Among gun controllers, there’s been one pretty consistent strategy in effect for the past thirty years:

1. Pick a lie about guns and gun owners
2. Run with it for all it’s worth…
3. …until it gets debunked too roundly and widely to be tenable even among liberals
4. Find a new one.
5. Repeat.

How many have we been through in the past thirty years?

• “Saturday Night Specials”: In the sixties and seventies, these inexpensive, “low-quality” handguns were the shrieking point du jour.  Although they served largely as a means of self-defense for poor people, the restrictions on their manufacture and sale were supposed to clean up the inner city.  We know how that worked, right?
• “Gun-Free Zones”: In the seventies, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns circulated “Gun Free Home” stickers to members who wanted to put their principles in writing on their front doors.  These quickly fell out of circulation when it was realized that homes posted as “gun free” were about an order of magnitude more likely to get burgled, robbed or otherwise attacked.  The gun control movement then took that precise logic and moved it to schools, malls, colleges – with results that any sane person could have foreseen from the first go-’round. 
• “Assault Weapons”: This term – which is, by the way, an entirely political term, having no meaning in the world of firearms whatsoever – was originally a precaution against “white supremacist militias”.  Remember when they were the boogieman du jour?  Look for this one to make a comeback, with the Obama administration claiming that Mexican narcotraficantes would eschew real, fully-automatic military weapons (like the AK-series, the Uzi, or the magnicent Heckler and Koch G-3, built in Germany and the official assault rifle of the Mexican armed forces) available to them for a fraction of the price of the semi-automatic-only versions available to them from Americans at many times the price.
• “Unregulated Sales”: Another supposed source of (overpriced, under-powerful) weapons to Mexico…well, let’s see to his one below.

There’s a “Gun Show Loophole” bill making its inevitable way through the Minnesota Legislature, sponsored by Michael Paymar, a St. Paul legislator and one of the most incoherent anti-gun legislators in a metro-DFL contingent that beings new meaning to the term “scared into incontinence”.

I was going to write about it – but Kevin Ecker does it better anyway:

According to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms less than 1 in 50 guns acquired by criminals come from gun shows or private resales.  A January 2009 Star-Tribune article says that the Twin Cities’ homicide problem is largely one of uncontrolled gang/drug activity. Anyone who can sell or purchase illegal drugs can acquire a gun in that illegal transaction. This is a black market transaction, not a legitimate sale by law-abiding citizens.  Don’t be fooled, this bill does NOTHING to prevent the former, but everything to impede the latter.

As a Second Amendment advocate, I could almost set up a hot key that’d type “howzabout we enforce existing laws”? 

Because, it should surprise nobody, laws that already control the source of most guns to most real criminals have been on the books forever:

Minnesota statutes already contain FOUR (4) provisions to cut off “black market” transfers. They are: (1) 609.52 – Theft by the criminal himself, (2) 609; (2) 609.53 – Theft-once-removed by acquisition from a “fence;” (3) 609.66 sibd. 1c – Receipt from an accomplice/strawman; and (4) 624.7141 – Transfer to an ineligible person.

Ecker has the real motivation figured out:

Of course, proponents try to justify all this by claiming the bill will make it illegal to transfer handguns and “assault weapons” to criminals.  Of course what they don’t mention is this is already illegal (Minn. Stat. 609.66 subd. 1f)!  So really all this does is make life difficult for law-abiding citizens.  It does NOTHING to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.  Of course if they had paid attention to studies done on similiar California laws, they’d already know that!

True.  But being a gun controller is never about evidence, fact, ethics or law.

It’s about manipulating emotions to get ones’ way, and preying on ignorance.

As this past election showed in Minnesota as elsewhere, there’s no money in betting against rank, wishful ignorance these days.

The MinnPost notes that agriculture is apparently “left out” of Porkulus:

In the blizzard of new research funding created by the federal stimulus bill, however, an important science has been left out in the cold: agriculture. The stimulus package approved by Congress and President Obama includes $10 billion for the National Institutes of Health, $3 billion for the National Science Foundation and $2 billion for the Energy Department — but not a penny for competitive research in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). One early version of the Senate’s plan included $100 million for agricultural science research, a tiny amount relative to the other research spending, but it did not survive the negotiating process.

