I grabbed this  John Hawkins piece last winter.  It’s been sitting in my drafts folder – just a link and a long quote – ever since.

Oddly, it still pretty much applies:

The conservative movement and the vehicle that we use to implement our ideas, the Republican Party, have a number of problems right now that need to be addressed. For example:

Taking Care Of The Base: The first rule of politics is to make sure that your base is reasonably happy and if they’re not, find a way to change that. Unfortunately, too many Republican politicians have forgotten that most basic of rules and they’ve allowed their biggest supporters to become dispirited and angry with them. Even the beatings that the GOP took in the 2006 election only partially shook George Bush and the Republicans in the Senate out of their stupor (To the House’s credit, it seems to have gotten the message). This anger/malaise is reflected in the lack of conservative activism right now, the querulousness of many conservatives, and the fundraising gap that has sprung up between Democrats and Republicans.

While it’d seem the fundraising gap is closing, I think we’re seeing more of what worried me during and after the ’06 campaign.  The GOP relies on volunteers (unlike the Democrats, who tend to pay not only their Get Out The Vote workers but much of trhe rest of their “grass roots”).  And those volunteers turned out and gave it their all in for Grams in ’94, Coleman in ’98, Bush in ’00, Pawlenty and Coleman again in ’02, the Presidential race in ’04…

…and were rewarded with an administration that didn’t deliver on many of the values for which these people had volunteered so much of their time.

I started sensing exhaustion among a lot of key volunteers – the kinds of people GOP campaigns need, the kind that keep coming back for more – in ’08.  I started asking GOP officials – what about the state of our volunteers?

I don’t think they’re back yet.

Yes, maybe some conservatives do have unreasonable expectations of Republicans in Congress, but that’s a reason for Republican pols to try even harder to make it clear to conservatives that their hearts are in the right place. The GOP absolutely cannot get back on track until conservatives feel that they are being well represented in DC and the Republican Party needs to make that happen.

That goes for Saint Paul as well.

Where’s Our Soros? The conservative movement has had plenty of rich, civic minded members who haven’t had a problem with greasing the wheels of democracy with a bit of lucre in the past, but the Left seems to be blowing our doors off in this area of late.

You can hardly turn around without finding some project funded by George Soros that’s making a political impact, but when we look for conservatives to do the same thing, we hear crickets chirping. There aren’t many conservatives who have enough money to make a big difference, but there are a few, and we need their help, now. If Soros and his limousine liberal pals are willing to spend the money while deep pocketed conservatives stand by and watch, the conservative movement — and this country — are going to suffer the consequences.

It’s tempting to respond “yeah, but what does Soros get for his money?  Steve Perry and Molly Priesmeyer?  Atrios?  Ollie Willis? SFW?”  At least on the alt media side of things, the conservatives have always done it for the love of the game (except for talk radio, which does it because they make a ton of money.  Except the NARN; we’re also about that love of the game thing).

And yet when you work a day job – like the vast majority of conservative bloggers do – it’s hard sometimes to counter the immense flood of BS the Sorosphere generates.  Soros’ money has turned the information war into a war of attrition.

Practicality vs. Purity: Yes, we want politicians to live up to our expectations and when they don’t, they can expect consequences. On the other hand, if we refuse to vote for a Republican politician every time he does something we don’t like, we’re going to be responsible for putting Democrats in office who don’t agree with us on anything. That’s the dilemma conservatives always have to deal with: practicality vs. purity.

Unfortunately, the conservative movement has tilted too far towards expecting purity from Republicans in Congress — so much so in fact, that we’ve got conservatives threatening to form third parties if certain candidates are elected — even as different factions of the conservative movement beat up on each other on an almost daily basis

When conservatives start acting like Libertarians or Greens – taking their toys and leaving to go someplace more ideologically pure – it’s a bad thing.   And the next time I hear a conservative venting about how much they “hate” Norm Coleman or Tim Pawlenty for being not ideologically-pure enough, they’re going to get my lecture about the tug of war.  The whole thing.  I’m serious.

.Technophobia: Liberals have made much better use of the internet as a messaging and fundraising tool than conservatives.

That astounds me.  Given the percentage of technical people who identify as Republicans, it should be much closer.  Money, of course, counts for a lot here.

Ronald Reagan Isn’t Coming Back: Unfortunately for conservatives and for America, Presidents like Ronald Reagan only come along every 50 to 100 years. So, comparing every Republican politician who comes down the pike to Reagan — or worse yet, the idealized version of Reagan who has had all the times he deviated from conservative orthodoxy airbrushed out of existence — is only going to produce disappointment

Every time I hear some of the “I hate McCain/Coleman/Pawlenty” crowd, I’m tempted to haul out my copy of George Will’s The Morning After – his collection of columns from the mid-eighties, most of which involved some degree of sniffing about how conservative Reagan wasn’t.

This next one is my peeviest pet peeve of all:

We Don’t Reach Out To New Constituencies: Conservatives have started to get into the bad habit of allowing ourselves to be perceived as hostile to potential blocks of new voters, for no good reason.

This has been my complaint about the Fourth District for years; how can a party in a district that is almost entirely urban (Saint Paul and its environs) expect to get anywhere by ignoring the city?  The Fourth District GOP should be out in front of the people in this district who are repulsed by the horrible state of education, the decay of society and respect for hard work, and the erosion of free enterprise; all of these, and crime, are issues that, party labels aside, are vital to the “urban” voter of whatever party.

