Tag Archives: ABM

Chanting Points Memo: Unclear On The Concept

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You just knew the DFL had this one planned either way.

If the budget forecast had come in in the red, there would have been caterwauling about how the state needed to raise taxes to make the state’s economy stronger.  The incongruity would have escaped the media.

Of course, it came in in the black; about a third of a billion.

And the regional DFL-prop media was quick to pee in the Legislature’s Wheaties; “It’s All Spoken For!”, they were quick to append to the news.

Dayton’s Management and Budget commissioner was quick with the Administraiton’s spin:

Management and Budget Commissioner Jim Schowalter said the $323 million surplus is already spent. By law, $5 million will go to refill the state’s budget reserve. The rest will start paying back the schools. At this rate, Schowalter said it could be quite some time before the state breaks even.

“It’s going to be a while before we have a positive forecast balance even if we have good news rolling forward for years to come,” he said.

That’s going to be the DFL’s line about the surplus: “it’s not really a surplus!  We owe!”

And when it comes up around he water cooler, every Republican, every conservative, every Real Minnesotan should have two responses:

  • “Duh.  No kidding?  The DFL spent us into a deep, deep hole between 2006 and 2010, larding up the budget with entitlements that were bound to leave us with a deep hole once the economy went south – and it eventually always goes south, at least for a while.  And when it did, the DFL just asked for more – like, six billion over previous budgets!  Have you learned your lesson yet?”
  • “Remember how all the DFL’s talking heads were saying “it’s going to take a lot of work to get out of this deficit?”  Well, welcome to “lot of work”.  Just like when your family falls behind on bills and spends some time playing catch-up; your tax refund and bonus from work go into paying old bills, rather than fun stuff.  Suck it up, little camper.  This is the “hard work”.  Put up or shut up”.

And one thing that is as predictable as the Alliance for a Better Minnesota lying about something; the Dems will call for whatever “surplus” there is to be added to permanent entitlement spending.  And “paid back” to the schools.

Because in the world of the Democrat, or “Republicans” like Arne Carlson, “surplus” is just another word for “money to spend spend spend!”

And if there’s one thing Minnesotans showed us in 2010, it’s that they’re tired of that piece of business as usual.

No Obvious Rant, No Overt Slant

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To: Catharine Richert, “Poligraph” writer at MPR
From: Mitch Berg, mere peasant
Re: Here’s a dandy story idea!

Ms. Richert,

You’ve been doing “Poligraph” at Mnnesota Public Radio for quite some time now.   The ongoing feature purports to fact-check Minnesota politicians’ statements.

Now, a quick glance through the Poligraph page seems to show that most of your “fact-checking” involves going over statements…by Republicans.  The statements, and the facts in question, can frequently be more than a little bit picayune, but the point isn’t so much that you fact-check a lot of things that are, to most people, pretty ephemeral stuff as it is that your efforts seem so very, very one-sided.

Now, on the one hand I’m one of those rare conservatives who credits MPR’s News operation for at least trying for some sort of balance.  Tom Scheck did an excellent piece on Alliance For A Better Minnesota, for example.  Two years after I did it, naturally, and long-lagging my own extensive coverage of ABM’s efforts, but then he’s gotta cover a lot of stuff, and it’s fine.  Better late than never (although I do wonder why MPR’s coverage of things that don’t carefully buff the DFL’s sheen always happen in the dead of winter, long before anyone actually cares about politics, but again, just a quibble).  As a rule, I appreciate the job MPR News does, while believing it could do better.

On the other hand, I do realize you work for MPR, you’re a graduate of the impeccably-“progressive” Humprey Institude, and beyond all that that you have to serve your Volvo-driving, Carlton-degree-holding, Wellstone-worshiping, Crocus-Hill-dwelling, latte-drinking master.  And that DFL-voting master just loooooves to have her ego stroked, whether during the pledge drives (I noticed a lot more of the “we MPR listeners are a smart, discerning bunch!” promos during your pledge drive) and in between.  Which means tackling those nasty, talk-radio-listening Republicans.

So it’d be interesting to see if you ever manage to get around to “Poligraphing” the most egriegious, pants-soaked-in-napalm lies in Minnesota politics today – those being told by the likes of Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom and the various metro police chiefs about the “Stand Your Ground” bill.  Quite simply, nothing they say – nothing, nada, bupkes – has even the faintest grain of truth to it.

(I’ll bring you up to speed:  Stand Your Ground would treat people who shoot in self-defense on their property a presumption of innocence.  Currently, to claim self-defense, you have to essentially say “I’m guilty, but here’s my explanation…”, and hope the explanation suits the prosecutor, judge and jury.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes it really really doesn’t.

Now, Backstrom, Darth Lillehaug, and some of the Metro police chiefs (and headline writers) claim that the bill would “legalize murder”, which is a slander both to the law-abiding owner and the cops and prosecutors who investigate the shootings – as if they can’t tell the difference between a legitimate self-defense shooting and a criminal act.

But more importantly for your beat, Ms. Richert, it’s right in your wheelhouse.  You have Minnesota politicans – and, even worse, officers of the court – lying about the law.  To Minnesotans..

That’s your beat, right?

Now, I realize that the Volvo-driving, free-range-alpaca-wearing, Saint-Olaf-diploma-sporting, latte-drinking, Merriam-Park-dwelling crowd that is your audience base might find guns and Second Amendment supporters unfashionable.  I get that.

But, again – politicians lying to the people.  In the news.

While this might take time away from poring over Michele Bachmann’s grocery list, I”m just saying.  You smelling what I’m cooking?

That is all.

Minnesota’s Ministry Of Truth: “People, Shmeeple!”

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One of the DFL’s more comical devices is calling themselves “the party of the people”.

It’s always been a mixed bag, of course; currently, it’s the party of the people who try to make a career out of giving other people handouts, and the people who can exploit that system for more power for themselves.  Which, admittedly, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so I’ll give ’em a pass for not using it.

But still, for “the party of the people”, the DFL is committed to quite a few stances this cycle that are diametrically opposed to what “the people” seem to want.   As a result, they and the astroturf groups that do all of the DFL’s actual messaging these days – Alliance For A Better Minnesota, Take Action MN, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the unions and such – are busily cranking out a PR campaign to try to show that a minority, sometimes a teeeeeny tiny little minority, of the people are really a majority.

Here are some of the issues on which the DFL and its astroturf hench-groups don’t want you to believe your lying eyes:

Opposed to Election Integrity – The DFL opposes Voter ID.  The DFL’s Astroturf Cabinet is making a lot of noise to cover the fact that between seventy and eighty percent of Minnesotans believe that voters should have to present some form of ID.  There is no way to do this without lying, of course; Mark Ritchie’s statement that “700,000 voters would be disenfranchised” is baked wind; even if the number is accurate (and it is no more accurate than a Mark Ritchie election), the vast majority of them would be same-day registrants who could fill out provisional ballots while their identities were validated.

And most people know that.  And even if they don’t, they do smell a rat, and think Voter ID just plain makes sense – just as it does when you cash a check, buy beer, rent an apartment, get a job, start a savings account, use a credit card at a store…

…which, apparently, 700,000 Minnesotans are unable to do.

That seems like a problem we’d hear about, doesn’t it?

Right To Work: According to the Survey USA poll from a few weeks back, the vast majority of Minnesotans – 55-24% – support “Right to Work”, which essentially means that unions have to make a case to the worker for their dues; they won’t be required to pay dues to a union.

The Astroturf Cabinet is trying to spin out of the jam two different ways; by comparing “right to work” states to “union” states in terms of straight-up per-capita income (as if New Yorkers earn more than Arkansans solely or even significantly because of unions), and the notion that wages drop in “right to work” states, which is very inconclusive at best, and offset by the fact that “Right to Work” states grow faster (which, again, isn’t entirely because they’re “Right to Work”; they tend to be red states, and they DO grow more).

Stand Your Ground – earlier this week, four Democrats (Tom Saxhaug, Rod Skoe, David Tomassoni and Dan Sparks). broke with the Metrocrat majority to vote with the GOP on the “Stand Your Ground” bill, which would allow self-defense shooters to be innocent until proven guilty while on their property or in their cars.

Some county attorneys and “police chiefs”, apparently unsure that they or their staffs could prove an unjust shooter broke the law, oppose the bill, saying it’d “legalize cold blooded murder”.  The DFL’s handmaidens in the media are, on this issue, apparently too incurious to prod into some of the people they use as sources.

And yet Saxhaug, Tomassoni, Skoe and Sparks no doubt remember ten years ago – the last time the DFL put itself on the opposite side of the Second Amendment movement – it cost the DFL, least outstate, dearly.  The DFL’s opposition to Concealed Carry reform ten years ago played a pivotal role in costing it the House, and in driving the Senate strongly to the right; DFLers played a key role in passing the Minnesota Personal Protection Act. They did it because real Minnesotans supported it, and showed it at the polls.  Nine DFLers crossed over to pass the original bill in 2003; it was much more than that in 2005 when the bill re-passed after it was struck down by a DFL pet judge in 2004.

But the DFL is much more extreme today than ten years ago.   And the right of the law-abiding to defend themselves is anathema to them.  So they’ll oppose Stand Your Ground,  and try to scare people away from it…

…even though the vast majority of informed people support it.

Wilfare – Minnesotans oppose raising their taxes to increase the value of Zygi Wilf’s investment (or, in some cases, oppose raising their own taxes).  But the DFL wants to divert money from the charities that get funding from charitable gambling to, again, give Wilfare to a billionaire whose only real goal is to inflate the value of his investment!

But it’s not being talked about – anywhere.  Least of all in the mainstream media, which profits handsomely from pro sports.

How do you think Minnesotans feel about that?

On issue after issue, the only consensus behind the DFL is the one their minions in the astroturf “Ministry of Truth” manufacture for them, and that their flaks in the media try to portray, provided one pays no attention to the Messinger behind the curtain.

Stand Your Ground: It’s Go-Time

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I got this from the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance:

If you do only one thing for gun rights this year, this is it!

The Stand Your Ground bill passed the Minnesota House last year. It overwhelmingly passed the Senate last week. Now the bill is headed to Governor Dayton.

TODAY!

Call Governor Dayton’s office and ask him to sign HR1467, the Stand Your Ground bill.

Metro: 651-201-3400

Toll Free: 800-657-3717

Please take a few minutes to write a real letter, on paper. These are incredibly effective in convincing a politician of how seriously we take an issue.

Governor Mark Dayton

130 State Capitol

75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

St. Paul, MN 55155

Suggested language: “Please sign HF1467, the Stand Your Ground bill, today.”

Send an email: Go to the governor’s web site  and send the same message.

Got a fax machine? Send a fax with the same message to 651-797-1850.

Forward this to a dozen friends and ask them to do the same.

TOMORROW, AND EVERY DAY UNTIL HE SIGNS THE BILL!

Do it again (see above)

You know as well as I do that he’s likely to veto the bill; his strings are being pulled by the likes of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” and the Metrocrat left. But even Dayton knows he has to defer to the fervor, passion and power of the Second Amendment movement at some point; he ran as a pro-gun, pro-self-defense candidate.

