Growing up isn’t easy.  Actually, it’s very easy because every day you get a bit older whether you like it or not – it’s just not a lot of fun.

Congress, always the antonym of progress, received yesterday a stern lecture from a representative of Standard & Poors (aka Poor Standards) on just what happens when your credit rating is slashed and how it can be avoided.  It appears that they successfully obtained adult supervision before doing something very stupid, which is to say doing nothing against the 2 August default deadline.

On the same day that the Greek debt crisis appears to have been ended this might actually be a cause for celebration.  Of course, something like a big party is how everyone got into these messes in the first place, so it’ll be a quiet affair.

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A deal to end the Minnesota shutdown is still being hammered out, but the broad agreement is clear – it’s not going to be anything but a punt until the next one.  We all expected that left and right would both hate the compromise, but in a stunning twist both sides hate the deal for the same reason – it’s all gimmicks and passes on real reform.

No one reasonably expected major reform in this bill, given the late hour, but there isn’t even the promise of any later on down the road.  That means it’s up to us, the citizens of Minnesota, to push for something before next January.

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The Minnesota state shutdown is dragging on with no end in sight. The sides aren’t meeting and Gov. Dayton is on a tour of the state to make his case. While there still hasn’t been a good poll on how the public feels, there are increasing signs that it is playing out much as I predicted last Friday. But at that time I didn’t include an endgame or a solution to the process. A few events and observations have led me to speculate on not just how this should end but how it could go down.

The answer is, as it always is, to get very real. There’s little substitute for leadership, and nothing creates leadership like a difficult time.

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Minnesota government has been shut down for a week now.  The State’s budget runs on a fiscal year starting July 1st and there was no agreement on how to proceed.  So it ended there, all but the most essential services ordered to stay in operation by the courts.

How will this end?  What will it mean over the long haul?  It is still far too early to say anything for sure because it has yet to play out completely.  The Independence Day holiday has made reliable polling nearly impossible so far, so we can’t even use that measure.  In place of anything intelligent there is always spin.  I’ll add a little conjecture to that and you can judge me on it later.

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