Well, blow me down; I was wrong.

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

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

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

No?

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

Got nothing?

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

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

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

More seriously?

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

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

More results from the Survey USA poll from yesterday.

I gotta confess, this one surprised me.  Conventional wisdom has it that the Left’s suffocating blanket of spending and publicity, as well as the purported apathy of many voters to the issue, would scupper the Marriage Amendment.

According to this poll – which, remember, oversampled Democrats, 38 to 32% – it’s just not so:

An amendment to the Minnesota Constitution on the ballot defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Will you vote FOR the amendment? Against the amendment? Or not vote on the measure?

52% Vote For

37% Vote Against

5% Not Vote

6% Not Sure

Remember, “No answer” counts as a “no” on Constitutional votes in Minnesota.  So let’s say these results hold up ’til election day, and that every single “Not Sure” response in this poll ends up voting “no” or not voting (which won’t happen); the measure passes 52-48.

This, I did not expect.

And I’m a tad gratified to see that the poll shows people seem to be resisting, broadly, the DFL’s torrent of lies and innuendo about the Voter ID Amendment:

An amendment to the Minnesota Constitution on the ballot would require voters to show photo I.D.’s in order to vote on Election Day. Will you vote FOR the amendment? Against the amendment? Or not vote on the measure?

65% Vote For

28% Vote Against

2% Not Vote

4% Not Sure

If the “Fors” stay put, and every single “Not Sure” votes against it (again, not gonna happen), the measure passes by almost 2:1.

While gay marriage isn’t an issue I care much about – I support civil unions – I’m glad to see that on at least a couple of issues, according to one mildly-DFL-leaning and slightly DFL-oversampled poll, the DFL’s huge, expensive, and slimy propaganda war seems at this moment to be crapping out.

A couple of stipulations up front before we cut to the chase:

1. I’m not going to say Michele Bachmann hasn’t occasionally observed a “Ready! Fire! Aim!” approach to some of the things she’s commented on over the years.  She’s tightened up her messaging a lot, of course, since deciding to run for President – but whenever I see a chorus of leftybloggers bleating “did you see what teh crazee Mishele Bachmannn said?”, I still occasionally take a deep breath and brace myself.  Of course, it’s more and more an automatic rather than a reasoned thing.  But we’ll come back to that.
2. I do think many American conservatives are way too exercised about the Muslim Brotherhood.  They are a big, loosely-knit movement with a lot of different histories in a lot of different nations. Some parts were radicalized by being pushed underground – think the IRA.  Other parts, in other nations, less so, or at least in different ways.  It remains to be seen what their majority in Egypt will turn out like – and they are far from the only force in Egypt that could drag that mess into the toilet – but they’ve been a broadly good influence in Libya, and neutral at worst in Tunisia.
3. Some decry the fact that some Muslim Brotherhood national parties would re-institute Sharia law if they get their way in their various nations.  So don’t move there!   They’re sovereign countries and making – for the moment – democratic decisions.  They get to do that.  At best, the Brotherhood will bring Islam, and Sharia, out into the open, where it can bump up against the 21st century and, with a little luck, the motives and desires and political demands of people with more exposure to the modern world than, say, Afghans.  Am I being a pollyanna?  Perhaps.  Or maybe just tired of fighting unneeded battles.

With that out of the way, it’s hard to miss the cascade of caterwauling that’s greeted Michele Bachmann’s statements (along with those of four other House Republicans – Louie Gohmert (TX), Trent Franks (AZ), Tom Rooney (FL), and Lynn Westmorland (GA).  “Why, even John McCain is bagging on her!”, the liberals, and not a few Republicans, phumpher – as if that were news.  McCain even throws out the dreaded “M” word, “McCarthy”, which Democrats have turned into a rhetorical nuclear option over the decades (ignorant of the irony; McCarthy was right, there were communist infiltrators, although as his hunt went on it became both too broad and way too easily caricatured.

Speaking of McCarthy, the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy – presumably no relation – unloads on McCain, and Bachmann’s critics, with an excellent, moderately lengthy piece that documents both Huma Abedin’s real, honest-to-pete links to the Muslim Brotherhood (read the article), and shreds the notion that Bachmann et al were “witchhunting”, but rather…:

The five House conservatives, instead, are asking questions that adults responsible for national security should feel obliged to ask: In light of Ms. Abedin’s family history, is she someone who ought to have a security clearance, particularly one that would give her access to top-secret information about the Brotherhood? Is she, furthermore, someone who may be sympathetic to aspects of the Brotherhood’s agenda, such that Americans ought to be concerned that she is helping shape American foreign policy?

Now, Senator McCain is no stranger to smear. No need to confirm that with Mr. ElBaradei; we’ve watched for years as he has slandered, for example, critics of his advocacy for illegal aliens as “nativists” seeking to reprise Jim Crow laws. Nevertheless, since McCain purports to be a tireless guardian of our security, one would think he’d appreciate the distinction between a smear, on the one hand, and a routine application of security-clearance standards, on the other

…as well as illuminates some of McCain’s own flip-floppery on the issue:

So, the reporter asked him, does Obama’s tolerance of the Muslim Brotherhood “concern you”?

 

Senator Maverick shot back without hesitation: “It concerns me so much that I am unalterably opposed to it. I think it would be a mistake of historic proportions.”

 

Senator McCain elaborated that he was “deeply, deeply concerned that this whole movement [toward democracy] could be hijacked by radical Islamic extremists.” And what, he was specifically asked, “is your assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood”? McCain pulled no punches:

 

“I think they are a radical group that, first of all, supports sharia law; that in itself is anti-democratic — at least as far as women are concerned. They have been involved with other terrorist organizations and I believe that they should be specifically excluded from any transition government”

 

In fact, so apprehensive was he over the Brotherhood and its sharia agenda that McCain was quick to brand Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate, as a Brotherhood tool.

By the way, Rep. Bachmann has claimed – with some considerable justification – that her words have been distorted and wrenched out of context, and she’s released all her communications on the subject to prove it.  You be the judge.

So the flap isn’t about “witchhunting” Muslims in government.  It’s about transparency and honesty about influence at the highest levels (as Rep. Bachmann’s letter to Rep. Ellison, whose has denied any knowledge of the Muslim Brotherhood, although his 2008 trip to Mecca was largely bankrolled by a group that, court documents indicate, is affiliated with the Brotherhood) makes clear.  It’s about transparency.

Lessons from this incident?  Simple:  When the media sounds off on conservatives, distrust, verify, and almost always distrust some more.

