Growing up, I dreamed – among a few other things – of being a news reporter.  Let’s just say it’s a good thing not every dream comes true.

But I digress.

One of my “role models”, of sorts, was “Joe Rossi”, a character played by Robert Walden from the Lou Grant TV series.  One of the things about “Rossi” that I remember admiring, and to which I aspired, was fanatical detachment from everything – groups, people, society – supported by a hard-bitten cynicism about just about everything else.  “Rossi” went overboard, of course; never voted, never joined any groups, never did anything that’d compromise this detachment (which was sent up in a memorable episode in which the rest of the staff, in an orgy of chain-yanking, signed Rossi up for every organization they could – the AARP, the NRA, severel political parties, the AAA…

OK, it was  TV show – but that was one of the things (supported by my later experience and a little formal education in the field) that I carried with me through my brief, fruitless career as a reporter; reporters should have a healthy skepticism about everything.
Including reporters.

And I suspect most reporters would agree – at least as a platitude.

That needs, of course, to be combined with ravenous curiosity (which was one part of the craft that I did get right), including the ability to question ones’ own gaps and, dare I say, preconceptions.  We’ll come back to that.

“Skepticism”, of course, has its limits.  Reporters are human; they follow baseball teams, they read books, they vote – they have preferences.  None of them – not even “Joe Rossi” – attains their perfect ideals, whatever thepy are. So it’s not a surprise that, among other sins, reporters are just as big a bunch of fanboys as the rest of us, when you get down to it.  Or so it’d seem, seeing the coverage of Seymour Hersh’s appearance last week at the U of M, as partof the U’s “Great Conversations” program.

I didn’t go – I don’t think the “U” is especially aggressive about inviting non-believers to these things, but I have no idea, honestly.

But it was all over the place; Hersh dropped a few “bombs” (as reported by the local media, who did attend in droves) that got picked up by the big leftymedia.

More on that angle in a bit.

Eric Black of the MinnPost was there:

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Heady stuff!

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”

Of course, when it comes to “covert executive assassination squads”, you don’t have to do a lot of “dwelling” for the story to grab attention, do you?

Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective…that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”

Hersh, who is most famous (recently) for releasing the Abu Ghraib story (which the Army had been investigating, and which CBS was sitting on at government request) must be complimented for his focus on “empiricism”.

You might be too, if you’d had enough of your claims – apparently the less-“empirical” ones – turn out to be complete squibs.  I’ll direct you to this story from two years ago; Hersh claimed (amid a flurry of publicity) that US Special Forces were operating in Iran, preparatory to a US invasion.  It’s a claim that’d seem to have fallen down the memory hole; I have read no accounts of any of the journalists present at this or any other appearance questioning Hersh about it.
So perhaps it’s a good thing he’s waiting.  Except for the whole “Dropping the bomb in a talk at the U of M” bit.

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government officials who had experience with many of the crises.

Or, in Mondale’s case, were intimately involved in causing the crises.

Again, I digress.

Black continues:

And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out. Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Viethnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.

Nothing like working a relentlessly friendly room.

That’s not a digression.

We’re getting into the interesting stuff here:

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

And we’ll wait for the evidence on that.

I’m not saying I doubt it, necessarily – it’s just that I hope Mr. Hersh isn’t too busy waiting for the invasion of Iran to show us the evidence.  Someday.

Now, here we get into the part of the story where it might have been useful to have some journalists in the room with Mr. Hersh:

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

Let’s take a brief time-out here.

Re-read Hersh’s explanation of JSOC.  Assuming Black is reporting his words accurately (and I’ve expressed my complete confidence in the honest of Eric Black’s reporting in the past), Hersh explains JSOC as if…:

1. He expects nobody has heard of it (probably not an unfair assumption, given his audience)
2. He wants people to believe that its status is something unique, sinister, and unique to the Bush Administration.

It’s buncombe, of course.  Joint Special Operations Command was established so that key, vital, high-risk special operations – hostage rescues, counterterrorist missions and the like – could take place without the paralyzing overburden of the military’s bureaucracy and its effects on these types of operations.

And it reports to the Executive Branch – the Secretary of Defense – rather than Congress; of course, the entire Executive Branch reports to the Executive Branch!  But JSOC is isolated from much of the miltiary’s bureaucracy; it does things that need to be done without bringing 535 other commanders into the chain of command.  JSOC reports to the Secretary of Defense, and thence to the President and Congress.

This chain of command – directly to the highest ranks of power – was established  after an infamous military disaster caused by, among other things, interservice bureaucracy, and micromanagment by civilian officials.

The disaster was “Desert One”.  And the order to create JSOC came from President Jimmy Carter.  The boss of Hersh’s fellow guest on the panel, former Vice President
Walter Mondale.

A roomful of journalists might have known that.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

And I’m sure we’ll wait for evidence of the “executions”, in Hersh’s book, upcoming in a year or so.

But barring that “evidence”, there’s a point of order here:  the military doesn’t have to clear its operations with ambassadors or the CIA!  The military doesn’t report to either of them!

There’s no question that JSOC – the umbrella for the US’ clandestine military, including the Joint Special Operations Detachment Delta (“Delta Force”) and the Navy’s DEVGRU (formerly “Seal Team Six”) – does things that aren’t supposed to see the light of day.  And some of these things are by their very nature controversial.  Mark Bowden chronicled the Clinton-era use of JSOC troops to track and kill Medellin drug boss Pablo Escobar; one wonders where the chorus of demands for constitutional due process were back then?

It’s not an idle question for any democracy; in the UK during “The Troubles”, Britain’s Special Air Service – the unit that “Delta” and many of the world’s other special forces are modeled after – garnered decades of controversy in its clandestine surveillance and, in some cases, direct action against the IRA.  While Britain’s constitution recognizes a closer relationship between the military and civil authority than we have in the US – something that helped spawn our tradition of Posse Comitatus, in fact – it’s the sort of thing that a free society needs to watch out for and be aware of.

But, until we get Hersh’s “evidence”, really, all we have is innuendo
A roomful of journalists might have known this, and asked Hersh to square his account with history and, while we’re at it, JSOC’s stated organization, oversight structure and (since it can be reasonably assumed Walter Mondale was there) three-decade-long mission.

“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Really?

Why?

Because the Obama Administration has found that there’s nothing illegal about what Bush sent JSOC to do?  Distasteful to modern, urban, urbane, small-l-liberal (and usually big-l-Liberal) products of the university system, perhaps, but not illegal?  Indeed, necessary under the circumstances – just as Jimmy Carter found when he plugged the whole thing in three decades ago?

A roomful of journalists might not have known this – but, armed by the skepticism that I and probably not a few of them used to think was a key part of the trade, you’d have thought someone might have asked.

A roomful of star-struck hero worshippers?  Not so much.

Am I being unfair in characterizing the room – people paralyzed, if not by Walter Mondale’s suffocating gravitas, by Hershs’ reputation as, as Black put it…:

…the best-known investigative reporter of his generation…

…as a bunch of star-struck fanboys? Who are acting like the shrimp-league lefty commenter on Marty Owings’ show last weekend whose entire line was “who are you to question Sy Hersh?”

Maybe.

But just as someone has to question the government – and its servants, like JSOC – someone needs to subject Seymour Hersh to some skepticism, too.

And I’m sure that roomful of Journalists will do just that.

After Hersh gets done covering that invasion of Iran he warned us about.

So the MOB party was last night.  It was the first one we’ve done in about 18 months.  I expected sort of a “rebuilding season” kinda vibe to the party, with maybe 40-odd people showing up.

I counted a total fo a little over 70 over the course of the evening, with probably a little over fifty in the room at one time at the party’s peak.

Being the peripatetic sort (and having heard once upon a time it’s a good host’s job to make sure everyone meets everyone else), I did my best to actually try to meet, if not have a meaningful conversation, with everyone there, just to get an idea of how showed up, and from where.

My attempts to get everyone are usually laughably incomplete, but here goes:

• Lileks, of course, with the Giant Swede and a significant-looking other.
• Bob Davis of KSTP-AM
• Laura and David Hemler, fans, activists, and longtime friends of the NARN
• Joel Rosenberg and Felicia Herman
• Gary M. Miller, Jeff Kouba and (I believe) Paul from Truth Vs. The Machine
• Casey, an intern reporter from The Daily Planet
• Jeff Rosenberg of the Daily Liberal MN Publius
• Mini-Flash 2.0 – Flash’s (Centrisity) doppleganger.
• Tom “Swiftee” Swift
• Jordan Mason  – formerly of the Taxpayers League – and lucky guy Mark Wernimont.
• The entire Night Writer clan; John “Night Writer” Stewart, the Reverend Mother, Mall Diva, Tiger Lily and Uncle Ben.
• Mr. D – of blog and comment section fame.
• Former MOB Mayor Andy “Andee Applecowskee” Aplikowski and Carrie (bka “Spurringirl”).
• Enge and his daughter
• Doug “Crossword Bebop” Bass and at least one of his kids
• Half of the McCollow/Pivec/Hubble clan; Katie (formerly of Yucky Salad with Bones) and husband Mike, sister MLP (from Casual Sundays) and – !!! – husband Jay Pivec, who was my college’s basketball coach back in 1984, whom I’d not seen in 25 years, who is the head coach at Minneapolis Community Technical College, and who earlier that every evening had won the game that’d send MCTC to nationals, along with the youngest sister and Katie’s twin/friend (whose names both elude me yet again).
• King Banaian and Janet B of SCSU Scholars, and King’s friend Ken Doyle.
• A couple of NARN2 Webstream viewers, including Wendy “Tolowen” and a couple others whose names have dodged me.
• Comment section regular Just Plain Angry
• Jamie Delton of Delton Digest and his friend, er, Shawn/Sean (sp?)
• Marty Andrade
• John “Policy Guy” LaPlante
• David Strom and Margaret Martin
• Duke Powell, former Burnsville state rep and new blogger at Ambulancedriver.com, who had to leave early to, well, drive an ambulance.
• Matt Abe of North Star Liberty
• Chief, Guy and Lassie from Freedom Dogs
• Fresch Fisch
• Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci from Kool Aid Report
• Leo Pusateri of “Psychmeister’s Ice Palace” and, er, Mrs. Pusateri
• Marty Stanchfield, promotions whiz, with the hit of the evening, the Obama spinny-head doll (Thanks, Marty!)
• Kevin Ecker
• Chris from Rocket’s Red Glare
• Barry Hickethier
• the Other Chris, from BuddhaPatriot
• And of course, Mayor Johnny Roosh and the first lady, Mrs. Roosh!
• Commenter Jim C.

I apologize to anyone I missed; I did my best to reconstruct the list from pure, overtaxed memory.
Special thanks to Terry and Virginia Keegan,who made room for the party after I, ahem, neglected to tell them we’d be descending on them (and thanks to Barry for tipping them off last week, averting disaster…)

We’ll do another one this summer, likely at a more spacious location (details being arranged).

And the long-joked-about MOB Day at the Range – wherein a MOB party would start at a firing range and move to a bar of some sort (in that order and no other), long spoke of tongue-in-cheek, actually has a better-than-even chance of happening this year.  Stay tuned.

UPDATE:  D’oh.  And Eric Black from the MinnPost.

Was disappointed to see the MinnPost’s David Brauer didn’t show up to recreate his ambulance scene with Duke.  Also hoping some of the MPR crowd can make it next time!

UPDATE 2:  Yep, Brad and Jen Carlson were there, too.  I reconstructed the list by who I saw sitting where; the Carlsons’ table had all sorts of people who were harder for me to remember, so I mentally kept going “I’ll get back to them!” every time I typed out names from that table.  But I didn’t.  Until now, I mean…

My quicker take on Brian Lambert’s take on Katherine Kersten’s departure from the Strib:  He’s irredeemably wrong, for reasons that are largely due to personal and vocational myopia.

I told you it’d be quick.

But that’s not all that satisfying, is it?

———-

A couple of points, just as background. 

• I used to be a reporter.  I was a decent writer, and could cover a story, but I never really had the urge to immerse myself in making it in the field.  My career began and ended as a freelancer, in between radio jobs.  I was perfectly fine with that then, and even moreso now.
• Most “journalists” honestly believe that they are objective, or at least detached.  With that in mind, they also believe that the organizations for which they work, individually and institutionally, are too. 
• Many “journalists” also believe that they are part of a higher calling.  The journalist’s trade has a collective mythology about it, studded with catchphrases like “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” and “Woodward and Bernstein” and “keeping an eye on the powerful”, and “fairness, clarity and balance”. 
• These catchphrases animate a lot of “journalists” through the lean years of what is, for most reporters, a lean, niggling, awful career that, even when times were good, usually didn’t pay all that well or lead to any particular distinction.  The attitude is the same one that drives people in a lot of spartan, tenuous careers – religious monks and policemen jump to mind.  All fo them voluntarily immerse themselves in a spartan, aescetic life in pursuit of what they see as a greater good.  Few people get rich in any of the fields; most careers are nasty, brutish and brutish and, while monks and cops can retire from the field, reporters rarely do. 
• With that immersion comes a sense of exceptionalism.  With exceptionalism comes an “us against them” attitude.  With “Journalists”, that attitude is expressed via a belief that journalists are “high priests of knowledge”; that only a trained, qualified journalist can really tell a story clearly, truthfully and effectively.

And a couple more:

• An aphorism for you:  From Sacramento, Boise is “way out east”.
• Keeping the above in mind:  if a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and a “sacramento” liberal is there to hear it, the liberal will hear “racism”, “whining”, “extremism” and “hate”.  Among other things.  Simultaneously.
• Oh, yeah; the latest meme:  No matter what their tone (to say nothing of facts), a conservative pointing out any anti-conservative institutional bias is always “whining”. 

