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:

1. On June 29, the GOP made an offer.  It traded giving some ground on revenue for some movement on social issues.
2. 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.
3. Much discussion ensued.  It ensued under the “cone of silence”; the participants really didn’t let on much about what was going on.
4. 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.
5. More discussion.  More cone.
6. 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.
7. Late-afternoon, the DFL ratcheted back to their morning demands.
8. More cone.
9. 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:

All Offers

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.
• Read the speech he gave as the shutdown started.  Nary a peep about social issues.

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.

All Offers

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:

1. 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!
2. 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:

1. The DFL – Dayton, Bakk and Thissen – demanded $1.4B.
2. Negotiation ensued under the “cone of silence”.
3. Dayton offered to drop the tax demands, and by omission showed that the GOP had dropped their social policy demands.
4. The GOP accepted this proposal, with a few fine tweaks, including one from Dayton’s own administration.
5. 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.

The next day?

We’ll talk about that that tomorrow.

(more…)

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:

Email to U of M General Counsel

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?

Mark Dayton gave a speech the other day.

John Gilmore at MN Conservatives heard the audio.

And we’ll get to that.  But first, the review:

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.

Nothing odd about it.

Nothing new, either.

It goes a little something like this:

“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.

Governor Dayton has an odd idea of what unites us as a people, and of what this nation is supposed to be all about.

It starts as the same old story…:

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!

Your nobles have spoken!

This piece is sort of a natural follow-on to yesterday’s post – all the “Deep Thoiughts” about man’s relationship to government, and the different philosophies liberals and conservatives bring to the table on the subject.

But first, a brief digression.

I don’t normally rebroadcast other peoples’ ads – but this one was just too good not to pick up and run with, just a little bit.

It’s a riff on President Obama’s “You didn’t do it” scold to entrepreneurs and, by extension, really anyone outside government:

Nope, nobody paid me to rujn it. Although they sure could.

Of course, this sentiment is pandemic on the left.  Yesterday Jim Schowalter, Mark Dayton’s budget director, was at a meeting in Thief River Falls with, among other people, the CEO of Digi-Key.  You may not have heard of it – it’s a privately-owned billion-dollar company based out of Thief River Falls that is one of the biggest success stories and major employers in northwestern Minnesota.  The company started in the CEO’s apartment forty-odd years ago – guy didn’t even have a garage at the time – and grew into a billion-dollar operation employing thousands (I have family in the area, so I hear things).

And, according to a report from the scene, Schowalter told the CEO that  without government, he could never have done it

The theory among lefties is that without all the “infraastructure” government “provides”, entrepreneurs would be huddled in caves, helpless, banging rocks together to try to get fire.  It’s only through the nurturing hand of government that any human activity is possible.

But once government – at some level – has dealt with banditry, brigandry, barratry, piracy and piracy, really, you’re into the mundanities of laws, roads and regulations.   And when those are the subjects…:

• What?  Government wants a cookie for doing what it was set up to do, and for which generations of people before the entrepreneur paid taxes – sometimes grossly overpaid in taxes – to get?
• By the way, where do people suggest the money to build that “infrastructure” came from?  Brought down from heaven on the backs of unicorns?  No – people, entrepreneurs and company guys and executives and high school kids working at Tastee Freez and trust fund billionaires alike – had it taken out of their paychecks.

So yeah, government – good job and all, “providing” things that I and millions like me paid you to do.  Isn’t that like me going to my boss and saying “thank me for the design I handed off, on top of paying me to do it?”

By the way – try as I may, I can not find a single reference to this episode anywhere in the mainstream media.

According to Governor Mark “Bored DIlettante” Dayton, NFL players get into trouble – bar scuffles, DUIs, shooting each other, dogfighting – because they’re just like you:

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).

National Review ran yet another dissection of the complete collapse of Detroit last week.

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.

The bill was presented to the Governor on May 11, with plenty of bipartisan support.

And it’s still sitting on his desk.

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.

Why won’t the governor sign this bill?

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!

That’s a start, anyway.

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.

Well, that and providing Wilfare.

Yesterday, Dayton vetoed a tax bill aimed at helping jump-start small business:

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:

1. The DFL – and especially the media that supports them – loves “bipartisanship”.  Provided it’s solely on the part of Republicans.
2. The DFL’s goal isn’t improving Minnesota, or making a better life for Minnesotans.  It’s getting and keeping power.
3. 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…

…and eventually strangle you.

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!

Episode 4: Mark Dayton truly led “his” state in the quest to stick the bill for a billion-dollar spiff to Zygmund Wilf’s real estate investment on Minnesota’s taxpayers in an example of “leadership” for the ages.

