{"id":27905,"date":"2012-05-15T12:30:07","date_gmt":"2012-05-15T17:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=27905"},"modified":"2014-10-05T14:39:34","modified_gmt":"2014-10-05T19:39:34","slug":"chanting-points-memo-do-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=27905","title":{"rendered":"Chanting Points Memo: &#8220;Do-Nothing&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker Zellers and Senator Senjem had barely brought the gavels down on the session when the DFL&#8217;s paid PR organs &#8211; Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Common Cause and the unions &#8211; and their unpaid ones in the media started chanting the meme: it&#8217;d been a &#8220;do-nothing&#8221; legislature.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/4575208799_e7c6e34c94.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"252\" height=\"192\" \/><\/p>\n<p>That is, of course, objectiively wrong. \u00a0The GOP went into the session with big plans, and threw itself into carrying them off.<\/p>\n<p>The DFL and Governor Dayton went into the session with smaller plans:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Run out the clock<\/li>\n<li>Veto everything they could<\/li>\n<li>Hope redistricting would pull their chestnuts out of the fire come November.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s not a bad strategy, really; it ties in seamlessly with the DFL&#8217;s strategy this past several elections: &#8220;lie about everything convincingly enough to sway the stupid vote&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>But in addition to being a really really cynically ofay political strategy, it&#8217;s just plain not true. Here&#8217;s a sampling of what the &#8220;do-nothing&#8217; legislature managed to get past a sluggardly DFL minority and a Governor whose only activities this past session were vetoing legislation and kissing Roger Goodell&#8217;s ass:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Brought the deficit from the &#8220;nearly seven billion&#8221; of two years ago to a billion dollars and change in surplus today.<\/li>\n<li>They passed a Voter ID Amendment, which promises to help make MInnesota elections less like Chicago&#8217;s<\/li>\n<li>Furthered policies that led to the creation of 41,000 jobs &#8211; almost making up for the 47,000 jobs lost jn 2009 and 2010 when the DFL controlled the legislature.<\/li>\n<li>Brought Health and Human Services spending increases down from the double digits under DFL mismanagement to just over the rate of inflation.<\/li>\n<li>King Banaian&#8217;s &#8220;Sunset Advisory Commission&#8221; did something I do not believe any DFL government has ever done; eliminated government offices that had outlived their usefulness.<\/li>\n<li>Tort Reform<\/li>\n<li>Changes in school choice laws.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Oh, yeah &#8211; and they passed a <em>ton <\/em>of other bills, which Dayton then vetoed.<\/p>\n<p>Put another way: \u00a0<strong>a legislature elected by over 50% of each district&#8217;s voters was stymied by a governor elected by barely over 40% of the people<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>But that matters not to Alliance for a &#8220;Better&#8221; Minnesota, and its new astroturf spinoff, &#8220;Alliance for a Better Legislature&#8221;. \u00a0WIth nothing to show for their own session, the DFL and its astroturf partners&#8217; only really strategy is&#8230;:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Find a big lie<\/li>\n<li>Tell it constantly<\/li>\n<li>Peel off enough stupid people&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;or fake and duplicate people to flip the Legislature while they still can.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>\n<p>They are about to dump more money into this state than we&#8217;ve ever seen &#8211; which is, of course, why they&#8217;ve spent the last year whinging about \u00a0the &#8220;American Legislative Exchange Commission&#8221;. \u00a0It&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?page_id=5033\">Berg&#8217;s Seventh Law<\/a>: \u00a0&#8220;When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives\u2019 ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s going to be a busy six months for conservative bloggers and talk radio &#8211; the only counterbalance the media and DFL (ptr) and all of their Rockefeller money have in this state.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker Zellers and Senator Senjem had barely brought the gavels down on the session when the DFL&#8217;s paid PR organs &#8211; Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Common Cause and the unions &#8211; and their unpaid ones in the media started chanting the meme: it&#8217;d been a &#8220;do-nothing&#8221; legislature. That is, of course, objectiively wrong. \u00a0The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,108,132],"tags":[115,243],"class_list":["post-27905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-12","category-chanting-points-memo","category-mn-legislature","tag-abm","tag-bergs-7th-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27905","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=27905"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47879,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27905\/revisions\/47879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}