Why, yes – I did spend a bit of time talking redistricting over the weekend, now that you mention it.

On the NARN, it was my pleasure to interview MNGOP Chair Tony Sutton and his deputy, Michael Brodkorb (punctuated by a surprise appearance by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker; I’ll be posting the podcast link as soon as I find it) about the redistricting process and all the outside money the left is pouring into Minnesota to try to skew the process in their favor.

And then, last night, I drove out to Ramsey to appear on “The Late Debate” with Jack Tomczak and Ben Kruse.  I was on a panel with Gary Gross of Let Freedom Ring, Mike Dean of “Common Cause Minnesota”, and Kent Kaiser, who is part of Draw The Line Minnesota’s (DTL-MN) “Citizens’ Commission”.  In the interest of accuracy, I’ll note that in my piece last week, I lumped Kaiser in with the Commission’s liberal hypermajority, because I personally didn’t know any better; Kaiser is of course well-known in GOP circles as one of the good guys; I regret the error…

…especially since he was the unquestionable star of last night’s debate.

I’m not going to try to reconstruct the whole thing from memory – you can check out their podcast at their site, and Gary Gross did an excellent rundown of the proceedings over atLFR.

I’ll recap this bit, though; I walked in there with two main points:  I walked out with four:

Who’s Politicized?:  As Kaiser noted, the GOP legislative majority’s proposal follows the letter of the law, and the spirit of the last several judicial decisions, pretty closely.  The DFL’s map was…well, nonexistant.  They never drew one up.

It was Governor Dayton’s veto that was, as Kaiser noted, exceptionally politically capricious.

And this entire process recaps a pattern we started seeing during the 2008 election, and rose to a crescendo in last year’s gubernatorial race; the DFL isn’t so much a political party as it is a political holding company, outsourcing its actual policy and boots-on-the-ground work to its “strategic partners” – the unions, and the array of astroturf pressure groups like “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Take Action Minnesota”, MPIRG, and “Draw The Line”.

Outside Money: Behind all of Draw The Line and Common Cause’s noble chatter about getting people involved – nay, getting them interested – in the redistricting process, the fact remains that a raft of “progressive” organizations are doing their level best to try to jimmy the redistricting in their favor, in a census period in which GOP-leaning districts exploded and DFL-districts continued withering.  The demographics aren’t a state phenomenon – and either is the left’s effort; “Draw The Line” is a regional, not state, entity, focusing on trying to attenuate (at least) the gains the GOP should get from pure demographics.  More below.

Competition: One of DTL-MN’s priorities – because it’s one of the priorities of its supporting groups (Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the MN Council of Non-Profits and Take Action MN), is “competitive elections”.  On a policy level, this goal – making sure that politicians are accountable to electoral pressure from their voters – is laudable enough.

It’s at the implementation level that it either breaks down or shows its ideological stripes, depending on your point of view.  Minnesota is a divided state – but not evenly or consistently divided.

Let’s look at the example of a hypothetical state of about five million people, which is closely divided on a statewide basis – but where the division stacks up as follows:

• An urban core – three, really – of about a million people that votes about 70/30 Democrat.
• An outer-suburban and exurban ring that votes, in a good year, maybe 52-55 percent GOP.  Let’s assume a huge year, and say it’s 55-45 GOP.
• The rest of the state – about half the population – which, to arrive at the sort of dead-even split that the last three statewide elections have shown, would be divided about 52-48 in favor of the GOP.

Of course it’s not hypothetical at all.  Minnesota is exactly that; a couple of big blue boils, the Twin Cities and Duluth, two Congressional and 20 legislative districts that routinely deliver 70+% to the DFL, surrounded by an exurban ring that, in a blowout year, might go 55-45 GOP (only two GOP-owned legislative districts topped 70% GOP, as opposed to 20 for the DFL), and an outstate that tips a little bit GOP, but is close enough to send Tim Walz and Collin Peterson to Congress.

So to make Minnesota “competitive” across the board, the legislative map would have to look like a couple of bicycle wheels, with spokes radiating out from the Marshall-Lake Bridge (and Canal Park in Duluth) all the way out to the state’s borders; the Congressional map would look like a big Key Lime (mmm, Key Lime) pie.

That is, of course, not acceptable practice.  New boundaries must, as much as possible, preserve existing community boundaries.

The answer, of course, is that Common Cause want the Republican parts of Minnesota to be competitive, and to leave the DFL-dominated Twin Cities and Duluth, and their 20 districts, pretty much alone.

“When did you stop beating your minorities?”: As Gary noted at LFR last week, there is a noxious little bon mot tucked away in the DTL-MN’s site:  “Historically, redistricting has been done out of the public eye, without meaningful public input, and used to dilute the voting power of communities of color“.

I’ll be on The Late Debate with Jack and Ben at 10PM.

I’ll be appearing with Gary Gross of Let Freedom Ring, Mike Dean of “progressive” astro-turf group Common Cause MN, and Kent Kaiser of the “Citizen’s Commission on Redistricting“.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Ah, political season, and the start of neutral, objective, even-handed news reporting in the Minneapolis paper.

The Strib’s headline reads “Oil refineries seek huge tax refunds that could force schools to give back money”, and as Joe notes…:

They couldn’t have been any cruder if they’d said: “GOP Presidential candidate Rick Perry taking money from schools to give to oil companies.”

It’s the perfect Progressive attack headline.

