Our next stop in our trip around the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is  Our House, by Minnesota’s public policy power couple, David Strom and Margaret Martin.

David and Margaret need no introduction; David has been every Minnesota lefty’s regional standin for Karl Rove for nearly a decade, since he made the Taxpayers’ League the DFL’s official boogeyman.  Margaret is a bit lower-key, working as a free-lance policy research/expert/political knowledge fixer (I honestly have no idea) for as long as I’ve known them.   They were for many years the NARN’s lead-in at AM1280 The Patriot, as co-hosts first of Taxpayers League Live and then the David Strom Show was one of the local conservative media’s weekly must-listens.

The Strom’s blog motto is “Live like a liberal, vote like a conservative”.  For me, that’s always been one of the blog’s big hooks; the Stroms live in North Minneapolis, a little red island in a sea of moldy blue.   The juxtaposition between their actual and political lives is interesting, especially for those of us who don’t necessarily fit the traditional mold of “how a conservative is supposed to live”.

The Stroms have had a busy year, so the blogging has taken a justifiable backseat.  Fortunately for the Stroms, Our House and their public, they have a reliable backup when they don’t have time to do a lot of political writing (and writing on other blogs – Martin also runs the Minneapolis Crime Watch blog, featured in this space a few weeks back); they are the Twin Cities’ foremost bird-bloggers:

Birds taking baths!

Our friend Katie Kieffer has entered a video in a US Chamber of Commerce contest to promote free enterprise.

Part of the contest is she needs to get lots of views on YouTube.

Check out the vid.  Pass it around.  It’d be cool if the home team won this one.

UPDATE AND BUMP:  Today’s the last day for people to view the vid.  The top 25 in terms of hits go on to the finals.  Vote early and often!

I’ve written about it in the past; blogging changed a big chunk of my life; when I started the blog, in 2002, I was a newly-divorced parent with a couple of young-ish kids. I hadn’t had a lot of time for a social life in quite a while. The blog, the NARN and finally the MOB opened up my social horizons in ways I’d never imagined.

I’ve also kept my day job and my radio and blogging lives pretty religiously separated.  There aren’t two people at my day job who know about the radio show or the blog; I don’t let on where I work to many outside my family and the NARN.

Indeed, in all my years of blogging, I’ve met very few who linked both worlds.

In the nineties, I was working as a technical writer – mostly writing instruction manuals for badly-designed software.  And one of the greats in the field was this guy, Matt Abe.  He was, for many years, the president of the local “Society for Technical Communication” chapter, the professional group where techwhirlies met, networked and looked for that next gig.  Matt had worked with a few friends of mine; everyone said he was a great guy and a great boss.

And then I left tech writing; the ideal tech writer is someone with a left-brained detail focus, and when it comes to details I’m the kind of look at that shiny object on the floor.

So I was pleasantly surprised when we held the first MOB party to find that not only was Matt Abe a blogger (not at all rare among tech writers) but a darned good conservative one; he runs Northstar Liberty, one of the essential conservative blogs in the Twin Cities, especially on (a subject obviously near and dear to my heart).

And he covers the waterfront, subject-wise; an excellent writer (doy, he does it for a living) and a much -better-than-average analyst:

After the passage of Obamacare, the debate on whether to allow video gaming machines to be installed at Canterbury Park and Running Aces may seem like just so much bread and circuses. Yet I spent some time recently researching this topic and exchanging some e-mails with the executive director of Racino Now. I learned a lot about Minnesota’s conflicted attitudes toward gambling, but the legislative debate all really boils down to money.

On the one hand, we have the “trouble in River City” crowd which opposes installing video gaming machines, ostensibly on moral and legal grounds, at two Twin Cities locations: the aforementioned racetracks where gambling is in progress as we speak. Yet these good folks are strangely silent on repealing the Minnesota State Lottery, or shutting down the Indian casinos or the racetracks, or office football and basketball pools. If gambling was such trouble (with a capital “T”), why not shut it all down?

The answer: money.

Read on, of course.

And make North Star Liberty a frequent stop on your rounds of the MOB.  But watch your comma splices when you do.

Sorry about the week off from the MOB tour.  No way around it last week!

Today’s stop, National Debt Busters is written by someone tersely named “Skydancer”, whose mission seems to have been, since 2007, focusing on the national debt.

They’ve been posting roughly weekly for three years – and now that the topic is Agenda Item #1 for the entire loyal opposition, I’m going to register my hope that they kick things into high gear.

