Minnesota has a historic budget deficit, our economy is in free fall and the legislative session is growing increasingly acrimonious. Given all this, one would expect that working with the Legislature would by Gov. Pawlenty’s top priority. A quick glance at T-Paw’s schedule, however, indicates that the Guv is much more worried about his national profile than coming to an budget agreement with legislative leaders.
Since the start of the 2009 session, Tim Pawlenty has met legislative leaders just three times. What’s T-Paw doing with all his free time if he’s not trying to close the budget deficit? Well, during that same period, Pawlenty has made 24 appearances on national media outlets (including 7 on Fox). That’s a stunning 8 national media appearances for each meeting with legislative leaders.
Its pretty clear that the Governor is more focused on raising his national profile than bringing the legislative session to a successful conclusion.
A list of the Governor’s legislative meetings and media appearances is after the jump.
I’m still sympathetic to government spending to stimulate the economy, and it will be a while before we can substantially rein in spending. However, we do need to start thinking about the future, and this is an obvious first step:
The House Blue Dogs on Wednesday quickly introduced a deficit-busting pay-as-you-go rule which seeks to ensure that new spending programs are paid for.
“This is not rocket science,” Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.) told reporters, arguing that foreign creditors would soon recoil from lending money to the U.S. if it kept up its deficit. “We either get our house in order…or we lose our economic freedom.”
The Obama administration’s budget calls for reducing the deficit over the course of his first term, but quite frankly that’s not good enough. With the amount of money we’ve spent in the past year, Rep. Tanner is exactly right — if we don’t get our fiscal house in order, we’re going to have a lot of trouble getting other countries to keep funding us.
Next year’s budget will probably still have to spend heavily, as we will most likely still be coming out of the recession. After that, Congress should eliminate the deficit. As always, this will require the same compromise I always advocate: Congress must raise revenues and cut spending. This isn’t rocket science — it’s just what needs to be done.
In an interview with Katie Couric, Wisconsin Republican Representative Paul Ryan says that “most of us think” Al Franken is going to win. Poor Normy, must be hard to show his face in DC these days. Video here.
Speaking of how crummy 2009 has been, advance data show another bad quarter from January through March:
Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — decreased at an annual rate of 6.1 percent in the first quarter of 2009, (that is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to advance estimates released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP decreased 6.3 percent.
Of course, this wasn’t really unexpected. We all lived through the last quarter, and we know how much it stunk. We don’t really need the official statistics to tell us it was a bad quarter for the US economy. I’ll be really interested in seeing the stastics for the 2nd quarter — that is, the quarter we’re in right now. Real GDP will almost definitely decrease again, but I’m hopeful that things are turning around. Who knows, by the end of the year we could even be back at zero!
Related update: Maybe things won’t improve in the 2nd quarter. Chrysler will file for bankruptcy after negotiations fell apart. That’s particularly important because of the auto industry’s impact on GDP. From the BEA press release: “Motor vehicle output subtracted 1.36 percentage points from the first-quarter change in real GDP after subtracting 2.01 percentage points from the fourth-quarter change.”
Global health authorities warned Wednesday that swine flu was threatening to bloom into a pandemic, and the virus spread farther in Europe even as the outbreak appeared to stabilize at its epicenter. A toddler who succumbed in Texas became the first death outside Mexico.
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WHO Director General Margaret Chan declared the phase 5 alert after consulting with flu experts from around the world.
I’d just like to add that this is turning into pretty much the worst year ever. First a massive recession, then swine flue, and the year”s only one-third over? For crying out loud, is it 2010 yet?
If you’re the Governor, there’s an easy way to make your budget proposals look better than they really are: Staff your budget office with lackeys and yes-men who don’t actually produce accurate budget estimates. That way, your Department of Management and Budget can massage the numbers to make your budget look far more responsible than it really is.
