Background follows.

Back in college, two of my professors, a husband and wife team that taught Math and English, respectively, went through a flash of tragic fame. The Swans had been Christian Scientists, and as their son fell ill with meningitis.

They followed their faith – and the boy died. The Swans left the church (although they apparently kept their faith in a broader sense), and have spent a few decades lobbying to change state laws that protect parents whose religious practices lead to their childrens’ deaths. It’s an issue fraught with emotion on both sides…

…and one I stay happily out of. I’m a Christian who sees no rational reason to find conflict between an allegorical reading of the Old Testament and science. There is no battle between “creationism”/intelligent design and evolution. It’s pretty simple.

And I regard zealots on both sides – the snake-handlers along with the fevered, bigoted caricatures that Big Atheism sends forth to do battle in the media – with suspicion and a little bit of sorrow.

Fast forward to today, and the dumbest post that’s ever appeared on Anti-Strib that wasn’t written by Ed Salden. It’s written by a fellow named Jeff, who must have gotten video of Tracy Eberly doing something really awful to get included in the Anti-Strib stable of writers in the first place.

Of course, part of the problem becomes clear at the conclusion:

(via Pharyngula.)

P.Z. Meiers is to religion as David Duke is to black people.

Onward to be beginning:

Just when you think that prayer can’t do any harm:

“Even as her 11-year-old daughter lay dying on a mattress on the floor of the family dining room on Easter Sunday, Leilani Neumann never wavered in her belief in the power of prayer.
“We just thought it was a spiritual attack and we prayed for her,” Neumann said, according to a police report. “My husband, Dale, was crying and mentioned taking Kara to the doctor, and I said the Lord’s going to heal her and we continued to pray.”

Prayer didn’t save Madeline Kara Neumann, who died of untreated diabetes March 23.”

No, it didn’t.

Neither, “John’s” claims notwithstanding, did it “do harm”. A couple of parents with a view of God and faith that is, to say the least, on the far fringe of orthodoxy, did.

So what’s my point? I’ve often accused faith of having no accountability, and this is exactly what I mean.

Well, good for you!

Except that for people of faith, accountability is a constant thing. Yes, accountability to God is a pretty powerful force, and if people see that accountability differently than you do (see also: female circumcision, suttee, substituting prayer for medicine, faith-healing, whatever) it can seem anything from “weird” to “barbaric” to “just plain wrong”.

And that accountability is why Christians devote 25% more – of their own free will, rather than via government coercion – to charity than do secularists, and are more likely to vote and volunteer for civic causes than atheists.

At any rate, “Jeff” seems to have missed (or never really understood) the Christian injunction to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”. Understandable, perhaps – liberals think means nothing more than “be happy to pay for a better Galilee Minnesota“. It actually means that Christians need to recognize civil authority (although the Protestant Reformation added the rather important bit about “evil governments are bad”). So there’s nothing “unnaccountable about faith”; there are merely people of faith who, through over-narrow interpretation or over-broad religious hubris, make the wrong choices.

And this wrong choice, like the Swans’ a couple decades back, ended in tragedy. Life happens. You live and – like the Swans – you learn, or at least, like the couple from Wisconsin, get some nasty consequences.

I might add that science – which is often delegated to merely another religion around these parts

That’s right, “Jeff”, which is why we have the North Memorial Snake Handling Auditorium, Regions Prayer Center, and the University of Minnesota Faith Healing Center, and why you can’t find a doctor on any regional golf courses.

Bad choices – whether driven by a fringe-y view of faith or its mirror image, the belief that ones’ self is the only intelligence that really matters – are the problem.

That, and Tracy Eberly’s lax HR standards, apparently.

The Minnesota Monitor is a financial first cousin of Peruvian terrorists?

The Iron Matron at KAR has the story:

Found today at the Capital Research Center:

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that George Soros’s Open Society Institute has been funding terrorism. In a column entitled Friends of Terror in Peru, O’Grady notes that

Thursday’s vote by the European Parliament to take the Peruvian guerrilla group known as the Tupac Amaru (aka MRTA) off its terrorist list has Peru in an uproar. For good reason: The MRTA is notorious for kidnapping, torturing and murdering civilians to advance its political agenda. More recently, Peruvian officials have linked it to Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Movement,” which seeks to destabilize democracies in Latin America, and to the Colombian rebel group FARC…

…Meanwhile the work of other foreign-funded NGOs in the interest of terrorist organizations warrants urgent attention. Take the Peruvian “human-rights” group Aprodeh, which labored in Europe to get the MRTA off the terrorist list there, even though Peru still considers it a grave threat to its security.

…In 2007, according to government records, Aprodeh received funding from Oxfam America, George Soros’s Open Society, the John Merck Foundation, the city of Barcelona, the Dutch embassy and a U.S. government agency called the Inter-American Foundation, among others. On Friday, the Peruvian government asked Aprodeh to explain how its NGO status allows it to intervene on behalf of terrorists, as it did in the European Parliament… [emphasis added]

Soros funds MN Monitor and Aprodeh?!???

Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci adds:

You forgot to close the circle!

(Don’t worry – I took a screengrab just in case).

The Center for “Independent” Media; a gift that just keeps on giving.

Q:  What is the Gryphon?

 It weighs only 30 pounds and can be fully weaponized for assault and rescue. It has a 6-foot jet-wing that is steered with handheld rotary controls connected to its rudder.

 

And it can hide more than 100 pounds of combat gear in a built-in compartment.

Or, presumably, laptops, IPods, cell phones and lunch.

The Gryphon attack glider, designed to penetrate combat zones at 135 miles per hour, could revolutionize the art of parachuting. It has got to be at the top of James Bond’s Christmas list this year.

Oh, not just Bond.

A vision straight out of “Batman,” the carbon-fiber stealth glider quadruples the speed of similar craft — and there are quite a few special forces soldiers who would like to jump out of a plane at 30,000 feet and give it a whirl.

Its helmet has a heads-up display and provides on-board oxygen for the jump. To land, a soldier separates the wing from his pack and releases his parachute to slow his descent. The wing remains attached to the soldier by a cord and lands before him.

My morning commute would be cut from 30 minutes (by bike or bus) to about two.

Provided I could find a door on the top of my building…

I didn’t even know Minnesota had a best mullet contest:

A 3-year-old Red Wing boy has won first prize in this year’s Minnesota Mullet Contest, and yes, there is such a thing.

But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Hockey Moms magazine, a Minnesota publication that’s distributed at hockey arenas, named Brady Arneson’s blond hairdo the best.

Mullets are a family tradition for the Arnesons — Brady’s older brother Blake won the same award in 2005. Their father Scott Arneson also had a mullet as a child.

I think they also do a “cutest gap in teeth” award.

With a nod to Chief at Freedom Dogs, who got to the title long before I did.

King Banaian, my friend and NARN colleague, is apparently out of surgery. 

Gary Gross forwards this email from King’s wife Barbara:

King had his gall bladder removed…[minor complication redacted – who needs private medical info, anyway?]…his hospitalization will be prolonged until Thursday or Friday…Barring complications, he will recuperate on the 4th floor of the hospital.

I’m always reticent about mentioning peoples’ conditions or prognoses – too many “last minute “oops” episodes of Scrubs, perhaps – but so far, so good.  Keep your prayers coming for the whole family. 

Quick – someone find us a penumbra. 

Twila Brase – who happens to be a neighbor of mine in District 66B – is crusading against one of the great overreaches of Minnesota government power out there – the State’s (actually the DFL establishment’s) push to take childrens’ DNA information, without parental permission, to build a huge genetic database of Minnesota (for now) children.

This would change existing law, as Twila writes in a op-ed in today’s Strib:

The 2006 Minnesota Genetic Privacy Law does what all of us want it to do. It requires written informed consent prior to the collection, storage, use, or dissemination of our private genetic information by government and others.

Specifically, the law states that our genetic information may only be collected and used if we give our written informed consent; it may be stored only for as long as we consent; and it may only be shared with others, including researchers and pharmaceutical companies, with our consent. The consent to allow sharing for specific purposes expires in a year and must be signed and dated.

This is all good news — unless Senate File 3138 becomes law.

And there’s the rub:

This legislation would allow the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) to exempt the collection, storage, use and sharing of newborn DNA from the informed consent requirements of the genetic privacy law. Without informed consent, MDH would be allowed to contract with hospitals statewide to prick the heel of newborns, use and analyze the baby’s DNA into adulthood, and give the DNA-filled blood spots to researchers and others.

If this legislation passes, the informed consent protections of today’s genetic privacy law will not protect any baby born after July 1, 1997 — the day health officials began building a government “DNA warehouse” for the purpose of genetic research. On that day, without legal authority or parent consent, MDH began keeping baby blood and storing it indefinitely.

“But it’s only government!  What could the problem be?  Aren’t you happy to give your privacy for a Better Minnesota?”

Today, according to health officials, the DNA of more than 780,000 children has been filed and claimed as state government property. Their parents have no idea…Senate File 3138 violates parent rights, privacy rights, patient rights and DNA property rights. Citizens young and old have the right to informed consent and genetic privacy. They also have the right to not be research subjects, to not incriminate themselves through their genetic codes, and to be free from involuntary genetic profiling and genetic registration.

If Pawlenty fails to use his influence or his veto pen to protect the genetic privacy rights of citizens, individual DNA and private genetic codes will become government property. What will the governor do?

We don’t know. 

And it’s up to all of you to help us figure that out.  Call the Governor.  Get him to veto this atrocity.  And call your legislator, find out their position, and let yours be known.  It makes a difference.

