MNDFL chair Ken Martin, in re the MN Supreme Court’s decision to toss his attempt to remove Trump/Pence from the ballot:
If they can’t competently follow the rules…how does anyone expect them to run the country,” said Martin.
Yes, Ken.
How.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Minnesota election law requires party delegates at the convention to designate electors and alternates. Minnesota Republicans failed to do that at their convention so party big-shots designated some afterwards. Democrats correctly pointed out this duct-tape fix failed to comply with the law and asked the Supreme Court to strike Trump’s name from the ballot.
The Secretary of State objected that early voting starts in 11 days and they’ve already printed a million ballots so it would cost a fortune to change the ballots now. The Supreme Court decided the Democrats had waited too long to bring the challenge and ruled against them based on the ancient equitable doctrine of laches.
Laches? Laches?!? That’s Republicans’ ace in the hole? That’s their big defense?
Laches is one of those kitchen-sink defenses you throw into the Answer when you’re totally desperate and have no defense on the merits of the case. It’s for losers and scoundrels and weasels. A major political party trying to get a Presidential candidate onto the ballot shouldn’t be relying on laches.
They really are the Stupid Party.
Joe Doakes
But why did the DFL file the suit – which, but for logistics and the appeal to, ahem, laches, might have succeeded?
Michael Brodkorb, newly at MinnPost, breaks that down. Short story short; there are people who get paid to be cynical about things like rules.
In perhaps the most bald-faced violation of Berg’s Seventh Law in history, the DFL – which is constantly whinging about phantom claims of “voter suppression” – is actively trying to disenfranchise half of this state’s electorate in the Presidential election.
DFL Chair Ken “Dwight Schrute” Martin is sueing to keep Donald Trump off the Minnesota ballot in November, over an absurd, abstruse technicality in election law:
The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s Thursday lawsuit claims the Minnesota Republican Party failed to nominate its presidential electors, the people who cast the state’s 10 electoral college votes, in accordance with state law. Keith Downey, the chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, said last month that the party called a special meeting to approve alternative electors because it had previously neglected to do so.
One of these people is imitating Mussolini. The other was a character on a hit TV show.
The suit, which was filed directly to the Minnesota Supreme Court, adds a new level of chaos to an already strange election season. It could cause the parties to spend some of the rushed final eight weeks of the election fighting in court, distracting from other campaigning. While the suit is a technical one, if successful, it could affect the entire presidential election.
If the DFL wins – and one would think even Minnesota’s absurdly liberal Supreme Court couldn’t possibly be that obtuse – then long-time friend of this blog Dave Thul had a great idea; every conservative should vote for Jill Stein, and make the Greens a major party in Minnesota, sapping DFL votes for at least the next four years and drawing money from the DFL’s graft pool.
There’s also a part of me that hopes Martin “wins”. This – the most baldfaced example of corruption masquerading as law I’ve seen in my lifetime – would stand a good chance of opening an epic floodgate of support for Trump, or at least against Hillary’s party.
Alpha News continues to absolutely thrash the Twin Cities mainstream media at…doing journalism and holding government accountable.
This week? Further evidence that Ilham Omar did, indeed, “marry” her brother, and that she was, indeed, married (via a combination of “faith” and undissolved legal marriages) to two men at the same time.
Expect an avalanche of anger from the left over the racism and hatred of foreigners and people of color on the part of Alpha News writer…
…er…
…Preya Samsundar.
After Power Line broke the story of Ilhan Omar’s apparent sham marriage to her brother (which we touched on yesterday), Channel 9 notes that there seems to be no divorce on file between Ilhan Omar and the man who is apparently her brother.
Omar’s response:
“It matters that I am a woman. It matters that I am a Somali-American woman. It matters that I am a Muslim and immigrant woman…I know deeply that the people of District 60B oppose Donald Trump-style misogyny, racism, anti-immigration rhetoric and Islamophobic division.
Absent from the response: any response, other than “you’re teh racist”.
Which will be fine in the DFL cesspool that is 60B, where a pair of novelty wind-up chattering teeth would get 65% of the vote if it had a “DFL” sticker on it.
(And today’s award for meaningless political chatter:
We stand together to build a more prosperous and equitable district and state.
