Zack at MNPublius writes:

Norm Coleman said he would allow the press to photograph his “cramped” apartment in Washington, D.C. in order to prove that he’s not getting favorable treatment. But now Norm is backtracking on that promise…

He goes on to say (emphasis added by me):

But yesterday a DC staffer said no photos would be made available. The reason? Security.

“We consulted with the Capitol Police who advised that taking photos could pose a security risk,” said LeRoy Coleman, Coleman’s press secretary.

Zack then replays last month’s “controversial” Coleman spot:

Please, I beg of you, please, please please please, please please PLEASE let this be true:

Barack Obama‘s presidential campaign has requested information from Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd as part of its search for a possible vice presidential candidate.

The former White House hopeful and Connecticut lawmaker indicated Wednesday that he has been approached by the campaign. “There’s been some inquiries, yeah,” Dodd said. “They ask for a lot of stuff. I’ll leave it there.”

Now that’s change I can believe in.

(Via Ed)

Nothing official yet, but Zack at MNPublius notes that…:

A reliable source at the Capitol tells MN Publius that Ron Erhardt will file as an Independent candidate for the State House in 41A shortly before the filing deadline next week. 

I’m torn; I think it’s possible Erhardt will take more votes from the DFL than from Keith Downey, the endorsed GOP candidate. 

Did I say Keith Downey?  Yes, I did.  If you’re a Republican in Edina, or in one of the safer Congressional Districts, it behooves us all to get out and get behind Keith Downey.

Oh, and I love this bit of DFLer boilerplate.

Erhardt was denied the Republican endorsement for reelection after he voted to override the Governor’s veto of the transportation bill despite decades of service to the MN GOP.

I wish I’d had a blog in 1996:  “Norm Coleman was chased from the DFL after he took a moderate line on taxation and abortion despite decades of service to the Saint Paul and Minnesota DFL”. 

To say nothing of 2005: “Randy Kelly was purged from the DFL after governing to the center, and endorsing on pure foreign-policy principle George W. Bush, despite decades of loyal service to the  Saint Paul DFL”. 

Anyway, where was I?  Oh, yes.  Keith Downey is running in 41A.  Keith Downey. Keith Downey.

At his best, Michael Yon is among the best journalists around, in the classical sense of the term.

This piece – about an American, pseudonymously “Charlie” – journeying up the Irrawaddy River in defiance of the Burmese junta’s ban on foreigners after Cyclone Nargis, which killed hundreds of thousands and exposed the corruption, cruelty and incompetence of the Burmese government – hit me where I live.

The local people, even the monks, expressed open hatred for the government of Myanmar. The people wanted guns as badly as they wanted shelter. They had no idea what to do with the guns, yet Charlie was deeply moved by the robust character of these people, to whom democracy and freedom were not cynical conceits argued over coffee or crumpets, but ideals for which these simple denizens of the river yearned, believing deep in their hearts that the United States of America could bring change to this far-off corner of the world. They hoped that the U.S. would swoop in and bring justice to the Irrawaddy by deposing the Myanmar military regime. But these hopes would be dashed by real-politik and shifting geo-strategic priorities. Something about the universality of man’s desires occurred to Charlie, how, he thought, we all want the same things—freedom, dignity, a chance to make our own way in this world. Between village visits and dodging patrols he would sit quietly on the bow of the boat and ruminate under the same night sky full of stars that had witnessed men struggle through folly, fiasco, and victory in the pursuit of these very ideas.

This quote smacked me right in the gut when I read it. It resonated on so many levels, both low (this is why the Second Amendment is a right “of the people”, and don’t you ever forget it) and high – this is what America, and the small-d democratic ideal that founded us and, at our best, binds us together, means to those looking at us from outside who really know what it is not to be free. Ignore the eurotrash; douse the stench of Berkeley from your nose; take those breathless articles about America’s supposedly diminished stature in this world and wipe your bottom with them on the hottest day possible, too good for them as it is.

The quote sums up why we’re here.

Naturally, you need to read the whole thing.

Another from Red:

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

1. Chips and Salsa
2. Nachos
3. Chex Party Mix (with excessive worcestershire sauce)
4. Key Lime Pie
5. Root Beer Floats

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

1. Popcorn
2. Apples
3. Grapefruit
4. Homemade Yogurt
5. Soy Nuts

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. Travel.  Europe, of course, especially the parts I haven’t seen (Norway, Ireland, Spain, Italy), but I’d love to get to the Near East – Turkey, Kurdistan, Armenia, Georgia – as well as India, Taiwan, Korea and Japan.  Then maybe start on South America.
2. Real estate.  I’d pay off my house (duh), get some sort of place in NYC, Chicago, Seattle, Colorado, San Diego and Edinburgh, and – natch – a lake cabin up north.
3. Support non-profits that resonate with me.  First and foremost the Salvation Army; they were there when I needed them waaaay back when, and I want to return the favor a thousand times over.  Heritage and Cato and the NRA, too, of course.  Every genuine conservative candidate for office in Minnesota could expect me to max my donation, naturally.  And my church, of course.
4. I’d set up a sensible, far-from-extravagant trust fund for the kids.  One that’d pay off when they turn 30.  Because there’s nothing in the world more obnoxious than teens and twentysomethings with scads of unearned money.
5. Buy a sailboat.  And sail.  A lot.

Five (non-academic) jobs that I have had:

1. Human Interaction Designer
2. Technical Writer
3. Nightclub DJ
4. Radio (reporter, producer, play-by-play, talk show host, music director, disc jockey)
5. Bellhop.

Five habits:

1. Waking up at 5:30 a.m.
2. Blogging
3. Biting my fingernails
4. Drinking lots of water
5. Whenever I see an airplane in the air, saying a quiet prayer for the passengers.  Not sure when or why that started, but it is virtually a reflex.

Five places I have lived:

Heh.

1. Rugby, ND
2. Jamestown, ND
3. Carrington, ND
4. Minneapolis
5. Saint Paul

Five people I want to get to know better

Like Red, I’m not sure who this refers to.  I don’t tag bloggers.  And this is one list I don’t really think about; there are zillions of people I’d like to know better (and a few from whom I’d happily distance myself).

Ralph Nader, desperately seeking relevance, rears back and tries to take a swing at Rush Limbaugh, calling him a welfare queen:

Rush Limbaugh
The Rush Limbaugh Show
2 Penn Plaza
New York, NY 10121

Dear Mr. Limbaugh,

The Associated Press reports your new contract with Premiere Radio Networks will enrich you with at least $38 million a year over the next eight years. You are making this money on the public property of the American people for which you pay no rent.

You, Rush Limbaugh, are on welfare.

As you know, the public airwaves belong to the American people. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is supposed to be our trustee in managing this property. The people are the landlords and the radio and TV stations and affiliated companies are the tenants.

Leave aside the obvious double standard – could also demand “rent” from the Big Three networks?  They’ve made astronomically more money than Limbaugh over the past eighty years.  How about Air America? 

Ralph (and the supporters of his who will hop up and down like poo-flinging monkeys at his latest utterance)?  Limbaugh doesn’t own any transmitters.  His production company, and Premier, his syndicator – just produce a program, and put it up on the satellite (and they do pay for that).

You’ll need to take it up with Limbaugh’s 600 affiliates, who carry the show.  By the way – this is important – they carry it of their own corporate free will:  nobody was forced to carry the Limbaugh show.

The problem is that since the Radio Act of 1927 these corporate tenants have been massively more powerful in Washington, DC than the tens of millions of listeners and viewers. The result has been no payment of rent by the stations for the value of their license to broadcast. You and your company are using the public’s valuable property for free. This freeloading on the backs of the American people is called corporate welfare.

No, it’s not.  The airwaves are “public” in the same sense that the great outdoors is “public”; I, or Limbaugh, owes “the public” no more for sending a radio signal through the ether than I do for walking along the beach.

You need not wait for the broadcast industry-indentured FCC and Congress to do the right thing. You can lead by paying a voluntary rent–determined by a reputable appraisal organization–for the time you use on the hundreds of stations that carry your words each weekday.

Excellent idea, Ralph!

And then you can pay me “rent” for the space you’re using on my monitor!

No really – they’re the same.  Equally senseless and illogical.