Naturally, the story is written in modern techno-thriller style: start with an explosive scene, randomly jump around introducing characters without any context, play up the human tragedy about to unfold unless a hero steps in, blame the usual villains.

It does read a little like someone who didn’t make the cut as a writer for “24” is slumming as a journo…

The story is much less compelling if laid out in a logical format.

1. There’s crude oil under the ground in Texas.
2. Crude oil must be refined to be useable as gasoline, diesel fuel, etc.
3. Hauling crude oil to the refinery is expensive, so
4. Oil companies built refineries in Texas near the oil fields
5. People who wanted good-paying jobs came to work for the refineries
6. Merchants who wanted to sell things to high-paid oil refinery employees built stores near the refineries
7. Refinery employees, merchants and merchants’ employees built houses near the refineries and started raising kids
8. The kids needed to go to schools, built near the homes that were built near the refineries
9. Schools are expensive and are paid for from local property taxes
10. Property taxes are based on local valuation and refineries are valuable so they paid huge property taxes
11. Huge property tax payments by refineries meant lower property taxes levied on homes, paid by employees
12. School districts got used to funding schools with huge property tax payments by refineries
13. Merchant and employee property tax payers got used to living large on the refineries’ dime
14. But federal law requires refineries to invest in pollution equipment
15. And state law gives a tax refund to refineries that invest in pollution equipment
16. So refineries that did invest in pollution equipment, filed for refunds
17. Refunding money to refineries would reduce their huge property tax payments
18. The money refunded to refineries cannot be given to school districts
19. School districts will have to cut spending or raise local property taxes to make up the shortfall
20. The state, knowing this, denied the refund claims, which were appealed
21. The governor appointed a commission to study the problem
22. The governor is Rick Perry, Republican candidate for President
23. The governor’s hand-selected commission is leaning toward giving the refunds; therefore
24. Rick Perry is taking money from schools to give to oil companies

It is a lot more mundane.  It’d sell fewer papers – or get fewer people inflamed against the GOP, whichever.

Well, I guess, in a way, the headline is half-assed, sort-of-true. Good enough for the Star Tribune.

But the entire thing could have been summed up more succinctly as:

“Gravy train ending, women and minorities hurt worst.”

Hell, that’s not news.

But it is campaign material.

To: Jim Klobuchar
From: Mitch Berg – guy with long memory
Re: You Are Full Of It

Mr. Klobuchar:

I got a kick from this bit from a flak piece you wrote for your daughter, Senator Klobuchar (quoted in Andy Aplikowki’s Residual Forces):

I still remember a time when campaigns were conversations – genuine debates between people of good will and mutual respect.

Baked wind.

I remember the condescension you used to heap on anyone that wasn’t DFL-blessed back in your days as a columnist, and on your old KSTP radio show.

Yo are – and I mean this with all due respect – full of crap.

That is all.

…that pays liberal pundits to be gratuitously smug, patronizingand condescending?

In an editorial in the Fairbault Daily News, editor Jaci Smith goes all Mommy on us:

You can’t have it both ways.

Although Smith does, in fact, try to have it both ways.  We’ll get back to that later.

This was a lesson I learned early in life.

I coveted a friend’s toy and wanted her to let me play with it, yet I never wanted to share my favorite toy.

“You can’t have it both ways,” my mom used to tell me. “Either you play only with your own toys or you play with others’ shared toys and you share yours as well.”

A good lesson but apparently one that some state legislators haven’t learned.

Smith – like the rest of the peanut gallery of outstate editorial writers who seem to be longing to sit for a day in Lori Sturdevant’s seat – says Steve Drazkowski and Pat Garofalo, who’ve been warning voters that their school districts got increases, and urging them to vote down referenda to increase taxes yet more, should just shut up:

Garofalo and Drazkowski claim that the state boosted spending to school districts in the budget passed this summer and that the 133 districts statewide seeking levy increases (or the continuation of an existing one) are “double dipping.”

“Despite these very generous funding increases — paid for by you, the taxpayer — 133 school districts statewide are considering asking their local property taxpayers to pony up even more money — the largest number that would call for a vote in a decade,” Drazkowski wrote in a recent newsletter.

Smith says it’s a local thing,and state pols should just. Butt. Out.

Thankfully, Faribault’s GOP Sen. Mike Parry disagrees. He said in a recent interview with the Daily News that referendums are local issues, to be handled locally.

That’s true, as far as it goes.  But here, Editor Smith, er, tries to have it both ways.  Garofalo and Drazkowski are exercising their First Amendment rights to tell people the facts as they see them.  As Legislators, they have no control over how local districts run their affairs, or what local voters vote for.  But they have the same right to speak that anyone – me, Bud Froemking at the liquor store in Faribault, or Jaci Smith for that matter – has.  Both have the advantage of the bully pulpit of elected office – which doesn’t negate their right to speak…

…any more than that of the Teachers Unions and the other groups from outside Faribault that will be speaking, and no doubt ponying up money, to try to push the levy through.

So since Mommy Editor Smith has reminded us that we can’t have it both ways, I wonder which one she’ll pick?

Here’s a bit of good news:  the American people distrust the mainstream media…

The majority of Americans still do not have confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 44% of Americans who have a great deal or fair amount of trust and the 55% who have little or no trust remain among the most negative views Gallup has measured

…and largely believe it to be biased to the left:

Here’s the part I think is dispositive – check out the numbers broken out by self-reported political category”:

For all of the extreme left’s caterwauling about the “conservatism” of the mainstream media, Democrats are three times as likely to say the news is “just about right” as Republicans – and almost twice as likely as “Independents”.

