After a thirty-year-break, Egypt is back in the “Trying To Wipe Israel Off The Map” business:

A Grad rocket has landed in the southern Israeli city of Eilat, but has caused no damage or injuries, Israeli security officials said.

District police chief Ron Gertner told Israeli radio the rocket had been fired from Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.

He said it struck a construction site close to a residential area shortly after midnight (21:00 GMT).

To be fair, we don’t know that the new Egyptian “government” (blessed by Tea-Party-haters and Occupiers throughout the US!) is behind this.

To be honest, we don’t entirely know that some faction of the newly-factionalized government isn’t, either.

Thanks for all that standing around the world, Mr. President!

Judicial Activisim.

To a conservative, it’s writing new law from the bench.

To a liberal / neosocialist?  It’s upholding the Constitution.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

President Obama said:

“And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example, and I’m pretty confident this court will recognize that and not take that step.”

Judicial activism. You keep using that phrase. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

Which is true.  But the real point is, just watch; this’ll be the opening salvo of an effort by the Administration, Media Matters and the left and media (ptr) to reframe “Judicial Activism” as a synonym for “Originalism”.

I’ve held for quite some time now that I think Obama is likely to get re-elected.

Incumbency is a powerful bit of inertia – and America’s media has abandoned all that “speaking truth to power” and “afflicting the powerful and empowering the afflicted” twaddle in favor of becoming a sort of info-Praetorian Guard.  Obama, by another measure, holds all the cards.

And yet he’s been busted his own big fat smug mouth has busted him colluding with a foreign dictator on defense plans, his own idiot Vice President is practically sending out invites for a resurgent Tea Party, the young and ignorant are wising up even as the rich and deluded are wiping the scales from their eyes. and the Constitution may finally be riding to the nation’s rescue, shooting his hallmark legislative “achievement” out of the saddle in the process, causing even the media to notice that all is not well.

The GOP – and the Tea Party – have a lot of work to do.  But this week, for the first time in four years, it almost seems doable.

Joe Doakes emails:

1.    To a Leftist, Rights do not come from God, there is only Power which flows from the government.  That’s why a good result doesn’t mean people are “blessed,” but are “empowered.”

2.    Here’s the clever bit: the implicit Liberal mindset underlying every Chanting Point

“Government is great, government is good, and Obama is its prophet.”

Geez, maybe I should trademark that and get T-Shirts printed

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I can hear the “cha-ching” all the way down on Minnehaha.

Sandra Fluke got laid off from her position as “Obama Administration Stage Prop”.

Trayvon Martin has the gig now.

I’ve been pondering why the Administration has been going so long on the Martin case.

Certainly the Obama administration has hated guns all along; the President tried use the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to pin responsibility for Mexico’s ‘drug wars on the law-abiding American gun owner.  The fact that the media has been so utterly hands-off with “Fast and Furious” should show you just what an explosive scandal it should be; the Government trying to set up the majority of its own population?

Can you imagine what they’d have said if George W. Bush had used the FBI to set up a sting to try to blame 9/11 on Democrats, purely for political gain on a wedge issue?

So of course, Obama would like to find some way to take a chunk out of firearm rights, a movement that has spit in the eye of the left and (are you listening, MNGOP Legislative caucus) won, and won consistently for the past thirty years, by setting its bar high and not compromising on core principle

But gun control is only part of the story.

Here’s the real story: Afro-Americans are losing their enthusiasm for Obama.   Oh, not in a way that’ll lose him the black vote – but Obama’s initial election depended entirely on a whipped up base.  Obama is going to face an uphill fight getting his based whipped up, though; whatever “recovery” we’re in has largely skipped the black community; the black unemployment rate of 14% (actually up in the past month) only tells part of the story; while 59.6% of the general population is actually working, only 53% of the black working-age population has a job.

That’s catastrophic.  Not only has the black community not gotten any of the hopey-changey yet, it’s inescapable that if you’re black in America, you are worse off than you were four years ago.

Of course, a black kid getting killed is hardly news.  It’s sad but true; it happens all the time.  And the white liberal media could hardly care less; confronting the horrendous death and incarceration rate among black youth – to say nothing of black unemployment – would force them to confront liberalism’s failures, which means confronting its institutional racism.   So while the possibly unjust death of a young black man may be good for enthusiasm points, if it doesn’t get media coverage, it’s the proverbial tree falling alone in a forest.

But when you combine a dead black kid with an issue that does get the white liberal media exercised – their fear of citizens with guns?  You’ve got political gold.  Suddenly, you’ve got media coverage!

And that’s why Trayvon Martin is in the news, and Sandra Fluke is out.  Every dim-bulb that can be fooled into thinking “Republicans will ban contraception” has already been fooled.  Now it’s time to hoodwink the ones that think Republicans want to arm white people to kill black people.

And the media – wittingly or not – is totally on board with that.

Claudia Rosett on the real story behind the Obama daughters’ vacation:

It’s not actually about the First Daughter, per se, who according to serially vanishing stories has been vacationing with a group of friends in Mexico — a country for which the State Department just last month issued a new warning to all U.S. travelers.

