I’m back from my first day as Undercover Boss for the GOP. I’m ready with a crucial report on how the GOP can bring young voting power back into the party.
If the GOP is bold enough to execute this plan, it will not be an easy Kobe Bryantesque slam-dunk to win the youth vote. It’s going to be a Rudy-like journey to achieve success.
Not bashing someone after they have passed away is an unwritten rule in polite society. But every rule has its exception. The headline might read Congressman Jack Murtha passes away, but for the soldiers and Marines stationed at Al Asad in 2006, he will forever be known as Traitor Jack.
There were plenty of reasons to dislike Murtha; political corruption, bribery, unrepentant pork barrel spending, and petty partisan politics among them. But all of those are things that corrupt politicians do, and corrupt politicians have been around since the first Neanderthals starting making rules for their clan to live by. In the military, however, Murtha will be forever remembered as the politician who looked at incomplete evidence, went on national television (later to be played around the world) and decided to judge the guilt or innocence of a squad of Marines operating in Haditha, Iraq.
A few days ago, President Obama told a story about an OFA supporter in St. Louis who had volunteered during the campaign and organized her community for health reform, but recently succumbed to breast cancer.
She didn't have quality insurance, so she put off crucial exams and didn't catch it early enough. And while she fought cancer, she also spent her final months fighting for a chance at health reform so others wouldn't go through the same thing.
We hear over and over the state of MN is broke. Legislators and the governor are already preparing to borrow another billion dollars for a bonding bill to reward a some of the states cities with community centers, zoo upgrades and union jobs. Our public servants are deceptively calling it a jobs bill. There is also a $2 billion school funding bill on the table (did they forget we are broke?) and millions for higher ed projects.
Last week Governor Pawlenty announced education funding was off the table for spending cuts (did he miss that memo that MN is broke too?). Education is almost one half of the state budget. Billions of dollars and some of our school districts cannot graduate an educated population as charged by our state constitution. A tend that has continued for decades and not for lack of funding.
Watching the president of Education MN (who makes over $160,000/year) in the latest million dollar ad campaign telling me to ask Governor Pawlenty and the legislators to fund education is driving me crazy.
Has to be seen to be believed. It comes at the end of last night’s Hardball, and within minutes my friend John Ziegler tipped me off to it. Chris Matthews talks with Eugene Robinson and Susan Page about Sarah Palin’s speech and hyperventilates about “secession”, which is where Robinson picks this up, attempting to keep up with Matthews’ paranoia. At the end, Matthews actually warns Robinson that “Charismatic leaders have done this country and this world a lot of harm,” apparently oblivious to his own track record over the last two years in being Barack Obama’s number-one fanboy.
Of course, we don’t forget it, and I’ve mashed this up with a couple of highlights from Matthews’ career as a journalist in the Age of Obama:
The ad hit pretty close to home. In our community, we are now required to use clear garbage bags so the garbage collectors can examine our garbage to make sure we are recycling instead of just dumping recyclables into the garbage. (But let me add that I have not heard of a single instance where a curbside garbage collector has actually looked at a garbage bag and rejected it because it contained recyclables. There's a pretty serious principal-agent problem here since the garbage collectors are competitive profit-oriented private businesses who have an incentive to keep us happy and collect whatever we put out.)
Why would governments not understand this incentive incompatibility? John notes that his local government has already given up the ability to inspect "personal garbage" (let your mind wander, I can wait. ... OK) and (this is the best part) people have cut so much back on putting out garbage that the contractor is losing money.
The I-35 Bush Billboard mystery made the Drudge Report. Bob Collins at MPR with NPR is hot on the pursuit of the billboard's owner:
There is a billboard along I-35 near Wyoming, Minn., with a huge photo of former president George W. Bush and this question: "Miss Me Yet?"
Now, the push is on to find out who paid to have it put up.
Bob says there's no readily apparent claim of ownership on the billboard, so he's heading back to the scene to see if he can find out who's behind the message. He's also got some local politicos looking into it. He'll keep us posted.
Your tips or best guesses? Cross-posted and tips welcome at FreedomDogs.
Prior to the 2006 midterms, Karl Rove highlighted the plan to maintain control of Congress. The Architect said that 2006 would be about presenting the electorate a choice between the Democrats and congressional Republicans. As they say, the rest is history.
