.One of the reasons that the left’s various attempts to counter the Tea Party have all failed, and will continue to fail, is that when you look at these hamsters, they just don’t look like America.  They look like superannnuated hippies and adenoidal poli-sci students and Macalester professors and the like.

And now, they’re bringing the magic to the Twin Cities:

Minneapolis, MN. – After this Saturday’s open forum in Stevens Square Park, through a group consensus, we now stand firm in our plans to unite at the Hennepin County

Government Plaza. This plaza is the new focal point for the OccupyMN movement.

Previously our plans were to stand in solidarity with those that occupy Wall Street by rallying at the steps of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

“Stand Firm?”  “Stand in Solidarity?”

Hey, “protesters”; Jane Fonda called; she wants her 40-year-old florid rhetoric back.

The plan has changed to reclaim the Government Plaza as the “People’s Plaza”.

It is time to establish a new system that values people over profits. We are the 99% and we are moving to reclaim our mortgaged future.

They’re going to “reclaim” big government property…for big government?

The Minnesota Occupation Begins:

October 7th, 2011 at 9:00am

The People’s Plaza (Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! – Ed)

300 South 6th Street

Minneapolis, MN 55487-0999

(Hennepin County Government Center Plaza)

I was briefly tempted to go there and videotape the Cantina Band scene that must certainly ensue.

Then I remembered – I have a family to spend time with, and an actual life.

First things first:  Pardon the fact that I’m linking to Infowars.

But this was just too good to miss:  the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters are truly, truly stupid people:

The zeal for totalitarian government amongst some of the “protesters” is shocking. One sign being carried around read, “A government is an entity which holds the monopolistic right to initiate force,” which seems a little ironic when protesters complain about being physically assaulted by police in the same breath.

One woman interviewed by Kokesh also announces her intention to help Obama to capture a second term. How can a self-proclaimed Occupy Wall Street protester simultaneously support the man whose 2008 campaign was bankrolled by Wall Street, whose 2012 campaign is reliant on Wall Street to an even greater extent, and whose cabinet was filled with Wall Street operatives?

My favorite moment – where by “favorite” I mean “scares the crap out of me” – is the nebbishy little product of, no doubt, an exquisitely expensive post-secondary education at 1:45:   “There are certain things called civil liberties which are limitations on democracy”.

I’m told that CNBC’s Jim Cramer, host of “Mad Money”, and I have a bit of a resemblance.

So – if Thompson Building and Remodeling, who’ve been sponsoring the Northern Alliance for most of this past five or six years, hires me to endorse their services, even though I don’t make any “Cramer” references whatsoever during the ads, is Thompson “impersonating Cramer?”

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Jill Burcum isn’t the worst, most in-the-bag-for-the-Democrats Strib editorial writer.  That “distinction” floats at random between Lori Sturdevant, Jon Tevlin and most of the rest of the staff.

And I don’t mean that to sound as nasty as it probably does.  If more of the Strib’s editorial writers were in Burcum’s “I’m a DFLer, but I don’t want to come across like an obvious house shill” weight class, the Strib and its editorial would be less a laughingstock.

Still, priorities are priorities.  Burcum takes umbrage, on behalf of Morgan Freeman, at the latest ad for Sheila Harsdorf in her battle for the Wisconsin Senate in the district just across the St. Croix from the Metro against  Shelly “WEEEEEEEEEEEEEE BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED UNIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON” Moore.

The latest attack ad on Wisconsin state Senate candidate Shelly Moore instantly prompts this question: How’d they get actor Morgan Freeman to do the voiceover?

The reality is that it’s not Freeman, whose authoritative voice made him a logical choice to play God in the hit film “Bruce Almighty” a few years back. Instead, the slippery group funding the ad found somebody who sounds just like Freeman.

So what does Burcum suggest?  That established voice-over guys be able to trademark the timbre and tone of their voices, so nobody else can sound like them?

Because Burcum sounds serious:

The [organization funding the spots’] latest effort is nothing less than a fake celebrity endorsement of Moore’s opponent, Republican Sheila Harsdorf, in the recall election taking place just across the border.

Baloney.  The guy’s voice sounds like Morgan Freeman, in the same way that I look like Jim Cramer.  Did he say “I”m Morgan Freeman?”  No.  Does his voice say “I’m detached and authoritative, like Morgan Freeman’s?”  Sure.  Is it of any legal or ethical weight?  If it is, then everyone with a passing resemblance to a celebrity who swerves into the public eye in any way loses their stock in trade.

(And this lawsuit, by Bette Midler against a soundalike who sang one of her songs on a commercial, tucks in the legal case.  Being a soundalike isn’t in and of itself an issue; Midler’s suit got tossed).

Let’s try this, and see if Burcum squawks.

“DFL and RINOs good.  Conservatives bad.  Vote for Sheila Harsdorf!”

Now, was that actually Lori Sturdevant endorsing Harsdorf?  Of course not.  Did I try to leverage the coincidental resemblance of the line I wrote with a regional celebrity’s trademark dogmatism?  Perhaps, but so what?   Does a celebrity own their tone, their timbre and cadence and presentation?

If so, Burcum might be getting a call from Doug Grow’s lawyer.

The lefties were all atwitter yesterday over a poll in the MinnPost that purported to show that Minnesotans blame the Minnesota GOP for the shutdown:

By a whopping 2-1 margin, Minnesotans blame the Republicans who control both houses of the Legislature for the recent government shutdown more than they blame Gov. Mark Dayton, according to a poll taken this week for MinnPost.

 

Predictably, most Republicans blamed Dayton more (by 56 to 10 percent, with the rest saying both sides were to blame or holding no opinion). DFLers blamed the Republicans by an even more overwhelming majority (68 percent to just 2 percent of DFLers who blamed DFLer Dayton).

 

But the key swing group of self-identified independents was also much more likely to blame Republicans than to blame Dayton. Among independents, 46 percent “blamed” the Republicans, 18 percent blamed Dayton and 25 percent both.

Hm. That sounds bad!

It also sounded familiar – indeed, it sounded right in line with a prediction I made in this space mere weeks ago.  Go ahead and read it; Prediction 1 was a month late, and it appeared in the MinnPost rather than the Strib; the piece is written by Erik Black and Doug Grow, former Strib staffers, so the feeling of deja vu was so overwhelming…

…that when I first read this post, I practically predicted the bit that is emphasized in the quote below:

Based on other questions in the poll, it was difficult to say whether the fallout from the shutdown will give DFLers a significant advantage heading into the 2012 elections, as Republicans seek to retain their majorities. Projecting current attitudes onto an election 16 months in the future would be folly.

 

Also, this poll, conducted for MinnPost by Daves & Associates Research, was designed to take the pulse of the state in the aftermath of the shutdown, not to predict the next election. No likely voter screen was used and sample surely includes non-voters.

And there you have it.  The MinnPost gets its polling from “Daves and Associates”.  That’d be Rob Daves – the guy who ran the Minnesota Poll for 21 years – the poll whose election-eve polls on Gubernatorial, Senate and Presidential races *always* showed the GOP doing worse – usually much worse – than it ended up doing.

And if it’s a post on politics in Minnesota by Strib alums Black and Grow, who else just has to show up?

Humphrey Center Political Scientist Larry Jacobs said the results of the new poll were “basically bad news for the Republicans.”

 

“They have to think about this fact,” said Jacobs.”The principles that they ran on in 2010 — that they would advocate for cuts only and would refuse to go along with any tax increase — may still be the principles that appeal to the most enthusiastic base of support they have. But that position seems to be pretty unpopular not only with two-thirds of Minnesotans, but with half of their own party, all of whom prefer a mix of significant spending cuts and at least some tax increases.”

Yep, Dr. Jacobs, whose Hubert H. Humphrey Institute Poll is even worse, and whose methodology was openly and publicly savaged by Frank Newman of Gallup last year after the Humphrey Institute polls were not only grossly wrong (predicting a 12 point Dayton blowout in the gubernatorial race which ended up about a .4% race) but were shown to have systematically oversampled strongly DFL areas of the state.

Both Daves’ and Jacobs’ polls, as I showed last year, shared an interesting trait: if the final result of an election ended up being really close, like the ’08 Senate and ’10 Governor’s race (as opposed to blowouts, like the ’06 Senate race), the Minnesota and HHH Polls *both* shorted Republicans *even more*:

The reason? Well, it’s a known fact that voters are prone to the “Bandwagon Effect”; they do tend to go along with what polls tell them, positively or negatively.  My theory – while it’s conceivable that the Strib, Rob Daves, the Minnpost, the HHH Institute and Larry Jacobs are unaware of the “bandwagon effect”,  I’d be a lot more convinced if Daves didn’t have a 24 year record of shorting the GOP on controversial, loaded polls when the chips were down (and Jacobs’ polls even worse for seven years).

The poll canvassed less than 600 random adults – not registered, much less likely, voters – and, as usual, it heavily-sampled identified DFLers and unspecified “independents”.

The Twin Cities media have largely been dutiful stenographers during the shutdown, carrying the DFL’s message pretty much verbatim while gundecking the GOP pretty consistently.

Let’s let all that slide for the moment.  We’ll come back to it, naturally.

But let’s talk for a moment about the “Old” Twin Cities media’s moldiest meme; that there was once a time when the parties just got along, and agreed to do “what was best for Minnesota”.

It’s baked wind, of course; to the extent things ever worked that way, it’s because the MNGOP used to be both extremely moderate, in the Rockefeller/Stassen mold, and also very weak, especially after Watergate.  So when the Twin Cities Old Media says “they just got along and did what was best for Minnesota”, what they mean was “they shut up and passed a “progresssive”, tax and spend agenda without a whole lot of muss and fuss”.