So a little over a month after Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros Monitor pondered Rep. Bachmann’s reticence about giving time to regional non-conservative/Christian media, and my challenge in turn to Al Franken, Amy Klobuchar, Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum, Growth and Justice leader Dane Smith and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, I can report the following:

• Stuart Smalley:  Bupkes.
• A-Klo:  Nada
• Keef:  Zippo
• Betty Mac:  Pfffft.
• Dave Thune:  While not specifically part of my original challenge, I did ask Thune several times to come on the air for some questions about his “puking Republicans” slur.  We’ve not heard the last of that one, yet.
• Dane Smith:  We had an excellent interview on the NARN a week and a half ago
• R.T. Rybak: Well, glorioski!  We have confirmed the Mayor for this Saturday’s NARN broadcast!  The Mayor’s press contact and I just confirmed the details!  I will welcome the Mayor to the show on the broadcast this Saturday, May 3rd.

Kudos the the Mayor! 

And hey, Andy Birkey?  Since Franken, BettyMac, Ellison and A-Klo don’t return my calls, why don’t you ask them why they are even more evasive around right-leaning media than Rep. Bachmann is around the left-leaning media?

Not that I’ll hold my breath or anything.

Democrat “Get Out The Fraudulent Vote” efforts took a hit yesterday when the SCOTUS ruled that states can require almost the same proof of identity that is required to write a check or use a debit card, validating an Indiana voter ID law:

The Indiana law was passed in 2005. Democrats and civil rights groups opposed it as unconstitutional and called it a thinly veiled effort to discourage groups of voters who tend to prefer Democrats.

It was in effect during the 2006 elections when Democrats picked up three congressional seats in Indiana and won control of the state House of Representatives.

One presumes some Tic officials were amazed they had so many honest voters.  Also living ones.

“The universally applicable requirements of Indiana’s voter-identification law are eminently reasonable. The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not ‘even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting,'” [Justice Antonin] Scalia said.

Especially when the “penalty” for not having an ID isn’t disenfranchisement, but merely the filling out of a provisional ballot. 

Kool Aid Report has appointed all of us the winner of the 2008 City Pages “Best Blog” category!

Who better to decide?

And since we can reliably assume that City Pages’ silence equals consent, you can all feel free to sell your award on e-bay without any questions about your award’s authenticity!

I think the price just dropped…

But why would you want to do that? Wouldn’t you rather share company with the other City Pages-selected local media all stars such as:

Best Columnist (Nick Coleman)?

Best TV Weatherperson (Paul Douglas)?

Best FM Radio Personality (Kerri Miller)?

Best Art Critic (who gives a shit?)?

Sport that graphic proudly, fellow local right wing blogger! Even though KAR now remains the only local right-wing blog to never win a City Pages award, we KARnies consider ourselves proud to count you as our colleagues!

Congrats!  You, I and all of us are #1!

I spent the weekend in New York with the kids.  We got in yesterday evening.

I’ll have more to write about the whole thing later.  I’m still fried from the trip.

Actually, I’m mostly fried from having to deal with the airlines.  It took us three extra hours to get there on Friday, and 2-3 more to get home, because of cancelled/late flights. 

However – as always – New York didn’t disappoint.

Much more later on.

This’ll larn me to leave town.  My good friend and longtime NARN colleague King Banaian is in the hospital, and scheduled for surgery this morning.  Apparently he took ill after the NARN show on Saturday.

Gary Gross from Let Freedom Ring has the story:

I just got an email update from Barbara Banaian, the wife of my good friend King Banaian. King went into the St. Cloud Hospital Saturday night and has been in there ever since. Yesterday, they ran some tests. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to diagnose the problem with those tests. Today, they ran more tests which helped them diagnose the problem. Here’s the important part of Barb’s email update:

King was scheduled to have his gall bladder removed tomorrow morning at 8:15 a.m., but is currently running a high fever and having heart palpitations.

…

This is just another reminder of how close the ties are between MOBsters.

Indeed.

Keep King (and his wife Barbara and their daughter, the Littlest Scholar)  in your prayers tonight and in the coming days.

From the “I had no idea these were real people” file, the NY Daily News has tracked down Rikki, Sharona, and Rosalita.  

Yes – the ones of Steely Dan, the Knack, and Bruce fame:

“Rikki” did lose that number. “My Sharona” has a Web site.

“Rosalita” hooked up with Bruce Springsteen at the beach – as her boyfriend “Wild Billy” drank with his buddies nearby.

I figured there had to be stories behind them…:

Four decades after she briefly met Steely Dan rocker Donald Fagen, Rikki DuCornet still cannot escape the song written for her.

“I notice it walking into a sushi bar, going into a drugstore. Take an airplane, there it is,” DuCornet, 65, told More. “It’s become a constant, something to hold onto.”

After nearly thirty years of listening to Elton John’s “The Mitch is Back”, I feel her pain.

The woman who inspired the 1979 anthem “My Sharona” was a gorgeous high school senior with a killer body when a co-worker brought a boyfriend, the lead singer from an unknown band called the Knack, into the boutique where she worked.

