“Dozens” [1] of Government workers are going to show Israel what-for by…

…er…

…skipping three meals:

To be fair, skipping three meals [2] is arguably a bigger commitment to one’s cause than, say, a “stolen land declaration” or some other such frippery.

If I were covering the story, I’d ask how many of the “dozens” [1] had scheduled colonoscopies, cholesterol tests or lipid panels for the next day.

[1] How many “dozens”? Two? Three? Eight?

[2] That’s presuming they actually complete the, er, “protest”.

You will search the Strib in vain for any mention of the fallout from Ilhan Omar’s speech, in which she basically told a Somali audience that she was there to uphold their side’s interests in an ongoing squabble with Ethiopia.

Now, normally you need to go to the London Daily Mail.

So the fact that it’s in the NYPost must mean it’s serious. Tom Emmer called on her to resign:

“Ilhan Omar’s appalling, Somalia-first comments are a slap in the face to the Minnesotans she was elected to serve and a direct violation of her oath of office,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) wrote on X. “She should resign in disgrace.”

If you’re confused by the fracas? It does need some explaining:

Omar, the first Somali American in Congress, appeared to assure her Somali American constituents that she would do everything in her power to prevent the disputed, breakaway Republic of Somaliland from entering into a sea-access deal with landlocked Ethiopia.

A clip of the Minnesota lawmaker went viral with over 2.6 million views after it was posted on X, with a translation saying Omar had said: “As Somalis, one day we will go after our missing territories.”

The congresswoman claims her remarks were lost in translation. 

“It’s not only slanted but completely off,” Omar said of the subtitles in a video of her speech shared by Republic of Somaliland Foreign Minister Rhoda Elmi. “But I wouldn’t expect more from these propagandists.”

Of course, as we noted yesterday, the Somali deputy foreign minister – presumably a Somali speaker – felt the need to disavow the speech in no uncertain terms:

My fearless prediction: Omar will do her usual on-air slumber party with Esme Murphy this Sunday. They’ll paint each others toenails on the air as they commiserate about all the bigotry that strong powerful women face in the world today.

And then it’ll get disappeared.

How much effort does today’s #MNDFL put into acting like a bunch of 25 year old “influencers”?

This much.

President Biden came to Duluth/Superior yesterday to celebrate breaking ground on a taxpayer-to-political class money transfer machine.

And the DFL showed him where he stands, figuratively and literally:

What just happened?

Either:

• The Babylon Bee has developed Artificial Intelligence video to the point where they can make a video mocking the President and the gathered, uh, dignitaries, or…
• Governor Klink and Senators DeVille, Baldwin and Slugger made the President stand with his thumb up his butt while they took the inevitable slew of selfies to gurgitate out onto social media.

I love how the even President Biden, around :30, puts up his hands so as to say “What TF? Aren’t I the President?” as DeVille, Slugger and Baldwin cackle like a bunch of Edina housewives chugging box wine.

Hilarious? Yes.

A perfect representation of today’s MNDFL – the obsession with self-adulatory echo-chambering, the forced junior-high giggling, the obliviousness to anyone and anything outside their special little world? The three of them, and Baldwin, act like a clacque of spoiled, oblivious middle-school mean girls.

This does, in fact, personify today’s DFL to a perfect “T”

Joe Biden is spry and capable and not senile and utterly in charge of things and not a semi-mobile meat puppet:

And don’t you dare say otherwise.

Old and Busted: “The rising tide raises all boats”

New Flava: “Decline and stagnation is not just good – it’s courageous“

When I was a kid, I got my first drivers license in North Dakota. The whole process was handled via snail mail between state offices. Took about two weeks.

IN the decades I’ve lived in Minnesota, I’ve gotten or renewed my license eight times, counting last month.

Three of those times, it took six or more weeks to arrive. Another time, after three months, I went to the newly-computerized DPS, and found that some union data entry droog and entered an address that I had not only never lived at, but didn’t exist (“18xx Minnehaha in MInneapolis”).

