Kelliher picked up the endorsements from the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 49 (yesterday) and the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees (last week).

How important are such endorsements?

“[B]ecause of changing demographics, union political endorsements may not move the rank-and-file members, whose interests may not be the same as the union leadership, the way they used to be,” Hamline University professor David Schultz told the St. Paul Legal Ledger.

AFSCME Council 5’s executive director disputed that.

“[O]ur members are incredibly motivated to elect a new governor who will promote public services, rebuild the economy of the state and deal with the budget crisis in a way that asks the wealthiest people in the state to pay their fair share of taxes,” Eliot Seide said.

Margaret Anderson Kelliher

State House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher’s gubernatorial campaign landed another labor union endorsement today, from the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 49. The “49ers” credit Kelliher with engineering the 2008 override of Gov. Pawlenty’s veto of the transportation bill — giving life to what the union terms “the largest job-creating bill in decades.”

That override has haunted the six Republicans who helped Democrats get the bill passed Pawlenty’s veto — most recently on Monday, when news broke that state Sen. Steve Dille won’t seek re-election.

One week ago, Kelliher won the backing of the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, who called her the “most electable candidate in the race.”

“It’s usurping the power of the legislature… Right now he’s actually writing laws,” he said. “I don’t know where’s he getting this authority, and nobody’s really taking him on.”

“Right now any governor — whether the governor is Tom Rukavina or Tim Pawlenty — can basically sign every spending bill and then decide to unallot,” he said.

Rukavina agrees that Pawlenty’s motives in unallotment have been more about his national political ambitions than in looking after Minnesota’s future.

“I think he’s being very insincere in his claim that he loves this state and loves the people of this state,” he said. “Because what he’s doing to them isn’t, from where I come from, any sign of love.”

On Monday, the House Rules Committee voted to file a brief in support of a suit against the governor’s unallotment of some $2.7 million from the state budget.

Watch it:

See answers by DFL gubernatorial candidates R.T. Rybak and Paul Thissen to Stellmacher’s ongoing candidate series on the biggest threats to Minnesota.

In 2003, Pawlenty submitted a proposed general fund budget of $28.1 billion — or $2.8 billion more than the revenues received during the previous biennium. Two years later the governor offered up a $29.8 billion budgetary blueprint, roughly $1 billion more than the state took in during the previous budget cycle.

The pattern continued in Pawlenty’s second term. In 2007, he proposed a $34.4 billion general fund allotment, $2.2 billion more than the state’s cash inflow during the previous biennium. Finally in January of this year, the governor submitted a $33.6 billion budget, $1.4 billion more than revenues during the prior two-year cycle.

In total, Pawlenty’s budget proposals for the eight-year span would have exceeded revenues by $7.4 billion. In other words, when Pawlenty actually had the opportunity to adhere to the strict fiscal stringency that he’s now advocating he chose not to do so.

Pawlenty unveiled the proposal at a state Capitol press conference Thursday morning.

Under his plan, the state’s general fund budget would be limited to the amount of revenue collected in the previous two-year cycle. The two-term Republican governor argued that such a stringent cap on spending is necessary because legislators have proven unable to contain spending. Since 1960, he pointed out, general fund budgets have increased by an average of 21 percent every two years.

“That is an amazing, startling, frightening number,” Pawlenty said. “It is unsustainable going forward.”

Such an amendment would need to be passed by the legislature and then approved by voters. Pawlenty wants the proposal to be on the ballot next year.

But it is unlikely to get a favorable reception from Democrats, who control both legislative bodies with substantial majorities. Pawlenty acknowledged that.

“I suspect they won’t like it,” he said of his DFL counterparts. “Anything that limits spending growth they won’t like.”

Democratic leaders insisted that they will give the proposal serious consideration. “I’m intrigued at learning more about it,” said Tom Bakk, chair of the Senate Taxes Committee and a candidate to take over Pawlenty’s job in 2011. “This will require some very thoughtful consideration.”

But Democrats also pointed out that Pawlenty has never proposed a budget that would have fit within the fiscal strictures he hopes to set for future administrations. In the current biennium, for instance, Pawlenty initially proposed a $34.4 billion general fund budget — more than $2 billion over revenue collections for the prior two years. In addition, the state is currently facing a $5–7 billion budget deficit.

“We’ve got a $5–7 billion iceberg in front of us and I think it would have been better if he would have proposed something of this significance earlier in his term,” said Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller. “But let’s give it some thought now, on his way out the door.”

Indeed, Pawlenty is not running for re-election next year and is clearly eyeing a 2012 presidential bid. Burnishing his credentials as a fiscal conservative could help with that cause — even if it does nothing to solve Minnesota’s budget problems.

Many conservative commentators, from the Wall Street Journal editorial board to Americans for Tax Reform, hailed Pawlenty in June for unilaterally slashing $2.7 billion from Minnesota’s budget over Democratic protests.

The DFL party was quick to characterize Pawlenty’s proposed amendment as another ploy to bolster his political ambitions.

“If a budget cap is such a good idea, why did Gov. Pawlenty wait until he was nearly out the door before proposing it?” asked Brian Melendez, chairman of the DFL party, in a press release. “The answer is simple: so that he wouldn’t actually have to govern under it, because he has no plans to follow through with what is really just a political stunt aimed at boosting his national notoriety.”

Image: PiM/YouTube

State Rep. Paul Thissen may be seeking the DFL Party’s gubernatorial endorsement, but he sounded down on the whole party thing in a karaoke duet with his wife, Karen Wilson, over the insistent synth tones of Prince’s “1999.”