Sharona Alperin wound up modeling for the cover of the band’s 6 million-selling record – and dated the rock star for four years.

Dating Doug Fieger?  Ewww.

Er, on second thought, maybe that’s all she deserves:

She was shocked and dismayed to find out that her namesake song is on President Bush’s iPod. “Couldn’t I be on Bill Clinton’s?” she moaned.

Bwahahaha.  You’re on mine, too.  Deal.

OK – so the cool part…:

Rosalita’s real name was Diane Lozito and she met the Boss in 1971 at a show at the Jersey Shore when he was an up-and-coming rocker.

Lozito, now a location scout, was actually the inspiration for more than one Springsteen tune. The story of their first kiss – behind a rock on the beach while her boyfriend was nearby – is retold in “Spirit in the Night.”

Soon “Wild Billy” was out of the picture. Springsteen and Lozito moved in together over her parents’ objections – “I know your mama, she don’t like me ’cause I play in a rock and roll band” – but split up after four years.

Wow.

Cool.

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I “The First Team” – Chad, John and Brian will do their thing from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliners” – I’m off on assignment this week, but James Lileks will be sitting in with Ed will be on from 1-3.  Beats a jab in the eye with a sharp stick.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King joins Michael from 3-5.

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. On the air at AM1280 in the Metro, or streaming at AM1280’s Website, or via podcast at Townhall.

And don’t forget the David Strom Show, with David Strom and Margaret Martin, from 9-11!

(ht/ Cube)

It occurs to me that I haven’t taken an honest-to-pete weekday off from blogging in years and years.

So, may it please the court, I’m going to take the day off today. 

Back – it is likely – Monday.

In the mania of this week, I’ve not been able to devote the full breadth I’ve wanted to to the “Empty Holsters” protest by Students for Concealed Carry on Campus – the group that’s protesting against the forced disarmament of law-abiding, carry-permit-holding college students and staff while on most American college campuses.

There’s an active protest going on at Saint Cloud State, though, and King Banaian covers not only it, but some of the deeply-deranged response from part of the SCSU community. 

These were before the President’s letter, and all were thinking that somehow it could and should be stopped. Afterwards, the comments turned to:

• It is unfortunate that people believe simple slogans like “Guns don’t’ kill people–People do” to answer complex questions about guns, freedom, and safety!
• the fact that there are people who are lobbying for the right to bring guns to a university campus — into classrooms and university buildings, no less — fills me with extreme terror.
• Nothing about these arguments so far even acknowledges that the tragedies at Virginia tech, Recori, columbine, and numerous others ever happened.
• I know that the opposition would say that “dangerous criminals and armed killers” would still be armed, but I like the odds better if fewer students are “carrying”–especially those young people whose good judgment is not yet in full blossom.
• I can just see it now: a grading complaint. Both the professor and the student put their guns on the table, and then begin the conversation.
• I accept the rights of the holster wearers to illustrate their opinions, but I hope our elected officials have the good sense to not change the laws to their liking. I’d be more comfortable if the holstered protestors also wore their marksmanship merit badges, military sharpshooter rankings, or any other evidence of requisite skill and composure.

I did not participate much in this discussion, as I realized how little I knew, but one would have to say that if the purpose of an Empty Holster Protest was to start a dialogue, they certainly got that. The question is, what happens after starting it?

That’s always a good question.  I’ve felt for years that post-secondary academics are particularly ill-suited to “dialog”; too many of them are used to carrying on extended monologues; for too many, it seems, “dialog” and its requisite “listening” (even to those who are not academic peers!) stopped about the time they had to defend their PhD.

I’m extremely busy today. 

Posting will be exceedingly light to possibly nonexistant today and tomorrow. 

Joe Repya finally has a blog. 

Glad you could join the party, Colonel.

The City Pages seems to have been embarassed out of doing best left-and-right-wing blogs this year.  Was it because Dan Lacey’s tone-perfect riposte (selling his “award” on EBay) skewered them to the heart?  Or was it because any award that puts “Clucking Stoop” and “best” in the same paragraph (unless followed by “emetic”) is so absurd on its face that liberal bloggers rose as one in embarassment  to demand they never, ever do that again?

It matters not.  The City Pages got out of the kitchen, opting for a “Best Local Blog” category.

And the winner?

Unlike so many bloggers, Carik doesn’t use his platform to disgorge treatises on his political views or journal the minutiae of his daily life. Instead, his stripped-down site simply offers links to other web pages he finds interesting, with perhaps a sentence or two of comment, as if he’s doing this simply as a public service. What sets Mediation apart, however, is the sheer range of Carik’s posts. There seems to be no area of human endeavor he isn’t interested in: politics and current events, science and mathematics, art, music, theater, pop culture, history—it’s all grist for his digital mill. In recent weeks, for example, visitors found links to a complex maze puzzle, a YouTube video of a 10-year-old Japanese girl playing Kansas’s “Carry on My Wayward Son” on an electronic organ, a Business Week article criticizing the Treasury Department’s plan to overhaul the financial regulatory system, and a story on the smallest black hole yet discovered. His posts are almost always informative, oddly fascinating, or amusing.

