As I’ve noted repeatedly in the past, the best way to for a Republican, or a “Republican” for that matter, to get fawning approval from the media is to become one of those Republicans that bash conservatives and conservatism.   See Arne Carlson, Dave Durenberger, Judi Dutcher.

And so with Richard Posner.  via Federal Judge Richard Posner: The GOP Has Made Me Less Conservative : It’s All Politics : NPR.

Judge Richard Posner, a conservative on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, has long been one of the nation’s most respected and admired legal thinkers on the right. But in an interview with NPR, he expressed exasperation at the modern Republican Party, and confessed that he has become “less conservative” as a result.

Posner expressed admiration for President Ronald Reagan and the economist Milton Friedman, two pillars of conservatism. But over the past 10 years, Posner said, “there’s been a real deterioration in conservative thinking. And that has to lead people to re-examine and modify their thinking.”

“I’ve become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy,” he said.

Which is fine – the guy’s got a right to an opinion.

But NPR is making up facts.  Posner isn’t a conservative, never was a conservative, and hasn’t called himself a conservative in years.

What’s the rule when getting “news” from the mainstream media?

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

I don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here.

Four years ago, “youth” – America’s younger voters, in all their smug, insufferable, know-it-all energy – helped sweep The One into power.

Today?  They seem a little less thrilled with things as they have turned out:

In the four years since President Obama swept into office in large part with the support of a vast army of young people, a new corps of men and women have come of voting age with views shaped largely by the recession. And unlike their counterparts in the millennial generation who showed high levels of enthusiasm for Mr. Obama at this point in 2008, the nation’s first-time voters are less enthusiastic about him, are significantly more likely to identify as conservative and cite a growing lack of faith in government in general, according to interviews, experts and recent polls.

Polls show that Americans under 30 are still inclined to support Mr. Obama by a wide margin. But the president may face a particular challenge among voters ages 18 to 24. In that group, his lead over Mitt Romney — 12 points — is about half of what it is among 25- to 29-year-olds, according to an online survey this spring by the Harvard Institute of Politics. And among whites in the younger group, Mr. Obama’s lead vanishes altogether.

It’s possible this may be Obama’s greatest legacy; a generation that – if they think about it, and here’s hoping there’s enough innate intelligence among them to overcome the complete lack of critical thinking in public education today – is completely soured on the idea that big government is, or has, or is equipped to reach, the answers.

Via the Christian Science Monitor, here’s the Fourth of July story we should be really proud about in this day and age:

My father left a mud-hut village in Pakistan to come to America, hoping to receive some technical training. He hadn’t counted on falling for America, but that’s what happens to unsuspecting visitors. And the world is becoming a better place for it.

Dad enrolled at North Carolina State University more than 50 years ago and earned an engineering degree. On a brief return to Pakistan, he met my mother at a wedding – their own. As you might have guessed, it was an arranged marriage.

The prefabricated couple decided to spend “just a few years’’ in the United States because of the job opportunities here. But they took on more of America than they had bargained for.

That immigrant passion for America was first described to me by a university president who noticed that foreign students are susceptible to a peculiar effect that warps their plans and bends their dreams. If they return to their homeland, they wish it were more like America, and will work to make it so. Often they choose not to go home, or choose to return to America after a while.

The article – which you should read, all of it – swerves through how America can, and does, moderate extremist Islam, by way of explaining how and why immigrants “fall crazy in love” with America.

And this is a potent lesson the week after this country took its biggest step ever toward serfdom; why is it that people have been coming here for centuries?

For the goodies?

Or for freedom?

Another day and a half left to vote in the “Who Do MN Liberals Hate” poll.

Give us your top ten Minnesota conservatives that liberals hate, in descending order of hatred.

Results later this week!

UPDATE:  Chalk it up to the heat, but it occurred to me; I ran one of the most important contests in the SITD schedule during one of the worst traffic weeks of the year.

So I’m extending voting through 11:59PM, Monday, July 9, with results to be released starting Tuesday, July 10 and the finals on July 11.

God Bless America!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I always liked this quote from Stranger in a Strange Land:

“ . . . a politico-judicial decision unparalleled in jug-headedness since Doheny was acquitted of offering the bribe Secretary Fall was convicted of accepting.”

Well, unparalleled until [last Thursday].

United States Supreme Court upheld Obamacare requirement that everybody buy health insurance or pay a penalty on the grounds that although the law says it’s a penalty, it’s really a tax, and therefore Constitutional. But it’s not an actual tax because if it were, it would be unconstitutional. So it’s a tax, but not a tax.

Chief Justice Joseph Heller, writing in the majority…

And Minnesota Supreme Court upheld DWI convictions based on the Intoxilyzer breath test machine because the State showed that more likely than not the machine was accurate. You’re guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of .08 Or More because the .08 shown on the machine probably is correct.

And society’s downward spiral continues.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

“Because government says so and wants to” is becoming a binding precedent.

Friend Mary Amlaw is hosting a fundraiser tonight for Allen Quist at the Blue Fox in Shoreview:

Quist is running in the primary against Mike Parry – there was no endorsement at the CD1 Convention – for a shot at taking on Tim Walz this November.

And best of all, our old friend, stand-up comic Tammy Nerby, is going to be providing the entertainment!

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.

“The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.” – Abraham Lincoln.

As a matter of full disclosure, I’m a worker-bee volunteer at the Tony Hernandez for Congress campaign.

When I mention this to people in my relentlessly-DFL neighborhood – and among some of my stalkers on Twitter – I get some fairly predictable responses:

• “Wow.  Sounds like a difficult race“.  Stipulated!
• “You are teh looser! Bettty MacGolum will win teh race, and you shoud not even try two stop her!” More below.
• “Why?”

The “why” is easy; to win.  To send the first Republican to Congress since the 1940s from CD4.  Not to “move the needle”, or to make the DFL spend money to keep Betty in office, although both will be byproducts of a campaign to win the Fourth CD.  But this isn’t about half-measures and consolation prizes; it’s about winning.

Of course it’s a difficult race.  In 2010 – as good a year for the GOP as we’ve seen in recent years – Betty McCollum trounced Teresa Collett by 2:1 which, ironically, is the same margin of IQ that Teresa had and has over the Congresswoman.  Name every candidate in recent memory in the Filthy Fourth – Ed Matthews in 2008., Obi Sium in 2006, Patrice Battaglia in ’04, Linda Runbeck in ’00.  Every one of them would have made a better Congressperson than Betty McCollum who, near as we can tell, serves no purpose other than pom-pom girl for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

(No, seriously – read and listen to her.  She talks like a junior high kid trying to get through a civics class presentation.  Look at her website sometime; she seems inordinately proud of having rid America of the scourge of National Guard ads at NASCAR events – which seems to be her signal accomplishment.  Or something).

Nobody doubts that this is going to be a very, very tough race.  Just as the CD8 race in 2010 and the CD6 bout in 2008 were very, very tough races.  Nobody doubts that the DFL considers CD4 “their” turf.  And for the next ten years – until the next round of redistricting, with ten more years of DFL mismanagement driving more and more people out of Saint Paul and its’ more DFL-addled inner ‘burbs – it may well stay that way.  That’s life.

