The Chicago Sun-Times lays off its entire photo staff.

It’s a start.

To:  The Twin Cities “Independent” Alt-Media
From:  Mitch Berg, uppity peasant
Re:  Terminology

All,

“Lamestream Media” is so 2007.  For that matter, saying something “is so…” a year is so 1998.

The term we now use is “in the bag for the DFL”.

That is all.

Good Politico profile on CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson, the one reporter in all of mainstream media who’ll actually confront Obama.

I loved this bit here (emphasis added):

Attkisson is a dogged reporter, driven by a strong skepticism of government. Producers at CBS News once nicknamed her “Pit Bull,” a source said, because she gets on a story and won’t let go. But that is seen as both a strength and a weakness. Her drive can produce great journalism, but it can also cause her to push stories to the point that colleagues — especially those of a more progressive bent — suspect a political agenda.

Didja catch that?  Doing what was one called a journalist’s “Job”, reporting on government, is now evidence of an agenda.

Anyway, it’s worth a read.

And it’s worth wondering – what if the Twin Cities had a reporter like this?  One that cared more about reporting news than being accepted by the Twin Cities’ “elites?”  Other than Tom Hauser, I mean?

A liberal acquaintance of mine on Twitter told me yesterday that this bit spelled out the case against the NRA “in a logical way”.

@tjswift2 @mitchpberg Reading the piece actually makes the point quite logical. Even if you don’t agree with it. @jruha

— John Shannon (@JohnTShannon) May 28, 2013

It’s by John Fugelsang.  Now, I do try to seek civil conversation, but Fugelsang is becoming to the left what Bob was to Baghdad; people who quote or cite Fugelsang are justly derided as ninnies; he’s best ignored completely, or as we conservative bloggers say, “Billied”.

But since the lefty tweep took the trouble, let’s show all the ways in which this piece (transcribed below) does not lay out any case with any logic.

It’s almost too densely-misguided to even “fisk” in the classical sense.  For starters, let’s stick with calling out the individual misstatements, evidence-free chanting points and distortions in blue.  Like this:  {Chanting Point!} 

Maybe you’re someone who, like the majority of Americans, supports the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, but you feel kind of creepy about the weapons-grade cretins who run the NRA and do all they can to keep Americans {Ad-hominem – name-calling!} safe from any gun laws that might keep Americans safe.  {Assertion made without evidence; not a single gun law proposed would have “kept” a single American “safe”}

Well, you’re not alone. And this is why: loving the Second Amendment while opposing the NRA is every bit as natural as loving Jesus while opposing Westboro Baptist Church.

Let’s take a break here.  This is straight out of Saul Alinsky.  Linking a mainstream organization of regular Americans – five million of us – with the “God Hates Fags” church?  Seems a stretch.

In fact, Wayne LaPierre’s fake constitutional rights lobbying group  {Perhaps Fugelsang would favor us by telling us how the lobbying is “fake”?} that gun manufacturers use to buy off congressmen actually has quite a bit in common with the revoltingly fake Christians of Westboro.   {The “Buy Off” meme is an interesting one; we’ll come back to that…} 

You see, Westboro is to Christianity what Jesus was to ignorance, hatred and inbreeding. They travel the country holding these vile, un-Christian protests at the funerals of anyone evil enough to live in a land that doesn’t stone gay people to death, Leviticus-style. They don’t want to hate gays — they’re just doing it because God commands them and they’re only following orders. It’s like Nuremberg, but with very bad teeth.

There’s a sign that Fugelsang’s piece is targeted at the insufficiently bright; he has to explain who Westboro – the church that pickets soldiers’ funerals – is.

These guys don’t picket outside gay bars or gay bathhouses or gay dance clubs or Lindsey Graham’s Senate office. Just places guaranteed to cause the most outrage possible – like funerals. Then when someone tries to stifle them, they engage in First Amendment lawsuits.  

Then you’ve got the NRA. And please understand, when we talk about the NRA, we’re not talking about their members. {Oh, heavens, no!} In Frank Luntz’s 2012 poll of NRA members, 87 percent said they believed Second Amendment freedom went hand in hand with preventing gun violence. That’s responsibility.

But you wouldn’t know that from the group’s leaders. Under the stewardship of Wayne LaPierre, or as I call him, “Il Wayne,” the NRA has become the front for gun manufacturers, the guys who’ve cashed in big time since Newtown.

So much “wrong” packed into two paragraphs.

Where precisely does Fugelsang think the NRA gets its leadership?  Who does he think elected, and re-elected, LaPierre?  The members – whom current events show to be among the most engaged, informed voters (especially on gun issues and the NRA itself) out there.

And the “Front for Gun Manufacturers” meme is one that the left bruits about without ever showing what the problem is.  It’s as if gun manufacturers, staring at legislation that would in many cases actively destroy their market – between the various confiscations, limits and price hikes that the bills would impose on the law-abiding and the law-abiding alone, don’t have a right to take up common cause with the biggest nationwide organization that’s on their side?

If someone tried to ban NPR, you don’t think Volvo or Patagonia or Starbucks would pony up for the defense?

They’re the reason why in America it’s now easier for a civilian to buy lots of weapons designed to kill lots of people really fast than it is for you to remember your old MySpace password.  {What the hell is he talking about?  This is just barking lunacy} 

But while they’re protecting profits, they’re also juicing up profits through fear-mongering mailings about how Obama’s coming to confiscate your weapons.

Here’s a little tip, Skeeter: The fact that you’re able to heavily arm yourself while publicly calling Obama a gun-grabbing tyrant is pretty much proof that he’s not.

And there’s your proof that liberal never have to learn how to debate conservatives.  I’ve heard that last bit countless times, even here in Minnesota during the session; if a noxious provision – a useless and price-gouging background check, a magazine restriction with a confiscation provision – hasn’t been signed into law yet, it doesn’t exist, so shut up about it.

But only if it’s about guns.  Not like abortion, or defunding NPR, or defending traditional marriage, the very whisper of which is cause to rally the liberal troops.

By opposing background checks at gun shows — checks supported by 90 percent of Americans — the NRA guarantees that guns can be legally bought through the gun-show loophole by felons or third parties who sell to felons. And then those legal guns just kind of disappear, get sold a few more times, and when the cops recover those weapons years later from a killing that wiped out a playground full of kids, the NRA can say, “Look, illegal guns! Background checks wouldn’t have stopped anything.” See, who needs the black market when you’ve ensured that bad guys can get guns freely on the open market?  {In junior high writing class, the story would then end “And Then I Woke Up”.  The scenario exists only in John Fugelsang’s imagination} 

Background checks only infringe on your Second Amendment rights if you’re a felon, a terrorist or criminally insane. And if you’re all three, you probably already work as an NRA lobbyist. {Not just an ad-hominem, but a really stupid one} It’s all about the money.