Not Defending Our Own: Unlike the Left, which considers the only sins its members can engage in to be not being liberal enough or helping conservatives somehow, the Right doesn’t mind cracking down on our own when they deserve it…There has to be a happy medium between the Left’s Pavlovian defense of each other under almost any circumstances and the Right’s current willingness to too quickly agree with the Left’s lies about people on our side.

Tom Delay, anyone?

Abandoning Our Principles In Office: One of the weirder tics of American politics is that liberals typically pretend to be much more conservative than they are to get elected while conservatives run on their principles, then break their promises once they get in office because they believe, falsely oftentimes, that it will be to their political benefit.

That is, indeed, the price of having principles; having to uphold them.

Speed Gibson (writing at his blog and at True North) notes the odd conundrum at Metro Transit:.

You’ve probably heard that transit fares will be rising, probably about 25 cents, probably around October 1st. A number of public hearings are scheduled in July.

Most of us will be paying more for transit July 1, however, when the sales tax goes up 0.25% in Hennepin, Ramsey, Anoka, Dakota, and Washington Counties. Also starting July 1, you’ll be paying a $20 Transit Improvement Vehicle Excise Tax when you sell a vehicle registered in these Counties.

But that’s already figured into the projected $15 million shortfall in the fiscal year starting July 1. As I posted earlier, that amount is suspiciously similar to the Light Rail subsidy. Increased business for an enterprise with such high fixed costs should more than cover the rising fuel costs.

Of course, it’s a government program.  Basic economic rules don’t apply.

So what does Metro Transit do? Raise bus fares, which will reduce ridership by pushing some back into their cars or carpools. And not just this fall, and not just a quarter, mind you. The resolution also would grant authority for another increase of up to fifty cents in 2009.

The second-biggest temptation to the bureaucrat, behind chiseling more money out of the taxpayer?  Coming up with a really cool system to do the chiseling:

What else can we do to discourage ridership? Let’s expand the morning rush hour to start at 5:30 AM, not 6:00 AM, so we can charge 50 cents more for these early birds. Isn’t the purpose of off-peak fares to encourage off-peak ridership?

Oh, and let’s make it complicated again, with the return of suburban fare zones to nickel and dime quarter and dollar us further.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Back in college, we had a scene with a pistol.  We used a starter pistol; the chamber held only caps, and the barrel didn’t even have a hole for a bullet in it.  And still, the professor/director insisted that, on stage, we  never point it directly at anyone.  “They’re always loaded”.

Which is a familiar notion to anyone that’s taken a gun safety close.

And – you’d think – to a French marine.  But apparently not.

French sergeant accidentally shoots 17 at a hostage-rescue demonstration:

The sergeant opened up with an assault rifle, firing live rounds instead of blanks into a crowd of hundreds of visitors watching a hostage-taking exercise Sunday at the base near the southwestern city of Carcassonne.

A man who witnessed the shooting told AFP that “suddenly, people were falling, we thought it was part of the exercise, and then we saw blood.”

The sergeant was playing a terrorist in a show being put on for a crowd.

A senior army officer insisted that the incident was almost certainly the result of an “unintentional” error.Fifteen civilians were among those injured, including the three-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl who were both operated on overnight and were described Monday as being in a stable condition.

…The use of the live rounds was “99.9 percent” likely to be “an unintentional fault,” said Colonel Benoit Royal, the head of the French army’s information service.

Hope everyone recovers.

Wonder if Nancy Pelosi will try to blame this on Heller?

Over at Loophole – the blog of MPR’s In The Loop series – Sanden Totten notes the apparently-peculiar power of the word “because”:

A study found that “because” is a powerfully persuasive word. The Economist blog lays out the experiment like this:

In the study, a stranger approached someone waiting in line to use a photocopier and asked, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” This resulted in 60% of people agreeing to let the stranger go ahead of them. But when the stranger asked instead, “May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”, 94% of people complied. And even when the given reason was meaningless–“May I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”–93% of people complied

I’m interested in how language works, so I’m interested in this thesis.

But I’ve noticed that “because I said so” isn’t quite as effective.

Case in point – a piece Molly “Is It White In Here” Priesmeyer wrote last week, in her customary breezy, snarky style, about the thesis that baby boomers’ home values have already evaporated. We wrote about this piece last week, after Learned Foot noted that Priesmeyer’s source was funded by George Soros’ “Open Society Institute” – which also funds the Minnesota “Independent”.

It gets better.

Someone – “Wabbit”, a commenter whom I happen to know, a fella very familiar with both Saint Paul real estate and crunching numbers – questioned Priesmeyer in the comment section.

Priesmeyer’s initial response?

The housing market crashed because of unregulated, subprime lending. This is a fact that cannot be disputed

“Because”.

“Because my source says so, and my source is the only source, to say nothing of viable opinion, on the subject”.

Any real estate people wanna set the girl straight?

Because she seems to need it.

Zam is very much a teenager now.  Tall, lanky/scrawny, sullen, surly – and, lately, very much hygiene-optional.  With all the requisite olfactory problems that causes.

So I was walking through the “baby” section in WalMart for some reason the other day – and the smell brought me to a screeching halt.

They say smells are the most powerful triggers of memory.  I’ve a believer today.  I had this overwhelming wash of nonspecific baby memories; changing diapers, rocking a tiny Zam to sleep, waking up and checking on him in the middle of the night – complete with the smells that attended each; the relief of a whiff of Desitin on a hot, rashy day, the happy grin when the powder went on, the satisfied gurgle and the aroma of formula as he spit up…

I think God gives us memories like that to take our minds off the miserable present that teenagers give us for a couple of…months.

