Posts by Britt Robson

Tim Pawlenty’s main claim to the mantle of GOP vice presidential candidate, when all is said and done, is probably his loyalty to the John McCain campaign in its dark hours of 2007 and McCain’s much-remarked personal affection for Minnesota’s Mr. Nice Guy. Pawlenty’s strategic value to the campaign is another question entirely, but to [...]

Workers in the Minnesota Attorney General’s office have alleged under oath that current AG Lori Swanson and her predecessor, Mike Hatch, may have illegally diverted federal monies meant to investigate Medicaid fraud, and that a legal settlement negotiated by Swanson and Hatch financially benefited a nonprofit organization that later endorsed Hatch’s campaign for governor.
The gist [...]

Political bickering over cause and culpability in the 35W bridge collapse continued apace at the State Capitol on Tuesday, as high-ranking officials from the Minnesota Department of Transportation rebutted a recent report commissioned by the State Legislature that called into question a number of MnDOT’s practices and procedures leading up to the tragedy.
Released last month, [...]

My mother raised me to believe that speaking ill of the dead was needlessly provocative, and tacky to boot. Consequently, I’ve bit my tongue over the last six days as the news media and political establishment have assiduously one-upped each other in exalting recently deceased television personality Tim Russert as a combination of Walter Cronkite, [...]

Four weeks after the conclusion of the 2008 session of the Minnesota Legislature, the policy damage from the no-new taxes mantra, quick fixes on the budget deficit, and last-minute gamesmanship between legislators and Governor Tim Pawlenty is still being sorted out. It turns out that while everyone was jawboning about how much or little to [...]

Now that we’ve watched Minnesota’s legislators emerge from their late-night rubber-stamping of closed-door policy negotiations with broad grins and hearty backslaps on a job well done, it’s important to remember that the last day of the session marks the first day of the campaign season. Everybody is pleased as punch. And they should be — [...]

Gov. Tim Pawlenty already received one black eye this legislative session when a bipartisan coalition voted to override his veto of the transportation bill. Now another piece of legislation, the education finance bill, is causing our chief executive and wannabe veep to take up another round of arm twisting, threats and hard negotiation to avoid [...]

Tired of watching Governor Tim Pawlenty try to raid Health Care Access Fund dollars to balance deficits in the general fund, DFL legislative leaders are attempting to put the matter in the hands of the voters. On Thursday, Senate Health and Human Services Budget committee chair Linda Berglin (DFL-Minneapolis; pictured above) brought forth a bill [...]

Ever since Tim Pawlenty was elected governor in November 2002, budget deliberations at the State Capitol have taken on a Groundhog Day redundancy. Regardless of whether the state’s general fund is showing deficits in the billions, millions, or even posting a rare surplus, Pawlenty tries to raid the Health Care Access Fund. HCAF is essentially [...]

A billion dollars is literally a nice round number — lots of zeroes. That’s the amount of “annual synergies” that a merger between Delta and Northwest will be able to create, according to Ben Hurst, the general counsel and senior veep of corporate affairs for Northwest. Hurst was the lead speaker in front of the [...]