On the first weekend in March, in about six weeks, the Northern Alliance Radio Network will celebrate its’ eighth anniversary on the air.

Not to be un-Scandinavian-ly immodest, but we’ve built quite a franchise; we dominate Twin Cities weekend talk radio ratings against much bigger stations with much stronger signals, we have become appointment radio for regional conservatives, and if there’s a local Twin Cities talk show with a bigger national footprint, I’m darned if I can think of who it is.  There’s a reason Salem Twin Cities keeps us on the air, and it’s not just because they’re nice guys.

Now, the NARN has always been run by conservative bloggers.  And if there’s anything conservative bloggers have in common, it’s the fact that we come  to mock, taunt, often clobber and, at least rhetorically, bury the mainstream media.   Not, as a rule, to praise it, much less seek their recognition or approval.  Most of us would rather be approved of by used car salespeople – and, indeed, having run a dozen or so remote broadcasts from Paul Ruben’s White Bear Lake Superstore, that is emphatically, literally true for us on the NARN.

So it’s not like we expect the NARN, no matter how successful we get, to ever break the wall at most regional mainstream media; the MSM’s policy has always been to ignore the alt-media until they need to attack it.  And, true to form, the few mentions we’ve gotten have usually been for cases where one or another of us has broken with GOP or conservative orthodoxy in a way that someone or other in the MSM thinks, I suspect, will weaken the conservative coalition, which certainly doesn’t happen often.

So I think we are, as a rule, perfectly happy to work in the Twin Cities media’s shadows, reaching our audience, kicking butt.  We fight way above our weight; we’ve interviewed  Presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, Governors Pawlenty and Walker, Senator Coleman and Grams, Representatives Gutknecht, Kline, Ramstad, Paulsen, Bachmann (also a prez candidate), Mayor Rybak, and too many Senate, Congressional, State Office, legislative and local candidates to even mention, to say nothing of a dizzying array of authors, cultural figures and others, ranging from Ann Coulter to MST3K’s Mike Nelson.

Just saying – we do pretty well without any fawning media coverage.

Which is good, because the regional media has to save all that obsessive fawning for coverage any time an establishment/liberal media figure burps after eating a burrito.

Case in point:  Does anyone remember Jack Rice?  I do, sorta – he was on WCCO for  a while.

Anyone remember WCCO?  I do – sorta.

Rice used to do a show on WCCO.  He was sort of a symbol of how far the station had fallen, about ten years ago.  Beyond that, I don’t know much, because not being 75 and with the Twins and Vikes having long moved elsewhere, I haven’t  spun my dial to 830 for anything but Mischke in a good five years, now.

Anyway, the MinnPost’s David Brauer breathlessly reports that Rice has found a new broadcast home – KTNF.

Does anyone remember KTNF?  It’s the local “progressive” station.  The Northern Alliance Radio Network, on Saturdays, has far more people tuned in than KTNF’s weekday morning drive show, and that doesn’t even count our web stream.    It used to be the Twin Cities Air America station…

…er, does anyone rememberr Air America?

Anyway, Brauer reminds us (with emphasis added by me):

Fans of Jack Rice, the “journalist, lawyer, former CIA officer” and ex-WCCO radio host, should mark their calendars for Feb. 5, when his new 7-9 a.m. Sunday show debuts on AM950.

Hm.  Sounds like appointment radio to me.

Brauer contends…:

AM950’s ratings are a blip (a half-percent of local listeners) and Sundays aren’t exactly prime time, but Rice has led an interesting life and he might spice up your weekend listening when “Weekend Edition” is just too patrician.

And what kind of “spice” can you expect at 7AM on Sunday?

 Says Rice, “I expect my show to be quite different than what I did on WCCO for some five years … Regarding my political approach, I intend to be fair and factual. Of course, I will state my own opinions which I will argue are based upon logical conclusions. So . . . in short, I will be subjective.”

Which is, of course, a novel idea, especially on a station featuring Fast Eddie Schultz.

Oh, what the hell.  More local radio is a good thing.  G’luck, Mr. Rice.  Bring coffee.

You may be in an out-of-the-way slot, but the MinnPost will be there to remind us how vital you are to our political conversation.

SCENE:  At the executive offices of the Alliance For A Better Minnesota.  Executive Director Carrie LUCKING sits near the center of the head table, next to an absurdly-large fake throne.  Her research director , Stephanie FORSTER, sits on the other side.

LUCKNIG:  It’s a gorgeous day out there, isn’t it?

FORSTER:  Um…(steals a glance out the window)…it’s below zero, and the wind is howling…

LUCKING:  (Glares chillingly at FORSTER):  Why do you hate the children?   I SAID it’s a beautiful day.

FORSTER:  It’s a beautiful day. (She slumps silently into her seat, looking abashed).

(Deputy Director Joe DAVIS opens the door into the chamber)

DAVIS:  Our Board!   Announcing Mr. Grebner, Mizz Beadle, Mizz Bergstrom, Mr. Elliott, Mister Blodgett, Mzz Lewis and Mister Goldfarb.

(Jon Grebner (AFSCME),  Kelly Beadle (America Votes), Greta Bergstrom (TakeAction) MN), Brian Elliot (SEIU), Jeff Blodgett (Win Minnesota), Connie Lewis (Planned Parenthood) and Ben Goldfarb (Wellstone Action) file silently into the room.   They file into small seats at small tables arranged  diagonally on either side of a central aisle).

(DAVIS again announces)

DAVIS:  Our legislative guests, Senator Bakk and Representatives Thissen and Dinkler!

(BAKK, THISSEN and WINKLER file into the room.  WINKLER steps over to DAVIS)

WINKLER: Um, it’s “Winkler”, not “Dinkler”.

LUCKING (leaping to her feet) SILENCE!

(DAVIS backhands WINKLER, who sits silently, rubbing a sore jaw)

DAVIS:  Womyn and Gentlemyn, Alita Messinger.  All rise!

(The doors swing open, and Alita Messinger enters the room, borne on a sedan chair carried by eight purple-shirted SEIU employees.  They maneuver careful up the aisle and set the sedan chair on the ground.  LUCKING motions to BAKK, THISSEN and WINKLER, who leap to their feet and lay on the ground between the sedan chair and the makeshift throne at the head table.  MESSINGER steps across them and takes her seat).

DAVIS:  You may be seated!

(All sit).

(Purple-jacketed Latino waiters maneuver through the room, filling glasses in front of each seat with a clear liquid).

(LUCKING rises)

LUCKING:  A toast!  To rigorous grassroots independence.

ALL (in unison): “To rigorous grassroots independence!”

DAVIS:  Miss Messinger, I present to you our new executive director, Carrie Lucking.

LUCKING: My name’s not Carrie Lucking.

FORSTER: Actually it is.

LUCKING:  Yes, it is.  Yes, Ma’am?

MESSINGER:  Very well, Mizz Lucking.  Proceed to the…

(MESSINGER glares at DAVIS).  Ahem.

(DAVIS grabs palm front, begins fanning MESSINGER)

MESSINGER:  Very well.  It reports on the progress!

LUCKING:  We are telling the people that a $3,000 one-time tax credit will create 25,000 jobs.

