[Chris] Coleman’s mayoral opponent, Eva Ng, is calling on Coleman to explain why his campaign committee is spending money on airline tickets, restaurants and hotels outside the city of St. Paul.
Included is a report showing Chris Coleman’s expenditures to the Young Democrats of America Convention, the Minnesota Building Trades Convention and the State Convention of the Minnesota Association of Justice. Stuff, that, um, high profile candidates do — regardless if they’re running for governor or not. Does anyone think Norm Coleman or Al Franken raised any money from outside the state? What about Tim Pawlenty? Think R.T. Rybak does anything outside the city limits of Minneapolis? Either way, is this really all Eva Ng has on Chris Coleman?
Another kicker: It’s being held at a Baja Sol of all places. Why fast food for a fundraiser? Tony Sutton, MN GOP Chair is also the CEO of Baja Sol. (Couldn’t they have picked a Chair that was wasn’t the CEO of a fast food chain?)
Tim Pawlenty says he’s against raising taxes, but that’s really not accurate. What he means is that he’s against raising taxes transparently and fairly. He’s fine raising taxes by stealth, by passing them onto local governments in the form of property taxes. He’s also fine raising taxes if the move is obscured, such as renaming new taxes and calling them “fees.” And he’s fine raising taxes if it’s just on poorer Minnesotans, such as his arbitrary decision to reduce the renters’ property-tax rebate but not the homeowners’.
Here’s another example — Pawlenty is raising taxes on thousands of Minnesotans who work in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. Desperate to raise revenues to “balance” the budget, Pawlenty decreed an end to income-tax reciprocity with Wisconsin. The Star Tribune forecasts the impact of the change:
About 13,000 Minnesota residents who work in Wisconsin will have to file income tax returns in both states next year, and roughly 8,000 of those will see a tax bump estimated to average $300 a year.
Now, I don’t have a big problem with tax increases. I’ve often advocated a combination of tax increases and spending cuts to return the state’s budget to solvency for the long term. But I also believe that tax increases should be transparent, and that they should apply to the entire population of the state. We all need to do our part to solve budget problems, not just a randomly-selected group of a few thousand unfortunate citizens.
By the way, I’d love to see readers tell me this isn’t a tax increase. Thousands of Minnesotans’ taxes will increase in order for the Governor to raise additional revenue for the State. That’s pretty much the definition of a tax increase.
Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.
Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage. [Reuters]
Are all of these deaths directly attributable to a lack of health insurance? Probably not. But how many people could access to preventative care have saved?
It’s absolutely insane that in a country as advanced and wealthy as ours, we’re letting thousands and thousands of people die because they can’t afford medical care. We’ve gotten so absorbed in abstract arguments that it’s easy to forget what we’re really talking about. We’re talking about people dying — thousands of them.
We continue our experiment in Publius Radio on AM 950, The Voice of Minnesota, tonight from 6-7 PM. Again, I will be your host and the topic will be, broadly, local Minnesota politics.
Specifically, we will be talking with Rep. Jim Davnie (DFL, Minneapolis) about the Governor’s elimination of the General Assistance Medical Care program (GMAC) and the toll that will take on not only hundreds of Minnesota’s most unfortunate, but also every single Minnesotan paying property taxes. Rep. Davnie had a pointed letter in the Star Tribune this weekend that pin-pointed the heart of the issue:
This is another example of a governor who pushes the cost of state government onto property taxpayers like us in order to keep his pledge to extreme special-interest groups. The costs don’t go away; they just get shifted to the least fair of taxes and to those least able to pay.
It should be a fascinating discussion and we would enjoy your input: 952-946-6205 is the call-in line.
Next we will be talking with John Fitzgerald from MN 2020 about his recent report tracking the devastating effect that the budget crunch is having on the availability of a wide variety of counseling services in our public schools. It’s an interesting illustration of the human toll funding cuts are having on our state’s youth and, subsequently, its future.
Tim Pawlenty has been busy. No, not busy being Governor of Minnesota — he has way more important things to do. He’s been touring the United States, trying to build support for a presidential campaign. And MPR has been keeping track. They’ve produced the handy-dandy map below to document his travels — green is for official travel, red is for personal.
A Member may not send any mass mailing outside the congressional district from which the Member was elected.
Considering Bachmann has an unusually high number of staffers dedicated to media, why is it that her press office is guilty of repeated violations of misusing taxpayer dollars and the congressional frank?
We all know that one of the worst features of the health insurance industry in the US today is the reliance on “preexisting conditions” to disqualify Americans for health insurance. What may not be clear to all of us if just how extensive some insurers’ lists of preexisting conditions have become.
Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan consumer advocacy organization, has released a report that explores the internal underwriting guidelines of several health insurance companies, and you won’t believe some of the “conditions” that make people “uninsurable,” such as being an expectant father, or taking prescription drugs for allergies, heartburn, or toenail fungus.
I looked a little closer into one plan that Consumer Watchdog highlighted: PacifiCare, a California insurance company. Their list of conditions requiring automatic rejection includes received therapy or counseling within the last 6 months, or being disabled. You can see the full, very extensive list of “preexisting conditions” here.
Whatever ultimately happens with health care reform, we at least need to end this nonsense. Without health insurance, millions of Americans are unable to afford proper medical treatment. So how could it make any sense to deny access to insurance just because a prospective client has heartburn?
