Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Are your children going to be better, paying off fifteen trillion in debt (and counting)?

Your grandchidren?

Don’t be an idiot.  Of course you’re not doing better now than you were four years ago.  One out of eight Americans who want to work can’t find a job – so even if you have a job, and have managed to improve your outlook, you are going to be pulling the cart, on the job and at tax time, for everyone else.

We’re not a foodstamp nation; most of the nation still has a strong work ethic.  And our Administration is counting on that – for just enough of us to keep pulling.

We’re a sled dog nation.  And Barack Obama is the musher.

Last night’s message; Mush.

While the Democrats will yip like a bunch of over caffeinated Jack Russell terriers about the “jobs” “lost” in the inevitable rejection of Governor Dayton’s idiotic Jerbs plan – jobs that would have either existed without the Jerbs plan (because the $3K one-time deduction would merely confirm a big company’s plan to hire someone) or would never have existed were it to pass (for example, virtually any small business hiring), they are downright proud of Obama’s rejection of the Keystone Pipeline, a private-sector initiative that would have created thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of real private-sector jobs, and create an oil supply to prevent inflation that would kill even more jobs.

The Obama administration announced that it would deny a federal permit for the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, which would run 1,700 miles across six US states bringing toxic, highly corrosive tar sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries and ports in Texas.

The president stood up to Big Oil, backed by the voices of hundreds of thousands of activists just like you, who have built the movement to stop this dirty, dangerous oil project.

So there’s your message, American electorate: government-sponsored jobs good; private sector jobs, expendable.

If the GOP doesn’t pound that home in November, they don’t deserve to win.

Michael Barone notes that some signs point to a bad year for incumbents – but mostly Democrat ones.

The theory is that vastly more Democrat incumbents have gotten under 70 in opposed primaries than Republicans; the gap gets wider when you leave out a few obvious cases (people running in hyper-safe districts, people running against ethics or moral issues.

The point?

These results suggest that the anti-Democratic wind is stronger than the anti-incumbent wind. Nearly half of Democratic incumbents with opposition ran under 70 percent, while only about one-third of Republican incumbents with opposition ran under 70 percent. More than half of Democratic incumbents had no primary opposition—there’s no telling how many would have run under the 70 percent mark if they had, but it’s possible quite a few of them would have. If all incumbents had had primary opposition, and the number running under 70 percent had been the same proportion as among those who did have primary opponents, some 38 Democrats would have run under 70 percent as compared to 19 Republicans.

The media is telling you it’s an “anti-incumbent year”.  They’re right – but if this theory starts to bear fruit in the coming months, they’ll strenuously leave out Barone’s half of the thesis.

The new Newsweek cover:

On the one hand, it’s only Newsweek – which will be a shopper by 2015.

But it sort of sums up what will be the media’s approach; Obama smart, critics smash.

Question:  In this economy, with Obama and Dayton’s regulations strangling you, with Minnesota’s and the IRS’ already-high business tax rates on top and Obamacare looming in the near future, please tell us:  will Dayton’s proposal of a one-time $3,000 tax break in 2012 (and half that in 2012) to hire a veteran,unemployed person or recent graduate have a drastic effect – or any real effect at all – on your hiring decisions?

I’d especially like to hear from businesspeople – people who make payroll and do the actual hiring.

For all of the talk about the GOP’s debt, Tom Scheck at MPR notes that the DFL is also the red:

There has been a lot of attention given to the finances of the Republican Party. It should be noted, however, that the DFL Party is also facing a debt.

DFL Party Chair Ken Martin said the party has a debt of roughly $210 thousand heading into 2012. Martin said the party had a debt of $750 thousand at the start of 2011.

Not huge news – this blog reported on the $750K debt years ago.

The funny part is reading the comments in the MPR piece.   You get the impression that a lot of DFLers are shocked that the press would bother with the DFL.  Further proof, I think, that Democrats expect the media to be on their side, when push comes to shove.

It’s part of the reason Twin Cities DFLers seem to be unable to meet conservatives in a ratoinal debate, ever; their entire worldview is formed by schools, colleges and a media that barely recognizes alternatives to the left exist.

Matthew Torgerson – who claims to be a lawyer, I think – claims that “15% of Minnesota GOP legislators have a college degree”.

Here’s one of several tweets on the subject:

Now, Torgerson, like many DFLers, confuses “education” with “schooling” – but beyond that, he’s utterly wrong.

Here are the notes on legislators’ education, taken from the Senate and House bio pages, broken down by district, chamber, party, legislator and level of education.