So this has got to have him conflicted.

Good!

And if there’s a bone in his body that resolves conflicts in favor of what the people actually want, then let’s make sure he hears real people, and not the  DFL.

Please write/call today and every day.

More later.

MN-MOT/Chanting Points Memo: Securing The Incurious Vote

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We’re getting close to election season.

And Minnesota’s left-“leaning” “grassroots” astroturf organizations – Common Cause, Take Action Minnesota, Alliance For A Better Minnesota, and the various unions are following suit with doing what their various funders are paying them to do; trying to spin news, facts and info to get people to vote DFL in the upcoming elections.

Now, as we noted during the 2010 election cycle, these groups – especially Alliance for a Better Minnesota – are lavishly funded by liberal plutocrats, and always have been…

…even back before Citizens United started evening the playing field and allowing conservatives the same access to soft money that the Dems have always gotten from their union and 527 supporters.

Which is like complaining about plate tectonics; what are you going to do about it, one would be right to ask.  Political money is speech; we conservatives live by that ideal, and we’ll have to learn to prevail by it.

It’s not that the money buys so much messaging that is so very very irritating – indeed, depressing, if one cares for the future of this society, beyond narrow partisan politics.

It’s that the messaging it buys is so often not merely devoid of fact or defining context, but so cynically so that one can only think their only motivation for the entire campaign is “to repeat enough complete bullshit often enough to fool enough of the stupid and gullible to keep us in power”.

We saw this in 2010 in Minnesota, when these groups and their “useful idiots” (Lenin’s term, not mine) in the Twin Cities media and lefty “alternative” media, pounded a couple of non-factual or almost criminally-context-deprived points home with almost experimental-psych-class-material mania; the idea that “Tom Emmer had two DUIs” (he hadn’t; he’d been arrested and pled down to “Careless Driving”, 20 and 30 years earlier) and that he’d (campaigned for lax punishment for drunk drivers” (also a lie; Emmer was proposing a change in the implied consent law that is supported by a broad, and bipartisan, range of figures, at least in part because current law discriminates so completely against people who can’t afford lawyers.  Emmer would have changed that).  The campaign helped convinced, I’m going to guess, just a shade over 8,000 of our stupidest, most incurious, lemming-like neighbors to vote for a superannuated playboy with drinking, drug and depression problems and a record as America’s worst senator instead.

In other words, slathering Minnesota’s dimmest, least-curious citizens with b*llsh*t worked.

And they’re going long on the tactic this year.

Under the dual rubrics of my “Minnesota’s Ministry of Truth” and “Chanting Points Memo” categories, I’m going to start cataloging the broad, rich, lavishly-funded vein of pure fiction (at best) that the DFL is banking on to try to stem GOP fortunes in Minnesota this fall.

“Most Minnesotans oppose Voter ID” – This one came from Greta Bergstrom, a spokes-bot for “Take Action Minnesota”, an activist non-profit that claims a Wellstone-ian pedigree, but whose inner workings (say an acquaintance with knowledge of their front office) would fit in better in Pyongyang; “Nobody wants photo ID”, she tweeted not too long ago.  That was about the time – go figure – that Survey USA was showing Voter ID with 3:1 support (71-29) among Minnesotans, even among self-identified liberals.  Which was, by the way, the poll with the best news for Voter ID opponents.   Ms. Bergstrom apparently believes that if she and her group repeat it often enough, just enough of the addled will buy in.  It’s worked before, after all; it’s why we have a Governor Dayton!

“The Stand Your Ground Bill” would allow citizens to shoot people because they felt like it” – It’s bad enough that pathetically addled leftybloggers grind their way through this bit of nonsense; they have no power even among lefty media types.  But when you have Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom – words fail me – misrepresenting the law in re Stand Your Ground, to try to draw out a wedge (to try to counter all the various wedges that the GOP have identified for this coming season), you know that the idiocy moves depressingly high on the food chain.  Backstrom may or may not be taking orders from Alliance For A Better Minnesota (and thence, likely as not, Media Matters) like the likes of Bergstrom, Carrie Lucking, Ken Martin and Denise Cardinal – but he’s basically playing from their one-note sheet music.

“Right To Work States Have Lower Per-Capita Incomes Than Union States!” – This, you hear from any number of different lefty-bots, is a great reason to oppose the “Right To Work” Amendment, which (says Survey USA) Minnesotans favor by a 55-24 margin.  Of course, they never mention that non-Right-to-Work states are, inevitably, coastal “Blue” states with – it’s true – higher standards of living, but much higher costs of living as well.  Of course wages are higher in New York City!  But do you think a carpenter in New York buys himself a better quality of life for his money in NYC than does one in, say, Dallas?   A carpenter in Texas will actually be working, as opposed to the New Yorker – but I’m on a tangent now.  The fact is, unions don’t make overall wages across an entire geographical region bigger or better than the same wages in the same jobs elsewhere (beyond the obvious job-by-job wage comparisons).  They do, however, contribute to the higher cost of living.

It’s a stupid argument – but since it’s aimed at stupid people, it works.  Depressingly enough.

“Republicans Are Waging A War Against Women!” – Notwithstanding the fact that no significant Republican has said word-boo about the subject on any sort of policy level.  Apparently it’s one of those things where Republicans want to ban contraception even if they don’t even know it.

Just as we do – we’re told this by our betters at Minnesota Public Radio – with race!  Because…

“Republicans speak in racist code words!” – And those words are so coded that we apparently haven’t the foggiest we’re saying about them.  This one got on Minnesota Public Radio on Thurday morning, on the Keri Miller show.  Miller – who is becoming the Lori Sturdevant of MPR – ran for an hour with the premise that the GOP’s racist message is so very tightly wound into the very language that Republicans (but not Democrats, natch) use that we don’t even realize we’re doing it!.  Because when Democrats talk about “urban” problems, they mean problems that occur to collections of buildings, apparently, but when Republicans talk about pizza, it’s because Italians in New York used to hate blacks, and white people use “pizza” as a code for that sort of hatred.  Or something.

“Voter ID would disenfranchise masses of voters” – I hate paperwork as much as much more than the next guy – government paperwork more than most.   And this really is a tangent, but isn’t it reasonable for society to expect someone to exercise the most absolutely de minimis requirement for personal administration – the precise paperwork one needs to have to cash a check, pick up a prescription, get a drivers license, hold a job legally, set up a bank account, buy Sudafed, get a cell phone, get into a bar before you “look over 21” – to exercise a right for which over a million Americans have died?

But that is a tangent, because many states do require voter ID, and they vote just fine.

Anyway – it’s a lie.

“Voter ID is like Jim Crow” – That predictable little apertif is from my new “representative”, Rena Moran.  Moran may or may not be a perfectly fine person, but she’s oblivious (or has not be told to be blivious, or she just flat-out knows she benefits from ongoing fraud) to the Democrat party’s history of election rigging – but she is in fact exactly wrong. Voter ID – along with a vigilant electorate – helps prevent the sort of sham elections that characterized Jim Crow.

“Governor Dayton has a Jerbs Bill!  The Republicans don’t! They must not want to put people to work!” – Because as everyone knows, jobs come from government!  If Tim Pawlenty and George W. Bush had just pushed laws requiring companies to hire people, there’d have been no recession!

Of course, even many Democrats know better than that.  They believe that a bonding bill that’ll pay for a few billion in construction work – or Obama’s “Shovel Ready” jobs, as if even a sizeable minority of Americans still work with shovels, or even in construction – is the answer!

Of course, the GOP is pushing legislation to cut business taxes and regulations and make Minnesota’s business climate healthier for business, especially small business, which is battered and bleeding from Obama’s regulatory orgy

And Onward!  – What else have you heard?

 

The Real State Of The State

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Governor Dayton will give the official State of the State address tomorrrow.

I figured I’d grab a jump on him, and – in my constitutional position as a freaking taxpayer – give the real state of this state.

You’re welcome.

Now – all rise.

———-

My fellow Minnesotans,

Thanks to eight years of responsible Republican – and conservative-enough – governorship, the state of Minnesota is doing…OK.   Unemployment is well below the national average.  Our schools, on a state-wide basis, don’t suck as bad as those in some other states.  As any good Scandinavian would put it, “we could be doing worse”.

But there is so much room for improvement.

Oh – you may be seated.  Sorry.

A good chunk of Minnesota’s establishment – government, educational, union and media – is stuck in the 1970’s.  It was an era when America had no economic competition – Germany and Japan were just starting to find their legs after World War II; China was still a Maoist dystopia; academic experts like Paul Ehrlich thought that India would be so wracked by starvation that it would always be what Somalia is today.

And in that environment, everyone got spoiled and fat.  The unions got used to demanding and getting pay and benefits around the country that were easy to support – provided we had no competition.  And American government, after three decades of aiming toward cradle-to-grave welfare, finally achieved it.

We did the same here in Minnesota.  Our business climate settled to favor big businesses, the kind that “partner” with big government the way that remora fish “partner” with sharks.  Our welfare state turned our cities into warehouses for the poor – an endless homework project for the state’s social service system, for which they’re always taking a grade of “incomplete”, claiming “the dog ate my homework”.

That, unfortunately, is exactly where one of our major parties, the DFL, is stuck.  They have not had a new idea since 1974.  Their entire worldview is centered around the idea “if we pretend it’s still 1978, maybe it’ll all be OK!”.

Minnesotans took a huge step toward reality in 2010.  We elected two chambers full of people who know that times have changed, and we have to stay ahead of the changes in the world around us, rather than just ignore them.

Oh, 8,000 Minnesotans who should have known better believed what the Alliance For A Better Minnesota told them rather than their own lying eyes.  And that’s being charitable; if I were a betting man, I’d say that if you left out all the ineligible voters, repeat voters and felons, it would have been Mark Dayton looking at an 8,000 vote deficit.  But that’s just a hunch.

So today we have a split government; a legislature with a powerful mandate, dividing power with a weak governor whose own party basically treats him like a coffee enema; he did beat their endorsed candidate, after all.

And so the DFL does what it always does when it’s up against the ropes; it lies.  The Alliance For A Better Minnesota – essentially a PR agency for what the “Occupy” movement, if you remember them, call “The One Percent” – has basically taken over the DFL.  And you can tell they’re lying when you see their fingers moving over keyboards, or whenever you see Denise Cardinal or Carrie Lucking on the TV.

And have any of you actually seen Denise Cardinal or Carrie Lucking in the same place?

And the media does what it always does when the DFL is up against the ropes; its editorialists declaim endlessly on the virtue of compromise.

My fellow Minnesotans, in response I say two things.

Number one?  Doy.  Compromise is part and parcel of politics.  But it’s something you do after you have the debate.  And when you debate, you bring the strengths of your own case, and explore and exploit the weaknesses in your enemy’s case. And you do your best to work the compromise in your favor – meaning, obviously, in favor of the agenda for which you were sent to office.  In other words, compromise is a negotiationl. And negotiations are always best made from a position of strength.

And so the GOP must use our strength – numbers, evolving demographics, mindshare – to make sure the “compromise” we get reflects the fact that we won.

