I was listening to Jack Tomczak talking with AFSCME’s Javier Morillo on the lesser talk station yesterday, about the Dayton pay raises.

Morillo said, out of one corner of his mouth, that there is no way you could find people in the private sector who deal with headcounts and budgets like these administrators do, at the same pay, even with the raises.

And there may be something to that.  Most people who can hold their own in the private sector and look for more out of a career than a pension (outside of law enforcement and fire, the military, teachers and a few other fields) look at government work as a purgatory of eternal frustration and career stagnation.

But out of the other side of his mouth, he said that the salaries still aren’t competitive with the private sector.

So if the salaries are not competitive, the “talent” still isn’t going to get attracted from the private sector (or, apparently, local government). So why have the raises?

It doesn’t make sense as a “talent acquisition” measure; Morillo admitted as much.

But as an expanded payoff to the political class?

There, it makes perfect sense.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A few years back, the local media ran big stories about government workers getting huge raises despite tough times. Outrage followed.

Wasn’t true, of course, it was “accurate but false.” Turns out that public employees are paid on a 2-week pay period system instead of being paid on the 1st and 15th. We get 26 paychecks per year instead of 24. But every seven years, payday falls on New Year’s Day which is a holiday, so the check is cut one day early and that results in 27 pay checks issued during in that year.

Is that a raise? No – the employee keeps the same hourly rate of pay. The money would have been paid in the new year, but for shifting the payday backwards. It’s a fake controversy based on a calendar quirk. It’s like claiming a 63-year-old man is 9 years old because he was born on Leap Day so he’s only had 9 birthdays. Calendar quirk.

Look for those stories again this year.

Joe Doakes

People who put these sorts of things out there as if there’s not some sort of “gotcha” involved annoy me to no end.

Fauxcahontas:  n:  Elizabeth Warren.

The DFL has a long, filthy history of dropping hit pieces in the closing hours of campaigns that would make people who care about petty annoyances like “right and wrong” and ‘truth” puke up their skulls.  Classic example – this piece from 2010, which tried to whip up ingorant anti-Arab sentiment against King Banaian – who happens to be of Armenian descent. 

But the people who do Democrat “Farmer” Labor Party hit pieces don’t bother with right and wrong.  Their ends justify their means.

I cited this piece, dropped against Stacey Stout in House District 43B, on the show over the weekend.  I called it “Evil”. 

It is. 

Here’s the front:

Uh oh.  An abusive guy (are there any other kind in the DFL’s world?  Other than Pajama Boy, I mean?)

And here’s the back:

This ad proves that the DFL is counting on finding a plurality of incurious cretins.  And in 43A, it apparently worked. 

Let’s go through this point by point:

Stout, like most people who don’t see “people with swastika armbands” as a government model to emulate, opposed a DFL proposal to take guns away from people accused, as opposed to convicted, of domestic abuse. 

The “Gun Show Loophole” is a fraud; every gun show I’m aware of requires an NICS background check, and require a police-issued “Permits to Purchase” to buy a gun.  The bill the DFL refers to would have required people to transfer all firearms via a Federal Firearms Licensed dealer.  That means if you’re handing a gun down to your kid, or lending a shotgun to your friend for duck season.  This does nothing but raise the price of firearms (FFLs don’t work for free) and create a paper trail for every gun – the same trail that police departments in Connecticut and New York are trying to use to confiscate firearms. 

As to her opposing a background check for “assault weapons?”  That was a proposal that would have added a second,  utterly redundant background check for buying such weapons. 

Stout made the right call in all three cases – if “following the law and the Constitution” is what you care about, which for the Democrat party it is not. 

Taking those stances, in favor of the law-abiding citizens’ civil liberties, and turning them into “support for rape and domestic abuse?”

If you’re a DFL official, you might want to steer clear of me today. 

And if you voted for Peter Fischer over this ad?   Sorry for all the two-syllable words.

