I’m trying to figure out exactly the angle to take on Lori Sturdevant’s Sunday column bemoaning the fact that our state government is working the way our Constitution says it’s supposed to. 

It must be the whole “the GOP isn’t rolling over and acting like DFLers” thing again.

I know – it’s the same story as with every Lori Sturdevant column.

But today, we’re seeing a bunch of different pathologies at work.

Is it the failure of the education system?

The liberal lobbyist was fuming. Months of hard work had been rendered fruitless by a legislative bow to a veto threat. How could the DFL Legislature have allowed the Republican governor to take charge, the way he did last week? …The civics books may claim that state government’s three branches are equal. But as Minnesotans are witnessing anew this year, in practice, the executive outguns legislative branch. Governors usually get their way.

Forgive the young lobbyist for thinking otherwise. The past four years gave her the false impression that the Capitol’s power formula is two against one…When the 2006 election put DFL majorities in both chambers and kept Gov. Tim Pawlenty in the southwest corner office, some people thought two against one was still the operative rule. They believed the DFLers had taken over.

Which is, of course, stupid.  Our system of checks and balances not “two against one”, it’s “three against three”.    

If it’s not a commentary on education, perhaps it’s merely satire gone horribly awry?

Last week’s litter of vetoed bills demonstrated otherwise. So did the concessions DFLers made before sending bills Pawlenty’s way, in vain hope of winning his signature. Gone were resident tuition for immigrant kids…[PaleoDFLer former Senate leader Roger] Moe noted that when Pawlenty boiled the session’s budget debate down to one simple question — “Isn’t 10 percent enough?” — DFLers were left to respond with what sounded like quibbles. A third of Pawlenty’s proposed 10 percent biennial spending growth is one-time money. The rest just covers inflation in things government does now. New things — mass transit, early childhood education, property tax relief that lasts — need new revenue, particularly the kind that keeps up with the state’s growth. Today’s tax base doesn’t.

The case for “failed self-parody” is strong, but hardly airtight.

How about “inability to read numbers?”

So far, none of that has fazed Pawlenty, or, evidently, Minnesotans. The governor’s most recent approval rating in the Survey USA poll is holding at a healthy 56 percent. ..The May 7 issue of the Weekly Standard magazine hailed Minnesota’s governor as “a rising star in a party that’s been knocked back on its heels” and praised his March presentation to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington…With notices like that bolstering his constitutionally bestowed authority, Pawlenty goes into this last full week of the 2007 regular session positioned to be more cocky than conciliatory.

Vetoes of tax bills actually making the Governor more popular – after an election that the likes of Sturdevant took to mean that Minnesotans really were happy to be fiscally sodomized for a “better Minnesota”? 

Why – what could that possibly mean?

Perhaps that not only is Pawlenty nancying the ever-weakening DFL majority…:

DFLers aimed all session to force the governor to choose at the end between higher taxes or inadequate school funding. But last week, he appeared to be doing the maneuvering. Pawlenty was setting DFLers up for the final choice, between property tax relief and education.

…which is forcing the DFL and Sturdevant (pardon the redundancy) to resort to old tropes:

DFL legislators may have to revert to pretty much the same game plan the skimpy Senate majority followed four years ago: Point out signs that the state’s quality of life is slipping. Put on the governor’s desk reasonable remedies. If he rejects them, demand Republican votes for bills he will sign. Then make sure voters in November 2008 know who said no to a better state.

Er, yeah, LoriDFL.  What would us mere Minnesotans – the ones who think Pawlenty is doing a damn fine job, many of whom are celebrating the Governor’s vetoes – know about this state’s “quality of life?”

Some will call that strategy capitulation. In 2004, when House DFLers gained 13 seats, they called it successful.

Right, but the DFL is the majority on whom the people get to vent their dissatisfaction now. 

And vent, I believe, we shall.

Someone tell Lori.

I saw the breathless news reports last week – about how mothers, if paid at the scale of the various jobs they hold (according to Salary.com), would/should earn $138,095 a year.

It didn’t pass the stink test for me, but I didn’t know why. 

Nihilist – recovering nicely from his year as a City Pages-endorsed blogger – in his capacity as a bean-counter, does know why.  “Mom”, according to the “survey”, has a bunch of jobs:

• Chief Executive Officer
• Psychologist
• Facilities Manager
• Day Care Center Teacher
• Computer Operator I
• Cook – Institution
• Laundry Machine Operator
• Van Driver
• Janitor
• Housekeeper

Nihilist starts going down the list:

Let’s start at the top. Mom as CEO. I recall the salad days of my youth, when mom orchestrated a hostile takeover of the Johnson family down the street and outsourced dad to India before jetting off to Wall Street to make a pitch to Goldman Sachs. No wait, I don’t remember that at all. Because Mom is not a CEO. Let’s strike that one.

Read the whole thing.

We MOB bloggers have been dinging on Susan Lenfestey for years, now; she’s got a place of (heh heh) honor in my pandaemon of frequent fisking targets.

But I’m starting to worry about here.  I’m not going to fisk anything; just show it.

Remember – it’s her “Mother’s Day” column, a “letter” to the President:

…I realize this is of no interest to you…and yet, you are the only one who can make my day…We’ve never made a big fuss over Mother’s Day at our house…This year I want my children to share with me the gift of hope — in their futures, in their children’s futures. And that’s where you come in…Mr. President, so we were lucky to grow up in the glory years…We grew up believing that we were the greatest, kindest nation in the world…Yes, we also saw our heroes — well, mine anyway, Jack and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. — murdered right in front of our eyes….we watched our classmates die in a terrible mistake of a war and vowed never again…through our self-indulgence, shortsightedness or greed, we’ve pretty much trashed things for those who follow…I am asking you to decide to give us hope, because our children are having a hard time finding much of it…For six years you’ve given us fear, and it’s taken a toll…

One wonders how she even finds the strength to wake up in the morning.

If you know Sue Lenfestey – wife of yet another ultra-liberal former Strib editor – render assistance.  Between columns like this and her ongoing venting of unrequited bile, she could apparently use a shoulder to cry on.

Or something. 

K. T. Tunstall.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, her current single – “Suddenly I See”, or whatever – is a whole lot better than her first, that gawdawful song with the impacted-sounding backup singers going “woo hoo” over and over again.  But the whole enterprise – every single song I’ve ever heard the woman do – sounds so utterly clenched that I just can’t react in any way but to reach for an ibuprofen.

That is all.

I was having an email discussion the other day with a friend who took exception to my continued criticism of Strib columnist Syl Jones.

To be fair (to Jones and to me), unlike most conservative commentators I’ve actually found reason to agree with some of Jones’ work – but it’s been a rare thing.  For starters, I’m desperately sick of his whole “ice people” slur – the whole Melanistic conceit that people of color are inherently emotionally and mentally healthier than white people because their sun-drenched past made them more open and less repressed they’ve “got no soul”, in effect.  Leaving aside the simple fact that no white commentator could get away with doing the same thing in reverse for any reason (assuming they’d want to – and what, indeed, is the point of slandering an entire race’s “soul”, anyway?), it’s a stupid conceit; anyone who can say that a strand of ethnic groups (linked only by skin color, for crying out loud) that produced Bach, Michaelangelo, Beethoven, Turner, Shakespeare, Tolstoii, Byron, Chekhov, Mahler, Ibsen, Hemingway and Ramone “has no soul” is pretty clearly deluded.

But I come neither to bury nor praise Syl Jones.

