This morning, I wrote to agree with Chad the Elder that the Catholic grass roots didn’t look like they cared that much about religious freedom – in part because a Catholic (indeed, Christian) laity was pretty much desensitized. like the fabled “frog in boiling water”, to the effects of losing that freedom, and that their leadership hadn’t done much to change that in a few decades.

On the other hand?  Maybe there’s some hope:

Catholic leaders are furious and determined to harness the voting power of the nation’s 70 million Catholic voters to stop a provision of President Barack Obama’s new heath car reform bill that will force Catholic schools, hospitals and charities to buy birth control pills, abortion-producing drugs and sterilization coverage for their employees.

 

“Never before, unprecedented in American history, for the federal government to line up against the Roman Catholic Church,” said Catholic League head Bill Donohue.

 

Already Archbishop Timothy Dolan has spoken out against the law and priests around the country have mobilized, reading letters from the pulpit. Donohue said Catholic officials will stop at nothing to put a stop to it.

Hopefully it’s not too little too late.

Last week, when I wrote about the stirrings of backlash on the part of some Catholic activists and Bishops over the Obamacare requirement that Catholic hospitals provide contraception and abortions, I expressed my doubt that mainstream Catholics really cared that much.

I got a few Catholics sounding off in my comment section that sounded a little more bellicose than I expected.

Chad the Elder over at Fraters – who is, unlike me, Catholic – is a lot less sanguine:

Many Catholics seem all too willing to erect their own wall between church and state and like to pretend that their politics has nothing to do with the Catholic Church and vice versa. The problem is that when the government breaks through that barrier and injects itself into the affairs of the Church by attempting to force it to accept policies that violate core tenants of its beliefs, the illusion of this happy little coexistence is shattered.

Does it?

I’m not trying to be snotty, there – it’s a genuine question.

If people have little tangible investment in the practical results of religious freedom – if it’s more an intellectual and rhetorical parlor game than an immediate, vital part of their life – then will it “shatter” so much as “melt like stale jello?”

Well, at least it would be if the Church were more consistent and forceful in explaining exactly what is taking place and why it matters to American Catholics.

There’s that, too.  Leaving aside that the laity themselves, to my observation, seem to think it’s an issue well above their pay grade, I have a strong hunch that a good chunk of the Catholic hierarchy is lukewarm on upsetting the progressive applecart.

For whatever reason, Elder’s observations seem to be in tune with mine:

My experience may not be typical, but so far little word of this current controversy has surfaced in our parish on any given Sunday. A few months ago, there was an insert in the bulletin that touched on it. Since then, nothing. No homilies, no presentations, no mention in the weekly bulletin. The only thing related to politics that has merited attention has been on the marriage front, with updates on the Minnesota Marriage Amendment appearing in the last few bulletins. But nothing on the Obamacare rules which are a direct threat to the freedom of the Catholic Church to exercise its religious beliefs.

In order for there to be action, there needs to be a call for it first. I fear that too many Catholic leaders are still reluctant to sound it.

And while I’m assured by many Catholic friends that some of the post-John-Paul-2 clergy is more conservative, I have serious questions as to whether that’s filtered down to an awful lot of lay Catholics and their immediate leadership.  Chad’s observations don’t do much to dissuade me.

Of course, it’s similar in my own Presbyterian church (where, to be fair, the problem is opposite; an extremely liberal elected temporal leadership representing congregations that are frequently much more conservative.

The GOP’s plan to help the economy by, among many other things, dialing back regulation, makes intrinsic sense if you have the faintest sense of how business works.

Most liberals do not.  They think jerbs are created when government submits a funded work order, all too often.

Worse?  When you talk to too many libs about reducing regulation, they say “Hey!  Regulation gives us safe water and clean air!”

To which one is tempted to reply “Yes, and we’re not talking, largely, about those regulations, and would it be possible to have enough government and the right amount of regulations, rather than too much of both?”

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

You thought that because the City approved all your permits, you could spend tens of thousands of dollars to open a business here?

SUCKER!

I followed the link to a PiPress story; one Kevin Vanderaa, owner of a Minneapolis bakery called “Cupcake”, wanted to open another location on Grand Avenue.  He had everything squared away – or so he thought.

We pick up with the PiPress story:

Vanderaa signed a lease in July to open in the former Wonderment Toy Store, between Lexington Parkway and Dale Street. Unlike the Minneapolis Cupcake location, this one was to have a 32-seat wine bar along with a bakery and cafe. At the time, he didn’t know that because he was going to serve beer and wine he would need more parking spaces. The city held up the business license until he could secure a shared parking arrangement or a parking variance for seven spaces required by the Board of Zoning Appeals.

“But people gotta park…!”

Have you been to Grand Avenue lately?

Bear in mind, these are jobs.  Not “infrastructure” jerbs, like the jerbs Governor Dayton is yapping about in his pork-laden bonding bill, temporary jobs that’ll go to Dayton’s union buddies and disappear as soon as the “infrastructure” is built.  Real jobs, that last as long as the business lasts.