As usual, in 60B as in most of Minneapolis, the only “prosperity” to come from the political process will be to politicians and their hangers-on.
Last week’s big Minnesota political news was the Ilhan Omar defeating 2343-term representative Phyllis Kahn in the DFL primary (the election that actually matters in that benighted part of Minneapolis, unfortunately). The Minneapolis media turned cartwheels over The First Somali Woman nominee.
Scott Johnson found a story behind the story at Powerline:
A reader has written us to point out that the Somali website Somalispot[since deleted, but visible on Googlecache] posted information last week suggesting Omar’s involvement in marriage and immigration fraud. The post notes that Omar married Ahmed Hirsi in 2002. Hirsi is the father of Omar’s three children. Omar is depicted with Hirsi and their children on Omar’s campaign website here.
The post further notes that Omar married her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, implying that the latter marriage assisted his entry into the United States. Her brother was a British citizen. “As soon as Ilhan Omar married him,” the post continues, “he started university at her [a]lma mater North Dakota State University where he graduated in 2012. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Minneapolis where he was living in a public housing complex and was later evicted. He then returned to the United Kingdom where he now lives.”
Let me note here that Omar’s marriage to her brother, if it occurred in fact, is illegal under Minnesota law. I believe it would be void ab initio, as though it never occurred. If it occurred, I infer that it must have taken place for dishonest purposes.
Seems like mindless gossip? Perhaps even unfounded?
Well, maybe – but wait’ll you read the response from Noor’s spokesdroid.
If only we had some institution – perhaps with printing presses and transmitters, staffed with people who see themselves as high priests of information – that weren’t terrified of never getting to do lunch at the Saint Paul Grill to look into these sorts fo things
My district – House 65A – features a primary between two DFLers; incumbent Rena Moran and challenger Rashad Turner, who’s earned a reputation this past year as one of Black Lives Matter’s more militant organizers. (And for those who want to get out of the fever swamp, it also features endorsed GOP candidate Monique Giordana!)
Over the weekend, this flyer started turning up on Saint Paul social media:
First things first: I’m not positive it’s legit. On the one hand, something smells funny about the flyer.
On the other hand, it is totally in character for the Saint Paul DFL, funny aroma and all.
The transportation, tax and bonding bills are all a shambles.
So what is the Minnesota DFL focused on?
Baseball players and their tobacco.
The bill was introduced Monday by Rep. Mike Freiberg, DFL-Golden Valley. It would ban the use of tobacco at Target Field, CHS Field and other professional sports stadiums in Minnesota.
“We need to make smokeless tobacco use in baseball a remnant of the past – and Minnesota should be proud to play a role in that movement,” said Freiberg Monday. “By allowing smokeless tobacco at the ballparks, we send the absolute wrong message about tobacco use. It’s time to take tobacco out of the game completely for the good of baseball and the health of our kids and players alike.”
You might recall Minneapolis City Councilor Alonda Cano; last winter, she was abusing her access to city data to “shame” people who criticized her support for Black Lives Matter. Then, when called for alleged laziness by (of all outlets) the City Pages, she…
…well, that actually brings us up to this week:
Tuesday evening, it was Cano’s turn to join the public conversation, doing so in the form of a Facebook post on her city council page. Cano wrote it was “hurtful and disappointing” to read the words “lazy,” “always late,” and “clueless” used to describe her work ethic on the council.
“It is important to illuminate,” Cano went on, “that these words, when used to frame women and people of color, carry a history of coded language that serve to create negative racial stereotypes.”
That could be.
Those words, when referring to someone who’d rather grandstand than learn their damn job, are also not-coded-at-all terms to refer to lazy, inconsiderate people who don’t do their homework, whatever their skin color.
Cano wrote that the negative story “weighed on me heavily,” and she went back and forth on whether she should respond to it. After all, she and her south Minneapolis constituents in the Ninth Ward have far greater concerns: wage theft, slumlords, a lack of paid sick time for workers, even working moms.
Which Cano, apparently, isn’t doing jack for.
“However,” Cano continued, “when loaded and biased attacks occur, it is vital that we stand up and speak the truth. In this case, this story was racist, sexist, and it was an attempt to smear all of the things I stand for.
