Don’t forget – the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers kicks off its fifth year next Saturday (3/7) at Keegans Irish Pub in Minneapolis.

As always, the MOB is non-partisan, and non-avocational; you don’t have to be a blogger to attend, much less a conservative one.  We explicitly invite bloggers of all (or no) political affiliations.

While you can feel perfectly free to show up unannounced, I’m looking for RSVPs in any of the following places:

• Either write me at “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”, or…
• leave a comment in any MOB Party thread, or…
• go to Twitter and send a Direct Message to mitchpberg (or on the hashtag #mobparty).

It’s been a while.  I’m looking forward to it!

Buckle in.  There’s gonna be flak:

It’s Steve Perry, formerly of the City Pages, Daily Mole and The Minnesoros “Independent”.  These days, he’s working for Sarah Janecek’s essential Politics In Minnesota. 

And – mirabile dictu – he’s discovered that, as a result of the DFL’s “listening tour”, people really are happy to pay for a Better Minnesota government that wants for nothing whatsoever:

Last night I spent some time talking to a DFL House member who has attended some of the budgetary road shows (“listening sessions”) that legislators have been staging around the state in the past week-plus. There was an air of surprise about his words. “Look,” he said by way of preface, “the people attending these things are a self-selected group. It’s not scientific. But it really struck me that people get the fact we can’t do this”–fix the state’s $6 or $7 billion budget gap, that is–“with spending cuts alone. Revenue has to be up for discussion. Real people are saying that, not just organized interests or the official representatives of groups.”

Was he saying the public is ahead of the politicians on this one?

I’m sure he was saying exactly that. 

Or at least, the carefully–stacked selection of the public that the DFL is pimping out at these “listening tour” stops.

Danger!  Flak!

I’ve been head-down on work and family stuff this past week, so I’m mortified to see that I didn’t catch this until today; Dennis Newinski passed away two weeks ago.

Former state legislator Dennis Newinski was a man who had strong beliefs, a positive outlook on life and a vision about what was important. He also had an inspiring personality, sincerity and common sense.

As a blue-collar worker, Newinski had no political aspirations, but many felt he would be the perfect candidate and asked the longtime union machinist to run for office, said his wife of 43 years, Sharie.

Newinski won a seat in the Minnesota House in 1990 and nearly made his way to Washington, D.C., in 1994 as a representative from the state’s Fourth Congressional District. That year he nearly beat incumbent Bruce Vento in a district that had long been held by Democrats.

It’s a sad irony that Mesothelioma claimed both Mr. Newinski and Vento, the former CD4 congressman against whom he campaigned. 

I knew Dennis from CD4 politics for many years.  Sharp and astute, a great conservative as well as Republican, Dennis was the last Republican to make a genuine go of it in the Fourth.  For a guy who – as the Strib notes – was a blue-collar working stiff who’d not been grooming himself for politics his whole life, Dennis was both a refreshing change from the masses of canned DFL hacks that dominate the east metro, and, despite all that, a sharp, impassioned, convincing speaker who had a natural knack for connecting with people. 

He was also the kind of guy that I suspect the Fourth District GOP would have a very hard time recruiting to run at all, these days.

The state, and especially the East Metro, need a lot more like him.  He is sorely missed.

First Ford Motor declines the offer. Thanks but no thanks.

Now they are actually re-opening a 58-year-old, retooled manufacturing plant.

…without government aid.

Ford is reopening its Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 to produce the 3.5L EcoBoost V6 for the Lincoln MKS and MKT, Ford Flex and 2010 Taurus SHO. The plant has been idle since 2007, but Ford has invested $55 million in the 58-year-old facility to create a flexible manufacturing system for powertrains. No new jobs will be created by reopening the plant, as Ford will staff it with 250 workers from other facilities on the site, but the job security that comes with being the first in the world to build the automaker’s most advanced engine is surely welcome.

So it can be done.