Personally?  I’m not sure that the Brotherhood is the suffocating danger that some conservatives claim, and even if it were, those are sovereign nations.  And I suspect Huma Abedin’s connections to the Georgetown Political Science Elite and Keith Ellison’s membership in the DFL are of more immediate danger to this nation and state, to be honest.

But since the subject is honesty – the flap about Bachmann seems to be little more than Dems trying to draw attention away from the real issue; Hillary Clinton and Keith Ellison’s disingenuity.

That casualty would be “any sense that the media is not working an agenda against conservatives, especially organized conservatives like the Tea Party”.

But that time was many years and at least one set of ideals ago.

During the confusion over the identity of the shooter in Aurora, ABC’s Brian Ross went on the air and reported…

“There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.”

Which has been, by the way, the leftymedia’s process for reporting on the Tea Party since the very beginning; find the slenderest reed of possible allowing the assumption of guilt, and work back from there (because there will be no consequences).

Brian Moran at Pajamas Media remembers that time as well:

There used to be a time when journalists had a rough integrity about what they said over the air and took pride in striving for accuracy. Who could ever forget ABC’s Frank Reynolds, ABC News anchorman, who, after receiving and announcing word that James Brady had been killed in the Reagan assassination attempt only to discover the press secretary was still alive, got visibly angry and to no one in particular barked on air, “Let’s get this right. Let’s nail this down.”

Today, Stephanopoulos thanked Brian Ross for smearing the Tea Party by reporting a lie. Ross should be suspended or lose his job for this attempt to inject politics into a national tragedy.

I noted the phenomenon years ago; in their unquenchable hunger to demonize the Tea Party – literally, to rhetorically turn them into demons – the media was bending over backwards to find the slenderest reed of association with the Tea Party first, and worry about attribution and proof later.  It was so pervasive, it launched an entire category on this blog, “The Slander Files“, chronicling the left’s demented quest to make the facts, such as they were, fit their narrative.   It’s been a busy category.  Do you remember when…:

• Andy Birkey of the Minnesoros Independent claiming Tea Party leadership was behind a phoned-in threat to an AFSCME office because, well, the guy on the phone message said he was a Tea Party leader?
• MSNBC’s Martin Bashir wrapped himself in faux science to diagnose the entire movement?
• AM950’s inept afternoon host Matt McNeil tried to link Norwegian spree killer Anders Breivik to the Tea Party?
• The entire Sorosphere leapt onto a story that “white supremacists” were involved with CPAC – and crashed to the ground, since it was a non-story?
• America’s front-page village idiot Paul Krugman tying the Tea Party to the Oklahoma City bombing?
• To say nothing of the various bouts of violence back in 2009 that the left blamed on the Tea Party?  John Patrick Bedell?  Joseph Stack?  Amy Bishop?  Maurice Schwenkler? The “cut propane tube?”

Slandering the Tea Party is an exemption from whatever still passes for “Journalistic Ethics”.

“So why do you spend so much time on the Second Amendment? Are you (titter, titter) compensating for something?”

Yes. I’m compensating for the fact that much of humanity is evil, and much of the rest of them are as dumb as you. No, I’m not saying you’re party to totalitarian dictatorship; merely that dictators need people like you to be in the majority for them to take power.

Shut up, watch and learn.

…it’s the liberals who are the smart, open-minded, non-depraved ones:

Jane Pitt, mother of actor Brad Pitt, has been scared into silence by the hate-filled, vulgar and even violent reaction to her public assertion that Barack Obama is “a liberal who supports the killing of unborn babies and same-sex marriage.”

Pitt has even been the subject of death threats following her letter to the editor of Missouri’s Springfield News-Leader in which she asserted failure to vote for Republican presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney constituted a vote for Obama.

Because free speech is only for liberals in Hollywood.

Big question:  will smarmy liberal Pitt defend his mother?

So the other day on Twitter, I took the liberty of congratulating Lynn Cheney for “marrying” her partner.  I took the liberty of pointing out that Cheney, lesbian though she is, has a rare and glorious ability to shred through lefty chanting points.

A couple of  liberals on Twitter, smelling rhetorical trap, tried to turn that into an endorsement of gay marriage and/or a position on the Marriage Amendment this fall.

Naturally, I’m not falling for any of that.  The fact is, I’m personally, deeply ambivalent about gay marriage.  And about the Marriage Amendment that will be addressing the issue in Minnesota this fall.  And about marriage, regardless of the genders of the participants, for that matter.   One of the liberals accused me of “moving the goalposts”, as liberals always do when one introduces logical or moral nuance into an argument (remember – they’re the smart ones, and the only ones allowed to have nuance or observe gray area in their world views).

But notwithstanding the lefties’ attempt to back me into a rhetorical box of their making, which I brushed aside with ease and style (as always), it did start me thinking; it’s getting toward November.  I mean, it’s four months away.

And I’m still undecided about the Marriage Amendment.

As I’ve written in the past, the Marriage Amendment is…

• On the one hand, a bad idea:  The libertarian in me bristles at the idea that the government should be telling people what to do in their personal lives.  Marriage is a contract; if two people have standing to sign a contract, why not?  Animals and children cant’ sign ’em, after all.
• On the other hand, the Amendment is a great idea: It should bring out social conservatives to vote.  Look, I hate using peoples’ personal lives as grist for the political mill, but it’s the coin of the realm.  And the long-term survival of this country does in fact depend on the political extinction of the current version of “progressivism” and its vessel, the Democrat party.  If this issue is a milepost on the way to the extinction of the DFL, I’m all for it (although I think the Voter ID Amendment will be much more useful in that regard).
• And on still a third hand, a good idea: because it’ll force gay marriage proponents to learn to actually debate an issue, rather than browbeat their opponents, which seems to be just about the only “debate” tactic any of them knows.

Because on the one hand, I believe government should stay out of peoples’ personal lives.

On the other, I believe “Marriage” is mostly a religious institution.

On the third hand, I find most of the arguments for gay marriage just as illogical as some of its proponents find “because Jesus said so”.  A quick sample, off the top of my head:

“Support Gay Marriage or we’ll thow things at you”:  This video clips is making the rounds; a young Marriage Amendment opponent tossing glitter at Amendment supporters at a demonstration outside General Mills:

He tosses glitter at old people, toddlers – and then has a hissy when people get mad at him.

And reading the comments to the video are enough to make you truly afraid for this nation’s future.  If the next great cultural war is fought on the fields on logic, ethics and fact, we’re screwed blue.

