Another Everyday Wonderwoman

Senatorial Weakness or Extreme Voter Manipulation?

2011-12-20T08:39:00.000-06:00

Today’s press coverage includes a story on the hold up of the St. Croix bridge project - again - due partly to the failure of the Senate to approve the bridge measure as part of any of its bills even though it requires no new spending. What is does require is an exemption from the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act that currently limits development on the St. Croix river.

Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar is described as a “leading proponent” of the bridge. Her party controls the Senate. She is up for re-election in 2012. Past practice and collegial courtesy take those things into account in the U.S. Senate, where bills sponsored by senators coming into an election year are routinely given extra consideration to give those senators something positive to talk about in their campaigns. So why has this bridge project been delayed yet again?

Supposedly both Democrat and Republican staffers are chalking it up to Washington’s “preoccupation” with negotiations on tax and spending deals. That “preoccupation” didn’t seem to hamper their multi-tasking ability to pass legislation allowing for indefinite detainment of American citizens without charges or censorship of the Internet, measures voted for by Klobuchar even though they were widely criticized and are sure to be challenged in court as unconstitutional. Women are great multi-taskers. So what stopped Klobuchar from pushing the St. Croix River bridge closer to the top of her to-do list?

Once you get past the anemic bipartisan soundbites, only two viable theories surface: either the good senator does not have the credentials and clout necessary to convince her leadership to pay attention to the needs of her state, or she is playing political football with the long-suffering constituents of the St. Croix River area. A key quote from the senator herself in a Star Tribune story by Kevin Diaz and Kevin Giles gives us a clue: “We believe we still have a window here for early next year. We can get it done.”

Early next year? As in, just in time to remind voters of her value and neutralize any idea of a valid alternative to her candidacy? Maybe this is the real consideration afforded to Klobuchar by her leadership: the ability to kick around desperately needed jobs and infrastructure projects until it serves her personal purposes. Either she can’t get this project done, or she will only do it for her benefit. It can’t be both. So, which it, Senator? Are you weak-kneed, or is this a power play?

Home Sweet Police State

2011-12-15T10:25:00.000-06:00

Fully half of Americans believe the United States federal government poses an immediate threat to the freedom of our own citizens. As crazy as that sounds, actions like these tell us why that sentiment is so strong:

The United States House of Representatives voted today to approve the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual occurrence that approves the budget for federal defense spending. But this year there’s an addition to the bill: Section 1031, a provision allowing our military to arrest and hold enemy combatants for indefinite periods of time without charges, has been expanded to include US citizens and legal residents. Moreover, the provision allowing the arrest and indefinite imprisonment of US citizens was inserted at the command of the President himself. President Obama threatened to veto the whole budget bill unless the language protecting American citizens and legal residents from this provision was removed. Minnesota Senator Klobuchar voted for in favor of this bill, even though as a former prosecutor she knows what kind of unprecedented power this gives both our President and the military to control, harass and threaten US citizens.

Another measure that Senator Klobuchar voted for, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion, Protect IP Act (PIPA) is well on its way to passage in spite of enormous opposition from internet providers, engineers, major website companies, journalists, entertainers and grassroots activists. The bills are couched as legislation to strengthen US copyright laws. The language is fraught with problems, however, authorizing prison terms for people classified as offenders and giving the government the ability to shut down entire websites that the Department of Justice believes are violating the provisions of the law. In an open letter to Congress, some of the most prominent computer engineers and web inventors had this to say:

“The current bills -- SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly -- also threaten engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that are not readily and automatically compliant with censorship actions by the U.S. government. When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish.”

These two statutes, if they hold up in court, strip American citizens of our First Amendment rights, our due process rights, and any other right the presidential administration deems necessary in the “war on terror”. By expanding the definition of the war on terror to include US soil and include US citizens and legal residents as possible enemy combatants, the administration now wields enormous legal power over the American people.

Both of these bills have bipartisan support, which only increases the cynicism and distrust of people who are looking to one party or another to defend our inalienable rights. These statutes are blatantly unconstitutional and must be immediately challenged in the courts. Every lawmaker who voted for them, like Senator Klobuchar, needs to be held accountable and replaced in 2012 with leaders who will untangle this mess and put the American people first.

The Rules of McPolitics

2011-12-14T11:17:00.000-06:00

“The reason it is so important to control government is because government is the source of enormous power. One president of this country, when he or she takes office, appoints…5,000 people to run a bureaucracy, nonmilitary nonpostal service of 2 million people, who hire 10 million outside outsource contractors – a workforce of 12 million people – that spends $3 trillion a year. That number is larger than the gross domestic product of all but four countries on the face of the earth.

“So the reason we’re doing what we’re doing…and the way to get progressive change, is to control government. That’s what this is about.” – Rob Stein, 2008

In 2004 a very small group of very focused Democrats came together in the state of Colorado, determined to change the course of election outcomes in their state. Started by one very bright political organizer and financed by one very ideologically driven wealthy resident, they built the most effective strategic and tactical system the American political world has seen in modern times. In so doing, they rewrote the playbook for winning elections, turning traditionally red state Colorado into a heavy hitting blue state. They created an extremely effective system that has now been franchised across the country, a system I like to call McPolitics. A book was written documenting their efforts and successes, authored by a journalist who covered the campaigns during that time period and by a former office holder who became a casualty of their success. The book is titled, “How the Democrats Won Colorado, and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care”.

In reality, however, this isn’t a partisan problem. This is a problem of regular people vs. power structures. The system the Democrats invented is now being adopted by many on the Republican side. Escalation is inevitable in an arms race, but the effect has been to so thoroughly manipulate the campaign process and stack the deck in favor of heavily funded shadow organizations, it is nearly impossible for “regular people” to make honest, informed decisions for themselves at the ballot box. Just like some independent business owners have a hard time competing against national chains when they come into town, McPolitics is incredibly hard to overcome once it is established in your area. Either you adapt to the new landscape, or you die.

Here, then, is the genesis of McPolitics:

In Colorado, the Democrats were really tired of being kicked around. Colorado had been a dominantly Republican state for a long time. Determined to change the landscape in Colorado to further their goals, dedicated liberal leaders from private and non-profit sectors came together around one goal: to win, period. They set aside any issue or policy disagreements, knowing they could work those out later once they were in the majority. They made the conscious decision to never criticize or work against each other in public. Their discipline was incredibly strong. It didn’t happen – not once. No public squabbles, no potshots, no public disagreements of any kind. The group’s leaders, made up of extremely wealthy business people, the heads of some of the biggest non-profits, and the best political operatives, formed a Roundtable that made all key decisions going forward. All participating organizations coordinated tightly around each one’s strengths and took their directions from the Roundtable. Organizations were focused (and new ones set up) on what they did best; they didn’t go rogue or step on each others’ toes. The organizations were plugged into the plan where they would be most effective.

The Roundtable based all decisions on how to take extreme advantage of campaign finance laws and protecting donors – file as little paperwork as humanly possible and operate in the shadows as much as possible.

Excerpt from, “The Blueprint”: “The group immediately recognized that campaign finance reform had completely changed the rules of the game. By limiting the amount of money candidates and political parties could raise and spend, the new law had seriously weakened candidates – and all but killed political parties… The biggest thing is it took parties out of the mix as a money entity [compared to the capacity of C4s and 527s].”

The Roundtable developed target lists for seats based on local issues, opposition vulnerability and voting index. All that mattered was whether the seat was winnable. Every race was local; there was no statewide message (although there were overarching themes). In-depth polling and research was used to develop strategy and messaging in every case.

Excerpt from, “The Blueprint”: “Party [entities]… have a tendency to put valuable resources into races they’re probably not going to win because activists demand it and they want to make friends…The people at the Roundtable recognized that they, for all intents and purposes, were the party…That wasn’t such a bad thing. They wouldn’t allow themselves to be caught up in interpersonal politics…Everyone had a common goal and it wasn’t to win friends. It was to win elections. That was the measure by which they would succeed or fail.”

Campaign budgets were developed on the question: “How much does it take to win?” NOT: “How much do we think we can raise?” “How much has been spent in the past?” “How much ‘should’ we spend?” The only cost/benefit analysis that mattered to them was winning the seat and gaining control. The defining philosophy guiding budget decisions was “overwhelming force”. They didn’t care how much money was spent; they only cared about winning. They adopted the attitude that it was cheaper to win and advance than to defend after losing. No matter how much it costs, winning is less expensive than losing.

Illustration: MN Governor’s Race: Republican Tom Emmer lost the election by 8,700 votes. For want of 8,700 votes, Republicans now contend with a governor who blocked our budget, blocked our redistricting maps, blocked our government reforms and now leads a very well-funded, well-organized opposition on everything from taxes to constitutional amendments. Now various Republican groups are on defense, trying to raise roughly $2-3 million to defend redistricting in the courts, defend against union activism, and pay legal costs for a recount. That’s $2 to $3 million the GOP is paying because we lost. Could the GOP have won 8,700 more votes with another $3 million in campaign funds before the election? The fact is, we’re going to spend the money anyway. We can choose to spend the money on offense or on defense, but it’s going to be spent one way or another. Wouldn’t you rather spend it to win?

Organizational structures were purposely kept separate to make money tracking more difficult. The Roundtable (which morphed into Colorado Democracy Alliance, ‘CoDA’) brought participating groups and funders to the table together and matched them up – like a dating service – rather than acting as a clearing house for contributions. 527s, C4s and other organizations deliberately shifted over time, changing names and becoming ever more complicated to befuddle opposition research. Their legal goal was the exact opposite of transparency.

The Roundtable’s plan carefully included every method of obstruction, obfuscation and intimidation available, including overpowering media of every kind and legal action for everything and everything. Truth or legitimacy had no bearing on actions, only turning advantage to gain power. Tactics were designed to keep opposition on defense and suck up opposition donor money in legal bills so it could not be used on the campaigns.

Democrat attorneys were brought in for the express purpose of filing nuisance lawsuits against every organization and candidate that was competitive.

“Professional” activists were used to threaten, intimidate and bully opposition donors and volunteers. Training camps were developed based on the mob tactics anarchists used during the G8 and G20 summits; trainings were hosted and filtered through specific unions, particularly SEIU.

Media outlets were co-opted either by “making friends” with the right people and nurturing those relationships, or arranging for financial help by liberal investors into new or troubled outlets to build them up and strengthen natural loyalties.

Every action was coordinated through the Roundtable. There was no truly unplanned or uncoordinated activity. “Random” or “coincidental” events were never truly random or coincidental. Rapid response to spontaneous opportunities was done through Twitter, text messaging and Facebook direct messaging. Lead “activists” were paid professional chaos creators, not volunteers who do things in their spare time.

Their main strategy was to discredit and demonize the opponent in every way possible while protecting their own candidate in every way possible.

Excerpt from, “The Blueprint”: “In the new arena, candidates are bit players in their own campaigns. It’s almost as if they don’t exist as people, but as biographies to be massaged, amplified and distorted by powerful campaign tactics.”

Overwhelming force and deep negativity were the tactics of choice because they work the fastest. At the same time, the Democrats hysterically decried and litigated (and were compassionately amplified by friendly legacy media) every minor attempt by Republicans to do the same. Class, race and lifestyle warfare were routinely used to great effect with a general electorate that was demoralized by an entrenched recession and subliminal (or not so subliminal) guilt trips over race and immigration.

Illustration: MN Governor’s race: We saw very little of Mark Dayton on the campaign trail in person. We made the mistake of thinking it was because he was so erratic as a candidate his handlers had to keep him hidden. In reality, they were just carrying out their intended strategy, and he was a compliant candidate. Tom Emmer, in contrast, engaged heavily in Main Street retail campaigning to make up for his smaller campaign war chest. The result was that it kept him in front of the press, exponentially increasing his chances of making mistakes and getting critiqued on the record, giving his opponent new advertising material to use against him. Which is exactly what happened.

After the success of the prototype model in Colorado, the decision was made to create a permanent infrastructure that could be replicated in other states, essentially franchising their system. Eighty Democrat donors put up $110 million to fund development in targeted states to develop that infrastructure. Minnesota was in the top targeted states in the nation as far back as 2006, which launched what we now know as A Better Minnesota and its cohorts. The political terrain, strategy and tactics have completely changed in less than one election cycle, bringing in tens of millions of dollars from other states and upending all of our political parties and traditions. AEW does not know how this will turn out. But the regular, everyday people of Minnesota are at the greatest risk of losing this arms race.

Competing with McPolitics

2011-12-09T15:21:00.001-06:00

I have been watching the changing dynamics of politics and campaigns play out for some time now. Fundamental shifts are taking place right under our feet thanks to the McCain Feingold campaign finance laws (along with its companion legislation) and to the landmark Citizens United court decision of 2009. They have upended political financing norms, with the net result being much weaker state parties, very powerful special interest organizations, and candidates whose election success will depend even more on who controls the most money rather than grassroots activists. Money buys advertising; advertising sways voters. When grassroots activists don't have organized channels through which to work and amplify their voices, they cease to matter. All that matters is who has the most money and can spend it the best to sway public voters.
This concept is foreign to most Minnesota Republican activists. Because Minnesota is a caucus state, grassroots activists play a larger role than they do in a primary state. Historically, the Minnesota Republican Party has been one of the most thoroughly developed state GOP party organizations in the nation, with the most extensive voter ID lists, the biggest, most active grassroots population, the largest in-house fundraising capacity and the most influence over elections and legislative agendas precisely because it has the ability to defend the candidates endorsed by its delegates and advocate for the platform developed by its delegates. The power of the party organization really is the expression of the power of grassroots people across the state.