That's what makes me curious why David Plouffe would want to turn this year's midterms into a choice election:
Ask David Plouffe how Democrats can recover from their electoral setbacks over the past few months and he has a simple answer: Republicans.
"Politics is a comparative exercise," Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama's presidential campaign, told the Fix in his first extended interview since he took on a broadened political role for the White House in advance of the midterm elections. "This isn't just a referendum on Democrats or our party. It's a choice."
Last week, the Obama administration went to great lengths that they were still getting information from Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab despite the FBI's Mirandizing him. Frankly, that's missing the point. Here's what Wikipedia says about Miranda rights:
The Miranda warnings were mandated by the 1966 United States Supreme Court decision in the case of Miranda v. Arizona as a means of protecting a criminal suspect's Fifth Amendment right to avoid coercive self-incrimination (see right to silence).
First, it's worth noting that, prior to this administration, Miranda only applied to criminals. Second, it's worth noting that, since terrorists never have to be released, there isn't a need to Mirandize a terrorist. That's only important if the federal government thought it was important to prosecute terrorists in federal criminal court. Third, it's important to note that the Obama administration is using a double standard.
Click on the link below and watch TV coverage of Representative Mary Ellen Otremba's "Dock-To-Nowhere". A $667,000 dollar dock built on a lake that few have heard of.
Although in a substantial minority, Kurt Zellers and the House Republicans have come out with an aggressive pro-growth platform in the first days of the 2010 legislative session. In stark contrast to the same old spending advocated by the DFL majority, the message is clear—we want more jobs and a more business friendly environment—now. This release from MNGOP today points to a fighting minority that is on the side of business and the will of the people.
House Republicans this afternoon on the House floor jumped out in front of DFLers who are fast-tracking a nearly $1 billion capital projects bill.
House Republicans, who hold a 47-vote minority to the DFLer’s 87-vote majority, tried to suspend the rules of the House in order to take up a bill that would phase-out the state’s corporate income tax over a period of 10 years. The bill is sponsored by Minority Leader Kurt Zellers, R-Maple Grove.
Rep. Laura Brod, R-New Prague, said lowering businesses’ costs would help get people back to work faster than the proposed bonding bill that borrows money to pay for construction projects.
Have you noticed how many political terms, mostly Democrat, have been given new, focus group tested terms the past 20 years or so? Tax increases are revenue enhancements. To be liberal is now to be progressive. National socialist health care is a public option or single payer. And, with expenditures at all levels of government too large for even Democrats to ignore, "spending" is increasingly being characterized as "investment."
Merriam-Webster defines (financial) investment as "the outlay of money usually for income or profit." Here we could subjectively expand that return on investment to mean cleaner air, for example. This obviously doesn't apply to all government spending like Welfare, and to be fair, the Left doesn't claim that it does. But far too much spending is labeled as investments, to avoid examination or backlash.
We need to invest in the environment! Actually, we have. The air is cleaner, the water is cleaner, sanitation never better, and we have the public health statistics to prove it. These truly were investments, money spent, tangible, valuable results returned. Not so, investments in green roofs, green energy, green jobs, and reducing "greenhouse" gases, all of it based on junk science and junk economics.
At first, this report from the Las Vegas Sun sounds as though conservatives have mostly won the fight against Big Labor to keep the Obama administration from stripping the secret ballot from organizing elections. They pushed hard on ObamaCare and appear to have lost that battle. No one in Congress has touched the Card Check bill as people grow more angry over employment losses. Unions themselves have slipped in standing with the American electorate to their lowest level of support ever recorded. With their political power waning, conservatives have focused more on the ObamaCare debate and the lack of action by Democrats on the economy.
However, deeper within this report lies a new strategy by the unions to use the latter to get its Card Check legislation out of Congress (emphasis mine):
WJAC is reporting that Congressman John Murtha (D-PA) has died at the age of 77.
Congressman John P. Murtha died Monday at 1:18 p.m. at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, VA. At his bedside was his family.
Murtha, 77, was Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.
Breitbart reports that he had been suffering complications from recent gallbladder surgery.