One of the remarks in my email exchange that grabbed me was the idea that my criticism of Jones was “white-guy-apologist stuff”.  Which prompted me to think – calling someone “white male”, to a fair chunk of our society, is taken as a sort of rhetorical trump card.  The twin involuntary sins of being Caucasian and male are taken as an explanation for the whole gamut of offenses; colonialism, the oppression of women, war, the despoiling of the environment, the alienation of the Industrial Revolution, bad awkward dancing.  Throw in Protestant Christianity (the dreaded White WASP male), and you add emotional rigidness and frigidity, homophobia, unsatisfying sex and patriarchalism.

It’s an “argument” (and I say argument in scare quotes, since there really is no discussion; “you’re a white guy” is tossed out like a rhetorical stun grenade, intended to knock out everyone in the room, without much backup plan as to what happens if it doesn’t work.  One left-leaning woman, on meeting me a few weeks ago and learning I was a conservative, snarked “a white male who’s a conservative.  There’s a surprise!”.  I chalk it up to my inherent restraint that I didn’t respond “a white, upper-middle-class, never-married, childless fortysomething professional woman that’s a DFLer?  Ibid!”) that I’ve pretty much seceded from.  What, indeed, is the point?  Can someone criticize, say, Syl Jones for his many individual misapprehensions of fact (which have nothing to do with anyone’s skin color), as well as the generalized caustic ugliness of constantly referring to “ice people” in his columns – itself “racist” by any rational measure – without having one’s own race dragged into it?

Or does a white male need to subcontract his own critique out to, say, a Hispanic lesbian ghostwriter for it to be valid?

Whatever.  I’m not the one to untangle this society’s angst about race, which started three centuries before any of my anscestors came to this country. Still, if I must be seen to engage in “white guy apologetics”, I’ll just get it out of the way right now.  Every society on this planet that must interact with other societies, from tribes in the New Guinea highlands barely removed from the Stone Age (many of whom have waged constant war on each other for millenia) to tribal clans in Central Asia and the American steppes (whose inherent discrimination against other clans is reflected in the very language the culture uses; the term for “human” in many indigenous languages around the world becomes more derogatory the farther removed from the home clan the subject is), to large, multiethnic societies throughout history.  And of all the thousands and thousands of such societies, from extended family tribes to globe-spanning empires, which ones have been the ones to even attempt to combat systematic racism, to make the genders equal, and to build societies that transcend such bigoties and hatreds?

I’m just saying.

I can’t begin to untangle the issue of race in this society, much less worldwide – partly because a fair chunk of this society’s punditry considers my opinion invalid (I’m a white guy, remember?), and partly because whatever my skin color, I’m not smart enough.  Nobody really is.  It’s something that’ll resolve itself despite the demigoguery and the rhetorical short-cuts and all the other baggage, eventually.  I  hope.  Maybe the demographers are right – the whole race issue will diffuse itself in another fifty generations, as all the races interbreed and the whole planet comes out looking tan.

So maybe the whole “white” part of the “white male” conceit will die off on its own, eventually.  But the “male” part?  That’s where this gets interesting.

Now, I am and remain the foremost feminist I know.  And it both troubles and amuses me to note that many of my fellow guys who call themselves “feminists” seem to feel that the only way for a guy to express “feminism” is to prostrate oneself before women and demand their forgiveness for the sins of ones forefathers, whatever they may have been and whenever they may have happened.

This, of course, is not only rubbish, it’s dangerous – to feminism.

I have a question.  Feel free to discuss it in the comment section.

Background:  This earth has tens of thousands of different societies and cultures.  Many of them – Islam being a key example – are intensely patriarchal (run by men).  However, many are very matriarchal, either behind the scenes (many Asian societies at the family and clan level) or quite overtly (many African cultures).

It’s a given (for most) that boys and girls are different, of course; in kindergarten, boys tend to be physical and spatial, while girls tend to be verbal and social.  Girls, stereotypically, play in groups and gossip about each other (and no, it’s neither a sexist stereotype nor a product of middle-class Western culture, so don’t go there); boys tend toward aggression (almost always stylized, although the feminization of the school system has arguably destroyed the socialization that taught boys to control that aggression, leading to ever-more real violence), physicality and a more-detailed conception of the physical world around them (recognized even in preschoolers as boys’ typically-greater conception of three-dimensional space compared to girls – which helps counterbalance girls’ greater verbal skills).

History’s great conquerors, of course, have all been males; Alexander, the Romans, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Ditka, the British (who were sometimes ruled by queens, but the queen ran a very patriarchal system) and so on.

Who have been the great rulers of matriarchal societies?   Who knows?

The theory I’ve heard – and I can’t remember when or from whom, sorry – is that matriarchal societies tend to be more inward-focused; it’s in matriarchal socities that it’s believed that “it takes a village to raise a child”; according to the theory, a matriarchal society behaves more or less like a group of girls will act; verbal, group-oriented, alternately supportive and undercutting.

Patriarchal societies, says the theory, act like boys; outward facing, rules-based, individualistic.

Most societies, of course, mix the two in some way or another, more or less.  And when two societies collide in conflict, it’s usually the patriarchal one that prevails (see:  the spread of intensely patriarchal Islam across heavily-matriarchal Africa).

Again – as I noted above, the only large, significant society in all of history that has seriously addressed the notion of equity among races, beliefs and genders is the patriarchal, Judeo-Christian western civilization.

Question:  If the Judeo-Christian West were a matriarchal society, would it have developed into small-l liberal democracies?  Or would they be recognizable to us today?  Would they be viable?

Discuss away.  Stupid comments (as judged by me and only me) will be excised.  Not mutilated; I want to stay on the subject, not on a bunch of tangents introduced by certain commenters’ peculiarities.

Oh, and anyone who replies “why does Mitch Berg hate women?” will earn a rhetorical wedgie.

I’m starting to find my power, here.   A few years ago, I demanded that “bloggy” and all derivatives thereunto appertaining be excised from the language.  I haven’t seen it much lately.  It is a sweet victory indeed, and I claim all credit. 

Ed and I interviewed Troy Scheffler yesterday on NARN Volume II. 

Troy, you may recall, was the Hamline University student suspended from school by executive fiat for emailing the University’s president  to suggest that allowing students to defend themselves against mass-murderers and other criminals (Hamline is a “gun free campus, just like Virginia Tech and the Red Lake School and Cold Springs/Rocori and Columbine…) might better serve the needs of security than wallowing in empty therapeutic blandishments.

Ed beat me to the story, so I’ll let him describe the interview:

I was curious about what kind of person Troy was, and so I looked forward to meeting with him yesterday after our intrepid producer Matt Reynolds made the arrangements. I didn’t think he’d be a Seung-hui Cho type at all, but I was very much surprised when Troy turned out to be as mild-mannered as anyone I had ever met. He didn’t harbor any bitterness nor even anger over his situation, only a resigned bemusement. He, in fact, is a very nice guy caught up in the academic manifestations of political correctness.

I’ll add to that – Troy is not some twentysomething fratboy all fired up on testosterone.  He’s in his early thirties (according to the City Pages article that kicked the whole story off), working on getting into law school.  My first impression was he’s about as regular as guy as they get.

Ed goes on to describe Scheffler’s explication of the email traffic between him and the Hamline administration.  He was suspended from school, and ordered to get psychiatric counseling before he could apply for reinstatement. 

For writing an email suggesting the allowing of guns on campus.

The upshot?

So far, the school hasn’t budged. Troy doesn’t really want to return there anyway under the circumstances, but he worries that the incompletes he had to take and the record of the suspension will damage his chances to get into law school. In fact, he has just about despaired of that career at this point, and isn’t sure what he will do now.

What is certain is that Hamline should be embarrassed to have treated Troy in this manner. Had Hanson actually met Troy, she would have seen that she had nothing to fear from him.

