It’s probably as good a time to announce it as any. If all goes according to plan, on the Northern Alliance Radio Network tomorrow we’ve got…
Tune in from 1-3PM!
The “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – the attack-PR drones financed by Alida Messinger and a group of plutocrats with deep pockets to make toxic, sleazy attacks on their opposition – stepped in it last night, to the point that even the Twin Cities mainstream media had to report it (with emphasis added):
The DFL-supporting Alliance for a Better Minnesota took its mockery of a Republican candidate a step too far, it admitted on Thursday.
In a Halloween-themed blog post, it suggested that Republican gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson should dress as Patrick Bateman, a serial killer in American Psycho, because he is “seemingly nice but actually pretty evil inside.”
Carrie Lucking tried to bury the evidence – but the Internet sees and knows all:
Leaving aside the obvious question – what should Alida Messinger and Carrie Lucking dress as? – it appears as if the smooth-running messaging machine at ABM is trying to break in some new amateurs.
But have no fear. Lucking explains it all (again, emphasis added):
Carrie Lucking, the group’s executive director, said within 10 minutes being alerted to the post they took the image down, removed the reference to Bateman and changed what it said about Johnson.
Instead of calling Johnson evil, the site says that he is “seemingly nice in public, but actually the policies he supports are pretty evil. It also appended an apology to its post.
Ah. Disagreement is “evil”. That’s much better.
How very Alinsky.
“The original image and text for Jeff Johnson was removed and the costume changed because it was an inappropriate reference to a fictional character. We apologize for this error. It will not happen again,” the web site said.
Yes it will – because every time ABM writes about Republicans, they’re writing about “fictional characters”. Alinskyite “framing” is all about turning real people and real ideas into characters and catch phrases that have little or nothing to do with reality. “Tom Emmer is angry”. “Jeff Johnson is evil”. “King Banaian is Arab”. Little bits of mental chaff that ABM is hoping – indeed, paying big bucks to prove – will stick in the minds of people who don’t think that hard about politics come election time.
It’s dishonest. It’s also how the Democrats do politics.
But I Promised A Brilliant Plan, Didn’t I?: Watch ABM’s coverage this past couple of days. Their flailing at Johnson was only the tip of the iceberg; I wrote earlier today about their calling Julianne Ortmann a “Genie”, with video of a blonde, jiggly Barbara Eden helpfully added in case you thought Lucking was referring to the “Djinn” of Arab mythology.
The election is a year away, and the attacks are already…
…unhinged.
And it occurs to me – maybe that’s a good barometer for the GOP races? Whichever candidate is drawing the most unhinged, scabrous “coverage” from ABM can be presumed to be in the lead?
A look at ABM’s front page this morning shows two weak-gruel attacks on Jeff Johnson.
That’s probably good news for the Johnson campaign.
The challenge for the Thompson campaign is obvious.
Minnesota’s media talking head-bots continually bellyache about wanting Minnesota politics to be “more civil” and “more like it was back in the good ol’ days”…
…but they give a continual pass to the antics of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, which every single day makes Minnesota a cheaper, dumber, uglier place to do politics?
…sorry. It’s getting so thick, I’m getting just a tad punchy.
There’s an election coming up. And the Democrats are going to need to need all the racial tension they can generate.
And their wholly-owned subsidiary at NPR is there to help them – in this case, in a story about Senate hearings on “Stand Your Ground” laws helpfully entitled “Senators bicker over state ‘stand your ground’ laws”:
The 2012 shooting death of Martin, 17 and unarmed, [provided you leave out “fists” and “bulk” – Ed] and the acquittal this year of neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman stirred racial tensions and sparked debate over stand your ground laws in Florida and at least 21 other states.
Well, no.
The case itself stirred no tensions to speak of – until the Obama Administration, desperate to get out the black vote, turned Martin into a campaign stage prop, with the willing and unseemly connivance of the mainstream media.
Now, if you recall the piece on “ProtectMN”‘s “strategy” for the coming year, one of their goals is to emphasize emotional stories. This is a common debate technique, of course; as my lawyer friends tell me, “when the facts are against you, argue law; when the law is against you, argue facts; when both are against you, argue like hell” – which means “emotions”, when you get right down to it.
And the media aren’t going to do anything about it.
Case in point:
Lucia Holman McBath, the mother of Jordan Russell Davis, implored the Senate to resolve the nation’s debate.
[I’m going to hold out on the actual incident that led Ms. McBath to testifying in the Senate for just a bit, here]
“You can lift this nation from its internal battle in which guns rule over right,” McBath told the panel.
Ms. McBath lost a 17 year old son to someone who shot him in “self-defense”.
So what was the miscarriage of justice that led to Ms. McBath’s son’s killer walking away based on a “Stand your Ground” claim? I’ll add emphasis:
Her 17-year-old son was shot and killed nearly a year ago when Michael David Dunn, 46, allegedly opened fire on a Dodge Durango with four teenagers inside after complaining of their loud music and saying he saw a gun and thus a threat. Jordan had been inside. Authorities never found a gun in the vehicle, the Florida Times-Union reported.
And, may I add…:
Dunn’s trial is set for next year.
So Mr. Dunn hasn’t even been tried yet?
We do not know the facts of the case that NPR hasn’t deigned to report…
…well, yes. We do. We’ve looked at this case in the past. Dunn would seem to have done just about everything possible wrong for a “self-defense” case. Is he claiming “stand your ground?” Sure.
And if he’s found guilty – as I’d imagine he will be – of some degree of homicide or another? It’s irrelevant to “Stand your Ground”, because every other factor of the shooting that would lead to a self-defense claim would seem to have been wrong.
The fact that he claims “Stand your Ground” in a shooting that is otherwise wrong in every legal particular is not a reflection on the Stand Your Ground law.
Not that NPR will tell you that.
(SCENE: Mitch BERG walks into a coffee shop in Linden Hills, a tony neighborhood in South Minneapolis. He orders a large light roast when, from out of frame to the left, a finger taps him on the shoulder. BERG turns around to see Avery LIBRELLE standing behind him).
LIBRELLE: Hey, Merg! You know how you are always saying you want a dialog, an informed debate, with people across the aisle?
BERG: Er, sure – I was kinda on my way to work, but…
LIBRELLE: There you go with that “Work” thing, again. You’re not even employed by a non-profit! Anyway – I brought a friend. It’s time for dialog and debate!
BERG: Well..OK, but I don’t have much time…
LIBRELLE: You can always make time for debate. Come on!
(LIBRELLE leads BERG through the small crowd of thick-rimmed-glasses-clad hipsters, all of them so focused on their mobile devices they’ve adopted a “Walking-Dead”-style shamble, and to a table in the back corner where Edwin DUCHEY, a forty-something fellow with thick-rimmed glasses and a mobile device, sits. BERG and LIBRELLE take seats, forming a triangle of people separated as widely as geometrically possible around the circular table).
LIBRELLE: Mitch, this is Ed DuChey, proprietor of the blog Minnesota Liberal Alliance Dot Blogspot Dot Com.
