Obama’s approval among Hispanics slips under 50%, says Gallup:

Despite launching his presidency with a large majority of Hispanics approving of his job performance, along with most blacks, Obama has seen significant erosion in Hispanics’ support. As a result, while Hispanics’ approval of Obama was at one time 20 points higher than the national average, at this time it is just 7 points higher. Two significant slips in Hispanics’ approval of Obama were seen in 2010, perhaps linked with the president hedging on campaign promises to make immigration reform a priority. However, that decline has continued into 2011 as the nation’s focus has turned more to the economy and federal budget problems.

The fact that illegals are returning to Mexico to find jobs means that there will be fewer Obama voters in Minnesota, at any rate.

Government loves to accrete power unto itself.

Because, say it and its adherents, there are some jobs that government just plain does better.

And in some cases, arguably, they have a good case.  Defense?  Sure.  Courts?  Yep.  Law Enforcement?  Sure, usually.  Public education?  Enh.  Roads?  Well, that’s the way we do it, I guess. Welfare?  Ugh. Economic planning?  Heh.  No.

Now, some believe government just plain does it all better.  Larry Pogemiller’s a great example – as he himself once said, “I think it’s silly to assume that people can spend their own money better than government can”.

Anyway, opinions vary.  But either way, one of the ways government does things is by “eminent domain” – basically, taking private property for the public benefit, whether that benefit is a road (mkay) or a hospital (sure) or…

…well, the projects range all over the place.  Being a government program, it can be used to further pretty much any government agenda.  It’s been used in the Twin Cities to seize the property of businesses in downtown Minneapolis to build the Target headquarters, and around 494 and Penn to make room for Best Buy – because government decided it just plain knew better than the people who were already there.

Anyway – one of the signal events in the history of Eminent Domain was the “Kelo” case, a SCOTUS case decided in 2005.  Pfizer wanted New London, Connecticut’s government to seize some private property to build an office/R’nD facility.

Pfizer won.

Everyone lost.

Brian Garst at Breitbart notes the rest of the story:

The public response was one of outrage. Facing the potential wrath of voters, politicians across the country moved to add new protections against such abusive seizures. But that wasn’t enough to save the homes of the folks in New London, whose property never would be developed. Pfizer, the intended beneficiary of the land theft, walked away years ago from their development plans.

Now, to add new insult to injury, the vacant lot is a dump. Literally.

 

But via » Years Later, Land Seized in Kelo Decision Used for Debris Dump – Big Government.

In 2005, Kelo v. City of New London made eminent domain infamous. The widely reviled Supreme Court ruling gave the go ahead for the city of New London to use eminent domain for taking private property in order that it be given to a private company for “economic development.”

The public response was one of outrage. Facing the potential wrath of voters,  politicians across the country moved to add new protections against such abusive seizures. But that wasn’t enough to save the homes of the folks in New London, whose property never would be developed. Pfizer, the intended beneficiary of the land theft, walked away years ago from their development plans.

It gets worse.  After all that – the legal wrangling, the government arrogance at all levels, the failure of the “devleopment” plan and the evaporation of the promised “economic development”, what happened?

Now, to add new insult to injury, the vacant lot is a dump. Literally.

Following hurricane Irene, the city designated the site as a place to dump storm debris, and citizens can be seen doing just that in this video on the local paper’s website.

Doesn’t that make you feel all warm inside? The Supreme Court reassured us in Kelo that the government orchestrated theft “would be executed pursuant to a “carefully considered” development plan.” What they forgot to mention is that careful consideration from politicians is worth about as much as the city’s new debris dump, which is to say: diddly squat.

It’s a metaphor, really, for most government action; it’s a fiction that government, choked with special interests, bureaucrats motivated toward accreting power and politicians who crave votes, can plan anything better than the invisible hand of the market.

The fact of the matter is that the development of the property was already being “carefully considered” by the folks that owned it, as is the case for all privately held property, and in their careful consideration they wanted to keep living on it. The lesson of Kelo is not merely on the illusory nature of our property rights. It’s also about the abject failure that is central planning, and the inability of political forces to better plan economic activity than the private sector.