The kind of jobs that the DFL extinguishes with gay abandon.

For your own good, of course:

“Everyone wants Cupcake on Grand Avenue,” said McLean Donnelly, vice president of the association. “But there’s a right process of setting up parking with businesses on Grand Avenue, and if the correct process had been in place, we’d be enjoying cupcakes right now.”

Let those unemployed people eat process!

In December, Vanderaa got a signed lease from nearby Anderson Cleaners for the parking spaces. The Zoning Board approved it Dec. 27 with a 10-day period for appeals. Vanderaa said he thought the appeal period began the day it was approved by the board. When 10 days had passed, he began construction. The floor was ripped out and pumping and electrical were started.

But at 5 p.m. Jan. 19, even though the Zoning Board already had given its OK, the Summit Hill Association filed an appeal, citing that Vanderaa should have had a shared parking agreement instead of a lease with Anderson Cleaners. Vanderaa was stunned because he thought the appeal period had passed. Later, he found out it hadn’t actually begun until Jan. 9, when the lease was officially voted on and signed off by the St. Paul City Council. The city then notified Vanderaa that his permit was being pulled.

Did you follow that?

Now, you might say “that’s just a bunch of city regulations” – and you’re right.  But DFL government behaves like liberal government, at all levels; regulations have boomed under Obama, under Dayton, and of course in Saint Paul under 60 years of DFL rule (with a 12 year break under Coleman and, to a lesser extent, Kelly).

Take the problems facing Mr. Vanderaa at “Cupcake”, and apply them to something in the state’s kill zone – say, the Polymet mine project up on the Iron Range.  Like Saint Paul, the Iron Range desperately needs jobs.  Like Saint Paul, there are markets to be filled on the Range; yuppie fans of cupcakes (which, MPR tells me, is the latest pop-culture fad) on Grand, a world hungry for industrial minerals like Polymet will produce).

And on the Range, as in Saint Paul, regulations – controlled, inevitably, by political as well as bureaucratic interests – stymie Polymet with every-bit-as-tight a stranglehold as they do “Cupcake On Grand”.

Donnelly said the information provided to the Board of Zoning was inconsistent and there were several unresolved technical questions the board hadn’t pinned down.

“People think we’re singling out this business,” Donnelly said. “But if Vanderaa gets a parking variance, it can impact other businesses on Grand Avenue. And a variance stays with the property and not ownership. If the parking situation is a mess, we’re stuck with it.”

Look at the bright side; nobody’s building a train down your street.

But the real point is, regulation kills jobs.  And while most of our society accepts some regulation – speed limits, pollution limits in water and air, medical licensure and the like – there’s a thick gray line between “The government and regulation we need” and “Government and regulation that really exists only to give government something to do at best, and serve as the policy manifestation of some special interest or another at worst”.

And that kills jobs faster than any “infrastructure” project can possibly replace them.

A while ago, I issued a challenge to supporters of single-sex marriage, and opponents of the proposed Constitutional Amendment on the issue this fall; develop an argument that’ll convince a majority of Minnesota voters that you’re right about the issue.

For a fair chunk of that audience, the “argument” has been expressed as simply chanting “you’re a bigot”, which is a stupid argument.

For another fair chunk, the argument reverts to chanting “we don’t vote on civil rights”, which is a nice platitude.  Also bullcrap.  We vote on civil rights all the time.  Ask any second amendment supporter or opponent of campaign finance “reform” / speech rationing, or academic freedom activist, or anti-“Fairness Doctrine” watchdog.  And that completely avoids the question “is marriage a civil liberty”.  I don’t know that I support the Amendment – but I know that all the best arguments against it come from conservatives.

The dumbest argument of all?  Glitter.

It’s become a fad among the local cutesy-but-inartciulate crowd in the past year; if you can’t manage an actual adult argument (and they never, ever can), throw glitter at them.

The Strib editorial board sounds off against the fad – for all the wrong reasons.  It comes in the wake of some giggle moron throwing glitter at Mitt Romney during his stop in the Twin Cities earlier this week:

 That’s a mistake. Further glitterings, especially of presidential candidates, place everyone at campaign rallies at risk. Security officers must make instantaneous judgments about suspicious-looking people who get close to the candidates and their families. Whether it’s highly trained Secret Service officers or local law enforcement, it’s incredibly difficult in those split-seconds to distinguish someone drawing a weapon from someone pulling out a hidden bag of confetti.

According to the Strib, that’s the reason to stop the glitterings; the safety of the idiot throwing the glitter.

Thjey’re wrong, of course..  The risk to the over-schooled, under-educated, smug little glitter-throwing jagoffs isn’t the main reason to ditch the glitter.

