Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

California students sued, claiming teacher tenure laws were unconstitutional.

“The students argued that they had terrible teachers who were nearly impossible to fire and who kept them from getting good educations.”

Students won in California.  They’re talking about bringing an action in other states, including Minnesota.  Can’t wait.

Joe Doakes

One can hope.  But I have to think Education Minnesota has been more diligent about buying judges than California was…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The IRS official email retention and backup plan is even dumber than mine, and I don’t have one.

Joe Doakes

I wish I could have the two hours of my life back that I spent sitting in meetings for my current company’s record retention policy.

Courtest of, among others, the IRS.

Mark Andrew is a former Henco commissioner and former DFL chair.  He also works in the “green energy marketing” biz.  Since “government” is the primary target of green industry “marketing”, it’s fair to say Andrew is part of our nation’s ongoing green graft racket – by which the “green” industry tries to chivvy tax money from friendly governments.

And as yesterday’s Strib op-ed shows, he really really doesn’t like the Koch Brothers – their refinery (the Flint Hills refinery in Rosemount), them, or their business:

What make’s their businesses so dirty is not just what they do, but how they do it.

Koch Industries’ corporate ethos is to pollute the American landscape with impunity.

(Really, Mark?  That’s their “ethos”?  The Kochs base their behavior on the idea that polluting is a moral good?  That seems a bit far-fetched).

After hours, they fuel a dark labyrinth of propoganda networks to spew out pollution of another kind-disinformation, defamation and denials. Their goal is not to gain market share–it is to rid the world of government oversight of their businesses and the nefarious groups that prop them up. This is how they roll.

Put another way – and in this case an accurate one?  The Kochs use some of their fortune (in the tens of billions) to press libertarian solutions (some of their stances have angered conservatives and would probably have gotten Andrew’s support, if he were intellectually honest, which this article pretty much confirms he’s not).

Oh, yeah – they’re thought-criminals (emphasis added):

The brothers over the years have outspent ExxonMobil’s subsidies of shadow climate denier groups by a 3-1 margin.

But this piece isn’t just an attack on the Kochs.

No – it’s against those polluted by association – in this case, the Ordway Theatre in Saint Paul, which the Koch Brothers help underwrite (again, emphasis added):

It is not so curious then, that the Koch’s would want to align themselves with St.Paul’s Ordway Theatre, one of the nation’s leading non-profit live performance venues. The 14th Annual “Flint Hills International Children’s Festival, presented by the Ordway” opens this weekend, and is the perfect halo under which the conglomerate might dwell for a few days, basking in the glow of delighted children whose lives are put at risk by their business and political actions.

The Koch’s [sic] and the Ordway’s that birthed the theatre couldn’t be a starker study in contrasts…Bathed in a riot of color, the brochure captures multi-colored children carefully photographed and captivated by a phantasmagoria of dance, music, acrobatics and reverie. And not a refinery to be found!

The stagings are fantasy adventures as far removed from daily reality as the Koch brothers’ climate change denials.

One wonders if the Kochs slither about in black capes and top-hats and laugh maniacally as they twirl their waxed mustaches.

What Andrew is trying to do is “shame” the Ordway – and the rest of Minnesota’s cultural community – into putting the Kochs “beyond the pale”.   Something like this:

Look for more of this; well-heeled liberals badgering Big Minnesota into dissociating with anyone who pushes back against Big Narrative.

Because to the Minnesota left, the only act that can be shamed any more is disagreeing with Big Left.

Epilogue:  A local journo pointed out on Facebook that Andrew’s op-ed reads a lot like Andrew’s former boss at the Minnesota Daily – Nick Coleman.

I toyed with responding on Facebook “A badly-written hatchet job, long on name-calling, thoughtcrime-shaming and innuendo and short on fact?  Yes, I see the similarity”.

But I don’t like it when people gunk up my Facebook page, either.   But it never ceases to amaze me – journalists actually think Nick Coleman is a good writer and reporter.

Last week in the Strib, an op-ed by Will Stancil – described as “Will Stancil is a researcher at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota” – declared:

But in the Twin Cities, many of those grade-schoolers are sitting in segregated classrooms. Single-race schools have been making a comeback in Minnesota.

It’s the charter schools that are the problem. Charters are rapidly growing, but still controversial, with their effectiveness hotly debated. Despite that controversy, or perhaps because of it, a disturbing reality about charters is widely overlooked: Many boast student bodies that are entirely composed of members of one race.

Stancil concluded:

We can’t allow new ideas about education to erode civil rights progress…Charter advocates frequently insist on the need to close the equity gap and create opportunity for all students, no matter their race. But their commendable agenda cannot proceed in a segregated organization. As we celebrate Brown’s legacy, we should also remember its lessons: that integration is the grandfather of all equity issues and that racial separation is a root cause of American inequality…Charter schools should not allow themselves to become flagbearers for a divided system reminiscent of an uglier era.

I read it – and marked it down to address this week. 

But Bill Wilson – the first black Saint Paul City Councilman – and education activist Joe Nathan did it first, in the Strib, and did a fine job…

…in part by noting Stancil’s invocation of the “S” word was cheap, inflammatory and wrong (emphasis added):

Some critics don’t seem to understand the huge difference between forcing people, because of their race, to attend a school, and giving new options to people, especially those from low-income families and families of color.

This exposes the great divide in education – between:

1. the “public” mandate that uses the school system to send society a symbolic message (however good that message may be), and maybe “educate” the kids in the bargain
2. The “individual choice” model, which empowers families to, y’know, see to their kids’ education.

For many kids, school is hard enough without having to solve all the social problems their parents kicked down the road to them.  And so their families choose – choose! – schools that actually work, on the assumption that it’s better for their kids to compete on a more level intellectual playing field later than to serve as some bureaucrat’s statistical incentive today. 

Read the Wilson/Nathan piece.  Compare it with Stancil’s tone-deaf vapidity.

