Leave aside for a moment the question of whether Porkulus is actually going to help or hurt the economy; for purposes of discussion, let’s say it’ll “help”, in the long term (and, equally plausible, let’s presume I’m going to be squiring Scarlett Johannsen around down this weekend).

Let’s also presume, for a moment, that the individual states have both the responsibility and the right (according to the Tenth Amendment) to set their own budgets and run their own business.

So should the government be holding up the “good” of the stimulus because  a state is balancing its budget by cutting pay for union workers?  As opposed to, say, firing them all?:

The Obama administration is threatening to rescind billions of dollars in federal stimulus money if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers do not restore wage cuts to unionized home healthcare workers approved in February as part of the budget.

Schwarzenegger’s office was advised this week by federal health officials that the wage reduction, which will save California $74 million, violates provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Failure to revoke the scheduled wage cut before it takes effect July 1 could cost California $6.8 billion in stimulus money, according to state officials.

The World Health Organization is half right.  We have an pandemic of Pork Flu in this country.

It was 1940.  Britain had been tossed from the continent, leaving most of its equipment behind in France.  It was facing an imminent invasion, and was being choked off from supplies from the outside world by the German submarine offensive.

Britain needed weapons.  It needed ’em fast. And it needed ’em cheap.

And so the “Sten” gun – the Saturday Night Special of submachine guns – was designed.

The Sten – named after its designers, Shepard and Turpin, and its factory, the Enfield works – must have been kicked off by Scots.  It was not only designed to be ruthlessly cheap to build (the Mark 2 shown above, similar to the one I shot many many years ago, cost $11 in 1944 dollars to manufacture), but designed to be fed by captured ammunition that no other Brit firearm used (the Brits had captured immense stockpiles of 9mm ammunition from the Italians in North Africa; British pistols of the day used a .38 caliber round).

It was a cheap expedient that jammed constantly. And it was light enough that the recoil of the 9mm round and the bucking of the bolt back and forth in the receiver made it extremely difficult to control when firing full automatic (which was,with the Mark II, the only option).

And yet it was a symbol; that the ingenuity of Democracies would find a way to muddle through in the face of fascism.

And it’s a hoot to shoot, too.  Not especially because of any redeeming qualities of its own; I believe the old saying is “the worst full-auto shooting is more fun than the best semi-auto”.

Or something like that.

There are really two stories in the recent Gallup Poll that shows Americans are throwing out the orc Koolaid on gun control.

One is the immediately-presenting one; Americans are growing beyond supporting gun control

Recent polls show shrinking support for new gun control measures and strong public sentiment for enforcing existing laws instead. So strong is the shift in public opinion that a proposed assault-weapons ban — once backed by three in four Americans — now rates barely one in two.

And actual “support” will be lower than that; the support for gun control has always been “a mile wide and an inch deep”, extending to “answering surveys”. When asked for specifics about bans, or informed about inconvenient truths (like “assault weapon” is a meaningless, political term), support drops markedly.  And membership in the NRA has always outstripped that of all victim disarmament groups, like the Violence Policy Institute and the Brady Factory, by 20-1.

Even an assault-weapon ban is not the political “sure thing” it once was…Elected officials in California and Pennsylvania have responded to the killings of four police officers in Oakland, Calif., and three in Pittsburgh by calling for restoration of the decade-long ban, which was law from 1994 to 2004. Gun control advocates also have pushed to revive the ban as a way to stem the flow of firearms smuggled from the U.S. into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Gallup’s Newport said the growing opposition to gun control is “counterintuitive” because of the heavy media focus on the use of assault weapons to kill police officers and students, as well as coverage of cartel lawlessness.

It’s only counterintuitive if you’re completely ignorant.  This poll could show us a couple of things; that Americans are believing mainstream media hype less (as in the police shootings); that the alternative media is undercutting some of the orcs’  lies (as with the “Cartel” myth, in which conservative blogs and talkradio debunked the orc meme about guns from “gun shows” arming the cartels.

Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston, called diminished public support for gun control measures “a good thing.” He said the recent poll findings would help lawmakers “resist pressure from this administration to pass more gun control legislation.”

“The NRA is in a pretty good position, public-opinion-wise,” Newport said.

So as to the gun control issue itself, this is a good thing.

The other story – which is, in the long term, the bigger one?  This should be a lesson to conservatives.  The rollback of orc superstition and bigotry on the gun issue is one of the great grassroots victories in modern political history.  The gun rights movement has been the class war the far left has always warned us about – except that in this case it’s been the plebeians that have taken the high road and defeated the patricians, our “elite” media and political establishments.  And we’ve done it one vote, and one voter, at a time, through dedicated, constant, low-level grassroots action.

