Dayton planned the shutdown all along.

As that great observer of Minnesota political nature Nick Coleman used to say (and say, and say, and say, and say…), “connect the dots, people”.

The MNGOP will help you connect them.

Evidence of Dayton Administration’s Efforts To “Create Chaos” & “Greatest Possible Pain” During Shutdown

Spread the word.

I have a couple of predictions for you.

Prediction 1:  Polled To Death – Take this to the bank:  sometime before July 1, the Strib will run another “Minnesota Poll” in re the shutdown.

The poll’s headlines will be within one rhetorical standard deviation of  “65% of Minnesotans Favor Compromise On Budget Impasse”.

The crosstabs, carefully buried, will show that DFLers are oversampled by 50%; those trying to investigate the faint whiff of metrocentrism in the polling will be frustrated by the absolute lack of crosstabs showing geography.

Prediction 2: Dead Silence – Despite the avalanche of evidence coming out of the state bureaucracy that Dayton is not only pushing for the shutdown, but actively trying to make it “hurt” as much as possible, there will be not one word on the subject from the Strib, WCCO, the PiPress, the KARE Bears (whose John Cronan is rapidly shaping up to be an Esme Murphy-grade stealth-DFL  propagandist), or MPR.

Place your bets.

Or make your own predictions, in the comment section.

As the Attorney General files to get the courts to determine what workers are “essential”…:

In her petition, Swanson asked the court to fund a broad expanse of state services and appoint a “special master” — essentially a shutdown referee, to sort the details.

…Governor Dayton goes back to his old dodge:

Dayton offered a different solution in his petition.

“Order the parties to mediate,” Dayton asked the court. He suggested former Supreme Court Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz or former Associate Justice James Gilbert to act as court-appointed mediators. Swanson had asked that Gilbert be appointed special master.

Only if mediation fails, Dayton’s brief said, should the court infringe “on the constitutional powers of the legislative and executive departments.”

For starters – ask any lawyer:   Mediation only works when both sides are entering into the discussion in good faith.  As Gary Gross, Janet Beihoffer and I have all shown this week,  Dayton is not.  He has been staging the shutdown from the word go.

(Leftybloggers will chime in around this point: “But the GOP was talking about a shutdown right after the election!”.  Yep.  Many of us expected that Dayton, facing an overwhelming legislative deficit with a real mandate, unlike his near-record weak plurality and feckless Legislative contingent, would head straight for the shutdown, and let his buddies in the DFL-allied media do the hard work for him – a prediction that is, as always, correct.  The GOP said “bring on the shutdown”; Dayton actively sought, planned for, and ensured it would happen).

Getting a late start on the bike commuting this year.  Part of it is because my commute jumped from six to about 20 miles.  Part of it is because my bike – a 1983 Fuji Monterey that I got in, well, 1983 – is showing its age; it’s a bit of a hangar queen these days.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s earned it.  I’ve got more miles on that bike that on some cars I’ve owned.

So I test drove some other bikes this past week, and have finally taken the plunge on a new ride.  More details – perhaps in a revived “Hot Gear Friday” – coming soon.

Next step – find a park-and-ride about 5-6 miles out from the office, drive and park there, and ride the rest of the way in (the office has a shower, thankfully).

Goal:  by the end of summer, be doing the whole 16 mile haul (it’s shorter via bike trails and lanes) at least once a week.

When I saw the headline on the Minnesota Birkeydependent – “Backers of gay marriage ban seek to prevent disclosure about campaign spending, donors” is how it reads – my spidey-sense just knew it would be in there.

What, you ask?

That little thing that’s there whenever any talk of campaign finance disclosure – by Republicans – comes up.

Stay with me, here.  Birkey writes:

The groups behind a ballot measure that would put a ban on same-sex marriage in the Minnesota Constitution urged the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board on Tuesday to retain a rule that would allow corporations to make unlimited contributions in support of the ballot measure. The Minnesota Family Council (MFC) testified that it shouldn’t have to disclose any of its donors in the campaign to pass the amendment, while Minnesota for Marriage, of which MFC and the National Organization for Marriage are a part, brought in attorneys from the Citizens United Supreme Court case to argue that political spending by corporations on the amendment push should be shielded from disclosure laws.

Now as you know, I favor scrapping all restrictions on domestic campaign contributions – but requiring all campaigns and parties to immediately, as in “within one hour of receiving the donation, and before cashing the checks”, disclosing all donations on the internet, and keeping those donations available for years.

But that’s not really the point of this post.

No, it’s this.  Indeed, I skipped over most of Birkey’s piece, until I found what I knew I’d find, immediately, upon reading the headline:

But the majority of the testifiers supported the board in changing its opinion on corporate disclosure.

Mike Dean of Common Cause Minnesota said, “Minnesota has a long history of supporting disclosure.”

He said it helps the board gather and detect violations and cited a complaint his group filed against the National Organization for Marriage and the Minnesota Family Council over ads the groups ran in 2010 that they did not report.

“Having this knowledge allows the public to make informed decisions,” he said. “The public has a right to know who is making this political speech. Without the knowledge about who is making political speech, the public can’t evaluate the information or misinformation.”

Fascinating assertion, coming from Mike Dean…

…who leads “Common Cause of Minnesota”, which agitates for transparancy (on the part of non-“progressive” organizations)…

…and whose organization shows $600,000 donations last year, every penny of them anonymous.

