“Netroots Nation” was held, as it always is, in the midst of a throbbing Progressive success story.  This year, it was Providence, Rhode Island – a city that, lying as it does at the nexus of organized labor and organized crime, is the perfect metaphor for the “Netroots”.

It was held in downtown Minneapolis last year.  I spent some time people-watching in between events at “Right Online”, which (usually) follows Netroots around the country to show the world what people with jobs and lives look like.

I shot this video of the Netroots crowd last year, at the 331 Bar in Minneapolis after the convo wrapped for the first day:

No, I’m a kidder. I kid.

But this year, the kids at Netroots – who make the goth kids on South Park seem pretty chipper even in normal times…:

…look even sprightlier.

M John Fund apparently lost the annual National Review poker match, and drew the job of going to Providence to cover the event.

Now, the Netroots kids weren’t particularly high on Obama last year.  It’s apparently gotten even worse:

It wasn’t only last Tuesday’s jarring defeat of public-sector unions in Wisconsin, or President Obama’s refusal to campaign in person against Governor Scott Walker — or unease that the Supreme Court may be only weeks away from sweeping much or all of Obamacare onto the ash heap of history. On Friday, in the middle of the conference, President Obama famously declared that “the private sector is doing fine,” calling into question his campaign’s basic competence in getting out a coherent message.

Indeed, enthusiasm for Obama was decidedly absent from this year’s gathering. Administration officials weren’t invited to attend (Valerie Jarrett and others have appeared in the past), and President Obama limited his role to an unpublicized surprise video shown to delegates late on Saturday, when many people had already left. “Change is hard, but we’ve seen that it’s possible, as long as you’re willing to keep up that fight, I’ll be right there with you,” Obama offered. Not exactly a stirring call to arms, and the tepid applause his video garnered can’t have pleased Team Obama.

That’s the problem with personality-cult politics; if the personality doesn’t start either delivering on his promises or killing off all rivals, things go flat pretty fast.

Steve “Spotty” Timmer, writing in “MNLeft”, yet another lefty group blog:

“They Put The Phyrric Into Victory”

Perhaps they – Craig Westover and Jason Lewis,the subjects of Timmer’s piece  – disagree with Timmer about the current GOP Senator race, but Steve Timmer is the one who put “Phyrric” into “victory”…

…which, for those of us who even passed remedial history, is spelled “Pyrrhic Victory“, after King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who, on noting the casualties he’d taken defeating the Romans at the Battle of Asculum in 280 BC, lamented (according to Plutarch) that “more such victories would undo him”.

Just keep chanting; “they’re the smart ones.  They’re the smart ones”.

Chant.  You heard me.

Oh, yeah – they think Kurt Bills hasn’t a chance.  Maybe they’re right.

The voters – the live, legal ones that the GOP tends to draw – haven’t actually spoken on that yet.

It could well be that A-Klo can eke out a…

…no.  I can’t go there.  Too cheap.

UPDATE:  They edited it.  And it’s still wrong.

Remember – Democrats are smart. Republicans – they’re stupid! Stupid and ignorant! Yepper!

UPDATE 2:  Third try’s the charm.

And, Steve, I’m working these days.  You?

Brian Lambert at the MinnPost reports on the story of…

…sorry.  I had quick chuckle there.  I’ll carry on.

Brian Lambert wrote a piece in the MinnPost about the flap with Jack Tomczak…

…sorry.  I got overcome with a gale of laughter.  OK.  Pull it together, Mitch.  Here we go.

Brian Lambert reported on…

…Oh, my sides hurt.  Holy cow.  I couldn’t carry on with a straight face.  Wow.

OK.  Let’s try this again.  Mark Dayton’s former communications chief Brian Lambert at the MinnPost does exactly what the MinnPost pays him to do; serve as the uncovered intellectual and political id of the rest of the in-the-bag-for-the-DFL publication, in this piece about the Tomczak / Gleason flap (about which you read actual facts last week on Shot In The Dark,

I posted an item recently about a former campaign operative for Tom Emmer and Michele Bachmann accused of stalking U of M professor Bill Gleason.

Not sure if Lambert noted that Tomczak was “accused” of “Stalking” by a dissociative narcissistic lunatic that tweets all day, every day, without cease, ever world-class researcher with the work-ethic of a beaver, honest.

(Note to self: I do have to write a post about what “stalking” is, and perhaps give a few examples from the local blogging community to illustrate it.  Hint:  I don’t think it means going, one time, to a public building, but what do I know?)

Y’see, the problem with Lambert is that he seems to consider “lefty narrative” a better “source” than “crap he hears in passing”…

…although he uses plenty of that too:

Gleason filed an FCC complaint against Jack Tomczak, the former aide. After some negotiating, the local “Tea Party Radio Network” station that carried Tomczak’s show agreed that Tomczak would read an apology on the air.

Er, yeah.

FM95.9 isn’t the “Tea Party Radio Network”.  It’s a little Christian station that plays old-time gospel music when it’s not running Jack and Ben.  The “Tea Party Radio Network” is a network in the same sense as the “Northern Alliance Radio Network” is; a wry little reference to the fact that we both do our shows on a shoestring.  Sort of like AM950, without all the self-righteousness.

As Gleason posts on his blog, Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant…

Bla bla bla.

If you want to know what one of those old-fashioned ransom notes made by cutting letters out of magazine articles would look like if put online the work of a world-class researcher with the work ethic of a dozen beavers looks like, read Sunshine. 

The situation prompted Andy Aplikowski at the conservative blog Residual Forces to post: “Due to a thuggish left of liberal professor’s intolerant tactics, the station that Late Debate with Jack and Ben is on has suspended Jack. It is time to get the best local talk show on a real station. Please contact Clear Channel and get them on air.”

We did in fact cover that here, as well, over the weekend.

But it’s next that Lambert really screws the pooch:

Then, in turn, Ken Avidor at the liberal site Dump Bachmann writes: “…A Twitter cabal comprising of Bachmann fans Sheila Kihne and former St. Paul School Board candidate Tom “Swiftee” Swift is apparently attempting a reprisal by contacting University officials to complain about Professor Gleason.”

No, Brian,

Swiftee’s been pursuing Gleason, all right.  I’ll save the details for later.

But that’s been going on for months.  As in, since last November.  It predated the Tomczak flap by almost six months, and will likely be going on for many more.

And by the way, it allegedly involved a real case of stalking; not a guy walking into a public building, announced and in the full light of day.  Swift’s case involves serious allegations of extremely inappropriate abuses of power.  The kind of thing that might wind up actually getting into newspapers with real reporters, who report on stories with facts and stuff, while Brian Lambert is busy requoting the likes of “Dump Bachmann” with a straight face.

For the record?  A Magic Eight Ball is always a better source than Ken “Avidor” Weiner – or anyone that uses him for a source.  A coin toss, dog entrails or picking random letters out of a bowl of Alpha-Bits is better yet.

And since the subject is “stalking”, maybe we should do a quick post one of these days to remind people what real “stalking” is, and who actually practices it, locally?

But that’s all in the future.  The question now is: will Brian Lambert have the integrity it takes to straighten out his facts on the Swift / Gleason story?

It’s a scenario that’s launched a thousand “miscarriage of military justice” stories and more than a few movies during and after three wars, now; soldier gets into difficult, ambiguous situation; soldier, believing himself to be threatened, shoots.  Judge Advocate General jacks the soldier up over an arcane technicality in the “rules of engagement”, adjudicated by a bunch of officers and lawyers sitting in a secure base camp, an office or the Pentagon.  And the soldier(s), having followed the rules in all but the one, most arcane, most-technical sense of the term, and having acted otherwise blamelessly, get sent to prison.