The same can, and needs to, go for other conservative principles.  Winning this nation back isn’t a matter of waiting for another Reagan to walk across the water; it’s a matter of getting out there and convincing people, one at a time.

And it’s working for more than just gun control; general support for abortion has cooled in the past decade, and I have a hunch we’ll see greatly eroding support for out-of-control Keynesianism before too terribly long.

What does Johnny Roosh think of Brett Favre donning the Purple?

Thanks for asking.

First off, I lost interest in the Vikings after the (…I’m getting emotional) 1998 season, which was poised to be the payoff for childhood memories of four forlorn Super Bowls. If the Vikes want to skip town because I won’t take money off our dinner table and put it into a stadium for the big boys, so be it. I could give a rip.

But, from a businessman’s point of view, if Favre’s tired bones can fill the seats with a choir of beer-swilling, profanity-prone fans and actually make some money selling tickets and selling out so I can tune in for the last quarter, I’m all for it.

Alas, if history teaches us anything about the Vikings, they will find a way to screw this deal (if it happens) and Brett Favre’s career will defy the odds by apending a prologue even more embarrassing than the the would-be, should-be final chapter that is last year’s season with the Jets. Favre’s story could have eneded on a high note.

He does look good in Purple though.

The WaPo writes about a colleague’s job change:

Senior Producer Sasha Johnson announced Monday she’s leaving journalism to serve as press secretary at the Department of Transportation, meaning yet another member of the Fourth Estate has left to join the Obama administration

Isolated jump?  As the artcle notes, hardly.  The WaPo piece notes the large number of reporters who’ve taken jobs in the Obama administration.

It’s not just in DC, of course; reporters in the Twin Cities have long found jobs waiting for them with left-leaning governments and pols.  A very partial list; my old colleague Karen Louise Booth jumped from being MPR’s Capitol Bureau chief to being head of communications for the DFL.  Brian Lambert left the Pioneer Press to work for Senator “Brave Sir” Mark Dayton. A scan of spokespeople for any variety of local DFL pols shows a who’s who of former producers, reporters and executives.

Indeed, it’d be interesting to start a list of our own.  Other examples, if you know ’em?  Put ’em in the comments!

One of the great “truisms” of major cities is that public education suffers from the poverty of its surroundings.

Speed Gibson notes that it may just be the other way around:

Nothing beats an involved parent when it comes to getting a quality K-12 education for a child. It works everywhere, from Minneapolis North to Wayzata, the big difference being in the number (percentage) of involved parents.

I was about to write what I believed to be a tangent – that the schools’ concern for “parental involvement” was a sham, that the schools wanted “involvement” in the sense of “collating handouts” and “setting up tables”, but would just as soon parents keep their mouths shut about problems with the schools.

But then I realized – it’s not a tangent to this particular story.  We’ll let Speed carry on:

This is then extrapolated by equating low involvement with low incomes to say that poverty itself is the big explanation for the “achievement” gaps between “rich” and “poor” districts.

Once again we must remember that correlation is not causation, that if A and B rise and fall together there are multiple possibilities. A might affect B, B might affect A, both may be affected by a third factor C, or the whole thing may just be coincidental. To that end, consider a recent article from US News & World Report article by the Chancellor of the New York Department of Education, Joel I. Kline. He thinks poverty is a symptom, not a problem, saying that “America will never fix poverty until it fixes its urban schools.”

After citing how Washington D.C. schools spend the most and achieve the least, he challenges the conventional wisdom of poverty (and race) explaining poor results.

As a side note; the urban schools that spend the least, and perforce depend the most on parental involvement, the urban parochial and charter schools (as well as the parents who get involved by pulling the kids out and enrolling them in a public school in the ‘burbs, which takes a lot of involvement,not the least of which involves compensating for the loss of school transportation that goes along with the move) are the ones getting the best results, measured on a kid-by-kid basis.

Joel Kline:

If the academic achievement of poor black students varies substantially from district to district, the mere fact of being black and poor cannot explain why low-income black students in Washington are years behind their peers in some big cities. By contrast, if extra spending and additional resources really were the antidote for the achievement gap, black students in D.C. should handily outstrip most of their urban peers.

