So according to the media, when then-Saint Paul mayor Randy Kelly – a moderate DFLer – endorsed George W. Bush for President in 2004, DFLers were right – says the media and the DFL – to repudiate him and chase him from public life…

…but today, when Arne Carlson – who endorsed Barack Obama and pointedly remained on the sidelines on Tim Pawlenty – speaks, we Republicans are supposed to bend a knee in reverence?

Especially since he represents exactly the sort of spend til you drop government that we conservatives are fighting against today?  The kind that Barack Obama and Mark Dayton support?

I haven’t figured that one out yet.

(The question came from regular commenter DiscoStoo, although not in exactly this form).

As this is rolling out, Tom Emmer is releasing the long-awaited Part 3 of the plan for his Administration – the re-engineering of how Minnesota government works.

It’s called “Living Within Our Means”, and it’s a tall order.

Here are the basics:

Minnesota Government Needs Fundamental Reform: Government must start to live within its means, rather than claiming a share of all income as an entitlement.

Economic Vitality And Fiscal Sustainability: Keeping government fat and happy at the expense of the entrepreneurs, the business community and the state’s hardest workers is no way to keep an economy running.  This needs to be a multipartisan effort.

Emmer Will Balance The Budget: Unlike Dayton, who swings and misses by over half a billion dollars (or maybe much, much more), Emmer’s budget is balanced and, as noted in Part 1 of The Plan, cuts taxes.

From the press release, here’s the plan:

Budget Plan Details:

1. Hold state spending in FY2012-13 to projected revenues minus job-creation tax relief.

I. Current state general fund spending (FY2010-11) is $30.7 billion

II. State revenue projections expect revenue to grow to $32.9 billion in FY2012-13

III. State government can perform its necessary functions within $33 billion over the next two years.

2. Reprioritize unsustainable, run-away human services spending to focus on the most vulnerable.

i. Refocus spending on programs for children and seniors which have been historically underfunded.

ii. Work with the legislature to reform programs for adults.

iii. Health and Human Services will total $9.6 billion; a $500 million increase in state funding.

3. Reform the relationship between state and local governments.

i. Reform Local Government Aid to focus solely on public safety and critical infrastructure needs.

ii. Give local governments relief from state mandates.

Put state government bureaucracies on a diet.

I. Cut bureaucracies and programs which are not fundamental to state government’s mission.

II. Reduce the government workforce through attrition and early-retirement.

III. Merge agencies to streamline decision making and reduce costs.

More – very, very much more – coming tomorrow.

But the important part is this;  the Emmer Budget does what Mark Dayton doesn’t have the guts or institutional wisdom to do; it cuts spending.  It pushes government to do better with what it can afford – meaning “what we the people can afford in these miserable economic times”.

Emmer attacks the disease.  Dayton merely throws other peoples’ money at the symptoms.

This is a game-changer.

Tomorrow in Shot In The Dark: The Emmer Budget Plan in detail, suitable for passing on to your friends, family and co-workers.

…Emmer’s budget plan is going to be impacting.

I won’t be able to write about it live – but I’ll have details tonight/early tomorow.

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.

For two months, the DFL and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) asked “Where’s the Emmer budget plan?”  They knew, of course, that it’d be stupid for Emmer to launch his plan at a time when nobody but reporters, wonks, partisans and political junkies cared about it – but that’s not how the Frame Game is played.

But then Emmer came out with a plan, on Labor Day.  And it was a good one.  And it made the DFL’s chanting point look pretty stupid.

Then the gears switched; Emmer “didn’t give details” for his plan.

Wouldn’t the DFL feel stupid if Emmer suddenly dropped a pile of details?

Hm.

More soon.

If you look on the leftyblogs and on Twitter, you will see another surge of people referring to Tom Horner – the Independence Ventura party candidate – as “Republican Tom Horner”.  Especially since he was endorsed yesterday by “Republican” (albeit in name only ) former governor Arne Carlson.

In fact, I think it looks like a huge surge of this sort of spin-mongering.

I’m going to bet that means the Dayton camp has seen another poll showing Horner drawing vastly more DFLers than Republican likely voters.

