The “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – the attack-PR drones financed by Alida Messinger and a group of plutocrats with deep pockets to make toxic, sleazy attacks on their opposition – stepped in it last night, to the point that even the Twin Cities mainstream media had to report it (with emphasis added):

The DFL-supporting Alliance for a Better Minnesota took its mockery of a Republican candidate a step too far, it admitted on Thursday.

In a Halloween-themed blog post, it suggested that Republican gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson should dress as Patrick Bateman, a serial killer in American Psycho, because he is “seemingly nice but actually pretty evil inside.”

Carrie Lucking tried to bury the evidence – but the Internet sees and knows all:

Leaving aside the obvious question – what should Alida Messinger and Carrie Lucking dress as? – it appears as if the smooth-running messaging machine at ABM is trying to break in some new amateurs.

But have no fear.  Lucking explains it all (again, emphasis added):

Carrie Lucking, the group’s executive director, said within 10 minutes being alerted to the post they took the image down, removed the reference to Bateman and changed what it said about Johnson.

Instead of calling Johnson evil, the site says that he is “seemingly nice in public, but actually the policies he supports are pretty evil. It also appended an apology to its post. 

Ah.  Disagreement is “evil”.  That’s much better.

How very Alinsky.

“The original image and text for Jeff Johnson was removed and the costume changed because it was an inappropriate reference to a fictional character. We apologize for this error. It will not happen again,” the web site said.

Yes it will – because every time ABM writes about Republicans, they’re writing about “fictional characters”.  Alinskyite “framing” is all about turning real people and real ideas into characters and catch phrases that have little or nothing to do with reality.  “Tom Emmer is angry”.  “Jeff Johnson is evil”.  “King Banaian is Arab”.  Little bits of mental chaff that ABM is hoping – indeed, paying big bucks to prove – will stick in the minds of people who don’t think that hard about politics come election time.

It’s dishonest.  It’s also how the Democrats do politics.

But I Promised A Brilliant Plan, Didn’t I?:  Watch ABM’s coverage this past couple of days.  Their flailing at Johnson was only the tip of the iceberg; I wrote earlier today about their calling Julianne Ortmann a “Genie”, with video of a blonde, jiggly Barbara Eden helpfully added in case you thought Lucking was referring to the “Djinn” of Arab mythology.

The election is a year away, and the attacks are already…

…unhinged.

And it occurs to me – maybe that’s a good barometer for the GOP races?  Whichever candidate is drawing the most unhinged, scabrous “coverage” from ABM can be presumed to be in the lead?

A look at ABM’s front page this morning shows two weak-gruel attacks on Jeff Johnson.

That’s probably good news for the Johnson campaign.

The challenge for the Thompson campaign is obvious.

Minnesota’s media talking head-bots continually bellyache about wanting Minnesota politics to be “more civil” and “more like it was back in the good ol’ days”…

…but they give a continual pass to the antics of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, which every single day makes Minnesota a cheaper, dumber, uglier place to do politics?

A mediator ordered the Dayton Administration to pay the legal bills for the plaintiffs against his “unionization by decree” stunt.

From a news release from MN Majority (with emphasis added):

Governor Dayton and the Bureau of Mediation Services yesterday settled to reimburse $60,000 in attorneys’ fees to the home-based child care providers who sued to halt Governor Dayton’s unlawful executive order establishing a unionization procedure for the providers. In Swanson, et al. v. Dayton, et al, the court found that the governor’s executive order exceeded his constitutional authority, struck down the order and awarded attorneys’ fees to the prevailing plaintiffs. The Administration paid these fees in compliance with a Minnesota Court of Appeals’ order earlier this year which said the fees were owed because the Governor was not merely wrong in issuing this unionization order, but had no substantial legal justification to do so at all under Minnesota’s Constitution and laws.

Mark Dayton:  The Law and the Constitution are for peasants.

The providers aren’t done:

 Plaintiff home-based child care provider Hollee Saville said: “This is a great day for the small-business child care providers who resisted the schemes to force unionization, dues and fees on our entire industry, and we plan to continue to resist the new unionization legislation, which is also unlawful.”

And I love the closing quote so much, I’m going to add emphasis to it:

Plaintiff Becky Swanson commented further on the fee payment made yesterday. “This fee payment illustrates that the real ‘extremist’ in the child care unionization scheme is the Governor, who ignored the constitutional limitations on his own authority to do political favors for his union friends, not us self-employed child care providers who resisted this overreach, and whom he arrogantly derided as ‘right wing extremists.’”

It’s the only line they know.

Suck it, commies.

Perhaps you’ve heard; Minnesota’s new “Teacher of the Year”, Saint Paul science teacher Megan Hall seems to have answered the question “are today’s public schools nothing but left-wing indoctrination centers” with a rousing “Hell yeah!”

This is from her acceptance speech, with emphasis added by me:

Teachers are persistent and responsible and generous because we believe that every child in America, regardless of circumstances of birth, deserves a decent chance at a good life. [Applause] From where I stand, teachers create equality of opportunity. From where I stand, teaching is a profession that takes a gritty patriotism. And from where I stand, teachers are American democracy’s last line of defense against the tyranny of the 1 percent

Don’t believe me?  Here’s the video

How over the top was it?  Even the City Pages’ Aaron Rupar seemed to feel a little uncomfortable: “Yeah, maybe that would’ve been a good line to save for when you’re having beers with your liberal buddies after the speech”.

For all I know Ms. Hall is a perfectly adequate teacher – and in my experience in the Saint Paul Public Schools, adequate would have been pretty superlative.

But I have to wonder:  if Ms. Hall is protecting the students from “the 1%”, who is going to protect them from the Saint Paul Public Schools?

Because between the child abuse, the brain-dead kommissariat masquerading as a bureaucracy, and the massive horde of intellectually-walking-dead union members Ms. Hall shares a district with?

I’ll take my chance with those gol-durned rich folks, thanks.

But look at it her way; I suppose if I taught for a district with the worst major-market achievement gap in the United States, with a minority graduation rate lower than Miley Cyrus’ neckline, a district that minority parents were decamping from as fast as they can find open spaces in charter schools or suburban schools via open enrollment, I’d look for a scapegoat too.

We’ve written before about “Moms Demand Action”, the gun-grabber astroturf group financed entirely by liberals with deep pockets, and “run” (and, I suspect, almost solely inhabited) by Jane Kay, a woman whose hatred of the law-abiding firearms owner is so toxic as to frankly make me worry about her well-being.

Jane Kay (l) with Rep. Heather Martens (DFL – 67A) and Rep. Michael Paymar, at last spring’s gun grab hearings.

Mama Jane has a website, now.  And through the miracle of Web 1.0 technology, it gives the Moms and the group’s “member” their sympathizer or two the ability to put lies, long-debunked research and bobbleheaded long-discredited scare stories out in front of Congresspeople via Twitter in bulk loads.  Sort of the “Ugly Black Gun” of Twitter interfaces, designed to spit out untruths as fast as a group of orcs can click.

