I am a firm believer in the sanctity of marriage.

So it’s a tragedy, truly, that Scarlett Johannson and, er, whatshisface are calling it quits:

“After long and careful consideration on both our parts, we’ve decided to end our marriage,” they say in a joint statement. “We entered our relationship with love and it’s with love and kindness we leave it. While privacy isn’t expected, it’s certainly appreciated.”

Johannson and that other guy. One might worry about the sanctity of marriage in Hollywood.

According to a source, the couple quietly split six months ago, and Johansson initiated the move. The actress began apartment-hunting in New York City and is currently in Jamaica with some girlfriends, the source adds.

Like I said.  No comment.

UPDATE:  Welcome, readers of PZ Myers’ Twitter feed.  The line you’re looking for is down in the comments. 

And, using the same logic Gavin Sullivan used in stating I “confirm” that your hero’s marriage was “ordained by God”, it’s fairly certain that Gavin Sullivan supports indiscriminate torture, since he pretty well waterboarded context.

The death of ones’ child is every parent’s worst nightmare; it stalks every parent, I suspect, from birth until the parent isn’t able to worry about it anymore.  There is no lighter side, no joking, no redeeming quality to the subject, even when it’s just a nightmare that you can wake up from.

When it’s for real?

I don’t even want to think about it, to tell you the truth.

And so I give my simple, unvarnished condolences to Mike Hatch and his family.  And I urge you all to give them your prayers, or whatever it is you believe in.

There’s nothing that leftybloggers like more than stories where a conservative Christian – usually white and male – freaks out and does something really off-color or awful.    You’ve seen it; fromar Larry Craig through Tom Hackbarth, they gambol and prance around such stories like a bunch of happy little pixies.  You know what I’m talking about.

Hold that thought.

I’m not one to make light of other peoples’ misfortunes.  Seriously.

I read this story about the Apple Valley woman who, apparently distraught over her son’s death, lit her house on fire with her husband in it, hammered a screwdriver into her chest, and then led police on a high speed chase.

Police got a call about 9:15 a.m. saying that Rhonda Arkley, 49, had poured gasoline inside her house at 4754 142nd St. in Apple Valley and was threatening to kill herself.

When officers arrived at the home, flames were coming out of the rear of the house. Arkley, locked in her car outside of the house, was stabbing herself in the chest with a screwdriver, police said.

Her husband was in the house.  He escaped, apparently with some burns.

When she saw the officers, Arkley drove away, triggering a chase that ended in neighboring Eagan, police said.

Rosemount resident Jim Corrigan was in his car trying to make a left-hand turn from Pilot Knob Road to Cliff Road when a squad car “came whipping down Cliff and backed up onto the sidewalk at the traffic lights.”

Corrigan said the officer pulled a set of road spikes out of his trunk and “waited, talking on his radio.”

“I could see in my rear-view mirror there was this car coming really fast,” Corrigan said.

The car, which he said was a station wagon, “went right over (the spikes) like it was nothing.”

According to police, as officers approached Arkley’s stopped car, she was using a hammer to pound a screwdriver into her chest.

In all seriousness, sounds like the woman needs some help, not to mention any prayers, karmic imvocations or best wishes  you can peel off for her.

Although that last bit may seem ironic.

This bit here almost escaped me:

Criminal records show Arkley served a year of probation after a fifth-degree domestic assault conviction in 2005…Arkley was a DFL candidate for state Senate District 37 in 2002. At the time, she called herself very progressive and said she was active in environmental and atheist organizations.

If she had been a conservative Christian (male!) active in business and faith organizations, she’d have not only been story number one with a couple dozen local leftyblog hamsters this morning, the storyt would wind up as an episode of Law and Order.

I was a little leery of tackling the Tom Hackbarth story last week.   

Not because I didn’t think I had the story right; Hackbarth’s behavior was unseemly, as was that of those who piled on to add detail to the story based purely on innuendo and supposition.  

No, I was leery mostly because whenever the topic of Planned Parenthood or any sort of offense against women is concerned, there are not a few people out there who would toss rationality to the wind, if they ever had it in the first place.  

I don’t know Rachel Nygaard, and she damned sure doesn’t know me.  Can she approach this, or any, issue rationally?  Well, she writes for Minnesota Progressive Project, which isn’t a good sign.  But that’d be a smear by association, and judgment by innuendo, and that’s the sort of stuff I condemned in my original piece on the subject.  

Of which more later.  

For better or worse, Nygaard does capably summarize the core of the local Sorosphere’s meme on the subject:  

“I understand why the police and the security guard thought what they might have thought, but it really was insignificant to me.” – Representative Hackbarth  

Tracking down a woman you met once while carrying a gun is an insignificant act? Even if you remove the fact that he was carrying a gun, a man that felt the need to track a woman down when he felt she wasn’t being completely honest with him is stalking behavior  

And if you leave aside the facts that Hackbarth was accused of no crimes, that there is no evidence that the target of his misplaced interest ever knew Hackbarth was looking for her, and that  the gun is irrelevant (Hackbarth has a permit, and permit-holders are two orders of magnitude less likely to commit any kind of crime than non-permittees like, well, Rachel Nygaard, among others), she’s right.  Hackbarth, by his own admission, was at the very least exceptionally clingy; at worst…  

…well, we don’t know, because there was no “at worst”.   Hackbarth parked his car – near Planned Parenthood.  He got out and changed jackets; a security guard saw Hackbarth’s legal, holstered gun, and called the cops.  But for that chance encounter with a closed-circuit camera, we’d have likely have known nothing of the story…  

…and, Rachel Nygaard will no doubt remind you, Hackbarth could have gone on to shoot the woman in a fit of rage.   

Which is, really, all she has.  Could-haves.  

Could-haves and dogma, of course:  

The ‘boys will be boys’ dismissal of his actions by the conservative bloggers astounds me.  When is this type of behavior ever okay?    

This is the GOP blogger Mitch Berg commenting on the Hackbarth issue.

Remember – in the world of domestic law, including “abuse”, “domestic violence”, “stalking” and the like, men are considered guilty until proven innocent.  

Going on to say that

Everything Is Stalking

He later qualifies his more offending statements (not those listed above) but the misogynistic attitude seethes from his post. 

Go ahead and read the article.  It’s nonsense, of course; there is no “misogynistic attitude” – not in the sense that a rational person would understand.  The only “offense” would be to those who find any questioning of The Narrative offensive.  