And this last month? Six weeks and counting. I went to the DPS office. They said “Production issue”.

3-4 years ago, I got my mother’s drivers license renewed in North Dakota. Printed on the spot. Done while I waited, and I didn’t wait long enough to even notice.

So tell me, DFLers – when Minnesota brags about having “good government”, what are you talking about?

The DFL will repeatedly and systematically cheat in their own elections.

But no way, no how in everyone else’s.

Sheesh. What are you, some kind of Cheetoh-haired Literal Hitler?

Don’t get me wrong. Jason DeRusha – former Channel 4 reporter and morning anchor, turned afternoon drive guy at the once-great WCCO – isn’t a bad guy. I’ve met him, engaged with him a time or two, and by Twin Cities media standards he’s OK. He’s no Bob Collins, anyway [1]

But if I were a DFL Comms person who wanted to come up with a nice, low-impact media appearance to side-slip the impression that your Governor’s only media contact was an endless stream of selfies and cheesecake (and donut, and pizza and corn dog) photos, without sweating the Governor too hard, DeRusha – or, really, anyone at ‘CCO – would be at the top of the list.

But somehow he managed to choke:

“Minnesota is a diverse state, it continues to grow. This flag was crafted in the 1890s,” said Gov. Walz regarding Minnesota’s current flag. “It’s highly offensive to a large number of people, and there’s very little debate about that.”

“…there’s very little debate” because the DFL steamrolled it through without a whole lot of debate allowed.

But here’s the clinker:

When asked about this topic, Gov. Walz compared these Republican efforts to “somehow saving the Confederate battle flag.” The governor added, “These are the arguments that happened with Jefferson Davis statues in Alabama.”

That’s right. The “old” flag was the one the 21st Virginia carried at Gettysburg.

Remember – he’s the governor of “#OneMinnesota”.

[1] Of course, either was Bob Collins, ’til he retired.

Sure.

But life isn’t all shooting three-pointers.

Sometimes you take the layup.

So, Saint Paul has a new city council.

Sort of.

Just like the old city council, the new one treats the knobs and levers of government power as their toy and playground.

They’re just a little more overt about it:

And in terms of waving “Progressive” bloody sheets about in public?

Again – same as the old council, but more-so:

Couldn’t see that coming. Honest. Seriously.

I was casting about for the perfect way to describe the incoming City Council, when an email from a friend of the blog did it for me:

The New York Times thinks it’s important that Saint Paul, Minnesota has elected an all-female city council.

I was with a group of women the other day who also were saying how wonderful it was, how diverse this council is now, and laughing at unfunny jokes like “don’t we feel sorry for the middle aged white man?” 

“Change doesn’t happen with the same voices at the table,” Ward 6 Councilwoman Nelsie Yang says in the article.

Funny, I say to the group of women I’m with- these women who were recently elected, their campaigns all sounded the same. And on top of that, their campaign promises and priorities all sounded the same as Russ Stark. Is he middle aged yet? I’ll bet he is. And he’s definitely white. And, this entire newly elected council, why, their priorities all sound the same as another white man who has visited the Twin Cities often- Pete Buttigieg. 

But, their voices, their priorities, don’t sound the same as former Ward 7 Councilwoman Jane Prince’s priorities. She was often mocked and called all sorts of names on social media for being a different voice.

I’m going to break in here and say it: Jane Prince, the former staffer for Ellen Anderson, who used to seem waaaaaay out on the left. [2]

Their voices and priorities don’t sound 100% the same as former Ward 1 Councilman Dai Thao, who was the first Hmong American to be elected to Saint Paul City Council. While he was definitely liberal, because his voice was different, because he didn’t sound the same as those in power, he was often “accused” of being a Republican. LOL.

And Debbie Montgomery, who was mentioned in this article as the first Black Woman to win a Saint Paul City Council seat. I don’t remember her a lot on the council, but I do know that since her time on the council, she has been accused of being a Nimby and being out of touch with her neighborhood because she doesn’t sound the way these newly elected women sound. 

