Christopher HItchens, one of the last of a dying breed of intellectual progressives commentators, has passed away after a two-year battle with cancer.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

Hitchens was a contradiction in ways that didn’t used to contradict each other; an irascible wit; fiercely civilized; an open-minded and spiritually-questing atheist (among an atheist scene that has become more dogmatic, rigid than Wisconsin-Synod Lutherans, and intellectually dead to boot), a progressive who sought human progress.

Props to our friend Katie Kieffer, who not only made John Hawkins’ 40 Best Conservative Columnists Of 2011 list…

…but made it to #10, just ahead of our other friend Dennis Prager.

Congrats, Katie!

A lawsuit against an Oregon blogger has prevailed, at least for now…

​A U.S. District Court judge in Portland has drawn a line in the sand between “journalist” and “blogger.” And for Crystal Cox, a woman on the latter end of that comparison, the distinction has cost her $2.5 million.

Speaking to Seattle Weekly, Cox says that the judgement could have impacts on bloggers everywhere.

It was a defamation suit.  The plaintiff alleged that Ms.Cox had written many things about him that were untrue and malicious; the judged tossed all but one of the counts, but since Ms.Cox couldn’t verify the truth of the statement – well, if you’d read my series over the fall about defamation, you’d know that can be a bad thing for the respondent.

“This should matter to everyone who writes on the Internet,” she says.

As well it should.  If you write malicious, defamatory things that aren’t true, there should be consequences.  I have no idea if Cox is or is not guilty of defaming her accuser – and I hope that justice prevails, whatever it is in this case.

Now here’s where the case gets more important: Cox argued in court that the reason her post was more factual was because she had an inside source that was leaking her information. And since Oregon is one of 40 U.S. states including Washington with media shield laws, Cox refused to divulge who her source was.

But without revealing her source Cox couldn’t prove that the statements she’d made in her post were true and therefore not defamation, or attribute them to her source and transfer the liability.

Here’s where it gets skeevy:

Oregon’s media shield law reads:

No person connected with, employed by or engaged in any medium of communication to the public shall be required by … a judicial officer … to disclose, by subpoena or otherwise … [t]he source of any published or unpublished information obtained by the person in the course of gathering, receiving or processing information for any medium of communication to the public[.]

The judge in Cox’s case, however, ruled that the woman did not qualify for shield-law protection not because of anything she wrote, but because she wasn’t employed by an official media establishment.

So – the rules change if you get a paycheck from a legacy media organization?

I’m not sure if Cox is guilty or not – but the mainstream media should get no special protections the rest of society don’t get.

A trusted source says had the following all written up long before the election for MN GOP Deputy Chair was held:

MN GOP’s _________ Represents Big Business, Divisiveness, and Bigotry #stribpol

Well, OK – no, there is no source, and I don’ t know what Ed had on his laptop.  But I’m pretty sure his headline was written, at least mentally, well before Kelly Fenton won the Deputy Chair vote yesterday.

And the rest of his post was easily-enough predictable; like a fair chunk of the Minnesota Left, he’s disappointed that the Minnesota GOP didn’t take Saturday’s Central Committee meeting as an opportunity to “move to the middle” and do more of the DFL’s work for it.

Never.  Never never ever.

So sorry, Minnesota Left.  You’ll have to do your own campaigning keep getting Alita to pay for doing your campaigning

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes in re a Carl Bogus column in the Strib:

Modern conservatives are stupid and wrong because they bitterly cling to obsolete sentiments about Commies and God, first articulated by William F. Buckley, Jr. in “God and Man at Yale.”

OR

Modern conservatives see government domination of industry, finance and medicine weakening us economically while free love, no-fault divorce, abortion-on-demand, flag burning and group-identity indoctrination weaken our moral fiber, both threatening to leave our country worse off when our children inherit it than when we inherited it; and we justly resent that trend.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

The Bogus piece purports that reading God And Man At Yale will explain everything you need to know about modern American conservatism.

I suggest that while there’s some merit to that, you can actually learn a lot more about the modern media by reading Bogus’ take on Buckley.

More tomorrow.

 The coverage of a politician’s announcement of their retirement, not unlike the coverage of their eventual passing, usually reads as an enduring time-capsule.  From their fame to their foibles, a few key sentences will forever define a politician who has left the political limelight. 

Retiring 16-term liberal Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank had plenty of fame (fierce conservative critic; first openly gay member of Congress) and foibles (a prostitution scandal that nearly ended his career), all of which were extensively covered by the press as he announced that due in part to redistricting, he was choosing to forgo another run.  Yet to read or listen to the mainstream press’ coverage of Frank’s farewell tour, nary a word was spoken or written about what should be Frank’s infamous, enduring legacy:

 ‘These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

 

 While the media’s hagiography of Frank dominated the afternoon news cycle (CNN called Frank “a teacher” of Congress), others noted that “Fannie, Freddie Lose A Friend In Frank” as Investors Business Daily‘s headline remarked. 

His role as the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the Great Recession would have defined Frank’s legacy had he been a Republican.  Frank’s determined ability to ignore the housing bubble until it was too late to save Fannie or Freddie or avert the financial crisis played a not-insignificant role. And when Fannie and Freddie finally failed, together they accounted for nearly 12 million subprime and other low quality and risky loans (40% of outstanding loans at the time).  Most of the loans existed to meet the affordable housing goals that Frank, and others, argued so passionately to protect at a projected cost to taxpayers of $400 billion.  But despite being among those in Washington “at the wheel”, outside of a few more conservative publications, Frank has largely escaped the Joseph Hazelwood-esque blame of running the American economy ashore.

Frank’s defenders can rightly point out that he did not become chairman of the HFSC until after the 2006 elections; implying that the Fannie & Freddie reign of error happened solely due to the previous Republican majority.  Such a defense gets the dates and times correct, but little else.  The expansion of housing lending authority had roots in the 1990s, not the 2000s and had Frank worked with Republican efforts to constrain Fannie & Freddie, instead of insisting that there were no problems, legislation might have been adopted in the early 2000s that could have lessen (not prevented, as some may argue) the financial crisis.

Frank tried to undo his part in the Fannie & Freddie story, telling Larry Kudlow in a 2010 interview that “it was a great mistake to push lower-income people into housing they couldn’t afford and couldn’t really handle once they had it” while expressing hopes that Fannie & Freddie would soon occupy the dust-bin of poorly constructed governmental program history.  Of course, Frank’s preferred methods of “reform” could easily add another $5 trillion of debt to the country’s maxed-out gold card of credit.