And number two?   Bull pucks.  We won.  And we’re going to legislate like we won – like a a party with a vision for a much much better Minnesota – a Minnesota that’s not dependent on state handouts, a Minnesota that works and prospers.  A Minnesota that keeps Big Brother’s passive-aggressive benevolence in its place – there to take care of its allotted business, and there for emergencies, doing its mandated job.  And no more.

So what do we do this session?

The agenda is simple.

First – pass Reform 2.0.  Make government more user-friendly, especially for business.  Our permitting process is a sham.

Second – pass Zero Based Budgeting.  Our current cost-plus budgeting not only guarantees that we will soon not be able to afford our government, it also puts the our government – our “servant”  – in a position of being in arrogant, hectoring control of the whole state; of saying “you, the peasants, serve us first, and yourselves last”.  We need to flip that around.

Third – No budget increase.  We’re at 35 Billion. That is plenty.  Not one dime more.  Not even if the revenue forecast rises.  Minnesotans are working hard – and if the economy grows, the temptation is there to turn that into more revenue for government spending.  No.  Bullshit.  Rebate all surpluses.  And not via the DFL’s convoluted targeted rebates; rebate them in exact proportion of state income taxes paid.  If you pay in, you get back.  If  you don’t, then you already got lucky once; give someone else their turn.

Fourth – Reform our voting system.  It’s not just Voter ID – although that’d be a great start.  Abolishing vouching would also be a great next step.  Isn’t the franchise – for which so many hundreds of thousands of our ancestors fought and died – and the integrity of the election system that determines who runs our democracy, worth a tiny little bit of administrative conscientiousness on the part of someone claiming to be a “citizen” today?

Yes.  Yes, it is.

Fifth – Pass Representative Cornish’s Stand Your Ground bill.  I put it in my State of the State address for a reason; it’s not that it’s necessarily the fifth most important bill on the entire raft of legislation facing this state.  But symbolically, it’s a vital priority.  After reforming our government and our budgeting process and  holding the line on spending, letting government know, once and forever, that we the people are sovereign, and that our right to defend our lives and families supersedes both criminals’ peace of mind and prosecutors’ convenience, is vital.  Criminals should be afraid to go out at night – not we, the people.  And it’ll be a lovely thumb in the eye of the Metrocrats.  They deserve it.

Sixth – get the Met Council out of the rail baron and utopia-planning businesses.  In a metro with cheap land and horizontal sprawl, light rail makes no, zero, nada sense.  And forcing people into high-density developments to justify those rail lines is downright stupid – not just a waste of money, but a vile overreach on the part of government.

In Mitch Berg’s Minnesota, the government is the servant, not the master – and we, the people, continually affirm it.  Just like training a dog; if we, the people, give the government constant, consistent discipline, it might just learn its place and be useful enough not to put down.

Although government, like any dog, must know that if it craps on our carpet again, it’s going in the car for that drive “out to the country”.

In Mitch Berg’s Minnesota, government scrimps and saves, and the people keep most of what they work for.  We have the government we need, not the government the governing class wants.

In Mitch Berg’s Minnesota, the people work out a compromise with government from a position of strength, and the government knows its place.

And that’s the state of the State of Minnesota.  It could be worse.  It should be much better. And only Mark Dayton and his one-percenter minions stand in the way.

So to sum up the whole address; let’s show this state who’s boss.

Thank you.  God Bless Minnesota, and God Bless America.

Chanting Points Memo: Beth Hawkins’ “Complete BS”

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If the Minnesoa left has a boogieman in this cycle, it’s the “American Legislative Exchanage Conference”, better known as ALEC.

Founded and run by that other perennial boogieman of the hysterial left, Grover Norquist, ALEC pushes a conservative agenda by hosting get-togethers and suggesting legislation to – wait for it – legislators.  Mostly conservative ones.

Sort of like the AFLCIO, the Ntaional Rifle Association, National Education Association, and practically every other  organization that  pokes is nose into legislation at the state level.

For the past year, a phalanx of leftybloggers and regional media have been passing on the meme hat ALEC is somehow different.  More sinister.

Some have called ALEC a “lobbying” group – which is odd, inasmuch as legislators actually pay to join the group.

Now,the coverage “coverage” of ALEC throughout the lefty alt-media has been utterly uniform in what it mentions (model bills!) and also what it omits (paid memberships), to the point that I’d bet money that the entire campaign is being run by “Media Matters” or some other lefty spin organization.

Just a hunch, mind you.

I bring it up because Beth Hawkins piece earlier this  week about an ALEC initiative on education legislation which reads in its entirety like a news release from a lefty attack-PR firm…

…but omits a number of the key facts that one might expect a “reporter” to provide in covering a “story” – the who, what, when yadda yadda.

Last week, the Minnesota House of Representatives did not meet on Thursday or Friday. The state Senate held a handful of hearings Thursday, but was in recess Friday.

Which was terribly convenient for those members of the Republican caucuses who are also members of the secretive, controversial American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which recently issued members this invitation to a confab where it was to roll out its 2012 legislative agenda:

 

You can plug your nose and read Hawkins’ piece for the details,such as they are.

Hawkins channels Sally Sorenson, snarking that the recess “was terribly convenient” for liegislators who are also ALEC members.

So – who went?

Anyone?

Hawkins tacitly admits she hasn’t a clue – and tries to fob her negligence as a reporter off on the legislators:

If you want to know whether your elected official was one, you will have better luck calling and asking as a constituent than reporters have had.

It’s striaght out of Jesse Ventura’s “Conspiracy Theory”; lack of evidence is, itself, evidence of a coverup!

“It’s complete BS”, said a source on Capitol Hill familiar with the issue.  The source was not aware of any legislators attending the event – “maybe one”, and that seemed like a long shot.

Read the piece.  See if you can find anything in it that doesn’t look like it came from a press release.

And then remember Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection:  “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”

The left is harping on ALEC because the the left’s pressure groups – “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”,and the various unions’ political arms – are about to launch a wave of smear and noise that dwarfs ALEC by many orders of magnitude.

It’s what the media – “alternative” and otherwise does; create whispering campaigns about conservative conspiracies to draw attention away from the real thing.

I’m open to other explanations.

Will The Circle Be Unbroken

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SCENE:  MITCH is talking with Inge “Lucky” CARROLL, a meme-buffer at Alliance For A Better Minnesota, at a Cathedral Hill bar.

CARROLL is sitting at a table with an empty martini glass, sipping a cosmpolitan from a second as MITCH approaches.

CARROLL:  We have teh best election system in teh world!

MITCH:  Um, OK – why do you say that?

CARROLL:  Because we get teh most people to teh polls!

MITCH: Well, OK – that’s cool as far as it goes, but if a significant number of those “people” at the polls are duplicate voters, or voters who aren’t supposed to be voting, then each of those votes negates the vote of someone who is entitled to vote, and only votes one time.

CARROLL:  That never happens in Minnesota.

MITCH:  Well, it’s been proven to happen.  The Minnesota Majority has brought hundreds of cases of felons voting and other people who weren’t supposed to vote to the Ramsey County Attorney, and gotten a few dozen election fraud convictions.

CARROLL: Only a few dozen of teh convictions!  Our system is teh PERFECT!

MITCH:  Well, no – because in Minnesota, unless you’re a paroled felon who hasn’t had is rights restored and who signed a piece of paper acknowledging you realize that not voting was part of your parole, pleading “I didn’t know” actually is considered an excuse.  And in every case, their votes were counted.  All of them.   Oh, yeah – and they busted a group home shoveling four – so far – vulnerable adults through the polls during the 2010 elections.  They were using the handicapped to stuff the ballots.  A county attorney basically used a grand jury to whitewash the empirical fact that four adults who are under guardianship, and under Minnesota statute have no right to vote, were registered to vote and voted absentee – basically had their ballots filled out for them by group home employees.   It’s full-blown corruption.

CARROLL:  So you want to disenfranchise teh people!

MITCH:  Blah blah blah.  Another stupid manipulative strawman – but hey, you work for Alliance for a Better Minnesota, so pardon my redundancy.  Nope, untrue.  Every who is entitled to vote should vote.

CARROLL:  Yabbut, what about teh elderly and students!  20% of them don’t have IDs.

MITCH:  OK, so two points, here.  For starters, isn’t it reasonable to ask people to assume a certain bare minimum of responsibility to exercise a franchise that over a million Americans have died defending?  And second:  all significant political parties have “get out the vote” efforts that make sure people get to the polls on election day.  So expand the effort to making sure people have IDs.  I mean, what – do I have to do all the thinking for you?

CARROLL:  See!  You want to disenfranchise teh people!

MITCH:  Er, Lucky?  I just described exactly why I don’t.

CARROLL:  Yeah, but…where’s my cosmo?

MITCH:  In front of you.

CARROLL:  Thanks.  (Drains a cosmopolitan, waves down a waitress).  But none of that is necessary.

MITCH:  Um, what?  “None of that is necessary?”  I’ve just shown you where hundreds of people voted illegally – and I didn’t even get into the credible allegations that students were voting in Minnesota and, via absentee ballot, in their home jurisdictions.

CARROLL:  But all of that is teh BS.

MITCH:  Um, why?

CARROLL:  Because we have teh best electoral system in teh world?

(WAITRESS appears at table)

MITCH:  She’ll have a cosmo.  I’ll have a double Laphraoig, neat.

WAITRESS:  Is she seeing unicorns again?

MITCH: You know it.

(And SCENE)

14,000-Odd Posts

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2612 weekdays of waking up at 5:30AM and writing til 7-ish.

520 weeks of following the Minnesota news cycle.

Two Presidential, three Gubernatorial, three Senate and 32 Congressional contests, plus five complete legislative election cycles and 11 Legislative sessions.  One wrestler ushered out of office; one Senatorial plane crash and two electoral train wrecks covered.  The decline of two major cities chronicled (keep checking back, that story’s not done).  One complete conversion, from conservative public school supporter to implacable enemy and charter school zealot.

A national convention, three major state conventions.

A couple of dozen Instalanches, and heaven knows how many Hot Air-alanches.

Two desktop and three laptop computers gone through, along with three blogging platforms and counting.

Hundreds of Nick Coleman, Lori Sturdevant and Brian Lambert columns and “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” memes disposed of.

Dozens of leftyblogger attacks met, trashed, humiliated and, in more than a few cases, out-lived.  One Soros publication outlasted.

Decades?  One.  So far.  Working on number two.

This one kinda snuck up on me; Shot In The Dark turns ten years old today.  And when I say “snuck up on me”, I mean, yeah – I knew after last year’s “ninth anniversary” that there would likely (God willing) be a tenth.  But I woke up this morning and it kinda smacked me upside the head.

