A friend of this blog who describes himself as “born in Browerville, raised and educated in Clarissa, still own hunting land outside of Clarissa”  resonded to the weekend’s Jon Tevlin column:

My apologies on letting Tevlin out of Todd County without teaching him manners and common sense. I am not sure where in Todd County he lived but he is an embarassment to those of us who were properly educated and reared in those places.

Don’t be so hard on yourself. Anyplace can produce a stenographer for the DFL.

After the Franson “story” broke the week before last, the DFL thought it was onto a Don Imus moment. And they needed one – their somnolent legislative caucus

They were disappointed when the story started to fade – even most DFLers can tell when context is being waterboarded.  It was dropping off the radar last week when the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” stepped in to demand an apology and try to fan the flames among their droogs.

It didn’t work. The protests planned for Rep.Franson’s lawn drew, according to one report, three droogs.

But the droogs on the street are afterthoughts to the DFL. They have them in higher places.

Jon Tevlin – aka “Nick Coleman 2.0” – seems to have gotten his marching orders, “file an indignant piece about Franson”, in by deadline,which was apparently back when the DFL was still flogging the story.

And Tevlin’s piece hits all the points Alita Messinger and Ken Martin desperately want to be hit:.

 When Rep. Mary Franson compared people who get food stamps to animals in the wild, beholden to humans who feed them,

Huh?

I wonder if Tevlin even knows how bizarre that is.

she was being blissfully ignorant of a growing number of people who live in a certain region in Minnesota.

Namely, her neighbors.

Really, Jon Tevlin, ace reporter?

And how do you know what Mary Franson is “ignorant” about?  She lives there, works in daycare, campaigns there every two years.

I’m going to suggest she’s less “blissfully ignorant” than Jon Tevlin is invincibly arrogant-enough to write columns in first-person omniscient.

Before she made jokes about people on food stamps, or SNAP, she might have asked around, or just looked at the website for Todd County, which is in her district. There, she would have seen a recent report that both food stamps and medical assistance are up dramatically in Todd County.

Soaring, under her watch.

And here, the ethical reader has a dilemma: does the Strib employ a columnist who is stupid enough to believe a state legislator’s “watch” has direct impact on poverty in her county?  Or do they employ one who’s so cynical and in the bag for the DFL propaganda machine that he writes garbage like this in hopes that the readers are too stupid to know any better?

To my mind, it’s a toss-up.

The assumption behind Franson’s logic is that people who get assistance do so because, like animals used to being fed, they get lazy.

No.  They get dependent.  “Lazy” is when columnists crib their chanting points from “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” .  “Dependent” is when you honestly don’t know another way than being on the dole.

Compare and contrast:  “Jon Tevlin is too lazy to dig beneath his own arrogant, smug, entitled, DFL-pimping preconceptisons”, versus “Jon Tevlin is dependent on DFL / ABM chanting points for his material on this issue, to the point where he has no idea how to find the real facts about the issue”.  See the difference?

OK.  Maybe not in Teviln’s case.   Because as we see, he’s both:

But the report from Todd County Social Services shows quite the opposite. The unemployment rate is relatively low, 5.8 percent.

Now, I get confused – is that “on Mary Franson’s watch”, too?

People are working, and working hard, but the fact is they just don’t get paid very much.

Right.  There’s a recession going on.  Perhaps Jon Tevlin has heard?

Need, Rep. Franson. Your constituents, about 8 percent of them, need help because the businesses in your district can’t or won’t pay them enough to live on, and can’t or won’t provide them with health care.

And here’s where both dependence and laziness rear their slothful, indolent heads.  Franson was talking a general principle; Tevlin is talking details – the temporary needs of people having hard times.  Which, I’m sure Tevlin would find if he weren’t dependent on ABM for his chanting points, the GOP broadly supports.

Franson probably thinks these people are slackers, too, no-goods leeching off the public.

And Jon Tevlin “probably” wrote about a third of this column.

Except for this next bit:

Franson might not know these people — her neighbors — very well, but I do.

I lived in Todd County and graduated from high school there. Yes, some of the people who took assistance were lazy or drunks. But mostly they were people like the old woman across the street, whose husband had died many years ago, or like the people who toiled on poor dirt farms, or waited tables at the local restaurant.

Yes, they were even people like my dad, who after working for 40 years at Honeywell had a brain aneurism and had to rely on Social Security, pension, and food stamps for a while.

My dad accepted food stamps because he believed in responsibility, responsibility to feed his kids even though he couldn’t work.

In other words, “my story about real, genuine, acute need – and, more accurately, the emotions it churns up – trump your statement of high-level principle”.

It’s a logical fallacy.  It’s an argument based purely on emotion – which, to be fair, is the only kind of argument Tevlin’s DFL masters can make.   You can’t top it, the logic goes, so you have to just shut up, or appear cold and heartless.

It’s crap, of course; nobody, least of all conservatives, denies that human circumstance and human frailty creates need.  Nobody, least of all Franson, has said anything about changing that.  But the larger point – that welfare does create dependence, and it does – gets obscured by the inflammatory emotion, both of the “can you top this” story and, behyond that, the defamatory slander of the DFL/ABM’s chanting point.

Yes, I said “Tevlin’s DFL masters”:

The war on women apparently now joins the war on the poor.

Two narratives for the price of one.  He’s lazy and dependent, but he’s thorough.

Keep going, Strib.  Has anyone thought about what happens when your paper becomes nothing but a DFL news release ‘bot?

A lot of you Strib employees will be on food stamps, for starters.

The next time someone from Public Radio asks why conservatives distrust public media and think it has institutional bias, I’ll tell them to listen to this Bob Garfield piece on “On The Media“, in which this official NPR production does a demise dance for Rush Limbaugh, and ask in return “why would anyone think otherwise?”

The DFL – as I noted earlier today – has been trying to make rhetorical hay out of mangling the context of a Mary Franson video (I wrote about this earlier) which, they say “compares welfare recipients to animals”.

The fact is, both parties see the citizen as animals.

The DFL View

"Bad Citizen. BAD!"

In the DFL view, the citizen is an animal.  A pet, at best.  One that might perform a useful service, or might not, but one whose existence is defined by its relation to its Master.

Does SHE deserved to be disenfranchised?

And we all know who The Master is, in the DFL’s world.

Of course, when it suits them, the DFL views the citizen as a different kind of animal:

Downtown Maple Grove, 2040, to the DFL's eyes.

Of course, as every good master knows, pets need discipline – and herd animals are just plain dumb.  Which means the masters need extra tools and power to make sure the animals get taken care of.

Elliot Seid (on ATV) on election day

At election time, or when it’s time to plump up numbers to justify a program’s existence, they see you, citizen, as livestock.  To be kept fed and contented until you’re needed for, er, other things.

The Conservative View

To a conservative, the citizen is a different kind of animal:

The CD4 GOP Committee meeting last Tuesday

Not necessarily “wild” – there are rules, after all – but free.  With liberty, dignity and free will of their own.  They don’t have “masters” – their packs have leaders.  And those leaders can be disposed of when they aren’t doing the job (although we humans have a more civilized way of doing it, unless the pack is Democrats and you are Jimmy Hoffa).

Mass transit, "animal"-style

These animals are, nominally, on their own – with no master, there’s nobody to crack up a can of Alpo.  But the pack does look out for the pack – of its own free will.  None of the animals starves – because that’s the way these animals treat each other.

How would you rather your government see you, you animal, you?

Last week, Rep, Mary Franson released a video response to constituent questions.  One of the questions was about welfare.

In the video (since removed, unfortunately), Franson compared welfare to treating people like animals – by creating dependence, making it impossible for them to live without help.  In other words, government treats them like pets, zoo creatures, livestock – creatures of whom they are the master.

Now, food stamp recipients aren’t animals – but the DFL chanting point machine, Carrie Lucking and Denise Cardinal of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, Greta Bergstrom of “Take Action Minnesota” and most of Minnesota’s lumpen gray mass of leftybloggers – are certainly a bunch of rhetorical hyenas.  They took Franson’s statement, water-boarded it until all the context went away, and put it out there as ‘Mary Franson Compares People On Food Stamps To Animals“.

And that’s how the media – in the bag for the DFL as they almost universally are – ran with it.

It was a lie, of couse; the DFL, being intellectually and morally bankrupt, has had nothing but lies for the past 30 years.

But since misogyny – Rush’s misguided statement about Sandra Fluke, not Bill Maher saying Sarah Palin would diddle Rick Perry if he were black, or Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a “slut”, or Maher calling Palin a “c*nt”, naturally – is in the news, let’s look at the biggest case of misogyny going on in Minnesota right now.

Because lies have consequences.

Franson has been a lighting rod for Minnesota’s demented left for a long time now.  A Central Minnesota teacher and leftyblogger apparently expressly condoned some of the local droogs-in-the-making in bullying one of Franson’s children in school because, in his role as moral judge, jury and executioner, he figured it served her right, having a parent who opposed gay marriage (LL has the audio; it’s a fairly searing indictment of the “Clockwork Orange”-y inner id of way too much of public education today, not to mention the dingo-like morality of a good 80% of Minnesota leftybloggers).  By extension, it served her right, being a conservative woman.

