EdMinn’s Curious Self-Indictment

Wait – didn’t the DFL in the Legislature spend most of April and May of last year doing the endzone happy dance celebrating having “fully funded” education?

I do believe they did.

So – what is up with this?

Now, when you asked a DFL legislator or an EdMN partisan what “Full Funding” meant, the “answers” should have come with a side of blue cheese for all the word salad. It was gibberish. And that was just the ones that didn’t ignore the question entirely.

As we see now, pretty much intentionally so.

The Messages Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Joe Doakes, formerly from Como Park, emails:

I keep getting campaign text messages.   “Hey, Joe, the country is going to the dogs. Text Senator . . .”

No, I won’t text.  I don’t live my life on my cell phone, it’s there for my convenience, not yours.  But there’s no escape.

“Text STOP to unsubscribe.”

“STOP”

“You texted STOP.  Are you certain want to unsubscribe from these important messages from Senator?”

“YES DAMMIT”

“Okay we have unsubscribed you.  If you want to receive these important messages from Senator in the future . . . .”

“Hey, Joe, the country is going to the dogs.  Text the Committee to Reelect Senator . . . “

“I already texted STOP”

“That was a different list. Are you certain you no longer wish to receive these important messages from Senator?”

“YES FOR CRYING OUT LOUD HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU”

“You realize that engaging in antisocial behavior affects your social credit, banks will consider you a reputational risk to close your accounts, a Red Flag order will be docketed against you and the IRS will be calling shortly? Do you still want to unsubscribe from these important messages from Senator?”

***

My folks had an old black Bakelite rotary dial phone sitting on a little table near the dining room.  I miss that.

Joe Doakes

Days Of Future Passed

Minnesota, 2024: The DFL says 46 days of early voting and “no excuses needed” mail in voting doesn’t make voting (for the DFL) easy enough; demands more:

Given that young adults are least likely to own a car, and many 18- and 19-year-olds do not even have a driver’s license, it can be very difficult for them to reach early voting and Election Day voting sites,” Pursell said as she explained the parameters of the legislation, which is being backed by Secretary of State Steve Simon.

The House Elections Committee voted to place the bill on the general register on a party-line voice vote. The bill has no companion in the Senate. No Republicans in the hearing expressed support for the bill, which one member said amounts to a fiscally irresponsible “unfunded mandate” for counties.

Minnesota, 2030: The Minnesota DFL, claiming early voting and polls that come to you if you’re a prog kid at Gustavus is still not easy enough, proposes to simply enter votes for all newborns for the rest of their lives, on birth (or when they would have been born, if the mother “reproductive freedomed” the baby).

The More Things Stay The Same, The More Things Change

So, Erin Murphy is the new MN Senate Majority Leader, replacing Senator Dziedzik (whom I wish the best in her ongoing battle with cancer).

What this means is that the old “Labor” coalition that ran the DFL and often Minnesota has been demoted to the back seat. Dziedzik’s father was a long-time Northeast MInneapolis politician who was a perfect metaphor for the coalition; blue-collar, from Northeast or the Iron Range, pretty much your typical Perpich voter.

Murphy represents the, uh, great leap forward for the DFL: Metro, public employee union, and not one degree behind The Squad in terms of perfect “progressive” credentials.

Anyway, here we are:

By the way – has anyone noticed that, if you left all anthropological terms out of the rhetoric, the “improvements” the DFL is making are the same kind of thing a farmer does to take care of a herd of livestock?

As opposed to free people?

Let’s Stir Up Another Republic-Threatening Hornets Nest: Part II

Since roughly the 2020 election, I’ve simultaneously:

  • Thought something was amiss about the elections; if not Chicago-style ballot stuffing, at least a world of irregularites with the “legal” changes due to Covid – mail in balloting, and the collusion between the DOJ, the Biden campaign, big media and big tech to “shape” the Hunter Biden story, among others
  • Told some of the more extreme election skeptics, especially on the air, “That’s an interesting theory, but until Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani bring an actual case with evidence to court, rather than beclowning themselves, what do you expect we’re going to do about it?”

