Category Archives: PC

Political Correctness and its “unintended’ consequences.

While The City Burns

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Saint Paul’s business sector is collapsing.  If downtown business occupancy rates are under 30%,it’s only because state government has been renting so much of it; the City is also party to the destruction of the downmarket but once-at-least-breathing University Avenue business strip.  Crime is rising, the school system is garbage (although the superintendent is doing the usual fine job of pre-emptively foisting the blame on the taxpayers), and with over 1,000 vacant properties (with many more forfeited via one path or another to the city, which is busy dumping them on the market for peanuts after filtering them through the non-profit system that helps install so many of the City Council in office), it’s impossible to sell a house without getting the fiscal Abner Louima treatment.

The Saint Paul Council, and Mayor Coleman, are at a loss for a response other than “tax the living crap out of whoever in the city still pays taxes”.  And building indoor ice rinks and traffic roundabouts and bike expressways.

So when it comes to the whole “run a responsible city government that doesn’t impede the city’s success”, the Saint Paul City Council is a big fat flop

But everyone’s got their sweet spot.  The St. Paul City Council does excel at worthless smug symbolic frippery:

St. Paul became the first city in Minnesota to formally resolve that federal military spending needs to be trimmed.

A resolution sponsored by St. Paul City Council member Amy Brendmoen unanimously passed the seven-member board Wednesday, Oct. 10. It asks the state’s congressional delegation to support shifting funding priorities from military operations to the needs of local communities.

“The bottom line for me is that federal spending impacts the money that goes to local initiatives,” Brendmoen said.

Of course, some of our old friends are involved (emphasis added):

 Wednesday’s council meeting was attended by members of various anti-war and social justice groups, as well as state Sen. Sandy Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, and anti-war activist Coleen Rowley.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, a professor [shouldn't that have scare quotes? - Ed.] of Justice and Peace Studies at the University of St. Thomas, said that if every American taxpayer received a bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, St. Paul taxpayers’ share would total an estimated $1.7 billion over the past decade.

I guess you have to be a highly-educated “peace studies” “professor” to think “military spending” is done in the form of “government goodies” coupons that can be redeemed for more ice rinks and light rail trains.

But what if that putative 1.7 bill had been available for local spending, rather than exacted by the IRS or borrowed from China?

With people like Sandy Pappas and the Saint Paul City Council in charge, we’d have gotten $1.7 billion more in ice rinks, drinking fountain art and electric cars for city employees.

This sort of thing is apparently all the rage among PC liberal circles these days:

Other major cities to pass resolutions in favor of trimming military spending are Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Hartford, Conn. Rowley said peace activists have approached the city councils in Eagan and Lakeville but have yet to receive responses. They also plan to approach Apple Valley, Inver Grove Heights, Shoreview and Mounds View officials in coming days.

If we could trade “trimming the defense budget” with “sending the city councils of Saint Paul, Philly, LA and Hartford to Afghanistan”, I think it’d be a fair trade for everyone.

That Deep-Down Ugly

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The Good News:  Esquire has named Mila Kunis “the Sexiest Woman Alive”.

Now, titles like that always made me wonder; do they wait until the previously reigning “sexiest woman alive” dies, relinquishes her throne, or gets un-sexy?  Or do they kill off last year’s winner?

Anyway – the bad news:  Kunis has that deep-down ugly:

“The way that Republicans attack women is so offensive to me,” Kunis exclaims. “And the way they talk about religion is offensive. I may not be a practicing Jew, but why we gotta talk about Jesus all the time? And it’s baffling to me how a poor person in Georgia can say, ‘I’m a Republican.’ Why?”

Esquire is to politics as Vogue is to hunting, of course.

So to go out on the good news:

Nobody cares what Mila Kunis thinks about politics.

Give Me Some More Of That Old-Time Politics

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Joe Doakes from Como Park writes in regard to a comment thread the other day about my issues with Apple maps (with emphasis added)…:

Sanity posted this comment to a prior post on SITD:

1. Sanity on October 2, 2012 at 9:26 pm said:

“. . . I don’t have a choice about who to buy electricity or water from. Those are regulated utilities because they have a monopoly. I do, however have the choice of buying an iPhone versus Samsung vs not buying a smart phone at all. Mitch chose to buy the Apple product, knowing that he is supporting a pro-gay rights company. I find that interesting.”

For crying out loud, how long does it take Sanity to do his shopping?

Let’s see, Fiber One or Fiber Plus? Hmmm, how to decide? Price? Fiber content? Taste?

No, that’s all irrelevant. How do their company executives feel about homosexuals – that’s the important thing! Fiber One is made by General Mills, which opposes the marriage amendment, meaning General Mills is Pro Gay. Okay, Fiber One it is.

Now, Land O’Lakes milk or Roundy’s?

Honestly, do people live like that? How can they stand to think that way?

Joe’s right – I mean, if a cell phone manufacturer advertised itself as “ambivalent about gay rights”, it’d be at least irrelevant to my purchasing decision (well behind “do the maps work?”), and most likely detrimental (I mean, not only is it unseemly, but marketing via social wedges is off-puttingly cynical).

But yes, Joe, people most definitely do live like that.   And not just commenter “Sanity” (who is, I suspect, one of the “Penigma” hive).  In fact, just about everyone is like that in one way or another.

I’m conservative.  As a conservative, poitics aren’t the be-all and end-all of my life; it’s a hobby, like playing guitar or blogging.  But my religious faith?  That is important.  It plays into the major, and most of the minor, decisions in my life.  For example, in 12 years of being single a second time, I haven’t dated an atheist – or even anyone who’s not some variety of Christian.  In something as vital as “a potential life partner”,. some sort of agreement on the basic nature and meaning of life is fairly vital.

As re the company that makes my cell phone?  Not so much.  As long as they don’t trade slaves or donate too promiscuously to Democrat and anti-liberty causes (as the company that used to own Pepsi, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell did for many years with their support for The Brady Organization – until a boycott from people like me got them to reconsider), I don’t really care.

