Lori Sturdevant, Strib columnist and unofficial DFL public relations writer, is doing her job: leading the DFL’s counterspin effort after their perceived defeat on the budget and unallotment battle.

No – of course the budget battle was never about making sure that no matter how tough times get for Minnesotans, government never wants for a single thing.

Nooooooo.  It was about jobs for all the rest of you!

Déjà vu hit me in the corridor outside the governor’s office Tuesday, as my compatriots pressed Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak for an “ain’t it awful” quote about Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s plan to yank another $200 million away from Minnesota cities…He kept pounding: Pawlenty’s unallotment will eliminate “a dramatic number” of Minnesota jobs. It is “a one-time fix that doesn’t create jobs.” The city of Minneapolis has had a better record of creating jobs in the last eight years than the governor has had for the state.

What an incredibly dishonest statement; Minnesota as a whole was in a recession eight years ago, and is in one today, and in between spent some time with among the lowest unemployment rates in the country.  If Minneapolis did “better”, it’s because of a statistical technicality.

Does Sturdevant know this?  Who knows? But nothing – not even a complete rewrite of history – is going to stand in her way:

Jobs, jobs, jobs. Shades of 1981-82.

Minnesota was mired in what was the biggest post-World War II recession until the current one came along. Every story out of the State Capitol contained bad news. Schools laid off teachers, college tuition climbed, cities cut library hours and parks programs, taxes rose. Beleaguered lawmakers would barely catch their breath before red ink returned, and they’d have to cut again. It was dispiriting business.

Then in April 1982, back from four years of political exile in Vienna came a talkative former governor who said Minnesota could do a lot more to create jobs.

As Rudy Perpich sold that idea, the gloom began to lift. People didn’t know whether Perpich’s ideas would work. But they wanted to believe that state government could be an aid, not a hindrance, to the climb out of recession. Instead of seeing state government as sick and prone to inflicting its misery on its citizens, people began to think that under the right governor, state government could be part of the cure.

That hopeful idea returned Perpich to office in 1982. And whether or not his pro-jobs policies did the trick, they coincided with one of Minnesota’s best economic interludes in the 20th century.

Perpich had also presided onver one of Minnesota’s worst interludes – the mid-seventies.  Hm.  What could have been different between the two terms?

What happened in national politics, and with the national economy, along about the end of Perpich’s ’82-86 term?   What rising tide lifted all the little socialistic boats, including Perpich and Sturdevant’s?

Chew on that for a while, Lori.

It might be that the DFLers who want to replace Pawlenty are channeling the thinking of the last DFLer to serve in the Capitol’s southwest corner office.

What?  “Elect a tax-and-spend hamster who emanates goofy cheer, and pray the national economy picks up?”

As prediced: Govenor Pawlenty is going to unallot the budget to balance it – and the Dems are going to cry that police and fire protection will be chopped (even though they’re a small fraction of most city’s budgets). 

Speed Gibson is onto the scam:

Even on the normally more reliable KSTP-TV, yes the sky will be falling from police cutbacks, closed libraries, neglected parks, and of course, unavoidable property tax increases. All from the loss of a very small cuts in Local Government Aid (LGA).

“I don’t need any lecture from Tim Pawlenty on how to run a budget,” says Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak. Yes, you do, Your Honor. Police protection, your number one obligation, is less than 10 percent of your budget. The Fire Department costs less than half of that. To even hint at cutbacks in these areas solely on the basis of LGA not being what you want is nothing short of a lie. But of course, nobody in the newsrooms will likely call you or any other mayor on this.

I’m going to have to take a look at the cuts Saint Paul’s budget can absorb without hurting police and fire protection.  I’m suspecting it’s “lots”. 

When Minnesota’s liberals aren’t trying to scare you into submission on their tax and spend plans, the apparent SOP is to riffle down through shame, ridicule and, presumably, chanting. 

Aaron Brown of “Minnesota Brown” issues what could almost be a parody of all of these approaches in a post this morning. 

Just to make it fun, we’re going to call out (with emphasis and, er, more) the standard-issue cliches that you can espect to see every liberal and media figure trot out every time the budget is discussed.  Be watching for them.

Yesterday, in a fiery press conference Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced his unilateral solution to the budget debate he was unwilling to negotiate during the legislative session.

Uh-oh!

“Unwilling to negotiate”? 

Well, that’s a way of putting it.  “Using the one tool he has when facing a two-chamber political disadvantage” would be more accurate.

Yay, executive power! Good luck in ’12, bub. But the outcome is devastating and the governor and his allies are unwilling to admit the role they’ve played in trying to turn Minnesota into a cold weather Mississippi.

That’s another of those “Scare” lines that the lefties throw at you to try to get you to cough up taxes, frightened by visions of roach-infested sheds and kudzu growing on school desks. 

Of course, Mississippi’s problems have much less to do with money than with a society that for three centuries was built on slavery (of blacks) and systematic disempowerment (of lower-class whites) run by a pseudo-aristocracy (the plantation owners before the war, and their descendents for most of the time since) that created a culture where people don’t do a lot to better themselves and stay in school and improve their communities because, really, what’s the point? 

This is in comparison with Minnesota’s industrious, cantankerous, Calvinist Scandinavian and Germans.  And, for that matter, the Dakotas’ and Nebraska’s and Montana’s cantankerous, Calvinist Scandinavian and Germans; all of those states have built well-governed, high-functioning (if low-tax and mostly lower-“service”) states, just as Minnesota did – only without the collective mythology of “high taxes are what make us special!” that’s plagued Minnesota.

You could tax Mississippi at Minnesota levels for a hundred years, and it’d still be…a warm, muggy, bug-infested Mississippi.  You could cut Minnesota’s taxes to Mississippi levels, and it’d be…

…well, a state full of hard-working people, and a bunch of whiny DFLers.

Brown:

The governor is a pleasant fellow. I’ve met him and, on paper, I can follow his policy goals from point A to point B. But his perspective on the role of government is from another universe, a closed universe that doesn’t reflect the Minnesota than most voters have supported over the last several decades.

Yes, since Gov. Pawlenty took office his policies have been rejected in three consecutive legislative elections.

Like we couldn’t see this coming:

No, Mr. Brown.  If his policies had been rejected, he’d have gone back into private legal practice in 2006.  Furthermore, voters rejected mushy, republican-in-name-only hamsters who donned the “R” label but voted like…I was going to say Democrats, and that’s accurate, but the real answer is “voted like the national GOP, who spent eight years voting like Tip O’Neil-era Democrats”. 

If voters had “rejected Pawlenty’s policies”, they’d have rejected Pawlenty.

Let the record show; they did not.

What Minnesotans seemed to be suggesting in their last three electoral choices is balance. Needed services funded. Efficiencies and budget cuts sought. Taxes made as fair as possible for all Minnesotans.

Needed services are funded; show me a city without police and fire protection, and you might have a point.  Efficiencies – like privatizing less-essential government services – are actively rejected at all levels.  Money is spent on light-rail boondoggles as cities whinge about being short of money.   

The governor is responsible for all Minnesotans — including that majority that didn’t vote for him or his policies in any of the last three elections.