To: “Ed Brayton” of “Free Thought Blogs”

From: Mitch Berg, “Right Wing Conspirator”

Re: Your Response Has Made Me Slam My Face Into My Palms So Many Times My Forehead Is Getting A Callous.

Ed,

I noticed in my pingbacks that you responded to my obit of the Minnesota “Independent” / Minnesota Monitor

Here’s the dumbest thing anyone has said so far about the transition that the American Independent News Network is undergoing. It’s the usual right-wing boogeyman being trotted out: “Soros pushes the ‘flush’ lever.” Sorry, but AINN had not received any funding from a Soros organization in years.

Maybe – and irrelevant.

For starters, Soros-funded organizations were involved with the franchise early in its existence; the deliciously-ironically-named “Center for Independent Media” got its start in a spare office at “Media Matters”, and you can’t get more Soros-backed than that.

Which is fine – Soros has First Amendment rights, too.  The problem was, for the first year or two of the blog’s existence, “editor” Robin Marty stonewalled and denied there was any connection – up until Eric Black confirmed, as he left the blog for the greener (fiscal) pastures at the MinnPost that yes, Soros was one of the sugardaddies that kept the lights on.

Beyond that, though, Mr. Brayton?  “Soros” is a sort of shorthand on the right for every “liberal with deep pockets” that is practicing checkbook advocacy, from Alita Messinger to Michael Moore to everyone in between. Sort of like “Fox News” is the lib’s code term for the left’s belief that the media is really conservative, or “ALEC” or “Koch Brothers” or “Richard Mellon Scaife” are the belief that conservative thought just has to be inorganic and merely a front for some sort of shadlowy Scrooges in the background.

These people really do think that anyone who has ever gotten money from any organization that Soros has given money to actually works for Soros and that he calls the shots — even if there hasn’t been any such funding relationship in a long time.

{Facepalm}

No, we really don’t “really do” think that.

What we do think is that, somehow, the Mindy – which has never run ads, but has always paid its “staff” the kind of money that no conservative blog with the Mindy’s middling-to-low traffic numbers ever gets – is getting its bills paid by someone who feels the need to underwrite “progressive” media.  Is it George Soros?  Or is it someone else?  For purposes of criticizing the liberal alt-media, it’s a distinction with only an academic difference.  y t

It’s just another way life on Planet Wingnuttia differs from the reality on this planet.

But only if you ignore all context.  Which is just another way life on Planet Progressive Alt-Media differs from the reality on this…oh, wait, you already used that.

Oh, and he also says that the organization has “always been a hothouse flower – something that couldn’t exist without massive outside support.” Well, yeah. That’s how non-profit journalism works. It’s how the entire non-profit sector works, including a million different conservative foundations. Few non-profits would exist without lots of outside support. How terribly shocking.

Right, the faux vapors are cute, and all, but the point is that non-profits generally exist for a reason – to promote the sale and use of ketchup, or to lobby for flax farmers, or to reach an audience.  Many of us wondered what was that attending purpose to the MinnMon / Mindy franchise over the past six years of being floated – in relative luxury, if you’re a mid-level blogger like, well, me.  Its demise is just one data point toward the conclusion that “we were right to wonder”.

The commenters at the Minnesota Post do even worse.

[Wait – didn’t you say that I wrote the “the dumbest thing” ever said on the subject? How many superlatives can you give in one posting? – Ed]

And another, Mike Izon, gets even dumber:

It’s because of the lawsuit. They know they will lose and you can’t get money from a news organization that isn’t making money anyways.

The lawsuit he is referring to is the one filed by nutball extraordinaire Bradlee Dean against AINN and Rachel Maddow. And I laughed out loud at the idea that there are people out there deluded enough to think that has anything to do with the decision to close down some of the AINN sites. I’ll have more on that in a separate post.

Do keep us posted.

That is all.

Gary Gross reminds me that today is the seventh birthday of Let Freedom Ring.  Gary’s built LFR into one of the essential sources for following Minnesota politics over the past seven years.

Happy Happy, Gary, and many more for you and LFR!

I sat down for an interview with Erik Black, the former Strib political reporter and one of the thundering herd of “deans of Minnesota political reporting”, the other day.

It went a little like this.:

BLACK:  So you took a trip the other day.

BERG: I did.

BLACK:  You’ve said your goal when driving long distances is to get there as fast as you legally can.

BERG:  Yep.  I like to get the trip over with.

BLACK:  But you stopped in Black River Falls.

BERG:  Right.  I had to go to the bathroom.

BLACK:  What do you mean?

BERG:  Er, I had to urinate. And buy a Red Bull.

BLACK: So haven’t you gone back on your princples then?

BERG:  Are you serious?

BLACK: You don’t have an answer, do  you?

BERG:  Of course I do.  My goal was to get to Chicago. As a practical matter, I needed to take a whiz.

BLACK:  So your principles are muddled, then?  Perhaps you shoudn’t talk about “driving fast”.

BERG:  (Facepalm).

OK, I made that one up.

But when you read Black’s fisking (I mean, really?  What else would you call it?) of a Jason Lewis column  in the Strib this past weekend, you might wonder:

Let’s do Mr. Jason Lewis the kindness of taking seriously his latest Strib op-ed philippic against the evils of liberalism.

The headline “Do you want equality or freedom?” certainly suggests that we can’t want a bit of both, and it also suggests that freedom and equality cannot coexist.

Now, when liberals read “equality” they think “women and minorities voting” – something conservatives support.  When Jason Lewis – whose broadcasts and op-eds sound and read more like grad-school poli-sci seminars every year – talks about “equality” in this context, he’s referring to equality of outcomes; leveling out the economic peaks to fill in the valleys; making sure nobody becomes wealthy until everyone’s in the middle class.

I’m going to add some emphasis to the next bit; we’ll come back to it:

Of course, Lewis didn’t write the headline, but it captures the keys to his argument, and to a bit of semantic bullying in which righties engage often.

