Republican “xeroxes” a bill: Leftymedia chants indignantly.
Democrat not only copies and pastes a bill from a special interest group, but allows that special interest’s registered lobbyist to sit in in the role of a legislator to introduce and read the bill into the record?
{crickets}
Berg’s Seventh Law may be the single most prescient thing I’ve ever written.
Remember when the left thought Sarah Palin’s jaunty “I’m Not Retreating, I’m Reloading” was a lethal threat?
I know; any human being with an IQ above plant life knew that the left was being drama-queeny at best, cynically manipulating an argument for low-information voters at worst.
Beyond that? It was Berg’s Seventh Law in action. Because while there’s not a psychopath simmering inside every liberal, or even most, it’s an ideology that promotes and rewards it.
As with this “guy”:
I guess I’ll rethink my request of @letargets for a @maryfranson (don’t worry, Mary, I just throw used gum). #nogunspo.st/ffMEnx
— Richard Molby (@rvm4) February 20, 2013
@LETargets is, of course “Law Enforcement Targets“, a Minnesota company that’s gotten flak for making custom targets of armed children, senior citizens and pregnant women, to help de-sensitize police officers to the idea of shooting to kill any of them.
The police’s current focus on “officer safety” at the expense of “citizens’ safety” is certainly worth discussing.
Desensitizing people to killing conservative legislators? It’s worth condemning.
I sent the following to Nick Coleman – the “Executive Editor” of Twin Cities’ videoleftyblog The Uptake, which appears to have jettisoned all pretense of being anything but, well, a videoleftyblog – after reading his email to the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance last night:
Mr. Coleman,
I caught your note to Andrew Rothman on Facebook.
As a rigidly law-abiding gun owner, I have a special interest in policing my own.
So if you would please: from whom are you getting this “growing sense” at the Capitol?
Any actual legislators you could name? Did they have complaints about any specific behavior, from any particular attendees?
If they felt intimidated, was there a reason they didn’t notify Capitol Security – who said, Mr. Rothman noted, that the crowd was better-behaved than most?
Finally, Mr. Coleman – as you have publicly acknowledged being a carry permit holder, how do people “find it possible” do do anything around you, knowing that you may be armed? It’s a serious question.
Thanks in advance.
Mitch Berg
Uppity Peasant
I’m not exactly expecting an answer. The one time Nick answered a question of mine, it was…
…well, memorable.
That is all.
There was a story yesterday.
The Sorosphere started feverishly blogging and tweeting about it…
…and then it stopped. And the mainstream media barely touched the story, as important and utterly newsworthy as it was.
Why?
Because the story’s main takeaway was that the NRA was absolutely right.
Emboldened by Betty McCollum’s plaintive cry for a “dialog”, I met my DFLer friend, AVERY LIBRELLE. Avery was just coming out of point-chanting practice at the Union building in downtown Saint Paul; we decided to have a dialog over a drink or two at the St. Paul Hotel.
MITCH: OK, a dialog about guns. OK, I’ll start by pre-empting one inevitable strawman; there are gun controls that actually reduce crime. They include keeping guns out of the hands of felons, and ramping up the sentences for gun crimes. They’re the measures the “Gun Lobby”, including but not limited to the NRA, have worked for. And they’ve worked.
LIBRELLE: The NRA is a terrorist group.
MITCH: Um…well, no. It’s an industry and hobby group that does some lobbying.
LIBRELLE: They are owned by the gun industry.
MITCH: The firearms industry certainly donates money to the NRA, since they are the biggest, baddest group fighting for their right to do business. They have the right to do that. But the NRA has always been one of America’s biggest grass-roots organizations. And it’s only getting bigger; it’s up 500,000 in the past six weeks. And that’s people who pay $35, at least, for a year; not a ton of money, but not inconsiderable in these tough times, either. And that’s up from 3 million in 1990.
LIBRELLE: Guns are out of control!
MITCH: Er, no. Violent crime is steadily falling, even as the number of guns in society approaches one for every American. Gun crimes are down nearly 50% in the past 20 years, along with crime in general. And the NRA worked with sensible politicians on both sides of the aisle to make that happen. In other words, the NRA has always supported gun controls that actually work – by attacking criminals, not the law-abiding.
LIBRELLE: But mass shootings are out of control!
MITCH: Well, no – media coverage notwithstanding, they’re actually less common than they were 20 years ago. In fact, the worst year for mass shootings was…1929.
LIBRELLE: But we have to dooooooo something.
MITCH: We’ve done something. It’s been working. It’s just that we haven’t done the “something” that our media establishment and its’ left-of-center political benefactors want.