I had the honor and pleasure of MCing a fundraiser for the District 45 GOP last night, at The Lodge in Robbinsdale.  The Lodge is, by the way, owned by the same people who own “Bill’s Gun Shop”, right next door.  Guns ‘n booze; God  Bless America.

I got to meet SD45 candidate Nick Peterson, HD45A’s Mark Martin and HD45B candidate Reid Johnson.

Full disclosure; I got some appetizers and – this is fun – a $20 Holiday gift certificate!  In all my years of blogging and doing political speeches, this is the very first bit of portable, spendable consideration I have ever gotten.

Watch for the leftyblogs to start writing about the scourge of conservative bloggers getting gas cards.

The appetizers were delicious.

Expect a photo-essay – probably tomorrow.

Do you remember way back last week, when the biggest crisis of the week was “Emmer didn’t get his budget validated by the Minnesota Department of Revenue“?

Either does the media, I’ll bet.  From DFL-leaning Tweep “Stowydad“:

Dayton says he has sought tax plan info from state gov’t. Revenue Dept. has no recent record of request by, answer to Dayton camp

And I’m going to suggest that, unlike Emmer’s plan, it hasn’t been vetted in pieces, either.

While I’ll never, ever label a blog post “breaking” or “developing”, let’s just say I’m gonna try to find out more about this one.

Betty McCollum (DFL, MNCD4)  does her best to insulate herself from dissent.

Tonight is your chance to show her anyway.  She’s got a “Town Hall” going on at Macalester tonight, at the Macalester Chapel, 1600 Grand Avenue in Saint Paul.  And the good guys are rallying against her.

Get there at 5:30.

I can’t make it – I have a prior campaign-related commitment.  But if you go – and I hope you do! – leave a comment.

Last week, Tom Emmer released his education plan.

The left’s been sputtering ever since.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Education in Minnesota, like most entitlement programs, is a “baseline” program.  It doesn’t start from zero every year; it starts with the previous years’ budget, and adds to it.  What what you add is where the political fun and games start.

P.J. O’Rourke, in his classic exposition of American government Parliament of Whores, explained baseline spending.  I’ll paraphrase.  Say there’s a state Human Service program to help provide treatment to deranged leftybloggers.  It gets $10,000,000 a year in 2010.  For the 2012 biennium, the DFL will claim that there will be a 10% hike in utilization, and the program will thus required$11 million dollars.  The Republicans can say that trying to make leftybloggers sane has diminishing returns, but raise appropriations for the program $500,000.  Both sides can say they’re raising program’s budget; the Dems can say the GOP is cutting the program; both are telling the truth, and both are lying.

———-

So too with the education budget.

Mark Dayton’s eduation budget, in his four-page “plan”, calls for a $15.6 billion educatino budget.

Emmer’s proposed  budget $13.8B – identical to the current budget (and actually a slight hike, since the 2008 budget inluded half a billion in federal stimulus money that, trust is, is wasted, gone forever, never coming back.

So that means $1.8 billion in new spending going to the classroom, right?

Wrong.

Dayton proposes to pay back “the shift” – money deferred to subsequent years in previous budget solutions – next year.  Minnesota’s education budget usually pays 90% of the annual allotment in the current year and defers 10% to the subsequent year; under the budget compromise, the deferral rose to 27%.   That means that Minnesota schools are floating 1.8 billion in various borrowing against future state payments.

Dayton wants to pay that back next year.

No, wait.  Let’s be accurate.

Dayton wants to crank your taxes up by $1.8 Billion dollars next year – $300 for every man, woman and child in Minnesota – to cover the shift.

Now, in normal times, with the economy ticking along and revenue coming in in surplus lots, that’d make some sense – but in those kinds of times, there’d have been no need for a shift in the first place.

Tom Emmer proposes to wait on paying the shift back to 2014, when, with a little luck, the economy will be doing better (which will itself be more likely if Emmer is in office), rather than saddling the taxpayer with it right now, at the depths of the Obama Recession.

Here’s where the DFL is trying to fool the people; the DFL’s spinbloggers are portraying he difference as a “$1.8 Billion Dollar Cut to education!”.

It’s a lie, of course.

The Emmer budget will keep the actual money to the classroom the same as in the current budget; the main difference is the shift.

