Mark Dayton apparently thinks he was elected pope.
I say that because of his style of interacting with the public; he pokes his nose out of his office, makes a pronouncment – “get this stadium deal done!” or “don’t shut down the government” or whatever it is he’s saying – and then disappears back into the office. He couldn’t be any more pseudo-papal if he built a balcony outside his office overlooking the Capitol Mall.
And that’s fine – he’s probably used to having absolute doctrinal authority in interpreting Alida Messinger’s revealed word, so it fits.
But if there’s anything striking about Mark Dayton as governor, it’s his time management skills. The guy just knows what matters.
I played hockey…and that actually got me to jump a little bit”
And that was it.
(Not that whinging like Governor Messinger Dayton would have done any good; the DFL approved of young Robert Espinosa’s little stunt, and thus so did the media).
Note to Governor Messinger Dayton: we’re not your butlers and maids. We pay the taxes – and those of us who pay attention notice that you and your idiot party are asking a lot of us to pay way too much. For more and more people every day, it’s way more than this state is worth.
Anyway – I hope that noticing that people aren’t amused by your distracted noodling while your lieutenants and the special interests that put you in office gut the economy and our personal savings doesn’t scare you off from appearing in public (outside the Twin Cities metro, anyway); I’ve got some tough questions for you too.
“Heckling”, I believe you and your praetorian guard call it.
Take a governor who rarely sets foot in front of the public, and usually leaves the “dealing with the proles” thing to his press secretary Katie Tinucci and his ex-wife’s consiglieri Carrie Lucking.
Put him in front of a crowd that hasn’t been carefully screened for obedience, with some spectators who are fighting and losing the battle to stay in the state they, for whatever reason, love – and are losing, with taxes and fees and regulations slowing eating first the ability to start a business, and finally the impetus to live here at all.
Let one of them heckle His Excellency.
What could possibly happen?
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I imagine King George felt this way about his peasants, too, right around 1775 or so.
Joe Doakes
He’s referring to this bit of video:
The Associated Press, in its capacity as part of the governor’s media Praetorian Guard, wrote:
The room apparently erupted into heckling and interruptions when Dayton was trying to explain his belief that state lawmakers should get a raise in pay.
The Minnesota Jobs Coalition, a Republican political committee working to unseat Dayton next year, recorded the meeting and publicized the governor’s comments.
Check out the video – or go to the piece that Joe linked, which has the longer version of the video. Tell us if “the room erupted”.
It’s preposterous. The crowd laughs when Governor Messinger Dayton tells them the Legislature is underpaid; a heckler points out that the legislators get a little over $31K a year for a “part-time” job – which it is (40 or more hours a week for about half the year). Dayton insults the audience.
It’ll be interesting to watch what happens with these meetings in the future. If they happen, look for the first several rows to be pre-filled with adoring fans. That’s what the legislature tried to do during the gun hearings, and that’s my fearless prediction.
Because it’s never too early to start the campaign season.
Former Sen. Norm Coleman’s announcement last week that he would forgo a challenge to incumbent Gov. Mark Dayton may be remembered in hindsight as the starting gun for the 2014 election cycle in Minnesota. With Democrats holding all the offices of note, the only real interest among political junkies is which Republicans will make bids for statewide office. Having only won two cycles in the past decade (2002 & 2010), the GOP cupboard is sparse, with many of the party’s once rising stars now out of office.
So who’s left to run for governor in 2014? In the spirit of the upcoming NCAA Tournament, we’ve made our brackets (sort of) and started the ball rolling towards months of endless chatter on who should or could lead the MN GOP out of the statewide office wilderness: Continue reading →
Spring 2011: Governor Dayton proposes a budget with a school payment “shift” – a delay of payments to schools until after an arbitrary date, the end of a fiscal year, to “move” the spending from one budget to another – of something well over $2 billion dollars.
May 2011: The GOP delivers a balanced budget that includes a shift of a little over a billion dollars. The DFL whinges that the GOP is “using a gimmick” to balance the budget. Notwithstanding the fact that Governor Dayton had himself proposed a “shift” twice as large as the GOP’s.
June 2012: The GOP proposes a bill to completely “repay” (i.e., pay before the arbitrary date) the existing “shift”. Governor Messinger Dayton, incomprehensibly, vetoes it.
DFLers muttered that paying back the shift would have been irresponsible, although they never really said why.
Election Season, 2012: The DFL relentlessly beats the GOP over the head with its chanting point about “Short-changing the children!”, notwithstanding the fact that the GOP had made an effort to fix it, only to be thwarted by Governor Messinger Dayton.
At this point, to the DFL, the “shift” is a campaign bludgeon.
Mid January 2013: The DFL proposes a budget that proposes paying back half of the “Shift”, but in a bill that – notwithstanding that the flood of other new spending and the tsunami of new taxes – has no funding mechanism, so the whole proposal is vapor.
Late January 2013: A DFL legislator says the shift “is just another tool”.
Summary: to the DFL, the “shift” has gone from “Irresponsible to pay back”, to “a fiscal assault weapon aimed at our children!” to “just a tool“.
Seriously.
Conclusion: The DFL defaulted on their promise “to the children”; they defrauded the voters by saying they’d pay “the shift” back, and they lied about the Republicans’ plans to do the same.
Discuss.
Special discussion point: why haven’t Rachel Stassen-Berger, Tom Scheck, Tim Pugmire, John Cronan, Pat Kessler and the rest of the elite capitol press corps reported on this?
CORRECTION: First two grafs were 2011, not 2012. Time flies when you’re fighting rapacious spendthrifts, doesn’t it?
