Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In the Vice Presidential debate, Candidate Paul Ryan was asked what role his Catholic religion played in his personal views on abortion. Chad the Elder at Fraters Libertas linked to a piece by George Weigel that imagines a different answer from Ryan. That got me to pondering what role my faith played in my views on abortion? It turns out the answer is: “None at all.”

I believe all people are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure those rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Do those words ring a bell at all? Remind you of Eighth Grade Civics, perhaps? They should – they’re straight out of the Declaration of Independence, the written explanation to the world of what the Founding Fathers were trying to accomplish and why they believed their actions were just. Those are not Catholic beliefs; they’re American beliefs that form the intellectual and moral basis for our nation.

Government’s job, first and foremost, is to protect innocent life. And an unborn child, well, life doesn’t get more innocent than that. A government that fails to protect the lives of its unborn children is failing its essential purpose. A government that forces its citizens to subsidize the deaths of their own unborn children . . . that’s unspeakable.

Some object that the Constitution gave no votes to women, and counted slaves as even less, so the Founders clearly didn’t believe in their own stated principles and neither should we. That claim asks us to believe the Founding Fathers were pro-choice, they actually meant to include a woman’s right to kill her unborn child as a fundamental right protected by the Constitution, but they had trouble articulating the concept so they left it implied in the emanations and penumbras of the Bill of Rights. That analysis doesn’t square with what we know of the people who helped write the document itself and the pamphlets describing it. And it doesn’t relate to the Catholic faith, which is the question at hand. Whatever defects hindsight lets us see in the Founders or their work, their concept of what good government is intended to do must reflect their own opinions, not projections of ours.

If you lined up the Founding Fathers and told them the President of the United States believes dead babies are not a tasteless joke but official government policy, required – required, mind you, by the very Constitution those Founding Fathers gave us – they would weep for shame.

It is the law in the United States today that taxpayer funded, partial-birth abortions for under-age girls, without parental notification, are a Constitutionally protected right. President Obama definitely would appoint Supreme Court Justices to preserve that system. Candidate Romney might not. Given that my choice realistically is limited to those two, I stand with the Founding Fathers. I stand with innocent life. I choose Romney.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I’d be pro-life even if I weren’t a Christian, based on the grounds above, as well as what I wrote way back when; even pro-choicers can’t decide when a “fetus” is “viable”

Lefty talk show host urges gay Romney supporter to kill himself.

Twice.

Wonder if this would be covered by any applicable “bullying” statutes?

Joe Doakes of Como Park emails:

“I, Pencil” is a famous Economics essay that makes this startling claim: Nobody knows how to make a pencil.

Consider the ordinary No. 2 lead pencil children use in grade school. No single person knows every piece of knowledge needed to make a pencil: forest management for the wood; polymer science for the paint; ore mining and refining for the metal and graphite; how to make whatever the eraser is made of; and the manufacturing process to bring the components together. A pencil is a simple tool but the result of a complex set of discrete processes, all of which must work in perfect harmony. If enough elements are removed, the result is not a pencil. If what you needed was a No. 2 lead pencil, removing some of the essential elements of a pencil leaves you worse off than you were before the changes were made.

President Obama’s recent “The First Time” campaign message uses a losing-your-virginity sexual theme to advise young voters that their first vote should be cast for someone who cares about women getting birth control, not somebody who studies in the library; in other words, someone cool and casual, not someone boring but permanent. The thinking underlying this ad is similar to the thinking behind the sexual revolution that led to the gay marriage movement and all are delusions dangerous to long-term societal stability.

 

The concept of marriage looks as simple as a pencil but it’s actually a complicated collection of rights and policies. Before 1970, the family was the fundamental organizational unit of society because, as Robert Heinlein famously noted, it was the most successful institution ever devised for protecting children while preserving family wealth. Marriage was hard to get into (blood tests, waiting periods) and hard to get out of (good cause required and alimony paid). But the incentives were good: sex outside marriage was illegal, children born outside marriage were denied rights, unmarried couples were denied tax breaks and were social outcasts.

The sexual revolution convinced us the individual should replace the family as the focus of society. Satisfying the desires of individuals became more important than sacrificing for one’s family. The changes to society were slow to manifest but breathtaking in scope. No-fault divorce made marriage temporary. Child custody assumptions turned fathers into powerless, occasional visitors. Abortion made casual sex outside marriage risk-free. Childhood illegitimacy and poverty rates skyrocketed while test scores plummeted and child abuse and neglect rates exploded.

A society focused on individual gratification at the expense of children’s futures cannot prosper long-term. By every economic and social measure, people raised in traditional families today are miles ahead of single-parent or never-married families. 40 years of evidence shows Heinlein was right. The sexual revolution removed some of the essential elements supporting traditional marriage and as a result, society is worse off.

