If you’re a conservative, especially in a liberal gulag like the Twin Cities, you don’t need to be reminded that…:

• all too many liberals don’t just disagree with conservatives; they actively, passionately hate them (in a manner that most conservatives, no, do not reciprocate)
• The mainstream media are biased against conservatives and conservatism in a way that is way too systematic to be either random or a matter of a few journalists and their individual worldviews.

As such, the most interesting question to come out of the “Journolist” flap isn’t so much how biased are the media as it is how many more “Journolists” are there?

Given the absolute lock-step uniformity among most of the Twin Cities media when it comes to politics, I’d be personally amazed if there weren’t some form of back-channel collusion going on.

Oh, yeah – and many of  our “elite” media are a bunch of sick bastards…

If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would.

But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, that isn’t what you’d do at all.

In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment.

In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”

….without a whole lot of regard for their fellow citizen…

When the writer Victor Davis Hanson wrote an article about immigration for National Review, for example, blogger Ed Kilgore didn’t even bother to grapple with Hanson’s arguments. Instead Kilgore dismissed Hanson’s piece out of hand as “the kind of Old White Guy cultural reaction that is at the heart of the Tea Party Movement. It’s very close in spirit to the classic 1970s racist tome, The Camp of the Saints, where White Guys struggle to make up their minds whether to go out and murder brown people or just give up.”

…or democracy…:

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air.

Back when Nick Coleman used to rant “The buh-law-ggers wunt tuh duhstroy thuh mediuh”, I and a lot of conservative bloggers protested “No!  We just want to hold it accountable!”.

Nowadays?  Given the extent to which the craft’s “elite” High Priests of Knowledge seem to have been trying to use their power and position to control the country rather than report the news?  Screw ’em.  The NYTimes, the WaPo, the Big Three, , the Strib, CNN – screw ’em all.  They have all gone way way beyond “bias” to become a de facto political party.

And I don’t mean the kind that runs candidates in elections.

In many ways, the classic Minnesota corporations have always been the very model of “good corporate citizens”.  These corporations – 3M, Daytons (now Target), Medtronic, Mayo, Best Buy and many more – gave profusely to Minnesota charities, schools, universities, arts, research…the whole works.

But they’ve also gotten squeezed, hard; has bad as taxes are for individuals in Minnesota, they are much worse for businesses; Minnesota has among the worst corporate tax rates in the country.   And the entire DFL slate – Dayton, Kelliher, Entenza and stealth-DFLer Horner – are running on platforms that involve “creating jobs” by taxing the living daylights out of corporations and their investors.

As we run up toward the primaries, groups working with the DFL – especially the Dayton-funded “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – has poured a sea of money into advertising against Tom Emmer, and it’s just started.  This past week, another group – MNForward – finally put an ad on the air pointing out Emmer’s positive approach to creating more jobs; getting government out of the way of the businesses, small and large, that’ll lead any recovery that happens.

And the DFL is shocked, shocked that some businesses are willing to help keep the Democrats from plundering the state.

The DFL has been hooting and hollering that Target, among a few other businesses [disclosures here – PDF alert] has given money – about $100K – to MNForward.

Among them was DFL representative Ryan “Don’t Call Me Henry” Winkler, who tweeted around eightish last night:

Target fundshttp://tinyurl.com/26bcfkw Emmer adhttp://www.mnforward.com. Emmer anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-min. wage. Target guests agree?

Anti-gay?  Huh?

A bit later, Darin Broton – a PR flak – tweeted back:

@repryanwinkler – Has Target given the House DFL Caucus money this cycle? Past cycles? DFL incumbents?

Winkler responded to Broton:

Nope. Never…

Later yesterday evening, WCCO-TV’s Esme Murphy ran a report on how Democrats were supposedly staying away from Target because of this advertising donation – which prompted me to wonder how many Democrat wonks Murphy hangs out with; the lines at Target in the Midway, deep in the most Tic-infested district in Minnesota, were as long as ever.  Perhaps they were all Republicans? I doubt it.

