MN - The Epicenter of GOP Hypocrisy

As I come out of the holidays I can’t help thinking what hypocrites the GOP in Minnesota are. 

What I fail to understand is why the Dems are not grabbing onto these two Minnesota stories and passing it around the US.  It is the epitome of GOP hypocrisy.

We have two different pieces of GOP hypocrisy that we are seeing in the news.  The Koch story is still making the news – but because our TV stations are all right wing – no one is talking about the GOP party financial issues anymore.

First – The fiscally responsible – Hah! – The Minnesota GOP stands right now with debt estimated from $500,000 and $1.2 million.  This resulted in the dramatic and immediate resignation of the GOP state chair.  It is my opnion that the DOJ should do an investigation of this for malfeasance.

But is that fiscally responsibility an anomaly– probably not.  When Tim Pawlenty was our governor he left office leaving the state with a 6.2 BILLION deficit.  Mother Jones went even further in their coverage to note:

Pawlenty turned in balanced budgets, Carlson explains, but only superficially. When he wasn't skirting his pledge not to raise taxes by using linguistic jujitsu—turning a sales tax increase on cigarettes into a "health impact fee," for instance—Pawlenty was simply redistributing the burden, from St. Paul to local authorities, or to the taxpayers themselves. According to Carlson, property taxes increased by $716 million in the eight years before Pawlenty took office; over his eight years as governor, they jumped by $2.5 billion. As Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, a Democrat, noted in April: "If the tea party really knew how much Tim Pawlenty raised taxes in Minnesota, they would throw him in Boston Harbor."

Those stealth tax hikes were buttressed by accounting gimmicks. In some cases, payments would be pushed back a few days until after the start of a new fiscal year, creating the false impression that the deficit had in fact been erased. In other cases, he stole from Peter to pay St. Paul. Pawlenty raided the coffers of select state agencies in order to provide a short-term patch for others—a strategy the Minnesota Taxpayers Association has called "budgetary duct tape." Pawlenty took $1 billion from a settlement with tobacco companies that had been earmarked for health care services and used it for the general budget. He borrowed another $1.4 billion from the state's K-12 education fund. And he quietly accepted $2.3 billion in stimulus funds while publicly lambasting the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

Second – The Party of Family Values – Hah! –  - Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch abruptly resigned her leadership post and said she wouldn’t seek re-election.  She admitted to an inappropriate affair with a staffer.  Regardless of who ends up being identified as the other person in the affair, there are no dems on that list – just republicans.  So it isn’t just Koch who is smashing the family values but also the person she crawled in the sack with.

We have become so accustom to the GOP hypocrisy that we let them go from one lie to the next lie (in relation to the party platform) and we seldom call them out on it in a meaningful way.  We must stop this destructive behavior.   We must treat he Repugs like a puppy -  a little puppy that poops on the carpet - we need to start rubbing their nose in it - again and again and again and again.  (The Repugs do this to the Dems all the time.)

Why do we let news like this go unnoticed and not scream it at the top of our lungs, across the entire USA?

Why do we – repeatedly – allow the Repugs to continue immoral behavior like this and we choose not to call them on it?  Why are we not screaming in their faces?

Why  do we let the MSM stop reporting GOP errors – while they will spend weeks hanging on to any mistake the Dems make?

Not only do we need to let others know what is happening – we have to be proactive in contacting our news stations that they are doing a disservice by not properly reporting GOP failures.

Sometimes dems – centrist and liberals - choose the wrong time to become silent and I think what is happening in Minnesota needs to be screamed from the top of every hill and mountain, across the US, for weeks or months to come.

This is how we will take Minnesota and the country back from the Repugs.