Some of the dimmer bulbs on the Twin Cities’ Sorosphere’s intellectual Festivus pole were grunting and argling yesterday about this piece here, from “Think” Progess, by one Jon Soltz, claiming that Florida’s (and by extension, Minnesota’s proposed and vetoed) “Stand Your Ground” laws “gives George Zimmerman more protection than soldiers overseas”.   It’s written by one Jon Soltz, listed as founder and chairman of VoteVets.org, 

Soltz:

The Trayvon Martin case has gripped the nation, and forced the country to re-examine our gun laws. But the horrible affair has struck me in another way, because of my two tours in Iraq. One fact stands out in my mind: The “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida, which may let George Zimmerman off the hook for the killing of Martin, gives more leeway to shooters than our own military gives to soldiers in war.

That sounds serious.  And it is.  Seriously misleading, anyway.

We’ll come back to that.

VoteVets.org has more than 105,000 members who take a wide array of views on gun control and the 2nd Amendment,

…although the group itself is a left-leaning “veterans” group affiliated with the whacko-left “Center for American Progress”, “Moveon.org”, and which is supported by the Soros-affiliated “Democracy Alliance”.

But this is less about the organization than about the spreading of chanting points in which Soltz is participating.

but the Trayvon Martin case is less about the right to bear arms than it is the “use of force.” It’s impossible to ignore the legal protection George Zimmerman enjoys in suburban Florida vs. the Rules of Engagement that outline when one of our troops can shoot while in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Soltz is half right…

…well, no.  He’s half on topic.  There is something that’s impossible to ignore.

But comparing rules for self-defense among civilians out and about in a civil society is nothing like the rules of engagement for the military in a combat zone.

The U.S. military issues Rules of Engagement (ROE) for every conflict to guide servicemembers’ ability to protect themselves from deadly threats…

…which Soltz goes on to describe in great detail and, I’ll presume, accurately (although I’d love to have some of combat veterans who read this blog go over his version of the ROE just to make sure), he misses a key point.  And by “key”, I mean, “so vital that his entire point makes absolutely no sense if you get it wrong”.

Soltz:

A key component of the ROE used during the height of violence in Iraq in 2007 was the requirement to use “Graduated Force” when time and circumstances permit. Section 3.G.(1) states that if an individual “commit[s] a hostile act or demonstrat[es] hostile intent” — meaning he or she attacks U.S. or designated allied forces, nationals, or property, or threatens the imminent use of force against any of them — U.S. Force “may use force, up to and including deadly force, to eliminate the threat.”

Right.

A soldier (or sailor, airman or Marine) in a combat has a lot of firepower at hand; a selective-fire assault rifle (sometimes with a grenade launcher), a machine gun (anything from a squad automatic weapon to an M2 .50 caliber or a fully-automatic grenade launcher on top of their Hummer), or more; antitank rockets, grenades, and more.  They can be supported by tanks with cannon with cannon that can pick your nose from a mile away with a depleted-uranium dart that flies at a mile every second and a half and that can go through a foot of armor steel.  They’re a radio call away from calling in artillery – 40-to-100 pound shells in barrages of dozens of shells that can level a city block faster than a  bunch of drunk Detroit Pistons fans – or air support, in the form of Apaches with rockets and automatic cannon, A10s and F16s flying close support,  dropping 2000 GPS-guided bombs that can fly down your toilet more accurately than the Roto-Rooter guy, or even a B52 that can drop thirty or forty of them, if you really need to dig out of a jam.

The rules of engagement are there to make sure that the 19 year old kid with the aweseome responsibility of being at the business end of all that firepower knows how to use it to advance, rather than degrade, America’s interests in the area.

On the other hand, the law regarding civilian self-defense is there to judge whether homicide is justified or not.  In every state, the questions are  “is the citizen’s fear of death, rape, maiming or other injury reasonable enough to justify using lethal force”, “was the citizen a reluctant participant”, “was the force they used reasonable” and in some states, “did the citizen make a reasonable effort to retreat”.  In some states, the citizens have to prove all of the above; in others – Florida – the state has to prove they didn’t.

We’ll come back to that.

Soltz gives an example of how Rules of Engagement caused a problem for one soldier:

In fact, Richard Allen Smith, the vice chairman of VoteVets.org, recently told me a story he had heard during his time in Afghanistan, which illustrates this point.

The Scout Platoon leader for Richard’s Battalion was in a situation in 2007 where they detained someone, but he managed to get out of their truck and flee. While he was running away, the Platoon Leader fired at him and caught him in the thigh. They called for a medevac, but he bled out before the bird could get there.

Under military law and rules of engagement, the Platoon Leader was clearly in the wrong: he pursued an unarmed guy who wasn’t posing a threat to U.S. Forces and shot him to death. He was charged (although he was never tried because he was injured a few days later when his truck was hit by an IED and he was deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial).

I’m not sure why Soltz brings this up: does he think a citizen would skate on shooting a fleeing attacker?  As a rule, they would not.

But Soltz is slowly cutting to the chase, here.  He starts out with an honest admission:

Of course, comparing the Trayvon Martin case to a war situation is neither fair nor clean, and we still don’t know all of the facts surrounding Trayvon’s death.

But the facts end there:

But insofar as what I’ve read about the case, it sounds to me that if Trayvon had been an Iraqi soldier, and George Zimmerman had been a U.S. Soldier, there would have been an immediate investigation, and most likely a manslaughter charge, and victim’s family financially compensated for wrongful death.

And that goes to show you the risks in going by “what you’ve read” when, as a lefty (and I’ll be charitable and assume that Soltz isn’t purely reciting the party line, which, given his groiup’s funding, is probably more charitable than warranted, but I’m a uniter, not a divider), the stuff you read is produced  by groups that are trying to use the Martin case to fan racial tension to boost the President’s fortunes – or lefty-vetted “Experts” who are, in fact, not.

If Zimmerman was attacked, then under either military law (as Soltz recited it) or under criminal law, he was arguably justified in shooting.  I say “arguably” because these things do need to be investigated.

Was it?  Do we know the facts?  As Soltz himself allowed, we do not.

Which doesn’t justify just making up facts to fill in in place.  LIke this:

But Zimmerman is a civilian in Florida where, as the country now knows, a shooter is often immune from criminal prosecution and civil liability if he believed he had been threatened with deadly force.

But only if the investigation shows that the evidence warrants that conclusion.  After – y’know – due process, according to the law passed by the relevant legislature.  Same as in the military!

Yes, I did say “making stuff up”:

One of the striking components of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law — or, more appropriately, “Shoot First” law — is that it eliminated the “duty to retreat” embedded in centuries of common law about self-defense. Traditionally, a person had the duty to retreat from dangerous situations if they could, and the use of deadly force was justifiable self-defense only if a person could not have otherwise safely gotten away.

Except that’s both not true – it’s not “embedded in centuries of tradition”.  It’s a feature of some self-defense laws.  Not others.  They vary.  And simply saying “it was part of common law” isn’t a carte-blanche guarantee of validity; slavery was a part of “common law”, until it wasn’t anymore.

“Duty to Retreat” is not a feature, it’s a bug; it means that the citizen is supposed to make a “reasonable” effort to disengage (which, when you’re a civilian with a carry permit, is always a good idea even if it’s not a legal requirement).  Reasonable according to whom?  If you have a bad knee and your attacker is 18 and faster than you?  If you are outnumbered?  If you are in a stopped car and someone points a gun at you?  What is the “reasonable” course?  The answer – under the law in half of the states – is ambiguous, and entirely at the discretion of a county attorney.  It’s ambiguous.

And ambiguity makes bad law – just as it makes for lousy orders for soldiers. Which is why Rules of Engagement are so detailed.

Soltz claims that “Stand Your Ground” gives citizens more protection than it gives soldiers in the field.  Leaving aside the apples-and-axles non-sequitur of trying to compare the situations, he’s 180 degrees wrong; “Stand Your Ground” removes ambiguity from the citizen’s case, giving them a similar standard (not “the same” – combat and self-defense are not the same) as the soldier has.

