Dayton has agreed to the GOP budget:

Gov. Mark Dayton said Thursday morning that he is willing to accept Republicans’ June 30 budget offer, which would close a $1.4 billion budget difference by delaying payment of school funds and borrowing against the state’s tobacco settlement.

“This is the only viable option that’s potentially available,” Dayton said.

It’s not a complete, 1940-NFL-Champtionship-style blowout – I think we started negotiations too high, and may have handed Dayton a propaganda point on the school shift, yet again.  And not getting VoterID and King Banaian’s Sunset Clause – those hurt.

But let’s focus on the big picture here.   We held the line on new taxes.  The line is drawn in the sand; government will live within its means, even if “its means” have been stretched more than conservatives want.   With redistricting coming up, it’ll be a good message to take back to the voters.   And nobody had to do without their Miller and Coors.

Kudos to the legislative freshmen class!  I can’t imagine this sort of outcome happening with the MNGOP of ten years ago.  Salut!

More later.

The next order of business, of course?  Press this win onward.  Dayton’s down (in a gauzy-focused, politically-sanded-off kind of way); we have to keep kicking.

UPDATE:  Was I too exuberant?  Perhaps, but I’m not apologizing, since it’s fun to spike the ball even if the play gets called back.  Friends of mine in conservative political circles say yes, Dayton’s conditions are too onerous, and the deal is DOA.

So hang in there, folks.

More tomorrow.

Yesterday, I noted that Kenneth Gladney’s attackers had been acquitted, in a trial in which his SEIU attackers were represented by expensive, big-bucks defense attorneys while the District Attorney’s office in the Democrat-dominated county – mirabile dictu – had assigned a greenhorn prosecutor trying his first jury case.

For those who weren’t paying attention three years ago, here was the  video.

In his Outstage Politics blog, Eric Austin responded with a piece called “The BLEATING Continues“.  You see, I called the original piece “The Beating Continues”, and capitol letters hypes the irony.  You only get this from watching Jon Stewart, I guess.

Anyway – in the mind of the left, the fact that Gladney’s attackers were acquitted means there was never an attack, no way, no how.

You saw the video, right?

Just in case you missed it above…:

What this means is that there is a level of violence that Eric Austin thinks is perfectly acceptable.  I suspect this means that if someone pushes and kicks Austin and knocks him down and puts him in the hospital for a night and calls him derogatory terms – “teacher”, maybe – he’s just going to laugh about it.  (No, I’m not going to warn people not to do it, because smart people know I’m making a point and not calling for violence, and the dumb people who attack people over politics are, with painfully few exceptions, on the left, which is bad news for society, but good news for Austin).

It’s not just Austin, of course; I’ve heard other leftybloggers, even some that aren’t utterly depraved, call it a “pratfall”. That many of them were the ones screeching about “climates of violence” during the Tea Parties, or after the Giffords shooting, is upsetting but also a bit of a tu quoque ad hominem, an inconsistency rather than a refutation.

But it does seem like a double standard; if a Democrat feels threatened, even if the threat is the exact sort of thing elected officials of both parties get all the time, the Republic is in danger; if union goons knock a guy down and put him in the hospital in a hail of racial epithets, it’s a “pratfall”.

No, no – of course the left doesn’t find violence acceptable.  Good heavens, no, and not racism either. Don’t you dare question their demonstrable commitment to non-violence!

Just ask Mr. Gladney.

KSTP is running an online preference poll on the shutdown.

Get in there and vote.

Early and often.

I drove out to North Maplewood the other day to have a chat with some DFLer acquaintances of mine;  Stephen (never “Steve”) Plotznick-Hale, and his wife, Bella Plotznick-Hale-Rehavy.  Committed DFLers both, she is a social worker in the Maplewood school system, and he’s a grievance writer with the Department of Labor.

They sat, dourly focused on their organic boxed wine, as I walked into the bar.  They were in no mood for small talk; they cut right to what passes for the chase.

I’ll join the conversation there:

STEPHEN:  This shutdown is ridiculous!  The GOP is obsessed with protecting the rich!

MITCH: Well, no – the GOP Legislative caucuses are doing what they were sent to Saint Paul to do; oppose all new taxes.

BELLA: But if we taxed the millionaires, we could solve thish problem!  We could afford everything that the Lezh…Ledge…Lesbolature sayzh we needed!

