No huge surprises in the primaries yesterday – at least not at the polls.

But the big news in my book?  The Strib’s poison-pen endorsements went 1 out of 3, with an asterisk on that “1”.

In the northeast subs, Karin Housley beat Eric Langness despite getting a snide, snotty, insincere little pseudo-endorsement from the Strib that served mostly as a free ad for the DFL candidate, wannabe professional politician Julie Bunn.   Hopefully Housley will go on to earn much tut-tutting from the Strib’s editorial board (or, let’s be honest, Lori Sturdevant, who seems to set the board’s political barometer).

But it was in the western subs that the Strib truly came a’cropper.

In HD33B, Tea Party activists (“community organizer”? Hmmm) Cindy Pugh pummeled career Representative Steve Smith by more than 2:1 – notwithstanding that the Strib gave Smith a glowing endorsement.  Glowing – but hardly surprising; while Smith had a few conservative issues (he was a solid Second Amendment supporter and had a Taxpayers League scorecard not too out of line with many GOP leaders), the DFL could count on him to vex the conservative caucus on some key issues.  That, of course, is why the Strib endorsed him.

That race was never really in doubt; Pugh had a huge lead from time the first returns came in.

The nail-biter came in Senate District 33.  Connie Doepke – the former Representative who decided to buck the SD33 Republicans’ endorsement of Dave Osmek – jumped out to an early lead, which became the only real cliff-hanger of the evening.  With every wave of precincts that came in, Osmek whittled away at Doepke’s lead, until close to 11PM, when with three precincts to go Osmek took the lead.  The final margin was 107 votes in favor of Osmek.

As Buckley once said, you should vote for the most conservative candidate who can win.  Both Pugh and Osmek are running in a district that is solidly Republican – something like plus 22, if I recall correctly.  I suspect they’ll both win comfortably.

Housley faces a tougher race; the northeast subs of Saint Paul are just about neutral, and the media will be out to try to re-install Bunn.  Housley will need some help.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes in re Al Sharpton’s Strib op-ed:

Civil Rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton writes in the Star Tribune to oppose Voter ID because 1 in 4 Blacks, 1 in 5 elderly and 1 in 6 Hispanics don’t have the proper credentials and apparently can’t get them.

Oddly, others can.

The Ramsey County Elections office is next door to the Property Records room where deeds are stored and I spend a fair amount of time working with real estate. I have seen an endless parade of Asian voters the past two weeks. They’re showing up by the van-load. They have guides who speak English directing them to the right office. Older folks are assisted by younger ones. They’re showing up to register and to vote absentee for the primary.

I’ve also seen a few Black immigrants, Somalis or Ethiopians from the way they dress and talk. No “American” Blacks, though. None of the people whose pants are stitched to their underwear, whose caps are on sideways, who have time in the afternoon to prowl the streets looking for 14-year-old girls in Frogtown and who learned to talk from rap videos. Those people can’t seem to make it to the Voter Registration Office.

Plainly, this is not a cultural thing. It’s not a matter of White and Asian people being conscientious and law-abiding while recent illegal immigrant Hispanics (and Blacks whose families have lived in this country for generations) are neither conscientious nor law-abiding.

Plainly, it’s just racissss. And that’s a crying shame.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

And I’ll add that it’s not even a matter of Afro-Americans and Latinos not being conscientious or law-abiding so much as it is the DFL, Sharpton, and their camp-followers in the Media wanting you to believe it; to believe that Black, Latino, elderly and young voters are just too stupid to handle bringing an ID to the polls.

We know better.  Right?

Polling shows that a fairly decisive majority of Minnesotans agree, and support Voter ID.  The left’s response – other than chanting “Disenfranchisement” and “Racism” – is to claim that the process of getting a free ID is juuuust toooo complicated for voters.  And since their strategy does seem to involve trying to win over “low-information” voters – people they can gull into thinking Mitt Romney is a felon who hasn’t filed taxes, that Bain killed a woman, that they’re out of work in 2012 because of what George W. Bush did (or really didn’t) do in 2007), that would be a concern.

As Joe points out, many groups – groups that actually take democracy seriously – are making the logical connection; they’re getting their people registered.    Expect not a few legitimate groups across the political spectrum to extend their ‘Get out the Vote” efforts to getting voters registered as well.

Clearly, for the DFL, it’s easier to manufacture bogus votes than to get their low-information rank-and-file to vote legitimately.

Is the WaPo’s “Politifact” biased toward the left?

Why, what would ever give you that idea?

As we’ve discussed earlier, the Star Tribune has two goals in its “Endorsement” process:

1. Promote the DFL.  At the least, an endorsement is free advertising.  Beyond that?   It gulls the gullible.
2. Ensure that whatever GOP does get elected causes the DFL as little trouble as possible.  It’s why all and sundry among their columnists, except Katherine Kersten, constantly harken back to the bad old days, when the GOP was basically the DFL with better suits.

Rep. Steve Smith of the southwest ‘burbs is at best a “moderate” Republican, conservative only only law-and-order issues, and would give “RINOs” a bad name on most other topics – or, as the Strib puts it, “thoughtful and pragmatic”.

And that’s the least of his problems. Talk with any mainstream conservative Republican in the legislature about Smith and you get a lot of head-shaking, eye-rolling and “Oof-da”-ing.  From the partisan to the political to the personal, Representative Smith is reportedly a poster child for the downside of life as a professional politician.

But he’s not even a speed bump for the DFL on most issues. and that means “Strib Heart Smith“:

Or as the Strib – and I have it on fair authority that Lori Sturdevant wrote this one too – puts it:

To function well, the perennially divided Legislature needs mavericks — independent-minded centrists willing to occupy the battle-scarred ground between the two parties and to stretch in both directions to strike deals.

But only so long as they stretch to the left.

Seriously – you’ll look long and in vain for similar praise for DFLers who inch to the right.  Partly because the DFL excises them from the party like they’re tumors (See Norm Coleman, Randy Kelly, Jerry Blakey, John Harrington).  Partly because to the Strib Editorial Board, sticking to one’s guns goes by two names; “populist pugnacity!” on the left, “partisan extremism” on the right.

Smith, naturally, “stretches” obligingly and solely to the left:

For 22 years, state Rep. Steve Smith, 62, a family law attorney [we’ll come back to that] from Mound, has played that difficult and increasingly lonely role. He gets our nod on that basis over Southwest Metro Tea Party founder Cindy Pugh of Chanhassen, who has party endorsement.

Not just party endorsement – like Dave Osmek, she had overwhelming party endorsement.

Which is yet another reason the Strib is endorsing Smith – to do its bit to undercut the GOP – a goal at which Smith is a reliable ally:

Unlike most Republicans, Smith is allied with organized labor — eight unions had endorsed him as of late last week. He opposes the same-sex-marriage ban that most Republican legislators voted to put before the voters this year. He voted for the stadium bill; Pugh says she would have voted no.

On vote after vote after vote, Smith tossed the caucus, and a Republican mainstream that has moved to the right over his decades of incumbency, under the bus – to the point where the caucus finally had to do something:

Speaker Kurt Zellers broke with customary practice two weeks ago by endorsing Pugh over his caucusmate Smith. After the 2011 session, amid rumors about Smith’s relationship with a female staffer (he is divorced), Zellers stripped Smith of the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Policy and Finance Committee. (The woman in question no longer works for the House.)

