Jeff Brandenberger thinks that economic growth is a generally good thing.  The self-described DFLer and ELCA Lutheran works a job in the private sector and would like the school system to suck less.

“Huh?”, you might say, before rejoining “Big friggin’ deal!”. 

And you’d be right. 

Background:  I’ve never smoked so much as a joint in my life; compared to me, Chad the Elder is a Dave Matthews roadie. 

And yet I don’t care if people do light up around me.  Pot has its harmful effects – it’s half the reason people still listen to the Doors – but less, all in all, than booze, which I cheerfully enjoy.  Drunk people start brawls and smack people around; baked people lie around and look for cheetos.  I’d have little problem legalizing, or at least decriminalizing, pot – although I’d still not partake because, jeezawfriday, it’s smoke, man.  How do you inhale that crap?

Oh, yeah.  I’m a conservative Christian Republican. 

Andy Birkey at the MRTA Monitor writes a piece to lend propaganda support to a DFL “medical pot” bill in the Legislature (I add emphasis):

Iron Range resident K.K. Forss has found medical marijuana to be a substantial relief for pain he suffers as the result of a disc that burst in his neck. The self-described registered Republican and born-again Christian uses marijuana for pain he says is constant and debilitating.

Now, Andy Birkey being an online “citizen journalist” and all, he was smart enough to find a cheeba monkey who has no google record of being a “Republicans for Kucinich”-type Republican, or even a Sturdevant-approved one.  So maybe there’s something to that…

…except who cares?  What is that factoid supposed to lend this story?

Quick – someone find us a penumbra. 

Twila Brase – who happens to be a neighbor of mine in District 66B – is crusading against one of the great overreaches of Minnesota government power out there – the State’s (actually the DFL establishment’s) push to take childrens’ DNA information, without parental permission, to build a huge genetic database of Minnesota (for now) children.

This would change existing law, as Twila writes in a op-ed in today’s Strib:

The 2006 Minnesota Genetic Privacy Law does what all of us want it to do. It requires written informed consent prior to the collection, storage, use, or dissemination of our private genetic information by government and others.

Specifically, the law states that our genetic information may only be collected and used if we give our written informed consent; it may be stored only for as long as we consent; and it may only be shared with others, including researchers and pharmaceutical companies, with our consent. The consent to allow sharing for specific purposes expires in a year and must be signed and dated.

This is all good news — unless Senate File 3138 becomes law.

And there’s the rub:

This legislation would allow the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) to exempt the collection, storage, use and sharing of newborn DNA from the informed consent requirements of the genetic privacy law. Without informed consent, MDH would be allowed to contract with hospitals statewide to prick the heel of newborns, use and analyze the baby’s DNA into adulthood, and give the DNA-filled blood spots to researchers and others.

If this legislation passes, the informed consent protections of today’s genetic privacy law will not protect any baby born after July 1, 1997 — the day health officials began building a government “DNA warehouse” for the purpose of genetic research. On that day, without legal authority or parent consent, MDH began keeping baby blood and storing it indefinitely.

“But it’s only government!  What could the problem be?  Aren’t you happy to give your privacy for a Better Minnesota?”

Today, according to health officials, the DNA of more than 780,000 children has been filed and claimed as state government property. Their parents have no idea…Senate File 3138 violates parent rights, privacy rights, patient rights and DNA property rights. Citizens young and old have the right to informed consent and genetic privacy. They also have the right to not be research subjects, to not incriminate themselves through their genetic codes, and to be free from involuntary genetic profiling and genetic registration.

If Pawlenty fails to use his influence or his veto pen to protect the genetic privacy rights of citizens, individual DNA and private genetic codes will become government property. What will the governor do?

We don’t know. 

And it’s up to all of you to help us figure that out.  Call the Governor.  Get him to veto this atrocity.  And call your legislator, find out their position, and let yours be known.  It makes a difference.

Angela Merkel begins what could be an avalanche of world leaders opting to skip the opening ceremony at the Bejing Olympics.

As pressure built for concerted western protests to China over the crackdown in Tibet, EU leaders prepared to discuss the crisis for the first time today, amid a rift over whether to boycott the Olympics.

The disclosure that Germany is to stay away from the games’ opening ceremonies in August could encourage President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to join in a gesture of defiance and complicate Gordon Brown’s determination to attend the Olympics.

Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, became the first EU head of government to announce a boycott on Thursday and he was promptly joined by President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, who had previously promised to travel to Beijing.

“The presence of politicians at the inauguration of the Olympics seems inappropriate,” Tusk said. “I do not intend to take part.”

Question to ponder; would this have happened three years ago, before the conservative (by Euro standards) wave that swept Sarkozy and Merkel into office (and reinforced the  small-“l” liberal governents of Klaus and Tusk)?

If Merkel and others do not attend the opening ceremony, it is likely to reinforce a growing sense in China that the Olympics is being used to vilify the host.China had hoped to use the games to highlight its economic development and growing openness. But it is increasingly proving an opportunity for critics to bash China’s one-party political system, human rights abuses, treatment of minorities and tightly controlled media.

Wow, China.

George Clooney leaps into action over Tibet:

If his previous form is anything to go by, the Tibetans should soon be able to count on the support of Hollywood star George Clooney in their struggle for freedom. After all, the man anointed by the media as the “heartthrob with a conscience” must have been pretty outspoken about China’s indirect responsibility for the on-going genocide in Darfur, right?

Well, not really. Here’s Clooney’s latest attack on China regarding Darfur delivered in his capacity as “ambassador” for Olympic partner and official timekeeper Omega:

“I have talked with Omega (about China) for over a year and will continue to talk to Omega,” Clooney told BBC Sport.“I have and will go to the places I and China do business and ask for help.”

You hear that, President Hu? Not so brave now, are we, People’s Liberation Army? Gorgeous George is going to “continue to talk to Omega.” He’s going to “go to places” and “ask for help.”

We’ve yet to hear from Clooney on the specific issue of Tibet, but he’ll surely take an even stronger stance than he has over Darfur, given that this time Chinese are doing the shooting themselves, rather than merely supplying the ammunition.

We can perhaps hope for something along the lines of the blistering attack Clooney launched on Nestle last year, when it was politely pointed out that his commercial activities on behalf of a company that’s been criticised for its policies in the third world didn’t sit well with his self-appointed role as global crusader for the oppressed.

