An assembled multitude of area bloggers and, like, actual friends and relatives were present, and in some cases live-blogging, the the first blogger wedding I’m actually aware of, between Ben “Hammerschwing” Worley and Faith “Mall Diva” Stewart, today.
All the best to the Worleys!
And here’s hoping the father of the bride, John “Night Writer” Stewart, recovers soon.
Governor Pawlenty’s discipline is tutelage for Republicans everywhere.
Congressional Republicans — the ones who got tossed because of their embrace of spending and earmarks — might start looking for a message up north. Fiscal responsibility? “It is the fundamental tenet of our party, and the conservative coalition more broadly,” says Mr. Pawlenty, nicely. “If we don’t have that, we are nothing.”
If Republicans are looking to get back their conservative groove, they could do worse than study Minnesota’s budget brawl. Mr. Pawlenty deftly (and amusingly) outmaneuvered his Democratic opposition, not only saving his state from huge tax increases but clearing the way to cut government spending. Call it a refreshing break from the financial-crisis norm.
While liberal TV ads equate fairness with sticking it to the “rich”…
…Mr. Pawlenty kept voicing three simple principles. “Number one, we must have [because of the constitution] and should have a balanced budget,” he told me. “Number two, the state government needs to live within its means, just like everybody else. Number three, we shouldn’t raise taxes in the worst recession in 60 years.” Minnesota already has one of the highest tax burdens in the nation.
While in Washington, Comrade Obama increases the Federal Government and National Debt at unprecedented speed…
this will be one of the first times in modern Minnesota history that the state will reduce the size of government in real terms, not just slow its rate of growth. “The correlation in recent history has been between job growth and states that have reasonable government cost structures,” he says. These cuts, he says, will position Minnesota to take advantage of the recovery when it comes.
A Crisis Not Wasted™ indeed, Governor.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 11AM-5PM.
(All times Central)
So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:
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(Title: Bruuuuuce)
Start the death-watch on the Midway’s long, hard-fought revival; pre-construction work for the “Central Corridor” began today:
Crews have started spray-painting and chalking symbols and numbers on streets and utility poles to guide workers when they start ripping up pavement as early as next month.
Real construction — laying the rails and building the stations — won’t start until next summer at the earliest.
So long, Midway based around a relatively vibrant University Avenue. So long, Frogtown, saved once-upon-a-time by the raw, naked capitalism of a couple generations worth of plucky immigrants. It’s been nice knowing the both of you.
It’s for the children!
It’s for the children!
It’s for the children!
It’s for the children!
It’s for the children…
Lost in among the rest of the news this past week was an amendment to a bill full of regulations on credit cards by Tom Coborn which, when signed, will allow legal carry pemit holders to carry their firearms in national parks.
Though it’s mired in a bill that is otherwise full of miserably bad ideas, the amendment would allow people who are demonstrably law-abiding citizens (the only kind that can get shall-issue permits) to do in national parks pretty much the same thing they do everywhere else in our society; nothing out of the ordinary. In the states nationwide that allow civilian carry (currently all but Wisconsin and Kansas), and especially the 40 “shall issue” states (where the burden is on the state to prove that a citizen can’t have a permit), permittees pretty much cause zero crime and create zero problems (inevitably, after lefty politicians, reading off the scripts the gun-control victim disarmament lobby give them, predict gore in the streets).
There is, after all, a reason that of the 32 states that have passed “Shall Issue” laws since 1983, none have repealed it via legislative action (and only Minnesota’s was overturned, on a picayune administrative technicality by an intellectually-dishonest judge, giving us a one-year gap before the legislature swept up the judge’s mess).
Of course, my “representative”, Betty McCollum, is not one to let facts, evidence, and twenty years of statistics get in her way. When blinkered ideology demands, she is right there, waiting to Mbark out the talking points on cue, like a trained ideological seal. Paul Schmelzer describes her reaction over at the Minnesoros “Independent“:
The language of Coburn’s amendment stated that the rule would “protect innocent Americans from violent crime in national parks and refuges.”
But Minnesota Democrat McCollum characterized the amendment as “a political game played at the expense of millions of families who will visit our national parks seeking enjoyment, recreation, and peace.” She continued:
“This is a shameful example of the failure of the legislative process and I would urge President Obama to veto the Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights and send it back to Congress to take the guns out. What rationale is there for the need to carry a concealed weapon on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial?
