So last Wednesday, the entire State Legislature attended a “Policy Conference” at the U of M.

Check out the notice.  It’s “closed to the public”.

Inquiries to the U’s public relations contact were – is this surprising to anyone? – not returned.

This follows close on the heels of an event in September at the U with Governor Dayton; Dayton’s performance appeared addled – but the U of M didn’t videotape the speech (citing “expense”), and the media in attendance embargoed their own video of Dayton’s performance.

I’m not as clear on open meeting laws as I should be, but I have to wonder: has the U become a handy place for the DFL to skirt open meeting laws?

To: General Stanley McChrystal (USA Ret)
From: Mitch Berg
Re: The Founding Fathers Had It Right

General,

Before I begin – thanks for your decades of service.

And, truth be hold, this post is less for you than it is for the rafts of liberals who’ve signed on as famboys this past 24 hours.

But the founding fathers knew that the military (as an institution, not as individual soldiers) is one of the things we needed to guard against to preserve our clvil liberties.  The standing army was every bit as big a boogeyman to the framers as the AR15 is to Andrew Cuomo.

And just as a cop or a county attorney or a federal prosecutor would love to toss the Fourth Amendment into the scrap heap (to the extent, let’s be honest, that it hasn’t  been), let’s just say your input is appreciated, but not really needed.

It’s not really against type, let’s just say.

That is all.

The left, the media and the Obama Administration – pardon the redundancy – have done their level best this past month to resurrect the spectre of gun control aimed at the law-abiding civilian.

According to more and more polls, they’ve failed:

A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that 54 percent of American adults would feel safer if their child’s school had an armed security guard.

And it seems Wayne LaPierre’s speech has exposed a vein of tough-minded pragmatism afoot in the country:

The same poll found that among parents of school-aged children, support for armed guards is even higher. Sixty two percent of such parents would feel safer with an armed security guard at the school, while 22 percent would feel safer if their child attended a gun-free school.

And some bi-partisan common sense:

And even as the gun banners seek to blame and attack NRA for the actions of a killer, Gallup’s poll reveals that NRA still has a 54 percent favorable rating among Americans. It is worth noting that, as of January 3rd, the Real Clear Politics average of President Obama’s approval rating is slightly lower, at 53.4 percent.

This is a big lesson for Second Amendment people; don’t panic.  And stay active.  It’s because of a generation’s worth of relentless activism that we’ve taught Americans – real Americans [1], anyway –  the truth about this issue.  America has grown up over the past forty years – from being led around on the issue by the in-the-bag media, to having independent thought and reasoning.

And there’s a lesson there for conservatives, the Tea Party and the GOP; people can learn the truth, and truth and reason can outflank the media.  But it takes time, determination, money, patience and courage.

The Second Amendment movement and all its component parts – and the NRA is the biggest single component, but by no means the only important one – has grown into the most successful grass-roots political efforts over the long term since the Abolition movement.   And it’s gotten there by relentless effort, and by realizing the battle is a marathon, not a sprint.  The rest of conservative America needs to remember that.

The orcs will never waste a crisis; there’ll be other atrocities, and the left will exploit them.  Now is no time for complacency.

But panic is equally out of place.

(more…)

WELCOME, Instapundit readers!

———-

My neighbor AVERY LIBRELLE is concerned about gun violence.

We met at a local coffee shop, where we spoke over the sound of a group of locals that was keeping alive the tradition of out-of-tune folk music played by large, enthusiastic groups of the tone-deaf.

LIBRELLE:  We need to ban high-clip bullets and assault weapons!

ME:  Ugh.

LIBRELLE: “Ugh?”  What?

ME:  Oh, I’ve only been having this argument for 25 years.  For starters, they’re called “high-capacity magazines”.  A “clip” as a general term for “anything that holds bullets” is a bit of Hollywood slang.  Really explaining it requires me to get all pedantic about how guns work, and I know you don’t care, and explaining it really takes me off the topic, but here – let me show you this:

“Clips”, pretty much by definition, are not “high-capacity”.  To talk much more about it would be to go onto a tangent that only gun geeks really care much about.

LIBRELLE:  Well, the media uses them interchangeably.

ME:  Uh, yeah.

LIBRELLE:  Anyway – you can not show me a reason anyone needs a…what?  High-capacity “magazine”?

ME:  No, I can’t show you one.

LIBRELLE:  I knew it.

ME:  I can show you several. (more…)

Last week:  the Lower Hudson Journal News – an anti-gun rag in metro New York – published an interactive map of all legal carry permit holders in Rockland and Westchester counties of New York.

This week?  They’ve hired armed guards:

A Clarkstown police report issued on December 28, 2012, confirmed that The Journal News has hired armed security guards from New City-based RGA Investigations and that they are manning the newspaper’s Rockland County headquarters at 1 Crosfield Ave., West Nyack, through at least tomorrow, Wednesday, January 2, 2013.

According to police reports on public record, Journal News Rockland Editor Caryn A. McBride was alarmed by the volume of “negative correspondence,” namely an avalanche of phone calls and emails to the Journal News office, following the newspaper’s publishing of a map of all pistol permit holders in Rockland and Westchester.

“Negative correspondence?”   You mean, threats?

McBride had filed at least two reports with the Clarkstown Police Department due to perceived threats. However, the police did not find the communications in question actually threatening. Incident-Report 2012-00033099 describes McBride telling police she was worried because an email writer wondered “what McBride would get in her mail now.”

Police said the email “did not constitute an offense” and did not contain an actual threat.

When did American journalists turn into such pansies?

(It’s a rhetorical question.  It happened about the time they decided to be high priests of information in the employ of the left).

You, the peasant, shouldn’t have guns; they, the patricians, must – to protect themselves from you, the peasant.

See how it works?

“Why do you need teh gun?” – Because it’s the duty of every law-abiding American to own and be proficient with firearms.

“You’re joking, right?” – Oh, sort of.

“You know what I think?  I think gun owners are compensating for something?” – Oh, haha.  Never heard that one before.  Honest.

But no, you’re right.  We’re compensating for the fact that our society is full of the depraved, the amoral and those that think their ends justify their means.

“Owning a gun is about teh fear!” – The same way buying insurance is about “fear” of fire or accidents, or the same way packing blankets and candles in your car is about “fear” of icy roads and blowing snow.  In other words, baloney.  It’s about responding prudently and reasonably to things about which one might be legitimately afraid.

“Aren’t gun owners just a bunch of teh flaby bald white guys?” – Sure, in the same sense that gay marriage proponents are a bunch of mincing, flouncing, buttless-chaps-wearing effeminate show-tune-singing poofters.

“Hey, that’s nothing but teh derogatory stereotype, designed to try to negate your opponents arguments by dehumanizing them without ever engaging any of teh facts!” – Bingo.  The difference is, I don’t believe the thing about gay marriage proponents.

“But teh conservative GOP Senator with teh “A” rating from teh NRA said big clips are useless for hunting!”  – Then that “conservative Senator” should get docked a few points.  The 2nd Amendment doesn’t protect hunting!

“OK, smart guy, why does a citizen need a gun with teh big clip for?” – For starters, it’s only a “clip” if it “clips” the bullets together.  Like this:

If it’s a metal box, like on an AK47 or an AR15 or a Glock, it’s called a “Magazine”.

Remember that and you’ll sound marginally less ignorant.