The Strib also reported that, despite the economic downturn that’s prompted them to lay off people at the corporate office and close a distribution center, than Target is not easing off its charitable giving:

Last year the Minneapolis-based retailer gave $169 million nationally in cash and in-kind contributions, making it, by some reckonings, Minnesota’s most generous grant maker. For the past five years its largess has significantly outpaced that of the McKnight Foundation, Minnesota’s No. 2 donor, according to the Minnesota Council on Foundations. Between 2004 and 2008, Target’s annual giving rose steadily, from $96.3 million to $169 million, while the McKnight Foundation’s went from $75.4 million to $93.6 million…

…Arts organizations around the country are particularly dependent on Target for providing free or reduced admission to museums, theatrical performances and events. Its beneficiaries in the Twin Cities include Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Children’s Theatre Company, Guthrie Theater, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Minnesota Children’s Museum, Circus Juventas, Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre and the Latin American Folklore Dance Company

No matter to Rep. Ryan Winkler, who responded to Murphy via Twitter:

@esmemurphy Target has been good corp. citizen, but MN political spending is new. Your show just showed risk of giving to candidates.

No.  It showed that it’s dangerous being a for-profit business in Minnesota, under the watchful eye of the DFL.  That it’s dangerous to cross the all-beneficent, all-knowing Mother Party.

It shows the risk of crossing party hacks like Steve Winkler, who think that corporate political giving is “new”, and that corporations should just shut up and take it – for giving $100,000 (which is, by the way, $761,000 less than various members of the Dayton family and Dayton’s ex-wife Alida Messinger have given in this cycle to “Win Minnesota” alone).

And it shows the risk of actually having to run a political campaign on donations from people and companies that actually have to earn their money, as opposed to merely inheriting it; the DFL will try to keep you from earning that money.

It’s the Chicago Minnesota DFL way.

Me?  I’m off to Target.   I’m going to buy something I may not even need all that badly.  And I’m going to write “thanks for donating to MNForward” on the charge slip.

Allegations of rampant vote fraud…

…brought by Democrats against Obama, from the 2008 Democratic Primaries.

Read the whole thing.

And then ask yourself if you really believe it all stopped cold at the end of the Dem primary/caucus season.

“Ignore the fact that Mark Dayton is a trust fund baby who lives off of capital gains. Look at that caricature CEO!  Let’s get him!”

Mike Maguire, the DFL mayor of the Twin Cities suburb of Eagan, is

Hoping to preserve “the sanity of our citizens and the beauty of our community,” Eagan Mayor Mike Maguire called on candidates of all political stripes to pledge not to clutter his and other communities with unnecessary political campaign signs through the whole summer.

Maguire, who is running for reelection in November, was disappointed to return home from a family visit this weekend only to see his city already posted with campaign signs for candidates with no elections until November.

“It’s not even the 4th of July yet! Its just too early,” said the Mayor, “Through the summer these signs serve no real purpose but to clutter up our community and subject our citizens to a whole summer of political signage.”

I have a hunch his motive might be a tad more cynical than that; Eagan’s two House and one Senate seats fell to DFLers during the past two elections – but second-tier suburbs like Eagan (where AM1280 The Patriot, the station that broadcasts my show, is located) are hotbeds of the Tea Party in Minnesota.   Eagan’s seats are prime opportunities for GOP pickups this fall.

And the best way to prevent that, if you’re a DFL mayor, is to make sure your citizens aren’t aware that there are any challengers until the last possible moment.

As Real America celebrates the judicial whack the SCOTUS gave the City of Chicago, even the ChiTrib notes how miserably Chicago’s gun ban has failed; Justice Alito, in his majority opinion, noted:

“[A group of Democratic Illinois legislators who proposed calling in the National Guard to try to re-take Chicago’s blood-drenched streets] noted that the number of Chicago homicide victims during the current year equaled the number of American soldiers killed during that same period in Afghanistan and Iraq,” the opinion stated.

“If (the) safety of . . . law abiding members of the community would be enhanced by the possession of handguns in the home for self-defense, then the Second Amendment right protects the rights of minorities and other residents of high-crime areas whose needs are not being met by elected public officials.”

If you can say anything about the government of Chicago, it’s that it doesn’t meet the needs of the people for safety.

And if there’s anything we can count on Richard Daley for, it’s that he’ll do his best to reinforce failure.

Just what kind of idiot is Chicago’s mayor?

In an interview with the Tribune, the mayor said his primary goal would be to protect police officers, paramedics and emergency workers from being shot when responding to an incident at a home.

Right – because cop-killers obey gun bans.

Now, if the NRA doesn’t print Daley’s next statement on T-shirts, and if the GOP doesn’t post it on billboards, and if the Illinois Tea Party isn’t harping on it at the top of their lungs, then all of them need to leave their jobs and never come back:

 He said he also wants to save taxpayers from the financial cost of lawsuits if police shoot someone in the house because the officer felt threatened.