Dist	Chamber	Name	Party 	BA
1	Sen 	Stumpf	D	MPA
1	A	Fabian	R	BA
1	B	Kiel	R	 -
2	Sen 	Skoe	D	BA
2	A	Eken	D	BA
2	B	Hancock	R	BA
3	Sen 	Saxhaug	D	BA
3	A	Anzelc	D	BS
3	B	Mcelfatrick	R	RN
4	Sen 	Carlson	R	BS
4	A	Persell	D	MA?
4	B	Howes	R	 -
5	Sen 	Tomassoni	D	BS
5	A	Rukavina	D	BA
5	B	Melin	D	JD
6	Sen 	Bakk	D	BA
6	A	Dill	D	 -
6	B	Murphy	D	BA
7	Sen 	Reinert	D	MS
7	A	Huntley	D	PhD
7	B	Gauthier	D	MS
8	Sen 	Loury	D	BA
8	A	Hilty	D	MA
8	B	Craford	R	BA
9	Sen 	Langseth	D	 -
9	A	Lanning	R	MS
9	B	Marquart	D	MS
10	Sen 	Hoffman, 	R	RN
10	A	Nornes	R	Cert?
10	B	Murdock	R	 -
11	Sen 	Ingebrigtsen	R	AA
11	A	Westrom	R	JD
11	B	Franson	R	BA
12	Sen 	Gazelka	R	BS
12	A	Ward	D	MA
12	B	LeMieur	R	 -
13	Sen 	Gimse	R	 -
13	A	Anderson	R	BA
13	B	Vogel	R	 -
14	Sen 	Fischbach	R	JD
14	A	O'Driscoll	R	BS
14	B	Hosch	D	MA
15	Sen 	Pederson J	R	MBA
15	A	Gottwalt	R	BA
15	B	Banaian	R	PhD
16	Sen 	Brown	R	BA
16	A	Erickson	R	BA
16	B	Kiffmeyer	R	RN
17	Sen 	Nienow	R	 -
17	A	Daudt	R	 -
17	B	Barrett	R	BS
18	Sen 	Newman	R	 -
18	A	Shimanski	R	AS
18	B	Urdahl	R	BS
19	Sen 	Koch	R	BS
19	A	Anderson	R	BS
19	B	McDonald	R	AA
20	Sen 	Kubly	D	MD
20	A	Falk	D	BS
20	B	Koenen	D	AA
21	Sen 	Dahms	R	BS
21	A	Swedzinski	R	BS
21	B	Torkelson	R	BA
22	Sen 	Magnus	R	BS
22	A	Schomacker	R	MPS
22	B	Hamilton	R	 -
23	Sen 	Sheran	D	MS
23	A	Morrow	D	JD
23	B	Brynaert	D	MA
24	Sen 	Rosen	R	BS
24	A	Gunther	R	BS
24	B	Cornish	R	 -
25	Sen 	DeKruif	R	  -
25	A	Gruenhagen	R	ChFC, CLU
25	B	Woodard	R	MBA
26	Sen 	Parry	R	 -
26	A	Kath	D	MS
26	B	Fritz	D	LPN
27	Sen 	Sparks	D	BS
27	A	Murray	R	MBA
27	B	Poppe	D	MS
28	Sen 	Howes	R	BS
28	A	Kelly	R	BS
28	B	Drazkowski	R	M.Ed
29	Sen 	Senjem	R	MA
29	A	Quam	R	MS
30	B	Norton	D	BS
30	Sen 	Nelson	R	ME
30	A	Liebling	D	MS
30	B	Benson	R	MNA
31	Sen 	Miller	R	AAS
31	A	Pelowski	D	MS
31	B	Davids	R	BS
32	Sen 	Limmer	R	BA
32	A	Peppin	R	MBA
32	B	Zellers	R	BS
33	Sen 	Olson	R	BS
33	A	Smith	R	JD
33	B	Doepke	R	BA
34	Sen 	Ortman	R	JD
34	A	Leidiger	R	MA
34	B	Hoppe	R	BA
35	Sen 	Robling	R	 -
35	A	Beard	R	BA
35	B	Buesgens	R	BS
36	Sen 	Thompson	R	JD
36	A	Holberg	R	BA
36	B	Garofalo	R	BS
37	Sen 	Gerlach	R	MBA
37	A	Mack	R	BA
37	B	Bills	R	MA
38	Sen 	Daley	R	MBA
38	A	Anderson	R	BS
38	B	Wardkiw	R	JD
39	Sen 	Metzen	D	BA
39	A	Hansen	D	MS
39	B	Atkins	D	JD
40	Sen 	Hall	R	BA
40	A	Myhra	R	BA
40	B	Lenczewski	D	BA
41	Sen 	Michel	R	JD
41	A	Downey	R	MIS
41	B	Mazorol	R	JD
42	Sen 	Hann	R	BA
42	A	Stensrud	R	BA
42	B	Loon	R	BA
43	Sen 	Bonoff	D	BA
43	A	Anderson	R	BA
43	B	Benson	D	MA
44	Sen 	Latz	D	JD
44	A	Simon	D	JD
44	B	Winkler	D	JD
45	Sen 	Rest	D	MBA
45	A	Pederson	D	BS
45	B	Carlson	D	BS
46	Sen 	Eaton	D	RN
46	A	Nelson	D	 -
46	B	Hilstrom	D	JD
47	Sen 	Kruse	R	BA
47	A	Dittrich	D	BS
47	B	Hortman	D	JD
48	Sen 	Jungbauer	R	BA
48	A	Hackbarth	R	 -
48	B	Abeler	R	Doc Chiropractic
49	Sen 	Benson	R	MBA
49	A	Scott	R	Cert
49	B	Peterson	R	 -
50	Sen 	Goodwin	D	BA
50	A	Laine	D	MA
50	B	Knuth	D	MS
51	Sen 	Wolf	R	BA
51	A	Sanders	R	BA
51	B	Tillberry	D	MA
52	Sen 	Vandeveer	R	BS
52	A	Dettmer	R	MA
52	B	Dean	R	BA
53	Sen 	Chamberlain	R	BS
53	A	Runbeck	R	BA
53	B	McFarlane	R	AA
54	Sen 	Marty	D	BA
54	A	Greiling	D	MA
54	B	Scalze	D	 -
55	Sen 	Wiger	D	JD
55	A	Lillie	D	BS
55	B	Slawik	D	MPA
56	Sen 	Lillie	R	MPA
56	A	Lohmer	R	 -
56	B	Kieffer	R	BS
57	Sen 	Sieben	D	BS
57	A	Kriesel	R	 -
57	B	McNamara	R	BS
58	Sen 	Higgins	D	BS
58	A	Mullery	D	JD
58	B	Champioin	D	JD
59	Sen 		D
59	A	Loeffler	D	BA
59	B	Kahn	D	MPA
60	Sen 	Dibble	D	BA?
60	A	Greene	D	MBA
60	B	Hornstein	D	MA
61	Sen 	Hayden	D	BA
61	A	Clark	D	MPA
61	B	Hayden	D	BA
62	Sen 	Torres Ray	D	MPA
62	A	Davnie	D	M Ed
62	B	Wagenius	D	JD
63	Sen 	Kelash	D	MPA
63	A	Thissen	D	JD
63	B	Slocum	D	BA
64	Sen 	Cohen	D	JD
64	A	Murphy	D	MA
64	B	Paymar	D	MA
65	Sen 	Pappas	D	MPA
65	A	Moran	D	BS
65	B	Mariani	D	BA
66	Sen 	McGuire	D	MPA
66	A	Lesch	D	JD
66	B	Hausman	D	MA
67	Sen 	Harrington	D	MA
67	A	Mahoney	D	 -
67	B	Johnson	D	MA

