Whenever “progressives” start trying to argue “logic”, my ears perk up.  Because it’s virtually inevitable that no logic will ensue.

Myles Spicer- blurbed as a “retired ad agency executive” – proves that advertising is about emotions, not logic:

Clearly, the greatest threat to the reelection of Barack Obama is the economy — the struggle to create more jobs.

Polls confirm that only 37 percent of Americans believe Obama is improving the economy. Fueling those doubts is the conservative rant about job creation.

Now, I’m no retired executive, but I’m going to guesss that “fuelling those doubts” is the fact that 9% of us are out of work, as many more are underemployed or checked out completely, we’re paying $4 a gallon for gas and more for heat and food prices are zooming and our mortgages are underwater and used car prices, or used parts to fix our beaters are out of sight due to “cash for clunkers” and our retirement accounts are shrinking and taxes are rising and those of us who have jobs are being told our companies may drop our health insurance and our local governments are jacking up property taxes to buy electric cars and artistic water fountains even as food prices zoom upward thanks.

Just saying.

Trouble is, this rant is inconsistent with their other rants — like the one that holds “government doesn’t create jobs, only the private sector can.” And there’s also their contention that jobs are created by the wealthy, who must be stimulated and rewarded to do so.

Spicer is, himself, inconsistent with the liberal rant that “laws are for peasants”.

Wait – that’s not a standard rant?

Either are “government doesn’t create jobs” and “only the wealthy create jobs”.   Conservatives know government can create jobs; they’re just not sustainable, except via ratcheting up taxes.

Entrepreneurs?  They create sustainable jobs.  Entrepreneurs don’t have to be wealthy – they’re frequently not – but then, what’s the point of doing all that work without the chance of becoming wealthy?

Anyway – whenever “progressives” think they’ve found they found a hole in the logic of the free market, it’s hard to stop yourself from going “oh, that’s so cute and precocious”:

This leaves a gaping hole in conservative logic when they blame Obama for the weakness in our economy.

The mantra of Republicans and conservatives has always been to bless the private sector and urge government to “get out of the way, and let capitalism work.” Great! Then where are the jobs?

It has been the private sector (not government or Obama) that has brought us to this malaise, if not crisis, and it is the private sector that is not helping us out of it.

In Mr.Spicer’s special little world, the government never inflated the mortgage bubble by socializing the risk, forcing Fanny and Freddie to underwrite most of this nation’s mortgage market, to “promote home ownership”.

Never happened, Winston.

Conservatives claim that government interference, especially taxation, is impeding our recovery; they just have no basis in fact. There is nothing at all that is preventing, obstructing, retarding or impeding American business from creating jobs … except American business itself.

Taxes have been lower than ever. Interest rates are low. Regulation is generally lax.

Three statements so vague as to be meaningless. Some taxes are low,and many others are not.  Interest rates are low, but paradoxically credit is difficult to get. Regulations are lax, unless they aren’t.

Republican administrations ran the government for eight of the past 10 years. Major American corporations are loaded with cash, but they have learned that they can scrape along with higher productivity by stressing their existing staff rather than adding jobs.

One wonders how Mr. Spicer ran his “advertising agency”. “Sure, things are slow – let’s hire lots of designers, so we’ll be ready when the work picks up!”

Conservatives and the business community claim that “uncertainty” is harming job creation. Give me a break.

If you think today’s environment is “uncertain,” you did not live in the Depression. You missed World War II. You forgot about the times when mortgage rates got up to 20 percent. You skipped the turmoil and discontent of the Vietnam War.

In fact, in the context of history, today’s times are more tranquil and predictable than most. “Uncertainty” is a cop-out.

What a boss Mr. Spicer must have been. “You think shaving the 401K contribution is bad?  No,the Donner party was bad!  The sinking of the Titanic was bad!  Oh, Auschwitz! That was bad!

One needn’t “forget” bad times to observe that times are bad.

What, then, about the claim that taxes are job-destroyers? We have, in fact, been operating under all the previous Bush tax cuts for 10 years now (the lowest in decades), and look where that has taken us.

I’m predicting “to gusts of non-sequitur”…

Deficits have soared, no new taxes have been imposed, yet the wealthy among us seem not to be creating the promised jobs.

Ah.  Because times are fantastic!

Rubbish.  As peoples’ personal finances are dragged down by their plummeting home values and skyrocketing cost of living, consumer spending is in the tank.

Who – besides Mr. Spicer, apparently – would break the bank hiring right now?

No, I’m not putting words in his mouth:

However, there is one area where government actually can create jobs: within the government itself. But here again, conservative policies have actually created unemployment.

Mr. Spicer seems unable to recognize the difference between a horse that pulls the cart and a horse that sits on the wagon, depending on another horse to pull the cart.

Solutions are complex, but doable. But demonizing government and blaming President Obama, as conservatives are doing (especially the early Republican presidential candidates), is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst, and destructive.

Well, he got the “solutions are complex” bit right.