Westboro ignores the teachings of Jesus and takes one line of Leviticus out of context to justify their homophobic evil.

The NRA ignores the Second Amendment’s “well regulated militia” part and takes one line out of context to justify their blood-soaked greed.

The NRA ignores nothing – “well-regulated” meant “can hit what it shoots at” in 1787, and it still does.  But Fugelsang, like every liberal who skis this well-worn rhetorical slope, ignores the whole “right of the people” bit.   In his blood-soaked ignorance.

OK. It’s time for the home stretch.  The part where Fugelsang – who has become one of the  lefty alt-media’s name-brand public intellectuals, their sine qua non of debate – closes his case with eloquent logic, a command of fact, and calm reason:

Homophobia is an insult to God, and opposing gun safety is an insult to living people.  {That’s right!  If you smear the label “gun safety” on a polished turd like Michael Paymar’s background check bill – which will never deter a single crime – you love death!}

These groups are both rackets and they’re both doomed. Because the WBC has made untold Americans realize, “Hey, I don’t want to be like that.” {The NRA’s membership has increased by over a quarter since Newtown} 

And now, the deal closer – the all-important final sentence: 

And Wayne LaPierre’s complete indifference to the consequences of gun proliferation makes more NRA members realize every day, “Dude, maybe I’m OK with my own penis size.”

All that buildup…for a dick joke?

(I could throw in a “Berg’s Seventh Law” reference here, but that’d be gratuitous)

Here’s the scary part:  it’s no dumber than most of the left’s arguments.

But John Fugelang?  Not so much.

The session over, their swag forcibly extracted and readied for handing over to their benefactors, the DFL – via their proxies in the mainstream media, have turned back to their favorite parlor game…

…which is “bitching about being called the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party”.

Although after this past session I’m willing to call them “ic”, if it means that much to them.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This column annoys me.

The DFL is running amok, enacting all kinds of seriously stupid legislation.  And it’s the Republicans’ fault, because they’re not holding them back.

The Republicans ran for election on social issues, which the Strib ridiculed at the time, and lost.  Now, the DFL is pushing through their extremely leftist versions of the same social issues the Strib mocked the Republicans for running on.

You hated our opinions when we were running for office so you did everything in your power to make sure we didn’t get elected.  But now that we aren’t in office because we didn’t get elected, you blame us for that, too.

Drop dead.

joe doakes

The Strib has a new publisher, Mike Klingensmith.

David Brauer at the MinnPost checked up on the guy’s financial donations, as well as the new board chair Mike Sweeney’s – which ranged from “moderate Republicans” to “very liberal Democrats” over the course of the past decade and change.  Brauer’s summary:

 All in all, bipartisan, big-business-like, skewed toward the D.C. Establishment, with a whiff of fashionable Democratic insurgency late. (Obama was not yet a favorite when Klingensmith started giving.)

But here’s the part that caught my attention; Brauer says the previous publisher, Chris Harte, “pushed the page in a conservative direction” – defined by chair Sweeney and quoted by Brauer, as “My understanding of Chris’s view was that he wanted to be fair to both sides”, which media people seem to think is a radical departure, since they don’t tend to think the current media has any bias.

I mean, in his piece Brauer says the Strib  is ever so slightly conservative these days.

But I’m putting words in Brauer’s mouth.  I’ll let him speak for himself – here, writing about the new guard’s rap sheet:

I don’t expect conservatives to be pleased with this record, but many seem happiest ripping the Strib as the Red Star. Harte’s push toward the middle, or further, yielded few dividends with that crowd.

So let’s run down a summary of what conservatives would make of a sober look at what the Strib has done over Harte’s term:

• Hired a single, solitary conservative columnist, Katherine Kersten
• Promptly caved in to the whinging of a staff that believed that adding a single conservative to a stable that included DFL stenographers Lori Sturdevant, Nick Coleman and his replacement Jon Tevlin made the paper “too conservative”
• Made the “Minnesota Poll” arguably less comically biased, with the dumping of the internal pollsters, the firing of Princeton, and the hiring of Mason Dixon (we’ll know in a cycle or two)

“More conservative?”  I’d run with “marginally less North Korean”.   It was a start, and a very slow one at that – one fought at every turn by people who think the Strib is juuuuust fine the way it’s always been.

I’d love to know from David Brauer – on precisely what grounds was he expecting “dividends” from the right?

While the Strib has some capable reporters (who have historically had an amazing and I’m sure coincidental propensity to go to work for liberal PACs, PR firms or the DFL after leaving the paper), at the editorial board level the paper has been since the Cowles era nothing but a glorified DFL PR firm.

After Nanny Pelosi says the calls to investigate Attorney General Eric “Let’s send guns to the narcotraficantes and bug the AP” Holder is about “Voter Suppression”, Rep. Trey Gowdy, bless his heart, did something politicians almost never manage.

He told the truth (emphasis added):

“It’s really beneath the office of a member of Congress to say something that outrageous, and the fact that she was once the speaker is mind-numbing,” Rep. Gowdy told Fox News’ Greta van Susteren.

“I have heard a lot in my 16 years as a prosecutor. I couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth,” he added.

Gowdy calls Pelosi mind-numbingly stupid

“I don’t know what was wrong with her when she said that. But I would schedule an appointment with my doctor if she thinks that we are doing this to suppress votes this fall. That is mind-numbingly stupid,” Gowdy said.

He wasn’t the only one:

Jim Hoft of the Gateway Pundit reminded readers that “Pelosi also said Democrats brought down the deficit after they increased it by a trillion dollars.”

“She’s either mind-numbingly stupid or a chronic liar, or both,” Hoft wrote.

I beg to differ.

What she said – almost always says, in fact – is mind-numbingly stupid.

But she’s speaking to the new Democrat base – the people who think a seven-second, Alinskyite sound bite is, in fact, fact.  People whose idea of “checking facts” has devolved into “checking to see what my favorite left-leaning source says they are”, which is two steps up from Duckspeak.

The Star Tribune Editorial board, in a piece that reads like Lori Sturdevant, holds forth on the DFL budget proposal, such as it is – and illustrates the Strib’s deep institutional hypocrisy along the way.

The editorial is stupid, hypocritical, and awash in institutional self-interest disguised – like all of Sturdevant’s work – as populist dooo-goodism:

No sales tax on clothing or haircuts. No alcohol tax hike. No income tax increase for 98 percent of filers. On Sunday, after four months of launching a flotilla of tax ideas, the Legislature’s DFL majorities and Gov. Mark Dayton unveiled a final 2014-15 state budget outline that, on the revenue side of the ledger, is more notable for its omissions than its contents.