It goes something like this:

Everything the right likes can be phrased as a form of “freedom,” as in freedom of the rich from paying higher taxes, freedom of corporations from government regulation, freedom to pollute, freedom of those with almost unlimited resources to use those resources to influence elections, freedom of the wealthiest 1 percent to accumulate any damn portion of the society’s wealth and income without shame, freedom to overthrow foreign governments (but only in order to bring freedom to the oppressed of those nations) and a few other important freedoms that you can think of on your own.

Once the right has established its ownership of the “freedom brand,” it follows that everything that distinguishes the left from the right is a form of oppression.

Government is oppression, taxes are tyranny, and progressive taxation or anything else that requires rich people to pay more than poor people is a particularly pernicious Bolshevik form of totalitarianism that requires a complete leveling between rich and poor.

That’s why you have to choose between freedom and equality.

Wow.

No “rhetorical bullying” in that passage, was there?

There are really two ways of addressing Black’s…argument?

First:  I work in an engineering-y field.  And when analyzing a problem, engineers will break it into two areas; what you want to happen – your goal – and how you make it happen.  Your goal – your “policy”, at a high level – is to put a bridge over a river.  That goal/”policy” drives the actual implementation; building over the road on one bank and between the buildings on the other, using plate-girder construction instead of stressed concrete arches (because it’s a small bridge with a low budget).  The same idea works in politics; high-level “principles” guide lower-level politics and undertakings.  If your princples are “progressive”, you likely believe some permutation of “society should use government to rectify the worst of life’s wrongs” and “those that have should be expected to help out those who have not”.  These principles likely inform  your “policy” decisions – things like “the rich should only make 80 times as much as the rest of us, rather than 90 times, so let’s add on a Wealth Tax”.  It’s a simple fact of life that there will be inconsistencies between your “princples” and the policies you use to implement them.   Lewis is speaking in terms of principles – “Freedom” and “Equality” in abstract, academic senses that never really occur as absolutes in nature.  That’s what he does.

Second: Well, duh.  That’s what political rhetoric is; trying to frame your side as a better idea than the other side.

You don’t have the option of maybe just bumping the top marginal rate up a point or two to help reduce the deficit (something about which the right generally claims to care) and still leave the average CEO 90 times better off than his average employee (or maybe only 80).

Mr. Black:  Behold the power of rhetoric.  Of course you have the option.  Lewis is arguing against the option.

It’s not much different than when progressives, for example, say “if you want to cut taxes [or just not increase them as much as the left wants – Ed.], you must hate government!”.  Conservatives respond “Er, government is fine – but couldn’t we settle for just the right amount of it, rather than letting it expand forever, unchecked?”

Because in principle, conservatives want to control the size of government; in practice, that means picking and choosing.

Just like Black wants Lewis to allow for.

Now, that’s Jason Lewis for you; the guy with the Masters (PhD?  LLD?  I forget) in Poli Sci does like him some high-level political theory.  He does it for three hours every night, and in most of his written output as well.   His second hitch in Twin Cities radio has been like an extended grad school poli sci seminar.

And I have to believe Black knows that.

So why would he write an entire column chastising Lewis’ “logic” when, in fact, all the cognitive dissonance is a matter of the scope of the argument (Lewis’ high-level rhetoric vs. Black’s policy-oriented low-level analysis)?

Reading the comment section – which largely reads like a thread at Democrat Underground or the Daily Kos – should answer that for you.

The Minnesota Independent  is pining for the fjords:.

I am writing today to announce the closure of the Minnesota Independent. After five years of operation in Minnesota, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com.

I love that; the “American Independent News Network”, which runs the “Colorado Independent”, the “Iowa Independent”, the “Florida Independent” and the “Texas Independent”, and ran the “Minnesota Independent” (as well as the also-closed “New Mexico Independent” and “Michigan Messenger”), allows the various regional fiefdoms about as much “independence” as the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture. The “Independent” regional media is not only being shut down…

…it’s being centralized!:

This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms of journalism made available as technology has advanced, and an increasing emphasis on national coverage and issue-based coverage from our network. Over the coming months, AINN will announce a number of new journalism initiatives that will continue to advance our mission of producing impact journalism in the public interest.

So that’s that!

The Mindy, as some of us called it, wasn’t always a complete waste; Paul Schmelzer was a capable writer; Andy Birkey could be a decent reporter, back before his obsession with Bradlee Dean drove him off the rails.

But from the Mindy’s breezy, amateurish start (as the Minnesota Monitor, under then-editor Robin Marty), through its history, it went from groaningly disingenuous (Marty often, absurdly denied any connection to George Soros and “liberals with deep pockets” during her reign) to curiously overstaffed (the Mindy briefly employed some very high-caliber liberal reporters and “editors” – Steve Perry, Erik Black and others – until, it seemed, moments after the 2008 elections) and its descent into near-irrelevance over the past three years, it’s always been a hothouse flower – something that couldn’t exist without massive outside support.

And that’s gone.

Going forward, an archive of Minnesota Independent’s reporting will exist on AmericanIndependent.com.

Perhaps a more interesting archive of the Mindy and MinnMon’s history is found right here on this very blog.

So just for old time’s sake, let’s go through some of the Mindy’s greatest hits:

• Andy Birkey wonders when Bradlee Dean stopped taxing his wife…
• …and promotes a call from a loud-mouthed unknown into “a threat from a Tea Party leader!!!!!!!”
• Dan Haugen is shocked, shocked that Tennessee might allow legal carry-permittees to carry guns in bars, unlike urbane, cultured Minnesota (where that very thing’s been legal since 2003).  That’s what you get for using Steven Colbert as a “source”.
• Andy Birkey teases a Tom Emmer quote into compliance with his narrative.
• The Mindy staff are shocked, shocked that their owner, the “Center for Independent Media”, tubed so many of them after their usefulness expired the 2008 election.
• Watched Steve Perry – who had turned the City Pages into one of the better reporting shops in the Twin Cities in the nineties – spiral into being a high-veneer Mark Gisleson (he’s been rehabbing himself for the past few years at Politics in Minnesota – by all accounts I’ve heard, successfully).
• Liberal mope-with-portfolio (and old friend of this blog) Molly Priesmeyer snickers and chortles about the state of John McCain’s orthodontia – ignorant of the fact that his originals were smashed out of his face by his North Vietnamese captors.
• We caught a MinnMon reporter plagiarizing the Associated Press on at least three occasions, in a three-part series (First, Second, Third) that drew emphatic, not-very-editorial silence from their editor.