Maintaining and improving all of the operations that go into doing those things takes money. A lot of money. Until McCain-Feingold was passed and vetted through court cases, the ability for the state party to raise money from small and large donors was largely unmatched because of its strength and tradition. However, three things have collided to challenge the strength of this state party and state parties throughout the country:

1. The regulations and statutes contained in McCain-Feingold coupled with the Citizens United decision;

2. Strategies implemented by the Democrats to challenge and litigate as much as possible in the campaign and election process;

3. The protracted recession.

First, McCain-Feingold and its companion legislation increased reporting requirements by party entities, and more strictly separated and defined how state parties could use the funds they raised. Donations are separated into state and federal accounts with a $10,000 individual contribution limit placed on federal donations. This makes it more time consuming and expensive to raise money for the federal account because it has to be driven by small dollar donations. Additionally, almost all state party operations (staff, rent, voter lists, IT, administration costs, etc) have to be paid for out of the federal account because finance regulation assumes that those things are used at least in part to promote federal candidates and influence federal elections. (an oversimplification, but it is the practical effect). Thus, raising money for the federal account has become more expensive and difficult, the costs required to be paid by the federal account have become even more burdensome, and compliance efforts are more complicated and expensive (driving up costs for legal and consulting budgets). The net effect has been to dramatically reduce the involvement and influence of state parties in federal elections around the country.

Second, McCain-Feingold created some new elements in the campaign financing game. People are familiar with 527s (as in Moveon.org), but the newest entities to gain traction are the Super PACs and C4s. Super PACs are candidate-oriented. C4s are the real competition to state parties now. A 501c4 organization can accept donations of unlimited size from both individuals and corporations, and it does not have to disclose those donors in its reports. It is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction to campaign transparency. C4s cannot tell people to vote for or against a particular candidate, but they can drive people to (or away from) specific candidates with ads urging people to "Call Candidate So and So and tell him to support free markets!" or "Call Senator X and tell them you don't want to compromise on environmental protection!" C4s can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money at a very low cost without reporting donors, and they typically have very little overhead to support because they do not work directly with candidates, nor do they have to support and sustain a grassroots activist network. If I'm a major donor with $100,000 to give, and I have a choice between giving to a state party where I have to give my own personal money, my name gets publicly reported, and a big chunk goes to overhead, or I can give to a 501c4 where I can give my own or my business' money, my name (or my company's name) is never released, and almost all of my money goes directly to advertising for the candidate or issue I like, where do you think I will spend my money?

Everything about McCain-Feingold tends to favor large donors and hamper activist organizations like state parties that speak for "the little people".

But it gets better.

The 2000 election crystallized a new campaign strategy adopted very quickly by Democrats: the art of influencing elections through the legal process. The mess that was Florida inspired an entirely new set of tactics that Democrats have used to tremendous effect around the country: filing complaints and litigation for everything they possibly can wherever it is to their advantage to slow down the opposition. Filing a campaign violation complaint against a Republican candidate or entity has proven devastatingly effective around the country because: 1) the media will hype it to the nth degree; 2) conservatives are naturally guilt-ridden and will consider a fellow conservative guilty until proven innocent (and even then there will be residual judgment); 3) conservative donors DO NOT want to contribute money to pay for lawyers. It doesn't matter if the complaint is without merit. It doesn't matter if Democrats have done it, too. It doesn't matter what the ultimate outcome or consequences will be. A campaign violation complaint is the hand grenade of the new politics: it can be thrown at will for any or no reasom, land anywhere, will have a very messy, negative effect for everyone within the vicinity, and it is time-consuming and expensive to clean up. Nobody wants to give money to an organization mired in legal battles: where there's smoke, there's fire, right? There must be something wrong with the organization somewhere, and my donation is just going to go to pay lawyers anyway. Besides, why do I want my name associated with that kind of controversy?

The final nail in the coffin is the protracted recession. People are hurting financially. Since they don't have the cushion of a refund to pay them back for their donation (even if they think it's horrible policy), they're going to be much more careful with their donation budget. Given the choice to give to their local candidate/party unit or give to a state organization mired in legal battles and squabbling among its officers, where do you think the money is going to go? And without sufficient resources at the state level to support the infrastructure that the local units rely on, how long will the units be effective?

To see the results of this convergence of circumstances, we only need look at the Minnesota DFL state party. Their party endorsement has no power; their delegates essentially have no voice. The DFL candidate is the one with the most money to win a primary, and then the resulting winner enacts policies and legislation that appease their biggest contributors. The unions have become the grassroots force when it's needed. All the money, all the strategy, all the top-line staff come from A Better Minnesota and its cohorts. And it comes from all over the country. New York, Hollywood, Colorado, Texas. The old adage that all politics is local has evaporated. It’s been replaced by McPolitics: local franchises of a well-developed, proven campaign concept with national financing.

So it becomes harder and more expensive for state parties to raise money. Legal battles - and bills - mount. Operational expenses have to be cut to appease those complaining about debt. Efforts are made to drive wedges into leadership either by outside attack or by co-opting individual members to the other side (big lobbying contracts on issues against the party platform, for example). Credible leaders walk away from the dysfunction, leaving a power vacuum. Donors wash their hands and direct their money to more effective organizations. The organization splits apart from the inside, crumbles and leaves the path open for victory by the opposition. And it takes years to rebuild, if ever.

This is eerily similar the game plan used by corporations launching a hostile takeover. It has proven very effective wherever it has been deployed. Welcome to the new era of McPolitics.

State parties don’t have to fall prey to this, however. Just like small businesses can retool and compete against national chains, state parties can compete against McPolitics.

Narrow focus to concentrate on what the state party does best. For years, activists and candidates have gotten used to the state party doing “everything” from list development to candidate recruitment to voter turnout to TV advertising. That won’t work in the McPolitics world. State parties have to concentrate on doing a very few things that no other group does, and then do them extraordinarily well.

Know your customer, serve your customer. In the “all things to all people” model, state parties work to appeal to both grassroots activists and the public. That’s a difficult balance to maintain. State parties may find an advantage in picking one group and gearing everything to serve that group. The real voice of the Republican Party is the grassroots activist – regular people who talk with their neighbors every day. No list will ever be complete without input from local volunteers, no advertising strategy can trump good relationships and conversations with your neighbors and friends. There are all kinds of tools and trainings that state parties can generate to equip local activists with what they need to accomplish the goal: successfully getting out the conservative message and turning out voters.

Expect accountability. Understand that successfully competing in the McPolitics world is a two way street, and every person has to do their part. It cannot fall to one person to raise all the money, be the spokesperson, run the daily operations, advise the candidates and keep the calendar. State parties can reasonably expect that every state level officer will help raise money and build local organizations. Every regional and local party officer should have a voter ID plan, a fundraising plan and a voter turnout plan, and it is reasonable to expect that if one plans to run for local party officer positions, one will have the integrity to fulfill all the responsibilities that come with the position. Candidates for office – every office – have to do their part to add to the effectiveness of the whole effort with strong, well-organized, self-sustaining campaigns. In this incredibly competitive new landscape, every single person matters. Slacking off is not allowed. Infighting is destructive. The only way this strategy works is when everyone stands shoulder to shoulder and does the work together. The bottom line is: if you want to be counted, then your efforts have to count for something.

I have been involved in Minnesota politics for longer than I care to admit. I’ve seen the parties here go through several cycles of renewal. The timing in this case for the Republican Party of Minnesota to retool and open the New Year focused and ready is perfect for the coming 2012 elections. There’s not a moment to waste.

This Country Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us

2011-12-07T14:15:00.001-06:00

Gallup Polling released some startling statistics in September. A nationwide poll showed that Americans’ distain for government performance is at a whopping 81% - an all-time record. Fully 57% have little to no confidence that the federal government can solve domestic problems, and they believe that government wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends. But most disturbing:

Half of Americans believe our own federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.

The New York Times released poll results at the end of October showing the same level of distrust and skepticism. Not only are these results profoundly negative, they are unprecedented. The overwhelming numbers alone suggest that these dismal views cross party lines, ideologies and socio-economic demographics. Americans are showing a cynicism toward their government that is unlike anything pollsters have ever seen.

Politicians everywhere are scrambling to get a grip on this problem. With national elections less than a year away, both Democrats and Republicans are trying to come up with a “messaging strategy” that will convince majorities of voters to go their way. I think voters are sending a strong message of their own: “We don’t believe in you anymore, no matter who you are.” A friend of mine recently summed up the feeling this way: “The enemy isn’t Republicans or Democrats. It’s the government.”

I have been fortunate enough to travel this beautiful state of Minnesota for three years now. I’ve spent a great deal of time observing and listening. I have felt a sense of desperation and urgency that is truly unlike anything I’ve encountered before. I remember the malaise of the 1970s with its misery index. The mood today is worse. Coupled with the insecurity of a very fragile economy is a feeling that Washington doesn’t care about what happens to all of us as long as Congressional members continue to get their perks and pensions, the President gets his vacations, and the bureaucracy continues to get fed. We have seen our rights and civil liberties stripped away in large and small ways, and by both parties. The only thing Washington really seems to care about is controlling ordinary people while indulging its own interest groups and bureaucracy.

This is the anger that sparked the Tea Party movement. This is the cynicism that spawned the Occupy movement. Even though most of the beliefs and ideas of the two groups are diametrically opposed, that fundamental sense of betrayal by their own government fueled both movements.

Voters are rapidly reaching the point where they don’t care which party politicians say they belong to. Voters want to vote for candidates who will actually take a stand against the Washington status quo and work for the people. For too long the People have been the ones on the losing end. The People do not want politicians anymore. We want elected officials who will set aside the desire to score points for their party or themselves and instead, put the needs of the American people first. We want leaders who will take bold action to reduce the size and power of government, reinforce our rights, and facilitate leadership in the private and non-profit sectors to grow our economy, not the government bureaucracy.

As we head into 2012, voters are using a new yardstick to measure their candidates: do your ideas expand the size and control of government, increase the need for more spending and diminish the rights and opportunities of the people, or do your ideas reduce the size and expense of government, strengthen our rights and liberties, and facilitate growth in the private sector? Voters are telling us there is not room for both. Either you stand with government bureaucracy and control, or you stand with the citizens of this great nation. Where do you stand?

Leave 'No Child Left Behind' Behind

2011-09-16T11:05:00.000-05:00

Twelve years ago, presidential candidate George W. Bush made public education reform a central theme of his campaign. American students were not keeping up with their global counterparts, and the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their better off peers was not getting any better. Mr. Bush thought it was time to do something drastic to overcome the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, as he called it.
That something drastic became “No Child Left Behind”, the largest, most comprehensive federal overhaul of education we have ever seen. For the first time, the federal government established education standards that every student had to master in order to graduate. Schools that repeatedly missed the mark risked losing students to better-performing schools or being completely reorganized and taken over by state government.

Despite my misgivings about federal involvement in k-12 education in general, I was a huge fan of the idea of No Child Left Behind when it was first implemented. Like many others, I was deeply disappointed with the overall performance of the education system in America and fed up with the lame excuses from those who defended the status quo. I was shocked that schools were churning out students as “graduates” with very little data to prove they’d mastered their material. Educators talked about how well they knew their students in the classroom, but in fact, we knew very little about our students at all. How could we effectively reach every student unless we dropped our assumptions about who they were and how they learned?
So we began testing. We began assessing. We compiled data. We measured progress.
Ten years later, a professional field that had operated almost entirely without numbers is now swimming in data. Entire companies have been developed to generate, compile, track and analyze all the data points we gather. We have demographics, psychographics, learning styles, rates of progress, cohort comparisons, and a host of other data points that educators, administrators, board members and regulators can use to measure the success or failure of a school system, a curriculum, a teacher, a student population.
Now we need to breathe.
School districts all over the country have been frantically trying to analyze all their data, compare it to federal and state standards and come up with improvement plans where necessary to avoid the most onerous penalties of No Child Left Behind, all in an environment of continually changing standards and requirements. If the federal government really wants to help improve education at this point, the best thing it can do is… nothing. Freeze No Child Left Behind for two years. We need sufficient time for data and people to work together all the way up and down the educational food chain to determine best practices and make well-planned adjustments to our educational vision that will serve students well into the future. We will not achieve good results by trying to accomplish this on the fly using staff who feel they have the sword of Damocles hanging over their collective heads every day. No Child Left Behind has been an enormous catalyst for transforming education in America. Freezing it for the purpose of properly finishing its task can be an equally significant contribution to our children’s futures.

Bridging the Great Budget Divide, Part I

2011-07-10T00:10:00.000-05:00

A recent tweet said, “Democrats think the budget is a negotiation; Republicans think it is an intervention.” That might be the most apt description for the philosophical divide at the heart of the budget fights on the federal and state levels across the country.

Dating at least back to the days of FDR and accelerated under Lyndon B. Johnson, the dominant school of thought in American politics has been that government entities are legitimate partners that should be included in most, if not every, area of life with the goal of improving people’s lives. The enforcement authority and funding power of government have been used for everything from rewarding or punishing individual personal behaviors to buying global friends to changing entire industries. The term “public-private partnership” was coined primarily to make the use of taxpayer dollars and government involvement in private projects more palatable to those who wanted to curtail the size and cost of government. And although the ‘partnership’ of government into virtually every social and charitable area of our American lives is strongly favored by Democrats (the so-called ‘war on poverty’, the easy negotiating of labor contracts between members of government bodies and the public employee unions that donate to their campaigns), so-called ‘pro-business’ Republicans have been no less culpable in their promotion of government partnership in commercial development projects and private industry R&D. Both sides have used Americans’ hard earned tax money to finance foreign forays of all kinds, often with unintended and dubious results. For many with both Ds and Rs behind their names, tax dollars were simply an unending stream of capital to be horse traded for each other’s priorities.

We are now reaping what we have sown. We are so far in debt at the federal level that people in high places actually talk about the United States federal government becoming insolvent. We have such significant structural liabilities from accumulated commitments in labor contracts and entitlement programs that we are in danger of suffocating from the weight of our own taxpayer-funded generosity. Our position in global affairs grows more tenuous by the day, as more allied nations question our ability to keep up with the promises we have made to them and the leverage of often unfriendly creditor nations increases every time we borrow more money.

Our situation has brought a different kind of fiscal sensibility to the forefront of national and state politics. A more sophisticated philosophy with a fundamentally different budgeting premise, it recognizes we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing and expect different results. The idea of using last year’s budget numbers as the starting point and horse-trading from there to get a passable and signable budget is a stale concept that does not fit these modern sensibilities; it's tantamount to redecorating the train as it speeds toward a derailment. “Public-private partnership” is a four letter word. New sensibilities are less “pro-business” and more “free market”. The idea of negotiating dollar allocations to different government agencies is viewed as a complete waste of time until the deeper problem of examining and testing the proper scope and role of government in today’s dynamics is thoroughly addressed - and remedied.