Because women, like blacks and latinos and gays, are supposed to be liberals.  And if they wander off the reservation, there need to be consequences.

And DFLers are promising consequences for Franson’s latest remark (as filtered through the Hyenas and the media).  Franson has received death threats, crude-to-the-point-of-prehensile attacks, and giggly snarks from the loathsome Paul Thissen, and, Saturday morning, a protest on her front lawn – prompting even some of the less-depraved leftybloggers to urge juuuust a smidge of caution.   (Can you imagine the furor if someone like this – who does, by the way, represent the DFL – turned up at a Tea Party?)  Incredibly, House Minority leader Paul Thissen disavowed any knowledge of the threats of violence, and tried to turn it into another snark.

So the story is this:  the hyenas of the Ministry of Truth twist Franson’s statement far out of context to whip up hysteria – part of a long-running campaign to harass Franson and, indeed, all conservative women, to make being involved in politics too emotionally draining for all but the supernaturally-toughest conservative women (and by God, your leading conservative women could make a Navy SEAL cry uncle).  Hysteria duly ensues, with less-mentally-gifted DFLers promising one of their made-to-order mini-riots on Saturday.

The media wants to know…

…if Franson really thinks food stamp recipients are reeeeealy animals?

Franson, fortunately, responded:

The real news story is the death threats and vicious, sexual, misogynist emails I have received in connection with the video that has been taken down and for which I have apologized. I’ve never compared people with animals as I think too highly of the human person. This is why it’s immoral for government to enable dependency, a subject my critics are fierce to avoid. Democrats are content with

the poverty status quo; republicans are not.

I’d be happy to forward to you some of the emails if you are interested. Otherwise, the subject that I understand you wish to interview me about is both stale & dated and

has been eclipsed by violence from the left. I think your viewers would be more interested in the latter than the former.

Best regards,

Mary Franson

It’s more than a little tempting to drive to Alex this weekend with a camera.  Indeed, if there are any conservative activists in the neighborhood, it’d be good to get the festivities on tape.  This blog will run your footage for you.

And I have a feeling I won’t have to shave any context to make it shame the DFL.

PS:  I implied above that there is a concerted rhetorical campaign to so intensely harass conservative women, blacks, latinos and gays to the point that they stay out of politics.  I’m wondering – can you imagine how some DFL hamster like Betty McCollum or Sandy Pappas would melt down if they were the target of the constant misogynistic hatred that the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Laura Ingraham, Mary Franson or any other conservative women are?

Imagining is all we can do, of course.  Because it just.  Doesn’t.  Happen.   Not like this.

I woke up this morning and realized I hadn’t written anything about the big anniversary yesterday.  So I’ll do it today.

March 6 was the eighth anniversary of the first-ever broadcast of the Northern Alliance Radio Network.

In the beginning, the idea was a simple trade;  AM1280 would get the promotional mojo that came from associating with a bunch of the leading bloggers in a conservative blog scene that, then as now, was the biggest and best in the US.  We’d get time to do a show.  Everyone would win.

And everyone did win.  I have no less fun doing the show today than I did on Day One.  In fact, it may be more fun – because those first two years made for some weird, if fun, radio.

The first two years, the show basically involved hourly relays from among the crowd of bloggers involved – and it was a crowd.  Ed, King Banaian, John HInderaker, Scott Johnson, Chad the Elder, Brian “Saint Paul” Ward and (at the very beginning) JB Doubtless and Atomizer all tramped in and out of the studio, along with the occasional guest, with me usually directing traffic making sure only one person talked at a time and (often as not) introducing them so the audience would know which of the mass of voices was which.  It’s not a kind of show you hear often on talk radio.  There’s a reason for that.

So those first two years, I was probably more of a traffic cop than a talk show host.  I like being a host a lot more.

It was two years later we split into two, and then three, shows.  People left (John, Scott, Chad, Brian), people joined (Brad Carlson) and joined and left (Michael Brodkorb), but we’re still at three shows on two stations on two weekend days.

It’s also a whack upside the head to note that in my first go-around in radio, I probably had actual jobs for eight of the 13 years; in other words, half of my “radio career” has been spent doing the NARN.

And I gotta say, it’s been the good half!

So as we kick off Year Nine of the NARN, I’d like to thank everyone involved.  General Manager Ron Stone, like John Hunt before him, continues to let us use his valuable air time.  Lee MIchaels, like Nick Novak and Patrick Campion before him, is a great, supportive program director.  Tommy Huynh, like Matt Reynolds and Irina Malanina and the late great Joe Hanson before, keeps making us sound good.

And of course Ed, King and Brad, like John, Scott, Chad, Brian, Michael and even JB and Atomizer before them, continue to help make the NARN the most fun I’ve ever had on the radio, and remain among my best friends off the air, and help make the show one of the highlights of the week.

I joke that “the worst day on the air is better than the best day off the air”.  It’s not really true – or at least, I feel sorry for anyone for whom it is true.  But week-in, week out, for the past 416 weeks and probably close to 400 broadcasts now, doing the NARN has been one of the highlights of my week.

And for way, way more of you than anyone would have figured eight years ago, it’s at least a stop on your weekend listening, too.  And for that I’m profoundly grateful.

Last month, Minnesota’s American Civil LIberties Union chapter ran a publicity stunt, offering a thousand dollar reward for an example of a case of voter fraud that a Voter ID Amendment would have caught.

Today, the Minnesota Majority took the stunt ball and rran, producing a case and putting in its clam for the reward:

Dan McGrath, executive director of Minnesota Majority, produced court records from an Anoka County case involving voting in the 2008 election. The records concern an Andover woman who was charged with three felonies. According to the records, prosecutors believe she voted in person in her own name, and by absentee ballot in the name of her daughter, who was away at college.

The daughter also voted near her college in the same election. The mother, according to records produced by McGrath, pleaded guilty to one of the charges and was sentenced to probation in August of 2011.

I”ll be asking McGrath for the names.  I’ll bet dimes to dollars the woman voted DFL both times.

But that’s not really the subject of this post.

No, I have two other observations.

Is Jim Ragsdale Gunning For Lori Sturdevant’s Gig?: Ragsdale kicked off his piece with the following, to which I’ve added emphasis:

A small conservative activist group known as the Minnesota Majority, which has been investigating voting irregularities in Minnesota for years, claimed a $1,000 prize offered by the ACLU for finding a case of fraud that a photo ID requirement would have prevented.

So the MInnesota Majority is “small” and “conservative” – but the ACLU is omniscient and balanced?

Why does Ragsdale feel the need to  label Minnesota Majority’s ideology but not that of the ACLU?

And why does he call it “small”, when the MM likely puts more activists out in the field on any given day than the ACLU – which is, let’s not forget, a couple of lawyers in an office in Saint Paul and a “membership” that is largely a list of donors?

Mr. Ragsdale:  Editorialize much?

So How Much Fraud Does The Left Find Acceptable?: Greta Bergstrom, who works for “Take Action Minnesota”, tweeted:

A college student was impersonated by her mom. Seriously? This is the “voting threat” in MN? #mnleg #stribpol

Let’s try to illustrate this for you.  Let’s say that the Koch Brothers forges a ballot on a referendum to ban abortion.  That forged ballot negated the vote of one pro-choice woman.  Would that level of fraud be acceptable?  Just one pro-choice woman?

Think hard, Greta.  Crank that finely-honed progressive propaganda-bot mind up to “puree” and cough up an answer.

You can do it.  I just know you can.

The Strib finally did it.

The Strib’s editorial board, in serving in its unstated capacity as stenographers for the DFL and its agenda, have written some howlers over the years; countering them has provided a constant source of material for Minnesota’s large, thriving center-right alternative media for a solid decade now.

But over the weekend, they pulled off the unthinkable – the triple three-peat, the three-minute mile, winning 164 games in a regular season of editorial writing.

They wrote an editorial that was absolutely devoid of truth, or of objective fact.  Literally, not one assertion in the entire column about Representative Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill is true, or not presented in a context that isn’t 180 degrees misleading.

An editorial that is, to a moral and ethical “T”, perfectly untrue beyond simple things like “the legislature passed…” or “Jim Backstrom is…”, obviously).

The thought of cataloging all the individual lies in this editorial is almost too daunting.  But if not me, who?

Now that the Legislature has passed a bill that would allow gun owners to use deadly force anywhere they feel threatened, only Gov. Mark Dayton can prevent it from becoming law.

This statement starts out with a bang (as it were), proving the stenographer writer’s absolute ignorance on the subject.  Minnesota law currently says you can use lethal force when you feel threatened.  The bill doesn’t change the justifications for lethal force.  Not at all.   It has nothing to do with how the law-abiding shooter “Feels”.

It has to do with the burden of proof in judging their motives, and only under certain circumstnces.

More later.

Known as an expanded version of the “castle doctrine,” the bill would allow Minnesotans to shoot to kill even if they aren’t at home. The state’s current castle law already allows citizens to use deadly force in their homes to protect themselves.

This statement is proof that the writer is just re-writing a press release from Heather Martens.