And then remember which party has always fought against school choice.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

You don’t need to see our appointment logs to check VA wait times; we’ve carefully checked our records and confirmed we were right all along.   So that’s settled.

 

This is the level of investigative journalism that meets the standards of the MSM.  The VA said they don’t have secret lists, so they don’t.  Because if the VA had secret stuff they would say so.  You know, like secret surveillance of citizens, secret monitoring of phone calls of world leaders and Joe the Plumber.  Secret targeting of undesirable political opposition by the IRS, the INS, the EPA, the Dept of the Interior, etc.

 

If they had a secret, the responsible people in the government would fess up at once, without doubt.  Since they haven’t, there’s nothing to see here: move along.

Takes me back to the days when Obama ordered the oceans closed.  Yeah, remember, what, a year ago, he closed the ocean off Florida to punish the voters for the shut-down?  He does so much outrageous, blatantly illegal and stupid crap that you forgot about that one, didn’t you?

 

This is what Fernandez means by “dense pack.”  Obama has so many scandals occurring so quickly that we never get a chance to investigate one before it’s old news and we must move on to the next.  Thus, no scandal ever sticks to him.

It’s the equivalent of a lawyer answering a discovery motion by dumping triplicate copies of every piece of paper in their client’s office on the petitioner, in hopes that anything incriminating gets lost in the blizzard of paper.

Word is starting to leak out; a number of GOP politicians are flirting with supporting the idea of the National Popular Vote.

Let me be blunt:  This idea must be stomped, and stomped some more, until the convulsions stop. 

This is an utterly wretched idea, favored by liberal plutocrats with deep pockets to give the nation’s population centers a stranglehold on presidential (and eventually, all)  politics.

The National Popular Vote means that presidential candidates will not, ever, need to campaign in flyover land.  They need only to play to the coasts.

It completely guts the “protection of minority states” that the Electoral College has given this nation, to its immense benefit.

Need a reason to oppose it?  Here are seven to start with, all of them worthy of a rhetorical death sentence. 

The campaign to institute it has been sneaky, under the radar, and not a little bit sleazy.  The supporters are clearly trying to gull a mass of low-information voters (swaying them with talk of “majority rule”) without fully airing out the consequences. 

It’s even sucked in a number of Republicans who should know better.  I’m not naming names.  But it’s going to happen, sooner or later.

Republicans:  I, for one, will support an NPV supporter about the same time I support a gun controller.   You support NPV?  We’re going to have a pointed conversation. 

This shall not pass.

Over this past nine months, conservative groups have railed against the Lightworker’s Administration’s abuse of the IRS to suppress conservative political activity.

Of course, if you live in Minnesota, you’re used to this.  The “Campaign Finance Board” has been a cudgel used against (mostly conservative) grassroots groups since its inception.

But the Dayton Administration is doing its best to make things worse:

As we’ve learned, the IRS under the Obama Administration has been weaponized against conservative non-profits in an effort to stifle opposition speech, but that’s not the only avenue of attack. A partisan bill was introduced in the Minnesota Legislature, but ultimately defeated last year that would impose onerous new regulations on grassroots organizations like Minnesota Majority, Tea Party groups and numerous other non-profits

It’s back this year and it contains all manner of vague, subjective language (like “clearly;” “reasonable;” and “biased,” that will allow a small 6-member board, appointed by the governor to determine who has violated the proposed new campaign finance laws and who has not. “Bias” is often in the eye of the beholder. In this case, it’s up to the governor to determine who the “beholders” are.

The bills involved appear to revive some of the worst, dumbest, most turn-free-speech-into-crime-ifying aspects of the late, unlamented McCain-Feingold law:

HF1944/SF1915 proposes to create “free speech zones” on the calendar, allowing the state to determine when grassroots groups can engage in unfettered speech and when such speech would be regulated.

In other words, putting bureaucrats in charge of when and, inevitably, how you may “speak freely”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The reason we have so many potholes is not that the St. Paul City Council pisses away money on frivolous projects while the streets decay; it’s the state and federal government’s fault.
“There’s a lot of potholes out there, and it’s kind of indicative of the condition of the street as a whole … the last time it was reconstructed or overlaid,” said [St. Paul City Engineer Jerry] Maczko, who added that state and federal lawmakers share some blame for potholes. “And it’s amazing how people don’t make that connection.  We’ve got our usual suspects in our streets that are old streets that need to be reconstructed,” Maczko continued. “At the federal level, at the state level, engineers have been saying we need funding for our infrastructure. Well, it’s not happening. … It’s a safety issue for the drivers and for our employees to be out there fixing that stuff.”
But the State Legislature is controlled by Democrats, as is the Federal Congress.  Democrats Care About People so it can’t be their fault. There’s only one conclusion:

Damn that George Bush!

Joe Doakes

There’ve been a lot of “think tanks” and “non-profits” touting “studies” about the “need for infrastructure investment”. They all sound a little like the Samoan Lawyer in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama celebrated the 41^st anniversary of Roe v. Wade with one curious omission – he never mentioned the word “abortion.”

Instead, he dwelt on access to health care, reproductive freedom, right to privacy, safe and healthy communities, opportunities to fulfill their dreams . . . what a snooze.  That same litany of mushy feel-good platitudes could roll across the Teleprompter any day of the week.  We’re here to talk about killing babies, something like 50 million of them since the decision was issued.  And according to Democrats, that’s a good thing. Fine, then say so.

It’s almost as if the President is afraid to speak the plain truth, for fear people will recoil from it.  Perhaps we haven’t been de-sensitized enough.  Might be time to recycle some Dead Baby jokes from my junior high school days.  Remember those?  Can’t remember the last time I heard a Dead Baby joke.  Perhaps with 50 million of them piled up, it’s not funny anymore.

Joe Doakes

One can hope.

How many Planned Parenthood executives does it take to change a light bulb?

None.  They just declare darkness a woman’s right.