Gay marriage advocates assure us that re-defining “marriage” away from one-man-one-woman won’t hurt the institution of marriage a bit. I can’t agree. I think we’ve already stripped the pencil of the eraser, metal holder and paint. If we strip the lead out, what’s left won’t be a pencil at all. That’s not a problem if we have ballpoints and highlighters and crayons to substitute for the pencil. But what’s the substitute system for protecting children and preserving family wealth? What’s the substitute for the next generation, and the one after that?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

More tomorrow.

I mean, seriously.

Suffice to say that if this is true…:

…the fashion world has remained particularly quiet on the Ann Romney fashion front, with many questioning whether or not outspoken Obama supporter Anna Wintour is keeping stylists and designers away, silently threatening their standing should they endeavor to promote their outfitting of the wife of a Republican presidential hopeful.

…then I will be boycotting Anna Wintour and all of her endeavors.

Over the past year, the Vogue matriarch [Oh, snap – Ed.] – who many say has enough power to make or break fashion careers – has become one of President Obama’s leading financiers. Wintour has raised over half a million dollars for the incumbent, hosted numerous lavish dinners in his name and even enlisted designer pals like Marc Jacobs and Thakoon Panichgul to design pro-Obama products.

Whatever will Republicans do?

As several state flirt with legalizing marijuana, it’s time for a quick pro-and-con check:

Legalization would be good because:

• The “war on drugs” has killed more people than Vietnam, and with less to show for it.
• The “war” has also destroyed most American inner cities.
• The black market has created a multinational organized crime network that Al Capone would envy, and whole soulless violence would make Sammy The Bull Gravano blanche in mute horror.
• Pot is probably less harmful, all in all, than booze.

Legalization would be bad because:

• Stoners are the most annoying people in the world.
• Stoner culture is the most annoying counterculture in the world.
• Phish and Dave Matthews.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Sandra Fluke speaks to ten in Nevada.

Apparently the women of north Nevada are conscientious objectors in the “War on Women”.

The media is having its usual bout of victorian vapours over this picture.

This would fool MPR, the AP, or any leftyblogger.

But as Stacey McCain notes, there is just not a chance in hell this isn’t a false-flag:

I can pretty much guarantee that this man photographed at a Romney rally in Lancaster, Ohio, is not in fact a Republican, but rather is a plant sent out by the Democrats as a dirty trick.

• Clue #1: Wearing a “Romney/Ryan” sticker on the back of his T-shirt. Nobody does this. Nobody.
• Clue #2: It’s kind of chilly in Ohio this time of year, and the guy’s wearing only a T-shirt, while those around him are wearing coats.

What’s the old saying?  “If something is too good to be true, it probably is”?

That’s true for photographs too, isn t it?

My guess is that this guy also wore a coat when he entered the rally, then stationed himself toward the back of the crowd (in front of the riser where the press photographers are stationed) and then removed his coat to expose the T-shirt, with the explicit purpose of having it photographed.

• . . . aaanndd, Clue #3: No name? A press photographer is going to take a picture like this and make no effort to ID the guy? Nuh-uh.

Fearless prediction:  This will turn out to be a bit of false-flag slander.  This is what the Democrats, nationally and here in Minnesota, do when they’re in trouble.

Second fearless prediction:  given the way it’s disappeared from the media, they are probably on the brink of finding that the shooting at the Obama headquarters in Denver was a false-flag, too – just like the one four years ago.

As I’ve said before, I’m ambivalent about the Marriage Amendment.  I’m still not entirely sure how I’m going to vote on it.

But I did encounter the least convincing argument against the amendment of all the other day:

[Any amendment supporter] is teh heppocreet!  They are teh divorced!  How can they limit marriage for others when they don’t take their own vows seeriously?  That is sucks!

This argument drips stupidity on almost too many levels to count.  But I’ve built a bit of an unremunerated career cataloging stupidity that drips; it’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.

1. Divorce is an awful thing – but sometimes it happens for a reason.  Even the Bible allows a couple of grounds for divorce – cheating, and being abandoned by a non-believing spouse.  I said “allows”, as opposed to “encourages”. Society has added a few more; people are only expected to give so much leeway to addicts, abusers and the like.
2. By the way, that “hypocrite” argument only stands up if one assumes gays will have a divorce rate of zero.
3. The fact that one has been divorced – leaving the cause aside (see 1, above) – doesn’t mean the person doesn’t believe in traditional marriage, or plan to make sure their next attempt is one.
4. If you’ve been out drinking, and have had about six too many, and are about to head out to your car to drive home, and a friend whom you know to have had a DUI 10 years ago says “give me your keys, I’ll give you a ride home”, do you say “You are teh hipocreet!  You had a DUI!  You can’t tell me about teh rules of driving!”?   If you’re not one of those people who says “Divorced people who support the Marriage Amendment are hypocrites”, you’re probably smarter than that.
5. A key tenet of the Christian belief that animates so many Marriage Amendment supporters (and enrages the opponents) is the idea that we are all imperfect; we all fall short of our ideals.  We are forgiven via God’s grace and the salvation He sent us via His son.  We err.  We sin.  We repent, and try to do better next time.  Christ, we believe, doesn’t tattoo sinners with scarlet letters that follow them the rest of their lives.
6. If you’re a DFLer – your party supported, and still supports, no-fault divorce.  Careful, your leadership will spank you for being a heretic.

