10 day forecast for the Twin Cites calling for a cold, rainy day on November 2.
Democrats: Mother Gaia is shedding tears over the pollution you would put into her sky by driving to the polls. Stay home and watch your Dave Matthews CDs and meditate.
Real Americans who are sick of being taxed to death: Rain? Pfft. Get out and vote.
A few years ago, I codified “Berg’s Seventh Law“, an iron-clad law of political behavior:
When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.
Now, when I started seeing the usual flock of DFL spokesbloggers warning that the GOP was sending “an army of thugs” (that’d be the Minnesota Majority’s $500 reward for info leading to the arrest and conviction of people intimidating voters), I figured it was something of an argument after the fact; Mark Dayton’s entire campaign so far has been an exercise in rhetorical voter intimidation.
Think about it; how do you get someone like Mark Dayton elected? He’s a terrible candidates; stiff, brittle, a trust fund baby with an awful record and amessage that is diametrically out of tune with a huge swathe of the post-Obama electorate.
The only way to get him elected is to make Republicans stay home.
And that’s really been the crux of the entire Dayton campaign; there has been precious little talk of “why Dayton would be a great governor”, because nobody, even a large part of the DFL (remember, Dayton only won the primary by a cat’s whisker) believes it. The entire DFL campaign has been negative.
Still, trying to convince people to stay home is one thing. Actively attacking your opponent’s campaign is another.
In Saint Paul, Republicans have long believed that the DFL was sending people out into the streets to vandalize, steal and destroy Republican campaign material, especially lawn signs. I think I’ve had one lawn sign survive a campaign – and while I’ve been perfectly willing to chalk it up to bored kids vandalizing things (and even just to bored , DFL-voting Hamline University kids, since often my GOP signs would be stolen or destroyed, while my neighbors’ DFL signs would remain untouched), somtimes it did seem a little too systematic to be completely random.
And while I don’t believe this is necessarily evidence that the DFL is systematically trying to destroy Emmer signs, it certainly does show that some DFL activists are not above mere vandalism, but serious overkill.
A DFL activist, Frank Dolinar, was arrested yesterday for burning Emmer signs:
The man in question is Mr. Frank Dolinar. Mr. Dolinar is a former Professor at Saint Cloud State University. His LinkedIn page says his one interest is “electing DFL candidates.”
Dolinar
Just remember – whenever the DFL starts babbling about Republican “thugs” and “voter intimdation”, start looking for DFL thugs trying to intimidate you.
Because it never, ever, ever fails.
The U of M College Republicans are going to be protesting the President’s pep rally for Lord Fauntelroy at the U of M today.
Via Luke Hellier at MDE, the details:
The College Republicans at the University of Minnesota, along with Students for a Conservative Voice, and other grassroots activists from the metro area will protest President Obama’s visit to the University of Minnesota October 23rd in support of Mark Dayton and the rest of the DFL ticket.
“While we recognize the historic nature of President Obama’s visit to campus as the fourth U.S. President to visit campus, we cannot sit idly by as he promotes an agenda of higher taxes and unrestrained spending that will drive jobs out of our state, and make it more difficult for college graduates to get jobs after graduation,” said Phil Troy, chair of the University of Minnesota College Republicans.
The protest is planned to take place across from the entrance to the University Field House from 12:00 PM until 1:30 PM. After the protest, Troy said participants will make GOTV calls at the 5th Congressional District Victory Office located above Chipotle at 800 Washington Ave SE, and attend a rally and cookout in Minnetonka with gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer and Representative Erik Paulsen.
“College students have a clear choice,” Troy went on to say, “The choice is between lower taxes that encourage job creation, and increasing debt and higher unemployment. College Republicans have been working fervently to elect candidates that will make sure college graduates have a job after graduation, and tomorrow will be no different. Tomorrow is about showing college students that there is an alternative to the lofty rhetoric and broken promises that we heard two years ago.”
It’s when I’m on the air today, so I can’t attend. It’s a shame…
…but I urge people to call in during the show (651 289 4488 from 1-3PM), or email me photos from the protest at the yahoo email address “feedbackinthedark”.
I’ll post ’em.
Here’s one of your neighbors in the Fifth District:
Pretty petty and venal, even for a DFLer.
…then Al Quaeda is really redundent. The Ohio Democrat Party, with the full apparent connivance of the public school system, is doing the job for them:
Three van loads of Hughes High students were taken last week – during school hours – to vote and given sample ballots only for Democratic candidates and then taken for ice cream, a Monday lawsuit alleges.
As Hugh Hewitt says, if it’s not close, they can’t cheat.
I think he was too sanguine, frankly.
The state deficit is zooming out of control.
Two of the three gubernatorial candidates have no idea how they’re going to fix it; they’re a step or two shy of hosting a contest looking for ideas.
The DFL, which has controlled the legislature for the past four years and dominated it completely for two, has spent the whole time whining about wanting more money to give to public employee unions and all but claiming Tim Pawlenty personally blew up the 35W bridge, and telling you you’re a racist who hates children if you don’t agree.
Minnesota’s health care – which, with its private/public partnership currently insures well over 90% of Minnesotans, including virtually all of them that actually want insurance – is about to get tossed into a vortex of government-controlled mediocrity by Obamacare.