I’m not going to say “this is the best argument that gay marriage supporters can muster” – notwithstanding the fact that it’s the best a lot of Amendment supporters can muster, it’s clearly not a great argument.  But much of the Minnesota gay movement has tied itself to the glitter bomb as its primary positive case.

Color me unconvinced.

Still, the better ones have challenges as well.

“Civil Rights aren’t the subject for popularity contests”: Of course they are.  The government and media spent years demonizing people who supported the Second Amendment, in order to shave those rights back as far as they could.  And ask German-Americans about the popular laws enacted during World War I, or Japanese Americans during World War II.

“But those were mistakes”.  Sure.  But that’s a separate question.  We constantly subject rights, including rights purportedly enshrined in the Constitution, to popularity contests.

“You antis are hung up on a word”.  Well, sure – the idea that “marriage” is a religious institution, while “civil unions” are not.

But let’s be honest – everyone is hung up on a word.  Try this exercise with your favorite local gay marriage proponent – and by this, I mean the reasonable one, the one that can hold a civil argument (we’ll get to the others later):

YOU:  Allowing for the fact that no major faith group (outside some dissenting congregations here and there around the US) sanctions gay marriage, and none of them do so on theological grounds, what are your reasons for wanting gays to marry?

GAY MARRIAGE SUPPORTER (GMS):  So that gays have rights to visitation, so they can visit each other in the hospital and have power of attorney, inheritance, the various tax benefits, the ability to transfer custody of children in cases of death or disability, those sorts of things.

YOU: OK.  So it’s a legal thing.

GMS: “Yep”.

YOU:  OK.  So I propose that we adopt Civil Unions.  It’s a contract between two adults of majority, conferring every single one of the rights you mentioned and a few others you (well, OK, I) forgot, just like marriage.  Only it’s called a “Civil Union”.

GMS: That’s not OK.  People would view that as a second class institution.

YOU: But you yourself said this was about rights.  You’ll get every single right that a married mixed-gender couple gets.  Exactly the same resolution to every single situation under the law.  What’s the difference?

GMS: People will think Civil Unions have a lower status.

YOU:  Hm.  So a parallel institution that is exactly legally equal to straight marriage is not acceptable because…

GMS:  Because you are hung up on a word.

YOU: Gotcha.

“Because Marriage is about love!”:  I have to clamp off my own personal cynicism about marriage to answer this one.  But even being idealistic for a moment?  No, it’s not.  Ask anyone who got married for “love”.  “Love’ carries you through about the first two years, if you’re lucky.  After that it’s about a lot more than “love”.

Which is not to say that gay couples don’t have whatever that is.  Just that the “Marriage is love” chant is a stupid one even for straights.

Still, it’s better than this one:

“A Gay couple would be better than so many of the straight couples out there!”: Have you noticed how every gay couple that anyone ever refers to is Ozzie and Harriet these days?  And those Ozzy and, er, Ozzy couples always get compared to straight couples that are like Joan Crawford and whoever she was married to?

Gay marriage supporters have painted not so much gay marriage, but gays who want to marry, as just plain better human beings that all us nasty, angry…human straights.  It’s becoming a bit of a stereotype – the doting, impeccable, perfect gay couple, always a better option than…whatever the option was.

Which is every bit as debilitating a stereotype as some of those other gay stereotypes.

“Marriage is a right, and we don’t restrict rights”:  There are really two responses buried in there.

Of course we restrict rights.  My right to keep and bear arms, to pick one example – which is important enough to be spelled out in the Constitution, and incorporated onto the states by the  McDonald decision – is restricted in all sorts of ways; I have to show ID to buy ammo, much less a gun; felons can’t buy ’em, and on on, and so on.

And marriage?  Yep, restricted all over the place.  You can’t marry your first cousin – not even “for love”.  You can’t have several spouses – not “for love”, or even because your religion, Mormon or Muslim or Hefnerian, allows it.  Not even if first cousins or multiple spouses make better parents than your uptight old straight parents did.

But beyond that – is marriage a “right?”

The US Constitution doesn’t say anything – except by omission, in the Tenth Amendment, which reserves everything not covered in the Constitution (and thousands of tons of case law, naturally) to the States and People, unless the Supreme Court can find a penumbra enanating something else (see: “right” to murder the unborn – which should not be viewed as a right, btw; one persons rights can not infringe another person’s rights; abortion not only infringes the “Fetus'” right to life, in many cases it destroys whatever rights may be scattered in and among the father’s many, many legal obligations).  And the state of Minnesota defines marriage as a guy and a gal.  Which is fine – laws were made to be changed, if you have the political muscle to do it.  Go for it.

For most of human history, “marriage” has been about making, raising, securing the safety and maintenance of, and protection of children.  Which, at various times, meant that the infertile, the old and the otherwise child-“free” weren’t elegible.  In some parts of the world, “marriage” doesn’t happen until there was a baby on the way (including, until not that long ago, some parts of rural Holland).

Of course, that’s not how we’ve observed things for quite some time, with senior citizens and the “child-free” marrying, and with many, many more having children without bothering with marriage (or knowing each others’ names, in some cases) at all.

And so while “…because we’ve always done it this way” isn’t an especially satisfying answer for supporting the Marriage Amendment in and of itself, either are any of the arguments I’ve heard against it.

See the conundrum?

(Lefties on Twitter needn’t answer…)

I’ve got nothing in particular against marijuana.  I’ve never smoked it, in part because I’m just not a “mellow” kinda guy – if I did a drug, it’d be cocaine, hands (and nose) down.

And I personally support legalizing pot.  Making this cheap commodity the focus of a federal prohibition has contributed to untold deaths and incredible misery in America’s inner cities. Decriminalizing pot would at least remove some of the expense and dislocation that our failed “war on drugs” has caused.

But with all that out of the way?  Stoners annoy me.  There is nothing in the world more annoying that numbed, hemp-reeking munchy-grubbing cackling drone of the Chiba Monkey set.   I’ll sit in a chair and listen to Shakira’s fingernails on a chalkboard all weekend before I listen to stoners babbling in Shaggy-Doo cant without forcing bongs down peoples’ throats.

So I’m glad to see that, along with Hollywood, government worker unions and plutocrats, America’s muzzy-headed hemp-clad frito-guzzling bong-o-nauts are among Obama’s big hopes in the coming election, as several state roll out pot legalization bills at least in part to try to turn out America’s Dave Matthews-listening, cheeto-searching, High Times-reading, neo-comatose Baked Caucus to vote for Obama.

