Remember when it was the conservatives who were the prudes who walked around like they had a poker up their nether regions?

Either do Wisconsin Democrats:

(WASHINGTON EXAMINER) Even as the Democratic National Committee profits from the “Republican war on women” meme, liberals opposing Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wis., have decided to attack the governor by targeting a woman in his campaign on the basis of her history of “unnatural sexiness”

That’s right – a woman who once worked as a Hooters’ waitress is their latest target:

Ciara Matthews, Walker’s communications director, is under fire for being both pro-life and a former Hooters restaurant waitress. “Profitting (sic) from selling a plasticized form of unnatural sexiness designed to arouse men while simultaneously believing that women should be forced to face the ‘consequences’ of actually giving into to their sexual desires is a pretty backward way of thinking,” the Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan suggested, while apparently trying to embarrass Matthews by posting a “hilarious” photo of her wearing a Hooters uniform. (Curiously, Ryan also said that Matthews’ “shouldn’t be faulted” for working at Hooters.)

So here’s the scroe card; the Democrats are all for women – provided they’re the right women.

Which means “not breaking any kind of liberal orthodoxy”.

Then, they hate you.

But this is not just about Governor Walker’s communications staffer.  This is about Democrats realizing that women who have kids and work for a living are deserting Obama.  Not just women, mind you – Obama is polling badly among working-class whites in general:

Nationally, Obama lost the white working-class vote by 18 points. But in the 2010 midterm elections, congressional Democrats saw a 30-point deficit among the same group and lost control of the House.

“While the first number is a figure Obama could live with repeating, the second could very well prove fatal,” Teixeira wrote in the New Republic.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Obama improving his standing among key constituencies except whites with annual household incomes under $50,000. His numbers were stuck at 40 percent favorable, 56 percent unfavorable.

“When he first started, I was hoping he’d keep to what he said he would do. But he didn’t,” said Zach Ritchie, 26, of Johnstown, who said he’ll vote Republican out of protest.

The headwinds facing Obama are a reminder that signs of an economic comeback belie the setbacks the recession has dealt many Americans. Towns across western Pennsylvania, a critical area in a critical state for Obama, remain depressed. Ritchie said work building greenhouses in West Virginia dried up four years ago, and he has not been able to find work in his hometown.

 

The media will obscure this as hard as they can – but the way this election is shaping up is that the only reason to vote for Obama is racicm or upper-middle-class, white-libeeral-built-plagued classism.

A Maine state Democrat legislator urges Dick Cheney’s execution:

Rep. Chuck Kruger (D-Thomaston)…used his Twitter account to express his view that former Vice President Dick Cheney should be executed…Kruger made the statement through his Twitter account this past summer, saying, “Cheney deserves same final end he gave Saddam. Hope there are cell cams,” a reference to technology that would allow Kruger to watch the proposed execution of the former Vice President of the United States.

But at least there were no crosshairs involved.  And he didn’t mention the word “reloading”.  So it must be OK.

The funny part?  Kruger is the chair of the Maine Legislature’s “Moderate Caucus”:

This comment has led some to question the validity of Kruger’s moderate credentials.

Lori Sturdevant and Brian Lambert will vouch for him.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s revelation that NBC altnered the tape of George Zimmerman’s 911 call to bump up the “Racist” factor comes the news that Zimmerman didn’t say “It’s a f****ng coon”, but rather “It’s f***ng cold“.

CNN cleaned up the audio from the 911 call.  I took a listen to it.  While some quibble, it seemed pretty clear to me that Zimmerman was saying it was “f****ng cold”.  You be the judge.

If that’s the case – and I believe it is – then what we have here is a case of the media (aka “Obama’s Praetorian Guard”) committing a series of calculated lies, or at least making a curiously congruent set of unwarranted assumptions, that might not have been carefully designed to whip up racial tensions on the part of blacks (to draw their attention away from their catastrophic unemployment rate under Obama) and against civilian gun ownership (so as to make white liberals like “Spotty“, among many others, care about just another dead black kid) – but it’s hard to see how events and news would have unfolded differently if they had been trying.

We saw all of this here in the Twin Cities last fall with the Evanovich case; until Mike Freeman, the Henco prosecutor, exonerated the shooter, the local media was doing its absolute level best to whip up exactly the same combination of racial and anti-gun frenzy.

I was going to invoke Berg’s Seventh Law: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”  But it doesn’t completely appliy.  It’s actually a contender to be a corollary to Berg Seven, if not a law unto itself:

“Any time the liberal media (to say nothing of leftyblogs) “reports” on guns or race, they should be distrusted but verified.  And then, almost invariably, distrusted some more“.

I lost count of the cases in point decades ago.

NBC’s editing of George Zimmerman’s 911 call just happened to make his statement sound frothingly racist.

Here’s what Today show listeners heard:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

Here’s what he actually said:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

Got that?