And on, and on, and on.

One of my more solidified principles is that I never, ever do the end-zone happy dance over people losing jobs.  I do indeed hope Andy Birkey (and whoever else may still have been left at the Mindy) come up with some kind of gainful employment (and I have a hunch the Sorosphere will look out for its own).

But I come to bury the Mindy, not to praise it.

Headline from today’s Strib:

Drought may cut odds of spring floods in Minnesota

Am I being too picky when I say “I think you’re underestimating your readers?”

It’s been two and a half years since the cathedra of elite Twin Citiesmainstream reporters gathered at the Humphrey Institute to giggle and fawn like a bunch of teenaged girls at a Justin Bieber autograph signing at an appearance by Seymour Hersh at the Humphrey Institute.

At that time, he said he was working on a book on how “Joint Special Operations Command” – a collection of special operations forces, “Delta” and “Seal Team Six” and other super-secret units  (and let’s note that “Delta” and “Seal Team Six” are both so secret that neither has existed under those names in over 20 years)  – that report directly to the Secretary of Defense, for hyper-secret counterterrorism missions, were “Dick Cheney’s private hit squad”.

Notwithstanding the fact that JSOF had been founded, with precisely the same mission and brief, by Jimmy Carter, whose Vice President, Walter Mondale, was sitting in the room with Hersch that night.

So why the delay on the book?

Was it because…

• …a schlep blogger in Saint Paul pointed out that he was full of it?
• …there really was no there, there?
• …he now agrees with the Administration that’s using the “private hit squad?”

When most kids today think of British music from the eighties, the decade starts with Flock of Seagulls and ends with Duran Duran.

There was a lot more to it.  That’s the subject this week.

Conor Fredersdorf, writing at the Atlantic, says something I’ve been saying since long before I started this blog; it’s time to ditch the 20th century American notion of “objective” journalism.

He does it in defense of a part-time NPR staffer who was fired for appearing, with a sign, at an “Occupy” rally.  To old-school journalists, that’s a big no-no, at least ostensibly; in theory, the ideal was that journalists be above it all – to “report from nowhere”.

Fredersdorf’s idea is familiar to anyone who follows European-style journalism – where reporters, and outlets’, opinions aren’t necessarily no-go territory, but where reporting is fair and accurate and, opinions aside, balanced:

That ought to be the pitch that newspapers and public radio stations make to their audience. It might go something like this: “Yes, the field of journalism attracts more liberals than conservatives, more Occupy Wall Street participants than Tea Party ralliers, more urban dwellers than rural Americans, more college graduates than people without degrees, more Democrats than Republicans, more English majors than math majors, more secular people than religious people — and although we value diversity of thought, experience and world view on our staff, the core of our value proposition is that we’re accurate in our reporting, fair-minded in setting forth arguments and perspectives even when we don’t agree with them, transparent about who we are, attune to our biases and constantly trying to account for them, and insistent that we be judged by our output, not our political or religious or ideological identity, or what we do on weekends. Judge us by our work, and if you challenge it in good faith we’ll engage you.”

Well, that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?

I mean, in theory I’m right there with him – at least for purposes the future of American journnalism.

The problem is, for purposes of describing how jiournalism theoretically works today, every part of the proposition is false.  The media – especially in the Twin Cities – does not value diversity in the newsroom.   There is no honesty about bias – when Nick Coleman can do a program on an Air America affiliate but yet still get praised as an “old-school gumshoe reporter”, where the Minnesota Poll and the Humphrey Institute polls can traffic in decades of inaccuracy whose pro-DFL bias is only thinly plausibly deniable, what’s the point?

And if Fredersdorf wants the media to be judged by its output – well, there’s a problem there, too. We’re talking about a media that worked overtime to examine (at best) and demonize the Tea Party, while bearing the “Occupy” movement along with gauzy soft focus.  They go over conservatives’ backgrounds with fine-toothed combs (except as re checking facts and providing sources), but let Barack Obama skate to the White House without a peep about his inexperience and background.  And they fabricated one very big story about George W. Bush.

And since Fredersdoff brought it up – why, yes – I’d love to bring my “good faith” challenges to the regional media over the way they tortured the facts for a full week in the Evanovich shooting story to support a “gotta be careful about those gun owners!” narrative.  Or on how Rochelle Olson reported, back in 2006, on Alan Fine’s “domestic abuse” arrest, taking care to excise every fact from her “output” that would have diverted from the narrative that he, Keth Ellison’s challenger, had a blotted record.

Who in the Twin Cities media would like to start “engaging” with “good faith challenges”?  Or is this something you’ll all just fob off on your ombudspeople for a careful whitewashing?

It may seem like a good idea to avoid the “perception of bias” by insisting that media employees hide who they are from the audience. Perhaps it was once even tenable. It no longer is. To build your credibility on viewlessness is to concede, every time an employee of yours is shown to be a sentient, opinionated person, that your credibility has taken a hit. To tout and enforce your viewlessness is to hold your own reputation hostage to reality; it makes your credibility, the most valuable thing you have, vulnerable to every staffer’s Tweet, or incriminating Facebook photograph, or inane James O’Keefe hidden video sting operation. She claims to be neutral, but look, while out at a dinner with friends we caught her on camera saying that she thinks Obama is a better president than was Bush. See! She was hiding her liberal views from us all along!

Who is even fooled at this point?

Nobody who actually reads the Twin Cities media, to name one.

The American public understands who makes up the press corps, or more likely, has an exaggerated idea of how liberal it is precisely because the lack of transparency and pose of viewlessness seems conspiratorial.

 

That, and the fact that the breaches in “viewlessness” always, inevitably,l every single time, break to the left.

Is any reader of this article shocked or even mildly surprised that a Brooklyn-based freelance Web journalist working part time at a New York City public radio station held up a cardboard sign during an Occupy Wall Street protest? If that totally banal and predictable event is the thing that gets you upset as a journalistic manager, if you think that it is the threat to your program’s credibility, you misunderstand the present media landscape.

And there Fredersdorff has a point.  The problem is a lot bigger than some NPR web prole carrying a sign at an “Occupy” rally.

But Fredersdorff has what I think is a deeply naive faith that the current mainstream media has the integrity to “engage” with anyone but itself.

I’ve got a bit of a dilemma here.