It’s gotta be months.

Gotta.

That, or I’ll be spending more time in the baby aisle.

…Sunday morning, I had that odd feeling.

Something wasn’t right.

Something was missing.

As usual, that little bird in the back of my head was right:

Can’t slip a thing past me.

Later in the day on Sunday, I did something I hadn’t done in eleven months; I rode up to the 35W River Bridge.  I rode out onto the 19th Street Bridge (a span I didn’t even know existed until I saw it on the coverage of 35W – which shows you the tunnel vision you can get driving on an interstate bridge), and saw the two spans dangling in mid-air, extending toward each other, maybe forty feet apart, even closer than in this Daily Digital photo from last week:

They’re at least another row of segments closer than they were in this  picture.

I pulled this off of an E-Democracy discussion group.  These groups are all basically DFL sandboxes.

Poll results show that about 19 out of 20 Republicans plans on supporting Senator Coleman; Franken is drawing about 3/4 of Democrats. It’s reasonable to expect independents to break toward the incumbent. As a result, Senator Coleman is currently sitting on a ten point lead.

As far as I know, there are no other declared candidates who will challenge Franken in the primary – yet. I’m not backing someone else, but I hope I’m doing more than venting. I’m trying to say in as many forums as I can that I am worried. Perhaps people who have influence in the DFL and in Franken’s campaign will recognize that the poll numbers reflect concerned Democrats as well as Republicans and independents. I’d like Al to get some new advice and definitely some better marketing. As [someone else] said, the vulgar joke issue must be taken seriously by the Franken campaign because it certainly is being taken seriously by people he needs in November.

I’ve written to the Franken campaign. Naturally, I didn’t get an answer. I’ve responded to their appeals for contributions and to appeals from the DFL with strongly worded appeals of my own – please get serious! Franken is bombing and the party must shake up his act or get someone else.

So far so good.  Almost reasonable.

Until we get to the zowie:

That might be Ciresi, or Nelson-Pallmeyer or someone no one’s thought of. Draft Steve Miles, even Patty Wetterling. Coleman is beatable. It’s inexcusable that he should have a 10-12 point lead.

I’m going to just sit and marinade in that little burst of concentrated desperation.

(Marinade).

(Marinading).

(Mari mari marinade).

Please, please, please Tics; draft Patty Wetterling.  If she couldn’t beat Bachmann, the great lightning rod for lefty derangement, she sure won’t put a scratch on Coleman.

Or better yet, Tics, please please please please PLEASE draft Jack “Conspiracy Nut” Nelson-“Conspiracy Nut”-Pallmeyer.

I’ll donate. Pinky swear.

I’m human.

I know, stop the presses.

And like any human, emotions will cloud my assessment of things on occasion.

Of course, being a blogger, I have my critics and/or amateur fact-checkers.  They, too, being human, can let emotions get the best of ’em from time to time.

This past week, we had a collision of emotions; I was generally very “up” (yes, I’m still stoked over Heller).  For whatever reason, some of those who disagree with me would seem not to be.  I dunno.

But this isn’t about them.  This is about me!

There were three different posts on local leftyblogs that purported to correct me on a couple of issues.

“Ollie” at Bluestem Prairie (what is it with leftybloggers and anonymity?) noted – correctly – that I’d mixed up a couple of bills and erred in connecting Rep. Bachmann’s domestic drilling proposals to those referred to a Marketwatch article last week; additionally, it was correctly pointed out that halving the price of oil will not half the price of gasoline.  Mea culpa as far as it goes.  Of course, neither criticism touches the important point; more domestic drilling will lower prices all up and down the supply chain in the mid-to-long term because of increased supply, and in the short term because of the psychology of markets.  Will it drop to $2?  Who knows.  Will it drop?  All other things being equal, almost certainly.  Which candidates and politicians support this? 

Any corrections there?

Charlie Quimby notes correctly that in my piece last week on the founder of the prototype for the Canadian health care system, I didn’t read the entire referenced PDF report, which was a little less depressed about the whole thing (and was written by the Quebec provincial healthcare authority).  I won’t pretend to be an expert on healthcare (and either should most “health care experts”, for that matter), but it’s a fair cop; the negative quotes of a leader don’t necessarily negate the reports from the troops in the field.

Please pass that observation on to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, OK?

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 11AM-5PM:

• Volume I “The First Team” – Chad and Brian and John kick things off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I will take over from 1-3. There’s a safe bet that I’ll be pretty fired up about Heller. Plus Eric Black and his advice for John McCain.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will be dishing the Minnesota smack 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 and the bird-friendly Prius, from 9-11!

Question One

So after all my writing yesterday about the Heller decision (I’m supportive), what would you think if it were divulged by someone other than myself that I were getting payments from, say, the National Rifle Association to plug news releases from the Institute for Legislative Action (an NRA subsidiary), and not divulging that organizational or financial link?

Better example; what if, say, the Strib (owned by Avista Capital Partners) ran an uncritical, even fawning, report about the surpassing excellence of Frontier Drilling’s offshore exploration technology – and did it without disclosing that they are owned by the same company?

Woudl you consider that an ethical lapse on the Strib’s part?  Well, duh; pretty shady – right?  Pretty dubious ethics, perhaps?