Now, it’s been over twenty years since anyone mistook Brian Lambert for fair, balanced or non-partisan.  For years, he carried water for the DFL as the Pioneer Press‘ broadcasting columnist, until he went to work (very briefly) as then-Senator Mark Dayton’s short-lived re-election campaign.  He’s been bouncing among the Twin Cities’ online publications (and a stint as the liberal point to Sarah Janecek’s counterpoint on a short-lived KTLK-FM afternoon drive show).  He’d be one of those “from Sacramento, Boise is far east” liberals; from his perspective, the Star/Tribune probably does seem stodgy, establishment and “conservative”. 

And like most Twin Cities’ lefties, he’s happy to see Katherine Kersten leaving the Strib.  Like most journalists, he probably figured the Strib was pretty fair and balanced before all those meddling kids conservatives showed up.

In this case, the Powerguys:

The “boys”, Scott Johnson, John Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff are worth mentioning here because they have played a critical role in this latest episode of self-abasement by Minnesota’s largest news organization

Editorial balance is “Self-Abasement”, when a conservative is involved.

While the Strib has always been attacked by right-wingers, usually for not adequately parroting the same talking points read off by Jason Lewis, Hugh Hewitt and the rest, the Power Line trio, Hinderaker and Johnson in particular, put a snake rattle in Anders Gyllenhaal’s head.

You can chalk that statement up to any number of things; I’ll chalk it up to Lambert being in “Sacramento” while Anders Gyllenhall is in “Boise” (as I sit in my office in Pittsburgh talking to most Americans, who are somewhere between Des Moines and Chicago).  But I keep trying to ask left-ish media types – can you show me where the Strib’s editorial/op-ed pages have ever been fair, to say nothing of sympathetic, to any of the principles of the center-right?  Forget about the hot-button issues like abortion and gun control; can you remember ever the Strib’s editorial board presenting a balanced view of, say, social security reform?  Government growth?  Local Aid to Government?  Cutting deficits by cutting spending rather than raising taxes?  School choice vs. the untrammelled power of the teachers’ union?  Parental notification? 

Can you remember the Strib doing a hatchet-job that benefitted anyone but a DFLer?

Get back to us on that one.

And when you do, tell us how that “balance” would actually be “parroting Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt and Jason Lewis”. 

Their legalistic, grad-school punditry, high standing among echo chamber “base” Republicans, combined with Time magazine declaring them “Blog of the Year” after their assault on Dan Rather…

“Assault on Dan Rather”.

You read that right.

Pay no attention to the forged dox, the impossible scenario, the implausible backstory; Dan Rather was the victim, says Brian Lambert, on his way to his inevitable (indeed, boilerplate) conclusion that conservatives are whining.

Now, it has never been proven that it was Power Line specifically who pushed Gyllenhaal to commit himself to a conservative “counter balance” to Nick Coleman, but Coleman himself aside, I’ve yet to hear anyone at the Strib doubt that that’s the way it went down.

So?

What if it’s true?  Indeed, it should be true; it was Nick Coleman’s gutless, factually-vacant assault on Scott Johnson that brought the issue to a head; it was the sheer feckless factlessness of it all, one might think, that convinced Gyllenhall, the Strib‘s former editor, that he had a real problem on his hands.

There are idiot ranters who don’t give a damn about facts and fairness. They can be ignored. And then there are well-educated, well-connected ranters who craft cleverly parsed, fact-like assertions and make demons out of those who show them no respect. Those are more difficult to ignore.

Question:  Why would one “ignore” the case that Powerline built against the Strib?  Over the course of almost seven years of writing, and countless articles detailing with lawyerly precision the crimes of Jim Boyd, Anders Gyllenhaal, Doug Grow, Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman against truth (to say nothing of balance and fairness), what’s to ignore?

Oh, yeah.  “They’re not journalists”.

That may not be exactly how Lambert would put it – “it has never been proven that Brian Lambert thinks only journalists are qualified to criticize journalism”, to paraphase Lambert – but really, what else could be behind it?

The point here is that Power Line in effect created the conflict that required the Strib to hire a Katherine Kersten and then pretty much delivered Kersten herself as the solution.

Powerline created decades of institutional bias?  They “created” the arrogance and incompetence that led Jim Boyd to slander them?   That led Nick Coleman to take a personal, defamatory (not remotely factual, certainly not “journalistically valid or ethical”) swipe at Scott Johnson?

Remember – Lambert is one of those lefty pundits that accuses conservatives of playing the victim.

———-

Let’s go back to the background points:  Journalists often see themselves as a class above and beyond the hoi polloi; they have a higher calling; they “paid their dues” in the “trenches” of the field, telling the truth when nobody else can; they often see themselves as being in the world, but not of it. 

I use the term “high priests of knowledge”.  Any given reporter may dispute that term, but it’s usually a difference of degree, not accuracy.

Kersten’s big problem, other than conservatism itself?

She’d never taken those same monastic vows:

Her arrival on the metro pages sent a clear message. Here was a purely partisan pundit with no reporting experience whatsoever. Moreover she was being set in place, with instant equal standing to a couple old dogs who had spent decades covering every imaginable facet of local culture…

So?

Nick Coleman spent decades covering city council meetings and one-car accidents, learning (let’s be charitable) to write clearly and effectively, just like every “journalist” does when “paying his dues”. 

And then, he became a columnist.  Someone who markets not fact, but observation, “insight”, and opinion.  One whose opinions led him to get a job as a talk show host on the local Air America affiliate, Lambert doesn’t trouble to add (he was a regular guest on Coleman’s abortive trainwreck of a morning show).

One has the right to ignore Coleman’s immense ideological baggage, and focus myopically on his “old dog”-ness as more of a qualification than Kersten’s background (academia and punditry).

But you’ll wait in vain for a defense that goes into greater depth than “because he’s a journalist, dammit”. 

Kersten became the ying-to-Coleman’s-yang, the quid pro quo, the internal countershot.That’s another way of saying that Nick saw Kersten for what she was, and for who and what she represented, (right-wing journalism haters and Power Line, who to be clear, delight in vilifying Coleman) and Nick rose to the fight, caution be damned. (Nick is Irish. He can’t help it. It’s an ethnic curse.)

Part of that ethnic curse, perhaps, is that our Scandinavian anscestors used to loot, pillage and dominate Coleman and Lambert’s Irish anscestors with little more trouble than Johnson and Hinderaker chewing up Coleman’s writing.

Here’s the big finish:

As I tried to get across in the Rake piece and in countless blogs since, I had no quarrel at all with the Strib hiring a conservative metro columnist. They needed one. The problem was hiring a conservative columnist who was first, foremost and solely a partisan voice. Had they found someone on staff or around town who had the breadth and depth of experience Nick Coleman and Doug Grow had acquired from years of covering the full spectrum of culture;

 And now we’re into the interesting stuff. 

Several questions, Brian Lambert:

1. Given the relentless “progressive” nature of the field of Journalism, where would a conservative candidate come from?  Countless surveys show that less than 15% of reporters vote to the right of center.
2. Most editors – certainly most Strib editors – aren’t all that far to the right of Brian Lambert.  They’re “Boise” to his “Sacramento”.  Which of them is going to promote a “Chicago” to the opinion page? 
3. Given the dearth of conservatives in newsrooms that proceed to “old dog”-itude, where does one find conservatives to serve in that role that you, yourself, acknowledge above was needed?
4. Why do you assume that only an “old dog” reporter can tell a story?

Lambert is – consciously? – echoing Nick Coleman’s infamous, pedantic, supremely arrogant justification for his own position and status

But that’s my defense: I show my face in public. I have been a reporter longer than most bloggers have been alive, which makes me, at 54, ready for the ash heap. But here’s what really makes bloggers mad: I know stuff.

I covered Minneapolis City Hall, back when Republicans controlled the City Council. I have reported from almost every county in the state, I have covered murders, floods, tornadoes, World Series and six governors.

In other words, I didn’t just blog this stuff up at midnight.

Nick Coleman “knows stuff” – because he was a reporter.

Top-flight lawyers?  Economists?  Career guys and keen observers?  Divorced guys on their third careers?   Ivy-league trained thinkers?

If they didn’t spend thirty years sitting in City Council meetings (or writing about TV shows, apparently), then they are not of the order. 

It’s not the ability to observe, to build a case, to tell the story, to make sense.  It’s that thirty years of ticket punching that really counts. 

I don’t think anyone outside “the order” buys that anymore.

All that said, it is a giant, groaning pity Gyllenhaal’s successors chose to wipe both Kersten and Coleman off the company ledger. But then it’s break-up-the-furniture-for-fuel time at the Strib. The only thing that’ll add loud, resonating insult to injury to this move is if Avista Capital Partners’ newsroom managers keep … a gossip columnist in place instead of two people who, say what you will, waded into serious, relevant issues and provoked constant reader reaction.

Well, I never said that Lambert was always wrong.

(more…)

Perhaps predictably, the best line in Eric Black’s takedown of the Strib’s buyout of Kersten and Coleman is at the end:

Pardon the football analogy (by the way, I’m on the Tarvaris bandwagon) but this Strib decision feels like trying to run out the clock when you’re behind by three touchdowns.

Even I wasn’t aware of how dumb Avista’s been playing it lately:

When the editors decided to ban the columnists from writing about politics in the last days of the recent election campaign, it was obvious that they thought controversy was not interesting. They thought it was DANGEROUS.Now this. Don’t just make them be dull. Make them be gone. Make everyone write in that same I-don’t-exist voice of the omniscient narrator (who knows all but won’t quite tell you the most interesting stuff he knows, because it might DANGEROUS).

Over at Powerline, Scott Johnson half agrees with me. Dumping the Coleman column “strengthens the paper,” Johnson writes. But Kersten, by virtue of her conservatism, “speaks for many in Minnesota who now are voiceless in the mainstream media.”

I disagree with Johnson about what the paper hopes to accomplish. They are seeking safety, but they won’t find it this way.

Not sure that Coleman was “dangerous” in the sense Black suggests, but the larger point is a good one.  The paper is weaker without Coleman.

Given that there is no shortage of mushy-left opinion at the Strib (including most of the editorial board), it should go without saying that whatever op-ed “credibility” the paper thought it had is circling the drain apace.

Now that the Minnesoros “Independent” has accomplished its mission of serving as a local-regional propaganda outlet for the mid-to-far left – a sort of local analogue to “Media Matters” and “MoveOn”, even as far as sharing some of the same funding sources – and the election is over…

…the reason for having the “Independent” has apparently passed.  The Center for “Independent” Media has yanked the budget leash on its’ “independent” vassals affiliates.

The first sign?  The “Independent” has started whacking its staff:

A couple more names are victims of budget-cutting at Minnesota Independent: full-timer Andy Birkey and politics freelancer Britt Robson.

Birkey had covered LGBT issues for the site since its August 2006 inception; he was one of two staffers axed, along with reporter Molly Priesmeyer.

The last time I knew anything of the “Independent”‘s financials, the “writers” got a stipend for working part-time for the glorified blog.  I’d suspect – and will try to dig up info – that when they brought on former journalist and ex-City Pages editor Steve Perry, it came along with a big, and currently unnecessary, jump in funding.

But I’ve come to look forward to staff departures at the “Independent”, because it seems that’s when the actual truth comes out.  When Eric Black left, he let slip the Mindy’s Soros connection (the worst-kept secret in the Twin Cities alt-media). 

And now, Britt Robson – one of the Mindy’s few capable better writers, unencumbered by having to carry the water for his overlords in DC, lets fly (emphasis added):

Robson became a casualty when MnIndy’s parent, the D.C.-based Center for Independent Media (CIM), eliminated the freelance budget entirely…However, Robson — who writes about arts for MinnPost and sports for The Rake — was caustic in his view [of] MnIndy’s Capitol overlords. He says CIM’s national staff was less interested in the organization’s professed mission — “a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that operates an independent online news network in the public interest” — than boosting the party of Barack Obama.

“I was working with them fairly closely during the Republican convention and privy to interoffice emails,” Robson explains. “The type of things non-local editors were into were very party-race stories, particularly stories that embarrassed Republicans and promoted Democrats.”

Wow.

Kinda exactly like the Mindy’s critics have been saying all along, you mean?

Robson believes the local staff chafed at this purposefulness; they consider themselves progressives, not DFL party hacks. He points to Perry’s tenure as City Pages editor, when staffers went after Republicans hard but regularly gnawed the legs off local Democrats such as R.T. Rybak.

A reflexively pro-Dem agenda “is a bias that’s reflected more in the national echelons,” Robson says. “We both know Steve Perry; he probably has as little use for Democrats as Republicans, that’s his reputation.”

That was Perry’s reputation.

My opinion:  when the Mindy got started in 2006 under original “editor” Robin Marty, it was amateurish but earnest.  It had journalistic ambitions, of sorts. 

When Perry took over, whether in spite of his presence or because of it, the paper’s tone became more shrill, more propagandistic; it read less like an earnest college newspaper staffed by newbies, and more like a dumb, trite, phoned-in, ill-informed, propagandistic leftyblog.

David Brauer covers the utterly unsurprising “story” at the slightly-less-overtly-bought-off MNPost; let’s see if my comment ever gets out of moderation.

Next to Michael Brodkorb, no center-right pundit in the Twin Cities generates more deranged irrationality than the Strib’s Katherine Kersten.