Hamline’s gutless administrators have hidden behind “student privacy” so far (although, as producer Matt Reynolds hilariously pointed out, Hamline’s switchboard isn’t so concerned about “student privacy” that they couldn’t give out the personal cell phone numbers of several principals to the story).

Come on, Hamline.  Explain yourselves – or have the whole world know what a bunch of gutless Orwellian toadies you are.

The challenge is on the table, Hamline.  Do you have enough respect for your students, your neighbors and the public to defend your actions?

Ed finishes:

NOTE: Troy could use a good Second Amendment lawyer. Let me know if anyone wants to give Troy an assist in that manner.

If anyone has any leads for lawyers or other organizations that help gun owners who’ve faced this sort of discrimination, write me at “feedbackinthedark” at the email address yahoo dot com. 

I’ve never been a huge sci-fi fan.  I’ve read very little, in fact – I was a history geek, not a sci-fi fan.

One of the very few sci-fi authors I ever really cared about was Jerry Pournelle; he infused his writing with a streak of millenarian libertarianism that grabbed me back when I read that kind of thing.

So I’m just a tad psyched to see that not only does he have a blog, but that he’s linked me.

I’m a very, very idealistic person.  And I’ve got a sentimental streak wider than my shoulders.

But I’ve bred a healthy – mostly – streak of cynicism into myself when it comes to the media, to pop culture, to public society.  With people as individuals, I trust but verify. With most public personae, I distrust and, if debunking fails, might be amenable to discussion.

So it took me a whole reading of Nick Coleman’s mother’s day column before I was able to tell my internal cynic to take a break, grab a drink, come back in a few.

I’m not going to quote it.  Read it, and if you have an angle on it – well, you know what to do.

And yet it’s never gone away.

It’s going to be a big day on NARN II.

We’ll be interviewing Roger Rapoport, author of the book Citizen Moore.  The timing is pretty dang good! 

So tune in to Volume I (11-1), Volume III (The Final Word, 3-5), and of course Ed and I on the Headliner from 1-3.  It’s going to be a fun weekend!

 UPDATE!  And kudos to producer Matt Reynolds, who booked Troy Scheffler, the student suspended by Hamline University for advocating concealed carry on campus, at 1:30 PM tomorrow!

I’m gonna tell you a story about a couple of groups of people.

News people – especially newspaper people – subscribe to the American ideal of what journalism is, and what journalists are.  Part of the culture involves seeing journalism as an almost monastic calling, with a higher codes and rituals and an impenetrable argot that separates them from baser callings.  Among good reporters, it’s a mission; among lesser ones, it’s an affectation.  It’s neither good nor bad. 

I grew up with a foot in that world; I was a news reporter, on and (mostly) off from age 16 into my late twenties.  I did my level best to stay detached and stay as close to “objective” as I could (even during my stint in the news department at ulter-liberal KFAI, of all places), where I am happy to relate that nobody ever guessed from my reporting that I had any politics at all. 

And then there’s the other world; the more plebeian, less-lofty world of radio, especially the part of radio outside of the few remaining serious commercial radio newsrooms.  The world of stunts, dirty tricks, “punking” the competition with gleeful abandon; the world that spawned Howard Stern and Scott Shannon and Opie and Anthony, for better or worse.  A world where an extra couple of hundred listeners tuning in for an extra fifteen minutes can mean the difference between having a great job and filing for unemployment yet again.   It’s a nasty, brutish, deeply dysfunctional world where arrested adolescents romp and play routinely on the dark side of the ethical moon.  And damn, when it’s fun, it’s fun!

Blogs are somewhere between the two, and way outside ’em to boot.  A blog reflects its writers, pretty much; you can tell Powerline is a bunch of lawyers with scrappy streaks, that The Sheila Variations is written by an eclectic with ADD, that Captain’s Quarters’ Ed Morrissey is a mild-mannered guy with an incisive rhetorical left hook and a Rainman-like command of facts.  And you can probably tell that this blog is the product of a guy who wears a bunch of hats; diarist, would-be-eclectic, amateur pundit-via-rhetorical-pugilist.

Anyway.

Last week, when the “Punk the Monitor” scheme got hatched, I asked myself – “is this a good idea?” to mock, to “punk”, such a request?

Jeff Fecke left a comment yesterday:

Mitch–

Thank you for your interest, but I have no comment at this time.

Sincerely,

Jeff Fecke

P.S. Oh, wow, look how easy that was!

Oh, wow, but that’s not the whole story. 

If it were, say, Tim O’Brien or Nick Coleman or Lori Sturdevant writing to me, that’s what I’d do.  Because they’re biased hacks who are out to attack the politics I personally espouse, and will use any info I provide to that end – but they’re the establishment, and everyone knows what they’re about.  No surprises there.

And if Eric Black or MPR or most mainstream reporters sent an email, it’d be another story; most of them take “detachment” fairly seriously.

But the Minnesota Monitor is an inherently deceitful enterprise, a propaganda organ funded (lavishly, by blog standards) by liberals with deep pockets whose mission is to win elections and regain control of this nation.  Which would be fine – if they were open and honest about their goals, motivations and support, so that the unwitting could make up their own mind.  Nobody reads Powerline or Captain’s Quarters or this blog for that matter and comes away thinking there’s any attempt at neutrality (although I do try to be fair). 

As such, the Minnesota Monitor – like the Huffington Post or the Young Turks – deserves overt mockery – which, by the way, is the type of thing Fecke himself serves up at conservatives in non-Monitor blogging (you be the judge!), but expects everyone else to turn off when he puts on his “junior reporter” hat.  It’d be like me doing this overtly partisan blog five days a week, and then walking into the Patriot studio and demanding that everyone treat me as a non-biased, open-minded objective person – nobody would buy it, and I’d get mocked for trying (and deserve it!).

 Why, it’s almost as if, if you don’t want someone to interview you, you can decline to be interviewed. And you can even do so without being a jerk. And you don’t have to “punk” anyone.

Jerk?

Mommy?  Is that you?

Jeff is right.  “Punking” the monitor is an act of free will. 

And declining “interviews” would certainly be a good idea – I know I would.  Ignoring the Monitor completely would be a fine plan, actually.  Most people do!

But mocking, pranking, “punking” is a perfectly fine way to express a different opinion; that we do not respect The Monitor; we see the “junior journalist” badge, but we’re not buying it (for good reasons that have more to do with journalistic credibility than ideology); that we are competing for hearts, minds, funny bones, votes, and the nodding realization at the end of the day that “these guys are reliable”. 

But hey, that’s what you do when you’re an adult.

No, Jeff, it’s what you do when you respect the requestor. 

 That’s what, say, Michael Brodkorb did the two times I asked him for comment–and the two times he’s asked me for comment.

Michael works in politics, and must maintain relatinships with all sorts of people.  I do not.

You and Aplikowski are less mature than Brodkorb. I mean, if that was me, I’d be really embarrassed. But hey, whatevs.

And I’d be embarassed if I was busted passing clairvoyance off as “reporting”, and even more so if I ever used the word “whatevs” (or “Pwn3d” or “hacktacular” or “whatevah”) in a sentence.

Tomato, tomahto.

Now have your people get back to me on those 13 questions, OK? 

(more…)

In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings – which could possibly have been thwarted had VT not been a gun-free zone – people and institutions around the country responded.

In the case of my neighbor, Hamline University in Saint Paul, the response involved punishing students that spoke out for concealed carry reform on the “gun-free” campus:

In the aftermath, officials at Hamline University sought to comfort their 4,000 students. David Stern, the vice president for academic and student affairs, sent a campus-wide email offering extra counseling sessions for those who needed help coping.