Well, have no fear; both cases are supremely hypothetical.

Hold that thought as we proceed.

 Question Two

So how about if the Minnesoros “Independent” ran a piece uncritically fawning over a study put out by a political pressure group-cum-economics think tank that is a financial first-cousin of theirs, without disclosing the link?

Well, yeah, of course they did it, publishing a report by the Center for Economic Policy Research (about declining home values and, naturally, the wisdom of an interventionist approach to the housing crisis.

Learned Foot looks at the CEPR’s funders…:

Foundation support in 2008 includes:

The Annie E. Casey Foundation

The Nathan Cummings Foundation

The Ford Foundation

The Meyer Foundation

The Moriah Fund, Inc.

***The Open Society Institute***

The Retirement Research Foundation

The Russell Sage Foundation

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The Streisand Foundation

Washington Area Women’s Foundation

There’s that “Open Society Institute” again! That name just keeps popping up like a bad Soros huffing Viagras.

And who else does the “Open Society Foundation” support?

MorOn.org – Your one-stop shop for hatchet-jobbery done on behalf of (but not in coordination with – oh no, that’d be wrong) the Democratic Party.

Media Matters – Media watchdog group that specializes in combating “conservative misinformation in the media.” As such on that site, “the media” tends to consist almost entirely of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

The Center for “Independent” Media – Runs several “non-partisan” (battleground) state-based “media outlets” that spew forth all manner of leftist drivel / character assassinations.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington: A “non-partisan” ethics watchdog that specializes in suing Republicans, and making endless FOIA requests regarding Republicans.

Approdeh – An outfit that lobbies on behalf of South American terrorist organizations.

And now…

The Center for Economic Policy and Research – Issues bogus reports that can be cited by all of the above as authoritative. Kind of like money laundering.

Or like working for a law firm with one client.  In the “construction” business. 

Question Three

Does the Minnesoros “Independent’s” “code of ethics” actually impel them to behave ethically, or does it merely give them a framework under which to rationalize their unethical behavior?

When you’ve been a Second Amendment activist long enough, you eventually realize something – something that is at once depressing and liberating. Depressing because you realize so many of your fellow Americans are incapable of framing a logical argument; liberating because it means you can have a life, and dispense with most of the sturm and drang that goes along with an actual challenging argument.

When lefties argue about guns, eventually, after you shred them on facts (and if you’re moderately competent, you always, always, always shred them on the facts), they revert to one of the following:

1. Spin a nonexisent penumbra from whole cloth: This, the first stage, used to be a lot more fruitful for them, when Laurence Tribe was still among the “Collective Right” orcs. But once even he got the big flamin’ clue, it became a lot more fruitless (as commenter Penigma/Leftout/maybe a few other handles demonstrates in this thread at Centrisity – whose author Flash at least has always been correct on this issue, anyway).
2. Insult your genitals: “OK, well, maybe that’s a fact, but I think the reason you gun nuts are so excited about guns is because you’re, hnyuk, hnyuk, compensating for something…hnyuk”. It’s always delivered with the little edge that makes it sound like they think they actually are the first person to use this line, but with a pacing that’s about two steps removed from Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade. And yes, when we argue impassionedly for our beliefs, we are compensating – for the fact that our votes count the same as those of the sort of pantloads that think they’re being clever with this line. Retire it, commies.
3. “The Founding Fathers were referring to muskets!”

Vide “MNob”, an alleged a lawyer (no, I do know she’s an actual lawyer, albeit one with a history of being really bad at explaining law to her readers), writing at Cucking Stool:

So in District of Columbia v. Heller the Supreme Court has found that the Washington D.C. gun control statute is invalid because it is at odds with what the writers of the Constitution had in mind when they drafted the Second Amendment.

REVERT ALERT!

No word yet on whether the citizens of the District will be limited to the single-shot, front loaded muskets that the drafters also had in mind when they wrote the Amendment

Um, no. No word on that.

Also no “word” on whether the First will be limited to the town criers, movable type broadsheets, small community churches and assemblies of white males in towns of less than 50,000 that existed when it was drafted.

Or if the Fourth will leave out international crimes unknown to the founders.

Or if the Fifth would prohibit eminent domain by corporations, which were exceedingly rare in 1789.

About the Sixth and Seventh only applying to juries made up of landed men? Still silent.

Or if the Eighth still primarily abjures things like burning at th stake and roasting over coals (common in the collective memory of the drafters) in preference for the non-cruel, non-unusual public group hangings of the day.

Also nothing on whether the the Ninth and Tenth…well, being a liberal, MNob doesn ‘t know either of those.

For that matter they were quiet on whether the whole “of the People” thing will still refer to white males who own property.

“What?”, you say? “Nowhere in the Bill of Rights is specific technology mentioned? And they provide no specific applications for principles? Why, it’s almost as if the Founding Fathers, many of whom were both the technocrats of their day and incurable optimists, knew that the technology of our society was going to change in the future, and were smart enough to write a constitution based on principles rather than niggling nit-picking about specific bits of applied science and social mores of the day? Who knew?”

Well, I know someone who doesn’t.

At any rate, MNob, I can set you up with some quill pens and parchment to help kick off your new originalist blogging career. No, seriously, don’t mention it.

UPDATE:  I still haven’t had time to read the decision – I may be taking the afternoon off and spending part of it on that.

But commenter Master of None notes that, indeed, there is “word” on MNob’s complaint.