While that’s literally true, it’s also a matter of interpretation.  But please, Mr. Brown, run with that theory; please have a word with Betty McCollum and Chris Coleman and Ellen Anderson and Alice “the Phantom” Hausman; while they “represent” the 30-40% of their districts that vote Republican, their voting records are not 30-40% conservative. 

Are you willing to put your beef where your moo is?

Tuesday, friends of mine rallied on the Iron Range for the theater program at Hibbing Community College. (Photo: Hibbing Daily Tribune). The program’s full time director is leaving and the college, because of unallotment cuts that are worse than the cuts they had already planned for, is not replacing him. This theater program might sound like a throw-away thing to many who live where there are plenty of theater options, but for the Iron Range HCC’s theater represented a flagship of quality artistic expression. And it — like advanced courses in most of our schools, care for our elderly and more — are out the door not through negotiation, but through a decree.

Sorry to hear that.  As a guy from a small town who had enough credits for a theatre minor (but all performance and technical, not academic), that’s gotta suck.

But the question, when times are tough, is “what is essential“.  Hibbing’s theatre program may not be a “throwaway”, but is it “essential?”  Essenntial as healthcare, fire protection, police, roads? 

Go ahead and make that case.  Or better yet, take up a collection and keep the guy in his job. 

For me and the many others who are trying to promote a better quality of life for the people of the Iron Range (or the people of any other forgotten corner of the diverse geography of Minnesota) these cuts aren’t just bean counting, they seem personal.

But they’re not.  They are bean-counting.  Because if we took everyone’s “personal” priorities into account when setting up a state budget, everyone else would be taxed at 100%.

They will damage our communities for decades and possibly longer. They will retard our growth and prosperity while the wealthy parts of the state get another pass, again.

So question, Aaron Brown:  what level of spending – and taxing the rest of the state – will it take to make the Iron Range prosperous?  Bearing in mind that the Range has had preferential tax treatment and received immense subsidies for a solid generation now – what exactly is the price tag?

Something like the price tag for eradicating inner-city poverty and improving public education?

No, that was me talking.  Never mind.

We’ve visited this topic before; for the past forty years or so, when outstate Minnesota was lagging and the Twin Cities were booming, Minnesota’s government instituted “Local Government Aid”, which essentially subsidized the growth of the rest of the state.  This coincided with a period where Minnesota Republicans, like Republicans nationwide, were very different from the post-1980 Republicans that most of us came to know, and with a period of time when Minnesota – blessed with immense natural resources and brain power, would very likely have boomed anyway.  This period was dubbed “The Minnesota Miracle” by Time Magazine, and it spawned the most noxious myth in the history of Minnesota politics; that Minnesota’s prosperity was a function of Republicans “cooperating” (read: acquiescing without question) with the DFL, a myth that still drives much partisan rhetoric in Minnesota.

And it still drives it, even though the dynamics have changed almost beyond recognition in the past forty years.  A generation of DFL social canoodling have left the Twin Cities short on revenue (“despite” some of the most confiscatory commercial property taxes in the country) and very, very long on spending; for a generation, the DFL has used the urban core as a warehouse for the poor, with all the spending that it causes and, (not very) arguably, attracts.  “LGA” has become a subsidy of the Twin Cities metro by the parts of the state that actually pay their way.

Governor Pawlenty has now followed through on the promise of his veto of the DFL’s attempt to crash a porkfest tax and spend plan through the legislature.  He’s cutting 2.7 billion dollars from the state budget.

Expect the usual yelping from the usual suspects. 

Bob Collins at MPR’s News Cut notes an opening salvo:

On MPR’s Midday this afternoon, Rep. Loren Solberg predicted massive property tax increases because of Gov. Pawlenty’s “unallotment.”

Only if the cities and their elected governments can convince the people that every blessed nickel that they spend is essential.  Oh, no doubt they’ll ram the tax increases through; Saint Paul’s city council still has two years before they face re-election, so they no doubt feel pretty safe, although Mayor Coleman is up for re-election this year. 

But here’s the interesting part:  Bob Colins asks:

How familiar are you with how your city spends tax money? What would you be willing to do without if you were given a choice?

Oh, where to start?

With a hearty nod to regular commenter “Nate”, who left a long list of ideas on a previous posting on the subject (thanks Nate!), I’ll start a list up, speaking in this case for my city, Saint Paul:

• Privatize snow plowing.
• Lose the refrigerated outdoor hockey rinks.  This is a cold city.  We don’t need to refrigerate ice.
• Dump all the STAR program arts grants.  A real artist does it for the love of the art.
• Cut all vacant building enforcement and a good chunk of non-essential Code activity
• Cut all funding for neighborhood councils
• Cut all funding for economic development – HRA and the Port Authority; if they were doing a decent job, we wouldn’t have this problem anyway
• Axe most of licensing and inspection
• Dump most of the Mayor and Council staff (the Mayor has 24 aides, most of them with assistants)
• Sell off all of the City-owned golf courses (all three of ’em!);
• Cut all parks-and-recreation programs and park improvements;
  meter maids;
• Cut or privatize the convention bureau; the local hospitality and events business can run their own operation.
• Slash all money going to support the Central Corridor. 
• Dump the Youth Job Corps; if there’s a need for working youth, employers can fund it; if there’s not, well, looking for work in tough times is one of life’s essential skills.
• Dump every committee, board and commission and all their staff from the Advisory Committee on Aging through the Fair Carousel Board to the Truth in Housing Board of Evaluators.
• Start charging at least a nominal fee to attend Como Zoo; it doesn’t have to be much, but during the fiscal crisis, every little bit helps.
• Remove the costly. wasteful and excessive security at city and county offices. This would have the salutary effect of making city/county workers a lot more circumspect in their demands on the citizenry. That could only be a good thing.

I stress, as did Nate in the original comment, that none of these reflects on the value of any of these programs; merely the need for the city to fund them at all costs at a time when the city’s tax base is heading south faster than Tommy Lee Jones’ career bell curve and people are feeling justifiably insecure about their place in the economy.  Perhaps when the crisis passes, the people of Saint Paul will decide they really do want to fund all of these programs.  And perhaps they will not. 

But “when the crisis passes” is the operative phrase.

What do you think?

Ryan Flynn at MDE on the latest developments:

I have been informed that Brian Sullivan and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann have officially ruled out Gubernatorial campaigns.

No news on Bachmann; her star is rising in Washington, she’d be a tough sell for Governor right at the moment.

Sullivan,though, is a disappointment.  Although I can see his point; if his main reason to run were to spend a lot of money to drive an eventual nominee to the right, noble and needed as that is, I can see Sullivan having better things to do for the next year.

So who is everyone else looking at for the GOP nod so far?

The most obnoxious, channel-knob spinning commercials on TV today are the ones where the D-list comic (name eludes me) dressed as a beer delivery guy goes to a bunch ostensibly hoity-toity locations – trackside at a horse race, an “exclusive” club – and makes a big show out of removing the “honest” beer (Miller, aka “your cat has diabetes”) for all the regular people to drink.

Which means times must be tough.  It’s the closest our society gets to Woody Guthrie anymore.
One of the ugliest sides of “progressivism”, especially in tough economic times, is the cynical faux-populism that wafts out from the bathrooms and basements of the “progressive” movement.

