David Brauer of the MinnPost – which seems to be peeling more of the wrapper off the idea that it’s a partisan DFL PR site every week, perhaps filling the “void” the Minnesota “Independent” left – tweeted about the crowd at the hearings for the Paymar Gun Grab yesterday:

#stuffwhitepeoplelike “@hartbeat11: Rm 10 at MN SOB filled with people interested in gun legislation.campl.us/nToK”

— David Brauer (@dbrauer) February 5, 2013

Now, David’s a good guy.  About as white as they get, by the way, but I do try to focus on the content of mens’ souls rather than the color of their skin.  Not sure where I got that.  But I digress.

I thought about responding…:

#StuffWhitePeopleLike – see also “Any MinnPost columnist or staff meeting.

Because it is hilarious – southwest Minneapolitan Brauer, at the head of a staff of middle-class, NPR-listening, Volvo/Subaru/Prius-driving U of M/Saint Olaf/Carlton/St. Thomas grads that is more Caucasoid than the Hutchinson Rotary Club, yipping about the skin color of Second Amendment activists?

As is often the case, Nancy LaRoche had a better idea:

 

.@dbrauer: You should visit Bill’s Range in Robbinsdale, then retract that silly #stuffwhitepeoplelike hashtag.

— Nancy LaRoche (@nwlaroche) February 5, 2013

Brauer’s defense – everyone on both sides was white, and it’s “interesting who got defensive”.

Because the role of journalists is to “afflict those who are peevish about being perpetually slandered”, I guess.  Especially as the Twin Cities’ media aids and abets the DFL in setting up the debate over Paymar’s gun grab bills as a contest between poor, beset, multiracial urban Minnesota and white, callous, redneck outstate Minnesota.

There was a story yesterday.

The Sorosphere started feverishly blogging and tweeting about it…

…and then it stopped.   And the mainstream media barely touched the story, as important and utterly newsworthy as it was.

Why?

Because the story’s main takeaway was that the NRA was absolutely right.

Emboldened by Betty McCollum’s plaintive cry for a “dialog”, I met my DFLer friend, AVERY LIBRELLE.  Avery was just coming out of point-chanting practice at the Union building in downtown Saint Paul; we decided to have a dialog over a drink or two at the St. Paul Hotel.

MITCH:  OK, a dialog about guns.  OK, I’ll start by pre-empting one inevitable strawman; there are gun controls that actually reduce crime.  They include keeping guns out of the hands of felons, and ramping up the sentences for gun crimes.  They’re the measures the “Gun Lobby”, including but not limited to the NRA, have worked for.  And they’ve worked.

LIBRELLE:  The NRA is a terrorist group.

MITCH:  Um…well, no.  It’s an industry and hobby group that does some lobbying.

LIBRELLE:  They are owned by the gun industry.

MITCH:  The firearms industry certainly donates money to the NRA, since they are the biggest, baddest group fighting for their right to do business.  They have the right to do that.  But the NRA has always been one of America’s biggest grass-roots organizations.  And it’s only getting bigger; it’s up 500,000 in the past six weeks.  And that’s people who pay $35, at least, for a year; not a ton of money, but not inconsiderable in these tough times, either.  And that’s up from 3 million in 1990.

LIBRELLE:  Guns are out of control!
MITCH:  Er, no.  Violent crime is steadily falling, even as the number of guns in society approaches one for every American.  Gun crimes are down nearly 50% in the past 20 years, along with crime in general.  And the NRA worked with sensible politicians on both sides of the aisle to make that happen.    In other words, the NRA has always supported gun controls that actually work – by attacking criminals, not the law-abiding.
LIBRELLE:  But mass shootings are out of control!

MITCH:  Well, no – media coverage notwithstanding, they’re actually less common than they were 20 years ago.  In fact, the worst year for mass shootings was…1929.

LIBRELLE:  But we have to dooooooo something.

MITCH:  We’ve done something.  It’s been working.  It’s just that we haven’t done the “something” that our media establishment and its’ left-of-center political benefactors want.
 LIBRELLE:  We have to control guns.  Period.

MITCH:  Did you just use “Period” to try to prove a point?

LIBRELLE:  Guns are out of control.

MITCH:  Er, where do you get this?

LIBRELLE:  You’re crazy.

MITCH:  Um – what now?  We’re having a dialog, right?  And yet all you’ve done is recite chanting points and long-debunked stats.

LIBRELLE:  I bet you’re compensating for something.  If you know what I mean.

MITCH:  Yep.  Compensating for the fact that there is evil in this world, yadda yadda.

LIBRELLE: You’re just a cranky middle-aged bald white guy.

MITCH:  And the last I checked the Constitution applies to us too.  So – do you have any actual facts to bring to this “dialog?”

LIBRELLE:  The NRA are fascists.

MITCH:  So in response to decades of patiently-assembled facts that support my case, you have ad-homina and chanting points?

LIBRELLE:  You’re cray-cray.

MITCH:  That’s not, technically, “dialog”.

LIBRELLE:  Why do you hate children.

MITCH:  This isn’t dialog.  This is me debating, you trying to trash me.

LIBRELLE:  Now you’re having a melt-down.

MITCH:  Don’t flatter yourself.

LIBRELLE:  I should wear a flak jacket.  You may try to kill me.

MITCH:  That’s nuts.

LIBRELLE:  Oh, now you’re attacking me personally!  There’s no way to have a dialog with you gun nuts!

(And SCENE)

In her column over the weekend, the Strib’s Lori Sturdevant does what she’s paid to do; paint the DFL’s toenails.

Yesterday, we noted the highly selective set of “facts” she used to praise Governor Messinger’s Dayton’s budget proposal.

Sturdevant’s column echoed the DFL’s current regimen of happy talk for the people, in obligingly noting that the current plan cuts the sales tax from 6.874% to 5.5% (before the local taxes that your city, like mine, may have larded on top of it all) while extending the sales tax to other goods and services.

Lots of other goods and services.

The DFL has to “Pay” for a half a billion dollar pay-off to renters, as well as a shopping list of goodies for Governor Messinger’s Dayton’s other lienholders constituents.