From Scalia (quoting MoN):

“Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment. We do not interpret constitutional rights that way… the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”

Wow.

Word!

And it doesn’t get any orphannier than when your father abandons you.

We’ll get back to that.  Let’s talk history:

As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates’ comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few.

But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn’t an American and hasn’t held office in over three decades.

But if you’re a Canadian who’s died waiting for a kidney transpant, or because they couldn’t get a specialist appointment to check out that mysterious growth, you might heard of the name.  He’s Castonguay was the father of Canada’s single-payer healthcare system.

And while American critics of single-payer who pay attention to the horror stories of Canadian healthcare get met with blizzard of non-sequitur stats from the usual US suspects, Castonguay has – well, a different perspective:

Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It’s as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.

Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.

Read the whole thing.

Chicago has a total ban on civilian firearm ownership.  Their ban is more draconian than New York’s Sullivan Act.  It’s even more draconian and, it could be reasonably inferred, less constitutional than the DC ban that the SCOTUS gassed in the Heller decision yesterday.

It’s also being shot to hell by armed gang-bangers who, I guess, haven’t gotten the word about the total gun ban.

Mayor Daley – who travels about the city with a full-time police escort, mind you – comments on the overall issue:

“It is frightening that America loves guns,” the mayor said, “and to me, I think this decision really places those who are rich and those are in power, they’ll always feel safe. Those who do not have the power do not feel safe, and that’s what they’re saying. If you’re elected officials, you feel safe. You cannot carry a gun into a federal building. You cannot carry a gun into a federal court. So they’re setting themselves aside, and really, they’re saying to the rest of America that the answer to all the constitutional issues is that we can carry guns. And I just don’t understand how they came to this thinking.”

Er, yeah, Mayor Daley.  I bet you – who grew up surrounded by the Chicago Police Department, and have probably spent scarcely ten years of your life without an armed bodyguard or ten – probably don’t understand it.  Probably because none of the people with the money and power – the ones that “feel safe”, people like Mayor Daley – aren’t the law-abiding citizens who want, demand, and need guns.

It’s the ones that don’t feel safe.  The ones that do worry about scumbags breaking into their houses at night, following them home from work, accosting them in crappy neighborhoods that elites like Mayor Daley don’t go into without police protection.

Forget about elections; Daley coudln’t win an argument that wasn’t fixed or bought-off.

CORRECTION:  Sullivan Act.  Not Sherman. 

A few weeks ago, Rep. Michele Bachmann – the biggest lighting rod for derangement in the entire Minnesota Congressional delegation – predicted that opening up domestic drilling could drive gas down to $2 a gallon sooner than later.

“Haw haw haw haw“, tittered the local Sorosphere.

But – oh, boy.  A bunch of actual experts agree with her:

Testifying to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Michael Masters of Masters Capital Management said that the price of oil would quickly drop closer to its marginal cost of around $65 to $75 a barrel, about half the current $135.

Fadel Gheit of Oppenheimer & Co., Edward Krapels of Energy Security Analysis and Roger Diwan of PFC Energy Consultants agreed with Masters’ assessment at a hearing on proposed legislation to limit speculation in futures markets.

Krapels said that it wouldn’t even take 30 days to drive prices lower, as fund managers quickly liquidated their positions in futures markets.

Wow.  Do you suppose Andy Birkey will update his story?  Perhaps he needs to consult the Twin Cities Sorosphere’s most respected economist, Molly Priesmeyer, for advice on how to dig out of a factual hole.

Brian “Saint Paul” Ward writes over at Fraters:

[A piece by Chad] reminds me that there was an all-star group of local, liberal bloggers who formed the web site “New Patriot” a few years ago. We covered it here. They promoted themselves at the time, among other ways, as “our answer to the Fraters dicks.”

As the Fraters dicks still have questions demanding answers, let’s check in on them and see how things are going: New Patriot.

Doh! Gone with the wind they are. I guess we’ll have to stand by for the New New Patriotism.

Doh – he’s right.  The New Pats have gone 404 on us. 

And in a sense that’s a shame.  In a local leftyblogosphere crowded with knee-highs who toss chuzzlewitted snark on good days, and too-pathetic-to-bother defamations on bad ones (almost inevitably from the cover of cowardly anonymity), the New Pats were generally good writers, usually up for a rational argument (once you got past the “Fraters Dicks” bit) and, refreshingly, actual people rather than head-slappingly melodramatic handles fronting for 15-watt intellects.  While I disagreed with them on most things, I respected the likes of Chris Dykstra, Luke Francl, Chuck Olsen and most of the rest of the contribs for being good thinkers, capable readible writers and responsible bloggers.

The Elder Swings Away: Silly kids. They shouldn’t have underestimated the staying power of the Fraters dicks.

Indeed; the part I do like is taking that quick swerve down memory lane past some of the leftybloggers that, er, came out swinging at us over the years.

Ragweed?  Hah.  Stick a fork in him.

Kevin McKay?  Floating belly-up.

Daddypants (I can’t even find a link in my own archives)?  Changed and tossed!

I could go on – but you get the picture. We just keep swinging away.

Anyway – be well, New Pats.  Your scene could use y’all.

Screencapped from the latest HuffPo:

Wow.  Are our ruling elites paranoid much?

I’m going to speed-fisk the whole thing, really quickly here:

Oooh! Scary!

Yep.  I hope that’s what every criminal scumbag in the US is seeing in their heads right about now; armed, empowered citizens.  Firing hardball.