Ah.

Kind of like Instapundit?

Plenty of bloggers fisked the bejeebers out of Nick Coleman’s column from a week ago Sunday (April 13); KAR lit it up pretty well, among several others.

But it’s still sitting out there, taunting me. And so while I’ve been trying to hand off the Nick-fisking duties to the crop of newer bloggers, and have been gratified to see many new Minnesota blogs standing on that wall guarding the Second Amendment, there are some siren calls that can’t be resisted.

Because the fact is that for all of Coleman’s agenda-flogging, he actually makes a few brief nods to something related to fairness.

I went to a die-in at the State Capitol on Wednesday, marking the anniversary of last year’s slaughter at Virginia Tech, where a deranged kid killed 32.I brought my Glock.I didn’t really. It would have been weird and crazy to take a gun to an event marking a massacre, especially the very kind of gun used in the massacre.

Actually, it’s…well, I won’t say “weird and crazy”, but it’s a little odd to lead off with a joke about it.

But then again, this country is weird and crazy about guns.

I went to a local gun store Wednesday (I have a permit) and found I could get a nifty Glock 19 — the 9-millimeter semiautomatic model that Cho Seung-Hui used on April 16, 2007 [not to mention an awful lot of policemen and, let it be noted, tens of thousands of honest citizens – Ed.] — for less than what Cho spent.

He bought his Glock for $571 at a Roanoke, Va., gun store. I could have purchased one Wednesday for $550.

It was on sale! Who says Americans don’t celebrate history?

“So what?” is the first thing to jump to mind. The ebbs and flows of the handgun market have what to do with the story? What’s the connection?

“More expensive handguns equal mass murder?”

The die-in (it was called a lie-in, actually) [then why change the name for your column? – Ed.] was organized by Protect Minnesota, an umbrella group representing five gun-control organizations pushing for tighter rules on sales and universal background checks on buyers. Thirty-two people wore black T-shirts that said, “Minnesotans Against Being Shot” as well as ribbons of maroon and orange (Virginia Tech’s colors) made by families of the victims. One by one, to the solemn beat of a drum, they went down on the Capitol steps and remained motionless, as if asleep.

It was like the state Senate, but without the pompous speeches.

Or the Strib newsroom

OK, it was one of those media events that is easy to mock and, indeed, it was mocked by a few underemployed members of the gun-rights lobby who couldn’t resist the temptation to spoil a somber moment by holding up frat boy signs to the effect that a teacher or student packing heat could have stopped the carnage, which is the kind of thing I wonder about when a cop gets shot.

Leaving aside Coleman’s failed attempt at clairvoyance (he asked the pro-liberty guys what they did for a living?) or the ad-hominem attack (frat boy signs?), or the complete illogic of comparing the “teacher or student packing heat” with a cop, who is paid (inadequately) to go where danger is…

…well, if you leave all of that aside, there’s nothing left to talk about.

Never mind.

Next, Coleman skirts perilously close to fairness…

Guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill people. And sometimes people with guns kill other people with guns.

…without quite getting there:

It’s as complicated as our feelings, and nobody’s come up with a convincing response to slaughters such as Virginia Tech, especially proposals to let college kids carry guns on campus. Rep. Tony Cornish, a Republican from Good Thunder, introduced one such obscenely timed proposal Wednesday.

Neither Nick Coleman nor I can define obscenity. But like most people, I know it when I see it.

Do you wonder how many guns were sold in the week after Virginia Tech, or Columbine, or Red Lake (hint: plenty). Do you wonder how many people started carrying, with or without a permit, after massacres like those? (Lots). How many NRA memberships are applied for after events like this? (A big surge, usually).

It’s from people who know the real obscenity; that while there is no guarantee that an armed student or teacher could have ended Cho Seung-Hui’s killing spree, having a gun increases your odds of walking away when the next Cho – or mugger, or abusive ex-spouse, or rapist or thug in the street – commits his or her next obscene act.

Still, Coleman does note both sides of one key fact:

The Virginia Tech killer shouldn’t have gotten a gun, because he should have been in a psychiatric ward. Virginia closed that loophole two weeks after the 32 died.

All the more reason, of course, not to assume government will take care of you.

But there remain many loopholes to shut, including in Minnesota, where some unlicensed sellers can still sell guns to unknown buyers without background checks. To tighten those laws is not anti-gun. It is pro-safety.

“It’s harder to transfer title to my fishing boat than a gun,” said St. Paul City Council Member Lee Helgen…

Then perhaps Minnesota’s boat control laws are almost as dumb as our gun control laws?

…who was displaying a gun shot map showing that the area north of the Capitol was well-sprayed with gunfire last month.

