The National Rifle Association has come out defending Michele Bachmann against Newsweek Magazine’s scabrous “Queen of Rage” cover piece on Michele Bachmann:

One of presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s major political opponents is defending her against what it says is blatant sexism on the part of Newsweek magazine.

Wait – did I say National Rifle Association?

Ooop.  I meant…the National Organization of Women!

Monday, the National Organization for Women (NOW) spoke out against Newsweek’s most recent cover, which features an extreme close-up of Michele Bachmann and the title “The Queen of Rage.”

“It’s sexist,” NOW president Terry O’Neill told TheDC. “Casting her in that expression and then adding ‘The Queen of Rage’ I think [it is]. Gloria Steinem has a very simple test: If this were done to a man or would it ever be done to a man – has it ever been done to a man? Surely this has never been done to a man.”

The NOW, of course, is myopic; it happens to (conservative) men in the liberal media all the time.

Still – when even NOW notices that the liberal media observes a toxic double standard when covering women who happen to be conservatives, that should tell you something.

Of course, if you’re award-winning journalist ® Karl Bremer, what it tells you is that them uppity wimmins is gettin’ off the reservation agin:

Gender politics at its worst–NOW defends Michele Bachmann over Newsweek cover. Sad. http://t.co/ZG9YO8g #stribpol

Remember; it’s only offensive if it doesn’t benefit the left.

Since there’s been another wave of media and political talking heads claiming, apparently seriously, that “there is no liberal media”, I thought I’d point to this latest bit by W. Joseph Campbell on Patrick Pexton, the WaPo’s latest “ombudsperson”.

In his five or so months as ombudsman, Pexton hasn’t dared touch the electrified third rail about the Post, which one of his predecessors, Deborah Howell, gamely if belatedly addressed.

That’s the Deborah Howell, the late publisher of the PiPress and, it should be added, Nick Coleman’s stepmom.

That’s a decided lack of intellectual diversity in the Post’s newsroom. In mid-November 2008, shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, Howell wrote in her ombudsman column:

“I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”

Howell’s column quoted Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism as saying that “conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It’s inconceivable that that is irrelevant.”

Howell’s column itself was very worth a read.

I’m told that CNBC’s Jim Cramer, host of “Mad Money”, and I have a bit of a resemblance.

So – if Thompson Building and Remodeling, who’ve been sponsoring the Northern Alliance for most of this past five or six years, hires me to endorse their services, even though I don’t make any “Cramer” references whatsoever during the ads, is Thompson “impersonating Cramer?”

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Jill Burcum isn’t the worst, most in-the-bag-for-the-Democrats Strib editorial writer.  That “distinction” floats at random between Lori Sturdevant, Jon Tevlin and most of the rest of the staff.

And I don’t mean that to sound as nasty as it probably does.  If more of the Strib’s editorial writers were in Burcum’s “I’m a DFLer, but I don’t want to come across like an obvious house shill” weight class, the Strib and its editorial would be less a laughingstock.

Still, priorities are priorities.  Burcum takes umbrage, on behalf of Morgan Freeman, at the latest ad for Sheila Harsdorf in her battle for the Wisconsin Senate in the district just across the St. Croix from the Metro against  Shelly “WEEEEEEEEEEEEEE BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED UNIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON” Moore.

The latest attack ad on Wisconsin state Senate candidate Shelly Moore instantly prompts this question: How’d they get actor Morgan Freeman to do the voiceover?

The reality is that it’s not Freeman, whose authoritative voice made him a logical choice to play God in the hit film “Bruce Almighty” a few years back. Instead, the slippery group funding the ad found somebody who sounds just like Freeman.

So what does Burcum suggest?  That established voice-over guys be able to trademark the timbre and tone of their voices, so nobody else can sound like them?

Because Burcum sounds serious:

The [organization funding the spots’] latest effort is nothing less than a fake celebrity endorsement of Moore’s opponent, Republican Sheila Harsdorf, in the recall election taking place just across the border.

Baloney.  The guy’s voice sounds like Morgan Freeman, in the same way that I look like Jim Cramer.  Did he say “I”m Morgan Freeman?”  No.  Does his voice say “I’m detached and authoritative, like Morgan Freeman’s?”  Sure.  Is it of any legal or ethical weight?  If it is, then everyone with a passing resemblance to a celebrity who swerves into the public eye in any way loses their stock in trade.

(And this lawsuit, by Bette Midler against a soundalike who sang one of her songs on a commercial, tucks in the legal case.  Being a soundalike isn’t in and of itself an issue; Midler’s suit got tossed).

Let’s try this, and see if Burcum squawks.

“DFL and RINOs good.  Conservatives bad.  Vote for Sheila Harsdorf!”

Now, was that actually Lori Sturdevant endorsing Harsdorf?  Of course not.  Did I try to leverage the coincidental resemblance of the line I wrote with a regional celebrity’s trademark dogmatism?  Perhaps, but so what?   Does a celebrity own their tone, their timbre and cadence and presentation?

If so, Burcum might be getting a call from Doug Grow’s lawyer.

While driving between meetings yesterday, I listened to the first part of Keri Miller’s interview with Juan Williams.

Williams, of course, was the commentator who split his time between Fox News and National Public Radio – even serving as a talk show host on NPR on occasion – before being fired for admitting on the O’Reilly show to sharing many Americans’ nervousness about obvious Muslims on aircraft after 9/11 (while stressing – and the media reports, especially NPR’s, always left this part out – that it’d be wrong to base policy on the sort of stereotypes he was admitting to).

I’m going to paraphrase the part I heard.  Feel free to validate it at the show link.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: Because we can’t have an honest conversation as a nation until we admit to the fact that this is how we feel.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: Now, let’s be honest – there was more than “reverting to stereotype”.  I urged people to remember that’s now how we set policy in this country.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: In and of itself, I don’t. But it’s an honest part of the conversation; if political correctness forces us to stifle acknowledging it, it’ll leak out in other ways.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: Um…hello?

Miller’s point seemed to be not so much that humans must conquer stereotype; it’s that having them, or at least admitting it, is itself a base, evil thing.

I’d love to propose an experiment.

Some evening when Ms. Miller is making her way from The Loft and one of her “Talking Volumes” programs to a brie and chablis tasting party in Kenwood, she should run across a group of thirtysomething white males in full biker gear, smack across her path.  Let’s measure her heart rate.  See if she is indulging in any stereotypes.

In the interest of science, naturally.

UPDATE:  Over on Twitter, “NarnFan” wrote the summary for this piece that I wasn’t caffeinated enough to hatch myself:

To the extent we can’t hold a complected thought about this stuff, we are screwed manifold ways.