Minnesotans – and residents of any state, for that matter – can already use lethal force to defend themselves, in or out of their homes.   Self-defense has been an accepted part of the law since before there was a United States.

The problem in MInnesota is that self defense is called an “affirmative defense”; you plead guilty to shooting someone, with an explanation.  You are then guilty until you prove yourself innocent, and show to the court’s and jury’s satisfaction that you were…:

• An unwilling participant
• in reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm
• that lethal force was justified
• that you made a reasonable effort to disengage.

The “Stand  Your Ground” law would make one change; if you shoot someone on your property – your house, your yard, your garage, in your car or a business you own – the burden of proof switches to the county attorney.   The law-abiding shooter on their own property will be innocent until proven guilty.

And that is all.

But the proposed law, more appropriately called the “shoot first” bill by opponents,

And there’s more proof that the editorial is just a rewrite of a Heather Martens press release.

“Shoot First” bill?

Has anyone on the Strib editorial board’s band of logicians ever pondered what happens if you shoot second?

would let gun owners fire at people they perceive as threats — without the expectation that they should first attempt to avoid trouble if possible.

Another lie, another direct crib from Heather Martens’ chanting points.  Self-defense shooting is always shooting at “perceived threats”.  The bill merely means that, while you’re on your property, the county attorney has the burden of proving that your perception was wrong.

In particular, ‘Shooting people without first trying to avoid trouble” is legal suicide now, and it would be if the law passes.

Minnesota doesn’t need this change. The state already has a conceal-and-carry law, and citizens who choose to arm themselves can already use firearms for protection anywhere within reasonable limits.

Which is true – and irrelevant to the subject of the editorial.

The bill is not about the right to keep and bear arms; that’s in the Constitution.  It’s about the right to use them in legitimate self-defense without an undue legal burden.

And as we saw in last month’s story from Iowa, the burden – being considered guilty until proven innocent – can truly be an undue one.

For years, shoot-first expansion has been among the top legislative priorities for the National Rifle Association. The organization believes that gun owners should have unfettered rights to defend themselves whenever and wherever they feel threatened.

That paragraph is more Heather Martens, from the callow, demonizing reference to the NRA, to the weasel-word that barely camouflages a lie (nobody, neither Cornish nor the NRA, supports an “unfettered” right to kill in self-defense; merely reasonable legal protections for everyone, including the shooter) and the face-palming illogic (again – self-defense is always about whether one “feels threatened”; the devil is in the details; they help determine whether that “feeling” reasonable?)

That’s part of the problem: Defining a threat can be very personal — and mistakes can be deadly. Some gun owners may feel nervous because of the way a group of youths is dressed. Others might find members of a different race or culture to pose a threat.

Heather Martens has been my rhetorical kick-toy for most of the past decade – but to the best of my knowledge, she’s never tried to play the race card.  I suspect this is the Strib’s editorial board taking some editorial license with Martens’ press release.

You can shoot someone today because you don’t like their clothes, or their race, or their “culture”.  You merely have to prove to a jury that you feared being killed or maimed, that lethal force was justified, that you made a reasonable effort to escape the threat of imminent death or mutilation, and that you didn’t seek out the fight.

And the only thing that’ll change – the only thing – under the proposal is that if you are on your property, the county attorney will have to prove that it was wrong.

And the editorial board apparently has no confidence whatsoever in Minnesota’s police or prosecutors’ ability to tell if a shooting is illegitimate – that a shooting was because of fear of the victim’s “race” or “clothes” or “culture” rather than legitimate fear of death.

Whichever is the case, the conclusion – the editorial board is lying – is the same.

And what about those occasions when a person hears a noise and worries that it could be someone who would do them harm? Then there’s the issue of defending one’s life vs. protecting property.

Absolutely none of which changes from current law.  If the police and county attorney investigate and believe that there was no legitimate threat to the property owner, the property owner still has a problem.  The editorial board – like Heather Martens – is lying about this.

The proposed law allows deadly force to be used against anyone who enters a garage, for example, “by stealth or force.” That means a homeowner could injure someone or take a life over the theft of a car, bicycle or lawn mower.

Let’s take this statement at face value – more than it deserves – and compare and contrast.

An unarmed black Somali youth sneaks into a garage to steal a bike.  Homeowner runs to garage and shoots him.  The homeowner claims self-defense – that he “felt threatened”.

Current Law: Since the youth was unarmed and there was no evidence that he was a lethal threat to the homeowner, the homeowner’s affirmative defense fails and he’s convicted of murder or manslaughter.

Proposed Law: Since the police investigation shows the youth was unarmed and there was no evidence that he was a lethal threat to the homeowner, the county charges him with murder or manslaughter, and easily proves him guilty.

That’s it.

As Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom pointed out in a Feb. 15 commentary on these pages (“A bill for the trigger-happy? Bull’s-eye”), the modified law would allow people to shoot first and ask questions later whenever they believed they were threatened, regardless of how a reasonable person would have responded under the same circumstances.

And as I showed, then and above, Backstrom was lying and misrepresenting the law.

It speaks volumes that Backstrom and most other state and national prosecutors, as well as law enforcement groups, oppose the proposal.

Yes; it shows, yet again, that they are in the bag for the DFL.  Which is a fact – urban “law enforcement groups” like the MN Police Chiefs’ association are primarily political organizations; the chiefs, especially those in the bigger cities, are mainly political offices, appointed by and serving at the pleasure of the (always DFL) governments.

More importantly?  These same groups all come out against all Second Amendment expansions.  All of them.  They all predict dire consequences.

And they are always wrong.

They’re on the front lines and understand that deadly force should be the last resort.

And the bill will not change that one iota.  It’ll merely mean prosecutors will have the same burden of proof they have against real criminals.

Rep. Tony Cornish, R-Good Thunder, has supported expanded castle legislation for years, arguing that the change would codify that law-abiding people “have the brains” [love those scare quotes, huh?  – Ed] to understand the seriousness of deadly force.

And the record, nationwide, has shown Cornish’s argument to be resoundingly correct.

Cornish, a former police chief, believes the bill is a logical extension of current law and that the change is needed because citizens need to know that they won’t be prosecuted for defending themselves.

But Cornish can’t point to a single case in Minnesota in which someone acting in self-defense was convicted of anything or sent to jail.

It’s deceptive rhetoric – and it’s untrue.  I sure can.

Thomas McCuiston – a 125-pound black man – fatally shot a 6’1, drunk, racist attacker with a 50-pound weight advantage who was breaking into his home; he was defending his five year old son.  At trial the judge refused to include the part of the statute that referred to “defending ones’ dwelling” into his instructions; they sentenced McCuiston to 15 years.  The appellate judge found that the jury instruction was a reversible error; McCuiston was granted a new trial, where the jury got the right instruction and acquitted McCuiston.

There’s one.  Want another?

Martin Treptow, who shot at a man who’d been road-raging at him and had him blocked in at a stoplight on Highway 10.  The man pointed a gun at Treptow’s pregnant wife as she sat in the passenger seat; Treptow shot the man, who turned out to be an “undercover cop” and member of the now-disgraced Gang Strike Force.  Although Treptow was released without even having his carry permit revoked by the Anoka cops, the Anoka County Attorney leaned on Treptow, promising endless prosecution unless he accepted a deal.  An unemployed security guard, he didn’t have the resources to fight the case; he pled guilty to lesser charges.  It was as complete a miscarriage of justice as I’ve ever seen – and as clear a justification of the Cornish Bill as exists.

Those two cases (and I’ll bank on there being more) distract from the real point, which isn’t necessarily that anyone “goes to jail” because they had to prove their innocence (unlike virtually any real criminal); it’s that they had to spend an average of $50,000 in legal bills against the  unlimited resources of the county attorney to  defeat a presumption of guilt until proven innocent – a financial hit the county attorney’s office can absorb without a second thought, but which breaks many poorer defendants…

…who plead guilty to lesser charges, and thus don’t count as people “sitting in jail because they were wrongly convicted”, because, hey, they confessed to the lesser crime – and the lesser included charge of being too poor to fight the County Attorney!  Indeed, those are the victims of the current system of law; smug upper-middle-class liberals can afford lawyers to fight their way through the system and prove themselves innocent; working class and poor people, like Treptow and McCuiston and Ray Lewis, people who live in lousyh neighborhoods (gutted by DFL policy) who need to defend themselves (against criminals against which the DFL-run city is powerless), but don’t have the resources to fight the county attorney.

So while the editorial is utterly devoid of fact, it is racist, in the way that Strib editorials always are; the racism of “good intentions”, of trying to do the little peoples’ thinking for them.  Even if it means you have to doctor the facts to do it.

So why is the Strib editorial board lying?  Why is it doing a glossy rewrite of an (I’ll guess, with authority) Heather Martens press release and calling it the institutional voice of the newspaper?

The Strib is lying to the people. Where is the accountability?

Other than the slow dripping of market forces pushing it into irrelevance?  There is none.

EXTRA CREDIT QUESTION:  How long until Catherine Richert at MPR’s “Poligraph” “fact-checks” this editorial?

I rarely post on Sundays.