Well, no.  It’s notable for about two billion of its contents.  Nowhere in the Strib’s editorial does the number “$38,000,000,000” occur.

The Strib doesn’t want to give its few readers who actually follow numbers a nasty sticker shock.

There’s plenty to like on the spending side of their balance sheet. The DFL plan pumps an additional $725 million into public education from preschool through graduate school. That’s enough to reverse the deep higher-education cuts of the past two years; ease the squeeze that has some of the state’s public schools operating only four days a week; pay for all-day kindergarten, and offer preschool scholarships to low-income families.

Read:  It’s a big kickback to Education Minnesota; they paid good money for that Governor and Legislature, it’s time for them to get their piece of the action.  

The plan also includes measures to close a nagging $627 million budget gap, the residue not only of the Great Recession but also of a dozen years of legislative failure to balance the budget in a lasting way.

Further proof that  Lori Sturdevant wrote this.  Remember 2010?

A Six Billion Dollar Deficit?  

The Strib editorial board is rewriting history for the benefit of the smug and the stupid.

But remember – they have their own self-interest at heart:

But the plan’s tax features are a disappointment. They raise revenue in a way that puts Minnesota’s economic competitiveness at risk.

Particularly worrisome is a new marginal tax bracket that will apply to the state’s top 2 percent of incomes. The rate attached to that bracket remains to be set by a House-Senate conference committee, but it is almost certain to be among the nation’s highest, especially after an anticipated temporary surcharge for top earners “blinks on” to get state aid payments to schools back to their normal schedule…While that decision is true to Dayton’s 2010 campaign promises, it comes at an economic price. Making Minnesota an income tax outlier among the states won’t be helpful in attracting and sustaining private-sector investment.

Especially the next round of investors the Strib will need to stave off bankruptcy.

Right?

It gets worse:

In addition, like a bad penny, a bad tax policy idea that disappeared two months ago turned up again Sunday. Applying the state sales tax to some currently untaxed business-to-business purchases will be part of the plan, Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk announced. He was not specific about which items or services would become taxable, nor about how the revenue thus raised would be used, other than for “significant economic development.”

Oh, well, then.  Good enough for me!

The Strib is worried that taxing business to business purchases – which could include advertising, as well as pretty much anything in the supply chain – is going to hit their bottom line.  It’s a legitimate worry; businesses of all size, from the Strib all the way down to lil’ ol’ me, are going to see some arbitrary percentage come out of our revenues; we can pass it along and hope that our goods and services continue to get purchased, or we can eat a percentage – 5.5%?  6%? – lopped out of our revenues and try to ride it out.

Or move.

Regardless of how the money would be used, taxing business inputs is not sound policy. It layers hidden taxes into the cost of goods and services and takes a toll on wages and job creation in the affected industries. Those costs will affect low- and middle-class Minnesotans as surely as a clothing sales tax would. But the spurned clothing tax would have had the virtue of transparency, and could have been offset for low-income earners by a refundable tax credit, as the Senate tax bill provided.

Waaaah.

In for a bad penny, in for a poo-streaked pound, Strib.  This is the government that you wanted.  You did whatever it took to get this government; you served as an adjunct PR firm for the DFL, you covered up their transgressions, you whinged about “ALEC” while laughing over cocktails with “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, you did whatever it took to get them into power, and you do your best to cover up the train wreck that is Mark Dayton.

To be sure, businesses will benefit from some of the property tax relief measures that total a hefty $400 million over two years in the DFL plan. But low- and middle-income homeowners and renters ought to be favored as the tax conference committee allocates that sizable sum.

This is Minnesota’s source of information.  Good lord.

Where does the Strib think that “relief” comes from?

It’s money that’s redistributed from the parts of the state whose votes the DFL doesn’t need, to the parts whose votes they need to protect.

Who do you suppose that is, Strib?

Republicans have offered no alternative budget plan this session, evidently preferring to stand aside and criticize DFL decisions.

Further proof it’s Sturdevant.

The DFL offered no alternative budget in 2011.  The Strib editorial board had not a word to say about it.

They should know that if they scuttle a bonding bill, they will deserve to be seen by this session’s critics as part of the problem.

And the Strib will do its’ level best to make sure they do.

I can not wait for the Strib to go bankrupt again.

This story caught my eye this morning; Mark Zdechlik (Mitch silently double-checks the spelling) at MPR reported the Senator Hann’s  likely upcoming vote on Gay Marriage is at odds with…

…his district’s vote on the Marriage Amendment:

Last fall, fewer than 4 in 10 voters in Hann’s Eden Prairie district cast ballots to define marriage in the state Constitution.

Still, Hann intends to vote against the bill.

“I have always supported the law that we have on the books today which defines marriage to be between one man and one woman,” he said.

So I’m wondering; how often does Minnesota Public Radio News plan on “exposing inconsistencies” in politicians’ votes?

Because I’d be interesting in hearing about the dilemma facing the DFL Senators – Stumpf, Skoe, Saxhaug, Tomassoni, and Majority Leader Bakk himself – who are likely to vote party line whose districts voted by 2:1 or better for the Marriage Amendment.

And on what votes can we expect this level of media scrutiny?  For example, I’m going to hazard a guess that a majority – maybe a supermajority – of Rep. Savick’s district opposed Michael Paymar’s gun grab bills.  How will the voter know if the media doesn’t tell them?

In Eric Black’s three part series about the Second Amendment a few weeks back (part 1, 2 and 3), Black – writing in the MInnPost, which operates in part through the generosity of a big grant from the anti-gun zealot Joyce Foundation – notes the not-exactly-earthshaking conclusion that the Second Amendment can confuse people.

Ooh! Confederates! That must mean the MinnPost is writing about bitter gun-clinging Jeebus freaks again!  Seriously, MinnPost – I’m never letting you live this down.

And the underlying themes of his series were – as I read ’em – that the Second Amendment is:

1. Linguistically and legally inscrutable
2. Confusing
3. Obsolete.

We’ll address the first two of these today.

Black notes the definitions that vex a surface-level reading of the Second Amendment:

What’s a militia? If you aren’t in a militia, does this have anything to do with you? Or perhaps (and this is roughly the current Supreme Court interpretation) what if “militia” is just an 18th century word for all the able-bodied males in a state who had better have access to arms in case their state needs them to secure its freedom…But if “militia” doesn’t refer to an organized group, what’s “well-regulated” doing in there?

It’s a good question.  But it’s hardly a new one.