I’m confused: Does Mr. Helgen – member of Dave “No puking Republicans!” Thune’s ultraliberal “Gang of Five” bloc on the Saint Paulitburo City Council – think that the “Well-sprayed” North End is being shot up by college professors and 21-or-older students with carry permits?

“I don’t know why everybody has to shoot somebody every time there’s a misunderstanding,” said 70-year-old bus driver Barb Sjerven, who was drawn to the steps by all the commotion while waiting for her Osakis, Minn., sixth-graders to finish touring the Capitol. “I mean, it’s OK to have guns,” Sjerven said. “But it seems like everybody has guns. So I can’t blame [the die-in people] for being concerned. There’s way too much shooting going on. And there’s something wrong with us. There really is.”

You don’t have to be on the side of anything more than common sense to agree with Barb Sjerven from Osakis.

There’s too much shooting.

And none of it is coming from people who give a rat’s ass about gun transfer laws, Lee Helgen’s map, or the “die-in’s” objectives.

It’s coming from criminals; the people who don’t care what the law is; the people who are too addled, impaired or defective to care about laws, morality, symbolic protests or Lee Helgen’s little maps. The people that are drawn to our city by the policies of people like Lee Helgen!

It’s not coming from college students, professors, office workers, bricklayers, bus drivers or even Metro columnists who are over 21, have clean criminal records, training, and the motivation to avoid being the next statistic for someone to mourn on the Capitol steps, under the watchful eye of a media who has the story about the significance of their death already written.

Glocks are on sale all month.

Keep ’em. I hate the trigger pull.

Wait – is that “obscene?”

Amy Ledig, a sophomore at Mac, won an award this past weekend (as King relates) at the Minnesota Association of Scholars annual fete.

She won it for writing a piece in the Macalester student paper that, to the outside observer who’s heard enough stories about academic intolerance, makes me worried that she might get herself “managed” by Mac’s administration, or the monocognitive droogs that run so many campuses.

The piece concludes:

All of that, though, is beside the point. We need to either strive toward actually creating an environment where free and open discourse can exist, or we need to accept that if things continue the way they are now, we have become the liberal counterpart to Liberty University and the like. Forcing everyone to stay on the liberal straight-and-narrow path is just as much intellectual censorship and repression as what Conservatives practice.

The difference, of course, is that nobody attends Liberty for an open, unbiased discussion of, say, homosexuality.  Whatever Liberty’s pros and cons (I’m not impressed with the up-front approach, but I’ve also known some very sharp, well-educated Liberty grads).

Read the whole thing, of course; Ms. Ledig provides a sobering view of intolerance in academia, in the event you haven’t been sobered enough already.

Mac sells itself as a place where a student can get exposed to a wide variety of points of view, though – even moreso today than when I was college shopping.

When last we discussed John McCain with the staff of the Minnesota Monitor – Minnesota’s wholly Soros-owned propaganda mill [*] – they were tittering about the state of the Senator’s teeth. After the gaucherie got national attention, they apologized – they didn’t know that McCain had lost his teeth to violence and malnutrition while held as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton.

Now, Steve Perry copies and pastes the lede from a LATimes editorial on McCain’s disability payment from the Navy, and adds:

Some interesting fallout from John McCain’s release of his tax return and other financial disclosures: Ralph Vartabedian of the LAT reports today that McCain receives a tax-free, 100-percent disability pension (nearly $60,000 last year) from the US Navy

Perry does realize that that’s the norm; when someone sacrifices his health in the line of duty, they’re entitled to disability – doesn’t he? And that Mac’s health was so shattered by the ordeal that his Navy career – for four generations, now, the family business – was impossible to carry on?

And that’s part of the bargain our society makes with its soldiers and sailors; in exchange for patrolling the world’s hostile reaches on our behalf, for lousy pay, with the additional risk of being killed, maimed, injured, or held hostage and beaten to the edge of endurance for years, we’ll take care of you if you’re disabled to the point that you can’t continue your career, whether that career is bricklayer or fighter pilot.
Especially if it, y’know, doesn’t interfere with his day job…

When Michele Bachmann  – representative from a mostly-conservative, mostly rural district – limits her appearances to conservative and Christian media, freezing out the traditional media and their anti-conservative hatchet-jobbery, the Minnesota Monitor furrows its brow and makes concerned-yet-snarky noises.

Uh-oh – now Barack Obama has abandoned all non-liberal-suckup media!

TalkLeft has some interesting criticisms about how Barack Obama is handling the press. Obama hasn’t held a press conference in 10 days, has limited his appearance to friendly outlets like The Daily Show, and snapped at a reporter who gave him a foreign-policy question at a Pennsylvania diner.

I don’t care about the waffle “incident” so much – let the poor fella eat!  But he wants to be the President after exposing his ideas to nothing more challenging than John Stewart, who wore knee pads to the interview?

Furrow your brows, MinMon. 

Furrow.