But I had to break the silence to point out that yesterday, the Strib ran an editorial about Rep. Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill that was distinguished by having not one solitary true assertion in it.

Not one.

As egregious as the Strib editors’ assaults against fact (on behalf of the DFL) have always been, I can not recall one in the past that not only so grossly buggers fact in pursuit of supporting the DFL’s agenda, to say nothing of being so morally, ethically and factually void to a physical absolute.

Tomorrow morning at 6AM here on Shot In The Dark.

Elspeth Reeve at the Atlantic – not necessarily a Breitbart-friendly mag – t on the late conservative alt-media impresario:

To understand Andrew Breitbart’s legacy, you first need to understand what he set out to do. If you happened to encounter him in Los Angeles during the middle of the last decade, when he was transitioning from Matt Drudge’s anonymous No. 2 to building his own web empire, he would happily tell you, in a long, not easy to follow monologue, about the terrible creeping forces of “cultural Marxism.” (To get a taste, here he is talking on the subject at the University of Redlands last September.) As he saw the world, there was still a grand battle raging between capitalism and communism, and the left — the heirs to the Frankfurt School as he constantly reminded people — had manage to twist the entire culture against capitalism. “The left is smart enough to understand that the way to change a political system is through its cultural systems,” he told The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead in 2010. “So you look at the conservative movement — working the levers of power, creating think tanks, and trying to get people elected in different places — while the left is taking over Hollywood, the music industry, the churches.”

His project was to take that cultural space back for free market conservatives. ƒTo make his brand of economic freedom cool.

“Cool” – with its hipster-turned-marketing overtones – is the wrong term.  Breitbart wanted the forces of freedom – libertarian-conservatives, free-marketeers, dissenters from the big government norm – to stop scoffing at the culture war, and start fighting and winning it.

Greg “Redeye” Gutfeld, writing last summer at Breitbart’s BigHollywood, called Tea Party conservatism the “new punk rock”, a joyous boiling down of whatever you need to boil down – rock and roll or conservative principle – to its very basics; shrink government and Keith Emerson organ solos; free markets and fewer 20 minute drum solos; three-minute songs and cut taxes; build independence, cut dependence.

And like Joe Strummer, David Johannson and Johnny Rotten, Breitbart had his squibs; anyone who’s breaking new ground (or exhuming old ground) will.  Combat Rock and Buster Poindexter and the ’78 US Tour and some of James O’Keefe’s stretchier pieces were all diversions and footnotes to much, much bigger achievements; in Breitbart’s case, the first large, coherent conservative alt-media attempt to engage in popular culture.

The opening lines of his CPAC speech are a brand of conservativism you’re unlikely to see at the Republican National Convention. They sound like rock song lyrics: “Everything has changed, everything has changed in the last few years, conservatives used to take it and we’re not taking it anymore.” He sounded like angry kids railing against oppressive suburban culture. But he also acknowledged that he didn’t quite fit in with the conservative movement and a party that shows no signs of edging closer to his right-wing punk aesthetic.”Two hundred of us went out to the Occupy people to stand toe-to-toe with them to say, ‘We are here and we are not going to take your [artful hand gesture].’ I didn’t say it, I’m on TV right now, I’m a respectful conservative and my mom is watching.”

And it’s that – confronting the poisonous and hateful, calling out the totalitarian, while still engaging in the larger culture that we all, ideally, share – is the great lesson of Breitbart.

And it’s one of the reasons I always loved all his efforts.  Like his former boss Matt Drudge, he didn’t come to the alt-media with a pedigree of working within the journalistic system.  He came not to suck up to the liberal establishment in Hollywood, Journalism, education, “public service” and so many other areas of our culture; he came to criticize, satirize, mock and chasten it.

Which is, of course, why all of us unwashed peasants in the conservative blogosphere got into the game.

Andrew Breitbart passed away this morning in Los Angeles.

Larry Solov at BigJourno writes:

We have lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a dear friend, a patriot and a happy warrior.

Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love.

Breitbart gave the conservative alternative media something it needed; a full-time, tireless, fearless crusader, a rebel without a pause.

Liberals hated him, because he and his group of fellow media Visigoths played their game, only better; BigJourno and Big Hollylwood were like the Huffington Post, only not vapid and obsequious to their subjects. Andrew and his protegees did John Stewart and Steven Cobert one better; news, sometimes straight, sometimes satirical, but without the miasma of self-satisfaction in which the lefty shows marinade themselves.

I only met Breitbart once, at a party at Lileks’ place during Right Online last summer:

Lileks, Chad The Elder, Breitbart, Margaret Martin, David Strom, Laura Hemler, Laura's friend Cindy Olson, and the Giant Swede, last summer.

My biggest impression, other than the fact that he’d been pretty much mobbed, with admirers and, er, detractors during the entire event (he was the star of both Right Online and the sad, dyspeptic “Nutroots Nation”, also in town that weekend) was that, as much as he was into, as big a counter-media-culture empire as he’d built, as potent an instrument as he controlled, the greatest adventure of his life was raising his son, whom he very visibly couldn’t wait to get home to see, and whose fourth birthday party was going to be the real highlight of the week.

And it’s for his family I pray, and to them I send my sympathy and condolences.

For the rest of us?

Solov quotes Breitbart in the foward to his latest book:

Three years ago, I was mostly a behind-the-scenes guy who linked to stuff on a very popular website. I always wondered what it would be like to enter the public realm to fight for what I believe in. I’ve lost friends, perhaps dozens. But I’ve gained hundreds, thousands—who knows?—of allies. At the end of the day, I can look at myself in the mirror, and I sleep very well at night.

Breitbart discovered – on a grand scale – what a lot of us bloggers did almost a decade ago; that showing up, that deciding to make a difference, could be the beginning of something great.   For many of us, it has been.  And here’s hoping his example creates a thousand more like him.

Solov:

Andrew is at rest, yet the happy warrior lives on, in each of us.

And that’s the key.  To be a warrior – but a happy one.  A gentleman.  A full, completely realized, multifaceted human being, not a frothing acidic polibot.

He’ll be much missed.  But he’s created thousands of memorials, and God willing there’ll be ten thousand more today and tomorrow.

To: Catharine Richert, “Poligraph” writer at MPR
From: Mitch Berg, mere peasant
Re: Here’s a dandy story idea!

Ms. Richert,

You’ve been doing “Poligraph” at Mnnesota Public Radio for quite some time now.   The ongoing feature purports to fact-check Minnesota politicians’ statements.

Now, a quick glance through the Poligraph page seems to show that most of your “fact-checking” involves going over statements…by Republicans.  The statements, and the facts in question, can frequently be more than a little bit picayune, but the point isn’t so much that you fact-check a lot of things that are, to most people, pretty ephemeral stuff as it is that your efforts seem so very, very one-sided.

Now, on the one hand I’m one of those rare conservatives who credits MPR’s News operation for at least trying for some sort of balance.  Tom Scheck did an excellent piece on Alliance For A Better Minnesota, for example.  Two years after I did it, naturally, and long-lagging my own extensive coverage of ABM’s efforts, but then he’s gotta cover a lot of stuff, and it’s fine.  Better late than never (although I do wonder why MPR’s coverage of things that don’t carefully buff the DFL’s sheen always happen in the dead of winter, long before anyone actually cares about politics, but again, just a quibble).  As a rule, I appreciate the job MPR News does, while believing it could do better.

On the other hand, I do realize you work for MPR, you’re a graduate of the impeccably-“progressive” Humprey Institude, and beyond all that that you have to serve your Volvo-driving, Carlton-degree-holding, Wellstone-worshiping, Crocus-Hill-dwelling, latte-drinking master.  And that DFL-voting master just loooooves to have her ego stroked, whether during the pledge drives (I noticed a lot more of the “we MPR listeners are a smart, discerning bunch!” promos during your pledge drive) and in between.  Which means tackling those nasty, talk-radio-listening Republicans.

So it’d be interesting to see if you ever manage to get around to “Poligraphing” the most egriegious, pants-soaked-in-napalm lies in Minnesota politics today – those being told by the likes of Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom and the various metro police chiefs about the “Stand Your Ground” bill.  Quite simply, nothing they say – nothing, nada, bupkes – has even the faintest grain of truth to it.

(I’ll bring you up to speed:  Stand Your Ground would treat people who shoot in self-defense on their property a presumption of innocence.  Currently, to claim self-defense, you have to essentially say “I’m guilty, but here’s my explanation…”, and hope the explanation suits the prosecutor, judge and jury.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes it really really doesn’t.

Now, Backstrom, Darth Lillehaug, and some of the Metro police chiefs (and headline writers) claim that the bill would “legalize murder”, which is a slander both to the law-abiding owner and the cops and prosecutors who investigate the shootings – as if they can’t tell the difference between a legitimate self-defense shooting and a criminal act.

But more importantly for your beat, Ms. Richert, it’s right in your wheelhouse.  You have Minnesota politicans – and, even worse, officers of the court – lying about the law.  To Minnesotans..

That’s your beat, right?