BERG: A pleasure. (DUCHEY glares)
LIBRELLE: Mitch is my…neighbor, and he writes Shot in the Dark.
DUCHEY: (in a nasal, adenoidal voice) Shit in the Park! (Snorts, sips his latte. LIBRELLE giggles as BERG rolls his eyes)
LIBRELLE: Anyway, Mitch says he’s always open for dialog and debate with the “other side”.
BERG: Yeah, I guess I do.
DUCHEY: I called your blog “Shit in the Park!” (Giggles to self as BERG stares, jaw barely under controlled tension and with an air of ill-concealed pity)
LIBRELLE: So let’s talk about the state of the Republican Party.
BERG: The Tea Party was a much-needed populist expression of the party’s real conservative roots. The Tea Party class of 2010 was actually the one bright spot for the GOP in the Minnesota legislature this past two years.
DUCHEY: You’re stupid.
BERG: Huh. Care to elaborate?
DUCHEY: You’re really stupid. The Teabaggers were full of hate and racism and they were stupider than you.
LIBRELLE: Interesting. OK. How about the shutdown.
BERG: My jury’s still out.
DUCHEY: Your jury is stupid and so are you.
BERG: Huh. (Looks around the room, as hipsters stagger, focused on their mobile devices, toward counter)
LIBRELLE: Good point, Ed. OK. How about the Affordable Care Act?
BERG: Jeez, read the headlines. It’s jacking up practically everyone’s rates and deductibles, the people who claim they’re saving money – the ones that aren’t busted lying in the first place – never acknowledge that there’s a huge taxpayer subsidy involved, and the people who are getting through on the exchanges are the ones with the massive pre-existing conditions, while healthy people are staying away in droves, meaning the system is going to be paying out huge and taking in nothing, which completely breaks down the idea of a “risk pool”.
DUCHEY: You’re…wait, I got a text message. (DUCHEY laboriously types a long text message into his iPhone – and gets a reply, giggles, and replies to it, before returning to the conversation) You’re a stupid teabagging wingnut.
LIBRELLE: You’re right, Mitch. Dialog and debate is fun! (Looks at BERG)
(BERG has, however, left the table and the building).
(Horde of thick-rimmed-glasses-clad hipsters shamble forward in line, hissing and hacking and making prehensile noises).
(And SCENE).
(SCENE: Mitch BERG climbs out of his car and fishes a big gym bag full of firearms and ammo out of the back seat. He walks toward the front door of the firing range – and notices Avery LIBRELLE, walking, alone, with a picket sign. The sign says “A Millian Americans Are Picketting This Gun Rang”. BERG hides his face, and tries to time his approach while LIBRELLE is walking the other way – but a piece of shiny tinfoil attracts LIBRELLE’s attention back toward BERG).
LIBRELLE: Hey, Merg!
BERG: Oh…uh, hi, Avery. What’s new?
LIBRELLE: I think MoveOn.Org has the right idea! It’s time to start arresting teabaggers for sedition!
BERG: Sedition?
LIBRELLE: Speaking out against the government!
BERG: I know what sedition is. That’s not what the House Republicans or Cruz or Paul did.
LIBRELLE: The “Affordable Care Act” is the law! And the law is the manifestation of government! And if you oppose The Law, you oppose Government, meaning you oppose the will of The People!
BERG: Well, no. The GOP majority in the House carried out the House’s Constitutional duty to take care of the nation’s purse-strings – a job for which the voters of this country gave them the majority at the polls in 2010 and 2012.
LIBRELLE: Yeah, but the people also elected President Obama twice. He is the government, and his laws are the laws of the land, the revealed word of the people!
BERG: The President is not “the government”. The government is the executive branch – the President and his staff and the rest of the bureaucracy – the Legislative branch, and the judicial branch, and – don’t forget this – all of the checks and balances in between all of them.
LIBRELLE: Well, the “Affordable Care Act” is now the law.
BERG: So? The First Amendment says we have the right to free speech, to assemble, and to petition to seek redress of grievances. Which is, in every particular, what the Tea Party is and always has been.
LIBRELLE: What are you, a constitutional scholar? I’m pretty sure those are all collective rights, just like the Second Amendment.
BERG: What now?
LIBRELLE: Anyway – Obamacare is the law, which means it’s the will of the people, and the government IS the people, so fighting the law is fighting the people. “Sedition” is probably the nicest word for it.
BERG: Again – what now?
LIBRELLE: I’d call it “Treason”.
BERG: “Treason?” Actively betraying your country to an enemy in wartime?
LIBRELLE: Yep. This country’s been at war against poverty since the sixties. Obamacare fights poverty. Undercutting the people in the War on Poverty IS betraying your country in wartime. That’s the very definition of treason! We should sic the military on all of you!
BERG: Huh. The military. (Takes stick of gum from pocket, unwraps it, pops gum in mouth).
LIBRELLE: Tanks. Choppers. Whatever it takes.
BERG: To preserve democracy.
LIBRELLE: Yep.
BERG: Huh.
(BERG drops shiny tinfoil wrapper onto the ground. LIBRELLE chases it, allowing BERG to make his escape).
(And SCENE).
Jonah Goldberg at NRO writes about a recent Roger Simon jape at conservative legislators – by way of addressing a much larger question; why aren’t the media offended by the left’s assumption that they’re biased?
Simon’s column reminds me of a point I’ve been making for years. Most mainstream journalists roll their eyes at the idea the MSM is biased. It’s a tired argument, I know.
It is. I’m tired of having to make it.
And yet – as Goldberg shows us – it’s not only true, but getting more and moreso:
But it’s simply remarkable that when supposedly objective reporters move on to the opinion column racket they reveal themselves as utterly conventional liberal Democrats. When any longtime New York Times reporter rewarded with a column at the Times or elsewhere — Nick Kristoff, Bill Keller, Maureen Dowd, Anthony Lewis, EJ Dionne et al. — rips off the mask it turns out that they were exactly as liberal as conservatives suspected…Just going by the law of averages, some of these reporters should turn out to be conservative or libertarian or at least ideologically heterodox. But it almost never happens. Indeed, when the Times needs to find a conservative columnist (Bill Safire, David Brooks, Ross Douthat) it always has to hire outside its own shop.
It’s true in the Twin Cities, too; the Strib had to hire think-tanker Katherine Kersten to give its columnist’s row a veneer of balance (as a generation of Strib columnists tut-tutted about What It All Meant). While the non-profit MinnPost originally claimed to want to shoot for multipartisanship, the best they could do was Cyndi Brucato – as a reporter. That, on a site staffed with DFL apparatchik Doug Grow, former Dayton comms guy Brian Lamberg, and a raft of other committed libs.
Jay Carney got his job working for Joe Biden, and later, Barack Obama because his employers knew from the get-go that the Time reporter was ideologically simpatico with the administration. The same goes for Linda Douglas, not to mention Richard Stengel, Shailagh Murray, and many others. I wonder if any of them ever feel insulted when Democratic politicians just assume that supposedly objective reporters would make great partisan hacks?
