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.

The media has convened in the press room at Shot In The Dark world HQ.

The reporters are taking their seats. The buzz of anticipation settles into a tense quiet as Mr. Berg steps to the podium.

Let’s join the questioning:

———-

Reporter A (Minnesota Public Radio): Mr. Berg? It’s been noted that you’ve achieved the one thing that was standing between you and the putative “big time” – you’ve actually gotten your own stalker. Would you care to comment on this? And I have a followup

Mitch Berg: Well, on the one hand, yes – it would seem that I do have a stalker. Actually, a stalker and a half – I’ve noticed the the “Lloydletta” blog names me something like 11 times in the past two weeks.

[Assembled reporters laugh politely, if uneasily]

But in fact, yes – it would seem that former porn-mag temp Ken “Avidor” Weiner has fallen into that role, using one of his twenty blogs and, apparently, his video camera and mad editing skeelz to draw the attention of his adoring public…

[more laughter]

…yes, adoring public to me. So – “good” news, I have a stalker. The bad news? He’s a piss-poor one!

Reporter A (Minnesota Public Radio): So to follow up – do you have any comment for the record?

Mitch Berg: Well, my good friend Joe Tucci – whom Mr. Weiner managed to “out” last week as the real name behind “Learned Foot”, and can I say “hey, great research skeelz, that took you almost exactly three years!’ – put it well, I think:

All Weiner knows how to do is steal off others’ websites, indulge his (erroneous) stereotypes and piddle his crap all over the internet (notice how I didn’t mention Photoshop) . Why does…

What the hell?

I feel like such a looser loser. Is this how stalkers feel all the time?

I don’t know that anyone could put it better!

Reporter B (WCCO-TV): Er, Mr. Berg? Do you mind if we call you “Mitch?”

Mitch Berg: Sure. Or “Mister Berg” if you’re nasty.

Reporter B (WCCO-TV): Mr. Berg, bloggers affiliated with your “stalker” Mr. Avidor…

Mitch Berg: …er, Miss? That’s “Mister Weiner”. “Avidor” was the name of an actual artist. It’d be like asking y’all to call me “Mister Hendrix” or “Mister Miller” after spending twenty years making a mockery of my real name. Anyway, carry on.

Reporter B (WCCO-TV): …sorry. Anyway, they have made a small cottage industry of making up nicknames for you. You’re referred to sometimes as “Blogger Berg”…

Mitch Berg: …that would, in fact, be gramatically and factually correct. I am a blogger, and my name is Berg! One adjective, one noun.

Reporter B (WCCO-TV): …and “Gasbag of the Midway”.

Mitch Berg: Given that I share this distict with Ellen Anderson and Jay Benanav, I must say that’s kind of an honor! Also…improbable.

Reporter B (WCCO-TV): So do any of those names…I don’t know, faze you in any way?

Mitch Berg: I grew up a tall, scrawny, greasy-haired, uncoordinated, athletically-inept cello-playing brainiac and a Bears fan. I got called worse than that around the Thanksgiving dinner table.

[laughter]

Next question?

Reporter C (Dump Bachmann): Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit?

Mitch Berg: I’m actually on record opposing it.

Reporter C (Dump Bachmann): But why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why, why why, Blogger Berg?

Mitch Berg: I’ve never supported it.

Reporter C (Dump Bachmann): But why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why, why why, oh Gasbag?

Mitch Berg: Nope. Never.

Reporter C (Dump Bachmann): But why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit? Why are you on record in support of Personal Rapid Transit…

[Reporter is tasered. By fellow reporters. His carried – with difficulty – from the hall.]

Mitch Berg: Next question?

Reporter D (Sixty Minutes): You make light of this purportered “stalker”…

Mitch Berg: …well, yeah, I do. This guy doesn’t have the balls to really do the job. He’s a gutless little moral, social and intellectual gimp who skulks around and makes photoshop “cartoons” and logically-and-factually-void proclamations because he can’t hold his own in a face to face…anything. Debate, discussion, fight, whatever. He’s nothing. Zero. I’ve wiped smarter opponents and bigger threats off the sole of my shoe walking through Mears Park.

Reporter E (Star/Tribune): Do you have any comment about Scott Johnson writing for True North along with Tom Swift, as our man “Avidor” reported in “Buzz.mn”?

Mitch Berg: …and Black Ink, and the Daily Kos, and the Daily Mole?

Reporter E (Star/Tribune): Er…yes.

Mitch Berg: OK. Three parts to my response.

1. Scott and Tom are both friends of mine. Ken “Avidor” Weiner isn’t fit to carry either of their gig bags, as a writer or a person.
2. Weiner’s big “point” against Tom is that he’s “nasty” – that he hits, he claims, below the belt. It’s crap, of course. But, um, so? Welcome to the blogosphere! It’s not like Weiner is a model of detached restraint! His beef is the same one Salieri had with Mozart; he realizes he’s not as good as either – or any – of the people he stalks.
3. Eric Black? Steve Perry? You share a local left-wing blogosphere with Ken “Avidor” Weiner and Kevin McKay and Mark “Revolutionary Gonads” Gisleson. By the standard that the Daily Mole and Black Ink are endorsing, you are guiltyi by association. Defend yourselves.

Reporter F (Lloydletta): Oooh! It looks like Ken Avidor has hit a nerve!

Mitch Berg: Sure, in the same way that a three-year-old “hit a nerve” when she colors on the walls!

Reporter F (Lloydletta): Oooh! It looks like Ken Avidor has hit a nerve!

Mitch Berg: [Thinks] Or maybe in the same way as Andy Milonakis…no, not quite that bad.

Reporter F (Lloydletta): Oooh! It looks like Ken Avidor has hit a nerve!

Mitch Berg: Nope.

Reporter F (Lloydletta): Oooh! It looks like Ken Avidor has hit a nerve!

Mitch Berg: Nope-er.

Reporter F (Lloydletta): Oooh! It looks like Ken Avidor has hit a nerve!

Mitch Berg: Still no.

Reporter F (Lloydletta): Oooh! It looks like Ken Avidor has hit a nerve!

Mitch Berg: I refer you to my friend John McGinley, who said it best.

Reporter F (Lloydletta): Oooh! It looks like Ken Avidor has hit a nerve!

Mitch Berg: [yawns]

Reporter F (Lloydletta): Oooh! It looks like Ken Avidor has hit a nerve!

Reporter F (Lloydletta): Oooh! It looks like Ken Avidor has hit a nerve!

Reporter F (Lloydletta): Oooh! It looks like Ken Avidor has hit a nerve!

Mitch Berg: I will give my next response in sign language:

Reporter G (Ha’aretz): You’ve been very critical of the local leftymedia…
Mitch Berg: Look, when a hack like Karl Bremer can get coverage in the Daily Mole and Black Ink, for a baldfaced “guilt by association” smear, and get it with breathless credulity to boot, it should make people ask questions.

Last question…

Reporter H (E News): Any truth to the bit we read in the Strib’s Blog House that…

Mitch Berg: Probably not.

Thanks!

[Pandemonium as reporters race for their phones]

UPDATE:  Learned Foot is doing a post-conference poll on the issue at hand.

And then, as he says, let’s finish this.

A source with knowledge of the situation tells me there’s trouble brewing at the Minnesota Monitor.

>> we’re hearing minnesota monitor is in
>> trouble. Jim Boyd has quit and there is some
>> consternation among the writers.

Rumor has it that Boyd – whose much-ballyhooed entree to the Monitor was intended to be yet another coat of credibility (along with hiring Eric Black) onto an enterprise that employs some good writers, some ethical trainwrecks, and some well-meaning amateurs – is moving on to another regional online outlet.  I’m working to confirm or spike the rumor.

The source also tells me that some local journalists are also upset in that nobody tells even potential employees exactly who it is that funds the Monitor.  (While nobody has formally confirmed anything, the Monitor’s parent group, the Center for Independent Media, shared offices with George Soros’ “Media Matters for America” during their organizational gestation period.  Nobody from the Monitor or the CIM has ever denied, after repeated direct requests, that Soros was the organizations’ sugardaddy). 

