Speaker Zellers and Senator Senjem had barely brought the gavels down on the session when the DFL’s paid PR organs – Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Common Cause and the unions – and their unpaid ones in the media started chanting the meme: it’d been a “do-nothing” legislature.

That is, of course, objectiively wrong.  The GOP went into the session with big plans, and threw itself into carrying them off.

The DFL and Governor Dayton went into the session with smaller plans:

• Run out the clock
• Veto everything they could
• Hope redistricting would pull their chestnuts out of the fire come November.

It’s not a bad strategy, really; it ties in seamlessly with the DFL’s strategy this past several elections: “lie about everything convincingly enough to sway the stupid vote”.

But in addition to being a really really cynically ofay political strategy, it’s just plain not true. Here’s a sampling of what the “do-nothing’ legislature managed to get past a sluggardly DFL minority and a Governor whose only activities this past session were vetoing legislation and kissing Roger Goodell’s ass:

• Brought the deficit from the “nearly seven billion” of two years ago to a billion dollars and change in surplus today.
• They passed a Voter ID Amendment, which promises to help make MInnesota elections less like Chicago’s
• Furthered policies that led to the creation of 41,000 jobs – almost making up for the 47,000 jobs lost jn 2009 and 2010 when the DFL controlled the legislature.
• Brought Health and Human Services spending increases down from the double digits under DFL mismanagement to just over the rate of inflation.
• King Banaian’s “Sunset Advisory Commission” did something I do not believe any DFL government has ever done; eliminated government offices that had outlived their usefulness.
• Tort Reform
• Changes in school choice laws.

Oh, yeah – and they passed a ton of other bills, which Dayton then vetoed.

Put another way:  a legislature elected by over 50% of each district’s voters was stymied by a governor elected by barely over 40% of the people.

But that matters not to Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota, and its new astroturf spinoff, “Alliance for a Better Legislature”.  WIth nothing to show for their own session, the DFL and its astroturf partners’ only really strategy is…:

• Find a big lie
• Tell it constantly
• Peel off enough stupid people…
• …or fake and duplicate people to flip the Legislature while they still can.

Dayton and his minions in the paid PR racket – and I count the editorial board of the Strib among that crowd – are doing what they can to label this past legislature a “Do-Nothing” one.

It’d be more accurate, naturally, to call it “The Sandbagged Legislature”.  Now, I’m not going to say all of “Governor” Dayton’s vetoes, even for bills with astonishing bipartisan support, even for bills Dayton himself had claimed to support, seemed to run according to some kind of script or another.  But I will say that if you look at the video closely, you can see strings attached to his hands and jaw, being pulled by Alita Messinger, Elliiot Seid and Javier Morillo.

But let’s take a moment to go over the winners and losers from this past few weeks in the legislature:

Losers

• Small businesses – who lost out on the front-loaded sales tax exemption, the angel investor tax credit, and reforms to Minnesota’s dismally-high business property taxes.
• Students – who, if you accept that the “Shift” that has been a centerpiece of DFL budgetary policy for over a decade actually harms them, surely must have been hurt by Dayton’s veto of the GOP plan to accelerate the repayment of the “borrowed” money.  Right?
• Private sector workers, whose businesses needed the tax help, and whose jobs are in that much more jeopardy today than they were six months ago.

Winners

• Zygi Wilf – The resale value on his real estate investment has just gotten plumped up astronomically, on the backs of you, the taxpayer.  Especially in DFL-addled Minneapolis.  Hey, all you foreclosed DFL-voting homeowners on the North Side – hope those warm thanks from Zygi Wilf and Jared Allen keep you warm when the Sheriff’s moving y our stuff out on the lawn!
• Minneapolis and Saint Paul – who got a slew of little plums and bailouts.  Thanks, all you outstate rubes!

That’s a start, anyway.

I never endorse candidates.

Partly it’s because I can’t imagine anyone really cares what a schnook blogger from the Midway thinks.

Partly it’s because on the off chance I do have even the faintest shred of clout about these things, I’d rather use them to help people think for themselves.

Partly it’s because my vote really doesn’t matter; I’m sixth alternate in a district with ten delegates of whom nine have been pretty disciplined about showing up for conventions.

So I don’t believe I’ve ever endorsed anyone on this blog.

I’m not entirely going to go back on that today.

———-

I could vote for any of the three significant (sorry, Harold Shudlick) GOP Senate candidates with a clear conscience.  I haven’t always been able to say that during nomination battles.

Kurt Bills is a smart guy with stances I largely agree with.  He’s one of the good legislators, a freshman, so while he doesn’t have the longest voting record, it’s a good one.  He’s been polluted with some delegates, I think, by the tit-for-tat retributive onslaught of the Ron Paul supporters that have carried him to front-runner status, which obscures, I think, an excellent candidate.   If he gets the nomination, I’ll work for him without hesitation.

Pete Hegseth is untried – at least in legislative bodies – but is a blazingly smart guy and an excellent organizer.  His association with “Vets for Freedom” gives him some big advantages (big fundraising potential)  – and Pete is a great candidate who is, I think, headed for a great future in politics at whatever level.  If he gets the nomination, I’ll be there.

But this week, at the convention? I’m supporting Dan “Doc” Severson.

Part of it is the experience.  Dan spent eight years as a legislator, he knows how that’s done.

And as Andy Aplikowski points out, that’s a two-edged sword.  Any legislator who’s had to balance the waves of special interests, in Saint Paul as well as back in the home district, against principle is going to wind up with a few regrettable votes.  Dan has a few.  So will Bills if he stays in the legislature.  So will Hegseth if he wins.   Dan’s got a few.  He’s also got a long record of fighting the same fight the conservatives fought in 2000, that the Tea Party fought two years ago, and that the Paul crowd at least in part fights today – the fight to try to limit government – from an actual seat in the legislature.

