For well over a decade, “Protect MN” – it’s changed its name several times since it started way back when – has been the dotty, not-too-bright face of the gun control movement in Minnesota.

While the wave of Michael Bloomberg money in 2013 moved the center of gravity over to “Everytown for Gun Safety” and its “local” affiliate, Heather Martens has remained an inescapable farce in Minnesota politics.

Force. I meant force.  Honest.  I’ll catch it in post-production.  Sorry.

But a correspondent who follows these things found this bon mot during some recreational reading of state Campaign Finance Board filings.

(more…)

…that if I voted GOP, plutocrats would romp and frolic.

And they were right.

Between them, Marco Rubio and O. J. Simpson have killed two people.

Among them, Marco Rubio and Bernie Madoff scammed people out of $20 billion.

Together, Marco Rubio and the Minnesota Vikings have lost four Super Bowls.

Marco Rubio and Keith Ellison have, together, 40 unpaid parking tickets and 11 moving violations.

Get right on that.

I got this email (via my pseudonym, Mr. Beria) from the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” borg last week, for a meeting that’s happening today.

I’ll let it sit and ferment on its own, with a bit of emphasis added by me:

Dear Lavrentiy,

I am excited to invite you to support my good friend, Hillary Clinton, in her presidential campaign. Over the next 18 months I will be doing all I can to help elect this great progressive champion. Will you join me?

Tomorrow, the Hillary for America campaign will hold a strategy session for community leaders and volunteers to jumpstart grassroots organizing efforts across Minnesota. I want to personally invite you to join me, Tina Smith, and others at the campaign’s first grassroots organizational meeting.

All the details are below. I hope to see you on Tuesday!

Thank you for your support,

Mark

That’s Mark Dayton, in case the folksy, “grassroots” delivery of the plutocrat funded by plutocrats asking me to support another plutocrat supported by more, bigger plutocrats threw you off.

…why the left has spent the last six years chanting about the perfidy of the Koch Brothers…

…well, wonder no more.

Four legal arguments against “Net Neutrality“.

The FCC’s new internet rules cite a Soros-funded front group dozens and dozens of times:

New internet regulations finally released by the Federal Communications Commission make 46 references to a group funded by billionaire George Soros and co-founded by a neo-Marxist…The term “Free Press” is mentioned 62 times in the regulations. Some are redundant mentions referring to the same Free Press activists’ comments in favor of more oversight. In total, the FCC cited Free Press’ pro-net neutrality arguments 46 times.

The FCC received more than 4 million public comments as it was weighing the net neutrality initiative, but Free Press and other activist groups have received the most attention by pressuring the FCC and the White House on behalf of their cause.

The Obama Administraiton is the most transparently corrupt administration in history.

The Clintons’ foundation, in addition to being tied to enough corruption to warrant comparisons between Hillary and Richard Nixon, is floating in influence-renting money from Middle Eastern nations that treat women like Marge Schott treated the domestic help, only with “death” instead of “venial little insults” involved.

But remember:  Koch!

Where would we be today if the federal government had enacted a “Cell Phone Neutrality” act in 1987?  A policy saying that nobody could pay a premium for a snazzy, newfangled, small cell phone until everyone had a big, clunky, expensive one?

How about a “Car Safety Neutrality” act in 1971, saying that no one could pay a premium for a car with airbags until everyone had a car with airbags?

What if we passed us a law saying that nobody could pay a few bucks extra for good healthcare until everyone had crappy healthcare… Oh, wait.

The United States government: giving the most successful piece of infrastructure of the 21st-century regulation that didn’t work in the 1930s.

Note to liberals/”progressives”:  when companies release “premium” products, other companies notice that less-“premium” people want them too – and they find ways to make those “premium” products more affordable.  And everyone wins.

Which is why poor people have cell phones, consumer electronics and cars of higher quality than the rich had 30 years ago – but their healthcare, education and mass transit keep getting worse.

…that if we voted for Mitt Romney, we’d have a government beholden to plutocrats, that trampled on the people and the law itself to get its wishes, while marinating in luxurious unaccoutability.

And they were right.  Even parts of the Left are smart enough to see it, albeit possibly too late.

Note To John Kline, Erik Paulsen, Tom Emmer and (if you’re smart) Colin Peterson:  Oppose this.  Seriously.

It gets old, always, always, always repeating “if a conservative said this, the media would collectively crap a cinder block”.

But it’s always true.

But former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg said something that would put him squarely in David Duke territory; emphasis added for the dense and dazed:

“It’s controversial, but first thing is all of your — 95 percent of your murders and murderers, and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America,” Bloomberg is heard saying in the newly released audio.

