Jay Reding on the minimum wage:

The left wants to argue that the minimum wage is a transfer of assets from the rich (business owners) to the poor. The reality of the minimum wage is that it ends up being an asset transfer between poor people — or more likely an asset transfer between disadvantaged people and less disadvantaged people. Any increase in the marginal cost of labor tends to be felt most strongly at the bottom — if labor costs rise, businesses are less likely to hire workers who have a higher likelihood of producing less value for their costs. That means people who have families, less reliable access to transportation, or other personal problems. Single mothers, ex-convicts, people on drug treatment, all of those groups that are the most disadvantaged.

Increasing the minimum wage is pure political theater. All it does is assuage the guilt of wealthy white liberals while doing little to nothing to help people.

On the upside – how many of those “first 100 hours” did Pelosi and Company waste on this “lack of wealth” transfer?

Al Franken, it seems, might just sign off his failed talk show by announcing he’s running for Senate:

Al Franken announced Monday that he will end his radio talk show on Feb. 14, increasing speculation that he is preparing to run for Minnesota’s U.S. Senate seat in 2008.

“I’m definitely giving it serious consideration, and I plan to make a decision soon and announce that, hopefully not on the same day that Barack Obama makes his decision and announces that,” Franken said on his liberal Air America radio show.

I suppose it’s more likely than, say, apologizing for this very tasteless joke.  And it doesn’t matter – because the only real questions are “how far in the bag for Franken will the Strib be?” and “how many “journalistic ethics” will they waterboard to make it happen?”

Representative Ellison:

I’m one of your constituents.

OK, no.  I’m not.  I live in Saint Paul, a city that is not a morass of crime thanks to your party’s policies, thanks mostly to politicians like you – yet.  But I’m a Minnesotan, and I have every right to address my concerns to you.

You’re on record as supporting impeachment.  And I’m writing with one simple demand:

Get on the stick.  Start the “impeachment” ball rolling.  Now. The people who put you in office demand it, and they’re wondering where their campaign promise went:

At a rally in Loring Park in October, Ellison said Bush “has been running amok” and needs to be reined in: “There is one way that you can truly hold this president accountable, and it’s impeachment.”

But for the time being anyway, Ellison seems in no hurry to push the matter. “My opinions really have not changed over time, but the circumstances that I’m in have,” he said. He said that he’s “a step before impeachment,” adding that his emphasis as he learns the ropes in Congress is on a broader range of human and civil rights issues.

Keith!  Your supporters didn’t merrily plug their ears and eyes and mouths, and the Strib didn’t gang-rape the “rules” and “ethics” of journalism to put you into office so you could sit and “learn”.  You’re there for one reason only – to reflect the unfettered id of the DFL and their constituents!

Like this guy:

Mikael Rudolph of Minneapolis, co-founder of a group called ImpeachforPeace.org, wasn’t aware of Ellison’s appointment until he was contacted by a reporter. “That’s fabulous!” he said.

It’s for people like this that you’re in Washington, Mr. Ellison; the half-informed zealot.  The knee-jerk ranter.  The ill-informed, reflexive, unthinking “progressives”.

“Learning”, Mr. Ellison?  Pfft.

Ellison’s appointment to the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over impeachment, has brought applause from the president’s fiercest critics. Democratic leaders have made clear they don’t intend to move to impeach Bush, and critics are disappointed, hoping Ellison will provide a loud voice to ignite their lonely crusade. Pro-impeachment groups plan to press their case for impeachment when they join anti-war demonstrators for a huge rally Saturday in Washington.

And, Mr. Ellison, you had best be there!

At the rally in Minneapolis, Ellison said it was time to “send the message to this Bush character that we’re not going to have it anymore.” He said that impeachment “would be a major undertaking and it would dominate the headlines for a long time” but that it was the right course.

Well, then start dominating the headlines, Representative Ellison!  Get in the papers with your half-witted little plan!  “Dominate” the headlines!

It’s what the Fifth District sent you to Washington for!

“I Hate Bush more than you do!”