I’ve told the story a bunch of times – including every year on this anniversary; I started this blog in 2002, at a time when, after fifteen years out of talk radio, with two kids and working at a failing dotcom, I was keenly feeling the absence of an outlet for my inner pundit.  I read an article in Time about the “New Breed of Conservative Intellectuals”, featuring – ahem – Andrew Sullivan.  The piece mentioned Sullivan’s main outlet – his “blog”.  There was a little sidebar piece on “What Is A Blog”, which led me to “Blogger.com”.  At home from work that night, I started the original Shot In The Dark.  And other than a week off at the end of 2003, and a few odd days off here and there, I think I’ve had something up every weekday, and most weekends, since then.  At the time, I plugged it on a couple of E-Democracy forums, and held steady at about 10 hits a day for the first nine months or so.

My traffic has grown, and remained, really big by regional standards since then.  But as I’ve said for years, I have always done it for me, and would still do it if I were my only traffic.  The blog has brought an avalanche of blessings, the greatest of which has been a great group of friends – Brian, Atomizer, Sisyphus and Chad (an email from Brian was the first indication I found that there were other bloggers in the Twin Cities, back in mid-2002), Ed, John and Scott, Mr. D, King Banaian (whose blog is offline for the duration of his legislative career, which for Minnesota’s sake had best be long and successful), Brad Carlson, Michael Brodkorb and his various successors at MDE, James Lileks, Learned Foot, Derek and Nancy and Guy and the whole crew over at the Dogs, Katie, Gary, Sheila, Pianomomsicle,  Ringer, Roosh, Bogus, and the entire True North syndicate, and the whole MOB, really, which led to the radio show (which is itself headed for an anniversary next month).  Beyond that, it’s been a long train of personal and intellectual growth – or maybe “growth” – and a constant introduction to opportunities that I’d never dreamed of ten years ago.

So I’d still do it just for myself – but I’m glad I don’t have to!

Anyway – thanks to all your regular readers, and the new friends (and occasionally adversaries) that’ve popped up over the past (gulp) decade.  God willing and with a tailwind, we can do it again!

The DFL’s Ministry Of Truth

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Check out Carrie Lucking of the Alliance For A Better Minnesota Ministry Of Truth, essentially admitting that Governor Dayton’s Jerbs Plan is exactly what I said it was – a sound bite that isn’t intended to pass the legislature, merely to give the DFL a chanting point designed to give the DFL something to wave in front of ill-informed voters this fall (“Look!  The GOP voted down a jerbs program! They’re taking yer jerbs!”)

Can I call ’em or what?

The DFL has turned its entire messaging operation over to the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, which – as we showed in 2010 – is owned and operated by the unions and “The 1%”,  liberal plutocrats with very deep pockets.

In the 2010 campaign, they raised lying, disingenuity, intellectual dishonesty and cowardice to amazing new levels. They are testimony to the liberal ideal that the ends justify your means – and the only end that matters is gaining and retaining power.  Minnesota’s last gubernatorial election was swung entirely by the fact that ABM was able to find at least 8,000 Minnesotans who don’t read blogs and who took anything they heard from a mainstream media just would not, cou.

There is one rule to remember when reading or watching any ABM production; they are padding the facts, bludgeoning context.  If they say it, it’s a lie – or at the very least, it’s wrong, and anyone who bothers to check knows it.   If Denise Cardinal or Carrie Lucking (ABM’s current and former executive directors stenos for Alita Messinger and Elliot Seid) tell you their names are Denise Cardinal and Carrie Lucking, double-check them. There is an oops buried in there somewhere.  Not sure how, but bank on it.

Their ideal – and the mission for which they are so very well-paid – is to find the Big Lies that will spin the election, and tell them often enough so that just enough dim-witted and gullible Minnesotans buy it.

And this blog’s mission in this coming election is to make sure everyone with a brain to think knows exactly what ABM is; the Big Lie Factory.  The DFL’s “Ministry Of Truth”

It’s what passes for messaging in the DFL these days.  Bankrupt of any real ideas, it’s probably the best they can do.

Can Minnesota do better?

We’re 8,000 votes away.

And Now Let Us Wallow In Metaphor

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I found this quote in yesterday’s Strib editorial about Governor Dayton’s bonding bill to be oddly revelatory:

“I learned from my father and my uncles, who were pretty successful job creators in Minnesota, the importance of focusing on downtown. … If you lose the core of the downtown, you lose the vitality of the region.”

He’s talking, of course, about spending bonding money downtown – the same kind of bonding spending (at various levels) that’s helped to bring all sorts of government-blessed downtown-saving ventures as Urban Renewal, the clearing of the Gateway, Riverplace, Saint Anthony Main, Mississippi Live, the Conservatory and Block E to Minneapolis’ core.  And we all know how those worked, don’t we?

But there’s a germ of revelation in that quote.  No, not that Dayton learned anything about business – clearly all business sense in the Dayton family passed on with the Governor’s ancestors.

But Dayton – and the DFL – learned everything they knew, and know, about the economy at about the same time that the Daytons chain of stores was at its commercial and social peak, in the forties through the early seventies.

It was a time when…:

  • America was the only economy, both worldwide and regionally.  American companies faced little competition around the world, since Europe and Japan were still recovering from World War II through the sixties, and China was mired in the worst excesses of Maoism through the eighties.  It meant that…:
  • American Union Labor Was King: Since American business had no competition, it could pay American Labor what it demanded in wages and (especially) pensions.  Like American government, American business and labor spent like there was no tomorrow – because they didn’t think there was one, at least in terms of “the world changing.
  • Minnesota Dominated The Region: Minnesota was the only significant commercial center between Chicago and Denver.   Today, of course, we are surrounded by thriving regional centers – smaller, perhaps, but much more nimble and forward-looking; Fargo and, of course, Scott Walker’s Wisconsin.
  • Downtown was the only town: Back when Daytons was king, Minneapolis’ only competition was downtown Saint Paul (back before Urban Renewal tore the city’s guts out) – and they put a store there, too.  It worked – because through the sixties, Minneapolis and Saint Paul were where the people lived and worked.  Now, of course, both downtowns compete with huge shopping centers at the MOA, Burnsville Center, Apple Valley’s mass of stores, Southtown, Southdale, Eden Prairie’s huge commercial center, Ridgedale, Maple Grove’s immense Arbor Lakes area, Brookdale, Rosedale, Maplewood, Albertville, and the sprawling commercial expanse in Woodbury – all of which benefit by being where the people are, these days.  Minneapolis and Saint Paul are shrinking and getting poorer (thanks to decades of DFL hegemony); the burbs are getting bigger, and people just plain want to shop near home, barring the odd adventure.

So Dayton is right – if he climbs into a time machine and zooms back to 1955.  Today?  Not so much.

But the world views of Dayton, and the people and institutions that support him – labor, Alita Messinger and all her Rockefeller money, the Alliance for a Better Minnesota – all formed back then, in a time when American business, centered “downtown”, dominated a bomb-ravaged world; when government and business all had all the money they needed; when Minneapolis and Saint Paul towered above humble and prostrate prairies and poor hardscrabble mining towns.

The world changed.

The DFL and its minions didn’t. They got left behind.

And everybody knows it but them (and the 50% + 8,000 people who were gulled into voting for Dayton in 2010), and who apparently never figured out that Woodbury exists, that Germany and Japan and India and China have thriving economies, and that you can’t pay a guy $60,000 a year and a lifetime pension to bolt on headline bezels and expect to sell affordable cars anymore.

One Day At The Ministry Of Truth

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SCENE:  At the executive offices of the Alliance For A Better Minnesota.  Executive Director Carrie LUCKING sits near the center of the head table, next to an absurdly-large fake throne.  Her research director , Stephanie FORSTER, sits on the other side.

LUCKNIG:  It’s a gorgeous day out there, isn’t it?

FORSTER:  Um…(steals a glance out the window)…it’s below zero, and the wind is howling…

LUCKING:  (Glares chillingly at FORSTER):  Why do you hate the children?   I SAID it’s a beautiful day.

FORSTER:  It’s a beautiful day. (She slumps silently into her seat, looking abashed).

(Deputy Director Joe DAVIS opens the door into the chamber)

DAVIS:  Our Board!   Announcing Mr. Grebner, Mizz Beadle, Mizz Bergstrom, Mr. Elliott, Mister Blodgett, Mzz Lewis and Mister Goldfarb.

(Jon Grebner (AFSCME),  Kelly Beadle (America Votes), Greta Bergstrom (TakeAction) MN), Brian Elliot (SEIU), Jeff Blodgett (Win Minnesota), Connie Lewis (Planned Parenthood) and Ben Goldfarb (Wellstone Action) file silently into the room.   They file into small seats at small tables arranged  diagonally on either side of a central aisle).

(DAVIS again announces)

DAVIS:  Our legislative guests, Senator Bakk and Representatives Thissen and Dinkler!

(BAKK, THISSEN and WINKLER file into the room.  WINKLER steps over to DAVIS)

WINKLER: Um, it’s “Winkler”, not “Dinkler”.

LUCKING (leaping to her feet) SILENCE!

(DAVIS backhands WINKLER, who sits silently, rubbing a sore jaw)

DAVIS:  Womyn and Gentlemyn, Alita Messinger.  All rise!

(The doors swing open, and Alita Messinger enters the room, borne on a sedan chair carried by eight purple-shirted SEIU employees.  They maneuver careful up the aisle and set the sedan chair on the ground.  LUCKING motions to BAKK, THISSEN and WINKLER, who leap to their feet and lay on the ground between the sedan chair and the makeshift throne at the head table.  MESSINGER steps across them and takes her seat).

DAVIS:  You may be seated!

(All sit).

(Purple-jacketed Latino waiters maneuver through the room, filling glasses in front of each seat with a clear liquid).

(LUCKING rises)

LUCKING:  A toast!  To rigorous grassroots independence.

ALL (in unison): “To rigorous grassroots independence!”

DAVIS:  Miss Messinger, I present to you our new executive director, Carrie Lucking.

LUCKING: My name’s not Carrie Lucking.

FORSTER: Actually it is.

LUCKING:  Yes, it is.  Yes, Ma’am?

MESSINGER:  Very well, Mizz Lucking.  Proceed to the…

(MESSINGER glares at DAVIS).  Ahem.

(DAVIS grabs palm front, begins fanning MESSINGER)

MESSINGER:  Very well.  It reports on the progress!

LUCKING:  We are telling the people that a $3,000 one-time tax credit will create 25,000 jobs.

MESSINGER:  That’s absurd.  Only an idiot would believe that.

CARDINAL: Precisely!  It is useless and has no chance of passing – but if it gets voted down, we accuse the Republicans of killing jobs.

MESSINGER:  Only a moron would believe that.

LUCKING:  We know.  I even admitted as much on Almanac last week!

MESSINGER:  This is a campaign that could appeal only to morons.

(ALL are silent).

MESSINGER: And as your 2010 campaign showed, there are 8,000 more gullible morons than smart people in this state.  Well done!  You may kiss my ring.

(CARDINAL and LUCKING kneel at MESSINGER’S feet kissing her pinky ring as SCENE fades to black).

———-

It’s almost time for another campaign season – which means it’s time for another wave of misleading, usually lying, always context-mangled propoaganda from “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” (ABM) – the people who brought you the false claims that “Target Hates Gays” and “Tom Emmer campaigned to reduce penalties for drunk drivers”.

The thesis is this: you can tell ABM is lying when their lips are moving or their fingers are touching keyboards.

