Insanity: repeating the same behavior over and over but expecting different results
 
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and her Tea Party cohorts in Congress have voted to repeal Obamacare 37 times. Each time they have a debate, each time the vote to repeal and every single time it hasn’t made a lick of difference.
 
But here’s the real expense of the insanity:
 

For the 37th time since 2011, House Republicans will hold a vote to repeal Obamacare on Thursday, bringing the total cost of all of their failed repeal votes to roughly $55 million in taxpayer money, according to one estimate.
 
Last year, CBS News calculated that the number of hours spent on 33 repeal votes — then roughly 80 hours, or two full work weeks — cost taxpayers an estimated $48 million. Since then, Republicans have held three more votes (another $4.5 million) and will add another $1.5 million with their latest.

When Bachmann talks about being fiscally responsible, keep this in mind.
 
She thinks the sequester didn’t go far enough in hurting the poor. Think of what could have been done instead.
 
But here’s the hilarity of it all …
 
Eric Cantor tweeted as question for his followers to give their thoughts on Obamacare in three words. The White House made him look the fool that he is
 

Steaming pile of manure	Sen. Eric Pratt (R-Prior Lake)

When Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton was signing the marriage equality bill into law on the Capitol steps on Tuesday, Republicans pulled a really petty, childish maneuver. They called a series of procedural votes that prevented DFL Senators from joining the celebration on the Capitol Steps including barring the doors so nobody could leave.
 
Here’s Sen. Scott Dibble’s reaction:
 

 
But Sen. Eric Pratt (R-Prior Lake) is pretending that isn’t what it was about.
 

But reached for comment today, the MNGOP Senator who first proposed locking the doors, Eric Pratt of Prior Lake, said the bill signing ceremony had nothing to do it.
 
“There weren’t many senators on the floor at the time, and I thought it was a pretty important point that we were talking about,” Pratt said. At the time, the Senate was in the midst of debating a bill to allow child care workers to take unionization votes.
 
“I thought it was an important enough discussion that everyone who could be should be there,” Pratt added.
(City Pages)

Let me get this straight …
 
During the early stages of what turned out to be a 17 hour filibuster of a bill to allow child care providers to join labor unions if they want to, he thought these bull**** tactics were SO vitally important that Republicans needed to make a motion of adjournment and then a motion to lock the doors? Why couldn’t their bull**** be dealt with at 7pm or 10pm or 3am or 5am?
 

strike while the iron is hot

Let’s be clear about one thing: we’re getting a TON of really great stuff out of this legislative session. Marriage equality, paying back the school funding shift, funding for all-day kindergarten (a bigger deal than virtually anyone is giving it credit for), and a budget that, while far from perfect, is worlds better than what we were getting from Tim Pawlenty’s reign of terror or from a Tea-infused GOP-led legislature. These things have come from both the House and Senate, and DFLers in both houses have worked hard on a variety of issues

All that being said, there’s one thing right now that’s an absolute joke, and it belies a complete lack of leadership in the State Senate: the state minimum wage.

The House has already passed a bill to raise the minimum wage above $9.00 per hour (and index it to inflation), and the Senate has a proposal to raise it to something in the $7.00 range. Majority Leader Tom Bakk said recently that he “doesn’t have the votes” to make even that increase happen. This is an absolute joke, and not a particularly funny one. This is a DFL Majority Leader who just helped guide the most contentious piece of social-issue legislation in a generation to success, but can’t whip 34 votes to raise the damned poverty wage to a measly nine bucks an hour?

The joke gets worse, though, because this is also a leadership team that’s pushing to raise legislator pay. Now, don’t get me wrong — legislator pay probably does need to go up. But again, this is an opportunity to permanently change the conversation about legislative pay — want to raise your pay? Raise the minimum wage concurrently. When workers win, legislators get a teeny bit more too. Good luck to future non-DFL-led legislatures ever changing that dynamic, if it were put in place. This Senate leadership is instead taking this opportunity to appear as crass and self-interested as any other set of politicians, when they could be using this chance to tie their own fortunes to the success of Minnesota workers.

To say nothing of the fact that the Senate, while legislatively not that different from the House, is somewhat more immune to political externalities since they’re not up for reelection for three more freaking years.

Just terrible politics, folks. Terrible leadership on this issue. And it’s such an important one for the DFL (and progressives as a distinct group) to be pushing if we want to hang on to these majorities in 2014.