For liberals, on the other hand?  It’s a stereotype that politics are more important than religion for liberals – but stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason.  In a dozen years on the dating market (more or less enthusiastically) I’ve never had a conversation with a self-identified liberalette go south over my religion, my taste in music or my choice of cell phone.  But I have had three or four send me emails oozing horror when they discovered I was a conservative.  ”I could never date one of…you“, they say.  Prodded, a few have replied to the effect of “because I think having some agreement on the basic nature and meaning of life is fairly vital”.

So even if all you have to go by is stereotype (as is the case with the commenter in question) and assume I oppose “gay rights” – I don’t, and have likely done more against anti-gay bigotry than most liberals anyway – it betrays one of the great aspects of the left-right culture clash; for conservatives, politics is a necessary evil, a chore you do for the greater good, like cleaning the septic tank, so you can get to what matters.

For liberals, politics and its attendant optics and messaging and symbology – let’s call it “liturgy” - are the point.

The commenter in question needs to remember that.

Also learn basic logic.

Chanting Points Memo: Barnes Bobbles Facts

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Legal language is a funny thing.  And by “funny”, we mean “funny weird”, not “funny haha”.

One of the left’s latest chanting points – abetted by Todd Akin’s groaner last week – is that a group of GOP legislators co-sponsored a bill, HR3, better known as the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion” bill.  The title more or less explains the bill.

In the original version of the bill’s language, the term “forcible rape” was used.

Of course, in the post-Akin political news cycle du jour, there is only one type of rape; it’s eminently PC to say “all rape is rape”.

And certainly non-consensual sex is, always, rape.  No argument about it.

Of course, not all “rape” is “forcible”, by definition.  If a 56 old guy has consensual sex with, say hypothetically, a 16 year old guy, it’s statutory rape – meaning “no force was used, but it’s still considered rape since the 16 year old is not of the age of consent”.

We’re splitting linguistic and legal hairs, of course.

Splitting hairs is something Third District DFL candidate Brian Barnes wasn’t doing when he accused his opponent, incumbent Republican representative Erik Paulsen, of drawing a distinction between “Rape” and “Forcible Rape”.   Here’s a statement from Barnes’ announcement for a press conference today:

According to Brian Barnes, “The voters of our district deserve the facts on Representative Paulsen’s positions on important issues, such as his vote to support H.R. 3.

Yep, they do.  And here they are; whatever the reason for the language, it is for Paulsen’s purposes irrelevant – because Paulsen was neither an author nor co-sponsor of the bill.

The word “forcible” was removed from the bill long before Paulsen got his first chance to vote on the bill – which he did, along with a strong bipartisan majority of the House.

This is a further example of how the Barnes’ campaign,. like most Democrat campaigns this year, are trying to rope in “low-information voters” – people driven by slogans and chanting points, who don’t really think that hard about the issues.

It’s not the most egregious example from the Barnes campaign, though.  More later today.

Playing Chicken With The Left

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A friend of mine went to Chick-Fil-A appreciation day yesterday.

He was not alone:

Holy Buckets! What a day. I had been to the University to scout out the location on Tuesday. There was no line for any of the food places on Tuesday including Chick-fil-a. There were not a lot of people there yesterday but as I looked around the tables there were Chick-fil-a packaging on about 20% of them. That was representative of the number of food outlets in Coffmann Union.

But it was a different story today! We arrived shortly before 11:30 at the UofMN. Spent $3 on parking. We got down to the lunch place where you have the choice of Panda Express, Chick-fil-a, Baja sol, Topio’s, Cranberry Farms, Greens to go, maybe some others.

There was a small line in front of Chick-fil-a when we got there. Fellow freedom-lovers were apparent in the crowd so we struck up conversations with them. One of them will hopefully send me his picture of me in front of the Chick-fil-a sign. We sat down with our DELICIOUS sandwich and waffle fries (outstanding). I watched the cashiers. There were 4 today compared to 2 yesterday. They were very busy with bag after bag of Chick-fil-a product going out the door. We left about noon and the line was out the door and around the corner. We headed for the exit and there was a swarm of freedom lovers (I recognized a couple of them in the group) coming in. We got to the elevators that led to the parking garage and a family of about 7 was getting off, saw our cups with the Chick-fil-a emblem and asked, “How do I get to that place?” pointing at our cups.

[An unnamed fellow diner] and I kept talking about the warm feeling we had along with happy taste buds and a full tummy.

Maybe I should bring Chick-Fil-A to the polls this November.

One Reason I Would Like To See Gay Marriage Pass

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In the modern media consciousness, there is no more noble, pure-as-the-driven-snow construct in all of humanity than the Gay Couple.

Now, I have nothing against gay couples.  Indeed, while I believe that God or Evolution or remorseless fate or random biology or whatever you believe in did in fact create male and female parents for some very good reasons – they are different, and both bring things to the child-rearing process that the child needs and that the parent of the other gender lacks – that for example it’d be preferable to have adoptive kids raised by gay couples than, say, single parents.  If nothing else, they can play one-on-one instead of zone defense against kids.  You laugh, but it’s important.

But the debate about gay marriage has nothing to do with children (and if it did, gay couples would eschew marriage, since the divorce industry is the worst thing for children). Indeed, you can listen to gay marriage supporters for years – as I have – and hear scarcely a mention of children (which is true of way too many straight couples too).

But here’s the one reason I’d like to see gay marriage pass.

Currently, gay couples – at least, the sort of gay couples that intend to get married – are portrayed, inevitably, as saints and angels walking among us.  Kind, loving, perfect parents, in a relationship placid enough to shame a fifties sitcom family.   And go ahead and read any thread about gay marriage on Youtube; the thread will be full of teenagers saying “I’d take any gay couple over my parents” (although I suspect you’d see some of those same kids saying the same thing on video threads about the Partridge, Manson and Ganbino families.  Teenagers are like that).   And always, always, always, whether in anecdote or media report, gay couples are juxtaposed with straight couples – who fight, get divorced, get arrested, have the sorts of problems real couples have these days.