Dave Mindeman at mnpACTed mines that same ugly vein – and does it pretty badly in this piece from yesterday:

Tim Pawlenty says he has no set plans for the future, but it is becoming pretty clear what he wants. He wants to be President.

This gives the DFLers vapors; as if a young, talented, ambitious politician is supposed to just say “maybe I’ll go into call center management” after spending years at the brink and years more working his way toward that point.  (Unless he’s Walter Mondale, of course).

The last 4 years of his tenure as Governor has been a cold hearted calculation about positioning himself for the big show. And, he has been mildly successful at it…. at least in perception.

I wonder if even Mindeman knows what that sentence means?

Pawlenty’s full phrasing on his sloganeering is…”We need to be the party of Sam’s Club, not just the Country Club.”Pawlenty assumes the Country Club crowd will stay. And why not? The Sam’s Club Governor continues to promote polcies that benefit them with little help for the rest of us.

This is actually brilliant messaging – or, if you prefer Mindeman’s treatment, “calculation” – on Pawlenty’s part.  Ronald Reagan, after getting many of the same criticisms Pawlenty’s gotten for not a few similar stances during his stint as Governor of California, built his entire national message on the idea that government is supposed to get out of peoples’ way; that, left to their own devices, the American people will build the prosperity they want and that their merits can earn.

Mindeman:

The real Pawlenty message is ..’Come on you Sam’s Club people. Join us. Aspire to make it to the Country Club. See what we can do for you if you do?’

I guess this is the reason people like Mindeman are liberals and DFLers.  The “real” Pawlenty message (actually conservative message) is “Come on; join us.  Aspire to make it wherever you want to make it – country club, your own business, a home in the ‘burbs or a condo downtown, putting your kids in college, getting out of poverty, building a new life in this new land, ; we will get out of your way.”

Nothing was made more clear in that regard, than the 2008 Legislative Session. Pawlenty’s policies have certainly affected those Sam’s Club people. He put them out of work [Really?  Pawlenty caused the mortgage bubble to burst?  Pawlenty started the recession?  I doubt even Pawlenty would want to be that powerful… Ed.], took away their health care [Again – really?  How many actual families without means of support got cut off?  Ed.], forced them to pay more for care for relatives [Er, no – he passed on more of the cost of state-funded care to those who could – and, rightfully, should – pay more of it – Ed.], raised the taxes on their homes [Good lord, Mindeman – now you’re saying Pawlenty is on every single county commission in Minnesota?  The counties are in charge of property taxes!  If they are spending money on something, why should the county’s residents be less obligated to pay for it (or more unwilling to do without it) than people in Thief River Falls?  – an ever-more-tired Ed.], and then, on top of all that, tried to force their kids to pay for it all.

Now, if they perservere and can overcome all of the obstacles that Pawlenty has burdened them with so he could protect his Country Club crowd…if their perserverance pays off and they manage to get that membership upgraded to Country Club status,….then they will find a Republican Party that can keep them happy and secure in their new lifestyle.

Conservatives?  You all wanna answer that one?

None of us depend on the party to make us happy or give us a lifestyle.

Of course, while the Sam’s Club crowd is working their way against the grain, they need to vote for those GOP candidates that are protecting their “future” way of life. They may not make it and probably won’t.

“It probably won’t work?” 

Dave Mindeman?  The American people called, and left a message; “Thanks for the vote of confidence.  Kindly speak for yourself”. 

And what would a son of a meat-packer who became a lawyer, and then governor, know about that?

Manfred Von Richtoven – better known to history as the Red Baron, the highest-scoring fighter pilot of World War I – was once asked for his “mission statement”, as they’re called in business today.

Paraphrasing closely, he said “My mission is to patrol my sector, and shoot down the enemy.  All else is bulls**t”. 

———- 

As I noted yesterday, Tim Pawlenty has done a great job as governor – in great part because he followed through on his promises.  (And lest anyone think I’m disparaging Governor Pawlenty in any way in saying this, let me add right now that I echo what King says in every single particular.  Thanks, Governor!)

And, as we noted yesterday, the promises that have mattered the most – indeed, the ones that have defined his administration – were the ones he made to get nominated; the No New Taxes pledge foremost among them.  To his immense credit, Governor Pawlenty has largely kept that promise, especially with the big things; I’m willing to sacrifice a pawn to take a queen; I’m likewise wiling (if not thrilled) to trade “health fees” one year for unallotment this year; it’s not purist conservative gospel, and it’s pragmatic, but that’s politics for you.

Which means that much of the success of the Pawlenty Administration came from his reaction to a powerful, motivated insurgency within the party – the conservative candidacy of Brian Sullivan.  Sullivan was a self-funded maverick (not a McCain kind, the real kind) who ran on a platform that’d have done Ronald Reagan proud.  It scared the crap out of the party establishment – so much so that “their” candidate, Pawlenty, had to adopt one of their key tenets to get the  nomination.

The rest, as they say, is history.  The good kind.

Of course, motivated insurgencies are always a headache to the establishment of any organization, at any level.  In 2006, many long-time Sixth District activists were turned off by Michele Bachmann’s organization; she flooded the precinct caucuses with supporters, which gave her a crushing majority of delegates at every level of the endorsement process.  She went on, of course, to win twice, including last fall, when the Conventional Wisdom said she would lose; she’s the most conservative voice in Minnesota elective politics; thank goodness the establishment didn’t get their way.

Another insurgency, we’re still digesting; last year, Ron Paul supporters flooded precincts caucuses throughout the state.  They brought boundless motivation, energy and (after one filtered out a few hundred thousand resolutions about the Trans-American Freeway and 9/11 being an inside job) some good, solid, libertarian-conservative politics.  It scared the establishment, who in some cases had to resort to parliamentary maneuvering that baffled the newcomers; in other cases, they just plain had to organize their opposition.

None of those three insurgencies change the party, fundamentally.  But all of them had their effects; the compromises that the parties had to make through the process made the party stronger, in each case.

———- 

There’s another insurgency this year. It’s not of quite the same import as the 2002 Sullivan assault.  It’s not going to send anyone to Washington.  It’s not going to shake the party down to its precincts.  But it’s important; just different.

For one thing, the battle for State Party Chair doesn’t have the same constituents as a convention, much less a general election; it’s the party Central Committee that’ll be doing the voting.  And nobody vaults into the Central Committee from nowhere.  It’s something that comes from years of service to the party.  Which means that, no matter what one believes, one has developed the network of connections and allegiances that are the building blocks of any “establishment”.

State Chairman elections, thus, are not unpredictable free-for-alls.  The network, the connections, the establishment has a very, very strong voice in the process.  As, perhaps, is entirely fitting. 

Tony Sutton is a good candidate; I believe he will make a good State Chairman.  I also believe that, since he is the establishment’s candidate, his connections with that establishment – the Central Committee – are strong enough that the election is his.  That’s not a bad thing because – this is important – his job is not to define the party’s philosophy.  That’s the job of the individual candidates, and the people who recruit them and, to some extent the districts they come from.  The chairman’s job is to run the administrative wing of the party, and make sure the party supports the candidates, and above all to raise tons and tons of money to make sure that support is there when it’s needed.

