Carolyn McCarthy (Ghoul, NY) has a sweeping new gun control bill already written:

One of the fiercest gun-control advocates in Congress, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), pounced on the shooting massacre in Tucson Sunday, promising to introduce legislation as soon as Monday.

McCarthy ran for Congress after her husband was gunned down and her son seriously injured in a shooting in 1993 on a Long Island commuter train.

Make sure your Dem friends catch that icky little irony; McCarthy’s husband was killed on a train in a city with among the stiffest gun control laws in the country, then and now.  Those laws served only to make Rep. McCarthy’s late husband and the rest of the victims on the LIRR train sitting ducks for Colin Ferguson – an earlier generation of insane shooter.

“My staff is working on looking at the different legislation fixes that we might be able to do and we might be able to introduce as early as tomorrow,” McCarthy told POLITICO in a Sunday afternoon phone interview.

36 hours flat.

What a deeply depraved woman.

As with most declarations about politics, it’s just not true:

And 1828 was worse…

As you go to the polls, remember – people call Republicans extreme.

And in one solitary sense, they’re right:

“Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.  And moderation in defense of justice is no virtue”.

It’s a half hour speech – but if you have time, give it a look.  Though it’s 46 years old, much of it, if you leave out the references to long-gone politicians, the Cold War and Nikita Kruschev, and the spending figures which seem so ludicrously tiny today) is as dead-on today as it was the day it was broadcast.

“You and I have the courage to say to enemies there is a price we will not pay, and there is a point beyond which they must not advance…You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.  We’ll preserve for our children for this, the last best home for mankind, or sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness…we’ll remember that we have the right to make our own decisions, and to determine our own destiny”.

And that point is today.

The NYTimes has a little web toy tracking Twitter traffic for various candidates over the past stretch of the campaign.

And if traffic is the measure of Minnesota’s race, then Tom Emmer wins big.  Here’s today’s snapshot:

If you go to the link and click Play”, you can get an animated historical record of the traffic.  Emmer has led pretty consistently.   As of today, conservatively, it’s a good 15:1.

Of course, elections are not decided on Twitter.  All good conservatives need to get out there and vote Emmer tomorrow.  Bring the kids.  Drive your (conservative-voting) neighbors.  (Leave the other ones at home).

See you at the polls tomorrow.

In case you missed them last week and over the weekend, I published by top five reasons Mark Dayton should not be governor.  Here are the links.  I’m a helpful guy.  That’s how I roll.

• #1: We don’t need more Malaise
• #2: Moving Minnesota Backward
• #3: Unexamined
• #4: Fool Us Three Times
• #5: We Are Better Than This

Of course, being a positive guy, I followed in each case with five more, more important reasons that Tom Emmer should be governor.  Here we go:

• #1: It’s The Hope!
• #2: Moving Minnesota Forward
• #3: The Overhaul
• #4: Buck The Narrative
• #5:  Our Better Nature

Among the maze of down-ticket races on my ballot is the Ramsey County Attorney race.

The race currently pits John Choi – a higher-up at the Saint Paul City Attorney’s office, and therefore part of the Saint Paul DFL machine, and hand-picked successor to former DFL gubernatorial hopeful Susan Gaertner – against David Schultz, who takes pains to point out that he is not the same Dave Schultz who is the poli-sci professor at Hamline University.

Schultz points out something interesting in a campaign email:

On some of [Choi’s] lawn signs in the city, he displays his DFL endorsement; on his lawn signs in the suburbs, he does not. In the literature he sends to Democrats he prominently displays his DFL endorsement and quotes Mayor Chris Coleman; in his literature sent to others, he conceals the DFL endorsement and his ties to the party.

Schultz points out…:

I send the same literature to everyone – Democrat, Republican, and Independent. I don’t change who I am depending on my audience.

Is it a sign that the DFL brand is past its shelf-life in the ‘burbs?

We’ll find out tomorrow.

