The Revolving Door: Outgoing Democrat Politician Edition

Ending the speculation about his next step, outgoing Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak announced that he will be running the educational non-profit Generation Next when he leaves office in January.

The three-term Democrat mayor will become the group’s executive director and will focus his efforts on reducing the achievement gap among minority students.  Good for him, I hope his efforts find great success.

In what has become an automatic perk for outgoing Democrat officials, Rybak will also be teaching a class at the University of Minnesota.

On the Media: Signal-to-Noise Ratio Edition

One thing that I’ve learned in three years of public commentary is that, in order to comment on public affairs, it is necessary to be a critic and student of the media.

I also have learned that little of the content in the media—however defined—represents actual information. 

In Praise of Political Parties

In this space, I’ve documented how a single Democrat donor—Alida Rockefeller Messinger—has leased Minnesota’s politics for the past decade or so for the bargain-basement price of $1 million per year, give or take.  Perhaps she is ready to pass the porch to another donor.  The names may change at the top of the table, but the party label does not.

The vehicle that Messinger has used to secure power in our state has been the Alliance for a Better Minnesota and its fundraising arm, WIN Minnesota.  Both entities are organized as 501(c)(4) tax-exempt charities.  According to its most recent publically-available IRS income tax return, Messinger serves on WIN Minnesota’s board of directors.
 

The Shape of Things to Come

Bear with me, in this edition of the Column, I will be tying together a few loose threads that, when linked together, may help to explain our otherwise inexplicable national situation.

Thread 1: Rasmussen Reports does a weekly tracking poll of whether Americans think our country is heading is the right direction or the wrong direction.  Not surprisingly, in this Federal shutdown month of October, the “right direction” numbers have been registering in the teens, while the “wrong” direction crowd has numbered in the 80’s.

What is surprising is that 17 percent of Americans think we are going in the right direction.  I’m surprised the number is that high because, if pressed, I’m not sure that I can describe what direction we’re headed in.  Not that I think there is any consensus among the 80 percent, who feel otherwise, about what direction we should be headed in.

The Moderate Impulse

Now that the Federal government shut down has ended, the debt ceiling raised, and the republic saved—at least for another few months—we can step back and contemplate, “What next?”

As per the Feiler Faster Thesis, the American public has already moved on, concerned with the implosion of Obamacare and the latest antics of the Kardashian clan.

Inside the Beltway, the recriminations continue: credit must be apportioned; blame must be cast before the political feels ready to lurch toward the next manufactured crisis.

Met Council: Doing Real Damage

I have written recently [here, here, and here] about the plans of the Met Council regional government to undertake a radical redesign of the area’s housing and transit patterns under the banner of its Thrive MSP 2040 plan.

For its part, the Met Council says they are responding to changing housing preferences: namely the desire of young millennials and empty-nester baby boomers to live downtown.  But what if the assumptions underlying Met Council’s planning are exactly wrong?

Three-Card Monte Government

Having never fallen off a turnip truck, in all my years of urban living I’ve never participated in a game of Three-Card Monte. 

For my more rustic friends, this playing card con game works exactly like the old shell game and is designed to separate the unwary mark from his money.

Minnesota taxpayers, like the hapless card players, can’t keep up with the shell game of our tax money.  We think we are paying in our hard-earned tax dollars into the public treasury for the public good, but through accounting slight-of-hand, the money disappears into the hands of private interests.

Met Council Rides into Town on a Smile and a Shoeshine

This morning I was able to attend a Twin Cities North Chamber of Commerce forum on the Met Council’s Thrive MSP 2040 plan for the seven-county metro region.

Defending the Met Council’s vision for urban, transit-oriented growth was council member Jon Commers, who represents western St. Paul.  Raising questions about this exercise in central planning was Katherine Kersten of the Center of the American Experiment, a non-profit think tank.

 

The Banana Republic of Minnesota: Render Unto Caesar Edition

Minnesota’s Commissioner of Revenue, Myron Frans, penned a column in today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune.  The column’s disingenuousness is matched only by the complete inappropriateness of the exercise.

Commissioner Frans opens his piece as follows,

I'll take the Minnesota way any day:  Tax policy and investment under Gov. Mark Dayton has produced results.

He goes on to say,

This year, we [Gov. Mark Dayton and I] worked with the DFL majority in the Legislature to pass a fair and balanced budget.

For those readers who do not follow Minnesota politics, Gov. Dayton is a Democrat and DFL is the local branch of the Democrat party, abbreviated for Democrat-Farmer-Labor.

The Banana Republic of Minnesota: Now It Can Be Told

In a late-summer series of posts, I described how the Minnesota arm of Obamacare, MNsure, was going to distribute taxpayer-funded grants for “outreach” to loyal Democrat and liberal interests.  In a twist only Nancy Pelosi would appreciate, MNsure would only reveal the identity of grantees and the dollar amounts involved once the checks went out.

Now it can be told.  Today, MNsure announced the grantees and the dollars.

The Democrats' Met Council Plays the Long Game

The Twin Cities’ regional government, the Metropolitan Council, is embarking on an ambitious exercise in central planning for a 7-county area under the banner of Thrive MSP 2040.  As reported in local media, the Met Council hopes to completely remake the landscape of the metro region.  The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported last month,

Young "millennials" and the gray-haired baby boomers leading the so-called "silver tsunami" are rejecting big, outer-ring townhomes and looking for more modestly sized housing near transit, jobs and services.