The rest?  “Shut up, peasants!  The State is your mother!”

Thanks, but no.

Nate Silver talks a little history, noting that well into the 1980 campaign, Jimmy Carter seemed to be defying the bad economy.  Carter was…:

…holding his own against Ronald Reagan. Some polls, even well after Labor Day (that’s Labor Day 1980, not 1979), showed the horse race to be tied or even had Mr. Carter with a slim lead.

Mr. Reagan would win overwhelmingly, however, claiming 44 states (even Massachusetts and New York) while limiting Mr. Carter to just 41 percent of the vote. He surged in the final week of the campaign after he posed the following question to Americans in the presidential debate of October 28, the first and only such event in which he and Mr. Carter participated together:

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Where was the unemployment rate four years ago? Four points lower.

Where was our national debt? Bad, but not this bad.

Where was our budget? Settled, and while waaaaay too big (Bad Bush!), much smaller than today.

How was our standing in the world? Leftymedia yammering aside, about the same as it’d always been.

One could argue in a macroeconomic sense that I’m better off because my house doesn’t have all that mortgage-bubble-based false valuation on it. Someday I’ll look back on that had laugh.

Otherwise?

Nope. Worse off.

ABC/WaPo poll shows Romney in a dead heat with Obama:

New Post-ABC numbers show Obama leading five of six potential Republican presidential rivals tested in the poll. But he is in a dead heat with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who formally announced his 2012 candidacy last week, making jobs and the economy the central issues in his campaign.

Among all Americans, Obama and Romney are knotted at 47 percent each, and among registered voters, the former governor is numerically ahead, 49 percent to 46 percent.

As with all leftymedia polls, the results need to be scrutinized; the mainstream media will always try to build up the GOP contender they think they can either beat outright, or effectively marginalize (see McCain).   Romney is weak among the conservative base…

…although pressure from the likes of Gingrich, Palin and Bachmann in the primary chase can only help that.  And given my belief that “perfect is the enemy of good enough”, I think a Romney that’d had to move hard to the right, a la Pawlenty in 2002, would be a huge step up from what we have.

This bit – the one in bold – puzzles me:

In another indicator of rapidly shifting views on economic issues, 45 percent trust congressional Republicans over the president when it comes to dealing with the economy, an 11-point improvement for the GOP since March. Still, nearly as many, 42 percent, side with Obama on this issue.

Who are these people? And do they read the news…

…oh, yeah.  Never mind.

Number of federally-owned limousines Limous soars on Obama’s watcha;

Limousines, the very symbol of wealth and excess, are usually the domain of corporate executives and the rich. But the number of limos owned by Uncle Sam increased by 73 percent during the first two years of the Obama administration, according to an analysis of records by iWatch News.

In related news; Strib still biased.

On the one hand, I guess conservatives should be happy the Strib actually published Michael Brodkorb’s a takedown of the Strib’s systematic bias in covering political rhetoric:

…I’m always impressed by the speed in which the Star Tribune editorial page will throw the foul flag on comments from [State GOP chair Tony] Sutton and me, while ignoring hyperbolic rhetoric from Gov. Mark Dayton, DFL Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk and Minnesota DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin over a potential government shutdown (“Sutton’s boorish behavior,” editorial, May 28).

It’s nothing new, of course; exposing the Strib’s institutional bias and ethical perfidy has always been the seed corn of the Minnesota conservative blogosphere.

But the double-standard has shifted into high gear this year, as the Strib’s editorial board circles its wagons to try to protect Dayton.

In the final days of the 2011 legislative session, GOP leaders in the Minnesota House and Senate provided DFL Gov. Mark Dayton with an opportunity to speak directly to both legislative caucuses. It was a historic bipartisan meeting, filled with the discussion and debate that Minnesotans expect. In this private meeting, both Gov. Dayton and the GOP legislators were respectful of differing views.

How did Dayton reward this olive branch from the GOP leadership? He publicly attacked the legislators who politely asked questions of their governor by calling them “extremists” and by saying they “know little about government and care even less.”

Rather than using his powerful soapbox to rally Minnesotans together, he chose to take a swipe at the mothers, fathers, teachers, veterans, Cub Scout leaders and small-business owners who serve as citizen legislators. Dayton attacked, but the Star Tribune editorial page was silent.

Did I say double-standard?

Good:

[Senate Majority Leader Tom] Bakk, who earlier in the session flat-out refused to produce a budget solution, was speaking to the press, comparing these same hardworking GOP legislators to members of “cults.” It’s worth noting that while Bakk has time to stroll the halls of the State Capitol launching personal attacks on citizen legislators, his caucus hasn’t found any time to provide substantive budget solutions.

It seems the only “budget” work the Senate DFL Caucus has done this year is cashing in its legislative pay and per-diem checks. Bakk attacked, but the Star Tribune editorial page was silent.