Anyway, Ralph; I’ll look for the same letter to go to Al Franken, Bill Maher, “Lionel”, Oprah Winfrey…

(Via Brian Maloney)

For those of you who always wondered “what if they could just swoop in and rip Washington Avenue out of the ground and toss it into space?”

We’re gonna find out!:

The University of Minnesota Board of Regents has approved a key agreement on the Central Corridor light rail project…The project includes $11 million for a transit and pedestrian mall on Washington Ave. The costs will be included in the budget submitted to the federal government.

I expect they’ll find people sitting in traffic around the East Bank so long they’ll actually form settlements up and down Huron Avenue.

Courtesy of Logobama, I’m audacious enough that this logo, displayed to enough criminals…

…will give me hope.

I’ve lived in Saint Paul for most of the past twenty years. I have no intention of changing that.

I love this city; its neighborhoods, its attitude, its architecture, its down-to-earth feel.

I love its contradictions.  Mark Twain once said, “Saint Paul is the last city of the east, and Minneapolis is the first city of the West”), and as you go through the neighborhoods, you can see why.  The great playwright August Wilson lived on Cathedral Hill because more than anyplace he’d seen, it reminded him of the Brooklyn he’d grown up in.  Highland Park feels like parts of Chicago; the West End reminds me of Cleveland, Toledo, even parts of Boston; the East Side, parts of Chicago or Baltimore or Camden, New Jersey, depending on the area.  My Midway?  Well, it could be anywhere.  And yet the old saying “Saint Paul is fifteen small towns with one mayor” still resonates; each neighborhood is, in many ways, its own stand-alone city.  And with all that, it’s still a ten minute drive from the hustle and bustle and thrum of Minneapolis (and yet you can duck back across the river and escape the crime rate pretty much at will). 

But things feel different lately. 

Back during the Latimer and Scheibel administrations, Saint Paul felt tired and spent.  While the neighborhoods throve, downtown was deteriorating as you watched; the Saint Paul Port Authority committed the city to a series of ruinous boondoggles, Town Square and Galtier Plaza and the World Trade Center, all of which stand mostly unoccupied, or occupied by government and non-profit offices; renting to government is the closest thing developers have to a “get out of jail free card” in Saint Paul, but even the state’s appetite can’t consume all the spare office space in downtown.  Saint Paul, especially the downtown, turned into a ghetto of official space and a few stalwart local companies.

During the Coleman and Kelly administrations, things felt like they picked up.  I’ll allow in advance that part of it is my projection of good thoughts onto more-conservative administrations.  But the fact that Coleman and Kelly held the line on property taxes and spending was huge; people started buying houses in the city again; the plague of absentee landlords abated as people started choosing to invest in living in Saint Paul.  The crime rate, always much lower than Minneapolis, subsided as Selby-Dale, Frogtown and the Lower East Side’s crime waves abated.  It wasn’t all roses; profligate Tax Increment Financing lured a few companies – most notably USBank – out of downtown and into the huge, and for the next several years TIF-subsidized – West Side Flats complex, leaving several downtown office buildings vacant and strewn with tumbleweeds.  But for the most part, Saint Paul during those 12 years had a “let’s do it” attitude. 

But since Chris Coleman was elected mayor, and the ultra-left wing of the DFL took prohibitive control of the City Council with five far-left council members, the city just feels different. 

Again, I’ll allow that part of it is projection.  And the foreclosure crisis, especially on the East Side, North End and Frogtown, doesn’t help. 

But a huge part of this intangible, subjective change is the attitude behind the flip in course in the Mayor’s office.  The bulk of Chris Coleman’s campaign, and the reason a fair chunk of his supporters voted for him, was retribution for Randy Kelly’s endorsement of George W. Bush in 2004.  They rode into office with a promise to raise taxes, not endorse Republicans…

…and not a whole lot else.  It was pure negativity.  And negativity is a response, not a direction.

The city feels devoid of real leadership these days.  It feels rudderless, drifting in a dyspeptic sea of bile.  And I don’t mean from Dave Thune’s mythical puking Republicans.

Oh, the city is putting its best face forward for the Convention (when clowns like Thune aren’t slandering the GOP from their bully pulpit); downtown will be in its Sunday best, and I have no doubt that Grand Avenue, Saint Anthony Park, Ford Parkway, Concord Cesar Chavez, West Seventh northeast of Saint Clair, and that strip of downtown from Eagle Street to Wabasha between Kellogg and Ninth will be great places to see, be seen, and take the whole event in.

But elsewhere? 

The twelve years of vitality the city experienced under Norm and Randy seem to have dissipated.    Rice and Payne and Arcade, after years of slow recovery, seem to have stopped – partly due to the foreclosure epidemic that has hammered the North End and lower East Sides, leaving some streets on some blocks with more blue “Vacant” tags than without.  The Midway is riding out the economy better, but University Avenue is on death watch, waiting for the light rail to come through and smother twenty years of largely organic, grass-roots-driven progress.  And downtown?  The rebirth of the west end of Downtown, from Five Corners up through Wabasha, while gratifying to those of us who remember the Scheibel years, has stalled cold, but for convention preparations.

Comme ci, comme ca.  Business has cycles.  Cities ebb and flow over time. 

Except that it’s about to get a lot worse in Saint Paul.  Government negligence is one thing – a good conservative expects it, especially from a bunch of bobbleheads like the Saint Paul City Council. 

But there’s a difference between negligence and active connivance in a plan that’s going to gut the city – and the Saint Paul City Council is about to drive across that line with a bulldozer.

And they’re going to do it for the children.

More on Monday.

Two things did not happen at the MDE/MNPublius Happy Hour at Billy’s on Grand last night:

1. Nobody started singing Kumbaya. In the presence of each other’s “operatives”, nobody apparently converted to their respective dark sides. Left stayed left, right stayed right, and though the twain met, it did not turn into an Ophrah episode.
2. Nobody started throwing punches. Everyone got along just fine in the presence of a roomful of the other side’s “operatives”. The lion didn’t lie down with the lamb, but they did share nachos and buffalo wings with each other.

Who did I meet? It was such a blur; I met Mary Lahammer from Channel 2, and found we shared some time in the North Dakota broadcasts wars. I met the MNPublius guys – Matt and Sean, whom I call the “giggly fratboys”, but all in good fun (Michael Corleone: “It’s not personal. It’s business), along with (naturally) the co-host of the party, my NARN colleague Michael Brodkorb. Gavin Sullivan was there, along with Jeff Rosenberg from MN Campaign Report, Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci from KAR, one of the fellas from “Liberal in the Land of Conservative” (nice guy, albeit a poor judge of “smack“), Sara Janecek and her colleagues from Politics in Minnesota, Dane Smith, Shadow from the “Urban Renaissance Coalition“, Brian McClung from Governor Pawlenty’s office, Anne Mason from the Erik Paulsen campaign, “Two Putt Tommy” (who’s graduating from being a comment section gadfly to writing for “MNBlue”; honestly, he could do better). I’m told even Charlie Quimby braved the flood of “anti-progressive operatives” and showed up, although he disappeared before I could work my way over to that corner of the bar.

And of course, I saw Brian Lambert, now with Minneapolis Saint Paul Magazine…

…at whom I’ve taken my fair share of shots over the years.

And at whom I’ll no doubt take many more.

But – here’s the fun part – I had a blast meeting him. He’s sort of like a political photonegative (a polinegative?) of Bob Davis; quick, glib but articulate, just erudite enough. We haven’t actually met face-to-face since he sat in for Geoff Charles one day at KSTP in 1985 – and I have to say that I had a great time talking with the guy.

I know. Stifle the “Kumbaya” stuff, dagnabbit; I’m gonna keep dinging on all of their politics! I mean, let’s be clear – nothing about the event was, as Charlie Quimby put it, “a symbolic show of bipartisanship — which is people who’d like to stab each other in the back pretending they won’t”. There was nothing “bi”-partisan about the evening; we all knew what sides everyone was on, when we were talking politics at all. It was multipartisan and nonpartisan (and let’s be perfectly clear; I only stab people in the face).

But as I noted earlier this week – one of the great joys of events like these is that you start to see people with whom you spar (constantly!) as people, rather than as collections of cliches and stereotypes. Which makes arguments, debates and discussions more difficult and, ultimately, much more rewarding.  And which some, unfortunately, find threatening.