Three points.

Imperfection

The first point? I made that a few weeks back, when I talked about why I don’t necessairly think “a judge and jury say so” is completely invariably the dispositive last word on any issue. Long story short – judges and juries make mistakes. And that’s ignoring the fact that some prosecutors play fast and loose with the rules, some defense attorneys have no idea what they’re doing, and some judges just want to make their @$%$#& tee times.

Sometimes it gets caught.

The legal system isn’t perfect, but it beats most of the alternatives.

Which may or may not be good enough.

Second: In a separate, seemingly unrelated topic: in Minnesota, most judges are elected. But the candidate pool is intensely circumscribed because, as a lawyer once told me, running a campaign against a sitting judge in front of whom one will one day have to appear in court is pretty much a one-way trip toward spending the rest of your career chasing people who bounce checks.

Judges, by inference – who are charged with being our society’s stentorian impartial guardians of justice and fairness and due process – apparently have the egos of a bunch of middle school “mean girls”.

Reading between the lines: the reputation and social standing of practitioners among other practitioners is as much a part of the judicial system as due process and gavels and the literal letter of the law.

Socially Rigged

So – did the social pressure among lawyers, judges and everyone else in the legal profession that we discussed above affect the election, or the way the courts approached questions about it?

I don’t know. But this article, among others, certainly seems to brag about the power of the Legal Mean Girl caste to bring Big Law into line. Certainly Big Media isn’t going to report on it.

Let’s just say I can be convinced.

Fact-Check

The Strib ran this story:

Fact-Check: Governors Flanagan and Klink tell us that Minnesota’s…er, “One Minnesota’s” economy has never been better.

And Brandonomics, we are constantly told, is breaking records.

So, clearly, the myth is busted.

Just Remember…

The DFL will repeatedly and systematically cheat in their own elections.

But no way, no how in everyone else’s.

Sheesh. What are you, some kind of Cheetoh-haired Literal Hitler?

Nuance

Governor Klink lies about “censorship”.

Hey, he’s the head of the Democrat Governors Association. He’s got to serve as a model for the rest of them.

Now, I think I read “Charlotte’s Web” in fourth grade. So it’s been a bit.

And I’d forgotten this bit – which is something that makes me seriously wonder…

…if there’s a Democrat school district out there that’s banned it because of its violent overtones?

Maybe He Should Stick With Food-Pr0n Selfies?

Don’t get me wrong. Jason DeRusha – former Channel 4 reporter and morning anchor, turned afternoon drive guy at the once-great WCCO – isn’t a bad guy. I’ve met him, engaged with him a time or two, and by Twin Cities media standards he’s OK. He’s no Bob Collins, anyway [1]

But if I were a DFL Comms person who wanted to come up with a nice, low-impact media appearance to side-slip the impression that your Governor’s only media contact was an endless stream of selfies and cheesecake (and donut, and pizza and corn dog) photos, without sweating the Governor too hard, DeRusha – or, really, anyone at ‘CCO – would be at the top of the list.

But somehow he managed to choke:

“Minnesota is a diverse state, it continues to grow. This flag was crafted in the 1890s,” said Gov. Walz regarding Minnesota’s current flag. “It’s highly offensive to a large number of people, and there’s very little debate about that.”

“…there’s very little debate” because the DFL steamrolled it through without a whole lot of debate allowed.

But here’s the clinker:

When asked about this topic, Gov. Walz compared these Republican efforts to “somehow saving the Confederate battle flag.” The governor added, “These are the arguments that happened with Jefferson Davis statues in Alabama.”

That’s right. The “old” flag was the one the 21st Virginia carried at Gettysburg.

Remember – he’s the governor of “#OneMinnesota”.

[1] Of course, either was Bob Collins, ’til he retired.

