I will be going to the Minnesota State Capitol Saturday morning to show my support for in-home childcare providers as well as Personal Care Assistants.
Hopefully many Minnesotans know by now that the MN Democrats are attempting to pass legislation to reimburse unions for their generous campaign donations force the aforementioned small business owners to unionize. It has already passed the Senate, so the House will be taking up the matter on Saturday.
Via NRO’s Andrew Johnson, Joe Scarborough isn’t the only TV show host rethinking his scorn of gun-rights advocates this week. Piers Morgan, who engaged in some of the worst demagoguery outside of the White House and Capitol Hill over the last six months on that issue, routinely derided the idea that the American government couldn’t be trusted to abide by the law and tell the truth. Now, after watching what happened at the IRS — and to the Associated Press — the CNN host admits to Penn Jillette that maybe people had a point about creeping tyranny after all:
Peggy Noonan’s article about the IRS scandal is her best writing in some time. She nails it when she talks about how the IRS became a political instrument in the Obama administration’s hands:
The Journal’s Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who’d donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government’s attention. He told ABC News: “It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare.” Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they’re afraid of saying they were audited.
Well the House DFL is leaving little to the imagination of what it looks like inside the mind of a utopian. That is, what does the agenda look like from someone who has no basis of using practical real world cause and effect and instead relies entirely on feelings to govern.
Its always a good indicator that a policy is flawed when, in order to get enough support to pass legislation, you have to insert exclusions for special interests who would be harmed upon implementation…. (emphasis mine)
A bill to move the state's partisan primary to June, backed by Gov. Dayton, has passed out of committee in the House with bipartisan support. This same proposal came out of committee in the Senate as part of an omnibus elections-policy bill.
Before I outline concerns I have with the push for earlier election dates, I want to clear up possible misconceptions about primaries and parties.
The MNDFL, as part of their languid dawdling in social issues this past session, introduced two deeply controversial sets of bills.
One was the raft of gun grab legislation that came out at the top of the session – everything from magazine restrictions and confiscations to background checks. As we chronicled in this space, the bills spawned an epic turnout of opponents, and the re-mobilization of the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance. Notwithstanding this, and overwhelming disapproval in public feedback, the DFL kept on pressing to try to squeedge one form of stupid, crime-non-affecting gun grab or another through the legislature, until the effort finally petered out (with a bill that expanded the state’s data reporting, which the NRA and GOCRA favored all along, and which may actually have a useful effect on crime, and which the local leftymedia is treating as a non-event, since they wanted confiscations, dammit).
Wednesday night, Michele Bachmann was interviewed by Greta van Susteren about the IRS scandal. What she said is quite pertinent to the scandal:
Here’s the first exchange between Greta and Michele:
GRETA: And, of course, we’re all chewing on the news that Bret Baier sent me that he was at the end of his term at the end of the month and President Obama making the announcement that he’d resigned just a month early.
BACHMANN: Well, he was the perfect scapegoat. He was exiting the stage anyway and so they might as well make it look like they’re chopping his head off on the way out because it wasn’t going to happen anyway.
A number of proposals to implement new energy mandates on electric utilities and their consumers are quickly moving through the Minnesota legislature in the final days of the legislative session. Most notably, as of today, the omnibus jobs and economic development bill mandates that 1.5 percent of all retail electricity sales from investor-owned utilities must be generated from solar by 2020.
Ironically, the solar and other energy mandates, despite finding a home in the jobs bill, will cost Minnesota jobs.
Adding to the irony, the new energy mandates only apply to investor-owned utilities, which account for over 70 percent of the electricity used by Minnesota’s commercial and industrial electricity customers, which also happen to be Minnesota’s job creators. Thus, the energy mandates appear to be targeted at Minnesota’s job creators.
When Mark Dayton ran for governor in 2010, he criticized Tom Horner’s cigarette tax increase proposal. He constantly talked about the need for making Minnesota’s tax system more progressive. Apparently, Gov. Dayton doesn’t have the same priorities as then-Candidate Dayton:
Dayton is now backing a cigarette tax increase from $1.23 per pack now to $2.52, more than he initially proposed. The money from the stocking tax would be diverted to a stadium reserve fund. Smoking will not be allowed at the new Vikings stadium, due to open in time for the 2016 season.
If it’s true, it would be the first time anyone has linked the issue in any way to the WhiteLanny Davis writes in The Hill today that he’s heard White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler knew for “several weeks” without informing Barack Obama, and she needs to resign … if his sources are correct.
So who are his sources? Hmmmm:
This one’s important, and needs some action on your part to prevent a corrosive overreach of government power.
I also got this one from GOCRA yesterday; it’s not a “gun rights” thing, but it’s an important civil liberty issue, and it needs your attention:
Minneapolis Police (as well as many other departments) use automated license plate readers to log millions of times, dates, and locations of cars every month. They know where you were, and they keep this data as long as they want.
This in from the House Republican Caucus:
The Minnesota House is scheduled to debate the childcare provider and personal care attendant unionization bill on Saturday. Simply put, this is a bad bill, and not something Democrat majorities should be wasting time on with so much work still left to be done on the budget.
We have under 100 hours left in session, but Democrats are insisting on pushing through this unwanted and unnecessary effort that the Star Tribune has called an "overreach" and a "collection of a campaign IOU by labor interests."
Last night, Barack Obama tried to take control of the narrative on one of the scandals that have rocked his administration by announcing that IRS Commissioner Steve Miller had resigned by request of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. As it turns out, Miller was leaving in a month anyway, but the outgoing IRS chief took the time to note that the wrongdoing was limited to two IRS employees in the Cincinnati office, who had already been “disciplined” — which directly contradicts the Inspector General’s report, which shows managerial involvement since March 2010 at least, and coordination between multiple offices and units. The report also notes that at least 300 applications got improperly obstructed, and the number is likely much higher than that.
Fox 19 in Cincinnati reports that the number doubled yesterday evening to four IRS employees, and that they’re not terribly interested in martyrdom (via Twitchy):
It’s becoming clear that the Obama Administration is using government agencies as political cudgels.
Although the Sorosphere has been strenuously chanting that the IRS scandal is no big thing, the “acting director” became the first scapegoat of the “non-scandal” yesterday. And it looks like there just might be a gap in the “two rogue employees” dodge; according to a Cincinnati TV station, it may be four employees. And (with emphasis added)…:
One of FOX19′s two sources went on say that these four IRS workers claim “they simply did what their bosses ordered.” FOX19 reported on Tuesday that the report by the Office of Inspector General states that senior IRS officials knew agents were targeting Tea Party groups as early as 2011.