David Harsanyi at Human Events has ht a retrospective on the “highlights” of the Obama Personality Cult. 

Of course, it’s his socialist and anti-market philosophy that I really dislike about the guy.  But the personality cult he and his handlers built around himself always seemed vaguely…

…North Korean?

That’s one word for it.

I’ll say this – even if I were still a liberal, this would have made me extremely uncomfortable.  And yes, that is a bipartisan thing;  a lot of Ron Paul supporters are a little less messianic, but not much less personality-focused.

Read Harsanyi’s whole piece.

John Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives is demanding the U of M release the video of Governor Dayton’s speech to the Humphrey Institute, which we discussed earlier this week.

Here’s Gilmore’s email to the U of M, which explains it better than I could:

Email to U of M General Counsel

If, as Gilmore notes, the U really did claim it was “too expensive” to videotape the Governor, and that local TV stations taped the event but are sitting on it (why?) – well, what’s the U protecting?

Still waiting for White House reporters to ask about Kathleen Sebelius’ apparently-illegal mixing of campaigning and work.

Reporters covering the White House don’t seem to have many questions about Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who was last week found in violation of federal law against engaging in political activity while on the job.

That would apparently  be racist.

Christian Schneider at The Corner, in re the noxious opinion by ultraliberal Wisconsin judge Juan Colas that gang-rapes Constitutional logic to try to overturn the will of Wisconsin’s voters and their duly-elected legislative and judicial branches:

It’s not hard to see why Colas likely wanted his opinion buried. It is a legal document so acrid, if it were read aloud at a funeral, the corpse would emerge from the casket and try to strangle the person reading it.

Read the whole thing.

This morning, the Legislative Subcommittee on Employee Relations rejected the latest state employee contract.

The contract would

• give state employee san average 9% pay raise
• keep the percentage of health care premiums paid by state employees at exactly zero. That’s compared to over 20% in the private sector, and 9% even among government employees in surrounding states.
• The average state employee already earns 23% more than the average private sector Minnesotan.
• If passed, it’ll add $174 million to the amount to be absorbed into the various agency budgets – or taken away from the amount to be paid back to the schools from the budgetary “School Shift”.

That’s what the Dayton Administration is fighting for; to steal from the state’s school children to pay the Minnesota Association of State Employees.

To: Insurance Agents
From: Mitch Berg
Re: New Business

I’ve had my car insurance with Geico for probably eight or nine years now.

And if you’re an agent who can underbid them, I’m very open to switching right about now.

That is all.

I’ve been a huge Dinesh D’Souza fan since I read his Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary President over a decade ago; it may have been the best Reagan bio ever.

And I got a chance to see 2016 over the weekend.  It didn’t disappoint:

The movie’s thesis is…

(Spoiler Alert: I’m going to talk spoilers below the jump, although to be fair I think much of what’s in the movie has been in the public domain; this is just the first high-profile place I’ve seen it all collected into one coherent thesis)

(more…)

Tens of millions of dollars burned up.  A state’s business disrupted (well, some) for the better part of a year and a half.  Endless rounds of recall elections, with much ballyhoo and smack-talk, passed…

…all to give Wisconsin Democrats a one vote majority in the State Senate that they can never use, because the Senate doesn’t meet until after the next round of elections.

Oh, never mind.  The Wisconsin Senate is…:

…16-16-1 now, thanks to Senator Jim Cullen bailing out of the Democratic party.

Cullen was one of the fleebaggers last year; one of the seventeen sore losers that tried to hijack democracy and nullify the election just passed by hiding out in Illinois to dodge voting on one of Governor Walker’s bills.

Let’s take a moment to remember that:

It may have been the Wisconsin Senate Dems’ swan song for now:

After months of screaming, millions blown on recalls up and down the state, and boasting and yelling by every fist-icon-sporting lefty out there, the Democratic victory that was recalling Walker barely flipping the senate (when it isn’t in session again until after the November elections which are likely to restore at least two seats to the Republicans) hit an iceberg today.

I’d like to say Cullen’s flip was due to pure, unvarnished principle – but like so much in politics, it’d seem there’s a tetch of ego involved:

When the party regained control, Cullen, who had fled with the rest of the Democrats but was willing to work with Walker on reforms after returning to the state, was denied chairman status on any committee. He felt insulted, has walked, and the three-week-long Democratic majority is over.

There are times a house in Hudson looks soooooooo good.

This piece is sort of a natural follow-on to yesterday’s post – all the “Deep Thoiughts” about man’s relationship to government, and the different philosophies liberals and conservatives bring to the table on the subject.

But first, a brief digression.

I don’t normally rebroadcast other peoples’ ads – but this one was just too good not to pick up and run with, just a little bit.

It’s a riff on President Obama’s “You didn’t do it” scold to entrepreneurs and, by extension, really anyone outside government:

Nope, nobody paid me to rujn it. Although they sure could.