Or to put it in IT terms, a Spam Generator.

They’re using the #gunsense, #Savethe9 and of course #momsdemandaction tags.

If #MomsDemandAction had more than a few members, it’d be fun to jack the hashtags.

But of course, the point of groups like Moms Demand Action and “Protect Minnesota” isn’t getting members, or even producing social media.  It’s getting the compliant media (like the MinnPost, which is sponsored by the same groups that sponsor both of the gun grab groups) to present them as if they’re real groups, to gull the gullible into believing that there is an organized, organic gun-grab movement.

There isn’t.  But you’ll never hear it from Doug Grow.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Star Tribune says Keith Ellison (D-Minneapolis) is pushing for an increase in the minimum wage to $9.50.  This is so obviously idiotic I thought it might be the result of a blow to the head during his recent arrest while protesting in favor of illegal aliens.  But no, here’s a Youtube video of him from 2007, beating the same dead horse.

But then I realized he might not be an idiot, he might be a stealth advocate for the Zimbabwe approach to managing the national debt.  We just re-value the dollar and we declare minimum wage is now 30 bucks an hour.  The dollar becomes worth 1/4 what it had been, the debt becomes manageable for another few months since it’s owed in dollars, not real assets, and we can print as many dollars as we want.  Viola, problem solved!  Plus, it has the advantage of having been invented in Zimbabwe by Black people, so nobody can oppose it without being racisssss.

Give the man credit, he might be more clever than he looks.

Of course, the long-term result still will be the squalor and despair that is ordinary life in Zimbabwe for everyone who is not In Charge.  But to the Obama Administration and its minion, Keith Ellison, that might be viewed as a feature, not a bug.

Joe Doakes

Of course it’s a feature.

The DFL has been doing the same thing with Minneapolis and Saint Paul for decades.

Last year, the hard left in Minnesota put together an immense coalition of groups to defeat the marriage amendment…

…and then to push a reluctant DFL to support and pass a gay marriage bill.

And the problem with coalitions is they’re pretty much all made up of unlikely bedfellows, or at the very least people who can only stand each other so long.

As the Twin Cities best feminist, I’m naturally on the National Organization of Women’s Minnesota Chapter’s mailing list.

Minnesota NOW and the Pro-Choice community as a whole contributed significant resources to the fight for marriage equality here in Minnesota. That is why we at Minnesota NOW were very disappointed to hear that the Minnesotans United PAC screens their candidates focused singularly on the issue of marriage for same-sex couples and that they will be providing funding to several legislators who have a history of voting for anti-choice legislation. We were told the Minnesotans United PAC will raise and spend resources to support legislators who voted for same-sex marriage – they have no other screens and are aware this model won’t work for all donors. We are truly saddened that the Minnesotans United PAC does not have our back when we need them. We are not equal until we are ALL equal.

Because infanticide is a civil right, dammit.

 We encourage you to direct your financial support to the Minnesota NOW PAC which screens candidates on all of our six core issues: LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, economic justice, racial equality, constitutional equality and freedom from violence. This will ensure your money is supporting a candidate that acts on all of your values, not just one.

All you DFL gay marriage supporters – are you going to take this sitting down?  Did you hear what they call you?

They listed 11 legislators – eight outstate DFLers and three Republicans (Kieffer, Peterson and Garofalo) who voted for the gay marriage bill – as being insufficiently pro-infanticide for their taste.

I may – in my capacity as the Twin Cities best feminist – start a new group:  “Minnesotans United For Womynandtheirchildren, Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgenders, Questioning And Others” (MUFWLGBTQAO) to campaign to resolve the battle between NOW and MUAF once and for all!

When Representative Ryan Winkler talks, people listen.

And then the smart people snicker.

He tweeted this yesterday:

My favorite point in this op-ed: low wages do not cause poverty. http://t.co/jBfXzKYSiF. Only an economist could be so enlightened.

— Ryan Winkler (@RepRyanWinkler) September 8, 2013

Of course, he had the point of the op-ed all wrong.  Read it for yourself.

The point is that low wages aren’t the sole cause of poverty.  In the great scheme of things, they aren’t even especially important, in and of themselves.

Much more important?  When there is no opportunity to earn higher wages.

How does that happen?

• When a preponderance of people don’t have the tools to do better themselves.  For example, when our overpriced education system continually short-changes them.  Especially minority kids, who have both the highest poverty rates and are the most systematically shortchanged by the education system Ryan Winkler’s party designed.
• When mandatory wages for entry level work are so high that the market for entry-level, unskilled labor gets depressed – ensuring fewer people, especially poor people, get into the labor market at all.
• When an overabundance of regulation makes entrepreneurship – starting ones’ own business – less tenable.  Like the DFL has done for Minnesota, giving the state the worst climate for entrepreneurship in the country.

To further address the point, though, I’d like to ask Rep. Winkler (or his defenders) this question:  at what minimum wage hourly rate will poverty disappear?

Put a number on it.

That’s the question I’d like to ask.  In fact, I asked it.

Hopefully we’ll see an answer.

I’m sure we will.

(more…)

About ten years ago, there was a  Saint Paul city council rep – it’d probably be redundant to note that he was a “progressive” – who was a died-in-the-wool public school-support machine.  Looooved those public schools.  Hated hated hated homeschools and charter schools and private schools.  Thought school choice created separate, unequal school systems.

Naturally, the councilperson’s son went to Saint Paul Academy.

“Progressives” have given any number of examples of such hypocrisy; Chelsea Clinton and the Obama kids would never be allowed in a public school, even as their parents fought against meaningful school choice for the children of the less fortunate. 

Anyway – Matt Damon, outspoken supporter of more tax funding for the schools that are supposed to be good enough for all us proles, isn’t going to risk  his own children in the public education cesspool:

 Actor Matt Damon is a strong supporter of America’s public schools. Just two years ago, the star spoke passionately about the importance of public schools at a Washington DC “Save our Schools” rally. In fact, the actor is so impressed with public school teachers that he has demanded they receive a pay raise. That passion and conviction, however, does not apply to Damon’s own children, who will not be enrolled into the Los Angeles public school system.

And the excuse is almost too stupid for “progressives” to buy.

I said “almost” (emphasis added):

In an interview with the Guardian published Saturday, Damon revealed that he had just moved to Los Angeles from New York, but that he didn’t “have a choice” when it came to putting his four daughters into private schools. The multi-millionaire did say that it was “a major moral dilemma” and then made the bizarre excuse that the public schools aren’t “progressive” enough.

That was a leap in logic not even Jason Bourne could make.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emailed:

No wonder gun control advocates all sound as if they’re talking from the same playbook. They are.