What Sturdevant doesn’t tell the reader:  the “broadening” will take a lot more money out of the state economy.

Page 10 of the “Budget for a Better Minnesota” shows that the net result of the changes to the sales tax will forcibly extract 2.1 billion more dollars from the “economy” (because apparently cranking up taxes on “the rich” isn’t enough to pay for A Better Minnesota.

Slide Ten from the “Budget for a Better Minnesota”, Click for a full-sized version.

In terms of specific changes to specific taxes?  That’s on Page eight of the “Budget for a Better Minnesota”:

From the “Budget for a Better Minnesota”, page 8. Click for a larger view.

The Democrats’ big chanting points – “fairer” income taxes, the cuts in state property taxes – are farts in the wind.

The two big sources of revenue to pay for all of that”Better Minnesota” are, according to the slide above…

• $4.2 Billion in new sales tax revenue (offset by $2.1 Billion from the rate cut), for a net hike of $2.1 Billion
• $370 million in cigarette taxes which, as we showed on Monday, will most likely not be collected.

So the sales tax “rate cut” is a smokescreen to cover the fact that the state will be exacting much, much more from this state’s economy (and more still, once the cigarette tax inevitably flops).

Governor Messinger Dayton phrases this as something inevitable – and Sturdevant, like any good stenographer, passes it on that way:

But Dayton wouldn’t consider asking households to pay a tax when they hire a lawyer or tax accountant unless he asked businesses to do the same. Fairness demands as much, he argues.

“This is going to be a tough decade,” Dayton told the Star Tribune Editorial Board last week. “If people understand that we’ve got a fair system, they’re going to be a lot more accepting of what we’ll have to do” to meet a rising demand for government services while federal help shrinks.

Notice how “leaving more money in everyone’s hands and cutting spending” never crosses anyone’s minds, even obliquely?  Even though that’s plenty fair?

The DFL’s had a standard dodge for that for the past forty years; “yes, you pay a lot of taxes, but they’re high quality taxes!”

He’s right: Tax fairness is important in a democracy. But competitiveness matters, too, in a place that aspires to be a player in the global economy — doesn’t it?

“Yes, but that needs to be measured in terms of value, not just taxes,” advised economist Art Rolnick, late of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve…the 50-year Minnesota success formula has been to invest in high-return “public goods” like a well-educated workforce, transportation and public safety. “We offer a great public environment,” Rolnick said. “That’s our edge.”

That’s been the DFL’s line – and, at the risk of sounding redundant, Sturdevant’s – for those entire fifty years.

But the world has changed a lot in those fifty years – and so has the upper Midwest.

In 1963, when the DFL was developing the tax policy that Mark Dayton just re-introduced with a huge arthritic groan last week, the Twin Cities were the unquestioned economic, political, educational, educational and social center of the upper Midwest.  And the United States was the world’s only functioning economy; Japan and Germany were still rebuilding; China and India were third-world nations in the middle of disastrous socialist experiments; South Korea was ravaged by war and underperforming the communist North.  Ours was the only economy that had the resources to both innovate and produce and export anything of value.   We could afford to give union workers a wage double the going rate and a lifetime defined-benefit pension!

And Minnesota was an industrial, financial and educational hub of an agrarian region.  The U of M was a big, powerful land grant research university surrounded by teacher colleges and ag schools.

Today North Dakota is kicking our ass economically – and even before Big Oil, Fargo was out-growing the Twin Cities based on medical and high-tech development.  Wisconsin’s growth (especially after adjusting for Milwaukee) is better than ours (more later this week).  And the education system in North Dakota has always rivaled and by some measures beaten Minnesota’s fabled system, at a fraction of the cost, while the University of Minnesota has become both a money vortex and a mediocre participant in the education price bubble.

And last week’s budget has more than a few businesses eyeing the environment across the borders – or around the globe.

So when Lori Sturdevant writes…:

When business folk come to the Capitol, they would do well to acknowledge that their competitive edge depends not only on how Minnesota ranks on taxes, but also on what those taxes buy.

…she, and the DFL for whom she shills, should not be in the least surprised if people start asking that.

They might not get the answers she and the Strib and the DFL have spent the last fifty years programming people to give.

The fact that Lori Sturdevant is a relentless shill for the DFL is one of those things that Minnesota conservatives have come to accept as background noise.

Her column from this past weekend – it’s entitled “Mark Dayton — A Man With A Plan“, and it paints Governor Messinger’s Dayton’s toenails about as much as you’d suspect from the title – almost serves to give you context as to why she’s such a DFL up-sucker.  Sturdevant is apparently too innumerate and ignorant of basic economics to even pass as a moderate Republican.

Give Gov. Mark Dayton this much: He’s found a way to raise taxes that the business community appears to hate more than an income tax hike for the rich.

Dayton’s proposal to impose the state’s sales tax on the services businesses buy — legal, advertising, accounting, computing and the like — had by week’s end become Competitiveness Enemy No. 1. In volume and vitriol, business condemnation of that proposal was outstripping the reaction two years ago to Dayton’s unsuccessful bid for a new income tax bracket for top incomes.

(“Vitriol” has apparently become “any criticism of any Democrat”)

Sturdevant’s propaganda piece column faithfully passes on what have become the DFL’s big rhetorical bludgeons in this campaign:

• Blame “the rich” who aren’t named Dayton, Messinger, Opperman, Mondale, Cramer…
• Lie about the economy – those of Minnesota and other states
• Give people a misleadingly incomplete picture of their own proposal
• Promise wondrous things someday in exchange for metric poo-tons of your money now.

It’s Those Darned Indecisive Rich Businesspeople!: Sturdevant starts by trying to portray Minnesota’s small businesspeople as flighty petty tyrants who just can’t decide what it is they want.

What keeping up with the competition requires of a state, it seems, is a changeable, eye-of-the-corporate-beholder sort of thing.

Sturdevant would have you believe that the business community can’t make up its mind; while two years ago Governor Messinger Dayton’s entire message was a class-war-baiting tax assault on “the rich”, Dayton has broadened the attack to every business, everywhere.

