Kurt Bills wows the crowd (www.startribune.com).
by Steve Timmer
May 22, 2012, 9:00 PM

Thanks, I’ll be here all week; try the veal

What are a lawyer, a community organizer, and a comedian?

According to Kurt Bills, they’re the cause of the mess we’re in today:

State Rep. Kurt Bills, newly endorsed by the Republican Party in the U.S. Senate race, is quoted as saying “we sent a lawyer, a community organizer and a comedian to Washington, D.C., and we get an economy that looks like it does today.”

The line is cute, “quippy” and closely follows the Republican playbook established years ago by Karl Rove. In football, it is called a misdirection play. In politics, it says that when your qualifications are nowhere near those of your opponent, go personal and cute while avoiding actual résumé or accomplishment comparisons.

That’s from a letter in the Strib.

He’s the new clown prince of the Republican party, all right.

But who’s the clown, really? My vote is for the guy who authored a bill to make gold and silver coins legal tender and to explore Minnesota beginning to print its own money. Can’t you see the headline: Bills Promotes Minnesota Bills!

And Bills is the guy — along with sweating ideologue fellow travelers Keith Downey and Doug Wardlow — who authored a bill, that in the words of website sidekick Aaron, drew the most stinging veto rebuke of Governor Dayton’s tenure.

The House staff didn’t even do a summary of this clunker, HF545, but amazingly it passed both houses of the Republican-controlled legislature. It was a bill to prepare the State for the impending collapse of the federal government. If Bills really believes that, one wonders why he wants to be a U.S. Senator? Aaron quotes the Governor’s veto letter:

This bill perpetuates one of the majority party’ s current political stratagems: to raise doubts about the reliability of government generally and, in this instance, of the federal government specifically. As such, it joins the list of such attempts as privatizing Social Security and the systematic undermining of public schools…

…Where, however, were the outcries during the previous decade from the legislators, who now tout this legislation?…

President George Bush spearheaded not one, but two, enormous tax cuts, which inordinately benefitted wealthy Americans, large corporations, and powerful special interest groups. They were followed by two wars and two recessions, the last one the most severe since the Great Depression. All of those projected operating surpluses were wiped out, as were the Social Security Trust Fund’ s surpluses; yet recent annual deficits have skyrocketed to over $1.3 Trillion.

Where were the outcries, when that drastic reversal of sound fiscal stewardship was occurring?

You really ought to follow the link to the bill and read the preamble. And all this time, you thought that Mike Parry was crazy. The U.S. does have a long term deficit problem that would easily be fixed by spending a little less on the military and introducing more progressivity into our tax system.

It really isn’t stretching a point to say that Bills — and Downey and Wardlow, too — want to return to the stirring days of the Articles of Confederation, that miserable and disastrous first draft at making a country right after the Revolution.

It only took the country’s leaders at the time about a dozen years to figure out what a failure that was; regrettably the current crop, represented by candidate Bills, isn’t nearly as bright.

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