Thank GOD they’re not getting their sample talking points and draft legislation from a special interest group like ALEC. Because that would be wrong.

Joe doakes

Five’ll get you ten this campaign is financed in large part by the Joyce Foundation, which, along with victim-disarmament groups like “Protect Minnesota”, funds the “objective journalists” at MinnPost.

UPDATE:  The original version of this post – complete with comical typos – shows the danger of trying to blog before one’s first cup of coffee.  In the bathroom.  On an iPhone.

I expect conservatives and libertarians to be exercised over the news that the White House is establishing a “Nudge Squad” – a group of behavioral scientists who will work with the government bureaucracy to try to help shape citizen behavior:

“Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less, and help people to achieve their goals,” reads the government document describing the program, which goes on to call for applicants to apply for positions on the team.

The document was emailed by Maya Shankar, a White House senior adviser on social and behavioral sciences, to a university professor with the request that it be distributed to people interested in joining the team. The idea is that the team would “experiment” with various techniques, with the goal of tweaking behavior so people do everything from saving more for retirement to saving more in energy costs.

The document praises subtle policies to change behavior that have already been implemented in England, which already has a “Behavioral Insights Team.” One British policy concerns how to get late tax filers to pay up.

On the one hand, it all sounds very Orwellian.  And it is; using the government to shape peoples’ behavior is a short and utterly undefineable step away from using it to shape peoples’ thought.

On the other hand?  Precisely what has the public education system been since its inception?

It was the Clinton playbook; the response to any PR threat to the President was a three-part cantrip:

• Deny that there ever was a problem.  That was good enough for a lot of low-information voters.
• Delay any reckoning.  If the Administration and its proxies in the media could create the sense that a story was “old news” and that we should “Mooooooove On”, it was a victory.
• Destroy the messenger. 

The Obama Administration has polished the Clinton playbook to a fine sheen; in terms of teamwork in executing the three-part play, they’re like a NASCAR pit crew. 

Oh, yeah – they’re in the “Deny” and “Delay” phase with the IRS scandal.  And it’s working – at least among low-info Democrats, who are bleating “there’s no scandal” on cue. 

Lately, the party denial-and-delay line is “Hey!  The IRS targeted liberal groups, too!”

The line depends on the consumer being too dense to know the difference between “examine some…” partisan groups, and “targeting an entire movement”. 

Oh, yeah; it’s false:

The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) sent a letter Wednesday to congressional Democrats telling them that while several liberal groups may have gotten extra scrutiny, the IRS didn’t necessarily target those — but it did do so for conservative groups.

“TIGTA concluded that inappropriate criteria were used to identify potential political cases for extra scrutiny — specifically, the criteria listed in our audit report. From our audit work, we did not find evidence that the criteria you identified, labeled “Progressives,” were used by the IRS to select potential political cases during the 2010 to 2012 timeframe we audited,” Inspector General J. Russell George said.

He said that while 30 percent of groups that had the word “progressive” in their name were given extra scrutiny, 100 percent of groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names were pulled out for strict scrutiny, which involved what the IRS since has said were invasive and inappropriate questions.

Democrats have argued that the IRS‘ scrutiny of applications for tax-exempt status hit both ideological sides equally, which would cut at the GOP’s argument that it was politically motivated. Instead, Democrats have said the scrutiny is the natural result of a jump in applications after campaign finance rules changed following the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case.

Read the whole thing.

And no; it’s not even close.

Lori Sturdevant has a mission.

The DFL – and the PR machine that includes bodies as inseparably-“diverse” as the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, the Joyce-Foundation-funded MinnPost and theStribeditorial board (which has close links to all three of the above) worked tirelessly to try to make Minnesota “Happy to Pay for a Better” state. 

The dim and querulous gave them the Legislature and Governor they dreamed about and paid for. 

But the parts of this state that actually produce the wealth that Our Better Government needs to siphon (and siphon, and siphon some more) are showing signs that they’ve had enough.  That the snapping sound that the fat, lazy, over-entitled riders upon the camel of state enterprise have been hearing is the sound of camel vertebrae giving up the ghost.

And Sturdevant’s apparent mission is to try to shame the camel for all that wobbling.

Our Innumerate Overlords – Sturdevant’s old club-mate Nick Coleman once famously declared that journos were better than bloggers because they “know stuff”, by dint of having written about “stuff” down the long, lonely, ink-smeared decades. 

Sturdevant, like Coleman, continuously show what a low bar “stuff” turns out to be, when it comes to the realities of business and economics:

The numbers always seemed screwy to me. If congressional action allowing all states to apply their sales taxes to online purchases would net Minnesota a cool $400 million a year, as the state Revenue Department keeps saying, why was the new “Amazon tax” only slated to bring in about $5 million per year?

Because – as anyone who followed the Vikings Stadium funding fiasco, or the course of any sort of cigarette or sin tax in history, can tell you – the figures that bureaucrats give when they’re trying to sell a tax are always higher than what you actually get.  Because people and companies modify their behavior, their purchasing, their lives if need be to try, try, try to keep more of their hard-earned income and profits. 

Oh, of course Sturdevant won’t report it that way:

The answer became obvious last week. Amazon unkindly cut off its Minnesota-based advertising affiliates with a bare two weeks’ notice to avoid collecting sales tax on Minnesota purchases starting July 1.

Right. 

And why would they do that?

Two possible reasons:

1. Because acting as an unpaid tax collector, in addition to shaving money off their own top line, hits their bottom line as well; it involves building systems and hiring people to not only do the collecting, but to handle dealing with the inevitable squabbles over collections with the state governments involved.  As only a small minority of states tax revenues on online sales, it’s just not worth it.
2. They’re big nasty ugly meanies.

Sturdevant wants the Strib’s readers – which is a synomym for “low information voters”, these days – to pick “2”.  Emphasis added:

The state’s tax collectors allowed that they were not surprised. They’d been expecting as much from Amazon, said Revenue Commissioner Myron Frans. It’s what the tax dodger, er, online retailer has done in at least seven other states. Hence the measly forecast for tax collections from online sellers with Minnesota affiliates.

And there you go; the left’s most noxious conceit; that productivty and its consequences – profit – belongs to government first and foremost; that trying to keep more of it for yourself, having done all the actual work to produce it and all, is a thoughtcrime. 

To avoid having to deal with the administrative and fiscal overburden, not to mention lending legitimacy to a tax that may well be unconstitutional, isn’t good business; it’s a moral offense.  Or so Sturdevant will keep chanting.

And chanting:

(The official name for the new sales tax provision is “affiliate nexis.” It’s not a new tax, but a new requirement that when an online seller has a Minnesota affiliate, the tax on its Minnesota sales must be collected by the seller at the time of purchase, rather than being reported and paid later by the consumer — as all consumers faithfully and fully do every year, right?)