MITCH:  Well, Bella, funny you should say that.  Let’s ignore, for a moment, whether all that spending is needed, much less wise. and start by definining “millionaire”.

STEPHEN: Easy.  Someone with a net worth of a million bucks.

BELLA: YEAH! Shomeone with more money than…Jeeeeebuzh!

MITCH:  OK.  Now, we’re talking income tax rates, here.  They don’t all make a million bucks; if we assume a million or more in net worth, we’re talking everyone from the CEO of United HealthGroup down to regular people who’ve invested very very wisely.  They may make $30 million a year, they may make $150K.  For purposes of this discussion, let’s say they make an average of half a million a year in income.

STEPHEN:  O…K… (takes another sip, fingers nervously drumming table).

BELLA: I’m gonna get a beer. (She sits motionless).

MITCH: OK.  So the first $200K in Adjusted Gross Income is taxed at the current top tier rate of 7.95%.  The rest of their income is taxed at 10.95%, as the Governor proposes.    We’ll hit all 7,700 of them.

STEPHEN:  Exactly!  That’ll close the deficit.

MITCH:  Which is how much?

STEPHEN:  Five Billion dollars.

MITCH:  Heh.  Not exactly.  Taxing “millionaires” according to Dayton’s plan, assuming an average income of half a mill a year, gives us a grand total of $375 million.  About six percent of the “Five Billion Dollar Deficit”.

STEPHEN:  (Stares blankly)

MITCH: Of course, the Dayton rate was never going to stop at an AGI of $200K.  It was going to be more like $135.

STEPHEN:  Yeah!

MITCH:  In which case, assuming a half a million a year in income, we the people rake in a total of a little over $390 million.

BELLA:  Oh, you’re sho full of…(belches)…crap, Merg.  They all make a million bucksh a year!

MITCH:  OK.  Let’s say the average income for these 7,700 millionaires is a million dollars a year.  Applying the Dayton tax rate gets you a total of…

BELLA:  Eleventy billion dollars!

MITCH: Hah!  Bella, you rock!  No – it’s just shy of $797 million.  And if you start the surcharge at $135,000, the extra revenue jumps to $811 million.

STEPHEN:  (Calculates frantically in his head) That’s, like, way less than five billion…

BELLA:  We should just TAKE IT AALLLLLL!  (Bella swoops into a face-plant on the floor).

MITCH: (after helping Stephen help Bella into her chair).  OK.  Let’s do that.  Let’s say we assume the average “millionaire” makes $500K a year, and we confiscate every penny above the $135,000 a year level – a 100% tax rate on the wealthy.

BELLA: (head down on table) Yeahhhh….

MITCH:  You get a total of $2.8 billion the first year – about half of the DFL Deficit.  And let’s say we assume the “millionaires” make a million a year apiece, and we confiscate everything over $135,000; the total we take in is $6.7 billion.

STEPHEN:  So you cover the deficit!

BELLA:  Yaaaay! (starts to vomit a bit in her throat)

MITCH:  Yeah – once.

STEPHEN: Well, that’s the Legislature’s problem, not mine!  Make it happen!  Eat the rich!

(Mitch grabs a mung rag and cleans up the expanding vomit slick under Bella’s passed-out head on the table).

The local media – who have mostly been serving as stenographers for Governor Dayton so far in this shutdown – have finally found the human interest story they needed.

There’s good news and bad news:

The state shutdown means Miller-Coors will have to stop selling beer in Minnesota.

State officials have told the company, it must come up with a plan to remove it’s 39 brands of beer from shelves and in bars in a matter of days.

Lack of Miller and Coors products will be a good thing for the regional beer scene.  But this isn’t about taste – this is about Governor Dayton’s passive-aggressive tactics hitting some Minnesotans where they live; in their alcoholic hazes.

The company failed to renew it’s brand license with the state before the shutdown. Each alcohol brand needs to pay a 30 dollar brand license fee. That fee is good for 3 years.

Actually, a TV news story notes that Miller claims to have sent the check for the renewal.   Miller Brewing’s brand license renewal fees were apparently not processed before the government shutdown – which is well in line with the Dayton Administration’s passive-aggressive approach to this entire fracas.

