Our man Doug Tice

Is certainly a man of limited vision, isn't he? Here's the gauntlet he threw down for readers:

With a serious and long-term budget crisis facing America and Minnesota, the Star Tribune’s opinion editors invite readers to join a discussion about what’s to be done -- and about the need for shared sacrifice. The question, recently posed to public policy experts by a local think tank, is this:

What governmental services and benefits are you personally willing to give up to help balance the public books? Could you live with lower Social Security or Medicare benefits? A later retirement age? Fewer national or state parks? Reduced school funding? Less highway or mass transit construction and maintenance? Higher taxes – for yourself?

These are just examples to get your thinking started. But readers will have the best chance of publication online and/or in the print newspaper if they sincerely try to identify personal sacrifices they are willing to make [emphasis added].

Who is this local "think tank?" Doug doesn't say but, of course, it's the Center of the American Experiment, the sheltered workshop where Katherine Kersten hangs her rhinestone tiara.

"Long term" is a, well, term, that can be applied to our current situation, but "serious" and "crisis" are not. Tice is just playing the clumsy propagandist here.

Some of the possibilities Tice doesn't offer include: 1) reducing the bloated military budget substantially to a point where we maybe spend only half as much as the rest of the world combined (although that would undoubtedly bother Peter Hagseth, another of the poisonous windbags who writes at CAE), 2) cutting back on subsidies to giant agribusiness companies, 3) genuine enforcement of tax laws, 3) elimination of tax breaks to oil companies, and well, the list goes on.

But Tice, and Mitch Pearlstein, and Katie, and Peter Hagseth want Grandma to write in and offer up her blood pressure medication. Anti-American knaves and blackguards, every one of them.