Note that of 109 Republicans in the House and Senate, 91 have some sort of post-high school education,from certificates or RNs or AAs up through JDs and PhDs.  28 Republicans have graduate degrees – MA, MS, MEd, MBA, PhD, and so on – alone, to say nothing of the 51 BA and BS, plus a variety of RN (which may or may not be four-year degrees), AA, AS and certifications.

And of 18 who don’t list post-high-school education, 14 are listed as business owners – the rest are farmers or tradespeople…

…and, most importantly, all of them convinced a majoirty of the people in their district that they should be in the Legislature,which is the only “credential” that means jack.

We’ll see if Torgerson changes his “story”.

UPDATE:  Torgerson apparently believes 74 GOP legislators are lying about having degrees on the legislative bio pages.  He’s sticking his (koff koff) “story”.

UPDATE 2:  He’s now saying he spoke in “gest”, which is I think a way of saying “jest”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Long article, gist is Obama administration creating new statistical model to define “poverty” which will have the effect of making it look as if millions of people suddenly are no longer poor, just in time for the election.

Gotta be careful – we could all be “the rich” at this rate.

Brian Lambert wants someone to do the reporting for him, in re my piece last week on the Koch flap:

Mitch says he’s friends with the two names involved in the incident. So call them up and have them, you know, emphatically, explicitly deny on the record what everyone is tittering about.

Heh.  Brian’s a kidder. He kids.

Nobody’s denying anything to me – partly because I’m not calling anyone to ask anything.  At this point, I don’t much care, because:

• All I care about is the way forward for the GOP.  There’s a much bigger story in this flap than a bunch of high-level canoodling – and the MNGOP needs to focus on its future – not on feeding the Media’s agenda. Speaking of which…
• Any digging I do do, will not be for the benefit of the mainstream media.  Any of them.  The Twin Cities’ mainstream media is nothing but the PR arm of the DFL.  Don’t believe it?  Compare the “rectal exams” the mainstream media gives to GOP candidates compared to the gauzy, soft-focus fluff jobs that Barack Obama and Mark Dayton got and continue to get.   Major, serious quesitons about Mark Dayton’s alcoholism and mental health were “covered” by one single Strib piece run eleven months before the election – which is about ten and a half months before anyone outside the wonk class was paying attention.  This is the template for all Twin Cities media political coverage.  Pass on details about GOP rhubarbs to the media?  Why not call them in to Ken Martin while I’m at it?
• Mr. Lambert? If you can’t show me some evidence that you never, not even once, said about Clinton and Lewinski “It’s just about sex!  Moooooove on!”, then really, we have nothing to talk about.

I had a brief burst of nostalgia from my teens earlier this week.

I was filling in for Tom Taylor on the night shift at KEYJ on a lonely, chilly Sunday night when the AP said that Iranian “students” had sacked the US embassy.  Jimmy Carter was president – and, I figured, he would be for four more years  “I mean”, thought the young Democrat-leaning Mitch mind,  “who do the GOP have?  Baker?  Reagan?  Huh?”

The Iranian “students” are back at it – and so is the Democrat party’s out-of-his-depth President (emphasis added):

President Obama’s slow ride down Gallup’s daily presidential job approval index has finally passed below Jimmy Carter, earning Obama the worst job approval rating of any president at this stage of his term in modern political history.

Since March, Obama’s job approval rating has hovered above Carter’s, considered among the 20th century’s worst presidents, but today Obama’s punctured Carter’s dismal job approval line. On their comparison chart, Gallup put Obama’s job approval rating at 43 percent compared to Carter’s 51 percent.

As the story notes, Carter was well below Obama’s current numbers; Americans actually rallied around the president after the crisis erupted; Carter worked long and hard to squander that national mandate.

How does this compare with other presidents’ first terms?

According to Gallup, here are the job approval numbers for other presidents at this stage of their terms, a year before the re-election campaign:

— Harry S. Truman: 54 percent.

— Dwight Eisenhower: 78 percent.

— Lyndon B. Johnson: 44 percent.

— Richard M. Nixon: 50 percent.

— Ronald Reagan: 54 percent.

— George H.W. Bush: 52 percent.

— Bill Clinton: 51 percent.

— George W. Bush: 55 percent.

What’s more, Gallup finds that Obama’s overall job approval rating so far has averaged 49 percent. Only three former presidents have had a worse average rating at this stage: Carter, Ford, and Harry S. Truman. Only Truman won re-election in an anti-Congress campaign that Obama’s team is using as a model.