Lambert writes about one of her recent columns (doesn’t matter which; they all react the same no matter what she writes):

As we know, Ms. Kersten writes . . . in public . . . because Star Tribune management felt it was overdue for someone to counterbalance the pro-gladiatorial, pro-crotch shot, and pro-animal-like moan worldview of brutish males such as Doug Grow and Nick Coleman. But countering those two violence-drenched pornographers is a big, tough job. Do you have any idea how many Minnesotans are obsessed with gladiatorial stripper-pole moaning? A lot.

So I got to thinking: The Strib needs help. [Heh – Ed.] This is too much for one person. Which is where you come in. With the assistance of MSP Publishing’s marketing department—and this is real—we are offering a swank dinner for two—a $100 gift certificate to r. Norman’s—to whoever out there produces the best 500-word column that “Out Kerstens Kersten”. (E-mail your submission to blambert@mspmag.com).

Of course, Lamborghini (as G. Charles used to call him) is pilfing my material; it was in 2006-2007 that this blog started the “Columnist Parody” tradition in the local media with dare I say a brilliant assault on the oeuvre of Susan Lenfestey (poll and entries).

So in the interest of protecting my copyright, and because the Twin Cities’ pundosphere is such a rich vein of “talent”, it’s time to do another “Parody In The Dark” contest, where you, gentle reader, get to show the world the kind of “satire” Al Franken can’t even pull off.
The only real problem: picking who to parody.  The environment is, indeed, that target-rich.
So here’s what we’ll do:

1. Starting today, through Friday night, I’ll take nominations.
2. I’ll run a poll early next week to pick our victim
3. Once the subject is chosen, I’ll start the contest, probably next Tuesday; the objective will be to find the best parody of the selected writer.

The winner will receive some kind of reward. What, I don’t know; rest assured, it’ll pale compared to the pleasure you’ll bring millions.

As Charlie Quimby says:

Imitating clumsy writing is like purposely singing off-key. A professional will never be as convincing as the earnest and tone deaf amateur.

Amen, brother.

Bring on the tone-deafness!

(NOTE: Susan Lenfestey can not be nominated for this competition; she’s already “won” one).

Doug Grow – long known as the DFL’s number two shill in the mainstream media (second only to Lori Sturdevant) – is trying to blow some wind into the sails of the Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenberg campaign.

E-Tink is trying to unseat Michele Bachmann in the Sixth Congressional District. He’s most “famous” in Minnesota for having been Jesse Ventura’s do-nothing Tranportation Commissioner. He should be even more famous for his ghoulish performance after the collapse of the I35W bridge, almost a year ago. As the fires still blazed and before the last girders had fallen into the water, Tinklenberg joined State Rep. Alice “The Phantom” Hausman on TV and radio coverage of the tragedy, claiming – before the National Transportation Safety Board investigators had shut off their pagers summoning them to Minneapolis – that the collapse was the result of Tim Pawlenty’s refusal to raise the gas tax. The performance was a ghoulish embarassment that would have ended the career of a politician…

…that was not a DFLer in a city where having paid lefty PR flaks like the MNPost and the Minnesoros “Independent” are almost redundant.

Anyway – Doug Grow writes in re the race:

A month ago, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann said she’s on board with a campaign plan to get gasoline prices back to $2 a gallon…Do people in the 6th Congressional District buy this sort of campaign talk?

Well, if “they” don’t understand the laws of supply and demand, they can certainly get jobs as economics reporters for the Minnesoros “Indepdendent” perhaps they deserve to be getting their news from Doug Grow we can trade them all to Massachussetts?

I digress. Grow is doing what he’s done his whole career; spin, whilst carrying water for the DFL:

At this point, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has NOT put the 6th District in its “red to blue” category. Instead, it calls the district an “emerging” race for Democrats. The difference in categories is substantial: Democrats in “red to blue” districts receive financial and other resource help. Those in “emerging” districts receive pats on the back and encouraging words from the DCCC: “Go get ’em, buddy!”

But even if the DCCC isn’t convinced that Bachmann can be defeated after one term in Washington, Tinklenberg says he’s optimistic.

I’d actually pay money to hear some DFLer say “Oh, I’m going to get my donkey kicked. It’s hopeless. Smoke ’em if you got ’em”.

Of course, being a DFLer in Minnesota means never needing to come up with your own facile explanations:

Recall, Bachmann defeated Patty Wetterling by 8 percentage points, 50 to 42. BUT there was a third candidate in the race, John Binkowski, of the Independence Party, who picked up 7.8 percent of the vote. This time around, the IPs endorsed Tinklenberg.

When you add Wetterling’s 127,144 votes and Binkowski’s 23,557 votes, Bachmann won the district by just 548 votes.

Fascinating.

Except that Bachmann and Wetterling were running for an open seat – which is always much more up in the air.

And the national Democrat establishment did a lot more than pat Patty on the back; they poured truckloads of money into the race. The media, even more in the bag than usual for the DFLer, called in all its markers, assisted by a large, sometimes deranged pack of alternative media adjuncts. And for all that, Bachmann still not only won, but won by the biggest margin of victory of any Republican in the state, in a year where Republicans got trounced nationwide, with the most conservative message of any Republican in Minnesota.

This time around? She’s the incumbent. That’s worth a few points all by itself. The media has moved on to other races, doing its damnedest to get Al Franken elected. The DCCC knows a dead horse when it sees one. Her alt-media stalkers – having provided her (I am convinced) with at least one point of her margin of victory – have marginalized themselves into near-irrelevance; even some of the media figures that used to regard them with breathless credulity have gotten the message.

E-Tink; Dead Bid Walking.

Tonight’s the MDE/MNPublius bipartisan happy hour at Billy’s on Grand:

Hope to see you there.

———-

Speaking of graphics, I saw this in a post on Charlie Quimby’s blog the other day:

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Yesterday, I noted that among my favorite interviews on the NARN have been my discussions with Eric Black, Dane Smith and Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak. I genuinely enjoy talking, and occasionally sparring, across the aisle. Two things can happen; either your beliefs get stronger from being tested in the exchange, or their weaknesses are exposed, perhaps leading to their changing. This happened to me twenty-five years ago; determined assault from conservative classmates showed me that my big-L Liberal beliefs were untenable. So I changed.

And this ties into what I wrote Monday – about how seeing those across the aisle from you as human makes for better, more satisfying argument. In a larger, more important sense, it’s also kinda important for running a country.

Of course, the flip side is also true; if you can keep your enemies firmly, securely dehumanized – from calling your opponents “wingnuts” or “commies”, up to presuming that the government you didn’t elect is depraved and evil enough to, say, spread AIDS in prisons or blow up the World Trade Center – it makes for an easy, more facile argument.

———-

It’s generally accepted as conventional wisdom that political discourse in this country has never been more foulmouthed, polarized and angry that it is today. That’s a bunch of liberal crap…

…er, wait. Heh heh. Dunno where that came from. Anyway – let me start over.

It’s ahistorical, to say the least. The 1828 campaign, which saw Andrew Jackson topple John Quincy Adams, was marred by violence, and represented a clash of social poles that spat venom across and unbridgeable gap; it was the original “blue vs. red” election; indeed, some of the media parallels between then and today are just too tempting.

Of course, at various times in the 1890’s and 1930’s, people were genuinely, and rightly, worried about the “discourse” adjourning to bayonet-point – which, in fact, it did in 1861.

That was an ugly, polarized debate.

Today? All we have is people taking broad, often factually-vacant shots at those with whom they disagree. Many of these shots are made possible by that sense of dehumanization we talked about on Monday. The “debate” – which, on blogs, is entirely one-sided, even if there’s a “comment section” involved – is fueled by the very real human pathologies that regard…

1. …”our side” as being where all the righteousness is, while “their side” is vacuous on a good day, evil on a bad one.
2. “Their” side being vacuous-to-evil, of course, anyone to practices it must by extension be vapid-to-rotten as well.
3. As long as you can keep your “enemy” nice and abstract and inhuman, there’s no real human consequence to ascribing his beliefs to base, loathsome motives.
4. This is reinforced by the tendency on blogs (especially, in the Twin Cities, among bloggers on the left, although it’s not exclusive) to write pseudonymously – so that not only are their targets too abstract to treat like humans, but they themselves are too abstract to be vulnerable to the very treatment they dish out.
5. Finally, resistance to the very notion that one should try to get past the abstract, dehumanizing influences of the medium.

At the bottom of it, of course, is this; it’s comfortable sitting in your echo chamber, smug ‘n happy with your preconceptions and your prejudices, bristling at the idea of approaching it any differently, because it’s just so much fun hanging out with your friends and bashing on the conveniently-abstract, abstractly-evil “enemy” among us.

It’s always been fun getting beyond that – for example, at the MOB parties I wrote about on Monday, or at Flash’s “Drinking Moderately” soirees.

Of course, liberals react oddly to the notion of going to a MOB party. And conservatives stopped getting invited to Flash’s gatherings about a year or so ago; rumor (not from Flash, by the way) had it the lefties didn’t like being seen with the enemy.

———-

Which brings us back to Charlie Quimby’s question: “Is it OK to meet unconditionally with anti-progressive GOP operatives?”

So many questions:

1. “Is it OK” according to what standard? Who set that standard? Why?
2. What are the consequences of meeting with the “operatives” if it’s not OK?
3. If it’s not “OK” to “meet with” Michael Brodkorb (over happy hour – the most innocuous and levelling institution Western Civilization has developed since the Polar Bear Run), what “conditions” would make it OK? Handcuffing all Republicans? What? Help me out here.
4. So if it is objectively proven that “progressivism” is actually intensively regressive, would that change the ground rules for this “Meeting?” (Trick question; it has been proven, albeit subjectively).
5. GOP Operative? So friggin’ what? A guy’s gotta have a job. And Michael does it well – indeed, he eats your party’s lunch so regularly that he’s become, if anything, a bigger source of derangement than Michele Bachmann and Katherine Kersten – two other conservatives that beat the local left like bongo drums, and have earned boundless hatred for it. And while I scratch my head at some of Brodkorb’s more gossipy revelations, after a while you have to look at his record – exposing Franken’s tax problems, which are on a whole ‘nother level than a squib Playboy interview – and realize the guy’s on the ball. Criminy, the way to learn to do things better is to have contact with those who do it better than you – and Brodkorb does it better than most of you. Grow up and cut the drama.
6. OK, let’s back out of the ideological swamp; if it’s not “OK” to “meet” (i.e. have a beer) with a “GOP operative” (and a room full of his friends, and yours as well), where do you stop? Should we not work together, too? (It’s not an academic question – the left actively purges “anti-progressive” thought in industries they control, like academia, education, unions, etc). Not worship together? Yep, you’re working on that. Not live in the same neighborhoods? At what point does contact – “meeting”, drinking, working, worshipping, studying, living – with those with whom you disagree, make you…unclean? Subject to dire consequences of “non-OK”-ness? Whatever you’re worried about?
7. Indeed – what in the hell are you worried about?

I’d expect that question from a lot of people before I’d expect it from Quimby. Yesterday, by way of pleading the sincerity with which he looks for conversation across the aisle, he elaborated:

Real community and real civility — civitas — come about when antagonists find something important they truly want in common. Something they cannot have without respecting the other’s perspective, values and rights.

Does anyone see the leaps series of hopscotch-like hops here?

Put aside your (plural) Brodkorb derangement for a moment here; does anyone seriously think that any of us on the right don’t seek a better country and society?

And before you answer “but conservative polices won’t lead to a better country and society”, just stop. In many ways, they do, and have – which is why all of us conservatives subscribe to it.

To ascribe it to other motives – that we’re idiots, that we’re tools of powerful interests that control our feeble little wingnut minds – is to buy into the “Dehumanizing” we talked about on Monday..

And liberalism has had its place (he says, clenching his teeth as he types) as well, and done the odd bit of good, by some definitions. Whew. That was tough.

More importantly – assuming there’s nothing worth talking about with liberals is just as dumb.

Quimby also asks:

Why would I or any progressive attend a branded event that seems calculated to create a veneer of bipartisanship for perhaps the most partisan attack blog in the state?

Dunno, Charlie. Why don’t you ask the MNPublius guys, among the few most respected “progressive” bloggers in the state.

If they can tough it out…

———-

For my part? Of course it’s “OK” to “meet” with “anti-liberty” “pro-speech-rationing, anti-growth, anti-market, pro-racist-gun-control” “operatives” over a couple of beers. For those with the intellectual horsepower to pull it off, it can be a fun challenge. For those who can take themselves and their beliefs a little less teeth-clenchingly seriously than normal, it can be fun to get out and mix it up with, or even just meet, other people. And as someone who not only “meets” with “operatives” across the aisle pretty regularly (and used to be one of them, for that matter), I’ll tell you something if you promise to keep it very quiet.

Ready?

(There are no consequences. It’s OK. It’s just casual contact with your fellow US citizen and, by the way, human. Nobody’s going to think the worse of you – assuming the left really doesn’t have some kind of purity police that show up at these things and takes names. They don’t exist – right?)

(And by the way, Michael Brodkorb doesn’t eat babies (just Democrats’ lunch) – he is, indeed, one of the nicer guys you’ll meet. Your face won’t peel off in divine retribution if you’re seen in the same room as him. Again, barring some kind of DFL purity police. We can bar that, can’t we?)

Shhhhhhh. Mum’s the word.

So I’ll hope to see you at Billy’s tonight. Hopefully the “consequences” are manageable.

