I pondered writing a piece about Barack Obama’s thunderous evangelism over the weekend. 

I really couldn’t come up with anything much more profound than “So all of you people who dinged on Bush for “violating the separation of church and state” – here y’go!  Prove you’re not a bunch of callow hypocrites!”.

Nah.  It feels like running up the same stairs, over and over, after a while, trying to write about the hypocrisy of the leftymedia.  And there are better people to tackle that sort of argument.

Like Kouba:

I say good for [Obama and his faith]. But it wasn’t more than a nanosecond or two before I thought back to Michele Bachmann’s appearance at the Living Word church a year ago. Her remarks kicked up a cloud of dust as her opponents howled about the separation of church and state, and the dangers of Theocracy.

In their endorsement of Patty Wetterling, the Star Tribune said this:

Bachmann has campaigned on broad strokes of low taxes and patriotic ideals. But her career in the Minnesota Senate was built on the narrowest of agendas, chiefly injecting her religious values into the public sphere. Her recent testimony to a Brooklyn Park congregation that God called her to run for Congress — and win — is an embarrassment, and despite her polish, she is surprisingly shallow on national issues.

An embarrassment. Uh-huh. Well, I now sit back and await a Strib editorial decrying Obama’s remarks this weekend as an embarrassment.

Waiting, waiting…. still waiting…

Bring a sleeping bag. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for people being open – indeed, enthusiastic – about their faith. 

I’d just like all the Obama supporters (and Hillary! supporters) who dinged Bush, Bachmann and any other conservative for exactly the same things that Obama said to take a step forward and ‘splain themselves.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but notice this.

Ed points us to this story, where a bunch of BDS-addled cretins counterprotested…

…a bunch of daycare kids:

“What an opportunity this is for our children,” center director Liz Burkhard said while herding children ages 4 to 6 into a compact, orderly row behind the yellow police tape lining Stony Battery at Church Street.

One group of protesters quickly descended on the happy cluster, however, chanting and singing their own songs to drown out the children’s voices.

“Stop brainwashing children to support a president who doesn’t deserve our support,” one man yelled through a bullhorn.

Now, let’s reiterate: I’m a greater proponent of free speech than any of my critics.  Always.

But this story touches on something in a piece I’m writing for Monday, about the self-centered narcissism that’s behind so many “protesters” – how their ends justify their means, no matter who they crap on in the process.

Ed said:

When children greet a President, they’re not endorsing policy or campaigning for his vote. They sang because of the office, not the person. Whomever would scream at children through bullhorns to promote their own hatred and obsession really needs some psychiatric care. Can you imagine how these children felt when a group of adults descended on them, screaming and shouting through bullhorns?

Scared out of their minds, I bet.

But no matter; to the BDS-addled “protester”, it’s all about them.  As Katherine Kersten pointed out earlier this week, indeed, it’s a pathology of some academic interest:

Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs has studied protest movements…In his psychological studies of ’60s-style radicals, Lichter discovered two revealing things: They scored high on the power scale, exhibiting a strong need to feel powerful. They also scored high on narcissism — the need to call attention to themselves, to get public notice.

Not surprisingly, Lichter says, protesters often latched onto high-sounding motives to justify their self-absorbed actions. “You can’t take expressions of love for humanity at face value,” he explains. “They can serve as cover for aggressive feelings and tendencies.

“It’s all about meeeeeeeeeeeeee”

Scumbags.

I’ve enjoyed this past few months, biking to work.  Of course, biking is something that’s only intermittently tenable when my kids are in school – I can manage it once or twice a week (there’s a post in there), but it’s been a great thing for me.

It didn’t teach me anything new about human nature, really; I used to bike a lot, and I ran into (figuratively) all the usual pathologies about urban traffic and raging drivers.  Of course, I have always been something of a stickler about following traffic laws; something about not wanting to spend the rest of my life in a vegetative state, and ending up no better than a contributor to Dump Bachmann…

…but I digress.  Like a lot of people, I’d not heard much about Critical Mass until last month, when the group’s monthly ride turned into a riot in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).

in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.  I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).According to yesterday’s column from Katherine Kersten,  I might have been wrong to be sanguine.  Assumptions about Critical Mass’ benign-ness might be misplaced:

They block traffic by “corking” — some riders hold cars at intersections during green lights while the mass passes through a red light. Others stand in the street and wave their bikes defiantly over their heads.

Are you rushing to catch the last few innings of your son’s baseball game?

Trying to get to the show you promised your wife for her birthday?

Critical Mass doesn’t give a rip. Tough luck for you, Mac, because you’re a gas-guzzler and I’m living green.

So do we chalk this up to innocent adolescent posturing?  Or, with 11 months until the Republican National Convention, is there something more sinister to it?

Why are Minneapolis police condoning this lawbreaking? Because the guys upstairs do. Two City Council members, Cam Gordon and Robert Lilligren, joined the Critical Mass mob on last week’s ride. Mayor R.T. Rybak also rode with the mob once several years ago.

In August, after some of the ride’s rougher elements provoked a confrontation with police, and 19 people were arrested, Gordon, whose aide was one of those arrested, called foul. The usual hand-wringing and internal investigation in the police department followed. Gordon organized a meeting, where police and Critical Mass representatives discussed what were called mutual expectations.

Police Chief Tim Dolan says he doesn’t like expending limited police resources on Critical Mass rides. But support for more hard-nosed enforcement isn’t there, he says.

In other words – in Minneapolis, the well-connected get a different brand of justice.

It’d be interesting to see what’d happen if a right-to-life group, or Protest Warrior, interfered with traffic in Minneapolis.

