Author Archives: Mitch Berg

Everyone’s A Minstrel

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You know what I can’t stand?  Chinese violin and piano players.  [1]

The violin (as we understand the instrument today) and especially the piano are utterly western inventions.  They are utterly inseparable with the development of western music, and thus art, and thus culture. 

Ditto Japanese blues guitarists, and Arabic hip-hop artists and African opera singers, and the like.   [2]

When, say, Asian or African or Arabic people put on tuxedoes and sit in philharmonic orchestras, and do art assocated with western civilization, while not being actual westerners who grew up thoroughly marinated in the culture, they are essentially playing in “whiteface”, pretending to be western.  They have no concept of these artifacts of western culture - they don’t gather for jam session in garages, they don’t sit on street corners in the Bronx, they don’t know the feeling of Renaissance-era Italy. 

“Wait”, you say – “adopting parts of other languages and cultures into one’s own is an essential part of humanity!”

Huh.

OK.  I guess you could say so. 

But tell it to this joyless slagathor at the apparently-racist, nativist rag Salon.  Who has, by the way, adopted a form of communication – the “opinion piece” – that is not native to her ethnic culture.  Why is she turning my culture into a white-face minstrel show?  [3]

[1] Not really . This is satire.

[2] See 1, above.

[3] It’s her logic, not mine.

In The Wake…

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…of the Instapundit straw poll that showed a convincing (if meaningless) lead for a ticket I’ve quietly dreamed about, I figure that’s an idea I should copy.

So here we go; the first Shot In The Dark Straw Poll.

(and not likely the last one of this campaign).

Who would you like to see running for President?

Who do you support for the GOP Nomination for President in 2016?
  
pollcode.com free polls 

Polls open until probably tomorrow sometime.

The Global Carbon Credit

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota is having the worst winter in 30 years.  Meanwhile, Australia just had its hottest Summer.  Plainly, the Aussies are no allies: they’re heat thieves.  They’ve stolen our global warming and I, for one, want it back.

I say we invade at once, at least through April; then we can call it off and be home in time for the fishing opener.

Joe Doakes

Minnesotans who are that upset about weather could at least rehearse an invasion…

Beneficiaries

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Got this via email:

Who benefits the most from a minimum wage increase?

Here are some back of an envelope calculations:
40 hrs a week X 52 weeks = 2080 hrs

FICA: employee tax = 6.2%, employer = 6.2%, total 12.4%
SECA: employee = 1.45%, employer 1.45% total 2.9%

total FICA/SECA combined = 15.3%

current govt take
2080 x $7.25 = $15,080.00 x 0.153 = $2,307.24

proposed govt take
2080 x $10.10 =$21,008.00 x 0.153 = $3,214.224

Net gain for govt = $906.984

now just for fun lets index the minimum wage to the rate of inflation, who else gets an automatic raise with that?

Government Union members!

Things I’m Supposed To Like But Can’t Stand: The B-52s

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I first heard about the B-52s in probably tenth grade.

“They’re so fun!”, I was told.  ”They’re, like, a party band!”

I was directed to listen to “Rock Lobster”.  They were indeed a party band.

I hated party bands. And I hated the B52s.

“But Mitch!”, you might respond, “how could you possibly hate the B-52s?  They were fun!”

Music wasn’t supposed to be fun.  Not to me, anyway. I was an over-tall, under-coordinated, anti-popular kid, a fish-out-of-water, sick of high school cliques and pecking orders, all hormoned-up with no place to go, already banging my head against the bars of small-town life.

Music for me was about channelling explosive adolescent rage.  I listened to the Who, and the Clash and Generation X and the Sex Pistols (and the bleeding passion of Beethoven and the crusader-esque purposefulness of Händel and the over the top expressionism of Tchaikowski, for that matter), and Springsteen in my rare introspective moments.  For me, music wasn’t about dancing; it was about breaking things and people, and furious adolescent angst.  The sound in my imagination at age 15 was me windmilling an open A5 chord on a Les Paul Standard through four Marshall stacks cranked to 11.  No wussy third tones.  No subtlety.  No shelter.  Certainly no murtha-farging “parties”.  Just pure un-subtle angry noise, blowing away the things that broke my heart and the lies that left me lost and brokenhearted…

…whatever they were.    It was a song, so they weren’t so much something I “knew” as “felt”. 

