Myron, May I?

Oh, snap:

Most Minnesota businesses dodged a sweeping expansion of the sales tax, but not logistics firms.

The final version of the tax bill, approved moments before the end of the legislative session last week, included an expansion of the sales tax on a handful of unlucky industries. One of them is warehousing and storage. Firms that repair electronic equipment and industrial machinery and those that sell telecommunications equipment also will be subject to the tax.

Logistics companies are baffled, and talking about moving their operations across the St. Croix River.

“Why wouldn’t I go to Hudson, and just ship across the border?” said Richard Murphy, CEO of Murphy Warehouse in Minneapolis. “The surrounding states are going to get business, and you’re going to see people pull back into Chicago, Des Moines and Kansas City.”

The good news for Murphy is that with the new bridge underway in Stillwater, it will be even easier to move across the border.

For their part, the brain trust in St. Paul are going all Alfred E. Neuman about it:

If it goes into effect, it will make Minnesota the only state to apply sales tax to warehousing, according to the Minnesota Trucking Association.

Companies like Murphy Warehouse charge handling fees, but also offer what they call “value-added” services, such as putting together assembly kits for clients or being able to ship products just in time for manufacturers. For now, it’s not clear how the sales tax will be applied. Murphy has 200 employees at 12 warehouses in the Twin Cities and one in Kansas City.

Sen. Ann Rest, DFL-New Hope, said hashing out those details, and figuring out what impact the tax might have on Minnesota’s competitiveness, are the reasons the tax won’t go into effect for nearly a year.

“That’s why we delayed implementation. If it’s serious enough, then we can reconsider it,” she said. “If I was one of them, I’d be feeding [Revenue] Commissioner [Myron] Frans all kinds of information.”

Uh, Sen. Rest? Why would you pass a law if you don't have at least some idea of the potental implications? I'm sure that Murphy can't wait to spend time playing Mother May I with Myron Frans. It's an excellent use of Murphy's time. Never mind talking to the hand -- talk to the Frans!

Take It to the Bridge

The long-awaited Stillwater bridge is officially underway and the politicians were there in force with their shovels:

Joining ceremonies near the old bridge were Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin U.S. Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson, and Wisconsin U.S. Reps. Sean Duffy and Ron Kind. Minnesota was represented by U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann and Minnesota Department of Transportation Commissioner Charlie Zelle.

It's long since past time for the bridge to be built, of course -- the ancient Stillwater Lift Bridge has been a problem for many, many years and this crossing will make it a whole lot easier for travelers to go from Minnesota to Wisconsin. It will also make life in Stillwater a lot easier.

One politician who was conspicuous by her absence was Cong. Betty McCollum, who ostensibly represents the Stillwater area and fought the bridge project with significant rancor. I'll give McCollum this much -- it would have been pretty ridiculous for a foe of the project to celebrate the groundbreaking.

Jim Graves Hardest Hit

You won't have Michele Bachmann to kick around any more:

With an early morning video message to supporters, embattled Republican U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann announced she would not run for re-election next year.

"My dear friends, after a great deal of thought and deliberation, I have decided next year that I will not seek a fifth congressional term to represent the wonderful people of the Sixth District of Minnesota," Bachmann said in the Wednesday morning video. "I've never considered holding public office to be an occupation."

This a good career move, actually. She really didn't have much of a future in Washington, except as a talking head. And since she's leaving, all the touted "investigations" will likely go away without much further comment, because what's the point now, really?  My guess is that some network will hire her as a commentator and she'll still be on television, maybe even more than she is now. Personally, I hope she gets hired by MSNBC.

The guy this hurts most of all is Bachmann's scheduled opponent, Jim Graves, who will now face an unnamed Republican in a district that is strongly Republican and chock-full of potential candidates. The out-of-state money is going to dry up, because no one is going to bother writing a check to help out a guy who's positioned himself as a moderate Democrat. It wouldn't be especially surprising if Graves decides that it's a better move to drop out himself and go back to running his hotel chain instead. Who needs the aggravation?