You may recall that last year, a big new Farm Bill didn’t happen. They’re trying again. And some of the world’s biggest idiots, and hypocrites – that is, hard-core conservatives – are again demanding relentless attacks on the poor as a price of passage.
 

On Tuesday, the Senate Agriculture Committee passed a Farm Bill that cuts food and nutrition programs by $4.1 billion over the next decade, $400 million annually. That’s bad, and unnecessary, particularly in light of the CBO’s new report of shrinking deficits. But the Senate cuts are peanuts compared to what the House is prepared to do: $2.5 billion in cuts annually for the next decade, for a total of $21 billion…
 
With the Senate proposing cuts of $4.1 billion, and the House $21 billion, you can expect the cuts to end up being in the double digits of billions range. Because we all have to have skin in the misguided austerity game, don’t you know.
 
(Daily Kos)

Here’s more.
 

Bruce Babcock, an economics professor at Iowa State University and regular critic of crop subsidies, said one of the new crop insurance proposals in the Senate bill is particularly generous to farmers.
 
“Those of us who have automobile insurance with a $500 deductible, it would be the same as if we were being given insurance for that deductible,” Babcock said.
 
In other words, farmers would barely be on the hook for any losses they suffer, he said. Farmers say crop insurance enabled them to survive hard times, such as last summer’s drought, without a government bailout.
 
But the government’s support for crop insurance has taken all of the risk out of farming and is responsible for the real estate boom in farm country, Babcock said.
 
“The more subsidies and the more crop insurance we enable farmers to buy, the more they bid up the price of land,” he said.
 
(MPR)

And you know what tends to happen for everyone, except the sleazy real estate hustlers themselves, and the big banks that back them, when land bubbles burst.
 
This whole thing is a wretched piece of corporate crap. (And didn’t someone say, a while back, that there’s been enough “budget-balancing” on the backs of the poor and disadvantaged, and he wouldn’t be part of any more of it? Hint- the house he lives in is “White.”) I’ll be blogging more about it. In the meantime, here’s an example of the sort of policy that we should be seeing.
 

U.S. agriculture is at a crossroads. The path we’ve been on, industrial food production, is a dead end. It damages air, water and soil, harms rural communities, and limits future productivity.
 
But there’s a better way. Scientists call it agroecological farming. We call it healthy farms. Healthy farms can be just as productive as industrial farms, but they’re better for the environment, the economy, and the people who grow (and eat) food.
 
(Union of Concerned Scientists)

It’s Friday, and I’m adding this, which has nothing to do with the above. YouTube page here.
 

 

Minnesota State Senator Julianne Ortman (R-Chanhassen) appears to be gearing up to challenge Sen. Al Franken in 2014. In typical Republican fashion, she’s going to get things started by lying.
 
Ortman attacked Franken asserting he was behind the IRS going after conservative, Tea Party groups. In fact, both conservative and liberal nonprofits involved in politics were scrutinized and the only nonprofit denied nonprofit status was a liberal group.
 
But Ortman wasn’t about to let facts get in her way:
 

State Senator Julianne Ortman held a press conference today to try and finger U.S. Senator Al Franken for playing a role in the current controversy over the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) giving unwarranted scrutiny to certain conservative 501(c)(4) groups.
 
In 2012, Franken and a group of other Democratic Senators sent two letters to the IRS, requesting that they give added scrutiny to 501(c)(4) groups. Both progressive and conservative organizations had been setting such groups up because they are tax-exempt and not subject to campaign finance disclosures.
(Brick City Blog)

Ortman wasn’t about to mention that the letters did not mention targeting RWNJ groups, but ALL tax-exempt groups involved in politics. As Sean Olsen at Brick City Blog notes: “ideology doesn’t come up in either letter.”
 

I had an interesting experience last night that I thought MN Progressive Project readers would like to hear about, and the best way to do this is to cross post something I wrote on my science blog, so that’s below.

But before getting to that, there is an interesting press release from the Natural Resources Committee’s ranking member Rep. Ed Markey regarding Fracking:

A new draft rule to guide regulation of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of oil and gas resources on public and Indian lands weakens safety and environmental protections and restricts public knowledge of dangerous chemicals, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said today. The Department of Interior new version of the so-called “fracking rule” ignores many suggestions made by Rep. Markey and other Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee, and appears to bend more towards the interests of the oil and gas sector, not the general public.

