On her official website, Senator Heidi Heitkamp is patting herself on the back for standing up to “special interests” on the floor of the Senate today. Heitkamp was arguing against amendments which would have ended trade protectionism for the sugar industry which keeps the price of sugar inflated by both controlling production to keep prices high and restricting access to foreign-produced sugar.

So the “special interests” Heitkamp is protecting against is, apparently, the American consumer who must pay higher prices for sugar.

“U.S. sugar policy defends more than 142,000 jobs in 22 states by defending our producers from unfair foreign competition,” said Heitkamp during her floor comments. “We grow and process a lot of sugar beets in the Red River Valley. Like many rural communities, sugar is the lynchpin of the local economy. If we bend to the proposed amendments, we will lose our domestic sugar industry. We can’t compete when the playing field is not level.”

So, in summary, the policy Senator Heitkamp is defending keeps prices inflated, enriching sugar producers, while simultaneously protecting them from competition. All that the expense of American shoppers. But we’re supposed to believe that Heitkamp isn’t on the side of special interests.

Again, even as Heitkamp is backing protectionism for actual special interests, she’s claiming she’s fighting special interests.

In related news, Senator John Hoeven isn’t much better on the issue. Despite the sugar program running up the price of sugar, he describes it as running “at zero cost to the American taxpayers.”

There’s a cost alright. Not in direct subsidies, but certainly in higher prices resulting from a protected market. But hey, whatever is best for Big Sugar, right?

The post Bizzaro World: According To Senator Heitkamp The American People Are A “Special Interest” appeared first on Say Anything.

I was floored when, earlier this year, North Dakota Democrats adopted an official resolution stating that women in North Dakota face “emergent danger…by simply being women in this state.”

Not just danger, mind you, but emergent danger. As in urgent danger.

That’s a little hard to swallow. One could argue that the influx of young men working in the energy boom has resulted in some tension. Any time you get a disproportionate number of young men in one area, and given them a significant amount of disposable income, you’re going to have some issues.

But emergent danger? That’s a stretch. Yet, those sort of wild-eyed pronouncements have become a central plank for Democrats both nationally and here in North Dakota. Senator Heidi Heitkamp was quick, during her campaign last year, to play the victim card when criticized. How often did we have to hear about how Karl Rove or Rick Berg was “attacking women” by going after Heitkamp?

It was ridiculous. And all the “war on women” hyperbole is even more ridiculous when you consider reports like this one in Business Week detailing the opportunities North Dakota’s thriving economy has created for women.

In fact, by the numbers, wages for women in the state are actually growing faster than men:

While men dominate North Dakota’s shale-oil industry, women in the region are starting complementary service businesses ranging from oil-well geology to occupational testing to day-care and medical clinics. “There are great opportunities for women,” says Kathy Neset, 57, president of Neset Consulting Service. “Whatever skill you have, we need it in western North Dakota.” Neset and her husband founded the geological services company in 1980 in Tioga, which is in the northwest part of the state. More than one-fifth of its 180 employees are women. Neset regularly gives presentations at elementary and middle schools in the upper Midwest, encouraging girls to pursue careers as geologists, where salaries range from $80,000 to $140,000 a year. …

Salaries for women employed full time in North Dakota jumped 22 percent from 2006 to 2011, to $32,500, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, compared with a 14 percent increase for women’s salaries nationwide. Male employees in the state saw a 17 percent increase over that period, to $45,439.

Those facts just don’t fit the Democrat narrative about women in “emergent danger.” In fact, they don’t fit talking points Senator Heidi Heitkamp was pushing earlier this year about gender pay inequality in North Dakota.

Heitkamp pointed out that women in North Dakota make just 73% of what men make on average. But Heitkamp didn’t mention that, thanks specifically to the state’s oil boom, that wage gap is closing.

Because, again, those facts don’t fit the narrative.

The post Wages For North Dakota Women Grow Faster Than Men, Democrat “War On Women” Narrative Hardest Hit appeared first on Say Anything.

There are moments when you read a story that makes you want to secede from the human race. I had a moment like that when reading this article about people finagling, or outright purchasing, the entitlement to cut in line at airports and amusement parks:

Disney World is investigating news that a handful of upper-crust Manhattan moms have a pricey, secret way to get their kids to the front of the lines—and it’s not by bribing Mickey Mouse.

Instead, according to the New York Post, the moms pay $130 an hour to hire a disabled, “black-market” guide, who uses her position—sitting in a motorized scooter—to help entitled families gain special access to rides.