I don’t have the figures handy – I have at the moment no idea how to look for them, although I believe I’ll poke around and figure it out – but I’d just about bet money that poor, black kids in the few remaining one-room schools in Mississippi do better than kids in DC, for (I’d suspect) about a third the cost.  Ditto with poor Latino kids at tiny schools in New Mexico, or for that matter white kids in small schools in Minnesota.

But Kline’s – and Gibson’s – larger point is a good one; the tragic failure of our urban public schools is perpetuating the cycle of poverty; the system is raising generation after generation of kids to be nothing other than poor – financially and spiritually.

Kline’s larger point is that “socio-economic status” is too often accepted as an excuse not to work harder, as if that would be throwing good money after bad. Yet, some Charter schools seem to be able to do so, obtaining spectacular results in some cases, and for less money that Washington D.C. is spending.

…when “swagger” was a bad characteristic in a president?  Why, it doesn’t seem so long ago.

But everything has, apparently, changed; CNN has apparently hired a Swagger (or, as the stupid kids are spelling it today, “swagga”) consultant to analyze Obama’s…well, you know where this is leading, right?

Evidence of “swagga” offered by the panel included: Obama being corrected by his wife during an interview and accepting it graciously; and, Obama hugging people.

After the segment, fellow CNN anchor Heidi Collins Kyra Phillips (who’d teased the segment by telling viewers, “If you look closely, you might notice the commander in chief has more swagger than Mick Jagger…”) asked Holmes whether any white American president has had swagger, to which Holmes replied:

Maybe it’s one of these things you’re not supposed to say, but you can go from Billy Dee Williams to Shaft to whoever you want to talk about and there’s just a bit of a swagger that we associate with them…

After which Collins Phillips and Holmes (really!) “hug it out” and exchange a “fist-bump.”

 In the meantime, Mark Hemingway at NRO also asks:

A reader asks, “Wasn’t it just yesterday that a swaggering president was a bad thing?” The answer to that is clearly yes:

White House Watch: Bush swagger could crimp domestic agenda

Obama rejects swagger of Bush for a sober analysis of economic crisis

Republican Convention Turns on the Macho Swagger, Misrepresents Bush Legacy

Bush’s Iraq swagger a distant memory

A Bit Too Much Texas Swagger

Lame Duck Bush Has Swagger, Not Waddle: President Continues To Do As He Pleases

Swagger to the center: Bush is in danger of leaving the country in far worse shape than he found it. It’s time for a new direction

How to Swagger and Bully Your Way to Disaster: Bush’s Foreign Adventurism

. . . and etc. There’s much more where that came from.

So let’s try to keep track of things, here:

Out: Tingly legs, the rule of law.

In: Swagger, McCarthyism.

Do try to keep up.

That is all Word.

I’m going to do the world a huge public service.

Lawn product dealers! Menards, Lowe’s, Home Depot!  It’d be good marketing to prevent your products from killing your customers’ dogs!

Please see to this.

There.  This way, everyone’s happy.  And this way, the government doesn’t have to waste time noodling about debating warning signs for dogs instead of figuring out how to fix the mess caused by the Legislature’s 10 year orgy of spending:

A bill that would require retailers to post notices that cocoa bean mulch can be dangerous to pets brought howls of indignation about overweening government and stories about the time Fido or Felix got sick from eating the wrong thing.The problem: Dogs can get sick from eating cocoa bean shells, which are growing in popularity as a landscaping mulch.

Dogs and chocolate.  Hello?

More regulation?  It’s a DFL thing:

A constituent of Minneapolis DFLer Frank Hornstein came to him this year after the death of the family Labrador retriever. Hornstein offered legislation on the House floor Tuesday directing retailers to put up a sign indicating that cocoa bean shell mulch could be hazardous to pets if eaten.

Now, there may be bigger threats to democracy than masses of dog fanciers.

But there are few as humorless:

Fangs started to show when Delano Republican Tom Emmer wondered what language the signs would be written in. Told by Hornstein, whose family dog is a Cockapoo, that the signs would be in English, Emmer scoffed: “I’m very concerned because I don’t believe the dog can read that,” he said.

Emmer should expect to be picketed by hordes of irate people with Ploobradors and JackShihtzus carrying signs wedged into their little harnesses.

And by the way – these new breeds of dogs that are popping up?  Hello, people – opportunity!  There is no rational reason a Labrador/Poodle cross should not be a Ploobrador; if there is not a Jack Russell/Shihtzu cross, then the terrorists have won.

Anyway – keep the cocoa bean mulch away from the dogs.  And next chance you get, keep the DFL away from office.