I won’t say “Nygaard is lying”, because “lying” implies knowing that she’s spreading a falsehood; I think that to Nygaard’s perspective, which (I’m going to go out on a short limb and guess) comes from marinading in Big Feminist dogma for an entire adult lifetime, men are guilty of misogynism, stalking, abuse, or whatever until proven innocent – and furthermore they can never be proven innocent! 

Of course, to Big Feminism (and I think it’s fair to say Nygaard is acting as an agent of Big Feminism), defending a man against even the most facile, unsupported innuendo, by introducing fact into the discussion (or, in this case, pointing out the lack of facts behind the innuendo thrown at Hackbarth), is itself “anti-woman”.   

Clearly, Mitch Berg and Rep Hackbarth have a different moral compass than the rest of us. 

Clearly. 

I believe that the guilty should be punished – and that people are innocent until proven guilty, and that “proof” means a lot more than innuendo, narrartive, and ideology-based assumptions.  I believe in empirical, observable fact, not dogma.  I believe that people are individuals with their own motivations and backstories and strengths and weaknesses and the dignity (and degradation) that comes from the exercise of their own free will  – not facile cartoons that follow pre-written narratives.

 And it’d seem that Nygaard believes that I’m a cartoon.  She puts it in as many words:

I truly hope that they educate themselves about domestic abuse and difficulties protecting women, men and children from domestic assault. 

Dear Rachel Nygaard; keep your prejudices, your narratives, your bigotry off my body.  You don’t know me.  You have no idea where I’ve been and what I’ve done in my life (and I’m not going to tell you any of it here, anyway).  Just as your idiot friends rushed to judge Tom Hackbarth based (as I showed) entirely on narrative, screed and innuendo, so you’re doing with me.  

That’s OK – I can take care of myself just fine, and it’d seem to be all you are equipped to do anyway, and we should expect no more.  

As I said in my original post; stalking is wrong.  Clinginess is a bad idea.  Separation and divorce are a bitch, psychologically as well as every other way.  

All clear?

If I were the President of Harvard University, I might wanna have a word with Matt Yglesias.

Matt – a prominent leftyblogger who’s gone on to write for a bunch of liberal rags – has a BA from Harvard.  Like a lot of leftybloggers, he profited from the leftyblog audience’s hive mentality and got promoted far beyond even his Peter Principle value, to say nothing of his actual perception.

And it’s gotta be undercutting the value of that expensive Harvard sheepskin.  Especially when he’s writing bilge like this, about planning ahead for the new GOP majority in Congress:

But the specific thing I would worry about isn’t gutting of health care legislation or endless investigations. It’s the economy. Anne Kornblut reports that the White House understands the basic political dynamic: “Even more important, senior administration officials said, Obama will need to oversee tangible improvements in the economy.”

So I know that tangible improvements in the economy are key to Obama’s re-election chances. And Douglas Hibbs knows that it’s key. And senior administration officials know that its key. So is it so unreasonable to think that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner may also know that it’s key? That rank and file Republicans know that it’s key? McConnell has clarified that his key goal in the Senate is to cause Barack Obama to lose in 2012 which if McConnell understands the situation correctly means doing everything in his power to reduce economic growth. Boehner has distanced himself from this theory, but many members of his caucus may agree with McConnell.

And Yglesias’ conclusion (emphasis added)?

Which is just to say that specifically the White House needs to be prepared not just for rough political tactics from the opposition (what else is new?) but for a true worst case scenario of deliberate economic sabotage.

Truly, truly dreadful.

The left; not only do they believe their ends justify their means, they believe everyone else believes it too.

They warned me that if I voted Conservative, dissent would be viewed as treason.

And they were right; according to Whoopi, speaking out against intrusive searching is “an act of terrorism”:

Via Rob Port.

David Harsanyi notes that it’s not just the Who0per:

Not so long ago, the left positioned itself as the defender of innocents against the Bush administration’s war on terror, which was “just one tiny step away from fascism.” The Constitution was sacred, especially when we faced danger — and even more especially when a Republican was president.

It is a little galling that the left likely would have upheld accused terrorists’ Islamic scruples against full-body scanning…

It was not long ago that Democrats were regularly quoting Thomas Jefferson, who never actually said that “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” (Every nanny-state initiative in existence exempted, of course.)

Yet today, left-wing pundits, typified by syndicated liberal columnist Ruth Marcus, implore Americans to grow up, become better automatons, get moving and submit. The admired liberal columnist Michael Kinsley first offers us tales of TSA kindheartedness and then tells us the same.

Many left-wing publications that cautioned us against George W. Bush’s ham-fisted intrusions now defend Barack Obama’s ham-fisted intrusions.

Modern liberals.  I’m not saying they support authoritarian dictatorship.  But they are the kind of people any would-be dictator needs to have around to take control.

Some of my liberal readers have been asking what I think about the Tom Hackbarth story.

My response; I can’t think much, since there’s really not much story. KSTP-TV’s piece reads, pretty much in its entirely:

State Rep. Tom Hackbarth was carrying a pistol when he told St. Paul Police he was jealous and looking for his girlfriend.

Officers took the gun from him calling his behavior “borderline terroristic.”

We’ll come back to what the police said and, more importantly, did.

The House GOP leadership reacted quickly and, under the circumstances, appropriately, suspending Hackbarth from his slated committee chairmanship for the next sessoin pending some sort of resolution.

Now, predictably, the regional leftymedia is in full dudgeon over this story.  As is their wont, they are filling in the blanks with a whoooole lot of innuendo, supposition, and flat-out fantasy.

As PJ O’Rourke once said, “I’m not a liberal, so I’m not an expert at stuff I know nothing about”.   I’m not going to pretend to have answers.  Indeed, all I have are questions.

Everything Is Stalking:  The accusations against Hackbarth aren’t all that clear; he was accused of “stalking-like” behavior by the always-articulate Saint Paul Police Department.  No charges have been filed.

That last bit is rather vital; no charges have been filed.

Remember – in the world of domestic law, including “abuse”, “domestic violence”, “stalking” and the like, men are considered guilty until proven innocent.  If the police had had anything beyond suspicion, they’d have come up with something.

Was Hackbarth doing something inappropriate?  It’s possible.  Very, very possible.  Hackbarth is separated, after 25 years of marriage.  Being “separated” is an emotional Cuisinart set on “mangle”;  a lot of hitherto-buried emotions run very close to the surface; people do things that they’d never normally do in real life (and I’m pleading the Fifth Amendment at this point).

So what did Hackbarth do?  We don’t know; not at all, other than “not enough for the SPPD to charge him with anything at all“, but apparently enough to draw their interest.  We’ll come back to that, too.