So while the mainstream media may not be “liberal” (although they are twice as likely to be OK with the status quo as conservatives), the Democrat mainstream certainly seems to be comfortable with the way things are.

The Usual Suspects is one of my favorite movies.

In the movie, the legendary arch-criminal and unseen (?) antagonist, the Turkish uber-villain Keyser Söze, operates by the adage that to win, you need to be willing to go further than your opponent is – whatever that means.  To Söze, when his family was taken hostage by his drug-smuggling rivals, it meant killing the family first, as the rivals watched, dumb-struck – and then the rivals, leaving one alive to tell the rest of the cartel (before Söze killed him, and the rest of the cartel, and their families).

It makes for a great bit of movie characterization.

For politics in a representative republic?

Not quite as good.

———-

I’ve had one iron-clad policy on this blog; never, ever, Ever, EVER go after someone’s personal life, family or (non-elected) job just because their opinion differs from mine.  That’s how I run the blog – especially for my three pseudonymous co-bloggers; there is nothing in blogging lower than someone who uses anonymity or pseudonymity as a cover for unethical attacks..

In fact, I keep other bloggers’ personal lives and livelihoods completely out of bloggjng.  There’s a good reason for it.  For starters, it’s dangerous; peoples’ personal lives have nuances that can wash the unwary and the stupid up on the shores of Defamation Island without them knowing about it.  More importantly, it’s completely illogical; it’s the fallacy of the tu quoque ad hominem – the idea that some inconsistency in your opponent’s actions or claims yesterday undercuts his argument today.  Like, for example, if someone’s ever been ticketed for speeding, their opinion on transportation issues is discounted.

It’s stupid.

It’s also one of the most common themes in political communications, as practiced by the not-so-bright.  Accusing people of “flip-flopping” is generally dumb (I’ve “flip flopped” on gun control, abortion, government intervention, and conservatism itself since I was a kid; so did Ronald Reagan, for that matter.  To some Libs, that’s “flip-flopping”; to us, it’s a sign that we’ve thought about things, and gotten the right answer better late than never).

It’s a lot more sinister than that, of course; it goes way beyond discounting arguments.  There’s a school of thought – codified in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – that believes the best way to win in politics is to ratchet up the personal attacks about non-political issues to the point that none of your opponents can muster the emotional energy to stay in the contest; to bring things to the point where they fail Söze’s, and Alinski’s, test of commitment.

There is a pattern among the Twin Cities left; if you can’t debate someone on fact, you go for the smear.  The more outmatched they are, the more ugly and personal they get.

Which, given that a distressing number of leftybloggers usually has at most one round of “facts” to bring to a debate (because few of them have ever had to learn to debate like adults, since they’ve spent their entire lives in cities and colleges and unions run by “progressives”), means that almost any debate with a depressingly huge swathe of leftybloggers dives straight into the mud very early in any discussion.  It’s like the left, rhetorically, has raised a generation of kids with sense of how to carry on a civilized discussion, or manners, or conventional sense of right and wrong – but given them all guns and ammo.

Great example: one Twin Cities leftyblogger – a guy who shall remain unnamed, but is known to many on both sides of the aisle as “The Dwight Schrute of the Twin Cities leftysphere” – spent a few weeks waddling around grinning like a toddler who’d made a nice pants because he found a record of some checks I’d bounced, during a spell of short money and worse bookkeeping, almost eight years ago,.  Blathered it all over the place – as “evidence” that I shouldn’t talk about government budgets.  Now, I know the facts of the situation – something “Dwight” never had the integrity to ask about – so while it wasn’t anything i had cared to discuss publicly, it didn’t especially affect me.  The intention, of course, was to shut me up – not by dint of any facts “Dwight” could bring to an argument (he never has any) but by trying to make opposing them too costly in ways that have nothing to do with politics.  Because after ten years of failing at civil debate, it’s all they have.

Which brings us to Eric Austin.  He writes the Outstate Politics blog.  I’ve always gotten along with the guy..

But a while ago Austin apparently jumped onto one of the left’s most demented memes; that any “family values” Republicans whose family lives and histories aren’t pristine are “hypocrites” and beyond the ethical pale, rightly subject to any manner of ugliness.  He spotlighted a Republican legislator, Mary Franson, who’d recently been divorced, publishing some rumors about the circumstances behind the split.

As Lady Logician wrote yesterday at True North, Austin wrote about these rumors – as he put it, based on “two independent sources” who confirmed it to his own satisfaction.

Is Austin’s story true, or not?  Who cares.  It’s none of my business, or Austin’s, or yours for that matter (and if you’re someone who ever said “move on” or “it was just sex” during the Clinton administration, think veeeery carefully about your next answer).  Chalk it up to giggly prurience if you want – but that short-changes the depravity of the act.  It’s really part of the Alinski-ite dictum to scorch the opponent’s earth; to make engaging in politics against liberals too personally and emotionally costly to sustain.

LL posts a recording of a phone conversation between Franson and Austin – listen to it at the link above.

LL’s contention is that the story is a rumor; Austin apparently believes his “sources” are plenty good enough to justify writing…

…what?  A story about what should be the personal business of two people whose marriage was unravelling, with all the emotional shrapnel that always accompanies divorce?

Is it worth slopping the worst details of the worst episode in a family’s life out in front of the public – embarassing the parents, sure, but doing much, much worse for the children – to take a whack at a poliitician you disagree with about legislative politics?