The modern fiscal philosophy does not ask, “What has government been doing?” or even, “What does or can government do well?” These questions are not relevant to modern budget discussions. The primary question that must be asked and answered is, “What functions are mandated of government by the Constitution?” Those functions enumerated by either federal or state constitution as governmental responsibilities are the primary (for many, the only) reasons for government to exist at all; every activity beyond that scope should be left to the private and charitable sectors. This new sensibility does not believe there should be no safety net; rather, it demands that we the people be the direct, primary safety net instead of abdicating our social responsibility for our fellow man to a government bureaucracy.

That is the true divide in American politics today. It’s not about the numbers. It’s not about the percentage of the top marginal tax rate. Until our body politic resolves the question of the proper role of government in our modern times, we will not bridge the divide. Having an honest and respectful conversation about that role may be the best recession therapy this country can get.

America's Conservative Agenda Brought to You by... Minnesota

2011-03-31T12:06:00.000-05:00

The land of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone finds itself in a very curious position these days. With the entry of both Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and former Governor Tim Pawlenty into the presidential arena, the election of a new congressional member from a district formerly considered a GOP black hole, and legislative majorities in both state houses committed to not just downsizing state government but completely overhauling its obsolete methods and assumptions, Minnesota is poised to be a major trend setter for the nation in the 2012 elections, perhaps THE trend setter.

Sounds funny, doesn’t it? “Minnesota” and “political conservatism” don’t exactly roll off the tongue here. The Scandinavian tundra is much better known for its ‘progressivism’, and downright socialistic tendencies in many respects. But things have been changing for awhile, even if establishment liberals have steadfastly ignored the shifting tides. More and more Republicans have been getting elected in the last 10 years, and those Republicans have trended more conservative than their 70s and 80s counterparts. Even though the 2010 election gave us a Democratic governor, he only garnered 44% of the vote, and he only managed to do that by spending more than $15 million – more than his two opponents combined. Buying an office isn’t exactly a voter mandate for the liberal agenda.

So what does Minnesota have to offer the nation?

First, we balance our budget every year. There is no such thing as deficit spending in our state government. We prove that it is possible to balance a budget and not run billions (or trillions) of dollars of debt. We had a governor who presided over that process for 8 years without raising taxes. Some Minnesotans will complain that he raised some fees, shifted some payments, and wasn’t exactly a libertarian’s dream. However, compared to governors in other states (Romneycare, anyone?), Tim Pawlenty’s record looks a darned sight better to regular voters. He can speak with authenticity about the reforms that are possible, and about the very serious reform limitations that challenge us if we don’t have the political will to make fundamental shifts in our thinking about government.

Second, we have a vibrant independent streak that demands politicians listen to us, or else. Michele Bachmann has become as popular as she is because she not only listens to what people are saying, she actually responds. Forget what the media elite are saying. Go beyond the Beltway Brie crowd, and you will find big chunks of voters who love the fact that she listens to them and respects what they have to say. Is her voting record perfect? Of course not. But her body of service shows that she actively works to learn what her constituents (and voters around the country) are clamoring to tell her, and then she takes that message back to Washington regardless of whether its popular or not.

Third, we have proven that the GOP should not write off ANY group of voters just because of past history. As they say in the financial world, “past performance is not indicative of future results”. The election of Chip Cravaack still has the Washington establishment shaking their heads in disbelief. They still think it was a weird fluke, that he can’t possibly get re-elected. The resignation to lose in certain districts among certain demographics is so ingrained that it will take a superhuman effort to instill a new paradigm of fighting for every district, every seat, every time. That’s what we did in Minnesota in 2010, and it worked. Every arm of the GOP – state party and house and senate caucuses – worked nearly seamlessly to recruit top quality candidates who fit their districts, train them, raise money and turn out the vote. Imagine what we could accomplish if we had the same level of teamwork on the national level among the RNC, the NRCC, the NRSC and the RGA?

Fourth, we are showing the nation what is possible when you have elected officials who deliver what they promised. Our Republican candidates campaigned not just on fiscal responsibility, but a complete overhaul on how government runs and a line by line review of what government should actually be doing according to our state constitution. Now that they’re in office, they’re doing exactly what they said they would do. Imagine that. Our Republican majorities are focused on narrowing the scope of government to align with our constitution and allowing Minnesotans to figure out the rest. This new paradigm is something our nation desperately needs. Americans want to trust their elected officials, but they’ve been betrayed and hoodwinked time and time again. Minnesota proves that politicians can and do follow through on their promises.

Minnesota has much wisdom and inspiration to offer the rest of our country at a time when it is sorely needed. That the wisdom and inspiration are coming from Republican leadership in a traditionally Democratic state only shows how truly progressive we are. Ya, you betcha.

#FALSECRISIS

2011-02-28T16:45:00.000-06:00

Minnesota’s newest revenue forecast came out today showing that the state will collect about a billion dollars more than previously expected. Democrats immediately went into spin mode about how, now that we “only have a $5 billion deficit”, it might be easier to convince us to raise taxes to close the gap – after all, raising taxes is the only sane thing to do to solve a state government budget crisis in the middle of a recession.

The problem is that the current budget assumptions increase spending nearly 30%, at a time when the rate of inflation is closer to 2%. We will take in almost 9% more revenue than we did the previous budget and yet the Democrats are still whining that we have to raise taxes. The problem is not that we don’t have enough money. The problem is that the Democrats want to spend still more money than we have. This is what we call a false crisis.

Imagine, if you will, that you are doing your own budget projections for your home or business. Over the next two years, you expect that you will bring in 9% more money than you did the last two years. First of all, most of us would be grateful that we’re seeing any increase at all considering the state of the economy. Secondly, we would go about planning our expenses to fit that revenue. That does involve having to prioritize our budgets and then sticking to our plan. If healthcare or energy costs go up more than planned in our own budgets, we cut back on other things. The same is true for governement spending.

Democrats are trying to create a false crisis to generate sympathy for their projects and bully us into extracting more money out of the private economy for their wish lists. Voters told us in no uncertain terms in November they aren’t interested in that agenda. By voting overwhelmingly for fiscally conservative candidates (remember that 56% of Minnesota voters voted AGAINST Mark Dayton), voters told us they want government to spend less money. They told us to focus on the few things that government is actually supposed to do, and cut the rest.

Lawmakers and the governor would do well to heed this advice. Voters want government to spend less money, but they also want to change the budgeting process on a fundamental level. Most of us are not strangers to this prioritization process, but it seems there are some folks who don't seem to understand how it works. For review: First, fund mandated/essential functions. Second, fund, as best as possible, the things that have a serious impact on the quality of performance and service. Lastly, look at funding the things that are nice to have but not really necessary. This process removes a lot of the personal biases and ties that inevitably grow up around any budget line item. It also prevents politicians from using certain hot button expenses like police and fire as political footballs to generate sympathy for spending. Essential services like law enforcement funding comes first. Effective initiatives to improve economic development are not mandated, but they can make a big difference to the health and productivity of the state, so they might fall into the second category. Items like park improvements and arts grants, while nice to have, would most likely fall into the third priority category in the middle of a recession. Within those categories, how do we most wisely spend the money we have?

By prioritizing categories and remaining committed to our promise to the voters that state government will live within its means, we can achieve a balanced budget without raising any taxes. #falsecrisis solved.

Trickle Down Economics Goes Negative

2011-02-22T13:52:00.000-06:00

It is amazing how short-sighted some people can be. In all the talk about Governor Dayton's tax plan (let's face it, it wasn't a serious "budget proposal"), folks seem to have gotten caught up in the idea that it's ok to raise taxes on the richest Minnesotans because they should pay their "fair share". We need a little clarity on what this plan really does before we get too comfortable with the concept of soaking the rich because they won't really miss it anyway.
This plan is not about whether a few dozen ultra rich people will leave Minnesota altogether to avoid taxation or will stay to ante up their "fair share". This plan isn't about whether those ultra rich people will take their income and spend it elsewhere, or even whether business owners in S corporations or LLCs will move their headquarters elsewhere to avoid the tax increase. That's not the real problem with Mark Dayton's tax plan.
Here is the sneaky truth of how Dayton's tax plan will kill jobs:
Dayton's tax plan affects any single filer with a taxable income of $85,000 and joint filers with a taxable income of $150,000 or more. The biggest group of people who will be affected by this tax increase will be people with jobs that pay between $90,000 and $130,000 per year. What kinds of jobs are those? They're upper middle management jobs - the department heads, the project leaders, the division managers. Those are the jobs that will start to dry up first. They are positions that can go unfilled in a recession if necessary. If you do have them, they can be relatively portable (depending on industry) - even outsourced on a contract basis to consultants and free lancers using modern technology like that newfangled internet the kids keep talking about. Let's say I am a job seeker looking at two jobs in that pay range. One is in Minnesota, where the tax rate just shot up to the highest in the country, and one is just over the border in Wisconsin, Iowa or the Dakotas where the income taxes and the cost of government are much lower. Which job do you think I'll take? If I have any flexibility at all, I’ll take the job in the lower-tax state.
Project leaders, division managers and department heads lead other employees. If you don’t have those positions, or if those positions move to another state, you don’t have the same division, department or project member positions either – the $50,000 to $80,000 a year jobs shrink even more. Without those division, department and project teams on site, their support employees aren’t needed in the same number either so those jobs shrink as well – those are the $35,000 to $50,000 a year jobs.
The loss or transfer of those jobs costs outside businesses as well: the dry cleaners, the lunch spots, the suppliers who base much of their revenue from the business of daytime workers also see their revenue drop in the absence of these positions. When revenue drops for these small business owners, they cut their own employees’ hours. The slowdown continues to every aspect of life for any population center: without your leading community base (several studies show correlations between those who make $50,000 a year or more and those who contribute most to their local community activities), communities lose their vitality and their tax base.

Then the reality of tax increases on the “wealthy” shows its negative trickle-down effect on the rest of the economy. To put it simply, the loss or transfer of one $100,000 Minnesota job can easily lead to the loss or transfer of dozens of other jobs and their related economic activity, resulting in higher unemployment and lower tax revenues and, ultimately, the decline of entire communities. It doesn't happen overnight, but it happens as surely as the sun rises in the east. This is the wrong direction for Minnesota. Governor Dayton’s proposal to raise taxes on $85,000 a year jobs will result in job loss for Minnesota. Republicans should relegate it to the trash heap and find ways to encourage employers to expand in Minnesota rather than take their jobs - and their prosperity - elsewhere.

21st Century Public Education: Remodel the Framework

2011-02-16T12:25:00.000-06:00

There is no doubt that the 1950s factory model of education no longer works. The needs and expectations of our students is vastly different now than it was 60 years ago (subject for an upcoming post). Just like teaching our students out of 1950s textbooks would be useless, trying to force-fit the needs and expectations of today's students into 60 year old operational framework will only stifle innovation and impede our students' future success. We routinely update and remodel outmoded HVAC systems, electrical wiring and other physical plant features to keep up with today's needs. We need to remodel the framework of our public education system so school board, administrators, teachers and parents have flexibility to design modern operational systems that work for today's students.

Did you know:

1. Local school boards are not allowed to determine their school calendar - the school calendar is dictated by a "meet and confer" committee of classified employees.

2. There is no formal, standardized performance evaluation measurement system that school districts can use to evaluate teacher performance. Some districts have developed their own; most have not.

3. Education Minnesota, the statewide union that all public school teachers must currently belong to, consistently ranks in the Top Five of expenditures on lobbying the legislature, which does not include the union dues that are contributed to candidates for office.

We need to shift this balance if we are going to succeed in remodeling our public education framework to meet the needs and expectations of 21st century students. Here is what school districts need:

1. Decide whether teachers fall into the "essential employee" category that already covers firefighters, police and school principals. If they don't, we need to give school board the latitude to make significant changes to teachers' Master Agreements. If they do, the legislature needs to classify them as such, eliminating their ability to strike over contract disputes.

2. Upgrade teacher and administrator training programs to require mastery of data use to improve student instruction and outcomes.

3. Modify PELRA (state laws governing contract negotiations) to ensure that school districts can retain the most effective teachers, not just the teachers with the most seniority, and give teachers and other staff assignments that best fit their skill sets and the district's needs rather than simply by who has "bumping rights". Allow districts to modify or eliminate the "steps and lanes" automatic increases that classified employees now enjoy as needed to fit budgetary requirements without having to renegotiate the master agreement.

4. Create an independent arbitrator corps that can only consider "last, best total offer" proposals on contract negotiations rather than acting as a negotiator in their own right, or allow districts the ability to implement a contract without the labor unions' agreement. This modification would go a long way toward balancing the needs of individual school districts that must, by law, negotiate individually against the power of the statewide union organization.

5. Allow school boards to determine school calendars, including staff development days and other non-student contact work days. Set a minimum school year length (there is currently no standard; each district's number of student contact days is set by the teacher committee).

By remodeling the framework by which we operate our schools, we will go a long way toward modernizing our publica school system and meeting the Minnesota constitutional requirement of "thorough and efficient schools".

21st Century Public Education: Enact Funding Flexibility

2011-02-15T14:52:00.000-06:00

Most people have no idea how complicated and painful education funding is. Virtually every dollar that comes into a district has strings attached in the form of mandates, restrictions and requirements. Some administrators have estimated that the staff time needed to keep up with all the mandated reporting and submission requirements amounts to nearly half of every full time employee in a school district. If you wonder why the ratio of administrators to teachers is so high, this is one big reason.
For instance, did you know:
1. School districts are required by law to keep separate accounts for capital, food service, debt service, future retirement benefit exposure, and operating funds, and those funds may not be transferred from one fund to another, even if they are not needed in their area;

2. Two percent of the budget every year is mandated to be set aside for staff development (continuing education, etc.), AND the locally elected school board has no control over how those funds are spent – those decisions are made by teachers and school building administrators according to state law;

3. If school boards don’t reach a contract settlement with their teachers’ bargaining unit (Education Minnesota) by January 15th of the contract year, the district is assessed a $25 per pupil penalty;

4. There are myriad “special pots” of money from state and federal sources that can only be used for specific things. Eligibility, submission and compliance requirements are often conflicting and negatively impact other sources of funding;

5. Various districts around the state have special local levying authority that other districts don’t have, and these authorities arise purely out of the clout their local representatives wield in the legislature (it's another form of earmarking). This creates a confusing and unequal playing field.