So let’s accept them at their word for a moment.  Let’s say that they, the old-school, dead-tree media (I’m looking at you, Lori Sturdevant and Doug Grow and Rachel Stassen-Berger) really do believe in that myth, and really think it led to “good government”.

So how does the behavior of Senate Minority (aaah) leader Tom Bakk and House Minority leader Paul Thissen fit into that meme?

The GOP and Governor Dayton had reportedly reached an agreement on June 30 – the day before the shutdown.  The shutdown that had the Twin Cities media wetting its collective pants was minutes away from being averted.  Governor Dayton had agreed to drop tax increases – any of them – from the agreement.

Problem solved?

Until Bakk and Thissen entered the picture – as related by Gary Gross at LFR, with emphasis added?

[State GOP deputy chair Michael] Brodkorb said he could confirm that Sen. Bakk and Rep. Thissen were in the room when Speaker Zellers and Leader Koch returned to say that they’d accept Gov. Dayton’s offer. At that time, Gov. Dayton said that he’d changed his mind and that tax increases had to be part of the final solution.

It’s important to remember that Speaker Zellers and Sen. Koch returned only 45 minutes after Gov. Dayton’s initial offer. The only thing that’d changed was that Sen. Bakk and Rep. Thissen weren’t in the room when Gov. Dayton made his initial offer but they were there when he’d reversed himself.

Let’s make this perfectly clear; it appears that Bakk and Thissen, after spending the entire session lighting farts in their offices (*), coming out periodically to wag their fingers on Almanac and heckle the GOP’s various plans to their various stenographers the media, did exactly one substantive thing during the entire session; scupper a settlement two weeks ago.

It’s pretty clear that they believe they could play the shutdown for their political benefit in 2012, and get that benefit on the back of state employees, contractors, the service-using public, and those that depend on the state  for whatever reason.

Brodkorb then said that “The only thing that Sen. Bakk and Rep. Thissen had done since the start of the session was cash paychecks. You can quote me on that.”

With pleasure.

When will the Minnesota Media raise its collective eyebrow over Bakk, Thissen and the DFL’s exploitation of this shutdown?  The region’s conservative blogs have done everything but engrave the story on the back of a “Society of Professional Journalists” award and walk the story into the Strib’s office.

It’s clear at this point that if Thissen and Bakk could tie defective strollers to the GOP, they’d both roll prams full of infants down the Capitol steps, with cameras rolling and the Strib’s editorial staff pondering with mock sincerity  “why don’t the Republicans just compromise and fight Big Stroller?”

(*) Figuratively and rhetorically speaking.  I have no idea if anyone lit a single fart, and if they did, it’s none of my business.  It’s a figure of speech implying sloth, negligence, and passive-aggressive idleness, and as such it’s richly, if disgustingly, appropriate.

Any bets on what they’ll talk about at this one?

Former Vice President Walter Mondale and former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson have called a news conference to discuss the state government’s shutdown.

Mondale is a Democrat who represented Minnesota as a U.S. senator in the 1960s and `70s. Carlson is a Republican who served as governor in the 1990s.

No, I don’t think there’s any action on that bet.

Whenever the regional establishment (read: left-leaning) media wants to try to delegitimize the MNGOP in the eyes the vast majority of people who don’t pay much attention to politics, they wheel out Arne Carlson.  Carlson, who governed Minnesota from 1990 to 1998, was a Republican, and that’s usually where the media accounts stop, omitting that he governed like a moderate Democrat; indeed, James Lileks used to joke that while he was in DC, he described the Carlson/Perpich race (1990) as “the pro-abortion, pro-gun-control candidate versus the Democrat”.

The MinnPost  continues the media’s curious habit of genuflecting to Carlson.

Gov. Arne Carlson had one of those “hey-wait-just-a-minute” moments Thursday while reading a MinnPost article.

On the surface, the article, about government reform, seemed complimentary of Carlson, who was governor from 1991 to 1998.

Rep. Keith Downey, a leader of the reform movement in the Republican-controlled Legislature, was talking about how way back in the Carlson era a report had been issued calling for structural reforms to help government move from budget to budget more smoothly.

“We’ve been putting off reforms for 15 years,” Downey said. “The time to act is now.”

That’s the line that upset Carlson.

“Who’s this Downey fellow?” he asked me.

“Me”, in this case, is Doug Grow, who along with Lori Sturdevant has been building the gauzy, soft-focus myths about the glory days of DFL/”GOP” cooperation.

And if Carlson doesn’t know Keith Downey, then who the hell cares what he thinks?

A representative from Edina starting his second term, the governor was told.

“If he’s starting his second term, he’s probably part of the problem,” Carlson said.

Can you imagine if Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann or Amy Koch had said something that so fluently mixed arrogance and ignorance?

Carlson contends that his administration didn’t just point out the long-term structural problems in the 1995 report that Downey was referring to. Rather, it made the “reforms” necessary to correct the problems.

Let’s talk about the truth about Carlson’s administration.

He had revenue surpluses most years during his administration.

You know – surpluses.  Years where revenues exceeded expenditures.  Given that Minnesota’s state revenues are so closely tied to economic performance, through income and sales taxes, a surplus is generally an indicator of a good year.

And most of the years in the nineties were good years.  Indeed, from 1990 to 1998 it was ar pretty cha-cha time in Minnesota; after a brief downtown early in the decade as the ’92 recession worked out and the local economy readjusted to plummeting post-Cold-War defense spending, the economy pretty much boomed the whole last 2/3 of Carlson’s reign.

And Carlson took those temporary surpluses into permanent entitlement spending. The budget more than doubled under Carlson’s regime – spending that was paid for by temporary windfalls during good times.

In other words, Arne Carlson is the problem we currently face in this state; he was the godfather of the autopilot spending increases that feed the all-consuming, ever-escalating  hunger for tax revenue that currently hobble our state’s budget process.

Arne Carlson – shut up and enjoy your retirement.  You are not just irrelevant and in the way; you are not just a Potemkin Republican that estabishment backslappers like Lori Sturdevant and Doug Grow trot out to beat over the MNGOP’s head.

You are the problem.

I’m not sure what bugs me more about this Doug Grow column; the fact that he deemed a bit of screeching DFL illogic newsworthy, or that he doesn’t seem to realize that it’s screechingly illogical at all.

He’s writing about the MN Senate debate over a Human Services bill which would change the way the state delivers health care to the poor, from a bureaucratic entitlement to a voucher system.

Grow:

Apparently, what’s good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander.

That little truth came to light during Tuesday’s Senate debate over health care for the poor.

Sen. David Hann, R-Eden Prairie, introduced one of the GOP’s plans for cutting Human Services costs by taking about 15,000 single adults out of MinnesotaCare and giving them vouchers so they can buy their own health insurance.

Hann sang the praises of the bill: It will save the state money. It will give the poor more choices. It will improve the health care of the poor. It will get government out of health care. It’s the American way!

No sarcasm clogging Grow’s keyboard there.  Nosirree Bob!  It’s the Twin Cities Media way!  All them poor folks is too dumb to take care of themselves!

But that’s not really the issue here:

Then, Sen. Barb Goodwin, DFL-Columbia Heights, rose to speak. She offered a simple amendment to this GOP plan.

She said her amendment would require legislators to test the plan for two years, before the poor were forced into it.

“I hear what a wonderful deal this is for people,” Goodwin said. “We can determine if this plan is working as it should.”

Amendment greeted with silence

For a moment, you could have heard a pin drop in the Senate chambers. What? Us on this plan?

When columnists try to play mind-readers, it’s pretty my much their own minds they end up reading.  Because I know that if I’d been sitting in that Senate chamber, I’d have been quiet, myself.  But not from taking offense at someone thinking I’d dream of being lumped in with the hoi-polloi.

No, it’d be because I’d be wondering…:

• …if Senator Goodwin gets the difference between people doing a job who get health insurance as part of their compensation – the legislators, in this case – and people who come to the taxpayers for help with getting health care?  If she recognizes a difference between someone who takes a job (yes, even an elected one) with full knowledge of what the health benefits are, just like most of us in the private sector do (with benefits that are admittedly not nearly as nice), and…
• …if she realizes how much of the private sector is moving in the direction of self-directed health care – where the consumer makes the key decisions about their own health care…
• …whether she appreciates the idea that vouchers, compared to the trough-slopping reality of most government entitlement programs, gives the recipient some dignity…
• …or, for that matter, giving public healthcare for the poor any chance of being sustainable at all…
• … or if any of that matters compared to her prevailing priority – keep the bureaucracy fat ‘n happy?

Doubt it’d be fit all that into a politic statement if I didn’t have the floor.

A rookie senator, Gretchen Hoffman, R-Vergas, stood, clearly offended by Goodwin’s amendment.

“We’re citizen legislators,” she said, adding that she’d waived her right to receive the health insurance benefits that most legislators receive.

After proclaiming her own goodness, she attacked the Goodwin amendment.

One wonders if Grow would ever call a DFLer a “Rookie”, or write off their defense as “proclaiming their goodness”.

“Political tomfoolery,” Hoffman said.

Again there was silence in the Senate. It had been years since anyone had heard the expression “tomfoolery.”

And later, Goodwin said that “tomfoolery” had never been applied to her before.

If “tomfoolery” means ‘incapable of carrying on a logical argument”, I’ll be it has.

Anyway, here’s what they’re arguing about;

Back up for a moment and look at the plan Hann sings the praises of but — as it turned out — wouldn’t want for himself.

Single working adults who have incomes of between 133 percent and 250 percent of poverty-level would no longer be covered by MinnesotaCare, the publicly subsidized health insurance program for the working poor that’s been in existence since 1990. Under MinnesotaCare, low-income working people pay premiums on a sliding scale based on ability to pay.

The Republican plan would force those earning between $14,400 and $30,000 off MinnesotaCare and into the “free” market. With the help of state vouchers, they could select the health insurance they want for themselves.

