Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty touts himself as a competent but firm manager in the 2004 Minnesota transit strike and 2005 Minnesota government shutdown in an ad playing in Des Moines and Ames, Iowa:

The narrator says that in the 2005 government shutdown, “Tim Pawlenty would not accept Democrats massive tax and spending demands.”

Not exactly. The shutdown ended when Pawlenty accepted a rise in the cigarette tax, increases in some property taxes, and more funding for schools–so he did raise taxes and spending.

However, the ad is very relevant — Minnesota is, of course, having a government shutdown already far worse than the 2005 partial shutdown, debt ceiling negotiations are at a standstill, and the GOP base loves governors fighting with public employee unions.

Before going off to the Council on Foreign Relations to give a speech on foreign policy, former Minnesota governor and 2012 GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty appeared on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning. Asked about his stance on cap and trade, he acknowledged that he had changed his mind. He added, “I denounced it for a variety of reasons, one of which is the science is bad and it’s in great dispute,” repeating once more that there is a “scientific dispute” about the issue of climate change.

But there isn’t.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reviewed the scientific analyses on the subject in 2007 and found that it is “very likely” — greater than 90 percent certainty — that most of the increase in global temperatures since the mid-20th century was due to increased greenhouse gas emissions. The American Association of the Advancement of Science wrote in 2007, “The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society.” The National Academy of Sciences also agrees that global warming is real and largely man-made.

Pawlenty has shifted from saying that global warming is real and human-caused to voicing skepticism about the science. In a 2007 press release, he said, “[O]ur global climate is warming, at least in part due to the energy sources we use. We cannot solve it by ourselves, but we need to lead and do our part. We also need to push for an effective national and international effort.”

And at the National Governors Association Meeting he said, “We should have listened to President Carter… We should not spend time on voices that say [climate change] is not real.” But, in December 2009 when asked about the Copenhagen Climate Change summit, he said the science was “unsettled.”

Leaked e-mails from Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon asked its journalists to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.”

Gov. Mitt Romney has acknowledged this fact. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman has reflected the GOP standard on cap and trade, while once supporting it like Mr. Pawlenty, now saying that it can’t be done in the recession. And that’s the position of most Republicans. Republicans like Sen. John McCain and Lindsey Graham supported a cap-and-trade plan, but fears of a bad economy and being attacked from the right led them to disavow the plan.

Watch it:

Sen. Scott Dibble and Rep. Jim Davnie announced Monday they won’t introduce the Safe Schools for All bill during the special session. Gov. Tim Pawlenty had rejected the call for tougher anti-bullying efforts, and DFL leadership was not prepared to back the measure. The duo offered the bills because of what they called a crisis of suicides by LGBT students in Minnesota this year. They will push for the legislation in 2011.

“We would like to stress that the focus of this bills always has been on the kids, parents, teachers and communities that are telling us we have a real crisis that must be addressed — as evidenced by the alarming number of tragic suicides in the past year,” Dibble said in a statement. “Disappointingly, some would politicize this topic and construe it as part of the current gubernatorial race. It is with regard for the safety and success of the state’s children that we are choosing not to have the bill considered during today’s special session. Instead, we will forge ahead with efforts to make it among the priority bills of the 2011 legislative session.”

Pawlenty rebuffed efforts to bring the bill up in special session.

“Bullying is a serious issue but there’s no need to duplicate existing Minnesota law which prohibits it,” Pawlenty spokesman Bruce Gordon told MPR last week. “If the legislature wanted to improve the existing law, they could have accepted our invitation to do so last session, but they choose not to. Nevertheless, the special session should be focused only on providing disaster relief to Minnesotans in need. The legislature will reconvene in January — less than 90 days — to address other matters.”

Davnie said that rather than fight Pawlenty on the issue, they will wait until a new governor is in place in 2011.

“[T]he current Governor has been clear about his position on this topic,” Davnie added. “He vetoed it after promising to sign the bill in 2009, and he has shown no willingness to reconsider his position this time around. This issue is simply far too important to become political fodder yet again… It is important that we send a message to kids feeling isolated that someone is listening, and that we will do what we can to make it better.”