Sturdevant writes:

Dayton’s new plan still raises the income tax by about $1 billion on the top-earning 2 percent of filers. But the marginal rate he proposes now, 9.85 percent, is down from 10.95 percent two years ago. Instead of tied for highest in the country, it would be fourth-highest, up from eighth-highest today.

Sturdevant misleadingly presents this as an either-or.  It’s not.  Both taxes were burdens on business, especially small businesses.

On the one hand, Dayton’s “fourth tier” tax would have had a huge impact on a massive swath of small businesspeople, especially successful small entrepreneurs running “Subchapter S” corporations who may have had incomes over $250,000 – dentists, consultants, salespeople, and a fair number of high-tech recruiters of my acquaintance (while not affecting liberal plutocrats like the Dayton family, most of whose income isn’t earned).

On the other?  This round of increases hits nearly every business at every level; it combines a piddly decrease in business tax rates…:

Dayton seemed to be responding to some of the business lobby’s old anticompetitiveness complaints. He offered to reduce the state’s corporate tax rate from 9.8 percent to 8.4 percent, taking it from fourth in the nation to 12th.

…with a 5.5% increase in many of the costs of doing business and, for many service-related businesses, a 5.5% decrease in business (which is what adding a 5.5% tax hike does to any good or service, all other things being equal).

“Be happy to pay for a Better Minnesota”, Sturdevant says, “and shut up about it”.

“The Dakotas Do It Too!”:  Liberal water-carriers have been painstakingly scouring Google for examples of taxes that the Dakotas have that Minnesota doesn’t yet, but that Governor Messinger Dayton is proposing.

And they’ve gotten the chanting points to Sturdevant, who throws on a little unearned contempt:

“It’s the most damaging thing we could do for competitiveness,” Minnesota Business Partnership exec Charlie Weaver said of taxing sales of business-to-business services. Minnesota would join just five other states — including South Dakota — in tacking the sales tax on so wide a range of business inputs…For 46 years, apparently, there’s been a Minnesota tax policy that this state’s businesses liked better than South Dakota’s version. Before Dayton flushed that out, who knew?

Sturdevant should leave the snark to Sally Jo Sorenson.  Not that it’d improve her point, but Sturdevant trying to go Jon Stewart is a little like Judi Dench donning a “Hollister” hoodie and a sideways baseball cap.

Oh, she’s wrong.  It’s one of many disconnected factoids that the left has been passing off this past week; “SoDak has business service taxes!”  “North Dakota taxes clothing!”.  Yes, both are true; but those taxes are parts of overall tax burdens that are much lower than in Minnesota.

According to the Tax Foundation, as of 2010, Minnesota had the seventh-highest overall state and local tax burden in the US.  South Dakota was #49.  My native North Dakota was #35 – more on that later – and is, as of the 2013 session, working on slashing state  taxes.

Sturdevant niggles and nit-picks and snarks with all the grace of a German jazz band about individual taxes to dodge the real point; both the Dakotas have lower overall taxes than Minnesota.  And better economies.

Focus On The Luxuries, And The Necessities Will Take Care Of Themselves!:  One of the left’s most damning and damnable conceits is that all economic economic activity, the “fruits of all our labors” – both of them fancy-schmantzy ways of saying “the money all of us work for” – are first and foremost government property, for government to use, and use as much, as it sees fit and then leave what’s left to the rest of us.

No, really:

The governor has come around to the realization that compared with other states, Minnesota underutilizes its sales tax.

Or, put another way, the Governor Messinger Dayton sees that there is productivity in the state that could be further sapped.

 He endorsed extending it to services when he saw that doing so would permit a drop in the overall sales tax rate from 6.875percent to 5.5 percent. That would move the rate from seventh-highest to 27th among the states, to the benefit of businesses and consumers who buy already-taxed goods.

Yay, a tax cut.  It amounts to about a 20% cut to the sales tax rate.  That’s a good thing, right?

Sure – but only if if you’re not getting…

An Incomplete Picture: Just as Governor Messinger Dayton sold the state bills of goods with electronic pull tabs, the “repayment of the school funding shift” and the cigarette tax, he’s doing it again.

So what does that mean?

It means Sturdevant is abetting Governor Messinger Dayton in yet another lie.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A Democrat senator sleeping with underage Dominican prostitutes?  That’s no crime.  Screwing over the next generation is Democrat policy, he’s just taking a personal interest.

Joe Doakes

Heh.

Well, I’m sure when the media gets a hold of this story…

…I mean, other than the stuff they’ve known and been sitting on for nearly a year, naturally…

Comparing two events:

And at least one of the people at the “Gun Control Rally” is a pro-gun ringer.

But compare the media presence, hey?

(Via Andrew Rothman at GOCRA)

Minnesota newspapers, largely, supported Governor Messinger Dayton and the DFL.  They largely not only bought the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota’s” bill of goods hook line and sinker, but most of them worked tirelessly to propagate it, and to squelch dissent from it.

They studiously avoided, almost completely, any reporting that would have impeded the DFL’s rise to power.

The Minnesota media, at large, were among the DFL’s most valuable players this past two electoral cycles.  At the highest levels – the Strib, the PiPress, and at least the programming arm of MPR – they serve as the DFL’s Praetorian Guard.

But now?  Now that the governor is tacking 5.5% sales taxes (for starters) onto print services, advertising and retail newspaper sales?

Not so much:

Business groups and retailers complain that the proposal would cost jobs. As he spoke to the Minnesota Newspaper Association, several editors and newspaper owners complained that a sales tax on newspapers would hurt their industry.

Tom West, the managing editor of the Morrison County Record in Little Falls, spoke about his concerns during a question and answer session.

“We are the ones who cover local government and state government, and we are wondering why you would think it would be a good idea to have less information about government and what government is up to,” West said.

(Cynical answer: “Because you’ve served your purpose”.  See also The Minnesota Independent).

(Slightly less cynical answer: “While your contributions to DFL hegemony were vital, you don’t have the same political clout as AFSCME, the SEIU or MPR).

(Cynical and partisan but realistic answer: “How about not just “covering local government”, but turnin a critical eye on the DFL?  For once?”)

Others said that expanding the sales tax to newspaper ink, paper and advertising would result in job losses. Dayton said he understood the concern but did not back away from his plan.