Gerald Molen – who co-produced Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016 as well as Schindler’s List– on the politically-motivated harassment of D’Souza:

“I’m a little bit taken aback by the whole thing because he’s such a great American,” Molen said of D’Souza on Newmax TV’s “Steve Malzberg Show.” The conservative writer and commentator understands the process in America and how it works, Molen said. Molen, who also produced the Academy-award winning “Schindler’s List,” said he has not spoken to D’Souza since he learned of the indictment, and wouldn’t make comments about the specific case until he’s learned all the facts. Still, he said he would not be surprised if the probe is politically motivated. Asked by Malzberg if he ever felt threatened or had any feelings they should not have been making the film, Molen answered, “No. This is America. I’ve never had that feeling,” adding, “I’ve never had the occasion to think that I had to fear my government. I never had the thought that I had reason to think I had to look over my shoulder until now.”

I think that’s exactly the effect the Obama Administration is looking for.

I was about to write “if the Koch Brothers – eeeeevil shadowy right-wing financiers – didn’t exist, the left would have to invent them”…

…but in fact h they did.

This – and last year’s fixation with the American Legislative Exchange Commission (ALEC), a small lobbying group no different than a raft of identical left-leaning groups – may be the most dramatic manifestation of Berg’s Seventh Law ever.

“Progressive” and Administration efforts to shut up conservatives are continuing apace as the nation gets set for another ugly round of elections.

One of their latest memes?  “Dark Money”.

To hear the usual liberal suspects (including most of the “news” media – “Dark Money” is an insidious scourge against Democracy.

But of course, the definition depends entirely on who’s using it.  And I don’t entirely mean “if it’s Alita Messinger, it’s OK”.

No, the hypocrisy goes deeper than that:

The HuffPo and the rest of the left define “dark money” groups as non-profits who don’t have to disclose the identity of donors. This non-disclosure of donors is actually a byproduct of the civil rights struggle, when the government sought to protect donors from intimidation by groups like the KKK. Given that conservatives feel the need for anonymity over their political speech is a stark reflection of how far leftist rhetoric has devolved.

And why do conservative donors feel the need to protect their identities?

Ahead of his reelection in 2012, President Obama published an “enemies list” of donors to his opponent Mitt Romney. Obama’s campaign even urged supporters to “report” attacks on the President’s record. Business Frank VanderSloot found himself the subject of two IRS audits, an investigation by the Department of Labor and the subject of an investigation by a Democrat Senate staffer, just days and weeks after being publicly named as a major Romney donor.

At the end of 2013, a cancer patient, Bill Elliot, went public with the news that his health insurance had been cancelled due to ObamaCare. An insurance broker, C. Steven Tucker, heard about his situation and helped Elliot get new insurance coverage. Both men appeared in the press about the events. Both men also, on the exact same day, were notified by the IRS that they were being audited.

Given the details revealed last year about how the IRS targeted conservative and grass roots organizations for extraordinary scrutiny and review, it is not unreasonable for conservatives to worry that they will be targeted for their political activity.

And like the campaign against ALEC, it’s all further evidence in favor of Berg’s Seventh Law – when liberals attack conservatives motives, commitment to freedom or ethics, it’s a cover for something they’re doing themselves.

But this year, there’s the added imperative change the conversation.

To anything!

The left knows they are at a disadvantage. HuffPo’s warning about “dark money” is just the first salvo in the campaign to silence the right this year. To paraphrase the old legal saw, if neither the facts or the law are on your side, pound the table. The left is going to pound the table loudly until November.

Look for the scourge of ALEC to make its reappearance as the Minnesota legislative sessions re-opens next month.

Scott Gillespie of the Strib editorialized about the one-year anniversary of Sandy Hook.

At least he ended the piece constructively:

Those 26 faces will stay frozen, though. The children and their teachers, lost forever except in photos and home video. At least — if you believe it will help — say another prayer for them and their families. If we offer nothing else, at least say a prayer.

Other than that?  Gillespie foreshadows what will, I suspect, be the anti-rights movement’s two big hooks in Minnesota this year; guilt, and the vague need to “do something”, even if the “something” is completely useless at preventing actual crime, with both of them always, always, wrapped in the memory of people who would not have been saved by anything that they’re proposing.

But practical responses aren’t the issue, here.  This is about emotions:

You see those faces frozen in time on your TV screen now. They are angels, every one of them. You would like to look away, turn the channel and move on. Our Congress did, and most of our state legislatures. One year later, little has changed.

It’s not the Sandy Hook kids’ faults the were all white and upper-middle-class, and that the media focused on them and not the many, many more children slaughtered in ones and twos in Barack Obama’s Chicago – who are almost entirely black.  But it is Scott Gillespie’s fault that he ignores, or doesn’t know, that not a single law proposed in any state legislature, or in Congress, would have prevented Sandy Hook – but that the City of Chicago has “done something”, a near complete civilian gun ban, that is closely correlated with a skyrocketing murder rate in Chicago.

But those kids are black, and in a Democrat stronghold.  As always, they go unmentioned.

The emotions that Gillespie – and the anti-rights movement whose water he’s carrying – aren’t just about sympathy.  No, there’s gotta be ninety seconds of hate: 

Wayne LaPierre is on the screen now. You can hear the anger in his voice. If he feels any pain, any regret, he hides it. The perfect man for the job. Raise more money and spread more lies. Intimidate. Bully. Threaten. Win at all costs, from coast to coast. Not undefeated, but close.

Scott Gillespie, I hereby challenge you; where was LaPierre wrong?  What are the “lies?”  Let’s talk about that.  Preferably face to face, but I’ll do email.  Let’s hash this out.

No, it’s not that LaPierre lied; he didn’t, and doesn’t have to.  He was right.  His opponents were wrong.  And they – in this case Gillespie, but it could be any lefty columnist – are attacking LaPierre with the dim ad-homina and the scurrilous accusation – the “lies” – because it’s all they have, and a boogeyman, a Goldstein, is what they need.

