Despite significant opposition from affected citizens, the Legislature rewarded a multi-year campaign by public unions AFSCME and SEIU to open the door to the unionization of both day care workers and personal care attendants (PCAs or home health care aides). The bill, which passed largely along partisan lines, is expected to be signed by Gov. Dayton.  It allows for providers who receive a state subsidy to care for children from low income families (CCAP funds) or a subsidy to care for people in their homes to vote on whether or not to select a public union as an exclusive representative for bargaining with the state.

AFSCME and SEIU carved up the spoils with AFSCME getting the day care industry and SEIU getting home health care aides. (Note: most of the media coverage has focused on day care but it also grabs this second sector---and no doubt is in search of more dues-paying members from the private sector who receive some kind of state subsidy.)  

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails, channeling Will Rogers:

The woman who was in charge of the unit that delayed conservative groups their tax exempt status has been promoted.

She’s now in charge of Obamacare, where she has the power to delay conservatives health insurance reimbursement for medical treatments.

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For over 7 years, the government employee unions have been trying to force home-based childcare providers to join them and start paying dues, or so-called “fair share fees.” The providers keep throwing them back, most recently winning a lawsuit to halt Governor Dayton’s illegal executive order to unionize them.

SEIU and AFSCME’s latest effort to refill their depleted coffers (from massive political campaign spending) on the backs of childcare providers and low-income families is being done in the legislature, where Democrat leaders (and staunch union allies) have made unionizing these independent small business owners their number one priority this session.

The town of Moore has been all but demolished by a horrifically strong tornado that stayed on the ground for more than 40 minutes, chewing up buildings and spewing debris throughout the area.  The confirmed death toll is bad enough, but it’s expected to rise as rescuers sweep what remains of Moore:

Watch

With Minnesota’s 2013 legislative session in the books, it’s time to total up the DFL’s damage to Minnesota’s economy. The tax increases will hurt Minnesota’s economy the most are the business-to-business sales taxes on warehousing and telecommunications. The warehouse tax has been tried in several states, including Massachusetts. It’s been quickly repealed because it does lots of damage in a short period of time. I suspect that the DFL will repeal the warehousing tax early next session. If they don’t, the damage that tax will do will be considerable, both in terms of economic damage and in political terms.

What happens when you have lobbying organizations outnumbering state legislators by a 6 to 1 margin?

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If you feel like you may be getting whiplash from all of the spin on the IRS scandal, it just means you’re paying attention.  Over the weekend, people had a tough time keeping the story straight — even within a single newspaper.  On Friday, the Washington Post reported from their sources within the Cincinnati office of the IRS that the low-level employees just followed orders from their bosses, rather than going rogue as the administration suggests (via Sean Higgins, emphasis mine):

As could be expected, the folks in the determinations unit on Main Street have had trouble concentrating this week. Number crunchers, whose work is nonpolitical, don’t necessarily enjoy the spotlight, especially when the media and the public assume they’re engaged in partisan villainy.

“We’re not political,’’ said one determinations staffer in khakis as he left work late Tuesday afternoon. “We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. . . . That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House counsel was advised of the Inspector General’s audit findings weeks ago. Doug Ross has compiled a useful IRS scandal timeline into which this latest tidbit fits.

A friend with substantial experience as a chief executive officer looks back on what we have learned to date about the IRS harassment of Obama administration political opponents. He raises the issue of executive responsibility:

The media is doing its best to help Governor Dayton and the DFL Majorities in the Legislature dramatically increase spending and taxes with out the public realizing. I think its critical to remind people of what happened under Republicans since they DFL slimed them to win the 2012 Elections and majorities.

Read the rest of this article at ResidualForces.com

The same DFL employees who gave us “E-Pulltabs” as a means of supplying “the state’s share” of an extorted payoff to an out-of-state billionaire for his real-estate upgrade (which fell 95% short of predictions, as predicted by certain right-wing bloggers) are going to try to take a mulligan and get it right on the second try, says this piece from the MinnPost’s James Nord:

The governor’s proposal would increase the cigarette tax from $1.23 per pack to $2.52 per pack – a larger jump than the 94-cent target he’d earlier proposed — and would require retailers and wholesalers to make a one-time payment on existing inventory that would funnel $24.5 million into the stadium reserve account, solving the shortfall there.