That complete lack of known facts hasn’t stopped the regional leftyblog brain trust from jumping to conclusions like a bunch of synchronized Shamu clones at a rhetorical Sea World.

Conservatives – Guilty Until Proven Anything At All:  The City Pages’ Hart Van Denburg gets the “who, what (sort of), when, where, why and how”, in his piece on the incident – and still manages to squeedge in some innuendo to fill in the factual blanks:

Republican state Rep. Tom Hackbarth went looking for a date the other day in a Highland Park alley, with his Smith and Wesson .38 strapped to his waist.

Innuendo; as Ven Denburg himself notes elsewhere in his story, Hackbarth has a carry permit.  Connecting his “stalking” and carrying a gun is convenient, and connecting the two certainly fits the institutional left’s narrative about conservatives, shooters and social interactions.  But it’s an innuendo unsupported by any actual facts – like, say, arrests or charges or any indication of intent that’d link the two factoids.

Which takes us to innuendo number 2:

The Most Important Right Of All:  Van Denburg continued:

He chose an odd place to park his pickup truck, too: The Planned Parenthood clinic lot, where security cameras caught him on tape.

Saint Paul’s pro-abortion community has come to regard all of Ford Parkway as its private property.  While the building itself doesn’t jump out at you, once you do know what you’re looking for, it’s hard to escape the fact that there is more going on in the neighborhood than just a baby-disposal mill.  There are apartments, stores, the Highland Park library, houses…people all over the place.  Ford Parkway is not all about Planned Parenthood.

But you’d never know that from the leftymedia’s reaction.  Was “near the Planned Parenthood Clinic” an “odd” place to park, as Ven Denburg called it?  Or was it a place to park his pickup, that happened to be near Planned Parenthood?

A justifiably skittish guard at the Ford Parkway clinic called the cops to report an unidentified man carrying a gun on the property. No surprise there.

More innuendo.  “Justifiably” skittish?  Planned Parenthood’s “justifiable” skittishness has led to a “justifiable” suspension of large chunks of the First Amendment within eye-and-earshot of the clinics in Saint Paul and elsewhere around the country.  And now, apparently, the Second Amendment as well; being seen with a firearm that is legal and permitted under Minnesota law “justifies” Planned Parenthood’s rent-a-cops calling in the heat?

What other civil liberties does Planned Parenthood get to selectively excise?

Worse, naturally, are the “Feminist” bloggers.  “Red Sonya” from the always-incontinent Shakespeare’s Sister tries Hackbarth and finds him guilty based on…well, you guessed it, more innuendo:

Who the hell decides that, after meeting someone for coffee, you are immediately entitled—nay, obligated—to make sure that she’s not with another man?! Oh, stalkery entitled douchebags with unchecked privilege and no sense of boundaries who believe that women are their property and have no respect for their autonomy, that’s who!

Perhaps.

Or people (male and female – it swings both ways pretty equally) whose senses of boundaries are temporarily (one hopes) warped by their current circumstances.

Or both.  We don’t know – because “Red’s” take is based entirely on filling in the factual blanks with a whole lot of PC filler.

While stalking is frightening enough, the loaded gun makes this even scarier. Hackbarth does have a permit for concealed carry, so his actions weren’t illegal.

Buuuuuuut…

But since he began his controlling behavior immediately after meeting this woman, I’m skeptical of his ability to shrug off this event—and, from his twisted perspective, her “lie”—without having a douchetantrum of massive proportions.

What a wonderful world, where people can issue the binding diagnosis of “douchetantrumitis” (let me check the DSM-IV for that one) while knowing zero facts whatsoever.

When guys like this escalate, altercations easily become fatal with the addition of a loaded gun to the mix.

And they much more easily don’t.

Look – it goes without saying that stalking – or even just being excessively clingy after less than a whole lot of dates – is a bad thing.  And it doesn’t excuse any bad behavior to add “don’t discount the weirdness that comes with the whole emtional bumper-car ride that goes along with divorce, because everyone reacts differently, and most everyone does something that they’ll wind up regretting one way or another, whether it’s getting married to the first person you sleep with or blowing all your money on strippers maybe just having a real hard time getting used to the differing expectations people have in the dating world after being off the market for most of three decades”.   Readjusting to single life can be a real bitch.

[Side note to conservative grownups in the audience; watch some idiot leftyblogger take that last sentence and run a post entitled “Berg Excuses Stalking”, ignoring that bit at the front where I said “It doesn’t excuse bad behavior…”.  It’s pretty much inevitable – Ed.]

The Victorian Vapours:  Oh, yeah – Hackbarth had a gun.  After his run-in with the SPPD, it was confiscated.  And then, after all was said and done, he got it back.

But the presence of a firearm – especially in the hands of a conservative, anti-abortion Republican who is engaged in liberal innuendo-fodder – acts on leftybloggers and lefty journalists like a green-and-yellow cape does on a Vikings fan.

The normally sensible David Brauer left a comment in a Facebook thread:

[O]f course, it seems like creepy potentially violent stalking, but then again, these gun dudes carry their pieces around everywhere. it’s like their wallet. and of course, he was in scary, scary Highland. It’s no Cedar, Mn!

Well, doy.  It doesn’t do you any good if you don’t have it with you when you need it.

And check out the leftyblogs (rhetorically, mind you – don’t actually read then) for the number of references to the fact that the revolver was “fully loaded”.   Huh?  You’d carry an empty gun?  To what – butt-whip a robber?  Or a half-loaded one?  For what – impromptu games of Russian Roulette?

Grrr. I’m sorry.  Dumb people bug me.

Oh, yeah – let me reiterate; he got the gun back when the episode was over.  Which may not be any sort of testimony to Hackbarth’s alleged actions or state of mind, but it is a pretty good sign that he did nothing remotely illegal – and that’d be in an area of law where telling a woman that those pants do make her butt look bigger is fifth-degree domestic assault, a misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail and a $10K fine.

(The above sentence is intended as satire.  The first idiot leftyblogger – and I’ll stipulate that that isn’t entirely a redundant phrase – that tries to run that into “Berg advocates stalking and makes light of domestic violence” will both incur my disinterested wrath and be lying, anyway.  Just don’t go there).

Berg’s Seventh Law?:  Remember – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.  The leftymedia is romping and playing with the Hackbarth story because somewhere out there there is a video of a DFL legislator standing outside an elementary school in full S&M garb, bellowing expletives at a first-grade teacher that spurned his advances, waving a katana.

No, I can’t prove it.