Hann says that by “allowing” these people to go into the free market, the state would save $100 million per biennium.

And since they’re “single, working” adults – unlike Grow, I’m using using scare quotes in place of an actual argument – it seems like a great compromise.  Grow’s, and Goodwin’s, only argument seems to be that Senators don’t want to trade their current plans for it.

By that “logic”, Goodwin and Grow should both shut up and go on welfare, including MNCare.

“The media isn’t really liberal”.

I’ve read a couple of mildly interesting takes on that premise this past week.  Both are worth a look – partly on their merits, and partly as a measure of how much the media’s liberal bias itself serves as a sort of “instrumentation error” in any attempt to judge the media’s bias.

The first; this bit in the New York Daily News.

I won’t quote the piece, by Joshua Greenman, at length – partly because as I write this (at 5:45AM on Tuesday morning) the NYDN site is not loading.  But the piece’s overall premise is “the media isn’t biased because conservatives wrote the political dictionary”.  The money passage:

It’s hard to know where to begin in dismantling the Republican canard that Democrats control the media. Fox News is the most popular 24-hour news network by a whoosh and a cachung. Rush Limbaugh is the most powerful radio host, and lots of little Limbaughs line up behind him. Sarah Palin is the biggest media-political crossover star. And in an increasingly fragmented Internet, the Drudge Report continues to drive more political traffic than any other website. In italics and bold, to boot.

We see the hole in Greenman’s logic, here, right?

Greenman cites as evidence Republicans “wrote the dictionary” a series of media and pundits who were spawned as a response to liberal control of the media.  It’s like saying “Mitch Berg, Mr. D and Minnesota Democrats Exposed control Twin Cities’ political debate” when we are in fact the antagonists, not the protagonists.

The New York Times doesn’t decide what words we use, nor does CNN or NPR. Our political vocabulary comes from the mouths of crafty conservatives, and that’s the ultimate proof that they steer the conversation.

Obamacare. Pity the poor congressional and White House staffers who spent hours coming up with the bromidic name “Affordable Care Act” only to see the 2,300 page bill (which Republicans complained Obama played far too passive a role in shaping) get labeled, for all eternity, “Obamacare.” This of course, is an update of the equally elegant Hillarycare. It’s interesting to note that both were used, from the get go, as slurs, unlike, say, “Reaganomics.” (Compare this to, say, “No Child Left Behind,” which has never for a second been called Bushducation – though that would have been pretty catchy.)

Greenman should take a course in the mechanics of language; catchy phrases have to be easy to say; “Bushducation” is almost impossible to pronounce…

…but that’s a digression.  According to Greenman, acceptance of conservative-driven language is a sign that the media never was liberal…:

Using the supposedly massive megaphone of the Liberal Media, Democrats, who were sensitive – hypersensitive, in my mind – to the Obamacare implication, tried to replace it with a blander formulation emphasizing insurance regulation.

…which is sort of like saying “if the receiver drops the ball, then the quarterback must have thrown a basketball”.   The fact that conservative catch phrases, er, catch, isn’t a sign the media is conservative; it’s a sign that the people are.

John Harris and Jim Vandehei in Politico make a more rational case; it’s not so much that the press is “liberal” as they prefer the appearance of “bipartisan process” to any actual policy outcome:

That is, they believe broadly in government activism but are instinctually skeptical of anything that smacks of ideological zealotry and are quick to see the public interest as being distorted by excessive partisanship. Governance, in the Washington media’s ideal, should be a tidier and more rational process than it is.

I’ve “joked” in the past that when I work at a company, and a manager joins a group and introduces himself as a “process person”, it’s time to get your resume polished up; the group is doomed.

It’s a little cynical – but you know what they say, a cynic is an idealist who got mugged by experience.

The problem with “process people” is that when process meets people, entropy wins, sooner than later; invariably, processes need someone to run them.  Someone just like the reporters:

In this fantasy, every pressing problem could be solved with a blue-ribbon commission chaired by Sam Nunn and David Gergen that would go into seclusion at Andrews Air Force Base for a week, not coming back until it had a deal to cut entitlements and end obesity.

Bill Clinton’s best press came when he made a deal with Newt Gingrich on the budget, and George W. Bush got favorable coverage when he reached a deal with Ted Kennedy on education reform and in the brief period after Sept. 11 when the terrorist attacks brought Washington together.

Harris and Vandehei’s point is that Obama has been exploiting this tendency to get better press – and it’s working:

Obama is taking advantage of the press’s bias for bipartisan process, a preference that often transcends the substance of any bipartisan policy. (See: GOP, Dem lawmakers sit together)

It was an easy choice. In the wake of the Democratic rout in November, for instance, it would have been political suicide to risk letting taxes go up. So Obama shrewdly ignored his own party’s liberals and made a big show of wanting to cooperate with Republicans on the Bush tax cuts — and reaped a bonanza of favorable news stories as a result.

It would help explain the likes of Doug Grow and Lori Sturdevant and their constant, unseemly pining for the 1970s and MNGOP that was “Republican”, but in no way conservative; it’s about process, not vision or outcome.

But all of us who polish up our resume when we encounter that bobbleheaded “process-oriented” MBA have a point; process without keen vision is just paperwork and churn.

And even if Vandehei and Harris are right, and reporters, editors and producers are leery of aggressive partisanship, which may be true in some cases – it leads to the same result; people who gravitate toward “process” to manage public affairs tend to be people with fond views of government activism.

Same result; different rhetoric to get there.

As I noted a while ago, I have been tempted for quite some time to write a long, long series of posts trying to explain the basic logical fallacies to leftybloggers.  I do this – or would do it, if I ever get the project underway – to improve the quality of the alt-media debate in Minnesota.

A good one to work first might be “correlation doesn’t equal causation”.

Because in the case of the four GOP voters who split from the majority to vote against the GOP’s first budget bill, it’s safe to say that correlation doesn’t equal much of anything.

Dave Mindeman at mnpACT thought he was on to something the other day:

Rep. King “Landslide” Banaian gave me a bit of a surprise the other day. I saw his vote on the House authorized $1 billion cut legislative package and surprisingly, the conservative, former SCSU Scholars blogger, voted NO….voting with the Democrats.

Well, no.  Remember – correlation doesn’t logically lead to causation.  He voted – it is safe to say, although I’ve not interviewed King about it – against one of the proposed cuts.  King would gargle Drano before he voted “with the DFL”.

Banaian works at St. Cloud State as an economics professor and represents St. Cloud and the surrounding area. The kicker here is that he won his legislative race by a 10 vote margin. Which means that, unlike Senator Newman and his selective constituent recognition, Mr. Banaian is probably wise to consider all comers.

It’s good that Mindeman has discovered this tenet of democracy.  Many DFLers, especially in the Metro, never need to learn any of this stuff.

Except I had assumed that Banaian was one of those true believer, first principle guys. He generally talks of government spending with utter disdain and one would think that this particular bill would certainly meet those first principle ideals.

Well, you know what they say happens when you assume…

After all, it hits that unnecessary Local Government Aid and outrageously out of control Higher Ed spending… as well as all of the Commission offices in the executive branch. Would have assumed that to be a no-brainer for Banaian.

I’m  not sure – I haven’t interviewed King, or Kriesel, or the other two Republicans who voted against the bill on its first pass.  Of course, either has Mindeman.  But I’m going to suspect that those were not the reason.

Yet, that pesky RED button went up. Explanation?

Well, Doug Grow at Minnpost, looked into this and found this quote:

And, as we discussed the other day, Grow was as wrong as Mindeman.

The Republican proposal calls for the continuation of cuts made to state colleges by Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the Legislature to bring the budget in balance last year. Those amount to $184 million for public colleges, including Banaian’s employer, St. Cloud State.

“We’ve taken a couple of pretty serious hits already,” Banaian told an Associated Press reporter in explaining his opposition to the bill. “To do this on extending an agreement by a previous Legislature and a previous governor didn’t seem like the right vote for St. Cloud at this time.”

What?

So those particular cuts were OK last year, but (ahem) not so good this year? Would that be 10 votes worth of caution, Rep. Banaian?

Well, maybe – but both Mindeman and Grow strip out some key context; SCSU took some serious cuts; a lot of King’s voters think it’s time for the U to take its lumps.

All that red meat rhetoric with “first principle” shouts of storming the castle seem to fade when looking toward a new election cycle.

One wonders if Mindeman has read HF2.

Once that passes, I suspect all this “King voted with the Dems” nonsense will be forgotten.

Certainly by Mindeman.

Remember last session’s’ spending debate?

When the DFL – which had a crushing majority in the Minnesota State House, pushed through a massive $435 million dollar tax hike.

They squeedged the increase through on a couple of very close votes; the final vote in the House was 71-63.  Bear in mind that the DFL controlled 87 seats up until this month.  Tha’ts 87/47 in favor of the DFL; almost, but not quite, veto-proof.

And in the Minnesota Senate?  Much worse; the DFL  had a 47-21 veto-proof majority in the Senate.

So when it came time for up-and-down votes on the Dems’ pet tax proposal, you’d think – given not only the DFL’s fabled unity, but the power of the mandate with which they’d been sent to Saint Paul to refudiate the Pawlenty government the previous fall, that the votes in favor of the bill might have been 87/47 in the House (or maybe 93/44, given the power of the “moderate Republicans”), and 47/21 in the Senate.

To have performed any worse would certainly have been a sign that the DFL was splintering under the pressure of working with their mandate.

Right?

Well, of course it didn’t work out that way.  The DFL carried the bill through the House by 71.  Sixteen DFLers crossed over to vote against the bill.

And before that?  In an epic bit of political theater, the Senate had to do all but send the Mounties out to find Tarryl Clark to drag her into the Senate chamber to get the bill passed by one vote.  A total of twelve DFL senators crossed over to vote against the bill.