Declaring The Causes That Impel Us, 2024 Edition

The below is an update of a piece I first wrote almost four years ago. It was at that moment about the time when people – smart people, anyway – were starting to realize that Covid wasn’t the new Bubonic Plague, that the sky was not falling, and that whatever “model” Governor Klink was reading that was predicting 70,000 deaths in Minnesota alone by mid-July of 2020, and 20,000 dead as a best case if they shut the state down completely, was perhaps…wrong.

I was looking at the gutting of civil and religious freedom that Minnesotans had countenanced – perhaps more or less voluntarily in March,

Over this past weekend, Big Left went through what’s become an annual orgy of celebrating what’s become their secular holiday, January 6.

Governor Klink took a break from his regimen of selfies of him being fed donuts by Co-Governor Flanagan to have his social media intern blurt this out:

The DFL, likewise:

So – a year and a half after Governor Klink reluctantly gave up his “emergency powers”, and after three years of Joe Biden serving as the doddering mouthpiece for Barack Obama’s third term as the greatest stealth authoritarian since Woodrow Wilson, let’s take stock of the state of “democracy”, in Minnesota and nationwide.

One of the obligations of a free people – and especially of a free people that wants to stay that way – is to push back when government overreaches. Not just in emergencies (although that was the initial subject of the original post), but always, on every facet of liberty. Conservatism holds that order and liberty exist in a constant state of tension; without order (or health) prosperity is impossible; without health, freedom is academic (subsistence farmers don’t have time to petition for redress of grievances); without freedom, order is onerous and, let’s be honest, prosperity is most likely concentrated among those keeping the order.

Three years ago, I said that Government power is like a handgun – sometimes, a necessary tool in extreme circumstances, under terms that are as strictly circumscribed as any rule on justifiable use of lethal force. And like any necessary tool, free people need to make sure that the newbie isn’t sweeping people at the firing range with her hand on the trigger, and that government isn’t getting drunk and profligate with its use, or abuse of power.

Of course, three years later, it’s clear that the Biden and Walz regimes great government power less like a handgun on the nightstand, and more like a Reaper drone, orbiting loudly above everything, ready to strike arbitrarily and without a whole lot of reason or respect for the niceties of constitutional law.

Just as Governor Piglet’s administration used Covid as a pretext for seizing unprecedented arbitrary power, Democrats nationwide are waving “January 6” around like a bloody shirt, to try to justify their ravaging of the spirit and letter of AMerican democracy.

So lets list the outrages. Let me know what I’ve missed; I intend for this list to live on as long as needed:

Life and Liberty

  • The emergence of the crypto-Maoist “Democratic Socialists of America” as the most powerful bloc in the Democrat party nationwide, and even moreso of the DFL – as both parties arrogate more power, wealth (transferred from taxpayers)
  • The multi-pronged bringing to heel of the education system, from pre-school through the post-doctoral level, is “the long game” in attacking not just liberty, but the entire underpinning of Western Civilization. Creating a generation of ignorant droogs who think “freedom” is just material satiety is both a key goal of those who’d gut the American experiment and, seemingly, a long way toward being accomplished.

The Pursuit of Prosperity

Here, the DFL’s disdain for business and private property rears its head, above and beyond any actual response to the epidemic.

