Advice To Our Liberal Friends

With the new session coming up, all you liberals are going to be in for a new experience – being a legislative minority here in Minnesota.

It’s never happened, not in the political lifetime of any of you out there.

It’s gonna be a whole new feeling for all you libs – not being able to spin the wheels and levers of government to make it do what you want at will or, at the very worst, to be able to control a chamber of the legislature to bog down legislature.  All you have is the veto (and of course DFL control of the state’s bureaucracies, which is not an inconsiderable power by itself).   He’ll float his “Crack Whore With A Stolen Platinum Card Budget”, just like the people who paid for his election told him to.  It’ll get shot down.  He’ll turn around and veto the budget put forward by the responsible adults.  That’s how it’s done.

So, speaking as someone who’s been in the legislative minority in this state as long as I’ve been in this state – 25 years, now – here’s some advice for all you DFLers.

You can thank me later.

The entire legislature was elected, not “Selected:  Yes, the people really did flush the DFL out of office.  Buck up, little campers; 2012 is another election.  Although I think we’re gonna clobber you then, too.

Stay Calm:  Some of you people are nuts even when you’re in power.  We conservatives are pretty good at tamping down our odd nutbar.  You guys need some practice.  You’ll probably get it.

Elections Have Consequences: The DFL used its temporary legislative supremacy to try to jam down a phalanx of spending and taxes over the past four years.  They were stymied by Governor Pawlenty, who exercised his veto and conducted a masterful rear-guard job.  And when he did, you – especially your pundit friends in the media – were downright heart-rending in your demands that Pawlenty also represent the Minnesotans who didn’t vote for him, and pass the DFL’s legislation.  Now, as a conservative, I’m under no illusion that Dayton is going to vote my conscience when he takes office. 

So I’m counting the hours until we get the first mawkish blog post or Lori Sturdevant column asking Republicans to remember that “you represent the majority of Minnesotans that didn’t vote for you”.  In that way that the DFL always forget when they controlled all the knobs and levers.

Pack Your Bags!:  I thought nothing could match Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon’s narcissistic solipsism in threatening to move to France if George W. Bush won his various elections (and naturally, neither did), until I heard Minnesota DFLers threatening to leave the state if Emmer had won the election.  Well, controlling both houses of the legislature is arguably a better deal than having the governor’s office and one chamber.

So since I just bought a truck, do you and your crap need a ride to Hudson?

Get A Grip: No matter what the DFL, Tom Dooher, the Strib’s editorial board and DFL-pet columnists tell you, Minnesota isn’t really going to change all that much when the adults take over.  Oh, keeping government fed will no longer be the primary stated mission of government (and if the GOP majority doesn’t change that, those of us who sent them there will be happy to bring them home), but the schools will stay open, the parks will still be there for, er, parking, there will still be libraries, cops and firemen will still respond (unless you live in a city where the DFL will hold those services hostage).  Indeed, the schools will probably do better, you’ll be able to enjoy the park to relax from the job you don’t have now but are more likely to have then, you can spend your time at the library reading rather than job-hunting, and so on.  But by and large, not all that much is going to change.

Except, it seems, your (plural) blood pressure.

Buck up, little vegan campers.  We conservatives survived.  So will you – if you choose to.

21 thoughts on “Advice To Our Liberal Friends

  1. Uh, Mitch, in case you haven’t noticed, Hudson is in Wisconsin where the GOP controls the legislature AND the governorship. (I’d say the control the executive, but we both know that that’s not true given the nature of the Civil Service bureaucrats.)

  2. Night

    “That leaves…Iowa…”

    Nah! They won’t go BACK there! If they do, I hope that they take Comrade Bitchie Ritchie and RickDFL with them!

  3. Expect an uptick in psychologist visits over the next two years.

    And calls to the suicide hotline.

  4. For kicks I went to the Madison papers websites today to see how the Republican takeover is going. Wooooooooo it is not a happy winter in Madison. The looney tunes are threatening to leave the state (I’ll drive over and help them pack). And here is something we don’t see in Minnesota. An intense hatred by the Madison wacko left of everyone else in Wisconsin. Think about the Democrat’s hatred of Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, but have that kind of venom directed towards the all the residents of their own state who are not from Dane County.

  5. Mitch and SITD fans……you should look at Wisconsin. Sit back and eat some popcorn when Walker and the new majority take on the gov’t unions. Actually I am not a big fan of Walker, but I have to say this. He has balls like I’ve never seen on a Republican politician.

  6. “Uh, Mitch, in case you haven’t noticed, Hudson is in Wisconsin”

    I was hoping Mitch was offering rides to the Hudson River, though I doubt he could stomach the journey.

