I want to take a vacation this summer.  I want to go to Norway to run down some of the geneology on both my parents’ sides.

Of course, a key part of making that happen, budget-wise, is going to be getting other people to buy my groceries and pay my utility bills for the next few months.  Or better yet, in perpetuity.

Lots of vegetables, everyone, please?

———-

Absurd?

Well, no.  That’s how cities and counties have been ratcheting up their lifestyles for decades in Minnesota – through “Local Government Aid”, which allows local governments to spend money that they don’t have to raise by taxing their own residents directly,  because the state passes it on to all Minnesota taxpayers.

It’s a perverted vestige of a holdover from the 1970’s “Minnesota Miracle”, originally designed to give poorer outstate town and school districts a little more even financial playing field with the once-wealthy Twin Cities.

In other words, “political welfare”.

And like any kind of public welfare, there is a legitimate reason for it – and like our public welfare system for people, it’s been perverted far from its original intent.

Of course, “original intent” to the left means “just the beginning’:  to the left, welfare isn’t intended to forestall starvation; it’s about controlling people and society.

Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius  does what the entire Minnesota left has been doing for eight years, and what theyll be doing for the next six months; he tries to tell the reader that a money-laundering program for local spending is really the capstone of civic virtue.

And he does it to the tune of every single chanting point the DFL has already worn out:

As Tim Pawlenty tries to walk into the sunset, he’s got one small problem: He’s left Minnesotans a complete mess.

Well, no.  He’s caused our governing class to go into spasms of discomfiture at having to react to a tax gravy train coming to an end.  The governing class is perturbed.

The state itself, with decent unemployment numbers and a generally better private sector performance – the sector that actually matters to most of us?  Not quite so bad, and thanks to Pawlenty, set up to recover better than many other states if we ever get Obama out of office and see genuine prosperity again.

Here’s what you NEED TO KNOW.

You are paying billions of dollars more in fees on a long list of items, including cigarettes, parking tickets, marriage licenses, building permits, court cases, college tuition and hundreds of other higher fees on Pawlenty’s watch.

Well, no.

We’re not paying “billions more” for them; we pay the same.  It’s just that the taxes sucked out of each of these are being extracted at the local, rather than state, level.  Because local governments are now more accountable for their own spending.

Here’s more REALITY.

Since 2003, state budget cuts mean Minnesotans pay significantly more in property taxes.

And why is that?

Because we are squeezed between local governments (especially in the larger cities) that are run by the DFL and the public employees unions and for whom spending is their main grip on power, and

Yes, Tim Pawlenty has kept the income tax — which is a progressive tax that asks the rich to pay their fair share — steady since he took office.

Let’s be clear on this – since neither Jeff nor WCCO will:    the “progressive” income tax soaks the “working rich”, the doctors and lawyers and engineers and mid-to-upper management and especialy entrepreneurs that make in low six figures.  The “Rich” – the Bill McGuires and Lois Quams and Mark Daytons of Minnesota – mostly don’t pay income tax; their “income” is mostly capitol gains and dividends.

In its place, he has forced massive increases in our property tax — which is a regressive tax that forces the poor and middle class to pay more. Since Pawlenty took office, local property taxes have increased by more than fifty percent. And that’s on top of the massive cuts local governments are making.

Rosenberg says this like it’s a bad thing.

The biggest problem is that forty years of state money-laundering have perverted local spending.  In Saint Paul, the city budget spends LGA money – money the city doesn’t directly control – on essentials like the police and fire departments, while its property taxes, which it does control, go to nonessential dross like the city Human Rights department and B-list expenditures like the city’s dozens of Rec Centers, and Neighborhood Councils.

How bad have local government spending cuts become? The city of Brainerd has started turning off the lights:

Selected streetlights – in alleys, in mid blocks and duplicates at intersections – started being shut off by the utility in early May in response to the Brainerd City Council’s direction to reduce the street lighting budget by $91,000. Brainerd Public Utilities Superintendent Tom Phelps told the Personnel and Finance Committee that in addition to shutting off lights he’s been reducing wattage in downtown decorative lights and looking at switching to LED lights.

Govenrment having to live within its means, and get more efficient?

Gosh, what will we do?

Our local governments have done everything up to and including reducing the wattage of their lights, but they’ve still been forced to raise your property taxes by over half under Pawlenty’s fiscal malfeasance. And if you don’t like that, it will just be worst under Extremist Emmer.

No, Jeff, I have a hunch it’s not the light bill that’s raising the property taxes.

Think featherbedded union labor, bottomless defined-benefit public pensions, redundant services, salaries that are outstripping those of the private sector mopes who have to float it all.

I used to be a Big-L Libertarian.  I left the GOP, disgusted that they’d sold the law-abiding gun owner down the river with the 1994 “Crime” Bill.  I joined the Libertarians because they were purists on liberty.

And in a room full of purists, it was easy to explain why believing in private property rights – a cornerstone of Libertarianism and, also, the United States – and the right to free association meant it was wrong to tell, say, a lunch counter owner that he had to desegregate his private property.  The proper response – in a room full of liberties purists who, as a general rule, are less racist than the population at large – is to not go to that lunch counter, and use your freedom of speech to let other people know that the owner ran a segregated lunch counter.

Of course, we rarely had to try to explain these things to people outside the room.  The Libertarians never won any elections – rarely got over a percent, in fact.

