Dayton squeaks through primary. Now on to general election.

Mark Dayton despite a 10 plus point lead in recent polls narrowly beat Margaret Anderson Kelliher in the DFL primary for governor. I spoke with a Minneapolis DFL politico who was supporting Kelliher. Asked him who he thought would win the primary and he said Kelliher because of her ground game. It almost happened.

The feeling among Republicans is Dayton will be the easier target in the general election. Dayton has personal issues and is much more radical on wanting to raise taxes than even Kelliher and Entenza were. I ran into Entenza last weekend and Dayton's tax proposal is one of the things he said to distinguish himself from Dayton.

That said, Dayton and liberal groups will pour boatloads of money into the campaign and his name is a household name to lots of Minnesotans.

I don't think Dayton will be able to avoid the public scrutiny he did in 2000 when he ran against Rod Grams for the US Senate. I recall then he was no where to be found publicly. He just ran tons of ads and avoided public appearances. Today, he won't be able to do that as easily and he'll have his record as a US Senator to live down. I recall it was reported in Time magazine that he was rated one of the five poorest US Senators.

It should be an interesting race for governor. The contrast between Dayton and Emmer will be great.

Follow the money. Liberal "fat cats" and Dayton's campaign.

The incessant attack ads on Republican candidate for governor Tom Emmer are being paid for by people with a lot of money. It's interesting learning where the money is coming from. It puts to bed the the notion that political "fat cats" are usually conservative. I think the opposite is true.

Katherine Kersten notes:

Few American political stereotypes are as durable as the myth that Republicans are the party of fat cats. You know -- the corporate tycoons and investment bankers who puff cigars in dark, paneled rooms as they bankroll elections for Big Business. Democrats, in the myth's telling, are Ordinary Joes -- lunch-bucket types who fight a lopsided, uphill battle against entrenched big-money interests.

Welcome to the real world, Minnesotans.

In the 2010 governor's race, it's Republican Tom Emmer -- an Ordinary Joe with seven kids to feed -- who's pounding the pavement for every $1,000 check he brings in. He and his team spend lots of time focusing on small donors -- the source, despite the myth, of a disproportionate amount of the Republican Party's cash.

But isn't Big Business pulling the strings for Emmer behind the scenes? Hardly. We saw that recently, when Target Corp. gave $150,000 to MN Forward -- a business-friendly PAC that supports Emmer against his three Democratic rivals, who have all vowed to raise taxes. Liberals and the media went berserk. As they tarred and feathered Target, their message was clear: Companies that support Republican efforts risk paying a big public-relations price.

She also notes the mega millions spent by Dayton and Entenza on their efforts to be the DFL candidate for governor. Together they've spent $9 million.

Meanwhile, the three DFL candidates for governor have raised a cool $9 million for their campaigns -- a sum that dwarfs Emmer's $910,000. Two of those candidates, gazillionaires Matt Entenza and Mark Dayton, are financing their races from their own capacious pockets. Unlike Emmer, they don't have to eat rubber-chicken dinners at rinky-dink fundraisers. They just write gold-plated checks to themselves.

Entenza has loaned his campaign $4.7 million heading into Tuesday's DFL primary. The money comes courtesy of his wife's fortune, made in the health care industry.

But the 800-pound gorilla in the governor's race is Mark Dayton, department store heir and current front-runner. Dayton's wealth has enabled him to make running for public office a hobby for 30 years.

In 1982 he dropped $6.7 million on a failed U.S. Senate campaign. In 1998, the figure was $2.1 million for an unsuccessful governor's bid. In 2000, he spent a whopping $12 million to become a U.S. senator. In the current campaign, so far, the sum is $3.3 million. All told, that's a jaw-dropping $24 million of Dayton dough.

Now we're learning that his family is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into his campaign albeit through two DFL PACs:

Dayton's own resources are augmented by donations to DFL interests from his megarich family. In this election cycle, the family -- his son, aunt, cousin and ex-wife-- have poured $851,000 into two DFL political action committees: Win Minnesota and the 2010 Fund. That's almost as much as Emmer has raised in his entire campaign.

The biggest family donor is Alida Messinger, Dayton's ex-wife. (Must have been a friendly breakup!) She's contributed an eye-popping $550,000 to the two PACS.

The source of Messinger's money? She's the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller -- founder of Standard Oil -- who nearly monopolized the American oil business in the late 1800s and died with a fortune valued at $670 billion in current dollars.

Wait. Isn't it Republicans who are supposed to be in the pocket of Big Oil?

The DFL's bottomless well of cash has another source: Big Labor. Since 2009, Minnesota's three largest public-employee labor unions have spent $750,000 on the DFL agenda -- five times as much as the Target gift to MN Forward that so incensed liberals.