There is a debate to be had about the Marriage Amendment.  The Amendment’s opponents have largely done a terrible job of making that argument.

But this one is the dumbest of all.

…that if I voted for John McCain, a woman’s worth would be measured purely by their sex organs.

And they were right.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

From this weekend’s DFL door hanger in support of Gay Marriage:

Love

Commitment

Working together

Bettering the community

Raising children

Growing old together

Marry the person you love

Value and support strong families

Welcoming environment for all families to thrive

When Achmed, Miriam and Fatima want a marriage license based on the above reasons, will those be sufficient to say NO?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Well, yeah – if three people love each other, who are we to say no?

What are you – a bigot?

No, this is not on the level of “what’s next, marrying  goats?”; goats can’t sign contracts.  But groups of people (of legal majority)?  They sure can.

So who are we to limit polygamy?   We don’t vote on peoples’ rights, dammit!  Except we did…

UPDATE:  Welcome “Bluestem Prairie” readers (via Politics In MN)!  Hey, I’m a big fan of Sally Jo – but her article linking to this piece was a huuuuuuuge, unsupportable reach, as I pointed out in this piece here.

Just saying.

———-

A couple bits of background here:

The American Left is banking its future on “demographics”.  The theory is, as America becomes less white and as American women bring home more of the nation’s gross domestic product, it will inevitably vote more Democrat.

But if they didn’t?

Berg’s Eighth Law states “American liberalism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from sociopathic disorder“.   I originally wrote the law in response to the left’s ongoing case of Bachmann Derangement Syndrome.   It works a little something like this; liberals see women, minorities and gays as their electoral property.  Indeed, in the upcoming presidential election they are just about the only sure bets that President Obama has.   And when minorities and women see that there are other viable electoral options?  Well, that’s a knife aimed at liberalism’s heart.

Because without mindless, robotic electoral obeisance from women, minorities and gays, the left’s “demographic” future and the Democrat party are both finished.

Which explains, in large part, why the American left are so utterly demented around female and minority conservatives.

———-

I once noted that if politicians like Norm Coleman or Tim Walz are like engineers – making sure everything they say and do is as perfectly calibrated as a bridge gusset plate before they put it in front of the public – then Michele Bachmann is like a jazz saxophone player, winging it and improvising and going with what sounds right.  In the past it’s made her flub-prone – but she’s also a politician who wears her heart refreshingly on her sleeve.

It’d be fair to call Mary Franson a little Bachmann-like.  While she’s been the target of an almost Bachmann-like frenzy of dementia from central Minnesota’s leftyblog community ever since she took office, the freshman conservative from Alexandria is most famous for the teapot-tempest that blew up last year about her video noting that welfare treats people “like animals”.  While Franson fairly clearly meant that welfare treats people like livestock or pets, dependent on their owner or master the government, the optics weren’t polished to a fine enough sheen to prevent the left’s noise machine from braying “Franson calls welfare recipients animals”.

They were wrong, she was right – but in the war for the low-information voter that is the DFL’s campaign this year, the headline is all that matters.

Franson is running for re-election in the new House District 8B.  Her re-election doesn’t seem to be in too much danger – 8B is conservative enough that her opponent, Bob Cuniff, doesn’t even talk about his teachers’ union endorsement.

That doesn’t stop them from trying to make hay, of course.

———-

Vikings punter, musician, alt-media poitical dabbler and media celeb Chris Kluwe has been an outspoken supporter of gay marriage.  As such, he takes a little flak.

He tweeted about some of that flak he’s taken – including a fairly nasty, if stupid, little cartoon. 

Aaron Ley is a DFL activist and leader of the “North Star Project”, a McPAC funneling money into central MN campaigns.  He’s also the son of Carol Wenner, who was an unsuccessful candidate for the DFL bid to run against Franson, and is currently running for County Commission up there.  He chimed in, responding to Kluwe:

The link (let’s forget the unfounded accusation – which is Ley’s style, but like Ley, it’s of no real consequence) is to a piece that points out that Franson, like most conservative Christians, shockingly, opposes same sex marriage.  Like most social conservatives, Franson refers to the “traditional values” involved in the current definition of marriage.

That brought Kluwe back into the, er, “fray”:

“Basically, I was pointing out the fact that it is very hypocritical of her to ask for a return to traditional values, when traditional values say she should have been in the kitchen, and not in office,” Kluwe told City Pages yesterday. “Traditional values doesn’t just mean what you want it to mean. It can also mean some pretty bad stuff.”