Well, no. It was an attempt to tell the public that Cano – who reportedly has ambitions to run for Mayor or the Legislature – isn’t doing a very good job, when her job doesn’t involve granstanding, or taking spiffy trips on the taxpayer’s dime.
I want you to know that I am unabashed in my commitment to continuing to advance a racial and social justice agenda no matter the backlash.”
Let’s take a moment to go over what just happened. Alondra Cano – an elected member of a power bloc with absolute one-party control of a major city, a person with in effect a lifetime sinecure either in government or non-profits for her and (likely) her entire family, one who wields the kind of power that mere citizens don’t even know how to dream of – is trying to paint herself as a victim.
Cano – like Nekima Levy-Pounds, another person with immense power and privilege herself – is perfectly fine using her position to shame critics who don’t buy newsprint by the trainload; when someone – even the lowly City Pages – comes along and hits her from the level, she cries “victimization”.
Question, Minneapolis: Do you deserve better, or not?
Want to to know the only thing that makes me happier than Chad Anderson winning the special election for Ann Lenczewski’s old seat in Bloomington?
Income: Anderson received $11,805 in individual contributions:
Carlson got $10,407:
So in terms of on-the-street fundraising from actual people, Anderson had a slight edge. The edge is especially notable in terms of non-itemized contributions – smaller contributions from regular people that don’t need to be itemized on state reports; 86% of Andersons contributions were from the little guy; with Carlson, 39% of his individual donations came from deep-pocketed suburban progressive grandées.
In terms of funding from political parties: Anderson got $500 from his local party unit- which, like most underfunded GOP party units in the city and the first ring of suburbs, no doubt had to dig really, really deep:
The state GOP doesn’t spend a lot of money on special elections in the city and the first ring, while it’s still getting its financial house in order.
Carlson got $9,158.40 from the always well-heeled local party unit ($2,000), as well as cleaning out Lenczewski’s campaign account to the tune of $3,000, and a generous $4158.40 gift from the state DFL:
Carlson received $9,700 from various union PACs.
Carlson also got a public subsidy of $6897.04:
Anderson got no direct PAC money, and he got no public subsidy.
Outgo: Here’s the fun part; in total, Carlson spent $25,122.67:
On the other hand, Anderson spent a total of $6324.32.
That means DFL’s Carlson outspent the Republican Anderson by roughly 4:1. And lost.
Apparently, people in Bloomington really don’t want their trash messed with.
Two DFL Senators – Bev Scalze and Barb Goodwin, both women and long-time critics of back-slappin’ boys-club-member-in-good-standing Tom Bakk – are retiring from the Senate:
…For Scalze and others, the problems go beyond the disappointment of passing a budget that looked much different after Bakk and Daudt emerged from days of private negotiations with a deal in hand. It’s how leadership handled the final days of session.
Sen. Barb Goodwin, DFL-Columbia Heights, said many budget bills were controlled unilaterally, with little input or outreach to herself and other members. She and Scalze declined to put a number on how many Senate Democrats are upset, saying only to “look at the votes.”
Enough Democrats voted against three of the state’s seven budget bills that they required GOP votes to pass. Seven Democrats voted ‘no’ on three or more.
Take the environment budget, which just 10 Democrats — and 25 Republicans — voted to pass. Scalze said the finished product contained a surprise law change she and other members couldn’t stomach: exempting copper and nickel mines on the Iron Range from the state’s solid waste regulations. Bakk and other Senate DFLers represent swaths of the Iron Range.
“(Bakk) gave up a lot of stuff that other members had worked real hard on while he was getting everything he wanted for the Iron Range,” Goodwin said. “That kind of naked power is really not appreciated.”
Nobody who’s seen Tom Bakk will ever use the term “naked power” casually again…
…but the point is – wow. It’s like the Dems have a war on women or something.
Joe Doakes from Como Park – who, let the record show, is an attorney – emails:
I don’t understand Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman’s legal analysis in charging the BLM shooter with assault with a deadly weapon.
When Black people protest, it’s a Constitutionally protected right. If White people counter-protest, it should be just as protected, right?
Yes, I know, the White people said they were going to stir up trouble. They know somebody who owns a Confederal flag. They talked trash on video. That’s bad manners, agreed. But filming Black protestors and even calling them names is no less protected speech than burning a cross in somebody’s yard and we know that’s constitutional, decided decades ago in RAV v. St. Paul. So going to the protest should be good.