So what do our brilliant DFL hamsters think is the real priority?
Recycling fake outrage over the FBI’s raids on protesters at the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul two years ago (in the House and the Senate).
From the Senate bill:
1.1A resolution
1.2memorializing the President of the United States and Congress to review the FBI
1.3raids on Minnesota activists.
1.4WHEREAS, a number of Minnesotans were issued subpoenas to appear before a grand jury
1.5in Chicago in October; and
1.6WHEREAS, these Minnesotans have not been arrested or charged with any crime; and
1.7WHEREAS, four of these Minnesotans are American Federation of State, County and
1.8Municipal Employees members in good standing in the union; and
1.9WHEREAS, FBI spokespersons have stated that the raids were prompted by the activities
1.10of the four union members, and other individuals subject to the same raids; and
1.11WHEREAS, these people are entitled to a presumption of innocence under the United
1.12States Constitution; and
1.13WHEREAS, every American has the constitutional right to advocate and organize for
1.14change of the foreign policy of the United States; and
1.15WHEREAS, the recent report by the Department of Justice Inspector General soundly
1.16criticized the FBI for improperly targeting domestic peace and antiwar groups for investigation;
1.17and
1.18WHEREAS, Minnesota’s elected officials have frequently gone on record in defense of
1.19trade unionists and others to educate, mobilize, and organize for the legitimate goals of peace,
1.20justice, and solidarity with all working people; and
2.1WHEREAS, Minnesota’s elected officials disavow any practices or policies which threaten
2.2the rights or civil liberties of trade unions and nonviolent peace organizations, and oppose both
2.3attacks on traditional constitutional guarantees and the granting of wider powers to the FBI to
2.4infiltrate or intimidate community groups, unions, and activists; NOW, THEREFORE,
2.5BE IT RESOLVED by the Legislature of the State of Minnesota that it expresses grave
2.6concern that the recent FBI raids are reminiscent of the Palmer Raids of the 1920s, the McCarthy
2.7hearings of the 1950s, and the FBI’s harassment of nonviolent civil rights and peace activists of
2.8the 1960s and 1970s, and that these raids may be the beginning of a new and dangerous assault on
2.9the First Amendment rights of union activists and antiwar peace campaigners.
2.10BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED by the Legislature of the State of Minnesota that, since
2.11no acceptable justification or evidence has been presented for these raids and subpoenas and
2.12there is no reason to believe any are forthcoming, it urges Congress to review these arbitrary
2.13and capricious raids.
2.14BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED by the Legislature of the State of Minnesota that, in light
2.15of the Inspector General’s recent report on the FBI investigation of certain domestic advocacy
2.16groups, we call upon the President of the United States to order an immediate investigation
2.17into the circumstances, motivation, and propriety of the judicial and FBI intimidation of these
2.18Minnesotans.
2.19BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Secretary of State of the State of Minnesota is
2.20directed to prepare copies of this memorial and transmit them to the President of the United States,
2.21the President and the Secretary of the United States Senate, the Speaker and the Clerk of the United
2.22States House of Representatives, and Minnesota’s Senators and Representatives in Congress.
Glad to see they can prioritize.
UPDATE: Nachman from Loyal Opposition went to the Capitol to protest – one on one, in person. He notes that the resolution, in support of the “Anti-War Committee”, would seem to be a violation of the DFL’s putative core princples:
The Anti-War Committee believes that:
“The Anti-War Committee is opposed to the U.S. military, political, and economic support for the state of Israel. We see Israel as an illegitimate apartheid state, and we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice and self-determination. We support the Palestinian right of return, the demand for a dismantling of Israeli settlements, an end the Israeli Occupation, and an end to racist policies in all of the territories. Our work includes protest, education, and solidarity trips to Palestine.” [4]
Aside from being libel, this is their statement of support for the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel, the Salafi Islamists who call for it’s destruction, and, in turn, for the subsequent annihilation of Jewish presence in the Holy Land. The Anti-War Committee and it’s supporters are public about their support for these ends, as their public statements of their support for the re-establishment of supply lines to and material support for the Harakat Al-Muqawama Al-Islamiyya (Hamas – the Islamic Resistance Movement), a designated terrorist organization. [5] The warrants were issued based upon probable cause and pursuant to an investigation concerning violations of “Providing, attempting and conspiring to provide material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations”. [6]
As a reminder, here are the core beliefs of the DFL.
“We, the members of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, in the State Convention assembled, in order to…sustain and advance the principles of liberal democracy, and uphold human rights, civil rights and constitutional government, do establish this Constitution.”
Representatives Clark, Davnie, Hayden, Kahn, and Hausman; Senators Berglin, Pappas, Moua, Dibble (see UPDATE, infra), and Torres Ray have some explaining to do.
I’ll need to follow up to see how that appeal to “core principles” works…
I direct you to Berg’s Seventh Law: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”
And so when lefties all over the internet started chanting about a “scandal” involving Republicans getting money from overseas, I thought “there has got to be a story about Democrats getting at least twice as much coming up shortly”.
Are these hunches ever wrong? Don’t be silly. That’s why they’re called “Berg’s Law”, and not “Berg’s Half-baked Theory”. Emphasis added;
Democratic leaders in the House and Senate criticizing GOP groups for allegedly funneling foreign money into campaign ads have seen their party raise more than $1 million from political action committees affiliated with foreign companies.
