Bradlee Dean takes Manhattan!

Unsatisfied with simply hijacking the end of the Minnesota legislative session, the Right Reverend Bradlee Dean has set his sights on a national audience. Wednesday, Dean will hold a Manhattan press conference to announce he's suing Rachel Maddow, MSNBC and others for defamation.

Tim Pawlenty's campaign clumsily tried to discredit Michele Bachmann with the Daily Caller migraine story, and failed. Now comes Bradlee Dean, who might well succeed, even though he's trying to help Bachmann:

In an interview earlier this year, MSNBC's president Phil Griffin admitted that the network, to boost its ratings, caters to the so-called "progressive left". This explains the malicious attacks on Bradlee Dean and his ministry, which are being used to harm the presidential campaign of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who is a conservative Christian.

In the past, Dean and his ministry have been complemented by presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (who prayed for the ministry) for their work in promoting values for the nation's youth. The left wing media's effort to defame Dean is an obvious way to try to harm Bachmann's presidential prospects, who they fear and despise. Other left wing media outlets have followed MSNBC and Maddow in their slanderous efforts. This suit may just be the first in a series of cases meant to protect the fine reputation of Dean and his ministry.

Oh, goody, there might be more? Please, pretty please!

Actually, given who Dean's retained as counsel, there probably will be a string of lawsuits.

The lawsuit is filed by attorney Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, in DC Superior Court and seeks in excess of $50 million in damages. However, money is not the issue. "This case is filed as a matter of principle," stated Klayman. "We need more Bradlee Deans in the world and hateful left wing television commentators must be made to respect not only his mission but the law," he added.

Klayman's famous for suing the Clinton administration repeatedly over every scandal from Vince Foster to Monica Lewinsky. Since then, Klayman's suffered through an ugly legal battle with Judicial Watch (which he founded), and come in last in the Republican primary in a run for Senate in Florida. Dean may be his ticket back into the big time. It's certainly more high profile than digging into the cost of Michelle Obama's parties at the White House.

The best part of this is that Bradlee Dean, in his quest for media attention, might finally get people to understand the close embrace of his ministry by Bachmann and other Minnesota Republicans. As he defends his "fine reputation," let's hope he gets the attention he seeks.

Follow me on Twitter @aaronklemz

Drone strike bears the hallmark of al-Qaeda

Charles Davis reports:

A missile from what witnesses described as an unmanned aerial vehicle left dozens of people dead and countless more injured in Pakistan's volatile tribal region this morning, a deadly strike that experts say shows all the classic signs of Islamic terrorism.

Carried out just before dawn, Pakistani officials say the attack killed at least 55 people, including dozens of women and children. According to experts, the obvious ruthlessness and casual disregard for innocent life are clear signs al-Qaeda – or maybe some other Muslims – were behind the strike.

“Killing people is a tried and true tactic of Islamists,” said One Important Expert who picked up the telephone. Indeed, the expert notes al-Qaeda first burst onto the scene with the novel idea of taking the lives of others with the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 – the first recorded intentional killings since the time of Jesus Christ, renowned savior and author of the Declaration of Independence.

Well, that's obviously a sendup of the jumping to conclusions that many right-wing pundits did after the massacre in Norway. It's a different way of looking at the drone strikes, too.

A thump of the tail to Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution.

David Hann and Wimpy's Hamburger Economics

For a hamburger today, I will gladly pay you on Tuesday

We all know Wimpy's pitch from the Popeye cartoons. (Thanks to Kevin Staunton for the original imagery.)

Let's say Wimpy gets his hamburger and does, in fact, pay for it on Tuesday. Then he turns around and asks for another one on the same terms. The burger shop is always financing Wimpy one hamburger.

And so it is with Sen. David One Hamburger Behind Hann's logic about school aid shifts.

One Hamburger Behind said in a recent interview on public radio that once you get past the initial shift, the accounting shifts don't mean much, because like the hamburger shop, the schools districts are getting paid for money allocated to them in the past before they are asked to defer current money.

This is all laid out in the Minnesota Public Radio PoliGraph (tm) article at the link. The article labels the claim accurate, but with a caveat. The term of art for "accurate with a caveat" is weasel-y. Why is it weasel-y?

That first hamburger.

Just like Wimpy, the state may be cash flowing its obligation, but it still owes the schools districts for the first hamburger. Or the last hamburger, take you pick, but it is always one hamburger behind.