Any more than any of the innuendoids above can prove any of their stuff.

But it’s a law, after all.

UPDATE: Welcome, “Developers are Crabgrass” readers.

Which is sort of like saying “hey, look at all the leptons”.  Both of them are at present largely hypothetical, abstruse constructs.

Oh, yeah – read my piece above.  Zaetsch is lying, as usual.  The guy wouldn’t know “factual” if “factual” spiked his Metamucil.  Read my actual post – something Zaetsch, or whomever sent him the link, clearly didn’t do – and decide for yourself.

Better yet, leave a comment and engage in the discussion.  If you’re used to the level of conversation over at all the blogs that are part of the “Stillwater Asylum” – “Lloydletta”, “The Dump”, “Crabgrass” and wherever Bremer is ranting and whatever pseudonym Weiner us using these days – you’ll find things are a whooooole lot more rational here; you have to bring some intellectual game, in a way you’re not used to .  Give it a shot!

Science has known for quite some time that conservatives, by most measures, are happier than liberals, earn more, and have better sex lives. The building blocks for a happier life are all there.

But why?

Dennis Prager has some ideas.

The unhappy gravitate toward the left… Life is hard for liberals, and life is hard for conservatives. But conservatives assume that life will always be hard. Liberals, on the other hand, have utopian dreams. At his brother Robert’s funeral, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy recalled his brother saying: “Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’ I dream things that never were and say ‘why not?'”

Utopians will always be less happy than those who know that suffering is inherent to human existence. The utopian compares America to utopia and finds it terribly wanting. The conservative compares America to the every other civilization that has ever existed and walks around wondering how he got so lucky to be born or naturalized an American.

The liberal in Minnesota grouses himself into incontinence over LGA cuts,  and works himself into a froth over how much “Better” a Minnesota we’d have if everyone else was just paying more money.

Third, imagine two Americans living in essentially identical socioeconomic conditions. Both earn $45,000 a year, both have the same amount of debt on their homes and both have the same number of dependents. One seeks governmental assistance wherever possible; the other eschews any governmental help. Which one is likely to be the liberal and which one is likely to be the happier individual?

This is not a question only an oracle can answer. The one who yearns for governmental help is the one who is likely to be both liberal and less happy. Conservatism, which demands self-reliance, makes one happier. The more one feels that he is captain of his or her ship (as poor as that ship may be), the happier he or she will be.

Read the whole thing.  If you’re a Lib, try not to hurt yourself.

You mention “urban theorists”, and not a few conservatives roll their eyes and snort “…another ivory-tower wannabe slurper-at-the-public faucet”.  Not without considerable justification, mind you.

I’ll ask the conservative reader to suspend his/her instincts in re Joel Kotkin, a Stanford demographer whose demographic and economic theories acknowledge the reality that people operating in pursuit of their own enlightened self-interest will develop patterns of living and working that defy the efforts of utopian urban planners.

More – much more – on that as the next legislative session gets under way.

Kotkin’s latest big effort, from earlier this week, was in Forbes, and  covers California’s extended economic tailspin, and the rise of pro-business states like Texas, and the political currents behind both.

Perhaps you’ve heard – California is America’s Greece:

In the future, historians may likely mark the 2010 midterm elections as the end of the California era and the beginning of the Texas one. In one stunning stroke, amid a national conservative tide, California voters essentially ratified a political and regulatory regime that has left much of the state unemployed and many others looking for the exits.

California has drifted far away from the place that John Gunther described in 1946 as “the most spectacular and most diversified American state … so ripe, golden.”  Instead of a role model, California  has become a cautionary tale of mismanagement of what by all rights should be the country’s most prosperous big state. Its poverty rate is at least two points above the national average; its unemployment rate nearly three points above the national average.  On Friday Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was forced yet again to call an emergency session in order to deal with the state’s enormous budget problems.

This state of crisis is likely to become the norm for the Golden State. In contrast to other hard-hit states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada, which all opted for pro-business, fiscally responsible candidates, California voters decisively handed virtually total power to a motley coalition of Democratic-machine politicians, public employee unions, green activists and rent-seeking special interests.

Exactly the sort of “solution” the DFL put before Minnesota in this past election…

In the new year, the once and again Gov. Jerry Brown, who has some conservative fiscal instincts [by Kotkin’s standards, naturally – Ed.] will be hard-pressed to convince Democratic legislators who get much of their funding from public-sector unions to trim spending. Perhaps more troubling, Brown’s own extremism on climate change policy–backed by rent-seeking Silicon Valley investors with big bets on renewable fuels–virtually assures a further tightening of a regulatory regime that will slow an economic recovery in every industry from manufacturing and agriculture to home-building.

Kotkin goes on to shred the Cali Dems’ current fairy tale – that “green jobs” will save the day.

Compare and contrast with the prototype pro-business big state, Texas:

Texas’ trajectory, however, looks quite the opposite. California was recently ranked by Chief Executive magazine as having the worst business climate in the nation, while Texas’ was considered the best. Both Democrats and Republicans in the Lone State State generally embrace the gospel of economic growth and limited public sector expenditure. The defeated Democratic candidate for governor, the brainy former Houston Mayor Bill White, enjoyed robust business support and was widely considered more competent than the easily re-elected incumbent Rick Perry, who sometimes sounds more like a neo-Confederate crank than a serious leader.

I read White’s bio and record in Houston, and I thought “what a wonderful world, Texas, where the the “lefty” candidate has not only a platform, but a record, to the right of the “Republcian” in California – or, for that matter, far enough to the right to make Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman yakk up their skulls”.

To be sure, Texas has its problems: a growing budget deficit, the need to expand infrastructure to service its rapid population growth and the presence of a large contingent of undereducated and uninsured poor people. But even conceding these problems, the growing chasm between the two megastates is evident in the economic and demographic numbers. Over the past decade nearly 1.5 million more people left California than stayed; only New York State lost more. In contrast, Texas gained over 800,000 new migrants. In California, foreign immigration–the one bright spot in its demography–has slowed, while that to Texas has increased markedly over the decade.

And the conclusions?

A vast difference in economic performance is driving the demographic shifts. Since 1998, California’s economy has not produced a single new net job, notes economist John Husing. Public employment has swelled, but private jobs have declined. Critically, as Texas grew its middle-income jobs by 16%, one of the highest rates in the nation, California, at 2.1% growth, ranked near the bottom. In the year ending September, Texas accounted for roughly half of all the new jobs created in the country.