“But what about inflation?”, the left countercaterwauls.  Simple; the biggest element in education’s inflation is union labor costs.

I think they can tighten the ol’ belt for a year or two like the rest of us.

What do you think?

I fell asleep last night before I could put up a post about my appearance on Rob Port’s “Say Anything Morning Show” on KZFG in Fargo this morning.

We talked about the DFL’s counterspin of the Emmer education budget, the huge gaps in the Dayton budget plan, and looked ahead to the third part of Emmer’s campaign plan.

Hopefully we’ll have audio later today.

Seen on Twitter last week:

MN Gov Hopeful Tom Emmer Doesn’t Want Schools Telling His Kids Not to Taunt Gay Kids

It pointed to a post on a gay website about Emmer’s opposition to a “bullyting” bill larded with objectionable amendments that had more to do with keeping plaintiffs’ lawyers employed than stopping bullying.  Money quote:

Yeah, pesky big brother! Get out of the way of parents teaching their kids whether or not pushing the faggot down the steps is okay.

They’re getting deranged.

Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring does the job the Twin Cities media juuuuust can’t seem to get around to (emphasis added by me):

During his mini-infomercial with Esme Murphy, Mark Dayton admitted that the highest income tax rate he’d propose would be less than 11 percent.

Based on Minnesota Department of Revenue guidelines, which I wrote about here, that means Dayton’s budget wouldn’t come close to balancing. Here’s what the guidelines say about revenue projections:

So how much money would boosting income tax rates actually deliver? According to the revenue department, each tenth-of-a-percent increase would currently bring in an additional $27 million annually, or $54 million each biennium.

Dayton said that he wouldn’t raise taxes more than 3 percentage points, meaning his tax the rich scheme would generate approximately $1,600,000,000 in additional revenue. Dayton also said that he’d raise property taxes on homes valued at more than $1,000,000.

Based on that information, and assuming that Dayton would essentially approve of the spending increases from last session’s budget bills, Dayton’s ‘detailed budget’ would fall at least $3,000,000,000 short of balancing.

It’s time that Minnesotans realized that Dayton’s supposed detailed budget isn’t a budget blueprint. It’s a tax increase. PERIOD. END OF DISCUSSION.

It is, literally, nothing more than throwing money at the deficit.

The Dayton “plan”…:

• Does not solve the deficit: As Gary notes – but Esme Murphy for some reason won’t – Dayton’s budget comes up way short on its promise to “solve the deficit”.
• Shifts the burden to the legislature, which could barely pass a $400 million tax hike in the 2008 session, will not be passing any huge tax increases in the next session, with the likely blood-letting among tax-and-spend DFLers
• Will required Dayton to push the definition of “the rich” well down into the middle class:  if jacking up taxes on couples whose adjusged gross income is $150,000 a year leaves Dayton’s “plan” billions short, how far down will the definition of “rich” have to get pushed?

Here’s the biggest question of all:  Gary Gross asks some excellent questions.

Why the hell didn’t Esme Murphy ask any of this?

The simple fact is this – the media isn’t going to ask Mark Dayton any of the tough questions.

Saturday morning I had KQRS on as I did some chores in the garage.

Now, I rarely listen to “classic rock”; most of it isn’t really “my” music. I was listening mainly to “Morning Show” reruns.

And they played “I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones.

(Followed by a Pink Floyd song).

My analysis of Nate Silver’s “analysis” of the MN Goober race.

Just listen to Betty McCollum.  And then peel off a couple of bucks for Teresa Collett.

Rich Stanek is running for Henco Sheriff. He’s one of the good guys.

Ed’s classmate.

UPDATE:  I’ll be on Marty Owings’ “Radio Free Nation” at 7PM.

Yeah, we miss you now.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 9AM-3PM.

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John or some combination thereof kick off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I follow from 1-3PM Central.  We’ll be talking with Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek, as well as a look back at the week’s news, and the ninth anniversary of 9/11.
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on from 9-11 on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  We’re broadening the franchise; two stations, now!
• And for those of you who like your constitutionalism straight up with no chaser, don’t forget the Sons of Liberty, from 3-5!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream).
• Podcast at Townhall, usually by Monday
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• And make sure you fan us on Facebook!