If the White guys were racially offensive in implementing their counter-protest, does that negate the shooters self-defense claim? The standard is:
- Did not initiate the physical conflict, must be a reluctant participant.
- Attempted to retreat by running away
- Reasonably believed they were about to suffer great bodily harm at the hands of an enraged mob
- Used reasonable force to repel the attack by firing a few rounds, only one of which injured anybody
I’m sure the prosecutor and the media will portray the White men as the aggressors, not as reluctant participants. But that doesn’t sound right to me. If you and I are having a heated discussion, the guy who throws the first punch is the aggressor, regardless how annoying the words are.
There might be such a thing as “fighting words” to justify a quick punch. But there’s no such thing as “chasing-down-an-alley” words to justify a mob beating. The Black mob initiated the threat of physical violence, the White men attempted to retreat and used reasonable force as a last resort. I would think the shooter has a pretty good case for self-defense. I would expect Mike Freeeman to see that. I therefore conclude the assault charge is grandstanding to pacify the same mob that initiated the violence. That’s not a good long-term strategy for maintaining public order.
Joe Doakes
“Progressive” politics is always a matter of balancing respective mobs of constituents, usually against each other.
We’ve gone around and around with Representative Kim Norton of Rochester. Norton, who is retiring from the Legislature after this coming session, is going to be carrying Michael Bloomberg’s water; she’ll be sponsoring, so we’re told, a number of gun control bills.
Not that you can get a straight answer out of her; although she went into great detail in the Rochester Post-Bulletin in which she called for a “conversation about guns”, she also told anyone who wanted to engage in dialog (as opposed to echo-chamber monologue) that she really had no idea what she was going to put into any bill, and had nothing to talk about.
Which is kind of hilarious, if you think about it.
Of course, on Twitter over the holiday weekend, she found a specific proposal to support – from Bloomberg’s chief streetwalker in the Senate, Kirsten Gillibrand.
And her response (below) to MNGOPAC leader Bryan Strawser is one for the record books, and one that every Rochester voter should take up with Ms. Norton: 
That’s right – for opposing denying civil rights to people who wind up on a non-transparent, easily-abused, unsupervised grab bag of names collected so willy-nilly it’s become the stuff of folk legends, for which the Feds don’t have to tell why, or even whether, you’re on it, Rep. Norton, one of the DFL’s inner circle thought leaders, equates you with a terrorist.
Remember when Democrats were opposed to mysterious starchambers handing down secret lists of enemies, with no transparency or accountability? I’ll bet Rep. Nortdon does.
This is today’s DFL.
Question: Do you suppose anyone in the media will question Rep. Norton on this?
The American Left is like a college girl with pathological daddy issues.
You can warn ’em and warn ’em, but they’ll still end up leaving the party with that a*****e you tried to warn them about:
Hitler: Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year”, 1938.
And they’ll inevitably marry the most disgusting person in their social circle …
Josef Stalin; “Time”‘s Man of the Year in 1939 and 1942.
…because I don’t know why. They’re girls with terrible daddy issues. How the hell would I know.
And even after they get divorced from the disgusting guy, their judgment is never, ever quite right.
This is a tweet from Dan Kimmel, DFL candidate for the Minnesota House in District 56A.
What does Dennis Prager say? It takes an elite education to be this misguided?
I’m mostly putting it online to make sure it’s out there for the whooooole world to see.
Non-Update Update: Kimmel withdrew from the race, after a burst of national attention to his tweet that caused even MNDFL chair Ken Martin to condemn the statement.
Here’s the deal; most DFLers, much as we disagree with them, can see the evil in what’s happening in ISIS territory.
But among the multiculturalists, there is a very strong current of moral equivalence, of unwillingness to “judge” other cultures by Western norms. I’m not quite going to say “Dan Kimmel was just the one that got caught” – but if you talk with enough of the multi-culti crowd long enough, you know it’s not exactly wrong, either.
The big problem, of course, was that Kimmel apparently isn’t very well-educated about ISIS. He – and pretty much everyone, really – should read, absorb and retain this article, for starters.
Remember when the DFL said “if we just increase Local Government Aid”, property taxes will fall?”
No?
That’s OK – either does the DFL.