Want double standards?  The Strib’s got ’em!:

By comparison, Pugh, 55, a former general manager of Dayton’s in St. Paul, is an energetic, personable apostle of free-market conservatism….By her own admission, if District 33B voters send Pugh to the Capitol next January, she’ll have a lot to learn.

Pugh is a successful businesswoman, and a key organizer of a political movement, the Southwest Metro Tea Party, that has been turning the formerly “purple” Third CD redder and redder by the year for for the past three years.  She is a dynamo.  Like many of the recent conservative “Tea Party” class of current legislators, she’s got a lifetime of real accomplishments outside of politics.  While the Strib may well prefer someone who’s spent an adult lifetime growing roots in the Capitol, one suspects the voters are getting smarter.

And I did mention double standards, right?  You’ll scour the Strib in vain for any patronizing references to the inexperience of, say, Carly Melin, a 25 year old DFL drone-ette whom the DFL trucked straight from Hamline Law School in Saint Paul to the Iron Range just in time to meet the residency requirements, for an insta-endorsement and perfunctory election to the House, notwithstanding the fact that she had no useful experience at anything, much less politics.

If they send Smith, he’ll have a different set of challenges.

He’ll have the kind of challenges that, were he a conservative like Tom Hackbarth, would have gotten obsessive coverage in the Strib.

We hope voters give him a chance to overcome them. Legislative mavericks are in grievously short supply.

No, we’ve got mavericks; a majority of them in both chambers.  They broke from the Strib’s orthodoxy.

As to Smith?  He’s a RINO.  That is forgiveable, personally if not politically.  He’s a throwback to an earlier, more useless era in the Minnesota GOP; the Carlson/Durenberger years, when the “Indendent Republican” party went along to get along.  May those days be soon forgotten.

What is unforgiveable is that Smith has been one of the leading forces against custody reform in Minnesota.  It’s a system that intentionally exacerbates divorces, by enshrining a “winner takes all” custody and support system that inflames divorces (and racks up billable hours for Smith’s fellow “Family Court” lawyers) and, make no mistake, operates in the precise worst interest of children in the vast majority of cases.  Minnesota’s current child custody system is a barbaric monstrosity that should be rooted out and killed.  

For his decades of supporting this inexcusable barbarism, there is no circle in hell hot or dark enough for Smith (rhetorically and morally speaking, at any rate).  He deserves to be pelted with rocks and garbage, mocked and exiled from polite civilization.

But I, and nearly 90% of his district’s Republicans, would be happy to settle for simply retiring from politics, starting Wednesday morning.

“It was a bitchy endorsement”.

That’s what a conservative female friend of mine described the Strib’s “endorsement” of Karin Housley (over Eric Langness) in the SD39 race.

It was an apt description:

Housley, 48, outclasses Langness, 34, and gets our nod, but it’s not an enthusiastic one. The Realtor and radio talk-show host, married to 21-year NHL star and Stillwater hockey coach Phil Housley, is making her second bid for the state Senate. She lost narrowly in 2010 to DFL Sen. Katie Sieben in pre-redistricting District 57.

Years of interest in legislative service should have led Housley to bone up on state issues. Her confession that she hasn’t analyzed the state budget, and her claim that “there’s waste across the board,” might be acceptable from a first-time candidate. They’re troubling the second time around.

Although not “troubling” enough for the Strib to similarly snif about many, many DFLers they endorse notwithstanding much genuine “ignorance” (or, as real people call it, “focusing on priorities”).

Still, we see more potential in Housley than in Langness, director of career services for Anthem College. He’s a former Forest Lake School Board member whose efforts to cut school spending led to his defeat for reelection in 2009.

The message: “at least we don’t know that Housley is one of those big bad conservatives”.

We did say “bitchy”, right?

District 39 isn’t in the habit of sending DFLers to the Legislature. But voters who share our concerns about the GOP contenders should know that former state Rep. Julie Bunn — a Stanford University Ph.D. economist and former Macalester College professor — is the DFL candidate on the November ballot. She warrants their consideration.

“We interrupt this primary endorsement to provide a free, fawning, foot-sniffing ad for a DFLer wannabe-career-politician who’s not running in the primary”.

I’m always amazed that Strib writers and editors are so nonplussed that anyone could accuse them of systematic bias.

…that the Light Worker’s campaign is aimed at the one group he’s got a shot with: the not very well informed:

This is an ad, as Ed points out, that even left-leaning Politifact has rated “pants on fire”.

As this blog has been noting for quite some time now, the Democrat strategy seems to be to just toss crap in front of the electorate and hope just enough of it sticks to the dim, uninformed, adolescent, solipsistic and over-emotional to eke out a win.

It worked for Mark Dayton.

While the national polls show the presidential race a statistical toss-up, Nate Silver points out that polls conducted in swing state show Obama with an actual lead of sorts – around three points:.

While that isn’t an enormous difference in an absolute sense, it is a consequential one. A one- or two-point lead for Mr. Obama, as in the national polls, would make him barely better than a tossup to win re-election. A three- or four-point lead, as in the state polls, is obviously no guarantee given the troubles in the economy, but it is a more substantive advantage.

Here’s the part that caught my attention; I’ve added emphasis:

The difference isn’t an artifact of RealClearPolitics’s methodology. The FiveThirtyEight method, which applies a more complicated technique for estimating polling averages, sees broadly the same split between state and national polls.

On the one hand – well, doy.  Obama’s an incumbent elected in a wave, protected by a media that serves as his Praetorian Guard.  Of course he’s going to be polling well.

On the other hand?  My real point in this article is the abovementioned “FiveThirtyEigtht Method”.

I addressed this two years ago – when Silver, who is generally acknowledged to be a moderate Democrat, spent most of the 2010 campaign predicting a 6+ point Mark Dayton victory.

How did he arrive at that number?

1. By taking an assortment of polls from around MInnesota, conducted by a variety of polling operations, and…
2. Applying a weighting to each poll, the “538 Poll Weight”, which came from an unexplained formula known, near as I can tell, only to Silver.  Which is not to say that it’s wrong, or statistically, intellectually or journalistically dishonest, per se – merely that it’s completely opaque

But let’s take Silver’s methodology at face value – because he’s a respected statistician who works for the NYTimes, right?

The fact remains that, at least here in Minnesota, two of the polls that were given great weight in Silver’s methodology – the Star Tribune “Minnesota” poll and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute poll, are palpably garbage, and should be viewed as DFL propaganda at best, calculated election fraud at worst. 

I must confess, I’ve more or less gotten over trying to each leftybloggers how logic works, except in the odd individual case (and I have to admit that’s more a matter of rhetorical endzone-ball-spiking, bordering on intellectual sadomasochism, than actual interest in education).

I say that partly because today’s subject isn’t a blogger (although he certainly packs the intellectual gear to  be a Twin Cities leftyblogger), and partly because, well, I’m at that stage of my life when I question a lot of my own motivations, and sometimes find my answers sorely wanting.

Not as wanting as I find my opponents, naturally.

Like most conservatives, I’ve long since given up reading the Star/Tribune for anything other than material to mock.

And as that last that last weekend’s “Counterpoint” – “Liberals are Right, Conservatives are Wrong“, from retired math teacher David Perlman qualifies.

And today’s liberal rhetorical stunt?  The incredibly-difficult “Double Circular Question-Beg” from a Rolling Start!