LIBRELLE: We have to control guns. Period.
MITCH: Did you just use “Period” to try to prove a point?
LIBRELLE: Guns are out of control.
MITCH: Er, where do you get this?
LIBRELLE: You’re crazy.
MITCH: Um – what now? We’re having a dialog, right? And yet all you’ve done is recite chanting points and long-debunked stats.
LIBRELLE: I bet you’re compensating for something. If you know what I mean.
MITCH: Yep. Compensating for the fact that there is evil in this world, yadda yadda.
LIBRELLE: You’re just a cranky middle-aged bald white guy.
MITCH: And the last I checked the Constitution applies to us too. So – do you have any actual facts to bring to this “dialog?”
LIBRELLE: The NRA are fascists.
MITCH: So in response to decades of patiently-assembled facts that support my case, you have ad-homina and chanting points?
LIBRELLE: You’re cray-cray.
MITCH: That’s not, technically, “dialog”.
LIBRELLE: Why do you hate children.
MITCH: This isn’t dialog. This is me debating, you trying to trash me.
LIBRELLE: Now you’re having a melt-down.
MITCH: Don’t flatter yourself.
LIBRELLE: I should wear a flak jacket. You may try to kill me.
MITCH: That’s nuts.
LIBRELLE: Oh, now you’re attacking me personally! There’s no way to have a dialog with you gun nuts!
(And SCENE)
Over the years on this blog, I’ve made certain observations about human behavior as manifested through online media, like blogs and Twitter. 
I’ve captured and codifed some of these observations as “Berg’s Law“, a series of common observations that I’m pretty sure are universal.
One of the most commonly-invoked Laws is “Berg’s Seventh Law”, which states “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.
I’ve rung up quite a number of occurrences of Berg’s 7th over the years. And I’ve found another.
Big-time.
To: Eric Black, MinnPost
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re: The New JournoList?
Mr. Black,
You built your reputation as a reporter. And for that, I give you all due respect.
I was a reporter, too. Not much of one; a couple of radio stations, some free-lance print work. Nothing big, and certainly nothing to build a career out of – but I did learn one thing, and practice it; a reporter is supposed to ask questions.
And while I apply only the broadest possible definition of “journalist” to myself, I do ask questions. I’m told I’m not bad at it, at least on the radio; even a reporter on your side of the aisle commented on it (I’ll direct you to paragraph 16). So it’s not a foreign concept to me.
Now, far be it from me to gainsay one of the deans of Minnesota political writing, but I’ve got a question here.
Last week, you wrote about Dr. Carl Bogus’ assertion from fifteen years ago that the Second Amendment was written to protect slavery. Now, my friend and frequent commenter Joe Doakes – who actually is a lawyer – pointed out that Bogus’ theory is given no weight by the legal academy, because it’s been pretty soundly debunked and, more signally, ignored by legal scholars; Bogus’ theory is only kept alive by anti-gunners who like, as Doakes put it, to “borrow his degree to lend them legitimacy”.
So here’s what I’m curious about.
Bogus published his theory fifteen years ago. It was roundly shredded in short order. It was substantially ignored (beyond a few trivial references to incidental research) in the SCOTUS’ debates that led to the Heller and McDonald decisions, which respectively adopted the “individual right” definition of the 2nd Amendment and incorporated that definition onto the states.
And yet somehow last week Bogus’ theory was pulled from legal history’s scrap heap and restored to glorious prominence by the gun-grabber left.
Hey! It’s Confederate soldiers, defending slavery! The MinnPost ran this image in Eric Black’s story last week about Carl Bogus’ theory. I’m never going to let the MinnPost live this one down!
So I got to checking. The first I heard about it was a comment on my blog on 1/17, which pointed to your article in MinnPost the same day; around that time, I started seeing a lot of lefties on Twitter chanting more or less the same thing. Danny Glover and Roger Ebert had spoken or written about it, stating the “slavery” theory as settled fact, around the same time. And the story was churning around the leftyblog fever swamp, as these things do, once the likes of Kos and Crooks and Liars repeated the meme (which meant every bobbleheaded leftyblog carried it like it was the revealed truth).
Disarmed people – Jews, in this case – dealing with the SS, which is short for “Schützstaffel”, which loosely translated means “Department of Homeland Security”. Connect the dots, people. The MinnPost can run its inflammatory, searing, emotionally manipulative images, I’ll run mine. Mine happen to be good analogies based on historical fact, but whatever.