It’s another entry in the library of chanting points the left is trying to use to keep the Martin case alive as a wedge issue.

Read Soltz.  Judge for yourself.

I went to downtown Saint Paul this morning to rent a room for the evening.  I figured if I was going to be dealing with Minnesoita’s chanting class – the mass of chant-bots that the unions and astroturf groups like “Take Action Minnesota” can spawn to protest wherever needed – I’d need a drink or fifteen.  I’d no doubt be too hammered to take the bus, much less drive.

I went to the front desk to reserve my room.

The clerk – a chipper Hispanic woman named Rosa – asked me for my ID.

“That’s ironic, isn’t it?”, I chuckled.  “I’m here to cover people who think there should be no photo IDs to vote, and you’re asking me for a photo ID to get a hotel room!”

“Ha ha, sir”, Rosa answered through a half-hearted smile.

“Sorry about that”, I said.

“No, I’m sorry – it’s my fault.  We have some, um, difficult guests”, she said, sotto voce.   “They were up partying all night.  They don’t tip – they say tipping is “for the 1%”, and that the waitstaff and bellhops should do their job “out of solidarity with the 99%””.

“Oh, no.  Who are they…”

She shook her head as the door opened.  “Can’t talk now”, she said, looking at the group coming through the door.

A group of short men in bright pastel clothing with chemical tans walked through the lobby.  Curiously, they were chanting.  I recorded the chant, and present the transcription, unedited.

Oompa Loompa, Doopity Dounted

We demand every vote be counted!

Oompa Loompa Doopity Dipocrit

If you ask ID, then you are a hypocrite!

One of the men, in an intonation-challenged Irish tenor, then took a solo

The 99 percent can’t get an ID!

They’re for the one percent, not for you or for me!

What if you ask me to prove who I am?

That’s what I call…

[Bass voice takes over]

Intimidation!

The rest of the group came in:

Oompa Looompa Doopity Doblem

There never has been a voter fraud problem.

Oompah Loompa Doopity Remand

We insist on no IDs like the Oompa Loompa Doompa Scroompa Froompa Loompas Doompity Demand!

They marched up the hall to their rooms, except for one who ambled over to the desk.

“You don’t see that every day”, I said.  But Rosa had already turned her attention to the fellow from the group.

I turned, looked down, and recognized the fellow as Edgar Torvaldsbladson – better known by his Twitter handle, “EightballEdgar”.  He shoots a lot of pool, apparently.  At least, I don’t think he’s a crack user, and I’m pretty sure it refers to pool.

“Can I help you, sir?” Rosa asked.

“YES! PLEASE SEND BOOZE TO MY ROOM!” EightballEdgar exclaimed.

The volume startled me.  Rosa didn’t skip a beat.  “Er, that’d be a room service request.  Do you have a credit card on file…”

“WHAT ARE YOU, A 99PNJ?”

“A what?”

“NINETY-NINE-PERCENT NUT JOB!”

“Er, sir?  I just have to make sure the booze is paid for…”

“FINE!”, he bellowed, digging a card out of the oily  brim of his little green homburg.

“Hey, EightballEdgar, how ya doing!  Long time no see!”

He looked up at me.  “I AM HERE TO PROTEST THE DISENFRANCISEMENT OF THE POOR BY THE VOTER ID BILL AS PART OF A SPONTANEOUS DEMONSTRATION”.

“Ah.  Well, cool.  Hey – did you have to show the hotel an ID to book your room?”

“SO?  BOOKING A HOTEL ISN’T A RIGHT IN THE CONSTITUTION, LIKE ABORTION”.

“Um, yeah”, I answered as Rosa wrinkled her nose silently in distaste.  “I didn’t say it was; merely that society takes all sorts of prudent measures to ensure people are who they say they are”.

EightballEdgar looked at me.  “YOUR SUIT LOOKS STUPID”.

“Perhaps, but that’s not really the point”.

“YOU WERE PULLED OVER IN 2004 FOR DRIVING WITH EXPIRED TABS!”

“I was indeed.  Now, about the topic of voter ID.  You’re right.  Hotel rooms aren’t constitutional rights.  Voting is.  But we demand ID as a reasonable restriction on many constitutional rights.  For example, my Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is spelled out in the Constitution, and is defined as an individual right which was incorporated in very literal form on the States by the Heller and McDonald decisions.  But as a reasonable restriction – to ensure that I am who I say I am – I have to present an ID to buy ammunition or rifles, and show an ID and pass a background check to get a permit to purchase a handgun, to actually buy the handgun, and to apply for a permit to carry that handgun, not to mention to rent time at a shooting range to actually practice with the thing!”.

His eyes opened wide, and he started hopping up and down.  “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  WHAT PART OF “WELL-REGULATED” CONFUSES YOU, YOU IDIOT!  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!”

“It meant “can hit what they aim at”, but that’s neither here nor there.  Let’s say I want to carry out my first amendment right to petition to seek a redress of grievances…”

“YOU AND YOUR FANCY LAWYER TALK!”

“Er, what it means is, I went to court to file a lawsuit against this guy that slandered me last summer – long story.  Anyway – I filed my petition.  I gave them my cash.  They asked to see a photo ID, to make sure I was who I said I was”.

“BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TEH CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO SUE!”

“Er, that’s what “petition for redress of grievances” means.  It’s a constitutional right.  An important one, as it happens”.

EightballEdgar looked at me.

He looked at me some more.

“YOU WERE PULLED OVER IN 2004 FOR DRIVING WITH EXPIRED TABS!”

“O…K…” I said as Rosa stifled a chuckle.

“EXPIRED TAB NUTJOB!  EXPIRED TAB NUTJOB!”  He waved his little arms around, trying to get the attention of other passersby in the lobby.

I turned to Rosa and handed her my credit card.  “Make that two bottles of Glenlivet in Room 821″.

“Thank you, sir”, she said, smiling as I signed for a 25% tip.

I walked to the elevator, with EightballEdgar walking behind me, chanting “EXPIRED TAB NUTJOB!  EXPIRED TAB NUTJOB!” until I dropped a piece of aluminum foil on the ground, which diverted him.

A few minutes later, I was off to the Capitol.

I was going to respond to Bill Maher’s “I’m Sorry You Overreacted To What I Said” op-ed, dutifully re-run by pretty much every left-of-center paper in America yesterday…

…until I asked myself “why?”

It’s what he wants. Maher is like a trained zoo monkey, paid well to throw poop at people and then sit on top of his cage and giggle at all the rubes who are angry at having poop on them.

And if I were in his position, I might do it too. Let’s take a walk back in history.

In the mid-nineties, Maher had a show on Comedy Central. I forget the name. Who cares.

It got picked up by ABC for the late-night line-up, one of many attempts to put something, anything, up against the Tonight Show and Letterman.

It bombed.

No, bigger than that.  Seriously.

And it became clear to Bill Maher that it was neither his personality nor his comedic chops that was going to keep him in hookers and blow.  (Cue outrage that I’d so insult a public figure.  Go ahead.  Be outraged.  It’s the Maher way).

He’d have to supplement that with periodic bouts of publicity-mongering “controversy”.  He, like that monkey, will have to throw just a little more poop next time, and giggle just a little harder at those poo-coated rubes.

And he’ll get away with it, until most of us realize that Bill Maher is nothing but a monkey with a hand full of poop.

I hope I’ve settled that for everyone.

Always, always, always – when you see stories in the mainstream media about conservatives’ moral crimes and misdemeanors, remember two things:

• Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection – “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” – has never been challenged, much less repealed.
• It’s the liberal press.  If’s most likely either painstakingly stripped of context, if it’s not an outright lie.

With that in mindThe Gateway Pundit notes an example of the media jumping all over the story of a “Tea Party Leader” accused of rape.