The rolling start?  A smarmy dollop of that other crutch of the liberal “thinker”, smug entitlement:

In “Based on recent rulings, it’s the court’s liberal wing that’s rigid” (June 29), D.J. Tice observed that the liberal members of the U.S. Supreme Court constitute a more lockstep group than the conservatives do.

I think he’s right — but Tice presented this as a criticism of the liberals.

I did say “smug entitlement”:

Here’s the arrogant part: Liberalism is correct and conservatism is wrong.

Perlman follows with some puffery that I’m sure he intends to be self-justifying – math and science are objective, doncha know! – before making with the Big Truths:

The law, unlike mathematics or science, attempts to be based on logic, but it is strongly influenced by interpretation. What, for example, is a “reasonable man”? Reasonable men can disagree.

But the “Reasonable Person” in the sense of the legal theory doesn’t actually get into arguments; it’s a standard, not an anthropological model.

But I digress – but to be fair, Perlman keeps digressing, too.

The purpose of the legal minds who sit on the Supreme Court is not so much to apply logic as it is to interpret the Constitution.

And there, I’ll let my lawyer friends have at it.

And now we come to rigid blocs and the miracle that is the Supreme Court. I can well imagine the behind-the-scenes conversations that go on among the nine justices. I envision congeniality and also heated debate, and I have come to believe that the liberals tend to sway the conservatives far more than the other way around.

And Mr. Perlman seems to have “come to believe” this in much the same way that I “came to believe” in Santa Claus when I was six; I really, really wanted to.

I am, of course, stating Mr. Perlman’s conclusion for him.  But as we read onward – and we will, damn the luck – Perlman returns the favor with noxious interest.

I’ll add emphasis here and there throughout the rest of the piece:

Justice David Souter comes to mind right away. Even Justice Sandra Day O’Connor moved to the left in the end. I think the reason is that they are all intelligent people, and intelligent people tend toward liberalism.

It’s a conceit that drives many liberals – and virtually all of them, near as I can tell, who get past high school.

Conservatives decry the liberal bias in the universities. It is true that most college professors are liberals, but I don’t think it has anything to do with bias. It is because college professors are intelligent people, and intelligent people tend to be liberal.

College is where smart people are, so liberals at college must be smart!

I have had many conversations with colleagues about why so many people vote against their own best interests, and the only conclusion that is ever reached is that those people are swayed by emotional arguments, not by intelligent thought.

Liberals are at college; smart people are at college; smart people know what’s in their best interests, and liberals are smart people, so voting liberal is in everyone’s best interest (whatever that is!)!

It’s simple!

But it’s in the next bit that Perlman shows his true mastery of the form; he not only sticks the “Double Circular Question-Beg”, he does it with style!

So, in the end, despite Citizens United, and despite Republicans’ putting extreme conservatives on the Supreme Court, the constitution of the court itself (pun intended) has a tendency to move to the left.

College is where smart people are.  Liberals are at college, so they must be smart.  Judges when to lots of college, so they are by definition smart, ergo liberal!

Why don’t all you morons understand this?  It’s as logical as any circle!

This piece is proof that:

• Minnesota Liberals never really learn how to question, much less debate, conservatism:  Growing up in a school system that trains youth to be “progressives”, coming of age in a university system that (sorry, Mr. Perlman) hangs out a “no conservatives need apply” sign, then spend decades in a system – public ed, civil service, any public employee’s union – that would never dream of second-guessing any of those preconceptions (but does have a very strict definition of “voters’ best interests”, yessirreebob) with a big helping of Minnesota-bred “we’re all strong, good looking and above average” larded on top, let’s be honest; it’d be a miracle if Mr. Perlman could be anything but smug, entitled, and not nearly as bright as he thinks.  His argument, full of circular question-begging (formidable as that is) would have embarassed a modestly bright ninth-grader when I was in school.
• The Strib is trying hard to buck up liberals’ self-esteem in what could shape up to be an awful election year for them, apparently showing them that anyone can be a Big Thinker  That, or they are almost out of commentary writers.
• American public education is screwed blue, presuming Mr. Perlman really was a teacher.

Mr. Perlman:  hang out at college some more.   You may not get any smarter, but you won’t be inflicting what passes for your “logic” on people via the Strib, anyway.

Secretary of State Ritchie http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_20964461/minnesota-marriage-amendment-title-chosen-ballot-measurewants to change the name shown on the ballot for the Marriage Amendment.

And Joe Doakes of Como Park is not impressed:

Excellent example of the language battle.  Other possible titles:

“Enshrining Hate In The Minnesota Constitution.”

“Limiting Homosexual Activist Court Tactics”

“Establishing a Second Class of Citizens”

“Limiting” is different from “Recognition” because “Limiting” implies discarding some legitimate options.  That’s not what’s happening – we’re not going from several forms of marriage down to one, we’re recognizing that we’ve always had one form and we intend to keep it.

More than liberal meddling, it’s liberal activism, attempting to influence voters with the wording question.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Given that it’s Mark Ritchie, we should be thankful he’s not calling it the “Family Suppression Amendment”>

Two years ago, this blog led the Twin Cities media in documenting the extent to which liberal plutocrats and government employee unions were buying the gubernatorial race.

Because remember – money in politics is baaaad, unless it’s from a liberal plutocrat…

…like Alita Messinger, billionaire and scion of the Rockefeller fortune and, need we mention, ex-wife and chief bankroller of Mark Dayton.  She is the prime financier of a network of little-publicized groups – “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”, “Common Cause Minnesota” – that funnel vast sums of money into epic, toxic sleaze campaigns against Republican candidates.

And Alita Messinger is back with a vengeance.  While her epic sleaze campaign against Tom Emmer was able to eke out a win for her ex in 2010,. the uppity peasants went and elected a Tea Party legislature.

And uppity peasants are one thing up with which she will not put:

Philanthropist  [!!!!!!!!] Alida Messinger, the ex-wife of Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton, is putting big money into overturning Republican control of the Minnesota Legislature.

Fundraising reports released Tuesday showed that Messinger gave $500,000 to the WIN Minnesota political fund. That group funneled money to the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, a Democratic-supporting independent expenditure group expected to sink significant amounts into key legislative races.

Among others, they are pouring money into trying to unseat Doug Wardlow in Eagan and Dave Hancock in Bemidji.

Dayton is asking voters to give Democrats control of the Legislature for the second half of his term.

This story is Berg’s Seventh Law in action; months of caterwauling about the Koch Brothers and “ALEC” have been done, entirely and without exception, to either distract attention from Messinger and her fellow plutocrats’ flow of money, or at least to let them say “Yeah, but you do it too!”:

Messinger’s donations dwarfed all others to independent groups so far this year. Three Republican-oriented funds combined had $380,000 on hand.

In 2010, Messinger was a major donor to funds that ran ads attacking Republican Tom Emmer in the governor’s race, which Dayton won by less than 1 percentage point.

On the one hand, this election is the national debate writ small:  Dayton, like Obama, depends almost entirely on big donors – Obama on Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Dayton on the Hamptons and the government unions – to cling to relevance.

On the other?  The Democrats know they can count on at least 43% of the voters to be ill-informed enough to fall for their propaganda machine’s slop.