Now, a concerted Googling (and a reading of your piece) seems to show that the “writing” about the subject links back to last Tuesday, when lefty talk show host Thom Hartmann – who is sort of the Dennis Prager of the left, only without the intelligence or credentials – wrote a piece on the lefty überblogs TruthOut and Smirking Chimp , lavishly citing Bogus’ theory.
Oops, I did it again! More disarmed people! The sign above their heads says “Arbeit Macht Frei”, which is German for “Work Creates Freedom”, which was sort of the “Hope and Change” of the era. Again – you publish your inflammatory, emotionally manipulative images? I’ll publish mine.
And I thought the dynamics of the story were interesting; in two days, the “story” of Bogus’ “theory”, which had laid mostly dormant since being shredded in the court of academic and public opinion half a generation ago, suddenly was on the lips and minds and blogs of, it seemed, every lefty, from the fever swamp to Hollywood (pardon the redundancy) to, well, MinnPost and a half a million chuckleheaded leftybots on Twitter.
I’ve been writing online for a long time, Mr. Black. I’ve seen memes come and go. The “come” side usually takes a while; someone writes something, it gains traction, it holds sway, it rolls away like the tide. It usually takes a little while.
The Klan attacking black people! And therein lies the real truth – and the Berg’s Seventh Law reference; Gun Control actually has its roots in American racism. The first serious American gun control laws were aimed at – you guessed it – blacks. In fact, the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment was written in part in response to a Texas law aimed at former slaves who’d been shooting up Klansmen.
But the Bogus theory went, metaphorically, from zero to sixty in four seconds flat.
Didja notice that?
Anyway, those are the facts; Bogus’ theory came, was shredded, went away for fifteen years, and suddenly re-germinated across the broad swathe of lefty opinion over the course of two measly days. Now, leaving aside the fact that the theory is, well, bogus (as noted last week) – wouldn’t it have been a useful fact for the reader to know that Bogus’ theory has been languishing in academic obscurity for 15 years for a reason? I know, that would have been a statement against your interest and, I suspect, the MinnPost’s, but it’s kinda significant, no?
But here’s my question: aren’t you the least bit curious as to the, er, pace at which this meme swept the left? From “forgotten” to “conventional wisdom” in two days?
It almost seems as if there’s some sort of back-channel communication – one might even call it a list of journalists, absurd as that sounds – a, for lack of a better term, “Journo List” that syncs the leftymedia up on the major chanting points.
No, I know – that’s just crazy talk. I know.
Anyway – did that strike you as odd in any way? If not, why?
That is all.
PS: Well, no. It’s not. Because while the theory that the Second Amendment was “about protecting slavery” is pretty much a fringe, fever-swamp conceit, it is a matter of settled historical fact and Constitutional Law that the roots of the gun control movement are intensely racist.
More at noon today.
Karl Bremer passed away from complications of pancreatic cancer yesterday.
Bremer, the co-author of “The Madness of Michele Bachmann: A Broad-Minded Survey of a Small-Minded Candidate,” died Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 15, at his house in Stillwater Township, from complications related to pancreatic cancer. He was 60.
Bremer was a tenacious muckraker, an award-winning blogger and an avid photographer. His blog — Ripple in Stillwater — was named Best Local Blog by City Pages in 2012. He also received several Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists awards for best use of public records.
I’d never speak ill of the dead. Bremer had his friends and family. I’m sorry for everyone’s loss.
But looking at all the references to Bremer as a “journalist”, I have to ask – is Brian Lambert going to ask to see his “badge?“, retroactively?
The other day, I was talking with Sheila Rae Thorvaldssen, a woman from Dilworth Minnesota who writes the liberal-leaning blog Oh Noes, Wingnutz Are Blooming Like Loosestrife On My Lawn. It is one of the leading blogs, left or right, from outstate Minnesota.
The conversation went something like this:
THORVALDSSEN: Har har, Merg! You gunny wingnuts have been pwn3ed again! Tony Cornish said stuff that wasn’t true!
ME: Yeah, that’s the problem with being a pro-Second Amendment activist. If you’re a gun controller, all you have to do is keep repeating the same lines over and over again. On our side, you have to keep up with current events. Israel “toughened” up their gun laws in the last decade or so!
THORVALDSSEN: It must be awkward to realize you were wrong on all the facts!
ME: Well, it sucks bobbling facts, and we all try not to. But here’s the rub; you’ve heard that old saying, “the British lose all the battles but win the wars?”
THORVALDSSEN: No. Did Conan O’Brien say it?
ME: Nope. Anyway – it’s a little like that when you’re a 2nd Amendment activist. Every once in a while you may bobble a fact, or factoid, that’s part of the larger discussion – but we’re still right on the actual conclusions.
THORVALDSSEN: Oh, riiiiiight.