And this, at the height of the post-Obama afterglow.  When people seemed Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota.  Less than a month after the first appearance of the Tea Party, when it still seemed (because the media was trying to paint it)  like a fringe-y little brushfire.

Quiz Question:  Did this loss of 16 votes in the House, and 12 in the Senate, mean that…:

a) The DFL was fragmenting?: The DFL legislators saw the Tea Party rallies, three weeks early, anticipated the upcoming summer of anger at the Obamacare Town Halls, and were consumed with a wave of originalist fervor, which Larry Pogemiller and Margaret Anderson Kelliher managed to hold together by only the barest of margins, in an epic feat of legislative engineering?

b) That was the plan?: Some DFLers from outstate and outer-tier suburban districts felt nervous about piling taxes on their already-disgruntling districts; they made their reservations known to their caucus’  House and Senate leadership, which did the math – not only for the bill, but for the next round of elections.  They figured out how many votes were safe, not only for the bill, but for future elections; they realized that some DFLers  – especially some of the ones that had just won squeaker elections in the previous two cycles  in usually-GOP-districts – were going to need to be able to deny association with the bill to their voters.  The did the math, and made sure they had the votes to both pass the bills and give their more potentially-vulnerable members the out they knew they were going to need?

Answer? B, mostly; of course there were DFLers who had objections – but for the most part,notwithstanding the media’s push to impart drama on the proceedings,  the votes came as no surprise to anyone in legislative leadership.

Of course, drama sells newspapers.

Last week, the House voted on the GOP’s billion dollar budget cut bill.  And the regional DFL and media (pardon the redundancy) hopped around like a toddler who’d just made a good pants – because four Republicans broke with the GOP.

Doug Grow wrote about it at the Minnpost:

Republican legislative leaders quickly are learning that it’s easier to hold the caucus together when they’re in the minority rather than the majority.

On the first big economic vote of the still-new session, four Republicans joined a united DFL minority in opposing a $1 billion budget-cutting bill that Republican leadership claimed was the “easy part” of cutting into the state’s $6.2 billion deficit.

Well, actually, there were 3.5 Republicans joining the DFL in opposing the bill. Freshman Rep. Rich Murray voted for the budget cuts but then, after voting had closed, switched to vote against the measure, which passed 68-63.

The biggest Republican defector was freshman Rep. King Banaian a St. Cloud State University economics professor and a conservative blogger.

Just a couple of weeks ago, beaming House Republican leaders described Banaian as the caucus’s “Wayne Gretzky” on economic issues.

For non-hockey followers, that means that Banaian was being described as the majority’s economics superstar, its guru, its leader.

Now, right out of the box he said “no” to the first Republican plan.

What happened?

What would Doug Grow suppose happened?

Is it that…:

a) The GOP majority is falling apart, with members – including my radio colleague Banaian, who had heretofore authored and sponsored HF2, a step toward instituting Zero-Based Budgeting, one of the most transformatively fiscally-conservative ideas – already souring on fiscal conservatism, to the immense surprise and shock of the MNGOP’s leadership?  Or is it…:

b) Those devilish details that caused the DFL’s leadership to let 16 Reps and 12 Senators seek a little cover, after making sure that they had the votes to pass their tax bill two years earlier?   Details that had been discussed between members and leadership for weeks – even since before the session began?   Details that made the GOP’s leadership do the math, and figure that they could afford to let three potentially-vulnerable Representatives flake off and still leave plenty of votes to pass the vital bill?

What do you think?

I don’t talk with a lot of legislators, so it’s not like I know any details.  But do you suppose that Banaian – who represents an area that includes Saint Cloud State University, which already went through some serious budget cuts, and which would take more with the proposed bill, and who won his seat by 13 votes, the closest margin of victory in the entire United States last November – just might have had a talk or two with Kurt Zellers, who might have gone over the votes one way or the other, and rationed out a few “no” votes to GOPers that might need ’em?

What do you think?

When the DFL needs heavy buckets hauled from the well to the corral, Doug Grow is always there:

Reality crossed paths with rhetoric…

…If Republican leadership can’t hold its caucus together on this first budget vote, imagine how difficult it will be to find conformity as it attempts to cut the remaining $5.2 billion with a cuts-only approach.

Grow taking part in the DFL’s strategy in the legislature; trying to paint the GOP majority as divided in the run-up to Mark Dayton – the weakest governor in recent memory – releasing a budget that is sure to be a big tax-clogged monstrosity.  They are trying to find a wedge to pound in between the new majority and the newly-minted activists who put them into office.

To some extent, it’s drawn some blood; a few conservative activists are making disgruntled noises.

We’ll talk about that later on here.

The point being this:  relax, everyone.  The procedure of getting votes lined up, and handing out some exemptions from party  mandates for purposes of planning for future elections, is the very definition of  “politics as usual”, and not even in a necessarily bad way.

The larger point is that the agenda is moving ahead – and needs to, in advance of Dayton dropping his fiscal duke in two weeks.

More on the big picture later today or tomorrow.

I was briefly at the Capitol yesterday for the signing of the Medicaid payoff bill.  It was terribly crowded, and I could only get as far as the outer lobby; it was that crowded.

Toward the end of the speeches, a baby started squalling.

Doug Grow in the MinnPost takes up the narrative, noting that Democracy is noisy:

It was, it should be noted, especially noisy from the lungs of one toddler, who screamed throughout part of the ceremony.

“His mother couldn’t get him out of the room,” Brase said.

That’s how tightly packed the room was, and how unwilling many were to even make room for a mom and screaming kid.

It wasn’t just any baby; it was the youngest MOBster, Baby Moose!

January 3: Session kicks off.  Mark Dayton throws a “blue jeans” inaugural.  Musical highlight: the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” Choir singing “Look For The Union Label”.  For four solid hours.

January 4:  The Humphrey Institute releases a poll showing that 80% of Minnesotans want the Legislature to pass Mark Dayton’s budget immediately.  Bloggers point out that the poll included only respondents from Kenwood and Crocus Hill. MPR reports that it’s a nice day for a bowl of Cream of Rice.

January 5: The Star Tribune’s Joe Doyle starts a three part series on “obscene corporate profits” and how they benefit “the rich walking among us”.

January 6: Dayton releases his first budget, calling for $40 billion in spending. Delivering the announcement in blue jeans with the SEIU Singers humming “We Are The World” in the background, Dayton notes that he plans to increase revenues to $41 billion. “We’ll finally have a surplus!” he exclaims, as a crowd described by the Star/Tribune as “50,000 womenandchildren at risk” applauds in the Capitol rotunda.  The plan calls for big tax hikes on “obscene corporate profits” and “the rich walking among us”.

January 10: The last of Dayton’s Iron Range supporters are finally bailed out of the Ramsey County lockup after the inaugural.

January 12:  Speaker Zellers refers the Dayton budget to the House Very Special Boom Zoom Committee” – actually a group of legislators’ children wearing “Junior Representative” t-shirts.  Bill dies, and is colored on, and has juice spilled on it.

January 16:  Lori Sturdevant notes that “a seasoned group of bi-partisan policy wonks say that the GOP risks getting tossed out by an angry mob if they don’t raise taxes.  Conservative bloggers point out that “bi-partisan” in this case means DFL and Green Party members.  Presented with the allegations, WCCO TV reports that Brett Favre just loves Chipotle Big Bols.

January 19: Governor Dayton submits a budget bill involving $42 billion in spending and $ 45 billion in taxes.  “A three billion dollar surplus”, Dayton announces to a group of senior citizens (“at least 20,000”, according to the Strib’s Pat Doyle) at the Hockey Hall Of Fame in Eveleth.  “It’s like a billion hat tricks!”.  Keith Ellison solemnly proclaims that the only reason not to vote for the bill is “racism.  Racism from all you crackers.  Pay the **** up, crackers”.

January 27: Speaker Zellers forwards the bill to the House Budget Committee.  The Mississippi House Budget Committee.  Which loses the bill.

February 3: The Humphrey Institute releases a poll showing that eleventy-teen percent of Minnesotans demand tax and spending hikes.  KARE 11 News finds eleventy-teen people on the street that agree.  Frank Newport of the Gallup Group points out that ‘Eleventy-teen” isn’t even a real number, but something Dennis the Menace used to say to show that he couldn’t count.  Rachel Stassen-Berger responded with a piece on “The Override Six, Two Years Later:  Profiles In Courage And Extremism”.

February 18:  Governor Dayton, speaking at a homeless shelter in Brooklyn Center, holds up James Blount, a three-year-old boy, in front of cameras; notes that “this boy is going to go hungry because of GOP extremism and intransigence tonight”.

February 19:  Conservative bloggers point out that the “boy”, Blount, was actually a schnauzer that had wandered over from a nearby housing development.  Eric Black of the MinnPost responded with a piece on how animal shelters are suffering under GOP rule.

February 27:  Dayton submits his third budget, a $39 Billion plan that is very similar to the budget he proposed during the campaign.  Conservative bloggers point out that it has exactly the same problems it had during the campaign; it assumes “the rich” (in this case, Minnesotans who are still employed) will pay the taxes rather than moving or getting Mark Dayton’s financial advisor, that the state can fire contractors whose jobs are both legally mandated and involve skills the state’s workforce doesn’t actually have, among many others.

February 28: The Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” claims that Minnesotans want the Dayton budget passed, that the people want to carry Governor Dayton through the streets on their shoulders, and that violence is about to break out against the Minnesota GOP.  Bloggers point out that the survey was conducted entirely at one “Drinking Liberally” event in Minneapolis.  Informed of the allegations, KTCA’s “Almanac” embarks on a three-week special on the history of Danish cooking in Minnesota.

March 20:  Speaker Zellers assigns the budget to the House Government Operations and Finance Committee.