Ron Paul started changing that; he brought liberty-minded people into the GOP, and in some places took it over.

The Tea Party furthered this, sanding off (thankfully) some of Paul’s whackdoodle conspiracymongering and focusing on libertarian ideas of taxation, spending and the role of government – a discussion this nation desperately needs.

Rand Paul, running for the Senate in Kentucky, just got into trouble for getting into an argument about classical libertarianism in a forum that’s more concerned with squeedging attack sound bites out of people with elephants next to their names.

Howard Kurtz on the original interview that started the flap:

[Rand Paul] kept telling [MSNBC host Rachel] Maddow he was not in favor of discrimination. He would have marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He supported the law’s ban on bias in public institutions. “Am I a bad person? Do I believe in awful things? No,” Paul said.

But he would not, despite repeated prodding, say the government should legally bar private institutions from discrimination.

And in doing so, he was that one thing politicians all claim to be, but almost none are;  honest.  He’s not a racist – indeed, to principled conservatives racism (imposing group stereotypes onto individuals) is an absolute wrong; to a Libertarian the thoughts in ones’ heart, the things one says, and the company one keeps are none of the government’s business – but everyone must be rigidly equal before the law:

“I’m all in favor of and that was desegregating the schools, desegregating public transportation, use public roads and public monopolies, desegregating public water fountains,” he said.

Which is a hunkydory discussion point among libertarians and Jeffersonian liberals; to them (us?), government has no place telling people they must not offend with their speech, their associations, or the use of their private property.  Among libertarians (big and small), at least as an academic discussion, allowing racists their constitutional rights to speak, associate and use their property as they wish does not in turn make one a racist – merely one who knows what government’s role is supposed to be, and the proper response to loathsome private beliefs, speech and behavior is evangelism and good speech.  It’s one of those poli-sci discussions that big-L Libertarians love to have, in the abstract.

But in politics, abstract questions have many layers of real manifestations:

“How about desegregating lunch counters?” Maddow said.

Mark Tapscott in the WashEx writes about the dim-witted feeding frenzy that ensued:

If the bloody waters that appear in the midst of such a shark frenzy make you uncomfortable, better get used to it. Odds are good that Paul is only the first of many Tea Party linked candidates whose inexperience in political combat with the media will spark such bloodbaths in coming months.

No such flap enveloped Scott Brown in Massachusetts probably because he had some prior experience as a Republican state senator in dealing with a hostile media in Massachusetts.

But many more of the Tea Party endorsed candidates who will gain visibility in the congressional campaign in coming months will, like Paul, be making their first-ever foray in seeking elective office. Like babes, they will go into brutal hand-to-hand combat with Establishment GOP, then Democratic opponents and their sympathetic journos, all of whom are seasoned veterans.

And when it comes to trying to frame your opponent, truth comes in a distant third to “making up a good chanting point to cleverly defame your opponent” and “making that chanting point so simple that any drooling SEIU droog can remember it”, in the hopes of taking a brief soundbyte of a statement intended as part of an academic discussion, and turning it first into “Rand Paul hates civil rights”, and thence to “Republicans are racists!”.

It’s poison for rational debate – but then, that’s not what the left, scared out of their minds by being on the wrong side of a populist tsunami, cares about.

The left is, of course, deeply hypocritical on the subject; via the ACLU, they are scrupulous about some peoples’  rights to speak and associate without question; somehow, the media managed to square the ACLU’s support for Nazis marching in Skokie with the idea that it didn’t mean the Democratic party sympathized with eliminationist anti-semites.   The rights of conservative college students, of course, don’t rate similar scrupulousness.

The lesson is a simple one, though.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know a couple of key truths for new politicians to remember when campaigning:

1. The media is in the bag for the Democrats.  Duh.
2. The media will cover for the “nuances” in the Dems’ positions; Rep. Keith Ellison, for example, will no more be grilled over whether his support for Hamas means he indirectly supports the extinction of Israel than Obama would be for his “bitter gun-clinging Jesus freaks” quote.
3. But they will find the energy to go over everything you say and do to find something that can be presented to the undecided to caricature you and frame you as part of the meme they are complicit in circulating about conservatives.
4. The left, believing as they do as a matter of historical, philosophical fact that “the ends justify the means, don’t care that they toss the entire context of what you say, and in effect lie about and defame you.  As long as it frames you so they win.

In ordinary times, by the way, this would be the point where I”d say “by the way, I oppose discrimination, and think Rand Paul was an idiot to try to get all academic on “nationa” TV on a subject as loaded as discrimination”.   But that doesn’t seem to be enough to keep the smear machine at bay, these days.

There’s an old Soviet-era joke that I remember from when I was a kid.  A Soviet radio station in Minsk was broadcasting a talk show.  The host said “Minsk is the most beautiful city in all of the Soviet Union”.  

A caller rang in, and asked “what do you think of the story that the Americans will be targeting nuclear weapons at all of our biggest, most important cities?”

The host immediately chimed in saying “Smolensk is the most beautiful city on all of the Soviet Union!”.

Two years ago, when the DFL ran former sergeant Steve Sarvi against (retired Marine colonel) John Kline in CD2, and former Marine lawyer Ashwin Madia against Erik Paulsen in CD3, military service was high on the DFL’s list of qualifications.  Very, very high, in fact.