An economic downturn is the worst possible time for any government entity to ask for more funds. Minnesota’s school districts need funding flexibility. Here is what Minnesota’s public schools need right now:
1. Allow districts to transfer operating money from one fund to another. Locally elected school board members, accountable to the taxpayers, ought to be able to use capital, food service and staff development funds elsewhere depending on the needs of the individual district;

2. Minnesota’s state government should eliminate the 2% set aside for staff development, or at the very least, waive it for the next biennium so school boards can use that money where it is needed most in their districts. Additionally, the law should be amended to give school boards the final authority in how the money is spent to ensure that staff development programs are in alignment with the district’s goals for performance and student achievement;

3. The deadline for settling contracts, and the penalty for not meeting that deadline, needs to be eliminated, pure and simple. This requirement and penalty threat is one of many things that makes it very difficult for school boards to effectively negotiate labor contracts that are in the best interest of the school district;

4. Every “special pot” of money that is currently in existence, whether it’s a grant program, a local levy authority, or something else, needs to be carefully examined for relevance, effectiveness and ease of use, with most of them sunsetted. If the state of Minnesota adopted the same mantra that most moms use during spring cleaning, “for every one thing kept, two things must be tossed”, we would have a cleaner, easier to navigate, more transparent and equitable system of education funding in this state. Reserve special pots for top priority policy items: innovation, outstanding performance, substantial cost savings. Get rid of all the dust bunny programs hiding under the file cabinets because people never bothered to sweep them out.

5. The notion of creating "special" levy authorities for specific budget items like technology, health and safety equipment, etc. is silly. Local school boards should be able to assess their budgetary needs in total and assess property taxes with the approval of the taxpayers with one number. Trying to get around that accountability by creating all these special little categories is intellectually dishonest, takes too much staff time, and forces districts to make budget choices that may not best fit their needs. This line of thinking falls into the dust bunny category above. Instead, the legislature should craft language that grandfathers any existing special levy now in force into the local districts' current local operating levies (in the odd event one doesn't exist, the special levies would be pooled together to create a standard levy), and let districts work with the aggregate funding without worrying about whether they comply with each special levy's restrictions.

6. Here's another, bolder thought: in an effort to stabilize education funding while we work out the budget and restructuring at the state level, the Minnesota legislature could authorize an automatic extension for two years of any local levy scheduled to expire within the next biennium. Why would that be helpful? First, it would remove the huge budgeting uncertainty that exists in every district where a levy is scheduled to expire during a biennium when the state budget will almost certainly have to cut (or at best, hold steady) education funding. Second, it would maintain stable tax rates for local communities. Granted, tax rates would not decrease, but they would not be threatened with an increase either. Third, it would relieve everyone involved from having to go through the process of a levy referendum - expensive and time-consuming for district staff who have to prepare all the data and deal with submission, approval and reporting requirements, divisive for communities during a time when communities are already exhausted from financial pressures. A two year extension would, in effect, 'calm the system', and provide some breathing space for everyone from MDE to the legislature to school boards to communities while we restructure our public education system in Minnesota.

Simplfiying the budgeting and allocation process will allow school districts the ability to focus on their most important priorities, ease the contortions that legislators, staff members and the public have to go through to understand and administer the process, and might even save a little money to boot as districts spend less time searching for all the little scraps they can find to make up for general fund formula reductions.

21st Century Public Education

2011-02-15T08:50:00.003-06:00

Minnesotans believe in public education. Our state's founders believed in it so strongly that it was written into Article 13, Section 1 our state's constitution: "UNIFORM SYSTEM OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS. The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools. The legislature shall make such provisions by taxation or otherwise as will secure a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state."

In the last thirty years of the education wars, Minnesotans of various stripes have tried to reinvent, circumvent, shut down and compete with our statewide public school system. I have been one of them, because I believe that parents should be able to choose how their children are educated and that competition improves performance in any endeavor.

However, I'm also a Constitutionalist.

As a Constitutionalist, and as a Minnesotan, I have to understand that Minnesotans value public education. It is the most accessible, most affordable means of education that most families in Minnesota have. Abolishing or dismantling public education in Minnesota would be unconstitutional. And since the reality is that public education will remain the most accessible, most affordable form of education for most families, we should also heed our state constitution's requirements to make it thorough and efficient.

Note to Governor Dayton: that doesn't mean throwing more money at the system.

I've spent nearly 8 years serving on a local school board here in the Twin Cities. We have made some amazing progress in transforming our district's educational systems to better serve our students. Our high school has been listed in Newsweek's Top 1,500 High Schools for three years in a row. Our AP and other exceptional learner programs have some of the highest per capita ratios of disadvantaged students of any district our size. We serve a higher proportion of special needs students than most other districts in Minnesota because parents have confidence in our capabilities to educate their children. Our district's superintendent was the first superintendent in the state of Minnesota to base her entire potential salary increase on merit alone.

And we've done it with lower tax rates and lower per-pupil spending than almost any other district in the metropolitan area.

In this series of posts, I will outline the kinds of reform that public education really needs to allow it to perform in the 21st century. I believe in competition as much as I ever did, and I believe that public education can perform just as well as any other educational option if we have the flexibility and call to innovation that our districts need to get the job done. Public education is a core Minnesota value: let's get it right.

Reconciliation is UnMinnesotan

2010-11-19T19:05:00.002-06:00

Ken Martin is trying to shame us into thinking that wanting an accurate vote count in our gubernatorial election is un-Minnesotan. He said as much in an article today regarding the petition filed by the Emmer campaign and the Republican Party of Minnesota requesting the Minnesota Supreme Court to order a reconciliation of ballots to legal voters signed in at each precinct. "What is this really about? This is about damaging the ability of our next governor, Mark Dayton, to govern in this state," said Martin, according to the Politics in MN report. He continues: "And it's wrong, it's un-Minnesotan and I don't think the voters of this state will stand for it." (see full article:
http://politicsinminnesota.com/blog/2010/11/%e2%80%98phantom-votes-suit-hangs-over-gov-recount/ )

The current chairman of the Republican Party of Minnesota suffers fools far more gracefully than some others would. Ken falls squarely into this category. How can reconciling the ballots in the election do anything but HELP the next governor's ability to lead? If the election results are scrutinized to this degree, they are bound to be more accurate. If they are more accurate, they are far more credible and lend even more gravitas to the governor - whoever that turns out to be. I'll give Martin credit for some understanding of Minnesota psyche: most citizens of this state would rather be dead than be considered 'un-Minnesotan'. He's softly trying to bully the supreme court justices into going with the flow, not making waves - don't do anything so un-Minnesotan as to question the judgement of the secretary of state or county workers. I would argue that it's very un-Minnesotan to want to disenfranchise our neighbors who cast their votes legally, and it's definitely un-Minnesotan to want to leave a pall of illegitimacy hanging over the next governor by not thoroughly, properly and accurately counting the ballots in our election. Let the justices determine whether administrative rule is equal in authority to state law passed by a duly elected legislature.

The article goes on with Hamline University political science professor David Schultz suggesting that the petition will get dismissed because it's "too soon" since the election results haven't yet been certified. However, in 2008, when the Coleman recount legal team tried to raise the issue late in the recount process once they realized there were more than 30,000 extra ballots, the argument was that trying to address it at that point was too late precisely because the election results had already been certified. Generally, the earlier these concerns are raised and addressed, the better chance we have of sorting them out and getting real answers.

Lastly, the argument is raised that if extra ballots must be randomly pulled out, both Emmer and Dayton would lose votes at roughly the same rate, and could even affect down ballot races. However, the writer fails to mention that the ballots are to be pulled within their precincts. If Hennepin and Ramsey counties are the areas with the highest proportion of potential problems, then the votes will hardly be lost at the same rate. Dayton would lose a disproportionate share of the vote, by a large percentage. And here is the crux of Martin's concern. He knows that if there are, say, 12,000 extra ballots in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, given the margin of difference between the two candidates in those counties - losing those extra ballots alone could easily wipe out the lead now enjoyed by Mark Dayton. And there would be no collateral damage to the legislative victories of the house and senate Republicans.

And if the Republicans are wrong and there is no phantom vote problem? Then we will have gone a long way to proving how good our election system is, and we can all be good Minnesotans knowing that our next governor is the man truly chosen by 44% of the people.

Let the chips fall where they may, indeed.

Reconciling Ritchie

2010-11-17T23:29:00.001-06:00

The Emmer for Governor campaign and the Republican Party of Minnesota today filed a petition with the Minnesota Supreme Court asking the court “to ensure that reconciliation has occurred in each of Minnesota’s 4,136 precincts as required by Minnesota law (Minn. Stat. § 204C.20)”. Raucus howling immediately ensued from the peanut gallery, decrying Mr. Emmer and the Republican Party for trying to drag out the process, waste taxpayers’ money on the recount and generally rain on the DFL parade. The loudest and ugliest detractors are perfectly well aware that the recount is required by state statute because the margin between the two candidates is less than one half of one percent. But they never seem to let facts get in the way of a good tantrum, so they yell at each other in their echo chamber and soothe themselves with their smug self-satisfaction. Meh.

All the howling is a lame attempt to try to distract the public from two very obvious facts that the Emmer campaign and the state GOP have uncovered: Minnesota’s election system is not as squeaky clean and smooth as some people would have us think; and, some Democrats will happily look the other way rather than reform the system because the current looseness in the rules and lackadaisical habits of our election practices usually tend to favor their outcomes.

Same-day registration fiascos, no photo ID and our mockery of a vouching system have already been covered. The majority of Minnesotans want reform on these issues. What is more fundamentally disturbing is the complete lack of respect some DFLers seem to show for the laws already on the books, and the high tolerance they seem to have for mediocrity in our system performance. The poster child for mediocrity and disregard for the law appears to be none other than Secretary of State Mark Ritchie himself. Although reconciliation of ballots to voters in each precinct is required by statute, Ritchie apparently ignored the requirement and dismantled the reconciliation program designed to make sure that every legal vote is counted, and counted only once. Why? In his own words: "He said the goal was to match voter registration and the certified canvassing board totals within 1,000 names. ‘You'll never get a perfect correlation between the two,' he said. 'We were at 40,000 in April. We're at about 30,000 now.'" (Patricia Lopez, “Ritchie is sued over voter-registration records,” Star Tribune, May 28, 2009).

Problem Number One: Disregard for the law. Why are we having to ask the Minnesota Supreme Court to force the Secretary of State to follow the law? Ballot reconciliation is required by statute. The system was in place to comply. Just do the job you’re supposed to do. Following state statute is not a suggestion; it’s a required part of the job description. How long would Ritchie survive in the private sector if he just chose to ignore required portions of his employers’ job description? About 2 seconds.

Problem Number Two: Why is it acceptable to Ritchie and his ilk to settle for mediocrity in our election system? I’ve heard two lines of flawed logic in this recount that boggle my mind:

1. Minnesota has one of the best election systems in the country, better than most other states.

2. In Ritchie’s own words, “You’ll never get a perfect correlation between the two.” (ballots counted to voters signed in)

It goes without saying that using “we’re better than the other guys” is about the dumbest piece of adolescent logic there is. That’s like having your kid come home with a ‘D’ on a test and hearing him or her say, ‘well the other kids got ‘F’ on theirs’. How we compare to other states is not the standard. The standard toward which we should strive in our election system is 100% accuracy and compliance with the law. This attitude is especially maddening when we know that there were systems and procedures in place to accomplish the reconciliation task, and they simply weren’t being followed.

Second, the acceptance of mediocrity as a matter of philosophy is utterly unacceptable. To say that “you’ll never get a perfect correlation between the two” is like a retail manager accepting that the cashiers’ tills will never balance. A 40,000 ballot to voter gap spread among 4,136 precincts averages less than 10 ballots per precinct. Figure it out for crying out loud. Make sure your systems and procedures are adequate, then train and support your election judges using the standard of 100% accuracy and compliance. The task is straightforward: the number of ballots must match the number of signed in, legally registered voters. The remedy for discrepencies is to discard any extra ballots. It’s not rocket science.

Minnesota is a state in fundamental political transition. We have seen a few cycles in a row now with extremely close elections in various races. Minnesota’s voters deserve to have confidence in the accuracy and integrity of our election process. Compliance with the law, a commitment to excellence and willingness to recognize – and reform – flaws in the system will earn and keep the trust and confidence so vital to our robust democracy for every citizen.

How does reconciliation work? Check out Mitch Berg's explanation at:
http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/

A little self-flagellation

2010-03-22T21:20:00.004-05:00

Here's a riddle for you: What do you get when you cross 12 years of majority status with a party that has its collective head in the sand?

Answer: Obamacare.

As much as we conservatives and Republicans want to wail and gnash our teeth over the heavy-handed, manipulative tactics of the Democrats in getting this behemoth of a bill passed, we really have only ourselves to blame. Healthcare reform is not a new issue. In 1992, when President Clinton took office, consumers were complaining about runaway costs, capricious insurance denials, no real choices, and haphazard delivery. Hillary Clinton became the first First Lady to take an active policy role in trying to shape an overhaul of the healthcare system to address these issues and create a system that insured everyone. We heard exactly the same arguments for and against her ideas as we've heard over Obamacare. Republicans - and the general public - recoiled. Of course we need healthcare reform, we said, but it should be targeted to the real needs in the system - we didn't need some sweeping overhaul that would destroy the best medical system in the entire world. We needed lawsuit reform, portability, more consumer choice and direct access so people could see how much their healthcare actually costs. Eventually Hillary Clinton's plans were tossed out as too far-reaching, too socialistic. Americans didn't want socialized medicine, plain and simple. They elected Republicans to a majority in 1994 to rein in the left and bring balance back to federal government.