I bring this up not  just to get you to read Kotkin’s whole piece – although I think you should – but to urge you to compare and contrast the competing visions facing Minnesota today.

Because Minnesotans today do face two starkly-different futures.  There’s the future presented to us by Mark Dayton, if he (heaven forfend) wins the recount, and there’s the one that the GOP majorities in both chambers have been sent to fight for.

Dayton’s vision is fundamentally the same as the one that led to Califorinia’s catastrophic decay; fat and happy public unions, high taxes, hostility to any real economy’s genuine strengths.  The GOP’s – if they do their job, and I’m here to say I’m not the only one who’s gonna make sure they do – is to shade things more toward the Texas model.

This next legislative session will see these two ideals battling like Godzilla and Mothra. 

Or maybe, given Mark Dayton’s fundamental weakness as a candidate and governor, like Godzilla and Andy Dick.

Part of me hopes that a kid in Saint Paul tries to ride his or her bike to school…

…and duly gets told by his or her teacher, principal or school board not to bring flags to school at risk of alienating the school’s America-Hating-American population…

…so we can see something like this:

…and then see Ann Carroll, John Brodrick and Ellona Street-Stewart’s heads explode.

Figuratively.

A guy can dream.

Last week, we addressed a piece by leftyblog Blue Man in a Red District bagging on Representative-Elect Glenn Gruenhagen (HD25A) for proposing a series of resolutions at a State School Board Association convention that he termed “extreme” that, as I pointed out, really are pretty mainstream except within the context of, well, the State School Board Association (think Comintern with a nice buffet).

It turns out Gruenhagen himself wrote a piece on the subject four years ago entitled “Can the Minority Be Wrong?”:

I would like to respond to the criticism of my 8 resolutions in last week’s editorial by Mark Rudy, titled, “Can 5 GSL school board members be wrong?” As a school board member, I have voted in the minority numerous times, although if you count my total votes, over 90% have been in agreement with the majority.

Question: Can the minority ever be right? Historically, there are thousands of examples where this is true, but I will use one recent example.

Approximately 10 years ago the Minnesota State Legislature and the governor passed the unproven educational experiment called the “Profile of Learning” (POL). The POL was promoted by great and small in public education as the solution to all public education’s shortfalls in every area of academics.

Over a billion dollars of MN taxpayer dollars were wasted promoting this unproven educational approach. There was only one problem; the POL did not have one shred of evidence that it would raise academic standards in public schools. In fact, for those who did the research, there was plenty of evidence that it would damage academic achievement.

As a public school board member I spent numerous hours studying and researching the issue both pro and con. What I found from credible sources was that the POL was hatched in atheistic psychology-land, based on feelings rather than academics. I was usually the sole vote against the POL on the GSL school board. I sent several resolutions to the Minnesota School Board Association (MSBA) conventions opposing the POL and calling for its repeal. Every resolution was voted down (some with laughter) by over 95%, but in the end the State Legislature and Governor repealed the POL. My view prevailed as a result of growing public awareness and pressure.

One thought that didn’t occur to me reading Blue Man’s original swipe at Gruenhagen; back when Paul Wellstone was the “1” in countless 99-1 votes in the Senate, the DFL – including, likely, Mr. Blue – celebrated it as an example of sticking to ones’ principles; as  a profile in courage.  Call it what  you will – Wellstone was way farther out on the extreme than Gruenhagen (at least six of whose proposals were statistically pretty mainstream, outside of the rarified confines of the State School Board Association).

As with the POL, I have spent a similar amount of time researching my 8 resolutions. I will not kneel at the “alter of public education” and blindly support experimental educational ideas with our children. Knowing the truth and the facts has a way of stiffening one’s knees.

There are many excellent staff members in public education, but we have allowed our schools to become expensive experimental laboratories (to the detriment of our children) by atheistic psychologists, radical left wing social planners and junk scientists (such as advocates for macro evolution and global warming). 

Say what  you will about evolution (it is in no way incongruent with an allegorical reading of the Bible) or the worldview of psychologists; our public schools, especially in Minnesota, are being used as social laboratories by the radical, but PR-savvy,  left (when they’re not being used as meal tickets for the Minnesota Federation of Teachers).

 I will continue to vote against such nonsense even if 100 % of state and local representatives vote for it. And I will do so, in the words of our first president, George Washington, “So help me God”.

There are several current books I would recommend for those who want to do additional research: “One Nation Under Therapy”, “Unprotected” (A campus psychiatrist reveals how political correctness in her profession endangers every student) and last, “Destructive Trends in Mental Health” (co-authored by a former president of the American Psychological Association who admits that much of modern day psychology is little more than “witch doctoring”) All three can be ordered from Barnes and Nobles.

And Christina Hoff Summers’ The War On Boys is another must-read for anyone who wants the background on the feminized teaching academy’s war on the male gender in education, under the fraudulent claim that schools were biased against girls.  Watch your lefty school administrators’ nose hairs curl as you mention it.

At any rate – it’s seemed to me for years that the DFL’s long-term agenda is to paint everyone who isn’t a DFLer as an extremist.

Did you ever wonder why Big Gay spent so much time and effort trying to demonize Target for donating to pro-business (ergo pro-Republican) PACs? 

Well, it certainly wasn’t because, as they claimed, Target was “anti-gay”; even in religiously-“progressive” Minneapolis’s business community, Target has stood out for decades in its support for “progressive” ideals; it’s been one of those “good corporate citizens” that the left always barbers about wanting companies to be.

Partly, of course, was that it didn’t want Twin Cities companies to get the impression that they’re allowed to leave the DFL reservation.  Dictators know you have to keep the peasants in line lest they get uppity.

But at least partly it must be due to the fact that Democratic hold on gay voters juuust might be slipping away from the left:

Gay men, lesbians and bisexuals who self-identified to exit pollsters made up 3 percent of those casting ballots in House races on Tuesday, and 31 percent of them voted Republican. By itself, that number is amazing, especially when you consider that way too many people think being gay and voting Democratic are one in the same. But that percentage is ominous news for a White House viewed with suspicion by many gay men and lesbians, because that’s four percentage points higher than the change election of 2008.

Self-identified gays have been slowly sidling up to the GOP for a while now. In the 2008 presidential race, they made up four percent of the vote and gave 27 percent of their votes to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) against then-Sen. Barack Obama. In the 2006 midterm elections, when the House and Senate flipped to Democratic control, gays made up three percent of the electorate with the Republicans snagging 24 percent of their ballots. And in the 2004 presidential elections, President George W. Bush got 23 percent of the gay vote. They comprised four percent of those polled.