Dan’s not perfect, but he’s been plenty good enough in a place and time that’s counted – in a seat in the legislature, after getting worked over by all those interests.

But Dan’s done one other thing that may be the single most visionary effort undertaken by a Republican leader in recent history in this state.

This state is a toss-up state.  Where does the GOP think its new voters are going to come from?   We’ve already mined the good GOP districts for every vote they have.  How many more votes are we going to get from Maple Grove and Benton County?

No.  While there may be pockets of un-reached Republicans out there, the long-term future of the Republican party, in Minnesota and nationwide, as a vessel for the conservative movement lies in the tens of thousands of Minnesotans who have come here recently from places like Laos, Guatemala, Eritrea, Mexico, Vietnam, Russia, Somalia…

…from places with strong traditions of family, faith and honor – things the GOP is supposed to uphold, although which it seems to do imperfectly lately – and whose way forward in this country, like all previous immigrants, is hard work and entrepreneurship.   Which are values where the GOP has a good track record, and are  values the DFL holds in sneering contempt.   These are people who are conservatives, and who vote DFL because the DFL has successfully painted the GOP as racists who want them all rounded up and sent back home.

I’ve railed at GOP candidates – from Mark Kennedy through Tom Emmer – for failing to poke their noses into the city, for not meeting with charter school parents (who in the city are mostly minorities, and who mostly vote DFL, and mostly don’t know that the DFL will kill charter schools before they kill cockroaches), or with H’mong leadership, or with Latino groups to discuss their view of immigration reform (to Emmer’s credit, he did this.  And hint: it’s a lot harder-line than most Republicans are).   My railing has been met politely, and ignored.

But Dan Severson has led the way on this.  He’s forged links with immigrant and ethnic communities in Minneapolis and Saint Paul that are a first in Minnesota Republican politics, and may be nearly unique in the US outside of Florida and the heavily-Latino southwest.

And that is the first step on the way to the future of the GOP and conservatism in Minnesota.

Also because Cathy Jo Severson will kick my butt if I don’t write this.

So I’m supporting Severson for Senate.

It’s become clear this past few days what “Governor” Dayton’s only real goal has been this past session: provide chanting points for the DFL and its paid messaging service, Alliance For A Better Minnesota.

Well, that and providing Wilfare.

Yesterday, Dayton vetoed a tax bill aimed at helping jump-start small business:

The plan would have given tax breaks for research and development, investment in new businesses, historic preservation and the Mall of America expansion. Tax rebates on capital equipment purchases would have been replaced by upfront tax breaks to small businesses purchasing capital equipment. Included was a provision Dayton sought: giving tax breaks to employers who hired veterans.

And in this lies the three biggest lessons of this entire fiasco of a session. They are simple, but apparently not simple enough to penetrate some moderate Republicans’ heads:

1. The DFL – and especially the media that supports them – loves “bipartisanship”.  Provided it’s solely on the part of Republicans.
2. The DFL’s goal isn’t improving Minnesota, or making a better life for Minnesotans.  It’s getting and keeping power.
3. To get the power back that they lost in 2010, the DFL is engaging in a Big Lie – really, a series of small lies, aimed at winning over the votes of the naive, the addled, the stupid, the ingenuous, the disingenuous and the illiterate.

That third bit?  Right here:

But Dayton said the bill tilted too heavily toward business, to the virtual exclusion of homeowners, renters, farmers and senior citizens…”There is no question that Minnesota businesses have been hit hard by recent property tax increases,” he wrote. “But so has everyone else! … I remain committed to broad-based, comprehensive property tax relief for all property taxpayers, including — but not limited exclusively to — businesses.”

And there’s a Big Lie.  Dayton knows that property taxes are set by local government.  They – accountable at the lowest, most intimate level with their taxpayers – control their own spending.  Dayton, like all the bobbleheaded leftybloggers who also get their chanting points from Alliance For A Better Minnesota, is trying to convince just enough of the ill-informed that this is not to to eke out a legislative victory.

And here’s the message I want to make sure gets out:

After weeks of intense lobbying, state business leaders were unhappy with the veto.

Jobs – real jobs that help the economy grow, not state jobs – come from business.  Now, I’ve heard some business owners say they are disgusted by the performance of the MNGOP in this past session,.

In response, here are  your two answers:

• Yesterday, we noted that the GOPers that were sent to kick butt for lower taxes have been largely holding their ground.
• Here, in this veto, you see the bloody conundrum; sending the GOP home this November to “teach the party a lesson” will leave Mark Dayton in complete control.

If you are a Minnesota businessperson, the lesson is clear:  if you are Zygi Wilf, government is here to serve you.  If you are not?  Then government is here to tax you, regulate you, to force you to unionize…

…and eventually strangle you.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve analyzed the votes of the Legislative GOP caucuses on the stadium votes over the past few weeks, and found that if you’re a conservative voter, you have some reason to take consolation; the legislators we sent to the Legislature in 2010 on a conservative platform largely – not perfectly, but largely – stuck with their principles.

How about the DFL?