Join us!

I thought I’d respond to some of the email I get most often here at Shot In The Dark.

Q: You come in for a lot of fairly scabrous attacks from a lot of leftybloggers.  How do you deal with that?

A: My basic assumption has always been that the opinion of anyone who doesn’t revere me isn’t worthy of contempt.

Q: Hah, Merg!  You are teh unethikel.  You poast derring the wurk day!?!

A: Nope.  In the past five years, I can think of two times I’ve blogged from the office, and both were for really big news flashes – Heller, and one other.  And they were both during breaks in the action at work, to boot.

I write, usually, from 5:30AM until about 7AM.  Sometimes, rarely, in the evening, although that is rare indeed.  Which isn’t to say I’m not thinking about what I”m going to post; when I actually do start writing, I usually have a posting pretty thoroughly mapped out in my mind, and can pretty much do data entry.  And I’m a very fast typist.

I am that good.

It helps that Wordpress – my blog editing tool – allows me to schedule posts for anytime I want them, so they can publish immediately, or at any time in the future that I want.  So I can run a bunch of posts in the early morning, and spot a few more to run at noon, and occasionally schedule something for much further out.

In fact, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, this blog would continue posting content for (checks schedule) right around two years.   Although a lot of it wouldn’t make sense; in October of 2012, I have a piece about the North Dakota National Guard landing on Guadalcanal that, so far, says “NDNG Guad; Bloody Nose, M1, Jungle, town”.   I could see it becoming a literary genre in its own right, really – but all in all, I’m hoping to be alive to flesh the notes out.

Still – those pieces I do on music of the eighties, and my World War II pieces, and most of my “Twenty Years Ago Today” stuff is written months – sometimes years  – in advance.  The current record?   I have a piece about the thirtieth anniversary of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “Shoot Out The Lights” scheduled for April of 2012; it’s been completely written for probably 18 months.

I’m a little manic that way.

Q: Whatever happened to “Twenty Years Ago Today”  Did you have much  of a life twenty years ago?

A: No, I really didn’t.

Well, that and some of the people who were in my life twenty years ago have said they don’t want to appear in my blog.

But I can announce this; the series will be making a return in coming months.  Actually, it did return, sort of; I posted my first epi in 15 months a few weeks ago.  But if you like the series, I have episodes spotted out for the next year or so.

The crazy part?  I started the series five years ago this month.  Those five years didn’t go nearly as fast the first time.

Q: Why so much writing about the gubernatorial race?  Do you work for the Emmer campaign?

A: This campaign has given me lots of opportunity to do some of the things I haven’t had much time to do with this blog – actual reporting.  Digging into stories and analyzing them.  In this case, the “story” is the boundless, slimy perfidy of the DFL and Mark Dayton’s campaign.  Let’s just say it’s a target-rich environment.

But no, I do not work for the Emmer campaign.  I keep my “Disclosures” section pretty rigorously up to date.  Unlike the Minnesota Independent, I am rigorously honest about this blog’s backstory.

Q: Oh, bull.  You have so much inside info from the Emmer camp, you gotta be working for them.

A: Nope.  I have plenty of contacts in conservative and GOP circles – one of the benefits of doing, I dunno, a successful conservative blog and talk show for all these years – and those contacts translate into “sources”, when it comes time to report on things.  But no; I have no connection to the Emmer campaign that every other “journalist” in town doesn’t have on whatever “beat” they cover.  Absolutely none.

Q: You are such a shill.  You are an idiot.  You are stupid. No intelligent person can believe what you do.

A: Mom?

Q: Why don’t you write more about music?  It’s what you do best.

A: Why thanks.  But throughout the history of this blog, I’ve written about whatever crossed my mind, when it’s crossed it.

That said, I have a solid two more years of “This Was The Year That Was” posts, about eighties music, coming up.  The pace is dilatory, but I’m kinda jazzed about the actual articles.

Q: You are wasting my time.  You have no expert knowledge of Minnesota politics.

A: You came to me, jagoff.  Not the other way around.

Q: What was that Gubernatorial  prediction again?

A: Emmer 47, Dayton 44, Horner 8.

Q: How about the CD6 race?

A: Bachmann 52, Clark 42, Anderson 6.