In trying to address the claims made in h this piece from Ian Millhiser in “Think” “Progress”, on a federal-level proposal for national reciprocity for carry permits, I faced a gnarly dilemma:  do I do a piece on “Think” “Progress”‘s efforts to cull selectively through facts to try to trash a conservative initiative, or do I do a piece on the congenital liberal inability to think through an argument logically?

The answer, unfortunately, is “both”.  Why choose?

The “National Right-To-Carry Reciprocity Act” has broad support in both chambers of Congress; Right-to-carry has been an untrammelled success throughout the United State for the past thirty years, with immense, intense support on both sides of the aisle at the federal and state level.

If the bill becomes law, it would allow nearly anyone to shop around for the one state that is willing to issue them a license to carry a concealed firearm, and then force other states to honor that license.

I’m not sure if Millhiser has really thought this through.  For example, they indulge the “progressive” conceit of looking in mock horror at the “red” state gun laws…:

Many states’ licensing rules for concealed carry are shockingly lax. Florida, for example, issued 1,700 concealed carry permits to people with “criminal histories, arrest warrants, domestic violence injunctions and misdemeanor convictions for gun-related crimes.”

…while, leaving aside for a moment the fact that the Florida story is a bit of bogus scare-mongering – the issues cited didn’t involve convictions, or “gun-related” misdemeanors serious enough to warrant denying their permit applications – it shows both “Think” “Progress”‘s myopia and ignorance of facts; carry permit holders’ crime records in “lax” states like Florida [1] are statistically no less impeccable than those in “strict” states like New York or, for that matter, states requiring no permit from the law-abiding, like Alaska, Arizona and Vermont.

Because Illinois is the only state that does not have a concealed carry law, the NRA’s bill would render out-of-state visitors immune to every state but Illinois’ licensing laws — so long as they obtained a license from a state that practically gives them away.

Right.  Because goodness knows if that happens, Illinois might get overwhelmed with gun violence or something.

OK,. back to my dilemma.  We established above that “Think” “Progress” is, like most (but by no means all) liberals, clueless about the reality of guns rights. Now, it’s on to the whole “couldn’t do logic in the throes of a full-bore Vulcan Mind Meld” bit.

Because Millhiser wants to throw out fifty years of “progressive” social policy!

Yet… forcing New York to honor Florida’s poorly vetted carry licenses…flies directly in the face of the right’s professed views on the 10th Amendment’s guarantee of states rights. The NRA’s bill is a direct attack on each state’s ability to determine on its own how best to protect the public’s safety.

Ultimately, however, this kind of fair weather tentherism is nothing new. Conservatives hate federal regulation of health care, until they want to invalidate state tort law or immunize the insurance industry from state consumer protection law.

There is a difference – legally and, if you care about America’s history and liberties no matter what your political stripe, morally – between “human rights”, especially those enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and the niggling impedimenta of government policy and regulation on  issues that are, let’s just say, a tad less exalted in this nation’s legal canon.

This country decided – with the 13th Amendment and, also, the blood of 600,000 dead Americans – that the Bill of Rights’s exaltation of inalienable human rights trumps the states and, for that matter, The People.  The Supreme Court, and generations of decisions pushed by generations of lawyers pushed for everyone from Dred Scott to the ACLU, has established that the states do not trump human rights.

Like the right to free speech and the press.  Or freedom of (and, apparently, from) religion.  And assembly.  And unreasonable (whatever that means under the prevailing legal winds) search and seizures.  And, now that Heller has been incorporated by McDonald, the right to keep and bear arms.

Health care?  It’s not a constitutional right.  It’s an entitlement; we can argue over whether it’s something that should be dealt with at the federal level, or that of any government, and indeed we have been arguing about it for the past two years, and I have a hunch we’ll renew it in 2013.  And while “progressives” have used FDR’s courts’ bogus interpretations of the Commerce Clause to federalize a lot of things, there is no rational way you can say Health Care exists on the same plane as Speech and Jury Trials.

Most conservatives and libertarians recognize this distinction; we are more or less absolute (with prudent exceptions) on issues of human rights, and reserving lesser issues to the states. Most “progressives” blur it, but at least recognize (and push!) federal supremacy on civil liberties issues, as they constantly remind you.

…provided they’re not scary, like commoners with guns.

So Mr. Millhiser is mistaken when he writes…:

In other words, the right’s lockstep embrace of the NRA’s concealed carry bill is just one more example of conservatives’ willingness to claim that the Constitution means whatever they want it to mean.

…because, indeed, it’s Mr. Millhiser, not conservatives, with the case of moral confusion.  Are human rights a federal issue, or not?

My stance is clear.  Mr. Millhiser seems to want it both ways.

UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION:  Why yes, my stance is in fact consistent.  I believe that specifics of gun laws should be a state issue, provided that they are consistent with the idea that the right to keep and bear arms is a right “of the people”.  Most state qualify, although I personally campaign for more “liberalization”.  Illinois’ law does not qualify.

I sat down with every pseudonymous “progressive” alt-media figure at a local watering hole the other day.  Here’s the transcript.

ME: So why do you all write pseudonymously?

THEM: Because we want to be able to write things under the cover of anonymity for which the consequences of using our own identities would be anything from bothersome to legally dodgy.

ME: Thanks.

OK, it was a short interview.

But they stuck me with the tab.  None of them would sign the receipt.

I’ve asked myself – when I’m not busy lampooning the demonstrations and their overkill media coverage – why are the Twin Cities media covering “Occupy Twin Cities” as lavishly as they are?

FInally, Jason DeRusha from WCCO asks the same question:

Reg Chapman and I were talking in the newsroom last night about how the coverage of the protest itself probably should stop fairly soon. Frankly, the fact that crowds haven’t really mushroomed tells us something about Minnesotans. Perhaps we’re not really the protesting type; perhaps this crowd of protestors doesn’t resonate with the middle class working people who are upset about Wall Street, mortgages, bank fees, etc [Ding ding ding – Ed]; perhaps it’s getting cold.

I think we oughtta run with the “Doesn’t Resonate” bit.

On the NARN show over the weekend, “Swiftee”, my old friend and conservative gadfly to the stars, made a great point when he called in; the Flea Party could have been a mass phenomenon, had it stuck with being for corporate perfidy what the Tea Party was to big government.  Let’s face it; the Tea Party’s roots are in revulsion at the government picking winners and losers and deciding which private enterprises are “too big to fail”.