This past year – especially with former Navy fighter pilot Dan Severson running on the GOP slate for Secretary of State, and former Navy helicopter pilot Chip Cravaack running against Jim Oberstar in CD8, that particular meme has disappeared from all DFL chanting.

But I have a hunch it’s going to disappear a lot more:

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in Connecticut finds Blumenthal with just a three-point advantage over Linda McMahon, 48% to 45%. Two weeks ago, he led the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment by 13 percentage points. The New York Times story broke late Monday; the survey was taken Tuesday evening.

Blumenthal is the anointed replacement for Christopher Dodd in Connecticut.  The NYTimes ran a story busting him saying he’d been in Vietnam when he had not.

To be fair, he spent the last years of the Vietnam War in a Marine Reserve unit in DC.

To be even more fair, isn’t that the kind of thing that the left raked George W. Bush and Dan Quayle over for?

I got the strangest sensation last week.  I haven’t had this sensation in the longest time.  Maybe a brief flash in 2000, but it wasn’t quite the same thing.

The DFL realizes that they’ve got nothing.

The Strib referenced Ben Smith in Politico this morning, saying that…:

Pawlenty appears to have run the table on the Democratic majorities in both of the houses of the legislature, forcing them to drop plans for new surcharges and scrap their top priority, an expansion of federal and state-funded health care for some of the state’s poor. They also enacted spending cuts that a court recently ruled Pawlenty could not make himself.

He will complete his two-term tenure at the end of this year having fulfilled his pledge not to raise taxes, with his approval ratings in positive territory, and having largely avoided the pragmatic compromises that often bedevil governors in polarized party primaries. His success gives him the accomplishments to match his conservative rhetoric, and set a high bar for other ambitious governors facing budget crises of their own in this lean year.

“We have some pretty clear values and principles in mind that we adhere to and when it relates to those core values and principles we don’t compromise on,” Pawlenty told POLITICO in an interview Monday after what he said was two hours of sleep on each of the two previous nights. “When it comes to issues around the role of government taxes and amounts of spending and other things, those are core values and principles by which we set our compass, and we stay strongly on that course and we battle.”

It’s a good piece.  You should read the whole thing. 

Perhaps the crux is right here; Pawlenty seems to have aversion-trained the DFL:

“Democrats have always known that a tax increase means a veto. As a result, there has been a grudging acceptance among Democrats that any package negotiated with the governor will not include tax increases,” Nelson said.

And this put the last piece into the (possibly completely-spurious) puzzle.  Maybe it’s just me, of course – but over the course of the past few weeks, it feels as if the Minnesota DFL has run out of gas.  They seem tired, like a boxer that’s gone a few rounds too many – as, in the legislature, they have, squandering four straight legislatures of prohibitive majorities but getting turned back by Governor Pawlenty at every juncture.

And if you’re a DFLer, after having beaten your head against a wall for four different sessions, culminating in agreeing to spending cuts that the Minnesota Supreme Court had just sent back from unallotment – snatchign political defeat from the jaws of a dubious legal victory – what do you have to look forward to?

A summer duking it out in a primary between a failed Speaker of the House, a former Senator that’s a laughingstock of the entire nation, and a former State senator who’s a pariah in his own party (not to mention Tom Horner who, ostensible former affiliations aside, is a moderate Democrat in policy terms, and who will draw away many, many more DFL than GOP votes). 

And when you pick from among those three deeply-uninspiring choices, you’ll stepping out into a hurricane; a GOP candidate not only at the head of an energized party out for four years of payback, but well-sited to bring in a huge chunk of the “Tea Party” vote.

It’s showing in a lot of ways; the DFL is skulking quietly away from the debris of the budget session tossing a few pro forma “Cold Omahas” and “we deserve betters” around; their big response to the Emmer campaign so far is to chant that he’s an extremist and to avoid any actual discussion comparing policy like a vampire avoiding sunlight.

Politics is cyclical; being a Democrat today must feel a bit like being a Republican (as distinct from a conservative) in, say, 2006; out of energy, out of ideas, needing a huge intellectual jumpstart.  Oh, they’ll pull something together for the campaign, but you can practically feel the fatigue.

 It won’t last forever, of course.

Not that we can’t try.

It’s the new Matt Entenza TV spot.

Entenza – with whom I’ve co-hosted a public event, a few years ago, and whom I found to be a perfectly likeable guy, although in contrast with Ed Schultz (one of the stars of the evening), a wolverine is good company, too – tells his tough yet heartwarming story:

After watching the spot, especially the tagline (about wanting to help Minnesota create more such heartwarming and inspirational stories), I have to ask, though; what state program were Entenza’s benfactors on, that allowed them to be so noble?

As long as I can remember, American Jews have regarded Israel about the same way as northeastern Catholics look at abortion; something that’s supposed to be of overriding importance, but doesn’t really affect their voting patterns.

But Obama’s radical dissociation from Israel, and his shameless treatment of Prime Minister Netanyahu, seems to be provoking a change.  I heard these numbers over the weekend, while interviewing Mark Miller of the Republican Jewish Coalition; for the first time,   American Jews are souring on Obama and the Democrats:

United States President Barack Obama has lost nearly half of his support among American Jews, a poll by the McLaughlin Group has shown.