Job losses only matter if they’re union.

Small papers aren’t union.

Big papers are – and we’ll see what happens there.

As to the rest of you newspapers?  You got the government you mostly worked for, largely shilled for, and for the most part operated as in-the-bag PR agents for.  Most of your editorial stances praised Dayton and the DFL’s return to power.

So now you’re saying you’re not Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota?

Suck it.

BONUS QUESTION FOR DFLers: What do you think happens when you tack 5.5% onto the price of something?

All other things being equal, people buy 5.5% less of it.

Ponder losing 5.5% of your business overnight.  Ponder hard.

Mess with the Second Amendment, and your bottom line is gonna bleed red:

A massive boycott sparked by the NRA and other gun-rights groups outraged that the nation’s largest outdoors show banned the exhibition of assault weapons has caused the show’s organizers to abruptly cancel the week-long event in Harrisburg, Pa.

The successful boycott was the biggest demonstration of support by the outdoors industry and outdoorsmen yet against gun control efforts being pushed in Washington and in several states.

It’s also a sign that the Administration’s attempt to drive a wedge between “sportsmen” and defense shooters is failing.

The show is the biggest in the nation and features several outdoors groups, hundreds of exhibitors and the most popular TV hunting show stars. It draws thousands from the Washington-Baltimore area. As the assault rifle ban became known, exhibitors, sponsors and the TV stars withdrew by the dozens.

The NRA is a huge sponsor of the show and pulled out Tuesday after Reed moved to ban assault rifles like Bushmasters and AR-15s at the show. A Bushmaster was used in the Newtown, Conn., shootings, according Connecticut State Police Lt. Paul Vance, and Reed said it was bowing to concerns about the gun in banning it from the show.

Real Americans know that guns are inanimate objects.

The rest of the right could learn a lesson or two from the Second Amendment movement; fire the Beltway consultants and do what’s right, for starters.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails to elaborate on the subject of this piece, assailing the MinnPost’s Eric Black’s participation in the resurrection of the long-forgotten “Second Amendment Was Written To Protect Slavery!” meme:

I forgot about this when I wrote to debunk Carl Bogus’ law review article.  Bogus relies for some of his historical evidence about firearms use on Michael Bellesiles, saying:

“Most militiamen were not even good shots.[168] We think of men as having grown up with guns in colonial America.[169] We assume they were sharpshooters by necessity. Did not men have to become proficient with muskets to protect themselves from ruffians and Indians or to hunt to put food on the table? Contrary to myth, the answer, in the main, is no. In reality, few Americans owned guns.[170] When Michael A. Bellesiles reviewed more than a thousand probate records from frontier areas of northern New England and western Pennsylvania for the years 1765 to 1790, he found that although the records were so detailed that they listed items as small as broken cups, only fourteen percent of the household inventories included firearms and [Page 342] fifty-three percent of those guns were listed as not working.[171] In addition, few Americans hunted. Bellesiles writes: “From the time of the earliest colonial settlements, frontier families had relied on Indians or professional hunters for wild game, and the colonial assemblies regulated all forms of hunting, as did Britain’s Parliament.”[172]

You remember Michael Bellesiles?  He supposedly studied probate records and found practically nobody owned guns in those days, so he wrote a book called “Arming America” saying the scarcity of private firearms ownership proved the Founding Fathers could not have intended the Second Amendment to refer to private firearms ownership, but must have intended it to refer to government militias.

James Lindgren at Northwestern University writes on The Volokh Conspiracy to remember his work taking Bellesiles down.   And I know you remember how Bellesiles claimed to have lost his research notes in a flood.

No serious historian believes Bellesiles today.   And to the extent Bellesiles is the foundation for Bogus, no serious legal scholar should believe Bogus, either.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Reading Bogus’ original article, most of the citations are to, well, himself.  But listing Bellesisles is about on par with listing Milli Vanilli.

Brian Lambert may now respond with a dismissive, name-calling bit of snark before going back to metaphorically painting Mark Dayton’s toenails.

Governor Dayton released his list of payoffs to his key contributors budget yesterday.

Is it a coincidence that the budget was called “Budget For A Better Minnesota?”

Maybe.

But the Governor released the budget at an 11AM press conference yesterday.

At 11:13, Carrie Lucking – the “Executive Director” of the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, one of the huddle of lefty non-profits via which liberal plutocrats and the unions launder millions of dollars and run the DFL’s entire messaging operation – tweeted:

Thirteen minutes.

Maybe Carrie Lucking is an incredibly fast reader.

Of course, she’s also romantically involved with Dayton’s deputy chief of staff Bob Hume.

A flurry of conservatives on Twitter wondered last night – is that how Lucking got enough detail about the budget, 13 minutes after it was announced, to call a critic a “liar?”

I thought that showed too much faith in Governor Dayton.  I think it’s more likely ABM gave the budget to the Administration.

Either way – I need your help here.

Back in the 2000s, the media spun up a tempest in a teapot over Governor Pawlenty’s involvement with an outside group, and the potential impact that had on the Pawlenty Administration’s message and policies.   It passed quickly, because there was no there there.  But the media gave it its’ 15 minutes.

Does anyone remember the parties involved in that?  I only remember the dimmest possible outlines of the episode.

But compared with the collegial clubbiness between the Twin Cities media – especially the Strib and the MinnPost  – and the various political non-profits and advocacy groups, I think it’d be useful for comparison’s sake.

UPDATE:  I need to point out that the heavy lifting on Twitter was done by Dave Thul and Sheila Kihne.  They smelled the rat.  I just wrote about it.

Brian Lambert took umbrage to Joe Doakes’ and my dissection of Eric Black’s anti-gun piece last week in the MinnPost, which cited a justifiably obscure theory by Dr. Carl Bogus.

Look out! It’s gun owners! At least, according to the MinnPost. I can just see the “job” interviews at the MinnPost; “do you now, or have you ever, supported an originalist interpretation of the Tenth Amendment, or ever blasphemed against the Commerce Clause?” Behold the liberal alt-media.