I don’t believe there’s any real question that Tony Sutton is going to win.  And I think he will do a good job (and if he doesn’t, I’ll be joining a hell of a lot of Republicans in pointing it out).   While I don’t like “Next In Line” politics, I think Sutton’s experience in the party machinery makes him qualified to run the party machinery.

I fully expect to be congratulating Tony Sutton next Saturday (June 13) after the Central Committee elections, and sincerely offering him my support (for whatever that’s worth) in helping the GOP kick ass in 2010.

But the party does need a swift kick in the pants, too.  The party machinery is decayed and complacent in some areas; the party has ceded the Fourth and Fifth Districts to the Dems for far too long; candidate recruitment and development is lagging badly in places like the First District, and is virtually nonexistent in the Cities.  The party still acts like it’s the 1970’s in terms of decentralizing authority; ask anyone who’s sat at a Congressional District convention and fumed as debate was slashed to ramrod District Committee initiatives through the processes.  The party machinery needs to make a contest of the entire state, not just the South, the Red River Valley, and the second-through-sixth-tier suburbs.

So while Tony Sutton will, I believe, be the next MNGOP Party Chairman, the party needs to put these goals – the need to not just embrace change, but conquer it; the need to adapt to a world where authority is decentralizing – out front. 

They need not so much to fight the DFL, but to present the GOP in a light that wins people over to what the party represents, and to make sure the candidates that do that are supported.

———- 

I don’t “endorse” people on this blog.  I’m just a workadaddy, hugamommy schnook from Saint Paul, with a couple of kids and a mortgage and a day job.  And I am not on the Central Committee, so my opinion really matters only inasmuch as I have a readership and a modestly popular talk show – i.e. not all that much.   To call my opinion an “endorsement” only makes sense as humor.  So I don’t endorse.

But I support Dave Thompson for State Party Chair. 

Part of it is that I like Dave, and I support his positions.  Dave’s politics largely agree with mine.  And I believe that if he were the state chairman, it’d send a message about the kind of candidate this party should be recruiting, and the kind of races we should be running; center-right, unapologetic, as tightly-focused on a solid, winning message as an hour of Dave’s talk show always was.  I believe that Dave has a good command of what politics is turning into in this state – which isn’t so important for an administrator, but is vital for a leader.

It’s not a shot at Tony Sutton or his supporters.  As I said, I believe Tony will win in the end, and I will work to support the party if and when he does. 

But it is a warning shot across the bow of the state party; “I support you, but not without question.  I expect results from you and your administration.  The stakes are too high to be complacent“, not that I don’t believe Sutton knows that.  “Come back with your shield, or on it“.

Whoever wins, the real challenges start June 14: recruit canddiates.  Build a bench.  Raise money.  Get a message out there.

Further conservatism; limit government; promote growth, security, and limited government.

Win races, and make those victories matter.

As to everything else?  Ask the Red Baron.

I was originally going to call this piece “What The Hell Is Wrong With the MNGOP, Part X”; there’s plenty more to talk about in that series.

But in the aftermath of the last legislative session, and especially Governor Pawlenty’s epic, lone stand against the DFL’s tax-and-spend orgy, I’m inclined to answer my question “not as much as there was eight years ago”.  Or last year, for that matter.

Nobody’s ever mistaken Tim Pawlenty for a movement conservative – and some of my Buchananite friends sputter angrily when I even mention “conservative” in the same paragraph as Pawlenty, who is certainly a pragmatist, front and center – but he’s delivered on the one big honka-lunka mega-issue that every conservative should agree on; curbing spending and the size and reach of government.

And while the GOP Senate caucus is too small to sustain any gubernatorial vetoes, the House caucus did itself proud this year, doing something many of us had nearly given up on seeing; doing what they were sent to Saint Paul to do; acting like a party; presenting Minnesota an alternative to the DFL, rather than acquiescing with the majority like a herd of hamsters.

It’d be much better to be in control – but the party showed big signs of hope.

And I think it all traces back to something that happened eight years ago at the State GOP Convention.

If you’re a Minnesota Republican, you remember the story; Brian Sullivan, a movement conservative, took Pawlenty, then the House Minority leader, to 3,000 ballots over forty days and forty nights of voting.  Pawlenty had to move sharply to the right of his normally pragmatic, legislative-negotiation-honed positions to win the nomination, finally taking the Taxpayers League’s “No New Taxes” pledge to secure the nomination.

Sullivan didn’t win the nomination – but had he not been in the race, Pawlenty would never have moved right; conservatism would have lost.

So what we have in Minnesota today – gubernatorial unallotment standing in the way of a state-bankrupting spending orgy – we owe to Sullivan (as well as a governor who has had the integrity to stick to his promises all these years against Thermopylean odds).

And this is what the party needs to recover from the last two drubbings: a coherent message, and the willingness to live and fight for that message when the heat’s on.

So on Saturday, June 13, the Central Committee of the Minnesota GOP is going to elect a new chair.  There are a couple of great choices on the ballot.

What are we going to do?

More tomorrow.

Chris Truscott is not a dumb guy.  Indeed, among regional leftybloggers, he’s one of the better ones (“in the land of of the blind, the one-eyed man knows enough not to write for Minnesota Progressive Project”)

But he does write for MPP in  this bit here – entitled hopefully “From Winning Elections to a Governing Majority, in a piece in which he seems to believe the DFL’s press releases (AKA Lori Sturdevant):

In recent years in Minnesota we’ve watched Republicans render themselves irrelevant through blind adherence to the failed policy of “no new taxes” and by placing the question of “who can get married?” ahead of things like “who can go to college?”Meanwhile, as the GOP mired itself somewhere in between the disproven Reganomics of the 1980s and the Salem Witch Trials of two centuries earlier, DFLers built sizeable majorities in both chambers of the Legislature.

Now, there is a useful point for Republicans buried in there, one I alluded to in my “What The Hell Is Wrong With The MNGOP” series a few months back: the GOP, being the genuine big tent (Ron Paul supporters and pro-lifers in the same party? Hello?) needs to quit beating itself to death over the things it disagrees about, and learn to focus on the places where we do agree.  Because when we do, we win.

What were the only real bright spots for the GOP in Minnesota this past two elections?  Places where conservatives held the line.  It wasn’t a panacaea; Phil Krinkie lost, after all (by 50-odd votes, but there ya have it).  But in two election cycles, at a time when people were sick of earmarks and backpedalling on spending, who were the Republican candidates who did win?  Michele Bachmann, who ran twice as an unrepentant conservative, in a district (MN-6) that is very much in play; Erik Paulsen, in the MN-3, which the Conventional Wisdom said was “purple” at best; Keith Downey, a genuine fiscal conservative with more than a passing physical and political resemblance to Phil Krinkie, in a district that Lori Sturdevant said would require a mushy moderate hamster for the GOP to have a shot.

And, let us not forget…

There’s something wrong when opinion polls, with questions phrased in the neutral language of scientific study, indicate at least modest support for the party’s agenda, but we’re not seeing that transfer into actual political capital when it comes time to put pressure on Gov. Pawlenty and his legislative allies

….our governor,who won during a terrible mid-term for Republicans, and held onto superhuman approval ratings during the Obama surge last year and, while he’s still no darling to Minnota’s hard-core conservatives, remains the most conservative governor in memory, if only because he stuck to his no-new-taxes pledge.  And let’s not forget – sticking to the pledge won him his recent victories, and burnished his cred for whatever his future holds.   Not accomodation with some fictitious “progressive” surge.

