February 1-3, 2018

Feb 01 01:14 Minnesota's competitive dilemma
Feb 01 09:57 The Trump/GOP bump
Feb 01 11:20 Tastiest bonuses ever?
Feb 01 16:19 Pelosi's elitist fantasy
Feb 01 21:04 Gov. Dayton's disastrous legacies

Feb 02 07:18 Jim Comey's bitter tweet

Feb 03 03:20 Comey & Hoover: FBI's biggest disgraces
Feb 03 10:02 Dana Milbank's myths & spin

Prior Months: Jan

Prior Years: 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

Minnesota's competitive dilemma

Now that Electrolux has officially announced that it's moving to South Carolina , it's time Minnesota admitted what Minnesotans have known for years. It's time Minnesota, especially the DFL , admitted that we aren't competitive with other states.

This isn't shocking in that Minnesota's taxes are far too high. Gov. Dayton's tax-the-rich administration brought this on. The phony-baloney award that Minnesota received is meaningless. According to the award, Minnesota is "the 2nd-strongest state in the union." The thing about the award is that they don't consider whether Minnesota is competitive from a business standpoint.

Minnesota's DFL politicians have insisted that all that's been needed to have a great economy is a great investment in education. In the 1970s, that was enough. This is the 21st Century. That isn't enough anymore. Other states have well-trained workforces, too. Unlike Minnesota, though, other states, like South Carolina where Electrolux is moving to, have low taxes and minimal regulations. South Carolina's policies invite people to the state.

Mayor Dave Kleis painted this the best he could, saying "It's significant. It's one of our largest employers. It's not welcome news, but it's something where we can coordinate with a number of folks to find employment before the end of two years."








Minnesota has 2 options to change this. If Minnesotans keep giving the DFL any of the levers of power in St. Paul, we won't become competitive anytime soon. The other option is to elect a reform-minded Republican governor and maintaining reform-minded Republican majorities in the state House of Representatives and the Minnesota Senate.

If Minnesota doesn't elect pro-growth legislators and a pro-growth governor, Electrolux won't be the last company leaving.

Posted Thursday, February 1, 2018 1:14 AM

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The Trump/GOP bump

I'm tired of people giving President Obama credit for the economy's outstanding performance. I'll stipulate that President Obama got us out of the Great Recession. I'll further stipulate that President Obama's oppressive taxes and regulations kept growth lower than it should have been.

In Ron Brownstein's article , he states "But growth still may not be a silver bullet for the party. One reason is that polls show that roughly as many Americans credit former President Barack Obama as Trump for the good economy. There's good reason for that verdict: On most fronts, the economy's performance under Trump represents a continuation of its improving health over Obama's second term - not a radical improvement in its trajectory."

That's a myth. First, economic growth under President Trump is significantly higher. Art Laffer predicts 4% growth for 2018, thanks in large part to the Trump/GOP tax cuts but also because of deregulation. Economic activity is booming. Another thing that's happening is repatriation of money kept overseas. Rather than keeping money overseas, multinational corporations are returning that money to the US.

Other companies are giving bonuses or pay raises or both. Most of these companies have said that they're able to do this thanks to the Trump/GOP tax cuts. Other companies have increased employer contributions to employees' 401(k)s or assumed more of their employees' out-of-pocket health care costs.

Those aren't things that President Obama can claim credit for. Here's another way of putting it: if this is just a continuation of the Obama economy, why didn't corporations start their repatriation until almost a year after President Obama left office? Why didn't corporations hand out pay raises and bonuses until almost a year after President Obama left DC?

[Video no longer available]

Remember when Democrats tried convincing Republicans not to vote for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act because it wasn't popular? Then, only 20% of people liked it. According a Monmouth University poll that I wrote this post about, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has gained in popularity. When asked "Do you approve or disapprove of the tax reform plan passed by Congress in December?  [Do you approve/disapprove strongly or somewhat?]", 44% say that they either strongly or somewhat approve of them while 44% say that they either strongly or somewhat disapprove.

[Video no longer available]

That's after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was enacted. As people experience the benefits of the Trump/GOP tax cuts, the more credit that Republicans will get.