MESSINGER:  That’s absurd.  Only an idiot would believe that.

CARDINAL: Precisely!  It is useless and has no chance of passing – but if it gets voted down, we accuse the Republicans of killing jobs.

MESSINGER:  Only a moron would believe that.

LUCKING:  We know.  I even admitted as much on Almanac last week!

MESSINGER:  This is a campaign that could appeal only to morons.

(ALL are silent).

MESSINGER: And as your 2010 campaign showed, there are 8,000 more gullible morons than smart people in this state.  Well done!  You may kiss my ring.

(CARDINAL and LUCKING kneel at MESSINGER’S feet kissing her pinky ring as SCENE fades to black).

———-

It’s almost time for another campaign season – which means it’s time for another wave of misleading, usually lying, always context-mangled propoaganda from “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” (ABM) – the people who brought you the false claims that “Target Hates Gays” and “Tom Emmer campaigned to reduce penalties for drunk drivers”.

The thesis is this: you can tell ABM is lying when their lips are moving or their fingers are touching keyboards.

And we will be dedicating a good chunk of this next nine months to making sure that none of ABM’s lies goes undebunked.

It’s gonna keep all of us conservative bloggers busy.

Stephanie Fenner

Founding Director

Denise Cardinal

Over at the MInnPost, Karen Boros laments the near-demise of the City Hall reporter. She notes that thirty years ago, both papers, the TV stations and some of the radio operations all had reporters prowling both City Halls, actively working their sources for stories.

Then…?

Then someone invented the focus group – one of those gathering of citizens who are given nice snacks and asked to share their opinions on a product. One of the “products” they analyzed was the television news operation where I was a foot soldier.

What these citizens often said was that they did not want so much government news. They especially did not want Minneapolis City Hall news or St. Paul City Hall news, because many of them lived in the Happy Suburbs. News from the core city did not apply to their lives. Or so they thought.

So according to Boros, people moving to the “Happy Suburbs” (anyone else getting tired of the patronization, here?) got tired of city government news.

It’s a theory.  And I think it’s got merit – only Boros has it backwards.  And I think Karen Boros (who I’m going to use as a surrogate for the rest of the Twin Cities media) are at least in part to blame.

Both of the Twin Cities have been DFL fiefdoms and sinecures for generations – literally.  Since the forties.

And a key part of the infrastructure that has kept the DFL in office, in a place of honor alongside the unions, the public-service bureaucracy and the non-profits, has always been the Twin Cities media, whose bias toward the DFL has been palpable and constant.  No, not each and every reporter, every time; many reporters, even reporters with demonstrated political beliefs, did a perfectly fine job of staying personally detached.  But at the management and editorial level, the bias toward “progressivism” – they like to call it “Good Government” – has been a constant theme.   And that has been one of the many factors that have led the Twin Cities, like most major cities to have become one-party “progressive” hegemonies.

And that DFL hegemony has done what “progressive” one-party rule always does to cities; brought blight, misery, bloated budgets, a culture of entitlement (and I’m not talking welfare recipients, here), decayed and worthless schools.  Like many cities, the Twin Cities are slowly becoming enclaves of the wealthy and upper-middle class (Kenwood, Summit Avenue, Linden Hills, Saint Anthony Park) surrounded by neighborhoods that serve as warehouses for the poor administered by the social service bureaucracy, in turn surrounded by suburbs full of those who’ve had the option to secede from the system.

And the media dutifully played along, doing its bit to keep the DFL firmly in charge.  And a large part of the reason for the decline, decay and rot of the Cities must certainly be that when Boros conjures all those “tough questions” from the reporters of the past, it was never enough to make voters question the wisdom of the ruling one-party states the Cities had become.

And, tired of being the ATM machines and ripe sucks for the system, people moved to what Boros sneeringly calls “the Happy Suburbs”.  They pulled out of the the schools – leaving the school systems skewed and warped, and begging for warm bodies to put in seats.  They took jobs in the “Happy” and productive suburbs, skewing the machine’s assumptions about demography (and prompting an orgy of spending on transit and punitive taxes to try to corral them back downtown.  They moved to redder zip codes, changing the traditional political assumptions and slowly eroding the DFL’s power base, prompting ever-more-desperate gerrymandering to try to shore up the DFL’s power base.

For a couple of generations, people have been voting with their feet to try to reduce the power of the DFL, its minions and its machine in their lives.

Why should they want to get dragged back to it on the 6PM news every night?  It has nothing to do with them.  And they spent a lot of time, effort and money to make it that way.

Times and technology change. Now, those Minneapolis City Council meetings are telecast on Channel 79.  You can watch from the safety of your own living room as council members debate the fees to license a dog or work their way through the budget.  But you can’t ask questions after the meeting like a reporter can if they are in the building.

But if the reporters had asked the “tough questions” that really needed to be asked over the past sixty years – is this spending wise? Is Urban Renewal/tearing down Rondo and Phillips to make way for freeways/warehousing the poor in the inner city/the war on drugs a good idea in the long run?  Why do our schools get worse, the more money we throw at them? Is one-party rule, even if it is rule by people who reflect our worldview, the way to get better Cities? – then there might not have been a problem in the first place.

And if there are two competing reporters in the building, you know that each of them will be trying to get something for their story that the other won’t have. News is still a competitive business — which is why I miss that crowd of reporters.

But the media stopped asking the “tough questions” that mattered decades ago.  And long before bloggers took over the “asking tough questions of the DFL” beat that the media stopped bothering with, the people asked them themselves.  They did the only “City Hall Reporting” that really matters, and asked the toughest question of all; “are the taxes, the trouble, the crime, the denigration, the eroding standard of living, the systematic disenfranchisement of dissent, worth it?”

And the answer sent them not to the news stand, but to the, ahem, “Happy Suburbs”.

Boros blames the people who fled the cities for wanting news that made her beloved, mythical hard-nosed gumshoes obsolete.  But the media machine played its role in the flight in the first place.

Will they ever learn that lesson?

The media knows that Obama’s in trouble.  An incumbent elected in a near-landslide should not be flirting with “unelectable” numbers in the face of the GOP offerings in this campaign.

And so look for any pretense of “objectivity” to be more a joke than normal…

…as we saw in Saturdays’ debate, where George Stephanopoulos reprised his prior career as a Democrat spinmeister:

When questioning former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Stephanopoulos, a former senior advisor in the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton, premised some inquiries on the assertion — offered without supporting facts — that Romney’s job-creation statistics were inaccurate.

“Now, there have been questions about that calculation of 100,000 jobs. So if you could explain it a little more,” Stephanopoulos asked Romney of the former governor’s claims about jobs created by companies he has helmed. “I’ve read some analysts who look at it and say that you’re counting the jobs that were created but not counting the jobs that were taken away. Is that accurate?”

“No, it’s not accurate,” Romney bluntly responded. “It includes the net of both. I’m a good enough numbers guy to make sure I got both sides of that.”

Stephanopoulos did not cite any analysts by name.

All mainstream media – from the Big Three down to the Star/Tribune  – will check all claims of detachment at the door for the next 11 months.  Between now and November, I predict, will be the nadir – so far – of the American MSM’s propensity to bias.