Untrue?  Naturally.  The guy had no connection with any Tea Party organization that anyone with the Tea Party could identify.

We have, of course, run into this before in Minnesota – during the 2010 campaign, Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros “Independent” ran a piece claiming that some schlub who left a profane and insulting message on the AFSCME voice mail was a “Tea Party Organizer”, notwithstanding the fact that not a single actual Tea Party organizer had ever heard of the guy.

If Charles Manson called himself a Tea Partier, the media would run with it.

Today’s “Compare and Contrast” feature pits the “American Legislative Exchange Council” – also known as “ALEC”, and also also known as “This Year’s DFL Boogeyman” – against the “National Conference of State Legislatures“.

“Who”?

Exactly.

Let’s compare them, point by point:

Agenda:  The group promotes a partisan point of view.
ALEC:  Yes – center right.
NCLS: Yes – center-left.

Pushing Agenda:  The group writes “model legislation” that, if passed, would further its agenda, and distributes it to its legislative members (because all legislation needs to be submitted by an elected legislator, naturally).
ALEC:  Yes.  As, by the way, do other conservative think tanks; Cato, the NRA, whomever.
NCLS: Yes.  As, by the way, do liberal think tanks, as well as the political action wings of all the unions.  Especially the NEA.

Content Of That Agenda:  The group promotes an agenda that its opponents find debatable.
ALEC:  Yes – and that fact has pushed the more-deranged reaches of the left to the point where the liberal “attention” has become self-parody, and has gotten to the point where “Berg’s Seventh Law” applies.  Two years ago, they babbled about the Koch Brothers to cover the fact that Alita Messinger was pouring millions into the Minnesota campaign.  This year, yapping like obedient dogs about “ALEC” will obscure the fact that the unions and groups like the NCLS will be doing the same, and much, much more, just by simple dint of there being more of them.
NCLS: Yes – although you don’t hear much about it.

Who Pays The Dues To Join The Group To Learn About The Agenda?:  Both groups charge dues, which by definition makes them “not lobbying groups”.  Someone has to pay for legislators to join and remain “members”.
ALEC:  The members pay their own dues.
NCLS: Dues are paid by the state, using taxpayer money.  One source with background in legislative matters tells me the dues amount to over $300,000 in state money a year.  That’s money that’s being taken from the children to pay for our legislators to think like this.

Attention Group Gets From Its Detractors:  What’s the group’s profile among its opponents?
NCLS: Not much.  Even though it promotes an institutionalist, big-government agenda, and does it with public money, you rarely if ever hear about the NCLS’ actions or agenda.  Or those of the National Education Association, which does all the same things – promoting policy, writing model legislation, trying to inveigle legislators into sponsoring it, yadda yadda.  Or the same operations at AFSCME, MAPE, the SEIU, and on, and on, and on.
ALEC:  The group is to the left in 2012 what “birth certificates” were to the fringe right in 2009, what “Bush’s cruise missiles” were to the “fringe” left in 2004, what “black helicopters” were to the paranoid right in 1996; a stalking horse for their lunatic fringes at best, justification for its own excesses at worst.

Hope we’ve settled that.

The MinnPost has a new design.  It’s a lot more readable, so kudos to them (or to whoever did the redesign).

Of course, with the new design comes what seems to this long-time reader a renewed commitment to passive-aggressively support the DFL even more.

Jay Nord asks if W voters will mind that Voter ID will delay election results:

Are Minnesotans willing to wait up to 10 days after the election to find out who won in races ranging from governor to local officials?

That prospect was raised at Wednesday’s Senate Local Government and Elections Committee meeting during discussion of the proposed Voter ID constitutional amendment.

The measure passed 8 to 6 on a party-line vote after an hour and a half of discussion. That action drew a round of boos from the hearing room filled with protesters.

At the session, the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office expressed concern that implementing provisional balloting could stretch the amount of time needed to count election results and that it could force earlier primary dates.

“Nobody’s going to know who won any of the elections until at least 10 days or more afterwards,” Secretary of State staff member Beth Fraser told the committee. “I know that people are on pins and needles on election night. That feeling is going to last for quite a while if we don’t know for more than 10 days who won anything in Minnesota from governor down to school board.”

Speaking just for myself here?  Who cares.  Oh, I think the “ten days” figure is a sign of the Secretary of State is sandbagging to try to gin up yet another public meme to give the pro-corruption forces something to chant about.

Outside the media – including the MinnPost  – who want to sell lots of papers and have lots of eyeballs tuned in to their election-night coverage or websites?  I’d be amazed if you found anyone that cared about a wait (and if Mark Ritchie’s office says “Ten days”, assume it means “two days”).   Outside the media?  Most of our lives don’t hinge, day by day, on any of these races – even those of us who follow this stuff closely.

But let’s take Ritchie at his word (always dangerous) and answer the question.

Yes.  I’ll trade a “ten day” wait for actual election integrity (which’ll involve a lot more than just voter ID, but it’s a start).  Every time.

But let’s stop for a moment here.  Apparently in the world of the liberal “alternative” media, some delays are better than others.

I don’t recall the MinnPost caterwauling over the delays forced on election results by “Instant Runoff Voting”, which has led to long, pointless delays to getting election results, and to a system with a byzantine, convoluted vote-counting formula that is both opaque to most voters and which admits up front that it disenfranchises voters.

So let’s summarize:  results delayed due to a system blessed by one-party DFL governments that obfuscates the election process and guarantees a certain percentage of votes will end up not being counted?  Just hunky-dory to the MinnPost.

Results delayed (maybe, according to a Secretary of State who reports to George Soros) due to a “GOP plan” that will be a solid first step to ensure our elections have integrity and don’t disenfranchise legitimate voters with a wave of illegitimate ones?

Oh, what do you think?

With great fanfare, the Democrats last week launched a devastating fusillade of rhetorical counterfire in the battle for the American Mind – or perhaps the American “Mind” – this past week with the splashy launch/relaunch of…

…well, a bunch of websites. To spread “the truth” about Barack Obama and his Administration.

RT Rybak took time off from finding ways to trade cops for bike paths to declare “We’re not going to take any baloney”.  And he seems a mayor of his word; reading the sites involved, it seems that the Dems are committed to giving “baloney” back, and upping the ante in the rhetorical luncheon-meat department.  Another lefty shill said that the “Ministry Of Truth” sites are a response to the “sleazy GOP money” from the likes of the Koch brothers – the left’s straw-boogeyman-du-jour.  Meaning that we’ll have Rockefeller, Soros and Big Union money to fight against big private sector money.

Let’s take a look at the Ministry Of Truth’s array of websites:

KeepingHisWord.com could be better called “Rhetorical Needles Threaded.com”; it’s devoted to repeating Obama Administration chanting points.  But here’s an innovation; the type is really really big.  Each “article” is, basically , a sentence, carefully trimmed for easy memorization for people who don’t think that hard about things.  It is, intellectually and rhetorically, the next steup up from Duckspeak.

KeepingGOPHonest.com is more of the same, with a Green emphasis; the site recycles Gingrich, Santorum, Paul and Romney campaign hit points against the other campaigns.  It’s basically an RSS feed of the big four campaigns’ negative pieces, only dumbed down for, you know, the Democrat electorate.

AttackWatch.com is…Attackwatch!  It’s our old friend, better known to conservatives and other sentient people as “Stasi.gov.us”; still asking for people to report in to Zentralkontrolle about Badthink aimed at The One and His administration.

So what conclusions can we reach about the Democrat campaign, viewed through the prism of their Ministry Of Truth’s websites?

1. They are admitting Democrat voters have no attention span. This stuff is written to the level and attention span of a third-grader with ADD.  They need Big Thoughts broken down into easily-memorized, quickly-chantable bullets, or sanitized, officially-sanctioned Big Humor
2. They need to dodge the Big Question at all costs: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”  The answer hidden in plain sight on these sites is “Yes – if you are government”.