The MDE/MNPublius bipartisan happy hour is coming up tomorrow at Billy’s:

Hope to see you there.

———-

Yesterday, I wrote about a party that an email discussion forum threw, which had some interesting results.

Once or twice a year for the past four years, we at the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers throw a party (stay tuned).

Now, the MOB tends to be center-right bloggers. It’s not entirely true – there are bloggers from around the spectrum, and some totally non-political bloggers as well on the MOBRoll. But for whatever reason, while the group has eschewed politics (indeed, tends to avoid politics at our parties completely), the membership is mostly center-right.

It’s not for lack of trying. Pinky swear.

Every time we throw a party I send more email invites to liberals than to conservatives, and I have the “sent” file to prove it. I send dozens of invites to local leftybloggers, media personalities, politicians of both parties.

Most don’t respond at all.

Some send “I gotta wash my hair”-caliber responses. I’m looking at you, Paul Demko.

A few, strangely, reacted with anger, writing bulgy-veined, teeth-clenched, splittle-o-licious rants about how conservatives were no fun. We’ll come back to them tomorrow.

And a few – Robin and Scott Steven Marty, Chuck Olson and (his girlfriend, whose name eludes me at the moment), Bob Collins (not a liberal pol, per se, but if you lay down with Keillor you’ll get up with snooty elitist fleas) and a few others actually bit the bullet and showed up. And we had a decent time. And – just like at the E-Democracy party I wrote about yesterday – it became just a tad harder to rip on them. Oh, their politics and policies and, eventually, employers were still a parade of material. But they weren’t just a bunch of facile labels anymore. There was a human behind the labels.

My neighbor Flash, who writes Centrisity, did something similar. For a couple of summers, he graciously hosted “Drinking Moderately” – a play on “Drinking Liberally” (which is a national chain of events where liberals gather where they’re told to drink and talk politics) – where he’d invite conservative, liberal, and who-gives-a-crap bloggers to his garage and his always-open kegerator to talk…

…whatever.

And, just like the MOB parties, it was a good time. Largely because there was free beer (thanks, Flash!)…

…but also because I got to meet the likes of Chris Dykstra and the MNPublius guys and – are we detecting a pattern here? – see that they were actual people, as opposed to labels. And, I’d like to think, vice versa.

Oh, it didn’t always work. There were a few attendees who remained bloated, irascible jagoffs and/or mirthless, spiteful harpies, and it showed. But as a rule, the experiment was a pretty cool one. Retroactive kudos to Flash.

———-

I’ve taken to enjoying this sort of exchange – when it works, anway. It can be interesting, talking with “the enemy” and, once in a while, listening to see what you can learn.

I actively seek this sort of engagement – partly because I’m a curious guy, partly because I love a good debate. A few months back, I sent a bunch of invites to appear on the NARN to a bunch of local DFL politicians. Of course, I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that I knew most of them wouldn’t respond – more on that tomorrow. And the prime motivator, naturally, was to highlight Andy Birkey’s ridiculous double standard, calling out Michele Bachmann for avoiding liberal media so many area liberal pols are utter cowards at facing polite but probing dissent.

Still, it’s a fact – our interviews with Eric Black, Dane Smith and RT Rybak are among my favorite episodes of the NARN show. Not that anyone convinced anyone, but have some discord in one another’s echo chambers can be good for the brain, once in a while.

On occasion, I also like appearing on Radio Free Nation, a BlogTalkRadio show hosted by Saint Paul’s Marty Owings. I’m the token conservative, normally, going at it with a couple of liberals, black activists, a couple of Ronulans, and the odd “anarchist”. And I learn things.

Of course, some of those “things” are “people are weird”, but in fact it can be interesting, getting outside ones own political safe zone, if only because the stretching and pulling makes your own beliefs stronger (or, alternately, changes them. Which is how I became a conservative in the first place).

But not everyone sees it that way. To some, that idea is a threat.

More on that tomorrow.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 11AM-5PM:

• Volume I “The First Team” – Chad and Brian and John kick things off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I will take over from 1-3. There’s a safe bet that I’ll be pretty fired up about Heller. Plus Eric Black and his advice for John McCain.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will be dishing the Minnesota smack from 3-5.

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. On the air at AM1280 in the Metro, or streaming at AM1280’s Website, or via podcast at Townhall.

And don’t forget the David Strom Show, with David Strom and Margaret Martin and the bird-friendly Prius, from 9-11!

I was going to write about this bit here – about local gay Catholic groups complaining about Archbishop Nienstedt’s cracking down on LGBT services at a liberal local parish.

Brian “Saint Paul” Ward, however, beat me to it with a huge headstart pointing out correctly that…:

To put it in terms a journalism school graduate might appreciate, the Catholic Church not hosting a Gay Pride event is dog bites man. It happens every day.

Now, a Catholic parish hosting these events, as apparently St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis has been doing so for the past several years, is man bites dog (i.e., an unusual, infrequent event more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence).

Reasonably speaking, that is what should have been covered the past few years. Maybe some shock headlines, “Catholic Parish Hosting Gay Pride Event” followed by quotes from founders of obscure pressure groups for traditional values accusing the organizers of spiritual violence and Christophobic hatred.

Of course, the local agenda-media coverage – Grow at the MNPost, Andy Birkey in the Minnesoros Monitor “Independent” – took the “man biting dog” angle with dreary predictability and impeccable punctuality.

…the most thoroughly dishonest portrayal comes from the new media. Here are excerpts from Doug Grow at the website MinnPost.

Remember when it was OK for Catholics to pray with gays and lesbians?

Be careful whom you pray for…Apparently with a straight face, McGrath said that this isn’t some new crackdown because Archbishop John Nienstedt is now in charge. Recently retired Archibishop Harry Flynn would have cracked down on this, too, had he known of it, McGrath said. Maybe…Many are saddened and angry ? but probably not surprised.

There’s got to be an award for reporting this awful. (A Pulitzer maybe?) Of course, this dispute has absolutely nothing to do with who you pray with or who you pray for. The Church encourages gay activists to attend Mass (sans sacraments, as with anyone in a state of mortal sin) and practically requires Catholics to pray for all those in mortal sin. At his age and experience, Grow should know this. In fact, comments testifying to these facts were in the article he linked to. But he ignores that, misrepresents the issue entirely, questions the integrity of the Church spokesman, and casts his favored actors as oppressed victims. Not bad for a couple of paragraph’s work.

The big question:  When did Doug Grow turn into Nick Coleman?

Grow is a former columnist for the Star Tribune. The only silver lining here is realizing he’s now at an online liberal ghetto like MinnPost, instead of working the monopoly newspaper in town. His ability to confuse the issue and demonize his political enemies in the public’s imagination is now severely limited. Let’s be thankful for small favors.

Andy Birkey?  This is your future!

McCain came to town.

I didn’t have an invite.

But reading the leftymedia’s contortions on the subject is probably almost as much fun anyway. It ranged, as usual, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Or at least from the groaningly obvious and cliche-driven to the moderately interesting.

For the former, we turn to former City Pages writer GR Anderson at the MNPost – who uncovered a real scoop:

Shocker! McCain’s visit to bring out the wealthy, protestors

GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s visit to the Hilton in downtown Minneapolis for a fundraiser this afternoon promises to be a moneyed affair: To qualify to be on the host committee, McCain’s web site says, “individuals or couples must raise or contribute $20,000.” For the less fortunate, “tickets for the Photo Opportunity & Dinner are $2,300 per person. Tickets for the Main Reception and Dinner are $1,000 per person.”

Right. As opposed to those Democrat fundraiser$, where $your $pocket $change will get you in?

Who says the economy is bad?

(I don’t have an exhaustive list, but I do know that the MNPost and the Minnesoros Independent will be calling it “Bad” until 18 months after the recovery is generally accepted as undeniable, or Barack Obama’s inauguration, whichever comes first. But I digress).

Seriously – does GR Anderson think that big-buck fundraisers are a Republican franchise?

Eric Black’s article was more interesting – or at least a little less predictable:

Senator McCain. Welcome to Minnesota. Thank you for your service. My question is about the occupation of Iraq.

I agree that some Democrats have tried to have a little too much fun with your “100 years in Iraq” quote a while back. I take you at your word that you didn’t mean 100 more years resembling the last five — 100 years of steady U.S. casualties. In explaining what you really meant, you have said that it would be fine with you if U.S. troops had a long-term presence in Iraq, like the troops have had in Germany, Japan and Korea.

Well, we’re off to a good start. That’s more honest than most of Black’s colleagues have been with that question.

Many Americans may think that sounds fine. I’m not so sure. No other country has huge military installations around the world.

But that’s a fairly recent development – not so long ago, plenty of other countries maintained genuine empires; Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and even Belgium had or have imperial possessions within my lifetime and, incidentally, Eric Black’s.

It’s not only expensive, but it smacks of imperialism.

Let’s touch on both of those assertions.

It “smacks” of imperialism, because it is – sort of – and always has been. And yet unlike every single other imperial power in history, our “imperialism” has left behind largely functional, largely democratic countries; Germany, Japan and South Korea are world leaders and, at least by their previous standards, incredibly liberal in that small-“l” way that even I approve of.

And the “expense” has to be based on costs and benefits – indeed, Black touches on that concept later, so we’ll come back to it. The “expense” of any “imperial” entanglement has to be judged against the benefits; the Cold War, for example, has to be gauged against the general good of having contained the Soviets until they collapsed.

Ask yourself how the U.S. — specifically the McCain administration — would view it if another powerful country — let’s say China for the sake of illustration — toppled the government of our neighbors — let’s say Mexico, and said that one of its goals was to leave behind a Mexican government that would be an ally of China. Let’s say China did install a Mexican government friendly to China and then reached a deal with its puppet government for a permanent military base close to our borders in order to protect what China declared to be its “vital interests” in the Americas. And then let’s say China announced that it would be fine if the bases were there for 100 years. My hunch is, the McCain administration wouldn’t like it, wouldn’t tolerate it, would view it as a threat and an act of aggression against the United States and a statement of China’s intent to dominate our hemisphere. Please correct me if I’m wrong about that.

Black is right – sort of. The Monroe Doctrine has pretty much been established policy, one we’ve enforced for almost 200 years.

Of course, the analogy makes Iran – a murderous dictatorship that has been in a de facto state of war with us for my entire adult lifetime – the moral equal of the United States.  Is that a dock  you wanna walk down, Eric Black?

There is, of course, another difference; China has not secured UN resolutions condemning our human rights abuses, our acts of war against China and their allies, our pursuit of Weapons of Mass Destruction and our defiance of previous agreements caused by our previous aggression.  We don’t pose a threat to China and the rest of the world.

The parallel, Mr. Black, really isn’t there.

And I know – your analogy doesn’t depend on the parallel, necessarily. But let’s just say that some of Mr. Black’s audience doesn’t know this.

Of course, the USA is not just any country. We are the world’s only superpower. How we use that position is essential to how the rest of the world views us as we try to repair some of the damage that President Bush — and the Iraq misadventure — have done to the our image in the world.

Actually, Mr. Black, Iraq has very little to do with the world’s “elites'” views of us. There’s another entire post brewing on that subject – but suffice to say that Europe’s opinion-class have never much cared for us (except when we’ve saved them from, say, Hitler or post-war starvation) and they never really will. The left’s conceit that Europeans will generally love the US once this “misadventure” is over are, at best, wishful thinking and utterly ahistorical.

I know I’m making more assertions than posing questions here, but the question is: If, as you hope, U.S. troops will be in Iraq for 100 years, what will that do to the perception that the U.S. seeks to dominate Middle East?

A “perception” that the left and media (pardon the redundancy) are trying to reinforce in every reference to the subject?

Your reference to the long-term U.S. troop presence in Germany, Japan and Korea is designed to illustrate that U.S. troops can be present in foreign bases without facing daily combat or casualties. My question is: How soon and at what cost in blood and treasure do you believe that the situation in Iraq — specifically the situation regarding the safety and normalcy of U.S. troops in Iraq — will resemble the situations in Germany, Japan and Korea?

I can answer that for Sen. McCain; “when the sentient terrorists realize that their chances of achieving their goals aren’t worth their lives”.

And Germany, Japan and Korea are bad examples (although to a nation of people who are largely ignorant of history, they may be the best we can do). The Philippines and El Salvador are better ones; insurgencies that died off (literally and metaphorically) as the result of an extended, judicious combination of military and civil action. It took six years for the Philippines’ insurgency to tail off a century ago; El Salvador is fairly recent history. Neither accomplishment was achieved without pain; both had the good luck to be either too early or too obscure for the attentions of the modern-day American media.

It’s wonderful that the level of violence in Iraq has fallen over recent months. But more than 200 U.S. troops, and a much larger number of Iraqis, have been killed in the less than half-year of 2008 so far.

Context counts, though. The number has been falling for a year, is at its lowest level of the war so far, and seems for the moment to be continuing to fall. Everyone from Petraeus to Michael Yon says to expect a counterattack to try to influence the election, and that’s reasonable. But if the violence continues to drop, the Iraqi government continues to improve (I notice you haven’t written, Mr. Black, about the fact that the Maliki government has quietly achieved most of the 18 criteria for recognizing Iraq as a legitimate government that the Dems were howling about last year), as Al Quaeda continues to be killed off (again, the MNPost is silent), it seems reasonable to believe things will tail off over the course of years rather than decades.

I hope, as you do, that the number continues to drop and soon gets close to zero. I assume we agree that the reasons for the decline in violence are several and complex and, as Gen. Petraeus said, “fragile” and “reversible.” Do you agree, “fragile” and “reversible?”