And I didn’t feel “party”. 

But I’m digressing.

The B-52s?  Yeah, they were “fun”.  And I was not.  I was very, very un-fun.  They played intentionally cheesed-up Farfisa organs, and I was all about the teeth-clenched throb of a Hammond B3 through an overdriven Leslie speaker.   They were lightweight, eggheaded college kids, and I was not.  They went to parties, and God knows I was never invited to parties.  Screw ‘em.

Oh, yeah.  Lead singer Fred Schneider’s voice annoyed the bejeebers out of me.  No, it wasn’t “homophobia”; at that age, I literally didn’t know what “gay” meant (and even if I did know what it meant?  I loved Freddy Mercury’s voice).   I didn’t actually know that guys could dig guys until college.  (Note to my 3-4 high school friends who, it turns out, were gay?  Even though you were all the girls’ best friends, and you actually did sit by the piano before play practice playing show tunes?  Hand to God, never figured it out until after high school.  And figuring it out didn’t make me like y’all any less – or show tunes any more).  So no, it wasn’t that Schneider was gay, even if I had known at the time what that meant.  No, it was that his voice annoyed me like few other sounds ever have.  I could literally listen to fingernails scraping on chalkboards all day long – but Schneider’s voice sent me racing for the volume knob.   And it still does.

But time went on.  My tastes in music broadened.  I lived a little more life.  Moved to the big city, started a career, ended a career, maybe mellowed out ever so slightly, knocked around, worked in bars…

…when “Love Shack” came out:

Nope. Still hated the B-52s. Part of it was residual disdain for “Party…” anything.

Part of it was that I had to play the damn song so ungodly often. I was at KDWB at the time; we’d play it every couple of hours on the air. Then I’d work my money gig, at the bars, and play it at least once a night, 4-6 nights a week, sometimes more. But then I played a lot of music way too much back then; I actually bought a car that had no radio, I was so sick of music.

But even with that context, the B52s still annoyed me half to death.  That voice.  That beat.  That contrived retro-sixies triviality.  Blech. 

And they still do.

Except for anything involving Kate Pierson.

Then, all is forgiven.

That is all.

All Those “Jazzy Terms”

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In Minnesota, if you are accused of a drug-related crime but not convicted, you can lose any property that the police and prosecutors say was used for the crime.

Seems prone to abuse to you?

It does to a lot of people.  There’s a bill to try to fix that in the Legislature – to require convictions before forfeiting property.

It’s getting flak from “Law Enforcement” and “Prosecutors”.

Guess why (emphasis added)?

Backers say the state’s civil forfeiture laws are long overdue for a little due process. The laws have become a growing source of cash for law enforcement agencies and were famously abused by the now-defunct Metro Gang Strike Force, which paid out $840,000 in settlements to ­victims who had their property illegally seized.

I suspect if you asked a whooooole lot of people on the street what the standard was, they’d say “conviction”.  They’d be wrong.

Under current law, police or sheriffs can keep property, vehicles and cash seized in drug cases or drive-by shootings — regardless of the outcome of the criminal case. If a suspect is found not guilty, they can still lose their property in civil court unless they can prove it was not involved in a crime. The bill would require prosecutors to return the property if there is no criminal conviction associated with the seizure.

And when I explain this to people who don’t follow these sorts of things, they’re non-plussed.  Then, frequently, upset; you’re not actually “innocent until proven guilty”:

 You have a kid who starts dealing a little weed?  And he gets on the County Attorney’s radar to the point where the prosecutor decides to try to squeeze him and those close to him to get to someone else?

Adios, property.

But it’s for the children.  Er, I mean, for law enforcement!

Lee McGrath, executive director of the Institute for Justice’s ­Minnesota chapter, said that between 2003 and 2010, law enforcement agencies supplemented their budgets with $30 million gained through forfeitures. That, McGrath said, represents a 75 percent increase despite a small drop in the crime rate. The bill has received broad bipartisan support.

