Here are just a few of mine.
Monthly Archive for December, 2009
The greats thing about having a nice, fresh new decade is that, for a while at least, it can be anything we want it to be. What are your hopes for the new decade?
For any of you readers aspiring to run for office one day, here’s a quick tip. If you have written things you’d rather people not see, it’s a good idea to purge them before you become a candidate, not wait until after you’ve been endorsed. By the time Mike Parry deleted 33 tweets from his Twitter stream, it was too late. Progressive bloggers and activists had already saved screenshots of many of the worst.
Perhaps the worst offender is this one:
read the exclusive on Mr O in Newsweek. He is a Power Hungry Arrogant Black Man
As Jeff Fecke puts it, Parry apparently finds “power hungry,” “arrogant,” and “black” to be equally problematic.
Or how about Parry’s elegantly simple solution to local government’s financial problems:
Here are a few choice excerpts from the ruling against Pawlenty:
The Governor’s unallotment power… has been held by the Minnesota Court of Appeals to be constitutional…. That remains the settled law in the State of Minnesota, and it would be improper for this Court to revisit the constitutionality of the unallotment statute itself. It is constitutional. It was the specific manner in which the Governor exercised his unallotment authority that trod upon the constitutional power of the Legislature.
The revenue that the governor vetoes would have balanced the budget based on the anticipated receipts forecast in February 2009. The governor used unallotment rather than calling a special session of the legislature or vetoing the appropriations bill to balance the budget. He did this after signing number spending bills which taken together, he knew would not balance the budget unless revenues were raised. He used the unallotment statute to address a situation that was neither unknown nor unanticipated when the appropriations bills became law.
The crux of the matter is simple: Tim Pawlenty is Governor, not a legislator. This ruling is very important for maintaining the separation of power in Minnesota, and as I’ve written before, I guarantee that one day Republicans will be thankful for it as well, when there is a Republican legislature and a DFL governor to tries to usurp the legislature’s power.
In the meantime, though, the ruling will undoubtedly make for a difficult legislative session. Let’s talk about that a bit.
Huge news…
Judge Kathleen Gearin, chief judge of the Ramsey County District, has granted a temporary restraining order, retroactive to Nov. 1, preventing one piece Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s use of his unallotment powers. Specifically, she is restoring the funds unallotted from a state program that subsidizes Minnesotans with special health-related dietary needs. Pawlenty unalloted that program in its entirety. The judge’s order un-unallots it. But the logic of her order affects the entire $2.7 billion unallotment that Pawlenty ordered at the end of the 2009 legislative session and seems to invite other plaintifs to come forward seeking reinstatement of all of the appropriations that Pawlenty unallotted.
Alright, I’m just about the last liberal in the entire blogosphere to get to this, because I usually try to avoid topics like defense, foreign affairs, etc. But the Republicans’ double-standard in light of the failed attempt at a terrorist attack this Christmas is just shocking and horrifying, and I need to at least say something about it.
Let’s review the history, shall we?
2001: On Bush’s watch, the worst terrorist attack in our history is perpetrated. A few months later, there is another attempt — the foiled “shoe-bombing.” The Bush White House doesn’t respond for 6 days, but nobody says much of anything. The shoe-bomber Richard Red is tried in the civilian justice system without a fuss. In 2004, the Republicans use the threat of new attacks to bludgeon Democrats — not the ones in charge of any aspect of the country at the time — as weak on security.
2009: On Obama’s watch, there is a foiled attempt at a bombing, much like the shoe-bombing. The Obama White House doesn’t respond for 3 days, and the entire nation wigs out. Plans to try bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in civilian courts are held up as proof that Obama and the Democrats are a danger to this country.
It would not be an overstatement to say that I am absolutely livid at the double-standard.
The upcoming special election to replace state Senator-turned-Racino lobbyist Dick Day has a very short timeframe, so the Republicans are coming out swinging. In their first attacks against DFL candidate Jason Engbrecht, the GOP seems to be calculating that voters in SD26 will be repulsed by a candidate who takes a rationed, reasonable approach. If you ask me, that sounds like a pretty bad plan.
Republicans are attacking Engbrecht over a quote from an interview with MPR, in which he discusses our massive budget deficit responsibly and rationally. He says that, given the state of our budget, we will need a solution that incorporates a number of strategies to balance the budget.
When it comes to the state’s budget problem, he said revenue and spending cuts need to both be on the table.