A few months back, those of us who figured Zygi Wilf should pay for his own real estate improvements rather than plunder the state treasury were vindicated when turned out that the “mechanism” (read: gimmick) the state planned to use for its share – “electronic pull tabs” – wasn’t going to deliver anywhere near the planned revenue. If things didn’t turn around fast (note: they will not), the state’s “contribution” to Zygi Wilf’s investment the Vikings stadium will have to be paid for by all of us taxpaying ripe sucks out of the general fund.
That’s bad enough – and it’s just to cover a putatively fixed bill.
Now, Governor Messinger Dayton has started coming out with budget proposals. And along with some of those proposals (although, notably, not the one to repay part of the education budget “shift”) come some “mechanisms” to pay for them. Gimmicks, if you will.
Minnesotans, being virtuous in a passive-aggressive sort of way, love “sin taxes”; tobacco is a common public policy kick toy in this state. And Messinger Dayton intends to jack up the price of cigarettes by 94 cents a pack.
Despite fanciful claims to the contrary, many tobacco tax hikes across the country have failed to produce the promised revenue. In 2009, Washington, D.C. raised its cigarette tax from $2.00 to $2.50 per pack. The District projected the new tax would generate $45 million in revenue, about 20 percent above 2009 levels. Instead, revenues came in $12 million below projections and $4.2 million lower than before the tax was imposed. Similarly, New Jersey reported a $52 million shortfall in tobacco tax revenues after it raised its cigarette tax by 17.5 cents in 2007.
The reason for this? Addiction notwithstanding, cigarette smokers are people – and people alter their behavior to avoid paying taxes on discretionary things like smoking. If a tax increase jacks up the price of a pack of smokes by 10%, then all other things being equal, people cut their spending.
(Indeed, the public health benefits of taxing smoking seem to have stalled over the past twenty years)
But government can’t seem to avoid the spending that was to be based on all that tobacco money, and goodness knows no DFL administration would ever roll back an expenditure that we can’t afford. Which means:
Due to these declining revenues, states often turn to broad-based tax increases to pay for an overspending problem. A recent NTU study also showed that 41 of 59 state tobacco tax increases from 2001-2006 were followed by more expansive tax increases within two years, as states attempted to make up for tobacco revenue that never appeared.
Just like the Vikings stadium; they’ll be after us to fill in the shortfall.
To: Governor Messinger Dayton
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re: A Time For Choosing
Governor Messinger Dayton,
I have a couple of questions for you.
Do you support President Obama’s declaration that legal gun ownership by the law-abiding citizen is a dangerous condition that needs monitoring? I’ll ask you not to equivocate; yes, or no?
If you support it, please make sure everyone knows. You’ve never been shy about using the media that serves as your praetorian guard, and the lavishly-funded apparatus that your puppeteer ex-wife owns, to get the message out before; please don’t stop now.
If you support the President, could you please prevail upon Minnesota’s DFL legislators to publicly declare their support as well? Very, very publicly? Maybe in a big press conference on the Capitol steps?
You ran as a “pro-2nd-Amendment” candidate in the 2010 election. I’ve always suspected that you did it more out of memory of what happened to Ann Wynia (and the rest of the Democrat majorities) in 1994, or to the DFL’s majority in the House in 2002, than out of any sincere care for civil and human and rights…
…but I’m willing, if not expecting, to be surprised.
I mean, one way or another, it’s time for a big profile in courage, isn’t it?
Governor Dayton is apparently out of surgery for his back. It apparently went well.
But the Strib gave us a late Christmas present yesterday, in announcing the appointment:
Minnesota Gov. Dayton heading to Mayo to undergo spinal surgery that will briefly sideline him
He was sidelined from his grueling schedule of reading instructions from Alida and periodically emerging from his office to gargle demands at the Legislature?
Yesterday we noted that the Administration is starting to walk back the shell game. And now we’re discovering that the main venue for the electronic pull tabs that the Administration is counting on – veterans clubs – just aren’t adopting the new toy.
So the question is why Legions and VFW’s are so unlikely to move into E-tabs? The answer is complicated, but boils down to three main reasons. First, demographics. The average gambling manager and post commander is over 60 and set in their ways.
Most post officers and bookkeepers are volunteers, so they don’t get paid for running the gambling operations. But they are financially liable for any mistakes they make, meaning a simple gambling system is a safe gambling system.
Second is technology and a bit of Luddite-ism. Despite efforts to get younger veterans involved, the majority of VFW and Legion posts in Minnesota have internet access only for email or transmitting legally required gambling reports. E-tabs require a high speed always on internet access. E-tabs are also 100% dependent on technology; a power outage or a computer virus means no gambling. Paper pull tabs can be opened by candle light if necessary, and bar staff are familiar with the possible ways to scam the system. E-tabs need additional plug ins, charging stations, always on wireless internet connections that are secure against hackers, and a big investment in training time for bar staff.
The third reason is survival. The smoking ban that took affect in 2007 was a devastating blow to VFW’s and Legions across the state, and resulted in a fair number of posts being closed. Ever increasing taxes, ever more burdensome regulations (remember most bookkeepers are volunteers) and a recession that is dragging out into a fifth year are all taking a toll in posts statewide. Faced with all of these issues, bringing E-tabs into a post is simply a bridge too far for most to consider.
Beyond that? The actual game machines; the state isn’t approving them for use in the state, even if bars and clubs do start turning out wanting them.
So how much are the people going to have to cough up to pay for Zygi’s Real Estate Upgrade “The People’s Stadium”?
Yesterday and Monday, we went over the chronology of the last-minute negotiations and back-and-forth leading up to the State Government shutdown, which started seventeen months ago last night. The abbreviated time-line:
On June 29, the GOP made an offer. It traded giving some ground on revenue for some movement on social issues.
On the morning of June 30, the DFL leadership – Dayton, Senate minority leader Bakk and House minority leader Thissen – demanded $1.4 billion in new revenues.