Getting more young people to vote has long been a Democratic fantasy, since they tend to vote so heavily Democratic. But past attempts to bong the vote have been disappointing, in part because stoners aren’t the group anyone would most count on to bother filling out a ballot. Ahead of the 2010 midterms, The Wall Street Journal ran the story, “Democrats Look to Cultivate Pot Vote in 2012,” noting that California’s pot-legalizing Proposition 19 was being studied to see if similar measures “could energize young, liberal voters in swing states for the 2012 presidential election.” But exit polls that year showed no spike in young voter turnout, and marijuana legalization was the top issue for just 1 in 10 voters, the Los Angeles Times reported.

(Also carefully note, all you Paul supporters who think pot legalization is your path to the presidency)

Ebony & Irony

The media begins to chum the political waters for race-baiting.

There was little doubt that race was one of the larger underlying narratives of the 2008 presidential campaign.  The election of the country’s first African-American president, by the largest popular vote margin in twenty years, was widely hailed by Barack Obama’s supporters as a sign that racial relations had truly improved.

And now, what of the electorate that gave Obama 69 million votes, 365 electoral votes, and an 8% margin of victory?  According to the polling analyst du jour, America has not only returned to being a land of racist voters but, in fact, always was:

Though many people believe that our first African-American president won the election thanks in part to increased turnout by African-American voters, Stephens-Davidowitz’s research shows that those votes only added about 1 percentage point to Obama’s totals. “In the general election, this effect was comparatively minor,” he concludes. But in areas with high racial search rates, the fact that Obama is African American worked against him, sometimes significantly.

 

“The results imply that, relative to the most racially tolerant areas in the United States, prejudice cost Obama between 3.1 percentage points and 5.0 percentage points of the national popular vote,” Stephens-Davidowitz points out in his study. “This implies racial animus gave Obama’s opponent roughly the equivalent of a home-state advantage country-wide.”

Apparently Obama was supposed to have won by 11% or even 15%.  Or maybe simply by acclamation.

Where is this thesis of latent racism coming from?  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard University, who gleaned his insight from that fount of all wisdom – the Internet.

Stephens-Davidowitz coupled internet search histories with racially charged words with searches for “Obama”, compared them to results for the 2004 election, and faster than you can google “the Bradley effect,” surmmerized that Americans are actually super secret racists.  And if you believe the liberal-leaning polling outfit, Public Policy Polling, you may need to add roughly one-quarter of African-American voters to the ranks of the racists since they’ve soured on Obama in North Carolina.  Perhaps Stephens-Davidowitz is saving that study for after he get his doctorate in an unrelated major.

There are a few issues within Stephens-Davidowitz’s thesis that most people wouldn’t contest.  Racists still do exist in some places in America and the electorate’s view on the condition of race relations has plummeted since Barack Obama’s election:

A myriad of reasons explain such stark polling data, but it doesn’t help that the media consistently attempts to propagate stories that seek to find racists around every corner.  Especially in political coverage which implies that to oppose President Obama is to oppose him based on the color of his skin.  It’s false and deeply insulting.

It’s also an attempt to prepare the battlefield post November.  As Stephens-Davidowitz concludes:

The state with the highest racially charged search rate was West Virginia, where 41 percent of voters chose Keith Judd, a white man who is also a convicted felon currently in prison in Texas, over Obama just this May. Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, and New Jersey rounded out the top 10 most-racist areas, according to the search queries used.

…

 

What does this mean for this year’s contest? “Losing even two percentage points lowers the probability of a candidate’s winning the popular vote by a third,” Stephens-Davidowitz explains. “Prejudice could cost Mr. Obama crucial states like Ohio, Florida and even Pennsylvania.”

 

The narrative is set.  If Barack Obama loses re-election, the nation of progressive, racially-harmonious voters will have suddenly become extras in a remake of “Deliverance.”  But is this exactly a wise political strategy?  It’s bad enough when one party blames their defeat on the electorate being stupid enough to fall for the rhetoric of the opposition, but what is there to be gained from inferring that voters are racists?

Do Republicans need to counter that if you vote for Barack Obama, you’re secretly a religious bigot who hates Mormons?  Sheesh.

Jeff Rosenberg from MNPublius has sent an “Open Letter To Amy Klobuchar” that explains, if nothing else, how little DFLers really understand about their “Senior Senator”:

Congratulations on your endorsement by the DFL this weekend, and on what looks to be a relatively easy re-election bid.

(As a side note?  Look for a lot of “bandwagon”-mongering from the DFL and the media (pardon, as always, the redundancy). Research shows that if you can create a sense in your opponents’ minds that voting is fruitless, they won’t do it.  They may never say that that’s why the “Minnesota” and “HHH” polls released right before election day are so inevitably, grossly, comically inaccurate in favor of the DFL, especially for close elections – but it’s difficult to see how they’d do it any different if if were utterly deliberate).

But I digress:

You’re the most popular politician in the state by a wide margin, and in your single term as a Senator so far, you’ve built up quite a bit of political capital.

I’m writing to ask you to invest some of that political capital in making positive change here in Minnesota in 2012. Notice that I’m not asking you to “spend” your political capital, but “invest” it.

Because “invest” is always the euphemism DFLers have for “squander on something I’d like someone else to pay for”.

But, again, I digress:

With a bit of work, you’ll make it back with hefty interest, making you not just the most popular but one of the most powerful politicians in the state. What is political power but the ability to affect change?

It is that, plus many, many other things; the ability to provide for ones’ special interest (“change” be damned) is a key one for DFLers.  In fact, that’d seem to be the main thing A-Klo does with it…

…dammit, I just keep on disgressing!

That’s why I’m asking you to devote a portion of your time and energy this year to fighting the harmful constitutional amendments on the ballot this year and returning the DFL to power in the state legislature. Your overwhelming popularity gives you significant influence with swing voters, and your fundraising prowess could transform marginal seats in the legislature into major opportunities. Your involvement could mean the difference between winning and losing all of these fights.

Interesting theory – but let’s set a few things straight.

A-Klo isn’t so much “popular” as she is “not unpopular”.  She’s cautious.  She’s taken the popularity she started with – as the daughter of a Twin Cities media icon and some time as a prominent and media-savvy if not especially effective county attorney – and husbanded it carefully.  She takes no positions that will anger enough Minnesotans to hamper her polling – and counts on her Praetorian Guard in the Twin Cities media to mute any coverage of those things that she has to do to not get thrown out of the caucus locker room back in DC.

For example – Klobuchar supported the Medical Device Tax, which is going to flense and gut Minnesota’s Medical Device industry, one of our great growth industries – but it got less coverage in the Strib than the Wayzata Middle School girls volleyball game.