Locally? Not only are the left’s “alt” media clogged with refugees from the Strib, PiPress and other mainstream outlets, but there’s been a steady parade of regional journos that’ve found post-media homes in the DFL, at left-leaning non-profits like MN2020, and as comms people for liberal pols.
Because it’s a safe assumption, I guess…
Earlier this week, the Joyce Foundation collected another installment on its payment for the MinnPost’s PR services in pursuit of disarming the American people – in this case, a “Community Voices” column by by Rebecca Lowen and Doug Rossinow, who are listed as “history professors at Metro State”.
Those who fail to learn from history, it’s fair to say, teach history at Metro State.
And if this reflects the current state of the victim-disarmament movement, it’d seem their strategy has shifted to “ad homina” and “making things up”.
A few weeks ago, I pointed out that not only does the MinnPost appear to be selling news to the highest bidder (or, more accurately, biggest contributor), but that MPR News appears to have done the same.
The Usual Bona Fides: Let me give you my usual disclaimer; I’ve always – or at least for the last ten years or so – believed that MPR News made a fairly credible effort at appearing, from an institutional level, to be fairly balanced and to keep its individual staffers’ biases firewalled away pretty well. I know some people at MPR News, and I believe they operate with a level of integrity (although some of them also believe they’re above criticism by the hoi polloi; after I asked questions about MPR News’ “Poligraph” segment’s oddly incurious coverage of the Betty McCollum/Tony Hernandez debates, I got an email from a senior MPR News exec to Catherine Richert advising her “not to engage with that guy”. He’d fumble-fingered and sent it to me, too).
All that aside, I’ve always believed MPR News – the news department, as opposed to NPR, or non-news programming, like Garrison Keillor – does an adequate job of compartmentalizing bias.
Or I did, until fairly recently.
The Shakedown We Pay For: As noted above, I wonder why MPR News is covering Second Amendment issues under the direct sponsorship of the Joyce Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of gun-grabber organizations.
Bill Glahn covers some of the same ground in a piece about MPR’s “Daily Current” show, hosted by the bias-sodden Keri Miller. The “Daily Current”, a look at their website notes, is a production of MPR News.
The hour was hosted by MPR’s Kerri Miller. Panelists included Denise Cardinal, the founder of Alliance for a Better Minnesota (ABM), Ben Golnik, a political consultant, and Kathryn Pearson, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota.
Cardinal is, of course, a major liberal mover and shaker and, as Glahn points out and I reported endlessly in 2010, architect of Alida Messinger’s epic, toxic sleaze campaign in 2010, which bought Mark Dayton barely enough votes to win. Golnik is a fixture in MN GOP politics. Pearson is Larry Jacobs’ understudy and contender for his title of “most over-quoted person in the Twin Cities media”.
Let’s turn to MPR’s Kerri Miller for a moment. As the show’s host and moderator, her chief means of controlling the narrative are by asking questions and controlling the show’s flow…As for flow, by my count, Miller interrupts the Republican Golnik at total of thirteen 13 times. During one 56-second stretch alone [08:26 to 09:22] MPR’s Miller interrupts Golnik seven times to challenge his facts.
Not only do such constant interruptions throw off a guest’s rhythm, they telegraph to the audience that the “neutral” host believes the guest to be untrustworthy or evasive.
On the rare occasions Miller speaks during Cardinal’s or Pearson’s time, she never interrupts and stops the flow. Rather, Miller will say a word or two to clarify or to reinforce a point—never to challenge or dispute—as can be heard at the 17:47 mark with Cardinal and the 25:52 mark with Pearson.
I urge you to try to find the recordings of Miller’s performance in the 2010 Governor’s race. I listened to both interviews, and wrote about ’em back then. Her interview of Tom Emmer was harsh, acerbic, combative, laced with hostile interruptions.
Which is fine – journalists should ask questions, right?
But in contrast, her conversation with Mark Dayton was chummy, clubby, a rhetorical warm fuzzy blanket with camomile tea. It sounded like they may have been painting each others’ toenails.
Miller hasn’t changed much.
Conflict Of Interest: But here’s the part I wanted to draw your attention to; I’ll add emphasis:
The host’s interruptions of the token conservative are not just to challenge facts or opinion. On two occasions, MPR’s Miller interrupts Republican Golnik to defend Democrat Governor Dayton—on the Vikings Stadium [30:22] and on MPR News’ sponsorMNsure [32:15].
Her defense of the Democrat Dayton during that latter exchange reveals volumes about the host and the outlet. While the disastrous debut of Obamacare was makinginternational news, and the problems with the local MNsure rollout again on the front pages, Miller dismisses the problems with her corporate sponsor as mere “glitches.”
Her defense of our liberal Governor is so over the top that she has to catch herself at one point [32:42 mark] with the walk back “not to speak for the Governor here,” played to laughter from the panelists.
That Miller is a shill for the DFL is not up for question by anyone paying attention.
That MPR News is taking money to produce the news is one thing; all commercial news operations have to work to create the impression there’s a high, thick wall between the money and news sides of their operations.
That MPR News is not only having its news coverage directly sponsored by advocacy groups, but is having its non-news, opinion programming – Miller’s show – sponsored by the government that MPR News is supposed to be covering?
How is this not merely a conflict of interest, but an undercutting of the integrity of a news operation that has always publicly wrapped itself in the flag of journalistic ethics (whatever they are?)
Tom Scheck? Mike Mulcahy? Rupa Chinoy? Bob Collins? Anyone?
Anyone?
NPR News this morning:
The officers who shot the woman at the Capitol are among the hundreds of thousands of government employees not being paid…
Tax money well spent.
UPDATE: This was just flip little thing I’d toss off onto the blog while I was sitting at a stoplight on my way to work.
But the whole “federal cops are unpaid!” bit not only seems to be a coordinated bit of lefty narrative…
So apparently the “top flight journalists” at National Public Radio are reporting lefty twitter-cant as fact, now.
Remember the spring of 2009? Obama and his hope’nchange had just been inaugurated – so everyone was still blaming Bush for everything.
And at the Humphrey Center, a conclave of journalist fanboys attended a shinding with Village Voice journo Seymour Hersh, hosted by Walter Mondale at the Humphrey Center, to pimp Hersh’s upcoming book claiming that Bush and Cheney used Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) as their personal hit squad (while not noting that JSOC was a creation of the Carter Administration in which Mondale served as vice president).
I’m thinking his next shinding in the Twin Cities might be a little sparser in attendance; Hersh is now claiming that Obama used JSOC to falsify the narrative of the Bin Laden raid.
And Hersh isn’t that impressed by his fanboys in the media, either:
The book will also discuss Hersh’s view that the U.S. media hasn’t committed enough resources to investigative journalism.
Hersh tells The Guardian that the ‘pathetic’ U.S. media ‘is afraid to pick on this guy (President Obama).’
“It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious,” Hersh said of the American media. “They are afraid to pick on this guy (Obama).”
“It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight,” he said.
“Now that doesn’t happen anymore. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president.”