Just saying.

 The coverage of a politician’s announcement of their retirement, not unlike the coverage of their eventual passing, usually reads as an enduring time-capsule.  From their fame to their foibles, a few key sentences will forever define a politician who has left the political limelight. 

Retiring 16-term liberal Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank had plenty of fame (fierce conservative critic; first openly gay member of Congress) and foibles (a prostitution scandal that nearly ended his career), all of which were extensively covered by the press as he announced that due in part to redistricting, he was choosing to forgo another run.  Yet to read or listen to the mainstream press’ coverage of Frank’s farewell tour, nary a word was spoken or written about what should be Frank’s infamous, enduring legacy:

 ‘These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

 

 While the media’s hagiography of Frank dominated the afternoon news cycle (CNN called Frank “a teacher” of Congress), others noted that “Fannie, Freddie Lose A Friend In Frank” as Investors Business Daily‘s headline remarked. 

His role as the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the Great Recession would have defined Frank’s legacy had he been a Republican.  Frank’s determined ability to ignore the housing bubble until it was too late to save Fannie or Freddie or avert the financial crisis played a not-insignificant role. And when Fannie and Freddie finally failed, together they accounted for nearly 12 million subprime and other low quality and risky loans (40% of outstanding loans at the time).  Most of the loans existed to meet the affordable housing goals that Frank, and others, argued so passionately to protect at a projected cost to taxpayers of $400 billion.  But despite being among those in Washington “at the wheel”, outside of a few more conservative publications, Frank has largely escaped the Joseph Hazelwood-esque blame of running the American economy ashore.

Frank’s defenders can rightly point out that he did not become chairman of the HFSC until after the 2006 elections; implying that the Fannie & Freddie reign of error happened solely due to the previous Republican majority.  Such a defense gets the dates and times correct, but little else.  The expansion of housing lending authority had roots in the 1990s, not the 2000s and had Frank worked with Republican efforts to constrain Fannie & Freddie, instead of insisting that there were no problems, legislation might have been adopted in the early 2000s that could have lessen (not prevented, as some may argue) the financial crisis.

Frank tried to undo his part in the Fannie & Freddie story, telling Larry Kudlow in a 2010 interview that “it was a great mistake to push lower-income people into housing they couldn’t afford and couldn’t really handle once they had it” while expressing hopes that Fannie & Freddie would soon occupy the dust-bin of poorly constructed governmental program history.  Of course, Frank’s preferred methods of “reform” could easily add another $5 trillion of debt to the country’s maxed-out gold card of credit.

John Nolte notes that  the media is frantically backing and filling and trying to remove all record that the Obama administration ever supported the “Occupy” movement:

Two months ago, the White House, Democrats, and the MSM were all sure that the #OccupyWallStreet movement would save them in 2012. With thousands of astro-turfed morons in the streets raging against Wall Street, Obama’s allies hoped to use said morons to create a silver lining in the economic cloud he himself created.

Obama’s goal was pretty simple; create (indirectly, through the unions that’ve been paying the freight for these “protests” all along) a sense that there was a mass movement protesting against the anonymous forces that were keeping the little guy down (but not, of course, the Obama administraiton, which had uncontested control of Congress for two years).

The hope was that by repeating this message incessantly, enough voters could be convinced that Wall Street, and by extension, evil Republicans, were to blame for our chronic unemployment, record deficits, and stillborn economic growth. President Obama who?

 And Obama jumped on the “movement”- his movement – from the beginning:

Now, of course, “Occupy” is rapidly becoming about as popular as Nickelback with voters.  And the AP is dutifully doing damage control for the President they desperately want to keep in office:

And it looks as thought the Associated Press has decided to start the memory-holing with the following:

“Democrats See Minefield in Occupy Protests

NEW YORK (AP) — The Republican Party and the tea party seemed to be a natural political pairing. But what may have seemed like another politically beneficial alliance — Democrats and Occupy Wall Street — hasn’t happened.”

Insert record scratch here.

Sorry AP, but the only reason Democrats see a minefield is because they’re standing in it.

Nolte helpfully exhumes some history that the Dems would rather have disappear – stories of Dems jumping on the Occupy bandwagon:

…House Democrats. And look, the story about House Democrats endorsing Occupy is an AP story!

…Top Democrats.

…Nancy Pelosi.

…A President named Obama, who said of Occupy, “We are on their side.”

…The SEIU.

The association between the Democrats and the “nazi-endorsed rat-infested rape camps” needs to pop up again next October.

Minnesota’s redistricting process – mandated by constitutions all up and down the governmental food chain to reallocate our congressional and legislative representation after accounting for changing populations – usually goes a little something like this:

1. The party in the power in the legislature draws maps that favor their desired outcome, more or less.
2. The opposing party draws maps that favor their desired outcome, more or less.
3. Either neither of them wins legislative approval, or the sitting governor (generally) vetoes the legislature’s final product.
4. The process goes to the courts, which draws its own map, imposes it on the state, and leaves behind some legal precedents and pseudo-legal guidelines (“preserve communities of interest”, “keep districts compact and contiguous”, etc, etc) for the next time through the process.
5. Lather, rinse and repeat.

And we’ve followed that basic process this time.  The GOP-controlled legislature, led by Rep. Sarah Anderson, drew up a congressional and a legislative map.  According to Kent Kaiser of the “Draw The Line Minnesota” (henceforth DTLM) “Citizen’s Commission on Redistricting” (which I”ve written about at some length in the past – about the commission’s sham nature, Kaiser’s protestations about the commission’s process and DTLM’s opacity, and in the end about the joke they played on us all), the Legislature’s map hewed pretty closely to the precedents set over the past forty years or so of court decisions on the subject.  It did seemingly create a map with four safe-ish conservative seats, three safe DFL seats, and a fairly swing-y district.  The DFL association of various non-profits checkbook advocacy groups that does all the ground work for the DFL cried foul, of course.