Actually, McCollum is asking the wrong question reciting the wrong question, from the notes handed to her by one astroturf anti-gun group or another. The real question, in the wake of last year’s re-affirmation in the Supreme Court’s Heller decision that the Second Amendment is a right “of the people”, is “what rationale is there to prevent people who are demonstrably two orders of magnitude more law-abiding than the average citizen from exercising their legal, licensed right?”
The only rationale can be for politicians to score political points with the NRA.
Not that that’s true, but to the extent that there’s accuracy in the statement – that pols need to beware of the NRA – then good. The more the merrier.
Our national parks are treasures. They don’t need to be protected by random people carrying loaded, concealed weapons around millions of vacationing families.”
One wonders if McCollum even has a conscience; she lies so fluently.
“Rep.” McCollum; concealed carry permit holders are not “random people”. They are people who have passed background checks, taking skills courses, and are quite demonstrably better, more law-abiding, more trustworthy, more stable than 99% (literally) of your constituents.
Speaking of lopsided margins (emphasis added to the Mindy story by yours truly):
The [original credit-card bill] was divided into two parts in a parliamentary maneuver. [Senator] Coburn’s amendment passed the House by a 279 to 147 margin, and the credit card reform bill passed on a separate 361 to 64 vote. In the Senate, the combined bill passed by a 90 to 5 vote.
Betty McCollum: Liar? Puppet? Lying Puppet?
It was Monday, May 22, 1989.
I woke up late at about the usual time, probably 9 or 10. I’d been working late the night before, at “Wallaby’s”, a horrible bar stuck under a strip mall in Columbia Heights.
Since I’d moved into the little upper duplex, life had gotten less eventful. Living without an addict in the house was a whole lot less crisis-prone.
But there wasn’t a whole lot going on to fill the time, either. My week pretty much ran like this:
And that was about it.
The routine during the day? Most days, it involved jumping on my bike and riding. I rode all over the metro. 20-30 miles a day, back in the day before there were bike paths and bike lanes all over the place. I’d ride whichever way the wind told me to; if the wind were blowing from the west, I’d ride west, across the Lowry Bridge, over to Wirth Park, and off into some maze of northwest-suburban streets or another; I’d have the wind behind me on the way home. I had no goal or destination, really; I’d just ride.
Whiling away the time.
The band thing had sort of tailed off again; Bill the Drummer had started drinking again, and gotten depressed about the prospects, and I just walked away. Again.
But it was a beautiful morning.
And so I rode.
Scott Johnson gives Obama’s National Archives speech the death of a thousand cuts, where the “thousand cuts” are administered by a jackhammer:
Where was the brilliant Lincolnian rhetoric Professor Goldsmith finds in Obama’s deep thoughts? Where the Rooseveltian diplomacy? Perhaps it was in the ascription of irrational “fear” to the Bush administration and “foresight” to himself that Obama ascended the heights Goldsmith finds in Obama’s musings. Professor Goldsmith, is this what you were talking about?
Read the whole thing.
The Congressional Budget Office notes that while Obama may be a “lightworker”, the miracle seems to be slow coming to the economy. The unemployment rate is suppposed . to keep on climbing through…well, the 2010 mid-terms:
The growth in output later this year and next year is likely to be sufficiently weak that the unemployment rate will probably continue to rise into the second half of next year and peak above 10 percent,” CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf said in prepared testimony to the U.S. House Budget Committee.It will likely take several years for the unemployment rate to fall back to levels seen before the recession hit, in the neighborhood of 5 percent, he said in the prepared remarks.
Whew. Good thing the Dems are jacking up taxes, or goodness knows how long a recovery might take.
(Via Gary)
Everyone, myself included, has a list of the things the GOP needs to do to repair itself an the nation.
J Ewing, writing at True North, correctly notes that it may be just as important to have a list of things to undo:
I propose that the most positive and effective message Republicans can have for the 2010 election is “The Undo List.” This would be similar to a Contract with America, but would consist only of those things in which Democrats have overreached, and tried to solve the problems created by big government with even bigger government intrusions. If it were to be announced immediately, it could even be effective during debate on these issues, demonstrating to Democrats that “the people” do not agree with their proposals and will punish them at the polls for their perfidy. Democrats HATE that, even more than they hate to cut spending… ever.