To:  New GOP Majorities in the MN House and US Congress
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Agenda

All,

Want something to show you’re serious about getting the boot of government off of innocent citizens’ necks? 

Reform civil-forfeiture laws.  Now. 

Including, preferably, eradicating laws that allow corrupt pettifoggers to run rackets with the blessing of “the law”. 

Do it now, so we can see who the real enemies are. 

That is all.

The Minnesota legislature wants to make it as easy as possible for voters to get to the polls.

In major, DFL-dominated cities, anyway; Minnesota urban transit systems will be providing free transportation all day tomorrow, courtesy of the Democrat-controlled 2014 legislature:

The faith-based group ISAIAH works to increase voter turnout. Organizer Matt Gladue said the new law might help people in a rush with work and children to get to the polls before they close.

“Any law that removes the substantial barriers people face to getting to the polls on Election Day is a good law,” Gladue said. “If it allows one, a hundred or a thousand people to get to the polls who wouldn’t be able to do it, it’s a good thing.”

No word yet if ISAIAH is going to help farmers in Pennington County make the long, cold drive to their polling stations after a long day in the fields…

 An activist with the Mali Marvin campaign (running against Deb Hillstrom in Brooklyn Center) provided an account on Facebook about the obstruction every Republican activist in a DFL town knows first-hand (included in full below):

(more…)

Black Chicago preacher endorses the GOP candidate for governor of Illinois over the loathsome Pat Quinn…

…and gets robbed, along with death threats:

Corey Brooks, a South Side pastor featured in an ad endorsing Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner, says he’s moved his family from his home while police investigate an overnight burglary of his church, as well as threatening derogatory phone calls he received which claim he’ll be beaten for being Rauner’s “puppet.”

On Saturday, Brooks rushed to the New Beginnings Church of Chicago after a maintenance employee found the church’s back doors shattered and an estimated $8,000 stolen from a glass charity box, meant to build a community center across from the church.

Democrat apologists will no doubt say that it was just typical street crime. 

How many common thug burglars operate from a political/racial agenda?   Emphasis added below:

“The death threats seem to be related to [GOP candidate] Bruce Rauner,” Brooks said at the church Saturday. “They say his name as well as mine and most of the references were in response to me in support of him. So it’s really derogatory, real racial, a lot of homophobic words. It’s real life threatening.”

Brooks said he received the five phone calls on Friday. He recorded one of them, and provided it to police. In that call, which was played for the Sun-Times, a man’s voice is disguised via a high-pitched filter. He is heard calling Brooks a “token n—–.”

How many common burglars in Chicago would you think even know the GOP endorsed a candidate, much less take the time to pitch-shift their voice on the phone?

Their message sounds a little like Minnesota Progressive Project reads:

“We on you boy, we on you. And you ain’t got nobody that can stop us, nobody. Who you go [to] the deacons? They can’t stop us. We going to beat your fat a– in front of your mama congregation Sunday. Yeah we going to steal the sheep of the hypocrite. You’s a hypocrite we going to beat your fat a– in front of your own congregation. Who you got that…f— we going to beat their a– too. They can’t protect you. You sell out you Uncle Tom a– n—–. You token. You a puppet for Bruce Rauner you puppet n—– a–. P—- a– n—–,” the voice says on the recording.

Read the whole, disgusting thing.

And imagine if it would be different here in Minnesota if a black pastor in North Minneapolis or Frogtown broke from the DFL. 

I’d bet $20 on “no”, but I’ll forgive you for not taking the bet.

Back in 2006, they told us that electronic voting machines were going to be an easy, non-transparent way to hijack elections. 

And they were right:

Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library.

“I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.”

The conservative website Illinois Review reported that “While using a touch screen voting machine in Schaumburg, Moynihan voted for several races on the ballot, only to find that whenever he voted for a Republican candidate, the machine registered the vote for a Democrat in the same race. He notified the election judge at his polling place and demonstrated that it continued to cast a vote for the opposing candidate’s party. Moynihan was eventually allowed to vote for Republican candidates, including his own race.