 

 

“This new fracking rule is extremely disappointing,” said Rep. Markey, the Ranking Member of the committee. “It gives oil and gas companies the freedom to frack without the proper safety protections and disclosures the American public deserve. Oil and gas companies like to say that every well is different, but this fracking rule would treat wells like cookie cutter activities, potentially leaving huge holes in ensuring that fracking activities on public lands are being done properly and safely. This rule essentially says to oil companies that they can frack first and ask questions later.”

 

In September, Rep. Markey along with committee members Reps. Rush Holt (N.J.), Gregorio Kilili Camacho Sablan (C.M.), Raul Grijalva (Ariz.), Grace Napolitano (Calif.) and Paul Tonko (N.Y.) wrote DOI expressing concerns with several aspects of the agency’s original draft rule. Those concerns weren’t positively addressed in this new rule, and in fact many were even further weakened in the latest draft rule. The Democrats’original concerns can be found HERE.

 

The new draft DOI rule doesn’t require companies to disclose what chemicals they are using and how much before they drill the well. Adding insult to potential injury to public lands, the DOI rule then says that companies can use drilling practices on one completed well, and then apply them to multiple wells in the same area.

 

The rule also puts faith into the industry’s favored “FracFocus” Internet-based disclosure of chemicals, when that website is both not run by the federal government and does not allow for easy public access to the information, limiting oversight of the industry. Finally, it keeps open the question of open pit storage of wastewater, instead of requiring closed system containment.

 

“Because there are so many issues with this draft rule, 30 days is not enough to review this new version. DOI should provide more time for the public to express their views on this rule. I hope that Secretary Jewell listens to our concerns,” said Rep. Markey.

And now, the the other thing, pertaining to the OFA and Keystone XL, originally posted here:

You’ve gotta love South Minneapolis.

My friend Sharon Sund passed me an email this morning about an Organizing for Action meeting in South Minneapolis to discuss climate change activism. Sharon and I had been talking about local climate change activism earlier in the week so she thought I’d liked to go to this meeting and see what they are up to.

Organizing for Action(OFA) is an offshoot of the Obama campaign, a grassroots non profit that is separate from any campaign committee (so they don’t support or run candidates) that organizes in favor of Obama’s issues like getting some sensible gun regulation or immigration reform passed in Congress, or keeping Obama care intact.

The organizer of the event described OFA’s structure and purpose, gave a bit of a pep talk, and then opened it up for discussion.

I was the first person to speak up, and after making a brief remark about some interesting climate science related news I won’t bother you with here, I brought up Keystone XL pipeline. I noted that it would be awful nice and a lot easier to get a climate change component of OFA going if Obama would just come out and say “no” to Keystone. The official OFA response, blew me away. Keystone XL might be someone’s personal issue, and that was fine, but since the President was neutral on it at the moment, OFA was as well.

Now, I don’t want to take credit or breaking the meeting. Had I not said something about Keystone, the guy next to me, or the woman behind me, or the guy two seats down, or the woman across the room, or any one of the 30 hard core activists attending the meeting, would have. I know this because once Keystone was brought up, and the need for Obama to take a stand, and in particular, oppose the pipeline was mentioned, everybody in the room had something to say, clearly indicating that they had all thought about it quite a bit.

Keystone is not a personal issue. It is the key, urgent, not-to-be-ignored grassroots issue that OFA and Obama should be all over.

I kinda feel bad for the organizer because he was swamped. I think we stayed on keystone for about an hour. He would say, “OK, let’s move on to a different issue. Sally, did you have something, I saw your hand up?” and Sally would say something very brief not about keystone, and then, “Well, I was in Nebraska last month chaining myself to construction equipment to stop the pipeline …” and then it would be back to the Keystone XL Pipeline. Or the organizer would say, “Oh, Bill, I see you’ve had your hand up,” and Bill would say, “Yeah, that idea of having house meetings to discuss climate would be good. This way we can get together and plan an organized push to get the President to do the right thing on the Keystone Pipeline..” and so on and so forth.1

There are two things that I now know for certain. The first, which I learned tonight, is that Obama for America will not have an effective climate change component if Obama does not come out in opposition to Keystone. Every single one of those activists is involved in a half dozen different projects, some focused on one issue, other on many, that they devote considerable time to, and that they regard, quite rightly, as very important. Many of the individuals in the room are heavily involved already in climate change activism and are already working with existing political groups, churches, or other organizations on climate change (our local 350.org guy was there for example). These climate change activists don’t need the OFA, though the OFA needs them. In fact, the meeting organizer had noted how great it was when OFA engaged in a new issue, and brought new volunteers into the fold in so doing. Most importantly, this little meeting tonight was a microcosm of the larger political landscape. Obama has to lead on climate change. He’s taken a few steps in that direction. And we’re all waiting around for the next couple of steps. Right now, Obama has not moved forward enough for us to find any space behind him so that he can actually lead us.