Finally, Martin ended the week with a frantic news release, decrying Sutton’s and my political statements about Dayton’s “erratic” leadership style. This, of course, is the same Ken Martin who said on TV hours earlier that GOP legislators would have “blood” on their hands if state government shuts down. Martin attacked, but the Star Tribune editorial page was silent.

I’ve been writing this for months; the DFL is running the first-year law school play; “if the law is against you, argue facts; it the facts are against you, argue law; if the facts and law are against you, argue like hell”.  They’re stuck with a population that tossed them from office by the palette-load last fall, and a governor who has won awards for his political ineptitude.  They are desperate.

As home prices are falling, and as gas prices have risen to nearly $4 a gallon, Gov. Dayton is preparing to shut down state government for a tax increase that Minnesotans can’t afford — something that candidate Dayton said he wouldn’t do. I guess if I were the DFL, I’d distract, too!

As Michael points out, the GOP accomplished its mission – or close to it.  They raised the budget, without touching anyone’s taxes.  In addition, they passed some historic reforms to government.

What does the DFL minority and our isolated, embattled governor have to show?

Delaying.  Name-calling.

And the Strib is covering for them.

Here’s Israel today:

Note the brown glob of the West Bank and the little strip between Gaza and Rafah – owned by Israel, with sizeable Palestinian populations.  These populations are largely highly hostile to Israel.

Here was Israel in 1967:

Doens’t look much different, does it?  And it’s not – except for the fact that there are Israeli troops securing the West Bank.  Note the numbers.  They’re distances to Israel’s major population and economic centers.   When Arabs controlled the West Bank before 1967, every major population center in Israel was threatened.  Today, with Iran supplying Hamas and Hezb’allah with more modern rockets, terrorists can scourge most of Israel at will, if the “peace process” breaks down.

As it will, inevitably.

Obama is insane if he thinks this is a rational solution while the Palestinians are controlled by people who still reject the idea that Israel has a right to exist.   The Israelis are right to reject it out of hand.

Regular commenter Golfdoc50 suggested that we put our rhetorical money where our literal mouths are as re my post this morning predicting the eventual release of the Bin Laden snuff pix.

You think Labor Day 2012? Let’s make some sport and have a pool to predict the day the first pictures leak. I don’t believe it will take that long, especially if the economy is in the toilet at the end of this year

Intrigueing and plausible theory.  One of many.

So post your predictions here; dates, along with your reasons in the comment section.  I’ll make a note to revisit this before election time.

Some Republicans have claimed that the DFL has spent the six weeks since the GOP introduced a balanced, tax-hike-free budget “loafing” and “running out the clock” (when they’re not clutching their pearls about the GOP ignoring the suddenly-“non-partisan” Minnesota Management and Budget fiscal notes).

But we know better.

The DFL has whiled away its free hours tackling the legislation that matters, dammit!:

• Thanks to Senate Minority (I can repeat that over and over all day long! – Ed) leader Tom Bakk, moose hunters are no longer encumbered by height limits on their moose stands!  All the better to eliminate the moose scourge!
• The state’s deficit in numbers of official mammals has been reduced from one to zero, thanks to the DFL!
• Joe Atkins (DFL, Inver Grove Heights), who is currently Ryan Winkler’s understudy as the DFL Minority Co-Snark (along with Rep. John “Jägermeister” Lesch [1]), tackled the vital work of trying to establish a state Pipe Band.

Thank you, DFL!

(more…)

The credit for the news of the deqth of Bin Laden fairly goes (in addition to the intelligence, military and even some local Pakistanis)  to the President.  If it’d failed, it would have rested on his shoulders; it’s only fair that we credit him for the risk he took –  different though that risk is from the ones the SEALs, the Army chopper pilots and the rest of the guys on the ground took.  To be honest, given his record so far, I’d have expected him to have launched a Predator strike – something that would have killed him (or someone) without the political risk – but also without the certainty.

Now, here’s the part I’m looking forward to; watching the left walk back the fact that so much of the policies – and so many, I suspect, of the discrete military and intelligence activities that led to this day – were continued under the Bush administration.

Which, again, is no knock on Obama.

But I’m looking forward to seeing the reactions of the elements of the Twin Cities media who, 24 months ago, were acting like a bunch of 15 year old girls who’d just gotten Justin Bieber tickets after having been allowed into the presence of Seymour Hersh, who was talking (along with Walter Mondale) about a story from “upcoming book”:

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

According to Hersh, this mattered  because…:

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

It was JSOC troops – officially SEALs, along with Army Special Operations Aviation, but JSOC missions reportedly mix in other troops, Rangers and “Delta” and other units pretty liberally – that carried on the “execution”.

Just saying.

(SCENE:  A DFL Legislative Caucus meeting over breakfast at the bar at the Kelly Inn.   Paul THISSEN, Ryan WINKLER, John LESCH, Phyllis KAHN, Scott DIBBLE, Carly MELIN, Sandy PAPPAS, Alice HAUSMAN, and Linda BERGLIN are sitting at a large table..  They are whispering amongst themselves as they wait for Tom BAKK)

LESCH: (to MELIN): If a Birther doesn’t believe The President is American, what is a Winkler?”