The editing changed Zimmerman’s statement from an answer to a dispather’s request for information  into an affirmatively racist statement.

Erik Wemple at the WaPo:

No matter how you feel about Zimmerman, that bit of tape editing was unfair to the truth and to Zimmerman’s reputation, such as it is. Reaction on Twitter and elsewhere to my previous post on this matter, was brutal toward NBC, with many comments suggesting the worst about the network’s motivations, reliability and so on.

And why might that be?

Because every editing “flub”, every “fake but accurate” story that gets past the “layers and layers of gatekeepers”, just happens to defame someone liberals want defamed?

Nah, it must be us.

NBC “apologized”:

During our investigation it became evident that there was an error made in the production process that we deeply regret. We will be taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future and apologize to our viewers.

Read: “The damage we wanted done is done; the Democrat / media (ptr) narrative was served.  We’ll try to be more artful in our slander next time, so as not to get caught”.

Bias?  What bias?

As we grind on through the ongoing morass of the Martin case in Florida, it occurs to me that there’s an article I should have written a month ago, when the “Stand Your Ground” bill was wending its way toward Governor “I’ve Got Two .357 Magnums” Dayton’s dim-witted veto.

It turns out a lot of liberals – in Minnesota and nationwide – are really unclear on basic logic, to say nothing of how the law works.

So as mu public service to the left, to try to educate them to a point where they might be able to participate literately in discussing the issue, I’m here out of pure unvarnished compassion to help them out.

Well, Freaking Duh! – I’ve brought this one up before – but as long as liberals say it, I’m going to have to repeat it. Lefties like to refer to “Stand Your Ground” bills as “Shoot First” bills. And I have to ask – have any of you hamsters ever thought about what happens in a legitimate self-defense situation when you shoot second?

No, I guess not. I’ll give you a subtle hint; you get kidnapped, raped, strangled, stabbed and shot.

“Shooting Second” is a really lousy idea.

(I know, I know – they’re trying to “frame” the term. And I’m just doing my best to have the frame blow up in their faces).

More Of That There Fancy Law Talk – When trying to explain what’s wrong with “Stand Your Ground” laws, liberals will get hushed, snd solemnly intone that “they mean people can shoot in self-defense if they feel they’re being threatened”. They usually follow up with one of those Jon Stewart smirks.

And I’m forced to slow waaaaay down – not so much “theatrically” as out of hope that exaggeraged emphasis will help me cut through the sludgy wall of intellectually-entitled smugness – and ask “what do you think people claim when it comes to “self-defense” in any state, regardless of whether it’s a “Stand Your Ground” state like Florida, or a place that actively persecutes the law-abiding gun owner, like the District of Columbia?”

“It is ALWAYS based on someone’s “Feeling” that they are in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm.. Always, always, always.”

“I mean, what do you think – that in Minnesota, there’s a Predator drone up aloft carrying out surveillance over dark alleys and trailer parks, so that there’s a photographic, objective trail of empmrrical third-party evidence as to which shootings are or are not self-defense?\  Flying up there with the unicorns that have all the money for your governlment spending plans?”

“No – in all 50 states and the D of C, self-defense is always, always, always, no exceptions about a party claiming to have felt in imminent danger of death or great harm. The difference is in how state law treats it; in Minnesota, the shooter has to prove the shooting was justified; in about half the states, the county attorney has to prove they weren’t”.

They usually run crying to their TV to see what Bill Maher tells them around this point.

Remember those hazy, crazy days three years ago? When Americans were just starting to rebel against Barack Obama’s encroaching socialism? And the Administration responded by starting its endless search for that elusive conservative hate group that would justify all the paranoia that Janet Napolitano was channeling through the media?  When Homeland Security started distributing “watch lists” including tax protesters, pro-life groups and everyone who’d ever gone skeet shooting?

And how the left tittered with glee when they finally found their “right wing bitter gun-clinging extremist militia group” all chock-a-block with “weapons of mass destruction” that were ready to launch their holy war against all that was enlightened?

No?

Well, then the Administration will be happy.

But I remember “the Hutaree”, the hapless MIchigan “militia” group that coudln’t shoot straight…

…or, apparently, actually justify any of the federal charges heaped upon them:

DETROIT — A federal judge on Tuesday gutted the government’s case against seven members of a Michigan militia, dismissing the most serious charges in an extraordinary defeat for federal authorities who insisted they had captured homegrown rural extremists poised for war.

U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts said the members’ expressed hatred of law enforcement didn’t amount to a conspiracy to rebel against the government. The FBI had secretly planted an informant and an FBI agent inside the Hutaree militia starting in 2008 to collect hours of anti-government audio and video that became the cornerstone of the case.

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“The court is aware that protected speech and mere words can be sufficient to show a conspiracy. In this case, however, they do not rise to that level,” the judge said on the second anniversary of raids and arrests that broke up the group.