No, the Strib say so:

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,

And there you.

“Bipartisan” legislation.  Everybody wins…

…but the taxpayer.

And that, as they say, is all.

I’ve said it over and over – and every day of new evidence confirms it more; the DFL’s strategy seems to be “say whatever we want to (knowing that the media will never, ever contradict us in public, at least not in a way that the majority of voters will ever see or hear),  regardless of accuracy or truth, to sway the ill-informed, the ignorant, and the not-so-bright.  Because their votes (and whatever else we can jam through the polls) count just as much as the votes of the smart and informed people”.

Case in point:  Education Minnesota president t Tom Dooher’s statement to the media yesterday as the session drew to a close; I’ve added emphasis:

“The 2012 Legislature showed that Minnesotans will have a clear choice in November between leaders who truly value public education and those who view our classrooms as places for political games.

“The Republican majority introduced more than 20 bills targeting public education and educators this year. None of them responsibly addressed the most pressing needs of our students, including repaying the state’s $2 billion IOU to its schools, closing the achievement gap and developing a sustainable funding system for the future.

It’s a lie, of course.

The GOP did, in fact, propose and pass a bill that would have accelerated the repayment of the shift.   Governor Fauntelroy vetoed it.

This, really, shows several things:

The DFL’s campaign – say whatever it takes to win in November, truth be damned, is well underway.  The unions and Alliance for a Better Minnesota will soon be buying up millions in airtime to saturate this state with ads saying “The GOP hates kids”.  Mark my words.

Your children are the DFL’s pawns.  To the extent that the shift actually harms children (it really doesn’t; it inconveniences administrations), the DFL showed this session that they’d rather exploit them in November than pay for their education today.

This is what happens when you let “Right To Work” die in committee.  How wonderful would it have been to have every conservative, Republican member of EdMinn walk of the union out en masse at this hypocritical slander?   Or if the 42% of union members who do vote Republican tell their leadership “uh, not so fast” when the unions spend 95% of their dues on Democrats?

Apparently some genius in the majority caucus figured if they backed off on Right to Work, the unions would play fair this election.

This is politics in Minnesota today; one party does the best it can for a better Minnesota; the other does whatever it can to retain power, truth and ethics be damned.

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?

$77 per ticket per game.

That’s what the taxpayers will be paying to subsidize the Vikings stadium if the legislature caves in on the deal.

I’m getting those figures from that teabagging wingnut John Marty:

If the bill for the Minnesota Vikings new stadium passes the cost to taxpayers will be $77.30 per ticket, per game, for 30 years, according to an analysis by state senator John Marty, who submitted his findings to his colleagues yesterday (see his full report below). If the taxpayers of Minnesota think $77.30 is too much, Marty has even worse news: the real cost is much greater because his calculation does not include the value of the property tax exemption on the stadium and the parking ramps, nor the value of the sales tax exemption on construction materials.

Never thought I’d post a letter from John Marty that I agreed with – but here you go.

Letter 2.From.sen.Marty

In the meantime, Governor Dayton is holding a lot of key reform proposals – tax reform, LIFO – hostage behind a crowd of chanting purple-clad bobos who’d light their charcoal with the Bill of Rights to get the taxpayers to pay for their recreation.

And pay.

And pay.

If we don’t stop the NFL’s ongoing plunder of state and city taxpayers, who will?

Because if we pay for it now, they’ll be back in 31 years looking for another one, just about the time we finish paying $77 a freaking seat for the one we don’t have yet.

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.

Last Friday, Ramco judge Dale Lindman shot down Mark Dayton’s the SEIU and AFSCME’s big money grap.

It wasn’t even a little bit ambiguous;

Luke Matthews covered the decision at True North:

Judge Lindman didn’t putter around the edges or employ a system of tests.

Lindman went right to the heart of the issue: the authority to conduct an election under Minnesota state law. He boldly stated, “The Minnesota Supreme court has interpreted a labor dispute as involving employer and employee relations.” Without such a relationship, the parties wouldn’t be engaged in a “labor dispute” but in some other kind of dispute.

Game over.

Oh, I’m sure there will be an appeal; AFSCME and the SEIU have deeeeep pockets, and if by some hail-mary they can get Lindman’s injunction ruling and injunction reversed they’ll get a lot deeper.

Matthews goes through a bit of the genesis of this case – one where every single conservative commentator and every daycare provider I talked with (and all by a tiny shaving of those I heard or read) knew from the beginning that the claimed “employer/employee relationship” was bogus?

