Read this piece in the MinnPost, entitled “House DFL opens session with priority of paying back $550 million to schools”
What’s missing?
It’s got the who, what, when, where, why and how (DFL, pay back the “shift”, or accounting gimmick that post-dates checks until after some future date, this session, at the Capitol, etc).
It’s got some quotes from DFL leaders:
Speaker Paul Thissen, sworn in Tuesday along with the rest of Minnesota’s legislators, said the ceremonial House File 1 would be a bill that returns roughly $550 million to the state’s schools. DFLers campaigned on the issue, but it hadn’t surfaced on many pre-legislative to-do lists.
And it’s suffused with the sense that all those DFLers are plugging away For The Children.
What does it not have?
Any reference to the fact that the GOP-dominated 2012 session passed a bill to pay back the shift last year. Governor Dayton vetoed it.
Precisely so that the media would have this headline, this year.
Heck of a job, MinnPost. You may take your place in the ranks of the Minnesota Praetorian Guard, doing your bit for the DFL.
Last week: the Lower Hudson Journal News – an anti-gun rag in metro New York – published an interactive map of all legal carry permit holders in Rockland and Westchester counties of New York.
A Clarkstown police report issued on December 28, 2012, confirmed that The Journal News has hired armed security guards from New City-based RGA Investigations and that they are manning the newspaper’s Rockland County headquarters at 1 Crosfield Ave., West Nyack, through at least tomorrow, Wednesday, January 2, 2013.
According to police reports on public record, Journal News Rockland Editor Caryn A. McBride was alarmed by the volume of “negative correspondence,” namely an avalanche of phone calls and emails to the Journal News office, following the newspaper’s publishing of a map of all pistol permit holders in Rockland and Westchester.
“Negative correspondence?” You mean, threats?
McBride had filed at least two reports with the Clarkstown Police Department due to perceived threats. However, the police did not find the communications in question actually threatening. Incident-Report 2012-00033099 describes McBride telling police she was worried because an email writer wondered “what McBride would get in her mail now.”
Police said the email “did not constitute an offense” and did not contain an actual threat.
When did American journalists turn into such pansies?
(It’s a rhetorical question. It happened about the time they decided to be high priests of information in the employ of the left).
You, the peasant, shouldn’t have guns; they, the patricians, must – to protect themselves from you, the peasant.
Check the caption (may only make sense to shooters in the audience):
(For non-shooters in the audience – the caption says the pistol is a “.40 caliber Glock”. It’s not. It’s a Colt M1911A1 (or a third-party copy thereof). Which is not just a different gun, but just about the un-Glock-iest pistol in the world that doesn’t have a rotating cylinder full of bullets, or a ramrod and a flintlock for that matter).
In the wake of the Newtown shooting, the Lower Hudson (NY/CT) Journal News published an interactive map of every single legal carry permit holder in southern Connecticut.
Regardless of whether they’d ever committed any sort of crime (which, indeed, none of them had – because Connecticut has a pretty restrictive permit law).
This is pure harassment.
And that’s why it’s such great fun to see regional bloggers hitting back in kind, finding and publishing the addresses of the newspaper’s “journalists”.
(Which is, by the way, exactly why the writers of Minnesota’s carry permit law fought so hard to make permits a non-public record; you just know the media in the Twin Cities would do exactly the same thing).
Wonder if this’ll pop up on NPR’s leftymedia-friendly “On The Media” this weekend? Bonus question: how badly will Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone’s case of vapors over the affront to the sanctity of journalistic secrecy be?
My response to the journalists’ complaint would be:
“Frequently, the work of bloggers is not popular. One of our roles is to quickly report publicly available information on timely issues, even when unpopular. I knew publishing the names and addresses of all journalists connected with reporting the names and addresses of applicants for gun permits would be controversial, but I felt sharing information about journalists living in our community was important to start a conversation about the media’s culpability in educating and inspiring copycat killers in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings.”
Hey, if it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for me.
Fortunately, in Minnesota the lists of CCW permittees are not public records (thanks, Joe Olson!).
But I think finding a list of anti-gun media figures who have carry permits would be useful. I can think of two so far…
Prior to yesterday, I never would have thought that possession of an empty magazine, kept separate from ammunition or a weapon, would violate the law, so I sympathize with Gregory on that point.
But I’m less sympathetic than you might expect because fear of unintentionally violating gun laws is one of the things that has kept me from purchasing a handgun. As you know, I took the NRA safety course over a year ago. But I’m a legal resident of Rhode Island who lives much of the year in New York, so there’s an issue of whether I could obtain a NY permit, which is needed even to keep a gun in the home. And then there’s the issue of transportation back and forth, and complying with the requirements to avoid prosecution as I pass through Massachusetts.
It all became such a bureaucratic jungle that I just deferred for the time being.
That’s attorney William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection in a piece on the importance of prosecuting NBC News’ David Gregory – who is a rabid anti-gunner and makes no “journalistic” bones about it, and whose kids attend a school protected by the same armed guards that he and his industry decry for the proles – produced a 30-round NATO STANAG magazine (which fits the AR15 and most other NATO rifles of the same caliber) during a segment haranguing for gun control on one of the Sunday Morning shows last week.
…that was designed, like all of DC’s gun laws, to ensnare and make criminals out of as many law-abiding gun owners as possible.
Against that? Howard Kurtz – a center-left journalist – responds (with emphasis added by me):
Was it a stunt? Yep, and an eye-catching one. Was Gregory being aggressive with the NRA chief, or seeming to push gun control in a confrontational interview? All that is up for debate.
But a police probe over what I assume was an empty ammo clip is a total waste of time. What it demonstrates above all is that journalists are getting ensnared in the political war over gun control.