And his prescription?  Well, it’s meant to sound a little more benevolent than something a Klansman would say, but spiritually it’s the same exact thing:

“That’s where the real crime is,” he added. “You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed. First thing you can do to help that group is to keep them alive.”

“Keep them alive” – by disarming the victims.

Forget dog whistles; this piece is full of racist foghorns.

And it puts an exclamation point on the most important premise related to the gun control issue today; it is today, as it was in 1968, and 1866 and 1842, an instrument of keeping ethnic minorities disarmed, helpless and in “their place”.

Rarely as they as obliging as to say it in as many words, as Bloomberg is recorded saying (and the media is doing its best to scrub all mention of the tape’s existence); even Heather Martens is smarter than that (thus far).

Do the world a favor; make sure a black DFL voter hears this.

Representative Mary Franson, GOP from Alexandria, is making the first move toward repealing the forced unionization of childcare and homecare providers:

… Rep. Mary Franson (R-Alexandria), a former childcare provider, introduced legislation – known as the “Hands Off Child Care Act” – that would repeal the childcare unionization law of 2013.

“The vast majority of childcare providers do not want be forced into a union,” said Franson. “Given the high costs of childcare in Minnesota, this legislation will help alleviate costs that unionization would bring providers, moms, and dads.”

It’s worth noting that Minnesota already had some of the highest childcare costs in the United States – considerably higher than our other costs and standards of living, before the DFL, working at the behest of the SEIU and AFSCME, jammed down the unionize Asian of providers in the 2013 session.

“But wait!”, You might say, “the DFL controls the Senate, and Mark Dayton is still the governor!”

And you to be right. Mark Dayton doesn’t take a dump without his union benefactors’ okay.

But this bill will get votes on the record, assuming it gets out of committee. And that’s with the GOP majority in the house needs to do; get lots of damning votes to associate with lots of DFLers on these bread-and-butter issues.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Got this fundraising e-mail today. I think there’s a flaw in the proposal but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

***

Dear Friend

Our country is in trouble and we need your help in a big way. The rich are cheating this country of a Billion Dollars of tax revenue EVERY MINUTE.

Right now, federal tax law supported by Republicans is costing the government at least 50 cents – and in some cases as much as 72 cents – out of every dollar earned. By closing the payroll tax loophole, Democrats in Congress could fully fund every vital program to invest in infrastructure, eliminate racial inequality and prepare our children for the future.

All it would take is one simple fix in the payroll tax laws, setting the amount of withholding equal to total wages earned. And it would affect only a small number of Americans – fewer of them every day – but the Evil Republicans backed by the Koch Brothers are blocking this common sense reform.

Tell Republicans to Give Congress Back its Money! Tell Republicans to Close the Payroll Tax Loophole!

And please help us spread this urgent message by contributing $100, $50 or even $25 today. Your contribution could make the difference between saving the country and letting the terrorists win.

***

Joe Doakes

it’s so hard to tell truth from parody these days…

 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.

I haven’t had the time to do as much in the way of digging into the DFL ad machine this cycle as in some past cycles.  It’s been a crazy summer.

Fortunately, Bill Glahn is on patrol

Glahn takes apart one of the latest flight of anti-Johnson ads from the Alliance for a Better Minnesota – the attack PR firm funded by liberal plutocrats that has run toxic sleaze campaigns against every Republican to run for office in Minnesota in the past eight years or so. 

ABM’s ads have been punctilious about punching up the phrase “Tea Party” in their ads, especially about Johnson, this cycle – even though Johnson is not especially identified with the Tea Party.  Glahn reaches one of the same observations I do:

Apparently the pejorative “Tea Party Republican” must test particularly well with low information voters. Or, perhaps its use in the ad is a sign the Democrats are concerned about turning out their base in an off-year election.

The Democrats have spent millions this past five years, trying to turn “Tea Party” into a pejorative.  If you go by what you hear in the media, it’s worked. If you go by election and polling results in red and reddish-purple states, it hasn’t.   Minnesota?  Well, the 2010 gubernatorial election showed Minnesota has 8,000 more low-information voters (along with Duplicate-Americans, Fictional-Americans and Deceased-Americans) than smart ones.  It might be a winning strategy. 

It might also show that that’s the best they can do; sputtering “Tea Partier” may be the “lowest blow” they think they can come up with. 