I wish I were in the market for a new car.

It would be a Ford Motor Company product.

A few weeks ago – while some “conservative” Americans were phumphering about over idiotic ephemera like Obama’s birth certificate – I predicted that the turmoil in Northern Mexico would lead the Obama Adminstration to drive head-first back into gun control, for the Mexican children.

As Kevin Ecker notes at True North and Eckernet, I was right – not that it’s hard to be right when trying to plumb the depths of Democrat depravity on civil liberties issues.

Ecker:

Attorney General Eric Holder has announced that one of those “common sense” measures on gun-control is that they’d like to bring back the Assault Weapons Ban and goes on to explain why. If the issue weren’t so serious, the statement would be hilarious. His rationale for such a move is a bold combination of self-defeating rhetoric, outright falsehoods and just plain paranoia.Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border.

So because of the ineptitude of the Mexican “government” and our inability to build something as complex as a fence, American citizens are being asked to give up some of their rights? At what point was our national sovereignty officially handed over to Mexico? I didn’t realize their needs superceded my rights. Was that part of Hope™ and Change™?

No, Kevin.

It’s a part of being good “citizens of the world”.

I hope all of you who stayed home because McCain was mushy on immigration are happy; not only are we not building fences, we’re importing Mexican laws and government attitudes into the US.

I’ve been perplexed…

…well, no.  That’s the wrong word.  I’ve seen what I know about the US, and International, left’s antisemitic roots fully validated yet again during and after the latest war in Gaza.

Israel is facing an opponent that uses human lives – non-combatant Palestinians in Gaza – as sacrificial pawns, worth only what their deaths will garner in one-sided international outrage. That outrage comes, naturally, from people who are perfectly fine accepting that the combatants among these same people have been lobbing rockets at Israeli civilians for the previous months on end.

In other words, noncombatant deaths are ammunition in the public opinion war.

But the Jews have been fighting the public opinion war for millenia, notes Rami Kaminski.

It’s only when they started contesting that war that things got bad for ’em:

As killing Jews for being Jews has been a national sport for centuries, Islamic militants are justified in believing they are merely fulfilling historical tradition in Argentina, India and Gaza. Surely the Jews in Mumbai did not occupy Gaza. They were tortured and killed just for being Jews. And predictably, in the eyes of the world, they immediately became good Jews, just like my murdered family in Bertishev.

Good Jews would wait until Hamas has weapons enabling its members to achieve their ultimate goal of absolute mass murder. Those enraged by Israel’s defensive military action insist Hamas uses only crude rockets, as if Qassams were BB guns, and military inferiority were somehow equivalent with moral superiority. In fact, Hamas now has Iranian-supplied Grad missiles which have landed on Beer Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

Westerners have had only sporadic exposure to the indiscriminate killing in the name of holy war which Israel has lived with for years. Memories of 9-11, Madrid, and London have dimmed. This is not because the Islamic militants made a careful choice of weapons. They simply have not yet acquired nuclear bombs. Once they do, the West will develop a less detached view about the Islamists professed intentions for the infidels.

Read the whole thing, naturally.

From the WaPo’s quotes of the week column:

Obama, I want a 65-inch plasma TV.” – sign held by a person along President Obama’s motorcade route in Arizona on Feb. 18″After God, Obama.” – sign held by a person along Obama’s motorcade route in Ottowa, Canada on Feb. 19

Silly wabbits.  Everyone knows the order of the universe is:

1. God
2. Jesus
3. Bono

Please see to this.

Remember – the MOB Party is a week from Saturday night, 3/7, at Keegans, starting around 6ish.

We’ve got RSVPs coming in, and I haven’t even started sending out invites.

Of course, if you don’t get invites, come anyway – the invites usually go to media peeps, government types and leftybloggers (who, inured to suffering by years of attending “Drinking Liberally”, tend to think “party” is a conflation of “partisan duty”, and need to be shown how to have fun) (I’m kidding, I’m kidding)

The MOB party (Karl Bremer’s vacuous caterwauling aside) is non-partisan; you don’t have to be a blogger to attend, and we explicitly invite bloggers of all (or no) political affiliations.