Without the license, Miller-Coors cannot sell in the state.

And there’s your human interest angle right there.  The TV stations have been trooping into the bars, interviewing a Cantina Band full of sodden souses to grumble “Itsh time for the gummamunt to get itsh jerb done!”, and in one case, a puffy fiftysomething north-woods gretel to shriek “You people need to GROW UP and COMPROMISE!”.

The pieces – clearly aimed at  the legislature, rather than the Governor – underscore a key fact of Minnesota political life; so much of it is focused on people who are hammered when they make their voting decisions.

Can you imagine a racial beating – something that in every possible way is a hate crime – getting allocated a county attorney who’d never tried a jury case?  Can you imagine a county that spends millions on squeezing people for child support starving a hate crime prosecution of funding?

After a trial marked by rookie flubs on the part of the rookie prosecutor, the SEIU goons who were captured on video beating the crap out of Kenneth Gladney – a black conservtive…

…were acquitted.

Does it help that the case was tried in Saint Louis – one of the most Democrat-clogged cities in the country?

Just asking.

Anyway – they’re not guilty.

Lesson learned:  onservatives’ free speech, and safety itself, is only as secure as the local establishment wants it to be.

Of course you’re not.

And Marco Rubio knows it:

“Every aspect of life in America today is worse than it was when [President Obama] took over. Unemployment higher. Interest rates. The only thing that has gone down in America over the last two years is the value of your home. This president has mismanaged this economy. He has been incompetent in his management of this economy,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said on “Hannity.”

Oh, incomes have dropped.  Don’t forget that.

The only thing Obama has done better than Carter so far?  Interest rates haven’t ballooned yet – and that’s likely coming if we don’t get the deficit under control.

It’s time for change.

It’s become a chanting point on the left lately.

Liberals – many of whom are not capable of carrying Reagan’s jellybean jar – are chanting “Reagan, the [Jon Stewart-issue snark turned on] “Godfather of conservatism”, raised taxes!”

The occasionally-unspoken coda to that? “So you have to do it too!”

But is it true?

Silly people.  It’s on lefty blogs.  What is the rule with leftyblogs?  Always assume it’s a lie, or at least grossly omitted context, until you can prove otherwise.  And you can almost never prove otherwise.

If you look into the details – and your liberal friends certainly hope you don’t, because none of them really have (because the whole meme is something they got from Media Matters, that has been passed down from the higher-ranking ranking blogs to the lower-ranking local blogs.  It’s the way they roll), you’ll see “no”.

Here’s a year by year walk through the major tax legislation of the Reagan administration, and the cuts (black) or hikes (red) they made in terms of percent of gross revenue.

So the table shows us a couple of key facts:

Reagan’s Tax Cuts Were Greater Than The Hikes:  Reagan’s total tax cuts outstripped his hikes by over 50%.  But even more importantly…

When The Economy Needed Cuts, Reagan Cut Them: During Reagan’s first term, when the economy was reeling from the seventies, Reagan by an average of 2% of revenues per year.  The result?  The economy boomed.  The cuts led directly to one of the greatest economic expansions in history.

Now, if you’ve been listening to your liberal friends, you are intellectually poorer you might say “But in his second term, he turned into a tax-hiking machine, didn’t he?”

Focus, people.  This is leftybloggers we’re talking about.  Because even if they’re not outright lying (the numbers are right there, so they’re not), they’re leaving out key context.

And so too with this issue.  Because…

The Tax Hikes In The Second Term Were A Result Of Democrat Perfidy: Remember – Reagan always faced Democrat legislative majorities.  And eventually Reagan had to deal.  Part of the deal was that in exchange for some tax hikes, the O’Neill Congress would cut spending.

The Democrat Congress naturally reneged on the deal (as commenter Kermit pointed out yesterday).

So when your liberal friends stand by the water cooler and chant with their glassy eyes and Jon Stewart smirks “Reagan raised taxes”, you can respond “it’s true.  Reagan raised taxes – after cutting them much more, and only as part of a deal on which the Democrats cheated”.

People ask “why is Dayton squiggling so hard to avoid any form of negotiation with the GOP?  He’s clearly beaten; public opinion largely opposes his “all taxes” approach to the deficit, and the GOP isn’t getting browbeaten into submission anymore?”