The rumor (and it IS just a rumor at this point) continues that Boyd will be joining the MinnPost – the new online DFL PR organ news outlet run by Boyd’s former boss Joel Kramer.  A source at the Post declined to comment and has kicked my request for an on-the-record comment up the chain of command.

More info as it becomes available.

UPDATE:  Roger Buoen, the MinnPost’s Managing Editor, writes “we haven’t talked to Jim [Boyd] about writing for MinnPost”

A few years back, many left-leaning commentators – up to and including Geraldo Rivera and some who are on the George Soros payroll – tried to bury Michelle Malkin in a wave of anti-Filipina bigotry.And while many people, left and right, rose as one to condem this ugly racist display, a number of left-leaning commentators were as silent as death on the subject. Among the silent – and thus, complicit – were:

• Steve Perry, editor of the big-buck-lefty-supported Daily Mole (and, at the time, editor of the City Pages),
• Karl Bremer, foul-mouthed Stillwater screechmonger, who has found via the local alt-meda a ready outlet and ravenous market for his raving vein-bulging screeching inner lout.
  
• Minnesota Monitor
• Every leftyblogger that attends “Drinkiing Liberally”, an organization of regional leftyblogs, which sets the agenda for local left-leaning alternative media.

The inference is clear; Perry, Bremer, Eric Black and the DrinkLib bloggers think the only place for a Filipina woman is writhing around a greased pole on a stage, or turning tricks by a navy base.

For that matter, on this blog I’ve commented many times at great length about the pre-1945 German trait of eliminationist anti-Semitism, as identified by Goldhagen. Who was silent on this subject? Perry, Bremer, MinMon and Drinking Liberally.

Their silence tells the tale; obviously, they hate Jews and want them all murdered.

Let us not forget that four years ago, DrinkLib participant and leading local leftyblogger Mark Gisleson called for the lynching of Vice President Cheney, among many other things. Whose silence again rolled like a hurricane storm surge? That’s right; Karl Bremer, the MinMon, the DrinkLib bloggers, and…well, OK, Steve Perry did sort of wind up giving Wege a muted “tut-tut” online.

The meaning is clear; all left-of-center alt-media commentators are racists who want to murder jews and lynch Dick Cheney.

Their silence is the proof.

When will leftybloggers rise as one and attack Steve Perry, Karl Bremer, the Minnesota Monitor and all of the Drinking Liberally leftyblogs?

———-

Stupid, right?

Yep. Intentionally so.

If only Steve Perry’s “Daily Mole” could say the same thing about Karl Bremer’s grindingly, corrosively stupid “Reader Op-Ed” hit ‘n run on Tracy “Anti-Strib” Eberly and, by the way, every single center-right blogger in the Twin Cities.

What happens when a leading local Republican blogger publishes a virulently racist screed that refers to Native Americans as “dirt worshipping heathens,” “domestic terrorists permanently stuck in the Stone Age” and “humanoid animals,” and describes them as a race “so primitive that they created nothing of any lasting value, nor did they contribute anything of note to the world”?

In Minnesota, evidently nothing—at least from his right-leaning compatriots in the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers and the mainstream media.

Wow. That’s pretty damning stuff. Where could that have come from?

Minneapolis regulatory affairs consultant Tracy Eberly published such a piece on his local blog Anti-Strib on October 11. Those are just a few salient quotes from it. If you want to read his further defense of genocide against Native Americans, you’ll have to visit his website yourself. Suffice to say it would make Andrew Jackson proud.

Um, yeah, Karl/Steve. About that.

Bremer knows how to put links into web copy; he provides copious links to the other Minnesota Organization of Bloggers (MOB) blogs that he wants to smear by association. So why – in the left-leaning “Mole”, publishing to a left-leaning audience – can’t he provide a link to Eberly’s actual piece?

Does he (and, by association, Perry, MinMon and the Drinking Liberally bloggers damn, now I’m picking up that awful habit), know is audience isn’t going to bother googling and digging to find the article? Is he counting on inertia (a reasonable assumption) to keep his audience from knowing the actual context in which Eberly was writing?

So read Eberly’s piece. I did. For the first time. I didn’t like it much, and don’t agree with it. Of course, I understand where it comes from – and it’s not racism.

To know that, of course, the reader would need to know the context of the story as well as the pull-quotes Bremer has elected to highlight. But that would undercut Bremer’s foamy-mouthed, self-righteous “point”. It’s unsurprising, of course – Bremer, a long-time anti-Michele Bachmann zealot, writes for “Dump Bachmann”, a blog whose entire oeuvre is built around crimes against context (and which also refuses to condemn the attacks on Malkin, the Holocaust, and to renounce the attack on Dick Cheney Crap. It’s catchy, and hard to kick).

More on that later. Bremer next lets his imagination romp and play – with results that some of his associates might find…hinky?:

Eberly is a member of a group known as the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, or more appropriately, MOB. Self-described as “a group of mostly center-right bloggers,” MOB includes virtually every Republican blogger in the Twin Cities, including GOP-affiliated Minnesota Democrats Exposed, TCF-connected Power Line, and St. Paul Pioneer Press editorial board member Craig Westover.

Bremer slips from omission into lying, here. PowerLine is not “connected” with TCF, any more than Karl Bremer is “connected” to the Nazi Party for whom his deafening silence about the Holocaust is a sure sign of support (dammit) my employer is “connected” to my blog (I’m going to make sure Scott Johnson sees that, however; Steve Perry might want to see to the “Mole’s” “fact”-checking).

More importantly (to me)? The MOB is rigorously non-partisan. As one of the group’s “organizers” (there is no “organization”), I am the one, along with Chad the Elder, Brian Ward and King Banaian, to state this for the record; the MOB eschews politics completely, as a matter of principle. The group is a blogroll and a twice-annual gathering at a bar. Not only that, but we have made a point of reaching out and inviting leftybloggers to our semiannual MOB parties; not only as blanket invitations on our blogs, but specific emailed invitations to the leftybloggers themselves. These invitations have included several sent to specific City Pages writers (Paul Demko among others) while Perry ran the place.

Karl Bremer’s “boss” at DumpBachmann, Eva Young, attended the last MOB Party. She seemed to have a great time! And – what’s this? Tracy from Anti-Strib attended! Eva must hate Indians, too!

Some “right-leaning” group, that MOB, huh, Karl?

Eberly reportedly finished third in the runoff for their little club’s “mayor,” so he clearly has their respect.

For the benefit of any “Mole” reader who reads this; the “Mayor” race is the MOB’s equivalent of a “Miss Congeniality” award and – again, I say this as one of the MOB’s Capi di tutti capi, the mayor election is not an official MOB function. It is something the Kool Aid Report does for the fun of it.

Yet since Eberly’s “dirt-worshipping heathens” column ran last month, the silence from the usually fawning MOB mob has been deafening.

Let’s make sure we provide the context that Karl Bremer (anti-filipina, anti-semite and pro-lynching-advocate-by-omission that he is Jeebus, this “smear by omission” thing is a slippery slope!) is apparently afraid to, yet again.

Anti-Strib is a rant blog. It is not the Weekly Standard. It is among local center-right bloggers what “Norwegianity” is for the local center-left; the loud, unrepentant, sometimes gauche, sometimes dead-on (well, Anti-Strib, anyway), shoot-first-ask-questions-later portion of the local center-right psyche. They are South Park conservatives of the most unrepentant stripe; they whiz on Political Correctness with the sort of glee that PZ Meiers piddles (or tries to piddle) on faith, or “Crayola Boy” Avidor pees on…I dunno, artistic talent?

And – take note, Karl Bremer – just because we share a label doesn’t mean we think, act or believe the same. I’m not a screedblogger, so sometimes the Anti-Strib is off-putting. It’s a “big tent” groupblog, so the writing is mighty uneven, ranging from amateurish and awful to really good (sort of like the City Pages).