Right.

Because the ag sector is so undersubsidized in normal times.

Because federal pork isn’t so seductive that rock-ribbed conservative farmers on the plains, real Americans who wouldn’t vote for a Democrat for President (and haven’t in generations), keep sending pork-snuffling gerbils like Kent Conrad and Tom Daschle and Byron Dorgan and Chuck Hagel to Congress.

Because almost eighty years of comprehensive farm subsidies have made agriculture such a stable enterprise, have rescued the “family farm”, and have kept food prices down.

Thank goodness Obama skipped something  we need.  Perhaps even he’s too smart to risk those consequences.

…that we’re two days away from the MOB Party – Saturday night, 6-ish at Keegans in Northeast Minneapolis (University at Hennepin, across from Surdyk’s).

We’re got a great bunch of RSVP’s so far, but there’s plenty of room; drop me an RSVP at “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”, or send me a direct message on Twitter (@mitchpberg is my ID).

Or just show up – I mean, nobody’s ever been kicked out of a MOB party, right?

…I look at it this way; even if the party is a complete flop, there’s no way it could possibly in a billion years sound more depressing than this.

Just…no.

…did anyone catch Mischke’s debut at the City Pages yesterday?

The CP has fallen so far off my list of regular browses, I gotta confess it didn’t even occur to me to try to listen yet.

Anyone?

UPDATE:  Um, City Pages?  For the benefit of those who work day jobs, and whose companies’ firewalls choke down most live streaming – would it kill you to actually post the damn show?

Thanks.

Normally, I can’t say as I pay much attention to the comings and goings of Vikings players.  I mean, if they, mattered, they’d play for the Bears.

So the departure of Matt Birk to the Ravens doesn ‘t really affect me in the least.

Or so I thought.

Because while I could care less about the football, Birk’s departure might at least in part explain the shuttering of “Matty B’s”, Birk’s downtown Saint Paul watering hole, former home of one of the better happy hours in downtown.

Now it’s impacting me…

General Motors expresses doubts that it’s going to hold on:

General Motors Corp said on Thursday that substantial doubt existed about the ability of company to continue as a going concern.

The story is mostly culled from statements on various annual reports and SEC filings.

In one statement, the company notes the need for a “$30 Billion” loan from the feds.

Do you remember when that seemed like a lot of money?

I’m doing my usual thing when I have a nasty cold; lots of fluids, rest (when I can – and I actually took a rare sick day @ work today), and eating lots of onions.

“Onions?”

Yep.  It’s part of the least appealing part of my anti-cold regimen.

I eat lots of onions for dinner – cheese and onion enchiladas, tonight, in this case – and pound a liter or two of water before bedtime, with a NyQuil chaser.  Then I curl up in sweats with a few extra blankets and a two-liter water bottle by my side, and try to sweat out the evening as hard as I can.

Doctors have spent the past 25 years poo-poohing the notion that this regimen works.  All I know is, it does; I can think of one cold in the past 20 years that it hasn’t cured, or nearly cured, overnight.

At any rate – I’ll be in full fighting fettle for Saturday night’s MOB party!  Or at least, fitter fettle than I was for the winter 2005 party, where I had bronchitis so bad I could barely get up from the table in the back and fill my customary role, circulating hyperactively about the place.

Anyway – where are those sweatpants?

Crushing headache, bodyaches, head cold.

If I had a jacuzzi, it’d be a great day to hammer back some Dayquil and vegg out in one.

Alas – unless the NARN picks up a jacuzzi dealer as a sponsor,they cut us a trade-out deal, and can have the thing installed by 9AM – it’ll be more like “wallow in the bathtub and to back to bed” for me today.

Carry on.

To: Michael Steele

From: Mitch Berg

Re: Limbaugh

Chairman Steele,

For starters, congrats on winning the chairmanship.

In addition; my condolences on winning the chairmanship.