Another obstacle for the GOP is that, unless and until wage growth accelerates for a sustained period, not everyone may view economic conditions the way Trump did when he called the country's current state a "new American moment."


That's already happening. While I agree this is a lagging indicator, it isn't lagging that much this time. President Trump is a great cheerleader for the economy. People are noticing, which is why consumer confidence is high. This isn't an obstacle. It's a highlight for the GOP.



It isn't a stretch to think that people will credit Republicans for the people's improved economic situation as they see their situation improve.

Posted Thursday, February 1, 2018 9:57 AM

Comment 1 by Chad Q at 03-Feb-18 06:43 AM
Saying Obama got us out of the recession is like saying FDR got us out of the depression. Both prolonged the pain with their policies. Had Hillary been elected, we would not be seeing tax cuts and companies giving bonuses. The stock market would still have climbed because of the governments continued quantitative easing policies and companies buying back their own stock and stockpiling their profits instead of re-investing them in the US.

Tastiest bonuses ever?

Give Hostess credit. At a time when a blizzard of companies are paying their employees bonuses, raising their wages or improving their benefits, Hostess conceived of a great idea for their bonuses. According to this article , "The company produces bakery snack cakes such as Twinkies, Ho Hos, Zingers and Sno Balls. Each week this year, a representative from one of the company's bakeries will choose a different product, which employees will take home in multi-packs, according to Bloomberg. Workers will receive the monetary bonus in the form of $750 in cash and a $500 contribution to their 401k."

I'm just wondering when some liberals will criticize Hostess for contributing to America's obesity problem.

It must frost Democrats to read "Hostess is the latest in a string of companies who have said they will use the large corporate tax cut in the new GOP tax law to invest in their workers. Starbucks, Disney, Home Depot, JP Morgan Chase and others have announced wage raises, one-time benefits or other bonuses for employees."

After reading the article, I posted this tweet:








Later, someone replied:







Posted Thursday, February 1, 2018 11:20 AM

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Pelosi's elitist fantasy

Dan Henninger's column makes the case that Nancy Pelosi will be speaker of the House when President Trump delivers his next State of the Union speech. Henninger starts his column by saying "It was impossible not to notice that Nancy Pelosi spent President Trump's 70-minute State of the Union speech grimly chewing her cheek. She was thinking: 'What I know, and he doesn't know, is that history says a year from now I will be speaker of the House, and he'll be on the brink of impeachment.' Odds are, she's right."

The problem with Henninger's theory is that the Democratic Party has turned into the elitist party. When Ms. Pelosi called the bonuses "crumbs", people noticed. Speaking this afternoon at the Republicans' retreat in White Sulphur Springs, VA, President Trump said "And then we got hit with these corporations giving tremendous bonuses to everybody, the ones that Nancy Pelosi called "crumbs" -- that was a bad -- that could be like deplorables. Does that make sense? Deplorables and crumbs? Those 2 words seem to have a resemblance. I hope it has the same meaning. But she called it crumbs when people were getting $2,000 and $3,000 and $1,000. That's not crumbs. That's a lot of money."

The reason why I think Henninger will be wrong is because Democrats have become so elitist that they're totally unlikable. They're so elitist that Democrats come across as not liking blue collar voters. It's impossible to like environmentalists and miners simultaneously. It's impossible to like tons of regulations and be friends of blue collar workers simultaneously. Check this out:

[Video no longer available]

That image of Ms. Pelosi isn't going away. The ads are already going into production. Next fall, Republicans will ask people if they think $1,000 is crumbs or if it's a lot of money. The ads write themselves. As juicy as that is, that's just the appetizer. Jazz Shaw's post is the ribeye steak entree:




The phrase "repeal and replace" is coming back into vogue, but this time we'll be hearing it from the Democrats.



At first glance I had to double check to make sure this wasn't an article from The Onion. But it's really published at The Hill and deals with the Democrats' overarching strategy heading into the midterms and perhaps even the 2020 elections. They're counting on Americans being so unhappy with their "crumbs" from the tax cuts that they will ask the voters to give them control of Congress so they can repeal and replace the new tax law.