Now, I realize that the Volvo-driving, free-range-alpaca-wearing, Saint-Olaf-diploma-sporting, latte-drinking, Merriam-Park-dwelling crowd that is your audience base might find guns and Second Amendment supporters unfashionable.  I get that.

But, again – politicians lying to the people.  In the news.

While this might take time away from poring over Michele Bachmann’s grocery list, I”m just saying.  You smelling what I’m cooking?

That is all.

One of the DFL’s more comical devices is calling themselves “the party of the people”.

It’s always been a mixed bag, of course; currently, it’s the party of the people who try to make a career out of giving other people handouts, and the people who can exploit that system for more power for themselves.  Which, admittedly, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so I’ll give ’em a pass for not using it.

But still, for “the party of the people”, the DFL is committed to quite a few stances this cycle that are diametrically opposed to what “the people” seem to want.   As a result, they and the astroturf groups that do all of the DFL’s actual messaging these days – Alliance For A Better Minnesota, Take Action MN, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the unions and such – are busily cranking out a PR campaign to try to show that a minority, sometimes a teeeeeny tiny little minority, of the people are really a majority.

Here are some of the issues on which the DFL and its astroturf hench-groups don’t want you to believe your lying eyes:

Opposed to Election Integrity – The DFL opposes Voter ID.  The DFL’s Astroturf Cabinet is making a lot of noise to cover the fact that between seventy and eighty percent of Minnesotans believe that voters should have to present some form of ID.  There is no way to do this without lying, of course; Mark Ritchie’s statement that “700,000 voters would be disenfranchised” is baked wind; even if the number is accurate (and it is no more accurate than a Mark Ritchie election), the vast majority of them would be same-day registrants who could fill out provisional ballots while their identities were validated.

And most people know that.  And even if they don’t, they do smell a rat, and think Voter ID just plain makes sense – just as it does when you cash a check, buy beer, rent an apartment, get a job, start a savings account, use a credit card at a store…

…which, apparently, 700,000 Minnesotans are unable to do.

That seems like a problem we’d hear about, doesn’t it?

Right To Work: According to the Survey USA poll from a few weeks back, the vast majority of Minnesotans – 55-24% – support “Right to Work”, which essentially means that unions have to make a case to the worker for their dues; they won’t be required to pay dues to a union.

The Astroturf Cabinet is trying to spin out of the jam two different ways; by comparing “right to work” states to “union” states in terms of straight-up per-capita income (as if New Yorkers earn more than Arkansans solely or even significantly because of unions), and the notion that wages drop in “right to work” states, which is very inconclusive at best, and offset by the fact that “Right to Work” states grow faster (which, again, isn’t entirely because they’re “Right to Work”; they tend to be red states, and they DO grow more).

Stand Your Ground – earlier this week, four Democrats (Tom Saxhaug, Rod Skoe, David Tomassoni and Dan Sparks). broke with the Metrocrat majority to vote with the GOP on the “Stand Your Ground” bill, which would allow self-defense shooters to be innocent until proven guilty while on their property or in their cars.

Some county attorneys and “police chiefs”, apparently unsure that they or their staffs could prove an unjust shooter broke the law, oppose the bill, saying it’d “legalize cold blooded murder”.  The DFL’s handmaidens in the media are, on this issue, apparently too incurious to prod into some of the people they use as sources.

And yet Saxhaug, Tomassoni, Skoe and Sparks no doubt remember ten years ago – the last time the DFL put itself on the opposite side of the Second Amendment movement – it cost the DFL, least outstate, dearly.  The DFL’s opposition to Concealed Carry reform ten years ago played a pivotal role in costing it the House, and in driving the Senate strongly to the right; DFLers played a key role in passing the Minnesota Personal Protection Act. They did it because real Minnesotans supported it, and showed it at the polls.  Nine DFLers crossed over to pass the original bill in 2003; it was much more than that in 2005 when the bill re-passed after it was struck down by a DFL pet judge in 2004.

But the DFL is much more extreme today than ten years ago.   And the right of the law-abiding to defend themselves is anathema to them.  So they’ll oppose Stand Your Ground,  and try to scare people away from it…

…even though the vast majority of informed people support it.

Wilfare – Minnesotans oppose raising their taxes to increase the value of Zygi Wilf’s investment (or, in some cases, oppose raising their own taxes).  But the DFL wants to divert money from the charities that get funding from charitable gambling to, again, give Wilfare to a billionaire whose only real goal is to inflate the value of his investment!

But it’s not being talked about – anywhere.  Least of all in the mainstream media, which profits handsomely from pro sports.

How do you think Minnesotans feel about that?

On issue after issue, the only consensus behind the DFL is the one their minions in the astroturf “Ministry of Truth” manufacture for them, and that their flaks in the media try to portray, provided one pays no attention to the Messinger behind the curtain.

Despite having media appearances in cicada-like increments, I’ll be braving the flurries to be on Marty Owings’ “Capitol Conversations” tonight at 6pm.

You can catch the show here as we discuss the current issues at the Capitol including the constitutional amendments, redistricting, election issues, the Vikings stadiums (would the plural be stadia?) or any other breaking news of interest.

To: Rachel Stassen-Berger, Tom Scheck, Pat Kessler, Bill Salisbury, Tim Pugmire, John Cronan, Tom Leyden, David Brauer, Erik Black, and all of the various other Deans Of The Capitol Press Corps their respective news directors and editors:

From: Mitch Berg, noisome peasant

Re: Huh?

All,

When covering the “Stand Your Ground” bill at the legislature, you all continue to quote the likes of Heather Martens, David Kolb and Jim Backstrom.

And yet everything any of them has ever said on the subject of gun control, the Second Amendment, and above all the consequences of “liberalizing” gun laws for the law abiding has been, always and with no exceptions, not only wrong, but completely the opposite of the truth.  As in, devoid of not just fact, but truth.  Nothing.  Zip.  Bupkes.  Never one iota of fact.

They are “sources” that have burned you, as reporters, every single time you’ve cited them on Second Amendment issues.  No exceptions.

Now, I was a reporter.  Not a great one – serviceable is the word – but even I knew that if you had a source that  never, ever, not once, did anything but discredit your reporting on an issue, you stopped using the source, or at least corroborated everything they said with a reliable one.   Even if I didn’t know better, my editors would usually insist on it.   I mean, if there were three sources that consistently either botched the story or just plain lied to you about, say, the budget or a Senator’s affair, you’d drop ’em off your Rolodex – right?

So is there some exception to this for Second Amendment issues, or are you all that genuinely incurious about the facts on this issue?

I’m genuinely curious.  Have your people call my people.

That is all.

Between 70% and 80% of Minnesota voters favor the Voter ID proposal.

Some of us favor it because it’s the first step in a series of election reforms that will help us ensure that our election system in fact has integrity; there are increasingly strong suspicions that the election system in Minnesota, with its reports of fraudulent election-day un-identified vouched registrations (among other abuses), lacks that integrity.

Others have the common sense to know that 32 states currently require some degree of voter ID, and elections work just fine; the elderly and students register and vote, just like adults (significantly, most of the non-ID states are Democrat, including states renowned for dirty elections, like Illinois, New York, New Jersey and California)

But for whatever reason, Minnesota voters overwhelmingly favor the measure.  Even in the most “conservative” poll on the subject, the Survey USA poll which showed a 71-23 margin of support overall, the measure even wins among declared liberals, 35-32.

So the anti-ID crowd is getting desperate.

And to paraphrase Gandhi, when you’re fighting the DFL machine on a subject like this, first they ignore you.

Then they mock you.

And  then they call you a racist.

The site was sponsored – apparently – by “Take Action Minnesota”, an astroturf group thats is basically what all of the various non-profit Wellstone cults became over the last decade or so.

And – oboy.  A black guy in a striped suit.  Not good.  Tone deaf.  Politically-incorrect.

And, in the special little world of the liberal astroturf group, I suppose it,  all by itself, invalidates the entire move to bring integrity back to our voting system.

BAD MN Majority.

MN Majority came out with another – which also aroused TakeAction’s drearily predictable ire:

Lest you think all TakeActionMN does is do screenshots, there was some writing and stuff too:

This image is on a Minnesota Majority website. It is trying to scare us into changing our state constitution to require a photo ID to vote. Photo ID would restrict voting rights for over half a million Minnesotans – especially people of color. Photo ID is voter suppression. And it stops here.

I’m always puzzled by the notion that requiring an ID to vote – like we require them for lesser “rights” like cashing a check, using a credit card, setting up a bank account, getting a Social Security Card, getting a copy of your birth certificate, buying Sudafed, getting into a bar, buying a firearm or ammunition, buying a car, taking out a loan, dropping your kids off and picking them up at drop-in daycare, buy alcohol or cigarettes, apply for welfare, food stamps or any sort of medical assistance, rent an apartment, get admitted to a hospital, or get a marriage license – “disenfranchises” anyone, much less ten percent of all Minnesotans, as “Take Action MN” claims.   Or, for that matter, that VoterID infringes, in and of itself, on the right to vote.  It doesn’t; it merely means you need an ID to do it.