Loose Cannon

Just what we don't need -- more freelance diplomacy. This time, it's John McCain, going maverick:

Leaders of Syria's opposition forces got a chance to make their case for increased U.S. support directly with Sen. John McCain when he slipped into that country for a surprise visit.
McCain, R-Ariz., favors providing arms to rebel forces in Syria. 

A State Department official said the department was aware of McCain crossing into Syrian territory Monday, but referred further questions to McCain's office. McCain spokeswoman Rachel Dean confirmed the Monday trip, but declined further comment.

Last time I checked, Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. As such, he and his administration have the right and the responsibility to set and direct U.S. foreign policy. I further understand that McCain lost the election to Obama some five years ago now.

Congress has a role to play in foreign policy to the extent that it controls the public purse. Certainly individual congresscritters can go on fact-finding missions and meet with representatives of foreign countries on a wide variety of issues. This is different. Syria is in the middle of a vicious civil war and it's unclear at best that there are any "good guys" involved in the conflict. Maybe John McCain can figure out who the good guys are, but I tend to doubt he understands matters any better than the folks at State do. At a minimum, he might consider sharing his wisdom with the Obama administration instead of going it alone. My suggestion would be that he go home and butt out.

Memorial Day

The American Cemetery, Verdun

This is a story worth thinking about on Memorial Day:

Desmond Doss, for instance, was a conscientious objector who entered the army in 1942 and became a medic. Because of his religious convictions and refusal to carry a weapon, the men in his unit intimidated and threatened him, trying to get him to transfer out. He refused and they grudgingly accepted him. Late in 1945 he was with them in Okinawa when they got cut to pieces assaulting a Japanese stronghold.

Everyone but Mr. Doss retreated from the rocky plateau where dozens of wounded remained. Under fire, he treated them and then began moving them one by one to a steep escarpment where he roped them down to safety. Each time he succeeded, he prayed, “Dear God, please let me get just one more man.” By the end of the day, he had single-handedly saved 75 GIs. 

Why did they do it? Some talked of entering a zone of slow-motion invulnerability, where they were spectators at their own heroism. But for most, the answer was simpler and more straightforward: They couldn’t let their buddies down.

We need to be mindful on this day about the many, many people who wouldn't let their buddies down.

Actually, this might not work

Michael Ramirez, as always dialed in:

What am I signing, Radar?

Although I still contend that this vision is more accurate, and also applies well to Mark Dayton:

The Boy Scouts

After wrestling with the issue in a very public manner for a few months, the Boy Scouts of America announced that they will no longer ban gay scouts from the organization. A few thoughts:

• My son is a Life Scout and is working toward his Eagle badge. He's been involved in scouting since he was in first grade and it's been an important part of his life. He and I have been able to have a lot of fun together over the years because he's been a Scout.
• I haven't ever known if any of the scouts in my son's troop are gay. It's quite possible that one or more of them were. It wouldn't have mattered, then or now.
• The ban on gay adult leaders isn't going anywhere. My guess is that there are openly gay adult leaders in the organization now and they will continue to be part of Scouting. Their presence will simply be below the surface.
• As you might recall, Scouting went through a sexual abuse scandal around the same time that the Catholic Church did, with much of the abuse taking place in the 1970s and 1980s. The bans came as a response to those abuses. It's not worth our time to rehearse the arguments about the policy here; I merely offer it up as an explanation.
• Beyond the ban, Scouting also has implemented other procedures for adult leaders which are pretty effective, especially "two-deep" leadership, which means that at no time can any individual scout be alone with an adult leader. I am a merit badge counselor and when I meet with scouts to discuss their progress on their merit badges, I always have another parent scout leader present. This approach makes the possibility of abuse pretty remote.
• Structurally, Scouting is a pretty loose organization. BSA can offer up whatever dictates it wants, but all troops have a chartered organization that sponsors and hosts the troop. Most of these organizations are local churches and many view homosexuality with a gimlet eye. My son's troop is sponsored by a local church and I don't know if they'll be interested in continuing to sponsor the troop because of this decision. We'll find out, I suppose. I do hope that gay-friendly churches and other civic organizations will step into the breach if individual troops start losing their sponsors. Put it this way -- they'd better.
• As a parent, what makes Scouting great is that it has given my son chances to do things he wouldn't ordinarily have done. Our family isn't into camping at all. I've often said my idea of "roughing it" is going to a motel that doesn't offer continental breakfast. Because my son has stayed with it, he's had the chance to go camping dozens of times and he's gained a love of nature and the outdoors that he wouldn't have it had been up to my wife and me. More importantly, he's gained significant benefit from the wisdom of older scouts and the wide variety of adult leaders he's met as a result of his participation. And as an adult leader, I've been able to teach kids about citizenship and their role in the community and nation. Those experiences are hugely important to those who are involved in Scouting and to the nation as well.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Chicagoans