And Lambert took after that dissection with the keen analytical mind and the rapier logic I’ve associated with Lambo for the 26 years I’ve known him:

At the conservative consortium blog True North, Mitch Berg goes after our Eric Black on the issue of … “gun grabbin’ ”: [lengthy quote from my piece removed] The sweat stains are showing among our gun-fondling friends.

“Grabbin'”.

“Fondlin'”.

Must be that “reporter badge” doing the talking.

Er, “talkin'”.

The 2nd Amendment movement is winning this one.

Over the years on this blog, I’ve made certain observations about human behavior as manifested through online media, like blogs and Twitter.

I’ve captured and codifed some of these observations as “Berg’s Law“, a series of common observations that I’m pretty sure are universal.

One of the most commonly-invoked Laws is “Berg’s Seventh Law”, which states “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”.

I’ve rung up quite a number of occurrences of Berg’s 7th over the years. And I’ve found another.

Big-time.

(more…)

To:  Eric Black, MinnPost
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re:  The New JournoList?

Mr. Black,

You built your reputation as a reporter.  And for that, I give you all due respect.

I was a reporter, too.  Not much of one; a couple of radio stations, some free-lance print work.  Nothing big, and certainly nothing to build a career out of – but I did learn one thing, and practice it; a reporter is supposed to ask questions.

And while I apply only the broadest possible definition of “journalist” to myself, I do ask questions.  I’m told I’m not bad at it, at least on the radio; even a reporter on your side of the aisle commented on it (I’ll direct you to paragraph 16).  So it’s not a foreign concept to me.

Now, far be it from me to gainsay one of the deans of Minnesota political writing, but I’ve got a question here.

Last week, you wrote about Dr. Carl Bogus’ assertion from fifteen years ago that the Second Amendment was written to protect slavery.  Now, my friend and frequent commenter Joe Doakes – who actually is a lawyer – pointed out that Bogus’ theory is given no weight by the legal academy, because it’s been pretty soundly debunked and, more signally, ignored by legal scholars; Bogus’ theory is only kept alive by anti-gunners who like, as Doakes put it, to “borrow his degree to lend them legitimacy”.

So here’s what I’m curious about.

Bogus published his theory fifteen years ago.  It was roundly shredded in short order.  It was substantially ignored (beyond a few trivial references to incidental research) in the SCOTUS’ debates that led to the Heller and McDonald decisions, which respectively adopted the “individual right” definition of the 2nd Amendment and incorporated that definition onto the states.

And yet somehow last week Bogus’ theory was pulled from legal history’s scrap heap and restored to glorious prominence by the gun-grabber left.

Hey! It’s Confederate soldiers, defending slavery! The MinnPost ran this image in Eric Black’s story last week about Carl Bogus’ theory. I’m never going to let the MinnPost live this one down!

So I got to checking.  The first I heard about it was a comment on my blog on 1/17, which pointed to your article in MinnPost the same day; around that time, I started seeing a lot of lefties on Twitter chanting more or less the same thing.  Danny Glover and Roger Ebert had spoken or written about it, stating the “slavery” theory as settled fact, around the same time.   And the story was churning around the leftyblog fever swamp, as these things do, once the likes of Kos and  Crooks and Liars repeated the meme (which meant every bobbleheaded leftyblog carried it like it was the revealed truth).

Disarmed people – Jews, in this case – dealing with the SS, which is short for “Schützstaffel”, which loosely translated means “Department of Homeland Security”. Connect the dots, people. The MinnPost can run its inflammatory, searing, emotionally manipulative images, I’ll run mine. Mine happen to be good analogies based on historical fact, but whatever.

Now, a concerted Googling (and a reading of your piece) seems to show that the “writing” about the subject links back to last Tuesday, when lefty talk show host Thom Hartmann – who is sort of the Dennis Prager of the left, only without the intelligence or credentials – wrote a piece on the lefty überblogs TruthOut and Smirking Chimp , lavishly citing Bogus’ theory.

Oops, I did it again! More disarmed people! The sign above their heads says “Arbeit Macht Frei”, which is German for “Work Creates Freedom”, which was sort of the “Hope and Change” of the era. Again – you publish your inflammatory, emotionally manipulative images? I’ll publish mine.

And I thought the dynamics of the story were interesting; in two days, the “story” of Bogus’ “theory”, which had laid mostly dormant since being shredded in the court of academic and public opinion half a generation ago, suddenly was on the lips and minds and blogs of, it seemed, every lefty,  from the fever swamp to Hollywood (pardon the redundancy) to, well, MinnPost and a half a million chuckleheaded leftybots on Twitter.

I’ve been writing online for a long time, Mr. Black.  I’ve seen memes come and go.  The “come” side usually takes a while; someone writes something, it gains traction, it holds sway, it rolls away like the tide.  It usually takes a little while.

The Klan attacking black people! And therein lies the real truth – and the Berg’s Seventh Law reference; Gun Control actually has its roots in American racism. The first serious American gun control laws were aimed at – you guessed it – blacks. In fact, the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment was written in part in response to a Texas law aimed at former slaves who’d been shooting up Klansmen.

But the Bogus  theory went, metaphorically, from zero to sixty in four seconds flat.

Didja notice that?

Anyway, those are the facts; Bogus’ theory came, was shredded, went away for fifteen years, and suddenly re-germinated across the broad swathe of lefty opinion over the course of two measly days.  Now, leaving aside the fact that the theory is, well, bogus (as noted last week) – wouldn’t it have been a useful fact for the reader to know that Bogus’ theory has been languishing in academic obscurity for 15 years for a reason? I know, that would have been a statement against your interest and, I suspect, the MinnPost’s, but it’s kinda significant, no?

But here’s my question:  aren’t you the least bit curious as to the, er, pace at which this meme swept the left?  From “forgotten” to “conventional wisdom” in two days?

It almost seems as if there’s some sort of back-channel communication – one might even call it a list of journalists, absurd as that sounds – a, for lack of a better term, “Journo List” that syncs the leftymedia up on the major chanting points.

No, I know – that’s just crazy talk.  I know.

Anyway – did that strike you as odd in any way?  If not, why?

That is all.

PS:  Well, no.  It’s not.  Because while the theory that the Second Amendment was “about protecting slavery” is pretty much a fringe, fever-swamp conceit, it is a matter of settled historical fact and Constitutional Law that the roots of the gun control movement are intensely racist.