Indeed, once you get past cartoon pratfalls, it’s TakeAction that makes the genuinely racist claim – the ludicrous and frankly offensive notion that ten percent of Minneostans – apparently, all minorities, students and the elderly, although nobody has any idea where they got that number, and next month it could very well be “eleventy-teen percent” and nobody will say “boo”.   But to me, their claims sound a lot like “minorities and people of color are too dumb to keep track of their paperwork and ID cards”.

I’m sure that’s not what they meant.

At any rate – we know how Gandhi’s bromide ends; “Then you win”.

TakeAction and the rest of the Minnesota astroturf cult are getting increasingly desperate on this issue, as well as the other big wedge issue likely headed for the ballot this fall, an amendment to make Minnesota a Right to Work state.  Without fraudulent votes and endless union money, the DFL’s position in Minnesota will get a lot weaker.

And that’s a big win for everyone, no matter what your race, ethnicity, or relentless political correctness.

We’re getting close to election season.

And Minnesota’s left-“leaning” “grassroots” astroturf organizations – Common Cause, Take Action Minnesota, Alliance For A Better Minnesota, and the various unions are following suit with doing what their various funders are paying them to do; trying to spin news, facts and info to get people to vote DFL in the upcoming elections.

Now, as we noted during the 2010 election cycle, these groups – especially Alliance for a Better Minnesota – are lavishly funded by liberal plutocrats, and always have been…

…even back before Citizens United started evening the playing field and allowing conservatives the same access to soft money that the Dems have always gotten from their union and 527 supporters.

Which is like complaining about plate tectonics; what are you going to do about it, one would be right to ask.  Political money is speech; we conservatives live by that ideal, and we’ll have to learn to prevail by it.

It’s not that the money buys so much messaging that is so very very irritating – indeed, depressing, if one cares for the future of this society, beyond narrow partisan politics.

It’s that the messaging it buys is so often not merely devoid of fact or defining context, but so cynically so that one can only think their only motivation for the entire campaign is “to repeat enough complete bullshit often enough to fool enough of the stupid and gullible to keep us in power”.

We saw this in 2010 in Minnesota, when these groups and their “useful idiots” (Lenin’s term, not mine) in the Twin Cities media and lefty “alternative” media, pounded a couple of non-factual or almost criminally-context-deprived points home with almost experimental-psych-class-material mania; the idea that “Tom Emmer had two DUIs” (he hadn’t; he’d been arrested and pled down to “Careless Driving”, 20 and 30 years earlier) and that he’d (campaigned for lax punishment for drunk drivers” (also a lie; Emmer was proposing a change in the implied consent law that is supported by a broad, and bipartisan, range of figures, at least in part because current law discriminates so completely against people who can’t afford lawyers.  Emmer would have changed that).  The campaign helped convinced, I’m going to guess, just a shade over 8,000 of our stupidest, most incurious, lemming-like neighbors to vote for a superannuated playboy with drinking, drug and depression problems and a record as America’s worst senator instead.

In other words, slathering Minnesota’s dimmest, least-curious citizens with b*llsh*t worked.

And they’re going long on the tactic this year.

Under the dual rubrics of my “Minnesota’s Ministry of Truth” and “Chanting Points Memo” categories, I’m going to start cataloging the broad, rich, lavishly-funded vein of pure fiction (at best) that the DFL is banking on to try to stem GOP fortunes in Minnesota this fall.

“Most Minnesotans oppose Voter ID” – This one came from Greta Bergstrom, a spokes-bot for “Take Action Minnesota”, an activist non-profit that claims a Wellstone-ian pedigree, but whose inner workings (say an acquaintance with knowledge of their front office) would fit in better in Pyongyang; “Nobody wants photo ID”, she tweeted not too long ago.  That was about the time – go figure – that Survey USA was showing Voter ID with 3:1 support (71-29) among Minnesotans, even among self-identified liberals.  Which was, by the way, the poll with the best news for Voter ID opponents.   Ms. Bergstrom apparently believes that if she and her group repeat it often enough, just enough of the addled will buy in.  It’s worked before, after all; it’s why we have a Governor Dayton!

“The Stand Your Ground Bill” would allow citizens to shoot people because they felt like it” – It’s bad enough that pathetically addled leftybloggers grind their way through this bit of nonsense; they have no power even among lefty media types.  But when you have Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom – words fail me – misrepresenting the law in re Stand Your Ground, to try to draw out a wedge (to try to counter all the various wedges that the GOP have identified for this coming season), you know that the idiocy moves depressingly high on the food chain.  Backstrom may or may not be taking orders from Alliance For A Better Minnesota (and thence, likely as not, Media Matters) like the likes of Bergstrom, Carrie Lucking, Ken Martin and Denise Cardinal – but he’s basically playing from their one-note sheet music.

“Right To Work States Have Lower Per-Capita Incomes Than Union States!” – This, you hear from any number of different lefty-bots, is a great reason to oppose the “Right To Work” Amendment, which (says Survey USA) Minnesotans favor by a 55-24 margin.  Of course, they never mention that non-Right-to-Work states are, inevitably, coastal “Blue” states with – it’s true – higher standards of living, but much higher costs of living as well.  Of course wages are higher in New York City!  But do you think a carpenter in New York buys himself a better quality of life for his money in NYC than does one in, say, Dallas?   A carpenter in Texas will actually be working, as opposed to the New Yorker – but I’m on a tangent now.  The fact is, unions don’t make overall wages across an entire geographical region bigger or better than the same wages in the same jobs elsewhere (beyond the obvious job-by-job wage comparisons).  They do, however, contribute to the higher cost of living.

It’s a stupid argument – but since it’s aimed at stupid people, it works.  Depressingly enough.

“Republicans Are Waging A War Against Women!” – Notwithstanding the fact that no significant Republican has said word-boo about the subject on any sort of policy level.  Apparently it’s one of those things where Republicans want to ban contraception even if they don’t even know it.

Just as we do – we’re told this by our betters at Minnesota Public Radio – with race!  Because…

“Republicans speak in racist code words!” – And those words are so coded that we apparently haven’t the foggiest we’re saying about them.  This one got on Minnesota Public Radio on Thurday morning, on the Keri Miller show.  Miller – who is becoming the Lori Sturdevant of MPR – ran for an hour with the premise that the GOP’s racist message is so very tightly wound into the very language that Republicans (but not Democrats, natch) use that we don’t even realize we’re doing it!.  Because when Democrats talk about “urban” problems, they mean problems that occur to collections of buildings, apparently, but when Republicans talk about pizza, it’s because Italians in New York used to hate blacks, and white people use “pizza” as a code for that sort of hatred.  Or something.

“Voter ID would disenfranchise masses of voters” – I hate paperwork as much as much more than the next guy – government paperwork more than most.   And this really is a tangent, but isn’t it reasonable for society to expect someone to exercise the most absolutely de minimis requirement for personal administration – the precise paperwork one needs to have to cash a check, pick up a prescription, get a drivers license, hold a job legally, set up a bank account, buy Sudafed, get a cell phone, get into a bar before you “look over 21” – to exercise a right for which over a million Americans have died?

But that is a tangent, because many states do require voter ID, and they vote just fine.

Anyway – it’s a lie.

“Voter ID is like Jim Crow” – That predictable little apertif is from my new “representative”, Rena Moran.  Moran may or may not be a perfectly fine person, but she’s oblivious (or has not be told to be blivious, or she just flat-out knows she benefits from ongoing fraud) to the Democrat party’s history of election rigging – but she is in fact exactly wrong. Voter ID – along with a vigilant electorate – helps prevent the sort of sham elections that characterized Jim Crow.

“Governor Dayton has a Jerbs Bill!  The Republicans don’t! They must not want to put people to work!” – Because as everyone knows, jobs come from government!  If Tim Pawlenty and George W. Bush had just pushed laws requiring companies to hire people, there’d have been no recession!

Of course, even many Democrats know better than that.  They believe that a bonding bill that’ll pay for a few billion in construction work – or Obama’s “Shovel Ready” jobs, as if even a sizeable minority of Americans still work with shovels, or even in construction – is the answer!

Of course, the GOP is pushing legislation to cut business taxes and regulations and make Minnesota’s business climate healthier for business, especially small business, which is battered and bleeding from Obama’s regulatory orgy

And Onward!  – What else have you heard?

You can go to Minnesota Public Radio for  h news today…

…that was on Shot In The Dark two years ago.

I fully expect to see Tom Scheck and Rachel Stassen-Berger write a piece raising questions about the accuracy, methodogy and timing of the Star/Tribune “Minnesota” Poll and the Humprhey Institute poll, and how curious it is that they all have the same statistical error at exactly the same time favoring exactly the same party, in such a way as would just happen to promote a “Bandwagon” effect.

And I expect to see it next January or February.  After the election.

The Obama Administration has created 19 jobs, anyway – for Washington “journalists” and media execs who’ve gone to work for the Administration:

For some Washington reporters and media execs, cheering their team from the sidelines just isn’t good enough: Tugging on a red, white and blue Team Obama jersey is the answer.

That’s the case for a whopping 19 journalists and media executives, including five from the Washington Post and three each from ABC and CNN, who’ve gone into the administration or center-left groups supporting the president.