I agree with the General that it’s best not to be overconfident – but that while the fragility is a function of a difficult Iraqi situation, the progress will “reverse” only because of decisions made in Washington DC.

I suspect we may disagree, but I believe that there is no likely benefit to ordinary Americans of the invasion and occupation of Iraq that will outweigh the costs already incurred.

Those costs are already incurred and we can’t get them back. But decisions about war, including the future policy in Iraq, cannot and should not be shielded from the logic of cost/benefit analysis.

OK.  Let’s look those costs and benefits over:

Costs:  4,000-odd dead American troops, hundreds of billions of dollars.  (I’m not going to count “international goodwill”, becuase for the most part that is mercurial and cultural and if it hadn’t tanked over the Iraq war, it would have over soccer rules or trade balance or Susan Lucci’s Daytime Emmy or whatever they Euros are always whinging about whenever we’re not disposing of their genocidal dictators for them).

Benefits: Iran is firmly counterbalanced.  In a few years, the countries of the Middle East will very likely have a safe, stable neighbor against whom the people can find their own dictatorships and medieval baronies sorely wanting.  We have a base to contest Iran’s control of – I stress this – two thirds of the world’s currently-working oil reserves, which may be of much more importance to the third world and developing nations like China and India than to us.  Absent a serious US presence and counterbalance on the ground, Iran could close the Straits of Hormuz more or less at will (indeed, has been building for a decade and a half a force capable to doing that, with North Korean and Chinese anti-ship missiles and Russian submarines), with terrible effects on the US economy and potentially cataclysmic effects on the developing world.

You can, of course, easily reply that there are never any guarantees in war except that it will be bloody and awful. I agree. It’s one reason we should not get into unnecessary wars. But seriously, given the entire regional and historical context in which Iraq sits, what is your level of confidence — and how can you convince skeptical listeners to share your confidence — that the situation of U.S. troops in Iraq will resemble the situation in Germany within 20 years? Or, I don’t know, why not make it 100?

That’s easy.  There’s a zero percent chance that Iraq will ever resemble any of those countries.  Unlike Germany, its two primary religious factions are still in a low-level war (as opposed to “500 years ago”).  Unlike Japan and Korea, Iraq is ethically as well as religiously heterodox.  Unlike Germany and Japan, there was no clean, legal end to a conventional war, after which the people of both countries pretty much toed the occupier’s line. 

What we can hope for, and have worked for, is that Iraq will turn into the best Iraq it can be.

So I called this “Question for Eric Black”, didn’t I?  Here’s the question, then:  Given continued improvement on the ground, and assuming that over the course of the next year or two the insurgency dies off to a fairly background-level problem, and that the US involvement starts to draw down (as Gen. Petraeus has said) to a small garrison of mostly civil affairs and special forces troops over the course of the next 2-5 years, what do you think Iraq is most likely to turn into.  What do you think, given the above (and the above seems not all that unreasonable these days), are the best, worst and most likely cases for Iraqi civil society over the next decade or two?

Take it away.

Doug Grow in the MinnPest does an endzone happy dance over the kickoff of Minneapolis City Hall’s new, hideously expensive, purely symbolic “Green Roof”:

Workers will begin tossing dirt on conservative talk radio skeptics and 5,000 square feet of roof at the Minneapolis City Hall Saturday.

Just a hunchy, Duggles, but I don’t think the last dirt’s been tossed on this issue.

We’re gonna keep this one on the radar for a loooooong time.

(more…)

G. R. Anderson – a writer who apparently spent his career at the City Pages rehearsing to be the next Doug Grow, building a career on soft-core DFL flakkery – gushes about MN Senator and and DFL hatchetwoman Tarryl Clark.

Did I say gush?  Yes, I did – like three times.

Well…?

Mid-session Fridays are sometimes a ho-hum affair at the Capitol. But media conferences are held on that day to review the past week and preview the week ahead, something the DFL caucus often does by putting Tarryl Clark in front of reporters.

One Friday morning last month, Clark, a state senator from St. Cloud, readied to meet the press before a polished wood conference table in a hearing room. The media savvy Clark always banters with the assembled scribes, talking heads and camera jockeys before getting down to official proceedings. (She’s also normally dressed in some shade of blue.)

Note to Mr. Anderson; I’m told she also likes walks in the rain and hates shallow people.

On this day, murmurs around the Capitol were that Gov. Tim Pawlenty had hopped a flight out of town, presumably to Washington, D.C.

Clark, who possesses a sharp tongue and tenacity, rarely misses a chance to take a loyal oppositional swipe at the governor, and she uttered something about a “super-secret” trip by  Pawlenty in a tone that suggested a wink and a nod: Surely you guys will report on this, right?

Surely he will.  In a reporters notebook festooned with scribbles; “G. R. Clark.  Mr. G.R. Clark.  Mister G.R. Clark”.

A cynic might see a ploy here — a leader of the less-than-moderate Minnesota DFL Party trying to position herself as a moderate who can work both sides of the aisle, unite Minnesotans, yadda, yadda, yadda … But Clark appears sincere.

Maybe a few hearts doodled around the margins.

King Banaian is a little less lovestruck over Senator Clark:

MinnPostToasties runs a long, gushing review of Sen. Tarryl Clark, repeatedly bringing up “she could be governor”. It does its best to portray her as moderate; I’ve heard her “my daddy was a Republican” pitch before. Those of us familar with her views on taxes, what bills we try to pass in response to a bridge collapse, stadium taxation without referendum, or denying access to a business development tool preferred by businesses in her own district, might not be as in awe of Clark as the Post is.

Let’s go back to that “I started out as a Republican” pitch. Anderson:

“I grew in a Republican family, and I voted Republican when I first started voting,” Clark admits, saying that she was hewing to her family members’ core beliefs.

I’d like to know, of course, what Senator Clark thinks that means – or, more importantly, what it’s supposed to mean to voters.

After all, I used to be a liberal!  What did I take from it?  (It’s fodder for another discussion).

What did Clark take from her alleged Republican background (bearing in mind we’re talking about pre-Quist, pre-Reagan Minnesota Republicans, which is to say “DFLers with better suits”?

“They’re pretty moderate. They believe that it’s important to make investments, but they didn’t like the idea of government being in people’s lives, local control, values I still hold.

Of course, the “value” is expressed by equating “Local Government Assistance” (or, as King notes, “ …on taxes, what bills we try to pass in response to a bridge collapse, stadium taxation without referendum, or denying access to a business development tool preferred by businesses in her own district” with “control”; the comparison works in the same way as “Freedom is slavery” works.

Things I don’t necessarily see the Republican Party doing.”

The biggest failing of the MNGOP in the past two years is that it has so abdicated its role as defender of smaller, more local government that Tarryl Clark can say this without getting hooted off the stage by any objective observer.

Well, not G.R. Anderson.  He’s back in his room, building a photo collage.

Reporters nibbled a bit on Pawlenty’s absence from St. Paul, and Clark was happy to offer some red meat. “The governor’s focus may be a stumbling block,” she said at one point. “Depends on whether he’s here or not.” And, later: “If his words were a bridge, I’d be afraid to cross it.”

Her words were wry, with no hint of anger. And they had the effect of painting Pawlenty as, like Clark often puts it, an “absentee governor.”

At the end, one rumor that was hanging in the air finally came as a question: Have you thought about running for governor?

Al Franken sacks his old “campaign manager”, brings in a new one.

What a difference a change in perspective makes: with the news, Roosh…:

Franken brings on new campaign chief, Minn. native has experience unseating incumbents

I don’t care if she can make Monkeys come out of Franken’s [rear exit]. Franken’s issue is his own dumbassness.

Brodkorb:

Hamline political science professor David Schultz is hardly more kind in assessing the state of the Franken campaign. ‘Is this the classic putting lipstick on a pig?’ he asks. ‘Does Franken have fundamentally bigger problems that changing campaign managers won’t solve?’

Schultz is struck by the static nature of the polls in recent weeks. ‘Unless the Franken campaign can get a bunch of people to rethink Coleman and therefore rethink Franken the race is over.’”

And finally, Doug Grow – for non-Twin-Citians, that means “the most in-the-bag member of the in-the-bagosphere”. I add emphasis:

The Franken for Senate campaign became a little more traditional today with the announcement that Stephanie Schriock will become campaign manager in early June. To date, Franken’s campaign has not had a single person with the title of campaign manager…Franken campaign officials say the hiring of Schriock doesn’t signal any major changes in the organization but is a traditional step in preparing for the race against incumbent Norm Coleman. The hiring apparently assumes that Franken will win endorsement at the DFL convention, which is to be held June 6-8. — Doug Grow

So yesterday I read Doug Grow for the first time since he left the Strib.  It was a review of P.J. O’Rourke’s speech at the Northrup.  And since it’s the first thing I’ve read from Grow now that he’s working for an overtly-political “news” outlet (The MNPost), I have to ask…

…is he doing anything different?

The Minnesota Monitor – which pretty routinely reprints talking points from left-of-center groups – is trying to gin up a phony controversy over Katherine Kersten’s columns about the Tarek Ibn Ziad Academy and the Saint Thomas University censorship of conservative student groups.

Well, nothing new there. In the entire Twin Cities media, nobody elicits more derangement than Kersten because, in a market full of full-bore liberals passing themselves off as “apolitical” and “moderate”, she’s the only “out” conservative.

She draws particular attack for having been associated with the center-right “Center of the American Experiment”, the local conservative think tank which, along with the Taxpayers League and Jason Lewis, was a prime mover behind Minnesota’s pesky outbreak of conservatism over the past decade. As such, all three (and the symptoms of that outbreak – talk radio, Michele Bachmann, EdWatch, Powerline and so on) are ripe for attack using the best tools the leftymedia have; ad-homina, harassment, and petty niggling.

Background: in this piece, the Monitor’s Andy Birkey notes that Kersten uses some themes from conservative group press releases and from Powerline.

(Yes, that’s the same Andy Birkey who’s written pieces that would seem to borrow slavishly from Dump Bachmann, Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota, the RNC Welcoming Committee, the DNC, anyone that bashes Christian colleges without a whole lot of context…)

Paul Schmelzer followed up with Strib management:

I left messages with editor Nancy Barnes and Politics Team Leader Doug Tice, Kersten’s direct supervisor, but it was Tice — a former contributor to the quarterly publication of the Center for the American Experiment, the thinktank Kersten served as director for — who called me back.

Schmelzer takes the obligatory dig at Tice’s “connection” with Kersten’s former employer – omitting plenty of key context. Doug Tice, during his stint at the Pioneer Press, before being hired at the Strib, was a very subtly conservative columnist – indeed, the last one with a Twin Cities paper before Katherine Kersten. He wrote a great column, although he was no ideologue – think of him as Craig Westover without the statements and with the questions. That ended in (if memory serves) 2002.

The Strib doesn’t post Tice’s email address (not that I could find online, anyway), so I can’t confirm my belief that Tice’s “contributions” were, essentially, re-used columns. I’ll try to follow up on that. I could be wrong – but if I’m not, it’d be a fairly key bit of context to omit; leaving it out could leave the reader with some wrong ideas.

In our first conversation, Tice said he was unaware of the YAF press release and asked for some time to compare it with Kersten’s column. In a followup call, he replied, “I’m not finding anything here to be particularly concerned about,” adding that he’s satisfied with the legwork Kersten did on the piece: getting a statement of explanation from UST, interviewing Parker, adding in an anecdote about another liberal allowed to speak on campus, etc. “My sense is she added fairly significantly to the discussion.”

Tice also doesn’t buy the argument that Kersten regurgitates what rightwing blogs have to say. “I would disagree that that describes Katherine’s work in a general way,” he said. “In a good many occasions she has broken new ground on things, most recently with the charter school [majority Muslim school TIZA]. Are there times when she is weighing in on issues and turns to sources from a conservative perspective? Sure. I don’t think that’s unique to her.”

The assertion that Kersten “regurgitates what right wing blogs say” is perhaps the weirdest of the Monitor’s assertions. Leaving aside the laundry list of lefty talking that the Monitor has been caught reprinting, or the fact that the Monitor exists to serve as nothing but a bought-and-paid-for propaganda organ in the first place; let’s ask this – Kersten is a conservative writer that lives in a market where the other well-known conservative writers are conservative bloggers! Why should Kersten not give to and borrow from them?

Is there a reason? Beyond the Twin Cities’ mainstream media’s shared Kersten Derangement Syndrome, anyway?

He continued, “One of the reasons we value Katherine at the paper is that she brings that perspective from another side of the spectrum that’s not always heard in the mainstream press.” But if Kersten’s columns cover the same ground — sometimes with startling similarity — as bloggers like Power Line or conservative groups like YAF, how is that an alternative to what’s already out there?

If by “out there” Schmelzer implies that the Twin Cities’ mainstream media and center right blogosphere have a whole lot in common, I’d like a shot of whatever he’s drinking.

“No criticism intended, but I’m not sure Nick Coleman raises altogether different opinions than what’s already out there in the blogosphere,” he said. “She provides this point of view on our pages.”

And there’s – to coin a phrase – the big question: why is the Monitor flapping its gums about the “connection” between Kersten and Powerline?

Because there’s a genuine journalistic concern?

Or because for half a decade, the Twin Cities blogosphere has been pointing out that Lori Sturdevant has been slavisly echoing the DFL’s legislative leadership’s agenda in her weekly column? That Doug Grow spent decades carrying water for the DFL? That Nick Coleman magically turns up whenever some lefty pressure group wants to hold a “Die-in” or needs someone to bellow “our schools are burning” on cue?