So, where did Dayton get his odd phrase of “regardless of whether there is an employer or employee relationship?” It was found in the BMS statute.

The union thugs, through Dayton’s order, twisted the meaning of the statute in question. The text of the statute is, “regardless of whether or not the disputants stand in the proximate relation of employer and employee.” Proximate relationship of employer and employee probably refers to the legal definition of two parties. It allows that people outside the standard tax definition of employer/employee may have a labor dispute and the BMS can mediate it. Just because they are contract workers and therefore technically not “employees” of a company, it could be a labor dispute. Even if a holding company wasn’t technically an employer of certain workers, it could still be deemed a labor dispute.

The union bosses and their pet pony Dayton tried to use the language to create a new power for the BMS. This would give Dayton’s union allies some truly broad latitude.

And that latitude was, had it become law, potentially even more drastic than the perversions of the Commerce Clause starting during the Roosevelt administration.  Under Dayton’s the SEIU and AFSCME’s version of the law, anyone who receives any aid, no matter how indirectly, from the government, is a government employee.

Daycare workers, some of whom participate in government food assistance programs for low-income clients, and some of whose clients themselves are on assistance, including daycare assistance?  Notwithstanding the fact that the parents are the “employers” and the daycare providers are (very) technically their employees (really service providers, but work with me here), the daycare providers would be “government employees” for purposes of…

…of what?

Being “represented” by government-workers unions.

How far does this get taken?

Are auto mechanics “government employees”, and liable for AFSCME dues, because the cars they repair wouldn’t get far without government roads?

Are the employees of very grocery store that accepts WIC, EBT and food assistance “government employees”?  Do employees of every clinic that takes Medicare and Medicaid payments de facto dues-paying AFSCME members?  (Wait – Obamacare means they will be, sooner or later.  Strike that).

Do Ed and I qualify as “federal employees” – or at least federal union dues-payers – because our radio station operates on a wavelength administered by the FCC?

Never thought I’d compliment a Ramco judge on his, well, judgment.  But kudos, Judge Lindman.

At this blog (and much moreso at Gary Gross’ Let Freedom Ring and Mr. D’s eponymous Neighborhood), we’ve been trying to unpack the fabrications behind the Dayton / Bakk stadium proposal – including the fantasy that electronic pull tabs are going to cover the state’s contribution.

One thing I haven’t done is look into what the team supposedly contributes in terms of taxes.

Paul Udstrand at Thoughtful Bastards has, though:

According to [MinnPost’s Joe Kimball] a group going by the name: “Home Team Advanage” has issued a “report” claiming that MN stands to loose $533 million dollars if the Vikings leave the state. HTA claims that the Vikings have generated $320 million in sales tax revenue, and $360 in income tax revenue from Vikings players since 1982.

There’s really no way to avoid the conclusion that these numbers are flat out distortions and fabrications. The $320 million figure comes from a 2009 RSM McGradrey report that was commissioned the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission. I’ve excerpted the relevant table and provided it below:

Udstrand includes a bit of spreadsheetery:

Spreadsheet courtesy the thoughtful bastards at "Thoughtful Bastards", where it's probably much easier to read.

As you can see, the tax contributions since the Metrodome opened are listed in columns starting with the Twins. If you look at the totals you see that the Vikings total has been $166,514,612. So where does HTA get the $320? Notice the total for ALL sports in the very last column is $319,306,727. HTA rounded it (wrongly) up to $320. In other words they almost doubled amount the Vikings have paid by included ALL taxes generated by ALL pro sports activity. The actual vikings contribution once you subtract personal income tax is $52 million. I find it hard to believe a bunch of business boys can’t read a basic spreadsheet so one has to suspect this is NOT an innocent mistake. At best it’s beyond sloppy research.

HTA also claims that the Vikings pay $20 million a year in state income taxes. The actual figure for 2010 was $12 million.

There’s much more.  I’ll urge you to read the whole thing.

And then remember that every single portion of the Dayton / Bakk stadium plan fails to add up – the City of Minneapolis’ contribution, the expected doubling in gambling revenue, or the projected benefits.

Nothing!

Of all the facile DFL chanting points sluicing outward from Media Matters For America the Alliance For A “Better” Minnesota this session, perhaps the most galling is “The DFL is focused on jobs, while the GOP is obsessing over constitutional amendments over social issues”.

For starters, it’s absurd; the GOP as a rule doesn’t believe government “creates jobs”.  And as we noted at the beginning of the session, the “jobs plan” contained in Dayton’s bonding bill is really just a “Jerbs Plan“, creating a bunch of temporary – ahem, “Shovel-Ready” – construction jobs (for DFL-up-sucking unions and the state workers that supervise them, naturally).  As we saw last January, the job numbers themselves make no sense.