Roberts granted requests for acquittal on the most serious charges: conspiring to commit sedition, or rebellion, against the U.S. and conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. Other weapons crimes tied to the alleged conspiracies also were dismissed.

But all that Tea Party violene is out there, somewhere!

Maybe that “cut propane line” at the brother0-in-law of an obscure Democrat operative will pan out into something yet!

One dark, ambiguous evening, a black youth was shot under circumstances that, to the local media, were confusing. Not much information was available; the youth was shot by a citizen with a legal handgun.  The citizen claimed self-defense.

So the local media did what they always do on big stories – shootings! – when not much information is available, as they waited for the details of the investigation to go public.  They found stuff  to write about.

They interviewed the deceased’s mother and family – who, stricken with grief, demanded justice.  They talked with friends of the deceased, and community leaders, many of whom wondered why the law allowed mere citizens to use lethal force, or to be able to claim “self-defense” with such seeming impunity.

Some of the media’s learned observers scratched their furrowed brows and pondered aloud (or in print) whether the changes the legislature had made in 2005 to the state’s laws regarding self-defense were wise – repeating things many of them had written at the time.

I am of course, not talking about the Trayvon Martin case.  I’m talking the Evanovich case in Minneapolis last fall.  You had the family.  You had the friends and community leaders.  Furrowed learned brows?  Check .

You had everything you have today in the Martin case, with one exception; a resolution.  Media caterwauling notwithstanding, it was a legitimate enough case of self-defense to prompt the frothingly anti-gun, anti-Second-Amendment, anti-law-abiding-citizens-with-guns Hennepin County attorney Mike Freeman to praise the shooter.

The point of this post is not to try to compare the Evanovich and  Martin cases; in terms of the factual and legal specifics, it’d be stupid to try, since we, the non-investigators, know nothing about the facts of the case.

Well, almost nothing; we know what the local Florida and national media have told us about the case.

And if there are any lessons from the Evanovich shooting to apply to the Martin case, they are…:

1. When it comes to emotionally-charged cases, the media is no better off at getting the facts than we are.  And that’s a best case.  Because…
2. …whether they will admit it or not, the media has a narrative; the higher up the media food chain you go, the worse it gets.  The law-abiding gun owner, the bitter, gun-clinging Jebus freak, is a powder keg just waiting to blow.  They’ve been saying it, one way or another – if not in their editorial stances, then via their editorial selection bias – since 1983, when Florida passed its “Shall Issue” law.  They did it with each of the 30+ states that have passed similar laws in the past 29 years.  They did it when Florida passed “Stand Your Ground” seven years ago, and in each of the dozens of states that have some combination of “Stand Your Ground” and “Castle” laws.   They’re still predicting it.  We’re still waiting for it to happen.  But hey, it’s only been almost thirty years; one of these days, the powder keg’s just gotta blow, right?

On gun issues even more than most others when it comes to the mainstream media; distrust, then verify.  Then, almost invariably, distrust some more.

That’s not to say the Martin case might very well not be a legitimate shooting.

We don’t know.

And when I say “we”, I mean “especially those of you who get your information on the case from the mainstream media”.

More later.

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

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

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

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

All very, very true.

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

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

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

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

But…

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

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

But he won’t!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via Breitbart, video of Eric Holder in 1995 claiming we need to “Brainwash” the citizenry when it comes to guns:

Holder was addressing the Woman’s National Democratic Club. In his remarks, broadcast by CSPAN 2, he explained that he intended to use anti-smoking campaigns as his model to “change the hearts and minds of people in Washington, DC” about guns.

“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we changed our attitudes about cigarettes.”

Holder went on, of course, to run one of the most egregiously, disastrously corrupt programs in the history of American government, “Fast and Furious”, a program hatched entirely to trade Mexican (and American) lives for points against the dreaded “gun lobby”.

Local political leaders and celebrities, Holder said, including Mayor Marion Barry and Jesse Jackson, had been asked to help. In addition, he reported, he had asked the local school board to make the anti-gun message a part of “every day, every school, and every level.”

Despite strict gun control efforts, Washington, DC was and remains one of the nation’s most dangerous cities for gun violence, though crime has abated somewhat since the 1990s.

Note to Attorney General Holder:

I shot about 300 rounds over the weekend.

It was cool.

Spread the word!

Always, always, always – when you see stories in the mainstream media about conservatives’ moral crimes and misdemeanors, remember two things:

• Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – has never been challenged, much less repealed.
• It’s the liberal press.  If’s most likely either painstakingly stripped of context, if it’s not an outright lie.

With that in mindThe Gateway Pundit notes an example of the media jumping all over the story of a “Tea Party Leader” accused of rape.

Untrue?  Naturally.  The guy had no connection with any Tea Party organization that anyone with the Tea Party could identify.