You never see the couples where one partner is flopped on a sofa in front of a TV, halfway through a twelve-pack, while the other partner is screaming at her about how she could have been something until she met her.  You never see the cop cars in front of gay couples houses, frog-walking a boxer-clad handcuffed gay guy out to the car while the other, in a tank top, bellows “I love you, Earl!” from the porch of the trailer and vows to come and bail him out.

The reason is most likely political correctness (and the fact that gay couples, having to adopt kids as they do, do have to be highly-motivated and just-about-perfect, at least for a while).

And if gay marriage were legalized, one minor fringe benefit would be that gay couples would actually “get” to be human.

Or at least the media – news, entertainment and otherwise – might start portraying them as humans.  Which is another matter altogether.

A Simple Experiment

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The whole  Chick-Fil-A story brought to mind an Idea I’d had years and years ago.

Almost twenty years ago, a bunch of orc “community organizers” brought down the full weight of Saint Paul’s regulatory bureaucracy against “Saint Paul Firearms”, a gun store opened in the Midway by an electrician who’d invested his life’s savings in the place.  After a years-long battle, the city finally squeezed the owner, Greg Perkins, out of business.

And I hatched the idea for an improbable but fun experiment.  How improbable?  It was all predicated on me winning the Megamilliions and having a couple hundred million to play with

With that out of the way?  I’d lop a cool mill out of my account and buy up a block of blighted housing in a Minneapolis or Saint Paul neighborhood with potential.  The whole block.  Every single house.   Maybe an old-school block with a corner store; .

Then I’d get Jeff O’Meara in there to rehab ‘every building to a fine sheen.  I mean, serioiusly – make ‘em middle-class dream houses.

And then I’d re-sell them to people – privately, natch.  $150,000 apiece.  Or $75,000 if you had a valid carry permit, a clean criminal record, and had attended a GOP caucus meeting or primary election.  Ditto the corner store - I’d sell it back at half price to anyone who’d display a “Protected By Smith and Wesson” sign in the front window, and a “God Made Man; Colt Made Man Equal” plaque and a “God Bless Ronald Reagan” poster behind the counter. Or maybe with a billboard on top that ran adds for Ruger, the GOP, “Armed American Radio” and such.

And I’d take out annual full-page ads in the Strib and PiPress showing how crime had dropped, not only on that block, but throughout the neighborhood.

I’d love to see the official reaction.  There’d be no discriminating against non-gun-owners and voters for the anti-business, pro-blight and pro-criminal party when I sold the houses - we’d just be giving a discount for those who exercise their constitutional right to keep, bear, and know how to use arms, and support a party that supports improving life, rather than making blight tolerable.

I’d have loved to have seen the official reaction from the city involved.

Playing Chicken

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Well, blow me down; I was wrong.

There is a Chick-Fil-A in the Twin Cities.   It’s in Dinkytown. which should be a nightmare to get to, but what the heck, I haven’t had a good nightmare lately.


View Larger Map

I may just buzz down there to buy…er, whatever it is they do there.  Chicken, I guess. On a bun?  Anyway – to support them in their battle against raging PC demagoguery in Boston and Chicago.

Do You Remember…

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…when conservative Republican Dave Kleis, mayor of Saint Cloud, barred gay-friendly Starbucks from that city?

No?

OK.  How about when Pat Anderson, the conservative Republican mayor of Eagan, spoke out against gay-friendly Target locating a store in her city?

Got nothing?

Well, of course not – because there really are no examples of conservative mayors using the power of their city government to squelch a legitimate business, not due to the business itself or the behavior of its customers, but because of the political beliefs of the business’ owners outside the business itself.

But the headlines are alive with the stories of the mayors of Boston and Chicago bringing the full weight of government down against “Chick-Fil-A” – using the city’s regulatory apparatus to try to keep the chain of (apparently) restaurants out of their cities, not because Chick-Fil-A discriminates against anyone in any part of its business life, but because its owners, in their private, non-business lives, oppose gay marriage.

I don’t know what Chick-Fil-A is.  I mean I know, it’s a fast food joint of some kind.   I don’t think they’re even in Minnesota.  But what the heck – this deserves a free ad:

More seriously?

One of the early objections to the idea of gay marriage was that if you made it the law of the land, then it’s a very short leap – a step, really – to requiring churches to perform them. Just like with civil rights rules regarding, say, renting that violate landlords’ rights to free association on their private property, or the ongoing official persecution of the Boy Scouts for their not-gay philosophy; it is just a matter of time before politicians, eager to rack up points with their bases (left or right) abuse the law and use the full weight of their government bureaucracies to penalize churches that oppose gay marriage on theological grounds.

What was the saying?  ”First they came for the fast food restaurants – but I did nothing, because I was Vegan.  Then they came for the churches that didn’t perform gay marriages, and I did nothing, because I support gay marriage and am a post-structural Unitarian.  Then they came for me, and nobody did anything,  because I’m so freaking annoying”?  Is that how it went?

Tea Party: The Smoking…Er, Bomb

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I’m chagrinned to admit it to all you liberals, but the break you spent the last three years waiting for has finally arrived; a Tea Partier has been pled guilty to a significant act of domestic terrorism:

One of five men charged with plotting to bomb an Ohio highway bridge pleaded guilty Wednesday and agreed to testify against his co-defendants.

Anthony Hayne, 35, of Cleveland, who has a criminal record for theft and breaking and entering, pleaded to all three counts against him in U.S. District Court. His attorney, Michael O’Shea, said Hayne hopes to get leniency in return for his testimony.

Under the terms of the surprise plea deal, Hayne will have the chance to avoid a life prison term. With the plea and offer of testimony for the prosecution, he could face 15 years to nearly 20 years in prison.

“I don’t think any of these guys intended harm to human beings,” O’Shea said. “I think they just thought this was a way of making some sort of political statement. But I’m relatively confident none of these people had any desires to actually hurt anybody.”…The men also discussed other potential targets, including a law enforcement center, oil wells, a cargo ship or the opening of a new downtown casino, according to a prosecution affidavit.

Er, wait – did I say Tea Party?