I didn’t pay much attention to last week’s video of Betty McCollum conspicuously avoiding saying “Under God” when leading the Pledge of Allegiance back in 2002.  The shelf life had passed for quite some time.

But McCollum’s reaction?  From Taranto in the WSJ, this was in her press release.  Emphasis is added:

Conservatives are using an eight year old video clip to incite hate, racism, and intolerance among Tea Party Republicans. This right-wing effort to call into question Congresswoman McCollum’s Christian faith, her belief in God, and her patriotism is blatantly anti-American and all too similar to the extremists who earlier this year mailed a soiled American flag to her Congressional office and threatened the Congresswoman with violence.

Racist?

Here’s Betty McCollum:

Rep. McCollum

She’s as much a cracker as I am.   Or is she claiming reverse-racism from a Tea Party that is a whooooole lot more ethnically-mixed than current lefty chanting points would have you believe?

We just don’t know.

And “Un-American?”

I can see Rep. McCollum leading a “House Unamerican Activities Committee” hearing in 2011; “Are you now or have you ever been a member of a Tea Party affiliated organization?”

One good way to prevent that, of course, would be to eject her from office tomorrow.

Keith Ellison crashes the Minnesota Majority’s “Election Integrity Watch” press conference.

(Note:  Lefties are repeatedly getting this video taken off Youtube by reporting it as “abusive”.  Why do they hate the First Amendment?  Why do you hate keeping “representatives” accountable?)

He gets busted in a lie – at 4:03, about his appearance in a video at 3:45.  Someone at either his office, the DFL, the Uptake or one of their affiliated groups doctored an Election Integrity Watch poster to make it look like an anonymous posting intended to intimidate.

And starting at 4:12, you can see what a brittle, cranky little fella the Congressman is.  Someone asks him “who stands to benefit from not having photo ID”.  Ellison answers “Well, my press conference is now over”.

“You’re my congressman! I can’t ask you a question?”, she continues.  Someone else chimes in “You get to decide which questions we can ask?”

Ellison stalks off the mic. “To the press”, he responds.

This is your “representative” in the Fifth District.  Someone who can’t handle a tough question – as I found out  last year when I asked him if he repudiated the parts of the Hamas charter that called for destroying Israel and exterminating the Jews.  His first response was “how many Palestinians do you know” (five, if you go back to college), and it went downhill from there.

Someone who needs to scamper back to the welcoming, friendly arms of the in-the-bag press when things get tough.

What do you call someone who takes his swings at people, and then scampers away when they can hold him accountable?  A bully?

The Fifth District deserves better.

For all the left’s and media’s caterwauling about “bipartisanship”, Tom Emmer is the only candidate in the race who actually calls for it.

Oh, Mark Dayton yaks about “reaching across the aisle”, but he showed that hand five years ago, when he told the world that his political opponents are, ironically, sick and depraved:

The DFL’s record of “bipartisanship” works like this; do everything they want without question, maybe they’ll say nice things about you.  There is no “bipartisanship” in the DFL; only power.

How “bipartisan” is Mark Dayton going to be?  Look at the scorched-earth campaign his minions at Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota are running.  They don’t care who they insult, attack or destroy today, because tomorrow they plan on governing absolutely, or not at all.

As to Tom Horner?  His “bipartisanship” is like that of, say, Liechtenstein; with no legislative presence, and no propsect of any ever forming, the Independence Party needs to curry favor in a “bipartisan” manner with whomever they can – like any good hooker.  Horner – on the imponderably tiny chance he wins, and that’s something I just mention out of intellectual curiosity – will have to be “bipartisan” to have any influence at all.  Which is one of many reasons he’ll do well to finish with 10% of the vote.

