An Hour to Kill

This week's Almanac program was particularly maddening, the focus throughout on how the DFL might win the budget stalement.  Scenario after scenario, rumor after rumor, it was a big CJ column on the small screen.  TPT has a well-earned reputation for leftward bias like all public media.  They won't admit it and I can understand that they might truly believe they're trying to be fair.  But another explanation occurred to me.

Consider two recent newspaper editorials, last week's Owatonna People's Press (6/18) and today's St. Paul Pioneer Press (6/26).  These are short, sweet, and devastating critiques of Governor Dayton's insistence on a shutdown.  They are 323 and 150 words respectively, easily read aloud in 2 minutes total.  There's nothing more to add, as the GOP leaders reiterated on the show.

But Almanac is an hour show.  They could hardly not talk about the impasse.  Even if limited to one segment, that's many more minutes they need to fill.  And the only way to get that fill is to fantasize, which necessarily leads to digging up all those possible ways the Republicans could lose.  Even then it was tough without relaxing a bit on the fact checking, so the hosts more or less let the speculators speculate.  After all, they could be right, that the Republican Party of Minnesota will commit suicide by raising taxes with the usual nothing in return.

This may be one reason why the Republicans always seem to have message trouble.  We don't challenge and refute all the facets of Global Warming one by one.  We simply dismiss the whole idea for lack of evidence, correctly so, and alas, concisely so.  Thus, Al Gore spends nearly an hour on Oprah appearing to have researched all these calamities in such detail.  It then made no difference when a real scientist was granted 90 seconds of equal time off stage.  It was enough time to destroy Gore's fundamental argument, but somehow our culture now has trouble with the simple and obvious.

In the 80's, we as a nation understood when Milton Friedman said that they're ain't no such thing as a free lunch.  A sentence would do then.  Now, we're all a bunch of rent seekers after listening to pages of propaganda.  Perpetual motion can't be far off, and think of all the green jobs that will create.  Let's talk about it!

 

Comments

[Hiram]

I was startled when I read that editorial in the Pioneer Press. It's one thing for the Owatonna editor to be so misinformed, but for the Pioneer Press to fail to grasp the basic way budgets work is something quite different. Thissen explained the problem well enough on Almanac. Signing the education budget bill as is would squeeze health and human services. I won't go too deeply into the politics here. It's enough to say that the legislative Republicans never thought the education bill would be signed as is, and would be in a awfully difficult position if it were.

It's said that there is a wall of separation between the editorial and news side of newspapers to prevent one from unduly influencing the other. In this case, the PiPress would have been better served if the wall had been a little lower and the editors had the chance to run that editorial by their political reporters.

[Speed Gibson]

The Republicans are not bound by the Democratic Party way of doing budgets. They are bound by the voters who sent them there - to NOT do business as usual.

[Hiram]

Both are bound by the rules of arithmetic whether the voters accept them or not.

[The Big Stink]

Yes, Hiram, but the debate is actually which number 2+2 equals.

[Hiram]

Arithmetic is policy neutral. Just because 4 is larger than 2 doesn't make it better. There is no inherent enoughness in the number 6 or even in the concept of 6%.