So, to Ms Yang and the rest of these women that are so proud to be a “different” voice on the council, you can ride that all they want, but the reality is, the majority percentage of the 30% or so of voters who bother to show up to vote in a local election really weren’t voting for change, weren’t voting for a new voice, they were voting for you because you sounded like the white men before you who were virtue signaling all the priorities that you virtue signaled in your campaigns.

Call me a cynic, or a realist, but I suspect our governing class thinks the not-at-all-new “New and more intesectional” council’s, er, predictability is a feature, not a bug:

As Alan Dershowitz once said in addressing a crowd we’d call “woke” today, but merely “PC” in the much less insipid early ’90s:

Your idea of “diversity” is someone with different colored skin, or in a skirt, who thinks exactly the same as you”

So that’s something that’ll never change.

[1] I acknowledge that I am not a biologist

[2] Jane Prince was also a great staffer – who made sure everyone, even pesky Republicans, got answers from Anderson’s office. Try that with Sandy Pappas or Rena Moran or Maria Isa).

The below is an update of a piece I first wrote almost four years ago. It was at that moment about the time when people – smart people, anyway – were starting to realize that Covid wasn’t the new Bubonic Plague, that the sky was not falling, and that whatever “model” Governor Klink was reading that was predicting 70,000 deaths in Minnesota alone by mid-July of 2020, and 20,000 dead as a best case if they shut the state down completely, was perhaps…wrong.

I was looking at the gutting of civil and religious freedom that Minnesotans had countenanced – perhaps more or less voluntarily in March,

Over this past weekend, Big Left went through what’s become an annual orgy of celebrating what’s become their secular holiday, January 6.

Governor Klink took a break from his regimen of selfies of him being fed donuts by Co-Governor Flanagan to have his social media intern blurt this out:

The DFL, likewise:

So – a year and a half after Governor Klink reluctantly gave up his “emergency powers”, and after three years of Joe Biden serving as the doddering mouthpiece for Barack Obama’s third term as the greatest stealth authoritarian since Woodrow Wilson, let’s take stock of the state of “democracy”, in Minnesota and nationwide.

One of the obligations of a free people – and especially of a free people that wants to stay that way – is to push back when government overreaches. Not just in emergencies (although that was the initial subject of the original post), but always, on every facet of liberty. Conservatism holds that order and liberty exist in a constant state of tension; without order (or health) prosperity is impossible; without health, freedom is academic (subsistence farmers don’t have time to petition for redress of grievances); without freedom, order is onerous and, let’s be honest, prosperity is most likely concentrated among those keeping the order.

Three years ago, I said that Government power is like a handgun – sometimes, a necessary tool in extreme circumstances, under terms that are as strictly circumscribed as any rule on justifiable use of lethal force. And like any necessary tool, free people need to make sure that the newbie isn’t sweeping people at the firing range with her hand on the trigger, and that government isn’t getting drunk and profligate with its use, or abuse of power.

Of course, three years later, it’s clear that the Biden and Walz regimes great government power less like a handgun on the nightstand, and more like a Reaper drone, orbiting loudly above everything, ready to strike arbitrarily and without a whole lot of reason or respect for the niceties of constitutional law.

Just as Governor Piglet’s administration used Covid as a pretext for seizing unprecedented arbitrary power, Democrats nationwide are waving “January 6” around like a bloody shirt, to try to justify their ravaging of the spirit and letter of AMerican democracy.

So lets list the outrages. Let me know what I’ve missed; I intend for this list to live on as long as needed:

Life and Liberty

• The emergence of the crypto-Maoist “Democratic Socialists of America” as the most powerful bloc in the Democrat party nationwide, and even moreso of the DFL – as both parties arrogate more power, wealth (transferred from taxpayers)
• The multi-pronged bringing to heel of the education system, from pre-school through the post-doctoral level, is “the long game” in attacking not just liberty, but the entire underpinning of Western Civilization. Creating a generation of ignorant droogs who think “freedom” is just material satiety is both a key goal of those who’d gut the American experiment and, seemingly, a long way toward being accomplished.