We will never “get our country back” until we can undo what the Left has done to us over the last many years, and that will require Republicans to field candidates, at all levels, with the political courage to oppose our socialist drift (now a tide) AND the political power to undo it, one piece at a time.
The list could be as long as the federal budget.
Heck – the list could be the federal budget.
Last night: Went to bed. At ten PM.
That is all.
Minnesota’s Gang Strike Force is temporarily shutting down due to, er, irregularities:
Commissioner Michael Campion also said he will hire a former federal prosecutor and former FBI agent to investigate the agency, and will restart the funding only when he is sure the problems are fixed.Legislative Auditor James Nobles said the missing cash adds up to more than $18,000. Thirteen cars are also missing.
Read the whole thing; it shows what happens when government gets too much power. For example – Bill Clinton’s property-forfeiture laws?
The report found that a member of the strike force sold a seized flatscreen TV to a student worker for $30. The TV had to be recovered when the original owner asserted his legal right to get it back.
Joel Rosenberg has a fictional(ized) conversation with Public Safety czar Michael Campion on the subject:
“You called me, Mike. Don’t interrupt so. As I was saying . . . if I had to guess, a real thorough investigation would exonerate a bunch of guys, and might just convict a few. I dunno. But, either way, it would do something to persuade people that you really want to get to the bottom of this, and not apply a slow-rolled coat of youknowwhat. And cover up your tipping off the perps, and all. ”
“Yeah. I see your point. Get to the bottom of it, even though we screwed up by announcing the investigation before we preserved the evidence.”
“Yup. Admit the screwup, do your best, clear the innocent and arrest the folks you’ve got reason to think are guilty . . . and let the system handle it while you move on. Glad you called?”
“Not really.”
“Didn’t think so.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to help, Mike. Really. But, relax, it’s not like there’s any proof that they shredded — “
*click*
Read the whole thing; fictional though it is, it reports the details behind the story better than anyone in the mainstream media…
When it comes to writing about the overweening nannystate, some posts write themselves.
For example – reading this story, it was almost impossible to resist referring to “Fashion Police” in the headline:
The “Too Much Bling? Give Us a Ring” campaign is the latest initiative by Gloucestershire police to lower the crime rate by cracking down on criminals who live in the lap of luxury as result of their crimes, the Daily Mail reported.
The police also urge residents to report anyone seemingly driving cars or buying items they shouldn’t be able to afford amid a credit crunch.
“In the current time of financial uncertainty, those who live a lavish lifestyle with no discernable, legitimate income become even more apparent,” Gloucestershire’s Chief constable Dr. Timothy Brain told the Mail.
Out-of-control leftism depends on turning citizens against each other – essentially deputizing all of us to become little junior spies, checking up on each other for the government. And of course, having us all know that our neighbors are checking up on us, lest we forget.
To: Minnesota D”F”L
From: Mitch Berg, keen analyst of satire.
Re: Dayton’s showing
Dear DFL,
Please, please please – take these results and run with them for next year. I beg of you.
Former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton comes closest to out-polling Gov. Tim Pawlenty in a theoretical match-up in the 2010 governor’s contest, according to a new SurveyUSA poll commissioned by KSTP (Channel 5).
I hereby promise I’ll give $50 to ACORN or International ANSWER or the Comintern or the Symbionese Liberation Army or whatever charity you folks are supporting these days if you please, please run with this poll.
Thank you.
That is all.
Back in high school, I had a friend who, while driving home from her boyfriend’s place on some dark, dank, country road around dusk one night, made a left turn onto a side road.
Through inexperience, bad luck, poor road design or the glare of the sunset, she didn’t see the truck barrelling up the road straight at her as she made the turn. She was killed instantly – about as instantly as it gets, as luck’d have it, not that that made her parents feel any better.
Was she “stupid?” Unlucky? Did she guess wrong, or just plain miss the oncoming truck? We don’t know. The driver was never cited, and no fault was ever really ascertained as I recall because, really, did it matter anymore?
Question: Is it a good thing she never got to “breed?”
