False Flag Operations

Should Minnesota Republicans take advice from an advisor to the state’s top-ranked individual Democrat donor, Alida Messinger?  [In Minnesota, Democrats are known by the initials DFL, Democrat-Farmer-Labor.]

I pondered that question on Friday night, as I was watching Almanac, the local public television public affairs show. 

Culture of Corruption, Part 2

It was a big week for Minnesota’s political culture of corruption.  [See Part 1 here.]

The state’s Legislative Auditor determined that Democrat Governor Mark Dayton broke the law by taking a campaign staffer along for a trip on a state-owned airplane.  Last month, when this story first surfaced, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the Governor’s spokesman, Matt Swenson, said,

It is appropriate for campaign staffers to travel with the governor to campaign events if that travel is paid for by the campaign.

Clearly the Legislative Auditor disagreed.  The same audit turned up yet another disturbing incident involving the Democrat Governor.

Minneapolis aims for Portland, hits Detroit

This week, newly-installed Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges gave a speech at a joint meeting of the Minneapolis and St. Paul chambers of commerce, “Hodges pushes for transit at business breakfast.”

I didn’t attend the meeting and I am relying on the Minneapolis Star Tribune account of her speech.  The Star Tribune reports,

The TakeAction Takeover Extends to Duluth

I have previously written about the election triumphs in Minneapolis and St. Paul of political non-profit TakeAction Minnesota.  TakeAction has posted another win, this time in Duluth.  Last night TakeAction tweeted,
 

	TakeAction Minnesota @TakeActionMN     Congratulations to Patrick Boyle on winning today's special election to fill Steve O'Neil's St. Louis County Commissioner seat in #Duluth!         09:45 PM - 14 Jan 14

The Wisconsin Experiment

Wisconsin Must Fail to Save the Progressive Project

I’ve written before about the left’s obsession with our neighbor to the east.  Progressives appear convinced that if Republican Governor Scott Walker’s tenure in Wisconsin is seen as a success, the larger progressive project will be threatened.  If conservative governance can succeed in a historically-blue state, like Wisconsin, the fear is that it could succeed anywhere.

Does Minnesota have a culture of political corruption?

In Lord Acton’s famous formulation,

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Since January 2013, Minnesota’s Democrats have enjoyed absolute power over the state, holding all four statewide offices and control of both houses of the state legislature.

Light Rail Anger on the Left, Part 2

Report from the Field

Of late, I have been following the struggles of the Southwest Light Rail project, as the regional government Met Council tries to quiet NIMBY opposition to its latest mass transit project, which is meant to take commuters from downtown Minneapolis through the southwestern suburbs.

In Part 1 I focus on the efforts of state Democrats to quell intra-party opposition to the train’s routing, using your tax dollars, of course.

Tonight, the Met Council visited the suburb of St. Louis Park, hoping to quiet critics of a plan to reroute nearby freight trains to accommodate the light rail service.

The Star Tribune declared the locals “skeptical.”  Pat Doyle reports,

A new search for ways to reroute freight train traffic to make room for the Twin Cities’ biggest light-rail line came under fire Thursday night by St. Louis Park residents who opposed earlier plans for moving the freight to their city.

I had hoped to swing by and take in a bit of the meeting, in person, but I couldn’t even get into the packed parking lot.  My man on the scene filed this report from inside the building.

We had between 200 and 300 people in attendance, not counting the hockey game going on elsewhere in the building.

It was an interesting meeting.  This evening’s event was conducted town hall-style, instead of the table talk format used for Tuesday’s Kenwood (Minneapolis) meeting.

St. Louis Park is united that they do not want the reroute.  Quite a few Minneapolis residents also spoke against the reroute and a few even were for the co-location alternative with an elevated or relocated bike trail.  For its part, the Met Council has dismissed that alternative even though it is the least expensive option.

Stay tuned.

Light Rail Anger on the Left

Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Pat Doyle uncovers a lot of disturbing facts in his piece “Light-rail meeting stirs anger.”  Now I know what you’re thinking: light rail? anger? the Tea Party strikes again.  Not this time.

Doyle reports on a community meeting in Minneapolis called to discuss the routing of the proposed Southwest Light Rail project, which (if built), will take commuters from downtown Minneapolis through some of the city’s southwestern suburbs.

There is a lot not to like among the facts Doyle packs into the short article that leads the paper’s Metro section this morning.  It’s tough to know where to begin, and the headline on the web version, “Southwest light-rail gripe session stirs some anger,” is as good a place as any.

The “gripe session” meeting was called “to help calm critics” in the wealthy enclave of Kenwood, which—not coincidentally—is the permanent home of Minnesota’s Democrat Governor, Mark Dayton.  (Minnesota’s Democrats style themselves DFL—Democrat-Farmer-Labor.)