I know your popularity is built, in large part, on your efforts to be a bipartisan figure, so you may want to stay “above the fray.”

Heh.

But what is the point of amassing this level of support if you can’t use it to make a difference?

Because if you “make a difference” in a way that blows that “support” sky high – or erodes it to the point where one has to work especially hard to retain ones power – then it was all as if nothing happened.

And here’s Klobama’s problem; she can read polls.  She can see that Minnesotans, even the liberal ones, overwhelmingly support Voter ID, and that the Marriage Amendment’s internal numbers, while lower, lead to an issue so fraught that even the mighty Obama has to “oppose” it in the weakest way possible.

And she knows that her popularity is a mile wide – look at those numbers! – but an inch deep, a product of name recognition and six years of carefully-cultivated and media-guarded innocuity.  And a good way to blow all that is to come out against an issue most Minnesotans are definitively for. 

It’s the same reason Paul Wellstone – he, the patron saint of Minnesota “progressivism” and the “1” in countless 99-1 Senate votes –  supported the Defense of Marriage Act.  Because he knew all of his “popularity” and “power” could go out the window with one badly-timed position on an emotional issue in an election year.

Just as A-Klo does.

You’ve earned the trust of millions of Minnesotans, but that trust has little value if you can’t or won’t use it to advance a positive agenda.

And there’s the conundrum, for a thinking liberal (and let’s say they do in fact exist, because they do); A-Klo is popular and powerful – but that popularlity and power is, I suggest, predicated on keeping hands off of the issues that progressives most want.

And this in an election year when Barack Obama’s going to have all the “coattails” of a T-shirt.

Senator Klobuchar, I hope 2012 will be a year of great triumph for you. I hope it will be the year you win re-election by an overwhelming margin — and the year your coattails mean victory in the legislature and on the constitutional amendments.

Yeah, good luck with that.

(Anyone but me think that Rosenberg’s post sounded like a prayer of supplication?)

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes about DC Comics’ move to create a gay superhero:

I wonder if they’ll make his partner a side-kick named Lavender Lantern?

This is either a brilliant move- targeting comics for all the gay guys who collect baseball cards and action figurines and read comic books – and will earn them billions of dollars in new sales;

Or it’s the dumbest idea since New Coke.

I will wager a brand-new nickel that Gay Green Lantern is killed off by Evil Straight Religious Wacko White Guy before January 1, 2014. Takers?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Never, ever, EVER any action on a bet like that.

On most issues, I’m pretty detached – clinical, really.  Politics, really, is mostly just politics.

But my blood shot from Scandinavian cool to full boil yesterday with the news that our plutocratic playboy rent-a-governor vetoed the Custody Reform bill we talked about earlier this week:

Gov. Mark Dayton has vetoed the final bill of 2012, an attempt to change the child custody formula to guarantee parents more time with their children

“Both proponents and opponents make compelling arguments in support of their respective positions,” Dayton wrote in a Thursday letter to the Legislature, after opting not to sign the custody bill, essentially issuing a pocket veto of the legislation.

Right now, Minnesota law presumes that both parents in a custody settlement will get a minimum amount of time — 25 percent of the year — with their child. The bill would have increased that minimum to 35 percent.

Supporters of the change said it would give non-custodial parents more quality time with a child than every other weekend and two weeks during the summer — a breakdown that doesn’t even equal 25 percent of the child’s year.

The bill isn’t the bill that I wanted – which would have created a rebuttable presumption that joint physical custody was in the best interests of the children involve.d

No, this will merely created a presumption (rebuttable, of course) that children should have 35% of their time with the “non-custodial parent”, and that this calculation should be used in calculating child support. .

And that would have been very, very much in the “best interest of the children”:

Opponents said the new formula took control away from courts and was designed to represent a parent’s interest more than the child’s.

That is a completely meaningless phrase – one that the bill’s various opponents have been chanting mindlessly ever since the veto came out, and can only have come from someone who doesn’t have children, or has never dealt with chidlren of otherwise-capable divorced parents.

What could be more in the “best interest of the children” than spending more time with both parents?

In his letter to lawmakers, Dayton said there was too much uncertainty about how the change in the custody formula might affect children. But he urged lawmakers to take up debate on the issue again during the 2013 session.

When, he hopes, a DFL majority will make it a non-issue.  Otherwise, he’ll veto it again.

Look – Governor Dayton’s veto was loathsome unforgiveable, and I hope he answers to a higher power for it someday.  But it’s understandable; he’s acting at the bidding of the radical feminists who are among his most vital constituents.  And radical feminists hate any divorce reform – because that would involve reforming the transfer of money from men to women that has sprung from the de facto alimony system that the child support system has become.

But I’m not as angry with Governor Dayton  – who, let’s be honest, isn’t doing any of the thinking, he’s just doing what his shareholders tell him to do – as I am with the legislators of both parties who cut the guts out of the original reform proposal (which would have created the rebuttable presumption of joint physical custody).   They, not our playboy plutocrat rent-a-governor, are the ones who see and hear the pain caused by the barbarism of our current divorce system.

(Yes, I’m looking at  you, Steve Smith; if you run in the primary, I will do everything I can to see that Cindy Pugh crushes you without mercy).

…when S. E. Cupp will be getting her phone call from Barack Obama?

Two years ago, during the run-up to the Minnesota Gubernatorial election, I published the results of some GOP-friendly internal polling that showed that Tom Emmer was leaving votes on the table, not so much for opposing gay marriage per se, but by not pushing a referendum on the issue (as opposed to the legislature or the courts deciding it).   Although I and many of Emmer’s libertarian base considered this a feature rather than a bug, it retrospect it may have been a bit of personal and philosophical integrity but a political mistake.

If it wasn’t a fluke.

And a new Quinnipiac poll indicates it wasn’t:

Quinnipac’s latest poll of the Sunshine State finds that 25 percent of voters say Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage makes them less likely to vote for him. On the other hand, 11 percent say that it makes them more likely to vote for him.

Among independents, 23 percent say that they’re less likely to vote for Obama over same sex marriage. Older voters (55 and older), born-again evangelical Christians, lower income voters and military veterans are all more likely than other demographic groups to say that Obama’s backing of same-sex marriage will sway them towards Romney.

And even a low-information DFL voter knows that 23 is bigger than 11.  Probably.

By the way, the Q-poll (insert all May polling disclaimers here) is bullish on Mitt:

On the whole, Romney beats President Obama by six points in Florida, leading 47 to 41 percent over the incumbent president.