This breeds a sense of entitlement.  Kersten notes…:

Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs has studied protest movements. He points out that political protest has changed since the ’20s and ’30s, when those involved were usually poor…The ’60s and ’70s brought a sea change. For the middle- and upper-class young people who flooded into the streets, protest became a vehicle for self-assertion — the “politics of personal expression.” (Think Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.) Middle-class kids wore their arrest record as a badge of honor.In his psychological studies of ’60s-style radicals, Lichter discovered two revealing things: They scored high on the power scale, exhibiting a strong need to feel powerful. They also scored high on narcissism — the need to call attention to themselves, to get public notice.

Not surprisingly, Lichter says, protesters often latched onto high-sounding motives to justify their self-absorbed actions. “You can’t take expressions of love for humanity at face value,” he explains. “They can serve as cover for aggressive feelings and tendencies.” A phenomenon like Critical Mass “allows people to act aggressively, while convincing themselves and some others that it’s all for a moral purpose.”

The problem with tolerating – and even officially encouraging – this sort of self-absorbed adolescent posturing is that it breeds the same solipsistic sense of entitlement that we noted last summer in Kathleen Soliahs’ husband and daughter:

“She lived in Berkeley,” Emily [Olson, Soliah’s daughter] says, trying to explain her mother’s affiliation with the SLA. “It was kind of normal.”…says Fred. “The LAPD massacre of the SLA was a bellwether event-the first televised SWAT team -” “Team murder,” Emily interrupts…“I always tell people she wasn’t a terrorist. She was an urban guerrilla,” says Emily, smearing Blistex on her lips while waiting for the waitress to return.

And, perhaps in parallel, much of official Saint Paul, acting unofficially, condoned Soliah, and continues to to this day.

Minneapolis authorities eventually will discover what parents learn when they allow petulant children to break the rules “just to keep the peace.” You don’t get peace. You just open the door to bigger trouble.

That’s my only klinker with Kersten’s article.  I wouldn’t use the “spoiled kid” analogy.

A kid starts out with perfectly innocent motives; her parents do the spoiling.

A better one; if you leave the door open, over and over again, even after being repeatedly burgled…

TvM has added Pat Shortridge to their already-imposing lineup of writers – and he comes out of the gate swinging with a great post on some poor assumptions that the conservative Presidential candidates are making – in this case, trying to court conservative voters by going through big conservative groups:

First, it’s incredibly stupid to try and reach conservative voters by talking to them through a group of folks in Washington, DC – or Arlington, VA in the DC suburbs.  The liberals found this out in 1980 when all the union bosses were lined up behind Carter and yet Reagan did incredibly well among union members by talking to them directly.

Thompson, and any other candidate of the center-right, will do well or poorly with conservatives depending on how well they speak to and deliver on our issues, not by how many endorsements they line up from group heads or party officials.  I can tell you first hand, the issues that top the list of concerns of conservative voters in America are often very different from the agenda of people who purport to speak for them in Washington.
Look at the polling data from ’06 if you want to see that in painful detail. There were a heck of a lot of pro-life, pro-marriage, socially conservative voters across America who pulled the lever for some extremely liberal candidates.

That is a huge point.  For people whose prime motivation in politics is not political idealism – like, 90-odd percent of the American voting public – group affiliations and the pronouncements of one consortium or another are pretty meaningless.  Especially among conservatives, who – outside the pro-life movement – really aren’t school fish.

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s the vision, stupid.

Speaking of vision, Shortridge also remembers the GOP’s last successful big one  – the Contract with America, whose tenth anniversary was yesterday.  Shortridge was working for Dick Armey; my triviageekitude compels me to point out that Rep. Armey and I are both graduates of the same college…

Carnivore at TvM notes a little bit of fun psychology:

 I like to do all my converting of anti-gun or ambivalent people by inviting them to empty a 30 round AK-47 magazine at the gun range. The big smiles on their faces tell me that a little safe fun is all it takes to convince them that guns aren’t evil. The blacker the rifle, the bigger the smile.

…but the real “beef” of the post is some good news from the Giuliani campaign; Hizzoner seems to have gotten his head a little straighter about the Second Amendment, in time for his invitation to speak at an NRA special convention:

[Giuliani] said his thinking on gun rights also was influenced by a federal appeals court decision that overturned a 30-year-old ban on private ownership of handguns in Washington on the grounds that the Constitution gives individual citizens the right to own guns.

“It is a very, very strong description of how important personal liberties are in this country and how we have to respect them,” he said of the ruling, adding it “sort of maybe even did more to crystalize my thinking on the whole gun issue in light of Sept. 11.”

He no longer argues, as gun control advocates do, that the right to bear arms applies only to the rights of states to maintain citizen militias. He now says that right also applies to individuals as well, and he cites the court ruling, Parker v. District of Columbia, that said the Second Amendment gives citizens the right to own handguns.

Carnivore – who may be the only blogger in town more pro-gun than I – approves: 

… if it takes 9/11 and the Parker decision to change Giuliani’s mind, then I welcome him to the club. As a person who grew up and was a product of New York, with its (originally anti-Italian) gun laws, dating back to the early 1900s, I can see how he might have lived his life with his previous view of the Second Amendment and the feeling that it’s not important since most New Yorkers can’t even exercise that right.

So one of Giuliani’s big sticking points for this conservative seems to be getting a little less sticky.