No, Howard. “Journalists” who are actively working to destroy a constitutional liberty they don’t believe to be in fashion broke a law. If it had been any other citizen – Wayne LaPierre, or (occasional NRA spokesbabe) Sarah Michelle Gellar, or you or I – the DC police would be going over them right now with all the grace the NYPD used in going over Abner Louima. Rhetorically speaking. Probably.
If it’s a “waste of time” for Gregory, then what is it for every other otherwise honest citizen in DC and the area that’s gotten snagged up in DC gun laws’ byzantine picayunities over the past 40 years?
After being injured on foreign soil while defending his nation’s freedom, Lt. Kim returned home to find that, in DC at least, there is very little of it left to defend. Lt. Kim was transporting his legally owned firearms from his parent’s home in New Jersey to South Carolina when he stopped at Walter Reed Army Hospital in DC for an appointment. Bad move!
After getting lost and pulled over by police, he was arrested, thrown in jail, and had over $10,000 in guns seized by the District. Despite the fact that he had no evil intent, Lt. Kim didn’t get a pass … but I bet Gregory will.
Or how about the case of Army Specialist Adam Meckler? Meckler, who had recently ended his active duty tour, was dropping off records at the VFW in DC when they discovered a few rounds of ammunition in his bag left over from recreational shooting. Let me repeat that … a few rounds of ammo … not a gun … not a knife … not an RPG … a few rounds of 9mm ammo.
For that ‘crime’ Specialist Meckler was handcuffed, treated like a terrorist, arrested, and forced to accept a plea deal that will mark the honored veteran for the rest of his life. But will the same happen to Gregory? I don’t think so.
So let’s recap. Two soldiers, absent any evil intent, violate the strict letter of DC’s draconian gun control laws and end up getting no leniency from a justice system that serves anything but true justice.
Apparently, to regular plebeians, the letter of DC’s stupid law isn’t a “waste of time”.
And if the media is in fact above the law, perhaps they should just say so, and make sure it’s clearly understood.
The other day, I was talking with Sheila Rae Thorvaldssen, a woman from Dilworth Minnesota who writes the liberal-leaning blog Oh Noes, Wingnutz Are Blooming Like Loosestrife On My Lawn. It is one of the leading blogs, left or right, from outstate Minnesota.
The conversation went something like this:
THORVALDSSEN: Har har, Merg! You gunny wingnuts have been pwn3ed again! Tony Cornish said stuff that wasn’t true!
ME: Yeah, that’s the problem with being a pro-Second Amendment activist. If you’re a gun controller, all you have to do is keep repeating the same lines over and over again. On our side, you have to keep up with current events. Israel “toughened” up their gun laws in the last decade or so!
THORVALDSSEN: It must be awkward to realize you were wrong on all the facts!
ME: Well, it sucks bobbling facts, and we all try not to. But here’s the rub; you’ve heard that old saying, “the British lose all the battles but win the wars?”
THORVALDSSEN: No. Did Conan O’Brien say it?
ME: Nope. Anyway – it’s a little like that when you’re a 2nd Amendment activist. Every once in a while you may bobble a fact, or factoid, that’s part of the larger discussion – but we’re still right on the actual conclusions.
THORVALDSSEN: Oh, riiiiiight.
ME: Well, wrapped around that factoid about the Israelis “toughening” their gun laws are two facts that everyone, like you, that jumps up and down about Rep. Cornish – and me! – bobbling the fact is the inconvenient truth that that factoid reinforces two conclusions that we’ve always made.
THORVALDSSEN: That’s just crazy talk.
ME: Well, yeah, but not in the way you think. For starters, the “tightening” of gun laws – on the law-abiding – in Israel cut the number of legal firearms in half – but more than doubled the number of illegal ones, and reinforced the black market. Which is exactly what happens whenever gun control is tried, whether in Tel Aviv or Chicago.
THORVALDSSEN: Hah hah! You said there were two conclusions, but you only gave one! You are a liar!
ME: Well, the other one is this; whatever happened in Israel in the past decade or so, and whatever they do now, it is a historical fact that in the seventies, there were several attacks on Israeli schools and school children – the 1970 Avivim Massacre which killed 12 kids, the Kiryat Shmona massacre (which began as an attempt to kill the children at a kibbutz school and evolved from there, ending in 18 dead, eight of them children), and the Ma’alot Massacre (terrorists killed 22 children and five adults). That’s 42 dead children among three incidents, in a population about the size of Minnesota’s. Can you imagine almost five Red Lake massacres in four years, the affect that’d have here? Anyway – at the time, one of Israel’s responses – one of many – was to allow teachers in high risk areas along the borders to carry legally-permitted guns.
THORVALDSSEN: So?
ME: So the attacks on children stopped. They found softer targets – actually, they largely switched to bombs and rockets.
THORVALDSSEN: But Cornish got current Israeli law wrong. So your entire point is invalid! Hah! Bow down before my superior reasoning, bitchez!
ME: Not if your point is “there are some ideas out there to stop school violence”. The point being, once schools became harder targets – in this case, harder because teachers in vulnerable areas were armed – school shooting stopped.
People like Cornish – and me, by the way – say that that just might be a better than the “gun-free school zones” that we’ve been trying for the past 25 years or so.
THORVALDSSEN: But you forgot the ultimate argument against arming teachers.
One of the reasons the Democrats and media are working so hard to drive a wedge between the “establishment” GOP and the Tea Party is that the Tea Party wins elections and, more importantly, represents the real future of the GOP.
Haley, a little-known state senator before being elected governor, would never have had a chance at becoming governor against the state’s good ol’ boy network of statewide officeholders. Scott would have been a long shot in his Republican primary against none other than Strom Thurmond’s youngest son. Marco Rubio, now the hyped 2016 presidential favorite, would have stepped aside to see now-Democrat Charlie Crist become the next senator, depriving the party of one of its most talented stars. Ted Cruz, the other Hispanic Republican in the Senate, would have never chanced a seemingly futile bid against Texas’s 67-year-old lieutenant governor, seen as a lock to succeed Kay Bailey Hutchison.