Now, by Kluwe’s logic, support for the enumerated powers clause of the Tenth Amendment means you also have to support slavery – because values, apparently, are tied to mores at various points in time, not the idea of what’s right and what’s wrong.

Kluwe says he’s been talking to Minnesotans for Equality — a group opposing the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage — about organizing a debate between him and Franson.

Yeah, I suspect Mary Franson’s busy on the campaign trail.  Retail politics has a pretty crowded agenda this time of year, and debating media dilettantes doesn’t make the cut.

But hey!  I’m a media dilettante! And I could scare up some free time!

So I’ll tell you what, Chris Kluwe – if you want a debate about the Marriage Amendment, let’s go!  I’ll even spot you a couple of points.  Read my writing on the subject if you don’t know what I mean.

Have your people call my people.   By the way, I am my people.

Speaking of your people?  You might wanna have a word with some of the people on your side of this thing.  Eepy-cray.

More on that later.

UPDATE:  I edited a bit of sloppy writing that left at least one leftyblogger enough wiggle room to make a real doozy of a leap.  That’ll teach me to write before I’ve had coffee.

Police investigating a “bias crime” against five churches in Buffalo:

Police believe the same person broke into St. Francis Xavier and destroyed a number of windows at the 7th Day Adventist Church. The other churches were plastered with signs making reference to Jesus being gay and other offensive comments.

“When we arrived on Sunday and saw this poster with a lot of inflammatory language about Jesus, we took it down and called the police,” Jarvis said.

Buffalo Police Chief Mitch Weintzel said the signs contained homosexual overtones and derogatory comments that any Christian person would find offensive as relating to Jesus.

Victims say it’s clear whoever left the signs was trying to send a message. Now, investigators are trying to find out what that message is.

The vandal(s) hit five churches in Buffalo:

• St. Francis Xavier
• Zion Lutheran
• 7th Day Adventist
• Buffalo Presbyterian
• Hosanna Lutheran

Surveillance footage shows a “person of interest”…

Courtesy Fox9 News

(churches have surveillance cameras?  Who knew?)

…and, I guess, a minivan of interest:

Courtesy Fox9 News

Back to the news report:

 So far, officials say there is no clear link between the vandalism and the controversial marriage amendment. The churches that were struck differ in their stances and there was no mention of voting on the signs.

“At first, I thought it might have because there was some homosexual language and overtones on the poster — but as I’ve been hearing a little bit more and talking with police about it, we’re doubting that might actually be the issue,” Jarvis said.

Any side bets on which Twin Cities leftyblog the vandal reads?

If you take the history of the Minnesota Poll as any indication, yesterday’s numbers on the Marriage Amendment might be encouraging for amendment supporters:

The increasingly costly and bitter fight over a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage is a statistical dead heat, according to a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll.

Six weeks before Election Day, slightly more Minnesotans favor the amendment than oppose it, but that support also falls just short of the 50 percent needed to pass the measure.

Wow.  That sounds close!

But as always with these polls, you have to check the fine print.  And the “Minnesota Poll” buries its fine print in a link well down the page; you don’t ever actually find it in the story itself.  And it contains the partisan breakdown (with emphasis added):

The self-identified party affiliation of the random sample is: 41 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 31 percent independent or other.

That’s right – to get this virtual tie, the Strib, in a state that just went through photo-finish elections for Governor and Senator, and has been on the razor’s edge of absolute equality between parties for most of a decade, sampled three Democrats for every two Republicans to get to a tie.

If you believe – as I do – that the “Minnesota Poll” is first and foremost a DFL propaganda tool, intended largely to create a ‘bandwagon effect” to suppress conservative turnout (and we’ll come back to that), then this is good news; the Marriage Amendment is likely doing better  than the poll is showing.

What it does mean, though, is that they are working to build a narrative; that the battle over gay marriage is much more closely-fought than it is.

And the narrative’s players are already on board with this poll.  The Strib duly interviews Richard Carlbom, the former Dayton staffer who is leading the anti-Amendment

Actually, here’s my bet; the November 4 paper will show a “surge of support” that turns out to be much larger than any that actually materializes at the polls.

More At Noon.

UPDATE:  I wrote this piece on Sunday.  Monday morning, all of the local newscasts duly led with “both ballot initiatives are tied!”.

If you’re trying to find a construction job in Minnesota, you can get a job putting siding on the DFL’s narrative.

UPDATE 2:  Professor David Schultz at Hamline University – no friend of conservatism, he – did something I more or less planned to do on Wednesday; re-ran the numbers with a more realistic partisan breakdown:

Why is the partisan adjustment important? The poll suggests significant partisan polarization for both amendments, with 73% of DFLers opposing the marriage amendment and 71% of GOPers supporting. Similar partisan cleavages also exist with the Elections Amendment. If this is true, take the marriage Amendment support at 49% and opposition at 47%. If DFLers are overpolled by 3% and GOP underpolled by 6%, and if about 3/4 of each party votes in a partisan way, I would subtract about 2.25% from opposition (3% x .75) and add 4.5% to support (6% x .75) and the new numbers are 53.5% in support and 44.75% against. This is beyond margin or error.