What does this flood of money make possible? Among other things, an endless barrage of anti-Emmer TV ads. They're being underwritten -- to the tune of $685,000 so far -- by a PAC called Alliance for a Better Minnesota. Where does its money come from? Win Minnesota and the 2010 Fund -- the Dayton family piggybanks -- are major sources, having funneled it $1.6 million in this election cycle.

Will the millions carry the day for Dayton in the general election? Not necessarily.

The Democratic money machine may succeed in buying the governor's mansion for Dayton -- whom Time magazine named as one of the five worst senators in 2005.

Then again, maybe not. In 2009, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey -- a fiscal conservative and scourge of public-employee unions -- surged to victory after being outspent three to one by his multimillionaire Democratic opponent. Christie might have a word of caution for Mark Dayton.

It will depend on whether the word gets out on his personal competency, the fact that he wants to raise Minnesota's income tax rates higher than any other state in the nation and his radicalism on social issues.

Franken's behavior and need for anger management counseling.

Last week it was reported that Minnesota's Senator Al Franken mocked and made faces from the dias when Republican Senator Mitch McConnell was making a speech on the Senate. According to "The Hill":

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) scolded Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) on the Senate floor Thursday for allegedly mocking him while he delivered a solemn speech on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.

The dust-up came seconds after McConnell delivered a speech on Kagan’s nomination shortly before the Senate voted to confirm her to the high court.Franken, who was presiding over the chamber from the dais, gesticulated and made faces while McConnell explained his opposition to Kagan, according to witnesses.

The television cameras broadcasting the speech on C-SPAN remained fixed on McConnell, missing Franken’s antics from the Senate president’s chair.

McConnell grew increasingly angry as Franken made fun of him before a crowded public gallery and Senate aides lining the chamber walls. Senate aides said they were shocked that Franken would flout the decorum of the chamber during such a solemn occasion.

After McConnell finished his remarks, he walked up to the dais and rebuked him.

“This is not 'Saturday Night Live,' Al,” McConnell said, making reference to Franken’s career as a writer and actor on NBC’s long-running comedy show, according to a witness who overheard the exchange.

After the vote, Franken walked to McConnell's office to apologize but couldn't find him. He has sent a personal note, instead.

"The Leader thought I was disrespectful while he was giving his speech on General Kagan," Franken said in a statement to The Hill. "He is entitled to give his speech with the presiding officer just listening respectfully. I went directly to his office after I was done presiding to apologize in person. He wasn’t there, so I’ve sent him a handwritten note.”

It was pointed out by the folks at Powerline previous episodes of Franken crossing over the line and the need for anger management help.

I was told that Franken has become notorious on Capitol Hill for incidents of this kind. He is described as someone who frequently becomes rageful and lacking in control over the behavior related to his emotions. He is susceptible to outbursts, involving Republican Senators as well as staffers, immediately following which he is consumed with regret. He fits the profile of a guy with serious anger management issues.

Several of the incidents involving Franken have been reported in the Capitol Hill press, if not in the local Minnesota media, and not all such incidents involving Franken have been reported. One Capitol Hill source pointed out published stories including this one (citing several such incidents), this one (involving Senator Corker), and this one and this one (involving Senator Thune). Franken now avoids the Capitol Hill press.

Checking out the incident involving Senator McConnell, I immediately thought of our own reportage on Franken during the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden. John Hinderaker provided readers an account of the "Row on Radio Row" (photograph above). The incident goes back to Franken's days with Air America.

In short, Al Franken is a guy with a problem. It hasn't gotten better since he was elected United States Senator. It may well have gotten worse. Someone who reports on the news for a living really should look into it.

Behavior before Franken ran for the Senate suggested Franken had problems but he generally kept a lid on it. But as one can see, the problem still persists.

Parenting isn't a priority in today's society.

Robert Samuelson has a great commentary, "The Parent Trap" on the priority or rather lack thereof given parents and parenting in American society.

He notes the cost of raising a child:

Among the government's most interesting reports is one -- published by the Agriculture Department -- that estimates what parents spend on their children. The latest version finds, not surprisingly, the costs are steep. For a middle-class husband-wife family (average pre-tax income in 2009: $76,250), spending per child is about $12,000 a year. Assuming modest annual inflation (2.8 percent), the report estimates that the family's spending on a child born in 2009 would total $286,050 by age 17. A two-child family would cost about $600,000. All these estimates may be understated, because they do not include college costs.

Society doesn't put much value on raising children as reflected in our tax code which is biased against raising children.