For much of US history, it didn’t need an answer – since hardly anyone questioned the notion that Militia meant…

…both.  The Militia Act of 1903 codified what had been followed in practice since the Militia Act of 1792; the the Militia was composed of…:

• The Organized Militia – the National Guard and the Naval Militia, and…
• the Unorganized Militia – every able-bodied male between 17 and 45 years of age who wasn’t a member of the Organized Militia.  In other words, everyone.  Including Eric Black.

But even answering “it’s in the law!” misses the most important point.

The answer to the question “What does the Second Amendment really mean?” started taking its currently definitive shape with the publication, about 20 years ago, of “The Embarassing Second Amendment“, by Dr. Sanford Levinson.  At the time, Levinson was a professor at the U of Texas School of Law; the article appeared in the Yale Law Review.

Levinson was and is an arch-liberal with portfolio, who described himself then and now as a card-carrying ACLU member who was very uncomfortable around the notion of civilians owning guns.   He’s no mossy originalist; he’s called for a Second Constitutional Convention.

The article – about 80 pages, half of them footnotes – is a highly detailed analyis of the textual, historical, structural, doctrinal, prudential and ethical history of the Second Amendment, its related case law, and analysis of all the above.

And the conclusion was all wrapped up in the title; Levinson, unabashed anti-gun liberal that he is, is embarassed to conclude that the “NRA” was right, and the gun-grabbers were wrong.

It came out a solid decade and a half before the Heller decision, but it was one of the key waypoints on the path between the silly, collectivist post-Miller-decision miasma and the Court’s curent stance on the issue.  It was the argument that started even arch-liberal Laurence Tribe on his path from dismissing the originalist interpretation (as Levinson notes in the article) to acceptance that the Amendment is in fact a right “of the people”.

The road to Heller and McDonald started with Levinson’s article.

And he started from the same question Eric Black did: what does “well-regulated militia” mean?

In textual terms – the strict reading of the words?  Not much help there: “The text at best provides only a starting point for a conversation. In this specific instance, it does not come close to resolving the questions posed by federal regulation of arms. Even if we accept the preamble as significant, we must still try to figure out what might be suggested by guaranteeing to “the people the right to keep and bear arms;” moreover, as we shall see presently, even the preamble presents unexpected difficulties in interpretation.”

But in historical terms?   Things are clearer:

Consider once more the preamble and its reference to the importance of a well-regulated militia. Is the meaning of the term obvious? Perhaps we should make some effort to find out what the term “militia” meant to 18th century readers and writers, rather than assume that it refers only to Dan Quayle’s Indiana National Guard and the like. By no means am I arguing that the discovery of that meaning is dispositive as to the general meaning of the Constitution for us today. But it seems foolhardy to be entirely uninterested in the historical philology behind the Second Amendment.

I, for one, have been persuaded that the term “militia” did not have the limited reference that Professor Cress and many modern legal analysts assign to it. There is strong evidence that “militia” refers to all of the people, or least all of those treated as full citizens of the community. Consider, for example, the question asked by George Mason, one of the Virginians who refused to sign the Constitution because of its lack of a Bill of Rights: “Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people.” 48 Similarly, the Federal Farmer, one of the most important Anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution, referred to a “militia, when properly formed, [as] in fact the people themselves.” 49 We have, of course, moved now from text to history. And this history is most interesting, especially when we look at the development of notions of popular sovereignty. It has become almost a cliche of contemporary American historiography to link the development of American political thought, including its constitutional aspects, to republican thought in England, the “country” critique of the powerful “court” centered in London.

One of the school’s most important writers, of course, was James Harrington, who not only was in influential at the time but also has recently been given a certain pride of place by one of the most prominent of contemporary “neo-republicans,” Professor Frank Michelman. 50 One historian describes Harrington as having made “the most significant contribution to English libertarian attitudes toward arms, the individual, and society.” 51 He was a central figure in the development of the ideas of popular sovereignty and republicanism. 52 For Harrington, preservation of republican liberty requires independence, which rests primarily on possession of adequate property to make men free from coercion by employers or landlords. But widespread ownership of land is not sufficient. These independent yeoman would also bear arms. As Professor Morgan puts it, “[T]hese independent yeoman, armed and embodied in a militia, are also a popular government’s best protection against its enemies, whether they be aggressive foreign monarchs or scheming demagogues within the nation itself.” 53

Which gets us into the third of Black’s conclusions, which we’ll come back to later in the series.

As to the notion that the “Right of the people to keep and bear arms” refers to a National Guard that the founding fathers didn’t envision:

Consider that the Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of he people to be secure in their persons,” or that the First Amendment refers to the “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It is difficult to know how one might plausibly read the Fourth Amendment as other than a protection of individual rights, and it would approach the frivolous to read the assembly and petition clause as referring only to the right of state legislators to meet and pass a remonstrance directed to Congress or the President against some government act. The Tenth Amendment is trickier, though it does explicitly differentiate between “state” and “the people” in terms of retained rights. 42 Concededly, it would be possible to read the Tenth Amendment as suggesting only an ultimate right revolution by the collective people should the “states” stray too far from their designated role of protecting the rights of the people. This reading follows directly from the social contract theory of the state.( But, of course, many of these rights are held by individuals.)

(If you haven’t read Levinson’s entire piece – you need to.  It’s one of the most politically influential law-review articles in recent history – and it’s not a bad read, either).

As to “well-regulated?”    Levinson doesn’t address it directly – in the parlance of the 1790s, it meant “can do the job”, or “can hit their targets”, a definition that’s changed in the past two-odd centuries -because it’s irrelevant.  It’s a right of the people, necessary to the preservation of a free state.  It’s a secondary question at most, in the lee of the real question “what is a right of the people?”.

As noted in Heller, it’s not an absolute right; states can ensure that people who aren’t good citizens, felons and the like, don’t get guns.  They can legislate the types of guns, within reason; the whole “can you get a flamethrower or a cannon” argument is a strawman, although it’s worth arguing on its own merits (if I’m a law-abiding schnook with a .380 or a shotgun, why wouldn’t I be with a howitzer or a bomb?).

The “What does the Second Amendment Really Mean?” argument – like the “The Second Amendment existed to protect slavery!” argument we dispensed with a few months back – is a manufactured controversy, a re-hashing of questions that were answered literally decades ago among those who pay attention to the issue.

But the gun control movement rarely makes its appeals to people who pay attention to the issue.

Up next – probably Tuesday – the notion that the Second Amendment is just plain obsolete.

Crime in general – especially crimes committed with guns – is down over the past 20 years.

Not just down.  Down drastically.  As in “the kind of thing that should be provoking celebrations in the streets”.

