Shot in the Dark

Category: Pork Patrol

  • Marketing The Unmarketable

    Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Want to make a fortune selling your service? Get invited to the next conference of County Managers or City Managers. Just sat through a mandatory half-hour meeting “on re-branding.” It’s the latest bandwagon for local governments. There’s even a handbook. Ramsey County is changing its logo. The County Board…

  • Deleted Extras

    Minnesota’s Film & Television Board faces a legislative re-write. Like Hollywood, Minnesota’s relationship with the entertainment industry has seen a tumultuous career trajectory.  From being the ingenue of Midwestern locations in the 1990s, resulting in a bevy of films such as Fargo, Grumpy Old Men, The Mighty Ducks, to a discarded destination left in favor…

  • Turd-Polishing

    Desperate to keep the stadium finance “plan”…er, afloat, the state is making another big push to try to sell “E-Pulltabs”: In Duluth on Tuesday night, about 35 charities and bar owners showed up for a chance to test-drive all the electronic pulltab and bingo games now available in Minnesota. They got tips from charitable gambling…

  • Strib: “2+2=38 Billion, Winston!”

    The Star Tribune Editorial board, in a piece that reads like Lori Sturdevant, holds forth on the DFL budget proposal, such as it is – and illustrates the Strib’s deep institutional hypocrisy along the way. The editorial is stupid, hypocritical, and awash in institutional self-interest disguised – like all of Sturdevant’s work – as populist dooo-goodism: No sales…

  • Forest, Trees

    Joe Doakes from Como Park writes: The federal government spent $890,000 on maintenance fees for bank accounts with no money in them. Watchdog groups say the government should close the accounts faster. They’re missing the point. Suppose Congress gives Dog Gone a $500,000 grant to study how assault weapons exacerbate global warming. The government opens…

  • Unintended Consequences

    Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: In 1996, the Minnesota Supreme Court adopted the requirement that every lawyer licensed in Minnesota periodically attend Continuing Legal Education classes on Elimination of Bias. It’s been 15 years. Has any progress been made? What measurement is used to determine the extent to which bias has been eliminated from…

  • Fumble

    The Monday Morning Quaterbacking over electronic gambling heats up. When breaking down the various back-up funding plans for the Vaseline Dome, one step was neglected – the finger pointing. For a funding mechanism that was originally billed to deliver $35 million in revenue per year, and continuously revised down to $17 million and then $1.7,…

  • Purple Bribe

    Upon further review – the Minnesota Vikings spent a fortune to acquire their new stadium. The Vaseline Dome has re-entered the media picture in the last few weeks, as new concerns have been raised about the viability of the electronic pull-tab funding mechanism which has fallen $13.2 million short of yearly estimates.  Or more accurately,…

  • The Care-Provider Unionization Debate In A Series of Nutshells

    The Shorter Anti-Unionization Activist: “Unionization would force us to,raise prices. Forcing us to unionize to accept state aid payments would cause me to stop accepting kids who get state assistance. Providers can already join the union; in eight years, out of 11,000 providers, exactly 57 have joined. I already work hard on improving the quality…

  • Open Letter To The Entire American People

    To:  Everyone in the USA From: Mitch Berg, Peasant who’s been through it all before Re:  “Sequestration” Hey, everyone, You may not remember this, but we’ve been through all this before.  Remember the “partial government shutdown”, back in the nineties?  It was a whole big nothing-burger. Oh, the Clinton Administration tried to make sure that…

  • Madame Obantoinette

    Michelle Obama seems to be a bit of a vacation junkie, and we – according to this story from the London Daily Mail, sourced from the Enquirer – are paying for it: White House sources today claimed that the First Lady has spent $10million of U.S. taxpayers’ money on vacations alone in the past year. Branding…

  • Comforting The Comfortable

    Let’s be clear, here:  “Public Art” is to art what “public restroom” is to rest.  I’m at a loss to think of any publicly-supported “art” that advances “art” in any way.  It could exist – my art trivia-fu isn’t the same as my music-fu – but it’s not leaping to mind. I think public subsidy…

  • Indiana as Precedent

    …and if you want to know where Scott Walker is trying to take the State of Wisconsin, read this.