WINKLER: Hey, shut up!

BAKK: (Enters with a flurry and a bustle, takes a seat at the head of the table): Hey, all.

THISSEN: Hey, Tom!

ALL (mumble their greetings)

BAKK: Sorry I was late.  I got held up in the Central Corridor construction getting here.

HAUSMAN: But Tom?  The construction is like four miles away.  You just had to walk across the street.

BAKK:  I think my driver was running out the clock ’til his pension!

(ALL chuckle)

BAKK: OK, we gotta come up with some messaging.  But I need a cuppa coffee first.  (Turns to MELIN) Get me a cuppa coffee, wouldja?

THISSEN: One for me, too…

MELIN: Er, I’m not a waitress…

BAKK: I didn’t ask for an autobiography, toots.  Cream, five sugars, and hustle.  (MELIN, visibly upset, gets up and walks to bar).   OK – so what’s on the table here?

PAPPAS: The Gay Marriage Ban amendment, for starters.

BAKK:  OK.  Big one.  2/3 of Minnesota will vote for it.  How do we spin this?

THISSEN:  Yeah!  Ideas, please!  Ideas!

WINKLER: Maybe introduce  a ban on all marriage?

(BAKK looks at Winkler for a beat or two, as…)

LESCH:  How about “Vote against it, or John Lesch will uncork a can of whoopass on you?”

WINKLER: Ooh, bitchin’!

BAKK: No…no….

KAHN: How about “Goddess Will Strike You Dead”….

BERGLIN: Let’s just spin this as “Hate”.

BAKK:  Hm.  Hate.  The GOP is Hateful.  I like it!

THISSEN:  Brilliant!  Brilliant!

(MELIN  returns, puts coffee on table in front of BAKK and THISSEN).

BAKK:  OK – now, the budget.

DIBBLE: How about “The GOP are acting like a bunch of pansy Nazis?”

LESCH: Yeah!

THISSEN:  Good!  Goooood!

BAKK:  Hm.  A little aggressive.

THISSEN:  Good Goddess, what a dumb idea, Dibble…

(Silence for a few moment)

HAUSMAN:  How about “The GOP exhibits their hate by not passing a budget”

BAKK:  Hmm.  It’s got a zing to it.  I like it.

THISSEN:  I could kiss you, Alice!

HAUSMAN: (Facepalm)

BAKK:  OK, next item…

(Former Senator Ellen ANDERSON stops by table).

ANDERSON: Hi, guys!

(PAPPAS, LESCH, KAHN, DIBBLE, BERGLIN, HAUSMAN, MELIN and other greet the Senator).

THISSEN:  Hey, Ellen!  Great to see you!

BAKK: Ellen, we’re kinda busy here…

(THISSEN draws a can of pepper spray and discharges it at Anderson, who beats a hasty, coughing retreat).

BAKK:  OK.  What’s next?

BERGLIN: Jobs.

BAKK:  OK.

LESCH:  How about “Why do  Republicans hate jobs?”

BAKK: Bingo!

THISSEN  (claps with excited glee).

BAKK:  Keep ’em coming!

DIBBLE:  Union pensions?

BAKK: “Why does the GOP hate public employees!”

THISSEN: Yaaaay!  Keep going!

KAHN: Publicly funded art!

BAKK: “Why does the GOP hate artists!”

(THISSEN hops up and down with glee)

WINKLER: The Vikings stadium!

BAKK: Why do the ReThugLiCons hate sports fans!”

(THISSEN does a spry cartwheel between the tables)

MELIN: Racino?

BAKK: Why do Republicans hate Indians!

(THISSEN loses consciousness in a paroxysm of unfettered glee, falls face-first into the omelet in front of Mary Lahammer, sitting at a neighboring table).

BERGLIN: Native Americans.

KAHN: Ahem. First Nations.

BERGLIN and BAKK:  Doh!

LESCH: The Ku Klux Klan!

BAKK:  Why does the GOP hate hate?

(Everyone stops).

BAKK:  Wait.  Back up.

PAPPAS: Sheesh.

BAKK: OK.  Well, we got the basics down.  Let’s get to work, people!

(ALL adjourn to drinking coffee and eating breakfast).

LESCH (Digs in briefcase, pulls out sheaf of paper).  Hey, what the hell is this?

WINKLER: (Reads front page) Governor…Dayton’s…budget…proposal…?  Huh?

BAKK: Never heard of it.  (Handing coffee cup to MELIN) Hey, cupcake, put a head on this, huh?

From BettyMac’s Facebook page:

I dunno – do Speakers keep their title forever, like Senators or Governors?

There are many, many reasons Barack Obama is not qualified or fit to serve as President.