Kudos to Matt, Sean and Michael. We gotta do it again sometime.

Hmmm…

Bob Collins at MPR sets just about the wrongest possible tone for any upcoming summer festivities:

[NYTimes “New Old Age” blogger Jen Gross] writes this week about a recent presentation that asked people when they wanted to die. Most, as you might expect, chose when they are “old.”

Then the presenter asked : When the room was not thrilled with cancer and then heart disease, they were told that they’d just chosen “dementia and frailty.”

“How many of you expect to die?” she asked.

…Dr. Lynn, who describes herself as an “old person in training,” offered three options to the room. Who would choose cancer as the way to go? Just a few. Chronic heart failure, or emphysema? A few more.”So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia?” Dr. Lynn asked.

Dr. Lynn must be a riot at parties.

I, for one, choose “shot by a jealous husband when I’m 95”, thanks.

Via GeeEminem, Kudlow notes that Mac seems to have abandoned his support for “Cap and Trade”. 

After writing favorably about Sen. McCain’s recent economics speeches, where he clearly shifted toward the supply-side both on tax cuts and producing more energy, I went back last evening and carefully read his 15-page policy pamphlet called “Jobs for America.” Here’s what I found: There is no mention of cap-and-trade. None. Nada. There is a section about “Cheap, Clean, Secure Energy for America: The Lexington Project.” But that talks about expanded domestic production of oil and gas, as well as the need for more nuclear power and coal along with alternative sources. Then it has the $300 million battery and flex-fuel cars. But nope, no cap-and-trade.

Watch for a giggly article from Steve Perry about his “flip flop”. 

This the kind of “flip flop” I can get behind.

L-Kud:

So then I asked this senior official if the campaign has taken cap-and-trade out behind the barn and shot it dead once and for all — buried it in history’s dustbin of bad ideas. The answer came back that they are interested in jobs right now — jobs for new energy production and jobs from lower taxes. At that point I became satisfied. Even though a McCain presidency might resurrect cap-and-trade, it will be a much different format. More important, the campaign is cognizant of the conservative rebellion against it.

That’s enough for me.

Miller:

And for me.

Berg:

And for me.

To:  Jesse Ventura, ex-governor and “celebrity”

From: Mitch Berg, Average Schlemiel

Re: Senate Bid

Dear “Governor” Ventura,

One minute you’re running; the next, you’re not.  It’s almost like you’re arguing with The Crusher or Vern Gagne or Vince McMahon [1] or someone.

Let me help you settle this.

Run.  Run, Jesse, Run. 

Run for Senate.  Please.

Ten years ago, in a simpler and more trite era, it was easy to convince people that you were a populist, libertarian/conservative everyman.  Back before you actually had to govern (“Govern”?  Whatever), you could make yourself out to be whatever you wanted to look like; like every third party candidate, you could wrap ideals around you like they were so many pink feather boas.

Of course, then you got into office.  And that “deer in the headlights” look you got on election night 1998 morphed into you turning into a sock puppet for Dean Barkley and Tim Penny and, eventually – to deal with the fact that you had no party supporting  you in the legislature – ran to Roger Moe like a new, boyish-looking blond inmate cuddling up to a big bruiser inmate for protection.

But we know you today, Mr. Ventura. Some of us know you way too well. 

We know that you, like your “party”, are DFL lite.  To Democrats, who might prefer a trite, vapor-light, paper-thin devil they know to a trite, vacuous devil they don’t, that might be a sell over Franken.  To Republicans?  You had some of us fooled ten years ago; they’re not biting anymore.

Oh, and you’re a 9/11 Truther.  That appeals entirely to…well, you know who.  Indeed, the numbers show, so far, that you will draw more voters from Franken than Coleman.

So please, Jesse.  Run.  I beg of you.  Let’s make this electoral season even more humiliating for Al Franken.

That is all.

[1] What?  None of these names were current when you were in “wrestling”?  Sorry – I guess I had a brain and didn’t pay any attention at the time.  Sorry.  Not.

I have two statistics for you to try to digest here:

1. Due Process Causes 34% of Violent Crime Deaths: Professors Irving Schmutzler and Gretel LeTourneau-Bye-Spankowski-Overmeier have posted research showing that the delayed effects of due legal process for the accused – through criminals being released from jail due to unconstitutional searches and seizures, or the inability of police to search suspects’ property without a court warrant – eventually result in 36% of our nation’s violent crime deaths. “Criminals get a pass from going to jail, where they arguably don’t belong, naturally – but people die!” said LeTourneau-Bye-Spankowski-Overmeier, at a ceremony at which she and Schmutzler accepted a MacArthur Genius Grant. ” Perhaps it’s time we repealed the Fourth Amendment”.
2. 22% of Statistics are Made Up: Including both of these.

It’s be completely absurd to abridge a civil right of law-abiding Americans because some Americans abuse, or mis-use, that right. Wouldn’t it?

Especially if the statistic were completely made up (or at least highly questionable)?

———-

Yesterday, the Saint Paul Pioneer Press gave me a blast from the past; they printed a recycled Washington Post piece that cited a 1991 study by Loftin and MacDowell (from the U of Maryland) about the putative relationship between civilian gun ownershp and suicide.

And lordy, did it take me back down memory lane.

Back in the nineties, as the battle to pass “shall issue” laws around the country started heating up, Professor John Lott released a study, and then a book (More Guns, Less Crime) which pretty much gutted the opposition.

The gun grabbers ponied up study after study – the infamous New England Journal study,one from Johns Hopkins, others – and of course, Loftin and MacDowell. And like spring-loaded ducks at a shooting arcade, they got shot down, one after the other.

For years, knowledgeable gun control advocates stopped even trying to cite these studies (actually, semi-knowledgeable ones stopped; the truly smart ones dropped their mania for curbing our civil rights and joined the good guys).

So apparently the folks at the WaPo have short attention spans – or they think we do:

Seventeen years ago, two criminologists published a paper about the 1976 handgun ban in Washington, D.C. — a ban that recently was overturned by the Supreme Court as inimical to the constitutional right to bear arms.

After tabulating all the suicides in the district from 1968 to 1987, researchers Colin Loftin and David McDowall of the University of Maryland found the ban correlated with an abrupt 25 percent decline in suicides.

The two, who now work at the University at Albany in New York, also tabulated suicide rates in Maryland and Virginia over the same period to see if suicide rates just happened to be declining across that region. No difference was found in the suicide rate in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs before and after the D.C. gun ban.

The researchers also tabulated the types of suicides that declined in number in Washington, D.C., and found the 25 percent drop was entirely driven by a decline in firearm-related suicide.

Wow. Seems pretty dispositive, huh?

Of course, 1967-1987 seems like an odd time period to select – but hey, they’re scientists, they must have their reasons.

And they did. We’ll come back to that.

It’s almost encouraging that the mainstream media are mixing in an admission of legal reality…:

There are many ways to read the Second Amendment to the Constitution, but all interpretations point to a core idea: Americans have the right to own guns to protect themselves against outside threats, whether the danger comes from a school shooter, a vicious mugger, a robber breaking into a house, a lawless neighborhood — even the government itself.

…among the lies:

What the amendment authors did not foresee is the fact when people own a gun, they unwittingly raise their risk of getting hurt and killed. That’s because the odds they will one day use their gun to commit suicide are much greater than the odds they will use their gun to defend themselves against intruders or muggers.

That’s completely statistically false, of course; about half of all gun deaths in a year (15,000, give or take) are suicides.  The FBI estimates that there are at least 80,000 defensive handgun uses per year, and they may be hopelessly low-balling; Gary Kleck at the University of Florida puts it in the millions.
And why did Loftin and McDowall pick that exact range of years?

Because it fit the thesis:

The most curious aspect of the Loftin study is the particular span of years which the researchers chose to examine.  The study period covers the years 1968-1987, which can best be described as a “plateau” period, before which murder/non-negligent manslaughter(MNNM) rates (as measured by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports data) were much lower than during the period of study, and after which the MNNM rates in the District ballooned to record levels!  (Ironically,in 1991, the very year Loftin, et al. published their work, the MNNM rate for Washington, D.C. had reached its all-time high.)