But CD4 isn’t the same district it was in 2010.

The way I see it, there are five paths to victory for Tony Hernandez.  And he is going to need to take all five of them for this to be a victory, or even an especially close race.

It’s Not Your Grampa’s Fourth CD – Redistricting didn’t do Betty any favors this time.  Where the old Fourth was as solidly DFL as could have been designed – Saint Paul and a bunch of DFL-addled inner ‘burbs – the New Fourth includes the entire swath east of Saint Paul all the way to the Saint Croix River, including Woodbury, Lake Elmo, Stillwater, and a slew of other suburbs full of people who, in many cases, fled the blight that the DFL brought to places like Saint Paul., Roseville and Maplewood.  They’ve spent years working hard, building communities run in many cases by good, solid, thrifty, competent conservative GOP city and county governments – working far to hard to see it all dumped in the sewer of incompetent, spendthrift, venal DFL perfidy that seems to have chased them down.  This is especially true of the wave of minorities who’ve moved to places like Woodbury, seeking decent schools and streets safe from that most noxious DFL constituency, petty criminals.

This is especially vital for Asian-American voters – those who moved up and out of Saint Paul to Woodbury because they were tired of a school system that marginalized their young men, and the ones who still live there and whose businesses along University have been sacrificed by the New Mandarins of the Met Council.

And for Latino voters, who came to America to find the kind of opportunity that McCollum seems to think awaits them only by dint of Government favor.

There’s also the little matter of all those Stillwater people sitting in endless traffic jams all summer because of the years McCollum spent opposing a new Stillwater bridge (before shamelessly flip-flopping).

It’s possible they may vote DFL.  We’re going to try to fix that.

Betty Is Long Past Her Shelf Date – McCollum has been in Congress for what?  Ten years?  And the interesting thing is this – election in, election out, her numbers just keep dropping.  Wave year or slow year, fewer and fewer people turn out to vote for her.  Oh, the unions keep funding her, and lavishly so, but when it comes to actual voters, even in landslide Democrat years, people just don’t care about her that much.

And they don’t have to – in a “safe” district where the DFL can traditionally run a set of wind-up chattering teeth and count on 55% of the vote.

But the Fourth isn’t like that any more.  It used to be a 70-30 district, maybe 65-35 in a bad year.  Now it’s probably more like 60-40.  Which is still a tough race – but it’s also about where the 8th CD was two years ago.  And we know how that turned out.

No Coattails:  The DFL can usually count of 40-odd percent of Minnesotans voting for whatever piece of crap the Democrats endorse for President, Govenror or Senate.  It’s a fact of life.

But Americans are much worse off than they were four years ago.  And to the extent Minnesotans are better-off, it’s because of GOP policies held to by Tim Pawlenty against the DFL’s best efforts, and by a GOP majority against Mark Dayton’s obstruction.

Now, the DFL’s paid PR arms – Common Cause and Alliance for a Better Minnesota – will be doing their best to try and obscure and confuse that fact.  It may even work – the 2010 gubernatorial election showed that 43% of Minnesotans are ill-informed, incurious, or just gullible – but they’ve got their work cut out for them, because in this election, Barack Obama is going to have all the coat-tails of a Daisy Duke tube top.

It’s Not Your Grandfather’s GOP:  While the Fourth CD GOP seems to be planning to be irrelevant in the coming election, it’s a different GOP than in previous years.  The Ron Paul surge brought a flood of new, passionate voters, activists and candidates to the fore.  In the past, I’ve challenged them to make sure they express some of that passion down-ticket from Ron Paul and Kurt Bills – and to a gratifying extent, many of them are.  There are more young Republicans running credible campaigns this year than in any year I can remember; unlike previous years when half the GOP legislative candidates were “warm bodies on the ballot” that didn’t fund-raise or door-knock, every single Republican race in CD4 this year is a real effort.

And that’s not all.  Four years ago, when it came to outreach among New Americans and minorities, the GOP had nowhere to go but up; it couldn’t have gotten any worse.  But over the past two years, conservatives – especially Dan Severson and his crew – have been actually doing the long-neglected work of building relationship among all those New Americans.  Will it make a difference in this election?  Perhaps – and the effort is as much about 2020 as about 2012.

So will the combination of newbie fervor, outreach and Obama and Dayton’s underwhelming record make a difference?

We’ll see.

Just Plain Passion:  Tony’s running a hard, aggressive race.  He’s got some good people working on his campaign – one of the fruits of the previous 4th CD GOP “establishment’s” effort to find and train campaign-management talent.  The campaign has nothing to lose, everything to gain, and is doing something the GOP in the 4th has tried before – taking the battle to the enemy – but hasn’t had the resources to pull off.

Will those five paths lead Tony to the Capitol?  Well, if I, a simple volunteer, have anything to say about it, absolutely.

Will it be a brutally tough race?  Absolutely.  But I’ll send you back to the Lincoln quote at the top.

And of course, these races don’t happen without help.  Tony’s campaign needs volunteers – and unlike some previous campaigns in the district, if you volunteer, you will be put to work!

And of course, money.  Betty McCollum can count on her masters, the government unions, to prop her up with close to a million dollars this cycle (because “Money in politics is evil”, as long as it’s not Democrat money).  If Tony’s gonna win – or qualify for any of the big national donors – he’s gotta earn money here at home.  If you can pony up a few bucks, please do.

Jesse Ventura was nothing but a fraternity prank run amok.  If you want to really shock the world – as in, make Chip Cravaack’s victory look like a fart in a tornado – let’s give Tony’s campaign a push.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

I went with my son-in-law looking at used cars this weekend. Have you seen the prices? Shockingly high. With incentives, rebates and interest rates, brand-new costs the same as used.

You do, indeed, pay a lot these days for that “pre-depreciated” option.

The used vehicle market seems to be distorted: there aren’t enough used vehicles so the scarcity has driven up demand and with it, price. It’s as if some giant vacuum cleaner sucked up millions of perfectly good used cars and crushed them to get them off the market. Weird.

My son-in-law can afford a replacement vehicle so I suppose that makes him a 1%-er. I have no idea how single mothers or low income minority families do it. The burden is falling on those least able to afford it. Good thing this isn’t the result of some well-intentioned Bush-era government program or there’d be Hell to pay.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

No kidding.

Because if an Administration were to make “imposing scarcity for a necessity – affordable transportation – on low-income Americans” a “first 100 days” priority, some might think that Administration didn’t have the good of this country’s poorest at heart.

That’d be just weird, woudln’t it?

Sixty-eight years ago at about this time, American, British and Canadian soldiers, supported by the full weight of America’s industrial might, stormed ashore in Normandy to begin the liberation of Europe.

And for that first day – the near-debacle at Omaha, the fierce knife-range duel between the ships and the German shore guns, the Canadians’ brutal house-by-house advance off Juno Beach – the fact was that for all of America’s vast industrial might, the real arbiter of victory, and of the future of Western civilization, was the GI, the Tommy, the Jock, the Canuck, spurred on only by training and fear and guts and the skirl of Lord Lovat’s bagpiper.  It was they – not the wealth and the industry and the sheer firepower…

…who earned that victory, the first domino on the road to the liberation of the Old World.