For all of the talk about the GOP’s debt, Tom Scheck at MPR notes that the DFL is also the red:

There has been a lot of attention given to the finances of the Republican Party. It should be noted, however, that the DFL Party is also facing a debt.

DFL Party Chair Ken Martin said the party has a debt of roughly $210 thousand heading into 2012. Martin said the party had a debt of $750 thousand at the start of 2011.

Not huge news – this blog reported on the $750K debt years ago.

The funny part is reading the comments in the MPR piece.   You get the impression that a lot of DFLers are shocked that the press would bother with the DFL.  Further proof, I think, that Democrats expect the media to be on their side, when push comes to shove.

It’s part of the reason Twin Cities DFLers seem to be unable to meet conservatives in a ratoinal debate, ever; their entire worldview is formed by schools, colleges and a media that barely recognizes alternatives to the left exist.

One flap I missed in this morning’s rundown of the present and future of the MNGOP was the railroading of Brandon Sawalich.

Sawalich was arrested last week for driving a truck with expired tabs.  The airport police grabbed and detained him, and initially moved to charge him with a gross misdemeanor that means, essentially, “tax evasion on wheels”…

…before they discovered a “clerical error” that showed his tabs were six, not 18, months out of date.  Anyway – it led Sawalich to bow out of the MNGOP Chair race (prematurely and for all the wrong reasons, according to some, and I don’t entirely disagree).

Mr Dilettante covered the “story” as well as anyone – and by “story”, I don’t mean Sawalich’s utterly mundane offense, but the media’s approach to covering a prominent Republican, which D accurately termed more a “rectal exam” than news coverage:

So, Sawalich is out of the race, has paid for his tabs and is presumably going back to being a private citizen. End of story, right? If you thought so, you don’t understand the modern media environment. The Star Tribune saw fit to add a completely gratuitous paragraph to the end of his account, detailing events in Sawalich’s life that happened 8 and 10 years ago, respectively. If you want to see what they are, you can click on the link, but I’ll not share them here. Sawalich is apparently 36 years old, which means that the events in question happened when he was less than 30 years old. In other words, even though he is now out of the race, Sawalich was Emmerized.

To the editorial board and, I suspect, not a few of their reporters, Republicans are like wild boars; you have to make sure they’re dead.  There’s no such thing as overkill.  Classic example; the Strib’s coverage defamatory lynching of Alan Fine in 2006; 32 column inches about a “domestic violence arrest” that never resulted in a conviction, had no physical evidence, and was completely expunged, that ex-wife in question had herself garnered a domestic violence record, and the widely-abused nature of these sorts of charges – all to smack down a candidate who might have gotten 35% with a tailwind and without a Ventura Party candidate who made moderate-to-Republican noises.  Such are the precautions the media must take to ensure the victory of a deeply-flawed, yapping little schnauzer like Keith Ellison.

There’s a message in that last paragraph — if you would seek to be a prominent Republican, or even prominent in the inner workings of the party, you can expect to have every indiscretion of your life shared with the world. So you’d better damn well keep your light under a bushel.

That’s what Alinsky preached.  It’s what the DFL – and their willing accomplices in the media – practice.  It should surprise nobody.

I have a few for today.

It’s virtually inevitable that some lefty commentator – probably a leftyblogger, but very possibly a media commentator – will blame yesterday’s shooting in Grand Marais on Minnesota’s concealed carry law.

It’s also pretty much a lock that the Strib and MInnPost’s columnist stables will paint the departure of Amy Koch as Senate Majority Leader as “proof that conservatives are becoming too unruly and powerful”, notwithstanding the fact that Koch is a conservative.

Just saying.

When most kids today think of British music from the eighties, the decade starts with Flock of Seagulls and ends with Duran Duran.

There was a lot more to it.  That’s the subject this week.

Conor Fredersdorf, writing at the Atlantic, says something I’ve been saying since long before I started this blog; it’s time to ditch the 20th century American notion of “objective” journalism.

He does it in defense of a part-time NPR staffer who was fired for appearing, with a sign, at an “Occupy” rally.  To old-school journalists, that’s a big no-no, at least ostensibly; in theory, the ideal was that journalists be above it all – to “report from nowhere”.

Fredersdorf’s idea is familiar to anyone who follows European-style journalism – where reporters, and outlets’, opinions aren’t necessarily no-go territory, but where reporting is fair and accurate and, opinions aside, balanced:

That ought to be the pitch that newspapers and public radio stations make to their audience. It might go something like this: “Yes, the field of journalism attracts more liberals than conservatives, more Occupy Wall Street participants than Tea Party ralliers, more urban dwellers than rural Americans, more college graduates than people without degrees, more Democrats than Republicans, more English majors than math majors, more secular people than religious people — and although we value diversity of thought, experience and world view on our staff, the core of our value proposition is that we’re accurate in our reporting, fair-minded in setting forth arguments and perspectives even when we don’t agree with them, transparent about who we are, attune to our biases and constantly trying to account for them, and insistent that we be judged by our output, not our political or religious or ideological identity, or what we do on weekends. Judge us by our work, and if you challenge it in good faith we’ll engage you.”

Well, that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?

I mean, in theory I’m right there with him – at least for purposes the future of American journnalism.

The problem is, for purposes of describing how jiournalism theoretically works today, every part of the proposition is false.  The media – especially in the Twin Cities – does not value diversity in the newsroom.   There is no honesty about bias – when Nick Coleman can do a program on an Air America affiliate but yet still get praised as an “old-school gumshoe reporter”, where the Minnesota Poll and the Humphrey Institute polls can traffic in decades of inaccuracy whose pro-DFL bias is only thinly plausibly deniable, what’s the point?

And if Fredersdorf wants the media to be judged by its output – well, there’s a problem there, too. We’re talking about a media that worked overtime to examine (at best) and demonize the Tea Party, while bearing the “Occupy” movement along with gauzy soft focus.  They go over conservatives’ backgrounds with fine-toothed combs (except as re checking facts and providing sources), but let Barack Obama skate to the White House without a peep about his inexperience and background.  And they fabricated one very big story about George W. Bush.

And since Fredersdoff brought it up – why, yes – I’d love to bring my “good faith” challenges to the regional media over the way they tortured the facts for a full week in the Evanovich shooting story to support a “gotta be careful about those gun owners!” narrative.  Or on how Rochelle Olson reported, back in 2006, on Alan Fine’s “domestic abuse” arrest, taking care to excise every fact from her “output” that would have diverted from the narrative that he, Keth Ellison’s challenger, had a blotted record.

Who in the Twin Cities media would like to start “engaging” with “good faith challenges”?  Or is this something you’ll all just fob off on your ombudspeople for a careful whitewashing?

It may seem like a good idea to avoid the “perception of bias” by insisting that media employees hide who they are from the audience. Perhaps it was once even tenable. It no longer is. To build your credibility on viewlessness is to concede, every time an employee of yours is shown to be a sentient, opinionated person, that your credibility has taken a hit. To tout and enforce your viewlessness is to hold your own reputation hostage to reality; it makes your credibility, the most valuable thing you have, vulnerable to every staffer’s Tweet, or incriminating Facebook photograph, or inane James O’Keefe hidden video sting operation. She claims to be neutral, but look, while out at a dinner with friends we caught her on camera saying that she thinks Obama is a better president than was Bush. See! She was hiding her liberal views from us all along!