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.

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?

I’ve been tangling with Karl Bremer for a long, long time.  Like,since long before any of us had ever heard of blogs.

Now, if this blog has had one iron clad standard, it’s that politics comes in behind humanity. This hobby – an offshoot of people doing what they believe – is frequently a stewing noxious morass of Alinski-ite ugliness. And so I never go after peoples’ jobs, their family lives, or, especially, parts of their pasts that aren’t germane to their political job.  Wherever else I may have fallen short, I’ve stuck to that.  

And beyond that?  Peoples’ lives are more important than their politics.

So it was a genuine gut-shot to read this last night:

Three weeks ago, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Tomorrow I start chemotherapy to try to destroy it. I’ve fought a lot of battles in my life and beaten some long odds. None of them have ever been life-threatening, though, so at this point, they all seem rather inconsequential.This one’s for real, and I’m going to need all the energy I can muster to beat it. Consequently, you may see a little reduction in flow here at Ripple in Stillwater. I’ll be recycling some old material to keep you entertained in the meantime

Best wishes and hopes that Karl kicks the odds in the ass.

A trusted source says had the following all written up long before the election for MN GOP Deputy Chair was held:

MN GOP’s _________ Represents Big Business, Divisiveness, and Bigotry #stribpol

Well, OK – no, there is no source, and I don’ t know what Ed had on his laptop.  But I’m pretty sure his headline was written, at least mentally, well before Kelly Fenton won the Deputy Chair vote yesterday.

And the rest of his post was easily-enough predictable; like a fair chunk of the Minnesota Left, he’s disappointed that the Minnesota GOP didn’t take Saturday’s Central Committee meeting as an opportunity to “move to the middle” and do more of the DFL’s work for it.

Never.  Never never ever.

So sorry, Minnesota Left.  You’ll have to do your own campaigning keep getting Alita to pay for doing your campaigning

To: “Ed Brayton” of “Free Thought Blogs”

From: Mitch Berg, “Right Wing Conspirator”

Re: Your Response Has Made Me Slam My Face Into My Palms So Many Times My Forehead Is Getting A Callous.

Ed,

I noticed in my pingbacks that you responded to my obit of the Minnesota “Independent” / Minnesota Monitor

Here’s the dumbest thing anyone has said so far about the transition that the American Independent News Network is undergoing. It’s the usual right-wing boogeyman being trotted out: “Soros pushes the ‘flush’ lever.” Sorry, but AINN had not received any funding from a Soros organization in years.

Maybe – and irrelevant.

For starters, Soros-funded organizations were involved with the franchise early in its existence; the deliciously-ironically-named “Center for Independent Media” got its start in a spare office at “Media Matters”, and you can’t get more Soros-backed than that.

Which is fine – Soros has First Amendment rights, too.  The problem was, for the first year or two of the blog’s existence, “editor” Robin Marty stonewalled and denied there was any connection – up until Eric Black confirmed, as he left the blog for the greener (fiscal) pastures at the MinnPost that yes, Soros was one of the sugardaddies that kept the lights on.

Beyond that, though, Mr. Brayton?  “Soros” is a sort of shorthand on the right for every “liberal with deep pockets” that is practicing checkbook advocacy, from Alita Messinger to Michael Moore to everyone in between. Sort of like “Fox News” is the lib’s code term for the left’s belief that the media is really conservative, or “ALEC” or “Koch Brothers” or “Richard Mellon Scaife” are the belief that conservative thought just has to be inorganic and merely a front for some sort of shadlowy Scrooges in the background.

These people really do think that anyone who has ever gotten money from any organization that Soros has given money to actually works for Soros and that he calls the shots — even if there hasn’t been any such funding relationship in a long time.

{Facepalm}

No, we really don’t “really do” think that.

What we do think is that, somehow, the Mindy – which has never run ads, but has always paid its “staff” the kind of money that no conservative blog with the Mindy’s middling-to-low traffic numbers ever gets – is getting its bills paid by someone who feels the need to underwrite “progressive” media.  Is it George Soros?  Or is it someone else?  For purposes of criticizing the liberal alt-media, it’s a distinction with only an academic difference.  y t

It’s just another way life on Planet Wingnuttia differs from the reality on this planet.

But only if you ignore all context.  Which is just another way life on Planet Progressive Alt-Media differs from the reality on this…oh, wait, you already used that.

Oh, and he also says that the organization has “always been a hothouse flower – something that couldn’t exist without massive outside support.” Well, yeah. That’s how non-profit journalism works. It’s how the entire non-profit sector works, including a million different conservative foundations. Few non-profits would exist without lots of outside support. How terribly shocking.

Right, the faux vapors are cute, and all, but the point is that non-profits generally exist for a reason – to promote the sale and use of ketchup, or to lobby for flax farmers, or to reach an audience.  Many of us wondered what was that attending purpose to the MinnMon / Mindy franchise over the past six years of being floated – in relative luxury, if you’re a mid-level blogger like, well, me.  Its demise is just one data point toward the conclusion that “we were right to wonder”.

The commenters at the Minnesota Post do even worse.

[Wait – didn’t you say that I wrote the “the dumbest thing” ever said on the subject? How many superlatives can you give in one posting? – Ed]

And another, Mike Izon, gets even dumber:

It’s because of the lawsuit. They know they will lose and you can’t get money from a news organization that isn’t making money anyways.

The lawsuit he is referring to is the one filed by nutball extraordinaire Bradlee Dean against AINN and Rachel Maddow. And I laughed out loud at the idea that there are people out there deluded enough to think that has anything to do with the decision to close down some of the AINN sites. I’ll have more on that in a separate post.

Do keep us posted.

That is all.

I sat down for an interview with Erik Black, the former Strib political reporter and one of the thundering herd of “deans of Minnesota political reporting”, the other day.

It went a little like this.:

BLACK:  So you took a trip the other day.

BERG: I did.

BLACK:  You’ve said your goal when driving long distances is to get there as fast as you legally can.

BERG:  Yep.  I like to get the trip over with.

BLACK:  But you stopped in Black River Falls.

BERG:  Right.  I had to go to the bathroom.

BLACK:  What do you mean?

BERG:  Er, I had to urinate. And buy a Red Bull.

BLACK: So haven’t you gone back on your princples then?

BERG:  Are you serious?

BLACK: You don’t have an answer, do  you?

BERG:  Of course I do.  My goal was to get to Chicago. As a practical matter, I needed to take a whiz.

BLACK:  So your principles are muddled, then?  Perhaps you shoudn’t talk about “driving fast”.

BERG:  (Facepalm).

OK, I made that one up.

But when you read Black’s fisking (I mean, really?  What else would you call it?) of a Jason Lewis column  in the Strib this past weekend, you might wonder:

Let’s do Mr. Jason Lewis the kindness of taking seriously his latest Strib op-ed philippic against the evils of liberalism.

The headline “Do you want equality or freedom?” certainly suggests that we can’t want a bit of both, and it also suggests that freedom and equality cannot coexist.

Now, when liberals read “equality” they think “women and minorities voting” – something conservatives support.  When Jason Lewis – whose broadcasts and op-eds sound and read more like grad-school poli-sci seminars every year – talks about “equality” in this context, he’s referring to equality of outcomes; leveling out the economic peaks to fill in the valleys; making sure nobody becomes wealthy until everyone’s in the middle class.

I’m going to add some emphasis to the next bit; we’ll come back to it:

Of course, Lewis didn’t write the headline, but it captures the keys to his argument, and to a bit of semantic bullying in which righties engage often.

