Minnesota GOP Fantasy Budget: Privatization Camel’s Nose Under the State Tent

It isn’t just that the state budget proposed by the Minnesota Republicans (and written by Accenture, IBM and Deloitte among others) is unethical as all get out. It’s that it’s a backdoor method of shoving privatization down our throats so various Republican donors and friends can profit even as state services suffer.

This sad story has played itself out in many other states. Now its perpetrators have taken their road show to Minnesota.

With that said, I’d like to introduce Patty the Privatization Camel. She’s a good friend of My Little Budget Pony, and she’s getting ready to push her little camel nose under the Minnesota tent that’s sitting off in the middle distance. Just like her friend, she looks sweet and harmless, but looks can be deceiving.

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)

Stop them d–n pictures

(From Bradblog)

“Stop them d–n pictures. I don’t care what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see the pictures.” —Boss Tweed

The cartoon perfectly expresses the reality that it’s unlikely that the people will ever believe that David Prosser won his judicial seat fairly. The examination of Waukesha–and, one hopes, all of Wisconsin’s votes– continues. Wisconsin will be lucky if the investigation does uncover election fraud, since otherwise the stage is set for decades of bitter conflict.

Write your own headlines

My friend and co-blogger, Phoenix Woman, thinks that the White House is putting out the meme that Nancy Pelosi is irrelevant. I think it’s one more shiny object thrown out by the Beltway media to keep people’s minds off of what matters. The press did something similar for Bill Clinton in 1995, as we may recall, asking him directly whether he was irrelevant.

What does matter? Well, this story for starters:

Hungerfast, an effort launched March 28 … now has over 35,000 Americans involved in fasting, including 28 Members of Congress. Fasters are demanding that the budget deficit not be resolved by slashing programs targeting the vulnerable at a time of economic distress…

The women Members of Congress fasting this week are Representatives Karen Bass (D-CA), Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Susan Davis (D-CA), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Donna Edwards (D-MD), Marcia Fudge (D-OH), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Laura Richardson (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Terri Sewell (D-AL), and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA).

Now, the guy who started this effort is not exactly a friend of mine. He leads a theocratic, Third way movement. But fasting to protest the budget cuts is a substantive response to wrongdoing by the powerful. It reminds those who fast that they stand in solidarity with the powerless. If the devil himself were leading such an effort, I’d say that it was the right thing to do.

This is the story we should fill our news with: the story of a few good Democrats. This is the story we should be telling our own congressmen, if they aren’t one of those fasting already, that they should join it. As somebody famous once said, “Let the dead bury the dead.” The Beltway journalists who obsess over who’s-up-who’s-down stories are surely among the long-deceased. The people who care about the poor have better things to do than hang around the morgue.

Added. This was my comment to Congress:

I was pleased to see that 28 members of Congress have joined a fast to protest the cuts in the budget deal that will burden the poor while doing nothing substantive to reduce the deficit. If nothing else, fasting reminds those in positions of responsibility that they stand as the only protection that the powerless have.

When will Representative […] join the fast?