And who opposes the bill?

[County Attorneys Association] Executive Director John Kingrey said his organization supports fairness and transparency in the state’s forfeiture laws, but that the bill is ripe for abuse.

“Drug dealers are smart people,” Kingrey said. “One of the challenges we have is we walk in the door with cocaine and $10,000 sitting on the table, with five guys saying ‘That’s not mine.’ Four of them get convicted, and the fifth guy says ‘That money was mine, I wasn’t convicted, give me the dough.’ ”

Good heavens.  That might require the county attorneys to do their jobs.

I’m going to emphasize this next bit:

It’s not just money, Kingrey said. Acquittals could also put guns back on the street.

Does anyone need to have this translated?  “Being found not guilty of a crime means people might get their property back?”

Anyway – they’re all lawyers, so the truth will be found under many interlocking layers of bullshit.  And here it is:

“Conviction is a very jazzy term, but it’s more nuanced,” Kingrey said.

“Conviction” may be jazzy.

“Innocent until proven guilty” is an AC/DC riff, plain and loud and unadorned and unmistakeable.  No conviction, no forfeiture.

Cut the weasel words, County Attorneys.  You’re running a licence to print money, and you don’t want the peasants to mess with a good thing.

There Once Was A President From Nantucket

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The President was in Saint Paul last week. Did Saint Paul Poet Laureate Carol Connolly memorialize the occasion with an epic poem? Why didn’t I hear about it?

Joe Doakes

Ms. Connolly was unable to write the poem; she is apparently non-union.

I’m going to cross the artistic picket line:

“The President rode on the train,
Debarked, and made for his plane.
As he left on his trip,
the train it did flip,
As if it were financed by Bain.

I live to serve.

Talkin’ Bout NARN Generation!

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Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

  • I’m in the studio today from 1-3.  I’ll be talking with Rob Doar of the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance about this years outlook for the Second Amendment in the Legislature.  I’ll also talk with Sheriff Joe Arpaio.  Tune in!
  • Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
  • Tomorrow,  Brad Carlson is on “The Closer”!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

Join us!

Strib: “Look At All That Money!”

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You know me.

You know I believe that the Strib is – and at the highest level, sees itself – as a PR arm for the DFL.

I don’t think I’ve left a whole lot of you wondering about my beliefs about Minnesota’s Newspaper of Record.

But I never figured the business section’s Neal Saint Anthony would turn into a stenographoer for Alida Messinger, too.

But one of my last little outposts of pollyannaism about theStrib’ssense of detachment has been the business section, especially Neal Saint Anthony.

I was wrong, of course:

Nearly half of the tax cuts Gov. Mark Dayton proposed Thursday are for businesses and their owners, a move that may reduce the anti-business criticism that has dogged him.

 Dayton proposed — and the House almost immediately passed — eliminating three business-sales taxes that accounted for $232 million in his overall $616 million in tax cuts.

 He also asked lawmakers to simplify and raise the estate tax deduction to $2 million from $1 million and to eliminate the gift tax, a 10 percent levy on any personal gift above $1 million. Those moves would cut $43 million in taxes, bringing the combined cut on businesses and the wealthy to $275 million, or 44 percent of the total.

So let’s get this straight:

  • In 2013, the DFL went on a taxing orgy, jacking up taxes by a net $2 Billion.  With the economy still moving forward after a decade of Republican control, revenues actually went up $3 Billion.  That’s an extra $600 taken out of the productive economy for every man, woman and child in Minneosta.   This orgy of larceny was treated with kid gloves by the Minnesota media. 
  • In 2014, the DFL proposes “giving” a few hundred million of those three billion dollars “back”.    This “gift” is being greeted with saturation media coverage, in a key election year in which – mirabile dictu – the DFL is in dire need of a PR win. 

Why, it’s almost as if a cynic might expect to dig back into the “hypothetical” Minnesota version of Journo-List and find a conversation between key DFL operatives and the major Twin Cities media figures saying “we’ll grab all the taxes we can first; keep mum about it.  We’ll give some back next year; make a huge deal about it.  And for God’s sake, never talk about MNSure!”. 