Anyway – the ad.  Like everything ABM puts out, it’s got an assortment of outright lies, and factoids stretched so far out of context as to be devoid of truth: 

Ms. Livermore [a “classroom teacher”] makes the dubious claim that Johnson “cut education by over $500 million” back in 2003, and then gave that money to corporations in 2005. Keep in mind that a similar ABM ad was judged “Misleading” by Minnesota Public Radio (of all places) for making those exact same claims. [The bill Johnson voted for in 2003 actually increased (rather than cut) public school spending.]

As always with ABM, though, there’s a level of stuff they don’t tell the voter (emphasis added):

No, the real lie in the ad comes from the “appeal to authority” of having an ordinary “classroom teacher” attack Johnson’s education policy. According to her LinkedIn profile, Ms. Livermore served on the governing board of the teachers’ union Education Minnesota from 2004 to 2007. [By the way, she spells the word “education” incorrectly on her profile.]

Although her service to the state teachers’ union may have given her some familiarity with decade-ago state legislation, it doesn’t exactly qualify her as a garden-variety “classroom teacher.” “Former union official attacks Republican,” just doesn’t have the same ring. Funny thing, the viewer is never informed of Livermore’s connection to the union, who happens to be the largest donor to Democrat campaigns in the state.  

And to be fair to ABM, why should the viewer be informed of this?  The campaign isn’t about informing voters.  It’s about framing the opposition, just like Saul Alinksky taught them to.

…is baked wind.

 Minnesota lost 4,200 jobs in July, and is adding them at an anemic pace year-to-date:

State officials said Thursday that Minnesota employers shed a seasonally adjusted 4,200 jobs in July. Meanwhile, they also revised June’s numbers downward by 3,600 jobs.

That means that, year-to-date, Minnesota has added a meager 2,900 jobs, or about 400 per month, on an adjusted basis.

During July, the education and health services sector lost 5,300 jobs. Information shed 1,000; construction, 700; financial activities, 200; and government, 100.

The sectors that added jobs: trade, transportation, and utilities (up 1,600); manufacturing (700); leisure and hospitality (600); and other services (200). Logging and mining, and professional and business services held steady.

Look for the Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s lie machine to fabricate a lot of phony economic happytalk in the next ten weeks; as we discussed earlier, they’re off to a running start.

No – a lot.

SCENE:  In the office of “Governor” Mark Dayton, at the Minnesota State Capital.  Carrie LUCKING, Executive Director of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, is sitting at a large, mahogany desk.  She is leaning back, feet up on the desk, looking idly upward at the paintings and carvings that decorate the ornate office in the classical romanesque structure. 

Across from her is a larger, more ornate mahogany desk.  The nameplate says “Alida Messinger”; it shows signs of being only intermittently occupied. 

A knock is heard on a door leading to a small closet (off right).  LUCKING barely stirs. 

LUCKING:  What?

GOVERNOR MARK DAYTON (dimly heard through door):  Can I go to the bathroom?

LUCKING:  Go.

(DAYTON opens closet door, walked quickly, shoulders hunched through the door to the left, as Hannah UNDERLING, a staff assistant, walks in)

UNDERLING:  Er, Miss Lucking?  House Minority Leader Daudt is calling for hearings on MNSure.

LUCKING:  Put out a press release calling him “extreme”.

(UNDERLING makes a note). 

That’ll be all. 

(UNDERLING leaves). 

(Time passes.  LUCKING indolently pecks a message into her cell phone, until T. Giles HUMID, a highly trained puppeteer and member of the Governor’s staff, enters the room).

HUMID:  Er, Carrie…

(LUCKING clears her throat)

HUMID:  …er, Miss Lucking?  A group of of Saint Paul school parents are demanding better results from the public schools for their children.

LUCKING (staring idly at the ceiling, twisting her hair):  Put out a call to Keri Miller saying they’re…extreme. 

(HUMID takes a  note, leaves the room).

(There is a knock on the door).

LUCKING:  What?

GOVERNOR DAYTON (voice muffled outside the door):  Can I come in?

LUCKING (Bored):  Yes. 

(DAYTON walks past, stops at LUCKING’s desk)

DAYTON:  Say, uh…

LUCKING:  I’m busy.

DAYTON:  Ok.  (He walks through the closet door again)

(LUCKING, bored, starts folding an origami swan.  It quickly starts resembling a badly-formed paper airplane.  She wads it up and throws it in a trash can that is overflowing with wadded-up pieces of paper)

(Tina FLINT-SMITH, the Governor’s chief of staff and Lieutenant-Governor candidate, enters the room)

FLINT-SMITH:  Carrie, I’m going to be out at a town hall meeting in Cambridge, and I need a term to use to refer to the GOP’s criticism of our budget.

LUCKING:  I’d run with “extreme”.

FLINT-SMITH:  Um…OK.  Do we use that a lot?