…to me has never been “does Bernie Sanders believe this, deep in the pit of his heart”.
The real question is, how, really, are Hillary Clinton’s, Mark Dayton’s, Tom Bakk’s, Chris Coleman’s and Betsy Hodges’ beliefs any different?”
I heard Steve “Spotty” Timmer on the lesser talk station the other day. He’s leading a “movement” to petition Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk to resign his leadership role.
Now, I periodically refer to regional progressive bloggers as “people who don’t belong under police surveillance. And how about those Twins?
However, if you are a Minnesota progressive, Timmer is exactly right. You need to excise Tom Bakk from power forthwith, or all of your “progressive” chatter is just baked wind.
You must rise up and remove Bakk from power by all means necessary.
Accept nothing less than progressive perfection!
Get on this, folks. It’s vital.
…was, paradoxically, only incidentally about Ryan Winkler.
Our Big Game of Telephone: From the mid-nineties on, when Michele Bachmann was still organizing the Maple River Education Coalition, before she even ran for the State Senate, the late Karl Bremer was dinging on the future Presidential candidate and conservative lighting rod.
And conservatives, in turn, dinged on the irascible Bremer. I’m not one to speak ill of the dead – but it’s a simple fact that the guy was prone to using imagination when the facts didn’t give him the story he wanted. For years, finding and pointing out all the logical and factual holes in his peevish tirades was for conservative bloggers what “mending nets” is for Spanish fishermen. In short – he was like a blogger, only more so.
But if you ask a left-leaning member of the Minnesota Media “elite”, you got a different story; Bremer was lauded as a hero, treated as one of the club, given the secret handshake. He won an award from the “Society of Professional Journalists” – something like “best digger of documents”.
It was all, every bit of it, related to Bremer’s nearly two-decade-long mania for “covering” / writing about / stalking Michele Bachmann. The enemy of the Twin Cities’ media’s enemy is the Twin Cities media’s friend.
And had Bremer turned all of that manic energy on Paul Wellstone or Keith Ellison? Not a single member of the Twin Cities media would have acknowledged his existence, much less pissed on his grave.
Warm, Fuzzy: With that in mind, take a good read through Doug Grow’s profile of the retiring Representative Ryan Winkler.
Entitled “Why the Legislature will miss Ryan Winkler”, it’s full of assurances, via Pat Garofalo, that Winkler’s big and rapidly-moving mouth was “all business, nothing personal” – which is a fine thing, and mildly reassuring (although mere nonelected proles who encountered Winkler on Twitter had mixed experiences with the lad)…
…and maybe even true, as far as it goes.
But read the article.
You’ll scan it in vain for any mention of Winkler’s “Uncle Tom” jape. And that’s fine; people make mistakes; to err is human and to forgive divine, yadda yadda. If every political “opposition researcher” in the world suddenly broke their femurs and spent six months in traction, and the world could forgive politicians their past oopses, the world would be a happier place, and maybe a little bit better one too.
That might actually be a wonderful thing.
But as I – and quite a few other people – noted when Winkler announced his retirement, Winkler was only the symptom. The disease? The Minnesota Media’s double-standard.
Because if Winkler’d been a Republican, you can bet “Uncle Tom” would have popped up in Grow’s epitaph; it’d be carved large on the media’s collective memory of the guy for all eternity.
Winkler has painstakingly avoided ruling out a return to Minnesota politics. Five will get you twenty that when he does, “Uncle Thomas” will not rate a single inch of copy.
Anywhere.
Ryan Winkler is leaving the House of Representatives.
Winkler spent nine sessions in the Legislature. During the last five or six of them, his job, coming from an utterly safe seat in Golden Valley, seemed to be “the DFL’s Costco version of Sidney Blumenthal”; to say and do the things that no DFLer in a contested district – or human with an education and a conscience – would dare to say.
Winkler racked up a long, storied history:
…enough that he seemed to be well on the way to becoming Minnesota’s Joe Biden.
Of course, Paul Thissen said what caucus leaders are supposed to say about their hatchet men:
House Minority Leader Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, said he’ll miss Winkler’s “impatience with injustice. He is always willing to take on the tough fights and not back down. He drove the discussion forward about how to make our economy work better for people. His work to raise the minimum wage and improve opportunity for average Minnesotans is a tremendous legacy.”