A while ago, I introduced a metaphor I like a lot – the “Tug of War” – to describe politics at this stage of the race. There are two (or more sides) to every question, and each is a tug of war, and each of our job is to get as many people pulling our way as possible, knowing we’ll likely never pull the other team into the mud pit, but we’ll at least pull the rope – the issue – far enough to our side to make us happy enough which, in a representative democracy (either a government or a party) is as good as it gets.

Rush Limbaugh represents a lot of us who are pulling to the right.  You represent a lot of people who pull in different directions on a lot of issues – the fiscal right, perhaps, but the social center on a lot of issues, including some on which you and I disagree.

So don’t yap about Limbaugh pulling to the right; that’s his job.

Rather, try to sell the rest of us on what your vision is.  Convince us.  Show us where you have a better plan.  Because your last couple of predecessors sure didn’t do it.  The burden of proof is on you to show where you and your office have a better idea, especially inasmuch as Rush and all of us conservatives represent ideas that have worked, and a time that the party did conquer all in its path.  Rush – and all of us – represent the Gingrich and Reagan eras; too many of the hamsters we have in office now represent the Trent Lott era.

But this is your chance, Mr. Steele.  Show us what you’ve got.  Take the good ideas from the right – and there are an awful lot of them – and convince us on the rest.

You have a little less than a year before the race to contest Congress heats up again.

Don’t screw up – and by that, I mean “don’t do what the last two rounds of elections have done – whiz on conservatives”.

That is all.

Allison Krauss and the Chieftains doing the traditional “Molly Ban”.

Apropos nothing.

With Nancy Pelosi now firmly esconced in power over these United States, it’s really only a matter of time until Americans will have to confront the notion of civil liberties, European-style; i.e., having them doled out to us by authorities who know best.

Which is bad enough. 

And then you add in “some of those who “know best” really are insane”, and…

…well, you know where I’m going with that.

All by way of introducing a German pol’s novel proposal for raising revenue; building a database of dog doo:

A German lawmaker proposed on Monday a novel and high-tech way of dealing with the menace of dog poo on the streets: DNA testing to identify the canine culprit and fine its owner. Peter Stein, a conservative politician in eastern Germany, told AFP that under his proposal, officials would test the excrement and then match it up to the offending dog using a DNA database of all pooches.German dog owners are fined 30-40 euros (40-50 dollars) if they fail to clean up after their pets, but very few are caught, with only four fines given out in Stein’s hometown of Rostock — human population 200,000 — last year.

“Just saying ‘it wasn’t my dog’ will not wash any more,” Stein said.

On the one hand; I suppose it is one of those things that’d be “reserved to the States” under the Tenth Amendment, technically.  I’ll wait for the SCOTUS case on the subject.

On the other hand – ew.

And on the third hand, five’ll get you ten that maintaining the database will be another of those jobs that “you can’t pay Americans to do”. 

Leave aside the ofay, twee incidental music (for which the show is famous); even moreso, leave try to ignore Ira Glass’ intro to the podcast, which just makes him sound, curiously, very dim and incurious; this week’s This American Life has one of the better, more balanced explanations of the banking crisis I’ve seen anywhere.

That hope that may now become a reality as the American people come to realize what the WSJ observed today…

The dismaying message here is that President Obama’s policies have become part of the economy’s problem.

Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it’s become clear that Mr. Obama’s policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence — and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.

I don’t have time today to elaborate but this picture is worth a thousand syllables…

…and why?

[Jimmy Carter II] has chosen to spend his scarce resources on income transfers rather than growth promotion. Most of his “stimulus” spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest.

The powers in Congress — unrebuked by Mr. Obama — are ridiculing and punishing the very capitalists who are essential to a sustainable recovery.

That’s Change^® you’re going to lose your job over. Hopefully not you – the President.

I confess; I haven’t listened to Joe Soucheray’s radio show in years.  I’m rather uncommon; Joe’s numbers are pretty much carrying KSTP-AM these days.  Let’s just say “Garage Logic” and I don’t click.

But in print?  When Joe’s hot, he’s hot.  

And I’ve rarely seen him better than unpacking the absurdity of the Saint Paul Public Schools’ response to the impending departure of Superintendant Maria Carstarphen.

Do you know how a lot of people — maybe everybody with a kid in the St. Paul schools — got the news that Meria Carstarphen was taking the same job in Austin, Texas?They got an automated phone call, similar to an announcement about snowplowing.