It makes no sense, if you assume that Mark Dayton is making any kind of decision at all.

So it only makes sense that he’s not making the decisions.

Mark Dayton is a marionette.

Think about it.

He’s A Rental: Mark Dayton had less to do with his own election than any governor in Minnesota history.  He owes his election to four things:

1. An immense infusion of cash from the unions, and liberals with deep pockets, including himself and his family, which funded…
2. …the most toxic, sleazy disinformation campaign in the history of Minnesota politics, which outspent the Emmer campaign by a minimum of 3:1 and foisted upon Minnesotans a drumbeat of half-truths, untruths or thirty-year-old, context-deprived twaddle about Emmer, which combined with…
3. …a suddenly deeply-incurious media that couldn’t bring itself to write about Dayton’s record in the Senate, much less his known issues with alcohol abuse and mental illness, which meant that…
4. …the 43% of Minnesota voters who don’t think very critically about politics didn’t have any of their assumptions challenged.

Let’s face it; Dayton is less a governor than a delivery man for an agenda set by the special interests that helped him into office; the public employees unions, deep-pocketed liberal plutocrats, and the non-profits that feed off the entitlement culture.

And like Dayton, those stakeholders know that…

Progressivism Desperately Needs A Win: It’s been a horrible year for big institutional progressivism.  The Tea Party tsunami in 2010 has rocked “progressive” government in former strongholds like Ohio, New Jersey, Michigan, and even New York and California, where the likes of Andrew Cuomo and Jerry Brown have become spending hawks all of a sudden.   And Wisconsin – the home of LaFollette, the buckle in the public employee union belt – was a gut-shot for progressives.  If the progressives’ “support government at all cost” creed can crumble in New York, California and Wisconsin, where is it safe?

Which is why…

Minnesota Is Progressivism’s Last Stand: The prognosis for progressivism isn’t good.  Sure, the GOP suffered setbacks in 2006 and 2008 – precisely because the Bush Administration and its attendant GOP caucuses didn’t act like a conservative government.  The economy is making progressive entitlement programs unsustainable – and, even moreso, undercutting the idea that they must be sustained at the cost of the viability of the sector that pays the taxes.  The conservative parts of the country are growing; the liberal ones are largely shrinking.  And with even the biggest showcases of “progressivism” defecting from the gospel, “progressivism’s” big stakeholders – unions, non-profits, plutocrats and the like – are faced with a stark reality; they need a win to stanch the bleeding.

Those stakeholders put him in office.  They will get their money’s worth.

And as the Administration itself telegraphed weeks ago, they don’t care who they hurt to get it.  Government employees?  Entitlement recipients?  Consumers of “services” like jobs at Canterbury?  All just eggs to be broken for the greater omelet.

So are you a citizen, or are you an egg?

…that the current Minnesota government shutdown is the longest in US history.

Most of the citizens of Minnesota responded by going to work today.

(I”m still crossing my fingers someone will show up with a .455 Webley).

I spent the weekend in North Dakota, at my class reunion.

More later this week, hopefully.

The American left today is a complex network of conspiracy theorists.

For example, there are the “Truthers” – people who believe that George W. Bush set up 9/11.  There are also “Triggers” – those who believe that Sarah, not Bristol, Palin begat little Trig.   There are many others – check ’em out.

The latest addition:  “Grovers”.  The “Grover” believes that the wheels of the GOP are being spun by Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Freedom.

In a move that should prompt deja vu on the part of Minnesotans who pay attnetion (admittedly mostly conservatives),

Brian Rosenberg is the president of Macalester College in Saint Paul.  The place makes fewer bones that most post-secondary schools about the fact that its mission is to train “progressives”; according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, it’s got the “progressive”-friendly, anti-dissent speech code to match (FIRE gave Mac a “Red” rating for atrocious commitment to free speech).

And if you’re a parent who’s spending, or pondering spending, over $100,000 to send a kid to Mac, you might want to read Rosenberg’s Strib op-ed, and ask yourself “is this the level of commitment to intellectual honesty, to say nothing of rigor, that my kid can expect at Mac?”

Because Rosenberg exhibits the great trifecta of modern “progressive” “thought”in an op-ed in yesterdays’ Strib:

• Crushing  Illogic: we’ll see plenty of that below.
• The exploitation of ignorance.
• The belief that government is our society’s most important enterprise

These lead liberals to some bizarre conclusions.