If one applies the correction to the Elections Amendment there is about an 80% DFL opposition to it and a similar 80% GOP support for it. Then the polls suggest approximately 56.8% support it and 41.6% oppose.

Which brings us very nearly back to the 3:2 margin  for the Voter ID amendment, and the tight but solid lead for the Marriage Amendment that every other poll – the reputable ones, anyway – have found.

Survey USA polls show that the Voter ID Amendmennt appears to be cleared for landing – barring, naturally, a major change in the landscape – while the Marriage Amendment could be a squeaker.

Let’s start with the Marriage Amendment.

At first glance, the news is good; the amendment is up 50-43.  Now, in elections for Constitutional Amendments, blanks ballots are counted as “no” votes.  So if every single “Undeicded” in this poll either votes “no” or doesn’t vote on the amendment, it flails 51-48.  On the one hand, that seems unlikely; it’s a lot more likely that some of the undecideds will break for the amendment; if an eighth of the undecideds vote “yes”, the amendment passes in a 50-plus-one-vote to 50-minus-one-vote squeaker.

Of course, it’s unrealistic to expect that the landscape will stay the same.  Both sides are going to pour money into this state on this amendment in the next seven weeks.  Given the deep pockets behind the left’s “grassroots” efforts, I suspect they’ll deploy a lot more money.  I suspect, as I have all along, that his vote is going to be a tight one.

Voter ID, on the other hand?

The proposed Voter ID Amendment is unchanged since the last round of polling, over a month ago.  It’s ahead by a 2:1 margin, with only 7% undecided.  IF every single undecided vote is a “no” or an abstention, the measure will pass with a 3:2 margin.

The “yes”  vote crushes among all age groups – even moreso among young voters (which makes sense; they’re the ones that see their classmates being approached to take part in the scams); it wins among every party and ideological stripe except among Democrats and self-identified liberals, and across all regions, income brackets and levels of education.

This measure is going to pass resoundingly.

As Todd Akin discovered this past week, rape is no laughing matter…

…if you’re a Republican pol.

Now, Democrats?  That’s another story.

But before Franken was a senator he was a writer on the TV show Saturday Night Live. Then, he famously joked about raping CBS reporter Lesley Stahl.

As New York magazine reported in 1995, from a writing session that the reporter sat in on:

Franken: “And, ‘I give the pills to Lesley Stahl. Then, when Lesley’s passed out, I take her to the closet and rape her.’ Or, ‘That’s why you never see Lesley until February.’ Or, ‘When she passes out, I put her in various positions and take pictures of her.’”

Hah!  Funny!  Rape ! Hahahahah!

With the national conversation now turning to women’s issues as a result of the bizarre and offensive comments by Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin over the weekend, it seems a bit odd that Vice President Biden would take the stage with Franken, considering his own lack of sensitivity to the horrors of rape.

No it doesn’t.  The media only holds sins against PC, intelligence, science, fact, logic and morality against conservatives.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes in re an incident over the weekend – a former semi-pro defensive end tackled an armed robber outside a Superamerica in Rogers:

Store customer sees crime about to happen, takes prompt action to stop robbery and capture suspect while police officer stands around watching, gets snotty remark from Chief of Police.

Lucky he didn’t get arrested for interfering with the officer’s observations, I suppose. Still, it’s annoying. The Chief could have said “Hey, thanks for the assist, man, we’ll take it from here; but for all you folks listening, don’t try this at home . . . unless you’re as big as my friend, here [big grin and fake punch in the shoulder].” That would have been classy. Now, the Chief just looks prissy. Jerk.

On the one hand, I’m sure there’s a liability issue involved; some nutcase will no doubt sue a police chief that is seen to encourage “vigilantism”.

On the other? I’m a fire-breathing law-and-order libertarian/conservative -and I’m getting more than a little concerned about the quality of the relationship between the police and the people.

It’s been my theory for a long time that liberals in Minnesota are incapable of carrying on an informed civil debate because in places like the Twin Cities – and in some careers, all of Minnesota – liberals can, or at least could until recently, go an entire lifetime without encountering a conservative thought.

From the left-safe, feminized public school system, through the eliminationist “progressive” ghetto of the university system, a young person can spend the first 20-odd years of their life without ever encountering a conservative opinion on a level deeper than a progressive’s cliche.  If they go into a career dominated by the left – teaching, academia, journalism, civil service work – and/or live in a place dominated by the left, like New York, Minneapolis or Madison, they can carry that ignorance well into middle age.