The fact that Minnesota’s unemployment is as low as it is is, in fact, testimony to the GOP’s real jobs plan; keeping taxes as low as possible (given an irresponsible and dogmatically partisan  DFL governor for the past year, and DFL legislatures for the four preceding).

As to the “social legislation?”  The Legislative can walk and chew gum at the same time (the fade on “Right To Work” notwithstanding).  They can do both just as easily as Tom Bakk can propose legislation on the State Beer and whatever else it is he does every day.

But the real difference is this:  while the DFL and Governor Dayton propose to “create” temp jerbs, the GOP is out to make Minnesota a place where business can get established, grow and thrive.

Gotta hand it to the DFL.

They’re playing a pair of “fours” this election.   But they’re playing them for all they’re worth.

Intellectually and politically, the DFL is running on fumes this year.  The closest thing they had to a legislative agenda – “tax the rich!” – stalled and died in the legislature.  The regional economy is slowly (sloooooowly) obsoleting their “We have to tax our way out of deficits!” meme.  They’re looking at Obama’s eroding popularity and hoping that the President’s coat tails are like the ones on a tank top.   And redistricting, for all of the partisan media’s backing and filling, looks to be mostly a wash in the near term, and reflects long-term demographic changes that can not bode well for the DFL (other than the progressives’ great long-term fairy tale, “lots of potential liberals are immigrating to the US”, which is of course true provided that we allow generations of new Americans to stay ignorant about what this country’s about – which is, of course, Democrat policy).

In response, the DFL really has only a few points to run on:

“Aren’t Those Republicans Awful People?”  In 1998, when the Democrats had a skirt-seeking missile in the White House, they responded by teaching a generation of American teens that oral sex wasn’t really sex at all, and demanding that we all just Mooooove On.  The French were laughing at us after all.

Now, after a low-grade “sex scandal”, Mary Fransion’s manufactured gaffe and a few other minor incidents, expect the Party of Infanticide to plead “family values”, making me wonder if all those teenagers from the Clinton era – now pushing thirty – will need years of therapy to sort out the mixed messages.

“Just Look At The Economy!” Minnesota’s economy is doing better than most.  Not North Dakota-good, but not bad.  The DFL and media (ptr) will work overtime to convince Minnesotans that correlation – Mark Dayton is governor and the economy sucks less than the rest of the US – equals causation, scrupulously ignoring that it’s the GOP majority in the Legislature that have done all the positive work this past few years (and, likely as not, eight years of Pawlenty’s leadership and four years of his stymying of the DFL that set the stage for the relative level of health we have).

“We Saved The Vikings!”  And they’ll save snowmobiling and binge-drinking, too, if they have to!

The mainstream media – especially the Strib, which profits from the current Dayton/Bakk plan – spun this as a partisan issue (and part of it was; principled conservatives joined a few principled liberals, like John Marty, in rejecting Wilfare), playing up Dayton and Senate Majority Leader Bakk’s “leadership”, and only incidentally scratching the surface of their plan, which seemed to rely on money borne down from heaven on the backs of unicorns. (You can go to MPR to read what I was reporting on two weeks ago, if you’d like).

Of course, with the Senate tabling the bill, that’s looking a little dodgy.  But no worries – the Dems still have the big daddy of them all:

“It’s Inevitable!”  One of my favorite aphorisms is an old Hungarian saying: “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”.

The DFL apparently read it too.

The DFL and the media – and on this, as few other issues, when I say “pardon the redundancy”, it rings truer than usual – are doing their best to portray this next election as an inevitable winner for the DFL, for…well, whatever reason.  Redistricting favored them (more on that probably later today), or people are sick of GOP squabbling and want the government to “get things done”, or demographics make it inevitable, or the economy is racing back so fast that Obama’s coattails are going to lift them up, or Minnesotans just loooooooove keeping their beloved government fat and happy…

…or all of the above.  Because the best way to win an election may not in fact be to appear as if you already have – but it doesn’t hurt to add it in there, either.

So this blog will spend a good chunk of the next seven and a half months covering the DFL Ministry of Truth’s attempts at psychological warfare.  There’ll be no shortage of material.

Commenter “Nate” yesterday, in a comment I thought was worthy of being posted:

It is strangely appropriate that the man who shut down his Senate office for fear of talcum powder now insists all Minnesotans should have a legal duty of cowardice. You may NOT stand up for yourself. If threatened, you MUST RUN AWAY.

Brave, brave Sir Robin

Perhaps James Backstrom warned him about the talc.