I meant…:

The five had been associated with Occupy Cleveland, but organizers of the movement have tried to distance the group from the men. They say the five didn’t represent it or its nonviolent philosophy.

Out of the rat-infested rape camps, a wave of violence and conspiracy.

From the Tea Party?  Bupkes.  We’re all still waiting on any evidence of that “wave ot Tea Party Violence”.

And waiting.

And waiting.

Appearances

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As we discussed on Monday, Michele Bachmann didn’t “witchunt” Muslims in government; she asked the Attorney General to take a break from handing out M-16es with “courtest of the NRA” stamped on the receivers to the narcotraficantes for a moment to look into some allegations.

Y’know.  Just like Democrats have a history of doing based on much less evidence.

Joe Doakes of Como Park takes us down memory lane:

Democrats accused George Bush Senior of flying the SR-71 Blackbird to Paris for a secret meeting with the Ayatollahs to free the hostages. The charge was idiotic but the Democrats insisted we must investigate. Remember why?

“In announcing the probe, House Speaker Thomas Foley, D-Wash., and Senate Democratic leader George Mitchell of Maine said that committees from each house will review the case based on `persistent and disturbing’ reports.

`We have no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, but the seriousness of these allegations, and the weight of circumstantial information, compel an effort to establish the facts,’ read a joint statement from Foley and Mitchell.”

Okay, how about infiltration by Muslim terrorist organizations into the United States government – does the seriousness of those charges warrant an investigation?

Isn’t that exactly what Michelle Bachmann asked the Inspector General to do – his job?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Well, to be fair, Foley and Mitchell didn’t have a pack of deranged opponents stalking their every move.

The Chicago Underground

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Here’s some news we Real Americans can use:

A Downstate [Illinois] pro-gun group says it turned payouts from Chicago’s firearm buyback program last weekend into a fund-raiser for a youth summer camp — a National Rifle Association shooting camp, that is.

The city collected 5,500 guns last Saturday in the annual buyback. The city gave out $100 MasterCard gift cards for each gun and $10 cards for BB guns and replicas.

Among the guns turned in under the “no questions asked” policy, beyond any doubt, were many used in street crimes that will now, no doubt, be that much harder to investigate.  Thanks, orcs!

But the good guys got their licks in:

Sixty of the guns and several BB guns were turned in by the Champaign-based Guns Save Life. In return, the group received $6,240 in gift cards, said John Boch, president of the group…Most of the money will go toward buying ammunition for an NRA youth camp in Bloomington. The rest will pay for four bolt-action rifles that will be given away to campers.

Unlike many of the guns in Chicago, the group’s guns were mostly an effort in metal recycling – with an edge (emphasis added):

“This was rusty, non-firing junk that we turned in,” Boch said. “We are redirecting funds from people who would work against the private ownership of firearms to help introduce the next generation to shooting safely and responsibly.”

Proof that Chicago hates the law-abiding gun owner more than the criminals (who, let’s be honest, are at some level a Democrat constituency)?

Despite the no-questions-asked policy of the buyback, police officials asked Guns Save Life members where they got their guns, Boch said. Still, the police officials allowed them to turn in their guns, he said.

All in all, this is brilliant stuff; robbing (legally) from the orcs to pay for freedom:

Todd Vandermyde, the NRA’s chief lobbyist in Illinois, said Guns Save Life turned the tables on Chicago.

“I think it’s a very good example of the resourcefulness of the pro-gun side to take the initiative to turn something used by anti-gunners into a positive,” he said.

Vandermyde said he’s heard that gun-shop owners also have used the annual gun turn-in for profit.

Vandermyde said he was told one suburban gun dealer imported junk rifles for less than $50 each and received $100 gift cards for each of them.

“It’s comical,” he said.

And for this, I salute them.

The big, dumb, orc government of Chicago is, naturally, not amused:

But the city doesn’t think so.

“We host the gun turn-in event on an annual basis to encourage residents to turn in their guns so we can take guns off the street and it’s unfortunate that this group is abusing a program intended to increase the safety of our communities,” said Melissa Stratton, a police spokeswoman.

Boch said he doesn’t think the crooks who have pushed the number of Chicago’s homicides to 38 percent over last year’s total are the ones handing over their weapons.

Well, not yet anyway.

And so I salute you, Guns Save Life.  As should all Real Americans.

I got this via email from a regular reader, who writes…:

Next time there is a gun buyback in town, I’m selling them the $100 Rossi combination 20ga/22lr that I bought at Dicks for a starter gun for my son. Worst gun in the world. I would never let another kid grow up shooting that piece of shit.

Let the orcs pay for your mistakes.

It’s freaking brilliant. I have an ancient, rusted, .22 single shot with a missing bolt in the basement that might be a contender for the same.

Bring on the buyback, orcs!

Well, It’s Never Been Tried, I Guess

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel – mayor of a city that forbids gun ownership by the law-abiding and is spending millions in taxpayer money to try to find ways to flout the Supreme Court’s McDonald decision which expressly condemned Chicago’s handgun laws, and is “unexpectedly” in the middle of a wave of gang violence that has increased the city’s murder rate 30% at a time when the national murder rate has been dropping for years – is appealing to gang-bangers’ “values” to try to stem the flood of blood:

“We’ve got two gangbangers, one standing next to a kid. Get away from that kid. Take your stuff away to the alley. Don’t touch the children of the city of Chicago. Don’t get near them,” Emanuel — President Obama’s former chief of staff — told anchor Scott Pelley.

It’s…er…

…novel?

“And it is about values. As I said then [when a 7-year-old girl was shot and killed last month], who raised you? How were you raised?

Oh, that’s easy!  They were raised by single parents in a system that systematically devalues fatherhood – the institution that traditionally helps boys channel their natural aggression!  They were either raised by people who may have had values of their own once, but for whatever reason either couldn’t keep their kids – or grandkids – out of institutions that think summarily ending the lives of people who wear  your colors, or “disrespect” you, or who sell drugs on your gang’s drug turf, is a perfectly acceptable way to resolve issues…

…or by people who subscribed to those beliefs themselves.  And many to most of them were raised into a post-nineties ‘urban culture” that glorifies violence, especially violence that ends up in wealth, however transient, and a form of “honor killing” no less noxious than the most backward Wahhabi.