Of course, this sentiment is pandemic on the left.  Yesterday Jim Schowalter, Mark Dayton’s budget director, was at a meeting in Thief River Falls with, among other people, the CEO of Digi-Key.  You may not have heard of it – it’s a privately-owned billion-dollar company based out of Thief River Falls that is one of the biggest success stories and major employers in northwestern Minnesota.  The company started in the CEO’s apartment forty-odd years ago – guy didn’t even have a garage at the time – and grew into a billion-dollar operation employing thousands (I have family in the area, so I hear things).

And, according to a report from the scene, Schowalter told the CEO that  without government, he could never have done it

The theory among lefties is that without all the “infraastructure” government “provides”, entrepreneurs would be huddled in caves, helpless, banging rocks together to try to get fire.  It’s only through the nurturing hand of government that any human activity is possible.

But once government – at some level – has dealt with banditry, brigandry, barratry, piracy and piracy, really, you’re into the mundanities of laws, roads and regulations.   And when those are the subjects…:

• What?  Government wants a cookie for doing what it was set up to do, and for which generations of people before the entrepreneur paid taxes – sometimes grossly overpaid in taxes – to get?
• By the way, where do people suggest the money to build that “infrastructure” came from?  Brought down from heaven on the backs of unicorns?  No – people, entrepreneurs and company guys and executives and high school kids working at Tastee Freez and trust fund billionaires alike – had it taken out of their paychecks.

So yeah, government – good job and all, “providing” things that I and millions like me paid you to do.  Isn’t that like me going to my boss and saying “thank me for the design I handed off, on top of paying me to do it?”

By the way – try as I may, I can not find a single reference to this episode anywhere in the mainstream media.

In 2004, lefty commentator Thomas Frank published a book “What’s The Matter With Kansas” – which analyzed the growing conservative majority in America’s heartland…

…in the most patronizing, contemptuous way I’d heard until the mainstream media’s response to the Tea Party five years later.  Frank hammered on the idea that conservatives in the heartland were “voting against their interests” by voting Conservative.

The ‘Interests”, of course, were limited to “having government take care of you, provided you send it enough taxes” (my phrase, not Frank’s)..  “Kansas” – Frank’s home state on the one hand, and his and every lefty pundit’s short-hand for “all those dumb rubes I left behind when I went to an Ivy League school” on the other – has “interests” that begin with getting farm subsidies and end with single-payer health care.

Frank’s thesis, in other words?  States, and citizens, are dependents.  Like pets.  Like a herd of cattle for which a noble farmer is responsible; it’s in the cattle’s interest to make the farmer’s life easy.  Or maybe like children – little people who aren’t quite fully formed, who depend on the older, wiser, parents to keep them on the straight and narrow until a majority that never comes.

And it highlit one of the big disputes between “progressives” and conservatives:  what is the role of a person, a citizen?  To a liberal, it’s “vote when told to vote, pay your taxes when told to pay taxes, and don’t get in the way”.  To a conservative, it’s to be one of the free association of equals that consents to having a government, and – make no mistake – controls that government.

This argument came to the nation, and Minnesota, this past few months.

Last spring, Representative Mary Franson from the Alexandria area took nationwide heat for a comment which some of the local Sorosphere’s ‘dimmer bulbs yanked out of context (and a few of the less less-bright ones correctly called out as a dumb hit) which was, in its entirety, correct; long-term dependence on welfare does, in fact, treat people like animals.  Like pets, at best; little critters for whose well-being the master – the owner, or government, depending on which end of the metaphor you’re talking about – is responsible.

And about the same time the Sorosphere was denouncing Franson with florid indignation, the Obama Administration came out and proved that Franson was exactly right – that the government did in fact see citizens as monochromatic consumers, as ivestock, dependent on their owner/master/government for their ongoing wellbeing, with the fabulously inept and gloriously spoof-worthy and, beyond that, downright Orwellian “Julia” campaign.

David Clemens – in a piece called “Elvis Vs. Julia”, which is actually a defense of humanities education, the discipline of studying the why of humanity, which is in its entirely worth a read for its own sake – cuts to the reason “progressives” attitudes about the government / citizen relationship, as revleated by “Julia” are not just toxic, but dehumanizing:

This is why selling the Julia concept frightens me. She doesn’t yearn to be free, like a human; she yearns to be kept. Julia embraces the piano key life that the president offers, and like W. H. Auden’s Unknown Citizen, she will act and behave predictably, she will choose and think correctly.

But in literature (and life) we recoil from those who trade freedom for safety nets and soft landings. The great anti-utopian novelists warned us over and over what happens when we make that bargain: George Orwell’s Winston Smith, Aldous Huxley’s John Savage, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s D-503 would rather suffer or die than join the Party, take the soma, or blend into the One State.