Where have we seen this before?

Gov. Mark Dayton wisely urged Minnesotans to use facts in the budget debate in a speech to the Chamber of Commerce. Despite this sage advice, he continued to rely on a flawed analysis as an important rationale for his budget's higher taxes.

"If the lowest taxes equaled the highest job growth and the highest per capita income, public policy would be clear and simple," Dayton told the Chamber. "In fact, however, the opposite is true. If you look at the last chart, two pages of your handout, people living in the states with the lowest taxes generally have among the lowest per capita incomes. And those states have inferior job growth," he stated.

Great moments in furniture

You might remember this moment. There was Clint Eastwood, iconic film star and hobbyist politician, appearing on the stage of the Republican National Convention, doing some performance art with an empty chair. It was less than a year ago and while the Republicans loved it, the moment made many people wonder if ol' Clint was, well, losing it, especially since his attempt at a one-sided conversation didn't exactly rise to the level of a Bob Newhart bit.

As I've thought about the past few weeks and the parade of scandals/outrages/nothingburgers that we've witnessed, I've gone back to this moment. It's striking that a president would be presented as so disengaged from things that happen around him. And when the New Yorker starts getting in on the action, you know that the meme is getting legs:

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I've had more than a few people ask me why I rail against Chicago politics so often. I lived in the Chicago area for five years, from 1987 through 1992, and I got a good look at what it's like there. Chicago is a great place to visit and it can be a fine place to live, so long as you understand, and are willing to accept, a few things. John Kass of the Chicago Tribune shares an example:

One Sunday, I must have been 12 or 13, I decided to ask what I thought was an intelligent question that was something like this:

We talk politics every Sunday, we fight about this and that, so why aren't you politically active outside?

I’m not talking about conservative publications either, but outlets that normally would allow Barack Obama and his team the benefit of the doubt.  Bloomberg starts us off with a straight report on the changing explanations:

Carney said Ruemmler was informed by the Treasury Department’s General Counsel’s office April 24 that the Inspector General for Tax Administration was completing a report that found that IRS employees improperly scrutinized political organizations seeking tax exempt status by searching their applications for words including “Tea Party” and “patriot.”

Not sure what MNGOP representative said that, but it may be the iconic statement about this past session. It was a five month union pork orgy.

Here’s the moment when the vote passed on Monday, 68-66, after the DFL waited on the vote until the crowd of daycare providers wod stood vigil all weekend ahead to go to work, and the galleries were packed with union droogs:

New poster I made tonight for Minnesota Action Network celebrating the horror show that is the  DFL ultramajority budget—Minnesota's Monster Budget.

The Minnesota legislature has finally passed their budget for the next two years. It scares us, and it should scare you.

Does it surprise you that Gov. Mark Dayton is running 3.8 million in the red and no one is reporting on it?

To see what we are talking about check the bottom of page 2 in the report below.

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Twin Cities media outlets are trumpeting a provision of the state education bill on its way to Gov. Mark Dayton with the headline "free all-day kindergarten."

Well, it is "free" — to everyone but the taxpayers.

We can debate the efficacy of early childhood education for all, but there still is no such thing as "free" all-day K, and it's actually worse than that. The Legislature's appropriation for all-day K doesn't fully fund it. The rest of the tab for "free" all-day K will fall on local school districts.

Remember the White House war on Fox News in 2009?  By the fall of that year, it had collapsed from overreach; after attempting to block Fox from participating in pool coverage, the rest of the White House press corps revolted, forcing Anita Dunn and others into retreat.  Apparently, the Obama administration found a way to wage that war by other means.  The Washington Post reports that the Department of Justice spied on James Rosen, Fox’s Washington correspondent, in 2010:

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

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