The tragedy hit me hard back then. And since I’ve had kids of my own, I’m even more keenly aware of how fragile life is. Bad things happen – frequently to people whose only “stupidity” is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And when those bad things happen, someone – a father, some kids, a girlfriend – get left behind.
I haven’t laughed about an accident, even a genuinely stupid one, since I had kids.
———-
I digress. But not really.
I’ve never really understood “conservatives'” antipathy toward bikers – and by “bikers”, I mean people who ride bikes. Lots of conservatives ride. I ride a lot from the beginning of April until it gets just too cold; it’s my main commute to work, and it’s one of my favorite weekend diversions, when weather permits.
Leaving aside that it’s a lot of fun, and it’s just about the best outdoor cardio exercise there is, especially for people who are past their mid-twenties and have the knees to show for it, there are a lot of good free market reasons to bike. It’s inexpensive. It saves you money on gas, maintenance, healthcare and taxes, since we’re cutting out miles of government gas taxes as we ride.
Some, like Jason Lewis, complain wrongly that we are getting a free ride. Its untrue of course; gas taxes go mostly to highways, and most biking is done on city streets. Which we pay through various city taxes, including property taxes, which I assure you I most definitely pay. Indeed, given that all other things being equal we pay the same city/county taxes as everyone else, and inflict vastly less wear and tear on the roads than our car-driving neighbors, it’s not unreasonable to say that all other things being equal we pay more taxes on the applicable roads than the rest of you (and that ignored the fact that most of us drive as well).
So it’s all you motorized freeloaders who need to step lightly around the rest of us.
And yes, I know – bikes are identified with a lot of lefty excesses; smug greenies wave their bikes in the rest of society’s faces with gay abandon. “Critical Mass” has turned into an excercise in group arrogance, and would be well dispensed with.
But the fact is, a bike – like a gun – is nothing more than a tool. It’s the rider that counts.
———-
At any rate, a rider was killed yesterday morning in Minneapolis. By a turning semi. While riding (the nerve of the guy) in a dedicated bike lane.
Stuff happens. Sometimes the accidents come to you. Urban biking requires immense care; experienced city bikers have eyes on the backs of their heads, and are not the ones you see riding around with IPods stuck in their ears. The old drill sergeant aphorism is true; anything you do can kill you, and anything you don’t do can kill you. When you’re a city biker, you are always one missed signal, one inattentive driver, one moron in a Jeep trying to reset his CD player or groping for a cell phone, one overly-wide turn, away from being a grease stain; you are only as safe as the sum of the dumbest driver around you and the speed of your own reflexes allow you to be. If you’re smart, you ride very defensively, avoiding dangerous streets (I cringe as I drive down University or Snelling watching people trying to ride in traffic), and places with particularly dangerous traffic.
Especially semis.
Tracy Eberly at the short-for-this-world Anti-Strib quoted the Strib article on the accident verbatim, adding only two editorial elements of his own; the title (“Weeding Out The Stupid“) and the tag (“I Hope He Didn’t Breed”). The victim, unfortunately, was named Donald Dumm. I know nothing about the late Mr. Dumm – his background, his experience at city biking, his knowledge of his route, and least of all his politics. I don’t know if he was riding carefully or not (he was in a bike lane), or whether he took a dumb chance.
I do know, though, that when Tony Snow – former talk show host, White House spokesman and all-around class act – died of cancer a few years ago, a horde of suet-brained leftybloggers partied like it was 1999, acting as if Hitler or, worse, Cheney himself had passed, and drawing glee from it. And I ripped on them for being, really, inhuman.
Leftyblogger and biker Charlie Quimby – who’s never been mistaken for a drooling Kossack – responded to Tracy yesterday.
Tracy is being extremely stupid and insensitive, but I don’t think he deserves to die for it.
Don’t know if I’ll go word for word with Charlie, but in for a penny, in for a pound; Mr. Dumm had friends, a family, a life, and his death – through circumstances that look to have been the kind of sudden, uncontrollable crisis that kills thousands of car drivers a year who pass without the benefit of anyone grabbing a cheap chuckle at their death – isn’t the stuff of cheap comedy.
Especially political comedy.
Especially political comedy that is just plain wrong.