As a result, Loftin, et al. begin calculating their averages in 1968, which (coincidentally) is the year before a large jump in the number of MNNM recorded by the FBI’s UCR (195 to 287), and they end their study in 1987, just before another jump in MNNM numbers (anothercoincidence).  In 1988, the MNNM number shot up to 369, from 225 in1987.  Data from years which would contradict the conclusions of the study are excluded from consideration

Refer to point #2, at the top of this posting.

It continues:

States with high rates of gun ownership — Alabama, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Montana, Wyoming and New Mexico — have suicide rates that are more than double the suicide rate in states with low rates of gun ownership, such as Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Hawaii and New York, said Matthew Miller, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.

The difference is not because people in gun-owning states are more suicidal, it’s that guns result in many more completed suicides.

Well, no.  A worldwide study by Don Kates and Gary Mauser showed that regional differences in suicide rates have much more to do with cultural differences than gun ownership.

Sweden, Japan and Finland have astronomical suicide rates by US standards.  Sweden and Japan control guns tightly; Finland has among the highest civilian gun ownership rates Europe.  Which is worse?

“The evidence is overwhelming,” said David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard. “There are a dozen case-controlled studies, all of which show the gun in the home is a risk factor for suicide for the gun owner, for the spouse, for the gun owner’s children.”

And in every case, the studies fail to control for the other key risk factors; the presence of a mentally-ill or chemically-impaired person in the home.

I could go on.  Indeed, in past years, I have gone on, and on and on.  If you dig back through the USENET, the various Minnesota Politics list servers, and even the archives of this blog, you’ll find novel-sized compendia of refutations of Loftin and McDowall (among many others).  The data is less at hand these days, because…

…well, the good guys won.  I – we, the people who’ve been plugging away at this debate for decades, now – don’t have to fuss as much about ephemera like Loftin/McDowalls (to say nothing of preliterate gunk like “are you gun people compensating for something?”, to which the answer is “yes, I am – I’m compensating for having to shift my brain into low-low gear to argue with a retard and his lobotomized question”).  Now that the Supreme Court has cleared up the Consitutional question, we can move on to stuff that matters.

Like consolidating victory, sure.

And, while we’re at it, figuring out how to really help people in danger of suicide, rather than waste time and effort on politically-motivated ephemera.

Yesterday, I started trying to follow up Monday’s piece on the Minneapolis Park and Rec Board’s jacking up of “large tent” event fees from $100 to $10,000. You may recall the Minnesota Independent’s Chris Steller posted video of the June 18 meeting in which PRB superintendent Jon Gurban explained the hundredfold hike… (emphasis from Steller’s transcription):

GURBAN: No, you’re … Allow me to explain. The small tent rental went to that. But we now have a larger tent rental that somehow coincided with a convention that is coming to town that had a number of requests for LARGE events and gatherings on our property.

I tried to contact representatives of the Minneapolis Park and Rec board for clarification. I left messages for Superintendant Gurban, as well as the PRB’s Public Relations office.

I also left a message for Park Board Commisioner Carol Kummer – who seemed to be giggling about the fee hike at the PRB’s June 18 meeting…:

PARK COMMISSIONER CAROL KUMMER: Mr. Chair, just before she gets … Under Strategy 1, I’m assuming the tent rental increase went from $60 to $100, not $10,000. Or is that your goldmine? [general laughter]

…last Thursday.

I’ve still gotten no response from either Park and Rec board official.

Tonight’s the MDE/MNPublius bipartisan happy hour at Billy’s on Grand:

Hope to see you there.

———-

Speaking of graphics, I saw this in a post on Charlie Quimby’s blog the other day:

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Yesterday, I noted that among my favorite interviews on the NARN have been my discussions with Eric Black, Dane Smith and Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak. I genuinely enjoy talking, and occasionally sparring, across the aisle. Two things can happen; either your beliefs get stronger from being tested in the exchange, or their weaknesses are exposed, perhaps leading to their changing. This happened to me twenty-five years ago; determined assault from conservative classmates showed me that my big-L Liberal beliefs were untenable. So I changed.

And this ties into what I wrote Monday – about how seeing those across the aisle from you as human makes for better, more satisfying argument. In a larger, more important sense, it’s also kinda important for running a country.

Of course, the flip side is also true; if you can keep your enemies firmly, securely dehumanized – from calling your opponents “wingnuts” or “commies”, up to presuming that the government you didn’t elect is depraved and evil enough to, say, spread AIDS in prisons or blow up the World Trade Center – it makes for an easy, more facile argument.

———-

It’s generally accepted as conventional wisdom that political discourse in this country has never been more foulmouthed, polarized and angry that it is today. That’s a bunch of liberal crap…

…er, wait. Heh heh. Dunno where that came from. Anyway – let me start over.

It’s ahistorical, to say the least. The 1828 campaign, which saw Andrew Jackson topple John Quincy Adams, was marred by violence, and represented a clash of social poles that spat venom across and unbridgeable gap; it was the original “blue vs. red” election; indeed, some of the media parallels between then and today are just too tempting.

Of course, at various times in the 1890’s and 1930’s, people were genuinely, and rightly, worried about the “discourse” adjourning to bayonet-point – which, in fact, it did in 1861.

That was an ugly, polarized debate.

Today? All we have is people taking broad, often factually-vacant shots at those with whom they disagree. Many of these shots are made possible by that sense of dehumanization we talked about on Monday. The “debate” – which, on blogs, is entirely one-sided, even if there’s a “comment section” involved – is fueled by the very real human pathologies that regard…

1. …”our side” as being where all the righteousness is, while “their side” is vacuous on a good day, evil on a bad one.
2. “Their” side being vacuous-to-evil, of course, anyone to practices it must by extension be vapid-to-rotten as well.
3. As long as you can keep your “enemy” nice and abstract and inhuman, there’s no real human consequence to ascribing his beliefs to base, loathsome motives.
4. This is reinforced by the tendency on blogs (especially, in the Twin Cities, among bloggers on the left, although it’s not exclusive) to write pseudonymously – so that not only are their targets too abstract to treat like humans, but they themselves are too abstract to be vulnerable to the very treatment they dish out.
5. Finally, resistance to the very notion that one should try to get past the abstract, dehumanizing influences of the medium.

At the bottom of it, of course, is this; it’s comfortable sitting in your echo chamber, smug ‘n happy with your preconceptions and your prejudices, bristling at the idea of approaching it any differently, because it’s just so much fun hanging out with your friends and bashing on the conveniently-abstract, abstractly-evil “enemy” among us.

It’s always been fun getting beyond that – for example, at the MOB parties I wrote about on Monday, or at Flash’s “Drinking Moderately” soirees.

Of course, liberals react oddly to the notion of going to a MOB party. And conservatives stopped getting invited to Flash’s gatherings about a year or so ago; rumor (not from Flash, by the way) had it the lefties didn’t like being seen with the enemy.

———-

Which brings us back to Charlie Quimby’s question: “Is it OK to meet unconditionally with anti-progressive GOP operatives?”

So many questions:

1. “Is it OK” according to what standard? Who set that standard? Why?
2. What are the consequences of meeting with the “operatives” if it’s not OK?
3. If it’s not “OK” to “meet with” Michael Brodkorb (over happy hour – the most innocuous and levelling institution Western Civilization has developed since the Polar Bear Run), what “conditions” would make it OK? Handcuffing all Republicans? What? Help me out here.
4. So if it is objectively proven that “progressivism” is actually intensively regressive, would that change the ground rules for this “Meeting?” (Trick question; it has been proven, albeit subjectively).
5. GOP Operative? So friggin’ what? A guy’s gotta have a job. And Michael does it well – indeed, he eats your party’s lunch so regularly that he’s become, if anything, a bigger source of derangement than Michele Bachmann and Katherine Kersten – two other conservatives that beat the local left like bongo drums, and have earned boundless hatred for it. And while I scratch my head at some of Brodkorb’s more gossipy revelations, after a while you have to look at his record – exposing Franken’s tax problems, which are on a whole ‘nother level than a squib Playboy interview – and realize the guy’s on the ball. Criminy, the way to learn to do things better is to have contact with those who do it better than you – and Brodkorb does it better than most of you. Grow up and cut the drama.
6. OK, let’s back out of the ideological swamp; if it’s not “OK” to “meet” (i.e. have a beer) with a “GOP operative” (and a room full of his friends, and yours as well), where do you stop? Should we not work together, too? (It’s not an academic question – the left actively purges “anti-progressive” thought in industries they control, like academia, education, unions, etc). Not worship together? Yep, you’re working on that. Not live in the same neighborhoods? At what point does contact – “meeting”, drinking, working, worshipping, studying, living – with those with whom you disagree, make you…unclean? Subject to dire consequences of “non-OK”-ness? Whatever you’re worried about?
7. Indeed – what in the hell are you worried about?