LUCKING:  No.

FLINT-SMITH:  Um…OK.  (Leaves the room). 

(More idle time).

(Finally, UNDERLING enters).

UNDERLING:  Ms. Lucking, I got a request from some DFLers from Greater Minnesota.  They need some talking points during upcoming debates.

LUCKING (sounding bored):  DFLers from where?

UNDERLING:  Um, Greater Minnesota?  (LUCKING stares, not compreheding.)  The part outside the Twin Cities Metro.

LUCKING:  Huh.

UNDERLING:  They want to know – what do we call Sheila Kihne?

LUCKING:  Er…hm.  Let me think.  I’d say “too extreme!”

UNDERLING: OK.  How about Jennifer Loon?  The rep whom Kihne is primarying? 

LUCKING:  I think we should call her…too extreme!

UNDERLING (sotto voce while writing): …too extreme.  OK – how about Dave Senjem, from Rochester, the leader of the “moderate” faction of the GOP in the House?

LUCKING (absent-mindedly twirling a piece of thread):  Oh, he’s “too extreme”. 

UNDERLING:  Hmm.  OK.  How about Julie Rosen?   Republicans are constantly complaining she’s too moderate.  What is the message about here?

LUCKING (staring into space):  Too extreme. 

UNDERLING:  And how about Tom Bakk.

LUCKING (visibly bored):  Too extreme. 

UNDERLING:  But he’s actually the DFL’s Senate Majority Leader.

LUCKING:  Oh.

(Ryan WINKLER walks in)

WINKLER: Hey, I was talking with Colin Peterson. He’s getting a run for his money from Torrey Westrom. How’s about we call him “shortsighted”?

UNDERLING: Really?

WINKLER: What?  You’re gonna say that’s racist, too? 

UNDERLING:  You don’t know…?

WINKLER:  What?  He’s a black lawyer, too? 

UNDERLING:  He’s blind. 

WINKLER:  I don’t get it. 

LUCKING:  He’s too extreme.

UNDERLING:  Right…

LUCKING:  But we must counter him as well.  (Turns toward DAYTON’s closet)  Hey!   Find some Ray Charles glasses and a long white cane!

(Silence from behind DAYTON’s door)

LUCKING:  HEY!

DAYTON:  Ok. 

(And SCENE)

The party that stood four-square behind Representative Ryan Winkler for calling Justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom“…

…has the vapors over two of the most innocuous jokes…

Nov. 16, 2012: “Poor Susan Rice. She’s the first woman in Washington to get in more trouble opening her mouth for a president than Monica Lewinsky.”

Nov. 18, 2012: “I keep hearing about this fantasy football thing. I don’t get it. My idea of fantasy football is where I am the quarterback and Angela Jolie is the center.”

They’re from Craig “Captain Fishsticks” Westover, an advisor to MNGOP gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson.  And the first one is accurate to a journalistic fault.

And, uh, note the dates.

So they – in this case, “Sam Jasenosky”, who would seem to be an undergrad journalism major (what else) – have been reduced to digging through advisors’ twitter feeds for any sign of political incorrectness to be tortured out of context.

I can hardly wait to see the ABM TV ad next year.

Here’s the fun part, though; ABM are the real sexists:  from yesterday’s post about the GOP candidates:

Julianne Ortman: A genie.

And lest the reader mentally compare Ortman – a graduate of U Penn law school and a former adjunct professor George Washington U  – to the “Djinn” of Arab mythology, they helpfully included video of Barbara Eden playing a jiggly, bubbleheaded blond piece of eye candy:

Because when you’re a Democrat, it’s only sexism if you’re one of the bad guys.

And because that’s what female conservatives are to Carrie Lucking’s little troupe of howler monkeys.

If Paul Wellstone really had all the integrity people said he did, he’d puke.

To:  Carrie Lucking, “Executive Director”, Alliance for a Better Minnesota
From: Mitch Berg, uppity peasant
Re:  Chain Of Command

Ms. Lucking,

The “Special Session” to deal with disaster relief teed up a few hours ago.

Just a hint; it might behoove you to copy your audioanimatronic marionette “Governor” Dayton on any legislation that gets proposed, or especially passed.  The vision of your audioanimatronic marionette our “Governor” proclaiming shock at legislation that the DFL has jammed through embarasses this state makes your chain of command look “not ready for prime time”. 

It’s pretty simple; route things from Governor Ms. Messinger, to you, to handler “Chief of Staff” Bob Hume, to Mr. Dayton.  And spend some time making sure he really knows what’s getting written into law. 

You’re welcome.

That is all.