ME: Well, wrapped around that factoid about the Israelis “toughening” their gun laws are two facts that everyone, like you, that jumps up and down about Rep. Cornish – and me! – bobbling the fact is the inconvenient truth that that factoid reinforces two conclusions that we’ve always made.
THORVALDSSEN: That’s just crazy talk.
ME: Well, yeah, but not in the way you think. For starters, the “tightening” of gun laws – on the law-abiding – in Israel cut the number of legal firearms in half – but more than doubled the number of illegal ones, and reinforced the black market. Which is exactly what happens whenever gun control is tried, whether in Tel Aviv or Chicago.
THORVALDSSEN: Hah hah! You said there were two conclusions, but you only gave one! You are a liar!
ME: Well, the other one is this; whatever happened in Israel in the past decade or so, and whatever they do now, it is a historical fact that in the seventies, there were several attacks on Israeli schools and school children – the 1970 Avivim Massacre which killed 12 kids, the Kiryat Shmona massacre (which began as an attempt to kill the children at a kibbutz school and evolved from there, ending in 18 dead, eight of them children), and the Ma’alot Massacre (terrorists killed 22 children and five adults). That’s 42 dead children among three incidents, in a population about the size of Minnesota’s. Can you imagine almost five Red Lake massacres in four years, the affect that’d have here? Anyway – at the time, one of Israel’s responses – one of many – was to allow teachers in high risk areas along the borders to carry legally-permitted guns.
THORVALDSSEN: So?
ME: So the attacks on children stopped. They found softer targets – actually, they largely switched to bombs and rockets.
THORVALDSSEN: But Cornish got current Israeli law wrong. So your entire point is invalid! Hah! Bow down before my superior reasoning, bitchez!
ME: Not if your point is “there are some ideas out there to stop school violence”. The point being, once schools became harder targets – in this case, harder because teachers in vulnerable areas were armed – school shooting stopped.
People like Cornish – and me, by the way – say that that just might be a better than the “gun-free school zones” that we’ve been trying for the past 25 years or so.
THORVALDSSEN: But you forgot the ultimate argument against arming teachers.
ME: What’s that.
THORVALDSSEN: It won’t work. Period.
ME: What makes that the ultimate argument?
THORVALDSSEN: I said “Period” at the end.
ME: Hm.
THORVALDSSEN: That means you’ve been pwn3d.
ME: Huh.
THORVALDSSEN: Do you feel awkward yet?
ME: Sure, why not?
And SCENE.
One of the reasons the Democrats and media are working so hard to drive a wedge between the “establishment” GOP and the Tea Party is that the Tea Party wins elections and, more importantly, represents the real future of the GOP.
Haley, a little-known state senator before being elected governor, would never have had a chance at becoming governor against the state’s good ol’ boy network of statewide officeholders. Scott would have been a long shot in his Republican primary against none other than Strom Thurmond’s youngest son. Marco Rubio, now the hyped 2016 presidential favorite, would have stepped aside to see now-Democrat Charlie Crist become the next senator, depriving the party of one of its most talented stars. Ted Cruz, the other Hispanic Republican in the Senate, would have never chanced a seemingly futile bid against Texas’s 67-year-old lieutenant governor, seen as a lock to succeed Kay Bailey Hutchison.
But all those upset victories–all of which at the time seemed shocking–took place because of the conservative grassroots’ strong sentiment for outsiders who campaigned on their principles, and not over their past political or family connections. Even a decade ago, party officials would have been more successful in pushing these outsider candidates aside, persuading them to wait their turn. (In Rubio’s case, it almost worked.) Now, in an era where grassroots politicking is as easy as ever thanks to the proliferation of social media, more control is in the hands of voters. And contrary to the ugly stereotypes of conservative activists being right-wing to the point of racist, it’s been the tea party movement that’s been behind the political success of most prominent minority Republican officeholders.
That, of course, is not the current left and media (ptr) narrative about the Tea Party. The media, and its rhetorical camp followers in the Leftyblogosphere Stupid Caucus, have been banging the “Teh Tea Partie is teh ignerent racisst” drum for close to four years now.
And in that time, the GOP overtook the Democrats in the number of elected minorities at the state level.
This is potentially good news, in the long term.
If the GOP deserves to keep it going.
Looking at Boehner’s performance this year, I’m seeing an obstacle or two.
…as Dennis Prager said.
But Amitai Etzioni, writing in the Huffpo, truly truly is that stupid.
SCENE: MITCH is sitting with Inge “Lucky” CARROLL and Bridget GRETELSTEIN, operatives for the ABM (“Alita Buys Minnesota”), at the Champs in Mendota Heights.