So what I find most chilling about the Julia ad concept is its creators’ cynical view of Americans, particularly women. And what if her creators are right? As Michael Walsh writes, “It’s tough to accept that perhaps a majority of our fellow Americans would cheerfully trade liberty for a false sense of security.” That is, how many workforce-ready but literature-free voters see The Life of Julia and find her flat, subsidized, feckless life desirable? With the liberal arts in decline, how many “miss the connection?” One must have been exposed to Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin in order to see their relationship to Julia and hear the warning.

Clearly, much of the left does – or, worse, “gets it”, but feels the trade is worthwhile, or worst of all, sees themselves as the “shepherds” needed to manage all of us sheep, or Julias, or whatever line of metaphor you want to run with.

A perennial question that divides the political left and right is this: what sort of beings are we? Do we have an immutable, perhaps transcendent, nature that will surrender everything utopia for autonomy, agency, and freedom (Elvis) [who, it might be said, rebelled against the very security that his phenomenally-successful career ]? Or is there no inherent nature, and humans are just socially constructed, plastic, seeking nothing but safety and a reliable sense of well-being (Julia)? Political Science, Psychology, and Anthropology cannot answer that question, and the sciences can only measure what is measurable. The liberal arts and humanities, however, insist that we are like Elvis, and that those who trade liberty for comfort always live to regret it.

Well, some humanities observe this.  Others are waiting on their next NEH grant.

But the real question is – which is a better reflection of what humans are, and can be?  Conservatism, with its immutable standards and great consequences and sometimes greater hurdles?  Or a life bellied up to the government trough, like the one Obama and Mark Dayton clearly see for us?

What’s the matter with Kansas – and with Kansans like us?

We’re human, and we want to stay that way.

After fighting against a full-court regulatory press by the City of Saint Paul for months and months, yet another entrepreneur – from that hive of business-friendliness, MInne-freaking-apolis – has opted to cut his losses.

Joe Doakes writes:

The City fought them long enough, they gave up and went away. Thank Thune we kept that Bad business off Grand Avenue. Now there’s room for a Good business, something that sells hand-dipped candles, maybe. Or maybe mystic crystals and wind chimes. To pedestrians or bicyclists.

Joe has too much faith.  In most parts of St. Paul, it’d be some kind of city-funded non-profit.  But on Grand Avenue, it’ll be a chain.  No, not a plebeian chain like Chipotle; not a local chain like Pineda.  No, it’ll be some national, fashionably-PC, high-end place like Patagonia, with the self-righteous cachet to overcome most of the objections and the money to beat the rest.

That’s what this City needs more of, good businesses like that.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Hey, we can take our train to Minneapolis for cupcakes!

In a couple of years.

…it’s the liberals who are the smart, open-minded, non-depraved ones:

Jane Pitt, mother of actor Brad Pitt, has been scared into silence by the hate-filled, vulgar and even violent reaction to her public assertion that Barack Obama is “a liberal who supports the killing of unborn babies and same-sex marriage.”

Pitt has even been the subject of death threats following her letter to the editor of Missouri’s Springfield News-Leader in which she asserted failure to vote for Republican presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney constituted a vote for Obama.

Because free speech is only for liberals in Hollywood.

Big question:  will smarmy liberal Pitt defend his mother?

Mitt Romney, after weighing risks (including taxes) and returns, opting to put money in a Swiss bank account: The biggest crisis they can gin up to draw attentio away from the Obama depression for now ever. and a sign of disloyalty and lack of faith in his nation!

Mark Dayton, after weighing the risks (including taxes) and returns, opting to stash money in a “Dynasty” trust in low-tax South Dakota: “Hey, a guy’s got a right to watch out for his nest egg!”

Back during the glory days of Fairness-Doctrine trial-balloonery from Obama and the Democrats, the President’s apologists liked to claim that “the President wasn’t going to push the doctrine”.

To which those of us who knew the issue replied “He, President Obama himself, does not need to do it himself.  He’s got his choice of FCC administrators or Congress to do it for him”.

Anyway, in recent weeks the subject’s turned to gun control.  Some lefties have claimed that “Fast and Furious” was not an attempt to used the ful weight and power of the federal government to slander the law-abiding gun owner; it’s risible, but it’s a point to debate.

But that usually gets followed up with a “President Obama hasn’t done anything to attack the Second Amendment, and he’s not going to”.

Which is wrong on one count – he was on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which actively funds anti-Second-Amendment groups – and he really doesn’t have to do it himself.  Congress may be smarter (or more afraid of the NRA) than that, of course…

…but the UN is not.

I must confess, I’ve more or less gotten over trying to each leftybloggers how logic works, except in the odd individual case (and I have to admit that’s more a matter of rhetorical endzone-ball-spiking, bordering on intellectual sadomasochism, than actual interest in education).

I say that partly because today’s subject isn’t a blogger (although he certainly packs the intellectual gear to  be a Twin Cities leftyblogger), and partly because, well, I’m at that stage of my life when I question a lot of my own motivations, and sometimes find my answers sorely wanting.

Not as wanting as I find my opponents, naturally.