The US Jews polled were asked whether they would: (a) vote to re-elect Obama, or (b) consider voting for someone else. 42% said they would vote for Obama and 46%, a plurality, preferred the second answer. 12% said they did not know or refused to answer.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll go to the GOP endorsee; that’s the GOP’s job to take care of.

Still, you don’t see these kinds of numbers every day:

In the Presidential elections of 2008, 78% of Jewish voters, or close to 8 out of 10, chose Obama. The McLaughlin poll held nearly 18 months later, in April 2010, appears to show that support is down to around 4 out of 10.

The poll showed that key voter segments including Orthodox/Hassidic voters, Conservative voters, voters who have friends and family in Israel and those who have been to Israel, are all more likely to consider voting for someone other than Obama.

Among Orthodox/Hassidic voters, 69% marked ‘someone else’ vs. 17% who marked ‘re-elect.’ Among Conservative-affiliated voters the proportion was 50% to 38%. Among Reform Jews, a slim majority of 52% still supported Obama while 36% indicated they would consider someone else. Among Jews with family in Israel and those who had been to Israel, about 50% said they would consider someone else…

It’s still two and a half years ’til the election, so nobody needs to get excited.  But not since Reagan have we seen such an erosion among Jewish support for the Democrats.

This story caught me just a tad off-guard:

Minnesota’s largest teachers union has thrown its support behind Democrat Margaret Anderson Kelliher’s campaign for governor.

Education Minnesota endorsed Kelliher on Saturday after a yearlong search.

Normally I’d say “after a year-long search for what – someone who could spell?”, but this year is a little different.  Matt Entenza founded MN2020 in large part to curry favor with public employees unions (leading to hatchet jobs like last  year’s jihad against charter schools, which beggared fact but, one would suspect, buffed his cred with the MFT.

I’m going to guess that the union chose long-term political infrastructure over short-term favor-banking.

I thought this was an interesting statement:

Union president Tom Dooher said in a news release that Kelliher shares the union’s determination to create an education funding system that is sustainable and sufficient.

Huh?

Achievement gap?  Minority dropout rates?  Bad math and science scores?

No.  Stable funding is the priority.

The Tom Emmer campaign has been aggressively pushing itself into places where, the conventional wisdom says, Republicans just don’t go.  Right after the MNGOP convention, Emmer paraded at the Longfellow May Day parade, promting all manor of victorian vapours among the lefty pundits who have, for some reason, stopped being big champions of the First Amendment since Barack Obama took office.

Last weekend it was the Cinco De Mayo parade, on Saint Paul’s West Side.  The Bill Jungbauer campaign blog  observed some intensely bigoted behavior…:

Another event that was totally outrageous occurred when we passed the dfl booth. About fifteen people stood in front of the booth in the street and chanted loudly in our faces, “KKK go away.”

And an interesting VIP (emphasis added):

Among the crowd was none other than Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, the endorsed democratic candidate for governor. The fascist, tax and spend feminazi was the ring leader amongst her merry band of liberals. So, rather than everyone sharing in our right to free speech and expression, these leftists, led by MAK, chose to disrupt and disturb us and those around us. The wonderful people of the community who only wanted to enjoy their celebration stood in witness to MAK and the democrats leftist hatred, exposing to us all their true fascist tendencies.

I don’t like bandying the “F” word around pointlessly – and I personally would like some third-party verification – but if a candidate herself gathers a pack of supporters, not to question or counterdemonstrate, but to heckle her opponent with defamatory ad-hominem, it’s not all that far off the beam.

What do you Democrats have to say about your endorsed candidate engaging in that kind of behavior?

Isn’t this the “angry” “provocation” that you are all mewling about the GOP doing (without, as always, providing any examples)?

UPDATE:  We may have video on the way shortly.  Stay tuned.

President refers to Tea Partiers as “Tea-Baggers”:

Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations.

In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year … That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

Tea Party activists loath the term “tea baggers,” which has emerged in liberal media outlets and elsewhere as a method of mocking the activists and their concerns.

I guess this means calling half of America “bitter gun-clinging Jesus Freaks” wasn’t an out-of-context mis-step?

Question for my liberal readers:  Does that fact that I’m writing about this make me racist, seditionary, or merely extremist?

Susan Gaertner leaves the goober race.

Prosecutor Susan Gaertner left the Minnesota governor’s race Monday, saying she didn’t want to be “a spoiler” in Democrat Margaret Anderson Kelliher’s quest to become the first woman to win the job.

Well, nothing like having a good reason.

The coast isn’t clear, though. Former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton and former state Rep. Matt Entenza continue to seek the Democratic nomination in the August primary.

Gaertner, the Ramsey County attorney, declined to endorse any of the candidates, but she said Minnesota has never come closer to electing a female governor.Kelliher became the first woman to win major-party endorsement for the state’s highest office when the Democratic Party backed her campaign in Duluth on Saturday.

“This is the closest Minnesota has yet to come to electing a female governor,” Gaertner said at a Capitol news conference. “That would be history-making.”

Wow.

I wonder if she’d have left the race if the Laura Brod had run and been endorsed?

I’ve been doing some digging – and I’ve found what really happened at a number of key moments of American history…

July 4, 1776: [Scene: Independence Hall, Philadelphia]. 

