From a local list-server; a Minnesota small businessman has had enough:

Being born in Minnesota, I have always been proud to claim this state as my home, but no more. After experiencing the never-ending social politics and nanny state liberal policies unfold year after year, I realize that Minnesota is on a fast path to destruction in the name of all things liberal and socialistic. Our politicians somehow feel entitled to continually spend money they don’t have because the can simply stick their hands in our pockets whenever they want more. The taxes in this state are incredible, yet we are continually expected to keep paying more and more in order to redistribute the wealth of the productive working class.  The stream of social and welfare benefits never seems to end. Somehow, those of us who continually struggle to get ahead; to get a good education, and work hard to support our families are deemed as being “blessed by opportunities” and therefore somehow owe something back to society.  I am not buying into this nonsense.

            The opportunities I have had were self created through hard work, personal struggle and sacrifice, hardship and came at great risk. There has never been a handout for me. I have earned what I achieved and worked incredibly hard for what I have.  And yet, the more I struggle and work towards being a productive member of society, the more I am taxed and viewed as somehow being privileged. Due to our current state of economic affairs in this country, we are all struggling to get by. We are all working harder and making sacrifices. Yet our politicians, especially in Minnesota continually prove they have no common sense to grasp basic economics 101, or they simply don’t care. We are on the path towards never ending tax and spend. Minnesota is continually hitting small business in the pockets through increased taxes, fees and regulations. And yet, we are somehow expected to standby and “pay our fair share” while the same politicians choose to frivolously spend more and more of our money on self serving interests in the name of social welfare or to further their careers.

            Well Minnesota…I am done!  I am no longer sticking around to support those that continually look for a free hand-out and those that seek to make their “self proclaimed rights” my burden. I am taking my productivity elsewhere and refusing to play the social redistribution of wealth game. I owe no one for my opportunities and success but God and family. I will create opportunities for those around me elsewhere, and will contribute towards productivity that serves to reward those willing to put it all on the line and take personal risk.  In a sense, I am now one of these former Minnesotans that has had enough and taking my money and labor out of this state. As more and more businesses and hard working individuals (and yes, the wealthy included) choose to leave this state and relocate to other states that are more business friendly and less tax happy, maybe Minnesotan voters will wake up and realize that one day, no one will be left to fund their socialistic welfare programs. Who will they tax then?

            So, while I guess we can not choose where we are born, we can choose where we decide to live. In the next month, I will be shutting down my Minnesota [business].  It has been a fun run while it lasted and I really enjoyed being a member of this list.  You are all great people and as [small businesspeople], taking huge risks every day in this state. Thank you all for your support over the years. This list is a great resource and I will miss participating in the future. I look forward to hopefully meet many of you in Duluth in a few weeks, even if you don’t agree with my view points.  Best wishes to you all.

(P.S. I know the country is not doing much better lately either, but once a professional soldier,, always a professional soldier.  I refuse to leave the USA.) 

It’s a big step – the ultimate one, really, in terms of voicing displeasure over state politics.  But it’s a long American tradition; if your neighbors get too stupid for you, strike out for the wilderness.

It’s more tempting all the time.

The Detroit Public Schools are pondering bankruptcy, swamped by (let me know if any of this sounds familiar) the combination of lowered demand for their product and mushrooming expenses, including pensions for long-retired employees:

A decision on whether to file for protection under federal bankruptcy laws will be by the end of the northern summer, according to Robert Bobb, Detroit Puablic Schools’ emergency financial manager. Such a filing would be unprecedented.But in Detroit — where US Education Secretary Arne Duncan dubbed the school system a “national disgrace” — politicians and bankruptcy experts see few alternatives, given the deep financial challenges confronting the district and the state.

“Am I optimistic that they can avoid it …? I am not,” said Ray Graves, a retired bankruptcy judge who has been advising Mr Bobb in recent weeks.

As with GM and Chrysler, bankruptcy may not be the worst thing for Detroit’s schools. A filing under Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code, which covers public entities such as school districts and municipalities, would allow the district to put major creditors, including textbook publishers, private bus operators and utility DTE Energy, in line for payment.

Some experts say the Detroit case could be the first in a string of Chapter 9 bankruptcies among school districts and other public entities battered by the economic crisis, and it could help shape that area of the law.

The various teachers’ unions – which long ago replaced the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers as the pre-eminent union political power in the United States – have been busy doing to the education industry what the UAW did for GM.  Indeed, the benefits – especially the pension – have long been always been the main economic reason to go into teaching.  But with inner-city public school district enrollments plummeting, both from demographic shifts and parents voting with their feet, the promises schools made to teachers in the sixties and seventies are going to prove to the untenable.

And it’s not just for Detroit anymore; it’s in Minnesota too:

Some Minnesota school districts may have to go into debt to pay for the rising cost of health care for their retired employees.Local Minnesota governments have until October to sell bonds — without a public referendum — to help pay for retired employees’ health care. But with the economy in the tank, some people are unhappy about paying higher property taxes to fund someone else’s health benefits.

The retirees’ health policy costs fall under something accountants call OPEB — Other than Pension Employee Benefits. OPEB obligations, especially for health care, are really starting to put the squeeze on school districts statewide.

So – ballooning obligations fobbed off on future generations, demand for product decreased by ruinous economic policies; future generations left holding the bag.  Sound familiar?

Back in 2002, a couple of unnamed conservatives walked into the State Green Party Convention on a lark, got themselves seated (because “credentials” were, at the time, an authoritarian paternalistic relic of fascism, apparently), and nominated former Marine fighter pilot Ed McGaa – a firebreathing property rights conservative and absolute anti-Green – for governor.  Hilarity ensued; McGaa, who was not present at the convention, won the nomination.  Afterwards, he got in on the joke, running an extremely tongue-in-cheek campaign while the Greens gradually realized they’d been had, went through a cataclysmic soul-searching, and finally tossed him and ran perennial pest Ken Pentel.  McGaa, tongue in cheek or not, might have done better. 

It was a joke that got out of hand. 

It looks like the joke got paid back this weekend.

While I’m deliriously happy about Eva Ng – a genuine conservative and person with the kind of vision my city needs – running for Mayor of Saint Paul, it’s not all roses.

The Minneapolis GOP has endorsed “Papa” John Kolstad.  Kolstad, a DFLer who left the party because “centrism” frustrated him, next ran for the Attorney General slot as a Greenie (note to pretty much anyone; the presence of “Papa” in a political stage name is always always always a bad sign).