Got that?   The law-abiding should remain unprotected so Daley’s cops don’t get the city in trouble for blazing away at people in their own homes.

It’s East Germany on Lake Michigan.

Come to think of it, maybe they do need the National Guard. 

They should storm City Hall.

J. Christian Adams on the Administration’s intercession in the Black Panther voter intimidation case.

Read the whole thing; it explains the legal vacuity and the legal incompetence of the Administration’s actions (dismissing the case despite clear and overwhelming evidence of federal violations).

But the conclusion is worse:

Most disturbing, the dismissal is part of a creeping lawlessness infusing our government institutions. Citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims. Equal enforcement of justice is not a priority of this administration. Open contempt is voiced for these types of cases.

Some of my co-workers argued that the law should not be used against black wrongdoers because of the long history of slavery and segregation. Less charitable individuals called it “payback time.” Incredibly, after the case was dismissed, instructions were given that no more cases against racial minorities like the Black Panther case would be brought by the Voting Section.

Refusing to enforce the law equally means some citizens are protected by the law while others are left to be victimized, depending on their race. Core American principles of equality before the law and freedom from racial discrimination are at risk. Hopefully, equal enforcement of the law is still a point of bipartisan, if not universal, agreement. However, after my experience with the New Black Panther dismissal and the attitudes held by officials in the Civil Rights Division, I am beginning to fear the era of agreement over these core American principles has passed.

Just keep chanting, liberals; “conservatives are racist; conservatives are racist;conservatives are racist;conservatives are racist;conservatives are racist…”

Keep chanting it to yourself:  “Conservatives are violent; conservatives are violent; conservatives are violent; conservatives are violent; conservatives are violent; conservatives are violent”.

Just keep on chanting.

Last week, in his video tongue-kiss to Obama before his (disastrous) “We Have Nothing To Fear But Oil Itself” speech, Fast Eddie Schultz wrote:

“Mr. PresIdent, I want to see the boot on the neck of BP tonight… it’s OK tonight to act kind of like a dictator and call the shots saying this is the way it’s going to be.”

Granted, Schultz is one of very few talk show hosts who actually is as stupid as conservative talk radio is supposed to be.

But according to Thomas Sowell, who daily excretes more intelligence than Ed Schultz ever had, Schultz may be  getting his tingly-legged wish:

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In other words, the Republicans who “apologized” to BP – over the perversion of US law, as opposed to over accountability – were right?  Hmm.

Many among the public and in the media may think that the issue is simply whether BP’s oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be compensated.

But our government is supposed to be “a government of laws and not of men.”

If our laws and our institutions determine that BP ought to pay $20 billion — or $50 billion or $100 billion — then so be it.

But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without “due process of law.”

Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.

Because the problem is the next victim of government overreach won’t be a big bad capitalist like a BP.

With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don’t believe in constitutional government.

Of course, many liberals don’t.

…if this had been suggested…:

Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday.

…during the Bush administration?

Are ACORN employees  dropping the dime?:

The radical activist group ACORN “works” for the Democratic Party and deliberately promotes election fraud, ACORN employees told FBI investigators, according to an FBI document dump Wednesday.

The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, a watchdog group, are FBI investigators’ reports related to the 2007 investigation and arrest of eight St. Louis, Mo., workers from ACORN’s Project Vote affiliate for violation of election laws. All eight employees involved in the scandal later pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud…The handwritten reports by FBI agents show that ACORN employees reported numerous irregularities in the nonprofit group’s business practices.

“But it’s only voter registration fraud”

Why pay for registrations alone?

According to one report, an ACORN employee said the purpose of “[f]raudulent cards” was “[t]o cause confusion on election day to keep polls open longer,” “[t]o allow people who can’t vote to vote,” and “[t]o allow to vote multiple times.”

Another report quotes an employee saying, “Project Vote will pay them whether cards fake or not – whatever they had to do to get the cards was attitude.” Project Vote pays based on the number of cards and “that’s why they were so reckless,” the report says.

Innocent until proven guilty (or until swept under the table), naturally.

…when the left furrowed its collective brow and fretted at endless length over the “avalanche of violence” – a brief spike in phone threats and a mysteriously-cut gas line – after the Administration and the Congressional Democratic Caucus rammed Obamacare down the nation’s colletive throat?