The Pursuit of Prosperity

Here, the DFL’s disdain for business and private property rears its head, above and beyond any actual response to the epidemic.

• The DFL “Trifecta” burned through nearly $18 Billion worth of “surprlus”, every dime of which came from a taxpayer of some kind or another. That’s nearly $3,000 for every man, woman and child in Minnesota – nearly $12,000 for a typical family of four. In one year. And they raised taxes enough to cover that and a whole lot more. And given that the state is inevitably falling into deficit while the Democrats control the Legislature, it’s going to get much worse. That money would, in fact, be better employed by the people.
• As Governor Klink established during Covid, the right to transact business is clearly subject to arbitrary, and in some cases seemingly capricious, interference. Small businesses are shut down (as big ones, and business with more, better lobbyists remain open), in many cases without regard to the business’ actual susceptibility to the virus (lawn services? nd smoke shops aren’t. It’s best that your vices not be politically unfashionable.
• Looking a back at the concept of “Essential” and “Non-Essential” workers – designations determined almost entirely via the political expediency of the designations, and their importance to the lifestyle of the “Laptop class” workers who make up the political class – feels like staring into the soul of Orwell’s universe, even three years later.
• The government started by barring all evictions and foreclosures, and halting student loan payments. The Twin Cities governments have moved on to rent control – furthering the road to gutting the affordable rental market, and completely foreclosing the existence of the small landlords that used to provide most of the metro’s “affordable housing” – while the Biden regime tried to unilaterally wipe out personal obligations to private student loan lenders.

Government Transparency

• The DFL created a “Hate Speech Registry”. What’s in it? What’s it for? How do we see what, and who, is in it? For what purposes will it be used? The registry’s supporters couldn’t and wouldn’t answer questions. They just jammed it down.
• The Governor’s “Covid Snitch Line” showed us not only the DFL’s ability for setting up a Stasi-like network of informants, but how much they genuinely enjoy it.
• School boards around the state are gradually, and sometimes not so gradually, being turned into rubber-stamps for district administrators and the state department of Education.
• For years, people complained, legitimately, that most of the legislature’s big decisions were made by the Governor, the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House, operating behind closed doors. That was intolerable and stupid when there were opposing parties involved in those negotiations. Now that they’re all with the same party? While elections have consequences, this is pure authoritarianism.
• Covid-era restrictions on meetings have morphed, post-pandemic, into a glib disregard for state open meeting laws, which serve more as suggestions these days.

First Amendment

• The collaboration of Big Government, Big Tech, Big Media and the Big Left’s non-profit/industrial complex completely gutted free speech in time for the 2020 election. The vituperation of their response to Elon Musk buying Twitter tips the hand; the Axis of Authority really, really wants “free speech” to be more about crappy art than actually holding government accountable.
• And as Big Left endlessly drones on about the “Threat” of “endemic white supremacist terrorism” that we’ve been told for 15 years is everywhere, honest, one of these days now – the threat of being swatted, of crowds of professional protesters and rioters making your free exercise of too much inconvenient speech potentially dangerous is always there. The March 4, 2017 “Anti”-Fa attack on a Republican gathering at the MN Capitol rotunda (and the fact that Ramsey County’s “criminal justice” system did everything but take the “protesters” out for dinner to apologize for the inconvenience of being arrested) was a warning; shut up, or you just might get cut up. Democrats and the DFL are very aware of this, because that malevolent mass of wannabe thugs are their children, nephews, classmates.

Second Amendment

• While the Second Amendment community remains strong, and with the departure of Wayne LaPierre may get some of its teeth re-sharpened at the national level, the attacks on the law-abiding gun owner in Blue jurisdictions are increasing, unconscionable, and not consistent with “protecting democracy”. More below.

