July 14, 2018 .
The headlined quote, in context:
Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson, also running for the Republican nomination for governor in the Aug. 14 primary, said Pawlenty’s immigration emphasis is a poll-tested play for the GOP electorate.
“If [Pawlenty] is talking about it, that means it’s polling well,” Johnson said, citing $96,000 the Pawlenty campaign spent on polls in recent months, according to state campaign filings. Johnson said in a news conference last week that one of his first actions as governor would be to fly to Washington to tell the Trump administration that Minnesota is no longer accepting refugees.
As governor, Pawlenty, who served from 2003 to 2011, sent the Minnesota National Guard to the southern border to help combat illegal immigration and proposed legislation and signed executive orders meant to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants to Minnesota.
DFL critics say Pawlenty’s focus on immigration, then and now, are attempts to distract voters from his record on issues like education, health care and the $6 billion budget deficit that existed when he left office.
[...] “This is the Pawlenty playbook,” said Javier Morillo, the president of Service Employees International Union Local 26. Morillo supports U.S. Rep. Tim Walz in the DFL race for governor.
“Whenever his poll numbers would go down, he would come up with something divisive,” Morillo said. In the Trump era, Morillo said, Pawlenty is using the same approach “on steroids.”
While Pawlenty tries to win over voters loyal to Trump, he could alienate suburbanites and business interests who are more open to immigration and much less likely to support the Trump administration’s child separation policy. Pawlenty said he opposed that.
“The Republican establishment is pretty powerful and they’re rooted in the business community, and they’ve taken a pro-immigration stance,” said Ryan Allen, a professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs who published a 2017 report positing that Minnesota needs immigrants if the state is to meet its labor shortage. That report was commissioned by a group that included the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce and Greater MSP.
Between 2007 and the first half of 2017, Minnesota became home to more than 21,000 refugees, with nearly 80 percent to either Hennepin or Ramsey counties. Although Somali refugees have received much of the attention from local and national media, nearly as many refugees came from Burma during that time.
“Many Minnesotans are understandably concerned with the tremendous cost this influx of refugees brings with it,” Johnson said.
Johnson also referred to concerns about security. The state has seen more than 30 defendants charged in Al-Shabab and ISIS-related cases in the past decade, although some were native-born American citizens — often of Somali descent — not Somali refugees.
Like Johnson, Pawlenty has called for a moratorium on refugee resettlement. This is a change in approach from when he was governor: In a 2004 letter to the Minnesota congressional delegation seeking funding to support 5,000 Hmong refugees, Pawlenty described the immigrants as “resourceful, they value education, and they believe strongly in family and community.”
The dilemma of Pawlenty: Either insincere about the Hmong voters, or now insincere in his immigrant bashing, exists as a characterization of Pawlenty which arguably is too narrow; in that he might simply be insincere about most everything besides Congress existing to serve the bankers for whom Pawlenty dutifully lobbied over the recent better part of his life, the paycheck being great and the duties fit to the character of the man.
_______________UPDATE________________
While arguably out of place on a post primarily about Pawlenty; there is recent Slate reporting from New Orleans:
Jaguar Escapes Enclosure in New Orleans Zoo, Kills Six Animals, Injures Three
A male jaguar somehow managed to slip out of its habitat at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans early Saturday morning, killing six animals and injuring three others. The three-year-old jaguar, Valerio, escaped at around 7:20 a.m. and it took almost an hour before the zoo’s veterinarian staff managed to sedate him and return him back to his quarters at around 8:15 a.m. By the time he had been recaptured, Valiero had killed four alpaca, one emu, and one fox. He also injured another alpaca and two foxes.
[...] The zoo immediately dismissed the idea of euthanizing Valerio because he didn’t act out of the ordinary for a jaguar. “He was doing what jaguars do. His behavior wasn’t out of the ordinary for that kind of animal. Just a normal jaguar as far as we’re concerned,” said Joe Hamilton, vice president and general curator at the zoo. The zoo’s doctor, Frank Burks, explained that “it was most likely a territorial situation.”
In a Facebook post earlier this year, the Audubon Zoo described Valerio as “incredibly smart” and said his care staff described him as a “big lovable goofball.”
A "Sam's Club Jaguar" might be a term coming to mind, for some.