He’s got a thesis = and if you follow Minnesota politics, it’ll all sound very familiar:

The most powerful figure in today’s Republican Party is not John Boehner or Mitch McConnell. It is not Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan. It is not even Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin.

It is, of course, Grover Norquist, the man with The Pledge.

Sound familiar, Minnesotans?  It’s like David Strom and the Taxpayers League’s “No New Taxes” pledge .

Norquist, who has never held elected office…

Isn’t it funny how liberals toss that out when it suits them?

Martin Luther King never held elective office.  Either did Keith Olbermann, James Carville or Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, and each of them is every bit as involved in setting policy as is Norquist is – where “involvement” means “using their God-given right to tell legislators what they expect of them”.

Remember my first point?  Crushing Illogic?   Rosenberg indulges in the strawman first:

…is the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, a group whose pledge not to raise taxes under any circumstances has now been signed by hundreds of Republican candidates and officials at both state and national levels.

And they do mean “any circumstances.” Enormous budget deficits? No. A country at war? Nope. Famine and plague? Sorry.

It’s not just a strawman, it’s a dumb one.  We’re at war – but it’s not a war for our very existence, like World War 2 or the Civil War.  And we’re not suffering famine.

Indeed, our country’s only plague is government that regards spending as a greater “right” than the peoples’ right to keep the money they earn.  That’s the plague that Norquist is trying to  address.

If the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, get back to us.

Our grandmothers kidnapped and threatened with death until and unless we raise taxes, as Norquist was asked recently by Stephen Colbert? Well, answered the unflappable Norquist, we always have our memories and our photographs.

(Colbert was being characteristically satiric. There appeared to be nothing satiric about the response.)

There’s point two, “playing on ignorance”.  A shocking number of self-described liberals believe that “The Daily Show” is a news show; it’s not a stretch to think they think the same of Colbert.

Norquist isn’t one of them.

I want to set aside for now the political and economic wisdom of raising or not raising taxes and focus instead on an even more fundamental question: How prudent is it to take an irrevocable pledge about how to govern before one begins the actual work of governing?

Again with the strawman.

If pledges were “irrevocable”, then Alcoholics Anonymous could make Step One “I pledge to quit drinking”, and dispense with steps two through twelve.

The politicians aren’t making the pledge to Grover Norquist.  They are making it to the voters.

Just as George H. W. Bush did, famously pledging “Read my lips!  No new taxes!”.  He broke the pledge.  It helped cost him the 1992 election.

Conservatives remember this.

How wise is it to remove from the legislative toolbox one of the most important tools before one knows what particular challenges one will face?

The “toolbox” is a dumb analogy.  Taxation isn’t government’s tool.  It’s government saying “I’m going to take your tool”.

A better analogy?  The credit card. It can be an important and useful tool in running a home – unless the homeowner starts believing it’s the credit card company’s obligation to support her spending no matter what.

Credit card companies don’t do that.  Why should we?

Up next?  Rosenberg shows – for those who might have doubted it – that he’s from Planet Academia:

How many employers in any industry would hire someone into a leadership position who declared, prior to beginning work, that he or she would under no circumstances employ a commonly used strategy or compromise with those with whom he or she disagreed?

Would a retailer hire a manager who asserted that he would never under any circumstances raise prices?

Would a manufacturer hire a vice president who insisted that under no conditions would layoffs be permissible?

No, no and no – but all of those analogies are wrong.

Nobody would hire a leader who promised to run the business according to a spending target.  And that’s exactly what the “progressives” have done to the state and federal government; make spending the measure of “good government”.

It’s why the DFL scolds us every year about “budget deficits” that are, in fact, based on nothing but bureaucratic spending targets; it’s the same at the national level, only moreso.

Even the most basic primers on leadership note that the ability to listen, the ability to learn and the willingness to compromise are among the essential characteristics of any successful leader.

True.  But Rosenberg missed the most important lesson in those “primers”; a leader leads people toward a goal.

Oh, liberals get it when it’s their goals – desired outcomes for their constituents, and above all that government itself remain fat and happy – and their leaders.

Norquist is asking that the main goal for would-be leaders that seek conservative votes,  at at a time when the greatest scourge facing our nation is an inability to continue long-term government entitlement spending, be to stop spending so much.