House and Senate Democrats have received approximately $1.02 million this cycle from such PACs, according to an analysis compiled for The Hill by the Center for Responsive Politics. House and Senate GOP leaders have taken almost $510,000 from PACs on the same list.
How did we maintain a democracy before blogs, talk radio and Fox news, anyway?
To: All Inner-City Parents with kids in the Minneapolis or St. Paul School Districts
From: Mitch Berg, who’s been there, pretty much.
Re: An Invitation
All,
I’m Mitch Berg. I live in Saint Paul. A few years back, I pulled my kids out of the St. Paul Schools, and went into the charter system.
And when I got into the charter school system, I was astounded at what I saw; in Saint Paul, the vast majority of the families were black, latino or asian. Many were recent immigrants. And they were among the most passionate advocates for school choice I’ve ever met. Because they – you – are not stupid. You can see that your school districts have among the worst “achievement gaps” in the nation between your kids and white kids. You know that our educational-industrial complex’s boasting about the quality of our school system rings hollow along Plymouth Avenue, and down Rice Street.
Most of the parents I met, like most of you that I’m writing to now, naturally, voted DFL. Not a few of them spat tacks at the mention of Republican politicians.
And it was fascinating, watching the cognitive dissonance when I mentioned to them that in May of 2007, when the DFL proposed a bill that would cap the number of charter schools in Minnesota, the DFL voted an almost-straight ticket in favor of capping charter schools (six of them broke with the party, only one of them from the metro). The GOP voted as a straight ticket against the cap, which was defeated by the skinniest of margins.
Let me re-emphasize that, all you parents out there: the DFL voted to cut off your kids’ lifeline, the charter schools that you all quite rightly judge to be your kids’ best shot at a quality education.
Today, the NAACP urged parents like you to pull your kids out of the Minneapolis Public Schools. But they did it for all the wrong reasons:
The Minneapolis branch of the NAACP on Wednesday urged parents to consider pulling their children out of the Minneapolis School District in response to Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson’s recommendation to close North High School.
I understand – North is, to some people, a center and rallying point for that troubled community.
And to the administration? Well, it’s part of their meal ticket:
The accusations were an affront to Johnson, who grew up in segregated Selma, Ala. “We have the responsibility of providing a high quality education to our students regardless of where they live,” Johnson wrote in a statement to the Star Tribune. “All of our students deserve educational opportunities that will prepare them to be global citizens. I am committed to providing them with those opportunities.”
Parents – if someone, a salesman or a boss or a teacher, spoke that kind of empty gobbledygook to your face, you’d laugh at them and walk away, wouldn’t you?
The woman said nothing!
Look – closing North High should be a cause for celebration; North High, with its atrocious achievement and yawning achievement gap and by-the-numbers mediocrity that fully lived out what George W. Bush called “the racism of low expectations”, was just a cog in a machine that devalued your children just as surely as any plantation owner ever would have 160 years ago; a symbol of an education establishment that exploits your children no less cynically than any drug kingpin. Oh, their intentions may be more benign than Simon LeGree’s and Plukey Duke’s, but when it comes to the education your children got at North – at any Minneapolis Public School, or Saint Paul for that matter, look me in the eye and tell me that the intentions made a stitch of difference?
[Minneapolis NAACP President Booker] Hodges issued a statement calling for parents “who value their children’s education or future [to] seriously consider other options for educating their children.”
And I – a cracker descended from North Woods rock farmers, myself – will stand up and yell “Amen”. Hodges is right.
Now is the time to free your children from the Minneapolis Schools’ racism of low, or no, expectations.
Of course, the Minneapolis School Board and the Minneapolis Public Schools are only the tip of the iceberg, just as they are in Saint Paul. The problem is that the cities’ school districts are controlled by people who owe their livelihoods and futures to the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, and the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party, first and foremost.
Not to you.
Not to your children.
And they are counting on you – the African-American parents, the Latino families, the H’mong clans who votes for them by imposing margins in every election, year in and year out – to remain ignorant of the fact that for all of the DFL’s yammering about education spending, it is the GOP that supports your right to choose where your kids go to school. It is the GOP that supports initiatives like School Choice, Charter Schools and, in many states, Vouchers to give you, the motivated, dedicated parents that I see and know from my time as a charter school parent, the power and tools – to say nothing of economic freedom – to make those choices and make them stick.
You can say “he’s just talking politics”. And you’re right – this is about politics. But politics control your childrens’ education just as surely as their teachers’ qualifications do.
So look at the record. The DFL – the Democrats, the people you have been voting for since time immemorial – are actively supported by those who are harming your children.
You want hope, for your children, for real? It’s time for change.
As Daniel Henniger notes in the Journal, the rescue of the miners was a victory of the free market:
It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.
Amid the boundless human joy of the miners’ liberation, it may seem churlish to make such a claim. It is churlish. These are churlish times, and the stakes are high.
In the United States, with 9.6% unemployment, a notably angry electorate will go to the polls shortly and dump one political party in favor of the other, on which no love is lost. The president of the U.S. is campaigning across the country making this statement at nearly every stop:
“The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper.”