Republicans held Congressional majorities for 12 years. For 8 of those years, we held control of the executive and the legislative branch. There was nothing we couldn't have done. We had a golden, perhaps once in a lifetime opportunity to enact the kind of reforms that would have transformed the medical industry in America and provided a shining example for the rest of the world for how to provide effective, cost-efficient healthcare that rewarded innovation and success and left no patient behind.

Instead, we did...nothing.

No tort reform. No delivery streamlining. No portability. No reforms of insurance pools or patient coverage. Oh, we managed to create a bill to cover prescription medications for some folks, but we even screwed that up. All we really did was expand bureaucracy and increase costs. For the most part, Republicans put healthcare reform on the back burner, telling ourselves that the public cared more about the war on terror than the state of our medical system.

The funny thing is, people did continue to care. The healthcare system is something that affects all of us every day - taking care of children or aging parents; dealing with insurance companies, providers, pharmacies, government agencies; paying the co-pays, the deductibles, the out-of-network, out-of-pockets. The maze is confusing at best, rife with traps that cost you dearly or dead ends that don't heal your ills. The costs are ridiculous - insurance premium increases of 15% or more annually are not unusual even when inflation stays near zero.

So, the Democrats come along, led by this charismatic "Yes We Can!" leader who promised to bring Utopia into being with his presidency. With commanding majorities in both houses, he had a golden, perhaps once in a lifetime opportunity to enact the kind of reforms that will transform the medical industry in America. The difference? President Obama did it. We may not like his vision or his methods, but he did it. The Democrats now own the healthcare issue. And beyond our goldfish bowls of cynicism and beltway politics, here is a sampling of real statements from average people about the bill:
"I'm glad that now self-employed people can buy into insurance pools like employees do."
"Now my husband doesn't have to stay with his job to keep our health insurance. We can take our policy with us."
"My neighbor can't be denied coverage for her heart condition."
"I know there are things in the bill I won't like, but we can fix those. At least this is a start."

Hear that? That's the sound of American common sense and compassion talking. Those are Republican ideas. But we will never be able to claim them now, because we failed to provide clear leadership when we had the chance. The American people wanted action. They wanted some direction. We didn't provide any, so they took the only direction that was laid out, knowing it would have to be fixed later.

We have a chance to fix it in November. Will we be fit to lead?

At the intersection of Walmart & Amway: the transformation of human civilization, brought to you by capitalism

2009-10-24T22:21:00.002-05:00

I read a galvanizing Wall Street Journal article Wednesday on my morning flight to Chicago. The article focused on a new trend in India: companies that are designing and selling new products geared toward improving the quality of life for India’s poorest populations, and giving individual entrepreneurs the opportunity to build their own businesses along the way.

That bears repeating: Indian companies are now focusing their resources on designing and selling new products geared toward improving the quality of life for India’s poorest populations, and giving individual entrepreneurs the opportunity to build their own businesses along the way.

Those in the know in India have figured out that they don’t have to settle for scraps of hand-me-down technology and jobs outsourced from the West to sustain their economy. Armed with some of the best designers and engineers in the world along with a highly skilled workforce and motivated customer potential, they have decided to build their own internal engine – I’m not even sure they realize exactly what they are unleashing in their country. In addition to the obvious economic explosion coming their way, it will have incredibly profound and far reaching social and political effects.

It started when they channeled Henry Ford with the release of the Nano, Tata Motors tiny little $2,200 car that the bulk of Indians could afford to buy and could physically drive throughout their country’s widely varied road system. Here are some other examples:

- One company has produced a small refrigerator that runs on batteries designed for use in India’s rural areas that sells for $70. Although it is a “major appliance purchase” for small Indian farming families, it significantly improves the safety of their food supply and their quality of life at a purchase price they can afford and a low cost of use they can sustain. It’s kinder to the environment just by its necessary design. Its sale and distribution is handled by women who go from village to village with the small refrigerator on their bicycles.
- Another company has figured out how to open bank “branches” virtually: it has designed a special cell phone with a chip that can compute and transmit basic banking transactions using portable fingerprint identification technology for account holders. A bank representative basically sets up shop in any given small village with the phone and a lockbox of rupees. Customers sign into their accounts using the fingerprint technology, do their transactions electronically, and either deposit or withdraw the physical rupees from the representative’s lockbox. The representative takes the physical currency back to a brick and mortar branch at the end of his/her run.

These are just two examples of ways that Indian companies are transforming the lives of their own citizens. Along the way, they are also blazing a revolutionary path to economic recovery and growth for the entire global market. Want to use less energy? Look to India’s innovative uses of rechargeable batteries and low-power drain electrical devices. Looking to improve product affordability? See how India’s new technologies and production methods are reducing manufacturing and transaction costs. Racking your brain over how to create new business and job opportunities for your underclass? India is leading the way by working with their culture: building distribution channels with independent entrepreneurs and small local businesses that create local jobs, thereby improving standards of living in villages and rural areas all over India. Wishing you could recoup some of the losses you took in the stock market plunge? Has India got some investment opportunities for you, even if your available investment dollars are modest.

Sam Walton opened Walmart with the vision of bringing affordable products to people who needed and wanted them to improve their quality of life. Amway built its global company with the vision to provide a path to business ownership for anyone with the drive to be an entrepreneur regardless of investment capital or previous experience. Those two philosophies are revolutionizing the culture and the economy of India – it’s only a matter of time before they light the way for the rest of us to follow.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125598988906795035.html

It's not the thought that counts.

2009-10-09T11:16:00.002-05:00

So the Big O has won the Nobel Peace Prize. To me it is no surprise and of no consequence. It is no surprise because all American presidential winners of the prize have been Democrats. It is of no consequence because the nomination deadline for this particular round was February 1, 2009 - barely 10 days after the president took the oath of office. Even though the actual voting occurred later, there was absolutely not enough time for the president to accomplish anything substantial enough to merit consideration, even working at his feverish pace.

This cheapening of the Nobel Peace Prize is extremely disappointing. It was foolish and shallow of the Nobel nominating committee to nominate anyone with such a slim record, regardless of how much Hope he spreads around. This was not the Nobel Hope Prize. It was the Nobel Peace Prize – arguably the most prestigious award in the world for a subject held in the highest regard by all of humankind. My disappointment, however, has nothing to do with President Obama, how I feel about his agenda, or the political party to which he belongs. My disappointment goes much deeper than that.

The gravitas of the Nobel Peace Prize should, in my opinion, be reserved until a person's whole body of work can be judged for its effect on the subject matter involved. Consider the polio vaccine, for example. The three scientists who won that award didn't win because they announced they would try to eradicate polio. They didn't win because they started on their experiment protocol. They won because they developed and proved a viable, economically and socially sustainable solution that could be replicated worldwide to eliminate polio as a threat. Now THAT'S an accomplishment worthy of a Nobel award. It's the worldwide effect of the accomplishment that matters and should be judged. If high-minded thoughts and good intentions were all that mattered to qualify someone for a Nobel award, nearly everyone would deserve one.

I don’t take issue with President Obama over this. I take issue with the Nobel committee. Either they don’t understand the importance of the award and have decided to hand it out willy nilly, or they do understand its importance, and they handed it to the least experienced and accomplished president in modern times because they want to lend weight to his agenda. Which one is worse?

Remembering 9/11

2009-09-11T13:47:00.002-05:00

'Please pray for all who were murdered by Islamic terrorists on this day in 2001. Pray for their families. Pray for all those who fight terrorism & terror sponsors "over there" so we can live in safety here. Pray for all peace-loving democracies, that God will give us the grace to reach out to all who want peace & freedom, the fortitude to stand strong against those who do not, and the wisdom to know the difference.'

That was my Facebook status today. I still mourn when I recall how that perfect September morning morphed into surreal horror as more than 3,000 Americans and foreign guests lost their lives – and thousands more lost their way in the aftermath.

Free commerce and global trading as we know it vaporized as the World Trade Center towers collapsed upon themselves.

The enormous gash in the Pentagon punched straight through to our very sense of American security and complacency.

The peace and tranquility of ordinary citizens living ordinary lives abruptly shattered when Flight 93 slashed through a Pennsylvania meadow in a searing jolt of terrorism with global reach.

Revulsion still shudders through every angry nerve when I recall the glee expressed by Osama bin Laden and his minions over the unprecedented success of their attacks.

I still weep at recordings of the last phone calls made by Flight 93 passengers to their loved ones, knowing they would not see them ever again.

My patriotic blood still courses at the phrase, “Let’s roll”.

Our very sense of American identity was transplanted that day. We were forcibly torn from our deep-rooted belief that because we stand for freedom, because we are the strongest, most able nation in the world, because we devote untold human and capital resources to helping less fortunate global neighbors, deep down other nations must like us – or, at the very least, have a grudging respect for us. Since entire generations had grown up in a post Cold War world with America as the only superpower, we had absorbed a complacent belief that we were invincible. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 ripped out that diseased belief structure and replaced it with Homeland Security, hundreds of thousands of combat soldiers in action, fighter jet patrols over our major cities and fundamental economic upheaval.

In the eight years since the attacks, we have behaved very much like transplant patients. Even though we know we now need these things – these intrusions into our civil liberties, these daily security inconveniences, these economic restructurings – to stay alive, our body politic still tries to reject the new transplanted reality. We still long for our old belief structure, even though we know it was diseased and unsustainable. We still try to avoid taking our daily dose of reality medicine, even though we know it’s the only way to stay strong and healthy. And we will always bear the permanent scars of our ordeal, no matter how much we try to eradicate them.

We Americans, eternal optimists that we are, need to strive forward. It is part of our national DNA. However, we also now carry with us the sorrow of knowledge that not everyone shares our outlooks and our beliefs, and they want us dead. Wisdom can spring from that sorrow. We can use that wisdom to improve how we influence the world. We can look to the world stage with our eyes wide open and see our friends – and our enemies – for who they are, understanding that our beliefs and our traditions may not necessarily reflect today’s current realities. We can then act accordingly to further the ideals of freedom, democracy and justice in the world. Let us pray that we do so with grace, fortitude and discernment in all things.

Muzzling the President

2009-09-03T23:35:00.003-05:00

The heated controversy around an upcoming speech planned for the beginning of the school year by President Obama on the importance of education is dangerously close to at least equal mankind’s annual contribution to global warming. Parents are threatening to pull their children from school on September 8th, political organizations are calling for boycotts of schools that show his nationally televised speech, teachers’ unions are issuing marching orders for their members to show the speech no matter what parents and school administration officials say, and policy think tanks are renewing their arguments for private and charter schools to ensure that students have “freedom of thought” rather than suffer from government-imposed indoctrination of leftist values.

What???

This is the President of the United States. This is the leader of the free world. This is the highest office of the most free and prosperous nation in the history of mankind – one that considers the right of free speech as one of its most sacred foundational cornerstones. Yet people are calling for a ban on his welcome back to school speech. Consider what is being demanded: people are calling – no, they are howling – for public schools to suppress a speech from the President of the United States.

Have a large number of Americans suddenly lost their minds? Have they decided that free speech is no longer an essential right, and the best way to set the example is to gag the President?

I would suggest that this is not quite the case. Rather, the outrage is coming from a keen sense of deep distrust on this particular President’s motives. It is unprecedented for the President to deliver a back to school welcome speech, but that isn’t enough to raise this kind of ire. That his soft, feel-good message of working hard and staying in school comes precisely when his approval ratings are suffering a TKO and his bungled health care plan is barely hanging on life support smacks of pandering still doesn’t deserve such passionate opposition to a mere back to school speech. No. Anger this visceral comes from a deep-seated belief that Barack Obama isn’t addressing our nation’s students to encourage them to stay in school. Instead, concerned people believe that Barack Obama is trying to indoctrinate their children over to his side on policy, pitting child against parent in a war over values, priorities and a fundamental vision of what America should be as a nation. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

But does he deserve such a reputation? Well, let’s look at his very short history:

In the first month of his administration, Barack Obama shoved Republicans aside from discussions on economic stimulus, smugly telling them “he won”, so things were going to be done his way;
In the second month of his administration, Barack Obama put together a plan to take over the financial industry and the auto industry all while protecting those who decimated the housing industry;
In the third month of his administration, Barack Obama appointed multiple Cabinet and staff whose tax dodging and other legal entanglements compromised his pledges of honesty and integrity in government;
In the fourth and fifth months of his administration, Barack Obama’s right hand Rahm Emmanuel was caught trying to take control of the U.S. Census process to tilt the counting of American citizens to favor Democrats in election politics;
In the last three months of his administration, Barack Obama has tried to shove an unbelievably bloated, contorted, impossible to understand, implement and pay for healthcare system under the guise of reform without letting people read or debate it. We also discovered that he had reached back room deals with a number of insurance companies in the process – a practice he specifically said would not happen during his term.
Now, it has come to light that Barack Obama’s education speech isn’t just a speech, it’s the focus of a lesson plan developed by the White House to challenge children to find ways they can help him.

I’m sorry, but if the shoe fits…

Barack Obama has caused this outrage because of his heavy-handed tactics to push his policies through, his arrogance and smugness, his willingness to intentionally surround himself with people who do not measure up to public standards of moral and ethical conduct, and his brazen (and ill-conceived) intentions of taking control of just about every industry in America. That kind of conduct breeds intense distrust in Americans; we don’t like people who act like they’re better than we are, and we surely don’t like people who try to pull the wool over our eyes and then insult us for taking it off. Barack Obama has politicized the office of the Presidency so much so that 63% of Americans (according to a recent Facebook poll) would rather ban public addresses by the President in schools unless they have been reviewed by parents and teachers first than let those addresses happen without oversight. This is a serious problem. If Americans distrust their President so deeply they would rather censor him than listen to him, how can we hope to build any kind of common ground anywhere going forward?

How do we really approach health care reform?

2009-08-13T22:22:00.002-05:00

Beyond tax cuts, more important than foreign policy, a core foundation for my conservative philosophy is the protection of innocent and vulnerable human life.