In fact, I bet it was just like a snowplowing call, which meant that it probably went out in a variety of languages. In the announcement, Carstarphen tells of her mixed emotions and her regret and how much progress has been made in St. Paul. I believe it was intended that the recipients of the calls were to understand the burden and the anguish Carstarphen faced in making the tough decision to move to a warmer climate for more money.

The big-school superintendent market, of course, is the real problem here. 

Now, many readers have misunderstood my preoccupation with Carstarphen’s leaving. It’s not that I don’t think Carstarphen has every right in the world to advance to bigger districts and higher salaries. It’s more to the point that we are absolute saps for letting these inmates continue to run the asylum in such wasteful fashion. There is also the inconvenient fact that these bureaucrats are so seemingly insulated from the reality of our current economic conditions.The taxpayers of St. Paul should be outraged that another $50,000 or $100,000 might get spent on a national search that can only result in somebody else being brought in here about whom the exact same things will be said that were said of Carstarphen and are being said about her right now in Austin.

The supers are in an exclusive club. Once they are in the club, it doesn’t make any difference who they are.

Read on for a trip through the money pit that is the SPPS’ 360 Colborne Avenue headquarters.

And the money pit it will stay, no matter who the board “chooses” to fill the slot.

I don’t have many “yuppie” affectations.

One of them I’ll cop to is beer.  I didn’t really start drinking seriously until I went to Europe.  I developed a taste for good beer before I developed a tolerance for crummy beer.  So ever since then, generally, when given a choice between a case of Budweiser and a six-pack of something really, really good for the same price, I’ll take the good beer and drink nice and slow.

Coffee is another.  I never drank coffee – not even when I worked graveyard shift radio (Mountain Dew provided my caffeine back then).  Then I got married to a coffee drinker, and lived across from a Dunn Brothers.  And…wow.  Just…wow.

So to this day, I’ll squeedge out two bucks for a large DunnBros, if I need it.

Takeaway; I can see the point behind some of the “hoity toidy” obsessions some of us have.  I can justify liking the “good stuff” rather than choking down the crummy stuff, when one has it as a responsible option.

That being said, I want to pants this guy just on principle.

I don’t read the “City Pages” all that much – while ten years ago it frequently did better long-form reporting than the dailies, today it’s a glorified college paper/ad handout.

Still, it’s good for the occasional laugh.

We’ve discussed Emily Kaiser before.  She seems to have inherited the political beat from the likes of GR Anderson and Mike Mosedale (themselves guys with, let’s say, opportunities as political reporters and commentators).

And like a lot of inheritances, it’s not working all that well, in this piece entitled “Republicans Don’t Really Like Pawlenty”.  See if you can figure out the problem with that premise before Ms. Kaiser does.  I’ll add emphasis for the benefit of anyone who takes the City Pages seriously:

The Conservative Political Action Committee straw poll must have been a real blow to Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s confidence this weekend. It turns out Republicans don’t like him much. He was seriously beat out by real winners in life: Gov. Bobby Jindal (Kenneth the Page) and Gov. Sarah Palin. That really hurts.

At CPAC’s annual conference Saturday in Washington, Republicans participated in a straw poll of potential 2012 presidential candidates. Pawlenty received just 2 percent of the vote, was second to last, and only beat out Charlie Crist.

Kaiser misses the blazingly obvious, even though she write the answer in black and white.

Emilyi It was the Conservative Political Action Conference!  Not the “Republican Political Action Conference”. Many Republicans are not conservatives.  Many – Chuck Hagel, Jim Ramstad, Ron Erhard, Olympia Snowe – are indistinguishable from Democrats.
And while you, Emily, are a Minnesota liberal who would seem to have trouble telling Arne Carlson apart from Rush Limbaugh, Pawlenty is no doctrinaire conservative.  Oh, he ran to the right to get nominated in 2002; he’s tried, against increasingly long odds, to hold the line on the the DFL’s psychotic spending.

But – and I realize this is tough for you, Emily, who have no doubt been trained to think that Republicans and Conservatives are monochrome thud-wits – Pawlenty is not seen as a movement conservative.