It’s not just a DC thing.  Here in Minnesota, the DFL and its various minion non-profits and “Think tanks” are clogged with former reporters.

On the right?  Not so much.

But no. No media bias anywhere out there. Perish the thought.

But liked this bit, from a spokesman for the liberal Brookings Institution:

Stephen Hess, a presidential and journalism scholar at the Brookings Institution, said reporters can be “conflicted” when they trade places. “On the other hand,” he added, “reporters going back to journalism after a stint in government are always better reporters in that they now understand how government really works.”

In other words, to the left, the media and government are training grounds…for each other!

Barack Obama thinks women are idiots.

Time will tell if he’s got a point.

Here’s the deal:  Obama’s poll numbers aren’t good.  Oh, the media is doing its best to spin it (with measures that seem desperate and slapdash), but the economy is still miserable (especially if you’re not too big to fail), the unemployment rate is “Down” to where the Administration said it wouldn’t go above if we passed Porkulus, and that’s through the grace of the fact that no Mullah in Iran has yet walked to the shore at the Strait of Hormuz and skipped a rock across the water, sending tankers scurrying for cover and pushing oil over $200 a barrel.  Yet.  And even so, this is the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression – largely because of Obama’s policies.

People have been cooling on “The One” pretty much since inauguration day.

And The One needs to get that enthusiasm going again.

And so what better to take peoples’ minds off their miseries and rile the (female) troops?

“Republicans want to take away your contraceptives!”

Notwithstanding the fact that, as Romney noted in December when George Stephanopoulos incongruously broached the subject in a debate, the subject has never come up in GOP circles.  Period.  It’s a non-issue to the GOP.

No matter.  The media is in lock-step behind the Administration’s meme that the GOP wants to outlaw contraception.  The theatrical “walk-out” of Democrats from Darrel Issa’s hearings was a classic bit of Goebbelsian theatre; while the useful idiots in the media (in this case, the gleefully dim Amanda Terkel at Huffpo) called the hearings “about contraception” they were in fact hearings on the constitutionality of mandating that religious groups offer contraception against their beliefs.

Catch that?  The Democrats don’t even need to hijack Republicans’ meetings themselves.  The mainstream media will do it for them, after the fact.

At any rate, that’s Obama’s message to female voters:  “Never mind the economy; never mind the unemployment rate; never mind the fiscal catastrophe waiting for you, your kids, and their kids; and above all, don’t believe your lying ears when the GOP mentions that they’ve never said word one about taking anyone’s contraceptives away.  Look!  Boogeyman!”

Women, in Barack Obama’s world, are not just dim little dolts; they seem to think that women are intellectual slaves to their reproductive systems.

The MinnPost has a new design.  It’s a lot more readable, so kudos to them (or to whoever did the redesign).

Of course, with the new design comes what seems to this long-time reader a renewed commitment to passive-aggressively support the DFL even more.

Jay Nord asks if W voters will mind that Voter ID will delay election results:

Are Minnesotans willing to wait up to 10 days after the election to find out who won in races ranging from governor to local officials?

That prospect was raised at Wednesday’s Senate Local Government and Elections Committee meeting during discussion of the proposed Voter ID constitutional amendment.

The measure passed 8 to 6 on a party-line vote after an hour and a half of discussion. That action drew a round of boos from the hearing room filled with protesters.

At the session, the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office expressed concern that implementing provisional balloting could stretch the amount of time needed to count election results and that it could force earlier primary dates.

“Nobody’s going to know who won any of the elections until at least 10 days or more afterwards,” Secretary of State staff member Beth Fraser told the committee. “I know that people are on pins and needles on election night. That feeling is going to last for quite a while if we don’t know for more than 10 days who won anything in Minnesota from governor down to school board.”

Speaking just for myself here?  Who cares.  Oh, I think the “ten days” figure is a sign of the Secretary of State is sandbagging to try to gin up yet another public meme to give the pro-corruption forces something to chant about.

Outside the media – including the MinnPost  – who want to sell lots of papers and have lots of eyeballs tuned in to their election-night coverage or websites?  I’d be amazed if you found anyone that cared about a wait (and if Mark Ritchie’s office says “Ten days”, assume it means “two days”).   Outside the media?  Most of our lives don’t hinge, day by day, on any of these races – even those of us who follow this stuff closely.

But let’s take Ritchie at his word (always dangerous) and answer the question.

Yes.  I’ll trade a “ten day” wait for actual election integrity (which’ll involve a lot more than just voter ID, but it’s a start).  Every time.

But let’s stop for a moment here.  Apparently in the world of the liberal “alternative” media, some delays are better than others.

I don’t recall the MinnPost caterwauling over the delays forced on election results by “Instant Runoff Voting”, which has led to long, pointless delays to getting election results, and to a system with a byzantine, convoluted vote-counting formula that is both opaque to most voters and which admits up front that it disenfranchises voters.

So let’s summarize:  results delayed due to a system blessed by one-party DFL governments that obfuscates the election process and guarantees a certain percentage of votes will end up not being counted?  Just hunky-dory to the MinnPost.

Results delayed (maybe, according to a Secretary of State who reports to George Soros) due to a “GOP plan” that will be a solid first step to ensure our elections have integrity and don’t disenfranchise legitimate voters with a wave of illegitimate ones?

Oh, what do you think?

Yesterday, I tackled a Strib op-ed by Jim Backstrom.  Backstrom, the Dakota County Attorney, wrote the latest in a long string of fact-challenged diatribes against the rights of the rigorously-law-abiding gun owner.

Now, Backstrom – who is not just an elected public official, but one in charge of enforcing the law by prosecuting accused criminals in Dakota County – has been misrepresenting facts  when it comes to the law-abiding gun owner for years.

Of course, we do have a First Amendment.  Freedom of Speech means freedom to lie like a sack of crap.  And as a general rule, I support the idea that the best way to respond to bad, stupid, misleading, lying speech is by responding with the truth, and more of it.  And I’m not changing that.

But I do have two questions:

Professionalism:  If a doctor were to go in the Star/Tribune and not just declare that, research notwithstanding, smoking cigarettes is in fact good for you, what would happen?  Would she be castigated?  Shunned by her fellow physicians?  Accused of professional malfeasance?  Have her records gone over by dogs trained to sniff out whackdoodelry?

Have her professionalism questioned for giving advice to the public that is directly counter to fact?

So why is it that Jim Backstrom – the chief prosecutor of one of Minnesota’s larger counties – is allowed, as a matter of professional integrity, to misrepresent Minnesota criminal law?  Because as I pointed out yesterday, that’s exactly what he did in yesterday’s op-ed, and in many before it.

Is there no requirement, legal or professional, that lawyers, especially lawyers who are public officials and officers of the court, refrain from actively and blatantly misrepresenting the laws they are charged with enforcing?

(Of course there is no legal requirement; I’d suspect that the same court decisions that allow cops to lie to suspects to trick them into giving information applies to county attorneys lying in the newspaper to the sheeple they’re responsible for herding).

Shouldn’t there be?

I mean, other than the next Dakota County attorney’s election?  Although as a point of principle, DakCo residents should take umbrage at a county attorney who lies about the law.  Even you liberals; if he misrepresents laws about self-defense, who’s to say the next one won’t be, I dunno, Voter ID?

The Same Old Song To The Same Old Beat: And yet again, the Strib prints without question or serious comment the opinion of someone who is simply empirically wrong about the subject.  On subject after subject, it’s been the Strib’s op-ed stock in trade for decades – and on none more than on the law-abiding citizens’ right to defend themselves.

The Strib continues to print the fact-less ravings of Heather Martens, Wes Skoglund, David Lillehaug, and of course Backstrom, without fact-check, without “gatekeeping”, without question, apparently for no other reason than (save Martens) they are big important (liberal) public officials.

Now, does anyone think the Strib would continue to publish, without question, op-eds from the doctor that claimed smoking was good for you?  Or would the circular-file his submissions after a while?

If that doctor were a powerful DFLer, apparently not.

With great fanfare, the Democrats last week launched a devastating fusillade of rhetorical counterfire in the battle for the American Mind – or perhaps the American “Mind” – this past week with the splashy launch/relaunch of…

…well, a bunch of websites. To spread “the truth” about Barack Obama and his Administration.

RT Rybak took time off from finding ways to trade cops for bike paths to declare “We’re not going to take any baloney”.  And he seems a mayor of his word; reading the sites involved, it seems that the Dems are committed to giving “baloney” back, and upping the ante in the rhetorical luncheon-meat department.  Another lefty shill said that the “Ministry Of Truth” sites are a response to the “sleazy GOP money” from the likes of the Koch brothers – the left’s straw-boogeyman-du-jour.  Meaning that we’ll have Rockefeller, Soros and Big Union money to fight against big private sector money.

Let’s take a look at the Ministry Of Truth’s array of websites:

KeepingHisWord.com could be better called “Rhetorical Needles Threaded.com”; it’s devoted to repeating Obama Administration chanting points.  But here’s an innovation; the type is really really big.  Each “article” is, basically , a sentence, carefully trimmed for easy memorization for people who don’t think that hard about things.  It is, intellectually and rhetorically, the next steup up from Duckspeak.