People can yell “racist” at one another ’til they’re blue in the face; the fact is, it’s human nature to be “we-ist”.  People are always most comfortable around people most like themselves; Keri Miller would no doubt be no more comfortable and relaxed among, say, white rednecks than would Cornell West.

Especially if there’s a “history”; Armenians might be forgiven for being leery of Turks; European Jews of a certain age might keep Russians, Poles or “Aryans” under close watch; blacks of any socioeconomic class in Los Angeles might be forgiven for being wary of tattooed, teenage and twentysomething Latinos.

Americans were attacked, and 3,000 of us murdered in cold blood, by people who caught us at our most vulnerable – stripped of weapons, jammed like cattle into aluminum tubes.  Not every Muslim attacked us – and I’ll strenuously exclaim that many Muslims serve this country with great honor, including the Pakistani-American who was reported to have gone on the Bin Laden raid.

To say “you are a bad person” for acknowledging the real human need to see to one’s own self-preservation, itself, retards the conversation that Ms. Miller said she was trying to “advance”.

Chris Cilizza has released his annual list of “Best State-Based Political Blogs” for 2011.  It’s a list for all fifty states.  Cilizza hastens to note that…:

The best political blogs list is entirely driven by Fix readers and commenters. Many of the blogs below are partisan and may use language and/or images that neither The Fix nor the Washington Post condones. To be clear, we are not endorsing the view of the blogs on the list. Instead we intend to serve as a gateway for interested political junkies to pick and choose your favorites.

So here are the lists for…:

Minnesota

• Bluestem Prairie
• Capitol View
• Dump Bachmann
• Hot Dish Politics
• Minnesota Independent
• MinnPotus – that one took me a second: they meant “MinnPost”, apparently.  Whew.  I was afraid a blog about Bachmann and Pawlenty had snuck past me…
• Smart Politics
• True North – Well, all right!  Congrats to Derek, Nancy, AAA, Jonz, Nancy ,Cindy and Matt!

So True North got on the list, against the MPR, Strib and Humphrey Institute house blogs, a Soros joint, The Dump (hey, give ’em their due; they’ve always known how to get the media to pay disproportionate attention to them) and “Bluestem”, which gets points for being one of about three Minnesota leftyblogs that’s neither obviously clinically deranged, nor employed by the DFL/Soros/some “progressive” institution nor seemingly written by a press-release bot.

Hey, at least a conservative blog got on the list this year – in a state that’s spawned two of the most powerful blogs anywhere in the business, Powerline and Captain’s Quarters  (which got assimilated into Hot Air) and where the organic conservative blog scene True North digests every day is the biggest, most vibrant in the country.

Hm.  Makes sense now.

Anyway, congrats to all.

Question:  If you were storing a car in your garage for the winter, would you carry insurance on it?

If you’d discovered you didn’t read the Strib anymore, would you continue to pay for the subscription?

If you got an hour’s exercise a day by biking or running or swimming, would you pay for a gym membership?

No, no and probably not, I’m guessing.

Careful.  Award-winning journalist ® Karl Bremer might accuse you of driving without insurance, illiteracy and being out of shape…

…well, no.  That’s not quite right.  He’d write a piece on his blog Ripple in Stillwater with a headline like “Is Joe Schmo Driving Without Insurance?”, or “Is Mary Moe Illiterate?” or “Is Evonne Yeo Obese And Out Of Shape?”, listing the factoids and not a whole lot more.

One of the great plagues of the “alternative media” – and by that, I mean mostly the left-wing alternative media – is the “I’ll ask an inflammatory question – one with either no facts to back it up, or facts presented with no context that would help the uninformed that are my target audience decide whether it’s a valid quesiton – and let it dangle out there”.

It’s sort of like this classic South Park spoof of Glenn Beck…:

Which brings us to this piece from Bremer’s Ripple, in which he writes:

Throughout her political career, Michele Bachmann has rarely passed up an opportunity to burnish her lawyerly credentials by claiming that she’s a “tax litigation attorney.” And for almost as long, Bachmann hasn’t even been authorized to practice law in her home state of Minnesota.

Now, it appears that Bachmann’s license to practice law in Minnesota should not only be unauthorized, but suspended and placed on “not in good standing” status for failure to comply with the “Rules of the Supreme Court on Lawyer Registration.”…

…

This is only the latest in a long history of sloppy record-keeping, tardy legal filings and questionable campaign reports that litter Bachmann’s political career. Will anyone care enough to enforce the law this time?

You bet!

But since the allegations are coming from the award-winning journalist ® Karl Bremer, perhaps it’s not my place to check it out.  I’m no award winning journalist ® after all – I’m a mere uppity peasant.

So I wrote a couple of lawyer friends of mine; Joe Doakes of Como Park, and Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci (*).  And, for good measure, called the Minnesota Judicial Branch, which maintains the lists of lawyers that practice in Minnesota and, by the way, which Bremer cited.

And the answer I got?  To borrow a quote from Joe Pesci in the greatest movie ever made about the law in America, My Cousin Vinny, “Everything that guy just said is bullsh*t”.

Let’s break down Bremer’s charges, one by one:

“Suspended” Disbelief: Let’s go back to that last paragraph:

Now, it appears that Bachmann’s license to practice law in Minnesota should not only be unauthorized, but suspended and placed on “not in good standing” status for failure to comply with the “Rules of the Supreme Court on Lawyer Registration.”

Bremer writes this because Bachmann’s record with the Minnesota Judicial Branch reads “Not Authorized”.  Here, take a look.  It says she’s “Not Authorized Resident, Not Practicing in MN / Voluntarily Restricted (By Choice).

What does this mean?  I mean, to me – a mere uppity peasant – it appears that she may have taken her license out of “active” status to pursue another career for bit.   But what do I know?

Doakes – not an award-winning ® journalist, but a lawyer – explains:

Mr. Bremer doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He reminds me of the guy who has read the “to coin money” phrase in the Constitution, interprets it to mean the only valid money is gold coinage, and therefore refuses to pay his mortgage. In similarly erroneous fashion, reading the plain English words in the Rules governing lawyer licenses doesn’t mean he understands how the Rules are applied in real life.

 First, Ms. Bachman’s license to practice law has NOT lapsed – she has voluntarily self-limited her license precisely as provided by the Rules. She could un-self-limit her license at any time as provided in the Rules (notify the Court, pay a fee, catch up on classes).

Sort of like letting the insurance lapse on a car you keep stored; it doesn’t preclude reinstating the insurance and going back on the road.

Unless you’re a conservative and you wander into Karl Bremer’s attention span.