So the “Conservative Political Action Conference” might be expected to vote for…

…what?

Conservatives.

Like Romney and Jindal and Palin, and not the likes of Pawlenty and Crist.

It’s not a sign that Pawlenty’s in trouble with Repblicans.  It’s a sign that he either has to burnish his credentials among conservatives (and I think conservatives sell him short) or hope that there is a sea of disenfranchised moderates out there.

It’s Orwell 101; the authoritarian/totalitarian state has to have an enemy to justify piddling on the Rights of Man.

I know, I know; the left spent the last eight years caterwauling emptily about the same thing – the threat that the War on Terror was just a pretext to gut Americans’ civil liberties.  It’s not to say that the price of Liberty isn’t eternal vigilance; it’s not even to say that the left was crying wolf.

It might seem, though, that they’re projecting a bit.  The Obama Administration is apparently weighing using the US military to help the Mexican military fight the narcotraficantes weighing using the US military to help the Mexican military fight the narcotraficantes that have made northern Mexico as dangerous as Iraq so far this year:

The U.S. military is in a better position to provide Mexico’s military with training, resources and intelligence as its southern neighbor battles deadly drug cartels, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says…”I think we are beginning to be in a position to help the Mexicans more than we have in the past. Some of the old biases against cooperation with our—between our militaries and so on, I think, are being set aside,” Gates said in an interview aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.””It clearly is a serious problem,” he said.

But yes, of course – it’s our civil liberties that are at fault:

A U.S. report has found that weapons in the drug killings are coming from north of the border. Mexican authorities are outgunned by the drug cartels because the criminals are receiving their high-powered arms from the United States, Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday…”They want to clearly stop the guns from the United States going south. We want to stop the drugs coming north,” Emanuel said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “That border is important to us and Mexico is a key ally of ours.”

We’ve called BS on this claim for quite some time; what self-respecting thug would use a measly semi-automatic, civilianized “Assault Weapon” when they can get, for a fraction of the price, fully-automatic weapons from Central American legacy terrorist groups, from the Mexican and other co-opted Latin American militaries, or from gun-merchants who can turn cartel drug money into first-world hardware for the asking.

No, the Administration needs a boogieman.

A domestic, right-wing boogieman.

So, gun owners; are you ready to boogie?

I strongly disapprove of police brutality.

So all I can add to the video Ed runs in this post is that the cops’ defense attorneys had better shoot for a jury of parents of teenagers.

The press is doing its job, asking the Administration the tough questions.

Like How do Michelle Obama’s arms get so fabulous?

The Obama effect has been that women of all ages have been inspired to take responsibility for their health and their body,” said Duggan. “As the first lady of the United States, at 44 years old, and with two young children, Mrs. Obama has shown the world that you are never too busy to take care of yourself and look good doing it too,” he said.

Ooh.  That’ll leave a mark.

And how about that crucial question – what soft drink does the Administration prefer?

Is Pepsi actually the choice of the Obama Administration?

My reporting at the White House suggests the answer is a resounding no. Several senior Administration officials are committed cola drinkers, and without fail they spend their days sipping from a can of Diet Coke, a product of Pepsi’s chief competitor, Coca-Cola.

The American media; “defending freedom” since 2000 until 2008.

Here’s some change for you; Obama has appointed Chaz Freeman, noted CAIR/HAMAS/House of Saud/Fatah upsucker, to head the National Intelligence Council.

Melanie Phillips in the UK Spectator breaks down Freeman’s history, and concludes:

If he is appointed to this new intelligence role, Freeman will shape the intelligence assessments that will tell America, among other things, what threats are posed to America and the free world by the Iranian regime. We already saw, with the misleading and manipulatively spun NIE two years ago which facilitated the demonstrably false conclusion that Iran had stopped working on the bomb – a conclusion almost immediately disproved by further intelligence but which was used to head off action against Iran – how such politicised intel can be used to thwart attempts to stop the Iranian bomb.

With such viciously prejudiced views and such an intimate association with the principal force behind the Sunni division of the Islamic jihad, can anyone apart from the west’s gloating Jew-haters doubt that the appointment by America’s 44^th President of Chas W Freeman as chairman of the NIC would be a stunning coup as a weapon in the armoury of the enemies of the Jewish people and the free world?