It was just one of the Candidate Karaoke acts at an Urban Embassy event last Friday that Politics in Minnesota has preserved for eternity on YouTube.

“Parties weren’t meant to last,” sang Thissen in his best basso.

Later in the video, Thissen switches to spoken word and knocks the very decade to which “1999″ belongs:

Too often our party, the Democrats, look to the past. They look back to the ’70s and the ’80s for solutions. But Minnesota is very different than it was in the ’70s and ’80s. I think we need a governor that’s going to look 2015 and 2020 and 2025.

Which really doesn’t seem in the spirit of Prince’s message:

Yeah, they say two thousand zero zero party over
Oops out of time
So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999

Click on the image below to see the full-sized version of PiM’s chart in all its glory:

PiM is also home to a less visually stunning but still very handy chart listing gubernatorial candidates of both parties.

The man that the current mob of contenders hopes to replace, retiring Gov. Tim Pawlenty, is the subject of another great graphical-political achievement: Minnesota Public Radio’s “Governor’s Travels” map, which charts T-Paw’s itinerary as he criss-crosses the country in pursuit of the presidency. Here is MPR’s current map (green for official travel on state business, red for personal travel):

I can attest from personal experience that it’s not as easy as it looks. Here’s a graph showing how donations to former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman went up and down in relation (or not) to milestones in his recount-challenge effort:

Click to enlarge

This week brought the revelation in the Star Tribune that sex offenders at Moose Lake were watching two dozen new 50-inch flat-screen televisions — and within hours, an announcement by Pawlenty that the $1,570 TVs would be removed from the facility’s common areas and sold off.

But it wasn’t the first time the Star Tribune shone a light on state Corrections Department spending for television equipment.

In July, the newspaper reported on a $60,000 remodeling of a conference room at the juvenile detention facility in Red Wing that included $4,300 for a single, 58-inch plasma-screen TV and had legislators “fuming.”

One was DFL Rep. Ryan Winkler, who said “the White House situation room pales in comparison” to Red Wing’s upgrades. He called the expenditure “jarring” in view of budget constraints on other areas of state government.

Questions about the conference-room spending came from both sides of the aisle, but a Republican legislator didn’t return a message from the Minnesota Independent. Staff at Red Wing referred questions to a state Corrections Departement spokesperson, who also didn’t respond to messages.

So what was the Pawlenty administration’s response to the outrage at the last plasma-TV spending scandal in the Star Tribune?

“So far as I know, nothing,” Winkler tells MnIndy. “After all, the phrase ’sex offenders’ didn’t appear in the story, so the governor’s not embarrassed enough to take action.”

Meanwhile, the governor’s quick nixing of the Moose Lake TVs has drawn criticism. Lyon County jail administrator Brad Marks says flat-screen TVs are cheaper for jails than console models, according to the Marshall Independent. The newspaper editorializes that

for Pawlenty to order the televisions removed and sold, if possible, is silly. The money has been spent, the state will now lose money on the purchase and now, it looks as if the response was more knee jerk than to spark responsible discussion about televisions and other features in our jails and prisons and about civil commitment prisons and sex offender treatment.

And Minnesota Public Radio reports that examining larger issues around such treatment is also what psychiatrist Michael Farnsworth, former Medical Director for the state Department of Human Services, is calling for in the wake of the TV hubbub.

“I still think it’s a little early,” she says. “I haven’t really given it too much serious thought. I’m concentrating on just completing my job in the Senate.”

But she certainly sounds like a politician with ambitions beyond her current post. Rosen touts her background as an agronomist, her work on the health-care issues at the Capitol and the fact that she’s a woman as political assets.

“I would be a very formidable candidate against Walz,” she says. “If I decided to run I’d work like a banshee.”

She argues that the two-term Democrat is out of touch with the First Congressional District on issues such as health care reform and cap-and-trade legislation. Despite the fact that Walz won re-election by 30 points in 2008, she believes he’s vulnerable.

“I don’t think I would be even entertaining the thought if I thought he was serving us correctly in all areas,” she says.

So does that mean Rosen’s leaning toward the First District instead of a run at the state’s top elected office? Not necessarily.

“I don’t have a preference one over the other,” she says.

The gubernatorial field already includes nine GOP challengers. And at least two other Republicans — Allen Quist and Jim Hagedorn — are already eyeing a Walz challenge. But Rosen insists that she doesn’t feel any pressure to settle on her plans (if any) for 2010.

“I think the decision will come in the proper time,” she says. “It will all work out if it’s supposed to.”

Elsewhere in Minnesota news today …

MINNEAPOLIS: Mayor Rybak met with people seeking jobs. Just not his. [KSTP-TV; Star Tribune]

STATEWIDE: Senators too. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar echoed Rybak’s call for extending jobless benefits about to expire — unless Rybak was echoing them. [Hot Dish Politics]

STATEWIDE: Minnesota a national model on renewable energy. The country is playing catchup, says Klobuchar. [St. Cloud Times]

MINNEAPOLIS: Minnesota not a national model on elections. The Center of the American Experiment’s first recommendation: a photo-ID mandate that stymied reform this year. [Politics in Minnesota]

INDIAN COUNTRY: The first shall be healthiest. Minnesota’s senators also back a bill “to make America’s native people the healthiest people in the world.” [Bemidji Pioneer]

ST. PAUL: Breakfast was served. Were the people of Minnesota? That’ll take more bacon and pancakes. [St. Paul Pioneer Press]