Lassie writes about this Macalester “experimental” class…:

Macalester’s EXCO (Experimental College) offers a four-session experimental class starting September 27. Pop quiz: find the oxymoron in the course title…

Non-Violence and Anarchy: An Intergenerational Dialog
When: Thursday nights, 7-9:3pm, start 9/27 (4 wks)
Instructor: Betsy Raasch-Gilman, Rob Czernik
Contact: to [redacted] or (651) 222-4956
Where: Hope to alternate between Jack Pine Center and Friends for a Nonviolent World

Even the class venues are an oxymoron. Jack Pine is where the anarkids meet up, Friends is where the peacemakers meet.

I wonder – will the Quakers teach the anarkids tantrum-free demonstration?  Or will the narks teach the pacifists about peace through adolescent posturing?

I biked over to the Capital Mall on Sunday to watch the union “peace” rally on the Capitol steps. 

I inadvertently got there very early – guess I don’t know my own strength! – so I went down to the World War II memorial, at the foot of the mall by the Veterans Services buildling. 

An older couple were there, wearing matching T-shirts commemorating their son, an Army major who’d been about a year and a half older than me when he was killed last year in Iraq. 

Now, I can’t pretend to imagine what it’s like to lose a child; the safety of my own children is a constant nagging worry in the back of my own head.  I’m no shrinking violet, and I’m certainly not the most sensitive guy, but I do know when to just shut up and let people talk.

And the woman – the bereaved mother – did talk.  She must have figured she was among friends, being on the grounds of a “peace” rally (and, indeed, she was; some things should transcend politics; caring for our kids and loving them more than anything in the world is one of them), and she unloaded, as her husband stood quietly by, admiring the WWII memorial. 

She was angry.  Still demolished with grief. 

She raged against the President. 

I wasn’t about to argue.  I disagreed, naturally, but what could I say?  What should anyone say?  She’d lost her son; for her, the sky might be red and the sun might rise in the west.  I can’t say as I’d see differently in her shoes.

And then she added “…it’s 2007.  We should be able to settle things by talking…”.

I wondered – to myself, of course – if, 65 years ago, Jewish advocates in Poland might have postulated the same ideal; that if they could only talk with Hitler, they could find a way to settle things, before the rest of their families disappeared into the nacht und nebel?  If some Ukranian kulak pondered the idea of just getting a letter through to Staliln to try to settle things as his children starved to death during Stalin’s famine, or if a Cambodian merchant or a Tutsi farmer yearned just to try to settle things like human beings as doom engulfed them and their families?  If some gay Afghan or pregnant Iranian teenager had a the urge to try to reason with their killers before the evil snuffed them out?  Did they believe that evil could be placated?  That behind the implacable mask of the Nazi, the chekist, the Khmer Rouge ideologue or Hutu zealot or Taliban or mullah, or muj with a cell phone alongside some road in Iraq, was someone who just needed to be reasoned with?

I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask.  I nodded, and listened, and expressed my genuine mutual sorrow.

———-

As the couple walked away toward the capitol, I noticed a group of people – younger and middle-aged – in red polo shirts, gathering around the memorial’s reflecting pool.  One of them came over and greeted me; I was among friends – in this case, “Families United“, a group of people whose children, spouses or siblings are in Iraq – or, in a few cases, who died there also. 

As the people in the distance on the Capitol steps  slowly gathered and strummed guitars, the Families United group – two dozen people, altogether – gathered under the American flag and had a brief observance.  The founder – Merilee Carlson, who lost a son in Iraq – read some letters from some of her group’s sympathizers who were also members of the participating trade unions, and were outraged that their unions would spend their dues money on demonstrating to scupper the troops’ mission.

———-

And money, they spent – although apparently not on trying to help people get there on time.  The permit was slated to kick off at 1PM; people were draggling in until two o’clock; between one and two, the crowd swelled from 200 to maybe 500. 

Four fairly posh motor coaches lined up on Constitution Avenue, reminding us that this wasn’t the same crowd we’d had two weeks earlier (at least, some of it differed); the unions, the AFL-CIO and AFSCME, among others, had pulled out the stops to make the day as low-impact as possible on their members.

And still, over half of the “crowd” was the usual suspects; the ACORN crowd, the poverty pimps from various “church” “social justice” groups – everyone but the anarchists, it’d seem.  It didn’t look like the “A-team” of protesters; the signs looked wan and halfhearted; a guy wandered up and down the Mall walkway, banging a pot to no apparent purposes (and yes, if the other guys start that “banging on pots” thing at the convention next year, I am bringing the bagpipes.  Oh, yes I am).  They didn’t know much about sound; they brought a PA system fit to handle a sock hop in a junior high gym; the speakers all exhibited that tendency that inexperienced, underamplified speakers do, shrieking into the microphone like they were hollering to be heard above a nor’easter.

The protesters shied away from talking in person; they’re smarter than most demonstrators (the ones that approached us two weeks earlier were generally woefully illiterate on current events, if not on talking points).

I left after a bit; it was too nice a day.

Janet Beihoffer and Jamie Delton were there, and covered things. 

Two points:

1) When this chick says:

Please put Mitch Berg in charge of all candidate selection and planning for your party’s run for the 3rd.

…cut the girl some slack.  She’s a Democrat and a Soros employee; she’s used to having orders handed down from above and carrying them out on command.  She assumes we’d do things the same way.  Right sentiment, wrong party.

And…

2) Resist the temptation:

If you do, I’ll bake you cookies…

She’s, like, pregnant.  The cookies will be something like Spam Cilantro Fudge Snickerdoodles or something like that. 

MDE and TvM both report that Brian Sullivan is not interested in running for Jim Ramstad’s seat…

…but Brodkorb says Henco sheriff Rich Stanek might be.

Stanek would join the list of candidates I’d seriously get behind.

I’ve wondered – what could I possibly say about the race in the Third CD?  Especially when the “moderate” hamsters start to mewl about the supposed imperative to nominate a fellow fuzzy moderate critter in the Third?

