To:  The City Pages
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  You Suck

Dear “City Pages”,

While you’ve always been a freebie hipster lifestyle ‘zine, you used to have some great writing.  Thirty years ago, you were the home of Lileks and Jim DeRogatis.

Twenty years ago, led by Steve Perry,  you had some great journalism – as in, some of the best reporting in the Twin Cities.  And as smugly left-of-center as you’ve always been, you surprised us; under Perry’s watch, you were the first newspaper in town to fairly and accurately cover the Concealed Carry debate.  I said so at the time, and I say it now – kudos.

Twenty years ago.

Today, though?

Just saying – this kind of fratboy drunk-Facebooking pablum would have been laughed out of my high school newspaper.  And this piece here might legitimately make someone wonder if the City Pages is getting money, directly or indirectly, from Bloomberg (more tomorrow).

Speaking of which – is City Pages getting money from Bloomberg?

It’s almost, but not quite, a Berg’s Law; whenever you think the City Pages can’t get any dumber, it will get dumber.

That is all.

The following post is going to sound kinda conspiracy-theory-ish.  That makes me a little queasy – but hear it out.

The headlines over the weekend were all about Trump.

As in, all of them.  Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, even Hillary and Bernie, could barely buy a headline; as they used to say, they “couldn’t get arrested”…

…which, for one of the candidates, is suddenly not such a quaint expression.

And while Republicans more or less dropped the “Trump is really a stealth Democrat” meme a long time ago, this weekend started me wondering.

Lesser Of Three Goods:  Let’s say for the moment that Trump is a sincere Republicans.  As we’ve seen, he’s also the Republican that Hillary would rather face (assuming the polls are legitimate).   They keep the focus on him,

So anything that helps Trump to the nomination, presuming the polls are legit, benefits Hillary.

Distracted:  When was the last time you heard anyone outside the conservative alt-media talking about Hillary’s email server, much less Benghazi?

Follow The Money:  The “protests” have largely been associated with Bernie Sanders’ supporters…

…but have gotten ample financial support from the cabal of liberal plutocrats and their shills that’ve been working for Hillary Clinton for nearly 20 years, now?

Connect The Dots, People: So the “protests” simultaneously promote a candidate the Democrats would prefer to face, starve the dangerous ones of media coverage during the heart of primary season, keep the media’s attention off of the marching band of skeletons banging on drums in Hillary’s closet, and provide a couple of layers of separation between Hillary and the protesters, even providing another entire campaign to blame if needed?

I mean, yes, it sounds all Art Bell-y – but isn’t that the beauty of it?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Bad news: Shot In The Dark failed to make the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups again this year.

There are only six hate groups in Minnesota.

A chapter of the KKK somewhere Up North.  Not sure how they found them, I never heard of them.

Vinlanders Social Club, a racist skinhead outfit in Vinlanders, Minnesota

A Christian preacher in Annandale who preaches that homosexuality is wrong.  [I bet that’s Bradlee Dean – Ed]

The Remnant Press, a traditional Catholic publisher in Forest Lake.

The Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, a black separatist church in Minneapolis.

Weisman Publications in Apple Valley, Christian Identity, whatever that means.

Even if we concede that the KKK and racist skinheads are hate groups, so what?  Hate speech is constitutional in Minnesota, has been since the St. Paul cross-burning case.

And what’s up with calling the others haters, simply because they’re Christians of one stripe or another?

This looks like nothing more than a list of “people we don’t agree with and wish to silence.”

I’m not sure what you need to do to amp up the hate around here so you can get yourself noticed, Mitch.  But there’s one consolation – Powerline didn’t make it, either.

Always next year.

The potatoes seem so small, we’d call them “popcorn” where I come from.

But with the SPLC – which is sort of the curia of the Social Justice Warrior community – there’s always a next year.

I’m frankly more worried SITD will be considered a terrorist outfit than a hate group.  It seems pretty likely, with another Democrat administration.

“Protect Minnesota” is taking it to the streets!

Heather Martens – who, let the record show, has never, not once, said or written a single true, substantive and original thing about guns or gun law – is undertaking one of her last actions as “executive director”

With the Minnesota legislature convening on March 8, now is the time to plug into our plan to stop the gun lobby and build safer communities! Every session, the gun lobby tries to ram through bills like “Shoot First/Stand Your Ground” or carrying pistols without a permit. We’ve been able to stop them year after year — but only because you have shown up.  

She’s making things up again.  Nobody “showed up”.

“Stand Your Ground” passed the legislature with bipartisan support; it was vetoed by Governor Dayton when Alita Messinger yanked his leash.  And that was the only reason Minnesota didn’t join 23 other states that opted to protect the rights of people who resist victimization by criminals and greedy prosecutors.

“Protect” MN’s clubfooted version of activism may have contributed to the good guys almost winning on that issue.

Anyway, they’re going to try to get people to turn up again:

Can you commit to showing up again? [Ha ha ha!  – Ed] You’re invited to a meeting near you next week:
In Mahtomedi – Wednesday, February 24, at 6:30 pm — Click here to RSVP
In Saint Paul – Thursday, February 25, at 6:30 pm – Click here to RSVP
In Duluth – Sunday, February 28, a faith summit from 1:30-4:30. Click here to RSVP.

Wanna know something funny?  If you try to RSVP, they don’t divulge the locations.  They are apparently worried that Real Americans will infiltrate the meetings and…tell the truth?  I dunno.

And what can the gentle reader expect?

At these meetings, you will:

• Learn how to pass our background check resolution at your precinct caucus Tuesday, March 1;
• Sign up for face-to-face meetings with key legislators during the session;
• Meet our new executive director!

So wait – “Protect MN” is going to pass a “background check resolution”, to become part of a DFL platform that already calls for gun control?

Sounds like a brilliant use of time and effort!

Oh, yeah – as re the last bullet:

That’s right, I’m stepping out of the executive director role to support Protect MN in other capacities. Watch your email for the full announcement. Meanwhile, see you next week!

If you learn the secret handshake, anyway.

As for me?  Heather Martens, I’ll attend your meeting for $1,500.

Thank you for all you do,

Heather Martens

The reader most likely “does” nothing – which likely has more effect on politics in MN than “Protect” MN does.