Much discussion ensued. It ensued under the “cone of silence”; the participants really didn’t let on much about what was going on.
At noonish on the 30th, Dayton – without Bakk and Thissen – made an offer that dropped most of the revenue demands, and was pretty close – almost dead-on – with the GOP’s letter. The letter mentioned no social issues – because they were off the table at this time.
More discussion. More cone.
Mid-afternoon, the Legislature sent its counteroffer, including revenue from the “school funding shift” and the tobacco bond money. This should have settled it – and indeed, was substantially the same as the offer that Dayton finally accepted to end the shutdown.
Late-afternoon, the DFL ratcheted back to their morning demands.
More cone.
At 10PM, the Governor essentially claimed that he was shutting down the government because the GOP had rejected the offer in 7, above, and was unwilling to compromise.
And that was that.
———-
In the hour or so after the shutdown, the GOP Caucus released the contents of the letters that had transpired on the 29th and 30th. The release included pages 2-4 of this document here:
No mention of social policy in there. it was not an issue.
So the government shut down. DFL and media narratives aside, it was a disaster for the governor. Government actually saved money; hardly anyone outside of government missed it; the people largely were apathetic, as the Governor learned on a tour of the state to attempt to rally support that drew nothing but dispirited SEIU goons. He returned to the Capitol, and returned to the GOP’s last offer.
And not long after, he gave this talk in WCCO-TV with Esme Murphy – which we’ve featured a time or two:
Dayton lied:
I was unaware on June 30, in fact I was clearly aware to the contrary, that all these social policy issues, from banning stem cell research and everything else, and just really reactionary social policy, was taken off the table.
Esme Murphy let that line pass without comment – as, in fact, she always does, as her mission seems to be to make sure DFL pols get a nice massage on the air.
But nobody else noted the contradiction; of course he was aware.
The GOP mentioned no policy issues in its June 30 proposal! As we noted above, it was nearly identical to the governor’s previous offer, differing on a few fiscal tweaks!
His rejection of that offer mentioned no social policy issues. Because they were off the table.
No, “social issues” only came up well the shutdown was settled.
Mark Dayton was shot down completely on the shutdown. And yet the media have allowed him to carry on with the “social policy” canard.
Why?
If I were a cynic, you’d think it was because the media was in the bag for Dayton, and wanted to give him cover. You’d also think the media were even more in the bag for the DFL – and chanting the governor’s version of the shutodwn is a key part of the DFL’s attempt to retake the legislature, which a good chunk of the media (at least at the management and editorial-board level) clearly wants.
And I am a cynic.
Because the alternate explanation is that the media just isn’t as smart and attentive to details as I am.
And that just beggars the imagination.
So when will the media start “fact-checking” Dayton’s story? Or their own, for that matter?
Seventeen months ago yesterday, in the midst of negotiations about the budget, the GOP-led Legislature sent Governor Dayton a proposed budget. It offered some concessions on revenue, and asked for some ground on social issues.
First thing the next morning, June 30 – 17 months ago today – the DFL came out with a counter-offer.
Labeled the “Dayton-Bakk-Thissen Compromise Budget Proposal”, it demanded $1.4 billion in new revenues. It was a further negotiation, just like the Legislature’s letter the day before.
And – this is important – it had all three DFL leaders on board. Governor Dayton, Senate minority leader Bakk and House minority leader Thissen all signed off on this proposal.
We’ll refer to this as “The Morning Letter” from now on.
And as the government coursed toward the midnight shutdown, that apparently was where things stayed.
The rest of this article uses this Scribd file, originally from Dayton’s chief of staff Bob Hume, as its source.
It’s been popping up around the Twin Cities media off and on ever since the shutdown.
The Morning Letter
Now, much of what went on over the next 6-7 hours is shrouded in mystery; it took place in off-the-record conversations and phone calls and communications that aren’t available to the general public if they’re recorded at all.
Noon: Dayton’s Offer
But the upshot of those conversations – whatever they were – was that at 3PM on the 30th of June, the Governor – alone, without Thissen or Bakk – released a proposal that dropped all tax increases.
There were three significant things about this letter, which we’ll call “Dayton’s Offer”.
One was that Dayton dropped demands for tax increases, in return, Dayton proposed a 50% shift in school funding to the following biennium – the “borrowing from the children” that the DFL and media have worked so hard to pin on the GOP this past year. It was a major concession by the Governor. According to sources on Capitol Hill familiar with the negotiations, this was seen by the GOP majority in the Legislature as a key step toward reaching a “lights-on” agreement to prevent the shutdown.
But the other two significant things were actually things missing from the proposal:
Bakk and Thissen: Their names had been on the Morning Letter – but were absent at 3PM. Sources at the Capitol indicate that that’s because – well, Bakk and Thissen didn’t support it!
Any mention of GOP policy proposals: The Dayton Offer includes no reference to GOP “Social Policy” proposals – because Dayton knew at noon on the 30th that the GOP had taken them off the table. This is an inference, both by my sources and myself. It’s also the only logical conclusion.
So as of a little after lunch on 6/30, the Legislature and the Governor – but not Bakk and Thissen – were in basic agreement; no tax hikes, no social policy concessions.
The 3PM Letter
A couple of hours later, at 3PM, the GOP sent a counter-offer. It involved two tweaks to Dayton’s proposal:
Cutting the size of the education shift (at the recommendation of Dayton’s Education Commissioner)
Making up the difference with tobacco bonding
This letter – we’ll call it “The 3PM Letter” – involved accepting the concessions in The Dayton Offer with a few on the GOP’s part. Otherwise, the two offers were just about identical.
As of 3PM, then, it looked as if the Governor and the Legislature were in agreement, and the shutdown could be averted.