Wimpy's Hamburger Economics have been the hallmark of budgeting in Minnesota for multiple biennia now. It is really borrowing money to finance current operations. But it's kind of off the books - think Enron - and therefore doesn't have to be counted in figuring out whether we have a state budget that balances.

But it isn't off the books to the school districts who were promised the money would be made up at the time the state took the first hamburger. They have had to cut budgets, cut teachers, cut programs, and borrow money.

Not to mention raise local property taxes. Local school board levy referenda (or referendums, if you prefer) are likely to be popping out this fall.

The tobacco bonds, incidentally, are functionally the same thing: funding current operations out of future revenue streams.

Drawing from here.

In other shooting news

A four-year-old boy was shot in the temple - and perhaps it is unnecessary to relate, died - while fishing with his father. A friend of the family described it as a "freak accident."

The father and son duo were fishing on a pier when a neighbor decided, in a drunken haze, to shoot out a light on the pier. The shot went a little wide! Unknown to this writer is whether the boy was on the shooter's curtilage.

I think the family friend got it almost right: it was a gun freak accident. Law enforcement authorities, having no sense of humor whatsoever, are calling it reckless homicide.

In the same article, there's a report of another Indiana four year old who "accidentally shot himself at a suburban Chicago liquor store."

I'm not making that up.

This brings to four the number of Indiana children's deaths from gun violence in the last three-and-a-half weeks.

According to the Brady Campaign, over 30,000 people a year die from gun violence in the United States, and twice that number survive a gun shot.

I mention all of this because the Second Amendment types are already beginning to wail that guns would have been the answer to the right-wing terrorism in Norway. Even after yesterday, however, the rate of death from gun violence is still much lower in Norway than say, Texas. Far lower.

Some security one the island would have been a good idea, but the idea of a bunch of teenagers packing as the solution to this event is ludicrous.

Jason Lewis: dirty hippie

Even the blind squirrel finds the occasional nut

In the Strib today, Jason Lewis says it is time to reconsider the war on drugs, or Prohibition II. Lewis brings in a few conservative luminaries to support his point, naturally, and he cannot resist a swipe at ATF and the Justice Department. But he does make a couple of good non-ideological points:

The drug habits and demand for drugs by U.S. citizens are killing Mexico, not just Mexicans, but Mexico itself:

Imagine a nightmare in which terrorists brutally murder 40,000 people in just five years. Now imagine that their base of operations is not across the globe, but directly adjacent to the United States. No doubt, hearing of such a thing, many of my conservative colleagues would be demanding a massive mobilization against the latest evils of Islamofacism.

But the real-life killers I have in mind, who revel in decapitating their victims (Al Capone's got nothing on these guys), aren't Muslim fanatics. They're narco-terrorists exploiting Mexico's failed war on drugs.

Most of the latest carnage appears to have been spearheaded by the Los Zetos gang, a group of former Mexican military men who simultaneously commit heinous acts of violence while building roads, schools and clinics for the impoverished. Sound familiar? It should -- because whether you're talking about the Taliban or Mexican drug cartels, both employ similar tactics that result when governments grant them de facto monopoly status in the distribution of illicit drugs. And the sad irony is that the exorbitant black-market profits used to finance their operations are a result of prohibition itself.

Some commentators will tell you that the 40,000 figure that Lewis quotes is conservative.

The war on drugs is killing us, too:

Nearly 80 years after the end of alcohol prohibition, the Global Commission on Drug Policy declared the war on drugs a failure with "devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world." Most of the deleterious effects reside in urban America, where young people find it much more lucrative to deal than to learn a trade. For all of the problems associated with alcohol, and there are many, you simply don't see gangs shooting one another (and innocent bystanders) over a six-pack of Bud.

I would quarrel with Lewis about the ease of learning a trade or getting a job afterwards, especially for kids in the inner-city, but I take his point. The incarceration rates for young black males is just unacceptable. As intolerance of ex-offenders only grows in the United States, the number of people who have received economic deaths sentences also grows. This is something we really cannot afford.

And holy mackerel, the war on drugs is expensive:

The United States alone has spent $1 trillion on narcotics enforcement over the last 40 years, and Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimates the total budgetary impact to state and federal governments at around $88 billion per year, including lost tax revenue.

Lewis' policy prescription falls short, though. He says we should turn to the states as laboratories of reform of the drug laws.