We all know what polls in May are worth.  I’m disinclined to put much stock in any of them until Labor Day, when all the low-information voters (mostly Democrats) start putting their voting caps on.

Still, it’s a bit of a morale booster, seeing the Democrats racking up the unforced errors.

With all of the billionaire-pork-bill signing and job-creation-bill-vetoing of the last week of the legislative session, there is one curious omission,.

It’s HF 322, the bill to change Minnesota’s family court laws to provide a rebuttable presumption of joint physical custody in divorce cases.

That means that unless there is a clear, compelling reason not to – substance abuse, criminal record, gross inability to raise kids, record of abuse and so on – that the parents will be presumed competent to share custody of the children.

That is as opposed to the current system, where the presumption is that full custody will be awarded to the parent that ticks off the greatest number of evaluation criteria from a list of about a dozen that judges use; whichever parent “wins” the most of those criteria “wins” physical custody, and child support, and the whole nine yards.

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ll know it’s been a hot button topic of mine forever.  Raising kids is hard enough with a functional family. The number of social ills that trace back to the huge number of single-parent households is absolutely overwhelming.

The bill was presented to the Governor on May 11, with plenty of bipartisan support.

And it’s still sitting on his desk.

Of course, two key DFL constituencies – radical feminists and lawyers – oppose the bill.  The feminists dislike the loss of child support money and the fact that joint custody puts a legal hurdle over women taking “their” children and going anywhere they want to go regardless of the kids’ relationship to a father they deem unnecessary and seemingly (to look at their rhetoric on the issue) presume to be a drunk abuser anyway.

The lawyers’ line is “if a couple can’t agree on enough to stay married,  how are they going to agree on raising kids together”.  But the current system deliberately introduces the stress of a winner-takes-all system into the dissolution of the relationship – the prospect of “losing” ones’ children – which heaps piles of emotional stress (and the billable hours they bring!) onto an already awful situation.  Lawyers oppose the presumption of joint physical custody because it trims down the cash cow of divorce.

Why won’t the governor sign this bill?

Illuminating: See Andrew Ferguson’s The New Phrenology, in the Weekly Standard. It digs through the history (long), motivations (predictable) and methodology (laughable) of the constant dribble of “social science” that claims liberals are genetically/chemically/socially wired to be good-hearted, open-minded, whole human beings, while conservatives are clenched little demi-humans:

It is a principle of psychopunditry that the political differences between right and left—the differences, in Mooney’s scheme, between those who would fearfully deny reality and those who embrace it unafraid—originate in two personality types. As it happens, the liberal personality, as psychopunditry describes it, is a perfect representation of those traits that liberals say they most admire. Liberals are “more open, flexible, curious, nuanced.” Conservatives are “more closed, fixed, and certain in their views.” But don’t get the wrong idea: Mooney insists he is not saying “conservatives are somehow worse people than liberals.” That would be judgmental, and Science is clear: Liberals aren’t judgmental. “The groups are just different,” he goes on amiably. Indeed, he warns that the truths he reveals in his book “will discomfort both sides.” Fairness requires him to be evenhanded. On the one hand, conservatives won’t like the scientific fact that they tend to deny reality and treat their errors as dogma. On the other hand, liberals won’t like the scientific fact that all their well-meaning attempts to reason with conservatives are doomed.

A young psychopundit called Chris Mooney has just published a book entitled The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, which seeks to explain the Republican “assault on reality.” He is a very earnest fellow, and an ambitious one. He glances over an array of conservative political beliefs and sets himself a goal: “to understand how these false claims (and rationalizations) could exist and persist in human minds.”

His list of false claims is instructive. Along with the usual hillbilly denials of evolution and global warming, they include these, to grab a quick sample: that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 will increase the deficit, cut Medicare benefits, and lead to the death panels that Sarah Palin hypothesized; that tax cuts increase revenue and that the president’s stimulus didn’t create jobs; that Congress banned incandescent light bulbs; and that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.”

The list of errors is instructive because they aren’t properly considered errors, though the misattribution is in keeping with the modern ideologue’s custom of pretending that differences of opinion or interpretation are contests between truth and falsehood. It’s perfectly reasonable for conservatives to assume that offering health insurance to 43 million people will cost a lot of money, and thereby increase the deficit; and it’s perfectly reasonable to distrust notoriously mistaken budget forecasters who say it won’t. The act redirects vast sums away from Medicare, which should require cuts in service. Palin’s “death panel” was a bumper-sticker summary of a rational expectation—that the act will transfer the unavoidable rationing of health care from insurance companies, where most of it rests now, to the government, which will be forced to bureaucratically reshuffle the vast sums spent on end-of-life care. Mooney is right that Congress did not ban the incandescent light bulbs that most of us are used to; but it did ban their manufacture—a distinction without a difference. As for the Christian nation: The country was founded by Christians who nevertheless resolutely declined to create a Christian government. Mooney’s conflation of the American government with the American nation is an error that conservatives are less likely to make. Studies show.

It is a principle of psychopunditry that the political differences between right and left—the differences, in Mooney’s scheme, between those who would fearfully deny reality and those who embrace it unafraid—originate in two personality types.

Someone needs to do a “study” on why liberals are so insecure that they need to constantly puff up their own sense of intellectual entitlement with hack “science”.

…but I’m making a donation in kind to the Walker campaign for the benefit of my readers in Wisconsin:

If I get only one electoral wish this year, I want Walker to utterly bury this recall, and for Obama to lose.

Sorry.  Gotta hold steady at two wishes.

Barack Obama is “The First Gay President”.

On the one hand, it’s only Andrew Sullivan.  I am only dimly aware that Sullivan was still blogging.

On the other hand?  Well, Jazz Shaw puts it well:

I’m not such a political neophyte as to suggest that this is unique in politics, but the bold faced, brazen machinations and ham handed plotting which have characterized this “evolution” in the President’s position on the subject at hand are rather breathtaking. And I’m not saying that people don’t actually “evolve” in their positions, beliefs or ideology. I know that my own attitudes and beliefs in my twenties were a far cry – in some instances at least – from where I stand in my fifties. Very few of us spring out of the halls of high school fully formed with all of the opinions we’ll hold until the grave.

But these evolutions generally take place over a long period of time, as exposure to new people and different ideas are examined and experimented with. Some are kept, others are rejected. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has gone in the course of less than a decade from full throated support of gay marriage to full opposition on religious grounds, back to full support. Are we really supposed to be buying this?

Ask Tina Brown.

I’m sure she thinks so.