“On one hand, you can say she’s a great entrepreneur,” disability activist Kleo King, of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, told Yahoo! Shine. “On the other hand, she’s kind of pimping herself out. And it’s outrageous she would help people commit fraud.” …

Using a false disability claim to skip lines is not a new trick, unfortunately. A recent Wall Street Journal story documented the trend of travelers requesting the use of complimentary wheelchairs in airports as a technique of getting pushed to the front of security lines, only to leap up and sprint to their gates once they have clearance. “We call them ‘miracles.’ They just start running with their heavy carry-ons,” longtime wheelchair attendant Kenny Sanchez noted.

This reminds me of a story from several years ago about parents, seeking an advantage for their kids in cut-throat world of private schools admission, started conducting DNA tests and hiring genealogists to find some trace ancestry that is considered a minority. Because if a nominally white student can be shown to have 11% Native American ancestry, or 6% African ancestry, he or she might qualify for special admissions consideration.

The entire spectacle is an exercise in absurdity, but illustrative of what our society is becoming in this age of entitlement. Not one in which the merit of a person is considered, not one in which hard work and achievement is the path to success, but rather one in which your ability to navigate the entitlement system gets you to the front of the line. Both figuratively and, it seems, literally.

We are a society that wants shortcuts. We are inundated with get rich quick schemes, and miracle weight loss schemes, because we want to be wealthy, and slim, without having to do the work and make the sacrifices it takes to get wealthy and slim.

It’s all about instant gratification. If exploiting Native American heritage you didn’t even know you had, or faking an injury or disability, gets us to the head of the line we’ll do that. Increasingly, it seems, without any hint of shame.

Because we’re all entitled, right?

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Score another point for the law of unintended consequences.

The left is fond of believing that the government can wave its magic wand and accomplish their policy goals. One example is the minimum wage. The left likes to believe that raising the minimum wage improves the economy. “A rising tide lifts all ships,” I believe the argument goes, but in reality all the minimum wage does is make employing people (especially low-income workers) more expensive. The rising tide doesn’t raise all boats. It ends up drowning some people, figuratively speaking, by pricing them out of the labor market.

The same is true of Obamacare and its insurance mandates. Far from resulting in more Americans having better health care coverage, it’s prompting employers to cut back on the number of full-time employees they have while simultaneously scaling back on the health care plans they do offer:

Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country. They cover minimal requirements such as preventive services, but often little more. Some of the plans wouldn’t cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital visit.

Federal officials say this type of plan, in concept, would appear to qualify as acceptable minimum coverage under the law, and let most employers avoid an across-the-workforce $2,000-per-worker penalty for firms that offer nothing. Employers could still face other penalties they anticipate would be far less costly.

Former Obama administration officials who were involved in passing the law are shocked – shocked, I say – that this is happening:

“We wouldn’t have anticipated that there’d be demand for these types of band-aid plans in 2014,” said Robert Kocher, a former White House health adviser who helped shepherd the law. “Our expectation was that employers would offer high quality insurance.”

Part of the problem: lawmakers left vague the definition of employer-sponsored coverage, opening the door to unexpected interpretations, say people involved in drafting the law.

To quote Allan Meltzer, regulations are static while markets are dynamic.

Our friends on the left are always convinced that they can impose major policy changes on the markets without changing the way those markets operate. But that is almost never true. Taxes and regulations change the way we make decisions, whether it’s the minimum wage acting as a sort of tax on low-wage workers or Obamacare inflating the cost of providing health insurance to employees, you cannot create heavy new costs for businesses without expecting businesses to try and avoid those costs.

Some might be tempted to argue that we should impose even more policies to force these employers to comply with the law as Democrats intended them to comply, but that will only result in more unintended consequences.

While the status quo in the health care and insurance markets was anything but good before Obamacare, the simple fact is that Obamacare is making things worse.

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Last week the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education approved more tuition hikes for the state’s students, but now Board President Duaine Espegard wants a second look

While I agree that the tuition hikes do need a second look – the state legislature increased total higher ed spending by 32% for the coming biennium while tuition in-state tuition has more than doubled at most of the universities in the last decade – why wasn’t Espegard prepared to make his case against these increases at the last meeting of the SBHE?

The level of incompetence in the governance of our university system from all involved is, at times, stunning.

Board President Duaine Espegard, a retired banker, said Monday he had more time to crunch the numbers after the last meeting and decided it was worth more discussion. A special meeting scheduled Thursday at NDSU is meant to take a second look.

“Upon reflection, when I got home after that meeting, I think about this and say, ‘Is that fair?’” Espegard said. “And because this stuff is kind of complicated, I’m not so sure everybody probably fully understood it. I didn’t until I took another look.”

The state Legislature approved a $900 million higher education budget — a nearly 12 percent increase over the last biennium — while sending a message to the board and university leaders to keep tuition costs down. But the funding does not cover nearly $32 million in inflationary costs, which could be covered under the approved plan if colleges max out their tuition limits.