Do I care for the tone of Tracy’s piece? Of course not. Of course, unlike Bremer, I know some of the backstory that is probably opaque to Bremer and his readers; as he notes, Eberly is reacting to “Doug”, a malignant comment-section tumor (one of only four people that’s ever been banned from this blog) who claims to be (among many, many things) Native American, and who relentlessly romanticizes Native culture. “Doug” is such a remorselessly abrasive jagoff that if he were to start advocating for unicorns and puppies, I’d be tempted to rhetorically warm up the .270 and the meatgrinder. And I hate that – because while I deeply respect Native culture (I’ve spent a lot of time reading about hunter-gatherer and aboriginal farming cultures in recent years) within their cultural context, Doug’s relentless preening is enough to make Russell Means break out a copy of Fort Apache out of pure snotty spite.
Tracy’s article is an attempt to let the air out of a really obnoxious balloon. Was it coarse and un-PC and maybe just a tad less artful than I’d shoot for, myself? Sure. Remember, I banned Doug rather than indulge in a reaction I’d rather not have; after almost six years of this, I’ve learned to pick and choose my stressors. Tracy sees it differently; that’s Tracy.

I don’t endorse his reaction; neither do I think it’s a sign of racism or lousy character or bad breath or anything other than wanting to give the relentless prig Doug a rhetorical wedgie.

Suffice to say every regional leftybloggers had best be very careful about their own flippant bigotries.

And, of course, “logical fallacies” – like the kind Bremer smears all over himself in the next bit:

Minnesota Democrats Exposed is authored by Michael Brodkorb, a paid consultant to the Minnesota GOP, Norm Coleman and many other past GOP campaigns. Brodkorb calls Anti-Strib.com a “daily read,” and it’s the first permanent link on his website, where he has been flogging Al Franken relentlessly lately for Franken’s statements about Native Americans.

The “daily read” list is in alphabetical order. And – lest the distinction be lost on anyone dim enough to take Karl Bremer as an authority on anything – Tracy Eberly is not running for US Senate.

Even Westover, with his bully pulpit on the Pioneer Press editorial page, has remained on the sidelines

Bremer, again, fails to provide a link to allow the reader to note that Westover has “remained on the sidelines because his blog has been moribund for six months. Clearly, Westover’s “silence on Al Quaeda” during that time means he also supports stoning gays – by Bremer’s logic.

Substitute “Blacks” or “Jews” or “Christians” or “Catholics” for “Indians” in Eberly’s harangue, and what do you think the reaction would be, even from the right?

That’s easy. “That’s stupid enough to be a Karl Bremer opinion”

Isn’t it time Republicans and their internet and media cheerleaders [Hahahahahahaha! – Ed.] quit pointing their fingers at liberal political groups and their TV ads, and cleaned up the hatefulness in their own back yard? A good place to start would be a repudiation of one of their own family members, Tracy Eberly and Anti-Strib, for the shame he’s laid upon their doorstep. Because as long as they remain silent about fellow MOBster Tracy Eberly and his “earth-worshipping heathens” slurs, they will all wear the mantle of racism in my eyes.

OK.

Tracy; don’t insult Native Americans. Please.

Now – Steve Perry? What do you think about the fact that Karl Bremer has selectively misreported key facts of this story? If these misstatements aren’t corrected and atoned for, you will forever wear the mantle of “hack” in my eyes. And I know that’d hurt you to the quick.

Eva Young (Karl’s boss at “Dump Bachmann”) – either Karl misrepresented the MOB, or you are a closet right-winger because you attended the last MOB party. Clearly, if Bremer is correct, your participation in the MOB party means you Hate Native Americans! Where’s the correction – nay, the outrage?

See where this leads?

Karl Bremer is a Stillwater writer and part Cherokee Indian.

Good thing he’s got “aggrieved minority” to fall back on.

KAR takes Dumpster “freelance journalist” Karl Bremer to the factual woodshed.

So, the Dumpster is a moron, and gets one more of these:

 

Nice try though.

Go over and read Foot’s vivisection of our old friend Karl.

Oh, and that fail also goes to Eric Black for his gatekeeping.

Black might have some ‘splainin’ to do.

Mr. Black; while I’m the last person who should tell you how to do your job as a reporter, as a general rule anyone involved with The Dump is about as reliable a source as a ferret on meth.

Yours in superior gatekeeping,

Mitch

Paul Schmelzer – the MinMon’s best reporter (Eric Black seems to be more of an independent than a staffer, hence the distinction) – notes the larger story behind the flap that surfaced in this post:

No hat tips from the Strib: Big ups to City Pages for last week’s bona fide scoop on the University of St. Thomas/Desmond Tutu flap. It’s spawned reports on blogs and in the corporate media alike, but CP staffer Paul Demko isn’t feeling the love. He says the Star Tribune “simply stole the scoop” without crediting the altweekly and has been emailing blogs to get its props. If it makes you feel better, CP, it happens to us all the time.

Why, yes.

It’s really pretty common.

So why did Eric Black – the dean of Minnesota political reporters – jump on what turned out to be the Media Matters bandwagon on the phony “Rush Limbaugh Insults the Troops” fiction?

Honest mistake, fueled by (admitted) bias?  Too much writing, not enough analyzing?  Leash being yanked?

Kouba at TVM wonders too:

Last Friday on his website, Eric Black had a post where he passed along, with an uncritical eye, the blast from Media Matters about its trumped up attack of Rush Limbaugh. Worse, in the second paragraph he referred to Jeff Fecke’s musings on the matter. A bit like Theodosius declaring Alaric an authority on Roman culture. [Two minute penalty; piling on! Not inaccurate – just piling on – Ed.]
The post made me raise at least 1.5 eyebrows, for Mr. Black is smart enough not to accept at face value a broadside against Republicans from a partisan outfit like Media Matters.

That the anti-war Left would grasp at such a weak excuse to try and take some attention away from MoveOn’s blunder with its smear of Gen. Petraeus should be a clue they need a telescope to see the moral high ground.

And…

Mr. Black is too experienced a journalist to carry water for Media Matters, and now that he’s waded out into the blogosphere, this episode should highlight the fact there are creatures swimming around with sharp teeth that don’t play as fair as he does.

Black wrote a correction – sort of:

The essence of Limbaugh’s defense/rebuttal (which he delivered, in high dudgeon on the next day’s show after the Media Matters piece had led to Limbaugh being criticized by several congressmen and senators) is that the full text of the show in which he used the term “phony soldiers” proves that he was referring to only one soldier, Jesse MacBeth, who actually was a phony.

MacBeth claimed to have been an Army Ranger, an Iraq vet, and to have witnessed atrocities. But all of those statements were lies. MacBeth stands convicted of making false statements.

Media Matters original piece attacking Limbaugh made no reference to MacBeth or to the possibility that Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” remark had been a reference to MacBeth. Limbaugh argues that any fair-minded person listening to the whole broadcast would have understood that he was referring to MacBeth and that Media Matters is guilty of a willful smear.

With an asterisk:

Here’s problem #1:

“Phony soldiers” occurs during a Limbaugh exchange with a caller. The caller complains that the media:

“never talk to real soldiers. They like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media.”

That’s when Limbaugh interjects “the phony soldiers.” At that moment, it certainly seems that both he and the caller are referring to soldiers and veterans who oppose the war. Jesse MacBeth has not been mentioned and is not part of the context.

Yeah, talk radio’s a funny thing. It’s always your rough draft, your first take (unless you’re on NPR, doing one of their highly scripted shows).  If one is sympathetically inclined toward Limbaugh, one will probably assume he meant the slew of soldiers thrown up in front of the media by one anti-war group or another that later turned out to by phony.  If not, you might assume he’s talking about all anti-war soldiers.

But when one thinks of (and refers to) Media Matters as a “media watchdog group” rather than a “leftist propaganda mill”, it’s a pretty big chink in your chain of informational evidence.

It’d be interesting to have Mr. Black on the show again; we have a lot to talk about…

The other day, in the comment thread for Joe Bodell’s incisive investigative piece on True North, a commenter noted:

The real question is when MinnMo is going to get their radio show up.

Oh, my.  That, I’d almost pay to hear.  Once.

 OPENING JINGLE (Performed by a group of studio musicians earning union scale): “MinnMonitor – on the air!”

(ten seconds of dead air).

 OPENING JINGLE: “MinnMonitor – on the air!”