Frequent commenter Joe Doakes, from Como Park, emails:

Coleman cleared of false charges:

http://www.twincities.com/ci_18274772?nclick_check=1

Palin cleared of false charges:

http://www.twincities.com/ci_18274772?nclick_check=1

Bush cleared of Dan Rather’s “false but accurate” charges

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12551

But hey, that’s just politics as usual; both sides do it all the time, right?

Really? Perhaps Dog Gone can do some of her famous fact checking and report on three major national Democrats whose careers were ruined by false charges brought by Republicans. Otherwise, it begins to look as if Democrats have established a pattern of bring false charges in order to deceive the voters and the only reason I can think for doing that is Democrats know that if voters have a reasonable choice, Democrats will lose. So they cheat.

I’m ready to be fact-checked.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

It was a well-known part of the Clinton playbook; whenever attacked, go for the Three D’s – Deny, Delay, Destroy.

And since it’s always better to be on attack than on defense, it makes perfect sense to go straight to destroy first.

Republicans just don’t get that.

BTW, Joe – someone will chime in “what about the Swiftboaters!”.  Because to the left, “slander” is “telling the truth about a prominent Democrat”.

President Obama denies individual aid for Henco storm victims:

Rybak and state officials learned Tuesday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) denied Minnesota’s request for individual assistance to homeowners, renters and businesses affected by the tornado. In its decision, the agency said “the damage from this event to dwellings was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the combined capabilities of the State, affected local governments and voluntary agencies to warrant the designation of Individual Assistance for Hennepin County.”

In search of other options for federal help, Rybak called the White House on Tuesday. The response: an invitation to meet with President Obama and other federal officials on Monday to discuss possibilities for federal help for the tornado-torn North Minneapolis neighborhood, which has one of the city’s highest concentrations of poverty and unemployment. The request for individual assistance from FEMA was meant to help homeowners, renters and businesses lacking insurance to cover the damage.

As David Strom noted on Facebook:

We have Dayton, who was a Democrat Senator. We have two Democrat Senators, one who served with Obama. We have Rybak, who supposedly a favorite of Obama’s. We have a tornado hitting one of the most economically depressed areas in the state.

Result? Minimal help from Washington.

When the Party of Pork can’t even deliver the pork when it’s needed, what do we keep them around for?

Yet again, as we watch the political contortions of Anthony Weiner, we see the great political truism; it’s not the act, it’s the cover-up.

And as we’ve seen over and over and over again, there’s nothing the media likes more than unravelling a coverup.  Of a Republican (or a Democrat who, like Weiner, has been deemed a liability).

So let’s talk cover up.

While the GOP presented a balanced budget in May – long before the DFL had done in the previous couple of biennia – Mark Dayton, who never presented a balanced budget and thus in effect never presented a budget at all, vetoed it after weeks of stonewalling.

Evidence is emerging from various Human Services and Department of Transportation sources that Dayton planned this shutdown all along.  The fact that the Administration and the Legislature were eight tenths of a percent apart shows that Dayton has no interest in negotiation.  In the meantime, he – his surrogates at “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, the attack-PAC funded by the unions, Dayton’s ex-wife Alita Messinger, the Dayton family and Mark Dayton himself – are running ads, constantly, trying to blame Republican intranigence for the shutdown.

And you only hear about it on the blogs.

On Channel Four, where Esme Murphy spends her every Sunday morning painting the toenails of DFL politicians?

Nothing.

On Minnesota Public Radio, which just finished a huge lobbying campaign to defend their federal and state subsidies because their “no rant, no slant” news coverage is just too vital to allow to allow any cuts?

Where are Mike Mulcahy, Tom Scheck and Tim Pugmire?

The Strib?  It’s no secret we don’t expect much of the newspaper of the “Minnesota Poll“; the paper that ran its sole story about Mark Dayton’s history of alcoholism and mental illness in January of 2010; half a year before the DFL primary, and a good nine months before 90% of the voters even knew there was an election coming up.  Still, one might think someone at 425 Portland would figure there was some utility in, y’know, covering the news.

Rachel Stassen-Berger?

The PiPress?  Does Bill Salisbury actually transgress the DFL?

Channel 5? Paging Tom Hauser; there’s a there, there.

Where is the media?

Mark Dayton, in a letter to state contractors, Governor Daytons…well, lies through his teeth:

Dayton Administration Distributes False Information

Dayton, of course, vetoed a perfectly fine balanced budget – several of them, in fact, many of them so close together that there can be no reason other than Dayton having planned for a shutdown at any cost if he didn’t get his way on his curious fixation on hiking taxes at all costs.

You depend on government.

You are a government worker.  You’re looking at the budget negotiations, and noticing that at the Department of Transportation, even though the Governor and the Legislature were eight tenths of a percent apart on their budgets – something even the Hatfields could have negotiated with the McCoys – Dayton vetoed the Transportation budget.

Dayton is holding you hostage.

You depend on government.  You are a walking, talking country western song, only it’s just not funny; you’ve been laid off, your significant other bailed leaving you with three kids to feed and clothe and try to insure.  One of them has chronic, serious health problems – and in your current state, you have no choice but to try to get help from the state.  But Mark Dayton has opted to stop all payments via Health and Human Services to health-care providers during the shutdown – indeed, he has specifically engineered that result from the budget battle.