Emmer?  His is the only candidacy that has said, repeatedly, that this is go time for all Minnesotans, of all political stripes.  He’s run a clean, idealistic campaign – because he knows every bridge he burns is one he’ll have to rebuild once it comes time to try to get this state working again.  Contrast that with Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s slimy, craven campaign of personal and group attacks.  Who do you call “bipartisan” – or, to pick a much better word, who do you call “genuinely committed to bringing everyone to the table?

Emmer is the candidate who is committed to making positive change.

Isn’t that what we need?

Previous Reasons Emmer Should Be Governor

#3: The Overhaul

#4: Buck The Narrative

#5:  Our Better Nature

As we discussed on Thursday, Dayton has running an amazingly sleazy, fact-free campaign for governor.

But let’s say – heaven forfend – that he wins.  What then?

Welcome back to the 1970s.

Mark Dayton’s entire plan is a throwback to a mythical era in Minnesota politics, the sixties and seventies, when DFLers joined hands with (suitably liberal) Republicans to fashion a large, communitarian welfare state that aggressively redistributed wealth from the parts of the state that worked, back then, to the parts that didn’t at the time – a time when Minnesota’s booming private industries “partnered” with government and academia to build a progressive, benevolent, forward-thinking state that was the envy of much of the rest of the country.

Let’s accept it all at face value for now; let’s say that the “Minnesota Miracle” was exactly that; a project guided by the wise, benevolent hand of “good government”.

The “Miracle”, even by that tolerant definition, depended on a number of factors that were unique to that era:

• Minnesota was a sleeping giant: The state had underperformed for the first century of its existence – and made up for lost time, taking advantage of its natural advantages in communication, resources and population to take its place as the largest commercial, industrial and population center between Chicago and the west coat.
• The US was #1!: The United States was still by a good stretch the world’s most powerful economy in 1960-1970.  The Japanese and German economic powerhouses were gathering steam – but in a very real sense, they were still rebuilding and gaining momentum from World War II (remember – 1967 was half as far from VJ Day as it is from today).  China was in the throes of Maoism, and had an economy the size of Mississippi, and wasn’t lending anyone anything but cheap Kalashnikovs and Little Red Books.  The US economy was head, shoulders and ankles bigger than our competition.
• Minnesota Was Breaking New Turf: The academic and private research markets were delving into new territories that were brand-new at the time; computers, medicine, healthcare, defense, and industrial research that led us to companies as diverse as 3M, Honeywell, Ecolab, Control Data, Cray and a host of others.  And the booming US consumer market, as well as an immense export market for which the US was the #1 supplier, gave immense domestic and export opportunities to General Mills, Pillsbury, Daytons, Target and a range of other home-grown corporations that grew into giants.

Add those three factors up, and you have a recipe for immense, nearly effortless earnings without a whole lot of competition.

But the world has changed since 1970, when the myth of the Minnesota Miracle was created.  Japan and Germany have been joined by South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia as significant competitors.  China, hobbled by totalitarian madness forty years ago, has turned into the world’s fastest growing economy.  India, written off as unsalvageable forty years ago by the likes of Paul Ehrlich, has turned into a huge competitor as well as a large market.

The conditions that allowed Minnesota’s government, and its government unions and other hangers-on, to latch like a leech onto Minnesota’s market and still allowed both to grow fat and happy are not here anymore.

So why would anyone think that returning to the same system (only more!) would yield the same results?

Indeed, why would anyone think that acting like a California or a Greece or a New York would make Minnesota anything but a cold California, a chilly Greece, a windy New York – in debt, floundering, and cold to boot?

The short answer – there is no rational reason. It is impossible and irrational.

Minnesota deserves better than to have an obsolete myth foisted on it by a past-his-shelf-date demigogue.