Those last questions are usually rhetorical, academic ones.  In this case, unfortunately, it’s very literal.  LL notes, in what is the real crux of the article:

Then there is the point that Rep. Franson’s daughter was being bullied as a direct result of [what Austin wrote]. His only response was to accuse Rep. Franson of being directly responsible for the bullying of gay teens. His logic is highly flawed.

Listen to the recording, around the 2:30 mark; Franson notes that Austen’s allegations caused her daughter to get bullied at school.   Listen to his response after 2:30.  I’ll closely paraphrase; “so what about gay kids that get bullied?”

Catch that?

The message is this: Disagree with us, and not only are we going to work over every nook and cranny of your personal life, without regard to damage we may be adding to your family, but we will condone and abet the torture of your children – because you disagree with us”.  

LL notes:

 First off, there is the old adage that two wrongs don’t make a right. Second, Rep. Franson had no direct action in these children being bullied.

So what does Franson believe about bullying gay kids?  I don’t know – and it’s for sure that if Austin knows, it doesn’t matter to him; Franson and her daugther are bones to be chewed in service to Austin’s point. For all we, and Austin, know, Franson has risked life and limb to thwart gay-bashers in her private life. Speaking as someone who has put more on the line against the bullying of gays than Eric Austin ever has or will (long story), I believe bullying is bullying. no matter who it’s aimed at.  But in Austin’s world, the fact that I oppose a bill to create a special, double-dog class of victims makes me not only the same as a bully, but justifies smearing my personal life and making my childrens’ lives hell?

In re Austin’s apparent defense (via the audio in LL’s article) of Franson’s daughter getting tormented at school over what he’d written, LL writes:

Austin’s weak defense is even weaker when you realize that this man is a…

Y’see, there’s my conundrum.  I said I never, ever go after peoples’ (non-elected) jobs – and I don’t.  But Austin works in a field where he’s supposed to look after the best interests of kids.

And yet there he is, saying things that could reasonably be interpreted as justifying bullying.

I’m the kind of guy who gives the benefit of the doubt way too easily – but I’ll entertain some explanations.  Was Austin flustered and mis-speaking his real intent?  Did he try to drive down a rhetorical road that he didn’t have the gas to come back from?   Is there some context tucked in there that I missed? I’m open to suggestions.

But let’s take him at his apparent word.  What do you suppose Eric Austin – or the rest of the Minnesota leftyblog community’s pack of Alinsky-addled ethical Oompa Loompas – would say if Medtronic sold their grandmother a pacemaker that was 20% defective, because of Obamacare’s hike on medical device taxes?  Or if their restaurants cut Democrats’ portions 15% to make up for revenue lost to the smoking ban?

If, say, a conservative college professor docked students grade points equal to the tax increases the students favored?

They’d howl like stuck cats.

Rightly so; it’s unethical, and in the first case illegal.

There’s really little point in conservatives doing more than pointing this sort of behavior out.  It is all most of the Minnesota leftysphere can do.

The takeaways:  Conservatives have to not only smarter than their opponents, they and their families and their supporters have to be a lot tougher.

Bonus question:  There’s a technical term for someone who uses fear to affect a political end.  What is it?

———-

We all know how The Usual Suspects ended, right?

(more…)

Sometimes, in order to try to understand those with whom you disagree, you have to try to put yourselves in their mind; to try to think like they do.

We’ll come back to that.

Last week, I saw that Spotty from Cucking Stool wrote what seemed to be yet another take on the left’s most threadbare post-Tea-Party meme; in this case, it was…:

Tea Party brigade struggles to put out BWCA fire

I assumed it was yet another tilt at the “If you don’t support all government, you oppose all government” meme.  Hardly worth a read, in and of itself; if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it all you need to.

It started out with a clip from a Strib piece about the rigors of firefighting in the Boundary Waters

Plywood walls were plastered with maps showing the growing footprint of the wildfire that’s raging across Minnesota wilderness of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Dozens of officials summoned to help subdue the blaze that has consumed more than 100,000 acres of forest…

Read the Strib piece for more.

“Spot” picks up…

…I was about to say “the narrative”, but that’s not quite right.  A narrative, certainly.  One of a choice of narratives?  I dunno.  Anyway:

The quote and the picture are real enough and from the Strib, but the headline — obviously — is fictional.

And utterly misleading, since the article relates not at all to the Tea Party, to budgets, to…well, anything but the rigors of firefighting.

There is, in fact, some controversy whether the Forest Service moved fast enough after the fire was started by lightning and whether logging should have occurred after the blow down in 1999…

Which is a fascinating subject, perhaps – I’ve written about it here – but, Spot informs us, it’s really not why we’re here.  Not at all:

Which brings me to the real point of the story. Walter Hudson, the spittle-flecked chair of the North Star Tea Party Patriots,

I’ve met Walter Hudson many times.  He’s been to several MOB parties.  He’s actually a pretty soft-spoken, measured kinda guy.

So why would “Spot” call him “Spittle-flecked?”  Let’s think like our opponent…

Racism is the only reason.

Well, no. It’s not.  Let’s go back to the top of the piece; let’s try to think like our opponent to understand him.

Why would one completely mangle the context of an op-ed to take a roundabout, groaningly false whack at the character of someone disagrees with?  Let’s try to put ourselves in the mind of…whatever our pseudonymous, utterly unknown writer is…

Nope.  I still got nothing.