Update:Allahpundit at Hot Air on replacing the late Rep. Murtha's seat:
A special election will be called within 60 days to fill Murtha’s seat for the rest of the year. The winner, obviously, will enjoy an incumbency advantage in November. It’s a jump ball:
With Murtha gone, however, the special election will be seriously contested. Murtha’s district is the only one in the country won by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in 2004 and by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008, according to Republican sources, and that trend line coupled with the volatile national environment for Democrats ensures Republicans will heavily target the contest.
I've spent much of the life of this blog - eight years, now - railing against the evils of smearing by association.
It's a particularly slimy tactic in the hands of the not-very-bright, on all sides of the putative political aisle. Being a conservative, I bag on particularly egregiously stupid examples from the left (like this, that, the other thing, this, and of course this), but of course it's not limited to a party. Much.
Still, there are those from whom we expect better. Or like to think we do.
The GOP is at risk of losing key votes from young people. Young professionals are considered “swing voters” or “Supervoters” because of their powerful ability to determine elections.
I know jealousy is wrong, so I was trying to preoccupy myself instead of visualizing the Vince Lombardi Trophy in Brett Favre’s hands after yesterday’s Super Bowl game. My distraction of choice was to sort through a pile of research I’ve been collecting on young voters and the GOP, while watching the intriguing first episode of Undercover Boss.
If you blinked during the third quarter, you probably missed $2.5 million of your tax dollars dissipating into the high-def ether — but fortunately, Story Balloon caught it for you. The ad, created by Christopher Guest and starring some of his regular cast members from his mockumentaries, cost the Census Bureau a fortune to run during the Super Bowl. Luckily, this year the game was exciting throughout, so people were paying attention, but is that necessarily a good thing?
According to this AP article, Gov. Palwenty's administration has until Tuesday to explain why it chose to unallot:
State lawyers representing Pawlenty have a deadline for filing a brief to the high court over his so-called unallotments. Pawlenty is appealing a lower court ruling that said he went too far in balancing the budget on his own.
I quoted Minnesota's unallotment in this post. Here's the language of the statute:
If the commissioner [of finance] determines that probable receipts for the general fund will be less than anticipated, and that the amount available for the remainder of the biennium will be less than needed, the commissioner shall, with the approval of the governor, and after consulting the legislative advisory commission, reduce the amount in the budget reserve account as needed to balance expenditures with revenue.
Via Story Balloon, the actual game-time ad featuring Pam and Tim Tebow turned out to be a funnier version of the first one, where Tim tackles his mom — who then worries that he may not be as tough as she is. It’s cute, completely non-threatening, and utterly unobjectionable.
Which means, of course, that the people who shrieked over CBS’ completely understandable decision to allow Focus on the Family to buy ad space will have to find some reason to justify their panic. Want to bet that someone will gripe about making light of domestic violence?
Anyone that thinks Minnesota's economic model makes sense needs to get in touch with reality ASAP. What's worse is that the DFL's tax proposals, especially their targeted tax credits, would make Minnesota's economy worse, not better. Small business tax credits are nothing more than picking winners and losers.
Let's be candid about Minnesotans. We're natural-born innovators. It's part of our genetics. When the DFL proposes tax credits for green jobs, etc., what they're really doing is they're telling Minnesota's innovators that they'll benefit if Minnesota's innovators do things that the DFL wants you to do.
The first reaction I had when I read that President Obama has finally invited Republicans to the White House to talk about health care was "What took you so long?" The next thought I had was whether he'd insist that some of their ideas be included in a health care bill. Anything's possible but I'll stay skeptical until there's proof that this isn't just a presidential photo-op.
The Feb. 25 meeting's prospects for success are far from clear. GOP leaders demanded Sunday that Democrats start from scratch, and White House aides said Obama had no plans to do so.
Years ago, my uncle taught me what's now an old saying. The saying goes like this: "There's no sense making anything idiot-proof. They'll just build a better idiot." That appears to be the case with the Twin Cities media scene.
For years, bloggers like Mitch Berg and John Hinderaker have ridiculed Nick Coleman with their dissections of his mentally incoherent columns. Many is the time I've enjoyed watching these talented bloggers turn Nick Coleman's writings into examples of deranged liberal incompetence.