When all conservative speech, including this blog, was being carefully sifted for evidence of “sedition” and “incitement?”

The American Left certainly doesn’t; the rabbi who videotaped Helen Thomas’ Turner Diary moment is  being deluged with death threats.

The tension of sitting and waiting for a Tea Partier to commit any kind of violence must be making them snap.

In the 1930’s, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty earned himself a place in literary infamy by whitewashing Stalin’s forced famine of Ukraine.

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias can at least take comfort in the fact that their junketeering whitewash of China’s authoritarian assaults on human rights has historical precedent, but will probably not lead to a Pulitzer that gets contested fifty years after their deaths:

Klein and Yglesias’ group was taken to tour a spanking-new village built on the outskirts of the northern city of Dalian. As Yglesias describes it, “back in 2006 the former “village” of rudimentary structures was razed and the government constructed a large and extremely nice park (it’s in a very scenic area), reforested the hillsides, and constructed a series of apartment complexes. The former villagers now live in modest but up-to-date structures.” But don’t worry about the forcibly displaced, Yglesias admonishes us, because, “[w]e spoke to one retired couple who was given four apartments—they live in one and rent out the other three to families who’ve either moved out to Cha’an from the central city or else moved to the area from less prosperous regions of China. The town’s current party boss said he was given five apartments.” Klein’s coverage on the website of the Washington Post was equally credulous. He informed his audience, “A conversation with some residents revealed that they didn’t just get one free apartment in the new building. They got four free apartments, three of which they were now renting out. And medical coverage. And money for furnishings. And a food stipend. And — I’m not kidding, by the way — birthday cakes on their birthdays. Sweet deal.”

The problem is, it’s not a “sweet deal” for most of the millions of Chinese displaced by development projects every years.  China has no real concept of private property; every hovel is considered state property, for the state to destroy as needed for any reason.

Big hydroelectric dam?  Millions relocated (with no documentary evidence of “sweet deals”).  Beijing holds the Olympics?  Over a million relocated.

Sweet.

Yglesias and Klein are on a junket managed and staged by a public relations firm based in Hong Kong called the China-United States Exchange Foundation. While the firm claims on its website it is a “non-government” organization, it would be impossible for it to operate without strictures imposed by the Chinese government. China has no concept of freedom of the press, and there is simply no way that the Beijing government would tolerate a group of American journalists traveling around the country with impunity. In other words, Yglesias, Klein, and their “fellow travelers” are being shown precisely what the Beijing government wants them to see. It is a non-governmental tour in name only. The fact that Klein and Yglesias report back on such obviously staged scenes without a hint of doubt raises serious doubts about their journalistic competence. The “sweet deal” that Klein alluded to above is obviously too – in fact, sickly – sweet. It is plainly obvious to anyone who knows a whit about China that they were visiting a stage-managed potemkin village.

The “Potemkin Village” – named after a Czarist minister who built a fake village to show Western visitors how well the Russian serfs were being treated (they were treated like slaves elsewhere in Russia) – is a great totalitarian tradition; dictators build a really, really nice demonstration of something controversial, to show how benign, even wonderful, it is.  Hitler even built a “Potemkin” concentration camp, Theresienstadt, to show visiting human rights dignitaries and, one presumes, the 1940’s anscestors of Klein and Yglesias, how good concentration camp inmates had it.

Sad to say, they bought it back then, too.

Leftyblogs:  Speaking “sweet deal” to power.

Perhaps Woody was just merely testing a plot to the sequel?

Woody Allen has a strange take on the democracy that allowed him to become rich and famous.

The “Scoop” director said it would be a cool idea for President Barack Obama to be dictator for for a few years.

Why?

So he could get things done without all the hassle of opposing views getting in the way.

In an interview published by Spanish language newspaper La Vanguardia (that we translated), Allen says “I am pleased with Obama. I think he’s brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him.”

But wait – there’s more!

The director said “it would be good…if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”

In other news, Allen revealed that he has redubbed Obama’s inaugural address and centered it around a secret egg salad recipe.

President condemns ubiquitous dissent:

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,” Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

[Like “the only reason not to support Obama is his skin color?” – Ed]

“With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.

What an incredibly illogical statement – unless by “empowerment”, he means government power.

He bemoaned the fact that “some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction,” in the clamor of certain blogs and talk radio outlets.”

