Category Archives: Chanting Points Memo

Taking on the DFL’s Chanting Points – like “Talking Points”, only not intended for cognitive thought.

Chanting Points Memo: “Minnesota Poll” Has Your Delivery Of Sandbags Right Here

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Yesterday, the Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” also delivered its mid-cycle tally of support for the Voter ID Amendment.

And coming barely a week after the generally-accurate Survey USA poll showing Voter ID passing by a 2:1 margin, the Strib would have you believe…:

Slightly more than half of likely voters polled — 52 percent — want the changes built around a photo ID requirement, while 44 percent oppose them and 4 percent are undecided.

That is a far cry from the 80 percent support for photo ID in a May 2011 Minnesota Poll, when the issue was debated as a change in state law. Support among Democrats has cratered during a year marked by court battles, all-night legislative debates and charges that the GOP is attempting to suppress Democratic votes.

Republicans and independents continue to strongly back the proposal, which passed the Legislature this year without a single DFL vote.

Wow.  Sounds close!

Sort of; if you accept the validity of the numbers (and unless the DFL is headed for a blowout win, you must never accept the validity of the “Minnesota Poll’s” numbers), and every single undecided voter today voted “no”, the measure would pass in a squeaker.

But are the numbers valid?    And by “valid”, I don’t mean “did they do the math right”, I mean “did they poll a representative sample of Minnesotans?”

To find that out, you have to do something that almost nobody in the Strib’s reading audience does; look at the partisan breakdown of the survey’s respondents.  Which is in a link buried in the middle of a sidebar, between the main article and the cloud of ads and clutter to the right of the page, far-removed from the headline and the lede graf.  Which takes you to a page that notes (with emphasis added):

• The self-identified party affiliation of the random sample is: 41 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 31 percent independent or other.

That’s right – as with the Marriage Amendment numbers we looked at this morning (it’s the same survey), the Strib wants you to believe…

…well, no.  I’m not sure they “want” anyone to believe anything.  I’m sure they want people to read the headling and the “almost tied!” lede, and not dig too far into the numbers.

It’s part of the Democrat’s “Low-Information Voters” campaign; focus on voters who don’t dig for facts, who accept what the media tells them, who vote based on the last chanting point they heard.

Fearless prediction:  On November 4, the Strib will release a “Minnesota Poll” that shows the Voter ID Amendment slightly behind, using a partisan breakdown with an absurdly high number of DFLers.   It’ll be done as a sort of positive bandwagon effect – to make DFLers feel there’s a point to come out and vote against the Voter ID Amendment (and for Obama, Klobuchar, and the rest of the DFL slate, natch).

And it will be a complete lie.  Voter ID will pass by 20 points, and this cycle of polling will disappear down the media memory hole like all the rest of them.

Question:  Given that its entire purpose seems to be to build DFL bandwagons and discourage conservative voters, when do we start calling the “Minnesota Poll” what it seems to be – a form of vote suppression?

Chanting Points Memo: “Minnesota Poll” Orders Material For A Narrative-Building Spree

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If you take the history of the Minnesota Poll as any indication, yesterday’s numbers on the Marriage Amendment might be encouraging for amendment supporters:

The increasingly costly and bitter fight over a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage is a statistical dead heat, according to a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll.

Six weeks before Election Day, slightly more Minnesotans favor the amendment than oppose it, but that support also falls just short of the 50 percent needed to pass the measure.

Wow.  That sounds close!

But as always with these polls, you have to check the fine print.  And the “Minnesota Poll” buries its fine print in a link well down the page; you don’t ever actually find it in the story itself.  And it contains the partisan breakdown (with emphasis added):

The self-identified party affiliation of the random sample is: 41 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 31 percent independent or other.

That’s right – to get this virtual tie, the Strib, in a state that just went through photo-finish elections for Governor and Senator, and has been on the razor’s edge of absolute equality between parties for most of a decade, sampled three Democrats for every two Republicans to get to a tie.

If you believe – as I do – that the “Minnesota Poll” is first and foremost a DFL propaganda tool, intended largely to create a ‘bandwagon effect” to suppress conservative turnout (and we’ll come back to that), then this is good news; the Marriage Amendment is likely doing better  than the poll is showing.

What it does mean, though, is that they are working to build a narrative; that the battle over gay marriage is much more closely-fought than it is.

And the narrative’s players are already on board with this poll.  The Strib duly interviews Richard Carlbom, the former Dayton staffer who is leading the anti-Amendment

Actually, here’s my bet; the November 4 paper will show a “surge of support” that turns out to be much larger than any that actually materializes at the polls.

More At Noon.

UPDATE:  I wrote this piece on Sunday.  Monday morning, all of the local newscasts duly led with “both ballot initiatives are tied!”.

If you’re trying to find a construction job in Minnesota, you can get a job putting siding on the DFL’s narrative.

UPDATE 2:  Professor David Schultz at Hamline University – no friend of conservatism, he – did something I more or less planned to do on Wednesday; re-ran the numbers with a more realistic partisan breakdown:

Why is the partisan adjustment important? The poll suggests significant partisan polarization for both amendments, with 73% of DFLers opposing the marriage amendment and 71% of GOPers supporting. Similar partisan cleavages also exist with the Elections Amendment. If this is true, take the marriage Amendment support at 49% and opposition at 47%. If DFLers are overpolled by 3% and GOP underpolled by 6%, and if about 3/4 of each party votes in a partisan way, I would subtract about 2.25% from opposition (3% x .75) and add 4.5% to support (6% x .75) and the new numbers are 53.5% in support and 44.75% against. This is beyond margin or error.

If one applies the correction to the Elections Amendment there is about an 80% DFL opposition to it and a similar 80% GOP support for it. Then the polls suggest approximately 56.8% support it and 41.6% oppose.

Which brings us very nearly back to the 3:2 margin  for the Voter ID amendment, and the tight but solid lead for the Marriage Amendment that every other poll – the reputable ones, anyway – have found.

The Declaration Of Independence, According To Mark Dayton

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It goes a little something like this:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to coerce the livelihoods from another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the superior and unequal station to which the Theories of Keynes and Bloomsbury entitle them, a decent respect to the needs of government requires that they should declare other peoples’ property to be public property first, and their own last.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equally vital belongings of Government, that they are endowed by their Government with certain unalienable Duties, that among these are to support the government that makes us all so very equal.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted upon Men, deriving their just powers from, paradoxically, their power.

Governor Dayton has an odd idea of what unites us as a people, and of what this nation is supposed to be all about.

It starts as the same old story…:

Dayton told a group at the University of Minnesota today that his administration is coming up with a plan to overhaul the entire tax code to make the tax system fairer to lower and middle income people. He didn’t offer specifics but said his plan would continue to include an income tax hike on the state’s top 2 percent of earners.

…but quickly devolves into a big toke off the Obama/Soros/Messinger kool-aid-filled water pipe:

Dayton also criticized Republicans in the Legislature and in Congress for being reluctant to raise taxes to pay for new programs.

“This unwillingness to pay taxes and seeing it as a threat to our freedom and our liberty and our way of life, to me, is going to be the death of this country if it’s not corrected,” Dayton said.

You heard him right.

The desire to keep what one earns rather than seeing it squandered, the spirit of dissent against the idea that the fruit of your labor belongs to government first and you, eventually, maybe?   That’s the threat to the nation!

All you peasants have got to quit being so uppity!

Your nobles have spoken!

Chanting Points Memo: Barnes Bobbles Facts

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Legal language is a funny thing.  And by “funny”, we mean “funny weird”, not “funny haha”.

One of the left’s latest chanting points – abetted by Todd Akin’s groaner last week – is that a group of GOP legislators co-sponsored a bill, HR3, better known as the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion” bill.  The title more or less explains the bill.

In the original version of the bill’s language, the term “forcible rape” was used.

Of course, in the post-Akin political news cycle du jour, there is only one type of rape; it’s eminently PC to say “all rape is rape”.

And certainly non-consensual sex is, always, rape.  No argument about it.

Of course, not all “rape” is “forcible”, by definition.  If a 56 old guy has consensual sex with, say hypothetically, a 16 year old guy, it’s statutory rape – meaning “no force was used, but it’s still considered rape since the 16 year old is not of the age of consent”.

We’re splitting linguistic and legal hairs, of course.

Splitting hairs is something Third District DFL candidate Brian Barnes wasn’t doing when he accused his opponent, incumbent Republican representative Erik Paulsen, of drawing a distinction between “Rape” and “Forcible Rape”.   Here’s a statement from Barnes’ announcement for a press conference today:

According to Brian Barnes, “The voters of our district deserve the facts on Representative Paulsen’s positions on important issues, such as his vote to support H.R. 3.

Yep, they do.  And here they are; whatever the reason for the language, it is for Paulsen’s purposes irrelevant – because Paulsen was neither an author nor co-sponsor of the bill.

The word “forcible” was removed from the bill long before Paulsen got his first chance to vote on the bill – which he did, along with a strong bipartisan majority of the House.

This is a further example of how the Barnes’ campaign,. like most Democrat campaigns this year, are trying to rope in “low-information voters” – people driven by slogans and chanting points, who don’t really think that hard about the issues.

It’s not the most egregious example from the Barnes campaign, though.  More later today.

Chanting Points Memo: If “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” Couldn’t Lie, They’d Be Mute

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Last night, the paid flaks at “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – the astroturf PR group financed by the Dayton family, Mark Dayton’s ex-wife Alita Messinger, a bunch of their liberal plutocrat friends, and the unions that own Mark Dayton, put out a tweet:

Good thing Gov. Dayton vetoed the law: Study says ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws increase homicides  http://ow.ly/bwUQs   ‪#mnleg  ‬‪#stribpol‬

Now, as always – when ABM says, writes or posts anything, one is best to do…

…what?

I don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here.  What does one do?

Distrust, then verify.  Then, almost inevitably, distrust some more.

So let’s look at the study and, as ABM would have the ill-informed voter believe, this wave of fresh murder begat by “Stand Your Ground”.  The study was cited in a WSJ Law Blog post:

In April, more than a month after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, we looked the incidence of justifiable homicides in states with “stand your ground” or “castle doctrine” laws like Florida’s.

In general, such laws grant people more leeway to use lethal force on an attacker. More than 20 were passed after Florida’s in 2005. They typically do at least one of the following:

• Remove a person’s duty to retreat in places outside the home

• Add the presumption that the person who killed in self defense had a reasonable fear of death or harm  [subject, in ever case I’m aware of, to a hearing establishing that that fear was reasonable]

• Grant people who killed in self-defense immunity from civil lawsuits [provided, of course, they are found to have acted in legal self-defense; currently, a woman killing a stalking rapist is only as safe from being sued back to the stone-age by her rapist’s family as the least bobble headed jury that can be empaneled]

So let’s look at the study’s conclusions (and I’ll add emphasis):

Justifiable homicides nearly doubled from 2000 to 2010, according to the most recent data available, when 326 were reported. The data, provided by federal and state law enforcement agencies, showed a sharp increase in justifiable homicides occurred after 2005, when Florida and 16 other states passed the laws.

While the overall homicide rates in those states stayed relatively flat, the average number of justifiable cases per year increased by more than 50% in the decade’s latter half.

Now, let’s put that number into two bits of context.

First;  the “doubling” – 160 or so killings up to 320 and change – amounts to less than 1% of the people killed in unjustifiable homicides every year.

And every single one of them involves someone who was ruled to have had a legitimate fear of being killed or maimed, killing an attacker first.

These “homicides”, every one of them, occurred in lieu of a rape, murder, kidnapping or aggravated assault.  In every case, the alternative to those 320-odd justified homicides would have been an innocent person dead; a woman raped; a child kidnapped, a person beaten into a vegetative state.

The study – and ABM – would have you think that’s a bad thing.  Or at least have you not think about it very hard.

Speaking of the study – what about it?

The answer, [Texas A&M Professors Mark Hoekstra and Cheng Cheng] conclude, is [that “Stand Your Ground” does not deter crime]. In fact, the evidence suggests the laws have led to an increase in homicides.

From the study:

Results indicate that the prospect of facing additional self-defense does not deter crime.  Specifically, we find no evidence of deterrence effects on burglary, robbery, or aggravated assault.  Moreover, our estimates are sufficiently precise as to rule out meaningful deterrence effects.

The blog post doesn’t go into details about the study – but this paragraph is nonsense on several levels.

  • So was the study “sufficiently precise” to account for other factors in changing murder rates?
  • Did it account for the deterrent effect that John Lott proved that the concealed carry laws that usually accompany “Stand Your Ground” provide?  Because if those laws are already deterring violent crime, there’s a smaller pool of violent crimes to deter.  Right?