And then there’s the murderer. We should ignore him and his story, right? Make him as abstract as possible because it’s too hard to answer the why question without that research. There are more like him, but how could we possibly know how to find or stop them? So we move on, trying not to say his name.

Now Gillespie is just making things up.   This is where LaPierre – and all of us on the human rights side of this battle – have been focusing; Adam Lanza.  The current system worked, in that it denied him a gun.  He killed his mother – already illegal in fifty states – to steal her legally-purchased firearms to use in the rampage.

And it’s on the crazies, like him, James Holmes, Harris and Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho and the like, that Wayne LaPierre – and, incidentally, all of the rest of us on the human rights side of the argument – are focused.

And not a one of them would have been affected by any of the laws that were passed in places like Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania or California.

So when Gillespie plaintively asks…:

The anniversary show is over now. Will there be another one next year, or the year after that? Why wallow, right? We are Americans. We press on. We buck up and never look back. Like LaPierre.

…the answer is “maybe, but nothing you’re proposing would change a thing”.

But Gillespie is part of a wave of mainstream media that are working to pave the way for the anti-gun movement’s next big campaign in Minnesota.

More – much more – in coming days and weeks.

In 2013, the grassroots of the Minnesota human rights movement – pro-Second-Amendment groups like GOCRA, the Twin Cities Gun Owners and other genuine grass-roots organizations – dealt the gun-grabbers a humiliating defeat.  Even though the anti-rights groups were lavishly funded, were supported by a purchased media narrative, and controlled the entire apparatus of Minnesota government, they were unable to jam down any of their useless legislation.

Zero.

It was an epic victory of an army of Davids over a phalanx of obese, arrogant Goliaths.

But 2014 is a whole new year.

Since the last session, the anti-gun movement has made some roster changes.  In place of last year’s leadership – “Protect” MN’s credibility-free Rep. Heather Martens, Moms Want Action’s shrill, self-caricaturing Jane Kay, and the hysterical, deranged Joan Peterson, a flood of Joyce Foundation and Bloomberg money has enabled the anti-rights movement (in this case, “Mayors Against Illegal Guns”) to hire Richard Carlbom, the architect of the campaign to torpedo the Marriage Amendment, and then to pass Gay Marriage in Minnesota.

And this is going to change the game here in Minnesota.

Unlike the Minnesota gun grab movement’s previous leadership, Carlbom is a smooth, polished PR fixer with great talent at running a nuanced, effective campaign – and he’s already got one improbable win against (at face value) longish odds under his belt.

As a result, this is going to be a different campaign, unlike any that Minnesota’s Second Amendment movement has ever faced.

My hunch?  Carlbom will replace Kay/Martens/Peterson’s club-footed yapping, and Michael Paymar’s wide-front legislative bludgeoning, with a more subtle attack:

• Emotional cruise missiles replace carpet-bombing:  the anti-rights movement has long bludgeoned their audiences with a ham-fisted appeal to emotion.  To be fair, it’s their only argument; to be honest, they haven’t done it well.  Carlbom won the gay marriage debate in part by personalizing the gay marriage issue – showing that gay couples were Just Like The Rest Of Us.  I think you can expect the emotional assault to be much more focused and personalized than in the past; fewer “schoolrooms full of children”; more “let’s talk with this mom, whose son was…[fill in tragic shooting].  Expect those attacks to be far harder to undercut – Carlbom is less likely to focus on the story of a “child” who turned out to be a gang thug than were the hapless Martens or Kay.
• The friendly face of “reasonable” authority:  The anti-gun movement lost a lot of credibility points by using as its public face the scolding, unctuous, unfluent Martens, the hectoring and red-faced Kay, and irrational Peterson.  Expect those faces to be replaced by Minnesota’s very definition of “reasonable”; lots of Lutheran ministers (ELCA, natch), with their Saint Olaf-bred diction and their carefully-trimmed beards, and liberal-but-not-too-liberal, Jewish-but-not-too-jewish rabbis, carefully and calmly asking for “common sense” measures to “prevent violence” and “promote safety”, and lots of other carefully-focused terms calibrated not to alarm tens of thousands of phone calls and thousands of protesters.
• Trying to build the “reasonable” brand:  Expect less (overt) talk about attacking puffy-faced white suburban caricatures, and more about how “gun safety” and “violence prevention” appeals to our better natures; the things that make us human, and Minnesotan.   This campaign has, in fact, already begun, with Strib columns by Lori Sturdevant and Scott Gillespie (see this space tomorrow morning) that stake out this emotional, intellectual space (in a campaign that just can’t be coordinated, and I’m sure is just a fluke that won’t, no, won’t get re-iterated in turn by every other Minnesota mainstream media outlet, nosireebob).

It’ll be a campaign calculated not to alarm, and to appeal on at least a shallow level to the conceit most Minnesotans have that we’re a thoughtful, deliberate people, not given to unseemly rash emotionality and open to “reason”.

Underneath and obscured by it all, of course, will be the facts; that none of the measures they’re proposing will affect actual violence in any way.  Nor are they intended to.

But it’ll be done in a way intended to gently gull the gullible, and lull at least a part of the crowd that rose up to repudiate Representatives Paymar, Hausman and Martens in the last session.

So it’s almost time for a new session – one that may be the most dangerous yet for Minnesota’s Real Americans.

Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

CORRECTION:  This past session was 2013, wasn’t it?

Let’s see; we have a state majority installed largely through money coordinated by the Governor’s ex-wife and paid for by the her and his buddies from the country club.

When Governor Messinger Dayton speaks, his lips are controlled by his chief of staff Bob Hume, who is very credibly rumored to be “romantically involved” – evidence indicates dating or married to, but the principals keep it under wraps – with Carrie Lucking, “executive director” of the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota (Of course, we don’t know anything official; merely that during the Governor’s last budget speech, Lucking was tweeting picayune details of the budget that seem unlikely to have come from someone who hadn’t had an advance look at the proposal.  Some say it’s because Hume must have given Lucking an advance look at the Governor’s budget.  I’d suspect it was more like Lucking let Hume look at it.  But I digress).