Let's say we did that and Minnesota decided by itself to declare an end to the war on drugs, marijuana especially [as legislation by Ron Paul and Barney Frank would apparently permit]. We could look forward to only 39,500 people being killed in drug violence in Mexico in the next five years?

Current drug policy is nationally crafted and is the work of both national parties. As long as transportation and distribution of drugs remains a federal crime, the efforts of individual states will mean very little to Mexico. We might, however, be able to affect incarceration rates and the long terms effects of a marijuana bust in Minnesota; that would be a good thing.

After swinging by the pawn shop

With their pawn shop bidness behind them, Amy, Kurt, Junior the Deputy, and Matt took their Buddy Can You Spare a Billion, or Even Two or Three? tour on the road, stopping at schools in every hamlet in the state to nick anything that wasn't cemented in place:

As expected, the hydrogen bomb at the center of [the K12 bill] is the nonpolicy decision to balance the budget by allowing the state to withhold 40 percent of education funding for a year after it’s due, and nothing even approximating a roadmap for paying it back.

And the devastation the shift will cause is where most of the educators canvassed on Wednesday would like the public’s attention to stay, given that the cumulative deficit it has caused is about an eye-popping $3 billion. That’s some $3,000 per pupil, or more than half the annual general fund appropriation.

Beth Hawkins at MinnPost has a great article explaining the education bill, from which this quote is taken, at the link.

There is no estimate at the time this is written of the T-shirt revenue expected from the tour.

Lining up at the pawn shop

Amy, Kurt, Junior the Deputy, and Matt are all standing there in line. They each have a stack of papers that have Tobacco Bond printed on the top. What they are proposing to do is trade these bonds for a loan of $700 million dollars.

These tobacco bonds represent a promise to repay that loan: IOU's printed up really nice. The thing that's uncertain is what the pawn broker is going to want in interest. The higher the interest, of course, the less net money is raised by the bonds.

So, Amy, Kurt, Junior the Deputy, and Matt are understandably nervous. Because, you see, these bonds aren't exactly AAA. Well, nothing in Minnesota is AAA these days, but the tobacco bonds border on flim-flam artistry: they aren't exactly investment grade.

The tobacco bonds aren't the general obligations of the State of Minnesota; they are backed only by a revenue stream to the state made payable under the tobacco settlement that was made way back when Skip Humphrey was the Attorney General. It was supposed to be kind of an annuity to help defray the health care costs to the state associated with smoking by its citizens and for anti-smoking education efforts.

These payments are not in a guaranteed amount, and they are only the promise of the tobacco companies. Companies never borrow money nearly as cheaply as governments do, and when you factor in the fact that the amounts payable are uncertain, you can be sure that the pawnbroker is going to demand a pretty high interest rate.

Experience elsewhere teaches us that the risks of tobacco bonds are subject to a lot more vagaries than general obligation bonds, and the prices they fetch reflect that. Here are a few grafs from the linked 2003 article:

In addition to New York City, there are a number of counties across New York State that will begin losing access to millions of dollars in annual revenues starting next spring because of the structure of their tobacco bond deals.

The counties include Nassau, Westchester, Monroe, Erie, Niagara, Ulster, Rockland, and Rensselaer. In addition, a number of other counties participated in two pooled New York county tobacco deals.

As a result of the unexpected budget hit, which was triggered by the hard and fast fall in tobacco company credit quality, some of those counties could follow New York City’s lead and begin reviewing a restructuring of their tobacco debt.

The impact on the underlying credit of the issuers “depends on the structure” of their tobacco bond deals, said Robyn Kapiloff, an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service. “It varies [from issuer to issuer] whether it will be a short-term event or a long-term event.”

In all, New York City, the New York counties, Iowa, and the District of Columbia, have sold nearly $4 billion in tobacco bonds that are structured with so-called trapping mechanisms. The mechanisms were built into early tobacco bond deals to provide additional security to bondholders, requiring the issuer to fund additional reserves if tobacco company credit quality fell below investment grade.

One of two things is likely to happen in the pawn broker's office.

If Amy, Kurt, Junior the Deputy, and Matt offer a straight tobacco payment stream deal, they won't get beans for the bonds. (The interest rate will be very high.)

If they offer bonds with a "trapping mechanism" as described above, there is a risk - a substantial one - that funds will have to come out of future state budgets to keep the tobacco bond holders happy.