JEFFERSON:  “OK, here it is.  When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to fully fund entitlement programs which have connected them with another, and to assume among the budgets of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Government and of Government’s God/Goddess entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of The Budget requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation and the costs, amortized over 30 years, of said separation, as adjusted for inflation, with due diligence paid toward the opportunity costs arising from said separation.

MADISON:  “Good – but we need more on bonding.  Could we go back to the bit on bonding?”

August, 1864: [Scene: The War Department, Washington DC]. 

GENERAL HALLECK:  “President Lincoln, General Grant is a drunk”.

PRESIDENT LINCOLN: “Then perhaps all of our generals should have a bottle of whatever he’s drinking.  (Turns to secretary) We’ll call the program “The Cheap Blend Surge”; we can fund it through an excise tax on player pianos!”

GENERAL HALLECK: “Capitol idea, sir!”

December 25, 1944: [Scene: a basement, Bastogne, Belgium.  General MacAuliffe, commander of the US 101st Airborne division, which has been surrounded by seven German divisions for nearly a week, is approached by a German emissary under a white flag]. 

GERMAN:  “General, vot iss your ansah to ze offer of zurrendah?”

MACAULIFFE:  “Nuts”.

GERMAN: “Pardon me?”

MACAULIFFE: “Nuts – I cant’ find my slide rule.  I’ll have to take the idea under advisement, but honestly, I’m not sure that we have the budget to support 12,000 POWs.  Can we schedule a meeting on this?”

August 28, 1963: [Scene: The steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC]. 

MARTIN LUTHER KING:  “I have a dream that one day this nation will be able to fund a program that will pay community leaders to organize us to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are entitled to an equal share of this nation’s budget!.'”

June 12, 1987: [Scene: The Brandenburg Gate]. 

RONALD REAGAN:  “If you want peace, General Secretary Gorbachev, increase the funding for East Berlin’s transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation process!   Secretary Gorbachev, open the books on East Berlin’s transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation process!   Mister Gorbachev, tear down the barriers to fully funding the timely completion of the transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation documentation as part of the pre-design environmental impact and mitigation process preparatory to getting approval from the affected district soil, water and easement committees!” [1]

April 26, 2010:  [Scene: a house in the Midway of Saint Paul (whose bathroom is the pride of the entire neighborhood]

FLASH:  “The state can’t go through 4 more years of the same policies that have gutted they very budget items that made Minnesota great.”

Immigrant pioneers struggling through blizzards to eke a living out of the sandy soil.  241 Svens and Oles fixing bayonets and charging at 2,000 Bubbas and Billy Joes, saving the Union in the process.  Doughty miners doing daily war with the rock beneath our feet for generations.  Ingenious inventors working in obscurity to invent the modern flour mill, the gyrostabilized bombsight, the supercomputer,  the pacemaker, the amalgamation of R’nB and rock’nroll, the greatest medical center in the world…

…whew.  Good thing all of that was in the budget!

Thank you, State of Minnesota, for budgeting for life itself! (more…)

Now that the DFL has endorsed Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, they get to answer the question “we endorsed who? How?  Why?”

The DFL endorsement is a traditional kiss of death.  The DFL’s real candidates, Dayton and Entenza and Gaertner, are all going directly to the primary – itself an indication of how out-of-touch the DFL’s power elite and activists are.

The conventional wisdom is that the GOP, which will have a candidate this weekend, is going to have a three month head start on the actual campaign, while the DFL dukes it out among itself until the August primary.

The conventional wisdom omits that the Strib is going to be running interference for the DFL:

Republicans claimed to be gleeful over Kelliher’s endorsement. GOP Deputy Chair Michael Brodkorb said Kelliher has presided over an “ineffective Legislature.” He visited the DFL convention to watch its party contest.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Marty Seifert said, “While the Republican Party will be united behind one candidate in less than a week, the DFL will have a bruising primary battle for months.”

But Democrats were quick to praise their convention for its civility. “This was the most courteous, cordial convention I can remember,” veteran delegate Randy Schubring, of Rochester, said Saturday.

So what?  Let’s see if they can say that in July.

Republicans may not be able to say the same thing. In advance of Friday’s gathering to pick the GOP gubernatorial candidate, Seifert and Tom Emmer, both members of the state House, waged a heated, testy fight for their party’s nod.

The two men have battled inside the party for years, developing a bitter rivalry even before they were leading candidates for their party’s endorsement. Their supporters appear to have no end of enmity for their rivals, shaping a battle thatwill spill onto the GOP convention floor.

Rubbish.  There is an end to the emnity.  It’s what conventions are for, for starters.

And if for some reason the GOP forgets what’s really at stake in this election, there a couple hundred thousand Tea Partiers (or as the Strib says, “dozens”) out there who’ll be happy to remind them.

It’s in the Strib’s interest, of course, to try to fan the conflict – or any conflict the can find – within the GOP.  Because if Kelliher is the DFL’s idea of a gubernatorial candidate, it’s gonna be a rough summer for the DFL and, thus, the Strib.

Fearless prediction:  expect a “Minnesota Poll” showing Kelliher with a decisive lead in the very near future.

Our father in heaven:

In the past year you took away my favorite b-list cheesecake actress, Britney Murphy.  You took away my favorite libertarian-conservative columnist, William Safire.  And you took away the inventor of one of my favorite guitars, Les Paul.

I just want you to know that Barack Obama is…

…still the worst president of my lifetime.  Don’t take him.