Typical fare:

Ever since Barack Obama became president and began advocating such big-dollar federal programs as an economic stimulus and health care reform, Republicans have gained increasing political traction with warnings to voters about the growing national debt.

On March 24, 2010, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, published an op-ed in the Des Moines Register that was timed to coincide with a March 25 visit by Obama to Iowa City, Iowa. Obama visited Iowa City to tout the health care bill two days after signing it into law.

Boehner’s column — titled, “Why Republicans will fight to repeal health-care takeover” — was a broadside against the newly signed bill, featuring a wide range of statistics. In it, he asserted that the health care bill “is a recipe for further fiscal disaster at a time when our national debt ($12.7 trillion today) is on track to exceed the size of our entire economy (about $15 trillion) in just two more years.”

That struck us as a huge amount, so we decided to take a closer look.

This, he does.

Make National Debt Busters a stop in your fiscal rounds of the MOB

Today’s stop on the tour around he MOB is Mr. Dilettante’s Neighborhood.  D has been writing steadily – very steadily, as in generally a couple of pieces a day – since 2005, at his own blog and several others around the MOB. That’s to say D is prolific.  If nothing else, it’s good to know that someone else out there writes for the sheer fun of writing.

And while D is, like a lot of us, into writing politics, he likes to have fun with it too:

As many of you know, I write catalog and web copy for a decent-sized privately held company. Sometimes in the course of my duties I am asked to write catalog copy for gag gifts. One of the products I wrote for an upcoming catalog is the “Poop Bank,” which is a coin bank that is shaped like a pile of, well, poop. Rest assured, my presentation of this item was tastefully rendered and you’ll be able to see it for yourself when the catalog comes out in the fall. (By the way, the link is to our vendor).

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only person writing about poop banks this week. A couple of reporters for the Washington Post were describing a steaming pile as well:

The Obama administration plans to overhaul how it is tackling the foreclosure crisis, in part by requiring lenders to temporarily slash or eliminate monthly mortgage payments for many borrowers who are unemployed, senior officials said Thursday.

Banks and other lenders would have to reduce the payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower’s income, which would typically be the amount of unemployment insurance, for three to six months. In some cases, administration officials said, a lender could allow a borrower to skip payments altogether.

This is madness, of course.  Let us count just some of the ways:

And he does.  D is one of those bloggers who, in a just world, would be getting 10-20 times the traffic he does.

So your mission is clear!

Margaret Martin’s Minneapolis Crime Watch has always (since 2006) been one of those blogs that showed what blogging was supposed to be.

At a time when the Minneapolis media was whitewashing Minneapolis’ crime record, Margaret and her other writers (“Chunkstyle” and “Nordeaster”) prowled the crime reports and provided in many cases, the kind of analysis that the big media couldn’t.  I’m still not aware of anyone that covers North Minneapolis crime like MCW.

Posting has gotten a bit more sparse lately, as life’s pressures, little and big, catch up with the staff.  But MCW still catalogues the thrum of daily life in Minneapolis like nobody else.

Here’s a typical blotter, skimmed from the Minneapolis Police site:

ASSLT2 w/Dangerous Weapon; ASLT5

44th Ave N & Lyndale Ave N Sunday 3/14/10 0425 hrs 10-069671

Officers were flagged down by V2/BF, 30 yrs, who relayed that she & V1/BF, 23 yrs, were assaulted & kicked out of a car.

V1 & V2 were leaving a friend’s house when a pit bull chased them onto a parked car. S1/BM, 20-50 yrs, 6’2”, heavy set, & S2/BM, 40-50 yrs, 5’6”, light build, w/goatee, wearing blue jeans & white t-shirt, pulled up in an older white, 4 door car. Suspects picked up the victims, but wouldn’t drive them back to their hotel. S1 stopped the vehicle, pulled V1 out of the car & began beating her. V1 was struck an unknown number of times in the face & torso, causing a cut above her eye. S1 also shoved V1 to the ground, kicked her in the torso, & pulled out a wooden stick/club, striking V1 in the back several times. V2 was punched once in her right ear by S1, causing it to ring. Suspects were GOA. The officers transported the victims to the hospital.

Margaret’s looking for contribs.  If you have an interest in following and/or analyzing Minneapolis crime (ideally both), drop her a line!

(Steny Hoyer has reportedly asked House Republicans to apologize for the crime listed above).

Today’s stop?  John Murphy’s , John Murphy Report, formerly The Medina Report.

Like a lot of professional blogs, JMR seems to serve its owner’s purposes.  John doesn’t write too frequently (although he does do it plenty enough to meet the threshold for inclusion in this series; indeed, I’m surprised at how few “dead” blogs I’ve run into while writing this series).

