Sally Jo Sorenson of Bluestem Prairie is – I’ll say it again – one of the tiny list of Minnesota leftybloggers who don’t deserve some sort of police surveillance.

But that doesn’t mean she knows how to tell a complete story – or do much beyond apes John Stewart lite snark at the C-squad level.

About a week back, she took a dig at Senator Dave Osmek and his take on the “Marriage Equality” bill while speaking to a class in Glencoe, in a post titled “Among school children: Sen. David Osmek misrepresents marriage bill in Glencoe class visit”.  Osmek said he opposed Same Sex Marriage on First Amendment grounds.

Sorenson (with a little emphasis added by me):

He must have missed this part of the senate bill. It’s right at the top:

363A.26 EXEMPTION BASED ON RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION. Nothing in this chapter prohibits any religious association, religious corporation, or religious society that is not organized for private profit, or any institution organized for educational purposes that is operated, supervised, or controlled by a religious association, religious corporation, or religious society that is not organized for private profit, from:

(1) limiting admission to or giving preference to persons of the same religion or denomination; or

(2) in matters relating to sexual orientation, taking any action with respect to education, employment, housing and real property, or use of facilities. This clause shall not apply to secular business activities engaged in by the religious association, religious corporation, or religious society, the conduct of which is unrelated to the religious and educational purposes for which it is organized.; or

(3) taking any action with respect to the provision of goods, services, facilities, or accommodations directly related to the solemnization or celebration of a marriage that is in violation of its religious beliefs.

And then this bit here, with more emphasis added: 

Or maybe this language in the bill:

Subd. 2. Refusal to solemnize; protection of religious doctrine. Each religious organization, association, or society has exclusive control over its own theological doctrine, policy, teachings, and beliefs regarding who may marry within that faith. A licensed or ordained member of the clergy or other person authorized by section 517.04 to solemnize a marriage is not subject to any fine, penalty, or civil liability for failing or refusing to solemnize a marriage for any reason.

I mean, that’s mighty big of the legislature, not unilaterally abrogating the First Amendment and all.

And if you’re not  a church, a religious educational non-profit or, I dunno, a supplier of rabbinical wine or communion wafers?

If  you’re, say, a baker?  A photographer?

Of course, Osmek did actually say…

“I’m afraid it will eventually inflict on religious institutions,” said Osmek. “The pilgrims came here for religious freedom, and we need to respect that.”

But let’s get past the idea that laws, or even the Constitution, actually protect law-abiding people acting in their own conscience, or that the First Amendment actually protects my right to hold government to ccount, or free association, or the right to decide how my children are raised, or the Second Amendment by itself protects my protect my family and property as I, a law-abiding tax-paying citizen, see fit, or that the the Fourth really guards from unreasonable searches and seizures, or the Fifth absolutely protects due process and the right to face my accuser in court, or the Tenth really enumerates powers.  It takes the Constitution and rigorous vigilance.

And it’s not that the left doesn’t see this, although the primary rights for which the left is universally, rigorously vigilant are the “rights” to expel un-gestated fetuses and make dung paintings of the Virgin Mary.

Osmek said that domestic partners are already given benefits by many businesses and corporations, and feels it best left to the private sector to create its own definition of domestic partnerships. . . .

So businesses get to define two committed people’s relationship? Would any married couple accept that?

It depends what marriage is, to you – doesn’t it?

If marriage is a religious thing to you, then you don’t care what government says about it.

If it’s about getting the same rights and benefits that guy/gal couples get, then why would anyone care? Put another way – “so government gets to define two committed peoples’ relationship?  Why would any couple accept that?”

If it’s about showing society who’s boss?

LA Police say they’ll no longer immediately release addresses of people who’ve been “SWATted” – victimized by prank false alarms designed to bring out a maximum, intrusive police response:

The Los Angeles Police Department said Thursday that they will no longer offer immediate information to the media on bogus 911 calls that target celebrity homes.

“We think that whoever is doing this is motivated by watching the police on TV and watching the helicopters come in, and we don’t want to allow that opportunity,” said Cmdr. Andrew Smith.

This is a good thing; it removes a motivation for these potentially dangerous pranks, and it might even potentially free up one of their overstretched supply of scarce reporters to cover the Gosnell trial!

Er, wait – no.  They’ll be busy filing paperwork to find out who’s been SWATted:

Smith said the department will also stop broadcasting the “swatting” calls so news organizations can’t hear the location of the star’s home. The media will now have to file a public records request, which can take 10 days.

They know what matters, after all.

One of the worst aspects of our current hyper-polarized political climate is that many institutions that the American people used to rely upon for something close to objectivity and reliable, politically-untinted information have turned into partisan propaganda.

Journalism is long gone, of course; the notion of the “objective” media died among anyone who pays attention nearly four decades ago.  The civil service bureaucracy is largely beholden to the big government unions.  Clergy at all too many mainline Protestant and Catholic churches are air-headed liberal chanting-point-bots.

And now, the left is trying to co-opt science – or at least how the public perceives science.

One of the cultural left’s favorite conceits is to try to wrap itself in the trappings of “science” – or, like the Wizard of Oz, at least enough trappings to keep the ignorant in line.

And I’ve seen few more brazen examples of this than Susan Perry’s interview in the MinnPost last Tuesday with Dr. Steven Miles, who Perry credits as “a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota”.

The list of titles lends credibility to Dr. Miles’ responses.  And apparently Ms. Perry thinks that’s enough.

As we’ll see, it’s not.

Establish The Boogie/Straw Men – Perry opens the door for the de rigeur nod to Alinsky:

MinnPost: Do you believe that public-health officials are doing enough to reduce gun violence? 

Before Dr. Miles gets to his answer, I’d like to draw your attention to Berg’s Seventh Law: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”

 Dr. Steve Miles: No, I don’t, and partly it’s because they’re hamstrung. Since 1996, the NRA, which also functions as an anti-science institution, has cut U.S. funding for gun-related research from a public-health perspective by over 95 percent. So, in terms of impairing the types of data collection and data analysis that’s necessary to do a public-health perspective, we’ve currently wound up in a situation where the science itself is impaired.

“Anti-science”.

“Racist”.  “Anti-Woman”.  “Bigot”.

They’re all slurs that the cultural left uses to try to cow conservatives into silence and compliance.

But the public health community impaired its own science decades ago by allowing itself to be co-opted into an arm of the gun control movement.  “Public health research” is paid for by anti-gun groups (a fact that’s never reported by a media that seems to have lost interest in afflicting the intellectually and politically comfortable).  Indeed, an amazing preponderance of “academic inquiry” into the Second Amendment is paid for by anti-gun organizations like the Joyce Foundation – legal, political, and academic, across the board.

As to the actual “science” that Dr. Miles is flogging?  We’ll come back to that.

Facial Absurdities – Next, Miles turns to the left’s canonical notion that without guns, everything would be juuuuust fine:

MP: What do you think will most surprise your audience on Wednesday about gun-violence statistics?

SM: Clearly, everybody understands that having a gun available increases the lethality — that is, the deadliness — of the suicidal impulse. If one has a suicidal impulse and there is a gun available as opposed to a knife, then the suicide attempt is much more likely to be lethal.

I’ll give Miles this much:  everyone knows that mental illness and guns don’t mix.

But availability of guns has little to do with suicide rates.  The suicide rate in the US is statistically identical to that in the UK, with its celebrated gun ban.  It’s a shade below Cuba, where only police and the military have guns.  It’s 15% lower than Hong Kong, where guns are not part of the culture; a little over half those of China and Japan, where civilian guns are strictly banned.

One – or Dr. Miles – could reply “but that’s a matter of cultural differences”.  And then one would be onto something,  something that applies across the gun control debate.

We’ll come back to that, too.

What’s so interesting is that it’s also true for homicide. The idea advanced by the NRA people is that homicides are basically done by monster criminals. But what really seems to be going on is that as the number of guns increases, as more houses have guns, as the gun saturation in the society rises, it’s the availability of guns that turn ordinary interpersonal disputes, including domestic disputes, into lethal events.

And if sheer availability of firearms were the dispositive factor in determining whether disputes turned lethal, then the streets of DC and Chicago would be relatively placid, and rural Montana, Utah and North Dakota would be shooting galleries.

But the opposite is true.

And in fact one could note that murder in, say, Chicago – where guns are legally illegal – is far from evenly distributed; some neighborhoods are as safe as suburban Fargo, while others are vastly more dangerous than Baghdad.

And one could fairly note in response that parts of the rural South – where guns are generally very available – have fairly liberal gun laws and high rates of violence.  But cities in those same areas are often quite statistically placid.

So when Dr. Miles says…:

So homicide looks very much like suicide in being gun-prevalence-driven.

…one must add “except when you look at actual facts and stuff”.

And?  And?  AND?  – One of the left’s favorite tactics in the gun debate (as with so many debates) is to give an emotionally-chilling (and thus manipulative) factoid with no context whatsoever.

