Morning Hot Dish newsletter

Good morning. Another beautiful day. Here's an idea: If enough of you go to Lake Mille Lacs and spend some money, maybe we won't have to do a special session to save the tourism business there.

Gov. Mark Dayton said it's government's job to help people in urgent need who are in their predicament through no fault of their own, so back to session we go to give 100 tourism related businesses loans, tax abatements and more advertising to help shore them up in the walleye crisis. I asked him during the news conference if state government would step up for struggling newspapers. His response: "I'll propose a ban on gill netting of journalists, if that helps."

Here's the story. And some debate on the op-ed page.

Dayton is headed to the region Friday. Today he's with staff and commissioners and then at a nurses association BBQ to celebrate 50 years of Medicare. (Thanks, YouTube: Reagan on Medicare.)

Standardized test scores were stagnant this year, with the achievement gap persistent. Look for this to be an issue next year, or one would hope anyway.

All your lion-killing Bloomington dentist news.

Dan Browning reports the Chamber will lobby to stop disability access lawsuits whose only purpose, they charge, are plaintiff attorney fees.

Grassley has a pork problem.

Jeff Johnson will chair the Rubio campaign here.

Clinton to the Benghazi committee on the Hill in October. (Prediction: The emails are the Whitewater of her presidency, if she has one.)

Do you follow @dick_nixon on Twitter? Well you should. The guy is spot on and often offers the most trenchant political commentary around, and in real time. Turns out the man doing the likeness is a playwright who spent years going through the tapes to master the Nixon voice and worldview. And he's done it. Great profile in the Post. (By the way his candidate is Kasich.)

I knew I was missing something lately: Nate Silver's analysis. Fret not, Republicans, Silver argues (as usual, with plenty of data) that Trump isn't actually that popular despite the recent jump in the polls. He has a strong coterie of passionate admirers (20 percent, and many or most are low-information voters) but no one else likes him. Silver likens him to the band Nickelback. That seems about right in so many ways.