Jeff Rosenberg from MNPublius has sent an “Open Letter To Amy Klobuchar” that explains, if nothing else, how little DFLers really understand about their “Senior Senator”:

Congratulations on your endorsement by the DFL this weekend, and on what looks to be a relatively easy re-election bid.

(As a side note?  Look for a lot of “bandwagon”-mongering from the DFL and the media (pardon, as always, the redundancy). Research shows that if you can create a sense in your opponents’ minds that voting is fruitless, they won’t do it.  They may never say that that’s why the “Minnesota” and “HHH” polls released right before election day are so inevitably, grossly, comically inaccurate in favor of the DFL, especially for close elections – but it’s difficult to see how they’d do it any different if if were utterly deliberate).

But I digress:

You’re the most popular politician in the state by a wide margin, and in your single term as a Senator so far, you’ve built up quite a bit of political capital.

I’m writing to ask you to invest some of that political capital in making positive change here in Minnesota in 2012. Notice that I’m not asking you to “spend” your political capital, but “invest” it.

Because “invest” is always the euphemism DFLers have for “squander on something I’d like someone else to pay for”.

But, again, I digress:

With a bit of work, you’ll make it back with hefty interest, making you not just the most popular but one of the most powerful politicians in the state. What is political power but the ability to affect change?

It is that, plus many, many other things; the ability to provide for ones’ special interest (“change” be damned) is a key one for DFLers.  In fact, that’d seem to be the main thing A-Klo does with it…

…dammit, I just keep on disgressing!

That’s why I’m asking you to devote a portion of your time and energy this year to fighting the harmful constitutional amendments on the ballot this year and returning the DFL to power in the state legislature. Your overwhelming popularity gives you significant influence with swing voters, and your fundraising prowess could transform marginal seats in the legislature into major opportunities. Your involvement could mean the difference between winning and losing all of these fights.

Interesting theory – but let’s set a few things straight.

A-Klo isn’t so much “popular” as she is “not unpopular”.  She’s cautious.  She’s taken the popularity she started with – as the daughter of a Twin Cities media icon and some time as a prominent and media-savvy if not especially effective county attorney – and husbanded it carefully.  She takes no positions that will anger enough Minnesotans to hamper her polling – and counts on her Praetorian Guard in the Twin Cities media to mute any coverage of those things that she has to do to not get thrown out of the caucus locker room back in DC.

For example – Klobuchar supported the Medical Device Tax, which is going to flense and gut Minnesota’s Medical Device industry, one of our great growth industries – but it got less coverage in the Strib than the Wayzata Middle School girls volleyball game.

I know your popularity is built, in large part, on your efforts to be a bipartisan figure, so you may want to stay “above the fray.”

Heh.

But what is the point of amassing this level of support if you can’t use it to make a difference?

Because if you “make a difference” in a way that blows that “support” sky high – or erodes it to the point where one has to work especially hard to retain ones power – then it was all as if nothing happened.

And here’s Klobama’s problem; she can read polls.  She can see that Minnesotans, even the liberal ones, overwhelmingly support Voter ID, and that the Marriage Amendment’s internal numbers, while lower, lead to an issue so fraught that even the mighty Obama has to “oppose” it in the weakest way possible.

And she knows that her popularity is a mile wide – look at those numbers! – but an inch deep, a product of name recognition and six years of carefully-cultivated and media-guarded innocuity.  And a good way to blow all that is to come out against an issue most Minnesotans are definitively for. 

It’s the same reason Paul Wellstone – he, the patron saint of Minnesota “progressivism” and the “1” in countless 99-1 Senate votes –  supported the Defense of Marriage Act.  Because he knew all of his “popularity” and “power” could go out the window with one badly-timed position on an emotional issue in an election year.

Just as A-Klo does.

You’ve earned the trust of millions of Minnesotans, but that trust has little value if you can’t or won’t use it to advance a positive agenda.

And there’s the conundrum, for a thinking liberal (and let’s say they do in fact exist, because they do); A-Klo is popular and powerful – but that popularlity and power is, I suggest, predicated on keeping hands off of the issues that progressives most want.

And this in an election year when Barack Obama’s going to have all the “coattails” of a T-shirt.

Senator Klobuchar, I hope 2012 will be a year of great triumph for you. I hope it will be the year you win re-election by an overwhelming margin — and the year your coattails mean victory in the legislature and on the constitutional amendments.

Yeah, good luck with that.

(Anyone but me think that Rosenberg’s post sounded like a prayer of supplication?)

I should change the motto of this blog; “Our Rumors Are Better Than Most Organizations’ News”.

The Wall Street Journal announced that Wisconsin AFSCME membership has dropped.

Well, no.  It plummeted.

Well, no.  It went into a flame-belching, smoking death spiral.

Yeah.  That’s what I”m looking for.

In the Wall Street Journal, (via Power Line):

Wisconsin membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—the state’s second-largest public-sector union after the National Education Association, which represents teachers—fell to 28,745 in February from 62,818 in March 2011, according to a person who has viewed Afscme’s figures. A spokesman for Afscme declined to comment.

Much of that decline came from Afscme Council 24, which represents Wisconsin state workers, whose membership plunged by two-thirds to 7,100 from 22,300 last year.