Let’s focus on the ones that matter; he’s a socialist; his background for office was never adequate; he oozes contempt for everyone who’s not like him; many of his supporters are reprehensible scumbags; he’s incompetent; he ran on a platform of “restoring Respect” for America, and then went on to lose it; his meddling has multiplied a national debt that already had us on the road to ruin; he’s at the head of one of the most corrosive movements in American history.

Put another way – what if his Birth Certificate is fake? Even if it’s fake, and even if an impeachment movement got him removed from office, it wouldn’t undo the damage he caused.

There is no miracle “get out of hell free” card with Barack Obama or the socialists; we have to get rid of them the hard way.  At the polls.  One vote at a time.

While there’s still time.

OK, but how about his law school admission?  Oh, there’s a shocker – a lawyer or petty academic who got where he wanted by paper-chasing, up-sucking and ass-kissing!  That’s never happened!

I’ll say it again; you don’t get rid of Barack Obama and the detritus of his administration by niggling about with paperwork.  You do it by getting the American people to vote him out of office.

We’ve got a year and a half.

The President serves up liberal leftovers in an effort the wrest the national fiscal agenda from Congressman Paul Ryan in his campaign speech this week.

Just one thing Mr. President:

According to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans—most of whom are far from wealthy—were taxed at 100%, it wouldn’t cover Mr. Obama’s deficit for this year.

These are desperate times for a Democratic President that can’t even keep Pennsylvania in the fold, a state where the last Republican who won it was George H. W. Bush.

At least Jimmy Carter had the good sense to turn apologetic, rather than imperious, when his policies tipped over the cliff.

Perhaps it’ll be Obama’s “Oberstar Moment”.

Hm.  Just in time for the Tea Party Tax Day Rally!

When he got invited to the President’s speech yesterday, he thought the President was going to exercise some of that “reaching across the aisle” and “new tone in politics” that the President and his media are always yapping about.  According to NRO’s Andrew Stiles:

Ryan says he was “excited” to received an invitation to the president’s speech, and thought it was a potential “olive branch” to the GOP signaling the start of meaningful negotiations over the deficit.

We all saw how it really worked:

I imagine being forced to sit through a smug lecture explaining how the serious plan you’ve just proposed to save America from a debt crisis is actually, in fact, fundamentally un-American, is not a very pleasant experience.

But it is part of the left’s, and in particular this President’s; our leaders are professors; everyone who agrees with him are the good students; the ones who don’t are the ones on double-dog academic probation.

As usual, when reviewing the DFL’s claims, the rule of thumb is “distrust but verify; then, resume the distrust”.

So too with DFL House Minority Leader Paul “Mini-Bakk” Thissen’s claims that the GOP budget is “destroying jobs”.   MPR’s “Poligraph” addresses Thissen’s claims.

At least, analyzes the direct claim on its face.  To really analyze it, and the DFL’s entire response to the GOP’s initiative to re-engineer how this state budgets its’ resources the money they divert from the economy, you have to dig a little deeper.

“Last week, the House Higher Ed budget put 1,200 employees at Minnesota’s colleges and universities on notice” he wrote in an April 5, 2010, press release. “The tax bill will slash another 1,700 jobs in counties and cities across Minnesota… With [the state government jobs] bill, the Republican Majority not only hands out an additional 754 pink slips, but also slashes support for private sector job creation.”

Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, is right that cutting government spending would cost jobs, but his numbers are hard to pin down.

In part because they were never meant to be “pinned down”.  Scare lines are supposed to be nice and vague.

And scare lines are all the DFL really has, this session.

Problem is, Thissen’s scare line isn’t even a good one:

The House version of higher education funding bill would cut about 17.7 percent from the University of Minnesota’s budget and mandate a tuition cap of up to 5 percent. That could mean the loss of 600 to 700 jobs, said Richard Pfutzenreuter who is the Treasurer for the University of Minnesota.

But he points out that those numbers include employees who will retire early and jobs that will remain vacant. Only a fraction will be layoffs, he said. Further, it’s unlikely the university would balance its budget only by cutting jobs, he said. Rather, it will be a mix of trims.

Meanwhile, the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) budget would be cut nearly 16 percent. As a result, the system is looking at either 554 staff reductions or 490 faculty reductions, including retirements and unfilled positions. That’s about 3 percent of the system’s 19,300 person workforce, according to spokeswoman Melinda Voss.

All told, that’s about 1,200 jobs. But Thissen’s figure is on the high end because it’s unlikely all cuts would come from layoffs. And those figures include retirements and unfilled positions as well.

In other words, Thissen is taking the “worst case” – more on that later – and putting it out there, unvarnished and without context, to disinform the voter.  And MPR is giving the reader the gentlest possible reminder to read beneath the surface.

Thissen’s numbers are based on fact, but he leaves out some important points. For instance, he doesn’t mention that it’s unlikely that the University of Minnesota will cut only jobs to save money, nor does he point out that employment reductions would be made through retirements and hiring freezes, not just layoffs. And his claim on the tax bill relies on just one source–Gov. Mark Dayton.