  • As If That Were a Small Thing

    The argument that public workers earn more or less than their private-sector counterparts is debatable but only done so honestly when their full compensation and benefits package is taken into account. There is no evidence that public-sector workers in Wisconsin have higher total compensation than their counterparts in the private sector. It is true that…

  • What We Can Learn from Great Tits

    A recent study of Great Tits may lend commentary to America’s over-subscription to government entitlements. In Britain, the world capital of amateur ornithology roughly half of households put food out for their feathered friends, and it is estimated that around 30m of the country’s birds are given nourishment this way every year. Other places are…

  • I Don’t Want to Pay for your Wussie Car

    Toyota has gone to great lengths to make their flagship hybrid conspicuously ugly. Don’t worry, we will all notice you if you buy one but it will take you years to make up the difference in price versus a similar mileage compact car and hybrids are widely known to come nowhere near stated EPA mileage…

  • Don’t Let The Door Hit You

    Bright and early this morning on MPR, I heard Cathy Wurzer talking with former MNCD8 Representative Jim Oberstar. It goes without saying the guy became a slippery wonk over his five decades in DC. But it was his closing line that stuck with me; it should go up there with Cy Thao’s classic “When you…

  • Congress Passes The Obama Tax Non-Increase Bill

    A tax hike is averted, but only for two years – not enough time or certainty to “create” jobs but certainly better than a tax increase. Majorities of both parties supported the bill. Voting in favor were 139 Democrats and 138 Republicans, while 112 Democrats and 36 Republicans voted against it. Eight lawmakers didn’t vote.…

  • Are you even listening to the words coming out of your mouth?

    The Minnesota Lame-ber of Commerce is joining the minority and declaring it’s time for a new Vikings football stadium. Vikings stadium supporters, despite the state’s looming $6.2 billion budget and widespread public opposition, will push hard for a public subsidy package during the 2011 legislation session beginning Jan. 4. [emphasis mine-JR] Two thoughts: 1) How…

  • The Weight of it All

    By now you have seen the video and national coverage of the Metrodome’s roof collapse. It didn’t take long for the media to speculate that an act of God is his vote for a new Vikings stadium. The Vikings have been pushing for a new stadium for years without success. So far today, they have…

  • Please Quit Calling it a Tax Cut

    The Bush tax rates were put in effect in 2001. …and yet the government and most politicians are calling the current efforts to extend those rates and provisions tax cuts. The “cuts” happened in 2001. Nine years went by. Anything other than extending these rates is a tax hike. Got it? It would be different…

  • Obama Lifts a Finger

    …just so no one can say he didn’t lift a finger to reduce a bloated federal sector in a move widely reported as a “move to the center.”  A federal pay freeze yes, but consider this: The freeze doesn’t extend to new hiring, bonuses or step increases. It doesn’t even match the three-year freeze recommended…

  • Neither Rain, Nor Snow, nor Sleet…’cept Saturday.

    The post office wants to dump Saturday delivery. The U.S. Postal Service, facing a crushing budget deficit, unveiled a sweeping cost-cutting plan Tuesday that apparently includes elimination of Saturday deliveries. Who was it that once said in response to the question… “Show me one thing the government has done well” …The Postal Service? Tangent notwithstanding,…

  • The Stimulus Creates Another “Job”

    Add this guy to the roles of those who owe their livelihood to the Obama stimulus plan. Is he creating more jobs? No. …growing the economy? No. He’s researching the myth that is man-made global warming. A scientist in the middle of the ClimateGate scandal received economic stimulus funds last June. As NewsBusters reported on…

  • Governor Pawlenty is Way Off Track

    …and so too should be the plan to spend billions, that we don’t have by the way, on a high-speed link to Chicago. According to the plan, freight and passenger rail 20-year capital costs could range from $6.2 billion, with nearly two-thirds of that provided by federal, state and local government. The Twin Cities-Chicago line…