  • The DFL “Trifecta” burned through nearly $18 Billion worth of “surprlus”, every dime of which came from a taxpayer of some kind or another. That’s nearly $3,000 for every man, woman and child in Minnesota – nearly $12,000 for a typical family of four. In one year. And they raised taxes enough to cover that and a whole lot more. And given that the state is inevitably falling into deficit while the Democrats control the Legislature, it’s going to get much worse. That money would, in fact, be better employed by the people.
  • As Governor Klink established during Covid, the right to transact business is clearly subject to arbitrary, and in some cases seemingly capricious, interference. Small businesses are shut down (as big ones, and business with more, better lobbyists remain open), in many cases without regard to the business’ actual susceptibility to the virus (lawn services? nd smoke shops aren’t. It’s best that your vices not be politically unfashionable.
  • Looking a back at the concept of “Essential” and “Non-Essential” workers – designations determined almost entirely via the political expediency of the designations, and their importance to the lifestyle of the “Laptop class” workers who make up the political class – feels like staring into the soul of Orwell’s universe, even three years later.
  • The government started by barring all evictions and foreclosures, and halting student loan payments. The Twin Cities governments have moved on to rent control – furthering the road to gutting the affordable rental market, and completely foreclosing the existence of the small landlords that used to provide most of the metro’s “affordable housing” – while the Biden regime tried to unilaterally wipe out personal obligations to private student loan lenders.

Government Transparency

  • The DFL created a “Hate Speech Registry”. What’s in it? What’s it for? How do we see what, and who, is in it? For what purposes will it be used? The registry’s supporters couldn’t and wouldn’t answer questions. They just jammed it down.
  • The Governor’s “Covid Snitch Line” showed us not only the DFL’s ability for setting up a Stasi-like network of informants, but how much they genuinely enjoy it.
  • School boards around the state are gradually, and sometimes not so gradually, being turned into rubber-stamps for district administrators and the state department of Education.
  • For years, people complained, legitimately, that most of the legislature’s big decisions were made by the Governor, the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House, operating behind closed doors. That was intolerable and stupid when there were opposing parties involved in those negotiations. Now that they’re all with the same party? While elections have consequences, this is pure authoritarianism.
  • Covid-era restrictions on meetings have morphed, post-pandemic, into a glib disregard for state open meeting laws, which serve more as suggestions these days.

First Amendment

  • The collaboration of Big Government, Big Tech, Big Media and the Big Left’s non-profit/industrial complex completely gutted free speech in time for the 2020 election. The vituperation of their response to Elon Musk buying Twitter tips the hand; the Axis of Authority really, really wants “free speech” to be more about crappy art than actually holding government accountable.
  • And as Big Left endlessly drones on about the “Threat” of “endemic white supremacist terrorism” that we’ve been told for 15 years is everywhere, honest, one of these days now – the threat of being swatted, of crowds of professional protesters and rioters making your free exercise of too much inconvenient speech potentially dangerous is always there. The March 4, 2017 “Anti”-Fa attack on a Republican gathering at the MN Capitol rotunda (and the fact that Ramsey County’s “criminal justice” system did everything but take the “protesters” out for dinner to apologize for the inconvenience of being arrested) was a warning; shut up, or you just might get cut up. Democrats and the DFL are very aware of this, because that malevolent mass of wannabe thugs are their children, nephews, classmates.

Second Amendment

  • While the Second Amendment community remains strong, and with the departure of Wayne LaPierre may get some of its teeth re-sharpened at the national level, the attacks on the law-abiding gun owner in Blue jurisdictions are increasing, unconscionable, and not consistent with “protecting democracy”. More below.

Fourth Amendment

  • The surveillance state has gotten steadily worse.
  • The presence of anonymous “snitch lines” – and especially “hate crime” lines, may not have led to any Fourth Amendment perversions of probable cause yet – but don’t bet against it.
  • “Red Flag” laws have largely trashed the Fourth Amendment (more below).

Fifth Amendment

  • With the courts pretty much closed your right to a speedy trial by an impartial jury is pretty much toast for the duration.
  • Let’s not forget how the state gutted the justice system – including the rights of defendants to speedy drials, to face their accusers, and of their attorneys to effectively prepare cases – under the pretext of “public emergency restrictions”.

Privacy

  • Among the many other depredations of Minnesota’s “red flag” law – “Mental Health” professionals are in fact now deputized to participate in the abuse of those laws. I’d say “consider the unintended consequences”, but I don’t think there’s anything “unintended” about them.
  • Government used your cell data to track the effectiveness of social distancing. Think that genie’s going back in the bottle?