OK, now to answer your question – and I say this without acknowledging if I do or do not own one or more weapons with high-capacity magazines; if I do have them, I need them because the threat, out there – robbers, burglars, gang-bangers of all stripes – have them.  Indeed, gun and magazine prohibitions make them more likely to have them.

Now, I don’t hunt, and I never likely will.  But I am a self-defense shooter, and anti-gunner wives’ tales to the contrary, there have been cases when armed intruders and home invaders, whether high or highly motivated or both, have opted not to turn tail and run when the home/business owner fired six, seven, eight or ten shots.  It’s happening often enough that most cops have not only traded in their six-shot revolvers for semi-auto handguns with 15-18 rounds, but retired their good ol’ shotguns for AR15s and M4s – fully-automatic assault rifles, not merely ugly “assault weapons” – in the trunk (leaving lots of surplus Remington 870 Express 12 gauges going for really nice prices at area gun shops!)

“So you think your life is as valuable as a cop’s?” – Yep.

“But robbereys like that hardly ever happin!” – Either do car crashes.  But you wear your seatbelt, don’t you?”

“No!  That’s what teh Police are for”  – OK, then.

“But conservative Republican Joe Scarborough, who says he’s a member of  teh NRA, says there’s no need for guns that can fire 30 shots in teh second!” – Joe Scarborough was a conservative in 1994.  He makes vaguely Republican noises these days, on some issues.  But it’s with this remark he not only shows why he can’t get a show on a real network, but that he must be one of those rare NRA members that knows nothing about firearms.  Guns that “fire 30 shots a second”, fully-automatic firearms like machine guns, submachine guns and real honest-to-pete military Assault Rifles, have been illegal for most citizens since 1934.

“But killings with assault weapons are out of control!” – As usual, no.  Murder in general dropped 14% in the past four years, and the drop among firearms deaths led all others.  And out of 10,000 or so firearms homicides in, say 2007, 358 involved rifles, which is down sharply since the mid-20002, and about a quarter of the 1,704 knife murders, not to mention much much lower than the 540 involving blunt objects, or the 745 people killed with fists and hands. And I’m going to bet that the vast majority of those were not legally purchased, by the way.

“Well, you are kidding yourself!  No citizen has ever stopped teh mass murdor!” – Sure they have.  I listed the ones I could find here.  And those were just the cases where the authorities said in as many words “there was a mass shooting incident underway”, which they usually won’t if it stops before anyone’s hurt.  Check it out.

“Well, you are teh coward.  A real man doesn’t need teh gun and I’m proud of it!” – Well, that’s your choice.  Go for it.  In fact, take that feeling to the next level.  Put one of these in your front window.

No, seriously – your masters have decreed it, so you have no choice.  Put your ass, and your family’s safety, where your precious little mouth is.  Deal?

Get right on that!

“Well, it’s time to have a conversation about guns” – We’ve been having one for almost forty years.  And the gun-grabber side lost.  And they’ll lose this time too, because outside the self-referential, self-adoring, rhetorically-onanistic lefty cluster-cuddle between the media, the alt-media, academia and the lefty wonk class, most of America has been convinced that you’re wrong.

Which doesn’t mean people like me – law-abiding citizens who believe in and practice the Second Amendment – are going to stop working to keep the battle won.

Because we’re always “having a conversation about guns”.  It’s just that you want the other side, my side, to shut up and let you do all the talking.

And as much as you’d like that, I for one decline.  Thanks.

The GOP’s new motto on immigration reform?  Yo quiero pander…to all sides of the debate:

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Politico that he’s open to giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship in exchange for a temporary moratorium on all legal immigration while they “assimilate.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a longtime proponent of reform, said legalization should be paired with the repeal of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. And Republican House Speaker John Boehner told reporters on Friday that he would not commit to including a path to citizenship in his immigration reform efforts…

Juan Hernandez, a Texas-based Republican political consultant who served as Sen. John McCain’s director of Hispanic outreach in 2008, said whatever the potential disagreements, congressmen should start hammering out a deal now.

“Should it be with two, three or four steps? That’s fine. Let’s negotiate. But let’s starting taking the first steps immediately,” Hernandez said. “We may not find a political moment again in which at least I see everyone saying it’s time for immigration reform.”

The cries that demographics equal destiny for an eventual GOP shift to the left on all issues pertaining to immigration reform have been shouted for some time.  And in the wake of a narrow popular vote re-election for Barack Obama, carried in part by a 44% margin of victory among Latino voters, the cries have renewed with vigor.  Even some in the conservative intelligentsia have backed a 2007-esque immigration reform stance, including Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer.

But would backing amnesty, a path to citizenship, however the GOP wishes to define such legislation, really give the GOP any electoral edge?  Republicans have gained nothing among African-American voters despite the GOP’s critical role in civil rights legislation.  Yet pollsters love to mention Bush’s 44% showing among Latinos in 2004 and equally enjoy pointing out 65% of all voters (including 3 out of 4 Latinos) support some opportunity at citizenship for illegal immigrants.  Of course, Bush’s Latino support was greatly inflated and was more likely around 38%.  And last, but not least, is the data suggesting that immigration from Latin American countries may be actually reversing.

That last part is critical because Latino attitudes towards immigration reform vary depending on whether they were born here or immigrated.  While 42% of all Latino voters called immigration reform their number one issue, only 32% of U.S. born Latinos agreed compared to 54% who were foreign born.  Financially stable ($80k+ incomes) Latinos and those who are second generation are less likely to focus on immigration reform or support carte blanche amnesty.  Those who called Spanish their first language were far more interested in immigration reform than those who said English was their primary language.  The greater integrated recent immigrants had become, the less interested they were in immigration concerns.

Republicans focus on Latinos when speaking about immigration reform ignores a number of other demographic groups who have more at stake in any immigration conversation.  Asians are now the largest block of recent immigrants, surpassing Hispanic migration.  And as a voting block, Asian-Americans voted by similar margins to Latinos for Obama.  Where are the breathless newspaper column inches declaring the GOP must court Asian-Americans?

Republican outreach to minority groups has been a priority mothballed election cycle after election cycle.  If an election where nearly 13 million fewer voters showed up prompts the GOP to finally engage demographics they’ve thus far all but ignored, then great.  But if Republicans try and out liberal liberals on issues like immigration reform, they will continue to find no real opportunities for political gain.

ADDENDUM: Rachel Campos-Duffy at National Review hits the nail on the head of the broader challengers standing between Republicans and Latino voters:

Hispanics come to America for the American Dream. They are “trabajadores,” and you would be hard pressed to find an American farmer, contractor, or restaurant owner who would not testify to their work ethic. Unfortunately, the communities in which they live and work are teeming with liberal activists: farm and service-industry labor unions, well-intentioned community-based social services providers and more radical and racially motivated Latino groups such as La Raza, LULAC, and Mecha. In addition, the curricula their kids encounter in public schools are either hostile or silent on the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and ideas that are the foundation of conservative thinking. All of these activist groups and institutions have a common ideology and an affinity for big and centralized government, and of course, entitlements. They go out of their way to sign folks up and to begin the cycle of government dependency. Once hooked to the IV of government handouts, a steady drip of ideology, and a heavy dose of raunchy pop culture, the once vibrant American Dreams and traditional family values of Hispanics drift into a slow, deep coma.

The bourough’s au pair

Michael Bloomberg dresses up as Ray Nagin for Halloween.

Perhaps the symbolism is apt.  As New Yorkers and assorted guests from around the world gather in Staten Island to race in the New York City Marathon, Gotham’s Mayor finds himself running for his political life.