The plan backed by Shirvani would require six of the 11 colleges to find cost savings to meet their budgets, leaving a shortfall of $3.3 million at the University of North Dakota and $2.4 million at North Dakota State University.

Shirvani asking for the universities to start prioritizing some of their spending is prudent, taking a long-view on the higher ed situation. Run-away spending, and bubble-like growth, has North Dakota way out on a limb when it comes to the university system.

Whether certain university bureaucrats, or their apologists in the media, want to admit it there’s a pop coming for this bubble, and it’s better to ask the universities to prioritize now than to let the train run off the cliff at full speed.

If the taxpayers are going to get hosed on higher ed spending, the least we could do is not hose the students too.

The legislature won’t lead on this issue, nor will Governor Jack Dalrymple, so it behooves Chancellor and the State Board of Higher Education to take the lead. It seems as though Espegard, Shirvani and some others may be awake to the problem, but the question is whether or not they can impose their will on a chaotic system populated with university presidents and bureaucrats who would rather maintain the status quo.

The post State Board Of Higher Education Wants Another Look At Tuition Increases appeared first on Say Anything.

See, if Republicans would just buy into the political alarmism about global warming, tragedies like the one in Oklahoma wouldn’t happen:

While many Americans were tuned into news coverage of the massive damage from tornadoes ravaging the state of Oklahoma, Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse took to the Senate floor to rail against his Republican colleagues for denying the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

Whitehouse spent 15 minutes chastising GOP senators and justified his remarks by alluding to states that seek federal assistance in the wake of natural disasters.

“So, you may have a question for me,” Whitehouse said. “Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I’ll tell you why. We’re stuck in this together. We are stuck in this together. When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas, it hits Montana with dying forests. So, like it or not, we’re in this together.”

Meanwhile, a Daily Show writer was classing up Twitter by suggesting the tornado had been sent to punish conservatives.

I often reject complaints that modern politics have become too polarized, and too partisan. I think they’re about as polarized and partisan as they’ve ever been. But one thing the advent of instant internet media has done is allow morons to be morons in real time, before their handlers or editors or good sense kicks in.

The post Democrat Blames Oklahoma Tornado On Republicans appeared first on Say Anything.

The hits keep coming in the IRS scandal, and it appears as though an anti-tea party union representing IRS workers may have had something to do with the IRS targeting union groups.

This revelation has “IRS employees in the position of actively financing anti-Tea Party candidates themselves, while in their official positions in the IRS blocking, auditing, or intimidating Tea Party and conservative groups around the country,” reports Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator:

According to the White House Visitors Log, provided here in searchable form by U.S. News and World Report, the president of the anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union, Colleen Kelley, visited the White House at 12:30pm that Wednesday noon time of March 31st.

The White House lists the IRS union leader’s visit this way:

Kelley, Colleen Potus 03/31/2010 12:30

In White House language, “POTUS” stands for “President of the United States.”

The very next day after her White House meeting with the President, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General’s Report, IRS employees — the same employees who belong to the NTEU — set to work in earnest targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups around America. The IG report wrote it up this way:

April 1-2, 2010: The new Acting Manager, Technical Unit, suggested the need for a Sensitive Case Report on the Tea Party cases. The Determinations Unit Program Manager Agreed.

In short: the very day after the president of the quite publicly anti-Tea Party labor union — the union for IRS employees — met with President Obama, the manager of the IRS “Determinations Unit Program agreed” to open a “Sensitive Case report on the Tea party cases.” As stated by the IG report.

The NTEU is the 150,000 member union that represents IRS employees along with 30 other separate government agencies. Kelley herself is a 14-year IRS veteran agent. The union’s PAC endorsed President Obama in both 2008 and 2012, and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles to anti-Tea Party candidates.

One of those candidates, as the NDGOP points out in the press release below, was Senator Heidi Heitkamp who received $10,000 in contributions from the group.

Of course, that doesn’t imply that Heitkamp knew anything about the IRS targeting tea party groups, but it does speak volumes about how political the IRS has become.

The post Heidi Heitkamp Got Big Support From Anti-Tea Party IRS Employees Union appeared first on Say Anything.

In 2009 the Obama administration was at war with Fox News, up to and including trying to exclude the top-of-the-ratings cable network from pool reports, something that only ended with other members of the White House press corps objected.

But now it comes to light that in 2010, while investigating leaks at the State Department, the Obama Justice Department obtained a Fox News reporters emails and tracked his security card swipes at the State Department:

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press.

Not the same sort of sweeping information grab as Associated Press reporters faced, but this is chilling none-the-less.