This was, of course, reported in this space two weeks ago today:

Scuttlebutt from a trusted source who works inside AFSCME Minnesota Council 5 states that there are interesting developments in the Wisconsin AFSCME. Ever since passage and signing of the “right-to-work” laws in our neighboring state to the east, about 80% of those AFSCME members have “opted-out” of paying union dues.

My source’s anecdote got the percentage wrong, but the magnitude of the catastrophic ennui facing Wisconsin’s unions was dead-nut on.

Certain members of the leftyblog clucking class tried to call BS on the anecdote, claiming “FACT CHECK”.

Their spurious claim of “BS” is returned with two weeks’ interest, um, piled on top.

(more…)

I’d throw in my usual “can you imagine the media firestorm if a Republican did this with an effigy of a Democrat”, but no – of course, you can not.

That’s the president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO whacking at a piñata of Nikki Haley.

On the upside?  The lady has a better swing than Paul Thissen.

It was a year ago today a tornado skittered through North Minneapolis, killilng one, injuring 30, and spreading damage throughout a neighborhood that didn’t need any more damaging.

Government sprang into action…

…and a year later, the neighborhood is still pocked with damage, with some damaged buildings still scattered about the place.

Congressional candidate Chrs Fields, writing in the Strib, takes Keith Ellison to task over the government’s response:

 A continual lack of focus by U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, a Democrat representing the Fifth District, led to a failure in making the case for the North Side in Washington. Who else is there to make the case? Instead, Ellison focuses on issues in the Middle East concerning Palestinians, Syrians and Egyptians. They are not the 99 percent of constituents, are they?

To be fair, at least North Minneapolis is free of Syrian tanks, so far.

To be honest, an Israeli bombing raid would probably get Representative Ellison’s attention better than his constituents’ calls.

Fields (with emphasis added):

We live in a political age when, if you live in a politically one-sided congressional district or state, an administrative department can afford to ignore you. Why? Because if a member is from a “safe district,” voters cannot punish the congressman for his neglect.

But if we were one of those “hotly contested” congressional districts or “swing states,” we not only would have gotten federal assistance promptly, it probably would have come with a marching band and a presidential visit.

Behold the exposed id of liberalism, and of the DFL.  As with the gay marriage debate – where one week liberal pols solemnly intone “we don’t play politics with civil rights”, and the next week they whinge about the President’s politics of civil rights harming their poll numbers – government is all about doing what it takes to get and keep power.

As a 21-year combat veteran of the Marines, I know that our community needs a combination of focused leadership and policy changes.

And again to be fair:  Ellison’s leadership is focused – on keeping Keith Ellison in the national media:  posturing intently over the Middle East, furrowing his brow at “Occupy” meetings, seeing his mug on MSNBC.

Dear North Minneapolis:  Are you better off the you were two, four and six years ago?

Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and over and expecting a different result – in this case, sending Keith Ellison to Washington.

Time to hope for some real change.

I got this via email early this morning:

Scuttlebutt from a trusted source who works inside AFSCME Minnesota Council 5 states that there are interesting developments in the Wisconsin AFSCME. Ever since passage and signing of the “right-to-work” laws in our neighboring state to the east, about 80% of those AFSCME members have “opted-out” of paying union dues.

This is from a source I trust on these things, who is – as noted above – relaying third-hand information.

So I’ll throw this out there; anyone else hearing anything from the Wisconsin unions?

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

After nearly killing Cupcake on Grand, the city is finally considering whether Mega-Mall-style parking lots are really necessary in St. Paul.

The City Council wants citizen input on the parking rule change, so a public hearing will be held at 5:30 in the Council Chambers in downtown St. Paul.

Because that’s a handy place for people to meet. Plenty of convenient parking. Easy to get to. Easy to find. Everybody knows where the council chambers are, and how to get there, and where to park, and how much it costs . . . during rush hour . . . right?

Look, if you want the public’s opinion, you ask the public at a time and place where the public is likely to show up, not just P&Z staffers. If you don’t actually want our opinion because you’re going to do whatever you want to do anyway, the cut out the nonsense and get on with it.

Businesses like Cupcake who plan to invest tens of thousands of dollars in St. Paul will roll with the punches or they’ll go somewhere else. And then you can have all your precious street parking for non-profit welfare agencies and low-income apartments.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Manipulating public hearings is a DFL oldie but goodie.

My favorite example:  back in 1987, when then-Senator Alan Spears was proposing a ratcheting-up of gun control laws, they scheduled public hearings on the bill.

And then proceeded to move it, constantly, so that outstate human-rights supporters could come and testify against the orcs – or at least stand up against them and be counted.  The DFL counted, then as now, on being able to manipulate the system to keep as few dissenters as possible from attending.

Real Minnesotans still outnumbered the orcs 600-24 – but that was state-level Second Amendment legislation, not Saint Paul parking.

Plan on the City Council being able to say “The public told us they hate having enough affordable parking”.

Dayton and his minions in the paid PR racket – and I count the editorial board of the Strib among that crowd – are doing what they can to label this past legislature a “Do-Nothing” one.

It’d be more accurate, naturally, to call it “The Sandbagged Legislature”.  Now, I’m not going to say all of “Governor” Dayton’s vetoes, even for bills with astonishing bipartisan support, even for bills Dayton himself had claimed to support, seemed to run according to some kind of script or another.  But I will say that if you look at the video closely, you can see strings attached to his hands and jaw, being pulled by Alita Messinger, Elliiot Seid and Javier Morillo.