When Democrats refer to Republicans as “fascists”, it’s a Berg’s Seventh Law case. .

“Unintended” Consequences

Among the many laws that went into effect on Monday, Governor Klink was proud to announce this:

For starters: 68? Sweet Jesus, what is this, “Cool Hand Luke” sweat fetish pr0n?

Beyond that?

Mandatory temperatures (outside the obvious safety habitability rules, which already exist) combined with rent control = less housing.

Or does nobody study economics anymore?

A Christmas-Time Visit To The Ghost Of Democrat Victory-Dancing Past

Let’s take a look back to last May.

I started this post at the end of the session, last May, amid the DFL was doing its endzone happy dance over having gotten their way on literally everything during the session,

Here’s Rep Long – who in normal times one would be tempted to call “one of Minneapolis’s more annoying legislators”, but “progressivism” has lapped him a few times on that count:

They sure loved to prattle on about “gridlock being over”, didn’t they?

The Strib cheered on the home team! Here was a rare photo from last year of Governor Walz not eating something:

And here, one of them rejoices that the trains will run on time.

Or something like that.

This tweet caught my eye last spring – someone had a clue what was going on.

Today, of course, the “surplus” (which wasn’t) is long gone. There’s going to be a deficit in the next biennium, even if the economy hangs on.

All as predicted.

A Look Ahead To The Ghost Of DFL Excuse-Making Future

Budget deficit of $2.5 Billion Plus?

Free Fall

As predicted by yours truly about this time a year ago, the DFL squandered a $18B “surplus” [1]

The DFL is contratulating itself that it still has a surplus of a couple billion dollars – which is a little like jumping from the top of the IDS building, opening your eyes and seeing the 20th floor, and thinking “Hey, I’m at the 20th floor, I guess I’m OK”.

The DFL has spent the state into debt.

Minnesota passed a humungous budget in the last session. To make that possible, they drew from other funds well outside of general funds, such as special revenue funds and money from the federal government.

For Health and Human Services spending, for example, lawmakers loosened eligibility and working requirements for cash assistance programs. The cost of these changes — which is about $50 million — is currently being funded by federal TANF dollars until the 2027 fiscal year.

And it’s actually much worse than that:

Once the state starts paying for these with state dollars in 2028, spending will go up. And if current events are any indication, the cost of these new changes will likely have blown past $50 million by then.

Additionally, lawmakers also allocated over $2 billion in extra funding to Medicaid. Until 2027, over half of the money will come from the Health Care Access Fund (HCAF) — a special revenue fund that has historically been used for MinnesotaCare. If at any point in the future, HCAF cannot sustain this new Medicaid spending, it will have to be shifted to the general fund.

And, go figure – the economically-illiterate DFL have killed a bunch of the golden geese (aka ripe suck citizens) that usually pay for DFL gigantism:

For one, Minnesota heavily relies on income taxation. But our income tax system is highly progressive. So, the state disproportionately relies on a small portion of the state’s high-earning individuals, which is in itself a problem.

Unfortunately, this problem was made worse last session, when lawmakers passed targeted “tax cuts” that have eliminated or reduced income tax liability for select taxpayers, such as social security income recipients and low-income parents with children. This has narrowed the individual income tax base even further.

And let’s not forget that high-income earners have already been fleeing Minnesota and going to low-tax states like Florida.

The recent changes to the tax system do not just narrow the income tax base, however. According to MCFE, these targeted tax cuts and tax redesigns have substituted less volatile sources of income tax revenue — such as salaries and social security — with the most volatile sources — such as corporate income — putting the state further in a precarious position.

I”m not in on the DFL’s planning, but I suspect it involves reliance on two things:

  • Hoping the Biden Administration convincing the Fed to keep interest rates low (through the election, anyway) convinces enough gullible voters that the ecomony is just great, and
  • Sending out an endless diet (as it were) of photos of Peggy Flanagan feeding Tim Walz donuts and corn dogs.