It’s about the judgment of the White House, which apparently deems there is “no vital news interest” to this story.

How so?

Read the whole thing.

Think “patricians versus plebeians”, and the media that props our Patrician President up.

Get back to me.

You’ve probably seen this story in the past day or so – Bristol Palin calling out the President’s and, especially, liberals’ hypocrisy in re the “war on women”:

You don’t know my telephone number, but I hope your staff is busy trying to find it. Ever since you called Sandra Fluke after Rush Limbaugh called her a slut, I figured I might be next. You explained to reporters you called her because you were thinking of your two daughters, Malia and Sasha. After all, you didn’t want them to think it was okay for men to treat them that way:

“One of the things I want them to do as they get older is engage in issues they care about, even ones I may not agree with them on,” you said. “I want them to be able to speak their mind in a civil and thoughtful way. And I don’t want them attacked or called horrible names because they’re being good citizens.”

And I totally agree your kids should be able to speak their minds and engage the culture. I look forward to seeing what good things Malia and Sasha end up doing with their lives.

All very, very true.

But here’s why I’m a little surprised my phone hasn’t rung. Your $1,000,000 donor Bill Maher has said reprehensible things about my family. He’s made fun of my brother because of his Down’s Syndrome. He’s said I was “f—-d so hard a baby fell out.” (In a classy move, he did this while his producers put up the cover of my book, which tells about the forgiveness and redemption I’ve found in God after my past – very public — mistakes.)

If Maher talked about Malia and Sasha that way, you’d return his dirty money and the Secret Service would probably have to restrain you. After all, I’ve always felt you understood my plight more than most because your mom was a teenager. That’s why you stood up for me when you were campaigning against Sen. McCain and my mom — you said vicious attacks on me should be off limits.

It didn’t work, of course; the hog trough that is the lefty “alternative” media spawned an entire movement of “Triggers”.

Yet I wonder if the Presidency has changed you. Now that you’re in office, it seems you’re only willing to defend certain women. You’re only willing to take a moral stand when you know your liberal supporters will stand behind you.

But…

What if you did something radical and wildly unpopular with your base and took a stand against the denigration of all women… even if they’re just single moms? Even if they’re Republicans?

Y’see, that’s the thing; the President could do it.  He’s got his Daily Koses and Bill Mahers and NPR and a herd of George Stephanopouli to do the actual dirty work for him; the Prez  could take the high road!

But he won’t!

Because Bristol Palin, and Alan West, and 4th CD candidate Tony Hernandez, and every black, hispanic, asian, gay or female Republican conservative that you see is the single biggest threat the Democrats face; they’re the apostates.

As the Democrat parts of this country shrink – mostly due to the pathologies that come from Democrat mismanagement – the Dems big long-term hope is “demographic shift” – the idea that as “minorities” become the majority, the Dems will eventually be unstoppable.

That is, of course, entirely predicated on minorities staying on the plantation. and voting in lock step for Democrats forevermore.  And those that don’t – the apostates – are the greatest threat that exists to that vision.

Centuries ago, as the Catholic Church’s struggling and corrupt bureaucracy struggled with change, they sent out the various Inquisitions to find and convince the various heretics and apostates to get back in line – by killing them for their own good, if necessary.

It didn’t prevent half a billion unforced turnovers as the Protestant movement established itself – but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Bristol Pallin may not have expected the Chicago Inquisition.  But her mother, and Alan West, and Laura Ingraham and every Asian and Latino conservative that showed up at caucuses this year certainly should.

Because they are the visible signs of the Democratic party bleeding to death.

When I saw that Eric Black – formerly of the Strib, now at the Minnpost – had written a piece entitled “Redistricting maps give DFL advantage in legislative races, but …”, I went “uh oh”.

I mean, Eric Black is no leftyblogging bobblehead.  He’s one of the Deans Of Minnesota Political Journalism (although to be fair Minnesota Political Journalism has more deans than the MNSCU system).

And while I don’t want to frame the redistricting in especially partisan terms, the fact is that the maps didn’t really adequately reflect Minnesota’s most important current demographic trend – people fleeing the failed DFL-controlled Twin Cities and Duluth, and moving to areas that actually work, which are universally and without exception GOP-controlled.   They bent over backwards to maintain the Twin Cities’ control over Minnesota politics, especially at the Congressional level.

Now – before I get into Black’s actual piece, here – let’s go over a tiny little bit of the theory of journalism.

Print journos know that the number of people who actually read any given point in a story drops, almost geometrically, the further into the story you get.  If 1000 eyeballs scan the headline, 100 might read the opening paragraph or two.  Of those 100, 10 might plod through the middle.  If there’s a jump, or if it takes longer than a few minutes to plod through, barring some immediate personal interest, 1 might get to the end of the piece (the numbers are made-up, but they’re neither gratuitously far-off nor conceptually wrong).

So copy editors write headlines that try to lure as many eyeballs as possible into the story – and generations of editors have groused at reporters “don’t bury the lede” – because in print news (and its red-headed stepchild, online journalism), the first impression may be the only impression you get.