Like most conservatives, I’ve long since given up reading the Star/Tribune for anything other than material to mock.

And as that last that last weekend’s “Counterpoint” – “Liberals are Right, Conservatives are Wrong“, from retired math teacher David Perlman qualifies.

And today’s liberal rhetorical stunt?  The incredibly-difficult “Double Circular Question-Beg” from a Rolling Start!

The rolling start?  A smarmy dollop of that other crutch of the liberal “thinker”, smug entitlement:

In “Based on recent rulings, it’s the court’s liberal wing that’s rigid” (June 29), D.J. Tice observed that the liberal members of the U.S. Supreme Court constitute a more lockstep group than the conservatives do.

I think he’s right — but Tice presented this as a criticism of the liberals.

I did say “smug entitlement”:

Here’s the arrogant part: Liberalism is correct and conservatism is wrong.

Perlman follows with some puffery that I’m sure he intends to be self-justifying – math and science are objective, doncha know! – before making with the Big Truths:

The law, unlike mathematics or science, attempts to be based on logic, but it is strongly influenced by interpretation. What, for example, is a “reasonable man”? Reasonable men can disagree.

But the “Reasonable Person” in the sense of the legal theory doesn’t actually get into arguments; it’s a standard, not an anthropological model.

But I digress – but to be fair, Perlman keeps digressing, too.

The purpose of the legal minds who sit on the Supreme Court is not so much to apply logic as it is to interpret the Constitution.

And there, I’ll let my lawyer friends have at it.

And now we come to rigid blocs and the miracle that is the Supreme Court. I can well imagine the behind-the-scenes conversations that go on among the nine justices. I envision congeniality and also heated debate, and I have come to believe that the liberals tend to sway the conservatives far more than the other way around.

And Mr. Perlman seems to have “come to believe” this in much the same way that I “came to believe” in Santa Claus when I was six; I really, really wanted to.

I am, of course, stating Mr. Perlman’s conclusion for him.  But as we read onward – and we will, damn the luck – Perlman returns the favor with noxious interest.

I’ll add emphasis here and there throughout the rest of the piece:

Justice David Souter comes to mind right away. Even Justice Sandra Day O’Connor moved to the left in the end. I think the reason is that they are all intelligent people, and intelligent people tend toward liberalism.

It’s a conceit that drives many liberals – and virtually all of them, near as I can tell, who get past high school.

Conservatives decry the liberal bias in the universities. It is true that most college professors are liberals, but I don’t think it has anything to do with bias. It is because college professors are intelligent people, and intelligent people tend to be liberal.

College is where smart people are, so liberals at college must be smart!

I have had many conversations with colleagues about why so many people vote against their own best interests, and the only conclusion that is ever reached is that those people are swayed by emotional arguments, not by intelligent thought.

Liberals are at college; smart people are at college; smart people know what’s in their best interests, and liberals are smart people, so voting liberal is in everyone’s best interest (whatever that is!)!

It’s simple!

But it’s in the next bit that Perlman shows his true mastery of the form; he not only sticks the “Double Circular Question-Beg”, he does it with style!

So, in the end, despite Citizens United, and despite Republicans’ putting extreme conservatives on the Supreme Court, the constitution of the court itself (pun intended) has a tendency to move to the left.

College is where smart people are.  Liberals are at college, so they must be smart.  Judges when to lots of college, so they are by definition smart, ergo liberal!

Why don’t all you morons understand this?  It’s as logical as any circle!

This piece is proof that:

• Minnesota Liberals never really learn how to question, much less debate, conservatism:  Growing up in a school system that trains youth to be “progressives”, coming of age in a university system that (sorry, Mr. Perlman) hangs out a “no conservatives need apply” sign, then spend decades in a system – public ed, civil service, any public employee’s union – that would never dream of second-guessing any of those preconceptions (but does have a very strict definition of “voters’ best interests”, yessirreebob) with a big helping of Minnesota-bred “we’re all strong, good looking and above average” larded on top, let’s be honest; it’d be a miracle if Mr. Perlman could be anything but smug, entitled, and not nearly as bright as he thinks.  His argument, full of circular question-begging (formidable as that is) would have embarassed a modestly bright ninth-grader when I was in school.
• The Strib is trying hard to buck up liberals’ self-esteem in what could shape up to be an awful election year for them, apparently showing them that anyone can be a Big Thinker  That, or they are almost out of commentary writers.
• American public education is screwed blue, presuming Mr. Perlman really was a teacher.

Mr. Perlman:  hang out at college some more.   You may not get any smarter, but you won’t be inflicting what passes for your “logic” on people via the Strib, anyway.

Who do Minnesota Liberals hate?

Feel free to particpate in this vital sociological research through Monday night at 11:59PM!  Just leave your list of the top ten or so in the comment section (or email it to “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”), in order from most to least hated.

Results will start coming out on Tuesday.

Nominees so far are below the jump.