One of Minnesota’s gubernatorial candidates has the same precise message.
Uh, yeah. That’s a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that’s right. Ask the miners.
If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?
Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.
This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill’s rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock’s president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.
Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That’s why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.
This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.
A remarkable Sept. 30 story about all this by the Journal’s Matt Moffett was a compendium of astonishing things that showed up in the Atacama Desert from the distant corners of capitalism.
Samsung of South Korea supplied a cellphone that has its own projector. Jeffrey Gabbay, the founder of Cupron Inc. in Richmond, Va., supplied socks made with copper fiber that consumed foot bacteria, and minimized odor and infection.
Chile’s health minister, Jaime Manalich, said, “I never realized that kind of thing actually existed.”
The profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at the mine rescue site.
So by all means, Democrats – keep focusing on killing that spirit off.
When after a year of joking that Obama might be re-run of the Carter years, suddenly it seemed that that might be the best case?
My joke may have been correct:
The most important fact to take from the September unemployment report released last week is that almost three years after the recession began the economy was still losing jobs! Almost 100,000 (95,000) additional jobs were lost last month from the economy overall. That makes 400,000 jobs lost since May. Moreover, in a regular annual benchmark revision to calibrate unemployment rates for updated data, the BLS reported a further 366,000 jobs lost for March. The total number of Americans unemployed stands at almost 15 million (14.8).
Malaise? The kids’ve got it!
Based on the long standing history and rhythms of the American economy, we should have had a booming recovery by now. Even more so, since the deeper the recession the stronger the recovery. Real economic growth in the first 4 quarters of Reagan’s recovery from the deep 1981-82 recession was a whopping 7.7%. Even the recovery under President Ford from the deep 1973-74 recession sported real economic growth of 6.2%.
But under President Obama we are already in another downward spiral, with real growth falling from 5% in the fourth quarter of 2009, to 3.7% in the first quarter of this year, to 1.7% in the second quarter.
Moreover, as the brilliant economist John Lott explained for FoxNews.com yesterday, the base unemployment rate has been stuck at least at 9.5% for 14 months now, over three full percentage points higher than the average unemployment rate during the recession. Since Obama became President, the U.S. unemployment rate has increased faster than 25 of 30 other major industrialized countries, as reported by the Economist.
Rumors that Obama is planning a stimulus for junior hockey in time for the next winter Olympics are at this time unconfirmed.
Over the past few weeks, the MNDFL and the Dayton campaign have been trying to hammer on the fact that Tom Horner – who voted for Obama, and hasn’t publicly supported a conservative Republican for office in years – is “A Republican”, just like Tom Emmer. They also note that former governor Arne Carlson and former senator Dave Durenberger – liberal Republicans who rejected Ronald Reagan while he was in office – are endorsing Horner. Who, by the way, is a “Republican” who proposes a tax-and-spend agenda only marginally less noxious and big-L liberal than Mark Dayton’s.
“What about that big tent?”, they snark.
The quick answer is that the tent is plenty big; all who favor limiting government and holding the line on spending are welcome. Neither Horner, Durenberger nor Carlson have ever stood for either.
But since we’re on the subject of big tents…
Yesterday, Maurice Hinchey had to get Bill Clinton out to Binghamton to try to rescue his re-election bid and save his House seat. Today, Republican challenger George Phillips trumps Hinchey with a surprise endorsement from former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat who has a track record of backing common-sense Republicans.
So all you DFLers who were trumpeting the Carlson and Durenberger endorsements last month; shall I expect you to start sending checks to George Phillips? Because Ed Koch is obviously the reasonable, responsible, non-extreme, big-tent Democrat?
Of course you should – if you follow your own logic.
And then, after the election, you can send Randy Kelly a few bucks and an “attaboy” for fighting for principle back in 2005.
Assuming you really believe all that “big tent” crap.
We Republicans don’t need a big tent. We need to get as many people as we can to crowd into the tent we have, with us.
While there are plenty of individual Democrats who are perfectly fine human beings, the simple fact remains that the Democratic Farmer Labor Party values power first and foremost; integrity, to them, is a luxury that you can fuss with once you get the power. The only thing that separates the DFL from the Illinois Democratic Party is geography.
They will fight like hell for every vote they can get; they will fight like hell to deny every vote they think might be against them; if playing by the rules won’t work, they will cheat. The DFL in Minnesota, at its upper levels, is a group of deeply depraved people who would throw The Rights Of Man on the bonfire if it’d get Tarryl Clark into office.
If it’s not close, Hugh Hewitt says, they can’t cheat – but this election is going to be close. No two ways about it.
One of the ways the GOP gets screwed on elections is via the DFL’s stranglehold on the administration of elections. From Secretary of State down to the myriad election judges, counters, poll watchers and challengers that keep “order” (of whatever type) at the polling stations and in the counting process, the DFL has its fingers on your ballots from the moment they slip out of your hands. And while the majority of them are, no doubt, honest, the one-party control of the electoral machinery is a temptation that, I suspect, the MNDFL can not resist.
Janet Beihoffer – former CD2 GOP chair – has been running the effort to recruit and train more GOP election judges, poll watchers and challengers.