———-

Yesterday, for all of the GOP PAC money that was poured into Wisconsin (enabled by the Wisconsin Democrats’ stupid decision to try to negate the elections of 2010, which in turn nullified applicable campaign finance laws), the victory similarly belonged to a few million Republicans – and not a few Democrats who had just plain had enough of childish petulance of the Wisconsin Unions and the party they seem to own.

It’d be specious to compare the courage of someone charging off a Higgins boat with someone going to the polls – which is, indeed, just exactly what the kid on that Higgins boat 68 years ago today was fighting for, so that voting need not be a life or death issue in this country.  (But it’s for sure some dim-bulb leftyblogger will claim that I’m making that comparison.  Mark my words.  That’s why I’m writing this here; I’ll mock them in advance).

But as a hard-fought first step toward this nation correction not just one mistake, Barack Obama’s misguided election, but indeed generations of mistakes that led the world’s wealthiest and most powerful significant nation into being a debtor state?  This is huge.

As Walker said, it‘s time for leaders who will make the tough choices, and fight for them.

Are you listening, Minnesota GOP Legislative caucus?

Are you listening, Mitt Romney?

In a post in this space last week, I asked what was the role of the eight various Congressional Districts in the various campaigns within the various districts.

Beyond that, I asked the same question of people from seven of the eight Congressional Districts in the Minnesota GOP.

And notwithstanding that the Minnesota GOP Constitution is more or less silent on the issue – it literally says nothing – I got a lot of answers.

Congressional District committees throughout Minnesota…:

• Help provide Congressional and Legislative campaigns with volunteers for phone banks, lit-dropping and other campaign-time activities.   This is especially important in districts where there is wide disparity in the number of Republicans – like, say, the Fifth, where some districts need a lot of help to carry out a credible campaign.
• Assist legislative races with fund-raising expertise and contacts – very important, especially in a party that relies on so many young candidates who are not professional politicians.
• Help Congressional campaigns put extra feet on the street; while campaigns tend to come and go, the Districts tend to have a certain continuity, including bodies of volunteers that have been working campaigns forever.
• Provide training to new campaign teams at the legislative (and lower) level.  For example, say a candidate in District  68 is going for the Minnesota House, and needs a campaign manager, a communications director and a volunteer manager.  The candidate rounds up three motivated volunteers – who between them have never managed campaigns, directed communications or scheduled, trained and directed volunteers.  The Congressional District is, often as not, able to put those three newbies in touch with people in the District who’ve done the jobs before, and who are happy to help spread the knowledge.  If done properly and consistently, the Congressional District can build a hardy corps of “middle managers”, people who’ve got some background at running the blocking and tackling of campaigns – the “unsung hero” stuff well behind the scenes of a successful campaign.

That’s the feedback I got from people in theFirst District GOP.  And the Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth.

But in the Fourth CD, there seems to be a different answer, from at least one quarter.

Nothing.

Zip.  Bupkes.  Nada.  Zilch.

More at noon today.

…but I’m making a donation in kind to the Walker campaign for the benefit of my readers in Wisconsin:

If I get only one electoral wish this year, I want Walker to utterly bury this recall, and for Obama to lose.

Sorry.  Gotta hold steady at two wishes.

Two bits of news from yesterday.

While I’m not especially knotted up about gay marriage – I support civil unions, yadda yadda – it lost big in North Carolina yesterday.  Bible-belt bigotry?  Or a sign that social issues are winners in swing states?  We’ll see.

And as you’ve no doubt heard, Scott Walker drew almost as many Republican voters to his meaningless primary than all the Democrat contenders put together in Wisconsin yesterday – an effort that cost millions in union money and led to the Dems getting…

…Tom Barrett, the Sharon Sayles-Belton of Milwaukee, a man who’s presided over the decline of a city that…well, was where Happy Days was set, anyway.

If you’re a union member?  Get ready to have your paycheck tapped harder than ever.

I’m going to slip a few bucks in the figurative online mail for the Walker campaign.  Now’s when it get serious.

Let’s imagine, if you will, a big knob or dial with a scale from 0 to 11.

This dial measures…

…well, anything, really.  For purposes of this article, let’s measure “Liberty” – the prevalence of and respect for the rights to think, speak, act, work and prosper freely.

Let’s say the numbers on the dial mean something like this:

0 – You’re in a North Korean concentration camp.

1 – You are in North Korea, but not in a concentration camp.

2 – You are in Cuba – unfree, and most likely dirt poor.   Your only “opportunity” is found in a bottle of some kind.  You are fed, more or less, and cared for, sorta.  Like a farm animal, really.

3 – You are in Red China – unfree, and a little less likely to be dirt poor.  Like an animal on a farm where the back forty is “free range”, if Farmer Brown Hu lets you live back there.

4 –  You are in Greece – Rioting and living on the dole? You’re “Free”.  Starting a business or excelling on your merits, absent lots of graft and what the Mexicans call mordida (maybe the Greeks call it “Mordidos?”  I dunno), and faced with paying taxes to pay for the problems caused by the earlier excessive taxes?  Not so free.  You are fed well enough, and cared for (or should be, if the government can figure out how to balance its budget) – like a house pet with a badly-organized owner who’s going to have to file for bankruptcy if he doesn’t square his act away, and who seems unlikely to do anything of the sort after the weekend’s household elections.

5 – You’re in the Netherlands or France.  You are “Free” from most wants, and have lots of “Free” time – but taxes and regulations make entrepreneurship exceptionally difficult, although it’s a more orderly form of difficulty than in Greece.    Food and care from the government are plentiful (provided that taxes and borrowing are in turn also plentiful, which is a big “provided” these days); you are like a pet in a well-organized and happy home, albeit one that has to keep renegotiating its credit cards.

6 – You are in a highly regulated United States or the UK – think “the worst of the seventies, on turbo”, run amok.  Entrepreneurship is marginally more free than in socialist Europe, and the social “safety net” is almost as smothering and the taxes almost as debilitating.

7 – You are in what Newt Gingrich might call Mitt Romney’s America – with lower taxes, but still more regulation that the United Freaking States of America, the land of people who risked all to come to the new world to risk all, could do without, and still too many taxes.  A place that is essentially a welfare state with some doors of opportunity left open for the lucky and incredibly motivated (or connected) few.

8 – You are in an America that Ronald Reagan worked toward – where we have the government we actually need, but not too much, and where feeding government comes in second to feeding and educating your family and financing your dream of success – a place where the rising tide lifts all boats, and where we don’t level out the peaks to fill in the valleys, but where we (as Churchill said) spread a net over the abyss.

9 – You’re in the America that Ron Paul’s party line says he works toward; where government is stripped down to the bare minimum, and people have the responsibility – and opportunity – to fend for themselves.

10 – The pure Big-L Libertarian Ideal.   Government guards the borders, enforces laws regarding order and property rights, and adjudicates contracts.  That’s it.  You are free to succeeed or fail precisely according to your merits and work.  And if you fail?  Social policy, especially the whole “Safety Net” thing, is in the realm of society – the individual and their own organic institutions (the church, Packers Nation, trade unions, the Elks, the NRA, the Oprah Book Club or whatever).

