• Tag Archives Pawlenty
  • What Is It With Minnesota?

    Mid-Summer                                                                   Waning Garlic Moon

    I live in Minnesota.  A state that has made me proud to be its citizen over and over again.  So.  Why is that the most mind-dulled adherent to the no-new taxes pledge, a blow-dried white guy like Tim Pawlenty represents our state among presidential candidates for 2012?  Why is it, even more incredibly, that Michele Bachmann, my congressional representative, has started punching holes in Pawlenty’s run?  Here is a link to a hilarious and scary article about Michele in Rolling Stone, Michele Bachmann’s Holy War.

    Who appears on the national stage from Minnesota these days?  A trinity of bizarre political positions represented by two really strange people and one so bland he could be a 1950’s ad man:  Jesse Ventura, Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty.  How did it come to pass that Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Eugene McCarthy got replaced by this trio of gibbering idiots?

    At time I don’t even recognize the state to which I moved in 1970, 41 years ago.   We seem Californiaesque in our deeply divided politics with Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim representing Minneapolis at one end of the spectrum and Michele at the other.  When I work with the Sierra Club’s legislative program at the state capitol, I see this divide often.  We have, for example, Kate Knuth, an Oxford educated environmentalist who articulates a clear defense of the science of global warming and a nearby state senator whose eccentric views would find a welcome home in the climate change deniers national conference.  Which he attended.

    I know this.  If those of us on the liberal, left and progressive wing of American politics don’t get organized, and soon, we may be headed to a world not too distant from the strange one that gave us George Bush and Dick Cheney.  Remember them?


  • Read My Lips: No No-New-Taxes Hot Air. Anymore.

    Beltane                                                                             Waning Garlic Moon

    Mid-Summer, the summer solstice, comes tomorrow.  Our eight times a year brief essay on the changing seasons of the Celtic calendar appears tomorrow.

    Tim Pawlenty says, “What deficit?”  He claims there is no deficit in Minnesota, just bad accounting.  Bad accountability, yes.  Bad accounting?  No.  If there is no deficit, it is difficult to see what the game of chicken at the Capitol is all about.  It must have something to do with that big number.  What was it?  $5 billion.  Yes.  A deficit.  One caused by following the unusual to business practice of trying to keep business expenses level while decreasing income.  If expenses remain the same–the state budget–, and sales are intentionally allowed to fall off by a no-new sales promise, then?  Deficit.

    If, however, expenses for keeping a state of the art business growing increase, then the sales force increases its effort.  Minnesota has been a state of the art state in so many things.  Compassion to the poor.  Education for all citizens.  Environmental consciousness.  Efficient and effective government.  Infrastructure improvement.  Education funding.  Property tax relief.

    Now, under the no new taxes regime, we get the poor denied health care and basic needs like housing and food.  High stakes testing has reduced our education system to a teach to the test marathon without even significantly increasing test scores.  A state that gave us the boundary waters and the wild and scenic rivers act plus state level mandates for clean air, clean water, a moratorium on the construction of nuclear power plants and a similar action barring new coal plants and importation of new coal generated electricity is tripping all over itself to build an unneeded bridge over the St. Croix and can’t wait to get sulfide mining started.  Aid to local governments has dried up and the state is days away from a shutdown.  Transportation funding, especially for emission reducing forms of transportation like light rail, has tanked.  Education funding for the UofM has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk while school boards are forced to go to the levy to raise funds that should come from the state.  The result?  Rising property taxes.  This is the legacy that Tim Pawlenty wants to share with the nation?

    It is a difficult time to have a radical analysis of the nation’s economic infrastructure since so many have tilted toward the center-right ideas of the free market, but it is an important time to have and to apply such analysis.  Who speaks for the poor now?  Who insists on gender, racial and age justice?  When did the guarantee of freedom in America get reduced to the right to carry concealed weapons and allowing states to deport persons?  When did careful interpretation of our founding document get replaced by a secular equivalent of biblical literalism?  We are deep into a time of unparalleled meanness in our politics.

    It’s as if Jesus said, “I come to bring solace to the rich, recovery of  cash for those who already have much, release to the plutocrat yearning for more wealth, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s bounty for all those who already have a lot.”

    It is no secret that children starve and adults go without health care in this the richest nation on earth. The left, the radical left, needs to heal its fractures and get back to building its base.


  • Gentle Politicians, Start Your Engines!

    Lughnasa                                  Waxing Artemis Moon

    Still feeling a bit punk, but I can breathe and I did get outside, pulled some weeds.  Much better.

    As August hits mid-point, we’re still experiencing high dewpoints and temperature, at least for us. Local meteorologist Paul Douglas compared today’s weather to the Congo. Land of 10,000 weather extremes.

    Huh.  Just occurred to me, the land of 10,000 lakes.  When the Chinese say the 10,000 things, they mean the whole universe.  10,000 is a favorite number among Chinese writers and thinkers; as I interpret it, it means more than you can imagine.  My understanding of the reason for selecting 10,000 in our state slogan is that it “sounds like more than 16,000,” the rough count of Minnesota’s lake sized water bodies.  Whoever made the decision was right.

    With the completion of the state’s first ever August 10th primary we stand now on the precipice of another silly season, campaign ads clogging the air waves, phone calls to support him or her and mailers in the box.  Kate and I, because we both have the appellation Dr. in certain places, often receive mailings to gauge the feelings of Republicans like us in our district.  I vacillate between pitching them and sending in disinformation.

    In some ways the electoral process is politics at its purest, retail politics in which candidates use whatever means they can afford to convince individual voters to fill in the oval for them in November.  In another way the electoral process  is politics at its most foul as candidate use whatever means they can afford to distance themselves from their opponents:  attack ads, push polling, deceptive mailings, outright lies and, the worst of all, in my opinion, pandering.

    Let me give you an example of pandering.  Tim Pawlenty entered Minnesota politics as a centrist right Republican.  As he attempts to position himself for a Presidential bid (Yike!), he keeps edging closer to nutty right wing tricorn wearing  Tea-Hee Party folks.

    “Gov. Tim Pawlenty has rejected a yearslong effort to update Minnesota’s rules for lakeshore development.

    Pawlenty says the revisions overreach, and undermine local control and property rights. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported Friday that he has sent regulators back to the drawing board.”  Fox News (sic) Website.

    Quick now.  Who builds oversized lakehomes right up to the edge?  Right, your neighbor on Social Security and all those folks recently tossed off GAMC?  Not hardly.  Folks who receive $40,000,000 severance packages like the naughty CEO of HP, that’s who.