Second, the Rules provide several different categories of lawyers – some actively practicing law and some not – for the excellent reason that some people may want to take a break from representing clients day-to-day in order to do something else (missionary work, for example, or perhaps public service) [Or serve in Congress – Ed.] but also want to be able to resume practicing law later, without having to retake the Bar Exam. This regulatory scheme is designed to let lawyers “park” their licenses for a time. It’s perfectly legal and commonly used.

Another friend of mine, also an attorney, raised some eyebrows when she let her Minnesota license go inactive.  It seemed odd – except her firm was giving her nothing but cases in Iowa and the Dakotas.  It only made sense to keep her active licenses there, but keep her MN license inactive until she really needed it.  Does it mean she’s “not following the rules”, as Bremer would claim?

Rep. Bachmann, with her LL.D in Tax Law from William and Mary, practices a fairly abstruse flavor of law.  Since she’s not currentlytrying cases, the license renewal is, at this moment in her life, an unneeded extra complication and expense – especially since it’s a relatively simple matter to get it back should she need it again.

My pseudonymous lawyers aren’t good enough for you?  Fair enough; I called the Minnesota Judicial Branch, and the Board of Continuing Legal Education.  They confirmed it. “Lots of attorneys go inactive when they are out of state, not practicing, or not in a position to do their Continuing Legal Education” due to, say, being in Congress, said a MJB employee who asked not to be named.

Paid Up: Bremer wrote:

Lawyers licensed to practice law in Minnesota are required to register annually with the Lawyer Registration Office in the Minnesota Judicial Branch. They’re also required to pay an annual registration fee that varies depending on the lawyer’s active/inactive status, income level, residence and years in the profession.

And – mirabile dictu  – she paid her fee!  Check out her MJB record; third line down?  “Last Payment:  7/11/11”.

Joe Tucci – a lawyer and member of the Minnesota Bar – notes:

I would add that the dues you are required to pay when you are on voluntary restricted status are about $100 less than on active status. If you have no prospect of representing clients in your jurisdiction because you are working in a different career out of state (which also hinders your ability to keep up on your CLEs), it just makes sense to to go on voluntary restricted status.

Hm.

States Of Existence:  Remember when Bremer insisted that there is something in Bachmann’s status that is deeply prejudicial?

Now, it appears that Bachmann’s license to practice law in Minnesota should not only be unauthorized, but suspended and placed on “not in good standing” status for failure to comply with the “Rules of the Supreme Court on Lawyer Registration.”

He even quoted the letter of the law…:

“A lawyer or judge who fails to meet all of the criteria to be on either active or inactive status is placed on non-compliant status, and the right to practice law in this state is automatically suspended,” the Supreme Court Rules state. “A lawyer or judge on non-compliant status is not in good standing. A lawyer or judge on non-compliant status must not practice law in this state, must not hold out himself or herself as authorized to practice law, or in any manner represent that he or she is qualified or authorized to practice law while on non-compliant status. Any lawyer or judge who violates this rule is subject to all the penalties and remedies provided by law for the unauthorized practice of law in the State of Minnesota.”

Wait a minute – where on the record does it say that Bachmann is in any sort of “non-compliant status?”  Check for yourself!

If you can’t find anything but the phrase “Not Authorized to Practice”, join the club.  Doakes notes that there is nothign to Bremer’s claim but, well, Bremer being Bremer:

Third, the phrase “Not Authorized to Practice” is not as ominous as it sounds. It has no negative connotation. The Rule is binary – you’re either Authorized or you’re Not Authorized.

And Doakes offers something Bremer didn’t – context:

For comparison purposes, here’s Michelle Bachman’s information.

And here’s the information for [another prominent local attorney].

And here’s the information about former Court of Appeals Judge Rollie Amundson, who was convicted of stealing from his clients and sent to prison.

You’ll notice all their licenses both are listed as Not Authorized but for different reasons: Ms. Bachmann’s because she’s chosen to stop representing clients while she serves in government, Mr. Shadduck’s because he’s dead, and Mr. Amundson’s because he hasn’t paid his annual fees. “Not Authorized” doesn’t mean “bad lawyer;” it simply means “not authorized.”

Because award-winning journalists ® don’tneed to give complete, accurate context, I guess:

Where? Finally, Bremer attacked Bachmann’s attention to paperwork in re reporting her address:

The Supreme Court Rules also require that “Every lawyer or judge must immediately notify the Lawyer Registration Office of any change of postal address. Every lawyer or judge who elects to use the online registration system must immediately update their online registration profile to reflect any change of their postal address and email address.”

That rule is clearly referenced on the Minnesota Judicial Branch website on Updating Lawyer Registration.

Bachmann paid her most recent annual registration fee on July 11, 2011. Her address listed on her registration is 1801 Johnson Drive, Stillwater, MN. But Bachmann hasn’t lived at that address for nearly four years.

That would appear to put Bachmann in noncompliance with the Supreme Court Rules—not just this year, but for at least the past three years.

“A lawyer or judge who fails to meet all of the criteria to be on either active or inactive status is placed on non-compliant status, and the right to practice law in this state is automatically suspended,” the Supreme Court Rules state. “A lawyer or judge on non-compliant status is not in good standing. A lawyer or judge on non-compliant status must not practice law in this state, must not hold out himself or herself as authorized to practice law, or in any manner represent that he or she is qualified or authorized to practice law while on non-compliant status. Any lawyer or judge who violates this rule is subject to all the penalties and remedies provided by law for the unauthorized practice of law in the State of Minnesota.”

 

Doakes, however, notes that Bremer is just making stuff up now:

Fourth, I know the plain English words in the Rule say you must update even an Inactive registration but nobody updates an Inactive registration while it’s still Inactive; you update your registration when it goes Active again, when you want to resume practice. Take another look at Mr. Shadduck and Mr. Amundson’s addresses – they use their last address from the time they last were in Active practice. That’s the common and widely accepted practice and Ms. Bachmann is following it.

And if that were not the case? Well, Bremer’s gonna be one busy little award-winning ® wannabe muckracker:

Finally, to address the major point of Mr. Bremer’s column, the phrase “postal address” in the Rule does not require you to list your HOME mailing address, the place where you eat and sleep, but only to list SOME mailing address at which the Court can send notices to you. In this age of wackos with instant Internet access to public records [heh heh – Ed.], NOBODY gives the home address where they actually spend their days and nights, on their registration.

[Ramsey County Judge] Robert Awsumb doesn’t list his home address.

Nor does the leading personal injury lawyer in the state and founder of Schwebel, Goetz and Sieben.