And with that headline and its key message- DFL ADVANTAGE!!!! – ringing in my mind, I tucked into the rest of the story:

When the new decennial map of Minnesota’s legislative districts was unveiled in late February, most neutral observers said the DFL had won the battle for a favorable map. But the degree of the DFL victory may have been understated. If the map is destiny (which it isn’t, but it can change the odds), the DFL may have a decent shot at taking back control of both houses of the Minnesota Legislature in the 2012 election.

The degree of DFL victory “may have been understated”.

That’s the lede.  And ledes are important for that portion of Minnesota’s population that reads past the headline – which, as we established in the headline, says the maps were a big win for the DFL (“but…”).

And who – other than those “neutral sources” – is behind this claim (and I’ll add emphasis):

DFL State Chair Ken Martin recently told me that the way his party scores the partisan lean of the new districts, the DFL has at least a slight advantage in 73 House districts and 34 Senate districts. If (a big “if” unless and until it happens) the DFL candidates were to prevail in those districts, it would give the party a substantial (73-61) majority in the House and a bare (34-33) single vote majority in the Senate.

So after a headline and a lede that proclaim that the DFL was the big winner, we get the source – Ken Martin.  The Chair of the DFL, after coming from “Win Minnesoita“, which is part of the DFL money shell-game that pays for all the DFL’s attack ads (and thus, all of its messaging, period).

That’s it.

So to the reader’s perception, the story really says THE DFL HAS A HUGE ADVANTAGE (according to the head of the DFL).

And we know this…

To be precise for the total political wonks in the audience, the DFL has developed a methodology that looks – precinct by precinct – at DFL votes across the last many elections. (As you can imagine, the partisan breakdown of a precinct can vary from year to year and from race to race within a given year.) The DFL method massages the numbers into what it called the DPI (Democratic Performance Index) of each precinct. And now that they know which precincts go with which state House and Senate districts, they can calculate which districts have a DPI of greater than 50 percent, which means that the DFL should have an advantage in winning and hold that seat.

…because the DFL did a bunch of math…

Before you get too excited (or upset, depending on your partisan preference) you should know that:

a) Martin didn’t release the map of the DFL-leaning districts nor the numbers on which the calculation is based, so skeptics cannot check his statement;

b) The Pioneer Press, which published a similar calculation, reached a significantly less favorable DFL number on the Senate map. (The Pi-Press analysis did indicate that the DFL has the map potential to take back control of the House and gain ground – but enough for control – in the Senate); and

c) Everyone that I interviewed for this post assured me that, while the map is important, it is neither the only nor even the most important thing.

…which was likely b*llsh*t, and even the media knows it.

But it’s worth, apparently, putting as an unvarnished headline and lede.

Why?

Because it’s one of the narratives the DFL wants spread far and wide; their success is inevitable.  Don’t ask why – they won’t tell you.  Just keep repeating it, Dems.  Just interenalize it, conservatives!

The DFL’s main hope this election is to drive down conservative enthusiasm – which slaughtered them two years ago – and try to create some sort of bandwagon effect on the left.

Prediction:  An upcoming Minnesota Poll or Humphrey Institute survey will show that A MAJORITY OF MINNESOTANS (from a sample that over-counts DFLers 3:2) APPROVE OF DAYTON’S JOB AS GOVERNOR.

Gotta hand it to the DFL.

They’re playing a pair of “fours” this election.   But they’re playing them for all they’re worth.

Intellectually and politically, the DFL is running on fumes this year.  The closest thing they had to a legislative agenda – “tax the rich!” – stalled and died in the legislature.  The regional economy is slowly (sloooooowly) obsoleting their “We have to tax our way out of deficits!” meme.  They’re looking at Obama’s eroding popularity and hoping that the President’s coat tails are like the ones on a tank top.   And redistricting, for all of the partisan media’s backing and filling, looks to be mostly a wash in the near term, and reflects long-term demographic changes that can not bode well for the DFL (other than the progressives’ great long-term fairy tale, “lots of potential liberals are immigrating to the US”, which is of course true provided that we allow generations of new Americans to stay ignorant about what this country’s about – which is, of course, Democrat policy).

In response, the DFL really has only a few points to run on:

“Aren’t Those Republicans Awful People?”  In 1998, when the Democrats had a skirt-seeking missile in the White House, they responded by teaching a generation of American teens that oral sex wasn’t really sex at all, and demanding that we all just Mooooove On.  The French were laughing at us after all.

Now, after a low-grade “sex scandal”, Mary Fransion’s manufactured gaffe and a few other minor incidents, expect the Party of Infanticide to plead “family values”, making me wonder if all those teenagers from the Clinton era – now pushing thirty – will need years of therapy to sort out the mixed messages.

“Just Look At The Economy!” Minnesota’s economy is doing better than most.  Not North Dakota-good, but not bad.  The DFL and media (ptr) will work overtime to convince Minnesotans that correlation – Mark Dayton is governor and the economy sucks less than the rest of the US – equals causation, scrupulously ignoring that it’s the GOP majority in the Legislature that have done all the positive work this past few years (and, likely as not, eight years of Pawlenty’s leadership and four years of his stymying of the DFL that set the stage for the relative level of health we have).