We have, of course, run into this before in Minnesota – during the 2010 campaign, Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros “Independent” ran a piece claiming that some schlub who left a profane and insulting message on the AFSCME voice mail was a “Tea Party Organizer”, notwithstanding the fact that not a single actual Tea Party organizer had ever heard of the guy.

If Charles Manson called himself a Tea Partier, the media would run with it.

Gotta hand it to the DFL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The DFL apparently read it too.

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

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

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

I’ve had not a few things to say about the family law system in this country, and in this state, over the years.  The disintegration of the family is a plague on the society – and needs to be addressed.

But while we’re working on fixing that, there’s some slightly-lower-hanging fruit to deal with; the divorce and child custody systems.

As I noted earlier this week, there’s a proposal in the Senate to create a “rebuttable presumption” that joint physical custody is, in fact, in the best interests of the children in divorces.

Joe Doakes – a lawyer – writes:

I was a divorce lawyer for a dozen years in the late 80’s-early 90’s. My experience and research is 20 years out of date but I think [the proposal to create a presumption of joint physical custody] is still good law.

Minnesota divorce law contemplates two kinds of child custody: legal custody (which parent makes decisions about the kid’s religion, education, medical attention) and physical custody (which parent does the kid live with).

Legal custody is usually shared because even if Mom and Dad can’t live together, they generally can set aside their differences long enough to make important decisions about health and education. The proposed law would not change that.

Minnesota’s physical custody statute 518.17, 2011 Minnesota Statutes, sets forth a list of detailed factors the Court must consider before awarding physical custody to one parent or the other when joint custody is sought. The fundamental test is “best interests of the child.” One of those factors is “primary caretaker” and the factors to determine who that was, were set forth by the Minnesota Supreme Court in Pikula v. Pikula, 374 N.W.2d 705 (1985) as:

“ . . . (1) preparing and planning of meals; (2) bathing, grooming and dressing; (3) purchasing, cleaning, and care of clothes; (4) medical care, including nursing and trips to physicians; (5) arranging for social interaction among peers after school, i.e. transporting to friends’ houses or, for example, to girl or boy scout meetings; (6) arranging alternative care, i.e. babysitting, day-care, etc.; (7) putting child to bed at night, attending to child in the middle of the night, waking child in the morning; (8) disciplining, i.e. teaching general manners and toilet training; (9) educating, i.e., religious, cultural, social, etc.; and, (10) teaching elementary skills, i.e., reading, writing and arithmetic. . . . “ Pikula, at 713. [case attached]

For convenience, I’ll call this the “primary caretaker” system as that seems to be the emphasis.

And these factors that undercut the notion that “the system is biased against men” – it’s really a matter of counting up how many factors each parent “wins” – and points you to the truth; it’s biased against traditional male gender roles.  Parents can be “tied” on every single factor in determining custody – every single factor – but if the children spend four days a week with Mom as the main caretaker, and three with Dad, then that’s the factor that’ll settle custody.

From what I’ve read in the news accounts, there doesn’t seem to be any dispute about the basic facts: the primary caretaker system gives Mom custody 85% of the time; single-mother households struggle with poverty; and children raised in poverty in single-parent households fare less well than children raised in poverty from two-parent households.

Mothers are different than fathers; there’s a reason humans evolved to have one of each in the “ideal” household.  Girls who grow up with impaired relationships with fathers statistically grow up with self-respect issues, depression and all sorts of trouble finding surrogate daddy figures in their lives.  Boys without fathers simultaneously grow up unable to process anger effectively and, perversely, risk averse; mothers are not generally temperamentally the physical risk-takers among kids’ parents.

There doesn’t seem to be any dispute with the conclusion that the primary caretaker system is an abysmal failure for many children.

From those facts and that conclusion, it seems fair to say that the primary caretaker system is NOT in the children’s best interests.

Now, saying the primary caretaker system is bad doesn’t mean this proposed legislation is good. But if we’re convinced the primary caretaker system is not in the children’s best interests, then it follows that we have a moral obligation to junk it. For the children.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

There are arguments against the presumption of joint physical custody.  Feminists insist that it’ll allow “abusive fathers” to raise children; the law would, in fact, allow proof of abusiveness to “rebut” the presumption – which would give men actual legal rights, which irks feminists.  Currently, as many as half of all allegations of abuse during divorces are shown to be false, raised purely to affect the custody process.  And it works.  Requiring allegations of abuse to meet a legal standard to rebut the presumption of joint custody would be a huge step forward.   That’s why feminists hate the proposal.

The “family law” lobby’s objections, if anything, are more cynical.  Their line is “if a couple can’t get along well enough to settle their differences enough to stay married, how can we possibly expect them to act in their kids’ best interest?”  Of course, one of the reasons divorces are so ungodly emotional is because it’s a winnter-takes-all system that costs hundreds of dollars an hour and ends with one party – usually the father – exiled from the kids’ lives.  The system – and the worst of the lawyers who earn their living from it – carefully fan that fear.