Now that Jeff Johnson has concluded his op-ed in the Strib with this bit here…:

As long as we nominate a conservative candidate who understands what most of the voters in the Third District care about, we will be successful. A prolife candidate will lose some votes and gain some votes because of that issue. But abortion (or gay marriage, school choice, stem-cell research, gun laws, etc.) will not be determinative in this election unless we’re stupid enough to put up a candidate who is defined by a single, controversial issue and insists on making it central to his or her campaign.

So far, I haven’t seen any such candidate on the lists of potential Republicans.

So take heart, conservative voters. If you believe, as I do, that your best candidate for Congress will be conservative both fiscally and — gasp — socially, use this opportunity to throw conventional wisdom on its rear end. This is going to be fun.

…then, frankly, nothing else needs to be said.

But read the whole thing.

Last week, when Jim Ramstad announced his retirement, I predicted that Lori Sturdevant would call for the Third District GOP to, basically, get another Ramstad – and in almost exactly the same words she used to end Sunday’s column:

 My advice, to both parties: Find another Ramstad.

The irony of that statement, of course, a year after the DFL endorsed Wendy Wilde to run against Ramstad on the far far far left, is pungent. 

No moreso than Sturdevant’s usual fare, however.  If Sturdevant isn’t collecting a check from the DFL for her reliable (if hamfisted) PR flakkery, the DFL can consider it a bargain (although only barely). 

It’s been 18 years since Minnesota’s pols and pol-reporters took a good hard look at Minnesota’s Third Congressional District.

Actually, “moderate Republicans” have represented the district since 1961. 

When they started looking closely again last Monday — the day that Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad bowled ’em over with a retirement announcement — there were more surprises in store.

For starters, take a look at which political party Third Districters told pollster Bill Morris that they like best last month (see graphic, right) […which doesn’t appear, as this is written, in the Strib online article – Ed.]. They’re just about evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.

Would the late Bob and Mary Forsythe, Edina’s Republican power couple of the ’60s and ’70s, believe that? (Wish I could ask them. Both of them left us this year, Bob in June, Mary just this month.)

And, Lori, it’d be pretty irrelevant, since if memory serves the party “left” the Forsythes, God rest their souls, when it stopped acting like DFLers with better suits, driving the Forsythes (one suspects) into the ranks of “bitter IR holdouts who are both Sturdevant’s only sources and only perspective on the GOP”.

Morris, the former Republican state chairman who heads the polling firm Decision Resources Ltd.,

Ibid. 

 …had a load of other betcha-didn’t-know stuff about today’s western suburbs. He was in the field Aug. 15-18, interviewing 600 people, which produces results with a sampling error of plus or minus 4.2 percent. Here are some nuggets:

• “No new taxes” has fallen out of favor in the Third in the past five years. In 2002, 61 percent of Thirders said they “favor the approach of balancing budgets without raising taxes.” In the new poll, that share is down to 37 percent.

Which is hardly, as they say, chopped liver.  The shelf life of the “no new taxes” slogan may have passed, but the ideal of having government live with in its’ means has not (although the likes of Sturdevant keep trying to ignore it).

It appears that many of them haven’t liked what they’ve seen of that governing approach. That may explain why DFLers have picked up eight legislative seats in the Third since 2004.

Which is equally likely to be explained by many of those seats having belonged to GOPers who bailed from “No New Taxes” early (they represented most of the GOP’s losses in ’04) and, let’s not forget, a terrible year in ’06 across the country. 

Sturdevant should stick with blaming David Strom for the bridge collapse.

• But these folks consider property taxes a drag. Three out of four say their community’s most important need is lower property taxes, Morris said.

That may have something to do with this fact: Parts of the Third District are graying faster than the rest of the state. Edina is believed to have the largest share of past-age-65 seniors of any metro municipality. Minnetonka isn’t too far behind. Seniors on fixed or slow-growing incomes are notoriously property-tax averse.

I wonder – do real people (as opposed to policy wonks) really distinguish between “taxes” and “property taxes?”  Indeed, do they care what the mechanism is, or what level of government or budget niche the various taxes serve?

Or is one hole in the wallet pretty much the same as every other hole in the wallet on the Minnesota Street?

That is a serious question.

• Morris couldn’t confirm the Third’s reputation as the working-mother leader of Minnesota. But he could report that one out of three working wives have either professional or technical jobs. That’s more than in any other Minnesota district.

Knowing that explains a lot — like, the Third District’s high percentage of college grads (52 percent, compared with 30 percent statewide). And its high average income — $62,400 per household, a good $10,000 more than the statewide average. And the consistently high proportion of those polled who say adequate K-12 funding is the most important issue facing the state. In the latest poll, education is beat out by rising health-care costs and — just barely — by the need to improve transportation.

And on two out of three, any Republican candidate that can register an EKG reading should beat the stuffing out of any mainstream (to say nothing of Wilde-like radical) DFLer.  The DFL has presided over the erosion of Minnesota education (indeed, the schools in the suburban Third are crowded with refugees from the Minneapolis schools – many of whom in North Edina have brought their noxious DFL politics with them.  And the DFL’s take on transportation is – no other word really fits – frivolous.

The GOP does need a coherent response to the healthcare question that actually resonates with real people.  Unfortunately, getting beyond the superficial palliative of “single payer care” is a very, very wonky exercise that glazes most peoples’ eyes over.

• Social issues are likely to give the Third District Republican candidate a headache…Three out of five Third District poll respondents called themselves “prochoice.” A slightly larger share oppose the “Bachmann amendment” that would ban both marriage and civil unions for same-sex couples. Fewer than one in five approve of the state’s 2004 law allowing the concealed carrying of handguns, Morris found.

