…I did not watch the Oscars.

I think I’ll keep the streak going.

Anyone else find incredible irony in a “Republican” governor that has run his state into the ground, and is now lauding the stimuless bill?

In an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Schwarzenegger said he welcomes his state’s share of the massive $787 billion package, believing it could create as many as 400,000 new jobs.

“We welcome this economic stimulus package. I think it’s terrific and will help us,” the California governor said. “We were happy even though there’s…people complaining. It’s not what they envisioned, but what is? The people will give you 1,000 different answers.

“It was Obama that got elected. He put the package together, so let’s support it,” he also said.

Ahnold, I loved you in True Lies but in real life you are an “ee-dee-yot.” There is nothing “terrific” in the rest of us bailing you out after years of deficits and mismanagement of your state.

What a sad artifact of a bygone era that moniker is. Arnold Schwarzenegger circa the 2003 “total recall” election was going to sweep all before him as California governor, bringing the same élan and toughness he had on the big screen to fighting special interests and restoring his beloved state to competitiveness.

With no screenplay to save him, the much-reduced Governator simply buckled and switched sides.

Sadly, California may serve as a model for the rest of the nation, now following in California’s footsteps.

California Democrats are only slightly ahead of national Democrats, so the country’s fiscal future may be in preview in Sacramento.

The state has been buffeted by the housing crisis, but the ultimate cause of the mess is relentless, heedless overspending.

Sound familiar?

Sorry Mr. Kennedy-Shriver, its time to cut the mooring lines and let Caleefohnia float out to sea.

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 yesterday, 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; 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!  We’ve got 14 RSVP’s after 24 hours, which isnt’ bad at all…
On behalf of Mayor Roosh, c’mon down!

It’s the stuff of NARN legend; in our first year on the air, we (Chad and company) got an email from JB Doubtless – Chad’s younger brother and a charter member of the NARN during its first three months – saying that he’d seen this comic, a conservative comic no less, that was pretty funny, and that he’d booked him on the show.  For us.

And it was atrocious.  Part of it was that the conservative comic talked more about politics than the funny during the interview – which was just not what we expected.  Part of it is – and I say this having worked on the Don Vogel show, where comics were trooping through all the dang time – comics are hard to interview.  It takes an unusual personality to work a room the way a comic does – and “unusual” all-too-frequently means “difficult for schlubs like us to relate to”.

So the interview went down in history as just about the most challenging one we’ve ever had on the NARN.

The comic, of course, was Brad Stine.  Ed and I talked with him last week (we didn’t realize who he was when we first booked him) and it went a lot better.

Just gotta say – Bun and I went to the show at the Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts earlier this evening.  And he was really good.

Not conventional, naturally; Stine, who has a Dennis-Leary-style delivery (and, let’s be honest, look) with material that swerves between hilarious observational comedy about politics, society and religion, with some bits that sounded like they’d have been more at home in a particularly challenging Presbyterian sermon (and that’s a good thing; Presbyterians put more stock in engaging the congregations’ brains from the pulpit than any other denomination).

But dang, it was funny.  Any thought that Stine worked safe because he doesn’t work blue missed the point; he doesn’t work blue, but it was still edgy enough to keep me interested.

Anyway – Brad Stine was a lot of fun.  Check it out if you get a chance.

Fresch Fisch asks:

The “stimulus” money coming to Minnesota will be full of strings and conditions in order to accept the money. Will our state elected officials let us read the details of the handouts before they accept them?

Oh, goodness no. Any good con man knows that getting in and out fast is the key to pulling a fast one on a ripe suck.

It’s been a long, long week.  I’ve had one of those ugly little bugs that’s not quite bad enough to call in sick over, but still messes up  your day.  And I haven’t been sleeping much since I’m looking at needing a second-shift job to pay the taxes that’ll be descending on me from the local and federal levels.

But it’s nothing a little binge-drinking can’t fix!

Tis the season for Minnesota Organization of Bloggers parties.  Now, when I say MOB parties, I know – it’s been a year and a half since the last one.  It’s high time.

And we’ll make up for lost time, here; this weekend, the Anti-Strib guys are throwing a shindig over at Keegans.  Stop on by! (I’ll try to, although I have a Patriot event to do that night).

And Mayor Johnny Roosh will be announcing the Mayor’s annual (?) MOB party very shortly here, after prolonged negotiations.  Watch this space (or, y’know, a space somewhere in the future from this space…oh, y’all know how blogs work, right?)

And sometime in late spring/early summer we’re still looking at “MOB Day at the Range” – the long-dreamed-of synthesis of shooting and drinking.  In that order and no other.

Stay tuned on that.