I liked this bit, from last January:

Roger Lowenstein has published an excellent piece in today’s New York Times regarding strategic defaults – other wise known as walking away from your property.    The Mortgage Bankers of America of course don’t want you to do that….neither does Wall Street or the Obama Administration.  But when Wall Street or businesses make a bad deal, they walk or flush the company.  It’s no big deal.  It happens all the time.

I am seeing more and more information about strategic default.  This could become a REAL problem if this starts to gain more traction.  Although that said, in conversations I’ve had with others recently, the government is doing so much to try to manipulate the market from loan modifications to holding interest rates artificially low – that no one really knows what the market should actually look like.

That’s the John Murphy Blog.  Among MOB blogs, he’s got location, location, location!

Old blogs never fade away.  They just die.

I read somewhere once upon a time that 95% of all blogs in existence have less than five entries, ever.  That’s close to my own personal average, actually; I’ve started close to a dozen different blogs over the years; a blog for NARN show prep, several special-issues blogs, and my favorite, “Scandalmanac”, a short-lived production during the Bush years that chronicled would-be “scandals” that the Dems tried to foist on the people (which, in retrospect, I wish I’d have not only carried on with but expanded; tracking Sarah Palin’s various “scandals” and their respective denouements would have been a fine public service, if only to contrast the productivity and fecklessness of the Democrat smear machine.

When most people stop blogging, they just…stop.

But Marty Andrade – an excellent writer, former talk show host (at KYCR and St. Cloud’s KNSI) and a conservative intellectual who in a less-imperfect world would be working full-time as a policy wonk, somewhere – has managed to neither die nor fade away, blog-wise. 

The story could have been familiar enough; Marty the writer’s life got more complicated (or so I surmised from his blog), so Marty Andrade the blog started, he thought, to suffer.

So Marty (writer and blog) seemingly repurposed themselves.  Marty Andrade morphed from a stream of original (and excellent) writing into a peripatetic stream of links to other peoples’ interesting stuff.

Like this:

Centuries later, lost Shakespeare ‘found’? – Yahoo! NewsQuote:”Some scholars believe Lewis Theobald’s “Double Falsehood,” first performed in London’s West End in December 1727, was based substantially on the Bard’s “Cardenio.” “There is definitely Shakespearean DNA,” said English literature professor Brean Hammond, who has worked since 2002 to determine if “Double Falsehood” has Shakespearean roots. Arden Shakespeare, an authoritative publisher of the Bard’s works, has released an edition of the play edited by Hammond — a decision the publisher acknowledges is controversial.

Arden’s general editor, Shakespeare scholar Richard Proudfoot, agrees with Hammond and says there is no absolute way of knowing if “Double Falsehood” is based on Shakespeare’s work, but he argues it is a “sufficiently sustainable position” that it represents the play in some form”

Sorta like Instapundit with less “heh”ing and “Indeed”ing.

I’ve lately found myself visiting MA just to give my brain a random trivia jumpstart.  I like that kind of thing.

And so should you.  Make Marty Andrade a stop on your daily prowl about the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers.

If you missed the MOB Winter Party last Saturday night at Ol’ Mexico, I feel sorry for ya. 

We drew about 80 people, which is up there with the totals we drew at the legendary MOB parties three and four years ago.  It didn’t seem as crowded; we had the party room at Ol’ Mex to ourselves, which left a little more elbow room that Keegans’ serpentine main room (although I’m thinking having the Summer Party at Keegans’, with cigar patio back in commission, sounds just fine to me).

As to who showed?  Well, pretty much the usual who’s who of Twin Cities blogging: Chad and Brian from Fraters Libertas (along with Mrs. Elder and the three Mini-Elders), King Banaian from SCSU Scholars, Ed Morrissey (who came bearing, um, Canadian cigars – thanks, Ed!), our NARN producers Tommy and Jon, Doug Bass, John “Policy Guy” LaPlante, the Night Writer, Reverend Mother and Tiger Lily, Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci, David Strom and Margaret Martin, Nachmann from Loyal Opposition, Jessica from the late Pianomomsicle, Katie Kieffer from KatieKieffer.com, Swiftee from the late Restraining Order, Toni Backdahl from the MN Tea Party, Derek Brigham and “Lassie” and Guy Collins from Freedom Dogs, Robin from A Girl’s Gotta Vent, Sheila Kihne and Laura Hemler and their husbands, Jamie Delton (Legislative candidate in St. Paul as well as proprietor of Delton Digest), Teresa Collett (candidate for the Fourth District Congressional seat), Mr. and Mrs. D from Mister Dilettante, Andy Aplikowski from Residual Forces…

…and I’m not gonna pretend I can remember too many more!  But there was a first; we had a table of five people show up who’d heard about the party at the “Kill the Bill” rally at the Capitol earlier in the day.  They knew nothing about blogs, but figured it’d be a fun party to crash.  Thanks!