Previous Reasons Dayton Should Not Be Governor

• #3: Unexamined
• #4: Fool Us Three Times
• #5: We Are Better Than This

I was bopping around Twitter last night, and I read this tweet from Nick Coleman, who has somehow managed to blend his leaden, lumpen, thudding oeuvre with Twitter’s 140 character format and end up with the worst of both worlds:

@NickColeman: Juan Williams a liberal? No stinking way, according to this

Read the linked piece.  It’s a Newmax article from Ron Kessler, that describes Williams as – this has to hurt people like Coleman – someone who’s willing to consider all points of view on an issue, and maybe even admit to the cognitively-dissonant concept that other peoples’ points of view aren’t always stupid!

It’s about here that I’d snark “so of course he’s not a liberal”.  But I am  better than that…well, no.  I’m not.  What I am is a former liberal, who grew up with parents who are still liberals.  For that matter, I’m someone who tries to uphold the traditional meaning of “liberalism” – all people are created equal, our rights come from our Creator and not man, we must be a society ruled by laws and not the passions of men, our nation is a free association of equals, etc, etc.

So it seems that Juan Willilams is the real liberal.  And so am I.

Because in this age, it’s we limited government conservatives who are the real, small-l liberals.

Teresa Collett debated Fourth District Rep Betty McCollum last night.

Collett, a constitutional saw professor at Saint Thomas’ law school and a blazingly charismatic woman, by all accounts clobbered McCollum, a monotonic logorrheac whose sole purpose in Congress is to yell “Off What?” when Nancy Pelosi yells “Jump”.

But the money line of the evening?  “Constituent of CD4”, from the fairly aptly-named MNCD4 Needs Change blog, transcribes:

The stupidest comment of the night came on the defense question, when Betty McCollum said: “Al Qaeda no longer poses a threat to the United States..” Wow, I’ve been so involved in following the campaign, I must have missed that news! …  McCollum did say, however that the military was drawing up contingency plans for global warming. That’s a relief! I guess in Betty McCollum’s world Global Warming is a bigger threat to the US than Al Qaeda.

Someone tell Juan Williams, OK?

This line needs to go in the great Minnesota DFL wall of shameful quotes, along with Cy Thao’s “When you win, you keep your money; when we win, we take your money!” and Larry Pogemiller’s “I think it’s silly to assume people can spend their own money better than government can”.

The hardest part about being a Republican in Saint Paul is that so many of us are so depressed and beaten down from generations of futility, it’s hard to get any of us to actually spend any time and energy on doing the footwork it’ll take to contest city and district, to say nothing of taking it back.  It makes it easy for the DFL to put a hamster like McCollum into office; she’d be getting 20% in the Sixth or Second districts this cycle.

Jim Geraghty called MNCD4 one of the potential upsets to watch for back in August. As someone who’s spent 25 years in Saint Paul, I almost don’t want to dream about it.  But I do; people – candidates and volunteers I know around CD4 – say that they’re seeing a lot of interest – mostly from people who are not traditi0nal Republicans.  There may be a lot of them; Obama’s that big a disaster, and McCollum is that bad a representative.

Hey, at least Al Quaeda isn’t a threat, right?

I hadn’t seen this one onlne yet…

I wish I could go vote for John Kriesel.

If you don’t have to break any laws, by all means, do vote for him.

That means you, if you live in House District 57A – Cottage Grove, Newport, St. Paul Park, South St. Paul and Grey Cloud Island.

Everybody sing along:

Bravely bold Sir Mark, Rode forth from Wayzata.

He was not afraid to serve, Oh brave Sir Dayton.

He was not at all afraid to serve in elected office,

Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Dayton.

He was not in the least bit scaredTo keep his office hours.

Or to serve his constituents, and live in DC.

To dwell in a Georgetown condo,And have his trust fund burned away,

And face the same threats as the rest of Congress…

His building threatened, his mellow harshed,

And his schedule changed and his alert level raised,

And his staff sent home and his office closed

His sobriety questioned, his fitness impugned…

Courtesy

Does anyone know a good lute player?

The shorter Strib endorsement of Tom Horner: “He’s wonky enough, he’s almost liberal enough, and he’s not bat-spittle crazy”.