The DFL ran in 2012 on a series of issues that – you heard in on the blogs first – were entirely buncombe. 

So let’s take stock of the things the DFL Alliance for a Better Minnesota said for which they need to be held accountable over the next 17 months or so:

“Property Taxes Will Drop”:  For the past six years, the DFL has been yapping that cuts in Local Government Aid forced property taxes to rise.  It’s a lie, of course; the “cuts” forced city and county governments to make tough choices about their spending, and made them justify their spending to their own taxpayers, rather than passing the bill off to the rest of the state with few if any questions asked.  And as I showed back in 2010, cities and counties jacked up property taxes by vastly more than the amount cut from LGA.  In the meantime, many cities learned to live without LGA entirely; it is they that are subsidizing everyone else’s spending. 

Prediction: the “extra” money from the state will almost entirely be consumed with extra spending (in fact, every single penny of “new” LGA sent to Minneapolis and Saint Paul will go to new spending).  Cities and counties will almost universally raise their property taxes, or at best hold steady.  Any exceptions?  They’ll prove the rule. 

That Economic Outlook:  The Minnesota left has been jumping up and down and beaming like toddlers that made good pantses about a “study” put out by the Philadelphia Fed a few weeks ago that showed Minnesota was clobbering Wisconsin in economic growth.

The “study” also showed that Minnesota was clobbering North Dakota.   Indeed, the “study” showed North Dakota in the bottom 10%, along with Wisconsin. You’ve heard what a wasteland North Dakota is, right? 

Oh, yeah – along with Minnesota in the “yay” column were fiscal and employment basket cases Illinois and California.  Economic powerhouses like North Dakota, Texas and Florida?  In the “Meh” column. 

Do with that information what you will.

But beyond that?  It was a short term analysis of growth, based on exceedingly transient indicators.  And to the extent that it had any value, remember: Wisconsin is still digging out from under decades of wastrel Democrat regimes.  And except for smokers, Minnesota is in the last couple of weeks of the result of over a decade of policy largely controlled by responsible GOP governors and legislatures.  The GOP never got everything they wanted – the shared the legislature from 2002-2008, had only the governorship in ’09-10, and both sides of the legislature but no governor in ’11 and ’12 – but at worst, Governor Pawlenty ran his veto pen red-hot and staved off the worst DFL-predations; at best, they were able to impose some restraint on things. 

But on August 1 – less than three weeks from now – that all changes.  Warehouse taxes, business taxes, wealth achievement taxes (make no mistake, income taxes don’t tax the “wealthy”, they merely penalize people who work for high incomes, leaving trust fund babies like Mark Dayton and Alida Messinger blissfully alone) and a raft of new regulations go into effect, penalizing businesses and – slowly – making Minnesota a lousy place to do business.

It’s already having an effect; Minnesota has sunk to the lowest ranking for new business creation in the nation.  More will surely follow.  And the raft of new regulations is going to brutalize the already somnolent mining industry; it’s literally cheaper and easier to build a tailing-recycling smelting plant in North Dakota and ship the ore – rock! – there than it is to build it where the actual ore is, here in Minnesota. 

Feeling good about that DFL vote, all you Iron Rangers?  This is your livelihood, being exported to a state that already has more jobs than it can fill. 

So over the next year, people have to ask themselves; outside of state government union jobs, who’s really benefited?

Prediction:  Other than “liberal plutocrats”, the answer will be “nobody”.

The Deficit:  The DFL and its toadies in the mainstream media did their by-the-numbers prancing last week over the news that the state’s economy generated $400M more revenue than expected. 

That, of course, was the last quarter of GOP-driven rules. 

In fact, as House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt noted on Twitter, we raised more money with the budget the Democrats called “the All Cuts budget” than Governor Messinger Dayton did with his All-Tax budget. 

What’ll happen this time next  year?

Place your bets.

“We Did It For The Children”:  After a couple of years of efforts to pay off the “Education Funding Shift” – a DFL-spawned accounting gimmick that the GOP adopted to compromise with rapacious DFL minorities and governors in years past – the GOP had most of the “shift” paid down.  The growth in the economy – not the Democrat tax hikes – paid that “shift” down.  The DFL will want to claim credit – and the media won’t challenge him on it in the least.

Over the next two years, education will get more expensive, and the achievement gap…

…will go unmeasured, since the DFL worked overtime to remove accounability from its biggest, most influential bloc of government-union supporters.

But we’ll know.

Who’s Watching The Kids?: The DFL promised that unionization of daycares would improve childcare. 