And I don’t buy this case where people say they don’t have values. They do have values. They have the wrong values. Don’t come near the kids — don’t touch them.”

Let me know if that works better than “no guns for you!” has been working out.

EIght young people were shot in Chicago in gang-related violence yesterday alone.

Everybody Knows…

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…that capitalism causes inequality between the very rich and the very poor, and that economies with higher degrees of government intervention don’t have that “problem” – right?

Arguing that government policy can too affect income distribution, TNR‘s Tim Noah writes:

“If you omit government redistribution from the calculations in the previous paragraph then four countries that previously were more equal in incomes than the U.S.—Portugal, Italy, Israel, and Germany—become less equal than the U.S.”

Wait. You mean that social-democratic, union-heavy, solidaristic Germany has worse income inequality, before taxes and transfers, than the cowboy capitalistic U.S., with its large underclass and out-of-control Wall Street greedheads? Don’t tell the narrative. …

Everybody just knows it.

Chanting Points Memo: Compare And Contrast

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Today’s “Compare and Contrast” feature pits the “American Legislative Exchange Council” – also known as “ALEC”, and also also known as “This Year’s DFL Boogeyman” – against the “National Conference of State Legislatures“.

“Who”?

Exactly.

Let’s compare them, point by point:

Agenda:  The group promotes a partisan point of view.
ALEC:  Yes – center right.
NCLS: Yes – center-left.

Pushing Agenda:  The group writes “model legislation” that, if passed, would further its agenda, and distributes it to its legislative members (because all legislation needs to be submitted by an elected legislator, naturally).
ALEC:  Yes.  As, by the way, do other conservative think tanks; Cato, the NRA, whomever.
NCLS: Yes.  As, by the way, do liberal think tanks, as well as the political action wings of all the unions.  Especially the NEA.

Content Of That Agenda:  The group promotes an agenda that its opponents find debatable.
ALEC:  Yes – and that fact has pushed the more-deranged reaches of the left to the point where the liberal “attention” has become self-parody, and has gotten to the point where “Berg’s Seventh Law” applies.  Two years ago, they babbled about the Koch Brothers to cover the fact that Alita Messinger was pouring millions into the Minnesota campaign.  This year, yapping like obedient dogs about “ALEC” will obscure the fact that the unions and groups like the NCLS will be doing the same, and much, much more, just by simple dint of there being more of them.
NCLS: Yes – although you don’t hear much about it.

Who Pays The Dues To Join The Group To Learn About The Agenda?:  Both groups charge dues, which by definition makes them “not lobbying groups”.  Someone has to pay for legislators to join and remain “members”.
ALEC:  The members pay their own dues.
NCLS: Dues are paid by the state, using taxpayer money.  One source with background in legislative matters tells me the dues amount to over $300,000 in state money a year.  That’s money that’s being taken from the children to pay for our legislators to think like this.

Attention Group Gets From Its Detractors:  What’s the group’s profile among its opponents?
NCLS: Not much.  Even though it promotes an institutionalist, big-government agenda, and does it with public money, you rarely if ever hear about the NCLS’ actions or agenda.  Or those of the National Education Association, which does all the same things – promoting policy, writing model legislation, trying to inveigle legislators into sponsoring it, yadda yadda.  Or the same operations at AFSCME, MAPE, the SEIU, and on, and on, and on.
ALEC:  The group is to the left in 2012 what “birth certificates” were to the fringe right in 2009, what “Bush’s cruise missiles” were to the “fringe” left in 2004, what “black helicopters” were to the paranoid right in 1996; a stalking horse for their lunatic fringes at best, justification for its own excesses at worst.

Hope we’ve settled that.


Jon Tevlin: Waterboy For The Narrative

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After the Franson “story” broke the week before last, the DFL thought it was onto a Don Imus moment. And they needed one – their somnolent legislative caucus

They were disappointed when the story started to fade – even most DFLers can tell when context is being waterboarded.  It was dropping off the radar last week when the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” stepped in to demand an apology and try to fan the flames among their droogs.

It didn’t work. The protests planned for Rep.Franson’s lawn drew, according to one report, three droogs.

But the droogs on the street are afterthoughts to the DFL. They have them in higher places.

Jon Tevlin – aka “Nick Coleman 2.0″ – seems to have gotten his marching orders, “file an indignant piece about Franson”, in by deadline,which was apparently back when the DFL was still flogging the story.

And Tevlin’s piece hits all the points Alita Messinger and Ken Martin desperately want to be hit:.

 When Rep. Mary Franson compared people who get food stamps to animals in the wild, beholden to humans who feed them,

Huh?

I wonder if Tevlin even knows how bizarre that is.

she was being blissfully ignorant of a growing number of people who live in a certain region in Minnesota.

Namely, her neighbors.

Really, Jon Tevlin, ace reporter?

And how do you know what Mary Franson is “ignorant” about?  She lives there, works in daycare, campaigns there every two years.

I’m going to suggest she’s less “blissfully ignorant” than Jon Tevlin is invincibly arrogant-enough to write columns in first-person omniscient.

Before she made jokes about people on food stamps, or SNAP, she might have asked around, or just looked at the website for Todd County, which is in her district. There, she would have seen a recent report that both food stamps and medical assistance are up dramatically in Todd County.

Soaring, under her watch.

And here, the ethical reader has a dilemma: does the Strib employ a columnist who is stupid enough to believe a state legislator’s “watch” has direct impact on poverty in her county?  Or do they employ one who’s so cynical and in the bag for the DFL propaganda machine that he writes garbage like this in hopes that the readers are too stupid to know any better?

To my mind, it’s a toss-up.

The assumption behind Franson’s logic is that people who get assistance do so because, like animals used to being fed, they get lazy.

No.  They get dependent.  ”Lazy” is when columnists crib their chanting points from “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” .  ”Dependent” is when you honestly don’t know another way than being on the dole.