The GOP’s freshman class in the legislature brought a lot of good, hard-nosed, idealistic conservatives into office – Wardlow and Hancock and Roger Chamberlain and Mary Franson and King Banaian and many others included, many of whom are on Messinger’s hit list.  They’re counting on the disarray in the state party to help them.

The GOP – especially its freshmen, who largely kept their promises – need your support more than ever.  If there were ever a time for Minnesota’s conservatives – a true Army of Davids – to pull off an upset against the DFL’s League of Plutocrats, this is the time.

Because the GOP Freshmen are all that stand between us and Minnesota becoming a cold Greece.

Jim Treacher notes what many conservative observers have long known; that thing the leftymedia and lefty “alt” media refer to as “fact-checking” is really no more than Democrat narrative-buffing.

“Politifact”, it seems, is less interested in “facts” than in “upholding the Democrat side of the story“.

Matthew Hoy writes:

 

In 2009, Judicial Watch made a big splash when they revealed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been using military aircraft to travel to and from her home district in California to the tune of millions of taxpayer dollars.

The spendthrift nature of the Democrat-controlled Congress was a key election issue in 2010 and Speaker Pelosi’s extravagance was Exhibit A. In response, Rep. John Boehner promised that if the GOP took control of the House and he was elected speaker, he would fly commercial to and from his district. After Republicans won, he reiterated his pledge.

Which brings us to March 23, 2012 and this update at self-appointed watchdog Politifact. Reporter Molly Moorhead referenced documents from the House and the Congressional Research Service and came up with absolutely no evidence that Boehner has been asking for or receiving military transport to and/or from his district.

Going by the old theory that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, Moorhead and her bosses at Politifact, decided that this merited an “In The Works” label…

“In The Works.” You’d think it would be either “True” or “False,” but that’s just because you don’t know any better.

Treacher’s conclusion:

I like PolitiFact’s style: “We can’t prove you’re lying, Speaker Boehner. In fact, there’s absolutely no proof of our suspicion whatsoever. Nice try!”

Moral of the story:  Any time a Media or Democrat (ptr) figure calls themselves a “fact checker”, assume they’re a narrative-buffer until proven otherwise.

The primary Democrat message this year seems to be to try to make every possible Democrat constituency feel like the most noble-possible victim.

We’ve got the “war on women”, “war on immigrants”, “war on over-charged college students”…

…and now, the “war” on those most-benighted victims in our society, teachers, according to this bit by Jeff Kolnick of the university formerly known as Mankato State U of M Marshall.

He tees it up with the story of his friend, a teacher, who is busy…

…surviv[ing] furlough days that cut short his pay as well as the education of his students to save money in tax-starved California.

There’s your first tip-off that our writer is approaching this first and foremost from the left; California is hardly tax-starved.  Cali is indeed a bounty of taxation – it’s why business is leaving the state as fast as it can move.

No. California isn’t tax-starved.  It’s spending-addled.

And after all this service to his community, instead of receiving praise and thanks he has a target on his back. Conservative forces in America have made public school teachers public enemy No. 1: If our schools are failing, blame the teachers. If our states are broke, it is the pensions of the greedy teachers. You name the problem and teachers are the cause.

Well, no.

Teachers, as individuals, aren’t the problem.

It’s the way they, their academy, and especially their public employees’  union and the government that, in California, that union pretty much controls have committed the state to pay for teachers and their (very very early) retirement first, and worry about balanced budgets second if at all, that are.

But Mr. Kolnick doesn’t seem to be interested in economics:

I am sick of it…

…conservative forces blame public school teachers for everything. A colleague of mine related a story to me about a person who blamed public school teachers for failing our students. The person complained that Minneapolis and St. Paul schools failed young people of color and he put the blame squarely on teachers and teacher-preparation programs.

Mr. Kolnick is listed as a history professor at the school formerly known as Marshall.  I bring that up because I’m trying to imagine what would happen if one of his students brought him a paper that started “A friend of mine says that The Jews were behind 9/11.  This paper will demand accountability from The Jews”.  I’m going to guess Kolnick’d send it back for a rewrite – right?

“Conservatives hate teachers because someone that my teacher friend placed as a conservative had an irrational complaint?”

Fed up with this garbage, my friend responded that his kids got a first-rate education in the Edina public schools with teachers who had union contracts and graduated from the same teacher-prep programs as the teachers in the Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts.

Let’s stop blaming the teachers and think about public education in terms of the evidence.

Yes, let’s indeed.

Because identical licensing notwithstanding, Minneapolis and Saint Paul graduate less than 3/5 of their students, and a minority of black, Latino and Native American students.  Afro-American, Hispanic and Asian families – who may be personally conservative, but currently vote overwhelmingly DFL – are deserting the city schools, decamping for charter schools and, via open enrollment, the suburbs.

And these are districts that are at the front of the pack for per-student funding, year in, year out.

And I’d suggest that if Mr. Kolnick wants to wave the various teachers’ paper credentials and bureaucratic certifications in those parents’ faces, he not do it while standing on 50th Street or Afton Road, in front of those parent’s cars, as they head to Edina and Woodbury.

But Mr. Kolnick said we needed to make this argument about “evidence”.   What’s his?

The attack on teachers is not about educating our young people. It is about ending public education and collective bargaining. It is about taking public dollars from public institutions and turning them over to for-profit corporations.

So Mr. Kolnick’s “evidence” is a paragraph of Democrat cant about unions.

There is no “attack on teachers”, there is a reasonable questioning whether our society can survive by forcing most of us to work until we’re 75 so that teachers – to say nothing of principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, special ed coordinators, and the other throngs of public employees that work in the system but never set foot in front of a classroom –  can retire at 55.

And since Mr. Kolnick asks; since when is collective bargaining “about education?”  For that matter, can you honestly say that the current public education system – not teachers, individually or as a group, but the institution, the entire educational/industrial complex – is “about education?”

In 1995, free-market evangelist Milton Friedman wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post calling for the privatization of the public school system. Now almost 20 years later, we are on the verge of seeing his ideas become a reality…In December 2005, a little less than a year before he died, Friedman wrote of an opportunity to privatize public schools in New Orleans after the tragedy of Katrina. He called for a radical reform of schools because they failed the students. “New Orleans schools were failing for the same reason that schools are failing in other large cities, because the schools are owned and operated by the government”.

OK.

So?

How is this, in and of itself, either wrong or, for that matter, an “attack on teachers?”

The sole purpose of public educational institutions is to educate. They may not be perfect, but they have only one goal.

And that’s at best a platitude, at worst a statement of complete ignorance.  Public schools have always had ulterior motives; “creating better citizens” (free of all those radical immigrant ideas) in the 1800s, or creating a society that reflects the goals of the educational academy today (diversity, multiculturalism)…

…and, above all, to serve as a big interest group and voting bloc, to gain and hold control of the government apparatus that feeds it.

Which is not a knock on teachers as individuals; lest Mr. Kolnick dive further into stereotype, my father, two grandparents and my sister are teachers.

But teachers as an institution demand that I work until I’m 75 so that they can retire at 55 – and vote relentlessly liberal to enforce it – and on the other hand work for a system that, for many of is, is an abject failure, whatever the individual teachers’ personal professional merits.

Do we really want to let corporations be responsible for teaching our young people? Come on, let’s get real.

“Come on, let’s get real”.

It’s always a treat to debate a classical Socratic logician.

Let me ask this:  if we presume a teacher is in fact capable, what difference does it make who pays them – a corporation, or a government body?