ROBIN “REW” MARTY: “Like, totally hello!  This is Minnesota Monitor Radio on Air America, like, Minnesota…”

 (five seconds of dead air)

…and I’d like to introduce the guys on the show.  We’ve got Andy Birkey…

ANDY BIRKEY: “I’m Andy Birkey…”

ROBIN “REW MARTY: “…and Eric Black”

ERIC BLACK: “Greetings”

ROBIN “REW” MARTY: “Joe Bodell”

JOE BODELL: “Robin!  I just ran a packet trace on John Hinderaker’s furnace, and found that his carbon footprint is actually higher than his golf handicap!”

ROBIN “REW” MARTY: “…”Paul” from “Eyeteeth”…”

PAUL SCHMELZER: “Yo”

ROBIN “REW” MARTY: “And, finally, the guy on the staff with actual radio experience from about 200 appearances on the Jeff Heaney show, Jeff Fecke”

JEFF FECKE: “Thank you.  As I always say, we must pay any price, bear any burden, to spread liberty and freedom”. 

ROBIN “REW” MARTY: “Like totally!  So our first topic of the day is, like, the Republican National Convention…”

ANDY BIRKEY: “It will affect gays more”.

ABDI AYNTE: “No, it will affect Moslems more”

ANDY BIRKEY: “That’s absurd!  Republicans hate gays more than they hate Moslems”

ABDI AYNTE: “That is rediculous!  They hate Muslims more than they hate gays!”

JOE BODELL OR JEFF FECKE: “Actually, they hate the troops even more”.

ROBIN “REW” MARTY: “Was that Paul or Jeff talking?”

JOE BODELL: “Beats me”

JEFF FECKE: “I have no idea”.

ROBIN “REW” MARTY: “Let’s take a caller.  In Minneapolis, it’s Eva.  Eva, welcome to MinnMon on the Air!”

EVA: “Read my blog”

(Five seconds of dead air)

ROBIN “REW” MARTY: “Totally!  Thanks for your call!  Next topic…”

JOE BODELL: “Just a minute, Robin. I ran a skiptrace on the ATM packets going from Karl Rove’s Blackberry to the RNC’s server in Virginia, and cross-indexed the results with derivatives of an IPMask Subnet to Supernet refluxogram, and it appears that the Republican National Convention is going to be held in…”

(Three seconds of dead air)

JOE BODELL: “…Bloomington.”

ERIC BLACK: (wearily) “It’s actually going to be in Saint Paul”

JOE BODELL: “No, look here – I printed it out”.

ROBIN “REW” MARTY: “Let’s take another call.  Eva, on line 2, you’re totally on MinnMonn on the Air”

EVA: “Read my blog”.

(Nine seconds of dead air)

ROBIN “REW” MARTY: “Yeah!”

JEFF FECKE: “When it comes to the RNC, it’s like Franklin D Roosevelt said to me; the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.

ERIC BLACK: “OK, that’s enough, Fecke.  That was said in FDR’s inauguration speech, and he died over thirty years before you were born.  How are you attributing that to a direct conversation?”

(22 seconds of dead air)

JEFF FECKE: “I’ve spoken with my editor, and she’s advised me not to comment”

JOE BODELL: “Oh, we’re totally porked”

ABDI AYNTE: “That is an anti-Muslim statement.  You must apologize.”

PAUL SCHMELZER: “Dude, we’re all on the same team…”.

ROBIN “REW” MARTY: “It’s time for totally a break!  We’ll be back after this word from our sponsors, Juan’s Balloon Animals, and Kites are Us!

On the other hand, Air American couldn’t possibly do much worse than the somnolent Mark Heaney show they run every afternoon.

Eric Black, at his new blog, jumps into the battle to spin the upcoming Petraeus report:

The Washington Post reports this morning that a GAO report, due out Tuesday, will find that the Iraqi government has failed to meet 15 of the 18 benchmarks that Congress and the Bush Administration had established to measure military and political progress.

It’s hard to escape politics, selective perception and confirmation bias when discussing the question of progress in Iraq, especially during the current run-up to the big September presentations by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

But if there’s anyone I would trust to call it straight, it would be the GAO.

Black went on:

When I read a few weeks ago that the GAO was doing its own study of the Iraq situation (at the request of Congress) I counted on it to be the unbiased assessment available. When I just read the Post story, I was disappointed to learn that the GAO will only be studying the 18 benchmarks.

As I previously fulminated, for those focused on the big question of how things are going for the U.S. mission in Iraq, these benchmarks are overrated. The benchmarks focus only on things the Iraqi government is supposed to do to facilitate the much-ballyhooed but not very visible national reconciliation among the various population groups.

Indeed – a casual study of counterinsurgency warfare shows that the GAO’s benchmarks, while of importance to those for whom the quality of a national government is the measure of success, are virtually meaningless in measuring success in the mission that will, for the immediate future, be the only one that really matters in Iraq; securiting the citizens; driving Al Quaeda out; cutting down on internecine ethnic/religious cleansing; killing or co-opting the religious death squads; getting the the point where “The Iraqi Street” doesn’t need to worry about being killed, having his children burned alive before his eyes, being gang-raped, for the crime of walking the street. 

As in all counterinsurgencies, government factions can negotiate until the paint peels from the conference room walls; none of it means anything until the “street” believes it’s safe.

I’d be more impressed when the results are real in ways that affect the safety our troops and of the well being of the Iraqi people. For example, when the number of attacks on the troops is down, likewise the number of Americans and Iraqis getting killed, plus the unemployment rate in Iraq.

Black – knowingly or not – invokes an irreconcilable paradox.

Focusing on the “number of attacks on the troops” is what got us into this mess in the first place.  Since Beirut and Mogadishu, the US military has focused on “force protection” to a degree that Robert Kaplan, quoting Special Forces troops in Afghanistan, called “debilitating”.  For the first three years of the counterinsurgency, the US military became so focused on “force protection” that it would seem to have  gotten neither safety nor victory; by going, essentially, on the defensive, we ceded control of much of the “Iraqi street” to the terrorists, death squads and thugs – which made most of Iraq a safe haven from which to…

…launch more attacks on our troops.

It’s only been by putting our troops in harm’s way, taking the initiative from the enemy, that casualties have dropped and, more importantly, people in places like Anbar are starting to sense the security that will give them, someday, the mental bandwidth to fuss about things like oil revenue and the Rights of Man. It’s also paradoxical that by taking the war to the enemy, one saves lives in the long run.

 I’ll be impressed by measurable progress toward the reconstruction of the Iraqi infrastructure,  an increase in how much oil is being produced and how many hours a day Baghdad has electricity.

And yet trying to get to any of that without making the people of Iraq secure is like trying to drive to Chicago before you’ve changed your flat tire.

It is a lamentable fact that the Administration – the Pentagon, really – allowed this to happen for three years.

It is to the Administration’s credit that things have finally changed. 

That the Administration’s opponents have never had a better idea in either case shows their unfitness to lead this nation in a time of war. 

Bob Collins at Polinaut notes the launch of two politics-oriented blogs this past week:

…tomorrow, as near as I can tell, a bunch of conservative bloggers are adding True North to their repertoire. I believe the link — when it debuts on Saturday, will be here.

Thanks for the hat tip, Bob!

However, I had to comment on this next bit:

Eric Black, the high priest of political blogging in Minnesota (formerly The Big Question) has launched Eric Black Ink.

Well, kudos to Mr. Black, with whom I disagree on much political, but for whom I have the utmost regard. 

But Bob – “high priest” of Minnesota poliblogging?

I mean, maybe if John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson, Ed Morrissey and Michael Brodkorb are respectively the Dalai Lama, Pope, Archbishop and Billy Graham of Minnesota political blogging.  Maybe.

Otherwise…?

I was at the Cub store by 60th and Nicollet in South Minneapolis, and I met my old friend Joshua-Micah Cohen-Tostengaard. 

Josh has been a lifelong Democrat; the guy bleeds blue.  He has impeccable DFL credentials.  And he’s bugged.

“I am a Democrat”, Josh said, “but I hate the DFL and the national Democratic Party.  I’ve voted for every Democratic presidential, Senate, Congress, Gubernatorial, State Constitutional and Legislative office, every election, ever.  But I’m not going to anymore”.

I asked him why?