And now – since the Greens have lost major-party status – he’s “running as a Republican”.

Kolstad has run for a DFL state senate seat and Atty. General (Green Party endorsed). His reasons for running for Atty General in 2006: http://dailyjam.blogspot.com/2006/06/minnesota-green-party-slate-of-2006.html

First, Becky Lourey has said she would bring the National Guard troops home from Iraq. Kolstad would use the attorney general’s office to assist her in that cause.

Second, as a strong supporter of Single Payer Health Insurance, Kolstad would continue the work Hatch has done in holding insurance company executives’ feet to the fire. He would also fight any legal challenges to Single Payer waged by the insurance companies.

Third, he would use the attorney general’s office to fight on behalf of the environment. If you are creating greenhouse gases by driving a gas guzzler, you should pay for it. He suspects collusion between coal companies and electric companies, and he’d like to investigate that. How can electric companies charge rate-payers to pay farmers not to use wind turbines to generate safe, renewable energy? He’d like to look into that.

Look, the GOP is a big tent, but this is lunacy. 

And while I’ve led the Twin Cities’ punditry in trying to welcome the Ron Paul supporters to the party, we have to draw the line at nominating a crypto-maoist like Kolstad.  Word has it that it was the Ronulans on the Minneapolis City Committee that pushed the decidedly non-conservative, non-Republican Kolstad through the process. 

Rules is rules.  Elections go to those who show up.  Duly noted.

But it is time for actual Republicans to take their party back in Minneapolis.  Somehow we in Saint Paul managed to incorporate the energy and vitality of the Paulbots, without losing our conservative souls.  Minneapolis needs to do the same.

Minneapolis Republicans; you need to rise up and condem this theft of your party by – words fail me – enemies of what you believe in.

Grace Kelly at Minnesota Tragedy of Spyrochaetal Paresis “Progressive” Project lets us in on a key facet in the liberal psyche:

They really do believe money grows on trees! 

She assails Governor Pawlenty’s unallotment process:

Perhaps here is why many people thought that unallotment was an empty threat! Balancing the budget through unallotment would violate the rules under which federal dollars match state dollars, resulting in loss of federal matching dollars beyond the unallotment. In this case that meant $72 million of lost federal funding beyond the unallotment.

Right.  That means there’s $72 million dollars that taxpayers in Rhode Island, New Mexico and Mississippi won’t have to fork over to be spent here in Minnesota.

The amount of $72 million comes from Commissioner Hanson’s letter. Check out the copy of MN Government letter from Hanson. An short excerpt is highlighted here from Appendix A.

In a dismal budget year, there’s $72 million that America’s hard-working men and women can keep and spend on things that actually help the economy.

All Republican Governor Pawlenty had to do was come to the bargaining table and give up something to reach a better overall outcome to keep that $72 Million in federal matching funds. I guess what was best for Minnesota would not have made a good sound bite in Pawlenty’s 2012 campaign speeches!

This is one of those things that astounds liberals; it never occurs to them that anyone would want or need to behave differently than a liberal.

Grace (and everyone like her)!  Governor Pawlenty was elected because he was an alternative to irresponsible, economy-leaching, blood-sucking tax-and-spenders!

And then re-elected – almost alone among his GOP constitutional officers – on exactly the same platform!

And if he has any Presidential ambitions, it’s not going to be as someone who grabs his ankles when the DFL tells him to (in the interest of “bipartisanship”, after all); it’ll be because he’s a sharp alternative to the Democrats nationwide.

Thank you, Governor Pawlenty.  If we could hitch heat collectors to the collective brain of Minnesota’s DFL to catch the exhaust heat from all that cognitive dissonance, we could all cut our heating bills 25%.

This one popped up in the comment section yesterday – but I figured it was worth asking here (although I know nobody will answer it).

For years, John McCain was the one Republican who could reach across the aisle.  From Democrats across the spectrum – from relative moderates, like my Dad (who once said he could have brought himself to vote for Mac) to moderately-sane liberals – said that McCain was someone they could get behind.  His American Conservative Union lifetime rating of just below seventy confirmed this: Mac’s correct stances on the budget and defense notwithstanding, he was no doctrinaire conservative.
And then, the moment he got nominated, he became “a radical conservative”.

Now, I understand that during the campaign the Tics will say whatever it takes; if the GOP had nominated Mother Teresa or Dennis Kucinich, they’d have called either of them “radical conservatives”, too.

But now that the campaign is over, you still see some of the left’s talkingpointbots repeating “McCain ran to the right!  He became too conservative!” in an endless loop, like a piece of computer code with no exception handling.

So Democrats – how, exactly, did McCain “become to conservative”?  And I’m talking policy statements, here – none of this “he picked Sarah Palin” BS, because he picked Palin to bolster his conservative support.  Because he was lagging.  Because he had not run to the right.

So anyway.  ‘spain away.

This I gotta hear.

Last month our Supreme Leader was quoted as saying “I’m not naive,” words that history will make famous some day. His advisors, being liberals, have only one lever to pull. Having pulled it harder than its ever been pulled before and to no avail, their advice?

The U.S. should consider drafting a second stimulus package focusing on infrastructure projects because the $787 billion approved in February was “a bit too small,” said Laura Tyson, an adviser to President Barack Obama.

“A bit too small.” Who are these people? Should it have had an “eency weency bit more pork?” Doubling it would not incent businesses to hire new employees right now or convince consumers to stop saving and start spending (hey, they’re smarter than the people they elected – maybe there is Hope^®).

The Obama stimulus already is the New Larger Size version of the failed Bush stimulus. Remember?

Hmm, what sort of policy would have incented hiring and spending? That’s a tough one. Anyone?

“The economy is worse than we forecast on which the stimulus program was based,” Tyson, who is a member of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory board, told the Nomura Equity Forum. “We probably have already 2.5 million more job losses than anticipated.”

Let me tweak that comment for you Ms. Tyson: “The economy is worse than we forecast because of the stimulus program.” Washington D.C. should be renamed “Ground Zero.”

The stimulus program will result in higher inflation and will require higher taxes. The anticipation of both is already putting pressure on businesses, who will continue to run as lean as they can for a long, long time. In fact, business owners are in fear of the government’s next move. Employees know this. The trickle-down effect is that even those that have jobs are hoarding cash and cutting expenditures.

Not very stimulating.