Here’s the full, unedited transcript:

“I’m not going to apologize to you for trying to make a living every once in a while. I find that an irritating question.”

Okay, it wasn’t that blistering. However, Clooney has on other occasions been genuinely outspoken in his condemnation of perceived injustices — namely those he feels have been committed by the United States, and specifically by the Bush administration.

Not that this is anything new – or even confined to the past eight years.

The violence in Tibet piles on yet another to boycott the Beijing Olympics (a few months ago, we noted the gag order being placed on Olympic athletes forbidding them from criticizing China and its totalitarian policies).

And there’s finally some talk of doing…well, something:

Moves to punish China over its handling of violence in Tibet gained momentum Tuesday, with a novel suggestion for a mini-boycott of the Beijing Olympics by VIPs at the opening ceremony.

Such a protest by world leaders would be a huge slap in the face for China’s Communist leadership.

France’s outspoken foreign minister, former humanitarian campaigner Bernard Kouchner, said the idea “is interesting.”

Kouchner said he wants to discuss it with other foreign ministers from the 27-nation European Union next week. His comments opened a crack in what until now had been solid opposition to a full boycott, a stance that Kouchner said remains the official government position.

The idea of skipping the Aug. 8 opening ceremony “is less negative than a general boycott,” Kouchner said. “We are considering it.”

I’m all for negative, but it’s a start.

Humans have a deep-seated need to belong to something bigger.

And I’m not just talking about the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, here. Bear with me – Ed and I were talking about this on the show on Saturday, and I’ve got this urge to elaborate. And we know how ugly that can get…

———-

For most of history, that “something bigger” has meant “higher powers” and “eternity” – the afterlife, Heaven and Hell, Valhalla, Nirvana, whatever. Organized religion, for much of human history, has focused (or, depending on the religion and your point of view, exploited) that human need, for good (hope, charity, Haendel and Bach) or ill. Religion is a hot topic, one way or another, for most of the organized world’s people.

And part of being “part of something bigger” also means “being against something bigger and badder and on the other side”; to Christians, it’s evil in its many forms, from Satan to temptation to what-have-you.

After the left claimed God was Dead in the late 19th century, that human impetus didn’t go away, of course. People have exploited that human desire even as they denied the Higher Power that had been its focus.

Marxism replaced God with ineluctible forces of history. Lenin turned that academic notion into a pseud-messianic crusade, an overarching “something bigger” that subsumed all of Russian (and, to his warped little mind, world) society. Stalin, a former Orthodox seminarian with a keen understanding of how people work, expanded his cult of personality to Messianic proportions – lessons the likes of Mao, Castro, Kim Jong-Il, Idi Amin and Pol Pot (himself a former Buddhist monk) exploited. And of course, they replaced Evil with a variety of enemies – class enemies, countries, anti-cults, whomever.
Hitler learned from Lenin’s mistakes, and did him one better; rather than banning God and the thousands of years of communal tradition His worship brings along, he co-opted it. An atheist, he wrapped himself and his party in the traditions of German Lutheranism and the mythology of German Catholicism, and – more importantly – the overarching German notion of Volk. This concept is a hard one to explain to Americans – I minored in German, and I’m only familiar with its outer edges – but it’s an idea at the nexus of the German land, language and history; Blut und Boden (“Blood and Territory”) is a phrase as familiar to students of Volk as “Domini et filii et spiritus sanctus is to Catholics, something with a meaning far beyond the literal to the adherent. Volk goes well beyond folklore and tradition, and was a sort of meta-religious link to Germany’s pagan past, underpinning German life and faith and culture the way paganism is just behind the surface of Latin, African and Caribbean Catholicism.

And so rather than having to spend time and energy vanquishing thousands of years of folk tradition and religious teaching, all Hitler had to do was take advantage of it.

Volk aided Hitler in putting a Big Evil – Judaism – in front of the people, as well; the Volk tradition viewed life on the land as inherently more noble and valuable than life in the towns; it viewed town and city life as corrupt and ignoble. And it associated Jews with city life, and at its extremes blamed them for its ills and corruption. The Lutheran Church in Germany drew heavily on Volk tradition and mythology, while the Catholic Church of the day added its own level of anti-Semitism which, again, was ripe for Hitler’s picking in Germany and especially Poland.

But in all cases, in the USSR and Red China and Nazi Germany and to similar extents in fascist countries everywhere, there were Big Enemies to replace the ones they’d abolished.

———-

Ed and I talked about Michelle Obama’s “Save the Nation’s Soul” speech on the Northern Alliance show last weekend (the podcast should be up soon). We called out this statement of Mrs. Obama’s:

And things have gotten progressively worse throughout my lifetime, through Democratic and Republican administrations, it hasn’t gotten better for regular folks. ….

We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another — that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

Ed’s response on the show was similar to what he wrote on his blog:

But it’s the notion that only Barack Obama can save our souls that is the most offensive part of the speech, by far. Government doesn’t exist to save souls; it exists to ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. If I feel my soul needs saving, the very last place I’d look (in the US) for a savior would be Washington DC or Capitol Hill. I’ll trust God and Jesus Christ with my soul, and I’m not going to mistake Barack Obama for either one.

And my first reaction was similar; “Step off, ‘Chel.  My soul is between Christ and I”.

But it’s really a lot worse than rude presumption.  It’s not just that government is a lousy place to go for moral repair.  It’s that when govenrment tries to serve as a national soul, things break and people get hurt.
Fortunately, Jonah Goldberg just wrote an entire book on the subject, and the reaction to the book sparked a really great blog,  on which he writes;

Many of the tropes of a political religion/liberal fascism are evident. He exalts unity as it’s own reward. His talk of starting new and starting over often sounds like more than merely “turning the page” on the Bush-Clinton years. It sounds a bit like starting at Year Zero.

Which was the hallmark of Lenin and Mao; the past had to be wiped away (and its practitioners, real or imagined, sent to gulags) before the future could really get underway.

But what I find most intriguing is his rhetoric of destiny and “choseness.” He often makes it sound like he has been selected by forces of providence or God or simply history for this moment. He is, in Oprah’s words, “The One.” But even more interesting, he tells voters they are the ones. “This is it,” Obama proclaimed on Super Tuesday. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change that we seek.” That’s pretty oracular stuff.