And yet Americans think crime is rising (emphasis added):

The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%. However, guns still remain the most common murder weapon in the United States, the report noted. Between 1993 and 2011, more than two out of three murders in the U.S. were carried out with guns, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found.

But is the word getting out? 

Despite the remarkable drop in gun crime, only 12% of Americans surveyed said gun crime had declined compared with two decades ago, according to Pew, which surveyed more than 900 adults this spring. Twenty-six percent said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.

And how does that happen?

It’s unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such violence is up. The mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., were among the news stories most closely watched by Americans last year, Pew found. Crime has also been a growing focus for national newscasts and morning network shows in the past five years but has become less common on local television news.

There’s nothing “unclear” about it.

On a non-partisan level of cynicism – crime makes for ratings.  If it bleeds, it not only leads – it sells papers and gets people to tune in.

The fact that the “guns are out of control” narrative supports the Administration for which the mainstream media serve as a Praetorian Guard?  Two hits for the price of one.

Watch for the the chuckle-and-snark set from the leftymedia to their yapping to “puree” over this:

The Rush Limbaugh Program is considering ending its affiliation agreement with Cumulus Media at the end of this year, a move that would bring about one of the biggest shakeups in talk radio history, a source close to the show tells POLITICO.

Should the move take place, 40 Cumulus-owned radio stations would lose the rights to the most popular talk radio program in the country. In addition, the show might be picked up by competing regional radio stations in Washington, New York, Chicago, Dallas and other major markets.

Now, the left’s been trying to paint this as a rejection of conservative talk radio, and specifically a result of the “boycott” of Limbaugh after the Sandra Fluke kerfuffle:

According to the source, Limbaugh is considering the move because Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey has blamed the company’s advertising losses on Limbaugh’s controversial remarks about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student. In Feb. 2012, Limbaugh referred to Fluke as “a slut” because she had called on congress to mandate insurance coverage of birth control. The subsequent controversy over those remarks resulted in a significant advertising boycott.

“Significant” in terms of headlines.  It was a fairly minor event, commercially – some companies regretted taking part pretty quickly.

But its greatest significance might be giving Lew Dickey an out for his incompetent management.  Cumulus  – whose management has always skewed left of center, politically – is one of the most rapidly-collapsing of the old big-media holding companies.

Here’s their stock value over the past ten years:

Lew Dickey and the left-leaning wastrels in management are looking for an excuse for their own dismal performance.  Limbaugh and the Fluke flap provides them a handy out.

And that’s all it is.

But look for the chuckle-and-snark set – who only know what they’re told about the radio industry – to try to present this as a verdict on Limbaugh, or on conservative talk radio.

It’s not.

As I noted about a week back, being a Second Amendment activist for any length of time – I started in the late eighties – is a little like being Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day; every time the argument cycles, you wind up answering exactly the same questions.  Over and over and over.

Some of the questions -“aren’t you compensating for something?” – are stupid conceits.  Some – “isn’t a gun in the home many times more dangerous to the owner or people he knows than to criminals?”, or “wasn’t the Second Amendment put in place to protect slave holders?” – are well-worn, long-debunked tropes that keep coming back, just like the villain in the last two minutes of a monster movie.

And others?  Well, despite both sides’ oversimplifications, they keep coming back because the Second Amendment is a complex issue, full of historical, linguistic and legal nuance.

Notice I said “complex”.  Not “inscrutable”.  Because it’s Groundhog Day, and everything, including answering nearly all the questions, has happened before.  Maybe several times.

Eric Black – one of the phalanx of deans of Minnesota political journalism – wrote a series a few weeks back at the MinnPost (which is the recent recipient of a big grant from the Joyce Foundation, an anti-gun group that lavishly funds anti-gun astroturf groups around the country).  The first of the three parts, “The Second Amendment is a Mess“, came out probably three weeks ago.

Confederate soldiers. With guns. Be afraid; your betters have declared that the Constitution is all about slavery.  Except the First Amendment, and of course the emanations of penumbras that give us abortion.  But I digress.  Prejudicial? Do you think?  The MinnPost ran this in a piece about the Second Amendment, and I’m never going to let them live it down.

In stating the case that the Amendment is “a mess”, Black writes:

…the interpretation of any law must start with the actual language of the law as enacted. So, for today, let’s just put the text of the Second Amendment under the microscope. Here is its full text:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

It’s a marvelously unclear statement, to modern sensibilities – and yet for some reason it defined a policy, more or less, through nearly 200 years.  Until the 1960s, nobody really questioned that the “…right of the people” in the Amendment meant anything different than “of the people” meant in the First, Third or Tenth Amendments.

We’ll come back to that.  I’ll return to Eric Black…

…while noting that I’m getting that feeling Bill Murray had during the last three-quarters of Groundhog Day; it’s deja vu:

It’s a disaster. Seriously. Here’s just a sample of problems it presents.

What’s a militia? If you aren’t in a militia, does this have anything to do with you? Or perhaps (and this is roughly the current Supreme Court interpretation) what if “militia” is just an 18th century word for all the able-bodied males in a state who had better have access to arms in case their state needs them to secure its freedom even though they might not actually “belong” to what we 21st century-types would recognize as a militia, like a National Guard unit that you actually joined and were trained by and that actually has a command structure.

A fair point…

But if “militia” doesn’t refer to an organized group, what’s “well-regulated” doing in there? Who gets to decide whether the (actual or theoretical) militia you are in is well-enough-regulated to trigger (no pun intended) whatever impact the militia clause has? Who is doing the regulating? The state? The United States? The (non-existent but theoretical) organization of all the gun-owners in the state acting as self-regulators?

…and a vexing one.

Indeed, Black’s series seems to focus on three allegations about the Second Amendment:

1. It’s linguistically and legally inscrutable
2. It’s confusing
3. In an era where the US has a standing military, it’s obsolete.

But the first two were rendered null and void nearly a generation ago.    And the third exhibits a myopia about history, to say nothing of the Constitution, that needs to be actively fought.

But none of them are new. Indeed, it’s been nearly 20 years since the first two points were put out to pasture among people who are serious about the issue of the Second Amendment.

As to the third?  Stay tuned.

We’ll come back to that on Thursday.

To:  Speaker of the House Thissen
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Vote NOW!  For the Children!

Speaker Thissen,

You’re taking a lot of flak for pulling Rep. Paymar’s gun grab bill from the agenda.

Representative Paymar

You’re getting the flak from the usual crowd; astroturf checkbook advocacy groups whose executives are also their entire membership; “faith” groups of the type PJ O’Rourke once described as “having faith the same way some people have halitosis”, the smug preening “faith” of the church that has adopted government as a sort of Executive Assistant to God.