For DFLers to parlay their success at the ballot box into the kind of sustainable governing majority needed to defend our heritage as a great place to live and do business and position Minnesota as a leader for the new century…

…the DFL will need to ensure that a not-very-conservative GOP with spend-a-holic Congress is always in power, to cause the conservative base to walk away in disgust.

Which – let’s not kid ourselves – is exactly what happened.  The conservative zeal of 1994 – which led Republicans to talk in exactly the same terms Dems are using today, about “permanent governing majorities” – dissolved by 2006 in Bush’s Democrat-like spending spree; his only pre-9/11 policy “victory”, his education plan, was the kind of thing only a liberal could love; he signed it with Ted Kennedy looking on approvingly!  Add in the rest of Bush’s domestic legacy – Medicaid part D, entitlement addiction –  and no wonder the Democrats won big in ’06 and ’08; the GOP didn’t present a credible alternative.

Pawlenty’s vetoes show Minnesota’s mainstreet that there is an alternative; conservatives, out of power, are starting to take back the GOP.  And it’s showing in the polls; there are more identified conservatives than liberals; if the GOP puts out a message that drags them to the polls in 2010, Truscott’s talk of “governing majorities” will look as quaint as the GOP’s talk of the same 13 years ago.

If “lack of conservative alternatives” is behind the DFL’s surge since 2006, then the DFL should pay attention to the example of the GOP in Congress tis past eight years in critiqueing their own party’s performance in Saint Paul.  Because they’re showing some of the same signs of befuddled complacency.

And I think some of the smarter DFLers know it.  Truscott:

It’s time to change the way we look at the world and talk about the issues that matter

But what does that mean?

We don’t want to “tax the rich.” That’s neither a good policy nor a good slogan. Everyone pays taxes and should. We just want to ensure everyone pays their fair share so we have the resources needed to support good schools, a modern infrastructure and universal health care. Nothing more, nothing less.

We have to understand the language of competition and speak it freely. Good schools, affordable college, solid infrastructure and health care aren’t just entitlements. Yes, there’s a moral component to our policies, but on the whole they’re not “feel good” initiatives or something we do to kill time during the annual legislative session. World-leading schools, 21st-century infrastructure improvements and affordable health care make Minnesota an attractive place to live, a better place to do business and a leader in a country in which too many states have long ago accepted merely treading water as opposed to boldly moving forward on these fronts.

In other words, the DFL needs to find ways to cloak statist, interventionist policies in terms that don’t make the slightly-conservative majority toss them en masse when the nation wakes up for the Obama hangover.  My words, obviously, not Truscott’s.

Look – the whole thing (and this is something I’ve never said before, and may never say again, about the MPP) is worth a read.

Eric Ostermeier at Smart Pollitics (a Humphrey Institute joint) notes that more voters are identifying themselves as “conservatives”:

While the last two election cycles have seen Upper Midwestern Republicans lose seats in state legislatures, lose seats to the U.S. House, and lose statewide elections for the U.S. Senate and the presidency, the conservative brand seems to be catching fire once again.A Smart Politics analysis of more than 160 polls conducted in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin finds that the percentage of residents identifying themselves as having a conservative political ideology has been on the rise in each state since 2007.

The story – which you should read in its entirety – notes that conservative identification dropped starting in about 2005, and of course helped lead to last year’s debacle:

In 2005, one-third (33.4 percent) of Minnesota residents identified themselves as conservative, in a yearly aggregation of SurveyUSA polling data. That number was slightly higher for conservatives in Wisconsin (36.0 percent) and Iowa (36.6 percent).

In 2006, the percentage of Minnesotans identifying as conservatives plunged 5.3 points (15.9 percent) to just 28.1 percent of Gopher State residents. Self-identified conservatives in Iowa also declined by 5.1 points (13.9 percent) to 31.5 percent that year, with the largest drop occurring in Wisconsin, with a 6.1-point decline (16.9 percent) to 29.9 percent. In that November’s election cycle, Republicans lost control of the Minnesota House, the Iowa House, the Wisconsin Senate, as well as three U.S. House seats (MN-01, IA-01, WI-08).

It dropped again in 2007 and 2008 – and we know how that turned out.

But having Democrats in the driver’s seat is usually a good thing for creating conservatives:

In Minnesota, those Gopher State residents identifying as conservative increased by 1.3 points in 2008 (to 27.8 percent) and by another 1.2 points to 29.0 percent in an aggregation of polling data through the first five months of 2009. This marks the largest percentage of Minnesotans viewing themselves as conservative since 2005…In all three states, conservatism is at its highest peak over the last four years.

Ostermeier notes that “moderates” outnumber both liberals and conservatives.  Which is both good and bad news; “Moderate” isn’t a philosophy, it’s the absence of one; it’s a vacuum.  The real  trick is to fill more of those vacuums with something that’ll make ’em want to come to the polls and vote conservatives. Indeed, that’s been the trick in the last several Minnesota elections:

1. In 1990, Arne Carlson filled the moderates with fatigue with the antics of Rudy Perpich.
2. In 1998, Jesse Ventura filled enough of them with the desire to prank everyone else.
3. In 2002, Pawlenty convinced a majority of Minnesotans that stupidity was a bad thing.

Here’s the one part that I bet hardly anyone expected:

Still, conservatives outnumber liberals by a large margin in all three states. In 2009, there are 1.6 conservatives for every liberal in Minnesota, 2.0 conservatives for every liberal in Wisconsin, and 2.1 conservatives for every liberal in Iowa.

So there’s the job…

Governor Pawlenty’s discipline is tutelage for Republicans everywhere.

Congressional Republicans — the ones who got tossed because of their embrace of spending and earmarks — might start looking for a message up north. Fiscal responsibility? “It is the fundamental tenet of our party, and the conservative coalition more broadly,” says Mr. Pawlenty, nicely. “If we don’t have that, we are nothing.”

If Republicans are looking to get back their conservative groove, they could do worse than study Minnesota’s budget brawl. Mr. Pawlenty deftly (and amusingly) outmaneuvered his Democratic opposition, not only saving his state from huge tax increases but clearing the way to cut government spending. Call it a refreshing break from the financial-crisis norm.

While liberal TV ads equate fairness with sticking it to the “rich”…

…Mr. Pawlenty kept voicing three simple principles. “Number one, we must have [because of the constitution] and should have a balanced budget,” he told me. “Number two, the state government needs to live within its means, just like everybody else. Number three, we shouldn’t raise taxes in the worst recession in 60 years.” Minnesota already has one of the highest tax burdens in the nation.

While in Washington, Comrade Obama increases the Federal Government and National Debt at unprecedented speed…

this will be one of the first times in modern Minnesota history that the state will reduce the size of government in real terms, not just slow its rate of growth. “The correlation in recent history has been between job growth and states that have reasonable government cost structures,” he says. These cuts, he says, will position Minnesota to take advantage of the recovery when it comes.

A Crisis Not Wasted^™ indeed, Governor.

To: Minnesota D”F”L

From: Mitch Berg, keen analyst of satire.

Re: Dayton’s showing

Dear DFL,

Please, please please – take these results and run with them for next year.  I beg of you.