There’s a simple answer, of course:

 “This was a calibration error of the touch-screen on the machine,” Scalzitti said. “When Mr. Moynihan used the touch-screen, it improperly assigned his votes due to improper calibration.”

“I’m not robbing this bank, officer; I’m just doing a bad job of calibrating the safe”.

“That’s not a crack pipe under my seat, officer; its a poorly-calibrated CPAP mask”. 

“Those weren’t dead people voting; just poorly-calibrated living people”. 

I’m not going to say the Democrats are a criminal syndicate.  I’m just wondering how they’d have to behave any differently to be one…

…that racism is the only reason to claim that election fraud exists. 

(Remember how the left whined during the 2000s that electronic voting machines were susceptible to corruption?  Turns out they think that’s a feature, not a bug).

Nope.  No irregularities here, you racist bastards.

During the Soviet era, while Soviet “citizens” crowded onto dilapidated streetcars and rattletrap buses, and waited in endless lines for food, shoes, or pretty much all of life’s essentials, and dreamed about getting their own apartment, maybe, and daydreamed about owning one of the Soviet-era cars that were both biodegradable and cost several years’ salary to buy, the Communist Party nomenklatura were whisked about in private cars, shopped in fully-stocked shops that catered to party members only, and had houses in the city and on the lake.

And as the Met Council works overtime to shove Twin Citians into high-density developments and high-density public transit run by high-density public employees, it stands to reason that some things never change.

I got word over the weekend that Democrat oppo-researchers, in trying to grunt out a hit piece against Stewart Mills, GOP-endorsed candidate in CD8, “quoted” Mills’ appearance with me last January on the Northern Alliance Radio Network.

The Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) released this exceptionally puerile hit piece on Mills last week.

No, I said “puerile”:

Green Bay Packers fan and millionaire Stewart Mills III emerged from hiding – briefly – to reports in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he sold millions of dollars worth of cars using stimulus money. As a candidate, Mills has opposed the stimulus.

The state’s economy is stagnant, we’re heading for deficit – and the Democrat Party is targeting voters whose votes turn on f****ng NFL team loyalty?

This is the mentality of the voter the Democrat Party is aiming for?

The ad tries to jack Mills up because the family’s car business bought vehicles using Cash for Clunkers money.

The nerve; in a system designed to promote and reward rent-seeking, people seek rent!

Of course, that was four solid years before Mills decided to run for office.   Y’know – one of those episodes that led him to decide to try, at least, to change things in DC.

Oh, yeah – I’m famous now:

Mills Said the Stimulus was a “Sugar High.” In 2014 Mills said, “The last round of tax spend and borrow stimulus which is nothing but one sugar high after another, negatively affected our part of Minnesota because we had none of the benefits from it, but yet we’re the ones that are going to have to pay the bills.” [Northern Alliance Radio Network with Mitch Berg, 1/4/14]

Wow – oppo researchers were tuned in!  I feel…

…dirty.

Oh, yeah – Mills was 100% correct.  The stimulus – of which “Cash for Clunkers” was far from the dumbest – was a “sugar high”; it subsidized car purchases in 2009, inducing people to buy buy buy probably earlier than they would have otherwise (the sugar high), meaning they didn’t buy later (the crash).

It’s how every “stimulus” works.

Mills was right.  The DCCC is wrong.

Someone tell their oppo weasel I said so.  And that I’m a Bears fan.

 Bill Glahn notes that the Dayton campaign’s latest TV ad – featuring a “beleaguered middle class family” – continues a long DFL tradition:

The Ports are in no sense “middle class.” Steve Port owns his own businessin Burnsville, employing several staff. In true, “What’s the Matter with Kansas” fashion, I’m not sure the Ports—by supporting Democrats—are operating in their own self-interest as small-business owners in Minnesota.

But they do support the Democrats. Besides the sizable campaign donations, Lindsey Port recently wrote a letter to the editor supportive of the Democratic cause.