Governor Dayton is holding you hostage.

The Republicans offered a budget that, by any rational measure, is a useful compromise; a 6% raise.  Too much for conservatives, but certainly more than enough to run the government at a time when none of the rest of us are getting 6% raises.   If a solution was what he wanted – for your benefit, Mr State Worker, and you, Ms. State Insurance customer – he’d have signed the Legislature’s budget.

Governor Dayton, on the other hand, has offered a budget that is still a billion dollars from balanced; he’s lying about not taxing 98% of Minnesotans, and he wants to commit us to endless autopilot increases; the bureaucracy will ask for $40 Billion next biennium, $46 B the budget after that.

He cares not one iota about compromise.

He doesn’t care about your job.

He doesn’t care about your kid.

He cares about raising taxes, and no more.

To protect a tax hike, he is shutting the government down.

Which doesn’t harm most of us; the vast majority of GOP voters only notice the state government on payday, or when we see a Highway Patrol car out on the road.  We may or may not notice at all if the government shuts down.

But you will, Mr Employee and Ms. Client.

And it’s you he’s holding hostage.

It’s you he’s warning; “dont’ break ranks with the unions and your DFL, or this will hurt you baaaad”.

Whenever “progressives” start trying to argue “logic”, my ears perk up.  Because it’s virtually inevitable that no logic will ensue.

Myles Spicer- blurbed as a “retired ad agency executive” – proves that advertising is about emotions, not logic:

Clearly, the greatest threat to the reelection of Barack Obama is the economy — the struggle to create more jobs.

Polls confirm that only 37 percent of Americans believe Obama is improving the economy. Fueling those doubts is the conservative rant about job creation.

Now, I’m no retired executive, but I’m going to guesss that “fuelling those doubts” is the fact that 9% of us are out of work, as many more are underemployed or checked out completely, we’re paying $4 a gallon for gas and more for heat and food prices are zooming and our mortgages are underwater and used car prices, or used parts to fix our beaters are out of sight due to “cash for clunkers” and our retirement accounts are shrinking and taxes are rising and those of us who have jobs are being told our companies may drop our health insurance and our local governments are jacking up property taxes to buy electric cars and artistic water fountains even as food prices zoom upward thanks.

Just saying.

Trouble is, this rant is inconsistent with their other rants — like the one that holds “government doesn’t create jobs, only the private sector can.” And there’s also their contention that jobs are created by the wealthy, who must be stimulated and rewarded to do so.

Spicer is, himself, inconsistent with the liberal rant that “laws are for peasants”.

Wait – that’s not a standard rant?

Either are “government doesn’t create jobs” and “only the wealthy create jobs”.   Conservatives know government can create jobs; they’re just not sustainable, except via ratcheting up taxes.

Entrepreneurs?  They create sustainable jobs.  Entrepreneurs don’t have to be wealthy – they’re frequently not – but then, what’s the point of doing all that work without the chance of becoming wealthy?

Anyway – whenever “progressives” think they’ve found they found a hole in the logic of the free market, it’s hard to stop yourself from going “oh, that’s so cute and precocious”:

This leaves a gaping hole in conservative logic when they blame Obama for the weakness in our economy.

The mantra of Republicans and conservatives has always been to bless the private sector and urge government to “get out of the way, and let capitalism work.” Great! Then where are the jobs?

It has been the private sector (not government or Obama) that has brought us to this malaise, if not crisis, and it is the private sector that is not helping us out of it.

In Mr.Spicer’s special little world, the government never inflated the mortgage bubble by socializing the risk, forcing Fanny and Freddie to underwrite most of this nation’s mortgage market, to “promote home ownership”.

Never happened, Winston.

Conservatives claim that government interference, especially taxation, is impeding our recovery; they just have no basis in fact. There is nothing at all that is preventing, obstructing, retarding or impeding American business from creating jobs … except American business itself.

Taxes have been lower than ever. Interest rates are low. Regulation is generally lax.

Three statements so vague as to be meaningless. Some taxes are low,and many others are not.  Interest rates are low, but paradoxically credit is difficult to get. Regulations are lax, unless they aren’t.

Republican administrations ran the government for eight of the past 10 years. Major American corporations are loaded with cash, but they have learned that they can scrape along with higher productivity by stressing their existing staff rather than adding jobs.

One wonders how Mr. Spicer ran his “advertising agency”. “Sure, things are slow – let’s hire lots of designers, so we’ll be ready when the work picks up!”

Conservatives and the business community claim that “uncertainty” is harming job creation. Give me a break.

If you think today’s environment is “uncertain,” you did not live in the Depression. You missed World War II. You forgot about the times when mortgage rates got up to 20 percent. You skipped the turmoil and discontent of the Vietnam War.

In fact, in the context of history, today’s times are more tranquil and predictable than most. “Uncertainty” is a cop-out.

What a boss Mr. Spicer must have been. “You think shaving the 401K contribution is bad?  No,the Donner party was bad!  The sinking of the Titanic was bad!  Oh, Auschwitz! That was bad!

One needn’t “forget” bad times to observe that times are bad.

What, then, about the claim that taxes are job-destroyers? We have, in fact, been operating under all the previous Bush tax cuts for 10 years now (the lowest in decades), and look where that has taken us.