If you wrote about the party, leave a link in the comment section!

Anyway – stay tuned for the MOB Summer Party, coming up right around State Fair time.

Tea Party?  Coffee Party?  Pfft.  It’s time for the granddaddy of them all, the original Minnesota beer party!

Don’t forget tonight’s the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers’ Winter Party.  We’ll be at Ol’ Mexico in Roseville from 7 until we’re done.

Ol’ Mex is on Lexington just a block or so north of Larpenteur in Roseville.

You don’t have to be conservative (the MOB is non-partisan) or even care about politics (not all MOB blogs are political, and it’s almost but not quite bad form to talk politics there).  You just have to love hanging out with fun people, with good food and drinks, and lots of stuff to talk about.

Hope to see y’all there!

Gotta say one thing about the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers; there’s no shortage of economists.

Phil Miller writes Market Power, an excellent, consistent, fairly prolific blog that covers family life, Missouri sports and, yes, copious economics.

And his timing is perfect.  I was just floundering through writing a post about  Joe Conason’s idiotic Salon column saying the Tea Parties would leave the US open to catastrophes like Haiti’s response to their earthquake.

Miller, naturally, does it better:

3.  On the one hand we have Haiti, an impoverished country hit by a magnitude 7 earthquake.  The result was hundreds of thousands dead and terrible damage.  On the other hand we have Chile, hit by a magnitude 8.8 earthquake, much, much worse than the quake that hit Haiti in terms of sheer seismic power (the Richter scale is based upon the base-10 logarithmic scale).  Like the Haitian quake, this one was centered near a major city and it caused considerable damage.  Unlike the Haitian quake, it also generated a tsunami that inundated coastal regions of Chile.  It was a double whammy for Chile.  But the death toll was much smaller than in Haiti (just over 700 dead from what I last saw).

Why the difference in death tolls?  One argument can be made that Chile’s building codes were stricter than Haiti’s.  That is true.  But you also have to point to Chile having enough wealth and income to be able to afford having stronger building codes.  You have to be able to take care of the basics – basic food and shelter – first before you take care of the fancy stuff – fancy food and shelter.  Where does wealth and income come from?  Generally speaking, from strong market institutions (HT Art Carden).  Why does Chile have stronger market institutions than Haiti?  Bret Stephens points to Milton Friedman.

Ironically, Friedman’s Nobel Prize ceremony was punctuated with protests for his having been associated with the Chilean dictatorship.

Phil Miller’s Market Power; all the Missouri, none of the Keynesianism.

Today’s MOB stop – Les Enfants Terrible, written by someone named “Tea Party”. He’s been writing more or less prolifically since 2005.

And I loved this piece, written on the occasion of the US Olympic hockey loss to Canada:

I love Olympic hockey. I’m a Minnesotan who came of age with the 1980 U.S. men’s team, how could I not? As I have been watching the Olympics this winter my eyes have naturally been drawn to one of my favorite photos, which hangs prominently in our family room:

Ya, that’s me in the middle with my brother close behind, waiting to have our sticks signed by Herb Brooks the summer after the 1980 Olympics. The photo was taken at the Roseville Ice Arena just after a session in Herbie’s summer camp. Attending his camp the summer after the Olympics was akin to hanging out with God just after the seventh day. We even got a pep talk from the man himself, in which we were instructed by the greatest coach ever to watch out for fast women.

Stop by Les Enfants Terrible and say hi!

Every couple of years, some lefty organization or another will release a brow-furrowed “report” on the dearth of female bloggers.

And it’s true – males bloggers outnumber females by a goodly bit.

But on the right, some of the women make up for the number gap by being blog powerhouses.  Some of the top conservative bloggers – Michelle Malkin and Mary Katherine Ham, among others – are women.  And the MOB is loaded with talented women who not only blog, but are powerful and effective at it.

A great example has always been Cindy from h Ladies Logic.

Cindy has been one of the cornerstone Twin Cities conservative bloggers ever since she started writing, almost four years ago.  She was one of the orignal bedrock bloggers for True North.