Dunno, Lori.  Do you?

“Atlas!  Knock Off All That Damn Shrugging!” – Up next, an irony that provokes a chuckle every time I see it, which is every time Sturdevant writes about the relationship between government and the people who pay for it, which is every other column; she rails against choice – when it’s The People doing the chosing:

The Revenue Department had been urging enactment of the Amazon tax since DFLer Mark Dayton became governor, even though it was known to be tricky to forecast and fairly easy to dodge.

Truth be told, much the same can be said of most of the $1 billion or so in annual tax increases enacted by the 2013 Legislature.

And after thirty-odd years, Sturdevant still hasn’t figured it out; when you build a spending plan based on making other people – “the rich”, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, the “haves” – pay for your stuff, those other people might just get other ideas. 

Ms. Sturdevant?  Your Institutional Hypocrisy Is Showing – Sturdevant avers that there might be some PR issues with the DFL’s / Alida Messinger’s (pardon the redundancy) “Happy To Make Other People Pay For Our Minnesota” plan: 

For example, the howl that went up from the warehouse industry about a sales tax that will start applying next April to its business-to-business transactions was accompanied by credible threats that warehouses would move to Hudson, Wis.

Right.

Even before the session ended, tax planning seminars popped up offering to coach well-heeled Minnesotans about ducking the new 9.85 percent income tax rate…Then there’s the $1.60-per-pack boost in the cigarette tax [which] might be the easiest to dodge of all. Cigarette sellers just across the Minnesota state lines — and on Minnesota’s Native American lands — can prepare for land-office business after July 1, when Minnesota smokes will become the most expensive in the region…The kind that involves spending six months and a day in no-income-tax Florida? That’s evidently tolerated.

And yep.

Was there another tax “for a better Minnesota” that elicited a howl of protest from a Minnesota institution?  One that threatened to put a 5.5%-to-6.75+% ding in an industrly that’s already shrinking by several points a year? 

One that pays Sturdevant’s paycheck, maybe?

You’ll search Sturdevant’s column in vain for any sign that she’s called her bosses “tax evaders” for having acted in their own enlightened fiscal self-interest.  

Guess the Strib – whose editorial board and occasionally newsroom shilled tirelessly for DFL candidates – doesn’t want A Better Minnesota, unless someone else is paying for it either. 

Keep that in mind in the next section.

She’s Head-Slappingly Ignorant Of Economics And Business – But I’ll Bet She’s Got History Down Cold! – Sturdevant next wraps herself in the flag.

I don’t think she knows it’s the Soviet flag:

…I’ve observed that in the rest of Minnesota, tax avoidance within “perfectly legal” parameters is socially acceptable behavior — so much so that people brag about it to their friends. Those who engage in it count themselves as patriots, and by today’s lights, they may well be. But they don’t think like the fellows in 1776 who pledged to their new venture “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Further proof – were any needed – that the Strib not only caters to low-information voters; they’re trying to create more of them.

The American Revolution was about much more than taxes! It was about defining a new relationship between the Individual and Government – one where the Individual and the fruits of their labor had worth, merit and standing every bit as important as that of government’s; one where government was afree association of equals, not a petty noble demanding tribute of cringing vassals. 

And that whole “STOP FUSSING WITH YOUR SELF-INTEREST, KNAVE!” thing is something you yell at someone you want to have acting like a cringing vassal.

(Speaking of history, Sturdevant adds “In 1933, Farmer-Labor Gov. Floyd B. Olson [Oh, Lord, here we go again – Ed.] made Minnesota a tax outlier. He pushed through a Depression-shocked Legislature the state’s first income tax, one of the few in the country. It was based on ability to pay and dedicated to education, which was struggling just then”.  Does Sturdevant wonder why Minnesota continued to lag the national economy for the next thirty years, until the “Minnesota Miracle?”  No?)

This Batter Doesn’t Go On Fish – No, Sturdevant casts her lot with George III, and the generations of petty self-appointed nobles that have spent the past five decades trying to roll back the relationship our founders fought to create:

They don’t even think about taxes in the way that their parents and grandparents did, economist Stinson noted.

“People who lived through the Depression knew that bad things could happen to good people. They knew that government is necessary when that happens,” he said recently.

Cry us a river.

The state had the whole “help people when times are tough” thing licked by the mid-seventies.  Everything government could do that it should be doing was being paid for, with plenty left over, before Ronald Reagan took office. 

No, the current growth in Minnesota’s spending – and the DFL’s tax and spend orgy – has nothing to do cushioning good people from Bad Things.  

• It’s about making sure government employee union members can retire at 55 – even if the rest of us have to work ’til we’re 70 to pay for it.
• It’s about giving billions of dollars to billionaires, to pay for other peoples’ entertainment.
• It’s about making the parts of this state that work hard, save their money, and pay their bills pay for the parts of this state that don’t. 
• It’s about paying for an “education” system that educates less, abjectly fails vast swathes of our state society (although it mostly fails black and brown kids who don’t look like the editorial board’s kids, so that gets politely ignored), indoctrinates more, and more and more seems to act as a money-laundering mechanism for the teachers union and Big Administration.
• It’s about paying chits back to the people who paid for the DFL takeover in Saint Paul. 
• It’s about enabling the continuing abuse of the state’s productive class.  Battered Spouse Syndrome depends on the victim knuckling under not only to abuse, but to the emotional manipulation that make it possible and keep going on.

In a state where the media is arrogantly and completely in the bag for the Tax and Spend party, where the big institutions are all in bed with and get paid by the Taxers and the Spenders, where elections themselves look to any intelligent person to be rigged to keep the Taxers and Spenders in power, how else are those who actually produce supposed to register their opposition?

With our feet – figuratively, and sometimes literally.

Like any other battered spouse, the only way to end the abuse is for the victims to realize that they have to break it off, and keep it broken off, no matter how hard they berate, belittle and attack you. 

No means no, Lori.

Michael Bloomberg is apparently running his anti-gun 501(c)4 non-profit using City of New York assets:

Domain names for [Mayors Against Illegal Guns] were registered in 2006 by the New York City Department of Information and Technology, and have remained on official city web servers ever since.

Yet the group’s “action fund,” through which [Mayor Bloomberg] has piped at least $14 million of his own money in ads over gun control this year alone, is registered as a 501c4, a nonprofit “social welfare” group with the same tax status as, say, the Karl Rove-linked Crossroads GPS or Organizing for Action, President Obama’s grassroots arm. And it raises questions about why a website associated with the group is being managed by City Hall.

…on the dime of New York city taxpayers, no less. 

In fact, the various pieces of the mayor’s efforts appear as a confusing muddle online, with sites that are ostensibly not part of the 501c4 nonetheless being visually dominated by entreaties to click through to the ones that are. There’s little indication that these are different entities with different oversight.