Compare and contrast:  ”Jon Tevlin is too lazy to dig beneath his own arrogant, smug, entitled, DFL-pimping preconceptisons”, versus “Jon Tevlin is dependent on DFL / ABM chanting points for his material on this issue, to the point where he has no idea how to find the real facts about the issue”.  See the difference?

OK.  Maybe not in Teviln’s case.   Because as we see, he’s both:

But the report from Todd County Social Services shows quite the opposite. The unemployment rate is relatively low, 5.8 percent.

Now, I get confused – is that “on Mary Franson’s watch”, too?

People are working, and working hard, but the fact is they just don’t get paid very much.

Right.  There’s a recession going on.  Perhaps Jon Tevlin has heard?

Need, Rep. Franson. Your constituents, about 8 percent of them, need help because the businesses in your district can’t or won’t pay them enough to live on, and can’t or won’t provide them with health care.

And here’s where both dependence and laziness rear their slothful, indolent heads.  Franson was talking a general principle; Tevlin is talking details – the temporary needs of people having hard times.  Which, I’m sure Tevlin would find if he weren’t dependent on ABM for his chanting points, the GOP broadly supports.

Franson probably thinks these people are slackers, too, no-goods leeching off the public.

And Jon Tevlin “probably” wrote about a third of this column.

Except for this next bit:

Franson might not know these people — her neighbors — very well, but I do.

I lived in Todd County and graduated from high school there. Yes, some of the people who took assistance were lazy or drunks. But mostly they were people like the old woman across the street, whose husband had died many years ago, or like the people who toiled on poor dirt farms, or waited tables at the local restaurant.

Yes, they were even people like my dad, who after working for 40 years at Honeywell had a brain aneurism and had to rely on Social Security, pension, and food stamps for a while.

My dad accepted food stamps because he believed in responsibility, responsibility to feed his kids even though he couldn’t work.

In other words, “my story about real, genuine, acute need – and, more accurately, the emotions it churns up – trump your statement of high-level principle”.

It’s a logical fallacy.  It’s an argument based purely on emotion – which, to be fair, is the only kind of argument Tevlin’s DFL masters can make.   You can’t top it, the logic goes, so you have to just shut up, or appear cold and heartless.

It’s crap, of course; nobody, least of all conservatives, denies that human circumstance and human frailty creates need.  Nobody, least of all Franson, has said anything about changing that.  But the larger point – that welfare does create dependence, and it does – gets obscured by the inflammatory emotion, both of the “can you top this” story and, behyond that, the defamatory slander of the DFL/ABM’s chanting point.

Yes, I said “Tevlin’s DFL masters”:

The war on women apparently now joins the war on the poor.

Two narratives for the price of one.  He’s lazy and dependent, but he’s thorough.

Keep going, Strib.  Has anyone thought about what happens when your paper becomes nothing but a DFL news release ‘bot?

A lot of you Strib employees will be on food stamps, for starters.

Animals

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The DFL – as I noted earlier today – has been trying to make rhetorical hay out of mangling the context of a Mary Franson video (I wrote about this earlier) which, they say “compares welfare recipients to animals”.

The fact is, both parties see the citizen as animals.

The DFL View

"Bad Citizen. BAD!"

In the DFL view, the citizen is an animal.  A pet, at best.  One that might perform a useful service, or might not, but one whose existence is defined by its relation to its Master.

Does SHE deserved to be disenfranchised?

And we all know who The Master is, in the DFL’s world.

Of course, when it suits them, the DFL views the citizen as a different kind of animal:

Downtown Maple Grove, 2040, to the DFL's eyes.

Of course, as every good master knows, pets need discipline – and herd animals are just plain dumb.  Which means the masters need extra tools and power to make sure the animals get taken care of.

Elliot Seid (on ATV) on election day

At election time, or when it’s time to plump up numbers to justify a program’s existence, they see you, citizen, as livestock.  To be kept fed and contented until you’re needed for, er, other things.

The Conservative View

To a conservative, the citizen is a different kind of animal:

The CD4 GOP Committee meeting last Tuesday

Not necessarily “wild” – there are rules, after all – but free.  With liberty, dignity and free will of their own.  They don’t have “masters” – their packs have leaders.  And those leaders can be disposed of when they aren’t doing the job (although we humans have a more civilized way of doing it, unless the pack is Democrats and you are Jimmy Hoffa).

Mass transit, "animal"-style

These animals are, nominally, on their own – with no master, there’s nobody to crack up a can of Alpo.  But the pack does look out for the pack – of its own free will.  None of the animals starves – because that’s the way these animals treat each other.

How would you rather your government see you, you animal, you?

The Real War Against Women

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Last week, Rep, Mary Franson released a video response to constituent questions.  One of the questions was about welfare.

In the video (since removed, unfortunately), Franson compared welfare to treating people like animals – by creating dependence, making it impossible for them to live without help.  In other words, government treats them like pets, zoo creatures, livestock – creatures of whom they are the master.

Now, food stamp recipients aren’t animals – but the DFL chanting point machine, Carrie Lucking and Denise Cardinal of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, Greta Bergstrom of “Take Action Minnesota” and most of Minnesota’s lumpen gray mass of leftybloggers – are certainly a bunch of rhetorical hyenas.  They took Franson’s statement, water-boarded it until all the context went away, and put it out there as ‘Mary Franson Compares People On Food Stamps To Animals“.

And that’s how the media – in the bag for the DFL as they almost universally are – ran with it.

It was a lie, of couse; the DFL, being intellectually and morally bankrupt, has had nothing but lies for the past 30 years.

But since misogyny – Rush’s misguided statement about Sandra Fluke, not Bill Maher saying Sarah Palin would diddle Rick Perry if he were black, or Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a “slut”, or Maher calling Palin a “c*nt”, naturally – is in the news, let’s look at the biggest case of misogyny going on in Minnesota right now.

Because lies have consequences.