As predicted here, the liberals are using Socialist Mexico’s (motto:  “America 3.0 Obama Beta”) inability to govern itself as a pretext for ratcheting up gun control:

More than 50 U.S. lawmakers sent a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to enforce a ban on importing assault weapons, saying many such guns are later smuggled south to arm Mexico’s ruthless drug cartels.

“They come to the United States from Europe and other places, and they make their way down to Mexico,” Rep. Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat, told reporters in Mexico City on Wednesday.

The ban was implemented under the administrations of President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, and the U.S. government can enforce it under provisions of the 1968 Gun Control Act.

And if Mexico is overrun with bandits wearing Randi Rhodes t-shirts, we’ll have to repeat the First Amendment to prevent all that nasty talk from further eroding the failed state to the south, right?
(Via Carnivore)

To:  The 40% of Americans who will pay no income tax under the Obama “stimulus”

From:  The other 60% and I

Re: The Future

Dear Deadbeats:

Well, you went and did it.  You voted yourself a President and Congress who promise to give you goodies and make someone else pay for it.

All the rest of the Someone Elses and I need to ask you, though; what if we just decide to quit?  Quit working, quit ponying up and paying the freight for ourselves and, with all due respect, your freeloading asses?

What’ll happen to your entitlement to our tax money?

By the way, “But you have to keep working and paying!  It’s not  your money, it’s taxes” is not an answer.

Think about it.

That is all.

Charlie Quimby notes that Athis blog is blocked on the wifi system at Denver international:

Not sure if it’s the headline, the post or the general content of Shot in the Dark. Or just general prudery.

Hm.  How to approach this?

I’ll let each of the voices in my head have a say:

• Marketer Mitch: [Wockawocka bow bow] “The ladies’ve been talking…”
• Kos Diarist Mitch: ACTION ALERT!  PRESIDENT JUGHEAD IS REPRESSING TEH OPPOSITION!
• Aaron Landry Mitch: “It’s Norm Coleman’s fault.  I hate him more every day.”
• Joe Mitch Bodell: “Open a new socket, Chloe!”
• Bulgarian Mitch: “Вие не виждате, че всеки ден…”

Charlie eventually chalks it up to the material in the comment thread.

I knew it; Angryclown and Swiftee are FCC plants.

Paul Schmelzer, writing for the Minnesoros “Independent”, barks on command:

It occurs to me that there is a rather simple pattern to [Rep. Michele] Bachmann’s belief system, ” writes Jason Linkins on Huffington Post. “…[I]f it was a rumor on the interwebs, Bachmann believes it!” Indeed, on this very page we speculated that Bachmann’s 2007 claim to know about plans to partition Iraq to “create a terrorist safe haven zone” may have come from a satirical posting online.

So because “Jason Linkins” – a person so thud-witted he uses the word “interwebs” in an apparently unironic sense – says it, and gives two examples, it must be true!

Hang in there, Paul; you might be able to get a job with Dump Bachmann at this rate.

I mean, while Schmelzer circulates the internet-spawned meme that Bachmann (and all “fundies”) be dum, he works for a “news” outlet that thinks lefty conventional wisdom (and the Colbert Report) are unimpeachable sources, with comical results.

I report.  You deride.

My day today:

1. Woke up late, fighting one of those toxic headaches.  Fought – successfully – the urge to herk. It did wipe out my morning blogging time, though.
2. Went to a pre-work appointment, headache and all.
3. Went to office. Now, I’m on like five projects right now. Four of them, I love.  One of them is bottled misery. Spent morning on bottled misery – headache and all.
4. Had soup for lunch.  Switched to one of the non-misery projects.  Headache gradually dissipated, although the work load did not.
5. Home.  Made dinner.  Put out brushfires.
6. Taking a moment to blog.
7. Next:  Finding nacho fixings in time for Burn Notice.

More tomorrow.

Supper last night:

1. Lightly brown a pound and a half of miscellaneous chicken meat.
2. Shred a couple of medium onions.
3. Throw the whole thing in a crock pot with a couple of those little 7-ounce cans of San Marcos Chipotle sauce (one can if you’re less spice-tolerant)
4. Let it cook for nine or ten hours.
5. Use for burrito or enchilada filling.

No, it’s not why posting was so light today.  But it’d have been totally worth if even if it were.

Barack Obama has a new web site…with some handy graphics too.

Recovery.gov

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be carried out with full transparency and accountability — and Recovery.gov is the centerpiece of that effort. In a short video, President Obama describes the site and talks about how you’ll be able to track the Recovery Act’s progress every step of the way.