And never mind, as Rep. Ryan Winkler points out, we're just borrowing money to fund general fund matters; we're not getting a bridge or a building or even just a shiny new car.

Comforting the Comfortable

And Afflicting the Afflicted



Way to go Republicans! As Mike Meyers notes in an op-ed in today's Strib, at least the well to do among us are spared the tragedy of domestic claret.

In gratitude, every person saved from this humiliation should celebrate and hire a second pool boy or gardner. It's the least they can do.

But who will twist the arms?

One of the jobs of the assistant majority leaders at the Legislature is to twist arms in the caucus to enforce the leadership's positions. Who are they in the Senate? David Hann, Doug Magnus, Dave Senjem, and Dave Thompson.

You do see the problem here, don't you?

"I don't know what the outcome will be," said Assistant Senate Majority Leader David Thompson, R-Lakeville. "I have some concerns, certainly, but I am not sure what I am going to do yet."

I have made some fun of the Senate - especially - leadership but the followership ain't so hot either.

There could easily be more defectors in the list of assistants. David Hann is one name that comes readily to mind.

Rhetorical self-demolishment

Gary Gross, writing at Let Freedom Ring, says (well, he heard somebody say) it's Mark Dayton's Commissioners who are cocking up the budget deal. But in the very next breath, he says this:

Gross goes on to give a laundry list of policy changes -- including several that he admits are controversial -- but clearly, it's the Commissioners who are the problem in his fevered imagination.

Rarely, in the field of rhetorical endeavor, has anyone so quickly demolished his own argument.

Our hats are off to Gary.

And just parenthetically, the King's "budget prioritization" idea is little more -- probably no more -- than saying let's do what Republicans want, and we'll assign things like HHS a lower priority, and if we run a little short of money, we'll let few poor people die in the streets.

Leading the children onto the ice!

If I made up this quote, it would be slander:

House Speaker Kurt Zellers, R-Maple Grove, acknowledged recently the blow to school budgets. "It will lead them out on to the ice, but they won't fall through."

C'mon kids! Follow me! It'll be fun! Don't worry about all the cracking noises!

This is the guy, by the way, who actually seems to have his caucus in order.

Kurt's right hand guy, Matt Dean, explains why Kurt is so effing satisfied:

"The most important thing is that we are not going to have tax increases," said House Majority Leader Matt Dean, R-Dellwood.

Is it really necessary to mention that Matt Dean is a nihilist moron?

The linked article reports:

In two budget cycles, the state will have rung up $2.1 billion in IOUs to its public school districts. As a result, schools scraping to keep students competitive must try to borrow money just to manage their own cash flow.

Of course, this won't bother you if you've don't have a child or grandchild in public schools, aren't an employer hoping to hire educated Minnesotan in the future, or aren't a homeowner hoping to avoid having to deal with a property tax levy for operating funds for your local schools, or, well, you get the idea.

Does leading Minnesota's schools "out onto the ice" seem like a prudent plan for the future, just so we can have "no tax increases?"

I thought there was a deal

Of course, there was. But because Amy, Junior, and Mikey cannot count to thirty-four, the reports were premature. A lot of people (including me) have judged Republican leadership as amateurs all along. These people cannot deliver pizza.

Katherine Kersten wrote again today

Yawn.

That's all I have to say.

Revenge of the Steaming Shitburger!

Sources say that the Republican caucus in the Senate may have as little as, well, not nearly enough votes to pass the budget compromise. I posted about Mike Parry's tantrum earlier, and MCCL is now in on the act, so you know that can't be good.

C'mon, Amy, Junior, and Mikey! Pull on your oars. You're the ones who served up the Steaming Shitburger of Revenue.

Now, in a moment of supreme irony, it looks like they're going to have to eat it, too!

Wasting Mike's time

That's a really good one, Mike!

From today's Strib:

While controversial social policy items such as abortion were taken off the table, Republicans maintained Friday that other reforms should stay in the mix. "The policy dictates where the money goes," said House Speaker Kurt Zellers. "You can't just take out all the policy and then hand somebody a chunk of money."

Those policy differences threatened to derail some negotiation Friday. Sen. Mike Parry, R-Waseca, who chairs the state government committee, stormed out of a meeting with Minnesota Management and Budget Commissioner James Schowalter on his bill after Schowalter told him the "policy and reforms" were off the table. Among the changes were consolidation of some state agencies and activities.