These dry statistics ought to inform the deficit debate, because a budget is not just a catalogue of programs and taxes. It reflects a society's priorities and values. Our society does not -- despite rhetoric to the contrary -- put much value on raising children. Present budget policies punish parents, who are taxed heavily to support the elderly. Meanwhile, tax breaks for children are modest. If deficit reduction aggravates these biases, more Americans may choose not to have children or to have fewer children. Down that path lies economic decline.

Fertility rates are dismal in Europe and OK in US but will we move in the direction of Europe given other trends in American society?

Societies that cannot replace their populations discourage investment and innovation. They have stagnant or shrinking markets for goods and services. With older populations, they resist change. For a country to stabilize its population -- discounting immigration -- women must have an average of about two children. That's a "fertility rate" of two. Many countries with struggling economies are well below that. Japan's fertility rate is 1.2. Italy's is 1.3, as is Spain's. These countries are having about one child for every two adults.

The U.S. fertility rate isn't yet close to these dismal levels. In 2007, it was at the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, reports the National Center for Health Statistics. Hispanics were at 3.0, and other groups clustered near replacement: 1.9 for non-Hispanic whites; 2.1 for non-Hispanic blacks; and 2.0 for Asian-Americans. (Not all the news is good. About 40 percent of births are to unmarried mothers; many children are entering poor or unstable homes.)

Though having a child is a deeply personal decision, it's shaped by culture, religion, economics and government policy. "No one has a good answer" as to why fertility varies among countries, says sociologist Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University. Eroding religious belief in Europe may partly explain lowered birth rates. In Japan, young women may be rebelling against their mothers' isolated lives of child-rearing. General optimism and pessimism count. Hopefulness fueled America's Baby Boom. After the Soviet Union's collapse, says Cherlin, "anxiety for the future" depressed birth rates in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Bias against families in tax policies will reduce fertility rates in US as well.

In poor societies, people have children to improve their economic well-being by increasing the number of family workers and providing support for parents in their old age. In wealthy societies, the logic often reverses. Government now supports the elderly, diminishing the need for children. By some studies, the safety nets for retirees have reduced fertility rates by 0.5 children in the United States and almost 1.0 in Western Europe, reports economist Robert Stein in the journal National Affairs. Similarly, some couples don't have children because they don't want to sacrifice their own lifestyles to the time and expense of a family.

Families need to be considered when establishing tax policy.

We need to avoid Western Europe's mix of high taxes, low birth rates and feeble economic growth. Young Americans already face a bleak labor market that cannot instill confidence about having children. Piling on higher taxes won't help. "If higher taxes make it more expensive to raise children," says demographer Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, "people will think more about having another child." That seems common sense, despite the multiple influences on becoming parents.

How to reconcile this with deficit reduction is unclear. From 2011 to 2020, the Obama administration projects budget deficits of $8.5 trillion. Other estimates are higher. Even if spending and benefits for the elderly are cut -- as they should be -- higher taxes will still almost certainly be needed. Parents ought to be shielded from the steepest increases.

Any tax system rewards some activities and punishes others. A case in point is the mortgage interest rate deduction that rewards people for buying larger homes with more debt. We might reduce this dubious subsidy and shift some savings toward children. Stein advocates combining existing pro-child tax breaks (the personal exemption, the child tax credit, the child-care credit and the adoption credit) into one generous credit. Whatever the details, policies should have a pro-family bias because parenting is, as he writes, "one of the most important services any American can perform."

I would argue the overall level of government and taxation needs to drop rather than merely shielding families from assumed tax increases. Families will invariably be hit with higher taxes because they're where the money is. High income folks are few and sustaining big government will invariably fall back on families to fund.

Overreach on by federal judge in Prop 8, even for gay activists?

There's a lot of discussion about the gay Federal District Court Judge Vaughn Walker's decision in California striking down California' s pro-marriage, Prop 8 initiative. The case will be appealed to the 9th Circuit and almost certainly come before the US Supreme Court.

What some observers are noting is the breathtaking reach of the judge's ruling.

University of Minnesota law prof Dale Carpenter, a gay activist who supports homosexual marriage, had some interesting thoughts on the courts decision at "The Volokh Conspiracy." He writes:

"But my concerns about this decision outweigh what I see as its merits. In reading so far, I think a notable feature of Judge Walker’s decision is its judicial maximalism — a willingness to reach out and decide fundamental constitutional questions not strictly necessary to reach the result. It is also, in maximalist style, filled with broad pronouncements about the essential characteristics of marriage and confident conclusions about social science. This maximalism will make the decision an even bigger target for either the Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court. If that’s right, it magnifies the potential for unintended and harmful consequences for gay-rights claims even beyond the issue of marriage. Think of a possible (but milder) anti-SSMBowers v. Hardwick, which had consequences far beyond the constitutional affirmation of sodomy laws. version of

Walker is the first federal judge to hold that states must recognize same-sex marriages. By doing so, he eschewed a potentially narrower ruling striking down only Proposition 8, which had been suggested by some commentators. Such an alternative ruling would have focused on what critics regarded as the “animus” behind the passage of Prop 8. In theory, it would have left states free to retain traditional definitions of marriage not reinforced by passion-driven plebiscites. I think a narrow, strictly anti-Prop 8, decision would have tried to thread too thin a needle, but it was an option. Walker mentions anti-gay sentiment in the Prop 8 campaign, especially highlighting the shameful and misleading ads supporting it, but that is not the basis for his decision.