And…:

Such a vision is comforting because it plays upon man’s inherent desire to belong, to be protected by his fellow man and his community. “Strength in numbers” is the narcotic of all populists, the logic of all “people powered movements” as leftwing bloggers like to say (though for reasons that defy easy analysis, the left has mastered the art of casting itself as the voice of the dissidents against the oppressive, stultifying “herd mentality” even as it places the group at the top of its hierarchy of political aesthetics). This is the motivating passion behind the fascist quest for order.

Sometimes it sounds like Obama wants to talk about God’s plan when he’s talking about his own campaign for a New Order. But most times, you can see that he wants to stay on the secular side of the divide — where his white base resides — but without giving up the prophetic vision. He wants to persuade his followers, and perhaps himself, that he is elect, but he cannot do so without religious language.

There’s much more, and you should just go read it.

I get leery of the likes of Mike Huckabee (note: not “Huckajesus”.  Just…no.  Don’t) and his rhetoric – but invoking ones’ personal, transparently-visible, well-known faith (anyone who thinks Christianity has a secret agenda has been sleeping for the past 2000 years) into the White House is both limted by the Constitution and mediated by the fact that it is completely open and transparent.  Most importantly, it’s a very different thing than turning the state into its own pseudo-religion.

A bipartisan bloc in Congress – led by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison – is Hleading a bipartisan tidal wave of Congressional support to overturn in the Supreme Court:

Hutchison said Thursday she is filing a friend-of-the-court brief in a challenge to the laws. Fifty-five senators and 250 House members have signed the brief to be filed Thursday by her and Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont.

Hutchison has long opposed the district’s ban on handguns and requirement that rifles and shotguns be registered, stored unloaded and either locked or disassembled. She has sponsored legislation several times to overturn the district’s laws. Her 2004 bill passed the House, but not the Senate.

The district’s law forced her to dismantle and return to Texas her .357 Magnum she brought with her when she moved from Austin.

“In Texas, of course, the right to keep and bear arms is well-settled. In fact, when in Texas you talk about gun control, they mean using two hands,” Hutchison quipped in a speech organized by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

For once, “bipartisanship” doesn’t mean “everyone act like a Kool-aid guzzling statist fop”. 

Thank goodness.

(Via Carnivore at TVM, who notes “As conservatives, we want the law decided only on merits and Constitutionality, but sinced Amicus briefs are part of our process, having a majority of both houses of Congress supporting our side should’t hurt”.  Amen, Meat-eater).

A robbery led to the shooting deaths of five women at a Lane Bryant store in Tinley Park, Illinois, in suburban Chicago.

When police arrived, they found multiple victims shot and killed in a back room of the store, Tinley Park police Sgt. T.J. Grady said.

As of 6 p.m., police confirmed that the motive in the case was robbery. In a press conference Saturday night, Grady said there is no indication that the suspect is still not armed.

“They are taking it very methodically,” Grady said about the search for the suspect, including working with a witness to try to get a composite of the shooter. Police have also pulled video from stores and establishments in a mile and a half radius around the store to see if the shooter stopped in anywhere prior to the shooting.

I hope the police find the shooter, although it looks like the first ten hours of manhunt have gone unrewarded.

It’s worth noting that while, unlike the Westroads Mall in Omaha where a shooting on December 7 of last year claimed eight, the Lane Bryant in Tinsdale Park was not posted against concealed carry permit holders.  The reason, of course, is that Illinois has the toughest state-level gun control laws in the country – and Chicago is worse still.  And while there was a private-property case to be made for Westroads (and other stores) being able to bar the law-abiding gun owner from their premises, it’s the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago that keeps the locals disarmed and helpless in this case.
The upshot another disarmed population being slaughtered like sheep.

When will the  brain-dead cretins who legislate gun bans (against the law-abiding) learn?  Or, better yet, be held accountable for the rivers of innocent blood on their hands?

GeeEmInEm at TvM forecasts:

In a reprise of the 1992 campaign, get ready to hear about the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Also, expect to see the return of the Fairness Doctrine titled “the Freedom Act of 2009” -or perhaps the subject of a book, “It Takes A Village To Decide What Each Villager Can and Can Not Say”.

Canada is in the process of trying to do to free speech what they’ve done with their health care system; gut it.

In the video clips on Little Green Footballs, we see Ezra Levant, the publisher of The Western Standard, called on the carpet by the ironically-named “Alberta Human Rights Commission” at the behest of a radical imam for publishing the Mohammed Cartoons, testifying in what amounts to an interrogation.

I watched all three clips. It reminded me of my various hearings with Saint Paul Public Schools figures.

Inquisitor asks what the paper’s “intent” in publishing the cartoons was.

Levant: “…the only thing I have to say to the government about why I published them is because it’s my bloody right to do so”.

No, that’s a compliment to neither of the groups.

Watch all three vids.

Ezra Levant; if you’re in town for the RNC, the first beer is on me.

(More on the Corner, Samizdata, and in Levant’s blog)

Smoke-free crusaders may now be at your door

One anti-smoking group will kick-start a campaign this week to encourage landlords to outlaw smoking in their buildings. While the program would be purely voluntary for now, some communities might follow two California cities by considering broader ordinances that would apply to multi-unit dwellings.Smoke-free groups are also considering pushes to restrict drivers who smoke with kids in their cars, park users who smoke and even cigarette-dangling youth-sport coaches. Still, condos and apartments appear to be the next battleground in the state’s smoking wars.

And after that, maybe they can go after people who talk on their cell phones in the rest room?

Maybe?

Because that is a scourge upon the land.

Stephen “Vodkapundit” Greene on his extended falling-out with the Libertarian Party – a topic with which I can relate…

…since his reasons were pretty much the same as mine:

If Libertarians couldn’t agree about the clear-cut case for war in Afghanistan, you can imagine how Iraq must have divided us. I had to stop reading Liberty months before my subscription finally, mercifully, ran out. Blogger friends of mine stopped emailing me. Ron Paul, whose name once graced the back of my first car, started sounding to me, less like a principled defender of American liberty, and more like a suited-up reject from the Summer of Love.