With the Eastern seaboard in shambles, power and transportation cut off to some boroughs in New York, and 19 dead at the Marathon’s starting line alone, it’s not hard to see what Mayor Michael Bloomberg thought he was accomplishing by pronoucing that the run would continue, Sandy or not.  The Marathon has been held every year since 1970 (a relatively short time for a city with a history stretching into the early 17th century).  A continuation of that tradition could project a calming influence on a battered city and provide Bloomberg the sort of popularity boost badly needed amid his sagging approval ratings.

Instead, Mayor Mike is being seen as diverting police and rescue resources from a city in dysfunction while simultaneously diverting his attention to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.  That Bloomberg has couched his work in the latter as due to Obama’s nearly nonexistent work against “climate change” might strike Gothamites as a sick joke from a Mayor whose lack of flood preparation has submereged their city while unleasing an estimated 8 million-plus rats from the sewers.  Bread and circuses might be the order of the day, but rat-traps, canned goods and diesel might be required.

Gotham hasn’t suffered this much since Tom Hardy donned a goatse mask.

Writing in The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead has penned what might be the penultimate political obituary of Michael Bloomberg, save for whatever New York’s technocrat-in-chief plans for the remainder of his term.  For if its anything like his third, it won’t be much:

The Mayor decided to run for a third term, but he was caught by his own term limits. The hacks on the City Council made clear that they wouldn’t give him an exemption from term limits unless the limits were lifted for everybody else. Disgracefully, Bloomberg took the deal and helped the corrupt political class destroy his greatest achievement….

The third term saw the Mayor struggle for a theme. His issues grew smaller and smaller: saturated fats, Big Gulp sodas—did Bloomberg really think it was worth wrecking term limits to campaign for these things? The air leaked out of his national political ambitions and the city waited patiently for his tenure to end.

Left unspoken in Read’s otherwise expansive review of Bloomberg’s legacy are the series of public-service failures that predated Hurricane Sandy.  The late 2010 snowfall that bedeviled most of the country snarled NYC’s traffic for days, leading even Bloomberg to sheepishly declare that “we’ve looked at some things that we probably could have done better.”  A city that had made significant progress against crime (a holdover from the Giuliani days), reversed itself in 2012 as crime stats rose for the first time in 20 years.  One of Bloomberg’s few public successes had been handling Hurricane Irene; the lessons of which apparantly weren’t taken to heart a little over a year later.

It is those failures, and many smaller ones, that strike at the heart of what was once Michael Bloomberg’s appeal – results-oriented governance.  Bloomberg may have been a cold, aristocratic figure who lacked much of a “common-touch” with the plebs of NYC, but he stood between many average New Yorkers and the army of liberal partisans who saw City Hall as Grand Central Station for a variety of socioeconomic engineering ideas.  So what if Bloomberg liked to chase grandoise ambitions of national office or dabbled in Nanny-state legislation that brought him media acclaim?  As long as the power stayed on, the trains ran on time, and crime was down, who cared if your fried chicken tasted like crap since it wasn’t cooked with trans-fats?  For most New Yorkers, it was the small price of electoral business.

In politics, like business, people are willing to pay for flaws as long as they outweigh the perks (witness the long lines for the latest iPhone).  Today, few New Yorkers will be thinking about sodium intake or banned salt shakers.  But they will be asking themselves if Michael Bloomberg cares more about his agenda than the city’s.

ADDENDUM:  Mayor Mike listens – sort of – and cancels the NYC Marathon.  But not without casting a few stones at those who criticized his decision to Keep Calm & Run On:

“We would not want a cloud to hang over the race or its participants, and so we have decided to cancel it,” Mr. Bloomberg and the organizers said in a joint news release. “We cannot allow a controversy over an athletic event—even one as meaningful as this—to distract attention away from all the critically important work that is being done to recover from the storm and get our city back on track.”

…in New York…:

View more videos at: http://nbcnewyork.com.

…remember: Obama’s Department of Homeland Security thinks that people who store food and supplies are dangerous.

I went to the minute clinic at Target the other day for a flu shot.

After I got the shot, I was astounded to see a nurse walk into the room with a bag and a tube.

And then a doctor, at the head of a small surgery team (anaesthesiologist and a couple of nurses) pushing a surgery cart, all scrubbed in and ready to go.

And after that, another small team of doctors and nurses carrying an Eskimo cooler.

And finally  buxom Swedish woman in low-cut set of white scrubs and white short shorts.

“Um, what?” I started speaking.  “All of this for a flu shot?”

“Oh, heavens no”, said the nurse as she tossed the syringe in a passing child’s backpack.  “Carrie”, she said, pointing to the nurse with the bag and the tube “is here to give you a colonoscopy.  And Jeff and his team”, she said, pointing to the surgical crew and their gear as they nodded and smiled under their surgical masks” are here to remove your appendix.  And Dr. Stavronakis’ team”, she said, pointing at the people with the cooler, who waved back, “are here to transplant you a new liver.  And Inge is here to give you a massage”.  Inge grinned.

“Er…”, I started, “that’s great – but I’m just here for a flu shot.  I don’t need a colonocopy – not just yet – my appendix and liver are both fine, knock wood, and as to the massage – well…”

“So you believe people don’t need colonocopies, appendectomies, liver transplants and massage?”

“Sure – people do.  Just not me, at this particular visit, knock wood”.  I looked at Inge, who was starting to pout a bit.  “Well, except for…”

The nurse glared at me sternly.  “Don’t you believe in medicine?”

“Well, sure, but if it’s medicine I don’t need, why do it?”

The nurse sighed an exaggeraged sigh.  “Oh, whatever.  That’ll be $400,000”.

“What?  All I got was a flu shot! You charged me for a colonocopy, an appendectomy, a liver transplant and a massage!”

“Oh, shoot.   I’ll fix that.  But…are you sure?  Because medicine is pretty important…”

———-

There are some reasons we have government.  Defending the country, making and enforcing laws (preferably just the ones we need, although that cow left the barn eighty years ago), enforce contracts – nobody really argues about those.

And there are some other functions that all but the most Libertarian among us can tolerate; I think the Centers for Disease Control is a good investment.  While Libertarian cases for privatizing infrastructure are tempting, it’s just a matter of fact that they have been mostly government endeavors – and as such, less useless than most others.  And most people agree that government, in general, should provide some level of support for some social safety net – especially for people in temporary, dire need.

And there is no more temporary, more dire need than an epic natural disaster, one that strains private resources (even those not already overstrained by supporting big government) and mangles infrastructure in a wide area.  Most people agree that the government, in some form, has a place in dealing with huge disasters – coordinating and supporting relief after the fact, and helping with the planning to prevent them by facilitating public and private efforts to mitigate disasters before the fact (see also: virtually every levee, dijk and storm-surge mitigation system ever built).

But there are those – like the (fictional, thank merciful heavens) nurse in my example above and the New York Times (which isn’t fictional – not yet), who believe that you can’t just stop with the government you really, rationally need; it’s all or nothing.  To them, Government is a Cable TV subscription; you want FEMA, the Interstate Highway System and the Navy?  You gotta also take dairy price supports, multigenerational subsidy of poverty, bloated bureaucracy, trillions in entitlement spending, vast federal intervention in credit and property markets – a fiscal colonocopy, to run with my example, and no, muscle relaxants are not  covered under Obamacare.