It h runs a little longer than that, naturally:

Historic challenges confront Minnesota in the next four years. They will be met only if the state has a governor able to inspire citizens to shoulder shared sacrifice for the sake of our common future. The Independence Party’s Tom Horner can deliver that kind of transforming leadership. We urge his election.

Further proof, if any were needed, that the Strib’s editorial board lives on Planet Portland Avenue.

Tom Horner, “inspiring citizens”?  The guy – like most “Independence” Party politicians, except for the one that will ever actually hold office, Jesse Ventura – is the political equivalent of a Star Trek fanatic; he loves the idea of fiddling with all those nifty levers and buttons.

As to “transforming government”?  If he takes office – and this endorsement is as close as he will get – he will stand at the head of exactly zero Independence Party legislators.  He will have to build a coalition of legislators who come as close as possible to agreeing with him.

And that’s the great fraud of the “Independence Party”, today as it was under Jesse Ventura.  Ventura, with no legislators (technically one RINO Republican did switch to the IP for her last term), had to run into the welcoming arms and pocket-picking hands of the only legislative caucus that had any synchronicity with his own agenda.

The DFL.

And Horner will have to do the same.  Because that’s the great secret that the DFL is trying to cover up with all of their “Horner Is Republican” ad blitz; Horner’s policies are indistinsuishable from a vaguely moderate DFLer.

Horner presents voters with an opportunity they cannot afford to pass up. He possesses not only the understanding and communication skills that governing requires, but, unlike either DFLer Mark Dayton or Republican Tom Emmer, he also has the temperament to bridge the partisan divide that has long stymied the search for lasting solutions to chronic problems, both in Minnesota and the nation. For us, this choice is not a close call.

No, I’m sure it’s not.

But again with the Planet Portland.  Horner “communicates” like a hectoring school teacher.  And the “partisan divide” exists for a reason; there are two vastly different visions for this state.  Horner has his toe on one side and his foot on the other – the left side – and like all “moderate” solutions will give us the worst of both worlds.

Tom Horner:  the Real DFLer.

Minnesota thanks you for your service…

…by whizzing on your electoral franchise:

State Representative Dan Severson, candidate for Secretary of State, today alerted military absentee voters of disenfranchisement by the Minnesota Secretary of State in the 2008 election. “So far, I have identified about 80 overseas absentee voters from various counties across the state whose ballots from 2008 were rejected on a ridiculous technicality by Secretary of State Mark Ritchie,” said Severson (see list attached at link). “And all of the data isn’t in yet.”

“After the 2008 election and during the subsequent U.S. Senate recount, Ritchie sent a memo (see attached) to county election officials instructing them to reject the absentee ballots of overseas voters—most of whom were military voters—if they did not have a ballot application to accompany the ballot,” explained Severson.

Should I mention that active-duty military tends to vote pretty consistently around 70-80% Republican?

(more…)

Remember a few weeks ago, when “Common Cause Minnesota” – a “non-partisan” organization that seeks “transparency” in campaigning (also speech rationing) – filed a complaint against the pro-business PAC “Minnesota’s Future” because it got a contribution from the Republican Governor’s Association.

To help illustrate the financial trail behind Citizens For A Better Minnesota’s complaint, I’ve prepared this graphic to show you the money trail involved.

Pretty crazy-complicated, huh?  Those folks at Common Cause Minnesota sure know how to protect all us stooped citizens, don’t they?

So courtesy of Derek Brigham, let’s take a look at the transparent, clear, path that money takes in getting to the Dayton campaign from…well, you take a look.

Now, I’m no accountant.  I asked Common Cause to come on the Northern Alliance a couple of weeks ago to discuss their complaint.  I heard nothing back – not so much as a tweet.

…that the avalanche of liberal violence continues with a hulking thug of a supporter for New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone slapping a 68 year old woman supporter of his Republican opponent while placing signs…

(Language not safe for work!)

…or that the 68 year old woman gives a lot worse than she gets.