But that’d be cynical, wouldn’t it?

Same As It Ever Was

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The other day, a pack of the usual crowd of waxy yellow Leftyblog and Leftytweet buildup  teased themselves to ecstasy over this photo:

It’s a group of “Trail Life” boys – from a breakaway sect of Boy Scouts that bars openly gay members – “giving a Nazi salute” as they recited their creed. 

Except it wasn’t:

But it turns out that the boys were not saluting Hitler and contrary to the first Associated Press caption, they were not reciting a creed. The boys were singing “Taps,” a longtime Boy Scout tradition that the Texas Trail USA troop had adapted as their own.

The boys had gathered in a circle with their hands raised straight into the air. They gradually lowered their hands as they sang the song. It concludes with their hands flush against their side.

“It really misrepresented what was going on,” [John Stemberger, chairman of the board of Trail Life] told me. “There are children involved and that made it more outrageous. They were exploited and misunderstood.”

The picture accompanied what was actually apparently a relatively fair story.

But when it comes to the un-PC, “fair” isn’t part of the left’s playbook. 

Read the whole thing.

The Left’s War On Blacks And Women

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The Rutgers Faculty Clique has, er, blackballed Condoleeza Rice from speaking at the Rutgers commencement.

Juan Williams, at least, sees the hypocrisy:

I, too, disagreed with many of the policies Rice faithfully supported as a member of the Bush administration. But only partisan hatred can blind the faculty to her extraordinary level of accomplishment for herself and her country.

Rice is smart, disciplined, hard-working and the model of an inspiring modern American. She personifies the American Dream. She is living inspiration for a young person trying to accomplish great work no matter what the barriers. And in Rice’s generation there were some serious barriers starting with her race and gender.

And Williams – who, let us recall, is an unapologetic liberal – notes that this frothing intolerance isn’t aimed just at black, female and black female politicians:

There is an added element at play here. There is a disgraceful double standard amongst liberals, particularly those in academia, in the hatred they direct at black conservatives.

We saw this last April when the conservative neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson was forced to step down as a Commencement Speaker for Johns Hopkins University (where he ably served as the head of pediatric neurosurgery).

Liberals on the Hopkins campus mobilized against Carson because he criticized President Obama’s health care reform law and said that he opposed gay marriage.

Hate eventually backfires.

The media and the academic establishment are going to do what they can to forestall this, obviously – but hate does eventually consume its owner.

And when people – especially blacks, women, and black women – see that one of our parties has been trying to program them for a couple of generations now, hopefully it’ll backfire with a vengeance.

Let’s Try A “Thought” Experiment

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Find one of your children.

Wait for when it’s super cold out – like, below zero.

Soak them with a super-soaker.  Then force them outside, and don’t let them back in the house, or any cars, or into the neighbors’ houses.

When (hopefully) someone calls the cops, you’ll be thrown into jail for child endangerment.  And you should be.

Because “idiot” wouldn’t describe it – but “evil” pretty much would.

Most of you have no doubt seen this story; a Saint Paul middle school forced a junior high kid to wait outside, in a swimsuit and towel, in -2 weather and -25 wind chill.   There’d been a fire drill while she was in the pool, and the teachers didn’t let her go to her locker, grab a coat, or anything but a towel (emphasis added):

[The girl] asked to wait inside an employee’s car, or at the elementary school across the street. But administrators believed that this would violate official policy, and could get the school in trouble, so they opted to simply let the girl freeze.

Let’s try to go through the “minds” of these hamsters:  Given a choice to “violate policy” and “endanger a child’s health and safety”, the kid got chucked under a bus.

What does it say that a bunch of junior high kids are smarter, and have more moral clarity, than their administrators?

Her fellow classmates, at least, huddled around her to try to keep her warm. And one teacher did eventually lend her a coat.

There should be arrests.  Idiot school administrators should be frog-walked out of their building in handcuffs.   Their mug shots should be splashed all over the TV, so parents can keep their children away.   Licenses should be slowly torn into long, thin strips.