Who is even fooled at this point?

Nobody who actually reads the Twin Cities media, to name one.

The American public understands who makes up the press corps, or more likely, has an exaggerated idea of how liberal it is precisely because the lack of transparency and pose of viewlessness seems conspiratorial.

 

That, and the fact that the breaches in “viewlessness” always, inevitably,l every single time, break to the left.

Is any reader of this article shocked or even mildly surprised that a Brooklyn-based freelance Web journalist working part time at a New York City public radio station held up a cardboard sign during an Occupy Wall Street protest? If that totally banal and predictable event is the thing that gets you upset as a journalistic manager, if you think that it is the threat to your program’s credibility, you misunderstand the present media landscape.

And there Fredersdorff has a point.  The problem is a lot bigger than some NPR web prole carrying a sign at an “Occupy” rally.

But Fredersdorff has what I think is a deeply naive faith that the current mainstream media has the integrity to “engage” with anyone but itself.

I’ve asked myself – when I’m not busy lampooning the demonstrations and their overkill media coverage – why are the Twin Cities media covering “Occupy Twin Cities” as lavishly as they are?

FInally, Jason DeRusha from WCCO asks the same question:

Reg Chapman and I were talking in the newsroom last night about how the coverage of the protest itself probably should stop fairly soon. Frankly, the fact that crowds haven’t really mushroomed tells us something about Minnesotans. Perhaps we’re not really the protesting type; perhaps this crowd of protestors doesn’t resonate with the middle class working people who are upset about Wall Street, mortgages, bank fees, etc [Ding ding ding – Ed]; perhaps it’s getting cold.

I think we oughtta run with the “Doesn’t Resonate” bit.

On the NARN show over the weekend, “Swiftee”, my old friend and conservative gadfly to the stars, made a great point when he called in; the Flea Party could have been a mass phenomenon, had it stuck with being for corporate perfidy what the Tea Party was to big government.  Let’s face it; the Tea Party’s roots are in revulsion at the government picking winners and losers and deciding which private enterprises are “too big to fail”.

The Flea Party blew it, of course; what could have been a outlet for a lot of legitimate outrage and concern on the part of Middle America either turned into a “progressive” platform or was never intended to be anything but.  And by “progressive”, I mean the worst side of “progressive”-ism; the groupthink, the chanting, the nods back to the miasma of the early seventies that still make a lot of Americans above the age of 45 queasy.

And from a newsman’s perspective – as I noted in my video from “People’s Plaza” on Saturday – there’s really no there there, if you leave either your barely-covered ideology or the news guy’s natural desire to be there with a camera when the molotov cocktails start flying and the hats and bats come out, or at least something qualifying as news happens. Which, it seems clear, isn’t likely to happen.

But the bigger issue is that the crowd is smallish, and there just isn’t news happening.

Face it – retreaded hippies and SEIU members and college activists chanting and making demands isn’t even dog bites man; it’s dog licks dog.

And in fact, that’s where I’m inspired by [a bit of viewer email he’d gotten]. Because we stop covering the protests or protestors doesn’t mean we stop covering the issue that motivated the original Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City.

What are the economic questions you want answered?

Question – and I’m not trying to be snarky, but I largely stopped watching most mainstream TV news years ago: what economic questions have you (WCCO and the larger media, not DeRusha personally, although the question is aimed at him) covered?

The role of the government intervention in creating the housing bubble?

The role of Obamacare and the administration’s mania for regulation in stalling hiring?

The real effect of three years of people chanting “tax the rich”, with a nudge and a wink and a “this is change you can believe in!” from sitting administrations in DC and Saint Paul, has had on entrepreneurship and expansion?

They’d all be great starts.

If you want that kind of coverage, you need to make your voice heard.

Well, there you go!

That, and tell Esme Murphy to stop painting the toenails of DFL politicians on the air.

Ken Burns has a new documentary series, about Prohibition.

Lori Sturdevant shows her ability to tease the wrong lesson out of history – or, more accurately, the lesson she wants her less-informed readers to find:

[The series] doesn’t pound on the lessons for today that spring from the nation’s disastrous ban on the sale and purchase of alcohol between 1920 and 1933. It did not need to.

The roots of Prohibition the series identified are still visible. Moralists still try to tell other people how to conduct private lives.

And other “moralists” respond to conflict by trying to get big government to impose utopia on the “enemy”.

“There’s a chance the children of immigrants – or gun-clinging Jeebus freaks – might believe things that are inconvenient to those who control society; let’s centralize and standardize education under the government!”

“Guns scare us aren’t how civilized people settle their problems; let’s ban them from the highest level possible!”

“We don’t like too much (of our opponents’) money in politics; let’s create federal laws to make sure elections are unpolluted by (our opponents’) money!”

In small towns — the “real America,” in Sarah Palin’s parlance — many people still look askance at urban habits. Americans of longer standing still wish immigrants would change their ways.

And the fact that all people are “we-ists” mean that it will ever be thus; that people, including urban people, will intrinsically trust people who are more like them, and be less sympathetic to people less like them.

Prohibition’s message for 2011 in Minnesota and the rest of the nation seems to be a warning: Allow these roots to sprout and grow, and the consequences could well be unpredictable and undesirable.

And the other, bigger, real-er lesson?  The “we-ist” with the printing press gets to decide which ‘we-ists” get called ‘good” and “noble” and “upstanding”, and which don’t.

Well, they did, anyway.

That

Just curious: how is last Saturday’s column by Lori Sturdevant anything but a campaign donation to the DFL?

I’m not going to fisk the whole thing.  Fisking Sturdevant has become a bit like fisking Nick Coleman; after a few years, you start to feel like you’re writing the same bit over and over again.

It’s got all her usual hallmarks; the gauzy, soft-focus mash note to some DFLer or another (Taryll Clark, in this case), the hook-line-and-sinker swallowing of some progressive group or another’s “non-partisan” line (Common Cause and Draw the Line, in this case)…

…and of course, the double standard.  Always, always the yawning double standard.

We meet our old friends “Draw The Line Minnesota”:

But the court’s final authority hasn’t kept Draw the Line Minnesota’s 15-member, multipartisan commission from behaving as if it had the power to draw the lines (hence its name).

In short, it’s showing what an independent redistricting commission would do, if Minnesota had been wise enough to create one — as 12 other states have.

And later

Draw the Line is a project of the Midwest Democracy Network, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and the Minnesota Council of Non-profits, and is funded by the Joyce Foundation and the Bush Foundation. Its commission includes a mix of known devotees of each of Minnesota’s major parties, plus a handful of that rare breed — true independents.

Why doesn’t Sturdevant favor the reader with any numbers?

Because they show how disingenuous she’s being.  The “multipartisan”  commission includes 2 Republicans, 1 “Independence Party” member and 12 who are either DFL activists, activists for groups that are closely aligned with the DFL, or people who work at institutions that are little but feeders for the DFL.

So to Sturdevant, “Draw The Line Minnesota” – which is bankrolled by four “progressive” pressure groups – and its “multipartisan” yet almost completely liberal-dominated commission – is “independent”, while…

…well, you could see this coming, couldn’t you?