Because the leftymedia needs a red herring to draw the readers’ attention away from that truckload of rotting carp that Powerline, Ed, the Fraters, Hugh, Anti-Strib, KAR, the Dogs, True North, David and Margaret, Fishsticks, Bogus Doug and a hundred other conservative bloggers have been piling on the doorstep at 425 Portland (and whatever coffee shop the Monitor meets at) for half a decade now?

Andy Birkey at the MinMon notes:

Have Michele Bachmann’s media gaffes and extreme conservative views [closed circuit to Birkey; are there any other kind? Or does the MNMon’s software prepend “extreme” to every instance of “conservative” in everyone’s copy? – Ed] driven her to speak mainly to conservative and Christian-right news outlets? Bachmann’s media appearances since her election create the impression of a member of Congress who is shy when not among friends, and perhaps a campaign that is concerned about what happens when a nonconservative microphone or camera is pointed in her direction.

Or – here’s another suggestion – someone who recognized what a hatchet job the regional media has been pulling on her for her entire political career?

Just a suggestion.

But that’s not the point of this post. Let’s try something new: let’s ask the same question in reverse.

How many regional liberal pols will do appearances outside the cozy, comfy club of the region’s reliably lefty-coddling mainstream media? (For a good laugh, check further down in Birkey’s piece – he calls WCCO and MPR and Almanac “mainstream”. [Closed circuit to Andy, again; Ed Morrissey and I are closer to the “mainstream” than either of those outlets – Ed]).

Andy notes that the Congresswoman has not responded to the Monitor’s many requests for interviews; perhaps Birkey feels the Monitor is “mainstream”. Whatever – it probably stands to reason that much of the regional dead-tree media has been asking for interviews. In that context, Birkey’s question is a good one.

Fair enough.

I wonder how well the shoe works on the other foot?

How many of Minnesota’s legions of DFL politicians, media figures and other eminementos feel like manning up and mixing it up with the conservative alt-media?

Birkey, or someone like him, will no doubt complain “it’s a lousy comparison! The NARN is bunch of “out” conservatives”. Actually, it’s a cop-out on two counts; at least we, unlike most the the Twin Cities’ mainstream media (to say nothing of the Monitor) are up-front about our biases; more importantly, Ed and I do fair, up-front interviews; we don’t ambush people (you know who you’re talking to), we don’t snip out bits of interview to engineer into a mutated context after the fact. We are, in short, the most honest interviewers in the Twin Cities media by a long, long way.

I’ll be sending out emails to a list of regional liberal personalities, asking them to appear on the Northern Alliance Volume II or, failing that, do an email interview with yours truly for this blog. The list includes:

1. Senator Amy Klobuchar (why is it so hard to find an email address on her campaign website?)
2. Senate candidate Al Franken (sent!)
3. Rep. Keith Ellison (left a voicemail and an email)
4. Rep. Betty McCollum (her office’s email processor seems to be mucked up; I left a message with her local press assistant)
5. Minneapolis mayor RT Rybak (Email sent).
6. “Growth and Justice” poobah Joel Kramer (email sent)

I’ll post the answers in this space when they come back.

(Kudos to the thin film of local left-leaners who do mix it up with the good guys; Eric Black, DFL chair Brian Melendez, and…well, that’s about it. On the other hand, brickbats to Nick Coleman, who responded to my request for an interview by demanding a $1,000 donation to a Saint Paul school).

Great idea, Andy!

The boilerplate for my email appears below the fold.

(more…)

The course of the Minnesota Monitor has been an interesting one.

The MNMon is, and has always been, a bald-faced propaganda site, funded by “liberals with deep pockets” – after a year of official denials and stalling huffing and puffing, Eric Black admitted that there was some George Soros money in the mix.

When they started under original editor Robin “Rew” Marty, the Mon had a recent-college-grad-ish earnestness about it; it was a genial, sloppy production prone to dumb mistakes, but they seemed at least to mean well and to try, in most cases, to do a credible job. Paul Schmelzer, former “Media” reporter and one of the Mon’s few genuinely good writer/reporters, took over as editor (seemingly briefly), around the time Eric Black jumped from the Strib and classed up the joint for a bit; for a few months, the Monitor’s material was a source for discussion rather than derision.

And then, about the time Black bailed to go to the MNPost, they hired former City Pages editor and Daily Mold blogger Steve Perry. I and a fair chunk of the the local RealAmericansphere has been scratching our heads watching the hilarity ever since. Perry seems to have brought over a bunch of the City Pages less stellar exiles, and changed the site’s focus from semi-original reporting to screechy polemics seemingly copied word for word from pressure-group press releases and topped off with a dollop of shrill, giggly, usually ignorant commentary.

In other words – Soros et al have finally hired a genuine, respected journalist to run the Monitor – and he’s basically turned it into a rantblog.
If it were a good blog-with-a-different-name-and-lots-of-money, there’s at least a chance someone could have written something better than this comically-bad piece by Heather Maartens “Anna Pratt” on the Heller case.

The scare strikeout is (like, let’s face it, all scare strikeouts) very much on purpose; there is nothing about this piece (like the Monitor’s “coverage” of Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill), that doesn’t look like it wasn’t directly cribbed from a Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota press release.

When is a right right and when is a right… wrong? In this case, when does one’s “right to bear arms” also trespass on the rights of others?

This could only be written by someone who has not the faintest clue about this nation’s moral, intellectual, political or social history. It’s a symptom of this nation’s catastrophic ignorance about the humanities of our own history.
The answer is “Rights don’t trample on other peoples’ rights”. Your right – or Anna Pratt’s right – to free speech doesn’t trample mine. I have no right not to be offended or nauseated by someone else’s speech – but I do have the right to respond with better speech. Not that it takes much.

The law-abiding, responsible exercise of your God-given rights, by the very nature of “Rights” (as opposed to “privileges” and “entitlements”) can not “trample” anyone else’s rights.

Rights have responsibilities and limitations; we have free speech, but we may not yell “I’m lighting my farts” in a crowded theater; we may worship freely, but if your poisonous snake kills someone’s child, you might have some ‘splaining to do. Abusing ones’ right to keep and bear arms has serious consequences; ironically, it’s the Second Amendment movement that’s moved to make those consequences more sure and severe, while the anti-gun left has steadily sapped them.

But I digress.

I’m talking about the Supreme Court controversy regarding the constitutionality of the handgun law in Washington, D.C., where nary a gun is allowed, excepting those of police officers.On Tuesday, March 18, arguments for and against Washington D.C.’s handgun ban were presented in a federal appeals court.

Ms. Pratt? That “Federal Appeals Court” is called the “Supreme Court of the United States”.

I never, ever thought I’d say this, but…go ask Jeff Fecke how to read and fact-check your stuff? OK?

This comes after a lower court’s 2-1 vote last year took issue with the ban.

On the other hand, the “lower court” was a US Circuit Court of Appeals, which isn’t really all that “lower” by court standards.

Now, to be fair, I’m not sure if Anna Pratt (like Dan Haugen and Andy Birkey before her) is completely oblivious to the actual law and history involved, or if she’s just cribbing off a press release from Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota (whose ignorance of law and history is a matter of documented record) – but while the flubs above might be a result of bad reporting and fact-checking, the below is just plain made up from whole cloth.

That would reverse nearly 70 years of legal precedent.

And there’s the tell; this “article” is cribbed from CS“S”M.

Teaching moment, Anna: there is not 70 years of legal precedent. There is one case, US V. Miller, from 1939, which is open to widely-varying interpretations, which has only been mentioned in five subsequent cases, and which is notable in that neither the defendants nor their lawyers were actually able to show up at the SCOTUS hearing. To claim Miller is a clear precedent is the sort of wishful thinking that most of us shy away from, and that Heather Martens takes as her stock in trade.

The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which hasn’t gotten such play since 1791, states, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”Heather Martens, president of Citizens for a Safer Minnesota (CSM), which lobbies for a public-health approach to prevent gun deaths and injuries, asserted in an email that a decision favoring the right to carry guns could “set off a deluge of legal actions across the country challenging every gun regulation there is, no matter how reasonable.”

Let’s take Heather Martens at her word – which, given that virtually everything she’s ever said on the subject has been a lie, is a bit of a gift.

So what?

The laws – as Pratt herself notes further down in the crib article – are doing no good anyway! Why not challenge them?

CSM is part of the Protect Minnesota campaign, a coalition of gun owners and non-gun owners alike, who are working to ensure background checks for gun purchases and safe gun use.

The “Protect Minnesota campaign” – like every anti-gun group in Minnesota, includign the “Million Mom March”, which might muster five or six “moms” for a protest these days – is an astroturf, checkbook advocacy group, and any Potemkin “gun owners” that are part of it are sock puppets, pets kept on the leash by “groups” like this.

Across the state, gun deaths and injuries are on the rise, according to campaign information.

Well, that sounds bad, doesn’t it?

Of course, it’s utterly meaningless; the deaths and injuries are being caused by criminals. And the Constitution doesn’t protect criminal activity!

But the Constitution would seem to be the least of Martens‘ Pratt’s concerns:

The Supreme Court debate recycles an old issue and as such, it is standing in the way of resolving firearm-related violence.

BAD Supreme Court! Get out of the way and quit interpreting the constitution!

Attention, Anna Pratt – “recycling old issues” is what the SCOTUS does!
I’m not sure who Anna Pratt is – but if Steve “Mister Furious” Perry’s goal is to turn the Minnesota Monitor into the dumbest rantblog in the state, she’s gonna be a great help!

CORRECTION: Foot pointed out that I, too, got a level of jurisprudence wrong. Fixed it. Suppose Anna Pratt will do the same?

Simple fact: when Republicans run like Republicans – with a conservative vision, with lower taxes, smaller and more honest government, safer streets, less-stupid schools, secure borders, a Higher Power and family and country, we win.

We win because there are an awful lot of Democrats who vote for fiscal responsibility, for ethics, and for America, when they get the chance.

We win because there are an awful lot of people out there who don’t care about parties, but respond to vision – and visions are like food. If the other guy’s offering a box of Mike and Ikes, and all you have in response is a snark about how bad for you Mike and Ikes are, people will take the candy. If you offer them the perfectly-done London Broil that is the conservative vision, people take the beef.

We win because, underneath it all, most people are smart enough to see that the DFL way is no way to run a state.

To Lori Sturdevant – who, with Doug Grow’s retirement, is the DFL’s most reliable flak in the Twin Cities media – the ideal “compromise” is bouillon-flavored Mike and Ikes.

When Laura Hemler – a major mover behind Keith Downey’s campaign – called from the Cleanup on Aisle 41 last week to tell me Sturdevant was lurking about the convention, I started taking internal bets to see what she’s write.

My top bet: that she’d treat the conservative insurrection as a form of sickness or dysfunction. In Lori Sturdevant’s (entirely flak-focused) worldview, it seems any approach to life, politics and government that isn’t straight from the DFL Necronomicon is something to fear.

She doesn’t disappoint:

One vote was the elephant in the theater full of District 41 GOP elephants Saturday at Edina’s South View Middle School. It was the vote cast Feb. 25 by Republican Reps. Ron Erhardt of 41A and Neil Peterson of 41B to override Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto, and put a tax-increasing transportation bill into law.The punishment meted out to the two wayward representatives was stern. Endorsement for the fall election was not only denied them; it was bestowed with ease on their opponents, Keith Downey in 41A, Jan Schneider in 41B.

Got that? Exercising their prerogative as a political party – an organization with actual codified beliefs to which members are expected to largely subscribe – is an “elephant” (hahaha) in the room; that’s 12-step code for “addiction” or “dysfunction”.This is how the DFLMedia views principled conservatism in Minnesota.

I’ve joked about it in this space so many times, I’m running out of new ways to say it; to Lori Sturdevant, the only Republican is a 1976 Republican – back before all that pesky “conservatism” polluted all of that kowtowing to the Tics.

It shows in everything Lori Sturdevant writes:

Applying “DFL-lite” to Erhardt and his late wife Jackie would have been a local laugh line not long ago. A financial planner, Erhardt has been among the party’s most prolific fundraisers and reliable foot soldiers for more than 30 years. He’s run for the Legislature with party endorsement nine times, and has never won his seat with less than 56 percent of the vote. In 2006, he was the second-best Republican vote-getter in his district, behind only U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad.

For years, I’ve wanted to ask Lori Sturdevant; “Lori? For years, Norm Coleman was a reliable DFL foot soldier; he even placed the sainted Paul Wellstone into nomination at the ’96 DFL convention. He was a major-city mayor! He was successful! And yet the DFL hounded him out of the party. Why?”

“For differing with the party on fiscal issues. For going against the party’s beliefs”.

“And so, after all those years of service to, and electoral success on behalf of, the DFL, the party “punished” Norm, hounded him out of the party”.

“Did you get the vapors about that? Was that an “elephant in the room?” Did you solemnly wonder why Tics weren’t the same, responsible, pro-American, fiscally-relatively-sane party they were under Kennedy or, for that matter, Hubert Humphrey?”

“No?”

“Just thought I’d ask”.

That point begs a longer look: In 2006, DFL U.S. Senate candidate Amy Klobuchar took District 41 with more than 56 percent of the vote. Pawlenty won there too, but his percent of the vote barely cracked 50 percent.

And in 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry carried District 41A with 51 percent. Rumor had it that there were rumblings under old Edina gravestones for days thereafter.