I wanna kick his ass at the ballot box in two years.

I humbly beseech thee, your deeply imperfect servant Mitch.

Margaret Anderson-Kelliher has won the DFL endorsement to run for governor.

Future footnote Anderson-Kelliher sings "It's Raining Men" at a karaoke bar in Maplewood last month

For those of you from out of state, this is a traditional ceremony that marks the beginning of the process for a DFL politician retiring from politics; all the real candidates are running in the primary.

Philadelphia politician bags on rival for Democratic nomination by claiming he’s faking being gay:

Veteran Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.) last Thursday accused her primary opponent, Gregg Kravitz, of pretending to be bisexual in order to pander to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender voters, a powerful bloc in the district.

“I outed him as a straight person,” Josephs said during a fund-raiser at the Black Sheep Pub & Restaurant, as some in the audience gasped or laughed, “and now he goes around telling people, quote, ‘I swing both ways.’ That’s quite a respectful way to talk about sexuality. This guy’s a gem.”

Kravitz and Josephs are duking it out for the Dem nomination to run for the Pennsylvania State House.   Thus the protected classes purity test.

Kravitz, 29, said that he is sexually attracted to both men and women and called Josephs’ comments offensive.

“That kind of taunting is going to make it more difficult for closeted members of the LGBT community to be comfortable with themselves,” Kravitz said. “It’s damaging.”

But others said the remarkable quarrel itself was a sign of progress.

“We’ve hit a new high point when candidates are accused of pretending to be gay to win a seat,” said Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News and a pioneering civil rights advocate.

It’s nothing new, of course; Bill Clinton pretended to be black, and Joe Biden pretends to be handicapped.

So why are the Democrats seeing militiamen under every rock, and Oklahoma City comparisons around every corner?

Not because of any evidence, of course; the rallies themselves are so peaceful that some police departments hold them to a looser standard than the loopier anti-war demonstrations.  And the fact remains that every known act of actual political violence in the past several years has been left-on-right.

No – as with anything else Bill Clinton does, it’s about a poll:

Dig past the headline of the Pew study and one discovers why Bill Clinton is insinuating that “demonizing” government could cause another Oklahoma City bombing. If these numbers are at all close to reality, something one can hardly doubt just now, the American people have issued a no-confidence vote in government, at both the national and state level. To the extent one believes in the “consent of the governed,” consent is being eroded.

This report isn’t bad news for the Democrats. It’s Armageddon.

Remember – the Democratic Party’s big platform is “Government Brings Good Things To Life”.

The survey compares views sampled in 1997 with now. The “now” is the Democrats’ problem. The survey took place this mid-March. After one year of the charismatic, ever-present Barack Obama, after passage of the party’s totemic health-care bill, after spending zillions on Keynesian pump-priming, the American people—well beyond the tea partiers—have the lowest opinion ever of national government.

A year ago, 54% said government should exert more control over the economy; a year later it’s 40%.

Some 58% say Uncle Sam is interfering too much in state and local affairs; 53% want “very major reform” of the federal government. After health care passed in March, Pew re-sampled in early April: Trust in government rose—to 25% from 22%. Inspector Clouseau would call that a “bmp.”

Barack Obama’s speeches are filled with the Democrats’ core claim to legitimacy: Government must and will do good. It must “act.” But in a crucial period when voters across the political spectrum were losing faith in that core claim, the Democrats lost any self-protective sense of what they were doing with public budgets. Barack Obama took a rising reservoir of public trust for his party (62% said they liked the Democrats in January 2009), and emptied it. Since he took office, the percentage of people who want smaller government and fewer services has risen, to 50% from 42%.

Better late than never – although be watching for the pundits to start scolding the American people about “Schizophrenia” for voting for a statist one cycle and a bunch neo-libertarians the next.

If that doesn’t help, start looking for pieces on how “the American people don’t deserve Barack Obama!” shortly after.

I’m thinking about the time I went to the Al Franken Obamacare rally.  And as they came out of the rally, and engaged in the odd debate or argument with us protesters, many of them duly parrotted the Obama party line; “he’s cutting your taxes”!

They’re not, anyway – and now, Obama wants to switch to switch on the tax afterburner:

President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days.

VAT Taxes are a money machine.  They also sap money from every stage of the economy.

I was enjoying an all-too-rare hour of listening to Jason Lewis the other day.

Years ago, when I ran an annual “State of Twin Cities Talk Radio” feature, a solid year before the Northern Alliance Radio Network went on the air (I discontinued the series when the show started, due to my obvious bias); in it, I noted at least once that “Jason Lewis is the host I’d like to be when I grow up”.  And that day was one of the broadcasts where I realized exactly why.

I’m not one of those people who bays “politics is the worst it’s ever been”; it’s not.  1928 was bad; 1828 was worse (albeit for many of the same reasons it’s bad today, only on steroids).   But it is getting pretty bad these days.

And not because people aren’t “bipartisan”.  “Bipartisanship” is a chimera; taken to an illogical extreme, it is antidemocratic. 

And in a multipolar political world, people are going to disagree – on issues, and on lesser things.

To paraphrase Lewis, we need to avoid bagging on the lesser things – especially personalities and personal attacks. 