Then I have to question Morris’ methodology, since a huge part of the metro base for the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, if memory serves, came from what is now the Third District.

A candidate who agrees with the district’s majority on those issues is not likely to win the endorsement of any Republican convention I can imagine assembling in 2008.

In a year when conservatives are embracing Rudy Giuliani, that’s not quite a safe a prediction as it might have been, say, ten years ago.  Don’t get me wrong; a GOP candidate will have to craft a fairly sophisticated message to grab the center in the Third; a Reagan-like approach to social issues (read the talking points and then put them on the back burner) might well be the best approach.  

But a GOP candidate who champions the party platform on those matters will be laying himself or herself open to a primary challenge and/or a general-election defeat.

We shall see, won’t we?

A big, national show at the Xcel Energy Center, right before the state’s primary election, that makes Republicans synonymous with government bars on abortion, stem-cell research and gay unions would be a nightmare for the Third’s GOP candidate.

Alternate perspective:  it might require a Republican candidate to stand for, and eloquently defend, actual principals – something that’s been done only in the breach since 1961 in the district.

Knowing how quickly the old Republican-red Third has been turning purple and even blue adds luster to Jim Ramstad’s star. He consistently commanded a solid two-thirds, and often more, of the district’s vote from 1990 until 2006. His blend of fiscal conservatism, social-issue moderation and nice-guy approachability obviously fit not only the Third District of old, but of today.

Alternate perspective:  Ramstad was an incumbent that straddled both eras in the Minnesota GOP and Minnesota politics in general – the era before Alan Quist, when Minnesota hadn’t yet caught up with the post-1980 national GOP, and the one after Brian Sullivan, when the last trickle-down of the Reagan Revoluion finally insinuated itself into Minnesota Republican politics.  As an incumbent, he was bulletproof even though the world changed around his feet. 

Who will suit it tomorrow? My advice, to both parties: Find another Ramstad.

Any Republican who takes “advice” from Lori Sturdevant should drop his brain off at Goodwill.  He doesn’t need it anymore.

Question:  If a leftyblogger says a unicorn is standing next to you, and then declares himself “reality-based”, should you saddle up for a magical ride through the starry skies?

Mark Gisleson continues to try to turn my comments about conservatives and demonstrations into something they’re not. 

Too much stuff to fisk (now), but this bit in particular was interesting:

Mitch says there won’t be much in the way of counterprotesters at the RNC next year because “conservatives” just aren’t into groups. Funny, they sure used to turn out in record numbers for George Bush, but then “conservatives” love to be lied to. Over and over again.

Now, do we really think Mark Gisleson can’t tell the difference between going to a campaign rally – an energizing gathering of people whose company one generally enjoys, toward a mutual end (no matter what your party or who your candidate) – and standing on a sidewalk waving a hand-made sign as an endless procession of not-too-literate droogs slouches past chanting gibberish and oozing self-righteousness? 

No, I know it’s possible.  I’m just asking.

Mark Gisleson of Norwegianity, apparently bummed about finishing way out of the big money in the Unintentionally Funny Leftyblog contest (despite years of dedicated striving from colleague MNob, would would definitely be a contender in the Individual category, if I had the bandwidth to present such a contest) apparently didn’t like this line, from a post last week about conservatives and protesting…:

 Conservatives are like sharks; any one of us is a match for dozens of liberals, and our very presence at marches or school board meetings or community council elections provokes unreasoning fear, panic, irrationality and an “end justifies the means” mentality.

He responded:

The first graf is the award-winner [for some hypothetical “unintentionally funny conservative blogger” contest – of which more below], the latter is the clip and save for next year to see if he’s still using this excuse for the pitiful wingnut counterprotester presence at the RNC.

He was talking about this quote from me:

 So I have neither the illusion of nor the desire to try to get thousands of conservatives out into the street next year for the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul. But I do want to get dozens out on the street, and spotted around the city’s various choke points, with cameras and video and laptops and wireless cards, to make sure that the “demonstrators” are held accountable to the world for the actions of their, er, less-restrained fellows.

 Of course, Gisleson misses the point; if he could see the point, he’d be a conservative.

Nobody – least of all me – is under any impression that conservatives will ever clog the streets of Saint Paul, waving signs and carring papier-mache puppets and chanting like a bunch of lobotomized droogs.  That’s the left’s monopoly, and y’all are welcome to it.  We cannot “fail” to spark a mass movement “in the street” at the convention, because there is not the faintest intention to try to create one.

Never has been!

Never will be!

The real intentions?  They’re hidden (apparently) in plain sight, in one post or another here and on True North, for whatever it may be worth to you.

So read again.  And focus.  Belay your dreams of bobbing down Kellogg Boulevard inside a giant Cheney head puppet for a few moments. 

Leave the goalposts alone.

Gary Miller at TvM is a little down in the dumps over the Ramstad retirement:

Jim Ramstad is the embodiment of everything I loathe about RINOs.  He is an SOB but he’s OUR SOB and losing Ramstad would almost certainly mean losing this “first ring” seat. 

I’m not quite as down on Ramstad as Gary; day in and day out, he did usually vote with the good guys; the American Conservative Union rated him a feeble but not-catastrophic 68% (equal to Norm Coleman, better than John McCain), while at least one lefty source isn’t exactly scattering palm fronds in his path.  Of course, he screwed the conservative pooch on many vital issues; he first earned my ire by voting for Clinton’s 1994 “Crime Bill”, a greater impingement on civil liberty than anything the Bush Adminstration has even suggested in the left’s most paranoid delusions.  In balance, he’s generally on the right side (compared to Minnesota’s DFLers), but frustratingly unreliable.