The wild part?  She’s remained one of Minnesota’s best, most prolific blogs, even after she and her family moved to Utah!

Hard to pick an excerpt from Ladies’ Logic; I liked this bit here:

One of the many epithets that the left loves to pour on right leaning individuals is that they are “haters”….any disagreement with ANY left leaning cause gets you labeled a hater.  You don’t believe that gay marriage is a “right” – you’re a hater.  Don’t think that President Obama has the right answer on health care = hater…don’t agree with him on cap and trade policy = hater…don’t agree with the left on abortion = hater.  The list goes on.  But is that really true?  Consider the reaction from the right when Ted Kennedy, Lion of the Senate was diagnosed with cancer.  Did Rush Limbaugh go out and gleefully gloat over Senator Kennedy’s illness?  No.  Did Sean Hannity pray for his death in retaliation for what Senator Kennedy “did” to Mary Jo Copeckne at Chappequiddick?  NO.  Did Michael Savage….well yes he did but then again Savage is an a…..

The bottom line is all of the mainstream representatives of “the right” except one did not turn the announcement of Senator Kennedy’s illness into a chance to score political points?  As a matter of fact they all (with the one noted exception) offered up prayers to the Senator and his family for his speedy recovery.

Our friends on the left are hardly ever as gracious…

For those of you who don’t already?  Make Ladies’ Logic a stop on your daily MOB (UOB?) rounds!

Reminder:  the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers’ Sixth Anniversary Winter Party is a week from this coming Saturday, March 13, at Ol’ Mexico in Roseville.  We’ll have their entire party room to ourselves; the joint’s located just north of Larpenteur on Lexington Avenue in Roseville – about a mile south of Highway 36, or half a mile north of Como Lake on Lexington.

You don’t have to be a blogger to show up; you just have to like hanging out at a fun place with a bunch of cool people.  And the cool people will be there!

Drop me an RSVP at “feedbackinthedark” at yahoo dot com email address.  Or check out the event’s Facebook page and sign up.  Or just show up unannounced!  We’d

Today’s stop on our lap around the MOB is Kowabunga http://www.kowabunga.org/.. It’s written by Todd Hanson, a family guy and seemingly unreprentant geek for comic books and games (or at least that’s what I think he was writing about…).

…and the same jaundiced eye for lefty social convention that I have:

I hear that the Progressives (they don’t like being called “liberals” any more, which works for me as they don’t believe in Liberty) have started a group to counter the Tea Party movement. They have picked the delightfully witty and appropriate term “brownbagger”. I had to look it up in the urban dictionary, which had seven definitions, including #5, which I believe is suitably appropriate. Yech! Appropriate, but yech!

Hansen’s been writing Kowabunga for just a little over six years.  Like a lot of bloggers, he’s hot and cold on it; there are months with one entry, there are months with fifty.  Here’s hoping to more twenties, Mr. Hansen, and by all means hang in there!

People who’ve been blogging a long time sometimes lament “are there any new blogs out there?”

Why, yes – there are.

Today’s stop on the MOB tour is Joe Blogs, by Joe Markham.  Markham’s an engineer by training, an IT project manager by trade, and apparently hasn’t put “archives” on his site  yet, so I have no idea how long he’s been at it.

But there’s some good stuff.  I liked this breakdown of the “jobs” claims for the proposed Vikes’ stadium:

The Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission saw a presentation for a new Vikings Stadium today. This built on information from an Economic Impact report by the same people. Among all the information presented were these nuggets:

• -36 Month Construction Time-line
• -$577,000,000 in “personal earnings” during construction
• -13,400 jobs
• -4,600,000 labor hours

With my handy-dandy calculator, I get some interesting results. Average the  dollars over the jobs for three years, and you get the princely sum of $14,353.23 per year, about $7.18/hour.

Now this is a low-ball figure. Some fraction of those jobs are part time, and most of those jobs will not last the full three years.

One of the other numbers in the stadium proposal is the 4,600,000 labor hours. Over the 13,400 jobs, that’s just 343.3 hours per job, or only about 2 month’s work.

Dividing the personal earnings by the labor hours gives you $125.43 dollars per hour – a very nice rate. But as seen in the previous calculation, you wouldn’t get it for long.

Bottom line: If you want a stadium, fine. Don’t try to justify it as a jobs program, though. It doesn’t add up.

Cool – finally someone to help King Banaian on the numbers beat!

Make Joe Blogs a stop on your own MOB tour!

It’s official – the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers’ Sixth Annual Winter party is going to be Saturday, March 13 at Ol’ Mexico in Roseville.

