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Ok I think there is concensus that Sotomayor is technically qualified for the Surpreme Court, but she\’s certainly not the most qualified person for the position.  And it\’s probably not a gross oversimplification to say that she\’s an affirmative action hire, that\’s designed more to fill a political quota than be a promotion of one of our most brilliant legal minds.  But with lots of different quotas that could have been filled instead, so have asked why this one?? And yet others have theorized that this is a sign that Obama is taking immigration reform off the table and is using this pick to appease Hispanics who might otherwise be disgruntled by that.

Since Sotomayor is likely to be confirmed regardless of what the GOP does, that would be good news, as at least something good comes of her appointment.  Unfortunately reality does not bear it out.  Even before the appointment the Obama administration and his Democrat cronies have indicated they intend on going full-speed ahead on immigration reform.

Despite Obama\’s promise of an open and transparent government Obama is going to be holding a closed door summit to discuss plans for upcoming immigration reform legislation.

On June 8, President Barack Obama will meet with Congressional leaders to discuss immigration reform legislation.  (Politico, May 20, 2009).  In the past, President Obama has supported \”comprehensive immigration reform,\” which has included amnesty for the more than 12 million illegal aliens who are living in the United States.  (Luuliyo Online, May 20, 2009).

And Democrats are already laying down a smokescreen to convince the public that they did what they promised they\’d do.

Schumer opened the hearing by claiming that the American people would only accept an amnesty \”if they can be convinced that their government is serious about drastically reducing the number of illegal immigrants entering the United States.\”  The subcommittee chairman stated that true immigration reformers opposed to amnesty for illegal aliens \”have continually promised that they\’ll engage in conversation about immigration reform once Congress showed it was serious about securing the border.\” Schumer then attempted to argue that this \”showing has clearly been made,\” and claimed that \”almost the whole border fence has been built.\” (Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship Hearing, May 20, 2009).

Fortunately Senator Sessions and former Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth was there to refute that pack of lies, not that Schumer could be bothered to be there to hear it.  But the fact remains is that Democrats are already laying the groundwork for a full-court press on immigration reform.  They are raising and knocking down strawman left and right.  They are organizing to for the effort and all signs point towards another showdown.

If Sotomayor was truly a pick to appease Hispanics, the Obama adminstration apparently doesn\’t believe she\’ll be enough to appease anyone.  And that speaks ill of her competence just as much as anything else.  But at least she might have paid her taxes.

[Crossposted at True North]

Since the Minnesota DFL is incapable of acting like adults and spending within their means like real Minnesotans, Pawlenty has been forced into having to use unallotment to balance our state budget. Because it is a relatively rare process not generally used in this fashion, few people know how it works. Citizens may have questions and this FAQ is designed to help. Of course none of this would be necessary if Democrats hadn\’t put the state in this position. Had they been able to make government live within its means, unallotment would be unnecessary.

What is unallotment?
Unallotment is a tool given to governors that allows them to reduce spending in the current budget in order to prevent a deficit. One technical but important distinction is that a governor can only unallot from funds that have a deficit, which in this case is the state’s General Fund, where most spending takes place. Other funds, such as the
Health Care Access Fund or the Game & Fish Fund, would not be subject to unallotment unless they also have an expected deficit.

(From here on in this article, everything refers to the General Fund unless otherwise noted.)

When can a governor use unallotment?
The governor can use unallotment when the state’s revenues cannot keep up with the spending approved by the Legislature. For example, last December revenues were $426 million short, so Governor Pawlenty used unallotment to reduce spending and keep the budget balanced.

As a technicality, the Commissioner of Finance has to determine that spending will outpace revenues before any unallotment can take place. With the economy in a recession and Democrats having passed a budget that outspends itself by $2.7 billion, this determination will not be
difficult.

When will unallotment happen?
Governor Pawlenty indicated that he will announce what spending he plans to unallot sometime in June. However, that does not mean spending will immediately go away. No unallotment can take place prior to July 1, 2009. The governor can also choose to delay unallotments until 2010. For example, he can choose to keep spending on a certain program in 2009, but eliminate it in 2010.

Can unallotments be undone?
The Legislature will reconvene on February 4, 2010. Any unallotment scheduled and carried out prior to then can be restored if the Legislature chooses to fund it. For example, Democrats in the Legislature could have restored LGA unallotments from 2008, but chose not to. The Legislature can also prevent future scheduled unallotments
by passing a new budget that is balanced. Again, it is important to remember that an unallotment does not necessarily take place when it is announced. An unallotment may be announced in June 2009, but not actually take place until June 2010. In that case, if the Legislature can work out a balanced budget next session it may serve to prevent a June 2010 scheduled unallotment.