But all those upset victories–all of which at the time seemed shocking–took place because of the conservative grassroots’ strong sentiment for outsiders who campaigned on their principles, and not over their past political or family connections. Even a decade ago, party officials would have been more successful in pushing these outsider candidates aside, persuading them to wait their turn. (In Rubio’s case, it almost worked.) Now, in an era where grassroots politicking is as easy as ever thanks to the proliferation of social media, more control is in the hands of voters. And contrary to the ugly stereotypes of conservative activists being right-wing to the point of racist, it’s been the tea party movement that’s been behind the political success of most prominent minority Republican officeholders.
That, of course, is not the current left and media (ptr) narrative about the Tea Party. The media, and its rhetorical camp followers in the Leftyblogosphere Stupid Caucus, have been banging the “Teh Tea Partie is teh ignerent racisst” drum for close to four years now.
And in that time, the GOP overtook the Democrats in the number of elected minorities at the state level.
This is potentially good news, in the long term.
If the GOP deserves to keep it going.
Looking at Boehner’s performance this year, I’m seeing an obstacle or two.
Washington Post Fact Check columnist Glenn Kessler gives Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, “three pinocchios” for claiming, as he did yesterday on Fox News Sunday, that so-called right-to-carry laws reduce crime. So, that’s settled then? There’s no evidence that the laws do that? Err, no … as Kessler’s own column indicates.
“When right-to-carry laws had a surge in popularity in the 1990s, a common liberal argument against them was that this would lead to an increase in gun violence. Stands to reason, right? More guns means more gun crime.”
“Except it didn’t happen. Gun violence overall has declined, horrible incidents like Friday’s notwithstanding. Economist John Lott has argued in his book, More Guns, Less Crime (written with David Mustard) that the concealed carry laws actually reduce crime. It was his work that Gohmert was presumably referencing.”
Well, among others.
Read the whole thing. Sean Higgins at the WashEx shows where the WaPo left the whole “fact” thing behind. It seems they find facts that conflict with a tidy narrative to be just too confusing.
Y’know, as the mainstream media slowly dies off, you’d think one of them might figure out that a feature that checks the facts of the MSM’s legions of biased, narrative-driven “fact-checkers” would be good business.
Unless the media, like the Democrats they support, are banking their entire future on the “low-information consumer”.
Right in the nick of time as even non-political Americans start to get concerned about tax hikes and the “fiscal cliff”, some good news from the Strib!
Minnesota’s two senators sought Monday to delay a tax on medical devices that was expected to add $28 billion over the next decade to help pay for health care reform.
Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken pointed to thousands of high-paying jobs that device companies support in Minnesota, headquarters to such giant devicemakers as Medtronic and St. Jude Medical. The industry has painted the tax as a job killer that would hurt innovation.
“The delay would give us the opportunity to repeal or reduce that tax,” said Klobuchar, co-author of a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seeking the delay.
So that means the Senators will join 3rd CD Congressman Erik Paulsen and support his bill in the House to repeal the tax, right?
Franken is among the letter’s signers who would not support Paulsen’s plan. “I felt the offset in the Paulsen bill would have undermined the architecture of the Affordable Care Act,” Franken said.
Oh, don’t bother us with details! Franken and Klobuchar – and say, doesn’t she just look stunning in the photo the Strib opted to use? – are coming out strongly in favor of delaying the tax!
So what’s missing from the Strib story, bylined to Jim Spencer?
Look it over. Carefully. Carefully…
How about any mention that both Senators voted for the tax initially?
Both Franken and Klobuchar participated eagerly in jamming Obamacare down the American people’s collective throat; both have timidly objected via friendly media in the least obtusive way possible; never bucking their caucus, never ruffling the Administration’s narrative, never standing up for the thousands of constituents that are already being harmed by the tax in any way that would bring them any risk whatsoever. Both of our Senators have invested facile lip service to delaying or repealing the tax – but neither of them have ever put a vote, or any substantive political capital, on the line.
Spencer’s loathsome Strib piece is what we call “public relations”. It’s what the Strib and most of the rest of the Twin Cities media is there for.
Over at MPR, Tom Scheck brings us the latest DFL chanting point; the “links” between two GOP legislators (Rep. Gottwalt and Sen. Hann) who pushed a healthcare privatization bill in the last session, and the insurance industry.
State Rep. Steve Gottwalt, R-St. Cloud, led the GOP effort to cut spending in the state’s Health and Human Services budget when the Republicans controlled the Legislature. Now, both he and his Senate counterpart [Hann] have business links to the insurance industry, which has some other lawmakers asking whether the arrangement violates ethics rules.
This is a chanting point that the DFL’s been working up for a while here. The DFL’s beef is that…
…some Democratic lawmakers are raising questions about the arrangement.
“I can see why the owner of the business was pushing for the bill. It’s more business for him,” said Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville. “The fact that [Gottwalt] is now working for him, I’m disappointed in that.”
Health insurance brokers backed the legislation, championed by Gotttwalt’s counterpart in the other chamber, state Sen. David Hann, R-Eden Prairie.
The incoming chairman of the House ethics committee, Rep. Tom Huntley, DFL-Duluth, said: “If these are payoffs, then the ethics committee needs to look at it.”
And if there are not payoffs – and there aren’t – then will Huntley, Marty, and the idiot leftyblogger chanting point bots apologize to Hann and Gottwalt?
Read Scheck’s piece for the details.
But I have a few questions, here:
Who else are you going to have working on healthcare finance policy? A bunch of lawyers and social workers? Who knows the financial side of the healthcare industry better than people who, y’know, work on the financial side of the healthcare industry?