The lefty chanting point-bots have been chattering like busy little meerkats over Romney’s remarks about FEMA, as if hypothesizing on principle that a huge, inefficient bureacracy might not yield the best disaster-relief bang for the taxpayers’ buck is the same as stating as a matter of policy that the bureaucracy should be shut down in mid-disaster.  It is a fact that FEMA is a huge, costly bureaucracy with a long history of wastefulness and ineffectiveness, home of one waste scandal after another going back to the Carter years (although the left only observes it when Republicans are in office); to make matters worse, it’s been folded into a bigger, even more wasteful and less-effective bureaucracy, the “Department of Homeland Security”.

Apparently if I point out that both bureaucracies – which I support with my tax dollars – are bloated, inefficient and have wide swathes of corruption, I should expect not to ask for help if there is a disaster.

And apparently I’m not supposed to ask “rather than have a permanent sub-cabinet-level bureaucracy with tens of thousands of employees to plan for emergencies that states and individuals are, or should be, planning for, why not simply create regional preparedness forums for state, private and federal groups and resources, and appoint a “Disaster Czar” with proven executive disaster management experience to facilitate the coordination of state, private and federal resources on an ad hoc basis?”, because that’s unpatriotic.

I ask “why can’t we just have the government we need?” – and the only real answer seems to be “because we just don’t do it that way anymore”.

And “This won’t hurt a bit”.

I got an email from MPR the other day.  It was actually a combo email from MPR News and “The Current” asking what song we thought best summed up the state of the nation during this election season.

I wrote back with my suggestion – a song that has layer upon layer of significance to our nation, our society, our zeitgeist and the election itself.  A song that’s all about dreaming a big dream, and having those dreams run up on the rocks, and hitting that moment where you have to think “was that a dream or was it a mirage?”.  A song about that moment when you have to decide – do I drown, or do I sack up and carry on?

A song about truth and consequences.  A song that, on a work week after a long trip across the prairie, reminds me of the huge swathe in the middle of this country, the square states full of bitter gun-clinging jebus freaks like me that are, in fact, my home and background and blood and my past.  And that is, with a blessing and a tailwind, may be our nation’s future.

The song is “This Hard Land” by Bruce Springsteen.

It’s a song he wrote during a John Steinbeck jag, for Born in the USA, and that should have been on the album (be honest – would anyone miss “Downbound Train?”) and was in its day one of the most sought-after bootlegs in Springsteen’s oeuvre.

So many layers to this song, and to the reasons I chose it.

First verse?

Hey there mister can you tell me what happened to the seeds Ive sown

Can you give me a reason sir as to why they’ve never grown

They’ve just blown around from town to town

Till they’re back out on these fields

Where they fall from my hand

Back into the dirt of this hard land

Thomas Hobbes, the 18th-century British intellectual who was one of the patron saints of conservatism as we understand it today, couldn’t have expressed better the fundamental conservative ideal that “life’s a bitch”, that there are forces that are bigger and more powerful than men and their dreams.

But well return to that.

Now me and my sister from germantown

We did ride

We made our bed sir from the rock on the mountainside

We been blowin around from town to town

Lookin for a place to stand

Where the sun burst through the cloud

To fall like a circle

Like a circle of fire down on this hard land

America is a land of myths.  Mostly big and glorious ones – like the ones that drew our forefathers, like the singer and his sister, from their old homes, the Germantowns and Norwayvilles and Saigon Centers, to This Hard Land.   Much of what America sees as its own self-image – whether the wilderness of the Badlands or the wilderness of the tradiing floor or the inventors garage or the moon or the neighborhood or the entrenched beliefs of the human heart – is about the epic American dream of going where your ancestors have never gone before, of being something they weren’t.

And over the past seventy years, it’s become about the marketing of those dreams, whether via John Wayne or “Hope and Change”.

But like all dreams – and their cousins, the myth and the chimera – they run afoul a brutal reality:

Now even the rain it don’t come round

It don’t come round here no more

And the only sound at nights the wind

Slammin the back porch door

It just stirs you up like it wants to blow you down

Twistin and churnin up the sand

Leavin all them scarecrows lyin face down

Face down in the dirt of this hard land

The prairie is dotted with the remains of old farm homes from families that just didn’t make it, flindered remains of their back doors still slamming in the wind.  Just as America is dotted with businesses that tried and failed, leaving behind empty buildings, rusty frames, doors drifting back and forth in the desultory breeze.  And yes, the wreckage of government initiatives like the one that’s dominated our political life this past presidential term, a dream – a chimera from a brief majority four years ago – of an undertaking that, despite the fervency of its dreamers’ beliefs, has failed as completely as the sodbuster in the song.  Whether through poor design, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or being fundamentally wrong or – like the singer and his sister – just from suffering a bad run of luck in the face of a merciless and uncaring Nature, all of human existence is a tough grind dominated by forces we don’t, by ourselves, control.

Being human, we attempt to control them anyway – to bring order to the chaos, and to tame the untameable:

 From a building up on the hill

I can hear a tape deck blastin’ “Home on the Range”

I can see them Bar-M choppers

Sweepin’ low across the plains

Its me and you, Frank, we’re lookin for lost cattle

Our hooves twistin and churnin up the sand

Were ridin in the whirlwind searchin for lost treasure

Way down south of the Rio Grande

Were ridin cross that river

In the moonlight

Up onto the banks of this hard land

It’s human nature to try to bottle up and contain Nature, whether the nature around us or the nature inside us.

And it’s one of the great dividing lines in human nature, the one between those who are content for their “home on the range” to come recorded, to have the almighty Bar-M or The Almighty  or The One out looking for the strays, for those who are just fine being “Julia“…

…and those whose dreams, or mirages, embrace the chaos that ensues where life and Nature, natural and human, are in conflict.

And the last verse is for them:

Hey frank wont ya pack your bags

And meet me tonight down at liberty hall

Just one kiss from you my brother

And we’ll ride until we fall

Well sleep in the fields

Well sleep by the rivers and in the morning

Well make a plan

Well if you can’t make it

Stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive

If you can

And meet me in a dream of this hard land

Whether it’s the pioneer seeking more elbow room from all the other settlers and their choppers and tape decks, or from bouncing back from a failure, or a big part of a nation taking a deep breath and saying “this is not the path we want”, or, I dunno, Atlas shrugging for all I know, this verse – with allusions to Okies loading up their trucks and bidding their relatives goodbye, or immigrants climbing on the boat and wishing their old lives auf wiedersehen, or men kissing their wives and kids and mustering down at Liberty Hall as the drums and the hobnails rattle on the wind, or a people saying “thanks, Julia, and all the best to you and that mysterious niece and/or nephew that appeared a few frames back, but I’m looking for something a little more…epically mythical” – is the American myth; the idea that we are a restless pack of strivers looking for a newer, better, freer horizon.

Beyond that, in terms of politics today?  Every generation dreams of leaving a better world to their kids, as I do for my kids and my new granddaughter. We have a distinct chance, as things go, of leaving them a world that my ancestors in the Dust Bowl would look at and whisper “there but for the grace of God…”.  And unlike the the Okies, our immigrant forefathers and protagonist in “This Hard Land”, this time there’s noplace to ride away to to start over.  We’re stuck with this hard land.

More on this after the election.

Anyway – ask a question, you’ll get an answer.  Usually.

UPDATE:  Hobbes, not Hume.  Sigh.  It’s been a few years.

UPDATE 2:  Welcome, Bob Collins’ readers!

(more…)

I’ve been a huge Dinesh D’Souza fan since I read his Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary President over a decade ago; it may have been the best Reagan bio ever.