Nor even ordinary government bureaucrats, such as the Attorney General, Lori Swanson.

And see United States Senator Amy Klobuchar, another Minnesota lawyer now serving in Congress.

Swanson and Klobuchar? Scofflaws?

Er, Karl Bremer?  You’ve got some wrongdoing to expose!  Our Attorney General and Senior Senator should both be chastised, shunned, and disbarred, by the logic in your own story!

You get right on that!

Doakes concludes:

Not Authorized to Practice – Voluntarily Restricted – and showing an address where she doesn’t actually eat and sleep on a daily basis (Senator Klobuchar lives somewhere closer to her job in Washington, DC, obviously, and simply maintains this condo in Minnesota for residency purposes). Nothing wrong with that – perfectly common practice for lawyers in government service. Such as Ms. Bachmann.

Mr. Bremer may have read the Rules governing lawyer registration, but he doesn’t understand them. Oh, and he still has to pay his mortgage, too.

The moral of the story?  If it’s the Twin Cities award-winning ® leftymedia, and they’re writing about conservatives?  Distrust, then verify.

Then, almost inevitably, distrust some more.

(And the very nice lady from the Minnesota Judicial Branch?  She confirmed everything Doakes and Tucci said).

UPDATE:  Another rep from the Continuing Legal Education office called back.  “Someone who voluntarily suspends their license but keeps their fees paid up is in good standing”.

As opposed to, y’know, bad standing.

(more…)

Paul Krugman – who is to Nobel Prizes what John Kerry was to Vietnam – wants to prove that Ronald Reagan never did anything useful for the economy, and he doesn’t care how sharply he has to shave the facts and the historical context to do it:

Reagan did not start an era of unprecedented growth by any measure: employment, GDP, productivity, whatever. But maybe the easiest way to see what didn’t happen is to look at median family income in constant dollars:

The NYTimes helpfully provided a graph:

Krugman:

 A spectacular increase during the high-tax, strong-union postwar generation; fitful improvement since, with the only sustained rise during the Clinton years. That’s the story; it’s amazing how many people don’t know it.

“That’s the story” Krugman says; high taxes (and unions, he adds in a non-sequitur) cause prosperity.

Like household income exists in a vacuum, affected only by taxes (and union membership).

I’m tempted to drive to New York, collar Krugman, and ask “what else happened during this timeline?”

What else happened between 1947 and 1971, besides unfettered taxes and government growth?  Like, the German and Japanese economies starting the period in ruins, and spending the entire period rebuilding?  China and India starting as third-world countries, enduring forty years of socialist governments that couldn’t feed their own people?  And,  respectively, a mass-murdering socialist dictatorship and civil wars?

Did Germany and Japan only get their economies rebuilt, and start to seriously compete with the US, in the late sixties and early seventies – about the time America’s rise in income leveled off?

Did America’s unions develop their high-salary, high-benefit, often low-skill paradigm perhaps because America’s economy had no competition?  The whole world was America’s market for those 25 years!

(And when Germany and Japan’s economies took off, they adopted high-tax, high-“service”, strong-union systems.  And when did their performance start levelling off?

That’s right, it shot up like a rocket from reconstruction until 1990…

…until China and India and Taiwan and the Republic of Korea started performing.

But don’t mind that.  According to “nobel-prize-winning” economist Paul Krugman, none of that matters.  Just taxes.

Media academics:  Distrust, then verify. Then, usually, distrust some more.

UPDATE:  I almost missed this:  Krugman also noted that the US prospered during the relatively high-tax Clinton era, and had troubles during the relatively low-tax Bush administration.

Right.  And Clinton benefitted from cashing the “peace dividend” won during the low-tax, high-prosperity Reagan administration.  And while Bush presided over prosperity from 2003-2007, he suffered from the deflation of the tech bubble early in his administration (exacerbated by a terrorist attack some of you may remember, but which Krugman clearly does not) and, of course, the housing crash, neither of which had anything to do with Bush’s tax cuts.

The lefties were all atwitter yesterday over a poll in the MinnPost that purported to show that Minnesotans blame the Minnesota GOP for the shutdown:

By a whopping 2-1 margin, Minnesotans blame the Republicans who control both houses of the Legislature for the recent government shutdown more than they blame Gov. Mark Dayton, according to a poll taken this week for MinnPost.

 

Predictably, most Republicans blamed Dayton more (by 56 to 10 percent, with the rest saying both sides were to blame or holding no opinion). DFLers blamed the Republicans by an even more overwhelming majority (68 percent to just 2 percent of DFLers who blamed DFLer Dayton).

 

But the key swing group of self-identified independents was also much more likely to blame Republicans than to blame Dayton. Among independents, 46 percent “blamed” the Republicans, 18 percent blamed Dayton and 25 percent both.

Hm. That sounds bad!

It also sounded familiar – indeed, it sounded right in line with a prediction I made in this space mere weeks ago.  Go ahead and read it; Prediction 1 was a month late, and it appeared in the MinnPost rather than the Strib; the piece is written by Erik Black and Doug Grow, former Strib staffers, so the feeling of deja vu was so overwhelming…

…that when I first read this post, I practically predicted the bit that is emphasized in the quote below:

Based on other questions in the poll, it was difficult to say whether the fallout from the shutdown will give DFLers a significant advantage heading into the 2012 elections, as Republicans seek to retain their majorities. Projecting current attitudes onto an election 16 months in the future would be folly.

 

Also, this poll, conducted for MinnPost by Daves & Associates Research, was designed to take the pulse of the state in the aftermath of the shutdown, not to predict the next election. No likely voter screen was used and sample surely includes non-voters.

And there you have it.  The MinnPost gets its polling from “Daves and Associates”.  That’d be Rob Daves – the guy who ran the Minnesota Poll for 21 years – the poll whose election-eve polls on Gubernatorial, Senate and Presidential races *always* showed the GOP doing worse – usually much worse – than it ended up doing.

And if it’s a post on politics in Minnesota by Strib alums Black and Grow, who else just has to show up?

Humphrey Center Political Scientist Larry Jacobs said the results of the new poll were “basically bad news for the Republicans.”

 

“They have to think about this fact,” said Jacobs.”The principles that they ran on in 2010 — that they would advocate for cuts only and would refuse to go along with any tax increase — may still be the principles that appeal to the most enthusiastic base of support they have. But that position seems to be pretty unpopular not only with two-thirds of Minnesotans, but with half of their own party, all of whom prefer a mix of significant spending cuts and at least some tax increases.”