At minimum, the use of a city web server and city employees underscore what critics have long derided as a blurring of the lines between government resources and Bloomberg’s own multi-billion-dollar fortune, his company, and his pet interests in his three terms as mayor.

The answer?  “Shut up, they explained”.  Their ends justify their means, silly peasant.  It only remains for you to be Happy To Pay For it. 

It’s the New York (and Chicago, Philadelphia, Trenton, Boston, Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Baltimore and, by the way, Minneapolis and Saint Paul) way.

Anyone remember this classic?

So, how is it that nakedly partisan bloggers who make things up left and right are gaining street cred while the mainstream media, which spend a lot of time criticizing themselves, are under attack?

Or this one?

“Bloggers don’t know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square.”

If you’ve been blogging in Minnesota any time at all, you know these quotes.

They’re from Nick Coleman, in his classic column “Blogged Down In Web Fantasy”, from 2004, in which he declared his sloppy brand of war on the Twin Cities bloggers (“Buh-LAW-gurs”, as he memorably pronounced the word on his unlamented radio show) that were starting to chip away at the sand castle he and his fellow “ink stained wretches” lived in.  The Strib removed the column from their website years ago, but its legacy lives on, in local blogger and national journalism circles.   In it, Coleman claimed that card-carrying journalists like himself were better than bloggers because they’d spent years covering the news, as opposed to bloggers, who merely work for decades and raise families and pay taxes and stuff.   Journalists know the rules and operate with accountability, he said (amid a column attacking someone he never did actually name, which was a dodge of accountability and against the rules for “journalists”).

This was when Nick Coleman was riding high – when he had a three-times-a-week column at the Strib for well into six figures, and a morning show at the local leftytalk station…

…where he indulged a curious predilection for crudely sexualizing people who dared to disagree with him (Go ahead – count the gay jokes in the link.  Only liberals on a liberal station can get away with that much homophobia).

Well, in The Boss’ immortal words, we’re still here and he’s all gone.  From the Strib and AM950 (which I’m told is still on the air, not that anyone cares), at least.  I’m not indulging in schadenfreud, here; I don’t believe in Karma, but what goes around comes around. 

But old journos never die – they just get jobs with left-leaning non-profits.

And they start blogs.   In which they do…

…well, pretty much exactly what Nick Coleman warned us about nine years ago.

The State He’s In – Nick popped up on the radar again.  After a stint writing propaganda for a think tank in Saint Cloud, a couple of college classes (in which a fellow student noted he described himself as a “recovering journalist”) and I-really-honestly-don’t-care-what-else, Coleman resurfaced as the “Executive Editor” of “The Uptake”, a videoblog financed by liberals with deep pockets; think a slightly-downmarket MinnPost with more video and less Brian Lambert.

There, he roams the same halls he used to roam.  And he gets positive reinforcement from other lefties:

That’s Coleman, in the jaunty racing cap. With (from L) Doug Grow (from the Joyce Foundation-supported MinnPost), Jane Kay, some minion, and Rep. Heather Martens (DFL-66A).

And he’s got a blog.  And he still knows stuff…

…about crudely sexualizing his opponents with all the grace of an eighth-grade locker room bully.

As to getting a story right, as opposed to just making things up?  Not so much.

Exhibit A:  The piece he wrote about the open carry activists canceling their get-together at “Open Streets” (we wrote about it this morning).

Remember:  He’s A Professional – I’ll add red emphasis to the frequent, dork-fingered sexualizations just to show how very, very juvenile the old duffer is.  Go ahead.  Scan it. 

The gun-slinging flashers who threatened to bring their guns to town and parade them around openly in Minneapolis and St. Paul have put their warm guns back in their happy pockets and backed down, running away at the first signs of gun-control Mommas and urban bicycling activists.

As someone said on my Facebook page: “Buncha candy asses!”

To be fair, “someone on my Facebook page” is no worse a level of sourcing than Coleman ever did during his “official columnist” career. 

And as we discussed this morning, the story had nothing – bupkes – to do with “gun control Mommas and bike activists”.  Neither of them ever turned up in the decision.  Second Amendment human rights activists mix it up with the usual “gun control mommas” constantly, and win the debate – emphasis on the term “debate” – every single time.  Because the law, the Constitution, the facts and morality itself are on our side.

There are two absolute, incontrovertible facts to keep in mind:

• It’s the threats, Stupid:  MN-RKBA – Minnesotans for the Right to Keep And Bear Arms – cancelled their Open Carry gathering entirely due to the threats of violence.  Legal firearms carriers know it’s best to avoid danger.  That’s what they did.  Period.  There was no more to it. 
• Coleman is lying: He’s trying to help his buddies in the gun-grab movement (see the cozy little group hug photo above) squeedge a victory out of a year where they couldn’t exploit a mass-shooting into a political win at an all-liberal Minnesota state Capitol.  This is the closest they’ve come to one; Coleman is trying, in his ham-fisted way, not to waste the crisis. 

Let me re-emphasize this:  Coleman, and the dim bulb Jane Kay and habitual liar Rep. Heather Martens, are doing the end-zone happy dance over the non-news non-occurrence of a non-event.   

That’s it.  That’s their “victory”, the only one they had, even in a state run entirely by liberals.  For now.

That’s just pathetic.

Insert The Usual Boilerplate – Coleman lays out the scenario.  Sort of:

The story started Monday when a gun-owners group used its Facebook page to invite members to attend the first of this summer’s “Open Streets” events this coming Sunday in South Minneapolis. Although “attend” doesn’t quite cover it: The gun owners specifically were encouraged to bring their weapons and to flash them in public, carrying them openly for the benefit of all those in attendance at “Open Streets,” an ongoing series of good-humored street fairs promoting bicycling and pedestrian rights.

And – Coleman omits – the various virtues of neighborliness.  Second Amendment supporters have been doing events like this for years, most notably our “Open Carry Picnics” a few years back at the Lake Harriet Bandshell, where dozens of regular Minnesotans would gather, eat, talk with their neighbors – many with their legal firearms in plain view. 

If you heard about them, it wasn’t in the news.  The only thing that ever happened was a good time.  In the couple such events I attended (sans visble firearm; that wouldn’t be my style, even if I did own a gun and have a carry permit), I remember one person – white, upper-middle-class, female, oozing “Carlton College” attitude from every manicured pore – running to the park police and demanding mass arrests, and being politely rebuffed because we were doing something legal, in a legal manner. 

He Doesn’t Know Stuff!  – Coleman:

This Sunday’s kickoff event is scheduled for a 20-block stretch of Lyndale Ave. South, one of the south side’s gun-plagued corridors.

And there’s the conceit the left keeps trying – and with the dimmer members of our media and political class, succeeding – at passing off; the idea that guns are the problem.  That there’s a “plague” of guns prowling Lyndale from the Twenties through the Fifties, randomly picking off innocent passersby and kids doing homework in their living rooms.