Three weeks ago, hundreds of thousands of Americans, driven by a campaign that started on Twitter, drew endless defamation from the mainstream and lefty (pardon the redundancy) media; some, when not taking part in juvenile giggling, insinuated that the Tea Parties had roots and followers with various violent groups (indeed, the DHS report was released just in time for the run-up to the media’s suspiciously synchronous campaign of defamation).

Nationwide, the arrest figures were extremely low – about half a dozen, mostly for the kind of petty-drunkenness and public urination sorts of things that’ll happen anytime 600,000 people get together around a nation like this; the typical evening at “Drinking Liberally” draws more drunk and disorderly and public urination arrests.

Compare with The One, threatening a group of legal investors, with all sorts of extralegal sanctions, including siccing his mobs of drooling fanboys and fangirls on them:

A group of lenders to troubled automaker Chrysler asked a bankruptcy court judge Tuesday to keep their identities secret, saying they could face “public attack” and “threats to their safety.”The petition was filed by the group that objected to a government plan to reduce the ailing company’s debt to help create a partnership with Italy’s Fiat…Represented by lawyer Gerard Uzzi of the firm White & Case, the group said its members may be subjected to threats and intimidation in part because of comments made by President Barack Obama, who chastised the opponents of an attempted deal to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy.

“Never before has the president of the United States announced a chapter 11 filing in a national address,” the petition said.

“The president publicly chastised these secured creditors for having the temerity to enforce their constitutional rights in this court of law…”

Hinderaker:

It is important to understand what is happening here. Many think that Obama is merely engaging in crony capitalism, favoring his political supporters (most notably the Auto Workers Union) at the expense of others. That’s true, of course, but it is much worse than that: Obama has tried to bully those who have not bought his favor–Chrysler’s non-TARP secured creditors–into giving up their legal rights by threatening to use the powers of the White House to damage their businesses. This sort of lawlessness is common in some of the more corrupt Third World countries, but it is brand new to the United States.

We just spent eight years with the left claiming conspiracies against the Constitution under every rock – and now we have an Administration that’s actually giving them to us; the DHS blacklisting Americans; the government running roughshod over the law and, let us not forget, looking for loopholes to carry out the very same policies (tribunals, “aggressive interrogation”) that the left spent the last eight years howling about.
Just remember Berg’s Seventh Law; “Whenever lefties defame conservatives’ ethics or commitment to liberty, they are projecting”.

On August 31, 1939, Adolph Hitler, in a speech to the Reichsreingebotsamt in Münich, said:

Peace is still attainable!  All the Poles, Norwegians, French, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, French and British need to do is start goose-stepping, killing Jews and working with us on the whole Lebensraum thing! 

Lavrencz Szdurdzevanski, writing for the Sztrela-Trzybuna Warszawy (Warsaw Star/Tribune), wrote in a column later that day:

Where is the spirit of bipartisanship that animated our anscestors?  Like when former Governor Elmzar Anderczszon worked with the Russians during the hundreds of years they controlled us?  No; our partisan government will no doubt do its best to not cooperate with our neighbors!

And we all know how that turned out, right? [1]

———-

In a similar vein, the Democrats Dthink, mirabile dictu, that their lives would be easier if Republicans put “partisanship” aside and did their work for them:

Congressional Democratic leaders said Wednesday that Sen. Arlen Specter’s party switch is a sign that Republicans should become more like, well, Democrats.

“I say to Republicans in America, take back your party,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters. “The party of protecting the environment, the party of individual rights, the party of fairness.”

Pelosi, like much of the Minnesota political establishment, wants a return to the good ol’ days of the sixties and seventies – when Republicans basically acted like Democrats with better suits. It’s explained very well in the Wall Street Journal’s obit for Jack Kemp is the most cogent explanation of what Lori Sturdevant, the Minnesota Establishment and the Mainstream Media believe Republicans should be that I’ve ever seen (emphasis added):

A celebrated pro quarterback, Kemp was an unlikely intellectual. Yet amid the economic troubles of the 1970s, he immersed himself in the details of fiscal and monetary policy. Along with a handful of others, many of whom wrote for this newspaper, Kemp became a champion for the classical economic ideas that challenged the Keynesian orthodoxy of that time. He also had to mount an insurgency inside the Republican Party, which for decades had been dominated by budget-balancers who saw their fate mainly as moderating and paying for liberal excess.

That’s what they want.  And I’m concerned that we’re seeing signs of the same thing from Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney on their “Listening Tour”. 

Look – there’s a time for compromise and some degree of cooperation. That time is not when you’re defining what your party stands for.