MITCH: (Continuing conversation that started before the scene) Well, yeah – ABM and the DFL’s message – pardon the redundancy – was aimed at low-information voters.
CARROLL(sitting with four empty cosmos in front of her): Hah! You are having teh meltdown!
BERG: Er, huh? “Meltdown”.
CARROLL: Yes. You are having teh meltdown.
BERG: Well, no. I’m pretty calm. Bored and waiting for a drink, actually. Where do you get “meltdown?”
GRETELSTEIN: It makes you uncomfortable, talking about your declining mental state. Doesn’t it?
BERG: No, it makes me uncomfortable that neither of you will answer a question about your organization’s cynical, factually-challenged campaign. I’ve been documenting all your group’s lies for years now. And I’m just amazed that so many people in our purportedly “above-average” state buy such a line of transparent BS.
CARROLL: You’re so angry, you’re about to have teh stroke.
BERG: What part of “bored and waiting on a drink” do you have trouble with?
GRETELSTEIN: Don’t go all postal on us!
BERG: Hm. OK, I’ll see what I can do. Hey, let’s talk about what the new DFL majority will inherit – since Democrats are all about babbling about things they inherited. A balanced state budget, for starters.
(Silence for a few seconds as CARROLL and GRETELSTEIN look uncomfortably at each other).
CARROLL: You are having teh meltdown.
(And SCENE)
I mean, seriously.
Watching Melissa Harris-Perry (!)’s meltdown on MSNBC…:
(Which I’ve moved below the jump, to keep it from auto-launching):
Seen at the State Fair (courtesy Andy Parrish):
“Exterminate Christians One Bullet At A Time”. Photo courtesy Andy Parrish, found at @AndyParrishMN on Twitter.
Now, is this really the Is this the exposed intellectual id of the DFL in action?
No, not really. Well, not totally – the Twin Cities is home to quite a few Wahhabi Atheists.
No, it’s just that after years not only of dim-bulb leftybloggers posting photos of redneck peckerwoods from Moldy Holler with objectionable signs hanging around the fringes of Tea Party rallies in Chattanooga labelled “This is today’s GOP”, but in fact Minnesota’s state-supported news service doing exactly the same, I figured I was entitled to one humorous fit of pique.
Note To Mr. Hairball: It’s been tried. Lots of us Christians are much harder targets than you are – and, let’s be honest, like most lefties, you’re all talk and no delivery, so I’m not exactly concerned. Nonetheless, in the words of the prophet Callaghan, “do you feel lucky?”
Serious Question For Lefties: I know, moral equivalence is a one-way street with you folks – but seriously, this is one of your guys, at the fair to espouse one of your key anti-initiatives this fall, in the intellectual center of the upper-Midwest left. You know damn well if it were a conservative – even one obviously from some trailer park outside Ashland Wisconsin – wearing a “God Hates Fags” T-Shirt, you’d be holding every blessed Republican in Minnesota and Wisconsin answerable. I mean, you blamed Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs” for the Tuscon shooting, for Stu’s sake.
I’m beyond asking for intellectual honesty from you folks, or the media that serve as your Praetorian Guard.
I’m just pointing it out. . Yet again. As I’ve done for ten solid years now.
Final Question For “Progressives”: At what point does this become a “Dog Whistle”? Or, alternatively, a commentary on the entire lefty id?
I’ve seen few better explanations of the Dems’ “Narratives For The Ill-Informed” strategy:
I used to joke “If a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear him, is he still an extremist?”
It’s not really much of a joke anymore.
Well, that didn’t take long. It’s Eric Boehlert, from Media Matters – George Soros’ attack-PR shop – on Twitter. Emphasis added to keep me from puking:
@EricBoehlert #kindalame former Navy SEALs don’t have guts to admit they’re running a GOP, anti-Obama campaign; http://nyti.ms/N2nYYj
I think the “anti-Obama” bit is pretty obvious. As is the alternative to Obama.
As to the guts?
Is the WaPo’s “Politifact” biased toward the left?
Mitt Romney, after weighing risks (including taxes) and returns, opting to put money in a Swiss bank account: The biggest crisis they can gin up to draw attentio away from the Obama depression for now ever. and a sign of disloyalty and lack of faith in his nation!
Mark Dayton, after weighing the risks (including taxes) and returns, opting to stash money in a “Dynasty” trust in low-tax South Dakota: “Hey, a guy’s got a right to watch out for his nest egg!”
Years ago, my old friend Moonbeam Birkenstock – who is much farther left than I am to the right – announced, with great noise and fury, that he was through paying the portion of his taxes to the Feds that went to defense.