And we do mean large contributions; the Ports gave $1,000 to Roz Peterson’s undistinguished lump of a DFL opponent. 

This is, of course, a DFL pattern.  Four years ago, the DFL and the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” and its media allies at “The Uptake”, produced a piece featuring a mother who was “boycotting Target” because of their pro-business campaign donation to the putatively “anti-gay” Tom Emmer.  Of course, the woman was an upper-middle-class DFL donor from the southwest suburbs. 

The DFL.  Fake outrage.  Fake numbers.  Fake people.

Holder resigns as AG. 

Now – how about some subpoenas?

Outrage is brewing over the scandal involving “Community Action”, a Minneapolis “non-profit” whose director, Bill Davis, spent a boatload of taxpayer money on living the high life, according to an audit. 

And yep, DFL figures are involved in the scandals up to their eyeballs:

[5th CD Representative and DFLer Keith] Ellison, [Senate Deputy Majority Leader Jeff] Hayden, [Minneapolis City Council president and DFLer Barbara] Johnson and City Council Member Robert Lilligren were on the board during the time covered by the audit. All have said they appointed alternates and did not regularly attend meetings.

Passing the buck to your patsy.  Not exactly a profile in courage…

…or, I suspect, much of a defense. 

The GOP has filed an ethics complaint against Hayden, and Ellison’s GOP challenger Doug Daggett has got Ellison pretty well dialed in.

But here’s the real scandal;  this is inevitable in a one-party city like Minneapolis. 

Maintaining one-party control in a place like Minneapolis (or Saint Paul, which has its own single-party patronage scandal brewing) requires paying off a lot of stakeholders from the dominant political class – in both the Twin Cities’ cases, that’s the DFL.

There are only so many patronage jobs available for the giving out in city government.  Likewise, the city school district can only absorb so many petty administrators and pay for so many “consultants”.

So the “non-profit sector” serves as a patronage factory for people in the dominant political class.  While many non-profits exist to do good things, many others exist to channel money from the government run by the party in power to the people who help get and keep it elected.

Picking examples of corruption in a one-party city like Minneapolis – like its intellectual kin in Detroit, Camden, New Orleans, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington DC and so many more – is like playing whack-a-mole.  Until the people of Minneapolis decide they need the accountability that a multi-party government can (with a little elbow grease) bring, not to mention an adversarial (as opposed to dutiful) media? 

Meet the new scandal, same as the old scandal.  And the next scandal.

 The BATFE is now collecting racial data when you go to buy a gun:

With little fanfare, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in 2012 amended its Form 4473 — the transactional record the government requires gun purchasers and sellers to fill out when buying a firearm — to identify buyers as either Hispanic, Latino or not. Then a buyer must check his or her race: Indian, Asian, black, Pacific Islander or white.

Now, the purpose of the form is supposed to be to collect information needed to screen potential purchasers for criminal background. 

So what’s race got to do with it?  

…“This issue concerns me deeply because, first, it’s offensive, and, secondly, there’s no need for it,” said Evan Nappen, a private practice firearms lawyer in New Jersey. “If there’s no need for an amendment, then there’s usually a political reason for the change. What this indicates is it was done for political reasons, not law enforcement reasons.”

Yet another example of politicized “law enforcement”.

Kevin Williamson’s conclusion:

The only thing stopping federal authorities from suffocating free speech — not only by independent groups such as the SBA List, but by individuals, trade groups, National Review, and the New York Times — is the First Amendment.

And Harry Reid wants to gut it. Figure out why that is and you’ll know everything you need to know about the Democratic party, which with each passing day functions less and less like a political party and more like a crime syndicate.

What led him to the conclusion?

Well, here’s the opener:

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Dissent is the lowest form of crime. If you are a drone in the hive of the Left, it is possible — easy, in fact — to believe both of those things at the same time.

Just read the whole thing.

A regular correspondent emails:

Just an update on this story.