You’d think that those votes — and not just the one on the transportation bill — would have been on District 41 minds Saturday. It doesn’t seem to be a propitious time for Republicans to be in purge mode.

Thanks, Lori, but if we want you to do our thinking for us, we’ll lobotomize ourselves with sporks and join the DFL.

When Republicans run as conservatives, we win. If we stand on our principles – as the party to a great extent didn’t in 2000, 2002 and 2006 – then we do just fine without your craven, upsucking advice.

The rest of it? You’re on your own.

I hereby coin a new term; Kersten Delusional Disorder.

I originally thought “Kersten Derangement Syndrome”, but I think KDD is a more serious pathology.

When they got the word that the Strib was going to hire a conservative columnist (to put in the stable with DFL monkeys Lori Sturdevant, Nick Coleman, Doug Grow, Kim Ode, Pat Reusse and, well, pretty much all of them short of James Lileks), the local lefty pundocracy acted like someone had proposed giving them a rectal exam with a pool cue; her addition to the staff – a lone conservative voice in a room full of people with boy and girl crushes on Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone – prompted the local Sorosphere’s most irritating conceit, the statement-as-fact that “The Strib is a conservative tool”.

Naturally, Kersten is pretty much right about everything, and is head, shoulders and ankles better than anyone else on the Strib columnist staff.

Last week, she wrote a column about Rep. Ellison’s “Department of Peace” proposal. Kersten points out the grim fact; institutional pacifism has a long record of abject failure to prevent war. She cites Norway, which, in the wake of the bloodbath of World War I joined Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and many other smaller European nations in declaring pacifism their primary line of national defense:

Norway’s commitment to what Ellison calls a “culture of peace” dates back to its founding in 1905, according to a 2006 report by Col. Karl Hanevik of the Norwegian Army. For decades, writes Hanevik, the country’s foreign policy was based on a firm belief that “international disputes should be solved via arbitration and international law.”

After World War I, Norway’s leaders placed their hopes for peace in the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, and let their military go to seed.

Norway declared neutrality when Hitler threatened in 1939.

Indeed, they officially resolved that all belligerents were equally wrong; that the Poles who were fighting for their lives, and the Brits and French who declared war in their support (but didn’t do much else) were equally as wrong as the Nazi regime that was bombing Poland’s cities.

Which is, indeed, one of the most corrosive conceits of today’s “peace” movement racket.

The country was wholly unprepared when Germany invaded on April 9, 1940…The German blitzkrieg rolled through Norway, and the king and government fled to England for safety…

Pretty thoughts didn’t work

Not only that, but the only reason King Haakon, his family and his cabinet were able to flee was because the only parts of Norway’s military that functioned as planned on that first day of the war – an ancient coastal fortress and a forty-year-old torpedo – sank the German cruiser Blücher and the German battalion that was supposed to cut off the retreat route from Oslo. And because the only squadron of Norwegian fighters that was capable of taking to the skies against the Luftwaffe broke up a German attempt to drop paratroops in the area.

Not, let us note, because of any pacifists’ actions.

Let’s make no mistake, here. Peace is something to strive for. Peace is almost always preferable to war. I said almost.

But pacifism is only tenable in a world where everyone believes in peace. Pacifists like to point out the examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King as triumphs of “passive resistance”. But both of their successes depended entirely on their taking place in a context of the (general) rule of law, in areas controlled by liberal democracies who were, if not initially friendly to either of them, at least not actively disposed to kill both men and all of their followers.

So – Kersten was right.

And her critics?

Well…

AlphaBetty writes for MNBlue, the home of an endless stream of dozey conspiracy theorists and purple-faced rantmongers. And her take on Kersten indulges in the same kind of selective, self-serving, myopic ignorance that, by nature, has to be prevalent to believe in things like “Departments of Peace”.

While Ms. Alphabetty may seek “peace”, she commits violence against clarity and context:

Norway was asking for it? Katherine Kersten blames Norway’s aversion to war for Germany’s World War II invasion of that country.

Popping a bully in the nose is a limited strategy in the school yard. That’s also true in the realm of international affairs. Sometimes you fight. Sometimes you circle your defenses. Sometimes you stand together and say as a group, this will not happen here.On this last point, the citizens of occupied Norway have much to teach us.

If violence is not the path to peace, neither is passivity. In the face of brutal domination, Norwegians hung together. Risking arrest, they wore subtle symbols of solidarity, a paper clip on the lapel, a bright red hat or vest.Resisting anti-Semitism, they refused to speak German, pretending they didn’t understand a language as common in Norway at the time as English is today. In Oslo, commuters refused to sit next to Germans on the bus.Was it effective? The bus action clearly got the goat of the Deutsche(Germans). They declared it illegal to stand when seats were open. More importantly, the horrible effects of German domination, including Jewish deportation were somewhat lessened in Norway than in other occupied zones.

Never let it be said that I’m not a big-tent kind of person.  Indeed, the GOP – as an amalgam of fiscal, social, legal and cultural conservatives, any individual of whom might fit one through four of those four adjectives – needs to some extent to be flexible on its bedrock principles, especially since they are so relatively complex.

Indeed, that’s one of the things that separates conservatism from liberalism; you can teach any child to be a liberal (indeed, that’s what many of our schools do); it’s a short leap from “share and share alike” to “what is yours belongs to everyone; from “don’t run with scissors” to “the Second Amendment is a collective right”; from “mind your own bees-wax” to “keep your laws off my body”.   It’s not for nothing that Churchill said a man has no heart if he’s not a liberal at 20 and no brain if he’s not a conservative by 40; liberalism and adolescence are both prone to callow, facile sloganeering.  Conservatism is, if you were raised liberal (and to some extent in western culture we all are), somewhat counterintuitive.

So to be a conservative (at least a multi-issue conservative) requires a certain amount of thought – and any group of three individuals who thinks about any set of issues is going to come up with at least four solutions. So running a “conservative” party necessarily needs accomodating a wide range of points of view (to say nothing of the more-rigid, more sloganistic views of the single-issue crowd who, I should observe, often don’t understand conservatism outside the bounds of their main issue – although they can be, and have been, taught).

And that is as it should be.  It makes election time a contentious scrum (as we see in the GOP Presidential race right now), but there’s really no other way. 

That being said, “big tent” or no, there are some “Republicans” we’re better off without. 

The Star-Tribune seems to have a boundless stockpile of these people.  They show up on cue in columns by Lori Sturdevant and Doug Grow; people who mewl about feeling “cut off from the current state of the party”, who pine for the days when the GOP, especially in Minnesota, was pro-choice and anti-gun and took a soft line on crime and foreign policy.  In other words, when the GOP (nationally and especially in Minnesota) was basically Tics in better suits.

Two of these popped up in the Strib yesterday, in an op-ed by Liz McCloskey and Peter Leibold entitled “To value life — in all regards — is to be politically adrift”.  The duo – described as “…a doctoral candidate at the Catholic University of America” and a “former general counsel of the Catholic Health Association”, respectively, describe a journey that’s not all that terribly different than my own (if you substitute “Protestant” for “Catholic”), in some ways:

When we were born in the early 1960s, it was possible to be both a Democrat and a Catholic without any agonizing pangs of conscience. John F. Kennedy was president; John Courtney Murray was a public theologian; Pope John XXIII was opening a window to the world at the Second Vatican Council. But as we came of age politically, we felt orphaned by the Democratic Party, whose prolife positions on war, poverty and the environment did not extend to the lives of the most weak and vulnerable, those not yet born.

In other words, they are liberals, except for that whole “infanticide” thing.  Now, I’ve confessed in the past – abortion, like gay marriage, isn’t my hottest-button issue.  I’m pro-life, but it’s somewhere down my list of “gotta haves”.  As it was for Ronald Reagan, as it happens.

While the moderate wing of the Republican Party provided us a foster home when we worked on the Senate staff of John Danforth, R-Mo., with the likes of former Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., and others, the Grand Old Party’s move to the right, including its hardening, dominant positions on the Iraq war, access to guns and the death penalty, among other issues, have made it an inhospitable place for us to dwell permanently. 

Let’s stop right there.

I’m not one to speak for the GOP as a whole – far from it.  But if Ms. McCloskey and Mr. Leibold can’t tell the difference between the life of a fetus – a human-under-construction, utterly innocent of any wrongdoing, exactly as the Catholic Church teaches – on the one hand, and convicted murderers, especially child-murderers, murderers who rape and then kill, mass-murderers and spree-killers on the other, perhaps it’s not their politics that are adrift.  If they compare abortion on the one hand with the right of the law-abiding citizen to defend themselves from criminals on the other, perhaps it’s not the GOP’s politics that have deserted reason and rationality.

During many elections we find ourselves facing the same dilemma: Which of our values must take a back seat when we go to the voting booth? Do we let our moral concern for peaceful resolutions of conflict, the environment, addressing poverty and aggressive enforcement of civil rights guide our choices? Or do we stand firm on another important issue of conscience and signal our hope for an end to abortion? Often, both choices leave a bad taste in our mouths.

Welcome to real life, kids!

But the fact that you – a “pro-life” voter – get a “bad taste” in your mouth because I have the right to protect my and my family’s lives through the grace of the Second Amendment as an individual right, then perhaps your notion of “life” is what’s adrift.

Tuesday’s March for Life in Washington brought home this problem. The assumption of abortion opponents is that anyone serious about his or her desire to see an end to abortion will vote for the “prolife” candidate. Yet there is rarely a candidate, and certainly not a political party, that embodies the consistent ethic of life that would make casting a truly prolife vote a simple or straightforward choice.

May I suggest that y’all – and the organizations you represent – are the ones with the inconsistent “ethic of life”.  To fail to differentiate between innocent life and life that is itself anti-life – murderers, and those whose actions are lethal enough to be covered by laws governing legal self-defense – is inconsistent to the point of meaningless.  And I say this as a conservative who opposes the death penalty. 

If the Democratic Party could adopt a much less disdainful, more welcoming, perhaps even “prochoice” stance toward those under its tent who have conscientious objections to abortion, we would be much less squeamish about supporting its candidates, and we know that we are not alone in that conviction.

As the 2008 campaign unfolds, we will look for a candidate who will not use rhetoric or a tone seemingly designed to alienate those of us who simply cannot cheer for speeches celebrating the availability of abortion….

…A party and a candidate that truly respect this viewpoint are ones that can adopt these two political orphans.

I can’t speak for the notion of “respect” – but if my party were to follow your viewpoint, that the life of a murderer or of someone who wishes to kill my family and I are of no less value than an an innocent human-under-construction – then I’d choose “orphan”. 

It’s a view of “life” that doesn’t even rise to the level of “illogical”. 

 Paul Schmelzer took understandable, mild umbrage over the “Shootie” award I gave the Minnesota Monitor yesterday. 

He might not be entirely wrong.  But we’ll get back to that.

Let’s go waaaay back to the spring of ’06.

Back before the Minnesota Monitor even started publishing, I got a tip from a source that said the “Center for Independent Media”, a group that “rented” office space from the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America, was going to be funding “grassroots citizen media” outlets, and was looking for reliably liberal bloggers to write for them.  So – going back to the summer/fall of 2006 – I and quite a number of center-right bloggers, in the interest of clarity, started asking the Monitor and its management (at that time, Robin “Rew” Marty of Powerliberal) where the money came from – who, indeed, were the “liberals with deep pockets” that were fronting the Monitor writers’ “stipends”?

For the better part of a year, “we” asked, and asked, and asked again.  The Monitor, when it responded at all, said that, appearances aside, the Hungarian-born currency speculator and leftymedia sugardaddy had nothing, nothing to do with the Center for Independent Media or the Minnesota Monitor.   We asked the Monitor’s editor; I emailed the Center for Independent Media and asked directly.  The CIM didn’t respond at all.  Robin Marty went further:

To clarify, the Center for Independent Media is not receiving funding from Media Matters.  The only financial arrangement they have is to rent office space.

Cleverly, carefully worded. 

Except “Media Matters” wasn’t the crux of the debate; money from George Soros was.  Robin’s response was that if one didn’t see an armored car labelled “Soros International”  unloading bags of currency labelled “Media Matters” at the CIM offices, it didn’t count! 

Never mind that many – especially Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci at Kool Aid Report and this blog’s regular commenter Master of None – did the digging and found the links.  The Monitor’s party line, and the line from its supporters, remained unchanged.

And so – given that the definition of “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results each time, we moved on, mostly; we took shots at the obloquy and apparent disingenuity of the denials, but figured there were bigger fish to fry.  The Monitor’s critics assumed the site was a “Soros” (among many others) front; its supporters stomped their feet and demanded to see the photos of that armored car and those bags of money.

And then, Eric Black went and admitted it all. 

Now, I have been unstinting in my regard for Paul Schmelzer and his work at the Monitor.  In a region that’s become accustomed to the likes of Brian Lambert as a media “reporter”, Schmelzer has done a great job; he’s head and possibly shoulders above the pack at the Monitor (in some cases, toss in knees or ankles).  He took over as editor in August.  I think he’s done a decent job – and I freely admit in deference to Schmelzer and his predecessor, Robin Marty, that I could certainly not run a big group-blog like the Monitor.

Schmelzer has noted – in private email to me and in this comment thread in the Monitor, that nobody since August has asked him about the Monitor’s funding, and that he’s being up-front about it.

Which, to be fair to Schmelzer, is true; most of us had given up and settled into our beliefs, pro and con, on the subject. 

So Schmelzer is correct in that he is being open about the Monitor and CIM’s funding, albeit under intense questioning from Tom Swift (see the comment section).