Aren’t we cherrypicking the outrage we choose to feed to the media, DFL? Shouldn’t we bar teachers from committees on education appropriations? . Union activists oughtta be at least recusing themselves from votes on Right to Work and unionizing daycare and personal care workers! Do we want lawyers writing laws? And don’t be trying to hide, there, Erin Murphy; I’m told you were the executive director of a nursing lobby group, and became the ranking DFLer on the Healthcare Committee. Or Ryan Winkler, who is employed (heh) at Ted Mondale’s government-data-mining software company, sounding off about legislation that’d involve another data-mining company?
Of course, the DFL finds these kinds of non-corrupt “corruption” all the time, while practicing it themselves.
If only we had some institution – maybe with printing presses and transmitters, and people whose job it was to run down little facts like this? Perhaps those people working for that institution could think of themselves as a holy, truth-seeking monastic order? Call themselves “high priests of gatekeeping”, perhaps?
Just a thought.
By the way – lost in the contrived, DFL-agenda-driven “hubbub”: the program that Gottwalt and Hann developed has been a huge improvement for the Minnesotans it was intended to serve. “Healthy Minnesota” gives its participants vouchers enabling them to buy a standard insurance plan on the open market; it’s cheaper than UCare, and the participants get better, more personally-focused coverage than provided by the state. There are gaps – every insurance plan has ’em – but it was, as advertised, a huge improvement over UCare at lower cost.
In other words, it’s a government program that does what it’s supposed to do, and saves money to boot.
But “big business” is invovled, and that thought apparently gives DFLers explosive diarrhea.
You could call it the “Hunger Games” approach to layoffs – one that’s getting a big thumbs-down from workplace experts.
Hunger schmunger. I call it the “Michael Scott” approach.
The Kansas City Star recently told two of its journalists, Karen Dillon and Dawn Bormann, that only one of them could keep her job — and the employees themselves would have to decide who should leave the company, according to the media blog JimRomenesko.com.
Dillion confirmed the report in an e-mail to NBC News, but did not provide any more details. The investigative reporter has worked for the Kansas City Star since 1991, according to her LinkedIn profile.
The good news?
Well, there really isn’t any. Although the idea that yet another left-toady publisher is circling the drain is probably a nice consolation prize.
I heard this last week on “Poligraph”, MPR’s self-styled “Politifact” homage.
“Poligraph” reporter Catherine Richert was “fact-checking” statements from the GOP and DFL about the state budget. She quoted Governor Messinger Dayton:
You know,[the wealthiest] were paying the higher rates during the 1990s when President Clinton was in office, and we enjoyed boom years in the states. We had the highest real per capita family income in 1999 than we’ve had in our history. Since then, we’ve dropped almost 9 percent from that high in the aftermath of the Minnesota tax cuts in 1999 and 2000, and also the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.” – Gov. Mark Dayton”
You don’t have to be a economist, or even a conservative, to understand where this is wrong. You merely have to be somewhat curious, and care a little bit about history.
Richert’s response:
Dayton made this statement in response to a question about Republican concerns that a state tax increase on the wealthiest to close the budget gap, which has been a priority for Dayton, and the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts on the federal level would hurt the state’s economy.
Dayton was arguing that their logic is flawed because tax cuts don’t always correspond with a strong economy.
Well, no. Governor Messinger Dayton was correlating prosperity with a causation, higher taxes and a Democrat president.
Now, I’ll give Catherine Richert the benefit of the doubt; as a self-styled “fact-checker”, she’s hobbled by needing to refer to other “Fact-checkers”, the WaPo and the woefully-misnamed “Politifact”, whose institutional bias in these matters is itself a fact:
It’s true that the wealthiest paid more in federal income taxes during the Clinton years. Clinton raised the top marginal rate from 31 percent to nearly 40 percent. It also happened to be a time of strong economic growth, partly because of Clinton and George H. W. Bush’s broader fiscal policies, which lead to lower interest rates and lots of activity on Wall Street, as reported by the Washington Post and PolitiFact.
Well, if the WaPo and Politifact say so. The paragraph itself shows the extent to which MPR’s reporting on the subject is based on the major media’s narrative; those “broader fiscal policies” involved a very pro-business climate, tax hikes notwithstanding.
Richert, the WaPo, Politifact, and Governor Messinger Dayton glossed over – or didn’t know – the larger historical causation for the correlation:
Clinton got to cash Reagan’s “peace dividend”
Gas prices were around a buck a gallon,
Clinton raised taxes, it’s true. But a GOP Congress didn’t let him raise them nearly as much as he’d wanted to, not to mention defeated his attempt to socialize healthcare, and forced Bubba to govern, tax hikes notwithstanding, as a conservative (especially relative to Dubya’s spending). Remember how liberals squealed about Clinton’s “conservative” nature? Back when Minnesota liberals spoke about the “Democratic Leadership Conference”, the moderate, pro-business Democrat caucus, the way they talk about the Koch brothers today?
Let’s go back Messinger’s Daytons’ statement.
As stated, it was a strawman; of course tax cuts don’t always bring prosperity, not by themselves. And tax hikes don’t always gut the economy – provided the other fundamentals are working. In the nineties, the other fundamentals of the economy – energy, capital, investment climate, relative levels of regulation, fairly conservative legislative branch, world markets – were humming right along.
That is just not the case today.
Correlation does not equal causation. It’s a maxim of logic.
But not of “fact-checking”:
George W. Bush slashed those tax rates; Minnesota lowered its tax rates around this time, too.
Assuming Dayton is talking about the national decline in real household income – real per capita family income doesn’t exist – it’s true that it took a 9 percent nosedive after 1999, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Right.
But not as a result of the tax cuts.
Which was what Dayton’s statement – intended as red meat for the low-information voter that is Dayton’s main constituency – insinuates.
I’ll give Richert’s “fact-check” a grade of “Obtuse”…
…for taking dubious “Facts” from discredited and biased “fact-checkers” to reinforce studiously avoid assailing an illogical and factually and historically void narrative by Governor Dayton.