(more…)

They said that if we voted for John McCain, we’d get secretive, imperial government that’d rule by decree and conceal its activities from the peasants.

And they were right! DEA Freedom of Information Act rejections have doubled since 2008:

Despite President Obama’s 2009 executive order requiring agencies to err on the side of disclosure when processing Freedom of Information Act requests, the Drug Enforcement Agency exempted a record number of FOIA requests in 2011 in nearly every category.

But it didn’t set records just in 2011: According to a comparison of publicly available data from FOIA.gov, the DEA rejected more FOIA requests in 2009, 2010, and 2011 than it did during the last year of George W. Bush’s administration.

It gets complicated.  I urge you to read the whole thing.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I always liked this quote from Stranger in a Strange Land:

“ . . . a politico-judicial decision unparalleled in jug-headedness since Doheny was acquitted of offering the bribe Secretary Fall was convicted of accepting.”

Well, unparalleled until [last Thursday].

United States Supreme Court upheld Obamacare requirement that everybody buy health insurance or pay a penalty on the grounds that although the law says it’s a penalty, it’s really a tax, and therefore Constitutional. But it’s not an actual tax because if it were, it would be unconstitutional. So it’s a tax, but not a tax.

Chief Justice Joseph Heller, writing in the majority…

And Minnesota Supreme Court upheld DWI convictions based on the Intoxilyzer breath test machine because the State showed that more likely than not the machine was accurate. You’re guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of .08 Or More because the .08 shown on the machine probably is correct.

And society’s downward spiral continues.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

“Because government says so and wants to” is becoming a binding precedent.

Dave Mindeman is one of the small group of Twin Cities leftybloggers who doesn’t deserve to be under police surveillance.

That’s actually pretty solid compliment, given the nature of Twin Cities leftybloggers.

But he obeys a bunch of the usual leftyblogger strictures – most notable among them the idea that conservatives, as they relate us, never, ever ask questions, broach issues, object to things, or any of the other ways civilized grown-ups communicate.

No.  According to this post, we deal in cliches, whining and too-convenient caricature:

Oh, yes.  And they’re mind-readers, too:

Like clockwork, the right wing bloggers get on their high horse and rip into large donations going to liberal PACs. Alida Messinger gave $500,000 to WIN Minnesota and the cries of “foul” go ringing through the righty blogosphere. Example: Mitch Berg at Shot In The Dark.

I wish they would make a factual clarification in their indignation… it is only liberal money that they object to.

Nonsense.

While I don’t expect that Mindeman has memorized the last ten years of this blog, I’ll drop a hint here; I’m one of those guys who thinks that everyone should be able to give everything they want to anyone they want – provided they disclose it.

The problem isn’t that Alida Messinger donates millions upon millions to the DFL.

The problem is that the DFL spends hundreds of thousands a year trying to cow conservatives out of doing it.

For years, they supported speech rationing – like McCain-Feingold with its strict limits on corporate and personal giving but oh-so-convenient exemptions for, mirabile dictu, the unions.

And for the past year or two, they – via their astroturf stealth PR group “Common Cause Minnesota” – have been working nonstop to demonize giving by anyone that opposes them. Target?  The Koch Brothers?  All of those are threats to democracy, naturally.

Alida Messinger and her plutodollars – well, that’s just a response!

Apparently, the progressive side of the ledger is supposed to unilaterally disarm in wake of Citizens United and give proper deference to the Koch Bros., the Freedom Fund, the Chamber of Commerce PAC, or Hubbard Broadcasting.

Then there was the overreach that ended up hurting GOP donations when proper transparency was allowed. Namely, the Target donations to a group supporting Tom Emmer which has chilled Target’s involvement in partisan campaigns for 2012.

Well, it wasn’t an “overreach” so much as “the left finding a corporation that was socially and politically vulnerable to being bullied into compliance with the DFL’s the Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s agenda”.

Conservatives are continuously using the left’s dislike for money in politics to shame us from working to achieve similar dollar numbers.

No, Dave,

We’re using your (plural) craven, cynical hypocrisy on the issue to let the people know what a bunch of double-talking used-car-salesmen are setting the Democrat agenda.

There is a huge difference!

Just keep repeating to yourself, Democrats: “Single-payer is the only option!  Single-payer is the only option’!  Single-payer is the only option“.

The primary Democrat message this year seems to be to try to make every possible Democrat constituency feel like the most noble-possible victim.

We’ve got the “war on women”, “war on immigrants”, “war on over-charged college students”…

…and now, the “war” on those most-benighted victims in our society, teachers, according to this bit by Jeff Kolnick of the university formerly known as Mankato State U of M Marshall.

He tees it up with the story of his friend, a teacher, who is busy…

…surviv[ing] furlough days that cut short his pay as well as the education of his students to save money in tax-starved California.

There’s your first tip-off that our writer is approaching this first and foremost from the left; California is hardly tax-starved.  Cali is indeed a bounty of taxation – it’s why business is leaving the state as fast as it can move.