There’s a Facebook invite going around – or you can RSVP to at the Yahoo.com email address “feedbackinthedark”, so we can get an idea of how many people to expect.

Come on out!  We’d love to see you there!

I amost feel like I’m switching into Telethon mode now.  Because the subject of today’s stop on the tour around the MOB has been one of my favorite MOB blogs since the very early days of this blog – is, indeed, one of very few Minnesota blogs that was actually blogging before I was.  And it’s one of the single best, most incisively analytical poltical blogs (with a healthy side of geekery) ever on the Minnesota blog scene.  In a just world, he’d be as big as Ed Morrissey – his writing and analysis has always been in that league – and his blog would have the traffic to show it.

It’s Jay Reding.  JR’s blog dates back to 2001, and from about 2003 through 2006 or so, he was writing great stuff nearly daily.

As with so many bloggers, personal life gets in the way; Reding (if I recall correctly) went to law school somewhere along the way, and if all went well he should be into all that “new lawyer” stuff by now.  Either way, updates have been a little scarcer lately.

Excerpt?  With that much material to choose from?  Hard to do.  Here’s a bit from his look back at his 2009 predictions:

Politics/National

• President Barack Obama’s popularity with the left will bleed away as he moves to governing as a centrist.Correct: Late in the year, liberal dissatisfaction started growing, as the President chose to double down on Afghanistan and failed to back the public option in healthcare. While liberals still tend to support the President, Obama has not given them everything they want, and that has not made the liberals very happy.
• Card check legislation will be narrowly defeated in Congress, preserving the rights of the American worker to a secret ballot.Not Quite: Card check has been pushed off until next year, where it may well be defeated, but it hasn’t yet gone away as a political issue.
• The Republican Party will continue to spend a year in the wilderness, while the seeds of political renewal will come from outside the party structure.Correct: The GOP remains mired, but the real energy lies in the Tea Party movement. The media paints the Tea Partiers as a radical fringe, and some of them undoubtedly are. However, they have energy and motivation, and that can make all the difference. Whether the GOP likes it or not, they will have to ingratiate themselves with the Tea Party movement and capture that energy in a constructive way. Doing so without alienating the vital center will be difficult, but it’s not impossible.
• Vice President Biden will say something incredibly stupid, creating a great deal of tension between him and President Obama.Duh: Predicting a Joe Biden gaffe is like predicting that the sun will come up in the east.
• Congress will continue to be unpopular as the economy continues to backslide and more and more scandals mount. By the end of the year, faith in American government will be at a new low.Again, Duh: Congress continues to be wildly unpopular with the American electorate, and sweetheart deals, political payoffs, and rampant corruption are to blame. People regard Congress with the same level of distaste they do with plague rats and filthy diapers—and who can blame them?

That’s Jay Reding. Here’s hoping he finds the time to dive back into it.

Every once in a while you run into a blog on the MOBroll that you want to use some mentalist-fu to get everyone to put on their daily blog-reading menu.

Frequent Shot In The Dark commenter “Master of None”, the proprietor of his eponymous blog, is one of those for me.  MoN is one of the stalwarts of this blog’s comment section, and his blog is one of the better small political-oriented blogs on the ‘roll.

I liked this post, where he fact-checked one of the hamsters the DFL is trying to run against Erik Paulsen (R-MN3)

As I reported, here and here,  DFL Congressional candidate wannabe Dr. Maureen Hackett isn’t quite sure what party her heart belongs to (or her checkbook).  Now, it’s being reported in the Star Tribune. that it’s not completely clear she knows who she’s running against.

While Bachmann’s extremism has won her great reviews from her right-wing base, it’s not acceptable here in the 3rd District.

Trying to compare Michelle Bachman to Erik Paulsen is a tactic that failed miserably in 2008, and it is doomed to failure in 2010 for one very good reason.  Paulsen has been very smart in putting together a voting record that is differentiated enough from Bachmann’s yet stays true to Republican core values. Paulsen’s votes against the stimulus, health care reform, and cap and trade not only place him solidly in the fiscally conservative camp, they also happen to be on the winning side of public opinion polls.   But, on some smaller issues, extension of SCHIP and funding for solar energy, for example, Congressman Paulsen moderated his voting record and went against the Republican grain.  Enough so that even some local chants of “RINO” have emerged from right wing political types with no experience in winning elections.

A scientist/engineer by trade, MoN brings some much-needed clarity of thought to blogging, along with some fun trivia about growing up in Alaska.

MoN updates regularly; here’s hoping he stays with it.  Of course, nothing encourages regular writing like lots of traffic!