I stopped voting Libertarian for local candidates, leaving lots of blanks on my ballot. Next year, I’m not sure which party I’ll support for President, much less which candidate. From here, it looks as if the Republicans have become wrong and corrupt, the Democrats are stupid and corrupt, and the Libertarians have gone plain crazy.

It was easy tearing up my LP membership card. It’s quite a bit harder to find something to replace it. But I know this much: There’s no going back. Maybe there’s just too little room for principle in such a violent world.

And yet…

Then again, maybe leaving the Libertarians is like leaving the mob. Somewhere in the back of my mind there are echoes of Al Pacino. “Just when I thought that I was out, they pull me back in!”

No, I’m not thinking about being a Libertarian again; there are better ways to kick the GOP in the butt.

I, along with King, Michael, Ed, Brian, Chad and John, have been doing the Northern Alliance for almost four years.

The downside? We don’t get paid (regularly, anyway – we get the occasional talent fee for appearances and such).

The upside? We don’t get paid. We don’t depend on radio for a living. Of course, none of the other guys ever actually have depended on radio for a living.

I did, for many miserable years. Radio is a funky dichotomy; doing radio in any of its many forms – music, talk, sports, whatever – is just about the most fun thing in the world. But the business itself is just about the skeeziest, most dysfunctional industry there is. The stories I could tell. In fact, I told one: I wrote this about radio, back in 2004:

The industry is a breeding ground for dysfunctional people. It’s no wonder; people usually start in the business at a very impressionable age (late teens, early twenties), when so much of one’s adult personality is formed. It’s a crappy field for people who want to have a life like everyone around them You almost never quit a job; you get fired, for every kind of reason. If you stink on the air, sure, but if your boss is replaced, you can count on the new boss bringing in a clutch of their own people; if your station is sold and the format changes, or just sold, or (these days) goes from being a live to a satellite operation, it’s back to the trades, looking for that next job. As competitive as the field is, it requires monastic dedication not only to advance, but to stay employed. And it draws that dedication – you could call it an addiction, because being on the air is truly addictive. It’s not a recipe for well-rounded human beings.

And I was one of them.

So to sum it up so far – radio is kind of a crazy, ugly, scummy business.

———-

I’ve noted it a million times; when I started in talk radio, in 1985 during the final years of the “Fairness” doctrine of passive-aggressive censorship, talk radio was a fringe player and a very different beast than it is today. After Limbaugh, talk radio went from being an also-ran aimed at bluehairs to a cash cow; when I worked for Hubbard Broadcasting, the AM station was the poor cousin, a property Hubbard tried for 10 years but failed to sell off. When I came back – in 2003, for a one-night fill-in for Bob Davis – the AM station was carrying KS95 and Channel Five, with plenty of money left over.

But for all of that, the business isn’t for everyone. And I’m not just talking about talk show hosts, here.

Some radio stations’ management are distinctly uncomfortable with the flak they take by taking a political stance (even one that is as remunerative as conservative talk). In some cases, management figures “if we can land half of the audience by pissing the other half off, just think of how many would listen to us if we pissed nobody off”. Others just don’t like conservative politics. And for others, criticism stings. For some stations (and the consultants to make a living out of telling stations to try one thing, and then another, and then another, for years and years), it’s just too much; for all that conservative talk pays them, they’re looking for an out.
And when you dip into politics, the audience always yields a bumper crop of criticism – some of it justified, some of it dimwitted and irrational.

———-

Speaking of dimwitted and irrational, some people think I didn’t “fact-check” my story the other day about the firing of Andy Barnett, the morning host at KNSI radio in Saint Cloud (although taking the unvarnished, spin-driven word of a city council candidate does qualify as a “fact”, apparently). They are wrong, as usual. It’s just that there are precious few “facts” to check.

But King Banaian – who knows many of the people involved, whether on the Barnett Show, KNSI’s management, and in Saint Cloud civic politics, knows a thing or two. And here’s the big question:

One is compelled then to ask, did KNSI change its format under duress? What are its intentions to its listeners (of which I am one)?

Duress is a real thing for people who manage small radio stations. KNSI is a tiny station – 1000 watts, high up the dial at 1450 AM. They’re duking it out for the small Saint Cloud/central Minnesota drive-through land audience with WJON, which is sort of the WCCO of Saint Cloud (and is 5000 watts at the much clearer 1240 AM frequency), a station that tries to be all things to all people and, within the context of Saint Cloud, largely succeeded for many years. It’s the sort of thing that, before 1987, would have left KNSI as radio roadkill, broadcasting polkas and community billboards and, with satellite and computer technology becoming ubiquitous and relatively reliable, have led to the station becoming – like so many smaller stations around the country, including my own alma mater – “computer in a closet” stations.
But conservative talk – Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and Joe Soucheray – have made KNSI a legitimate player and money-maker in Saint Cloud, as well as an audience. And money. Things that precious few 1000 watt stations in metro areas – and Saint Cloud qualifies – have these days.

But as King notes, KNSI’s owner – Leighton Broadcasting – has been uncomfortable with the label that goes along with the format:

• In April, Pscymeistr reported on the newspaper’s criticism of Steve Gottwalt, in which the local newspaper referred to KNSI as “KGOP.” (The article is down, as is the comment stream, but Leo has captured most of what’s written.)
• In July, state Senator Tarryl Clark stops by the station and inter alia informs talk show host Andy Barnett that she is not interviewing on his show any more because “is not comfortable doing opinion based entertainment talk shows.”
• Over the summer, according to sources, the station has been advised by a consultant, and the talk show — the only weekday local programming on the station — underwent several changes at the behest of management. When I guest-hosted on the show in October I saw the new “clock” or hourly chart you follow to know when to do sports, news, commercials, etc. It was very different from what I had seen before. “Why?” I asked Andy. He indicated this was management-inspired.
• There has been criticism of Barnett’s parodies, and those had created some criticism from mostly liberals.

Politicians throwing their weight around.

Consultants with background in the controversy-averse music radio business (i.e. – not the faintest clue about how talk radio works) trying to turn the station into a music station without the music.

The signs, according to King, were there.

Which doesn’t mean Barnett didn’t screw up…:

This should not be construed that I think the station had no right to fire Barnett. It can do what it wants as long as it’s not agreed to not censor Barnett through its contract with him; I agree with most that I do not think I would have fired someone for asking those questions (you can hear what was said by listening to this audio on Andy’s site and decide for yourself.)