Conservatives: Barack Obama was born a US Citizens.  Even if he wasn’t, it’s really too late to do anything about it; but it’s a moot point, because he is.  Get a grip.  And he’s not a Marxist or a communist, and won’t be until he opens re-education camps somewhere in Utah.  He’s a cut-rate Richard Daley, not Josef Stalin.   He’s a fabian statist, all right – and he got elected President.  He’s doing the job that 52% of your most gullible neighbors sent him to Washington to do, for now.  Let’s see if we can fix that in 2012.

And yeah, the left is doing it, too.  Unable to fight the Tea Party and the resurgent grassroots right on the issues, they’re going for the ad-homina, the name-calling, the fearmongering and slander, and the yellow hackery – all standard drills for people who are running on intellectual empty, and need to count on their opponents to react to an ofay provocation to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve dug.

Americans need to be smarter.  Conservatives, in particular, need to be smarter than the opposition; we’re fighting against a full-court media press that is at present fully in the bag for the President.

And this president is so easy to attack on the issues; he’s really been an incompetent disaster, so far, except inasmuch as he’s copied Bush’s policies that worked.  There is no need to barber on about his birth certificate, his religion or his labels; he is so weak on the issues that there’s no excuse for it.

Because when he’s essentially destroying, in the long run, everything that ever made this nation great, who really cares where he worshipped as a child?

Vulnerable Democrats are afraid Obamacare is going to drag them underwater this fall:

Tough votes for Obama’s health care plan have further complicated the re-election prospects of dozens of already vulnerable freshman and second-term Democrats. There’s even a chance the party could lose control of one or both houses in the midterm elections.

And the nervous Reps are responding like Brave Sir Robin; they’re running away from their constituents:

In districts and states where the overhaul was most controversial, town-hall meetings have been replaced with tightly controlled business roundtables and other gatherings with voters.

In Nevada, first-term Democratic Rep. Dina Titus defended her vote for the health care bill in a newspaper piece she co-wrote and in a meeting with female doctors. Facing a vigorous GOP challenge from a Republican physician, she acknowledged treading carefully.

“It’s more of a teaching tour than a selling tour,” she said of her recent appearances.

Expect to see lots of tightly-controlled, “on message” events, and virtually no meetings with uncontrolled groups of peasants.  Er, voters.

The obvious answer is this; if the Dems are too cowardly to face the people and answer for the damage they’ve wrought, the Republicans will have to do it for them.  Have town-hall meetings, Republicans.

In fact, have ’em in front of your opponents’ offices.

One of the reasons Senator, professors, academics and “intellectuals” make such lousy presidents is that they feel the need to micromanage everything. 

One of Jimmy Carter’s great failings – among many – was his need to have his fingers stuck deeply into everything his government did, from noodling with the specifics of the various farm bills to directly interacting with the commanders of the Desert One raid as the mission progressed.  A president is supposed to delegate.

Micromanaging is bad.

Especially when the president gets down to trying to  micromanage people’s opinions, as with last week’s 17 minute answer to a Town Hall question:

His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, “F-Map”). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as “FICA”).

I’m getting a headache just reading about it.

Always fond of lists, Obama ticked off his approach to health care — twice. “Number one is that we are the only — we have been, up until last week, the only advanced country that allows 50 million of its citizens to not have any health insurance,” he said.

A few minutes later he got to the next point, which seemed awfully similar to the first. “Number two, you don’t know who might end up being in that situation,” he said, then carried on explaining further still.

“Point number three is that the way insurance companies have been operating, even if you’ve got health insurance you don’t always know what you got, because what has been increasingly the practice is that if you’re not lucky enough to work for a big company that is a big pool, that essentially is almost a self-insurer, then what’s happening is, is you’re going out on the marketplace, you may be buying insurance, you think you’re covered, but then when you get sick they decide to drop the insurance right when you need it,” Obama continued, winding on with the answer.

Leaving aside that it’s lousy oratory – running off at the mouth like that is rude; it’s the prerogative of someone who believes his time is worth much, much more than yours.

It was 1952.  In the lifetimes of the Americans who were of prime voting, earning and thinking ages, the 25-50 year olds who make up the Great American Middle, there’d been a great Depression, one (or for the older ones, two ) world wars plus a nasty “police action” in Korea, and more turmoil in general than people today can comrehend.

And as popular as Franklin D. Roosevelt had been, and as tightly as his administration’s policies had wound themselves into the lives of everyday Americans, the thought of extending his legacy to six terms was too much for many Americans.

And so when the Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson, the GOP responded with Dwight Eisenhower – war hero and, by today’s standards, a moderate.  And whatever you can say about the next eight years (baby boomers made a great show of rebelling against the era’s staid placidity; their parents, who’d come home from World War II having had a lifetime’s worth of excitement by age 25, didn’t have a problem with placid), it was a great time for America.

So could the GOP do it again with General Petraeus?

Americans have never been so disgusted with their politicians. More than three-quarters of Americans disapprove of Congress. President Barack Obama’s favourability ratings have slumped to below 50 per cent and he is no longer trusted or believed by many who voted for him…Many voters yearn for an outsider, someone with authenticity, integrity and proven accomplishment. Someone who has not spent their life plotting how to ascend the greasy pole, adjusting every utterance for maximum political advantage.

Say what you will about Barack Obama, but he, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, is the consummate professional politician; it’s hard to see what he’s done in his entire life that hasn’t played into preparing for a career in politics.