Scheffler had a different opinion of how the university should react. Using the email handle “Tough Guy Scheffler,” Troy fired off his response: Counseling wouldn’t make students feel safer, he argued. They needed protection. And the best way to provide it would be for the university to lift its recently implemented prohibition against concealed weapons.

“Ironically, according to a few VA Tech forums, there are plenty of students complaining that this wouldn’t have happened if the school wouldn’t have banned their permits a few months ago,” Scheffler wrote. “I just don’t understand why leftists don’t understand that criminals don’t care about laws; that is why they’re criminals. Maybe this school will reconsider its repression of law-abiding citizens’ rights.”

Ironically, Concealed Carry Reform Now of Minnesota – the group that drove the Concealed Carry reform issue for a decade in Minnesota (not, as the media would have you believe, the NRA) – had most of its meetings at the Hamline University law school auditorium. 

But after the Virginia Tech massacre, school administrators across the country were ramping up security. Flip to any cable news channel and you’d hear experts talking about warning signs that had been missed. Cho had a history of threatening behavior and stalking. And a psychological evaluation had deemed him a threat to himself.

So Hamline officials took swift action. On April 23, Scheffler received a letter informing him he’d been placed on interim suspension. To be considered for readmittance, he’d have to pay for a psychological evaluation and undergo any treatment deemed necessary, then meet with the dean of students, who would ultimately decide whether Scheffler was fit to return to the university.

The consequences were severe. Scheffler wasn’t allowed to participate in a final group project in his course on Human Resources Management, which will have a big impact on his final grade. Even if he’s reinstated, the suspension will go on his permanent record, which could hurt the aspiring law student.

“‘Oh, he’s the crazy guy that they called the cops on.’ How am I supposed to explain that to the Bar Association?” Scheffler asks.

For exercising his right to speak freely, he’s branded as a nutcase by the school’s administration.

Sort of like the Soviets used to do.  

While Hamline doesn’t have the rep for relentless PC noodling of, say, Macalester or St. Thomas, it gives both a run for the title.

He has also suffered embarrassment. Scheffler obeyed the campus ban and didn’t go to class, but his classmate, Kenny Bucholz, told him a police officer was stationed outside the classroom. “He had a gun and everything,” Bucholz says…Now Scheffler is looking to hire a lawyer of his own. Even if Hamline lifts the suspension, he doubts he’ll return to campus, he says. “If they’re going to treat me that way before, how will they treat me after?”

Dunno, but I hope his suit draws blood. 

Note to any Hamline administration reading this space; your worthless frat trash’s “puke on Mitch’s property” privileges are permanently revoked. 

…when you’ve got Foot?

It all began when noted objective internet journalist Jeff Fecke requested an interview from his long-time friend whom he had always respected and held in high regard, Andy Aplikowski (1) for an article he was writing for the online news source Minnesota Monitor (2). But instead of treating his fellow blogger with the respect and solicitude that he rightly deserved, Aplikowski replied with a series of hate-filled, racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, unhinged rants emblematic of any wingnut Republican. Like a good journalist, Mr. Fecke cleaned up the transcript, added some copy and posted the piece.

And so on.  Read it all.

And then look for Obie’s “real” “Blog House” this weekend, and see if there are any substantial differences.

Since the local bought-and-paid-for “progressive” media has taken to “interviewing” selected Republican “insurgents” (purely to help political discourse in Minnesota, naturally), I figured fair was fair. I’m sending the following interview questions to Minnesota Monitor. 

Since they can trust my motivations implicitly, I’m sure I’ll get a full, thorough, ingenuous response.

Here goes:

———-

To: Minnesota Monitor Staff

From: Mitch Berg, ace reporter

Re:  Interview

I have some questions for y’all.  Please pay no attention to my five year history of rhetorically beating you guys like a baby harp seal and my known antipathy to your party’s “magazine’s” site’s underlying worldview; please disregard everything you know, and assume that I’m being utterly sincere in saying that I seek merely knowledge and enlightenment.

1. So where does your funding come from?  Since the Center for Independent Media started out sharing offices with David Brock’s attack-PR firm “Media Matters for America”, in an arrangement that looked to anyone who’s ever worked in the world of business like an “incubator” deal (where an established company lends material assistance to a smaller spinoff), it’s a legitmate question that bears directly on your site’s “journalistic credibility”.
2. Ha ha.  A cutesy snark.  How precious.  OK, now a serious answer, if you please?
3. Where in your “code of ethics” is “clairvoyance” mentioned?  Because ascribing motivations in the midst of a “news story” absent any factual basis is the kind of thing MY first news boss would have given me a swirlie over.  How is it that Minnesota Monitor’s “ethics” allow this egregious faux pas?
4. What was the motivation for Fecke’s interview, if not to try to dig at the MNGOP?
5. Given the answer to #4 (and there really can only be one answer, no?), when your Jeff Fecke sent Andy Aplikowski the “interview questions”, can you possibly understand why Aplikowski – given Fecke’s track record – might have viewed it as a subject for derision rather than worthy of a serious response? 
6. Word has it the Strib’s Tim O’Brien is working on a puff piece on your side of the Aplikowski flap.   Does “Minnesota Monitor” have an O’Brien-lip-shaped groove in its institutional ass from the fawning he’s given you?
7. Do you think you’re giving Soros his money’s worth?
8. Doh!  It was a trick question!  I’m a silly boy.  OK, I’ll try again.  Who are the “Liberals with deep pockets” (that was the phrase one of you used in informal conversation) that are funding the “Center for Independent Media”?
9. The Monitor claimed that it posted Aplikowski’s interview fairly.  Aplikowski claims that you edited out a few things that were fairly critical to his position.  Tomato tomahto?  After sending Aplikowski a draft of the piece, Andy sent Fecke back some clarifications.  Fecke (says Aplikowski) picked and chose among the clarifications he posted.  True, or not? 
10. If true, how ethical do you believe this is?
11. You’ve hired a staff that consists to a great extent of people who’ve built their blogging “careers” out of snarking and japing at Republicans.  Now, those same snarkers and japers are coming to Republican “insurgents” bearing interview questions transparently designed to feed into your site’s institutional biases and to try to undercut the party we all support.  Exactly how is it you expect anyone not to try to yank your chains, as Andy et al did earlier this week?  Seriously – do you think pasting “Ace Journalist” on your foreheads makes you inherently trustworthy?  
12. In a larger sense – please state the case for taking Minnesota Monitor seriously, not just as “news” but especially in terms of granting actual trust and credibility to your reporters.  Especially for readers and interview subjects who are not part of the  “progressive” (bwahaha) audience.
13. The bloggers who punked Fecke (and the dolts who take him seriously) over his “Inteview with an Insurgent” bit view the Minnesota Monitor not as a bunch of fellow bloggers with whom to coexist, but (I think it’s fair to say) a foe to be undercut, screwed with, and eventually vanquished.  Are they wrong to do so?  Why?

That should get y’all started.

Please return this immediately, as I have a deadline.

Kathy from Cake Eater Chronicles was one of the best bloggers in town even before her cancer became her only topic.  Since the very beginning, she’s brought her customary, warped sense of humor – the life of many a MOB part – to the subject.

Her latest post, among many other things, goes through the way people react to women wearing the do-rags and hats in that way that says “I’m in chemo”.

