MN-01: Ignorant, bigoted drivel from Rep. Hagedorn

Rep. Jim Hagedorn (R-MN) won a very close race in 2016. For the most part he hasn’t made a lot of noise since then. But a lot of people knew that it was just a matter of time. These are both from an apparent doozy of a recent public address.

“Agriculture is a national security issue,” he said, according to The Globe. Hagedorn grew up on a grain and livestock farm near Truman and serves on the House Ag Committee.

In fact, it was because of agriculture, he said, that “nobody [in America] goes to sleep at night wondering if they’ll be able to feed their families.”

Jim? Jim?

As wondrous and bountiful as America’s yield is, it still routinely fails to feed everyone in the country. It's estimated that 1 in 8 Americans are “food insecure,” a polite way of saying they often go without. That translates to roughly 40 million people, 12 million of them children. - City Pages

And:

“What’s going on at the border is an emergency,” Hagedorn said. He added that Democrats in Congress are “turning our border patrol agents into having to care for children and families.”

He claimed that 5 to 6 million people are in America undocumented because they have overstayed their visas. He said many of these individuals are “from terrorist countries” and that this phenomenon is what caused 9/11. - The Globe

MN lege: Stuff of interest, good and otherwise

- “Worker Friendly Bills Continue to Move Forward" (Workday Minnesota)

- The House Health and Human Services Finance omnibus bill, HF 2414, was passed last week. House Party of Trump anti-choice zealots - that is, all MN House Republicans - tried and failed to add 6- and 20-week abortion bans. Of course. (The foregoing is paraphrased from an email I got from Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota Action Fund).

- The House passed a 100% clean energy by 2050 mandate.

The Minnesota Solar Energy Industries Association (MnSEIA) said the bill could increase solar jobs in the state 10x. “We estimate that if this bill were to pass through the senate, then our state’s solar industry would balloon from 4,600 jobs to well over 45,000,” MnSEIA Executive Director David Shaffer told pv magazine.

But it may be too good to be true. Every state house to date that has passed a 100% clean energy mandate has been dominated by the Democratic Party. And while the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party holds a 75-59 majority in Minnesota’s House, in the Senate it’s a different story: a story where Republicans hold a 35-32 majority.

Sources close to this bill have made it clear to pv magazine that some features of this bill – specifically the 100% clean energy mandate – have a snowball’s chance in Hell in the Senate due to Republican opposition, and this concern was alluded to in Shaffer’s statements. - pv magazine

- In fact, the Senate has very different ideas in general about anything good for the environment.

(In mid-April), the Minnesota Senate Environment and Natural Resources Finance committee unveiled an omnibus budget bill that would dramatically cut general state support for our natural resources by 25%. These cuts, representing a funding decrease of $90 million from the last two year budget, would harm the ability of agencies like the Department of Natural Resources, the Pollution Control Agency, and the Board of Water and Soil Resources to tackle environmental threats to Minnesota’s health and livelihoods. - Minnesota Environmental Partnership

U.S.-China trade deal hype

New talks are scheduled for next week. Even some on the left - the center-left, anyway - seem to be already thinking this will be a big huge massive win for Traitor Trump.

I for one am choosing to be maybe just a little more skeptical, if you know what I’m saying. I mean, a big win like peace and love on the Korean peninsula? The new NAFTA? An end to "illegal" immigration?

I’ll believe it when I see it, and I doubt that’s very likely. I get that somehow Trump fluked into mostly having solid, experienced negotiators handle this. But how is anything really going to be “enforced?” Are lost markets somehow going to be magically brought back better than ever? Good luck.

MN lege: On Trust Fund $, Republicans don't ever learn

That title is actually misleading, because Republicans did in fact “learn,” last year, that they could get away with this.

Recall last year that the Republican-controlled Legislature approved in its last hours and without public input a bill allowing the state to use about $8 million annually in lottery money from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund to pay interest on appropriations bonds to fund wastewater treatment plants and other infrastructure projects…

Much-less-expensive general obligation bonds typically fund projects such as these…

…this session (Sen. Torrey Westrom (R-Elbow Lake)) included about $10 million of the $61 million the Senate trust fund bill spends to pay for wastewater treatment plants. Moreover, another Senate Republican bill eliminates 18 LCCMR-recommended projects and replaces them, in part, with $10 million in funding for state parks and trails operations and maintenance. - Dennis Anderson/Star Tribune

Part of this is the GOP positioning itself for now fairly imminent end-of-session showdowns. And part is legislative right-wingers just fucking up everything they touch, same as always. In any case, I don’t presume to know how hard-core Minnesota Senate Republicans plan to be, as far as potentially forcing a special session, with or without a shutdown. I’m sure not putting it beyond them.