January:  the Real Americans of the Second Amendment movement watched President Obama’s tearful, angry, and utterly theatrical broadside about guns, gun owners and gun manufacturers, noted that nearly everything he was “proposing” was existing law already, and said that the President’s big “effort” was nothing but a shallow bit of political grandstanding calculated to make it look like he planned to, as his supporters wailed, “dooooooooooo something”, without actually signing the political death warrants of every Democrat between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre.

February:  The New York Times notices the same thing.

Lesson:  the Real Americans of the Second Amendment movement are smarter and better-informed than the media.

NARAL objected to a Super Bowl commercial because it “humanized” a fetus.

Let me respond:

It’s an ultrasound.  But take note, NARAL and other infanticide supporters; I don’t need to “humanize” it, any more than someone needs to “conservatise” me – because it is human.   Left alone without any medical intervention (or, likely, help), the odds are overwhelming that in about 31 weeks it’ll be born as a human being, not a cat or a goat or a Prius or a producer of NPR’s “On the Media”.

It is a human, you joyless babbling harpies.

Go suck an exhaust pipe.

UPDATE: Anything that gets Darth LateTerm and the Infanticide Sith this exercised deserves some product-placement love:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Once a week, the Minnesota Court of Appeals releases decisions in criminal cases that have been appealed.  This week, four of them involve pistols possessed by people who aren’t eligible to have them.

One was handed his pistol by a friend just before the murder.  One had a pistol in the trunk of a stolen car.  One was carrying a pistol wrapped in plastic, secured with earbuds (not the way gun stores package the products they sell).  One was found under the seat of a van – nobody knows how it got there.

The court doesn’t discuss how these ineligible people got their pistols, only the fact they had them.  And these four cases are not everybody arrested with a gun, only those who had a strong enough case to appeal; but it’s an indication that the problem is widespread.

How would these crimes would have been prevented by universal background checks?

Joe Doakes

They’d give urban liberals that sense that they’ve dooooooone something.

Which is all that they really care about.

Fiction: Liberal “comedians”, trying to show how easy it is to “legally” buy a gun without a background check, show that the law and system works (not that they’re apparently smart enough to see it that way, judging by their responses in the comment section) – and flirt with committing a felony in the process:

Note for those who don’t know their gun laws: “Comic” Steve Hofstetter took his friend in with his ID to do the buy, which – “joking” notwithstanding – went through without a hitch.  Because “Brent”, the “buyer”, was perfectly legal.   He has a criminal record and is, as such, a relatively low risk, himself.

But if he’d given the gun to someone who was otherwise disqualified from owning a gun,  that, too, would be a felony.  And while Steve Hofstetter’s “comedy” would be a disqualifying felony in a just world, it’s not in this one.  But if Steve had a couple DWIs, a domestic abuse rap, or some other mischief on his record?  They’re both committing a felony.

So you might ask – what if a criminal with a long felony rap sheet had gotten a friend with a clean record to go to a gun show and buy a gun, and give it to him out in the parking lot?  Well, it’s already illegal, and both parties would be committing a felony.  And if we instituted mandatory background checks to close the so-called “gun show loophole” – more about that below – then what?  They’d be committing another felony – which, like the two they committed without the mandatory background check, will go utterly undetected until some other crime is committed.

Same as today!

Fact:  Crowder goes to actual gun shows, tries to actually find the “gun show loophole”.

And fails:

Not that I need to reinforce this to people who are smart enough to deserve the right to vote – I get this.

I mostly write these things so smart people can pass it on to their friends who need convincing and educating.  Because God knows there are still a lot of them out there.

Rep. Kim Norton is going to come for your guns this session.

It may not work, but it’s the next measure in what Big Left hopes to make into a steady drumbeat that eventually wears the great, underinformed middle down on the issue.

But the facts are out there.

Location, Location, Location:   If you live in Minnesota, you know that North Minneapolis is the state’s little Oakland.  While Minnesota as a whole has a murder rate of 1.6 per 100,000 people, the North Side’s violent crime (about 30 murders last year, in a population of under 40,000 people) teases out to a murder rate of 75/100,000 – higher than Venezela, double that of Columbia.

Of course, Minneapolis (and Hennepin County in general) has among the lowest legal firearms ownership rates in the state:

So if the left’s conceit  – less guns (in the hands of the law-abiding) equals less crime – would seem to predict a nice, low crime rate in Minneapolis.

But the MinnPost ran a piece earlier this week – and for starters, it confirmed what everyone already knew; the North Side is a shooting gallery, at least judging by the MPD’s “Shot Spotter” system.

Here’s a “heat map” of the city:

There’s a faint dribble of shooting in the “Phillips” neighborhood (between Franklin and Lake, east of 35W and west of Hiawatha), and some in the central core of the south side between 35W and probably Chicago (and just so we’re accurate, here, the shot-spotter microphones are only installed in high-crime areas; we don’t see shots fired in Linden Hills or along Minnehaha Creek because there are no microphones in Linden Hills or along Minnehaha Creek.  But there are no microphones there because, objectively, there really isn’t a big “gun violence” problem there.  Or Nordeast.  Or by Nokomis. Or even on Lake Street east of Hiawatha or much west of Nicollet.

More telling?  Shooting has been trending down on the south side for the past six years:

Even the NYTimes knows that North Minneapolis is a free-fire zone:

But as Willesha Moorehead, who came here from Chicago a dozen years ago, can attest, struggle is baked into its streets.

Seven of her friends or members of her family, including the father of her first child, have died from gun violence in North Minneapolis. She has struggled to get work, in part because she could not find child care for her two daughters, she said. And for the past three years she has bounced between the homes of friends and family because she could not find affordable housing.

The problem, the NYTimes seems to imply, is that not enough money gets spent on the North Side:

Public transportation is poor, residents say, and though local officials are planning to spend more than $1 billion on a light-rail line, North Minneapolis residents have been critical because it will run through downtown and the suburbs but skirt their community.

So clearly, the answer is to crack down on guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens in Northeast and Saint Paul and Anoka and Thief River Falls.

That should solve it.

The real problem?  The government has been using the North Side as a warehouse for the poor for a couple of generations now.  The city has been fine with that – they’re a nice pool of captive DFL voters – but now, the social consequences of keeping a bull pen full of dependents is catching up with the city.