Which leads them to concludes…:

In contrast, we find significant evidence that the laws increase homicides.

But what kind of “homicides?”

Suggestive but inconclusive evidence indicates that castle doctrine laws increase the narrowly defined category of justifiable homicides by private citizens by 17 to 50 percent, which translates into as many as 50 additional justifiable homicides per year nationally due to castle doctrine.

But if they’re justifiable – a response to a lethal threat – then why is this a problem?

Is the death of a rapist the same as the death of his victim?

More significantly, we find the laws increase murder and manslaughter by a statistically significant 7 to 9 percent, which translates into an additional 500 to 700 homicides per year nationally across the states that adopted castle doctrine.

And there, the researchers find causation in a correlation.

Which came first – the rise in violent crime, or the rise in killings in self-defense?

Thus, by lowering the expected costs associated with using lethal force, castle doctrine laws induce more of it.

This is patent nonsense.

The study seems to make several key errors of logic:

  • Considering “justifiable homicides” a bad thing. And they are, in a very real way; they’re the second-worst possible outcome of a lethal-force situation. But giving the same moral weight to the death of someone who was killed for providing a deliberate and grave threat to another person, who responded by shooting?  That’s madness.
  • Not providing full context for the numbers – the researchers ascribe a hike in all homicides to the “lowered cost” of self-defense.  But we don’t know which murders are attributable to which motive.  Also, we don’t know how many of the un-justifiable homicides were justifiable, but hung up on one technicality or another in court (see George Zimmerman).
Back to the study:

 

This increase in homicides could be due either to the increased use of lethal force in self-defense situations, or to the escalation of violence in otherwise non-lethal conflicts. We suspect that self-defense situations are unlikely to explain all of the increase, as we also find that murder alone is increased by a statistically significant 6 to 11 percent.

I find that number intensely suspect, and will be looking into it.  My sniff-sensor tells me that number is BS – murder rates in general are dropping, nationwide, and given the number of states with stand your ground laws, it seems unlikely that there’s any link.

As the authors note, the increase in homicides may not be viewed by everyone as “unambiguously bad.” It could be driven by individuals protecting themselves from imminent harm by using lethal force. But it could also be driven by an escalation in violence that, absent the “castle doctrine,” wouldn’t have ended in serious injury for either party, they say.

Or it could – no, it would  – be substituting deaths of criminals for deaths of the innocent.

Chanting Points Memo: “Two Campaigns”

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You’ve been hearing it all over the place since it started sinking in among Democrats that their anointed candidate, Tom Barrett, was not going to pull off the win in Wisconsin last Tuesday – not even close.

Once the “Coin Toss” turned, for Dems in Wisconsin and nationwide, into a “Lunch Toss”, they – and their enablers in the mainstream, public and lefty media – started looking for excuses, for reasons that the ineluctable forces of history turned out to be very, very eluctable.

Among the first was the notion that Barret was outspent by 6:1.

It would sure make a reassuring story – “we didn’t get beat on ideas, we got beat by money”.

There are three answers to this meme:

Answer 1:  It’s Just Not True – The problem is, according to that noted conservative tool the WaPo, it’s really more like 2:1:

Now, Walker out-fundraised Barrett in Wisconsin, as well as outside the state.  But the part Dems never, ever tell you is that the Dems, as usual, outspent the GOP on independent expenditures by over $1.6 million

As everyone knew they would.

But they got outspent by the Walker campaign.  Which brings us to the second point:

Answer 2: Boo Freaking Hoo – So the Democrats got outspent?

In a recall that they forced?

There is not one single person in the entire Wisconsin Democrat party that knew that there would be no campaign finance restrictions on the race?  And that the GOP would call in every dog it could for this fight?  That Reince Priebus wouldn’t run his rolodex red-hot to defend the win he earned back in 2010?  And that the Tea Party wouldn’t absolutely slam the organizing?

Because there are only a few possible explanations:

  • There was, in fact, nobody who knew .  It’d seem to be a drastic mistake, forcing a recall without knowing the laws involved.  Just saying.
  • They knew, but figured that sheer Fleebagger passion would carry them through.  It’s the kind of hubris that is explainable, if not necessarily excusable.
  • They knew, but figured the GOP would screw it up.  Not a bad assumtion, under normal circumstances.  But the GOP – or at least the Tea Party-influenced part of it – is learning.

At any rate, it was the Wisconsin Democrats who asked for the recall.  So they got outspent?

Sucks to be them!

Answer 3: Hypocrisy – So winning an election by spending lots of outside money is a bad thing?

Well, tell it to Mark Dayton, whose 8,000 vote margin of victory was paid for by…:

  • An epic toxic smear campaign financed by Alita Messinger, a scionette of the Rockefeller family who dumps millions of her own money into Minnesota astroturf groups, which managed to convince just enough low-information voters that Tom Emmer had a DUI to cost him whatever…
  • The DFL-friendly travesty of an election-registration system didn’t provide Dayton.
  • Which, by the way, outspent Emmer and the GOP by at least 2:1.  More like 3:1, if memory serves.

In Minnesota, you have truckloads of outside money financing outreach to dumb voters and creation of illegal voters to win elections for the DFL.

I’ll await your peals of outrage.

And await.

And await.

Chanting Points Memo: “Do-Nothing”

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Speaker Zellers and Senator Senjem had barely brought the gavels down on the session when the DFL’s paid PR organs – Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Common Cause and the unions – and their unpaid ones in the media started chanting the meme: it’d been a “do-nothing” legislature.

That is, of course, objectiively wrong.  The GOP went into the session with big plans, and threw itself into carrying them off.

The DFL and Governor Dayton went into the session with smaller plans:

  • Run out the clock
  • Veto everything they could
  • Hope redistricting would pull their chestnuts out of the fire come November.

It’s not a bad strategy, really; it ties in seamlessly with the DFL’s strategy this past several elections: “lie about everything convincingly enough to sway the stupid vote”.

But in addition to being a really really cynically ofay political strategy, it’s just plain not true. Here’s a sampling of what the “do-nothing’ legislature managed to get past a sluggardly DFL minority and a Governor whose only activities this past session were vetoing legislation and kissing Roger Goodell’s ass:

  • Brought the deficit from the “nearly seven billion” of two years ago to a billion dollars and change in surplus today.
  • They passed a Voter ID Amendment, which promises to help make MInnesota elections less like Chicago’s
  • Furthered policies that led to the creation of 41,000 jobs – almost making up for the 47,000 jobs lost jn 2009 and 2010 when the DFL controlled the legislature.
  • Brought Health and Human Services spending increases down from the double digits under DFL mismanagement to just over the rate of inflation.
  • King Banaian’s “Sunset Advisory Commission” did something I do not believe any DFL government has ever done; eliminated government offices that had outlived their usefulness.
  • Tort Reform
  • Changes in school choice laws.

Oh, yeah – and they passed a ton of other bills, which Dayton then vetoed.

Put another way:  a legislature elected by over 50% of each district’s voters was stymied by a governor elected by barely over 40% of the people.

But that matters not to Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota, and its new astroturf spinoff, “Alliance for a Better Legislature”.  WIth nothing to show for their own session, the DFL and its astroturf partners’ only really strategy is…:

  • Find a big lie
  • Tell it constantly
  • Peel off enough stupid people…
  • …or fake and duplicate people to flip the Legislature while they still can.

They are about to dump more money into this state than we’ve ever seen – which is, of course, why they’ve spent the last year whinging about  the “American Legislative Exchange Commission”.  It’s Berg’s Seventh Law:  “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.

It’s going to be a busy six months for conservative bloggers and talk radio – the only counterbalance the media and DFL (ptr) and all of their Rockefeller money have in this state.

 

Chanting Points Memo: With “Experts” Like This, Who Needs Enemas?

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Long before the Trayvon Martin shooting started dominating the headlines, gun law reform was in the news in Minnesota, and had already spawned a smaller, more “Barney-Fife”-y version of the disinformation mill that has been sweeping the nation these past few weeks.

I and the rest of the Minnesota Second Amendment community have been playing whack-a-mole for months now, as one dishonest public official or in-the-bag cop or another misinformed/disinforming editorial board excrescence essentially spreads the same vacuous chanting points.

Usually, whether the issue passes (like concealed carry) or not, it dies down between the final passages/vetos and the next session – because none of the people who write for the other side really know much about the issue other than what they’re told.

The Martin shooting has extended the disinformation season even here in Minnesota, though, as the DFL and media try to find a wedge issue to get their base frothed up and to try to peel off the uninformed, not-very-curious ones part of the swing set – the ones voted for Mark Dayton in 2010.

Which brings us to a piece from over the weekend at the MinnPost, by one Thomas Weyandt, a former St. Paul City Attorney’s-office prosecutor who’s  joined the cottage industry of instant pundits with opinions on gun laws:

With the national uproar over the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida, it’s a good time to take another look at the expanded Castle Doctrine bill that almost became law in Minnesota. Ours would have been even worse than Florida’s “Shoot First” law.

It’s an inflammatory statement.  Let’s see if he packs the factual gear to follow it up:

But first, my qualifications before I explain why. I was an assistant city attorney for St. Paul for 34 years. In about 1996, I became interested in the lack of knowledge of gun laws by police, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges. I did a study of the results of 676 cases my office had prosecuted and then wrote a manual on how to do it correctly.

His auto-bio speaks of 30-odd years in workmen’s compensation law for the City of Saint Paul – but a “special interest in gun crimes”, leading to a book on the subject, “Investigating and Charging Weapons and Gun Cases“.  Book?  Manual?

Whichever.  He’s setting himself up as an expert..

I have taught police, prosecutors and defense attorneys at a number of classes. I also was involved in the prosecution of hundreds of gun crimes during the last 10 years of my work with the city. Since retiring, I have been a consultant to a group that deals with gun laws at the Legislature.

Odd that he doesn’t favor the reader with the name of the “group” with which he “consults”.  I’m tempted to wonder if it’s “Protect Minnesota”, whose leader, Heather Martens, may be among the most discredited lobbyists on the hill – because she so habitually lies.  If so, that might be why Weyandt doesn’t give us the name of the group.  I’ll check up on that.

(UPDATE:  It’s “Protect Minnesota“, all right – check down in the “2009 Background Check Bill” section.  They’re hawking his “book”, in CD form.  Weyandt felt the need to buttress his credibility by proclaiming himself a “consultant” on the issue, but not to tell you he “consulted” with a group that’s been fighting a bit of an “Aboslutely No Credibility” issue for the past decade or two).

He also doesn’t say how he, a work-comp attorney, was “involved” in that prosecution.

There are two things to keep in mind as we proceed through Weyandt’s article:

  1. To A Lawyer, It’s As Much About The Information The Jury Doesn’t Get As What They Do:  A good trial lawyer never asks a witness a question whose answer he doesn’t know in advance.  They can also spend as much time arguing about the instructions the jury get about the law relating to the case as they do about the case itself – to make sure the jury doesn’t get the information that doesn’t help their case.  In this case, the “jury” is “the MinnPost’s audience”, and he’s already left out one key bit of information, the “group” with which he “consults”.  What else has he left out?  Oh, we’ll get to that.
  2. There Isn’t Just One Law:  Law really exists at three levels in this country; the Constitution puts down the basics.  “Statutory” laws passed by Congress, legislatures, county commissions and city councils fill in the implementation details.  And then “case law” – the stuff that makes lawyers rich – covers all the nuances that law develops over time and application to real-world situations.   We’ll come back to this.  Oh, yes, we will.

Back to Weyandt, the “expert” on gun law (and workmen’s comp!): he’s gotten his first key fact wrong.

So what’s wrong with Minnesota’s proposed Castle Doctrine bill?

Most important is the fact that there is no duty to retreat in a person’s home if someone enters illegally. That has been the major factor expressed by many in support of the proposal — “Come into my house and you’re toast.”

Pretty scary, huh?

Sounds like a pretty damning indictment of “Stand Your Ground”, doesn’t it?  The idea that Minnesotans would lose the “Duty to Retreat”, while in their homes?

Except that it seems to have escaped the “expert” Mr. Weyandt, Esq. that Minnesotans have not had a duty to retreat when in their homes – between the front and back doors – for almost thirteen years. .

It’s not in the state statute.  It’s in case law:

Case: State v. Carothers
Issue: Defense of dwelling, duty to retreat
Court: Minnesota Supreme Court
Cite: C8-98-86
Date: June 17, 1999
Link: http://www.lawlibrary.state.mn.us/archive/supct/9906/c89886.htm
Decision: A duty to retreat does not attach to defense
of dwelling claims.

So why does Weyandt, the “expert”, not relate this fact?