Right.  Between.  The.  Eyes.

REACTIONS… Bloomberg: Ruling Is What We Mayors Believe Is One Of Our Tenets…

Oh, Mayor Bloomberg believes it’s one of your tenets?  Well, why don’t you slip out of NYC and buy yourself a country and write  your own constitution and appoint  your own court, then, slapnuts!  You and Arianna Huffington can have a splendid time!

Obama: Ruling Provides Much Needed Guidance …

What’s the shelf-life on this pronouncement?

McCain: Not The End Of Our Struggle…

Duly noted.

Chicago Mayor: “A Very Frightening Decision”…

“Frightening”?  You mean, like the reign of gang terror on Chicago’s streets?  That kind of “frightening”?  What “frightens” you about the common citizen’s God-given rights, you elitist douchebag?

First Major Pronouncement On Gun Rights In U.S. History…

But not the last.

Strikes Down DC’s 32-Year-Old Handgun Ban…

And danced on its grave.

Decision Goes Further Than Even What White House Wanted…

So what?  We don’t look to the  White House for the final word on our God-given rights, either.

NRA Head: This Is Just The Beginning…

It had better be.

NRA To File More Lawsuits To Challenge Handgun Restrictions

Let slip the dogs of forty years of retribution.

I’m so there.

I’d love to be at the federal building in Chicago right now.

I wonder how many potential handgun owners are bum-rushing the court administrators right now, filing suits against Chicago’s gun ban (even more draconian than the DC ban which Heller euthanized this morning)?

From Page 57 of Scalia’s opinion:

It is enough to note, as we have observed, that the American people have considered the handgun to be the quintessential self-defense weapon. There are many reasons that a citizen may prefer a handgun for home defense: It is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; It cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier to use for those without the upperbody strength to lift and aim a long gun; it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police. Whatever the reason, handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.

Even more?  Michelle Malkin notes:

And it’s not just that self-defense is a subsidiary right to the common defense, it’s (page 26) “the central component of the right itself.”

And not just self-defense in the sense of immediate threat to life: it’s for the defense of life, family, and property (p.54):

The prohibition extends, moreover, to the home, where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute. 

In other words, Chicago – to paraphrase old friend and frequent commenter Angryclown – your gun ban ain’t worth dicta.

UPDATE:  Well, that didn’t take long! 

Yaaay, NRA! 

Lefties – including in my comment section below – are nattering about Scalia’s opinion, and what it didn’t decide.

Look – at the end of the day, it all comes down to this:

1. The Second Amendment is an individual right.
2. All the technicalities – makes, models, calibers, operating systems, registrations, databases, exceptions, local sensitivities, what have you – are to be worked out in the legislatures, Congress, and lower courts.

Once you have #1, the rest is just footwork and lobbying and winning people over.

Which is what the Second Amendment movement’s been doing for the last three decades.

It was Sunday, June 26, 1988.

There truly wasn’t much going on in my life around this time.

My nights involved going to work at one gawdforsaken bar or another, six nights a week.

The good news – I was the best “jock” the DJ service had, and they told me so; my boss said that “I can put you in any bar I have – R’nB, Rock and Roll, oldies, County Western, background music, whatever – and they love you”. And they were putting me in different bars, at least; after months of bouncing back and forth between “Jams” in Brooklyn Center and “City Limits” in Rosemount, I was starting to get into some more places.

The bad news – I got put in every bar they had. It’s not like they got any better than Jams or City Limits, for crying out loud.  You had your choice; sleazy R’nB bars, redneck Rock and Roll dumps, tired and empty Oldies bars, malignant “country” joints, and somnolent “none of the above” lounges. All of them equally depressing.

And, truth be told, that’s just what I was. Depressed. I’d been going at the talk radio job hunt for over a year, now. Nothing.

My station-calling had slowed to a trickle. Every week or two, I’d get a flash of inspiration…

…no. That’s not true.  It wasn’t “inspiration”. It was a flash of desperation – a sudden, searing flash of panic; “THIS IS HOW MY WHOLE F****NG LIFE IS GOING TO BE” would beat my eyes open at 9AM, and I’d race downstairs, a curdled ball of panic in my stomach that would impel me to an hour or two of frantic, despairing calling, more to say I’d done it, sort of like a ticket-punching ritual done for its own sake than out of any hope that there’d be anything on the other end of the line. Think of rebound dating.

I’d get to the end of these sessions feeling worse than when I’d started. And yet there I went – every week or so, it’d overwhelm me again.

Again – sort of like rebound dating.

———-

One change – Wyatt had finally driven our other roommate, Dan, out earlier in the month. Oddly, for as amazingly promiscuous a man as he was (he said with a straight face at about this time that “my goal in life is to f*** every woman in the world”), he had a very dim impression of gays. “I don’t like faggots”, he said many times. He did his best to live up to both statements. The women bit – well, that should be obvious.

As to Dan? His property – including several of his paychecks – started disappearing. By early May, Wyatt had taken to actively antagonizing Dan’s boyfriend. He did it when I wasn’t around – I heard about it all second-hand…

…but by the end of May, Dan had had enough. He gave notice.

A day or two later – in early June – Dan and a few friends showed up with a truck and moved him out in during the day, while Wyatt and I were out. He left me a note – he just couldn’t deal with Wyatt’s BS anymore.

So that made for an extra-large rent payment, and a payment to the Pioneer Press to put an ad in the “Roomates Wanted” section.