And it’s a learning experience.  For example – I’ve been this guy:

First off you have the I’M NOT LOOKING AT YOU People. Theyr’e not looking at you. No, they’re not. You just thought they were looking at you. They’ll swear on a stack of bibles that they’re not looking at you. You’re wrong. Their pupils are firmly set directly in the middle of their sockets, they’re looking directly ahead, and NO they did not SEE YOU. They’d swear they didn’t. And if they did just for one fraction of a second, well, they didn’t mean to see you. They really didn’t. It was an accident and it will never happen again! EXCEPT THAT THEY JUST DID! AIEEEEEE! Oh, Holy Hell! Their eye slipped over to the corner and…they forced it by sheer will back to center. OHMYGODDIDTHEYNOTICE??? I DON’T WANT TO MAKE THEM FEEL LIKE THEY’RE IN A FREAK SHOW! I CAN’T LOOK! REALLY, I CAN’T. LOOK AT THE GROUND LOOK AT THE GROUND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST LOOK AT THE GROUND!!!!

Yeah, yeah.  I know.  I’ve been working on it.

Her whole series should be required reading.

I remember when I worked as a reporter, both on the radio and as a freelance print reporter.  Now, I was nothing to shake a stick at; I was a serviceable reporter.  Nothing more.

And part of being a serviceable journalist that could get hired to write stories was making sure that what you turned in to your editor was all facts.  Especially when I did print work – my last step before walking my copy in to the office was to call back all my sources and double-check everything I’d presented as fact – names, spellings, places, numbers, who said what to whom, everything – to remove all semblance of opinion, supposition and by-guess-and-by-gosh, to say nothing of human error, that was humanly possible. 

That was back when I was working for the most benign media in the US – the small neighborhood newspapers that dot Minneapolis, Saint Paul and the suburbs, the papers that report on neighborhood business, events, crime and the daily (or more usually weekly or monthly) parade of events on their turf, the Midway Monitor, Grand Gazette, Highland Villager, East Metro Courier and a bunch of others, all of them little tabloids that depended for their existence on getting the story right in their neighborhoods.  Accuracy was a premium, since everyone in the paper’s audience knew everyone and everything that was being written about.

The editors and publishers of these little papers knew that their survival, even more than that of the big dailies, depended on their credibility with their audience.

Credibility.  It’s a big thing, if you’re in the communication business.

———-

We conservative bloggers give the Minnesota Monitor a hard time.  As has been amply observed by many local center-right bloggers, the MinMon is supported by the “Center for Independent Media”, which until fairly recently shared offices with “Media Matters for America”.  MM4A is a George Soros-funded attack PR firm associated with an awful lot of gutless attack-flakkery; in addition to carrying on a high-profile campaign of smearing conservative commentators (often swerving into overt racism, sexism, anti-semitism and a lot of other “isms” that, were MM4A a conservative organization, wouldn’t pass unnoticed and unassailed. 

The Center for Independent Media pays a group of local bloggers a fairly fat stipend, by blogging standards, to write for the Minnesota Monitor.  One must, on the surface, give the CIM and the Monitor some points for at least trying to put up a good appearance; they bandy their “Code of Ethics” about with giggly abandon.  I think it’s fair to say that some of their “journalists” make a game effort to try to meet that “code”; an examination of Minnesota Monitor’s coverage shows that the “code” gets ignored when convenient.  And while questions have been raised about CIM’s funding, they’ve never revealed anything – although the phrase “liberals with deep pockets” has slipped out in informal conversation.

To sum it up – the Minnesota Monitor and its merry band of rentabloggers has been trying to eke out some credibility as a news source.  I think it’s fair to say that outside the motivated center-to-far-left, they’re not there yet.

Which is where this story starts.

—–

One of the Minnesota Monitor’s bloggers is Jeff Fecke.  Jeff’s been writing his “Blog of the Moderate Left” for a long, long time – almost as long as I’ve been doing this blog. I’ve never met Jeff, knowing only his online persona; I’ve sympathized with him during his divorce, and read about some of his health issues, about which he’s written quite a bit over the years (he once had a side-blog about bariatric surgery that was by far the most affecting and interesting thing he’s written).  But for the most part, Fecke is a snark-blogger in the model of fellow rentablogger Duncan “Atrios” Black; the stereotypical Fecke piece actually reads like the stereotypical Black piece:

Why Does Bush Hate The Troops?

Article says administration trying to solve vets health care crisis.

Oh yeah.  That’ll work. 

After five years of that (and yes, I know – like most three-line parodies, it’s as hamfisted as…well, an Atrios analysis piece; read Fecke’s oeuvre and judge for yourself).

To be clear and fair – I don’t believe Fecke to be a bad person in any way. I’m not getting into any personal attacks here. 

But we’re talking about journalism.  It’s nothing personal – just business.

———-

I know what you’re thinking.  “Who are you to judge, Berg?”

Who, indeed.  I’ve worn a lot of hats in my life; reporter was one of them, for a while.  This blog, of course, is not journalism, for the most part (I’ve taken my shots at it, of course).  It is a combination of things – diary, soapbox, punching bag; at the end of the day, it’s really my personal comment section for the big blog of my life.  I seek to be “fair” not as a matter of journalistic ethics – this blog (generally) is not a journalistic endeavor – but out of a personal sense that fair is the right thing to be.  And like all personal senses, it’s malleable and subject to all the usual personal vicissitudes.  I am not always fair.  But I generally strive to me.  And I can say with absolute honesty that I’ve never knowingly put anything false on this blog, outside what I believed to be fairly clear satire and parody.  While my bias is one of the reasons this blog exists, I take personal integrity seriously; the only person I’ve banned from this blog in the past two years was ejected for calling me a liar (wrongly, of course).

On the radio?  I’m honest about my biases.  And I can honestly say that I’ve never done even the most highly-charged interview (last October’s interview with the Strib’s Rochelle Olson, about her hatchet-pieces on Alan Fine, was probably the most portentious of my radio career) wanting to be unfair.  Indeed I was fair to Olson; I just paid out the rope by which I think she hung herself.

On any given issue, you can figure for yourself how fair and credible I am; your decision may be informed, well or foul, by the fact that I’m honest about my biases.  On the show as on this blog, you, the listener and reader, are the judge.  

———-

Last week, Fecke – in his capacity as a “journalist” for the Minnesota Monitor – sent Andy Aplikowski an “interview” – an email with a bunch of questions. 

Andy is an outspoken Republican, a firebrand within the party, someone who has a vision and works for it with a tirelessness that the party needs a lot more of.  Like anyone with a vision and the cojones to state it, he’s developed some detractors and enemies within the party.  It’s the detractors’ loss; the perception that political parties are full of people who fret more about internal politics than about winning elections is one of the things that kills the desire of anyone who doesn’t live for that kind of thing to get and stay involved. 

Andy’s first reflex was to delete the “request”; Fecke is a writer with a five year history (on his personal blog as well as the MNMOn) of antipathy toward Republicans, working for an outlet whose mission is to serve as a propaganda organ for the regional left.  In retrospect, it may have been the right reflex.

But Andy forwarded the email to a group of other local center-right bloggers, including me.  And in a brief burst of creativity, we concocted a number of flagrancies; a fictional groundswell for John Hinderaker to lead the MN GOP, a bunch of things that’d jump right out at a typical leftyblogger as stereotypes for the snarking, to justify much gamboling about and poo-flinging.

Learned Foot – a party to the party – sums things up fairly well:

What it was, however, was an amusing diversion; an exercise in disinformation with a rather obvious play to the preconceived prejudices of you and your audience. I mean, didn’t those references to Obama and the Imus comment seem just a little extraneous and out of context?

It was like waving our arms yelling “Yoohoo! You can play the race card here!”

Not to you people. Critical thinking jumps right out the window when you hacks see the chance to slime somebody. Hell, it never even occurred to any of you that perhaps Andy didn’t write any of those answers at all (aside from inserting typos and torturing some of the syntax to make it look more authentic).