David French at The Corner has a similar, complementary observation; his thesis, that liberals in major liberal centers are much more prone to speaking and acting out of incivility and hatred, comes from the lack of diversity in these liberal centers:

The heartland of American leftism is less intellectually diverse than any large conservative community in the United States. The entire cities of New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. are less politically diverse than your average Evangelical megachurch.

Don’t believe me? In 2008, McCain/Palin won 73 percent of the Evangelical/born-again vote. By contrast, San Francisco gave Obama/Biden 84 percent of its votes. All the boroughs of New York City (except Staten Island) went for Obama by wider margins than 73 percent, with Manhattan giving Obama 85 percent of its votes. There were similar numbers for Philadelphia and Washington D.C. In other words, these major American cultural centers are less diverse than churches entirely filled with self-selecting populations of Bible-believing Christians. Leftists have greater group solidarity than Christians.

French quotes that noted liberal tool Cass Sunstein, in a Harvard Law Review article called “The Law of Group Polarization”:

 In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming. This general phenomenon — group polarization – has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, “radicalization,” cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism, and tribalism.

Which explains everything from Pauline Kael to Mike Malloy.

This next graf deserves to be a quote of the day somewhere:

 It is a truism of American life that unless a conservative turns off all technology, grabs a gun and a dog, and heads for the hills, he will be exposed to an avalanche of liberal thought and ideas — in education, television, movies, and the Internet. Liberals, by contrast, can and often do live lives isolated from conservative thought, and their ignorance of our ideas is starting to show.

I was very left-of-center when I was a kid; chalk it up to my family.  But it was in a place where, once I got out of the house, conservatism was everywhere.  I never had the luxury of thinking that my point of view was the only point of view – indeed, I converted to conservatism in college, largely due to the efforts of an English professor, of all things.

I was apparently lucky:

 I was first exposed to liberal ignorance of conservatism way back in 1991. I was a new law student and had just walked out of a class with my ears still ringing from the boos, hisses, and jeers at my conservative arguments. A classmate came up to me and said, “I wish they’d let you speak. I’d never heard anything like what you were saying and wanted to hear more.”

I was shocked. I was merely making a standard conservative argument — breaking no new ideological ground. “You’ve never heard an argument like that? Where did you go to college?”

“Princeton.”

Some liberal once told me: “Ignorance breeds hate.” I couldn’t agree more.

And if you’re a conservative in a place like, well, Wisconsin, you don’t need this explained.

I’m not going to get into the politics of the shooting at the Family Research Council headquarters.

Neither are the leftymedia.  In stark contrast to…

• the Aurora shooting, where NBC’s Brian Ross falsely identified shooter Holmes as a Tea Party organizer
• the Tucson massacre, where the blood hadn’t dried before the leftymedia gravely blamed it all on Sarah Palin’s rhetoric
• The Discovery Network incident, in which a nutcase with a gun and a bomb took over the network’s lobby.  It was blamed on conservatives, until it turned out James Jay Lee was a Zero Population Growth advocate inspired by Obama’s “Science Czar” John Holgren (at which point the story disappeared)
• the Pentagon Subway shooting, which the left and media (ptr) blamed on the Tea Party until it turned out John Patrick Bedell was a lefty (at which point the story disappeared)
• the Austin, TX airplane crash, in which a lone pilot crashed a light plane into the skyscraper housing the Austin, Texas IRS office.  Blamed, naturally, on the Tea Party, until it got out that Joseph Stack was an anti-Bush zealot (at which point the story disappeared)
• The death of Bill Sparkman, which the media hurried to pin on Michele Bachmann, until it turned out he was a lefty too (at which point the story disappeared)

…the media are being very circumspect about politicizing the incident.

Why, maybe they’ve learned their lesson!

Or maybe they are, as always, serving the narrative, if they bothered to note the incident at all.

Democrats who unctuously and tiresomely lectured us that “there are no Death Panels” (there are; it’s called Case Management) will smugly declare “Paul Ryan wants to kill Grandma” (whereas Ryan’s plan is intended someone can take care of Grandma – and Grandpa – after 2024).

Jim Geraghty goes into details, not that you really need them.

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

He was not alone:

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

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

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

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

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

The piece could also be entitled “The Five Stages Of Liberal Argumentation”.

I’ve observed for a long time now that liberals, especially in liberal hotbeds like the Twin Cities, are really, really bad debaters.  My thesis is that liberals in liberal hotbeds never really need to learn how to debate; they are indoctrinated in a school system that teaches “progressive” values as the baseline, they are educated schooled in a university system that actively squelches dissent, and they are politically spawned in a party and movement whose entire internal message is coordinated top-down groupthink. They never have to learn to think of conservative arguments as anything but something lesser people do.

And let’s be honest; there are conservatives out there who live down to that stereotype.