The 4:06PM Letter
Dayton responded about an hour later, at 4:06PM. Dayton accepted the changes to the education shift – it was his administration’s idea, after all – but tossed the tobacco bonding proposal and renewed the demand for new taxes…
…that he himself had taken off the table earlier in the afternoon!
The GOP’s response expressed dismay at the sudden – I believe the term of art in the Age of Obama is “unexpected” – flip-flop on Dayton’s part – and proposed a “lights-on” bill.
So To Recap…
Just to make sure we’re clear, here:
The DFL – Dayton, Bakk and Thissen – demanded $1.4B.
Negotiation ensued under the “cone of silence”.
Dayton offered to drop the tax demands, and by omission showed that the GOP had dropped their social policy demands.
The GOP accepted this proposal, with a few fine tweaks, including one from Dayton’s own administration.
Dayton spun on his heels and rejected that offer – ignored it, really – and countered with a flip-flop on taxes.
The “cone of silence” remained in effect for the next five or six hours. Nobody exactly knows what transpired on the way to Dayton’s big speech at 10PM.
Dayton’s Presser at 10PM
Just in time for the 10PM news, Dayton called a press conference. Here’s the transcript.
It’s full of prevarications, and one outright lie:
“Therefore, a $1.4 billion gap remains between our last respective offers.” But the GOP’s proposal on the 29th offered to compromise with the DFL on revenue. The conservative base – myself included – would have howled at this, but the GOP was clearly looking to keep the government open.
“Republicans have offered only to forego their $200 million tax cut and add that amount of spending. While welcomed, $200 million is only a small step toward resolving a $5 billion deficit.” The 3PM Letter shows that the GOP was willing to go along with some sort of revenue hikes.
“Today, Representative Thissen, Senator Bakk, and I made two proposals which contained revenues to be raised by increasing taxes only on people who make more than $1 million per year. The Department of Revenue reports that there are only 7,700 of them, less than 0.3% of all Minnesota tax filers.” Well, no. Dayton made two offers; Bakk and Thissen only participated in the first one.
The Administration started out demanding tax hikes; the GOP expressed a willingness to compromise. The Administration then flip-flopped and went back to their first set of demands, ignoring the GOP concessions (for purposes of presenting the media a narrative), with Dayton contradicting himself in the process.
And Here’s Where The Media Tush-Smooching Comes In
The Governor contradicted himself and rejected a proposal that was one minor tweak removed from his own, Bakk-And-Thissen-less offer (“Dayton’s Offer”), leading directly to the government shutdown.
And yet today, 17 months later, the DFL’s PACs and pressure groups refer to it as “the Republican shutdown”. It’s a Big Lie. But nobody’s countering it.
I’ve often wondered; what if our society had an institution, maybe even an industry, with printing presses and transmitters, staffed with people whose job and training involves checking up on things that government officials say – and maybe even holding them accountable for the things they say and do? Heck, even allow this institution to see itself as an aescetic elite who “comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted”, in exchange for, you know, actually comforting and afflicting.
We could use this in Minnesota.
Remember where we started yesterday – with Esme Murphy giving Mark Dayton her usual deep-tongue-kiss on her Sunday Morning Show:
Notwithstanding the contradictions in Dayton’s own proposals that are part of the public record timeline of the negotiations on June 29-30, Dayton runs with the “Social Issues” canard.
The Strib also served, then as now, as Dayton’s de facto stenographer in their “coverage” of the chain of events.
The Star-Tribune also bought Dayton’s line – that the “requested concessions” brought on the shutdown – completely uncritically, without noting the evolution, and then abrupt de-evolution, on Dayton’s position. The Strib mentioned not a word about the “flip-flop”.
Tomorrow – appropriately, Halloween – the way the shutdown went down, and conclusions about “journalism” and Governor Dayton.
The DFL – and, more accurately, its’ big-money PR operation “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – have been trying to repeat a couple of Big Lies often enough that, over the course of the next two years, a plurality of Minnesotans agree with them.
Again.
One of them is the myth of the “do-nothing legislature”. But I think even the least-informed Minnesotans are starting to figure out that over the past two years, the talk, even from the DFL’s noise machine, has turned from “We have a $6.6 Billion Dollar Deficit!” to “the surplus isn’t really all that surplus-y”.
Another? The idea that the GOP is “extreme” and “focused on social issues” – as if the party can’t fiscally walk and chew social gum at the same time. Please, people; we’re not DFLers.
But today? We’ll be talking about the other Big Lie; that the GOP “shut down the government”.
———-
Next week’s election is going to have a lot to do with setting the stage for the state’s next budget battle. It’ll be a fork in the road; the GOP path, leading to prosperity, and the Mark Dayton/Tom Bakk/Paul Thissen path, leading to California, Spain and Greece.
Today and tomorrow are also the vital seventeen-month anniversaries of the key dates in the final negotiations leading to the shutdown [1]. I’m going to walk through the events leading up to the shutdown.
The inevitable conclusion is that the DFL’s line is a complete fabrication, designed only to leave the uninformed with a sound-bite to take to the polls with them. Even Alida Messinger knows that she’ll need more than 43% in 2014.
We’ll start the whole thing out with a Mark Dayton quote from Esme Murphy’s show. Murphy was doing her usual job – painting the toenails of DFLers on the air – when she asked the governor if he had any regrets about the shutdown:
MURPHY: The proposal that you ended up agreeing to was basically the one that was offered up on June 30, before the shutdown. Do you have any regrets now about not taking that proposal and trying to work that out on June 30th that would have prevented the shutdown?
DAYTON: Well, very significant difference, I was unaware on June 30, in fact I was clearly aware to the contrary, that all these social policy issues, from banning stem cell research and everything else, and just really reactionary social policy, was taken off the table. That just was not part of my understanding on June 30th it was a very important part of the consideration after the shutdown…
The Governor is lying. (The governer is also borderline incoherent).