Hint hint.

I’ll cop to it; even though I co-founded the MOB, there are plenty of MOB blogs that I didn’t even know existed, much less read them regularly.

One of them is Is That All You’ve Got?, a blog written by a “public health nerd” from Saint Paul’s Selby/Dale neighborhood with the nom de plume “Shyest Violet”.

Fire-breathing conservative politics?  Not that I can see (somebody tell this shrieking ninny).  A few bits and pieces about Obamacare and MNCare here and there…

…and an awful lot of wry wit, updated pretty regularly.  It sort of reminds me of a slightly-public-health-tinged Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry (TREBEK: “References to less-well-known blogs to define even less-well-known blogs?” BERG: “What is the most inside trivia game of all time?” TREBEK “Correct, and you have the board”).

No, really.  As a Saint Paul guy who goes up and down University a lot, I loved this bit here – a plea to “Big Daddy’s Saturday Barbecue”, a University-avenue barbecue joint that was open on Saturdays, and isn’t open at all at the moment (because, if I recall correctly, its building was torn down):

Please come back soon.  [Shyestviolet’s apparent sig.other and regular blog character] J and I are going into withdrawal.  Yes, Costello’s is nice as a temporary substitute, and we really enjoy wings during happy hour, but now that Lost is back on TV, we’d really like a solid takeout option, and YOU’RE NOT HERE.  Where are you?  Why have you left us?  Will you come back soon?  Look at how much we love you.  Please come back.  I don’t want to go to Rooster’s.  I don’t want to go to Hickory Hut.  I don’t want to go to JJ’s.  I WANT TO GO TO BIG DADDY’S.  I’m almost out of my last jar of Big Daddy’s barbecue sauce, and can’t be responsible for my actions once we have to resort to some processed crapgarbage off of the bottom shelf at Target. If you want to talk about your temporary location strategy, you can find me wallowing in my misery at Lee & Dee’s.  You know, that place that ISN’T BIG DADDY’S.

And now I’m hungry.

Anyway – make Is That All You’ve Got a stop on your MOB Tour!

One of the things that less-well-informed leftybloggers (see also: most leftybloggers, many of the most-quoted leftybloggers) like to chant is that “the MOB is a conservative group”.

It’s untrue, of course. Some lean left; some don’t really get political.

One of those is Garden of Eden – which is currently on the MOBRoll as “I’m Free Now” (and needs an update…). Gabrielle Eden runs it, and has been writing pretty prolifically since 2007. Kudos!

And the first thing that jumped to mind when I read GoE was “Daily Affirmations” – but that sounds too stuffy. There’s stuff about religion, family, gardening (!), cats – all the usual non-political blog fodder. But it’s good stuff. I feel better reading it.

As it happens, Ms. Eden didn’t write this piece – but it cracked me up anyway. It’s a collection of church bulletin bloopers, and I’m sure it’s been around the Internet a dozen times, but it’s new to me, and it made me laugh. Don’t judge me.

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The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.

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The sermon this morning: ‘Jesus Walks on the Water.’ The sermon tonight: ‘Searching for Jesus.’

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Ladies, don’t forget the rummage sale.. It’s a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.

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Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community. Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say ‘Hell’ to someone who doesn’t care much about you.

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Don’t let worry kill you off – let the Church help.

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Miss Charlene Mason sang ‘I will not pass this way again,’ giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.

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For those of you who have children and don’t know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

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Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all the help they can get.

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Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.

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A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.

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At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be ‘What Is Hell?’ Come early and listen to our choir practice

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Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.

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Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.

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Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.

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The church will host an evening of fine dining, super entertainment and gracious hostility.

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Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM – prayer and medication to follow.

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The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.

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This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.

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Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10 AM. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B. S. is done.

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The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the Congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next Sunday.

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Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use the back door.

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The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM.. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.

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Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.

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The Associate Minister unveiled the church’s new campaign slogan last Sunday:

“I Upped My Pledge – Up Yours”.

“Garden of Eden”. Read it when touring the MOB (via “I’m Free Now”).

In my trip around the MOB, I’ve been amazed at the number of bloggers I’ve found who’ve been plugging away for years that aren’t on my personal blog radar.

I mean, I do, pinky swear, try to read as many blogs as I can.  Honest.  But there’s only so many hours in a day, and it seems like there are fewer now than there were a few years ago.  And I have to hope they’re on someone’s radar, because they’re not only good, but they’re diligent; they’ve been cranking out material for…

…well, in the case of today’s stop, h Heavy Handed Politics, almost six years.  Which is pretty formidable, if you think about it.