It’s a worthy goal.

Because conservatives don’t believe that keeping government fat and happy is the main goal of life – or, for that matter, of government.

Which brings us to the bizarre conclusion:

Many of these newcomers to public office appear also to believe that the mere fact of being elected constitutes a “mandate” for how they should subsequently act — as if the business of governing ended rather than began with being chosen for office.

That would make sense if we elected people to be bureaucrats – to follow pre-set, tested procedures to do a job whose parameters everyone already agrees on.

We don’t agree on those parameters, though.  Which is why we have elections – as an alternative to fighting a civil war over how that job is supposed to be done.

This is a new, peculiar, and destructive way to think about representative government. It ultimately would lead to the elimination of representative government altogether and, instead, to public ballot initiatives on every issue large and small. And we know how well that is working in California.

If Rosenberg were an undergrad writing an English or history paper, and he used such a broad, unsupported conclusion for his thesis, a teacher worthy of them name would knock him down a couple of letter grades and send it back for a rewrite.

Minnesota was once a place known for the exceptional ability of its leaders to place the common good above polarizing ideology.

No.  Minnesota was once a one-party state.  It had two “parties”, of course – but intellectually, there really was only one party.

Life changes.  Wear a helmet, Rosenberg.

Americans for Tax Reform asks every candidate for elected office on the state or federal level to make a written commitment to their constituents to “oppose and vote against all tax increases.”

Every member of Congress, upon taking office, is asked to swear an oath to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.”

Here is my simple question: Which “pledge” takes precedence?

That Rosenberg thinks “making government live within its means” is not “part of the duties of the office” shows us where part of Minneosta’s problem is.

…let me answer the standard-issue DFL chanting point that you read on virtually ever tweet, ad and TV ad the DFL puts out:

“The Republicans want to (do horrible things) to protect millionaires”.

Let’s settle this.

None of us gives a rat’s ass about millionaires.  Bupkes.  Zip.  Nada.

It’s about reforming government.

It’s about stopping the DFL’s spending crazy train.

It’s about making all of those safety net entitlement programs for the elderly and children and unemployed and mentally ill sustainable for the long term. as opposed to the current fiscal time bombs they are.

It’s about making sure that public employees actually have pensions to retire on in thirty years.

It’s about having a state where we don’t have a perennial budget crisis, because the state lives solidly within and below its means – and it’s just fine, because the state is so prosperous its’ “means” are pretty darn formidable.

We oppose government sucking up any more of this state’s viability than it really needs – and by “needs”, I don’t mean “wants”, “covets” or “craves”.   That means taxes on millionaires and the poor – including the DFL’s screechingly regressive gas and cigarette taxes.

Watching yesterday’s saturation coverage of the Kacey Anthony case, I watched a piece on “the nation’s reaction to the verdict”.

The reporter – NBC’s  Jeff Rosson – mentioned that he was in the airport when the verdict was read.  And he said “People were literally glued to the TV”.

No.  People were figuratively glued to the TV.  Nobody was physically adhered to a screen.

It’s time for misuse of “literally” to be, figuratively, killed with fire.

Or maybe literally.

Joe Doakes of Como Park emails:

The state government is shut down because the Legislature and Governor can’t agree on an extra couple of billion to fund it; meanwhile, the billion-dollar stadium deal is all but done (St. Paul’s tantrum won’t change anything, they’re just pouting because Arden Hills got the glory this time).

Is the public insane? If we can’t keep state government doors open and lights on, how in Hell can we afford a new stadium?

For the same reason families who can barely make their mortgages somehow manage to squeedge out the money for snowmobiles…:

No, the public is not insane, they’re completely rational. They know the vast majority of state spending is welfare and welfare is boring. Football is fun and a new stadium is exciting. People would enjoy spending that billion much more than the other.

“Shut down the government, build a stadium instead.”

We should make signs and go stand on the Capital lawn. How’s Friday work for you?

I’ll be at the Dubliner.

Wearing my Bears T-shirt.

In 1994, disgusted by the GOP’s cave-in to the Clinton Administration on the 1994 Crime Bill, I ditched the GOP and went over to the Libertarian Party.