“No, I hate Bush more than you do”.

“Well, I think he’s dumber than you think he is”

“No way, duuuuude”

I listened to local rent-a-blogger Jeff Fecke on “Minnesota Matters”, the local Frankennet affiliate’s (for now) attempt at a local show. 

Let me step out of “conservative host” mode for a bit here, and switch into “guy who loves good talk radio” mode.

My earlier observations about the show still hold true – “Minnesota Matters” is no worse than any Twin Cities leftyblog (heh heh) and makes for better radio than anything Janet Robert has tried before…Which is, of course, damnation by faint praise. But faint praise is more than Janet Robert’s FrankenNet affiliate has earned in three years of existence. Limited, qualified, muffled, mildly-chuckled kudos to all involved.”   I’ll stand by that.  Fecke was the audio version of his blog (see paragraphs 1-4, above – it’s not a bad synopsis of Fecke’s oeuvre); he passed on his Straight-from-George-Soros-but-since-I-don’t-have-the-smoking-gun-showing-that-even-though-the-group-that-paid-Fecke-shares-office-space-with-Soros’-Media-Matters-For-America-there’s-no-financial-connection-whatsoever-and-you’re-an-idiot-to-wonder-because-I-ASSURE-you-there’s-no-connection-nosireebob talking points with the fluency you’d expect from someone who’s spent the last several months being paid to do the job; the interviewer was passable.

But what killed the show was the callers. 

Good talk radio doesn’t need callers anymore than good food needs coriander.  Both serve as accents, spices, variations on the theme. 

Don Vogel – for whom I started in talk radio as a call screener – explained the art of call selection once upon a time.  There are four kinds of callers:

1. Great Callers.  These are the people who have a point that is like a jet-pack strapped to your show’s back; they rocket the show ahead of itself, add something to the proceedings that make the whole thing more entertaining, gripping and valuable.  A good screener flags the great callers and gets them on the air pronto.
2. Boring Callers.  Instead of a jet pack, a boring callers straps a bag of spoiled meat to a show’s back; they agree, maybe, but not only do they add nothing to the conversation, they sap the energy from the conversation.  They weigh things down, destroy any momentum, and stink the place up.  Their calls should be politely declined.
3. Crazy Callers.  Crazies are…well, crazy.  Their calls can be a dead weight or a godsend.  Picking which is which is what separates a good screener from a bad one.
4. Ordinary Callers.  They have good questions and input.  You air them, if you need them, after the Great Callers and the good Crazy Callers, just so that the Ordinary Listeners don’t feel intimidated.

The show – like most Air America shows – sounded like the same person called over and over again, with the same point (or “point”).  The were desperately dull.  One might have sufficed; the show, such as it was, would have benefitted from their absence, believe it or not; you can be in the fever swamp without sounding like you’re marinading in the fever swamp.

At any rate – the show would have done well to ignore the boring callers – most to all of them – and just talked.

Note to Janet Robert:  I’ll check back in a few weeks to see if you’ve implemented any of this.  Enjoy.

Senate Bill S.1 has garnered a fair amount of controversy.  Intended to reform rules for lobbyists, it is in some ways a fair idea (and apparently a retread of a bill sponsored in the last session by Trent Lott).  It would put limits on lobbyists’ transactions with Congress.

The controversy comes from its attempts to classify blogs and bloggers as lobbyists:

Section 220 of the bill “would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K. Street lobbyists,” said [direct-mail campaigner Richard] Viguerie in a statement, but the truth isn’t that simple.

First, a couple of facts: though groups like the Family Research Council claim that “the liberal leadership in the US Senate seeks to silence groups like the Family Research Council,” the bill was actually cosponsored by Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the top Republican leader in the Senate. What’s more, the bill appears to be an exact reintroduction of last year’s S.2349, which was introduced by Trent Lott (R-MS) and actually passed the Republican-controlled Senate, complete with section 220.