More at noon today.

To:  Everyone in the media and alt media that lionizes “PolitiFact”
From: Mitch Berg, person who actually cares about the truth
Re:  Suck It.

All,

Politifact’s “Lie Of The Year” was in fact true.

Please go reassess the tragedy that is your life and career.

That is all.

(Via Bill C)

I hinted at this in the past few weeks; one of the hard parts about being a Second Amendment supporter is that it feels a lot like the movie Groundhog Day.  Every time the left goes through one of its spasms of gun-grabbing, they bring up the same, exact, precise points every single time.  There is nothing new, ever, under the sun when it comes to anti-gun “arguments”.  Never!

And yet every single liberal, especially in the media, receives the same threadbare worn-out arguments from their elders during every spasm of this debate, as if they’ve discovered some new logical Killer Anti-Gun App.  And they trot them out with all the pride of a toddler that just made a good pants, repeating the moldy meme with a nod and a knowing, condescending wink, as if they think you’re lucky they suffer fools like you.

And you – me, in this case – shake your head, and re-muster facts that you’ve been deploying since before your children were born, and feel a little like the burned-out gunfighter in a Clint Eastwood movie; I’ve lived this day, or at least this argument, more times than I can remember.  I know these facts backward and forward.  There is not a corner of the left’s argument that I can’t make better than the lefty I’m wasting my time with.  

And on you go.

Fortunately, we’re not alone.

———-

The problem with Eric Black isn’t that he’s a lefty who’s been getting steadily more “out” about it for years, in the “pages” of the MinnPost, whose focus has been sliding away from “legitimate journalism” toward “being a DFL Public Relations organ” for this past year or so.

It’s that he believes, and reports, so much that is just not so.

Yesterday, he – oh, God, it’s that Groundhog Day endless repetition thing again – dragged out the theory by the gloriously-occuponymous Dr. Carl Bogus, that the Second Amendment was written to protect slave-owners.

I read it yesterday, and thought “even in monster movies, there’s only so many times you have to kill the critter before the movie ends”.  So with the esteemed Carl Bogus.

Fortunately, Joe Doakes from Como Park – an actual lawyer – took over.  I’ll add the odd bit of emphasis to Joe’s email:

God, not that old chestnut again. Carl Bogus? Really?

 Okay, facts: Bogus was indeed a law professor. He wrote a law review article for UC Davis in 1998. He admitted there was plenty of evidence the Founders intended the Second Amendment so ordinary people could resist tyrants. But he argued Southern slaveholders probably wanted to keep ordinary people armed to prevent slave rebellion. Therefore, the Second Amendment might have served two purposes: resist tyrants and oppress slaves. Bogus’ explicit argument is that ordinary people couldn’t have resisted tyranny and oppressed slaves acting alone so when the Founders said “the people” they must have meant “state militias.” His implicit argument is that since slavery is bad, the Second Amendment is tainted so we can ignore it.

Bogus’ arguments were immediately rebutted by other legal scholars, see for example “The Approaching Death of the Collectivist Theory of the Second Amendment” by Douglas Roots, 39 Duq. L. Rev. 71.; and “The Supreme Court’s Thirty-Five Other Gun Cases” by David Kopel, 18 St. Louis U. L. Rev. 99. The Supreme Court cited several of Bogus’ works in District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008) but the majority opinion expressly rejected his collectivist legal theory. Bogus was mentioned in Justice Stevens’ dissent in MacDonald v. Chicago, 130 S. Ct 3020 (2010) as the source for a single statistic on handgun violence, but not even Stevens endorsed Bogus’ collectivist legal theory. Nobody endorses his secret slavery theory.

Bogus’ legal theories are not taken seriously by Constitutional scholars, only by gun-control advocates hoping to rent his diploma to give the appearance of credibility. That’s why Bogus was appointed a director of Handgun Control, Inc. and served on the advisory board of the Violence Policy Center. That’s also why Eric Black cites him. It’s as if the Flat Earth Society suddenly learned of this brilliant mathematician named Ptolemy who PROVED the Sun does indeed revolve around the Earth and thus vindicated what they’ve believed all along. Sorry, fellas, serious scholars have moved beyond that hoax.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I’m thinking; is there an issue besides guns where a journalist can get away with so much guileless incuriosity as the gun issue?

And wrap that incuriosity in so much misguided-yet-inflammatory rhetoric?

Inevitably, the MinnPost ran a photo of Confederate soldiers along with Black’s piece. I suppose we should be thankful it wasn’t a photo of white guys lynching a black guy, huh?
That said, I suspect I just gave some clever MinnPost copy editor another bright idea for the next round of anti-gun articles, along with the next, inevitable citation of Carl Bogus as an expert on the Second Amendment.    You’re welcome, MinnPost.

Feminist dogma patrol, maybe, and even that doesn’t generally impact the Constitution.

Mark Dayton’s mental health?  That’s not so much “incuriosity” as “a gentlemans’ agreement between journalists and the DFLers who own them”.

What is it about Second Amendment issues that makes so many journalists act like journalists think mere partisan bloggers act?

———-

Nothing against Eric Black, of course.  He’s doing his job, which these days seems to be “advancing the DFL and Democrat Parties’ narratives”.  It’s good to have a gig.

But the mainstream media in the Twin Cities has gotten a free pass on their habit of just slopping whatever crap fits the DFL’s narrative in front of the public for far too long.

Manti Te’o grasping at straws. Also missing a tackle.

Perhaps Andy Warhol’s famous quote should be amended.  In the future, even fictional people will be famous for 15 minutes.

By now, most of the world has heard the too-crazy-to-be-true story of Notre Dame and Heisman Trophy finalist Manti Te’o’s fictionally deceased fictional girlfriend Lennay Kekua.  The facts are relatively few yet terribly convoluted for a love-story that might as well have been crafted by Nicholas Sparks.  What is known is that Te’o purported to have a long-time girlfriend in distant California who communicated with him largely via Twitter.  In a 21st Century George Glass sort of relationship, Te’o’s girlfriend was a digital creation of his friend Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.  The revelation of Lennay Kekua’s true identity has resulted in he-said/he-said allegations of whether Te’o was the victim or willing perpetrator of the elaborate hoax.