Anyway – set aside an hour or two, and a pint of stomach capacity, and join us!  It’s the fifth anniversary of the MOB, and we’d love to have you there.

While you can feel perfectly free to show up unannounced, I’m looking for RSVPs in any of the following places:

• Either write me at “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”, or…
• leave a comment in any MOB Party thread, or…
• go to Twitter and send a Direct Message to mitchpberg (or on the hashtag #mobparty).

It’s been a while.  It should be fun!

On behalf of Mayor Roosh – as Joe Biden would say, this is your patriotic duty!

I dreamt that John McCain was President last night.

I know, I know…he’s not the most Republicanny Republican and all, but think about it for a moment.

We’d have three highly qualified candidates waiting in line to be Commerce Secretary instead of Obama’s “sometimes it takes three tries to get it right.”

…yah, I am sure you think that sounds pretty smart Obammy, but I’d like to know what Michelle thinks of that.

I think you meant it takes three tries to find someone desperate enough to put “Obama Administration” on their resume knowing full well what his policies are going to do to with what’s left of “commerce” in America.

It’s why we don’t have a Titanic II. No one would want to be Captain, let alone sail on her.

If John McCain were President, we would have a cabinet packed with people that actually pay their taxes, have actually started business (vs. reading about it in a textbook), hired employees, owned homes and paid mortgages – versus trading favors with a Chicago criminal to put a roof over their head.

There’d have been no speculation of Oprah’s official capacity either.

As for the speech last night, McCain would probably have dissapointed us ala the debates been less inspiring…from a show-business sort of perspective. Not a lot of charisma or flash. Not a lot of big words. Very little emoting.

We’d have his nervous ticks instead of Obama’s sweeping, graceful poise.

…and no Hopey Changey Messiah talk.

But McCain’s math would have been better.

Obama’s Math:

Socialize Health Care

+ Cap and Trade

+ Increase Taxes on Those That Actually Pay Taxes The “Rich”

+ Halve The National Debt Deficit

= Fatal Error. Please Reboot.

Either way, we’d still have Nancy Pelosi’s assenine permagrin dental work burned into our pixels (I actually had coffee with someone this morning that had to put a towel over the right side of the TV screen last night so he could watch Obama’s sermon).

If John McCain were President, Congress would still be hashing out the “Stimulus” bill under threat of a veto, and chances are in the end there would have been less pork hanging on it’s bones – it would still be a terrible mistake, but to a lesser degree.

…and we’d all actually have some true hope for the economy and our dollar.

McCain would be fighting for government policy that might actually have a chance of stimulation, like cutting taxes to corporations, business owners and consumers, and forcing government to do more with less, like the rest of us poor saps that have the audacity to pay our mortgages, live within our means and respect our commitments and responsibilities.

As it stands, the only thing Obama has proposed to cut is military spending – in the era of the only successful terrorist attack on American soil – barely a footnote in Obama’s monologue last night.

John McCain’s speech would have been shorter. He’d be less talky-talky and more worky-worky. He would have ended his campaign once elected. Obama can’t stop his.

John McCain likely would have tackled our nation’s issues like the decorated hero/servant that he is. He’d likely have picked the most urgent, pressing target, (it’s the economy, stupid) trained his sites and directed his resources and political capital in a focused campaign dedicated to it’s destruction, and we’d have some semblance of a plan right now.

Contrast that with Obama’s reckless design to force-feed thirty years of pent up and failed liberal agendas, without regard for the timing or capacity of our economy to absorb the costs or overcome the additional friction borne by the conduct of commerce.

The President and his book-learned liberal turd-squad think you can make a train start moving again by building more track and adding more cars. McCain would feed the boiler with more coal.