Wrongly, I suggest.  The parts of this state that lean DFL – Duluth, the Twin Cities, the Range – have shrunk, at least partly due to people moving away from them and to the parts that actually work.  Which are largely GOP-leaning; the exurban Metro from the third tier of ‘burbs on out, the Rochester area, the drive-through land between Maple Grove and Saint Cloud.  Places with responsible, frugal, in-their-limits municipal government and good schools.

“Draw The Line Minnesota” (DTLM) submitted its congressional and legislative maps next.

And then, finally, last week, with much ado, the DFL’s current caretaker, Ken Martin, released the DFL’s official submissions (congressional and  legislative), to a chorus of catcalls…

…from the DFL.  The plan lumped Betty McCollum and Michele Bachmann into one large (and conveniently DFL-dominated) east-metro district – without telling McCollum:

The Minnesota DFL Party submitted a congressional redistricting plan Friday that would place Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum into a district with GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann…The plan has prompted McCollum’s chief of staff to send an e-mail criticizing the proposal.

 

“The DFL Chair and his high-paid lawyers have proposed a congressional map to the redistricting panel that is hyper-partisan and bizarre,” McCollum’s chief of staff Bill Harper said in the email. “Their plan ignores the judge’s redistricting criteria and it insults established communities of interest, particularly in the Twin Cities East Metro. Congresswoman McCollum has faith in the judges on the panel to draw fair political boundaries that will serve the best interests of all Minnesotans.”

That answers the question “is Bettymac capable of thinking a thought that isn’t blessed by her party’s higher-ups, anyway.

Dave Mindeman of mnpACT wonders:

I can’t decide for sure what the DFL strategy was here. Obviously, the elimination of Bachmann from a safe district was the main goal, but alienating your solid incumbents is an unnecesary side bar. As far as numbers go, a tweak to shore up Walz and another tweak to make Cravaack a little more vulnerable would have accomplished pretty much the same split guaranteed….a 5-3 DFL majority. The DFL lines work to that 5-3 with eliminating Bachmann….the tweaking of current lines would have been a 5-3 without Cravaack.

Mindeman, like a lot of DFL pundits, accepts it as a matter of faith that they’ll beat Cravaack next fall, in much the same way that they accepted that he’d get 30% of the ballot in 2010.  But that’s not really the subject of this post.

No, it’s that I, too, wonder what the DFL’s strategy is.

And to explain the strategy, I think I’m going to refer to the newly-minted “Berg’s Twelfth Law of Hyperbolic Empiricism”.

To wit:  “The humorous or hyperbolic explanation of “progressive” behavior is likely, in direct proportion to the recklessness, extralegality, deviance or confrontiveness of the “progressive” actions being analyzed, to be the correct explanation“.

And knowing that, the hyperbolic reason – “they are trying to release something so far removed to the left that the courts, applying their traditional Scandinavian conflict-aversion to the issue, in trying to split the difference between the DFL and Legislative plans, will find “the middle” is about as far to the left as the DFL really wanted in the first place”.

I’d put money on it.

I was talking on Twitter with a Democrat activist the other day.

The activist and I were debating what the 2012 election would be about.

I said “unemployment”.  I mean, do you really think people think they’re better off now than they were four years ago?

The activist’s response: “Depends on who people think is at fault. Thinking on that seems to be shifting”.

Well, the media will be doing its best to “shift” that “thinking” for the part of the electorate that doesn’t pay much attention to these things.

But I think the activist was overestimating their own party.  Because I will bank on the prediction that the Democrats’ campaign will key on the folloiwng:

• “Oh, that Hermain Cain!  He’s sure a randy one, isn’t he?  We can’t have a philanderer in the White House!”
• Related: “A president needs to be better at covering their tracks for their transgressions than that!”
• “We can’t have someone in the White House who gets mental blocks on tedious, repetitive questions at game shows debates, can we?  We can not have a President who makes gaffes and who doesn’t shine on TV, oh, no!”
• “Doesn’t Mitt Romney look insincere?”
• “Hey, don’t blame us – bailouts were all lBush’s idea!”

Doug Ross looks at history….

In the early 20th century, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. While Great Britain’s maritime power and its far-flung empire had propelled it to a dominant position among the world’s industrialized nations, only the United States challenged Argentina for the position of the world’s second-most powerful economy.

…and finds some really ugly precedents.

Yes, we can.

Every once in a while, when I drop some factoid or another into a “debate” with a lib, I’ll wrap it with a bit of a verbal end-zone happy dance; “Sometimes”, I’ll say, “reality is just plain conservative”.

With that in mind – the five-member Judicial Redistricting Panel has ruled on the rules to be used in redistricting…

…and it’s generally good news for those who support following the rules as they’ve sprung up over the past forty years or so:

For the first time, the panel said the metropolitan area should be regarded as 11 counties, not seven. As a result more exurban counties could be tied into districts in suburban and urban areas.

That was an approach Republicans favored, said Elizabeth Brama who represents the Republican party on redistricting. She said it’s unclear what effect the change will have.

“I don’t think it’s a question of one party or the other benefiting,” Brama said. “I think it’s more a question of just fairly representing where the people in the state of Minnesota live and how they organize themselves.”