A group of anti-gun zealots.  They’re frowning because someone – I bet it was the second guy from the right, in the glasses – forgot to invite anyone that wasn’t a white, Volvo-diving, NPR-listening, alpaca-wearing pre-1970 Saint Olaf graduate.  Courtesy of the Joyce-Foundation-supported MinnPost.

The Minnesota Gun Violence Prevention Coalition, which encompasses the main people and organizations working for firearm regulation in Minnesota, staged a rally/press conference on Friday to demand Thissen allow the measure to come up for a vote.

 “It seems to me that Speaker Thissen is trying to protect the caucus,” said Sami Rahamim, whose father, Reuven Rahamim, was killed in the Accent Signage shooting last year.

Rahamim posed a tough question for Thissen and the rural Democrats who tanked the gun-control bill: Does the DFL House caucus need protecting, or “hardworking citizens like my father?”

I know – the Accent Signage shooting both takes attention away from the fact that violent crime (outside North Minneapolis) has been in free fall for 20 years.  And the anti-gunners are using Rahamim and the searing images of that horrible shooting to distract from the fact that nothing in any of the bills that the DFL has been pushing would have prevented the Accent shooting in any way whatsoever – that, indeed, the only thing that might have would have been a guy in the plant with a gun and the will to resist, whether a guard or just a regular schnook with a carry permit.

But never mind that, Speaker Thissen; the real point is coming up:

Advocates for more regulations stressed that polling shows the public supports such measures as universal background checks, which would regulate the private sale of firearms at gun shows and over the Internet, among other avenues.

That’s right, Speaker Thissen.  Ignore your lying eyes, which showed you Greater Minnesota hates your bill.  Ignore the polls that show support for your bills was an uninformed mile wide and an inch deep (gun control is a vital issue to 4% of the voters); never mind the historical fact that the last time the MNDFL crusaded against the law-abiding citizen’s right to keep and bear arms, you lost the House.

But no.  The people who carried the water

 “With the will of the majority behind us, we believed our state would pass a universal background check bill” this session, said Jane Kay, of Moms Demand Action [heh heh] for Gun Sense in America. “That has all been swept aside.”

Heather Martens [DFL Rep. HD 66A], executive director of Protect Minnesota, which lobbied lawmakers extensively on the issue, said Thissen should bring the measure up for a vote, even if it is doomed to fail.

“I think he has a responsibility to reconsider that decision,” she said.

And for once, notwithstanding the fact that she has not uttered one substantive word of truth in her public life, I agree with Representative Martens.

You need to bring this to a floor vote, Speaker Thissen.  And you need to do it immediately.    Because it’s the right thing to do.  Do it for the children.  You owe it to them.

And you need to bust some knuckles in your caucus to make sure they vote the party line too.   Get everyone in the DFL caucus to vote the Metrocrat conscience, and do it this week.  None of this “voting their constituency” BS;  make sure Joe Radinovich and Zac Dorhold and Steve Howe vote the most enthusiastic “yea” they can manage.

And smile for the cameras when you do.  Thanks.

That is all.

The foot of the Minnesota Vikings’ punter will no longer be in his mouth.

Chris Kluwe: so focused on his job

There is a truism in all professional life that your cost, real or perceived, cannot outweigh your value.  Once that threshold is crossed, there is often little incentive for an employer to maintain such an employee.

Of course, that truism seems to take an extraordinary beating when it comes to being applied in the world of professional sports.  Athletes are excused all manner of crimes and statements while staying employed.  Kobe Bryant hardly suffered despite allegations of rape.  Michael Vick emerged from jail for the cruel practice of dog fighting and resumed his NFL career.  Mike Tyson’s been in and out of jail three times.  If he goes back a forth time, apparently it’s free.

Chris Kluwe: so totally focused on his job

In that light, the Minnesota Vikings’ expected release of outspoken punter/gay-marriage advocate/musician/video-game enthusiast/Deadspin contributor/gameboard store owner/all-around stunted adolescent Chris Kluwe hardly seems fair.  Kluwe has maintained a decent-to-high punting yards average since joining the NFL (notwithstanding his drop to 22nd in the NFL in 2012). And in a league that doesn’t even have a punter in their Hall of Fame (another source of Kluwe-influenced controversy), Kluwe may be the most relatively famous punter in history.

The problem?  None of that notoriety comes from his actions on the field.  The Star Tribune’s Chip Scoggins danced around the elephant in the stadium when he wrote Kluwe’s Vikings career post-mortem in advance:

Kluwe’s departure will make the Vikings locker room a lot more dull because he is incredibly intelligent, articulate and passionate about societal issues. He’s a fascinating individual in a sport that breeds conformity. The NFL has become so big and so powerful that players often cling to political correctness for fear that a ripple might swell into a tidal wave. Kluwe is that surfer dude on top of the wave, hanging 10 on any issue that stirs his emotion.

“No single thing that I do defines me as a person,” he said. “Just because I play football, that doesn’t define me as a person.”

Chris Kluwe: like so very focused on his job

The message is unmistakable – Chris Kluwe’s gay marriage advocacy cost him his job.  And Scoggins et al are correct…sort of.

Kluwe’s value to the Minnesota Vikings was as a $1.4 million a year player at a reasonably expendable position.  Simply put – you don’t get to be a distraction if you’re easily replaceable.  And by every definition, Chris Kluwe is a distraction.  Kluwe has run his mouth on issues beyond gay marriage.  He’s been fined for “campaigning” for Ray Guy to get into the Hall of Fame.  He’s appeared on the website Deadspin several times over the 2011 NFL Lockout where he attacked numerous players over their views.

Chris Kluwe: so super duper focused on his job

Worse, Kluwe’s tactics are the epitome of his generation – foul-mouthed personal attacks against anyone who disagrees.  Pro-lockout players are “douchebags” who stand for “pretty much the definition of greed.”  His opponents are “a**hole f**kwits”, which also suggests he’s a plagiarist since I’m sure he stole that from Oscar Wilde.

In truth, the media needs Chris Kluwe’s release to be about his vocal and abusive activism.  Because admitting to solidarity with Kluwe’s political views, and his ability to deliver good copy to sportswriters and sports radio networks, is harder than portraying the SoCal punter as a victim of a 1st Amendment NFL crackdown.  Does anyone seriously believe that if Kluwe had come out passionately against gay marriage (ala Matt Birk), and saw his production dive, that those arguing against Kluwe’s release today would be defending his penchant to “hanging 10 on any issue that stirs his emotion”?