And if you can honestly answer that question in terms that aren’t foremost about defending the defined benefit pension, you’ll be doing better than Mr. Kolnick, so far.

Jeff Kolnick is an associate professor of history at Southwest Minnesota State University.

Submitted without comment.

Found Wednesday’s Stillwater Gazette story about candidates filling in the Stillwater and Washington County area; I’ll add some emphasis:

In District 4, U.S. Rep Betty McCollum is challenged in the Democratic primary by Diana Longrie and Brian Stalboerger. The winner of that race faces Republican Ron Seiford and Independence Party hopeful Steve Carlson.

Huh?

Missing someone?

The GOP’s endorsed candidate is Anthony Hernandez, who b eat Seiford 195-5 in the endorsing convention.  Seiford is going to take that seething pot for Ronmentum to the primary this August, not that anyone cares.

Now, I’ve always believed in Hanlon’s Razor – never chalk up to malice what might better be explained by laziness, overwork, under attention or whatever.

I’ve notified the editor.  We’ll see if there’s a correction today.

What this does tell us is that we Republicans in the Fourth CD have to have our own media.  Please “follow” Tony on Twitter.  Check out his website.  If you can donate a few bucks, or volunteer, so much the better.

The Fourth CD is always a long shot.  But via a combination of…:

• Redistricting making the district a lot more competitive
• Betty being a terrible candidate
• Tony being a great candidate
• All of that “Ron Paul” energy boinging around the 4th CD
• All those Stillwater and Washington County people who are wondering what Betty was thinking, voting against the new bridge…

…this is actually doable.  Provided we get a 150% effort from everyone, of course.

The Star/Tribune editorial board, being in effect a volunteer DFL PR operation, got to work bright and early yesterday doing damage control and trying to build a firebreak against the Republican contagion across the Saint Croix in an editorial that couldn’t be any more perfect a vehicle for national Democrat chanting points if it were being explicitly paid for.

Within minutes of projecting Gov. Scott Walker the winner in Tuesday’s Wisconsin recall election, CNN pundits began earnestly overstating the national importance of the vote.

And someone start singing “The Circle Of Life”, because the left-leaning media – the various levels in the Public Radio chain of command, MSNBC, CNN and of course the Strib itself – leapt into action to understate and diffuse it.

It was an understandable impulse, given the high profile of the attempted recall over the past 17 months. Ener­gized Wisconsin ­Democrats and an outraged organized labor threw everything they could muster at the Republican ­governor, who earned their ire last year by moving to ­curtail collective-­bargaining rights for public employees.

But a closer look at the factors that propelled ­Walker tells us that caution is in order when projecting national implications from his decisive win.

And when they say “closer look”, they really mean “a realignment of the narrative to the Democrats’ chanting points”.

Let’s start with money. Out-of state cash poured into Wisconsin as if the Packers had offered more souvenir stock, and Walker outspent his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, 7-1. Mitt Romney’s campaign won’t have that kind of advantage in November, nor will other GOP contenders in hotly contested races.

Nor did Walker.  The 7-1 advantage was in spending by the campaigns – perfectly kosher under Wisconsin campaign law in recalls, which aren’t covered by the same limits as regular elections.  And it doesn’t count all the spending the unions did on Walker’s behalf. It also ignores – or rather, tries to suppress – the fact that Walker had vastly more support from non-insitutional donors inside Wisconsin than Barrett had.

Walker also faced a middling opponent. Barrett, who wasn’t the first choice of organized labor in the primary, was the recycled loser from the 2010 gubernatorial race.

His second campaign gained so little momentum that President Obama stayed away from Wisconsin, and the president’s single contribution to the Barrett ­effort was a 17-word tweet.

Blame Bush.

Before discounting the impact labor will have in November, however, it’s worth noting that unions won a major victory in Ohio just seven months ago, when voters resoundingly rejected similar collective-­bargaining changes backed by GOP Gov. John Kasich.

Because it was a referendum, because the unions poured money into Ohio, and the GOP wasn’t able to support the proposal as vigorously as it needed to be supported.  The Strib is trying to compare apples and axles.  There’s no comparison.

The recall attempt itself also skewed Tuesday’s results in Walker’s favor. Exit polls showed that 60 percent of voters agree with this editorial board (“Wrongheaded recall in Wisconsin,” June 3) that recall elections should be reserved for cases of significant malfeasance or criminal misconduct by elected officials. They should be the ­direct-­democracy equivalent of impeachment, not a minority party’s response to a hard-fought policy dispute.

And if ifs, ands and buts were candy and nuts we’d all have a merry Christmas.   The fact remains the Wisconsin Democrat party has responded to Walker’s upset victory by petulantly hiding out in Illinois, by clogging the Capitol, and by trying to stage an electoral putsch.

Those same polls show that Wisconsin voters would have chosen Obama over Romney, 51 percent to 45 percent.

Those were the self-same exit polls that showed the Gubernatorial race was a “coin toss”. Take them with a big shaker full of salt.

And other recall efforts appear to have given Democrats narrow control of the state’s Senate.

Which doesn’t meet until 2013.  After the next round of elections.  It was a very expensive and meaningless “victory” for the Wisconsin Democrat party.

Those results, too, ought to tamp down GOP victory swells;

Or at least the Strib editorial board is going to try to make sure they do.

Some of them were touting Walker as a future national Republican candidate after Tuesday’s win. Let him prove first that he can cease being the nation’s most polarizing governor and work effectively with both parties for the good of his state. Only then will he warrant the acclaim that was heaped on his victory this week.

He’s a “polarizing governor” precisely because of the petulant reaction Democrats – like the Star/Tribune editorial board – have to the idea of their power, either direct power or the soft authoritarianism of “bipartisanship” that favors Democrats, being challenged.

And the Strib will do what it can to keep Republicans demoralized, downtrodden, and – most of all – home on election night.

Screw the Strib.  I’m celebrating.

How long before Lori Sturdevant starts clucking and exuding victorian vapours that there seems to be no room for “moderates” in the DFL?

Of course, only in a place like Saint Paul could Senator and former police chief John Harrington be considered a “moderate”.  The guy’s got the ABM chanting points down as pat as he ever had the Miranda statement:

“Show me one example of where somebody had fraudulently voted here. Oh, you don’t have one. You have no evidence.

Other than tens of thousands of provisional voting cards – the cards filled out when their vote is questionable, and their ballot is already in the hopper – being returned because the listed person didn’t live at the address?  Other than people listing laundromats as residences?   Dozens of felons convicted?  Hundreds of other cases found, but tossed because, under Minnesota law, “I didn’t know” is an excuse?

Nope.  No evidence at all.

Harrington said he was similarly disheartened during debate this year on the “castle doctrine” self-defense bill, which would have given Minnesotans greater freedom to defend their homes with deadly force. Law enforcement objected to the proposal, saying it could endanger officers, and Dayton ultimately vetoed it.

Of course, there, there’s no evidence.

But while Senator Harrington would be considered, by the vast majority of the US between the Hudson and the Sierra Mare, a “flaming liberal”, he was just tooooo moderate for the whackdoodles of the eastside DFL:

Harrington faced two challengers — Tom Dimond and Foung Hawj — for the party’s endorsement. After four ballots, Harrington had a slight lead over Dimond, a carpenter and former city council member. Delegates decided on no endorsement because it was clear neither candidate could capture the 60 percent needed for the party’s backing. Harrington had 46 percent, Dimond 40 percent, and Hawj had no votes on the last ballot.