Maybe we should follow the MAC’s proposed signage plan and apply it to the economy. Let’s put up $2 Million signs everywhere “Be Happy. Spend Money.”

Tyson, 62, later told reporters that the U.S. can afford to pay for a second package, even as the fiscal deficit soars. She said the budget shortfall is “likely to be worse” than the equivalent of 12 percent of gross domestic product that the administration forecast for 2009 and the 8 percent to 9 percent it projected for next year.

We can “afford to pay” is an egregious choice of words given the fact that no one is “paying” – we are borrowing. I suppose her assessment is based on the fact that China hasn’t canceled our Visa card yet.

Tyson said the U.S. should shift away from its dependence on consumption to grow, and promote expansion through investment and exports. The dollar will need to weaken in the longer term to promote export-led growth, she said.

So, we shouldn’t consume, but let’s hope the rest of the world does? Remember kids what liberals mean when they say “investment?” I wonder how my Social Security “investments” are doing?

I think you’ve done enough to weaken the dollar in the long term Ms. Tyson. Thank you.

The Obama administration and its advisors are not naive; they know exactly what they are doing. They are holding the economy hostage until they get their way, executing an agenda despite its effects on the economy and leaving the “fixing” to the next administration.

In 2008, 34 Million passengers traveled via Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport.

Faced with complaints that an estimated 20,000 people show up at the wrong terminal each year, MAC has been considering proposals to change the terminal names on the signs and list the airlines that fly out of each terminal.

In 2008, 34 Million passengers traveled via Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport.

If 20,000 people can’t make it to the right terminal, that’s 0.059%; less than six in ten thousand people.

The price tag to make sure people get to the right terminal at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has soared to $2.2 million, more than twice the original estimate.

When the revised proposal goes before the committee, Hogan predicted that the new cost estimate will be a consideration in how the vote goes. “But in the big scheme of things, we just spent $3 billion to improve the airport, and if there are still people having trouble getting to the right terminal, that’s a small price to pay.”

The last sentence of that paragraph is rather demonstrative as to why government shouldn’t be in business, health care – or running airports for that matter.

In 2008, 34 Million passengers traveled via Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport.

Over 90,000 people travel through our airport per day. 20,000 per year can’t discern the difference between “Lindberg” and “Humphrey.”

34,000,000

vs.

20,000

Managing to the exception needlessly costs taxpayers and travelers.

There will always be percentage of people who can’t figure out where they’re going and as the percentages get smaller, the resources to required to remedy the CRISIS(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) increase exponentially. Spending $2.2M of OPM is easy when there is no accountability; no career repercussions for spending resources foolishly.

An expenditure judged to be a waste in a well-run corporation is deemed an “investment” by government.

“…the President said in an interview not that long ago ‘We are out of money’ with all due respect Mr. President, if we’re out of money, quit spending it!”

…also, at about nine minutes in, Pawlenty shares what he thinks of the President’s performance six months in and calls out the “Stimulus” Bill and the Federal Government’s encroachment into private industry.

I watched TresSec Geithner on Jim Lehrer the other night (the video is available in the link below as well) and thought the following interchange (emphasis mine) said so much about the elitist arrogance and stupefying lack of practical experience that the Obama administration represents, from the very top down.

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: In the financial sector, the financial markets require well-designed regulation. We did not have well-designed regulation. We had the worst financial crisis in generations because of basic failures in the design of regulation.

…

JIM LEHRER: Finally, President Obama said yesterday that the real cause of all of this was a culture of irresponsibility. You’ve worked in and around the financial industry for years. How would you describe that, what that culture was? What caused it?

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: I’ve never worked in the financial industry, just to say. I’ve always worked in public service and the government.

That’s okay, Timmy. Your boss hasn’t even done that. But there are some really well-organized communities in Chicago now.

Silly Mr. Lehrer for thinking the man charged with regulating our nation’s financial system might actually have worked in it (or paid his taxes for that matter – he must have skipped that chapter whilst basking in academia).

How unremarkable is it that a man who has spent his entire life working in government fails to see that in fact government overreach was the cause of this crisis, and is now the root of it’s persistence.

His prescription? More of the same. Just “designed” better.

Polls are polls which is to say one needs to take their assertions “under advisement,” taking into account who is behind them, etc. One troubling trend of late is that much of the Obama administration’s agenda seems to be more and more out of touch with the majority of Americans as depicted in a series of recent polls.

As a gearhead, I came across another such poll:

America’s “Cash for Clunkers” bill is on the cusp of being signed by President Obama, but according to a new survey by Rasmussen Reports, a majority of U.S. citizens aren’t in favor of the plan.

…not that Obama’s agenda is correlated in any way with what is best for America…or Americans. Obama thinks taxpayers want to spend more money our country doesn’t have to sell cars that people apparently still want so they can buy new cars that they don’t want right now either, from an industry where the taxpayer has already invested billions to buy the biggest domestic player.

According to the telephone survey, fully 54% of those queried are against the measure, while 35% are in favor and 12% aren’t sure how they feel about it. That’s up from a similar survey done last month, in which just 34% were against consumer vouchers for trading in older, less efficient cars and trucks. In fairness, Rasmussen Reports indicates that the change could have been influenced by a change in the wording of the respective surveys (the initial survey did not indicate how much the program might cost the government).

So, not unlike the President’s socialized health plan, there are those that are for it in theory (and in the minority) but when the promoters thereof have to account for the cost, support wanes.

Perhaps most interesting of all is news that many Americans would appear to have little faith in the ability of the government to help General Motors improve its fortunes, with 41% expecting for GM’s quality to deteriorate under federal ownership. (Presumably, this leaves 59% of those surveyed that feel otherwise or are undecided). Perhaps more damaging is that the study’s findings say that fully 57% of those questioned believe that the government is likely to pass laws and regulations that give Chrysler and General Motors unfair advantages over other automakers that did not receive bailout funds.

General Motors’ quality has markedly improved of late. Nonetheless it is by no means is on par across the board with the Japanese competition. As such, it’s not an area where GM can afford to backslide.

You can always buy a Honda and avoid this debacle, which is to say the consumer still has a choice. But substitute Obama’s government trespass du jour, “Socialized Health Care,” for “General Motors” in the passage above, and the stakes go way up, and there will be no going back; no alternative for consumers.

Led by the President, liberal lawmakers are working feverishly to trim their proposal down to a trillion dollars, to reform a health care system that covers most of us and that most of us are satisfied with to offer a theoretical system that will cover less of us and will almost surely degrade the quality and accessability of care. The proposal has less support now than when Hillary Clinton gave it a go.