Right on cue: 

MP: One of the statistics in your presentation that jumped out at me was the high number of American children who die in gun accidents. As you note, the accidental gun death rate is 11 times higher among 5- to 14-year-olds in the U.S. than the combined rates of 22 other high-income developed countries.

Hm.  That must be some number.

SM: It’s a very sad number.

And I’m sure when we see that number – the number of children killed in accidents – it’ll make our hearts ache.

When you have a gun in the house, for kids there is a 16-fold increase in the risk of a lethal accident involving a gun.

Oh, my.

So what’s the number?

So, despite what everybody says about gun education and gunlocks, it just doesn’t work.

Hm.  OK, so I’m sure the number will bear this out.

What’s the number, again?

A gun in the house is an accident just waiting to happen.

So you say, Dr. Miles.  So what’s the number?

MP: As you also note in your presentation, the NRA…

Er, huh?

What’s the number?

According to the CDC, in the entire US, in 2010 (the latest numbers the CDC provides), the number of kids below 15 killed by firearms was…

And yep, every one of those deaths is a tragedy.   Education and gun locks are no guarantee, but they do help.  So does training gun owners in general.

But as a “public health” issue, accidental firearms deaths come in well below:

• Drownings (832)
• Accidental poisoning (220)
• Fires (372)
• Car accidents (forget about it; 1432)

And about the same as the number killed in falls (74).

And so I have to ask (since no “journalist” ever will) – while, as a parent, I recoil at even one  child dying in an accident, I have to ask; what was Ms. Perry referring to when she said “One of the statistics in your presentation that jumped out at me was the high number of American children who die in gun accidents?”  Tragic, yes.  High?

Huh?

Schools Of Red Herrings Say “Huh?” – Miles next goes after the notion of armed self-defense with a hearty “I know you are but what am I?”

MP: As you also note in your presentation, the NRA often says that guns prevent their owners from becoming crime victims. In fact, they claim that huge numbers of gun owners find themselves in situations each year in which they are forced to use their weapons to defend themselves and their families.

SM: I spent some time tracking that down. [And by “some”, Miles apparently means “not a whole lot”.  But I’m getting way ahead of myself – Ed.] Mostly, they cite an article from 1995 by Kleck and Gertz, which cites 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year. But the Cato Institute — which is an anti-gun-control conservative group — took a different approach. What they did is [search] eight years of news clippings. They found only a few hundred events over those eight years — somewhere around 450 or so. That’s a long way from 2.5 million.

This paragraph presents its “data” so very, very misleadingly that if I were a teacher grading Dr. Miles’ paper, I’d swat him on the knuckles with a ruler and have a word with him about intellectual honesty.  To try to introduce him to the subject.

Let me count the misstatements, frauds and lies in the above statement:

1. Only Two Sources?  – Miles cites Kleck (whose seminal 1991 work Point Blank has been the main source for all sides in the debate), and an article by Cato – and that’s it?  Our choices are 2.5 million a year or 450 over eight years?  No reference to the FBI (which estimates about 80,000 deterrences a year)?  Or even Kleck critic David Hemenway, who attempted to “invalidate” Kleck with an estimate of between 55,000 and 80,000 defensive gun uses per year?
2. Misstating Cato – Cato’s research was of a completely different scope and intent than Kleck.  While the research leading to Point Blank was a detailed, academic, scholarly investigation of national figures (Kleck is a professor of criminology), the Cato piece was a glorified blog post, and admitted as much: “it is important to remember that news reports can only provide us with an imperfect picture of defensive gun use in America”; the Cato piece also notes that “Gun control proponents cannot deny that people use guns successfully against criminals, but they tend to play down how often such events take place. The purpose of this map is to draw more attention to this aspect of the firearms policy debate”.

Yesterday, we looked at a piece by Joe Loveland in the Twin Cities leftyblog Wry Wing Politics.  WWP rates my ultimate endorsement for a leftyblog – its author isn’t in line for a harassment restraining order and remedial logic class.

That’s all to the good.

But he cited a series of media polls about the public’s opinion on Universal Background Checks, listed off the top-line numbers…:

• CNN/ORC (89% support background checks)
• Quinnipiac (91% support background checks)
• Morning Joe/Marist (87% support background checks)
• CBS (90% support background checks)
• Fox News (85% support background checks)
• ABC/Washington Post (90% support background checks)
• Pew/USA Today (83% support background checks)
• University of Connecticut (69% support background checks)
• Gallup (91% support background checks)
• Associated Press-GfK (84% support background checks)

…as dispositive evidence that the public overwhelmingly favors universal background checks.

And unlike many leftybloggers, Loveland knows that polls aren’t, themselves, iron-clad.  He takes a whack at a pre-emptive defense of the results:

For those who quibble about question wording, these polls all asked the question a bit differently.

“A bit differently”.

Let’s take a look at the questions asked in the individual polls that Loveland cited:

• CNN/ORC (89%) – The 89% response came from asking if the respondent supports background checks “If the buyer is trying to purchase a gun from a gun store or other business that sells guns”.  Other questions came in much lower.
• Quinnipiac (91%) – “Do you support or oppose requiring background checks for all gun buyers?”
• Morning Joe/Marist (87%) – “Do you support or oppose legislation that would require background checks for private gun sales and sales at gun shows?”
• CBS (90%) – “Do you favor or oppose a federal law requiring background checks on all potential gun buyers?”
• Fox News (85%) – There were several questions; the one getting 85% was whether the respondent favored “Requiring criminal background checks on all gun buyers, including those buying at gun shows and private sales”
• ABC/Washington Post (90%) – “Would you support or oppose a law requiring background checks on people buying guns at gun shows?”
• Pew/USA Today (83%) – Asked if the respondent supported “making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks”.
• University of Connecticut (69%) – asked if the responded supports “a law which would require background checks before people – including gun dealers – could buy guns at gun shows”, which is, by the way, borderline-incoherent.
• Gallup (91%) – “Require criminal background checks for all gun sales”
• Associated Press-GfK (84%) – Asked if US should  “Establish a federal standard requiring background checks for those trying to buy guns at a gun show”
• Strib “Minnesota Poll”/Mason Dixon (72%) – “Do you support or oppose a universal background check on all gun sales, including those sold at gun shows?”

Loveland’s right.  They’re a “bit” different, all right.

And yet they are all exactly the same.  The questions – all of them – float a high-level proposal  (“Should we have background checks at gun shows?”) with no further context.

Like the pro-gun-control push poll from the 1980s I cited yesterday, which showed 85% of the people “supported gun control”, it was a hopelessly broad question – a gauzy proposal that gave the less-informed respondent no context that would help them actually understand the issue beyond the top-level sound bites – far from enough information to give an informed answer.

Valid questions on the subject, questions that provided the context needed for informed answers on the subject, would go something like this:

• “Do you support universal background checks at gun shows knowing that the checks create a paper trail leading to every gun and gun buyer in the country – which is de-facto registration?”
• “Do you support universal background checks, even though criminals don’t subject themselves to background checks of any sort?”
• “Do you support universal background checks, even though violent gun crime has dropped by over 40% in the past 20 years, and the drop has accelerated over the past five years, after the sale of 70 million firearms in the US?”
• “Do you support universal background checks, knowing that in California similar legislation has added about $100 to the cost of every firearm, pricing poor people out of the market for guns to defend themselves, their families and their homes?”

Yeah, I know – there’s bias in the wording of my questions; I’d be happy to work with a poll writer on the actual verbiage. But sometimes you need a biased question to lead you to the truth, and sometimes an “unbiased” question, like the polling questions, are biased by omission (and the uncritical reporting on them is biased by commission).

At any rate, I’m going to hazard an informed guess here; if people know the real-life consequences of “universal background checks” (they oppress the law-abiding, hamper the poor and are useless in preventing violent crime), the results might just drop below “landslide” levels.

Because the fact is, people know this already.  Second Amendment rights have expanded over the past twenty years, and violent crime has plummeted.   Obama’s gun-control push has largely fizzled; “background checks”, useless as they are, are about all that’s left, outside the gun-grabber liberal havens on the coasts.

Anyway – back to Minnesota, and Loveland’s assertions:

For those who argue methodology, these polls all reached a different randomized sample of respondents, and relied on different methodologies.

Perhaps they did; the geographic, demographic and ethnographic details weren’t included in any of the links Loveland provided.   

For those who worry about sponsorship bias, these polls were sponsored by a wide variety of news outlets and academic institutions.

And yet the questions they uncritically asked were all nearly exactly identical.

For those who stress that polls are blunt instruments, these polls did not find slim margins that conceivably could be slightly off.

That’s correct.  They found overwhelming support for a hopelessly broad question that, by its nature, filtered all possible context from the results that were reported.  

Of course, this isn’t just about polling “science” to Loveland.  The mission is to try to undercut the Minnesota GOP, which has been gratifyingly solid on Second Amendment issues this session.  (In-line thought bubble: Where the hell was that sense of purpose last session on the freaking stadium? Or in 2011 on the budget negotiations? Hello?)