Now, we need to be clear about a few things up front; Sy Hersh is as a rule no more based in reality than Minnesota Progressive Project.
And yet liberal media types revere him, along with Bob Woodward, as the acme of the craft.
I’m guessing that’ll change, and the US media will start devoting resources to investigating…
..Seymour Hersh
Just a hunch.
Last week, when the first news of the Washington Navy Yard shooting broke out, I thought to myself “let’s sit out these first reports – because whatever the mainstream media reports for the first 4-6 hours will be not just wrong, but hysterical and the result of templates being filled in from the MSM/Democrat narrative”.
In watching the coverage of the Washington Navy Yard shooting as it unfolded last Monday, I had to remind myself that most of the reports I was hearing would surely turn out to be incorrect, in some cases wildly so. And indeed this turned out to be the case. We were told, for example, that there was more than one gunman, and that one of them was armed with an AR-15 rifle. Even worse, both CBS and NBC identified the wrong man as the shooter before issuing retractions.
The first of these errors is the most understandable. In the rush to beat their competitors, the editing filters ordinarily in place are often put aside in favor of greater speed. Reports from the scene, no matter how unverifiable, are broadcast live so as to be first on the air. Again, understandable and even forgivable in most cases.
Less so is the misidentification of the shooter’s weapon.
I’m going to guess that the writer (PJM’s Jack Dunphy) and I aren’t the only ones.
I’d love to ask a mainstream media figure – is your industry’s adherence to Democrat narratives (and in some cases money) worth the damage your credibility is taking among people who pay attention?
To: MPR News
From: Mitch Berg,Uppity Peasant
Re: Re-Joyce And Be Glad
MPR,
Last week, in a similar open letter to the management at the news-blog MinnPost, I asked how they squared the fact that they were accepting sponsorship for their “news” coverage – let alone sponsorship from non-profit issue advocacy groups and the government that journalists are supposed to hold accountable – with professional journalism’s purported ideals and ethics.
These ideals are – we are told – set forth in the “Society of Professional Journalists’ “Code of Ethics“.
Now – in 2011, MPR accepted a grant from the Joyce Foundation supporting the production of a series, “Following the Firearm“. As Joyce notes…:
The Center selected reporters working in the Great Lakes region and awarded them fellowships to enable them to undertake in-depth investigative reporting projects. The fellows also attended workshops to learn from experts in gun crime and gun policy. MPR News reporter Brandt Williams spent four months researching the story. The four-part series looks at the sources of Minneapolis crime guns, sentencing for gun crimes, the impact of gun violence on the African American community, and the challenges surrounding firearm tracing.
Now, as has been noted in this space, the Joyce Foundation is the primary sponsor of gun control groups in the United States. They donate a lot of money to groups like Michael Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns“, the Violence Policy Center (whose “research” on Second Amendment issues is notable for its strident inaccuracy)…
…and the MinnPost, whose own “journalism” on the subject has been increasingly suspect for the past year or so; the MinnPost would seem to have turned into a PR firm for the “Gun Safety” movement.
But enough about them; let’s talk about MPR.
The SPJ Code of Ethics’ “Accountability” section says that the journalist should…:
Your series aired back in 2011 – and to be fair, it presented factual information without pushing a political point of view especially overtly. But neither did it go out of its way – in my opinion as a news consumer, activist on the subject and one-time reporter – to present much considered dissent from material supporting Joyce’s desired narrative, either.
Which would make for an interesting parlor discussion – not that MPR News is especially interested in parlor discussions with people outside the Journo tribe.
But beyond that? About a month after the Joyce-sponsored series ran on MPR, the MPR News website published a commentary piece by Heather Martens – director and one of very few members of “Protect Minnesota”, a gun-control group. The piece was notable for its complete absence of fact; every single non-numeric assertion made in the “Commentary” was false. Every single one.
And since I can’t imagine MPR News would publish a commentary by, say, a 9/11 Truther, or someone who favors white supremacy on biological grounds at all, much less without some sort of dissenting comment, I thought it was odd that MPR News granted her the bandwidth they did.
“Protect Minnesota” is also sponsored – almost entirely – by the Joyce Foundation, which had underwritten MPR’s series the previous month.
Am I connecting dots that don’t belong connected?
Perhaps. But if MPR had allowed its reporting to be sponsored by the NRA, and then ran an unaccompanied op-ed by Ted Nugent, people would talk, wouldn’t they?
I don’t expect an answer, of course; MPR News doesn’t like engaging people outside the tribe (as I found last year, when one of your executives mis-addressed an email telling an MPR News staffer not to engage with me, to me).
But since MPR News spends such time and effort claiming the moral and ideological journalistic high ground – claims to which I’ve given public credence in the past – it’s worth asking.
Even the SPJ Code of Ethics says so.
Sincerely,
Mitch Berg
Uppity Peasant
(SCENE: A darkened alley in Newark, New Jersey, on a dark, drizzly April evening. A broken down school bus full of inner city middle-schoolers returning from a trip to the ballet in New York sits by the side of a dismal road, steam rising from its up-tilted hood, in front of a deserted chemical plant. The driver, a cute, plucky Puerto Rican single mother of three named Maria LOPEZ, looks under the hood along with passerby Tobias “Wang Dang Doodle” JACKSON, a grizzled 60-something black man in a porkpie hat and a worn black suit. Mitch BERG pulls up, driving a rented Ford Focus, and climbs out to try to render assistance, carrying a cell phone and a nearly empty bottle of lemon-lime Powerade).
BERG: Can I help? Has anyone called a tow or anything yet?
LOPEZ: I called the police, the district and a wrecker, but there won’t be any help coming for at least an hour.
JACKSON: Those infernal garages aren’t what they used to be.
BERG: OK. Well, maybe we can figure out what’s wrong here…
(A black BMW sedan pulls up beside the bus. Out pops a dapper African-American man, who walks briskly to the bus).
MAN: Hi. I’m Corey Booker, and I’m the mayor of Newark.
LOPEZ: Hello, Mister Mayor!
BOOKER: Hi. We don’t have much time. The CIA just called me. A band of Serbian narcotraficantes are apparently en route from the docks in Elizabeth to pick up several drums of methamphetamine stored in that disused chemical factory, and they’re not above killing everyone that gets in their way.
BERG: Isn’t this a job for the police?
BOOKER: They’re all busy. It’s up to us.
BERG: I hate it when that happens.
JACKSON: Newark police are, let us say, sub-optimal.
BOOKER: Be that as it may, we’re going to have to get these children out of the way before the Serbian narcotraficantes get here and kill everyone in their path. You, maam, and you, sir (points to LOPEZ and JACKSON), start walking those kids to safety in that community center on the other side of that culvert. You, sir (points to BERG) and I need to divert them to provide cover.
BERG: Er…OK.
(LOPEZ and JACKSON start to herd the kids out of the bus and into the ditch).
LOPEZ: Hurry, kids!
JACKSON: Remember, gentlemen – fire and movement!