But that’ll never happen.

The Wind Beneath The Right Wing

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I mentioned it on the air last Saturday – because that’s when I’m on the air! – but today, March 6, is the actual tenth anniversary of the first Northern Alliance Radio Network broadcast.

I think it was John Hinderaker who predicted the show would probably go about three weeks before AM1280 kicked us off the air.  By the end of that first day, I think everyone was amazed at how fast that first three hours had gone.

The NARN has changed a lot over the years, of course; as befits an outpost in the bumptious, fractious alternative media, there’ve really been a bunch of different incarnations of the NARN:

  1. 2004-2006 – the original three-hour show, with Brian Ward, Chad Doughty, King Banaian, Ed Morrissey, John Hinderaker and me (along with Scott Johnson ’til 2005, JB Doubtless for a couple months, and Atomizer for exactly one segment).
  2. 2006-2010:  The station gave us an extra hour – so we split into two different shows; John Hinderaker, Brian Ward and Chad Doughty from 11-1, and Ed, King and me from 1-3PM.  A little later that year, AM1280 had two more hours became available – so King joined Michael Brodkorb from 3-5PM.
  3. 2010 to Today:  Chad and Michael left the show, for family and political career respectively; Brian and John followed sometime over the winter because…well, it’s a long story.   King moved to AM1570 around the time he decided to run for the Legislature, and stayed there.  Brad Carlson joined a little over two years ago, and Ed left in November of 2012.  Which is where we’re at now – Brad, King and me.   For now.

You know why I love doing the NARN?    I’ll tell you.

I worked – full-or part time depending on the station, but always as my primary career - in the radio business from 1979 to 1992, off and on.  And I learned that the radio industry in general is one of very few businesses that can not look used car salesmen, sports and music agents, entertainment industry lawyers or pimps in the eye with even the faintest air of judgment.   I say “in general”, because Salem Twin Cities is a huge exception, and I’d say that even if they hadn’t been letting me use their station for two hours a week for the past decade.   But in general?  The radio industry is one of the scuzziest industries in the world.

But there is almost nothing in the world more fun than talking with an audience on the radio.  Don Vogel once talked with me about the “Talk Radio Bug”, a subtle addiction to reaching out to an audience, and having them reach back, to putting a point out there and fielding challenges to it from whatever random assortment of drunks, cranks, and brilliant people happen to call in to talk with you.

So for the past decade, I’ve really had the best of both worlds; all the fun, but none of the misery of trying to earn a living and raise a family working in one of the world’s nastiest, most dysfunctional businesses.

But as I said, Salem is a whole different thing.   For starters, think about the gamble they took – putting seven guys, most of whom hadn’t done radio, two of whom hadn’t done it in at least a decade, on the air without any particular guidance or creative leash (or, for a while there, a dump button of any kind).   And then staying with it for a decade, through three different management regimes.

Anyway – thanks to Salem; to the three general managers (John Hunt, Ron Stone and Nik Anderson) and the three operations/program managers (Patrick Campion, Nick Novak and Lee Michaels) who’ve kept putting us on the air.

And to the producers who’ve made us sound less bad than we should have; the late, great Joe Hansen in the beginning, followed by Irina Malanina, Matt Reynolds, Sam Holmgren, Jon Osburn, Tommy Huynh, and, today, Maegan Fatale (and a few others tucked in there from time to time in between).

And of course, a million thanks to Atomizer, JB, Michael, Chad, Brian, John, Scott, King and Ed – nine random guys with blogs, seven of whom I’d met exactly twice before ten years ago today, who went on to become some of my best friends. 

And that is ten years well-spent.

Marketing

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Southern Baptist Church doing whatever it takes to get the heathens in the pews.

Joe Doakes

“Those who built on the wall, and those who carried burdens loaded themselves so that with one hand they worked at construction, and with the other held a weapon. Every one of the builders had his sword girded at his side as he built” (Nehemiah 4:17-18).

I guess that’s a form of constitutional carry…

Tax Cuts!