In this toxic climate, perhaps the only public institution that has increased in prestige in recent years is the American military. Its officers are looked upon, as General George Patton once noted, as “the modern representatives of the demi-gods and heroes of antiquity”.

Or at least people of integrity who’ve had to prove their worth with more than just school rankings and voting records.

Where better to look for Obama’s successor, therefore, than in the uniformed ranks? Not since 1952, when a certain Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War, was elected President, have the chances of a military man winning the White House been more propitious.

Within those ranks, no one stands out like General David Petraeus, head of United States Central Command, leader of 230,000 troops and commander of United States forces in two wars. Having masterminded the Iraq surge, the stunning military gambit that seized victory from the jaws of defeat, he is now directing an equally daunting undertaking in Afghanistan.

The story doesn’t end there, of course – it barely begins there.  Nobody knows if Petraeus is interested in running, or much of what he’d stand for, policy-wise.  Which was, of course, Ike’s story as well.

Still, the possibilities are intrigueing.

A few years ago, as the ’08 campaign was heating up, up, you started seeing the stories, asking “are evangelicals leaving the GOP?  The story was like so many – an idea looking for a trend – that fairly screamed “someone’s trolling to get ahead of a curve that doesn’t exist yet”.  (The answer, by the way, was “no – evangelicals just stay home if they’re not thrilled with their choices.

So I’m not sure what to think of this story, a CNN poll showing Democrats joining the Tea Parties:

They are not typical Tea Party activists: A woman who voted for President Obama and believes he’s a “phenomenal speaker.” Another who said she was a “knee-jerk, bleeding heart liberal.”

These two women are not alone.

Some Americans who say they have been sympathetic to Democratic causes in the past — some even voted for Democratic candidates — are angry with President Obama and his party. They say they are now supporting the Tea Party — a movement that champions less government, lower taxes and the defeat of Democrats even though it’s not formally aligned with the Republican Party.

I spoke at the Constitution Day Tea Party last year, and I took a very informal poll of my own; I asked people to give a shout and wave their arms when I mentioned their label of choice.  There was a small film of people who responded to “Democrat”.

The CNN poll, wonder of wonders, found…more or less the same thing:

To be sure, the number of Democrats in the Tea Party movement is small. A recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll shows that while 96 percent of Tea Party activists identify themselves as either Republican or Independent, only 4 percent say they are Democrats.

On the other hand, you can see where some Democrats – especially the blue-collar ones that stand to be damaged the most by Obama’s plans – might find some resonance; their parents did the same thirty years ago when Jimmy Carter presented them with the same dismal future.

Some of these disgruntled voters are taking part in the current Tea Party Express tour. The tour began in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada, on March 28 and is making 44 stops across the nation. It ends in Washington on tax day — April 15.+

Which is where I’ll be – at the State Capitol for the Minnesota Tea Party, after work on April 15!

See you there!

Look –  polls three years before an election are meaningless.  I doubt Reagan was doing all that well in April of 1982, to pick a pointed example, and we all know how that turned out.

As we get closer to the Presidential election, incumbency, a full-court press by a biased mainstream media and the GOP’s lack, to this point, of a barn-burner candidate may well even things out for Obama, if things don’t go even further south (as they very well may).

But today’s Gallup results show that maybe, just maybe, P Americans are waking up and finding that they spent 2008 with electoral beer goggles, and they’re not crazy about what they woke up with, and they’re starting to gnaw their arm off to get away, just maybe:

Americans anxious about unemployment and the economy increasingly blame President Obama for hard times, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, amid signs of turbulence in November’s midterm elections.

Last week’s jubilant signing of the health care overhaul, Obama’s signature domestic initiative, seems to have given the president little boost. Instead, his standing on four personal qualities has sagged, and 50% of those surveyed say he doesn’t deserve re-election.

“People are still hurting; a lot of people are still struggling, and I think a lot of what we’re seeing in the polls reflects people’s views on the economy,” says Rep. Chris Van Hollen, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Note to the GOP:  betting on  your opponent to “keep screwing up” is not a “strategy”.  Get out of the lesbian strip clubs and get a message together.

That is all.

About a quarter of Americans O believe this nation will be the most powerful nation in the world 90 years from now:

Just 27% of U.S. voters now think the United States will still be the most powerful nation in the world at the end of the 21st century, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. That’s down eight points from the previous survey in February just after a highly-publicized U.S. military surge in Afghanistan

I don’t think it ever got this bad during the Carter years.

The Tea Party is all about idle unemployed people!

That’s the NYTimes’ big discovery:

Tom Grimes lost his job as a financial consultant 15 months ago, he called his congressman, a Democrat, for help getting government health care.

Then he found a new full-time occupation: Tea Party activist.

In the last year, he has organized a local group and a statewide coalition, and even started a “bus czar” Web site to marshal protesters to Washington on short notice. This month, he mobilized 200 other Tea Party activists to go to the local office of the same congressman to protest what he sees as the government’s takeover of health care.

I can tell you from experience; having a hobby helps when you’re out of work.

And it’s a fact that Obama’s policies are making an awful lot more people unemployed.

But I’ll tell you what: when I speak at the 4/15 Tea Party at the Capitol, I’ll ask how many are unemployed, and how many are working but not looking forward to getting financially flensed by Obama’s tax orgy.