The fact that Lott introduced it is hardly prima facie evidence that it’s a great idea.  But let’s proceed:

So much for the liberal plot. In fact, some liberal groups oppose the measure, including the ACLU. The group argues that the reporting requirements are “onerous” and that “people must be able to disseminate information, contact their representatives, and encourage others to do so as well.”

And with this, I agree with the ACLU.

More below:

Section 220 introduces a series of modifications to the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act. The most important is that “paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying” now counts as “lobbying” under certain circumstances…This is what has inspired claims that bloggers and activists of all stripes will suddenly be classed as lobbyists and will be monitored by the government.

Hm.  So is it a fact?

What the bill says, though, is that the rules only apply to people who are paid by clients to encourage the public to contact Congress about specific legislation. The rules do not apply to any communication directed at less than 500 people, they do not apply to any communication directed at a group’s current membership, and they do not impose any speech regulations (all that is required is a quarterly report describing where one’s money came from and what bills were worked on).

Would this apply to a political blogger? Not usually. Because section 220 is only a series of changes to the Lobbying Disclosure Act, that legislation’s other rules still apply. According to OMB Watch, a government accountability watchdog group, the LDA’s registration requirement is only triggered by groups that spend more than $24,500 on lobbying semiannually and employ a least one person who spends 20 percent or more of their work time on lobbying. The bill also concerns only the federal government; groups operating at the state level are exempt.

On the one hand, like most “Reform” legislation, it leaves more questions than answers; the big one for me is “do I fit in?”  I reach a lot more than 500 people, but I might make $50 a month in blogads, if I’m lucky.

This sort of thing is a two-edged sword.  On the one hand, more transparency in this sort of thing would be good – and it would be best to depend on the honesty of all involved.  I do, in fact, disclose every non-advertising nickel I get from this site.  Other sites’ financial underpinnings are a little fuzzier and closely held.

Still and all, there’s a chance it’ll come to naught:

Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT), though, is concerned that section 220 is overly broad. He has introduced amendment 20, which would kill section 220 but leave the rest of the bill intact. (As a sign of just how much interest the bill has received on Capitol Hill, it currently has 96 proposed amendments).

Worth watching.

Si eres uno de esos republicanos que permanecían caseros este último noviembre porque Mark Kennedy apoyó subsidios del etanol, o porque Michele Bachmann hizo política mejor que el status quo en el 6o Districto – esto es sobre lo que te advertíamos.

Bush signed the law last year and the Republican-controlled Congress provided money to start work on the fence. But Republicans worry that now they have their majority on Capitol Hill, they never will see the fence built. Democrats in charge today generally oppose the fence.Based on the comments of some Democrats, there is no rush.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he wants the Bush administration to offer a plan for securing the northern and southern borders.

“My preference is to delay the construction of a fence until we have a plan,” said Thompson, D-Miss.

Lest we forget, Minneapolis voters were duped into electing a racist troll to their school board this past November.

Jim W. at Anti-Strib sums up where things are at.

Stay tuned at Anti-Strib – this is one of the most amazing stories in Minnesota politics today.

The unmarried, “child-free” career woman is a Democrat, statistically speaking (women without children vote overwhelmingly Democrat; women with children tend to be Republican).  And it’s an electoral truism that African-Americans vote left.

Feminists – both equity and identity feminists, and the distinction is a very meaningful one – flocked to the left, the Democrats, because of the left’s purported openness to women in non-traditional roles – like, for example, working women who choose career over family.  The Democrats, the saw went, treated these women better.

Unless, of course, those minority, female overachievers aren’t Democrats.

Barbara Boxer took a swipe at one of America’s two foremost black working women, and the most powerful black woman in US government history, dinging Condi Rice – a woman who is in every way Boxer’s better – for not having children:

Boxer was wholly in character for her party – New York’s own two Democratic senators, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, were predictably opportunistic – but the Golden State lawmaker earned special attention for the tasteless jibes she aimed at Rice.

Rice appeared before the Senate in defense of President Bush’s tactical change in Iraq, and quickly encountered Boxer.

“Who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price,” Boxer said. “My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young.”