…and yet the President persists here as well. So much for the theory that an Obama Presidency would be driven more by ambition that ideology as it is clear now that agenda has little regard for the times we are in or the people he represents.

Here’s a unique unique visualization of the 46 states (plus the DC) that are running budget deficits this year.

California’s is not only disproportionally huge, but works out to around $1.000 per capita.  Minnesota’s is a little lighter – about $600 per person (before the Governor’s unallotment, not included in the graphic, takes hold). 

The four states missing from the graph?  The low-tax, low-“service” states run by conservatives (whose education systems generally keep pace with Minnesota’s vaunted system, and clobber the bejeebers out of California, New York, New Jersey and Massachussetts’): North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Alaska; South Dakota’s deficit comes to around $60 per South Dakotan, so it’s close.

Conrad DeFiebre is not one of the bad ones, as a general rule, as far as media types are concerned.  While he was a Strib writer for about 600 years, he was also one of the reporters that could tell a balanced, fair story.  He was the first reporter from either of the dailes (to say nothing the TV statiosn) to be bothered with reporting the actual facts on the Concealed Carry debate back in the nineties.  For that, I’ve personally given credit where it was due, not that anyone cares.

Long story short:  He’s always been a good reporter.

But these days he works for MN2020, the regional “non-partisan” “progressive” think tank.  Which is apropos not much, except that for someone whose gig has been telling entire, complete stories for his entire career, he kinda, well, doesn’t.

His latest piece is called “Conservatives “Re-Writing History”

; I’ll direct you to read the piece to find any examples of history at all, much less conservatives “re-writing” it.

Opposition to modern transit development may be on the wane in most parts of Minnesota,

“May” it be?  Well, I guess we have to take Mr. DeFiebre’s word for it.  Perhaps he knows of a Minnesota Poll on the subject?

but it’s alive and well in one surprising location: The Minnesota History Center in St. Paul.

“Light rail is an expensive investment without return except as an exercise in chest-thumping to make a city feel like it’s in the big leagues.”

That’s a quote from Lyle Wray, former Citizens League executive director, posted in big letters in the history center’s long-running transportation exhibit “Going Places: The Mystique of Mobility.” It enjoys equal billing with more mildly-worded praise of light rail in the display’s vintage Soo Line boxcar.

OK, so we have a qualitative judgment about the “mildness” or, I dunno, “spiciness” of wording?

I’ll let that pass.

What’s worse, an accompanying video clip features half a dozen anti-light rail comments, some from anonymous on-the-street interviewees, some from inveterate transit bashers at the Taxpayers League of Minnesota.

Er – so what?  Isn’t it refreshing that the Minnesota History Center,noted conservative tools that they are (note to non-Minnesotans: they are not; they are more given to hagiographic treatment of old labor and Farmor/Labor Party organizers) actually presents both sides of a story?

Does MN2020 have a problem with that?

Oh,wait.

I digress.  My question:  Where is history, and its conservative re-write?

Worse yet, the exhibit also includes plenty of promotion of personal rapid transit, a thoroughly failed technology that has been embraced by both the rabid right and the lunatic left, mainly as a foil to responsible transit proposals.

“Rabid”?  “Lunatic?”  Such invective from a…reporter?  Why, it’s almost as if DeFiebre is getting talking points from…someone with an ax to grind?
And let’s be clear: Personal Rapid Transit seems to be a rather pie-in-the-sky proposal that’d crisscross cities with small rails for tiny, taxi-like rail cars whose destinations could be programmed for anywhere on the system, rather than shuttling back and forth on a single line.  It’s utterly un-tested, and it’s the kind of thing that draws all sorts of fawning resolutions at caucus-time demanding government support, and its cost estimates (which are usually about 10% those of light rail lines per rail mile) strike this tech/engineering industry hanger-on as hopelessly pollyannaish.

But “Thoroughly failed?”  It can not “thorougly fail” unless it’s been “thorougly tested”.

But that kind of invective on an utterly speculative subject like PRT?  Why that can only mean one thing:

Minneapolis artist, activist and blogger Ken Avidor tipped me off…

[scraaaaatch]

Ken “Avidor” Weiner is indeed a blogger.  He’s an “artist” of sorts as well – the only “cartoonist” in the Twin Cities less talented that Swiftee.  But he’s indeed an “activist” for light rail; so active, indeed, that he felt he needed at least two of him.

Note to Conrad DeFiebre: you might wanna pick better sources for this stuff.  Not that “Sources” matter so much in your new career – clearly John Fitzgerald is mushy on the subject – but still.

But yet again, I digress.

The post is a puff piece about the wonders of light rail, and how short-sheeted they allegedly are in the MHS presenation on the subject.

So where is the the ballyhooed “conservative rewrite of history?”  It’s the present.  And the issue of “is light rail a boon or a doggle” is very, very Very, VERY, VERY much in the balance.

Because even if oil runs out tomorrow, the free market will have developed a hydrogen-powered car (the ultimate Personal Rapid Transit) and a network of nuclear powered hydro stations long before government will have built rails to haul the gray, lumpen hordes of proles about.

…because President Obama conveniently failed to say “Americans.” In the spirit of creating crises that ostensibly only larger government can solve…as long as we’re counting the “uninsured”…I know there are a great many other living beings that aren’t insured too.

The administration uses the “46 million uninsured” as a reason to nationalize health care. But the Census Bureau says about a fifth of those aren’t U.S. citizens. In fact, a goodly number are illegal aliens.

According to “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” a Census Bureau report published last August, of the 45.6 million persons in the U.S. that did not have health insurance at some point in 2007, 9.7 million, or about 21%, were not U.S. citizens.

“Being uninsured is a transitory state, since most uninsured Americans [emphasis mine-JR] are only without coverage for a short time.”…only 19 million Americans go without insurance for a full year.

If we work real hard, enlist our nation’s Neighborhood Organizers^®, and count house pets for example, we might find close to “100 Million Uninsured” if we discretely drop the “people” moniker altogether.

Subtract noncitizens and those who can afford their own insurance but choose not to purchase it, and the number of uninsured falls dramatically. “Many Americans are uninsured by choice,”

…but what about house plants! People talk to their plants, which means they have feelings, which means they suffer, which means they have a right to access affordable health care. Since most plants don’t have legs, we need to provide transportation as well.