Heres’ the interesting part:  Look at the DFLers in the House and Senate who voted “no” on the Stadium deal.  Don’t worry, it won’t take long; not many DFLers could bear the thought of not giving Wilfare to a billionaire:

• Allen
• Carlson (Lyndon)
• Clark
• Davnie
• Dibble
• Dziedzic
• Eaton
• Falk
• Greene
• Greiling
• Hansen (Rick)
• Hausman
• Hayden
• Hornstein
• Kahn
• Laine
• Lenczewski
• Liebling
• Loeffler
• Lourey
• Marty
• McGuire
• Mullery
• Murphy (Erin)
• Pappas
• Paymar
• Scalze
• Torres Ray
• Wagenius

With the exceptions of Rep. Falk and Senator Lourey, every last one of them is from the metro area.  They represent (or, for some of us, “represent”) the people who will actually be stuck with the lion’s share of the tax burden for all of those purple-clad horn-blowing tail-gating Bud-chugging freeloaders’ “family traditions”.

The rest of them?  From 18-term dinosaur Mary Murphy to first-term carpetbagger Carly Melin, from Eastsider Jon Lesch to suburban grandée Nora Slawik, from Iron Range glad-hander Tom Rukavina to smirky suburban snark-bot and Eddie Haskell impersonator Ryan Winkler, they’re the ones who figured billionaire Zygi Wilf deserves your money more than you and your family do.

Here they are:  Anzelc,Atkins, Bakk, Benson (John), Bonoff, Brynaert, Champion, Cohen, Dill, Dittrich, Eken, Fritz, Gauthier, Goodwin , Harrigton, Higgins , Hilstrom, Hilty, Hortmann, Hosch, Huntley, Johnson (Sheldon), Kath, Kelash, Knuth, Koenen, Langseth, Latz, Lesch, Lillie (Leon), Mahoney, Mariani, Marquart, Melin, Metzen, Moran, Morrow, Murphy (Mary), Nelson (Michael), Norton, Pelowski, Persell, Poppe, Reinert, Rest, Rukavina, Saxhaug, Sheran, Sieben, Simon (Steve), Skoe, Slawik, Slocum, Sparks, Stumpf, Thissen, Tillberry, Tomassoni, Ward, Winkler and Wiger.

They’re the ones that practice Cy Thao’s classic if inadvertent dictum of “progressive” politics – “when we win, we take your money; when you win, you get to keep your money”. And Larry Pogemiller’s even better “it’s silly to think that the people can spend their own money better than the government can”.

Does the GOP need to get more conservative?  Do its less conservative members need to shape up or get out?  Absolutely.  And hopefully we’re not done with that process this election season.

But let’s not forget who invented “overtaxation” and “subsidizing the 1%” in this state.

Tomorrow – what the MNGOP needs to do.  Says me.

…but I’m making a donation in kind to the Walker campaign for the benefit of my readers in Wisconsin:

If I get only one electoral wish this year, I want Walker to utterly bury this recall, and for Obama to lose.

Sorry.  Gotta hold steady at two wishes.

Tomorrow at noon on this blog, I’m going to do something I’ve never done in this space before.

See you then.

I mean, the only poll that matters is five and a half months away.  We all know that.

But a guy can dream; what if the Gallup Poll isn’t wrong?:

Well, it means conservatives are going to have to not screw up, and keep a hypothetical Romney Administration honest and, ahem, non-RINO-y.

Which means flipping the House and Senate.

More on that tomorrow.

I’ve heard not a few conservative voters groan in frustration over the stadium vote this past few weeks: “why did we even bother voting for the GOP in 2010?”

And watching the way some “conservative” legislators caved in at the first sign of beer-gutted yahoos and their husbands flouncing about the halls of the capitol with their faces painted purple and the bratwurst-grease stains on their sweatpants concealed by the crocodile tears they were squirting at the thought that the taxpayers would let Zygi Wilf take all their precious family memories to California, it was easy to feel discouraged.

One might feel justified in asking – do any of these people have any cojones at all?

But a look at the numbers from the vote shows there’s a little more than that to be hopeful for.

———-

As I noted this morning, the Legislature voted by a  thin majority to support the stadium.  That majority included a sizable minority of the GOP caucuses.

Most of the GOP caucus did, in fact, vote against the stadium.

But it’s when you break down the caucus by class that you see the real distinction.

Let’s look at the House first.

Of the 71 House GOP caucus members, 33 voted Yes and 38 voted No.   Ten of the votes came from Freshmen Republicans (Fabian, Kiel, Kriesel, LeMieur, Murray (Rich), O’Driscoll, Schomaker, Swedzinski, Vogel and Woodard ) voted “Yes” – all of them but the retiring John Kriesel from outstate.  The other nine certainly owe us some answers.

But 18 of the “No” votes came from first-term Representatives (Anderson (Diane), Banaian, Barrett, Benson (Mike), Bills, Crawford, Daudt, Franson, Gruenhagen, Kieffer, Mazorol, McDonald (Joe), McElfatrick, Myhra, Petersen (Brandon), Quam, Stensrud and Wardlow).   They’re from all over the place; they were a majority of the GOP “No” votes, while the Freshmen were about a third of the “Yes” total.

Put another way?  The “No” voters had served an average of less than 2.5 terms; the “Yes” votes, an average of four terms.

In other words, the average “No”-voting Republican in the House came to office after the debacles of 2006 and 2008, and most of them in 2010; they remember the price of moderate hamsterism, and they rejected it when the chips were down.   The average GOP “Yes” voter has been there a while – in the cases of some of the old-timers, maybe too long.

In the Senate, the pattern holds: of 37 Republicans in the Senate, 15 voted “Yes” and 22 “No”.  That’s 60% of the Senate GOP caucus holding the line (it was 54% in the House).

And if you look at shelf life?

Of the “Yes’ votes in the Senate, only five (Carlson, Magnus, Miller, Nelson and Pederson) were freshmen.

But on the “No” side, of 22 votes, 15 were freshmen (Benson, Brown, Chamberlain, Dahms, Daley, DeKruif, Gazelka, Hall, Hoffman, Howe, Kruse, Lillie (Ted), Newman, Thompson and Wolf).