“As a scientist, I had to learn to accept the way the universe is and try to study it for what it is. And that’s the approach we need to take when looking at our finances at the state level right now. There’s a harsh reality that needs to be faced and the simple is that we can’t fix the problem by raising taxes by itself. We can’t fix the problem by making cuts by itself.”
If you ask me, it doesn’t get any less controversial than that. We have a massive budget deficit ahead of us, and all options should be on the table. I think Minnesotans value policymakers who are willing to look at a problem rationally and find the best answer.
As opposed to, say, Republican candidate Mike Parry’s answer:
Watching the health care debate unfold in the Senate, I was struck by how much the bill has become a creature of the way things work in the Senate. The Senate has a very complicated, arcane set of rules and procedures. Bills in the Senate are typically the product of a complex combination of procedure, tradition, and Senators’ social relationships. It can all be difficult to follow if you’re not used to watching. That’s why I’ve created this handy-dandy flowchart to summarize the way things work in the Senate.
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Have you noticed over the past few months that every single bill that goes through Congress passes the House first, only to be held up for months in the Senate, if it even emerges at all? People for the American Way has discovered the reason: The Republicans have filibustered dozens of bills, slowing progress in the Senate to a crawl. Their report finds that Republican filibusters are setting a nearly record-breaking pace — although they may not quite break the record, which they themselves set in the last Congress.
What’s particularly heinous about the Republicans’ obstruction strategy is that it’s not just geared towards controversial bills. In fact, the majority of cloture votes have been not even remotely controversial:
…many of these votes didn’t just fail: they failed by such significant margins that no one, especially not an experienced vote counter like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, could possibly have expected they could actually pass. In fact, in a majority of cases, 65 or more Senators voted to cut off debate. In several cases the number reached into the seventies and eighties, and in one case 97 Senators voted in favor of cloture, but not before the maneuver chewed up valuable time.
So why force a vote? Because it eats up a ton of time:
That’s a critical question for Minnesota, given projections that we will lose a Congressional seat in the redistricting after the 2010 census. The margin for error is incredibly small; we may miss out on retaining 8 seats by only about 1,000 people.
The folks doing the forecasting are using a few different tools, but the most important among them is a series of population estimates by the US Census Bureau. Looking back at the 2000 Census, however, it looks like the Census Bureau significantly underestimated Minnesota’s population.
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If you haven’t been following Ed Kohler’s blog, The Deets lately, you’re missing out on a lot of good writing and research. Kohler’s interests and writing topics are wide and diverse, ranging from Jucy Lucys to shoes on powerlines, from online marketing and business intelligence to toilet paper, from exposing unethical practices in media organizations and the phone book industry to covering up graffiti, and physically running every single street in Minneapolis and writing about it.
Lately, however, Kohler has been writing a lot about the MN GOP and their unofficially associated whisper site, Minnesota Democrats Exposed. Here’s a few posts if you need to be caught up:
Luke Hellier: Minnesota Democrats Exposed Exposed
Marty Seifert Puts Taxpayer Funded Arts Ahead of Cops
Ben Golnik Tweets About Getting Out of Minneapolis – from Minneapolis
Aaron Cocking’s Twitter Echo Chamber Contributions
MinnesotaDemocratsExposed.com Dropped from Google
Some Perspective on MN GOP’s Issue with R.T. Rybak
A lot of it is great research and solid work in catching liars red-handed. I caught up with Kohler recently and he agreed for a quick interview. In full disclosure, Kohler is a neighbor of mine and is someone I have a drink with now and then.
MNpublius: Looking back, your blog hasn’t been very political. Why are you getting into politics?
Ed Kohler: My blog started as a political blog, but I lost interest in politics as a theme over time and surely will again. Lately, my inspiration actually came from Newsbobber.com. Out of curiosity, I visited every blog in the Newsbobber 100 list of top-100 Minnesota blogs which reintroduced me to some new blogs and blogs I haven’t visited in quite a while. Some right-wing blogs that were particularly over the top with misleading statements inspired me to correct the record with links to accurate data.
MNp: Some of your recent posts sound very pro-R.T. Rybak. Do you support his run for governor? Do you volunteer or donate to his campaign?