There are really two reasons this could happen:

  • He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and he’s letting it show.
  • He’s trying to shape a reality in his audience’s mind’s eye that furthers his goal, which isn’t the same as telling the truth.  LIke a prosecutor trying to make sure his “Jury” – the MinnPost audience – hears only the bits of information that he wants them to see, and none of the inconvenient facts that lead them away from his desired conclusion, he’s counting on his audience’s ignorance to make his case for him.

He’s not done.  Not by a long shot:

The proposal — sponsored by Rep. Tony Cornish, R-Good Thunder, and Sen. Gretchen Hoffman, R-Vergas — would have allowed for the use of deadly force without a duty to retreat in a great many places other than a person’s home.

Why doesn’t Weyandt specify what the “Great Many” are?

Either because he’s incompetent, or he doesn’t want to “pollute” the argument with the fact that  “the person’s property, outbuildings, vehicle or business” just aren’t and will never be a “great many” places; it’s small list indeed.

Which reason – incompetence, or a considered desire to mislead the public about the law – do you think Weyandt is exhibiting?

It also allowed a person to use deadly force if they reasonably feared harm. The proposal contained a provision that creates a presumption that the fear is reasonable. Current law requires the use of the reasonable-man standard and leaves the question up to the jury.

This paragraph is a dog’s breakfast of nonsense.

There’s an omission – from incompetence or via deception, again, and we have no idea – that presumes the fear of death or great bodily harm is reasonable “in the case of a person entering a dwelling or occupied vehicle by stealth or force”.  That’s a rather more limited set of circumstances than Mr. Weyandt seems to want you to think, now, isn’t it?

Beyond that, and speaking to the lack of integrity in Mr. Weyandt’s piece?  The law today allows a person to claim a homicide is justifiable if they “reasonably” fear death or great bodily harm.  Here’s the law, as it is today.  See the word?  It’s right there!

The difference – the only difference – is that under the circumstances covered in the proposal, in the home or vehicle or property or business, which is being entered by force or stealth, the county prosecutor will have to prove that the fear of death or harm was unreasonable, rather than the shooter having to prove it (at their own expense, with a lengthy jail term hanging over their head should they not prove themselves innocent after an admission of “guilt with an explanation”).

That’s it!

Whether someone’s fear is reasonable is something a jury can understand.

And there’s the point of view of the professional attorney speaking.

A jury – sitting in a nice, warm, well-lit room, protected by sheriff’s deputies, with coffee breaks and donuts and bathroom time, can certainly determine that.  But the jury also has to operate on information shaped by the way two lawyers – one of them a county prosector, working the case full time on the taxpayers dime, sitting in another nice, warm, safe, well-lit office, without, say, rapists beating down his door.  He’ll have the luxury of time to try to persuade the jury, not that a woman’s fear of death or disfigurement wasn’t legitimate, but that she didn’t try hard enough to retreat from that threat to satisfy his picayune reading of the law.  And if her attorney, charging her $250, can’t convince the county’s full-time attorney that that undefined “duty to retreat” was met, then she’s going to jail, even with her legitimate fear of death.

And that is the status quo that Weyandt – and Jim Backstrom, and at the end of the day Mark Dayton – are defending; the idea that a law-abiding citizen’s freedom hangs on a technicality to be decided by a bunch of lawyers.

Like Mr. Weyandt.

Cornish’s bill wasn’t a “shoot first” law.  It was a “prosecutors have to earn their pay, or at least playing rhetorically-onanistic and politically-motivated games with peoples’ lives, when the shooting is so obviously law-abiding that even a lawyer other than Mr. Weyandt could see it”.

Lamentably, that doesn’t roll off the tongue quiet as fast.

Proving beyond a reasonable doubt that it was not reasonable, as the proposed law would have required, would seem to be nearly impossible.

This is pure fantasy.

Walk through this list of cases – mostly fictional, all plausible.  They’ll show the “near impossibility” of a reasonably intelligent cop and prosecutor telling the difference between legitimate self-defense and murder, with or without the Cornish proposal.

Will some cases be more complicated than my examples?  Sure; the Martin case is one of them (at least in terms of information available to the public. There may be cases – few, indeed – where the circumstances force prosecutors to work to get their precious conviction.

There might be a reason for that; it just might be that the shooting was perfectly legitimate.

So far, I’m guessing “reading Weyandt’s book” would be a bigger handicap to prosecutors than Cornish’s proposal.

The Cornish/Hoffman proposal allowed the use of deadly force if someone is threatened with substantial bodily harm (SBH). The law defines that as including a temporary disfigurement. That means a punch to the face and a black eye would allow the use of deadly force.

This is unvarnished bullshit, and Minnesota law says so.

Substantial bodily harm is “bodily injury which involves a temporary but substantial disfigurement, or which causes a temporary but substantial loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ․

Go have a look for yourself.  It’s not exactly beach reading – but it’ll show you that under Minnesota law, Weyandt is talking nonsense.   A moderately-thorough scour through the cases didn’t find a single black eye among ’em.

Let me know how you do.

There are a couple of other especially troubling provisions:

• The expanded Castle Doctrine proposal would have granted total immunity from criminal prosecution.

They’re granted “total” immunity provided that the shooting was fully legal!  Read the law yourself (jump down to line 6.16)

• The proposal did not allow the arrest of the suspect until police have fully considered any claim of self-defense.

I’ve often wondered about people who object to this provision, which basically says “if the shooting was of someone who was entering a house/vehicle/property by force, and there was reasonable fear of death or substantial harm, and the force was reasonable, and every other part of the law was upheld, feel free not to arrest the shooter”.  That’s it.

Mr Weyandt’s desire to put people in handcuffs even if they are so obviously within the law that it’s transparently obvious to the cops borders on the unseemly.

So, if the police can’t arrest a suspect and bring him or her in for questioning, they have very little to no ability to determine if the person was acting in self-defense or not.  If the police can’t develop evidence that the claim of self-defense is false, there can be no prosecution.

Wait – is Mr Weyandt saying that, even in cases where the facts aren’t relatively obvious, that the best or only source of information is an interrogation after arrest?

If there is a prosecution, the proposal would presume the belief that the fear of harm was reasonable…

…if the circumstances of the shooting were those covered in the law!  If the shooter reasonably feared death or sufficient harm, and were on their property/in their car or business, and if the “victim” was entering one of those places via force or stealth to commit a crime!

It’s just not that difficult – provided the cops and prosecutors are modestly competent.

Despite all my criticisms, I am not among those who think such a law would create an increased danger to police. Nor do I believe that it would result in shootings all over the place.

What I do know, though, is that this proposal virtually would have negated the ability to prosecute anyone who applies deadly force under virtually any circumstance.

Provided they were utterly incompetent.

And on, and on, and on.

The entire piece relies on two things, really:

  • Studiously misstating the context and effects of Cornish’s proposal
  • Ignoring Minnesota case law.

As such, it stands alongside the rest of of the long-debunked “Protect Minnesota” propaganda that this blog has been shredding for a decade.

Here’s a special invitation to my lawyer friends to pick apart Mr. Weyandt’s argument.  Use all the comment space you want.  Hell, email me; I’ll print it as a post.

Because humiliating this brand of partisan disinformation from the front page of the Minnesota Media would be a wondrous public service.

Chanting Points Memo: The Law And The Leftyblog Fantasy World

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Hypothetically, here:  Let’s say that a Neo-Nazi – let’s call him “Tim Stevenson” – gives a rabble-rousing speech at a tiny meeting of neo-nazis.  He rouses the skinheads and flat-earthers present to a fever pitch of hatred against “N****rs, Kikes, Wops, Spics, F****ts, C**holics and Immigrants”, calling for their expulsion from the US – peacefully, if possible, not-so-peacefully if not.

Stevenson – at 60 years old a small man, 5’7 and maybe 150 pounds, with a law degree from the U of M and closely-cropped hair – is a truly hateful man.  He also has a spotless criminal record, and has a Minnesota permit to carry a handgun; “believing rotten things” is not a condition for denial.  As hateful as his beliefs are, he’s never been in a physical fight in his life. He’s got a little .380 in his pocket.

After his speech, and after coffee and coffee cake with the assembled louts, Stevenson leaves the meeting, walking out onto a cold, dark, wind-swept Brooklyn Center street to get to the parking lot, a block away.  He’s being followed, he notices, as he tries to walk toward the parking lot, by a large woman in a “trench coat mafia” duster. His spidey sense, augmenting his far-left Nazi paranoia, kicks in; he walks a little faster.  The woman walks faster still.  Stevenson breezes through the stoplight to get across the street to the parking lot; the woman breaks into a jog, yelling “Hey!”

Stevenson turns, and notices the woman appears very aggressive.  He starts backpedaling, toward his car, yelling “what?”

“I’m coming for YOU, Stevenson!” the woman – Hannah Rothenshteyn-Gabler, 29, a 5’11 former rugby player and current competitive bodybuilder, bellows.

(By an odd coincidence, a video production class was just letting out in a building across the street.  Seven people with video cameras happen to videotape the entire incident, from a variety of angles, with crystal-clear audio, albeit with a style overly derivative of early John Sayles).

At this point, it was Stevenson’s opinion and perception that something bad would happen if he waited to meet the woman.

Stevenson backpedals, yelling “DO NOT ATTACK ME!  HELP!  DO NOT ATTACK ME!” – because while Stevenson may be a neo-Nazi, he did pay attention in concealed carry training; he remembers the part where his instructor said “when you’re carrying, you have to turn into the biggest p**sy in the world”.  “HELP!  DO NOT ATTACK ME!”

As he backpedals through the parking lot, he can’t see the banana peel, left earlier in the evening by a littering driver, lying in his path.  As he backpedals, he slips and falls squarely on his butt, sprawled on the ground, dazed for a shaved instant.

Rothenshteyn-Gabler runs up to where Stevenson lies on the ground, and pulls a 16 pound sledgehammer from under her duster, and hefts it above her head.  “I am going to pound your brains into silly-putty”, she says.  “And then I’m going to soak what’s left of you in gasoline and light you on fire!”, she bellows, preparing to smash the hammer down on Stevenson’s face.

Feeling himself – in his opinion, informed by his perception of what was going on – to be in imminent danger of death and great bodily harm, having established that he was an unwilling participant and making a very credible and reasonable effort to try to run away, Stevenson pulls his .380 and fires one shot.  It hits Rothenshteyn-Gabler in the head, killing her.

Stevenson calls the police, who detain him, but review the evidence – including the seven videotaped accounts – and note that Stevenson behaved correctly in every possible way.

But the Hennepin County Attorney brings charges – Second Degree Murder.  Stevenson’s lawyer mounts an affirmative defense, a “self defense” claim, noting that yes, Stevenson did shoot Rothenshteyn-Gabler, but…:

  • Stevenson  was as reluctant a participant as it was possible to be.
  • He’d made an extraordinary effort to retreat.
  • He had a freaking sledgehammer above his head, and an attacker who was clearly ready and able to use it, putting him in very reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm.
  • He fired exactly one shot, enough to end the threat – so his force was “reasonable”.

The prosecutor got up to respond.  “But ladies and gentlemen of the jury – while the defendant meets all four criteria of the self-defense claim, HE IS A NEO-NAZI!  I mean, come on!  He’s a NEO NAZI!  He HATES Jews and women and blacks!  HE’s A NEO NAZI!  A NEO NAZI!”

Two questions for you, the audience:

  1. How does the jury rule – bearing in mind that Stevenson’s beliefs, reprehensible as they are, had nothing whatever to do with the fatal encounter itself – personal beliefs don’t justify deadly attacks, right?
  2. How would the story be any different had the “Stand Your Ground” bill passed?

For the first:  If the Jury doesn’t nullify the law and ignore that, noxious personal beliefs aside, Stevenson acted correctly?  They’ll most likely acquit him; hateful as he is, he obeyed the law.  There are no guarantees with a jury, but given impeccable behavior, he could prove the correctness of his actions.  He’d make his lawyer a little wealthier, of course.

For the second?  The lawyer would have to come up with a better argument, one that hinged less on “HE’S A NAZI”, and more on proving his fear wasn’t reasonable.

Tha’ts really about it.

I bring this up because some local leftybloggers want to ignore the facts and pretend that the first part is what matters, when it suits them.

 

Continue reading →

Chanting Points Memo: Jerbs Vs. Jobs

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Of all the facile DFL chanting points sluicing outward from Media Matters For America the Alliance For A “Better” Minnesota this session, perhaps the most galling is “The DFL is focused on jobs, while the GOP is obsessing over constitutional amendments over social issues”.

For starters, it’s absurd; the GOP as a rule doesn’t believe government “creates jobs”.  And as we noted at the beginning of the session, the “jobs plan” contained in Dayton’s bonding bill is really just a “Jerbs Plan“, creating a bunch of temporary – ahem, “Shovel-Ready” – construction jobs (for DFL-up-sucking unions and the state workers that supervise them, naturally).  As we saw last January, the job numbers themselves make no sense.