“Because while I have always been a good, dues-paying liberal Democrat, I have found that I just can’t abide my party’s policies!  Although I’ve been a card-carrying liberal my whole life, I cannot stand the left’s stances on gun control – I own an AK47 and am carrying a Desert Eagle in my cargo pocket right now!  I’m very pro-life, and find my party’s stances on all abortion issues to be noxious.  I support my party, but I find their drive to disengage from Iraq – indeed, to cut and run – to be horrendous.  And while I revere the legacy of Hubert Humphrey and Fritz Mondale, I think the party’s high-tax, low-growth, punish achievement policies are going to kill this state.:

 ” I think Local Government Aid is a subsidy of failure.  I applaud my party’s record on welfare, but I think that aid should be closely tied to work.  While I believe in my party’s history as a supporter of immigration, I support English as a national language, and believe that the border should be closed, immediately.  Oh, while I support my party on transportation issues, I think every cent spent on trains and buses is a complete waste.”

Was that all?

“Yes.  Well, there’s one more thing; while I support my party’s historical legacy, I think David Strom and Phil Krinkie and their “no new taxes” pledge issued exactly the call this state needs, no matter what the DFL party as a whole says”. 

“So”, Josh concluded, “I’m a Democrat.  But what my party has become, nauseates me.  I can’t support them, since they oppose everything I, as a Democrat, believe”. 

It was an interesting conversation.

(more…)

It was June 27th when we noticed that Jeff Fecke of the Minnesota Monitor was playing fast and loose with the rules of journalism (to say nothing of blogging).

It was July 2nd when we noted that there was at the very least a strong appearance of plagiarism on the part of this “journalist” whose publication is funded by liberals with deep pockets and which has gone as far as hiring former Strib reporter Eric Black to burnish its reportation as a “journalistic” endeavor. 

We noted, correctly, that despite their own self-published “Code of Ethics” that bids them to “Admit mistakes and correct them promptly”, there’s been nary a peep from the “New Journalists” at the Minnesota Monitor explaining, much less admitting to, these problems.

Their “code” seems to be entirely based on denying responsibility for their “mistakes”.

So when will the “Monitor” follow its own code of ethics?  Or are they above all that?

I’m not asking because I expect an answer, of course.  They won’t.  I just want reinforce the salient point in the minds of the Twin Cities’ online news consumer; the credibility, ethics and talent in the regional online alternative news market is overwhelmingly congregated on the right.

(more…)

Someone asked me, in relation to my series  (Parts I, II and III)  on the Minnesota Monitor’s sloppy attribution and possible apparent plagiarism – “why are you pounding so hard on Jeff Fecke?”

I’ll cite Michael Corleone; “It’s not personal.  It’s business”. 

Oh, I’ll cop to having “creative differences” with Fecke; his non-Monitor blogging over the past few years has slid into a morass of Atrios-style snarking.  It irritates me, as a conservative, as a blogger, and as a reader. 

But that hardly makes Fecke unique among leftybloggers; he’s been doing it a long time, and among what passes for the mainstream of leftybloggers, he’s no worse than most, better than quite a few. 

It is business.

Part of it is that, as someone who once did aspire to be a journalist, it sticks in my craw when I see people practicing the craft shoddily – even allowing that I was no master of the craft myself.  As a conservative, it irritates me even more when that slipshod craft is practiced toward partisan ends.

But above all?

We – overtly partisan bloggers of the left and the right – are engaged in a battle for the hearts and minds of Americans; of Minnesotans.  Left-leaning benefactors – from George Soros on down – are pouring a lot of money into trying to win that battle, from projects big (bankrolling attack-PR firm “Media Matters for America”, with whom the Monitor’s parent organization, the Center for Independent Media, used to share offices) to small (trying to establish online publications like the Monitor and its sister publications, Colorado Confidential and the ironically-named Iowa Independant as reputable “news” organizations).  They are – in my opinion – trying to buy credibility. 

It’s working, in many respects; the mainstream media routinely carries Media Matters hit pieces as if they were independent research; some local media give the Monitor, likewise, complete credence.  Hiring Eric Black wasn’t a bad move toward that end, one must admit.

Against that, the center-right independent alternative media has…well, not a lot of money, at least none that I’ve seen filtering down to us lil’ ol’ conservative bloggers in Minnesota. 

Just facts. 

In my three-part series, I presented a bunch of them; either shoddy attribution or plagiarism, depending on your definition of either.  I present them, unvarnished, to help the unaligned news consumer and voter gauge the credence they want to give the various news – and alternative news – options available to them.

And in the online world, facts are available like never before.

So I’d like to present this challenge to center-right bloggers in Minnesota; look over the Monitor.  Find the quotes that are presented as if they were direct quotes made to Monitor reporters – in other words, quotes that are not attributed to press releases, AP copy, or linked to news organization websites or other blogs.  And if you’re a center-right blogger in Iowa or Colorado, you can follow suit with your local Center for Independent Media affiliate as well.

Google ’em. 

See if you get any hits. 

If  you do, see if those hits predate the MinMon/ColCon/IoIndy piece in which the otherwise-unattributed quote appeared.

If so – publish it in your blog.  Let the world know.  Shine a light on the type of “credibility” that the lefty plutocrats’ pieces of silver have bought them.    

And please keep me posted.

The battle for this nation’s hearts and minds needs to be fought at a higher level.

So let’s fight it.

This is Part III of a three part series.  Part I appeared last Wednesday, and Part II was published last Friday.   

———-

Here’s the story, so far. 

In Part I, we noted that Jeff Fecke, when pressed about the attribution of a quote from MNGOP chair Ron Carey, in a story in this article about the various parties’ responses to the idea of changing the date of the Minnesota Primary, begged off.  We noted that he changed his story – changing the attribution of a quote by chairman Carey only when pressed in the comment section by Michael Brodkorb, my Northern Alliance colleague and publisher of Minnesota Demcrats Exposed, and one of Minnesota’s more notorious gadflies. 

I noted that among bloggers who aspire to credibility, it is at the very least poor form to change key mistakes – like attributions of quotes – without informing the readers. 

In Part II, I showed the reader that while Fecke, in his original piece, wrote the quotation from Ron Carey in such a manner as to indicate that he’d gotten the quote directly from the GOP chairman, that Michael Brodkorb noted in the original post’s comment section – and I independently confirmed with the MNGOP’s Mark Drake, who handles all press relations for Carey – that Fecke was never present at the interview from which this story was generated. 

I also showed a similar quote, from a May 17 piece in which Coleman threw Alberto Gonzalez under the bus, in which Fecke presented a quote from Coleman with no other attribution, in a tone that suggested Fecke had had access to the Senator.  I showed, via a source familiar with the story, that the quote took place in a phone interview at which Fecke (and the rest of the Minnesota Monitor’s staff) was not present. 

So what we have so far is a bit of bad blogging etiquette – failing to inform users that one has made corrections germane to the central facts of a story – and a slightly more serious offense, sloppy attribution.  To translate – since Fecke wasn’t present at either interview, then neither Carey nor Senator Coleman “said” anything to Fecke.  The quotes had to have come from another source.

Fecke, of course, has been called on this: as we noted, Brodkorb asked:

You have a direct quote from the Republican Party of Minnesota Chairman Ron Carey in your post:

“…GOP chair Ron Carey saying there is a ’90 percent probability’ of a change…”

Did you interview Chairman Carey?  Did he give you the “90 percent probability” quote?

Fecke responded:

 Maybe I did interview Ron Carey…and maybe I got the information from wire sources…and maybe there’s another option you haven’t thought of. 

Since this is a rather important issue, I asked Fecke myself, in two separate emails last Wednesday and Friday, where those two quotes came from.  Excerpted from Friday’s email (the question differed from Wednesday’s only in the occasional conjunction):

1) To what source to you attribute the Ron Carey “90%
probability” quote?  Was it from an interview, a
statement from the Carey office, or some other source
(and if so, where?)2) To what source to you attribute the Mark Ritchie
quote in the same piece?  Again – direct interview,
statement, or a different source?3) On May 17, 2007, you published a piece
(http://www.minnesotamonitor.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1800)
on Senator Coleman‘s statement on Attorney General
Gonzalez.  The quote read “”’I don’t have confidence
in Gonzales,’ Coleman said, adding, ‘I would hope that
the attorney general understands that the department
is suffering right now, and he does the right thing,
and that is allows the president to provide new
leadership.’” To what source do you attribute this
quote – an interview, a statement, or another source? 