Make no mistake, on the issue of universal gun background checks, Minnesota Republicans are choosing to represent the will of NRA lobbyists over the will of the overwhelming majority of Minnesotans, including gun owners, Republicans, Independents and Greater Minnesota citizens.

“NRA Lobbyists” are the great lefty boogeymen.  The heavy lifting on gun issues this session, as between 1995-2005 in passing Concealed Carry, has been GOCRA – the most successful grass roots group in Minnesota politics, and the grass-rootsiest successful group in Minnesota politics to boot.  It has no paid lobbyists.  It has no paid anything.  It’s an email mailing list and over 20,000 Minnesotans who write letters and make phone calls.

Legislators report that phone calls and emails against the DFL’s gun grab legislation run about between 50-100:1 against the gun grab supporters.

And Minnesotans are voting with their feet; 135,000 Minnesotans now have their carry permits, and at current pace there will be 200,000 within a year.

None of those figures gives you any more context than the questions in any of the polling Loveland cites.  Or, to be fair, any less.

Frankly, Minnesotans, Republicans just aren’t just not that into you.

And given that the “you” really doesn’t exist outside of a push-poll wording card trick, they’ve got the right idea.

“Wry Wing Politics” is one of the painfully small group of Twin Cities leftybloggers who don’t expressly deserve to be under police surveillance.

But that doesn’t mean WWP and its author, Joe Loveland, know how to take apart a complex issue, or dig beneath the hood of a lefty propaganda meme, better than the babbling bobbleheads at Minnesota Progressive Project.

Vide this piece about the polling claiming to show Minnesotans and Americans are lock-step in favor of universal background checks.  Loveland thinks the polls show it’s not even a debate anymore.

And on the surface – as in, the layer that a dust-rag and a spritz of Pledge removes – it looks like he might be onto something:

In politics, presidential candidates who win the support of over 60% of Americans are said to have won overwhelming “landslide” victories. Harding’s 60.3% in 1920. FDR’s 60.8% in 1936. Johnson’s 61.1% in 1964. and Nixon’s 60.7% in 1972. Landslides!

It is so difficult to get 60% of Americans to agree on politics, that such “landslide victories” are considered highly unusual indications of a historically overwhelming level of public sentiment.

So far, so good.  When Americans in all their infinite variety consider all the different issues and perceptions and angles that go into electing a president, a landslide like Reagan’s in 1984 (which, at 58.77%, is mighty close to 60%) is pretty much a mandate.

That’s with what should be a complex decision, like a Presidential election.  Now, you can look at the results of the past two elections and wonder if voters really do put all that much thought into elections, but let’s have some faith in The People and assume that there’s a certain amount of reasoning and, for most people, at least a week or two of thought that goes into elections.

But a public opinion poll? 

In Minnesota right now, Minnesotans of all walks of life, including Republicans, Independents, gun owners and Greater Minnesota citizens, are giving a landslide victory to gun background checks.

Loveland cites the Strib “Minnesota Poll”, which I’ll borrow here:

Pilfered without permission from “Wry Wing Politics”, but with a link back included. Go ahead. Click it. Click the picture. You know you want to.

Now, we’ve gone over this in the past; through most of its history, the “Minnesota Poll” has been a bald-faced DFL propaganda organ, so any conservative is going to distrust but verify their results.

However, I think there’s reason to believe they cleaned up their act in 2012 – the next election will be an interesting one.  So I’m not as inclined to reject the poll because it’s the Minnesota Poll as I used to be.  But they say “trust but verify”, and so I shall:

Loveland thinks he’s closing in for the kill:

The Minnesota Republicans’ point person on this issue, State Representative Tony Cornish (R-Vernon Center) shrugs off this Star Tribune Minnesota Poll with a cavalier “nobody really believes those polls.”

• Or this poll — CNN/ORC (89% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Quinnipiac (91% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Morning Joe/Marist (87% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — CBS (90% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Fox News (85% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — ABC/Washington Post (90% support support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Pew/USA Today (83% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — University of Connecticut (69% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Gallup (91% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Associated Press-GfK (84% support background checks)?

Before we address the polls, let’s take a quick trip back in time.

———-

When I first started covering the war on the Second Amendment back in 1986, as a fairly newly-minted conservative talk show host on the weekend graveyard shift at KSTP, it was a very different world.  There were eight shall-issue states, and many states and cities with absolute gun bans.

And when I interviewed a woman, Margolyn Bijlefeld of the “National Coalition to Ban Handguns” (which later morphed into either the Brady Factory or the VPC, I forget which), she flogged a set of polling stats that showed something like “85% of the American people support gun control!”

A landslide!

And so I pounced:  the poll leading to that question simply asked people if they supported “more gun control”, with no elaboration.  Yes or no.  No coloration, no flavor, no nuance.

For those who quibble about question wording, these polls all asked the question a bit differently.

Right.  A bit.

We’ll come back to this tomorrow morning and go through the fallacy of the “overwhelming support”.

We’ll call it “Back to the Future”.  Or that’s what 85% of the writers of my blog say right now.

[1] (I’ve been trying to find any reference to the polls from the eighties; happening as they did back when only Algore had the internet, I’m having not much luck.  If anyone has a pointer, I’d be much obliged)

Dana Milbank reflects the exposed id of the spoiled, cossetted, inside-the-beltway journalist in exactly the same way as Nick Coleman, Doug Grow and Lori Sturdevant do for the self-absorbed, smug Twin Cities journalistic “elite”; all of them wrap a lot of high-minded-sounding wrapping around “being a hack for a party narrative” .

But a hack is a hack – and Milbank may never have been hackier than in today’s piece about an NRA press conference which revolved less around reporting and analyzing the news than in comparing it with Milbank’s narrative and, worse, the prejudices he’s accreted on the subject over decades of being an “elite journalist” and damn glad to tell you so.

But give Milbank this; he doesn’t bury his lede.  He really, really doesn’t like gunnies (emphasis added):

The gun-lobby goons were at it again.

The National Rifle Association’s security guards gained notoriety earlier this year when, escorting NRA officials to a hearing, they were upbraided by Capitol authorities for pushing cameramen. The thugs were back Tuesday when the NRA rolled out its “National School Shield” — the gun lobbyists’ plan to get armed guards in public schools — and this time they were packing heat.

About 20 of them — roughly one for every three reporters — fanned out through the National Press Club, some in uniforms with gun holsters exposed, others with earpieces and bulges under their suit jackets.

In a spectacle that officials at the National Press Club said they had never seen before, the NRA gunmen directed some photographers not to take pictures, ordered reporters out of the lobby when NRA officials passed and inspected reporters’ briefcases before granting them access to the news conference.

The NRA has been the target of an awful lot of what would be called “hate speech” if directed at any regular schemiel.   Death threats have been the least of it, the background noise.

If a media outlet were the target of this much hatred – whipped up by the likes of Milbank – do you think they might tend to their security?

Of course they would.

Hint:  Try to walk in to the Washington Post office without an armed security guard giving you a brusque once-over, if you don’t have an employee pass.  Get back to us.

It’s The Beltway Way – Provinicalism?  Milbank’s got it!

By journalistic custom and D.C. law, of course, reporters don’t carry guns to news conferences — and certainly not when the person at the lectern is the NRA’s Asa Hutchinson, an unremarkable former congressman and Bush administration official whom most reporters couldn’t pick out of a lineup.

Well, then.

Let that be a lesson, peasants; your worth is proportional to how much you’ve hobnobbed inside the beltway lately.

Everything They Need To Know About Policy Analysis, They Learned From Aaron Sorkin – Milbank rattles off the left’s shopping list of shame:

 Thus has it gone so far in the gun debate in Washington. The legislation is about to be taken up in Congress, but by most accounts the NRA has already won. Plans for limiting assault weapons and ammunition clips are history, and the prospects for meaningful background checks are bleak.

Watch any of Aaron Sorkin’s poli-tainment; “The West Wing” and “The American President”.  Liberal orthodoxy is always presented, without question, not just as the only rational approach, but the only approach.  Which is one thing when you’re watching an overhyped TV show.  It’s another when you’re reading the blithe assumptions of the “elite” media…

…in this case Milbank, who’s assuming that:

• “Limiting assault weapons” is of any use in fighting crime.  It’s not; violent crime has dropped like a rock since the end of the 1994 Ban, even as the number of “assault weapons” in general circulation has ballooned).
• Limits on “ammunition clips” (grrr) are equally useless; even if criminals obeyed the law, mass murder is not a function of magazine size; having extra magazines is of much more use to defenders than attackers.
• The background checks being proposed, above and beyond the NICS system, are of any use in fighting crime.  They’re not.  Criminals don’t take background checks.

And yet all three are presented critically, as if questioning any of them is too absurd to think about.