I have always been pro-life. I have carried the pro-life message with me wherever I could. I used it as a topic for persuasive argument assignments in high school. I taught about it at our church youth group. In college I picketed Planned Parenthood in St. Paul, counseled girls and young women before and after having abortions, and volunteered my time to pro-life causes and political candidates. While the pro-life cause wasn’t my only issue, it was certainly a defining issue – if the candidate wasn’t pro-life first, then we weren’t working from the same philosophical framework. Being pro-life didn’t guarantee that a candidate would get my vote. But, not being pro-life certainly guaranteed that he/she wouldn’t get it.

I tell you this only to provide background. I recently gave birth to my fourth child 2 months before her due date. As I looked at her tiny face, I couldn’t help but think of this glaring contradiction in our society: we seem to be equally willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of staff resources to keep our youngest babies alive on the one hand, yet on the other hand we pervert the talent and skills of medical staff supposedly committed to healing to killing off these same babies when it suits the whim of the mother (or others who coerce her). What kind of philosophical schizophrenia allows us to do this?

I would suggest that we, as a nation, are simply too psychologically cowardly to face the truth of what we are doing and take responsibility for changing it.

There is no reconciling this dichotomy of national consciousness. Until we, as a nation, commit to a consistent, cohesive set of values regarding our care and concern for human life in all its stages, we will not be able to create a health care system that genuinely works. We cannot commit to both saving people and actively killing them, selecting who will live and who will die according to a false code of ethics built on the idea of ‘choice’ – because choice for one necessarily eliminates the choice for another. There is only one equation that works here: all human life is equally deserving of protection and healing. In order to build a health care system that works for everyone, we must first work from the premise that everyone counts equally. Every person in our society has innate value; it is up to us to develop a health care system dedicated to honoring that value. Here’s a hint: a health care system that works for everyone won’t involve a government funded plan.

Yet more good news

2009-03-24T00:23:00.001-05:00

Over the weekend I attended some local Republican conventions in Minnesota. Minnesota is a caucus state, which means that local grassroots activists have much greater influence in determining everything from the party platform to the selection of candidates to the execution of campaigns across the state. It is a terrific leveling force against the complaint that “big money” rules politics; unlike primary states where candidates run their campaigns largely through paid media, caucus states ensure that the people who truly care about the direction of their party and the quality of their candidates are heard loud and clear.

I was delighted to see excellent turnout at these local conventions in a non-election year. It was obvious to me that conservatives are motivated and focused on rebuilding the Republican Party in Minnesota. I heard lots of good ideas, substantive discourse on a variety of topics, and one overall message loud and clear:

The Republican Party is a conservative party, with conservative principles that we are not interested in leaving behind. On the contrary, the folks at these conventions believe (rightly so, in my opinion), that we need to do a much better job of adhering to our conservative principles and articulating the success of those principles to the rest of the voters. America is a center right country; even apolitical people cringe at the idea of “socialism” and government control of their lives. Americans believe that the government that governs best governs least, and that there is no government control that will substitute for personal responsibility, integrity and conviction.

The success of our local conventions combines with a spontaneous explosion of conservative activity around the country: Tea Party rallies with tens of thousands of participants, governors making the very hard (but wise) choice to eschew the Big O’s “free” candy because they know that their state’s freedom will be held for ransom in return, bank executives telling the federal government they can take their TARP funds and put them somewhere else because their intrusion and control isn’t wanted in our free market system, and local groups of all kinds springing up, using the power of the internet to connect with each other and spread the conservative message.

This is how it all starts: conservatives banding together on the issues, educating and motivating each other so we can go out and literally evangelize the general electorate. As we build our momentum, we need to keep our message clear: the Republican Party is a conservative party. We are not Democrat Lite, we are not Mushy Middle. We’re not interested in wannabes or RINOs. We have no patience for whining, grousing, or petty personal agendas. We want tried and true positive conservatives who will build on the momentum we see starting and take advantage of all the innovation that the web and other tools have to offer to catapult the Republican Party back into the majority in Minnesota and across the country. We've got a great start. Let’s keep it going!

And now for the good news.

2009-03-23T21:13:00.002-05:00

The media is full of bad news. I managed to work myself into a full-blown fit the other day before work because I made the mistake of watching the morning news as I got ready. By the time I got into the car I was a nervous wreck, ready to throw in the towel on everything we were doing to build our business. I have a pretty thick skin, which tells you how dramatically bad the commentary was that morning.

But just as the media started reporting on the recession long after it actually began, so they are lagging behind on highlighting the improvements we are seeing on the ground. My business – the restaurant business – is much like the canary in the coal mine of the economy. Eating out is almost completely discretionary for most people, so restaurants tend to be more sensitive to even minor changes in the economy. It doesn’t take much for people to decide to eat out less often, choose less expensive venues, and spend less on their meal when they do go out.

The good news is that sales in our restaurants are up – strongly up.

Digging into further research gave me even more reason to be optimistic that we’re seeing the bottom of the economy and are moving out of the recessionary period. Here are a few stats to consider, according to Gallup Research Polling rolling averages:

Consumer spending is up to $58*, an increase of 6 points
People who are “Not Worried” about their personal finances: 63%
Consumer mood: Happiness is up 10 points to 54%
People who feel “Energized” is up 3 points to 53%
People who think the economy is getting better: 27%, a 20 month high
Consumer mood has improved by 31 points over past 10 days
Support for nuclear energy: 59%, all time high
Economy trumps environment: for the first time, 51% of Americans say economic growth should be given top priority, even if the environment suffers for it

*Note: this number is still lower than it was earlier this year; however, there is no adjustment available to account for the lower prices people are paying for goods. So, while people may not be spending more hard currency, they are coming out and buying more goods – they’re just getting better deals due to reduced pricing.

This is great news for Main Street. When people start to feel better, they relax. When they relax, they open themselves up to possibilities and new perspectives – like, maybe the sky isn’t really falling after all. There are always caveats: Obama’s stupidity could easily derail this delicate improvement; China, Russia or any number of other countries could short circuit our recovery with their own problems because we owe them so much money at the federal level, and the Democrats in Congress are quite able to reroute any improvements to their own districts and then take credit for everything good that happens from here on out, and many banks are still making things difficult for business, and the Big O’s spending sprees have done absolutely nothing to improve that at any level.

I believe we will still see some job shedding in fat or outdated industries. However, with public sentiment swinging toward making the economy a priority over everything else including the environment, we will begin to see new jobs opening up in other industries by the end of the year – if we don’t let the Big O and Co. screw it up too badly.

Obama is an idiot.

2009-03-23T20:07:00.003-05:00

For the past few weeks I’ve been paying very close attention to the Big O’s administration and movements as he tilted this way and that on his agenda, his positions on various issues, and trying to fill his Cabinet. I tried to cut him a little slack regarding ignorance in the actual “being president” part of this historical juggernaut; after all, he’d only been a US Senator for 43 days when he announced he was running for President. One could understand that he hadn’t had a chance to really absorb the finer points of running the country day to day in such a short time – details such as choosing Cabinet members without major legal and tax problems, paying more than momentary lip service to the idea of getting to know the folks on the other side of the aisle before insulting them, and actually putting a mature White House staff in place that knows how to do more than just campaign for the liberal agenda, they might also be able to spell.

However, enough is enough. The Big O has shown that while he’s a stellar campaigner, he’s a completely incompetent leader. He hasn’t a clue what he’s doing. Unfortunately, like so many others who are products of free passes in life, he thinks he’s a lot smarter than he is. He’s not interested in being corrected because he smugly thinks he already knows everything. In fact, he knows very little from a practical standpoint. Forget the Harvard degree. With all due respect to Harvard graduates, the only thing Obama had to do to get his degree was agree with the left-wing teachings of his professors – not exactly a difficult thing to do for a master manipulator.

Oh, the Big O knows plenty about putting on a cool front – but just about any teenager can school you in the art of being cool. He knows a lot about manipulating words and images to get people to do what he wants – as do my 2 year old and my 6 year old. He is a truly gifted orator, an important skill for which he not only has a natural talent, but which he also learned at the feet of Reverend Wright and others who are also accomplished in emotional manipulation to further their own agendas. It’s easy for the lay person to confuse master manipulation for wisdom; it’s even easier to mistake gifted eloquence for intelligence. They are neither.

The Big O has now shown without a doubt that he is not only a dedicated and unapologetic socialist who seems to despise the very socioeconomic and political systems that gave him the opportunity to become President of the most powerful nation on earth, he’s not even remotely good at the most basic functions of the job. And he doesn't seem to care about that. He brushes off the near daily mistakes of his administration and aides as unimportant distractions from the "real" business of being President, when in fact, these near constant errors are symptomatic of a fundamental lack of competence that affects every aspect of policy and politics.

The question is being asked: when will the media turn on him? The answer is absolutely never. Not a chance. Instead, they’ll blame nitpicky critics who are out to “get” him, and an outmoded system of standards that are unrealistic and probably irrelevant in this txt msg age. They will never expect their golden boy to conform to the universe as it stands; instead, they will expect the universe to evolve around to his style.

That is, if there are any traditional media outlets left in business to even talk about it.

The best thing to happen to education is a budget shortfall.

2009-02-24T20:17:00.002-06:00

I serve on our local school board, one of seven elected representatives of the taxpayers in our school district ISD 199. First, let me say without equivocation that I think we have one of the best school districts in the Twin Cities metro area, if not one of the best in the state. Our district isn’t perfect, to be sure, but because we have a no-nonsense board combined with a results-oriented superintendent and building administrators, we put 70% or more of our dollars directly into the classrooms, we’ve limited our district administrative staff to just seven key people (with limited clerical support), we’ve implemented pre-AP and AP courses and gifted programs that draw students from surrounding districts, we serve a disproportionately large special needs population very well, and we renewed an operating referendum without raising property taxes last year.

Last night we heard the first rollout of our budget proposal for the next two years. We knew going into this presentation that we needed to cut $1.3 million from our expected budget (which essentially meant a cut of $71,755 in actual dollars spent from the year before). Unlike other government entities, school districts cannot deficit spend. By law, we have to maintain balanced budgets or we go into statutory operating debt, which makes us vulnerable to a state government takeover of district operations. And we do make reductions to proposed budgets every year based on enrollment figures in each grade and participation levels in all programs and activities. This, however, was by far the biggest reduction proposal we had had to consider since 2001.

We could have tried the approach of a simple spending freeze, but that wouldn’t have addressed many of the educational issues we faced, and it would have required the buy-in of the unions in our district – highly unlikely.

Instead, our district and building staff, led by our superintendent Dr. Dee Wells, conducted an all out assault on Business As Usual practices in the district. Everyone was engaged in the process, from building maintenance workers to teachers to district department heads. Every line item was debated. All expenditures had to prove their worth and value to the goals of the district (improving test scores and graduating students who are prepared for whatever they want to accomplish in life). Priorities were clear: core academics came before everything else; all other classes, programs and services were prioritized based on use and usefulness to the students.

It was a beautiful sight to behold: educators willingly hacking over a million dollars from their own budgets and finding ways to improve our education along the way. They found new cost efficiencies in purchasing; outsourced some services while bringing others in house; combined some programs and services with other districts; completely redid the scheduling in the middle school to increase student teaching time and cut under-utilized staff; found ways to implement brand new uses of technology to improve teaching quality while cutting personnel costs, and came up with better ways to achieve our AYP goals under No Child Left Behind.

The result: a proposal for a leaner, cleaner, better organized and more efficient school district that will be much better positioned to prepare its students for 21st century careers and lives. Like all crises, this budget shortfall forced everyone in our district to look at all aspects of product and service delivery in completely new ways. It brought out the best in creativity and innovation, resulting in proposed solutions that will save us money, increase productivity and give us better results as we go forward. That’s the American way.

It’s a pity that Washington has forgotten that.

For a closer look at how this school district balanced the budget without bilking the taxpayers, go to: http://www.invergrove.k12.mn.us/Proposed_Budget_Reductions.html

Playing in Zero Gravity

2009-02-19T21:22:00.004-06:00

I’m tired of everyone acting as if the Big O pulled off a miraculous feat of marketing genius in 18 months by building the electronic campaign and social networking machine that we saw in the 2008 campaign. The truth is, while the effectiveness of the Big O’s new media campaign was awe-inspiring, the signs of the electronic transformation have been around for us to see for awhile. If conservatives want to even begin to think about becoming competitive again, we need to understand what has happened to American culture in the last 20 years, and how it is being expressed through the technology of the last 5 years.

First, for the culture change.
It all goes back to education. For more than 20 years in some states, conservatives have been fighting the culture wars in the education establishment. We have focused on standard public education, arguing about curriculum content, teaching methods, test results, tax rates and spending patterns. In many cases, we made substantial progress in improving graduation standards. We passed No Child Left Behind, which, despite its flaws, finally gave school boards a big enough stick to use against the power of the teachers’ unions to improve teaching methods and testing results. Nonetheless, we missed a couple of crucial elements that we cannot control through regulations or standards.

The first thing we missed is that no matter what the standard curriculum content is, teachers have the ability to supplement the curriculum with additional materials. That means that if they feel there is something lacking in the regular textbooks they’re using, they can add other materials, activities, projects and assignments to “flesh out” what they think should be taught. If a teacher is motivated by a particular social, religious or political concern, it is not unusual for them to bring this into the classroom in that way, whether it's conservative or liberal. The coverage of the presidential inauguration provided a classic example of how easy it is for a civics lesson to turn into an opportunity for political indoctrination. Even if teachers focus on seemingly non-controversial aspects of the inaugural, there is no way for the student to escape the politicization of the office by the current holder. Students are learning in subtle and not-so-subtle ways the finer aspects of liberal thought just by the ancillary teaching that occurs in the classroom.

The second thing we missed is the nature of “character development” that is occurring in the classroom. While we were busy lamenting the lack of discipline in the classroom and the fact that Judeo-Christian values cannot be taught for fear of running afoul of the First Amendment, schools were busy filling that void with less controversial values. Now we have a whole generation of voters aged 18 to 30 who literally grew up with these ideas of American values:

Cooperation instead of competition
Consensus instead of majority rule
Community instead of individuality
Celebration of racial and cultural diversity instead of American unity
Fairness of outcome instead of equality of opportunity
Non-judgementalism instead of discernment and strength of conviction

Thus, these younger voters truly believe that fairness is patriotic, that cooperation and consensus are more American than the cruelty of competition and majority rule. How exactly do we re-educate them?