The damage the practice does to our political discourse.  It’s long been a principle of free speech; your right to swing your fist stops where my face begins.  Maybe a couple of feet before, if you’re smart.  Throwing anything at another person is a form of assault; if you did it to a spouse or significant other in the wrong context (the middle of a fight) it could earn you a trip to jail.  As, indeed, it should have for the little prick that glittered Romney.

So what we have in Minnesota -and it seems to be a phenomenon among smug little Minnesota jag-bags, so far – is a group of people that thinks a form of assault, stylized as it is, is a legitimate form of protest.   Of “free speech”.

It makes Minnesota look like an invincibly stupid place.

As if electing Al Franken and Mark Dayton hadn’t done enough damage.

Cliff Kincaid at Accuracy in Media reports that the Catholic Church – or parts of it, anyway – are up in arms (as it were) over the Obama administration’s mandates:

My Catholic priest, Father Larry Swink, delivered a homily on Sunday that I told him would make headlines. In the toughest sermon I have ever heard from a pulpit, he attacked the Obama Administration as evil, even demonic, and warned of religious persecution ahead. What was also newsworthy about the sermon was that he cited The Washington Post in agreement—not on the subject of the Obama Administration being evil, but on the matter of its abridgment of the constitutional right to freedom of religion.

What is happening is extraordinary and unprecedented. The Catholic Church is in open revolt against the Obama Administration, with Fr. Swink noting from the pulpit that priests across the archdiocese were joining the call on Sunday to rally Catholics to resistance against the U.S. Government. He said we are entering a time of religious persecution and that Catholics and others will have to make a final decision about which side they are on.

If true, that’s great news – but I gotta say I’m not nearly as sanguine.

I’m not Catholic – and in my observation, most Catholics outside the clergy and intelligentsia are as diligently observant of the Vatican’s rules as most Jews are of Kosher laws; birth control and hamburger on Friday are as common among Catholics as the odd bit of ham and Saturday shopping trips are among mainstream Jews.

And I know – exceptions exist, including among readers of this blog.  But in my observation, there are vast swathes of the Catholic Church, in major cities, that either turns a blind eye to the inconvenient parts of the Vatican’s rules, or is willing to rationalize and ignore them in pursuit of a “progressive” political agenda – which accounts for a huge number of Catholic liberals I personally know.

Oh, the Bishops will make a ruckus:

The issue is what the Catholic Bishops have called a “literally unconscionable” edict by the Obama Administration demanding that sterilization, abortifacients and contraception be included in virtually all health plans.

At a time when the media are full of reports about who is ahead and behind in the polls, and who will win the next Republican presidential primary, this incredible uprising in the Catholic Church is something that could not only overshadow the political campaign season, but also may have a major impact on the ultimate outcome—if Republicans know how to handle it. This matter goes beyond partisan politics to the growing perception of an unconstitutional Obama Administration assault on religious freedom. To hear the Catholic Bishops and Priests describe it, our constitutional republic and our freedoms hang in the balance.

But if you go to St. Joan of Arc (to pick a far-left parish of my acquaintance), it’s all an un-issue, ignored for the “greater good”; many, perhaps the majority of Catholic parishes I know of in the Twin CIties would trade, at the clerical level as well as among a fair chunk of the laity, the Nicene Creed for single-payer health care and Cap and Trade.

So am I wrong?  I’d especially like to hear from Catholics, here.  Does anyone at your parish – from your priests on down – care about Obamacare?  Has that “caring” been manifested in the form of “telling the congregation that it’s wrong, and that it’s going to screw with the what the Catholic Church supposedly holds dear?”

I’d be interested in hearing.

A few years ago, on a brutally-cold winter night, I was standing at a bus stop on University Avenue at Oxford with a bag of groceries. An older – or older-looking – guy, wobbling from a day of drinking, wobbled around on the sidewalk behind me (It was 7PM, although dark as midnight in mid-January).  The guy wasn’t feeling the cold.  He was muttering something under his breath.  He seemed agitated.  I kept my guard up.

I heard a car engine accelerate behind me – fast.  I turned, and saw a Saint Paul police cruiser, pouring on the steam and pulling across two lanes of traffic and heading straight toward the bus stop.

I noticed the drunk guy had started to amble north up Oxford Steet.

The cops slammed on the brakes and hit the whoopie lights just as they pulled around onto Oxford and squalled to a hard stop.  The two cops bailed out, fast, and pulled their clubs as they raced toward the old guy.  They took him down, hard.

Two more units pulled up in the next thirty seconds or so.  Whoopie lights blazing, the corner felt warmer all of a sudden.

This being University, the 16 and 50 buses were both late – so I watched as the cops cuffed the guy, bundled him into the first cruiser, and drove away.  Being a good blogger, I asked one of the cops what was up.

The cop motioned toward a bar further down University.  “He beat a guy with a chair.  Put him in the hospital, probably in critical condition”.

They took off.

And still I waited for the 16.