“I refuse to contribute to the US military, which exists only to murder children and bomb innocent people” bellowed Birkenstock as we talked at a party.
I grinned a smug grin, pulled a pocket-sized copy of the US Tax Code from my pocket, and announced “You are teh LIER!!! Nowhere in the IRS Tax code can you find a single reference to rifles or bombers or bombs or any sort of military hardware at all!”.
Moonbeam pulled a can of mace and gave me a long, wet blast in the face. And as I coughed and hacked and wiped tears from my eyes, I knew I deserved it.
———-
Eric Austin is a liberal blogger from somewhere in central Minnesota. We’ve run into him before – in one case, admitting in an audio passage that he condoned the bullying of the child of a conservative legislator because, in his words (seriously – follow the link and listen to the audio, if you can stomach it – it may be one of the most vile, reprehensible things I’ve ever heard) her mother had voted against a bill making bullying gay kids extra special illegal.
But that was then. This is now. Perhaps Austin’s rhetoric has improved with time and maturity?
Local conservative layabout, Gary Gross, has been churning out quite a few posts since the Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act is, in fact, Constitutional. Any one of those posts could be the subject of another episode of Gross Inaccuracies but who has the time to keep up with a single childless unemployed blogger who lives off the government he loathes.
OK, ixnay on the whole “improvement” and “maturity” thing, I’d say I’m curious how Mr. Austin thinks this sort of ugly, personal name-calling advances his, or any, argument…
…but I’m not curious. It’s easy. The fact is, it’s incredibly easy for Minnesota liberals to grow to what passes for “adulthood” these days – through their feminized public schools, a university system that marginalizes and expunges conservative dissent from the dominant narrative, and a media that accepts liberalism as the baseline for good and, via its leading figure Jon Stewart, “snark” as its main rhetorical cudgel – without having the foggiest idea how to debate a conservative, or even what real civilized debate is.
Which is why most liberals’ “arguments” start with ad hominem and tu quoque (“Look! My opponent said or did something that is inconsistent with something else he says or does! That invalidates his entire argument!”) and proceed through…
…well…
Today’s episode of Gross Inaccuracies concerns the most ludicrous of these most recent posts about how terribly awfully no good it is to now have Romneycare (oops, I mean Obamacare). Gross fawns over an exchange on Fox News between Sarah Palin and the token Democrat on the show about how there really are DEATH PANELS in the Affordable Care Act.
Here is the relevant part of the exchange from Palin:
There’s a faceless bureaucratic panel and the acronym is the IPAB and the I-P-A-B, what that will be is that is a board that will tell you, Bob, whether your level of productivity in society is worthy of receiving the rationed care that will be the result of Obamacare.
Now there is a board called the Independent Payment Advisory Board but its purpose isn’t anywhere close to what Palin suggests. The duty of the board is to find ways to keep Medicare spending from growing out of control. However, one of its provisions specifically states that it may not recommend “rationing” care.
Right. So – like my friend Moonbeam Birkenstock in the example at the top of this post, Palin has completely botched the entire factual basis of the argument…
…well, no. She has assigned a role to one piece of the bureaucracy that will be practiced by another piece of the bureaucracy. It might be a government agency, or as Austin notes from the mandate tax law…
From the Affordable Care Act:
‘‘(ii) The proposal shall not include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums under section 1818, 1818A, or 1839, increase Medicare beneficiary cost- sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria. [emphasis mine]
So what this means – if you accept it at face value – is that the law will not deal, in and of itself, with rationing. That can is being kicked down the road.
Which brings us to a key fact of this debate, one that Obama and Obamacare’s supporters either don’t know or don’t want you to know. It’s true that there will likely never be a room somewhere in northern Virginia with a brass plate on the door engraved with the title “Death Panel Conference Room”, and that nobody in whatever bureaucracy takes over Obamacare will have “Death Panelist” on their job description.
But in modern health care insurance parlance, the term you look for is “Case Management” (sometimes “Care Management”). The term was spawned in the eighties, in the HMO industry, to cover the intersection of insurance, medicine and actuarial science. And it’s the part of the health care insurance industry that goes through the utterly rational process of answering the question “if we have one transplantable liver, do we give it to the 43 year old guy with the curable degenerative enzyme disorder whose productive life expectancy will be increased by (on the average) ten years, or do we give it to the 70 year old chain-smoking diabetic alcoholic who has already run past her life expectancy given her current state of health”
To the 43 year old who gets the liver, it’s how the system works. I suspect to the family of the 70 year old, the body that made that decision could be viewed as a “death panel”.