On June 29, 2011, the GOP- controlled Legislature sent Mark Dayton an offer. Sources on Capitol Hill tell me that this proposal did involve some give and take on policy issues both fiscal and social; in exchange for compromise on revenue, the governor would give some ground on some social policy issues.
It was a negotiation. That’s where both sides bargain their various chips with each other, to try to get the end result they want. This, the GOP did.
In other words, the GOP Legislature did what they had been elected to do. And given that there were some sort of tax hikes – even indirect ones – in the proposal, it was politically risky for a bunch of Republicans who’d been sent to office promising to hold the line on taxes and spending.
And so the proposals went to the governor on June 29.
John Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives is demanding the U of M release the video of Governor Dayton’s speech to the Humphrey Institute, which we discussed earlier this week.
Here’s Gilmore’s email to the U of M, which explains it better than I could:
If, as Gilmore notes, the U really did claim it was “too expensive” to videotape the Governor, and that local TV stations taped the event but are sitting on it (why?) – well, what’s the U protecting?
Gov. Dayton’s first two years have been abysmal. What was it he wanted to do as governor anyway? Wouldn’t a house and senate controlled by republicans offer him the perfect opportunity to lead? To show compromise? To get things done as these political types like to pretend they can? If one was a real leader instead of a lost soul looking for external housing to shore up the inner, yes. But a leader is not who Gov. Dayton is and it is not who he will be in the coming two years, either.
John’s a good friend of this blog. But I’m not sure whether he’s overestimating Dayton, or underestimating him.
On the one hand, the entire body of evidence that Mark Dayton has ever been that kind of politician is…the body of Mark Dayton’s spoken record claiming it.
On the other hand? Mark Dayton, his beliefs, his “ideas” and “ideals” and “policy initiatives” – are about as relevant as mine are to the job – because Mark Dayton isn’t really the governor. Indeed, when they paint Mark Dayton’s official gubernatorial portrait – hopefully in two years – it should look a little like this:
It’s an intercom speaker. Dayton occupies a seat with the sole mission of repeating, like that intercom speaker, what Alita Messinger and Elliot Seid and Javier Morillo and Tom Dooher to say.
And when he doesn’t have electric cables tied to him, figuratively, to carry their messages, he may as well be that intercom speaker; he’s about as fluent a public speaker as a disconnected intercom.
Back to Gilmore:
Last week the Governor, sounding like a vaguely fascist mandarin, simply insisted without any intellectual depth or sustained engagement that taxes must increase because of his perceived need of all that government must do. His idea of the size & scope of government is not open to discussion. There is no opting out from it because he knows best. What’s that called again?
He made his statement at what, until just yesterday, I had been led to believe was simply a speech reported on by the press. Instead, as MinnPost reported the day before (as did the Pioneer Press), it was a University Lecture. MinnPost polished the knob by saying that the title “university lecturer” could be added to Mark Dayton’s resume. No, really.
Yet what shocked is that this was a lecture grandly titled: “Minnesota’s Future: Challenges and Opportunities” given to the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs Policy Fellows (there’s more intellectual diversity among supporters of Ron Paul by orders of magnitude; the Fellows are the stuff of David Mamet’s nightmares). This was a liberal/progressive/left confab with Little Lord Fauntleroy in attendance.
Now, listening to Mark Dayton speak is, to this speech teacher’s kid, a singularly masochistic thought. The guy has the diction of Michael Stipe circa 1984. He’s not a monotone – he’s got two or three tones, really.
And that’s just style points:
I listened to the audio of the Governor’s 25 minute speech. It is appallingly bad. To learn only after the fact that it was a university lecture proper for a set of fellows was mind boggling. He spoke from notes as best from what I could tell. Meandering, at times pointless, at others a non-sequitur minefield, his speech revealed that there is serious trouble with our Chief Executive.
Here’s the problem:
But wait there’s more! The event was closed to the public.
Pardon? Is this possible? Is Common Cause Minnesota on it? From whence shall our help come? Surely the event was taped and surely I will get my hands on it. Try making it private. The entire speech and question and answer session should be posted on the Humphrey School’s website without delay. This event was not a private function.
Huh. Odd, that.
Where are Common Cause? The ACLU? All the usual watchdogs? MPR’s “Poligraph?”
But here’s the real question:
Why would the press acquiesce in this? Access? Or just the usual hot dish politics? Both?
That’s easy. For some of the media, it’s access.
For others, it’s that they see themselves as the DFL’s Praetorian Guard.
Remember – after over a decade of hearing about the Governor’s history of alcohol abuse and treatment, of mental illness and concomitant prescriptions for various psychotropic medication, the sum total of the Twin Cities mainstream media’s coverage of Candidate Dayton’s chemical and psychological history was one, single, solitary piece in the Strib by Rachel Stassen-Berger, in January 2010 – roughly nine months before anyone outside the wonk class gave a crap about the election.
Our Governor’s visual performance at this public event is what is being deliberately withheld from the public. What an odd thing to say about Minnesota politics.
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to coerce the livelihoods from another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the superior and unequal station to which the Theories of Keynes and Bloomsbury entitle them, a decent respect to the needs of government requires that they should declare other peoples’ property to be public property first, and their own last.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equally vital belongings of Government, that they are endowed by their Government with certain unalienable Duties, that among these are to support the government that makes us all so very equal.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted upon Men, deriving their just powers from, paradoxically, their power.
Dayton told a group at the University of Minnesota today that his administration is coming up with a plan to overhaul the entire tax code to make the tax system fairer to lower and middle income people. He didn’t offer specifics but said his plan would continue to include an income tax hike on the state’s top 2 percent of earners.
…but quickly devolves into a big toke off the Obama/Soros/Messinger kool-aid-filled water pipe:
Dayton also criticized Republicans in the Legislature and in Congress for being reluctant to raise taxes to pay for new programs.