More telling: Top GOP operatives and money-raisers have formed Minnesotans for Fair Redistricting. It’s a sway-the-court group that’s hired top legal talent — including former state Chief Justice Eric Magnuson — to argue for a GOP design.

Got that?  Draw The Line, the multi-state non-profit group funded by liberals with deep pockets, is suddenly a plucky underdog, while Big Bad GOP is riding into town on a steamroller powered by stacks of Jacksons.

Apparently Sturdevant thinks that David Lillehaug and the rest of the DFL Lawyers Koffee Klatsch are working pro bono?

Draw the Line Minnesota is a buck-a-plate beanfeed compared with the GOP’s steak-and-lobster operation.

Does Sturdevant have any numbers to back up the comparison?

Of course not.  Nobody does.  Other than an audible from Mike Dean on “The Late Debate” the other night, none of the players have disclosed their funding, and we have precious little basis for fact-checking any of them at this point.

We only know one thing; whatever Sturdevant writes will be calibrated to serve the DFL’s interests.

And, despite insinuations by conservative bloggers, it is not a DFL front group.

Ah.  Well, that settles it then.  Lori says so.

I mean, sure; it’s literally a fact (as far as we can tell) that none of these groups are literally part of the DFL.

And John Wilkes Booth was not a Confederate soldier, but they shared enough goals where it didn’t really make a difference in the end.

And Lori Sturdevant isn’t literally a flak for the DFL, in the sense that “Ken Martin signs her paychecks”; their purposes just happen to be 100% congruent.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Ah, political season, and the start of neutral, objective, even-handed news reporting in the Minneapolis paper.

The Strib’s headline reads “Oil refineries seek huge tax refunds that could force schools to give back money”, and as Joe notes…:

They couldn’t have been any cruder if they’d said: “GOP Presidential candidate Rick Perry taking money from schools to give to oil companies.”

It’s the perfect Progressive attack headline.

Naturally, the story is written in modern techno-thriller style: start with an explosive scene, randomly jump around introducing characters without any context, play up the human tragedy about to unfold unless a hero steps in, blame the usual villains.

It does read a little like someone who didn’t make the cut as a writer for “24” is slumming as a journo…

The story is much less compelling if laid out in a logical format.

1. There’s crude oil under the ground in Texas.
2. Crude oil must be refined to be useable as gasoline, diesel fuel, etc.
3. Hauling crude oil to the refinery is expensive, so
4. Oil companies built refineries in Texas near the oil fields
5. People who wanted good-paying jobs came to work for the refineries
6. Merchants who wanted to sell things to high-paid oil refinery employees built stores near the refineries
7. Refinery employees, merchants and merchants’ employees built houses near the refineries and started raising kids
8. The kids needed to go to schools, built near the homes that were built near the refineries
9. Schools are expensive and are paid for from local property taxes
10. Property taxes are based on local valuation and refineries are valuable so they paid huge property taxes
11. Huge property tax payments by refineries meant lower property taxes levied on homes, paid by employees
12. School districts got used to funding schools with huge property tax payments by refineries
13. Merchant and employee property tax payers got used to living large on the refineries’ dime
14. But federal law requires refineries to invest in pollution equipment
15. And state law gives a tax refund to refineries that invest in pollution equipment
16. So refineries that did invest in pollution equipment, filed for refunds
17. Refunding money to refineries would reduce their huge property tax payments
18. The money refunded to refineries cannot be given to school districts
19. School districts will have to cut spending or raise local property taxes to make up the shortfall
20. The state, knowing this, denied the refund claims, which were appealed
21. The governor appointed a commission to study the problem
22. The governor is Rick Perry, Republican candidate for President
23. The governor’s hand-selected commission is leaning toward giving the refunds; therefore
24. Rick Perry is taking money from schools to give to oil companies

It is a lot more mundane.  It’d sell fewer papers – or get fewer people inflamed against the GOP, whichever.

Well, I guess, in a way, the headline is half-assed, sort-of-true. Good enough for the Star Tribune.

But the entire thing could have been summed up more succinctly as:

“Gravy train ending, women and minorities hurt worst.”

Hell, that’s not news.

But it is campaign material.

To: Jim Klobuchar
From: Mitch Berg – guy with long memory
Re: You Are Full Of It

Mr. Klobuchar:

I got a kick from this bit from a flak piece you wrote for your daughter, Senator Klobuchar (quoted in Andy Aplikowki’s Residual Forces):

I still remember a time when campaigns were conversations – genuine debates between people of good will and mutual respect.

Baked wind.

I remember the condescension you used to heap on anyone that wasn’t DFL-blessed back in your days as a columnist, and on your old KSTP radio show.

Yo are – and I mean this with all due respect – full of crap.

That is all.

…that pays liberal pundits to be gratuitously smug, patronizingand condescending?

In an editorial in the Fairbault Daily News, editor Jaci Smith goes all Mommy on us:

You can’t have it both ways.

Although Smith does, in fact, try to have it both ways.  We’ll get back to that later.

This was a lesson I learned early in life.

I coveted a friend’s toy and wanted her to let me play with it, yet I never wanted to share my favorite toy.

“You can’t have it both ways,” my mom used to tell me. “Either you play only with your own toys or you play with others’ shared toys and you share yours as well.”

A good lesson but apparently one that some state legislators haven’t learned.

Smith – like the rest of the peanut gallery of outstate editorial writers who seem to be longing to sit for a day in Lori Sturdevant’s seat – says Steve Drazkowski and Pat Garofalo, who’ve been warning voters that their school districts got increases, and urging them to vote down referenda to increase taxes yet more, should just shut up:

Garofalo and Drazkowski claim that the state boosted spending to school districts in the budget passed this summer and that the 133 districts statewide seeking levy increases (or the continuation of an existing one) are “double dipping.”

“Despite these very generous funding increases — paid for by you, the taxpayer — 133 school districts statewide are considering asking their local property taxpayers to pony up even more money — the largest number that would call for a vote in a decade,” Drazkowski wrote in a recent newsletter.

Smith says it’s a local thing,and state pols should just. Butt. Out.

Thankfully, Faribault’s GOP Sen. Mike Parry disagrees. He said in a recent interview with the Daily News that referendums are local issues, to be handled locally.

That’s true, as far as it goes.  But here, Editor Smith, er, tries to have it both ways.  Garofalo and Drazkowski are exercising their First Amendment rights to tell people the facts as they see them.  As Legislators, they have no control over how local districts run their affairs, or what local voters vote for.  But they have the same right to speak that anyone – me, Bud Froemking at the liquor store in Faribault, or Jaci Smith for that matter – has.  Both have the advantage of the bully pulpit of elected office – which doesn’t negate their right to speak…

…any more than that of the Teachers Unions and the other groups from outside Faribault that will be speaking, and no doubt ponying up money, to try to push the levy through.

So since Mommy Editor Smith has reminded us that we can’t have it both ways, I wonder which one she’ll pick?