It’s untrue, of course; we have a plague of people who use guns to enforce their gangs’ rules, protect their (illegal) business’ turf from competition, take out revenge for various slights (in a manner our modern urban culture glorifies), with guns.

Not a one of them has a carry permit.  Not a one of them passed a background check, taken the training course, or bought their firearms legally. 

Maybe Coleman doesn’t know the distinction.  Or maybe he, like the anti-gun groups with whom his “Uptake” shares funders, really really wants the distinction to be blurred. 

If it’s the former, he’s wrong.  If it’s the latter, he’s lying. 

Again.

The Original Classist Gangsta – Coleman – the child of a highly prominent legislator, the stepchild of a prominent publisher – loves to try to pound the outlines of his childhood into the rough-and-tumble Irish-Catholic-In-America myth.  He’s spent a career trying to portray himself as a Studs Terkel “Everyman with a Typewriter” type street journo. 

It’s a crock, of course; the last we checked, Coleman lived in a tony part of Saint Paul, near Grand and Summit, a leafy neighborhood dotted with private colleges and tudor homes.  And more power to him!

But watch Coleman wrap himself in the “urban activist warrior” flag:

 For some reason, the promise/threat of suburban gun flashersbrandishing their weapons along the avenue did not have a reassuring effect on the benighted city dwellers who prefer fewer guns, not more, on their streets.

(“Hey!  We don’t vote on civil rights!” Remember that from the gay marriage debate?)

A quick look at the city’s “shot spotter” maps, in addition to showing an alarming number of recorded gun shots on the city’s North Side (dozens each week), shows that there have been a couple dozen shots fired on the streets in the Lyndale-Hennepin area in the past two months.

Yep.  Now – can Coleman show us that any of them were fired by law-abiding citizens, much less carry permittees?

Of course not. 

Now, it’s time for some classism!:

Imagine how reassured you would feel when hundreds of bearded guys from Andover and Elko show up in North Minneapolis or the Summit-University area of St Paul (“Open Streets” events will take place in both of those communities later this summer) with Bushmasters and Brownings slung over their shoulders or Glocks and Rugers hanging from their paunches.

Condescension for People Not Like Nick is the main color in Coleman’s palette.  That and junior-high pseudo-sexual japery.

It’s also part and parcel of the most cancerous trait of the Left; the battle isn’t ideas versus ideas, or even people vs. people.  The battle they fight is Classes against Classes.  And they define the classes. 

At the very least, it’s a mark of intellectual laziness.  At the worst, it’s a cancer that’s killed millions in the last 100 years.

But let’s run with the thought; what if hundreds of guys from Elko and Andover and Forest Lake – some bearded and paunchy, some elderly and flinty, some young and smokin’ hot, but every last one of them a carry permittee with the legal right to carry a firearm – did show up at the festivals?

What would happen?

The smart money says “Not a damn thing” – other than anti-gunners acting out on their paranoia. 

Thought Experiments for The Unthinking – But since Nick’s in a mood to play hypotheticals, let’s come out and play, shall we?

Here’s a neat mental exercise: Try to imagine hundreds of inner-city residents carrying weapons at the Andover Family Fun Fest, July 13. Just because they can.

Nick, if you’re reading this;  let’s do indeed!

I’ll take you up on your challenge!  Let’s you and I get “hundreds” of “inner city residents” (by which I assume you mean “black people”, as opposed to “family guys who live in Saint Paul’s Midway”, like me), with legal carry permits, just like you had, and just like I may hypothetically have – complete with objective proof that they are law-abiding citizens that the permit conveys – and trek out to Andover on July 13!

And let’s see what happens!

Just think, Nick:  you and me can watch the hijinx unfold!

What do you suppose is going to happen?

Nothing.  Nothing is going to happen.  Oh, some ninny may run to a cop, who’ll investigate, see the “inner city resident” is a regular schlemiel with a carry permit, and gently tell the complainant to relax.   Just like happens with legitimate carriers all over the state or, more usually, doesn’t happen. 

More likely?  The “inner city” – which I suppose does mean “black” or “Latino” or “H’mong”  in Coleman’s mind – carry permittee will tell us to get tied; they have a live to live.

And they’ll be right. 

But let’s do get the ball rolling on this, Mr. Coleman. 

Heres’s How You Tell A Hack With A “Journalist” Badge He Got From A Box Of Cracker Jacks – Next, Coleman drops any pretense of “journalism” that may have evaded extinction, and openly parrots his whiny pals in the gun-grabber movement; I added emphasis to the really demented stuff:

Openly carrying firearms inside the Minnesota Capitol this winter helped gun-law opponents shoot down gun-safety legislation.

Coleman is regurgitating Heather Martens’ delusion that the law-abiding carry permittees who had notified Capitol security of their intent to carry, and visibly wore their legal, permitted firearms into the hearings, were doing it to “intimidate” the legislators.

It’s bullshit, of course.  It was a demonstration of “civil obedience” – showing the legislators that the law-abiding gun owner isn’t the cartoon that ghouls like Jane Kay and Nick Coleman and the City Pages portray to their audiences.  We’re regular schlubs who work day jobs and raise kids, just like everyone else.  And we vote. 

And it worked. 

But Coleman isn’t going to let facts get in his way:

But the tactic backfired this time. Maybe you can intimidate people in the Capitol, but not in the cycling community. Bicyclists wee outraged and told the gunslingers to stay away.

They wavered. Then they cracked. Finally, they called off the whole thing when the Gun Control Mommas stood up to them.

Let me put this as bluntly as it needs to be put:  Coleman is lying.

The “Gun Control Mommas” – “Moms Want Action”, Jane Kay’s toxic little astroturf group with fewer members than “the Uptake” has paid staff – had nothing to do with the cancellation. 

Neither did Coleman’s mythical “cycling community” (Note, Nick:  I’m part of the “cycling community”.  There was no memo). 

Coleman is making things up.  He’s taking correlations (a memo from the impotent Jane Kay, facebook proclamations from wannabe “biking community” spokesbots) and making up a causation.

He’s lying. 

The Gun Flashers ran for cover. By Thursday, the skedaddling gunsters canceled their Gun Wiggle, blaming the liberal media, bicycle punks and the “intolerance” of the mamas who opposed the plan they had clearly hoped would get them some media time and notoriety. Their plan worked, but not the way they hoped. The guns blew up in their faces.

It’s the closest the gun-grabber “movement” – really a collection of astroturf checkbook advocacy groups – have come to a victory in recent years.  And they’re jumping up and down like toddlers that just made a good pants. 

Candy asses.

 That’s big talk, coming from Nick Coleman, a nakedly (ew) partisan blogger who as we’ve shown makes things up left and right to gain “street cred”; a man who knows nothing about anything he wasn’t told by other people in his vanishingly tiny social circle, but who sat down to share his every thought with the moon. Like a grafitti artist holding a spray paint can between his knees, he’s tagging the public square, and doing it very, very badly. 