Given all these caveats, it was a tough call. But overall, Thissen is correct that the spending bills being debated in the House would likely mean government job losses throughout the state.

Right.

Just like cratering revenue means job losses to all of us in the private sector.

And what does the private sector do when this happens?

Not just lay people 0ff (not the smart companies, anyway); if it wants to survive, the business changes the way it does business.

And as much as it may hurt the feelings of some government workers, it’s a fact that there is a difference between the horse that’s pulling the cart and the one that’s sitting in the back cracking the whip.  Government funding exists because the private sector pulls the cart forward. Fewer horses in the cart makes the whole thing easier to pull – and, ideally, means more horses can do the pulling.

Which is something that was, to be fair, outside the scope of the MPR piece – and something Thissen wants to keep you from thinking about.

Since there is talk that the federal government will shut down this weekend, it’s Shot In The Dark’s job, as the Twin Cities’ best source of news, to tell you what to expect.

With Austan Goolsbee and the Council of Economic Advisors busy looking for work at McDonalds, President Obama will go on a deficit spending spree four times as huge and damaging as that of his predecessor.

With the Department of the Treasury shut down, US currency will cease to have any value.  All sales and purchases in the United States, from the transfer of Mortgage Backed Derivatives to buying Tic Tacs at the gas station, will be transacted by old-fashioned barter of goods or services.  Cigarettes will become the primary unit of currency…

…except that without the Department of Health and Human Services to mandate the warning labels, there will be no cigarettes.

With the Department of Education furloughed, all schools (public and private) in the US will be sold at sheriff sales and turned into union-staffed Community Centers.

With the Department of Housing and Urban Development wandering the streets from bar to bar, public housing in the United States may become blighted and undesirable.

With the Attorney General looking for work as a community organizer with ACORN,  brigades of government lawyers will be forced to seek honest work.  As prostitutes.

With the Department of the Interior not functioning, national parks will become covered with grass and animals.

Vice President Joe Biden will actually have to seek work in a coal mine.

If you’re a veteran?  Without Veteran’s affairs, you won’t be anymore!  All that service to the country…gone!

With Commerce closed for business, no business can take place.  But that won’t matter, because with the Department of Labor closed, nobody will do any work at all.

With Hillary Clinton’s State Department sitting on the beach in Norfolk, the United States will become reviled around the world.

With the Department of Agriculture lying fallow, there will be no more food.  We will all starve.

You might think the price of oil will drop, since without the Dept. of  Transportation, we will all be utterly immobile.   But it won’t matter, since without the Department of Energy, there will be no oil.

With Homeland Security shuttered, only the terrorists will be able to mindlessly vex and grope you.

The the entire chain of command on the unemployment line, the Army’s tanks will immediately rust away, the Navy’s ships will careen out of control into bridge abutments, and all nuclear missiles will spontaneously fire, plunging the world into nuclear winter.

Whew.  Could be ugly!

President Obama may be taking a break from his busy schedule of, apparently, breaks – assuming they avoid the shutdown.

And I found this more than a little bit ominous (emphasis added):

On Thursday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration established a no-fly zone over Williamsburg that will be in place from Friday through Monday.

Not a plane will fly over Williamsburg for month.  And civilian casualties could get quickly out of hand…

When Barack Obama was running for and/or fairly new in office, the left – and others who are impressed with such things – were all dewy-eyed over Barack Obama’s “intelligence” – as measured by the toniness of the diplomas on his wall.

He was an Ivy Leaguer, of course – ending the long national nightmare of our presidential Ivy League drought.

But as I pointed out at the time, not only is the toniness of ones’ degree utterly immaterial to ones suitability for the Presidency, there’s a case to be made that an Ivy League degree (other than in, say, medicine, hard sciences or physics) is a liability in the real world.

P.J. O’Rourke – one of the people who turned me conservative, and a fellow grad of an obscure school (he: Miami of Ohio) – agrees:

Barack Obama went to an Ivy League school, not that he’s doing very well in his career at the moment. Let’s check on the most successful people in America. Sarah Palin went to the University of Idaho. Warren Buffet went to Nebraska. John Boehner went to Xavier. Glenn Beck didn’t go to college at all [to say nothing of Limbaugh – Ed.]. And I’m not sure whether Justin Bieber’s mother even finished high school. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates did go to Harvard but​…​they dropped out.

O’Rouke is actually responding to Amy Chua, Ivy League professor and author of Tiger Mom, a manifesto on raising children to take up more space in the Ivy League.   But the larger point – the one that applies to our President – is…:

Amy Chua, I’ve got bad news. “A” students work for “B” students. Or not even. A businessman friend of mine corrected me. “No, P. J.,” he said, “ ‘B’ students work for ‘C’ students. ‘A’ students teach.”

And that, really, sums up The One.  He came; he studied; he punched the tickets one must punch to be a Chicago Democrat.