Indeed, the question that sent Langjoen into her sullen tantrum was pretty standard talk radio fare; perhaps not really literally germane to a Saint Cloud City Council election, but also the kind of “litmus test” question that will matter to a large chunk of KSNI’s listening audience who – lest you’ve forgotten – come to the station largely for conservative opinion.

Stations have the right to do whatever they want with their format and staff (subject to the contracts they sign); having been fired at four different stations – never for cause, always due to the vicissitudes of management – I’m here to testify. I wish Barnett well.

The interesting remaining question; is Leighton Broadcasting losing its stomach for being a conservative lightning rod, and duking it out with intellectual thugs like Taryll Clark? Time will tell.
But it’d be a shame.

Keith Ellison stands up for corruption:

Requiring photo IDs to vote in federal elections would be banned under legislation introduced Wednesday by Rep. Keith Ellison, who said such requirements disenfranchise minorities, the poor, women, elderly and young people.

“While photo IDs seem harmless, they are in fact the modern day poll tax,” Ellison, D-Minn., said in a statement.

While appeals to logic with supporters of someone like Keith “X” Ellison are probably futile, one is bidden to try.

How, precisely, is a photo ID – something that is equally available to everyone regardless of race or economic status – anything like a “poll tax” which was, in fact, designed to keep people from the polls?

How dare Ellison trivialize the ghastliness of the Jim Crow laws like this?

Ellison, who serves on the Judiciary Committee, got an important backer for the bill, as the panel’s chairman, Michigan Democrat John Conyers, signed on a co-sponsor.

Color me “not shocked”.

Ellison noted that people do not need a photo ID to vote in Minnesota.

 And we’ve not had (much of) a voting scandal, which shows that Minnesotans are either very lucky, very blind or uncommonly virtuous.

“In Minnesota we go to great lengths to make voting as inclusive as possible,” he said, arguing that has helped with voter turnout.

The mania for “turnout” as a goal in and of itself is absurd. 

While I support the right of everyone, no matter how ill-informed or ignorant, to vote, I value “inclusiveness” at the polls less than I do “smart voters”.  Dragging busloads of ignorant, uninformed people to the polls – whatever the party – does nothing good for our democracy.

Making elections amenable to the ignorant, the uninformed and the lazy (to say nothing of the many Democrat initiatives to re-enfranchise felons – who, factually, seem to be America’s most solid Democrat constituency) cheapens the franchise for everyone – and, more importantly, means this nation will be run by ever-lower common denominators of people.

Fill in the snark of your choice right here.

Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said that requiring a voter ID helps preserve the integrity of the voting process.

“The right to vote is one of the most fundamental liberties we have as Americans,” he said. “And to protect that right, we must ensure that those who vote do so legally.”

But “the integrity of the voting process” is the last thing Keith “X” Ellison would seem to care about.

But what on earth is the big problem with ensuring people are who they say they are?

Most Americans approved of giving government a lot of extra power after the onset of the crisis.  We gave the power on the assumption that the government would operate with integrity.  Being composed of humans with imperfections (and, being careerists and politicians, perhaps more imperfections than most), some of them took more than they were supposed to.

The crisis – well, that’s the trick, of course:  the Red Scare, the Kennedy Assassinations (both), Watergate, the Stockton Massacre, the Crack Epidemic…

…oh, yeah – and 9/11.  The responses, in the wrong hands, led to untrammelled power in the hands of J Edgar Hoover, immense CIA abuses and the Gun Control Act of 1968, a special prosecutor law with inordinate power, the 1994 Crime Bill and 1996 Counterterrorism Act…

…and the Patriot Act, which gives the government powers it may well need to fight the war on terror, and gives unethical law enforcement and intelligence peopleimmense opportunities for abuse, as Patterico relates:

First, it is true that, as the anonymous source told the New York Sun, there is information that “could jeopardize the safety of certain individuals” — namely, the ages of Higazy’s family members, and the fact that his brother has arthritis. But I don’t really think that this information is that significant — or that its omission would provide a significant roadblock to security officials determined to harm Higazy’s family members.

The other thing you notice is, I believe, far more significant — which is why I put it in bold type. Namely, you have an FBI agent who admits that he threatened to ensure that a suspect’s family would be tortured by a foreign government.

Somehow, I think that’s the reason the information was submitted under seal.

The ethics of power depend on the integrity of government’s agents.  Which, like any other people, takes constant scrutiny.

Oh, read the whole thing.

So here’s a question:  It’s conventional “wisdom” among BDS-addled liberals that Bush has gutted the Constitution, razed civil liberties, laid siege to the Bill of Rights.

This from the party that not only pushed the ’94 Crime Bill and the ’96 Counterterrorism Bill – the two greatest guttings of real civil liberties in our lifetimes – but many of whom referred to people who opposed those infringements as “wackoes” and “nutcases”.  It’s the party that is not only promotes the return of the Fairness Doctrine, but has a history of trying to censor criticism.  They prance and gambol about like poo-flinging monkeys over Guantanamo Bay – but giggled like schoolgirls when the FBI murdered two Americans with conveniently-ugly beliefs and covered up the evidence of their wrongdoing.

So with that background in mind, someone please tell me (and this is not the first time I’ve asked) – precisely what civil liberties have Americans lost under Bush.

And when writing your list, please omit any claims to liberties – wiretapping, data mining – that actually shifted to “puree” under Clinton.

Thanks.

Edwin Bulwer-Lytton – the man who gave us the line “it was a dark and stormy night – also lent another classic line to the English language’s stockpile of quotations; he penned “The pen is mightier than the sword“.

Of course, he never had to bet his life on it.

I’m always astounded at the naivete of so many – too many – “peace” activists; their brains marinaded in a generation of “Give Peace a Chance” and legends of non-violence resistance and civil disobedience and Martin Luther King and Gandhi (who, need it be said, flourished under liberal democracies that were fundamentally friendly to change), and spoiled rotten by the largely-peaceful fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, too many think that “sending messages” and symbolic actions are all it takes to put a dictator in his/her place.

Sadly, it’s untrue.

Thousands of protesters are dead and the bodies of hundreds of executed monks have been dumped in the jungle, a former intelligence officer for Burma’s ruling junta has revealed.