Put another way, the average “Yes” voter has spent just shy of three terms – almost 12 years, on average – in Saint Paul (and if you leave out the freshmen, it’s closer to four terms on average).

On the other hand, the average “No” voting Republican has been there a little over a term and a half (the seven long-timers voting “No” included indefatigable conservatives like Gerlach, Hann, six-termer Warren Limmer, Nienow, Ortman, Parry and Vandeveer, people who survived the debacles of 2006 and 2008 for good reason).

———-

So what’s the conclusion?

Conservatives can console themselves ever so slightly in the wake the stadium debacle in the fact that legislators elected after conservatives took real control of the GOP did, in fact, vote overwhelmingly conservative during the stadium debacle.

And fortify themselves with the absolute knowledge that we have to get more of the same in Saint Paul.

So what do we do about it?

More tomorrow.

One of the worst takeaways from this stadium fiasco has been the wedge it’s put in the GOP – and which, naturally, the DFL are using on Republicans, inside and outside the party.

Which is politics, and to be expected.

But it’s also at least in part wrong.

Hear me out here.

———-

Conservative voters have become a majority among GOP activists.  It’s why the GOP has morphed from the party of Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger 15 years ago to the party of Dave Thompson and King Banaian today; the base, and people who vote Republican, want it.

And when the party strayed too far toward being “DFLers with better suits” over the past decade, the voters punished them by staying home in droves in 2006 and 2008, and by voting with the Tea Party and expelling many of the “moderate” hamsters from office in 2010 (to say nothing of many liberals).   They were sent to office with a mission; cut taxes, shink government, get out of the way of job creation, among a few other things.

And they took a good whack at it this session – hobbled by a Governor whose only goal (and job) was to veto everything he could, and the rhubarb at the State GOP (which slopped over into the Senate) they certainly didn’t get it all done.

But the stadium?  That was the bill that’s gotten conservatives exercised, one way or the other.  It’s been amusing to see Ron Paul and Kurt Bills supporters laboriously backtrack to justify spending public money on the single least essential bill government has – Zygi Wilf’s real estate improvements.

The DFL and media (PTR) scarcely need to exacerbate the internecine scrum between Republicans over the stadium (although they are), though. We’re beating ourselves up hard enough.

I’m going to suggest that conservative Republicans have a little more to show for the stadium debate than the DFL, the press and our less sanguine friends may let on.

———-

On the surface, of course, the numbers just aren’t good.  The stadium passed both chambers:  71-60 in the House, 36-30 in the Senate.

The partisan breakdown looked like this (and this is my count, not the official one – I assembled much of this data manually, and errors are very possible – although they don’t really affect the conclusion):

House (and I know, the math doesn’t square with the totals I got from the Strib above – I’ll work on it when I get a moment – and it doesn’t change the conclusion, again):

• For: 40 DFL, 33 GOP
• Against: 20 DFL, 38GOP

Senate:

• For: 21 DFL, 15 GOP
• Against: 8 DFL, 22 GOP.

So on the one hand, it does make sense – the DFL, yet again, voted in greater measure to pick the taxpayers’ pockets.  Indeed, it’s instructive which Democrats voted no (in both chambers, they included Davnie, Dibble, Dziedzic, Eaton, Falk, Greene, Greiling, Hansen (Rick), Hausman, Hayden, Hornstein, Kahn, Laine, Lenczewski, Liebling, Loeffler, Lourey, Marty, McGuire, Mullery, Murphy (Erin), Pappas, Paymar, Scalze, Torres Ray and Wagenius) – for the most part, the ones whose constituents would actually have to pay for the stadium.  It’s the DFL philosophy writ small; make other people pay for your toys.

But the fact remains that there would have been no publicly financed stadium without GOP participation.

And the GOP voted for it; 15 of 37 Senators and 33  of 71 Representatives; a minority within the caucus, but enough to saddle the taxpayers with the bill.

But as the DFL and media (ptr) remind us, there are really two GOPs.  There’s the “moderate”, pre-Tea Party version, and there are the newcomers who came to Saint Paul in 2011 full of whiz and vinegar and on a mission to change government.  They are in fact the majority of the Senate GOP caucus.

What’s the divide in the vote between the “old’ and “New” GOPs?

More on that at noon today.

Barack Obama is “The First Gay President”.

On the one hand, it’s only Andrew Sullivan.  I am only dimly aware that Sullivan was still blogging.

On the other hand?  Well, Jazz Shaw puts it well:

I’m not such a political neophyte as to suggest that this is unique in politics, but the bold faced, brazen machinations and ham handed plotting which have characterized this “evolution” in the President’s position on the subject at hand are rather breathtaking. And I’m not saying that people don’t actually “evolve” in their positions, beliefs or ideology. I know that my own attitudes and beliefs in my twenties were a far cry – in some instances at least – from where I stand in my fifties. Very few of us spring out of the halls of high school fully formed with all of the opinions we’ll hold until the grave.

But these evolutions generally take place over a long period of time, as exposure to new people and different ideas are examined and experimented with. Some are kept, others are rejected. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has gone in the course of less than a decade from full throated support of gay marriage to full opposition on religious grounds, back to full support. Are we really supposed to be buying this?

Ask Tina Brown.

I’m sure she thinks so.

I didn’t think Andrew Sullivan could do more to undercut the intellectual legitimacy of the left than his “Trigger” obsession – his demented notion that Trig Palin was Sarah’s baby.

Happy to say I was wrong.