Um yeah. When a Minnesotan loses a job to pay for his precious minimum wage hike, we need to say they’ve been “Winklered”.
But this isn’t about my observations. Look at the adjectives the media uses in describing Winkler’s career; “outspoken” (as in “outspoken advocate on behalf of…” yadda yadda), “sharp-tongued”, “Harvard-Educated”, and the like.
If he’d been a Republican, I’d have looked for adjectives more like “Controversial”, “stridently partisan”, and maybe “gaffe-prone”. More to the point? A “sharp-tongued” Republican would be “contibuting to the nasty partisanship” around the Capitol.
But he’s a DFLer in Minnesota. He was just a character, one that the reporters could always get a cutesy quote from.
Ryan Winkler is the poster child for the Minnesota media’s double standard.
House DFL Minority Leader Paul Thissen having a word with Rep. Ryan Winkler.
What is being said?
Leave your entries in the comments.
(Photo Glenn Stubbe)
In lieu of a mining industry – which Metrocrat environmentalists from the Twin Cities have been keeping nice and shut down for decades – the DFL substitutes a lot of state money to try to tease some economic activity out of the Iron Range.
Part of that, traditionally, is the cataract of money that has gone through the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board – more commonly called the IRRRB, but more accurately referred to as a “Taxpayer-financed DFL Slush Fund”.
The Strib’s Jennifer Bjorhus will never do lunch in Minneapolis again, having written this generally excellent piece. The IRRRB may not have reinvigorated The Range, but they sure have greased a lot of DFL palms (emphasis added):
For years, prominent Democratic candidates and political groups have used the obscure center tucked among hills and pines to canvass and raise money from small donors. DFL organizations, state and national, have paid the phone bank’s current and former owners about $80 million over the last decade, campaign records show.
The call center relocated to Eveleth in 2006 thanks in part to a $625,000 loan from a unique state agency called the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board (IRRRB). It doles out about $40 million each year, much of it from a tax on taconite, in the name of bolstering and diversifying the Range economy.
In its first incarnation, the call center on the Range failed to meet job targets, but the IRRRB gave the company, Meyer Associates, more time to repay the loan. It shut down anyway last year. The IRRRB let Meyer’s owner walk away and wrote off the $250,000 Meyer owed, records show.
Then a former Meyer executive reopened the phone bank under the name of his new company. The deal allowed him to pay $50,000 for equipment that had been purchased with $500,000 in IRRRB money. The largest political client for the call center remained the same: a group called Dollars for Democrats.
Of course there’s a rational explanation!
Officials at the IRRRB say jobs, not politics, are behind its dealings with the two firms.
“There’s still 100 people working there,” said former state Rep. Tom Rukavina, a DFLer who served on the IRRRB board for years and once hired Meyer to make calls for his own campaign. “That to me is a success story. Any time I went in that office people clapped and thanked me that they had a job.”
So should the taxpayer provide cut-rate financing and pennies-on-the-dollar equipment and infrastructure for the GOP? The NRA? Pro-Life Action? The Tea Party?
If the IRRRB weren’t a DFL slush fund, and an equal opportunity graft machine, you’d see some equal-opportunity gravy-training.
Somehow, there seems to be none…
I got a brief shot at listening to the Jack Tomczak show this morning, on the lesser talk station.
They were talking about Minnesota’s “budget surplus”.
And they played an audio clip of Gov. Dayton, which pretty completely summed up the disconnect the DFL has on this issue.
In the audio clip, the governor referred to the surplus as “our collective good fortune”.
And this highlights a yawning golf of cognitive dissonance between DFLers (and others they’ve fooled) and the rest of Minnesota.
To a DFLer, budget surpluses are borne down from heaven in velvet-lined ivory chests on the wings of unicorns.
To the rest of us? The government’s “surplus” is our deficit. Every penny of that surplus came from what could’ve been a more productive use. Small business’ payroll; a manufacturers capital budget; your household budget and mine.
It’s not a “collective good fortune”; it’s a burden. It’s money taken out of the productive economy to run government, in excess of what government demanded in the first place; if the DFL has its way, it will be turned into permanent spending, to be wrenched from your wallets, your budgets, your bottom lines in perpetuity.