But let’s take a moment to go over the winners and losers from this past few weeks in the legislature:

Losers

• Small businesses – who lost out on the front-loaded sales tax exemption, the angel investor tax credit, and reforms to Minnesota’s dismally-high business property taxes.
• Students – who, if you accept that the “Shift” that has been a centerpiece of DFL budgetary policy for over a decade actually harms them, surely must have been hurt by Dayton’s veto of the GOP plan to accelerate the repayment of the “borrowed” money.  Right?
• Private sector workers, whose businesses needed the tax help, and whose jobs are in that much more jeopardy today than they were six months ago.

Winners

• Zygi Wilf – The resale value on his real estate investment has just gotten plumped up astronomically, on the backs of you, the taxpayer.  Especially in DFL-addled Minneapolis.  Hey, all you foreclosed DFL-voting homeowners on the North Side – hope those warm thanks from Zygi Wilf and Jared Allen keep you warm when the Sheriff’s moving y our stuff out on the lawn!
• Minneapolis and Saint Paul – who got a slew of little plums and bailouts.  Thanks, all you outstate rubes!

That’s a start, anyway.

…but I’m making a donation in kind to the Walker campaign for the benefit of my readers in Wisconsin:

If I get only one electoral wish this year, I want Walker to utterly bury this recall, and for Obama to lose.

Sorry.  Gotta hold steady at two wishes.

The U of M Duluth shows that, if you seek to impose policy via grievance, it’s really as simple as 1-2-3!

In this case, it’s the case of Blair Moses.  Mr. Moses wanted UMD to install more “Gender-Neutral Bathrooms”.

Now, I’m not here to judge Mr. Moses’s goal; I know people with gender issues, and it’s not a trival thing.

On the other hand, UMD is a public institution, supported by tax dollars, and bathrooms aren’t cheap, and it’s somewhat illuminating to notice the degree to which policy can by pushed by shrill, intransigent insistence (see also: thousands of yobbos with purple-painted faces demanding we all knuckle under to the NFL’s blackmail so they don’t have to find some other meaning in life than supporting Zygi Wilf’s real estate investment “their team”).

Did I say “simple as 1-2-3?”

Why yes – I did:

Step One: Make a Shrill Demand: No matter how outrageous the demand is, state it as an absolute:

In late April, Moses sent a letter to the administration with two demands. First, he insisted they “take immediate action to begin the process of designating more gender neutral bathrooms.”

Step Two: Ratchet Up The Emotion!:  Budgeting and finance are such dry, empirical subjects.  Emotion sells better.

How much emotion?  In the movie “The Usual Suspects”, the Turkish arch-villain Keyser Söze operates under the axiom that when you show you’ll go further than your opponent will, you win.

And Blair Moses certainly goes there:

Second, he demanded an “announcement stating the said day of change.”

In the letter, Moses threatened that if his demands were not met by April 26, he would begin a hunger strike for three weeks or more.

Step 3: Work On That End-Zone Happy Dance For When Minnesota Bureaucrats Acquiesce in the face of your shrill, queue-jumping demand for your priorities to be pushed ahead of everybody else’s:

Late in the day on April 26, Moses uploaded a video to YouTube claiming he had begun his hunger strike and was “sweating” because he “had not eaten” all day. He continued to cite current policy regarding “gendered” bathrooms, describing them as “oppressive” and a “problem” on campus.

No, really:

The very next day, April 27, the university administration ceded to both of his demands.

Chancellor Lendley C. Black issued a campus-wide e-mail stating the school would take “immediate steps” to resolve the issue and would “provide two gender neutral restrooms” in the student center. Additionally, she pledged that all new construction projects and remodels would include at least one gender neutral restroom.

Who says college doesn’t teach anything these days?

If I were a betting man – and I’m not – I’d wager money that we see hunger strikes over meat at the cafeteria, cars on campus, and finally the fact that it costs to go to UMD at all.

Any action on that bet?

Let’s imagine, if you will, a big knob or dial with a scale from 0 to 11.

This dial measures…

…well, anything, really.  For purposes of this article, let’s measure “Liberty” – the prevalence of and respect for the rights to think, speak, act, work and prosper freely.

Let’s say the numbers on the dial mean something like this:

0 – You’re in a North Korean concentration camp.

1 – You are in North Korea, but not in a concentration camp.

2 – You are in Cuba – unfree, and most likely dirt poor.   Your only “opportunity” is found in a bottle of some kind.  You are fed, more or less, and cared for, sorta.  Like a farm animal, really.

3 – You are in Red China – unfree, and a little less likely to be dirt poor.  Like an animal on a farm where the back forty is “free range”, if Farmer Brown Hu lets you live back there.

4 –  You are in Greece – Rioting and living on the dole? You’re “Free”.  Starting a business or excelling on your merits, absent lots of graft and what the Mexicans call mordida (maybe the Greeks call it “Mordidos?”  I dunno), and faced with paying taxes to pay for the problems caused by the earlier excessive taxes?  Not so free.  You are fed well enough, and cared for (or should be, if the government can figure out how to balance its budget) – like a house pet with a badly-organized owner who’s going to have to file for bankruptcy if he doesn’t square his act away, and who seems unlikely to do anything of the sort after the weekend’s household elections.