My “DFL Dictionary” first came out in 2002.

The Dictionary – a glossary of terms that explain the world and English Language as the DFL sees them – has been pretty stable since then.  It’s time for an update.

I made an addition yesterday – “Intransigence: n. When a Republican sticks to their “principles”. (See also: “Princples”)”.

But we need more.

So – for the first time in almost a decade, I’m taking submissions for the DFL dictionary!

Times have changed.  The DFL hasn’t – not since 1972 – but it’s time the Dictionary did!   Please send me any definitions I’ve missed over the years, and I’ll get the update underway!

Leave your entries in the comment section.  Winning selections will be…well, included.

Senator Roger Chamberlain writes:

I assume all you have heard Jimmy Hoffa’s comments regarding 90% of Americans who are not in the union.

My humble observation:

1. Hoffas comments, included – “War on working people”, “We’re your soldiers”, “Fight” and of course referred to Americans who don’t share his opinions as “Son’s of a bitches”

2. The President said nothing

3. The press has said little to nothing

And pick your lefty pundit – they’re either strenuously avoiding the subject, or telling themselves it’s the GOP’s problem (if I could have a nickel for every lefty tweet I read that was some variation of “ReTHUGlicons are weting teh pants over Hoffa! LOLZ”, I could retire early).

4. Our opponents agenda should be clear

5. Our opponents tactics, what they intend to do, should be crystal clear. It should no longer be a mystery to anyone.

6. We should make sure others have no illusions about the challenges we face

The biggest challenge we face?  We – the thinking, responsible Americans who make this country actually work – have to share a country with a movement whose intellectual and moral leaders are Jimmy Hoffa and Robert Espinosa.

TREBEK: “The most annoying people in the world”.

BERG: “People who pedantically fuss over fairly meaningless, and usually wrong and out of context, ephemera in history to try to discredit their opponents among people who don’t pay much attention to the subject but like to think they do”.

TREBEK:  “Form of a question, Mr. Berg…”

BERG: “Who are who pedantically fuss over fairly meaningless, and usually wrong and out of context, ephemera in history to try to discredit their opponents among people who don’t pay much attention to the subject but like to think they do”

TREBEK: Correct, and you control the board.

I woke up in a cold sweat after dreaming the above exchange, and couldn’t get back to sleep.

So I fired up the computer, and – this is a completely bizarre coincidence – found  this piece in the blog PoliticsUSA, a liberal blog:

Progressive political commentator Thom Hartmann has something to say about the real history of the Boston Tea Party. Using a first-hand account written by one of the participants, he shows that it was not against government regulation; it was not against the size of government. It was not even really at its core about government at all, except to the extent that a government supported a huge mega-corporation that had a stranglehold on America’s economy. As Thom Hartmann says, the Boston Tea Party was “A revolt against corporate power and corporate tax cuts.”

It’s a good thing for Thom Hartman that there is liberal talk radio. Otherwise, he’d be, I dunno, a barrista or something.  A nutty barrista with a very selective sense of history.

Hartman – and the “account” from “one of the participants” – are right to a point; the British East India Company was a corporation.  And it definitely was powerful.

But not a corporation in the sense that we have today.  Mostly.

The BEIC was given a government charter – a legal monopoly – on trade between India and the rest of the British Empire.  It had its own special dispensations to defend that monopoly – like its own frigging Navy and Army.  Even Microsoft and Apple don’t have that kind of government-granted power (more or less).

So the BEIC was a corporation, indeed – at a time when corporations were very, very rare things that were created (if memory serves) by act of Parliament.  It served as a pseudo-government in large parts of India – and, indeed, several of the American colonies had been started by similar “corporations”.  With Armies.  And Navies.  And the power to levy taxes.

And it’s irrelevant – because the Tea Party was a reaction to Parliament’s “Tea Act“, which the BEIC passed on to the colonists in more or less the same way that Whole Foods passes on sales tax to Tom Hartman’s listeners.