“Watch the behavior of people at an open bar versus a cash bar. It is very different. That’s all you need to know about government. If you have an open bar, you’re going to have one set of behaviors, and we’ve got to get back — at least partially — to a cash bar.”
[...]

“It’s pretty tough to be pro-job and anti-business. That’s like being pro-egg and anti-chicken. It doesn’t work so well.”

“Each time government, whether it’s through taxation, regulation or intervention into the marketplace, forcibly takes … one more piece of (a citizen’s) ability to have freedom to invest, freedom to invent, freedom to innovate, freedom to take risk, they are taking one more piece of that American dream, of human spirit, away. [...] “Patriots who see it, who understand the corrosive effects of that chipping away of the pillars of our country, need to rise up and say, ‘enough.’”

“I think Minnesotans and Iowans and others in certain parts of the Midwest have been more fortunate economically and have a little stronger base for their optimism than in other parts of the country.”

“But I’m concerned that this may plateau or we might even double-dip because the policies and the direction that the president has led us toward is wrong for what I know to be the things that make the private economy want to grow and expand.”

“When you’re dealing with bullies, they respect strength. They don’t respect weakness,” Pawlenty said of national military policy. He said the President was correct in sending troops to Afghanistan, but it took him five months to make the decision, and he’s talking about removing them next summer. “What message does that send to those who want to stand with us?”

Photo: WDCpix.com

In a matchup between President Barack Obama and Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Obama would win by ten points, according to a new St. Cloud State University poll (pdf) released Tuesday. When asked who they would vote for in 2012, 49 percent of Minnesotans surveyed said they’d support Obama, while 39.7 percent said they’d back Pawlenty.

The poll of 550 Minnesotans also found that among independents, when pushed, many are more likely to identify with the DFL (40.5 percent) than the Republican party (23.7 percent).

Just over half of Minnesotans (50.5 percent) gave President Obama a favorable rating in the poll. Gov. Tim Pawlenty didn’t fare as well, with only 48.5 percent rating his job performance as excellent or pretty good. Almost as many, 48.4 percent, rated Pawlenty’s performance as fair or poor.

The poll found that 50.3 percent of those surveyed say Obama is doing an excellent or pretty good job, but 47.4 percent rated the president’s performance as fair or poor.

Topping the list of the main issues facing the state are health care insurance at 19.6 percent, the budget deficit at 13.8 percent, education at 13.3 percent and unemployment at 12.8 percent.

Wedge issues barely registered with poll respondents with abortion at 0.8 percent, “family issues” at 0.2 percent, immigration at 0.8 percent and religious moral issues at 0.1 percent.

Overall, respondents said the state was heading in the wrong direction; 42.5 percent said the state is moving in the right direction and 43.8 said it was moving in the wrong direction. Nine percent said the state’s situation is neutral.

The poll doesn’t reveal its margin of error or polling methodology.

Negative stain EM image of the swine influenza (Wikipedia)

Minnesota has its first suspected case of the new flu that has killed more than 100 people in Mexico. The affected person, who is associated with Rocori Middle School in Cold Spring, is “recovering at home” and “is responding well,” state officials said at a news conference Wednesday morning. The person did not travel to Mexico but had contact with someone who did.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty said both the school and adjoining St. Boniface Elementary School are closed today, on the local superintendent’s orders after conferring with Pawlenty.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is testing samples from the Minnesota case and is expected to say today whether it is indeed the flu that the CDC calls “swine flu” but state officials prefer to call “H1N1 novel influenza.”

Whatever it’s called, state epidemiologist Dr. Ruth Lynfield said this influenza is “notorious for changing” — and that change could mean becoming more — or less — virulent.

Minnesota is prepared for this flu outbreak and is moving aggressively to deal with it, the officials said. The state is adding 200,000 doses of anti-viral medicine to its stockpile of 400,000 doses, and distribution to regional hospitals is beginning today. Conference calls are going on throughout the day with local public health, agencies, clinics and others throughout the state’s medical community.

Referring to the state’s stoic reputation, Lynfield said “Minnesotans don’t panic. That’s what I like about working in this state.”