I’m predicting “to gusts of non-sequitur”…

Deficits have soared, no new taxes have been imposed, yet the wealthy among us seem not to be creating the promised jobs.

Ah.  Because times are fantastic!

Rubbish.  As peoples’ personal finances are dragged down by their plummeting home values and skyrocketing cost of living, consumer spending is in the tank.

Who – besides Mr. Spicer, apparently – would break the bank hiring right now?

No, I’m not putting words in his mouth:

However, there is one area where government actually can create jobs: within the government itself. But here again, conservative policies have actually created unemployment.

Mr. Spicer seems unable to recognize the difference between a horse that pulls the cart and a horse that sits on the wagon, depending on another horse to pull the cart.

Solutions are complex, but doable. But demonizing government and blaming President Obama, as conservatives are doing (especially the early Republican presidential candidates), is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst, and destructive.

Well, he got the “solutions are complex” bit right.

The rest?  “Shut up, peasants!  The State is your mother!”

Thanks, but no.

So…

…are you better off than you were in 2007?

Romney’s asking.

Yesterday, we discussed the email in the Department of Human Services that indicated that it’s common knowledge among higher ups in the DHS that Governor Dayton is actively promoting the government shutdown to cause all the misery it can, to try to turn it toward the Legislative majority.

But that’s just the beginning.

A highly-placed source with intimate knowledge of Minnesota’s public heath system contacted me over the weekend. (A similar source contacted Janet Beihoffer; she ran the email at Freedom Dogs).   My source an assortment of high-ranking officials in state public-health agencies and non-profits received the email last week from one Michael Scandrett, a lawyer with the firm of Halleland and Habicht, a term that works in health-care policy consulting.

Accoring to my source, Scandrett’s email said that – I’m paraphrasing, here, so feel free to read the whole thing over at the Dogs – Governor Dayton’s shutdown plan will involve terminating payments to health care providers working with all government programs, as of July 1.

Also according to my source, the email said that the intent of this action appears to be – my source quoted the email – “to create create the greatest possible pain and resulting pressure on the Legislature to resolve the dispute“.

In other words, the Governor is using the executive branch to ratchet up the pain of the shutdown on the state’s workers and those dependent on the state – his supporters – to feed his mania with raising taxes at all costs.

I’ll be seeking comment from Mr. Scandrett, as well as other top DHS officials on this email.

The upshot, though?  If you depend on the state of Minnesota – as an employee or as a client – Governor Dayton is holding you hostage.

Throughout this series, I’ve been highlighting the usual stuff about World War II – the battles and the personalities – but also the political and social events,  many of which still affect us today.

I’m also highlighting, bit by bit, over the next few years, some of the industrial trends that affect us today.  Great example coming up in future months – the fact that the US was able to build, on top of their thousands of tanks, aircraft and combat warships, over 4,000 units of one class of 5,000 ton merchant ships.  That’d be one of nine or ten different classes of ships, all of which were built in the hundreds or thousands.

We also undertook some of the most immense research and development projects in the history of science and engineering; in four years of frenetic research, we not only took the atomic bomb from the stuff of fuzzy-headed academics to Hiroshima – we also developed from scratch and built the plane to carry it, the B29 Superfortress – a plane whose development cost nearly as much as The Bomb, and may have been the most troubled, overrun-prone weapons development program in history, at least among weapons that actually got into service, the kind of thing that would have given William Proxmire a stroke, had those sorts of figures been made public back during the war.

We couldn’t do that today if we had to.

But today’s installment is about the opposite extreme – and it’s not about the US.

———-

Today, seventy years ago, the United Kingdom had just endured the worst year in its military history; driven from the Continent, the Brits had pulled off a miracle the previous June, evacuating most of its army at Dunkirk.  But that Army came home virtually without equipment; it had left all its tanks, artillery, machine guns – virtually everything heavier than the infantry’s rifles, and hundreds of thousands of them, too – lying in the sands and the approach roads to Dunkirk’s beaches.

And while they’d staved off Hitler’s first push to invade the island during the Battle of Britainthe previous summer, things were still dire. British industry, even though entirely harnessed to the war effort, was struggling to re-equip the British and Commonwealth militiaries for the invasion they still believed could come – as  well as for the war bubbling along in the Mediterranean, and which they also expected to erupt in the Pacific sooner than later.

They did have one advantage.  They’d captured thousands of tons of Italian ammunition in action the previous summer, as they’d swept aside the Italian , including a curiously large supply of 9mm ammunition.

That sparked a curious adaptation.

———-

The gun maker’s art in the years up to World War II was indeed an art.

The typical military firearm before World War II, all the way down to the lowliest infantry rifle, was a work of, if not art, at least craftsmanship.

The British "SMLE" Rifle. First built in 1903, it served until the 1950s.

With wooden furniture varnished to a fine sheen, and metal parts laboriously machined from solid blanks of high-quality steel, military weapons were high-quality pieces of equipment that took lots of time, money and skilled effort to manufacture.

The same was true of the newest addition to the infantryman’s armory – the submachine gun.

An Italian Beretta M38. With its milled wooden parts and perfectly-machined metal components, the M38 was a high-quality - and expensive - piece.

Basically a tiny machine gun that fired low-power pistol ammunition to make it manageable when being held in a rifleman’s hands (machine guns firing full-powered rifle ammo required a bipod or tripod), the submachine gun had evolved during World War 1 to bring extra close-range firepower to the infantryman.