 

 

 

The most senior official to defect so far, Hla Win, said: “Many more people have been killed in recent days than you’ve heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand.”

The boot, it would seem, is right back on the throat of the Burmese people.

[Swedish diplomat] Liselotte Agerlid, who is now in Thailand, said that the Burmese people now face possibly decades of repression. “The Burma revolt is over,” she added.

 

“The military regime won and a new generation has been violently repressed and violently denied democracy. The people in the street were young people, monks and civilians who were not participating during the 1988 revolt.

 

“Now the military has cracked down the revolt, and the result may very well be that the regime will enjoy another 20 years of silence, ruling by fear.”

 

Mrs Agerlid said Rangoon is heavily guarded by soldiers.

 

“There are extremely high numbers of soldiers in Rangoon’s streets,” she added. “Anyone can see it is absolutely impossible for any demonstration to gather, or for anyone to do anything.

 

“People are scared and the general assessment is that the fight is over. We were informed from one of the largest embassies in Burma that 40 monks in the Insein prison were beaten to death today and subsequently burned.”

 

The diplomat also said that three monasteries were raided yesterday afternoon and are now totally abandoned.

No, Virginia, sometimes dictators don’t listen to reason.

Sometimes the village eats the children.

To steal a concept from Andy Warhol; soon, everyone will spend fifteen minutes wrapping some personal shortcoming in the Constitution.

This week?  It’s this intellectual gimp, an editor at the Colorado State “Collegian” newspaper:

The editor of the Colorado State University newspaper says he has no plans to resign amid criticism of the paper for using an obscenity in an editorial about President Bush.

The four-word editorial, published Friday in the Rocky Mountain Collegian, said in large type, “Taser this. F—- Bush.” 

J. David McSwane, the Collegian’s editor-in-chief and a CSU junior, said the newspaper’s governing board may fire him but he said he would not voluntarily step aside.

The irony, of course, is that I’m flummoxed to remember a single person ever being tasered at a Bush press conference.  John Kerry, on the other hand…

(And oh, good lord.  A college kid with an initial for a first name.  I want to taser him on principle).

“I think that’d be an insult to the staff who supported the editorial,” McSwane told the Fort Collins Coloradoan in Monday’s editions.

I think that’d be irrelevant at this point.

Of course, the news isn’t all bad:

The newspaper’s business manager has said the operation lost $30,000 in advertising in the hours after the editorial was published, and that the pay of student staffers would be cut 10 percent to compensate

McSwane said the newspaper’s student editors decided to use the obscenity because CSU students are apathetic about free speech and other rights.

“We thought the best way to illustrate that point was to use our freedoms,” he said.

Let’s get something straight, “Mr.” McShane; you didn’t “use your freedoms”; you defaced them.  You “used” your freedom of speech like someone who farts in church, sprays grafitti on a bathroom wall, and has a food fight in a clothing store “uses” their freedoms of religion, press and assembly.  You trivialized those freedoms, and made yourself, your “advisors”, your paper and  your university laughingstocks. 

The Board of Student Communication, which oversees the Collegian and other student media at the university, plans to discuss the editorial when it meets Tuesday night.

Proposal #1:  hire a grownup.

(Via Fraters)

I’m not one of those conservatives who reflexively bashes the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union.

But I do relish the chance to give them a rhetorical wedgie.

They’re organizing a phalanx of lawyers to defend the well-heeled “anarchist” fops that’ll be swarming the Cities about this time next year.

Katherine Kersten, as usual, is the only voice in the major media with the real story:

The pinstripe brigade may see lots of action. At the 2004 Republican convention in New York City, police arrested more than 1,800 people, though a smaller crowd of protesters is expected here next year.

The MCLU’s volunteer lawyers will go to bat for any demonstrator arrested at the convention, regardless of conduct or offense, says Samuelson.

Really?

So if a ProtestWarrior runs afoul of a cop for whatever reason, the MCLU will be there, defending a conservative counterprotestor?

What sort of protesters are likely to benefit from these legal eagles’ skills? Earnest grandmas who wave signs outside the Xcel Energy Center aren’t likely to get in trouble with the police. Arrestees will probably disproportionately be anarchists and other self-proclaimed rabble-rousers who are eager to flout the law.

One such group is Unconventional Action, an “emerging network” whose national membership advocates “militant direct action.” At a recent planning conference, members listed goals to “shut down” Minneapolis and St. Paul, and “to deter [other] cities from wanting to host [political] conventions in the future,” according to an anarchist web site.

Unconventional Action lauds the strategy of an organization that helped create havoc at World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, another website says. In Seattle, according to published accounts, a relatively small group of activists used weapons like Molotov cocktails and ammonium-nitrate bombs with nails to provoke violent confrontations with the police. Millions of dollars in property damage and numerous injuries resulted.

So the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union is going to elevate malicious violence to the level of a civil liberty, worthy of our defense?

According to Unconventional Action, the Twin Cities have “strategic vulnerabilities unique to any trade summit or party convention of recent years.” The group is considering blockading traffic on narrow highway interchanges, bridges and key intersections and conducting other kinds of civil disobedience.

Hm.  It’s a little late to organize this, but wouldn’t it be fun to organize a counteprotest to visit this next bit…

This weekend, the so-called RNC Welcoming Committee, a local anarchist group, is hosting activists from across the country — including Unconventional Action — to strategize. The committee has urged people to march through St. Paul to “gather information, take measurements, check drain covers, etc.” At a news conference on Monday, the group showed a video featuring masked figures and hinting at violence. “There exists no ‘peaceful’ option,” it said in a news release.

…and block their right to speak freely?

Wonder how they’d like it?

No matter.  The MCLU, head buried firmly in sand, will be there to get Ian and Ashley out of the clink:

Samuelson says that protesters have no “license to riot.” But he expressed little concern about anarchist threats, and said that serious problems — if they occur — are likely to arise spontaneously.

So, Chuck Samuelson – is the MCLU defending the right to commit violence as a general thing?

Or only violence against Republicans?

The other day, I wrote about the odd double standard the city of Saint Paul observes when it comes to civil liberties; a law that was enacted to protect Planned Parenthood on Ford Parkway is, according to City Council prez Dave Thune’s channelling of the City Attorney, possibly unconstitutional.