    Simply moving our angry liberals across the border to WI is like letting the Taliban slip across the border from A-stan to Pakistan. It solves the short term problem, but you know it will come back to bite you in the ass.

  7. Liberals should stop watching MSNBC and listening to NPR. According to NYT, it makes them believe wrong things:
    http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/study-some-viewers-were-misinformed-by-tv-news/#more-52445

    Of course the same study cited by the Times, carried out by some liberal thinktank at the University of Maryland, found that Fox was even worse. In response to this a Fox News spokesman said “The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’ – given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with.”

    Too bad libs can’t dismiss the study the same way — it was done by a real university with PhD’s and stuff, and it was PEER REVIEWED, so to a lib it has passed every FACT CHECK and it must be believed.

  8. Terry, it was a survey, which is the least scientifically rigorous of studies. So your last paragraph isn’t accurate. Of course, that’s a good reason to dismiss the study, as opposed to a place being a “party school,” which has no bearing on an actual scientific study and is a bad reason to dismiss the study.

  9. Because we all know that academics at universities NEVER EVER allow their political biases or personal agendas to influence a “study”.

  10. Sure it is, Disco. They were both surveys. The Fox guy knew that. Was his point too subtle for you?
    I’ve read dozens of these “studies”. Most newspapers just reprint the summary handed to them by the researchers. A lot of them are “meta studies”, which aren’t real research at all. Social science is a strange discipline. Researchers and authors are allowed to be policy advocates.
    Many times the goal of these “researchers” is to turn differences of opinion into right or wrong beliefs.
    Did Sadam Hussein have a connection with the 9/11 hijackers? “Connection” is not a precise term. It was certainly possible that at some point in time Saddam’s secret police had contact with the Taliban and/or al Qaida, perhaps even funneled some money or supplies their way. Yet a famous “study” — done by a social studies department at a department at a CA university —
    flatly said that there was no connection between Sadam and the 9/11 hijackers, and if you believed there was a connection, you were wrong. Not had a different opinion, you were wrong.

  11. OK.

    You said “libs” had to believe this study. I, perhaps too subtly, said I could disagree with the study because it was a survey. You, for some reason, started talking about Saddam Hussein.

    I’m not sure what’s going on here. I’ll be clearer. A survey study must be taken with a good sprinkling of salt, and anyone jumping up and down saying, “Fox News viewers are uninformed” because of this report need to calm down. And “libs” can dismiss a bad study just like anyone else. Oh, and Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. (I added that because I didn’t want to be accused of supporting terrorists for not having said it.)

  12. swiftee, I’ve been mentioning that Gov. Moonbeam is not the liberal most folks think he is for some time. He’s certainly no Pelosi. Anybody who’d invite the Marines into town to do urban combat training in order to get their spending money and then run roughshod over the Greenies to revitalize downtown isn’t your typical liberal. And while his first round as governor was socially very liberal, fiscally he was pretty conservative. Kali could have (and has) done much worse.

  13. Chuck, one of the more fun things to watch is what losing has done to the Dems in Wisconsin.

    Doyle saw the light after the election and punted on the high speed choo-choo that was a classic boondoggle, and in doing so he saved Minnesota some change, too.

    But Doyle figured he had political debts to pay, and wanted to push through the bill on the union contracts before he left. But Sen. Decker (D), who was speaker until the fun started, voted against it. Decker was pissed at being frozen out of reelection help and took a “principled” stand against approving that contract in a lame duck session. Needless to say, the unions and Democrats (sorry for the redundancy) went nuts, stripped him of his speakership, and the head of AFSCME union called him a “whore.”

    All in all, it’s been interesting to see what’s going on. The government unions are running scared and Walker is threatening to decertify them as a starting point, and banning them if he can’t. I can’t recall ever seeing these kind of fireworks after a state election ever, but considering just how radical the shift was in Wisconsin state government I suppose something like that was inevitable.

    Kohl’s got to be running scared about 2012.

  14. Thanks Nerdbert. I should look for a Wisc version of SITD to watch the show from. I really dispise the lefty wackos of Madison (this is very different than the Mpls/St Paul left as there is so much more intellectual diversity in the Twin Cities).

    Yeah, my parents local small town weekly had a guest column by the local Democrat state senator. She barely won relection against kind of a good ball. She was apoligizing for the $500,000 that Gov’t unions spent in this rural county trying to get her re-elected.

  15. Chuck, one place I tend to watch is Boots and Sabers (http://www.bootsandsabers.com/) by Owen Robinson of West Bend. I don’t go there all that often, but it is fun to watch the heads of Madison residents explode after this election. He’s certainly more moderate than badgerblogger.com is.

  16. DiscordianStooj said:

    “And “libs” can dismiss a bad study just like anyone else.”

    What if the study is really, really “scientifically rigorous” though?

    Hehe.

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