11 – One more than ten.

Where do you want to live?

That’s one way of looking at life, anyway.

———-

I was listening to Jason Lewis the other night – something I don’t get to do nearly enough.  And he looks at political life a little differently; “You’re either for freedom, or against it”.  Instead of a dial from 0 to 11, you have a light switch, or an LED; it’s on, or it’s off.

How accurate in measuring anything in life is a lightswitch?

Is your marriage either wonderful, fulfilling and perfect or utterly miserable, abusive and dysfunctional?

Is your job either your dream come to fruition or something that makes you want to stick a gun in your mouth every morning?

Are your children either endless joys that make you thankful to wake up every day or little deviants on whom you can’t find enough dimes to drop?

If your marriage, job and kids aren’t perfect, do you instantly file for divorce, quit, and look up a pack of travelling gypsies?

Of course not.  So – is all of American political life really a choice between either “North Korean Concentration Camp Inmate” or “One More Than Ten?”

Of course not.

You put up with your spouse’s imperfections and insanities (or, in about half of marriages, you don’t).  You tough out a job you may not like until something better comes up (or doesn’t).  You try to focus on and bring out the best in your children, and get them to the point where you can say “I did the best I could”, and others answer “We can tell”, and you both keep a straight face.

Everything in life has a “dial” that goes from zero to 11 – your marriage, your job, your kids…

…and political life isn’t any different.

There are two political battles going on today, if you are a conservative and a Republican.

The big one is against Barack Obama.  Obama’s America is at or below a “Six” right now, and – measured by executive branch action – heading south.  He’s putatively targeting a “five” – but his deficit spending, as any sane conservative knows, pretty much inevitably leads to “four”.  Which, then, can just as easily lead to overreaction on the part of government and those who’ve come to depend on it – the Democrat constituency – that leads to points south of four; see “The Weimar Republic”.

So if you’re sitting at a 5.5, and your options are “Five and dropping” or “Seven (at worst) with the potential to move up, if you keep engaged and don’t let up the pressure?”, what would you take?

Which leads us to the other – and first – battle we face; between those who answer that question “If I can’t get at least a nine, then I don’t care and I’m going to stay home”.

Now, during the caucus and endorsement process, I’m all for accepting no substitutes – for pulling like hell for whomever your ideal candidate is, and eschewing compromise like the plague.

But once the endorsement process is over, there’s another time for choosing.  And if you’re a conservative Republican, at any level, your choice is, ineluctibly, this:

You held out for your ideal.  Now it’s time to choose; the US is at a 6, maybe a 5.5, today. Another term of Obama and we’ll be a weak 5, maybe headed south.  The only realistic choice right now is – at worst – to increment the counter to a 6+.  Maybe a 7, maybe shooting for an 8 if we get a good Congress.  You will not get your 9 or 10 in this election – and if the needle slips further, and more Americans slide into dependence and choose that comfortable, entitled “Five” on the big dial of political life, it’ll become much, much harder to budge things upward again.

Do you let the dial slide?  Or do you push the dial up?

There is no other option.

What do you say?

Hollande, looking sauced

France goes on a holiday from financial reality and makes Sarkozy pack.

The future of the European Union (and worldwide markets) may hinge on the following question: Is François Hollande a “fool or a knave”?

Hollande, seeking to become France’s first Socialist President since François Mitterrand, won a narrow victory Sunday over Nicolas Sarkozy – ending the Fifth Republic’s brief and troubled flirtation with mildly conservative economic policies.  Hollande’s election was not only a victory for a Socialist Party in political disrepair but for his former domestic partner and 2007 Socialist nominee (remember, it’s France) Ségolène Royal.  Whether his win proves to be a defeat for the economics of the EU will have to wait to be seen.  As the UK’s Telegraph details, (having asked the above question about Hollande’s political motivations), France faces extraordinary fiscal challenges:

Today, the top corporate tax is 34.4 percent (compared to 15.8 percent in Germany) and France has a €96 billion budget shortfall, which caused it to lose its high credit rating. The absurd 35 hour week largely remains in effect. Here’s the most damning statistic: government spending now accounts of 56 percent of France’s GDP. It’s only higher in five other countries in the world – including Iraq and Cuba.

Keep in mind, these figures were after 5 years of Sarkozy’s supposedly “draconian” policies and political rule by his center-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP).  Hollande, in theory, wants to undo the same policies through increased progressive taxation, including the creation of an additional 45% for income above 150,000 euros and capping tax loopholes at a maximum of €10,000 per year.

In an economic era defined by deficit spending and a general lack of funds, François Hollande seems intent to upend the Franco-German alliance that has sought to force austerity measures on the rest of the EU.  “Germany doesn’t decide for all of Europe,” Hollande intoned during the campaign.  Yet what is the alternative?  A nation drowning in debt can no more spend it’s way solvent than a fat person can eat themselves thin.

Marine Le Pen should be proud.  The leader of the supposed ultra-conservative (more social nationalist) National Front and daughter of the 2002 run-off presidential candidate announced her intention to leave her ballot blank – a signal to the 18% who voted for her to ensure Sarkozy’s defeat.

Sarkozy would hardly be recognized as “conservative” across the Pond.  Three of his ministers were leftists.  He pushed for legislation to fight global warming.  He worked to help Socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn become head of the IMF (when Straus-Kahn wasn’t trying to plow room service).  Far more damning, Sarkozy’s response to the 2008 economic meltdown was vintage Socialist – declaring that “laissez-faire capitalism is over” and decrying “the dictatorship of the market.”  Yet, he raised the retirement age, cut taxes and attempted, unsuccessfully in the end, to ween France off the entitlement teat.

How the markets react may be the most important question in the aftermath of Hollande’s victory.  Coupled with the showing of Alexis Tsipras in Greece – whose policies mirror Hollande in a desire to tax the rich and delay debt repayments – the concern over the fate of he EU will renew Monday morning.  Greece had agreed to impose pension and wage cuts in return for two international rescues worth 240 billion euros.  Either the policy continues or the payments stop.  An end to payments would suggest an economic amputation from the Euro Zone, with Greece either leaving or being forced to abandon the Euro.  A Greek departure could easily start a domino effect in the EU and send worldwide markets into a tailspin.

Hollande may be forced to continue may of the policies he publicly campaigned against.  Short of a desire to commit economic suicide, he has little leverage to do otherwise.

I’ve written about it a slew of times; I grew up in a Democrat household.  I became a conservative in college (perhaps the only person in recent western civilization to have been converted to conservatism by an English professor).  I left the GOP in 1995, disgusted by the GOP caving in on the 1994 Cxrime Bill and other Clinton-era fripperies. I became a big-L LIbertarian.

I stayed in the party for four years.  I left because I realized that while the LIbertarian Party believed in an absolutely purest form of what I believed in, I also figured out that if what I believed in fell in a forest and an infinitesmal minority heard it, it’d never matter.

So I went back to the GOP.  I figured I’d sully my pristine principles a little, and have a shot at getting the rest of my principles – as many as possible –  at least a hypotehtical shot of getting passed into law.  I would do my little bit to fight for the conservative, Reaganesque soul of the GOP.   I was one of the little group of libertarian-conservatives, fiscalcons and other conservatives tthat were .