BONUS: John Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives also tags Richert for some fairly incurious reporting on the Campaign Finance Board.
As Ed announced on Hot Air earlier this week, last Saturday was his last regular Northern Alliance broadcast.
So some might ask – what’s the NARN’s future?
The answer: Lots.
The show will carry on on Saturday at the usual time (and Brad’s show on Sunday, of course, is unchanged). I’ll probably focus more on Minnesota politics – I mean, with Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Miller and Mark Levin, AM1280’s got the national stuff pretty well covered, right? I’ll likely also have a group of regular guests in the studio to talk important Minnesota stuff.
I was out at Target the other day when I ran into a familiar face pushing a shopping cart full of Reynolds Wrap through the grocery section. It was Professor William G. Krieppi, Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Hennepin Technical College’s School of Geology.
It went something like this.
———-
KRIEPPI: (Seeing me) Hey, Merg! Brian Lambert at the Minnpost sure pwn3ed you?
ME: Hm. I always wondered how one pronounced “Pwn3d”. Otherwise – and I know I’ll regret asking you this – what are you talking about?
KRIEPPI: He called you out on your “citizen journalist” nonsense! In the MinnPost!
ME: Well, I’m glad to see they have such important stuff to cover.
ME: Jeez, it’s only Lambert. I’ve got stuff I gotta do.
KRIEPPI: You are clearly melting down. Why do you hate children?
ME: Oh, what the hell. (Types quickly on IPhone) (sotto voce) If I say “That’s a fascinating point”, will you go away? (Normal tone of voice) OK, here it is:
…you might want to reader conservative blogger Gary Gross’s take on [whatever Lambo was writing about]. It concludes with this semi-classic threat: “What this means is that Gov. Dayton’s words, Pat Kessler’s words and other biased media’s words didn’t have a hint of truth to them. It’s worth noting that ABM didn’t hesitate in using them in their statewide smear campaign against GOP candidates. It’s time for Mr. Sommerhauser and other reporters to blister Alida Messinger, Gov. Dayton and the Twin Cities media for telling the whoppers that they told. If he won’t, citizen journalists like Mitch Berg and myself will expose the DFL for the corrupt political party it is.” Hey, guys, can I see your “citizen journalist” badges?
ME: I don’t have one. But then, I used to work as a reporter, and I didn’t have a “badge” back then, either. Why don’t you ask Lambert to see his “badge”?
KRIEPPI: He is teh real journalist! What teh hcek is a “citizen journalist”?
ME: (Groaning wearily) I don’t much care for the term “citizen journalist”, and I never have.. And for that matter, the term “Journalist”, either. Establishment “journalists” wrap themselves in the term to try to give themselves a veneer of non-existant “objectivity”. The problem is, left-leaning establishment journos from the NYTimes down to the MinnPost, along with the Administraiton, are trying to define the term such that only “people who get paid by institutional media outlets” qualify as “journalists”, which is cynical and stupid, but certainly self-serving.
KRIEPPI: Quit equivocating! He pwn3d you! Maybe even pwn4d you! He showed that you are nothing but a partisan hack!
ME: Huh. So let’s recap, here; you’re referring to the “objectivity” and/or “hackery” of a guy who writes utterly-unveiled opinion pieces for a glorified blog, and has appeared for years on the radio as an expressly, even stridently-partisan commentator…
ME: …who interrupted his “non-partisan” “media” career for a gig as then-Senator Mark Dayton’s press secretary?
KRIEPPI: …Hahahahahahahahahaahhahahahaaaahahaaahaahah… (maniacal laughter slowly grinds to a halt).
ME: Who’s spent most of his career as a DFL stenographer and snark-bot, but who will nonetheless dance up and down and say “You’re not a real journalist” because it’s a whole lot easier than explaining why a group of plutocrats and unions have basically bought the governorship and legislature with his blog’s blessing.
KRIEPPI: (stands, blank-faced)
ME: Hey, have a great day, Professor!
(I walk away as KRIEPPI slowly opens a carton of Reynolds Wrap and starts to wrap it around his head)
———-
Like I said, i don’t much care for the term “citizen journalist”. Partly because it’s stilted and anachronistic, but mostly because In the modern sense of the term, it’s a little like saying “citizen carpenter”. There’s no real barrier of entry to picking up a hammer and a saw – or a keyboard.
Oh, “professional” journos like to act like Journalism is a higher calling, like a secular monastic order. Listen to Garfield and Gladstone doing “On The Media” on NPR sometime (somebody has to, right?); Krista Tippett’s “On Being” isn’t as pompous, solemn and brow-furrowed. And it makes sense; “professional” journalists devote a lot of time to learning the craft, and years and decades practicing it – and usually spend their time covering city council meetings and interviewing high school athletes and boutique owners. Of course they’ll try to give it some higher meaning!
But journalism is not a monastic calling. It’s certainly not a profession. It’s a craft, not much different than carpentry or CNC machining or cooking a good steak. If I need a complicated metal part, I call a machinist. If I want to know what happened in a city council meeting, or what was up with that car crash or house surrounded by police tape, and I’m not able or interested in asking the questions myself, I go to a “journalist”. And if you want to know what’s really going on with charter schools, I go to someone who covers education because it’s their passion and interest and whose coverage of the issue engages me; it might be a reporter for an institutional media outlet, but it’ll more likely be Matt Abe and Speed Gibson, because they’re just plain better at it.
Am I a reporter? Not normally. I do some reporting – I’ve eaten the rest of the media’s lunch on a few stories over the years, and I’ll do it again – but doing “reporting” right takes time. I have a day job, so I usually stick with analysis, or just plain opinion. Sort of like a newspaper columnist, only without the salary.
So I don’t have a badge. Either does Lambert. He gets paid to snark and occasionally report. I don’t. He does it eight hours a day or so. I do it for about 90 minutes.