Which, to be honest, is what the GOP has been shooting for all along; as Dr. Kent Kaiser has pointed out in numerous forums, the plan passed by the Legislature – really the GOP majority – did a good job of sticking to the letter and spirit of the body of law that this state has developed in its decades of sending these questions to the courts to decide.

It was the DFL that’s gone partisan; Mark Dayton vetoed the Legislature’s plan for purely partisan grounds.  (Actually, I suspect it was less “partisan” than that the unions, Alliance for a Better Minnesota and other groups that control the DFL didn’t give him permission to pass it).  And a group of groups that, by any rational measure, call at least some of the DFL’s shots – the groups behind “Draw The Line MN” – took their shot at skewing the system to favor “communities of interest” which, inevitably, are DFL constituencies.

Now, I’m going to do just a bit of place-keeping her for future debates.  I’ll add emphasis to this next bit, from Ken Martin, former head of “Win Minnesota”, one of the groups that funneled money from unions and liberals with deep pockets into the DFL’s campaign coffers, especially for their sleazy, toxic campaign against Tom Emmer last year.  He is the current chair of the DFL.

DFL party chair Ken Martin wasn’t surprised by those changes.

“I think it’s pretty pro forma and certainly establishes a lot of the same principles that were in place ten years ago,” Martin said. “Again, without discussing this further with my team and being able to look at it more in detail, I can’t comment any more than that. But on the surface I think it’s fine. I don’t think it give any party an advantage over another.”

I’m emphasizing those passages now, for later.  Because you just know that if the Judicial Panel draws the lines based on these rules, the DFL and the groups that call its shots – the public employee unions, Alliance For A Better Minnesota, the Minnesota Council of Non-Profits, the League of Women Voters, Take Action Minnesota and Common Cause – will be screeching exactly the opposite, and demanding that you forget history in the bargain.

Because it’s a fairly simple thing – if you follow the rules set down in the past several court-decided apportionment decisions, the GOP should benefit; the parts of the state that support the GOP have grown, while the DFL parts have shrunk.  This represents many things – but we can not discount the fact that one of the key “communities of interest” are “people who moved to get the hell away from the cesspools the DFL has created” in the Twin Cities and Duluth.

The judical panel’s deadline to produce a redistricting map is February 21.

Obama’s numbers are in freefall – against generic and real Republicans.

Worse – for him?  He’s falling in the demographics that put him in office.  Even students.

Which must have something to do with his ride to the rescue of all those student loan holders:

In keeping with his new campaign theme of “we can’t wait,” President Obama today will roll out a plan to put more money in the pockets of some of the nation’s 36 million student loan recipients.

Obama has broad latitude in this area – certainly broader than the first two parts of his western campaign trip, underwater mortgages and subsidies for hiring veterans – because one of his early legislative initiatives was to have the federal government take over the student lending business in America.

Students are apparently now “too big to fail”.

Obama argued for the measure in 2009 as a cost-savings initiative, saying that the old system of privately issued, government secured loans reduced the amount of available money for needy students and also prevented the feds from making the system more efficient.

And we all know nobody makes systems efficient like the feds.

Here’s the part that should give you pause (emphasis added)

But Obama is now seeking to use that new power to obtain a taxpayer-financed stimulus that Congress won’t approve. The idea is to cap student loan repayment rates at 10 percent of a debtor’s income that goes above the poverty line, and then limiting the life of a loan to 20 years.

And you know what that means?  Money thrown away:

Take this example: If Suzy Creamcheese gets into George Washington University and borrows from the government the requisite $212,000 to obtain an undergraduate degree, her repayment schedule will be based on what she earns. If Suzy opts to heed the president’s call for public service, and takes a job as a city social worker earning $25,000, her payments would be limited to $1,411 a year after the $10,890 of poverty-level income is subtracted from her total exposure.

Twenty years at that rate would have taxpayers recoup only $28,220 of their $212,000 loan to Suzy.

The president will also allow student debtors to refinance and consolidate loans on more favorable terms, further decreasing the payoff for taxpayers.

Too bad the founding fathers said nothing about spending without representation…

IHS Global’s economic model – reported by James Pethoukoukis – sounds a dire warning for The One:

“Based on the likely state of the economy in 2012, President Obama faces a steep uphill task to secure reelection. Based upon our forecast for the economy, our election equation projects just a 43.5% share of the two-party vote for the president, i.e., a heavy defeat.”

Pethoukoukis:

It may already be too late for Obama, given the lengthy lag between an economic turnaround and voter economic perception. Then again, maybe the Gray Davis model—use a huge fundraising advantage to squeak out a win—can be effectively employed by Team Obama.

As we saw earlier, you can expect the Dems to pull out their biggest advantage – plutocrats – for all they’re worth.  As it were.

But it’s not just IHS Global. Yale economist Ray Fair has a well-known election forecasting model that uses three economic variables to makes its call: a) growth rate of real per capita GDP in the first three quarters of 2012; b) growth rate of the GDP deflator in the first 15 quarters of the Obama administration, c) number of quarters in the first 15 quarters of the Obama administration in which the growth rate of real per capita GDP is greater than 3.2 percent at an annual rate.

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Governor Dayton – a wholly-owned subsidiary of the SEIU, AFSME and the MFT – has formally pulled back on his push to unionize in-home daycares.

That’s “formally”.  Dayton The unions that own Dayton want those 11,000 monthly dues workers.

The Strib publishes an op-ed by a couple of daycare providers who are fluffing for the Union:

To us as family child-care providers, the care and education of Minnesota’s children isn’t just a business opportunity. It is a vocation. We provide a supportive and loving environment for the children we serve, allowing parents to go to work without worry.