“This unwillingness to pay taxes and seeing it as a threat to our freedom and our liberty and our way of life, to me, is going to be the death of this country if it’s not corrected,” Dayton said.
You heard him right.
The desire to keep what one earns rather than seeing it squandered, the spirit of dissent against the idea that the fruit of your labor belongs to government first and you, eventually, maybe? That’s the threat to the nation!
All you peasants have got to quit being so uppity!
Football players aren’t ordinary citizens, [the Governor] said, and compared the game to combat.
”It’s basically slightly civilized war, and then they take that into society, much as solders come back, and they’ve been in combat or the edge of it and then suddenly that adjustment back to civilian life is a real challenge,” Dayton said.
You heard him right. The Governor – who got a draft deferment by staying in college and then working as a substitute teacher until his number went away – says that NFL players, many of whom started on the fast track to stardom in high school, waltzed through college in dumbed-down academic programs and “work” at playing an overgrown sandlot game for millions of dollars a year, misbehave because they’re just like you are after you get home from a tour or two in Afghanistan or Iraq (or Desert Storm or Vietnam).
One of the key lessons – giving unions carte blanche neither bolsters middle-class wages nor general prosperity:
One lesson to learn from Detroit is that investing unions with coercive powers does not ensure future private-sector employment or the preservation of private-sector wages, despite liberal fairy tales to the contrary, nor do protectionist measures strengthen the long-term prospects of domestic firms competing in highly integrated global markets. We cannot legislate away comparative advantage or other facts of life. But the problem of unions’ coercing distortions in the private sector is at this point a relatively small one, given the decline of unionization outside of government. Organized labor being a fundamentally predatory enterprise, its attention has turned to the public sector, where there are fatter and more stable rents to be collected.
Also – taxing ones’ way to prosperity is merely the road to madness:
The second important lesson to be learned from Detroit is that there are hard limits on real tax increases, a fact that will be of more immediate significance in the national debate as our deficit and debt problems reach crisis stage. Even those of us who are relatively open to tax increases as a component of a long-term debt-reduction strategy must keep in mind that our current spending trend is putting us on an unsustainable course in which our outlays will far outpace our ability to collect taxes to pay for them, no matter where we set our theoretical tax rates.
Detroit was a cold Greece long, long ago.
But tax rates are not the only incentive: Google is not going to set up shop in Somalia. Healthy governments create conditions that make it worth paying the taxes — which is to say, governments are a lot like participants in any other competitive market (with some obvious and important exceptions).
And one of the keys to that is that creating a “healthy government” isn’t much different than creating a “healthy teenager”, in health doesn’t’ mean “giving them everything they think they need”.
The benefits of being in Detroit used to be worth the costs, but in recent decades millions of people and thousands of enterprises large and small have decided that is no longer the case. It is not as though one cannot profitably manufacture automobiles in the United States — Toyota does — you just can’t do it very well in Detroit. No one with eyes in his head could honestly think that the services provided by the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan are worth the costs.
The lesson there: while government is necessary to create the legal stability needed to do business of any kind, when government’s main mission becomes sustaining itself, it defeats that purpose.
The third lesson is moral. Detroit’s institutions have long been marked by corruption, venality, and self-serving. Healthy societies have high levels of trust. Who trusts Detroit?
Without some other overarching reason to stay there? And in Detroit – without the location and markets of a New York (I’m thinking in the Dinkins era, of course) or the resources of a New Orleans or the weather of a Miami? There’d be no reason.
What is true of Detroit is true of the country. Our national public sector not only is bloated and parasitic, it is less effective, less responsible, and less honest than that of many other developed countries, including New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and Germany. I am not an unreserved admirer of Transparency International’s global corruption-perceptions index, but I believe that it is in broad outline accurate. Liberals are inclined to learn the wrong lessons from the relative success of countries such as Canada or New Zealand, concluding that what we need is a bigger welfare state, government-run health care, etc.
And as it’s true for the nation, it’s true for Minnesota.
Who has spent the last year trying to expand the coercive power of Minnesota unions, by trying to unionize home daycare providers and expending boundless political capital on stopping the Right to Work amendment?
Whose entire substantive platform (other than “create chanting points for the Alliance for a Better Minnesota”) is “raise taxes?”
Whose administration is focused on obstructing efforts to curb corruption and safeguard the state voting system?
I’m not saying Mark Dayton is trying to be a Detroit-style governor.
I’m just saying that if he were, I can’t think of anything he’d be doing differently.
Maybe “get indicted for something”. Other than that, I got nothing.
With all of the billionaire-pork-bill signing and job-creation-bill-vetoing of the last week of the legislative session, there is one curious omission,.
It’s HF 322, the bill to change Minnesota’s family court laws to provide a rebuttable presumption of joint physical custody in divorce cases.
That means that unless there is a clear, compelling reason not to – substance abuse, criminal record, gross inability to raise kids, record of abuse and so on – that the parents will be presumed competent to share custody of the children.
That is as opposed to the current system, where the presumption is that full custody will be awarded to the parent that ticks off the greatest number of evaluation criteria from a list of about a dozen that judges use; whichever parent “wins” the most of those criteria “wins” physical custody, and child support, and the whole nine yards.
If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ll know it’s been a hot button topic of mine forever. Raising kids is hard enough with a functional family. The number of social ills that trace back to the huge number of single-parent households is absolutely overwhelming.
Of course, two key DFL constituencies – radical feminists and lawyers – oppose the bill. The feminists dislike the loss of child support money and the fact that joint custody puts a legal hurdle over women taking “their” children and going anywhere they want to go regardless of the kids’ relationship to a father they deem unnecessary and seemingly (to look at their rhetoric on the issue) presume to be a drunk abuser anyway.