Now we’ve got ourselves a crisis!…that only government can solve!

…that I, a young liberal who believed in the left in my adolescent way (but was starting to sour on Jimmy Carter) was mortified that Margaret Thatcher had become the Prime Minister in the UK.

And then came Reagan.

Now, I don’t believe history repeats.  But after a couple of years when Europe has moved to the right with elections in Germany, France and Italy showing a center-right swing (by Euro standards, naturally), and a likely big conservative pickup in the next elections in the UK, it’s good to see the trend picking up speed across the continent:

Conservatives raced toward victory in some of Europe’s largest economies Sunday as initial results and exit polls showed voters punishing left-leaning parties in European parliament elections in France, Germany and elsewhere.Some right-leaning parties said the results vindicated their reluctance to spend more on company bailouts and fiscal stimulus amid the global economic crisis.

First projections by the European Union showed center-right parties would have the most seats — between 263 and 273 — in the 736-member parliament. Center-left parties were expected to get between 155 to 165 seats.

Of course, there are no real parallels with the seventies just yet; America was ready to come out of the miasma of post-Vietnam trauma, Watergate and stagflation when Reagan came on the scene; I don’t know that America’s really woken up to the hangover from it’s last electoral tantrum yet.

But give it time.

…someone who can smack down the lefties with style, like Friedman did here.

And to be fair, the left could use a pundit with half the class Donahue had back then.  As comical as Donahue could be, neither Olberman nor Matthew were fit to carry his gig bag.

CAFE standards and the UAW hobbled the US auto industry…Barack Obama is here to finish the job.

Eric Ostermeier at Smart Pollitics (a Humphrey Institute joint) notes that more voters are identifying themselves as “conservatives”:

While the last two election cycles have seen Upper Midwestern Republicans lose seats in state legislatures, lose seats to the U.S. House, and lose statewide elections for the U.S. Senate and the presidency, the conservative brand seems to be catching fire once again.A Smart Politics analysis of more than 160 polls conducted in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin finds that the percentage of residents identifying themselves as having a conservative political ideology has been on the rise in each state since 2007.

The story – which you should read in its entirety – notes that conservative identification dropped starting in about 2005, and of course helped lead to last year’s debacle:

In 2005, one-third (33.4 percent) of Minnesota residents identified themselves as conservative, in a yearly aggregation of SurveyUSA polling data. That number was slightly higher for conservatives in Wisconsin (36.0 percent) and Iowa (36.6 percent).

In 2006, the percentage of Minnesotans identifying as conservatives plunged 5.3 points (15.9 percent) to just 28.1 percent of Gopher State residents. Self-identified conservatives in Iowa also declined by 5.1 points (13.9 percent) to 31.5 percent that year, with the largest drop occurring in Wisconsin, with a 6.1-point decline (16.9 percent) to 29.9 percent. In that November’s election cycle, Republicans lost control of the Minnesota House, the Iowa House, the Wisconsin Senate, as well as three U.S. House seats (MN-01, IA-01, WI-08).

It dropped again in 2007 and 2008 – and we know how that turned out.

But having Democrats in the driver’s seat is usually a good thing for creating conservatives:

In Minnesota, those Gopher State residents identifying as conservative increased by 1.3 points in 2008 (to 27.8 percent) and by another 1.2 points to 29.0 percent in an aggregation of polling data through the first five months of 2009. This marks the largest percentage of Minnesotans viewing themselves as conservative since 2005…In all three states, conservatism is at its highest peak over the last four years.

Ostermeier notes that “moderates” outnumber both liberals and conservatives.  Which is both good and bad news; “Moderate” isn’t a philosophy, it’s the absence of one; it’s a vacuum.  The real  trick is to fill more of those vacuums with something that’ll make ’em want to come to the polls and vote conservatives. Indeed, that’s been the trick in the last several Minnesota elections:

1. In 1990, Arne Carlson filled the moderates with fatigue with the antics of Rudy Perpich.
2. In 1998, Jesse Ventura filled enough of them with the desire to prank everyone else.
3. In 2002, Pawlenty convinced a majority of Minnesotans that stupidity was a bad thing.

Here’s the one part that I bet hardly anyone expected:

Still, conservatives outnumber liberals by a large margin in all three states. In 2009, there are 1.6 conservatives for every liberal in Minnesota, 2.0 conservatives for every liberal in Wisconsin, and 2.1 conservatives for every liberal in Iowa.

So there’s the job…

Governor Pawlenty’s discipline is tutelage for Republicans everywhere.

Congressional Republicans — the ones who got tossed because of their embrace of spending and earmarks — might start looking for a message up north. Fiscal responsibility? “It is the fundamental tenet of our party, and the conservative coalition more broadly,” says Mr. Pawlenty, nicely. “If we don’t have that, we are nothing.”

If Republicans are looking to get back their conservative groove, they could do worse than study Minnesota’s budget brawl. Mr. Pawlenty deftly (and amusingly) outmaneuvered his Democratic opposition, not only saving his state from huge tax increases but clearing the way to cut government spending. Call it a refreshing break from the financial-crisis norm.

While liberal TV ads equate fairness with sticking it to the “rich”…

…Mr. Pawlenty kept voicing three simple principles. “Number one, we must have [because of the constitution] and should have a balanced budget,” he told me. “Number two, the state government needs to live within its means, just like everybody else. Number three, we shouldn’t raise taxes in the worst recession in 60 years.” Minnesota already has one of the highest tax burdens in the nation.

While in Washington, Comrade Obama increases the Federal Government and National Debt at unprecedented speed…

this will be one of the first times in modern Minnesota history that the state will reduce the size of government in real terms, not just slow its rate of growth. “The correlation in recent history has been between job growth and states that have reasonable government cost structures,” he says. These cuts, he says, will position Minnesota to take advantage of the recovery when it comes.

A Crisis Not Wasted^™ indeed, Governor.

Back in high school, I had a friend who, while driving home from her boyfriend’s place on some dark, dank, country road around dusk one night, made a left turn onto a side road. 

Through inexperience, bad luck, poor road design or the glare of the sunset, she didn’t see the truck barrelling up the road straight at her as she made the turn.  She was killed instantly – about as instantly as it gets, as luck’d have it, not that that made her parents feel any better.

Was she “stupid?”  Unlucky?  Did she guess wrong, or just plain miss the oncoming truck?  We don’t know.  The driver was never cited, and no fault was ever really ascertained as I recall because, really, did it matter anymore?