In all fairness, neither President would have a clue how exactly to solve an unprecedented, systemic and global financial and credit crisis; but one would have the good sense of what not to do right now.

…but he’s still the Senator from Arizona.

A guy can dream, can’t he?

I’ve joked about it in the past.  Since rabid, corrosive sexism became vogue-y during the election in response to Sarah Palin, it seems only reasonable that if Bobby Jindal becomes a serious contender for President, “Apu the Convenience Store Clerk” japes will be declared completely politically correct, and South-Asian Americans will become the left’s new racial kicktoy.

Pinky swear, it was a joke.

Until yesterday, apparently.

(Note to Allahpundit: your post’s headline, “The obligatory “Helen Thomas makes nasty crack about Jindal?” post” contains the words “Helen Thomas” and “crack”, three words that should never appear in a sentence in any context.  Please see to this). 

First things first;  it’s good to see Jay Reding is back to writing more regularly.  He’s one of the better policy bloggers out there, and has been for years.

And he dips into a subject

I’ve been dying to write about for weeks:  the idea of the “shovel ready” job:

What we need is not a bunch of make work jobs. Exactly what would Mr. Herbert’s plan look like? Should we take an unemployed financial analyst from Manhattan, hand him a shovel and have him dig a ditch or fix potholes on I-95? Is that really an effective use of his skills? Of course it isn’t- it’s a waste of human capital.

Leaving aside the undeniable Schadenfreud many would feel at the idea of Bernie Madoff pushing a wheelbarrow full of broken cement (or, to be honest, that I’d feel to watch my the guy who wrote my ARM five years ago cleaning the ape cages at the Como Zoo in July), I’ve wanted to ask – beyond the absurdity of thinking one can take unemployed auto workers and bank workers and put ’em out on the prairie fixing roads, has anyone noticed that building roads is a completely different operation than it was seventy years ago?  That it doesn’t involve armies of guys with shovels and pickaxes hacking the roadbed down to size?

Here’s where the standard argument about government jobs comes in: “but you’ve built a road!” they exclaim. Great, you have a road. Does that mean anyone will use that road? Sure, that road would be nice for all the trucks that aren’t going anywhere to take all the goods that aren’t being produced, but here in the real world just building a road produces a strip of concrete that may or may not get used. “If you build it, they will come” is a line from a movie, it’s not a theory of economics.

So, what do we really need? We really do need jobs, and we really do need infrastructure fixes. But those are two different problem with two different solutions.

If we want to get out of this mess, we need to tear down walls rather than build them up. The first bill that President Obama signed into law was an act that dramatically expanded liability for employers. You want to create jobs? Try not hobbling the people who create them.

The tax holiday is looking better and better.

And the earliest shot for one of those is 2013.

Hang in there.

…the banking industry is melting down, Afghanistan is getting out of control and the Administration is trying to throw troops at the problem…

…but it’s nice to know that Congress can tackle the important stuff.

Remember when allowing for indefinite detention of terror suspects without access to American constitutional legal protections was the greatest moral crime of all time?

No worries:Either does the Obama administration:

In Holder’s view, then, we are engaged in a war that started years before we noticed it and may never end, at least not in any definitive way. The enemy is not simply the guy who shoots at you on the battlefield, who can be readily identified; he can be anyone, anywhere who helps anti-American terrorists. He could be a guy captured in the Philippines suspected of funneling money to Al Qaeda, or (presumably) he could be the employee of an Islamic charity in the U.S. that is accused of sending money to Hezbollah.

He even brings new meaning to the “Fairness” Doctrine:

Given Holder’s invocation of cyber and mental battlefields, the enemy could even be someone accused of fomenting terrorism through incendiary online criticism of the U.S. government. The implication is that any of these people could be held in military custody without trial until the cessation of hostilities, i.e., indefinitely.