I thought about this when I got an email from Joe Doakes this morning:

These are the prospective riders of the Light Rail.

The link is to a piece in the PiPress about a shooting on Uni:

A man was injured in a shooting at a University Avenue bus stop in St. Paul on Thursday evening, and police believe there were multiple witnesses who have yet to come forward.

The victim, who was taken to Regions Hospital with a gunshot wound to his leg, was at a bus stop at the southeast corner of University Avenue and Dale Street when he was shot about 6:45 p.m…Anyone with information should call St. Paul police at 651-266-5650.

According to the story, three guys including the shooter crossed Dale Street, opened fire as cars sat at the light, and hit the victim.  They helpfully point out that the cops don’t believe it was a random shooting.

Back to Doakes:

Do you still think people will come from Woodbury to ride that train?

And if they don’t, who will shop at the newly renovated stores?

That’s always been my big question about the Central Corridor – especially about the choice to make it a “Light Rail” train rather than a trolley which, if you just have to have a freaking train, makes a lot more sense.  “Light Rail” is for people who whiz through the neighborhiood on their way from one downtown, or one of the colleges, to the other.  It’s not people going from WalMart or Rainbow with a bag of groceries who are trying to get down to Grotto for the four block walk to their house.  It is designed, scaled, and stationed to carry people through the Midway and Frogtown with as little interaction with the neighborhood as possible.

And the more I look at this boondoggle, the more fanciful – almost Jetsons-like – the “development” scenarios for the stretch between Cleveland and the Capitol seem.  What – someone en route from their legislative assistant job at the Capitol to their apaartment on Washington is going to stop at UniDale for a mocha?

Huh?

The train is going to largely cut the north side of the street off from the south side.  What does that do to neighborhoods that are, as urban planners euphemize, “in transition?”  It does what it did when they drove a freeway through Phillips (the part of Minneapolis between Franklin/Lake and 35/Hiawatha), or Frogtown (St. Paul from Lexington/Western and Como/94).

Any takers?

It’s a question I see from “progressives” all the time; what harm does regulation do?

Via BigGov, we have an example right here in Saint Paul:

Verlin Stoll is a 27-year-old entrepreneurial dynamo who owns Crescent Tide funeral home in Saint Paul, Minn. Verlin has built a successful business because he offers low-cost funerals while providing high-quality service. His business is also one of the only funeral homes that benefits low-income families who cannot afford the high prices of the big funeral-home companies.

It’s not a “shovel-ready” job, but it’s a business.  One might think Minnesota’s DFL-strangled bureaucracy would appreciate another tax-paying business on the books.

Oh, no.

Verlin wants to expand his business, hire new employees and continue to offer the lowest prices in the Twin Cities, but Minnesota refuses to let Verlin build a second funeral home unless he builds a $30,000 embalming room that he will never use.

Why?

Minnesota’s law is irrational. Embalming is never required just because someone passes away and the state does not even require funeral homes to do their own embalming. In fact, it is perfectly legal to outsource embalming to a third-party embalmer. Minnesota’s largest funeral chain has 17 locations with 17 embalming rooms, but actually uses only one of those rooms.

In other words, state regulations force Stoll to build an embalming room even though state law doesn’t require anyone to be embalmed, or require him to do it in his own facility in any case.

But why?

So that the big, full-amenity funeral-home businesses can benefit from a law that drives up prices for consumers and operating expenses for competitors such as Verlin.

There you go.  Too many regulations not only pick winners and losers – they allow the winners to pick themselves.

The government should not force Minnesotans to do useless things. That is why on January 19, 2012, Verlin and the Institute for Justice challenged the law in state court.

The Minnesota Constitution protects every Minnesotan’s economic liberty, which means that it protects entrepreneurs from being burdened by legal requirements that are either useless or designed to suppress honest competition.

A victory here will not only free Verlin from an unconstitutional restraint on his economic liberty, but protect entrepreneurs across the state from pointless laws and bureaucracy.

And when you bring up stories like this, “progressives” will inevitably snivel “so you want to abolish the FDA and allow bakers to put sawdust in bread and allow child labor and let rats roam through preschools…”

Well, no.  We’re just wondering why we can’t have the government we need, and get rid of the parts we don’t?   To have the right amount of government.

Via Amy Alkon

No, it’s not my opinion – it’s from a bunch of lefties.  And I’m not talking your Twin Cities Leftyblogger chump kinda lefties – according to Althouse, it’s the big-time ones.

The first observation – and it’s one I’ve made, although perhaps not enough – was a fun one:

The Tea Party, [David Dayen of “Firedog Lake”] says, has “struck fear” into the Republican Party, but the Democrats don’t respond to their grassroots because “the progressive movement inspires laughter.” Quoting Kos:

Dayen:

You have an entire wired generation focused on this issue like a laser, fighting like hell to protect their online freedoms, and it’s F*****G REPUBLICANS who are playing the heroes by dropping support?