Q: OK, smart guy; CD2?

A: Kline 62, Madore 38.

Q: You think you’re sooooooo smart.

A: No.  I don’t.  Honestly, I feel like a moron most of the time.

Part of it is that kids on the Great Plains generally grow up with the sense that they really aren’t anything special; you’re not bad, but don’t go expecting to change the world, because you’re just not that big a deal.  There’s even a Norwegian word for it.  I forget the word – Fjøreløren, for all I know – “Janteloven“, or “Jante’s Law”, which is a constant dynamic in small-town Scandinavian life – but it translates to “knowing your place in the scheme of things”.  Not getting “uppity”, to translate it to American.

Anyway – long story short, I usually feel like the dumbest person in any room I’m in.

Unless I’m at “Drinking Liberally”.  Then I’m in the 99th percentile.

Q: You are teh heppocreet and you lie!

A:  “Hypocrisy” is one of those concepts that sloppy usage has perverted out of all semblance of reality in recent years.  So please focus on this; on what issue do I demand that someone else make a moral decision from which I exempt myself?  That would be hypocrisy.

“Lying”, again, is another one.  It’s entirely possible – albeit unlikely – that I’ve made a mistake on some issue or another; bobbled a number, mis-read a quote, whatever.  An error made in good faith, like “Paul Wellstone was elected in 1988”,  is not a “lie”; “I bagged Marisa Tomei last night”, alas, is – or would be, were I not using it as a f’rinstance.

Which brings up an interesting question; is a statement like  “9/11 is an inside job” or “the Holocaust never happned”  or “Mark Dayton will be a fantastic governor” or “the moon landings were faked” a “lie”?  All are absurd – but people can say either one and honestly believe ’em.

Q: Why are you so arrogant?

A: Please.  Like you’d understand my motivations.  Sheesh.

Q: Where are Roosh and Bogus Doug?

A: Not writing at the moment.  They both have other things going on – and my deal with them from the very beginning was always “write as much as you want; once a day, once ayear, I don’t care”.  They took me seriously on it!

Q: I like your World War II stuff.  Why don’t you write more?

A: Were there other major wars going on 70 years ago today?

No, I’d love to write more of the non-political stuff.  After the election, I likely will focus a lot more on some of my ancillary interests.

But this election is a hoot!

Q: Why do you bag on leftybloggers?

A: Because so many of them are just sloppy thinkers and crummy writers.

Don’t get me wrong – most of them are good human beings (there are notable exceptions); some of them are capable of a rational argument, and a few are even fairly bright.  But for whatever reason, the gene pool among the great mass of lefty bloggers is just really really shallow.  Like their reasoning.

In fact, I’m pondering starting a big series after the election; “Logic for Leftybloggers”.  I’m thinking of going through the list of classic logical fallacies and applying them to the sorts of “template” premises you see leftybloggers falling back on all the time.

Because I’m all about the education.

We’ll see.

Q: When are you going to update your blog’s design?

A: Good question.  It crosses my mind from time to time.   But I’ve got seven and a half years invested in this look, and I kinda like it.

Q: Couldn’t you go with a snazzier color scheme?

A: I don’t care about snazz.  I’m a usability guy. Black text on white background is the most readable combination; Verdana is a nice, readable font.  Lots of blue is relaxing and agreeable-looking.  “Friendly”, and also just plain easy to read in a hurry.

Q: Why don’t you go with a three-column layout? Everyone’s doing it!

A: Never.  Never never never.  I hate three-column layouts (unless you need a left column for navigation, and I do not).  Hate hate hate.  I mean, if you like ’em, put ’em an your own blog, and God bless ya, but I hate hate hate hate hate three column layouts.  The content is king on a blog, especially a blog like mine that’s not part of any larger enterprise.

The western Human eye starts reading on the left, and so I don’t want my audience to have to pick their way over a bunch of links and ads and unneeded navigation and crap to get to the actual content.  Furthermore, I want the left margin to the usable to provide “scanning cues” to users who are scrolling down the page looking for something interesting; clogging up that left margin with ads and lists and twitter feed widgets to try to find what they want.

The left side of the page is the most valuable real estate on the page.  Putting a bunch of links and lists and crap on the left side is like putting the restrooms and service corridors at the front of your mall.