The fact that Minnesota’s unemployment is as low as it is is, in fact, testimony to the GOP’s real jobs plan; keeping taxes as low as possible (given an irresponsible and dogmatically partisan  DFL governor for the past year, and DFL legislatures for the four preceding).

As to the “social legislation?”  The Legislative can walk and chew gum at the same time (the fade on “Right To Work” notwithstanding).  They can do both just as easily as Tom Bakk can propose legislation on the State Beer and whatever else it is he does every day.

But the real difference is this:  while the DFL and Governor Dayton propose to “create” temp jerbs, the GOP is out to make Minnesota a place where business can get established, grow and thrive.

Chanting Points Memo: Compare And Contrast

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Today’s “Compare and Contrast” feature pits the “American Legislative Exchange Council” – also known as “ALEC”, and also also known as “This Year’s DFL Boogeyman” – against the “National Conference of State Legislatures“.

“Who”?

Exactly.

Let’s compare them, point by point:

Agenda:  The group promotes a partisan point of view.
ALEC:  Yes – center right.
NCLS: Yes – center-left.

Pushing Agenda:  The group writes “model legislation” that, if passed, would further its agenda, and distributes it to its legislative members (because all legislation needs to be submitted by an elected legislator, naturally).
ALEC:  Yes.  As, by the way, do other conservative think tanks; Cato, the NRA, whomever.
NCLS: Yes.  As, by the way, do liberal think tanks, as well as the political action wings of all the unions.  Especially the NEA.

Content Of That Agenda:  The group promotes an agenda that its opponents find debatable.
ALEC:  Yes – and that fact has pushed the more-deranged reaches of the left to the point where the liberal “attention” has become self-parody, and has gotten to the point where “Berg’s Seventh Law” applies.  Two years ago, they babbled about the Koch Brothers to cover the fact that Alita Messinger was pouring millions into the Minnesota campaign.  This year, yapping like obedient dogs about “ALEC” will obscure the fact that the unions and groups like the NCLS will be doing the same, and much, much more, just by simple dint of there being more of them.
NCLS: Yes – although you don’t hear much about it.

Who Pays The Dues To Join The Group To Learn About The Agenda?:  Both groups charge dues, which by definition makes them “not lobbying groups”.  Someone has to pay for legislators to join and remain “members”.
ALEC:  The members pay their own dues.
NCLS: Dues are paid by the state, using taxpayer money.  One source with background in legislative matters tells me the dues amount to over $300,000 in state money a year.  That’s money that’s being taken from the children to pay for our legislators to think like this.

Attention Group Gets From Its Detractors:  What’s the group’s profile among its opponents?
NCLS: Not much.  Even though it promotes an institutionalist, big-government agenda, and does it with public money, you rarely if ever hear about the NCLS’ actions or agenda.  Or those of the National Education Association, which does all the same things – promoting policy, writing model legislation, trying to inveigle legislators into sponsoring it, yadda yadda.  Or the same operations at AFSCME, MAPE, the SEIU, and on, and on, and on.
ALEC:  The group is to the left in 2012 what “birth certificates” were to the fringe right in 2009, what “Bush’s cruise missiles” were to the “fringe” left in 2004, what “black helicopters” were to the paranoid right in 1996; a stalking horse for their lunatic fringes at best, justification for its own excesses at worst.

Hope we’ve settled that.


Chanting Points Memo: “I Shot Him Because I Didn’t Like The Way He Snored”

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Rep. Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill – which must be either signed or vetoed by midnight tonight (as this is written, neither has happened, although that may change; I write these posts between 5:30 and 7AM, because, well, I work during the day and can’t always follow the news in real time like some puling Sorosblogger), has come in for the most amazing avalanche of slander over its four years of consideration at various levels.

I’ve pointed out that most of the bill’s detractors – whether politicians, cops or the  DFL-promoting media – are lying when they say (and say, and say) that the bill would “legalize murder”, and that the bill merely changes the presumption of guilt to a  presumption of innocence when one is attempting self-defense on ones own property – in the home, yard, garage, or in the car or at a business one owns.

That’s it.

But some people learn better from seeing examples.

So let’s go through some compare and contrast exercises to look at the differences between current law and the Cornish bill.

A really stupid 10 year old boy enters a homeowner’s property to steal apples.  The boy is unarmed, by the way, and that’s above and beyond the fact that he’s a ten year old boy.  The homeowner comes out of his house with a handgun and shoots the boy, who dies on the scene.  The homeowner claims self-defense.

  • Current Law: The homeowner can not prove that the boy was a reasonable threat of death or great bodily harm.  She’s convicted of manslaughter or 2nd degree murder.
  • With “Stand Your Ground”:  The police investigation shows no evidence the boy was a threat to anyone.  The county attorney charges the homeowner with manslaughter or 2nd degree murder, and proves it to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.  The jury convicts her.
A homeowner feels a passerby has given him the “stink eye”.  The homeowner – a lawyer and leftyblogger – is walking up his front walk when he sees a man walking up the sidewalk towards him.  The homeowner believes the man has “given him the stink-eye” and pulls a Smith and Wesson Model 29 .44 magnum from his camera bag, firing six shots at a range of eight feet, hitting the man once, killing him.  Claiming to have felt threatened by the “stink-eye”, the homeowner claims self-defense.
  • Current Law: The homeowner’s claim that “stink-eye” was a threat of death or great bodily harm, his failure to even attempt to retreat from said “stink-eye”, and the unreasonableness of the use of lethal force against an unarmed man (“stink-eye” notwithstanding) is rejected by the jury, who convict him of second-degree murder.
  • With “Stand Your Ground”: The police investigation shows that the homeowner was not under threat of death or great bodily harm from the alleged perception of “stink-eye”.  The County Attorney, noting that there is no reasonable doubt that a jury will find “stink eye” not to be a lethal threat, and that using lethal force is not a reasonable response to “stink-eye”, takes the case to trial.  Based on the lack of lethal threat and the unreasonableness of lethal force, the jury finds him guilty of second degree murder; “duty to retreat” is no longer an issue, obviously. The homeowner, breaking into a curious German accent as his lawyer buries his face in his hands during the verdict, yells “But ze law zayz I don’t have to retreat to ze house, and zat I can kill for ze ztink-eye!” as the judge pounds the bench, and then the defendant, with his gavel.
A man – Man A – becomes irritated when another man, “B”, cuts him off on Cedar Avenue in Eagan during rush hour.  A flips B off.  B flips A off harder.  A accelerates around B, narrowly missing several other drivers.  B accelerates to keep pace.  A swerves to cut B off.  B bumps A’s bumper.  A races up the Cliff Road exit followed by B.  They pull into the parking lot at Doolittle’s at Cliff and Nichols.  B slams into A’s trunk.  A pulls away, turns sharply, and slams into the right-front corner of B’s car.  B backs away and accelerates, ramming into the front of A’s car.  Their cars both disabled, the men climb out and commence a vigorous fist-fight.  They pummel each other for three minutes before A pulls a can of mace and squirts it at B, catching him in the pants – which is useless for purposes of blinding him.  B responds by drawing a revolver, firing twice to knock A down, and four more times as he lies bleeding on the pavement.  He claims self-defense in the court with jurisdiction, Dakota County.
  • Current Law:  Are you kidding?  Dozens of witnesses testified that B was a willing participant (you can’t jump into a fistfight and then claim “self-defense” when it goes out of control), so the jury didn’t buy that.  They also rejected the claim that he legitimately feared death or great bodily harm from the mace, or that shooting was a reasonable use of lethal force (even if you leave out the four shots to finish him off, which, naturally, the county attorney did not).  Finally, B did not retreat, although that was the least of his legal problems.
  • With “Stand Your Ground” – While Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom had claimed that this was the sort of case that would have allowed “B” to walk free – apparently lacking confidence that the cops or his staff could successfully prove wrongdoing – the cops successfully interview the dozens of witnesses who noted that both parties were flailing away with aplomb, not to mention having been involved in a miles-long road rage incident – thus making “B” a willing participant.  The cops also noted that B was faced with mace, not a knife or gun.  They noted from the spatter and four bullets embedded in the pavement below “A”‘s body that at least four of the shots were against an unarmed, incapacitated and probably dying man, meaning lethal force was, at least for those four shots, not justified.   Even though his boss, JIm Backstrom, went on WCCO and “Almanac” claiming that “B” would likely go free because the “Stand your Ground” law meant the incompetent boobs who worked for him probably couldn’t win the case, his beleaguered assistant easily won a conviction, and a reprimand from Backstrom for making him look like an even bigger idiot than those pesky bloggers had done.
A homeowner, an older black woman, is surprised when  couple of of young latino men from the neighborhood walk through her open front door to ask if she’s all right; they, being good citizens, were genuinely concerned about their neighbor’s well-being.  The woman, afraid after hearing stories of latino-on-black violence in Los Angeles, comes out of her bathroom with a shotgun, and in a brief orgy of gender-and-race-based fear, kills one man and gravely wounds the other.  She claims self-defense.
  • Current Law:  The woman is in her home, so she has no “duty to retreat” under current law.  But the jury rejects her self-defense claim, as there is no evidence of a lethal threat (the men were unarmed) and the lethal force was unreasonable.   She quickly pleads down to one count of manslaughter and one of aggravated assault.
  • With “Stand Your Ground”:  The investigating cops find no sign of weapons, no evidence of a threat.   The county attorney gets the conviction.
A 100 pound Asian woman is tending her Frogtown garden.  A car with two white men – “Mark”, a 300 pound man with a long history of violent offenses (unbeknownst to the woman), and “Jeff”, a wiry man with facial tattoos who was recently released (again, unknown to the Asian woman) from prison after serving time for a sexual assault conviction, drives up.  “Mark” climbs out of the car and says “Bitch, get in the car!  We’re going to a party”.  The Asian woman says “no, and get off my property”.  As “Jeff” climbs out of the car, “Mark” says “Aw, honey, it’ll be a fun party!”, and advances toward her.  “Go away!” she yells.  “Mark” grins a chilling grin, as “Jeff” takes up what looks like a lookout position.  The womam backs away from “Mark”, draws a .380 pistol from her pocket.  “Mark” chuckles.  “Oh, no, don’t shoot me”, he says sarcastically, pulling down his zipper as he continues to advance.  The woman shoots him twice in the chest.  He falls to the found as “Jeff” jumps in his car.  The woman administers CPR until the police and paramedics arrive, saving his life.
  • Current Law:  Deputy County Attorney Jon Hesch – an up and comer who wants to be elected County Attorney someday – sitting in his office surrounded by metal detectors and deputies – notes that the woman was not in her house, so she had the ability to run away; being in shape, she could certainly have outrun a 300 pound man.  He also notes that the men were unarmed, and so the woman had no fear of death or great bodily harm.  Furthermore, “Mark” states from his hospital bed that he had been drinking, and was pulling down his zipper because he wanted to urinate, and that in fact they really really really did actually want to go to a party, not to try to rape her (and Hesch notes that there’s no way she could have known about Mark’s violent crime convictions), putting a “rape” claim in some doubt.  Hesch decides to prosecute for attempted murder.  The woman – and her husband – are not wealthy.  They can’t afford an attorney with the oomph to fight back against Hesch and the entire Ramsey County Attorney’s office; to avoid putting the family in the poorhouse, the woman pleads guilty to a lesser charge – felony aggravated assault – putting a felony on her record and a “conviction” and a “gun off the street” for ambitious young weasel Hesch, who duly files it away in the “win” column in time to make it to a cocktail party with Keri Miller and Alita Messinger.
  • With “Stand Your Ground”: Assistant County Attorney Hesch notes that the police investigation turned up no evidence that’d give him a shot of even insinuating, much less proving beyond a reasonable doubt, that the woman was a willing participant, or  that her fear or her use of force was unreasonable.  Trying to try the case would be a lot of work with almost no chance of a conviction.   As an ambitious up-and-comer, he decides to curry favor with the Asian community, declines to press charges, calls her a hero for getting a thug off the street, and makes his 5PM squash date with his supervisor.
While at an amusement park , a group of  young ruffians grope a teenage girl.  The girl’s father intervenes, getting in the lads’ faces.  The lads start beating and kicking the man who, outnumbered 6-1, eventually goes down.    Another man – a concealed carry permit-holder with a concealed handgun – assesses the situation and, nervous about how a county attorney would react, opts to yell at the lads that he’s calling the police.  One of the lads draws a 9mm handgun from under his Breck School sweatshirt and dares him to do anything about it, and brandishes the gun at the rest of the crowd, sending any would-be intervenors fleeing.  The man draws his own handgun and fires one shot, hitting Mr. Breck in the head, killing him and sending the rest of the perps fleeing.
  • Under Current Law: Good question.  If the “amusement park” is in Clay County, the cops probably shake his hand and offer to buy him coffee if they see him; the county attorney thanks his lucky stars there’s another scumbag off the street.  In Henco, of course, the County Attorney must appease the DFL, so the cops arrest the man; he’s charged with manslaughter.  He posts bail, cashes in his retirement account, and lawyers up.  The County Attorney could opt to pursue him using any number of approaches; he should have retreated, it wasn’t he who was under direct threat, and really, the cops were only 15 minutes away.  The man’s fate is in the hands of a Henco jury.  What would you do?
  • With “Stand Your Ground”: What, do I have to explain everything?  He’s not on his property. Nothing really changes.  More’s the pity.
A young female law student driving home to her apartment after night class is approached in her parking lot by two men.  They run toward her car.  She draws her gun – but ponders for a moment – “is my fear of death or great bodily harm legitimate?  Do I need to try to retreat before I draw and shoot?  Is this reasonable?”
  • Under Current Law: The crime scene investigator is called to a wooded area in Maplewood to investigate an apparent homicide.  In addition to ligature marks around the neck and signs of sexual assault, the woman’s face shows signs of having been hit by mace.  Back in her apartment parking lot, her car shows signs of that same mace; under the car lies an un-used handgun, traced to the woman, a law student who’d apparently just left night class.
  • With “Stand Your Ground”: The crime scene investigator is called to the scene of a shooting in an apartment parking lot.  One man with a long history of sexual assault convictions lies on the pavement, shot twice in the chest.  His accomplice fled, and is found, pantsless, in a nearby park.  The young woman’s inner monologue, not muddled by having to second-guess a county attorney, resolved itself in time to kill the mace-armed rapist.  His accomplice claimed he removed his pants in self-defense as he was bundled off to jail.  The Strib’s Matt McKinney writes a touching portrait of the dead man’s family, highlighting his sister’s claim that the “victim” was so close to turning his life around, this time…
A man is driving down the road with his pregnant wife.  Their two children are in the back seat.  He changes lanes, inadvertently cutting off another man speeding up behind him.  The second driver honks, enraged.  The first man – let’s call him “Marty” – waves, the universal Minnesota driver sign for “sorry about that’.  The second man – let’s just call him “Lyndon” – seethes with rage.  Finally Lyndon sees the chance to avenge his besmirched manhood.  He pulls up next to Marty’s car as it’s stuck between two other cars at a stoplight, rolls down a window, and points a Glock at Marty’s wife.  “It’d sure be a shame if your wife died because you’re such a f****ng stupid driver”, Lyndon yells.    Seeing his wife and children being threatened by a man with a gun – by definition, a lethal threat – and unable to drive away because he’s boxed in on all sides, Marty draws his own gun and fires three shots, wounding Lyndon.  He then calls the police – following the self-defense playbook to a T.
  • Current Law: Assistant County Attorney Hedda Blatz-Grehnbehlt notes that while the threat of death or great bodily harm was definitely present, and that the use of lethal force against lethal force meets the letter and spirit of the law, and there was no way to show that Marty was a willing participant, she did believe that Marty had the option of telling the kids to climb out the left door and dragging his wife over the transmission hump and out the driver’s side door, rather than shooting.  She informs Marty’s lawyer – as he charges $250 an hour to listen – that she’s going to take the case to court, with a bevy of witnesses to show that there wasn’t clear convincing evidence that Marty couldn’t have evacuated his kids from the car rather than shooting.  Marty’s attorney tells Marty “We should be able to win this one – but we’ll need expert witnesses to rebut the county’s contention, plus there’ll likely be a long, nasty trial against a team of county attorneys.  it’s gonna cost ya a minimum of $50K, maybe $100K, and that’s win or lose, and there are no guarantees.  Wanna roll the dice?  Or take the deal to plead guilty to aggravated assault, serve a year, maybe suspended, plus ten years probation, and get your life back?”  It’s a tough call for the guy, a working-class stiff who doesn’t have “a lawyer” of his own to call.
  • With “Stand Your Ground”:  Assistant County Attorney Blatz-Grehnbehlt shakes her head, declines to press charges, and leaves work early to go to a “Take Action Minnesota” rally.
A man walks, uninvited, into a garage in South Minneapolis.  The homeowner, working on his lawn mower in the garage, turns, alarmed, as a disheveled man walks toward him demanding money.  The man draws his permitted concealed handgun and orders the intruder to leave.  “F**k you, pay me!” the man yells.  The homeowner believes he sees a knife; he fires, killing the intruder.
  • Current Law: Knife?  Threat?  Reasonable?  Sure – but could the homeowner have tried to run away?  That’s up to the county attorney – and if the county attorney has seen too many kung fu movies, the homeowner will have to spend his life’s savings and then some to prove he couldn’t have – to  prove his innocence – beyond a reasonable doubt.    It’s a crap shoot.
  • With “Stand Your Ground”: Did the man do anything wrong?  The burden of proof is on the prosecutor.  Where it should be.
That’s the dirty little secret behind the DFL/Media’s “Legalizing Murder!!!!!” invective over this law; it’s to draw your attention away from the fact that vetoing “Stand Your Ground” will be a blow against everyone’s civil rights – especially working and poor people.