No. California isn’t tax-starved.  It’s spending-addled.

And after all this service to his community, instead of receiving praise and thanks he has a target on his back. Conservative forces in America have made public school teachers public enemy No. 1: If our schools are failing, blame the teachers. If our states are broke, it is the pensions of the greedy teachers. You name the problem and teachers are the cause.

Well, no.

Teachers, as individuals, aren’t the problem.

It’s the way they, their academy, and especially their public employees’  union and the government that, in California, that union pretty much controls have committed the state to pay for teachers and their (very very early) retirement first, and worry about balanced budgets second if at all, that are.

But Mr. Kolnick doesn’t seem to be interested in economics:

I am sick of it…

…conservative forces blame public school teachers for everything. A colleague of mine related a story to me about a person who blamed public school teachers for failing our students. The person complained that Minneapolis and St. Paul schools failed young people of color and he put the blame squarely on teachers and teacher-preparation programs.

Mr. Kolnick is listed as a history professor at the school formerly known as Marshall.  I bring that up because I’m trying to imagine what would happen if one of his students brought him a paper that started “A friend of mine says that The Jews were behind 9/11.  This paper will demand accountability from The Jews”.  I’m going to guess Kolnick’d send it back for a rewrite – right?

“Conservatives hate teachers because someone that my teacher friend placed as a conservative had an irrational complaint?”

Fed up with this garbage, my friend responded that his kids got a first-rate education in the Edina public schools with teachers who had union contracts and graduated from the same teacher-prep programs as the teachers in the Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts.

Let’s stop blaming the teachers and think about public education in terms of the evidence.

Yes, let’s indeed.

Because identical licensing notwithstanding, Minneapolis and Saint Paul graduate less than 3/5 of their students, and a minority of black, Latino and Native American students.  Afro-American, Hispanic and Asian families – who may be personally conservative, but currently vote overwhelmingly DFL – are deserting the city schools, decamping for charter schools and, via open enrollment, the suburbs.

And these are districts that are at the front of the pack for per-student funding, year in, year out.

And I’d suggest that if Mr. Kolnick wants to wave the various teachers’ paper credentials and bureaucratic certifications in those parents’ faces, he not do it while standing on 50th Street or Afton Road, in front of those parent’s cars, as they head to Edina and Woodbury.

But Mr. Kolnick said we needed to make this argument about “evidence”.   What’s his?

The attack on teachers is not about educating our young people. It is about ending public education and collective bargaining. It is about taking public dollars from public institutions and turning them over to for-profit corporations.

So Mr. Kolnick’s “evidence” is a paragraph of Democrat cant about unions.

There is no “attack on teachers”, there is a reasonable questioning whether our society can survive by forcing most of us to work until we’re 75 so that teachers – to say nothing of principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, special ed coordinators, and the other throngs of public employees that work in the system but never set foot in front of a classroom –  can retire at 55.

And since Mr. Kolnick asks; since when is collective bargaining “about education?”  For that matter, can you honestly say that the current public education system – not teachers, individually or as a group, but the institution, the entire educational/industrial complex – is “about education?”

In 1995, free-market evangelist Milton Friedman wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post calling for the privatization of the public school system. Now almost 20 years later, we are on the verge of seeing his ideas become a reality…In December 2005, a little less than a year before he died, Friedman wrote of an opportunity to privatize public schools in New Orleans after the tragedy of Katrina. He called for a radical reform of schools because they failed the students. “New Orleans schools were failing for the same reason that schools are failing in other large cities, because the schools are owned and operated by the government”.

OK.

So?

How is this, in and of itself, either wrong or, for that matter, an “attack on teachers?”

The sole purpose of public educational institutions is to educate. They may not be perfect, but they have only one goal.

And that’s at best a platitude, at worst a statement of complete ignorance.  Public schools have always had ulterior motives; “creating better citizens” (free of all those radical immigrant ideas) in the 1800s, or creating a society that reflects the goals of the educational academy today (diversity, multiculturalism)…

…and, above all, to serve as a big interest group and voting bloc, to gain and hold control of the government apparatus that feeds it.

Which is not a knock on teachers as individuals; lest Mr. Kolnick dive further into stereotype, my father, two grandparents and my sister are teachers.

But teachers as an institution demand that I work until I’m 75 so that they can retire at 55 – and vote relentlessly liberal to enforce it – and on the other hand work for a system that, for many of is, is an abject failure, whatever the individual teachers’ personal professional merits.

Do we really want to let corporations be responsible for teaching our young people? Come on, let’s get real.

“Come on, let’s get real”.

It’s always a treat to debate a classical Socratic logician.

Let me ask this:  if we presume a teacher is in fact capable, what difference does it make who pays them – a corporation, or a government body?

And if you can honestly answer that question in terms that aren’t foremost about defending the defined benefit pension, you’ll be doing better than Mr. Kolnick, so far.

Jeff Kolnick is an associate professor of history at Southwest Minnesota State University.