The British Army, one of the world’s most conservative, came late to idea of issuing the submachine gun.  But after the drubbing in France, where they’d seen the effect the Germans MP38/40’s devastating effect in close-range action, they got into the market.

The MP38/40 - not to be confused with the Italian M38.

Their first attempt was to buy the American Thompson.  Most famous today as the preferred weapon of a generation of rumrunners and gangsters, British agents glommed onto every one they could find.

A Model 1928 Thompson.

Which wasn’t many.  The Thompson was a very old-school weapon, machined to a very high standard of finish, slow and laborious to build – and the US military was buying them as fast as factories could turn them out.

The Brits needed more, and they needed them fast.

At the Enfield weapons works, two men – Major Reginald V. Shepherd and designer Harold Turpin – designed a simple, intentionally crude weapon, designed to be built quickly and cheaply and to use the mountains of Italian 9mm ammunition.  It looked like a couple of lengths of pipe with a crude wooden forearm.  The British military bureaucracy took the first initial of their last names, added “En” for “enfield”; and so the “Sten” was born.

The Sten Mark 1.

It was unbelievably crude by the standards of the weapon-makers craft.  It was designed to be built quickly, cheaply, mostly out of stampings and welded parts rather than machined metal, by less-skilled labor.  It cost a fraction of the time, money, skill and materiel of the Thompson.

And it was still too complex.  So after a few hundred Mark 1s were built, the factory simplified it even more, into the Mark II.

The Sten Mark 2

It looks crude and cheap.

It was crude and cheap. It was manufactured in the millions.  By the time production ramped up, it could be built with five man-hours of labor, for under $12 in 1940 money.

It was not a high-quality weapon.  The design of its 32 round magazine promoted jamming; some British paratroops joked that their Stens jammed every time they fired them. The safety mechanism tended to slip, allowing frequent accidental discharges after the locking pin wore down from heavy use.

But it was fast and cheap.

And as the war wore on, a cheap submachine gun that one had was worth more than a quality piece that was still being built.

In addition to (quickly) re-equipping the British and Commonwealth armies, the Sten was dropped by the thousands to resistance groups throughout Europe.

And, needing guns, they quickly reverse-engineered  the crude, simple Mark 2 and started building it in clandestine machine shops throughout Europe.  Sten Mark 2s were build in secret plants, or underground chains of machining and stamping and sheet metal fab shops, in Norway, Denmark, Poland and Yugoslavia.  And not in inconsiderable numbers, either; resistance guerillas build them in the hundreds, sometimes thousands.

A Polski Sten, with a custom-made short 10 round magazine, designed for easy concealment, perhaps for an assassin stalking German officers.

The Sten was fired for the first time seventy years ago today.  And while it’s a footnote in many ways, it showed the extent to which the heat of war caused western ingenuity to push western business and industry into behaviors it’d never considered before.

Across Britain and the US, the stresses of war- from imminent invasion to the more mundane issues of having to produce with rationed, scarce material and with unskilled labor as the skilled workforce got drafted – were causing industry to adapt in ways it’d be hard to imagine today.

A British "Mosquito", the most successful light bomber of the war. Built of a mostly plywood airframe, it was assembled from parts built by...Britain's furniture makers.

And locations.  As the US war effort ate up available shipyards along the US coasts, the booming submarine program prompted US industry to build a submarine construction yard…

…in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

It is hard to imagine that sort of dislocation today, when it takes decades for the US military to pick a new pistol, where the Army has been noodling with replacing the venerable M16 for nearly four decades (and still issues fifty-year-old M14s to troops that need a reliable rifle in the sand) and US industry takes a decade to build a factory, if they build one at all.

More in coming months.

This email – purportedly from a State Department of Human Services employee – surfaced over the weekend, and has been making the rounds of the conservative blogs in Minnesota:

Click to expand.

In other words, if the leak is accurate, Dayton has been inducing the government shutdown for the DFL’s political gain.  He’s sandbagged the budget process to try to beat on the GOP.

Dayton, if this checks out, is holding state goverment workers, schools, the U and our state university system, those that depend on government for health care, and the entire state government hostage…

…to pursue his curious mania for raising taxes on the not-very-“rich”, to try to whip up the forces of class envy to his, and his cronies’, benefit, and to defend a an unsustainable status quo.

And you know what else?

I think I may have happened upon an even bigger, more damning smoking gun.

Tomorrow morning at 7AM on Shot In The Dark.

Last week, we took a look at the Strib op-ed by Roger Hale that supported Governor Dayton’s budget plan, whom the Strib felt it was important to remind you was a former CEO at Tennant Corporation…

…but not that he was a large-scale DFL donor who’d given $110,000 in the last gubernatorial race alone to Alliance for a Better Minnesota, the Dayton-family-supported attack-PAC that launched the most epic sleaze campaign in Minnesota history against Tom Emmer.  That, apparently, the Strib didn’t believe was relevant.

“But what about what he said about business?”, some leftybloggers responded.

Doug Baker, CEO of St. Paul-based Ecolab, responded in the Strib over the weekend.  (Full disclosure:  I worked for Ecolab for four years. A good chunk of my retirement is still in Ecolab stock – and it’s performing better than most of my portfolio at the moment.  Their IT department would give Scott Adams a year worth of material, but it’s a good company – as it happens, 20 times the size of Roger Hale’s Tennant).