March 28:  Rep. Quam (GOP) of Byron demands that the DFL members of the committee play a game of Twister on the House floor if they want the budget to get out of committee.  The committee members comply.

April 8:  Nick Coleman, writing his new colum in the Wayzata Shopper, remembers when his father was running things.  “The wingnuts wanted to play Twister for a better Minnesota”.

April 12: The Dayton budget comes to a vote in the House.  It loses decisively, on state party lines.  To signify the defeat, Speaker Zellers ties the budget to a string hanging from the ceiling of the House chamber, and members of the House Republican Caucus whack at it like a piñata.

April 15: Speaker Zellers tells a cheering crowd of 10,000 at the Tea Party rally on the capitol grounds that the budget is dead on arrival.  Six pro-tax protesters stand across the street wanly chanting in favor of the Dayton budget.

April 16: The Strib editorial reports that a crowd of “dozens” at the Tea Party rally were evenly split, showing the deep partisan divide in Minnesota politics today.

May 1: , Governor Dayton start making contingency plans for a shutdown.  Bloggers point out that the Governor’s plans include evacuating the Governor’s office to Vail, and euthanizing animals in all state parks.  Told of the allegations, Keri Miller of MPR wonders on the air “whatever happened to bipartisanship?”

May 14: A day ahead of the deadline, the GOP Caucus introduces a $33 Billion budget that makes steep spending cuts and balances the budget with no new taxes.  It passes on a straight party line vote, is sent to the Senate, which also passes the budget by the end of the day.  The bill is sent to the Governor.

May 15  Mark Dayton appears at the Hockey Hall of Fame, dressed in a Minnesota Wild Uniform, with Minnesota hockey legend John Mayasich, to veto the GOP budget. “Minnesota demands that we do the responsible thing and pass my budget without all this debate and democracy and crap”, he says, as Mayasich looks on.   Bloggers point out that “Mayasich” is actually Alliance for a Better Minnesota chair Denise Cardinal in a bald wig.  Told of the allegations, KARE 11 news re-runs the January 4 Humphrey Poll.

May 16:  The Strib runs a piece by reporter Pat Doyle, an expose of the “Casualties of the Shutdown”.  Doyle, clearly gunning for a Pulitzer, writes a heartrending tale of Minnesotans standing in line at soup kitchens, of families (mostly “womenandchildren”) living in huge “Zellerville” on the Capitol Mall living on McDonalds coffee, and people lining up to throw themselves off the High Bridge.  Bloggers point out that government hasn’t actually shut down yet, that nothing Doyle wrote had actually happened, and that the piece was clearly pre-written weeks earlier and run by mistake.  Told of the allegations, MPR’s Keri Miller runs a two-hour broadcast on “How Blogs Provide A Chilling Effect On Free Speech”, featuring a bipartisan panel of Larry Jacobs and Nick Coleman.

May 17: Dayton demands the Legislature pass his budget.

May 18: Nobody at the legislature responds.

July 1: Minnesota’s state government shuts down.

July 2:  The Strib re-runs the Doyle piece.

July 22: The state budget office notes that business activity is increasing, and tax receipts are rising.

July 23: The Strib editorial board runs an extended interview with Elmer Anderson, who gruffly demands that Minnesota Republicans “think about what’s best for Minnesota” and adopt Dayton’s budget immediately without any of that “commie wingnut debating crap”.  Bloggers point out that Elmer Anderson died in 1998, and “Anderson’s” rhetoric read like Nick Coleman writing with a bag over his head.  Told of the allegations, MPR’s Mark Zdechlik embarked on a two-week series on “What we can learn about Democracy from the Iroquois”.  Salient observation: the Iroquois tradition of “Local Tribe Aid” was considered inviolate.

August 18: The State Budget Office notes that, with no government expenditures and business thriving, the state is in a surplus.

September 2: Katherine Kersten’s column, “Happy Days Are Here Again”, notes that Minnesota is in a much better state with the government shut down.  Lori Sturdevant muses in her column that in Wendy Anderson’s day, the governor would have told the State Patrol to arrest Kersten for “making terroristic threats”.  Bloggers point out that that is utterly absurd, there is no record of any such demand, anywhere.  There is no response to these allegations.

September 23: With no budget in place and government shut down for weeks, Mark Dayton, operating from his office in Vail, orders the National Guard called out to react to what Dayton’s press secretary Tinucci calls the “Terrorist Threats”.  Bloggers point out that the “threat” was the conclusion of Sturdevant’s slanderous column about Kersten.  The National Guard’s commandant says “the paperwork is in process, call back in July”.

September 24: Dayton exercises his unallotment power on the GOP’s budget.  Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch is left visibly speechless on hearing the news.

September 25: Finished with his line item vetoes, Governor Dayton signs a 27 billion dollar budget.  Alliance For A Better Minnesota’s Denise Cardinal notes that “Mark Dayton has always been the budget-cutting candidate”.  But Andrea Outrage-Guevara, president of Minnesota’s “Alliance of WomynAndChildryn”, speaking at a rally on the capitol grounds that drew “Millions” (according to the Strib), demands that all budget cuts be reinstate immediately or “Dayton will be ousted”.

October 15:  Dayton, relocated his office from Vail, sits on a whoopie cushion left in his office by Tony Sertich.

Rachel Stassen-Berger, writing in the Strib yesterday:

Republican candidate for governor Tom Emmer is all over the new Republican theme — Democratic candidate Mark Dayton doesn’t have a complete budget plan.

Emmer hammered the point, made by supportive Republicans repeatedly during the past few days, on a Tuesday spot on Minnesota Public Radio.

“Let’s start talking about the elephant in the room that nobody wants to acknowledge. Sen. Dayton has proposed a plan that is billions of dollars short,” Emmer said. He went on to suggest that Dayton will have to increase taxes more folks than he’s specified — couples making taxable income of $150,000 and singles earning $130,000. “How far are you willing to go?”

Let’s extend that thought for a moment:  Mark Dayton is not a dumb guy.  And he’s got people on his campaign staff who are even smarter.  They don’t own a supercomputer – but they don’t need one to put together the broad outlines of a budget.  Their campaign isn’t short of staff or funding, obviously.

So if you think the only budget that the Dayton campaign has is the one that’s on the website – the one that grins a big dumb grin and says “we’re $890 million short” with the same seriousness of a junior high kid saying the dog ate his homework – then I have to say with all due respect that you’re beggaring reason.   Either the campaign is incompetent, or they know where that extra $890 million is coming from, and would rather the electorate not know.

And if you assume Democrats and Dayton aren’t just plain stupid, that leaves you with only “b”

“Put it on paper, Sen. Dayton,” Emmer said. (Republicans on Twitter and on blogs have taken to accusing individual reporters of negligence for not following suit.)

Stassen-Berger links to my Twitter account, as well as my “AWOL Media” piece yesterday.  I wouldn’t use the phrase “accusing of negligence”, really – it’s got a legalistic tinge to it that’s a little unseemly for free speech.

It just seems that the media, which six weeks ago were hot to get all the details of the Emmer budget, has suddenly gotten incredibly incurious.  And yet now that Dayton’s budget has a large, suspicious hole – and there really is no solution but to jack up taxes on the middle class – suddenly it seems that the people don’t have a “right to know”, accorinding to our regional political media.

I mean, did you see Esme Murphy?

She might as well have been giving the Senator a massage.  “Do you have any plans?”  Er, nope.  And it ended there!

Did you hear Keri Miller’s interview with Tom Emmer?  Back before Emmer released his budget?  She went after him like a barracuda after Charlie the Tuna.

Does the public – especially us middle-class schnook taxpayers – still have a right to know now that it’s the favorite son of Minnesota’s political “elite?”

I mean…:

Dayton has acknowledged that his budget plan comes up nearly $1 billion short. That’s in part because his income tax plan won’t bring in as much money as he had hoped. He has specified how he would make the cuts he’s found, although some are estimates and others have been deemedunrealistic. But he admits a “gap,” which leads opponents to believe he’ll raise more in taxes.

…I’m a complete schlemiel as a “reporter”, and even I see that these are some huge, valid questions!

So David Brauer – who’s never covered up his lefty sympathies, but seems to try to do a decent job anyway – asked via Twitter:

@mitchpberg regarding @Rachelsb & @MinnPost, does thishttp://bit.ly/c4f26t and thishttp://t.co/jj16mXx get them off your bad list?

He links to a this Rachel Stassen-Berger story in the Strib, and a Doug Grow piece in the MinnPost.  Stassen-Berger did, indeed, note that Dayton’s budget comes up short – but there’s no evidence that I’ve seen (I’m willing to be corrected!) that she’s gotten up at a Dayton presser and said “OK, Chauncey Fauntelroy, if you don’t have to hit the middle class, who do you have to get the $890 million?  We’ve got all day, Yale boy” (Those might be my words rather than Stassen-Berger’s).

Grow makes the valid point that…:

…no governor, no matter how popular, will be able to zip a budget package through the Legislature without major changes. In this case, whoever is governor likely will not be elected with a majority of the vote, meaning there will be little chance to claim any mandate, so you can expect nasty legislative fights.

…while basically claiming a pox on all their fiscal houses.

And, most importantly, both of these pieces were two weeks ago.  Juuuuust about the time that the non-wonk class – all those actual voters – started thinking about the election.

Which was why I took exception to Brauer’s followup tweet:

@mitchpberg Fair question. Would venture Dayton’s gap is well-known, covered and acknowledged. For many weeks, Emmer seemed to be ducking.

Well-known to whom?  Political reporters and political junkies and fire-breathing political bloggers?  Sure!

The average voter – especially the ones who start paying attention to politics sometime between the first and fifteenth of October?

Hell – I’ve talked with candidates for the State House who haven’t read anything about this yet.