5 – You’re in the Netherlands or France.  You are “Free” from most wants, and have lots of “Free” time – but taxes and regulations make entrepreneurship exceptionally difficult, although it’s a more orderly form of difficulty than in Greece.    Food and care from the government are plentiful (provided that taxes and borrowing are in turn also plentiful, which is a big “provided” these days); you are like a pet in a well-organized and happy home, albeit one that has to keep renegotiating its credit cards.

6 – You are in a highly regulated United States or the UK – think “the worst of the seventies, on turbo”, run amok.  Entrepreneurship is marginally more free than in socialist Europe, and the social “safety net” is almost as smothering and the taxes almost as debilitating.

7 – You are in what Newt Gingrich might call Mitt Romney’s America – with lower taxes, but still more regulation that the United Freaking States of America, the land of people who risked all to come to the new world to risk all, could do without, and still too many taxes.  A place that is essentially a welfare state with some doors of opportunity left open for the lucky and incredibly motivated (or connected) few.

8 – You are in an America that Ronald Reagan worked toward – where we have the government we actually need, but not too much, and where feeding government comes in second to feeding and educating your family and financing your dream of success – a place where the rising tide lifts all boats, and where we don’t level out the peaks to fill in the valleys, but where we (as Churchill said) spread a net over the abyss.

9 – You’re in the America that Ron Paul’s party line says he works toward; where government is stripped down to the bare minimum, and people have the responsibility – and opportunity – to fend for themselves.

10 – The pure Big-L Libertarian Ideal.   Government guards the borders, enforces laws regarding order and property rights, and adjudicates contracts.  That’s it.  You are free to succeeed or fail precisely according to your merits and work.  And if you fail?  Social policy, especially the whole “Safety Net” thing, is in the realm of society – the individual and their own organic institutions (the church, Packers Nation, trade unions, the Elks, the NRA, the Oprah Book Club or whatever).

11 – One more than ten.

Where do you want to live?

That’s one way of looking at life, anyway.

———-

I was listening to Jason Lewis the other night – something I don’t get to do nearly enough.  And he looks at political life a little differently; “You’re either for freedom, or against it”.  Instead of a dial from 0 to 11, you have a light switch, or an LED; it’s on, or it’s off.

How accurate in measuring anything in life is a lightswitch?

Is your marriage either wonderful, fulfilling and perfect or utterly miserable, abusive and dysfunctional?

Is your job either your dream come to fruition or something that makes you want to stick a gun in your mouth every morning?

Are your children either endless joys that make you thankful to wake up every day or little deviants on whom you can’t find enough dimes to drop?

If your marriage, job and kids aren’t perfect, do you instantly file for divorce, quit, and look up a pack of travelling gypsies?

Of course not.  So – is all of American political life really a choice between either “North Korean Concentration Camp Inmate” or “One More Than Ten?”

Of course not.

You put up with your spouse’s imperfections and insanities (or, in about half of marriages, you don’t).  You tough out a job you may not like until something better comes up (or doesn’t).  You try to focus on and bring out the best in your children, and get them to the point where you can say “I did the best I could”, and others answer “We can tell”, and you both keep a straight face.

Everything in life has a “dial” that goes from zero to 11 – your marriage, your job, your kids…

…and political life isn’t any different.

There are two political battles going on today, if you are a conservative and a Republican.

The big one is against Barack Obama.  Obama’s America is at or below a “Six” right now, and – measured by executive branch action – heading south.  He’s putatively targeting a “five” – but his deficit spending, as any sane conservative knows, pretty much inevitably leads to “four”.  Which, then, can just as easily lead to overreaction on the part of government and those who’ve come to depend on it – the Democrat constituency – that leads to points south of four; see “The Weimar Republic”.

So if you’re sitting at a 5.5, and your options are “Five and dropping” or “Seven (at worst) with the potential to move up, if you keep engaged and don’t let up the pressure?”, what would you take?

Which leads us to the other – and first – battle we face; between those who answer that question “If I can’t get at least a nine, then I don’t care and I’m going to stay home”.

Now, during the caucus and endorsement process, I’m all for accepting no substitutes – for pulling like hell for whomever your ideal candidate is, and eschewing compromise like the plague.

But once the endorsement process is over, there’s another time for choosing.  And if you’re a conservative Republican, at any level, your choice is, ineluctibly, this:

You held out for your ideal.  Now it’s time to choose; the US is at a 6, maybe a 5.5, today. Another term of Obama and we’ll be a weak 5, maybe headed south.  The only realistic choice right now is – at worst – to increment the counter to a 6+.  Maybe a 7, maybe shooting for an 8 if we get a good Congress.  You will not get your 9 or 10 in this election – and if the needle slips further, and more Americans slide into dependence and choose that comfortable, entitled “Five” on the big dial of political life, it’ll become much, much harder to budge things upward again.

Do you let the dial slide?  Or do you push the dial up?

There is no other option.

What do you say?

Judicial Activisim.

To a conservative, it’s writing new law from the bench.

To a liberal / neosocialist?  It’s upholding the Constitution.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

President Obama said:

“And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example, and I’m pretty confident this court will recognize that and not take that step.”

Judicial activism. You keep using that phrase. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

Which is true.  But the real point is, just watch; this’ll be the opening salvo of an effort by the Administration, Media Matters and the left and media (ptr) to reframe “Judicial Activism” as a synonym for “Originalism”.