It goes something like this:

Everything the right likes can be phrased as a form of “freedom,” as in freedom of the rich from paying higher taxes, freedom of corporations from government regulation, freedom to pollute, freedom of those with almost unlimited resources to use those resources to influence elections, freedom of the wealthiest 1 percent to accumulate any damn portion of the society’s wealth and income without shame, freedom to overthrow foreign governments (but only in order to bring freedom to the oppressed of those nations) and a few other important freedoms that you can think of on your own.

Once the right has established its ownership of the “freedom brand,” it follows that everything that distinguishes the left from the right is a form of oppression.

Government is oppression, taxes are tyranny, and progressive taxation or anything else that requires rich people to pay more than poor people is a particularly pernicious Bolshevik form of totalitarianism that requires a complete leveling between rich and poor.

That’s why you have to choose between freedom and equality.

Wow.

No “rhetorical bullying” in that passage, was there?

There are really two ways of addressing Black’s…argument?

First:  I work in an engineering-y field.  And when analyzing a problem, engineers will break it into two areas; what you want to happen – your goal – and how you make it happen.  Your goal – your “policy”, at a high level – is to put a bridge over a river.  That goal/”policy” drives the actual implementation; building over the road on one bank and between the buildings on the other, using plate-girder construction instead of stressed concrete arches (because it’s a small bridge with a low budget).  The same idea works in politics; high-level “principles” guide lower-level politics and undertakings.  If your princples are “progressive”, you likely believe some permutation of “society should use government to rectify the worst of life’s wrongs” and “those that have should be expected to help out those who have not”.  These principles likely inform  your “policy” decisions – things like “the rich should only make 80 times as much as the rest of us, rather than 90 times, so let’s add on a Wealth Tax”.  It’s a simple fact of life that there will be inconsistencies between your “princples” and the policies you use to implement them.   Lewis is speaking in terms of principles – “Freedom” and “Equality” in abstract, academic senses that never really occur as absolutes in nature.  That’s what he does.

Second: Well, duh.  That’s what political rhetoric is; trying to frame your side as a better idea than the other side.

You don’t have the option of maybe just bumping the top marginal rate up a point or two to help reduce the deficit (something about which the right generally claims to care) and still leave the average CEO 90 times better off than his average employee (or maybe only 80).

Mr. Black:  Behold the power of rhetoric.  Of course you have the option.  Lewis is arguing against the option.

It’s not much different than when progressives, for example, say “if you want to cut taxes [or just not increase them as much as the left wants – Ed.], you must hate government!”.  Conservatives respond “Er, government is fine – but couldn’t we settle for just the right amount of it, rather than letting it expand forever, unchecked?”

Because in principle, conservatives want to control the size of government; in practice, that means picking and choosing.

Just like Black wants Lewis to allow for.

Now, that’s Jason Lewis for you; the guy with the Masters (PhD?  LLD?  I forget) in Poli Sci does like him some high-level political theory.  He does it for three hours every night, and in most of his written output as well.   His second hitch in Twin Cities radio has been like an extended grad school poli sci seminar.

And I have to believe Black knows that.

So why would he write an entire column chastising Lewis’ “logic” when, in fact, all the cognitive dissonance is a matter of the scope of the argument (Lewis’ high-level rhetoric vs. Black’s policy-oriented low-level analysis)?

Reading the comment section – which largely reads like a thread at Democrat Underground or the Daily Kos – should answer that for you.

The Minnesota Independent  is pining for the fjords:.

I am writing today to announce the closure of the Minnesota Independent. After five years of operation in Minnesota, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com.

I love that; the “American Independent News Network”, which runs the “Colorado Independent”, the “Iowa Independent”, the “Florida Independent” and the “Texas Independent”, and ran the “Minnesota Independent” (as well as the also-closed “New Mexico Independent” and “Michigan Messenger”), allows the various regional fiefdoms about as much “independence” as the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture. The “Independent” regional media is not only being shut down…

…it’s being centralized!:

This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms of journalism made available as technology has advanced, and an increasing emphasis on national coverage and issue-based coverage from our network. Over the coming months, AINN will announce a number of new journalism initiatives that will continue to advance our mission of producing impact journalism in the public interest.

So that’s that!

The Mindy, as some of us called it, wasn’t always a complete waste; Paul Schmelzer was a capable writer; Andy Birkey could be a decent reporter, back before his obsession with Bradlee Dean drove him off the rails.

But from the Mindy’s breezy, amateurish start (as the Minnesota Monitor, under then-editor Robin Marty), through its history, it went from groaningly disingenuous (Marty often, absurdly denied any connection to George Soros and “liberals with deep pockets” during her reign) to curiously overstaffed (the Mindy briefly employed some very high-caliber liberal reporters and “editors” – Steve Perry, Erik Black and others – until, it seemed, moments after the 2008 elections) and its descent into near-irrelevance over the past three years, it’s always been a hothouse flower – something that couldn’t exist without massive outside support.

And that’s gone.

Going forward, an archive of Minnesota Independent’s reporting will exist on AmericanIndependent.com.

Perhaps a more interesting archive of the Mindy and MinnMon’s history is found right here on this very blog.

So just for old time’s sake, let’s go through some of the Mindy’s greatest hits:

• Andy Birkey wonders when Bradlee Dean stopped taxing his wife…
• …and promotes a call from a loud-mouthed unknown into “a threat from a Tea Party leader!!!!!!!”
• Dan Haugen is shocked, shocked that Tennessee might allow legal carry-permittees to carry guns in bars, unlike urbane, cultured Minnesota (where that very thing’s been legal since 2003).  That’s what you get for using Steven Colbert as a “source”.
• Andy Birkey teases a Tom Emmer quote into compliance with his narrative.
• The Mindy staff are shocked, shocked that their owner, the “Center for Independent Media”, tubed so many of them after their usefulness expired the 2008 election.
• Watched Steve Perry – who had turned the City Pages into one of the better reporting shops in the Twin Cities in the nineties – spiral into being a high-veneer Mark Gisleson (he’s been rehabbing himself for the past few years at Politics in Minnesota – by all accounts I’ve heard, successfully).
• Liberal mope-with-portfolio (and old friend of this blog) Molly Priesmeyer snickers and chortles about the state of John McCain’s orthodontia – ignorant of the fact that his originals were smashed out of his face by his North Vietnamese captors.
• We caught a MinnMon reporter plagiarizing the Associated Press on at least three occasions, in a three-part series (First, Second, Third) that drew emphatic, not-very-editorial silence from their editor.

And on, and on, and on.

One of my more solidified principles is that I never, ever do the end-zone happy dance over people losing jobs.  I do indeed hope Andy Birkey (and whoever else may still have been left at the Mindy) come up with some kind of gainful employment (and I have a hunch the Sorosphere will look out for its own).

But I come to bury the Mindy, not to praise it.

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.

I sat down with every pseudonymous “progressive” alt-media figure at a local watering hole the other day.  Here’s the transcript.

ME: So why do you all write pseudonymously?

THEM: Because we want to be able to write things under the cover of anonymity for which the consequences of using our own identities would be anything from bothersome to legally dodgy.

ME: Thanks.

OK, it was a short interview.

But they stuck me with the tab.  None of them would sign the receipt.

The Northern Alliance Radio Network was the first all-blogger talk show in the United States – heck, the whole world – when it went on the air in 2004.

Since then, there have been a few other blogger/activist focused radio shows; there was one in Boston back in 2005, and as I recall one, maybe in Colorado (not sure).

Of course, Jack Tomczak and Ben Kruse have been doing “The Late Debate” for a while now on a small chain of stations in the north ‘burbs and Saint Cloud; it’s an excellent show that you should check out.

The idea went badly off the beam a few years ago, when KTNF, the former Air America affiliate in the Twin Cities, started putting leftybloggers on their afternoon drive show, before discovering that none of them had anything interesting to say.

And now, perhaps, a much better plan; Aaron Brown, one of Minnesota’s better leftybloggers, debuts tonight on KAXE, a community station in northern Minnesota.