Instead, finding a federal right to same-sex marriage itself, Walker leans on not one but two prominent constitutional arguments. First, he says that the fundamental right to marriage protected by the Due Process Clause includes the right to choose the sex of one’s mate. That’s because, he writes, sex-based classifications in marriage have long since been stripped away. The ban on same-sex marriage is the vestige of discredited and long-abandoned sex discrimination in marriage.

Few courts upholding a right to SSM have used a fundamental-rights rationale (not even the original SSM decision, Goodridge, did so). It’s an aggressive claim, especially given the composition of the federal courts and the Supreme Court. I see little enthusiasm in this Court for expanding fundamental rights. If the Ninth Circuit and/or Supreme Court decide to reverse Walker’s ruling, they will be more likely to deal with this issue in a way that will set broader precedent. A minimalist decision for SSM by Walker could have left this matter undecided and thus would not have forced a higher court’s hand.

Second, Walker held that the ban on gay marriage violates the Equal Protection Clause. The interesting question is why. In part of Walker’s opinion, he accepts the case for heightened scrutiny of classifications based on sexual orientation and asserts that denying marriage to same-sex couples is a form of sexual-orientation discrimination (and sex discrimination, which is related).

But he then concludes that because laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples are not rational, “the court need not address the question whether laws classifying on the basis of sexual orientation should be subject to a heightened standard of review.” If that’s true, why address the issue at all? He may be hoping, in maximalist fashion, to lay some foundation for future courts to apply strict scrutiny to sexual-orientation discrimination. But at the same time, leaving the intellectual structure unfinished, he invites a higher court to undermine it.

Walker then rejects as irrational each of the reasons offered for Prop 8, including tradition, procreation, and the need to proceed cautiously and incrementally on matters involving important social change. The biggest difficulty with his argument on these matters, as I see it, is that he thinks of gay marriage as a technical change in the law about which there is no need to proceed cautiously. California has enough printers and paper to issue the additional marriage licenses, so what’s the big deal?

The decision, as I read it, relies directly or indirectly upon every prominent constitutional argument for SSM. One could say this is a strength of the decision. If a higher court doesn’t like one reason, it might accept another. But it is also a weakness of the decision, from a gay-rights litigation perspective, since it invites a higher court to address them all if it decides to reverse the result. A sweeping victory becomes a sweeping defeat.

Judge Walker, I am sure, would deny that his decision is maximalist. SSM, he assures us, is not a “sweeping” change. Furthermore, his decision is couched in the lop-sided evidence presented at trial about marriage and the potential consequences of recognizing SSM. By my count, he uses the word “evidence” 54 times in the “Conclusions of Law” section alone. This evidentiary reliance will be used to try to insulate the decision from meaningful appellate review. The evidence just leads us, inescapably, to the conclusion that SSM is a neutral or even good thing. What’s more, the evidence is so one-sided that judges are entitled to say so as a matter of constitutional law. But I have never been convinced that the issue of gay marriage would be decided, in courts at least, by a battle of expert witnesses in the way we might decide whether a Pinto is unreasonably dangerous.

Gay-rights groups, you may recall, initially opposed the Prop 8 litigation on the grounds that it was too much, too soon. Though they are publicly celebrating this ruling, I imagine in the background there is considerable unease about what happens next. The Supreme Court, they reasoned in early 2009, was not ready to declare a right to SSM. Premature litigation, they feared, would do more harm than good (even if there were a temporary win at a lower level). Well, nothing has changed except that the stakes have been considerably raised today in a maximalist decision, bringing us one step closer to Perry v. Schwarzenegger, ___ U.S. ___ (201_) (reversing lower court ruling for same-sex marriage on due process and equal protection grounds).

Of course, the question will be which direction Justice Kennedy will go on this case. Maybe Carpenter is right and the overreach by Judge Walker will be too much for Kennedy to swallow in addition to the realization that overturning 30 plus state marriage amendments is a bit too much.

Whatever happens the cultural divide is only widening and deepening in our nation.