Now for the technology.
So we have these younger voters who have been educated for some 20 years in these systems with these values, and they begin to connect with others in Europe, Asia, South America, Africa and elsewhere who think like they do via outlets like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and other social networking sites. If you don’t know what those are, you’re not alone. That also means you’re officially part of the problem. These plugged in young Americans may just as easily have a best friend in Zurich whom they've never met in person as one down the block from their childhood home. They meet their spouses online, they find jobs online, they look for and buy homes, clothes, cars, electronics, gifts and illicit substances online. While people over 40 use the internet, for people under 40, the internet is so integrated into their lives that they live partially in the physical world and partly in cyberspace – and both places are equally real and valuable in their lives. They literally don't know how to live without the web, nor do they find any value in the idea that they should live without it.

Most importantly, they are getting their news and information on the web and forming their opinions on the web based on information they seek out from multitudes of sources (reliable and not so reliable) and from the people with whom they connect online. While we were busy shaking our heads at the “crazy things kids do online”, those kids were busy building entirely new cultures that transcend national boundaries, ethnic divisions, religious differences, and political labels. If you ask them what it means to be an American, you might be very surprised at their responses. You might even find that "being American" isn't all that important to some of them.

This isn’t just a new playing field or a different playbook. We have to learn how to play an entirely different game in a zero gravity atmosphere.

We can start by reading this excellent article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/26/AR2008122601131.html

and by reading every book on the list - even Al Gore's book. Some of us need more schooling than others, but we all need to understand the new world we live in if we’re going to make conservative values relevant again.

Extorting Socialism

2009-02-18T19:29:00.001-06:00

I was talking with a banker friend of mine today about the “bailout” of the financial markets. I learned a few things. For instance, it’s not enough that Capital Hill financiers are creating enormous welfare programs for banks of a certain size in this country. It’s not enough that they are flirting with nationalization of some banks to prop them up. Because Capital Hill has both the funding and the legal authority to do so, it is not only providing funds for banks – it is forcing banks to take those funds or the FDIC will not guarantee the banks because it assumes the banks are insolvent and will not be operating in a year. So banks like TCF Financial, Wells Fargo and US Bank, which didn’t really even need the TARP funds, are getting them because Capital Hill is forcing them to take it if they want to retain their FDIC insurance.

Further, Capital Hill isn’t content with forcing banks to take loans. The structure of the transaction is in the form of preferred non-voting stock. In essence, the federal government is buying non-voting ownership in these banks at a preferred rate of return beginning in two years.

So let me get this straight. The federal government is forcing banks to take its money in return for insurance protection, then forcing banks to pay the money back in two years at a higher rate of return than other shareholders get. Sounds suspiciously like a protection racket.

And the Don lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Capital Hill

2009-02-17T21:25:00.002-06:00

No, it’s not a typo. It appears that the vast majority of our members of Congress desire a career change. They have gone from public servants to venture capitalists. Capitol Hill, once the bastion of Constitutional defense that guaranteed, uniquely in this world, that the people would be heard and represented has become Capital Hill, the central headquarters of one of the largest investment and loan operations in the world. Obamunism is painting the whole town bright red. The Big O is trying to downplay it, of course. Secretary Geithner backed away from the idea of federally controlled banks, saying that, “Governments are terrible managers of bad assets”. Regardless, the Big O is pressing forward with an agenda that will make our banking system look like Sweden’s – an even more systematically socialist approach than Japan’s bailouts, which the Big O says didn’t go far enough.

And where are our free market defenders?

In the Left Lurch
Astoundingly, many Republicans on Capital Hill are beginning to think that nationalization of the American banking system is not such a bad idea after all. Senator Lindsay Graham, once a conservative but now merely a Republican, is quoted in a Financial Times interview as saying, “You should not get caught up on a word [nationalisation]. I would argue that we cannot be ideologically a little bit pregnant. It doesn’t matter what you call it, but we can’t keep on funding these zombie banks [without gaining public control].”

Senator Graham said that it didn’t make any sense to throw good money after bad into institutions that now have lower values than the amount of public bailout money they’ve already received.

Stop. That actually makes sense. Don’t throw good money after bad. Stop there.

But no. Republicans like Graham aren’t stopping there. They’re taking a hard left turn and actually supporting the idea that nationalization of at least some banks will be a good idea to help the economy.

Has the phrase ‘free market correction’ left their vocabulary entirely? Yes, it hurts. It hurts a lot. But it doesn’t hurt as long and it doesn’t leave the economy crippled for a decade or more trying to right itself after such a hack job intervention as partial (or, God forbid, total) nationalization of the financial sector. Free market corrections leave the American economy leaner, cleaner and far better able to compete on the global stage precisely because Americans adapt, innovate and find ways to work ourselves out of the economic pain we hate to feel. ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ and all that. When did we (or at least our politicians) become so allergic to discomfort that we would rather throw our American ideals – and proven successes - down the toilet than deal with the shot-term suffering of making the right decisions?

An even more important question: if some of the leading Republicans on Capital Hill are buying into the new Obamunism, who are we left with to carry the flags of conservatism and free market capitalism?

A Kinder, Gentler Dictatorship

2009-02-12T23:29:00.002-06:00

OK, people:
The rubber has hit the road.
The train has left the station.

Pick your favorite colloquial phrase. We cannot afford to waste any more time wondering what happened to Republicans in the 2008 elections. We cannot afford to waste time pointing our fingers at each other. And our soul-searching odyssey must be cut short, or we won’t have the freedom to finish the odyssey at all.

In case you missed it, the Democrats are serious about reviving the Fairness Doctrine, requiring radio and TV stations to provide equal amounts of airtime for both conservative and liberal views. The Democrats are doing this because every effort they’ve made on their own to compete in the marketplace has failed: their radio stations go bankrupt, their TV stations go dark, their newspapers lose readership daily. No one wants to listen to them, so advertisers don’t want to advertise on their stations; the stations can’t pay their bills and they go out of business. That’s how the free market works. But that’s not how socialism works. The way socialism works, government dictates what we will hear, read and see by regulating and controlling the airwaves.

Wait – that’s a dictatorship.

We aren’t even into the first 30 days of the Big O’s presidency, and we’re already in full tilt mode for a federal government takeover of the financial sector, the healthcare sector, the manufacturing sector; the federal government by presidential decree is making sweeping (if largely unreported) changes in social policy from gays in the military to federal funding for abortions; the American federal government is practically playing kissy-face with some of our most dangerous foreign enemies while putting smarmy political operatives in charge of our intelligence community, the federal takeover of public education is almost complete, Democrats have already planned how they will rewrite the lines of our electoral future for at least the next decade by politicizing the census. Now they’ve hatched their plan to publicly brainwash all of us using all the airwaves we access for information.

The scope of the Democrats’ hubris is breathtaking. Their cunning is extraordinary. Their boldness of vision and discipline to carry it out bears strong resemblance to a few other such grand plans we’ve seen in history.

Lenin.
Stalin.
Hitler.
Mao Tse Tung.
Chiang Kai-shek.
Saddam Hussein.

It sounds melodramatic, I know. To be sure, an American Democrat dictatorship would be a kinder, gentler kind of dictatorship. Probably bloodless (unless you include the body count of the unborn killed by abortion; the aged, infirm and handicapped dead from rationed healthcare; and the civilians and soldiers who will undoubtedly die from renewed terrorist attacks here and elsewhere; but that’s all).

Repression in any language is a violation of human rights. Government control of public airwaves is constitutionally unsound. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen. We’ve had the Fairness Doctrine before, and there’s no reason to think we can’t be muzzled by it again given the current state of affairs and the sheer might of the Democrat machine.

I don’t care where you put yourself on the political spectrum; who you supported for President, or what you think of the current Republican Party. We cannot allow this to move forward. If we don’t stand strong together, the Democrats will succeed beyond their wildest dreams, and all we will have left is our own extinction. We'd better run; the train is fast picking up steam.

Al Capone in the White House

2009-02-11T07:24:00.003-06:00

I've always loved Chicago. I love the buildings, the food, the larger than life people, the history, and the culture. I was raised on gangster movies and movies about the Chicago political machine. I thought it was all fascinating and glamorous. As I got older, of course, I saw the seediness and destruction of organized crime and understood how bad it was. But, Chicago was still always endearing as a pocket of the country where the remnants of that bygone era still hang on, albeit in slightly less bloody forms.

Well, life may well imitate art if the White House gets its way now.

Buried as a news item everywhere except deep on the Fox News website, the White House has announced that the Big O's chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, will be in charge of conducting the 2010 census, even though operations will "technically" stay within the Commerce Department:

"White House officials have announced that the census will technically remain part of the Commerce Department, but that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel will oversee it at the White House, raising eyebrows among critics who say he can't be expected to be neutral in the task. Emanuel ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 and was instrumental in getting Democrats elected into the majority."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/02/10/gop-lawmaker-calls-probe-obama-decision-oversee-census/

Since the outcome of the census determines funding levels for many federal programs to the states in addition to defining Congressional district lines for the next ten years, it is essential that it is done accurately and without any partisan involvement, which is why the Commerce Department does it and not, say, ACORN.

Now it looks like our First Community Organizer will have the opportunity - and the muscle - to truly remake the country in his image for at least the next ten years. What we will witness is the development of a federal numbers racket designed to systemically entrench Democrats' power throughout the country and all but eliminate any chance of Republicans even gaining enough ground to be competitive, much less gain control of Congress again for at least a decade.

This is exactly how Chicago style politics is run for real. The wards are divided up to ensure easy margins of victory for certain groups of people, virtually guaranteeing that those in power stay in power. Deals that don't pass the public sniff test - like the notion of turning the census into a list builder program for the Democrats - are done behind closed doors and slid past the public eye with disguises and subterfuge. Meanwhile, public adoration is purchased by giving money to orphanages and churches, calculatingly following the old adage that all politics is local.

Think it can't happen? It already has. The foundation for the infrastructure was built early in the Big O's campaign with all the ACORN activity searching out and registering new voters. How easy will it be to call up those same workers with the same training and tactics to do the sampling surveys the Democrats like to use so they can overcount their constituents and undercount ours? They've already done it once, under the public scrutiny of a presidential campaign. Doing the same thing for the - yawn - US Census is like taking candy from a baby.

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, bless her heart, is calling for an investigation into the decision. Not that it matters. Republicans have no numbers, we have no media, and we have no public sympathy. The Big O has it all, and he has Rahm Emanuel to enforce his agenda with absolute discipline behind the scenes. Forget breaking legs or getting kneecapped. The only thing members of Congress truly fear is not being able to raise money for their war chests. How many phone calls do you think Emanuel would need to make to stop the flow of cash to a recalcitant Congressperson? We have a bloodless mob war in the making.

We may not realize it yet, but we are watching the Democrat party transform itself into an organized crime ring - each major player with his or her own territory and racket across the nation and an unending stream of revenue from the labor unions, Hollywood and other typical mob co-conspirators. And the Don lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Final sale, as is, no warranties

2009-02-10T22:11:00.002-06:00

A new album I posted on my Facebook page with photos from some of the more notable terrorists attacks and activities in recent memory elicited a strong response.

Good.

I'm glad to know that people on both sides of the aisle still recognize that there are people in the world who intend to do us grave and permanent harm - who would like to see us wiped from the face of the earth, if truth be known.

One person suggested that there's no way a liberal President would just 'forget' about terrorism. I'm not worried that the Big O will forget about terrorism. I'm worried sick that his new approach to dealing with these evil people will be ineffective at best and destructive at worst.

This brings me to the fundamental difference between hawks and doves (or, conservatives and liberals, generally).

Hawks see the world as it is, guarding against the atrocities of the past. Hawks believe in the idea that we need to take the actions of other actors on the world stage primarily at face value and deal with the situations at hand in ways that best contain/eliminate threats and protect the people we are sworn to defend: American citizens, our allies and others who ask for our help. Hawks believe in the validity of protecting American interests, because hawks believe that the American way of life (generally the Western society we recognize of Greco-Roman lineage) and government is superior to other ways of life and other forms of government. Hawks believe freedom and democracy are worth fighting and dying for, whether it's for America or another country that shares our values (or whose people demonstrate they want to adopt those values in spite of oppression/brutality/dictatorship).

Doves use a completely different operating system. Doves see the world as it could be, with the ultimate goal of global peace and harmony. Doves believe that love really does conquer all, and that everyone, if given understanding and support, will eventually respond in kind. Doves genuinely believe that all cultures, religions, histories and global actors have relatively similar value and can add positive attributes to what they believe is everyone's ultimate goal: world peace, harmony and equality. Therefore, Communism has just as many positive attributes as Democracy (albeit in different ways). The idea of peaceful coexistence is the highest ideal. Doves are so commited to this ideal that they will sacrifice their own self-interest and the national interest of America to try to achieve it because they want to put what they perceive as others' needs ahead of their own.

We need both perspectives.

We need to believe in the positive potential of humankind even as we recognize and accept that not everyone will achieve it. We need to believe in the idea of global peace and prosperity while understaning that not everyone does or wants to share that belief. We need to believe in the possibility of redemption for every soul, even though we know that many souls will willingly reject the chance. It's a bit like trying to reconcile some of the things we know about Christ as recorded in the Bible:

- the man who preached love, forgiveness and understanding was the same man who bodily whipped and threw merchants out of the temple without warning - he didn't waste time talking to them;

- the man who commanded us to love one another as we loved ourselves was the same man who told his apostles to shake the dust from their sandals and move on from any town that didn't listen to them, and told them that the poor would always be among them;

- the man who told us to forgive 70 times 7 is the same man who said he came into the world to divide it rather than unite it, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to spit the lukewarm from his mouth;

- then that man allowed us all to brutalize him in front of his mother, willingly dying in agony so we could be redeemed, knowing that some of us would still willingly reject the chance.

2,000 years later, we still can't figure it out.