Easy prediction: the price of childcare will rise, as its availability drops.  More poor Minnesotans will be squeezed out of the market.  The Democrats will need to add a new subsidy program to try to lower the prices whose hikes were their fault to begin with. 

There’ll be more.

SCENE:  At the DFL headquarters, on Plato Boulevard in Saint Paul.  Chairman Ken MARTIN is sitting in his office.

(Carrie LUCKING of the Alliance for a Better Minnesota walks in.  MARTIN springs to attention, salutes).

LUCKING:  As you were.    (MARTIN sits as LUCKING settles into an overstuffed leather recliner)

LUCKING:  So what’s going on?

MARTIN:  Well, we’re hitting the GOP over their War on Womym, we’re telling Minnesotans that taxing the 1% will make them taller and smarter, and…

LUCKING:  That’s not what I mean, and you know it.

MARTIN: Beg pardon?

LUCKING:  Beavis is at it again.

MARTIN:  Beavis?  You mean Represntative Winkler?

LUCKING:  Yes.  His tweet yesterday embarassed the party.  Summon Bakk and Thissen.

MARTIN:  Summon Bakk and Thissen!

(Tom BAKK and Paul THISSEN enter the room.  They stand attention and salute LUCKING, who returns the salute.  They remain standing).

LUCKING:  Explain!

(BAKK smirks at THISSEN with a look of badly-concealed contempt).

THISSEN:  I don’t know, your highness.

LUCKING:  Doesn’t he know he must clear all utterances with me before making them?

THISSEN:  Yes, your highness.  Normally calling black conservatives racist names is perfectly acceptable.

LUCKING:  Right.  But not this time.  How about the media?

BAKK:  Only Rupar has written about it so far.

LUCKING:  Who gave him permission?

THISSEN:  Nobody that I know of.  But it’s mostly been damage control so far, so it should be OK.

BAKK:  And Michelle Malkin and Dana Loesch.

LUCKING: Who?

BAKK:  The Filipina Pole-Dancer and some chick who probably boffed Grover Norquist to get a job.

LUCKING:  Ah.

(Through the window, we see Ryan WINKLER walking toward the door.  He’s singing Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back”).

LUCKING:  Let’s get his explanation.

(WINKLER walks into room, salutes LUCKING – who doesn’t return salute. He awkwardly releases salute…)

WINKLER:  Your highness?

LUCKING:  Explain yourself.   You tweeted this yesterday:

WINKLER:  Well, in my defense, I didn’t know “Uncle Tom” was racist.

BAKK:  What?  It’s up there with the “N”-bomb! A white guy using a term to refer to a black guy as a cringing, servile piece of chattel?

WINKLER:  Well, there’s some debate about that.

BAKK:  Not in like 150 years.

WINKLER:  Well, my bad.  And since when is it bad to bag on oreos who vote Republican?

LUCKING:  That’s immaterial.  What the hell else have you been writing? (Takes out pearl-encrusted iPhone, starts flipping through WINKLER’s twitter account) Oh, what the hell…:

And if Virginia wants a battle flag back from their war to defend slavery, they can march to Minnesota and take it.

— Ryan Winkler (@RepRyanWinkler) June 25, 2013

WINKLER: What?

LUCKING: The Civil War’s been over for nearly fifty years.

THISSEN:  At least!  And the ACLU won!

LUCKING:  Look – give me your Blackberry.  I need to see what else you’ve got in your Drafts.  (WINKLER hands over phone).

LUCKING (Flips through phone):  Wait – calling Representative Hillstrom “Screechy McMenstrual?”

WINKLER:  Is that bad?

LUCKING:  Yes!

WINKLER: But she was derailing Representative Martens’ gun bill!

LUCKING:  Thanks be to Alida that never went out.

THISSEN (quietly):  Still, you save that sort of thing for Republican lawmakers.  Like Tara Mack or Mary Franson.

WINKLER:  Ah.  Point taken.

LUCKING:  Didn’t you learn anything at Harvard Law School?   I mean, the school that great minds like Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz teach at?

WINKLER:  Dershowitz?  Ah!  Good ol’ Schlomo the Money-Grubbing Skinflint!

(LUCKING, BAKK and THISSEN glare at WINKLER)

WINKLER:  What?   Wait – that, too?  You gotta be kidding…

(And SCENE)

It was one of those “Mission Accomplished” moments.  But not in a good way.

A week or so I was talking with someone who was considering running for a fairly important political office. 

This person would be anidealcandidate for this office – by which I mean both “as a candidate” and “as a conservative policymaker”.  I’m not going to go into specifics – I don’t want to give anyone the faintest whiff of a thread by which to identify them. 

So what’s holding them back? 