Just speaking from a talent standpoint, Democrats must be total idiots. Why would Democrats think that fatter paychecks, pay raises, bonuses and more generous benefits equal a great opportunity to repeal and replace the Trump/GOP corporate tax cuts?



Republicans should thank their lucky stars for this opportunity. When Democrats explain what they mean by repeal and replace, Republicans should ask Democrats why they'd want to raise taxes on the companies that have given literally billions of dollars worth of bonuses to tens of thousands of people? And if Democrats don't explain what they mean by repeal and replace, Republicans should pressure them constantly until Democrats explain what they mean.

Mr. Henninger is right. History indicates that Republicans should lose a ton of seats in the House. Then again, never in history has the president's party run against such a bunch of elitist idiots. I'd just add that patterns are patterns until they aren't anymore. I suspect we're watching the death of another pattern. Good riddance.

Posted Thursday, February 1, 2018 4:19 PM

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Gov. Dayton's disastrous legacies

When the honest history is written on Gov. Dayton's legacy, it will be filled with total ineptitude. I've started writing about the elder care crisis a couple weeks ago. That crisis killed people. In that instance, the Dayton administration didn't pay attention until it was a crisis. This week, the crisis is about MNLARS. According to this Pi-Press article , "More than eight years after its planning began, nearly three years after it was developed and after more than $93 million in taxpayer funds had been spent, the state's new computer system for vehicle registrations, MNLARS, was launched over the summer, and failed. It failed so badly that, six months later, officials determined that it will cost $43 million and another year and a half to fix the problems and make needed improvements, officials said Wednesday."

What's frightening is that there's no guarantee that the next $43,000,000 will fix things. The thought that MNLARS would take eight years to plan, develop and implement and $136,000,000 to partially implement is infuriating. This wouldn't take nearly this much time or money to implement in the private sector. What's worse is watching Gov. Dayton attempting to explain things away while protecting union workers:

[Video no longer available]

MNLARS isn't the first tech thing that's turned out disastrous. MNsure was a disaster for the first year. I remember writing about it in this post because "the state failed to send out letters to 16,000 low-income Minnesotans seeking medical assistance to let them know their applications had not been processed", which caused tons of headaches in Olmstead County.

Then there's the elder care facilities where patients were abused. While that isn't a tech failure, it's a failure of gigantic proportions. The question that needs to be asked before writing Gov. Dayton's legacy is whether he paid attention to details. I'm not certain he ever did. This is illuminating and disgusting:




Joan Redwing took a stab at answering it. Redwing, a veteran of the private sector, was hired by MN.IT several months ago to help prioritize the problems and come up with a plan to fix them. Her title is chief enterprise architect. Here's some of what Redwing said:



We analyzed that. : One reason was there were some real lapses in technical leadership within the organizational structure, where we had bottlenecks of decision-making and didn't have enough programmer supervisors. We had a tier of management but we did not have individual supervisors that managed small groups of programmers. So (as) you'd imagine, all those decisions got backed up to just a critical few resources.

That resulted in concerns that were escalated by members of the team to project leadership and to these few critical decision makers that were not really listened to or were disregarded. Sometimes they said they'd like to delay those decisions until post-launch.


There's no reason to think this group will fix the problems they created. They've made things worse, not better. Minnesota would likely be better off if they hired the best private contractor and have them fix this mess.

Posted Thursday, February 1, 2018 9:04 PM

Comment 1 by eric z at 02-Feb-18 10:02 AM
It would be enlightening to see an audit of ALL questionable money sinks, including which consultancy got what, when. That's one. The Wilfare Stadium is another.

Dayton was not ideal, but compared to Pawlenty, he's been brilliant, with the bar set that low.

Comment 2 by Chad Q at 03-Feb-18 06:37 AM
Dayton has been a disaster from the beginning and the sad thing is, he's not coherent enough to know how mush of a disaster he really is.

Comment 3 by eric z at 03-Feb-18 09:48 AM
Cindy Pugh for governor?

Jim Comey's bitter tweet

Jim Comey's tweet last night was the tweet of a bitter man. In Comey's tweet, he said "All should appreciate the FBI speaking up. I wish more of our leaders would. But take heart: American history shows that, in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field, so long as good people stand up. Not a lot of schools or streets named for Joe McCarthy."