Other than that, there’s not much difference, really. Unless you start talking radio.
SCENE: MITCH is sitting with Inge “Lucky” CARROLL and Bridget GRETELSTEIN, operatives for the ABM (“Alita Buys Minnesota”), at the Champs in Mendota Heights.
MITCH: (Continuing conversation that started before the scene) Well, yeah – ABM and the DFL’s message – pardon the redundancy – was aimed at low-information voters.
CARROLL(sitting with four empty cosmos in front of her): Hah! You are having teh meltdown!
BERG: Er, huh? “Meltdown”.
CARROLL: Yes. You are having teh meltdown.
BERG: Well, no. I’m pretty calm. Bored and waiting for a drink, actually. Where do you get “meltdown?”
GRETELSTEIN: It makes you uncomfortable, talking about your declining mental state. Doesn’t it?
BERG: No, it makes me uncomfortable that neither of you will answer a question about your organization’s cynical, factually-challenged campaign. I’ve been documenting all your group’s lies for years now. And I’m just amazed that so many people in our purportedly “above-average” state buy such a line of transparent BS.
CARROLL: You’re so angry, you’re about to have teh stroke.
BERG: What part of “bored and waiting on a drink” do you have trouble with?
GRETELSTEIN: Don’t go all postal on us!
BERG: Hm. OK, I’ll see what I can do. Hey, let’s talk about what the new DFL majority will inherit – since Democrats are all about babbling about things they inherited. A balanced state budget, for starters.
(Silence for a few seconds as CARROLL and GRETELSTEIN look uncomfortably at each other).
Not, not the January one. Or not just the January one, anyway, although that’s gonna be ugly. No, I’m talking about the Entitlement time bomb. The one Romney and Ryan were at least serious about allaying, and that Obama is not – not in any way.
So what better to take the peasants’ minds off a gathering crisis?
Word has been making the rounds that Obama plans to declare victory late this afternoon – long before the polls even start closing on the East Coast.
If it happens, it’ll be an attempt to do what the Big Three Networks tried to do for Algore in 2000; declare victory early enough to discourage Republican voters in the Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones.
If you are a Real American, you need to make sure your Republican relatives know what’s up. This is way too important to leave to chance and the ministrations of our in-the-bag major media.
The Democrats and the media – and yes, let’s cut the crap and recognize they are indistinguishable – will do whatever it takes to finagle a victory for The One.
One outcome is certain tomorrow – the pollsters will finish last.
Give the pollsters of the 2012 cycle some credit – they’ve managed to straddle the fence, predicting a solid electoral victory for Barack Obama…and potentially a major popular vote win for Mitt Romney.
The top line of most of the recent polls has been easy enough to read. The Real Clear Politics national average represents a statistical tie as Obama leads by 0.7% but the sheer numbers of polls showing slight edges to Obama in key states has the conventional wisdom pegging the President at somewhere around 290 to 303 electoral votes. A step drop from 2008 but a large win by comparison to the recent histories of 2004 or 2000.
The lead isn’t universal – Gallup has Obama up 1% among indies with Politico having a similar result…after deciding they would qualify more indies as Republicans following Romney’s 10% lead just two weeks earlier. The trendline is obvious. The question is how much does it matter to win independents?
Conventional wisdom in politics is like conventional wisdom about everything else – it’s right up until the point it’s wrong. Whereas independent voters have been prized possessions in past elections, suddenly the value of these voters has been called into question:
It’s true that independents are a diverse group. But that’s mostly because the large majority of independents are independents in name only. Research by political scientists on the American electorate has consistently found that the large majority of self-identified independents are “closet partisans” who think and vote much like other partisans. Independent Democrats and independent Republicans have little in common. Moreover, independents with no party preference have a lower rate of turnout than those who lean toward a party and typically make up less than 10% of the electorate. Finally, independents don’t necessarily determine the outcomes of presidential elections; in fact, in all three closely contested presidential elections since 1972, the candidate backed by most independent voters lost.
Let’s look at that last statement in greater detail.
On the surface, it’s 100% correct. Jerry Ford, John Kerry and George W. Bush all won the independent voter demographic and all three lost the popular vote (although not the election in all three cases). Bush won indies by 2% and lost by 0.5% in an electorate that was 4% more Democrat than Republican. Kerry won indies by 2% as well but lost by 3% in a tied partisan affiliation election. And Ford, amidst a massive movement of Republicans to Independents post-Watergate, won that block by 4%…the largest margin for a losing candidate and done in an electorate with a 15% Democratic advantage.
The trendline here is simple as well – a narrow advantage among independent voters guarantees nothing other than perhaps a close election. But compare Romney’s margin among indies to past performances. Obama won indies by 7%. Clinton won indies, despite an independent candidate on the ballot, by 8% in 1996 and 6% in 1992. Bush Sr. won by 14% in 1988 and Reagan by 28% and 25% respectively in his two races.
Some have argued that Romney’s lead among independents is simply a reflection of dissatisfied Republicans having left the party but whom will still vote conservatively. It’s not a bad theory and it’s supported by some evidence. Gallup has Republicans at 28% and Independents at 38%. Pew has Republicans at 25% and Independents at 36%. Yet neither Gallup or Pew reflect such a shift in their presidential polling. Gallup has Obama up 1% among indies, as previously stated, and Pew has Romney up only 3%. If Republicans just dropped the ‘R’ from their ID, someone forgot to tell them.
The end result isn’t actually about who wins on Tuesday. Regardless of the outcome, most of the pollsters have made a series of startling errors. Either they’ve completely whiffed on properly defining party IDs within whatever likely voter model they’re using or they can’t accurately identify independent voters as a demographic. Simply put, the numbers don’t match. Obama can’t win if he loses the largest party ID block by high single or low double digits. Conversely, Romney can’t lose if he wins independents by those kinds of margins.