“We Saved The Vikings!”  And they’ll save snowmobiling and binge-drinking, too, if they have to!

The mainstream media – especially the Strib, which profits from the current Dayton/Bakk plan – spun this as a partisan issue (and part of it was; principled conservatives joined a few principled liberals, like John Marty, in rejecting Wilfare), playing up Dayton and Senate Majority Leader Bakk’s “leadership”, and only incidentally scratching the surface of their plan, which seemed to rely on money borne down from heaven on the backs of unicorns. (You can go to MPR to read what I was reporting on two weeks ago, if you’d like).

Of course, with the Senate tabling the bill, that’s looking a little dodgy.  But no worries – the Dems still have the big daddy of them all:

“It’s Inevitable!”  One of my favorite aphorisms is an old Hungarian saying: “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”.

The DFL apparently read it too.

The DFL and the media – and on this, as few other issues, when I say “pardon the redundancy”, it rings truer than usual – are doing their best to portray this next election as an inevitable winner for the DFL, for…well, whatever reason.  Redistricting favored them (more on that probably later today), or people are sick of GOP squabbling and want the government to “get things done”, or demographics make it inevitable, or the economy is racing back so fast that Obama’s coattails are going to lift them up, or Minnesotans just loooooooove keeping their beloved government fat and happy…

…or all of the above.  Because the best way to win an election may not in fact be to appear as if you already have – but it doesn’t hurt to add it in there, either.

So this blog will spend a good chunk of the next seven and a half months covering the DFL Ministry of Truth’s attempts at psychological warfare.  There’ll be no shortage of material.

Like many conservatives, I watched the video of Obama cuddling up to the usual dog’s breakfast of radicals in college..

…and thought “OK, that’s maddening, but it’s hardly anything to run a campaign on”.

I mean, many of us said, did and wrote things in college and high school we’d not like to have turn up now.  I was a liberal, for crying out loud.  The platform I wrote for 1980 North Dakota Boys’ State would have made Paul Wellstone look like Ron Paul.  I’d rather it nor turn up, if you catch my drift.

But the President’s past isn’t going to defeat him – and only partly because, like Mark Dayton’s mental health and alcoholism, the media will cover it up for all they’re worth.  No, it’s just not the kind of thing most Americans outside the conservative wonk class will ever care about.  

And as Stanley Kurtz notes,  the present is the outrage, and the future should be the real weapon against Obama:

I don’t quite hold with either view. The debate is miscast, both because it treats the past and present as sharply different, and because it assumes we actually know and understand what Obama has been doing these last three-and-a-half years. I disagree. Many aspects of Obama’s present–to say nothing of his plans for the future–are as guarded and mysterious as his radical past. In fact, the poorly-known side of Obama’s world makes the clearest sense only when you combine research into his past and present alike….There are many aspects of Obama’s current policies that the public knows little or nothing about, and seemingly familiar things that are still poorly understood. When you put the total picture together, the links between Obama’s present and past can be drawn much more convincingly than many now imagine.

That’s the slow, steady drip in the background, for those of us who are paying attention; if Obama wins re-election, and has either house of Congress, he’s going to go on a hopey-changey orgy.

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.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Progressives claim this election is Conservatives’ last gasp before demographics render them irrelevant forever.

Sounds as if they agree with that awful right-wing hate-monger, Mark Steyn:

Well then, if Liberals will be in charge from now own, this won’t be a problem:

Source: Chart 5-1, page 58, appendix to President Obama’s 2013 budget proposal.

I can divert spending from whiskey and bullets to . . . well, more whiskey, I suppose. Good to know!

I guess Warren Buffet is in for a huge bill.

Did you know Minnesota had a Lieutenant Governor?

Gotta confess, I’d pretty much forgotten about Yvette Prosser Sorum.  A long-time legislator from Duluth, she served Governor Dayton’s need for a politician with ovaries and a relentlessly party-line record, to try to shore up DFL support after defying the DFL endorsement process and beating Margaret Anderson-Kelliher.

Wait – it’s Yvonne Prettner Solon?  Whew.  That coulda been embarrassing.

But not as embarrassing as this bit here, where our “Lieutenant Govenror” tries to talk economics:

Lt. Gov. Yvonne Prettner Solon said the governor’s office wants all who are eligible to enroll in the program, which not only ensures Minnesotans have enough to eat and be healthy, but also helps the state’s economy.

“Every dollar of use of the SNAP program, there’s $1.73 that’s generated for our economy, which helps our grocery stores,” Prettner Solon said. “It helps our farmers. It helps everybody along the food supply chain.”

That’s right – food stamps help the economy!

Because the money that goes into food stamps comes from unicorns, brought to us in golden boxes.

It’s not like anyone had to pay for those food stamps (and the administrators who , well, administrate them) out of money taken from what they or their business had earned, right?

Well, not in DFL world, anyway.

This is a DFLer’s education at work.

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!