Chanting Points Memo: Unclear On The Concept

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You just knew the DFL had this one planned either way.

If the budget forecast had come in in the red, there would have been caterwauling about how the state needed to raise taxes to make the state’s economy stronger.  The incongruity would have escaped the media.

Of course, it came in in the black; about a third of a billion.

And the regional DFL-prop media was quick to pee in the Legislature’s Wheaties; “It’s All Spoken For!”, they were quick to append to the news.

Dayton’s Management and Budget commissioner was quick with the Administraiton’s spin:

Management and Budget Commissioner Jim Schowalter said the $323 million surplus is already spent. By law, $5 million will go to refill the state’s budget reserve. The rest will start paying back the schools. At this rate, Schowalter said it could be quite some time before the state breaks even.

“It’s going to be a while before we have a positive forecast balance even if we have good news rolling forward for years to come,” he said.

That’s going to be the DFL’s line about the surplus: “it’s not really a surplus!  We owe!”

And when it comes up around he water cooler, every Republican, every conservative, every Real Minnesotan should have two responses:

  • “Duh.  No kidding?  The DFL spent us into a deep, deep hole between 2006 and 2010, larding up the budget with entitlements that were bound to leave us with a deep hole once the economy went south – and it eventually always goes south, at least for a while.  And when it did, the DFL just asked for more – like, six billion over previous budgets!  Have you learned your lesson yet?”
  • “Remember how all the DFL’s talking heads were saying “it’s going to take a lot of work to get out of this deficit?”  Well, welcome to “lot of work”.  Just like when your family falls behind on bills and spends some time playing catch-up; your tax refund and bonus from work go into paying old bills, rather than fun stuff.  Suck it up, little camper.  This is the “hard work”.  Put up or shut up”.

And one thing that is as predictable as the Alliance for a Better Minnesota lying about something; the Dems will call for whatever “surplus” there is to be added to permanent entitlement spending.  And “paid back” to the schools.

Because in the world of the Democrat, or “Republicans” like Arne Carlson, “surplus” is just another word for “money to spend spend spend!”

And if there’s one thing Minnesotans showed us in 2010, it’s that they’re tired of that piece of business as usual.

MN-MOT/Chanting Points Memo: Securing The Incurious Vote

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We’re getting close to election season.

And Minnesota’s left-“leaning” “grassroots” astroturf organizations – Common Cause, Take Action Minnesota, Alliance For A Better Minnesota, and the various unions are following suit with doing what their various funders are paying them to do; trying to spin news, facts and info to get people to vote DFL in the upcoming elections.

Now, as we noted during the 2010 election cycle, these groups – especially Alliance for a Better Minnesota – are lavishly funded by liberal plutocrats, and always have been…

…even back before Citizens United started evening the playing field and allowing conservatives the same access to soft money that the Dems have always gotten from their union and 527 supporters.

Which is like complaining about plate tectonics; what are you going to do about it, one would be right to ask.  Political money is speech; we conservatives live by that ideal, and we’ll have to learn to prevail by it.

It’s not that the money buys so much messaging that is so very very irritating – indeed, depressing, if one cares for the future of this society, beyond narrow partisan politics.

It’s that the messaging it buys is so often not merely devoid of fact or defining context, but so cynically so that one can only think their only motivation for the entire campaign is “to repeat enough complete bullshit often enough to fool enough of the stupid and gullible to keep us in power”.

We saw this in 2010 in Minnesota, when these groups and their “useful idiots” (Lenin’s term, not mine) in the Twin Cities media and lefty “alternative” media, pounded a couple of non-factual or almost criminally-context-deprived points home with almost experimental-psych-class-material mania; the idea that “Tom Emmer had two DUIs” (he hadn’t; he’d been arrested and pled down to “Careless Driving”, 20 and 30 years earlier) and that he’d (campaigned for lax punishment for drunk drivers” (also a lie; Emmer was proposing a change in the implied consent law that is supported by a broad, and bipartisan, range of figures, at least in part because current law discriminates so completely against people who can’t afford lawyers.  Emmer would have changed that).  The campaign helped convinced, I’m going to guess, just a shade over 8,000 of our stupidest, most incurious, lemming-like neighbors to vote for a superannuated playboy with drinking, drug and depression problems and a record as America’s worst senator instead.

In other words, slathering Minnesota’s dimmest, least-curious citizens with b*llsh*t worked.

And they’re going long on the tactic this year.

Under the dual rubrics of my “Minnesota’s Ministry of Truth” and “Chanting Points Memo” categories, I’m going to start cataloging the broad, rich, lavishly-funded vein of pure fiction (at best) that the DFL is banking on to try to stem GOP fortunes in Minnesota this fall.

“Most Minnesotans oppose Voter ID” – This one came from Greta Bergstrom, a spokes-bot for “Take Action Minnesota”, an activist non-profit that claims a Wellstone-ian pedigree, but whose inner workings (say an acquaintance with knowledge of their front office) would fit in better in Pyongyang; “Nobody wants photo ID”, she tweeted not too long ago.  That was about the time – go figure – that Survey USA was showing Voter ID with 3:1 support (71-29) among Minnesotans, even among self-identified liberals.  Which was, by the way, the poll with the best news for Voter ID opponents.   Ms. Bergstrom apparently believes that if she and her group repeat it often enough, just enough of the addled will buy in.  It’s worked before, after all; it’s why we have a Governor Dayton!

“The Stand Your Ground Bill” would allow citizens to shoot people because they felt like it” – It’s bad enough that pathetically addled leftybloggers grind their way through this bit of nonsense; they have no power even among lefty media types.  But when you have Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom – words fail me – misrepresenting the law in re Stand Your Ground, to try to draw out a wedge (to try to counter all the various wedges that the GOP have identified for this coming season), you know that the idiocy moves depressingly high on the food chain.  Backstrom may or may not be taking orders from Alliance For A Better Minnesota (and thence, likely as not, Media Matters) like the likes of Bergstrom, Carrie Lucking, Ken Martin and Denise Cardinal – but he’s basically playing from their one-note sheet music.

“Right To Work States Have Lower Per-Capita Incomes Than Union States!” – This, you hear from any number of different lefty-bots, is a great reason to oppose the “Right To Work” Amendment, which (says Survey USA) Minnesotans favor by a 55-24 margin.  Of course, they never mention that non-Right-to-Work states are, inevitably, coastal “Blue” states with – it’s true – higher standards of living, but much higher costs of living as well.  Of course wages are higher in New York City!  But do you think a carpenter in New York buys himself a better quality of life for his money in NYC than does one in, say, Dallas?   A carpenter in Texas will actually be working, as opposed to the New Yorker – but I’m on a tangent now.  The fact is, unions don’t make overall wages across an entire geographical region bigger or better than the same wages in the same jobs elsewhere (beyond the obvious job-by-job wage comparisons).  They do, however, contribute to the higher cost of living.

It’s a stupid argument – but since it’s aimed at stupid people, it works.  Depressingly enough.

“Republicans Are Waging A War Against Women!” – Notwithstanding the fact that no significant Republican has said word-boo about the subject on any sort of policy level.  Apparently it’s one of those things where Republicans want to ban contraception even if they don’t even know it.