And I got a chance to see 2016 over the weekend.  It didn’t disappoint:

The movie’s thesis is…

(Spoiler Alert: I’m going to talk spoilers below the jump, although to be fair I think much of what’s in the movie has been in the public domain; this is just the first high-profile place I’ve seen it all collected into one coherent thesis)

(more…)

P.J. O’Rourke – the greatest writer of my generation, even though he’s a generation older than me – writes on the dolorous effect of the Baby Boomers on not just American society, but the idea of America.

O’Rourke laments the death of far-sweeping goals – going to the moon, building the biggest dam or the tallest building, being the biggest and the baddest:

But if America is still rich and strong, why should it matter that we’re no longer interested in doing anything spectacular? Maybe critics of an America whose grasp exceeds its reach are victims of atavistic machismo. Maybe we have Freudian issues. Professional help might be in order. No Americans are scheduled to go to Mars, but plenty are scheduled to go to therapy. Perhaps the realities of 2012 demand a change in attitude.

Except the change has already happened, the result of our shift from an exterior to an interior existence. America once valued the high-skilled. Now we value the high-minded. We used to admire bold ideas. Now we admire benign idealism. This doesn’t make us good, it makes us wrong. The bold can be achieved. Of the ideal, there is none in this life.

And why does it matter?

America’s retreat from visible, tangible manifestations of superiority doesn’t hurt just our pride, our economy, and our place in the Guinness Book of World Records. It’s also a bad advertising campaign. America has one great product to sell, individual liberty. It’s attractive, useful, healthy, and the fate of the world depends upon it.

We are the most important and maybe the only country that fully embodies the sanctity, dignity, independence, and responsibility of each and every person. “American” is not a nationality, an ethnicity, or a culture; it’s a fact of human freedom. Our country was not created and is not governed by a ruling class or even by majority rule. America is individuals exercising their right to do what they think is best with due respect (to the extent human nature allows) for the right of all other Americans to do likewise. This is not an ideology or a system. This is a blessing.

You should read the whole  thing.  And vote accordingly.

In the last few weeks, since Ron Paul got eliminated from the running for the nomination, I’ve seen not a few Minnesota Ron Paul supporters waxing mildly suicidal that their guy didn’t pack the gear to go the distance in the primaries and caucuses.  Paul nabbed three states, if I recall correctly, including Minnesota – giving them what I think it was Shot In The Dark’s associate editor First Ringer once called (I’m paraphrasing closely, I think, maybe) that delusion that you could pull it off that’s so well-known to insurgent dark horse candidates from Obi Sium to Ross Perot.

Unlike most states, the Paul camp is running a candidate in a high-profile race here in Minnsota.  Unfortunately, Kurt Bills is a low-profile candidate – a freshman State Rep from Rosemount – running against the pleasant, innocuous, mistake-averse Amy Klobuchar and the media Praetorian Guard that shields her from inadvertent controversy.  The poll numbers show it. In a just world, Bills would be competitive – but in Minneosta, Republicans have to make their own justice.   Not to say long shots have no shot – ask Chip Cravaack or (shudder) Jesse Ventura.  Work like hell for Kurt Bills – I know I will do my best too.  But Hollywood money, a decade of name recognition, and stifling media pollyannaism are a tough row to hoe, and the polls are, at the moment, showing it.

And that’s why if you’re one of the flood of Ron Paul supporters in the Fourth and Fifth CDs that so stirred up the GOP’s pot last spring, I’d like your attention.

Because you do have a chance to shock the world.

Tony Hernandez in the Fourth CD is one guy whose platform is completely amenable to any  Ron Paul supporter.  He’s running in a tough district, sure enough…

…but it’s a district that is winnable.  Betty McCollum is a Zombie Democrat; she sleepwalks to 70-30 victories every two years pretty much because she’s a DFLer.  But redistricting made the Fourth much more Republican-friendly, adding Stillwater, Woodbury and Afton to the mix.  It’s not the same district it was even two years ago.

And here’s the deal – people just don’t care about Betty that much.  Fewer and fewer people turn out to vote for her every two years; I know DFLers who haven’t voted for her in a looong time.  She’s an empty skirt; when she give a speech, she’s like a substitute teacher who’s straining to control a class, and failing.  Her crowning “achievement” in a district with plummeting home values, a metro area school system with among the worst achievement gaps in the country, and unemployment lagging the rest of the state?  Saving us from the scourge of military ads in NASCAR.

Oh, there’s method to the madness; Representative McCollum sees that redistricting has changed her district, and is looking for a singular “Achievement” to show she’s “fiscally conservative” (cutting a tiny little fleck of spending, against the trillions in deficits she’s voted to create) while not cheesing off her base (she’s cutting military spending, although only the most innocuous kind).

She knows that there is a more conservative current in her district than she’s seen before.

In part?  She knows you, the Paul supporters, are out there.  And she’s trying to placate you.

So here’s the deal.  If you, the mass of Ron Paul supporters who swept into power in the Fourth, can pull together and each get a friend or two to come to the polls this November and vote Hernandez, you can do something for Ron Paul’s movement – including its future, Rand Paul – that Ron Paul himself couldn’t do: win a significant, Congressional office with someone not named “Paul”.

And if you are Marianne Stebbins, the organizer from Excelsior who engineered the epic statewide Ron Paul sweep in the caucuses, and were able to get Ron Paul himself to throw down on Hernandez’ behalf – what the heck, maybe even come here and seriously campaign for Tony as well as Kurt Bills – it’d sure put a wind in your movement’s sails, now, wouldn’t it?

Because antics in Tampa notwithstanding, whether you’re a recent grad who came out for Paul last spring, or a shadowy organizer from the Lake, you gotta know that it’s only by putting candidates in office that you actually earn real, long-term relevance.

And Betty McCollum is so freaking beatable, why on earth not do it?

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

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

Shut up, watch and learn.

As we noted on Tuesday, the Strib’s coverage of the fact that over 100,000 Minnesotans have carry permits (six weeks later than it was covered in this space) had good news and bad news.

The good news?  Larry Oakes, the Strib reporter, did a decent job of finding some sources on the pro-gun side.  Like a few Strib reporters before him – Conrad DeFiebre was the first – he seems to have tried to do a fair job.

And maybe it’s that urge – and reportorial “duty” – to be fair that pushed Oakes into his mistake, and the bad news; Oakes took Heather Martens seriously.

That may be a form of “good news” in a sense; fifteen years ago, there were a couple of anti-gun groups, and a slew of Metrocrat DFL legislators who would queue up to bash on the Second Amendment and its supporters.  Now, Martens is pretty much the best anyone can manage.

And as this blog has been showing for most of the past decade, if Heather Martens says it, it’s a lie.  Or, in this classic example published by a very gullible and uninformed Minnesota Public Radio, fifteen lies in a row with barely a breath.

But here’s where it gets serious:  Oakes writes…:

State data shows that since the law took effect, permit holders were convicted of 882 non-traffic crimes, including 66 assaults, two robberies and two killings. Many were committed with guns.

I don’t know the “66 assaults” or “two robberies”; I’m going to dig into those.

I’ll show you why in a moment.  Let’s focus on the “two killings”.

I had  a hunch where the “two killings” numbers came from.  I called Mr. Oakes at the Strib.  And he confimed – he’d been pointed to the numbers at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension by Martens.