Joe Doakes emails:

1.    To a Leftist, Rights do not come from God, there is only Power which flows from the government.  That’s why a good result doesn’t mean people are “blessed,” but are “empowered.”

2.    Here’s the clever bit: the implicit Liberal mindset underlying every Chanting Point

“Government is great, government is good, and Obama is its prophet.”

Geez, maybe I should trademark that and get T-Shirts printed

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I can hear the “cha-ching” all the way down on Minnehaha.

The wisdom of Scott Walker’s approach is being hailed by…

Wisconsin’s Teachers unions?

Or at least, that fraction of their mlembers that weren’t laid off, as we were warned they’d be?

Huh-wha?

When debate over public unions flared up in Wisconsin last year, educators claimed Gov. Scott Walker’s austere reforms would require thousands of teachers to be laid off.
They were wrong.
With small changes in pension and healthcare contributions while allowing school districts to buy health insurance plans on the open market, Walker’s reforms have resulted in what could be considered a statewide teacher-retention program. School districts such as Wauwatosa, hometown of Governor Walker and the Weekly Standard’s Fox News star Stephen Hayes, faced a $6.5 million deficit and planned to lay off dozens of teachers. But Walker’s reforms allowed all those teachers to remain employed.
At other large school districts such as LaCrosse, Racine, Wausau, and Beloit, if there were any layoffs at all, they were limited to two or fewer. And in addition to retaining teachers, the reforms have instituted merit-based pay systems that allow excellent teachers to be rewarded.

But was there a catch?

Silly wiberwal wabbits. There’s always a catch – and it comes from your side:

However, not all school districts adopted Walker’s reforms so readily. Milwaukee’s school district, which is immediately east of Wauwatosa, rammed through a union contact in December, just in time to avoid being subject to the reforms.
Now it appears the Milwaukee district is reconsidering its hasty action.

The Walker “Recall”, combined with the onset of Obamacare and Obama’s microphone flub with Medvedev, might be just about the best thing to happen to the GOP this year.

More recalls like this, and Walker might be the Presdent next year.

(Via commenter Bosshoss429)

Conservatives are not engagled in a “war on women”.

But liberals are.   If there is one thing liberal dogmatists hate worse than a conservative,it’s an apostate.  

And to a liberal, a woman and/or an ethnic, racial or or social minority is a “liberal” by dint of having been born – and so if they become conservatives, they are by definition apostates.  And since Ameircan liberalism is about whre Wahhabi Islam is today, in an intellectual sense, they have about the same attitude toward apostates.

But it seems that, at least for the worst of the left’s Wahhabi, self-marinading in hatred is costing them.

Feeling pressure in the wake of the Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke controversy, Bill Maher recently said he could say disgusting things about Sarah Palin and other women because he’s on HBO and doesn’t have sponsors.

Apparently the White House doesn’t completely agree, for according to Politico, David Axelrod, one of Obama’s right-hand men, has cancelled an upcoming appearance on Maher’s Real Time:

Maher is only the worst of the offenders. Indeed, hatred of apostate minorities, women, “working person” or social minority is a pathology that nearly every liberal, from Maher down to the most hackneyed leftyblog, seems to share.

The only answer is for real people to call them on it when they see it.

Found on the truck of a Walker supporter in Madison:

This is not the mark of a movement that believes things are going well.

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

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

The DFL View

"Bad Citizen. BAD!"

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

Does SHE deserved to be disenfranchised?

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

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

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

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

Elliot Seid (on ATV) on election day

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

The Conservative View

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

The CD4 GOP Committee meeting last Tuesday

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

Mass transit, "animal"-style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, I have two other observations.

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Ragsdale:  Editorialize much?

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

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

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

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

You can do it.  I just know you can.

The First Amendment protects free speech (as well as the press, assembly, and worship provided that the subject isn’t contraception).

But it has limits.

Fraud is not free speech.  You need to speak to commit fraud – “Hey, you have money in Nigeria, and we need $1,000 in legal fees to get it for you!”, right?  But it’s illegal.

It’s not illegal, in most cases, to lie.  There is the odd exception – the Stolen Valor Act which, by the way, makes me uncomfortable; I’d rather have a group of Green Berets set an impersonator straight than some federal prosecutor.    In most other cases, it’s not illegal.

Indeed, in some cases it’s encouraged, even among public servants.  The Supreme Court has said it’s OK for cops and prosecutors to lie to suspects to get information out of them.  That’s acceptable, generally, although it’s led to the odd miscarriage of justice.

But I think there should be a great, shining exception to “freedom of speech”.  Officers of the court should not be able to lie about the law, to their constituents.

There are only two explanations for Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom so grossly misstated the potential effects of the “Stand Your Ground” bill, vetoed yesterday by Governor Dayton.

He Doesn’t Know Any Better And, Like The Strib “Editorial Board”, Just Wrote What He Was Told.  If he’s that ignorant of the laws he’s supposed to enforce, he should not be a County Attorney.

Or…

He Actively Misrepresented The Law To An Audience Including His Constituents. With the goal of influencing public policy (the bill was then in committee), Backstrom wrote an op-ed (not for the first time, mind you) that actively and knowingly tried to mislead the public by lying about the consequences of a law.