After all, that [2] is what got them through 2022.


[1] Which was a bit of a mirage, to be honest – made up of limited-time Federal stimulus money and taxation of economic activity spurred by other government-stimulated spending.

[2] Well, and that whole Roe V.Wade thing, of course.

As Predicted Here

You know those photos that amusement parks snap as you come down to the end of a log flume or roller coaster?

They catch the rider at a moment when they’ve just been waaay up high, and are in the process of falling waaaaay down, into the water (for the log flume) or back to the end of the ride.

If your only frame of reference isd the photo, you have no idea that seconds later, the riders and their “log” are plowing up a plume of water. But seeing as the tracks head inexorably downward, you know where it’s going.

I have to suspect when a DFLer gets those photos, the response is “You’re not in the water right this second


According to last week’s budget forecast, MInnesota’s DSA-led DFL has led Minnesota from a nearly $18 Billion surplus to…

…well, the snapshot released last week caught the state’s budget at a $2.4B surplus – but, like that log flume photo, it’s that high because that’s when the snapshot was taken on the way down:

Higher estimates in health and human services and education raise total spending in FY 2024-2027, resulting in a negative structural balance in the next biennium.

That “negative structural balance” could be up over $2 Billion. And that’s provided the economy doesn’t really tank.

Who has two thumbs, predicted this, and is currently typing this post? This guy.

Compare and contrast with Iowa:

Iowa led the “tax-cutting wave” in 2022, with the most comprehensive and aggressive tax reform in the United States. This will gradually replace the nine-bracket, progressive income tax with a flat tax, bringing the top rate, which was close to 9 percent, down to a flat 3.9 percent by 2026. Not only will Iowa have eliminated the progressive income tax, it will also have reduced the top tax rate by almost 60 percent.

Iowa’s corporate tax rate, once the highest in the nation at 12 percent, is also being cut: Starting in January 2024, the corporate tax rate will be 7.1 percent, and the rate will continue to be lowered until it reaches a flat 5.5 percent.

Critics of Iowa’s fiscal reforms warn against alleged “economic recklessness.” Mike Owen, deputy director of Common Good Iowa, a progressive think tank, told the Economist that “a crash is coming” and that programs such as education and health care will suffer as a result.

This doesn’t add up. Thanks to fiscal prudence, Iowa’s budget is in strong shape. For the last few years, Iowa’s budget has been in surplus, ending fiscal year 2023 with a $1.83 billion surplus, which was $86.3 million higher than originally estimated. The fiscal year 2024 surplus is projected to be $2.12 billion, rising to $2.99 billion in the fiscal year 2025.

Common Good, like the rest of the non-profit/industrial complex, is getting less official graft out of the state.

No such problem in Minnesota.

Yet.

False Flags: The Career

“Flag experts” – there are people out there who call themselves that – step in to grade the new Minnesota state flag proposals:

So what about the actual experts? In interviews, flag experts and graphic designers generally praised the six choices. Vexillologists — yes, there’s a word for people who study flags — said Minnesota’s finalists mostly follow the guidelines of flag design.

Ted Kaye, secretary of the North American Vexillological Association, said he thinks the six finalists are a “good start.” But he also suggested one or more changes to each. A common critique was that the flags are “trying to do too much” and should be simplified in order to be distinguishable from a distance.

“All of these designs have a great flag in them trying to get out,” Kaye said. “They all need work, but that’s OK.”

“They all need work”

Give up hope. You have entered the world of the “Graphic Designer”.

Don’t get me wrong – I have good friends, colleagues and family who are graphic and visual designers. It’s a talent I do not have. I’m in UX, but not one of the visual-design-y UXers (no, they are not the same thing).

And if you turn a group of average graphic designers (not the very good ones in my social circle) loose on a project, they can and will spend two years picking out the “right” color palette.

So the GOP may get to repeal this nonsense after all (provided they win some House races).