Jim Golden resigned his position as State Medicaid Director [a few weeks back]. Rumor has it that April Todd-Malmlov has a new job in Washington DC.

Romance is a good thing, I guess Costa Rica is a good place for it.

[Redacted]

You may remember April Todd-Malmlov as the MNSure “director” who took a vacation in Costa Rica with Mr. Golden about the time MNSure’s website was garnering headlines as among the worst in the country.

So I guess it all works out:  guy (apparently) gets girl, girl gets newer and probably bigger and better government job, the taxpayers get…

…well, we’ll get back to you on that.

A regular reader emails:

So I am driving home listening to MPR/NPR and hear this article below.  Essentially Camden, NJ, couldn’t afford the “work rules” negotiated by the local police union spending $180,000 per cop.  So they turned it over to the county and a new contract with new rules which brought the cost down to $90,000 per cop.  Crime is down, more cops are on the street, more community policing.
And I thought…isn’t that kind of the same thing Scott Walker did with the teacher contracts?  Hmmmmm.

Your friend,

[Redacted]

We’re seeing it all over the country; when public sector unions are stripped of their undue influence (even just by making them voluntary), costs go down and services improve.

That’s why I’m pushing Walker for President, so far.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If we establish a national park to let people see Nature as God intended but then it rains, who decides what repairs are required to raise God’s handiwork to Federal standards? If you want a sanitized wilderness with handicapped-accessible pathways, go to Disney World.

Joe Doakes

Yet another reason to get jet packs built sooner than later.

The chairbeing of the Minnsota 6th District DFL calls daycare and personal care workers who fought against forced unionization “human parasites”

On the one hand, I suppose we should be thankful he called them “human” at all.  On the other hand, I’m sure the irony escaped him.

If there were ever a reason to keep the DFL in the 6th CD in the minority, this is one.

For that matter, independent businesspeople statewide need to read and absorb what this hamster really means; if you’re not chipping into the public employee unions, you’re not contributing to society

Union leaders have having a hard time talking about last week’s Harris v. Quinn decision – largely because their case involved extorting money from people who had neither the need nor the desire to be in unions in the first place:

After all, it’s not easy to make to a convincing argument that labor organizations should have the right to extract money directly from the paychecks of people who don’t want to be union members in the first place, which is ultimately what Harris v. Quinn was about.

As a result, the responses to the ruling from people like AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry and Center For American Progress President Neera Tanden all claimed the decision was a blow for working families without ever mentioning that the plaintiffs in the case were eight people from working families that just didn’t see a need to be in a union.

I’m not anti-union – in fact, unlike most Democrats, I’ve been a union member.

But the drive to force home daycare and personal care workers into unions against their will (using “elections” that were as rigged as any Chicago alderman’s race) should be seen as a catastrophic blow to whatever moral case Big Labor might think it still has.

In the past, I’ve “joked” that anyone with an Ivy League degree should be disqualified from “public service”. 

It’s a “joke” – I keep using the scare quotes, because it’s only barely a joke – because over-educated fools have First Amendment rights, too. 

But to paraphrase Dennis Prager, it takes years of the “finest” education this country offers to make someone as ill-informed as Representative Ryan Winkler, who represents west-metro Saint Louis Park.

Winkler – known to many on and off Capitol Hill as “The Eddie Haskell Of The Legislature” – rocketed to national fame last year by calling Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom”, after which the Harvard-educated legislator pled ignorance that it was considered a racist insult. 

This week?  Big strong Harvard lawyer Ryan Winkler needs to tell those dumb widdle wimmins who watch babies and change bedpans all day how to run their businesses.  This from Twitter on Monday, in re the SCOTUS decision on childcare provider unionization:

@RepRyanWinkler: Union organizing is our best hope for equal pay for women and creating living wage jobs. Five activists on the Supreme Court can’t stop it.

Bear in mind, Winkler is speaking about unionizing daycare and home care providers – people (largely but not entirely women) who have created their own living wage jobs,with pay that varies but is enough to keep a lot of people doing the work for years and years; nobody gets drafted into the daycare business, right? 