And Baker is unimpressed by either Hale or Governor Dayton:

I have two reactions to [Hale’s piece]: First, many in the business community strongly disagree — and second, focusing on revenue generation misses the point and delays action on the more important issue — unsustainable increases in government spending.

It’s no secret that Minnesota always has been a high-tax state. An April 2010 report from the Itasca Project, which highlighted our region’s strengths and weaknesses, identified Minnesota’s uncompetitive tax structure as one of the main barriers to job creation.

Blam.

The “progressives” never, never get that.

My experience, which is shared by the majority of my fellow business leaders in Minnesota, is that personal taxes do matter. It’s an issue that frequently comes up when recruiting people or transferring people to Minnesota.

A majority.

And that’s when it comes to getting talent to come to Ecolab Tower in downtown Saint Paul, or the R&D center in Eagan.   Like most big Minnesota companies, Ecolab has created no manufacturing, distribution or non-sales jobs in Minnesota in years.

Following Gov. Mark Dayton and enacting the second-highest tax rate in the nation would hurt our state.

This is especially true today when state and national borders no longer constrain the movement of labor, capital and intellectual property. In this digital age, people can and do work from anywhere — and they can and will choose to work where they can keep more of their income.

And that’s just speaking of people who work for major corporations.

Ecolab started in the 1920’s, back when the barriers to enter business were very, very low.  The corporation was able to build its business during decades when Minnesota’s taxes were blissfully unintrusive.

How about people starting the next generation of businesses?  The little S-corporations that are the big C-corporations of tomorrow?

They’re moving to Hudson, or Fargo, or Sioux Falls, or Dallas/Fort Worth.

Bring this up to a progressive.  Note that North Dakota is lowering taxes as their revenues boom; they’ll respond “but how many Fortune 500 companies have?”  The response is “that’s a function of population density, but nice try.  Still – how many jobs are those Fortune 500 companies creating in MN?”

The answer: fewer:

There also have been recent headquarters moves that cost Minnesota thousands of jobs — MoneyGram comes to mind — which I strongly believe was motivated more by personal income tax rates than anything else (in my opinion).

But you don’t have to take my word for it. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, Minnesota employment growth has lagged the U.S. rate for a decade. More than 1,200 small and medium-sized businesses left the state from 1997 to 2008.

Baker gets the real problem – the one Hale glossed right past:

More important than the tax issue, though, is Dayton’s proposed double-digit increase in state spending. The legislative majorities have offered a 6 percent increase in spending over last year’s budget — this includes a substantial increase in spending on both K-12 education and health care.

For any family or anyone who owns a business in this state, a 6 percent increase in revenue would be considered very good news and would be considered a budget they could live with. However, in government-speak, a 6 percent increase is considered a “cut” because it represents less than the government wanted to spend.

Baker notes the same thing I did in shredding Hale last week; back in the seventies, Japan and Germany were getting done with recovering from World War 2. China and India were mired in experiments with various degrees of extreme socialism, and starving and riven with political contortions and very much third world countries.

Back in the sixties and seventies – which is where Dayton’s entire strategy came from, and when Roger Hale was an active CEO – it was a very different world.

Baker gets this:

Raising taxes and double-digit increases in government spending may have been a manageable strategy in the 1980s and 1990s, when our competition for jobs came primarily from Wisconsin and Iowa.

But the reality our state faces today is a very different one.

Our global competitors and the majority of U.S. states — led by a number of prominent Democrat governors — are moving toward lowering taxes, prioritizing government spending and building a more supportive business environment in order to attract jobs.

Minnesota must do the same if we hope to grow jobs in the future and compete in the 21st century.

Baker’s piece utterly shreds Hale.  You can tell it hurt the DFLers who were defending Hale last week.  They’re responding.

With name-calling.

It still inspires me.

Perhaps we could stand at University and Wheeler and demand the same…

Setting a single, no-haggle price was a great publicity point for the late, great Saturn marque of cars.

Of course, they are a late, great marque of cars.

I’m not sure if no-haggle pricing was the issue; GM’s bad management had a lot more to do with it.

But whatever no-haggle pricing had or had not to do with Saturn’s demise, it may have been a mistake in this past legislative session.

John “Shabbosgoy” Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives would have preferred some smash-mouth haggling; I”m inclined to agree:

…[R]epublicans find themselves boxed into a budget corner of their own making. Having won both the House and Senate, the latter for the first time since the 1970’s, they should have been able to advance their core principles in a manner that consistently gave them the upper hand, despite the executive branch being controlled by the opposition. Instead, republicans find themselves on the defensive and playing a poor hand largely dealt to them by themselves.

The shortest analysis is that the republicans erred badly in sending only one “this is it we really mean it!” budget to the Governor and expecting him to roll over.

I’m also not a bit puzzled by the fact that the GOP jumped immediately to the “spend the available revenue/live within our means” budgets, expecting to put it out there and then hold on through the gale of union-and-Dayton-family-funded astroturf advertising and pro-DFL, biased media coverage.   The current proposal – the $34 billion budget that uses new revenue from the February forecast – would have been an acceptable ending point, the place the DFL would fall back to to compromise.