Brian Urlacher announced his retirement yesterday. Urlacher served with great distinction for 13 seasons as the middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears, following in the footsteps of a string of all-time greats: Bill George, Dick Butkus and Mike Singletary, all of whom have busts in Canton, Ohio. I would fully expect that Urlacher will as well.

As most readers of this feature know, my team is the Green Bay Packers. The Bears are the eternal, ancient rival and so Bears middle linebackers have played a substantial role in the course of this rivalry. I only really saw Dick Butkus play at the tail end of his career, which was cut short because of the many injuries he suffered, so I never really got a sense of his greatness except through highlight packages from NFL Films. I saw plenty of Mike Singletary and Urlacher and while they were very different players, they were both great. And the common trait between the two is uncommon football intelligence. They both could understand what was happening on the field immediately and find a way to defeat the play that was coming at them. Singletary, who was undersized for the position, did it with sheer force of will, while Urlacher, who was just about the prototype middle linebacker, did it with astonishing athleticism.

Urlacher made a play in the 2010 NFC Championship Game that almost changed the course of NFL history. The Packers were going in for a touchdown that might put the game out of reach, when suddenly Urlacher struck:

Aaron Rodgers was able to bring Urlacher down, barely, and the offensively challenged Bears weren't able to overcome the Packers that day, but you see Urlacher's intelligence and talent on display in the video. A guy who is 6'4" and played at around 260 pounds shouldn't be able to move that well, especially in the latter stages of his career, but Urlacher could do it and he used his abilities to make big plays on a regular basis. He's leaving maybe a little sooner than he'd liked, but secure in the knowledge that he is one of the best middle linebackers to ever play the game.

Meanwhile, Back in the Magical Land of Obamacare

It's all going so well:

The Obama administration said Monday that it was cutting payments to doctors and hospitals after finding that cost overruns are threatening to use up the money available in a health insurance program for people with cancer, heart disease and other serious illnesses.
      

The administration had predicted that up to 400,000 people would enroll in the program, created by the 2010 health care law. In fact, about 135,000 have enrolled, but the cost of their claims has far exceeded White House estimates, exhausting most of the $5 billion provided by Congress.

      

Under a new policy issued by Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, “health care facilities and providers will get paid less” for providing the same services to patients in the federal program, known as the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan.

      

In most cases, payments to health care providers will be capped at Medicare rates, which are substantially less than the commercial insurance rates they have been receiving. The new policy generally prohibits doctors and hospitals from increasing charges to consumers to make up the difference.

Oops -- you mean people aren't flocking to the program? Man, hard to imagine why. But fear not, since it's only a temporary problem:

When the federal program for people with pre-existing conditions ends on Jan. 1, 2014, many of them are expected to go into private health plans offered through new insurance markets being established in every state. Federal and state officials worry that an influx of people with serious illnesses could destabilize these markets, leading to higher premiums for other subscribers.
      

For this reason, federal and state officials say, they will try to recruit large numbers of healthy young people to buy insurance. Their premiums would help pay for the care of less healthy people.

Recruiting, they're calling it. As if you can choose to do something different.

Just so you know, young people of America, this is the drill: you get to pay more for insurance, and pay back those student loans you racked up, right now, even if you're rocking the barista job at the Starbucks. You need to be thinking about those less healthy people you're supposed to be subsidizing. Hope and change, kids. Maybe the less healthy people will throw a few extra nickels in the tip jar to help you pay for the premium.