I’d expect that question from a lot of people before I’d expect it from Quimby. Yesterday, by way of pleading the sincerity with which he looks for conversation across the aisle, he elaborated:

Real community and real civility — civitas — come about when antagonists find something important they truly want in common. Something they cannot have without respecting the other’s perspective, values and rights.

Does anyone see the leaps series of hopscotch-like hops here?

Put aside your (plural) Brodkorb derangement for a moment here; does anyone seriously think that any of us on the right don’t seek a better country and society?

And before you answer “but conservative polices won’t lead to a better country and society”, just stop. In many ways, they do, and have – which is why all of us conservatives subscribe to it.

To ascribe it to other motives – that we’re idiots, that we’re tools of powerful interests that control our feeble little wingnut minds – is to buy into the “Dehumanizing” we talked about on Monday..

And liberalism has had its place (he says, clenching his teeth as he types) as well, and done the odd bit of good, by some definitions. Whew. That was tough.

More importantly – assuming there’s nothing worth talking about with liberals is just as dumb.

Quimby also asks:

Why would I or any progressive attend a branded event that seems calculated to create a veneer of bipartisanship for perhaps the most partisan attack blog in the state?

Dunno, Charlie. Why don’t you ask the MNPublius guys, among the few most respected “progressive” bloggers in the state.

If they can tough it out…

———-

For my part? Of course it’s “OK” to “meet” with “anti-liberty” “pro-speech-rationing, anti-growth, anti-market, pro-racist-gun-control” “operatives” over a couple of beers. For those with the intellectual horsepower to pull it off, it can be a fun challenge. For those who can take themselves and their beliefs a little less teeth-clenchingly seriously than normal, it can be fun to get out and mix it up with, or even just meet, other people. And as someone who not only “meets” with “operatives” across the aisle pretty regularly (and used to be one of them, for that matter), I’ll tell you something if you promise to keep it very quiet.

Ready?

(There are no consequences. It’s OK. It’s just casual contact with your fellow US citizen and, by the way, human. Nobody’s going to think the worse of you – assuming the left really doesn’t have some kind of purity police that show up at these things and takes names. They don’t exist – right?)

(And by the way, Michael Brodkorb doesn’t eat babies (just Democrats’ lunch) – he is, indeed, one of the nicer guys you’ll meet. Your face won’t peel off in divine retribution if you’re seen in the same room as him. Again, barring some kind of DFL purity police. We can bar that, can’t we?)

Shhhhhhh. Mum’s the word.

So I’ll hope to see you at Billy’s tonight. Hopefully the “consequences” are manageable.

It was Friday, July 8, 1988.As usual, I was working at City Limits, an innocent-looking hellhole of a bar in Rosemount.

It was a typical night at City Limits – “Slims”, as we at the sleazy DJ service referred to it. It was a bowling league night, so I’d play background music while bowlers filed through the place buying a steady stream of pitchers to carry out to the lanes. Then, as the leagues let out, bowlers would grab tables for an after-league beer and a burger. They’d mostly have filed out of the place by 10-ish, leaving a thin film of regulars at the bar, and – on a lucky night – some local girls who wanted to dance or, rarely, couples who would dance. The staff adjusted accordingly; after about ten, the place filed down to one bartender (a guy who looked and sounded just like Kevin McDonald of Kids in the Hall, but with frizzier hair), a waitress (Tammy, a cute, amazingly dizzy 18 year old – underage cocktail waitresses being legal in Rosemount at the time), and a “bouncer”, a 5’8 guy who ran maybe a buck forty and who, with his long stringy hair and spotty teeth, looked like he was fighting a meth habit.

Now, there were four kinds of male customers at “Slims”, ever, back then (aside from employees):

1. Bowlers.
2. Barflies – a group of maybe eight or ten guys who were there every night, occasionally to bowl, but usually just to hold down a stool at the bar and BS with the bartender. Most of them had tried and struck out with every female that walked through the door.
3. Bikers. At least, in the summer it was bikers. In the winter, they’d switch to snowmobiles. Either way – same crowd. They talked loud, they started fights, they acted like they owned the place. And they occasionally surprised me – although we’ll get to that in a much later episode.
4. Rednecks. It might be hard to see, going through the area these days, since the suburbs have completely engulfed the area in the past fifteen years or so, but in 1988 that area – Dakota County 42 and South Robert Trail – was still rural, teetering on the south edge of then-exurban Rosemount. There was a big rural clientele – guys who worked at tractor-parts stores in Farmington and feedlots near Elko and all the other niches in the semi-rural ecosystem that I remembered from North Dakota, and hadn’t seen much of since then. Rednecks and bikers frequently intermingled – but bikers travelled in groups, and “rednecks” travelled in ones, twos and fours, usually.

Anyway – things were going well. It was around 11PM, and for a summer Friday, it wasn’t half bad. There were maybe eight or ten couples – almost all girls, naturally – out on the tiny dance floor. I’m told it’s a Twin Cities thing; girls’ll hit the floor if there are no guys available (or worth bothering over). Not a big “floor”, but useful for marketing, since seeing a bunch of drunk twentysomething girls on the floor gave some of the drunk twenty/thirtysomething guys at the bar and among the tables something to hope for.

The key to keeping the girls on the floor? Play music they can dance to. In 1988, that meant dance music; Prince, Michael Jackson, Madonna, “Word Up” by Cameo, Run-DMC’s version of “Walk This Way”, Beastie Boys…all the Top40 dance stuff that was current at the time. It was simple; if you play music that drunk girls can dance to, they’ll dance. The music set the hook; I would then beat-mix it together so the beat didn’t stop for half an hour a time – making them hotter, drier, and more likely to keep beering up. This helps business.

This made the bartenders (and the bar’s owner) happy; girls who are dancing, and guys consumed by unrequited lust, drink. A lot. And in Rosemount, they might even leave a tip.

The key? The music.

Around 11:30, four rednecks walked in and sat at the table next to the DJ booth. They ordered Budweisers. They looked at the girls out on the floor. And one of them -wearing a sweat-stained white T-shirt and a scruffy beard that made his face look like Eddie Rabbitt, shuffled up to the booth.

“Hey”, he said, his breath smelling like a party that’d started after work and had just kept going, “you know what’d really get people on the floor?”

“Huh?”, I said, shuffling through the records, trying to set the hook a little deeper in the wan little crowd on the floor.

“If you got this n***er s**t off and played some white people’s music”.

I carefully controlled my face, not so much out of anger as to control breaking out laughing as I looked at the guy. His eyes were flitting around in that unfocused, jerky way of the very, very drunk.

“Whaddya mean?”

“White people’s music. Not this n***er crap. I bet everyone on the bar gets out on the floor if you play some white people’s music”.

I thought for a moment. “White people’s music? You mean, like Jimi Hendrix and Chuck Berry?”

“Yeaaaah!” he said, his head jerking forward like he was losing his balance, leaning against the formica tabletop around the booth.

“I’ll see what I can do”, I said.

I was not going to see what I could do, of course. Playing “Can’t Get Enough” or “Slow Ride” or “All My Rowdy Friends” would empty the floor – and drunk twentysomething girls don’t just leave the floor when the beat stops; they hit the doors and find a bar that won’t kill the buzz.

So the beat rolled on.

It took maybe fifteen minutes, but Eddie Rabbitt came back, bringing his friend – a nondescript, stubbly, potato-shaped man in a seed cap and a sweat-stained wife-beater.

“Hey” said the potato. “Didn’t we tell you to get the n***er s**t off?”

“Yeah, I’ll get to it – the girls are dancing, man”.

Potato looked at me; he looked angry.

“You’re a faggot”.

He and Rabbitt glared at me as they slunched back to the table. The four of them looked at me and shared a vicious sounding chuckle as I pondered a safer exit from the place at the end of the night.

