The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Minnesota is staring deep into an ever-widening abyss that, unfortunately, has gone from staring blankly back to a potentially $7 billion glare. And to find solutions to address the monumental clusterfuck that has become our state budget, the DFL held listening meetings across the state this past week looking for a magic bullet lodged in the minds of the "common people."

In other words, they're crowdsourcing the deficit.

During Gov. Pawlenty's state of the state address, in a nod to the era of post-Obama bipartisanship, he made a point to mention that "...today, we're not Democrats. We're not Republicans. We're Minnesotans."

Eventful barely begins to describe the year that was 2008. There was, of course, the ongoing fiction that Minnesota was ever a battleground state during the presidential election, and the RNC taking place in Minneapolis, er...Saint Paul. But even stripping away the millions of dollars and the monstrous steaming piles of carefully worded bullscheiss funneled into the state and strewn across the landscape like so many cow pies by the national politicos leaves us with a startling patchwork of transcendence and frustration on the local political scene.

"Embrace the challenge of the deficit!" Thus spake our own Macho Man Marty Seifert, exhorting Minnesotans to recognize the 5.2 billion blessings dropped on us by the fiscal Wrestlemania brought on by the spectacular failure known as mortgage backed securities.

For those of you lulled into complacency by auspicious recent events such as Britney's brief flirtation with lucidity, it's important to note that, not only is the entertainment industry still pumping out fucking loons at a heretofore unheard of pace, but our politicians are providing ample evidence of a world view so profoundly divorced from reality that it's likely

Like Jabba the Hutt, whose only purpose was to give George Lucas an excuse to put Princess Leia in a slave bikini, this year’s $1 billion budget deficit seems only to exist to further divide a legislature already spoiling for a fight. And much like the epic struggle between Empire and the Rebellion, the battles are pretty damn fun to watch, but the fallout is pretty painful for