There’s a reason that “discussion” with the Mos Eisly Cantina that is the AM950 audience is so futile; it’s that so much of what they “know” is crap.

Just a reminder – the benefit for Homes for Heroes is Sanday, 3pm to 6pm, at the St. Cloud Holiday Inn, (Division Street & 37th Avenue).

Homes for Heroes builds and renovates homes to make them accessible for badly-injured veterans.

The benefit is a wine tasting, along with a Silent Auction. Hors d’oeuvres will be served!

Admission is $50 Per Ticket or $75 For Two – 50% Military Discount.

The party is loaded with guest speakers:

• Andy Pujol – President, Building Homes for Heroes
• Dan “Doc” Severson – US Senate Candidate
• King Banaian – State Representative
• Steve Gottwalt – State Representative

Mexican cops cross border, shoot and pilf American hunters:

An ABC-7 viewer contacted the station early Thursday, saying her son, husband and friends were hunting on the Rio Grande levy on the U.S. side when men on the Mexico side fired shots, narrowly missing them. She said more men on the Mexico side drove up with automatic weapons and into to U.S. side. She said the armed men fired weapons and stole hunters’ chairs and drove back into Mexico.

Mosier said Border Patrol agents and Texas Parks and Wildlife officers were sent to the area immediately.

“Upon approach, our agents observed those subjects (Mexican officers) who committed the incursion return back to Mexico,” Mosier said.

Forget “high tech fences”;  We need to close our border with minefields, F16s flying with bombs, and machine guns.

We are no longer served as a nation by our open – no, porous – border policy.

My friend Robin, who used to write the blog A Girl’s Gotta Vent, and has met a bunch of you at at least one MOB party, has a project going on – and it is, in fact, life or death:

I /WE are working feverishly to save my sister in-law’, Lenecia Weisbender’s life. We have CANCER ASS to Kick .. But, it ain’t cheap .. any and all donations appreciated … Nothing is too small .. Everything donated is 100% applied to Lenecias Medical expenses.

Lets Git ‘er Dun!!!!

Here’s a link to the website.

If you know anybody that is passionate about kicking cancer in the butt, please forward it to them. Every $5.00 counts, it adds up! I know that Lenni would be very touched.

THANK YOU in advance

Hope you can help.

Earlier today, I wrote about an op-ed from over the weekend in the Strib.  Reading it, I assumed that the piece – by “Hinda Mandell”, formerly of Edina – was incredibly bad, overly over-the-top, broad-to-the-point-of-unfunny, stereotype-clogged parody.

Mandell is, in fact, a real person, with a twitter feed of her own; Ms. Mandell is apparently a real mid-level “communications” academic whose brief seems, ironicaly, to include parsing communication so finely for the wispiest hint of perceived victimization that “communication” of any type will eventually be rendered impossible.  The article was apparently on the level.  Not to mention the first thing I’ve ever read that was actually too dumb to be on Minnesota Progressive Project.

Ryan Rhodes figured it out before me – and after almost ten years of blogging, he’s just as worth reading as he ever was, by the way. He commemorated Ms. Mandell’s raving with the gifts of art…

…and fisk.

Who says there’s a higher education bubble? Note to aspiring communication students: Avoid the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, lest you come out of college much, much, MUCH dumber than when you went in.

Anyway – I guess there are a couple of lessons from this whole thing:

• We have too many academics.
• The higher ed bubble is about to explode. And when it does,and if (heaven forfend) Hinda Mandell has to find another gig, wouldn’t it be ironic if she had to get a job as a barrista?

I apologize for the error.

I’m off to tell my farmer friends to stop referring to “Hard Red Spring Wheat“, before Hinda Mandell claims they’re bigoted against Native Americans.

An actor friend of mine tells me that the hardest roles to play are “dumb” people.  It’s easy to play the less-intelligent too broadly, like a bunch of “dumb people” cliches.  Making them sympathetic, nuanced and interesting?  That’s hard.