We’re getting close to election season.

And Minnesota’s left-“leaning” “grassroots” astroturf organizations – Common Cause, Take Action Minnesota, Alliance For A Better Minnesota, and the various unions are following suit with doing what their various funders are paying them to do; trying to spin news, facts and info to get people to vote DFL in the upcoming elections.

Now, as we noted during the 2010 election cycle, these groups – especially Alliance for a Better Minnesota – are lavishly funded by liberal plutocrats, and always have been…

…even back before Citizens United started evening the playing field and allowing conservatives the same access to soft money that the Dems have always gotten from their union and 527 supporters.

Which is like complaining about plate tectonics; what are you going to do about it, one would be right to ask.  Political money is speech; we conservatives live by that ideal, and we’ll have to learn to prevail by it.

It’s not that the money buys so much messaging that is so very very irritating – indeed, depressing, if one cares for the future of this society, beyond narrow partisan politics.

It’s that the messaging it buys is so often not merely devoid of fact or defining context, but so cynically so that one can only think their only motivation for the entire campaign is “to repeat enough complete bullshit often enough to fool enough of the stupid and gullible to keep us in power”.

We saw this in 2010 in Minnesota, when these groups and their “useful idiots” (Lenin’s term, not mine) in the Twin Cities media and lefty “alternative” media, pounded a couple of non-factual or almost criminally-context-deprived points home with almost experimental-psych-class-material mania; the idea that “Tom Emmer had two DUIs” (he hadn’t; he’d been arrested and pled down to “Careless Driving”, 20 and 30 years earlier) and that he’d (campaigned for lax punishment for drunk drivers” (also a lie; Emmer was proposing a change in the implied consent law that is supported by a broad, and bipartisan, range of figures, at least in part because current law discriminates so completely against people who can’t afford lawyers.  Emmer would have changed that).  The campaign helped convinced, I’m going to guess, just a shade over 8,000 of our stupidest, most incurious, lemming-like neighbors to vote for a superannuated playboy with drinking, drug and depression problems and a record as America’s worst senator instead.

In other words, slathering Minnesota’s dimmest, least-curious citizens with b*llsh*t worked.

And they’re going long on the tactic this year.

Under the dual rubrics of my “Minnesota’s Ministry of Truth” and “Chanting Points Memo” categories, I’m going to start cataloging the broad, rich, lavishly-funded vein of pure fiction (at best) that the DFL is banking on to try to stem GOP fortunes in Minnesota this fall.

“Most Minnesotans oppose Voter ID” – This one came from Greta Bergstrom, a spokes-bot for “Take Action Minnesota”, an activist non-profit that claims a Wellstone-ian pedigree, but whose inner workings (say an acquaintance with knowledge of their front office) would fit in better in Pyongyang; “Nobody wants photo ID”, she tweeted not too long ago.  That was about the time – go figure – that Survey USA was showing Voter ID with 3:1 support (71-29) among Minnesotans, even among self-identified liberals.  Which was, by the way, the poll with the best news for Voter ID opponents.   Ms. Bergstrom apparently believes that if she and her group repeat it often enough, just enough of the addled will buy in.  It’s worked before, after all; it’s why we have a Governor Dayton!

“The Stand Your Ground Bill” would allow citizens to shoot people because they felt like it” – It’s bad enough that pathetically addled leftybloggers grind their way through this bit of nonsense; they have no power even among lefty media types.  But when you have Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom – words fail me – misrepresenting the law in re Stand Your Ground, to try to draw out a wedge (to try to counter all the various wedges that the GOP have identified for this coming season), you know that the idiocy moves depressingly high on the food chain.  Backstrom may or may not be taking orders from Alliance For A Better Minnesota (and thence, likely as not, Media Matters) like the likes of Bergstrom, Carrie Lucking, Ken Martin and Denise Cardinal – but he’s basically playing from their one-note sheet music.

“Right To Work States Have Lower Per-Capita Incomes Than Union States!” – This, you hear from any number of different lefty-bots, is a great reason to oppose the “Right To Work” Amendment, which (says Survey USA) Minnesotans favor by a 55-24 margin.  Of course, they never mention that non-Right-to-Work states are, inevitably, coastal “Blue” states with – it’s true – higher standards of living, but much higher costs of living as well.  Of course wages are higher in New York City!  But do you think a carpenter in New York buys himself a better quality of life for his money in NYC than does one in, say, Dallas?   A carpenter in Texas will actually be working, as opposed to the New Yorker – but I’m on a tangent now.  The fact is, unions don’t make overall wages across an entire geographical region bigger or better than the same wages in the same jobs elsewhere (beyond the obvious job-by-job wage comparisons).  They do, however, contribute to the higher cost of living.

It’s a stupid argument – but since it’s aimed at stupid people, it works.  Depressingly enough.

“Republicans Are Waging A War Against Women!” – Notwithstanding the fact that no significant Republican has said word-boo about the subject on any sort of policy level.  Apparently it’s one of those things where Republicans want to ban contraception even if they don’t even know it.