I didn’t think Andrew Sullivan could do more to undercut the intellectual legitimacy of the left than his “Trigger” obsession – his demented notion that Trig Palin was Sarah’s baby.

Happy to say I was wrong.

…but Obama got one right.  He may not had intended to get it right – from the standpoint of a libertarian-conservative “tenther” – I’d rather doubt it, given his other behavior.

You could say he got it right for all the wrong reasons.

Stil, if even the loathsome Gawker gets it, then I think there’s some there, there.

Of course, the announcement itself infuriated the far left just as much as the far right:

He now believes that gay couples should be able to marry. He doesn’t believe they have a right to do so. This is like saying that black children and white children ought to attend the same schools, but if the people of Alabama reject that notion—what are you gonna do?

The key language in the ABC News write-up is this:

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own.

On this afternoon’s special broadcast, Jake Tapper echoed that point: “The president said he thought this was a state-by-state issue.”

Whoah!

Now, this is not a profile in federalistic courage; it’s Obama hiding behind the Tenth Amendment to try to avoid infuriating blacks and gay-hating union members.  Obama would use the Tenth Amendment as a placemat if he could get Obamacare, “tax the rich” and complete radical underhaul of the banking system jammed down.

The announcement, in other words, was an attempt to do the same basic thing he did with the Zimmerman/Martin flap: get his part of his base energized ( white liberals in this case) without losing the other half.

It may not be working yet.Well, before Roe v. Wade, abortion was a state-by-state issue, too. So was slavery.

We should never, as a nation, have embraced either.

At any rate – it may not be working.

The U of M Duluth shows that, if you seek to impose policy via grievance, it’s really as simple as 1-2-3!

In this case, it’s the case of Blair Moses.  Mr. Moses wanted UMD to install more “Gender-Neutral Bathrooms”.

Now, I’m not here to judge Mr. Moses’s goal; I know people with gender issues, and it’s not a trival thing.

On the other hand, UMD is a public institution, supported by tax dollars, and bathrooms aren’t cheap, and it’s somewhat illuminating to notice the degree to which policy can by pushed by shrill, intransigent insistence (see also: thousands of yobbos with purple-painted faces demanding we all knuckle under to the NFL’s blackmail so they don’t have to find some other meaning in life than supporting Zygi Wilf’s real estate investment “their team”).

Did I say “simple as 1-2-3?”

Why yes – I did:

Step One: Make a Shrill Demand: No matter how outrageous the demand is, state it as an absolute:

In late April, Moses sent a letter to the administration with two demands. First, he insisted they “take immediate action to begin the process of designating more gender neutral bathrooms.”

Step Two: Ratchet Up The Emotion!:  Budgeting and finance are such dry, empirical subjects.  Emotion sells better.

How much emotion?  In the movie “The Usual Suspects”, the Turkish arch-villain Keyser Söze operates under the axiom that when you show you’ll go further than your opponent will, you win.

And Blair Moses certainly goes there:

Second, he demanded an “announcement stating the said day of change.”

In the letter, Moses threatened that if his demands were not met by April 26, he would begin a hunger strike for three weeks or more.

Step 3: Work On That End-Zone Happy Dance For When Minnesota Bureaucrats Acquiesce in the face of your shrill, queue-jumping demand for your priorities to be pushed ahead of everybody else’s:

Late in the day on April 26, Moses uploaded a video to YouTube claiming he had begun his hunger strike and was “sweating” because he “had not eaten” all day. He continued to cite current policy regarding “gendered” bathrooms, describing them as “oppressive” and a “problem” on campus.

No, really:

The very next day, April 27, the university administration ceded to both of his demands.

Chancellor Lendley C. Black issued a campus-wide e-mail stating the school would take “immediate steps” to resolve the issue and would “provide two gender neutral restrooms” in the student center. Additionally, she pledged that all new construction projects and remodels would include at least one gender neutral restroom.

Who says college doesn’t teach anything these days?

If I were a betting man – and I’m not – I’d wager money that we see hunger strikes over meat at the cafeteria, cars on campus, and finally the fact that it costs to go to UMD at all.

Any action on that bet?

Let’s imagine, if you will, a big knob or dial with a scale from 0 to 11.

This dial measures…

…well, anything, really.  For purposes of this article, let’s measure “Liberty” – the prevalence of and respect for the rights to think, speak, act, work and prosper freely.

Let’s say the numbers on the dial mean something like this:

0 – You’re in a North Korean concentration camp.

1 – You are in North Korea, but not in a concentration camp.

2 – You are in Cuba – unfree, and most likely dirt poor.   Your only “opportunity” is found in a bottle of some kind.  You are fed, more or less, and cared for, sorta.  Like a farm animal, really.

3 – You are in Red China – unfree, and a little less likely to be dirt poor.  Like an animal on a farm where the back forty is “free range”, if Farmer Brown Hu lets you live back there.

4 –  You are in Greece – Rioting and living on the dole? You’re “Free”.  Starting a business or excelling on your merits, absent lots of graft and what the Mexicans call mordida (maybe the Greeks call it “Mordidos?”  I dunno), and faced with paying taxes to pay for the problems caused by the earlier excessive taxes?  Not so free.  You are fed well enough, and cared for (or should be, if the government can figure out how to balance its budget) – like a house pet with a badly-organized owner who’s going to have to file for bankruptcy if he doesn’t square his act away, and who seems unlikely to do anything of the sort after the weekend’s household elections.

5 – You’re in the Netherlands or France.  You are “Free” from most wants, and have lots of “Free” time – but taxes and regulations make entrepreneurship exceptionally difficult, although it’s a more orderly form of difficulty than in Greece.    Food and care from the government are plentiful (provided that taxes and borrowing are in turn also plentiful, which is a big “provided” these days); you are like a pet in a well-organized and happy home, albeit one that has to keep renegotiating its credit cards.

6 – You are in a highly regulated United States or the UK – think “the worst of the seventies, on turbo”, run amok.  Entrepreneurship is marginally more free than in socialist Europe, and the social “safety net” is almost as smothering and the taxes almost as debilitating.

7 – You are in what Newt Gingrich might call Mitt Romney’s America – with lower taxes, but still more regulation that the United Freaking States of America, the land of people who risked all to come to the new world to risk all, could do without, and still too many taxes.  A place that is essentially a welfare state with some doors of opportunity left open for the lucky and incredibly motivated (or connected) few.

8 – You are in an America that Ronald Reagan worked toward – where we have the government we actually need, but not too much, and where feeding government comes in second to feeding and educating your family and financing your dream of success – a place where the rising tide lifts all boats, and where we don’t level out the peaks to fill in the valleys, but where we (as Churchill said) spread a net over the abyss.