This Was/Is Chicago

I've had more than a few people ask me why I rail against Chicago politics so often. I lived in the Chicago area for five years, from 1987 through 1992, and I got a good look at what it's like there. Chicago is a great place to visit and it can be a fine place to live, so long as you understand, and are willing to accept, a few things. John Kass of the Chicago Tribune shares an example:

One Sunday, I must have been 12 or 13, I decided to ask what I thought was an intelligent question that was something like this:

We talk politics every Sunday, we fight about this and that, so why aren't you politically active outside?

Why don't you get involved in politics?

There was an immediate silence. The older cousins looked away. The aunts and uncles stared at me in horror, as if I'd just announced I was selling heroin after school.

Asking why is often a dangerous business. Kass explains:

This is America, I said.

"Are you in your good senses?" said my father. "We have lives here. We have businesses. If we get involved in politics, they will ruin us."

And no one, not the Roosevelt Democrats or the Reagan Republicans, disagreed. The socialists, the communists, the royalists, everyone nodded their heads.

This was Chicago. And for a business owner to get involved meant one thing: It would cost you money and somebody from government could destroy you.

The health inspectors would come, and the revenue department, the building inspectors, the fire inspectors, on and on. The city code books aren't thick because politicians like to write new laws and regulations. The codes are thick because when government swings them at a citizen, they hurt.

And who swings the codes and regulations at those who'd open their mouths? A government worker. That government worker owes his or her job to the political boss. And that boss has a boss.

The worker doesn't have to be told. The worker wants a promotion. If an irritant rises, it is erased. The hack gets a promotion. This is government.

So everybody kept their mouths shut, and Chicago was hailed by national political reporters as the city that works.

This is the milieu in which Barack Obama learned politics. He brought a team of operatives from Chicago and put them in key positions in his administration. He knew that he could find plenty of workers in the massive bureaucracy of Washington who would be willing, even eager, to get with the program -- Lois Lerner of the Internal Revenue Service is just one example. The reason Chicago "works" is that the system has been in place for so long that people like Kass's father understand that they can't become an irritant. Silencing your foes is a big part of what makes Chicago work.

You can impose a system like that in a concentrated area and get by with it. Imposing it on an entire nation is another matter, especially in a nation where dissent is patriotic, as I am assured whenever the Right is in power. So if you want to understand why the IRS would single out Tea Party groups for abuse, or why a reporter for Fox News would be labeled a "co-conspirator" for reporting something the government finds inconvenient, you need to think back to the lesson that John Kass learned a long time ago. You need to keep your mouth shut.

Jamdown in St. Paul

It's going to take a while to sort out everything that happened in St. Paul in this legislative session. The Star Tribune provides a brief synopsis here. We'll be picking at these bones for a while, I'm thinking.

Horror in Oklahoma

The story in Moore, Oklahoma, is likely to get far worse in the coming days. There's not much I can do or say about it other than to offer prayers and suggest that you make a donation to the Red Cross or another relief organization.

Nothing on this earth is promised to any of us and yesterday was a reminder of that.

How a competing narrative forms

Great moments in furniture

You might remember this moment. There was Clint Eastwood, iconic film star and hobbyist politician, appearing on the stage of the Republican National Convention, doing some performance art with an empty chair. It was less than a year ago and while the Republicans loved it, the moment made many people wonder if ol' Clint was, well, losing it, especially since his attempt at a one-sided conversation didn't exactly rise to the level of a Bob Newhart bit.

As I've thought about the past few weeks and the parade of scandals/outrages/nothingburgers that we've witnessed, I've gone back to this moment. It's striking that a president would be presented as so disengaged from things that happen around him. And when the New Yorker starts getting in on the action, you know that the meme is getting legs:

President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years.

“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”

The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.”

It's satire. Yeah, sure.

Surprisingly enough, some people don't believe it, and they tend to be people who have long memories. Here's Bob Schieffer of CBS, summing things up quite nicely:

On the news that the IRS targeted conservative groups for burdensome scrutiny during the 2012 election, Bob Schieffer says, "Surely no one could be dumb enough to think you could get away with that in an election year. But they were! So, welcome to dumb and dumber."