Dimond seemed to resonate with delegates who thought Harrington was too conservative for his district and has done little to reach out to Democratic-Farmer-Labor activists since his election. Harrington, however, insisted he was politically attuned to his constituents.

And it’s pretty likely he was.  The East Side is a largely run-down area, hard-hit by the recession, perpetually in transition.  It’s been a destination for new Americans since, well, it existed; wave after wave of immigrants, from German to Irish to Swedish to Italian to Black to Latino to Vietnamese to H’mong to Somali, have coursed through the area, learned to do the American thing, and then moved – first north of Maryland, then out to the ‘burbs.  Most of them are conservatives – they just don’t know that means “republican” in this country.

The DFL “activists”, on the other hand, are vastly more radically left-leaning than their constituents – and farther left than the GOP is to the right.  Harrington – pragmatic local fixer that he is – didn’t pass the progressive purity test.

I’ll await the hand-wringing from the media.

I’ve got stereotypes.  We all have ’em.  It’s one of the ways humans process the nearly infinite number of permutations of human behavior into a mentally-manageable size.

For example, intellectually I know that journalists behave in as many differnet ways as there are journalists.  Indeed, they may be have in up to double the number of ways as there are journos – because not a few journalists behave completely differently in their personal and vocational lives.  I do know this, in my brain.

But the stereotype I have is that journos, drawn as they are largely from the strata of society that is wired to be “progressives”, trained at institutions whose general left-leaning bias has always been omnipresent, especially in the departments (journalism, humanities and social and zephyr-soft sciences) that tend to spawn journos, and who work their entire careers in, and develop entire networks of sources and colleagues and social lives among, institutions that tend to be left of center – government, academia, the activist community and the like, will, when in doubt and the chips are down, swerve left.  Maybe not intentially (although some do), maybe just as a result of confirmation bias (as many do) – but to the left they do indeed swerve.

And part of the stereotype is that that those stereotypical liberally-marinated journos will pick the parts of “the truth” that fit their worldview – aka “confirmation bias” – and pass it along as the unvarnished truth.  Not maliciously, usually, but with absolute certainty that they, or people like them, are indeed the fonts of the absolute indisputable truth.

Which brings us to Erik Black at the MinnPost who, er, minnposted an article the other day  entitled, as luck would have it, Stereotypical Thinking About Political Parties Is Often Just Flat Inaccurate.

When it comes to race, gender and ethnicity, we are urged to guard against stereotypical thinking. But how about when it comes to presidents? How about when it comes to political parties?

Stereotypical thinking about political parties is extremely powerful and often highly misleading, unfair and just flat inaccurate.

As a gun-owning custody-reform-advocating pro-life conservative who is frequently called a violent insecure wife-beating woman-hating uneducated dummy, I could hardly agree more.

So far.

But then Black follows it with

Read the following sentences slowly and carefully.

Scoring the last eight presidential terms according to the spending that occurred under the budget signed by that president, federal spending increased at the fastest rate during the first Reagan term (an increase of 8.7%). It went up the second fastest during the second term of George W. Bush (8.1%). It went up the slowest during the current term of Barack Obama (1.4%.) The second and third slowest periods of federal spending growth occurred under the two terms of Bill Clinton.

These numbers from this piece by Rex Nutting who writes for MarketWatch, which is an arm of the Wall Street Journal. They are based on Congressional Budget Office numbers.

And there, in turn, is a bit of stereotyping from Black; as if the Wall Street Journal byline makes it conservative, ergo against Black’s interest.  It’s just not always so – but, again, that’s why stereotypes exist.

In case you don’t click through, here are the graphics from Nutting/MarketWatch:

..

And since it comes from MarketWatch and the WSJ – journalists! – it must be accurate, right?  It must have compared apples with apples throughout – ya?

You know where this is leading – right?

MarketWatch’s Nutting did not compare apples with apples, but rather swerved between CBO figures and Obama’s own numbers for no apparent reason but with the result, mirabile dictu, of inflating Bush’s (as opposed to his Democrat Congress’) spending and lowering Obama’s in comparison, and uses CBO numbers that are known to be wildly inaccruate.

And he has an infographic of his own.   It’s below the jump (because it’s very, very long)

(more…)

The Forest Lake Times is running a poll to try to undercut new 4th CD legislators Senator Ray Vandeveer and Rep. Bob Dettmer, asking if people support their votes against the stadium.

So if you do in fact support their votes, just for the fun of it, why not zip out to the Flaketimes site, go to the “poll” section in the lower right corner, and vote a “Yes”?

Not that it’s of earth-shattering importance, but the little wins are fun too.

To the Strib editorial board, DFL policy is like that ’87 Taurus you’ve been driving since ’92., on a very cold morning.  Just keep cranking the thing between pumping the gas and eventually – your almost-superstitious faith in that old beater tells you – it’s gonna start.

I was going to write something to that effect.  Joe Doakes beat me to it:

Democrats think Minnesotans should turn government over to Democrats, Star Trib’s main editorial [yesterday].

Nothing like thinking in the precise geometrical center of the box to solidly nail all your hopes to the failed policies of the past.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

And if you whack on the steering wheel, sometimes that helps, too…

I’m going to start a new TV show.  I’m going to call it “Profiles in Leadership”.

I’ve got a few episodes all plotted out.

Episode 1:  After decades of weak mayors who futzed around with “due process” and “the limits of government”, Boss Tweed finally did more than pay lip service to the office of “Chief Executive”, and actually used the office of mayor to lead the City of New York!

Episode 2: Putting lesser religions with their notions of “spiritual commitment” to shame, Revered Jim Jones put the leader back into “leadership”, when by the strength of his example he led his followers to put the “Ded” in “Dedication”.

Episode 3:  Unsatisfied to be a regular businessman, Bernard Madoff led his organization to excel beyond all others in its category!

Episode 4: Mark Dayton truly led “his” state in the quest to stick the bill for a billion-dollar spiff to Zygmund Wilf’s real estate investment on Minnesota’s taxpayers in an example of “leadership” for the ages.

No, the Strib say so:

Gov. Mark Dayton’s savvy and indefatigable advocacy for a new Vikings stadium represents the kind of executive leadership Minnesotans should applaud.

In much the same way that Chicagoans should have “applauded” Al Capone getting the prostitution rackets lined up and paying him tribute.

Unlike his predecessor, Dayton did more than occasionally lead cheers for the Vikings — he delivered on a key campaign promise to the people of Minnesota despite significant political risks.

Unlike his predecessor, Mark Dayton makes no pretense of being fiscally responsible, except where that means “taking other peoples’ money to pay off your campaign chits”.

And make no mistake about it; this was a payoff – to the Strib as well as many others.

The Strib needs the Vikings to be in downtown Minneapolis, to be paying big money on that fallow land the Strib owns near the current ‘dome, and to give it another ready market for selling newspapers.  So do the rest of the Twin Cities media, to a lesser degree.  They knew Dayton was a willing stooge for the downtown Minneapolis business interests that want that state subsidy every bit as bad as Wilf did.

And so the Star/Tribune’s coverage of the election race that led Dayton to office resembled  DFL public relations more than journalism – from their careful white-washing of Dayton’s political record to the election-eve “Minnesota Poll” showing Tom Emmer trailing by an improbable margin that certainly induced not a few Republicans to stay home.