Parody is kinda the same.

The Twin Cities conservative blogosphere has more than its fair share of brilliant satirists and parodists – people who attack with humor, and by getting inside their targets’ styles, peccadillos…heads for comedic yet pointed effect.

The roll call is long and distinguished; “Sisyphus”, “Nihilist in Golf Pants”, “Wintryminx”, Brian “Saint Paul” Ward, Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci and Ryan “Dirty Shroom” Rhodes are all known quantities who dominate in print (and conservatives going by the names “Spotty”, “MNob” and “Phoenix Woman”, their true identities unknown, do spot-on sendups of smug, overpraised, overwrought “progressive” bloggers); Tom “Swiftee” Swift is by far the most talented, iconoclastic visual satirist in the Twin Cities; and of course, James Lileks is the Segovia of multimedia satire.

Doing good adversarial satire is like playing a dumb person; it’s easy to do badly, and very hard to do well.

So I’m puzzled as to who wrote this Strib parody masquerading as “op-ed”, entitled “The subtle racism around us (even in a cup of coffee)”.  With a stable of satirists like we have in the Twin Cities, we could certainly come up with something less over-broad and hamfisted.

For starters, the “writer” is “named” “Hinda Mandell”, and is purportedly an “assistant professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology”, who graduated from Edina High in 1998.  Why not name “her” “Golda Schimmelfarb-Williams, adjunct visiting scholar in Victimization Studies at Radcliffe”, while you’re at it?  Have her come from North Oaks? Maybe have her complain about her asthma and constantly ask if it’s too cold in the room and start sentences with “oy vey” before nattering about white privilege?   If you’re going to run with the cliché, why not go all-in?

Cliché is not satire, and stereotype is not parody.

Anyway – with that out of the way, the piece is about that ultimate “progressive” cliché, hYpStR coffee!

What do you do when a favorite coffee shop features various coffee blends with racially tinged names?

Just a tangent here; twenty years ago, when gourmet coffee shops were a new thing, and I would order a cup at the Dunn Brothers by Macalester College.  And I’d occasionally ask – “are all you liberals aware that the coffee you’re ordering, from Ethiopia and Java and the Celebes and Peru and Venezuela, supports a lot of ugly, authoritarian regimes?”

They’d stare blankly.

Just a tangent.  Apropos nothing.

Emphasis is added below as “Ms. Mandell” continues:

I was sitting in this beloved joint in New York recently, with its hipster-hippie ambiance, when I overheard a conversation. I’m convinced that the barista and customer, both white, were oblivious to the racially charged nature of their utterances.

Asked the customer: “What type of roast is the Jungle Roast?”

The barista, who looked on the younger side of 20, answered: “It’s a darker roast.”

I sat there flabbergasted. These two women were engaging in a practical conversation — is the coffee a light or dark brew?

But because of the name of the roast — and its richer flavor — they were in fact reinforcing the notion of the jungle and its people as “dark.”

Now, this is funny – but pretty rote.  An overweening liberal petty academic,finding racism in coffee?  It’s freshman level stuff.

Perhaps you think I’m making too much of a simple exchange.

Oy.  To the serious parodist, saying “maybe you think I’m making too much of this” is like waving a sign saying “I’M PRETENDING TO HAVE THE VAPORS FOR COMEDIC EFFECT.  PLEASE LAUGH NOW”.

And, unfortunately, it’s a rookie flub that telegraphs a descent into hamfisted absurdity rather than good parody:

But consider, too, that while eavesdropping I was sipping on a luscious coffee blend that the shop calls Jamaica Me Crazy. It’s seasoned with fresh cinnamon. Maybe that’s what they drink in Jamaica? I don’t know, since I’ve never been there.

But I do know that if the coffee was labeled Protestants A Plenty, Catholics Be Crazy, Jews be Jivin’ or Blacks Be Boppin’, there would be an uproar. Of course, Protestants and Catholics, as part of the religious mainstream, do not typically face the brunt of prejudice in the United States.