Remember when Mark Gisleson and Steve Perry fretted that the Bush Administration was going to toss them all into re-education camps by the end of his term?

As with much lefty projection, it looks like it’s a possibility – now that they are in power.

It must be a rough time to be a “feminist”.

Oh, there’s never a shortage of things to caterwaul about.  Modern Gender-Identity feminism is largely about the cultivation and political exploitation of grievances – “Angriculture”, to coin a term.

Still, at a time when women make up an almost 3-2 majority among college students, when the tide is turning even further against the rights of fathers in family court, and when the Obama administration has just pushed a law that’ll allow a woman who’s taken two or three years off the job over ten years to raise kids to sue a company for paying more to men who put the entire ten years in on the job, it must be getting harder and harder to be perpetually angry.

With one big exception.  There is one thing that men always have, that women never will.

Well, anyway, there was:

Minnetonka-based GoGirl has created a reusable “urination device” so ladies can go anytime, anywhere without p**sing all over their shoes or getting crabs on dirty toilet seats. What a relief.

Apparently this is old news in Europe, but Americans are clearly getting a kick out of it. It’s getting some play on national TV shows because frankly no one is too old for potty talk.

The device is marketed to “active women” who frankly don’t have time to sit down and pee. Or you know, they love being outdoors but hate squatting. We just want a couple for fun.

“We just want a couple for fun”?  I’d love to be a fly on the wall at those City Pages parties.

Stimulus dollars go to turning capable journalists into gabbling, addlepated, conspiracy-theory-mouthing ninnies!

No, really!

Taxdollars are being used to train Pioneer Press in what I do, when I am not paid!

That’d be Grace Kelly, over at The Heartbreak of Spirochaetal Paresis Minnesota Short Bus Project.

So whaddya think, all you journos out there; you wanna get paid to do what Grace Kelly does – babble like a half-trained macaw?

It’s time for me to make an announcement, in my capacity as Press Secretary for MOB mayor Johnny Roosh.

(to say nothing of my capacity as Capo Di Tutti Bloggi in the MOB:)

At any rate, as announced on the NARN2 show this past Saturday, the next MOB Mayor’s party will be held March Seventh, at Keegan‘s, starting around 6PMish.

As always, the MOB Mayor’s party is non-partisan, and non-avocational (someone tell Karl Bremer and Steve Perry); you don’t have to be a blogger to attend, and we explicitly invite bloggers of all (or no) political affiliations.

While you can feel perfectly free to show up unannounced, I’m looking for RSVPs in any of the following places:

• Either write me at “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”, or…
• leave a comment in any MOB Party thread, or…
• go to Twitter and send a Direct Message to mitchpberg (or on the hashtag #mobparty).

It’s been a while.  It should be fun!

On behalf of Mayor Roosh – sheesh, what else would you have planned?

Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring looks at the Minnesota Budget Deficit – six billion and counting – on the one hand, and the zooming cost of DFL legislators’ per diems on the other, and notes:

it’s come to the public’s attention that DFL members of the legislature were paid a substantial amount of per diem for out-of-session hearings and meetings.On the Senate side, the top 16 DFL legislators were paid a grand total of $99,648 for out-of-session hearings and meetings. With senators getting paid $96 per day in per diem, that’s a total of 1,038 days of out-of-session per diem paid.

On the House side, the 14 biggest amounts of out-of-session per diem were paid to DFL representatives. The total amount of out-of-session per diem paid to these representatives is $65,142. Dividing the $65,142 by the $77 per day per diem payment gives you a total of 846 days of out-of-session hearings and meetings.