Just like, y’know, a bunch of us actual civil libertarians – the ones that cared about civil liberties before John Ashkkkroft was sworn into office – said at the time. “Oh, Pshaw” responded Saint Paul’s liberals at the time – until (in their opinion) it was their ox hypothetically being gored.

Tom Swift covers Thune’s statement much more thoroughly:

imagine your city leaders publicly announcing their readiness to spark a “charter crises” to do it.

I expect the council will have to override our permit process. ifthis is challenged by anyone we could have a charter crisis over whether thecouncil can unilaterally do it.

A city’s charter is its constitution.

What Thune is saying is that he is prepared to attack the founding document of the city he was elected to protect and to serve. He is telling us that he puts his own political agenda ahead of the law.

He is telling us that he puts the best interests and wishes of those constituents that do not wish to have their homes, lives and livelihoods put in jeopardy second to those of the constituents who will be providing the havoc.

If you think I am overstating the facts, or that I am reading intentions into Thune’s words that do not exist I encourage you to read the following paragraph very carefully.

I am counting on mutual cooperation from local free speech folks and cityofficials to not only advance the speech part but also to protect the residentsand small businesses here in my downtown area ward from chaos or danger. So farour city atty has been great and police very calm. the ramsey county sheriff’soffice is not in any lead planning role. The MCLU and Lawyers Guild have beengreat in keeping this in play by their presence as well as opinions.

dave

city council

ward 2

“So far our city atty has been great and police very calm. the ramsey county sheriff’s
office is not in any lead planning role.”

People who do not live in St. Paul, or who are not familiar with the city might not know that the police officers union (and the fire fighters union) is heavily invested in the left wing politics that dominate the place.

I’m not suggesting that they do not catch Democrat shop lifters, but what Thune is suggesting to the chaos crew is that the police department is playing ball with them.

The bed-wetters and fair-weather civil libertarians of the St. Paul DFL are terrified, of course, of Sheriff Fletcher; he’s rumored to be somewhere right of center – probably the only elected official in Ramsey County to qualify as “Center” – and is thus the target of an incessant smear campaign from lefty politicians and activists in the county.

Thune assures me in an offline communication that he’s committed to lawful, peaceful demonstrations, and claims to have opposed the ordinance in question when it first went on the books (I’d have to check that out) – but the question remains, why is this ordinance suddenly receiving attention from the City Government?

Where was the MCLU when it was the rights of law-abiding anti-abortion protesters who were being squashed?

Where were Dave Thune and Randy Helgen and Jay Benanav and the rest of the crypto-Maoists on the City Council when it was a bunch of mere pro-lifers who faced jail time for expressing their views, in accordance with their First Amendment rights…

…that the rest of the USA honors?

I’ll be asking the City Attorney tomorrow, personally.  Anyone want to place odds on whether I get a call back?

Saint Paul City Council prez Dave Thune, writing in a Saint Paul politics email discussion forum (emphasis added) about the city’s preparations for the 2008 Republican National Convention – specifically, the planning that’ll allow demonstrators within earshot of the convo itself:

> We have an assembly permit ordinance but our city
> attorney says it would be unconstitutional if
> challenged. I’d like to get that out of the way
> before we run into trouble with it. it was enacted
> to attempt to protect planned parenthood from
> demonstrators. 

Wow. 

So the Saint Paul City Council…:

1. Came up with a law to bar protesters from the front of the Planned Parenthood clinic on Ford Parkway, which…
2. …the City Attorney now, it just happens, notes is probably unconstitutional, just in time to welcome thousands of white, upper-middle-class liberal demonstrators to the city next year.

Show of hands from everyone who had that whole “constitutionality” thing figured out years ago?

Saint Paul – where your freedom is inversely proportional to your political distance from the Gang of Four.

(more…)

An Orem, Utah grandmother hauled to jail like a recalcitrant dog…

…for failing to water her lawn:

A widow and grandma spent the morning in jail, arrested for refusing to give a policeman her name when he tried writing her a ticket for failing to water her yard. The woman hasn’t watered her lawn in more than a year, and the condition of her yard violates an Orem zoning ordinance.

Tonight, the woman says she is traumatized and shocked that she was hauled to jail, just because she says she can’t afford to water her lawn.

She’s lucky.  In Eden Prairie, I think that’d put her under the property forfeiture law.

I’ve written a lot this past week about the Dems’ push to re-instate the “Fairness Doctrine”.  

Let’s be clear about one thing:  the push to re-instate the Doctrine is based on a huge, cynical lie that the left is repeating, true to Goebbels, over and over.  Dick Durbin, for example (I’ve added emphasis):

Dick Durbin — the Senate’s Majority whip — came out four-square in favor of the Fairness Doctrine today, declaring in The Hill — a newspaper for Capitol Hill: “It’s time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine” It’s the clearest statement yet from a member of the congressional leadership that there will be a real fight over the issue.

Oddly, Durbin explained his position with an appeal to old-time values: “I have this old-fashioned attitude that when Americans hear both sides of the story, they’re in a better position to make a decision.”

And there – in the bold type – is the lie.  Americans hear both sides of the story.  Every story.  All the time.  The metaphorical marketplace of ideas in the broadcast, cable, and (since the early ’90’s) online media over the past 20 years has been a lot like a literal marketplace in, say, Warsaw Poland.  In 1986, it had pretty much what the government said it could have.  Today, both are jammed with a dizzying assortment of stuff, of widely varying quality – and the consumer has almost infinite choice.

Rush Limbaugh is absolutely correct about one thing; before 1987, the “Fairness Doctrine” didn’t explicitly stifle free speech; it merely made it too complicated for the vast majority of radio and TV stations to attempt.  When I started in talk radio in 1985, even the mighty KSTP-AM broadcast only a thin film of “controversial” content, sticking mostly to the usual pre-1987 miasma of sportstalk, recipes, relationship talk, author interviews, counseling, and “stuff going on around the community”.  Talk was a fringe format, the province of the very old, the housebound, and the shift-worker who was bored with music radio.  AM radio was on the brink of extinction. 

Today, the consumer is bombarded with opinion of every stripe, from all corners.  Newspapers, magazines and broadcast TV and radio have been joined by cable and internet TV, satellite and streamed radio, home-made video and pod streaming, blogs in text or audio or video – which have forced the traditional media to adjust to keep up. 