I didn’t get everything I wanted.  But I – we – got a lot; a GOP that fumigated itself of the miasma of Arne Carlson, fought for limiting the size of government and, to an extent that Minnesota had not seen in decades, succeeded; we inviegled Tim Pawlenty to move to the right to stave off a spirited challenge from oour guy, Brian Sullivan; we exacted a No New Taxes pledge from Pawlenty, and largely got him to stick to it, even when he was outnumbered two chambers to zero.

Not a bad decade, all in all.  Perfect?  No – but way better than it would have been otherwise.

The Minnesota GOP is in the middle of…well,l not an “epic battle for its soul”, really.  A tug of war, really – between the people who’ve been running the party since about 2002, whoever they are, and the “Ron Paul crowd”.  It’s a tug of war with some fairly exposed emotions; in 2008, many “establishment” Republicans fought very hard to exclude the Paul contingent from the conventions, from BPOU level all the way up to the state convo.  And on their site, not a few Paul supporters (sometimes called, with varying degrees of affection, “Paulbots” due to the personality cult-like attitude of some Paul supporters, including some pretty notable ones) advanced some ideas that traditional conservatives found anathemic; Libertarians are a lot more “live and let live” on social issues like abortion and gay marriage than traditional conservatives.  There was bound to be some conflict – and there was.

The Paul crowd has bounced back this year and made a huge impact on the MNGOP, taking most of the delegate and many of the executive seats in the Congressional District conventions.  And it’s causing all sorts of people to ask questions.

One of them is “Average Andy”, a guy I met on Twitter, a tweep and blogger with a background not too far different than mine, at least up until 1998ish or so.  Andy, asks:

I have a serious question for my Republican friends… I have been given the riot act from countless Republicans about my views on Presidential candidates. I’ve been told that I MUST vote Republican for a whole host of reasons. I may not like the candidate, but the Democrat will always be worse. I’ve never been much of a pragmatist in elections, and these conversations drive me as crazy as my vote drives these Republicans crazy, if not more.

On the one hand – by all means vote your conscience.

On the other hand, that’s one of the problems that many of the Republilcan activists are genuinely, and legitimately, upset about; the idea the that party many of us worked very, very hard for is being taken over, for now, by people who will – as Andy admits he himself did – vote for a third party candidate if “his” Republican doesn’t get nominated, and who can say “there’s no difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama” with a straight face,

It’s just not true.  Romney is a northeastern conservative, which means he’s pro-business, pro-law-and-order, and more comfortable with big governnment than a lot of us Western Conservatives.  And the knock-down drag-primary has helped push him to the right, to surmount the challenges from more conservative candidates, and to try to win over people who really wanted Santorum, Gingrich, Cain, Perry – even Ron Paul.

That’s all to the good.

Now – not a few Paul supporters (and yes, Santorum and Gingrich supporters, all of whom should know better) have claimed they’ll sit out the presidential election (or vote for some fringe-right third-party, which is the same thing), if not the whole race.  They think – wrongly – that a Romney administration will be the same as an Obama one.

More on that later.

But Andy – who avers that he followed up his support for Paul in the 2008 race by voting Constitution Party – does in fact show the flip side of that coin.

Despite the way my fellow Ron Paul supporters were treated in 2008, I repeated the process in 2010 in order to be a part of selecting a candidate for Governor. I didn’t know the candidates well, as I tend not to follow state politics nearly as closely as I follow national politics. However, I had made a lot of connections two years prior in the process and befriended a lot of people who were out in 2008 to support Ron Paul…To a man, they were all behind Tom Emmer, and I threw my support behind Emmer. Despite the fact that he lost, I have no regrets.

And the fact is that for all of the concern about among traditional Republicans that Paul supporters were single-candidate one-trick ponies, many of the mainstays of the Emmer campaign, and many people who have and are invaluable to the GOP today, are people who came to party politics in 2008 via Paul, and 2009 via the Tea Party.

2012 rolled around and I got into the mix again. I was unhappy with my experience four years prior, and was tempted to forget the whole thing, but ultimately decided to give my fellow Republicans another shot. I had made many connections in 2008, and met a lot of people. Most of which were friendly toward me and seemed happy to have me in the process. However, when my support for Ron Paul would come up in conversation, defensive walls would immediately go up. There were, and are, strong stereotypes of Ron Paul supporters, many of which are unfair – based on a very small minority of fellow Paul supporters.

Andy’s right – see my previous graf – and also a bit dismissive of some of the concerns some of the “establishment” have.

An awful lot of Paul supporters don’t thnk there’s a significant difference between “establishment” Republicans and Democrats.

Not a few fairly significant Paul supporters in the MNGOP also advance some views that “regular” Republicans find noxious; I’ve run into Holocaust deniers and some fairly noxious anti-Semites.  Of course they’re not the majority of the movement – but there are enough of them, and they are prominent enough, that it gets people a little standoffish.

A few significant Paul supporters – one in particular – have been carrying out witch hunts attacking Republicans they don’t consider acceptably and unquestioningly adoring enough  of Ron Paul and every single point of his platform.  OK, them I can handle myself – but you might wanna have a word with ’em.  Because there are a lot of you – but not enough to win any offices by yourself.

More commonly?   Many who’ve been involved with the party have tallked with many in the current wave of Paul supporters at the BPOU level, and found many – by no means all – of them to be focused almost exclusively on the Presidential election.  Which is fine – it’s important, and it’s one of the things you do when you’re involved in the party endorsement process.  But we’ve noticed less interest and concern in the activities that are the blocking and tackling of Congressional District politics – getting Republicans elected to Congress – to say nothing of the BPOU level (doing the door-knocking and phone-calling and grunt work that gets State Legislators and Senators elected).  It’s why I wrote my “Open Letter To Ron Paul supporters in CD4” a few weeks back; on the off chance that Ron Paul doesn’t get the nomination, it’d be great to see that wave of enthusiasm turn out to support whomever gets nominated to run for Senate, for Congress, and for the State Legislature – by doing what a political party does, even if one doesn’t have absolute control over it.  By supporting people that you don’t agree with 1000%, based on the ideal that someone you agree with 70% of the time is not your 30% enemy, but your 70% ally.

The reaction to that post, by the way, was just about the most interesting of any post I’ve ever written.  I got a lot of compliments – from traditional Republicans and not a few Paul supporters – and a little bit of hate mail as well.

Some Paul supporters objected to my use of the word “Paulbot”.  Enh.  I didn’t invent the term.  There was no offense intended, but life’s tough, and politics ain’t beanbag, and wear a freaking helmet.  The Dems will call you much, much worse (once they stop seeing you as wedges to undercut the GOP, like their revenge for that whole “Green Party” thing, anyway).

Others took offense that I’d presume they won’t turn out to help downticket races.  Well, good.  The whole article was a challenge.  I’d be more than happy to have the entire inference disproved in spades.  I’ll apologize, in public and on the air, at Tony Hernandez’ victory party.  Or Carlos Conway’s.  Hell, both.