If You Can’t Dazzle ‘Em With Fact, Baffle ‘Em With Strawmen – Milbank presents the facts that fit the narrative and ignores the pesky stuff next:

Now, The Post’s Philip Rucker and Ed O’Keefe report, the NRA is proposing language to gut the last meaningful gun-control proposal, making gun trafficking a federal crime. Apparently, the gun lobby thinks even criminals deserve Second Amendment protection.

“Gun trafficking”, depending on your definition of the term (and Milbank doesn’t define it, and I doubt that someone who refers to “Magazine Clips” would know how to define it if he had to) is already illegal, at various state and federal levels (unless you’re the Department of Justice, ironically).  The “gun trafficking” bill that Milbank refers to, the Elijah Cummings bill, is a sloppy thing that would ensnare a lot of innocent gun transfers with felonies worth 20 years in prison, and the NRA is right to oppose it.

Not because “the NRA thinks criminals deserve” protection, but because it believes the innocent do.

Milbank is either too lazy to know the difference, or lacks the integrity to say so.

Boogeymen! – Next, Milbank – trapped in a world that he never made – whines about the state of the world:

If the NRA has its way, as it usually does, states will soon be weakening their gun laws to allow more guns in schools.

And why does Milbank think the NRA “usually” gets its way?

Because it’s a voracious all-powerful monster that consumes all in its path?

If that’s what it is, why does Milbank propose it got that way?

Because a solid, growing majority of the American people support it and its agenda.  The NRA is rapidly heading toward five million members, and any legislative staffer will tell you that if a phone call representes the opinions of ten other people, then someone who’ll come out and shell out money to join an organization represents at least as many.  There are more NRA members in the Twin Cities metro than there are actual activist members of every gun-control group in the country rolled up together.

That’s why the NRA is powerful; unlike their opponents, they represent actual people in vast numbers.

And all those uppity proles have just gotta piss Milbank off.

Dana Milbank, Low-information producer – Get a load of this next statement:

The top two recommendations Hutchinson announced Tuesday involved firearms in the schoolhouse. The first: “training programs” for “designated armed school personnel.” The second: “adoption of model legislation by individual states to allow for armed school personnel.”

Hutchinson claimed that his task force, which came up with these ideas, had “full independence” from the NRA. By coincidence, the proposals closely matched those announced by the NRA before it formed and funded the task force.

Oh, cry us a river, Dana.  Everyone claims to be independent of their side’s 900 pound gorilla.  Major media claim they’re not at the beck and call of the Democrats. Governor Dayton claims Alida Messinger doesn’t make him dance like an organ-grinder monkey.   Let it go.

The task force did scale back plans to protect schools with armed volunteer vigilantes, opting instead for arming paid guards and school staff — at least one in every school. States and school districts “are prepared” to pay for it, Hutchinson declared.

Vigilantes.

Milbank seems unaware that citizens with carry permits are 2-3 orders of magnitude less likely to hurt anyone (unjustifiably) than the general public – including journalists.

The task force garnished the more-guns recommendations with some good ideas, such as better fencing, doors and security monitoring for schools, and more mental-health intervention. But much of that is in the overall Senate legislation that the NRA is trying to kill.

And why does Milbank suppose the NRA is trying to kill those passive “good ideas?”

Because they’re part of a bill with many noxious, stupid provisions.

Save It For “Lifetime Movie Scriptwriting” Class, Mr. Milbank – Milbank’s big finish is apparently also an audition for a Mad Max reboot:

If so, American schoolchildren may grow accustomed to the sort of scene Hutchinson caused Tuesday, protected by more armed guards than a Third World dictator.

Where does Milbank live?

A quarter of schools have armed guards already. In urban schools with over 1,000 students, the figure is already over 90%.   Many schools feature metal detectors, pat-downs and permanently-assigned uniformed officers.

Our kids, bombarded by our onanistic, self-absorbed media with images of carnage that bely the fact that schools are safer now than they’ve been in decades, and that violent crime is down 40-odd percent in the past 20 years and is falling faster as the number of civilian guns explodes, are forced to endure “huddle on the floor and hope you don’t get killed” drills – called “lock downs” by more clinical-sounding school administrators.

Seriously – on what planet is “huddling in the corner and hoping you don’t get murdered” better than “there’s someone here whose job it is to protect us?”

Note to Dana Milbank:  I’m sure your journalistic credentials, including your “independence” from the nation’s major gun control groups, are in order.

But if you were working as a PR flak for the Brady Factory, how would your writing be any different?

Can you imagine what would have happened if Michele Bachmann, rather than Sonia “The Wise Latina Woman” Sotomayor, had said this:

Mr. Olson, the bottom line that you’re being asked — and — and it is one that I’m interested in the answer: If you say that marriage is a fundamental right, what State restrictions could ever exist? Meaning, what State restrictions with respect to the number of people, with respect to — that could get married — the incest laws, the mother and the child, assuming they are of age — I can — I can accept that the State has probably an overbearing interest on — on protecting the a child until they’re of age to marry, but what’s left?

But #crickets.

To: Strib “Hot Dish Politics” Blog
From: Mitch Berg, long-time ex-subscriber
Re: Narrative

Hey,

This is a screenshot of the online Strib this morning: 

The Strib is devoting its usual vast space to whatever it is that advances the DFL’s narrative and undercuts the party’s opposition.  In this case, the non-story that a pro-marriage group compared their opposition’s propaganda effort to that of the Nazis.

I know.  Baaaaad marriage group.  Godwin Godwin Godwin.  No Nazis here.

The thing is, I’m scanning back through a decade and change of Strib coverage, looking for evidence of earnest tut-tutting about eight solid years of what was at one point the cultural left’s supreme intellectual statement, the “Bushitler” reference…

…and, mirabile dictu, I’m finding not a thing.

This comes, of course, at the end of a solid decade of clucking from the Strib editorial board about the need to “return civility (like we had when the DFL and the “Independent Republicans” were basically the same party with different hairdos) to politics”, wrapped up with constant badgering about the “toxic influence” of all the “vitriol” that the right-wing alt-media (and sure, maybe the left juuuuust a little, but mostly the right, according to the Strib, ignoring a decade and change of inconvenient fact) was making politics ugly and hateful and just not as fun for y’all as it was when Elmer Anderson and Wendell Anderson and Nick Coleman Senior painted each others toenails on the floor of the House Chamber.

And so a pro-traditional-marriage group has transgressed the narrative and compared the gay-marriage crowd with Josef Göbbels, and the Strib makes certain the left’s high-horse dudgeon is transmitted verbatim.

Because goodness knows the mainstream left has been so very, very scrupulous about being true to and literate about history in dragging Hitler references into the national conversation.

The thing is, there is a time and a place for invoking totalitarians.

There are legitimate comparisons between things we see today and things people saw 80-85 years ago in the streets of Germany; the drift of one side or the other to the extreme, the use of extremely martial rhetoric (“Wars” on this and that and the other group, designed to get one constituency or the other whipped up), the beating up boogeymen, the use of compliant media to serve as a regime’s praetorian guard…

…well, I’m getting ahead of myself, now.

Suffice to say, Star/Tribune, that your concern for civility and the historical sanctity of Hitler references (says me, mit meine Nebenfäche auf Deutsch und Geschichte, und die Jahre ich an diese Subjekte studiert, and you can look up exactly what that means on your way to learning the damn subject for real and not at the trite, Hollywood-via-Junior-High history level most Americans know it) is observed, its hypocrisy noted, and its sincerity mocked without mercy.

That is all.

James Taranto notes that while “Universal Background Checks” will have no effect on crime – serving as they do only to further harass and hamper the law-abiding, and price more low-income shooters out of the market – they will infringe on peoples’ privacy rights.

Currently, Federal Firearms License (FFL)-holding dealers perform these background checks online or via phone.  FFLs, by the way, are pretty tightly regulated; it’s not something you get for the asking.  On the other hand, Universal Background Checks would require all private transfers to get the background check.

And that means everyone:

Currently access to the FBI’s background check system is limited to licensed firearms dealers, who have an incentive not to abuse it lest they lose their license. If it’s opened up to all prospective sellers of guns–that is, to everybody–what’s to prevent someone from abusing it, say by requesting a background check on [Anti-gun WaPo columnist] Greg Sargent, who presumably has no interest in acquiring a gun?

The system only gives a yes-or-no answer as to whether the putative buyer is eligible to own firearms under federal law. But if you’re looking to dig up dirt on someone, a “no” answer on a firearms background check would give you a nice clump of it.

It’d put a big info-trawling tool into the hands of the unethical.

Think that won’t get abused?

Look at the last ten years in the history of Twin Cities’ leftyblogging and ask if you want that crowd to have access to a “there’s trouble here!” flag on every man, woman and child in the country.

Cam Winton is running for Mayor of Minneapolis.

Winton – a former DFL activist who told of seeing the economic light after going into business – is running as a fiscal conservative and social moderate, and not as an endorsed Republican, per se.  I attended his kickoff rally a few weeks back in Minneapolis, and had a pretty singular experience for a GOP activists, standing in the same room and cheering along with people who’d opposed the marriage amendment (which Winton also opposed) and listening to Ashwin Madia, a couple of lesbian marriage activists, and Winton’s business partner extolling the candidate’s virtues.