(In the distance, a pair of panel vans stop and disgorge 20 Serbian narcotraficantes,all carrying AK47 assault rifles. They form a skirmish line and start charging toward the bus. Scattered shots ring out as the line moves forward. LOPEZ and JACKSON start the children running in single file down the ditch by the side of the road as a few sparks fly from the bus’ chassis).
BOOKER: You flank them to the right. I’ll draw their fire.
BERG: Flank them with what? Your state’s idiotic gun laws bar me from bringing my legal handgun, much less something I can use against…
BOOKER: GO!
(BOOKER springs to the left, waving his arms wildly. BERG, nonplussed, crawls to the right and crosses the road. The Serbian narcotraficantes fire picks up and their charge gathers speed, as they yell “get the meth! get the meth!” in Serbian)
(BOOKER dodges incoming bullets in a complex, acrobatic display that makes The Matrix look like that old SNL “Bears Fans” sketch. An RPG fires, the rocket tracing an angry red slash across the field. BOOKER catches the rocket by the tail and throws it back at the Serbian narcotraficantes; it explodes, sending several Serbs diving for cover as others blaze away at the Mayor).
(Berg, in the meantime, as closed the gap with the Serbs, who are focused on blazing away at Mayor BOOKER. Having no weapon, he looks around, and sees a puddle of New Jersey rainwater. He ducks down and starts filling the Powerade bottle).
(Two more RPG rounds rocket toward the Mayor. He catches them, cross-handed, just before they’d have impacted his chest, and in a grandiose double-pirouette, throws both rounds back at the Serbs. One splashes into the mud at the feet of Branko SLRBÇ, the leader of the Serb narcotraficantes.
SLRBÇ (yelling in Serb with subtitles): Is this even plausible?
(The round explodes, and SLRBÇ vanishes in a gout of gore and flame).
(The second round slams into the grill of the first of the narcotraficantes’ vans, exploding it in a gout of flame. The rest of the Serbs go to ground, panicked and pinned down).
(BERG caps the bottle of New Jersey rainwater, and with a mighty heave, throws it at the second van, which explodes into brilliant blue and green flames).
(The surviving Serbs get up and run back up the road toward their rally point, a giant Exxon sign which, unfortunately for them, gives the local cops plenty of light by which to apprehend them).
BERG (soaking wet, walks back to Booker, who is somehow still dry): Wow. How did you do that?
BOOKER (As police cars pull up all around them) It’s all in a days work for the Mayor of Newark.
(BOOKER tips his hat and climbs into his car, and – notwithstanding that a dark cloudy night fell over two hours earlier – drives into the sunset as LOPEZ, soaking wet, walks back up the freeway. She and BERG look at each other, drenched, before embracing in a passionate kiss as the camera pulls back to a wide shot of the full post-battle vista).
(And SCENE)
I was listening to MPR News the other day.
I heard a “Jennifer Vogel” on the air. She’s working for MPR’s “Ground Level” project. Her mission – and that of the “Ground Level Project” – “focuses on complex issues playing out in Minnesota’s cities and towns”
Check out the page above. Ms. Vogel is spending all sorts of time in Greater Minnesota.
She sounded familiar.
So I checked the archives. Yep – it’s the same Jennifer Vogel who wrote the seminan patricial classist rant, “F**k The Suburbs“, for a Seattle version of a City Pages-style Village Voice knockoff – an article which provided us all sorts of fun in this space back in 2004.
It started:
Minneapolis and St. Paul sit on either side of the upper Mississippi River, in what amounts to the middle of nowhere. For three hundred miles in any direction, there are no cities of size, only prairie, gas stations, and big open sky. We may be on the Mississippi but no one comes here by boat. There are no containers from Japan piling up on the dock. People arrive by bus and car, dusty and road-worn, mostly from the small towns of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas–places where ambitious and misunderstood kids grow up despising their parents’ lives.
OK, a lot of us who move from what Vogel calls “The Big Nowhere” think those sorts of things – at one point or another.
But Vogel – like most writers for freebie lifestyle ‘zines, and by “most” I mean “every one I’ve ever met“, who are by the way white and upper-middle-class to a geometric fault – saw racists behind the hedges:
As the city changed, the “family values” folks moved away. However, they didn’t move all the way away. Oh, no. They moved to the suburbs. Tract housing began to sprawl in all directions as many wild-eyed whities climbed over each other to get the hell out of town. And good riddance, I say. Except that these defenders of all that’s wholesome have formed a band around the city, a ring of red that’s threatening to strangle the very idea of beneficent government.
You get the idea.
Read the whole, depressing thing. Or don’t. You really do get the idea; Vogel hates conservatives, and seems to loathe the sort of people…
…that MPR has her reporting on today.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t begrudge that she got a job. They’re hard to get in that racket these days. A lefty “Journo”‘s gotta wait until a generation of former Strib and WCCO reporters dies off before they can hope for a gig at a non-profit or in the DFL Comms Office. These are tough times.
And who knows? Maybe Vogel has grown up in the past nine years. Maybe she has learned to see people as more than collections of stereotypes classified by exterior decorating choices, zipcodes, ethnic food preferences and skin tones. Maybe she’ll approach the people she’s reporting in Greater Minnesota with less of the seething, patrician, classist contempt she showed nine years ago.
I do like to believe the best in people.
Yeah. Maybe that’s it.
(PS: Here’s a story idea for Ms. Vogel: More immigrants are moving to the suburbs than the city these days. Sounds like an idea for an article! You’re welcome).
To: Joel Kramer (CEO/Editor), Roger Buoen and Susan Albright (Co-Managing Editors) Don Effenberger (News Editor)
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re: They Get What They Pay For
Esteemed Editors:
I was never much of a reporter. I could always do the “who, what, when, where, why and how” of a story just fine, and earned a living at it, off and on. But it was never really my thing.
But I do remember, when I worked in the business, that the fastest way to get a reporter, producer or editor up on their back legs was to suggest that journalism partner with business or government to do the job. They would say – with righteousness rivaling any Baptist minister or Trappist monk – that Journalism’s mission was to be a check and balance on government, business, anyone with power. To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Any whiff of filthy lucre was to be kept on the other side of the thick wall and locked door that separated the Sales department from the newsroom.
Media analysts – I’m thinking Garfield and Gladstone’s “On The Media” on NPR, and the whole Romanesko borg – go through gyrations worthy of a Talmud symposium sifting through the ethics of mixing journalism and money.
Now, theMinnPosttalks a big game about journalism. And you’ve certainly staffed your site with a lot of people with long pedigrees in the regional news business. And Brian Lambert.
But I’ve noticed on one issue that your site gets a fair chunk of money from from the Joyce Foundation. The Joyce Foundation also bankrolls most of the major gun control organizations in the United States, including Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts and “Protect Minnesota“.
And along with this financial link, the MinnPost’s coverage of Second Amendment issues has gotten more and more slanted, and not a little bit risible in the bargain:
The MinnPost gets big bucks from Joyce, and starts a wave of anti-Second-Amendment (I’ll be charitable) cheerleading. Coincidence?