As I drank my French Roast this morning, trying to recover from last night’s Irish coffee and Swedish meatballs, I shook my head.  Too obvious.

And most know that intolerance against Jews and blacks is not publicly accepted. Blatant bigotry is easy to spot, while covert bigotry — where an entire group is used to sell coffee — can be easier to stomach and therefore ignore.

Right there – that’s the bit that threw it over the top.

The key to great parody is painting a picture of your target that is just sympathetic enough to be plausible.  It’s the touch that separates a good parody – Dwight Schrute, for example – from a bad one, like Stephen Colbert.  Is Hinda Mandell sympathetic?  About as sympathetic as a turd on your kitchen floor – a turd that nags and hectors you about the racial overtones of the dark stain you used on your bedroom floor!

It’s been nearly a decade since I learned one of my biggest life lessons. Difference is all about perception.

For instance, perceiving that coffee that is roasted to a darker hue is “dark”?

Seirously – calling this “satire” is like calling someone who walks onstage and bellows “Durrrr! I am teh DUMMY!” “acting”.  Whoever is writing this “Mandell” character just swerved past parody into group defamation.

I mean, how is this – “Durr, I am a spoiled, cossetted pseudo-academic who draws lessons that impugn others from my own provincialism!” – any different?

Do I embarrass the cafe manager by saying something? Do I become complicit by ordering a medium Jamaica Me Crazy with steamed milk, please?

Yes, unknown parodist – we got it.  “Hinda Mandell” is tortured by the racism in the mundane.  Let it go.  I’ve given up on finding a reason to like “her”; I’d settle for believing “she” was plausible.

Deciphering these messages might be the easier part. Figuring out what to do with them afterward is a lot harder.

The scary part is, someone apparently wants us to believe we have an entire academic discipline to help people “figure out” “hidden racist messages” in everyday objects – if you believe that “Hinda Mandell” is real.

But I think we all know better.

Researchers at Tufts have a single molecule that acts as an electric motor – a tiny little armature and pivot:

The motor, made from a single molecule just a billionth of a metre across, is reported in Nature Nanotechnology…The butyl methyl sulphide molecule was placed on a clean copper surface, where its single sulphur atom acted as a pivot.

Its primary applications so far are a) driving the next generation of “Smart Car”, and b) powering the printer in Tom Bakk’s office.

Jimmy Hoffa promises “war” against Republicans:.

And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? Theyve got a war, they got a war with us and theres only going to be one winner.

It was at an Obama event, no less.

Its going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. Were going to win that war,” Jimmy Hoffa said to a heavily union crowd.”President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Lets take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong,” Hoffa added.

OK, all you libs who feigned (good lord, I hope it was feigned) outrage over the non-existant threats from the Tea Party (or the occasional rant from insignificant unknown alleged Tea Partiers) and Sarah Palin’s out-of-context crosshairs; this is one of the leaders of your mainstream.

Allahpundit notes that on the one hand, it’s just stupid trash talk, the kind of thing Teamsters leaders (named Hoffa) always do with their rank and file around.  But…

…so filthy was the the left’s demagoguery of the right’s “tone” after the Giffords shooting that this sort of verbal excess by one of their own will never, ever be allowed to pass again without their faces being ground in it. So here you go. Start grinding, please.

So whatdya say, lefties?  After the Giffords shooting, you all ran blubbering into the streets with the victorian vapours over Palin’s “crosshairs” map, and her “I’m reloading” remarks.

I’m sure you’ll leap to condemn this, right?

Or is it “war” you want?

Because I know that word doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Let’s take a trip back to early 2007.

While Minnesota’s conservative blog scene had been been dominating the local alternative media scene since the “Blog” became a household word, it was a series of scattershot phenomena – you had a bunch of huge megabloggers like Powerline and Ed Morrissey, and on the other hand a whoooole lot of people who tried blogging for a few weeks or months, maybe drew a little attention,and then got frustrated at the difficulty involved in actually getting read.