9 – You’re in the America that Ron Paul’s party line says he works toward; where government is stripped down to the bare minimum, and people have the responsibility – and opportunity – to fend for themselves.

10 – The pure Big-L Libertarian Ideal.   Government guards the borders, enforces laws regarding order and property rights, and adjudicates contracts.  That’s it.  You are free to succeeed or fail precisely according to your merits and work.  And if you fail?  Social policy, especially the whole “Safety Net” thing, is in the realm of society – the individual and their own organic institutions (the church, Packers Nation, trade unions, the Elks, the NRA, the Oprah Book Club or whatever).

11 – One more than ten.

Where do you want to live?

That’s one way of looking at life, anyway.

———-

I was listening to Jason Lewis the other night – something I don’t get to do nearly enough.  And he looks at political life a little differently; “You’re either for freedom, or against it”.  Instead of a dial from 0 to 11, you have a light switch, or an LED; it’s on, or it’s off.

How accurate in measuring anything in life is a lightswitch?

Is your marriage either wonderful, fulfilling and perfect or utterly miserable, abusive and dysfunctional?

Is your job either your dream come to fruition or something that makes you want to stick a gun in your mouth every morning?

Are your children either endless joys that make you thankful to wake up every day or little deviants on whom you can’t find enough dimes to drop?

If your marriage, job and kids aren’t perfect, do you instantly file for divorce, quit, and look up a pack of travelling gypsies?

Of course not.  So – is all of American political life really a choice between either “North Korean Concentration Camp Inmate” or “One More Than Ten?”

Of course not.

You put up with your spouse’s imperfections and insanities (or, in about half of marriages, you don’t).  You tough out a job you may not like until something better comes up (or doesn’t).  You try to focus on and bring out the best in your children, and get them to the point where you can say “I did the best I could”, and others answer “We can tell”, and you both keep a straight face.

Everything in life has a “dial” that goes from zero to 11 – your marriage, your job, your kids…

…and political life isn’t any different.

There are two political battles going on today, if you are a conservative and a Republican.

The big one is against Barack Obama.  Obama’s America is at or below a “Six” right now, and – measured by executive branch action – heading south.  He’s putatively targeting a “five” – but his deficit spending, as any sane conservative knows, pretty much inevitably leads to “four”.  Which, then, can just as easily lead to overreaction on the part of government and those who’ve come to depend on it – the Democrat constituency – that leads to points south of four; see “The Weimar Republic”.

So if you’re sitting at a 5.5, and your options are “Five and dropping” or “Seven (at worst) with the potential to move up, if you keep engaged and don’t let up the pressure?”, what would you take?

Which leads us to the other – and first – battle we face; between those who answer that question “If I can’t get at least a nine, then I don’t care and I’m going to stay home”.

Now, during the caucus and endorsement process, I’m all for accepting no substitutes – for pulling like hell for whomever your ideal candidate is, and eschewing compromise like the plague.

But once the endorsement process is over, there’s another time for choosing.  And if you’re a conservative Republican, at any level, your choice is, ineluctibly, this:

You held out for your ideal.  Now it’s time to choose; the US is at a 6, maybe a 5.5, today. Another term of Obama and we’ll be a weak 5, maybe headed south.  The only realistic choice right now is – at worst – to increment the counter to a 6+.  Maybe a 7, maybe shooting for an 8 if we get a good Congress.  You will not get your 9 or 10 in this election – and if the needle slips further, and more Americans slide into dependence and choose that comfortable, entitled “Five” on the big dial of political life, it’ll become much, much harder to budge things upward again.

Do you let the dial slide?  Or do you push the dial up?

There is no other option.

What do you say?

According to the Twin Cities’ leftysphere and mainstream media:

• Writing thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of abusive and harassing tweets about people you disagree with, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including over “work” hours?  Not stalking.
• Claiming on a large conversation thread on Twitter that someone has been convicted of driving while intoxicated?  Not Stalking.  (OK, it’s legally more like defamation, but it’s part of the previous bullet).
• Leaving dozens, maybe hundreds, of Google-turds all around the web under a transparent sock-puppet ID (whose source is trivially easy to trace), and setting up a sock-puppet website about an embarassing incident (naturally, with the parts that aren’t embarassing carefully excised away for the perp’s enjoyment) under a false but drearily transparent sock-puppet ID,  with the help of a “source” who should have known better (and does, today), and engaging in this behavior against many, many people under many, many monkers and doing that and much, much more with such demented abandon that when something bad did finally happen, he felt the need to make sure people knew it really really wasn’t him who was responsible, this time:  Good heavens, no – not Stalking, silly wingnut.
• Going to a public building, with intentions publicly displayed under one’s own name, with a clearly-stated express intent well within the bounds of free speech, and obeying the rules – including the ones about “threatening people” – and doing it while carrying a baby and hauling a stroller:  “Stalking”

I’ve always tried to treat people the way I’d like to be treated.  Seriously, I do – I mean, a good chunk of the Twin Cities left think that “Expressing any sort of conservative opinion” is a form of assault, but beyond that I do try to keep things on the up and up.

But I have had about enough.

It’s time for another round of fretting about “where all the young people going?”

I’ll let you read the article yourself. My responses?

A) What “young adults” with options *don’t* strike out on their own to establish an identity separate from their parents?

B) Its the economy, stupid. The “health” of MN’s economy is focused on Fortune 500s and Metro tech and high-value service companies. If neither is a kids field, why are they supposed to stay here? The pro sports? The article notes Minnesota already has a surplus of espresso shops, nightclubs, bike paths, and all the other shiny things that attract the young, urban, “creative class”. That’s because Minneapolis is already a great place for the “creative class”. It’s getting worse and worse for the “producer class”.

C) Dear Millennials: you might wanna talk with your marketing department. You are rapidly turning more entitled and overweening than the baby boomers.

That is all.

The media is all abuzz over Ted Nugent’s  rather inflammatory commentary at the NRA convention.

I was struck my Andrea Mitchell’s comments on the Today show this morning – every line of the story included a carefully-enunchated to Nugent being a “Mitt ROMney supporter…”

I guess it’s a good thing that I can still be amazed by anything; after my decades of pointing out the bias and perfidy of the mainstream media, it’s probably a good thing I can still be this outraged.

Dear mainstream media (and idiot leftybloggers); if I say I “support” Mark Dayton, and then go rob a bank, it doesn’t make Mark Dayton complicit in the crime.

Further proof that the Democrats’ main constituency is the stupid.