Here’s a bit of good news:  the American people distrust the mainstream media…

The majority of Americans still do not have confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 44% of Americans who have a great deal or fair amount of trust and the 55% who have little or no trust remain among the most negative views Gallup has measured

…and largely believe it to be biased to the left:

Here’s the part I think is dispositive – check out the numbers broken out by self-reported political category”:

For all of the extreme left’s caterwauling about the “conservatism” of the mainstream media, Democrats are three times as likely to say the news is “just about right” as Republicans – and almost twice as likely as “Independents”.

So while the mainstream media may not be “liberal” (although they are twice as likely to be OK with the status quo as conservatives), the Democrat mainstream certainly seems to be comfortable with the way things are.

In his “jobs” speech, Barack Obama jobbed history.

In a flub that would have set the media and Jon Stewart babbling for a solid week had it come from George W. Bush, Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin, Obama said that Abraham Lincoln founded the Republican Party.  Lincoln, of course, joined the party two years after its founding.

The media, at best, yawned and let it pass without remark.

But not PBS:

…[Government]-funded PBS has altered the transcript of the Presidents speech, removing the offending comment.

The New York Times transcript has the following quote:”We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union.  Founder of the Republican Party.  But in the middle of a civil war, he was also a leader who looked to the future — a Republican President who mobilized government to build the Transcontinental Railroad — applause — launch the National Academy of Sciences, set up the first land grant colleges.  Applause.  And leaders of both parties have followed the example he set.”

That’s how I heard it…

But how does it appear in the PBS transcript?”  We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union.  But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future – a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges.

Now, NPR did correct the “flub” – on Saturday.

Here’s my question: Forget about Jon Stewart and Brian Williams; the real question is will Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone’s NPR program “On The Media” cover this bit of egregious Obama-fluffing at all?

My money is on “hah, are you kidding?”

The Star/Tribune Editorial Board puts the happiest, rah-rah-local-team-iest face they can on the aftermath of “Operation Fast And Furious”, the “Justice” Department’s infamous “gun-running sting” that morphed into an organized attempt to slander America’s gun owners and gun dealers to undercut the Second Amendment movement – and tried to play the issue against the GOP.

They start out with the facts, more or less…:

The agency’s “Operation Fast and Furious” was supposed to monitor illegal gun sales from small-time gun buyers to large weapons traffickers, but after the sting operation failed an ATF analyst concluded that about 1,400 of the more than 2,000 weapons linked to the operation have not been recovered.

That’s one way of looking at it.

The other way – and the one that I’m pretty well convinced history will find accurate – was that the program was supposed to create a trail of guns from small American gun dealers to the narcotraficantes, that would allow the Administration to step in in 2012 and declare they were shocked, shocked to see a trail of firearms from Texas to the carterls.  This, of course, would allow them to frame the “bitter gun-clingers” of the Second Amendment movement, in classic Alinsky style, as aiders, abetters and profiteers from Mexico’s anarchy.

The Strib starts with some bipartisan gurglings…

It’s been reassuring to see dogged Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley take a lead role in the congressional investigation. While Jones, who will continue to serve as U.S. attorney in Minnesota, works to straighten out the agency’s internal operations, the American people deserve a thorough review of what went wrong in Operation Fast and Furious.

…which lead to the paper’s real goal; finding some way of tying this fiasco to the GOP and the Right (emphasis added):

[It’s] already clear that the ATF has suffered from being without a permanent director since 2006, when Congress began requiring Senate confirmation of the position.

President Obama nominated Andrew Traver, special agent in charge of ATF’s Chicago field division, in November 2010, but like other candidates he’s been opposed by the too-powerful gun lobby.

And there you have it.  For the “crime” of demanding better accountability in the leadership of the BATFE – a government agency with a decades-long history of colossal, epic, face-palming incompetence and politicization aimed at law-abiding gun owners – the Strib editorial board wants it to share in the responsibility for a bureaucratic cluster-hug designed entirely to slander that same movement.

The BATF doesn’t need Minnesota’s US Attorney to fix it. It needs to be shut down, its staff scattered to the four corners of the country, and have its offices demolished and the land beneath it salted.

The Strib editorial board has less interest in “fixing the BATF” than it has in cutting down Barack Obama’s opponents – or at least limiting damate to their President.

Operation Gun Runner (aka “Fast and Furious”) was not an operation done in good faith to “take down criminals” that “went wrong” that “left a mess at the ATF”, as you are all reporting today.

It was a politicized attempt to smear law-abiding gun dealers, law-abiding gun owners, and the Second Amendment movement, purely for the political benefit of the Obama Administration, and the Administration knew it.

Please

I’m told that CNBC’s Jim Cramer, host of “Mad Money”, and I have a bit of a resemblance.

So – if Thompson Building and Remodeling, who’ve been sponsoring the Northern Alliance for most of this past five or six years, hires me to endorse their services, even though I don’t make any “Cramer” references whatsoever during the ads, is Thompson “impersonating Cramer?”

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Jill Burcum isn’t the worst, most in-the-bag-for-the-Democrats Strib editorial writer.  That “distinction” floats at random between Lori Sturdevant, Jon Tevlin and most of the rest of the staff.

And I don’t mean that to sound as nasty as it probably does.  If more of the Strib’s editorial writers were in Burcum’s “I’m a DFLer, but I don’t want to come across like an obvious house shill” weight class, the Strib and its editorial would be less a laughingstock.

Still, priorities are priorities.  Burcum takes umbrage, on behalf of Morgan Freeman, at the latest ad for Sheila Harsdorf in her battle for the Wisconsin Senate in the district just across the St. Croix from the Metro against  Shelly “WEEEEEEEEEEEEEE BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED UNIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON” Moore.

The latest attack ad on Wisconsin state Senate candidate Shelly Moore instantly prompts this question: How’d they get actor Morgan Freeman to do the voiceover?

The reality is that it’s not Freeman, whose authoritative voice made him a logical choice to play God in the hit film “Bruce Almighty” a few years back. Instead, the slippery group funding the ad found somebody who sounds just like Freeman.

So what does Burcum suggest?  That established voice-over guys be able to trademark the timbre and tone of their voices, so nobody else can sound like them?

Because Burcum sounds serious:

The [organization funding the spots’] latest effort is nothing less than a fake celebrity endorsement of Moore’s opponent, Republican Sheila Harsdorf, in the recall election taking place just across the border.

Baloney.  The guy’s voice sounds like Morgan Freeman, in the same way that I look like Jim Cramer.  Did he say “I”m Morgan Freeman?”  No.  Does his voice say “I’m detached and authoritative, like Morgan Freeman’s?”  Sure.  Is it of any legal or ethical weight?  If it is, then everyone with a passing resemblance to a celebrity who swerves into the public eye in any way loses their stock in trade.

(And this lawsuit, by Bette Midler against a soundalike who sang one of her songs on a commercial, tucks in the legal case.  Being a soundalike isn’t in and of itself an issue; Midler’s suit got tossed).

Let’s try this, and see if Burcum squawks.

“DFL and RINOs good.  Conservatives bad.  Vote for Sheila Harsdorf!”

Now, was that actually Lori Sturdevant endorsing Harsdorf?  Of course not.  Did I try to leverage the coincidental resemblance of the line I wrote with a regional celebrity’s trademark dogmatism?  Perhaps, but so what?   Does a celebrity own their tone, their timbre and cadence and presentation?