There’s no point in embroidering the fact that one wing of conservatism – the southern, social variety – isn’t especially pro-gay.  The other two wings are much more live-and-let-live about social issues – either through culture or libertarian bent.  

Either way – the idea that gays are finding increasing traction with the conservative message, even despite the inhopitability of one wing of the movement, has got to have Big Gay scared out of its mind:

Jimmy LaSalvia, Executive Director of the gay conservative group GOProud, is heralding the uptick in votes from gay men, lesbians and bisexuals for Republicans.

“The gay left would have you believe that gay conservatives don’t exist. Now we see that almost a third of self-identified gay voters cast ballots for Republican candidates for Congress in this year’s midterm,” continued LaSalvia. “This should be a wake-up call for the out-of-touch so-called leadership of Gay, Inc. in Washington, D.C., which has become little more than a subsidiary of the Democrat Party.”

It’s an exit poll, of course, with a large margin of error.  But those polls have been creeping upward, margins and all, for most of a decade.

I moved to Minnesota 25 years ago.

I moved here because my home state, North Dakota, was mired in an epic farm depression – and even in the best of times, the job market for a guy with a BA in English and a drive to be a writer was dodgy.

I moved to find opportunity.  I worked my ass off, and eventually found it.

But I look at the Minnesota that a forty-year near-monopoly stranglehold of DFL control has had left behind – but for a few hopeful years in the past decade – and wonder “would I move here if I were getting out of college today?”

And “will my kids have any reason to stay here?”

Eight years ago, I might have said “absolutely’!” without reservation.  Sane adults were taking over.  Even Saint Paul had been run for quite some time by guys – Norm Coleman and Randy Kelly – who could focus on what mattered, at least by Saint Paul DFL standards.

But Minnesota’s sliding backwards.  Businesses are leaving.  And Mark Dayton’s entire goal is to make sure goverment wants for absolutely nothing.

It’s a recipe for decay, decline, and failure.  Ask the Greeks.  Ask California and New York.

It reminds me of the years not long before I moved to Minnesota.  The Carter years – the years of malaise and hopelessness.

What would America have given, in retrospect, to have avoided the years of malaise? Of hopelessness?  Of that feeling that we were rolling downhill like the proverbial snowball headed for hell?

We found our redemption, of course – in Reagan, in a way, but in a larger sense in rediscovering part of our nation’s soul.

So what will Minnesota choose?  Lining up like dutiful oxen to drag the wagon of government forward, groaning and creaking as the driver cracks the whip ever louder as the going gets tougher?

Or will it choose to again become the place that drew my great-grandparents from the old country, over 100 years ago – a place of opportunity, of untapped potential?  The place that spawned my paternal grandparents, where gumption and will and hard, hard work could lead one to a better place (even if that place was North Dakota, for a few generations?)  The place that has the potential to be for our kids what it was for me?

Mark Dayton is the candidate of stagnation.  Of decay and decline.  He is the driver on that oxcart.  He wants you to be good, compliant, oxen – happy to drag your days away for a Better Minnesota.

Tomorrow is your chance to choose better.

To choose growth over decay.

To choose the American, and Minnesotan, spirit over the soulless miasma of the bureaucracy.

To choose the spark of personal initiative, creativity and soul over the deadening hand of Big Mother Government.

To choose freedom, prosperity and happiness over lumpen gray satiation.

Vote Emmer.

Previous Reasons Emmer Should Be Governor

#2: Moving Minnesota Forward

#3: You And I

#4: Playing To Our Strengths

#5: The Overhaul

Remember last spring?

When leftybloggers and the local and national media were scouring behind every dandelion for “racist tea partiers?   When the standard of “proof” was “suspicious ambiguity?”

As most of us who actually attended Tea Party rallies knew, it was all crap.

And now we have proof:

A new analysis of political signs displayed at a tea party rally in Washington last month reveals that the vast majority of activists expressed narrow concerns about the government’s economic and spending policies and steered clear of the racially charged anti-Obama messages that have helped define some media coverage of such events.

And there’s your thesis – the media has used whatever “racist” signs they did find to paint their entire coverage of the conservative revolution.   The gullible and/or depraved lefty “alternative” media has run with that meme, naturally.

Ekins’s conclusion is not that the racially charged messages are unimportant but that media coverage of tea party rallies over the past year have focused so heavily on the more controversial signs that it has contributed to the perception that such content dominates the tea party movement more than it actually does.

“Really this is an issue of salience,” Ekins said. “Just because a couple of percentage points of signs have those messages doesn’t mean the other people don’t share those views, but it doesn’t mean they do, either. But when 25 percent of the coverage is devoted to those signs, it suggests that this is the issue that 25 percent of people think is so important that they’re going to put it on a sign, when it’s actually only a couple of people.”

Conservatives can expect the media to slander us.  But it’s good to fight it.

This just occurred to me: Maureen Dowd may be the  Betty McCollum of columnists:

As I sat above the Hoover Dam under the broiling sun, I was getting jittery.

There was Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, speaking at the dedication of a bridge linking Arizona and Nevada 890 feet above the Colorado River.

As the politicians droned on and my Irish skin turned toasty brown, I worried that Governor Brewer might make a citizen’s arrest and I would have to run for my life across the desert. She has, after all, declared open season on anyone with a suspicious skin tone in her state.

The Irish never turn “toasty brown”.

And the only “suspicious skin tone” this country should open a season on is that waxy, corpse-like newsroom pallor.

Kidding.  I kid.

As I’ve written in the past, single-sex marriage is not my marquee issue, personally.

Oh, I know what I believe; that marriage is about having kids, and kids grow up best with functional parents of both genders.  It’s a belief that should inform a lot of family-law issues (which is why I support gay adoption; two functional same-sex “parents” are not preferable to different-gender parents, but they are much better than a single parent, if that’s the choice.

But I think that as a rule government should stay out of most personal choices; that people should be able to sign a civil contract that ties them into a legal construct that gives them all the legal rights that a “Married” couple has – and that people like me should be able to opt out of the government contract and follow the purely religious contract that we believe in.  And if you belong to a religious demomination that can come up with a theological justification for it, then that’s your first amendment right – just as it’ll be mine to debunk it.

I’m not going to argue about it, either.

But the fact is that while Tom Emmer is not focused on gay marriage – this election is, quite rightly, about jobs to him – he also stands in sharp contrast to Dayton and Horner in that he does not want the issue decided by a DFL-dominated legislature or an “elite” court that jams the issue down the state’s throat.