And there is undoubtedly more revelations in this vein coming. Remember, Attorney General Eric Holder stated he can’t remember how many times he authorized spying on reporters.

The post Obama’s Justice Department Spied On Fox News Reporter In 2010 appeared first on Say Anything.

The state capitol building in Bismarck is a unique design. But it is what that design signifies or tells that makes it so important. I hope every legislator now and into the future reads this piece. When they or elected officials walk the halls of the capitol I hope they are reminded of the sacrifice the people of North Dakota went through, beginning construction in 1932 at the height of the depression.

The architects Joseph Bell DeRemer and W.F. Kurke gave us a beautiful structure and a lesson in government. If you start at the far west end of the Great Hall and walk to the east you see first the legislative chambers on both sides of the hall. The entrances to the chambers are on the same floor and across from one another signifying they are co-equal parts of the legislative body.

After passing the chambers you are in an atrium or large hall with glass on its south exposure that reaches up a couple of stories. The view facing south down a large mall always reminded that it was a welcoming spot for the citizens to gather and petition their government. Over the years many rallies in support or against a legislative initiative have been staged on the steps and mall leading up to the Great Hall. The vast expanse of glass allows for a great deal of sunshine reminding us of the openness of North Dakota government.

I believe the length of the hall between the legislative chambers and the tower where the executive branch resides is there for a reason. There is a clear demarcation between the branches of government. As I have said many times the legislature is the people’s branch of government. A reading of the state’s constitution makes it clear the framers intended it to be the case. The legislature is also the policy making branch of government. The executives in the tower are there to carry out the will of the people as developed by the people’s branch.

The first offices in the tower you come to on your walk east are the Governors, the Attorney Generals and the Sec. of State. They are all on the same floor as the legislative branch and serve to remind us they are the most powerful of our states elected officials.

Continuing east you come to the North Dakota Supreme Court chambers which are also on the same floor.
If you make this walk from west to east you should be struck with the fact that you can see all three branches of government from one vantage point. You should also come away with the feeling the designers were trying to convey the thought that the branches of government are equal but separate.

Which brings me to an issue that has bothered me for some time. I think the legislature has let the executive branch get too involved in its deliberations. I can remember the time when an elected official did not appear at a committee hearing unless they were requested to do so by the chairman of a committee. Their deputies would be at the hearings sometimes giving testimony but most of all they were there as a research person and observer.

Governors never appeared in the legislative chambers unless it was for an occasion such as the state of the state address or to deliver their budget message. In fact the governor’s office always sent a letter requesting the legislature’s approval of the date and time for those occasions.

On page 37 of my book I relate a story about Gov. Schafer wanting to speak to the House Republican Caucus during a legislative session. I told him at one of our weekly breakfasts that it wasn’t going to happen. He then called the Caucus leader who asked me again and I not very politely said no. It wasn’t that I didn’t get along with the Governor it was that there is a separation of powers that should be a bright line. If governors or other elected officials want to lobby the legislature they should do it by requesting a meeting with legislators in their offices.

Once a legislator told me the governor had requested a meeting about a particular issue. He wanted to know how I felt about those meetings. My answer was that if he felt comfortable talking with the governor on the issue he should go out of respect for the office. If he was uncomfortable it was his prerogative to politely decline the invitation.

In Chapter 12 of the book I describe how PSC commissioners Wefald and Sandstrom were in the chambers constantly as we deregulated telecommunication. In my opinion they hurt their case significantly. How could they have that much time on their hands to be spending hours day after day lobbying their position on the issue? In the main they polarized the discussion making it easy to pass the legislation they opposed.

If a Republican elected official wanted to get my dander up it was to use the phrase “you should support this because we are all Republicans”. That better have been the last argument on the subject because they were only moments from being shown the door. If they couldn’t make a case based on the merits of the bill and how it would be good for North Dakota, playing the GOP party card wasn’t going to cut it.

The post Dorso Column: North Dakota’s Executive Branch Is Too Involved In Legislating appeared first on Say Anything.

At the end of the legislative session we published attendance records for legislators in the House and the Senate. Since there is no central repository for attendance numbers, no government record which shows a votes missed total for each legislator, we had to compile that information from the daily House and Senate journals.

It was a real pain in the arse, and it turns out that with the Senate votes something got messed up with out spreadsheet, something that was noted when several Senators pointed out that they had perfect attendance but hadn’t gotten credit for it.

We tried to piece the data back together by doing spot checks on Senators, but at this point it seems a bad sort or something has busted the data beyond repair.

So we’re going to have to go back and produce that data again.

I’ve taken down the original post. We’ll do a new post with the right information as soon as we have it done.

The House information, which was kept on a separate spreadsheet, is just fine.

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