Where is Your Money Going? (click on the graphic for more detail)

*Wealth Transfers, Political Payback and the Installment of Socialism

Eight Billion Dollars. Gone.

…all you can offer is “Other“?

Welcome to the club. Please pass the Grey Poupon.

The richer people are, the ruder they are, according to Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Are rich people rude?

…or are rude people rich?

And yet while the rich may be rude because they are wealthy, it is just as likely to be the other way around. Just as plausibly, they are wealthy because they are rude.

So screw you.

Jerks.

PS Aw, shucks. Sorry. *Hug*

Al Franken has spent most of the time since the election far outside the state he purports to want to represent in the US Senate.

But he’s got time to go on Marty Owings’ “Radio Free Nation” tonight.

Might be worth a call.  See if he remembers anything about the state he wants to “represent”.

The former owner of long-vanished “Let It Be Records” is going to be having a garage sale.

It reminds me; the worst thing about the digitization of all music is the disappearance of the record shop.  Let It Be was not the best record store in town, but it was one of the last holdouts among the good ones.
Time to go load up on vinyl!

When you have some downtime today, I have an assignment for you.

Jeff Rosenberg at the Daily Liberal looks at the bill apportioning Minnesota’s share of the Porkulus spending, and asks “Where’s the pork?”

It’s interesting to see Minnesota Republicans not just adopting the national Republicans’ strategy, but also their talking points.

[Ahem.  Grrrrrrr.  Ed]

And of course, they do it even when it doesn’t make sense. Session Daily reports:

Rep. Keith Downey (R-Edina) was one of several Republicans who criticized the bill as being hastily constructed and potentially filled with “pork.”

Pork? Really? You might disagree with those spending priorities, but are they really pork? Or is this just another example of the word “pork” being used as a meaningless political buzzword?

I have an idea. I’ll post the entire text of HF 680 below; it’s actually not too long. Righties, please tell me where you think the “pork” is.

Jeff asked for help.  We should lend it to him.

Jeff helpfully posts the entire bill.  Why not skip on over there and show Jeff – not a bad guy, by the way – where the pork is?

I’ll see you over there.  Over lunch, anyway.  Time to run to work.

Yestrday, I wrote about Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman’s Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman’s budget proposal, which attacks an awful lot of spending that directly impacts the public.  As I wrote yesterday, I suspect that’s the goal; to scare people into demanding more taxes at all levels.

In the meantime, property taxes are up sharply – 40-50% in many cases, and slated for more – even as services are slashed, crime rises,and vacant homes spatter the cityscape.

So what do we do about this?

Well, if you’re a Saint Paul Republican, the traditional answer is “grit your teeth”.  The GOP in the Fourth District doesn’t really do a whole lot.  And in all of Saint Paul, there is precisely one elected Republican official – School Board member Tom Conlon.

Living in a one-party city causes all sorts of problems for any “opposition” parties in town. Leaving aside the obvious – one party controls all levers of city government – the big problem is that the public discourse is entirely framed, in the citizens’ minds, by the arguments one side makes.  The opposition never even registers on the radar.

Now, the GOP in Saint Paul and the Fourth District tries,after a fashion; they run candidates for Congress (Ed Matthews thrashed Betty McCollum in the debates) and for most state legislative races – but it’s all very perfunctory.  The most demoralizing part?  Legislative district conventions kick off, frequently, with a stirring call from one state party functionary or another to…

…try to make a showing, to soak up DFL money and effort so it can’t go to challenge Republicans in stronger districts.

Who can’t get behind that?

The fact is, the GOP needs to do a couple of things.

1. We need to form coalitions with other groups in Saint Paul, which are not necessarily Republican.   Property rights is a huge issue in Saint Paul; many property activists are Democrats.  We need to find the obvious common cause.
2. We need a coherent message.  That can be hard for Republicans; we are  the nation’s only big-tent party, which makes message discipline difficult.  I’m going to suggest finding the things we agree on and hammering on them, and softpedaling the disagreements rather than trying to bash out acquiescence. To an extent, that means the Saint Paul GOP has to come to terms with the huge number of Ron Paul supporters that showed up last year.  And by the way…
3. The Ron Paul supporters will need to deliver.  Running a guy for President is fun and all, but 99% of politics is local.  Do you really want to see Rep. Paul’s message of civil liberty and low taxes implemented?  Then you’re going to have to get together with enough other people, and find enough common ground,to make it connect with people who aren’t members of any party.  Which means using that boundless energy you devoted to Rep. Paul, certainly.  It also means compromising – something your experience on the Paul campaign didn’t teach you much about.  So whaddya say?
4. We’ll need to make a point of running conservative candidates for every single community council. The community councils are a traditional hotbed for of DFL-centric politics, and a breeding ground for DFL politicians.  They are also where all the community development money in Saint Paul gets spent – and that is some serious political clout.  In 2007 Republicans took over the Highland Park Council; last year, we got Republicans elected to two or three other councils. It’s a start – but we need to follow through.  This means in every district, we’ll need people who volunteer to run for office, sure enough.  It ALSO means we’ll need to get people to come out and vote for Republicans.  These seats are winnable.  And we need to, because this is where we develop talent for the next stop:
5. In 2011, we’ll need to run credible candidates for City Council in all seven wards. Not just warm bodies on the ballot, mind you – we’ll need to find people who can take a campaign to the street; find people who can put in the shoe leather to help that battle; raise money to run seven serious campaigns; most of all, to get noticed, and noticed positively.
6. In 2013, we’ll need to take a credible shot at the Mayor’s office.