To put it more bluntly; I’ll look forward to seeing the “establishment’s” conventional wisdom about the Paul contingent proven wrong.  Indeed, I’ll do my level best to help them do it.

If you, GOPer, want me to go back to staying out of your way, and voting Constitution Party for President, I will be happy to do so. If you want me to stay involved in the process, and put in the work to make my voice heard in 2014 when we’re looking for a candidate to unseat Mark Dayton, I will be happy to do so. What I am not happy to do is to get involved, but echo your voice. If my role in the GOP is to be a yes-man, check in with you on which candidates to support and what work to do for your precious party, count me out!

Excellent!  And given that Paul supporters have taken wide control of much of the BPOU and CD apparatus around the state, you’re probably in a good position to call some of those shots.  But be that as it may, I’m more than willing to hash out the differences face to face, rather than through parliamentary skullduggery (which I opposed, then and now).

In return?  Please stop pretending that any candidate that isn’t 100% yours is in no way different from the evil we’re all hypothetically fighting against – at least not without showing how that’s true, and being open to the idea that it’s to some degree or another false.  There are a lot of us in the GOP are small-l libertarians who don’t care for Ron Paul, but have high hopes for his son.  Have some respect for the good work that came before you – because plenty did, in fact, come before you.

And learn to get along with some cognitive dissonance.  When I came back to the GOP as a libertarian conservative, I ran into not a few single-issue pro-life voters who coudln’t understand why I wanted to pass concealed carry reform or stop subsidizing stadiums.  They took convincing.  They, in turn, and to work to convince me on a few things.  Everyone learned.

Deal?

The GOP – especially in the 4th and 5th CDs – needs a ton of help; having the Paul contingent turn some of that energy toward winning that race would bury a lot of hatchets.

…a letter like this’d be popping up any moment now.

———-

To: Minnesota GOP Legislative Caucus
From: Governor Dayton / the DFL Legislative Caucus
Re: Thanks

Our GOP Colleagues,

I know, I know – we call you all sorts of names, we lie about you and your proposals in the press, and we make you endure Ryan “The Pauly Shore of the House” Winkler.  Most of all, we want to spend, spend, spend.  You’re right. It’s a fair cop.

But we gotta give credit where credit is due.   Holding the line on taxes and working to roll back regulations has put the state on a much better fiscal footing than it might have been.  And holding the line on spending, keeping it within the recession-addled revenues we had two years ago, like you did in the 2011 session?

I know, I know – we fought you tooth and nail, and said you hated the children and bla bla bla.   But yep, not only did the February forecast show a surplus, but  revenues are coming in even faster than the forecast thought it would.

So kudos to you, GOP.

Now – could you cut us a break on that whole “paying back the school funding shift” bit?  The treasury’s full of MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY…

…sorry.  I got a little carried away.  Anyway, we’d like to make sure we have single-payer healthcare for pets.  And build a light-rail line from Uptown Minneapolis to Northeast Minneapolis.  And build MPR a new studio, in case their old studio breaks.

Do it for the children.

Sincerely,

The Entire Minnesota DFL

If there’s one issue where the GOP-led Legislature has dropped the ball this session, it’s in letting the “Right To Work” Amendment (henceforth RTW) proposal languish, apparently to die, in committee.

Rumor coming from the Legislature is that the leadership is afraid that the unions will dump a ton of money into Minnesota to fight legislators who support RTW.   The fact is that the unions are facing a full-court press, with RTW legislation or related campaigns (like the Walker recall) going on in more states than ever before; they’re playing whack-a-mole, and while they have a lot of extorted dues money to spend (just less than half on union members are Republicans; about 8% of unions’ political money goes to GOP candidates), they’re spread thinner than ever before; putting one more piece of legislation out there will spread them thinner.

It’s not like the unions aren’t going to go after swing-y candidates in Minnesota – they already co-own the DFL along with Alita Messinger, and they will conduct a merciless, no-holds-barred, no-boundaries-respected smear campaign of every Republican in this state no matter what’s on the ballot this year.  And in a year or two or three?  The DFL and unions will have re-filled their coffers, and have many, many fewer challenges to deal with, for better or worse.

So if not now, when?  If not here, where?

The fact is, according to sources on Capitol Hill, we are three votes shy of passing this thing, and there are six GOP Senate holdouts. 

Leadership can do something about this. I’m going to urge you to contact the leadership of the House and Senate:

• Rep. Kurt Zellers – Speaker of the House (rep.kurt.zellers@house.mn / 651-296-5502)
• Sen. David Senjem – Senate Majority Leader (sen.david.senjem@senate.mn / 651.296.3903)

Tell them – politely but firmly – that 2/3 of the people in Minnesota, including liberals, including union members, support this legislation.  And so do you.  And you’re a voter.

Later this week, we’ll start talking about the reported holdouts.

To: Ron Paul Supporters, especially in the 4th Congresisonal District
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Your Shot At Making A Real Difference

All,

Some of you know me.  I’m Mitch Berg.  And long before I had a blog, and even longer before I hosted a talk show, and longer-still before I got heavily involved in “establishment” party politics, I was a Libertarian, with a big “L”:.  I even ran for office as a big-“L” Libertarian  – and won a moral, if not literal, victory.

I support liberty.  I also support being in a position to actually affect policy, rather than being an eternal protest-voter.  All of your chanting and zeal witthin the GOP are of no value – zero, nada, zilch – if you don’t have the ability to actually affect policy in the world outside the party.  And while having your guy win the presidency would do that, you also need to push candidates with your worldview into the US House and Senate, Governors and state constitutional offices, state Legislators and Senators, the county commission, city hall, the school board – the stuff you actually have to win if you want the government to, y’know, audit the Fed and stuff.

Which is why I endorsed Paul – Rand Paul, that is – last winter.  Libertarian purism, like any kind of purism, is a fun self-indulgence – and like any self-indulgence, it will have no affect on society around you.

So I have no beef with libertarianism.  I don’t even have so much a beef with Ron Paul, either.  I approve of many of the issues he runs on.  The stuff he wrote 30 years ago is a big problem – don’t kid yourself.  But I want to support him, or at least what he stands for.

The problem, I’m sorry to say, is many of you, his supporters.  Part of it is that so many of you do in fact propose using the power of the executive branch in a way not a lot different than liberals propose using the judicial branch – as a cudgel.

But the bigger part is that, for too many of you, Ron Paul is a personality cult.  I’ve run into too many Paul supporters who support Paul, but can barely articulate what he stands for; indeed, I do a better job of speaking for what Paul believes than they do.

Worse?  Just like four years ago, you flooded GOP precinct caucuses, and are in the process of flooding the BPOU Conventions, and trying to push your delegates on to the CD, State and (you hope) National conventions.  And that’s fine; that’s how the process works.

What’s “worse” is that, like four years ago, so very very very very very many of you will never be seen again after your next round of conventions.  You’ll show up, do your bit for Ron Paul – but not the GOP – and disappear, likely not to be seen again.  There are some exceptions – but they are rare.  Your commitment is to Ron Paul, not to the GOP, even in the context of “Changing the party into a more-libertarian institution in the long term” – with which I’d be completely on board.