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SCENE:  Mitch BERG is picking up cat food at the grocery store.  Avery LIBRELLE, carrying a case of kombucha, walks past, sees BERG, and stops. 

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!   University Avenue is about to get a $1.4 Billion dollar tax cut!

BERG:  (Looking for a graceful way out) Um, what now?

LIBRELLE:  The Green Line light rail is rebating 1.4 billion dollars worth of local, state and federal taxes to the consumer of Saint Paul!

BERG:  Um, we’re spending a billion and change on a light rail line. 

LIBRELLE:   Right – the taxes were paid, and then the money is being sent back to the taxpayer in the form of rail!  It’s a tax cut!

BERG:  That’s absurd. 

LIBRELLE:  And MNSure is tens of millions of taxpayer dollars being returned to Minnesota’s healthcare consumers. 

BERG:  And Information Technology companies, and business consultants.

LIBRELLE:  Exactly!  All of them are benefitting from the Tax Cuts!

BERG:  None of these are tax cuts.  All of them are government taking money from some people, and giving it to others…

LIBRELLE:   …you’re a sore loser, Merg!   Why, look at the tax cuts we’re giving to the working poor!

BERG:  “Tax cuts?”  You hiked the budget $2.1 Billion, and took over a billion extra out of the economy, and the DFL’s idea of a “tax cut” is to give a few million back to people to reinforce their DFL votes?

LIBRELLE:  Blah blah blah!  It’s tax money, and someone is getting it back!

BERG:  So giving hundreds of millions of tax dollars to Zygi Wilf is a “tax cut?”

LIBRELLE:   Is it tax money?  Is someone getting it?  It’s a tax cut!

BERG:   So the CIA and the SEALS gave Osama Bin Laden a “tax cut” when they killed him?

LIBRELLE:   Don’t be absurd!  They lowered the unemployment rate!

(And SCENE)

They All Mean The Same Thing Eventually, Don’t They?

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 Remember:  the reason the mainstream media is better than all of us bumptious alt-media people is that they have layers and layers of gatekeepers. 

Now, don’t get me wrong; I read h this AP piece in the Strib, about United Airlines cracking down on people hauling refrigerator-sized “carry-on” bags onto their flights, and went “yay”. 

But this sentence here stuck in my craw:

It has nothing to do with revenue, [United spokesman Rahsaan Johnson] said, adding that one non-complaint bag takes up the same space as two complaint ones.

One suspects a bag that generates no “complaints” would take up much less than half the space of two bags that generate complaints. 

Unless the word they were looking for was “compliant”.   Which is a whole different word – indeed, geometrically opposite in this context. 

English in America today: I’m afraid a generation of hasty online spelling means were loosing the standard’s of are language. 

Layers.  Of Gatekeepers.

Cutting The Cookies

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I found “Robin Hood” on Netflix, the updated version released by the BBC in 2006. The casting was more interesting than the show.

The BBC modernized the story but only up to the 2006 Code of Stereotypes: the Bad Guy Sheriff of Nottingham must be a White male, Maid Marian must be a butt-kicking, wise-cracking feminist, the hero’s side-kick must be a dumb White guy to serve as the butt of all jokes, all war veterans must have PTSD and be ticking time-bombs for violence, at least one racial minority must play a supporting role as Member Of The Merry Band (Hispanic preferred) and most important of all, no Black may be cast in an unsympathetic light.

In 2014, that Code has been updated to require at least one gay character and, if at all possible, a disabled person, e.g. “Glee.”

In this “Robin Hood,” there is no Friar Tuck in the Merry Band (religious characters are forbidden under the new Code), but there is a Saracen woman named D’jaq and of course, she’s smarter than all of the White males put together. But get this – D’jaq is supposed to be slave captured by King Richard’s armies fighting Saladin in the Middle East. She ought to be an Arab Muslim. But she’s played by an English actress of Indian descent using a Pakistani accent to sound foreign. Why? Probably because there is a giant immigrant population in England from former Crown colonies like India and Pakistan and the BBC Code must acknowledge them by substituting a Paki for a Hispanic in the Member Of The Band slot.