Any legislator, GOP or DFL, who opposes this proposal is going to get a molten-hot earful from me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because lies have consequences.

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

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

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

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

The media wants to know…

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

Franson, fortunately, responded:

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

the poverty status quo; republicans are not.

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

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

Best regards,

Mary Franson

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

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

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

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

I’m going to go back to Dave Mindeman’s piece at mnpACT, about the most recent Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey of Minnesota politics, for the numbers on some issues that don’t pertain to Governor Dayton and the Legislature.

Minnesota’s constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is headed for a close vote. 48% of voters say they support it while 44% are opposed.

I neither support nor oppose the Amendment, but I have a fearless prediction; if the PPP poll, which trends a little left and features a left-heavy sample, calls it a four point race today, it’ll be 49-41 in November.

Let’s go back to the whole “people like their own bastards” bit:  Mindeman, mindful of the poll results, asks:

So, WHERE is the DFL candidates for MN-02 and MN-06 ? MN-03 and MN-08 seem to have multiple candidates in the mix …. if there are going to be any coattails from the top to help the State Legislature candidates, doesn’t there need to be someone in every district ?

There are two answers:  First, it’s further evidence that people like their own bastards; while national polling shows that Congress is less popular than Slobodan Milosevic, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to know that John Kline and Michele Bachmann will win their districts by 30 and 15 points respectively, even if the Dems endorsed Zombie JFK to run for the office.

“Even though Congress is unpopular?”

Yep.  As noted earlier today, polls of legislative bodies as a whole are almost always misleading.  Congress may be unpopular; Kline and Bachmann are not.

BTW … do you think the mature approach that Governor Dayton has taken on the Vikiings stadium has helped … even if the taxpayers don’t want to pay for it, they sure don’t want to the lose the business … and obviously the Governor is trying.

If by “mature approach” Mindeman means coming out of his closet long enough to croak “Uh want ivverbaddy to git to WOARK and sulve the prollum”, then retreating to the closet and letting the Legislature, the cities, the counties, the NFL and Wilf do all the work?  It may or may not be “mature”, but it’s certainly easier on the poll numbers.

The other day, Sally Jo Sorenson at snarkblog Blue Stem Prairie wrote:

Just this morning Bluestem observed that we simply can’t make this stuff up about the Republican Party of Minnesota when it comes to scandal and mayhem.

And if she could make stuff up, she’d be writing for Cucking Stool.

But I digress:

Tonight on 45 Local News’ 9:00 p.m. broadcast, Jay Kolls reported that Representative Steve Smith had an “inappropriate relatioship” with a staffer, who was reassigned to a different area of the House, before leaving employment at the chamber. The report is the be expanded on KSTP 5 at 10.

Well, here’s hoping the good, conservative citizens of Mound toss his ass and replace him with someone better.  Smith is an adequate Republican; his Taxpayers League score is on the low end of the GOP average; Mound can elect better.

But Smith has been standing smack in the face of shared-parenting legislation in the House for years.  Provided he’s replaced by a conservative Republican, I wouldn’t shed a tear if he was disappeared from the House this fall.  He’s been playing into the hands and filling the coffers of the Wahhabi Feminists for way too long.

Every once in a while you run into a lawyer – or wannabe lawyer – whose idea of argument is to tell you “you’re not positive you don’t not know you’re right, are you? Are  you?  ARE YOU?”

The idea, of course, is to bog your own sense of logic and reason down with so many non-sequiturs and strawmen that you’re not sure you don’t not know you’re right.

Or something like that.

It may not make sense the way I explain it.  But if you watch what the partisan media will be doing this next eleven months, somehow it all makes sense.

It fits in with the great sales bromide “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS”.

Which brings us, for the final time, to Katrina Vanden Heuvel’s WaPo op-ed earlier this week in the Strib, which is to this year’s effort to make people ignore the question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

Third, the media’s obsession with false equivalence: How the election is covered will almost certainly have a measurable impact on its outcome.

When we think of this, conservatives may think of things like “the inexperienced and radically-connected Barack Obama not getting vetted as much as your typical mid-sized city mayor, while GOP candidates get their records gone over with electron microscopes”, or “The Twin Cities media gave Tom Emmer and all his contributors the equivalent of a rectal exam, while the sum total of the Strib’s coverage of Mark Dayton’s well-known mental illness and alcohol issues was a single story the January before the election, about eight months before anyone outside the wonk class gave a crap”.
That’s not what Vanden Heuvel means, of course:

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman describes what he’s witnessing as “post-truth politics,” in which right-leaning candidates can feel free to say whatever they want without being held accountable by the press.

