Governor Mark Dayton’s road trip!

DFL Governor Mark Dayton is taking his message about the government shutdown to the people of Minnesota.

Governor Dayton will be traveling to St. Cloud today and then stopping off in several other locations in greater Minnesota.  Of course, GOP leaders decried the Governor’s road trip, but of course they would–they’re already going public with their message and they don’t want the Governor to do the same.

Amy Koch doesn't want Mark Dayton to leave town because she doesn't want to be left alone with Kurt Zellers. (Photo: ctpost.com)

Quite frankly, it is about time!  Governor Dayton has been far too quiet for too long on the budget stalemate.  He needs to take a page (only one page, mind you) out of Tim Pawlenty’s playbook and start traveling all over the state to drum up support against the legislature.  This is what Tim Pawlenty did to the Democrats in the legislature when he was Governor, and it is exactly the same dose of medicine the GOP-legislature should get from Mark Dayton.  Take it to the people, Governor!

Time to hit the road, Governor! (Photo: caranddriver.com)

Minnesota’s bond rating lowered

Life's a Fitch! (Photo: blogs.citypages.com)

Yesterday, Fitch Ratings lowered Minnesota’s bond rating from AAA to AA+. For those of you who don’t know (or have never cared about) state bond ratings, this is your wake-up call.  State bond ratings are a big deal and even small changes can cost taxpayers millions of dollars–they have a direct impact on the interest rate the state gets on loans (for things like capital improvement projects).  These loans, of course, have to be paid back by taxpayers; so a lower bond rating means that Minnesota taxpayers are going to be paying more interest (something that nobody likes).

It was all fun and games until someone got hurt. (Photo: blogs.citypages.com)

Fitch Ratings said that the downgraded rating for Minnesota was in part due to the government shutdown and in part due to the accounting gimmicks that Minnesota has been using for years now to balance its budget (example: deferring payments to schools).

It is time for Minnesota to get responsible with the budget.  Since Ventura and throughout the Pawlenty administration, Minnesota has been relying on budgetary tricks to make it look like the state was running a balanced budget (we actually weren’t) so we wouldn’t have to raise taxes.  Well, guess what those budget shenanigans have gotten us–a government shutdown that is costing the state millions of dollars each day and a lower credit rating that is going to substantially increase the cost to taxpayers when the state borrows money.

So let me get this straight–we shutdown our government and wrecked our state’s credit rating so that we wouldn’t have to raise taxes at the state level; but to offset the lack of revenue, local governments had to increase local property taxes.  Sooooo…we actually ended up with increased taxes anyway?!  That’s lunacy!  It is time to do the right thing–let’s raise enough in taxes to cover the hole in the budget and set ourselves on a more firm financial footing for the future.  It is the best way forward and it is the way we should have been moving all along.

Chief Judge Kathleen Gearin’s ruling on the MN government shutdown.

Ramsey County Chief Judge Kathleen Gearin issued this ruling today, stating that core services should continue if the Minnesota state government shuts down on July 1st.

Ramsey County Chief Judge Kathleen Gearin has a splitting headache from listening to all this budget muck. (Photo: MPR)

She also appointed retired state Supreme Court Justice Kathleen Blatz as Special Master.  This Special Master will “create an orderly process to resolve requests for, or objections to, funding, thereby preventing the necessity for multiple individual lawsuits to be filed and adjudicated.”

Still, from Chief Judge Gearin’s ruling it appears that there are still some funding issues that need to be worked out by the judiciary above and beyond the ones reported by Minnesota Public Radio‘s Elizabeth Dunbar.

Tim Pawlenty still doesn't believe he got us into this mess. (Photo: crooksandliars.com)

Regardless, it appears that the suspense relating to which parts of the state government are “critical” and which are not is going to continue to drag on for at least a short while longer.

I’m stuck wondering: when are we ever going to get some good news?

Politics, Zen and the Art of Bathroom Remodeling

Here's the book that I shamelessly ripped off the title of this post from. (Photo: Amazon.com)

While I was out of the house circling my lovely world on this past Saturday morning, my partner decided it was time for us to begin remodeling our upstairs bathroom.  That’s fine, it needed it–especially since some parts of that bathroom haven’t seen sunlight since Karl Rolvaag was governor of Minnesota.

Yes, that is a toilet and a wallpaper steamer in the shower. (Photo: circlelovely)

Phase 1: Happy Destruction.

So, we set off on the work together, happily tearing apart our upstairs bathroom.  At first is was a lot of fun.  We were tearing off the wallpaper with an almost idiotic glee.  We tore up the linoleum with a fervor that quite frankly frightened us a tad bit.

In some ways, the happy demolition that we did in our bathroom represents the time in Minnesota’s history during the Ventura and Pawlenty administrations.  Ventura inherited a large budget surplus and decided to give Minnesotans refunds rather than invest the money in Minnesota’s infrastructure or do something else productive with it.  Pawlenty’s draconian approach to balancing the budget tore through Minnesota’s quality of life faster than we tore through that bathroom wallpaper.

At about this point, all the fun had worn off and we were coming to grips with what we had done. (Photo: circlelovely)

Phase 2: Grumpy Terror.

Once all of the damage was done to our bathroom, it started to sink in that we had probably bitten off more than we could chew.  The sheer magnitude of the problem (which was our own doing) was settling in, and it was quite unpleasant.  It became obvious that putting in a new floor was not as easy as it seems in the abstraction.  Wallpaper adhesive had also pulled off *some* portions of the paint, and so we had loose paint that needed to be sanded down as well.  Since we only have the one shower, we couldn’t take a shower until we got the new floor put in and the toilet re-installed.  And so…you guessed it…we were hot, smelly, and in utterly foul moods as we begrudgingly worked together on fixing the mess we had made (to be fair, my partner handled it all much better than I did).