Our friend Nancy LaRoche – chair of the 5th CD GOP – took at whack at Winkler’s reasoning.  

In response, Winkler puts on his best Roger Stirling impression in showing those dumb broads their place (emphasis added):

@RepRyanWinkler: @nwlaroche Unions raise wages. Dues are a small fraction of the financial benefit unions provide. Childcare activists are foolish.

I’ll just let that quote rattle around on its own for a bit.  “Childcare activists are foolish”, says the Harvard-trained lawyer. 

Of course, I sat through those hearings, and talked with those providers; the unions provide no “benefit” to providers whatsoever. 

They don’t “negotiate for better salaries” for the workers, because the workers are contractors working directly for families and patients.  There will be no union rep sitting in on the meetings between parents and the daycare providers!

They don’t “provide” any “training” for the providers that they’re not required by state law to provide themselves already to keep their licenses.

They don’t deal with work conditions, because those are already part of their state licensing conditions. 

In short, Winkler is either utterly ignorant, or lying. 

He also replied to a shot from MNGOP chair Keith Downey:

@RepRyanWinkler: @KeithSDowney Nobody is forcing anybody to unionize. Why do you oppose letting child care providers vote on whether to collectively bargain?

Because it won’t just be “child care providers?”  Because the unions have been organizing ringers, people who aren’t licensed providers but who will vote to unionize.   All the DFL’s talk about “letting providers vote” is a sham.  Again – either Winkler is ignorant, or he’s lying.

And again to LaRoche: 

@RepRyanWinkler: @nwlaroche Nothing stops them from running their business, they get to decide on and run a union, and negotiate higher rates. Good deal.

 They already negotiate their rates (and they’re already high; Minnesota has some of the highest daycare costs in the country).  They don’t get to “run” any union; Javier Morillo (of AFSCME) and Elliot Seid (of the SEIU) do.  And while they will have nothing to do with “negotiating” the “rates” that the providers charge, they will be right there collecting those dues, and kicking $2 million a year of them back to the DFL, with Ryan Winkler being a recipient. 

Winkler and the DFL expect you, the voter, especially the female voter who is most likely to be working in home daycare or personal care, are too stupid to know any better. 

On the one hand?  It’s just Eddie Haskell Ryan Winkler.  Nobody who’s political brain isn’t on autopilot – like, apparently, the DFL voters in his district – takes him all that seriously. 

But of the autopilot set?  Winkler is clearly being groomed by the DFL for bigger and better things (or was, until the “Uncle Tom” flap – and the media has buried that story effectively enough for the DFL to start easing Winkler back into the spotlight).

But does the DFL want to identify with this sort of paternalistic sexism? 

I gave myself a chuckle, there.  All sins are forgiven the DFL True Believer. 

Unionization will create not one single daycare job; it will raise no personal care attendant’s pay; it will improve not a single working care provider’s working conditions. Not one.

Walter Hudson smacks Winkler down good.

The SCOTUS rules 5-4 that forcing private independent healthcare contractors (and, presumably, child-care workers) to join unions violates the First Amendment:

The ruling is a financial blow to labor unions that have bolstered their ranks in Illinois and other states by signing up hundreds of thousands of home health care workers.

 The case was brought by a group of Illinois in-home care workers who said they didn’t want to pay fees related to collective bargaining. They claimed the “fair share fees” violate their constitutional rights by compelling them to associate with the union.

According to a local attorney involved in the case, the opinion distinguishes between actual public employees and those – like daycare providers and Personal Care Attendants (PCAs) that are employed by their customers. 

Minnesota’s PCA/daycare unionization law is a dead issue now – as is the Messinger Dayton administration’s litigation to defend it.

Up next, Hobby Lobby.

Why do Democrats yap so much about the “Koch Brothers”?

Because Berg’s Seventh Law is absolute and irrefutable, that’s why.