There may be instances in which a candidate is called out for saying something outright misleading; but, as Krugman notes, “if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be ‘balanced.’ “

[MItch doesn’t even know what to say here.  He’s at a loss for words. I mean, the obvious – “Paul Krugman has become the nation’s crazy great-uncle, slowly descending into madness as the family watches the disintegration around the table every Thanksgiving” – but Krugman’s a gimme.  The idea that someone could say “political reporters strive for balance” is absurd on its face; the idea that they pull punches on Republicans because they want to appear balanced is less deranged than “there’s a bunch of elders of Zion that have these evil protocols…” only in a moral sense.  Anyway – Mitch is otherwise at a loss to address that last bit, and invites contributions from his reading audience – Ed]

In that world, candidates can continue to say things that are “flatly, grossly, and shamefully untrue,” as The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne described it, without fear of retribution.

Obama has traveled the world and “apologized for America,” says Romney.

Except that, no, he hasn’t.

Wait – so the media is “biased toward conservatives” because they don’t attack conservatives’ opinions of Obama’s “America Last” philosophy in slavish detail?

The stimulus “created zero jobs,” says Rick Perry.

Except that it created or saved at least 3 million.

Wait – the media is “biased toward conservatives” because while reporting Republicans campaign rhetoric, they don’t counter with Obama Administration chanting points, which are themselves wrong and largely unchallenged in the mainstream “conservative” media?

Obama is going to “put free enterprise on trial,” claims Romney.

How does he square that with the nearly 3 million private-sector jobs created under Obama policies in the past 20 months?

And then, agreement with the Administraiton’s chanting points is the barometer of truth?

These three factors are key not only to understanding this campaign and election but to seeing just how far we have to go to reclaim a democracy that is driven by the people themselves.

The biggest factor in going as far as you “have to go”, if you’re on the left, is making people see everything but how far they’ve slipped since 2008.

Think the media is up to the job?

The Strib seems to be getting into its A game.

More over the next ten months or so.

As part of Barack Obama’s campaign to keep Americans from asking themselves the vital question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”, they’re getting back to an oldie but goodie – one that’s been more or less on the sidelines since the end of the Healthcare debate; how anyone opposing Obama is some sort of “extremist” or another:

In keeping with its previous line of attack, the Obama campaign’s manager Jim Messina said in a statement that the “extremist Tea Party agenda won a clear victory” shortly after the results were announced early Wednesday.

“No matter who the Republicans nominate, we’ll be running against someone who has embraced that agenda in order to win — vowing to let Wall Street write its own rules, end Medicare as we know it, roll back gay rights, leave the troops in Iraq indefinitely, restrict a woman’s right to choose, and gut Social Security to pay for more tax cuts for millionaires and corporations.”

This from the administration that spent all fall using Social Security funding as a political football.

Messina also warned of “unprecedented” spending by outside groups on campaign ads and urged the president’s supporters to step up donations and on-the-ground organizing ahead of the November vote.

And remember – BOO!  Extremists are around every corner!

Kids make the best props for deranged lefties!

(UPDATE: And deranged righties too. I dislike it when people use their kids as political props, no matter who does it).

I’m of many minds about  this story (the photos are at the link; it’s safe, but tasteless, for work).

Rossie Brovent wants £60,000 in damages from Ryan Fitzjerald.

Rossie, from Dayton, Ohio, US, wanted a scene from the Narnia trilogy inked on her back.

But thaaaat’s not what happened…

Instead she was left with a pile of excrement with flies buzzing around it.

Ms. Brovent’s ex-boyfriend had a reason…:

Tattoo artist Ryan turned rogue after discovering that Rossie had cheated on him with his best friend.

Thoughts:

1. On the one hand – ick.  I mean – ick.
2. On the other hand, it’s only in the details that it’s worse than most tattoos, especially full-back ink.  Note to people with full-back or ful-frontal tattoos; ugh.  Ugh ugh ugh.  That means you.   Ick.  I mean – yes, again – Ick.
3. Seriously.  Call me a child of another era – one where tattoos meant that someone had been in the military (good) or prison (not good), but I think America is going to wake up someday from its fixation with tattoos the same way people woke up from hair styles they tried back in the seventies – except they won’t be able to get a hair cut and burn a bunch of photos to eliminate the evidence.  Nothing short of third-degree burns will get you out of that.
4. Seriously, Mr. Fitzjerald – not classy.
5. And yet I’m curiously impelled to give you at least some style points.

I see an Administration ban on drunk tattooing coming up.

UPDATE/CORRECTION:  When I wrote this, I wrote it more as a commentary on the battle of the sexes and on America’s gauche fixation with body art than as legal reporting.  I gotta confess, I also thought “reads like a hoax, and I’ll bet it’s henna”.

Which is good, since the story is…well, at least all of the names and the legal action are apparently fake, according to this story from which, I note, all mention of the existence or permanence of the tattoo itself is absent.