Captain Tuttle was unavailable for comment.

The details of the hoax have been engaging.  Theories abound.  Is Te’o, who is a practicing Mormon, in a homosexual relationship with fellow Mormon Tuiasosopo?  Did Te’o invent the girlfriend (or at least her Lifetime moviesque demise) to play upon the heartstrings of Heisman voters?  Or is Te’o the victim of a long-term ruse – perhaps the least plausible theory unless Te’o also believes he’s about to claim millions of dollars from a Nigerian prince he met via email.

The “real” motivation is less interesting than the motivations of the media, fans, and anyone else who makes up the sporting establishment to believe Te’o’s lies.  And whether Te’o’s initial motivation was to hide his sexual orientation or not, Te’o most certainly did lie to further his career.  The narrative of Te’o’s loss of both his grandmother and girlfriend on the same day was by Te’o’s own standards a near storybook tale of woe.  Te’o’s otherwise great season was bookended by every reporter gushing on his ability to perform amid such personal torment.  Te’o himself declared his greatest career challenge as September 12th – the date his very real grandmother died and a very big lie about his girlfriend got even bigger with her “passing” from cancer.

The timing of Te’o’s story coincides quite well with another high-profile web of lies – the Tour de Farce of Lance Armstrong’s career.

Te’o did not do what Armstrong did – no rules or laws were (as far as we know) broken.  But the connection of Te’o and Armstrong lies within the motivation for their appeal – our desire for compelling narrative that overwhelms a needed dollop of skepticism.  Manti Te’o having a strong statistical year is a nice story.  Manti Te’o overcoming death and loss is a much better one.  Lance Armstrong surviving cancer to ride again is a nice story.  Lance Armstrong winning 7 Tour de France’s in the face of cancer is exceedingly better.

The fans and media’s desire for narrative to drive accomplishments can be seen even when the truth isn’t at stake.  Adrian Peterson’s near record breaking year was given phenomenal coverage, as it should have been.  But while Peterson may win the MVP, just a few short years ago Tennesse Titans RB Chris Johnson ran for over 2,000 yards but didn’t even receive one first place MVP vote.  Why?  A lot of reasons can be suggested, but nearly breaking a record isn’t nearly as impressive as nearly breaking a record after reconstructive knee surgery.

Manti Te’o, at some level, understood this.  Sports “journalism”, like most reporting, has little connection to facts and almost everything to do with emotionalism.  Actions don’t count – narrative does and the anger being expressed by reporters against Te’o today is less for his lies than for what they reveal about the motivations of journalists.  As one sportswriter remarked, even the man who beat Te’o for the Heisman, Texas A&M QB Johnny Manziel, won in part on his ability to manipulate the media.  Afterall, there was no “Johnny Football”, as Manziel is known, on the Heisman ballot.

To:  Senator Amy Klobuchar
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re:  Powers

Sen. Klobuchar,

I have  a couple of questions for you.

1. Do you join President Obama in the belief that the law-abiding, legal gun owner is a public health risk and manifesting a mental illness?  I’ll ask you not to equivocate; yes, or no?
2. Could you please make your reasons for this support as public as you can, if applicable?  You’ve never been shy about using the media that serves as your praetorian guard to get the message out before; please don’t stop now.
3. If you support the President, could you please prevail upon Minnesota’s DFL legislators to publicly declare their support as well?  Very, very publicly?

You’ve spent the past six years in a calculated effort to create a public image of studied innocuity.  But given your massive victory last November, surely you feel secure enough politically to be honest about your stance and motivations.

I mean, you just know you’re bulletproof come election time, don’t you?

That is all.

Example 1: The Strib’s Josephine Marcotty and Bill McAuliffe in a piece yesterday on the legislature leaping onto the anthropogenic global warming express:

Science made a comeback at the State Capitol on Tuesday.

Example 2: Bob Schieffer says defeating the NRA is a moral crusade along the lines of defeating the Nazis:

BOB SCHIEFFER: …Let’s remember: there was considerable opposition when Lyndon Johnson went to the Congress and…presented some of the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the history of this country. Most people told him he couldn’t get it done, but he figured out a way to do it. And that’s what Barack Obama is going to have to do…what happened in Newtown was probably the worst day in this country’s history since 9/11. We found Osama bin Laden. We tracked him down. We changed the way that we dealt with that problem. Surely, finding Osama bin Laden; surely, passing civil rights legislation, as Lyndon Johnson was able to do; and before that, surely, defeating the Nazis, was a much more formidable task than taking on the gun lobby.

I’m starting to think merely ignoring the mainstream media isn’t enough.

Karl Bremer passed away from complications of pancreatic cancer yesterday.

Bremer, the co-author of “The Madness of Michele Bachmann: A Broad-Minded Survey of a Small-Minded Candidate,” died Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 15, at his house in Stillwater Township, from complications related to pancreatic cancer. He was 60.

Bremer was a tenacious muckraker, an award-winning blogger and an avid photographer. His blog — Ripple in Stillwater — was named Best Local Blog by City Pages in 2012. He also received several Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists awards for best use of public records.

I’d never speak ill of the dead.  Bremer had his friends and family.  I’m sorry for everyone’s loss.

But looking at all the references to Bremer as a “journalist”, I have to ask – is Brian Lambert going to ask to see his “badge?“, retroactively?

If the Minnesota DFL didn’t have the “American Legislative Exchange Council”, better demonized known as “ALEC”, to turn into a boogeyman for the low-information voter, they’d have to make them up…

…oh.  Haha.  They already did make it up.

Nonetheless, the MNDFL – in this case, Senator Scott Dibble – has taken time out from its relentless drive to put every Minnesotan to work to introduce a bill aimed at ALEC:

If the measure became law, anyone who promotes or distributes model legislation would be required to register as a lobbyist. Under the measure, lobbyists and lawmakers would have to disclose any scholarship funds they get to attend events or meetings.

“It is aimed at ALEC,” said Minneapolis DFL Sen. Scott Dibble, the bill sponsor. “ALEC is a very strong influential entity.”