The consensus at tonight’s meeting was this: The local Minneapolis OFA has to take a message back to Obama and OFA headquarters: Yes, of course we’ll help. But first you need to get your head out of the sand. In particular, the Alberta tar sands. And then we will do more than help. We’ll carry you.

The second thing I know for certain, but that I didn’t learn from this meeting because I already knew it is this: The people of South Minneapolis (and adjoining inner ring suburbs) are awesome.2

_____________
1Those were not the actual names of participants or what they said. Since I’m not prepared to report those things exactly, I’m just wildly paraphrasing to make the point.

2A word I’ve probably used four times in my entire life. Just so you know.

Photo Credit: billb1961 via Compfight cc

There is a reason you didn’t see any Minnesota State Senators at the marriage equality signing ceremony on the State Capitol steps. It is because the Republican Senators behaved like absolute jerks. Only the bill’s authors, Sen. Scott Dibble and Sen. Tony Lourey, attended.
 
The rest were called to the floor of the Senate for a series of useless, time-wasting procedural motions.
 
Republicans called in all Senators to the floor for an adjournment vote. This is the highest ranking motion legislators can file and requires the attendance of all Senators. There is no debate or discussion, but DFLers needed a majority there to make sure the Republicans couldn’t end the legislative session before all of the Senate’s business was completed. Like the budget, for example.
 
Once everyone (aside from Dibble and Lourey) were in the chamber, Republicans filed a arcane motion requiring Sargeant-At-Arms to bar the doors and prevent any Senators from leaving.
 
The sole purpose of these procedural votes was to make sure that the DFLers couldn’t join their friends, families and constituents on the Capitol steps and celebrate our momentous victory.
 
BTW, DFLers didn’t pull any bull**** like this when the bigots passed their bill to get the anti-marriage amendment on the ballot back in 2011.
 
What a bunch of sad and petty clowns.
 

it looks as if michele bachmann’s going to start running her tv campaign ads for next year’s election right…about… NOW.
 
no kidding! on wednesday, may 15th, the bachmann congressional campaign committed to an extended television ad buy with the local Fox broadcast outlet. the National Journal reported that here.
 
so it’s clear that at this point bachmann is showing the world that she has no intentions of leaving congress or politics — no matter how bad things look for her. it was only yesterday i was taking people to task for continuing to try to write political epitaphs for michele bachmann (year after year) despite her extraordinary record of survival.

there was media speculation that michele might retire from politics in response to a fox network offer to hire her as highly-paid pundit. the ad buy indicates: nope.
 
why haven’t these bachmann political epitaphs ever worked so far? one reason: ever since michele first won that seat, the *national* christian right has had a strong interest in seeing her retain it. that seat remains under the control of the national christian right even if michele loses every last bit of her national influence she’s ever had. so long as she occupies that seat: it’s not a national gop seat, not a seat controlled by ‘tea party leaders,’ not a seat controlled by the establishment gop. so long as she occupies it, it’s a seat (in congress and on committees) controlled by the national christian right.
 
so it doesn’t matter that there other minnesota republicans and conservatives who could replace michele and win that district next time around. the minnesota republicans with that election capability *aren’t* firmly under the control of the national christian right. so there’s no percentage for the national christian right in replacing michele with one of them.
 
of course the national christian right *could* try to replace her with another one of their local puppets….but currently none of their local puppets could be elected to that seat. at this writing, there are plenty of ‘baby bachmanns’ in office — conservative christian and tea party republican types who got into minnesota politics in wake of michele’s ultra-winger election success. (a few possible or real baby bachmanns that come to mind: the draz, matt dean, paul gazelka, kathy lohmer, perhaps the recently arrived karin housley of stillwater…) and wherever there are down-ticket races in minnesota that can be won by republicans: the number of ‘baby bachmanns’ in conservative districts is likely to grow, so long as the MNGOP establishment continues to lose control of “who can be a candidate.”
 