And we will be dedicating a good chunk of this next nine months to making sure that none of ABM’s lies goes undebunked.

It’s gonna keep all of us conservative bloggers busy.

Stephanie Fenner

 

Founding Director

 

Denise Cardinal

Chanting Points Memo: Bring A Shovel!

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If the local leftybloggers have it right, the Governor apparently wants to staff up a bunch of do-it-yourself projects.

I first saw it on Minnesota “Progressive” Project last night – Governor Dayton has announced his “bonding plan”.

And here was the claim:

In contrast to the upcoming ballot measure open season the Republicans will be envisioning instead of working on a bonding bill, Gov. Mark Dayton released his bonding bill proposal today. Dayton’s plan would put 25,000 Minnesotans to work in every corner of the state. It would cost $775 million.

The reverberations throughout our economy of putting 25,000 people to work would be significant. These people would spend money in their communities, increasing the income of people in the service industries.

These are the almighty “infrastructure projects” that Libs are talking about these days.


But after our experience last week – where Dayton’s “Jerbs Plan” turned out to be a meaningless deduction equal to about a month of $15/hour employment – I remembered the great dictum one must always observe when reading liberal commentators:

Distrust, but verify.  Then, almost inevitably, distrust some more.

So I ran the “numbers”, such as they are.

The “plan” calls for $775,000,000, and will supposedly provide 25,000 jerbs.

So when you divide $775,000,000/25,000, you get $31,000 per job.

That’s a little under $15 an hour, on average (and probably lower, since presumably some of those 25,000 people will have to be DFL/union-connected bureaucrats to manage everything, who are just a little  more equal.

And when Eric “Big E” Pusey gushes (or, presumably, takes dictation from some Dayton Administration spokesbot the Alliance For A Better Minnesota) that…:

The projects included in his proposal are ‘shovel ready’ and would improve our state’s infrastructure.

…perhaps he should add that the workers will actually need to bring their own shovels – because creating 25,000 $14-and-change/hour jobs out of $775,000,000 leaves no money left over for shovels.  Or concrete.  Or macadam, asphalt, aggregate, or even paint.

Pusey’s number, in short, is baked wind.

Just like every number the Dayton Administration Alita Messinger and the Alliance For A Better MInnesota have put out so far this year.

Yeah, I know – Pusey’s probably conflating the phantom jobs in the Jerbs Bill with the fantasy numbers in the Bonding Bill.   I’m probably jumping on the wrong thing, because he’s probably writing taking dictation about the wrong connection.

More on that later today.

(With a tip ‘o the hat to Sarge, who did the math just about the time I was thinking about doing the math…)

Chanting Points Memo: “Tergeted Jerbs”

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With much fanfare from the media and the DFL’s press-release bloggers (most of them), the Dayton Administration released its “jobs plan”.

Call it “porkulus with a side of lefse“.  It’s a dumb plan – and there’s language in here that shows the DFL knows it (emphasis added):

Saint Paul – Governor Mark Dayton and DFL Legislators together today announced a plan that if passed by the legislature, will put thousands of Minnesotans back to work this year.

And there’s the tell.  This “plan” – more below – will come to the legislature bundled with some of the other nonsense Governor Dayton couldn’t get through the GOP-controlled legislature last session.  The legislature will toss it.  The DFL/media (ptr),the Strib editorial board and the chanting point bots will say “The GOP took your jerbs!” in November.

This plan is intended for no more.

To encourage businesses to hire new employees, Governor Dayton and the DFL Legislators propose offering a New Jobs Tax Credit. This would be a one-time $3,000 tax credit to any Minnesota business for each veteran, unemployed worker or recent graduate they hire during calendar year 2012, and a $1,500 credit for each new hire through June 2013. This $35 million program would create over 10,000 new, private-sector jobs this year.

Which is a great way to create a bunch of low-wage temporary jobs.

Business owners, I’d love to hear from you.  $3,000 is better than a kick in the teeth.  But given the other uncertainties in the economy.- Obamacare and the coming tax hikes and all the other regulatory nonsense that’s been pecking you to death and all the rest that’s looming in the next two years, not to mention Minnesota’s already-miserable business taxes  – isn’t it more like whizzing in the wind?

Like- a chanting point?

It’s a sign that the DFL has learned one lesson – sort of.  They’ve learned that “eat the rich”, in and of itself, isn’t a strategy for a session.  They have to put a meaningless veneer of “job creation” on top of it.

Other proposals in the plan include a new bonding bill with details to be announced next week, a proposal that will help Minnesota compete for business expansion through the Minnesota Investment Fund, an expansion of the FastTRAC program to provide career-specific training to prepare adults for the jobs of the future and the creation of the Minnesota Opportunity Grants Pilot Program which will help Minnesotans get the training required for high-demand careers.

Read:  a) Construction jobs for Dayton’s union backers, b) spending to try to convince businesses that the tax climate isn’t so bad, and c/d) more spending that benefits Dayton’s supporters in the education industry, coupled with platitudes, as if government has ever successfully predicted about what anything will be tomorrow. 

Dayton:

“From day one, my top priority has been to get Minnesota working again.

No, Governor Dayton.  With all due respect, from day one,  your priority has been to do what the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Win Minnesota,and the unions have told you to do.  Last year, they told you to Eat The Rich.  Class warfare bombed.

With that out of the way…

Our jobs plan will help businesses create good jobs for thousands of Minnesotans who are looking for work.

No, it won’t.  It’s of little value alive – at $3K credit is bupkes – but of value as a wedge issue dead. Which is why you have your chanting-point bots yapping so hard about it now.

We need to focus on what we know will work: investing in infrastructure, providing incentives to private sector businesses to create more jobs, and training workers for high-demand careers.

Again with the code words.

Look- if you slash business taxes and cut regulations, the economy improves.  Revenue booms based on economic activity.  Then you build the infrastructure. Then you needn’t worry about training, because companies will train their own workers,on their own dime (although they’re happy to let the state pay for it, too).  That is the only “incentive” you need.

And it’s the one the GOP’s been talking all along.

And it’d hardly do to campaign on that, if you’re the DFL,now – would it?

The important part, of course, is preventing Minnesotans from getting fooled by this Potemkin plan.

Out For Drinks With “Lucky” Carroll

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I met my old friend, Inge Carroll (whom everyone calls “Lucky”) at a local watering hole to compare notes about politics the other day.  Lucky is a DFL operative.

CARROLL: So did you see teh article?  Teh Republican party said came into offices saying they were going to create jobs,but they have cost 16,000 jobs!

MITCH: For starters, why do you always pronounce “the” as “teh” after you drink cosmpolitans?  And then, huh?  You’ve missed the news? Minnesota’s unemployment rate is down.

CARROLL:  You are teh lier!  Didn’t you hear it on teh MPR?  Teh Republican policies have cost 16,000 jobs!  That means all of you Rethuglicons are TEH LIER!

(CARROLL orders another cosmopolitan)

MITCH: Um, what on earth are you talking about?  Minnesota is recovering from the recession faster than other states, largely because the GOP stood off Dayton’s orgy of taxes and regulations.

CARROLL:  Hah!  You didn’t read the article, did you?  You don’t even know what I”m talking about!

MITCH:  Well, that’d make two of us, if it were true – but yes, I read it. It says that because of LGA cuts, local government are having to either raise taxes, or cut government jobs, or both.

CARROLL:  Yep?  16,000 jobs!

MITCH:  OK.  Well, sorry to hear that – being out of work sucks. But what, you think government jobs are sacrosanct?

CARROLL:  Oh, I think people kind of like having teachers and firemen and cops and services.

MITCH:  Well, at face value, it looks more like people in towns around Minnesota like to have them – provided they can get someone else to pay for them.  When they have to pay for them themselves, not so much.

CARROLL:  (Glares at MITCH):   Why do you hate the troops?

(And SCENE).

Lucky had to get back to her job at “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, where she power-sands memes.

Back To The Future

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Here’s what I’m hoping happened on Tuesday:

  1. The Senate took a move to reassure people in and outside the party that the GOP is a sane, sober, grown-up party that, despite the press’ giggly and untoward obsession with the Koch “scandal”, is in the business of running a solid government in pulling former minority leader Senjem off the bench.
  2. Senjem – called a “pro-business conservative” by some of the leftybloggers (which means “moderate enough to not make them wet their pants with fear”), and a relative moderate by the rest of the world, is a calming, reassuring figure – partly to the caucuses (one of which he’s run before), and mostly to the rest of the world.
  3. The Senate, however, has recognizes the invigorating reality that the majority Senjem leads is mostly freshmen, swept into office on a wave of Tea Party conservative fervor, and who both went there to do what they were sent there to do and who haven’t, so far, gone native.   The assistant leaders include Roger Chamberlain, a straight-talking conservative from Lino Lakes, upperclassman Paul Gazelka of Brainerd, Ted Lillie of Lake Elmo and Claire Robling of Jordan, who may have been the architect of any non-tax “solution” we have on the Vikings stadium, among other things.  If you’re a Tea Partier, this is a pretty acceptable rounding-out of the leadership.

That’s what I’m hoping anyway.  Sources at the Capitol tell me that the caucus was rife with conflict during the last session, as the more-conservative freshman majority within the majority struggled with the more-moderate upper class senators.  Hopefully this is a sign that the struggles have been worked out, and the Senate can get down to the business of kicking Tom Bakk and Mark Dayton Alita Messinger’s butts.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough.  I’d hoped for Dave Hann for majority leader – but I have a hunch the splatter from the Koch incident stuck to a number of the principals; of the four leaders involved in the press conference a few weeks back that announced the flap to the public, Hann, Gerlach and Michel are absent from the leadership.  It’s a shame; Hann was one of the better upperclass members of the chamber last session.

Anyway, onward and upward; it’s time to not only kick Dayton’s the Alliance For A Better Minnesota and the SEIU’s agenda back under the bus, but defend every seat of that majority, and hopefully extend it.

More on that next week.

What The Hell Do We Do About The MNGOP, Part V

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More about the GOP Chair race,and the future of the position, later in the week.

The question for today is “what should a party look like these days?”

The DFL has followed a model similar to many IT companies; they are basically a shell.that administers groups of programmers in India, Ukraine and the Philippines.

The DFL is more or less the same. They’ve farmed out a lot of that policy, publicity, advertising, and interacting with the public stuff to other groups:  Alliance for a Better Minnesota,whose mission is to collect money from “progressive” plutocrats and unions to waterboard context about Republicans; “Win  Minnesota”, which collects money from plutocrats and unions to distribute to, well, Alliance for a Better Minnesota.  Then there’s the unions – the MFT,AFSCME, MAPE, the SEIU, Teamsters…

…and of course, the Minnesota Council of Non-Profits, Take-Action Minnesota, Common Cause,the League of Women Voters, MPIRG,and all the other non-profit agenda pimps…

…to say nothing of Big Feminist, Big Environment, Big Gay, Big Minority and Big Grievance (by which I mean the big, institutional lobbying arms of those social movements)

So what does this mean for a political party?