Yep, Dr. Jacobs, whose Hubert H. Humphrey Institute Poll is even worse, and whose methodology was openly and publicly savaged by Frank Newman of Gallup last year after the Humphrey Institute polls were not only grossly wrong (predicting a 12 point Dayton blowout in the gubernatorial race which ended up about a .4% race) but were shown to have systematically oversampled strongly DFL areas of the state.

Both Daves’ and Jacobs’ polls, as I showed last year, shared an interesting trait: if the final result of an election ended up being really close, like the ’08 Senate and ’10 Governor’s race (as opposed to blowouts, like the ’06 Senate race), the Minnesota and HHH Polls *both* shorted Republicans *even more*:

The reason? Well, it’s a known fact that voters are prone to the “Bandwagon Effect”; they do tend to go along with what polls tell them, positively or negatively.  My theory – while it’s conceivable that the Strib, Rob Daves, the Minnpost, the HHH Institute and Larry Jacobs are unaware of the “bandwagon effect”,  I’d be a lot more convinced if Daves didn’t have a 24 year record of shorting the GOP on controversial, loaded polls when the chips were down (and Jacobs’ polls even worse for seven years).

The poll canvassed less than 600 random adults – not registered, much less likely, voters – and, as usual, it heavily-sampled identified DFLers and unspecified “independents”.

It’s no secret – American trade unions have been hemorrhaging membership for decades.  Outside government, there really is very little future for unions; in the private sector, they are a cost that generally can not be sustained.

And so when the unions can find a hidden trove of tens of thousands of workers that can be unionized in one fell swoop, it’s like candy at Christmas.

The proposed merger between ATT and TMobile will release just such a stockpile of fresh potential dues-paying recruits.  ATT is unionized; TMobile is not, but being the absorbed entity, its employees – 20,000 of them – would be potential union recruits.

That’s a lot of money.

And the unions knew it.  And so the unions – almost all the big ones – aggressively lobbied the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve the merger.  The record is long and ornate; the unions really, really wanted this deal.

Richard Trumka, President, AFL-CIO., sounded off when the news of the proposed merger broke:  “Yesterday’s announcement of the acquisition of T-Mobile USA by AT&T hasimportant, positive implications for consumers in the U.S. and Germany, forthe U.S. telecom workforce and for our country’s economic future. The acquisition ensures AT&T a strong telecom workforce well-positioned tocompete globally, while offering tens of thousands of T-Mobile USA employees the opportunity to make their jobs good jobs by benefitting from the pro-worker policies of AT&T, one of the only unionized U.S. wireless companies”

The AFL-CIO’s house blog was similarly effusive: ““The announcement over the weekend that AT&T is buying T-Mobile USA could benefit both consumers and employees”

And Larry Cohen, President, Communications Workers of America. also spoke up: “For more than a decade, the United States has continued to drop behind nearly every other developed economy on broadband speed and build out. The Federal Communications Commission sounded the alarm more than a year ago with its broadband report, and President Obama in his State of th eUnion address called for increased efforts to bring the U.S. back to global parity as a key stimulus for economic development. Today’s announcement of the acquisition of T-Mobile USA by AT&T is  avictory for broadband proponents in both the U.S. and Germany. For the U.S.,it means that T-Mobile customers will get quick access to the AT&T network,soon to include LTE or data speeds of at least 10 megabits down stream.More important, as part of the deal, AT&T is committing to build out to nearly every part of the U.S. within six years”    Bear in mind that Cohen and the CWA are not cheerleaders for big telecoms; they’ve fought a long, losing battle with Sprint over their practice of contracting out labor, rather than hiring expensive union employees and taking on their pension burden.

Last month, Philip Qualy, legislative director of the Minnesota United Transportation Union’s mailed the FCC’s Julius Genachowski to support the merger; you can read the letter here.  Ditto Shar Knutson and Steve Hunter, from the MN AFL-CIO.  And Julie Schnell, President of the SEIU’s Minnesota State Council; while the SEIU is reliably in bed with the Democrats and the DFL, they know money when they see it.

And Edward Reynoso, political director of the Teamsters’ “Democratic Republican Independent Voter Education” (DRIVE) project, who estimated the long-term upside for the unions, and the private economy, at up to 96,000 jobs.  Not to mention Mona Meyer, president of the Minnesota Communications Workers of America, the union that’d be most affected by the merger.

There is no doubt that labor has close ties with Democrats in Congress.  A list of eighty members of the House of Representatives – including Betty McCollum, of Minnesota’s Fourth Congressional District, signed a letter to the FCC also supporting the merger.

So it’s a big deal for the unions.

And as such, it should be a big deal for Democrat – right?

———-

Last Wednesday, Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl recommended that the FCC spike the almost-$40-billion deal:

”I have concluded that this acquisition, if permitted to proceed, would likely cause substantial harm to competition and consumers, would be contrary to antitrust law and not in the public interest, and therefore should be blocked by your agencies,” Kohl said [last] Wednesday.

The unions seemed flabbergasted.  Candice Johnson, communications director for the Communications Workers of America, wrote to tell the FCC that no, they were not amused:

CWA Response to Kohl Letter 7 20

So what does this mean for Al Franken, for  you private sector union people out there,and for the country?

More tomorrow.

For starters, there’s only one thing in the media lower-rent than posting titillating headlines to draw search engine traffic.

And that is anything said, thought or done by Cenk Uyghur.

Uyghur who just got whacked at MSNBC after a not-especially-auspicious year or so – claimed that he was diced because he was just too tough on politicians, and that his Youtube channel is bigger than Jebus.

Which drew the attention of Breitbart, who is to bloaty-headed lefty wannabe thugs what garlic is to bloaty-headed wanna be thug vampires::

Nothing lower than exploiting public prurience for ratings and search engine traffic.

And in closing, may I just add “Scarlett Johannson Sex Tape”.

That is all.

Matt McNeill – a “host” of sorts at failed local liberal-talk station AM950, on Twitter Sunday morning:

Disturbing the righto’s/tea baggers who condemn the Norway shooting in 1 breath, then share the shooters frustration at liberals in the next

For some reason – no coffee yet? – I responded:

It’s official: @MattMcNeilAM950 thinks questioning American liberalsm = sympathy w/Breivik. This is the liberal media. #stribpol #narn

Which prompted McNeill’s to respond:

It’s official, #mitchpberg understands and sympathizes with the Norway shooter. To Mitchy, killing 100 people is just a 1st Amendment issue.

This is the “mind” of the Twin Cities leftymedia in action.

It’d be tempting to call for some sort of response – but it occurs to me that “working” on AM950 is punishment enough, in almost a Biblical sense, for that kind of bigotry.

I have a question for the media types in the audience.