The lawyers’ line is “if a couple can’t agree on enough to stay married, how are they going to agree on raising kids together”. But the current system deliberately introduces the stress of a winner-takes-all system into the dissolution of the relationship – the prospect of “losing” ones’ children – which heaps piles of emotional stress (and the billable hours they bring!) onto an already awful situation. Lawyers oppose the presumption of joint physical custody because it trims down the cash cow of divorce.
Dayton and his minions in the paid PR racket – and I count the editorial board of the Strib among that crowd – are doing what they can to label this past legislature a “Do-Nothing” one.
It’d be more accurate, naturally, to call it “The Sandbagged Legislature”. Now, I’m not going to say all of “Governor” Dayton’s vetoes, even for bills with astonishing bipartisan support, even for bills Dayton himself had claimed to support, seemed to run according to some kind of script or another. But I will say that if you look at the video closely, you can see strings attached to his hands and jaw, being pulled by Alita Messinger, Elliiot Seid and Javier Morillo.
But let’s take a moment to go over the winners and losers from this past few weeks in the legislature:
Losers
Small businesses – who lost out on the front-loaded sales tax exemption, the angel investor tax credit, and reforms to Minnesota’s dismally-high business property taxes.
Students – who, if you accept that the “Shift” that has been a centerpiece of DFL budgetary policy for over a decade actually harms them, surely must have been hurt by Dayton’s veto of the GOP plan to accelerate the repayment of the “borrowed” money. Right?
Private sector workers, whose businesses needed the tax help, and whose jobs are in that much more jeopardy today than they were six months ago.
Winners
Zygi Wilf – The resale value on his real estate investment has just gotten plumped up astronomically, on the backs of you, the taxpayer. Especially in DFL-addled Minneapolis. Hey, all you foreclosed DFL-voting homeowners on the North Side – hope those warm thanks from Zygi Wilf and Jared Allen keep you warm when the Sheriff’s moving y our stuff out on the lawn!
Minneapolis and Saint Paul – who got a slew of little plums and bailouts. Thanks, all you outstate rubes!
It’s become clear this past few days what “Governor” Dayton’s only real goal has been this past session: provide chanting points for the DFL and its paid messaging service, Alliance For A Better Minnesota.
The plan would have given tax breaks for research and development, investment in new businesses, historic preservation and the Mall of America expansion. Tax rebates on capital equipment purchases would have been replaced by upfront tax breaks to small businesses purchasing capital equipment. Included was a provision Dayton sought: giving tax breaks to employers who hired veterans.
And in this lies the three biggest lessons of this entire fiasco of a session. They are simple, but apparently not simple enough to penetrate some moderate Republicans’ heads:
The DFL – and especially the media that supports them – loves “bipartisanship”. Provided it’s solely on the part of Republicans.
The DFL’s goal isn’t improving Minnesota, or making a better life for Minnesotans. It’s getting and keeping power.
To get the power back that they lost in 2010, the DFL is engaging in a Big Lie – really, a series of small lies, aimed at winning over the votes of the naive, the addled, the stupid, the ingenuous, the disingenuous and the illiterate.
That third bit? Right here:
But Dayton said the bill tilted too heavily toward business, to the virtual exclusion of homeowners, renters, farmers and senior citizens…”There is no question that Minnesota businesses have been hit hard by recent property tax increases,” he wrote. “But so has everyone else! … I remain committed to broad-based, comprehensive property tax relief for all property taxpayers, including — but not limited exclusively to — businesses.”
And there’s a Big Lie. Dayton knows that property taxes are set by local government. They – accountable at the lowest, most intimate level with their taxpayers – control their own spending. Dayton, like all the bobbleheaded leftybloggers who also get their chanting points from Alliance For A Better Minnesota, is trying to convince just enough of the ill-informed that this is not to to eke out a legislative victory.
And here’s the message I want to make sure gets out:
After weeks of intense lobbying, state business leaders were unhappy with the veto.
Jobs – real jobs that help the economy grow, not state jobs – come from business. Now, I’ve heard some business owners say they are disgusted by the performance of the MNGOP in this past session,.
In response, here are your two answers:
Yesterday, we noted that the GOPers that were sent to kick butt for lower taxes have been largely holding their ground.
Here, in this veto, you see the bloody conundrum; sending the GOP home this November to “teach the party a lesson” will leave Mark Dayton in complete control.
If you are a Minnesota businessperson, the lesson is clear: if you are Zygi Wilf, government is here to serve you. If you are not? Then government is here to tax you, regulate you, to force you to unionize…
I’m going to start a new TV show. I’m going to call it “Profiles in Leadership”.
I’ve got a few episodes all plotted out.
Episode 1: After decades of weak mayors who futzed around with “due process” and “the limits of government”, Boss Tweed finally did more than pay lip service to the office of “Chief Executive”, and actually used the office of mayor to lead the City of New York!
Episode 2: Putting lesser religions with their notions of “spiritual commitment” to shame, Revered Jim Jones put the leader back into “leadership”, when by the strength of his example he led his followers to put the “Ded” in “Dedication”.
Episode 3: Unsatisfied to be a regular businessman, Bernard Madoff led his organization to excel beyond all others in its category!
Gov. Mark Dayton’s savvy and indefatigable advocacy for a new Vikings stadium represents the kind of executive leadership Minnesotans should applaud.
In much the same way that Chicagoans should have “applauded” Al Capone getting the prostitution rackets lined up and paying him tribute.
Unlike his predecessor, Dayton did more than occasionally lead cheers for the Vikings — he delivered on a key campaign promise to the people of Minnesota despite significant political risks.
Unlike his predecessor, Mark Dayton makes no pretense of being fiscally responsible, except where that means “taking other peoples’ money to pay off your campaign chits”.