The Flea Party blew it, of course; what could have been a outlet for a lot of legitimate outrage and concern on the part of Middle America either turned into a “progressive” platform or was never intended to be anything but.  And by “progressive”, I mean the worst side of “progressive”-ism; the groupthink, the chanting, the nods back to the miasma of the early seventies that still make a lot of Americans above the age of 45 queasy.

And from a newsman’s perspective – as I noted in my video from “People’s Plaza” on Saturday – there’s really no there there, if you leave either your barely-covered ideology or the news guy’s natural desire to be there with a camera when the molotov cocktails start flying and the hats and bats come out, or at least something qualifying as news happens. Which, it seems clear, isn’t likely to happen.

But the bigger issue is that the crowd is smallish, and there just isn’t news happening.

Face it – retreaded hippies and SEIU members and college activists chanting and making demands isn’t even dog bites man; it’s dog licks dog.

And in fact, that’s where I’m inspired by [a bit of viewer email he’d gotten]. Because we stop covering the protests or protestors doesn’t mean we stop covering the issue that motivated the original Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City.

What are the economic questions you want answered?

Question – and I’m not trying to be snarky, but I largely stopped watching most mainstream TV news years ago: what economic questions have you (WCCO and the larger media, not DeRusha personally, although the question is aimed at him) covered?

The role of the government intervention in creating the housing bubble?

The role of Obamacare and the administration’s mania for regulation in stalling hiring?

The real effect of three years of people chanting “tax the rich”, with a nudge and a wink and a “this is change you can believe in!” from sitting administrations in DC and Saint Paul, has had on entrepreneurship and expansion?

They’d all be great starts.

If you want that kind of coverage, you need to make your voice heard.

Well, there you go!

That, and tell Esme Murphy to stop painting the toenails of DFL politicians on the air.

The Northern Alliance Radio Network was the first all-blogger talk show in the United States – heck, the whole world – when it went on the air in 2004.

Since then, there have been a few other blogger/activist focused radio shows; there was one in Boston back in 2005, and as I recall one, maybe in Colorado (not sure).

Of course, Jack Tomczak and Ben Kruse have been doing “The Late Debate” for a while now on a small chain of stations in the north ‘burbs and Saint Cloud; it’s an excellent show that you should check out.

The idea went badly off the beam a few years ago, when KTNF, the former Air America affiliate in the Twin Cities, started putting leftybloggers on their afternoon drive show, before discovering that none of them had anything interesting to say.

And now, perhaps, a much better plan; Aaron Brown, one of Minnesota’s better leftybloggers, debuts tonight on KAXE, a community station in northern Minnesota.

And from Brown’s description, it looks a little more like “The Northwoods Home Companion” than “Fast Eddie Schultz Lite”:

I knew things were getting serious when I hired the jug band. Have you ever hired a jug band? There’s a certain feeling after you do a thing like that – neither good nor bad, a sense that you have altered the universe in an unpredictable way. Da’ Elliott Brothers out of Duluth will bring three musicians and a couple dozen instruments.

We’ll have a company of actors – Pete Pellinen, Marty and Michelle Rice, Josh Anderson and Scott Hanson performing an original radio drama written by the up-and-coming writer Matt Nelson, a Hibbing native. There’ll be a couple of original sketches and a set of lumberjack stories by Matt’s dad Ed. And I wouldn’t be a showman if I didn’t promise some surprises and special guests.

I actually share Brown’s fascination with the great tradition of live radio (read the article); I’ve had the odd dream of doing something similar…

…but different.

Anyway, break a leg, Brown.

I’m of two minds about the closing of Tariq Ibn Ziyad Academy, the Muslim-centered charter school which went bankrupt over the summer.

The good news?  All the lefties who’ve been sniffing their derision about Katherine Kersten’s “lack of reporting experience” will have to eat their words (or would, if being a “progressive” didn’t mean never being held accountable in the media); as Scott Johnson notes, Kersten broke the story at a time when the Strib as a whole, along with the rest of the media, wouldn’t touch it.

Thanks to the work of Katherine Kersten, the Star Tribune has owned this story. Yet it cannot have been a pleasant experience for her to have worked on the story while inside an organization that would sooner have served as TiZA’s public relations arm than investigator or whistleblower. In its pathetic editorial postmortem on TiZA, the Star Tribune jumped straight to the ACLU lawsuit without including in its chronology the fact that one of its own writers broke the story. By contrast, the ACLU Minnesota acknowledged Kersten’s role in uncovering the scandal from the outset of the lawsuit. Wouldn’t a genuine newspaper want to tout its key role in the events? Why is this story different from any other story

Isn’t that what “journalism” is supposed to be about?

Well, maybe once upon a time…

I know, I know.  Separation of church and state. It’s a good thing, in the long run.

The story of TIZA – the Tariq Ibn Ziyad Academy, an Islam-centered charter school that at its peak had schools in the north and south-east metro – was one that inspired passions in a lot of people.

The fact that it was a charter school at all brought in the “progressive” clans against it.

The fact that it “mixed church and state” naturally exercised the ACLU, which has had the school in court for years over the Establishment Clause lssues first reported by Katherine Kersten.  Scott Johnson at Power Line reports that the recent dump of legal papers from the case reveals…:

In one motion filed with the court, the Minnesota Department of Education disclosed a few of the items that TiZA had been hiding. Among the department’s discoveries in the litigation was the fact that TiZA had made multiple misrepresentations to the department. These misrepresentations included potential conflicts of interest between TiZA and its sectarian landlord, TiZA’s relationship and shared resources with its sectarian co-tenant, and the sectarian nature of TiZA’s curriculum. According to the department, these misrepresentations formed the basis for the department’s determination that TiZA was operating legally.

 

Of course, Kersten notes that even in carrying out the suit against TIZA, the ACLU revealed its own institutional bigotry:

Samuelson chuckled. In fact, “If this school had been Catholic, we would have sued them years ago.”

And the fact the school was aggressively Islamic in focus – although not, as far as we’ve seen, in an aggressively anti-American sense, but apparently enough so, as Kersten noted – angered conservatives.  Which, in turn, angered “progressives”, as Kersten also noted:

Rep. Mindy Greiling — then chair of the House K-12 Education Finance Committee — publicly called on the paper to fire me for “gross distortion of the facts.” TiZA is “a school to be emulated, not hated,” she told the Minnesota Independent.

