Minnesota governor refuses to appoint State mime
Gov. Tim Pawlenty rejected a bill that was overwhelmingly passed by the Legislature that would have allowed him to appoint a poet laureate after receiving recommendations from the nonprofit Minnesota Humanities Commission.
The laureate would have been called on to provide verse for 'appropriate ceremonies and celebrations' of the state, such as the 2008 sesquicentennial. No state money would have gone with the job.
In a veto message signed Friday and announced Tuesday, however, Pawlenty said he saw no need for such a position.
'We can benefit from the richness and diversity of all of the poets in Minnesota and recognize and embrace their work as merit and circumstances warrant,' he said.
He also suggested that the measure could lead to "requests for a state mime, interpretive dancer or potter."
What an old meanie.
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2 comments:
We have had four poet laureates here in IL, with the first being Carl Sandburg in 1936.
Somehow in all that time we have never needed a state mime.
I think Pawlenty is trying to head off an embarassing situation such as the one here in NJ, where a hideously anti-Semitic poet who wrote a poem about 9/11 which asked "
why did the Jews all stay away," might have something to do with it.
It takes a lot to embarass a NJ politician, but he managed it.
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