Right.  That’s what we pay y’all for.  And pay and pay and pay, as I remember from my kids’ earlier childhood.  I’m told it’s worse today.

When state government shut down last summer, many of us were forced to decide whether to stay open without receiving Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) payments or temporarily close our doors. A lot of us stayed open so that parents could keep working.

We needed to make a case to the state of Minnesota that CCAP funding was vital and necessary for all who received it. We needed a strong voice at the State Capitol. We joined together to ensure that the needs of children and their working parents were heard.

You joined together – as citizens frequently do.  It’s a First Amendment right, in fact.

We’ll come back to that.

More recently, we read the Oct. 3 commentary “Too many questions on day care union.” The authors, state Sens. David Hann and Mike Parry seemed puzzled by the question “what is the problem we’re trying to solve?”

Well, to be honest, Senators, one of the most important problems we face is the fact that many at the Capitol aren’t aware that there is a problem.

And after reading this op-ed, I’m still pretty convinced that the only “problem” this solves is “plummeting union membership”.

In forming a union, we seek to have a stronger voice as we advocate for one another and for the families we serve. We would have the opportunity to share our concerns more effectively as an industry.

Well, thanks, but no.  I am not aware that parents – your customers, not your management, by the way – are paying you for “advocacy” or for “sharing as an industry”.  They – we – want our kids taken care of, at a reasonable price.  We can “advocate” for our kids just fine.

We could ensure that the state, as a partner with us, is fully aware of the challenges we face as we continue to improve and standardize how we care for Minnesota’s kids.

And there’s another problem; I don’t want the state as a “partner” in caring for my kids (if I had any in daycare); I want them tucked safely away in the background.

And if you are talking about advocacy in dealing with the various state daycare support programs that providers depend on when working with low-income families?  Then form a group that, unlike the unions, isn’t a de-facto wing of state government itself!

The DFL retains two absurdly-safe Senate seats in special elections last night:

In Brooklyn Center, registered nurse Chris Eaton won the seat formerly held by DFL Sen. Linda Scheid, who passed away this summer after a six-year battle with cancer. Rep. Jeff Hayden, an incumbent legislator who represents south Minneapolis, will take the Senate seat of DFL Sen. Linda Berglin.

Hayden and Eaton will now enjoy a one-to-four-year vacation, as they join Tom Bakk’s do-nothing Senate DFL caucus.

On the one hand, Barack Obama is throwing in his lot with a “mass movement” of professional protesters and  bobble-headed self-important “post”-adolescents…

Barack Obama, US president, offered more support for protesters against the global financial system after a weekend of demonstrations in cities around the world,

…more or less like George McGovern did.

On the other hand, he still wants as much of that Wall Street money as he can salvage:

but called on them not to “demonise” those who worked on Wall Street.

So perhaps they’re learning…

Let’s be clear about this: I do appreciate the leftybloggers and lefty pundits in the Twin Cities that can have a civilized debate for more than one round without diving straight into the name-calling.  They are rare, but given the number of “progressives” in the Twin Cities, there are still plenty of them.

That’s not just smack-talk.  I grew up in a liberal household, I was a liberal til my early twenties, and my parents still are (although all three of us Berg kids did in fact see the light), so I have no interest in demonizing or pointlessly antagonizing liberals; I have to visit them over Christmas, for crying out loud.

Anyway, I get along with Jeff Rosenberg just fine.  He’s a good guy.  Wrong about most things, but then so’s my Mom, and we get along too.

Anyway, Jeff bit on that most classic bit of inter-party smack talk, “The Real American”:

According to Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign, I’m not a “Real American,” because I live in a city.

That one seems to bug a lot of libs.  Which, to be fair, is what it was intended to do.  It’s “smack talk”; sorta like saying “your momma’s so fat, they can’t even find the search party they sent down her butt crack to find the missing airplane”; it doesn’t really mean that anyone’s missing, or that any of that could fit between “your momma’s” buttcheeks, or even that any of us have met your mother.

It’s just supposed to get you too angry to think about your game.  It gets me – the smack-talker – into your head.  It puts me in control.

And it worked!

Now, it is a fact that America’s urban areas tend to vote Democrat.  And it is a further fact that Democrats, while often proclaiming the depth of their patriotism, also have a really hard time with the idea of American exceptionalism; patriotism in a red county may be chock full of God Bless America and the Troops and “Shining City On A Hill”, while in a Blue county it is frequently more a matter of “We’re a lot less unlike France than we used to be, and with 12 more years of Obama and Dayton, we’ll get even better“, and yes, I know I’m simplifying things, but work with me here.

So it is a logical deduction that an urban American is less likely to believe that America is anything special.

Rosenberg:

Apparently, Palin isn’t the only one who feels that way. Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Lori Gildea feels similarly: I’m also not a “Real Minnesotan.” At least, that’s what she told an audience in Brainerd:

Jeff quotes a City Pages piece:

“I’m so happy to be in real Minnesota,” Gildea said.

Okay, well, maybe Gildea was just coming down from an acid trip, and couldn’t tell if she’d actually been in the state of her birth. Let’s give her a chance to explain.

“Outside of the Twin Cities,” Gildea clarified.

Darn those SCOM justices and their smack talk!  Now, we’re going to have 50,000 leftybloggers’ undies in a bunch!

And Rosenberg must be wearing boxers, because the bunch is obviously painful:

Got that, everyone? The only “real” Minnesotans are the ones who live outside of the Twin Cities, the place where most Minnesotans live. That made me wonder: Just what percentage of Minnesotans are real?

Warning:  A Democrat is about to attempt to work with empirical, geographical and demographic data.  This could get ugly.