Yuk.

Q: How long are you going to do this blog?

A: Until it stops being fun.  We’re nowhere close yet.

Just so we’re clear on this:  Mark Dayton’s education “plan” calls for three things:

1. Gutting charter schools
2. Ending federal-mandated testing
3. Giving the teachers union a bunch of money.

To contrast with this, Tom Emmer is releasing his own plan, as we speak.

His education plan is focused on a few simple, key things:

• ensure that K-12 funding is held harmless in the next biennium.
• improve school results through broad reforms.
• cutting mandates on schools

There are also reforms including  initiatives related to teacher effectiveness, kindergarten readiness,and – this oughtta be interesting – the redesign of teacher preparation programs.

And – this should play interestingly on the left – the state will repay the education shift to local school districts in accordance with state law.

Expect the DFL to respond “we really need a huge increase”, and for the union to say the only “reform” needed is more union teachers.

More later today.

They said that if I voted for John McCain, the government would trash our property rights like John Bonham trashing a hotel room.

And they were right:

Sheriffs in North Carolina want access to state computer records identifying anyone with prescriptions for powerful painkillers and other controlled substances.

The state sheriff’s association pushed the idea Tuesday, saying the move would help them make drug arrests and curb a growing problem of prescription drug abuse. But patient advocates say opening up people’s medicine cabinets to law enforcement would deal a devastating blow to privacy rights.

One of the purported cost savers in Obamacare is electronic medical records kept – eventually – in a national database.

And when the government controls your data, your data is only as safe as the least power-hungry or dishonest government official wants it to be.

Joe Bodell at the Minnesota “Progressive” Project may know his technology.  But he needs to work a little on his cultural and language literacy:

It’s always been a curiosity to me that our media calls radical Muslim leaders “clerics” while people like Terry in Florida and Phelps in Kansas get to hang on to the title “Pastor.”

{{facepalm}}

That’s partly because Christian churches have  a fairly uniform system for naming and identifying clergy; Islam’s system isn’t nearly as uniform. “Pastor” is a very broadly-accepted definitive for protestant clergy; “Father” works for Catholics, while “Rabbi” generally works for Jews.

“Imam” is usually, but not always, an appropriate definitive for a Muslim prayer leader.

Sounds less ominous than “cleric”, doesn’t it?Are we trying to make the other side’s radicals sound like Dungeons & Dragons characters? Does that make them scarier, somehow?

Only if you are completely unaware that “cleric” is the singular of the plural “clergy” – which, to be fair, didn’t pop up in “Dungeons and Dragons”.

More momentum building among the Dems Mo for extending the Bush tax  cuts:

Momentum built Thursday for extending all of the Bush-era tax cuts after President Obama avoided a veto threat and a key Senate Democrat voiced support for the extension.

War policy. Guantanamo.  Patriot Act . Tax cuts.

Not sure if we have any policy reason to miss Bush yet; it’s like he never left.

Did Tom Emmer lie?

No.

But we’ll come back to that.  We’ve got a bit of business to take care of first.

———-

It’s time to inaugurate a new Berg’s Law.  These laws of human and political behavior are based on decades of observing people and their behavior, and, as “laws”, have passed beyond mere theory.

Anyway – there were nine.  Now there are ten.  Here’s the new one:

Berg’s Tenth Law of Quantum Context: When a liberal says a conservative is “lying”, the odds of the “lie” being merely an ambiguity triggerging some form of cognitive dissonance increases in geometric proportion with the volume and stridency of the liberal’s declaration.

That law will rear its head shortly.

———-

If there’s one thing I like about Tom Emmer, it’s that he’s a real guy.

When Emmer talks, you know you’re getting Tom Emmer, and not some slickee-boy focus-group-polished polibot facade.   That’s played against the part of his public image his opponents and the Twin Cities media (they are, at an institutional level, one and the same) have chosen to spotlight; “he has a temper”, intones a Twin Cities media that spent a couple of decades covering for congenital martinet Mike Hatch’s Queeg-like administration at the Attorney General’s office and his legendary temper.