On the one hand, it’s Barbara Boxer – one of the stupidest people to ever serve in the Senate, and with the departure of Mark Dayton perhaps that body’s biggest embarassment.

On the other hand – what’s it gonna be, Democrats?  If women don’t have children, does it devalue them, as Boxer would seem to believe?  Because you can’t have it both ways.

We warned you.

Vote DFL, or stay home because “the Republicans suck” or “they’re all the same”?

Pay through the nose:

The 2007 legislative session offered the Minnesota DFL an opportunity to shed a bit of its hard-taxing reputation. With a projected $2.2 billion state budget surplus, legislators could have funded champagne-style programs while avoiding the headache of higher taxes. Given the surplus, some hard-pressed Minnesota taxpayers were even dreaming of a rebate.

Sober up, taxpayers. In the opening hours of the legislative session, the DFL-dominated Senate went on a tax increase binge.

More of that “bipartisan cooperation” that the DFL and the Strib were always yapping about when the GOP was in control, obviously.

Read the whole thing and weep.  It’s going to be a brutal couple of years.

Victor Davis Hanson on the Democrats’ approach to Iraq:

Apparently the party line is that we can’t win, but we’re afraid to pull out in case we do, and so we will equivocate as we watch the battlefield and make the necessary rhetorical adjustments just in time.

They’ll vote for it, before they vote against it.  Before they vote for it again.

Generals in the bedroom, lotharios on the battlefield.

Every time the Strib’s New Years’ editorial makes a muted plea for a monolithic socialist state or a vacuous apology for the vapid left, an angel will lose its wings and fall to earth.

As we say farewell to 2007 and hello to 2008, it’s appropriate that we take a moment to reflect on events of the past year. That a single circuit around the sun could have brought so many welcome developments would have seemed incredible a year ago. Remember the sadness of that season? The deaths, in cruelly quick succession, of Frank Stanton and Gerald Ford? The prospect of a winter with virtually no snow? The Iraq Study Group had found almost no reason for optimism in the war; polar bears were endangered; Israel was proposing a new settlement in the West Bank; James Brown was dead.

Into that void of hope strode 2007. How quickly things changed!

No one could have foreseen the sudden surrender of Osama bin Laden. His dramatic arrival at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, with his hands up and his BlackBerry at his feet, turned the tide of what we used to call the “war on terror” [“aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh”] and certainly earned him his recent designation as Time’s Person of the Year (albeit deceased). The rapid unraveling of the Iraq insurgency, and the speedy consolidation of power by Iraq’s first female president [“Someone grab my harp!!!”] , combined to form a miracle: a truly democratic, progressive [“Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp”] government, and a year in which the dwindling U.S. force — now down to 150 — suffered not a single casualty.

Likewise, the 2006 Christmas sales numbers for Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” [“Pull thy ripcord, Jeremiah!”] shocked Detroit, the energy companies and Washington into an unprecedented effort to fight global warming [“I’m going in! I’m going in!”] . President Bush’s now-famous shirtsleeves stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue [“A Jimmy Carter reference…hey, where the hell are my wings?”] before delivering his State of the Union address last January showed that he finally understood the nature of the threat [“Hang on! It’s going to be a bumpy landing!”] . And while the arctic summer ice has yet to recover, the federal initiative to outfit polar bears with FEMA pontoon boats offered a temporary fix and won world admiration.

Of course, some problems remain. The refugees who fled North Korea after Kim Jong-il’s suicide still need meaningful work [“Assuming the position!”] . Fidel Castro’s renunciation of communism has created a troublesome brain drain in Miami as Cuban-Americans pull up stakes and move back home [“Did he just write the communism will recify its own excesseswhoooooaaaaaaaaaaaah!“] . And the passage of national universal health care threatens to extend the average U.S. lifespan and put more pressure on the Social Security system [“This place is so crowded from all those British cancer patients who died on the waiting liwhoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!“] .