Those g*****m Democrats would rather keep collecting their Hollywood checks….

Al Franken – you smelling what we’re cooking?

I love it when lefties have no choice but to confront the dilemma that the “party of the people” really isn’t.

Althouse:

Fascinating. There’s long been this assumption that young people take their political cues from the entertainment industry, but it’s pretty obvious that no matter how much they like movies and music, they care more about what they personally do on the internet than the entertainment industry’s financial interests.

If the GOP doesn’t beat the Dems – especially Senators Smalley and Klobuchar – with this like a bunch of bongo drums, they don’t deserve to win.

While the Democrats will yip like a bunch of over caffeinated Jack Russell terriers about the “jobs” “lost” in the inevitable rejection of Governor Dayton’s idiotic Jerbs plan – jobs that would have either existed without the Jerbs plan (because the $3K one-time deduction would merely confirm a big company’s plan to hire someone) or would never have existed were it to pass (for example, virtually any small business hiring), they are downright proud of Obama’s rejection of the Keystone Pipeline, a private-sector initiative that would have created thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of real private-sector jobs, and create an oil supply to prevent inflation that would kill even more jobs.

The Obama administration announced that it would deny a federal permit for the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, which would run 1,700 miles across six US states bringing toxic, highly corrosive tar sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries and ports in Texas.

The president stood up to Big Oil, backed by the voices of hundreds of thousands of activists just like you, who have built the movement to stop this dirty, dangerous oil project.

So there’s your message, American electorate: government-sponsored jobs good; private sector jobs, expendable.

If the GOP doesn’t pound that home in November, they don’t deserve to win.

To: Senators Franken And Klobuchar

From: Mitch Berg, Potential Target

Re: SOPA Pillaging

Senators,

Everyone from Wikipedia to Keilth Ellison is blacking out their sites today to protest the idiotic “Stop Online Piracy Act”, which would “stop piracy” by giving the Executive Branch the ability to wantonly shut down websites for linking to sites that had so much as one pirated file among thousands of others, even inadvertently.

I don’t have time to muck with this site’s code to that extent, but I’ll give an excerpt:

We know – your Hollywood backers want this bill.  They want their man Obama to be able to crush anything that saps their revenue.  And they paid good money to get you both elected.

So go work for them.  In Hollywood, not DC.

Ditch the bill and take your lumps.

(And yes, even if you do withdraw SOPA, I will dog you about it until you leave office, and beyond; you deserve it.  But them’s the breaks)

That is all.

Did Hamline’s faculty break the law when they ganged up to prevent Tom Emmer’s hiring?

Law professor Eugene Volokh wonders:

Minn. Stats. Ann. § 10A.36 makes it a gross misdemeanor for “[a]n individual or association” to “engage in economic reprisals or threaten loss of employment or physical coercion against an individual or association because of that individual’s or association’s political contributions or political activity.” There is an exception for “compensation for employment or loss of employment if the political affiliation or viewpoint of the employee is a bona fide occupational qualification of the employment.”

In other words, Steve Sviggum could lose his gig as GOP Senate spokesman if he went all liberal on us.

But for non-political jobs?

(All jokes about the staff at Hamline, St. Olaf, St. Thomas, Carlton etc claiming the “viewpoint of the employee is a bona fide occupational qualification of the employment” are noted, laughed at, and disposed of in advance)

As I read this, the statute criminalizes pretty much any boycott or other economic retaliation against a person because of his “political activity.” Is this a just law? Or should people have the right to take their business elsewhere, whether on their own or together with others, and whether as customers, contractors, or employers, if they disapprove of a person’s political activities?

It’d seem to be a key part of that whole “Free Association” thing we conservatives support.

So so far I’d say “no, not illegal” – just as it should not be illegal for me to write “The State of Minnesota should not spend one dime of research money at institutions of higher education that are shown to discriminate politically.

Volokh:

Many states impose such restrictions on employers’ firing employees for certain kinds of political activity, and South Carolina law also bans landlords from evicting their tenants for political activity, but the Minnesota statute is the only I could find that bans “economic reprisals” more broadly…I should note that, under NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware (1982), speech encouraging a boycott is protected by the First Amendment. But this law prohibits the actual economic reprisal, not the speech urging it.

I suspect it’s make some lawyer pretty wealthy, trying to litigate it – at least on the basis of the law Volokh cites.

But Katherine Kersten, writing for the Center of the American Experiment, notes that some litigation is starting to worm its way through the system.

Given his rejection by Hamline (after he thought he had a job), Emmer might be pleased to know that some aspiring conservative faculty members who are victims of political discrimination are gaining new traction through the courts.

Take Teresa Wagner, whose case was recently considered by the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Iowa, Minnesota and other Midwestern states.

Some might question Wagner’s sanity, since she applied—and was turned down for—a position at a law school whose 50-member faculty includes only one registered Republican.