The threat that the Vikings would have left Minnesota without a stadium deal this year was real, although to their credit the team and NFL leadership negotiated in good faith.

The negotiations were done in the same “good faith” the Mob uses when “negotiating” with a shopkeeper who is threatening not to pony up protection money fast enough.

Had this market lost the franchise, we no doubt would have seen an expensive reprise of the effort to bring big-league hockey back to the state after the North Stars left for Dallas.

Right!

And we all know how that loss devastated the State of Minnesota…

…well, no.  It devastated hockey fans, who were upset that “their” team got moved elsewhere by an owner that, like Zygi Wilf, wanted better tribute from the local government.

And it devastated the TV and radio stations and newspaper reporters and (especially) ad execs that covered, and sold ads for coverage of, North Stars games.

Other than that?  The loss of the North Stars had much less impact on this city than the loss of, say, the Ford plant.

Thursday’s passage of a stadium bill ends years of debate over the future of the team and the outdated Metrodome.

And the debate will be “ended” for another twenty years.  Until the next round of NFL owners wants their investments buffed up on other peoples’ money.

Or until someone tells them “no”.

Which would devastate nobody…

…but WCCO, KSTP, KARE, Fox Sports North, the PiPress and the Strib.  

Which, to be fair, at least discloses part of their vast interest in this bit of racketeering:

(Disclosure: The current stadium development plan includes one of five blocks owned by the Star Tribune near the Metrodome.)

But they graze up against the truth at least briefly:

The stadium bill, and the bonding bill that went before it this week, were exercises in effective bipartisan lawmaking,

And there you.

“Bipartisan” legislation.  Everybody wins…

…but the taxpayer.

And that, as they say, is all.

I’ve said it over and over – and every day of new evidence confirms it more; the DFL’s strategy seems to be “say whatever we want to (knowing that the media will never, ever contradict us in public, at least not in a way that the majority of voters will ever see or hear),  regardless of accuracy or truth, to sway the ill-informed, the ignorant, and the not-so-bright.  Because their votes (and whatever else we can jam through the polls) count just as much as the votes of the smart and informed people”.

Case in point:  Education Minnesota president t Tom Dooher’s statement to the media yesterday as the session drew to a close; I’ve added emphasis:

“The 2012 Legislature showed that Minnesotans will have a clear choice in November between leaders who truly value public education and those who view our classrooms as places for political games.

“The Republican majority introduced more than 20 bills targeting public education and educators this year. None of them responsibly addressed the most pressing needs of our students, including repaying the state’s $2 billion IOU to its schools, closing the achievement gap and developing a sustainable funding system for the future.

It’s a lie, of course.

The GOP did, in fact, propose and pass a bill that would have accelerated the repayment of the shift.   Governor Fauntelroy vetoed it.

This, really, shows several things:

The DFL’s campaign – say whatever it takes to win in November, truth be damned, is well underway.  The unions and Alliance for a Better Minnesota will soon be buying up millions in airtime to saturate this state with ads saying “The GOP hates kids”.  Mark my words.

Your children are the DFL’s pawns.  To the extent that the shift actually harms children (it really doesn’t; it inconveniences administrations), the DFL showed this session that they’d rather exploit them in November than pay for their education today.

This is what happens when you let “Right To Work” die in committee.  How wonderful would it have been to have every conservative, Republican member of EdMinn walk of the union out en masse at this hypocritical slander?   Or if the 42% of union members who do vote Republican tell their leadership “uh, not so fast” when the unions spend 95% of their dues on Democrats?

Apparently some genius in the majority caucus figured if they backed off on Right to Work, the unions would play fair this election.

This is politics in Minnesota today; one party does the best it can for a better Minnesota; the other does whatever it can to retain power, truth and ethics be damned.

The sexual shenanigans of John Edwards, Elliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton and Andrew Weiner define the entire history of the Democratic Party. Everything about the Democrats – their beliefs, their policies, their legacy, the intellectual currents that led to the DFL being what it is today – all of it.  Every single aspect of Democrat life and thought in America is defined by affairs, hookers, harassing interns, and sending pictures of one’s wedding tackle.

More locally?  Jim Metzen’s drunk driving arrest is, in fact, the action that defines the DFL Party in Minnesota – all its activities, its policy positions, everything.

And at both levels, those incidents show the brazen hypocrisy of Democrats, in Minnesota and nationwide.

———-

Now, you might read the above, and say “Hey, wait! Those actions, by individuals and small groups, do not, in and of themselves, “define” an an entire party.  They’re the actions of individuals, which have had consequences”.

And you’d have a point.

And my point is, in response, you’d be a smarter person, more logical writer and more ethical columnist than the Strib’s Jon Tevlin.

Although it’s not like you couldn’t see this one coming:

A short history of the current Minnesota GOP, in their own words:

June 2009: Members of the GOP’s Central Committee elect Tony Sutton as chairman.

“Yeah, we’re in soul-searching phase, but I think we’re coming to the end of that,” Sutton said. “I think we’re starting to get our sea legs back. We have to get back to our philosophical roots, so when we talk about fiscal responsibility, we mean it. We have to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. ”

June 2009: “We went way off track in the last eight years,” said Sutton. “The party of fiscal responsibility was spending money like crazy in Washington.”

Repeat through a series of quotes involving Tony Sutton and his predecessor, Ron Carey, talking about how they were in the midst of leaving the party in better financial shape than they found it.

And not just leadership.

June 2009: Rep. Steve Drazkowski runs for office, emphasizes his “rural values,” which included tax cuts, fiscal responsibility and gun rights.

And not just money.  No, Tevlin found examples of Republicans uttering the dreaded “V” word – Values.

March 2010: Sutton tells Minnesota Public Radio the GOP is trying to convince Tea Party members it’s returning to core values: “We’re going to have to do it through our actions, not just words. We had spent eight years of being the party of so-called fiscal responsibility, but were spending money like drunken sailors.”

The word is like catnip to partisan pundits from the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy), who love bagging on (other groups’) values, when individuals don’t live up to them.

But only when they’re the values of the right.

A columnist could find a rich vein of jape-worthy material on the left, of course.  One could mock the left’s bepspoke “commitment’ to “education”, while they and major benefactor, the teachers’ unions, preside over a system that is (at least in Democrat urban areas) collapsing in every area but budget.

A truly curious columnist could squeedge boundless yuks from a party that proclaims sensitivity to the poor, while marching in lock step behind policies that do nothing but keep them poor.

A talking (typing?) head might cavort and romp around the fact that the DFL keeps gays in line as voters by paying lip service to a concept that they, from their president on down, only rarely support when it’s their actual vote on the line, barring the odd flurry of lip service before elections.

A columnist with genuine interest in holding institutions accountable might note that there is a party whose “values” claim to support children on the one hand but kill millions of them a year on the other, and whose “support” for “the family” is manifested in policies that are destroying the family.

That same columnist might note that the DFL is in plenty of debt itself, even after farming out its messaging operation – the parts that the Strib, WCCO, KARE, the City Pages, the programming side of MPR, and the entire Sorosphere don’t cover, anyway – to the plutocrat-and-union-financed “Alliance for a Better Minnesota“, which essentially does all of the DFL’s PR work gratis.