A man who’ll never answer for any of his lies and distortions because he’s never had to; he’s used and abused the “journalist/columnist’s” factual “get out of jail free” card while enjoying the protection of the Big Institutional Media system his entire career, and who now – let’s be honest – gets paid to parrot the lies he’s told to parrot. 

Same as he ever was.  Just much, much smaller.

UPDATE:  I didn’t even catch all of Coleman’s lies.  Attorney David Gross – one of the legal workhorses of the Second Amendment movement in Minnesota – left a comment which points out even more perfidy. 

One of many quotes worth reading (hence you should read the whole thing):

…Coleman was lying some more, as I read the published material, when he claimed that the Open Streets sponsors were against what Shelley had planned. I guess he can’t help himself from not letting the facts get in his way.
“Priem said Open Street organizers will not ask the gun owners not to attend. ‘Everyone is welcome at Open Streets,’ she said.”

Keep ’em coming.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

USDA buys food products from eligible vendors, then gives them away to schools and eligible poor people.

The purpose of the program: “The Agricultural Marketing Service’s Commodity Procurement Staff purchase a variety of food products in support of the National School Lunch Program and other food assistance programs. These purchases also help to stabilize prices* in agricultural commodity markets by balancing supply and demand.

*Euphemism for price supports, aka subsidy to food producers.

Lots of foods are available including raisins. Raisins? We need to create an artificial shortage to support higher prices for grape growers? Yes, except one of the growers is pissed the government forces him to hand over his crop and brought a Takings claim. The case went to the Supreme Court which ruled he didn’t have to pay the fine for failing to turn over his crop before he could bring a Constitutional challenge to the law requiring him to turn over his crop or pay a fine. The government didn’t pay for raisins, they took them, to feed the poor. Barak “Raisin Robin Hood” Obama.

The whole system is insane. We buy food and store it in warehouses to make food artificially expensive and therefore more profitable to producers, but then poor people can’t afford food so we truck it around the country and give it to them for free. Stop The Madness! Don’t buy the food, let the market decide how many producers can produce food and still be profitable, let Cub and Rainbow warehouse and ship it, let prices slip so poor people can afford it. The market will take care of everything if we just get the hell out of the way!

Why is that so hard to understand?

Joe Doakes

If you leave out the forced labor (so far) and use of food as a terror weapon, the similarity to the Soviet agriculture plans of the 1930s will make you pound your head on the desk.

“…I don’t think we’re in Cincinnati anymore!”

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Bush put tracking devices in assault weapons and let them go to Mexico so we could track down drug cartels. Obama gave assault weapons to drug cartels to up the body count to justify gun controls in the US.

Bush tracked a few international calls to find terrorists. Obama tracked all of Verizon’s domestic calls to find terrorists.

Obama supporters are quick to remind us Bush Did It First and when Bush did it, it was illegal but now, it’s not. But there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between the two administrations’ actions. And Bush didn’t specifically run on a platform promising never to do that again.

The Democrats’ logic is: My brother stepped on an ant so I blew up a school bus full of nuns. Because he started it. And while I’m no better than he – in fact, I’m worse – he started it. So what I did was okay.

“Only a little worse than Bush,” that’s the Democrats’ new defense.

Joe Doakes

This is the sort of thing that makes a parent ground their kids.

How do we ground a government, again?

Especially one that is actively suppressing any attempt to ground it?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’m sure the Governor’s campaign manager sits in on meetings with Revenue Commissioner all the time. What’s the big deal?

By that, do they mean the actual revenue commissioner, or Alida Messinger?

I mix them up.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Warehouse tax snuck into law this session.  It’s been tried and repealed in other states, drives businessout of state.  Also, mining products tax makes Superior cheaper than Duluth.  Dumb.

You’d think a guy who hides his own money across the border – to take advantage of their tax laws – would understand that concept.

Joe Doakes

In all fairness, Governor Messinger Dayton might understand it.

But he’s got a DFL legislature full of people who are more used to having money laundered in-state by unions and other proxies than artfully sheltered elsewhere.

It makes their meetings difficult.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If the dice at your casino come up seven every single time – about which you are shocked to learn and know nothing – I’m eventually going to wonder why these dice defy the odds and I will begin to question your credibility.

If the scandals in your administration – about which you are shocked to learn and know nothing – run against conservatives every single time, I’m eventually going to wonder why this long string of incidents defies the odds and I will begin to question your credibility.

Joe the Plumber
New Black Panthers
Fast and Furious
IRS audits
IRS Tea Party
IRS Israel supporters
Sebelius’ HHS shakedown

I’m beginning to wonder if President Obama is playing completely fair.

Joe Doakes
Como Park

It’s the Chicago way.

I’ll direct you to an excellent op-ed by James Sherk in the Strib yesterday.   It’s about the lunacy of the AFSCME daycare jamdown bill, passed last week and signed by Governor Dayton.

You should read the whole thing – it’s as good a digest of the absurdity of the bill as I’ve read, and I’ve read them all.

But the important part is “where does this go?”

The most likely place is “to court”; the daycare providers have already started working on a lawsuit to enjoin the law from going into effect.

And for the providers’ sake – and the sake of the kids who are going to lose daycare, and the families whose daycare budgets are about to get gang-raped by fat guys in AFSCME T-shirts – I hope the suit works.

But this is Minnesota, where you can reliably count on courts to find some picayune reason to uphold the left’s status quo ante.  So what happens if the courts don’t spike the law?

Sherk looks to history:

In 2006, the SEIU persuaded then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm to let them organize Michigan home-care workers reimbursed by Medicaid. Most of these home-care workers are family members caring for disabled relatives. This saves the state money by avoiding expensive institutionalized care, while enabling parents to care for their disabled children.

These home-care workers made strange candidates for unionization. Parents certainly weren’t going to go on strike against their children. But Granholm allowed the SEIU to mail ballots for an organizing vote. Most parents ignored the mailers; fewer than one-fifth sent them back. However, the SEIU mobilized its supporters and won a majority among those who voted.

Which is exactly what AFSCME and SEIU (which is angling for a piece of the Personal Care subsidy) are hoping; that, and flooding the market with “providers”, including unlicensed childcare providers who haven’t provided in years, but will vote for the union.

Perplexed parents soon began seeing union dues deducted from their Medicaid checks. The union charged families hundreds of dollars a year without providing any services. One father complained to a reporter:

“We’re not getting anything from them [SEIU]. We’ve tried to contact them, and they don’t even bother to respond. I don’t even know what they could do to help. Considering the dues money we’re sending them, maybe they should come over and baby sit our kids so we could have one night out.”