Was this hotbed of liberalism Berkeley, or an Ivy League university where (one suspects) conservatives risk being burned at the stake?

No. The school in question was in the heart of Corn Country: the University of Iowa.

As a conservative, Wagner was guilty of several “venial” sins that the high priests of faculty diversity might have forgiven had she confessed and begged for absolution.

The Eighth Circuit is going to hear the case:

The court’s reasoning was revealing. First, the court drew a discriminatory inference from the law school’s grossly skewed 49-to-1 ideological composition. If this is a suspect ratio that may justify hiring lawsuits on First Amendment grounds, then most public education institutions in America may be vulnerable.

 

Second, the court noted the incestuous nature of the hiring process at the University of Iowa Law School.

 

While deans and the hiring committee technically have some authority in this respect, in reality, an ideologically homogenous faculty wields authority and creates cookie-cutter replicas of its ideological biases in its new hires. The court found this constitutionally problematic.

Read the whole thing.

And boycott everything to do with Hamline Universtiy [THIS STATEMENT HAS BEEN RULED INPERMISSIBLE UNDER MINNESOTA STATUTE]

It’s not the game-changer for this campaign.  But it could shave off a lot of votes for a lot of candidates.

It’s the Stop Online Piracy Act.  Posited as a means of protecting copyrights and against counterfeit drugs, the act – sponsored by Lamar Smith, with a slew of co-hosts – is rife with opportunity for abuse; it would make it frighteningly easy for government to censor online content on any dubious grounds it sees fit to find; it’ll make the user-content industry (think Youtube, Flickr and, potentially, any blog) exceptionally hazardous – not for abusers of copyrights, but for the service providers themselves.   It’s possible, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, for as little as a single complaint to shut down, say, Hot Air (and we all know what side is full of complainers who just loooooooooove to use the bureaucracy to stifle debate).

And the issue is gaining traction among those who pay attention to these things:

To the ranks of same-sex marriage, tax cuts and illegal immigration, add this to the list of polarizing political issues of Election 2012: the Stop Online Piracy Act.

The hot-button anti-piracy legislation that sparked a revolt online is starting to become a political liability for some of SOPA’s major backers. Fueled by Web activists and online fundraising tools, challengers are using the bill to tag its congressional supporters as backers of Big Government — and raise campaign cash while they’re at it.

Al Franken and – as luck would have it, the up-for-election Amy Klobuchar – both support SOPA.  Elements of the left have been beating on them, especially on A-Klo; both are, of course, in the bag for Hollywood.

It’s time to join in the bashing!

And sometimes “I haven’t said anything” has an implied “…yet” after it.

One the most dull-witted bit of comment-section rhetoric is the old “I see you’re silent on…[some issue you haven’t written or spoken about]”, usually written to imply “silence equals assent”.

I’ve had a few commenters, tweeps and other people say “I notice you’re completely silent on the issue of the MNGOP “Sex Scandal”, the “coverup”, and the principals involved”.

Well, there’s a grain of truth to that, in that I haven’t written anything on the subject.

Yet.

There are a few good reasons for that.

I Have Little To Say:  All of the principals in the case are, to some degree or another, friends.  More importantly, they all have families.  Others may believe that their ends – pillorying the opposition – justfify their means, including piling on a couple of families who, let’s be honest, didn’t ask to be part of this.  So go read them, if that’s what you want.  But before you do, remember…

If You Ever, Even Once, Said “It’s Just About Sex” During The Clinton Administration, You Need To Just Shush: Seriously.  It’s private business.  It didn’t affect government.  Move on.  Just mooooove on.

Some might respond “But the relationship was inappropriate!  What kind of management style is that?”  To which I respond:

It’s An HR Issue:  Is every complaint about “inappropriate relationships” aired out in the media where you work?  Not until it goes to court, if at all.

Yeah, I know – Koch is an elected official in a position of some considerable power, so it’s a little different.  Suffice to say I have no opinion.  Yet.

But…

Much Of The Discourse On The Subject Has Nothing To Do With Amy Koch:  The “relationship” with the unnamed male staffer is the issue that’s got a good chunk of the Twin Cities leftyblogosphere cackling away with their prurient, projection-addled glee.  A name has been popping up, over and over again.  But none of the MSM’s sources on the subject have gone on the record with that name yet – not to a standard that a “real” news media outlet can run with yet.

And I’ll confess this to you all right now – I hope the “rumor” is wrong.  And I hope that the reason the subject of the tittering speculation is lawyering up is because so many of the Twin Cities’ leftybloggers and less-scrupulous media outlets have stuck their tender extremities into a meatgrinder; that they’ve defamed the “rumored” staffer, and done it because they  ignored the standards of fact-checking required to defend a defamatory assertion, and exercised “reckless disregard for the truth” – which is a form of “malice” under Minnesota defamation law that might, with a good lawyer, be enough to void the First Amendment protection they’re all hoping to hide behind.  I’ll cop to it; my Christmas cheer is marred by a hope against hope that the next year sees an awful lot of smug leftyblogging and City-Pages-writing prigs bussing tables at Panera to pay off a humongous legal judgment.