In the meantime, the Big Left blogs had two big advantages; a hive-like reader community that pretty much read what they were told to read, and liberals with deep pockets who were willing to pay bloggers to write the stuff.

We wondereed – what was the way forward?

It was in the summer of ’07 that Andy Aplikowski hatched the idea of a center-right conservative group blog, aggregating material from the full range of center-right bloggers in Minnesota.  He and Derek Brigham and Nancy LaRoche ran with the idea, along with Brian Mason, Matt Abe, Kevin Ecker, the Lady Logician and, eventually, me.

That idea became True North.

The idea?  Give regional center-right bloggers an outlet, and a soapbox, and if all went well, a megaphone – a way for they, their blogs, and especially their writing and reporting,to be seen by a wider audence than they could get all by themselves, an outlet that would be greater than the sum of all our individual parts.

And so it was four years ago today that True North launched.  Then as now, we were based on one simple set of principles – and the mission to get writers who supported those principles out and in front of the public.

Some leftybloggers didn’t know what to make of us. But we’ve had a blast.

Nobody’s ever made a dime from True North – I don’t think we’ve ever accepted advertising – but we’ve had an effect far beyond anything anyone could have expected.  Litlte birds tell me we’re daily reading at the Capitol, on both sides of the aisle.  Beyond that?  One of our former contribs is in the Legislature (King Banaian, 15B); another, Michele Bachmann, is a presidential candidate.

It’s been a great four years – and the best is yet to come!

So thanks, Andy and Derek and Nancy, and Brian, Cindy, Kevin and Matt, and especially everyone that’s written for True North over the past four years!

There’ll be no Northern Alliance broadcast at the fair today.  Ed and I are taking a much-deserved day off from our grueling one-day-a-week schedule.

See you live from the studio next Saturday!

The Star/Tribune Editorial Board puts the happiest, rah-rah-local-team-iest face they can on the aftermath of “Operation Fast And Furious”, the “Justice” Department’s infamous “gun-running sting” that morphed into an organized attempt to slander America’s gun owners and gun dealers to undercut the Second Amendment movement – and tried to play the issue against the GOP.

They start out with the facts, more or less…:

The agency’s “Operation Fast and Furious” was supposed to monitor illegal gun sales from small-time gun buyers to large weapons traffickers, but after the sting operation failed an ATF analyst concluded that about 1,400 of the more than 2,000 weapons linked to the operation have not been recovered.

That’s one way of looking at it.

The other way – and the one that I’m pretty well convinced history will find accurate – was that the program was supposed to create a trail of guns from small American gun dealers to the narcotraficantes, that would allow the Administration to step in in 2012 and declare they were shocked, shocked to see a trail of firearms from Texas to the carterls.  This, of course, would allow them to frame the “bitter gun-clingers” of the Second Amendment movement, in classic Alinsky style, as aiders, abetters and profiteers from Mexico’s anarchy.

The Strib starts with some bipartisan gurglings…

It’s been reassuring to see dogged Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley take a lead role in the congressional investigation. While Jones, who will continue to serve as U.S. attorney in Minnesota, works to straighten out the agency’s internal operations, the American people deserve a thorough review of what went wrong in Operation Fast and Furious.

…which lead to the paper’s real goal; finding some way of tying this fiasco to the GOP and the Right (emphasis added):

[It’s] already clear that the ATF has suffered from being without a permanent director since 2006, when Congress began requiring Senate confirmation of the position.

President Obama nominated Andrew Traver, special agent in charge of ATF’s Chicago field division, in November 2010, but like other candidates he’s been opposed by the too-powerful gun lobby.

And there you have it.  For the “crime” of demanding better accountability in the leadership of the BATFE – a government agency with a decades-long history of colossal, epic, face-palming incompetence and politicization aimed at law-abiding gun owners – the Strib editorial board wants it to share in the responsibility for a bureaucratic cluster-hug designed entirely to slander that same movement.