This will give moral relativism a bad name.

US Bank essentially avoided the mortgage crisis and as such had no need for government bailout dollars. What does their CEO think of the government’s efforts to assist less discerning banking organizations?

While government leaders were well-intentioned in setting up the Troubled Asset Relief Program, it’s a “lousy program,” U.S. Bancorp CEO Richard Davis said at a business leaders forum Tuesday.

U.S. Bank was told, not asked, to participate in the program, which is a Darwinian attempt to “synthesize” weaker banks into stronger banks through consolidation, Davis said at the forum.

The problems with the U.S. Treasury Department’s program are that its goals and rules have changed since its inception last fall, it’s poorly defined and it’s caused collateral damage to healthy banks.

Davis said he would be “darned” if Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank would suffer collateral damage from the government’s “sloppy attempt at nationalizing the [banking] industry.”

No, that doesn’t sound like Socialism at all.

Source Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal

The last couple of weeks have seen big news in the local talkradio community – albeit for very different reasons.

This week, former KSTP host and cult object Tom Mischke will start an internet-based talk show, affiliated with formerly-readable boutique freebie ‘zine The City Pages.

David Brauer at the MinnPost writes:

Of course, Tommy Mischke is a rare bird; for two decades on KSTP-AM, he somehow blended content and advertising in a way that generated fierce listener and advertiser loyalty. But when Mischke was fired from AM1500 and disowned commercial radio, few thought he could replace his radio income on the Internet.

Without getting into specifics, let’s just say he did amazingly well. But it didn’t happen without help from a much-mocked legacy medium: print.

Internet advertising alone wouldn’t pay the freight for a 2-4 p.m. weekday show (beginning March 4 at citypages.com). But advertisers did pony up enough for a print-web combo that Mischke secured a one-year deal. He’ll also do a weekly column in the paper.

The benefit for City Pages? It was able to get around a corporate hiring freeze because most costs were covered on Day One, and its reps now have a new selling opportunity.

To someone who’s been in media, off and on, for most of his adult life, it’s a bit of a departure.  In traditional entertainment media, the “owner” of the show bets long – produces and airs a program (including hiring and, indirectly or directly, paying the air and support talent) based on the potential for ratings and the money they might bring.

Mischke’s model is different; he’s bringing his advertisers – some of his big backers from his long-running KSTP show – with him.

Will it work in the long term?  Does internet narrowcasting draw enough ears to make it work?  Has the City Pages – a fairly pathetic shell of its former self, journalistically speaking – got the mojo to serve as the fiscal and demograhic bedrock for a cult figure like Mischke?

Given the singular history and qualities of its namesake, the “Mischke Model” may be tough to replicate, and its long-term success remains unknown. But it does show how old and new media can be woven together. The Strib, PiPress — hell, the local edition of the Onion — might’ve pulled this off. Perhaps they can rig up something like it.

Perhaps they can – yes, indeed.  We’ll come back to that.

I am, of course, a big Mischke fan.  I’m a fan, of course, because he’s a real original, wildly creative, and just plain fun to listen to.

For a good chunk of the Twin Cities intelligentsia, of course – the likes of Garrison Keillor, Brian Lambert and, if I may be so bold, David Brauer – Mischke is more than that.  He’s a thumb in the eye of the “establishment” in talk radio, standing defiantly against the tide of conservative programs. And in some respects, I can even go along with that; while I disagree with whatever politics Mischke likely believes, I much preferred “The Mischke Broadcast” to the likes of Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck; Mischke clobbered the lesser ranks of conservative hosts in all ways that matter to the likes of Keillor, Lambert, Brauer – that is, everything but ratings and revenue.
“But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the play?”

Brauer’s point seems to be that to get anything “interesting” on “the air”, one needs to get creative.  Outlets like City Pages are floundering; shows like Mischke’s, long KSTP run notwithstanding, have always been fish out of water in the radio industry.