I suspect that there won't be any schools or streets named after Jim Comey, either.

Apparently, Mr. Comey isn't happy that President Trump has decided to release the House Intelligence Committee summarization memo written mostly by Chairman Devin Nunes. According to the article, the "memo purportedly is critical of the FBI's use of surveillance during the 2016 presidential campaign, particularly in the initial stages of its investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and Trump's campaign." As usual, Fox News's Catherine Herridge broke the story. Here's Comey's tweet:








The most no-nonsense member of Congress, Trey Gowdy, said that the memo will be embarrassing to Adam Schiff:


Posted Friday, February 2, 2018 7:18 AM

Comment 1 by eric z at 02-Feb-18 09:57 AM
Where do you live, Gary? I want to circulate a petition to rename the street after Hillary Clinton, since you'd not want it named after James Comey.

Kidding aside, you wrote "the article" without making that a link. You only at the end give a video link.

As to Tweets, I don't like any of them, nor the concept, nor the site. However, Comey can tweet as he likes, just as you can. However, not to overuse the word, it is much better seeing you post longer more detailed things, with thinking and rationale apparent and clearly stated; so don't tweet, write.

A national police force will be made up of people, and every person has opinions, and, unlike J. Edgar, those on the national police force should not let opinions color the job. In an ideal world that would be so, but we live in the real world.

What's your proposal? A McCarthy-like purge, some litmus test with lie detector application? If you've no solution to propose, live with it.

And if an aim is to purge agenda-oriented civil servants, start at CIA and NSA first, and the military officer corps. The agenda of overspending on arms and ignoring infrastructure and helping the poor is a policy I don't like so should I be proposing a purge of the officer corps of any in it supporting the arms-industrial complex?

I don't like a lot of things, but life is short and time is fleeting. I don't like Trey Gowdey, he's a hack, not as bad as Nunes, but few are. So, what can I do about it? Gowdy is "all nonsense" with a dour face and tone but wielding a McCarthy-like hatchet. Calling him "no-nonsense" is a stretch, but what's his agenda, and/or Nunes'? Deflecting attention from the Trump family including in-laws?

My biggest gripe is Pence in everything seeming to be teflon coated.

He chaired the transition team, it's his picks as much as anybody's, and do you really think he was misled by Flynn, instead of being an integral part of a plan to try to mislead the nation by affirmatively lying to everybody on TV while knowing the truth?

Comey & Hoover: FBI's biggest disgraces

It's hard to think that Jim Comey and J. Edgar Hoover aren't the FBI's biggest disgraces in that agency's history. After reading this article , it isn't difficult to call Jim Comey a disgrace. In a tweet Friday afternoon, Comey said of the Nunes memo "That's it? Dishonest and misleading memo wrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen. For what? DOJ & FBI must keep doing their jobs."

It isn't difficult to make the case that the House Intelligence Committee did its job. Their job is to make sure that the institutions of government don't become corrupt like FBI apparently did. Under Comey's administration, they thought they were above the law. They thought they didn't need to obey congressional subpoenas. The FBI leadership thought they were above the law. The Intelligence Committee proved that they weren't above the law. They proved that the FBI leadership was just arrogant and needed to be checked.

One chilling part of the Nunes memo states "Neither the initial application in Oct., 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role the DNC, the Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele's efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials."

First, the FISC needs to interrogate the people applying for warrants more thoroughly. Second, the people applying for warrants must disclose everything. If they don't, they've earned some sanctions from the court. As for Comey's tweet, what was he thinking?








Why wouldn't Congress get upset when the FBI thinks that they can use sloppy opposition research to get a warrant against a campaign's political opponent? That's the type of thing that Putin or Chavez would do. That isn't what we expect from the FBI.

[Video no longer available]

This should bother us, too:








Andrew McCabe didn't stand tall. Based on Ari Fleischer's op-ed , I'd argue that he isn't a man of character:




In January 2017, I was invited by then-FBI Director Comey to deliver the keynote address for a major meeting of law enforcement directors from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. These English-speaking countries are called the Five Eyes nations. In addition to the FBI director and his foreign counterparts, the heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were to attend. The meeting was a big deal. 