And make no mistake about it; this was a payoff – to the Strib as well as many others.
The Strib needs the Vikings to be in downtown Minneapolis, to be paying big money on that fallow land the Strib owns near the current ‘dome, and to give it another ready market for selling newspapers. So do the rest of the Twin Cities media, to a lesser degree. They knew Dayton was a willing stooge for the downtown Minneapolis business interests that want that state subsidy every bit as bad as Wilf did.
And so the Star/Tribune’s coverage of the election race that led Dayton to office resembled DFL public relations more than journalism – from their careful white-washing of Dayton’s political record to the election-eve “Minnesota Poll” showing Tom Emmer trailing by an improbable margin that certainly induced not a few Republicans to stay home.
The threat that the Vikings would have left Minnesota without a stadium deal this year was real, although to their credit the team and NFL leadership negotiated in good faith.
The negotiations were done in the same “good faith” the Mob uses when “negotiating” with a shopkeeper who is threatening not to pony up protection money fast enough.
Had this market lost the franchise, we no doubt would have seen an expensive reprise of the effort to bring big-league hockey back to the state after the North Stars left for Dallas.
Right!
And we all know how that loss devastated the State of Minnesota…
…well, no. It devastated hockey fans, who were upset that “their” team got moved elsewhere by an owner that, like Zygi Wilf, wanted better tribute from the local government.
And it devastated the TV and radio stations and newspaper reporters and (especially) ad execs that covered, and sold ads for coverage of, North Stars games.
Other than that? The loss of the North Stars had much less impact on this city than the loss of, say, the Ford plant.
Thursday’s passage of a stadium bill ends years of debate over the future of the team and the outdated Metrodome.
And the debate will be “ended” for another twenty years. Until the next round of NFL owners wants their investments buffed up on other peoples’ money.
Or until someone tells them “no”.
Which would devastate nobody…
…but WCCO, KSTP, KARE, Fox Sports North, the PiPress and the Strib.
Which, to be fair, at least discloses part of their vast interest in this bit of racketeering:
(Disclosure: The current stadium development plan includes one of five blocks owned by the Star Tribune near the Metrodome.)
But they graze up against the truth at least briefly:
The stadium bill, and the bonding bill that went before it this week, were exercises in effective bipartisan lawmaking,
It’s been popping up on leftyblogs and leftytweets for the past couple of days – the Minnesota GOP is “Anti-NFL”.
It’s odd that Democrats in Minnesota have picked National Football League to rally around, given their long history of union-busting, affiliations with organized crime, and – most germane, here in Minnesota – making a huge industry out of jacking up states and cities for taxpayer-funded subsidies to support the one-percentiest people of all, professional football owners and players.
The NFL have developed a routine; demand the public pay for stadiums (so they and their owners don’t have to). When taxpayers and the lawmakers they elect balk, exploit “fan loyalty” (the greatest source of wasted energy in the universe) by threatening to move the team to some other city. Play the local political parties against one another, like colonials playing tribes against each other, to browbeat the politicians into caving in.
Naturally, Mark Dayton and the DFL, driven by pure cynicism as they are, have taken the bait. “The GOP will let the Vikings leave!”, they whine. “They’re part of our cultural legacy!”
And it’s true.
They’re part of that rancid little corner of our “cultural legacy” that says “Give me something for nothing! Take other peoples’ earnings to pay for my recreation! My and my family’s obsession with a billionaire’s enterprise justifies taking money from you and your family, by force. Skål Vikings, suckers!”
So yeah. I’m anti-NFL. Zygi Wilf and Roger Goodell can, and should, pay for the stadium by themselves; he can dig it out of his pocket, float a private bond paid for out of proceeds from Vikings enterprise revenue and tapping the vast amounts of private equity that’s been sitting on the sidelines for years. Or offering stock in a Vikings Stadium enterprise, complete with shopping, parking rental and hospitality, that would be a license to print money. Or from charging drifters for illicit services at bus stops, for all I care.
But if you care about what’s right, and moral, and ethical? Everyone should be “Anti-NFL’.
The NFL’s racket has to stop. Someone has to stand on principle. If not us, now, then who and when?
Dayton issued a “mock” veto of the Voter ID Amendment today:
Governor Dayton has ceremoniously vetoed a proposed constitutional amendment that would require people to present a photo ID to vote. Dayton’s veto won’t prevent the measure from going to the voters in November but he said he’s vetoing the bill because the Legislature sent it to him in bill form.
Well, that and to give the DFL a chanting point to put in front of the same gullible Elmers that put him in office in the first place. “Well, heck, Ethel, if da Govner vetoed it, I should vote against it, ya?”
“Ya”.
Dayton says the amendment could disenfranchise thousands of voters, including overseas military members and seniors who are unable to drive.
Although those numbers come from Mark Ritchie, who can’t even count real ballots; how good could he be at counting estimates?
Dayton says ending same-day registration and replacing it with a provisional balloting system could lower the state’s nation-leading voter participation.
And that’s the DFL’s most curious chanting point on elections; the idea that we cart more people to the polls than other states, absent any insurance that those votes have any integrity, is just bizarre. By that measure, the elections in North Korea are the best in the world, since 99+% of North Koreans make it to the polls.
If the ballots themselves have no integrity, the number that get cast is meaningless.
“This amendment is a proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Dayton said. “It goes far beyond its purported intention to require photo identification. Instead it dismantled Minnesota’s best in the nation election system…
…which is sort of like the Minnesota Twins’ “Best In The Nation” first series in Baltimore. Or the Vikings’ “Best In The Nation” 2011 season. Or the Go-Go football team’s “Best In The Big Ten” record last year.
Marks Dayton and Ritchie are going to turn the phrase “Minnesota’s Best In The Nation…” into a synonym for overweening, malignant mediocrity.