Why is unallotment necessary now?
The Democrat-controlled Legislature failed in its responsibility to reach a balanced budget agreement. Their misguided desire to raise taxes during the worst recession in the last 60 years left a $2.7 billion hole in the state’s budget. Because they could not do their job, Governor Pawelenty will have to step in and use unallotment to
bring spending back to reasonable levels.

Will there be public input?
Yes. Minnesotans can email the governor with their input at budgetideas@state.mn.us. The governor also asked all legislators for their suggestions. Balancing the budget through unallotment is not anyone’s preferred situation, but it is reality because of Democrats’ failure to reach a balanced budget agreement. The governor committed to keeping the media informed throughout the process so they can report information to the public.

The Commissioner of Finance will also consult with the Legislative Advisory Commission (LAC) in public and notify it of what spending the governor intends to reduce. The LAC does not have to approve or deny any unallotments, its role is purely informative.

The LAC consists of Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller (DFL-Minneapolis), House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher (DFL-Minneapolis), Sen. Dick Cohen (DFL-St. Paul), Rep. Loren Solberg (DFL-Grand Rapids) and the chairs of the finance committees that oversee the budget areas being reduced. Minority party members are also
included.

Because the LAC is mostly made up of Democrats, and because they have not yet come to terms with their failure, Minnesotans can expect much
grandstanding and Pawlenty-bashing from Democrats the public meeting of the LAC. During that time, it is important to keep in mind that the only reason unallotment is necessary is because those same Democrats could not pass a budget that made government live within its means.

What can or cannot be unalloted?
No spending is exempt from a potential unallotment, but Governor Pawlenty indicated that he intends to stay true to his budget priorities of K-12 education, public safety and veterans. According to nonpartisan House Research, it does not appear that the governor can unallot spending on the legislative or judicial branches of government because doing so would violate the separation of powers clause. However, those branches can voluntarily offer to reduce their own budgets and have done
so in the past, most recently last December.

Can the governor unallot the Health Care Access Fund?
Not likely. The Health Care Access Fund is funded with dedicated revenues from the sick tax, and the fund is actually running a surplus. Because this is separate from the General Fund and because there is no expected deficit, the governor cannot use it to unallot and balance a General Fund deficit.

[Crossposted at True North]

[Most of the information provided here was courtesy of the folk at the House GOP Caucus]

…especially when it\’s the media itself that has the double standard.

During the Bush Administration, we learned that his department occasionally contracted with public relations firms and ad agencies to put together pre-produced news reports about various things the government has been up to.  It\’s commonly done by both corporations and governments alike.  No effort at deception takes place on the part of the government agency, although the news agencies that take advantage of the opportunity to be lazy and rebroadcast the reports, seldomly disclose their origins.

Still at the time the liberal left literally freaked out at the very idea.  The mainstream media condemned it.  Liberal activists slobbered all over themselves in frothy madness.  Democrat politicians politicized it.  Yet all are now strangely silent when in the Age of Obama, the Obama Administration has created it\’s own news network, and at times shuts out other news networks in favor of it\’s own.

Bush openly distributes pre-produced news stories which news networks are welcome to broadcast or not according to their own preferences.  But Obama creates it\’s own news network to exclusively broadcast it\’s message and nobody has a probably with government owned press??

Amazing how much standards have changed in just a few years.  Or maybe that double standard was present the whole time?

Not only did we get the Supreme Court to finally give an opinion on what the Second Amendment means, but it appears that Heller has had a number of other effects on Washington DC via SayUncle.

The D.C. police department\’s aggressive gun recovery efforts and the office of the attorney general\’s coordinated emphasis on prosecuting gun-related crimes are showing strong results: In the past year, robberies with guns have decreased 12 percent; assaults with guns have decreased 14 percent; and overall violent crime has decreased by 5 percent in the District.

While it\’s very difficult conducting any sort of social experiment in a vacuum, this is sort of a special case.  A city that used to have an extremely harsh anti-gun culture, is now open to the idea of private gun ownership by legal adults.  In a period of bad economic times, one would expect the crime level to go up.