The facts, however, are…:
While Palin continues to use a lie that has been repeatedly debunked by fact checking organizations and was even named the Lie of the Year by one,
Not by “one” – by “Politifact”, which has been pretty well shown (via the “Lie of the Year” canard and some even more egregious episodes) to be less a “fact checking” organization and more a Democrat propaganda mill.
Austin takes issue with Gross’ explanation of the various bureaucratic roles involved, and reaches some conclusion:
Let’s take a couple things here, Gary. First, the Independent Payment Advisory Board doesn’t look at any “individuals” but rather looks at the Medicare system as a whole and it explicitly states in its mission that it shall not recommend “rationing” health care. Second, the phrase “quality adjusted life years” is not used ANYWHERE in the Affordable Care Act.
This, Austin calls a “lie”. At the most, of course, it’s an “error” – “Lying” requires some intent to deceive.
And, like my friend Moonbeam at the top of the story, the only immediate error (or, if you’re a liberal talking about a conservative, “lie”) is in mixing up different layers of administrators.
Sophistic niggling about different layers of the bureaucracy is the kind of thing that sends tingles up law students and bureaucracy-nerds’ legs. But in terms of the actual effect of Obamacare on real people, they’re all distinctions without differences. They are all parts of a system that will, inexorably, lead to increased shortage, hiked costs and diminished availability.
Which will be arbitrated by some body, somewhere.
And you can call it a “Case Management Process”, a “Death Panel”, or a “Happy Time Commission” for all anyone cares. The result in terms that real people, real taxpayers, care about is always, and can only be, the same.
And with those immutable facts in place, I suppose responding to dissent with snark and ad-hominem is better, to some, than just admitting you’re wrong and addressing that whole “why do you promote the bullying of children?” thing.
Who do Minnesota Liberals hate?
Feel free to particpate in this vital sociological research through Monday night at 11:59PM! Just leave your list of the top ten or so in the comment section (or email it to “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”), in order from most to least hated.
Results will start coming out on Tuesday.
Nominees so far are below the jump.
Jim Treacher notes what many conservative observers have long known; that thing the leftymedia and lefty “alt” media refer to as “fact-checking” is really no more than Democrat narrative-buffing.
“Politifact”, it seems, is less interested in “facts” than in “upholding the Democrat side of the story“.
Matthew Hoy writes:
In 2009, Judicial Watch made a big splash when they revealed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been using military aircraft to travel to and from her home district in California to the tune of millions of taxpayer dollars.
The spendthrift nature of the Democrat-controlled Congress was a key election issue in 2010 and Speaker Pelosi’s extravagance was Exhibit A. In response, Rep. John Boehner promised that if the GOP took control of the House and he was elected speaker, he would fly commercial to and from his district. After Republicans won, he reiterated his pledge.
Which brings us to March 23, 2012 and this update at self-appointed watchdog Politifact. Reporter Molly Moorhead referenced documents from the House and the Congressional Research Service and came up with absolutely no evidence that Boehner has been asking for or receiving military transport to and/or from his district.
Going by the old theory that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, Moorhead and her bosses at Politifact, decided that this merited an “In The Works” label…
“In The Works.” You’d think it would be either “True” or “False,” but that’s just because you don’t know any better.
Treacher’s conclusion:
I like PolitiFact’s style: “We can’t prove you’re lying, Speaker Boehner. In fact, there’s absolutely no proof of our suspicion whatsoever. Nice try!”
Moral of the story: Any time a Media or Democrat (ptr) figure calls themselves a “fact checker”, assume they’re a narrative-buffer until proven otherwise.
The primary Democrat message this year seems to be to try to make every possible Democrat constituency feel like the most noble-possible victim.
We’ve got the “war on women”, “war on immigrants”, “war on over-charged college students”…
…and now, the “war” on those most-benighted victims in our society, teachers, according to this bit by Jeff Kolnick of the university formerly known as Mankato State U of M Marshall.
He tees it up with the story of his friend, a teacher, who is busy…
…surviv[ing] furlough days that cut short his pay as well as the education of his students to save money in tax-starved California.
There’s your first tip-off that our writer is approaching this first and foremost from the left; California is hardly tax-starved. Cali is indeed a bounty of taxation – it’s why business is leaving the state as fast as it can move.
No. California isn’t tax-starved. It’s spending-addled.
And after all this service to his community, instead of receiving praise and thanks he has a target on his back. Conservative forces in America have made public school teachers public enemy No. 1: If our schools are failing, blame the teachers. If our states are broke, it is the pensions of the greedy teachers. You name the problem and teachers are the cause.