He’s a big, beefy guy with an iron handshake and a sense of dynamic magnetism that wins people over when they actually meet him – which is why the DFL and media (pardon the redundancy) are playing such eager ball on “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”‘s smear campaign.

Which shows off, by the way, some of the media’ s hypocrisy; their editorials will bemoan, for three years at a shot, the impossibility of “real people”, with families and warts and skeletons and real-life jobs and careers and stories, getting into politics, and how opposition research will eventually limit the political gene pool to people who’ve bred themselves for campaigning from childhood – people who can not possibly related to regular voters.  And then we get exactly such a regular guy – and the media spends two months misrepresenting his civil court records and his 20-and-30-year-old reckless driving convictions.

Anyway: like most people, Emmer’s great strength is also a weakness.  His passion for his cause and his campaign, and everything it stands for, makes every room he’s in positively throb with energy.  That’s a huge strength;  watching Emmer on a stage with with his opponents is a study in contrasts; Tom Horner is like a human MP3 player loaded with message lines stuck on “shuffle”; Mark Dayton looks like he’s about to demand to go watch Wapner.  Emmer, on the other hand, is sharp, engaged, and thinks on his feet as well as anyone in Minnesota politics.

As opposed to “consistently repeats a rehearsed, focus-grouped, finely-tuned message vetted by his message cops”.

And that’s the downside of Emmer’s big strength; he occasionally ad-libs; often it’s a home run; sometimes he fans; once in a while – the tip flap – he bats into a double play.

I give Emmer – or anyone who speaks exemporaneously but genuinely, including the likes of Paul Wellstone, who was a spotty public speaker but nothing if not geuine, warts and all – a lot of slack.  Because that’s how real people who are passionate about what they think and believe speak; straight from the gut, damn the torpedoes.

I like that quality in Emmer, because that’s how I speak.  I’m usually dead-on; I occasionally muff one.  I pick myself up, dust myself off, and go forth to kick more ass.

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So the other day, Emmer released the first installment of his budget plan.  It is, for the moment, a high-level set of goals and principles, as befits a guy from the party not in power (yeah, Pawenty’s the goverrnor, but his power, brilliantly as he’s exercised it, has been entirely defensive).

And as part of presenting that installment, Emmer said that the  proposal had been vetted by the Department of Revenue.

Someone from DoR, asked later that day, said that “Emmer’s plan” had not been vetted.

“Lie!”, screamed the usual assortment of DFL chanting-point bots in the blogs and on Twitter.

That’s where Berg’s Tenth Law comes in.

I talked with two different sources close to the episode.  Both said that Emmer – speaking extemporaneously and on a bit of a roll – wrote a rhetorical check that the bank needed to run through two times; he mis-spoke just a tad.  Because “the plan” had not, in its entirety, been vetted by the DoR.

But every single part of it, individually, has been.

Because there is, in fact, nothing new in Emmer’s plan.  All of it has come out in one proposal in the house or another over the past few years, from the conservative bloc led by Emmer and Mark Buesgens and Laura Brod and Keith Downey and a few other notable fiscalcons.   And each of those proposals has, in turn, been vetted by DoR when they were going through the legislative process, according to the same two sources with intimate knowledge of the gestation of Emmer’s budget proposal.

So while nobody has walked Emmer’s entire budget proposal into the DoR and gotten the entire document signed off, there is nothing new in the proposal as far as the DoR is concerned.

More on that later.

So Emmer turned many small approvals, in the heat of the moment and on a stage at a moment when his campaign was making a great leap forward, into one big one that happened not to exist.

Is it a “lie?”

Depends on what the definition of the word “is” is, doesn’t it?

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So does a conflation of many approvals into one for purposes of giving a speech – an infinitesimal rhetorical bobble under any normal circumstances – make Tom Emmer a bad candidate?

Hell no.  The underlying facts are worthy of debate (which is why the media and the DFL chanting point bots are focusing so hard on everything but the underlying facts).  So what if Tom Emmer bobbles the occasional I or T?  I will take a real, genuine person with passion for his principles every single time, all other things being equal, over a focus-grouped talking-point-bot.

Every single time.

So, I think, would most Minnesotans, if they thought about it.

Which is why the Twin Cities media and the DFL’s noise machine is trying to keep people from thinking about it.