Maybe some clue will come to us as we continue through the piece:

[Hudson is] speaking to the adoption of a supermajority requirement to raise taxes in Minnesota, but here’s what Walter thinks of social goods:

Government ought not “function” to any whimsical end. Government should function only when its aim is proper, only when it protects individual rights.

You can read how Walter concludes that a simple majority vote is whimsical; I’m not going to try to explain it.

Having read both Hudson’s actual piece – which concludes “Government’s mandate is not to “function” at any cost. Impasse, gridlock and shutdowns are not inherent evils” – and tells the DFL and its supporters that there is much more to “majority rule” than browbeating the minority into submission, and says not one thing about government’s essential services, like protecting lives and property – firefighting, a subject even Ron Paul agrees is a legitimate government service – I don’t honestly think Spot could explain it any better than he explains Minnesota’s self-defense law.

But maybe there’s some hidden flash of insight in his conclusion:

What is whimsical is the fact that Walter heads a group with the word “patriot” in it. Patriots love their country. Walter’s patriotism extends no further than the tip of his nose, or his stomach, whichever sticks out farther.

So “Spot’s” whole piece is…a laborious personal insult?  Whose underlying “point” seems to be that “patriotism” is not only keeping government’s every whim funded, but funded without the need for real consensus?

I’m open to further suggestions.  I’m rhetorically tapped.

This whole “understand what your opponent is thinking” bit is a lot harder than I thought.

As we saw with the Sally Jo Sorenson bit over at Bluestem, apparently lefties have a hard time distinguishing between different levels of authority.

Sorenson confused “students” with “emplioyees”, “monks” and “inmates” in her piece.

And “Alex” at Minnesota Progressive Project (MPP) seems to conflate “free speech” with “seizing control”

The headlines write themselves.

At MPP, it might be better if they did.  But I digress.

The Mn GOP, led by Pat Garofalo (R, Big State Government), don’t want any more funding increases for local schools. The what is easy. We need to dig deeper, and ask why. Interfering with local school boards is the epitome of the heavy hand of state government sticking its nose in where it doesn’t belong.

“Alec” is responding to the gangs of Republican commandos that have been bursting in to local school board meetings and holding them at gunpoint threatening to kill everyone unless they abandon their special levy drives.  Tony Sutton and Michael Brodkorb, festooned with bandoliers and carrying Dirty Harry revolvers, sneer and cackle like Snidely Whiplash as they demand the school boards lower their budgets or else…

…well no.  Of course not.  The GOP is doing what political parties – and unions, and PACs, and 527s, and groups of people, and individuals with blogs or standing on soapboxes on the street, for that matter – do; telling voters what the truth is (most of the schools boards got more from the state), and asking local property owners if they really  need another tax increase.

Have Minnesota Republicans given up on small, local government?

Well, no, “Alex”; we’re merely participating in it.

Democrats seem to find that threatening.

A lot.

Govenor Dayton, by all accounts, is considering issuing an adminstrative fiat that would unionize daycares.

Senator Roger Chamberlain writes:

As many of you know the governor is considering signing an executive order to unilaterally unionize thousands of private sector employees.

It is unwarranted and unnecessary. It will increase costs and kill jobs.

If you do not want this to happen, give him a call; encourage others who use daycare services or run a day care to do the same.

Here’s the Governor’s contact information.

If there’s one thing the budget impasse showed us, it’s that the Governor can take a hint, if it’s big and broad and unmistakeable enough.

Over at True North, Tom Steward covers the issue.

To: The Media
From: Mitch Berg, schlub citizen
Re: Terminology

Dear Sirs and Madams:

You call it “bail“.

We call it “ransom”.

That is all.

Sincerely,

Real America.

Paul Krugman may not have written the most reprehensible column in his entire career as a cossetted, ivory-tower academic – but for the life of me, I don’t remember anything he’s ever done that’s worse than last weekend’s “9/11” column:

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

I have a hunch most people get very “subdued” around Paul Krugman.

No, that’s not fair.

Still, it’s fairer than Krugman is…well, ever.  As in this bit – which may be the dumbest piece of writing I’ve ever read in a column by a “major” columnist (emphasis added):

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful.

“This is what you think, whether you admit it or not”.

It’s a a claim common to drama queens, 5’4″ guys selling Amway distributorships, and junior high girls worldwide.

 

Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror.

How many greasy black suns orbit Planet Academia?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

In its heart, the nation knows that Paul Krugman offers less intrinsic value to society than most drunk drivers.

In his heart, Krugman knows it too.

(Nah, it’s not very satisfying, actually.  Not sure what Krugman gets from it).

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

Obviously, Krugman’s a gutless punk.

In his “jobs” speech, Barack Obama jobbed history.

In a flub that would have set the media and Jon Stewart babbling for a solid week had it come from George W. Bush, Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin, Obama said that Abraham Lincoln founded the Republican Party.  Lincoln, of course, joined the party two years after its founding.

The media, at best, yawned and let it pass without remark.

But not PBS:

…[Government]-funded PBS has altered the transcript of the Presidents speech, removing the offending comment.

The New York Times transcript has the following quote:”We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union.  Founder of the Republican Party.  But in the middle of a civil war, he was also a leader who looked to the future — a Republican President who mobilized government to build the Transcontinental Railroad — applause — launch the National Academy of Sciences, set up the first land grant colleges.  Applause.  And leaders of both parties have followed the example he set.”

That’s how I heard it…

But how does it appear in the PBS transcript?”  We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union.  But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future – a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges.