Sometimes it’s not just what a blog says; it’s what it exposes you to.  I’ve been looking for some great writers’ pithy quote on the asininity of “bipartisanship” for its own sake for years; HHP found it for me, in this piece by David Mastio in the WashTimes (I’ll add emphasis):

Bipartisanship may be the single most destructive force in Washington. Today, it is on the lips of the president, congressional leaders and commentators alike. They say we need a new tone in Washington. We need to work together on health care reform. We need a bipartisan commission to solve our deficit problem.

No. We. Don’t. Bipartisanship saps faith in politics and government. It protects the most stupid and counterproductive federal policies. It erodes ethics. It unites America’s ruling class against the ruled. And, inevitably, it leads to the growth of government power.

And for that quote, alone – one to which I’ll be paying homage for years – I owe HHP a debt of gratitude for the rest of my blogging and talk-show-hosting life.

So check out Heavy Handed Politics.  Who knows what you’ll stumble across?

What happens when you get a bunch of guys together who like to write, but don’t want the hassle of running their own blogs?

Besides the entire newsroom at Shot In The Dark, I mean?

You get a bunch of the Twin Cities’, and the MOB’s, growing crew of group blogs.  Including one of the newer additions, Grumpy Old Men, featuring a phalanx of people you know from other blogs and, indeed, the Shot In The Dark comment section; BikeBubba, the prolific Mr. D, K-Rod, Steve (formerly of the late lamented Gigglepundit. I think), and a few others whose names are new but whose styles look oddly familiar.

Sample? Sure.  Bubba captures the “grumpy old man” aethos quite nicely:

The happiness and very life of your daughters, or sons, probably depends on it, according to Charlotte Allen. Now she doesn’t come out and say it–her 12 page piece more or less only documents how many promiscuous (and predatory) men use social darwinism to justify their behavior–but the reality is that our children’s defense against the “meat market” mentality appears, if the testimony of the “male sluts” quoted in the article is indicative, to be the willingness of parents to actually raise their children. Overwhelmingly, the “pick up artist” is one who didn’t have a decent relationship with his dad. His victim–the same.

So polish and clean the old shotgun, and get ready to tell the kid with the jeans hanging halfway off his rear end to get off your porch until he’s wearing something that fits and has his shirt tucked in. Be a grumpy old man, and your kids will be the better for it.

Words to live by.

Make GOM a stop on your tour around the MOB!

Part of the reason I’m taking this tour through the MOB is to make sure I read some of the newer MOB blogs that, for whatever reason, I might have missed reading over the past few years.  There’ve been some pleasant surprises; when people ask  “where are the new blogs?” I can answer “all over the place!”.

One good example that is completely new to me is GOP Mommy. Jalen is, indeed, a mommy (of two), and also a GOPer.  Indeed, as she explains in her site’s sidebar:

A little about me: I am now a registered Republican and I make Alex P. Keaton look like a flaming liberal. I believe in a small government since much of what the government touches turns to crap. I am a fiscal conservative though I tend to be more lenient when it comes to (some) social issues.

Which sounds a lot like an awful lot of us!

And she’s had just about enough of the Susan Komen foundation:

I am literally sickened by the fact that the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation is partnered with Planned Parenthood. How insanely hypocritical is it for a group that wants to save the lives of women with breast cancer to donate your donations to a group that DESTROYS the lives of infants? Don’t ask me to donate money to “save lives” when you work with a group that wants to END life for profit! Pretty sure “abortion” is the polar opposite of “saving lives”. Pro-murder groups- oops, I mean pro-choice (to murder)groups like Planned Parenthood have no business working with or accepting donations from any group that claims to want to help people.

Also, I find it interesting that having an abortion is linked to causing breast cancer. This simply means that the Komen foundation is helping to CREATE new breast cancer patients! Just know that if you donate to the Komen Foundation, they give a percentage of your donations to abortion providers like Planned Parenthood. Think about that before you donate. Perhaps they should use donations to find a cure for breast cancer instead of for ending lives….that would seem to make the most sense.

My donations to the foundation have ceased permanently.

GOP Mommy is no shrinking violet!

So tune in when making your rounds of the MOB!

That’s the date of the MOB “Winter” Party.

It’s a Saturday night.  It’s about a month away, so there’s plenty of time to get that babysitter (or parentsitter).  It’s going to be at a different location, at least for purposes of this party, although it’s still going to be centrally-located.

Stay tuned for the location, later this week. And if you’re going to attend, drop me a line at “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”.