It means that the party can focus on running endorsements and a few other things, and leave all of the complicated stuff – advertising, communicating with voters, fundraising – to other other groups.  This is especially useful when it comes to trying to appeal to “big tents” full of voters; the unions can reach out to their constituents, and have their messages carefully sequestered away from Big Environment’s countervailing message, and neither will be the wiser.  (I think that’s part of the reason that so much of the messaging coming from the DFL proper is so very very stupid; all the talented communicators are working for 527s.

Of course, this means that the 527s are a little more equal than the voters – and to the DFL’s activists. And if Republicans wonder about how their party’s budget’s been spent, and want more transparency?  The money spent getting Democrats elected is accountable only to a raft of non-profit boards, union leadership and private parties with deep pockets.

Not a few Republicans have pondered if that’s the future of political parties; since so many businesses are doing more or less the same thing.  It’s probably irrelevant at the moment; there are not enough Republican-leaning 527s.  I’m not sure it’s something the GOP wants to do; I like the idea of standing in contrast with

More later this week.

Chanting Points Memo: “Peasants! Your Masters Are Displeased!”

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Last week, we reported that according to the latest Minnesota Management and Budget figures, Minnesota’s state government took in almost $900 million more than it spent in the last year.

As I noted, it’s not all good news, for quite a number of reasons.  Some of the extra money came from the Feds.  Some of it was borroewed from future tobacco settlement fund payments – a source that should not only not be a piggy bank to plunder, notwithstanding that it should not exist at all.  And even if it was entirely due to the economy rebounding (and Minnesota’s is doing better than the national average, thanks in no small part to the GOP sweep last fall), the fact is that surpluses only mean that government is taking more from the economy than it needs; real surpluses should be rebated to the taxpayers – as in “people who pay taxes” – immediately.  But that’s a nicety for better times, not to mention genuine surpluses.  We’ll come back to that (no doubt after Obama and Dayton are bundled off to retirement).

A couple of the DFL legislators who caused the problem in the first place, Lyndon Carlson (the DFLer who first entered the Senate in 1928) and Dick Cohen, who inhabits a DFL sinecure in Highland Park, L were granted space in the Strib to pee in the GOP’s Whwaties:

We all breathed a sigh of relief when last week’s updated economic forecast showed a positive balance for the state in the current budget year. This was unexpected good news.

However, if we look at the budget by comparing both the “checking account” and the “credit card statement” — the way families and businesses do everyday — we’ll see our state’s structural budget problem is far from solved.

When a Republican talks about “structural budget problems”, you can be sure she’s talking things like “demand based budgeting – where every bureaucracy’s budget equals the previous budget, plus the bureacracy’s forecast, and inevitably self-serving, expected increase in delivering its service”.

When DFLers like Cohen and Carlson talk about “structural budget problems”, they mean “bureaucracies not getting what they demand, when they demand it”.

Keep that in mind as we continue.

Responding to the forecast, Republicans were quick to pat themselves on the back. House Speaker Kurt Zellers praised their “fiscal restraint” and Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch lauded how the state had “lived within its means.”

Both of which are both true and false; the state did get federal money, and did borrow against future Tobacco Shakedown proceeds.

Carlson and Cohen’s deceit lies in the details:

Most Minnesotans, looking at the numbers, would see it differently. Here’s a look at each side of the ledger. Judge for yourself:

Checking Balance: $876 million. The updated economic forecast shows Minnesota has a current “surplus” of $876 million. Like a household checking account, these are funds to cover expenses during the budget cycle we’re currently in.

But unlike most checking accounts, our state’s balance has not been completely generated through money that’s been saved up.

Of course not.  The GOP, faced with an intransigent governor who is in office solely to serve the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”, “Take Action Minnesota”, “Common Cause” and the unions, bent on the budget last session, spending a couple billion more than they should have,

Had we done it the way the conservatives said to do it, we’d have multibillion-dollar surplus and no borrowed money.

They’d also have been able to eliminate statements this:

Current Debt: $4.2 billion. Our state’s “credit card statement” reveals a lot of new red ink due to the budget Republicans passed after taking our state to a government shutdown. In the next budget cycle, Minnesotans will face a $1.3 billion budget deficit.

This has been a familiar story. In eight of 10 years, the state has faced a deficit. Instead of making permanent adjustments to our budget, we have used one-time dollars, accounting shifts, and borrowing. All this patchwork and duct tape hasn’t solved the problem.

This takes us back to the “structural budget problems”, above.  The only deficit is in terms of current spending versus the bureaucracy’s projected future demands.  To use Cohen and Carlson’s “family budget” example, it’s like giving your kid a $20/month cell phone plan and a $30 flip phone today, and having her tell you your bill is going to $250 plus $80 a month next year because, naturally, you’re getting them IPhones, whether you have the money to pay for it or not.

You know what you’d tell your daughter.  It’s exactly what we, The People, need to tell Carlson and Cohen.

They do not have first dibs on what we earn.  Our first and foremost job as citizens of Minnesota is not to keep the bureaucracy fat and happy, any more than it is to buy your kid and IPhone just because she wants one.

Continue reading →

Same-Sex Marriage: Six Theses

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As we start heading toward the next round of elections, both sides – the GOP and the DFL – are planning to make the biggest electoral hay that they can out of the Same Sex Marriage issue.

The GOP majority in the legislature put the issue of a Marriage Amendment on the ballot for next year.  The issue might just overshadow all other issues on the ballot, short of the presidency itself.

Just a couple of observations:

  1. Both Sides Need It To Be An Issue:  there’s evidence that the GOP left a lot of votes on the table in the 2010 gubernatorial election when Tom Emmer didn’t make gay marriage a key campaign issue.  Naturally, gay marriage is a bloody shirt that the DFL can wave at its constituents; they think it’ll get people to turn out.
  2. Neither side wants this issue to be resolved:  You caught the bit about this being a vote getter – or at least a perceived vote-getter – for both sides, right? It’s not just this election; however this amendment turns out next year, it’ll be an electoral carrot and stick for both parties to dangle out there for years to come…provided it’s not actually resolved, one way or the other.
  3. The GOP Has More To Gain By Keeping It As A Public Issue: While I agree with Andy Aplikowski that Minnesotans are generally a fairly socially libertarian bunch, I think that when you add up the math for the GOP, it’s a lot easier to get to “landslide win” if the evangelicans turn out for you.  And while evangelical conservatives will turn out for economic issues, throwing them some social red meat surely can’t hurt.  Can it?
  4. The DFL Has More To Lose: The Democrats nationwide are scrambling to give their base – to say nothing of independents – a reason to turn out next November.  Saddled with a turkey of a President, a Senate with approval lower than Mullah Omar, a slew of Senate seats at risk, the unions’ attempt to outsource agitation to the “Occupy” movement dissolving in a welter of filth, crime, sexual assault and counterculture dissipation, and Progressivism in the heartland rocked back on its heels by two-chamber flips in Wisconsin and Minnesota, the DFL needs to be able to wave the bloody shirt of “bigotry” at its gay and gay-sympathetic constituents.
  5. The DFL Needs It More: If the Democrats nationwide are in a public relations bind – still running against George W. Bush, looking forward to a campaign that has to answer the question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” with “Hey! Mitt Romney has weird hair!”  – the DFL is worse.  They’re not really even a party anymore; The DFL is a shell that basically administers outsourcing contracts with “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Take Action Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”, “Common Cause”, “Draw The LIne” and other checkbook advocacy groups that do most of the “party’s” actual work; think “the Hessians”.  DFL could use something to get people to remember they exist.  (But they’ll likely subcontract this out to “Minnesotans For Marriage Equality”, a fully-owned subsidiary of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”.  Yes, it’s fictional, but you know that’s basically how it’s going to work, don’t you?)
  6. The DFL Doesn’t Want Single-Sex Marriage Legalized: Think about it.  They’ve been nominally for gay marriage for thirty-odd years.  And from 2006, and especially 2008, through 2010 the DFL had absolute control of the Legislature; it was two chambers against Tim Pawlenty.  Now, the DFL maintains that a majority of Minnesotans support same sex marriage.  So if they actually believe that, why not push it through in the 2008 or 2010 sessions, when they had overwhelming control, were riding high on two landslide victories and the Obamascenscion?  “Because Pawlenty would have vetoed it!  Why waste the votes?” is the usual answer.  So why not bypass Governor Pawlenty and go for an amendment?  Or use that purported majority of Minnesotans that favor the issue to either override the veto, or use it to get Republicans voted out of office back in 2010?  There really are only two reasons; one would be that there just isn’t that much of an electoral demand for same sex marriage – but we just know the DFL wouldn’t blow smoke up the state’s skirt, would it?  The other reason is that it’s not in the DFL’s interest either to push this issue (in the oh-so-unlikely even they’re lying) or, I suspect most likely, they don’t really want same sex marriage legalized; that would take it off the table as a get-out-the-vote issue.
Discuss.

Reality Is Conservative

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Every once in a while, when I drop some factoid or another into a “debate” with a lib, I’ll wrap it with a bit of a verbal end-zone happy dance; “Sometimes”, I’ll say, “reality is just plain conservative”.

With that in mind – the five-member Judicial Redistricting Panel has ruled on the rules to be used in redistricting…

…and it’s generally good news for those who support following the rules as they’ve sprung up over the past forty years or so:

For the first time, the panel said the metropolitan area should be regarded as 11 counties, not seven. As a result more exurban counties could be tied into districts in suburban and urban areas.

That was an approach Republicans favored, said Elizabeth Brama who represents the Republican party on redistricting. She said it’s unclear what effect the change will have.

“I don’t think it’s a question of one party or the other benefiting,” Brama said. “I think it’s more a question of just fairly representing where the people in the state of Minnesota live and how they organize themselves.”

Which, to be honest, is what the GOP has been shooting for all along; as Dr. Kent Kaiser has pointed out in numerous forums, the plan passed by the Legislature – really the GOP majority – did a good job of sticking to the letter and spirit of the body of law that this state has developed in its decades of sending these questions to the courts to decide.

It was the DFL that’s gone partisan; Mark Dayton vetoed the Legislature’s plan for purely partisan grounds.  (Actually, I suspect it was less “partisan” than that the unions, Alliance for a Better Minnesota and other groups that control the DFL didn’t give him permission to pass it).  And a group of groups that, by any rational measure, call at least some of the DFL’s shots – the groups behind “Draw The Line MN” – took their shot at skewing the system to favor “communities of interest” which, inevitably, are DFL constituencies.

Now, I’m going to do just a bit of place-keeping her for future debates.  I’ll add emphasis to this next bit, from Ken Martin, former head of “Win Minnesota”, one of the groups that funneled money from unions and liberals with deep pockets into the DFL’s campaign coffers, especially for their sleazy, toxic campaign against Tom Emmer last year.  He is the current chair of the DFL.

DFL party chair Ken Martin wasn’t surprised by those changes.

“I think it’s pretty pro forma and certainly establishes a lot of the same principles that were in place ten years ago,” Martin said. “Again, without discussing this further with my team and being able to look at it more in detail, I can’t comment any more than that. But on the surface I think it’s fine. I don’t think it give any party an advantage over another.”

