving forward” really sounds like.

(Gary at LFR pointed the appearance out out to me, and hammers it too)