I don’t know the legal definition of fraud – and I don’t have to, to still be able to say “this sort of behavior on the part of a court official defrauds and actively disinforms the public, toward a political end”.

And while there never will be, there oughtta be a law.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Asian businesses along University Avenue, seeing their livelihood destroyed by Light Rail, came up with a marketing plan for their neighborhood. They’ll call it “Little Mekong” after the famous river in Southeast Asia that runs through many of the residents homelands: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and China.

Makes perfect sense to me.  “Frogtown” predates the Asian influence in the neighborhood by a solid 100 years.  They have pretty much redefined the area.  More power to ’em, I say!

Not everybody likes the plan.

“Irna Landrum, executive director of the Summit-University Planning Council, said it makes sense to have a strong identity around each of the light rail stations. But she said Frogtown already has one.

“I’m not immediately convinced it has to be this big cultural branding. People know where Frogtown is. You know there’s a lot of natural curiosity for people who don’t live in these communities about what these strong community names mean,” Landrum said.”

I’m not sure that the curiosity about “Frogtown” goes much beyond “why is it called Frogtown?”, and I live here.  (Answer;  Maybe it was frogs in the long-gone swamps.  Maybe it was the French settlers.  We may never know).

No matter.  As it was, it shall be evermore!

Doakes:

The Summit-University Planning Council got left out and they’re miffed. I wonder why they were left out?

Could it be because they are most city planner types who support light rail and urban renewal, living on grants and government handouts while spreading their gaze over such a large and diverse area as University Avenue and Summit Avenue that they can’t get anything useful done?

So local business people step up and do it themselves.

And get criticized for it.

Welcome to St. Paul.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

That’s part of it.

The other part?  Community councils in Saint Paul have tended to draw the kind of people who love to exert petty, passive-aggressive power over others.  The Summit-University council seems to do little but fuss and phumpher over things like names and numbers in zoning formulas, and while they create little of value, they certainly destroy much.

Thank you, anonymous preliterate wannabe-class-warrior union droog, whoever you were…

In fact, the most confrontational moment came when Rep. Banaian was answering another right-to-work question. Jerry Albertine interrupted, saying “Don’t sit there with your hairspray and your tie, you’ve never worked labor, and say you know what the unions are about.”

…for giving Learned Foot the best straight line he’s had all year:

Heh.

It’s one of liberalism’s most cherished tenets; “If you define what’s “for everyone’s good”, and force people to do it on pain of forfeiting property and liberty, nothing bad can happen”.

The City of Saint Paul – which is such a one-party state that North Koreans feel sorry for us St. Paul residents – has been practicing that bit of preaching for a couple of decades now.

Like most liberal-dominated cities, Saint Paul has for decades used its poorer neighborhoods – the lower East Side, Frogtown, the North End, and the pre-gentrification Selby-Dale, all formerly decent working-class neighborhoods that were gutted by other liberal, interventionist policies like “Urban Renewal” and the drilling of interstate freeways through the vacuum of political clout from which they suffered – as “warehouses for the poor”, convenient places for the DFL-run bureaucracy to put public housing and the welfare recipients who live in it.

Property values eroded by the freeways and the bureaucratic attention, property owners fled to the ‘burbs, leaving lots of property available for people to snap up at bargain-basement prices.  Which led to the city’s plague of “absentee landlords” in the eighties and nineties.

As often happens in neighborhoods blighted by liberal policy, crime rose.  Minneapolis’ Phillips and North Side neighborhoods, along with Saint Paul’s neighborhoods (and the remaining shards of unfashionably-black Rondo, which was almost completely wiped out by I94), with the departure of the people who’d made the neighborhoods ticked, fell into blight, decay and crime; as the “war on drugs” gave those people an outlet for their suppressed and unfashionable entrepreneurship, the crime wave grew big ugly teeth.

The City of Saint Paul decided to fight back by…attacking the “absentee landlord”.  The number of private, small landlords in the city – people owning less than ten rental units – dropped from thousands in the eighties to, by some estimates, hundreds today.

Crime didn’t abate – although it didn’t swell by quite the same numbers that it did in Minneapolis.

And so in the early 2000s, the city took another approach; fighting all landlords.  Thanks to eighties-era regulations, it’s very difficult for landlords to evict problem tenants, or do much of anything at all about them.  Nonetheless, the city discovered that it was simpler to go after “problem properties” extrajudicially, using the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections, than via using the police.   Landlords who objected were smeared as “slumlords” by an elaborate and extensive whispering campaign by city-government-affiliated DFL activists – sometimes accurately, often not, and in context a fairly shabby defamation.

And in 2004, a group of those landlords sued the city.  In Magner v. Gallagher, the landlords’ lawyers argued the theory that the city’s efforts had a “disparate impact” on the poor – which, indeed, they did.  Saint Paul’s policy – demonizing landlords – was precisely the same one at a policy level (and in most of the mechanics) that has made places like Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington DC such idyllic places to be poor.

“Disparate Impact”, of course, is one of the tools by which the Johnson-era federal bureaucracy has browbeaten banks, cities and landlords.  The Wall Street Journal gives a brief history lesson on the subject (emphasis added), which includes the fact that the theory is alive and well…:

The Justice Department started a special unit in 2010 to pursue disparate-impact claims, which don’t require proof of intent. Lower courts have loosely interpreted the Fair Housing Act to allow for disparate-impact analysis, which ignores other factors that affect lending decisions.