Bobby Jindal is not only pandering to the base, he’s doing so with absolutely no originality. He’s apparently copying Tim Pawlenty’s boneheaded recent move, in which Pawlenty claimed to be cutting state funding for ACORN, even though no such funding exists.
Jindal is stealing Pawlenty’s schtick, even the part where it fails:
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an executive order to keep any state money from going to the controversy-wracked Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has its national headquarters in New Orleans.
According to the state’s Division of Administration, no state agencies have existing contracts with ACORN. [Times-Picayune, via Think Progress]
I have two words for Bobby Jindal: Back off. Our governor was the first to expose himself as a pandering but incompetent suck-up to far-right conservative extremists, and you can’t just waltz in and steal his failure.
I fully support the public option. The public option will be in the bill that passes the House.
That brings us much closer to truly progressive reform. Now, our attention has to be on the Senate. Will the Senate also pass a public option? If not, will the conference committee preserve a public option?
Politico has a great article about House Minority Leader John Boehner’s struggle to keep his head above water amidst the building flood of crazy coming out of the conservative wing of his party:
Like a surfer riding the heavy waves before a hurricane, Boehner, a conservative with a penchant for compromise, has spent the past few months trying to harness the anger of the GOP base without allowing his conference to veer too far to the right.
A particular danger to the party, Politico writes, is our very own Congresswoman Michele Bachmann:
Sources say they have been especially wary of the possible damage inflicted on the party’s reputation by bomb-throwing Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who last fall called for an investigation into whether members of Congress are “pro-America or anti-America.”
But Boehner is way too late. The Republican party is now completely under the influence of people like Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and “birther” leader Orly Taitz. Reasonable* Republicans like Boehner are a dying breed.
*The word “reasonable” here means only “reasonable compared to the lunatic fringe,” and not “reasonable by most standards of logic.” Boehner is, in fact, an extremist in his own right, and it’s a sad day when he’s considered one of the more reasonable Republicans in the House.
A “journalist” releases a heavily edited tape* of a few individuals saying some questionable things and suddenly the US Congress (and that one VERY CONSERVATIVE friend you have on Facebook) are up in arms? Yes, these folks said inappropriate things, and yes, they were fired. No, they were NOT representing the principals or values of ACORN, and NO, no one in their right mind believes that they were.
This is CLEARLY and OBVIOUSLY a concerted effort from the right to take down a progressive and successful movement that is currently focusing on working people and health care. This isn’t about a few employees’ actions, this is about using any kind of dirt that can be “found” (gathered by entrapment) to distract from much larger and much more important issues at hand.
And you know, it’s a damn shame. ACORN has done some wonderful work in our communities, and now they are going to have to fight an uphill battle against politicians who are rushing to distance themselves from the organization in this latest small-minded fad.
*He refuses to release the recording in its entirety.
As Justin Gardner points out at Donklephant, Max Baucus’s health care bill does not have a public option. This is a major change from the other health reform proposals out there. Nevertheless, it appears that absolutely no Republicans are willing to vote for it.
Republicans are apparently completely uninterested in any compromise, no matter how far to the right it moves. So why bother compromising at all? Baucus’s bill is clearly inferior to the other health reform bills in Congress. Why should the Democrats choose an inferior bill when it won’t get any Republican support anyway?
[Ed. note: The last time I wrote about Republican intransigence, one commenter asked that I stop writing about the subject. Admittedly, I write about it a lot. But there’s a simple reason: It’s the big story of the past few months. If there were some progress in Congress, I’d be writing about that. But since there isn’t, I’m writing about what’s stopping it.]
One side effect of 30 years of conservative culture wars is that city-dwellers are now seen as “un-American.” In the parlance of the 2008 campaign, urbanites aren’t a part of “real America,” they’re part of the “liberal elite.” We saw this dynamic unfold once again, for the umpteenth time, during Margaret Anderson Kelliher’s announcement yesterday.
Kelliher represents several neighborhoods in Southwest Minneapolis, in the heart of the evil American-hating city. But that’s not where she chose to announce:
Today, Minnesota Speaker of the House Margaret Anderson Kelliher announced her campaign for Governor at her family farm near Mankato.
Highlighting her career in public service, Anderson Kelliher discussed her days growing up on a dairy farm and the challenges of the 80’s farm crisis.
The Republican Party’s attack on Kelliher, on the other hand, warned “real” Minnesotans that Kelliher is actually from Minneapolis:
Margaret Anderson Kelliher’s rural makeover in Mankato isn’t fooling anyone. As an out of touch Minneapolis liberal, Kelliher has voted to raise the gas tax, the metro wide sales tax and income taxes. People in Greater Minnesota and the suburbs need to be aware of this tax and spend wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Matt posted a few days ago about Margaret Anderson Kelliher making her Gubernatorial announcement on Wednesday and guess what - today is Wednesday and it happened. I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know (you’re so SMART!) but I wanted to share the video that was released today HERE. It’s a lovely little announcement and bio piece, mostly revolving around the family farm.
We continue our experiment in Publius Radio on AM 950, The Voice of Minnesota, tonight from 6-7 PM. Again, I will be your host and the topic will be, broadly, local Minnesota politics.
Matt 
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