It was a half-baked hoax – because, frankly, what’s the point of fully-baking a hoax with these people? 

———-

In writing about the whole flap, Fecke asks:

So I’ll have much more on L’affaire Aplikowski later today, but I’m still left wondering how “I know!  I’ll lie in an interview and say racist and incendiary things, and then Jeff Fecke will print them in Minnesota Monitor, and that’ll show him!” makes me look bad.

If Fecke’d stopped there, it probably wouldn’t have. 

But Fecke went on to fall into our trap, and prove our point.

Remember – being a “journalist” involves clearly separating fact from opinion – and, if you ever worked for a boss like my first one, keeping your opinion the hell out of it.

Fecke seems (to my opinion) to have a habit of inserting opinion into ostensible “journalism”; remember when he wrote with no evidence one could discern from his reporting that Representative John Kline – combat veteran, one-time carrier of the nuclear “football” and survivor of several campaigns’ worth of DFL mud-mongering – was “”terrified” of his contituents at a town hall meeting?  I wanted to jump through the monitor (and the Monitor) to ask “um, based on WHAT?”

Or how he implied without any visible evidence that the Kline campaign conspired to block his liveblogging of the meeting?  His long record of jumping to unwarranted conclusions, sometimes with very embarassing results?

Not that he stands out from the Minnesota Monitor in general; last winter, when a group of Twin Cities gay activists’ van was vandalized at Dordt College in Iowa – a fairly fundamentalist Christian school that bans gay relationships on campus – the report on the subject skimped on little facts like Dordt had invited the gay activists, and that Dordt had ordered the vandalism cleaned up by their own maintenance people.  Andy Birkey, the reporter who covered the story, left a comment about my questions a few weeks later:

I wrote the piece the night before I went on vacation, based on information from my good friend Matt Comer who was a participant in the Soulforce Equality Ride. I wrote it before media reports had come out, and did not have internet access for the following week, or I would have followed it up.

While I do – sincerely – appreciate Birkey’s clarification, my inner editor wants to ask – “so you didn’t bother to get Dordt’s story before you left on vacation?  Then why did you run the story, as incomplete and thus unfair as it was?”

Minnesota Monitor has done little to earn the trust of those who aren’t fundamentally-disposed to agree with it in the first place.  Given that Minnesota Monitor’s “reporters” have a record of omitting non-prejudicial facts about Republican, Christian and right-leaning subjects (by omission or commission), while essentially making up things to fit their preconceived hypotheses, where’s the percentage in someone like Andy Aplikowski not assuming that Fecke will screw him in the final draft?

As, indeed and predictably, he did:

I’m also left wondering who the “proper GOP leaders” Aplikowski notified were.  As far as I can tell, Andy Aplikowski is saying that the Republican Party of Minnesota authorized him to lie to the newsmedia to prove–well, something.  I didn’t know the GOP of Minnesota was in the habit of authorizing its district chairs to freely lie to people, but it’s probably good to know.

From a bald-faced hoax, Fecke – with no source other than an emailed statement from a party to the hoax, presumes a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Minnesota GOP.

Satisfying to one’s inner Bob Woodward, perhaps, but getting another source would have been a better idea.  In saying the State GOP “authorized” anything, Fecke is making things up, presuming facts nowhere in evidence (nowhere in existence) to go along with his preconceived idea. 

For while Fecke says:

I regret that I did not expect him to lie in the interview, but we rarely think ill of those lied to.  Generally, it’s the liar who looks the worst.

Except the “lie” was a trick.  And it worked.

Sad to say.  But true.

———-

Fecke does bring up one point – possibly advertently. 

For now, I’m just left shaking my head sadly.  I actually wanted to write an article that was fair to Aplikowski and the GOP, one that was not a hatchet job, but simply presented his point of view.

About a month ago, Jeff Horwich from MPR approached me about appearing on a panel in front of a live audience on the MPR program “In The Loop”.  I did my due diligence, of course – but I, a conservative talk show host, could walk into Minnesota Public Radio with a reasonable expectation that I wasn’t going to get punked.  MPR – at least their news and public affairs departments – have a reputation for being fair.  I felt I could trust MPR – and my trust was amply rewarded.  As was theirs; I did nothing to jerk them around.  I respected their integrity, and with good reason; they apparently believed there was good reason to respect mine.

Likewise, when Eric Black called me a few years ago asking for background on Powerline and the other local center-right bloggers, I believed – rightly – that what I said would be reported fairly, clearly and with no words crammed into my mouth.  I didn’t assume I’d agree with any conclusions Black drew – but I believed in Black’s integrity.

With Minnesota Monitor – a propaganda organ funded by wealthy liberals in pursuit of an agenda I find largely noxious, a website that I believe to be deeply disingenuous about its funding and motives –  there is no such trust; indeed, by employing a serial would-be clairvoyant like Fecke, the Monitor shows contempt for factual, fair reporting.

And that’s assuming Fecke is sincere about his desire to be fair, which, let’s be charitable, is yet to be determined, as Andy points out in his rejoinder to the flap (which you should read):

Fecker left out a lot of very pro-Republican content, because it did not suit his needs and fit his agenda. A paid political operative is an operative all the same. What they say is tainted by the money that pays for their words and where it appears, and it can no longer be trusted as objective. I don’t care who pays who, when a blogger takes money to blog, they obviously have sold their objectivity and credibility as well.

So if you were a rock-ribbed conservative Republican, and a Jeff Fecke with all of that journalistic baggage approached you, what would you do?

The fact that Fecke needs to assure the Minnesota Monitor reader that he’s not carrying out a hatchet job is telling, whether Fecke meant it that way or not.  With Jeff Horwich, Caroline Lowe, Eric Black, Conrad DeFiebre and any number of other solid local journalists, it wouldn’t even be a question; integrity would be assumed; Eric Black never has to assure the reader he doesn’t intend to punk his subject. 

If Minnesota Monitor wants to be taken seriously as “journalists”, they have to get to the point where they can say the same thing.  With a straight face, anyway.

———-

“So why did you do it, Berg?  Why did you go along with the other center-right bloggers in this juvenile prank?”

Because I thought it would be interesting to see what cockroaches got scared out of under the rocks.  I had no expectation that Minnesota Monitor or Jeff Fecke would change their spots.

Less still did I expect the local leftysphere would disappoint.

But more on that later. 

(more…)

Gary Miller’s mother is having some serious surgery today:

I am one of those numbskulls who believes there is One who takes into account the solicitations of His people before rendering a perfect plan for the universe.

If you are like-minded, I would be grateful if you would whisper a quick prayer for Pat Miller.

So pass the word.

The good news: Gun Control as a major political vote-mover is pretty much not only dead, but has reversed on itself to become a Social Security-level Third Rail.  Nationwide as well as in Minnesota, only the most hardened, defeat-proof Metrocrats dare propose anything to do with gun control, and then only as a flag-showing exercise.

Conservatives have led both the moral, ethical, legal and practical pushes for defeating gun control and un-doing the four decades of damage it has caused.

But behind the self-assurance one gets when one knows one is aboard an utterly righteous cause was the nagging realization that victory couldn’t really be consolidated until the other guys – the people who’d been causing all that trouble – really believed it too.

As I was noting in the days a decade before blogs became a household term, the sea was starting to change in the early nineties.  And today – via Powerline – I notice that one of the last ramparts of orthodox gun-control is falling to the peasants; the NYTimes, the most reliable media proponent of gun control (published by Arthur Sulzberger, holder of a New York City concealed carry permit) notes the rise of a consensus among liberal legal scholars that the Second Amendment “right of the people” to keep and bear arms actually does refer to “the people” as individuals:

There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

In those two decades, breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law, they have helped to reshape the debate over gun rights in the United States. Their work culminated in the March decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, and it will doubtless play a major role should the case reach the United States Supreme Court.

Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.

Tribe’s switch in allegiance – in the mid-nineties – was a huge victory for pro-liberty forces.

“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Professor Tribe said. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

An honest liberal lawyer.  Good to see they exist.

The piece notes the contributions of Akil Reed Amar and, especially (for me) Sanford Levinson in starting the slow swing in the legal left’s perception of the issue.  The Times piece notes Levinson’s article:

In 1989, in what most authorities say was the beginning of the modern era of mainstream Second Amendment scholarship, Professor Levinson published an article in The Yale Law Journal called “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.”

“The Levinson piece was very much a turning point,” said Mr. Henigan of the Brady Center. “He was a well-respected scholar, and he was associated with a liberal point of view politically.”

In an interview, Professor Levinson described himself as “an A.C.L.U.-type who has not ever even thought of owning a gun.”

The article – which is a fairly dense read for a layperson and a modestly-accessible read for legal scholarship – hit the anti-gunners’ stances like a pugil stick hitting a kitten.

And it still does:

Scholars who agree with gun opponents and support the collective rights view say the professors on the other side may have been motivated more by a desire to be provocative than by simple intellectual honesty.

“Contrarian positions get play,” Carl T. Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, wrote in a 2000 study of Second Amendment scholarship. “Liberal professors supporting gun control draw yawns.”

Appeals to “lack of sexiness” don’t carry a lot of legal, ethical or moral weight, do they?

The Times piece sums up much of the legal history of both sides of the movement, and is well worth a read, especially as we lead up to the possible hearing of the Parker case – the tossing of the DC gun ban – in the Supreme Court:

Filing [the Parker suit] in the District of Columbia was a conscious decision, too, Mr. Levy said. The gun law there is one of the most restrictive in the nation, and questions about the applicability of the Second Amendment to state laws were avoided because the district is governed by federal law.

“We wanted to proceed very much like the N.A.A.C.P.,” Mr. Levy said, referring to that group’s methodical litigation strategy intended to do away with segregated schools.

Levy, the suit, and the sea change in even liberal outlook are battling a four-decade encrustation of ignorance:

Linda Singer, the District of Columbia’s attorney general, said the debate over the meaning of the amendment was not only an academic one.

“It’s truly a life-or-death question for us,” she said. “It’s not theoretical. We all remember very well when D.C. had the highest murder rate in the country, and we won’t go back there.”

Question, Ms. Singer:  How many of those murders were carried out by people with no criminal records?

Get back to me on that.

Tribe:

Should the case reach the Supreme Court, Professor Tribe said, “there’s a really quite decent chance that it will be affirmed.”

I’ll be watching.

Champagne may be in order.

The Times of London discovers that favorite slow-newsday staple of the Star-Tribune; a “flood” of several “Republicans” who are jumping over to support one Democrat or another.

And after spending the last couple of years looking at stories like that, and bumperstickers for “Sportsmen for Kerry” and such, I think it’s time to start coming up with some of our own:

• Free-Marketeers for Edwards!
• Recovering Addicts for Ted Kennedy!
• Zionists for Ellison!
• Speechwriters for Biden!
• Hussein Torture Victims for Kucinich!

More?

Jeff Kouba on the changes at the Strib:

Conservatives care about news, and bias in newsrooms, because we recognize the importance of a free press. I don’t want the Strib to disappear, I value a strong local paper. I want a local paper that isn’t the publishing arm of the DFL. I want a local paper that finds the stories I never could, and is home to quality writing.

There is much I enjoy about the Strib. I enjoy their theater and music and dance critics. I like the sports pages. In short, I value the local focus Hugh Hewitt says will be necessary for newspapers in a changing media landscape.

That’s a key point – one missed by rage-o-holics like Nick Coleman and Garrison Keillor; most of us have  nothing intrinsically against newspapers or their reporters. 

Merely the blinkered, smug political bias that all too many (but by no means all) newspaper reporters, columnists and editors have.

Some of us, indeed, roil with anger in noting that the Strib has the tools for its own salvation already on board, in the likes of Eric Black, Doug Tice, Lileks (for now) and whomever decided to hire Katherine Kersten, but chooses to ignore them in favor of an ever-more-noxious status quo.  They’re “staying” the wrong course.

But a paper that equates local focus with turning Lileks into a brand new J-school graduate doesn’t know where it’s going, and that’s not a good sign.

Jim Boyd a lousy leader?

Who’da thunk it?

A family near Waseca wants – get this! – to use its own land the way it wants to, legally, to make some money and have some fun!

 How un-Minnesotan of them!

Tony Borglum has a thing for tanks. So much so that last fall, after he and his father traveled to England to buy one, they bought four more with the idea of opening a tank-riding business and obstacle course in their back yard.

“We were there a day and a half, and I got to thinking: ‘There’s nothing like this in the U.S.,’ ” said Borglum, 20, talking about the obstacle course in England where he bought the tanks and an armored personnel carrier. “I said, ‘I think people would be interested. So let’s bring some back and see what happens.’ ”

What happened has turned Waseca County into a battleground, pitting the Borglums and their plan against dozens of residents who are less than thrilled by the idea of seeing and hearing tanks and an armored personnel carrier rumbling across the land.

The great Minnesota plague – dozens of neighbors, terrified over…

…well, febrile emotions and untrammelled myths, really:

“There’s a lot of emotion in guns and tanks,” said Charlie Mathern, a hardware store owner and a member of the Planning Commission. “And it brings out a lot of fear in everybody.”

And like much fear – especially when it comes to guns – it’s wrong:

Safety is among the foremost concerns of critics, some of whom say they fear damage from stray bullets from the outdoor ranges.

Oh, for the love of…

…can anyone find any actual records of serious damage ever being done nearby outdoor ranges?

Still others are concerned about noise, vibration and pollution from the tanks, most of which were built in the 1950s and 1960s and used by the British government.

“Who is going to monitor all this?” asked Sue Stangler, who lives about a half-mile west of the proposed course.

Vickie Hill, who lives down the highway from the Borglums, worries that tank and gun noise could spook her horses.

“It just scares me to death,” Hill said. “We don’t know if we even dare pasture them if this gets approved.”

I can’t say which’d be worse; the occasional tank and gun noises, or the fumes and flies from all of Vickie Hill’s horses’ droppings.

“I guess you can say it’s controversial, but we don’t think it is,” Marie Borglum said. “We just wanted to have some fun.”

Others, however, don’t see the fun. “I don’t have anything against guns or tanks or anything like that,” Stinehart said. “I just don’t want it in my back yard.”

Or, as Stangler put it: “They’re good people. It’s just a bad idea.”

Mark my words; if this gets approved, I will be there.

Lori Sturdevant – would would seem to be operating as a full-time DFL Public Relations operative – castigates Tim Pawlenty for keeping his word.

How?

As usual – by dredging up another mildewed name from Minnesota’s paleoliberal past.

You already know what’s in this article, don’t you?

1.  A reference to a Minnesota Republican in the sixties or seventies – one who allowed the DFL to get exactly what it wanted
2. A Republican in the legislature today who’d “frustrated” with his party and wants to follow the DFL’s orthodoxy.

With all these Republicans-who-really-hate-Republicanism that Sturdevant would have us believe she’s unearthing, it’s a wonder we have a GOP at all, isn’t it?

Unless it’s the same couple of representatives being recycled over and over, in the Larry Jacobs fashion…

Anyway, here goes:

Governors always attach messages, public and private, to their vetoes. The publishable ones that get hissed in legislators’ ears range from “Don’t you dare!” to “Go ahead. Override me. I won’t mind.”