But Jon Tevlin is none of those.  He was hired to do Nick Coleman’s old job; be the “bad cop” to Lori Sturdevant’s “good cop” on the Strib’s DFL narrative-buffing team.

And that narrative is that this…:

March 2011: Alex Conant, a spokesman for Gov. Tim Pawlenty, assesses the legacy: “Hopefully, Gov. Pawlenty’s record of fiscal responsibility and government reform will be a model for the future.”

…and this…:

March 2011: “I believe so much in that personal responsibility concept and that city officials must be masters of their own fate, as pleasant or unpleasant as it is,” said Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake.

…and this…:

February 2011: All 37 Senate Republicans send a letter to Gov. Mark Dayton that restated their complete opposition to his plan to raise $3.3 billion in taxes, mostly on the wealthy. “We do not have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem.”

…are completely, utterly and irrevocably negated by this:

May 2011: The GOP misses the first of many rent payments on their headquarters.

April 2012: The GOP’s landlord files eviction papers against the GOP, saying it owes $111,000 in rent, which it hasn’t paid in a year.

…which serves as a blanket indictment of this…:

October 2011: Hennepin County Commissioner, national committeeman and fiscal “watchdog” Jeff Johnson writes in a blog about Occupy Wall Street: “I frankly get very annoyed at the propensity of some to blame our greatest problems on the free market or successful businessmen and women rather than on government policies and the politicians who have gotten us into this massive mess.

You can tell Tevlin’s a professional.  He uses “scare quotes” to as a written substitude for giggling theatrically when saying “watchdog”, as if Jeff Johnson – who, a columnist with integrity would note, has led the effort to get the GOP’s budget house in order – were some profligate wastrel.

1. It’s election time.
2. The DFL, with no legislative achievements to talk about at any level, needs help.
3. So the Strib will get back on narrative patrol, no matter how they have to waterboard logic, fact, ethics or context to do it.

Expect a “Minnesota Poll” any day that shows Minnesotans think the GOP should sit this election out to sort out its finances.  I’d almost put money on it…

…but I’m way too fiscally responsible for that.

I’m used to seeing left-leaning writers like David Brauer tossing kudos on Twitter to DFL legislators.

But when I saw him punching up this op-ed here by GOP representative Dean Urdahl, responding to the Strib’s Jim Souhan and his pro-stadium, fact-challenged hatchet job earlier in the week?

That was news.

Urdahl:

Jim Souhan’s attention-grabbing April 18 column (“No point in dumbing down stadium issue”) has generated much discussion — even more since readers have learned elsewhere that I voted “yes” in a House committee to advance a Vikings stadium bill.

Citizens also have been interested to learn that, while quoting me, Souhan omitted key sentences that would have made my legislative intent clear.

Why would this happen?

Because it’s very much in the Star/Tribune’s interest to get a public subsidy for the Vikings.  Because the Vikes are a huuuuuge moneymaker for the Strib and its owners, who have a large and ill-advised investment to protect.

It appears that Souhan neither attended the meeting about which he wrote, nor listened to the audio from it, nor reviewed the transcript before penning his column. He also did not contact me before taking great leaps in asserting what my thought process was.

The sad truth is that Souhan ended up with a column based on a false premise and filled with ignorance and distortion.

Urdahl proceeds to shred Souhan.  Read the whole thing.

Faced with an amendment that will likely pass 2:1 this fall that will also peel off enough fraudulent votes to cost them some of the close elections (like the last Governor and Senate races), the Democrats are turning on the spin.

Emphasis added to this bit here from the MinnPost:

But opponents say it will make voting more difficult for those who don’t have  the right ID, such as seniors who no longer drive, college students, soldiers overseas and homeless people. And they argue that there’s no evidence that voter fraud is a big problem, and that there are laws in place already.

Dave Thul – regional blogger, activist and senior non-commissioned officer – pointed out in the comment section yesterday:

Every member of the US military on active duty is required to have and carry a photo ID. Every member of the military overseas is required to have said photo ID on them at all times.

Also, every US military member has in his or her unit an appointed Voting Assistance Officer, responsible for implementing the DOD directive that every member of the military will have the ability to vote. Voting assistance officers have the same legal authority as a notary public to sign off on a ballot to certify that the voter provided photo ID.

Huh.  I don’t recall anyone in the media checking on that.  Catherine Richert?  You out there?

Another one’s been making the rounds, this time from the MinnPost article linked above, with emphasis added::

…many voters do not realize that it is not just any government-issued (or approved) i.d. they would need to present at their voting place. It will be a special i.d. for voting only and those who want one will have to purchase and present a government-issued birth certificate or perhaps passport in order to get the voter i.d. card. I’m not sure of the current price of a birth certificate, but a passport cost $100 a few years ago.

The Pro-Voter Fraud crowd – the DFL, the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Common Cause and so on – are passing this meme around (or at least not saying it’s not wrong; they’re telling the students, the poor, and especially seniors that their driver’s license, state ID or existing passport won’t suffice for voting.

I expect the DFL to start telling that same crowd that Mary Kiffmeyer wants to collect bone marrow samples before voting.  Indeed, expect that previous sentence to pop up on at least one leftyblog.

There’s been a triple shooting in Brooklyn Park:

Police say three adults have been killed at an in-home day care in Brooklyn Park. A search is underway for the suspect.

According to the Department of Human Services, the day care is licensed to handle up to 12 children and is operated by DeLois Brown.

Police are looking for a black male in his mid twenties. He was last seen leaving the area on a BMX bike wearing blue jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt with gray hood and a pair of 1-inch white stripes down the back.

.

No arrests have been made.

Nonetheless, sources tell me the Strib’s Matt McKinney has started hagiographies of all victims (and the still-unknown shooter, just to be safe), and MPR’s Mid-Morning ahem, “Daily Circuit” with Keri Miller has already booked Heather Martens to explain why the shooting is a result of concealed carry and the Stand Your Ground Law (which was vetoed).

One of this blog’s more consistently popular long-running features is my “Climate of Hate” page, in which I keep a running tally of episodes of liberals exercising their hatred of conservatives, usually via violence.  I started it at the height of the liberal media’s obsession with trying to find and pin an example of violence –any violence, any violence at all – on the Tea Party, to underscore the invariable accuracy of 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“.   And there are a lot of misdeeds.

And as we sift through the collapse of the media’s concerted, deliberate effort to frame the Martin case as a racial hate crime (and armed self-defense as a disaster, just to keep white liberals interested in the death of a black kid), it occurs to me – we need a similar feature for Media Witch Hunts.

What I”m looking for is cases where the media arrived at a conclusion prejudicial to some conservative institution or belief, looooong before the facts warranted it.  Especially if the facts were completely at odds with the conclusion.

It’s too early to say with the Martin case – but a few other examples pop to mind:

• The Duke Lacrosse Team case.  Not that rich lacrosse players are a “conservative institution”, but the case had a political side too…
• Tawanna Brawley
• The 35W Bridge Collapse, which a good chunk of the Twin Cities media tried to politicize before actual engineering set in.
• Anthropogenic Global Warming
• The Burkett Papers / Sixty Minutes piece about George W. Bush’s Air National Guard record.
• The Evanovich Shooting.  The Twin Cities media lionized the “victim” before they had to admit (quietly) that he was a thug.

I think I’ll call it “The Conservative Is Obviously Guilty”.