Again.

In recent years, I’ve had two fascinating interviews on my show, on a subjects that gets short-to-nonexistent shrift in the mainstream media and academia; the role of our Second Amendment in the Civil Rights movement.  Charles Cobb’s This Non-Violent Stuff’ll Get You Killed chronicles the role of armed blacks in protecting the nascent civil rights movement of the sixties, while Nicholas Johnson’s Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms documents the history of armed black resistance to racism.

Another story that needs to be told – especially in the wake of President Obama’s “town hall meeting” about guns two weeks ago, and the wave of the President’s minions trying to paint gun control as a racial issue, is the inextricable involvement of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization in protecting the nascent civil rights movement.

That’d be the National Rifle Association.

A group called the “Deacons of Defense” – largely black military veterans – sprang up to defend civil rights workers and leaders, including Martin Luther King, as well as helping defend blacks in general from the Klan’s depredations.

It wasn’t an academic exercise:

On a hot July night, a cavalcade of 25 Klan automobiles drove through a black neighborhood in Bogalusa, shouting vile comments at women and spewing racial insults. Some Klansmen then randomly fired into some houses. To the Klansmen’s shock, the response was a fusillade of return fire. The Klan members sped away in fear.

“They finally found out that we really are men,” one Deacons leader remembered, “and that we would do what we said, and we meant what we said.”

The escalating crisis forced the hand of the U.S. Department of Justice. Previously timid about expending political capital against the Klan’s alliance with local police, the DOJ unleashed Civil Rights Division head John Doar. For the first time ever, the DOJ took action against pro-Klan local law enforcement. By the end of the year, the Louisiana Klan had been devastated.

The Deacons were rigidly politically neutral – the snubbed Stokely Carmichael’s “black power” agitation, sticking to self-defense – but their impact was immense:

Black dignity—the responsible protection of family and community—was a CORE value of the Deacons. For centuries, adult black men had been called “boy,” and—because of fear of white violence—often acted in servile manner to those whites who treated them with disdain. No longer.

And that thought alone terrifies the Big Left.

And let nobody forget that the NRA was right there with them (I’ve added various bits of emphasis):

As America’s youngest civil rights organization, the Deacons received support from America’s oldest civil rights organization—the NRA, which, like the Deacons, was dedicated to training Americans in the responsible exercise of constitutional rights. At the time, the NRA was the authorized public representative of the U.S. Army’s Civilian Marksmanship Program, and could sell army surplus ammunition at discounts to NRA members.

So the Deacons for Defense—as NRA members—bought ammunition in bulk, and distributed it for free to individual members. It’s little wonder, though, that the NRA was the Deacons’ arsenal. For most of the 20th century, the NRA shooting range in Washington, D.C., had been one of the few public accommodations in the city that was not racially segregated. Virtually alone among the sporting organizations of the late 19th and early 20th century, the NRA had always remained open to members of all races.

As for firearms, the Deacons already had plenty of their own—especially in the “Sportsman’s Paradise” of Louisiana. As it had back in 1775, a strong tradition of hunting provided a solid foundation for armed defense of liberty.

Initially, the Deacons’ main arms were shotguns, plus some handguns. Over time, there were efforts to standardize the Deacons with .30-cal. M-1 carbines [obtained from the Civilian Marksmanship Program, administered by the NRA] and .38 Special revolvers.

Read the whole thing.

And spread it around.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Everyone wants our children to be educated so they can achieve The American Dream.  But even in school districts run by Black administrators, Black students do poorly on reading and math tests.

According to the article, that’s because Black students lack White Privilege which consists of parental supervision, respect for teachers, education is valued, correctly spoken English at home, homework done and checked for errors, security from violence at home and teachers who have high expectations.

Of course, those are precisely the behaviors that constitute Acting White and which no self-respecting authentic Black youth would be caught dead doing, lest he be ridiculed as an Uncle Tom by peers and in the media.

Worse, the tests measure knowledge that might have been essential to success in 19^th Century Prussia, on which our educational system was based.  But is it knowledge essential to success as a 21^st Century American? What is “success?”  The Amish don’t define “success” the same as the Clintons and President Obama’s vision of being an American seems nothing like Ronald Reagan’s vision.  Do Blacks define “success” the same as Whites or Asians or recent Central American immigrants or African refugees?   What should schools teach when it’s obvious that students do not share the same definition of “success” and how can different measures of “success” constitute one American Dream?

Why should all students take the White Success tests? Maybe there should be a different tests to measure Black success?  I’m not talking about racist joke tests like “Jasper steals three watermelons . . .” but a serious inquiry into what constitutes “success” for modern Black Americans and what knowledge, skills and abilities are essential to achieve that success?

I’m asking for a serious inquiry:  what is The American Dream?

Joe Doakes

As we’ve discussed in this space before, “class” privilege is every bit as big an issue as “white privilege” – which is why BLM is protesting so furiously about the white variety.

But “class privilege” is exactly behind our current school system’s definition of “success”.

One of the mixed blessings of being involved with an issue – the human right to self-defense – as long as I have is that every couple of years, I’m treated to the spectacle of a whole new generation of gun-grabbers excitedly making arguments that they just know are going to send the Real Americans scurrying for mama…

…not realizing that they are probably the fourth or fifth generation of gun grabbers I’ve heard use the argument since I started.

“Put a 1000% tax on bullets?  You mean like Patrick Moynihan proposed in the seventies the National Coalition to Ban Handguns talked about in the eighties, and Chris Rock in the nineties?  No, ma’am, that one’s new to me.   Does that also mean that the First Amendment protects speech, but that the government can regulate newsprint, or that it protects freedom to worship, but the government can censor the Bible, the Torah and the Quran?  That the Fourth Amendment says we can be secure in our papers and possessions, but that we need to give the cops a master key to our front door because it’s not made of paper?”

That one’s been pretty beaten down again; it’ll be another generation – 3-5 years, in gun-grabber terms (Heather Martens notwithstanding, although she makes the same “arguments” every generation anyway) before we hear that one.