KeepingGOPHonest.com is more of the same, with a Green emphasis; the site recycles Gingrich, Santorum, Paul and Romney campaign hit points against the other campaigns.  It’s basically an RSS feed of the big four campaigns’ negative pieces, only dumbed down for, you know, the Democrat electorate.

AttackWatch.com is…Attackwatch!  It’s our old friend, better known to conservatives and other sentient people as “Stasi.gov.us”; still asking for people to report in to Zentralkontrolle about Badthink aimed at The One and His administration.

So what conclusions can we reach about the Democrat campaign, viewed through the prism of their Ministry Of Truth’s websites?

1. They are admitting Democrat voters have no attention span. This stuff is written to the level and attention span of a third-grader with ADD.  They need Big Thoughts broken down into easily-memorized, quickly-chantable bullets, or sanitized, officially-sanctioned Big Humor
2. They need to dodge the Big Question at all costs: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”  The answer hidden in plain sight on these sites is “Yes – if you are government”.

If the Minnesoa left has a boogieman in this cycle, it’s the “American Legislative Exchanage Conference”, better known as ALEC.

Founded and run by that other perennial boogieman of the hysterial left, Grover Norquist, ALEC pushes a conservative agenda by hosting get-togethers and suggesting legislation to – wait for it – legislators.  Mostly conservative ones.

Sort of like the AFLCIO, the Ntaional Rifle Association, National Education Association, and practically every other  organization that  pokes is nose into legislation at the state level.

For the past year, a phalanx of leftybloggers and regional media have been passing on the meme hat ALEC is somehow different.  More sinister.

Some have called ALEC a “lobbying” group – which is odd, inasmuch as legislators actually pay to join the group.

Now,the coverage “coverage” of ALEC throughout the lefty alt-media has been utterly uniform in what it mentions (model bills!) and also what it omits (paid memberships), to the point that I’d bet money that the entire campaign is being run by “Media Matters” or some other lefty spin organization.

Just a hunch, mind you.

I bring it up because Beth Hawkins piece earlier this  week about an ALEC initiative on education legislation which reads in its entirety like a news release from a lefty attack-PR firm…

…but omits a number of the key facts that one might expect a “reporter” to provide in covering a “story” – the who, what, when yadda yadda.

Last week, the Minnesota House of Representatives did not meet on Thursday or Friday. The state Senate held a handful of hearings Thursday, but was in recess Friday.

Which was terribly convenient for those members of the Republican caucuses who are also members of the secretive, controversial American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which recently issued members this invitation to a confab where it was to roll out its 2012 legislative agenda:

 

You can plug your nose and read Hawkins’ piece for the details,such as they are.

Hawkins channels Sally Sorenson, snarking that the recess “was terribly convenient” for liegislators who are also ALEC members.

So – who went?

Anyone?

Hawkins tacitly admits she hasn’t a clue – and tries to fob her negligence as a reporter off on the legislators:

If you want to know whether your elected official was one, you will have better luck calling and asking as a constituent than reporters have had.

It’s striaght out of Jesse Ventura’s “Conspiracy Theory”; lack of evidence is, itself, evidence of a coverup!

“It’s complete BS”, said a source on Capitol Hill familiar with the issue.  The source was not aware of any legislators attending the event – “maybe one”, and that seemed like a long shot.

Read the piece.  See if you can find anything in it that doesn’t look like it came from a press release.

And then remember Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection:  “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”

The left is harping on ALEC because the the left’s pressure groups – “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”,and the various unions’ political arms – are about to launch a wave of smear and noise that dwarfs ALEC by many orders of magnitude.

It’s what the media – “alternative” and otherwise does; create whispering campaigns about conservative conspiracies to draw attention away from the real thing.

I’m open to other explanations.

A few weeks ago, I did an article about the tense-to-nonexistant relationship between conservatives and the media.  Any media.  Even media that strives in its own way for detachment.

Conservatives just don’t trust the media.

The context, of course, was a conversation I had with Melody Ng, who works for the “Public Insight Network” at American Public Media, the national/syndicated programming arm of Minnesota Public Radio.   She’s found the attempt to engage conservatives – one of her job goals – for feedback and as sources is frustrating.

My theory – conservatives distrust the media on a level that’s become ingrained in core conservative thought.  And that distrust, as a rule, is utterly warranted; with many in the media the perspective on events, politics and life in general is so different, it makes basic communication difficult.  Here was a recent example that points to the statement “they don’t get us, and we don’t get them”.

Now, for the entire life of this blog one of my theses has been that conservatives need to engage in the larger culture; everything from sports to art to the media.  There can be as many reasons for this as there are conservatives; to promote better communication, to learn more, to teach the rest of society that conservatives are not the stunted caricatures that so much of the media describes to the rest of society today, or to co-opt and neutralize the media.

Which isn’t making Melody Ng’s job any easier.

So I offered Melody something I rarely offer anyone – a shot at reaching the SITD audience directly by posting something here on Shot In The Dark.

As it happens, Ms. Ng is curious about the same thing I am; what is everyone’s “Plan B”, should “your” candidate not get the nomination. (For a variety of reasons, it came in just a tad late for pre-caucus discussion; I figured it was still plenty timely).

Is the (primary) party over? Or is the Republican Party just getting started? 

It’s barely February. Super Tuesday is still to come, and it’s a long way to August in Tampa. Yet some seem ready to call the race for Republican presidential nomination.  This after a month of fairly unprecedented and brutal finger pointing among GOP hopefuls over who best represents conservative values in America.

What’s a non-Romney Republican to do?

This blog’s host, Mitch Berg, suggested that I find answers by going directly to you, his readers, and asking: “What’ll you do if your candidate doesn’t win the nomination?”

So where do you stand?

Fill us in on your Plan B here. 

This question was inspired by lively conversation here on Shot in the Dark, and Hot Air around Mitch’s post advising “‘Anybody But Mitt’ Republicans” to vote Romney should he get the party nod.  But discussions about this are happening in all kinds of venues, physical and virtual.

I decided also to check in with our sources at the “Public Insight Network (PIN), 140,000 people like you who share their expertise to help reporters across the country cover the news.  In recent months, many have been telling us how their life experience influences their preference to presidential candidates.

I tapped PIN sources whose candidates of choice have dropped out or refused to run.  Among them, supporters who favored Bachmann, Rubio, Perry, Cain, Palin, Pawlenty, Christie, Ryan and Huntsman.

Their responses varied, but there was a strong current of Republican over Democrat, even if it wasn’t their favorite Republican.

This from Jay Maynard, of Fairmont, Minn., who backed Herman Cain, but now says he’ll vote from Romney: “The duty of the Republican Party is to nominate and work to elect the most conservative electable candidate. … The goal is to limit Barack Obama to one term in office.”

James Murphy, a Libertarian from Austin, Texas, and Rick Perry fan, will strive to get the GOP nominee, whoever he is, into office:  “Of the candidates who remain, not a one of them is worse than Obama.”

Another Texan, Jackie Thompson of Longview, agrees.  Perry was her favorite as well – she’s “as conservative as a person can be about wanting a small government and in all fiscal matters.”  But now that Perry is out, she says, “I’ve known all along that I will vote for whoever is the Republican nominee.  I am not going to vote for a Democrat for president, period.”

As strong as that sentiment is, it doesn’t seem to be universal. Two respondents – both Huntsman supporters – declared they now might vote for Obama.  Said Chris Eriksen, a self-described “Federal Libertarian-State Socialist” from Arden Hills, Minn., it’s about deft foreign policy, the skill he values most in a president.  He finds Obama the most “statesmanly” candidate now that Huntsman’s gone.

A third Plan B is to shift efforts away from the presidential campaign and to other power positions in support of one’s beliefs.  Example:  Richard Mulholland, a Perry guy.  Well before his state’s presidential primary, he had already moved on.

“The Congressional races are more important,” Mulholland said. “At this point I am indifferent about the remaining presidential candidates. Would I have preferred someone else? Sure. But all of my preferred candidates have withdrawn. … In the fall, I will be happy with anyone my neighbors will have chosen from the remaining field.”

How about you?  Is your first choice for president still in the race?  If not, how will you remain involved?  Is there a line between getting a Republican in the White House and your own values?

Please share your story here.  Reporters across the nation want to know what’s driving your vote.

By responding, you’ll help them tell the story of this election, voter by voter, and you’ll become one of our expert sources in the PIN.  Then we’ll contact you from time to time about topics you know and care about – all for news coverage.

By the way, if you haven’t decided yet who you’re supporting for president, give Minnesota Public Radio News’  “Select A Candidate a whirl.

The interactive, GOP primary/caucus tool doesn’t tell you whom to vote for – Would you follow advice from public radio? – but after asking you a series of questions about issues from abortion and immigration policy to the tax code, it tells you which GOP candidate your views most closely align with.  I got Newt Gingrich.

Happy caucusing tonight, Minnesotans and Coloradans!  And a good rest of your primary to you, Missourians!  I hope to hear from you soon.

Many thanks to Melody.

So -discuss!