And she needs help:
MNGOP has the most R election judges ever (but not enough and many of the new ones were not placed b/c of _____________- fill in the blank). We can take poll challengers and have a proven system for training and assigning them. They can register here: www.mngop.com/edo and must go through training. We will assign them based on the risk ranking of precincts (which I did and distributed to CD chairs in May/June). We also have [a team of lawyers] in place but will take more.
This is something you can do to help clean up this state’s potemkin electoral system. Please volunteer if you can.
Joe Doakes from Como writes about the latest round of presidential/vice-presidential campaign junketeering:
What would you say is the most liberal place in Wisconsin? UW-Madison?
How about Iowa? Drake University?
What would you say is the most liberal place in the Twin Cities? Macalester?
Where did the President go last month, and Vice-President today, just four weeks before the election, in prime campaign time?
Why those tiny oases of liberalism rather than larger middle-of-the-road locations? Why spend the entire day on the campaign for Governor of a fly-over state, and not stumping for Congressional candidates in close races around the country?
No other Democrat wants to be anywhere near them.
Desperation.
And fear.
No, not just the “ooooh, you conservatives are motivated by fear!” BS Dems throw out as a substitute for intelligent argument.
It’s the fear that their base is eroding. A confident movement strikes out into territory it hasn’t conquered before – like Reagan into the Rust Belt, or Obama into the suburbs, or like Chip Cravaack into the hinterlands of the Iron Range.
A movement on the defensive hides out in places like UW/Madison and Macalester and tries to keep the less koolaid-sotted droogs from sitting the election completely out.
Remember last June?
According to the DFL and their buildup of minimum wage leftyblog minions, the fact that Tom Emmer hadn’t released a detailed budget plan was a finger in the eye of The People. They had a right to knoooooooooow!, after all. And they had to knooooooooooow it right then and there, dagnabbit!
Then Emmer released a budget plan – one that balanced the budget without raising taxes, lowered taxes on job-creating activities, and left K12 education untouched.
And then it turned out that Mark Dayton’s first attempt at a budget plan fell three billion dollars short on balancing the budget.
And then his second attempt fell 890 million dollars short (or maybe more!).
And now, suddenly, having a budget plan in place just isn’t that big a deal!
He even said on WCCO on Sunday morning, amid Esme Murphy painting his toenails…
Can you imagine what Esme Murphy would have done had Tom Emmer ever called his plan a “work in progress?”
Now, Mark Dayton’s a smart guy. And he’s got a lot of smart people working for him. And while they don’t have access to a “supercomputer” to figure out budget numbers, they don’t need one. A fairly complex Excel spreadsheet will get you the big-picture numbers; some not-cheap software (certianly avaiable to the compaign) can work out the fine details. Just like Emmer did.
And yet they didn’t.
Wait. Do you really believe that, after two go-arounds, that the Dayton camp doesn’t have a budget?
Rubbish.
They do. They just don’t want you to see it.
Because the real Dayton Budget Plan – the one they don’t want you to see yet – socks it to the Middle Class. There is no other way. To think that Dayton doesn’t know this beggars credulity. To think that there is any other politically-palatable answer is pollyannaish and just plain stupid.
There are huge questions to be asked about the nonexistant “Dayton Budget Plan”.
So when will the media ask?
Anyone?
Is that an echo I hear?
There’ve been some interesting dynamics in the race this past few weeks.
And, like the inner workings of most political campaigns, the reasons for some of these dynamics are hidden.
Which doesn’t mean we can’t take a swipe at them.
The below is a narrative of the past few weeks in the Minnesota gubernatorial campaign. I will clearly label events “Fact” or “Theory”; you can file the results under “prognostication” or “science fiction”, or “wishful thinking”, or whatever you want. The only evidence – so far – is purely circumstantial.
While I will not assign hard dates to any of my “Theory” entries, the rough time-frame should be clear enough for county work, read in sequence with the context of the real events.
BEGIN: Roughly two weeks ago.
THEORY: DFL internal polling shows that Mark Dayton’s lead is eroding (as reflected in the Rasmussen poll – see below) and that Tom Horner is taking more DFL than GOP voters. A lot more. And DFL enthusiasm numbers are lagging badly, while GOP enthusiasm is exploding.
FACT: The Rasmussen poll showed that Emmer had erased Dayton’s primary-time surge and pulled into a lead (within the margin of error).
FACT: Dayton’s entire campaign staff drops what it’s doing and come to HQ for an all-staff emergency meeting. THEORY: The main subject was this putative internal polling.
THEORY: Key DFL staffers discussed this polling with their friends, colleagues and contacts at the Strib, and elsewhere in the Twin Cities’ left-leaning media, academic and non-profit community (to the extend that “Key DFLers” and those other groups are actually separate and need to be distinguished at all), indicating that Dayton is in trouble. The message just wasn’t working. The leadership decided that a) they needed to try to push Horner down, and b) the message needed more than just a little tweak; they were going to have to try to sell a “class warfare” platform as something…almost conservative and responsible.
THEORY (and a conspiratorial one at that): For reasons all their own – liberal bias, the urge to sell papers, the imperative to keep clients – the various polling organizations jiggle the “likely voter” numbers to show Dayton with a commanding lead.
