Minnesota House passes stadium deal; Senate up next

The Vikings welfare train is rolling.

The Minnesota Vikings have agreed to spend $477 million —$50 million more than they had planned — to get a new stadium under a deal that was given final House approval around 3:30 Thursday morning.

Senate approves Vikings stadium with a raft of changes, differences

The corporate welfare bill now goes to a House-Senate conference committee to resolve differences.

President Obama affirms his support for same-sex "marriage"

Dog bites man. From ABC:

President Obama today announced that he now supports same-sex marriage, reversing his longstanding opposition amid growing pressure from the Democratic base and even his own vice president.

In an interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts, the president described his thought process as an “evolution” that led him to this place, based on conversations with his own staff members, openly gay and lesbian service members, and conversations with his wife and own daughters.

...

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own. But he said he’s confident that more Americans will grow comfortable with gays and lesbians getting married, citing his own daughters’ comfort with the concept.

Voter anger sweeps Europe

From the Wall Street Journal:

French voters elected Socialist Party candidate François Hollande as president Sunday, choosing a national leader who has pledged to shift the burden of economic hardship onto the rich and to resolve the protracted euro sovereign-debt crisis by softening the current prescription of austerity.

With his victory over conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in the second and final round of voting, Mr. Hollande—France's first Socialist president in 17 years—won a mandate to challenge German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has imposed spending cuts as the main remedy to repair the public finances of heavily indebted European countries.

Mr. Hollande's first steps will have big implications. Both recession and unemployment are spreading across the 17-country monetary union, fueling doubts among voters, politicians and economists about the wisdom of slashing public spending in a downturn, which Ms. Merkel and others say is necessary to restore confidence in euro-zone public finances.

The growing malaise was also reflected Sunday in Greece, where voters delivered a stinging rejection of the two incumbent parties, with many people casting ballots for smaller, far-left and far-right parties.

In Germany, Ms. Merkel's coalition of Christian Democrats and pro-business Free Democrats suffered defeat in a closely watched state election in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein Sunday, suggesting Ms. Merkel's options for ruling beyond 2013 are narrowing.

...

Mr. Hollande—the first Socialist president since François Mitterrand, who served from 1981 to 1995—has promised to continue efforts by Mr. Sarkozy to reduce the government's budget deficit. But Mr. Hollande has said he would ask wealthy households to contribute more.

"We will bring back Europe on a track for jobs, growth and the future," Mr. Hollande said in a victory speech from the town of Tulle in central France where he was mayor. "We're no longer doomed to austerity."

Well, no longer doomed to planned austerity, perhaps.

House approves stadium bill

The spirit of corporate welfare is alive and well. Previous claims of austerity were exaggerated.

The House bill does increase the Vikings' share of the project from previous plans from $427M to $532M, lowering the state's share to $293M, a change the team does not support, although it is unclear that it would torpedo the new stadium. The City of Minneapolis would kick in $150M.

From the StarTribune:

The Minnesota Vikings won a decisive and long-awaited political victory late Monday when the House passed a public subsidy package for a new stadium, sending the project marching toward final passage at the State Capitol. ...

The final vote came after a day of high drama and a weekend of intense lobbying by Gov. Mark Dayton and the team, and produced a relatively easy 73-to-58 approval in the House. ...

The stadium project now goes before the Senate, possibly on Tuesday, and could be ready for Dayton to sign into law by the end of the week.

(HHT: BMTN)

Oklahoma supreme court rules personhood effort "is clearly unconstitutional"

From The Blaze/AP:

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Monday halted an effort to grant “personhood” rights to human embryos, saying the measure is "void on its face."

The state’s highest court ruled unanimously that a proposed amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution that would define a fertilized human egg as a person violates a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving a Pennsylvania case and “is clearly unconstitutional.” Supporters of the personhood amendment are trying to gather enough signatures to put it before Oklahoma voters on the November ballot.

The ruling is the latest setback for abortion opponents who have been pursuing personhood measures in several states. In December, a judge in Nevada ruled that a personhood initiative petition was vague and could not be circulated for signatures to qualify for the 2012 ballot. Similar personhood proposals were defeated last year in Mississippi and Colorado.

Occupy movement returns

In the Twin Cities, it seems nothing happened (at least as of 5 PM). Meanwhile in New York, the Occupy movement kicked off its “spring awakening” in Bryant Park with a scaled down version of last fall's Occupy Wall Street, including "free food, a skills exchange, and plenty of noise and soap-box style rhetoric."

From the Christian Science Monitor:

In New York, Protest organizers said that the goal of the day, aside from much of the anticorporate rhetoric, was to show that it was back after a relatively dormant winter.


“We want to displace the narrative that this is a fad and disappearing,” says Mark Bray, a spokesman for the Occupy movement. “We want to show that we are building a long-term social movement.”

Update:

Oh, I guess OccupyMN was out and about yesterday.