Will Trump voters screwed by this one "get it?"

There will be a Trump rally in Minnesota, later today. The state’s corporate “news” media will not discuss his deteriorating mental health. They have the same base as Trump does, namely, for the most part those no longer in the first roseate bloom of youth (any more than I am). And I get why they’re going to spend today throwing Trump supporters many a bone, instead.

Though I don’t think they have to do that. Most late-middle-aged-to-elderly people who thoroughly peruse the morning paper, and faithfully view the evening news, are basically still doing so out of locked-in, lifelong habit, and that’s not going to significantly change if c. media starts doing more legitimate journalism, even at the risk of annoying Trump diehards. They may complain, but they won’t cancel their subscriptions or change their viewing habits.

But, the people who run corporate media aren’t paying any attention to me, and there’s really no particular reason that they should that I know of, so I might as well move on.

The Trump administration claimed that the new overtime salary threshold is a win for workers, and many news outlets echoed the administration’s spin, declaring in headlines across the country that the Trump rule is an “expansion,” or at least a “compromise” on overtime pay. In reality, it is a significant rollback that will cheat millions of Americans of fair pay for hard work.

That’s because the Trump overtime regulation replaces a 2016 Obama-era Labor Department rule that would have restored overtime protections for more than 12 million salaried workers earning up to $55,055 by 2023. The Trump rule slashes that salary level to $35,308 — and treats workers earning more than that as if they were highly paid executive who don’t need overtime pay. All told, Trump’s decision to slash the salary threshold means workers will miss out on $1.2 billion in wages each year they would have received under the 2016 rule. - Truthout

This is the sort of thing that should be on the front page, day in and day out, because it really does affect a lot of people’s lives for the worse. It won’t be. And that’s a big part of the reason why, going back to the title of this, the answer is for the most part in all likelihood “no.”

MN lege: Redistricting, so far

Back in 2017, Minnesota Republicans were seriously hot to trot for the 2020 elections to get here, because they figured they’d seal the legislature/governor trifecta then, and could install the sort of extreme right-wing gerrymander here that has plagued the nation since 2010. 2018 brought a reality check. (In fact, I’ve noticed that the “Minnesota turning red!” crowd in general has been rather mum, of late. I suppose that, considering among other things that as of the next state executive office elections in 2022 the GOP will not have won a single one of those seats in 16 years, one sees the reason for embarrassed silence.)

Now, Republicans are on board with efforts to block gerrymanders. Left.mn has a summary, here. From what I’ve seen, it’s the last discussed therein, HF1605/SF2575 that has the best chance of getting somewhere.

This is the bill we heard about at Drinking Liberally Minneapolis last Thursday and is my personal favorite of all the bills listed in this post. It sticks with the five retired judges model, four picked by the Majority and Minority leaders of the Senate and House, and those four judges then pick the fifth judge. But this bill doesn’t stop there. It also provides for the appointment of twelve citizen members, making the redistricting commission 17 members in size, with slightly less than 30% of those members being retired judges.

It’s mostly, but not entirely, Republicans who have been doing the gerrymandering, nationally. That’s wholly unsurprising, because the bottom line is that it is a desperately cowardly practice.

Farmers are being crushed, screwed over, and plenty of other things by Trump

You probably saw that last year Minnesota’s median farm income was the lowest it's been in the 23 years that the U. of Minn. has been tracking it. A couple more items:

Among those who’re learning about the “truthy-ness” of The Donald are farmers who voted for him, having bought his campaign promise to restore farm prosperity.

Once in office, though, he quickly sold them out, throwing a hissy-fit of a trade war with China that ended up slapping U.S. farmers by lowering the already low prices they get for their crops...

Actions speak louder than words, of course, so on March 11 Trump took actions to express his true love for farmers: He whacked $3.6 billion from the safety-net programs that offer a measure of relief to hard-hit producers when crop prices crash. Revealing his plutocratic core, his cuts specifically targeted programs that benefit small farmers — a deliberate manipulation meant to drive more families off the land and increase corporate monopolization of agriculture. - OurFuture.org

The reference is to the Trump budget proposal; cuts like that are highly unlikely to get through Congress. But the point is that that’s where Traitor Trump's head is at.