Bank CEOs have tended to settle these cases rather than risk bad publicity, and Justice has pocketed the cash to distribute to its political allies. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is also pushing a new rule to codify disparate-impact analysis under the Fair Housing Act, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is making such lending enforcement a priority.

…which ends in the fact that now, Saint Paul is the big bad banker.  The 1%er, the Daddy Warbucks on the wrong end of a “Disaparate Impact” suit.

If Saint Paul won the case – which has burbled up to the Supreme Court over the past eight years – it would weaken the use of “disparate impact” as a tool to blackmail and browbeat banks and the private sector.

And so the Obama Administration stepped in and pressured Mayor Coleman to drop the city’s response to the lawsuit:

St. Paul released a statement Friday saying it “likely would have won” at the Supreme Court but that “such a result could completely eliminate ‘disparate impact’ civil rights enforcement, including under the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. This would undercut important and necessary civil rights cases throughout the nation. The risk of such an unfortunate outcome is the primary reason the city has asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the petition.”

To sum up: St. Paul has spent taxpayer money for almost a decade fighting a case to force slumlords [See?  The city’s PR campaign made it all the way to the WSJ!] to provide the poor—including minorities—with better housing. But just as it was on the cusp of what it claims would have been a victory at the Supreme Court, the city withdrew its appeal under pressure from the Obama Administration and liberals who feared they might lose a weapon of dubious legality that they want to use to tell banks how and to whom to lend.

The piece concludes:

It’s enough to recall the old joke that liberals love the poor in theory—it’s the actual poor they have a problem with.

The poor are just another tool by which the left achieves and maintains power.  When they’re of use, good for them.  When they’re impediments, the join the Constitution, liberty and genuine fairness under the bus.

If there is a case that spotlights the cynicism of the American left at all levels better than this, I’d love to hear about it. 

Bob Johnson at the A Democracy blog has been covering Saint Paul housing issues, and especially Magner v. Gallagher, long before anyone else could figure it out.  He’ll be covering it long after they leave.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

The City intends to change the zoning of properties along Front Avenue between Dale Street and Rice Street. That means you can’t sell your land for as much money. Naturally, landowners are upset.

Here’s why: if your land is zoned for Industrial Uses and the building on it is a warehouse, you have a Conforming Use and any future owner can continue to use the land for a warehouse. But if the city changes the zoning of your land to Residential, then your warehouse becomes an Existing Non-Conforming Use. You – and future owners – are severely limited in what you can do with it. You can’t expand. If it burns down, you can’t rebuild. You can’t even guarantee the future owner will be allowed to keep using it as you did. So naturally, the future owner won’t pay as much for it as he would have before the zoning change.

Yes, the City has the power by law to do it. But destroying people’s land values through regulation is not a trifle. It shouldn’t be done lightly.

Key line in the article:

“Because no one who lives or does business in that area was involved in the current planning effort, community members and city officials agreed that the plan needs a second phase of study.”

Nobody who knows anything about the neighborhood was involved in the plan. It was dreamed up by urban planners in government and academia.

The crux of the piece – and it ties into so much about living in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and any one-party autocracy:

This is how liberals think. We’re so smart we don’t even need to VISIT the neighborhood to know what to do in it. We have a plan for an ideal neighborhood so tough luck to you.

This is classic Saint Paul government in action; make a grand sweeping change “for the good of the peasants” – and then sit back and look amazed as the unintended consequences mount.

Another great – and bigger – example; almost four years ago, the city passed an ordinance requiring most vacant properties to be brought up to the latest building codes before they could get back their certificates of occupancy.  This means a foreclosed house with a bubbled-up paper value of $200.000 in Frogtown, the North End or the lower East Side, which might net $40-50K today, mostly on the value of the land it sits on – would need an additional $100-150K to make it actually salable – meaning the banks would be into properties for $300-350K apiece, guaranteeing a loss of a quarter million dollars on each property they sold.

I asked a few sitting members of the City Council about this.  They didn’t respond “the banks will make up for it with volume!”, but close; one councilperson said – I’m paraphrasing here – the  mortgages are owned by companies with lots and lots of money, so it’d all be OK.

In other words, money came from unicorns.

The results?  The Saint Paul housing market is worse than most.  There is a glut of property on the market; as mortgage companies opt to let properties go into tax default rather than  take quarter-million-dollar baths on them, they revert to state ownership; the state then generally hands them back to the city, which then either sells them to non-profits for a pittance, hands them over to public housing, or sells them on occasion to remodelers who meet the city’s absurdly high qualifications for a nominal amount, sometimes a dollar.

So do you want to pay $188,000 for a property on the private market, or do you want to pay a buck?

Saint Paul is a beautiful city with an incredibly ugly government.

Since they’ve solved all the nation’s other problems, President Obama and his minions and the media (pardon the redundancy) are going back to liberal basics; they are beating the drums for gun control (there’s a much bigger piece on the subject coming soon).

Part of this is some renewed activity on the part of the myriad astroturf gun control “groups” – almost invariably tiny groups of addled activists – to try to push the anti-human-liberty agenda.   These groups and their tiny but clout-enhanced coteries of followers – whom I affectionately call “orcs”, because they represent everything Tolkien intended with his fictional soldiers of darkness – are trying, with the full connivance of the mainstream media, to agitate for gun control, or at the very least enhanced harassment of the law-abiding gun owner.