And as with an awful lot of Ivy Leaguers whose main stated qualification is that they were Ivy Leaguers, not a whole lot else.

You’ve probably already heard this; in the wake of the emailed death threat to Republican senators last week, someone has sent conservative blogger Ann Althouse a threat, presented here in its vulgar entirety (emphasis added by me):

“We will picket on public property as close to your house as we can every day. We will harrass the ever loving shit out of you all the time. Campus is OCCUPIED. State street is OCCUPIED. The Square is OCCUPIED. Vilas, Schenk’s Corners, Atwood, Willy Street – Occupied, Occupied, Occupied, Occupied. Did you really think it was all about the Capitol? Fuck the Capitol, we are the CITY… We have the numbers and we don’t back down from anyone. We all know each other. We all know each other. We know each other from Service Industry Night at the Orpheum, because we’re regulars at the same coffee shops, restaurants and bars, we know each other from the co-ops, we know each other because we’ve had a million jobs each (and we all worked at CapTel at least once), because we live in every shitty townie house in ever-changing groups of 2 – 7 people, because we are young and horny and screw each other incessantly, because we’re all on facebook, and because we aren’t anti-social, life-denying, world-sterilizing pieces of human garbage like the two of you. WE WILL FUCK YOU UP. We will throw our baseballs in your lawn, you cranky old pieces of shit, and then we will come get them back. What are you gonna do? Shoot us? Get Wausau Tea Patriots to form an ad hoc militia on your front lawn? That would be fucking HILAROUS to us. You could get to know the assholes on your side in real fucking life instead of sponging off the civil society we provide for you every single day you draw breath.”

Thanks for that “civil society”, scumbags!

The not-very-fringe, over-entitled, spoiled-rotten near-left is the moldy underbelly of American society.

Every example of true mass depravity in recent American history – every one, without exception – has come from the Big Left.

No exceptions.

Answer for this, lefties.

Of course, whenever a lefty decides to run off at the mouth, a conservative blogger is there to humiliate their entitled, upper-middle-class asses.  In this case, it’s Robert Stacy “The Other” McCain (emphasis added):

The terroristic screed against University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse was posted on a Web account of Madison resident Jim Shankman.

In a Facebook status update about 9 p.m. this evening, Shankman wrote:

Because of a right-blogosphere campaign to silence me, I have been forced to commit Identity Suicide. I have never supported or advocated violence for any purpose other than self-defense against terror attacks by the armed wing of the American Right….

A “campaign to silence” you, Jim? And what was your obscenity-filled rant against Professor Althouse?

McCain also adds:

We have seen this before in American history. The lesson is a bit too close to home — and a bit too fresh in memory – for me to let it pass unmentioned. The privileged never surrender privilege willingly. They employ demagogic appeals to rally others to their self-interested “cause” by demonizing those who dare challenge them. And if someone gets hurt in the process, if some of those duped by the demagoguery decide to turn wrathful words into violent deeds . . .

Madison has become the Neshoba County, Mississippi, of this season. “Workers’ rights” is the Jim Crow of 2011 and government-employee unions are the new Klan.

Naturally, not a word from the MSM.

UPDATE:  Ann Althouse will join us on the Northern Alliance at 1PM tomorrow on AM1280.  Tune in.

The editorial page at the Pittsburgh New Tribune is noticing President Obama’s disconnect:

Much of the Middle East is ablaze in revolution, the thuggery of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi being the highlight of how low megalomaniacs will go to stay in power.

And, of course, the nuclear tragedy unfolding in Japan, following the devastating earthquake and tsunami, is reeling the world.

Then there’s that little matter of a looming government shutdown.

But what’s the leader of the free world been up to?

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama appeared on ESPN to announce his picks for the NCAA basketball tournament.

Earlier in the week, he gave “exclusive” interviews to TV stations from around the country — including Pittsburgh’s KDKA — on “education reform.” (KDKA’s story catapulted pro forma local TV video stenography to news lows.)

Saturday last, when not giving his weekly radio address on the critically important issue of Women’s History Month, Obama was playing golf — reported to be the 61st round of his presidency — joking that it was not “playing” at all but an “investment.”

That was fast on the heels of his riveting summit on “bullying.”

Can you imagine how the mainstream media would have reacted to such disconnected behavior had it been a Republican president?

As re the Middle East, Japan and the budget?  We’ve had an entire month of “My Little Goat”.

This isn’t a matter of “optics” but one of judgment. This president is woefully out of touch with reality and how a leader should behave in such trying times.

Bring on 2012.

Windows at the District of Columbia COP office were shot out by a vandal with an airgun on Tuesday:

All of the windows of the officer were damaged…Workers believe the shooting was politically related.

Further proof that if there’s an “avalanche of political violence” in this country, it’s moving from left to right. There have been no meaningful exceptions.

Empirical research has proven in recent years that people who favor smaller government, by whatever label – conservatives, Tea Partiers, whatever – are smarter, better-informed, better-educated and more generally successful at life, are generally happier, more generous,  and are even better in bed than big-government people by whatever label (liberal, “progressive’, yadda yadda).