Questioned about this via email, Fecke had no comment.

So the question remains; from where did the quotes come?

———-

Remember; in his original story, Fecke wrote:

While the state has not officially moved the caucus date, both DFL and Minnesota GOP leaders have indicated support for the switch, with GOP chair Ron Carey reportedly saying there is a “90 percent probability” of a change, and the DFL already giving preliminary approval to the plan.

When I talked with Carey’s press handler Mark Drake, I asked him – since Fecke wasn’t present when Carey said the above, how could he have gotten the quote?

Drake replied that the only place he’d seen it in print was an AP story on the subject.

The West Central Tribune covered the story, listing its source as the Associated Press. 

Here’s a paragraph about Chairman Carey, commenting on the primary date:

I like to think Minnesotans have good common sense, so it will be a shame to not have Minnesota’s voice heard as we choose the nominees for both major parties,” said state Republican Party chairman Ron Carey.

Carey said there’s a “90 percent probability” the caucus date will be accelerated. His party’s executive committee intends to decide on the issue next month.

This same report – and quote – is repeated in several other news outlets:

• The Pioneer Press’ Bill Salisbury used the quote in this story.  The story notes that “The Associated Press contributed to this article”. 
• WCCO (Channel 4) has the same quote, in a story entirely credited to the Associated Press.
• The Sioux Falls Argus Leader has, essentially, the same story, credited entirely to Associated Press wire copy. 

So we’ve seen several instances of the “90 percent probability” quote that Fecke used in a manner to indicate that he’d heard the quote – indeed, that he equivocated about in his comment, saying “Maybe I did interview Ron Carey…and maybe I got the information from wire sources” in his comment-section response to Michael Brodkorb’s direct question.

Maybe this, maybe that.  But where did the quote come from?

The only source I can find for this quote – the only source that any news outlet seems to have provided, indeed, for this quote, and the only place other than the Minnesota Monitor where Ron Carey’s press handler Mark Drake has seen the quote other than Jeff Fecke’s story – is in a report from the Associated Press, furnished to its subscribers.

———-

You can find a website for everything, these days.

I took a trip out to Plagiarism.com, your one-stop source for everything related to…well, we need go no further, need we?

Plagiarism:  1. to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of nother) as one’s own
2. to use (another’s production) without crediting the source
3. to commit literary theft
4. to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.

The only source anyone can find for the Carey quote is the AP story on the subject. 

The AP is fairly stringent about requiring subscribers to attribute or credit the service for the material it supplies.  In none of Fecke’s stories is any wire service credited.

Which is irrelevant, since, when questioned by email, Monitor editor Robin Marty confirmed that the Monitor is not a subscriber to the Associated Press wire service. 

———-

“So what, Berg?  It’s three lousy words!  Anyone can make a mistake!”

Indeed, anyone can.  Bobbling ones’ attribution is, indeed, a rookie flub in journalism, albeit a rookie flub that can get a new reporter unceremoniously fired.  And tacking a “reportedly” on after the fact (as Fecke admitted doing) when credit to the AP (and, on a blog or online news site, a link to the source) is called for, doesn’t really fix the problem; the Associated Press is, indeed, fairly clear about requiring attribution at the very least. 

But if it’s an isolated incident, what’s the problem?

True.  If it’s an isolated incident.

———-

Let’s go back to the May 17 piece in the Monitor, in which Fecke quoted Senator Coleman.  I’ve bolded a brief passage; it will be important later in the piece:

“I don’t have confidence in Gonzales,” Coleman said, adding, “I would hope that the attorney general understands that the department is suffering right now, and he does the right thing, and that is allows the president to provide new leadership.”

Where did the comment come from?

Here was Senator Coleman’s office’s printed statement, taken from the Senator’s website:

May 17th, 2007 – Washington, D.C. – The cloud of suspicion continues to hover over the Attorney General’s office surrounding the dismissal of U.S. Attorneys. This political debate distracts from the important work that must be done at the Justice Department. I believe Attorney General Gonzales is unable to provide the type of leadership needed to effectively run the Department The Department needs new leadership. Sadly, the reputation of Minnesota’s former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger has been dragged into this situation. Tom is a first-class prosecutor and Minnesota is grateful for his service. I consider him to be a good friend and an outstanding public servant. I have spoken to Tom many times, and he has assured me that he left of his own accord. Nevertheless, it is disturbing that he was ever targeted for possible dismissal.

So Fecke’s quote never occurs in Coleman’s printed public statement.  Where did it come from?

WCCO-TV covered the story; I’ve bolded a passage, again for emphasis:

“’I don’t have confidence in Gonzales,’ Coleman told reporters on a conference call. ‘I would hope that the attorney general understands that the department is suffering right now, and he does the right thing, and that is allows the president to provide new leadership.’”

The story is credited to the Associated Press.  Note that the quote – attributed to a conference call with the Senator – is identical to the quote in Fecke’s piece – except that Fecke’s piece excises (noted the bolded text in the quotes) any reference to the phone conference at which the quote was originally uttered. 

The Strib carried the story:  Brady Averill, attributing the report to a conference call (and crediting wire services in the story’s footnote) wrote:

“I don’t have confidence in Gonzales,” Coleman said in a conference call. “I would hope that the attorney general understands that the department is suffering right now, and he does the right thing, and that is allows the president to provide new leadership.”

The LATimes covered the story, with the same quote and attribution.

The quote took place in a conference call.  Sources familiar with the conference call confirm  that Fecke wasn’t present at the conference call.  The only difference between Fecke’s story and the AP-sourced copy? 

Fecke removed “Coleman told reporters on a conference call”, and replaced it with “Coleman said, adding”. 

How is one to interpret this, other than to make it appear Fecke is trying to make it look like he was present for the statement?

I’m open to explanations.

———-

On May 31, Fecke wrote a piece about Governor Pawlenty’s veto of a tax bill.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed a tax bill Wednesday night over language that would have required the state to take inflation into account when preparing a budget, as it had before 2002.

“When legislators and the Governor assemble the state budget, we shouldn’t assume that every program should grow on autopilot. We need to examine every taxpayer dollar that will be spent and ensure that we are streamlining and keeping government efficient and effective,” said Pawlenty.

Note the attribution: “…said Pawlenty”.  There is no link to any other source, implying that Pawlenty “said” this to Fecke, or to an audience of which Fecke was a member. 

From the Governor’s website, in a release dated the day before Fecke’s piece:

In his veto letter regarding the tax bill, Governor Pawlenty said there were many positive items in the bill, but that legislative leaders were aware of his opposition to including a measure that would automatically incorporate inflation into the budget forecasting process.“When legislators and the Governor assemble the state budget, we shouldn’t assume that every program should grow on autopilot. We need to examine every taxpayer dollar that will be spent and ensure that we are streamlining and keeping government efficient and effective,” Governor Pawlenty said. “When complaints come about provisions lost as a result of this veto, I would encourage people to contact DFL leaders who chose to keep controversial policy language in rather than passing a clean bill.”  

The quote – presented in bold in both instances – features identical wording and punctuation.  Several organizations released this story, verbatim – noting prominently that it was a news release from the governor’s office.  Larry Schumacher of the St. Cloud Times filed a piece that carried the quote verbatim – in a story that credits the Associated Press. Fecke’s piece included no such attribution

———-

In November, 2006, Eric Black – then with the Strib, now ironically with the Minnesota Monitor – wrote in Strib’s “The Big Question” blog (calling the piece an “Online version of a story that appeared in shorter form in the Nov. 2, 2006 Star Tribune”) quoting then-candidate, now Congresswoman Michele Bachmann:

This is Part I of a three-part series. 

———-

The other day, I went to the Society for Professional Journalists website. 

No, not just out of idle curiosity.  But we’ll get to that a bit later.

The SPJ has a page devoted to its ethics code.  The whole thing is worth a read; you can learn a lot about the core of the craft, as well as the things that real journalists are taught to strive for as they do their jobs.  I was one of them, once; I did radio and freelance print news, way back when.  I wasn’t very successful – I’m not doing it now! – but a couple of editors said I was good, or at least not bad, at it.   