Starbucks is in the crosshairs.

When the orcs approached some national coffee chains, they found a willing audience that was in tune with the shallow, showy, shrill politics of their most stereotypical customers – shallow, showy, shrill liberal coffee drinkers. Some national chains banned guns (in the hands of the law-abiding citizen – carry permit holders and the like) on their premises.

Starbucks held the line for liberty, enacting a policy that deferred to local laws – as any sensible business should.

For supporting the human right to self-defense, I'll say "thanks" in part by giving them a free ad on my site.

The orcs are organizing to try to boycott Starbucks.

An anti-gun group is attempting to organize a nationwide Valentine’s Day boycott of Starbucks over the coffee chain’s gun policy.

Starbucks does not ban guns in its stores; rather, it defers to local laws. The National Gun Victim’s Action Council (NGAC) says that amounts to a pro-gun policy that endangers customers.

Gun owners, and other civil rights activists, are rallying to support The Buck tomorrow.  If you support civil rights, do the following:

1. Go to Starbucks on Tuesday.  I don’t care if the thought of spending $2 for a cup of coffee galls you – it does me too.  But swallow your pride and buy a damn cup.  And then…
2. Tell the manager why.  I never go to Starbucks.  But I will – because of their principled stance.  I will tell the manager to his/her face exactly why I’m supporting them.  Leave a tip for the barrista, while you’re at it.
3. Go to Starbucks.com, or their Facebook and Twitter pages, and tell them what you told the manager.  Be polite, professional and civil; don’t get in their way; maybe just leave them a note.

Too often we gun owners – like conservatives as a whole, when social issues come up – are as quiet and unassuming as our concealed firearms.  Orc groups – the NGAC, “Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota and the VIolence Policy Center make up for their dearth in numbers by making lots of noise (having a sympathetic media doesn’t hurt ’em, of course).

It’s time to speak up.  And caff up.

Earlier this week, I noted that the WaPo released a Presidential preference poll that…:

• Bucks all current polling and shows President Obama firmly in the dirver’s seat, which…
• releases no crosstabs or backup data for mere consumers to use to judge the poll’s context, parameters or validity.

As I predicted, only faster, the Strib is already on board.  Joe Doakes – making a rare two-fer today – wrote to ask about h this column by Sue Hogan at the Strib:

“Catholics” is a pretty broad label. Abortion advocate John Kerry claims to be Catholic and so do openly-gay parishioners at St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis as well as traditionalists who attend St. Agnes in St. Paul.

Who did they poll?

How was the question worded?

Silly Doakes.  Raw data is for gatekeepers.

Let’s take a look at Hogan’s piece:

A majority of U.S. Catholics support President Obama’s decision to require religious institutions to include birth control in health insurance plans, according to two new polls.

A poll by the Public Religion Research Institute in Washington, D.C., found that support among Catholics (58 percent) is higher than that of the American public overall (55 percent).

And who exactly is the “Public Religion Research Institute?  They describe themselves as “non-partisan”, which pretty much inevitably means “left-leaning”.  You be the judge.  Their piece on the poll doesn’t go into a lot more detail than Hogan’s puff piece.

Likewise, a Public Policy Polling survey commissioned by Planned Parenthood found that Obama’s position enjoys support from 56 percent of American voters. Of the Catholics polled, 53 percent agreed with the president.

Meanwhile, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops continues to decry the president’s decision, saying that it violates religious freedom.

And as we’ve noted in the past, PPP voter polls trend left of reality.

Look – I’ve expressed my skepticism that the Catholic Street really cares that much about the issue, or that the “middle management” would choose Vatican doctrine over progressivism.  It could be that the polls are accurate.  Since they seem to confirm my hunch, that’s a point in their favor [1]

But who did they poll?  What questions did they ask?

And, more importantlly, why aren’t they teliling us who they polled and what they asked?

Remember – distrust but validate.  Then, usually, distrust some more.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Ramsey County doesn’t take credit or debit plastic for recording fees for deeds, mortgages, etc., only checks or cash.

The recording fees can easily be $150.00. Who carries that much cash? Who carries a checkbook anymore?

The Credit Union put an ATM in the lobby for the convenience of customers, employees and the cash-needing public.

The ATM doesn’t meet the requirement of the Americans with Disabilities Act: it doesn’t have Braille keys.

Result: if everybody can’t use it, then nobody can use it. We pull it out.

So that makes everybody EQUAL, in having no access to funds. Everybody suffers together EQUALLY. I suppose it’s FAIR. But is it HELPFUL?

Does this application of the law actually make things BETTER for persons with disabilities, or worse? At least the old way, you could have a friend punch in the numbers so you could get your money. And you did bring a friend, right, to drive you here — because how else did you get to an office located across the river and not on a bus line? So you have a friend, you have money in the bank, you have documents to record . . . and we send you away. To be fair TO YOU, the disabled person. You’re the one we’re protecting with this law. You’re the one we’re “helping.”

We’re from the government and we’re here to help you. Why aren’t you more grateful?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

But remember, handicapped people who are traipsing back across the river to find cash: if you complain about government regulations, it’s back to tainted beef and sewage in your water!

Give thanks to Dear Governnment!

Now!