Now, NPR did correct the “flub” – on Saturday.

Here’s my question: Forget about Jon Stewart and Brian Williams; the real question is will Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone’s NPR program “On The Media” cover this bit of egregious Obama-fluffing at all?

My money is on “hah, are you kidding?”

To: History Channel
From: Mitch Berg, Mere Peasant
Re: “America: The Story Of Us”

Dear History Channel

I watched an episode of “America: The Story Of Us” – an episode focusing on the history of slavery.

In and among all your traditional low-budget camera herky-jerkery, there was a fairly well-told story there.

Your show follows the current fashion, interspersing commentary from experts – or “experts” – into the cinemetic story.  Anyone who’s ever watched a PBS cinementary knows the technique; academics adding bits of, well, academia to a larger story.

Now, some of the “experts” you picked – Colin Powell, Al Sharpton, Henry Louis Gates – are pretty predictable in a story on slavery.  So far so good.

But “Mack” Machiewitz, the overdramatic former SEAL whose claim to fame is having hosted “Future Weapons?”

Bill Maher? I say again, Bill Maher?

Who, to be fair, was at least more measured and sober than noted historian Sheryl “Share Your Toilet Paper” Crowe, whose comment “I think in the south today there are still people who believe in the rightness of slavery?” still strikes me, three days later, as one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard?

TREBEK: “The most annoying people in the world”.

BERG: “People who pedantically fuss over fairly meaningless, and usually wrong and out of context, ephemera in history to try to discredit their opponents among people who don’t pay much attention to the subject but like to think they do”.

TREBEK:  “Form of a question, Mr. Berg…”

BERG: “Who are who pedantically fuss over fairly meaningless, and usually wrong and out of context, ephemera in history to try to discredit their opponents among people who don’t pay much attention to the subject but like to think they do”

TREBEK: Correct, and you control the board.

I woke up in a cold sweat after dreaming the above exchange, and couldn’t get back to sleep.

So I fired up the computer, and – this is a completely bizarre coincidence – found  this piece in the blog PoliticsUSA, a liberal blog:

Progressive political commentator Thom Hartmann has something to say about the real history of the Boston Tea Party. Using a first-hand account written by one of the participants, he shows that it was not against government regulation; it was not against the size of government. It was not even really at its core about government at all, except to the extent that a government supported a huge mega-corporation that had a stranglehold on America’s economy. As Thom Hartmann says, the Boston Tea Party was “A revolt against corporate power and corporate tax cuts.”

It’s a good thing for Thom Hartman that there is liberal talk radio. Otherwise, he’d be, I dunno, a barrista or something.  A nutty barrista with a very selective sense of history.

Hartman – and the “account” from “one of the participants” – are right to a point; the British East India Company was a corporation.  And it definitely was powerful.

But not a corporation in the sense that we have today.  Mostly.

The BEIC was given a government charter – a legal monopoly – on trade between India and the rest of the British Empire.  It had its own special dispensations to defend that monopoly – like its own frigging Navy and Army.  Even Microsoft and Apple don’t have that kind of government-granted power (more or less).

So the BEIC was a corporation, indeed – at a time when corporations were very, very rare things that were created (if memory serves) by act of Parliament.  It served as a pseudo-government in large parts of India – and, indeed, several of the American colonies had been started by similar “corporations”.  With Armies.  And Navies.  And the power to levy taxes.

And it’s irrelevant – because the Tea Party was a reaction to Parliament’s “Tea Act“, which the BEIC passed on to the colonists in more or less the same way that Whole Foods passes on sales tax to Tom Hartman’s listeners.

There’s a reason that “discussion” with the Mos Eisly Cantina that is the AM950 audience is so futile; it’s that so much of what they “know” is crap.

Let’s take a trip back to early 2007.

While Minnesota’s conservative blog scene had been been dominating the local alternative media scene since the “Blog” became a household word, it was a series of scattershot phenomena – you had a bunch of huge megabloggers like Powerline and Ed Morrissey, and on the other hand a whoooole lot of people who tried blogging for a few weeks or months, maybe drew a little attention,and then got frustrated at the difficulty involved in actually getting read.

In the meantime, the Big Left blogs had two big advantages; a hive-like reader community that pretty much read what they were told to read, and liberals with deep pockets who were willing to pay bloggers to write the stuff.

We wondereed – what was the way forward?

It was in the summer of ’07 that Andy Aplikowski hatched the idea of a center-right conservative group blog, aggregating material from the full range of center-right bloggers in Minnesota.  He and Derek Brigham and Nancy LaRoche ran with the idea, along with Brian Mason, Matt Abe, Kevin Ecker, the Lady Logician and, eventually, me.

That idea became True North.

The idea?  Give regional center-right bloggers an outlet, and a soapbox, and if all went well, a megaphone – a way for they, their blogs, and especially their writing and reporting,to be seen by a wider audence than they could get all by themselves, an outlet that would be greater than the sum of all our individual parts.

And so it was four years ago today that True North launched.  Then as now, we were based on one simple set of principles – and the mission to get writers who supported those principles out and in front of the public.

Some leftybloggers didn’t know what to make of us. But we’ve had a blast.

Nobody’s ever made a dime from True North – I don’t think we’ve ever accepted advertising – but we’ve had an effect far beyond anything anyone could have expected.  Litlte birds tell me we’re daily reading at the Capitol, on both sides of the aisle.  Beyond that?  One of our former contribs is in the Legislature (King Banaian, 15B); another, Michele Bachmann, is a presidential candidate.

