On the final Sunday of Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s eight years in office, the Star Tribune Editorial Board dropped a burning pile on the doorstep of the Governor’s Mansion, rang the bell and ran off without looking at Pawlenty’s complete record. Let’s step back and take a different look.<\/p>\n
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary declared “austerity” the top word of 2010. While austerity isn’t sexy — and may not garner as much cocktail party praise as issues Strib editorial writers prefer — Minnesota state government needed it badly. What Gov. Pawlenty did over the past eight years was a near-miracle. During the four decades before he took office, Minnesota government spending had grown by an average of more than 20 percent every two years; on his watch it was less than 2 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Read the whole thing.\u00a0 Use it to gargle and spit out the aftertaste of the leftymedia’s bilge-y meme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Strib Editorial Board and the other varieties of intellectual roadkill that make up Minnesota’s left-wing pundocracy are all firmly agreed; “Tim Pawlenty’s eight years were a disaster”. And if that crowd believes it, you know it’s untrue. Brian McClung, mirabile dictu, got an op-ed in the Strib to set the record straight, and so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17026"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17028,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17026\/revisions\/17028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}