That can be a problem, though, when you come across legislators who actually know what they’re doing. One such legislator is Larry Pogemiller, the Senate Majority Leader, who excoriated Finance Commissioner Tom Hanson yesterday.
Pogemiller had a simple argument: Spending shifts are not at all the same thing as budget cuts. Shifts, obviously, need to be paid back. They’re not true savings, they’re just procrastination. That’s why Minnesota law now requires the budget to be balanced over four years, not just two. Over four years, the Governor’s budget runs a deficit of $2.6 billion.
The Governor says that he can fix the budget without raising revenues, but the fact is that he can’t. He has only “balanced” the budget if you ignore billions of dollars in spending shifts and new borrowing, and pretend that we’ll never have to pay for them.
Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher also chimed in, saying the Governor’s budget was not ready for prime time. Watch that video after the break.
“I will not be an automatic 60th vote,” Specter said Tuesday afternoon. “I would illustrate that with my position on employee choice, also known as card check. I think it’s a bad deal and I’m opposed to it. I will not vote to impose cloture. … If the Democratic Party asks too much, I will not vote with them.” [via Politico]
I don’t support imposing strict party discipline and ideological purity like Republicans have done. Democrats should not require that Specter vote with them 100 percent of the time. Nevertheless, one thing is clear: Specter needs the Democratic party. If he lost the Republican nomination — which he would have — he would not have been able to run as an independent in Pennsylvania. As such, Specter will need to make some concessions to the Democrats.
I’m certainly concerned that, while Specter often crosses party lines, he leans more to the right than he does to the left. The Wonk Room details some of his leanings, such as his opposition to Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the Employee Free Choice Act, and clean energy proposals.
Pennsylvania Democrats should keep Specter honest by challenging him in 2010, and ask him to prove himself throughout the remainder of this session. If Specter is going to receive the Democrats’ support in the 2010 primary, he needs to be a reliable vote for the Democrats’ agenda, and in particular, he needs to be a reliable vote for cloture. He doesn’t need to vote for cloture 100 percent of the time, but if he remains a reliable Republican vote while simply changing his party affiliation, his switch doesn’t really benefit the Democrats.
Because of Specter’s vulnerability within the Republican party, Democrats are now in the driver’s seat. They need to make sure they’re actually getting votes from Specter in exchange for saving his political career.
MPR’s Tom Scheck just put out an interesting tweet on his Twitter feed:
@MAKMinnesota complained that @Pawlenty won’t allow her to follow him on twitter.
For those of you who are not Twitter-literate, that means that the Governor of Minnesota is blocking the Speaker of the Minnesota House from reading his updates (called tweets). The Speaker isn’t really missing much - T-Paw hasn’t written much interesting on his feed - but its an exceptionally juvenile gesture on the part of the Governor.
When will the people of the 6th District tire of this garbage:
Quoth the Bachmann:
“I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter,” said Bachmann. “And I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”
As the City Pages point out, Bachmann’s comments are not only disgusting, they are factually inaccurate. The 1976 swine flu started under the watchful gaze of Gerald Ford.
Franken makes 60. Franken will win at this point, but with Specter switching, the GOP is likely to fight his seating even more.
How bankrupt is this party!? I mean, for one of your longest-standing members to switch parties when it gives the opposition a FILIBUSTER-PROOF MAJORITY … that’s just crazy. The GOP is completely FUBAR people and if you’re one of the thousands who managed to bail on the sinking ship, we’ll help you off your lifeboat with open arms.
While this does change everything (don’t let anyone tell you this is a wash), Specter will remain a conservative; he’ll just have a (D) next to his name. This helps us in a huge way, but don’t expect the Senate to all of a sudden pass universal healthcare — Specter’s not the only conservative D.
Also, have I added: WOOOWWWWWWW!!!!!
Addendum: I’m sure many of you will note that this is a raw political calculation by a Senator facing a potentially brutal battle in PA in 2010 (and it is just that), this is still an Earth-shaking moment. Specter has actually decided that having an (R) next to his name in the next election will be so bad that he’s willingly sold his party down the river — that’s big no matter what the motivation.