And now, we have proof that not only are we as a whole less racist than big-government advocates…:

Social scientists usually measure traditional racism against African Americans by looking at the survey responses of white Americans only. Among whites in the latest General Social Survey (2008), only 4.5% of small-government advocates express the view that “most Blacks/African-Americans have less in-born ability to learn,” compared to 12.3% of those who favor bigger government or take a middle position expressing this racist view (Figure 2). We social scientists sometimes like to express things in relative odds, especially for small percentages. Here the odds of small government whites not expressing racist views (21-to-1 odds) is three times higher than the odds of big-government whites not being racist (7-to-1 odds).

…but that we long-abused white male small-government are, empirically, the least-racist subgroup of all, by a whopping margin:

Figure 3 shows that, among whites, Republican advocates of smaller government are even less racist (1.3% believing that blacks have less in-born ability) than the rest of the general public (11.3% expressing racist views). Thus, in 2008 Republicans who believe that the government in Washington does too much have 10 times higher odds of not expressing racist views on the in-born ability question than the rest of the population (79-to-1 odds v. 7.9-to-1 odds).

How social conservatives who aren’t necessarily small-government – stereotypically southern?

Yep – still half as likely to be a racist as a typical American:

In 2008, only 5.4% of white conservative Republicans expressed racist views on the in-born ability question, compared to 10.3% of the rest of the white population.

An aberration – perhaps caused by all that messianic hopey-changey twaddle?

Nope:

In sixteen surveys from 1977 through 2008 (Figure 4), overall white Republicans were significantly less racist on the in-born ability question than white Democrats (13.3% to 17.3%), and white conservative Republicans were significantly less racist than other white Americans (11.7% to 14.7%), though in most surveys the differences were too small to be significant taken individually — and in the 1993 survey, the relationship was reversed: conservative Republicans were significantly more racist on the racial inheritance question than the rest of the public.

Another traditional racism question — on segregated neighborhoods — was asked on fifteen General Social Surveys from 1972 through 1996. Though the percentage of white Democrats and white Republicans who slightly or strongly agreed that “White people have a right to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods” did not differ significantly in any one survey, overall white Democrats were significantly more likely to support segregated neighborhoods than white Republicans (30.4% to 26.3%).

Quite clearly, the legacy of Nixon’s “southern strategy” – which was never especially racist in its own right – is long dead.

The Dems’ “racism of low expectations” is, in fact, just racism.

Maybe we need some sort of outreach program to, I dunno, judge people by the contents of their hearts rather than the color of their skin.

Americans don’t need to stock up on potassium iodide to prevent radiation damage to the thyroid, says California:

State and county officials spent much of Tuesday trying to keep people calm by saying that getting the pills wasn’t necessary, but then the United States surgeon general supported the idea as a worthy “precaution.”

Americans do need to stock up on potassium iodide to prevent radiation damage to the thyroid, says…

…U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin was in the Bay Area touring a peninsula hospital. NBC Bay Area reporter Damian Trujillo asked her about the run on tablets and Dr. Benjamin said although she wasn’t aware of people stocking up, she did not think that would be an overreaction. She said it was right to be prepared.

Like all Obama Administration pronouncements, Benjamin’s will likely have a shelf-life shorter than that of the tablets on which she just caused a run.

I predicted it.

I reiterated the prediction.

And, as per usual, it’s happened; the Obama Administration rule fining airlines for keeping passengers waiting on the tarmac over three hours is causing a huge spike in flight cancellations:

A Star-Ledger analysis of federal DOT figures reveals airlines are simply canceling more flights, presumably to avoid idling on the tarmac and exposing themselves to the whopping fines. In fact, the cancellation rate at the nation’s major airports surged 24 percent during the eight months after the rule went into effect.

There is no breakdown by airport, and there was a noticeable spike in cancellations during the wicked December weather. But over the course of the eight-month period, 7,095 more flights were ditched.

Put another way: Nearly 900 more flights a month are being scrubbed..

At 100 passengers per flight, that’s 90,000 a month having to change their plans on the fly – usually with a lot more than three hours’ delay.

“They’ve exchanged inconvenience for a relatively few number of people for an inconvenience for a tremendous number of people,” said David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, a passengers advocacy group.

Jennifer Sutherland, 46, a gymnastics coach and Cedar Grove native now living in Clarksville, Ohio, was among the thousands of air travelers whose flights were canceled at Newark Liberty International Airport after the Dec. 26 blizzard. Sutherland has no way of knowing if the tarmac rule came into play in her case, but she was angry that airlines could be canceling flights as an easy, sure way to eliminate their risk of penalties.

“The airlines are saving the massive fines from the tarmac rule and at the same time forcing passengers into the impossible situation of waiting days or weeks to re-book or simply purchase another ticket,” she said.

Unintended consequences…