Michael Medved’s ridicule aside, it was a great experience.  I learned a lot about how politics does, and doesn’t, work.  Part of the learning was from being a Libertarian – I read a lot.  Part of it was from becoming active in the first place; when I noticed that, for whatever reason, people weren’t rushing to the Libertarian Party with me, I got to learning a little about how the mechanics of government actually worked.

Which led to me leaving the Libertarian Party in 1998.  I figured that I had a choice; be an absolute Libertarian purist, and think big Libertarian thoughts and never, ever have an actual direct effect on how government, taxation, spending and the machinery of how government affects us really works (other than by siphoning voters out of the two party system, which is a little like trying to stop a NASCAR race by stealing gasoline from SuperAmerica), or get back into the political party that was the least un-friendly to my beliefs.

Which was, and remains, the MNGOP which, imperfect as it is, at least puts liberty on its short list of things to pay serious lip service to (and that’s looking at it at my most cynical; there is a crop of freshman legislators who do, I think, get it).    I’m a proud member of the libertarian conservative wing of the Minnesota GOP.

Still, there’s a Big-L Libertarian Party out there.  And the state shutdown is hog heaven for them:

Less government is good government, as far as Tylor Slinger is concerned.

As a member of the executive board of the Libertarian Party of Minnesota, the resident of St. Paul’s Highland Park sees benefits in the state government shutdown.

In Slinger’s eyes, this isn’t “tea party” radicalism or anarchist rhetoric.

And it’s there we see the reporter’s (Frederic Melo) bias or, maybe, just plain ignorance.  The Tea Party is inextricable from libertarianism; in a Venn diagram of conservative/libertarian political thought, the Tea Party tucked in where the “libertarian” and “conservative” rings overlap.  The “radical” bit is pure editorializing – although to many in the Minnesota establishment, the idea of cutting spending, “services” and taxes is distilled radicalism itself.

“We think that the shutdown clearly illustrates how centralizing political power to an elite group places the rest of us at their mercy,” said Slinger, 24, who works as a communications specialist at a bank. Slinger is also running for a St. Paul City Council seat.

“While people’s immediate reaction will likely be based on … their daily reliance on governmental services, the longer the shutdown lasts, the more opportunities each individual will have to find more reliable alternatives.”

Slinger has the big picture points exactly right, of course – hey, I did say I was a libertarian-conservative, right?   Government entitlements do exist to perpetuate themselves; bureaucrats have no less well-developed a sense of self-preservation than the rest of us.

With more than 20,000 state employees suddenly finding themselves out of work, such statements have made the Libertarian Party few friends in Minnesota and, at best, uneasy allies on the national stage.

Which is a tautology; state government workers are (hypothetically) angry at a party that opposes the idea of excessive state workers.  Notify the media…

…well, OK.  Melo is the media.

Melo does bother to note the same conflict many of us who navigate the border between Conservatism and Libertarianism run across:

Unlike Slinger, Amy Brugh, a public policy director with the Minnesota AIDS Project in Minneapolis, sees no benefit to a shutdown whatsoever. Her largely state- and federally funded programs are assets to taxpayers, she said, not hindrances.

As a result of the shutdown, “47 of our 57 employees are either laid off full time or reduced time without benefits,” Brugh said. “It means that three of our programs are completely closed down, so clients won’t have access to their case managers, or to transportation to get them to medical appointments or to the pharmacy, or for benefits counseling.”

Those include specialized services that an AIDS patient can’t just lean on friends and family for, Brugh said. And without the right care, each one of those clients could end up in an emergency room, with taxpayers footing the lion’s share of the bill.

“A Libertarian not wanting to pay tax dollars should actually be in favor of our programs,” Brugh said.

And again with the tautologies; in this case, “government runs Ms. Brugh’s program because government has always run Ms. Brugh’s program”.

It’s one of those historical “what ifs” that people of libertarian bent run through their heads; what if, say, the AIDS epidemic had broken out in a society that had never undergone the New Deal, the immense socialization that accompanied World War II, the Great Society, Medicare Part D and Obamacare?  What if American society had developed through the 20th century without the underlying assumption that the federal government was there to do anything but defend the borders, sign treaties, adjudicate disputes and enforce contracts?  If society had developed without the “ideal” of having its social needs taken care of by government – and it had been able to turn the output of its stunning prosperity to private rather than public charity, the way it always had?