To make it a real challenge – the Saint Paul GOP will need to do this, it seems, without any help from the State or CD4 GOPs.

So how does this happen?

More later this week.

Since pitchers and catchers are working out down south – you know what I’d like to see this baseball season?  I’d like to see all of the teams in the major leagues work together, so that all of them win the World Series this season!

Absurd?  Of course.  To most of us.

But to those who fuss over “bipartisanship”? Not as absurd, as Thomas Frank points out in a partly-correct series of observations in the WSJ:

The way I remember it, the No. 1 issue in the election was the collapsing economy, followed at some distance by the Iraq war. On both of these questions, Mr. Obama prevailed because he was the candidate who promised most convincingly to reverse Republican policies — not because he planned to meet the GOP halfway across the charred ruins of American prosperity.

The reason the Washington media think bipartisanship is the top issue, even when economic disaster stomps Americans like Godzilla, is because of the way it reflects their own professional standards. They are themselves technically impartial, and so it’s only natural for them to wish for a hazy millennium in which everyone else in Washington is impartial, too.

As anyone familiar with the incestuous relationship between the media and the left in Minnesota knows, Frank has it only partly correct.   The media do see themselves as technically impartial, but they’re not; they’ve merely redefined their own biases as “the norm” as far as the public is concerned.

“Bipartisanship” means “everybody working together to do things our way”; see every Lori Sturdevant column ever written for prime examples of how this manifests in real life.

Frank does get this part right:

It is supposed to be high-minded stuff, this longing for a bipartisan golden age. But in some ways it is the most cynical stance possible. It takes no idea seriously, since everything is up for compromise. The role of the political parties is merely to cancel each other out, so that only the glorious centrists remain, triangulating majestically between obnoxious extremes.

…before proving that he is himself from Planet Beltway:

What’s more, bipartisanship’s boosters can’t even discern friend from foe. The Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, which seems to be growing even more conservative as its numbers shrink, has clearly resumed the strategies of the early Gingrich era — obstruction, bomb-throwing and more obstruction. But to the mainstream media, the angry Republican pols seem to mainly discredit Mr. Obama, who failed to win over the GOP. Which will, of course, encourage the bitter-enders to obstruct even more.

Never has Beltway orthodoxy looked as clueless and futile as it does today. Confronted with the greatest failure of economic ideas in decades, it demands that the president make common cause with people for whom those failed ideas are still sacred. To think we can solve our problems in this way is like hoping to chart a route to the moon by water.

That’d be the cheap irony of this situation; the Republicans spent the last four years as they did the years from 1936 to 1976; governing like Democrats.

We have political parties because people believe different things; while at the end of the day people will reach a compromise (provided they don’t run back to their corner of the country and grab their followers and their weapons – and after 233 years, we’re still avoiding that fairly well), the point, as I wrote last year, is not to cast away the highlights of ones own beliefs cheaply, but to pull like mad for them to affect and inform the final compromise.

In other words, “Bipartisanship” comes after you reach the final result of everyone pulling for their partisan beliefs.
They say “politics isn’t bean-bag”; it’s not just because some people ignore common civility.  “Politics” comes from the same root as “polite”; it’s not just the art of compromise,but the art of advantageous compromise; of “Getting to Yes”.

I’m going to give a wedgie – rhetorically, probably – to the next idiot “journalist” to carp about “bipartisanship”.
(Via Chad the Tweeter)

Will any of you that paid your taxes please turn out the lights?:

There could be tax troubles on the horizon for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who reportedly has lived rent-free in Washington for five years but hasn’t paid taxes on the imputed income from that, according to reports.

He’s the latest in a growing list of President Obama’s nominees to have been involved in tax issues, according to those tabulating the tally in Washington.

Calls to Vice President Biden asking if these officials are “unpatriotic” have gone unanswered.