So while I’m not going to say that our assembled mass of journalists are “negligent” for not asking, I’m still curious; when the public has a right to know, does it imply they’re supposed to exercise that right by developing a jones for research?

Look, journos; if your line is “all three of the candidates’ budgets leave questions”, then ask them.  That’s what you get the big bucks for.  Hell, I’d do it, if any of them (but Emmer) returned my calls!  And since neither of them do, I – and, more importantly, we, the entire body politic – have to depend on y’all, Tim Pugmire and Tom Scheck and Bill Salisbury and Rachel Stassen-Berger and Pat Kessler to do it.

Thing is, so far in the race, it’s Emmer that’s been getting the questioning; Dayton seems to be the only one who can get away with saying “I’ll get back to you on November 3”.

Am I wrong?

What say you, Tim and Rachel and Tom and Bill and Pat?

Remember in June and July?

When the Dayton Campaign, and their minimum-wage minions in the leftyblogosphere, demanded that Tom Emmer release his budget plan?

Because without an Emmer Budget Plan in place for their perusal, democracy itself was in mortal danger!

The entire media was in on it. of course.

Tom Scheck at MPR?  Yep.  He was asking.

Tim Pugmire at MPR?  Yep, he wanted the details, too.

Eric Black at the MNPost?  It was surely important to him!

The question certainly fascinated Rachel Stassen-Berger at the Strib!

Over the past five weeks, Tom Emmer has released a budget plan that balances the budget, and lays the groundwork for the kind of economic growth that actually sets economies up for the kind of long-term prosperity that makes budget fiascoes like the past four years dim, comic memories.

In the meantime, Mark Dayton’s first budget cratered – came up $3 Billion short – and his second attempt is well over a billion off the mark, and Dayton is now saying budgets don’t really matter that much anyway until he’s elected.

So I’m wondering – where are the media who were so strident about having a budget to fact-check last summer?

Rachel Stassen-Berger?  Tim Pugmire?  Tom Scheck?  Pat Kessler?  Bill Salisbury?  Eric Black?  David Brauer?

Where are all the great journalistic instincts of one of the nation’s putatively top-twenty media markets?

Or don’t the people have a right to know anymore?

Let’s start counting up days until someone in the regional mainstream media – MPR, the Strib, the PiPress, WCCO-TV, anyone covers the vaporous vacuity of the Dayton “budget plan”.

Good thing I don’t pay for ink, huh?

[I just sent the following to Mark Dean, director of Common Cause MN, which just filed a complaint against conservative PAC “Minnesota’s Future” for doing exactly what “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota” and “The 2010 Fund” have been doing – or about 10% of what they’re doing, anyway…]

Mr. Dean,

I’m Mitch Berg, one of the hosts of the Northern Alliance Radio Network on AM1280 in the Twin Cities.

I’d like to invite you to appear on the “NARN” with Ed Morrissey and I one of these next weekends to discuss your complaint against “Minnesota’s Future”; we’re curious why Common Cause has neglected to file a similar complaint against “”Alliance For A Better MInnesota”, “Win Minnesota” and “The 2010 Fund”, which are doing exactly what you allege Minnesota’s Future has done, only with many times more money.

On the chance it was all a ghastly oversight, I’ll bring a complaint form. We can fill it out on the air together.

While the request is pointed, the Northern Alliance prides ourselves on doing civil, respectful interviews. Previous “non-partisan” guests include RT Rybak, Dane Smith, Eric Black and Rochelle Olson.

We would sincerely love to discuss this before the election.

Let me know if any of the next few Saturdays work. Our program airs from 1-3PM.

I do hope to hear from you.

Sincerely,

Mitch Berg

Co-host, The Northern Alliance Radio Network,

AM1280 (WWTC-AM) Radio.

“Shot In The Dark” (www.shotinthedark.info)

“True North” (www.looktruenorth.com).

The Twin Cities media continues its ongoing wet tongue kiss of Mark Dayton.  This time, it’s Eric Black at the MinnPost – who sniffs that if you’re of those weirdos that focuses on big principles and visions of limited government getting out of the peoples’ way, then maybe Tom Emmer might be for you.  But…

But  if you value straight talk about what a candidate plans to do, based on facts and logic, DFL guv nominee Mark Dayton demonstrated again today at the Humphrey Institute that he is in a class by himself.

That’s another way of saying, apparently, that he droned on about facts and figures for a long, long time.

He also told the press gaggle in the hallway that he may not release the figures he gets from the Revenue Department on his plan, suggesting that it was getting to be unfair that he is so transparent about his taxing and spending proposals while Emmer continues to be so mysterious.

That’s our Twin Cities media; always looking out to make sure people are “fair” to Mark Dayton.  Whether it’s making sure nobody “unfairly” notes his and his family’s contributions to the PAC that’s been running a three-month smear campaign that gets an “F” for accuracy from “factcheck.org”, to breathlessly parroting Daytons’ whinging about the “unfairness” of the GOP trackers actually holding him accountable for his statements (like saying at yesterday’s debate that cutting state contractors will save over $600 million a year, when his own budget “plan” says it’s more like $425, and even that is misleading).

He told [U of M Poli Sci professor Larry] Jacobs that he won’t raise the whole $4 billion he seeks from the taxes he has specified so far, and during his presentation he told the audience that he is “looking for suggestions” of other revenue-raising ideas that will be consistent with his overall determination to make the state tax system more progressive

In other words, for all the “detail” Dayton offers, he can’t close the budget.  Even his own budget “plan” says he comes up over $600,000,000 short – and that’s assuming that the legislature under a Dayton Administration, likely to be much more conservative than the 2010 class, would pass a tax hike fifteen times as large as the one that passed  by exactly one vote (that of Taryll Clark) in the last session.

So could you please pony up an idea or two, so Eric Black’s narrative can remain undisturbed?

Within an hour or so, Tom Emmer is going to release a plan.  It is going to make the DFLers yak up their skulls, because it will not hold government immune from the vagaries of the economy (which is all Dayton and Horner plan to do).

But I’m fairly confident it’ll provide the answers Dayton’s “plan” fobs off for later.

The Minnesota Majority reports (via Fox) that Ramsey County is investigating felons voting in Saint Paul during the ’08 elections:

That’s the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes — fewer votes than the number of felons whose illegal ballots were counted, according to Minnesota Majority’s newly released study, which matched publicly available conviction lists with voting records…

…”We aren’t trying to change the result of the last election. That legally can’t be done,” said Dan McGrath, Minnesota Majority’s executive director. “We are just trying to make sure the integrity of the next election isn’t compromised.”

Naturally, the MNGOP is excited about this.

And, equally naturally, the DFL/media spin machine is not.

Writing at the MinnPost, Doug Grow – who was always almost as reliable a DFL shill as Lori Sturdevant – is on fact-check detail:

Now, some context:

• In the hyper-excited Fox News reports, Carruthers is quoted as praising the Minnesota Majority study.  “What I said is that they did as well as they could do given the data they had, but much of their data is not good,” Carruthers said.
• Of the 475 cases Minnesota Majority questioned, 270 examples were just not accurate, Carruthers said.

There are reasons for so many inaccuracies, Carruthers said. For example, because of data privacy laws, Minnesota Majority was able only to get year of birth of many of the people they claimed had voted illegally. But, for the group to be sure it had the right individual, it would have needed the actual date of birth.

“In a state with so many Johnsons,’’ said Carruthers, “you have many people with the same name born in the same year. You have to have date of birth, to be sure you have the right person.’’

I’m suspecting there aren’t that many Johnsons on the list. Just a hunch.

• Additionally, Carruthers said, Minnesota Majority would not have had access to changes in sentencing. For example, a person who initially had been sentenced to 10 years of probation may have had that probation reduced during the period of the sentence. At that point, the individual’s civil rights – including the right to vote – would have been restored.

Now, that might hold water.

Still, there were people who voted, or registered to vote, who were not eligible. That’s a felony, and if found guilty, they could face five years in prison and a $10,000, though Carruthers said that would be unlikely.

Not as unlikely as “reform” – or as Doug Grow is to answer the question “how many felons are acceptable?” in an election.

But I am so so so so glad that the likes of Grow are finally focusing on making sure media coverage is accurate.  Thank you, Doug Grow. Thank you so very much.

Can a little known newspaper publisher author a different ending for Tom Horner’s campaign?

If there truly exists a halfway point between gadfly and contender in the realm of politics, Independence Party gubernatorial hopeful Rob Hahn has staked his long-on-moxy and short-on-funds campaign on finding just such an electoral sweet spot. A distant undercard to the expensive heavyweight battle royale occuring on the DFL side of the ballot, the IP’s primary focus on promoting erstwhile liberal Republican Tom Horner has been complicated by the would-be William Randolph Hearst. 

While Hahn might be unknown to most voters (I passed one of the few visible signs of his campaign – a billboard near Rockford – this past week), the man claiming to be the “only real independent running for governor” has gained minor traction with the only section of the electorate paying close attention to politics in general – the media.  From announcing his running-mate selection, to calling on Horner to drop out of the race, and even his policy proposal of using riverboat gambling to enhance the state’s coffers, Hahn has been granted a level of legitimacy seemingly far surpassing his likely ability to wrest away the IP’s nod this August.  The real question may be why?

Part of the answer may have less to do with Hahn’s media background and more to do with an agenda that leans heavily on the credible side of his credible fringe candidate persona.  While Hahn’s riverboat gambling concept has received far more press than an idea that at best would only generate $400-600 million a year should get, Hahn has put forward solutions on the budget deficit that sound far more detailed than many of his opponents.  Hahn’s call alone for phasing out LGA funding and a 5-7% across-the-board cut in state government is more intricate and conservative than anything Tom Horner has publically committed to other than tax policies that are apparently to the left of even Matt Entenza.