Fake News?

Someone claiming to be MN State Senator Grant Hauschild posted this on TWitter yesterday:

This must be a Russian hoax. Hauschild,and the rest of the DFL caucus in the legislature, to say nothing of the Flanagan/Klink Administration, spent the whole first half of summer high-fiving each other over “fully funding education” (in between selfies of grinning legislators stuffing donuts and corn dogs in each others mouths).

Now, they never, not once, explained what that meant.

For that matter, the term has vanished from the DFL’s chanting points since about Bastille Day.

Weird.

While Waiting For The “Murder Hornets”…

…and having given up on the “killer bees”, people in the Upper Midwest have this to worry about:

Fearless predictions:

  • North Dakotans, being gloriously well-armed and with a state government run by smart people ,will have all sorts of pulled pork (and, given these pigs reportedly yield a fairly bland meat, likely come up with some great recipes).
  • Minnesotans in CE7 and CD8 – the northern half of the state – will try to kill some hogs. But Metro “environmentalists”, claiming the “erasure” of “undocumented potential DFL voters”, will appeal to Keith Ellison, who will promptly file an injunction citing a battle against “MAGA White Supremacy”.
  • Canadians, being largely disarmed, will remain under cover, get eaten by hogs, or prosecuted by the Trudeau (who is no way, no how Fidel Castro’s son) regime.

Prove me wrong.

False Flags II

These are the finalists:

To me, they all like the came from IKEA, and appear to have been designed to work as button icons on Android phones, but…

…the one on top, and the bottom right, offend me the least.

But let’s be honest – if on July 2 1863 the First Minnesota Regiment had gone into action behind any of these flags, Lee would have ended up sacking DC, NYC and Boston within a few weeks.

And the crop improved a bit from the semi-finalists:

Not sure if the committee noticed how redolent a flag with a five-pointed star would be of a Soviet, Nork or Red Chinese flag, or were anticipating the avalanche of jokes and not-so-jokes if they picked a flag that looked like, uh…

…the flag of Somalia.

Which seemed to have inspired a prett, er, impressive number of the original 2,600 submissions.

Open Letter To Governor Klink

To: Governor Wilhelm Walz, Co-Governor, State of Minnesota
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re: Hungry For The Truth

Governor,

You tweeted this yesterday:

And yet your administration and the DFL majorities in the Legislature told us that Minnesota’s economy was doing better than ever, that “Bidenomics” was not a bitter joke whose self-induced inflation was no way no how hurting poor and working class people worse than the general population, and that the actions of this past session were going to reduce poverty by 30%.

If any of that were true, food banks wouldn’t be seeing unprecedented demand – would they?

Addiction?

Governor Klink apparently came to love the way he got to govern while he had “emergency powers” [1]:

Of course, none of it is “done”.

It’s mandated. It’s on paper.

Businesses have scarcely started paying for “Paid Leave”, or absorbing the impact of the unfunded mandate.

“Affordable Housing” is exquisitely unaffordable.

Public transportation? They’re throwing around plans for trains. That’s about it.

It’s the sort of performative posturing that we’d call “virtue signaling” if it were talking about social hot buttons.

Since it’s about spending and building, we’ll need a new term.

Bureauvirtue signalling?

[1] Or at least the twerp who handles his social media.

Just A Doggone Minute

Governor Klink, and Co-Governor Flanagan have been yapping nonstop about their “free lunch and breakfast for kids“ program.

So I was amazed to see this:

If kids are getting 10 of the weeks 21 meals at school, how are they going hungry?

Or is the school feeding program financed by the feds through the back door?

Lipstick On A Pig

A Gaffe is what happens when a politician accidentally tells the truth.
— Michael Kinsley

Governor Walz may have committed a gaffe the other day:

He’s being too modest.

With its proposed ban on liquid fuel, the DFL is working to ensure that no matter where you grow up or go to school, you have to stay in your community.