The other one that pops up every time a new wave of naive proto-statists takes the stage is “the founders never envisioned assault rifles”.  Which might be true – but while everyone from Leonardo DaVinci to James Puckle had designed firearms that were conceptually similar to “assault weapons” by 1789, the founders hadn’t the faintest inkling of lithography, radio, television, the Internet, chat rooms, Craig’s List, megachurches, the supercomputer, the NSA, electronic surveillance, photo-cops, photography itself, the electric chair, standing municipal police forces, cradle-to-grave social welfare, the Internal Revenue Service and do you still really want to go there, Ms. “Progressive?”

The point, of course, is one that I also sometimes get so far down in the weeds of the minutiae of the subject that I miss it; the Founders, in their much-greater-wisdom-than-today’s-brand-of-bobbleheads, wrote the Constitution not to guarantee things, but to guarantee broad, unalienable rights.

Charles C. W. Cooke had the reminder I needed:

Because, our contemporary rhetorical habits notwithstanding, the right to keep and bear arms is not so much a right in and of itself as an auxiliary mechanism that protects the real unalienable right underneath: that of self-defense. By placing a prohibition on strict gun control into the Constitution, the Founders did not accidentally insert a matter of quotidian rulemaking into a statement of foundational law; rather, they sought to secure a fundamental liberty whose explicit recognition was the price of the state’s construction. To understand this, I’d venture, is to understand immediately why the people of these United States remain so doggedly attached to their weapons. At bottom, the salient question during any gun-control debate is less “Do you think people should be allowed to have rifles?” and more “Do you think you should be permitted to take care of your own security?”

And to a large – and, at its logical conclusion, disgusting – part of our population, the answer is “isn’t the state’s security more important?”

Which is what we’re fighting, here.

Read Cooke’s entire article.  It’s a good primer for the battles we’ll face in the coming year.

Listen to, or read, the left talking about gun control for a while.  (It’s OK if you don’t want to; I do it so you don’t have to).

You eventually run into three basic tracks of thought:

1. The Stupid Track:  Best summed up by lefty commenter and triteness merchant John Fugelsang’s line “I don’t have a gun because I’m satisfied with my penis size”.  Which is typical of this crowd; we’re trying to save lives, lower crime and secure liberty, and they’re focused on genitals.  Conversation is difficult, and pointless, and of dubious utility with people this smugly (and unjustifiably), er, self-satisfied.
2. The Thundering Herd:  The vast swarm of (often) well-meaning people whose only frame of reference is what they hear in the media; “we’ve got to dooooooo something”, “gun show loopholes”, “355 mass murders so far this year” and other chanting points.  Many are otherwise intelligent people who’ve been swayed by the “Lie First, Lie Always” campaign of emotional manipulation that gun controllers have been running for decades.
3. The Root Causers:  The are the ones that swerve into Deep Thoughts.  Their latest?  Rumination about this nation’s “Gun Culture”.

Let’s talk about #III for a bit.

Culcha:  The notion that America has a “Gun Culture” – a part of society that embraces guns on a social, intellectual and philosophical level – isn’t an earth-shaking one.  A significant part of this country…:

• Believes the Second Amendment recognizes a right granted us by our creator, whatever that is
• Owns guns, and treats them like utilitarian tools
• Makes shooting sports – hunting, target shooting, self-defense training – a part of their lives, shooting for relaxation, fun, exercise,  mental stimulation, food, and personal and family security
• Passes these beliefs down through the generations, making shooting sports and self-defense a part of family life
• Believes that guns in the hands of the law-abiding are an awesome responsibility, with horrendous consequences for misuse, but immense benefits for legal, proper use
• Passionately defends the right to keep and bear arms, supporting gun rights groups with their time, money and political interest in numbers that many other grassroots movements would love to be able to harness.

The “gun culture” is stereotypically a rural trait – but it extends throughout America; there are advocates and activists, as well as passive members, in the largest, most blue-choked cities.

Politically, the “gun culture” is associated with conservatives – and that’s largely true.  But there are plenty who don’t care in the least about politics – and more importantly, enough on the left, especially in politically schizoid states like Minnesota who vote DFL but who support not only the shooting sports, but the armed lifestyle, to make the Minnesota Legislature, split down the middle on partisan lines, a fairly to strongly pro-2nd-Amendment body, especially outside the hapless Twin Cities DFL contingent.

And while decades ago the “gun culture” was associated with the America’s blue collar class, today it crosses most social and class lines, except the academic class and the exceptionally wealthy (who can afford all the security they want).  At its best, it’s best described by this quote from Tolkein:

“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

So the “gun culture” is relatively easy to identify.  It’s big, it’s passionate about its politics, and it’s been emboldened – some might say “rendered complacent” – by twenty years of relative political success.   It’s support for the Second Amendment is a mile wide and a mile deep.  It is an electoral buzz saw that has cut many a gun-grabbing politician (outside of America’s crime-choked urban cores) off at the knees.   Naturally, it’s also a common boogeyman for the left.

But what about its counterpart?

Objectors Without Object:   There is most definitely an “anti-gun culture” in the US.  It’s no more socially homogenous than the “gun culture”; it includes Hollywood titans, suburban grandées, inner-city political activists, and a whole lot of people in between.

But like the “gun culture”, they share some traits.

They are more or less illiterate about the Second Amendment:  some believe the Amendment is irrelevant; others, that it’s archaic (the whole “the founding fathers never envisioned AK47s” bit), some just don’t care.

Guns and their use are more or less foreign to them.  Don’t get me wrong; shooters can get pretty pedantic about gun terms and parts.  On the other hand, it’s hard to have a literate, much less productive, conversation with people who mix up “semi-automatic” with “machine gun”, or who think a thirty-round magazine makes a firearm uniquely deadly.

But Jonah Goldberg, in an excellent piece in National Review, notes that while part of America regards guns as just another tool, to another part they are utterly foreign and associated only with crime.

And too many of them take that fear out in the form of smug condescension:

The Second Amendment, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten wrote, is “the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.”

Almost but not quite too stupid for Minnesota Progressive Project.

Many are just afraid of guns.  Being afraid of guns isn’t especially irrational; they are intimidating machines.  The irrationality comes from wanting to take them away from everyone else.

For the most part, they believe that guns are too dangerous for regular people – until those same people strap on a badge or a uniform, and become infallible.