But what may really fuel the coverage of Rob Hahn’s campaign is his willingness to attack Horner’s most publicized weakness – his unwillingness/inability to release his client list – coupled with the uncertainty of turnout for an August 10th Independence Party primary.

Horner’s lobbying with his now former firm Himle Horner has proven to be the bête noire of his campaign, leading even the Star Tribune to momentarily put down their promotion of Horner’s Republican past to wrap his knuckles over the lack of disclosure.  The issue is a classic political conundrum; Horner is legally bound to keep his clients’ identities hidden while the Strib and Hahn maintain every right to question the inherent conflicts of interest such a past entails.

Can such an issue – or any – prove powerful enough for Hahn to win?  It depends on how exactly hotly the primary will be.  The IP has come a long way since the dog days of the summer of 2000 when party officials publically worried that IP U.S. Senate nominee James Gibson might not be able to defeat the Harold Stassen of the environmental set, Leslie Davis, in the party’s primary (Davis was considered “strong” enough to be included in pre-primary polling questions).  A whopping 5,600 votes were cast that September between four candidates, leaving Gibson – and the party’s fledgling respectability – intact. 

Higher profile races since then have done little to drive turnout.  The IP’s 7 candidate U.S. Senate field in 2008 that featured former appointed Sen. Dean Barkley only saw 11,000 votes.  It would be little wonder then if at least a few political beat reporters believed Hahn capable of gaining the necessary 5,000 or 6,000 votes to pull off a mildly noticed upset.  With Horner and even long-time politicos like Doug Grow floating theories of cross-over mischief, such an outcome hasn’t been completely discounted.

More likely, Hahn’s wrath will be felt in 7-second MPR soundbites and tiny column inches buried in the metro section.  Enough perhaps to provide a respectable margin of defeat 30 days hence but not enough to provide the party’s biggest upset since their candidates wore feather boas.

Last week, we discussed the media flap over what amounts, in the end, to Tom Emmer’s not releasing details on how he plans to change Minnesota government until he actually has an opponent.

Politics In Minnesota Weekend summed up the details:

On Monday, Tom Scheck reported a piece for MPR that digs into Emmer’s publicly stated plans to downsize state government.

The Emmer campaign responds via an “Emmer Truth” section of its website, implying that claims made by Sheck’s story are inaccurate and cherry-picked.

Enter Dave Mindeman (mnpACT!) and Eric Black (MinnPost), who call EmmerTruth “pretty weak” and “winging it.” Jon Tevlin at the Strib also gets his two cents in, basically repeating the cries for Emmer to get specific.

Mitch Berg (Shot in the Dark) and Gary Gross (Let Freedom Ring) hit back, generally with two points: Scheck’s and Black’s reports wereinaccurate/mangled the context, and it’s a legitimate and sensible strategy for Team Emmer not to give up the “master plan” so early in the campaign season.

Charlie Quimby (Across the Great Divide) comments on Berg’s blog: “I think if you put Emmer’s full statement in front [of] 100 voters, not many would find it definitive or conclusive or clarified.” And Berg in reply: “As to how 100 random users would perceive Emmer’s statement … I don’t disagree; presentation counts … But is it the media’s job to relate the actual facts, or to reinforce confusion?”

A terrific question, if a little antagonistic in the wording.

Antagonistic?  Moi?

The piece, by…well, I never got the name, but it’s someone on the Politics In Minnesota staff – summed up the issues pretty well, so far.

But perhaps more to the point, there was nothing confusing in the MPR piece. In fact, both EmmerTruth and the conservative blogs skip the entire point of Scheck’s reporting while digging around in the semantics: Emmer, as a candidate, has promised major redesigns of government, but the programs and agencies he’s highlighted so far are playing with thousands or millions of dollars, not billions. The “could not should” distinction is sort of absurd.

To be fair to Gary and I, we were reacting to the presenting issue; we had leftybloggers and the media chanting “Emmer said he’d hack a third of State Government!”. 

But the real issue is the beef.

Now, to most of the Twin Cities media, that question is…:

 If the media’s job is to relate actual facts, then it’s perfectly reasonable — no, responsible — for the media to ask Emmer, the candidate for Minnesota’s highest office, what he would do if elected. If the answer is, for now, that he’s not sure, then it’s the media’s responsibility to say so.

True. 

But it’d be useful for the media to also note that Dayton (and Kelliher, Entenza and Horner’s, not that it matters) plans are no more articulate; if Emmer is saying “Cut Cut Cut!”, as John Tevlin wrote, then the Four Stooges are responding “Tax Tax Tax!”, with no more articulation.

I hate to repeat myself, but I think I summed up my most serious response to this in my response to Erik Black last week:

Black:  And [Emmer] owes the voters of Minnesota some straighter talk, not about what he could do, but what he would do to balance the budget. (Not to say that all the other guv candidates have been clear abut how they would do it. They haven’t.)

Let me get this straight:  the DFL candidates have been “unclear”, but Emmer “owes” everyone an explanation now …?

Why does the MinnPost hold Republicans to a different standard than the DFL?

When Mark Dayton and the other three soon-to-be-chum contenders appear on Midmorning with Keri Miller, will Miller press any of them for details on how their “Tax, Baby, Tax!” agenda is going to lead to more (non-public-employee union) jobs?  How they lead to recovery?  How they will defy history by actually improving the economy?

Will Nick Coleman and John Tevlin and Lori Sturdevant demand more details amid their inevitable victorian vapours?

Will Erik Black and Tom Scheck write pieces noting how vague they’re being?

So there are two questions for everyone that’s demanding answers from Emmer, the Tom Schecks and Erik Blacks and John Tevlins and Charlie Quimbies:

1. Where is the scrutiny of Dayton and the other three?  The double standard was plain as day in the Black quote above; why do you, as a group, observe it?  Or does supporting the status quo (only more of it) get one a pass with the media?
2. I asked this before, I’ll ask it again:  What is in it for Emmer to put his entire platform out there six weeks before the DFL has a candidate, for the DFL-leaning media to spin and soften up while the DFL goes through its primary contortions?  How would that benefit Emmer and the MNGOP in their quest to win the race?  Because this race isn’t about making the media’s job easier, or making the DFL’s job easier; it’s about saving Minnesota.  Why does Emmer “owe” Minnesota any more than his opponents do?

 A listening tour is a fine populist idea, but with Minnesota accumulating red ink in Deepwater Horizon-like volumes, a candidate — from any party — should be able to talk state finances in real terms. We don’t buy the idea that campaigns for office build policy proposals around a master plan that remains absolutely secret until the last possible moment.

“Last possible moment?”  Of course not.   What’s unreasonable about waiting until he faces the real opponent, as opposed to the opponent’s legions of ringers?  Because Mark Dayton isn’t his only, or even his most serious, opponent in this race.

The Tea Party and the avalanche of dissatisfaction that are at Emmer’s back are driven by a fairly articulate demand for real answers; if Emmer doesn’t do better than the “Tax Baby Tax!” crowd, that’ll be a big problem.

I”m pretty comfortable he will have the goods on August 11, when Mark Dayton finally starts his campaign.

Imagine how much  better criminal justice would be if prosecutors and judges worked with defense attorneys to speed up the judicial system?

Or if accountants and auditors were on the same team?

Or if the President, Congress and the Supreme Court spent less time checking and balancing each other, and more time working on ways to help each other increase their power?

Well, no.  They are all terrible ideas.  The whole point of having adversarial systems built into government is to ensure there’s accountability, or at the very least a speed bump in the way of unlimited power on the part of CEOs, Presidents, Governors, Congresses…

That’s why of all of Jesse Ventura’s mind-dissolvingly stupid ideas in his time-warpingly stupid administration, the dumbest of all was his constant lobotomized yapping for a unicameral legislature, so government could “get stuff done”.  Of course, keeping government from getting “stuff done” with impunity is one of the great virtues of both the bicameral legislature and the two-party system.

Of course, the Minnesota DFL has never understood this.  Their primary frame of historical reference is the period nationally between 1933 and 1980, and in Minnesota until about 2003;

This is a good thing; it means everyone’s working to hold everyone accountable.

Which may explain a lot why Doug Grow thinks this is a good idea:

The relationship between Mary Cathryn Ricker and Valeria Silva stands in sharp contrast to the common education confrontations that have dogged public education in Minnesota in recent years.

Ricker, head of the St. Paul teachers union, and Silva, the St. Paul school district’s superintendent, meet often and banter easily.

“Mary Cathryn asked me to attend a workshop (sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers),” recalled Silva.

“It was on a weekend,” Ricker said.

“I told her I’d go, but if I’m going on a weekend, it proves I must love you,” Silva said.

The two women laughed.

An alliance between the union and the superintendent’s office is no easy thing to maintain. Silva admits that even some members of her high-ranking staff are leery of how quick the superintendent is to pick up the phone and call Ricker.

Well, I’m glad someone at 360 Colborn is doing their job…

And Ricker suspects that at least some teachers are uncomfortable with a union leader who spends considerable time at district headquarters.

Which may be the most depressing commentary on the mentality in public education today that I’ve ever heard.

Silva is distressed by the public attitudes toward teachers — and the teaching profession. It’s hard enough, she said, to attract people into the profession, given the relatively meager starting paying, compared with other professions. But after years of bashing, fewer and fewer people even believe the profession deserves respect.

“Any other culture,” Silva said, “a teacher is greatly valued. That’s been lost here.”

Ms. Silva: get back to me about this episode, which your district has been trying to ignore for five years.   Until you have an answer that wouldn’t insult my dog’s intelligence, I won’t value your “profession”.

Maybe Mary Rickert will ask on my behalf?

Is the GOP a “big tent?”  Or is it a “pup tent?”

The real answer is below.