Fourth Amendment

• The surveillance state has gotten steadily worse.
• The presence of anonymous “snitch lines” – and especially “hate crime” lines, may not have led to any Fourth Amendment perversions of probable cause yet – but don’t bet against it.
• “Red Flag” laws have largely trashed the Fourth Amendment (more below).

Fifth Amendment

• With the courts pretty much closed your right to a speedy trial by an impartial jury is pretty much toast for the duration.
• Let’s not forget how the state gutted the justice system – including the rights of defendants to speedy drials, to face their accusers, and of their attorneys to effectively prepare cases – under the pretext of “public emergency restrictions”.

Privacy

• Among the many other depredations of Minnesota’s “red flag” law – “Mental Health” professionals are in fact now deputized to participate in the abuse of those laws. I’d say “consider the unintended consequences”, but I don’t think there’s anything “unintended” about them.
• Government used your cell data to track the effectiveness of social distancing. Think that genie’s going back in the bottle?

When Democrats refer to Republicans as “fascists”, it’s a Berg’s Seventh Law case. .

Mere days after the Biden regime sued Texas for trying to stop illegal immigration – i.e. doing the Feds job – we see this:

Doesn’t compute?

Of course it does.

The Biden Administration is holding up the spending for the border and Ukraine because it removes the funding “Biden” wants – to process “asylum seekers” – and spends it on Border Patrol agents.

The Mexicans can (hypothetically) regulate the flow long enough to accomplish the regime accomplish its two main missions:

• make the backlog a little more hypothetically manageable
• create the misguided impression that “things are getting better” long enough to arrest Bidenn’s slide in the polls.

When you remember that, it all makes perfect sense. .

Yesterday – four days after the DFL’s vaunted “Red Flag” swatting-enablement and gun confiscation bill came out – the form to file to appeal a Red Flag order is out.

And it’s worse than you might have expected:

It should go without saying that your metro county attorneys – the ones that can’t be bothered to charge actual violent criminals – will turn up at court to oppose your appeal, and that the legal bills to litigate the issue against the bottomless resources of a hostile county attorney will be on you.

By the way – as bad as you think the new ERPO law is, it’s actually worse. The MN Gun Owners Caucus explains it here

The top story in Twin Cities lefty alt-media, and media in general, was the “eviction” of “Camp Nenookasi”, a homeless camp in South Minneapolis:

Not really commenting so much about that…

…as about this:

According to homeless advocates – whose estimates can be expected to skew toward the, er, generous – there are about 8,000 homeless in Minnesota. We’re also told that the number is rising, which doesn’t seem to jibe with the claims for “Bidenomics”, but let’s come back to that later. Let’s be even more generous, and make the math nice ‘n easy, and call it 10,000 “unhoused” people in MInnesota at any given time.

That means Minnesota is currently spending $100,000/year (the budget is biennial) per homeless person (and that’s closer to $120K if we take the homeless advocates at their own word).

That’s enough to rent every single homeless person a place at the Calhoun Beach Club, feed them, and pay for the social workers to make sure everything’s hunky dory.

Or, y’know, flush down a bureaucratic rathole.

…by this point that nobody who supports absurdly high minimum wages at a policy-making level can possibly actually believe that it’s about helping working people, can you?

Let’s take a look back to last May.

I started this post at the end of the session, last May, amid the DFL was doing its endzone happy dance over having gotten their way on literally everything during the session,

Here’s Rep Long – who in normal times one would be tempted to call “one of Minneapolis’s more annoying legislators”, but “progressivism” has lapped him a few times on that count:

They sure loved to prattle on about “gridlock being over”, didn’t they?

The Strib cheered on the home team! Here was a rare photo from last year of Governor Walz not eating something:

And here, one of them rejoices that the trains will run on time.

Or something like that.

This tweet caught my eye last spring – someone had a clue what was going on.