Look – I’ve defended Anti-Strib when nobody else would; during the “Dirt Worshipping Heathens” fracas, I took Tracy’s side against drooling crank Karl Bremer and the bought-and-paid-for Steve Perry and their horde of anonymous, lead-paint-chip guzzling leftyblog droogs. And I’d do it again. Because, more often than not, Tracy’s right.
But one of the most important tenets of conservatism is that of the worth of the individual, as opposed to the class, label or group. When we start focusing on group labels – “Bushie” or “Cyclist” or “wingnut” or whatever – over individuals, we lose. We become like “the enemy”.
And it wouldn’t matter if Dennis Dumm, God rest his soul, were an ACORN worker who was singing “The Internationale” and smacked into the truck because he was laughing at that funny “Somewhere in Texas, a Village is missing an Idiot” bumpersticker yet again.
One of the great joys of spring and summer in Minnesota is our small proliferation of restaurants with patios.
So I”m glad to see that the PiPress’ list of the top 25 restaurant patios includes:
Moscow on the Hill, 371 Selby Ave., St. Paul; 651-291-1236; moscowonthehill.com: This Russian restaurant’s enclosed patio is one of the best-kept secrets
Because, doy, it’s enclosed. But the Cathedral Hill joint is one of the great joys of life in Saint Paul in the summer.
Of course, not all is well. One of the real signal joys of life in Minneapolis – Keegans Pub’s smoking patio, out back – is under attack from city bureaucrats who want to assess fees on summer-only seating as if it were indoor, year-around real estate. It’s a bald-faced attempt to shut down the cigar patio, and it’s further evidence that Minneapolis is a deeply stupid city.
More on that story coming shortly.
Again – as I predicted, the DFL will try to make the “case” against Governor Pawlenty’s budget cuts by framing it as scary, scary stuff, while ignoring the immense amount of waste pork and patronage that is just begging to be clear-cut from the budget.
Dave Mindemann at mnpACTed! delivers, true to form:
So, let it be his. We will have to take the pain but maybe the citizens of this state will get the real picture once and for all. As the hospitals close, rural areas lose health care facilities, nursing homes cut back, state employees join the welfare rolls, more people lose health insurance, building projects get scrapped… maybe then the voters will fully understand what they have gotten.
Perhaps, but probably not the way folks like Mindemann, the DFL and the mainstream media (pardon the serial redundancy) think they will.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to think back to 1989. We had hospitals. Rural areas had health care. Old folks had nursing homes. State employees managed support themselves (with good reason, since we were a high tax, high “service” state back then, too); people had health insurance; stuff got built.
And as the prosperity of the Nineties (thanks, Reagan and Gingrich!) switched Minnesota’s economy to “puree”, we had years of higher-than-projected tax receipts, leading to surpluses. Which serial DFL legislatures turned into more permanent spending.
So when Carlson left office, the budget had doubled. But we still had hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, insurance and schools.
Right?
And then the four years of the Ventura Administration, which started with epic surpluses. Which were mostly converted to more permanent spending. Until the recession of ’01, when the prosperity gravy train (for government) ended.
But even at that time, we had hospitals, schools, clinics, state workers buying houses and cars and not living out of boxes – the works.
So far so good?
And in the past six years, the budget has not shrunk; it’s risen, through good times and bad. Slower, now, perhaps, but it’s still by any standards a huge friggin’ budget, compared to 20 years ago.
And so yes, Dave Mindemann; the people of Minnesota might just wonder “why am I paying vastly more in taxes now than 20 years ago, and getting the same “services”, and being threatened with losing the “basics” even as I pay more and more and more at all levels of government taxation?
The DFL chooses to try to terrorize Minnesotans into submission. This state is the world’s largest case of Stockholm Syndrome.
…and I overslept just a tad. But I did need the sleep.
Blogging light until this afternoon.
I remember discussing the Obama/ACORN link, and some of the allegations against ACORN, before and immediately after the election – and especially after allegations surfaced that ACORN was going to directly and indirectly benefit from Porkulus – and being told “There’s just no story!”. (“Told” was, let’s just say, a nice way of putting it – it was usually more of a “sneer”).
And I’d look at the evidence on the one hand, and see and hear what I was being told on the other, and wonder – why don’t these people think this is a problem?