But first, an homage to the best wife of the day, Yesterday edition:  Wendi Murdoch, who clocked dipsh*t Brit “comedian” Robert “Glittery Pony” Erickson “Jonnie Marbles” after his asinine shaving-cream pie attack on Rupert Murdoch:

Punch happens at about the :34 mark.

Kudos.

Now – let’s be clear on the fact that Britiish tabloid-style “journalism” is unacceptable. Of course, nobody’s come up with any evidence that any of Murdoch’s American properties have done any of the same kind of hacking – indeed, due to technical and procedural differences in the way British and US telcos handle cell phone security, it’d be more difficult, albeit not impossible, to hack into American cell phones.

But let’s talk ideology.

When someone points to, say, a very liberal person, family or group owning or publishing a newspaper – think the Sulzbergers at the NYTimes, or Joel Kramer at the Strib – newsies always say “No! No no no! There is a rigid dividing line between the newsroom and the business!”

But with Murdoch – let me try to keep this straight – the front office has intimate control over everything going on in the newsroom?

Just curious.

It was Friday, July 19, 1991.

A few weeks back, Joe Hanson had tipped me off that KSTP-AM was looking for a new “Executive Producer” – sort of a Program Director, but less power.

That night, I wrote a resume.  It took some stretching; the sum total of my experience was…

• A year and change at KEYJ/KQDJ back in high school.  A great learning experience, to be sure – I reported news, did sports, and wrote and cut commercials as well as spinning records – but it was a year and change of part-time work.
• A summer at KDAK in Carrington, ND as a full-time jock, play by play guy, and the station’s main commercial production guy.
• Another couple of years part-timing at KQDJ in college.
• My year and change at KSTP-AM, producing Don Vogel and Geoff Charles and doing my weekend graveyard show.
• The year and a half watching the needle bob at K-63 and answering phones and running the occasional board at KDWB.

I guess my talent as a writer didn’t start with my blog.  I came indoors from some yard work to a message on the answering machine (!) from Ginny Morris, asking for a call back about perhaps talking about the executive producer gig.

I called back, and got through to her secretary.  She wondered if I could come in to the station on Monday.

I sure could.

I hung up, and frantically scoured the house for my suit.  I reassembled it, and whispered a silent prayer than it hadn’t shrunk.

And then I started trying to figure out how to convince Ginny Morris I was management material.

———-

Does it seem to you that this opportunity dropped into my life suddenly, even abruptly?

It seemed that way to me too, at the time.  I heard about the opening one day in June.  I sent the resume the next day.  And while I kept my fingers crossed, that’s about all the thought I put into it.  I’d pretty much given up on anything happening.

Until it did.

What was Keith Olberman doing all those months?

Yesterday, I noted that Kenneth Gladney’s attackers had been acquitted, in a trial in which his SEIU attackers were represented by expensive, big-bucks defense attorneys while the District Attorney’s office in the Democrat-dominated county – mirabile dictu – had assigned a greenhorn prosecutor trying his first jury case.

For those who weren’t paying attention three years ago, here was the  video.

In his Outstage Politics blog, Eric Austin responded with a piece called “The BLEATING Continues“.  You see, I called the original piece “The Beating Continues”, and capitol letters hypes the irony.  You only get this from watching Jon Stewart, I guess.

Anyway – in the mind of the left, the fact that Gladney’s attackers were acquitted means there was never an attack, no way, no how.

You saw the video, right?

Just in case you missed it above…:

What this means is that there is a level of violence that Eric Austin thinks is perfectly acceptable.  I suspect this means that if someone pushes and kicks Austin and knocks him down and puts him in the hospital for a night and calls him derogatory terms – “teacher”, maybe – he’s just going to laugh about it.  (No, I’m not going to warn people not to do it, because smart people know I’m making a point and not calling for violence, and the dumb people who attack people over politics are, with painfully few exceptions, on the left, which is bad news for society, but good news for Austin).

It’s not just Austin, of course; I’ve heard other leftybloggers, even some that aren’t utterly depraved, call it a “pratfall”. That many of them were the ones screeching about “climates of violence” during the Tea Parties, or after the Giffords shooting, is upsetting but also a bit of a tu quoque ad hominem, an inconsistency rather than a refutation.

But it does seem like a double standard; if a Democrat feels threatened, even if the threat is the exact sort of thing elected officials of both parties get all the time, the Republic is in danger; if union goons knock a guy down and put him in the hospital in a hail of racial epithets, it’s a “pratfall”.

No, no – of course the left doesn’t find violence acceptable.  Good heavens, no, and not racism either. Don’t you dare question their demonstrable commitment to non-violence!

Just ask Mr. Gladney.

The United Way of the Twin Cities advertises itself as an organization that…

…creates a better life for us all by focusing on three key areas: Basic Needs, Education and Health.

We attack poverty on multiple, interconnected fronts to achieve lasting change. We LIVE UNITED by collaborating with partner agencies, corporations, community leaders and people like you.

United Way serves people living in or near poverty in nine counties: Anoka, Carver, Chisago, Dakota, Hennepin, Isanti, Ramsey, Scott and western Washington. Making a gift to United Way is the most effective way to help the whole community.

Many of us give – generously, in many cases – to the United Way through their various institutional drives at Twin Cities businesses.

So where does that money go?

To the MinnPost?    The center-left-leaning media website?

Community Voices section is made possible by the generous sponsorship support of the Greater Twin Cities United Way.

“Attacking poverty” via sponsoring the MinnPost is certainly a new definition of an ” interconnected front”.  Although the logic of the connection escapes me.

Do United Way contributors know they’re supporting agenda-based media?

It’s worth asking.

I sent a message to the United Way.  I’ll let you know what I hear back. If anything.

The Minnesota “Independent” feels the need to remind its audience that Bachman’s Floral and Koch Refineries are not related to the political figures with similar names.

Probably a good idea.

The New York Times opts to toss facts under the bus in yesterday’s editorial about the Minnesota Shutdown:

How far will Republican lawmakers go to protect millionaires? Those who think a default on the federal government’s credit seems implausible should take a sobering look at the “closed” signs dotting Minnesota. The Republican Party there readily shut down the state’s government on Friday by refusing to raise taxes on the 7,700 Minnesotans who make more than $1 million a year.

Well, no.

The GOP refused to raise taxes.  Period.  Dayton chose to make it about “millionaires”, and before that “the rich”.  Had Dayton chosen to raise, say, the gas tax (like the DFL majority in 2009 did), a terribly regressive tax that squats all over working-class prosperity, the GOP would have opposed that, as well.

For the Times to turn the GOP’s opposition to a tax into “protecting millionaires” is a craven bit of rhetorical dishonesty.

Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, campaigned for office last year promising to raise taxes on high earners, so it was no surprise when he proposed a tax increase on families making more than $150,000 a year to help close a $5 billion budget gap. In negotiations with the Republican majority in the Legislature, he compromised and reduced the increase to those making $1 million or more, but Republicans are refusing to consider any income tax increase.

Note the rhetoric: Dayton keeping a campaign promise?  Good.  The GOP? Can’t be good, can it?

Like Republicans in Washington, they have the delusion that they can balance the budget entirely from cuts.

The Times’ “editorial” was apparently written by the MNDFL’s chair, Ken Martin.  The GOP budget is the biggest spending increase in Minnesota history.

The governor proposed more than $2 billion in cuts but refused to slash billions more from education, health care and public safety programs.

All of which the GOP compromised on, meeting Dayton much more than halfway.

The Legislature also wanted new abortion restrictions and a voter ID law that Mr. Dayton had already vetoed. When he said no, lawmakers allowed the fiscal year to end without a budget, and state government officially shut on July 1.

The Times apparently believes the GOP should “negotiate” like a Saturn dealer; start with their “final offer” and work backward from there.

Also unmentioned by “the Times” editorial writer: Dayton walked out of the negotiations every time.  The GOP Legislature was waiting in the Capitol, ready to negotiate and/or pass a “lights on” bill, to keep govermment running

More than 40 state agencies have closed, including the state parks over the July Fourth holiday. Courts and public safety agencies are operating, but essential services for the poor, like food pantries and child care subsidies, have evaporated. Many parents say they may have to quit their jobs if state-subsidized child care does not resume quickly. The shutdown will cost the state money, since many of the 22,000 laid-off workers will receive unemployment benefits and health insurance, while the treasury is unable to collect on tax audits, lottery tickets and park fees.

Unmentioned by the Times (or any of the Twin Cities media); the evidence is overwhelming that Governor Dayton rigged the shutdown to cause as much pain as possible, specifically to drive those dependent on state employment or services to try to push moderate Republicans into wobbling.

As painful as the closure may become, the governor is right not to yield to the extremist ideology the Republicans are pursuing in St. Paul, Washington and across the country.

“Extremist ideology”.

The GOP ran very openly on a platform of holding the line on taxes and spending.  Perhaps you remember the Tea Party – it was in all the papers, including the Times.

Extremist?  Governor Dayton won with 43% of the vote; the GOP majorities had, by definition, over 50% of the state’s voters pick them (since the third-party challenges were virtually nonexistant in legislative races in 2010).  Can a policy chosen by over half the voters be “extemist?”

Someday, when “Drinking Liberally” becomes more of a food thing and less of a booze gig, I think I’ve got their venue:

.

Broadway at Bass Lake in Crystal.

Just saying.

Any bets on what they’ll talk about at this one?

Former Vice President Walter Mondale and former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson have called a news conference to discuss the state government’s shutdown.

Mondale is a Democrat who represented Minnesota as a U.S. senator in the 1960s and `70s. Carlson is a Republican who served as governor in the 1990s.

No, I don’t think there’s any action on that bet.

Whenever the regional establishment (read: left-leaning) media wants to try to delegitimize the MNGOP in the eyes the vast majority of people who don’t pay much attention to politics, they wheel out Arne Carlson.  Carlson, who governed Minnesota from 1990 to 1998, was a Republican, and that’s usually where the media accounts stop, omitting that he governed like a moderate Democrat; indeed, James Lileks used to joke that while he was in DC, he described the Carlson/Perpich race (1990) as “the pro-abortion, pro-gun-control candidate versus the Democrat”.

The MinnPost  continues the media’s curious habit of genuflecting to Carlson.

Gov. Arne Carlson had one of those “hey-wait-just-a-minute” moments Thursday while reading a MinnPost article.

On the surface, the article, about government reform, seemed complimentary of Carlson, who was governor from 1991 to 1998.

Rep. Keith Downey, a leader of the reform movement in the Republican-controlled Legislature, was talking about how way back in the Carlson era a report had been issued calling for structural reforms to help government move from budget to budget more smoothly.

“We’ve been putting off reforms for 15 years,” Downey said. “The time to act is now.”

That’s the line that upset Carlson.

“Who’s this Downey fellow?” he asked me.

“Me”, in this case, is Doug Grow, who along with Lori Sturdevant has been building the gauzy, soft-focus myths about the glory days of DFL/”GOP” cooperation.

And if Carlson doesn’t know Keith Downey, then who the hell cares what he thinks?

A representative from Edina starting his second term, the governor was told.

“If he’s starting his second term, he’s probably part of the problem,” Carlson said.

Can you imagine if Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann or Amy Koch had said something that so fluently mixed arrogance and ignorance?

Carlson contends that his administration didn’t just point out the long-term structural problems in the 1995 report that Downey was referring to. Rather, it made the “reforms” necessary to correct the problems.

Let’s talk about the truth about Carlson’s administration.

He had revenue surpluses most years during his administration.

You know – surpluses.  Years where revenues exceeded expenditures.  Given that Minnesota’s state revenues are so closely tied to economic performance, through income and sales taxes, a surplus is generally an indicator of a good year.

And most of the years in the nineties were good years.  Indeed, from 1990 to 1998 it was ar pretty cha-cha time in Minnesota; after a brief downtown early in the decade as the ’92 recession worked out and the local economy readjusted to plummeting post-Cold-War defense spending, the economy pretty much boomed the whole last 2/3 of Carlson’s reign.

And Carlson took those temporary surpluses into permanent entitlement spending. The budget more than doubled under Carlson’s regime – spending that was paid for by temporary windfalls during good times.

In other words, Arne Carlson is the problem we currently face in this state; he was the godfather of the autopilot spending increases that feed the all-consuming, ever-escalating  hunger for tax revenue that currently hobble our state’s budget process.

Arne Carlson – shut up and enjoy your retirement.  You are not just irrelevant and in the way; you are not just a Potemkin Republican that estabishment backslappers like Lori Sturdevant and Doug Grow trot out to beat over the MNGOP’s head.

You are the problem.

Graeme Zielinski is a former “journalist” who, at least, finally cut the crap and went to work for the Wisconsin Democrat Party.  And here was his Tweet from last Friday:

Go for it, Graeme.

I’m one of the few Twin Cities conservative bloggers who bothers, occasionally, to try to stomach reading Twin Cities leftyblogs.