Even so, a country that can make college free for any student with a 2.5 grade point average or better can do just about anything [“Did they just devalue college, and at the same time raise the demand curve to the point that no person can afford a higher education without government assistance, all the while utterly socially devaluing all non-college-track vocationsaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!“] . We’re proud to live in a country that, in a single year, brought peace to Sudan and Somalia [“Isn’t that a conservative value…hey, I still have my wings…”] , gave free HIV medications to anyone on the globe who needed them, made abortion permanently legal but completely unnecessary [“ISn’t that a complete logical inversion, making a good free and ubiquitous but then assuming that people will have the infinite common sense not to use is Heeeeeeeeeeeeey, wheeeeere did my wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings gooooooooooo…“] , and established a national endowment to prevent domestic abuse [“Oh, take my fecking wings. The notion that you can spend money to prevent something like domestic abuse – something we don’t even entirely understand – is just too stupid to think about. I’m walking home”] .

And of course, the Twins’ victory in the 2007 World Series speaks for itself. [“Welcome to the Metrodome. No, I have no wings. Just a pitchfork”]

Jay Reding on one of the Dems’ favorite memes; the incredible shrinking middle class, and their inevitable solution to the nonexistent problem (you get one guess), in re Byron Dorgan and Sherrod Brown’s latest bit of anti-free-trade demigoguery:

Either the middle class is getting shorter, or this is just more populist garbage. There’s no evidence that supports a “shrinking” middle class. Instead, reality tells a different picture. We’ve had years of solid growth. Unemployment is at record low levels. Consumer confidence is high. For all this talk about how terrible life is for the middle class these days the numbers state otherwise.

Here’s how you tell an economic bullshit artist from someone with a clue: if they start resorting to sob stories about how little Mary Jane Pityme lost her job at the mill because of some big bad corporate fatcat, you’re dealing with a bullshit artist. Real economists go for the head, not try to pull wool over people’s eyes with sad stories. Senators Dorgan and Brown are bullshit artists, as will soon be demostrated.

Read the whole thing.

Watch for the media to note that the middle class has stopped shrinking in about January of ’09, by the way – assuming a Democrat wins.

Remember last fall, when during my election predictions I said that new Attorney General Lorie Swanson would be “Mini Mike”?

According to Brodkorb, it’s actually worse than that.  Hatch is staying on as an AGO “employee”.

Mr. Hatch; you were rejected at the polls, during a year in which you held every possible advantage.  Minnesotans do not want you anymore.

Leave.

l…liked Donald Trump much…

…but I’m willing to cut him a lot of slack after this.

The Strib is up in arms over out-of-state contributions to this past election.

Unions piling on in favor of DFLers? Teachers’ union money flooding districts and squashing all dissent? George Soros? Liberal pressure groups paying the freight for friendly bloggers?

Pfft. Get serious. Of course it’s a Republican private citizen!

A Houston homebuilder who helped finance the Swift Boat veterans campaign against former presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 was the primary bankroller of a Minnesota group that ran a harsh advertising blitz against Mike Hatch, the unsuccessful DFL candidate for governor this fall.

A spokesman for the group, the Minnesota chapter of A Stronger America, said Tuesday that Bob Perry contributed two-thirds of the $750,000 that was spent on TV ads and direct mail.

“I received a call from A Stronger America in Washington, which is where the bank account was held, informing me that a half a million dollars was wired into the account,” said Joe Weber, a spokesman for the Minnesota chapter. “At which point we sprung into action.”…It also allowed the group to mount an extensive television campaign that it otherwise might not have been able to muster.

Now, check out this next bit:

Some of the ads accused Hatch of two decades of “intimidation, arrogance and abuse of power,” and asserted that he was under investigation for “influence peddling” in a dispute with a judge.

Perry had helped finance the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

What was that investigation? What are those allegations of intimidation and abuse (which have been rebounding around among Minnesota politics insiders for as long as I’ve been following the subject – along with allegations that the Strib has always played softball with the Attorney General)?