All of this is not only putting new pressures on you, it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.”

In other words, the President doesn’t trust the peasants with all of that crazy infomacation.

You’ve heard about it by now; a school sent kids home on Cinco De Mayo for wearing the American flag:

The five teens were sitting at a table outside during their brunch break about 10:10 a.m. when Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez asked two boys to take off their American flag bandannas. The boys said they complied. In the same conversation, sophomore Dominic Maciel said, Rodriguez told the group to “walk with him to the office.”

…

The boys were told they must turn their T-shirts inside-out or be sent home – and that it would not be considered a suspension – but that Rodriguez did not want any fights to break out among Mexican-American students and those wearing American flags. Dariano said other students were wearing American flags but since they were a group of five “we were the easiest target to cause trouble” according to Rodriguez, he said.

Here’s hte part that amazed me:

The boys told Rodriguez and Boden that turning their T-shirts inside-out was disrespectful, so their parents opted to take them home.

I’m kinda shocked that there are kids today who actually know it’s wrong to hide the flag.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Dominic’s mother Julie Fagerstrom. “I’m an open-minded parent, but it’s got to be on both sides. It can’t be five kids singled out.”

A front-desk secretary said Boden was unavailable for any comment on what had happened Wednesday and Rodriguez was busy with testing, the secretary said.

Hint:  Yes, he was, and no, he wasn’t.

More than 100 students were spotted wearing red, white and green as they were leaving school. Some had the Mexican flag painted on their faces or on their arms.

Others have said it was a matter of the school treating the flag like gang colors, likely to cause trouble.

Dear Principal Boden:  Here’s my gang colors, beeyoch:

Better lock down.

Back in March, the left crowed with great glee about the arrest of nine members of the “Hutaree”, a self-styled Christian “Militia” group in Michigan.

The left and media (pardon the redundancy) saw this as the long-awaited proof that the American Right, afroth with racism over Barack Obama, was about to launch an “avalanche of violence” to vent its hatred toward the plucky black President.  They wheeled up the big guns; the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose job it is to see right-wing threats under every rock, reported right-wing threats…under every rock.

They needed something, of course; after setting up a prophylactic narrative in the days after the March 20 passage of Obamacare, the Democrats, led by Steny Hoyer, launched a meme about right-wing violence that impugned and defamed nearly every “out” conservative in the country – but has not to date yielded any violence (short of a still-unexplained “cut gas line” that has tellingly diappeared from the media).

So the Hutaree were a lifeline; a tank of rhetorical oxygen for a meme that was on life support.  Obama and the Dems needed to have Nine Redneck Terrorists, and the Feds obligingly provided them Public Enemies One Through Nine.

But over the past few days, a judge has tossed the Feds’ entire justification for holding them without bail, and raised serious questions about the soundness, and indeed the motivations, of the Feds’ case.

Archy Cary at BigJo runs down the case’s history – read it ASAP if you please – and asks the important question (emphasis added by me):

Here’s the question the MSM needs to ask, but won’t: Was this flamboyant raid primarily driven by political rather than law enforcement motives?

Was the arrest of the Hutaree militia Attorney General Eric Holder’s effort to manufacture an imminent right-wing extremist threat for political purposes?

Just asking.

Fearless prediction:  the Feds will drag this through court as long as they can.  They will lean on the Hutaree as hard as they can with the full weight of federal law enforcement, reinforcing the great Federal prerogative, “you can not afford to fight us”, squeezing them into a plea deal that allows the Administration and Media (ptr) to claim with a straight-ish face that of course there’s a threat!  People got convicted!  Nah nah nah I can’t hear you!

I’ve never cared much for Michael Savage.

And so I’ve never gotten one of his “liberalism is a mental disorder” T-shirts.

But the left seems to want so badly to presume that the right in America – especially the obstreporous, color-outside-the-lines right that’s making so much hay these days – represents some sort of depravity that I think some sort of diagnosis – clinical Narcissism? – might just apply.

Back as far as 9/12 (or maybe 9/13) I remember liberals chanting “the real danger is still home-grown militias”.  And every time there’s an incident these days, that wistful hope – that their fellow Americans are really a bunch of murderout animals – comes back to the front.