Of course, we’d like to shoot for better than “sucks less”:

Congressional majorities are comprised of true believers and heretics.  Congressman Ramstad is a card-carrying member of the latter but his departure would make it that much more difficult to regain the Speaker’s gavel in the next few election cycles. 

The obvious answer, of course, is to win the Third District for a conservative.

Gary’s stablemate First Ringer is on the case with the best wrapup of potential candidates I’ve seen yet.

Look for more – much more – on TrueNorth, where this race is going to be one of the big priorities for the next year.

And someone tell Gary to cheer up.  This is an opportunity.

Jim Ramstad has always been an aggravating case.

On the one hand, I have some residual home-town loyalty going on.  Ramstad and I are both natives of Jamestown, ND. 

On the other hand, he’s the kind of Republican that makes Lori Sturdevant coo and giggle with girlish glee; a Republican that, when the chips are down, is as likely to vote with the Dems as with the GOP.  You know – one of those “responsible” Republicans (to the local media) who don’t bother with all of that “stiff-necked adherence to party principles” stuff.  (Oddly – for those of you from out of state – they don’t have any similar guideline for DFLers; to the Strib, John Kline is an “irresponsible extremist”, while Keith Ellison is mainstream). 

Ramstad is retiring.  And little birds are telling me that the Third CD Republicans want to endorse another “Moderate”, so scared are they of the district’s alleged purplish trends (even though the Third voted for both Bush and Pawlenty). 

Note to my readers in the Third District:  Rubbish.  This is the time to be bold.  To stand up for a strong message – for prosperity, security, and our culture. 

Now is the time for you – the conservatives in the Third District – to turn off Rush and get out in the street to work for an actual, first-principle conservative. 

Remember the Sixth District last year; the party orthodoxy preferred Jim Knoblauch (and to be fair, Jim would have made a great representative; indeed, any of the four candidates would have been better than Patty Wetterline).  But Michele Bachmann won by organizing, by getting her people out to the caucuses and voting for her in droves.

Conservatives in the Third CD need to do the same thing, or they’ll get stuck with another “moderate”.  And they need to do it soon.  While the Third, by all rights, should be solid conservative country, the party district establishment is a throwback to the old “Independent Republican” era.  Between Ramstad and Jim Frenzel, the district has been represented by “Moderates” – which in Minnesota GOP parlance means “people who missed the Reagan Revolution” – for a couple of decades now. 

You – the conservative in the Third – can change that.  We’re going to spend the next few weeks talking about exactly how.

While the local anti-genocide community was out at Triangle Park demonstrating against the “peace” movement (Jamie Delton has the best wrapup of blog coverage I’ve seen), Jack Langer was at a contemporaneous rally in Washington.

And he was…unimpressed?

The protestors, around 8,000 in all, soon lined up in marching formation. But there was some major organizational problem, and they remained in place for over an hour before setting out for the Capitol. Once the march began, it got about two blocks before organizers temporarily halted it, informing us through bullhorns that we had to allow large groups to catch up who were still back at Lafayette Park, unaware that the march had begun. I was mystified how so many people failed to notice thousands of banner-waving, drum playing, chanting protestors leave their vicinity.

The rest of the march was equally disorganized. The massive lead banner, stretching around 40 feet across the width of the protest, ripped in half, hindering the lead protestors’ efforts to hold a straight line. Then they had to endure a three-block stretch that was lined with around a thousand flag-waving, pro-American counter-protestors. The marchers at first tried to ignore the interlopers, but their self-control always seemed to break down right around the guy who was singing into a bullhorn “All we are saaaying, is give soap a chance.” Some heated exchanges ensued, but the cops maintained order and the marchers eventually arrived at the Capitol.

Yeah.  “Unimpressed” is the word.

They stopped at a wall, about waist-high, that separates the Capitol steps from a large field split by a walkway. Behind the wall stood a line of dozens of cops, some in riot gear. Sensing some action was about to break out, I rudely shoved my way to the wall. I was joined in the front row mostly by other, equally uncouth reporters, none us caring one iota about basic manners when a big story seemed about to break.

It was at this point that the “die-in” commenced. Hundreds of protestors lied down and, I suppose, pretended to be dead. I think the spectacle was somehow supposed to help end the Iraq War. After all, nothing conveys the dignity and solemnity of a noble cause like a “die-in” does.

And, hopefully a portent of things to come in Saint Paul…:

The anarchists really disappointed me. None of them jumped the wall. They portray themselves as the most militant wing of the antiwar movement, but they didn’t even have the guts displayed by the Code Pink grandmas. The anarchists claim to want a revolution, but apparently not a single one of them is willing to risk a misdemeanor arrest to achieve that glorious goal. Instead, they sufficed with yelling a lot of slogans about class war at the cops. This was ironic, seeing as the anarchists were almost certainly all college kids, while the cops were about the only working class people in the entire crowd.

Back “in the day” when I was a wanna-be punk rocker and weekend talk show host, I interviewed a bunch of kidz from the “Backroom Anarchist Center”, the old narky commune in Minneapolis, on my old graveyard shift talk show.  I took the liberty of checking into some of their bios.  To a kid, they were from upper-middle-class neighborhoods – Edina, Woodbury – and apparently going through some sort of rite of rebellious passage.  As I’ve written before – I’d kill to know what those kids are doing now, when they’re all in their late thirties.  Not living in the back of a van, I’ll hazard.