FACT: MPR/The Humphrey Institute and the Strib/Minnesota Poll almost simultaneously issue polls showing improbably large Dayton leads, using samplings and turnout models that don’t pass any stink test this side of Baghdad Bob.
THEORY: DFL campaign staff contacted key Minnesota leftybloggers, and ordered them to do what they do as their primary reason to exist best; pass along a meme for them, to stanch the bleeding toward the Horner campaign.
FACT: Nearly every leftyblog in Minnesota runs “Tom Horner is really teh Republican” stories, all with very similar wording and thought structure. The Alliance for a Better Minnesota releases a “Tom Horner Is Teh Republican” website – on a domain rented back in January of 2010.
FACT: Lefties have been talking jobs, jobs, jobs. Yesterday was a good example; Javier Morillo of the SEIU debated Laura Brod. Gary Gross covered it:
Let’s start with Morillo’s pathetic performance during the Face-Off segment of @Issue With Tom Hauser. Morillo said the words middle class and jobs so often, it was like he was trying to win a repitition competition. He repeatedly argued that Mark Dayton was “the only candidate who would protect the middle class.” How will Dayton help the middle class by chasing employers from Minnesota with the 2nd-highest income tax rate in the nation?
It’s painfully obvious that the DFL got the news that their message isn’t working and that their message has to shift from their tax-the-rich scheme to creating jobs. People’s first priority is getting the economy humming, not whether the rich are paying their fair share.
Dayton’s “message” has gone from “Tax the Rich” to “We love you, middle class” in a matter of weeks.
My scenario is admittedly and gleefully fictional.
So was “The Great Pacific War” by Hector Bywater. And we know how that turned out.
Common Cause Minnesota is a “non-profit, non-partisan” organization whose every initiative is, mirabile dictu, exactly in sync with the “progressive” wing of the Minnesota DFL.
No huge shock there.
Speech rationing – “campaign finance reform” – has long been one of their main initiatives. Read for yourself. They want – so they claim – transparency in politics.
Of course, as Luke Hellier notes at MDE, they are a 501c4 lobbying organization which, in 2008, took in over $665,000 on donations, entirely from anonymous “individual” sources (check it out starting on Page 13 of this very large PDF file).
Sample swiped from MDE
Now, the law doesn’t require them to divulge exactly who their donors are – which is kind of a weaselly out for a group that wants government to limit and regulate your First Amendment right to political speech.
At any rate, yesterday they released word that they were going to file a complaint against a series of Minnesota political action committees (PACs) that were playing a shell game with third-party donations, trying to make accountability difficult.
And given how hard Common Cause has been proclaiming their ecumenicism and non-partisan mission, I thought “Halleluiah! They’re going to do something about the epic three-card monte game the Dayton campaign has going on!”
As we discussed last June, the Dayton campaign was being supported by a huge ad campaign from a group called “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”. At that time, ABM’s funding came from a bunch of unions, and a group called “Win Minnesota”, which was largely funded by…the Dayton family; as of last June, the list was…:
Win Minnesota also funded a group which at the time had no name, but which shared an address with Win Minnesota, which has since been named “The 2010 Fund”. 2010 of last June had about $850K in the bank, including money from:
I’m looking for the updated numbers from all of these funds.
So who does Common Cause go after?
Who would you think? (emphasis added):
Common Cause Minnesota has uncovered a scheme by the Minnesota’s Future political committee and the Republican Governors Association (RGA) to avoid Minnesota’s original source disclosure law by funneling a $428,000 contribution from the RGA to Minnesota’s Future through a shell company. The company, Minnesota Future, LLC was created just days before it received the contribution from the RGA and immediately transferred the funds to the Minnesota’s Future political committee.
Today, three separate complaints were filed with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Disclosure Board against Minnesota’s Future, Minnesota Future, LLC, and the RGA. The complaints allege that the three groups together violated multiple state statutes ranging from circumvention of campaign finance laws, failing to register as a political committee, and failing to report receipts and expenditures. The three entities could face $5.1 million in civil penalties and criminal prosecution.
“This was a brazen attempt to circumvent Minnesota’s disclosure law,” said Mike Dean, Executive Director of Common Cause Minnesota. “The public has a right to know what special interests are behind political ads, especially during a hotly contested election.”
So the public has a “right to know” the money behind “Minnesota’s Future” from the Republican Governors Association…
…but the multiple millions of dollars from the Dayton Family, the unions, and the Democratic Governors Assocication which financed the most vile smear campaign in the history of Minnesota politics (under the cover of a phony grass-roots organization funded by the Dayton family!) isn’t something “the public” needs to know about?
I’ve invited a representative of Common Cause to come on the Northern Alliance tomorrow to discuss what would be brazen hypocrisy from a genuinely “non-partisan” organization.
Any bets?
MNDFL chair Brian Melendez sent this out to the faithful yesterday:
The more Minnesotans hear from Tom Horner, the clearer it becomes that he is just another Republican insider, and his only plan is to continue Governor Pawlenty’s failed policies.
Insider? A guy who hasn’t darkened the doorstep of a GOP caucus since Arne Carlson was in office?
By that standard, Mitch Berg is “just another Libertarian Party insider”.
As far as that bit about “continu[ing] Governor Pawlenty’s failed (sic) policies”? Let’s take a brief march back through time:
2002
CANDIDATE PAWLENTY: “No new taxes!