Which leads us to this week, and Susan Perry’s piece on an academic “study” on gun violence. It was a puff piece about a junk study…
…and it was sponsored – as noted in the story’s headline – by UCare. An arm of the government of the State of Minnesota. Now, leave aside that that government is currently controlled by the extreme metrocrat wing of the DFL party. Here’s the question: if journalism is supposed to hold government accountable, should be finacially beholden to government?
Or does that only count when it’s not a DFL sacred cow being promoted?
Because when your “journalism” is being done at the behest of issue-oriented non-profits and the government you’re theoritically supposed to hold accountable, isn’t it really just public relations? Or campaign media?
Thanks,
Mitch Berg
Uppity Peasant
The MinnPost – a non-profit-run institutional blog established the the intention to get a jump on the next wave of institutional journalism – gets a whole bunch of money from the Joyce Foundation. Joyce also bankrolls Minnesota’s “largest” gun grabber group, “Protect Minnesota”, and Michael Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns”, as well as paying academics to deliver the conclusions they want.
Is that financial relationship related to the fact that the MinnPost has, whenever the subject of guns and the Second Amendment is at hand, turned itself into a risible propaganda organ for the gun-grabbing extreme left?
From Eric Black’s recycling long-obscure legal theories about the origins of the Second Amendment to Doug Grow’s naked puff-piecemongering in support of Heather Martens’ checkbook advocacy group, the MinnPost would seem to be working hard to earn the $50K or so they got from Joyce.
The latest? Susan Perry, a “Health” reporter who has pulled her weight in the past on theMinnPost’santi-gun beat.
Confederate soldiers! With guns! Defending slavery! This is what the MinnPost think you, the law-abiding gun owner, genuflect to.
Yesterday came this piece, entitled…
Well, no. We’ll get to the title in a bit. But I’m going to pull a quote from the end of the story first. I’ll add emphasis for weasel words and a particularly dim strawman:
“Although correlation is not synonymous with causation,” write Bangalore and Messerli, “it seems conceivable that abundant gun availability facilitates firearm-related deaths. Conversely, high crime rates may instigate widespread anxiety and fear, thereby motivating people to arm themselves and give rise to increased gun ownership, which, in turn, increases availability. The resulting vicious cycle could, bit-by-bit, lead to the polarized status that is now the case with the US.”
“Regardless of exact cause and effect, however,” they add, “the current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis purporting to show that countries with the higher gun ownership are safer than those with low gun ownership.”
So – seventeen paragraphs into a nineteen paragraph article, we hear that the reasearchers aren’t actually drawing conclusions (in attacking a “widely quoted hypothesis” that nobody quotes at all).
Which is a bit of a letdown for a story whose headline…:
“Idea that ‘guns make a nation safer’ is debunked in study”
…fairly screams “We’ve got a big big big conclusion here!”
The Rhetorical Slalom Between The Strawmen: I’ll throw this out to the shooters in the audience. Was this premise…:
The idea that “guns make a nation safer”
…as new to you as it was to me?
Anyway – the “premise”…
…is not true, according to a study published today in The American Journal of Medicine.
In fact, the study found just the opposite: Countries with a low rate of gun ownership have significantly fewer gun-related deaths than those with a high rate.
Right. In the same way that areas where couples marry have higher divorce rates than areas where they just shack up.
The study – and Perry’s piece – are honest, in a very dishonest sense; they scrupulously point out that gun death rates are, mirabile dictu, lower in places fewer guns. But the “study” is equally scrupulous in avoiding apples to apples comparisons, or correlating their conclusions to any data that doesn’t fit inside their razor-thin premise…
…which is to attack a case (“Nations with few guns have higher gun crime rates!”) that, for the life of me, I’ve never heard a single credible person make – about nations, anyway.
Cherry-Picked: Perry notes that…
The U.S. leads in gun ownership — and gun deaths
The analysis found that the United States has far and away the highest rate of gun ownership, with 88.8 privately owned guns for every 100 people (“almost as many guns as it has people,” Bangalore and Messerli note)…The United States also has the highest firearm-related death rate: 10.2 deaths per 100,000 residents…At the other end of the spectrum are Japan and the Netherlands. Japan has a gun-ownership rate of 0.6 guns per 100 people, while the Netherlands’ rate is 3.9.
Those two countries also had two of the lowest death-by-gun rates: 0.06/100,000 for Japan and 0.46/100,000 for the Netherlands.
But neither Japan nor the Netherlands is fighting a “Drug War”; neither nation has policies that have turned their inner cities into shooting galleries, controlled by people who have nothing to lose by resorting to violence to protect their markets, using entry-level employees who grow up in a culture that glorifies violence and ignores consequences.
Neither Japan nor the Netherlands has a major geographical region dominated by a culture that was practicing duelling and honor-killing and treating violence as a way of life long before there was a United States – a culture whose crime rates are, at worst, on par with the worst of the inner cities.
Indeed, both Japan and the Netherlands are extremely homogenous countries; homogenous societies tend to be pretty placid – until they have to flirt with heterodoxy (ask the Koreans and the Ainu in Japan, or the Indonesians in the Netherlands).
Indeed, Perry’s article points – unwittingly – at the truth:
The only country that was a bit of an outlier was South Africa. It had a relatively low gun ownership rate of 12.5/100, but a high (the second-highest, just below the U.S.) gun-related death rate of 9.41/100,000.
And of the countries on the list, South Africa is the only one with a significantly – indeed, pivotally – heterodox society. One with massive urban dysfunction, to boot.
Which might lead the rational observer to conclude – or see a correlation, anyway – that guns don’t kill people; societal dysfunction does.
Math Is Hard, And Psychiatry Is Harder: But let’s look at the “gun death” numbers Perry actually does deign to report – the relative gun murder rates in the US, the Netherlands, Japan and…:
[…the] United Kingdom also ranked low on both lists. It has a gun-ownership rate of 6.2 per 100 people and a gun-death rate of 0.25 per 100,000.
But fully half of the US “gun death rate” is suicides. And the suicide rate in the US (12/100,000) is half of Japans (21.7/100,000), and equal to the UK’s (11.8), and both the US and UK are 50% higher than the Dutch, at 8.8/100,000.
We’re not sure if the “study” concluded that guns and depressed, mentally-ill or chemically-addled people don’t mix, or not. Perhaps the Joyce Foundation will write a grant to study that?
No?
Is This A Strawman, Or A Begged Question?: Perry’s piece continues:
Their conclusion: “There was no significant correlation between guns per capita per country and crime rate, arguing against the notion of more guns translating into less crime.”
This is the third time in Perry’s piece the “notion” that anyone is comparing national gun rates to crime – at least in nations with working legal and law-enforcement systems, which is what the “study” is limited to.
And for the record, I’m at a complete loss as to a single credible pro-gun advocate who’s made that claim – between nations. The variables – societal heterodoxy, cultural conditions, criminal justice issues, different judicial systems – are far too complex to make such a case in an intelligent way.