Even that truncated analysis, however, obscures other problems with the manner in which the republican majority has performed. For example, running uniformly on a platform of bringing down government spending while not increasing taxes, one might plausibly have expected them to produce a budget that actually cut spending. Not a budget that was signed into law by the Governor, mind you. No, one that actually required of the majority some intestinal fortitude and made cuts to the bloated mess that is Minnesota state government. The idea that there isn’t largess is laughable. The fact that the Minnesota government is the state’s single largest employer is shameful.

We need more freshmen in the GOP caucus.

There are some in Minnesota – think the Independence Party and the wonky class who love tinkering with the machinery of government (pardon the redundancy) who believe in “compromise” because to them, the process of goverment is the goal of government.  Principle be damned – Process is the golden idol.

There are others in Minnesota who believe that compromise is just what parties in Minnesota tradtionally do. It’s BS, of course.  The traditional Minnesota political “compromise” involves seettling on some version of DFL/”progressive” policy or another.

And there are others who pimp for compromise because otherwise, they lose.

But they all have one thing in common; anyone who says the MNGOP hasn’t compromisedon the budget…

Comparison Budget Offers In General Spending

…is lying.

Or – let’s be charitable – parroting DFL chanting points.

Not that compromise with the DFL is in and of itself a good thing, much less a worthy goal.  But facts are facts.

The governor s it a freeze vetoed the K12 Education budget bill…

In his letter vetoing the Republican K-12 budget, Dayton criticized the bill’s “freezing of compensatory revenue.” The state doles out that money, sometimes more than $400 million a year, based on the number of poor students in each school district.

If you suspect that the Dayton administration’s responses to every GOP initiative were written last December, here’s your evidence:

But there’s one problem. Dayton and the Republicans both want spend the same amount on compensatory revenue over the next two years. Each side proposes leaving it at levels set in current law.

Senate Republicans once proposed freezing compensatory revenue, but that provision was eliminated when lawmakers crafted the final version of the K-12 bill (known as the “conference report”).

What Republicans did instead was separate the compensatory revenue from the basic per-pupil formula allowance. That means future Legislatures will have to specifically increase the compensatory revenue formula, rather than just boosting the basic formula.

In other words, they took it off the “autopilot” that drives so much of our biennial budget discussion.  The autopilot that drives up proposed spending, leading to “$5 billion deficits” and 20-odd percent spending hikes in every budget, and that legislatures will have to do their jobs.

Is that a freeze?

“How on God’s green earth do you argue that it’s a freeze?” said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, the Republican sponsor of the bill. He noted that not only have Dayton and the GOP both left the formula at current law levels, but spending will also increase automatically if there are more poor students.

The Administration let out a rare honest emission:

At first, Department of Education spokeswoman Charlene Briner agreed the letter got it wrong.

“It is incorrect to say that compensatory was frozen in the conference report,” Briner said in an interview. Soon after, Briner sent Hot Dish e-mails backtracking that statement and adding  “I think I was incorrect to say that.”

“The net effect is a freeze,” she wrote, “unless future legislatures act.” In other words, delinking it from the basic formula could mean future legislatures choose not to increase the compensatory revenue formula.

What?  Requiring that spending be justified?  The nerve of those peasants!

Dayton spokeswoman Katie Tinucci said they stand by the veto letter. “It is our interpretation that the effect of delinking compensatory revenue is the same as freezing it—we cannot rely on the actions of future legislatures.”

In other words – “spending is the goal; shut up and pay up”.

Asked  whether it’s a good idea to profile Muslim males under 35 years old, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano says (with emphasis added by me):

“You’re not using good logic there. You’ve got to use actual intelligence that you received. And, so, you might — all you’ve given me is a kind of status. You have not given me a technique for tactic or behavior. Something that would suggest somebody is not Muslim, but Islamic, that has actually moved into the category of violent extremists,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said at a forum on U.S. security and preventing terrorist attacks.

OK, so isn’t that an endorsement of the Israeli system?

To say nothing of stopping the intrusive pat-downs of children, octogenarians,airline pilots, law-abiding citizens, parents hauling children with them…

…OK, pretty much everyone?

It was probably Sunday or Monday when the lefties started tittering about Sarah Palin’s visit to the Old North Church.

And “tittering” was all they managed.  Even Erik Black, one of the phalanx of “deans of Minnesota political journalism”, was reduced to embedding a “ThinkProgress” flakvid without any additional commentary – which is, in and of itself, a pointed commentary on the regional leftymedia.

Jill  Burcum, editorial writer for the Strib, is seemingly being groomed to take Lori Sturdevant’s place in the “smug, entitled DFLer” slot on in the stable of columnists.

And she boldly strode where no talking head had gone before.

During a visit this week to Boston, she recounted a twisted take on Paul Revere’s historic ride. In a nearly incoherent stream of phrases full of folksy dropped “g’s” (ringin’ those bells, warnin’ shots), Palin appears to have said that Revere warned the British, when in fact he warned Americans about the British.

I’m a kidder; I kid. Burcum followed the same narrative the entire leftysphere follows. up and down its chain of command, from Media Matters down through the Strib’s editorial row to the Twin Cities’ leftyblogosphere; “Wimmins who are conservative are teh stoopid”.

With the dropped g’s and the history flub, Palin is such a caricature of herself that it’s hard to tell if this now-viral video is a Saturday Night Live skit or the real thing.