And so those of us who have committed to the party – some of you call us “the establishment”, which makes me laugh, since I’ve been a libertarian insurgent in the party for 12 years now, and being “the establishment” means “campaign after campaign of door-knocking, phone-calling and lit-dropping – do feel a bit of resentment, like when you cook a big dinner and some stranger eats the whole thing and doesn’t even say thanks.

Anyway, I’m not here to bag on all you Ronulans.  I’m here, actually, to propose a win-win solution; you get to push liberty, the GOP gets to make inroads in the arena of actually changing policy in a meaningful way.

We have a big opportunity in the Fourth Congressional District.  I’ll take a moment to remind you what the Fourth CD is, since a disturbing number of you Paul supporters have little concept of politics down-ticket from the Presidency.  It’s Betty McCollum’s Congressional District:

It’s been controlled by big-government stooges from the DFL for over sixty years now.

But the latest round of redistricting made it a lot more competitive.  It used to be pretty much Saint Paul – a 70-30 statist-DFL district.  But redistricting added in a bunch of the more-conservative, more liberty-friendly East Metro, including thousands of people who moved to Lake Elmo, Woodbury, Stillwater and Afton to get away from the DFL and the rot they bring.

Now, Tony Hernandez is currently the candidate running for the GOP nomination in the 4th CD.  I’ve interviewed him a couple of times – and the language he uses is the kind of thing that should make you Paul supporters (and me) happy to support him.  Big on liberty, shrinking government – most of the Ron Paul elevator pitch is in there.   Before redistricting, he might have been looking at a 65-35 campaign, if he was lucky.

Now?  The odds are not nearly so quixotic.  With a little luck and a ton of work, it’s doable.

So here’s the deal, Paul supporters; if all of you turn out between now and the election with as much enthusiasm and whiz and vinegar in support of Tony Hernandez – who likely will get nominated, as opposed to Paul – and work your asses off alongside all us “establishment” Republicans?  We might just pull off a miracle.

No, bigger than that.

And not just a miracle in terms of sending Betty McCollum back to work as a receptionist at Alliance for a Better Minnesota; not just a miracle in upending sixty years of statist big-government representation in the 4th CD.

It’ll be a miracle in terms that matter much more, both to you Paul supporters and to the GOP; you’ll have done some real, palpable good in bringing your beliefs to bear in a way that can actually affect policy.

If you’re interested in helping out?  I’ll see you at the conventions.  We’ll have a great time. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and we’ll have fun doing it.

If you’re not? If you’re one of those dolts who believes that by staying home on election day because your candidate didn’t get nominated you actually “send a message” anyone will care about?  It’s not true, by the way – politics, especially at the grassroots level, reflects the will of those who show up.  Not just once, mind you, but every month, every election.  Anyway – yeah, I’ll be working against you.  Totally.

Whaddya say?

That is all.

…the GOP is focused on jobs.

The “MNGOP’s “Reform 2.0” agenda moved forward yesterday with the passage of the “Tax Relief And Job Creation Act”, which passed in the House.

I wish every working Minnesotan could see this bit from yesterday – Rep. Matt Dean tearing chunks out of Ann Lenczewski, who’d just finished demigogueing against the bill:

Pass it around.

This is going to come up in the Senate soon. And while it’s not as sexy and sound-biteable as the Marriage Amendment or Voter ID, it’s much more important for Minnesota’s long-term future, especially for the parts of Minnesota that actually work.

We’ll keep you posted.

Janet Dailey, writing in the Telegraph, notes British Minister of the Exchequer George Osborne’s visit to the US, along with Prime Minister David Cameron.

“George who, minister of what?”

George Osborne.  The “Minister of the Exchequer” is what they call their “Secretary of the Treasury” over there.

Anyway, Dailey – who is a center-right columnist at the center-right Telegraph (yaaay, Europe, for at least having a journo culture that’s honest about its biases!),  notes something that eludes our entire media and one, and sometimes both, of America’s major poitical parties:

This brings me to my original theme: why America’s recovery – which will eventually come, as night follows day – cannot be an instantly usable model for a British one, which is not inevitable. It is not federal governments that bring about economic revival in America: it is the country’s people.

From Daily’s pen to God’s ears.

John McCain got pounded by the media and America’s Stupid Class for saying, in 2008, that the fundamentals of the American economy were strong.  As wrong as he was, and is, on so many issues, he had that one as right as anyone ever has.

Because the only relationship our economy has with our government is a negative one.  Government action inevitably harms the economy (in the long run, if usually but not always the short).  It’s only when government butts out that it does no harm, which is the best it can do.

Even Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal has finally been demythologised. All those works projects and federal programmes may have done something for national morale, but the hard economic evidence shows that the worst effects of the 1929 crash had begun to abate under Herbert Hoover, and that the Great Depression (which was arguably prolonged by FDR’s policies) did not properly end until the US entered the Second World War.

That’s the elephant in the American economic room.

We’ve got four generations of economists, now, who pay obeisance to the flawed notion that Keynesianism worked, once.

It’s wrong, of course; as Dailey notes, it was a morale booster that arguably did more harm than good, and certainly prolonged the period of extended private unemployment.

No – America’s nine economic lives come from its private sector.

Read Dailey’s entire piece.

Send it to a liberal friend.  Make a liberal friend to send it to, if you need to.

This just in:  Astroturf protesters heckled Mary Franson in the House Ag Committee, trying to overturn the 2010 election results by demanding her resignation over their context-mangled attack on her.  (The issue was in danger of fading from the headlines; the left can’t afford that)

Here’s her response – emphasis added:

Intimidation and bullying are hallmarks of the far left. The protesters here today exemplify the abusive nature of their political involvement by demanding my resignation and silence. They don’t engage on the tragedy of dependency and poverty because they have no solutions, only threats and theatrics.

No one is fooled or persuaded by these Alinsky tactics and far from resigning, these astro turf events only make me more committed to helping the poor out of poverty. My constituents support my efforts to change that status quo. The public knows stunts when it sees one and today’s orchestrated, manufactured “protests” are just that.

Mary Franson

The poor aren’t animals – but huge swathes of the DFL are a bunch of hyenas.

Mary is under a lot of fire right now – and it’s becoming more and more depraved.  She could use a call from some real Minnesotans, supporting her.

To: Dave Senjem, Kurt Zellers and the rest of the Legislative GOP Caucuses
From: Mitch Berg, Conservative Pugilist Without Portfolio
Re: WTF?

I was talking with a fairly prominent GOP/conservative activist the other day.  He noted that some of you are getting squishy on some core conservative issues – specifically “Right To Work”.

You’re nervous about the amount of money the “labor” movement is going to spend against against you this fall if you pursue this issue.

My question:  If not now, when?  The “labor” movement is spread incredibly thin this year; they’re fighting “Right to Work” in a slew of states, all of them “must-wins” for them.  They have a lot of ill-gotten money, it’s true – but they’ll be playing whack-a-mole in a whole bunch of legislatures.  Next session, and 2014, they will not be.

You were sent to Saint Paul in an epic reversal of fortune from the previous two cycles; you went from plucky but almost irrelevant minority to solid majority in one election.