The battle of the blogs has been a rollercoaster for the past decade.  From 2002 through 2005, it was no context; conservative blogs owned the field.  After 2004, liberals with deep pockets – most famously but not only George Soros –  began pumping huge money into building an instant alt-media infrastructure (including, locally, the deliciously-ironically-named Minnesota Independent) designed mainly to pass chanting points down a virtual “chain of command” from the Soros-funded “Media Matters For America”, either explicitly or via the monkey-see, monkey-do mob social dynamic of the left.

But as Erik Telford notes, it’s just not working:

I’d told you three years ago that conservatives would be leading the left in the realm of online politics, I would have been laughed out of the room. Now we’re dominating so thoroughly that the left is running scared — literally.

One of the key drivers of the left’s online dominance used to be the Netroots Nation Convention, an annual gathering of several thousand left-wing bloggers. Started in 2006, the convention provides attendees with networking opportunities and trains them to more effectively organize and mobilize “progressives” through the Internet.

Telford is, of course, one of the organizers of “Right Online”, which since 2008 has been accompanying Netroots around the country.  And this year, the contrast couldn’t have been more stark.  More in a bit.

This year, The New York Times declared the conservative side victorious, saying: “judging by the fervor for one’s favorites and animosity toward the opposition, the passion of bloggers seemed to have swung toward conservatives.” The Washington Post noted “the only chants of ‘Yes We Can’ seemed to be at RightOnline.”

Let’s go back to that “animosity” bit for a moment.  Conservatives are used to having to react civilly to dissent; most (by no means all, but a crushing majority) of conservatives are fine with, or at least accept, the fact that we share a society with people with differing opinions.

But here’s your leftymedia in action, at Netroots:

VIDEO

Clearly, the tables have turned in a dramatic way…In fact, the president has found himself embattled in the new media sphere — with attacks from both his left and his right. Call it reverse triangulation.

Just a few weeks ago, the White House acknowledged its shift from an offensive to a defensive posture with the addition of Jesse Lee — who, as the “Director of Progressive Media & Online Response,” is charged with the unenviable task of defending the president from critical bloggers and online activists from both sides of the ideological spectrum.

At the same time, Tea Party groups are using technology to organize and mobilize in unprecedented ways. Republican members of Congress are better than their Democratic counterparts at using Facebook and Twitter to inform and motivate their constituents.

The roller coaster can certainly turn again; Soros has a lot of money.  Perhaps he’ll invent a computer program that can generate content more efficiently than this current army of flacks.

But for now?  All good.

…but this was pretty good.

Good enough that the NARN’s going to have to find a way to raise the ante…

When you get any group of insular, echo-chamber-dwelling, chanting-points-motivated people who communicate with each other and almost nobody else, it’s a virtually inevitable trait of human nature that they will develop a worldview that centers on…well, them.   It doesn’t matter if it’s Packers fans, Manhattanites, Kansas sorghum farmers, Ivy Leaguers, bowlers, avant-guard music fans, square dancers…

But our Twin Cities’ “progressive” “alternative”  media are especially funny.

Eric “Big E” Pusey at Minnesota “Progressive” Project wrote about the Strib’s coverage of last weekend’s “Netroots Nation”.  Or, he complains, lack of coverage:

I was at Netroots Nation so I wasn’t paying attention to my newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Apparently, the Strib didn’t even send a reporter to Netroots. This time someone else noticed that their coverage of politics is not very thorough:

Pusey links to a piece at Crooks and Liars, a rhetorical dutch oven echoblog.  Astute observers of the regional media scene will get a chuckle:

Now, I expect that local readers will tell me that the Minneapolis paper is a long-established right-wing Republican rag, and gauging from their Sunday editorial-page lineup, that certainly is the impression I came away with.

[Facepalm – Ed.]

And no doubt it is despised by the PowerLines of the world for not being right-wing enough, which then becomes their excuse — “See? Both sides hate us! Therefore, we must be exactly right in the middle!”

This is what passes for logic on their side.

So to be honest, I wasn’t really surprised to see that the Star-Tribune, as I perused it over my coffee and hashbrowns this morning, had actually completely ignored the presence of Netroots Nation in their city and carried not a single word about events there. And indeed, if you check their archives, they couldn’t even be bothered to send a single reporter over to the convention center this week to write about the many luminaries there. Instead, their coverage consisted entirely pieces filed by Associated Press reporters. Oh, wait — there was one piece by a columnist that talked about Netroots and its deeper meaning without any indication he’d ever set foot in the convention.

That’s just embarrassing.

Yes, but not in the way that the writer intended.

Pusey picks up the narrative:

But it’s even worse than that. They spent the weekend lavishing column inches upon the much smaller, conservative Right Online convention which shadows Netroots wherever it goes:

And why might that be?

Netroots Nation – the annual gathering of the lefty echo chamber in some hapless city – was a massive clot of angry leftybloggers and media types, angrily declaiming their anger.

It was nothing but an anger convention.  There was nothing of any news interest there, beyond the lefty “alt”-media’s apparent need to feel noticed.

In news terms, it’s not even dog bites dog.  It’s dog licks dog.

And RightOnline – a smaller event, as Pusey correctly notes – normally isn’t even that much.

Except for the three serious presidential candidates who spoke.

And the omnipresence of Andrew Breitbart, who broke not only the biggest political story of the past few months – Weinergate – and endured weeks of agenda-based hazing from the establishment media and lefty “alternative” crowd (before being proven 100% correct in every way), and James O’Keefe, who has also launched some newsworthy bombshells [and endured months of agenda-driven hazing from the establishment and lefty “alt” medias (before being proven 100% correct in every way ] was a bit newsworthy too.

Now, it’s not entirely true that there was no news at Netroots.  Breitbart’s hysterically hysterical reception by the Sorosphere’s dingos when he sauntered into the Convention, and the frothing anger at Obama provided the only real “news” at Netroots.

But Breitbart’s promenade was unplanned (or at least the dead-tree media weren’t cc’ed on it), and the anger at Obama – well, it undercuts Pusey’s and “Crooks’…” spin, doesn’t it?  If the Strib were a GOP-leaning rag, they’d be happy to show Obama eroding among the True Believers, woudn’t they?

I thought about ending the post there – but the C’nL “writer” lurched from solipsism into delusion next:

But then I nearly blorted my coffee out onto the rag when I came across Bob Von Sternberg’s loving coverage of the Republican luminaries at the Right Online conference, complete with big pictures of Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty, which meant that they not only sent a reporter, there was a Star-Trib photographer there as well. (Von Sternberg wrote a second piece, for online readers, about Right Online as well.

Bob Von Sternberg? This Bob Von Sternberg?  “Loving” conservatives?

In the special little world of the lefty “alt” media, apparently covering the news, to say nothing of the odd fitful attempt at balance, is bias.