The GOP has been schizphrenic on immigration for as long as I can remember.

Which is understandable – because I think most of us Republicans, as individuals, are schizophrenic about it.  Or, to pick a less loaded term, we believe things that seem, on their surface, to be contradictory; we support immigration – we just want people to follow the rules and come to this country legally.

So I’m going to try to state the case, contradictions and all.

1. I think it was Fred Thompson who really stated the true conservative case; we support a high, impermeable fence, but a wide, well-lit gate.
2. As to that “wide, well-lit gate” bit – when I was at Dan Severson’s campaign launch, I heard a Latino minister talk about one of the dynamics behind illegal immigration; it takes someone 10-15 years for a Mexican citizen to legally come to this country.  Of course, there’s a chicken and egg dynamic here; we have plenty of Central American immigrants in this country – it’s just that many of them are here illegally.  It’s time to revamp how we handle legal immigration.  Indeed…
3. ….we have to have a rational legal immigration policy.  Immigration – the legal variety – has always been one of this nation’s big strengths.  It’s more important than ever, as Europe’s demographics stagnate, China deals with the long term demographic fallout of the “one child policy”, and the developing world remains vastly younger than the Western world.  The US has been lucky – both Europe’s and America’s populations are ageing, as birth rates drop.  It’s immigration that’s prevented our society from ageing into obsolescence.  We’ll need more of that.
4. OK, now to the high wall – when not only immigrants seeking jobs, but every zeta and narcotraficante that wants to drive a Hummer full of firearms across the border can do it with relative impunity, then talk about “do we need a border fence”, or at least something that forces people to come to this country via the legal route, is simply ridiculous.  This nation not only has a right to to protect its sovereignty – it is one of its few genuine obligations.  If the government can’t secure our borders, there is truly no reason for it to exist.
5. Perhaps the real high wall we need is to keep out liberals and the media (pardon the redundancy) out of the US.  They both adopted a meme years ago – whenever conservatives refer to wanting to crack down on illegal immigration, painstakingly leave out the”illegal” bit.  The media and left (ptr) have been enaged in a decades-long effort to misrepresent the mainstream right’s approach to immigration.
6. That being said – misrepresentation aside, what is the conservative approach to immigration reform and curbing illegal immigration?  Rounding ’em up and sending ’em back is certainly not practical, even if there were the political will to do it, which there is not.  OK – so what is a realistic approach?  You don’t want amnesty, fine – what is your answer?

As we start heading toward the next round of elections, both sides – the GOP and the DFL – are planning to make the biggest electoral hay that they can out of the Same Sex Marriage issue.

The GOP majority in the legislature put the issue of a Marriage Amendment on the ballot for next year.  The issue might just overshadow all other issues on the ballot, short of the presidency itself.

Just a couple of observations:

1. Both Sides Need It To Be An Issue:  there’s evidence that the GOP left a lot of votes on the table in the 2010 gubernatorial election when Tom Emmer didn’t make gay marriage a key campaign issue.  Naturally, gay marriage is a bloody shirt that the DFL can wave at its constituents; they think it’ll get people to turn out.
2. Neither side wants this issue to be resolved:  You caught the bit about this being a vote getter – or at least a perceived vote-getter – for both sides, right? It’s not just this election; however this amendment turns out next year, it’ll be an electoral carrot and stick for both parties to dangle out there for years to come…provided it’s not actually resolved, one way or the other.
3. The GOP Has More To Gain By Keeping It As A Public Issue: While I agree with Andy Aplikowski that Minnesotans are generally a fairly socially libertarian bunch, I think that when you add up the math for the GOP, it’s a lot easier to get to “landslide win” if the evangelicans turn out for you.  And while evangelical conservatives will turn out for economic issues, throwing them some social red meat surely can’t hurt.  Can it?
4. The DFL Has More To Lose: The Democrats nationwide are scrambling to give their base – to say nothing of independents – a reason to turn out next November.  Saddled with a turkey of a President, a Senate with approval lower than Mullah Omar, a slew of Senate seats at risk, the unions’ attempt to outsource agitation to the “Occupy” movement dissolving in a welter of filth, crime, sexual assault and counterculture dissipation, and Progressivism in the heartland rocked back on its heels by two-chamber flips in Wisconsin and Minnesota, the DFL needs to be able to wave the bloody shirt of “bigotry” at its gay and gay-sympathetic constituents.
5. The DFL Needs It More: If the Democrats nationwide are in a public relations bind – still running against George W. Bush, looking forward to a campaign that has to answer the question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” with “Hey! Mitt Romney has weird hair!”  – the DFL is worse.  They’re not really even a party anymore; The DFL is a shell that basically administers outsourcing contracts with “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Take Action Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”, “Common Cause”, “Draw The LIne” and other checkbook advocacy groups that do most of the “party’s” actual work; think “the Hessians”.  DFL could use something to get people to remember they exist.  (But they’ll likely subcontract this out to “Minnesotans For Marriage Equality”, a fully-owned subsidiary of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”.  Yes, it’s fictional, but you know that’s basically how it’s going to work, don’t you?)
6. The DFL Doesn’t Want Single-Sex Marriage Legalized: Think about it.  They’ve been nominally for gay marriage for thirty-odd years.  And from 2006, and especially 2008, through 2010 the DFL had absolute control of the Legislature; it was two chambers against Tim Pawlenty.  Now, the DFL maintains that a majority of Minnesotans support same sex marriage.  So if they actually believe that, why not push it through in the 2008 or 2010 sessions, when they had overwhelming control, were riding high on two landslide victories and the Obamascenscion?  “Because Pawlenty would have vetoed it!  Why waste the votes?” is the usual answer.  So why not bypass Governor Pawlenty and go for an amendment?  Or use that purported majority of Minnesotans that favor the issue to either override the veto, or use it to get Republicans voted out of office back in 2010?  There really are only two reasons; one would be that there just isn’t that much of an electoral demand for same sex marriage – but we just know the DFL wouldn’t blow smoke up the state’s skirt, would it?  The other reason is that it’s not in the DFL’s interest either to push this issue (in the oh-so-unlikely even they’re lying) or, I suspect most likely, they don’t really want same sex marriage legalized; that would take it off the table as a get-out-the-vote issue.