Which is the subject of this ad:

Let the legislature do its damn job. For that matter, let the courts do their job, and interpret laws, not create them from whole cloth.

Emmer is right on this issue.  I think most Minnesotans agree.

Dayton wants our self-appointed “elites” to decide this issue.  Horner too, although he’s irrelevant.

Pass the word.

I’d almost forgotten about this: Mark Dayton is a hero to the 9/11 Truther community.

In 2005, from the well of the Senate, Mark Dayton claimed that NORAD and the FAA were hiding something big about the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

And the 9/11 Truther movement was a big, happy audience for him:

This excerpt deals with the death threat against Senator Mark Dayton (D) Minn – when he aggressively challenged the Pentagon and FAA lies to Congress.

Mark Dayton: Chicken Little?  No – Former Senator Chicken LIttle.

I’ve said it many times in this forum; Gay Marriage isn’t the biggest issue to me.

Oh, I believe “marriage” is about a guy and a gal and having kids, sure enough.  I believe that marriage is something sanctioned by the God I believe in.   I believe the religious reason is rooted in an evolutionary reason – children need both male and female parents to grow and develop as best they can (and, with that in mind, I’ll also say that I support gay adoption, in preference to single parenthood, if only because the stresses of single parenting are so very very intense). There is not a single significant religion in the world that sanctions same-sex marriage.  Not that all of the world’s religions are internally unified on the idea of same-sex marriage, as with any other political issue.

You, naturally, don’t have to believe in my God, or believe in Him in the way I do, which is why our government separates church and state.  And why I believe there’s a case to be made to allow single-sex couples to sign contracts with each other (and, for that matter, to allow any religious denomination to find some way to theologically justify it).

But while it’s not a big issue for me, personally – I’m here, I’m straight, and I’m not going away – it certainly is a defining issue for a lot of people, including quite a few that aren’t traditional Republicans.

Earlier this week, Archbishop Nienstedt, the top Catholic in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area, released a video – on Youtube, and on a DVD that is being mailed to Catholics throughout the region via the good graces of an “unnamed donor” – that pretty much laid down the ecclesiastical smack on single-sex marriage.

Now, Nienstedt is a social conservative, in contrast with his predecessor.  His message is far from unexpected.

What is unexpected is the regional social left’s response to Nienstedt’s video.  They are outraged.

It almost seems out of proportion to the video; after all, Nienstedt has been a social conservative all along; as such, among largely traditionally left-of-center Twin Cities Catholics, he’s been a known quantity since long before he became Archbishop.

No – they are outraged because same sex marriage, even in traditionally “purple” Minnesota, is not just a loser for the Dems; a new poll shows it’s a potential game-changer.

Lawrence Research carried out a poll three weeks ago, among 600 likely voters.  The poll, by way of level-setting, discovered Minnesotans feel the state is on the wrong track by a 57-31 margin.

And, as befitted a poll taken in August, two weeks after the primary, as Tom Emmer’s campaign was just getting started, the initial poll result looked good for Mark Dayton, who pulled out to a 40-33 lead, with Horner drawing 14%.

Then, and only then, the pollsters brough same-sex marriage into the picture.   The Minnesotans polled say “marriage” should be between a man and a woman by a 58-36 margin, with very few – 6% – undecided.

The sample also overwhelmingly believe that future legislation about the definition of marriage should be carried out by the voters, rather than the Legislature or the Federal courts (62%, 6% and 19% respectively, with 13% undecided).

Here’s where it got interesting.  I’ll quote from the Lawrence poll:

5. Have you heard or read anything about efforts to have the state legislature legalize same-sex marriage in Minnesota?

Yes, aware……………………………….. 51

No, unaware…………………………….. 49

Initially I was surprised the “Yes” was that low.  Then I realized – the DFL and media (pardon the redundancy) have wanted to soft-pedal this news.  After reflection, I’m surprised it’s that high.

Because I suspect they knew how this next question was going to break out:

6. Gubernatorial candidates Mark Dayton, DFL, and Tom Horner, Independence, both support same-sex marriage while Tom Emmer, Republican, believes that marriage should be preserved as only between a man and a woman.  In light of this, if the election were held today, would you vote for … (ALTERNATE READING 1-2-3 AND 2-1-3)

Tom Emmer, Republican……………… 43

Mark Dayton, DFL……………………. 36

Tom Horner, Independence Party…. 11

[UNDECIDED]………………………… 10

Catch that?  Among this sample, introducing the notion that the definition of marriage will be taken out of the peoples’ hands and given to the legislature or, worse, the courts causes a 14 points swing.

And the poll has ramifications down-ticket, in state legislative races, as well:

7. Let’s say you have decided to vote for a candidate for the state legislature because you agree with most of his or her positions on the issues.  Then, let’s say you find out that your chosen candidate has the opposite position of yours on the marriage issue.  Would you still vote for that candidate or would you switch and vote for someone who agrees with your position on the marriage issue?

Would still vote for original candidate………………….. 47

Would switch and vote for someone else……………… 38

[NO OPINION]…………………………………………….. 15

That means over a third of respondents would ditch a legislative candidate who favored legislating single-sex marriage from above (almost invariably DFLers).

Bear in mind, this poll was taken in a linear order.  There’s a reason for this; it helps pollsters measure how ideas change peoples’ minds.  The poll took one more look at the Governor race:

Looking ahead to November’s election for governor one more time …

8. If you knew that Mark Dayton and Tom Horner are opposed to letting the people vote on the same-sex marriage issue, and Tom Emmer favors letting the people vote on the same-sex marriage issue, would you then vote for … (ALTERNATE READING 1-2-3 AND 2-1-3)

Tom Emmer, Republican……………… 44

Mark Dayton, DFL……………………. 33

Tom Horner, Independence Party…. 11

[UNDECIDED]………………………… 12

Now, it’s only 600 voters.  The margin of error is 4.1% either way.

But the overall impression – people want to decide the future of marriage themselves, even in “liberal”, “purple” Minnesota – is broad and unmistakeable.

And that’s why Nienstedt, his DVD, and his un-named mysterious donor are all public enemies-number-one for the regional left.

For my purposes, this election is about the economy, jobs and the role of government.  But same sex marriage is a sleeping giant of an issue throughout this state.

Heh.

(Via Amy Alkon)

Seen on Twitter last week:

MN Gov Hopeful Tom Emmer Doesn’t Want Schools Telling His Kids Not to Taunt Gay Kids

It pointed to a post on a gay website about Emmer’s opposition to a “bullyting” bill larded with objectionable amendments that had more to do with keeping plaintiffs’ lawyers employed than stopping bullying.  Money quote:

Yeah, pesky big brother! Get out of the way of parents teaching their kids whether or not pushing the faggot down the steps is okay.