And from Brown’s description, it looks a little more like “The Northwoods Home Companion” than “Fast Eddie Schultz Lite”:

I knew things were getting serious when I hired the jug band. Have you ever hired a jug band? There’s a certain feeling after you do a thing like that – neither good nor bad, a sense that you have altered the universe in an unpredictable way. Da’ Elliott Brothers out of Duluth will bring three musicians and a couple dozen instruments.

We’ll have a company of actors – Pete Pellinen, Marty and Michelle Rice, Josh Anderson and Scott Hanson performing an original radio drama written by the up-and-coming writer Matt Nelson, a Hibbing native. There’ll be a couple of original sketches and a set of lumberjack stories by Matt’s dad Ed. And I wouldn’t be a showman if I didn’t promise some surprises and special guests.

I actually share Brown’s fascination with the great tradition of live radio (read the article); I’ve had the odd dream of doing something similar…

…but different.

Anyway, break a leg, Brown.

The Usual Suspects is one of my favorite movies.

In the movie, the legendary arch-criminal and unseen (?) antagonist, the Turkish uber-villain Keyser Söze, operates by the adage that to win, you need to be willing to go further than your opponent is – whatever that means.  To Söze, when his family was taken hostage by his drug-smuggling rivals, it meant killing the family first, as the rivals watched, dumb-struck – and then the rivals, leaving one alive to tell the rest of the cartel (before Söze killed him, and the rest of the cartel, and their families).

It makes for a great bit of movie characterization.

For politics in a representative republic?

Not quite as good.

———-

I’ve had one iron-clad policy on this blog; never, ever, Ever, EVER go after someone’s personal life, family or (non-elected) job just because their opinion differs from mine.  That’s how I run the blog – especially for my three pseudonymous co-bloggers; there is nothing in blogging lower than someone who uses anonymity or pseudonymity as a cover for unethical attacks..

In fact, I keep other bloggers’ personal lives and livelihoods completely out of bloggjng.  There’s a good reason for it.  For starters, it’s dangerous; peoples’ personal lives have nuances that can wash the unwary and the stupid up on the shores of Defamation Island without them knowing about it.  More importantly, it’s completely illogical; it’s the fallacy of the tu quoque ad hominem – the idea that some inconsistency in your opponent’s actions or claims yesterday undercuts his argument today.  Like, for example, if someone’s ever been ticketed for speeding, their opinion on transportation issues is discounted.

It’s stupid.

It’s also one of the most common themes in political communications, as practiced by the not-so-bright.  Accusing people of “flip-flopping” is generally dumb (I’ve “flip flopped” on gun control, abortion, government intervention, and conservatism itself since I was a kid; so did Ronald Reagan, for that matter.  To some Libs, that’s “flip-flopping”; to us, it’s a sign that we’ve thought about things, and gotten the right answer better late than never).

It’s a lot more sinister than that, of course; it goes way beyond discounting arguments.  There’s a school of thought – codified in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – that believes the best way to win in politics is to ratchet up the personal attacks about non-political issues to the point that none of your opponents can muster the emotional energy to stay in the contest; to bring things to the point where they fail Söze’s, and Alinski’s, test of commitment.

There is a pattern among the Twin Cities left; if you can’t debate someone on fact, you go for the smear.  The more outmatched they are, the more ugly and personal they get.

Which, given that a distressing number of leftybloggers usually has at most one round of “facts” to bring to a debate (because few of them have ever had to learn to debate like adults, since they’ve spent their entire lives in cities and colleges and unions run by “progressives”), means that almost any debate with a depressingly huge swathe of leftybloggers dives straight into the mud very early in any discussion.  It’s like the left, rhetorically, has raised a generation of kids with sense of how to carry on a civilized discussion, or manners, or conventional sense of right and wrong – but given them all guns and ammo.

Great example: one Twin Cities leftyblogger – a guy who shall remain unnamed, but is known to many on both sides of the aisle as “The Dwight Schrute of the Twin Cities leftysphere” – spent a few weeks waddling around grinning like a toddler who’d made a nice pants because he found a record of some checks I’d bounced, during a spell of short money and worse bookkeeping, almost eight years ago,.  Blathered it all over the place – as “evidence” that I shouldn’t talk about government budgets.  Now, I know the facts of the situation – something “Dwight” never had the integrity to ask about – so while it wasn’t anything i had cared to discuss publicly, it didn’t especially affect me.  The intention, of course, was to shut me up – not by dint of any facts “Dwight” could bring to an argument (he never has any) but by trying to make opposing them too costly in ways that have nothing to do with politics.  Because after ten years of failing at civil debate, it’s all they have.

Which brings us to Eric Austin.  He writes the Outstate Politics blog.  I’ve always gotten along with the guy..

But a while ago Austin apparently jumped onto one of the left’s most demented memes; that any “family values” Republicans whose family lives and histories aren’t pristine are “hypocrites” and beyond the ethical pale, rightly subject to any manner of ugliness.  He spotlighted a Republican legislator, Mary Franson, who’d recently been divorced, publishing some rumors about the circumstances behind the split.

As Lady Logician wrote yesterday at True North, Austin wrote about these rumors – as he put it, based on “two independent sources” who confirmed it to his own satisfaction.

Is Austin’s story true, or not?  Who cares.  It’s none of my business, or Austin’s, or yours for that matter (and if you’re someone who ever said “move on” or “it was just sex” during the Clinton administration, think veeeery carefully about your next answer).  Chalk it up to giggly prurience if you want – but that short-changes the depravity of the act.  It’s really part of the Alinski-ite dictum to scorch the opponent’s earth; to make engaging in politics against liberals too personally and emotionally costly to sustain.

LL posts a recording of a phone conversation between Franson and Austin – listen to it at the link above.

LL’s contention is that the story is a rumor; Austin apparently believes his “sources” are plenty good enough to justify writing…

…what?  A story about what should be the personal business of two people whose marriage was unravelling, with all the emotional shrapnel that always accompanies divorce?

Is it worth slopping the worst details of the worst episode in a family’s life out in front of the public – embarassing the parents, sure, but doing much, much worse for the children – to take a whack at a poliitician you disagree with about legislative politics?

Those last questions are usually rhetorical, academic ones.  In this case, unfortunately, it’s very literal.  LL notes, in what is the real crux of the article:

Then there is the point that Rep. Franson’s daughter was being bullied as a direct result of [what Austin wrote]. His only response was to accuse Rep. Franson of being directly responsible for the bullying of gay teens. His logic is highly flawed.

Listen to the recording, around the 2:30 mark; Franson notes that Austen’s allegations caused her daughter to get bullied at school.   Listen to his response after 2:30.  I’ll closely paraphrase; “so what about gay kids that get bullied?”

Catch that?

The message is this: Disagree with us, and not only are we going to work over every nook and cranny of your personal life, without regard to damage we may be adding to your family, but we will condone and abet the torture of your children – because you disagree with us”.  

LL notes:

 First off, there is the old adage that two wrongs don’t make a right. Second, Rep. Franson had no direct action in these children being bullied.

So what does Franson believe about bullying gay kids?  I don’t know – and it’s for sure that if Austin knows, it doesn’t matter to him; Franson and her daugther are bones to be chewed in service to Austin’s point. For all we, and Austin, know, Franson has risked life and limb to thwart gay-bashers in her private life. Speaking as someone who has put more on the line against the bullying of gays than Eric Austin ever has or will (long story), I believe bullying is bullying. no matter who it’s aimed at.  But in Austin’s world, the fact that I oppose a bill to create a special, double-dog class of victims makes me not only the same as a bully, but justifies smearing my personal life and making my childrens’ lives hell?