"I just took my tablet, put it in my folder," Parry said. "And Commissioner Schowalter looked at me and said, 'Senator, please don't leave.' And I said, 'Commissioner, I'm not here to waste my time.'"

The idea that you could waste legislative cipher Mike Parry's time strikes a lot of us as pretty funny. Mike's just a windy grandstander, as I learned early in his career at the Capitol. From the baggers rally in April 2010:

Who won?

Thursday, the great Minnesota Shutdown went from intractable to settled with dizzying speed. Mark Dayton's morning presentation at the Humphrey Institute became an announcement of his acceptance of a June 30th offer from Republican leaders. The $1.4 billion dollar package of shifts and tobacco revenue bonds, coupled with demands for removal of policy changes contained in the GOP budget bill, agreement not to seek a 15% across the board cut of state employees, and a $500 million bonding bill became the framework for a compromise. By 5:15 PM, a deal was struck.

It was oddly anticlimactic to watch Speaker Zellers and Majority Leader Koch announcing that they had an agreement with Governor Dayton. Dayton's offer was effectively one the GOP couldn't refuse, even if they wanted to. It was a definitive end to an impasse that transformed Minnesota into a synecdoche for national budget woes. Twenty-two thousand laid off state employees, shuttered state parks, and a downgrade to the state's credit rating were all part of the mounting toll. In one stroke, Dayton ended that.

A lot of folks on the left have been and will be critical of this decision. Instant reaction from a number of DFL legislators was strongly negative, though minority leader Paul Thissen reportedly said that he'd support it. The smart money is that very few DFL votes will be cast for the budget compromise. Many left-leaning pundits took Dayton to task for caving to the GOP. Indeed, by the evening that was the GOP's talking point, with Michael Brodkorb posting a sheet of headlines that Dayton had conceded or lost.

While it chafes for Dayton supporters to watch, this bravado is mostly for the Republican base. Check out the sources for the headlines in Brodkorb's piece; National Review, Powerline, True North, Drudge, and the lead quote from Rush Limbaugh. This is not a piece for the general public, it's for the right wing base. Or consider this piece from House Republicans claiming that they've held state spending to $34 billion. That might come as a surprise to House Speaker Kurt Zellers, considering he "said the agreement will spend more than the $34 billion Republicans wanted to spend." Remember, Dayton won his budget. The revenue comes in the only form the GOP would permit, borrowing and shifting. As Dayton said - he'll own the budget, but not the revenue.

There are a lot of members of the GOP caucus that have made a lot of noise about cutting state spending. This compromise will be hard to swallow, especially as the pet policy provisions of GOP members are excised. Rep. Garofolo will howl about the removal of private school vouchers and curtailment of teacher's organizing rights. Sen. Hann will lecture disapprovingly as his plan to voucherize MinnesotaCare disappears. Rep. Banaian will cluck, as he did on MPR this morning, about the loss of his budgeting provisions. Rep. Runbeck's vendetta against Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth is shelved. And Rep. Downey's corporate consultant crusade against state employees will have to wait until later. Stopping a tax increase will seem like cold comfort for Republican true believers.

This assumes, of course, that "no policy provisions" means what it says. The details of an agreement will be painstaking on some of the larger bills, and it's worth watching what makes it into a final version. But it represents a big win for Mark Dayton on many fronts.

Dayton is taking the long game on the budget. The resolution insulates folks from the full brunt of cuts to health care and increased property taxes from local government aid cuts. The $500 million or so in bonding projects will stimulate the construction industry and the economy, and it seems that a $1 billion Vikings stadium will likely follow. This will put literally thousands of folks back to work. For a governor in the mold of Rudy Perpich, this is exactly what he wanted.

It's true that both sides shared in the blame for the shutdown, but Dayton's well-positioned to get credit for decisively ending it. Republicans will be saddled in 2012 with a broken promise to their base and an intransigent reputation with moderates. DFL legislators will get to campaign against the budget as irresponsible borrowing and shifting. In all, the political advantage is decidedly in favor of the DFL and Mark Dayton.

They'd better take advantage in 2012. It will take three or four budget cycles to dig Minnesota out the hole created over the last decade.

Follow me on Twitter @aaronklemz

Grover's nut collection

You have to wonder if he keeps them in a jar on his desk.