The question in doubt tomorrow isn’t whether the pollsters erred but on which end of the spectrum. We’ll find out for sure on Tuesday. The pollsters will have to find out how they went wrong starting on Wednesday.
One thing will be decided this time — either polling is broken, or the time-honored tradition of reporting and observation is obsolete. It’s a fascinating question to resolve.
Yesterday and Monday, we went over the chronology of the last-minute negotiations and back-and-forth leading up to the State Government shutdown, which started seventeen months ago last night. The abbreviated time-line:
On June 29, the GOP made an offer. It traded giving some ground on revenue for some movement on social issues.
On the morning of June 30, the DFL leadership – Dayton, Senate minority leader Bakk and House minority leader Thissen – demanded $1.4 billion in new revenues.
Much discussion ensued. It ensued under the “cone of silence”; the participants really didn’t let on much about what was going on.
At noonish on the 30th, Dayton – without Bakk and Thissen – made an offer that dropped most of the revenue demands, and was pretty close – almost dead-on – with the GOP’s letter. The letter mentioned no social issues – because they were off the table at this time.
More discussion. More cone.
Mid-afternoon, the Legislature sent its counteroffer, including revenue from the “school funding shift” and the tobacco bond money. This should have settled it – and indeed, was substantially the same as the offer that Dayton finally accepted to end the shutdown.
Late-afternoon, the DFL ratcheted back to their morning demands.
More cone.
At 10PM, the Governor essentially claimed that he was shutting down the government because the GOP had rejected the offer in 7, above, and was unwilling to compromise.
And that was that.
———-
In the hour or so after the shutdown, the GOP Caucus released the contents of the letters that had transpired on the 29th and 30th. The release included pages 2-4 of this document here:
No mention of social policy in there. it was not an issue.
So the government shut down. DFL and media narratives aside, it was a disaster for the governor. Government actually saved money; hardly anyone outside of government missed it; the people largely were apathetic, as the Governor learned on a tour of the state to attempt to rally support that drew nothing but dispirited SEIU goons. He returned to the Capitol, and returned to the GOP’s last offer.
And not long after, he gave this talk in WCCO-TV with Esme Murphy – which we’ve featured a time or two:
Dayton lied:
I was unaware on June 30, in fact I was clearly aware to the contrary, that all these social policy issues, from banning stem cell research and everything else, and just really reactionary social policy, was taken off the table.
Esme Murphy let that line pass without comment – as, in fact, she always does, as her mission seems to be to make sure DFL pols get a nice massage on the air.
But nobody else noted the contradiction; of course he was aware.
The GOP mentioned no policy issues in its June 30 proposal! As we noted above, it was nearly identical to the governor’s previous offer, differing on a few fiscal tweaks!
His rejection of that offer mentioned no social policy issues. Because they were off the table.
No, “social issues” only came up well the shutdown was settled.
Mark Dayton was shot down completely on the shutdown. And yet the media have allowed him to carry on with the “social policy” canard.
Why?
If I were a cynic, you’d think it was because the media was in the bag for Dayton, and wanted to give him cover. You’d also think the media were even more in the bag for the DFL – and chanting the governor’s version of the shutodwn is a key part of the DFL’s attempt to retake the legislature, which a good chunk of the media (at least at the management and editorial-board level) clearly wants.
And I am a cynic.
Because the alternate explanation is that the media just isn’t as smart and attentive to details as I am.
And that just beggars the imagination.
So when will the media start “fact-checking” Dayton’s story? Or their own, for that matter?
…that Barack Obama wins this election (more at noon).
But as the situation among reputable polls shifts ever more to Romney, and as more and more hitherto “likely Obama” states flip to “Leans Obama” and “Toss-up” and even “Lean Romney”, it’s interesting to watch Nate Silver doubling and tripling down on his prediction; he’s still giving The Light Worker a 75% chance of winning.
I’m not a statistician – but I can read and reason, and I’ve been dinging on Silver’s polling, methodology and predictions for a couple of years now. My beef – and I’d suspect the beef of any rational person who isn’t one of the incurious low-information voters at which Silver’s polling is aimed – is that he calculates his results based on weighting existing polls based on some proprietary secret sauce known only to him.
Is the “sauce” valid? I don’t know – nobody does, really – but as I showed in the 2010 Minnesota Governor’s race, it involved giving exaggerated weight to polls like the absurd “Minnesota Poll”, the so-bad-it’s-out-of-business Humphrey Institute poll and the frankly left-leaning PPP poll, while systematically shorting polls like Survey USA and Rasmussen.
Is Silver right? Even if I could check his math, I probably couldn’t check his math, if you catch my drift. Maybe Obama still is a near-sure thing, even after this past three weeks; maybe the Dems and Silver know something we don’t (like how many dead people will be voting). We won’t really know until next week.
But while there will be many things about a Romney win that I’ll applaud, one of the big ones for me, personally, will be dancing – rhetorically, of course – on Nate Silver’s professional grave.
Seventeen months ago yesterday, in the midst of negotiations about the budget, the GOP-led Legislature sent Governor Dayton a proposed budget. It offered some concessions on revenue, and asked for some ground on social issues.
First thing the next morning, June 30 – 17 months ago today – the DFL came out with a counter-offer.
Labeled the “Dayton-Bakk-Thissen Compromise Budget Proposal”, it demanded $1.4 billion in new revenues. It was a further negotiation, just like the Legislature’s letter the day before.
And – this is important – it had all three DFL leaders on board. Governor Dayton, Senate minority leader Bakk and House minority leader Thissen all signed off on this proposal.
We’ll refer to this as “The Morning Letter” from now on.
And as the government coursed toward the midnight shutdown, that apparently was where things stayed.
The rest of this article uses this Scribd file, originally from Dayton’s chief of staff Bob Hume, as its source.
It’s been popping up around the Twin Cities media off and on ever since the shutdown.