We need to understand that the world we live in is a fixer-upper, that our time in it is non-returnable, non-refundable and non-transferrable. There are no warranties, no guarantees that any of our approaches will work 100%. In fact, history has pretty much shown there is no 100% solution. There are, however, a few approaches with a track record of working better than others:

First, we have to protect the people and things we've sworn ourselves to protect. Without our word, we have no credibility. Without credibility, we have no negotiating power. We need to say what we mean, and follow through with what we say. Every time. No exceptions. It's the foundation of behavioral modification, and it works better than anything else I've ever seen.

Second, we need to bring back Pres. Reagan's policy of "trust, but verify". That was the best example of balance that I know of in the modern world. Work together where we can with those whom we can, but never just believe that what they're telling us is true without third party verification.

Third, we need to live up to our own ideals as best we can in order to win the hearts and minds of people around the world who want democracy in their own countries. Spreading democracy is easier than ever now with the interconnections we have via modern technology; we need to take responsibility as a nation and as individuals to be positive ambassadors of freedom, opportunity and democracy.

Fourth, we need to accept that not everyone wants to coexist peacefully, and we need to have the testicular fortitude to deal with them on their terms in ways they understand, because there is no other way. There was never an example in the Bible of Jesus sweet-talking a demon out of someone. He commanded it to leave, and forced it when it didn't go on its own. There is real evil in the world, and doves need to accept that the only way to deal with evil is to exterminate it. Even as we look for ways to spread peace and prosperity in partnership with those who share our ideals, doves need to cope with the reality that we still need to do some demolition on this fixer-upper to achieve the world of our dreams. Not everything or everyone should be saved.

Fifth, and I think this is important as an American, is that we all need to be a little less cynical and get back to the rock solid conviction that America is the expression of all that is best in humankind. Even if our leaders don't always make the right decisions, even when our government's policies don't work the way we think they will, even when we as American citizens forget to live up to the ideals of our Constitution - America is still the shining city on the hill. Some people hate that, and we need to be steadfast and unwavering in our commitment to defend her. Most people love that: they look to us to lead the charge for freedom and democracy even when they grumble about how we do it. Hawks need to remember that this fixer-upper has limitless potential. We don't want to get so caught up in defending ourselves against the evils of the past that we miss the opportunities to build the future of our dreams.

Give us another 2,000 years - maybe we'll get the job done by then. In the meantime, I am a hawk who believes that we need to do whatever it takes to stop the bad guys in their tracks.

But we need to keep sending out the doves to see if they come back with a live olive branch.

The economy is our fault, stupid

2009-02-10T20:54:00.002-06:00

I'm going to set partisanship aside for a moment as I try to consider and reconcile some of what I heard last night in Pres. Obama's speech and the various reactions to it. I believe some important points are getting lost in the hype: The economic mess we have on our hands is actually not the result of "Republican" or "Democrat" policies exclusively. Is it the result of a combination of things:

- trade deficits that have fed our national deficit;

- the seemingly insatiable appetite for people to want to appear more prosperous than they are, leading to them spending more than they can afford on a lifestyle they haven't earned;

- willingness (and in some cases, encouragement) by lenders to work out programs that allowed consumers to borrow against their homes at 125% of the home's value to "pay off" their unsecured debt, which only allowed them to build up more debt;

- lack of education and responsibility on the part of first-time homebuyers about all the costs involved in owning a home. Saying that you can buy for less than rent isn't exactly true after you factor in insurance, maintenance, taxes, utilities and various other expenses that go with owning a home. I think most first-time homebuyers were utterly unprepared for this, especially if they did not come from a family that owned their own home;

-protracted intransigience on the part of labor unions unwilling to recognize that the world is a very different place now, and their focus on extracting as much as they can from the companies for which their members work is not a good strategy for long term economic health. Instead, they should be taking a cue from the entrepreneurial sector and looking to workers in other countries (who may actually need their services much more) to imcrease their membership - and their funding sources. Grow and diversify.

The single biggest cause of this recession, however, is us. We can blame regulators, financiers, Congress, political parties, advertising executives and everybody else until we're blue in the face, but what we really need to do is look in the mirror. We, the consumers, let our own desires to look more prosperous, feel better about ourselves, 'one up' our neighbors, or whatever our motivations, get in the way of making sound spending decisions based on the reality of our ability to pay rather than what we could get away with or push off down the road. All of the programs that we are now criticizing Wall Street for creating and government for not regulating only exist because there was enough consumer demand for those programs to make them profitable. That's how the free market system works. If we weren't clamoring for free money, no money down programs, no payments for a year programs and the like - they wouldn't exist. Our own greed got us into this mess.

Wall Street didn't drive us - we drove it. To abdicate that responsibility is the height of immaturity and denial on our parts. We have to be accountable. We have to accept the notion that we can't have everything we want, exactly when we want it, just because some marketing firm says "You're worth it". We have bought into the false idea that we "deserve" things - because we work hard one day, because we watch what we eat during the week, because we live stessful lives. The fact is - we only deserve what we legitimately earn, after we've earned it.

So now we have Communist nations holding more than 25% of our debt, our domestic real estate is devalued to the point of attracting the only foreign investors who have any money right now - who happen to be part of a culture that wants to see ours completely dismantled - and we are led by a President and a Congress who believe that appeasement of enemy dictators and federal government spending are the best ways to fix things. I would be far less worried about Barack Obama if Nancy Pelosi and Hary Reid were not running Congress. But they are, and we are headed for an absolute train wreck because of it.

Welcome to the USRA

2009-01-31T09:46:00.002-06:00

Brace yourselves.

Under President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, accumulated federal debt will go from about 36% of GDP to as much as 70% of GDP or more, depending on whose numbers you follow.

The annual federal deficit will increase from approximately 4.5% of GDP to as much as 15% of GDP - potentially even more if Democrats continue to find ways to spend money.

Federal government control of our national economy (government owned or controlling interest in business and industry), because of how the 'bailout' funding is being used, will skyrocket to 44%, including control of our financial centers, our construction industry, healthcare and manufacturing. If it moves money or is heavily unionized, chances are the federal government will have a substantial or controlling interest in it.

Welcome to the United Socialist Republic of America.

I applaud the Republicans for trying to get the word out about the egregious examples of pork and pet project funding that went into the newly passed spending package - this is no bailout or stimulus, but rather a laundry list of Democrat spending priorities geared toward increasing union power, promoting their social engineering agenda and stengthening the influence (and campaign fundraising power) of their other constituencies. I'm glad that Republicans stood together and voted against the bill as a group rather than peeling off on their own.

It's not nearly enough.

First, we have very few media outlets that are even willing to cover the Republican side of the issue, much less cover it in a substantial and objective manner.

Second, we don't have even close to the voting strength we would need to either block legislation on our own, or even enough to influence the remaining centrist Democrats to vote with us on key issues. They are far more concerned about staying in the good graces of their party's leaders right now.

Third, the man occupying the White House right now is showing that he's more than happy to be a bully if it suits him, smugly telling Republicans that, "I won" and that we can't listen to Rush Limbaugh and expect to get anything done - and he has the enforcers in both houses of Congress to back him up. In other words, he's got the executive power, he's got the voting numbers, he's got the adoration of the media, and he intends to use it to remake the world in his image.

We are real trouble, folks. Now, I know that every time Democrats control either the White House or the Congress, we wring our hands and lament about the impending doom that could result from their influence. I know that every election is a historic election. I know that there are always people predicting the end of the world as we know it regardless of what's really happening. But this time, with this convergence of circumstances, cultural influences and power players, I believe we could honestly witness the end of the kind of America we know and love. We are looking at moving toward adopting governmental and financial models similar to Germany and France - countries the liberals adore, but that we have no interest in emulating. If we go that route, we will sink to their level, and the dream of America as we know it - the land of freedom and opportunity - will be lost, possibly for good.

What are we going to do about it?

Here's a novel stimulus plan

2009-01-24T18:57:00.002-06:00

President Obama wants to pump another trillion dollars of federal money back into the economy. Democrats are lining up to make sure their favorite industry, cause, or district is part of the largesse. We are poised to see the control of our economy shift from the private sector to the government, in ways that may not be able to be undone for decades, if at all. The ripple effect across the globe will be enormous, and the unintended consequences of such a sea change cannot even be quantified yet.

And the best the Republicans have to say is that it's too much money? They're whining because the socialists who now control Washington have not given them a big enough seat at the table to determine which industries should get checks that will be paid by our great grandchildren?

No wonder we lost.

Here's a novel idea: if you want to get a trillion dollars working in the American economy, how about taking a trillion dollars less out of it to begin with???

If Republicans said, "Instead of having government get its claws even deeper into American business, we're going to reduce our involvement - and our cut of the take - by $1 trillion through tax cuts targeted to stimulate business, relieve homeowners and working families and encourage charitable giving", now that would be a bold alternative vision that Americans could get behind.

Imagine - a $1 trillion tax cut that:
- rewards small business investment by beefing up deductions and tax credits that can be taken for start ups, expansion, providing jobs, providing health insurance and other benefits;

- relieves homeowners by providing optional interest deduction schedules that allow homeowners to deduct mortgage interest at accelerated rates, perhaps even an outright tax credit in interest for the next two years rather than a deduction;

- at least doubles the dependent deduction to provide relief for families with children;

- completely reforms the puny deductions that can be taken for healthcare costs right now and provides taxpayers the ability to take outright tax credits for premiums and other out of pocket expenses;

- cuts the capital gains rate;

- in a new move to encourage charitable giving, provide a tax credit for charitable contributions made to 501c3 organizations up to $100,000.

Instead of porking out $1 trillion in programs and projects that will only reward the Democrats' constituencies and strengthen their socialist stranglehold on the only real bastion of economic freedom in the entire world, let's put government on a $1 trillion diet by cutting taxes to stimulate the economy. The federal government gets $1 trillion further in debt either way. At least this way we've got real economic stimulation going on, and it will force us to confront federal government obesity head on without pretending we had no choice in the matter.

Come on, Republicans. We've got $1 trillion to work with. Get creative. Get a vision Americans can get behind and stop the Democrats before they pull the plug on the American dream.

A round of Introductions

2009-01-23T22:28:00.000-06:00

I finally caved on my prohibition to be yet another person on the web venting my opinions. So many people I know (and don't know) have started their own blogs, it began to seem positively passe. With all the blogging out there already, I couldn't imagine I'd have anything new or interesting to add to the global conversation. Besides, I used to do this for a living. Before blogs even existed, I was writing electronic columns that were emailed to a subscriber list of roughly 7,500 people - not bad in 1999.

So, what's changed my mind? It's probable that I still don't have anything original to add to the new global conversation. There are others much better educated and much more gifted than I doing this very thing. What motivated me to put my thoughts out there for the whole world to see (or at least a handful of people with nothing better to do but read my rants)?

John Murtha.

This longtime Congressman from Pennsylvania proved himself a jackass over and over again during the presidential campaign. Still, I cannot comprehend how someone who has spent so much time in Washington, who has been re-elected time after time, who has access to so much information and so many experts that we do not on a daily basis, can be so colossally stupid. I am infuriated by his idiocy. I cannot abide his obtuse perspectives. And I am equally appalled by the fact that we do not seem to have any Republican leaders on the national stage willing to call him out for the dimwit that he is.

So here I am. Again.

I know there are others who think the same things I will write. There are plenty of others who will communicate much better than I can. I simply cannot contain myself anymore; hence the blog.

I wanted to give this new administration a fair chance. In spite of my misgivings and my fundamental disagreements with our new President, I wanted to think that he was shrewd enough to play even-handedly, at least at the beginning. Boy, was I wrong.

It took less than 48 hours for President Obama to declare that he was going to shut down the Guantanamo Bay military prison installation that currently houses some of the most lethal and most capable sociopaths in the world. Some of them have planned, financed or executed the most heinous acts of violence against innocent people that we have ever seen. Some of them are connected to the biggest players in the international terror industry. Yet, the President who only 72 hours ago (give or take, depending on which oath you use for timing) swore to faithfully execute the duties of his office and protect the American people, showed with a flourish of his pen that he cares more about appeasing terrorists and their sponsors than he cares about protecting Americans. But the icing on that cake was John Murtha's flippant comment that he would happily take those displaced sociopaths and house them in a minimum security federal facility in his district while they await trials designed to protect their phantom Consititutional rights saying, "Sure, I'd take 'em. They're no more dangerous in my district than in Guantanamo."

What?

Did I really just witness a United States Congressman say that housing some of the most lethal international sociopaths in the world at a Club Fed facility in the middle of America's heartland is no more dangerous than keeping them locked down in a maximum security military installation off U.S. soil separated from U.S. citizens?

I don't know how Murtha has managed thus far in his life. He obviously has absolutely no understanding of how the prison system works, how military installations work, who these people are or what they are capable of accomplishing in a minimum security facility. Let's set aside the obvious security gaps for a moment that would make it so much easier for the Gitmo prisoners to plan and successfully execute an escape plan of their own. U.S. citizens who are serving time in U.S. prisons do have Constitutional rights (unlike the foreign terrorist prisoners, who don't even properly fall under the Geneva Convention). At a minimum security federal prison, inmates have significant access to the outside world through visiting policies, computer use, mail and phone privileges - and that's just the legal, above board portion of their communication. Then there's the black market system that trades dollars and goods for favors, along with intimidation, coersion, or old-fashioned corruption. How long would it take the terrorists, who have been trained in manipulation and intimidation tactics and who know there is an outside network of money and resources waiting for them if they can just make contact with it, to convince other American prisoners to carry messages for them, use their computer and internet time and their visitors to rebuild networks of communications that will allow them to resume their anti-American terrorist activities? Anyone want to to take odds on "immediately"?

This is just one example of what we're in for during the next four years. A new President who begins his administration of "change" by blowing off the Salute to Heroes Inaugural Ball honoring our Medal of Honor recipients but wastes no time in finding ways to release Islamic terrorists who have wounded and killed our most dedicated service members and innocent Americans, and a U.S. Congressman who invites those terrorists to live in his district among his constituents as casually as if he were inviting friends for a barbeque.

Perhaps he'd like to host that barbeque in the crater left by Flight 93.