They largely believe, deep down inside, when push comes to shove, that citizens shouldn’t have guns, and that government legitimately claims a monopoly on the use of force.

There’s one other key difference; beyond a few hyperactivists, it’s just not that big a deal to most anti-gunners.  They may oppose guns of one kind or another, to one degree or another.  They may be scared of…something, and advocate some regulation or another than one of another “leader” has proposed.  But for most of them, their support for restrictions on the law-abiding is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Ill-Informed Hysterics With Short Attention Spans:  So this combination of dilatory, poorly-read passion, slopped on top of intense fear spread by social convention (not a whole lot different than racial bigotry, when you take it apart) has yielded a small, badly-informed, but intensely powerful political force that exerts a disproportionate, universally deleterious effect on American politics.

And as it did when large minorities of American society smoked cigarettes, hated black people or treated women like chattel, it’s going to take a huge education program and changes in Americans’ attitudes to send our intractable anti-gun culture where it belongs – history’s scrap heap, along with the Klan and the glass ceiling.

I rarely if ever endorse candidates, per se.  I figure it’s not my job – who am I, after all?   I inform; you decide.

But I live in Saint Paul.  The Fourth Congressional District; Senate District 65; House 65A.  I’m “represented” by Betty McCollum, Sandy Pappas and Rena Moran.   And while I do my best to get involved in politics in my own neighborhood, let’s be honest; I probably have a greater  impact elsewhere.

Of course, Andy Aplikowski is a longtime friend of this blog.  And of mine, for that matter.  One of the co-founders of True North, one of the smartest political numbers guys I know, half of one of the genuinely nicest couples I know.  Andy’s running to replace Brandon Petersen in the Senate.  And I hope he wins.

Andy’s got the endorsement of the SD35 party apparatus.  But he’s gotta get through a primary against long-time former rep. Jim Abeler.

Now, I’ve interviewed Abeler a few times.  He’s a great guy; there are those who choose to demonize those they disagree with, and neither Abeler nor I are them.  And in his interviews, Abeler makes a solid case for some of the votes he’s taken.  Not solid enough to convince me, but nothing to brush aside, either.

But one vote that concerned me, as someone who’s gone around and around with the public school system, is a vote he took that ended up denying vouchers to students in Minneapolis and Saint Paul schools. Did Abeler have his reasons?  I’m sure he did – but they pale against the opportunity that arises when you allow the free market, personified by giving the parents the fiscal clout to say “no” to the district system, to have its effect.

So while I’m not sure what Abeler’s policy reasons are, I know that the vote did earn him some powerful friends. No, I mean some very powerful friends, friends with deep pockets and heavy-duty outsized clout in Minnesota politics.

Anyway – if you’re in SD35, or have friends there, by all means let ’em know where the School Choice vote goes.

A long-time friend of this blog writes:

I do have sympathy for the BLM grievances, truly.  But their goals are very undefined, nebulous, etc.  It’s sad.  It is a tragedy about the young man killed by the police.  I don’t know the facts but it is still a tragedy for all who are involved.
I purposefully walked through the tunnel from the HennCo Govt Center to Mpls City Hall this morning.  There is no evidence of the large protest there yesterday.  The graffiti on Wings Financial was not in evidence.  The main lobby of City Hall did not look worse for wear.  I am pleased for the protesters not doing permanent damage to get their point across, that was very good of them.  The clean up crews also did a good job.

That same night [an acquaintance], a white, middle-aged woman left our building unaccompanied as usual.  The bulding is very near City Hall.  Some man leaving the protest walked up to her and started screaming “BLACK LIVES MATTER, BLACK LIVES MATTER!”  She is a very experienced urbanite and just ignored him but he followed her screaming some more.  She was not particularly frightened by the whole incident, felt a bit threatened and will be sure to pay attention to more  “protests” in order to plan her route to evade them.  The moral of this story is that all the BLM energy simply made a person who might be sympathetic to their cause into a person who sees them as complete idiots to be avoided.
The BLM group though reminds me of the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”  I mean they go to protest at Elsie’s in NE Mpls (a fine place) because they heard a “police” function was happening there.  But lo and behold it was a holiday fundraiser for HennCo Sheriff Stanek (I had an invite but was unable to attend).  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  Plus the even was over by the time they got there.  Wrong event, wrong time.  This is BLM’s problem.  They have some legitimate gripes.  They have a totally ineffective response.

And here’s the real radical idea (emphasis added):

Maybe they should do something REALLY radical and start showing up, putting forth candidates, and finding support at the REPUBLICAN caucuses!  Guaranteed, they will very quickly find real meaningful results coming their way.  Either the Dems will get so scared, they will actually start doing something or they will find a very welcoming group at the GOP who will also be falling over backwards to assist.
Just a thought.

That would, of course, shake things up.  A lot.

Of course, it won’t be BLM pushing that.  Black Lives matter is funded by liberals with deep pockets, almost entirely with a goal of trying to keep the African American vote jazzed up during a Democrat campaign season where the black voter will be asked to choose among a bunch of geriatric white people.

Qua BLM, it may not be working – but then that’s not the point.

I was tempted to fisk the NYTimes’ deeply stupid editorial – their first front-page editorial since 1920 – calling for confiscation of “assault weapons”.

But Brian Doherty at Reason already did it, and did it better.

(more…)

We apparently don’t have Heather Martens to kick around anymore!

As carry permit applications, pre-purchase background checks, and gun and ammo sales roar to new all-time records, the NRA is being crushed with new and renewing members.

Scarcely a peep in the media (especially about the membership).

But one Democrat politician and “NRA member” “quits” – and the media is lined up out the door.

If I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d wager good money that:

1. He was an “NRA member” for the same reason I “joined the teachers union” when I taught a semester at Metro State, and
2. Come his next campaign, he’s going to have at least one pic in his campaign lit, decked out in hunting camo with a duck gun.

But I won’t blame anyone for not taking any action on that bet.

That figure that the media and the anti-gun chanting-point-bots are jabbering about – where there’ve ostensibly been 355 “mass shootings” so far this year?

Yeah, it’s BS.