Today, of course, the “surplus” (which wasn’t) is long gone. There’s going to be a deficit in the next biennium, even if the economy hangs on.

All as predicted.

A Look Ahead To The Ghost Of DFL Excuse-Making Future

Budget deficit of $2.5 Billion Plus?

To: The Minnesota Republican Party
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Stragegery

Republicans,

Wanna cause a stampede of voters outside the 494/694 loop?

Make this person – Rep. Sandy Feist – the face of the MNDFL.

Her and her pet billl (I’ve added emphasis):

The Minnesota Legislature is considering a bill that would require all public and charter schools to make menstrual products available in school bathrooms, including boys’ bathrooms.

The bill, House File 44, would make it so “A school district or charter school must provide students access to menstrual products at no charge. The products must be available in restrooms used by students in grades 4 to 12.” …

“There are a lot of schools that are moving towards gender-neutral bathrooms, and if we add ‘female,’ we might become obsolete very quickly,” Feist said. 

“Second, not all students who menstruate are female,” Feist continued. “We need to make sure all students have access to these products. There are obviously less non-female menstruating students and therefore their usage will be much lower. That was actually calculated into the cost of this.”

Business output is down 9%. Investment is cratering.

And Sandra Feist’s priority is giving middle-school boys lots of materials for practical jokes.

Sincerely,

That is all.

I wonder if the members of the DFL “coalition”…

…will start to put together for themselves how much of that “alliance” is built on social gaslighting and browbeating by their white, pronouned, “progressive” overseers. (and, naturally, their “leaders” bellying up to the trough for their graft paymetns)?

As predicted by yours truly about this time a year ago, the DFL squandered a $18B “surplus” [1]

The DFL is contratulating itself that it still has a surplus of a couple billion dollars – which is a little like jumping from the top of the IDS building, opening your eyes and seeing the 20th floor, and thinking “Hey, I’m at the 20th floor, I guess I’m OK”.

The DFL has spent the state into debt.

Minnesota passed a humungous budget in the last session. To make that possible, they drew from other funds well outside of general funds, such as special revenue funds and money from the federal government.

For Health and Human Services spending, for example, lawmakers loosened eligibility and working requirements for cash assistance programs. The cost of these changes — which is about $50 million — is currently being funded by federal TANF dollars until the 2027 fiscal year.

And it’s actually much worse than that:

Once the state starts paying for these with state dollars in 2028, spending will go up. And if current events are any indication, the cost of these new changes will likely have blown past $50 million by then.

Additionally, lawmakers also allocated over $2 billion in extra funding to Medicaid. Until 2027, over half of the money will come from the Health Care Access Fund (HCAF) — a special revenue fund that has historically been used for MinnesotaCare. If at any point in the future, HCAF cannot sustain this new Medicaid spending, it will have to be shifted to the general fund.

And, go figure – the economically-illiterate DFL have killed a bunch of the golden geese (aka ripe suck citizens) that usually pay for DFL gigantism:

For one, Minnesota heavily relies on income taxation. But our income tax system is highly progressive. So, the state disproportionately relies on a small portion of the state’s high-earning individuals, which is in itself a problem.

Unfortunately, this problem was made worse last session, when lawmakers passed targeted “tax cuts” that have eliminated or reduced income tax liability for select taxpayers, such as social security income recipients and low-income parents with children. This has narrowed the individual income tax base even further.

And let’s not forget that high-income earners have already been fleeing Minnesota and going to low-tax states like Florida.

The recent changes to the tax system do not just narrow the income tax base, however. According to MCFE, these targeted tax cuts and tax redesigns have substituted less volatile sources of income tax revenue — such as salaries and social security — with the most volatile sources — such as corporate income — putting the state further in a precarious position.

I”m not in on the DFL’s planning, but I suspect it involves reliance on two things:

• Hoping the Biden Administration convincing the Fed to keep interest rates low (through the election, anyway) convinces enough gullible voters that the ecomony is just great, and
• Sending out an endless diet (as it were) of photos of Peggy Flanagan feeding Tim Walz donuts and corn dogs.