In case you missed it over the past weekend – an internal poll shows that GOP House Minority Leader Kurt Zellers maintained a 24 point lead over challenger Katie Rodriguez in disatrict 32B.  It also shows that Tom Emmer has gone from a 3 point deficit to a ten point lead.

Just so we’re clear on this.

I’m not sure what the purpose was behind this – Ex-North Dakota governor Allen Olson has endorsed Tom Horner:

Olson quickly made it clear that he is a Minnesota resident, moving to the Twin Cities area two years after he lost re-election to Democrat George Sinner. He is best known, in Minnesota, for his years running a community bank association.

Olson, a Republican, said he never has endorsed a Minnesota governor candidate before. He joins former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson in Horner’s camp.

That whole “Carlson” thing really tells you all you need to know about Tom Horner.

As to Olson?  Perhaps the Horner campaign is trying to lock up the ‘Ex-North Dakotan” vote. We are about 40% of Minnesotans, after all – the smart 40% who know how to drive and had better educations for less money.

But Allen Olson presided over some of the most miserable years in North Dakota history. They weren’t his fault, per se – but any North Dakotan over the age of forty remembers the Olson years for the farm foreclosures, lousy grain prices,and high unemployment.

By all means, Hornerites; dig into that Allen Olson record!

Lori Sturdevant’s column Sunday was really nothing but an ad for Walter Mondale’s new book:

Former Vice President Walter Mondale speaks both for and to people of that mindset in his new autobiography, “The Good Fight,” published by Scribner and due in bookstores Tuesday. (It was written in collaboration with an Editorial Board alumnus, Star Tribune health team editor David Hage.)

“I came of age in an optimistic America, a society that believed in opportunity and the value of common endeavor. Today, two generations have grown up in a flinty and anxious America,” Mondale wrote, citing the ills of increasing poverty, unaffordable health care, ineffective schools and widening inequality. “I wonder what happened to that other America, a place of empathy and hope.”

In other words, the book is what Sturdevant’s entire history of print work has been; an uncritical hagiography of an era of big government that we can’t afford anymore, wrapped up in a collective slander (“flinty”?  “Anxious?”  Really?) of those who want something more rational.

Gary Gross puts it well:

The day of reckoning for these programs has finally arrived. Unfortunately, the designers of the bills didn’t mix cost containment with their compassion. Unfortunately, we elected a radical who thinks he can spend unprecedented and unsustainable amounts of money without consequence.

Now the thoughtful people of the TEA Party are telling government what they already know: that you can’t keep putting expensive item after expensive item on the credit card without it catching up with you. You don’t have to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier to figure that out.

The other thing that happened is that, in Minnesota at least, the DFL said yes to their special interest allies so often that they came to think of our wallets as their ATM. It’s difficult for people to be magnanimous when they’re either unemployed, underemployed or worried if they’ll have a job next week.

The Mondale legacy is a society that, for whatever reason, believed that a happy government made for a happy society.

We can do better.

Sturdevant’s job is to make sure we don’t.

..the crowd at Glenn Beck’s rally at the Capitol Mall last month left the Mall cleaner than it’d been before.

Just saying.

Last August, Joe Stone – the son of Ron Stone, the general manager at AM1280, who is kind enough to give me two hours of air time a week – had a very serious parasailing accident in Montana.

He was a lucky as one could be in a situation like that; although he fell nearly 150 feet, there happened to be an off-duty paramedic parasailing right behind him; he was able to land and stabilize Joe until help could arrive.

Obviously, Joe was hurt bad, and is very very very lucky to be alive.  He’s recovering at a hospital in  the Twin Cities, where he’s got a lot of physical therapy and just plain healing up to do.

Anyway – there’s going to be a benefit for Joe, and to help the Stone family defray some of the medical expenses, this coming Monday at the Fine Line Music Cafe in downtown Minneapolis.

Hope you can make it!