Ted “Mini-Governor” Mondale wants you, the voter, to believe that 4-2=6.

Metropolitan Sports Facility Chairman Ted Mondale said the electronic pull-tab financing mechanism for the state’s $400 million share is solid, despite questions about gambling revenue projections and the bonds the state intends to sell. Mondale also seemed to be hinting that he’s not worried about charitable gambling operators’ complaints about their taxes:

“As it relates to the revenue estimates. We believe that the total pot in the first year will be $72 million. There will be a final negotiation when the bill goes through with the bars and the restaurants, but we think their revenue almost doubles.

That’d be amazing!

Of course, it’d involve gaming revenues taking a huge U-turn from their past ten years’ performance.  Gary Gross at the Examiner unpacks reality (I’ll add some emphasis):

According to this pdf report, the trend continues. In FY2002, gross receipts were $1,435,426,000. That figure had dropped 31% to $989,906,000 in FY2011. To be fair, that represented a 1% increase in receipts from 2010.

That said, that’s the only increase in gross receipts during the FY2002-FY2011 decade:

FY2010 gross receipts dropped 5%.

FY2009 gross receipts dropped 9.6%.

FY2008 gross receipts dropped 9.8%.

FY2007 gross receipts dropped 3.3%.

FY2006 gross receipts dropped by 4.8%.

FY2005 gross receipts dropped by 3.1%.

FY2004 gross receipts dropped by $100,000. That was listed as breaking even.

FY2003 gross receipts dropped by 1.2%.

FY2002 gross receipts dropped by .1%.

When you factor in the fact that only 4% of all receipts get to charities, there isn’t nearly enough revenue to pay off the state’s share of $398,000,000.

Mondale is saying that charitable gaming will not just turn around a constant bleeding away of receipts, but double.

This is more Democrat economics in action.

As we pointed out this morning, the Minneapolis “contribution” is wobbly as well.

DFL economics; based on phantom revenue growth and nonexistant consensus!

And 43% of this state voted for Mark Dayton exactly why?

MPR’s Curtis Gilbert and Jon Collins report that the Minneapolis City Council is not on board with all the triumphalistic high-fiving from the Administration on the Dayton/Rybak stadium plan, as I noted yesterday.

The proposal would peel money away from the part of the city’s (exorbitant) sales taxes that currently support the Convention Center, which under city charter requires a referendum – which, as you recall, was so effective in stopping the taxpayers from being shaken down to build Target Field:

Gary Schiff championed the charter amendment back when he was executive director of the political organization then-called Progressive Minnesota. Now he is a member of the City Council and he said if city money is involved, then the referendum is not negotiable.

“I could never support a plan that circumvents city law,” Schiff said. “I won’t break the law. I’ve sworn to the law as an office holder. And I’m not going to break the city charter.”

Council Member Cam Gordon, who represents areas around the University of Minnesota, said he still opposes the plan because his impression is that it ignores the requirement to hold a referendum.

“I have a concern that ultimately, it’s probably going to be a judge who’ll have to make this decision. Apparently there’s lawyers, maybe in the city, the Vikings, the governor’s office, who are all working on the rationale to make the arguments that this doesn’t violate the charter,” Gordon said. “But there’s probably other lawyers who could read the exact same rules and ordinances and statutes and say it is violating the charter, and so it may end up going to court.”

Council Member Robert Lilligren said he is “philosophically opposed” to public funding for stadiums. He wants a referendum, but he stops short of vowing to vote no on the plan.

“It’s clear that if the legislature wants to see this stadium plan go forward, they will need to write into legislation a way of circumventing the charter amendment,” Lilligren said.

Council Member Lisa Goodman also opposes the stadium plan. Council Members Elizabeth Glidden, Sandy Colvin Roy and Betsy Hodges previously opposed the stadium plan, although they haven’t yet commented on the current package.

So half of Dayton, Rybak and the Downtown Brotherhood’s plan relies on a tax diversion that may be illegal – as I reported yesterday.

As to the other half?  The mainstreams haven’t quite twigged to the fact that the Dayton-Bakk proposal to divert money from the state’s charitable gambling industry relies on some unsupportable figures; it assumes a doubling in charitable gambling receipts, even though as Gary Gross notes, charitable gambling revenues are trending down, not up.

And the tribes haven’t spoken out publicly yet.  But they will.

So – two takeaways:

1. The “Deal” is a turkey.
2. MPR has given you yesterdays’ “Shot In The Dark” today.

Please call.  Fifteen seconds is all it takes.

This will remain at the top of this blog until the issue is resolved.