For whatever reason, Burcum comes back to Palin’s accent over and over in this piece – to a degree that I’d call “a Saturday Night Live skit”, if SNL ever did skits about Midwestern editorial writers so desperate to confirm their parochial need to feel superior that they have to resort to catcalling someone’s accent.

And I have a hunch you could look in vain through Jill Burcum’s entire clipfile in vain, trying to find any mocking of Hillary Clinton’s artificial swerves into “Sista” slang, or President Obama’s curious habit of slipping out of his Ivy-League pronunciation into a phony “Black” patois, when speaking in front of black audiences.

Revere, according to historical documents, was captured by the British. Under questioning, sometimes with a gun to his head, Revere said he had warned revolutionary forces that the redcoats were coming.

Arguments that this means he warned the British, as Palin defenders claim, are more than a stretch. That Palin had that detailed level of knowledge about Revere’s ride is even more unlikely, especially in context of her meandering statements about Revere’s “ringin’ those bells.”

It’s “unlikely”?  One wonders why Burcum is slaving away as an editorial writer when a career as a mind-reader awaits.

The Massachusetts Historical Society was asked about the matter on Monday. In a statement, it said Revere’s mission was to warn the revolutionary forces: “The Society holds three accounts written by Paul Revere. Based on these accounts, Revere was sent out to warn colonists that troops were marching west.”

Gauging by the excited people around Palin in her video — none of whom went “huh?” at the Revere reversal — she’s lost none of her star power. That should concern the Minnesota Republicans who also harbor presidential ambitions.

But gauging by the excited people around her — none of whom went “huh?” at the Revere reversal — she’s lost none of her star power. That should concern the Minnesota Republicans who also harbor presidential ambitions.

Bachmann – unfairly derided as Palin-lite — is expected to declare her presidential candidacy soon. Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty has already announced his bid.

A quote that didn’t make the Palin video makes her gaffe even more head-scratching and hilarious.

Somewhere during the course of her Boston visit, she uttered this phrase, according to the Boston Globe: “You’ve got to know a lot about our past in order to know how to proceed successfully into the future.’’

Words to live by.

Oh, yeah – according to historians, Burcum and Black and “Think” “Progress” are wrong, and Palin was, well, closer to right than any of then would credit her for being:

Palin prompted howls of partisan derision when she said on Boston’s Freedom Trail that Revere “warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.”

Palin insisted yesterday on Fox News Sunday she was right: “Part of his ride was to warn the British that were already there. That, hey, you’re not going to succeed. You’re not going to take American arms.”

In fact, Revere’s own account of the ride in a 1798 letter seems to back up Palin’s claim. Revere describes how after his capture by British officers, he warned them “there would be five hundred Americans there in a short time for I had alarmed the Country all the way up.”

Boston University history professor Brendan McConville said, “Basically when Paul Revere was stopped by the British, he did say to them, ‘Look, there is a mobilization going on that you’ll be confronting,’ and the British are aware as they’re marching down the countryside, they hear church bells ringing — she was right about that — and warning shots being fired. That’s accurate.”

Patrick Leehey of the Paul Revere House said Revere was probably bluffing his British captors, but reluctantly conceded that it could be construed as Revere warning the British.

You should read the whole thing.

And remember – a conservative is smarter after a concussion than a liberal who’s just graduated from Princeton when the subject is history, as anything; if you read it in the leftymedia, distrust but verify and, almost inevitably, distrust even more.

Man left to die, lies in Brit hospital for nearly half a day before being dragged away like a sack of garbage:

Nurses casually stepped over a patient as he lay dying on a hospital floor.

Peter Thompson, 41, was left in a corridor for ten hours before someone noticed he had passed away.

In a final act of indignity, hospital auxiliaries pulled his lifeless body across the floor in a manner his family described as like ‘dragging a dead animal’.

Just keep repeating it to yourselves, Dems; socialized medicine rocks.

The regional leftysphere is tweeting up a busy little storm today; as the MNDFL noted on Twitter, “Former head of the MN Business Partnership: the @mngop budget is a “job-killer””.

The uninitiated might think “Wow. That’s quite an indictment of the GOP budget!”

And the tweet linked to a Strib article, entitled “The governor’s budget plan won’t send businesses scurrying“, by one Roger L. Hale, which didn’t do much to disturb that conclusion.  I’ll let you read it yourself; if you’re observant, you’ll note the subtle red herring; tax hikes might not send businesses “scurrying”, but it’ll inhibit them from forming in the first place, or hiring more Minnesota workers.  What good does having 3M or Best Buy or Ecolab plopping their headquarters here do us if they’re not expanding, building and hiring?

But the DFL and Strib (pardon the redundancy) are even less transparent and more perfidious than meets the eye.

The Strib piece notes that Hale is “…a former: CEO of Tennant Co, director of five NYSE companies, chairman of the Minnesota Business Partnership and the Governor’s Workforce Development Council, and successful start-up investor.

And to those who don’t pay much attention, a businessman is a businessman is a businessman.  And probably a Republican.  Right?

Wrong.

Roger Hale, as I noted last summer, contributed six figures to “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”; $110,000 as of this time last year, and tens of thousands more to other DFL candidates and organizations.

But the Strib didn’t see fit to let the reader know that.

The fix is in.