No wonder the libs want the “Fairness” doctrine; the market is rejecting their material like badly-matched transplant organs.

Nova M – Sheldon Drobny’s second attempt at a LibTalk network after Air America’s initial meltdown – has coded, taking Randee Rhodes and Mike Malloy with it:

Randi Rhodes’ on-air home for less than a year will shut its doors. In an email message of February 17th from counsel for Nova M Radio, Inc. to Randi’s entertainment attorney, Robert V. Gaulin, the company is said to have been advised to file for bankruptcy protection next week. All payroll deposits were reversed on Tuesday, leaving Nova’s employees unpaid for the past two weeks.On Sunday, Nova received a letter from Mr. Gaulin asserting that the contract with Ms. Rhodes was terminated due to material breaches and other reasons. Ms. Rhodes had not broadcast for over a week prior to this time, a situation which was diplomatically referred to as a “problem” that was solely within Nova’s control to solve. A few days earlier, Sheldon Drobny, founder of Nova M, and a co-founder of Air America Radio, attempted suicide and is hospitalized in Chicago.

The only thing lower than Nova’s revenue numbers were its audience.  Nova M was, if anything, a more vacuous flop than Air America.

To add insult to injury?  Brian Maloney reports (in the same story linked above) that Randee Rhodes’ “flagship” station, WJON in Palm Beach, has tubed her.

For Sean Hannity.

So long, Nova M.

Observation after a few decades of watching Minnesota politics in action:  when budget time comes around, DFL politicians do whatever it takes to wheedle more budget money out of everybody – taxpayers, government, whatever – they make the cuts that would seem to directly impact taxpayers.

For example – when school district administrations slash budgets, they start with (and publicize!) teacher layoffs, program cuts, building closings (especially in districts with lots of committed and vocal voters) and sports.

When things settle down, almost inevitably, things end up being a lot less catastrophic, for the simple reason that they never were in the first place.  The whole thing was a dog and pony show, put on to scare and bully taxpayers and legislators at all levels into paying more.
This is especially true where Minnesota’s “Local Government Aid” program, or “LGA”, is concerned.  LGA redistributes money from the parts of the state that are self-sufficient, to the parts that are not.

Pawlenty trimmed LGA six years ago (the DFL read that as “Slashed”), to balance the (at that time) unprecedented deficit the DFL and Ventura left him after squandering a billion dollar surplus on new spending.  The DFL, especially the part that runs the state’s four biggest cities (Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Duluth and Bloomington) squealed like stuck pigs – but the cities went on.

They’re baaaack:  Saint Paul mayor Chris Coleman has released his next year’s budget:

So why trim the muscle?  Coleman wants to cut police in a city where, after decades of being one of the safest major cities in the country, crime is rising.  He wants to hack away at a fire department that is by most accounts the best urban fire department in the United States.  He wants to slash criminal prosecutors in a city that has a hard time getting even simple cases to trial.

Of course, the fat remains.  Saint Paul maintains a Human Rights department which fully duplicates functions not only at the State, but in Ramsey County government.  Its police duplicate many functions of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department.  We’ve been on an orgy of building park and rec spending, including Mayor Coleman’s infamous push to build new outdoor hockey rinks in a city that is now screaming for money.  And of course, Mayor Coleman’s government has made it impossible to put thousands of vacant homes back on the tax rolls.

Why?

The truth is out there:

Coleman, a Democrat running for re-election, also blamed Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty for “forcing” the cuts on the city by proposing to reduce state aid payments to local governments. Pawlenty has said the cuts were necessary to balance the state’s troubled budget.

Now, there’s plenty of fat in many of these budgets; the city got by with two police districts for many years (and does placid Highland Park need its own police station?).  The city has also spent a king’s ransom building libraries (the Rondo library at University and Dale is a gold-plated wonder) and rec centers.

In the meantime, the city plans to close the Hamline Library.  On the one hand, it’s small, old, “outdated” (I mean, all it has is books!) and the neighborhood is served by the newish Merriam Park library (about a mile away); if you HAD to pick a library (and presuming one could not bleem back in time and say “let’s spend less money on building libraries like Rondo, which are monuments to the wisdom of sitting library boards whose expense we can not possibly sustain in the long term”), it’d be a prime contender.

It’s also a library in a fanatically DFL-leaning district that’d still vote for the DFL’s hard-left majority at City Hall if the city carted our first-born off to labor camps in Idaho.

These “budget cuts” serve mainly to ratchet up the pain level for voters, to spur more public pressure on legislators (note the prominent placement of the state legislative angle in all of the coverage of this budget) to try to override any vetoes of LGA increases.