Over the weekend, before the arrest of the TImes Square bomber, we had Mayor Bloomberg   fairly hyperventilating at the possibility that the suspect would turn out to be a tea partier – a representative of a moment that has never had so much as a face slap attributed to it:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg appeared on Katie Couric’s show Monday night to discuss the attempted car bombing in Times Square. Between reassuring viewers at home that New York was safe and praising the city’s resilient spirit, Bloomberg wondered aloud if the culprit behind the Times Square car bomb was “a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health-care bill or something.”

Hizzoners’s wishful thinking was brutally let down when t Faisal Shahzad didn’t turn out to be a Tea Partier at all.

So intense is the left’s lust for this blood libel that left publications from The Nation to  the Daily Kos to tony leftybloggers to wannabee journalists citing “anonymous sources” that just knew that every liberals fantasy was going to come true, the left, fresh off of eight years of demanding that the right stop its (nonexistent) threats to their patriotism, seems to have developed an affirmative need to slander half of this nation.

So when are that tiny film of responsible liberals going to demand better of your leaders?

The conservative blogosphere – at least the A through D lists – have been really reticent about assigning blame in the »  beating of Bobby Jindal aide Allee Butsch and her boyfriend last weekend at the Southern Republican Leadership conference in New Orleans.  Conservative bloggers, for example, led the way in showing that the couple weren’t wearing Sarah Palin pins, which was an initial story about the crime:

Allee Butsch suffered a broken leg from the beatdown outside to the SRLC dinner at Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans. She had her leg operated on over the weekend and it will take her months to recover. Her boyfriend Joe Brown suffered a broken nose, a broken jaw, and a concussion. They were attacked after leaving the Southern Republican Leadership Conference dinner at Brennan’s Restaurant.

Police have no suspects, and are doing their best not to release uncorroborated information to the public.  And conservative bloggers aren’t jumping the gun in any numbers to call this a political hate crime – something that Steny Hoyer, Rep. Lewis, Rep. Cleaver, Nancy Pelosi and the Twin Cities AFSCME should try.

Now, I’m not going to jump to any conclusions, and I’ll say up front that the following execise is purely conjectural.

But do me a favor and turn on your stereotype radar when you read the lone description available among the five attackers:

Police are looking for a Caucasian male who appeared to be dirty, in his 20’s, 6′1″ tall, thin build with a thin face. He had a beard and auburn color hair in a pony tail. He was wearing a light color T shirt and dark color pants. Up to 5 men beat the couple after they left the GOP event on Friday night.

A dirty twentysomething white guy in a ponytail.  I mean, if it were a dirty fiftysomething in a ponytail and a beard, you’d think  “a bunch of meth addicts jumped the kids”.  But most twentysomethings have to spend a lot of time, money and effort to affect that kind of look.

The Twin Cities AFSCME has not yet told us whether they consider this  a threat to them from the Tea Party.

I can’t believe I missed this one last week; Lori Sturdevant asks:

Is DFL Senate majority leader growing more conservative on the job?

That’s easy.  No.

But Pogemiller’s no idiot.  I mean, he doesn’t have to be smart in the classical sense to keep winning a seat in his district, but he’s not dumb, either.  He can see which way the wind is blowing.

And in a year when the dominant sentiment is “throw the taxing, spending bums out”, having a statement like “I think it’s simplistic and naive to say people can spend their money better than the government” on one’s record can’t be good electoral mojo.

So it makes perfect sense that someone like Pogy would enlist some willing flaks – that’d be Sturdevant – to try to paper over that long record of “all of your money are belong to us”-type statements, made back when it looked like Obama’s shirt-tails were going to stretch all the way into the next century.

But underneath it all?  It’s gonna be the same old story.

By the way, I’m going to put that quote on a sign to take to the Tea Party.

Along with Cy Thao’s classic “When you win, you get to keep your money, when we win, we take your money”.

Wonder if Sturdevant’s gonna write a piece about Thao’s newfound financial libertarianism?

The greatest fear of a genuine conservative is government inflicting too much power on society.  The greatest fear of a genuine liberal is that government lacks the size and power to govern society.

Hold those thoughts.  We’ll come back to them.

———-

There are a lot of reasons to distrust government.  The least of them is that nothing guarantees it will ever be able to help you when you need it.

It’s happened.  Katrina, of course, was a debacle.  Before that?  It took only a videotaped beating and an unpopular “innocent” verdict to turn one of our major cities into a war zone – one from which government withdrew, leaving the citizens to the mercy of the mob and to their own devices.