As someone who is an admirer and supporter of the FBI, I looked forward to going and sharing what I learned about how to communicate in a crisis. Having been the White House press secretary on Sept. 11, 2001, there was a lot I wanted to share with the Five Eyes leaders.

One month before the event, Comey was fired and McCabe became acting FBI director. The day prior to the event, Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He acknowledged telling President Trump he was not under investigation, and he admitted he provided FBI memos to a friend so they could be leaked to The New York Times.

That evening, I went on Fox News and was mildly critical of Comey. I said when President Trump sought a one-on-one meeting with him, he should have resisted it, a statement Comey himself made at the hearing. The next morning, about an hour before I was due at the 9/11 Museum, I was on another TV show and again was mildly critical of Comey. I questioned the ethics of his leaking FBI memos to a private citizen so they could be given to the press. I also said I saw no evidence of collusion between President Trump and Russia.

I left the show, got into an FBI car and headed downtown for the counterterrorism training event. That's when my assistant called me to tell me that she got a call from the acting FBI director's office telling me not to show up. No explanation was provided.


Anyone that can't take mild criticism isn't a man of character. Period.

Posted Saturday, February 3, 2018 3:20 AM

Comment 1 by eric z at 03-Feb-18 09:46 AM
Gary, that's it?

Response 1.1 by Gary Gross at 03-Feb-18 04:54 PM
Is it that you don't care about people's civil rights? Is it that you only care when progressives' civil rights are violated? JFK famously said that if everyone's rights weren't protected, nobody's rights were protected. As additional information comes out, it's apparent that Jim Comey cared only about protecting FBI management. He didn't care about following the law. I expect better than that from this nation's top law enforcement agency. These are supposed to be people of impeccable character. The vast majority of agents fit that description.

Far too many in the upper echelons of the FBI, unfortunately, don't fit that description.

Dana Milbank's myths & spin

Dana Milbank's latest column doesn't have a single bit of spin in it. It has lots of bits of spin in it.

For instance, Milbank wrote "Now, best of all, he gets to release a memo (possibly written with White House help) to exonerate Trump in the Russia probe by using cherry-picked information implying wrongdoing by the FBI - while at the same time blocking declassification of a memo from committee Democrats providing context and exculpatory information that Nunes omitted."

Actually, Nunes favors declassification of the so-called Schiff Memo. It's just that it hasn't gone through the scrubbing protocol required to prepare the document for public consumption. It's worth noting that Rep. Schiff accused Chairman Nunes of wanting to publish a memo that contained sources and methods. That accusation wasn't accurate. It was Schiff-produced spin.

It's worth noting that Chairman Nunes told Bret Baier that he didn't "read the actual FISA applications." Chairman Nunes told Baier that "this has been one of these bogus news stories that's been put out. So the agreement that we made with the Justice Department was to create a reading room and allow one committee member and 2 investigators to go over and read the documents. I thought the best person on our committee would be the chairman of the Oversight Committee, Trey Gowdy, who has a long career as a federal prosecutor, to go and do this..."

In fact, Milbank could've written a much more fact-based article, if that was ever his intention, if he'd watched this interview:

[Video no longer available]

Then there's this:




And the FBI, which under its Trump-appointed director says it has 'grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy,' can't defend itself because, well, the information is classified.


The FBI director can't defend the agency's actions because what they did is indefensible. He can't say the FBI can't defend itself because the information is classified because it's been unclassified or is in the process of being prepared for declassification.






In essence, Nunes is free to allege whatever he wants, even if false, and nobody, by law, can contradict him.


That's a wonderful bit of spin. Pretty much everything from the FISA warrant, including the application itself, is in the process of getting declassified. The applications have to get scrubbed so they don't reveal sources and methods, which means they'll be heavily redacted in parts.



Why didn't Milbank admit that the FBI applied for a surveillance warrant "without telling the court the FBI itself had dismissed Christopher Steele, who generated the opposition research, for lying to the FBI and leaking his relationship with the agency to the press"? Is that because Milbank isn't that worried about people's civil liberties?

Posted Saturday, February 3, 2018 10:02 AM

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