If so, Burcum might be getting a call from Doug Grow’s lawyer.

While driving between meetings yesterday, I listened to the first part of Keri Miller’s interview with Juan Williams.

Williams, of course, was the commentator who split his time between Fox News and National Public Radio – even serving as a talk show host on NPR on occasion – before being fired for admitting on the O’Reilly show to sharing many Americans’ nervousness about obvious Muslims on aircraft after 9/11 (while stressing – and the media reports, especially NPR’s, always left this part out – that it’d be wrong to base policy on the sort of stereotypes he was admitting to).

I’m going to paraphrase the part I heard.  Feel free to validate it at the show link.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: Because we can’t have an honest conversation as a nation until we admit to the fact that this is how we feel.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: Now, let’s be honest – there was more than “reverting to stereotype”.  I urged people to remember that’s now how we set policy in this country.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: In and of itself, I don’t. But it’s an honest part of the conversation; if political correctness forces us to stifle acknowledging it, it’ll leak out in other ways.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: Um…hello?

Miller’s point seemed to be not so much that humans must conquer stereotype; it’s that having them, or at least admitting it, is itself a base, evil thing.

I’d love to propose an experiment.

Some evening when Ms. Miller is making her way from The Loft and one of her “Talking Volumes” programs to a brie and chablis tasting party in Kenwood, she should run across a group of thirtysomething white males in full biker gear, smack across her path.  Let’s measure her heart rate.  See if she is indulging in any stereotypes.

In the interest of science, naturally.

UPDATE:  Over on Twitter, “NarnFan” wrote the summary for this piece that I wasn’t caffeinated enough to hatch myself:

To the extent we can’t hold a complected thought about this stuff, we are screwed manifold ways.

People can yell “racist” at one another ’til they’re blue in the face; the fact is, it’s human nature to be “we-ist”.  People are always most comfortable around people most like themselves; Keri Miller would no doubt be no more comfortable and relaxed among, say, white rednecks than would Cornell West.

Especially if there’s a “history”; Armenians might be forgiven for being leery of Turks; European Jews of a certain age might keep Russians, Poles or “Aryans” under close watch; blacks of any socioeconomic class in Los Angeles might be forgiven for being wary of tattooed, teenage and twentysomething Latinos.

Americans were attacked, and 3,000 of us murdered in cold blood, by people who caught us at our most vulnerable – stripped of weapons, jammed like cattle into aluminum tubes.  Not every Muslim attacked us – and I’ll strenuously exclaim that many Muslims serve this country with great honor, including the Pakistani-American who was reported to have gone on the Bin Laden raid.

To say “you are a bad person” for acknowledging the real human need to see to one’s own self-preservation, itself, retards the conversation that Ms. Miller said she was trying to “advance”.

The lefties were all atwitter yesterday over a poll in the MinnPost that purported to show that Minnesotans blame the Minnesota GOP for the shutdown:

By a whopping 2-1 margin, Minnesotans blame the Republicans who control both houses of the Legislature for the recent government shutdown more than they blame Gov. Mark Dayton, according to a poll taken this week for MinnPost.

 

Predictably, most Republicans blamed Dayton more (by 56 to 10 percent, with the rest saying both sides were to blame or holding no opinion). DFLers blamed the Republicans by an even more overwhelming majority (68 percent to just 2 percent of DFLers who blamed DFLer Dayton).

 

But the key swing group of self-identified independents was also much more likely to blame Republicans than to blame Dayton. Among independents, 46 percent “blamed” the Republicans, 18 percent blamed Dayton and 25 percent both.

Hm. That sounds bad!

It also sounded familiar – indeed, it sounded right in line with a prediction I made in this space mere weeks ago.  Go ahead and read it; Prediction 1 was a month late, and it appeared in the MinnPost rather than the Strib; the piece is written by Erik Black and Doug Grow, former Strib staffers, so the feeling of deja vu was so overwhelming…

…that when I first read this post, I practically predicted the bit that is emphasized in the quote below:

Based on other questions in the poll, it was difficult to say whether the fallout from the shutdown will give DFLers a significant advantage heading into the 2012 elections, as Republicans seek to retain their majorities. Projecting current attitudes onto an election 16 months in the future would be folly.

 

Also, this poll, conducted for MinnPost by Daves & Associates Research, was designed to take the pulse of the state in the aftermath of the shutdown, not to predict the next election. No likely voter screen was used and sample surely includes non-voters.

And there you have it.  The MinnPost gets its polling from “Daves and Associates”.  That’d be Rob Daves – the guy who ran the Minnesota Poll for 21 years – the poll whose election-eve polls on Gubernatorial, Senate and Presidential races *always* showed the GOP doing worse – usually much worse – than it ended up doing.

And if it’s a post on politics in Minnesota by Strib alums Black and Grow, who else just has to show up?

Humphrey Center Political Scientist Larry Jacobs said the results of the new poll were “basically bad news for the Republicans.”

 

“They have to think about this fact,” said Jacobs.”The principles that they ran on in 2010 — that they would advocate for cuts only and would refuse to go along with any tax increase — may still be the principles that appeal to the most enthusiastic base of support they have. But that position seems to be pretty unpopular not only with two-thirds of Minnesotans, but with half of their own party, all of whom prefer a mix of significant spending cuts and at least some tax increases.”

Yep, Dr. Jacobs, whose Hubert H. Humphrey Institute Poll is even worse, and whose methodology was openly and publicly savaged by Frank Newman of Gallup last year after the Humphrey Institute polls were not only grossly wrong (predicting a 12 point Dayton blowout in the gubernatorial race which ended up about a .4% race) but were shown to have systematically oversampled strongly DFL areas of the state.

Both Daves’ and Jacobs’ polls, as I showed last year, shared an interesting trait: if the final result of an election ended up being really close, like the ’08 Senate and ’10 Governor’s race (as opposed to blowouts, like the ’06 Senate race), the Minnesota and HHH Polls *both* shorted Republicans *even more*:

The reason? Well, it’s a known fact that voters are prone to the “Bandwagon Effect”; they do tend to go along with what polls tell them, positively or negatively.  My theory – while it’s conceivable that the Strib, Rob Daves, the Minnpost, the HHH Institute and Larry Jacobs are unaware of the “bandwagon effect”,  I’d be a lot more convinced if Daves didn’t have a 24 year record of shorting the GOP on controversial, loaded polls when the chips were down (and Jacobs’ polls even worse for seven years).

The poll canvassed less than 600 random adults – not registered, much less likely, voters – and, as usual, it heavily-sampled identified DFLers and unspecified “independents”.

The United Way of the Twin Cities advertises itself as an organization that…

…creates a better life for us all by focusing on three key areas: Basic Needs, Education and Health.

We attack poverty on multiple, interconnected fronts to achieve lasting change. We LIVE UNITED by collaborating with partner agencies, corporations, community leaders and people like you.

United Way serves people living in or near poverty in nine counties: Anoka, Carver, Chisago, Dakota, Hennepin, Isanti, Ramsey, Scott and western Washington. Making a gift to United Way is the most effective way to help the whole community.

Many of us give – generously, in many cases – to the United Way through their various institutional drives at Twin Cities businesses.