Here are some of the things officials recommend that Minnesotans do:

Stay home when possible.
Stay away from people who appear to be sick
Take care of yourself.
Get adequate sleep.
Wash hands frequently, and for long enough to sing “Happy Birthday” twice.
Call your doctor if you have flu-like symptoms such as a cough and temperature.
Stay informed by visiting state and federal Web sites devoted to the outbreak.
Call the State Department of Health with questions.

Minnesotans should not do these things:

Don’t run out and purchase anti-viral medicines.
Don’t stop eating pork.
Don’t panic.

“We’re all in this together,” Lynfield said. “We will get through this.”

Just how together are we? The governor is forgoing one of his frequent out-of-state trips, cancelling a scheduled speech at Harvard University tonight. The topic of his talk was “The Need to Transform America’s Education, Healthcare and Energy Systems”

Also Friday morning, Gov. Tim Pawlenty questioned the Minnesota Supreme Court order under which the rival campaigns can veto the counting of votes on any of about 1,350 absentee ballots that election officials have determined should have been counted.

The court is expected to rule soon on Coleman’s Dec. 31 demand that the process for counting wrongfully rejected absentee ballots be halted and rejiggered to let the campaigns propose a new round of rejected ballots to be reconsidered. 

Meanwhile, counties must turn in any ballots the campaigns have agreed may be counted to the secretary of state’s office by the end of the day, with opening and tallying of those votes planned for the weekend, barring a new Supreme Court order that blocks it. The State Canvassing Board could then certify a winner early next week.

U of M professor Prentiss Cox, a former assistant attorney general who helped create the bill with Sen. Ellen Anderson (DFL-St. Paul), says Pawlenty’s reasons for killing the bill are short-sighted. “This is a false allegation in this context, in my opinion,” Cox says. “There is no substantial subprime or negative amortization mortgage credit being issued to homeowners right now. A law can’t have an impact on credit that doesn’t exist.”

The bill would’ve required homeowners with a subprime or negative amortization loan originated before August 1, 2007 to pay either 65 percent of the payments due when the loan defaulted, or the minimum monthly payment when the mortgage was first created, whichever is less, for a one-year foreclosure-deferment period.

The bill’s originators created the plan as a stop-gap to state foreclosures before the federal government implements a solution to the growing crisis. It would’ve been the only law in a series of subrpime-crisis legislation that would provide relief to homeowners in the foreclosure process. So far, Minnesota has been at the forefront of creating anti-predatory-lending laws that make certain types of mortgages illegal and require tougher standards for mortgage brokers.

“This notion that lenders will refuse to make financially sensible mortgage loans of a different character in the future based on Minnesota helping subprime borrowers now can accurately be described as a threat of class warfare,” Cox says. “It may make good, if divisive, politics — inciting fear in the affluent against homeowners in need — but it doesn’t make sense from a market perspective. And such threats, which are consistently made against any proposed laws designed to help consumers in the financial services area, have a track record of being wrong.”

Pawlenty is no stranger to the mortgage industry. During the 2006 election, his top contributors came from the real-estate sector. Those who listed their employers as commercial banks make up Pawlenty’s third-largest group of donors.

The article author, Amy Merrick, writes that “if the governor takes a higher profile in the presidential election, amid a widespread housing crisis, a veto of the deferment plan could be portrayed as insensitive to homeowners.”

Critics of the legislation, Pawlenty included, believe the bill would cause the cost of credit to increase. DFL leaders say a late compromise put the legislation in line with the governor’s goals.

“This legislation now allows lenders to choose whether to negotiate with a home owner or to allow the deferral to go forward. This legislation strikes a fair balance between the rights of legitimate lenders and the need to help home owners who were victims of predatory lenders,” said Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller, DFL-Minneapolis.

Pawlenty has until Monday, June 2, to sign the legislation.

The McCain campaign is denying that they will be vetting potential running mates over the weekend and says this is just a friendly get-together. Other notable McCain allies and invitees include Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.; Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.; and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

The absence of our own potential McCain runningmate, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, has not gone unnoticed. Politico’s Johnathan Martin reports that Pawlenty was included on the original guest list in March, but will be unable to attend due to a scheduling conflict. Fred Thompson, hardly a vice-presidential front runner, was also a McCain guest in Sedona last month, suggesting that McCain may be more focused on maintaining party unity at this point than who his future running mate will be.