There were other connections between that SwMinnesota Monitoift Boat campaign and the efforts against Hatch. A Stronger America-Minnesota is registered in Minnesota with an Alexandria, Va., address. Hatch said before the election that he discovered that an insurance-industry backed group, Americans for Job Security, shared the same address.

(Side note: Before the election, I noted, correctly, that Minnesota Monitor, a local lefty site, was funded by a group that “shares an address” with Media Matters, George Soros’ PR agency. “Not fair!” cried the local leftybloggers who were being paid by the group that “shares” that address; “don’t believe what your eyes tell you – Minnesota Monitor isn’t a George Soros joint!”. But for Mike Hatch, “sharing an address” is apparently dispositive.

Hatch said Tuesday the election was over, and it was time to move on.”But the lesson learned is that the disclosure laws need to be updated so that people know who is participating in a campaign,” he said. “The way our laws are currently structured, you don’t find out until after the election.”

Well, there he has a point. Dislosure needs to be immediate…

…combined with repeal of our other, ludicrous campaign finance laws.

Watching David “The Lori Sturdevant Of The Beltway” Gregory providing audio campaign collateral for “interviewing” John Kerry this morning on Today.

And I can’t confirm this, but I think Gregory has his head so far up Kerry’s butt that he actually signed off the piece from within Kerry’s esophagus.

The fall of Wonkette – from moderately-readable all-over-the-place blog to vacuous giggly snarkblog distinct from “Oliver Willis” only by being…well, actually, “editor” Alex Pareene might be Oliver Willis…

…down to the corrosive racism at the very core of his stunted little excuse for a psyche.

“Michelle Malkin to Go to Iraq, Hopefully Stay” says Pareene’s (?) piece on Malkin’s “Odd Couple” trip to Iraq with disgraced former CNN chief Eason Jordan. He accompanies the “story” with a cowardly forgery within a cowardly racist forgery; the old, photoshopped “Girls Gone Wild” slag copied into a photo of a World War II Japenese internment camp.  (Mount an intellectual defense of a deeply-flawed 65-year-old policy?  Get your ethnic background sniggered at by “liberals”.  See how this works?)

Did you know Michelle Malkin was from the Philippines? The idea seems to obsess the leftybloggers.

Michelle is going because there’s an Associated Press source in Baghdad who she thinks doesn’t exist, and, like Curt Weldon, she knows only her and some other no-name blogger can find the truth.

Oh, that’s gotta leave a mark!

But did the big-name bloggers at “Wonkette” pay much attention last time a bunch of “no-name bloggers” got the truth about the media making stuff up?

Why, no. They didn’t!

I look forward to meeting Alex Pareene at the ’08 GOP convention.

He’ll probably remind everyone that Michelle Malkin is really Philipino.  Woot.

While Senator Johnson had the stroke, it’s some on the far left that seem to have suffered the damage.

This time, via Brian Maloney – conspiracy theories about Senator Johnson.

Rove’s henchmen and their evil arterial-occluder ray strike again, apparently, in their little peabrains.

A local leftyblogger (who’ll not chisel another link out of me; Christmas is over, big fella!) took a shot at honing his descriptive skills last week.

It was, unfortunately a swing and a miss.  So to help out, allow me to present a bit of a contest:

Who do the following terms describe:

• “Pasty”
• “White”
• “Out Of Shape”

Is the correct answer:

1. Conservative Bloggers
2. Liberal Bloggers
3. Virtually every Minnesotan over the age of 22

 The answer, of course, is “3”.

Just saying.

(more…)

Cynthia McKinney, leaving the House, files a purely symbolic bill to impeach the President:

In what was likely her final legislative act in Congress, outgoing Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney introduced a bill Friday to impeach President Bush.

The legislation has no chance of passing and serves as a symbolic parting shot not only at Bush but also at Democratic leaders. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has made clear that she will not entertain proposals to sanction Bush and has warned the liberal wing of her party against making political hay of impeachment.

As long as we’re dwelling in the world of symbols, allow me to symbolically lob (if only rhetorically) a sulpherous, rotten egg at Cynthia McKinney’s gibbering face.