But when you start eliminating variables? By just considering different firearms ownership rates in the US? It’s not rocket surgery – even I can do it, even though I don’t have to because John Lott et al already did. At worst, in the United States, places with higher legal gun ownership are very generally safer.
And that’s just a correlation. I’m not ascribing causation.
And unlike Susan Perry, I’ll admit that without any obfuscation.
So Let’s Summarize: Susan Perry’s article reports on a non-comprehensive study whose own authors admit it’s a non-“debunk”-ment, that reached no meaningful conclusion about a premise that nobody advanced.
Follow The Money: We mentioned the Joyce Foundation – which bankrolls both the MinnPost and the state’s “largest” gun control group.
One might ask – is it possible to expect honest “journalism” from a publication that has a financial interest in reporting an organization’s slant on the news?
I’ll ask – because as Perry’s article notes in its heading, in addition to the Joycers…
This content is made possible by the generous sponsorship support of UCare.
So not only is the MinnPost an organ of an anti-gun extremist group, it’s also on the payroll of…
…the State of Minnesota.
Edward R. Murrow would vomit.
Jerry by the Numbers: 12 wins, 4 seizures (and 16 losses)
The debate over the future of Jerry Kill’s tenure at the U of M gets seized by political correctness.
The scene last Saturday at TCF Bank Stadium was tragically familiar – the Minnesota Golden Gophers head coach lying down, surrounded by medical staff, the victim yet again of his epileptic condition. It was the fourth such game-day incident since Jerry Kill inherited the mess of a program left by booster-in-chief Tim Brewster. And as reports trickled in throughout the weekend, conflicting stories surfaced about how many off-field seizures Kill has had since joining the Gophers, with numbers as high as nearly a dozen seizures in one week being casually thrown about by sports radio talking heads.
Ever-present in the wake of Kill’s latest health scare was the maddening silence from Athletic Director Norwood Teague, or any official from the University of Minnesota. Teague would eventually issue the standard press release of support backing his head coach, but not before Star Tribune columnist Jim Souhan did what most journalists and sports commentators have apparently found verboten to discuss – is Jerry Kill’s health a determinant to the football program?
Even those who admire him most can’t believe that he should keep coaching major college football after his latest episode. Either the stress of the job is further damaging his health, or his health was in such disrepair that he shouldn’t have been hired to coach in the Big Ten in the first place.
The face of your program can’t belong to someone who may be rushed to the hospital at any moment of any game, or practice, or news conference. No one who buys a ticket to TCF Bank Stadium should be rewarded with the sight of a middle-aged man writhing on the ground. This is not how you compete for sought-after players and entertainment dollars.
The reaction to Souhan’s comments showed precisely why few, if any, major media figures have dared to broach the subject.
Souhan’s column was deemed “ill-informed, dishonorable, and just plain nasty.” Callers into Dan Barreiro’s KFAN radio show denounced the topic even being discussed, with one caller even comparing the questioning of Kill’s fitness to coach as a form of bigotry. Multiple voices demanded Jim Souhan be fired. And all this just for questioning the health of a coach whose had four seizures in 28 games.
Souhan’s harshest criticism was directed not at Jerry Kill, who has little control over the frequency and severity of his seizures, but at Teague’s combination of silence and dismissive attitude on the matter. The lack of information from Teague allows speculation to run rampant (how many seizures has Kill really had since coming to Minnesota?) and fosters the concern that Kill’s health is a bigger hurdle to the program than assumed. Such silence doesn’t help when there are legitimately poorly-informed commentaries on the issue, such as CBS Sports‘ Gregg Doyel who believes Kill is taking his life in his hand by continuing to coach. But credit Jim Souhan for starting a conversation that needs to be taking place, if not in public, than at least in private within the University.
Removing Jerry Kill based solely on his health is almost certainly impossible, as the University would quickly run into Americans with Disabilities Act provisions. But a negotiated buyout of Kill’s contract, right now at $1.2 million a year for the next five years, might be possible – if extraordinarily expensive.
The better question is should Kill step down?
Let’s dispense, if we can, with the obvious. Jerry Kill is admirable for coming as far as he has with his condition and seems like an honorable man and a competent coach. Stepping down from his job would be a major career reversal and disappointment for both Kill and fellow epileptic individuals from whom he rightly ought to be a role model. But if stress is a major factor in Kill’s epilepsy, how exactly will that stress lessen as the coach of a Big 10 team on gameday? What if Kill suffers another seizure while leading against a top-ranked team? Or in a major bowl game? Will fans be as accommodating with his condition if they believe, rightly or wrongly, that his health cost them a game? Forget the opinion of fans, how will recruits react to Kill’s health?
If Kill’s condition worsens, even with the program reducing his day-to-day activities, at what point has the University reduced Jerry Kill to more of a figurehead than an administrator? Given the trajectory of Kill’s health, with seemingly an increasing number of seizures, that point may be coming sooner than anyone wishes.
ADDENDUM: The Star Tribune editorial board, rarely a fount of wisdom, offers the definitive assessment of the impact Jerry Kill’s health has on the team – and it comes from the coach himself:
[Kill] confessed that a seizure he suffered during halftime of last November’s Michigan State game had been a low point for him because he realized “you can’t be the head football coach and miss half of the game.” If that were happening all the time, “the university wouldn’t have to fire me,” Kill said. “I’d walk away if I didn’t think I could do it.”
Whenever there’s a big story involving firearms, you can be sure the media will be ready to provide comic relief.
Like Piers Morgan’s reference to Aaron Alexis and his “legally purchased AR15 shotgun“.
Or the NY Daily News (“Like MSNBC, Only In Print!”) front page story about the AR15 Alexis owned…
…even though it appears that not only didn’t he have one, but didn’t – as was reported yesterday – steal one from one of the base police he murdered after all.
The Media. On Second Amendment issues, they are the real low-information voters.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Only a person obsessed with racial issues would worry about why there aren’t more people of color brewing craft beer.
I’m guessing the reason there are few Black beer crafters is the same reason there are so few Black start-up business owners: they don’t know anyone who ever did it so why would they consider it possible? Instead, they look at the other choices they see patterned for them by the adults around them and that’s what they take up. Entrepreneurship is a learned behavior but our First Black President’s administration is working vigorously to kill it.
Only a dog can hear a dog whistle. Only a racist sees racism everywhere.
Joe Doakes
Technically speaking, there are two ways to be a “post-racial” president; when there is no more racism, and when racism is the norm.
What do you think the Twin CIties media would say, and do, and write, if they found out that…:
…all got funding from, say, the Koch Brothers?
Take your shot at writing the headlines you’d see in the Strib, on WCCO and KARE, and on MPR (to say nothing of NPR), in the comment section.
Oh, wait – it’s not remotely hypothetical.
More next week.
Governor Messinger’s Daytons’ approval ratings – the media says – have dipped.
Survey USA shows the Governor at a 47 percent approval rating:
Significantly, however, the September approval rating is down 9 percentage points since May of 2012. Back then, when Dayton was still grappling with a Republican controlled Legislature, the governor’s approval rating was 56 percent in the SurveyUSA poll.