Franson has been a lighting rod for Minnesota’s demented left for a long time now.  A Central Minnesota teacher and leftyblogger apparently expressly condoned some of the local droogs-in-the-making in bullying one of Franson’s children in school because, in his role as moral judge, jury and executioner, he figured it served her right, having a parent who opposed gay marriage (LL has the audio; it’s a fairly searing indictment of the “Clockwork Orange”-y inner id of way too much of public education today, not to mention the dingo-like morality of a good 80% of Minnesota leftybloggers).  By extension, it served her right, being a conservative woman.

Because women, like blacks and latinos and gays, are supposed to be liberals.  And if they wander off the reservation, there need to be consequences.

And DFLers are promising consequences for Franson’s latest remark (as filtered through the Hyenas and the media).  Franson has received death threats, crude-to-the-point-of-prehensile attacks, and giggly snarks from the loathsome Paul Thissen, and, Saturday morning, a protest on her front lawn - prompting even some of the less-depraved leftybloggers to urge juuuust a smidge of caution.   (Can you imagine the furor if someone like this - who does, by the way, represent the DFL – turned up at a Tea Party?)  Incredibly, House Minority leader Paul Thissen disavowed any knowledge of the threats of violence, and tried to turn it into another snark.

So the story is this:  the hyenas of the Ministry of Truth twist Franson’s statement far out of context to whip up hysteria – part of a long-running campaign to harass Franson and, indeed, all conservative women, to make being involved in politics too emotionally draining for all but the supernaturally-toughest conservative women (and by God, your leading conservative women could make a Navy SEAL cry uncle).  Hysteria duly ensues, with less-mentally-gifted DFLers promising one of their made-to-order mini-riots on Saturday.

The media wants to know…

…if Franson really thinks food stamp recipients are reeeeealy animals?

Franson, fortunately, responded:

The real news story is the death threats and vicious, sexual, misogynist emails I have received in connection with the video that has been taken down and for which I have apologized. I’ve never compared people with animals as I think too highly of the human person. This is why it’s immoral for government to enable dependency, a subject my critics are fierce to avoid. Democrats are content with

the poverty status quo; republicans are not.

I’d be happy to forward to you some of the emails if you are interested. Otherwise, the subject that I understand you wish to interview me about is both stale & dated and

has been eclipsed by violence from the left. I think your viewers would be more interested in the latter than the former.

Best regards,

Mary Franson

It’s more than a little tempting to drive to Alex this weekend with a camera.  Indeed, if there are any conservative activists in the neighborhood, it’d be good to get the festivities on tape.  This blog will run your footage for you.

And I have a feeling I won’t have to shave any context to make it shame the DFL.

PS:  I implied above that there is a concerted rhetorical campaign to so intensely harass conservative women, blacks, latinos and gays to the point that they stay out of politics.  I’m wondering – can you imagine how some DFL hamster like Betty McCollum or Sandy Pappas would melt down if they were the target of the constant misogynistic hatred that the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Laura Ingraham, Mary Franson or any other conservative women are?

Imagining is all we can do, of course.  Because it just.  Doesn’t.  Happen.   Not like this.

Wages Of Snit

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Carbonite was one of the companies that dropped its sponsorship of Rush Limbaugh during last week’s snit over the host mischaracterizing Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown Law school student who is clearly overpaying for both her education and her birth control, as a “slut”.  (She’s a “Democrat/Media (ptr) prop”, to be perfectly accurate).

And that self-righteousness has come home to roost:

However, it hasn’t done much to contribute to his company’s stock price. Since the market opened on Monday through its close today, Carbonite stock (NASDAQ:CARB) has plummeted nearly 12 percent, outpacing the drop of the NASDAQ index in that same time period by nine-and-a-half points. It was also one of the biggest decliners on the NASDAQ on Tuesday.

Maybe the League of Women Voters will pick up the slack?

 

Code Words

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Can you imagine a “White People For Romney” group?

No?

Because it’d be roundly condemned on all sides of the aisle, right?

Just remember – “Republicans and conservatives…

…are obsessed with race”.

No, keep saying it!

Remember – the only reason not to vote for a utopian socialist who believes in radically transforming American society and the economy, who has a three year record of failure and is the worst president of your lifetime is…because he’s black.

No other reason could possibly exist!

TakeAction Minnesota Thinks People Of Color Are Too Stupid To Keep Track Of IDs

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Between 70% and 80% of Minnesota voters favor the Voter ID proposal.

Some of us favor it because it’s the first step in a series of election reforms that will help us ensure that our election system in fact has integrity; there are increasingly strong suspicions that the election system in Minnesota, with its reports of fraudulent election-day un-identified vouched registrations (among other abuses), lacks that integrity.

Others have the common sense to know that 32 states currently require some degree of voter ID, and elections work just fine; the elderly and students register and vote, just like adults (significantly, most of the non-ID states are Democrat, including states renowned for dirty elections, like Illinois, New York, New Jersey and California)

But for whatever reason, Minnesota voters overwhelmingly favor the measure.  Even in the most “conservative” poll on the subject, the Survey USA poll which showed a 71-23 margin of support overall, the measure even wins among declared liberals, 35-32.

So the anti-ID crowd is getting desperate.

And to paraphrase Gandhi, when you’re fighting the DFL machine on a subject like this, first they ignore you.

Then they mock you.

And  then they call you a racist.

The site was sponsored – apparently – by “Take Action Minnesota”, an astroturf group thats is basically what all of the various non-profit Wellstone cults became over the last decade or so.

And – oboy.  A black guy in a striped suit.  Not good.  Tone deaf.  Politically-incorrect.

And, in the special little world of the liberal astroturf group, I suppose it,  all by itself, invalidates the entire move to bring integrity back to our voting system.

BAD MN Majority.

MN Majority came out with another – which also aroused TakeAction’s drearily predictable ire:

Lest you think all TakeActionMN does is do screenshots, there was some writing and stuff too:

This image is on a Minnesota Majority website. It is trying to scare us into changing our state constitution to require a photo ID to vote. Photo ID would restrict voting rights for over half a million Minnesotans – especially people of color. Photo ID is voter suppression. And it stops here.