The BCA doesn’t go into a lot of detail about what killings are what – but let’s presume that the “two killings” are not the two justifiable homicides in Hennepin County over the past couple of years – the Grumpy’s shooting, where a bouncer shot and killed a patron that was threatening him (and cut him!) with a knife, and the Evanovich shooting last fall, where a good samaritan killed a mugger who’d just pistol-whipped a woman in the parking lot of a Cub foods on East Lake, and then drew on the samaritan (who shot first, taking out Evanovich and ending a bit of a crime wave on East Lake).  HenCo attorney Mike Freeman – no fan of civilians with guns – ruled both of those shootings justifiable.  So those are of no use to Heather Martens or any anti-gunny.

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, other than these two, there have been two other shootings involving carry permittees, and the BCA records seem to line up with them.

The first “killing”, if my sources are correct (and they pretty much always are) was a 2010 suicide; a man in Duluth who had pled guilty a week earlier to sexual assault.

There are a couple of interesting details about this case, though:

• For starters, his permit should have been yanked when he pled guilty – in court, that moment – if not when he was arrested for felony sexual assault.  So if the man – Brock McCarthy was his name – ever had a permit, he shouldn’t have when he killed himself.  That’s if the system worked as it is supposed to.
• He shot himself in his home.  His permit was irrelevant.
• It was a suicide.  Not a murder.  While suicide is a tragedy (that, in this case, was connected to another awful crime), it’s different than killing a second or third party who doesn’t want to get killed.

While suicide is a tragedy, one needn’t have a carry permit – or a gun – to do it. People without permits – or guns – do it all the time.  The only difference with gun suicides is that it’s rarely about “seeking attention”, like cutting one’s wrists or taking pills. It’s about wanting to check out, now. Tragic? Sure. A rap on carry permits? Nope. Fishy to present as a “killing”, in the sense of a person killing another person?

Absoflutely.

The second killing was one Michelle Rae Wilson, who killed her boyfriend in 2008 in St. Paul.  Wilson was convicted of second-degree murder.  I’m familiar with the case; my friend the late Joel Rosenberg covered it extensively.  It was a fair cop.   It was also in her home – the carry permit was irrelevant.

(On the off-chance that the other homicide was the shooting at Nye’s back in 2005?  The permit-holder was using a pre-“Shall-Issue” permit, one of the ones issued with the full police discretion that, Heather Martens would have you believe, made them safer than the ones we’ve had for the past nine years).

Martens’ point was to try to impugn carry permittees – as Oakes’ next quote made clear:

Martens said it debunks the notion that all permit holders are law-abiding.

Let’s shoot that strawman in the face.  Nobody said “all” permittees were law-abiding.  Merely much more law-abiding than the general public.

As Oakes, to his credit, allows Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance boss Andrew Rothman to note:

Rothman responded that permit holders commit much less than their share of crime, citing as an example that though one in seven Minnesotans has a DWI on their record, only one in 545 of the state’s permit holders got one after getting a permit.

“No one ever claimed permit holders would be perfect,” Rothman said, “but the numbers show (they) are consistently orders of magnitude more law abiding than the general public.”

Indeed, as we’ve shown in this space, even in a bad year, carry permittees are a couple of orders of magnitude safer than the general public.

Let’s look at Minnesota statistics.  Leaving out the two justifiable homicides and the suicide, there has been one unjustified murder carried out by someone who had a carry permit in 10 years.   There are over 100,000 carry permittees.  Divided over ten years, that yields a murder rate of .1 per 100,000.  The murder rate in Minnesota averages around 2/100,000.  Carry permittees are 20 times safer than the general public.  So far.

And in terms of danger to the public?  From 2003-2010, there were 1107 murders in Minnesota (give or take a few – I did the math in my head).  That’s an annual murder rate of about 2 per 100,000.  Against that, we have one non-justifiable homicide carried out by a permit-holder.  That boils down to an annual rate of .002/100,000, meaning a typical citizen is just shy of three orders of magnitude less likely to be murdered (unjustifiably, anyway) by a carry permittee than by a non-permittee.

We’ll look into the “robberies” and “assaults” later.

Whatever the overall affect on society, Easton, the Twin Cities gun instructor, said he thinks that carrying has made him a safer member of it by giving him what he perceives to be “a sense of grace.”

“When you’re carrying a gun, you can’t afford to get accused of causing trouble, so you let things roll off your back,” he said. “You wave with all five fingers.”

Very, very true.

So there are two lessons from Larry Oakes’ story:

• The Strib is making an effort to cover the issue relatively fairly.
• On the other hand, if Heather Martens opens her mouth, she’s lying.

I think that sums it up well.

Via Power Line, I see that the Strib has noted the fact that 100,000 (currently 103,000) Minnesotans have carry permits…

…which was first reported in this space on May 31; well over 1z00,000 Minnesotans currently have active carry permits.

The Strib is finally on the story – and there’s good news, and there’s bad news.

The bad news?  They – in this case. reporter Larry Oakes – still can’t resist a bunch of the usual clichés:

[A carry permittee named Pat Cannon] not a vigilante. He’s not a nut. He’s just another average Minnesotan who has acquired the power to kill.

Why do I suspect the Strib newsroom is the only place, besides a DFL meeting (PTR) that “Vigilante” or “Nut” would have been suggested?   I mean, you get used to it when the MSM talkes about gunnies – this sense that underneath it all it’s just a little “off”.

But here’s the good news – Oakes balances things out relatively fairly:

[Permit training instructor Evam] Easton said the permit holders he knows “are lawyers, real estate agents — especially women who have to show houses alone — landscapers, a video engineer, a network technician, a radio show host [Quite a few of the, actually – Ed.], a couple of legislators, a mediator who talks divorced couples through sticky situations … a lot of typical, average careers.”

And to his credit, Oakes finds a couple of “experts” who are not completely ludicrous on the subject:

“America has long had a gun culture, but now it’s becoming a carry culture,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at the UCLA School of Law and author of “Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.”

Winkler traces the roots of the shift to fears spawned by the social and political upheaval of the 1960s.

“People began to see the gun as something for personal protection, not just hunting,” Winkler said. Meanwhile, as gun-control advocates pushed to get handguns banned in Washington, D.C. and Chicago, the NRA “changed overnight” in 1977, Winkler said, from stressing support for hunters to focusing like a laser on the right to bear arms.

Those factors helped trigger a handgun rights movement that swept the country, and by 2011, 37 states adopted so-called “shall issue” permit laws, taking away officials’ discretion to deny permits to people who are of legal age, sound mind and have no criminal history.

Not a bad whack at history for an MSM piece, all in all.  And it’s perhaps a sign that the Twin Cities media is growing in office ever so slightly that Andrew Rothman is getting as many calls as some of the more risible antis:

Rothman said it’s no surprise that a greater proportion of permit holders live where the gun culture is generations deep.

“If you grew up in Minneapolis, it’s easy to believe that guns are just plain trouble,” he said. “But you don’t have that out in the country, and the square miles are huge. If you have a dangerous situation, the police can be 30 minutes or an hour away.”

And Oakes does in fact manage to get outside the traditional envelope of media sources:

[A woman], a 40-year-old professional from the Twin Cities, asked that her name be withheld for the same reason she started carrying: A man with a violent history is stalking her.

She got a restraining order, but even the judge who signed it told her it wouldn’t necessarily protect her. So both she and her husband got permits and carry.

“I don’t want to ever have to use it, and I would rather not have the responsibility,” she said.

So so far I have to give kudos to Oakes.