The dip was particularly glaring among Democrats:
According to the SurveyUSA poll, Dayton went from an 80 percent approval rating among self-identified Democrats in May of last year and February of this year to 67 percent approval rating. The pollster said that segment of the poll had a plus or minus 6.7 percentage point margin of sampling error.
And naturally, the Strib poll – which has a long history of comical inaccuracy – differs:
The Star Tribune’s polling over the past two years do not track with the SurveyUSA polling. The latest Minnesota Poll, which had a margin of sampling error ofplu sor minus 3.5 percentage points, was taken in June and found Dayton’s approval rating was 57 percent. That was up from 45 percent in February of this year and 53 percent in September of last year in Star Tribune polling numbers.
In the Strib’s poll, Democrats approved of Dayton overwhelmingly – which would appear to be a major difference in the two polls.
That, and SUSA having a track record of relative accuracy, or at least not being utterly comical.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Now Investors Business Daily is claiming that while the IRS was holding up Conservative groups to make sure they didn’t actively campaign to get-out-the-Conservative-vote and thereby run afoul of tax laws, the IRS was also actively teaching Black groups how they could actively campaign to get-out-the-Black-vote without running afoul of the tax laws.
This isn’t the first time in history that the entrenched bureaucracy has chosen the new leader, but it’s not the Change I’d been Hoping for.
And where is the shock and outrage in the press? Uncaring? Or complicit?
hat tip: instapundit
J Doakes
I keep forgetting; does “just following orders” count as complicity?
Bill Glahn – who has become one of the essential bloggers in Minnesota – notes something I picked up on in the 2010 race; all “reporting” that might discomfit Democrats takes place at times in the cycle when even wonks are hard-pressed to pay attention, much less Joe and Jane Casual Voter.
I noted it in 2010, when the Twin Cities media issued one – precisely one – “report” on Mark Dayton’s mental health and alcoholism during the campaign cycle. Eleven months before the 2010 election. When nobody, but nobody, cared. The Strib could tell people honestly that they had covered the issue; it was just at a time when nobody in the world was paying attention. They buried the story just as effectively as if they’d put it on page E-18.
As Glahn notes, they’re at it again:
Some 8 months after the data became available, the Minneapolis Star Tribune finally gets around to an analysis of campaign spending in the 2012 election.
The article (headlined “Spending on Minnesota legislative races has doubled in 10 years”) describes how much more money has poured into races for the state legislature in recent years.
Not surprisingly, they bury the lede. Yes, lots more money is coming into these races, but in recent years, it’s almost all on the Democrat/liberal/progressive side of the ledger.
Of course they do.
Read the whole thing.
And chalk it up to the pattern; too little, too late, too early.
Just like the DFL needs it.
The fact is, I have a lot of questions about the minimum wage debate.
Of course, the uncountably vast majority of people who are earning minimum wage are kids, or others who are just entering the workforce. People who haven’t yet developed even the most rudimentary work skills – like showing up on time, much less running the shake machine or the deep fryer with authority.
But there are people earning the minimum wage who do, in fact, have themselves and others depending on their income.
If you’re a conservative, you no doubt suspect that that sad state is because of poor choices; partying too much in high school and not getting an education; having children out of wedlock; working on the easy crime career before developing the boring straight career.
Of course, not every person is affected by their own choices. When you party you way into your twenties, do jail time, get knocked up and wind up having to raise a family on a wage that wouldn’t support a single person, you are very likely passing a lot of problems on to the next generation; you’re passing your bad, shortsighted, immature and/or stupid choices on to them. “Personal Responsibility” is great when it’s just your own choices affecting you – but when your parents, and grandparents, were idiots or drunks or screw-ups, what’s a kid to do?
(And if you’re the progeny of a couple of generations of people who made good choices, worked hard, got good jobs and dedicated themselves to helping you make good choices, too, then thank whatever it is you believe in. It’s a major leg up in life).
Now, I’m not sure how many of Jessica English’s choices were her ancestors, and how many were hers. But the media certainly is playing up the results – the state of Ms. English’s life today:
Jessica English is the face of a newly revived effort to raise Minnesota’s minimum wage.
Ms. English, speaking at the Minnesota State Fair, illustrating the dangers of poverty to cute, white women from Wayzata who choose to work in art.
She earned minimum wage while working in rural western Minnesota, places such as Fergus Falls, Ortonville and Kerkhoven. A case worker called it the “land of the minimum wage.”
Now, the 35-year-old divorced mother said she faces losing custody of her four daughters, ages 6 to 15, because she earned so little, even though her finances improved a bit since moving to St. Paul.
On the one hand? That sounds scary – being 35 and up against it like that. Now, I have no idea what got Ms. English to this point in her life – single, four kids, job skills worth $6.15 an hour.
(As to the “losing custody” bit, though? Er, if she was a single father – presuming that’s who Ms. English would be contesting for custody – would the media even care? What if the father is better able to provide a decent life for the kids? The double standard is nothing new).
But the fact is, one does make choices in one’s life. I’ve made a few; I left radio, my first career, when I was married and had two kids and another on the way, and was making $6.50/hour, and painstakingly taught myself how to convince managers I was a competent technical writer. I adapted. I did what it took to develop a skill that would get me and my family out of poverty. I don’t want, or deserve, a cookie for that – that’s what you do when you have a family; you take care of them. I had some blessings, of course; I’d gotten a passable education when I had the chance, I’d avoided doing any jail time, that sort of thing. Perhaps my greatest blessing? Growing up in a place and time when “not being ready to raise a family when I had one” still had some moral weight.
And it’d seem Ms. English has learned that lesson, at least in part. The article notes that her financial situation has “improved a bit since moving to St. Paul”.
Where she works – for an inadequate wage, perhaps, although we don’t know – as a “community organizer” for “The Coffee Party”, the beyond-astroturf liberal-plutocrat-funded “response” to the Tea Party.
In other words, one of the liberal-plutocrat-supported non-profits that’s agitating for a “living wage” apparently won’t provide one.
Judging by Ms. English’s rap sheet, she spent the last several years working in the public/non-profit art business – a famously penurious racket, usually the province of trust fund babies, bored housewives and young, no-strings-attached arts majors.
I don’t know Ms. English. But how much weight should the media give the testimony of a person who has apparently dedicated herself to finding and remaining in poverty?
And how much should Minnesota’s real working poor – the 20 year olds scrambling for their first jobs at Burger King, who will be the first to get laid off when the robots do finally take over the fast food business, the immigrants who are working as many minimum wage jobs as they can while they learn English and develop other skills, the poor kids who need to some some reassurance that there’s a future in working the straight and narrow rather than turning to crime – have to pay for such dilettantism?
Because it’s their jobs – not the “Community Organizer” jobs for fashionable lefty non-profits – that’ll be disappearing.
UPDATE: Someone emailed “aren’t you being a bit condescending?”
Me? Not a bit. There’s a reason that the poverty pimps are trotting out an attractive white woman instead of a 30 year old Somali immigrant. Put another way – the proponents of the minimum wage hike are doing the condescending, here.
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