Just as we do – we’re told this by our betters at Minnesota Public Radio – with race!  Because…

“Republicans speak in racist code words!” – And those words are so coded that we apparently haven’t the foggiest we’re saying about them.  This one got on Minnesota Public Radio on Thurday morning, on the Keri Miller show.  Miller – who is becoming the Lori Sturdevant of MPR – ran for an hour with the premise that the GOP’s racist message is so very tightly wound into the very language that Republicans (but not Democrats, natch) use that we don’t even realize we’re doing it!.  Because when Democrats talk about “urban” problems, they mean problems that occur to collections of buildings, apparently, but when Republicans talk about pizza, it’s because Italians in New York used to hate blacks, and white people use “pizza” as a code for that sort of hatred.  Or something.

“Voter ID would disenfranchise masses of voters” – I hate paperwork as much as much more than the next guy – government paperwork more than most.   And this really is a tangent, but isn’t it reasonable for society to expect someone to exercise the most absolutely de minimis requirement for personal administration – the precise paperwork one needs to have to cash a check, pick up a prescription, get a drivers license, hold a job legally, set up a bank account, buy Sudafed, get a cell phone, get into a bar before you “look over 21” – to exercise a right for which over a million Americans have died?

But that is a tangent, because many states do require voter ID, and they vote just fine.

Anyway – it’s a lie.

“Voter ID is like Jim Crow” – That predictable little apertif is from my new “representative”, Rena Moran.  Moran may or may not be a perfectly fine person, but she’s oblivious (or has not be told to be blivious, or she just flat-out knows she benefits from ongoing fraud) to the Democrat party’s history of election rigging – but she is in fact exactly wrong. Voter ID – along with a vigilant electorate – helps prevent the sort of sham elections that characterized Jim Crow.

“Governor Dayton has a Jerbs Bill!  The Republicans don’t! They must not want to put people to work!” – Because as everyone knows, jobs come from government!  If Tim Pawlenty and George W. Bush had just pushed laws requiring companies to hire people, there’d have been no recession!

Of course, even many Democrats know better than that.  They believe that a bonding bill that’ll pay for a few billion in construction work – or Obama’s “Shovel Ready” jobs, as if even a sizeable minority of Americans still work with shovels, or even in construction – is the answer!

Of course, the GOP is pushing legislation to cut business taxes and regulations and make Minnesota’s business climate healthier for business, especially small business, which is battered and bleeding from Obama’s regulatory orgy

And Onward!  – What else have you heard?

 

Chanting Points Memo 2012: Third Verse, Same As The First!

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It’s been almost two years since I launched what’s become one of those blog’s most popular features that doesn’t involve waving guns at drug dealers – the “Chanting Points Memo”.

Since we’re heading into a  new campaign, I figured it was time for a reset – a “relaunch” of the Chanting Points Memo.

What’s a “Chanting Point?”  From the Dictionary In The Dark, here’s the conventional definition:

Chanting Point:  (Noun)  Similar to a “talking point”, but intended to be recited by rote (often as part of large real or virtual crowds) rather than critically analyzed.

The term – and the idea – was sparked during the 2010 by the DFL response to Tom Emmer – which was almost entirely something I christened “chanting points”; bits of rhetoric that may or (generally) may not contain a grain of “truthiness”, but aren’t designed so much for substantial policy discussions as they are to be chanted by crowds, either in person or online.

I’ve related the story before: the term occurred to me in the summer of 2010 at the Minnesota State Fair.  Ed Morrissey and I were sitting on stage, across from the DFL booth, talking about the ongoing negotations that led to Obamacare back in 2009 and 2010.   A compact fiftysomething woman in a full Frankenware ensemble strutted to the middle of the audience area, folded her arms, and started shaking her head back and forth.

“Would you care to discuss this?” I asked her, getting ready to take the mobile microphone and hike out into the audience.

She took a deep breath as I stood up, and yelled “PUBLIC OPTION NOW!  PUBLIC OPTION NOW! PUBLIC OPTION NOW!”.  She then turned on her heels and scampered away as fast as her busy little legs could carry her.

Ed and I noted that that was about as close to a substantive argument that most Minnesota DFLers came then, and now.

Words designed to be bellowed over ones’ competition.

Chanting points.

The point is, people don’t have to understand the chanting points, much less the truth; they just have to be gulled into voting DFL.  It’s not about elucidating issues or informing the public; it’s about swinging the ill-informed just enough to gain and retain power.

It’s another election.  And the DFL has another set of chanting points rolled out;

  • “Right To Work costs jobs!”
  • “If you support traditional marriage, you’re a bigot!”
  • “Voter ID disenfranchises voters!”
  • “The rich aren’t paying their fair share!”
  • “Dayton’s pork-barrel “Jobs” bill will create jobs!  Cutting taxes, rationalizing regulations and cutting the size and scope of government will cost jobs!”
  • “The American Legislative Exchange Conference (“ALEC”) controls the Legislative GOP with their shadowy conspiracy!  And any lack of evidence of this conspiracy is proof of a coverup!”
  • “Citizens United distorts and perverts democracy!” (a message passed along in a campaign paid for by liberal plutocrats and unions rolling in member dues).

None of the points ever stand up to logical scrutiny or analysis – and aren’t intended to.  They are intended to be chanted at people who aren’t informed, who don’t analyze and scrutinize logically.

Image courtesy Lassie from True North.

Follow along in the “Chanting Points Memo” category.  Pass ‘em around.  Learn ‘em.  It’s gonna be a long campaign.

Chanting Points Memo: Nothing Here But Us Extremists

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I was out of town last week during Governor Dayton’s frankly weird performance, referring to supporters of the “Right To Work” amendment as “Extreme”.

More on that – it ties in closely with my piece on the DFL’s new PR effort to flood the state with unsupportable memes on wedge issues designed to fool the uninformed and gullible – later this week.

It’s just interesting to note how many “extremists” there are out there, according this SurveyUSA poll covering Minnesotans’ attitudes on the Gay Marriage, Right To Work and Voter ID amendments seem to show that a majority of Minnesotans are, by Governor Dayton’s self-indulgent standard, “Extremists”.

Let’s go through the numbers one issue at a time:

Marriage Amendment

This is the weakest of the bunch so far; it’s winning by 47-39, and over the top in most of the cross tabs (other than 18-34 year olds, cell phone users, Democrats, Liberals and people making over $80K a year).

This is in line – and maybe a little better – than the results I found in the fall of 2010, when a Lawrence Poll showed that Minnesotans’ preferences swung strongly to Tom Emmer when they were clear that Emmer supported referenda or legislative rulings on the issue, while Dayton and Horner both supported legislating the issue from the bench.

The problem is that these numbers aren’t nearly good enough to pass the bill, given one quirk in Minnesota’s law when voting on constitutional amendments; blank votes are counted as “no” votes.  Everyone who supports an amendment must vote affirmatively “yes”.

So let’s assume the numbers in this poll’s “Not Sures” – 4% overall – break evenly between Yes and No on election day, bringing the actual results to 49-41 in favor; then “Not Votes” stay on the sidelines, becoming “No” votes, making the final vote a bare 51-49 against.  That’s not counting “Ritchie Votes”: the dead, people being vouched into multiple districts, people who aren’t legally entitled to vote, and the like.

Even without that, the measure loses by default. By this count, the Marriage Amendment needs to arf up at least three more points – five as insurance against “Ritchie Votes”.

With a state this polarized, it’s a tall order.

Right To Work

Minnesota is much less polarized here – and it shows.  Governor Dayton’s memes on the subject have been more fact-free and desperate than usual – “right to work states have lower wages!”, he declared, ignoring the other context (closed shop states tend to be more urban, coastal and have much higher costs of living as well as wages) – showing how hard the DFL is going to have to dig for votes on this issue.

“Right To Work” leads 55-24% overall.  It leads in every single cross tab – the narrowest is 35-32 among identified liberals.  Bad news for the DFL – it leads among women even more than among men; more among the young than the old;

More importantly?   Even if you take the 12% “not sure” vote and split it evenly among “Yes”, “No” and “Not Voting” , the numbers become 59-28-13, which really means 59-41 (remember, blank votes become “No”, as noted above).  Even if every undecided voter decides to side with the unions – in other words, the hopelessly unrealistic breaks, things about as likely as me getting a third date with Amy Adams – or just sit the issue out, the issue ends up at 55-45.

It’ll take a lot of “Ritchie Votes” to beat “the extremists” on this issue.

Photo ID

Perhaps the best news of the poll is that the left’s idiot memes about Voter ID – “it disenfranchises the poor, the elderly and college students – are falling not so much on deaf ears, but ears that mock their idiocy.

During the 2010 campaign, the meme of the right was that Voter ID had 2-1 support in Minnesota.  The SUSA poll shows it’s actually 3-1 with a bullet; the measure currently leads 70-23.

The cross tabs?  Again – the measure is more popular among women than men (73% of women favor it, vs. 66% of men); more among younger voters, with a 77-20 lead among 35-49 year old voters); more among the educated (71-24 among college grads ys 63-23 among high school grads); about evenly across all income bands; even by 69-24 in the Twin Cities.

Most significantly?  Only 4% of Minnesotans are undecided on the subject, and 4% more claimed they’ll “not vote” on the issue.  Even if every single undecided voter is convinced to vote against the issue or sit it out, the measure passes 70-31%.

Even Mark Ritchie will have a hard time rigging this one.

Takeaways

Caveat up front; the conclusions below presume the SUSA poll is accurate.  The poll is of registered voters, rather than likely voters, which is inherently less accurate on the one hand, but traditionally skews things to the left on the other hand; for purposes of the conclusions below, I’ll presume those two factors roughly cancel each other out.

GOP legislative candidates need to closely align themselves with the Right To Work and Photo ID issues.  They need to hammer on their support for Right to Work and Voter ID, and the positive things that both bring to this state – more jobs, and an election system with actual integrity (although Voter ID is only one of many reforms needed).

The Marriage Amendment strikes me as a loser for GOP candidates – not because it’s off the ideological beam (although as a libertarian conservative, I’m less enthusiastic about it than some Republicans), but because presuming that this poll is accurate, candidates will spend more time and effort supporting the amendment than being supported by it.  By tying themselves to amendments that seem likely to pass overwhelmingly and which show the deep wedge between the DFL and the GOP, on issues where the DFL is both wrong and diametrically opposed to a crushing majority of Minnesotans, the GOP wins free votes; the Marriage Amendment will cost time and effort to prop up at the polls.  Not to say the votes can’t be found, but it’s going to take a lot of time and effort – which is the job of the various pro-marriage groups, not candidates.

The other takeaway, in light of the Governor’s prate and gabble on the subject(s)?  In every case, with all three of these amendments, the conservative, “extreme” position is the mainstream.

But we knew that.

See more on the subject from Ed Morrissey.

Chanting Points Memo: Beth Hawkins’ “Complete BS”

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If the Minnesoa left has a boogieman in this cycle, it’s the “American Legislative Exchanage Conference”, better known as ALEC.

Founded and run by that other perennial boogieman of the hysterial left, Grover Norquist, ALEC pushes a conservative agenda by hosting get-togethers and suggesting legislation to – wait for it – legislators.  Mostly conservative ones.

Sort of like the AFLCIO, the Ntaional Rifle Association, National Education Association, and practically every other  organization that  pokes is nose into legislation at the state level.

For the past year, a phalanx of leftybloggers and regional media have been passing on the meme hat ALEC is somehow different.  More sinister.

Some have called ALEC a “lobbying” group – which is odd, inasmuch as legislators actually pay to join the group.

Now,the coverage “coverage” of ALEC throughout the lefty alt-media has been utterly uniform in what it mentions (model bills!) and also what it omits (paid memberships), to the point that I’d bet money that the entire campaign is being run by “Media Matters” or some other lefty spin organization.

Just a hunch, mind you.

I bring it up because Beth Hawkins piece earlier this  week about an ALEC initiative on education legislation which reads in its entirety like a news release from a lefty attack-PR firm…

…but omits a number of the key facts that one might expect a “reporter” to provide in covering a “story” – the who, what, when yadda yadda.

Last week, the Minnesota House of Representatives did not meet on Thursday or Friday. The state Senate held a handful of hearings Thursday, but was in recess Friday.

Which was terribly convenient for those members of the Republican caucuses who are also members of the secretive, controversial American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which recently issued members this invitation to a confab where it was to roll out its 2012 legislative agenda:

 

You can plug your nose and read Hawkins’ piece for the details,such as they are.

Hawkins channels Sally Sorenson, snarking that the recess “was terribly convenient” for liegislators who are also ALEC members.

So – who went?

Anyone?

Hawkins tacitly admits she hasn’t a clue – and tries to fob her negligence as a reporter off on the legislators:

If you want to know whether your elected official was one, you will have better luck calling and asking as a constituent than reporters have had.

It’s striaght out of Jesse Ventura’s “Conspiracy Theory”; lack of evidence is, itself, evidence of a coverup!