For the seven-county Twin Cities area, population growth will be centered in St. Paul, Minneapolis and the developed inner-ring suburbs for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, growth will continue in the less-developed edges--but more slowly than previously thought.

Those are the latest predictions from the Metropolitan Council, which on Wednesday released preliminary population figures that forecast the metro growing by 893,000 residents by 2040

As I’ve written before, this view of the Metro’s future is based entirely on wishful thinking.  There are no trends visible in actual census data that would justify the Council’s shift to promoting core urban growth at the expense of suburban growth.

 

Minnesota’s New Feudalism

I’ve written lately of the transformation of the North Star state under the one-party rule of the Democrats under the banner of The Banana Republic of Minnesota.

Author Joel Kotkin has taken to describing the transformation of his home state of California under one-party Democrat rule as the New Feudalism.  Since Minnesota’s liberal progressives see the Golden State as a model for all of America, Kotkin’s analysis may give us a glimpse into our own future.
 

Follow the Money: SEIU Edition

In a recent post, I touched on the activities of the Minnesota chapters of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).  Even among labor unions, at the national level, SEIU has a reputation for strongly supporting President Obama.  In this post, I dig into SEIU’s involvement in the 2012 elections.

The Invisible Koch Brothers

A lot partisans won’t let the facts get in the way of a good narrative.  For many on the left, the brothers David and Charles Koch—oil industry billionaires and Republican donors—collectively serve as Emmanuel Goldstein and all-purpose bogeyman to frighten the children of progressives at bedtime.

But facts are stubborn things, and the Koch Brothers have been non-factors in Minnesota politics.

A few years back, the left-leaning Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper did a series on money in state politics.  It tracked political donations from January 1, 2001 through August 2008.

Number 1 on the top 200 donor list was Alida Rockefeller Messinger—ex-wife of current Democrat Governor Mark Dayton—giving a total of $9,165,357 during the eight-year period.  The next highest amount was $7 million lower.  For more than a decade, Minnesota’s politics has been dominated by a single leftist donor, with access to the nearly limitless Rockefeller oil fortune.

A man named David A. Koch is ranked 20^th on the list, donating $438,360, barely ahead of a few lesser members of the Dayton family.  He is not the David H. Koch of Koch Brothers fame.  George Soros appears on the list at 44^th.  Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos ranks at 50^th.  NBA commissioner David Stern appears on the list at 102^nd.

Neither Koch Brother appears on the top 200 list.

Anatomy of Bias: New York Times [Updated]

Media bias is turning out to be the theme of the week.  In this edition of “Anatomy of Bias,” we take a look at a national story with a suspiciously local angle.

The Dead End Sitting in the Middle of the Road

How Political Centrism Always Leads to Bigger Government

As it does once a month, this Sunday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published a commentary written by the state’s designated political centrists, former Democrat Congressman Tim Penny and former Independent candidate for governor, Tom Horner.

This month’s theme from Messrs. Penny and Horner was the Federal government shutdown, “If Congress won't lead, others must.”  They write,

A full-fledged debate over the appropriate role of government at the beginning of the 21st century is overdue. However, instead of a thoughtful discussion that explores legitimate ideological differences regarding the size and role of government, we hear only each side blaming the other.

I don’t know about Penny and Horner, but I hear that debate every day.  The problem is not a lack of debate, but that true “balanced solutions” cannot exist when the “ideological differences” are ones of kind and not degree. 

The Anatomy of Bias: Minnesota Public Radio

You would think that, at this late hour in the proceedings, the question of whether the legacy news media exhibit political bias would be settled.  And for the most part it is.  Polling conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2012 indicates that 67 percent of the population believes that the media is biased either “a fair amount” or “a great deal.”  Pew reports that,

The number of Americans who believe there is a great deal of political bias in news coverage has edged up to [a record] 37% from 31% four years ago.  Republicans continue to express more concern about media bias than do Democrats, but the rise in recent years has occurred across party lines.

Still, it’s a lesson worth relearning from time to time.  A more interesting question would be how such biases present themselves.  It is still relatively rare that a legacy media figure will make flat out statements along the lines of “Republicans are bad, Democrats are good.”

 

The Age of Herbert Stein

Even with the warm weather lingering into October, I’m declaring an end to summer and marking the return of The Column.

We have entered Day Two of a Federal government shutdown, the latest in a series of a dozen-and-a-half such shutdowns that have occurred over the past forty years or so.

The latest deadlock between Congress and the President is the result of the unbridgeable divide between the parties that I’ve been writing about for the past two years.  The differences between Democrats and Republicans are ones of kind, not of degree.  Since there is no overlap in what the two parties want, there is no natural point of compromise.

More interesting than the national story is the local dispute between the Minnesota Orchestra and its musicians.  This dispute/lockout/strike had dragged on for more than a year and has cost the Orchestra its celebrity conductor and more than a full season worth of concerts.

In the Matter of Public Safety Matters, Part 4

In this series, I chronicle the activities of Public Safety Matters Campaign, a police-union-backed effort to defeat Republican candidates for the Minnesota State Legislature in 2012.

Until very recently, Republicans and police unions tended to get along.  In Part 2 of this series, I note how Republican Tim Pawlenty received police union support in both of his runs (2002, 2006) for Minnesota Governor.