———-

But that was the closest thing to excitement that I managed. My days during this brutally hot summer were very, very circumscribed. I’d wake up around 9ish. I’d have something to eat, usually. I’d jump on my bike and ride most of the day – unless something was broken, which would involve a half-day quest to roll my bike laboriously to a repair shop. If I was feeling especially industrious or motivated, I might stop at the Dairy Queen, or the library, or ride down to Crosby Park, or…well, whatever rolled my way, really. If I was not feeling motivated, I’d ride to see how dry my mouth would get before I could take a drink, or how yellow my pee could get, or how many of my old apartments and houses I could reach, or how many miles I could ride without seeing anything interesting. Some days, I did nothing but ride box grids in different neighborhoods; others, I’d just pick a street and ride it to the end, or as far as I could get before I had to turn around to get back for work.

Looking back (because I’d never have put it this way back then) most days’ rides would have bookends of despair; at the beginning of the ride, I was pounding out the miles to forget about how awful it felt to be so…aimless. Such a failure. And at the end, there was the dull ache of knowing I had to wash up and go to yet another awful bar.

I’d have something to eat (usually a baked potato stuffed with cheese and onions), then off to whatever the bar of the evening was. I’d grab the traditional after-work drink at the bars that allowed it, drive carefully home, and check in for the latest in Wyatt’s game of musical women. About half the nights, Wyatt would have hooked up with some girl he’d met at his day job during the day, and would have Teresa, his hot blond “steady” girlfriend, over at night. On the other nights – when Teresa worked (she was a night nurse at a nursing home), they’d bump uglies in the afternoon, and Wyatt’d pick up some other floozie at Christenson’s or the Belmont or O’Gara’s for the evening’s entertainment. I figured that Wyatt was boffing, on the average, with between four and seven different women a week. Every week.

Which was, in and of itself, depressing.

I’d usually fall asleep reading a book, to the sound of Wyatt and whomever-it-was having thudding, drunken, arklahoma-inflected, drug-enhanced sex in the next room, or having a thudding, drunken, arklahoma-inflected, drug-enhanced argument about something or another.

And then I’d wake up, and it’d start again.

Every f*****g day.

Allahpundit at Hotair, with emphasis added:

Kennedy was the deciding vote — or, if you prefer, Alito was the deciding vote. Would O’Connor or Harriet Miers have voted the same way? If nothing else, Bush at least delivered this.

Remember this.

There’ll be a couple of SCOTUS seats coming open in the next administration.  And there will be cases just as important to liberty as Heller confronting the court.

By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court of the United States today ruled in the Heller case that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is exactly what the founding fathers intended; that a right “of the people” means “people”, not “the National Guard”.

The court dealt forty years of erosion of civil liberties and contempt for the law-abiding citizen a sharp kick in the groin with pointy boots. The decision stands as the capstone on one of the most remarkable bits of grassroots politics in American history – a three-decade battle where the nation’s people, black and white and Republican and Democrat, fought their elites first to a standstill, and then came back to an escalating series of victories, starting in the courts of public opinion, extending through legislatures and city councils around the nation, to today.

This ruling euthanizes the DC Gun Ban – which is was, like most gun control measures, a racist concoction intended to keep all those brown-skinned people from running amok in the nation’s capitol, to return us in deed if not in thought to the days when black people had a separate, unequal justice system…

To quote Lyle Denniston of ScotusBlog:

the Court nullified two provisions of the city of Washington’s strict 1976 gun control law: a flat ban on possessing a gun in one’s home, and a requirement that any gun — except one kept at a business — must be unloaded and disassembled or have a trigger lock in place. The Court said it was not passing on a part of the law requiring that guns be licensed. It said that issuing a license to a handgun owner, so the weapon can be used at home, would be a sufficient remedy for the Second Amendment violation of denying any access to a handgun.

The decision opens up possibilities for litigation and legislation on further gun bans, like Chicago’s, and also at least partially ejects US V. Miller from its misbegotten role as definitive precedent on Second Amendment issues.

This is not the end of the war over the Second Amendment, of course. It’s not a complete victory; licensing at the end of the day is conceptually scarcely less odious or abuse-prone than a ban (as we’ve found out in Saint Paul this past year). The orcs still control much; many cities (or at least their governing elites) still pay lumpen, unthinking fealty to the notion that a disarmed, docile citizenry is a safe one.

Some of this world’s people know better…:

…that the only genuinely secure people in this world are the ones that can see to their own security.

Yes, folks – this is serious business.

This is far from the end. Indeed, as Churchill said, it’s the end of the beginning…:

…and much hard fighting remains.

The court did the right thing – and now, this is a battle we Real Americans have to consolidate, extend, and win in the legislatures, City Councils, and in Congress.

The orcs will regroup and try to consolidate and, eventually, make another assault on the God-given rights of the law-abiding American. It is inevitable; it is the way of the orc to feed on your freedom. Softcore fascists like Heather Martens and Wes Skoglund aren’t drying up and blowing away because of this ruling; it remains to us to extinguish the smoldering dung-heap of that whole school of thought, in the legislature, in court, and most importantly in the hearts of people smart enough to know the difference between “rights of the people” and “privileges granted by your masters”.

But we – the Americans who’ve fought long and hard to keep this issue on the national radar, and drive this nation back from the insane nadir of the collectivist seventies – deserve a moment, if only a moment, to relax and enjoy the fruits of today’s victory. It’s a great respite from a dismal political season, and a solid jumping-off point for what comes next.