And I can’t fault Oakes for his editorial drive to lend some balance to what has, so far, been a favorable story about Minnesota carry permittees.

But I saw the next section head…:

A mixed record

…and my Martensdar went off.

“Martensdar” is that feeling any Minnesota Second Amendment activist gets when Heather Martens is about to be cited as an expert source in the Twin Cities media (see also: Jacobsdar, Daveschultzdar).

And lemme tell you, my Martensdar is one finely-tuned machine:

The law “has not been a net benefit to our society in any way,” said Heather Martens, executive director of Protect Minnesota — Working to End Gun Violence. “They promised that if lots of people had guns everybody would be safe. Here just [recently] we had a 5-year-old child killed while sleeping on a couch. I think we were sold a bill of goods.”

Maybe Oakes is new to the guns beat.  Or maybe – this is actually the most likely – he can’t find another anti-gun “expert” in the Twin Cities.  It’s plausible that Oakes doesn’t know the single fact anyone needs to know about Heather Martens.

So here it is:  If Heather Martens says or writes something about guns, it’s a lie.  

This blog has been documenting Heather Martens’ serial perfidy for almost a decade.  Her “Group” (it’s not a group), “Protect Minnesota”, has just changed its name, because after almost a decade nobody took her seriously under the old name, “Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota”.

And she’s in traditional form with the statement above, with two toxic lies in one paragraph:

• Nobody, but nobody, “promised that if lots of people had guns everybody would be safe”.  We showed with a preponderance of evidence that we’d be safer – and we are.  Violent crime is down in Minnesota – especially the parts with the strongest gun culture.
• The five year old was not killed by a carry permittee.  He was killed by a juvenile (you need to be 21 to get a permit, and 18 to buy a gun legally, which I’m pretty certain the gun involved in the murder was not) on a block that was in effect a self-contained criminal enterprise, among a group of a adults among which one might suspect few would qualify for a carry permit (due to criminal records), in a city that was, and remains, hostile to the law-abiding gun owner.

But that’s not all.

There’s some even more misleading information in Martens’ contribution to Oakes’ piece.

More on Thursday.

Yesterday, the President invoked “executive privilege” in order to cover up his administration’s involvement in a plan to slander America’s law-abiding gun owners, which went awry and ended in the death of a Federal agent.

IBD’s editorial board has had enough

President Obama’s contempt for the rule of law hit a new low when, on the eve of a vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, he granted his AG’s 11th-hour request to hide sought-after documents on Operation Fast and Furious under the cover of executive privilege.

“I write now to inform you that the president has asserted executive privilege over the relevant post-Feb. 4, 2011, documents,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole says in a letter that GOP Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa received just before Wednesday’s hearing and vote, a letter that apparently was not mentioned in a last-minute meeting between Issa and Holder Tuesday night.

Or maybe it wasn’t the 11th hour at all, but just a long-planned final gambit in the cover-up of who made the decisions in a federally sponsored effort to provide Mexican drug cartels with sophisticated American firearms and who is ultimately responsible for the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry with these weapons?

Remember – Fast and Furious didn’t attack terrorism.  It didn’t even attack the narcotraficantes that have made Northern Mexico more dangerous than Iraq, Afghanistan, even Chicago.

It was a government financed effort to smear America’s firearms industry and law-abiding gun owners, in pursuit of Obama’s goal to try to reverse the slide in this nation’s gun control laws.

No more.

Executive privilege, as Issa noted in his opening remarks, can only be asserted when it involves direct presidential decision-making and communications. It cannot be invoked, legally, to prevent others in the chain of command from explaining their actions or responding to requests for information on their decisions in which the president is not involved.

And the Administration has been lying to Congress, and the people (over half of whom the program attempted to slander) the entire time:

Back in February 2011, Assistant Attorney General Ron Welch, in response to the investigations by Rep. Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley of the Fast and Furious gun-“walking” program run out of ATF’s Phoenix office, wrote a letter stating that the “allegation that ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons … is false.”

Later, Deputy Attorney General Cole, in another letter to Congress, wrote: “Facts have come to light during the course of this investigation that indicate the Feb. 4 letter contains inaccuracies.” In other words, the Department of Justice lied to Congress. The cover-up continues with the invocation of executive privilege.

IBD’s editorial writers have reached their conclusion:

Fast and Furious has become worse than Watergate. No one died at Watergate. Just what is in those documents that Obama and Holder so desperately want to hide? Brian Terry’s family and the American people deserve answers.

Well, this was supposed to be the most transparent administration in  history.

Rhetorical question:  can you imagine what would have happened had George W. Bush spent federal money to smear, say, ACORN or Common Cause or the Violence Policy Center?

March, 2012:  “You do NOT play politics with civil rights!” – DFLers getting the victorian vapours over the Minnesota Marriage Amendment

May 2012: “Mr. President, please stop making it so hard for us to play politics with civil rights!” – Senate Democrats responding to Obama’s Gay Marriage proclamations.

The Obama Administration and the left – at least, the mewling, white, upper-middle-class version of the Left – thinks it’s in a position to start re-instating gun control.

And they’re doing it the same way they started doing it 40 years ago; with a concentrated, coordinated, considered slander of all law-abiding gun owners.  Fast and Furious tipped the Administration’s hand; they want to undercut the “law-abiding” stock of the most law-abiding people in the United States – the legal gun owner,

You’re starting to see it in the media and in the leftyblogs that re-package BIg Left’s message for further regurgitation; the way the media tried to turn the Martin/Zimmerman case into a commentary on gun owners (to say nothing of the “Stand your Ground” law, which it – let’s repeat this – was not).

So it’s time for all of us who support the human right of self-defense – no less important than speech, religion, press or assembly – to do something that many of us figured we wouldn’t have to do anymore; get up, get organized, and start voting for gun rights again.

Don’t take it from me.  Take it from Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.

Remember when liberals opposed indefinite military detention of terror suspects captured on American soil?

Either do the libs or the President:

President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) today, allowing indefinite detention to be codified into law. As you know, the White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use it and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations.

But wait – isn’t this exactly what liberals were comdemning George W. Bush for?

The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.

Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again.

Forget about Jimmy Carter; it seems that Barack Obama has borrowed the most noxious and troublesome aspects of almost every previous Administration:

• From George W. Bush, the most troubling ingressions into civil liberty in the same of national security.
• From Bill Clinton, the most obnosxious two-faced hypocrisy and star-snuggling.
• From George HW Bush, the most obnoxious aspects of ofay patricianism.
• From Carter?  Obama may well turn out to be a less competent president.  But there’s a competition, there.
• From Ford?  Obama is to choosing Vice Presidents as Gerald Ford was to controlling his golf swing.
• From Nixon?  The same blithe assurance that massive intervention was just plain the right thing to do.
• From LBJ, Obama gets the ideal that for every issue, there is an exquisitely expensive government program or regulation, and a propensity to think “dirty tricks” are a normal political tactic.
• And from JFK, Obama takes the lesson that public relations is as good as competence.

Bring on November.

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

This dial measures…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11 – One more than ten.

Where do you want to live?

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

———-

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

How accurate in measuring anything in life is a lightswitch?

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

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

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

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

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

Of course not.

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

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

…and political life isn’t any different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no other option.

What do you say?

As some of you know, I’ve been one of the “establishment” (har di har) Republicans who’s been trying to welcome Ron Paul supporters into the MNGOP.  I tried to make this – along with an opportunity for Paul supporters and the GOP to get together and do something useful – clear in a piece I posted yesterday.