And not to Nancy Pelosi (and everyone who thinks as she does): partisanship is necessary for democracy. 

(more…)

You are a blogger, writing for a blog that is, let’s just say, “hyperspecialized” on one local politician.

In some of your more many flights of fancy, you call yourself a “citizen journalist”.  I will, in fact, call you “journalist”; first, you have to call me “Admiral”.

But I digress.

You asked me a question last week on your “blog”; if the Tea Parties are as independent as I said they were in a stand-up interview with am anonymous blogger who was roaming the Capitol grounds with a camera during the Tea Party, “who pays for the porta-potties?”

I’m sure you chuckled a high-pitched, strangled, adenoidal cackle as you hit “Post” on that one.

But since you fancy yourself a “journalist”, I thought I’d ask you, why not do what “journalists” do?  Do what I used to do back when I was a “reporter”; do the actual work, and call around and find out who paid for the porta-potties, so as to tell once and for all if there’s a vast, right-wing conspiracy behind the Tea Parties, or if it is (like pretty much everything that’s ever been in your “blog”) a rumor and an assumption and a nudge and wink and strangled cackle?

Oh, yeah – I talked with Toni Backdahl, one of the people from “Moving MN Forward”, the grass roots group that organized the MN Tea Party.  She writes:

– Walgreens stuff for event:  10.64

– Adobe font for T-shirts:  58.72

– domain names .org, .inf, .net:  50

– building tops for barrels:  34.08

– office max:  33.62

– archivers paper:  17.06

– banners:  220.97

– Blick art:  24.58

–  metal for stand:  123.56

–  insurance:  463.81

– t-shirts Monitors:  567

– Office supply:  122.59

– 2-way radios:   330

Total costs:   2056.63

donations:   1630

left to cover:   -426

The above is [one of the local organizer]’s account for her portion of the event. Online T-Shirt sales figure is not included here, but our portion is minimal and most likely will not cover the deficit. Also they sold some t-shirts at the event but haven’t received any info on that either.

[Another local organizer] received a few donations from friends of his to cover the cost of printing (15,000 flyers and 10,000 post cards)

Port-a-potties were $497.00 (one friend gave him $500 for it)

I had about $200.00 worth of expenses (cell phone, hosting, printing and misc) that I donated without reimbursement

[Another local organizer] had about $100.00 worth of expenses in cell phone charges she donated without reimbursement. Angela had expenses for the credential materials she donated without reimbursement.

We all brought garbage bags and water (which got mixed into the water from [Minnesotans for Limited Government])

Sounds like Rush Limbaugh and “Faux” News (hahaha, that never gets old -no, really) teamed up!

But at any rate – see?  It’s fairly simple.  Question answered.

Now you can respond to this one of two ways:  do some digging and find actual evidence that there’s some larger, more sinister group funding these Tea Parties, or giggle your strangled little giggle and snark “Suuuuuure, that’s all“, and scamper back to your little cave.

I’m guessing you’ll go with “B”.

Now, since we’re all playing “journalist”, I have a question for all of you: Is the entire staff your Bachman-Derangement-Syndrome motivated blog a result of attempted lobotomies gone terribly wrong, or did your parents feed you peeled lead paint chips as babies?

See?  That’s journalism!

Playing little doop-di-doop games with Photoshop?  Not so much.

Young Israelis Ydon’t trust Barack Obama as far as they can throw him, according to an Israeli public opinion poll.

“This poll has revealed that Israelis make a distinction between the United States and President Obama and his policies. They have less fondness for him than they have for the US, and display a certain degree of mistrust in him,” the professor said.  

 

Gilboa said the poll largely resembled a similar survey carried out in 2007 during former President George Bush’s tenure. Only 38% of the respondents in the new poll said they believe that Obama’s attitude towards Israel is a friendly one, compared to 73% in the 2007 poll regarding Bush.

Good to know that our staunchest ally is nervous about Obama’s commitment to them, huh?

“It’s OK To Look!“:

British-based Galina Rusanova is accused of of punching and kicking flight attendants and – at one point – ‘snapping like a dog’ while trying to bite a crew member’s leg.

Rusanova appeared at court in Bangor, Maine, on Friday, charged with assault and interference with a flight crew. She will remain in custody before a detention hearing in a US district court on Monday.

In fact, Match.com might already have an in with her:

According to the FBI, Rusanova went to Los Angeles to visit a man she me on the internet and was returning to London on Wednesday when her flight was diverted to Bangor.