But for the biennial pundit palaver on the subject, who better to ask than Doug Grow, who spent decades carrying water for the DFL at the Strib before decamping to the MinnPost?

“The idea of a big tent means different things to different people,” Sutton told MinnPost. “I believe we are a big tent, filled with right-of-center folks. We have social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, people who believe in a strong national defense. There’s a business wing, and we have those people who have a libertarian/populist streak. … But the unifier is the economy. People are anxious about the economy, about their jobs. That makes people more conservative. Business. Jobs. That’s our brand.”

Sutton, as should be expected, gets it right; the GOP should be open to everyone who believes in small government, prosperity for the individual, security and family.

And who better to ask about our tent size than someone who got kicked out of it for supporting bigger government and higher taxes?

But former Rep. Neil Peterson, who was drummed out of his party and office by conservative forces in Bloomington after joining five other House Republicans in overriding Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of a gasoline tax, has a different view. He says the delegates gathering for this convention are not even close to the party regulars who supported him.

“When I was in office, we still had a fairly big tent in my district,” Peterson said. “But those people [the party activists] have all been replaced by much more conservative people. The party has moved from being a big tent to a pup tent.”

And Grow, like much of the Twin Cities media, audibly pines for the days when the GOP was basically nothing more than the DFL with better suits – a half-hearted speed bump to complete DFL domination.

The real answer is “the tent is as big as it needs to be; all who support prosperity, limited government, security and the family are welcome.”

It’s really pretty simple.  If you’re not a reporter with decades of experience covering Minnesota politics, anyway.

I’ve spent much of the life of this blog – eight years, now – railing against the evils of smearing by association. 

It’s a particularly slimy tactic in the hands of the not-very-bright, on all sides of the putative political aisle.  Being a conservative, I bag on particularly egregiously stupid examples from the left (like this, that, the other thing, this, and of course this), but of course it’s not limited to a party.  Much.

Still, there are those from whom we expect better.  Or like to think we do.

Erik Black at the MinnPost – the dean of Minnesota political reporters (or, I guess, one of a classroom full of deans, once you add in Pat Kessler, Mary LaHammer and Bill Salisbury), makes noises about also rejecting the whole stupid game in this piece about the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which Governor Pawlenty will be attending:

In February, Gov. Tim Pawlenty will take his undeclared campaign for the Republican presidential nomination back to Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC, as it is always called, is a  major annual gathering of conservatives and an opportunity for Repub candidates and might-be candidates to strut their stuff before various elements of the party base (although CPAC, which is put on by the American Conservative Union, is technically non-partisan).

Among the co-sponsors of the conference one finds a name one hasn’t heard much since the mid-20th century — the John Birch Society. As a refugee from that century, I can tell you that when your mom and I were kids the “Birchers” (I use the term I grew up using and mean no offense by it) were a leading symbol of right-wing extremism.

Of course, “right wing extremism” is a term that’s more or less lost all meaning, largely because of the efforts of the news media of which Eric Black has been a part for his entire working life.  I joke about it; “if a fiscal-conservative socially-libertarian constitutional originalist orders a pizza in the woods and no liberal is there to hear him, is he still an extremist?”, I ask, constantly, when people refer on the left and in the media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) to everyone from Tom Tancredo to (this makes me mildly dizzy) Tim Pawlenty as “extremists”. 

But Black, being all responsible, rejects the whole stupid game.

Or…does he?

So this is an obvious set-up to play the always popular “dissociate yourself” card. Under the rules of that card game, everyone involved in CPAC (including Pawlenty, as a speaker) has to repudiate the Birchers or be tainted by association with the most extreme thing the group ever said or did. It’s fun and easy to play (see Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright) but also stupid and demeaning (ibid). A letter-writer to the Strib played the card early this week, asserting that Pawlenty’s attendance would amount to an endorsement of Bircher views.

Well, so far, so good – although I think it’s fair to observe that the MinnPost is no better than the rest of the left-leaning mainstream media at focusing attention on the right’s fringe players; the nutcase with the racist sign at the Tea Party, the stars-‘n-bars-flying redneck at the Second Amendment rally, the Tenth Amendment’s long-dead associations with slave-owners-rights.

But Black is better than that.  Isn’t he?

I actually did inquire of the spokester for Pawlenty’s undeclared campaign whether the governor might want to comment on whether his willingness to speak at an event co-sponsored by the John Birch Society implied any association between his views and theirs, but the calls and emails (over several days) received no reply.

And why would that be?  Because Black works for an organization that is pretty up-front about working for the “enemy?”  Or merely because the very question is, to quote Black himself in the context of this very issue, “stupid and demeaning?”

Still, I cannot bring myself to play the card.

Am I overly cynical, or do I detect a silent, implied “when did the Governor stop beating his wife?” in Black’s repudiation of the whole “stupid, demeaning” issue?

Because if there is no story there – if there is no evidence throughout Pawlenty’s career of any sympathy, overt or otherwise, for the Birchers – then why write about it at all?

I was surprised and interested to learn that the John Birch Society was still in business. But, as this recent NYTimes where-are-they-now feature indicates, they are still kicking, based in Grand Chute, Wis., (near Appleton, Oshkosh, Green Bay), still believing in what its leaders call a satanic conspiracy to take over the world.

Right.

So what?

Black gives a brief lesson on the history of the Birchers – they’re anti-UN, anti-Communist, and have espoused some pretty wacky things over the decades – and then cuts to what passes for his chase:

So, back to the present. If Tim Pawlenty wants to be president, he certainly must say what he thinks the U.S. relationship to the U.N. should be, but he doesn’t have to start from any particular that he agrees with the long-standing JBS position just because he spoke at a conference co-sponsored by the JBS.

Right.  Especially since “sponsorship” is a come-one, come-all thing, as opposed to an implication that a “sponsor” has any special ideological traction:

Of course, Pawlenty is no more implicated in JBS’s beliefs than any of the many other speakers, which includes other leading undeclared presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Mike Huckabee was scheduled but has canceled. Sarah Palin was invited but has declined. The current list of speakers, co-sponsors and exhibitors is available here.

Right.

So – the story is…what?  That no candidate needs to apologize for being at an event sponsored (in tiny measure) by a splinter group that nobody’s taken seriously since the Johnson Administration?

Why, that’d be like saying that one needn’t discount the opinion of Mark Dayton, Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, Steve Kelley, John Marty and Taryll Clark even though none of them have renounced the activities of International ANSWR (who are involved in much left-wing agitation), since none of them have expressly shown sympathy for America’s last Stalinist fringe group.  It’d be another “why did you stop beating your wife” moment.

Pawlenty needs to improve on that showing more than he needs to repudiate the John Birch Society, but he really needs to return my calls anyway.

To answer a question that Black himself considered “stupid and demaning?”

Just curious.

A few years back, incontinent shriekblogger Karl Bremer jumped up and down and shot steam out his nostrils and bellowed that the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers was a conservative organization.  To be fair, Bremer always jumps up and down and squirts steam out his ears, so it’s not that big a distinction…

…but the main point is that the MOB is, and has always been, intended to be utterly non-partisan.  That it is largely conservative could be chalked up to any number of reasons – I suspect it’s that way too many liberals really really can’t tolerate cognitive dissonance – but the proof is in the pudding; our seminnual MOB parties have welcomed people of every political stripe, from Swiftee to Eva Young to Eric Black.

At any rate, Flash from Centrisity is one of the MOB’s charter members.  He’s a center-lefty, and so is his blog.

But just as Flash and I go way back beyond blogging and politics (we’ve been friends and neighbors since long before either of us thought “blog” was anything other than a post-drunken-burrito-frenzy kind of bodily noise), his blog often enough focuses on the sorts of things that should unite us all; family (including his years-long narratives about his songs, including Sergeant Tom, who just got out of the Marines), community, and most importantly, beer:

Yes folks, Global Climate Change has been officially confirmed.

Today, January 15, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Spring arrived in the Midway. On tap, Natural Ice! I need the 5.9% alcohols to keep the lines clear LOL

Flash’s kegerator has long been not only the social center of the central Midway for almost a generation – but its’ first tapping of the season is always the great harbinger of spring in this part of Saint Paul.  The ceremonial first tapping is usually a sign that winter is over.

(But…January 15?  The phrase “Beerational Exuberance” springs to mind.   I’ll discuss it at the garage sometime this next weekend).

In reading Doug Grow’s account of A-Klo’s “Tele-Town Hall” “meeting”, it occurs to me…

One caller tried hard to pin her down.

“Do you support a public (health insurance) option?” he asked.

That seemed to call for a “yes” or “no” answer.

The caller got neither.

Sen. Amy KlobucharInstead, here’s what he got: “I will tell you this,” the senator said. “I’m open to a competitive option. You need to put pressure on the insurance companies. One way to do that [is allow the public to join] the federal health care plan or one just like it. The government does administer it, but it’s a private plan. That’s one way. And then there’s this co-op plan proposal [in the Senate]. That really hasn’t been formed yet. Those are some of the ideas. I want to make sure whatever option we choose works for our state. Make sure it makes it easier for small businesses and the self-employed.”

…that in the wake of Minnesota’s eight-month recount ordeal, that Minnesota has gone from having one Senataor in DC…

…to none.

Eric Black reports on the Project for Excellence in Journalism report on the State of the News Media.

It’s an ugly report – you can read the details at MinnPost.  Black’s conclusion:

I heard PEJ chief Tom Rosenstiel (disclosure: Tom and I went to college together less than one century ago; he’s a nice guy) on the radio today say that he doesn’t believe the day when a major American city will have no newspaper is imminent. I agree with that (although what’s happening in Detroit, where you can only get home delivery three days a week is frightening). The papers that have been folding are in two-newspaper towns.

So far.

Again, read the whole article.
On a quasi-unrelated note, I noticed that I haven’t gone to the Strib for blog fodder in quite some time now…