The most amazing thing of all? The Master-at-Arms, who kills innocent women and children so the Sheriff can blame Robin Hood for it, is a Black man. The fake Abbess who’s really a con artist, is a Black women. Black people are criminals! That would never happen in an American series.

Rearranging the priority of victims to cater to local sympathies makes business sense for the film maker. But it also reflects a certain callousness. Casting a show to fit the Stereotype Code means you don’t actually care about the people being stereotyped, only that the correct boxes are checked to meet your quotas.

Joe Doakes

I think I wrote about that a few years back, when my kids were still watching the Disney Channel (back when I’d still let kids watch the Disney Channel); all of the cookie cutter “Disney Movies” had the same basic characters:

  1. The spunky, low-income white kid.
  2. The Latina tomboy who kicked everyone’s butts athletically (except, perhaps, #4 below
  3. The black, Chloe-O’Brien-level tech nerd.  Always, always, always the black kid was the nerd. 
  4. The lead character – almost always a blonde white boy…

…and a painstakingly-mixed bunch of supporting characters.

Strib: “Oops – Sorry About All Those Unexpected Property Tax Hikes”

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If there’s a “broken record” phrase in all of Minnesota conservative alt-media, it’s “the Star Tribune is carrying the water for the DFL”.

It’s like saying “Boy, isn’t Lady Gaga weird”.  It’s the baseline.  It hardly needs to be said.

As Strib observers and critics go, I’m more jaded and cynical than most, which is another way of saying “almost cynical enough”.

But even I – who doesn’t really doubt that the Strib’s editors, and likely some “journalists”, are on the local version of “Journo-List” with the DFL, Take Action, Alliance for a Better Minnesota and Alida Messinger – wasn’t ready for the avalanche of lies and bald-faced image-shaping in this editorial.

The subtitle says it all:  ”Relief not as sizable as hoped, but help goes where it’s most needed.”

There was no relief, and the “help” was taken from most Minnesotans and given to the Minnesotans whose votes the DFL wants to buy!

It only gets worse:

As many previous statehouse politicians learned to their sorrow, local property taxes are hard to control from the Capitol. That reality has hit home to the DFLers in charge of the Legislature and the governor’s office.

 They thought they set the table in 2013 for noticeable reductions in property taxes around the state. Instead, they got mixed results and a muddled message. Total K-12 school and local government levies are up $125 million this year, giving Republican politicians the chance to crow that the DFL’s tax-suppression strategy failed.

There was no “DFL Tax-Suppression Strategy, other than repeating “raising Local Government Aid will lower property taxes!” enough times for the incurious to believe it. 

None! 

But DFLers also engineered an increase in property tax refunds for both homeowners and renters, distributed on an income-based formula to low- and middle-income taxpayers facing high tax bills. Factor in estimated claims for the richer refunds, and net property taxes in 2014 are down slightly from 2013 — by $8 million, or 0.1 percent…But count us too among fans of the $133 million boost this year in refunds to qualifying taxpayers. The income-driven property tax refund and renters’ credit are well-designed programs that this year will reach an estimated 550,000 property owners and renters — up from 140,000 previously eligible.

“Income based formula”.

In other words, the DFL took money from some people, and gave it to others. 

That’s not a tax cut.  That’s redistribution.  That’s the state picking winners and losers. 

 That leaves plenty of Minnesota’s 2.1 million households staring at higher taxes again this spring. This is the 12th year in a row for increases in total property tax burdens, with yearly increases averaging $332 million.

 But the credits are helping to stabilize housing for low-income Minnesotans by sending help to those whose property tax bills are high enough in proportion to their incomes that their ability to remain in their homes could otherwise be in doubt.

That’s not “property tax relief”.  That’s a social program, using the state to funnel money to overextended low-income home owners.

 The refunds may not stifle political criticism, but they’re sound policy.

No.  They are DFL campaign spending.

Fact: after two years of the DFL claiming at every turn that the GOP’s cuts to LGA hiked property taxes, and that their reinstatement would “cut property taxes” – their words, over and over and over again – nearly 80% of Minnesota’s jurisdictions raised property taxes. 

