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.