“It’s complete BS”, said a source on Capitol Hill familiar with the issue.  The source was not aware of any legislators attending the event – “maybe one”, and that seemed like a long shot.

Read the piece.  See if you can find anything in it that doesn’t look like it came from a press release.

And then remember Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection:  “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”

The left is harping on ALEC because the the left’s pressure groups – “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”,and the various unions’ political arms – are about to launch a wave of smear and noise that dwarfs ALEC by many orders of magnitude.

It’s what the media – “alternative” and otherwise does; create whispering campaigns about conservative conspiracies to draw attention away from the real thing.

I’m open to other explanations.

Chanting Points Memo: “The People Love Dayton And Hate The Legislature!”

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This particular chanting point has been making the rounds this week – a “Public Policy Polling” (PPP) survey appears to show that Mark Dayton is dreamily popular, and the people just can’t stand the GOP-run legislature.

It’s made the rounds of most of the mainstream media, the leftyblogs, and the lowest of the bunch, the  City Pages.  I figured I’d pick on Dave Mindeman at mnpACTttp and his take on it because unlike way too many Twin Cities leftybloggers, he’s articulate, recites the chanting point pretty much verbatim, and is otherwise not an idiot.

Mark Dayton’s numbers have improved since PPP last polled Minnesota in May and he’s one of the most popular Governors in the country.

Now, the numbers would seem to bear that statement out.  Let’s unpack them before we move on.

In observing PPP polls over the past couple of cycles, their results seem to consistently fall a little to the left of how Minnesota reality eventually shakes out.  Not in an egregions-to-the-point-of-fraud kind of way, like the Humphrey Institute or Strib Minnesota polls, but it’s noticeable.

I also think – and this is a theory, not something I’m stating as fact, but a decade of observation has led a lot of us on the right to wonder if there’s something to it – that liberals are much more prone to answer polls, especially in between election cycles.

Let’s ignore both of those for the moment.  Let’s talk about the surface indicators for this polling:

A little belated birthday present for Mark. Dayton has an approval rating of 53%, while disapproval is at 34% — a 19% spread.

The numbers have led Mindeman – and most other lefties – to a misleading conclusion.  Not wrong – I’m not telling people not to trust their lying eyes – but there’s more in those numbers than meets the eye.  Mindeman and the rest of the lefties are ignoring a key bit of American political behavior.

The poll covers the time between the shutdown and the present – when Dayton really didn’t do anything.  For that matter, he really didn’t do anything during the last session, or the shutdown.  He’s been for the most part a non-entity.  And if you don’t do anything – either positive or negative – then your numbers are going to be juuuuust fine.  Or at least fairly steady.

(Opposite case in point – Tim Pawlenty, who fought a two-court DFL advantage in 2009 and 2010 with aggression and passion.  He did not sit in his office drinking Kombucha or, given his hockey-playing pedigree, PBR, and his poll numbers showed it.  They were “lived-in”.  Who was a better governor?  Depends, now, doesn’t it?)

During the session, and the shutdown, it was the Legislature that did all the heavy lifting.  Dayton sat in his office, released the occasional demand, and until his final, fatal tour around the state, where he realized that getting behind his own plan would be political suicide, really did nothing.  And after that tour, when he folded his cards, he did so quietly, minimizing if not the GOP’s victory at least his own defeat.

In other words, he’s played defense.  He’s sat back and let the other guys take the hit.  The media, naturally, abet this behavior.

And in a state as polarized as Minnesota is, when you actually do things, you will take the hit – especially given our DFL-owned-and-operated media, whose interest in fluffing Dayton is obvious and constant.

And the Legisature has done things – affirmative things during the session and the shutdown, many of which pissed off Democrats and a few of which irritated the more conservative, and also not-so-affirmative things that have been all over the news lately.  Of course, sitting back and being passive-aggressive, like Dayton, was not an option for the Legislative branch; they were sent to Saint Paul on a mission, and the mission wasn’t going to get done without some serious action, and given the number of GOP freshmen who said they didn’t care if they only served a term, some fallout was to be expected.  It was inevitable.

But there’s more.

Dayton may get himself an easier legislature to work with next year. Democrats lead the generic legislative ballot in the state by a 48-39 margin. If that holds through November they should win back a whole lot of the seats they lost in 2010. It’s not that legislative Democrats are popular- only 31% of voters have a favorable opinion of them to 49% with a negative one. But legislative Republicans have horrible numbers. Their favorability rating is 23% with 62% of voters viewing them negatively. That honeymoon wore off real fast.

And here Mindeman and the rest of the metro chattering class fall into the seductive charms of drawing using high-level data to draw high-level conclusions on low-level questions.  Mindeman – and the entire regional left – have scoped the data wrong. I suggest.  The fact is that “generic” never manages to get endorsed to run for the Legislature.

The Legislature will take popularity hits – they, as a body, did all the work.

The Legislature, as a body, will always lag a do-nothing governor under those circumstances.  Just like Congress does.

But aggregate polls of the entire Legislature – those mythical “generic” legislators – are meaningless, just like aggregate polls of Congress.  People may want to vote the bastards in general out, but people tend, generally, to support their own bastard.  There are exceptions – they voted a lot of incumbent “bastards” out in 2006 and 2010 – but as a very general rule, unless you have a wave election, incumbency has its virtues.  This election may be many things – it may return both chambers of Congress to the GOP – but I don’t think anyone’s predicting a wave yet.

Tack on the fact that PPP polls trend left, that poll respondents this early in the cycle trend left, that the PPP poll was of registered voters (who always trend left), and the fact that the poll is meaningless, and the additional fact that redistricting – provided that it reflects actual demographic shifts rather than the DFL’s rhetoric – should favor the GOP, and I’m a lot less worried about this poll than the DFL, media (ptr) and the chattering classes want you to be.

And despite those numbers the GOP legislature continues to play ultra partisan games.

Well, yeah, Dave.  They know the numbers are meaningless.  So does the DFL.

Chanting Points Memo: “Vote DFL Or You Lose Your Toys”

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In Lori Sturdevant’s world, there’s no recession. Money is just….there.

Government creates it. And its allocation is like a chess game between the good guys (the DFL) and those whose names must not be mentioned (Republicans who don’t act like DFLers, which these days is most of them).

Snug a her cube above the city (assuming she comes to the office at all anymore), it’s all just an academic parlor game to her.

I trust that Gov. Mark Dayton included $35 million for expansion of Rochester’s Mayo Civic Center in his proposed bonding bill solely because he shares economic futurist Richard Florida’s vision for Minnesota’s third-largest city.

You go right ahead and “trust” that a politician, playing politics, would allocate budgets based on a “futurist’s” yapping.

Still, things are looking rosy in Rochester:

Its mix of world-class medicine, computing and agribusiness positions it to become the Austin, Texas, of the north. All it lacks is a few smart public-sector sparks — like a bona fide convention center.

Actually, I think two things could be fairly said:

  1. If the economy of this GOP-leaning city is, in fact, booming, then they don’t really “lack” those public-sector “sparks” at all, now?  Do they?
  2. Right, Lori Sturdevant – what could possibly put the “spark”, the cherry on the sundae of a booming economy like public spending!

I’m sure that prospect, and not the chance to put new Senate GOP Majority Leader David Senjem in an uncomfortable spot, drove the DFL governor’s thinking.

Mostly, anyway.

Let’s stop for a moment, here.

This is the same Lori Sturdevant who charges at Republicans like an enraged schoolmam at the faintest hint of “political games” aimed at the DFL – like any bill that exploits a wedge issue that will put the DFL on the short end of the PR stick – and sniffs with the victorian vapours about the need for “bipartisanship” and “cooperation”.  As long as the DFL is losing.

And when the shoe is on the other foot (or she and her editorial board want the people to think it’s on the other foot)?  Behold, Lori “As Snarky As Sally Sorenson” Sturdevant.

Just so we’re clear on this.

Rochester has been coming to the State Capitol since 2008 to pitch a plan for a 180,000-square-foot, $77 million addition to the Mayo Civic Center. The city is asking the state to pay half of the bill.

I’ll just bet they are.

The City of Rochester does, indeed, make a case that the Civic Center could be a useful addition to the community; it could host more than its fair share of medical conventions alone.  In theory.

Which is fine, but when the state is fighting to get its outgo inside its income, choices have to be made. Nobody likes it when their choice gets the short straw – but you can’t have everything…

…unless you live in Lori Sturdevant’s little world, where unicorns bring money down from the clouds.

But in 2010, the Tea-infused GOP had lost its appetite for projects that could be cast as local pork. After approving planning money for the Mayo Civic Center in 2008, Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed construction funds in 2010.

He did the same to civic center proposals in Mankato and St. Cloud. Notably, all three places elected Republicans in 2010. The class of 2010 came to St. Paul convinced that austerity plays better with voters than do government-funded development dreams.

Right.

Because the Freshman class in the legislatue knows that money doesn’t comes from Studevant’s magic unicorns.  It comes from taxpayers – out of our incomes.

Of course, Sturdevant doesn’t mention that there is all sorts of money in the bonding bill that could go toward the Rochester Civic Center – which is the sot of development that could help make some money and be, hypothetically, of some use.

How many Rochester Civilc Centers could we float for what we’e pouring into another idiotic money-pit light-rail line?  Or the many other wastes of taxpayer money hiding in Dayton’s bonding bill?

Sturdevant is too busy giggling about how “bipartisan” she’s not to be interested in any of that.

“For me, it’s a question of mathematics,” [Senate majority leader Dave Senjem] said. “How do we make this work?”

Danger, Dave.  Math is hard.  The Strib Editorial board and the DFL, via their mouthpiece Sturdevant, can’t do it.

No, it’s in this piece that we see the exposed id of the DFL in big LCD letters, like on the outside of that other civic center built with bonds, the Excel:

The smaller the GOP bonding bill gets, the more Senjem will be torn between the pleadings of his city and the desires of his caucus. And the more Senjem caters to his parsimonious peers, the more Dayton can campaign this fall saying that if Rochester wants state government to help it grow, it should elect DFLers.

There it is – the exposed id of the DFL in full glory.  “Elect us, and you get your toys.  You want toys, don’t you?  BIg mommy State of Minnesota would love to buy you a toy – it’s just big bad daddy GOP that’s keeping it away from you.  Toys are nice!   The money will come from fluffy unicorns “The Rich”!   You like unicorns, don’t you?”

It is the only idea they have – “use cheap and empty rhetoric to gain, or regain, power”.

Sturdevant and the rest of the Strib editorial board like power.  Or liked it, back when the unicorns brought it to them, in their offices high above Portland Avenue.

Chanting Points Memo: Bring A Shovel!

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If the local leftybloggers have it right, the Governor apparently wants to staff up a bunch of do-it-yourself projects.

I first saw it on Minnesota “Progressive” Project last night – Governor Dayton has announced his “bonding plan”.

And here was the claim:

In contrast to the upcoming ballot measure open season the Republicans will be envisioning instead of working on a bonding bill, Gov. Mark Dayton released his bonding bill proposal today. Dayton’s plan would put 25,000 Minnesotans to work in every corner of the state. It would cost $775 million.

The reverberations throughout our economy of putting 25,000 people to work would be significant. These people would spend money in their communities, increasing the income of people in the service industries.

These are the almighty “infrastructure projects” that Libs are talking about these days.


But after our experience last week – where Dayton’s “Jerbs Plan” turned out to be a meaningless deduction equal to about a month of $15/hour employment – I remembered the great dictum one must always observe when reading liberal commentators:

Distrust, but verify.  Then, almost inevitably, distrust some more.

So I ran the “numbers”, such as they are.

The “plan” calls for $775,000,000, and will supposedly provide 25,000 jerbs.

So when you divide $775,000,000/25,000, you get $31,000 per job.

That’s a little under $15 an hour, on average (and probably lower, since presumably some of those 25,000 people will have to be DFL/union-connected bureaucrats to manage everything, who are just a little  more equal.

And when Eric “Big E” Pusey gushes (or, presumably, takes dictation from some Dayton Administration spokesbot the Alliance For A Better Minnesota) that…:

The projects included in his proposal are ‘shovel ready’ and would improve our state’s infrastructure.

…perhaps he should add that the workers will actually need to bring their own shovels – because creating 25,000 $14-and-change/hour jobs out of $775,000,000 leaves no money left over for shovels.  Or concrete.  Or macadam, asphalt, aggregate, or even paint.

Pusey’s number, in short, is baked wind.

Just like every number the Dayton Administration Alita Messinger and the Alliance For A Better MInnesota have put out so far this year.

Yeah, I know – Pusey’s probably conflating the phantom jobs in the Jerbs Bill with the fantasy numbers in the Bonding Bill.   I’m probably jumping on the wrong thing, because he’s probably writing taking dictation about the wrong connection.