Just as we do – we’re told this by our betters at Minnesota Public Radio – with race!  Because…

“Republicans speak in racist code words!” – And those words are so coded that we apparently haven’t the foggiest we’re saying about them.  This one got on Minnesota Public Radio on Thurday morning, on the Keri Miller show.  Miller – who is becoming the Lori Sturdevant of MPR – ran for an hour with the premise that the GOP’s racist message is so very tightly wound into the very language that Republicans (but not Democrats, natch) use that we don’t even realize we’re doing it!.  Because when Democrats talk about “urban” problems, they mean problems that occur to collections of buildings, apparently, but when Republicans talk about pizza, it’s because Italians in New York used to hate blacks, and white people use “pizza” as a code for that sort of hatred.  Or something.

“Voter ID would disenfranchise masses of voters” – I hate paperwork as much as much more than the next guy – government paperwork more than most.   And this really is a tangent, but isn’t it reasonable for society to expect someone to exercise the most absolutely de minimis requirement for personal administration – the precise paperwork one needs to have to cash a check, pick up a prescription, get a drivers license, hold a job legally, set up a bank account, buy Sudafed, get a cell phone, get into a bar before you “look over 21” – to exercise a right for which over a million Americans have died?

But that is a tangent, because many states do require voter ID, and they vote just fine.

Anyway – it’s a lie.

“Voter ID is like Jim Crow” – That predictable little apertif is from my new “representative”, Rena Moran.  Moran may or may not be a perfectly fine person, but she’s oblivious (or has not be told to be blivious, or she just flat-out knows she benefits from ongoing fraud) to the Democrat party’s history of election rigging – but she is in fact exactly wrong. Voter ID – along with a vigilant electorate – helps prevent the sort of sham elections that characterized Jim Crow.

“Governor Dayton has a Jerbs Bill!  The Republicans don’t! They must not want to put people to work!” – Because as everyone knows, jobs come from government!  If Tim Pawlenty and George W. Bush had just pushed laws requiring companies to hire people, there’d have been no recession!

Of course, even many Democrats know better than that.  They believe that a bonding bill that’ll pay for a few billion in construction work – or Obama’s “Shovel Ready” jobs, as if even a sizeable minority of Americans still work with shovels, or even in construction – is the answer!

Of course, the GOP is pushing legislation to cut business taxes and regulations and make Minnesota’s business climate healthier for business, especially small business, which is battered and bleeding from Obama’s regulatory orgy

And Onward!  – What else have you heard?

Barack Obama thinks women are idiots.

Time will tell if he’s got a point.

Here’s the deal:  Obama’s poll numbers aren’t good.  Oh, the media is doing its best to spin it (with measures that seem desperate and slapdash), but the economy is still miserable (especially if you’re not too big to fail), the unemployment rate is “Down” to where the Administration said it wouldn’t go above if we passed Porkulus, and that’s through the grace of the fact that no Mullah in Iran has yet walked to the shore at the Strait of Hormuz and skipped a rock across the water, sending tankers scurrying for cover and pushing oil over $200 a barrel.  Yet.  And even so, this is the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression – largely because of Obama’s policies.

People have been cooling on “The One” pretty much since inauguration day.

And The One needs to get that enthusiasm going again.

And so what better to take peoples’ minds off their miseries and rile the (female) troops?

“Republicans want to take away your contraceptives!”

Notwithstanding the fact that, as Romney noted in December when George Stephanopoulos incongruously broached the subject in a debate, the subject has never come up in GOP circles.  Period.  It’s a non-issue to the GOP.

No matter.  The media is in lock-step behind the Administration’s meme that the GOP wants to outlaw contraception.  The theatrical “walk-out” of Democrats from Darrel Issa’s hearings was a classic bit of Goebbelsian theatre; while the useful idiots in the media (in this case, the gleefully dim Amanda Terkel at Huffpo) called the hearings “about contraception” they were in fact hearings on the constitutionality of mandating that religious groups offer contraception against their beliefs.

Catch that?  The Democrats don’t even need to hijack Republicans’ meetings themselves.  The mainstream media will do it for them, after the fact.

At any rate, that’s Obama’s message to female voters:  “Never mind the economy; never mind the unemployment rate; never mind the fiscal catastrophe waiting for you, your kids, and their kids; and above all, don’t believe your lying ears when the GOP mentions that they’ve never said word one about taking anyone’s contraceptives away.  Look!  Boogeyman!”

Women, in Barack Obama’s world, are not just dim little dolts; they seem to think that women are intellectual slaves to their reproductive systems.

Just keep repeating it, over and over.

Just like the media do.

Gas prices are going to spike again this summer.

Boy. Good thing Obama spiked the Keystone pipeline and has dragged oil drilling down steadily!

(“Hey!  We know the oil companies are going to raise prices to hurt Obama!”.  Good).

To: President Obama
From: Mitch Berg, Mere Citizen
Re: Our Stature In The World

Dear Mr. President,

Maybe if you bowed deeper and more vigorously, you could fix this little mess.

That is all.

PS:  Please ask Rep. Ellison if he’ll call for not destroying all Jews now?  Just an idea.