After all, that [2] is what got them through 2022.

[1] Which was a bit of a mirage, to be honest – made up of limited-time Federal stimulus money and taxation of economic activity spurred by other government-stimulated spending.

[2] Well, and that whole Roe V.Wade thing, of course.

I’m no expert, but it looks to me that keeping the southern border open is more important to the Biden administration than either Ukraine or Israel.

Again – no expert. But those seem like strange priorities for the American executive branch.

You know those photos that amusement parks snap as you come down to the end of a log flume or roller coaster?

They catch the rider at a moment when they’ve just been waaay up high, and are in the process of falling waaaaay down, into the water (for the log flume) or back to the end of the ride.

If your only frame of reference isd the photo, you have no idea that seconds later, the riders and their “log” are plowing up a plume of water. But seeing as the tracks head inexorably downward, you know where it’s going.

I have to suspect when a DFLer gets those photos, the response is “You’re not in the water right this second…

According to last week’s budget forecast, MInnesota’s DSA-led DFL has led Minnesota from a nearly $18 Billion surplus to…

…well, the snapshot released last week caught the state’s budget at a $2.4B surplus – but, like that log flume photo, it’s that high because that’s when the snapshot was taken on the way down:

Higher estimates in health and human services and education raise total spending in FY 2024-2027, resulting in a negative structural balance in the next biennium.

That “negative structural balance” could be up over $2 Billion. And that’s provided the economy doesn’t really tank.

Who has two thumbs, predicted this, and is currently typing this post? This guy.

Compare and contrast with Iowa:

Iowa led the “tax-cutting wave” in 2022, with the most comprehensive and aggressive tax reform in the United States. This will gradually replace the nine-bracket, progressive income tax with a flat tax, bringing the top rate, which was close to 9 percent, down to a flat 3.9 percent by 2026. Not only will Iowa have eliminated the progressive income tax, it will also have reduced the top tax rate by almost 60 percent.

Iowa’s corporate tax rate, once the highest in the nation at 12 percent, is also being cut: Starting in January 2024, the corporate tax rate will be 7.1 percent, and the rate will continue to be lowered until it reaches a flat 5.5 percent.

Critics of Iowa’s fiscal reforms warn against alleged “economic recklessness.” Mike Owen, deputy director of Common Good Iowa, a progressive think tank, told the Economist that “a crash is coming” and that programs such as education and health care will suffer as a result.

This doesn’t add up. Thanks to fiscal prudence, Iowa’s budget is in strong shape. For the last few years, Iowa’s budget has been in surplus, ending fiscal year 2023 with a $1.83 billion surplus, which was $86.3 million higher than originally estimated. The fiscal year 2024 surplus is projected to be $2.12 billion, rising to $2.99 billion in the fiscal year 2025.

Common Good, like the rest of the non-profit/industrial complex, is getting less official graft out of the state.

No such problem in Minnesota.

Yet.

“The Twin Cities are victim of Greater Minnesota!”

It’s a weird approach to messaging.

But the DFL’s noise machine is apparently betting long on it.

A common refrain from Minnesota Republicans goes something like this: Rural communities are overtaxed, underfunded and ignored by legislators. Greater Minnesota sends their tax dollars to the Twin Cities, where metro residents benefit from government programs…It’s a sweeping argument that plays into the state’s often bitterly divided partisan and geographic politics, which have become deeply intertwined during the past decade, with Republicans dominating greater Minnesota while the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has locked down the metro. It also simplifies a complicated web of tax and revenue distributions — and it’s factually untrue. 

This is an extension of Paul Krugman’s ludicrious claim from 15-odd years ago that “blue” states “send more revenue” to “red” states than the other way around.