Well, no.
Teachers, as individuals, aren’t the problem.
It’s the way they, their academy, and especially their public employees’ union and the government that, in California, that union pretty much controls have committed the state to pay for teachers and their (very very early) retirement first, and worry about balanced budgets second if at all, that are.
But Mr. Kolnick doesn’t seem to be interested in economics:
I am sick of it…
…conservative forces blame public school teachers for everything. A colleague of mine related a story to me about a person who blamed public school teachers for failing our students. The person complained that Minneapolis and St. Paul schools failed young people of color and he put the blame squarely on teachers and teacher-preparation programs.
Mr. Kolnick is listed as a history professor at the school formerly known as Marshall. I bring that up because I’m trying to imagine what would happen if one of his students brought him a paper that started “A friend of mine says that The Jews were behind 9/11. This paper will demand accountability from The Jews”. I’m going to guess Kolnick’d send it back for a rewrite – right?
“Conservatives hate teachers because someone that my teacher friend placed as a conservative had an irrational complaint?”
Fed up with this garbage, my friend responded that his kids got a first-rate education in the Edina public schools with teachers who had union contracts and graduated from the same teacher-prep programs as the teachers in the Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts.
Let’s stop blaming the teachers and think about public education in terms of the evidence.
Yes, let’s indeed.
Because identical licensing notwithstanding, Minneapolis and Saint Paul graduate less than 3/5 of their students, and a minority of black, Latino and Native American students. Afro-American, Hispanic and Asian families – who may be personally conservative, but currently vote overwhelmingly DFL – are deserting the city schools, decamping for charter schools and, via open enrollment, the suburbs.
And these are districts that are at the front of the pack for per-student funding, year in, year out.
And I’d suggest that if Mr. Kolnick wants to wave the various teachers’ paper credentials and bureaucratic certifications in those parents’ faces, he not do it while standing on 50th Street or Afton Road, in front of those parent’s cars, as they head to Edina and Woodbury.
But Mr. Kolnick said we needed to make this argument about “evidence”. What’s his?
The attack on teachers is not about educating our young people. It is about ending public education and collective bargaining. It is about taking public dollars from public institutions and turning them over to for-profit corporations.
So Mr. Kolnick’s “evidence” is a paragraph of Democrat cant about unions.
There is no “attack on teachers”, there is a reasonable questioning whether our society can survive by forcing most of us to work until we’re 75 so that teachers – to say nothing of principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, special ed coordinators, and the other throngs of public employees that work in the system but never set foot in front of a classroom – can retire at 55.
And since Mr. Kolnick asks; since when is collective bargaining “about education?” For that matter, can you honestly say that the current public education system – not teachers, individually or as a group, but the institution, the entire educational/industrial complex – is “about education?”
In 1995, free-market evangelist Milton Friedman wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post calling for the privatization of the public school system. Now almost 20 years later, we are on the verge of seeing his ideas become a reality…In December 2005, a little less than a year before he died, Friedman wrote of an opportunity to privatize public schools in New Orleans after the tragedy of Katrina. He called for a radical reform of schools because they failed the students. “New Orleans schools were failing for the same reason that schools are failing in other large cities, because the schools are owned and operated by the government”.
OK.
So?
How is this, in and of itself, either wrong or, for that matter, an “attack on teachers?”
The sole purpose of public educational institutions is to educate. They may not be perfect, but they have only one goal.
And that’s at best a platitude, at worst a statement of complete ignorance. Public schools have always had ulterior motives; “creating better citizens” (free of all those radical immigrant ideas) in the 1800s, or creating a society that reflects the goals of the educational academy today (diversity, multiculturalism)…
…and, above all, to serve as a big interest group and voting bloc, to gain and hold control of the government apparatus that feeds it.
Which is not a knock on teachers as individuals; lest Mr. Kolnick dive further into stereotype, my father, two grandparents and my sister are teachers.
But teachers as an institution demand that I work until I’m 75 so that they can retire at 55 – and vote relentlessly liberal to enforce it – and on the other hand work for a system that, for many of is, is an abject failure, whatever the individual teachers’ personal professional merits.
Do we really want to let corporations be responsible for teaching our young people? Come on, let’s get real.
“Come on, let’s get real”.
It’s always a treat to debate a classical Socratic logician.
Let me ask this: if we presume a teacher is in fact capable, what difference does it make who pays them – a corporation, or a government body?
And if you can honestly answer that question in terms that aren’t foremost about defending the defined benefit pension, you’ll be doing better than Mr. Kolnick, so far.
Jeff Kolnick is an associate professor of history at Southwest Minnesota State University.
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