Pennsylvania’s Republican Senator Arlen Specter is reportedly changing parties, with the expected outcome of being able to break up Senate filibusters (once we get Al Franken for the magic number 60), and move the President’s agenda forward. The New York Times specifically mentions the race in Minnesota, and the Senator’s statement mentions how far to the right the party has moved in recent years. You have to wonder - is former Senator Norm Coleman inadvertently causing Republicans to change party just in an effort to counter his drag on the US Senate?
DFLers continue to do what needs to be done, with both houses in the legislature passing $400 - $600 million in cuts for Health and Human Services. The cuts are necessary to help balance our massive budget deficit, but they’re a heck of a lot better than Tim Pawlenty’s proposed cuts of nearly $2 billion. Pawlenty’s unsustainable cuts are the result of his continued refusal to recognize the need for a compromise between spending cuts and revenue increases.
Pawlenty’s irresponsible proposal has the support of even one small group — hardcore conservatives who believe that social safety net programs should be abolished. Even a majority of his fellow Republicans don’t seem to support him. During the debate on Health and Human Services funding, Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller brought the Governor’s proposal up for a vote. Only 9 Republicans out of 21 in the Senate supported it.
“Some people think that declaring a state of emergency about the flu was a political thing to push the Sebelius nomination through,” said [Concerned Women for America president Wendy] Wright. She pointed to news stories that ask whether the slow-walking of the Sebelius choice will hurt the response to the flu. “If there’s even a hint that [Department of Homeland Security] is manipulating the health situation to push a political appointee through, well, it almost defies imagination that they’d be willing to that.”
It’s not just the Obama administration using “science” to try to push through Kathleen Sebelius’s nomination, though. Even the World Health Organization is in on it, raising their pandemic alert level from Phase 3 to Phase 4. It must be a global conspiracy to get Sebelius confirmed — either that, or a coordinated global response to a potentially deadly public health threat.
As Minnesota Democrats Exposed continues its slow slide into obscurity and irrelevance, it’s good to see Ryan Flynn continuing to make the most superficial arguments possible. You’re right, Ryan, Ellison is a disgrace. After all, in all of American history, what good has civil disobedience ever done?
Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, along with four other Congresspeople and two activists (from Save Darfur and The Enough Project), were arrested this afternoon outside of the Sudanese embassy in DC when they crossed a police line to protest the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur. The participants in the protest knowingly and willing crossed the line and were arrested with the hopes of garnering the attention of the Obama administration. They are calling on world leaders to put pressure on Sudan President Omar al-Bashir, who recently ousted 16 aid agencies in Darfur. The message is simple: the violence and terror in the Darfur region of Sudan must end, and our country must help.
While we must respect all activists who put their lives on the line to bring light to such important issues, we have to especially honor our elected officials who are putting their jobs, their careers, their constituents and their party on the line when they take such brave steps. I am proud to say that the person who represents me in the US Congress not only believes as strongly as I do about this issue, but is willing to use his prominent position so honorably in the service of his beliefs.
The Darfur region is on the Western side of Sudan, and has been primarily known since 2003 as the site of acts so brutal and violent that many are calling it genocide. The conflicts that have led to the War in Darfur are complex - including issues of overpopulation, drought, ethnic conflict, clashes between tribes and rebel groups and government cover-up. The outcome has been stunning: hundreds of thousands of people killed, 3 million people displaced (meaning that they are mainly living in overpopulated and underserved refugee camps), attempts at ethnic cleansing, widespread killing and rape, villages burned to the ground and young boys drafted to go to war.
Apologizes for the graphic content. I hope that we can listen to the voices we have heard today and make a new push for our government to do what they can to ease this human rights tragedy. If you wish to send a message to President Obama about his commitment to Darfur, click here.
Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison, along with four other Congresspeople and two activists (from 
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