EK: I’ve been a Minneapolis resident since 2000 with the exception of one year in St. Louis Park, and wouldn’t live in the city of I didn’t think it was the right place for me. I’m proud of the city and was ticked off to see Luke Hellier at Minneapolis Democrats Exposed misrepresenting the city’s crime data in an attempt to attack Rybak. I’m more pro-Minneapolis than I am pro-Rybak, so seeing Hellier mislead people about the state of crime in the city pissed me off. I’m not very politically involved day to day, so haven’t had a chance to give each candidate a serious look yet, so I can’t say for sure whether Rybak is my candidate of choice. Perhaps I should go with Tom Emmer since we were both athletes at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks? Well, that may be one of the only things we have in common. To be clear, I have not volunteered or donated to Rybak’s campaign and my opinions are definitely my own. More »
1912: Franklin Teddy Roosevelt campaigns on a ticket of national health insurance. (EDITED; whoops!)
1934: After some discussion of including national health care, the New Deal passes without it.
1945: Harry Truman tries and fails to get health reform through Congress.
1965: Medicare and Medicaid increase coverage, but stop far short of universal coverage.
1976: Universal health coverage is a part of Jimmy Carter’s platform, but it never comes up for a vote in Congress.
1994: Bill Clinton tries and fails to get health reform through Congress.
2009: Both houses of Congress pass health reform.
So nobody’s 100 percent thrilled with the health care bill that passed the Senate. For an undertaking this large, this controversial, and this long in the making, it could hardly be otherwise. But let’s keep in mind just how extraordinary it is that, after an entire century, our president is finally on the verge of signing major health reform into law.
[Adapted from the New York Times]
I don’t mean to sound fawning, but I’m very impressed by the willingness of the DFL majority — and in particular, the DFL majority leader — to push for a fairer process for redistricting.
Redistricting — the redrawing of the state’s voting districts which takes place after every decennial census — has historically been a messy affair, because the process is controlled by state legislators who have obvious conflicts of interest. There are always instances of gerrymandering, the process of drawing the boundaries precisely in a way that maximizes one party’s advantage. Gerrymandered districts usually look like the one to the right; you can see more at Slate.
There are two primary methods of gerrymandering: You can split up a large bloc of one party’s voters, effectively diluting their influence, or you can cram them all into one district, conceding that one district but taking them out of all of the other districts. Either way, it’s a shady process. That’s why, here in Minnesota, Senate Majority leader Larry Pogemiller has proposed a bill to make the process significantly less political (more on that bill below the break).
There are many on the right who would like to draw a parallel between Representative Parker Griffith’s switch from the Democratic party to the Republican party and Arlen Specter’s switch the other way earlier this year. They would also like to claim, of course, that the Big Bad Liberals Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid forced Griffith’s hand with their Incredibly Liberal Liberalness. Aside from the fact that Specter’s shift, coming from a Senator rather than a Representative, had a much greater impact, the fact is the Republican party seems to have been the proper place for Griffith all along.
To all of our readers who will be traveling for the holidays, here’s hoping you can avoid this:
According to a winter storm warning issued this afternoon for central and southern Minnesota and western Wisconsin, the mess is expected to begin Wednesday afternoon — and go on and on.
…
The heaviest snowfall, 12 to 20 inches, likely will fall in a swath from Minneapolis to the Iowa border and west to the South Dakota border, said National Weather Service forecaster Jim Taggart.
That’s some spectacularly crummy timing for a winter storm. Stay safe!
Oh please oh please oh please oh please….
A reader at MN Progressive Project reports getting a poll that sounds like it was from the Coleman camp. Is Coleman planning to jump into the race? The DFL can only hope.
Coleman has a lot of residual goodwill from conservatives who supported him during the recount. Given his lack of conservative principles — or really any principles whatsoever — he wouldn’t ordinarily have an easy time during a GOP primary, but he just might be able to get the nod, which would be a tremendous gift to the DFL.
The fact is, Coleman is not popular with Minnesotans, and he’s had a heck of a time winning statewide elections. In fact, his only success — a narrow victory over Walter Mondale, running in Paul Wellstone’s stead — came in such extraordinary circumstances that it can hardly be considered an example of Coleman’s ability to win at the statewide level. More recently,he failed to get 42 percent of the vote against Al Franken, which does not indicate a high probability of success in future elections, to say the least.
We all know how much trouble the DFL has had in recent gubernatorial elections. Now, though, they may have a new secret weapon — Norm Coleman.
People Are Shouting
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