The Morning Letter
Now, much of what went on over the next 6-7 hours is shrouded in mystery; it took place in off-the-record conversations and phone calls and communications that aren’t available to the general public if they’re recorded at all.
Noon: Dayton’s Offer
But the upshot of those conversations – whatever they were – was that at 3PM on the 30th of June, the Governor – alone, without Thissen or Bakk – released a proposal that dropped all tax increases.
There were three significant things about this letter, which we’ll call “Dayton’s Offer”.
One was that Dayton dropped demands for tax increases, in return, Dayton proposed a 50% shift in school funding to the following biennium – the “borrowing from the children” that the DFL and media have worked so hard to pin on the GOP this past year. It was a major concession by the Governor. According to sources on Capitol Hill familiar with the negotiations, this was seen by the GOP majority in the Legislature as a key step toward reaching a “lights-on” agreement to prevent the shutdown.
But the other two significant things were actually things missing from the proposal:
Bakk and Thissen: Their names had been on the Morning Letter – but were absent at 3PM. Sources at the Capitol indicate that that’s because – well, Bakk and Thissen didn’t support it!
Any mention of GOP policy proposals: The Dayton Offer includes no reference to GOP “Social Policy” proposals – because Dayton knew at noon on the 30th that the GOP had taken them off the table. This is an inference, both by my sources and myself. It’s also the only logical conclusion.
So as of a little after lunch on 6/30, the Legislature and the Governor – but not Bakk and Thissen – were in basic agreement; no tax hikes, no social policy concessions.
The 3PM Letter
A couple of hours later, at 3PM, the GOP sent a counter-offer. It involved two tweaks to Dayton’s proposal:
Cutting the size of the education shift (at the recommendation of Dayton’s Education Commissioner)
Making up the difference with tobacco bonding
This letter – we’ll call it “The 3PM Letter” – involved accepting the concessions in The Dayton Offer with a few on the GOP’s part. Otherwise, the two offers were just about identical.
As of 3PM, then, it looked as if the Governor and the Legislature were in agreement, and the shutdown could be averted.
The 4:06PM Letter
Dayton responded about an hour later, at 4:06PM. Dayton accepted the changes to the education shift – it was his administration’s idea, after all – but tossed the tobacco bonding proposal and renewed the demand for new taxes…
…that he himself had taken off the table earlier in the afternoon!
The GOP’s response expressed dismay at the sudden – I believe the term of art in the Age of Obama is “unexpected” – flip-flop on Dayton’s part – and proposed a “lights-on” bill.
So To Recap…
Just to make sure we’re clear, here:
The DFL – Dayton, Bakk and Thissen – demanded $1.4B.
Negotiation ensued under the “cone of silence”.
Dayton offered to drop the tax demands, and by omission showed that the GOP had dropped their social policy demands.
The GOP accepted this proposal, with a few fine tweaks, including one from Dayton’s own administration.
Dayton spun on his heels and rejected that offer – ignored it, really – and countered with a flip-flop on taxes.
The “cone of silence” remained in effect for the next five or six hours. Nobody exactly knows what transpired on the way to Dayton’s big speech at 10PM.
Dayton’s Presser at 10PM
Just in time for the 10PM news, Dayton called a press conference. Here’s the transcript.
It’s full of prevarications, and one outright lie:
“Therefore, a $1.4 billion gap remains between our last respective offers.” But the GOP’s proposal on the 29th offered to compromise with the DFL on revenue. The conservative base – myself included – would have howled at this, but the GOP was clearly looking to keep the government open.
“Republicans have offered only to forego their $200 million tax cut and add that amount of spending. While welcomed, $200 million is only a small step toward resolving a $5 billion deficit.” The 3PM Letter shows that the GOP was willing to go along with some sort of revenue hikes.
“Today, Representative Thissen, Senator Bakk, and I made two proposals which contained revenues to be raised by increasing taxes only on people who make more than $1 million per year. The Department of Revenue reports that there are only 7,700 of them, less than 0.3% of all Minnesota tax filers.” Well, no. Dayton made two offers; Bakk and Thissen only participated in the first one.
The Administration started out demanding tax hikes; the GOP expressed a willingness to compromise. The Administration then flip-flopped and went back to their first set of demands, ignoring the GOP concessions (for purposes of presenting the media a narrative), with Dayton contradicting himself in the process.
And Here’s Where The Media Tush-Smooching Comes In
The Governor contradicted himself and rejected a proposal that was one minor tweak removed from his own, Bakk-And-Thissen-less offer (“Dayton’s Offer”), leading directly to the government shutdown.
And yet today, 17 months later, the DFL’s PACs and pressure groups refer to it as “the Republican shutdown”. It’s a Big Lie. But nobody’s countering it.
I’ve often wondered; what if our society had an institution, maybe even an industry, with printing presses and transmitters, staffed with people whose job and training involves checking up on things that government officials say – and maybe even holding them accountable for the things they say and do? Heck, even allow this institution to see itself as an aescetic elite who “comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted”, in exchange for, you know, actually comforting and afflicting.
We could use this in Minnesota.
Remember where we started yesterday – with Esme Murphy giving Mark Dayton her usual deep-tongue-kiss on her Sunday Morning Show:
Notwithstanding the contradictions in Dayton’s own proposals that are part of the public record timeline of the negotiations on June 29-30, Dayton runs with the “Social Issues” canard.
The Strib also served, then as now, as Dayton’s de facto stenographer in their “coverage” of the chain of events.
The Star-Tribune also bought Dayton’s line – that the “requested concessions” brought on the shutdown – completely uncritically, without noting the evolution, and then abrupt de-evolution, on Dayton’s position. The Strib mentioned not a word about the “flip-flop”.
Tomorrow – appropriately, Halloween – the way the shutdown went down, and conclusions about “journalism” and Governor Dayton.