So isn’t it just a little…bitchy to write a law “aimed at” – that’s what Dibble said – a group that does exactly, exactly the same thing as the “National Council of State Legislatures”, or the “Progressive States Network”, or the political arms of all the unions do; write model legislation and try to persuade legislators to pass them into law?

Oh, there’s an out of sorts:

The measure would also apply to other national groups that push model legislation, that is, bills that are proposed and written outside of Minnesota and then tailored to the state. Dibble said a coalition of lawmakers interested in environmental issues would also be forced to disclose more information in the bill became law.

Well, isn’t that special.

I’m not so much upset that the DFL is wasting the legislature’s, and the peoples’, time to count coup over the head of an organization that does exactly what a roomful of other groups do at the Legislature.

No, what we should all be upset at is the role the Twin Cities media have played in serving as the DFL’s handmaidens in this demonization.  The Twin Cities media have written countless stories in this past year, entirely at the behest of left-leaning pressure groups like the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota, about the “insidious influence” of ALEC – but you’ll scour the net in vain for even a trivial mention of the fact that the PSN, the NCSL, and an organic poo-ton of liberal activist and pressure groups do exactly.  The.  Same.  Thing.

I’d love to ask the likes of Rachel Stassen-Berger, Mike Mulcahy and Bill Salisbury why that is.

But I’d imagine the public doesn’t have a right to know that.

In case I haven’t mentioned it before – a billion thanks to Professor Joe Olson and the rest of the crew at the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance for ensuring Minnesota’s carry permit law was written so that carry permits are not public records.

While the safety of the individual carry permittee wasn’t the primary reason, the depraved indifference of some – many – journalists to the safety and well-being of people who oppose their editorial agenda, and their families, is reason enough to say “Thanks, Joe and GOCRA”.

We’re a lot luckier than the poor saps in New York, the legal, law-abiding carry permit holders whose names and addresses were published by the in-the-bag-for-the-left News Journal.

It’d seem that the information has been used to target the law-abiding citizens for attack.  A White Plains (NY) homeowner targeted by the News Journal was burglarized; his gun cabinet was singled out:

A White Plains residence pinpointed on a controversial handgun permit database was burglarized Saturday, and the burglars’ target was the homeowner’s gun safe.

At least two burglars broke into a home on Davis Avenue at 9:30 p.m. Saturday but were unsuccessful in an attempt to open the safe, which contained legally owned weapons, according to a law enforcement source. One suspect was taken into custody, the source said.

The News Journal’s interactive online map of…:

• law abiding citizens, who…
• …passed a stringent background check, and were…
• …issued carry permits by the State of New York…

…served no news purpose whatsoever; under any other circumstance, a list of demonstrably law-abiding people who’ve obtained a legal document under normal processes is the very definition of “dog licks dog”, journalistically speaking.

Since there’s no news purpose, the only reason for the “story” was politically-motivated badgering of law-abiding citizens.

Which is an interesting juxtaposition; in producing a “story” about people exercising their Constitutional rights in a thoroughly law-abiding manner, the News Journal, with the blessing (or silent acquiescence, which is the same thing) of much of the American mainstream media, abused their First Amendment rights; isn’t pointing a big red “Burgle Me!” sign at citizens the very definition of “fighting words?”

The gun owner was not home when the burglary occurred, the source said. The victim, who is in his 70s, told Newsday on Sunday that he did not want to comment while the police investigation continues.

Police are investigating what role, if any, the database played in the burglars’ decision to target the home, the law enforcement source said.

Prediction:  under political pressure from Andrew Cuomo, the police will play down any connection they find.

Don’t believe your own lying eyes, peasants!

The News Journal should be sued out of existence.  If the homeowner (and the other citizens whose privacy was frivolously gang-raped by their idiot media) decide to file a suit, I’ll be happy to send a buck or two to their legal attack fund.

…I’d bet a ton of money that the word “bipartisanship” turns up a lot less often in the Strib’s commentary section Over the next two years.

Liberals complain that if people have the right to keep and bear arms, then angry, unstable people with no regard for human life will use them to kill people for no reason.

And they were right!

In a segment on Piers Morgan’s CNN program, sports columnist for the Daily Beast, Buzz Bissinger, shockingly states:

“I don’t care what the justification is that you’re allowed in this country to own a semi-automatic weapon – much less a handgun. But what do you need a semi-automatic weapon for? The only reason I think you’d need it is, Piers, challenge Alex Jones to a boxing match, show up with a semi-automatic that you got legally and pop him.”

Abby Huntsman (Huffington Post) : “I’d love to see that… [laughter] in uniform.”

Piers Morgan: “I’ll borrow my brothers uniform.”

Maybe the NICS database needs to screen for Obama voters and left-leaning pundits?

Or maybe teachers?

Katrina was bad.

Sandy was, in many ways, worse.

Six days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, President Bush’s presidency had been declared a failure and a disgrace. It was all FEMA’s fault, we were given to understand, and, by extension, Bush’s fault. It wasn’t the incompetence of local and state officials, or the levee collapse (a failure, by the way, that impartial observers lay at the feet of another government agency going back years, the Army Corps of Engineers). No, within a few days of the storm’s impact, Bush was an enemy of the people.

Compare and contrast:

Six days after Sandy hit the East Coast, most of the press had utterly lost interest in the human toll, though thousands of people went without food, water, gasoline, or electricity for the better part of two weeks. The Washington Times reported two weeks after Sandy, “Bodies are still being recovered in Staten Island. Chaos reigns in the streets of the outer boroughs. Residents have taken up arms — baseball bats, machetes, shotguns — as crime and looting soar.”

All they lacked was a Superdome.  And Anderson Cooper to trumpet the rumor mill to a gullible nation.

It took three days for the Red Cross to reach Staten Island — ditto for FEMA. For those without power or water, that’s a very long time. What happened to the “lean forward” strategy FEMA had supposedly put in place? What became of the prepositioning of supplies like water and blankets? Prepackaged meals and bottled water languished in Georgia and Maryland warehouses, reported Breitbart.com.

It’s simple; after election day, the photo op disaster was no longer of use to the narrative.