The tale often told about GOP Gov. Harold LeVander’s famous 1967 veto of the bill that created the state sales tax is that it bore a message of the latter type. He shot that bill down, twice. In the 1966 campaign, he’d promised not to sign a sales tax into law. For an upright Lutheran lawyer, that ended the discussion. He would not break his word.

But by then, the state had endured years of financial struggle, and property taxes were soaring. (Sound familiar?) [Spendthrift legislatures strongarming an honest Republican into mugging the public?  Yep! – Ed] Legislators of his own party, then in charge of both houses, decided that more state revenue was both a political and a fiscal necessity, and a sales tax was the way to get it. The second override attempt prevailed on the strength of Republican (then Conservative) votes.

Sturdevant recites the drearily-predictable litany of betrayal.  And then…:

Jean LeVander King, the daughter of the late governor, said of her father’s veto stance: “He had made a pledge, but others had made different promises. It was not in his nature to say, ‘You have to break your promise, but I get to keep mine.’ He had great respect for the Legislature, and thought that each branch had to exercise its best judgment.”

Today’s news is recycled history. Last week, Gov. Tim Pawlenty felled the bonding bill with the first in what’s widely expected to be a batch of major-bill vetoes this year.

And here’s hoping he holds the line.

No gubernatorial subtext was needed on the bonding bill veto. That bill didn’t leave the House and Senate with the veto-proof majority — at least 90 votes in the House, 45 in the Senate — needed to raise the curtain on an override drama. If DFLers intend to run the veto gantlet with a bill raising the income tax, it’ll be the same story. Despite its promise of property tax relief for almost all Minnesota homeowners, the House tax bill limped into conference committee with 74 all-DFL votes.

Didja catch that?

Sturdevant trots out Levander’s daughter with one of her father’s moral lessons – and Sturdevant tries to dump it, lock stock and barrel, onto the current situation?

To scold the Governor into getting out of the way for yet another DFL gang-rape of the state economy?

Sturdevant relates one of the back-room – inevitably pro-DFL – intrigue that she must live for:

But there’s a lot of whispering already about the impending drama on transportation funding. It’s speculative stuff: Maybe as many as a dozen House Republican votes, and maybe, just maybe, all 85 DFL votes might be aligned in support of a conference committee report containing the right array of “revenue enhancements” for roads, bridges and transit.

I loved this bit:

Some corridor talk had Pawlenty looking for a way to bend his no-new-taxes rule and let such a bill become law, perhaps without his signature. (Here’s a line for his speechwriters, gratis: “I just couldn’t let Minnesota pass up the federal matching money Jim Oberstar is promising us.”)

Er, yeah.  Egregious porkmongering is such  a chuckle.

Cue the tame “Republican”:

“He wants us to make this issue go away for him,” groused a House Republican who might vote for a gas tax increase, but won’t go along with an override.

It’s now a complete Sturdevant editorial! 

When an override vote comes, they have a duty to exercise their own best judgment about what’s good for Minnesota.

He is.

It’s why we elected him.

Remember that?

Bad news for columnists at the Strib, according to long-time lefty shill Brian Lambert:

Thursday afternoon at the Star Tribune saw the paper’s four metro columnists, Doug Grow, Nick Coleman, Katherine Kersten and Cheryl “CJ” Johnson called in to separate meetings with editors Nancy Barnes and Scott Gillespie and told, in so many words, that the paper was looking to scale back the number of columnists and would any of them care to raise their hands and volunteer for reassignment to the paper’s suddenly thin — and getting thinner — ranks of street-level reporters?

Nick Coleman and Doug Grow as beat reporters?

Be still my heart. 

There were, as far as I can tell, no immediate takers. Later it was learned that quasi-metro columnist, James Lileks, was also given the same message.

I can see James as a thirties’ kind of reporter, with the pork-pie hat sitting behind a pebbled-glass door, smoking a Panter with his feet up on a steel desk next to the old Underwood. 

But I’m guessing he can’t…

This sort of scale-back/down-sizing/gutting has been anticipated ever since the new owners, Avista Capital Partners took over and after the round of voluntary buy-outs that clipped 24 positions from the payroll two months ago. Widespread assumption in the Strib newsroom is that fewer columnists will soon be matched with fewer theater critics, fewer film critics and perhaps — all though this is very hard to imagine — fewer sports reporters. (Veteran NBA reporter, Steve Aschburner, has already left the paper.)

Which, of course, has to hurt Lambert, who I suspect is slavering to return to the Broadcast beat that the PiPress ejected him from.

Meanwhile, newly-arrived publisher, Par Ridder, the target of a much-publicized lawsuit accusing him essentially of industrial espionage, remains secure in his position.

Yeah, that whole “he’s brand new in the gig and hasn’t been proven guilty of anything yet” bit’ll get you every time.

UPDATE:  Of course it’s worse than we thought.  Lileks’ column is apparently on the chopping block.

Send a note to the Reader Rep.

UPDATE II:  Via trackback, Britblogger Tim Worstall explains things to a European audience that need none with Yanks:

But any European observer, indeed any US manager who has dealt with union shops, would recognise what is going on here.

Take a well respected, well known and (for all I know, well paid) employee and assign him to duties manifestly ill suited to his talents at a time when you’re looking to cut costs and create redundancies.

Then hope they resign in disgust so that you don’t have to pay the “dismissal pay provision”.

I’ve long advocated introducing toll roads to Minnesota, especially the metro area, as a substitute for generalized taxes to support road construction.

Mentioning this around DFLers, of course, draws offense; to the DFL’s statist senses, all public goods are a public duty, with “public” meaning “the whole public” (or at least that part not favored by tax breaks from the DFL-strangled legislature).

And as the standardbearer of all DFL folk “wisdom”, the Strib can’t help but vent for it, even when basically agreeing with the concept:

Tolls cannot substitute for government’s broad responsibility to raise the taxes needed to build and care for basic transportation.

Um – why? 

I mean, if it were determined that tolls could somehow replace gas and other taxes, why wouldn’t we reassess this “responsibility?”

The Strib does, in fact, support the experimental addition of a toll lane to 35W in the South Metro…:

But tolls used specifically to relieve congestion and support transit on certain crowded roadways might be worth trying. Thus we applaud Minnesota’s application last week for federal money to refashion Interstate Hwy. 35W between Burnsville and downtown Minneapolis to include a toll lane for single drivers that would, in turn, help finance bus rapid transit service.

…but, naturally, all libertarian sense has been stripped from the proposal: 

The idea is to free up more space in regular lanes, draw more commuters to transit and coax others to alternate routes or times. A similar experiment in Stockholm raised bus ridership and reduced congestion by 20 percent.

Indeed, tolls (like so much of the “Transit” mania gripping the local center-left) are to be tools, used to further the powers-that-be’s frenzy of social engineering:

Toll lanes should not be seen as “solving” the metro region’s severe shortfall in transportation funding. They cannot substitute for the Central or Southwest light-rail lines [Really?  Why? – Ed]. Tolls should always be set high enough to retain transit’s competitive advantage. 

Does anyone proof-read this crap?

What “competitive advantage” does transit have?

  And care should be taken to assure that tolling doesn’t damage central business districts.

One wonders if the Strib editorial board has reviewed the ghastly toll that its’ beloved Central Corridor light rail line is going to take on the non-“central” business district in the Midway and Frogtown – a district that has been saved by small, Asian business that is going to be gutted by nearly a decade of rail construction, for a line that will detract from rather than enhance the neighborhood (it’ll be a light rail rather than trolley line).

One wonders if the Strib editorial board even understands any of this.