Former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton comes closest to out-polling Gov. Tim Pawlenty in a theoretical match-up in the 2010 governor’s contest, according to a new SurveyUSA poll commissioned by KSTP (Channel 5). 

I hereby promise I’ll give $50 to ACORN or International ANSWER or the Comintern or the Symbionese Liberation Army or whatever charity you folks are supporting these days if you please, please  run with this poll.

Thank you.

That is all.

Again – as I predicted, the DFL will try to make the “case” against Governor Pawlenty’s budget cuts by framing it as scary, scary stuff, while ignoring the immense amount of waste pork and patronage that is just begging to be clear-cut from the budget.

Dave Mindemann at mnpACTed! delivers, true to form:

So, let it be his. We will have to take the pain but maybe the citizens of this state will get the real picture once and for all. As the hospitals close, rural areas lose health care facilities, nursing homes cut back, state employees join the welfare rolls, more people lose health insurance, building projects get scrapped… maybe then the voters will fully understand what they have gotten.

Perhaps, but probably not the way folks like Mindemann, the DFL and the mainstream media (pardon the serial redundancy) think they will.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to think back to 1989.  We had hospitals.  Rural areas had health care.  Old folks had nursing homes.  State employees managed support themselves (with good reason, since we were a high tax, high “service” state back then, too); people had health insurance; stuff got built.

And as the prosperity of the Nineties (thanks, Reagan and Gingrich!) switched Minnesota’s economy to “puree”, we had years of higher-than-projected tax receipts, leading to surpluses.  Which serial DFL legislatures turned into more permanent spending.

So when Carlson left office, the budget had doubled.  But we still had hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, insurance and schools.

Right?

And then the four years of the Ventura Administration, which started with epic surpluses.  Which were mostly converted to more permanent spending.  Until the recession of ’01, when the prosperity gravy train (for government) ended.

But even at that time, we had hospitals, schools, clinics, state workers buying houses and cars and not living out of boxes – the works.

So far so good?

And in the past six years, the budget has not shrunk; it’s risen, through good times and bad.  Slower, now, perhaps, but it’s still by any standards a huge friggin’ budget, compared to 20 years ago.

And so yes, Dave Mindemann; the people of Minnesota might just wonder “why am I paying vastly more in taxes now than 20 years ago, and getting the same “services”, and being threatened with losing the “basics” even as I pay more and more and more at all levels of government taxation?

The DFL chooses to try to terrorize Minnesotans into submission.  This state is the world’s largest case of Stockholm Syndrome.

Yesterday, amid my Fearless Predictions about the aftermath of this session at the Legislature, I called it:

 Threats from cities to lay off cops and firemen (leaving city garbage collectors, administrators, civil rights commissioners, convention planners, community planning organizers, planning/policy wonks and layer upon layer of other bureaucrats unmentioned and untouched, because people don’t get scared into writing their legislatores to demand tax hikes to protect any of those jobs).

In other words, the DFL’s line will be pass our budget or life as we know it will cease to exist!
This morning at MNPublius, Jeff Rosenberg puts my prediction in the money:

Tim Pawlenty said there would be no special session and no government shutdown. But what he meant was that there would be no official shutdown. Under his slice-and-dice plan, our government will slowly stop functioning. Hospitals will shut down or begin refusing service. Schools will go without billions of dollars are funds are “shifted” away from them. Cities and counties will raise property taxes and curtail most services.

(“Cities and counties will raise property taxes and curtail most services?”  In related news, Best Buy will raise prices but refuse to let you walk out the door with your product?  WTH?)

Leaving aside the reality that at complete government shutdown that led to a re-funding of government on a purely skeleton level that kept only essential services [*] functioning would probably be a very, very good thing for Minnesota, especially if it became permanent, let’s be honest here; the scenario is just not true.  Government has plenty of money – way too much, in fact.  They just didn’t get the increases they wanted, and they didn’t get to fund more increases by raising taxes.

It’s time to call the Dems on their fearmongering.  At the polls, of course.
[*] Note to Metro city governments: most of us define “essential services” as police, fire departments and courts. As opposed to, say, planning offices and convention bureaux and civil rights offices.  Just saying.

The dominant sentiment among Minnesota’s left (expressed in this case by the estimable Bob Collins via Twitter – and I am not lumping Collins in with “Minnesota’s left”, per se, by the way, but he happens to express the sentiment more concisely than most) is that Minnesota is a messed-up state (sometimes with the qualification that it’s still a great place to be,anyway.

Of course, what’s “messed up” (think they) is that the GOP didn’t fall meekly into line behind the DFL’s “Crack Whores With Stolen Gold Cards” tax and spend spree.  The GOP broke with recent tradition and worked as a caucus to try to act like Republicans are supposed to act.

There was no talk of “compromise” and “bipartisanship” when the DFL was revelling in their supermajority in the Senate, and their almost-veto-proof lead in the house, last fall.  No, it’s only when they ran into a governor that’s outmaneuvered them at every turn, who’s not only stuck to his guns but creamed the DFL in doing so, that the “C” word – compromise – has escaped their rusty, creaking jaws.

“Diversity”, “Compromise” and “Reaching Across the Aisle” are things the DFL only values when they are out of power.  Which – this is the funny part – they are not.  They hold nearly-absolute power in Minnesota; only a governor and a couple of Representives stand in the way of Minnesota becoming another California.

Did I say “California?”  Megan McArdle shows us the future of a state that acts like the DFL and their bobbleheads in the regional media want the state to act (emphasis added):

California is completely, totally, irreparably hosed.  And not a little garden hose.  More like this.  Their outflow is bigger than their inflow.  You can blame Republicans who won’t pass a budget, or Democrats who spend every single cent of tax money that comes in during the booms, borrow some more, and then act all surprised when revenues, in a totally unprecedented, inexplicable, and unforeseaable chain of events, fall during a recession.  You can blame the initiative process, and the uneducated voters who try to vote themselves rich by picking their own pockets.  Whoever is to blame, the state was bound to go broke one day, and hey, today’s that day!

That emphasized bit- does it sound familiar? Like, exactly what the DFL does whenever there’s a “Surplus?”  Turn windfalls into permanent spending, and then whine about deficits when the windfalls go away?
“Messed-up?”  No.  The fact that we have  an opposition, that our government’s dominant party has to compromise, that the (current) electoral minority in this state is protected – is a strength.  It’s a strength. It is a saving grace of this state.

Now that theLegislature has adjourned without the DFL majority’s budget passed, and with Governor Pawlenty promising to use the line-item veto to unallot the budget back into balance, look for the following:

• Predictions from DFLers of bodies lying in the street (oops – already happened)
• Threats from liberal-run school districts that they’ll have to close, followed by exactly zero schools closed, at least due to state budget cuts.
• More predictions from DFLers of bodies lying in the street.
• Lamentations that “the governor abused his plurality”, which are not only shrieking points, but dumb ones; the governor is an elected executive, not a pluralistic deliberative body.  That’s why the Legislature is given the opportunity to override his vetos.
• Threats from cities to lay off cops and firemen (leaving city garbage collectors, administrators, civil rights commissioners, convention planners, community planning organizers, planning/policy wonks and layer upon layer of other bureaucrats unmentioned and untouched, because people don’t get scared into writing their legislatores to demand tax hikes to protect any of those jobs).