And of course, the director of Minnesota’s flailing “MNSure” program spent two weeks during the catastrophic rollout of her website playing little spoon in Costa Rica to the state Medicaid director’s big spoon.

So I suppose the real question about Governor Messinger Dayton’s hiring of Minnesota DFL Executive Director Ken Martin’s wife as his deputy chief of staff isn’t “why all the nepotism”.  It’s “why isn’t the spouse of every powerful DFL functionary making six figures on the public teat”.

Because clearly someone reliable needs to be able to spell Bob Hume in making sure Governor Messinger Dayton doesn’t deviate from the chanting points.  Bob’s gotta be exhausted.

It’s party time, Dems!

(PS: Love the headline.  Governor Messinger Dayton hires a “well-connected” deputy?  No!  He hired his party chair’s wife.  Nope.  No media bias whatsoever in the Twin Cities).

In yet another Berg’s Seventh Law violation, Minnesota conservative activists noted that the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota – the attack-PR firm supported by the unions and Alita Messinger, which was trying to dig on Scott Honour for not releasing his tax information – hadn’t released its tax or donor information yet.

It’s worse still in Wisconsin; a liberal-controlled county launched a shakedown of Wisconsin conservative groups, in order to find out their donors to target them for future harassment.

And this seems to be a national pattern; liberal groups caterwauling about “lack of transparency” in conservative groups, while themselves keeping their donor lists secret:

Two weeks ago, the liberal Center for Media and Democracy kicked off a national campaign to reveal the identities of anonymous contributors to conservative groups in an effort to unseat the GOP governor here.

Now the group may have to answer embarrassing questions about its own finances….CMD lists no donors on its tax returns, but its website identifies numerous financial backers without any financial data. Several are highlighted in bold and labeled “current donors.” But one important name is missing: Schwab.

Read the whole thing.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama-care has more holes than Swiss cheese, the latest one being something called “risk corridors” that give DHS the power to pay extra to insurers who lost money on Obama-care policies.

No, those extra payments weren’t figured into the original cost, but it’s okay – the taxpayers can make up the difference.

In other words, corporate kickbacks will cover the unexpected costs of underwriting Democrat campaigns as the public catches on to the massive fraud the President played on them last election.  Donations from insurers to Democrats will be refunded via risk corridors, sort of like the incest that goes on between NPR and the DFL with Minnesota tax dollars.

Joe Doakes

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Instead of building State Senators a nice place to do business, we should erect pup tents.  This is a part-time legislature.  We should encourage them to get their business done and go home.  Incentives work, just need to create the correct incentives.

Also, this is odd:

“Hausman’s committee usually would have had the task of vetting and approving such a large-scale project like a new Senate office building. Instead, it was placed in the tax bill in the final hours of the session and bypassed most of the usual committee process.”

She’s a Democrat.  She should already understand that laws are passed so that you can read them later to learn what’s in them.  Why is she claiming to be confused by this now?

Joe Doakes

Representative Hausman  – who, confusingly, is listed as the representative from HD66A, which we all know is Heather Martens’ district – is a good DFL soldier.  She claims what she is told to claim.

Still, this sort of thing – jamming down a huge capital expenditure without the requisite government oversight – is a little strange.

If only this state had an institution – say, with printing presses and transmitters, with a group of people who perhaps annoyingly see themselves as a monastic class of truth-seekers, but whose job was to, I dunno, report on things like this?

You may say that I’m a dreamer…

In past months, I’ve showed you how not only big-media-alum group-blog MinnPost, but “No Rant, No Slant” Minnesota Public Radio are on the take from the Joyce Foundation – which funds “Protect MN”, the anti-rights group run by Rep. Heather Martens.  I speculated that it might be the reason that MPR has been so incurious about Martens’ astroturf group, and why the MinnPost – with all its pretenses to legitimate journalism – spent the past year giving Martens a public tongue bath.

I asked – does this involvement go any higher in the Twin Cities’ “progressive” political world?

I asked, and Bill Glahn answered – ten months ago.  Joyce is a huge financial backer of “Take Action MN”, a non-profit that verges on being a political party in its own right, a descendent of “Progressive Minnesota”, which had its own unseemly connections with “non-partisan” institutions.

Glahn:

The Joyce Foundation of Chicago, Illinois, was founded by Iowa lumber heiress Beatrice Joyce Kean.  This $760 million foundation has been involved with TakeAction since near the beginning of the Minnesota non-profit’s existence.  Joyce’s 2006 Annual Report (p. 25) shows a grant of $350,000 to be paid out to TakeAction over two years, “To develop and promote a political reform agenda focused on campaign finance, judicial, and voting rights reforms.”
Joyce’s 2009 IRS Form 990 reveals that the $350,000 grant to the 501(c)(3) TakeAction Minnesota Education Fund was renewed in 2008 for two additional years, “for ongoing efforts to reform and strengthen democracy in Minnesota.”[12]
Joyce’s 2011 IRS Form 990 reveals that, yet again, the $350,000 grant to the TakeAction Education Fund was renewed in 2010 for two additional years, “For advancing a political reform agenda that encompasses election administration, voting rights, campaign finance, redistricting, and judicial independence.”[13]

The Joyce Foundation’s website indicates that the TakeAction Education Fund received an additional $150,000 in 2012 for one year, “For advancing a democracy reform agenda using legislation, community organizing, movement building, coalition work, and unexpected alliances.”
Unexpected alliances?  In any event, the seven-year total of grants from the Joyce Foundation to TakeAction equals $1,200,000.

So let’s break this down:  The Joyce Foundation heavily sponsors “Progressive” non-profits, including “Take Action MN”, “Protect MN”, and (I strongly suspect) “Common Cause MN”.

And they pour money into at least two “non-profit” Minnesota media outlets that have pretensions to respectability; Minnesota Public Radio and the MinnPost.