2004
GOVERNOR PAWLENTY: Nope. No new taxes!
2006
GOVERNOR PAWLENTY: Ixnay on the Axestay!
2008
GOVERNOR PAWLENTY: You shall not pass…taxes!
2010
TOM HORNER: We need over two billion in new taxes!
I’d think even Brian Melendez could detect the pattern, here.
Tom Horner wants to raise sales taxes on almost everything we buy, which will hit middle-class families twice as hard as others. And while Minnesota’s middle-class families are struggling, Tom Horner’s priority is to cut taxes for big businesses.
As opposed to Mark Dayton – who’ll raise taxes on everyone, directly or indirectly – and Tom Emmer, who …won’t!
With less than five weeks left until the election, we wanted to make sure all Minnesota’s voters know exactly what Tom Horner stands for.
Who is Tom Horner? Just another Republican.
Read: “Internal polling shows he’s taking a lot more Democrat than GOP votes”
If you are a charter school parent, no matter what your politics, I urge you reprint this article and pass it around to your friends,
While Minnesota is proud of its education system, its great achilles heel is the inner city. The Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, have among the highest achievement gaps in the nation between white and black students – and pouring money into the districts isn’t changing anything. Indeed, as the budget has skyrocketed, the situation’s gotten worse.
So for many parents in the Twin Cities, charter schools have been a lifeline – a place where their kids aren’t just numbers on a school district spreadsheet, where they have some input into how the school works. The vast majority of parents in inner-city charter schools are, ironically, minorities. Most are below the district income averages.
Mark Dayton wants to slash state funding to charter schools.
His budget plan (both of his tries at a budget plan, actually) will slash lease aid payments to charter schools.
This is a huge financial hit.
When people throw around figures like “it costs $11,000 a year to teach a student in this district”, remember that public districts can float bonds to build their school buildings, as well as get extra money from special local school tax levies. Charter schools are forbidden by (a stupid) state law from spending their money on buying buildings.
The state allots a certain amount of “lease aid” to charter schools, which helps them rent space.
Dayton wants to slash this aid.
It may or may not affect well-heeled schools in tony suburbs. But it will shred poor inner city charter schools.
So, all you black, Latino, H’mong, Native American, or Muslim parents who pulled your kids out of your wretched inner-city public schools? Most of you, statistically, will vote for Mark Dayton.
You are voting for your kids’ ticket back to sub-mediocrity. The ticket back to being treated like a number. The ticket back to being written off, and treated like make-work programs for the teachers’ union, rather than future people with immense potential.
Mark Dayton cares more about feeding money to the union that helped cause your neighborhood schools’ collapse than he does about your kids and the path to education that you, the parents, have chosen.
Think about it.
I joined a good chunk of the blogosphere in reviling Michelle Obama for saying she wasn’t proud of being an American until her husband became a contender. It was a dumb remark.
Still – hearing that the Democrats are going to do this…:
Comedy Central humorist Stephen Colbert is set to testify before a House subcommittee on immigration at 9:30 a.m. today. Yes, you heard that right. Colbert is scheduled to appear alongside United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez, whose group initiated a campaign called “Take Our Jobs” that challenged U.S. citizens to replace immigrants in farm work. On last night’s edition of “The Colbert Report,” Colbert took the challenge, packing corn and picking beans to see if he could handle farm labor. As it turns out, he really can’t.
…and I gotta confess, they might wanna close the Statue of Liberty, because it’s gonna fall over.
Next week, look for the Cookie Monster to talk about childhood obesity.
If you blinked last Monday, you missed Betty McCollum’s “town hall” meeting. Indeed, if you sneezed at the wrong time, you may have missed the part where she or any of her staff called it a “town hall”, themselves.
I had a prior engagement – but Doug Bass attended.
Not that it was easy:
I actually didn’t know it was advertised as a “DFL Town Hall Rally” until I got to the event. But doesn’t the phrase “DFL Town Hall Rally” sound contradictory, oxymoronic? If they said “DFL Rally,” it would be clearly understood as a partisan event. If they said “Town Hall Meeting,” I believe it would be generally understood as a non-partisan event. So the very phrase “DFL Town Hall Rally” sounded odd to me.
As I headed to Macalester, I was thinking to myself “Whose idea was it to have a town hall meeting at 5:30 pm? There are a lot of people who aren’t going to be able to make it.” I then realized that this wasn’t a bug, it was a feature, a mechanism of keeping inconvenient people away from the event.
Doug noticed something I did not; I’ll add emphasis:
When I got to Macalester College, one of Teresa Collett’s volunteers saw me, and we started chatting. He showed me the press release for the event, which was issued on Friday, the traditional day where news goes to be buried. And not just any Friday, mind you, the Friday three days before the event, and the Friday the day before September 11, where the nation’s attention is elsewhere. The only media outlet that covered the event was Minnesota Public Radio, which let the abovementioned “Town Hall Rally” oddity pass without comment.
And this may be the quote of the day:
I thought to myself “This isn’t a Town Hall Meeting, this is a flash mob! A secret, moonless midnight flash mob!”
And the conclusion?