Saw this on CBS News [Thursday] night and I thought it was a pretty fair report. Of course I may be biased because they used our youTube video. But you have to give credit where credit is due. Everyone should go here and leave a favorable comment.
Saturday night, I watched Sarah Palin deliver a spell-binding, stirring speech that, I suspect, reached well beyond the GOP's traditional conservative base. In doing so, Sarah Palin demonstrated that this movement isn't confined to the Republican Party, though she emmphasized that the "Republican Party would be very smart to absorb as much of the Tea Party movement as possible."
One of her best lines was about Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts:
The White House blames their candidate, and Nancy Pelosi, she blamed the Senate Democrats, and Rahm Emanuel, he criticized a pollster. And yet again, President Obama, he found a way to make this all about George Bush. When you're 0-for-3, you'd better stop lecturing and start listening.
While it is pretty well known to my family and immediate friends, I don’t usually talk about it to my co-workers or new acquaintances. I’m not sure if I was born this way or if it developed over time though the passion definitely increased over time and my exposure to others of the same bent. Hearing how others talk about it, the demeaning language, the sneering, the derision, causes me to be very guarded. There have even been stories in the news lately about people being beaten up because of it.
I am a huge fan of the Tea Party Movement, and this weekend is the big Tea Party Convention in Tennessee. When discussing the whole Tea Party thing, the third party question inevitably comes up. Should the movement break off and start running candidates on their own, competing against Republicans and Democrats? Or should they try and bring the Republican establishment back to its roots, and force Democrats to move to the right? Mark Tapscott takes on the dilemma in the Washington Examiner saying:
Going the traditional third-party route will lead Tea Partiers to a dead end. Taking over the GOP probably should be pursued in any case, but even if successful would only win half the battle and likely would be temporary in any case.
Why settle for half a victory when Tea Partiers have within their grasp as an independent third force to be the decisive influence in both major political parties?
Today is the ninety-ninth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. At NRO's Corner, Paul Kengor relates the following anecdote provided by Bill Clark, "Reagan's close friend and most significant adviser." Kengor writes:
Clark was serving as Reagan's national-security adviser. He had previously been deputy secretary of state, and would later be appointed secretary of the interior. His driver all this time was a man named Joe Bullock, a Georgia native who had moved to Washington during the Great Depression. Joe was a victim of the cruel Jim Crow laws that afflicted the South. He went to Washington for a better life.
Joe first found employment as a mule driver. He eventually began chauffeuring various senior people in the federal government, some of whom, including a high-level figure in the Carter administration, didn't treat him well; in fact, that previous cabinet secretary didn't speak a word to Joe in three years.
Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith interview Andrew Breitbart at the Nashville Tea Party convention. The PJTV video is accessible here. The interview is twenty minutes long, but it covers a lot of ground and is full of good stuff all the way through.
Around the 10:00 minute mark, for example, Breitbart mentions running into one of the Bay City Rollers at a Tea Party event. The Bay City Rollers? You know, the group that made its American debut on the first show of the short-lived Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell series ("[o]ver the (very brief) run of this series, Cosell seemed to go out of his way to get the worst acts possible"). Remember?
Cindy has an interesting post about Jim Matheson voting to raise the debt ceiling by a whopping $1,900,000,000,000. Theoretically, Rep. Matheson is a Blue Dog, though there isn't much proof of that recently. According to Cindy, Matheson wouldn't have voted for the bill without this provision included in the bill:
The rule, known as "pay-as-you-go" or "Paygo," was in place during the 1990s, the last time there was a federal budget surplus, and Democrats hope that it will spur a return in that direction.
"The passage of statutory Paygo today will help usher out an era of irresponsibility and begin putting the country back on a fiscally sustainable path," President Barack Obama said, in a statement.
Apparently I'm quite a burr under the governor's saddle. My guess is it goes back to 2005, when then-Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson and I helped force him to raise a tobacco tax in spite of his 'no new taxes' pledge. We saved health care for hard-working families who can't afford it and made sure our schools didn't endure further gut-wrenching cuts. We felt a little bad for the governor, so we allowed him to call the increase a 'fee,' but whatever you call it, it was the right thing to do for Minnesota.