but at present, none of these baby bachmanns are big enough to replace michele and win the sixth district congressional seat (keep an eye on housley over the next couple of years, though.) to run in the sixth district, you’d have to establish some kind of personal connection there (not all of the baby bachmanns have that — dean and housley, yes.) you’d also have to have a serious reputation (comparable to bachmann’s) in the minnesota conservative media and Republican activist circles. (to my knowledge, none of the ‘baby bachmanns’ triggers the level of name recognition and fervor that bachmann does. matt dean is fairly prominent, and he’s “with” the national christian right…but did you ever hear anyone get all excited about him, a la bachmann?)
 
and if you want to replace michele as GOP candidate, you have to show that you can produce crowd support, conservative church support, and serious fundraising chops. finally: to replace michele… you have to persuade her to retire, which means persuading the national christian right to *tell* her to retire… and so far they’ve shown no signs of giving her up.
 
maybe that will change if one of the campaign election scandals currently swirling around her head actually lands squarely on her, roosting in her hair for months to come. but right now…
 
if you’re a lib/prog/dem, the fact that bachmann’s making a show of staying in is bad news for more than one reason. first of all: no matter how much legal and media trouble she has at present — she can win this district again, as she has in the past. second bad news for libs/progs/dems: this year she’s as nuts as ever, and that’s what inspires these huge efforts to toss her out. so if you’re of the persuasion that it’s a waste of dem resources to topple michele…
 
…then i’m ‘pat robertson,’ and all those people who waste scarce resources trying to beat bachmann are ‘your cheating husband,’ and you people who object to trying our best to beat bachmann are ‘the suffering wife.’ thus: i’m here to tell you “what are you gonna do, they’re like that — you have to suffer through this the best you can — and for god’s sake would it kill you to lose a few pounds?”

.You almost, but not quite, have to feel sorry for the right.

They get so much wrong, and it is catching up with them.

As much as they wanted something bad to be true, we now know that it was the ambassador himself who turned down the offer of military security for Benghazi, made by the African Command, that this was NOT negligence or incompetence by the Obama administration State Department.

As much as the right wanted it to be true, earlier claims to the contrary, there was no cover up or attempt to lie to the public, based on the actual emails released from the White House about the editing process of the talking points. Those were not reported accurately; they were edited to make Obama look bad.

As much as they desperately wanted it to be true, there was no live camera footage watched by the White House in real time, or any other time.

What we DO know is that, unlike Dubya and the righties, THIS administration is more careful and prudent to be sure they know what is fact from fiction before asserting something is true, much less going to war over it.  We see it in the example of checking out chemical weapons in Syria.

It’s nice to have a thoughtful, prudent, fact-based  grown up sitting in the power chair in the Oval Office.  I wish that could be said for the power chair of the Speaker of the House, or the various crackpot witch hunting committees of Congress that waste a lot of money investigating things which don’t merit investigation, while failing to act on things that DO need both investigation and action.  Right wing government is not good government, it is not effective government, it is not COST effective government.  It is the epitome of political partisanship, waste of tax dollars, and waste of time.

From Tuesday:
 

U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum today introduced legislation to establish a special U.S. House committee to conduct oversight, ensure accountability, and report on sexual assault and abuse in the U.S. military. Responding to the on-going and ever growing problem of sexual violence and abuse committed by members of the military, the “Special Committee on Sexual Assault and Abuse in the Armed Forces” would focus congressional attention on necessary reforms to the Department of Defense’s prevention, prosecution, and victims’ services efforts.

And it just so happens that Minnesota’s Congressman most identified with the military is avoiding this issue as determinedly as if it’s an opponent that wants to debate him in public.
 

And from Minnesota’s Member that is assigned to the Armed Services Committee …. John Kline (R-MN-02) … silence.
No outrage.
No press release.
No Facebook post.
No Tweet.
No membership in the bi-partisan Military Sexual Assault Prevention Caucus
And No Legislation … heck, John Kline has failed to co-sponsor the BE-SAFE Act (H.R. 1867), the Military Judicial Reform Act of 2013 (H.R. 1079) or Sexual Assault Training Oversight and Prevention Act (H.R. 1593) — all legislation that has bi-partisan support and addresses sexual assaults in the military.
Simply stated, John Kline continues to disappoint Minnesotans.
 
(MN Political Roundtable)

I’m not qualified to provide informed, comprehensive discussion on sexual assault in the military, which is being described with terms like “epidemic.” For example, as to whether it‘s more about a redneck conservative military culture, or the proverbial “few bad apples.” (Though I have my opinions, and they lean strongly toward the former.) The bottom line is that it has to end, and legislators that don’t help to seriously work toward that, via their votes, don’t belong in office.