I’m going to suggest to you that the voters didn’t do that because of anything connoted with the term “Republican Party of MInnesota”, or because they wanted Lori Sturdevant to approve of you.  They threw out the Democrats because you took a courageous stance on the stump, and convinced the voters that they didn’t want Democrats passing the laws.

They did it because the Cauci proposed to change things in this state, and the voters believed them.

So deliver.

That is all.

Can you feel the Romnentum?  Me neither.

Following his wins in Michigan, Arizona, Maine & Wyoming, Mitt Romney has at least regained the aura of a front-runner and silenced the punditry’s Opium dreams of a contested convention, for now.  But with Tuesday the grandest night of the GOP presidential contest calendar (466 delegates are up for grabs; kinda…let’s not talk about unpledged caucuses for a moment), the chance for the race to be changed awaits voters in 10 states.

• Ohio (primary):  The center stage of this delegate-rich Mardi Gras night, Ohio is seen not just as the fulcrum on which the outcome of the race pivots, but also the competing narratives of the two major candidates.  The meme of Mitt Romney’s aloofness from white working class voters has been certainly been strengthened by the candidate’s repeated gaffes on his wealth, yet Romney and Santorum tied among voters without secondary education.  Santorum’s choosing of Michigan as his challenging ground was due entirely to the supposed demographic resemblance to the blue-collar communities that Santorum successfully rallied to win his congressional and Senate seats.  Fitting neatly into the Rust Belt, Ohio should be attractive Santorum territory.  And by RCP averages, it is as Santorum leads there by 8.3%.  But who needs Ohio more?  Karl Rove argues that Santorum needs the state to even survive politically while Romney can afford at least a narrow loss.  That may be true from a delegate standpoint (all of Santorum’s wins have been from unpledged delegate states), but determining who truly needs the headlines of a Ohio victory is easier to see by looking around at the rest of the March 6th primary states.
• Oklahoma (primary):  The raging wheat must sure smell sweat to Santorum who holds a 43%-22% lead over Gingrich in the state as Romney only manages 18%.  Santorum’s team has identified Oklahoma as one of his “must win” states in addition to Ohio and…
• Tennessee (primary):  Santorum is poised for a crushing victory here, holding an RCP average of 19.5% over Romney.  In both cases, even if Santorum’s numbers drop, he’s still positioned to win comfortably and dent the meme that he can only win caucus states.  Does Santorum run the risk of looking too much like a regional candidate (don’t be surprised for the media to suddenly declare Oklahoma a classic “southern” state)?  Perhaps, if he can’t win another state on Super Tuesday.
• Alaska, North Dakota & Idaho (caucuses):  Well, so much for that Santorum concern.  All three are likely to fall into Santorum’s camp, despite Romney rolling out the lion’s share of party endorsements in North Dakota (because that worked so well in Minnesota).  There isn’t reliable polling on any of these three states, and even if there was, caucus polling is one step short of political alchemy.  The only real concern Santorum should have is whether the media will treat victories in these states as significant.  Santorum’s poised to win the most states on Super Tuesday, but not necessarily the most delegates.  Which becomes the headline Wednesday morning?  Because Romney isn’t going home empty-handed.
• Virginia (primary):  Yes, Virginia, there is a primary on Super Tuesday.  It lives in the hearts of all Republican activists, because frankly, there isn’t much of a contest.  It’s Romney versus Paul, and since Paul has about as much of a chance of winning a state as attacking Romney in a debate, Romney’s winning in a walk.  Unfortunately for Mitt, that’s exactly how the press will treat his win.
• Massachusetts (primary):  A contest in Romney’s actual home state isn’t going to be as close as Michigan.  As of the last poll, Romney holds 63% of the vote.  If his night doesn’t go well, fully except Team Romney to crow about the margin – and that the media won’t care.
• Vermont (primary):  At last, a vote Romney is expected to win that isn’t either A) missing one or more of his opponents or B) a state that he’s declared residency in at some point.  Unfortunately, that state is Vermont and even more unfortunately, Romney only holds a 7% lead.  That was at the height of Santorumania and Rick isn’t making a serious bid here, meaning Romney is likely to win by more.
• Georgia (primary):  Somewhat oddly, the biggest delegate prize of the night (76 in all) has among the least amount of attention of the larger Super Tuesday states.  That’s of course because most pundits have assumed that Newt Gingrich will win despite his RCP average of 9% (created by two polls that show him with double-digit leads against two that show a neck-and-neck race).  The night could very well end with Gingrich holding the second-most pledged delegates while being discussed as an afterthought.  Gingrich has hinged his campaign on a southern strategy, despite his relative lack of southern cultural cues.  Newt won’t driven out of the race if he only wins Georgia, believing that victories in upcoming Alabama and Mississippi are not only possible, but will change the trajectory of the race.  Instead, he’ll likely cost Santorum several states he could have won post Tuesday, muddling the non-Romney waters.

So who needs Ohio more?  The answer would seem to be Romney.  Losing 6 of 10 states on Super Tuesday isn’t the performance of a front-runner.  Losing 7 of 10, including a major November bellweather, isn’t even the campaign of a significant challenger.

The Dems are crowing about the drop in unemployment numbers.

But if you look a little further into the numbers, you see that the American job market is not better off than it was four years ago.  Indeed, it’s a lot worse.

On Inauguration Day in 2009, when Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent (up from 4.4% as recently as May of 2007).  Notwithstanding his promises that Porkulus would cap unemployment at 8.5%, it soared to 10% in October of 2009, and didn’t dip down below 9% in any sustained way until last fall.  Last month, after three years of Obama, it was at 8.3% – or .2% lower than where he said it’d never get above if we spent what he proposed.

That’s bad.

“But 8.3% is better than 10%, right?”

Sure – if all you’re doing is comparing numbers straight-up.  But by itself, the unemployment rate is meaningless.  It’s a percentage of people out of work – but who are those people?  They are the ones that are participating in the labor market.

And fewer Americans than ever -ever! – are doing that!

So let’s figure the actual percentage of Americans working, overall.

January 2009: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Workforce Participation rate when Obama took office was 65.7%.  That means 34.3% of the workforce wasn’t even trying to participate, through discouragement, disability or whatever case.  Add to that the 7.8% unemployed, and you reach a figure of 57.1% of the American workforce actually working.

October 2009:  At this point, the “low point” of the Obama recession, the participation rate was an even 65% just in time for unemployment to hit an even 10%.,  55% of the American work force was working.

January, 2012:  As unemployment stood at 8.3%, the workforce participation rate was 63.7% – the lowest since records have been kept.  That means that overall employment in the American workforce is now a whopping…

…55.2%.

That’s a fifth of a percent higher than it was at the lowest point of the Obama recession.

Almost two full points lower than it was when Barack Obama took office. 

(And five full points lower than June of 2003, the worst month of George W. Bush’s before the GOP lost the Congress.  That’s five percent lower employment overall.  Six and change if you take one of Bush’s better months.  And I know, Bush benefitted from a bubble, yadda yadda.  But…five points!).

The media is spinning nonstop about the “Obama recovery”.  It’s vapor; in terms of percentage of the American workforce actually working, there is no recovery.

Are you better off than you were four years ago, America?  No – you’re doing two percent worse.