If you want to help Geoff, Kurt, and Matt find their nuts back, and become Minnesota legislators, you should contact them (at the Legislature's home page) and help them out!

mis-ˈnō-mər

It's Teach Michele Bachmann English Usage Day at the Cucking Stool. Who can spot the misuse of a word in the lede in a story about Michele and the debt ceiling:

WASHINGTON - Taking the vanguard of a Republican revolt against President Obama and their own GOP leaders, Rep. Michele Bachmann and two other Tea Party members said Wednesday there is no need to raise the federal debt limit in order to continue paying Social Security benefits.

"This is a misnomer that the president and the Treasury secretary have been trying to pass off on the American people," said Bachmann, R- Minn., a presidential candidate who is leading the polls in her native Iowa.

Of course, I gave it away in the title. Misnomer means:

1: the misnaming of a person in a legal instrument

2: a: a use of a wrong or inappropriate name
b: a wrong name or inappropriate designation

Unless Bachmann was saying, "The President said 'debt ceiling' when he meant 'Social Security'," which is not likely, she used this word incorrectly, as she often does. From the same Mirrriam-Webster entry:

“International Airport” is something of a misnomer, since almost all the arriving and departing flights are local.

See? Must better choices of words would include error, falsity, misconception, or maybe misbelief.

That would leave Bachmann's comment factually incorrect, but grammatically more satisfying.

In any event, her statement is duplicitous, since she and the Tea Party want to dismantle Social Security. Providing assurances about Social Security while maneuvering to kill it is guileful.

In other words, calling Michele Bachmann a truthful person would be a misnomer.

The St. Paul hospitality industry: a teachable moment

One of the interesting stories about the shut down comes from the eateries and watering holes in St. Paul that are so severely affected. There have been several articles in the Twin Cities' dailies about them: hard to hang on, having to let employees go, rent still has to be paid, property taxes still have to be paid, etc.

It occurred to me that the plight of the hospitality industry in the Capitol City is a perfect example of some things in the current economic debate.

First, demand for products or services is what cause businesses to hire people. It matters not at all how rich or poor a coffee shop owner is, if she has no customers, she won't need employees to serve them. To hire the employees first and then expect the business to come is what is called supply side economics.

Second, the tax that kills small business, especially in downturns, is the property tax. You have to pay the property tax if you are a building owner, or you pay it as part of your rent for the coffee shop, or whatever. You have to pay this tax whether a single customer walks through the door or not.

Parenthetically, the same is true of residential property owners; the property tax is no respecter of fluctuations in your income.

To have customers, you need to have not only people, you need people with money to spend. And enough confidence to spend it. Contrary to what Republicans will tell you, plunging the economy into the shitter is not the way to create people with money and the confidence to spend it.

What tax don't you have to pay if you aren't making money? The income tax, of course.

The hospitality industry in St. Paul is not carping about the income tax. Nor the sales tax, for that matter, because it doesn't have to be paid on sales not made.

Most of the jobs created by small business are not created by hot shot entrepreneurs racing around the country looking for the lowest tax rate. They are created by people like the St. Paul hospitality industry, who are hurt far more by the increased property taxes that will result from cutting off local government aid to St. Paul than a small income tax increase on incomes over a million dollars, or even $300,000.

The "job creator" argument is pure sophistry.

Now, we can't rely on the income tax alone, because as is obvious from the discussion, it goes down when people's incomes go down. The property tax for all its warts is pretty reliable (unless property values assessments decline severely). And the property tax is rather unavoidable, too. A similar argument can be made for the sales tax. People have to eat. Okay, not a good example, at least in Minnesota. But they have to buy clothing. Kidding. But the sales tax is more stable than the income tax, and it's pretty collectible, too.

But the case of the St. Paul hospitality industry during the shut down does illustrate quite nicely the Republican game that's afoot on income taxes.

Quote of the day

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (apparently channeling his inner Mike Parry) in remarks made on the Senate floor:

"After years of discussions and months of negotiations, I have little question that as long as this president is in the Oval Office, a real solution is probably unattainable."

Let that one sink in.

Update: More pro-democracy bons mots from McConnell:

The time has come for a balanced budget amendment that forces Washington to balance its books. If these debt negotiations have convinced us of anything, it’s that we can’t leave it to politicians in Washington to make the difficult decisions that they need to get our fiscal house in order. The balanced budget amendment will do that for them. Now is the moment. No more games. No more gimmicks. The Constitution must be amended to keep the government in check. We’ve tried persuasion. We’ve tried negotiations. We’re tried elections. Nothing has worked.

Again, let that sink in: Elections haven't worked.