I realized it when I read this bit the other day; when the New York Times claims that it’s “All The News That’s Fit To Print”, American lefties just take that very, very literally; if it doesn’t appear in the NYTimes, then it must not be news:
Acknowledging what the blogosphere has known for weeks, the New York Times finally went on record to admit that just before last Election Day it killed a politically sensitive news story involving corruption allegations that might have made the Obama campaign look bad.
But the admission on Sunday, which came seven months after NYT staff reporter Stephanie Strom’s reporting about possibly illegal coordination between the Obama campaign and ACORN last year, took the form of a snarky column from Clark Hoyt, the Old Gray Lady’s “public editor.” Hoyt used the word “nonsense” to describe the allegations of impropriety leveled against ACORN and the Obama campaign.
Read the whole thing.
And observe the pattern,which follows Bill Clinton’s old pattern for dealing with issues; Deny, Delay, Destroy (or at least Denigrate). It’s a pattern every lefty, in the media and politics, big and small (remember how the Minnesoros Monitor/”Independent” reacted to allegations they were on George Soros’ payroll? delays, denials and, finally, snark?).
Eventually America will get tired of getting led, and informed, by a pack of ethical greased-pigs who learned english from Jon Stewart.
Won’t they?
Ya gotta have faith.
Yesterday, amid my Fearless Predictions about the aftermath of this session at the Legislature, I called it:
Threats from cities to lay off cops and firemen (leaving city garbage collectors, administrators, civil rights commissioners, convention planners, community planning organizers, planning/policy wonks and layer upon layer of other bureaucrats unmentioned and untouched, because people don’t get scared into writing their legislatores to demand tax hikes to protect any of those jobs).
In other words, the DFL’s line will be pass our budget or life as we know it will cease to exist!
This morning at MNPublius, Jeff Rosenberg puts my prediction in the money:
Tim Pawlenty said there would be no special session and no government shutdown. But what he meant was that there would be no official shutdown. Under his slice-and-dice plan, our government will slowly stop functioning. Hospitals will shut down or begin refusing service. Schools will go without billions of dollars are funds are “shifted” away from them. Cities and counties will raise property taxes and curtail most services.
(“Cities and counties will raise property taxes and curtail most services?” In related news, Best Buy will raise prices but refuse to let you walk out the door with your product? WTH?)
Leaving aside the reality that at complete government shutdown that led to a re-funding of government on a purely skeleton level that kept only essential services [*] functioning would probably be a very, very good thing for Minnesota, especially if it became permanent, let’s be honest here; the scenario is just not true. Government has plenty of money – way too much, in fact. They just didn’t get the increases they wanted, and they didn’t get to fund more increases by raising taxes.
It’s time to call the Dems on their fearmongering. At the polls, of course.
[*] Note to Metro city governments: most of us define “essential services” as police, fire departments and courts. As opposed to, say, planning offices and convention bureaux and civil rights offices. Just saying.
“See? Look! Obama is a great president! The Dow is rallying!”
Right. In the same say that your family’s economy “rallies” when someone gives you another credit card. Government – governments around the world, really – Aare printing money faster than “Twilight” novels.
I’m not buying shares if that’s what you mean. Not at all,” Rogers told “Squawk Box Asia.””The bottom will probably come later this year, next year, who knows when,” he added.
Governments have not solved the essential problems that caused the crisis but instead they “flooded the world with money,” according to Rogers. Trying to solve the problem of too much consumption and too much debt with more consumption “defies belief” and will not work, he said.
“I mean … you give me 5 or 6 trillion dollars, I’ll show you a very good time, there’s no question about that,” Rogers said.
Indeed, dropping five or six trillion dollars from airplanes over the country would probably do the world a lot more long-term good than the government’s plan – if you could find enough planes to haul that much money.
So, other than that whole “pro-infanticide speaker at a “Catholic” institution” bit, how was President Obama’s speech?
Father Richard Landry on Cthe full theological ghastliness of Obama’s address:
The most audacious part of the address was when the President tried to change the meaning of the Christian faith and draw erroneous conclusions from the false notion. “The ultimate irony of faith,” the president declared, “is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen.” He seemed to be quoting from Hebrews 11:1, one of the most famous definitions of faith found in Sacred Scripture, but, whether intentional or not, he got its meaning completely wrong. The passage reads, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith is not a “belief” in things not seen — which would be tautological and nonsensical — but the “substance” or “evidence” of things not seen. Faith leads not to doubt, nor merely to subjective conviction, but to objective truth discoverable through revelation and grace.