Submitted without comment.

I take this from the “Inevitable End-Results of Progressivism” files not so much because I believe this proposal  is especially surprising…:

A Swedish political party is taking a stand against upright urination.

At a county council meeting Monday, the Left Party, or Vänsterpartiet, tabled a motion that would require office washrooms to be genderless with a sit-down-only requirement, reported the news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå.

…as because I’m astounded a DFLer like Phyllis Kahn hasn’t already proposed such a bill.

What have we been telling you as long as this blog has existed?

The businesses along University Avenue that the Central Corridor doesn’t starve out of existence now, during the construction phase, it will either price out of existence in the few areas – around the stops in the less-blighted areas – that get gentrified, or starve out the business in between that are beyond easy dead-of-winter walking distance from the stops that can’t also afford to build off-street parking for customers.

But those last two are well in the future.  We’re still in phase one, starving out the businesses we already have along Uni:

Ne Dao is worried. Business at her normally bustling grocery store has slowed the past two weeks, and she fears it will only get worse once the massive light-rail transit construction project lands on her doorstep.

Ask the Panellis, from the late, great Caribe Bistro; it doesn’t get any better.

Many of the Asian businesses located along the five-block stretch of University Avenue recently dubbed the Little Mekong business district say they’re losing customers and sales. Business owners blame the road construction that is making way for the Central Corridor light-rail line connecting downtown Minneapolis with downtown St. Paul.

The road work on their stretch started in March and is expected to finish in late October. At University and Western avenues, the owner of Mai Village restaurant says she’s had to lay off the hostess and cut back from 10 servers to five because of the drop in business.

The problem was clearly inherited from George W. Bush.

Seriously?  I know the Mai Village.  The Mai was started probably close to twenty years ago, one of the wave of businesses started along Uni in Frogtown by Asian immigrants – first the Vietnamese, then the Hmong – who took the blighted stretch of the avenue between Lexington and the Capitol and turned it into, if not “Architectural Digest” fodder, at least a place with people, traffic, commerce, jobs…

…life.

Not the kind of life the DFL approves of – it’s not the kind of thing that fits the DFL’s vision of what Saint Paul’s Main Street should be.  Caribou. Patagonia, and lots and lots of government offices and non-profits.

Little Asian restaurants, founded by families who risked everything to leave Communist dictatorships to come to America, pooled their resources after years of working at scut-work jobs, leased ratty-looking little holes in the wall in blighted neighborhoods, built them into successes (and eventually nicer buildings, at least for those who kept their businesses on the avenue), and eventual hard-won prosperity?

Disposble!

This year, Mother’s Day, typically her busiest day of the year, was a dead zone.

“I don’t know how long we will survive,” said My Dung Nguyen, who along with her husband, Ngoan Dang, have owned Mai Village on University Avenue for more than 20 years.

The construction – as predicted in this space and in the spaces of everyone who really pays any attention to these things – has led to a long chain of destroyed businesses, wiped-out lifes’ savings, and misery in among all the dislocation for us Midway residents.

The sound of Bobcats and work crews, coupled with the dust they’re kicking up, have left her rose-filled haven of a patio empty because customers don’t want to sit out there in the middle of a construction zone.

“My customers, some of them tell it to me straight. They say, ‘I love your family. I love your food. But I’m sorry, I won’t come back until the light rail is done,'” Nguyen said.

What can I say?  If you’re ever down on Uni and are looking for a great Vietnamese meal, give the Mai a try.  They – and every business along Uni that isn’t part of a national chain with cash reserves to ride out the construction – will need the help.

Institutional Minnesota – the white, upper-middle-class part of it that was born here and never had to sail across a shark and pirate-infested ocean and learn a second, difficult language and start their lives over in a strange, cold land – is responding as usual; with blithe arrogance disguises as effort:

“Change is hard for many people. We’ve heard this from businesses elsewhere on the corridor and in other areas,” said Laura Baenen, a spokeswoman for the Central Corridor Light Rail Project.

“Change is hard for many people” is the “I’m sorry you were offended by what I said” of the social engineer.

Along with the arrogance, we have the out-of-context diversions:

Baenen noted that more businesses have opened on the entire corridor in the past year than have closed. From March 2011 to March 2012, 64 businesses opened on the corridor — including Washington Avenue, University Avenue, and Cedar and 4th Streets in downtown St. Paul — while 59 closed.

I’ll just bet they have.  There’s a lot of cheap space available now!

Now – how many of these “businesses” are non-profits that will bring no meaningful commerce to the Avenue?

I’ll get back to you on that.

And it looks like there’ll be more cheap space, as things are shaping up now:

The Asian restaurants are the ones that have been hardest hit, Thoj said. “Just in Little Mekong area, most of the restaurants are seeing a 25 to 50 percent loss. We have about 12 eating establishments. They all drop in customers during lunch and dinner.”