(more…)

Over the weekend, I went out looking for a movie to watch.  I don’t go to a whole lot of movies, but I’d heard that Truth, the mash note to Mary Mapes and Dan Rather, staring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford (someone I dimly remember being a star when I was in grade school) had been out for a couple of weeks.  So I tried to find it on a screen somewhere in the Metro.  It wasn’t so much out of interest, or any expectation that the film would be anything but a rhetorical tongue bath for Rather and Mapes from their BFFs in Hollywood.

But the collapse of Rather (along with the Gordon Kahl shootout) is one of two major news stories where I’ve been, if not “involved”, at least watching from the sidelines rather than the bleachers; John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson were co-hosting the NARN at the time they broke the story; the show on the Saturday following the seminal “Sixty First Minute” posting at Powerline was one of the most intense programs I’ve ever been involved in in my life.

I couldn’t find the movie.  A month after release, after a disastrous opening (one of the 100 worst wide-release openings in history), I couldn’t find it anywhere.  The shamefully revisionist retelling grossed a little over $2 million on a budget of $11 million.   “Lucy Ramirez”, Bill Burkett’s fictional source for the fraudulent documents, is easier to find than a screen playing Truth.  [1]

The search for a screen – any screen – in the Twin Cities showing Truth, starring Robert Somebodyorother and Cate Galadriel over the weekend, got a little intense.

Now, even the critics thought the movie adequate at best, for starters.  But is the fact that it’s also basically unvarnished American progressive propaganda part of the reason it tanked so very very badly?

Tankage: I don’t expect much from our self-appointed coastal “elites”. Most of them serve only as warning signs about the diminishing value of an “elite” education.

But I have always counted on Hollywood, if no one else, knowing how to protect its own market.

Apparently, not so. More and more, Hollywood seems to find its ideology – at the corner of which is preening contempt for everyone who lives between the Hudson river and the Sierra Madre – more important than its bottom line.

And this seems more clear than ever, given last weekend’s box office results; three other “can’t miss” movies open to results anywhere from bad to disastrous.  None of the movies were especially political – but their stars certainly took an ill-advised run at it.

“Secret In Their Eyes”, vehicle for Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts (a pair of women most famous for being redheads  married to vastly more talented men back in the 1990s, both of whom have been flexing their hatred for conservatives, Republicans and Christians on overdrive for years) opens to less money than the Northern Alliance earns on a typical weekend.

Documentary evidence that Julia Roberts once existed.

And the latest Seth Rogen movie – whose name elludes me, but was probably about being really drunk – tanked with a bullet not long after the notoriously self-impressed Rogen erupted in an obscene tirade against Ben Carson for, presumably, leaving the plantation.

No – the photomeme caption is not satire.

Most shockingly? The “can’t miss” final episode in the Hunger Games franchise came in about 20% below expectations.

Jennifer Lawrence, this time in the indescribably wonderful and utterly apolitical Silver Linings Playbook, for which she earned a very well-deserved Oscar, back before she tried to turn into Rosie O’Donnell. No, you know what I mean. Seen here with her co-star, Bradley Cooper, long before his own Oscar-caliber turn in American Sniper, which probably renders him trayf to J-Law. I’m just going to sit and think what could have been for a few minutes, here.

Why?  Well, maybe this:

A mere ten days before the film’s release, Lawrence went so far as to expose her anti-Christian bigotry, telling Vogue magazine that Christians are “those people holding their crucifixes, which may as well be pitchforks, thinking they’re fighting the good fight. I grew up in Kentucky. I know how they are.”

“I know how they are”.

In Silver Linings Playbook, Cooper and Lawrence’s characters hilariously botch their big final move at the dance contest. Cooper reputedly reprised this scene with Joy Behar during rehearsals for American Sniper  to simultaneously build bulk and method-act some of the horror and depression Chris Kyle felt when he came home from the war.

Presumably she means “like a bunch of undergrad Social Justice Warriors out seeking confessions from politically incorrect professors”.

Bradley Cooper, out of his dancing shoes, trying to find a screen showing Truth anywhere in the Metro, and failing.

Anyway – these, along with the almost complete lack of box office interest in non-Hurt-Locker-related left-wing propaganda using the War on Terror as a stage, especially compared to efforts like American Sniper, Zero Dark Thirty, Lone Survivor and Act of Valor, which treat war as complex and horrible, but somehow fail to show Americans and American troops as bloodthirsty racists savages, make me wonder – does Hollywood really not care about the market as much as it does carrying the hard-left’s water?

Yes, it’s a partly rhetorical question.

[1] I know, I know – it was one one screen at the Lagoon – the art-house multiplex over in Uptown.  That may actually reinforce my point.

The good guys have apparently gotten into Heather Martens’ head.

GOCRA and MNGOPAC figured prominently in Martens’ “Give to the Max” day fundraising plea:

By giving today, you make it possible for the voice of reason to be heard at the Capitol despite the intimidation.

Intimidation?

The stories we could tell.

And will, someday.

But let’s move on to the fun part:

We need your support, because this other group says whatever it wants. I quote [from, I believe, a MNGOPAC fundraising email]:

“Let’s remember what Protect Minnesota advocates for: bans on common hunting rifles and shotguns, licensing of gun owners, mandatory inspections by your county sheriff for ‘safe storage,’ court orders to seize your firearms without a hearing, and on and on!”

It seems that Protect Minnesota is scary to those who think assault weapons are “common hunting rifles and shotguns” and will believe whatever accusations this group invents.

Now, let’s recap:  Heather Martens has never, not once in her career, said a single, original, substantive true thing about gun owners, gun crime, or the Second Amendment.

And she doesn’t start with this email.  “Assault Weapons” like the AR15, the Mini-14,  and SKS are exceptionally common hunting weapons.  The de facto licensing and mandatory inspections were parts of the bills that Protect MN supported – indeed, that Martens, a paid lobbyist, read into the record in lieu of Rep. Hausman, in a clubby little violation of House rules. The seizure without hearings was part of the various Domestic Abuse proposals pushed at the state and federal (by Sen. Klobuchar) level, and supported with robotic monotony by Martens and “Protect” MN.