As it happened, I didn’t need it. Another group of rednecks came in. One of them was apparently diddling one of the first group’s cheating girlfriends or ex-wives or something. A fight broke out. Meth-Head the bouncer hid behind the doorway to the bowling alley as the seven of them went at it. Tables and chairs flew, and I grabbed the sawed-off pool cue that was standard equipment in most DJ booths back then, just in case.

The police came in about ten minutes, hauled the whole lot away, and left us…

…with Tammy, the bartender, Meth-Head and I, along with one old regular who probably hadn’t noticed the fight in the first place. The fight had cleared the place.

I played nothing but requests the rest of the night. Tammy loved Madonna. The bartender wanted country. I beatmixed an impromptu Springsteen medley. The bartender let everyone but Tammy have a round of drinks even though none of us was supposed to drink on the job. We’d all earned it.  Except the bouncer, but hey, we were all in the same miserable boat.

I checked the parking lot carefully on my way out at 1AM, and started the long drive up South Robert back to Saint Paul.

The MDE/MNPublius bipartisan happy hour is coming up tomorrow at Billy’s:

Hope to see you there.

———-

Yesterday, I wrote about a party that an email discussion forum threw, which had some interesting results.

Once or twice a year for the past four years, we at the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers throw a party (stay tuned).

Now, the MOB tends to be center-right bloggers. It’s not entirely true – there are bloggers from around the spectrum, and some totally non-political bloggers as well on the MOBRoll. But for whatever reason, while the group has eschewed politics (indeed, tends to avoid politics at our parties completely), the membership is mostly center-right.

It’s not for lack of trying. Pinky swear.

Every time we throw a party I send more email invites to liberals than to conservatives, and I have the “sent” file to prove it. I send dozens of invites to local leftybloggers, media personalities, politicians of both parties.

Most don’t respond at all.

Some send “I gotta wash my hair”-caliber responses. I’m looking at you, Paul Demko.

A few, strangely, reacted with anger, writing bulgy-veined, teeth-clenched, splittle-o-licious rants about how conservatives were no fun. We’ll come back to them tomorrow.

And a few – Robin and Scott Steven Marty, Chuck Olson and (his girlfriend, whose name eludes me at the moment), Bob Collins (not a liberal pol, per se, but if you lay down with Keillor you’ll get up with snooty elitist fleas) and a few others actually bit the bullet and showed up. And we had a decent time. And – just like at the E-Democracy party I wrote about yesterday – it became just a tad harder to rip on them. Oh, their politics and policies and, eventually, employers were still a parade of material. But they weren’t just a bunch of facile labels anymore. There was a human behind the labels.

My neighbor Flash, who writes Centrisity, did something similar. For a couple of summers, he graciously hosted “Drinking Moderately” – a play on “Drinking Liberally” (which is a national chain of events where liberals gather where they’re told to drink and talk politics) – where he’d invite conservative, liberal, and who-gives-a-crap bloggers to his garage and his always-open kegerator to talk…

…whatever.

And, just like the MOB parties, it was a good time. Largely because there was free beer (thanks, Flash!)…

…but also because I got to meet the likes of Chris Dykstra and the MNPublius guys and – are we detecting a pattern here? – see that they were actual people, as opposed to labels. And, I’d like to think, vice versa.

Oh, it didn’t always work. There were a few attendees who remained bloated, irascible jagoffs and/or mirthless, spiteful harpies, and it showed. But as a rule, the experiment was a pretty cool one. Retroactive kudos to Flash.

———-

I’ve taken to enjoying this sort of exchange – when it works, anway. It can be interesting, talking with “the enemy” and, once in a while, listening to see what you can learn.

I actively seek this sort of engagement – partly because I’m a curious guy, partly because I love a good debate. A few months back, I sent a bunch of invites to appear on the NARN to a bunch of local DFL politicians. Of course, I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that I knew most of them wouldn’t respond – more on that tomorrow. And the prime motivator, naturally, was to highlight Andy Birkey’s ridiculous double standard, calling out Michele Bachmann for avoiding liberal media so many area liberal pols are utter cowards at facing polite but probing dissent.

Still, it’s a fact – our interviews with Eric Black, Dane Smith and RT Rybak are among my favorite episodes of the NARN show. Not that anyone convinced anyone, but have some discord in one another’s echo chambers can be good for the brain, once in a while.

On occasion, I also like appearing on Radio Free Nation, a BlogTalkRadio show hosted by Saint Paul’s Marty Owings. I’m the token conservative, normally, going at it with a couple of liberals, black activists, a couple of Ronulans, and the odd “anarchist”. And I learn things.

Of course, some of those “things” are “people are weird”, but in fact it can be interesting, getting outside ones own political safe zone, if only because the stretching and pulling makes your own beliefs stronger (or, alternately, changes them. Which is how I became a conservative in the first place).

But not everyone sees it that way. To some, that idea is a threat.

More on that tomorrow.

Via Paul Demko at the Mindy: Michael Kinsley wants all of you mindless proles to quit getting uppity, to shut up and do what your superiors tell you.

The funny part? Kinsley basically cribs Alec Baldwin’s “argument”; “Coleman’s a Republican! Franken is cool! Trust us!”

Demko:

Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsley scrutinizes Minnesota’s Senate race today. He chastises voters for getting hung up on Al Franken’s past jokes…

Oh, really, Michael F*****g Kinsley?

Sorry, sirrah, but by your leave I’ll make up my own mind.

And, for what little it’s worth (coming from a mere non-patrician and all), it really has little to do with his jokes – but rather…:

…rather than focusing on legitimate campaign issues:

…yes. Those. Franken has, improbably, fewer positions on these than even Barack Obama.

This year a professional jokester, Al Franken (D), is challenging a professional politician, incumbent Norm Coleman (R), for a Senate seat in Minnesota.

But – again, by your leave, Mr. Kinsley, since I’m one of the mere citizens you deign in your infinite wisdom to scold – we Minnesotans have a bit of a track record with politicians whose only claim to fame is…well, fame. “We” – or at least our moron cousins from Hinkley – elected a governor whose track record was close enough to Franken’s for county work; he was famous mainly for being famous. A celebrity. Actually, Ventura had more political experience than Franken; he’d been the mayor of Brooklyn Center (or Brooklyn Park? I mix ’em up – although to be fair, so did Ventura).

And he spent four years in office as a loud, abrasive mouthpiece for Dean Barkley and Tim Penny, and a de facto DFLer.

And Franken will be no different; “polemicist” pretty much sums up his political resume. He will be no less a sock puppet than Jesse Ventura was.

Not every joke Franken wrote or told over a third of a century in the joke business was hilarious, okay? Minnesota voters will have to decide whether their dislike of professional politicians trumps their enjoyment in taking umbrage, or vice versa.

Kinsley? Bubbie? Thanks for assuming us mere Schlitz-drinking, NASCAR-watching, bible-clinging rubes are obsessed over, ahem, the most understandable part of Franken’s personality.

Doy.

I’ll grant you every word of that – and Franken still has not one single recommendation.

Coleman is a man of no interest, a run-of-the-mill professional politician who started out as a standard issue long-haired student rebel leader on Long Island in the 1960s and surfed the zeitgeist until now.

So like Alec Baldwin, we have the ad-hominem…

Today he is a standard-issue pro-war tax-cut Republican.

…the slur on Republican policy (have you, Lord Kinsley, ever called a Democrat “standard-issue”?), and…

…what?

Franken, by contrast, needs no introduction and from Day One would be one of the most interesting people in the Senate.

Ah.

“Interesting”.

If you say so, Lord Kinsley.

An “interesting” person who raises taxes, jacks up fuel prices (by omission), stifles nuclear energy, appeases terrorists and foments destructive isolationism, coddles the UN, supports speech rationing, gun control, activist judges and the “Fairness” Doctrine, to this survivor of the Carter era, not very interesting at all.

Demko:

Kinsley further points out that any comedian who hadn’t ginned up some risible material over the years wouldn’t last very long in the profession. There’s a fine line, after all, between making people laugh and causing them to squeam.

“If the voters of Minnesota would rather be represented by a hack like Norm Coleman than laugh off a few jokes that didn’t work, then they should stop complaining about being stuck with professional politicians,” Kinsley concludes. “And the real joke will be on them.”

So to you, my liege – if you would deign to entertain a question from a rude fyrd – I ask “what would be an affirmative policy reason to vote for Franken, rather than against Coleman?