Senator Durbin:  How does the average American not have access to “both sides of the story”?

Congressman Mike Pence is sponsoring an effort to legally bar the FCC – which administers the “Fairness Doctrine” – from regulating poltical content.  Ed Morrissey, my radio colleague, liveblogged the debate on the amendment, about which he reported:

Pence says it represents an “existential threat” to the conservative movement, and believes that the aim isn’t for “fairness” but for the silencing of conservatives. The problem is that the threat is that government retains this ability, either by legislation or executive order. We have to very aggressively explain that the high legal and administrative costs of the FD would simply choose not to carry any political talk radio at all.

Pence points out that the FCC actually has the authority on its own to reinstate the FD, without any action from Congress or the Presidency. They have chosen not to do so, but if the FCC wants to, they could reinstate it tomorrow. The judiciary may have a say in this eventually, but Pence’s bill would strip the FCC of that ability altogether. That doesn’t mean that Congress can’t pass future legislation to do it, but it would have to do so openly.

Do us a favor; call your Congressional representative.  Tell them to support the Pence amendment on the Fairness Doctrine..

Liberals, remember – when they came for conservative alternative media, you need to speak up, or when “they” come for liberal media, there’ll be nobody left to speak for you.

(more…)

All this talk of “balancing” talk radio by bringing the government in to “make things fair” brings up an idea.

What this country needs is political balance across the board.  The “red states vs. blue states” split is tearing the nation apart.  When half of the nation’s votes and 90% of the land are populated by self-reliant, hard-working people who create most of the nation’s actual wealth, and the other half (and 10% of the land) are people who get wealthy by jiggering numbers and skimming from the work of the rest of the country, we’re headed for disaster.  Moreover, the nation would benefit if Red and Blue could live together, rather than segregated; the ideological cross-pollination would make a better nation, in the long run. 

So I advocate forcibly relocating people from New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and the rest of “Blue America” to live in the interior, and moving people from the “Red States” to replace them.  52% of the “Blue States” will be populated by red staters, and 48% of the “Red States” will be occupied by former blue staters.

Anyone who resists will face the full weight of federal law enforcement.

And the results would be…?

Probably pretty dismal, right?

Bringing in government to re-engineer society is pretty much always a bad idea, whether it’s “Urban Renewal”, clearing the Plains of Indians, banning alcohol (or, as we’ve seen in our inner cities, drugs), the “Fairness Doctrine”…

…or mandatory school busing.  Katherine Kersten writes about the decades of fallout after yet another attempt at (voluntary) integration falls flat:

The Inter- District Downtown School in Minneapolis and the FAIR School in Crystal opened their doors with much fanfare in 1999 and 2000, respectively. Their sponsor is the West Metro Education Program, a consortium of the Minneapolis school district and 10 suburban districts. WMEP created the schools at a cost of more than $26 million to be showcases of racial balance, achieved voluntarily.

Last week, we learned that they are no such thing.

Today, InterDistrict students are 70 percent minority’ and the FAIR School is nearly 70 percent white. Their racial composition is little different from that of the districts in which they are located. The InterDistrict School actually qualifies as “racially isolated” under state desegregation rules.

For those of you too young to remember – and I am, although I do remember parts of the debate, because I was a really weird kid who remembers a lot of news from the late sixties and early seventies – the theory was that forced busing would improve things by sending the poor to wealthier districts, and by giving the kids from the wealthier districts an exposure to life outside the privileged classes. 

Kersten:

 As a result, many Minneapolis students began spending extra hours every week on the bus to get to schools far from home. Brothers and sisters were often assigned to widely separated schools, and parents struggled to attend conferences and get involved in school life.

After two decades of busing, however, black students’ test scores did not improve as expected. (No surprise there: data from the National Assessment for Educational Progress from 1975 to 1988 — when black students across the country made significant academic gains — showed black students in majority black schools doing as well or better than those of blacks in majority white schools.)

But mandatory busing did have one devastating unintended consequence: White, middle-class families began streaming out of the city. When the suit that launched busing was filed in 1971, the Minneapolis district was 14.5 percent minority. In 1985, it was 40 percent. In 1994, it was 62 percent minority and today it’s 72 percent.

The effects?

Minneapolis is still paying the costs of two decades of forced busing. Busing increased the concentration of poverty in the inner city, undermined community institutions that could otherwise have provided vital stability in poor children’s lives and weakened district schools.

Today, it is black students who are leaving Minneapolis district schools. Some are choosing to attend suburban schools through Choice Is Yours program, the outcome of a 2000 legal settlement. Many more are flooding to charter schools. Ironically, students at Minneapolis charter schools are more likely to be poor and minority than those at district schools.

The teacher’s union’s legislature’s response?  Shut down charters, and cram the kids back into the public schools for their own good.  But I digress.

In 2004, black Minnesota students had the fourth-lowest graduation rate in the nation, according to a recent Education Week study. Imagine the progress we could have made on this and other fronts if — instead of devoting endless hours to racial balance study groups and endless millions to busing — we had focused on learning how the best schools are succeeding with the children who face the greatest obstacles.

The lesson we need to take away from this:  when government tries to enact social change anywhere below “broad sweeping concept”-level, it’s always a disaster. 

Via Schmaltz Und Grieben,  the story of a man in Poland who went into a coma under communism, and awoke a free man:

A 65-year-old railwayman who fell into a coma following an accident in communist Poland regained consciousness 19 years later to find democracy and a market economy, Polish media reported on Saturday.

Wheelchair-bound Jan Grzebski, whom doctors had given only two or three years to live following his 1988 accident, credited his caring wife Gertruda with his revival.

“It was Gertruda that saved me, and I’ll never forget it,” Grzebski told news channel TVN24.

“Not forgetting” seems to be a smart tack to take…

…but I digress.  The verdict?  Freedom rocks:

“When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol lines were everywhere,” Grzebski told TVN24, describing his recollections of the communist system’s economic collapse.

“Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin.”

Grzebski awoke to find his four children had all married and produced 11 grandchildren during his years in hospital.

Mr. Grzebski gives us Red Minnesotans hope; we will too wake up from the coma that started November 8.