I’m emphasizing those passages now, for later.  Because you just know that if the Judicial Panel draws the lines based on these rules, the DFL and the groups that call its shots – the public employee unions, Alliance For A Better Minnesota, the Minnesota Council of Non-Profits, the League of Women Voters, Take Action Minnesota and Common Cause – will be screeching exactly the opposite, and demanding that you forget history in the bargain.

Because it’s a fairly simple thing – if you follow the rules set down in the past several court-decided apportionment decisions, the GOP should benefit; the parts of the state that support the GOP have grown, while the DFL parts have shrunk.  This represents many things – but we can not discount the fact that one of the key “communities of interest” are “people who moved to get the hell away from the cesspools the DFL has created” in the Twin Cities and Duluth.

The judical panel’s deadline to produce a redistricting map is February 21.

The Plutocrat

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Over the weekend, Baird Helgeson at the Strib did a piece – the first I’ve personally found – on Alita Messinger, the largest non-union bankroller of the various “progressive” pressure groups that have been doing all the DFL’s actual work for it this past couple of years.  As I’ve been reporting for the past year or so, Messinger – an heir to the Rockefeller fortune – was the main funder of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”‘s epic, toxic sleaze campaign that was the dominant – indeed, only – substantive output of the Dayton for Governor campaign last year (because, as this blog and the entire 2011 legislative session showed, he really had no other proposals).

Alida Messinger, an heir to the fabled Rockefeller fortune, has quietly given at least $10 million to candidates and causes over the past decade. Some recent gifts have been extraordinary: $500,000 to a group that last year backed her former husband, Mark Dayton, for governor. And before that, $1 million to help bankroll the ballot campaign for the Legacy amendment, which raised the state sales tax to create 25 years of new funding for conservation and cultural projects.

Once upon a time, the rich paid to improve life.  Alida Messinger pays to get government to get the improvements out of the taxpayer.

Now, Messinger is preparing for a new showdown that will be expensive, contentious and, for the first time, public.

She is vowing to do all she can to help the DFL regain control of the Legislature and get President Obama re-elected.

And I’m wondering if all those libs who’ve been wetting their pants over the Koch Brothers and ALEC will get the, um, juxtaposition?

Her millions could also become a force in the fight over the constitutional amendment on the ballot next year to define marriage as a union of man and woman — not gay couples. Messinger, 62, contends GOP politicians are harming Minnesota. “We are not a quality-of-life state anymore,” she said. “Citizens need to get involved and say we don’t like what you are doing to our state.”

She’s got a point.

Citizens; it’s time to get involved to blunt the influence of ofay, arrogant plutocrat dilettantes like Messinger.

Read Helgeson’s entire piece.  And then get pissed off.

They’ve got the dirty money – from plutocrats and the unions.  All we have is the desire to save this state.

The Later Debate

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Why, yes – I did spend a bit of time talking redistricting over the weekend, now that you mention it.

On the NARN, it was my pleasure to interview MNGOP Chair Tony Sutton and his deputy, Michael Brodkorb (punctuated by a surprise appearance by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker; I’ll be posting the podcast link as soon as I find it) about the redistricting process and all the outside money the left is pouring into Minnesota to try to skew the process in their favor.

And then, last night, I drove out to Ramsey to appear on “The Late Debate” with Jack Tomczak and Ben Kruse.  I was on a panel with Gary Gross of Let Freedom Ring, Mike Dean of “Common Cause Minnesota”, and Kent Kaiser, who is part of Draw The Line Minnesota’s (DTL-MN) “Citizens’ Commission”.  In the interest of accuracy, I’ll note that in my piece last week, I lumped Kaiser in with the Commission’s liberal hypermajority, because I personally didn’t know any better; Kaiser is of course well-known in GOP circles as one of the good guys; I regret the error…

…especially since he was the unquestionable star of last night’s debate.

I’m not going to try to reconstruct the whole thing from memory – you can check out their podcast at their site, and Gary Gross did an excellent rundown of the proceedings over atLFR.

I’ll recap this bit, though; I walked in there with two main points:  I walked out with four:

Who’s Politicized?:  As Kaiser noted, the GOP legislative majority’s proposal follows the letter of the law, and the spirit of the last several judicial decisions, pretty closely.  The DFL’s map was…well, nonexistant.  They never drew one up.

It was Governor Dayton’s veto that was, as Kaiser noted, exceptionally politically capricious.

And this entire process recaps a pattern we started seeing during the 2008 election, and rose to a crescendo in last year’s gubernatorial race; the DFL isn’t so much a political party as it is a political holding company, outsourcing its actual policy and boots-on-the-ground work to its “strategic partners” – the unions, and the array of astroturf pressure groups like “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Take Action Minnesota”, MPIRG, and “Draw The Line”.

Outside Money: Behind all of Draw The Line and Common Cause’s noble chatter about getting people involved – nay, getting them interested – in the redistricting process, the fact remains that a raft of “progressive” organizations are doing their level best to try to jimmy the redistricting in their favor, in a census period in which GOP-leaning districts exploded and DFL-districts continued withering.  The demographics aren’t a state phenomenon – and either is the left’s effort; “Draw The Line” is a regional, not state, entity, focusing on trying to attenuate (at least) the gains the GOP should get from pure demographics.  More below.

Competition: One of DTL-MN’s priorities – because it’s one of the priorities of its supporting groups (Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the MN Council of Non-Profits and Take Action MN), is “competitive elections”.  On a policy level, this goal – making sure that politicians are accountable to electoral pressure from their voters – is laudable enough.

It’s at the implementation level that it either breaks down or shows its ideological stripes, depending on your point of view.  Minnesota is a divided state – but not evenly or consistently divided.

Let’s look at the example of a hypothetical state of about five million people, which is closely divided on a statewide basis – but where the division stacks up as follows:

  • An urban core – three, really – of about a million people that votes about 70/30 Democrat.
  • An outer-suburban and exurban ring that votes, in a good year, maybe 52-55 percent GOP.  Let’s assume a huge year, and say it’s 55-45 GOP.
  • The rest of the state – about half the population – which, to arrive at the sort of dead-even split that the last three statewide elections have shown, would be divided about 52-48 in favor of the GOP.

Of course it’s not hypothetical at all.  Minnesota is exactly that; a couple of big blue boils, the Twin Cities and Duluth, two Congressional and 20 legislative districts that routinely deliver 70+% to the DFL, surrounded by an exurban ring that, in a blowout year, might go 55-45 GOP (only two GOP-owned legislative districts topped 70% GOP, as opposed to 20 for the DFL), and an outstate that tips a little bit GOP, but is close enough to send Tim Walz and Collin Peterson to Congress.

So to make Minnesota “competitive” across the board, the legislative map would have to look like a couple of bicycle wheels, with spokes radiating out from the Marshall-Lake Bridge (and Canal Park in Duluth) all the way out to the state’s borders; the Congressional map would look like a big Key Lime (mmm, Key Lime) pie.

That is, of course, not acceptable practice.  New boundaries must, as much as possible, preserve existing community boundaries.

The answer, of course, is that Common Cause want the Republican parts of Minnesota to be competitive, and to leave the DFL-dominated Twin Cities and Duluth, and their 20 districts, pretty much alone.

“When did you stop beating your minorities?”: As Gary noted at LFR last week, there is a noxious little bon mot tucked away in the DTL-MN’s site:  “Historically, redistricting has been done out of the public eye, without meaningful public input, and used to dilute the voting power of communities of color“.

The next sentence helpfully adds “Minnesota has a reputation for fair and clean government, but we believe we can do better“.

So if Minnesota has a “reputation for fair and clean government”, why mention trait that was a part of redistricting in Mississippi and Illinois and Alabama?  Because any thinking person knows that it’s immaterial to Minnesota’s history, right?

Of course; but the quote wasn’t included for the benefit of the thinking and literate audience; it was included to provide an inflammatory, polarizing soundbite for the ignorant – TV reporters and Strib columnists, for example – to latch onto.  Otherwise, if it has nothing to do with Minnesota’s history, why include it at all?

———-

That said, it was a fun time, and a generally good debate.  Up to the end, anyway.

I have been duking it out with Mike Dean of Common Cause for quite some time, mostly on Twitter.  I have been inviting him on the Northern Alliance to discuss Common Cause’s agenda and funding for a little over a year now; like many Twitter arguments, it’s been curt and acerbic.

And I’ll cop to the fact that I’ve had a bad attitude about Common Cause.  While they are disingenuous about being “non-partisan”, that’s fine; it’s a free country, you can say anything you want.  Hell, I can call myself “non-partisan” – but, of course, I don’t. More importantly, most of my impressions of Common Cause were formed in the early-mid 2000’s, when they agitated for a lot of really noxious policies, especially campaign finance reform speech rationing.

In person, Dean’s a heckuvva nice guy.  And he held his own pretty well, and stayed on his point, for the first 118 minutes of the show,. One of the points on which he stayed was an idea on which we all agreed at the beginning of the show; that we all wanted people to get more literate about and involved in the redistricting process, across the political board.

And so with that in mind, I reiterated my invitation to Dean to appear on the Northern Alliance one of these next weekends.

He turned it down – and then kept going.  “What do we gain from it?”  he asked, noting that in my blog’s coverage of Common Cause I (paraphrasing him closely ) published “fairy tales” and “made things up”.

Nope.  Never.  In almost ten years, this blog has published things I don’t reasonably believe to be true only when I’m pretty clearly writing satire.  No exceptions.

Oh, I may err at times, and on a point or two I was in fact wrong; as Dean noted, the Joyce Foundation doesn’t get money from George Soros.  But I can concede that point, without changing the conclusion that actually matters; while Joyce (and Common Cause MN, which is supported by Joyce) may not get money from Soros or his various shell groups, its’ goals nationwide are indistinguishable from those of the Open Society Foundation, Media Matters, the Center for Independent Media or any of the other Soros joints; to slap a phony “non-partisan” sheen on a partisan pressure industry.

So at the end of the day – literally, at two minutes to midnight – it became clear what the real mission is.  It’s not to reach out to people of all political stripes.  It’s to reach out to those who don’t know what their stripes are, but who can be inveigled into exerting themselves to fight against a vague, sorta-racist boogeyman.

And so the battle will continue.

Thank to Ben Kruse and Jack Tomczak for the invite – and to AM1280 for letting me appear off of Salem turf for an evening.

DrawTheLine MN: Giving “Potemkin” A Bad Name

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According to Russian legend, Catherine the Great’s consort, minister and general, Grigory Potemkin, built fake villages, just shells and faςades and a few serfs going through happy-serf-like motions (see also SEIU – Ed.) along the banks of the Dniepr river – which he’d just seized from the Ottomans in a costly war he’d advocated and led, to impress Catherine with the wisdom of his campaign.

“Potemkin village” – or “Potemkin” – has thus become a synonym for “a hollow, insubstantial faςade, intended to deceive”.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at “Draw The Line Minnesota’s “Citizens’ Redistricting Commission” – a body that should make Grigoriy Potemkin’s descendants sue for trademark infringement.