He’s got some questions:

There are several reasons why I’m highlighting these per diem payments, the most important of which is to ask these questions:

* What work product did these DFL legislators produce during these hearings and meetings?
* Did the DFL give a high priority to gathering important budgetary information during these meetings?
* Did the DFL give a high priority to finding solutions to the budget deficit the highest priority of these hearings? If the DFL didn’t put a high priority on that, why didn’t they?
* Did the DFL give a high priority to identifying spending that was spent on wants, not needs? If the DFL didn’t put a high priority on that, why didn’t they?
* Did the DFL put a high priority on finding ways to save money without reducing service levels? If the DFL didn’t put a high priority on that, why didn’t they?
* How many hours did these legislators work, on average, each of these 1,884 work days? Less than 4 hours on average? Was it 4-8 hours? Was it more than 8 hours a day?

The reason why your answers to these questions are so important to me is to know that the legislature is doing its fair share of work in finding solutions to Minnesota’s budget deficit. If you aren’t part of the solution, then you’re really just putting up an unneeded, and unwanted, roadblock in the solution process.

Yeah, that’d be a shock, wouldn’t it?

Still, Gary notes that he’d like the legislators – especially the cash-guzzling DFL majority – to hear those questions.  Over, and over, and over again.

…on hearing that The One planned to appoint Gary Locke to Commerce…:

President Barack Obama’s likely third pick for Commerce secretary is former Washington Gov. Gary Locke, a senior administration official said Monday.Locke, a Democrat, was the nation’s first Chinese-American governor when he served two terms in the Washington statehouse from 1997 to 2005.

…was to wonder “what did he do wrong?”

North Dakota House of Representatives bans abortion:

The bill, which now moves to the Senate, is a direct and legally interesting challenge to Roe V. Wade and is seen by many as a backdoor to outlawing abortion.

The House voted 51-41 yesterday declaring that a fertilized egg has all the rights of any person.

This could be to Roe what Heller was to the Second Amendment; the first step in a battle that leads to a cataclysmic battle royale in the Supreme Court.

Which means the good guys have a few years to reverse their electoral fortunes and take the US Senate back.  Before it’s too late.

Since the Heller decision last summer, pride of place as the second-most-misinterpreted and underenforced part of the Bill of Rights has devolved to the Tenth Amendment.

That looks like it could change, with eleven states proposing laws that’d nullify federal trespasses onto powers reserved to the states – tresspasses that are part and parcel of The One’s plan so far:

State governors — looking down the gun barrel of long-term spending forced on them by the Obama “stimulus” plan — are saying they will refuse to take the money.  This is a Constitutional confrontation between the federal government and the states unlike any in our time.

In the first five weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has acted so rashly that at least 11 states have decided that his brand of “hope” equates to an intolerable expansion of the federal government’s authority over the states. These states — Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, California, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas — have passed resolutions reminding Obama that the 10th Amendment protects the rights of the states, which are the rights of the people, by limiting the power of the federal government. These resolutions call on Obama to “cease and desist” from his reckless government expansion and also indicate that federal laws and regulations implemented in violation of the 10th Amendment can be nullified by the states.

As befits a states’ rights issue, the issues are very different:

For example, Family Security Matters reports that Missouri’s “House Concurrent Resolution 0004 (2009) reasserts its sovereignty based on Barack Obama’s stated intention to sign into law a federal ‘Freedom of Choice Act’, [because] the federal Freedom of Choice Act would nullify any federal or state law ‘enacted, adopted, or implemented before, on, or after the date of [its] enactment’ and would effectively prevent the State of Missouri from enacting similar protective measures in the future.”

The resolution in Montana grew out of concerns over coming attacks on the 2nd Amendment, thus its preface describes it as, “An Act Exempting From Federal Regulation Under The Commerce Clause Of The Constitution Of The United States A Firearm, A Firearm Accessory, Or Ammunition Manufactured And Retained In Montana.”

New Hampshire’s resolution actually references certain federal actions that would be nullified within that state were they pushed by Obama’s administration, according to americandaily.com. Among these are “Any act regarding religion; further limitations on freedom of political speech; or further limitations on freedom of the press, [and any] further infringements on the right to keep and bear arms including prohibitions of type or quantity of arms or ammunition.