So where does that money go?

To the MinnPost?    The center-left-leaning media website?

Community Voices section is made possible by the generous sponsorship support of the Greater Twin Cities United Way.

“Attacking poverty” via sponsoring the MinnPost is certainly a new definition of an ” interconnected front”.  Although the logic of the connection escapes me.

Do United Way contributors know they’re supporting agenda-based media?

It’s worth asking.

I sent a message to the United Way.  I’ll let you know what I hear back. If anything.

The New York Times opts to toss facts under the bus in yesterday’s editorial about the Minnesota Shutdown:

How far will Republican lawmakers go to protect millionaires? Those who think a default on the federal government’s credit seems implausible should take a sobering look at the “closed” signs dotting Minnesota. The Republican Party there readily shut down the state’s government on Friday by refusing to raise taxes on the 7,700 Minnesotans who make more than $1 million a year.

Well, no.

The GOP refused to raise taxes.  Period.  Dayton chose to make it about “millionaires”, and before that “the rich”.  Had Dayton chosen to raise, say, the gas tax (like the DFL majority in 2009 did), a terribly regressive tax that squats all over working-class prosperity, the GOP would have opposed that, as well.

For the Times to turn the GOP’s opposition to a tax into “protecting millionaires” is a craven bit of rhetorical dishonesty.

Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, campaigned for office last year promising to raise taxes on high earners, so it was no surprise when he proposed a tax increase on families making more than $150,000 a year to help close a $5 billion budget gap. In negotiations with the Republican majority in the Legislature, he compromised and reduced the increase to those making $1 million or more, but Republicans are refusing to consider any income tax increase.

Note the rhetoric: Dayton keeping a campaign promise?  Good.  The GOP? Can’t be good, can it?

Like Republicans in Washington, they have the delusion that they can balance the budget entirely from cuts.

The Times’ “editorial” was apparently written by the MNDFL’s chair, Ken Martin.  The GOP budget is the biggest spending increase in Minnesota history.

The governor proposed more than $2 billion in cuts but refused to slash billions more from education, health care and public safety programs.

All of which the GOP compromised on, meeting Dayton much more than halfway.

The Legislature also wanted new abortion restrictions and a voter ID law that Mr. Dayton had already vetoed. When he said no, lawmakers allowed the fiscal year to end without a budget, and state government officially shut on July 1.

The Times apparently believes the GOP should “negotiate” like a Saturn dealer; start with their “final offer” and work backward from there.

Also unmentioned by “the Times” editorial writer: Dayton walked out of the negotiations every time.  The GOP Legislature was waiting in the Capitol, ready to negotiate and/or pass a “lights on” bill, to keep govermment running

More than 40 state agencies have closed, including the state parks over the July Fourth holiday. Courts and public safety agencies are operating, but essential services for the poor, like food pantries and child care subsidies, have evaporated. Many parents say they may have to quit their jobs if state-subsidized child care does not resume quickly. The shutdown will cost the state money, since many of the 22,000 laid-off workers will receive unemployment benefits and health insurance, while the treasury is unable to collect on tax audits, lottery tickets and park fees.

Unmentioned by the Times (or any of the Twin Cities media); the evidence is overwhelming that Governor Dayton rigged the shutdown to cause as much pain as possible, specifically to drive those dependent on state employment or services to try to push moderate Republicans into wobbling.

As painful as the closure may become, the governor is right not to yield to the extremist ideology the Republicans are pursuing in St. Paul, Washington and across the country.

“Extremist ideology”.

The GOP ran very openly on a platform of holding the line on taxes and spending.  Perhaps you remember the Tea Party – it was in all the papers, including the Times.

Extremist?  Governor Dayton won with 43% of the vote; the GOP majorities had, by definition, over 50% of the state’s voters pick them (since the third-party challenges were virtually nonexistant in legislative races in 2010).  Can a policy chosen by over half the voters be “extemist?”

Any bets on what they’ll talk about at this one?

Former Vice President Walter Mondale and former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson have called a news conference to discuss the state government’s shutdown.

Mondale is a Democrat who represented Minnesota as a U.S. senator in the 1960s and `70s. Carlson is a Republican who served as governor in the 1990s.

No, I don’t think there’s any action on that bet.

Whenever the regional establishment (read: left-leaning) media wants to try to delegitimize the MNGOP in the eyes the vast majority of people who don’t pay much attention to politics, they wheel out Arne Carlson.  Carlson, who governed Minnesota from 1990 to 1998, was a Republican, and that’s usually where the media accounts stop, omitting that he governed like a moderate Democrat; indeed, James Lileks used to joke that while he was in DC, he described the Carlson/Perpich race (1990) as “the pro-abortion, pro-gun-control candidate versus the Democrat”.

The MinnPost  continues the media’s curious habit of genuflecting to Carlson.

Gov. Arne Carlson had one of those “hey-wait-just-a-minute” moments Thursday while reading a MinnPost article.

On the surface, the article, about government reform, seemed complimentary of Carlson, who was governor from 1991 to 1998.

Rep. Keith Downey, a leader of the reform movement in the Republican-controlled Legislature, was talking about how way back in the Carlson era a report had been issued calling for structural reforms to help government move from budget to budget more smoothly.

“We’ve been putting off reforms for 15 years,” Downey said. “The time to act is now.”

That’s the line that upset Carlson.

“Who’s this Downey fellow?” he asked me.

“Me”, in this case, is Doug Grow, who along with Lori Sturdevant has been building the gauzy, soft-focus myths about the glory days of DFL/”GOP” cooperation.

And if Carlson doesn’t know Keith Downey, then who the hell cares what he thinks?

A representative from Edina starting his second term, the governor was told.

“If he’s starting his second term, he’s probably part of the problem,” Carlson said.

Can you imagine if Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann or Amy Koch had said something that so fluently mixed arrogance and ignorance?

Carlson contends that his administration didn’t just point out the long-term structural problems in the 1995 report that Downey was referring to. Rather, it made the “reforms” necessary to correct the problems.

Let’s talk about the truth about Carlson’s administration.

He had revenue surpluses most years during his administration.

You know – surpluses.  Years where revenues exceeded expenditures.  Given that Minnesota’s state revenues are so closely tied to economic performance, through income and sales taxes, a surplus is generally an indicator of a good year.

And most of the years in the nineties were good years.  Indeed, from 1990 to 1998 it was ar pretty cha-cha time in Minnesota; after a brief downtown early in the decade as the ’92 recession worked out and the local economy readjusted to plummeting post-Cold-War defense spending, the economy pretty much boomed the whole last 2/3 of Carlson’s reign.

And Carlson took those temporary surpluses into permanent entitlement spending. The budget more than doubled under Carlson’s regime – spending that was paid for by temporary windfalls during good times.

In other words, Arne Carlson is the problem we currently face in this state; he was the godfather of the autopilot spending increases that feed the all-consuming, ever-escalating  hunger for tax revenue that currently hobble our state’s budget process.

Arne Carlson – shut up and enjoy your retirement.  You are not just irrelevant and in the way; you are not just a Potemkin Republican that estabishment backslappers like Lori Sturdevant and Doug Grow trot out to beat over the MNGOP’s head.

You are the problem.