The BATF doesn’t need Minnesota’s US Attorney to fix it. It needs to be shut down, its staff scattered to the four corners of the country, and have its offices demolished and the land beneath it salted.

The Strib editorial board has less interest in “fixing the BATF” than it has in cutting down Barack Obama’s opponents – or at least limiting damate to their President.

One of the things I miss the most about music in the eighties was that almost anything could score, with a little luck.

Some kinds, of course, had a head start.  South Africa was tres hip in the nineties – and for a brief spell, South Africa’s jumpy melange of pop styles got some airplay and mindshare in the west.

And one of the biggest sellers – to the extent that there was a big seller – was South Africa’s “Johnny Clegg and Savuka”.

Clegg – an Brit-Rhodesian whose mother’s parents were Polish/Lithuanian Jews – fronting a mixed-race group that pretty edgy stuff in apartheid-era South Africa – was a musical sponge, known as “The White Zulu” who mixed languages and genres like Emeril Legasse mixes spices:

<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/diCyzQSkmyU” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

And while it was almost inevitable that the politics would beat you over the head – because politics were an inevitable part of South Africa’s situation at the time – it worked as often as not,and in any case, it was often great music…

<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/KfTkD-XWOFg” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

…so who cares anyway?

And sometimes being beaten over the head could be fun!

But more of that tomorrow…

See if you can detect the pattern:

1. Republicans propose budget cuts decreases to budget hikes to some government service or another – whether it’s fire departments, public education, welfare…whatever.
2. The bureaucrats and politicians – pardon the redundancy – warn of dire consequences; layoffs, drastic curtailing of “service”, immense dislocation.
3. The cuts pass.
4. The various bureaucracies adjust their budgets to the new reality and, somehow, manage to carry on.  Just like most of the families they “serve” manage to do.

Do you recognize the pattern?

Of course you do. Every single state, county and city bureaucracy went through that play during the last session.  At the faintest hint of budget cuts decreases to demanded increases, schools warn that they’ll have to lay off half their teachers and crowd 80 kids into a classroom;  police departments warn that they’ll have to turn criminals loose from jail; public works warns the streets will collapse into the sewers, meaning you’ll have to drive to work through sewers.

And MTC inevitably cavils that they’ll have to slash routes and double fares.  Indeed, that’s exactly what they did.

And now that the proverbial rubber has hit the road?

Enh.

The predictions were dire: [No!  D’ya think? – Ed] Twin Cities bus and rail fare hikes as high as $4 and a dramatic loss of riders.

But transit officials dropped threats of fare increases and service cuts as quickly as ink dried on a budget deal that cut state general funding for transit by 40 percent.

Do you smell a rat, too?

The quick reversal this week renewed suspicion by some critics of the Metropolitan Council that it had enough money to keep transit rolling without drastic measures, even with reduced state funding.

“They were overplaying their hand and being the drama queens,” said Rep. Mike Beard, R-Shakopee, chairman of the House Transportation Policy and Finance Committee.

Mike Beard is a smart guy.

The Metropolitan Council defends its contingency planning as valid because earlier versions of a transit bill called for even greater cuts in state funding than what was finally enacted.

“This was not drama,” said Met Council Chair Susan Haigh. “This was real.”

Of course it was.

And it was also theatre.  It’s part of negotiating.

And this blog is doing it’s little bit to make sure people know it when they see it.

New Mexico governor Martinez NM gover shoots a 100 on her carry permit requalification:

Gov. Susana Martinez received perfect scores on recertification for her concealed-carry permit over the weekend in Las Cruces. She scored 100 percent with both .38- and .45-caliber handguns, her staff said.

It is, of course, serious business for Martinez:

She was a district attorney and a Republican candidate for governor when she first went through training and qualified to carry a concealed weapon. Her spokesman, Greg Blair, said Martinez’s personal and professional experiences motivated her to arm herself.

I’m not sure if this is her re-qual (the video says it is)…

…but it’s 11 hits for 14 shots in a quick fire drill, which ain’t chicken feed.