Enjoy it. I sure am.

To all of you who’ve spent so much time, toil and treasure winning today’s victory, a salute. You’ve earned it.

Tomorrow? Well, it’s back to work. Back to the endless job of putting the enemies of freedom to the rhetorical point of the political pike – one Congressman, one Justice, one voter at a time.

The way we’ve done it all along.

Thank you. And God Bless America.

(Over the top a little? Not really. Oh, I’m doing the endzone happy dance. I’m doing to do the endzone happy dance on David Lillehaug’s neck – rhetorically speaking, of course. Today’s a great day, and I’m going to treat it as such).

5-4

More in a moment.

Mitch here.

As you read this, it’s 9AM.  I’m cut off from the world, in a meeting.  I’ll be 150 yards from my computer.  And yet I might as well be at the bottom of a well, or in the Gobi Desert for all the good it does me.

By now, most of you probably know how the Heller decision came out.

But not me.  I’m ignorant enough to be a friggin’ MNBlue writer right about now.

So I’ll be…:

1. Working my butt off to reach an early consensus on the design issues that led to this meeting
2. Racing back to the cube
3. Ignoring all watercooler conversation, avoiding my conservative co-workers, and eschewing all comments on this thread until I can read the SCOTUS wire.

It’s gonna be news to me, dammit.

(And yes, I’m actually writing this on Wednesday night, and setting it to publish at 9AM sharp, in case you were wondering why I’m writing this and not looking at the wire).

That is all.

(more…)

I’m not Catholic.  I never will be.  I have my theological reasons.

I have nothing against Catholicism or Catholics. Many of my best friends, and some of my relatives, are Catholic.  I agree with John Paul II – there are many paths to salvation.  I don’t believe Catholicism is a detour on the road to salvation. 

As it happens, I’m Presbyterian.  The theology of the Presbyterian Church just makes more sense to me (even though the actions of the Presbyterian Church in the USA’s non-clerical governing body on temporal issues frequently don’t).  I believe strongly in its focus on scripture, its mix of justification by faith with strong encouragement of putting ones’ faith into action, its governance, John Knox’s founding beliefs on the relationship between government and the faithful (hint:  it strongly influenced how this country was founded), and many, many other things.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t things I respect about Catholicism – indeed, as a newly-minted conservative in the mid-eighties, Pope John Paul II’s example was downright inspirational.

But given a choice between…:

1. starting a pressure group within the Catholic Church – say, “Catholics for Justification By Faith Without Eschewing Works, An Attitude of Judging Civil Authority By Its Record On Being Good Versus Evil, and An Elected Church Governing Hierarchy”, and spending decades/centuries duking it out with a church that is based on theologically inimicable principles, or…
2. …joining a church that actually practiced these things…

…the choice seemed fairly simple (presuming one doesn’t live merely to fight fruitless battles the end of which one will never see).

Which is why I see things like this:

Saying they don’t want to go back in the closet, gay and lesbian Catholics and their supporters took their annual prayer service celebrating gay pride outdoors Wednesday night…About 100 people marched from the parking lot to the front of St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in south Minneapolis, where they celebrated a [GLBT prayer service] officials from the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis had banned from the church itself.

I’m totally with ’em about not going back into the closet.

But…well…

Lucia Engelhardt, 2, was helping her sister Anna, 9, carry a sign reading “Gay love is not a mortal sin.”

I may or may not agree on that count.  I’m pretty “live and let live” on these sorts of things.

But to the Catholic Church, the way of the gay is a mortal sin.  And changing the Catholic Church is like changing the orbit of the planet.

Their 7-year-old sister, Ingrid, also carried a sign supporting gays in the Catholic Church.

“We’re here to support our gay friends,” said their mother, Stephanie Vagle. “And to show our displeasure with the Catholic Church over this issue,” their father, Bill Englehardt, quickly added.

So here’s a question; if you disagree so completely with the Catholic Church over something that the Church itself is so adamant about not changing, why stay Catholic?

Why not leave?

Why not find a church that reflects your beliefs?  It’s an ancient, honorable thing;  the Armenian and Coptic and Chaldean and Indian and finally the Greek Churches left over creeds and doctrines and, I dunno, the heights of miter caps for all I remember.  We Protestants left over all manner of things, and have collected half a billion unforced turnovers since then.  The Episcopals seceded over the whole “my king beats your pope” thing.

Just saying – it’d be nothing new.

I’m genuinely curious – for the second day in a row, as it happens; why stay in a church whose beliefs are so inimicable to you?

Is it the incense?  The nuns?  The tradition?

Someone explain it, please.

The Wall Street Journal on Obama’s economics flub:

The “psychological impact” to which McCain refers is quite simple: The expectation of greater oil supplies in the future would make it more attractive to sell oil now, when supplies are restricted and prices are high, thereby bringing prices down in the short term.
Is Obama really too ignorant to grasp this, or does he just think voters are?

Roosh:

Methinks both.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Senator Barack Obama! The man that wants to lead our nation; restore our economy!

Why is the price of Oil so high? Speculation? Not so much. Weak dollar? Getting warmer. Supply and demand? Warmer Still. The anticipation of static supply and high demand? Bingo!

I saw no mention of “ineluctible forces of history” or, for that matter, the Inaudacity of Hopelessness.

Get ready to have to spend a lot of time explaining basic economics to people.