And in the end, what had the protestors achieved? Not much, it seems to me. I asked a cop about the fate of those arrested. He told me they’d be processed and then released, probably spending no more than a few hours in a holding cell. The entire spectacle was really just a kind of performance art, acted out for the benefit of a gullible media that laps up these exhibitions and presents them to the nation as if they reflect some meaningful social current.

I hope to spend the first  week of next September documenting the silliness.

We drew (according to one count) about 30 people to yesterday’s counterprotest on John Ireland Boulevard.

It was a huge success.  Before I took off from the house Saturday morning, I had a hard count of maybe 18.   Getting nearly double that?  Awesome.

Of course, the point wasn’t to demonstrate.  Demonstrations don’t really affect policy in any way at all.  What they are, if you keep things in perspective, is a dandy social occasion; a time to get together and realize you’re not alone out there. 

Liberals and “activists” are like tuna (and, if it’s possible, please believe I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense); they travel in big groups, they get uneasy when they’re NOT in a big group, they have a hard time conceiving of existence that doesn’t involve big groups. 

Conservatives are like sharks; any one of us is a match for dozens of liberals, and our very presence at marches or school board meetings or community council elections provokes unreasoning fear, panic, irrationality and an “end justifies the means” mentality.  And we usually operate alone.  Conservatism is fundamentally a solitary thing; we usually come to the movement alone, or with a spouse.  Liberals have their marches and their union meetings and their poli-sci classes; our social impulses are usually carried out via talk radio and blogs, at work or while hauling kids to school.  Getting a group of five or more conservatives together for ANYTHING but an open bar is a major undertaking.

So I have neither the illusion of nor the desire to try to get thousands of conservatives out into the street next year for the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul.  But I do want to get dozens out on the street, and spotted around the city’s various choke points, with cameras and video and laptops and wireless cards, to make sure that the “demonstrators” are held accountable to the world for the actions of their, er, less-restrained fellows.

Like Brad Carlson did with this guy.

The left labors under the fantasy that there’ll be an equal amount of provocation from the left and the right.  My goal; to have the radical far left’s sins and crimes spread far and wide, in the event that their lunatic fringe misbehaves in Saint Paul this year.

And yes, I fully expect that the left will have its phalanxes of “citizen journalists” trooping through the streets with cameras, trying to do the same.

Hopefully we’re all going to be bored stiff.

Anyone wanna place bets on who’s gonna be busier?

Kermit, Brad, Dr. Jonz and Swiftee were there…

20 to 1?

Seems like a fair battle.

I had to take off before the actual fun started at the Cathedral and long John Ireland Boulevard in Saint Paul this morning – I had to get to the station to do the NARN show – but I’m told it was a great time.  Most of the lefties behaved (all of the counterprotesters, naturally, behaved impeccably), and our presence – for a bunch of people who are just not wired to stand around on a gorgeous Saturday waving signs and yelling – was way stronger than I expected.  I had hoped to draw 15-18 counterprotesters – by all accounts we doubled that. 

I’ll be linking to some of the other bloggers who were there – but this was a great start.

More later!

Kerry Hogan at Smoothing Plane, preparing for Saturday’s counterprotest, notes:

Arguing with the deranged shows optimism but is futile. The unreasonable do not come to reason through reason. Humor and ridicule, that’s the ticket.

He’s also got some ideas for signs.

Please join us – the Twin Cities’ anti-surrender, anti-appeasement, anti-genocide community – at a counterprotest this coming Saturday. 

The counterprotesters will gather and demonstrate at Triangle Park in Saint Paul (the triangle-shaped block east of the linked map) at the corner of Marshall Avenue and John Ireland Boulevard.   (For an aerial view, click here)  We’ll be counterprotesting the Vietnam rally “Peace” march, which starts around noon-ish.  We’ll be getting to the park early in the morning.

The park is located a block north of the Cathedral of Saint Paul and east of John Ireland Boulevard (the road that connects the Cathedral and the Capitol) across from Saint Paul College.  It is Saint Paul Parks property, and is reserved for the use of counterprotesters during the time of the march.

Interested in attending?  Drop us a line at the email address “demonstrationwatch”, at Yahoo.com. 

Conservatives dominate talk radio.  And they dominate the smart half of the blogosphere.

Chief at True North/Freedom Dogs writes, quoting Patrick Ruffini:

The second fact is that conservative blogs, excluding Free Republic/Lucianne/etc. for a moment, serve a fundamentally different audience than the netroots. They’re more elite, focused on policy, and interested in the execution of the war. What was going on when conservative blogs first boomed? 9/11 and the American response to it. And discussions of the size of the conservative blogosphere (strictly defined) should take into account the fact that there are only so many people who can digest the kind of almost-scholarly analysis that happens in places like Power Line, Captain’s Quarters, and Red State. The conservative blogosphere today is what the liberal blogosphere would have been if elite bloggers like Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias had remained the dominant voices.This is not meant to be self-congratulatory. In fact, I think it’s probably a serious limitation in the size of our blogosphere, to the extent that’s a concern. If you want to be bigger, you’re not necessarily going to like the people you have to let in to make it happen.

I think Ruffini misses a key point – and a key point that anyone involved in the conservative alternative media should understand in their marrow, instinctively.

Why doesn’t liberal talk radio work?  Because lefties already have the networks, most of the cable news outlets, virtually the entire dead-tree media, and NPR.  They don’t need it – at least, not in the traditional media.  Conservative talk radio filled a niche that had gone begging since the dawn of the big political split; a place for the conservative id to come out and shout and throw things, in a way they couldn’t do at their jobs and in their homes.