But there is plenty of history here.  Kudos to Schmelzer for being up-front about it – but, to be fair (to us), it’s not like it didn’t take well over a year of trying, accompanied by a lot of rhetorical abuse and tittering from the Monitor and its defenders, to get to this point.

Does it matter?  On the one hand, not really.  I mean, I don’t begrudge the Monitor’s staff their paychecks; if you love to do something (and blogging is rarely more than a labor of love), it can be mighty nice to see some payback.  And if George Soros or any other fatcats with deep pockets want to spend their kids’ inheritance on propaganda organs – well, it’s their money!  I know I’d jump on a check from Richard Mellon Scaife or the Heritage Foundation with both feet.  I’d also disclose, completely and immediately, the fact that I had gotten the check, rather than tapdancing and misdirecting and denying the source of my support – I’d just as soon let the reader accurately and completely know, and let them assign or deduct credibility accordingly. 

Just as most of us have done with the Monitor.

It’s not that complicated.  Or shouldn’t have been, at least.

 PS:  My wise old grandpa always told me “don’t listen to lectures about “embarassment” from people who seem unable to feel it themselves”. 

Words to live by!

Eric Black and his “Black Ink” blog are picking up and moving over to MinnPost.com – but not without leaving an answer we’ve been looking for for a very long time – something I asked him (in his interview on the NARN last March, when he left the Strib), as well as every other Minnesota Monitor staffer with whom I ever came in contact (emphasis added):

I’ve always meant to write piece titled “Who Pays Me?” Never got around to it. But if I had, I would have said that I was working under a contract with the Center for Independent Media (CIM), a Wasington-based non-profit, which is the parent organization of the Monitor and three other similar state-based sites. And I would have said that the silly attack meme of some conservative bloggers that the Monitor was staffed by George Soros sock puppets was nonsense.

“Nonsense” – meaning there was no truth to the claim that George Soros backed the Center for Independent Media (which, at the risk of repeating myself, started life in offices sublet from Soros’ attack-PR firm Media Matters for America).  Right?

Because that’s what “nonsense” and “silly attack meme” mean.  Right?   

Soros’ foundation is one of several that contribute to the CIM so I guess I have some Soros money in my checking account,

Er…OK.  So the “silly” “nonsense” claim was actually true, then?

And do you think that if, say, Powerline or Ed Morrissey or I got so much as a nickel of money from Halliburton, or Richard Mellon Scaife or Rupert Murdoch, that the crack staffs of the MinnPost or Minnesota Monitor or or the Daily Mold would let it pass?

Black adds:

but I was never asked, pressured or even encouraged to promote any particular point of view and the same goes for the Monitor’s other writers.

Sounds good, right? 

Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci of Kool Aid Report, who drew my attention to the piece, notes a hole in that idea big enough to drive the entire MinnPost office through:

Say your house has a mouse infestation. And further assume that you are an old-timey sort that doesn’t believe in exterminators or mouse traps. So instead, you buy a cat.

Do you have to tell a cat to go hunt the mice?

 Of course not. 

I always get a kick out of commenters who accuse me of “parroting GOP talking points”.  There is no C-list blogger in the Twin Cities who is farther off the Republican party’s official radar than I am.  I don’t get invites to the press conferences.  I get press releases only intermittently, and usually from campaigns – rarely if ever from the party proper. 

And yet I’m a conservative, almost-always Republican blogger.  Not because I’m on a payroll, but because I believe in the ideals of the GOP and the Conservative movement.  Nobody pays me to do it (outside the odd advertiser) – I do it because it’s what I believe.

So if some right-leaning sugardaddy group of right leaning sugardaddies wanted to come to town and pay a bunch of bloggers to generate propaganda, I have a six-year-deep clip file to put in front of them. 

Every member of the Minnesota Monitor was recruited because they are a reliable, left-leaning voice.  They are paid their “stipends” (at one point, $1,500 a month – unheard of for most E-list bloggers) because they will deliver what is expected of them.  The notion that any of them are going to go maverick and turn into low-tax, pro-defense, law-and-order conservatives on the Monitor‘s dime is absurd.  Eric Black retains some plausible deniability, here, but I think he’s made his actual sympathies pretty clear (as is his right!) since he left the Strib; one suspects, for example, that had Doug Tice left the Strib, the Monitor/CIM would not have have come calling.  Conservative bloggers need not have applied to the Center for Independent Media.

Tucci continues:

And it bears mentioning here in a non-parenthetical paragraph that this is the very first time anywhere in the year and change history of MinniMoni that anyone connected with that website has admitted as much. Why?

“Why”, indeed, on a couple of levels.

For over a year, MinMon’s management and staff reacted in every possible way to questions about the CIM’s backing – every way save one.  They obfuscated.  They misdirected.  They changed the subject.  They threw out cutesy tangents and scampered away.  Their supporters denied any Soros connection, ever more vehemently.  And yet it was true all along (not that there was any doubt or mystery to the question).

And why does Black admit it (couched in an attack on the “silly” but true “attack” meme) as he’s cleaning out his desk?

UPDATE:  Welcome Cap’n Ed’s readers, and any Instapundit readers that’ve leaked through this far into the story!

I’d like to direct you to Learned Foot, who was on this several hours before I was, and in three years of blogging hasn’t had an Instalanche (remember them?); a Ed-a-lanche and a secondary Instalanche can’t be a bad way to roll into the holidays, though.

Doug Tice – who’s taken and run with “The Big Question” after Eric Black’s departure – noted something from Saturday’s NARN broadcast:

Yesterday, on one of the Saturday afternoon “Northern Alliance Radio Network” talk shows on AM 1280 The Patriot, I heard two of the the allies — I believe, Mitch Berg (from shotinthedark.info) and Captain Ed (from captainsquartersblog.com) — discussing last week’s awful Nebraska mall shooting. Their take on it was intriguing.

Doug noted that, first, I…

…insisted that nearly all mass shootings in recent years have occured in “gun-free” zones.

Not surprisingly, evidence for these assertions has been compiled and disseminated by scholar John Lott, the famed advocate of the “more guns-less crime” theory.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist – or an economist – to note that the vast preponderance of spree killings – certainly all of the ones the media brings up – take place in “gun free zones”, in academic sources like Lott, as well as, er less-academic ones:

Schools. College campuses. Government buildings. The list goes on, and on, and on. And if there are exceptions to the rule, they are often as not found in “gun-free” states.

We can certainly argue the premise. The numbers are on my side, but there is most certainly an argument to be had.

But Tice goes on to the more interesting question:

But anyhow, the allies didn’t stop there. Apparently following the lead of Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, they argued that victims or victims’ families in this situation may have grounds for a lawsuit against the mall based on the gun ban.

No doubt there will, as usual, be lawsuits, alleging various reasons for holding the mall liable for the tragedy. But the new theory (new to me, anyhow) is this: By deliberately banning otherwise permitted guns from their property, the mall managers exposed their customers to greater danger from criminal violence, since the ban ensured that no one would have the means to return fire.

Not “legally”, anyway. Fact is, if Nebraska’s law is anything like Minnesota’s, then carrying illegally in the store would have been a legal infraction, punishable by a fairly trivial fine. I’m not sure if there’d be any additional penalty to a carry permit holder actually using a permitted gun in a posted space in legal self-defense, or if a jury would ever convict them of it if they had done so. I don’t know that there’s ever been a case on the subject.

But I digress. The fact remains that the Westroads Mall had declared itself a no-gun zone – for those who follow the niceties of the law, anyway. And I, like most carry-permit holders, would have honored that request – by keeping my gun, out of there. Also myself; I don’t go where I’m not wanted, as a rule, and I don’t spend my money there, either.

Tice cuts to the, er, Big Question:

Interesting, but also puzzling.

Granting, for the sake of argument, the Lottian view that gun-free status makes a place of business more dangerous for its patrons, this lawsuit theory seems a surprising position for conservatives to take, since they presumably are defenders of private property rights.

True. (And to be perfectly accurate, I’m not entirely sure Ed shares my views on this issue; guns are pretty much my turf, among the NARN crew).

Doesn’t a property owner have a right to ban guns from his property, even if it is unwise to do so? And aren’t those who believe such a ban puts them at risk free not to enter his property?

Yes, and yes. It’s a freedom I generally exercise, too. As noted above, I rarely if ever patronize posted businesses, if there is a reasonable alternative.

Aren’t customers assuming any risk, and waiving any right to recompense, when they knowingly and voluntarily enter a gun-free zone?

I’m not aware that there is any law or precedent about this. Has there ever been a case with a:

1. legal activity, whose practicioners are…
2. …permitted by the state to carry out the activity with…
3. …an object that is legal – a firearm – for the express purpose of…
4. …defending themselves and bystanders from…
5. …an illegal activity that also happens to be a lethal threat?

…being enjoined for matters of a shopkeeper’s pure personal preference (as opposed to an empirical hazard – which, let us not forget, doesn’t exist with concealed carry permit holders)?

I’m trying to think of any situation that’d be even analogous. Barring defibrilators from your store (they can be misused!)? Banning asthma inhalers (they can be abused)?

Here’s the, er, Big Counterquestion: Does your property right trump my right to self-preservation?

The situation seems roughly comparable to the debate over bar and restaurant smoking bans. Conservatives as a rule argue that smoking bans are improper because a property owner should be able to decide whether to allow smoking or not. People who fear secondhand smoke need not work there or take their leisure there — or so the conservative line usually goes.

By and large conservatives can be expected to respond with disdain to the idea of lawsuits based on harm from voluntary exposure to secondhand smoke.

True. But the two ideas aren’t really similar. If I’m in a bar, smell smoke, and decide I don’t like it, I (and my friends and family) can make an orderly exit with a reasonable chance of getting out alive.

If I’m in that same bar, and a spree killer stands in the doorway and starts blazing away, the decision loop is a lot tighter; neither I nor the bar owner can be reasonably assumed to have chosen this activity; it’s being inflicted on all of us against our will. The threat to my life, liberty and happiness isn’t at some hypothetical intersection of property rights and science. It is in the hands of a madman with a gun. A madman that the store owner has forbidden me to defend myself against, without (obviously, and indeed impossibly) safeguarding me and mine from him.
He’s put my right to live snugly behind his property rights.  Just as the owners of the Westroads Mall did.

And let’s not forget that while the science of secondhand smoke is very much up in the air, the science of hot lead is not.

Here are three questions — assuming, for this purpose, that both secondhand smoke and gun bans are hazardous to people voluntarily exposed to them.

Question 1: Is it possible, coherantly, to believe secondhand smoke lawsuits are ridiculous but gun-ban lawsuits make sense?

Question 2: Is coherance possible the other way around — secondhand smoke lawsuits are sensible but not gun-ban lawsuits?

Going to a bar and smoking are both voluntary activities. One may leave a bar and find a smoke-free place at ones’ leisure. One may not leave this life, metaphysics aside, to go to a different one if someone gives you secondhand lead. Being enjoined by a property owner from taking legal steps with a legal gun that one is legally permitted to carry to safeguard the life that you and yours have is a whole different level of importance.

And when you’re talking about government offices and public buildings, I think it’s even more clear-cut. The right to protect ones’ life, and ones family’s lives, exists on at least as high a moral plane as private property (and at least a plane higher than smoking).

Question 3: Again assuming the Lottian view correct, are gun bans by private businesses a market failure caused, as market failures often are, by inadequate information — in this case people’s failure to understand what really makes them unsafe? Is the mall owner’s self interest in attracting shoppers better served by what Lottians would consider the illusory safety of the advertised gun ban than by the actual safety of allowing guns?

When statistically tiny numbers of Americans were poisoned by tampered Tylenol, or sickened by tainted spinach, sales of both dropped through the floor, creating marketing nightmares for both industries.

Against that – in just two incidents in “gun-free zones” in the past year, over forty people have died. In Minnesota, ten people have died in two school shooting incidents in the past few years – all of them on “gun-free” property. I’m not sure where that places the relative odds of dying of tainted beef to being shot by a madman at a posted business or federally “gun-free” school, but I’m guessing it’s pretty daunting.

I think the market has at least partially answered Doug’s question; the vast majority of the stores that “posted” themselves in the wake of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act have quietly dropped the signs in recent years; perhaps some were swayed by the protests of people like me, who made our displeasure at the unwarranted bigotry known. The vast majority, I suspect, simply realized that the law-abiding gun owner was less a threat than the average customer, and that Wes Skoglund was a lying moron.

If it takes a lawsuit to convince the rest that my right to protect my life is on a par with their property right – or at least that trying to trump my right to survive with their property rights is an act with consequences – I think I’m willing to go with that.

Am I missing something?

UPDATE:  Of course I’m missing something!  Or at least in Minnesota, according to the panoply of lawyers in the comment section below. 

So the legal route is, at least under Minnesota law, a non-starter (I don’t know about Nebraska law), and as commenter Jay Reding points out, the market does seem to be taking care of things in Minnesota. 

And commenter JoelR notes that, since carrying ones’ legally-permitted handgun in a posted store is an infraction that might be punishable by a $25 fine in Minnesota, it’s pretty much worth committing “civil disobedience” anyway, as long as one acts legally (to say nothing of tactfully and respectfully – keeping the gun carefully concealed and not making an ass of oneself.  Which is always a good idea).

But let me emphasize; while the law would seem to hold that the stores are legally blameless for anyone getting murdered because nobody can legally carry a firearm to defend themselves, it still doesn’t make it right.  Hence, I’ll continue to avoid posted stores; less out of fear of mass-murder than out of protest against bigotry against the demonstrably law-abiding.

Like me.