Nope – not the fundraising. 

It’s the trashing they’d expect to get from the Alliance for a Better Minnesota (with the willing connivance of a media that carries ABM’s water). 

And I have to think; that has got to be one of Alida Messinger’s goals – to make running for office as a conservative such an intimately-brutal, self-abnegating torture test that good people can’t justify putting themselves and their families through it. 

Mission Accomplished.

MPR’s Daily Current – whose Keri Miller is as reliable a PR flak as the DFL has – talked about the upcoming Governor’s race – with a panel of media libs:

After the Friday Roundtable taping wrapped up, Kerri threw one more question to our guests off the air: “Who is emerging as a GOP candidate to challenge Dayton?”

Patricia Lopez: “I don’t even know if that name is out there yet.”

Steve Perry: “The name I keep hearing in sort of an ‘if only’ vein from Republicans is Julie Rosen.”

Lopez: “She has not said ‘no’ and [I heard her give] what sure sounded like a stump speech. She just dropped by the office and I thought, ‘That sure sounded like a stump speech.’”

Brian Bakst: “She would be headed for a primary no matter what, though, because that stadium legislation that she co-sponsored would be a non-sale within the convention.”

Rosen’s generally good, with a few unfortunate traits, most notably her penchant for being among the first to work “across the aisle” – an inevitable last resort when you’re in the minority…

…which she was not, back in 2012, she led a small group of Republicans to ingratiate themselves with Helga Braid Nation without bothering to get any spending concessions from the Governor.

Of course, working with the DFL sans quid pro quo is one of the key criteria on getting the media to accept you…

…temporarily.

I direct you to Berg’s Eleventh Law (“The conservative liberals “respect” for their “conservative principles” will the the one that has the least chance of ever getting elected.”) and its various corollaries, especially the McCain Corollary (“If that respected conservative ever develops a chance of getting elected, that “respect” will turn to blind unreasoning hatred overnight”). You may be certain that if Keri Miller and Patricia Lopez are talking up Julie Rosen, that the Alliance for a Better Minnesota has a campaign in the pocket against her, all ready to go.

Perhaps “Julie Rosen: Stadiums for the 1%”.

Lopez – the editor of that notable bellwether for conservatives, the Strib – notes:

Lopez: “Think about how hard it would be for Dayton to run against a moderate, Republican woman. Yikes.”

I’m not saying Rosen might not be an excellent candidate. I’m willing to be persuaded. Seriously.

But the fact that a round table of de facto DFL apparatchiks – Steve Perry, for Stu’s sake – are mutedly humming her praises can’t be a good thing, right off the bat.

The Star Tribune Editorial board, in a piece that reads like Lori Sturdevant, holds forth on the DFL budget proposal, such as it is – and illustrates the Strib’s deep institutional hypocrisy along the way.

The editorial is stupid, hypocritical, and awash in institutional self-interest disguised – like all of Sturdevant’s work – as populist dooo-goodism:

No sales tax on clothing or haircuts. No alcohol tax hike. No income tax increase for 98 percent of filers. On Sunday, after four months of launching a flotilla of tax ideas, the Legislature’s DFL majorities and Gov. Mark Dayton unveiled a final 2014-15 state budget outline that, on the revenue side of the ledger, is more notable for its omissions than its contents.

Well, no.  It’s notable for about two billion of its contents.  Nowhere in the Strib’s editorial does the number “$38,000,000,000” occur.

The Strib doesn’t want to give its few readers who actually follow numbers a nasty sticker shock.

There’s plenty to like on the spending side of their balance sheet. The DFL plan pumps an additional $725 million into public education from preschool through graduate school. That’s enough to reverse the deep higher-education cuts of the past two years; ease the squeeze that has some of the state’s public schools operating only four days a week; pay for all-day kindergarten, and offer preschool scholarships to low-income families.

Read:  It’s a big kickback to Education Minnesota; they paid good money for that Governor and Legislature, it’s time for them to get their piece of the action.  

The plan also includes measures to close a nagging $627 million budget gap, the residue not only of the Great Recession but also of a dozen years of legislative failure to balance the budget in a lasting way.

Further proof that  Lori Sturdevant wrote this.  Remember 2010?

A Six Billion Dollar Deficit?  

The Strib editorial board is rewriting history for the benefit of the smug and the stupid.

But remember – they have their own self-interest at heart:

But the plan’s tax features are a disappointment. They raise revenue in a way that puts Minnesota’s economic competitiveness at risk.