It’s been a great four years – and the best is yet to come!

So thanks, Andy and Derek and Nancy, and Brian, Cindy, Kevin and Matt, and especially everyone that’s written for True North over the past four years!

The Star/Tribune Editorial Board puts the happiest, rah-rah-local-team-iest face they can on the aftermath of “Operation Fast And Furious”, the “Justice” Department’s infamous “gun-running sting” that morphed into an organized attempt to slander America’s gun owners and gun dealers to undercut the Second Amendment movement – and tried to play the issue against the GOP.

They start out with the facts, more or less…:

The agency’s “Operation Fast and Furious” was supposed to monitor illegal gun sales from small-time gun buyers to large weapons traffickers, but after the sting operation failed an ATF analyst concluded that about 1,400 of the more than 2,000 weapons linked to the operation have not been recovered.

That’s one way of looking at it.

The other way – and the one that I’m pretty well convinced history will find accurate – was that the program was supposed to create a trail of guns from small American gun dealers to the narcotraficantes, that would allow the Administration to step in in 2012 and declare they were shocked, shocked to see a trail of firearms from Texas to the carterls.  This, of course, would allow them to frame the “bitter gun-clingers” of the Second Amendment movement, in classic Alinsky style, as aiders, abetters and profiteers from Mexico’s anarchy.

The Strib starts with some bipartisan gurglings…

It’s been reassuring to see dogged Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley take a lead role in the congressional investigation. While Jones, who will continue to serve as U.S. attorney in Minnesota, works to straighten out the agency’s internal operations, the American people deserve a thorough review of what went wrong in Operation Fast and Furious.

…which lead to the paper’s real goal; finding some way of tying this fiasco to the GOP and the Right (emphasis added):

[It’s] already clear that the ATF has suffered from being without a permanent director since 2006, when Congress began requiring Senate confirmation of the position.

President Obama nominated Andrew Traver, special agent in charge of ATF’s Chicago field division, in November 2010, but like other candidates he’s been opposed by the too-powerful gun lobby.

And there you have it.  For the “crime” of demanding better accountability in the leadership of the BATFE – a government agency with a decades-long history of colossal, epic, face-palming incompetence and politicization aimed at law-abiding gun owners – the Strib editorial board wants it to share in the responsibility for a bureaucratic cluster-hug designed entirely to slander that same movement.

The BATF doesn’t need Minnesota’s US Attorney to fix it. It needs to be shut down, its staff scattered to the four corners of the country, and have its offices demolished and the land beneath it salted.

The Strib editorial board has less interest in “fixing the BATF” than it has in cutting down Barack Obama’s opponents – or at least limiting damate to their President.

Operation Gun Runner (aka “Fast and Furious”) was not an operation done in good faith to “take down criminals” that “went wrong” that “left a mess at the ATF”, as you are all reporting today.

It was a politicized attempt to smear law-abiding gun dealers, law-abiding gun owners, and the Second Amendment movement, purely for the political benefit of the Obama Administration, and the Administration knew it.

Please

I’m kind of a nut, sometimes.

I mean that in a benign way.  My occasional little bout of unusualness usually expresses itself in very, very benign ways.  I sing in the car.  I make up languages, and then talk to myself in them (don’t judge).

And I sometimes decide, out of the clear, blue sky, to focus on subjects that one might not expect a guy to focus on for any rational reason.

A good example – I once spent three months reading about the German invasion of Poland – from large-scale histories down to very micro-level accounts by Polish soldiers and civilians.  This in the days before the Internet, mind you.  Another week back in high school, it was learning how to improvise explosives (Note to Janet Napolitano:  It was entirely academic).  In my mid-twenties, it was Asian cooking. And it’s covered many other topics, too – as you may be able to tell from this blog’s rather peripatetic range of subjects.

Anyway.

I sat bolt updright in bed the other day, and thought “wouldn’t it be fun to explain Minnesota law as regards defamation?”

Seriously – that’s the only reason I’m doing this – pure unvarnished serendipity!

It didn’t take much digging to get down to the crux of the gist; defamation (traditionally broken into “Libel”, or written/printed defamation, and “slander”, or spoken defamation, although those categories are largely vestigial holdovers from English common law, where the printing press and the spoken word were pretty much the extent of mass communication, although the lines are blurring rapidly today) is when someone says, writes, or otherwise transmits…:

• …something that is defamatory – in other words, that has a reasonable chance of damaging the subject’s livelihood or reputation (where “reasonable” means “would convince a jury”)…
• …to one or more third parties – meaning that someone besides the target has to hear it.  The communication in question must be…
• …untrue, as in “there is no truth to it”.
• And if the target of the statement is a “public figure”, the target needs to prove the person making the statement acted out of malice.

Seems pretty clear-cut, right?  I mean, here’s Minnesota’s “Criminal Defamation” statute, which covers most of the same sorts of things.

Well, no.  It’s not.  There is all sorts of case law on the subject – all the little crossed fingers behind the metaphorical back that the legal system churns out to make sure only lawyers can really follow the law without some major effort.

And some of those crossed fingers are a good thing.  Otherwise, you could have a situation like in the UK, where defamation is frightfully easy to prove, to the point where it genuinely chills freedom of speech, and always has – which is one major reason why American jurisprudence has legitimately tried to make proving defamation a much harder hill to climb.

So over the course of this week, we’ll look at some of the wrinkles to defamation law.

Apropos, again, nothing but my own schizoid whim.