Check out the story at Caribe Bistro.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism – as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• Ed and I are both in the studio this week, from 1-3PM.  We’ll be talking about the Minnesota GOP’s very bad week, Barack Obama’s worse one, and maybe, just maybe, with a couple of the casualties of light rail.
• Special programming note here – I’ll be filling in on Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – tomorrow from 1-3 so Brad could take Mother’s Day off.
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  Join him from 9-11 every Saturday!

(All times Central)

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

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream) .
• New – send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• Podcasts are now available on the AM1280 page!  (Ed and I are #2 – Brad is #3).
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

I’m going to start a new TV show.  I’m going to call it “Profiles in Leadership”.

I’ve got a few episodes all plotted out.

Episode 1:  After decades of weak mayors who futzed around with “due process” and “the limits of government”, Boss Tweed finally did more than pay lip service to the office of “Chief Executive”, and actually used the office of mayor to lead the City of New York!

Episode 2: Putting lesser religions with their notions of “spiritual commitment” to shame, Revered Jim Jones put the leader back into “leadership”, when by the strength of his example he led his followers to put the “Ded” in “Dedication”.

Episode 3:  Unsatisfied to be a regular businessman, Bernard Madoff led his organization to excel beyond all others in its category!

Episode 4: Mark Dayton truly led “his” state in the quest to stick the bill for a billion-dollar spiff to Zygmund Wilf’s real estate investment on Minnesota’s taxpayers in an example of “leadership” for the ages.

No, the Strib say so:

Gov. Mark Dayton’s savvy and indefatigable advocacy for a new Vikings stadium represents the kind of executive leadership Minnesotans should applaud.

In much the same way that Chicagoans should have “applauded” Al Capone getting the prostitution rackets lined up and paying him tribute.

Unlike his predecessor, Dayton did more than occasionally lead cheers for the Vikings — he delivered on a key campaign promise to the people of Minnesota despite significant political risks.

Unlike his predecessor, Mark Dayton makes no pretense of being fiscally responsible, except where that means “taking other peoples’ money to pay off your campaign chits”.

And make no mistake about it; this was a payoff – to the Strib as well as many others.

The Strib needs the Vikings to be in downtown Minneapolis, to be paying big money on that fallow land the Strib owns near the current ‘dome, and to give it another ready market for selling newspapers.  So do the rest of the Twin Cities media, to a lesser degree.  They knew Dayton was a willing stooge for the downtown Minneapolis business interests that want that state subsidy every bit as bad as Wilf did.

And so the Star/Tribune’s coverage of the election race that led Dayton to office resembled  DFL public relations more than journalism – from their careful white-washing of Dayton’s political record to the election-eve “Minnesota Poll” showing Tom Emmer trailing by an improbable margin that certainly induced not a few Republicans to stay home.

The threat that the Vikings would have left Minnesota without a stadium deal this year was real, although to their credit the team and NFL leadership negotiated in good faith.

The negotiations were done in the same “good faith” the Mob uses when “negotiating” with a shopkeeper who is threatening not to pony up protection money fast enough.

Had this market lost the franchise, we no doubt would have seen an expensive reprise of the effort to bring big-league hockey back to the state after the North Stars left for Dallas.

Right!

And we all know how that loss devastated the State of Minnesota…

…well, no.  It devastated hockey fans, who were upset that “their” team got moved elsewhere by an owner that, like Zygi Wilf, wanted better tribute from the local government.

And it devastated the TV and radio stations and newspaper reporters and (especially) ad execs that covered, and sold ads for coverage of, North Stars games.

Other than that?  The loss of the North Stars had much less impact on this city than the loss of, say, the Ford plant.

Thursday’s passage of a stadium bill ends years of debate over the future of the team and the outdated Metrodome.

And the debate will be “ended” for another twenty years.  Until the next round of NFL owners wants their investments buffed up on other peoples’ money.

Or until someone tells them “no”.

Which would devastate nobody…

…but WCCO, KSTP, KARE, Fox Sports North, the PiPress and the Strib.  

Which, to be fair, at least discloses part of their vast interest in this bit of racketeering:

(Disclosure: The current stadium development plan includes one of five blocks owned by the Star Tribune near the Metrodome.)

But they graze up against the truth at least briefly:

The stadium bill, and the bonding bill that went before it this week, were exercises in effective bipartisan lawmaking,

And there you.

“Bipartisan” legislation.  Everybody wins…

…but the taxpayer.

And that, as they say, is all.

I’ve said it over and over – and every day of new evidence confirms it more; the DFL’s strategy seems to be “say whatever we want to (knowing that the media will never, ever contradict us in public, at least not in a way that the majority of voters will ever see or hear),  regardless of accuracy or truth, to sway the ill-informed, the ignorant, and the not-so-bright.  Because their votes (and whatever else we can jam through the polls) count just as much as the votes of the smart and informed people”.

Case in point:  Education Minnesota president t Tom Dooher’s statement to the media yesterday as the session drew to a close; I’ve added emphasis:

“The 2012 Legislature showed that Minnesotans will have a clear choice in November between leaders who truly value public education and those who view our classrooms as places for political games.

“The Republican majority introduced more than 20 bills targeting public education and educators this year. None of them responsibly addressed the most pressing needs of our students, including repaying the state’s $2 billion IOU to its schools, closing the achievement gap and developing a sustainable funding system for the future.

It’s a lie, of course.

The GOP did, in fact, propose and pass a bill that would have accelerated the repayment of the shift.   Governor Fauntelroy vetoed it.

This, really, shows several things:

The DFL’s campaign – say whatever it takes to win in November, truth be damned, is well underway.  The unions and Alliance for a Better Minnesota will soon be buying up millions in airtime to saturate this state with ads saying “The GOP hates kids”.  Mark my words.