Absent from the list:  Minnesota.

I suppose that’d require us to be controlled by a party that was more attached to the Constitution than to the thrill of being in power.

For now.

It’s time for me to make an announcement, in my capacity as Press Secretary for MOB mayor Johnny Roosh.

(to say nothing of my capacity as Capo Di Tutti Bloggi in the MOB:)

At any rate, as announced on the NARN2 show this past Saturday, the next MOB Mayor’s party will be held March Seventh, at Keegan‘s, starting around 6PMish.

As always, the MOB Mayor’s party is non-partisan, and non-avocational (someone tell Karl Bremer and Steve Perry); you don’t have to be a blogger to attend, and we explicitly invite bloggers of all (or no) political affiliations.

While you can feel perfectly free to show up unannounced, I’m looking for RSVPs in any of the following places:

• Either write me at “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”, or…
• leave a comment in any MOB Party thread, or…
• go to Twitter and send a Direct Message to mitchpberg (or on the hashtag #mobparty).

It’s been a while.  It should be fun!

On behalf of Mayor Roosh – sheesh, what else would you have planned?

I don’t believe in public subsidies of broadcasters – but I listen to MPR.  I mean, my tax dollars go to them, whether I support the concept of socialized radio or not, so it doesn’t give me any moral qualms.

I didn’t support public money for the Midtown Greenway – but my taxes pay for it, so I ride it with pride.  Dang skippy.

And Jason Lewis is wrong, wrong, wrong; I bike to work on roads for which I pay no gas taxes for my bike, and I do it without a single sleepless night .  I pay plenty of gas taxes when I’m not biking, and my bike does no damage whatsoever to the road that – I haste to add – I already paid for.

I’m not going to join with my conservative friends who are bagging on Governor Pawlenty for not rejecting Minnesota’s share of Porkulus, because, well, we’re ponying up our share.  While Pawlenty has not been the perfect fiscal conservative,  he’s done the best anyone could do under the circumstances under which he’s operating, at least trying to veto the DFL’s worst excesses.

The money’s leaving Minnesota.  Better that it had not left in the first place, of course; better still that we slash the size of Minnesota’s government.  But this is the hand we’re dealt.

Imperfect?  Sure.  But he makes some sense – and makes Rachel Maddow look like the gabbling, overpromoted ninny fighting four intellectual classes above her mental weight she is in the process, to sweeten the deal:

Pawlenty recently appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show, and fairly effectively rebutted the host’s charge that those who criticized the stimulus bill were hypocrites for accepting the funds now that it had passed.“I have a number of responses to that argument,” Pawlenty said. “Minnesota ranks forty-sixth in terms of getting federal spending in relation to the amount of taxes paid — for every dollar we sent in to Washington, we get about 72 cents back. We’re a major payer of the federal government’s tabs, unlike many other states that I won’t mention. I say, when you’re paying to buy the pizza, it’s okay to have a slice. Now, if you were a liberal Democratic governor and you opposed military spending, are you not going to take National Guard funding? If you were a liberal who opposed No Child Left Behind, are you going to take federal funding in education? So I’m wondering why that standard is only being applied now to conservatives.”

Snap!

“All the governors are going to take almost all of the money. I’m not aware of any governor turning down a substantial amount. There’s some talk about not taking unemployment insurance — about 2 percent of the stimulus — because it expands obligations in unemployment insurance, and might require a tax increase later on down the road. But the point is moot to Minnesota, because our benefit level is already beyond what the federal government would require.”

Of course it’s politics – on Jindal and Barbour’s part no less than Pawlenty’s.  Pawlenty has a hideous, DFL-fathered deficit to close, while trying to buff up his rap sheet for a presidential run in the next 4-8 years; Jindal, Barbour and Sanford are aiming to be seen to Pawlenty’s  right.

Does it make a fiscal budget hawk happy?  Of course not; and Minnesota’s not a state of budget hawks.  Yet.