And if all of the above haven’t happened by the end of the day today, I’ll rhetorically eat my hat.  Or would, if I owned any.

Twila Brase writes from the Capitol:

It’s 1:15 a.m. and I want to report the good news. We won! The gavel came down at midnight, the Minnesota legislature adjourned in the nick of time, and the Baby DNA warehousing bill to repeal genetic privacy and DNA ownership rights at birth, never came up for a vote!

This is your success!

Your citizen petitions, the many people who attended the legislative hearings, your emails and phone calls to legislators, the Sue Jeffers show on KTLK, CCHC’s new Protect Baby DNA cards, the Glenn Beck Program, Reps. Tom Emmer and Mary Liz Holberg, Sen. David Hann’s great questions during the Senate hearing, the “Do NOT Repeal Genetic Privacy” stickers we all wore, my opportunity to speak at the Tea Party, our meeting with  Governor Pawlenty, the CCHC report on newborn screening and eugenics, the filing of the lawsuit against the Department, local TV news coverage (esp. WCCO-TV), the prayers of many people, and the unexpected informational hearing on genetic privacy led to this success.

Twila represents the Citizen’s Committee on Healthcare, and she’s been lobbying against the Baby DNA bill – which would allow the state to collect a DNA database from the state’s newborns without any form of parental consent – for years.

Of course, the battle isn’t over.  Check in with the CCHC to get and stay up on this teeth-grinding bit of government arrogance.

Looking at this video, of the final nine minutes of the 2009 Minnesota Senate Sesssion, I notice a couple of things.

First: They look like a bunch of drunks at last call.  Its from the fatigue (previous Legislative drinking o duty scandals probably notwithstanding), of course, but still kinda funny.

Second, and much less funny?  Sit through the whole nine minutes of the video.  The DFL, behind Senate Majority Jefe “Hugo” Pogemiller, rammed through a half-billion-dollar spending bill that nobody had had time to read yet.  At all.  Zippo.

Viva La Junta!

Minnesotans, The Frozen Chosen, celebrate a high quality of life and boast once people move here they never move away. That stickiness is a mystery to others around the nation, especially when viewing our winter weather forecasts in January and February from points even just a click or two South of here.

Residents and business owners have tolertated a fairly high cost of doing business in deference to that quality of life.

As our population ages however, and as our tax-and-spend lawmakers leverage their majority, we will find ourselves waxing nostalgically about the good old days when our economy was strong and diversified, our schools were world-class and our cities safe and clean.

Ever wonder why you see so many Florida license plates on the backs of Cadillac, Mercedes Benz and Lexus cars in Minnesota?

Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich

With states facing nearly $100 billion in combined budget deficits this year, we’re seeing more governors than ever proposing the Barack Obama solution to balancing the budget: Soak the rich. Lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Oregon want to raise income tax rates on the top 1% or 2% or 5% of their citizens. New Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn wants a 50% increase in the income tax rate on the wealthy because this is the “fair” way to close his state’s gaping deficit.

A good many wealthy Minnesotans have figured out how to live in Florida – and more recently in my professional experience, South Dakota and Arizona – 181 days of the year, and if we raise taxes again, I’d say a good many more are going to give it a go.

…from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

Examining data from a 2008 Princeton study on the New Jersey tax hike on the wealthy, we found that there were 4,000 missing half-millionaires in New Jersey after that tax took effect. New Jersey now has one of the largest budget deficits in the nation.

Have you seen those commercials and heard those radio ads here that equate the Governor’s directive to not raise taxes with the suffering of students and teachers and firefighters and law enforcement?

Those who disapprove of tax competition complain that lower state taxes only create a zero-sum competition where states “race to the bottom” and cut services to the poor as taxes fall to zero. They say that tax cutting inevitably means lower quality schools and police protection as lower tax rates mean starvation of public services.

They’re wrong, and New Hampshire is our favorite illustration. The Live Free or Die State has no income or sales tax, yet it has high-quality schools and excellent public services. Students in New Hampshire public schools achieve the fourth-highest test scores in the nation — even though the state spends about $1,000 a year less per resident on state and local government than the average state and, incredibly, $5,000 less per person than New York. And on the other side of the ledger, California in 2007 had the highest-paid classroom teachers in the nation, and yet the Golden State had the second-lowest test scores.

Texas, recently threatening secession, seems to have the right formula.

Texas created more new jobs in 2008 than all other 49 states combined. And Texas is the only state other than Georgia and North Dakota that is cutting taxes this year.

The Texas economic model makes a whole lot more sense than the New Jersey model, and we hope the politicians in California, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota [emphasis mine-JR] and New York realize this before it’s too late.

Given the current economy and already-high taxes, we may be near a tipping point where raising taxes now could accelerate an exodus of the wealthy and more importantly, business owners, taking their jobs and consumption with them.

Surely New Jersey didn’t think they would ever be a cautionary tale. Let’s not let Minnesota be the next.

AFSCME is yanking the DFL’s leashes:

Union workers greeted legislators today with chants of “override” outside the Minnesota House chamber.Members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 5 were anticipating a vote to try to overturn Governor Tim Pawlenty’s recent veto of a $1 billion tax bill. Democrats say the revenue is needed to help erase a $4.6 billion budget deficit and protect schools, hospitals and nursing homes. The Republican governor opposes any tax increase. Union leader Eliot Seide said public employees want a balanced budget solution.

Well, no.  They want a “balanced budget solution” that allows plenty of extra spending, especially on AFSCME pork.

Glad we’re clear on that.

Governor Pawlenty – virtually the sole Republican with any semblance of power anywhere near Capitol Hill – drops the “L” word, promising line-item vetoes rather than a shutdown or a special session:

Turning the heat up to a boil in the closing days of the legislative session, Gov. Tim Pawlenty said Thursday that he would use his powers of line-item veto and unallotment to singlehandedly balance a state budget facing a $4.6 billion deficit if a compromise plan can’t be crafted in the next four days.The unusual flexing of executive power seemed clearly designed to make Pawlenty’s adversaries in the DFL-controlled House and Senate blink as the clock ticks toward adjournment.

I’ve criticized the Governor in the past, but I’ll say it now; great job, Governor.

Now, expect the following in the next few days:

• A “Minnesota Poll” showing that Minnesotans oppose this use of the line-item veto (in a poll that’ll oversample DFL voters by 2-1)
• A Lori Sturdevant column bemoaning how Elmer Anderson would be rolling in his grave over this; how he’d have taken the DFL out for beer and lutefisk and cigars and gotten them all together by giving them pretty much what they wanted, but scolding them with a colorful homespun story that left everyone chuckling in that beer/lutefisk/cigar clogged way that old-time pols in smoky back rooms at Jax or Murray’s or the Saint Paul Grill always laughed, and everyone would have walked together into the glorious future.
• Gauzy, soft-focus stories on “the Minnesotans affected by the budget cuts”, which may very well focus on Minnesotans that are affected by budget cuts, but which will certainly ignore reams and oodles of waste, pork and subsidy of things government should not be subdizing.

Blogger reactions?