Your children are the DFL’s pawns.  To the extent that the shift actually harms children (it really doesn’t; it inconveniences administrations), the DFL showed this session that they’d rather exploit them in November than pay for their education today.

This is what happens when you let “Right To Work” die in committee.  How wonderful would it have been to have every conservative, Republican member of EdMinn walk of the union out en masse at this hypocritical slander?   Or if the 42% of union members who do vote Republican tell their leadership “uh, not so fast” when the unions spend 95% of their dues on Democrats?

Apparently some genius in the majority caucus figured if they backed off on Right to Work, the unions would play fair this election.

This is politics in Minnesota today; one party does the best it can for a better Minnesota; the other does whatever it can to retain power, truth and ethics be damned.

Sorry if my output is a little light today.

I was watching all those idiot Vikings fans hooting and hollering, and those chucklehead Vikings players doing their idiot dances on camera, over the news that Zygi Wilf’s and the NFL’s exploitation of the state’s stupid and gullible classes convinced a majority of legislators to allow Wilf to pilfer hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers to buff up the  value of his private investment, and I guess I chundered so long and hard it was impossible to write much.

Sorry about that.

Clearly, Mark Dayton knows his niche; go for the gullible, the easily manipulable, the people who think money comes from unicorns from on high, or who just don’t care that they’re making other people pay for their recreation.

The Obama Administration and the left – at least, the mewling, white, upper-middle-class version of the Left – thinks it’s in a position to start re-instating gun control.

And they’re doing it the same way they started doing it 40 years ago; with a concentrated, coordinated, considered slander of all law-abiding gun owners.  Fast and Furious tipped the Administration’s hand; they want to undercut the “law-abiding” stock of the most law-abiding people in the United States – the legal gun owner,

You’re starting to see it in the media and in the leftyblogs that re-package BIg Left’s message for further regurgitation; the way the media tried to turn the Martin/Zimmerman case into a commentary on gun owners (to say nothing of the “Stand your Ground” law, which it – let’s repeat this – was not).

So it’s time for all of us who support the human right of self-defense – no less important than speech, religion, press or assembly – to do something that many of us figured we wouldn’t have to do anymore; get up, get organized, and start voting for gun rights again.

Don’t take it from me.  Take it from Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.

I’m going to spend a little time going over the votes of the Republicans who supported the stadium.

Let’s start with the Senate.

You can look at a fairly interesting map of the votes in the House and Senate; the map isn’t entirely unpredictable; third-ring exurban Republicans voted (mostly) against it; Republicans in swingy districts, and moderates, voted “yes”.

Let’s break ’em down:

Democrats voting yes

I’m not going to bother analyzing them – they’re all hopeless anyway.

Bakk (Cook); Bonoff (Minnetonka); Cohen (St. Paul); Goodwin (Columbia Heights); Harrington (St. Paul); Higgins (Minneapolis); Kelash (Minneapolis); Koenen (Clara City); Langseth (Glyndon); Latz (St. Louis Park); Metzen (South St. Paul); Pappas (St. Paul); Reinert (Duluth); Rest (New Hope); Saxhaug (Grand Rapids); Sheran (Mankato); Sieben (Newport); Skoe (Clearbrook); Sparks (Austin); Stumpf (Plummer); Tomassoni (Chisholm); Wiger (Maplewood)

Democrats voting no

Now, I’m pretty sure Mark Dayton has to be loving the fact that the GOP is the party tearing itself apart over this – the only eight DFLers voted against the bill:  Dibble (Minneapolis); Dziedzic (Minneapolis); Eaton (Brooklyn Center); Hayden (Minneapolis); Lourey (Kerrick); Marty (Roseville); McGuire (Falcon Heights); Torres Ray (Minneapolis)

Republicans voting no

No arguments here.  They’re the good guys and gals:

Benson (Ham Lake); Brown (Becker); Chamberlain (Lino Lakes); Dahms (Redwood Falls); Daley (Eagan); DeKruif (Madison Lake); Gazelka (Brainerd); Gerlach (Apple Valley); Hall (Burnsville); Hann (Eden Prairie); Hoffman (Vergas); Kruse (Brooklyn Park); Lillie (Lake Elmo); Limmer (Maple Grove); Newman (Hutchinson); Ortman (Chanhassen); Parry (Waseca); Thompson (Lakeville); Vandeveer (Forest Lake); Wolf (Spring Lake Park)

Carlson (Bemidji); Fischbach (Paynesville); Gimse (Willmar); Howe (Red Wing); Ingebrigtsen (Alexandria); Jungbauer (East Bethel); Koch (Buffalo); Magnus (Slayton); Michel (Edina); Miller (Winona); Nelson (Rochester); Nienow (Cambridge); Pederson (St. Cloud); Robling (Jordan); Rosen (Fairmont); Senjem (Rochester)

I have to say I’d hoped for much better from Niennow, who has been as solid a supporter of the taxpayer as there is (UPDATE:  And rightly so.  Nienow’s vote was apparently a parliamentary dodge.  My apologies).  And I didn’t expect much from a few of the others – especially the retiring Michel, who has nothing to lose – sad to say.

But for the rest?

I think an explanation is in order.

It looks like the stadium is a done deal.  The fat lady is warming up in the locker room.

And people – Republicans, mostly, although there are exceptions – are angry about it.   Some are angry enough to start a Facebook group to yak about un-endorsing Legislators (Republicans, naturally, mostly) who voted for the stadium.

Now, setting up Facebook pages is easy and cheap.  Primarying legislators is work, and expensive.   Keep it all in context.

But there is a valid point, there; Republicans ran on a “fiscal responsibility” platform – and then caved in to a billionaire seeking Wilfare.