Question:  Is it a good thing she never got to “breed?”

The tragedy hit me hard back then.  And since I’ve had kids of my own, I’m even more keenly aware of how fragile life is.  Bad things happen – frequently to people whose only “stupidity” is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And when those bad things happen, someone – a father, some kids, a girlfriend – get left behind.

I haven’t laughed about an accident, even a genuinely stupid one, since I had kids.

———-

I digress.  But not really.

I’ve never really understood “conservatives'” antipathy toward bikers – and by “bikers”, I mean people who ride bikes.  Lots of conservatives ride.  I ride a lot from the beginning of April until it gets just too cold; it’s my main commute to work, and it’s one of my favorite weekend diversions, when weather permits. 

Leaving aside that it’s a lot of fun, and it’s just about the best outdoor cardio exercise there is, especially for people who are past their mid-twenties and have the knees to show for it, there are a lot of good free market reasons to bike.  It’s inexpensive.  It saves you money on gas, maintenance, healthcare and taxes, since we’re cutting out miles of government gas taxes as we ride. 

Some, like Jason Lewis, complain wrongly that we are getting a free ride.  Its untrue of course; gas taxes go mostly to highways, and most biking is done on city streets.  Which we pay through various city taxes, including property taxes, which I assure you I most definitely pay.  Indeed, given that all other things being equal we pay the same city/county taxes as everyone else, and inflict vastly less wear and tear on the roads than our car-driving neighbors, it’s not unreasonable to say that all other things being equal we pay more taxes on the applicable roads than the rest of you (and that ignored the fact that most of us drive as well).

So it’s all you motorized freeloaders who need to step lightly around the rest of us.

And yes, I know – bikes are identified with a lot of lefty excesses; smug greenies wave their bikes in the rest of society’s faces with gay abandon.  “Critical Mass” has turned into an excercise in group arrogance, and would be well dispensed with.

But the fact is, a bike – like a gun – is nothing more than a tool.  It’s the rider that counts.

———-

At any rate, a rider was killed yesterday morning in Minneapolis.  By a turning semi.  While riding (the nerve of the guy) in a dedicated bike lane.

Stuff happens.  Sometimes the accidents come to you.  Urban biking requires immense care; experienced city bikers have eyes on the backs of their heads, and are not the ones you see riding around with IPods stuck in their ears.  The old drill sergeant aphorism is true; anything you do can kill you, and anything you don’t do can kill you.  When you’re a city biker, you are always one missed signal, one inattentive driver, one moron in a Jeep trying to reset his CD player or groping for a cell phone, one overly-wide turn, away from being a grease stain; you are only as safe as the sum of the dumbest driver around you and the speed of your own reflexes allow you to be.  If you’re smart, you ride very defensively, avoiding dangerous streets (I cringe as I drive down University or Snelling watching people trying to ride in traffic), and places with particularly dangerous traffic.

Especially semis. 

Tracy Eberly at the short-for-this-world Anti-Strib quoted the Strib article on the accident verbatim, adding only two editorial elements of his own; the title (“Weeding Out The Stupid“) and the tag (“I Hope He Didn’t Breed”).  The victim, unfortunately, was named Donald Dumm.  I know nothing about the late Mr. Dumm – his background, his experience at city biking, his knowledge of his route, and least of all his politics.  I don’t know if he was riding carefully or not (he was in a bike lane), or whether he took a dumb chance.

I do know, though, that when Tony Snow – former talk show host, White House spokesman and all-around class act – died of cancer a few years ago, a horde of suet-brained leftybloggers partied like it was 1999, acting as if Hitler or, worse, Cheney himself had passed, and drawing glee from it.  And I ripped on them for being, really, inhuman.

Leftyblogger and biker Charlie Quimby – who’s never been mistaken for a drooling Kossack – responded to Tracy yesterday.

Tracy is being extremely stupid and insensitive, but I don’t think he deserves to die for it.

Don’t know if I’ll go word for word with Charlie, but in for a penny, in for a pound; Mr. Dumm had friends, a family, a life, and his death – through circumstances that look to have been the kind of sudden, uncontrollable crisis that kills thousands of car drivers a year who pass without the benefit of anyone grabbing a cheap chuckle at their death – isn’t the stuff of cheap comedy.

Especially political comedy.

Especially political comedy that is just plain wrong.

Look – I’ve defended Anti-Strib when nobody else would; during the “Dirt Worshipping Heathens” fracas, I took Tracy’s side against drooling crank Karl Bremer and the bought-and-paid-for Steve Perry and their horde of anonymous, lead-paint-chip guzzling leftyblog droogs.  And I’d do it again.  Because, more often than not, Tracy’s right.

But one of the most important tenets of conservatism is that of the worth of the individual, as opposed to the class, label or group.  When we start focusing on group labels – “Bushie” or “Cyclist” or “wingnut” or whatever – over individuals, we lose.  We become like “the enemy”. 

And it wouldn’t matter if Dennis Dumm, God rest his soul, were an ACORN worker who was singing “The Internationale” and smacked into the truck because he was laughing at that funny “Somewhere in Texas, a Village is missing an Idiot” bumpersticker yet again. 

Doug Williams goes after Paul Krugman’s latest:

Krugman is not an idiot. And yet anyone from quick-thinking geniuses to nose-picking morons knew exactly what Krugman’s opinion was going to be about any issue for the past eight years – his opinion was the opposite of whatever the Bush administration supported. Krugman substituted a reliably pure strain of reactionism for thoughtful commentary and bleated it with all the gusto of an agitated sheep. Only now that scary Republicans do not inhabit the land’s highest offices does he feel free again to flex his long neglected thinking parts.

Without getting into a whole “the media is biased” diatribe, this is the problem when media classes turn into left-right cliques. Krugman spent the last eight years in blind, unthinking opposition, and probably made himself more popular because of it. The lefties didn’t want to hear careful thought about a Republican administration. They wanted their smart people to give them smart sounding justifications for their automatic opposition to everything that administration attempted. Krugman more than happily danced to that tune. The fact that this schtick works just as well for right-leaning pundits doesn’t change the basic point – it’s a fundamentally anti-intellectual approach to punditry. Rather than using reason to determine one’s opinion, the opinion comes first and reason is used simply to justify it after the fact.

Read the whole thing.

One nice thing about conservatism, especially the whole “limited government” and “fiscal responsibility” bits; when government runs out of pockets to pick, suckers to borrow from and marks to shake down, eventually conservative policy becomes your only option.