A guy can dream, can’t he?

But What About The Coverup?:  We’ll see.  I’m going to do something that a whoooole lot of – I’ll be frank – dumber bloggers could stand to try; waiting until I know enough to have a perspective worth writing.

Now – as to all of you leftybloggers and comment-section-lawyers who haven’t specifically condemned the massacre at Katyn Wood?  Why do you support Russian genocide against the Poles?

Does your silence speak volumes, or what?

A Ramsey county judge has told Governor Dayton, the SEIU and the AFSCME that they’re going to have to go back to shaking down small businesses the old-fasioned way – without state goverment help (for now):

Just two days before ballots were set to go out, a Ramsey County Judge has halted the upcoming election on child care unionization by issuing a temporary restraining order. Ramsey County Judge Lindman said the matter should go through the legislature instead.  He also said the election was “very harmful to all of the parties involved.”

The entire bid to unionize childcare workers get more dues-paying members to prop up their budgets and political efforts is going to have to Plan B – actually make sure it’s a debate:.

Judge Lindman set a hearing on the injunction for January 16th.  “It means we have more time to educate providers and get the truth out,” Hollee said.  “It gives me hope.  We’re small business owners and I keep telling people, who’s next?”

More on the NARN in coming weekends.

A little bird in Minneapolis sent me an invitation.

Not, it’s not to me.  It was to someone else – for a $100/plate fundraiser for Minneapolis’ Ward 3 Councilcritter Diane Hofstede, featuring Governor Dayton, Rep. Phyllis Kahn,City Council president Barbara Johnson, and a galaxy of Minneapolis DFL stars.

Not my kind of crowd.

The interesting bit, though, is the stationery.

That’s City of Minneapolis stationery.

For an election fundraiser, this coming Thursday night.

Is this kosher?

Or is this just another of the petty little bits of corruption that attend life in a one-party city?

UPDATE:  I’m informed that the letter and the use of the letterhead is kosher.  It says “not printed at taxpayers expense” in the lower left corner.

That answers that question…

Let’s all us conservatives run down to the “Planned Parenthood” clinic on Ford Parkway in Saint Paul, and block the door.

And when anyone tries to come out of the building – for any reason – we’ll shove them back inside, and not let them get out.  No matter what.  Got your kids with you and need to get home?  F***  you, you’re not leaving.  Done with work at the end of the day?  F*** you, you’re not leaving.  [1].  And if the media asks us any questions, we’ll shout/chant them down, and walk away howling like testosterone-sotted dogs. And if someone gets antsy and starts shoving?  We’ll shove them back, chanting and screaming!

Would that be “non-violent?”

I mean, if  I did it, which no mainstream conservative has done, or intended to do, naturally.  Other than that?

“Occupy?”  That’s a different kettle of organic quinoa.

Megan McArdle notes:

What’s more disturbing, however, is that my reading, and private conversations, have uncovered a number of people who think this is all right–and who consider the real outrage to be the rumor (now squashed, I believe) that an old lady was knocked down by Occupy DC protesters*.

 

I am shocked that anyone would make this argument. This is outrageous. I don’t know any people on the left who would think that this behavior were “non-violent” if it were, say, aimed at abortion clinics. It’s bad enough that many of the occupiers seem to put as little thought as possible into the space they share with many fellow citizens. A sizeable number of them now seem to have decided that physical intimidation is a legitimate tactic with which to express their rage and frustration.

 

I have no doubt that support for these tactics is a minority sentiment on the left. But where are the condemnations that our left-wing commentariat were so eagerly demanding from the right a year ago every time Michelle Bachmann or another tea party figure said something stupid?

No “Tea Party” rally ever did this to anyone, ever.

Never.

Not once.  Nothing close.

“Occupy” is a movement that believes its ends justifies its means.  I don’t think we’re done with this.

[1] It’s a wonderful day for a “Goodfellas” reference.

I’ve got a bit of a dilemma here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Mr. Millhiser is mistaken when he writes…:

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

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

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

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

Flea Partiers in Boston spit on, curse, throw bottle at Coast Guardswoman:.

The Coast Guard in Boston confirmed that a woman in uniform was harassed and spat upon by Occupy Boston protesters.

The woman was walking to the train and said protesters spit on her twice, called her foul names and even threw a water bottle at her.

Just like the grandparents in the seventies.

Or maybe it was their parents.

Heck, maybe it’s them.

An “Occupy LA” speaker exposes the id of the “Occupy…” movement and the radical left:

Occupy L.A. Speaker: “One of the speakers said the solution is nonviolent movement. No, my friend. I’ll give you two examples: French Revolution, and Indian so-called Revolution.