That’s why I’ve put together a handy chart to give you an idea of how it breaks down. The chart uses the smallest possible definition of the Twin Cities, the seven-county area.

Here’s Jeff’s chart, for starters:

And can we get all you good Lakeville and Maple Grove “Real Minnesotans” to sound off here?  That’s not the smallest possible definition of the Twin Cities.

That would be, er, the Twin Cities; 667,646 people according to the 2010 census, between Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

So an accurate chart looks a little more like this:

I wasn’t sure if the exurbs were real; Gildea hasn’t yet clarified how many acres of land you must own to be a real Minnesotan.

All right.  Time for a cleansing breath, everyone.

(Whooosh).

OK.  If you’re going to get all knotted up over other peoples’ smack-talk, then the game is no fun.

Still, speaking on behalf of all conservatives, I’ll work with y’all on this.  Tell your buddies in the SEIU, MAPE, AFSCME, the MFT and the Teamsters to stop calling themselves “labor”, or at least “workers”.  I’m not in a union (anymore), but I most definitely work.  Indeed, among “real workers” in the private sector, 91% of us “workers” apparently aren’t “workers” according to “labor”.

As long as you wanna be all literal and all which, I stress, I don’t.  Not really.

That is all.

Obama jobs plan fails in the GOP-controlled Senate:

The Senate defeated President Barack Obamas job-creation package on Tuesday in a sign that Washington is likely too paralyzed to take major steps to spur hiring before the 2012 elections.

Well,naturally. The Senate is controlled by the GOP.  What else could happen?

UPDATE:  Oh, silly me.  I always mix up the House and Senate.  The Dems control it, right?

(Mitch checks)  Wow.  Sure enough.

Obama had barnstormed around the country to pressure his Republican opponents to back his top legislative priority, but he did not pick up a single Republican vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate.Two Democrats, facing re-election in conservative states, also voted against the measure.

Hm.  So – is Washington “too polarized”, or are Barack Obama’s coattails shrinking again?

Just curious: how is last Saturday’s column by Lori Sturdevant anything but a campaign donation to the DFL?

I’m not going to fisk the whole thing.  Fisking Sturdevant has become a bit like fisking Nick Coleman; after a few years, you start to feel like you’re writing the same bit over and over again.

It’s got all her usual hallmarks; the gauzy, soft-focus mash note to some DFLer or another (Taryll Clark, in this case), the hook-line-and-sinker swallowing of some progressive group or another’s “non-partisan” line (Common Cause and Draw the Line, in this case)…

…and of course, the double standard.  Always, always the yawning double standard.

We meet our old friends “Draw The Line Minnesota”:

But the court’s final authority hasn’t kept Draw the Line Minnesota’s 15-member, multipartisan commission from behaving as if it had the power to draw the lines (hence its name).

In short, it’s showing what an independent redistricting commission would do, if Minnesota had been wise enough to create one — as 12 other states have.

And later

Draw the Line is a project of the Midwest Democracy Network, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and the Minnesota Council of Non-profits, and is funded by the Joyce Foundation and the Bush Foundation. Its commission includes a mix of known devotees of each of Minnesota’s major parties, plus a handful of that rare breed — true independents.

Why doesn’t Sturdevant favor the reader with any numbers?

Because they show how disingenuous she’s being.  The “multipartisan”  commission includes 2 Republicans, 1 “Independence Party” member and 12 who are either DFL activists, activists for groups that are closely aligned with the DFL, or people who work at institutions that are little but feeders for the DFL.

So to Sturdevant, “Draw The Line Minnesota” – which is bankrolled by four “progressive” pressure groups – and its “multipartisan” yet almost completely liberal-dominated commission – is “independent”, while…

…well, you could see this coming, couldn’t you?

More telling: Top GOP operatives and money-raisers have formed Minnesotans for Fair Redistricting. It’s a sway-the-court group that’s hired top legal talent — including former state Chief Justice Eric Magnuson — to argue for a GOP design.

Got that?  Draw The Line, the multi-state non-profit group funded by liberals with deep pockets, is suddenly a plucky underdog, while Big Bad GOP is riding into town on a steamroller powered by stacks of Jacksons.

Apparently Sturdevant thinks that David Lillehaug and the rest of the DFL Lawyers Koffee Klatsch are working pro bono?

Draw the Line Minnesota is a buck-a-plate beanfeed compared with the GOP’s steak-and-lobster operation.

Does Sturdevant have any numbers to back up the comparison?

Of course not.  Nobody does.  Other than an audible from Mike Dean on “The Late Debate” the other night, none of the players have disclosed their funding, and we have precious little basis for fact-checking any of them at this point.

We only know one thing; whatever Sturdevant writes will be calibrated to serve the DFL’s interests.

And, despite insinuations by conservative bloggers, it is not a DFL front group.

Ah.  Well, that settles it then.  Lori says so.

I mean, sure; it’s literally a fact (as far as we can tell) that none of these groups are literally part of the DFL.

And John Wilkes Booth was not a Confederate soldier, but they shared enough goals where it didn’t really make a difference in the end.

And Lori Sturdevant isn’t literally a flak for the DFL, in the sense that “Ken Martin signs her paychecks”; their purposes just happen to be 100% congruent.

…is pretty perfectly defined by the flap over North Carolina Bev Perdue’s comment about “suspending elections” for two years.

“I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them – whatever decisions they make – to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that,” Perdue said.

“You want people who don’t worry about the next election,” she continued.

Of course it was hyperbole.

The dumb part?  That a bunch of politicians, relieved of the pressure of having to justify their political existences to voters, would “solve” anything.