After talking a good game in his first election, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has morphed into a governor that nobody can possibly mistake for a conservative.  But as California’s fiscal doldrums – exacerbated by generations of frivolous, stupid liberal leadership from both parties – spiral toward terminal velocity, Dah Gahvenah is being forced to get real:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today will propose selling San Quentin Prison, the Los Angeles Coliseum and other state-owned properties in a bid to raise cash to counter the state’s daunting budget shortfall.

Ahhold wants to sell a shopping list of state properties, from San Quentin and the LA Colisseum all the way down to the Orange County Fairgrounds.

The sale of those properties would generate upward of $600 million and possibly more than $1 billion for the state, according to a copy of Schwarzenegger’s proposal. But proceeds from those sales would not arrive for another two to five years.

Note to aspiring government leaders: the next step is to not have government buying, building or seizing these sorts of things in the first  place.

No matter what it is; colisseums, heath insurance systems, or anything in between.

I run into this over and over again; Democrats in debates or discussions who accept as a matter of faith that “republicans are the party of the rich, and the tics are the party of the working people”.

I ask them why, then, that the Plains states and the West – which are, demographically, very disproportionally “working people” – vote so reliably Republican.  They usually respond by calling me a racist and a sexist and asking why I hate children.

But I digress.

The claim, of course, beggars all the evidence.  My favorite factoid; in the 2002 Senate campaign, the average Coleman contribution was about a fifth that of the average Wellstone donation – but they raised about the same total.

Of course, plutocrats like Warren Buffet, George Soros and Bill Gates, to say nothing of a uniform cross-section of Hollywood’s super-wealthy, have long supported the Democrats; for the fantastically wealthy, a regulated society is a predictable (and, for currency speculators like Soros, exploitable) one.

And in the last election, Wall Street contributors backed Obama over Mac.

There might be a bit of morning-after remorse from that last, though:

Wealthy Wall Street financiers and other business figures provided crucial support for Mr Obama during the election, backing him over the Republican candidate John McCain as the right leader to rescue the collapsing US economy.But it is now dawning on many among them that Mr Obama was serious about his campaign trail promises to bring root and branch reform to corporate America – and that they were more than just election rhetoric.

A top Obama fundraiser and hedge fund manager said: “I’m appalled at the anti-Wall Street rhetoric. It was OK on the campaign but now it’s the real world. I’m surprised that Obama is turning out to be so left-wing. He’s a real class warrior.”

The bad news is that people on Wall Street seem to be very stupid.

The good news?  Michelle Obama’s campaign claim that our best and brightest go into hedge funds rather than teaching and nursing would seem to be wrong.

“These big companies are based in New York Boston, Seattle and Silicon Valley, where Democrats dominate,” [Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute] said. “Obama’s tax plan is already cleaving him from his big corporate supporters,” he said.Mr Obama made no secret of his plans to raise taxes on the “working rich” (individuals earning more than $200,000) by imposing a top income tax rate of almost 40 per cent, and there is little surprise that those plans remain on track, even during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Note to self and world; next time, let the whole gabbling bunch of Brooks-Brothers-clad cretins go bankrupt.

There are really two stories in the recent Gallup Poll that shows Americans are throwing out the orc Koolaid on gun control.

One is the immediately-presenting one; Americans are growing beyond supporting gun control

Recent polls show shrinking support for new gun control measures and strong public sentiment for enforcing existing laws instead. So strong is the shift in public opinion that a proposed assault-weapons ban — once backed by three in four Americans — now rates barely one in two.

And actual “support” will be lower than that; the support for gun control has always been “a mile wide and an inch deep”, extending to “answering surveys”. When asked for specifics about bans, or informed about inconvenient truths (like “assault weapon” is a meaningless, political term), support drops markedly.  And membership in the NRA has always outstripped that of all victim disarmament groups, like the Violence Policy Institute and the Brady Factory, by 20-1.

Even an assault-weapon ban is not the political “sure thing” it once was…Elected officials in California and Pennsylvania have responded to the killings of four police officers in Oakland, Calif., and three in Pittsburgh by calling for restoration of the decade-long ban, which was law from 1994 to 2004. Gun control advocates also have pushed to revive the ban as a way to stem the flow of firearms smuggled from the U.S. into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Gallup’s Newport said the growing opposition to gun control is “counterintuitive” because of the heavy media focus on the use of assault weapons to kill police officers and students, as well as coverage of cartel lawlessness.

It’s only counterintuitive if you’re completely ignorant.  This poll could show us a couple of things; that Americans are believing mainstream media hype less (as in the police shootings); that the alternative media is undercutting some of the orcs’  lies (as with the “Cartel” myth, in which conservative blogs and talkradio debunked the orc meme about guns from “gun shows” arming the cartels.

Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, called diminished public support for gun control measures “a good thing.” He said the recent poll findings would help lawmakers “resist pressure from this administration to pass more gun control legislation.”

“The NRA is in a pretty good position, public-opinion-wise,” Newport said.

So as to the gun control issue itself, this is a good thing.

The other story – which is, in the long term, the bigger one?  This should be a lesson to conservatives.  The rollback of orc superstition and bigotry on the gun issue is one of the great grassroots victories in modern political history.  The gun rights movement has been the class war the far left has always warned us about – except that in this case it’s been the plebeians that have taken the high road and defeated the patricians, our “elite” media and political establishments.  And we’ve done it one vote, and one voter, at a time, through dedicated, constant, low-level grassroots action.

The same can, and needs to, go for other conservative principles.  Winning this nation back isn’t a matter of waiting for another Reagan to walk across the water; it’s a matter of getting out there and convincing people, one at a time.

And it’s working for more than just gun control; general support for abortion has cooled in the past decade, and I have a hunch we’ll see greatly eroding support for out-of-control Keynesianism before too terribly long.

On August 31, 1939, Adolph Hitler, in a speech to the Reichsreingebotsamt in Münich, said:

Peace is still attainable!  All the Poles, Norwegians, French, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, French and British need to do is start goose-stepping, killing Jews and working with us on the whole Lebensraum thing! 

Lavrencz Szdurdzevanski, writing for the Sztrela-Trzybuna Warszawy (Warsaw Star/Tribune), wrote in a column later that day:

Where is the spirit of bipartisanship that animated our anscestors?  Like when former Governor Elmzar Anderczszon worked with the Russians during the hundreds of years they controlled us?  No; our partisan government will no doubt do its best to not cooperate with our neighbors!