And the most inspiring scene from that entire miserable episode was that of Korean shop owners, armed with their own rifles and shotguns, patrolling their storefronts and rooflines, bringing order to anarchy.  As stores burned all around them, they and their property remained safe – because when government couldn’t safeguard them, they did it for themselves. 

I saw that, and I damn near cried.  It was beautiful – the silhouette of an American citizen with a rifle, doing what big, stupid government can’t, drawing the metaphorical line in the sand and saying “You, evil, shall not pass”, and facing down the mob, and on their little corner or in front of their little store, winning.

They were the militia.

Not the idiot nutslaps in Michigan who are serving as the media and left’s current boogeymen on the subject.

Indeed, we all are.  That’s the law.  The Second Amendment says so – boiled down to 21st century parlance, it says “since freedom needs to be defended, the people shall have the right to own guns, and use them”.   Heller declared that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” means “you and me, the law-abiding citizens”.   God willing, McDonald will say “and it means the same thing in ever corner, nook and cranny of the union”.    It is the duty of every law-abiding citizen who pays more than lip service to liberty to own a gun and be proficient with it.

Now, go back to that first section.  The great difference between liberals and conservatives is the question “who’s in charge”. 

Last year during the Tea Parties, much of the media and about half the nation  got the victorian vapours over a few reports that Tea Partiers had brought firearms to the rallies.   And it was instructive to see peoples’ reactions to the news that nobody got arrested, because in the jurisdictions involved, it was perfectly legal.

About half the country rolled their heads in horror; “what if someone had shot somebody?”  Some even suggested that the possibility that one of these law-abiding armed citizens would step out of line was cause to restict the Second Amendment.

The other half went “Well, duh!”.  They know that the law-abiding citizen is a law-abiding citizen, whether he’s carrying a wrist rocket or an M14 or a flamethrower for that matter.  Our rights, they know, front and center in the heart of their soul, are not dependent on what our dumbest neighbors might do!.

To the liberal, a citizen who believes society is a free association of equals who consent to be governed, and who believe that consent must be earned, and who arms himself to reinforce the point, is threatening; “who governs him?”, the liberal asks.  The conservative responds “Unless I’ve actually broken a law?  I do!”.   That defies the liberal’s vision for what “society” is.

Tough.

Peter Suderman notes that the Federal Communications Commission is poking its nose into regulating the Internet.

But that’s not the main issue.  The question is not whether we need the FCC at all:

The FCC’s entire approach is to rule by impulse and expand its reach whenever and wherever possible. Recent FCC actions include investigating the approval process Apple employs in its iPhone App Store, mulling whether and how phone companies might upgrade their networks and passing judgment on various consumer devices of minimal likely importance, such as the Palm Pixi.

The FCC is a crank-and-wire institution in a nanocircuit age:

When the FCC was launched in 1934, backers argued that airwave scarcity justified its existence. In an age of information overload, with a nearly infinite array of media choices available to anyone with a mobile phone or broadband connection, no such argument can be made. Yet rather than shrinking, the FCC has ballooned, growing its budget by more than 60 percent between 1999 and 2009.

The FCC is one of many government agencies that an administration that cared about responsible, limited, unobtrusive government could eliminate in toto without anyone noticing.

…so why does America think we lost…and lost big?

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the health care overhaul signed into law last week costs too much and expands the government’s role in health care too far, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, underscoring an uphill selling job ahead for President Obama and congressional Democrats.

Is it the Pareto Principle? Are one-third of us smarter than the other two thirds? If so, is that how Amerika works now?

“They’re going to have to spend substantial time convincing people of the concrete benefits of this legislation.”

Isn’t that supposed to happen before a law is passed?

Interestingly, regarding the post-passage “violence” on the part of “opponents” to the bill, what say ye Amerika?

And when asked about incidents of vandalism and threats that followed the bill’s passage, Americans are more inclined to blame Democratic political tactics than critics’ harsh rhetoric. Forty-nine percent say Democratic tactics are “a major reason” for the incidents, while 46% blame criticism by conservative commentators and 43% the criticism of Republican leaders.

Is that tacit approval for the acts of defiance?

First the Obama administration blasts Wall Street for not following the rules…and also when they do. AT&T discharges it’s duty to shareholders by quantifying the hit they will be taking as a result of Obamacare.

This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”

…when in fact what they are is simple math.

Give this a listen.

See you at a Tea Party.  With, or in front of.  Either one is fine by me.