But when they run into an argument that beats them on the facts, the rules and the logic – and that is very, very often, especially in the battle between the left and rights’ media and alt-media – I’ve observed a bit of a pattern:

Stage One: Unearned Smugness.  Most liberals are good for about one round of “facts” in a given argument.  These, they deliver as if they were carved on stone tablets by a lightning bolt from on high, whether they came from empirical research (rare) or chanting points straight from the leftymedia chain of command (from “Media Matters” all the way down to “Minnesota Progressive Project”).

This round of facts, or factoids, generally falls after one round of actual enquiry.  The collapse of the round of facts, or “facts”, leads to:

Stage Two:  Logical Fallacy.  When confronted with the collapse of their first and only round of factoids and chanting points, most liberal bloggers and activists will fall back on the lessons they learned from the oracle from which most of them learned all they will ever know about debate – Stephen Colbert.   Thrown off-balance by a substantive counterattack, they’ll fall back one of several common logical fallacies to try to negate an argument they can’t attack.  These include:

• The Ad-Hominem:  “Oh, right – you got that from “Republicanmussen”!”
• The Tu Quoque:  “But ten years ago, you supported raising taxes!  You flip-flopped! I shall disregard your argument!”
• The Appeal to Ridicule: “I had an argument like that – until my father got a job!”
• The Straw Man: “You want to reform Medicaid?  Why do you want every single poor person to die?“
• The Appeal to Authority: “Your source went to a Tier 3 Law School.  My source went to a Tier 1 school.  His data is therefore better!”
• The “Red Herring”:  “You say you oppose building a light rail train.  But you favored building an aircraft carrier!  You’re a hypocrite!”

Stage 3:  The Tonkin Gulf Gambit:  Once their facts are disposed of and their logical fallacies are called out, the liberal will have to dig deeper into the bag of tricks.  The Tonkin Gulf Gambit is named after LBJ’s signature foreign policy accomplishment – the faking of an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on an American destroyer.  LBJ used the fake attack to justify a huge ramping up of the Vietnam War.

Liberals, their “facts” shredded and their fallacies mocked, will frequently gin up a simiilar fake attack, to cover their own inability to carry on a factual arrument, as in the scenario below:

LANA LIBRELL:  “Assault weapons cause crime waves!”

KEVIN KONSERVATIVSKI: “Crime rates are actually lower in states that don’t ban assault weapons, and they’re going down”.

PETE PROGRESSIVE: “Going down?  That was sexist!  You apologize to Lana! I don’t argue with sexist pigs that objectify women!”

This is also called “Getting The Victorian Vapours”.

Stage 4:  Killing The Messenger: Unable to debate, BS or sidetrack you, the liberal’s next tactic will be to destroy  you.

KEVIN KONSERVATIVSKI: “Keeping the speed limit at 55 makes no economic sense”.

YOLANDA YUTOPIAN: “Of course you’d say that.  You have three speeding tickets in the past 15 years.  What ELSE will your records show?”

Stage 5:  Declaring Victory And Calling The Debate Over:  Like the President did the other day:

There never was an argument, Winston. The facts, logic and rules always favored us. There was never a debate. There was never a debate.

What to do about this?

Any psychologists in the house?

As I’ve noted over the years, I was born, grew up and went to college in North Dakota.  I left when I was 22 – largely because everything I really wanted to do with my life involved one kind of city or another.  At that time, “things I wanted to do with my life” mostly included “have a band and take a shot at making it in a city with a decent music scene” – but over time, everything else I ended up wanting to do tended to involve living in a major city as well.

In 1985, North Dakota was in pretty dire straits.  The state had a lot in common with Minneapolis and Saint Paul, back then; it was in the throes of the deflation of a huge real estate bubble, in this case a bubble in the price of farm land which had led an awful lot of farmers to over-borrow, which led to a huge wave of foreclosures when the bubble finally burst.  Foreclosures zoomed, unemployment soared, the whole US agriculture industry reeled (no state more than North Dakota, which was at the time more dependent on agriculture than any state in the union).  The farm crisis of the eighties took place in the fly-overiest of America’s flyover lands, and so left only a few marks on the larger American psyche – some good, some pretty awful.

The state learned a few lessons from the eighties (which also included a brief boom and long bust in the oil market; the Oil Embargo in the seventies caused a brief burst of drilling in the western part of the state, which led to some rapid expansion and equally rapid contraction when the price of oil dropped the below the point where North Dakota oil made economic sense).

Of course, times have changed in my home state.  The place is floating in oil, and money to boot.  And that money is going to a lot of things – and infrastructure isn’t as high on the list as some (MPR) seem to think it should be.  There’s method to the madness, of course; during the first oil boom, North Dakota built all kinds of infrastructure that wasn’t needed when the boom shriveled.  While this boom may not shrivel in the same way, the state also knows that there’s a pattern to oil booms; the first ten or twenty years is the Boomtown phase, with hordes of workers drilling exploratory rigs all over the place.  Once all the exploring is done, and things switch over to production mode?  There’s still lots of oil, jobs and money – but it’s not the same.  It’s steadier. And a lot of the “boom” will move on to the next boomtown, wherever that is.  And the infrastructure needs will be very different.

