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1. Taxpayers League Live! with David Strom.
2. Lucky for former Star Tribune political reporters left-wing think tanks are running an employment service.
3. Isn’t it nice when one branch of government doesn’t need its hand held?
4. Wait, lobbyists say and do things that are distasteful? For money? No way.
1. Taxpayers League Live! with David Strom.
Tune in this Saturday to AM 1280 The Patriot from 9 – 11 am when David will be joined by Carol Molnau and Ward Connerly. Lt. Governor Molnau, who also serves as Minnesota’s Commissioner of Transportation, will give us an update on the state of our state’s road construction season and what MnDOT has planned to remedy this situation.
Connerly, Chairman of theAmerican Civil Rights Initiative, will join us to talk about this week’s ruling from the Supreme Court that struck down race-based preferences in schools in Seattle and Louisville and why “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
2. Maybe Minnesota2020 will be as good for our fundraising as Growth and Justice is.
Apparently there was some kind of unmet need for stale liberal policy pronouncements that wasn’t being filled by the handful of other “progressive” think tanks in the state. Or maybe the desperate desire to be relevant again was too strong a pull for Matt Entenza. At any rate, he and a handful of liberal luminaries have launched Minnesota2020, a nonpartisan think tank focusing “on good ideas for education, health care, economic development, and transportation.” Let me save you the trouble of a visit to their website and give you titles of their first couple of reports:
Education (in) Minnesota: Quit Complaining And Leave It To The Unions
The Magic Of Cuba’s Healthcare System: 1950s Innovations Right To Your Door
Planes, Trains and Automobiles: All the Things Our Liberal Utopia Won’t Allow You To Use For Transportation
Minnesota’s “progressive” think tanks: now with twice the potential for policy nuttiness!
3. I said it last week and I’ll say it again: pompous US Senators are ruining America.
The other big ruling to come out of the Supreme Court this week was a long-awaited repudiation of the McCain-Feingold “Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act.” The decision, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, and which centered around issue ads that a group called Wisconsin Right to Life wanted to air during the BCRA “blackout period” during the 2004 election, goes a long way towards freeing up political speech and untying the hands of corporations (and unions) and nonprofits(!). This is a very good thing.
But not having what PA and Dubay would call “a great legal mind,” I’ll refer you to the folks at SCOTUSblog for analysis of the Court’s recent decisions.
4. Captain Obvious of Harper’s magazine, reporting for duty.
Last week it was an MSNBC report that highlighted the overwhelming number of journalists that have given to Democratic political candidates and liberal causes as opposed to Republican ones. To which all I can say is, well duh (in Minnesota they take it one step further – they don’t just give to liberal causes, they go to work for them).
This week’s non-bombshell is a story in Harper’s magazine that chronicles one editor’s attempt to find a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm with the right “morally casual attitude” to help his client win the world’s respect:
“My story in the July issue of the magazine details how two beltway lobby shops I approached, on the pretense that I represented a shady London-based energy firm with a stake in Turkmenistan, proposed to whitewash the image of that country’s Stalinist regime.”
Matt Felling’s analysis for CBS News gets it exactly right:
“Now it’s quite possible – and I invite readers to point this out – that I may be more unsurprised by this finding than most, having been Inside the Beltway for nearly my entire life. But is the discovery that PR flacks serve as schills for disagreeable clients really groundbreaking stuff worth hoodwinking somebody for?”
What should really get you upset about the world’s second oldest profession (after all, members of the world’s oldest profession needed someone to represent them, right?) is how you pay local units of government to hire lobbyists to raise your taxes. That, is a crime.
Last Sunday, Iwo Jima flag-raiser and past Taxpayers League Live! guest Charles Lindberg died in Edina at the age of 86. Lindberg was one of a handful of U.S. Marines that raised the original flag on Mt. Suribachi (not this one). RIP, Devil Dog.
The Taxpayers League of Minnesota's E Update is written by Mark Giga
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