I’ve sought comment from both organizations in the past, without success.  I’ll try again.

All of this carefully obfuscated money going to support “campaign finance…reforms” is one thing.

Going to buy friendly media coverage?

And finding willing takers, in an industry whose “code of ethics” tells journalists who avoid financial entanglements in their “journalism?”

From the Declaration of Independence, with emphasis added :

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

From the Journal – again, with emphasis added:

Copies of two subpoenas we’ve seen demand “all memoranda, email . . . correspondence, and communications” both internally and between the subpoena target and some 29 conservative groups, including Wisconsin and national nonprofits, political vendors and party committees. The groups include the League of American Voters, Wisconsin Family Action, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, Americans for Prosperity—Wisconsin, American Crossroads, the Republican Governors Association, Friends of Scott Walker and the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

One subpoena also demands “all records of income received, including fundraising information and the identity of persons contributing to the corporation.” In other words, tell us who your donors are.

Oh, yeah – and since the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel may be one newspaper that might occasionally take its lips off of the Democrat party’s boy parts long enough to worry about that whole “holding government accountable” thing…:

The investigation is taking place under Wisconsin’s John Doe law, which bars a subpoena’s targets from disclosing its contents to anyone but his attorneys. John Doe probes work much like a grand jury, allowing prosecutors to issue subpoenas and conduct searches, while the gag orders leave the targets facing the resources of the state with no way to publicly defend themselves.

And hey, just in time for campaign season!

I’ve always tried to stay hopeful for the future of this country.  But it gets harder and harder every day.

Bill Glahn has been doing the work the Twin Cities media hasn’t won’t in covering the big, unseen unreported-on force in Minnesota politics:  Take Action Minnesota.

Even among people who know that TAM exists, I think few know exactly what they’re into, and how the organization works:

Charity Status—whether legal or not, I object to TakeAction’s abuse of its tax-exempt non-profit charity status. Unlike the traditional political party—whose role the group is increasingly displacing —TakeAction can accept tax-deductible contributions from anonymous donors. Despite my best efforts at discovery, we really do not know who contributes the millions of dollars that fund TakeAction’s operations.

Quasi-Party Status—although TakeAction operates much like a political party—recruiting and financing candidates, conducting campaigns, and getting out the vote—it does not have to abide by the same laws on transparency and accountability. It acts as a closed political machine—answering to its (unknown) donors, but not to voters and taxpayers in the same way that the Democrats and Republicans must answer.

They also sit among a warren of offices for similar “progressive” “non-profits” – “ProtectMN”, “Wellstone Action” and others – in the Griggs Building, in the St. Paul Midway.  This isn’t just a happy accident, or entirely the product of the Griggs’ very low rent.  The network shares much more than just an address; phone banks, lists, staff, know-how.

You should read Glahn’s entire series on the subject:

My latest “Who Is TakeAction?” Series:

·         Part 1—Political philosophy

·         Part 2—TakeAction takes over city politics

·         Part 3—All the cool kids went to this year’s Progressive Prom

My original TakeAction Minnesota Series:

• Part 1–Intro and the 2010 election for Minnesota Governor
• Part 2–Follow the Money, as it spins around inside the TakeAction network
• Part 3–Tracking down the money to its sources
• Part 3A—More donor names and dollar amounts
• Part 4–The lobby machine
• Part 5–The 2012 referendum on Voter ID
• Part 6–Updating Part 5 with final 2012 money figures
• Part 7–TakeAction Goes to Washington

The entire series is excellent.

Although Glahn also observes:

[S]imply from a journalistic viewpoint, the rise of TakeAction as a political force is a major story—one that has received almost no coverage from Minnesota’s legacy media. In contrast, oceans of ink have been spilled over the Tea Party and its relationship to the Republican Party. There is a man-bites-dog story waiting for an enterprising reporter to pick it up.

This is not an accident.  It’s a case of Berg’s Seventh Law in action.

And most of the Twin Cities media shares TAM’s mission, whether they admit it or not (and whether their friendly coverage/non-coverage is being purchased by some of the same donors or not).

Support for the anti-rights “gun safety” agenda is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Support for gun rights is a mile wide and a mile deep.

Case in point:

Although Mayors Against Illegal Guns’ efforts helped defeat GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, no one seriously expected him to win. However, of the 67 Virginia House of Delegates candidates endorsed by the National Rifle Association and targeted by Bloomberg’s group, 65 won, according to the Washington Examiner.

That’s about a 3% win rate for the splashy anti-rights group – or alternately, 97% for the good guys.

It’s been a tough year for the splashy, big-bucks rights-grabbing group:

After December’s Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, the group got behind President Obama’s call for sweeping gun control legislation. But negotiations between U.S. Sens. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Joe Manchin, D-W.V., yielded a mere milquetoast background check proposal.

Still, the Mayors Against Illegal Guns website reported that the group got firmly behind the bill and aired a new series of ads campaigning for its passage. When the measure came for a Senate vote, it went down in flames.

It wasn’t just legislation: 

The group then tried to prevent the recall of two anti-gun state senators in Colorado. Although a reported $2 million was spent to support the lawmakers, both lost their jobs, according to Reuters.

About 10% of the mayors are voting with their feet: 

Some 95 key members of the group that targets and criticizes lawmakers backed by the National Rifle Association are losing their title of “mayor.” According to an election review of Bloomberg’s membership list of about 1,000, three quit the group, 69 retired from their jobs, and 23 were rejected by voters.

And that doesn’t even count the ones that have left office for, er, other reasons.

And I bet Michael Bloomberg would call this next factoid an “unintended consequence”, if he were honest enough:

As for that Virginia election, the number of state lawmakers the NRA rated “A” actually grew from 63 to 65 as a result of Tuesday’s election.

More of this.

To: Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone, Hosts, NPR’s On The Media
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Your Concern For Journalistic Integrity

Ms. Gladstone / Mr. Garfield

I caught your story in this week’s edition of On The Media criticizing NBC for paying, not only for footage (of this spectacular skydiving accident) but for exclusive access to the principals to the story.