The DFL lied to the people.

TheStrib, in this editorial, is covering for the lie, and doing it clumsily. 

Well, too clumsily to fool anyone that’s paying attention. 

But the Strib’s political coverage isn’t aimed at that audience.

Fair Play

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Remember when the Lower Hudson Journal News published the names and addresses of every carry permit holder in its coverage area (the northern NYC/southwest Connecticut subrban area)?  When pro-Second-Amendment bloggers struck back by publishing the names and addresses of the “newspaper’s” “journalists?”

The good guys are at it again.

Last year, a small majority of Connecticut legislators passed legislation that is, as we speak, leading to the confiscation of firearms in Connecticut.

And the bloggers are at it again.

(This blog doesn’t endorse intimidation.  The state needs to stop it).

 

Pop

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A buddy wonders why, if the economy is as bad as Republicans claim, the stock market is roaring?  Doesn’t that prove Republicans are lying?

I’m no expert but even I have noticed the S&P 500 and NASDAQ have hit highs while the Dow Industrials and Dow Transport have not.  What’s the difference?  The high-flying stock exchanges buy and sell stocks in companies that are NOT industrial or transport.  So what are they?  The NASDAQ-100, the top performing companies, is composed of banking, insurance, mortgage and brokerage companies  . . . in other words, companies that own a lot of paper but nothing else.  They are dependent on the federal government continuing to dump $60 Billion per Month into the economy to prop up lending and housing.  When that gravy train stops, those companies will collapse.

Industrial and transport – companies that own a lot of heavy iron – have been wrung dry for a decade and thus are far less dependent on stimulus but also far less profitable right now.  Major contractors don’t order billions of heavy machinery for a short term burst of government work; instead, they do the jobs with what they have, defer maintenance, scrape by.  The real orders for machinery, jumbo jets, etc. go to companies that are seeing real growth.

The true measure of the economy is not reflected in paper companies that shuffle stimulus money back and forth, skimming a percentage off the top each time.  The true measure of the economy is iron companies that make things that do stuff.  And that economy is not robust at all.

Joe Doakes

To take the absurd extreme, if I had a Dow Jones company, and I laid off all the employees and sold all the inventory and buildings and land, and took all that cash and the bailout payment besides and stuck it in a Swiss bank account, my stock value would be…

…well, probably 0, and I’d probably be in jail for something or another.

But leave out the “selling the plants and land” bit, and don’t lay off quite as many people, and my stock value would soar, because I’d be in a freaking awesome cash position.  No matter that I’m producing less, employing fewer, shedding payroll, and just waiting for things to get better.  My shareholders are happy.

Isn’t that the sort of thinking – thinking for profits? – that liberals claim to criticize in business?

Turnabout

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I’ve said it for nigh-on 20 years, now; gun control is the class war the Left’s been barbering about for the past century.  And they are the patricians.

And the plebeians are winning. 

Glenn Reynolds notes something I’ve been talking about for the past half-decade; the legal, social and moral landscape of the gun question and the Second Amendment has inverted completely over the past 25 years:

Overall, the trend of the past couple of decades seems to be toward expanding gun rights, just as the trend in the 1950s and 1960s was toward expanding free speech rights. America has more guns in private hands than ever before, even as crime rates fall, and, after a half-century or so of anti-gun hysteria, the nation seems to be reverting to its generally gun-friendly traditions.

This is a state of affairs that seemed almost inconceivable a mere two decades ago, and therein lies a reminder: It often seems as if the deck is stacked, and change is inconceivable. Twenty years ago, the prospect of this kind of expansion in constitutional freedom seemed very dim. But in America, change, when it comes, can be sudden and dramatic — even when, as here, the general current of punditry and political opinion seems set in stone. Keep that in mind, as you contemplate other political issues.

And there’s an important lesson there; while the Second Amendment is in the ascendant, it’ll only stay there with constant vigilance and effort – and in the meantime, we have many other civil liberties that’ve been serving as bureaucratic playgrounds for decades now; the Fourth, Fifth and Tenth Amendments in particular are in about the same state today as the Second was thirty years ago.