Some large equipment manufacturers, including John Deere and Caterpillar, announced almost immediately after the tariffs were implemented last summer that they would raise their prices to adjust for the higher price of steel and aluminum imports. It’s not just large manufacturers, though—small, locally based equipment manufacturers have also had to raise prices or look elsewhere for steel. In Montana, a horse-trailer manufacturer was forced to hike prices by about 20 percent last summer because of the tariffs. Bank of America Merrill Lynch downgraded John Deere’s stock in February, citing “a real risk to farm equipment demand” if the trade war continues.

Many farmers are precluded from buying new agricultural equipment because of a combination of higher prices and lower profits. But that puts them in a catch-22. Farmers replace their equipment only every five to seven years. Those who were going to replace it this year and now can’t afford to are forced to repair it instead. And because steel costs are up, so too are the costs of replacement parts. - The Atlantic

Norm Coleman's outfit desperately tries to keep Ilhan Omar-bashing alive

From a couple of days ago:

A political organization closely aligned with the Republican establishment is launching an advertising campaign this week to take on freshman Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota over her comments earlier this year that were widely condemned as anti-Semitic.

An official from American Action Network, a conservative advocacy nonprofit group, told CNN the organization will spend six figures on digital ads that criticize Omar...

AAN, which was founded by former Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, also of Minnesota, and the recently deceased GOP donor Fred Malek, has close ties with Republican House leadership. The group is affiliated with the Congressional Leadership Fund, a well-funded political action committee focusing on supporting GOP House candidates. - CNN

I can understand this from the perspective of, what else are Minnesota Republicans supposed to do? I saw somewhere that they’re trying to get Doug Wardlow to run against Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) in 2020, as Karin Housley is apparently not up for a rematch. That’s just one indication of how desperately thin - indeed, emaciated - the GOP bench is, in this state. House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt (R-Crown) seems uninterested in bigger game. Perhaps you see Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka (R-Nisswa) as just dripping with political charisma, but I wouldn’t state the case that way. Anyway:

So my simple point is this: Whether or not you agree with Omar’s remarks, whether or not you were personally offended, anyone who tells you that these nonstop, bipartisan political attacks on her are about fighting anti-Semitism is gaslighting you. - The Intercept

MN lege: Gun violence, so far

From last week:

Republican Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka said Wednesday that a hearing on gun legislation is possible this year if bills to restrict firearms pass through the Democratic-led House as standalone measures...

“If the House begins to move on their end, then we are willing to take a look at it on our side,” Gazelka said. “I’m not so sure it’s going to pass on our side. In fact I don’t think it’s going to pass on our side. But I think an open hearing on it is worthwhile.”

One bill awaiting a vote in the House would require background checks on all but a few types of gun sales and transfers. The other would give law enforcement greater latitude to seek a court-ordered revocation of guns if they or a person’s family believes there’s a risk of gun violence. It’s possible both could be put to up-or-down votes on their own and tucked into budget bills, which would put them in the end-of-session mix...

He stressed that such a Senate committee hearing would also involve bills favored by gun-rights supporters. That includes an expansion of self-defense laws and a measure to step up penalties for gun transfers to someone whom the seller knows to be ineligible to have a firearm. - MPR

A hearing! Why, that's awfully "big" of Sen. Gazelka, given that the House measures are only supported by 89 and 87% of Minnesotans, respectively, per recent polling. Meanwhile, perhaps you've seen what one of the Minnesota Party of Trump's parent organizations (in practical terms, anyway) is up to.

In the United States today, a man convicted of physically abusing his spouse, ex-spouse, live-in lover, or co-parent does not have the right to own a firearm. A man convicted of assaulting his casual dating partner — or stalking him or her, after they break up — however, can carry on owning as many AR-15s as his heart desires. (The same, of course, holds for abusers of all genders).

Congressional Democrats want to change that. And not without reason. Women in abusive relationships are five times more likely to be murdered by their partner if he (or, in rare cases, she) owns a firearm. About half of all female homicide victims are killed by intimate partners — and about half of intimate partner homicides are committed by casual dating partners. The fact that federal law bars abusive husbands — but not abusive boyfriends — from owning guns has no criminological justification. Thus, Nancy Pelosi’s caucus wants to use Congress’s pending reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act as an opportunity to close “the boyfriend loophole,” by adding language that would bar abusive dating partners and stalkers from purchasing firearms.

But the National Rifle Association is rallying to the defense of the little guy (who stalks his ex-girlfriends and stockpiles deadly weapons). - New York Magazine