“He’s a funny guy” is not a policy reason.

Pardon the impertinence, Lord F*****g Kinsley.

GOP blogging machine Gary Gross from Let Freedom Ring reports on Coon Rapids’ July 4 parade (held, perversely, on July 3).

Coon Rapids is in the heart of the Third District, where longtime representative (and fellow Jamestown ND expat) Jim Ramstad is retiring.  Erik Paulsen is running against DFL-endorsed Ashwin Madia for the seat.

Gross – as sotted a GOP koolaid-drinker as exists anywhere – paints a sanguine picture for Paulsen:

Team Paulsen looked picture-perfect this evening, with plenty of youngin’s sporting the uniform. By contrast, the Dems did not appear to have assembled any kids. If the Democrats are the party of Madison Avenue, it sure doesn’t show. The Paulsen contingent appears normal, family-oriented, apolitical and content. Very middle middle class. Neighborly. With the talent Team Madia has brought on board in the last few weeks, this evening’s poor showing astounds.

Erik Paulsen looked great this evening–slim, youthful, jogging comfortably from side to side, greeting parade viewers in a friendly, low-key manner. Ashwin Madia didn’t show up for today’s parade, adding to the sense of blowout. It would seem reasonable to me to view this race–today, district-wide–as a 60-40 contest, in Paulsen’s favor.

Of course, you can expect a GOP pep-talk from the likes of Gary Gross, so take the above with the appropriate-sized grain of salt.

UPDATE:  Oops.  The above was not written by Gary Gross, but rather by DFL-blogger and Paulsen gadfly Gavin Sullivan.

I apologize for any trouble my misunderstanding has caused.

I don’t normally fisk bloggers – and, indeed, I don’t want to “fisk” this, per se.  There’s just so much in this piece by Charlie Quimby that deserves an answer from someone who’s had to get comfortable with the “new economy” back when most of this nation was still well within the “old economy” [*].

Four bartenders prior to the shift change talk about one of their buddies who worked 100 hours last week at three jobs, including a 7:00 a.m. shift at Starbuck’s “so he can get benefits.” One bartender needs someone to cover for him on an upcoming shift, and though willing, no one could commit because they all had to check the schedules at their other jobs.

Tending bar is one of those old economy jobs that’s likely to be around for awhile, and some of these guys may move on. But it will be to a one-paycheck career?

Good question.  Some others that might need to be answered first to solve it:

• Do they want a one-paycheck career?
• What choices have they made to move them toward a one-paycheck career?  They don’t just happen, these days.

Last week the Strib documented the case of a Hmong immigrant who works two janitorial jobs for $9 an hour, earning about $1,800 a month pre-tax, which goes to help support his parents and eight younger siblings. Tong Lee has limited English and no time to go to school.

The future he sees for himself: Just working all the time.
At least the bartenders can be charming and collect tips.

It’d seem Mr. Lee and his family are doing something that’s very “old-economy”, something that people in immigrant families have always done in this country; have the oldest and most able work to help the younger ones succeed (and not just immigrants, either; a woman I knew in college, a black woman from rural Mississippi, started college at age 28 because she’d worked for ten years to put her siblings through school.  Then, esconced in decent jobs, they repaid the favor). 

So is there some reason Mr. Lee’s siblings won’t turn around and help out?

Sure, kids in America can overcome the disadvantages of a broken home and teachers who under-estimate them. But to become a hedge fund manager, it still helps to be born speaking English and win a Harvard scholarship.

Leave aside the fact that speaking English (and speaking it properly) and going to Harvard “helps” whether you want to be a lawyer, teacher, poet, computer programmer, lesbian performance artist, physicist or hedge fund manager; would someone please explain to me what is this fascination liberals have with “hedge fund managers?”  Michelle Obama complained that our “best and brightest” are becoming “hedge fund managers” instead of social workers, nurses and teachers.  So why is hedge fund management the sine qua non of American working life? 

Philip Falcone made $1.5 billion last year betting against the home mortgage industry. There’s someone who’ll tell you his strategy helped some investors, but his outsized rewards required the mortgage market to blow up, so it’s not as if his creativity created anything.

Nonsense.  It created wealth out of an event that would otherwise not have.  It allowed his fund participants to have money to save, to reinvest, to put in their gas tanks or spend at Saks or Dairy Queen, to use in the economy.   

He  just played the speculation game better than anyone else.

And had he not?  Who’d be the better off?  It’s not like his wealth caused the implosion in the mortgage market.

In the next wave of speculation, investors are betting on hunger, more or less. Hedge funds are taking actual positions in food production, where they buy up farm land and warehouse corn, for example, instead of just holding contracts.

The investors plan to consolidate small plots of land into more productive large ones, to introduce new technology and to provide capital to modernize and maintain grain elevators and fertilizer supply depots.

But the long-term implications are less clear. Some traditional players in the farm economy, and others who study and shape agriculture policy, say they are concerned these newcomers will focus on profits above all else, and not share the industry’s commitment to farming through good times and bad.

That “commitment” is utterly relative.  The number of farmers in this country has been in freefall for decades.  There are currently less than half a million full-time farmers in this country who make their living entirely from farming, and perhaps three times as many who make a good chunk of the family income doing other, non-farming things. 

Indeed, the number of farmers has been in freefall ever since society developed the concept of “surplus production”; 3,000 years ago, 99.9% of people farmed (or hunted and gathered); 500 years ago, 95% of people in Western civilization worked the land, mostly for subsistence and to pay taxes to nobles or chiefs.  Today, it’s a tiny fraction of that. 

“Farmland can be a bubble just like Florida real estate,” said Jeffrey Hainline, president of Advance Trading, a 28-year-old commodity brokerage firm and consulting service in Bloomington, Ill. “The cycle of getting in and out would be very volatile and disruptive.”

As opposed to…what?  Letting the market stay in its current, stagnant state?

But there’s some suspicion the investment is is simply a way around limits to speculating on commodities. Having possession of the commodities also helps limit some of their risk.

And this is bad why?

There are other ways to speculate that get even closer to gambling. Joel Stein writes about prediction markets such as InTrade that allow people to place bets on things like politics, the economy, global warming and the top marginal income tax rate in 2011.

It’s like owning a fantasy baseball team: I no longer care about what’s best for the country, as long as I have money on it. I have no idea if Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida would make a great GOP vice president, but I do know it would make me $800.

Quimby and his source ignore the concomitant benefit; when money is on the line, people take these choices much more seriously, and study them much more carefully.  And that’s not just of idle importance.  As Steven Green noted in an article about the same subject as my link…:

The “market” for intelligence works, such as it does, opposite of the stock market. A guy who knows one important bit often can’t effectively share it with another guy in another agency who knows another important bit – and so two plus two ends up equaling something quite less than four. Those who simply have good hunches generally aren’t intel pros, and therefore aren’t given much credence by the government. And so hidden knowledge remains hidden, and good guesses go unheeded. Then people die.  

Now that is a truly grotesque system, yet that’s how the intelligence world has operated for approximately ever.

Would investors put their money on the line if there weren’t any profits to be made? Of course not. Yet today, we ask our military and intelligence professionals to risk their reputations and careers, working mostly in the dark, with zero extra incentive.

I guess it’s just a difference in perspective.

Quimby:

The new economy venture that really ties it all together is gold farming, where Chinese sweatshop workers labor away at online games like World of Warcraft. Their objective isn’t to win, but to harvest “gold” by successfully completing some aspect of the game, often by doing the same part of a quest over and over. The gold, which allows gamers to buy better weapons or create more valuable products, is sold for real money to actual players through online exchanges.

In effect, the gold buyers get richer and become more powerful, while gamers who try to build value added products through honest play find their products devalued because the “investor” players don’t need them to build their own wealth. Meanwhile, in China, perhaps a hundred thousand gold farmers make better money than they could from real farming.

I’m not sure what Charlie advocates, here – Congressional hearings? 

But these things tend to have a solution of their own.  Two words:  Pet Rocks, Beanie Babies, Pokemon Cards.

Oops.  That was six words.

Because the end game of such fripperies as Warcraft “Gold Farming” should be three times as obvious; either…:

•  people will continue to be willing to trade their real wealth for imagined virtual wealth; no blood, no foul.
• people will not continue to do so; the “gold” market crashes and ends up as a side note on “VH1’s I Love the ’00s”, complete with snarky comments by Danny Bonaduce.
• Warcraft fades, fads move on, people forget about it all.