Chris Kluwe: so focused…on finding his next job

Kluwe mocked even his own Special Teams coach for suggesting the punter needed to focus on his job with the hashtag “so focused.”  Here’s hoping that Chris Kluwe finds the time to focus on realizing that being a public relations bully to those who don’t share his worldview isn’t the best way to advance what’s left of his career.

DFL 2010:  “Glitter-bombing Michele Bachmann and dumping pennies on Tom Emmer are the highest expressions of our First Amendment rights”.

DFL 2013:  “Heckling the governor is juvenile”.

The New York Times – the apogee of American journalism, yessirreebob – has reported that a government program started under the Clinton Administration to settle discrimination claims by black farmers in dealings with the Agriculture Department was rife with fraud.

It started out as a small, measured payout.   The Justice Department thought it might wind up costing less than they’d feared.

They were wrong.

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.

The deal, several current and former government officials said, was fashioned in White House meetings despite the vehement objections — until now undisclosed — of career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination. What is more, some protested, the template for the deal — the $50,000 payouts to black farmers — had proved a magnet for fraud.

“I think a lot of people were disappointed,” said J. Michael Kelly, who retired last year as the Agriculture Department’s associate general counsel. “You can’t spend a lot of years trying to defend those cases honestly, then have the tables turned on you and not question the wisdom of settling them in a broad sweep.”

You haven’t seen me say this often on this blog, but read the whole NYTimes piece.

And then ask yourself – where have you seen it before?

Oh, yeah – Andrew Breitbart covered it.

Two years ago.

And the paid leftymedia – led by Soros’ pet reporterettes at Media Matters – has spent the entire time since claming it was a symbol of conservative racism.

MPR News asked yesterday:

How do you know when the news you read is true?

That one’s easy; I don’t.

Everything you read or hear or watch on the news is subject first and foremost to…

1. The facts that are available to the reporter at the time they have to produce the report.  In late-breaking news about spectacular events, these facts are very often wrong.   After that comes…
2. …the reporters’ deadlines.  Especially in broadcast media, especially Cable TV with its 24 hour cycle; they’ve gotta put something on the air.  So often as not they’ll report what they have, whether it’s complete or reliable or not.   After that comes…
3. …the institutional bias of the news organization.  Now, as I’ve written in the past, I don’t necessarily think that all news media start out in the morning in a conference room with an editor exhorting the staff to “go out there and win one for the Democrats!”, except at the MinnPost, which seems to have taken over the Minnesoros Independent’s niche.  But I think it’s fairly clear that most reporters’ personal backgrounds, educations, social networks and frames of reference are largely left of the proverbial center, and that at the very least confirmation bias is as much a factor in reporting the news as it is among consumers.

At the risk of sounding provincial, I trust Euro media more;  they’re at least honest about their political biases.  You read the Frankfurter Allgemeine for a center-right take (by European standards), and Die Zeit for a perspective from the left, and make up your own mind.  European media dispenses with the fiction of objectivity, and for that I trust them more.

Dina Temple-Raston’s report re the Boston Marathon Bombings the other day was a classic example:  before the dust had settled, the first words out of her (and NPR’s) mouths in re possible suspects were that the FBI was looking at “right-wing extremists” because it was Tax Day, and Hitler’s birthday, when they worry about right-wing attacks on government and foreigners.

Now, I’ll take Temple-Raston at her word that she reported something someone in the FBI said about the subject at some point.  And given deadlines and the urgency of the story, she and NPR had to put something on the air.

The problem is that Temple-Raston’s report would make someone who doesn’t pay much attention – or who implicitly trusts NPR news – think that there IS an actual pattern of “right-wing” violence of any kind, to say nothing of spectacular attacks like Boston, associated with Tax Day, or that there’s some pattern of “right-wing” violence against foreigners in the US.

Neither is the case.

It’d have been like a news organization reporting the Catholic church’s sex scandals going to great pains to say “the FBI wants to rule out the gay community first”, when there had been no behavior that would have led anyone to casually conclude that the gay community was ever involved.

It would have been a made-up association; a symptom of systematic bias.

Just like “right wing violence on Tax Day”.

And yet NPR floated it as “news” until facts caught up with them.

So as with all news, I distrust but verify.

Public opinion is driven by mass caprice.  When the subject is “American Idol”, that’s fairly harmless (and where the hell is Ruben Studdard?).

When the subject is our civil liberties – especially the ones that are less popular with the coastal media “elites” that would set the popular tone? Less so.

P.J. O’Rourke, many of you know, is a conservative humorist and, as such, one of the great public intellectuals of the past forty years.  In his classic A Parliament of Whores  – which is rapidly pushing 25 years old and in a just world would be required reading in every high school civics class – O’Rourke summed up the capriciousness of democracy, defending the contrarian idea that our democracy is, in fact, protected by the most counterintuitively autocratic institution of them all, the Supreme Court.

The SCOTUS – and the Constitution that the SCOTUS is supposed to protect – is that way because it’s intended to be immune from the vagaries of public opinion.

Here’s the money quote from Parliament (with emphasis added):

“In the final D-day invasion results, Normandy was a decisive winner, with 54% of the votes, while 43% of American soldiers thought we should re-invade North Africa and only 4% favored a massive land, sea and air attack on the folks back home.” There wouldn’t even be any democracy to defend if our every national whim were put into law. We’d sacrifice the whole Constitution for those lost kids on milk cartons one week, and the next week we’d toss the Rights of Man out the window to help victims of date rape.

After every crisis large and small – drug abuse, naughty words in music lyrics, gay marriage, food poisoning, people opposing gay marriage, mass murder – there are, inevitably, calls to reconsider whether freedom is really all that much more important than public safety.

And always, always, there’s someone out there willing to profit politically from those calls.

Especially when there are children involved.  Propose cutting welfare?  “Children will starve!”.  Propose paring back teachers union benefits or pensions? “Kids will turn stupid.  Invade Iraz?  The anti-war movement ten years ago made a grab for “absolute moral authority” by parading Cindy Sheehan in front of the cameras, after she lost her child (an adult who’d volunteered for the Army) in Iraq.  And it worked – until Sheehan went batspittle crazy and started making Mike Malloy look pretty well-balanced.

Anyway – this impulse is never as powerful as after an ugly mass shooting – and Sandy Hook, in which a deranged “adult” targeted children because they were children, was the ugliest since the Stockton Massacre in 1988.

There’s no question about it; losing a child is the most awful thing a parent can experience.     It strikes a chord in just about every parent, one way or the other.  It’s impossible for a parent not to feel something way beyond sympathy.  Some respond “I have to protect my children”.

Others respond “someone’s gotta protect my children”.