A couple of the items from the code caught my attention.  I’m going to add emphasis here and there.  You’ll see why, eventually:

— Identify sources whenever feasible. The public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources’ reliability.

Hm. 

— Make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.

— Avoid misleading re-enactments or staged news events. If re-enactment is necessary to tell a story, label it.

— Never plagiarize.

There’s also an entire section entitled “Be Accountable”, which notes that “Journalists are accountable to their readers, listeners, viewers and each other”, and tells them to:

— Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.

And finally, there’s this last bit here; journalists should…:

— Expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.

So I guess today I’m going to be a journalist.

———-

Local center-right bloggers have been piling on Minnesota Monitor since before the last election.  The piliing-on stems, mainly, from a couple of things:  the Monitor’s funding (from the “Center for Independent Media”, a DC-based non-profit that started life sharing offices with George Soros’ “Media Matters For America” attack-PR firm), and its staff (a group of leftybloggers with long track records of ideological snarkblogging). 

The Monitor – which calls its’ staff “Citizen Journalist Fellows” rather than “guys in their mom’s basement who blog in their pajamas” and pays them a stipend for blogging on schedule and to purported journalistic standards – has attempted to class up the joint a couple of different ways:

• by publishing a “Code of Ethics” of its very own.  This code reads almost identically to the SPJ’s code – and indeed the code itself notes “The New Journalist Code of Ethics was inspired by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.”
• Hiring an actual journalist, Eric Black.  Black needs no introduction to readers of this blog; he’s a guy with over three decades of experience in the field, and comes to the Monitor with warehouses full of credibility and gravitas. He is no Cucking Stool.

So it’s established; while the Monitor’s tone is explicitly “progressive”, they are slathering the veneer of journalism over the operation. 

Fair enough.  Let’s run with that. 

We’ll come back to that, too.

———-

Bloggers, of course, have no published code of ethics.  But among reputable bloggers – or bloggers who strive to be reputable – there are at least a few generally-accepted standards.  Plagiarism, of course, is very bad form, and can be punished mercilessly (anyone remember “The Agonist?”).  Another one – prominently label any corrections that are germane to the fundamental facts of a story – ties in closely with one of the articles in the SPJ and the Minnesota Monitor’s codes of conduct: the injunction to “Admit mistakes and correct them promptly”.  It’s why whenever a good blogger changes a fundamental fact in their story, they’ll put something at the bottom of the posting.  For example…:

“UPDATE:  Commenter BillVanNassouwe points out that Councilman Royce was convicted of shoplifting, not high treason.  I’ve changed the story above.  Sorry about the bobble”. 

It’s just good blogging manners, along with that whole “journalistic ethics” thing.

Oh, and one other thing; if you pull a quote from an online source, you link to it.  If you don’t, it is – at the very least – a gaffe.

———-

On Monday, the Monitor ran this story on its front page, under Jeff Fecke’s byline…

…well, no.  That’s not exactly what happened.  Let’s construct a timeline.

1. On Monday, the Monitor ran this story under Fecke’s byline.  It is reproduced verbatim below the fold in this posting; a PDF file made from the screen capture is available for those who want to check the veracity of my copy/paste job for themselves.
2. Michael Brodkorb – my friend, Northern Alliance Radio Network colleague, and Minnesota Democrats Exposed blogger – noticed a couple of things (which will be explained later).  He took the screen shot of the story.
3. Brodkorb then left a comment in the story’s thread at the Monitor questioning the sourcing of a few of the statements in Fecke’s article.  He asked Fecke “Did you interview Chairman Carey?  Did he give you the “90 percent probability” quote?”
4. Fecke responded – twice – and then edited the piece…
5. …which was re-published in this form.  About this time, the story fell off the blog’s front page. 

Note that at no time did the posting explictly say “some facts in this story were changed”.  No update notice was posted.  The casual reader  might never know any part of the story’s content had changed. 

And what happened?

———-

Fecke changed three words. 

• In the second paragraph, he removed a word: “Leslie Sandberg, communications director for the Mike Ciresi campaign, issued a statement to Minnesota Monitor saying, “We’re going to abide by the endorsement, and our campaign looks forward to having many supporters show up whether the caucuses are held in February or March”.  OK – good edit, removing a colloquialism that any editor would have insisted be cut. 
• In paragraph six, he added a word (flagged in blue): “GOP leaders have indicated support for the switch, with GOP chair Ron Carey reportedly saying there is a “90 percent probability” of a change”
• And in paragraph seven, the same basic change: ” Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat, has said his office will facilitate a change, reportedly saying, “We’re here to be helpful to the parties if the parties want to move in that direction.”

“Three friggin’ words, Berg?  This is a scandal?  Criminy”.

Of course it’s not a scandal.  Nobody’s that anal-retentive, right?  Adding two lousy words is hardly a journalistic faux-pas; it barely qualifies as a blogging flub. 

Of course, it would have been a better thing had Fecke noted in his post that these corrections, piddling as they seem, had been made.  But it’s no big deal, right?

Right.

Until you dig behind the corrections.

We’ll get to that in our next installment, Part II, on Friday.

(more…)

Rentablogger Jeff Fecke yet again bobbles his “facts”. 

In the midst of an exceedingly obtuse whack at Governor Pawlenty, Fecke – who may be the most fact-challenged “journalist” in Minnesota today – writes about Luke Hellier.  Hellier is a conservative Republican whom Pawlenty has nominated for one of the student spots on the MNSCU Board of Trustees.

Fecke:

Now, I don’t think anyone would begrudge Pawlenty picking a highly qualified conservative over a highly qualified liberal.  Pawlenty is, in fact, a Republican.  But it takes a certain Cheney-like genius to pass over a highly qualified Republican for an unqualified conservative zealot, and that’s exactly what Pawlenty appears ready to do.  Pawlenty is evidently planning to bypass the MSUSA-endorsed candidates for Luke Hellier, who has not, to date, set foot in a MnSCU classroom.  He has, however, served as political director for Michele Bachmann and interned with Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life.

What Fecke doesn’t deem fit to tell the readership is that the MNSCU Students Association endorsement is neither a requirement nor, for that matter, mentioned in the Open Appointment process.  King Banaian – an SCSU professor who interviewed Hellier and Adam Weigold, another candidate for the board on NARN III last weekend – relates:

Using the Open Appointments process meant he filled out a form. He reports that last week, he was interviewed for the position. Nothing on that form indicated to him that he should speak to MSUSA for screening, nor did anyone from the governor’s office when they interviewed him.

As to the part that the leftybloggers are hopping up and down and cackling like poo-flinging monkeys about – that Hellier supposedly “isn’t a student” – King actually went to the trouble of reading the Minnesota Statute:

 when the statute says (136F.02) that “Three members must be students who are enrolled at least half time in a degree, diploma, or certificate program or have graduated from an institution governed by the board within one year of the date of appointment.” (emphasis added), it clearly contemplates the applicant pool to include a student entering school. Nobody disputes this. And this would appear to be the case: The entering student would be a graduate student coming to a MnSCU school. We do not offer doctorates (yet) and master’s programs typically take two years. So it’s most likely that if grad students are contemplated to join the board, they would most likely join it at the very beginning of their enrollment in a program. Without the provision I italicized, it is unlikely that graduate students could gain the 4-year student seat on the MnSCU board.

Yet the system by which MSUSA announces the process it uses is exclusionary to those who would enter a program a few months after the announcement of a vacancy. It puts candidates like Luke at a disadvantage to insiders within MSUSA and the seven campus student governments.

If you think that’s fair — that there should be preference for current over incoming students, even if the incoming student has experience in student government from a non-MnSCU school — you’re welcome to argue that point. Please indicate how you read that into current Minnesota statute.

Those, of course, are the parts that the leftyblogs – especially Fecke and his “editors” at MNMon – don’t see fit to tell their readers; Hellier’s application is within the letter and spriit of the law, and that the MNSCU Student Association’s endorsement is really meaningless.

Why is MNMon afraid of the truth?

Brodkorb attacks Fecke’s other “point” – that Pawlenty “favors” Hellier in the first place:

One thing I don’t endorse is the misleading, dishonest, and downright nasty attacks Hellier has faced in the liberal blogosphere.  