And we all know how that turned out, right? [1]

———-

In a similar vein, the Democrats Dthink, mirabile dictu, that their lives would be easier if Republicans put “partisanship” aside and did their work for them:

Congressional Democratic leaders said Wednesday that Sen. Arlen Specter’s party switch is a sign that Republicans should become more like, well, Democrats.

“I say to Republicans in America, take back your party,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters. “The party of protecting the environment, the party of individual rights, the party of fairness.”

Pelosi, like much of the Minnesota political establishment, wants a return to the good ol’ days of the sixties and seventies – when Republicans basically acted like Democrats with better suits. It’s explained very well in the Wall Street Journal’s obit for Jack Kemp is the most cogent explanation of what Lori Sturdevant, the Minnesota Establishment and the Mainstream Media believe Republicans should be that I’ve ever seen (emphasis added):

A celebrated pro quarterback, Kemp was an unlikely intellectual. Yet amid the economic troubles of the 1970s, he immersed himself in the details of fiscal and monetary policy. Along with a handful of others, many of whom wrote for this newspaper, Kemp became a champion for the classical economic ideas that challenged the Keynesian orthodoxy of that time. He also had to mount an insurgency inside the Republican Party, which for decades had been dominated by budget-balancers who saw their fate mainly as moderating and paying for liberal excess.

That’s what they want.  And I’m concerned that we’re seeing signs of the same thing from Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney on their “Listening Tour”. 

Look – there’s a time for compromise and some degree of cooperation. That time is not when you’re defining what your party stands for.

And not to Nancy Pelosi (and everyone who thinks as she does): partisanship is necessary for democracy. 

(more…)

There were three people who turned me into a conservative.

Four, if you count Ronald Reagan.  But before I, who grew up very much a liberal, could embrace the idea of conservativsm that Ronald Reagan put out there – and let’s remember that to a liberal Ronald Reagan, especially the version of Reagan that liberals discussed amongst themselves, was a very scary figure –  someone had to soften me up.

The first was Jimmy Carter.  He created a lot of Ronald Reagan voters. And with the “Malaise” speech and his relentless “America Last”-ism, he gave me a good start up the ladder.

The second was Dr. James Blake.  He was the head of the English Department at Jamestown College.  He was also that rarest of creatures – a college English professor who was also a conservative. The son of a New York cop, Blake described himself as a “Monarchist”; whatever, he also made me read Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, and Doestoevskii and Tolstoii and Solzenitzyn and, for that matter, P.J. O’Rourke.  I may have been the last person in Western History to have been pushed up the ladder to conservatism while majoring in a humanity.

But Carter’s impetus was negative; Blake introduced me to the high-level reasons conservatism was not only better, but indeed vastly preferable for intellectual and personal freedom.

But it was Jack Kemp who first connected those ideas to daily life for me; to money, to jobs, to the nuts and bolts of running a government and a society.  While Reagan focused on the big picture – as, indeed, a President and leader should – Kemp tackled the machinery.

In the wake of the Carter malaise, he was one of Reagan and Stockton’s foot-soldiers for supply-side economics. He first filed his tax cut bill – which became known as “Kemp-Roth” when it finally passed, in 1981 – in 1977, long before supply side economics was a household word. Kemp was more than an adherent; he was a pioneer.

“Every time in this century we’ve lowered the tax rates across the board, on employment, on saving, investment and risk-taking in this economy, revenues went up, not down”, he said – and, as a major mover and shaker during the Reagan years and George HW Bush’s HUD secretary, he worked to follow through, advocating privatizing public housing (a policy on which Clinton’s HUD boss Henry Cisneros followed through, after carefully rechristening it to get credit for his boss); many of the “welfare reforms” that happened during the Contract for America were ideas that Kemp had been instrumental in not only thinking up, but whose bureaucratic angles Kemp had worked through.  Kemp was the giant on whose shoulders the welfare reformers stood.

Kemp was a native of Los Angeles, the son of a small businessman who went to a small college, mainly because it was his best shot at getting to the pros as a football player.  He was a journeyman quarterback for years…

…he was present at “The Greatest Game Ever Played (before the ’86 Super Bowl)” – the Colts/Giants NFL championship game in ’58 – as a third-stringer on the Giants’ taxi squad. He was cut or traded by five teams before he latched on with the Buffalo Bills, back when the AFL was a separate league.

He led the Bills through a series of great seasons, before and after the merger with the NFL, before injuries slowed him down.  He was drafted to run for the US House in 1971 by the GOP, and he stepped away from his contract with the Bills to run his campaign.

Maybe it was the humble roots, the non-Ivy-League background, the years of struggle and failure before hitting it big, his self-taught nature that made Kemp a face of conservatism for the little guy. I’ve often said that Reagan’s great strength was that he translated Hayek and Friedman into something accessible to pretty much everyone; Jack Kemp turned those ideas into things of substance.  “The supply-side claim is not a claim. It is empirically true and historically convincing that with lower rates of taxation on labor and capital, the factors of production, you’ll get a bigger economy.”

And he was always a conservative Republican who spoke to the little guy first and foremost, as befitted perhaps a Rep from Buffalo; “There is a kind of victory in good work, no matter how humble“, he once said.

And as I moved to the city and started plying a trade – first as a bush-league conservative pundit, and then as a schmuck trying to make my way, and then again as yet another bush-league pundit, Kemp was consistently a voice and an inspiration to those of us who sought to break the noxious liberal strangle hold on places like Saint Paul.  And like many like me, I took inspiration from another Kemp protege in Jersey City, where Brett Schundler, a Reagan Republican who was very much in the Kemp mold, won three terms as mayor and tranformed his city.  When I’ve said that the Minnesota GOP will never really contest control of Minnesota until we make a play of it in the Cities, I’m echoing Kemp;  “There really has not been a strong Republican message to either the poor or the African American community at large“, he once said, nailng one of the enduring chinks in the GOP’s (albeit not conservatism’s) armor.

People say the GOP needs another Reagan.  That’s true to a degree, of course.  But Reagan spoke of truths that are eternal enough that pretty much anyone can remember them; freedom, limited government, security. Reagan took on the world.

Jack Kemp took on mainstreet, one store-owner, voter, program and American at a time.

What the GOP really needs, stat, is a few dozen Jack Kemps; people who can spread the gospel to everyone from the local town hall meeting all the way to the Beltway, and back again.