She does swerve toward truth, briefly – but that, inevitably, undercuts her case without her knowing it, bless her simple little heart:

They are a small minority [Which routinely turns out 30 times as much public support as “Protect” MN – Ed] that makes “controversy” to stop any kind of public policy to reduce gun violence — even when the vast majority of Americans support such policies. But something scares me in their email: That they raised $51,000 last year.

Which is, likely, 50 times as much as “Protect” MN raised from the general public last year (they get $300K from the Joyce Foundation and other big institutional donors – read “Liberals with deep pockets”).

The people – real people, Real Minnesotans, Real Americans – support the Second Amendment.

And I’m not sure why that “scares” Heather Martens. It’s the only thing keeping her employed.

Heather Martens – “Director” and likely sole member of “Protect Minnesota”, and sometimes ad-hoc legislative representative from House District 66A – has sent out a fund-raising email.

Because trying to squat on peoples’ civil rights isn’t cheap, even if you do it badly.

And in this email, Martens – who has never, not once, uttered a single, substantive, original true statement about the Second Amendment, gun owners or guns in her career – gives us a little surprise.

Here’s the fundraising letter:

Dear Friend,
In Colorado on Halloween morning, a woman called 911 when she saw a black man walking down the street. During the six-minute call, the dispatcher lectured the caller on the fact that it is legal in Colorado to be a black man walking in public. Then black man started shooting people. He murdered three people before being killed by police, when they finally arrived on the scene.
Can you support Protect Minnesota on Give to the Max Day, to fight the laws that enable such black people to perpetrate such tragedies?
[Several paragraphs of bla bla bla about PMs purported accomplishments]
Thank you for all you do,

Heather Martens
Executive Director
Protect Minnesota: Working to End Gun Violence

“Wait – did Heather Martens actually send out a letter saying that a woman called in to report a black man walking down the street?”

Of course not.  Even a director at a PC non-profit can’t get away with that – unless they’re talking about Ben Carson or Tim Scott.

No – where you see references to “black man” in the letter above, fill in “a man carrying a gun”.  Here’s the actual fundraising email from Martens.  In the episode Martens writes about, a woman called 911 about someone openly carrying a firearm.  The 911 operator told the woman that it’s legal to open-carry in Colorado…

…and something else.    This story has a twist at the end.

Put a pin in that.  We’ll come back to it.

Then, six minutes into the 911 call about a man carrying a gun, something illegal happened – the man started shooting.  People died.  It was a tragedy.

But here’s the rub; Martens wants the police to respond to someone doing something they have every right to do, in a place they have every right to do it.  And they want them to do it when they know full well that the overwhelming majority of people who open-carry firearms are utterly and completely legal, and will never break a single law.

Martens thinks the police should respond to her fear, her paranoia, and her bigotry about people doing what they do, utterly legally, because of her paranoid assumption that a guy with a gun is a crime waiting to happen – which is not even a little bit different than assuming a black guy is a crime waiting to happen.

And that alone is reason to mock the hapless Martens.

But there’s more.  Heather Martens also lied.

Details, Details:  Buried further down in the fundraising letter, we see this little bon mot; emphasis is added:

:45  Naomi Bettis calls to report that she sees a man on her street carrying a big black rifle and  several cans of gasoline.  Over six minutes of conversation, she relays to the dispatcher the activities and a description of the man, noting that he had gone into another building and then emerged also carrying a handgun. She tells the dispatcher that she is “scared to death.”

So it turns out that Ms. Bettis not only called in to report the legal and overwhelmingly unremarkable fact that the man had a gun, but also the fact that he was carrying gasoline and acting suspiciously.

As, by the way, she should have.

And then the dispatcher responded…:

The dispatcher relates to her “It is an open carry state, so he can have a weapon with him or walking around with it.   But, of course, having those cans of gasoline it does seem pretty suspicious, so we’re going to keep the call going for that.”

So in other words, the police responded to Ms. Bettis’ call, exactly as if they’d have responded to the killer’s legal behavior.  The dispatcher acted correctly, and the police responded to the part of Ms. Bettis’ call that actually addressed something objectively and legally worthy of a response given the facts at the time, exactly as they’d have done if carrying the gun had been the  act they responded to.

Martens lied about the content of the phone call, and about the police response, to give the misleading impression that Colorado’s open carry law led to the deaths of innocent people.

It’s misleading, and it’s cowardly.  It’s a lie.

And yet the news media uses her as a source, without question.

Question For The Media:  It’s not a new one.  It’s the same one I ask every time Martens pulls a stunt like this.

When I was a reporter, we learned that when a source burns you, especially multiple times, you stop using them as a source.  At the very least, you get lots of corroboration.

Heather Martens has burned you.  She’s burned you  so often that the parts of the Minnesota media that care about accuracy and credibility have quietly started downplaying, or burying, her side of the story below that of credible sources like Joe Olson, Andrew Rothman and Bryan Strawser.

But if you’re one of those who still puts Heather’s stuff out there unquestioned, I have to ask you – why?

Ignorance?  Call me.  Email me.  I’ll show you the problem.

Not ignorance?  Then I really wanna talk with you.

Because they don’t give the faintest whiff of a rat’s patoot about gun safety.

When I was a kid, someone came into the school and gave us a quick demo and (IIRC) a film strip on actual gun safety.  It included a couple of simple rules that any kid can remember – and that I still do.  If you’re a kid, and you see a gun – your friends bring out their dad’s hunting rifle or grandpa’s WW2 pistol – and your parents aren’t there:

• Stop
• Don’t touch
• Run away
• Tell a grownup

That’s it.   That’s gun safety for kids.

There’s no way of knowing how many kids in my elementary school’s lives were saved by that lesson; not a single kid in my school died in a gun accident.  Zero.  There was a drowning, a couple car accidents, an alcohol poisoning, and a suicide right after graduation – but no gun accidents.

And this, in a part of the country where there are likely more guns per-capita than on bases for some branches of the military.

It’s a pretty standard program; many hunting groups, along with the NRA, teach gun safety in schools.

Y’know – because it keeps children from getting killed, accidentally.

You’d think moms (not to mention fathers) would be all over it.  And in the parts of our society ruled by common sense, they are.