I’m always puzzled by the notion that requiring an ID to vote – like we require them for lesser “rights” like cashing a check, using a credit card, setting up a bank account, getting a Social Security Card, getting a copy of your birth certificate, buying Sudafed, getting into a bar, buying a firearm or ammunition, buying a car, taking out a loan, dropping your kids off and picking them up at drop-in daycare, buy alcohol or cigarettes, apply for welfare, food stamps or any sort of medical assistance, rent an apartment, get admitted to a hospital, or get a marriage license – “disenfranchises” anyone, much less ten percent of all Minnesotans, as “Take Action MN” claims.   Or, for that matter, that VoterID infringes, in and of itself, on the right to vote.  It doesn’t; it merely means you need an ID to do it.

Indeed, once you get past cartoon pratfalls, it’s TakeAction that makes the genuinely racist claim - the ludicrous and frankly offensive notion that ten percent of Minneostans – apparently, all minorities, students and the elderly, although nobody has any idea where they got that number, and next month it could very well be “eleventy-teen percent” and nobody will say “boo”.   But to me, their claims sound a lot like “minorities and people of color are too dumb to keep track of their paperwork and ID cards”.

I’m sure that’s not what they meant.

But what they do mean is “if you support Voter ID, we’re going to call you the worst thing there is in modern discourse; the R word”.  It’s the nuclear option – for people who don’t have a factual or ethical argument.

At any rate – we know how Gandhi’s bromide ends; “Then you win”.

TakeAction and the rest of the Minnesota astroturf cult are getting increasingly desperate on this issue, as well as the other big wedge issue likely headed for the ballot this fall, an amendment to make Minnesota a Right to Work state.  Without fraudulent votes and endless union money, the DFL’s position in Minnesota will get a lot weaker.

And that’s a big win for everyone, no matter what your race, ethnicity, or relentless political correctness.

Bruce, Bruce, Bruce.

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To: Bruce Springsteen
From: Mitch Berg, Once And Always Fan
Re:  Janteloven.

Mr. Springsteen,

I’ve been a huge fan since I was a kid.  Since before I became a conservative, even.

When you’re a conservative Springsteen fan, you get used to the occasional churlish phumpher from some ideology-addled lib scold; “have any of you actually listened to Springsteen’s lyrics?”  To which I reply “yes – in a level of detail people like you only devote to stalking Michele Bachmann.  My question for you is, have you actually listened to the lyrics, especially on his first five or six albums, without passing them through your PC filter?”

They rarely answer.

But the fact remains that you, starting in about ’84, but escalating since 2004, have been slathering yourself and your music with politics – which, like most showbiz-lefty politics, is showy, shallow, shrill, and skin-deep.

Like in your conversation with a Swedish radio station recently. Tim Blair writes:

The Boss goes all svag and hopplöst:

Bruce Springsteen wants to see the United States transformed into something closer to a Swedish-style welfare state, the rock legend said Thursday …When asked if he thought the United States should be changed into something closer to a Swedish-style welfare state, Springsteen responded enthusiastically …

Now, whenever “Springsteen music” comes up in conservative circles – as in Blair’s comment section – you get a slew of standard responses; “haters”, I believe the kids call ‘em today.  You hear a lot of the same lines over and over:

  • “Springsteen’s music sucks!” - Well, there’s no accounting for taste as a general rule, but…no.  That is objectively, empirically, physically false.
  • “He’s got no talent” - Wrong again.  He’s a great guitar player, one of the greatest songwriters of the rock and roll era (only Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richard, Leiber/Stoller and a few others come close to the impact he’s had, commercially and artistically).  And you just try to arf out a tune, much less in tune, during a three-hour concert, even in your thirties, much less when you’re over sixty, like Bruce, much less without stripping your vocal cords bare and shooting them out your mouth with his “all lung-power” vocal technique?  You can’t do it, whoever you are.  No.  You can’t.  Any of those are talent.  Together, they an amazing combination.
  • “Sprinsteen’s politics are dumb, and he should just shut up and sing” - Well, OK.  Now we’re getting somewhere.

Good example?  Blair points out Bruce’s paean to the fleabaggers:

It’s impossible to know what young Bruce would have made of the Occupy movement, but old Bruce is down with the deadbeats:

“The temper has changed. And people on the streets did it. Occupy Wall Street changed the national conversation …

“Previous to Occupy Wall Street, there was no push back at all saying this was outrageous – a basic theft that struck at the heart of what America was about, a complete disregard for the American sense of history and community.”

Springsteen is worth four times as much as Michael Moore, and he’s still bitching.

Sigh.

It is a simple fact that the “Holy Trinity” - Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town andThe River - are three of the greatest albums in the history of rock and roll.  There is no rational way of denying that.  Absolutely incandescent albums, crammed with moments that grab me and tens of millions of other people right in the liver, sometimes sending a shiver up my spine, others a smokey glimmer of understanding.  And not a partisan political moment in the bunch.  Not that that’d matter, necessarily – although they’d be a tangent that’d really make no sense on any of the records.  I mean, would “Backstreets” have been a better song had the estranged lovers been driven apart by evil capitalists?  Would “Rosalita” have been better if Bruce had gotten a big advance from the Carter campaign instead of the record company?   If what (what) Candy (Candy) wanted (wanted) was (was) his talking points list?

Of course not.

And Nebraska, Tunnel of Love, The Rising and The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle are all wonderful in their own right, full of things – stories, lessons, hooks, characters – that have accompanied me through good and bad times throughout my entire adult life, from junior high through 9/11.

And nothing’s going to change that.

But in your own amiably earnest way, you are turning into a thinner, less-grim, less-outrageous, but vastly wealthier Michael Moore.

It’s the dirty little secret for conservatives who are Bruce fans:  the more into politics he got, the less interesting his music became. Born in the USA was…good, with a few great moments. The relentlessly-political Ghost of Tom Joad got tiring.  And his work since The Rising?  Kinda rote and not that interesting, musically or thematically.

Ah. Bruce.  Sorry you’ve gone off the rails.  We’ll always have the Holy Trinity.