Robert Downey – not only working again…:

A winking nod to that tumultuous history is baked into the banter in “Iron Man.” The movie opens with Mr. Downey’s mitt wrapped around a tumbler of whiskey, rumbling along in a Humvee, AC/DC’s “Back in Black” blasting on the soundtrack and Mr. Downey acting all lusty and incorrigible. And when Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, the dewy-eyed, ever-loyal assistant he sees with new eyes by the end of the film, learns about his alter ego, Mr. Downey’s Tony Stark goes deadpan.

“Let’s face it,” he says. “This is not the worst thing you’ve caught me doing.”

That running dialogue — between audience and actor, between Mr. Downey’s past and present — gives the film a symbolic power not usually found in comic book movies. In the interview he preferred to leave that history between the lines.

…to say nothing of “alive”…

“It has struck me lately that I don’t have to talk about last century at all,” he said with a dismissive wave. But he does so, obliquely.

…and – um – conservative?

“I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.”

(Suffice it to say he is not one of the Hollywood types who weeps over innocents trapped behind bars.)

A hollywood actor who’s more conservative that I am?

I love this country.

UPDATE:  Robert, not Morton.

Why on earth  would a conservative pundit think “Morton”, anyway?

It’s been a month since Andy Birkey at the Minnesota Monitor complained that Rep. Michele Bachman (GOP, MN6) fails to disregard the Minnesota mainstream media’s anti-conservative hackery, and limits most of her media to conservative and Christian outlets.

I responded by sending invites to half a dozen key DFL office-holders and candidates. I left emails and, in almost all cases, voice mails with the media contacts for Al Franken, Amy Klobuchar, Keith Ellison, my own “representative” Betty McCollum, Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak, and Growth and Justice president Dane Smith. In the intervening time, I also invited Saint Paul City Council prez Dave Thune to talk with us about his “puking Republicans” slur.

Of course, on Saturday Ed and I interviewed Dane Smith of G’nJ. It was, nearest I could figure, an excellent hour – although frustraing. I think we could devote a couple of shows to be debate between the “Happy to Pay for a Better Minnesota” movement that Smith represents, and the opposition of which I’m a part. It was a civil debate – notwithstanding the conceit of talk radio’s opponents, who believe we’re entirely about plate-throwing – and hopefully the first of several.

I noted last week that, in addition to Smith, I’d heard from another of my invitees. Sort of.

Someone in RT Rybak’s press office left a comment on “The Upsider” (a regional blog you should be reading) denying that I’d emailed the Mayor. I responded, in the comment as well as via email, saying that I’d left a note at the City of Minneapolis site on a form that said “we’ll forward the message to the right party”. Apparently that didn’t include the mayor’s office.

We traded an email or two last week. We shall see.

But I’ve heard not a peep from candidate Al Franken’s campaign, or from te press offices of Representatives Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum, or Senator Amy Klobuchar.

The logical conclusion is that, while conservative politicians have to either run the gauntlet of hostile left-leaning mainstream media or be considered “evasive” by the even more hostile, more left-leaning alternative media, Minnesota’s liberal politicians feel no compunctions about ignoring the half of their constituents with whom they disagree. They are afraid to face tough questions, preferring the vacuous softballs they get from a regional media that largely regards them as friends – a regional media that largely sympathizes with them (the Strib’s Rochelle Olson and the wife of Keith Ellison have been observed to have a cordial social relatioship; it seems unlikely that most of the Strib’s staff will get too tough with Amy Klobuchar, daughter of longtime columnist Jim Klobuchar; that Dave Thune feels the need to depart the friendly confines of the local media and the lefty echochamber to answer questions.

Which is the sign of a particularly gutless breed of politicians.

UPDATE AND BUMP:  I neglected, in my haste, to note the name of the blog via which I came into contact with Mayor Rybak’s office – The Upsider.

One of the anti-gun left’s favorite conceits is that owning a guns is a sign of anger, paranoia, “compensation” – really, everything that Obama’s “Crackerquiddick” jape was a milder version of. Hollywood has reinforced this idea for decades – at least as far as law-abiding civilians are concerned (gang-bangers, Jodie Foster, action-adventure heroes and rogue-cops-who-push-the-envelope while being dogged by the ineluctible forces of corruption and institutional apathy get a pass, of course).

Of course, anecdodatally it’s nonsense. I cheerfully proclaim my biases – and have many friends and relatives who are as anti-gun as the most wretched Code Pink refuse, our differences in attitudes notwithstanding – but gun owners have always seemed to be generally happier, more secure, more…normal to me. And yes, I’m leaving out the odd “gun nuts” that you most assuredly do meet at gun shows and gun shops – but I don’t hang out with them, they don’t figure into any anecdotes and (this is important) they’re vanishingly rare.

Fifteen years ago, Jeffrey Snyder wrote the article “A Nation of Cowards“, in Public Interest magazine. Along with Sanford Levinson’s “The Embarassing Second Amendment“, it’s one of the bedrock articles of the concealed carry movement. In it, Snyder laid down the historical and moral imperative for civilized people to take responsibility for their own personal safety, including the use of and training at firearms for individual personal defense.