There is a valid response; the team tapped exploited this state’s boundless reserves of sentiment for our team.  And they exploited the key fact about Mark Dayton; he was elected by the stupid, and Dayton and his people know how to make the stupid turn out.  Daily during the stadium debate yahoos in purple staggered about the halls of the capitol and wrote beer-stained letters and misspelled but irate emails demanding that the stadium pony up for their recreation, their “tradition” (of losing), “their” team.  And that adds up to votes.  Stupid, entitled, spoiled-rotten votes?  Yep.  And they count just as much as the votes of smart, or at least ethical, people.

And the bitch of it is this; a legislator can have voted right on every single issue – the budget, taxes, deregulation – but if they’re threatened with losing office to a worthless DFL challenger who puts on a purple cap and bellows on cue, what the hell good is any of it?

Republicans who voted for the stadium owe the voter an explanation.  There are a few I’m willing to accept; if a conservative with a 75+ rating from the Taxpayers League is in a district where he or she is up by less than five in a district full of pinheads who dress up like vikings, I’ll buy it.

More either this noon or tomorrow, depending on how much I like putting the numbers together.

…but Obama got one right.  He may not had intended to get it right – from the standpoint of a libertarian-conservative “tenther” – I’d rather doubt it, given his other behavior.

You could say he got it right for all the wrong reasons.

Stil, if even the loathsome Gawker gets it, then I think there’s some there, there.

Of course, the announcement itself infuriated the far left just as much as the far right:

He now believes that gay couples should be able to marry. He doesn’t believe they have a right to do so. This is like saying that black children and white children ought to attend the same schools, but if the people of Alabama reject that notion—what are you gonna do?

The key language in the ABC News write-up is this:

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own.

On this afternoon’s special broadcast, Jake Tapper echoed that point: “The president said he thought this was a state-by-state issue.”

Whoah!

Now, this is not a profile in federalistic courage; it’s Obama hiding behind the Tenth Amendment to try to avoid infuriating blacks and gay-hating union members.  Obama would use the Tenth Amendment as a placemat if he could get Obamacare, “tax the rich” and complete radical underhaul of the banking system jammed down.

The announcement, in other words, was an attempt to do the same basic thing he did with the Zimmerman/Martin flap: get his part of his base energized ( white liberals in this case) without losing the other half.

It may not be working yet.Well, before Roe v. Wade, abortion was a state-by-state issue, too. So was slavery.

We should never, as a nation, have embraced either.

At any rate – it may not be working.

The U of M Duluth shows that, if you seek to impose policy via grievance, it’s really as simple as 1-2-3!

In this case, it’s the case of Blair Moses.  Mr. Moses wanted UMD to install more “Gender-Neutral Bathrooms”.

Now, I’m not here to judge Mr. Moses’s goal; I know people with gender issues, and it’s not a trival thing.

On the other hand, UMD is a public institution, supported by tax dollars, and bathrooms aren’t cheap, and it’s somewhat illuminating to notice the degree to which policy can by pushed by shrill, intransigent insistence (see also: thousands of yobbos with purple-painted faces demanding we all knuckle under to the NFL’s blackmail so they don’t have to find some other meaning in life than supporting Zygi Wilf’s real estate investment “their team”).

Did I say “simple as 1-2-3?”

Why yes – I did:

Step One: Make a Shrill Demand: No matter how outrageous the demand is, state it as an absolute:

In late April, Moses sent a letter to the administration with two demands. First, he insisted they “take immediate action to begin the process of designating more gender neutral bathrooms.”

Step Two: Ratchet Up The Emotion!:  Budgeting and finance are such dry, empirical subjects.  Emotion sells better.

How much emotion?  In the movie “The Usual Suspects”, the Turkish arch-villain Keyser Söze operates under the axiom that when you show you’ll go further than your opponent will, you win.

And Blair Moses certainly goes there:

Second, he demanded an “announcement stating the said day of change.”

In the letter, Moses threatened that if his demands were not met by April 26, he would begin a hunger strike for three weeks or more.

Step 3: Work On That End-Zone Happy Dance For When Minnesota Bureaucrats Acquiesce in the face of your shrill, queue-jumping demand for your priorities to be pushed ahead of everybody else’s:

Late in the day on April 26, Moses uploaded a video to YouTube claiming he had begun his hunger strike and was “sweating” because he “had not eaten” all day. He continued to cite current policy regarding “gendered” bathrooms, describing them as “oppressive” and a “problem” on campus.

No, really:

The very next day, April 27, the university administration ceded to both of his demands.

Chancellor Lendley C. Black issued a campus-wide e-mail stating the school would take “immediate steps” to resolve the issue and would “provide two gender neutral restrooms” in the student center. Additionally, she pledged that all new construction projects and remodels would include at least one gender neutral restroom.

Who says college doesn’t teach anything these days?

If I were a betting man – and I’m not – I’d wager money that we see hunger strikes over meat at the cafeteria, cars on campus, and finally the fact that it costs to go to UMD at all.

Any action on that bet?

Like most nerds, I read “xkcd” pretty religiously.

And last Monday’s panel was one of the funniest ever – “Every Major’s Terrible”.  Go ahead, sing it to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Modern Major General” (or “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, if that’s what you know).  Click on it to go to the original site, if my print is too small.

I love it.

Of course, cartoonist Randall Munroe is not only a brilliant cartoonist (I mean, the guy gives a stick figure more personality than a page full of Ken Weiner’s R-Crumb-derivative visual overemoting does) – but he’s a math snob.  HIs strip constantly and positively ooozes contempt for humanities and liberal arts majors.