And it was in that crowd, I thought, that one might see a successful challenge to DFL hegemony in Minneapolis; a candidacy that attacks the DFL’s weak spot in Minneapolis – its incompetence at running a city – while ignoring the GOP’s big weaknessses in places like Minneapolis.

Now, some – including my friend John Gilmore – have asked “is Winton Republican or conservative enough?”   He, and they, point to the fact that Winton is a former Democrat, and was in fact a prominent enough activist through 2008.

As a former Democrat myself, I’m pretty forgiving of Road to Damascus conversions.  And if you want to grill a candidate to assess the sincerity, or at least integrity, of their beliefs, then a debate could be a fine place to do it.

And there’s the problem.

———-

The Minneapolis mayor’s race is an expressly non-partisan one.  Party identification doesn’t appear with candidates on the ballot.

The Humphrey Center – the U of M’s Poli-Sci think tank and, if you ask conservatives, DFL hatchery and retirement home – is hosting a debate of these candidates this coming Wednesday.

The DFL ones.

Let’s rephrase that for impact; the Humphrey Institute – a public institution whose mission is at least ostensibly not “furthering the DFL’s interests and hindering their opposition” – is hosting a debate for a non-partisan office in the city in which the Institute resides.  And they’re only inviting DFL candidates to it.

According to the Winton campaign, he has been invited to a second debate.  At this second debate – which will have virtually no media coverage – Winton will appear on a panel with Bob Carney and Leslie Davis, a couple of perennial candidate who are shunted into a side-debate to isolate the comic relief from the “Real” race…

…which, the Humphrey Institute has decided in its infinite institutional wisdom, is among the DFL candidates, who will get the “real” debate.

This brings up a couple of questions:

Is the Humphrey Institute serving as a DFL campaigning tool?: Why the seemingly arbitrary cutoff at “DFL”, in a race where every candidate goes to the final ballot (Minneapolis uses “ranked choice” balloting, resulting in slow, unreliable elections with no need for party endorsements or primaries.   Having a fully-partisan “debate” is not only against the Humphrey Institute’s stated mission – it’s supposed to be irrelevant to the contest at hand.

Is this a debate or a DFL campaign rally?:  The Humphrey Institute’s planned event will include five DFL candidates who differ on policy only in the most tangential incidentals. That’s not a “debate”, it’s a support group meeting.

“Debate” implies “difference of opinion”:  But this “debate” – the one the U of M will actually publicize, the one the media will attend – studiously ignores a sharp, articulate candidate who sharply differs from the DFL on some issues where the DFL itself knows it’s vulnerable – spending, taxes, regulation, public safety, infrastructure.

I asked the Humphrey Institute’s Dr. Larry Jacobs about this last week.

I’ll have that part of the conversation tomorrow.

When you’re a conservative, distrust of the media – like most large institutions – is part and parcel of the job.

You probably accept that, for whatever reason – from systemic bias to cultural confirmation bias to being paid off by George Soros – that the media has a comprehensive bias toward the left.

And you notice it on some issues more than others.   For example, you notice that anti-gun groups – for example, “Protect Minnesota”, led by Representative Heather Martens (DFL – 66A), a woman who has never, not once, uttered a substantively accurate or true original statement about guns or the Second Amendment – gets breathless, slavish coverage from the Twin Cities media, whose mania for “balance” obscures, in their coverage, the fact that the pro-Second-Amendment movement includes thousands of actual activists, while Martens’ group and the other antis muster…

…well, Martens and about a dozen of her pals.

And it doesn’t take a political rocket scientist (?) to notice that while their groups have virtually no electoral clout, Martens is apparently a big enough cheese among DFLers on Capitol Hill that she gets treated like, well, a Representative herself.

So after the hearings broke up last night, I watched who went where for a bit.

After he got done with the media, Rep. Paymar lit his afterburners and ran for the bleachers to meet Representative Martens and Jane Kay from Action Moms:

Kay, Martens and Paymar, talking about how much clout they have when those Million Moms finally show up. Someday. Honest.

DFL stenographer and former Strib columnist Doug Grow – now with DFL PR shop MinnPost – painted Jane Kay’s toenails:

Grow, Kay

Hey, maybe his story about last night won’t be pre-written!

And at the end of the night, you had pretty much every anti-gun activist in town gathered with the DFL PR coalition:

Grow, Kay, Nick “I’m Not The DFL’s Monkey” Coleman (from “The Uptake”), a staff guy and Martens talking, presumably, about what a bunch of wingnuts their opposition are.

Us gunnies? We had the fun down front:

Second Amendment attorney David Gross mixing it up with an anti who claimed we should “learn our history”, that firearms confiscation had nothing to do with the Holocaust. The anti, by the way, reportedly had walked up to the child of one of the GOCRA members in attendance and said “You’ll grow up to be a better person than your father” at a hearing last week. These people ooze class, don’t they?

Same as it ever was.  Back next week.

Governor Messinger Dayton famously appeared at the Chamber of Commerce yesterday.

And boy, did he give ’em what-for!

Gov. Dayton told a stunned luncheon audience that Minnesota is among the best places for business in the country, contrary to the Chamber’s message.

He said government spending is right in the middle, and that the state’s tax rank is dropping.

Dayton said he never heard the same criticism when Republican Tim Pawlenty was governor for eight years, and he asked his staff to investigate.

“And we could not find a single instance of the chamber calling for spending reforms during those eight years,” Dayton said. “Evidently, in your view, spending reform is needed only when a Democrat is governor.”

Messinger Dayton also said he was sticking firm to his promise to hike taxes on “the rich” (meaning “successful entrepreneurs and professionals who didn’t have the foresight or the fiscal and legal clout to move their money to dynasty trusts in South Dakota”, as opposed to, say, him).

A couple of observations:

Gov. Dayton told a stunned luncheon audience that Minnesota is among the best places for business in the country, contrary to the Chamber’s message.

He said government spending is right in the middle, and that the state’s tax rank is dropping.

Dayton said he never heard the same criticism when Republican Tim Pawlenty was governor for eight years, and he asked his staff to investigate.

“And we could not find a single instance of the chamber calling for spending reforms during those eight years,” Dayton said. “Evidently, in your view, spending reform is needed only when a Democrat is governor.”

A few observations:

Governor Whinypants:  Business never complained about spending on Pawlenty’s watch?   Huh?

During the first term, business complained about things like “health impact fees” – stealth taxes framed as compromises with the DFL in a legislature he didn’t completely control.  Just ask Sue Jeffers.   On the other hand, he generally held the line on taxes, pursuant to his pledge to the Taxpayers League.

During the second?  Pawlenty was faced with a wastrel DFL legislature; business rightly figured he was the last line of defense against the sort of pillaging the Messinger Dayton Administration and the Legislature have in mind.

And they were right then, and they’re right now.

Profiles In Leadership:  This is leadership?  “If you don’t see things my way you’re a poopyhead?”

Reverting To Stereotype: Conservatives pillory liberals for being innumerate, having  stunted knowledge of economics outside of Paul Krugman’s ravings – the type who think raising the minimum wage cures poverty.

It’s on stories like this that you realize; the stereotype exists for a reason. .

Dave Mindeman at mnpACT put it a little differently, by way of cheering Governor Messinger Dayton on in a piece titled “To the Chamber of Commerce: SHOVE IT” in a flight of Oscar Wilde-like whimsy..:

So Dayton dropped the sales tax proposal with the caveat that his increased income tax on higher income earners would go forward.

But they object to that as well.

“Hey, we left your top line alone, more or less; you can’t complain if we attack your bottom line, now, can you?”

They continue to promote the addage that this tax will affect small business…and yes, here we go, the “job creators”. They continue this argument even though the Department of Revenue has shown that only 6% of small business would be affected. And again, we are only talking about the highest portions of their income. If they are making substantially more than $250,000, why the huge objection to paying some back to a state that has benefitted you greatly?

I can see Messinger’s Dayton’s disconnect; she he has never worked, and has no concept of what business is about.  Not sure where Mindeman comes at it from, and I’m not sure that it matters.

Messinger Dayton is daring business to pick up and leave.

She He doesn’t think they will.

I imagine we’ll find out sooner than later.

The Southern Poverty Law Center – which is sort of the intellectual NKVD of the hard left – is publicizing its “list of patriot groups” to be watched.

“Patriot” in scare quotes, by the way, is the SPLC’s shorthand for “hate”.