A group of the Newtown/Sandy Hook parents were flown to Washington last week, their every motion from leaving their homes to getting on Air Force One to arriving at the White House to listening to President Obama’s angry rant over the failure of his bill recorded in minute detail.  (It’s worth noting that it was only the right Sandy Hook parents were invited – and that for some reason no parents of black kids murdered in Chicago showed up)

They believed, I’m sure, very sincerely that the Senate’s bill – which would not have impeded their kids’ murderer in the least – was the right response to their childrens’ deaths.

But the prominence they got in the media – from a President who was desperate to pass his bill in the Senate, to get his vote in the House to try to use guns as leverage in swing districts in 2014, and to draw attention away from debt, deficit, spending, taxes, an ongoing war and the gathering disaster that is Obamacare?  That was pure, distilled cynicism.

Twin Cities talk show host Bob Davis – morning guy at AM1130, which is a cheap copy of AM1280, and a guy who gave me my first shot at trying talk radio again, ten years ago last January when I filled in for him for an evening on his old KSTP-AM night-side show – has taken a ton of flak for his remarks about the exploitation of the Sandy Hook parents and their grief (and especially other parents’ fear):

I have something I want to say to the victims of Newtown or any other shooting, I don’t care if it’s here in Minneapolis or anyplace else: Just because a bad thing happened to you doesn’t mean that you get to put a king in charge of my life. I’m sorry that you suffered a tragedy, but you know what? Deal with it, and don’t force me to lose my liberty, which is a greater tragedy than your loss.

I’m sick and tired of seeing these victims trotted out, given rides on Air Force One, hauled into the Senate well, and everyone is … terrified of these victims. I would stand in front of them and tell them, ‘Go to hell.’

The comment has gotten the usual manufactured outrage by the national leftymedia, and the inevitable chest-thumping “come here and say that!“.

The responses – on both sides, really – miss two key points:

• Davis is fighting cynicism – the Administration’s exploitation of the parents – with cynicism; major-market radio lives by the dictum “all publicity is good publicity”.  Wanna picket the station?  Send hate mail?  Burn Davis and Emmer in effigy in front of the TV cameras?  The folks at the station say “Great, go for it!”. The station can’t pay for publicity like this.  (No, literally – they can’t.  KTCN’s owner Clear Channel is freaking broke).
• Davis is right – but is focused on the wrong people.

The parents?  Yep, they’re awash in grief.  They’re trying to bring some meaning to a really, really horrible loss.  I sympathize with them.

Every parent worthy of the title does.

And the people who booked them on Air Force One, and who made sure they got prominent placement (some might say “overkill”) in the media, and who made sure they were staring down from the gallery at the Senators as they voted on the President’s bill, which would have been meaningless in fighting crime, would have made law-abiding gun owners more vulnerable to confiscation, and which was never intended to do anything but increase the Democrat party’s fortunes in 2014?

Them?

They can go to hell, all right.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

The Gosnell trial is in its 5^th week but until six days ago, the Star Trib’s policy on the case was:

 

 

 

 

 

[crickets]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What changed was this column by USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers, published April 11^th .  Shameful, Star Trib.  Just pathetic.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

NPR’s Nina Temple-Raston intones to her white, upper-middle-class, degreed, free-range-alpaca-wearing, Volvo driving audience last Wednesday that the Boston Marathon Bomber was probably a white extemist…

…because right-wingers love April.

It’s the anniversary of Waco, Columbine and Hitler’s birthday, after all.

I wasn’t aware the Klebold and Harris were right-wing figures.  Hitler shouldn’t be, although some on the “extreme right” have accomplished that ex post facto.

It’s also the month of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.  But not a word about Jewish extremists, for some reason.

This was two days before we learned that the alleged bombers weren’t right-wingers at all.

But remember – there is no liberal bias at NPR.

This year’s battle to destroy the Second Amendment is dead – at least in DC.

I’ve said it for years; the gun control debate is the most ironic battle in American politics.

The left – the movement that floats on Soros and Rockefeller and Allen and Opperman and Messinger money – loves to paint itself as the party of the working stiff, the fabled “99%”; it likes to pretend the right is white, rich and disconnected from the world.  The left, back to its historical roots, is built on the idea of struggle between classes.

And yet gun control is the most class-focused debate in America today.  Our elites – of both parties, in some cases – loathe the Second Amendment, or at the very least think it’s a quaint doddering relic.  It’s the American mainstreet – the real 99% -that supports the Second Amendment.

The plebeians just keep defying those patricians.

Reason notes this as well:

Whatever the merits and popularity of the specific measures that went down to defeat in the Senate on Wednesday, I think the Establishment fails to appreciate the depth of American support for the Second Amendment. NPR and other media have lately noted a growing libertarian trend in American politics. That’s not just about taxes, Obamacare, marijuana, and marriage equality. It also involves gun rights. After each high-profile shooting, support for gun control rises. But it tends to fall again in short order, as public opinion reverts to the baseline of strong support for gun rights.

And the fact that controlling guns is only a vital issue to 4% of the people indicates that the vast majority know the score; guns don’t kill people, people do.

I’m going to add emphasis below:

I was struck by this poll graphic in the Washington Post on Wednesday. Despite the virtually unanimous support for stricter gun control in the national media, along with other opinion shapers such as Hollywood and the universities, and despite the mass shootings that have received so much attention in our modern world of 24-hour news channels, Americans are becoming more convinced that guns make your family safer.

The media in particular exhibits a persistent form of Pauline Kael syndrome on the subject of guns; they accept gun control as an ideal almost completely without question, and seem nonplussed that the nation ignores them.

But yet they continue their narrative – that the NRA is a astroturf checkbook advocacy group supported by Big Gun and Big Business.  Yesterday, some in the media breathlessly reported the departure of Adolphus Bush from the NRA board as a “blow to the NRA”.

It’s not.  The group’s membership is up nearly a quarter since Newtown.  It’s just shown the entire country that it can shut the media down on Capitol Hill.  It’s just shown it commands more of the hearts and minds of this country’s real people than the President does, at least on the gun issue.

But that’s not the narrative, now, is it?

The alleged killer of the two Texas prosecutors and a spouse has turned out to be…

…the a former judge and his wife.

Not the “Aryan Brotherhood”, ad so many on the left and in the media desperately hoped predicted.

Government employees. I tell ya.

Watch for this story to vanish without a trace.
.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Article in Slate, republished in today’s Star Tribune on-line:

“So let’s drop the pretense. Most politicians standing in the way of background checks for firearms don’t really believe in freedom or limited government. They simply care more about controlling immigration than they do about controlling guns.”

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Lawmakers being more interested in curbing law-breaking than attacking the law-abiding?

There oughtta be a law.