For example:  

“A controversy regarding the appointment of a new student representative to the Board of Trustees for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system is resulting in strong criticism of a candidate reportedly favored for consideration by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.” Source: Minnesota Monitor, June 22, 2007

Reported by who?  Who is reporting that Hellier is favored? Governor Pawlenty hasn’t announced his decision yet and I haven’t been able to find a direct or indirect quote where Governor Pawlenty said Hellier is his favored pick.  

I’ll repeat my question: Reported by who? Who is reporting that Hellier is the favorite as Minnesota Monitor reported. 

Is this just another rambling by one of the most inaccurate and sloppy bloggers in Minnesota, Jeff Fecke?  

One is bidden to wonder. 

I don’t go to MNMon for truth or accuracy, much.  My only real question is, what does Eric Black think about the people he shares a masthead with?

UPDATE:  For the same “coverage” you get on MNMon but with a depressing dose of undermedicated twitchiness, try Cucking Stool’s fevered recitation of the same talking points; same fact-challenged drivel, more self-adulatory incoherence.

In other words, just another day in the fever swamp.

You can never keep everyone happy.  And when you do talk radio – even as an amateur weekend warrior – it’s usually best not to try to.

On the NARN, we don’t get a lot of chances to interview people with whom we disagree.  Partly because we just don’t do a lot of guests; partly because a lot of liberals don’t bother returning interview request calls from conservative talkers, much less actually appear on the shows.  There’s good reason for that, of course; the fact is, talk radio can be a rough room to work. 

One of the things people miss – especially people whose primary interest is news or politics – is that talk radio is an entertainment medium first, an informational/news medium second.  And throwing plates – picking fights with guests, generating heat and eschewing light – can be mighty entertaining (when it’s not completely tiresome).  The masters of the talk radio attack interview genre – the late Morton Downey Jr, Bob Grant, Tom Leykis and dozens of others – have mastered pushing guests’ buttons as well as those of the audience in the same way that Michael Savage has conquered pushing them in monologue.  It pays the bills.

It’s not how I’m wired.

Part of it is that I got my start as an actual reporter, at one point.  Another part is that I actually have a lot more fun talking with people than throwing plates at them. 

And finally – most important of all – people give you much better material when they’re not on the defensive.

In the past few months, I’ve taken a certain amount of flak for a couple of interviews with Ed and I on the NARN Volume II show – last October’s go-around with the Strib’s Rochelle Olson, and the June 16 chat with former Strib/current Minnesota Monitor reporter Eric Black.   One commenter on another blog called the Black interview a “love fest”, apparently hoping that I’d carry out a Daniel Pearl-style beheading live on the air. 

And what’d be the point of that?  Everyone knows we disagree on a lot of things – do people need to see how very very much I disagree for it to matter?  And frankly, I think you get a lot more interesting material out of people by talking to them, and letting them respond; the Olson interview in particular, if you were listening, exposed some ghastly breakdowns in the way media handles news.  I’m not sure any of that would have come out if I’d have yelled at Ms. Olson, and she’d have hung up and walked away.

In this country, we face a dual challenge: disagree, sometimes vehemently, while still living together under the same governmental roof.   It’s a challenge at which most of the world fails really, really dismally.  And to me, it’s a lot more interesting when conversations are actually two-way things. 

Wanna hear people throwing plates at each other?  Fair enough.  A lot of talk shows will do that for you.  Or start your own, if you’d like. 

Go for it.

Last weekend, Ed and I had a long, interesting discussion with Eric Black, formerly of the Strib, now of the Minnesota Monitor.  One of the questions – how does journalism with an established agenda differ from journalism that, at least formally, abjures a point of view?

I don’t know that we’ll get any answers right now, but it’s an interesting question to keep in mind as you read Black’s debut on the MinMon, on what is presented to us as an awkward moment for US Attorney for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose:

Rachel Paulose, the embattled U.S. attorney for Minnesota, suffered through an awkward moment Tuesday when a retirement party for a long-serving prosecutor in her office turned into a thunderous ovation for several of Paulose’s severest critics. Word of the incident has buzzed through the Twin Cities federal legal community and become the latest symbol of a very rough 18 months since Paulose took over the top federal law enforcement job in Minnesota.

Let’s get some context in here.

The Minnesota US Attorney’s office, like the Attorney General’s Office, has been the province of Democrat-leaning lawyers for quite some time.  Paulose replaced Tom Heffelfinger, who in turn replaced David Lillehaug, whose political inclinations have led him to seek the DFL nomination to run for Senate. 

In other words, Paulose is  a very different person than Lillehaug or Heffelfinger, and brings a different agenda to the office than either of her predecessors.

How different?  As a layperson, it’s hard to know exactly what difference things like differing management styles and priorities make to people like US Prosecutors. 

And the story, unfortunately, sheds little light on that, relying on “conventional wisdom” about Paulose. 

Paulose has been under increasingly harsh public scrutiny about how her appointment is connected to the Bush administration’s alleged politicization of the Justice Department, and about how she has run the office.

But as Power Line – especially Scott Johnson – in their extensive coverage of the Paulose tempest-in-teapot has noted, that “public scrutiny” has been generated by a pretty narrow swathe of “public”.  Katherine Kersten also lends the reader some context missing from the mainstream (and now explicitly-biased) media’s coverage. 

But let’s go to the ceremony in question, this past Tuesday:

This account of the Tuesday incident comes from people who were present but requested anonymity.

So we have not only no idea who they were and what there motivations are, but whether their story is accurate? 

Were these “people” acting independently?  Were they detached from the Paulose “controversy”? 

We don’t know.

On Tuesday afternoon, about 70 employees of the U.S. attorney’s office and other guests gathered in a big conference room to recognize the departure of Assistant U.S. Attorney Perry Sekus. Sekus is leaving to join the legal staff of UnitedHealth. Paulose was present…When it was his turn to address the group, Sekus deflected the compliments that had been sent his way and said that those who deserved the praise were the former supervisors who had resigned their posts, because their actions had required courage.

And then, the chase – as apparently described to Eric Black, by anonymous “people” who may or may not have had an axe to grind with Paulose in the first place; being anonymous, we really have no idea, and are forced to trust, or “trust” (or not) a reporter from an organization which has an agenda on this issue.

At that, the room erupted with loud, sustained applause that could not be taken as anything other than solidarity with Paulose’s internal critics and appreciation for the sacrifice they had made to protest against her– clearly a spontaneous release of the tensions within the office. 

According to a witness, the ovation was so loud that it had to represent the applause of 90 percent or more of those in the room.

“Could not be taken as anything but…” – or so say an undetermined number of anonymous witnesses about whose motivations we are utterly in the dark.

Paulose was present throughout and could not have left without calling attention to herself. One of the eyewitnesses said she had a glazed look during the ovation.

Sort of like the look I’m getting, pondering the logical gaps in this story.  Words fail me.

Fortunately, they don’t fail Joel Rosenberg, who left a comment:

Okay; you’ve now established that Paulose is unpopular with (at least) much of her staff.  I thought that was well-established, but maybe you missed the reporting on that.

What you haven’t established is why — is it because she is, as some have accused her being, overbearing?  Is it that under Heffelfinger the priorities of the office were different than hers, and that the staff is chafing under new direction?  Is it similar to what happened when Lillehaug took over the office back in the ancient days — when, I believe, you were working for the Star Tribune — and the Star Tribune (at best) glossed over how half a dozen very experienced attorneys in that partisan Democrat US Attorney’s office left in the ensuing demotions and reshufflings he engaged in when he took over?  Is this better, or worse?  Is it all of those, in some mixture, or none of the above? …Guess I’m going to have to look somewhere other than in your article, which broke the news that a bunch of lawyers cheered when another retired, and you were unable to get a comment from the US Attorney on that pressing matter.

I have an anonymous witness that says that Black’s anonymous witness had a glazed look on her face.

No, I don’t.  But I could.

Seriously, Joel’s right.  No comparison, no context, no contrast, no history.

A bunch of lawyers – people famous for hating everyone – don’t like their boss. 

Mr. Black – perhaps an anonymous tipster can give us some insights on these questions.

UPDATE:  I see Brian “St. Paul” Ward reached about the same conclusion.