Here’s the list in Minnesota:

• Alarm & Muster: The Modern Day Alarm Riders – Statewide: This is a national group.  Gotta say I don’t know much about ’em.
• Constitution Party – Redwood Falls:  Huh.
• Genesis Communication Network – Eagan: The broadcast home of libertarian on-air professor Jason Lewis as well as conspiracymongering huckster Alex Jones.
• John Birch Society – Statewide: Question for you: outside of SPLC news releases, when was the last time you even heard of the John Birch society?  I used to say that if the JBS didn’t exist, the left would have to invent them – but at this point, it’s more like “keep them on life support”
• Oath Keepers – Statewide:  The idea of getting law-enforcement agents and the military to pledge to uphold the Constitution even if asked not to is “hate”? 
• The Republic for the united States of America and The Republic for the united States of America — Republic Congress – Statewide: Huh.
• Tenth Amendment Center – Statewide: I supposed limiting the power and scope of government, as the 10AC advocates, is a hate crime in the eyes of the SPLC.
• We Are Change – Duluth: Fighting government abuse?  So hateful.
• We the People – Shoreview: I’ll believe ’em when I see ’em.

Wonder what I need to do to get on their list?

Heck, maybe we all already are!

I was down at the State Capitol yesterday for a press conference, as Representative Deb Hilstrom (DFL Brooklyn Park) introduced the gun bill/s we talked about yesterday.

The bills, as we noted yesterday, would exert the state to solve actual problems – close gaps in the background check system, add mandatory penalties for using guns in crimes or possessing them illegally…

…y’know.  Controversial stuff.

At the presser, I saw a big group of legislators from both chambers and both parties lining up to support Hilstrom’s proposal.  Reps, Senators, Democrats, Republicans – it was probably the most bipartisan assembly I’ve seen that wasn’t in the lounge at the Kelly Inn after hours.

Not just legislators; guys in uniform.  They weren’t just there for the fun of it – guys in uniform never are.  No, they were from the Minnesota Sheriff’s Association.

And I saw media.  Oh, lord, did I see media.

And Heather Martens was there, naturally; where there is truth about the Second Amendment, Martens will be there.  To lie.  And lie and lie and lie (note to the media who bothered to speak to her; she has uttered not one substantial word of truth in her years at the capitol.  Ask me).

And the “groups” she represents put out a call for their “membership” to turn out in force to oppose this bill – probably remembering the hundreds of Second Amendment supporters who turned out daily to oppose the DFL’s gun grab bills a few weeks ago.

We’ll come back to them.

One person who was not there was Doug Grow, from the MInnPost.

To be fair, I haven’t seen Grow in person in over 20 years; I might not recognize him.

But judging by the story he wrote about the conference, and the bill itself, even if Grow was there, his story was pre-written, and would have appeared in exactly the same form had Mothra emerged from the Supreme Court chamber shooting flame from wherever Mothra did whatever he did, since I never watched the movie.

Rep. Debra Hilstrom, DFL-Brooklyn Center, has discovered again that there is no comfortable middle ground when the subject is guns.

At noon at the Capitol, Hilstrom, standing with Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek and Rep. Tony Cornish, the gun-toting legislator from Good Thunder, introduced a gun bill that she said “can bring people together’’ on the volatile subject of guns.

“Gun-toting”.

Scare quotes.

No, no bias here.

The Astroturf Consensus

Grow, like most of the Twin Cities mainstream media, labors under the delusion that there’s a large, organized mass of people supporting gun control, and that they were out in force yesterday.

Her words were still echoing in the Capitol when critics, who had hoped for much stronger actions from the Minnesota Legislature, lambasted the effort of Hilstrom and a bipartisan group of 69 other legislators to “close gaps’’ in current state gun law.

“This is just a band-aid over a huge problem,’’ said Jane Kay of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, an organization formed in the days following the mass shooting of school children in Newtown, Conn.

Only in America can a two-month old pressure group with fewer members than there were legislators standing behind Hilstrom get the breathless adoration of the media.  Which is what “Moms Demand Action” and “Protect Minnesota” both are; astroturf checkbook advocacy groups funded by liberal plutocrats with deep pockets – with “membership” numbers in the single digits.

Provided they share the goal of fluffing the left’s withering narrative on gun control.

Of course, Grow wasn’t the only offender; Pat Kessler of Channel 4 asked Hilstrom why the bill included no universal background check which, he asserted, “70% of Minnesotans oppose”.

The correct answer – the polls ask people about background checks without explaining the consequences of those checks as the DFL and Governor Messinger Dayton currently propose them; they will result in a de facto gun registry, which is a necessary first step to universal confiscation.

More on gun-related media polls in another piece soon.

The Pre-Written Story

But Grow himself is the real problem here.  His piece, while short on the sort of insight that actually engaging people on both sides of the issue might have given it, is long on  evidence that Grow wrote the story long before yesterday’s press conference.

There’s the inflammatory reference to every leftymedia member’s favorite boogyman:

 The bill has the support of the National Rifle Association, presumably because it does nothing to require background checks on all gun sales and because it does nothing to restrict sales of military-style weapons or even the quantity of rounds in ammunition magazines.

Well, no.

The bill has the support of gun-rights organizations because instead of wasting time and effort putting niggling restrictions on the rights of the law-abiding that didn’t affect crime in any way the first ten years they were tried, they actually address the real problem; criminals, the insane, the addled, and the holes in the data the state sends to the Feds for the background check system.

(And while the NRA makes a nice, recognizable, stereotyped boogeyman for the lazy propagandist, the NRA actually has very little to do with the day to day heavy lifting of the gun rights movement in Minnesota.  It’s the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance that turned out 500 or more people a day to attend the gun grab hearings a couple of weeks back.  Grow either doesn’t know that, or doesn’t want people to know that.  You know where my money is).

More evidence that Grow wrote the story entirely off of DFL and “Protect Minnesota” chanting points?

Despite the fact that it’s a bill that authors hoped would unite people, it seems to be dividing. Yes, there was a mix of Republican and DFL representatives standing with Hilstrom, Cornish and Stanek. But there were no law-enforcement organizations represented at the news conference where the proposal was unveiled.

That’s false.

Here’s the video of the press conference: 

See all those guys in uniforms?

Scroll in to 1:12.  That’s Sheriff Rich Stanek, Hennepin County Sheriff, speaking on behalf of the Minnesota Sheriff’s Association.

Either Grow is lying, or he wrote the entire story with no knowledge of the facts of the story.

Short On Fact, Long On Jamming Words Into Peoples’ Mouths

Grow follows by saying…:

There also were no DFL senators, though presumably the bill will be as attractive to outstate senators as it appears to be to many outstate DFL representatives.

Grow throws that in there as if it’s a substantive fact related to the bill itself.  It’s not.  While most outstate legislators no doubt remember the DFL debacle of 2002, it’s also more than plausible Tom Bakk wants to keep his powder dry.

In other words, presence of no DFL senators is a non-factor, unless you’re a low-information reader.

Grow next swerves through fact – and in so doing, undercuts his own premise.  I’ll add emphasis:

Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, and the chairman of the House public safety committee, has indicated he has no desire to have the bill heard by his committee. Paymar is pushing a bill that would require purchasers of guns at flea markets and gun shows to go through background checks.

Yet, given the large number of co-authors with Hilstrom, there likely are ways for the bill to weave its way through the legislative process.

Yes.  There are a large number of co-authors; so many they had to submit it not one, not two, but three times to get them all on.  Over half of the House is signed on as authors of the bill.

Michael Paymar wants to thwart the will of the representatives of over half of Minnesota’s voters?

Putting Thirty Shots From An AR15 Into A Strawman

Finally, Grow takes his whacks at some of the legislators who’ve violated the DFL’s narrative:

[Representative Tony] Cornish, usually a lightning rod in the gun debate, said he was taking a different role regarding the fate of this bill.

“Several of my statements (in the past) have been controversial,’’ he said. “Today my role is to be a peacemaker.’’

No sooner had he said that than he uttered a statement that raises the hackles of those hoping for stronger gun measures.

“I want to thank the NRA for helping (on the bill),’’ he said. He went on to say that the bill “contains nothing for gun owners to fear.’’

Er, who’s “hackles” got “raised”, here?  And why?

Was it the involvement of the NRA?  Your dog whistles aren’t our problem.

Or was it the quote about gun owners having nothing to fear?  Is that the actual goal, here?

Hilstrom, in her seventh term, refused to talk about her true feelings of the bill. Rather, she kept speaking of the importance of “passing a bill that will solve real problems.’’

She did point out that she never has sought the endorsement of the NRA and that in the past she has received a “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ from the NRA.

OK.

So what?

If she’s doing the right thing – which, for a majority of Minnesotans, is “solving problems”, rather than attacking the law-abiding gun owner – then I don’t care if she’s a life-time “F” rating.  And I don’t care about her true feelings; I don’t care if she’s being used as an escape hatch by the DFL to get out of the embarassment of the Paymar/Hausman gun grab bills.

Guess Who!

Finally:  I owe the Twin Cities media an apology.  I’ve said that Larry Jacobs is the most over-quoted person in the Twin Cities media.  And he is.  David Schultz is right up there.