Meanwhile, Bob Woodward, who as I recall was something of a player in the events of 40 years ago, ended up sparring with David Gregory on Meet the Press and said some interesting things, too:

MR. WOODWARD: Well, I-- I think you have to kind of step back and say what’s the theory of governing here.
GREGORY: Mm-Hm.
MR. WOODWARD: And the theory is, it seems, oh, there are investigations of the IRS so we can’t interfere. There is this leak investigation of the AP, so we can’t get involved. Oh, there is an investigation of Benghazi, so we’re not responsible. The President and the executive branch need to govern on a daily basis and you can’t purchase immunity from governing.
GREGORY: But you can’t conflate all those things, Bob.
MR. WOODWARD: Yes, you can.

And this:

MR. WOODWARD: But some institutions have a no-surprise rule, which is you need to make sure the person at the top, who is the president in this case, he is constitutionally responsible for the whole executive branch, to be told about things that are going on that are bad. And you can’t kind of say, oh, that happened last year and they’re investigating. You need to stop the bad things right away.

Yep. And we're going to find out whether anyone made any effort to stop the bad things. And we're going to find out if crazy ol' Clint was just crazy, or if he had matters dialed in pretty well.

Happy birthday, Dad

My dad would have celebrated his 80th birthday today. I wrote a version of the following a few years back and I'm reposting it here today, with just a few edits here and there.



May, 1933 was a pretty grim time in our nation's history. The Great Depression was in full swing. On the 10th of the month, a monstrous tornado tore through the town of Beatty Swamps, Tennessee, killing 35 people. The World's Fair was about to begin in Chicago, promising a "Century of Progress." It was in this milieu, on May 19, 1933, my father was born in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Dad was the 4th child of Joe and Julia Heuring. He was to grow up in Kimberly, Wisconsin, a small town on the banks of the Fox River just to the east of Appleton. The fame of Kimberly rests with the paper industry and the village's name lives on in the name of Kimberly-Clark, which is most famous for Kleenex. Dad's father was a millwright and worked for the Institute of Paper Chemistry, which served as the training ground for many of the people who made the Fox River Valley the paper capital of the world. Dad had a fairly normal childhood in Kimberly and graduated from Kimberly High in 1952. After a few years of harmless young adult shenanigans, Dad went into the service and served in Europe during the late 1950s. He then came back and got his degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1963. In between all that, he managed to meet and marry my Mom in January, 1963; I arrived at the end of 1963.

 

Unfortunately, Dad isn't here to celebrate this milestone birthday, as he died in 1990. Dad's generation came of age at an interesting time in our nation's history - he came of age a few years before rock and roll arrived in earnest and his generation wasn't considered part of the "greatest generation." Like most people his age, Dad simply went about his business and tried to provide a good life for his family. For the most part, he was successful. It wasn't always easy, especially given the challenges that life put before him as the father of 7 children and the husband of a wife who struggled with mental illness, but he always approached his life with generosity and a sense of humor.

You don't get to choose the circumstances of your birth and while Dad came around at a tough time, he was a tough person in part because of it. Happy birthday, Dad.

Road Rage

Another reason to look askance at those who would bring Chicago politics to the rest of us:

Less than half the money exacted from Illinois taxpayers to pay for roads is actually used to pay for roads. The Illinois Auditor General has found that, of the $5.7 billion in the state’s road fund over the past two years, $2.7 billion went to cover salaries at the Illinois Department of Transportation, bond debt payment, and other “nondirect costs.”

Three observations:

• Spending 47 cents on the dollar for things other than the services provided is not a sustainable way to operate over the long term.
• The image that will always stay with me about the highway system in Illinois is this: back in the early '80s, we were on a family trip to a wedding in Ohio. We were stuck in an enormous traffic jam on the Tri-State and things where essentially stopped. As we went through a construction zone at about 2 MPH, there was a guy in a safety vest standing on the road holding a sign that said "SLOW." As we crawled past him, my brother rolled down his window and yelled "I can't believe you're getting paid for that." The guy in the vest flashed my brother a big grin. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the guy was a ward committeeman.
• We were in western Illinois (on I-74 from the Quad Cities to Galesburg) about two months back and the roads there were pretty good. For that price, they'd better be.