So in a city where we would fully expect crime to either stay the same or else climb, crime is dropping significantly.  It\’s almost as if when you give law-abiding citizens a way to defend effectively themselves against the scum of society, that same scum regards those citizens as less appealing targets.

In fact, one could conclude that gun control simply doesn\’t work.  Amazing what one can learn when you decided to grant citizens their Constitutional rights!

…but not for the reasons you think.

Instead California scares me because they voted down the tax increase.

Of the day\’s six fiscal propositions — the rainy day fund, education funding, lottery modernization, children\’s services funding and temporary reallocation of mental health funding — all went down — and hard. The results were roughly 60-40 against.

The only proposition to sail through was one preventing pay increases to top elected state officials during years of budget deficits. That one was being approved about 76-23. Take that! (That doesn\’t affect Arnold, of course, because he\’s never taken a state salary.)

The propositions are all explained over here. The county-by-county results on each proposition are available over here. And the results of local races and propositions are over here.

Yeah, you read that right, it scares me that California voted it down….bear with me on that, I\’ll explain.

It seems it\’s pretty much universal that people will gripe about paying taxes, nobody likes April 15th.  People complain, but then they always seem to vote for tax increases and vote in the same Democrats that have raised their taxes time and time again in the past.  In my own city, voters have repeatedly passed school referendums, despite repeated past history of the school district misusing funds and/or suddenly \”finding\” additional money after we\’ve already passed a new bonding bill.  It frustrates me to no end.  Often I find myself asking just what the hell it\’s going to take before people finally get it.  Seriously, how much is enough???

And that brings me to my point.  California voted down another tax increase.  They finally had enough.  They got to their breaking point.  The present state of California is the answer to my earlier question.  That scares the hell out of me.  Before now I could just write off California as an outlier, an exception, a state of crazy dumbasses who just never learn.  Instead, I fear they are the future.

There is a quote I\’ve heard before, \”As California goes, so goes the nation\”, and that\’s largely been true.  Many trends have started in California, everything from fashion to social engineering policies.  It seems whatever crazy stuff California does, the rest of the nation eventually follows.

Now I have to wonder, is Minnesota going to have to get THAT bad before people finally get that more taxes is not the answer?  Do we really have to dig THAT big of a hole that people finally realize spending is the problem??  Do we really all have to become wage slaves before people finally realize that tossing more money at a problem isn\’t always the answer??

Until now I could contend myself by thinking the end was just around the corner.  Until now I could just write of California as a land of people who think unicorns fart more tax dollars.  Until now, \”How much is enough?\” was just a rhetorical question.  That all ended on Tuesday.  And suddenly it\’s a rather depressing thought.

[Crossposted at True North, comments welcome]

It\’s bad enough that Obama bows to the King of Saudi Arabia, but really, now he\’s bowing to children??

Granted the kid very well may be his intellectual superior, but you\’re the President man.

Back from the dead is the latest attempt at amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. Again, Senator Dianne Feinsten (D-CA) has authored a bill (S 1038 and HR 2414), that grants amnesty to “agricultural workers”.

Basically here’s what it boils down to:

• Grants “emergency worker status” (essentially equivalent to a green card) to 1.35 million illegal aliens for five years
• Also grants amnesty to their families (bringing the total to five million or so)
• Gives “work authorization” to illegal aliens
• Gives “travel authorization” to illegal aliens and their families
• Gives illegal aliens legal protection from prosecution for pretty much any crime they probably had to commit to get into the country and stay here as long as they have, including identity theft

In order to qualify an illegal alien must show he or she was employed for at least 863 hours or earned at least $7500 in the 48 months before December 31st, 2008. The illegal alien pays a fee of $400.00 and then they receive a \”blue card\” demonstrating his/her legal status.  The blue cardholder would be eligible for a green card, and permanent legal resident status in three years.

Feinstein gave an lengthy attempt to tug heartstrings on the Senate floor last Thursday morning in support of AgJOBS.  She insisted that because of \”a farm emergency in this country\” brought about by \”the absence of farm labor\”, that Congress absolutely had to pass her amnesty bill.  What she fails to note is that there is no absence of farm labor, in fact farm workers are experiencing unemployment four times the national average but why let the facts get in the way of a good emotional tirade.

It\’s absolutely amazing that in this time of economic recession, Congress is still finding time to try to bring in more illegal aliens to compete with American workers for already scarce jobs.  Guess we know where the priorities of the Democrat leadership is.

Call your Congress Critter and let them know what you think of this monstrosity.