Because if a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and nobody is there it hear it, it’s still apparently “hate”.

Lost in the tangle between immovable institutions and unstoppable advocates, of course, are the real losers in this story; the children.   And I don’t mean that in the “progressive’s”  “for the chilldren” caricature sense; I mean it in the sense that any human, especially a conservative, tries to protect the generation that is the future

Because whatever TIZA may have done to offend, well, everyone, it did one thing – teach kids – very well.

TIZA got the kind of results that many charter schools, and all urban public schools, should envy and try to emulate.  The student body was 80% low-income. 2/3 of them spoke English as a second language, Both of those are huge handicaps in the pbulic schools – but TIZA got math and reading test scores that clobbered most schools of all types, everywhere in the state (and nationwide).

Whatever you think about the different issues and parties involved, TIZA certainly seems to have something right.

The ACLU is following its brief in sueing the school for violating the separation clause, and Kersten was right to blow the story up years ago, and Scott Johnson did yeoman service in preventing the Strib from shoveling the story down the memory hole.

But let’s not pretend that there’s only one side to this story.  While TIZA may have skirted the Constitution, and as Scott noted may have benefited from an institutional Captain-Renault-ism on the part of the MN Department of Education, it was good at one thing – teaching low-income students, most of them not native speakers of English – how to do math and read.

In English, as well as Arabic.

Ken Burns has a new documentary series, about Prohibition.

Lori Sturdevant shows her ability to tease the wrong lesson out of history – or, more accurately, the lesson she wants her less-informed readers to find:

[The series] doesn’t pound on the lessons for today that spring from the nation’s disastrous ban on the sale and purchase of alcohol between 1920 and 1933. It did not need to.

The roots of Prohibition the series identified are still visible. Moralists still try to tell other people how to conduct private lives.

And other “moralists” respond to conflict by trying to get big government to impose utopia on the “enemy”.

“There’s a chance the children of immigrants – or gun-clinging Jeebus freaks – might believe things that are inconvenient to those who control society; let’s centralize and standardize education under the government!”

“Guns scare us aren’t how civilized people settle their problems; let’s ban them from the highest level possible!”

“We don’t like too much (of our opponents’) money in politics; let’s create federal laws to make sure elections are unpolluted by (our opponents’) money!”

In small towns — the “real America,” in Sarah Palin’s parlance — many people still look askance at urban habits. Americans of longer standing still wish immigrants would change their ways.

And the fact that all people are “we-ists” mean that it will ever be thus; that people, including urban people, will intrinsically trust people who are more like them, and be less sympathetic to people less like them.

Prohibition’s message for 2011 in Minnesota and the rest of the nation seems to be a warning: Allow these roots to sprout and grow, and the consequences could well be unpredictable and undesirable.

And the other, bigger, real-er lesson?  The “we-ist” with the printing press gets to decide which ‘we-ists” get called ‘good” and “noble” and “upstanding”, and which don’t.

Well, they did, anyway.

That

I spent some time last night listening to Terry Gross, her brow audibly furrowed, interviewing Jane Mayer of The New Yorker for the better part of an hour over “The Red Map Project” – a GOP project to target and win state legislatures in swing states.  Mayer focused on the contributions of one Art Pope to the GOP Legislative races in North Carolina:

“He and his family members have basically poured money into the state’s politics; $40 million is about what they’ve spent through their foundations,” says Mayer. “About $35 million of that has gone towards pushing a far-right political agenda in North Carolina. In the 2010 state races, where people don’t spend much money, he and the groups that he helped found — that were supposedly independent groups — spent $2.2 million. It doesn’t sound like a lot nationally, but it can make all the difference in the context of one state. So basically what you’re looking at is one very wealthy corporate captain who, when motivated enough, can exert enormous influence in a state.”

The influence Pope wields in North Carolina can be seen in the results of the 2010 legislative election. Republicans won 18 of the 22 races Pope or his organizations targeted. Roughly 75 percent of spending by independent groups during North Carolina’s state races came from accounts linked to Pope.

Sounds pretty serious – a rich guy deciding to do of his own free will, out in the open, what George Soros and Paul Allen and Alida Messinger and do of their own free wills with their own money.  Or what the AFL/CIO, Teamsters, SEIU and NEA and other groups do with their members’ money (whether the members approve or not – 42% of union members voted GOP in 2010, while their unions gave more than double that share to the Democrats), frequently laundered through layers of 527s and other front groups. .

But let’s take this at face value; “Fresh Air” and the New Yorker have blown the lid off of an out-in-the-open “GOP plot” to use freely-donated money in its capacity as free speech to try to win elections.  It’s what “journalists” do, after all – focus attention on campaign spending by Republicans.

But I had to check; has Terry Gross, or the New Yorker, spent any time on, say, George Soros’ “Secretary of State Project“, his well-funded attempt to put Democrats in charge of state election systems?

NPR?  Nope.  I guess they don’t rant or slant – against Democrats.

The New Yorker?  Any guesses?  If you don’t take that bet, you win!

The war against Republican/Conservative money in the electoral process continues apace!

CBS has apparently gundecked Sharyl Attkisson, after she exposed the White House’s spittle-flecked response to her reporting on the media’s complicity in “Fast and Furious”, the Administration’s attempt to tie Americans’ gun rights to Mexico’s drug war:

Yesterday, CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson told radio show host Laura Ingraham that the White House yelled and swore at her over her reporting on the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal tied to the deaths of two U.S. law enforcement agents. Attkisson also revealed that she’d also been yelled at by the Justice Department.

Today, I called CBS News in an attempt to interview Attkisson. I was told by CBS News senior vice president of communications Sonya McNair that Attkisson would be unavailable for interviews all week. When I asked why Attkisson would be unavailable, McNair would not say.

I’ve also heard from a producer at another media outlet that has previously booked Attkisson that they tried to book her since she made news with the Laura Ingraham interview yesterday. They were also told that she would be unavailable.

And, by the way, don’t you dare call CBS biased.

The “N-Head” “controversy” – which was the most contrived, yellow bit of journalism since Rochelle Olson’s hit piece on Alan Fine back in the ’06 race in MNCD5 – may not be what knocks Rick Perry out of the presidential race.  Indeed, there are months before the fat lady sings, and anything can happen.