Still, it’s very different than when other NYTimes columnists were calling for the state to be evacuated and handed back to nature – the infamous “Buffalo Commons”.

Our nation’s idiot media “elite” have never known what to make of the place.

I bring it up because the New York Times is writing about North Dakota again.  Gail Collins, as trifling and meringue-y a columnist as Maureen Dowd,  h paid the state a visit recently, and wrote a column that TMZ might have rejected as too shallow and caricature-worthy:

Right now you are probably asking yourself: “What would it be like to live in a place with an unemployment rate of 1 percent?”

Me, too! So I went to Williston, N.D., to find out. There are certain things that journalists do as a public service because you, the noble reader, are probably not going to do them for yourself — like attending charter revision meetings or reading the autobiography of Tim Pawlenty.

Or take Gail Collins seriously.

But she gets a key fact straight; there are jobs out in oil country:

Going to Williston is sort of in this category. The people are lovely, but you’re talking about a two-hour drive from Minot.

If you did come, however, you would feel really, really wanted. Radio ads urged me to embark on a new career as a bank teller, laborer, railroad conductor or cake decorator. The local Walmart has a big sign up, begging passers-by to consider starting their lives anew in retail sales. The Bakken Region Recruiter lists openings in truck driving, winch operating and canal maintenance work, along with ads for a floral designer, bartender, public defender, loan officer, addiction counselor and sports reporter. All in an area where the big city has a population of around 16,000.

There’s an oil boom…Williston’s median income, which was under $30,000 when the serious drilling started, has jumped to well over $50,000 a year…“It’s a place of opportunity,” says E. Ward Koeser, the genial head of a local communications company who has also been Williston’s part-time mayor for the last 18 years. A waitress at a restaurant that Koeser patronizes recently told him that she made $400 in tips on a single night. “Although I’m sure that’s not the norm,” he added hastily.

(As someone who used to work in part for tips in ND, it sure isn’t.  I drove an airport van for a hotel.  You could always tell when someone visited from New York or LA; I’d get a $5 tip for driving and hauling the bags.  Minneapolis?  A couple of bucks.  North Dakotans?  Nothing.  Or a quarter.  And that was meant to be a good tip).

You are probably wondering about the downside.

Indeed, if you’re in the MSM, you’re obsessing about it.  This is wealth not bestowed by government; there just has to be a dark side to it all!

Obviously there has to be one, or you and I would already have moved to Williston, or at least taken up a collection to send unemployed college graduates.

We’ll come back to that.

You would expect that, as population and incomes rose, new stores, theaters and restaurants would follow. But, in Williston, they haven’t. Lanny Gabbert, a science teacher at the high school, says his students yearn for a mall where they could shop, “but the closest thing is Walmart.” The most ambitious restaurants would be classified under the heading of “casual dining,” and the fast food is not fast, given the lunchtime lines that can stretch out for 20 minutes or more. Neither retailers nor restaurateurs are interested in investing in a place where they have to compete with the oil fields to attract workers.

So the “downside” is that relatively great wealth hasn’t brought a Rodeo Drive to Williston.

OK, fair enough.  Let’s continue.

Housing costs in Williston, N.D., are approaching those in New York City. Many of the oil workers stash their families back wherever they came from, and live in “man camps,” some of which resemble giant stretches of storage units.

“The man camps — I call them the necessary evil,” said Koeser, who added, apologetically, “that’s a little derogatory.”

If the place you love can’t quite climb out of the recession, think of this as consolation. At least you’re not living in a man camp and waiting half an hour in line for a Big Mac.

Which is as excellent a metaphor for Obama’s America, the America of Planet Upper West Side, as there is; better to have amenities than a job – even a job in a place that may not be up the street from Fifth Avenue or the Mall of America.

Not-Obama America?   I know guys who wake up in West Saint Paul on Sunday morning, drive all day to Williston, make a ton of money, and drive home after work Thursday.  I know guys – my sister’s husband among ’em – who spend two weeks driving a truck in oil country and a week at home, because it’s where the money is and a great way to blast that nest egg to the next level.  People who, by desire or by necessity, have taken the recession by the horns and done what needs to be done to keep themselves and their families not just above water, but in the black at a time when the likes of Gail Collins are sniveling about their friends’ brats who just graduated from Bard College with an art degree and somehow can’t find a job with a hedge fund.

(Via North Dakota’s official blogger, and my Mom’s neighbor, Rob Port)

… not to mention dumbest conceit that the left has is that so many of them think that if I were given a choice in a race between two candidates – namely:

• A black Taoist lesbian who was a fierce Austrian-school trench-fighter with a solid private-sector background and a record as a spending hawk and tax reformer, and…
• A white Ivy League dweeb with impeccable liberal credentials…

…that I’d try to find some excuse to vote for the white guy.

Just isn’t so

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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