And there might be something to that.  Outlets like the Pioneer Press might do well to ally themselves with other media outlets; a content and advertising alliance between, say, the Pioneer Press, AM1280, and one or more internet content and video operations (like “The Uptake” and “True North”, to pick out some random examples) would provide some interesting cross-media possibilities, not only for advertising and opinion content but – cue the drum roll – journalism.

So, if you take Brauer’s piece at face value, it’d seem that “interesting”, “creative” media’s future is going to depend on a concerted do it yourself effort.

Unless – Brauer doesn’t go into this in his piece on Mischke – you operate in a format that’s actually succeeding, even despite the current advertising economy.

Salem Radio Network’s ad inventory is reportedly pretty well sold out.   Rush Limbaugh’s salary is greater than the Paraguayan military budget. And long-time local radio fixture Jason Lewis is, as of last week, in the big show: That’s worth a separate article.

Anyway, the lesson – as filtered through the lens of the “progressive” “alternative” media, is this:  the current media landscape requires creativity to survive.  Unless you’re a huge success, in which case we ignore it all.

First things first; congrats to the MinnPost’s David Brauer on having his first ambulance ride end fairly benignly.

And yes – it is certainly a small world. Brauer called an ambulance after experiencing shortness of breath and chest pains:

The Minneapolis fire guys were there immediately; their quick read of my vitals didn’t scream heart attack. A minute or so later, the ambulance crew was on the scene. After being appraised of my non-demise, the crew’s paramedic asked me a question I wasn’t expecting:

“Hey David, do you recognize me?”

He did look vaguely familiar.

“Duke Powell.”

I laughed even though it hurt.

Although we’ve never met face-to-face, Duke and I are Twitter friends. Via @dbrauer, I follow him at @dukepowell.

The saga, to an extent, did play out on Twitter over the weekend.  Duke is a longtime friend of this blog, a former GOP representative from the Burnsville area who lost a heartbreaker of a race in 2006.

Burnsville’s loss is the first-responder profession’s gain, of course, as Brauer found:

Of course, politics doesn’t matter much when you’re strapped to a gurney and wheeled through the snow. But it was definitely reassuring to have a member of my social network be part of my survival network…Duke expertly threaded my IV (the nurses would later marvel at the precision), gave me the short course on nitroglycerin (a precaution; headaches approaching) and kept it light but not unprofessional. In short, his actions buttressed the trust we’d already established.

Brauer waxes just a tad philosophical:

Our politics are as different as can be (Duke was a conservative Republican legislator from Burnsville), but we’re both Coleman-Franken junkies. For some reason, Twitter has been a place where lefties and righties can actually talk to each other; perhaps it’s because the medium is young, or you pick who you follow.

There’s something to that – although Minnesota is blessed with many forums where people can talk across the aisle:  the Northern Alliance Radio Network earned kudos from Mayor Rybak for our interview with him; the MDE/MNPublius Happy Hour last summer was a lot of fun.  And this Saturday’s MOB party should be like all previous ones; a fun, utterly civil time for everyone involved.

Oh, yeah – there’s more good news; Duke’s finally blogging:

If you want to read Duke’s version, check out his new Ambulance Driver blog. I’m Patient #5 on Feb. 27. Don’t worry; Duke doesn’t violate patient confidentiality here — I’m the one outing myself.

Hope both Brauer and Powell can show up on Saturday, and re-enact the scene – substituting Guinness for the nitro, natch.

As I noted earlier, free-lance journalist, former NPR reporter/Miss North Dakota/Fargo North alum Roxana Saberi is being held incommunicado in Iran.

Ed at Hot Air notes:

This puts Barack Obama’s “smart power” foreign policy to the test. If Saberi’s case gets a lot of attention, the State Department will feel the pressure to get her released. This happened a few times during the Bush administration, which succeeded in all but one case to gain the release of arrested Americans.

Of course, Congress is frequently the engine of the “attention” that needs to be paid.  What is the position of NoDak’s two Senators, arch-liberal Obama supporters Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan?

There was a time we could have counted on Norm Coleman to be a voice for justice in these cases.  God willing, we will again.

Where is Amy Klobuchar, figuratively (and where is Al Franken, literally)?  Do either of our Senators/would-be Senators have the falafel to smack down the mullahs?