But Perry is making some unforced errors.  And it looks as if Mitt Romney is making some moves toward testing the thesis that he’s “the most electable Republican”.

Now, let’s be clear ; Romney’s never been my candidate, but he’d be light years better than Obama.  Indeed, except for John Huntsman and Mike Huckabee, every GOP contender (I know, Huck’s not in the race; work with me, here) would be a better president than Barack Obama, especially if we flip the Senate this next session; on dealing with the economy, Mitt Romney at the head of a Tea-Party-motivated two-house majority to temper whatever flecks of “moderate” impedimenta he still has would be just the cataract of common sense this nation desperately needs.

There is danger here, of course.  “Berg’s Law” – the immutable laws of human and political behavior that I’ve compiled over the years – pretty clearly apply here.

I’ll cite the relevant ones:

Berg’s Eleventh Law of Inverse Viability: The conservative liberals “respect” for their “conservative principles” will the the one that has the least chance of ever getting elected.

The McCain Corollary To Berg’s Eleventh Law: If that respected conservative ever develops a chance of getting elected, that “respect” will turn to blind unreasoning hatred overnight.

The Huckabee Corollary the McCain Corolloary To Berg’s Eleventh Law: The Republican that the media covers most intensively before the nomination for any office will be the one that the liberals know they have the best chance of beating after the nomination, and/or will most cripple the GOP if nominated.

No ambiguity here.

It’s why the media has given the likes of McCain, Huckabee and John Huntsman such “favorable” coverage; in the hopes of building them up into contenders that’d sap the real Republican front-runner, or even fatally weak nominees that they could then turn around and demolish (vide McCain).

Now, I think the Democrats and media (pardon the redundancy) are in a bind here; they hate Perry, obviously; if nominated, he’s win in a landslide, so the media is on full-blown destructo alert; unfortunately, Perry is obliging.   But they really wanted to prop up someone like a Huntsman, who is indistinguishable from a mainstream Democrat, or Huckabee, who is more of the same plus the kind of pro-lifer that’ll get the social libs exercised enough to maybe squeedge out some votes.

Romney?  He’s not a Tea Party favorite, but most of the Tea Party is driven by common sense, not purist ideology; the Tea Party is as much about rejecting socialism as it is adopting pure conservatism.

And that may sum up Romney’s appeal; he’s not a pure libertarian ideologue; nobody will ever mistake him for Ron Paul.  But he’s conservative enough on the issues that matter – the economy, business – and he’s got a lifetime of experience actually executing on that ideology, unlike the current resident.

So yeah, if Romney is the nominee, I won’t need to hold my nose to work and vote for him.  He’s not perfect, but he’s way more than “good enough”.  On a stage full of candidates who would all be better than Obama on every issue, Romney (along with Perry and Cain) stands out from the pack on the issue – the economy.

Could Herman Cain still blow this thing up?  It’s fun to think so; I’d hate to think that our race was already decided 10 months before the convention, 2-4 months before the first caucus or primary.

At any rate, as (I think it was) Mark Steyn noted on the Hewitt show the other day, the GOP race really has devolved  to “who is going to be Marco Rubio’s running mate?”

Just curious: how is last Saturday’s column by Lori Sturdevant anything but a campaign donation to the DFL?

I’m not going to fisk the whole thing.  Fisking Sturdevant has become a bit like fisking Nick Coleman; after a few years, you start to feel like you’re writing the same bit over and over again.

It’s got all her usual hallmarks; the gauzy, soft-focus mash note to some DFLer or another (Taryll Clark, in this case), the hook-line-and-sinker swallowing of some progressive group or another’s “non-partisan” line (Common Cause and Draw the Line, in this case)…

…and of course, the double standard.  Always, always the yawning double standard.

We meet our old friends “Draw The Line Minnesota”:

But the court’s final authority hasn’t kept Draw the Line Minnesota’s 15-member, multipartisan commission from behaving as if it had the power to draw the lines (hence its name).

In short, it’s showing what an independent redistricting commission would do, if Minnesota had been wise enough to create one — as 12 other states have.

And later

Draw the Line is a project of the Midwest Democracy Network, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and the Minnesota Council of Non-profits, and is funded by the Joyce Foundation and the Bush Foundation. Its commission includes a mix of known devotees of each of Minnesota’s major parties, plus a handful of that rare breed — true independents.

Why doesn’t Sturdevant favor the reader with any numbers?

Because they show how disingenuous she’s being.  The “multipartisan”  commission includes 2 Republicans, 1 “Independence Party” member and 12 who are either DFL activists, activists for groups that are closely aligned with the DFL, or people who work at institutions that are little but feeders for the DFL.

So to Sturdevant, “Draw The Line Minnesota” – which is bankrolled by four “progressive” pressure groups – and its “multipartisan” yet almost completely liberal-dominated commission – is “independent”, while…

…well, you could see this coming, couldn’t you?

More telling: Top GOP operatives and money-raisers have formed Minnesotans for Fair Redistricting. It’s a sway-the-court group that’s hired top legal talent — including former state Chief Justice Eric Magnuson — to argue for a GOP design.

Got that?  Draw The Line, the multi-state non-profit group funded by liberals with deep pockets, is suddenly a plucky underdog, while Big Bad GOP is riding into town on a steamroller powered by stacks of Jacksons.

Apparently Sturdevant thinks that David Lillehaug and the rest of the DFL Lawyers Koffee Klatsch are working pro bono?

Draw the Line Minnesota is a buck-a-plate beanfeed compared with the GOP’s steak-and-lobster operation.

Does Sturdevant have any numbers to back up the comparison?

Of course not.  Nobody does.  Other than an audible from Mike Dean on “The Late Debate” the other night, none of the players have disclosed their funding, and we have precious little basis for fact-checking any of them at this point.

We only know one thing; whatever Sturdevant writes will be calibrated to serve the DFL’s interests.

And, despite insinuations by conservative bloggers, it is not a DFL front group.

Ah.  Well, that settles it then.  Lori says so.

I mean, sure; it’s literally a fact (as far as we can tell) that none of these groups are literally part of the DFL.

And John Wilkes Booth was not a Confederate soldier, but they shared enough goals where it didn’t really make a difference in the end.

And Lori Sturdevant isn’t literally a flak for the DFL, in the sense that “Ken Martin signs her paychecks”; their purposes just happen to be 100% congruent.