“Draw The Line MN” is an astroturf “activist” group, a collaboration between Common Cause Minnesota, the League of Women Voters Minnesota, the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits and TakeAction Minnesota – one of the groups behind “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, which ran the astroturf smear campaign against Tom Emmer last year.  All of them portray themselves as “non-partisan”; all are relentlessly “progressive” astroturf activist groups, all of them fronts for Big Progressive money (and incredibly disingenuous about it).

…who’ve teamed to to masquerade under the “non-partisan” guise of “Draw The Line” (DTL) to try to influence the redistricting process in Minnesota and throughout the Midwest.

DTL’s latest scam?  The “Citizens’ Commission on Redistricting”.

The term is picked carefully; it sounds official, doesn’t it?  Like it’s something sanctioned by the state?

It’s not – no moreso that if I’d sent them out to campaign.

And who are these people?

DTL’s website provides an explanation…

The Commission Members serving on the Minnesota Citizens Redistricting Commission are volunteers, who are committing a significant amount of time and effort to this process. To that end, Draw the Line Minnesota has devised a process we feel is both transparent and limits the necessity of significant days of travel for Commission members.

 

The Commission will rely heavily on technology, so that much of its work can be done on the internet and by conference call. To that end, public meetings will be livestreamed (where possible) and taped and posted on our website. Any communications received by the Commission or Draw the Line Minnesota, related to map-drawing or redistricting principles, will also be uploaded to our website.

 

…and a list.  Let’s look into that list a bit.  I’ll add some emphasis here and there:

Lori Berg of Maplewood is a program officer for Minnesota Community Foundation and The Saint Paul Foundation and has worked in the field of philanthropy for twenty-seven years. She was born and raised in rural southwestern Minnesota and through her work is familiar with communities around the state.

Berg – no known relation – has no record of political contributions on the MN CFB, Opensecrets, Newsmeat, or the Federal Elections Commission.

Bruce Corrie of St. Paul is the dean of the College of Business and Organizational Leadership at Concordia University-St. Paul. Dr. Corrie has a Ph.D. in Economics and is an expert on the ethnic markets and has been featured in a wide range of international, national and local media. His website and blog can be found at www.ethnictrends.info.

No political contributions found: Corrie’s work seems to focus on multi-culti stuff.

 Sally Fineday of Pennington is a member with the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and Executive Director of Native Vote Alliance of Minnesota. With Native Vote, Sally has helped promote nonpartisan civic engagement and voter participation.

Again – no contributions found; she’s been involved in community politics in Beltrami County.

Kathi Hemken of New Hope currently serves as the community’s Mayor. Previously, she worked as a planner at Honeywell for twenty-years and served on the city’s planning commission. We’re pleased to have Kathy’s local government experience on the Commission.

No contributions listed – and very little on isplay about her tenure as mayor of New Hope, a struggling blue-collar burb west of North Minneapolis.

Kent Kaiser of St. Paul is a professor of communication at Northwestern College. Previously, he served as the communications and voter outreach director in the office of the Minnesota Secretary of State. While with the Secretary of State’s office, he serviced as liaison to the U.S. Census Bureau and on the boards of Kids Voting Minnesota and Kids Voting St. Paul.

Yet again – not a single political contribution found.

Lorna LaGue of Waubun is the Special Projects Director for the White Earth Reservation where she serves in various roles involving community organizing, planning, and development. She works with diverse agencies throughout the State and is a member of the Rediscovery Environmental Learning Center Board and Chair of an enterprise board for the Tribe.

Couldn’t find any political contributions:

Matthew Lewis of Edina is the Communications Director of the Independence Party and a master’s candidate at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Last year he served as press secretary to gubernatorial candidate Tom Horner. Previously, in Washington, DC, he worked as a reporter at The Center for Public Integrity covering topics including infrastructure and climate change legislation in conjunction with outlets such as POLITICO.

Lewis is on record giving $2000 to Tom Horner last year.

Elda Macias of Minneapolis is Marketing Director for a large Fortune 300 company, developing new marketing strategies for emerging markets. Elda was formerly active in the DFL Latino Caucus, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Minnesota, and the Scholarship Selection Committee for the Latino Economic Development Center. She is originally from El Paso, Texas.

Macias gave $250 to Obama, and $350 to Patricia Torres-Ray, in addition to her DFL involvement listed above.

Anne Mason of St. Paul is the Assistant Director of Communications at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She served as a political appointee for Tax and Budget Policy for the US Department of the Treasury, Communications Director for Congressman Mark Kennedy, and Political Director for the Erik Paulsen for Congress campaign.

The person on the list with any form of Republican affiliation of any kind, Mason seems to show not a single political donation.

Sedric McClure of Brooklyn Park is a Multicultural Counselor in Student and Academic Affairs at Macalester College and has worked in multicultural settings in higher education for fifteen years. A current public policy student as well, Sedric is an avid reader of history and civil rights.

No contributions listed.

Kenya McKnight of Minneapolis is Operations Director of the Northside Economic Opportunity Network, which provides business and economic development services in the areas of training, technical assistance, and loan packaging. She is actively engaged around social and economic justice issues within ethnic communities and serves on the boards of organizations including North Point Health and Wellness and serves as a DFL Director of Senate District 58.

A DFLer (as noted above), McKnight seems to have no record of political donations.

Carl Rosen of Spring Park is a retired social worker, who worked in long-term care nursing homes and at the Hennepin County Psychiatric Unit. He is also a retired Priest and worked at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville for thirteen years.

Hm. Not a thing.

Karen Saxe of Northfield is Chair of the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at Macalester College and is actively affiliated with the Mathematics Association of American and the Association of Women in Mathematics. She was also recently elected to serve on the board of the League of Women Voters of Northfield and Cannon Falls.

No political contributions founded.

T. Scott Uzzle of Saint Paul is an attorney with Blaschko & Associates. He was previously an Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney in Virginia. He has authored a detailed memorandum on voting rights in Richmond, Virginia. Prior to law school, he was the Committee Assistant to the Privileges and Elections Committee of the Virginia House of Delegates.

No political contributions found.

Candi Walz of Lindstrom is an adjunct professor of Political Science at Century College and the small business owner of Let’s Talk Kids, LLC. She was Legislative Correspondent at the state Capitol for fifteen daily newspapers in Northeastern Minnesota, and worked in Government Relations at Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and the Minnesota State College Association.

So there’s the “Citizens’ Commission”.

Now, I look for patterns for my day job.  What did we see above?  A group of people chock full of low-level involvement with “progressive” institutions (the DFL, various non-profits), or with institutions that are aligned with the left (the tribes, academia, especially political science), or who depend for their livelihood on institutions where a strong left-of-center pedigree is vital for survival, much less advancement (Macalester, the Humphrey Institute) – but who have, across the board, give off few of the obvious signs of high level partisanship, like lots of campaign donations, to be held against them.

Now – what are they doing?

More tomorrow..

Astroturf Rising, 2011

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Minnesota is heading for a battle over redistricting that may just make the just-passed budget battle look like a stroll in the park.

And, just like with every such battle lately in Minnesota, there is at least one “non-partisan” non-profit claiming to have the interests of average, non-affiliated Minnesotans at heart.  There are a couple of reasons for this; for starters, the Minnesota DFL is a largely impotent organization;

In the 2010 elections, of course, it was “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” and a small circle of other groups – “The 2010 Fund”  – a group that funnelled millions of dollars from unions, the Dayton family, and their cronies to try to win the election for Mark Dayton (largely by running a toxic sleaze campaign).  Their power in “progressive” circles is remarkable; Governor Dayton has brought a fair number of ABM’s staffers to work in his office; the former head of the “2010 Fund”, Ken Martin, now runs the DFL.

And for the redistricting battle?  The new astroturf group is “Draw The Line”, an organization that spans several states where the Democrats are fighting for their organizational lives, including Minnesota.

So who’s behind “Draw the Line?”  And what are they after – and by “they”, I don’t mean “Draw The Line”, so much as the people behind them?

More next week here on Shot In The Dark.

One Day At DFL Headquarters

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(SCENE: Denise CARDINAL, head of Alliance for a Better Minnesota chair of the Minnesota DFL, wallks into her office, sits in an overstuffed chair)

(KEN MARTIN walks in to room).

MARTIN: “Hello…”

(MARTIN stops abruptly as CARDINAL motions downward with her index fingers.  MARTIN sighs, gets on hands and knees in front of CARDINAL’s char.  CARDINAL puts feet up on MARTIN’s back).

(REP. JOHN LESCH, who is minding the phones, buzzes in) “Mizz Cardinal, the party from the legislature is here to see you”.

CARDINAL: “Send them in please”.

(Tom BAKK, Paul THISSEN and Ryan WINKLER walk in.  Each bows deeply toward CARDINAL).

CARDINAL: Rise!

(All three take seats in overstuffed chairs around the room).

CARDINAL: OK.  What do we have?

BAKK: We think we have a plan!

THISSEN: Yes!  A plan!

WINKLER:  Heh!  Heh heh heh!

CARDINAL:  Let me hear it!

(THISSEN motions to WINKLER)

WINKLER:  Well, there’s this group, the “American Legislative Exchange Council“, or “ALEC”.  They are your run of the mill conservative activist group, run by Grover Norquist…

(BAKK, THISSEN and CARDINAL hiss theatrically)

WINKLER: …and they propose legislation and stuff, and lots of Republicans legislators have signed up with the group…

BAKK:  And if we can spin them as some big, shadowy conspiracy that tells affiliated legislators do to Grover Norquist’s bidding…

THISSEN:  Yeah! Grover Norquist!

WINKLER: Heh!  Heh heh heh!

CARDINAL:  Silence!  I like it! Winkler?

(WINKLER bows deeply)

CARDINAL: Start telling people that ALEC is a powerful, unaccountable group that wields boundless resources to pull the strings at the Minnesota State Legislature…

LESCH (Buzzes in) Mizz Cardinal?

CARDINAL (enraged) WHAT?

LESCH:  The Gentlemen are here.

CARDINAL:  Thank you. Send them in.

(CARDINAL makes a hand gesture to BAKK, THISSEN and WINKLER, all of whom get up from their chairs and lie, face-down, on the floor, head-to-foot, from the door to CARDINAL’s chair)

(CARDINAL rises as Tom DOOHER enters the room in a long, black cape.  He is accompanied by Javier MORILLO, who is wearing a long purple cape.  DOOHER steps across WINKLER, THISSEN and BAKK’s backs to walk to CARDINAL, to whom he offers his hand.  CARDINAL kisses his pinky ring).

DOOHER:  Well?

CARDINAL, BAKK, THISSEN, WINKLER:  We hear and obey.

MORILLO:  You heard the man! SOUND OFF!

CARDINAL, BAKK, THISSEN, WINKLER:  We hear and obey!

DOOHER: Very well.  Stand up, for Minnesota’s students.  (As BAKK, THISSEN and WINKLER stand, DOOHER takes BAKK’s seat.  BAKK takes THISSEN’s, THISSEN takes WINKLER’s, who stands awkwardly).

DOOHER: Let us talk of the 2012 session…

(And SCENE).