This – paying for access to news – is one of those things that furrow the brows of journo-wonks.   And the two of you were audibly furrowed.  Gotta hand you that.

So – paying for access to a news story is bad.  Gotcha.

So is being paid by a partisan pressure group to run a news story even worse?

Get back to us on this.

That is all.

Is Detroit’s new-found cause célèbre ignoring the past to cloud the future?

George Clooney had the Sudan.  Bono has Africa.  Anthony Bourdain – and much of the American media – apparently has Detroit.

Michigan’s So Not Grand Central Station: built in 1912 and on the national registry of historic places. It was closed in 1988 and is one of Detroit’s estimated 78,000 abandoned buildings.

In recent months, the city of Detroit has witnessed two narratives arise in Phoenix-like fashion from the economic ashes of the city, often in conjecture with themselves.  One is the purported economic revitalization of the city that gave birth to Motown and the American automotive industry.  It is a narrative fostered by Quicken Loans founder (and Cleveland Cavs owners) Dan Gilbert who, among others, has put millions into Detroit to try and restore its grandeur.  The other narrative, the so-called “ruin porn” seen in picture form below, depicts Detroit as a third-world ghetto.  A Somalia on the St. Clair River.

The former delights the denizens of Detroit with hopes of a better future.  The latter rankles them.  Gilbert himself expressed outrage when 60 Minutes balance their report on the Motor City between Gilbert’s altruism and the destruction of the out-lying portions of the city, comparing it to Dresden after the Allied bombing of World War II.  Gilbert tweeted a defiant message, stating “a city’s soul that will not die was the story & they missed it.”  But even a sympathetic, blue-collar soul as Bourdain, whose CNN show Parts Unknown highlighted the city last night, saw the need to balance Detroit’s attempts to pick itself up off the ground with the stark realities of a city undone.

The Fisher Body Plant: once part of the GM empire

Both narratives ignore the Chrysler in the room – how Detroit got to where it is today.

If the “ruin porn” industry renders pity without judgement, the acts of Dan Gilbert and others, as well-intended as they obviously are, seek a future for Detroit without acknowledging its past or present.  Not once in 60 Minutes‘ coverage did the story’s telejournalism deal with the political causes for Detroit’s decay – a corrupt, one-party institution burrowed like a tick into City Hall.  Equally, if differently, ignorant are the views of Gilbert et al who believe that once their plans to remove all of Detroit’s blight (78,000 buildings), capital will come easily rushing back into the city:

Gilbert is no fan of urban farming, though. When he envisions land cleared of  blight, he sees developers rushing in to build anew…

“When that blight is gone, maybe we don’t have to be talking about shrinking cities because it will be such a rush of people who want to get into low-value housing — when all the utilities are there and the land is pretty much close to free— not exactly free, but close to it — and all the utilities are there, it becomes very cheap for a builder/developer to develop a residential unit, and they are going to develop them and develop them in mass as soon as we get the structures down and maybe we don’t have to worry about raising peas or corn or whatever it is you do in the farm.”

The Highland Park Police Station: even Detroit’s police stations no longer want anything to do with the city

And what will cause developers (yet alone individuals or businesses) to return to a city with the highest property tax rate in the country?  What will encourage retail industries when Michigan’s sales tax is 6% on top of that?  Detroit’s backers can honestly claim that the city ranks no where near the top of the tax chain (Detroit ranks 92nd nationally; Minneapolis is 52nd by comparison).  But the tax climate is far from ideal, especially the dubbed “most dangerous city in America” with a murder rate 10-times the national average.  Throw in a 58-minute response time for police, to attract businesses back, Detroit may literally need the fictional hero RoboCop (to whom a statue is being built – seriously).

There isn’t much evidence that Detroit is about to change its ways.

The Merrill Fountain at Palmer Park: has sat empty for 50 years since being moved from the Opera House. Vandals have stolen much of it.

Since Governor Rick Snyder’s decision to appoint emergency manager Kevyn Orr last spring, Detroit’s journey to bankruptcy has been managed with minimal (some would say no) input from City Hall.  As the case has headed to court, where Orr has testified about Detroit’s long-term debts of $18 billion, city officials have fought the measure almost every step of the way.  The election of Mike Duggan as mayor, the former head of the Detroit Medical Center, has been advertised as the promotion of a turnaround artist.  But while Duggan had success revitalizing the city’s Medical Center, Duggan also ran on opposing Orr’s decisions and comes as a political protégé of former Wayne County Executive Edward McNamara – an official who backed the cartoonishly corrupt Kwame Kilpatrick and had FBI agents and state police raid his own office in November 2002, over alleged corruption in airport contracts and campaign fundraising.  Meet the new boss.

The American Hotel: built in 1926, the hotel is 11 stories high with over 300 rooms. It has remained vacant since the early 90’s.

Oh, there have been the requisite platitudes.  Duggan and Orr have broken bread in what was described as a “very good first meeting.”  And Duggan has said all the right things that a reformer would state, such as being “a huge believer in lean processing. If you are not excellent at making systems work, you cannot survive…”

But the inertia of the status quo has been apparent even after only one week from the election.  The Michigan House Appropriations Committee ranking Democrat Rep. Fred Durhal, Jr. is angry that Duggan hasn’t called him yet.  Metro Detroit AFL-CIO President Chris Michalakis essentially threw down a polite ultimatum that Duggan must “honor” his commitment to working families, while suggesting the labor doesn’t trust the new mayor.  Duggan claims he just wants a seat at the table as Detroit’s debts are solved, and if Synder and Orr are smart, they’ll allow it.

Wilbur Wright High School: closed in 2005, this building actually is among the few on this list that has been demolished. 10,000 buildings have been torn down in Detroit since 2010.