Which is fine – everyone brings their prejudices to the table.  And as we creep up toward the inevitable deflation of the education bubble, Munroe’s particular peccadillo is hardly rare; you see it in blogs and hear it on talk shows constantly; “it makes no sense to go deeply into debt to get an arts/humanities/social sciences degree that will never earn you a living.”

The response to that statement, really, is a series of questions:

“Does it ever make sense to go into debt for any degree?”  Sure, potentially; it depends on how much debt, and what the return on that investment actually is.  $50K in debt for a biomedical engineering degree that will have the student earning six figures not too long after graduation?  Go for it.

How about $50K for a BA in Music or $10K for a degree in Computer Science, or $100K to go through eight years of school for a PhD in Folklore?  Seems stupid, doesn’t it?

Well, it really depends on two more questions:  What is “Education”, and what is “Return on Investment”?

Let’s look at both of ’em.

What is “Education”?  Munroe has the same conceit most academics have; your degree defines you.

Back in college, I had a friend – a business major – who used to sneer at my English major (without, by the way, any intention of becoming an English teacher or professor).  “Hah, Berg”, he used to say.  “I’ll be making big money right out of college, and you’ll be working in a bowling alley”.

He wasn’t much of a “friend”, come to think of it.

25 years on?  He’s a customer service manager for a health insurance company – which is, to be fair, something for which a BA in Business is perfectly adequate preparation.  Not sure how happy he is .  I design software – something for which a BA in English was no preparation whatsoever?

In and of itself, no.  But in my degree – and my related minors in German and History – I started polishing up my ability to think – to look at a problem and tear it down into logical components.  Which was a no-brainer when it came to being a reporter and producer.  And which paved my way to taking those skills and break down the problem of switching into technical writing, and then User Experience work.

I’m not the only one, of course.  The person with the $100K in debt for a PhD in Folklore?  That person was one of my mentors in my current career.  He doesn’t do much work in folklore, but he has pretty much paid off those student loans with a bunch left over – so if “money” and “respect in a non-academic field” are valid measures, this guy has blown the lid off the gauge.

The guy with the music degree? Computer programmer, very talented, self-taught in the field, paid very well, and enjoys the hell out of his career.

So if you view “Education” as “preparation for a job”, then there are definitely better degrees than Arts and Humanities.  If you view it as “learning how to think”, then your answer may be different…

….and lead you to a different question altogether; “are there cheaper ways to learn to “think” than accruing $30-100K in debt”?    I was lucky enough to get out of college without significant debt.  My kids won’t be so lucky.  Should they treat education as a trade school?

That – not “should I major in English or Computer Science” – is the tough question.

Well, that and…

How Do You Define “Return On Investment” – Now, I’m a little biased.  My “investment”, at least financially, paid for itself at my first job, financially.

How about the computer science major with the fairly minuscule debt who left college directly into an upper-middle-class income?

Well, he was pretty miserable.  Hated it.  Loved the money, of course, but hated the field.  Made good money, but was bored out of his mind.  Made up for it by getting into a relationship that led to a marriage that is now (just between you and I) pretty miserable and expensive.  His education returned a pretty fair financial investment, but almost nothing in terms of the whole “who I am and what I really think I should do in this world” bit, which is a question whose interest, over the years, adds up just as surely as interest on student loans or bills that pile up because you don’t have the education to get a better job.

None of which is to say, of course, that this world doesn’t have blissfully happy electrical engineers, or anthropology majors walking around with six figures in debt and prescriptions for prozac besides.

But the most important questions about education today, as we near the peak of the education bubble, really are…:

1. Does it make you a better person, as an individual, a provider for yourself and any future family, and member of our society?
2. Does it do it at a cost that will, for years, drag you down as an individual, a provider and member of society?
3. What balance works for you?

Which is a hell of a question to ask people when they’re 18 years old.

I will, of course, be humming “Every Major’s Terrible” all day.

Two bits of news from yesterday.

While I’m not especially knotted up about gay marriage – I support civil unions, yadda yadda – it lost big in North Carolina yesterday.  Bible-belt bigotry?  Or a sign that social issues are winners in swing states?  We’ll see.

And as you’ve no doubt heard, Scott Walker drew almost as many Republican voters to his meaningless primary than all the Democrat contenders put together in Wisconsin yesterday – an effort that cost millions in union money and led to the Dems getting…

…Tom Barrett, the Sharon Sayles-Belton of Milwaukee, a man who’s presided over the decline of a city that…well, was where Happy Days was set, anyway.

If you’re a union member?  Get ready to have your paycheck tapped harder than ever.

I’m going to slip a few bucks in the figurative online mail for the Walker campaign.  Now’s when it get serious.

To: Minnesota Vikings
From:  Mitch Berg – Bears Fan
Re:  Your Fiscal Plans

Dear Mr. Wilf,

if having “Mitch Berg” come to your new bit of political swag stadium and spend money on user fees, or going to some pull tab machine to lose a pre-planned amount of money to pay for the stadium improvements to your investment on the public dime is in any part of your plans, please subtract from your plans appropriately.  Not going to happen.  You will not see one voluntary dime from me.

(I was going to add “If any of my legislators vote for this bit of legislative larceny, I’ll work tirelessly to remove their lame asses”, but I think you know I’m “represented” by Sandy Pappas and Rhea Montgomery, so I’ll be working tirelessly against them anyway).

I’ll be at Alary’s with the Bears fans.  That’s a private sector business.

Unless they demand money from the state to pay for improvements to their real estate.   Then I’ll tube them too.

The Vikings may suck, they may in the Super Bowl.  But you, Zygi, will never voluntarily get a dime from me.

That is all.