One of the biggest takeaways for me from Snyder’s piece over the last 15 years was his citation of a study by civil rights lawyer Donald Kates and former gun-control majordomo Patricia Harris. In it, Snyder noted, gun owners were found to be less-tolerant of police brutality, more conscientious about protecting the civil liberties of others, and – this is important – generally better-educated, farther advanced in their careers, and happier than non-gun owners.

Years of searching for an online version of this study (or, just in case, any refutations, or claims that Snyder made the whole thing up) have been fruitless.

And, with any luck, irrelevant. Arthur Brooks in the Wall Street Journal updates the whole question:

In words that he has come to regret, Barack Obama opined as to why he was having a hard time winning over many blue-collar voters: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

It was a throwaway line to a private audience at a San Francisco fund-raiser.

I think it’s more significant that liberals say the most outrageous things in what they think is friendly company – but it doesn’t really matter at the moment.

The comment may or may not be an indication of Mr. Obama’s real views about those ordinary Americans who’ve not enjoyed the full fruits of economic growth over the past decades. Yet his casual portrayal no doubt had heads nodding vigorously in assent among his supporters, and probably among many others.

Koff koff.

That anybody would find this portrayal realistic illustrates how little some Americans know about their neighbors. And nothing reveals the truth better than the data on guns.

According to the 2006 General Social Survey, which has tracked gun ownership since 1973, 34% of American homes have guns in them. This statistic is sure to surprise many people in cities like San Francisco – as it did me when I first encountered it. (Growing up in Seattle, I knew nobody who owned a gun.)

That last bit fascinates me. Growing up on the Plains, guns were as normal a part of most families’ lives as power drills and ovens. But to friends of mine from New York, San Franscico, even Kenwood and Highland, guns are as foreign as shrunken heads.

And it’s a pretty normal human reaction to transpose “foreign” into “fearful”, which as we all know is a step shy of “bigoted”.

Which, when it comes to perceptions of your fellow human that impact politics and civil liberties, is just not OK.

Especially when it’s wrong:

Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group.

Nor are they “bitter.” In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were “very happy,” while 9% were “not too happy.” Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.

In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling “outraged at something somebody had done.” It’s easy enough in certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and miserable fringe group. But it just isn’t true. The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that don’t have guns.

If you’re a shooter – especially one involved in politics – you know that Second Amendment support isn’t entirely a GOP thing:

The gun-owning happiness gap exists on both sides of the political aisle. Gun-owning Republicans are more likely than nonowning Republicans to be very happy (46% to 37%). Democrats with guns are slightly likelier than Democrats without guns to be very happy as well (32% to 29%). Similarly, holding income constant, one still finds that gun owners are happiest.

While gun ownership it no indicator of being lower-class, miserable or bigoted, I think it’s fair to say that being an anti-gunner is associated with the perception that one is on a higher mental, social and political plane (hence Obama’s audience for Crackerquiddick), though. Which is an irony I’ve always treasured – that while the left has nattered on about class conflict for generations, this issue is the one where the liberal leadership is quite clearly the patricians, arrayed against the shooters, who are – whatever their income, education and mental state, are seen as the plebeians.

Why are gun owners so happy? One plausible reason is a sense of self-reliance, in terms of self-defense or even in terms of the ability to hunt their own dinner.

I’ll vouch for this much; being able to address, capably and seriously, the issue of random violent crime, takes a lot of stress out of life. Not that it’s a lightly-taken responsibility; merely that addressing it soberly and rationally takes one ugly variable out of your life, one most of us are better off without.

A bit of evidence that self-reliance is at work among gun owners comes from the General Social Survey. It asked whether one agrees with the statement, “Those in need have to take care of themselves.” In 2004, gun owners were 10 percentage points more likely than nonowners to agree (60% to 50%).

LEFTYBLOGGER: “Oooh! Gun owners are selfish!“

Nope!

That response is not evidence that gun owners only care about themselves, however. In 2002, they were more likely to give money to charity than people without guns (83% to 75%). This charity gap doesn’t reflect their somewhat higher incomes. Gun owners were also more likely to give in other ways, such as donating blood. Are gun owners unsentimental? In 2004, they were more likely than those without guns to strongly agree that they would “endure all things” for the one they loved (45% to 37%).

One might be tempted to say “shooters are, in every possible way, better citizens, better providers, better neighbors…better people than grabbers”.

But I’ll resist the temptation.

None of this is to dictate what gun policy should be in our nation and its communities, let alone whether gun owners deserve to be happier than those of us without firearms. Guns are an important area of debate about freedom and security, not to mention constitutionality. What we do know, however, is that contrary to the implication of Mr. Obama’s comments, for many Americans, happiness often does indeed involve a warm gun.

A warm gun and a trunk full of targets with the “10” ring blown to hell.

A day at the range is the (second) best stress relief there is. That alone is worth something.