Well, he does for one Democrat, anyway.  Democrat Kate Marshall is a Democrat running in a special election in Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District.

And she released a lit piece pointing out her really double-dog sincere support of Israel:

“I am proud to consider Israel a friend and I reiterate my unwavering support for its fundamental right to exist and the absolute necessity for Israel to secure its people from outside threats. I stand ready and willing to assist Israel in defending itself against all acts of terrorism,” the statement reads.

Unfortunately, nobody copy-edited the piece – so it went out with one of Marshall’s strategists’ internal comments still in the text:

“Background: Israel has been in the news lately, and will be even more in the news with [Glenn] Beck’s ‘Rally to Restore Courage’ in Jerusalem. In an R district, it will be useful to express support for Israel and demonstrate some foreign policy prowess while it is a timely topic — especially for people who are likely paying attention to Beck’s event.”

To be fair, the Dems have had their agenda driven by much worse…

Caterwauling.

Whinging.

Yapping.

Argling.

Whinnying.

Squealing.

Sniveling.

Screeching.

Sobbing.

Bellyaching.

Caviling.

Grousing.

Kvetching.

Grumbling.

Yammering.

Those are the first fifteen synonyms I can think of for “Whining”.  Which is the sole verb every “progressive” blogger seems to use to describe “any of our opponents talking or writing”.

I can only assume you “progressive” bloggers’ superiors haven’t told you to write anything else…

UPDATE:

Mewling.

Gargling.

Puling.

Gurgitating.

Maladicting.

Frumping.

Eeyoring.

Even simple ol’ complaining!

Still haven’t had to go to a thesaurus.

I”m starting to think the only “smart” thing about “progressives” is the way they branded themselves as “the smart people”.

If you were paying attention during the Wisconsin recall (also every other political campaign since the rise of the alt-media in the early nineties), you could not only note that the left was claiming that conservative billionaires were influencing the media – you could have predicted it.

Because you, a discerning media customer, know of Berg’s Seventh Law:  to wit, “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.

So you just knew this was going to come out:

Conservative foundations have poured big bucks into new Wisconsin websites that do original opposition research supporting Republican candidates.

[Note to conservative billionaires; some of us in Minnesota would be more than happy to help]

But it’s not like deep-pocketed liberal institutions are sitting on their hands.

Foundations created and funded by billionaire philanthropist and noted liberal George Soros have sunk money into two new media projects in the state – the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and MapLight.

And – you guessed it – it’s a lot more money than there was on the conservative side.

Read the whole thing.

Ron Fournier at National Journal had, um,  a curious take on the Pawlenty legacy:

What a shame. What a shame that Pawlenty bowed to the tea party wing of his party and abandoned the qualities that made him a popular two-term Minnesota governor. He was once known for his blue-state moderation and political courage.

Political courage?  Fournier got that right.  Politically, the guy was King Leonidas.

But I can just hear the Twin Cities’ leftybloggers squealing like stuck little piggies over that “blue-state moderation” bit.  Yeah, TPaw got a reputation as a “moderate” in the MN House.  And he was too moderate on fringe issues for some conservatives.

But the defining events of his administration – every one of them – related to his dogged adherence to his promise to stick to his “no new taxes” pledge, made to put him over the top in the 2002 GOP convention.

In that respect – the one that matters – Pawlenty was a Tea Partier years before anyone used the term.

Not anymore. A fact that says as much about today’s GOP as it does about Pawlenty himself.

No.  It says as much about the myopia of the media – its desire to conjure a “moderate GOP” from nowhere, or its need to do so for the benefit of the Democrats – as it does about the GOP.

And I think even the Twin Cities’ DFL would agree. Right?

Minnesota is heading for a battle over redistricting that may just make the just-passed budget battle look like a stroll in the park.

And, just like with every such battle lately in Minnesota, there is at least one “non-partisan” non-profit claiming to have the interests of average, non-affiliated Minnesotans at heart.  There are a couple of reasons for this; for starters, the Minnesota DFL is a largely impotent organization;

In the 2010 elections, of course, it was “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” and a small circle of other groups – “The 2010 Fund”  – a group that funnelled millions of dollars from unions, the Dayton family, and their cronies to try to win the election for Mark Dayton (largely by running a toxic sleaze campaign).  Their power in “progressive” circles is remarkable; Governor Dayton has brought a fair number of ABM’s staffers to work in his office; the former head of the “2010 Fund”, Ken Martin, now runs the DFL.

And for the redistricting battle?  The new astroturf group is “Draw The Line”, an organization that spans several states where the Democrats are fighting for their organizational lives, including Minnesota.

So who’s behind “Draw the Line?”  And what are they after – and by “they”, I don’t mean “Draw The Line”, so much as the people behind them?

More next week here on Shot In The Dark.

Someone in Wisconsin – who describes herself as a “Passionate Dem, lover of justice fairness freedom animals bflies quilts words & nyc. RW asshats: be gone or be blocked. I don’t cast my pearls before swine” – cast forth the following pearl via the miracle of Twitter::

@moronwatch @mitchpberg thinks the unions and George Soros are “an oligarchy” while he supports RW’s destruction of our democracy. Moron!

I asked – she didn’t think Soros, AFSCME, the WEA and Big Labor are an “oligarchy?”

She replied:

 @mitchpberg George Soros’s efforts are to help the people and country. Real oligarchs like Kochs work strictly for themselves & u r thr tool

He’s like a Hungarian Robin Hood!

I’m pretty sure she blocked me.