When liberals confront recession, their first – and usually disastrous – impulse is to print more money  (Which sparks inflation and devalues the currency).  Yes, it’s Keynesianism; just because it has an academic name doesn’t change the fact that its record is fairly abysmal.

So if you’re a liberal, it’s a short jump from printing money to printing political power.  Democrats want to add a Representative to the District of Columbia:

The concept of the District, as outlined by the Founders, was that it should be autonomous and not subject to the whims and outside pressures of a state government. Those reasons, as articulated by James Madison, Elbridge Gerry, and George Mason at the Constitutional Convention, are just as relevant today as they were over 200 years ago.And while statehood supporters cite the famous American rallying cry “no taxation without representation,” that is a false analogy. The entire Congress represents the interests of the District, because every single member of Congress works in the District.

The piece is by Hans Spakovsky at NRO.

And it is the equivalent of printing money – or in this case, printing Democratic votes.

This is not an attempt to secure representation for District residents’ interests, then, but a raw grab at political power. It will establish a new, permanently Democratic seat in the House of Representatives. The bill attempts to balance that by adding a second seat as well (bringing the total number of representatives to 437), and giving that seat to Utah. But unlike D.C.’s seat, Utah’s extra seat is guaranteed only until next year’s Census — after which each state will be assigned seats in proportion to its population. The extra seat will almost surely be transferred to a Democratic state like California or New York.

Suddenly – shamefully – Garrison Keillor’s “ideas” don’t seem so absurdly far-fetched.

Everyone knows one; the neighborhood Jeremiah.

He’s the guy who hangs out at the hardware store, stocking up on the one hand, ranting about the “Trilateral Commission undercutting our currency” and proclaiming that “in five years the United States’ll be like Red China” on the other.  He was a survivalist before the term became a dirty word; he’s positive that the end of civilization is nigh, and he never stops talking about it.

Or should I say, never stopped.  Because you knew him during the Carter and first term of the Reagan Administration.And though you last talked with him twenty years ago, and wonder if American Idol isn’t evidence that he was at least partially correct, you still recall the sense of crushing fatigue his harangues left wafting over you.

Glenn Beck does that to me.

Allahpundit talks about Beck:

Even before watching this, if you’d asked me which media star’s most likely to turn survivalist, move to the mountains, and start doing his show from a lead-lined bunker, there’s no doubt what the answer would have been. There’s something “off” about Beck in a way that’s not true of other chat-show hosts, although that’s not necessarily a criticism: O’Reilly and Hannity can be tiresome in more than small doses but this guy I find watchable even at a stretch. Partly it’s the sheer bravado of the performance, partly it’s the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on in his head to make him the way he is. As big an audience as he has, I’m surprised it’s not bigger. He’s one of a kind.

Look, don’t get me wrong; it’s always prudent to be prepared for emergencies; putting extra food by is just plain smart; anyone who doesn’t have guns and ammo laid in isn’t really all that American anyway.

And he’s right, in the sense that all real conservatives are right; this country has painted itself into a corner, with endless entitlement spending and the stupid, neo-socialist policies of the past ten years that privatized the fruits of greed but socialized the results of stupidity.

But – how do I put this – Glenn Beck bores me just as silly as his equally-nutty, slightly less listenable forebears in nuttiness do. This nation is in a bind – and this current trough in the business cycle is just the beginning – and The One’s policies seem sure to keep the bind going for a nice long time.

But more than any other talk show host – more than O’Reilly, vastly more than Hannity or Limbaugh or anyone in the Salem or TRN stables of hosts – when I listen to Beck, I feel like I’m listening to someone who regards the whole mess as less than a blight on the nation he loves and the society that allows him to earn a living doing what he does than as material.
I know he has fans out there.  Let me break this down for you; stop.

Whenever I bag on Beck, his fans write in to defend him. Feel free.  But be advised; you’re wrong.