Damn

We have higher gas prices in the Twin Cities than just about anyplace else in the country right now:

Brutal

Even in 2008, it didn't get much above $4.00 here. It's $4.39 in my neighborhood. Yeah, we're a little cranky about it. What are you paying where you live?

Scandals

It's tough to suss out all of the scandalous behavior that we're hearing about, but of the big three issues at play, the one that really matters the most is the behavior of the IRS. Peggy Noonan, apparently fully recovered from her 2008 swooning over the dreamboat candidate, zeros in:

All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit.

It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved. Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.

You just can't have this sort of thing going on. I'm not a Tea Party person, but I'm largely in agreement with the concerns that the various Tea Party organizations raised, especially when they were successful in changing the national conversation in 2010. I never did understand why it seemed that the Tea Partiers seemed to go silent after the 2010 election. It makes a lot more sense now. Noonan details some of the tactics:

In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the second amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution.

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare." Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're afraid of saying they were audited.

All of this will come out over the summer. The demands to see names and even Facebook postings represent intimidation on a grand scale. As the details become public, it won't be possible to pretend that this was just the unfortunate result of some rogue operation in Cincinnati.

Cartoon of the Year

The great Michael Ramirez, getting to the nub of the matter:

Smokescreen

So the supersecret, amazingly clever plan that Mark Dayton has to pay for the Vaseline Dome/Glass Menagerie is to add a little more pain to the smokers:

Gov. Mark Dayton wants to rely on new revenues from cigarette and corporate income taxes to help pay the state's share of a new Vikings stadium.

Myron Frans, commissioner of revenue, explained Dayton's plan to the Tax Conference Committee Thursday.

It would include two funding sources: approximately $24.5 million in one-time revenues from tax on the current cigarette inventory once the tax is increased. Dayton is proposing an increase from the current tax of $1.23 per pack to $2.52 per pack.

As Bob Casey always reminded us, there's no smoking in the Metrodome, but smokers better get a puffin' to pay for the new building.

So, do you honestly believe that the state is only going to get "one-time revenues" for coffin nails? Not a chance. Why?

The second source would be to end what Frans called a "tax avoidance" strategy that corporations with sales in Minnesota and elsewhere take advantage of under current law. Currently, he said, some businesses are able to avoid Minnesota corporate income taxes by attributing Minnesota sales to affiliates in other states.

The change, known as Minnesota Unitary Sales, would require reporting all those revenues in Minnesota, increasing a company's income taxes and revenues to the state.

Those revenues would be approximately $26 million in the first year and $20 million per year after that. The revenue would be used as the first backup plan for stadium financing, Frans said.

The money would be collected and deposited into the general fund, but would not be used for the stadium unless needed, Frans said.

Frans can say he'll close the loophole, but in truth he'll only be playing whack-a-mole with corporations who have the resources to hire clever finance people. The money he anticipates won't materialize, certainly not in the amounts he envisions. And then it'll be back to the smokers, assuming they don't start buying their smokes online, on the reservation or from smugglers.

Nope, darn the luck, the money is going to come out of the general fund. Dayton and the gang can deny it until the cows come home, but that's how it's going to be. But on the bright side, you have three years to save up the coin to pay for a personal seat license in the People's Stadium.

One Year Later, Still in Your Wallet

Yeah, it's getting a little spendy

Not what we need right now:

Gas prices jumped by nearly 40 cents a gallon overnight on Wednesday, shocking Minnesotans who likely will feel the sting of higher fuel prices well into summer.

Relief from four-buck gas could come by the Fourth of July, provided two major Midwest oil refineries are back on line by mid-June and the price of crude oil doesn’t continue to rise, according to AAA officials who monitor gas prices.

The average price of gas in the Twin Cities was about $3.85 on Tuesday, just slightly below the record average of $3.99 recorded in June 2008. By Wednesday morning, some pump prices hit $4 a gallon and higher, said Gail Weinholzer, a spokeswoman for AAA Minnesota/Iowa. A lot of callers complained about having to shell out $4.19 a gallon, she said. The lowest price reported to her was $3.99; the highest was $4.30 in the west metro.

I saw $4.19 everywhere I usually travel yesterday. On the other hand, good luck passing that gas tax increase about now, Minnesota Lege.