The situation didn’t last. Corruption charges forced the president of the Michigan SEIU local to resign. After Gov. Granholm left office, the Michigan legislature terminated the program.

Unions need to modernize and adapt to the 21st-century economy. But forcing disadvantaged families to pay dues out of their government benefits is the wrong approach. Unions should reinvent themselves to provide services modern workers value, not tap into money meant for children and the disabled.

But when you have a two-chamber majority and a compliant governor, tapping is so much easier.

If you’re a Minnesotan who provides, or uses, home daycare?  Or is, or uses, or knows a personal care assistant – whether an indy, a family member or a regular worker – whether the courts throw the law out or now, you need to remember this come next year.

The legislators who gave us this abomination need to pay at the polls.

The left is using the regulatory system to try to shut conservatives up.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The IRS denied or delayed 501(c)(4) applications for conservative groups. So what, tax law is too confusing to understand anyway.

It’s not a tax law matter. It’s a free speech matter. The IRS denied conservatives their free speech, which helped Obama get re-elected. Here’s how it works:

Candidate Joe needs money to buy advertising to convince ordinary voters to Vote For Joe. Candidate Joe raises money by asking for donations. The implied promise is the more you give, the more likely Joe will take your call telling him how bad HR 123 will be for the people he represents.

Ordinary voters can’t afford to buy access so Congress imposed individual contribution limits. But clever people work around those laws through bundling donations or establishing political action committees or educational non-profit groups to amplify donors message loud enough to be heard by voters and politicians. The tax code section that governs these groups is 501(c)(4). Both sides use it to get their message out.

If one political party can use IRS to delay approval of the other political party’s tax status until after the election, then people won’t donate and the message won’t get out to the voters to Vote For Joe. Joe will lose because the IRS delay has the effect of denying Joe’s donors their freedom to pool their money to buy political speech.

This isn’t about hazy guidelines or bumbling management. Democrats used the power of government to silence Republicans. This is a direct attack on our First Amendment rights. That’s why it matters.

Joe Doakes

The IRS is just the national incarnation of this issue.

The DFL has been doing the same thing for years here in Minnesota.  Scarcely a single conservative or Republican active in Minnesota politics avoids having some DFL apparatchik file a Campaign Finance Board complaint against them at some point – or many points – in their political career.  These filings usually come with a flurry of breathless media coverage – designed, naturally, to give the likes of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” a chanting point to use against the candidate.

The accusations usually fall flat, after the race, with no media coverage.

We saw this writ small and dim a few years back, during the 2010 campaign, when a couple of DFL bloggers with deep pockets and lots of extra time on their hands filed a CFB complaint against the King Banaian campaign.  As we pointed out in this space, there was no there there, and the CFB agreed – but, I suspect, it wasn’t about any actual complaint.  It was about getting the low-information voters who are the mainstay of the DFL effort to chant something on cue – and, mostly, about trying to use the bureaucracy to shut conservatives up.

Look for more of this at all levels.

SCENE: MITCH Berg is walking away from the Capitol building.  He runs into Avery LIBRELLE, who is dressed in a green AFSCME tshirt.

LIBRELLE:  Well, that was a great session!

BERG: The DFL’s union benefactors made out like bandits.

LIBRELLE:  We sure did!

BERG: And with a two-chamber majority, you spent months working on gun grabs that’ll never affect crime, a bullying bill that’ll stop no bullying, a gay marriage bill that is a huge priority for a small part of maybe 2% of the population, and what? Half a day on a budget?

LIBRELLE: You’re just mad because you lost.  

BERG: No, I’m mad because you’re screwing up the state.  Three more yearsof  this and Minnesota will be a cold California.  

LIBRELLE: Sweet!

BERG: And the big daddy of them all – the Daycare Union Jamdown.  

LIBRELLE: What “jamdown?”  All we’re asking for is a chance to vote to organize.  It’s democracy!   Don’t you conservatives like democracy?

BERG:    Don’t get cute.  This isn’t democracy – its democracy Mark Ritchie-style. The unions are packing the vote with unlicensed providers that the union knows will vote for them, many of whom haven’t worked in daycare or personal care in years. Look – providers could already join unions.  Out of 11,000 licensed providers, less than 100 ever did.  86% of licensed providers oppose the union.  

LIBRELLE: That’s a lot of numbers.  My head is spinning.  

BERG: Now – do you think the DFL, AFSCME and the SEIU wold have wasted a year or two of organizing, and five months of legislative arm-twisting, with several million a year in union dues and DFL money at stake, if they didn’t know they had enought ringers to jam the vote down?  Anyone who answers “no” probably also thinks Minnesota has the country’s best election system. 

LIBRELLE: But why shouldn’t daycare workers and PCAs have the right to organize for better pay and working conditions?

BERG: Organize against whom?   To get better pay from whom? 

LIBRELLE: Management!  The bosses!

BERG: They’re their own bosses.  They manage their own businesses!   Many of them went into the field because they wanted to be their own boss, be their own management. And they get paid from their clients – parents and patients. 

LIBRELLE:  Wait. Back up.  What’s this “their own boss” bit?

BERG: They’re independent businesspeople.  

LIBRELLE: (stares blankly)

BERG: They run their own business.  

LIBRELLE: (Stares; lips move, but no sound comes out)

BERG: They’re their own bosses.  They work for themselves.  

LIBRELLE:  But…everyone has a boss.  

BERG: They have clients. Parents.   Patients.  Te people who pay them. 

LIBRELLE: But…no.  Everyone has a boss!

BERG: Ummm…

LIBRELLE: EVERYONE HAS A BOSS!

BERG: Medic!   I think I broke Avery…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I posted this to an earlier thread but it deserves more thought:

Have you thought through the implications of your defense, [regular commenter Emery, whom some of the Mitchketeers think is long-banned former comment-section regular “Doug”; I don’t think it’s him, unless he’s been on some serious meds]?

You suggest IRS agents misused the power of their office for partisan political purposes, not because Obama ordered it, but because he was incompetent to stop them.

That implies government agents are predisposed to abuse their powers but are restrained only by competent managers, i.e. Republicans.

The sensible conclusion is to give over as little of our lives to government agents as possible, and in those areas, put Republicans in charge.

I completely agree with the conclusion that flows from your analysis; I’m surprised you do.

See also: Fast and Furious, Secret Service hookers, government conventions in Vegas, AP wiretaps . . . the logic could apply to almost every scandal and for the exact same reason: we shouldn’t have given them that power in the first place. The Framers were smarter than we know.

Joe Doakes

To this I’d add that this blog has noted that the government and its handmaidens in the media and the lefty “alternative” media have spent the past six years demonizing every form of conservative thought, from fever-swamp leftybloggers chanting “Conservatives are Racist” to Janet Napolitano putting every form of conservative thought on a terror watchlist.

If you build a government around the notion of demonizing your opponents, your government will demonize your opponents.