With dreary predictability (I almost called it word for word), Grace Kelly at Minnesota Preliterate Conspiracy Wackoes With Dubious Senses Of Ethics “writes“:

“Pawlenty’s idea of compromising is “Do it my way!”, each “offer” has been the same offer as before. Pawlenty gave a press conference where he said he will sign bills and not have a special session. Pawlenty announced his intention to use line item vetoes and unallotments to create his own budget without the house or senate involvement. Sounds like we no longer have a three part government, we now have a “dictator” or “king”.”

No, Grace, you deeply dotty little person; we have the governor acting in accordance with a law that was passed by our elected representatives. Elections have consequences.  He’s doing his job.

Zack at MNPublius:

That’s all fine and dandy, except that in the time that Kelliher has been Speaker there hasn’t been a special session (a streak that is only in danger of ending due to Pawlenty’s Presidential ambitions and inability to engage in any kind of compromise).

Notice how often “compromise” is popping up with the leftybloggers?  Pay attention to how often you see it in MSM columns in the near future.  “Compromise” will be the paramount public virtue in this country before long.

This – when they’re defaming you on the one hand, and demanding “compromise” (i.e., silent acquiescence) on the other, is when you know they’re getting frustrated.

Thanks again, Governor.

I’ve never been a huge Adam Platt fan, but he certainly has his moments:

The Minnesota Supreme Court is days away from hearing arguments in Coleman’s election challenge. It comes down to this: absentee ballots were rejected in different counties and municipalities with varying levels of rigor and adherence to the law. I don’t think either side denies this. The election challenge judges concluded that because Coleman could not prove this variance caused him to lose the election, it was not germane.

Because that court refused to reexamine every absentee ballot, we don’t know what they would tell us. (I suspect Franken would still win.) But if the shoe was on the other foot, and Al trailed by 300, wouldn’t Franken supporters be crying for justice? Would Al have bowed out? Let’s be intellectually honest here—no way.

And it’s nice to see at least one of “them” being intellectually honest.

Look – that’s the biggest scandal of this botched Senate election; I doubt one voter out of 10,000, including the various judges involved, could correctly explain how a 200-odd vote Coleman lead turned into a 200-odd vote Franken one.  I doubt even that many of them could come up with a rationale for having different counting stanards in every jurisdiction, for a US Senate race.  And I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who can justify the rate at which absentee ballots have gone miscounted in this race (which is, by the way, further proof of Berg’s Seventh Law; “When a Democrat defames a conservative’s regard for ethics or the law, they are projecting“; remember how the DFL accused Mary Kiffmeyer of “disenfranchising voters”, without ever showing a single, er, disenfranchised voter?).

Hopefully, Minnesota will learn its lessons from this campaign.  Why, if we have a conscientious Secretary of State who can put his partisan urges aside to work on fixing the voting sytem…

…oh.  Yeah.  We’re screwed.

I’m not one of those conservatives who necessarily piddles on third parties.  They exist for a reason – or, really, two:

1. They provide a place for people who are vastly more into ideology than the mechanics of politics to ply their hobby (see also the Constitution Party, the Libertarians)
2. Occasionally, they give voice to protests against some aspect or another of the big parties. Of course, they usually remove the protesters from one of the major parties, sometimes decisively influencing elections (the Greens in 2000

Minnesota’s “Independence” Party, an offshoot of Ross Perot’s “Reform” Part from the ’92 election, has lately been a third category all by itself; “the thing that wouldn’t leave”. An irrelevant collection of wonks lost in the wilderness until Jesse Ventura won the flukey election of 1998, the IP has been clinging to its misbegotten “Major” status ever since.
First Ringer at TvM notes that the IP is has been swirling the drain since Ventura walked offstage pouting, leaving on the the question “when will it die?”

Despite a strong field of statewide candidates in 2006, arguably the best and certainly most experienced IP slate ever to appear on a ballot, the party barely crested the 5% minimum to mantain major party status and thus state funding.  And while in 2008, the last minute candidacy of former appointed Senator Dean Barkley gained a respectable 15% of the vote, the same year had the IP only running 13 candidates for various offices – its lowest total since Jesse Ventura’s 1998 win.

The answer, despite the protestations of the IP’s dwindling clot of partisans – the IP was never an independent political party.  It was, indeed, never anything more than a small support staff for Jesse Ventura’s vanity project.  And they tipped their hat when Ventura was elected to office; the people who pulled his strings, Dean Barkley and Tim Penny, were former DFLers (Penny a former Congressman, from the 2nd District); when Ventura took office, with no legislative traction whatsoever, he ran to the DFL, and governed like a mildly-apostate DFLer.  The only other significant IP official, State Representative Sheila Kiscaiden, was a very moderate Republican (some would say RINO, but not me) who’d stabbed the party in the back on many issues and was best parted with.

So what’s happening with the IP today?  Ringer has the story, or at least one that doesn’t begin with “who” and end with “cares”:

Since “shocking the world” that November night 11 years ago, the Reform/Independence Party remains fixated on lightning striking twice. Instead of focusing on building from the ground up – the IP only endorsed three candidates for local office in 2008 – the party continues to place its future on the slim hopes that one of its dwindling few candidates for major office will win.  This indie modus operandi focus has stayed with the party over its numerous transformations, from one built on personality in 1998, to a way station for misfit pols in 2002 to finally a warming house for center-left policy wonks in 2006.

Perhaps the IP will finally drop out of major party status.  Their influence has soaked up far too much Minnesota time, money and spotlight. None of it’s been earned since about 2002.

Pawlenty vetoes the DFL’s tax bill on before going fishing.

And – wonder of wonders – although the DFL’s Recovery Confiscation bill passed in both houses, the GOP closed ranks and stood its ground against the DFL’s rapacious assault in both chambers.

Bob Collins at NewsCut:

Under the Legislature’s plan, taxes would rise on alcohol, credit card companies that charge high interest rates and couples earning more than $250,000.

Send your local GOP rep a note of thanks; phone calls are best.  Also to the two Dems in the Senate (Sparks and Tomassoni) and the sole DFLer of principle in the House (Pelowski).  All of them can expect immense pressure from the Tics and their hordes of kept groups to override the veto.

The House can — and will, probably — try to override the veto and most of the media experts focus on the need to get three Republicans to defect to their side, presuming that all the DFLers vote for the override. But will they?

Well, we lost six last year. Hopefully the caucuses learned their lesson last year.

It’s a good day!

The WaPo writes about a colleague’s job change:

Senior Producer Sasha Johnson announced Monday she’s leaving journalism to serve as press secretary at the Department of Transportation, meaning yet another member of the Fourth Estate has left to join the Obama administration

Isolated jump?  As the artcle notes, hardly.  The WaPo piece notes the large number of reporters who’ve taken jobs in the Obama administration.

It’s not just in DC, of course; reporters in the Twin Cities have long found jobs waiting for them with left-leaning governments and pols.  A very partial list; my old colleague Karen Louise Booth jumped from being MPR’s Capitol Bureau chief to being head of communications for the DFL.  Brian Lambert left the Pioneer Press to work for Senator “Brave Sir” Mark Dayton. A scan of spokespeople for any variety of local DFL pols shows a who’s who of former producers, reporters and executives.

Indeed, it’d be interesting to start a list of our own.  Other examples, if you know ’em?  Put ’em in the comments!