The whole thing is worth a read.
The dominant sentiment among Minnesota’s left (expressed in this case by the estimable Bob Collins via Twitter – and I am not lumping Collins in with “Minnesota’s left”, per se, by the way, but he happens to express the sentiment more concisely than most) is that Minnesota is a messed-up state (sometimes with the qualification that it’s still a great place to be,anyway.
Of course, what’s “messed up” (think they) is that the GOP didn’t fall meekly into line behind the DFL’s “Crack Whores With Stolen Gold Cards” tax and spend spree. The GOP broke with recent tradition and worked as a caucus to try to act like Republicans are supposed to act.
There was no talk of “compromise” and “bipartisanship” when the DFL was revelling in their supermajority in the Senate, and their almost-veto-proof lead in the house, last fall. No, it’s only when they ran into a governor that’s outmaneuvered them at every turn, who’s not only stuck to his guns but creamed the DFL in doing so, that the “C” word – compromise – has escaped their rusty, creaking jaws.
“Diversity”, “Compromise” and “Reaching Across the Aisle” are things the DFL only values when they are out of power. Which – this is the funny part – they are not. They hold nearly-absolute power in Minnesota; only a governor and a couple of Representives stand in the way of Minnesota becoming another California.
Did I say “California?” Megan McArdle shows us the future of a state that acts like the DFL and their bobbleheads in the regional media want the state to act (emphasis added):
California is completely, totally, irreparably hosed. And not a little garden hose. More like this. Their outflow is bigger than their inflow. You can blame Republicans who won’t pass a budget, or Democrats who spend every single cent of tax money that comes in during the booms, borrow some more, and then act all surprised when revenues, in a totally unprecedented, inexplicable, and unforeseaable chain of events, fall during a recession. You can blame the initiative process, and the uneducated voters who try to vote themselves rich by picking their own pockets. Whoever is to blame, the state was bound to go broke one day, and hey, today’s that day!
That emphasized bit- does it sound familiar? Like, exactly what the DFL does whenever there’s a “Surplus?” Turn windfalls into permanent spending, and then whine about deficits when the windfalls go away?
“Messed-up?” No. The fact that we have an opposition, that our government’s dominant party has to compromise, that the (current) electoral minority in this state is protected – is a strength. It’s a strength. It is a saving grace of this state.
The good news: Ted Kennedy’s brain cancer is in remission. This is a good thing; I join with all credible conservatives in wishing Senator Kennedy the best.
The bad news?
[H]e is expected back in the Senate after the Memorial Day recess to spearhead healthcare reform, according to Democratic colleagues.
Seriously, Ted. Get some rest.
Now that theLegislature has adjourned without the DFL majority’s budget passed, and with Governor Pawlenty promising to use the line-item veto to unallot the budget back into balance, look for the following:
And if all of the above haven’t happened by the end of the day today, I’ll rhetorically eat my hat. Or would, if I owned any.
Doug Williams goes after Paul Krugman’s latest:
Krugman is not an idiot. And yet anyone from quick-thinking geniuses to nose-picking morons knew exactly what Krugman’s opinion was going to be about any issue for the past eight years – his opinion was the opposite of whatever the Bush administration supported. Krugman substituted a reliably pure strain of reactionism for thoughtful commentary and bleated it with all the gusto of an agitated sheep. Only now that scary Republicans do not inhabit the land’s highest offices does he feel free again to flex his long neglected thinking parts.
Without getting into a whole “the media is biased” diatribe, this is the problem when media classes turn into left-right cliques. Krugman spent the last eight years in blind, unthinking opposition, and probably made himself more popular because of it. The lefties didn’t want to hear careful thought about a Republican administration. They wanted their smart people to give them smart sounding justifications for their automatic opposition to everything that administration attempted. Krugman more than happily danced to that tune. The fact that this schtick works just as well for right-leaning pundits doesn’t change the basic point – it’s a fundamentally anti-intellectual approach to punditry. Rather than using reason to determine one’s opinion, the opinion comes first and reason is used simply to justify it after the fact.
Read the whole thing.
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