It’s an intellectual parlor game,of course –  because the Libertarians are right about one thing; government has made our society dependent on itself.

And as De Tocqueville warned, it may not be possible to unravel that dependence.

Mission accomplished, big government!

The question those of us on the Center-Right keep asking – is it possible to have government, but only just the right amount?

…was two pages away from being resolved.

And Dayton is always two pages away from resolving it.

And no matter what the “pain”, he’s going to stay two pages, and no less than two pages, away from resolving it.

Array

About 500 union members – and not much of anyone else – formed a “Downeyville” on the Capitol grounds yesterday.

“Downeyville’s” city government quickly formed a city bureaucracy which hired a unionized workforce to take care of “Downeyville’s” city business.  The unions worked with the city and instituted a comprehensive defined-benefit pension plan for “Downeyville” city workers, with automatic cost of living raises and a n0-questions-asked health insurance.

“Downeyville’s” bills quickly spiralled out of control; taxes surged, and “Downeyville” quickly sent lobbyists (further) up Capitol Hill to demand Local Government Aid – which only inflamed the protesters, because the government is shut down.  Which caused the entire city work force to form another small town – a suburb of “Downeyville”, further up the capitol steps, called “Zellerston”.

The suburb  quickly  took the wealthy population from “Downeyville”, causing the “Downeyville” city government to demand the forming of a “Protest Met Council” to equalize revenues between the two “towns”.  “Zellerston” also formed a unionized city work force, which quickly adopted a defined-benefit pension plan and cadillac health benefits, which quickly drove the city’s budget into the red, causing the city to demand Local Government Aid.  They sent their lobbyist up the hill to the Capitol, where he ot into a fight with “Downeyville’s” lobbyist, getting them both thrown into jail, where their union-paid lawyers (it’s a benefit, hey?) filed suit against each other, both winning multimillion dollar judgments, which spun both cities into crushing debt.

And then the six-o’clock news cycle ended, and the news trucks left, and most of the “population” of both “cities” left, leaving both cities with crushing debts.  Both cities called in union members from other cities, who scheduled a protest…

Oh, yeah – union members were the only people that cared.

But Rep. Frank Hornstein, DFL-Minneapolis, one of several DFL legislators who attended the rally, said he was surprised the shutdown did not yet seem to be resonating with many Minnesotans. “I thought there would be a lot more tension on July 4th,” Hornstein said of the many Fourth of July parades across the state. “I’m surprised.

Of couse, Twitter redounded with warnings from Democrats to Republicans about “tension” to be expected at Fourth of July parades.  Apparently they thought Minnesotans would be up in arms about the shutdown.  Maybe they even tried to see to it – hell, they astroturf eveything else. We just don’t know.

Anyway – while “Downeyville” apparently stiffed as anything but a union pep rally, Hornstein – and by extension, the entire DFL – still has hope:

“But I think the longer this would go on, the public would get concerned,” he said.

AFSCME and SEIU members will be going door to door to union members and registered DFLers to make sure people “get concerned” over the weekend*.

(

The United Way of the Twin Cities advertises itself as an organization that…

…creates a better life for us all by focusing on three key areas: Basic Needs, Education and Health.

We attack poverty on multiple, interconnected fronts to achieve lasting change. We LIVE UNITED by collaborating with partner agencies, corporations, community leaders and people like you.

United Way serves people living in or near poverty in nine counties: Anoka, Carver, Chisago, Dakota, Hennepin, Isanti, Ramsey, Scott and western Washington. Making a gift to United Way is the most effective way to help the whole community.

Many of us give – generously, in many cases – to the United Way through their various institutional drives at Twin Cities businesses.

So where does that money go?

To the MinnPost?    The center-left-leaning media website?

Community Voices section is made possible by the generous sponsorship support of the Greater Twin Cities United Way.

“Attacking poverty” via sponsoring the MinnPost is certainly a new definition of an ” interconnected front”.  Although the logic of the connection escapes me.

Do United Way contributors know they’re supporting agenda-based media?

It’s worth asking.

I sent a message to the United Way.  I’ll let you know what I hear back. If anything.

The Minnesota “Independent” feels the need to remind its audience that Bachman’s Floral and Koch Refineries are not related to the political figures with similar names.

Probably a good idea.