Kind of difficult to take a hard look in the mirror at yourself when there is no mirror. (Photo: circlelovely)

The political parallel to this second phase is all of the political jockeying and mud-slinging back and forth by the two major parties over the MN budget shortfall.  They both blame each other for not compromising, even though it is the failed policies of one of those parties (Republicans) that largely got us into this mess in the first place.

Apparently, Henry Hastings Sibley used this same nut and bolt to secure the handle on his farm plow back in 1862. Someone thought it would be a good idea to also use it to secure our toilet to the floor. (Photo: circlelovely)

Phase 3: Last Ditch Effort to Avoid Catastrophe.

So, with midnight drawing near, we made one last push to finish up the floor and get the toilet out of the shower so that we could clean ourselves off and we wouldn’t have to go to work the next day smelling like grim death.

Well, apparently nothing brings two people closer together than the prospect of unthinkable catastrophe.  For us, it was the thought that we might not have a functioning shower (we did get the shower working, by the way).  But, what about our elected officials?  You would think that the specter of a government shutdown would be enough to frighten the GOP legislature into compromising and working with the Governor.  Yet, from the looks of it, it appears that a government shutdown is exactly where we are heading.

Let’s just hope that the Republicans don’t keep Minnesota’s bathroom toilet in the shower.

Reasonable Republicans Believe in Raising Revenue

Former GOP Rep. Paul Kohls (no relation to the department store) says that the state must raise revenue if a budget deal is going to be found. (Photo: Minnesota Legislative Reference Library)

Reasonable Republicans continue to line up against the current GOP leadership in the Minnesota Legislature over the budget impasse with Governor Mark Dayton.  The latest GOP defector was former gubernatorial candidate and former Rep. Paul Kohls (of Victoria).

On Minnesota Public Radio’s Morning Edition former Rep. Paul Kohls, when asked about what it would take to get a budget deal done, said that he thinks that “finding a place for some additional revenue of some type is probably going to be necessary.”

This is a very realistic view, even if you don’t think the state should raise revenue–this, I think, is an accurate portrayal of the political realities currently between Governor Dayton and the GOP Legislature.

Playing around with the color and lighting of a photo can make even smiling people look sinister. (Original photo: MPR News)

Unfortunately, rationality isn’t something that we get very often from the GOP anymore.  Former GOP Governor and now Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty has been urging MN Republican lawmakers to hold the line on taxes and not to give in to the Governor.  The problem with this is that now that Pawlenty is running for President, he has essentially jumped ship from Minnesota and a government shutdown isn’t going to hurt him any.  Never mind that he was responsible for driving the ship toward the iceberg in the first place.

Icebergs suck (Photo: AFP - Getty Images).

Google it: Corporate Fraud

There are so many possible things to write about…the fact that North Minneapolis residents probably aren’t going to get FEMA assistance (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/06/14/tornado-housing-folo/) or the frightening prospect of Michelle Bachman running for president (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/06/13/michele-bachmann-presidential-announcement/).  But instead of writing about either of these topics, I would like to focus your attention on something that Former Minnesota Governor and Presidential Candidate Tim Pawlenty said the other day at the University of Chicago:

At least Tim Pawlenty trims his nose-hairs.

“There are some obvious targets. We can start by applying what I call ‘The Google Test.’ If you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it. The post office, the government printing office, Amtrak, Fannie and Freddie, were all built for a time in our country when the private sector did not adequately provide those products. That’s no longer the case.”

Okay, I recognize that this line of argument has traction with people.  However, it is a flawed assertion and based on unsound assumptions of organizations.  Let me explain what I mean.

Organizations–whether public or private–are made up of people.  Human beings are quite varied, but even the best of us are prone to mistakes and errors in judgment.  Now, let us consider the fact that public organizations have much more oversight and “sunshine” shining into them (by which I mean that they have greater accountability and open information to the public).  So, when people in public organizations make mistakes or errors in judgment, the public and the media find out about it–usually pretty quickly–before the mismanagement or abuse spirals out of control.

Unfriendly monsters apparently have scales and beady eyes.

Now, what about the private sector?  Well, the private sector has a lot less oversight and “sunshine.”  But since private organizations are also populated with human beings who are sometimes prone to mistakes and flaws in judgment, this means that private-sector corruption and mismanagement often festers in secret for a lot longer–and when it does come to light it has often turned into something very ugly.

Not sure why he's smiling.

So what do these private-sector catastrophes look like?  Let’s start with one close to home–Petters Group Worldwide.  Minnesota businessman Tom Petters was convicted after nearly 10 years of running his business, Petters Group Worldwide, as a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme (the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history).  This lead to the bankruptcy of Sun Country Airlines and investors in Petters’ company were lucky to get pennies back on the dollar for their investments.  Now just to put this in perspective, $3.65 billion is MORE than the entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the South American country of Guyana (among others).

Guyana--here it is.

Some might claim that the free market will weed-out corrupt and inefficient companies.  Yet that wasn’t the case with Petters Group Worldwide–it was the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and Federal prosecutors who put an end to Petters’ Ponzi scheme–not the market.

Home of the colossal collapse.

Exhibit 2: Enron.  Oh where oh where to start with this one?  The cooked books?  The late-night paper shredding?  The cheering of the rolling energy blackouts in California?  The price-gouging?  Oh heck, you can just read about it if you really want to know all the gory details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron.

Still not convinced?  There’s plenty more where that came from.  Why don’t you do what Tim Pawlenty suggests and “Google it” to see just how rampant corporate fraud really is?