Surpluses are a bad thing. Deficits – provided they lead to spending cuts, rather than tax hikes – are a good thing.
Except for the permanent government class, of course.
The DFL is in the midst of an extended campaign of sniveling about the amount of money in politics.
A look at this list of independent expenditures registered from the 10 Minnesota House races that flipped last election shows you why:
The DFL spent more. Sometimes a helluvva lot more. And it didn’t work.
Courtesy John Rouleau of the MN Jobs Coalition, via Twitter.
The candidate with the most indy spending in each race is color-flagged.
Of 10 races, DFL groups outspent GOP groups in eight of them, notching a little over 10% more independent spending. And that doesn’t even tell the whole story.
So no wonder the DFL is so concerned about rationing money in politics; theirs didn’t work. They need less competition.
Who could have seen this coming – an administration that, for all of its chatter about “shovel ready jobs” and “infrastructure”, is hog-tied to its allegiance to academia and liberal plutocrats, having big trouble with working class voters, especially white ones?
As the price of fuel, staple foods, education and healthcare skyrocketed, all that talk of blue-collar work evaporated.
Glenn Reynolds writes:
That was actually an original part of Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, but it was derailed by feminists within the Obama coalition who thought it would produce too many jobs for men. Christina Romer, then-chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, reported: “The very first email I got … was from a women’s group saying ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’ ”
Well, if you’re offended by jobs for burly men, you probably won’t do well with working-class men, or with the working-class women who are often married to burly men. And, as Joel Kotkin notes, many other Obama policies — promoting urban density, which creates fewer construction jobs; fighting oil and coal extraction, thus targeting industries that create high-paying blue collar jobs; and even opening up immigration, which drives down wages for the working class — all seem designed to punish people who work for a living, even as expanded benefits for the poor seem designed to reward people who draw government checks for a living.
The parallels in Minnesota are – or should be – tantalizing to conservative Republicans; the DFL is even more the lapdog of urban academia and plutocrats than the national party; I’m not sure how Rick Nolan beat Stewart Mills, and I’m not sure he’ll do it again. And when Collin Peterson finally retires in the 7th CD, that district will be Republican for a generation or two…
…entirely on the dynamics in Reynolds’ article.
The DFL has a long, filthy history of dropping hit pieces in the closing hours of campaigns that would make people who care about petty annoyances like “right and wrong” and ‘truth” puke up their skulls. Classic example – this piece from 2010, which tried to whip up ingorant anti-Arab sentiment against King Banaian – who happens to be of Armenian descent.
But the people who do Democrat “Farmer” Labor Party hit pieces don’t bother with right and wrong. Their ends justify their means.
I cited this piece, dropped against Stacey Stout in House District 43B, on the show over the weekend. I called it “Evil”.
It is.
Here’s the front:
Uh oh. An abusive guy (are there any other kind in the DFL’s world? Other than Pajama Boy, I mean?)
And here’s the back:
This ad proves that the DFL is counting on finding a plurality of incurious cretins. And in 43A, it apparently worked.
Let’s go through this point by point:
Stout, like most people who don’t see “people with swastika armbands” as a government model to emulate, opposed a DFL proposal to take guns away from people accused, as opposed to convicted, of domestic abuse.
The “Gun Show Loophole” is a fraud; every gun show I’m aware of requires an NICS background check, and require a police-issued “Permits to Purchase” to buy a gun. The bill the DFL refers to would have required people to transfer all firearms via a Federal Firearms Licensed dealer. That means if you’re handing a gun down to your kid, or lending a shotgun to your friend for duck season. This does nothing but raise the price of firearms (FFLs don’t work for free) and create a paper trail for every gun – the same trail that police departments in Connecticut and New York are trying to use to confiscate firearms.
As to her opposing a background check for “assault weapons?” That was a proposal that would have added a second, utterly redundant background check for buying such weapons.
Stout made the right call in all three cases – if “following the law and the Constitution” is what you care about, which for the Democrat party it is not.
Taking those stances, in favor of the law-abiding citizens’ civil liberties, and turning them into “support for rape and domestic abuse?”
If you’re a DFL official, you might want to steer clear of me today.
And if you voted for Peter Fischer over this ad? Sorry for all the two-syllable words.
You are currently browsing the archives for the MNDFL category.