But in the “single-issue” category, Heather Martens – “Executive Director” and, near as we can tell, one of less than a half-dozen members of “Protect Minnesota” (and de facto representative of House District 66A) and a woman whose entire body of public assertions is lies, dwarfs them all:

Heather Martens, executive director of Protect Minnesota, derided the bill as “NRA-approved.’’

Boo!  Boogeyman!  Hiss!

Listen, MinnPost-reading dogs!  There’s your whistle!

“Any bill that fails to address the gaping holes in our background check law falls far short of the public’s demand for the right to be safe in our communities,’’ Martens said in a statement.

And there’s another lie.  The bill does address the gaping hole that exists in the background check laws.

No, not the misnamed “gun show loophole”, which is another media myth.   The real gap is  the data that the state isn’t sending to the feds; the Hilstrom bill fixes it.

GOCRA’s Mountain, Grow And Martens’ Molehill

Leaving aside the fact that Grow got pretty much everything in this story wrong – and wrong in a way that suggests not only that he wasn’t at Hilstrom’s press conference but that he wrote the whole thing straight from chanting points long before Hilstrom took to the microphone – the most pernicious thing about Grow’s story is that it tries to create the impression that there’s a genuine battle between two titanically-powerful sides to this debate.

There’s not.

In terms of legislators?  A bipartisan sample of over half of the House is on board co-authoring Hilstrom’s bill(s).  A thin, runny film of metro-DFL extremists is backing the Paymar/Hausman/Simonson gun grab bills.

In terms of the public?  Last month, GOCRA put out a call for people to come to the Capitol.  And they did.

No, really:

“Protect Minnesota” and “Moms Demand Action” put out a call yesterday for people to come out and protest against Hilstrom’s bill.

Here they are:

Well, not literally.  But no, other than Heather Martens, nobody showed up.

There are literally more DFL legislators co-authoring Hilstrom’s bill than there are members of “Protect Minnesota” and the “Moms Demand Action” put together.

So how much money did Big Labor spend along with Big Lefty Plutocrat to buy the Governor’s Office and the Legislature?

If you believe the Strib, it’s “around $3 million.

If you believe the Strib is going to tell the truth about DFL perfidy – and especially the big money behind the DFL, I’ve got a 50% stake in the next Lindsay Lohan movie to sell you.

Bill Walsh, long-time Minnesota political operative, did a little digging into the story – and he’s got something the Twin Cities’ mainstream media doesn’t want to give you; the facts:

I’m publishing his piece as a guest writer at Shot In The Dark today.

———-

Unions Spent $11.1 Million in 2012 to Buy Friendly Legislature for Gov. Mark Dayton

Bill Walsh, Shot In The Dark Guest Writer

A few weeks ago the Star Tribune published an article about campaign spending in the 2012 election focusing on two big individual donors – Alida Messinger and Bob Cummins. The conclusion? Each party has a big donor that gave lots of money, it’s all a wash. I’m afraid this story is all we’re going to get from the Strib on campaign spending analysis. Today, in an otherwise well written article on union influence at the capitol this year, Rachel Stassen-Berger writes that unions “put at least $3 million into elections.” I guess $11.1 million is “at least” $3 million. She’s only off by $8.1 million.

I took the time to go through the campaign finance reports of 111 different union organizations in Minnesota and nationally for the 2012 election. Spending ranged from Education Minnesota at $1.8 million to the Bemidji Central Labor Body AFL-CIO Political Fund at $250. State and local unions accounted for $9.1 million in campaign spending with national unions kicking in the other $2 million.

Union Contributions 2012 by

It took some time to come to the right numbers because many unions give money to each other for joint spending initiatives. These numbers reflect the net spending after backing out contributions between unions. It goes without saying that over 99% of the money went to DFL candidates and causes.

I blame myself for not getting this research to the StarTribune before they published today’s article. It really would have added some punch to their story.

For example, when talking about the nurses union asking the legislature for new staffing ratios that will drive up health care costs, it would have been useful to point out to readers the nurses union spent over $500,000 helping DFL candidates win back the legislature last year. As a matter of fact, that probably should be mentioned every time the media covers the progress of this legislation.

Likewise, when discussing AFSCME’s attempt to force unionization on small private childcare businesses, it would inform the reader to mention that seven different AFSCME organizations gave a total of $1.6 million to DFL candidates and causes in 2012.

The list goes on – Education Minnesota is trying to resurrect their statewide insurance pool legislation, MAPE and AFSCME are getting new generous employment contracts, the minimum wage is being increased and Dayton is following through on his promise to raise taxes on the rich.

But business spends a lot too, right? Wrong. It’s hard to get anywhere near $11.1 million if you add up the business money spent in the 2012 election. A business friendly PAC called Minnesota’s Future spent $1.2 million while the Chamber of Commerce-supported Coalition for Minnesota Businesses spent just $283,000 on the 2012 election. We all know the MNGOP received little support from the business community and the two legislative caucuses combined to spend only $4.1 million, and not all of that can be attributed to business.

According to today’s Pioneer Press, however, business interests do spend a lot on lobbying. The Campaign Finance Board reported that business interests spent $17.4 million lobbying the legislature during the 2011 session.

This may be the key to understanding today’s political environment. Unions spend heavily getting sympathetic Democrats elected to office. Once they are in place, it doesn’t take much money to lobby –the jury is already selected.

Business on the other hand, spends relatively little on the nuts and bolts of campaigns and prefers to hire lobbyists to try to influence the debate after the legislature has been selected.

What’s next?

First, Republican legislators need to hammer away on the $11.1 million unions spent to buy this legislature for Gov. Mark Dayton. They need to remind the public and the press at every opportunity to follow the money. Pay to play has never been more obvious in Minnesota.

Second, the business community needs to shift some of its resources to where it matters: the 2014 general election. Business will never match the collective self interest and desperation of the unions, so we need to reach a higher level of cooperation if we hope to recapture the House and win back the governor’s office in 2014.

———-

MITCH ADDS:  More on this in coming weeks.

SCENE: at the Twin Cities Liberal Blogger Collective, located in a secret chamber below the 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis.

Liberal bloggers Cat SCAT, Derek ROSTON, Betty Rae TORSTENGAARDSEN, GUTTERBALL Gary, and Senior Blogger Randy POSTAL are plotting out their next days coverage, along with cartoonist Kevin LIVERWURST.

POSTAL:  All right.  Let’s start working on today’s coverage.  What’s first?

TORSTENGAARDSEN:   Republicans are complaining about the Dayton tax plan.  My headline is “Republicans complain about Dayton tax plan”.

ROSTON: I’d go with “Republicans:  Tax Plan Is So Unfair!”

POSTAL:  Hm.  Doesn’t exactly zing.  New headline…I got it!  “Republicans Pee Pants Over Tax Fairness!”

(Rest of bloggers chortles with glee as TORSTENGAARDSEN types).

SCAT: How about Glen Gruenhagen’s remarks about gays?

(The rest of the bloggers “hiss”).

At the end of February – almost four months after the election, and 20 months before the next one – the Star Tribune does its explosive analysis of individual campaign contributions.

This, after a gubernatorial race where the DFL outspent the GOP on the order of 2:1, and a legislative race with a nearly-as-dismal margin.

And in a piece by Rachel Stassen-Berger with 23 paragraphs, Governor leading DFL donor Alida Messinger got one paragraph and a brief shout out in the lede.

Indeed, the raft of liberal plutocrats who have essentially taken over the entire DFL messaging operation took up exactly six of the 23 paragraphs, along with a brief mention that “Corporations and unions still pour cash into elections”.

The rest of the piece was largely focused on GOP individual donors who, it is noted, largely  sat out the election, or focused on single issues.  The influence of ABM, which essentially entirely controls the DFL at least in terms of message, is ignored.

Well, not quite:

Blodgett and others said she is not the type of donor who makes demands of the beneficiaries of her largesse.

Not “ignored”; “whitewashed” may be a better term.  I mean, if Jeff Blodgett says Governor Alida Messinger behaves herself, that’s good enough for me!

\Of course, when you can act unilaterally with impunity, demands are superfluous… 

To:  Everyone in the USA
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant who’s been through it all before
Re:  “Sequestration”

Hey, everyone,

You may not remember this, but we’ve been through all this before.  Remember the “partial government shutdown”, back in the nineties?  It was a whole big nothing-burger.

Oh, the Clinton Administration tried to make sure that the people felt whatever pain was generated – closing parks, cramping down on the voters.  But as a rule, the whole thing affected nobody.

And here in Minnesota, we had a “complete” shutdown two years ago (which, again, wasn’t – the courts kept most of the government going as “essential”).  It lasted a few weeks.  Then Governor Messinger Dayton abandoned it, when he realized Minnesotans, for all his efforts to squeeze and scare them – shutting down state parks and highway rest areas, threatening to lay off teachers – barely noticed any difference.  While the media did its best to prop up the Messinger Dayton line, the people of Minnesota heard the gales of calumny but saw and felt a big fat nada burrito.  Even Governor Messinger Dayton – as cosseted and isolated from reality as his staff keeps him – noticed; on his trip around the state to whip up support for the DFL budget, he saw tepid crowds of union droogs, and a few professional protesters, and realized he had nothin’ (which may be why Dayton makes so few public appearances these days).