But while the traditional media are liberal, they are also very top-down.  Their “gatekeepers” keep the unwashed rabble – even their own – from getting on the air or into print.  So the Sorosphere – the Kos Kidz and Atrios and Democrat Underground and Jesus General – are to the left what Michael Savage is to the right; a place for the nattering, madding horde to gather and vent. 

In the meantime, the conservative blogosphere fills a role, too, in the hands of the likes of Powerline and Ed and Michelle Malkin; an outlet for our best and brightest, which outflanks the traditional media that had frozen them out for so long. 

Ruffini:

 If and when that were to happen, the elite flavor of many leading conservative blogs today would give way to more freewheeling Daily Kos and Free Republic-like sites and comment areas.

Maybe – if there were a need for such a thing.

A need, I suggest, that does not exist. 

Chief, quoting Ruffini:

Finally and here is the larger point that I agree with Ruffini on is “if you want to start a new blog that will get read, your best bet is 1) obsessively cover 2008 and be good at it, and 2) fill a niche, especially one covering local politics True North will do just this. Bookmark us and keep coming back. I also think conservative blogosphere has misread the marketplace. To make a wild overgeneralization here, policy is boring and politics is interesting. By blogging about policy, you choose to be boring (and that’s ok). There is probably a much bigger marketplace for people focused on elections, especially in even numbered years.

Policy is boring (unless John LaPlante is writing about it); but politics is connected to the pocketbook and the future of this nation; it’s something people get emotionally involved with. 

And the emotional involvement is what people tune in, or click your link, for.

We share a city with some…”interesting” people. 

Lassie at True North notes that the “9/11 Truthers” are setting up shop over in Minneapolis:

 This Tuesday, September 11, many will reflect and say a prayer in remembrance or honor those who lost their lives in the wake of 9/11/2001. Then, there are those who think 9/11 was an inside job — the 9/11 Truthers. They plan to show their film “9/11 Press for Truth” and act out with some street theater in Minneapolis, with Coleen Rowley, former FBI agent.

Spend an evening celebrating our freedom of expression thru music, dance and spoken word (open mic time, too.)

Learn about the case for impeachment, find out about the campaign for a US Department of Peace, and discover great ways to work for change right here in Minneapolis…

Speakers Include: Coleen Rowley, former FBI agent and Time person of the year 2003, Marv Davidoff founder of the Honeywell Project…

If there ever was a better opportunity (or duty) to crash a party, this is it.

Hm.  Some parties, I’d like to crash.

Others, I’m happy to let stew in the fetid backwash of what Dostoevskii might have called their “brain fever”.

A few weeks ago, I proposed a contest to pick Minnesota’s most unintentionally-funny leftyblog. 

I haven’t had time to put the poll together – but events today have given the idea some added impetus.

Minnesota’s dullest-witted leftyblog, “MNBlue”, has uncorked a howler.  Written by one “Grace Kelly” – long known to Saint Paul politics followers as a rhetorical acid trip – it addresses the Republican National Committee’s deposit of two million dollars into an inner-city Saint Paul bank, to help give loans to help clean up the inner city in the year before the convention:

The Star & Tribune publishes “Political parties give money for host cities’ trouble: Political parties provide loans and volunteerism to create civic goodwill ahead of conventions.” Dear Randy Furst(author) and Star Tribune, “give money” and “deposit money in the bank”, is not the same thing – not even close! 

Actually, given that the money was deposited in a zero-interest account – they’re just letting it sit there, for the bank and community’s benefit – and that the bank will be able to use the interest (well into six figures in the next year) to help capitalize more improvements in the neighborhood, and that a dollar so invested can create multiple dollars of effect as it circulates through the community?  Um, yeah.  It’s “even close”. 

Not until the second paragraph does the article actually state the real information, “the party is depositing $2 million in St. Paul’s University Bank to make capital available for loans to repair dilapidated homes. Ultimately, the committee will take the money back to pay expenses, but in the meantime the bank can use it.”

(warning, maximum sarcasm)

*** deposit money in a bank until I need it back ****

That’s the Republican party’s idea of helping out local communities and creating civic goodwill! Arggggh!

Yes.

And, as luck would have it, it’s the Democratic Party’s idea, too:

Wishing to build goodwill among American Indians and the broader Denver community, the Democratic National Convention Committee is helping [Denver-based] Native American Bank increase its portfolio of small-business loans.

The committee deposited $2 million into a zero-interest account at the Denver-based bank Wednesday morning and said it would leave the money there until late spring.

“It’s very important to us that the convention is a team effort,” said Leah Daughtry, the DNCC’s chief executive, before handing over the check.

MNBlue.  It features a bunch of Minnesota’s most rhetorically-incontinent writers (Kelly, Eric “Big E” Pusey, and Andy “Mister Furious” Driscoll for good measure), and the most baroque comment section security to boot.

But facts?   Not so much.

Too. Stupid. To.  Fisk.

A group of people who support the troops, and want the world to know that not all of the Twin Cities agrees with the anti-war, pro-surrender agenda, will be staging a counterprotest at the “peace” march on September 15.

The counterprotesters will gather and demonstrate at Triangle Park in Saint Paul (the triangle-shaped block east of the linked map) at the corner of Marshall Avenue and John Ireland Boulevard.   (For an aerial view, click here – it’s one of Saint Paul’s coolest places, in a lot of ways)

The park – a memorial to Minnesotans who served in the Civil War – is located a block north of the Cathedral of Saint Paul and east of John Ireland Boulevard (the road that connects the Cathedral and the Capitol) across from Saint Paul College.  It is Saint Paul Parks property, and is reserved for the use of counterprotesters during the time of the march.

Interested in attending?  Drop us a line at the email address “demonstrationwatch”, at Yahoo.com.