Gandhi, Gandhi today is, with respect to all of you, Gandhi today is a tumor that the ruling class is using constantly to mislead us. French Revolution made fundamental transformation. But it was bloody.

India, the result of Gandhi, is 600 million people living in maximum poverty.

So, ultimately, the bourgeoisie won’t go without violent means. Revolution! Yes, revolution that is led by the working class.

Long live revolution! Long live socialism!”

The posturing of a spoiled post-adolescent?

Sure.  So were the worst atrocities of the Cultural Revolution.

I’m almost getting tired of asking “can you imagine if a Tea Partier had said this?  Any Tea Partier?  Ever”?

Well, imagining is all you have, because it never happened – but it didn’t take that much for the media to find things to condemn the Tea Party over, either.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In English, as well as Arabic.

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

We’ll come back to that.

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

Tea Party brigade struggles to put out BWCA fire

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

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

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

Read the Strib piece for more.

“Spot” picks up…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racism is the only reason.

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

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

Nope.  I still got nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RedSquirrel, writing at the Red Squirrel Report blog, relates what he apparently posted at Stasi.gov.us “AttackWatch.com”.

It’s your informant, ‘Joe’, again. I feel that it’s my duty to blow the whistle on the gang of right-wing miscreants and troublemakers known as The MOB (The Minnesota Organization of Bloggers). I have been working undercover inside that organization, and think that I have their trust.

Two of the MOB bosses, Ed Morrissey and that reprehensible rapscallion, Mitch Berg host The NARN (Northern Alliance Radio Network) on 1280 AM The Patriot. They slander and smear The Messiah regularly, using the public airwaves. I have been monitoring their program for about seven years. Morrissey regularly writes hit pieces for that….that queen of right-wing slime, Michelle Malkin.

A brief point of order;  nobody should feel they’ve “earned the trust” of Ed and I.  We are endlessly devious.  It’s why, for example, we engineered the results of this week’s “Most Valuable Blogger” contest at WCCO – to do for that august competition what Algore, Yassir Arafat and Obama himself did for the “Nobel Peace Prize”. 

But yes – it is a fact we are attacking President Obama, where “attacking” means “exercising our First Amendment rights to dissent while we’re still allowed to”.

Scary!

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

Senator Roger Chamberlain writes:

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

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

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

Here’s the Governor’s contact information.

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

Over at True North, Tom Steward covers the issue.

Gibson Musical Instrument Corp. CEO Henry Juszkiewicz will be at President Obama’s “Jobs” speech tonight, to remind His Excellency and the assembled, adoring media that the Administration’s politicized, idiotic policies – enforcing an arcane Indian law – are going to cost the company millions of dollars, and if followed through will cost the Nashville area 40 skilled, high-paying manufacturing jobs.

Close-up of the new re-issue "Eric Clapton 1960 Les Paul". Hint, Santa.

In solidarity with Gibson, I’ll supply them some free advertising.

Indian Freaking Rosewood, Administration Byatches!

I do endorse Gibson guitars (although, to be fair, most guitar players do – even lifelong Fender guys like me; I finally took the plunge on a Gibson product last year, and yeah, it’s niiiice).

Oooh - Gibson provides jobs all over the world!

Gateway Pundit writes:

Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz told reporters today that the federal raid on the popular American guitar maker will cost the company $10,000,000. Juszkiewicz also said that he will attend Obama’s big spending jobs speech tomorrow in Washington DC.

Is that a gorgeous piece of work or what? It sounds even better than it looks. And guess what? Yep - made in the USA. One of those "American Manufacturing Jobs" that lefties are constantly barbering about. Outsource this? Why not outsource guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns to the Pakistani military, while you're at it?

Attorney General Eric Holder said the raid on the Gibson was not political.

And if you believe Holder you are an idiot here’s an excellent Fox News clip summing up the entire story so far.

Remember – the CEO of Martin guitars (sorry – while they make gorgeous guitars, and I also own a Martin product, they get no free ads from me), which builds guitars out of exactly the same Indian-grown, American-finished rosewood as Gibson, which is not illegal under US law and only vaguely-sanctioned under Indian law, is a big Democrat contributor.

A Gibson ES335. A favorite of both jazz musicians and loud rockers who like the ES' excellent feedback characteristics.

Of course, Gibson is just one of many such stories – companies being harried, money being confiscated, jobs being destroyed by our rapacious, power-mad bureaucracy.

Yep, there's parts, too. This is a Gibspon "Soap Bar". I have one sunk into the middle position of my Fender Jazz, wired out of phase with the bridge pickup; when they play together, it sounds more like Mark Knopfler's Strat (think "Sultans of Swing") than Mark Knopfler's Strat does.

I’m working to get Mr. Juskiewicz on the Northern Alliance one of these next few weekends.  Keep your fingers crossed; if you’re a fan of limited government or music, it’ll be a great chat.