In re Austin’s apparent defense (via the audio in LL’s article) of Franson’s daughter getting tormented at school over what he’d written, LL writes:

Austin’s weak defense is even weaker when you realize that this man is a…

Y’see, there’s my conundrum.  I said I never, ever go after peoples’ (non-elected) jobs – and I don’t.  But Austin works in a field where he’s supposed to look after the best interests of kids.

And yet there he is, saying things that could reasonably be interpreted as justifying bullying.

I’m the kind of guy who gives the benefit of the doubt way too easily – but I’ll entertain some explanations.  Was Austin flustered and mis-speaking his real intent?  Did he try to drive down a rhetorical road that he didn’t have the gas to come back from?   Is there some context tucked in there that I missed? I’m open to suggestions.

But let’s take him at his apparent word.  What do you suppose Eric Austin – or the rest of the Minnesota leftyblog community’s pack of Alinsky-addled ethical Oompa Loompas – would say if Medtronic sold their grandmother a pacemaker that was 20% defective, because of Obamacare’s hike on medical device taxes?  Or if their restaurants cut Democrats’ portions 15% to make up for revenue lost to the smoking ban?

If, say, a conservative college professor docked students grade points equal to the tax increases the students favored?

They’d howl like stuck cats.

Rightly so; it’s unethical, and in the first case illegal.

There’s really little point in conservatives doing more than pointing this sort of behavior out.  It is all most of the Minnesota leftysphere can do.

The takeaways:  Conservatives have to not only smarter than their opponents, they and their families and their supporters have to be a lot tougher.

Bonus question:  There’s a technical term for someone who uses fear to affect a political end.  What is it?

———-

We all know how The Usual Suspects ended, right?

(more…)

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.

As we saw with the Sally Jo Sorenson bit over at Bluestem, apparently lefties have a hard time distinguishing between different levels of authority.

Sorenson confused “students” with “emplioyees”, “monks” and “inmates” in her piece.

And “Alex” at Minnesota Progressive Project (MPP) seems to conflate “free speech” with “seizing control”

The headlines write themselves.

At MPP, it might be better if they did.  But I digress.

The Mn GOP, led by Pat Garofalo (R, Big State Government), don’t want any more funding increases for local schools. The what is easy. We need to dig deeper, and ask why. Interfering with local school boards is the epitome of the heavy hand of state government sticking its nose in where it doesn’t belong.

“Alec” is responding to the gangs of Republican commandos that have been bursting in to local school board meetings and holding them at gunpoint threatening to kill everyone unless they abandon their special levy drives.  Tony Sutton and Michael Brodkorb, festooned with bandoliers and carrying Dirty Harry revolvers, sneer and cackle like Snidely Whiplash as they demand the school boards lower their budgets or else…

…well no.  Of course not.  The GOP is doing what political parties – and unions, and PACs, and 527s, and groups of people, and individuals with blogs or standing on soapboxes on the street, for that matter – do; telling voters what the truth is (most of the schools boards got more from the state), and asking local property owners if they really  need another tax increase.

Have Minnesota Republicans given up on small, local government?

Well, no, “Alex”; we’re merely participating in it.

Democrats seem to find that threatening.

A lot.

TREBEK: “The most annoying people in the world”.

BERG: “People who pedantically fuss over fairly meaningless, and usually wrong and out of context, ephemera in history to try to discredit their opponents among people who don’t pay much attention to the subject but like to think they do”.

TREBEK:  “Form of a question, Mr. Berg…”

BERG: “Who are who pedantically fuss over fairly meaningless, and usually wrong and out of context, ephemera in history to try to discredit their opponents among people who don’t pay much attention to the subject but like to think they do”

TREBEK: Correct, and you control the board.

I woke up in a cold sweat after dreaming the above exchange, and couldn’t get back to sleep.

So I fired up the computer, and – this is a completely bizarre coincidence – found  this piece in the blog PoliticsUSA, a liberal blog:

Progressive political commentator Thom Hartmann has something to say about the real history of the Boston Tea Party. Using a first-hand account written by one of the participants, he shows that it was not against government regulation; it was not against the size of government. It was not even really at its core about government at all, except to the extent that a government supported a huge mega-corporation that had a stranglehold on America’s economy. As Thom Hartmann says, the Boston Tea Party was “A revolt against corporate power and corporate tax cuts.”

It’s a good thing for Thom Hartman that there is liberal talk radio. Otherwise, he’d be, I dunno, a barrista or something.  A nutty barrista with a very selective sense of history.

Hartman – and the “account” from “one of the participants” – are right to a point; the British East India Company was a corporation.  And it definitely was powerful.

But not a corporation in the sense that we have today.  Mostly.

The BEIC was given a government charter – a legal monopoly – on trade between India and the rest of the British Empire.  It had its own special dispensations to defend that monopoly – like its own frigging Navy and Army.  Even Microsoft and Apple don’t have that kind of government-granted power (more or less).

So the BEIC was a corporation, indeed – at a time when corporations were very, very rare things that were created (if memory serves) by act of Parliament.  It served as a pseudo-government in large parts of India – and, indeed, several of the American colonies had been started by similar “corporations”.  With Armies.  And Navies.  And the power to levy taxes.

And it’s irrelevant – because the Tea Party was a reaction to Parliament’s “Tea Act“, which the BEIC passed on to the colonists in more or less the same way that Whole Foods passes on sales tax to Tom Hartman’s listeners.

There’s a reason that “discussion” with the Mos Eisly Cantina that is the AM950 audience is so futile; it’s that so much of what they “know” is crap.

I’m kind of a nut, sometimes.

I mean that in a benign way.  My occasional little bout of unusualness usually expresses itself in very, very benign ways.  I sing in the car.  I make up languages, and then talk to myself in them (don’t judge).

And I sometimes decide, out of the clear, blue sky, to focus on subjects that one might not expect a guy to focus on for any rational reason.

A good example – I once spent three months reading about the German invasion of Poland – from large-scale histories down to very micro-level accounts by Polish soldiers and civilians.  This in the days before the Internet, mind you.  Another week back in high school, it was learning how to improvise explosives (Note to Janet Napolitano:  It was entirely academic).  In my mid-twenties, it was Asian cooking. And it’s covered many other topics, too – as you may be able to tell from this blog’s rather peripatetic range of subjects.

Anyway.

I sat bolt updright in bed the other day, and thought “wouldn’t it be fun to explain Minnesota law as regards defamation?”

Seriously – that’s the only reason I’m doing this – pure unvarnished serendipity!

It didn’t take much digging to get down to the crux of the gist; defamation (traditionally broken into “Libel”, or written/printed defamation, and “slander”, or spoken defamation, although those categories are largely vestigial holdovers from English common law, where the printing press and the spoken word were pretty much the extent of mass communication, although the lines are blurring rapidly today) is when someone says, writes, or otherwise transmits…:

• …something that is defamatory – in other words, that has a reasonable chance of damaging the subject’s livelihood or reputation (where “reasonable” means “would convince a jury”)…
• …to one or more third parties – meaning that someone besides the target has to hear it.  The communication in question must be…
• …untrue, as in “there is no truth to it”.
• And if the target of the statement is a “public figure”, the target needs to prove the person making the statement acted out of malice.

Seems pretty clear-cut, right?  I mean, here’s Minnesota’s “Criminal Defamation” statute, which covers most of the same sorts of things.

Well, no.  It’s not.  There is all sorts of case law on the subject – all the little crossed fingers behind the metaphorical back that the legal system churns out to make sure only lawyers can really follow the law without some major effort.

And some of those crossed fingers are a good thing.  Otherwise, you could have a situation like in the UK, where defamation is frightfully easy to prove, to the point where it genuinely chills freedom of speech, and always has – which is one major reason why American jurisprudence has legitimately tried to make proving defamation a much harder hill to climb.

So over the course of this week, we’ll look at some of the wrinkles to defamation law.

Apropos, again, nothing but my own schizoid whim.