…back in 2009 that if we supported the Tea Party, violence and depravity would reign in the streets.

And they were right!

Three young bucks at the “Occupy Portland” rally were arrested with crude, home-made fragmentation grenades…:

…two commercially made mortars inside glass canning jars, designed to be fired into the area during professional pyrotechnic displays. One was found in the floorboard of the vehicle, and the other was allegedly in [one of the accused’s] jacket.

The deputy also found two gas masks, protective eye goggles and a safety helmet. All three men told the deputy that they had spent the night at the Occupy Portland demonstration, and they brought the mortars and safety equipment to the demonstration in preparation of the expected confrontation between police and protesters Sunday morning.

Just reckless adolescent posturing?

When asked about the explosives, the three men told authorities that they knew the canning jar would explode, causing glass shrapnel to fly and possibly cause injury.

So compare and contrast; the Tea Party; mature, peaceful and effective.  “Occupy”; post-adolescent at best, violent, rapacious and depraved at worst.

This is what Democracy looks like, all right.

Apropos not much, there’s been so  much violence lately at “Occupy” protests – rapes, assaults, serious stuff – that I’ve stopped adding it to the “Occupy” chapter of my “Climate of Hate” page.  That’s a page I started back during the Tea Party, when the left was finding “Tea Party Violence” under every rock (but not, we note, at actual rallies).  There’s just too much of it.

Anyway – you might look at the beginning of this story….

Taylor Garrett, a Republican consultant in Texas who stars in the reality series on the channel LOGO TV, said in an interview that he was attacked outside a birthday party in Dallas…

…might be just a red-state gay-bashing, or maybe someone who just doesn’t like “reality” TV much.

Not so:

…after finding a vandal scratching “F–k Coulter” on the side of his car.

Ooh.  Wonder if there’ll be brow-furrowed editorials about the tone of politics?

(And yes, that’s presuming it doesn’t turn out to be a hoax  I expect hoaxes from Democrats.  I’ll be disappointed if one of the good guys does it).

Remember the great struggle to end discrimination against shoplifters?  And all the parallels that struggle had with the civil rights movement?

No?

How about the long battle to make domestic abuse a form of free speech before the law, equal in legal stature to the fight to bring women the right to vote?

Not that, either?

Of course not.  They’re both completely absurd.

Equating a crime – shoplifting, domestic abuse – with bringing the rights in our Constitution to people who, as law-abiding citizens, deserve them profanes logic and, worse, devalues the rights.

Any rational person knows this.

Which is why the media seem to be trying to make the irrational seem rational.  As in this AP piece, carried on MPR, on Alabama’s new immigraiton law, titled “Alabama immigration battle recalls past civil rights turbulence”.

Alabama was well-suited to be the nation’s civil rights battleground because of its harsh segregation laws, large black population, and the presence of a charismatic young minister named Martin Luther King Jr., who led a boycott of segregated buses in 1955.

Opponents say the new law’s schools provision conjures images of Gov. George Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door to block integration.

But only if you’re an idiot.

Because black children – and their parents – were American citizens, endowed by their creator with the same rights as their white neighbors, notwithstanding George Wallace.

But illegal aliens are violating the law by being here.  And to treat their presence in this country as a right devalues that right, and undercuts our sovereignty as a nation.

And stating it any other way – like, comparing a crime to a right – is no better than lumping domestic abuse in with women’s suffrage.