They’re getting deranged.

I’m trying to remember my talking-points briefing from ScaifeNet on conservatism’s “heterosexist agenda”.

Maybe I left it in my notes.

Oh, wait; there were no notes, or talking points, because across conservatism at large, there is no heterosexual conservative agenda.

There are most definitely conservatives, of course.

Now, many of us are Caucasian (we are reminded, by people who are almost universally Caucasian).

But among conservatism’s most celebrated thinkers and activists  are Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, and Linda Chavez and Michelle Malkin.  It passes without remark on the right, largely – becuase conservatism isn’t about nursing or fixing racial grievances.  It’s about traditional values in running a society.

Most American conservatives are Christians – but not all of them.  There are atheist conservatives; among America’s immigrants, the most likely to be and vote politically conservative are Indians, largely of Hindu, Sikh, Jain and other South Asian faiths.  Is Bobby Jindal any less a conservative for having been born a Hindu?

So how about gays?

Gays vote predominantly Democrat, of course; they are considered a safe-enough voting bloc by Democrats that the party counts on their support even though they extend themselves to enact virtually none of their favored policies until a majority of conservatives are on board anyway (see “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell”).

But if an American is a pro-free-market, pro-fiscal-responsibility, pro-security, pro-sovereignty, pro-individual rights, pro-merit person who happens to be oriented toward his or her own gender, what is the problem?

To Joe Farah – who’s been harping on Ann Coulter for appearing at “HomoCon” – plenty.  He’s debating Christopher Barron of “GOProud”, a gay conservative Republican group:

Barron told The Daily Caller that Farah challenged him to debate over whether GOProud can be considered “conservative” after Farah argued on his site that there is no place within conservatism for an organization like GOProud, a group that promotes itself as “the only national organization representing gay conservatives and their allies.” TheDC is waiting for confirmation from WND about the debate’s details.

Farah dropped Coulter from a speaking engagement at WND’s annual “Taking America Back” convention in Miami for agreeing to speak at GOProud’s “Homocon” party in New York. (Coulter later said that Farah had never actually booked her for a speech, calling him a “swine” and a “publicity whore.”)

Farah contends that groups like GOProud are trying to commit a “coup” to unroot the conservative movement with an “agenda…to take the homosexual agenda inside the conservative tent.”

Barron insists that his group is genuinely conservative and said he looks forward taking on Farah in front of a WND crowd.

For the record, I will vote for a Philipina Taoist lesbian who is a solid fiscal, legal and security conservative before I’d vote for a liberal hamster who happens to be white, straight and Christian.

Although if the Filipina is a Bears fan it’d help.

Having the most interesting – read “depressing” – discussion with a couple of DFLers.

Bobby Jindal is coming to the Twin Cities to raise money for Tim Pawlenty.

Lefties:  “So was Bobby Jindal an “Anchor Baby?”  The GOP wants him sent home when they repeal the 14th Amendment!”

Er, geniuses?  Jindal was born in Baton Rouge; his “home” is here.  His parents, Amal and Raj Jindal, were *legal* immigrants.  They followed the rules.  Jindal is not an “anchor”, since his parents intended to stay here all along.

Idiots.  I’m surrounded by idiots.

¡Arizona es i occupado!

The federal government has posted signs along a major interstate highway in Arizona, more than 100 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, warning travelers the area is unsafe because of drug and alien smugglers, and a local sheriff says Mexican drug cartels now control some parts of the state.

But by all means, Left – keep blurring the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.  It’s done us so much good so far.

Count the references to the crowd at the Beck/Palin rally being “overwhelmingly white“.  Why, it’s almost as if there’s a back-channel discussion group for the liberal/mainstream media to coordinate chanting points and narrative peaks or something.

Although slipups happen.  Heads will no doubt roll.

How desperate was the leftymedia to find some evidence – any evidence at all – of “racism” in the crowd?  NPR’s correspondent had to go back to the Obamacare rallies last March, and refer to Rep. Lewis’ charges of racism (albeit she didn’t bother to mention that these accusations have been debunked).

It’s interesting; while the Dayton campaign is jumping up and down like a mountain baboon about Emmer’s supposed lack of specifics on the budget (so far), Dayton is being pretty vague on another wedge-y issue:

In direct conflict with FOCA, a Dayton spokesperson said in a WNMT Radio story Thursday that Dayton supports parental notification for minor girls before an abortion can be performed on them.

Well, that sounds almost…reasonable?

But FOCA would outlaw parental notification of any kind. And as a senator, Dayton voted twice against legislation to require parental notice when a minor is taken across state lines for an abortion, in violation of the law in the state in which they live. Planned Parenthood has fought fiercely at the Minnesota Legislature against parental notification bills for decades.

The “right” for a minor to an abortion without notifying parents (without the formality of a court order for situations where children have some legitimate and demonstrable fear of retribution from the parents) is one of the stretchier emanating penumbra of US Constitutional law…

Also at odds with FOCA, his spokesperson stated that Dayton also is opposed to “third-term abortions” (presumably thirdtrimester) with some exceptions. Planned Parenthood has never tolerated opposition to any abortion, for any reason or at any point in pregnancy. It fought long and hard against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which brought an end to the brutal method of abortion in which the child was killed moments before birth by puncturing the skull and suctioning out the brains, ensuring the birth of a dead baby. The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was passed by Congress in 2003; Dayton voted against it twice. How can he now oppose late-term abortions?

Because he says so.  That’s how.

Well, it seems to have worked so far.

“Has Dayton flip-flopped on his absolute opposition to parental notification, which is central to Planned Parenthood’s abortion advocacy? And does he suddenly regret his votes against the partial-birth abortion ban?” Fischbach asked. “If so, why would Planned Parenthood endorse a candidate who disagrees with its own agenda? His campaign appears to be in chaos, at least over the issue of protecting human life from abortion.”

The most important thing about Planned Parenthood’s endorsement, of course?  (Other than Dayton’s obvious, public waffle on abortion, naturally?)

The left’s assault on Target – because of a donation given to Tom Emmer, who supported a “Traditional Marriage” amendment and had a fictional, ginned-up association with fundamentalist ministry – now means that every single person, business and organization that supports Mark Dayton in any way thus endorses infanticide.

All of them.  No matter what they have shown via previous actions, much less their beliefs.

I mean, that’s the precedent, right?