One of the things I predicted on election night back in 2010 was that, out of power, the DFL would revert to whatever forms of power it actually had with more passive-aggressive vigor.

One of those forms of power was the “bureaucratic complaint”.

The DFL has created a small industry of bureaucratic complainants.  Groups like “Common Cause” essentially exist, at least in part, to complain about non-DFL politicians and politics.  Of course, “filing complaints” is one of the few areas where the DFL allows do-it-yourself-ism in politics.

The reason, of course, is to create a buzz in the compliant media; the goal is to create the possibility that a voter – inevitably poorly-read, ill-informed, one who still believes anything the mainstream media says, especially about politics – will hear “corruption” and “Republican” and think “Hey, Republicans shore must be KerrRUPT!” and cease thinking right then and there.

That the complaints are pretty much inevitably dismissed?  Even if the mainstream media were to hypothetically report it as aggressively as they did the original complaint – and they never, ever do – the DFL knows that with at least a few voters, the damage is done.

And so the “Ethics Complaint” against Senator Dave Thompson of Lakeville got big play in the media – but the fact that there was no there there?

The Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board has dismissed the Complaint filed by DFL Chairman Ken Martin against Senator Dave Thompson. In a letter dated January 26, 2012, the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board stated there is no basis for a claim against Senator Thompson. In the letter, Executive Director Gary Goldsmith stated, “Under the authority delegated to me by the Board, I have reviewed the complaint and concluded that it does not provide a sufficient basis for the commencement of a Board Investigation.”

(Echo)

On Monday, January 23, 2012, DFL Chairman Ken Martin filed a Complaint against Senator Dave Thompson (R-Lakeville) with the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board regarding an alleged failure to disclose payments made by the Republican Party of Minnesota.

Weasels chew things.  Ken Martin files spurious complaints about Republicans.  The circle of life.

Senator Thompson said, “I complied with all disclosure requirements. Therefore, I am not surprised by the Board’s decision. Still, it is gratifying to see a clear statement from Mr. Goldsmith concluding that the Complaint does not even provide a basis for an investigation.”

And yet for Ken Martin -the former executive from “Win Minnesota”, which collected contributions from plutocrats and unions to run an attack PR campaign against Tom Emmer – it’s “mission accomplished”.

Because somewhere out there, in a trailer park in New Prague, a gas station attendant with a DUI and a couple of misdemeanor domestics pled down to “disorderly conduct” but whose vote counts just as much as yours does is now thinking “G’huck – Dave Thompson and the GOP sure must be corrupt!”

And that’s a form of power you can’t take away from the DFL no matter how many elections you win.

Gallupp rreleased its final digest of presidential approval numbers.

And throughout 2011, the news was bad for Obama.  His net approval was only above 50% in ten states plus DC, according to Gallup:

In 10 states plus the District of Columbia, a majority of residents approved of the job Barack Obama was doing as president last year, according to aggregated data from 2011. His greatest support came from District of Columbia, Maryland, and Hawaii residents, while Utah and Idaho residents gave him his lowest levels of support — below 30%.

Here are the state-by-state numbers.

Now, let’s remember it’s still early in the year, and that the Democrat noise machine and media (pardon the redundancy) willl eke out some more points for The One, and that this is an aggregate approval number, not a candidate-vs-candidate number.

And memes like “No president has ever (gotten some number or another) and still won the election” tend to be true until they’re not.

But if you accept the meme that no President with popularity below 50% has ever won re-election, and you apply that number state-by-state, it looks rought for The One, according to Conn Carroll at the WashEx:

Carroll (with emphasis added):

Gallup released their annual state-by-state presidential approval numbers yesterday, and the results should have 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue very worried. If President Obama carries only those states where he had a net positive approval rating in 2011 (e.g. Michigan where he is up 48 percent to 44 percent), Obama would lose the 2012 election to the Republican nominee 323 electoral votes to 215.

Again, that’s just popularity numbers based on the old “50%” meme.  Maybe it sticks,  maybe it doesn’t.

But bit by bit, I think this election might be doable – if we Real Americans don’t shoot ourselves in the foot.

Cliff Kincaid at Accuracy in Media reports that the Catholic Church – or parts of it, anyway – are up in arms (as it were) over the Obama administration’s mandates:

My Catholic priest, Father Larry Swink, delivered a homily on Sunday that I told him would make headlines. In the toughest sermon I have ever heard from a pulpit, he attacked the Obama Administration as evil, even demonic, and warned of religious persecution ahead. What was also newsworthy about the sermon was that he cited The Washington Post in agreement—not on the subject of the Obama Administration being evil, but on the matter of its abridgment of the constitutional right to freedom of religion.

What is happening is extraordinary and unprecedented. The Catholic Church is in open revolt against the Obama Administration, with Fr. Swink noting from the pulpit that priests across the archdiocese were joining the call on Sunday to rally Catholics to resistance against the U.S. Government. He said we are entering a time of religious persecution and that Catholics and others will have to make a final decision about which side they are on.

If true, that’s great news – but I gotta say I’m not nearly as sanguine.