Political veterans have seen candidates say alot of stupid things during campaigns. It's another thing to say that political veterans, like myself, have seen candidates commit unforced errors like Mr. Entenza did in that statement.
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Janitors will clean Hennepin County buildings during the day.
Yesterday’s Star Tribune included a story (”Cleaning in the Light of Day“) about the upcoming change to janitorial services in Hennepin County buildings:
Janitors typically do their work sight unseen, after everyone else has gone home. But soon that’s going to change at the Hennepin County Government Center and other heavily used county buildings.
By shutting off the lights and turning down the thermostats at night, the county expects to save at least $100,000 a year in energy costs.
The Republican race for governor crossed a substantial milestone this Tuesday at the statewide caucus and confirmed very clearly that it is now a two-man race between Marty Seifert and Tom Emmer. Marty who had a bigger machine and much more money came away with having a sizeable lead, but it would be wrong to rule Tom Emmer unable to make up the distance. Anyone else who chooses to hang around is doing so without a serious chance at the endorsement.
It's a mistake to say Marty's team is X and Tom's team is Y by categorizing them as different breeds due to a wrong vote on this bill and that bill. I know great conservative people across the state who are behind both men, and see it largely as who has won them over in the credibility and victory odds categories. Both are strong conservatives who can be found making votes on a few bills here and there that conservatives will have issues with, but on the whole, both are rock solid candidates.
Politico reports that an angry confrontation ensued when David Axelrod met with Senate Democrats in private this week. While Obama’s meeting with Congressional Democrats was so managed as to be boring, Axelrod took the brunt of anger from the caucus, especially Al Franken, not exactly known for his sunny disposition. However, Franken was not alone in complaining about the lack of leadership from the White House:
Sen. Al Franken ripped into White House senior adviser David Axelrod this week during a tense, closed-door session with Senate Democrats.
Five sources who were in the room tell POLITICO that Franken criticized Axelrod for the administration’s failure to provide clarity or direction on health care and the other big bills it wants Congress to enact.
The Pinecone Road extension in the St. Cloud area has generated a lot of interest and questions.
My husband dubbed it “Obama Road” after seeing a sign that noted President Obama’s $800 billion-plus American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided the $1.6 million to extend it from the Sartell border at Stearns County Road 120 to Stearns County Road 134. Nationwide, about $30 billion in stimulus funds were designated for roads and bridge repairs considered “shovel-ready.”
How many jobs were produced by this local project? Was this a wise use of taxpayer money? How does it address the nation’s long-term infrastructure needs? And how does the administration determine if jobs were created or retained?
With unemployment lingering in the double digits, jobs and the economy are foremost on minds.
It's the biggest condundrum of conservatism; there are so many of us.
Some are social conservatives, motivated by the decay of our culture. Others are fiscal hawks, alarmed by the Administration's mortgaging of our great-grandchildrens' futures. There are security conservatives motivated by the war, libertarian conservatives driven by conservatism's fundamentally hands-off approach, and not a few Republicans, whose loyalty is to the Party first and foremost, and of course every possible permutation of these options and probably not a few others.
It isn't surprising that Tarryl Clark talked fellow former lobbyist El Tinklenberg into writing a fundraising letter for her. It isn't surprising that the DFL-endorsed candidate in 2008 would call Michele an extremist either. Still, it's funny watching how predictable the fundraising letter is. Here's a sample from the fundraising letter:
Divisive rhetoric and extreme right-wing views have become Michele Bachmann's calling card, and it's paid off for her. The far-right is rallying around it's darling, Michele Bachmann, filling her campaign coffers, in fact, Bachmann just announced that her campaign raised more than $1 million last year.
I'd love to give Mr. Tinklenberg a shot of sodium pentathol, then ask him if it's an extremist viewpoint to vote to uphold the rule of law. Then I'd ask if it's extremist to vote against legislation that isn't constitutional.
Part 2 of 3
A few days ago, President Obama told a story about an OFA supporter in St. Louis who had volunteered during the campaign and organized her community for health reform, but recently succumbed to breast cancer.
The I-35 Bush Billboard mystery made the Drudge Report. Bob Collins at MPR with 
Part 1 in a series
Janitors will clean Hennepin County buildings during the day.