The Governor’s former neighbors are apparently whipped up into a good-old-fashioned NIMBY (not in my back yard) frenzy.  To quote Mongo from Blazing Saddles, the dispute has “got to do with where choo-choo go.”

Not near them, seems to be the Kenwood consensus.  Doyle writes of the Governor’s former neighbors,

A common argument of Kenwood residents opposed to plans for running the line through their neighborhood, one of the city’s more affluent, is that it won’t provide enough service to poorer communities.

Of course.  Mass transit is a poverty-relief program, so why would you run trains in areas where rich people could hear or see them?  It makes no sense.

The Kenwood meeting was facilitated by consultant Dan Kramer of the firm Grassroots Solutions.

As Doyle reports,

The decision to pay Grassroots for “facilitating” public meetings grew out of closed-door strategy sessions this fall involving Dayton, a DFLer, Met Council officials and leading DFL legislators in response to opposition to the project.

Notice who is conspicuous by their absence:  Republicans.  Democrats, exclusively, got together—behind closed doors—to figure out what to do about their difficulties in selling their Democrat-developed mass-transit project to Democrat voters living in Democrat neighborhoods.  As Doyle reports,

Some of the most vocal critics are DFL activists in the corridor area, who urged Gov. Mark Dayton to intervene.

Intervene he did.  And the solution?  Use taxpayer funds to hire a public relations firm.  And not just any public relations firm, as Doyle reports about Cramer and his firm,

He’s a former aide to Sen. Paul Wellstone, and the firm works for prominent labor unions and DFL politicians.

Maybe it’s just me, but if Gov. Dayton and his fellow Democrats are having difficulty selling the this light-rail project to the Governor’s wealthy, liberal neighbors, perhaps they should not be using taxpayer money to resolve an intra-party squabble.

Cramer’s firm is being paid $22,000 by the government agency Met Council to facilitate a series of public meetings along the route and judging by the headline, he’s off to a shaky start.  Minnesota boasts a plethora of well-financed, left-leaning advocacy groups who support mass transit.  I’m sure any number of these would be happy to facilitate such meetings for free.

Calibrations

Today, the Minneapolis Star Tribune republished a column by Michael Gerson, a neo-conservative columnist with the Washington Post.  The column’s headline gives away the gist of the piece,

Government, per se, is not the problem: The founders left room for continuing calibration. Republicans must accept this.

Gerson argues that any opposition to the growth of government is not legitimate.  He writes,

The Federalist founders did not view government as a necessary evil.

In 1909, Federal spending accounted for only 2.48 percent of the economy.  One hundred years later, 2009 (Barak Obama’s first year as President), Federal government spending as a share of the economy had soared to 25.17 percent of the overall economy.  In a century, government has literally grown 10 times in size.

Republicans were ok with Federal government spending as 1/25 of the economy (1917).  Republicans were ok with Federal government spending as 1/10 of the economy (1935).  Republicans were ok with Federal government spending as 1/5 of the economy (1975).  But when Federal government spending hit ¼ of the economy, Republicans balked, and for that, they cannot be forgiven.  For Gerson and many others, to question the continued growth of government spending is to question the existence of government itself.

The debate is not whether or not we should have a Federal government, but just how massive a Federal government is sustainable.  As I've discussed before, we are “calibrating” ourselves into oblivion.

The Geography of Politics

In the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring the nexus between geography and politics in Minnesota.  Along the way, I’ve been developing the hypothesis that the safer a seat becomes for a political party, the more radical its holder will be.

In Part 1, I offer the test case of Minnesota House of Representatives District 64B.  This St. Paul district is safely in the hands of Democrats.  With the long-time incumbent retiring, seven candidates have already announced efforts to win the Democrat endorsement for the open seat.  One of the multitude in the running currently serves the communications director for the ultra-liberal political charity TakeAction Minnesota.  2014 will reveal just how far to the left district 64B will shift.

Safe seats like House District 64B abound for the state’s Democrats—who, though perhaps more numerous than Republicans, are concentrated into relatively few districts.  Districts that lean Republican actually outnumber districts that lean toward the Democrats.  Further, the Democrats’ safe seats are concentrated in the core urban areas of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth.

In Part 2, I examine some empirical evidence for my hypothesis, graphing how much further from the political mainstream incumbents move, the safer their seat becomes.

In 2012, the state’s Democrats recaptured control of the Legislature.  They offered voters in swing suburban districts a value proposition around the idea of socially-moderate, “pro-business” Democrats.  In 2013 Democrats delivered to suburban voters a radical-left agenda orchestrated by party leaders in in safe Minneapolis and St. Paul districts.

The “Geography” series originated in an earlier series, one which examines the bizarre plan of the Met Council regional government to reduce poverty in the metro area by spreading the poor more thinly around the 7-county region.  The relocation of urban low-income citizens may not make them less poor, but it does hold out the possibility of flipping marginal suburban Republican seats toward the Democrats.