More on that later today.

(With a tip ‘o the hat to Sarge, who did the math just about the time I was thinking about doing the math…)

Chanting Points Memo: A Tax Plan Masquerading As A Job Plan

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Yesterday, we took a look at Dayton’s jerbs plan.

It’s a sham.

It’s a piddling little one-time tax credit equivalent to what you’d pay a $36K/year employee for a month (in salary alone – not capitalized cost (liberals, as a conservative to tell you what that is); if you count that in, it’s more like a month at $12/hour, plus benefits and other costs), offered for one year, cut in half for people hired the following year.  In other words, it says “Quick!  We know you don’t know what’s going to happen to the economy, or with Obamacare, or with the payroll tax, or with consumer demand, but never mind that;  hire someone right now, and you’ll get 8% of that credited in taxes in a year.

It is, of course, not a serious “jobs plan”.  It is a campaign slogan.  Nothing more.

Of course,  there’s more to this “plan” – and since the “plan” comes from Dayton Alita Messinger and the unions, you know it’s gonna rhyme with “flexes”:

Invest in Infrastructure: A new bonding bill, to be announced next week, would provide $775

million for new investment in infrastructure, allowing primarily private-sector employers to put tens

of thousands of Minnesotans back to work.

What this means is that the state is going to spend nearly a billion dollars to hire union temp workers to fix the things that should have been fixed with all the money we’re pouring into trolleys on University Avenue – presuming it’s “infrastructure” that’s needed at all.  “Infrastructure” is moving from buzz-phrase to slush fund in Minnesota.

The bill would also include $20 million in bonding requests by the Department of Employment and

Economic Development specifically designed to help businesses expand in Minnesota. These

initiatives would provide grants to cities for business infrastructure, help local authorities renew old

property for business development and aid in the development of transportation improvements

focused on businesses.

Which is both a meaningless drop in the bucket and, of course, more code words for “construction union temp jobs” and “enabling more government spending at all levels”.

Here’s the cruncher:

Internet Sales Tax Fairness—Affiliate Nexus: Under current law, out-of-state retailers that do not have a physical presence in Minnesota are not required to collect the sales tax on online purchases used and consumed in Minnesota. As a result, a large portion of the taxes due on sales by large internet retailers—such as Amazon—go uncollected. This results in a loss of state revenue and

gives these remote retailers an unfair competitive advantage over Main Street Minnesota retailers.

Passing the Internet Sales Tax Fairness bill would level the playing field for Minnesota businesses and generate about $3.5 million in FY2013.

In other words, new taxes.  To enable new spending.

Has it ever occurred, in Governor Dayton’s Alita Messinger and the SEIU’s fevered and obsessed little minds, that perhaps a better way to help “main street Minnesota” “level” the “playing field” would be to lower our ridiculous sales taxes?  And business taxes?  And income taxes?

And wait on the “infrastructure” until the economy switches back to puree, and they money can come from a budget that is as big as it needs to be and still a smaller percentage of this state’s domestic product?

I’m going to guess that’s a big no.

Chanting Points Memo: “Tergeted Jerbs”

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With much fanfare from the media and the DFL’s press-release bloggers (most of them), the Dayton Administration released its “jobs plan”.

Call it “porkulus with a side of lefse“.  It’s a dumb plan – and there’s language in here that shows the DFL knows it (emphasis added):

Saint Paul – Governor Mark Dayton and DFL Legislators together today announced a plan that if passed by the legislature, will put thousands of Minnesotans back to work this year.

And there’s the tell.  This “plan” – more below – will come to the legislature bundled with some of the other nonsense Governor Dayton couldn’t get through the GOP-controlled legislature last session.  The legislature will toss it.  The DFL/media (ptr),the Strib editorial board and the chanting point bots will say “The GOP took your jerbs!” in November.

This plan is intended for no more.

To encourage businesses to hire new employees, Governor Dayton and the DFL Legislators propose offering a New Jobs Tax Credit. This would be a one-time $3,000 tax credit to any Minnesota business for each veteran, unemployed worker or recent graduate they hire during calendar year 2012, and a $1,500 credit for each new hire through June 2013. This $35 million program would create over 10,000 new, private-sector jobs this year.

Which is a great way to create a bunch of low-wage temporary jobs.

Business owners, I’d love to hear from you.  $3,000 is better than a kick in the teeth.  But given the other uncertainties in the economy.- Obamacare and the coming tax hikes and all the other regulatory nonsense that’s been pecking you to death and all the rest that’s looming in the next two years, not to mention Minnesota’s already-miserable business taxes  – isn’t it more like whizzing in the wind?

Like- a chanting point?

It’s a sign that the DFL has learned one lesson – sort of.  They’ve learned that “eat the rich”, in and of itself, isn’t a strategy for a session.  They have to put a meaningless veneer of “job creation” on top of it.

Other proposals in the plan include a new bonding bill with details to be announced next week, a proposal that will help Minnesota compete for business expansion through the Minnesota Investment Fund, an expansion of the FastTRAC program to provide career-specific training to prepare adults for the jobs of the future and the creation of the Minnesota Opportunity Grants Pilot Program which will help Minnesotans get the training required for high-demand careers.

Read:  a) Construction jobs for Dayton’s union backers, b) spending to try to convince businesses that the tax climate isn’t so bad, and c/d) more spending that benefits Dayton’s supporters in the education industry, coupled with platitudes, as if government has ever successfully predicted about what anything will be tomorrow. 

Dayton:

“From day one, my top priority has been to get Minnesota working again.

No, Governor Dayton.  With all due respect, from day one,  your priority has been to do what the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Win Minnesota,and the unions have told you to do.  Last year, they told you to Eat The Rich.  Class warfare bombed.

With that out of the way…

Our jobs plan will help businesses create good jobs for thousands of Minnesotans who are looking for work.

No, it won’t.  It’s of little value alive – at $3K credit is bupkes – but of value as a wedge issue dead. Which is why you have your chanting-point bots yapping so hard about it now.

We need to focus on what we know will work: investing in infrastructure, providing incentives to private sector businesses to create more jobs, and training workers for high-demand careers.

Again with the code words.

Look- if you slash business taxes and cut regulations, the economy improves.  Revenue booms based on economic activity.  Then you build the infrastructure. Then you needn’t worry about training, because companies will train their own workers,on their own dime (although they’re happy to let the state pay for it, too).  That is the only “incentive” you need.

And it’s the one the GOP’s been talking all along.

And it’d hardly do to campaign on that, if you’re the DFL,now – would it?

The important part, of course, is preventing Minnesotans from getting fooled by this Potemkin plan.

Chanting Points Memo: “Peasants! Your Masters Are Displeased!”

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Last week, we reported that according to the latest Minnesota Management and Budget figures, Minnesota’s state government took in almost $900 million more than it spent in the last year.

As I noted, it’s not all good news, for quite a number of reasons.  Some of the extra money came from the Feds.  Some of it was borroewed from future tobacco settlement fund payments – a source that should not only not be a piggy bank to plunder, notwithstanding that it should not exist at all.  And even if it was entirely due to the economy rebounding (and Minnesota’s is doing better than the national average, thanks in no small part to the GOP sweep last fall), the fact is that surpluses only mean that government is taking more from the economy than it needs; real surpluses should be rebated to the taxpayers – as in “people who pay taxes” – immediately.  But that’s a nicety for better times, not to mention genuine surpluses.  We’ll come back to that (no doubt after Obama and Dayton are bundled off to retirement).

A couple of the DFL legislators who caused the problem in the first place, Lyndon Carlson (the DFLer who first entered the Senate in 1928) and Dick Cohen, who inhabits a DFL sinecure in Highland Park, L were granted space in the Strib to pee in the GOP’s Whwaties:

We all breathed a sigh of relief when last week’s updated economic forecast showed a positive balance for the state in the current budget year. This was unexpected good news.

However, if we look at the budget by comparing both the “checking account” and the “credit card statement” — the way families and businesses do everyday — we’ll see our state’s structural budget problem is far from solved.

When a Republican talks about “structural budget problems”, you can be sure she’s talking things like “demand based budgeting – where every bureaucracy’s budget equals the previous budget, plus the bureacracy’s forecast, and inevitably self-serving, expected increase in delivering its service”.

When DFLers like Cohen and Carlson talk about “structural budget problems”, they mean “bureaucracies not getting what they demand, when they demand it”.

Keep that in mind as we continue.

Responding to the forecast, Republicans were quick to pat themselves on the back. House Speaker Kurt Zellers praised their “fiscal restraint” and Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch lauded how the state had “lived within its means.”

Both of which are both true and false; the state did get federal money, and did borrow against future Tobacco Shakedown proceeds.

Carlson and Cohen’s deceit lies in the details:

Most Minnesotans, looking at the numbers, would see it differently. Here’s a look at each side of the ledger. Judge for yourself:

Checking Balance: $876 million. The updated economic forecast shows Minnesota has a current “surplus” of $876 million. Like a household checking account, these are funds to cover expenses during the budget cycle we’re currently in.

But unlike most checking accounts, our state’s balance has not been completely generated through money that’s been saved up.

Of course not.  The GOP, faced with an intransigent governor who is in office solely to serve the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”, “Take Action Minnesota”, “Common Cause” and the unions, bent on the budget last session, spending a couple billion more than they should have,

Had we done it the way the conservatives said to do it, we’d have multibillion-dollar surplus and no borrowed money.

They’d also have been able to eliminate statements this:

Current Debt: $4.2 billion. Our state’s “credit card statement” reveals a lot of new red ink due to the budget Republicans passed after taking our state to a government shutdown. In the next budget cycle, Minnesotans will face a $1.3 billion budget deficit.

This has been a familiar story. In eight of 10 years, the state has faced a deficit. Instead of making permanent adjustments to our budget, we have used one-time dollars, accounting shifts, and borrowing. All this patchwork and duct tape hasn’t solved the problem.

This takes us back to the “structural budget problems”, above.  The only deficit is in terms of current spending versus the bureaucracy’s projected future demands.  To use Cohen and Carlson’s “family budget” example, it’s like giving your kid a $20/month cell phone plan and a $30 flip phone today, and having her tell you your bill is going to $250 plus $80 a month next year because, naturally, you’re getting them IPhones, whether you have the money to pay for it or not.

You know what you’d tell your daughter.  It’s exactly what we, The People, need to tell Carlson and Cohen.

They do not have first dibs on what we earn.  Our first and foremost job as citizens of Minnesota is not to keep the bureaucracy fat and happy, any more than it is to buy your kid and IPhone just because she wants one.

Continue reading →

Chanting Points Memo: “We Have To Tax You To Prosperity!”

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It was an uncanny coincidence – if you assume that leftybloggers operate as independent agents, and why, oh, why would one assume that every one of them, from Daily Kos down through Penigma, takes their chanting points from Media Matters for America just because they’ve all been chanting them not merely in unison but in strict top-down sequence for almost a decade now, after all? – to watch the leftyblogs and leftytweeps all chanting the same basic thing almost simultaneously yesterday.

Leftytweep Chris Shields – a semi-frequent kicktoy in this space – twote yesterday:

@ChrisShields There wouldn’t be a need to tax the rich to create jobs if the rich were actually creating jobs.

Gosh – why would “the rich” – let’s broaden that out to “entrepreneurs”, “job creators” and “business” – not be throwing caution to the winds and creating jobs with gay abandon?

  • Skyrocketing regulation: The regulatory environment for business – big and small – is getting downright ugly.   There is no realistic chance it’s going to improve during an Obama administration, or while the Democrats control half of Congress.
  • The Obamacare of Damocles: Obamacare is already killing jobs, and it’s three years away from going into effect, so we’ve seen nothing yet.
  • Taxes Kill: Obama’s initial round of taxes – aimed at “the rich” who are also the investors who provide capital for investing in new business – put a huge chill on job creation.  His “new” “jobs” “plan” may be worse.  They all lead up to…
  • Uncertainty: Nothing is ever certain in business, but managing uncertainty is a key part of a good manager’s job.  And when there’s this much uncertainty – in regulation, expenses and taxes, to say nothing of the markets that are all also affected by the same regulations, taxes and expenses – the prudent response is to cut expenses and wait and see.

I find it fascinating that “progressives” like Mr. Shields think that the response to this is to “tax the rich to create jobs”.

Another “progressive” responded to the above:..

Business fears the future, so they hide under the bed where they clip coupons.

…and, when reminded of the need for prudence…

You remind me of the Vikings, who instead of playing to win, play not to lose. How’s that working out?

Which proves the old conservative adage that when it come to business, liberals are generals in the bedroom and whores on the battlefield.