Particularly worrisome is a new marginal tax bracket that will apply to the state’s top 2 percent of incomes. The rate attached to that bracket remains to be set by a House-Senate conference committee, but it is almost certain to be among the nation’s highest, especially after an anticipated temporary surcharge for top earners “blinks on” to get state aid payments to schools back to their normal schedule…While that decision is true to Dayton’s 2010 campaign promises, it comes at an economic price. Making Minnesota an income tax outlier among the states won’t be helpful in attracting and sustaining private-sector investment.

Especially the next round of investors the Strib will need to stave off bankruptcy.

Right?

It gets worse:

In addition, like a bad penny, a bad tax policy idea that disappeared two months ago turned up again Sunday. Applying the state sales tax to some currently untaxed business-to-business purchases will be part of the plan, Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk announced. He was not specific about which items or services would become taxable, nor about how the revenue thus raised would be used, other than for “significant economic development.”

Oh, well, then.  Good enough for me!

The Strib is worried that taxing business to business purchases – which could include advertising, as well as pretty much anything in the supply chain – is going to hit their bottom line.  It’s a legitimate worry; businesses of all size, from the Strib all the way down to lil’ ol’ me, are going to see some arbitrary percentage come out of our revenues; we can pass it along and hope that our goods and services continue to get purchased, or we can eat a percentage – 5.5%?  6%? – lopped out of our revenues and try to ride it out.

Or move.

Regardless of how the money would be used, taxing business inputs is not sound policy. It layers hidden taxes into the cost of goods and services and takes a toll on wages and job creation in the affected industries. Those costs will affect low- and middle-class Minnesotans as surely as a clothing sales tax would. But the spurned clothing tax would have had the virtue of transparency, and could have been offset for low-income earners by a refundable tax credit, as the Senate tax bill provided.

Waaaah.

In for a bad penny, in for a poo-streaked pound, Strib.  This is the government that you wanted.  You did whatever it took to get this government; you served as an adjunct PR firm for the DFL, you covered up their transgressions, you whinged about “ALEC” while laughing over cocktails with “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, you did whatever it took to get them into power, and you do your best to cover up the train wreck that is Mark Dayton.

To be sure, businesses will benefit from some of the property tax relief measures that total a hefty $400 million over two years in the DFL plan. But low- and middle-income homeowners and renters ought to be favored as the tax conference committee allocates that sizable sum.

This is Minnesota’s source of information.  Good lord.

Where does the Strib think that “relief” comes from?

It’s money that’s redistributed from the parts of the state whose votes the DFL doesn’t need, to the parts whose votes they need to protect.

Who do you suppose that is, Strib?

Republicans have offered no alternative budget plan this session, evidently preferring to stand aside and criticize DFL decisions.

Further proof it’s Sturdevant.

The DFL offered no alternative budget in 2011.  The Strib editorial board had not a word to say about it.

They should know that if they scuttle a bonding bill, they will deserve to be seen by this session’s critics as part of the problem.

And the Strib will do its’ level best to make sure they do.

I can not wait for the Strib to go bankrupt again.

With much fanfare, a few DFL figureheads are introducing a gay marriage bill:

“Minnesotans spoke so loudly during this last election refusing to adopt that proposed constitutional amendment. It was a very clear statement, and I think we’re now ready to take the next step, and it means everything to our families.”

Surrounded by supporters, Clark and Sen. Scott Dibble, who was instrumental in the anti-amendment campaign, said their side is prepared to combat the flood of national money that’s been promised against the proposal.

I’ve been saying since the opening day of the session that the DFL was going to stall on gay marriage – and they have.

And they’ll continue to; even the DFL’s house PR organs (including the MinnPost, from which I quote) note that the DFL leadership is going very slow:

Although DFL leaders have said they personally support same-sex marriage, they haven’t been overly enthusiastic in discussing legislative action with the press.

This is echoed in fundraising letters being sent to gay marriage supporters; outstate DFLers, already alarmed by the DFL’s gun grabs and a DFL tax bill that is going over outstate like a Lindsay Lohan one-woman show in Branson, are queasy about the bill; they remember (even if the media doesn’t) that the Marriage Amendment passed, often convincingly, in most of Minnesota; it was stopped by cataclysmic turnout in the Metro.

Where, unlike greater Minnesota, the issue is a winner for the DFL.

My fearless prediction:  the DFL will introduce the bill with much fanfare (ok, that’s not a prediction, that’s what happened).  It’ll quietly die in committee.  And the Alliance for a Better Minnesota will send its flying monkeys out next year to spin the death as perfidy by a GOP caucus that, in fact, controls nothing.

Final scorecard:  those who prosper from low-information voters: 1.  Gays who wish to marry:  0.

And so it shall stay.