So it’s time for “sequestration” – the “radical” budget cuts that Obama and the super-di-duper commission agreed to as a stick to lead everyone to the “carrot” of an actual federal budget.  We’ve been waiting nearly 1,400 days for a budget from the Democrat-addled Senate, so Washington figured a “stick” was needed.

By the way – how radical and drastic are those cuts?:

Yep. They’re not even cuts.  They’re reductions in the increase.  Indeed, almost completely worthless, if cutting spending is your goal, but really nothing but a fart in the wind; sort of like “dropping HBO” in your family budget, even though your gas bill is rising and your teenage kids are costing more and more.

Obama will try to make “sequestration” hurt; he’ll slow down the TSA lines, he’ll gundeck some ship overhauls and clamp down some military maintenance budgets, he’ll inveigle some big cities to lay off a few cops and teachers, he’ll shut down Yellowstone as the cameras record photos of crestfallen children.  Hell, Joe Biden may even personally try to close the gates at Disney World.

But there is no there, there.  It’s a scare tactic, engineered by Obama and his compliant media.

It needs to be ignored.

That is all.

Her lips are moving.

More below.

———-

The Strib’s longtime outdoor writer Dennis Anderson wrote an excellent profile of state representative Tony Cornish over the weekend.  Cornish, with the departure of Pat Pariseau and Linda Boudreaux from the Legislature, has taken on the role of key defender of the Second Amendment in the Legislature:

In St. Paul, however, where he’s the face of gun rights at the Capitol, he’s sometimes less popular, even downright loathed, particularly this legislative session, when a minor blizzard of gun bills has been introduced.

Not to worry, Cornish says confidently, he and other Republicans have enough votes, along with those from rural DFLers, to block any proposals that gun-rights advocates oppose.

“They won’t pass,” he said.

A one-time city cop, deputy sheriff, conservation officer, police chief and, yes — speaking of big guns — Army tank commander, Cornish legally packs what he advocates, either a .40 caliber Glock on his hip — if he’s wearing a sport coat — or a Smith & Wesson in his pocket.

“After being shot at a couple of times and receiving a number of death threats, and never knowing whether I might come across someone I arrested years ago,” he said. “Well, I guess after 36 years as a peace officer, I’d just feel bare without it.”

Plain-speaking, Cornish seems at times a throwback among legislators, reminiscent, in his forthrightness, of Charlie Berg, the onetime DFLer, onetime Republican, mostly independent lawmaker from Chokio in west-central Minnesota.

Sometimes underestimated, in that respect he’s also not unlike the outwardly wacky but ultimately effective retired Sen. Bob Lessard of International Falls.

Of course, every time the “G” word pops up in the Twin Cities mainstream media, the media beat a path to the door of Heather Martens, “Executive Director” (also likely only actual member) of “Protect Minnesota”.  Maybe the editors insist, and she’s the only anti-gun person in their collective rolodex.

The media seems to be unaware of the simple fact that every single substantive declaration about the gun issue, that Heather Martens has ever made, beyond the gurgitation of the odd statistic, has been a lie.

Every single one.

Without exception.

I have been documenting this in this space for over a decade now.

And Dennis Anderson’s piece, like every piece of coverage Martens has ever gotten in her misbegotten public life, is more of the same; I’ll add emphasis to the most dissociative of Martens’ lies:

” [Cornish says the] …background-check system needs to be improved, but it’s complicated and it will cost money,” he said. “If we mandate upgrades to the system, we’ll have to get it right, and it’s going to cost money.”

Heather Martens of Protect Minnesota, a group that would like to see gun laws tightened, wants Cornish to go further.

“We just don’t agree with him, and we don’t think he operates in good faith,” Martens said. “He believes guns are an unlimited right, no matter how many people die. We believe gun deaths can be prevented and that prevention is warranted.”

Martens is ranting – and she’s counting on the public to be both stupid and gullible too.

Cornish, like every single significant pro-Second-Amendment figure, anywhere, believes that there are limits:  criminals, the insane, the chemically-addled, at a fair and clear statutory point, must not get guns.  People who use guns to commit crimes must be punished.  People who get carry permits must know the laws and know how to handle their guns without hurting themselves or others.

Those are limits.  Those are gun controls that, unlike anything Heather Martens says (or hands off to the legislature), actually work.

Cornish disagrees. Background checks on gun sales between private parties? “No.” Restrictions on modern sporting arms, or what commonly are called assault-style rifles of the kind he uses to hunt coyotes? “No.” Prohibition of high-capacity magazines? “No.”

“None of those will reduce crime,” he said. “And none of those bills will pass. We’ve got the votes to block them.”

Thank God for Tony Cornish.

And in the Almighty’s own way, thank God for Heather Martens.  The harsh, incoherently-gabbling, upper-middle-class elitist pathological liar symbolizes the myopia and hypocrisy of the gun control control movement as capably as anyone since Carl Rowan.

Republican “xeroxes” a bill:  Leftymedia chants indignantly.

Democrat not only copies and pastes a bill from a special interest group, but allows that special interest’s registered lobbyist to sit in in the role of a legislator to introduce and read the bill into the record?

{crickets}

Berg’s Seventh Law may be the single most prescient thing I’ve ever written.

Remember when the left thought Sarah Palin’s jaunty “I’m Not Retreating, I’m Reloading” was a lethal threat?

I know; any human being with an IQ above plant life knew that the left was being drama-queeny at best, cynically manipulating an argument for low-information voters at worst.

Beyond that?  It was Berg’s Seventh Law in action.  Because while there’s not a psychopath simmering inside every liberal, or even most, it’s an ideology that promotes and rewards it.

As with this “guy”:

I guess I’ll rethink my request of @letargets for a @maryfranson (don’t worry, Mary, I just throw used gum). #nogunspo.st/ffMEnx

— Richard Molby (@rvm4) February 20, 2013

@LETargets is, of course “Law Enforcement Targets“, a Minnesota company that’s gotten flak for making custom targets of armed children, senior citizens and pregnant women, to help de-sensitize police officers to the idea of shooting to kill any of them.

The police’s current focus on “officer safety” at the expense of “citizens’ safety” is certainly worth discussing.

Desensitizing people to killing conservative legislators?  It’s worth condemning.

I sent the following to Nick Coleman – the “Executive Editor” of Twin Cities’ videoleftyblog The Uptake, which appears to have jettisoned all pretense of being anything but, well, a videoleftyblog – after reading his email to the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance last night:

Mr. Coleman,

I caught your note to Andrew Rothman on Facebook.

As a rigidly law-abiding gun owner, I have a special interest in policing my own.

So if you would please: from whom are you getting this “growing sense” at the Capitol?

Any actual legislators you could name? Did they have complaints about any specific behavior, from any particular attendees?

If they felt intimidated, was there a reason they didn’t notify Capitol Security – who said, Mr. Rothman noted, that the crowd was better-behaved than most?

Finally, Mr. Coleman – as you have publicly acknowledged being a carry permit holder, how do people “find it possible” do do anything around you, knowing that you may be armed? It’s a serious question.

Thanks in advance.

Mitch Berg

Uppity Peasant

I’m not exactly expecting an answer.  The one time Nick answered a question of mine, it was…

…well, memorable.

Stay classy.

That is all.

Common threads are noted in red.

2008:  Joseph Sparkman is found hanging from a tree in a rural area with “pro-GOP” graffiti scrawled on him.  The media leaps to conclusions, blaming the right.  It turns out Sparkman, as one of his last demented acts on earth, opted to try to use his death as a crude smear of the conservatives he hated, including Michele Bachmann.

2009:  After the media publicly assumed a Republican or “Tea Partier” vandalized the Colorado Democrat party headquarters, it was discovered that the vandal, Maurice Schwenkler, was a Democrat hoping to smear his opposition.

2010: After Joseph Stack flew his plane into an office building in Austin TX, the media assumed he was a right-winger.  He turned out – naturally – to be a left-winger.  

2012:  ABC News broadcasts report – picked up by other media – that James Holmes, the Aurora theatre shooter, was a Tea Party activist.  He was very much not.

2013:  After a killing spree teed off by a screeching, shrill leftist political screed, Christopher Dorner’s left-wing politics pass with scarcely a mention in the media.

It seems an odd time for them to rediscover the virtues of detachment, doesn’t it?

The media is acting like this is a big story:

A Sri Lankan prisoner who tried to hide his mobile phone during a search of his cell was caught out when guards heard ring tones from his rear-end, a hospital official said on Friday.

The 58-year-old convict had to be admitted to the national hospital in Colombo where doctors later retrieved the handset from his rectum.

Heck, that’s nothing.  Mark Dayton has most of the Twin Cities media in about the same place.