To the extent that its true, it’s because:

• Much federal spending is huge-ticket items – farm bills, interstate highwatys, military bases – dropped into sparsely-populated states. A Minuteman III squadron in a bunch of farmers fields in northwest North Dakota may consumer hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but almost none of it goes into local pockets.
• Costs of living and incomes are higher in urban, “blue” areas. Wait – don’t Democrats support “progressive taxation”?

But for whatever reason, DFLers are hammering on this “issue” this week. The DFL’s “taxation expert” Aisha Gomez:

We talked about this in 2010: big-ticket “public good infrastructure costs the same in Greater Minnesota (basically) as in the metro; a school or water treatment plant or road in a town of 4,000 doesn’t cost 1% as much as a school in MInneapolis (400,000). Those costs are spread across a smaller population – meaning higher per capita consumption.

Gomez could point that out.

Or she could demigogue the – for lack of a better term – “issue” and try to use it to wedge the Blue cities and Red state even further.

Why? No idea.

But if I were forced to bet on this, I’d spot a couple bucks that:

• The next financial forecast isn’t nearly as rosy as the last couple
• The DFL is pre-emptively trying to demigogue the issue to stoke their base’s sense of victimhood and tribal rage.
• That sense of rage is a good bit of “preparing the PR battlefield” for an election in a decaying economy where the SCOTUS can’t overturn Roe again.

Action on that bet?

Blue City governments apparently think banning matches will prevent fire.

No, it hasn’t quite gotten that stupid ytet. But give ’em time.

Banning guns (in the hands of the law-abiding citiizen, at least) is a pretty common…conceit? Deflection? Fig leaf? Anyway – the notion that barring law-abiding citizens from using legal things to do things they weren’t going to do in the first place will affect crime (positively) is the sort of thing you have to believe to be a modern Democrat.

But that sound you hear?

It’s the bottom of the intellectual barrel being scraped.

Philadephia bans ski masks in some public places.

Because crime:

“The City of Philadelphia has been under siege with individuals who use ski masks to commit crimes. It’s caught onto not just young people, but young adults who have made this a particular thing to do,” Phillips told CNN. “The Philadelphia Police Department can’t tell who’s a criminal and not a criminal, which makes it difficult for crimes to be solved in Philadelphia.”

Sarah Peterson, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, told CNN, “The administration will review the legislation, and in the meantime looks forward to our ongoing work with City Council on the urgent matter of ensuring public safety.”

The Covid-19 pandemic, which resulted in people wearing various face coverings including ski masks, “complicated policing” because mask mandates made it easier for criminals to conceal their identities, Philadelphia Police Department Deputy Commissioner Francis Healy said during a committee hearing in November.

Philadelphia has a crime problem.

Too many ski masks? Could be.

Could also be all the depraved leftists:

Place your bets.

I was warned that if I voted Republican, there’d be an explosion of Fascist sympathizers.

And they were right.

Berg’s 7th Law is called a “law” for a reason.

Senator Ron Latz – an anti-gun zealot about whom I’ve never, not once, said anything good or complimentary – came out in support of Israel finishing the job of removing a terrorist group that has spent decades training its children to hate Jews, and is currently not only deliberately using civilians as human shields, but bragging about it.

And his DFL colleagues were not amused:

The DFL responded “Nuh-uh” in defense of a group that has created a generation that in fact is trained to venerate killing Jews. Because the truth about “Palestinians” is to DFLers what sunlight and garlic is to vampires.

The Senate DFL Caucus went full-on fascist symp in response:

CAIR is trying to put the squeeze on.

I’d say this makes a good electoral “hit list”, although of this entire list of genocide symps, the closest to one to a “contestable” seat is Erin Maye Quade. One hopes Apple Valley does better. I, for one, am going to do my bit to make sure they remember this.

Just to be clear, this is what the MNDFL supports. It’s a long thread.

If you happen to know a “progressive” who supports this mob, push their snout to the screen and make them read the whole thing. :

Secretary of (checks notes) Education Miguel Cardona misquotes Ronaldus Maximus:

Wonder how many Millennials think Reagan was actually endorsing the Feds?