Now, when I mentioned this yesterday, one prominent Paulbot responded “LOLOLOL”.  There’s a backstory there; he’d pondered out loud why True North‘s stable of center-right writers didn’t include any Paul supporters.  I asked him to put up or shut up – to send me some Paul-aligned bloggers who’d been blogging any length of time and who didn’t completely suck as writers, and we’d put ’em on.  The problem wasn’t a lack of outreach on True North’s part; it was that outside of the excellent Katie Kieffer, I’m not aware of a single pro-Paul blogger in Minnesota who’s kept a blog going for more than 2-3 posts.

He never sent me anyone.

Anyway, the fact is I do support the Paul crowd’s activity in the GOP – provided that they’re not there simply to blow it up.

Unfortunately, a small flock of little birds tell me their big plan this month is to bum-rush Kurt Zellers’ district and deliver a “no endorsement” vote.

This – trying to undercut the party if you can’t take control of it – is just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.  Vandalizing the one party in the state that has any actual impact on policy that does, however imperfectly, stand for any form of liberty at all, however imperfectly, to “teach it a lesson” about…

…about what?  Not paying sufficient obeisance to a candidate that, whatever his chances of getting the nomination for President, which, important as it is, has nothing to do with the business of the State, Congressional District or Legislative District/BPOU operation of the party?  On behalf of people who will, largely, have little to do with nominating Senate, Congress, Legislative, Mayor, County Commission, City Council and School Board candidates, but less still to do with supporting them once the time for debating resolutions about “Auditing the Fed” is over and the time for raising money, making calls and droppoing lit and trying to get people elected begins?

And for what?  To undercut the GOP Speaker of the House?

Paul supporters – curb your colleagues’ urge to commit political vandalism.  Given that there is only one party in the state whose establishment pays even imperfect service to “liberty”, what are you trying to accomplish?  “Teach the GOP a lesson?

Parties don’t learn lessons.  They reflect the will of those who show up.

And by “show up”, I mean to meetings in January, and for House District special elections in March.

I”ve heard from more than a few Paul supporters who’ve complained that the “establishment” of the GOP – meaning the people who were elected two years ago, whatever their beliefs – aren’t welcoming them with open arms.

How much more explaining to we need to do, here?

To: Ron Paul Supporters, especially in the 4th Congresisonal District
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Your Shot At Making A Real Difference

All,

Some of you know me.  I’m Mitch Berg.  And long before I had a blog, and even longer before I hosted a talk show, and longer-still before I got heavily involved in “establishment” party politics, I was a Libertarian, with a big “L”:.  I even ran for office as a big-“L” Libertarian  – and won a moral, if not literal, victory.

I support liberty.  I also support being in a position to actually affect policy, rather than being an eternal protest-voter.  All of your chanting and zeal witthin the GOP are of no value – zero, nada, zilch – if you don’t have the ability to actually affect policy in the world outside the party.  And while having your guy win the presidency would do that, you also need to push candidates with your worldview into the US House and Senate, Governors and state constitutional offices, state Legislators and Senators, the county commission, city hall, the school board – the stuff you actually have to win if you want the government to, y’know, audit the Fed and stuff.

Which is why I endorsed Paul – Rand Paul, that is – last winter.  Libertarian purism, like any kind of purism, is a fun self-indulgence – and like any self-indulgence, it will have no affect on society around you.

So I have no beef with libertarianism.  I don’t even have so much a beef with Ron Paul, either.  I approve of many of the issues he runs on.  The stuff he wrote 30 years ago is a big problem – don’t kid yourself.  But I want to support him, or at least what he stands for.

The problem, I’m sorry to say, is many of you, his supporters.  Part of it is that so many of you do in fact propose using the power of the executive branch in a way not a lot different than liberals propose using the judicial branch – as a cudgel.

But the bigger part is that, for too many of you, Ron Paul is a personality cult.  I’ve run into too many Paul supporters who support Paul, but can barely articulate what he stands for; indeed, I do a better job of speaking for what Paul believes than they do.

Worse?  Just like four years ago, you flooded GOP precinct caucuses, and are in the process of flooding the BPOU Conventions, and trying to push your delegates on to the CD, State and (you hope) National conventions.  And that’s fine; that’s how the process works.

What’s “worse” is that, like four years ago, so very very very very very many of you will never be seen again after your next round of conventions.  You’ll show up, do your bit for Ron Paul – but not the GOP – and disappear, likely not to be seen again.  There are some exceptions – but they are rare.  Your commitment is to Ron Paul, not to the GOP, even in the context of “Changing the party into a more-libertarian institution in the long term” – with which I’d be completely on board.

And so those of us who have committed to the party – some of you call us “the establishment”, which makes me laugh, since I’ve been a libertarian insurgent in the party for 12 years now, and being “the establishment” means “campaign after campaign of door-knocking, phone-calling and lit-dropping – do feel a bit of resentment, like when you cook a big dinner and some stranger eats the whole thing and doesn’t even say thanks.

Anyway, I’m not here to bag on all you Ronulans.  I’m here, actually, to propose a win-win solution; you get to push liberty, the GOP gets to make inroads in the arena of actually changing policy in a meaningful way.

We have a big opportunity in the Fourth Congressional District.  I’ll take a moment to remind you what the Fourth CD is, since a disturbing number of you Paul supporters have little concept of politics down-ticket from the Presidency.  It’s Betty McCollum’s Congressional District:

It’s been controlled by big-government stooges from the DFL for over sixty years now.

But the latest round of redistricting made it a lot more competitive.  It used to be pretty much Saint Paul – a 70-30 statist-DFL district.  But redistricting added in a bunch of the more-conservative, more liberty-friendly East Metro, including thousands of people who moved to Lake Elmo, Woodbury, Stillwater and Afton to get away from the DFL and the rot they bring.

Now, Tony Hernandez is currently the candidate running for the GOP nomination in the 4th CD.  I’ve interviewed him a couple of times – and the language he uses is the kind of thing that should make you Paul supporters (and me) happy to support him.  Big on liberty, shrinking government – most of the Ron Paul elevator pitch is in there.   Before redistricting, he might have been looking at a 65-35 campaign, if he was lucky.

Now?  The odds are not nearly so quixotic.  With a little luck and a ton of work, it’s doable.

So here’s the deal, Paul supporters; if all of you turn out between now and the election with as much enthusiasm and whiz and vinegar in support of Tony Hernandez – who likely will get nominated, as opposed to Paul – and work your asses off alongside all us “establishment” Republicans?  We might just pull off a miracle.

No, bigger than that.

And not just a miracle in terms of sending Betty McCollum back to work as a receptionist at Alliance for a Better Minnesota; not just a miracle in upending sixty years of statist big-government representation in the 4th CD.

It’ll be a miracle in terms that matter much more, both to you Paul supporters and to the GOP; you’ll have done some real, palpable good in bringing your beliefs to bear in a way that can actually affect policy.

If you’re interested in helping out?  I’ll see you at the conventions.  We’ll have a great time. We’ve got a lot of work to do, and we’ll have fun doing it.

If you’re not? If you’re one of those dolts who believes that by staying home on election day because your candidate didn’t get nominated you actually “send a message” anyone will care about?  It’s not true, by the way – politics, especially at the grassroots level, reflects the will of those who show up.  Not just once, mind you, but every month, every election.  Anyway – yeah, I’ll be working against you.  Totally.

Whaddya say?

That is all.