This event was a Potemkin Town Hall meeting, an event created for the purpose of being able to claim that a Town Hall meeting took place. The scheduling, the publicity, the audience made it nothing of the sort. It was a treachery within further treacheries.
Read the whole thing.
So we had the “flash mob”, and we’ll have two more coming up with friendly audiences – a union hall and another.
That’s a lot of “appearances” for Betty McCollum.
Maybe being in a “D+13” district doesn’t feel as secure as it used to…
(And yes, now would be a perfect time to pitch in a few bucks for to Teresa Collett’s campaign. The CD2 leadership hates me when I write this, but you live in the Second, where John Kline is going to win by thirty on a bad day, it’d be cool if you could peel off a buck or two for Teresa, who actually seems to have a shot. And/or for Joel Demos, who’s running the funnest underdog campaign I’ve seen since Harley McClain. And for that matter for Randy Demmer and Chip Cravaack, both of whom have quietly moved into positions to have decent shots against Walz and Oberstar).
Betty McCollum (DFL, MNCD4) does her best to insulate herself from dissent.
Tonight is your chance to show her anyway. She’s got a “Town Hall” going on at Macalester tonight, at the Macalester Chapel, 1600 Grand Avenue in Saint Paul. And the good guys are rallying against her.
Get there at 5:30.
I can’t make it – I have a prior campaign-related commitment. But if you go – and I hope you do! – leave a comment.
More momentum building among the Dems Mo for extending the Bush tax cuts:
Momentum built Thursday for extending all of the Bush-era tax cuts after President Obama avoided a veto threat and a key Senate Democrat voiced support for the extension.
War policy. Guantanamo. Patriot Act . Tax cuts.
Not sure if we have any policy reason to miss Bush yet; it’s like he never left.
Mark Dayton is to money like John McCain was to houses:
Luke Hellier explains Dayton’s South Dakota trusts – which save him a ton in taxes – and asks some questions:
- In your “Deficit Solution” plan (item #3), you criticize snowbirds who maintain residences outside of Minnesota for six months and a day to avoid certain taxes, but why is it okay that your trust funds maintain residence outside of Minnesota 12 months a year?
- Have you ever asked your family members or the executor of your South Dakota trust funds to move these trusts to Minnesota? If not, why not?
- Have you ever asked your family members or the executor of your South Dakota trust funds whether you can divest? If not, why not?
- Will you ask for the release of the tax returns for your South Dakota trust funds?
- What tax benefits do you derive from your South Dakota trusts in comparison with the tax liability you would have were they in Minnesota?
- How much in Minnesota taxes have you avoided paying the state in your lifetime because of these arrangements? If you cannot answer this question, would you be willing to allow an independent referee to calculate it before Election Day?
- Can you explain your holdings in the well-known tax havens of the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands that are listed on your Senate Financial Disclosure reports?
- Would you be willing to gift to the state of Minnesota all monies you would have been required to pay had your trusts been established in Minnesota?
I’m picturing a Scrooge McDuck kind of vibe here:
Perhaps it’s a good thing that David “The Spam Meister” Plouffe is one of the “geniuses” behind the Obama campaign two years ago.
His tactic this year? Put the bar down on the ground, walk over it, and spin it as a successful high-jump:
President Obama’s top political guru said Tuesday that he believes 70 House races and 15 Senate races are in play this fall.
White House senior adviser David Plouffe — Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign manager — said that a bevy of races were in play, from the national to local level.
Next stop: say the GOP should pick up 140 seats; spin a 60 seat pickup as a crushing disappointment.
Reality is this; if the GOP picks up 20 seats in the House, and any in the Senate, the DFL should commit seppuku.
There.
If there’s one thing that America could do for its own long-term betterment over the next few years (that doesn’t involve big electoral victories for the GOP), it’s sending Paul Krugman to work at McDonalds or in a nursing home, or something else productive.
This past week, he said the US needed another World War II – at least, in terms of Keynesian government intervention in the market – to revive the economy.
Victor Davis Hanson points out that the US economy recovered in spite of the government involvement, largely because the war left us as the last market standing:
As WWII ended and the clean-up began, there was an enormous amount of pent-up global demand for goods. Given the wreckage in Europe, Japan, and Russia and the underdevelopment of India, Asia, and South America, we were about the only ones with the industrial and commercial wherewithal to supply the world rebound — often receiving cheap oil, gas, minerals, and interest in exchange, which supplemented our own vast supplies of comparatively cheap and easily recoverable resources. Nor should we forget the psychological element: Americans, after winning two wars, were enormously confident about their newfound international stature and influence.
At home, four years of consumer deprivation during the war and the weak demography of the 1930s had combined to create huge demand, all while society was increasingly leaving the farm for good and becoming suburbanized. The result was that in the late 1940s and 1950s, the birth rate soared and consumers enthusiastically made first-time purchases of washers, dryers, fridges, cars, etc. Thus, the American economy grew by leaps and bounds.
Any similarities between 1948-1958 and today are purely coincidental:
Today’s situation is not comparable: We are in hock to foreign creditors for trillions and have not been a net creditor since the 1980s. A China, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, or India is as or more likely to supply recovering demand for food, steel, or electronics.
Massive spending will only revive the economy if it involves destroying the rest of the world economy, in other words.
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