I’m not Catholic – and in my observation, most Catholics outside the clergy and intelligentsia are as diligently observant of the Vatican’s rules as most Jews are of Kosher laws; birth control and hamburger on Friday are as common among Catholics as the odd bit of ham and Saturday shopping trips are among mainstream Jews.

And I know – exceptions exist, including among readers of this blog.  But in my observation, there are vast swathes of the Catholic Church, in major cities, that either turns a blind eye to the inconvenient parts of the Vatican’s rules, or is willing to rationalize and ignore them in pursuit of a “progressive” political agenda – which accounts for a huge number of Catholic liberals I personally know.

Oh, the Bishops will make a ruckus:

The issue is what the Catholic Bishops have called a “literally unconscionable” edict by the Obama Administration demanding that sterilization, abortifacients and contraception be included in virtually all health plans.

At a time when the media are full of reports about who is ahead and behind in the polls, and who will win the next Republican presidential primary, this incredible uprising in the Catholic Church is something that could not only overshadow the political campaign season, but also may have a major impact on the ultimate outcome—if Republicans know how to handle it. This matter goes beyond partisan politics to the growing perception of an unconstitutional Obama Administration assault on religious freedom. To hear the Catholic Bishops and Priests describe it, our constitutional republic and our freedoms hang in the balance.

But if you go to St. Joan of Arc (to pick a far-left parish of my acquaintance), it’s all an un-issue, ignored for the “greater good”; many, perhaps the majority of Catholic parishes I know of in the Twin CIties would trade, at the clerical level as well as among a fair chunk of the laity, the Nicene Creed for single-payer health care and Cap and Trade.

So am I wrong?  I’d especially like to hear from Catholics, here.  Does anyone at your parish – from your priests on down – care about Obamacare?  Has that “caring” been manifested in the form of “telling the congregation that it’s wrong, and that it’s going to screw with the what the Catholic Church supposedly holds dear?”

I’d be interested in hearing.

Rep. Allan Westhas words for our nation’s lefty leaders:

“Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America,” Rep. Allen West (R-FL) said at the Palm Beach County Republican Party Lincoln Day dinner. West represents the district in the U.S. Congress.

Obviously he’s a racist.

There was good news and rejoicing; the SEALS continued their winning streak, rescuing an American and Danish hostage in Somalia.

But buried in the good news is a sign of the Obama Administraion’s myopia.

The Navy SEAL operation that freed two Western hostages in Somalia is representative of the Obama administration’s pledge to build a smaller, more agile military force that can carry out surgical counterterrorist strikes to cripple an enemy.

That’s a strategy much preferred to the land invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that have cost so much American blood and treasure over the past decade. The contrast to a full-bore invasion is stark: A small, daring team storms a pirate encampment on a near-moonless night, kills nine kidnappers and whisks the hostages to safety.

It all sounds good.  And so far, it is.

Here’s where the logic breaks down:

Special operations forces, trained for such clandestine missions, have become a more prominent tool in the military’s kit since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that led to the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The administration is expected to announce Thursday that it will invest even more heavily in that capability in coming years.

Cool, except that creating special operations troops is not just a matter of “Investment”.  You can’t create them with money.  You have to start with troops – traditionally people from the infantry and airborne, although they come from all corners of all services today – who learn the basics of being a soldier (or sailor, or airman, or Marine).  Then, the ones that have the urge to try will audition – and, mostly, fail – less than half of those who try to get into the Rangers succeed; the even-more-selective elite-of-the-elite units like the US Special Forces (“Green Berets”), SEALs and “Detlas” are vastly more selective; from6-12% of those who try out make the cut over a training-and-selection regimen that runs two solid years and change…

…and starts with people who are already proficient at soldiering; you don’t enlist to be a SEAL or a Green Beret or a Delta; you make your bones as a highly-competent infantryman or tanker or gunners mate or helicopter mechanic or paratrooper or Ranger or combat engineer first; to get into “Delta”, one usually starts the selection process as a highly-regarded, supremely fit NCO, a fairly senior sergeant with the beginnings of a solid career, before even volunteering for the brutally-exclusive selection process.

And in hearing the Obama Administration’s plan, I get the impression He thinks that you create SEALs and Deltas and Green Berets and Pararescue Jumpers by throwing a lot of money at an underemployed Georgetown Public Policy grad.

As it happens, APM’s “Public Insight Network” is asking about the same bit fof the State of the Union that stuck in my craw the other night.

In his State of the Union Address to Congress, President Obama talked about what he called “the basic American promise” — that if people worked hard, they could afford a home, college for their kids and some savings for retirement.

Is that still YOUR expectation of America?

They’ve put it in the form of a survey question.

My answer went a little something like this:  It’s one of the questions that defines the difference between conservatives and liberals.

In my world, America isn’t defined by our government or any material possessions or financial status symbols.  It’s about opportunity and liberty; the opportunity to succeed by dint of my merits and talents (or fail through the lack of them).

My “expectation of America” is that the government that I elect will shut up and get out of the way and let private enterprise – me – take care of things.

That pretty much covers it!