In my mind, it made such a symbolic spatter.

…and Frank Rich is no Walter Cronkite:

“As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq.

“The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.”

Wow.  The President nominated the wrong Secretary of Defense!

Lori Sturdevant – who alone surpasses Doug Grow as the Twin Cities’ media’s most reliable DFL flak – must have been saving this piece for the Hatch/Dutcher coronation she felt the state so richly deserved. She must have dusted it off, changed a few tenses, and run it anyway.

For a not-insignificant share of Mike Hatch’s supporters, and maybe even some of his detractors, the most regrettable thing about the DFL gubernatorial ticket’s defeat last month is that Judi Dutcher won’t be lieutenant governor next year.

Just a brief aside here.

Newspaper columnists; could we retire the phrase “not-insignificant share” for describing a vanishingly small group of believers in a hopelessly picayune concept that is nonetheless a writer’s pet idea?

Judi Dutcher was, if anything, an emptier skirt that Amy Klobuchar. Her only clakim to fame is in being perhaps the state’s poster child for RINOism; she was a hopelessly, crushingly liberal Republican who turned coats (purely for political advantage) and joined the party she should have been in all along. So while her fans might be a “not-insignificant share” of people, I’d suspect that a more significant share, at least among those who care about such things, are glad to see the miserable wretch’s political career take its’ last spiral down the drain.

I digress. Sturdevant wants to make sure the people know Dutcher really does know about Ethanol:

“I felt terrible that people would think that Mike didn’t value ethanol, or that I didn’t know what it was,” Dutcher, a former state auditor, recalled in a recent interview…Minnesotans are forgiving people. My guess is that even in corn country, the vast majority of voters would have given her a pass for her forgetfulness.

They would have, that is, had Hatch not tripped on his own angry tongue as reporters pursued the Dutcher-E85 story.

It was good to hear from Dutcher that Hatch treated her much better than he did the inquiring Duluth News Tribune reporter who said Hatch called him a “Republican whore.” (“Mike was terrific,” she said. “He never made me feel bad.”)

Judi’s such a terriffic gal! And Mike Hatch! What a terriffic guy! Never mind all those former employees and their pesky stories about what a pint-sized Napoleon he is…

It was disappointing to hear that, in the weeks since Hatch first publicly blamed her gaffe for his defeat, then recanted, he has not contacted her personally to make amends. (“For the sake of the relationship that Mike and I enjoyed during the campaign, I’m not going to focus on that letter,” Dutcher said.)

Ah. So maybe “Mike” wasn’t so “terrific” after all?

No matter. One doesn’t read these columns expecting to see any smudge on Mike Hatch to be explored beyond the odd expository sentence.

No, one reads them to see the puffiness of the piece extended to a full eight years of what might have been:

But what was most worth hearing from the 44-year-old attorney and former foundation president was a reprise of her proposed job description for Minnesota’s lieutenant governor.

Her notion sprang from the genuine worry she — and plenty of others — have about widening divisions in this state’s body politic. Rural vs. metro, city vs. suburb, rich vs. poor, Republican vs. DFL — all the usual fault lines have widened into chasms. Not coincidentally, a troubling breach has developed between Minnesota citizens and state government. Getting things done at the state level has grown more difficult as a result.

As lieutenant governor, Dutcher wanted to throw herself into that breach and work to heal it.

“My job would be to work with every legislator, both sides of the aisle — get to know them, personally and professionally, and ask what issues are facing their communities. What can we in the governor’s office do to work with them to get the best results?”

In addition, she said, she planned to convene regional forums, aimed at bringing fresh ideas and more citizen input to bear on public problems.

“We’d bring together elected officials and the best public policy leaders in this state, to understand the emerging trends and how we can address them together,” she said. The topics she expected the forums to address, just for starters, included the aging of the population, business development, environmental protection, and education improvement. Rural development — ironically, in light of the E85 flap — was going to be a special emphasis.

“There’s so much work to do, I wish there were six lieutenant governors,” she said.