The decision to abrogate Detroit’s city government in the bankruptcy process may have been politically necessary (Detroit certainly hasn’t come to grips with its position despite many, many, many opportunities), but doing so has allowed Snyder and Orr to play the villain while the usual suspects who caused this economic disaster play the victim.  However, it’s also allowed Snyder to take all the credit too.  67% of Michigan voters approved the move back in March (including 41% of Detroit), and the decision has given Snyder a welcome bump in his approval rating.  That’s a short term political fix to a long-term structural problem.

Mike Duggan may be a product of the system that failed Detroit, but he’s viewed warily by both it.  Orr’s contract expires in the fall of 2014; Duggan and the City Council can vote whether or not to renew it – almost literally the only voice they have in the process.  If that’s the first time Duggan has to impact the process, he’ll have likely caved by then to labor, vote to end Orr’s tenure and – more importantly – work to undo reforms set in place.  Should Rick Snyder not return in 2015, an opportunity to address Detroit’s deeper fundamental problems will have passed and a new administration will slap a band-aid bailout on the city, and hope more journalists write about Dan Gilbert than urban hunters who live off of raccoon to supplement their meals.

I’ve said it a few times; Sally Jo Sorenson of the outstate leftyblog “Bluestem Prairie” is one of the few Minnesota leftybloggers who don’t deserve to be under some kind of police surveillance.

But that doesn’t mean she gets all that much right.

Or maybe when your target is “voters who don’t think that hard about voting”, “getting it right” isn’t the goal.

I’ll commend to you this piece on…

…well, apparently the Sibley County GOP thinking Things That Make Sally Jo Sorenson Angry Even Though She Doesn’t Appear To Understand Them All That Well.

I’ll add some emphasis here and there:

Bluestem’s favorite Minnesota Republican Basic Party Operating Unit (BPOU) is at it again, promoting an informational town hall against the court-delayed organizing of home-based daycare providers, while simultaneously asking the readers of the New Ulm Journal to dream of a future where moms can stay home and care for their own kids.

 

Yes, indeedie: Emily Gruenhagen and her fellow executive board members are here to save daycare so they can destroy it…The more recent epistle, Childcare Unionization Town Hall Meeting, repeats standard talking points against the organizing drive by AFSCME, before asserting this vision for a better Minnesota:

 

“Imagine a society with taxes and utility rates so low that mothers have the economic freedom to choose to stay home with their children, again…”

 

Yes, indeedie. Those days of women staying home in the glory days of the 1950s and 1960s (or 1850s and 1860s) had absolutely nothing to do with wages, and everything to do with low taxes and utility rates.

And yes indeedie-doo, the market for daycare today is all about women with degrees in Arts Admin from Saint Olaf having time to run off to their day job at an arts-education non-profit to negotiate a visit by a Bulgarian women’s therapeutic drum circle co-op.

Sure.  Sometimes it is.

But much more often, it’s about low-income women (and, uh, men) needing someone to watch the kids while they earn a living – something that Sally Jo Sorenson’s Democrat party just made a whole lot harder, especially in rural Minnesota.

And daycare unionization will do absolutely nothing for those families – or the daycare union providers – but make it less affordable.

Sorenson swerves through a krazy kwilt of other bits of outstate un-PC before returning, eventually, to the daycare topic:

Representatives Glenn Gruenhagen and Dean Urdahl, along with Senator Scott Newman and anti-daycare union advocate Hollie Saville, who shares the belief that allowing daycare providers to vote to choose or reject representation amounts to “forced unionization,” will speak at the meeting, the letter notes.

According to the Sibley County Republicans, “the lying DFL” isn’t concerned about low income people, just “more money for unions, which everyone knows their leaders run the DFL.” 

And here we thought it was George Soros, with the billions he was making in shale gas, along with Alida Messinger, who ran the DFL.

The good ol’ “if you can mock it, it must be false”.  Never seen that one before from every single Minnesota “progressive” blogger.  Nosirreebob.

But there are two objective facts that every “progressive” supporter of the union jamdown is either ignorant about, or just lies about:

1. The “election” to unionize is always, always stuffed with ringers – unlicensed providers that the unions drag into the election to stuff the ballot boxes.  It’s what they’ve done to pass unionization in many states (Michigan jumps to mind), and it’s what they’re doing in Minnesota.  So when people like Sally Jo Sorenson say “what’s wrong with letting daycares choose?”, they either don’t know how the plan works, or they’re lying. You know where my money is.
2. If and when the jamdown happens, the “union” will provide absolutely nothing to the daycare providers but a bill for services.   No more money (that’s between the providers and their clients).  No more “training” that the providers aren’t obliged to provide for themselves via state law already (and no help getting that).  Nothing.  Bupkes.  All it’ll be is a bill – that must be either eaten, or passed on to the parents, their clients, or avoided by refusing families who take part in the government daycare subsidy program – which in turn raises the price and lowers the supply of daycare.

So Sally Jo Sorenson is pushing a rigged election that will lead to a jamdown the licensed providers don’t want (they can already join the union, although 99.5% don’t), that will lead to hikes in Minnesota’s already-high daycare prices, pricing more working families out of the market for daycare.

I’m going to guess Sally Jo Sorenson has never been a parent in one of those poor working families.  I have.  Daycare costs more than rent for many families; it did for mine, twenty years ago.  Jacking up that bill for no benefit other than giving the public employee unions (and the DFL they own) a new $2 million annual revenue stream isn’t just cynical; it’s cruel.

Why does Sally Jo Sorenson hate working families?

Oh, you don’t have to believe me.  Hollee Saville – one of the leaders of the brilliant grassroots campaign against the DFL/AFSCME/SEIU’s well-funded push – tried to leave Sorenson a comment.  Now, Sorenson doesn’t often post critical comments – and never without writing her response first, which is certainly her right; it’s her blog.  But it sorta screams “insecure”, doesn’t it?

Anyway – goodness only knows if Saville’s response will ever see the light of day on “Bluestem Prairie”.

So with her permission, I’m posting it here.  Below the jump.

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