Back at Mai Village, Nguyen says the vision that the Metropolitan Council has of light-rail bringing prosperity to Little Mekong is still a long way from happening.

In the meantime, she says she and the other longtime owners are just trying to hold on to see that day.

“We put our heart, our time, our everything in here,” she said. “We would like to see it a success if the light-rail is done. But that is a big question.”

Silly eggs.  Your hearts, time and everything exist at the pleasure of the DFL’s omelet machine.

These are people who did everything right.  They rejected socialism for freedom.  They threw everything they had into succeeding – with very little to no government help – in a new, sometimes hostile land.  And they succeeded.   Indeed, the only mistake most of them made – it’s a statistical fact – was voting DFL.

And there’s noplace else to take a boat to, this time.

Berg’s Seventh Law – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – is going to be one of the dominant themes of the both the Presidential and the Minnesota Legislative campaigns.

We’ve been subjected to a solid year of caterwauling about the Flying Koch Brothers – who donate a fraction of what George Soros has pumped into liberal politics over the years – and “ALEC“, which “donates” ideas and the model legislation, which is pretty much what the Teachers Union does (except the Teachers donate lots of money too).   And above all, we’ve been subjected to years of liberal do-gooder fronts like “Common Cause” telling us that money in politics is baaaaaad.

Why?

To draw attention away from the extent to which the Democrats are controlled – not “supported”, “controlled” – by plutocrats.

Here in Minnesota, the DFL has basically handed its entire message operation over to “Alliance for a Better Minnesota“, the PR arm of a network of fundraising groups, unions and, especially, wealthy liberals.  They’ve even put Ken Martin, former administrator of part of that network, in charge of the DFL – which is, really, a measure of how much the DFL has become the instrument of the will of a small pack of liberal moneybags.

More on that later.

With Obama’s support among the middle class, small business and blue-collar whites in free fall, and enthusiasm among Latinos, women with kids and the unemployed young stagnant, Obama really has only one important constituency locked up:   the extremely wealthy, and Hollywood.  And since the regular “big-money” donors – people who donate between $500 and $2,500 to the campaign – are bailing on Obama…

…well, you see the conundrum, here, right?  Where’s Obama going to go for money other than the people who still support him completely, and lavishly?

And with that said, who is he going to listen to when it comes time to try to enact policy?

Obama has seen enough Architectural Digest-type interiors in Park Avenue triplexes and Beverly Hills mansions, and on the block in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, where every house is owned by a billionaire, to develop an expertise in Louis XV walnut commodes and Brunschwig & Fils fabrics.

He’s also had plenty of chances to absorb the advice of the kind of rich liberals who like to give money to Democratic presidents. And the evidence that he has taken some of that advice is his initiatives on three controversial issues, each of which involves serious political risk.

Barone spells out how plutocrat money drove Obama’s positions on gay marriage, government-paid contraception and abortion (and the jamming the bill for both down on churches that oppose them on religious grounds), and…

The third issue is the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil produced from tar sands in Canada to United States refineries and create thousands of jobs in the process.

Earlier this year, Susie Buell Tompkins, John Kerry’s fourth-biggest money-raiser in 2004, picketed outside an Obama fundraiser at San Francisco’s W Hotel to protest the pipeline. She wanted Obama’s State Department to block it because she thinks tar sands production hurts the environment and the planet.

Our neighbors the Canadians, who are not unconcerned about the environment themselves, disagree. The pipeline’s promoters say it would produce 20,000 American jobs and would tend to lower U.S. gas prices.

Obama came out on Tompkins’ side and blocked the pipeline.

And enacting non-fiscal, mostly-social policy pushed by plutocrats is great politics, because plutocrats represent real people -right?

If the same-sex marriage reversal seems somewhat risky politically and the contraception mandate considerably riskier, the Keystone pipeline decision seems downright foolish politically. Voters tend to favor it by two-to-one margins — and if they’re not aware of it, the Republicans (and maybe the pro-pipeline unions) will make sure they are.

The priorities of the well-connected, donation-happy and frighteningly well-off will continue to drive Obama’s policy.

And when your liberal friends – and the DFL’s trained chimps like “Common Cause’s” Mike Dean – plump about the evils of money in politics, ask them to clarify who’s money they’re talking about.

It’s been my theory for a few years now that there are things young “progressives” in liberal cesspools like Madison, Macalester and the U of M never really learn.

One of them is how to debate; since they all go straight from high school through their college years with no real challenges to their lefty preconceptions, they seem to have the debating skills of junior high kids.

Another?  How to take a hit gracefully.  When you have no concept of what it means not to be in power, you have no idea what even the most minimal adversity – losing a political campaign – feels like.

And you react like these icons of the progressive <i>id</i>:

I’ve met libs like “Thistle Petterson” in Saint Paul; so full of intellectual entitlement they can’t comprehend, much less live with, the notion that they don’t own the world politically.

I won’t say this video makes the whoooole thing worthwhile – but it is a nice mental after-dinner mint.