And knowing Dutcher’s record, there might have been. Or at least six Second Lieutenant Governors.

I’m not sure what to harp on here: Sturdevant’s notion that Judi Dutcher was anyone that could “bring together” anyone – she’s as left-of-center a figure as any in Minnesota politics – or that bringing anyone “Together” is desirable, or that the columnist’s plaintive cry to “get things done…” is anything but a cover for the unstated coda “…the DFL way”.

What Dutcher describes is quite different from what Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s reelected runningmate has been doing. Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau is also Transportation Commissioner Carol Molnau, the head of one of the largest and most important agencies of state government.

Four years ago, when Pawlenty announced that his lieutenant governor would also be his transportation chief, it sounded like a good bargain for the cash-strapped state. Molnau had the qualifications. She’d been a transportation specialist in the state House. She would fill two jobs for the price of the lower-salaried one.

Today, with the state once again in the black, the arrangement doesn’t seem as nifty. It implies no criticism of Molnau’s performance at MnDOT to observe that a commissioner who holds his or her own election certificate is hard for a governor to control.

What’s more, employing a lieutenant governor to run a state agency doesn’t take full advantage of the special asset the occupant of that office has. No other junior member of a governor’s administrative team is elected. He (or, since 1983, she) brings to the office a relationship with the voters.

Molnau’s double job aside…huh?

If 1/3 of the passersby on Nicollet Mall or on Main Street in Fergus Falls could name the Lieutenant governor (much less “who was the losing Lieutenant Governor candidate last November?”), I’d grant a “familiarity” between her and voters. But “Special Relationship?”

Using and building on that relationship as a liaison to the Legislature and the citizens, as Dutcher intended to do, would seem to be in a governor’s interest — and the state’s.

Judi Dutcher’s campaign has been ushered to the scrap heap of Minnesota history. Let her ideas lie on the heap where the voters sent them, to lie atop piles of Lori Sturdevant’s old columns.

On reading David Drucker’s op-ed in the Strib (via the LATimes), it’s tempting to simply mutter “good riddance” as Drucker – whose column is so sodden with lefty caricature that it reads like parody – and his wife decide to move to Canada:

I’m sure a lot of other dyed-in-the-organic-wool liberals muttered something similar that dark morning in 2004, but unlike most of them, we meant it. Plan A: John Kerry wins, we build that dream ski house in Vermont. Plan B: Move to Vancouver.

So, Plan B it was. We’d had enough of Bush, the direction the United States was going, and this was the last straw. Never mind that we lived in Cambridge, Mass., arguably the most liberal city in the bluest of the blue states. We were packing our bulk granola into our diesel Beetle and heading out.

But then, after reading the cloyingly vacuous Drucker’s analysis of Canadian and US politics, you reconsider…

…and mutter “good riddance, yuppie a****le”.  I don’t care what your politics are – but we’re a better country to be at least be rid of one pair of worthless quitters.

What do Ed Gein, David Duke, Charles Manson, Michael Richards and Richard Ramirez have in common?

 THey all finished better than John Kerry in a likeability poll [1]:

“Americans know who he is, and have pretty much decided they don’t like him,” said Brown. He noted the poll found that 95 percent of respondents said they had heard enough about Kerry, who lost the 2004 White House race to President Bush, to rate the Massachusetts Democrat.

The poll of 1,623 registered voters was conducted after the November 7 national elections, which saw Democrats win back control of the U.S. Congress from Republicans.

93% of Americans apparently think John Kerry was found guilty of war crimes.

No – it’s fellow veteran Chuck Rangel, not so much attacking the troops as claiming they’re too dumb to know better:

If a young fella has an option of having a decent career or joining the army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq.

Allahpundit notes:

[the left need] to find a way to exculpate our all-volunteer military for their role in it; blaming them, however obliquely, is politically unviable, which is why even Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore insist they support the troops. Solution: deny their autonomy. Pretend that they’re either too stupid or too lazy or too poor to do anything but enlist.

As to that whole “decent career” thing – AlPundit and I both thought of the same example…