But not I Moms Want Action (a wholly owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown For “Gun Safety”, the billionaire’s gun-grabber group),   To them, “gun safety” is, in their own words, “atrocious”:

Moms Demand Action’s Jennifer Hoppe recoiled at the news that Forest Hills was teaching children about gun safety. She said, “It’s atrocious to put the onus of gun safety onto children — this is an adult problem. Every gun that’s gotten into the hands of a child has first been under the control of an adult. A program that tries to dodge that is disingenuous.”

In a further effort to make her point, Hoppe added, “Accidental gun deaths among children are not ‘accidental,’” suggesting that the focus should be on how they are “preventable” if adults store guns properly.

Which is the sort of calm, cool, rational logic we’ve come to expect from Moms Want Action.  No, seriously.

Because in a world where our leftist entertainment industry gives money to gun-grabber groups with one hand, while glorifying consequence-free violence with the other, there are plenty of irresponsible parents out there, leaving guns in easy reach of kids.  And that is certainly a moral, and often literal, crime – which is nice, but what does your kid do when he or she comes face to face with their kids, acting like kids?

Question for you, Jennifer Hoppe, Jane Kay, Michael Bloomberg and Heather Martens:  would you be happier if your kid knew to stop, run away and tell an adult, or would you prefer the county attorney sort it all out after the funeral?

The article points out something I’d missed.  Usually, when a gun-grabber yaps about wanting a “conversation about guns,” what they mean is “you shooters shut up while we shriek at you”.

But Mark Kelly – wife of Gabby Giffords, and certainly no gun-rights advocate – actually indulged in that rarest of treats; he actually conversed about guns, complimenting the NRA’s exceptionally-effective child safety program.

The results were…predictable:

Ironically, it was just months ago that Huffington Post went comparably apoplectic after gun control proponent Mark Kelly praised the NRA’s Eddie Eagle program for its effectiveness with children. On April 14, Kelly tweeted: “I don’t agree w/ the NRA on some big issues, but they deserve a lot of credit for teaching kids about gun safety [via] Eddie Eagle.”

The reaction from the left was predictably emotionally-thud-witted, intellectually barren and morally bereft.

Dear Moms Want Action:  the blood of every child accidentally killed for want of commonsense gun-safety education is on your desiccated talons.

Off-year election results around the country were a mixed bag.

And by “mixed”, I mean generally good for conservative Republicans nationwide, and six of one, half a dozen of the other in Minnesota.

Tinkering With Leviathan:   Saint Paul’s elections yesterday, were a victory for DFL zealots over DFL extremists.

The City Council gained two councilors who ran on an agenda critical of Mayor Chris Coleman.   This can, in some ways, be read as a very mild moderate win – Jane Prince, who ran unopposed in Ward 7, and Rebecca Noeker (who is currently leading by a razor-thin margin as the “Instant Runoff” counting slogs on and on in Ward 2) ran in opposition to Mayor Coleman’s profligate subsidies of favored businesses via “Tax Increment Financing”, as well as his botched plan to install parking meters on Grand Avenue to try to chisel revenue out of shoppers in Saint Paul’s only successful mid-market retail district.

But I wouldn’t count on much change from the Council on the larger issues that are sandbagging Saint Paul; the stifling regulatory environment, the obeisance to the Met Council’s lust for 19th-century transit, and the crime problems that are percolating along University and out on the East Side.

Meet the New Boss, Same As The Old Boss:  The Saint Paul School Board election, as predicted, installed the four union-backed wholly union-owned candidates over the four formerly union-owned candidates. Whatever residue of independence from the Teachers Union that might have existed in the Saint Paul public schools will be hunted down and buried in concrete shortly.

While changing Superintendent Silva’s intensely unpopular disciplinary policies may be one of the upshots of yesterday’s elections, look for the fiscal profligacy and unaccountability to accelerate.

The election will be a great boon to charter schools – if Saint Paul parents are smart.

Schools Dazed:  The referenda in the various school districts around the east metro went about 50-50; the pattern seemed to be, broadly, that voters approved the bond levies for maintenance and repairs, but voted down the big additions to infrastructure and programming.

Which may show – who knows? – that voters are still manipulable by demands “for the children”, but they have their limits.

We’ll see.

The Gathering Storm?:  Around the country, the news was less ambiguous.  A Republican not only won the Kentucky governor’s race. but so did his black Tea Party Republican Lieutenant Governor.  In VIrginia, Michael Bloomberg, hoping in his ghoulish way to capitalize on the deaths of a couple of TV reporters, pumped a ton of money and a lot of agenda into a couple of key races, with control of the Virginia state senate on the line.  It flopped; just as in Colorado a couple of years ago, only in the most addlepated coastal hothouses can gun control get any popular traction.

In Houston, a referendum on gay rights got swept away in a vote that would be hard to see as anything but a backlash against the creeping fascism of the Social Justice Warriors and their waves of lawsuits and coercion against supporters of traditional marriage.  And even in San Francisco, the sanctuary-city-promoting sheriff got sent packing.

It’s a year ’til the next election.  Look for “progressives” with deep pockets to spend a ton of money to try to iron out the wrinkles in the narrative.

In the wake of the “debate” between Heather Martens – liar for hire and leader of a gun grabber “group,” sort of – and…

Andy Parrish?  The former Michele Bachmann staffer and campaign manager of the abortive Marriage Amendment, who is famous for many things, not including having an extensive portfolio as a Second Amendment activist?

Nothing against Andy, with whom I’m a nodding acquaintance – but why in the name of all that is holy would anyone select him to be the face of Second Amendment Human Rights issues?

My hunch:   because he’s the only Republican that anyone at KARE11 has talked to, lately, and, perhaps, someone at KARE11 figured it’d be a fair fight.  Martens going up against Andrew Rothman or Joe Olson or David Gross of GOCRA, or Bryan Strawser or Rob Doar of MNGOPAC, or even lil’ ol’ me would be a massacre.  A turkey shoot.  Like shooting fish in a barrel on a plate.

Anyway, KARE11,  I’m all about the help.  So I’m here to suggest some equally-appropriate matchups of “expert spokesperson” and issue:

There you go, KARE. Don’t say I’ve never done anything for you.

UPDATE: Bryan Strawser of MNGOPAC is responding to KARE11:

Letter to KARE-11 TV – October 2015 Gun Control Debate by Bryan Strawser

So, I think, will I. More later.