Just saying – we have bigger things to worry about.

(more…)

Maha – of “Mahablog”, a famously gutless leftyblog and a leader in the “namecalling = facts and research” school of leftyblogging – wants to dismiss the whole “we found yellowcake uranium in Iraq” story:

The critical point is that Saddam Hussein couldn’t do anything with this uranium because he lacked the equipment and technology to enrich it. So it had been sitting around for years in drums sealed by the IAEA. No nuclear program.

Right.

Of course, the presence or absence of “equipment and technology” was a key bone of contention between about 2001 and the invastion, but…

…oh, why bother.

Justin Levine at Patterico has the essential response:

If Mahablog has a legitimate point, then why did Joe Wilson go to such great lengths to try and cast doubt on the very existence of the yellowcake Niger story? Why didn’t he just say, “It is possible that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake from Niger. But even though I can neither confirm nor deny this accusation, it is ultimately irrelevant since yellowcake is harmless and is not proof of anything significant regarding an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.”?

That is not the argument that Joe Wilson the liar made. There is a reason for this – reason’s that people like Mahablog would rather not address. So I’ll be happy to stay on his ‘Idiot’s Hall of Fame’, let people read both posts, and decide for themselves.

Look – it’s pretty clear, five years on, that Hussein didn’t have any functioning WMDs when the tanks crossed the border.  We know that he had WMDs, because he gassed the Kurds in the eighties.  We know he wanted WMDs, because he was buying equipment to build them.  We know he had uranium that, combined with that equipment he was seeking (and, for whatever reason, didn’t deny having), could have been made into one kind of bomb or another.

If it were a criminal case, it’d be like finding a once-convicted, paroled Meth producer with 50,000 tabs of Sudafed.  All he needs is a stock pot, some tubing, and a few other chemicals…

Oh, Maha’s counterattack?

Here’s the Idiot’s Hall of Fame:

American Thinker
Don Surber
Gateway Pundit
Pirate’s Cove
Neptunus Lex
Patterico’s Pontifications
Sweetness and Light

The accumulated IQ of the above bloggers adds up to about 47.

Hm.

Oh, the two grafs I pulled were the closest “Maha” gets to sentience.

But please, “Maha” – can I be an “idiot” too? 

(And note to Ms. O’Brien; she can’t ban my comments when they’re on my blog)

According to Gary, Leo from Psycmeister’s Ice Palace is a grandpa!

I’ll join with Gary in hoping Leo takes a few days off from vexing Taryll Clark and the rest of Saint Cloud’s DFL establishment.

First, the plug:

It’s the first Minnesota Democrats Exposed/MNPublius Happy Hour, at Billy’s on Grand. Hope to see you there.

———-

Of course, it’s not all beer and pretzels.

A very smart man – a teacher of mine who’d served in Vietnam – explained the “why” of basic training.  “The goal” he said “is to teach you to dehumanize your enemy”; to see the enemy not as a human being, but as a “Jap” or a “Kraut” or a “Gook” or whomever the enemy of the day is, a not-quite-human thing who doesn’t rate the consideration a human does.  Someone you can kill not only with impunity, but with your country’s approval.

In Citizen Soldiers, Steven Ambrose described the moments when GIs in World War II started seeing the enemy as human – as people who really weren’t all that different from them (notwithstanding the whole “supported a regime that started a war that brought them to Europe” bit).

It was a huge moment for everyone involved.

———-

Years and years ago – when I first got a computer, actually, back before “the web” was the common synonym for the Internet – I got involved in an “E-Democracy” email discussion group on Minnesota Politics.

Traditionally, online discussion groups tend to fall into one of two categories, each with its own set of pathologies:

1. Unmoderated Free For Alls: These tended to start with a bang, and rapidly descend into anarchy. “Inhibition” is one of the first casualties of online communication, and for some people that reads “license to act like you’d never act in person”. These people are drawn to unmoderated free for alls as a place to vent…whatever – anger, ire or immature, juvenile urge to call people names. The signal to noise ratio on these sorts of forums usually drops to 0 quickly, as the people who were interested in the actual subject at hand wandered away to more interesting pastures.
2. Overmoderated Gulags: These forums kill the discussion to protect it; moderators enforce rules at some level or another. These rules can be elaborate and legalistic (some forums have posted rules, human moderators and formal, pseudolegal appeals processes) or arbitrary and capricious (the forum’s “owner” bans anyone who displeases him/her).

In the early days, the E-Democracy forums trended toward “1”, above. And it was fairly predictable stuff. They were (then as today) dominated by DFLers and Greens. I was, in fact, invited to join the forum by the chairman of the state Libertarian party (to which I then belonged) to help even things up a little bit; at the time, there were maybe two Republicans, two Libertarians, and dozens and dozens of DFL/Green/”Reform”-future IndyVentura party members (and a couple of typically-irritating Young Socialists).

And it was wild and wooly. Both sides All three or four or five sides tore into each other like hungry sharks.  I ripped into “liberals” with gleeful abandon, and they ripped back.  Because there’s nothing in Minnesota Politics that we detested more than each other.

And then the forum’s management threw a party.

We met at Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis.  We brought brats and beer (and tofu, natch) and chips, and sat down at picnic tables…

…and talked baseball and street cleaning and movies and just a tiny little dab of politics.

I wrote in my wrapup on the forum the next day that it was just a tiny bit harder to flame on people that I’d met in person.  That I’d actually met as humans, rather than as mere brain-damaged big-government-coddling tax-and-spend liberal drones.  And a few of them wrote as well, saying they could maybe be a little more tolerant of uncaring, selfish conservatives now that they’d actually met some of us – something they didn’t do much of in real life.

It made an impression.

Oh, it only lasted so long, of course.  Soon a few of us (myself, you’ll be shocked to know, included) indulged in a few petty flames for old time’s sake.   Other just never “got” the whole “the other guy is human too” bit.  But things got, and stayed, just a tad more civil, because people got to see each other as just a tad less a collection of labels and more as people who believed what they did for their own reasons, but didn’t exist in vacuums.

Today, the email discussion group is pretty much an anachronism (and “E-Democracy” has decayed into a sad joke); blogs pretty much gutted their reason for existence.  Everyone can write anything they want; blogs that are nothing but mindless flames tend to get ignored over time (or turn into Democratic Underground).

But the same pattern holds just as true; people see those across the aisles as labels to attack, pathologies to identify, threats to be counterattacked.

And just like E-Democracy 13 years ago, some of us thought – “Maybe the answer is a party”.

More tomorrow.

It seemed like a “punk”; the Minneapolis Park Board goes on video and says they’re jacking their “large tent rental” from $60 to $10,000, to take advantage of the Republican National Convention. So much so that I had to double-check to make sure it wasn’t tongue-in-cheek.

No such luck.

Sure enough; the Minneapolis Park Board wants to gouge Republican event planners.

PARK SUPERINTENDENT JON GURBAN: I would then turn over the numbers point to Julie, subbing for Don, who presented these to the mayor and will also report on where we found that new goldmine. No?
PARK COMMISSIONER SCOTT VREELAND: Thank you. Juli Wiseman will be making the staff presentation.
PARK COMMISSIONER CAROL KUMMER: Mr. Chair, just before she gets … Under Strategy 1, I’m assuming the tent rental increase went from $60 to $100, not $10,000. Or is that your goldmine? [general laughter]
GURBAN: No, you’re … Allow me to explain. The small tent rental went to that. But we now have a larger tent rental that somehow coincided with a convention that is coming to town that had a number of requests for LARGE events and gatherings on our property.
KUMMER: It’s not a typo.
GURBAN: No.
KUMMER: Thank you for that good news.

Chris Steller has the video over at the Mindy. See for yourself.

So – now that we know this isn’t some elaborate hoax – you have the Minneapolis City Council actively and publicly planning to gouge the GOP Convention on the one hand, and the President of the Saint Paul City Council publicly expressing his contempt for Republicans on the other, while passing resolutions welcoming the protesters.

Naturaly, I’ll be inviting all the principals to this discussion onto the NARN. Hopefully Superintendent Gurban and Commissioners Vreeland and Kummer will be forthcoming.