The 54-year-old is known in Britain as a respected artist, actress and author who mixes with the rich and famous at London society and charity events.

According to court documents, after her arrest she spent the night at Eastern Maine Medical Center for observation and is said to have told FBI agents: ‘It’s typical of me. I sometimes do crazy things.’

Sounds like someone’s getting six free months of Match!

It was a day a lot like this only (as I recall) clearer and warmer.

I had a pretty good gig going, as I recall; only child, pretty much had the run of the little stucco house on Third Avenue in Jamestown.  Best yet, I’d just had a couple of days with Granma babysitting – and that always rocked, because she made cookies.  Lots and lots of cookies.

And I was probably enjoying the aftermath of one of Grandma’s spectacular lunches when I got the news, and raced out to the porch to meet…

…my new little sister.

And while I never did get that “only child” thing back, I did get…

…well, (koff koff) years of being a big brother.

Anyway, happy birthday, Barb!

While we’re on the subject of Canadian folk singers gone awry – I just can’t stand Neil Young.

Let’s make sure I’m clear here.  I love tons of Neil Young music; “Down By The River” is one of the sixties’ better moments; that it can survive the presence of Stephen Stills is testimony to its greatness.

And he’s got plenty of great music where that came from; much of Harvest; “Rockin’ in the Free World”; a lot of what he did with Crazy Horse.
And still I grit my teeth and expect the worst every time I hear he’s got something new coming out.

Neil Young is like that crazy neighbor who happens to be a fantastic baker.  You know that nine times out of ten when you hear anything from that neighbor it’ll be because he’s plinking at cats with a BB gun, or because the cops are hauling her back into treatment.  But there’s that odd visit where he/she brings over the lemon meringue pie that proves the existence of a divine loving God that makes you forget the other nine times – for the moment.
That’s Neil Young. He bounces from the sublime to the…well, not really “ridiculous”.  “Tiresome”?  “Not really quite right?” “Waste of time?”  Anyway, he bounces around like a hyperactive four-year-old who’s broken into the Coca-Cola.

And I don’t mind that, even. Oh, it’d be cool of so many of Neil Young’s reinventions weren’t squibs (Trans, Re-Ac-Tor, and on and on), but it would be boring, for Young and for the audience, if he never,ever changed.

So part of the problem is that I get worn out keeping up with Neil Young.

But the big problem I have?

Let’s go back to college.  I took a piano tuning class.  In learning how to tune pianos, my ears became incredibly sensitive to pitch, and especially to harmonic dissonance between strings; when two strings that are supposed to have the same pitch are just ever-so-slightly out of tune, phase cancellation creations a subtle “beat” in the sound; the more out of tune the strings are, the faster the beat. 

So by the time I got done with that class, my ears were as sensitive as a dog’s.

And then Re Ac Tor came out.   And its first single, “Southern Pacific”, came on the radio.

And I listened.  And held my head in pain.  Neil Young’s guitar was out of tune. 

And as I listened to more and more Young, the throbbing phase beats told me Neil Young never ever ever ever tunes is &^%^$#$@ guitar!  My ears are still very sensitive to pitch, by the way, which is why Karaoke night can be so utterly painful to me.

So stylistic schizophrenia aside, even when I like Neil Young, he makes my teeth hurt from clenching at the out-of-tuneness of it all.

In 20-odd years, I haven’t been able to ignore it.

So yeah.  I’m supposed to love Neil Young. But he bugs me. 

To the musical hipster, Gordon Lightfoot has for almost thirty years been synonymous with getting a kiss from your great-aunt.

Let’s do try to set the record straight, here.

Lightfoot is one of the last, longest-living (commercially, anyway) survivors of the folk music boom of the early sixties. But I always took to Lightfoot because, while most of the “folk” music I heard was either screechingly, mawkishly self-righteous (Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez) or self-consciously archaic (all of Pete Seger and Woody Guthrie’s many, many imitators) or groaningly over-literate (Bob Dylan’s many, many, many imitators), Lightfoot was just a guy who wanted to entertain a crowd.  He was just a hard-drinking Canadian guy who looked and drank like the guy who refinished your driveway and sang songs about being hungover and unreliable.

Which isn’t to say that he didn’t follow some of the trends of the times – but even those shots were more interesting than their contemporaries.  Amid the suffocating masses of “protest” folk songs, songs like “Don Quixote” and “Circle of Steel” were deft, oblique yet engaging.

Unlike most of his folk contemporaries, his shots at pop stardom, “Sundown” and “Carefree Highway” and “Summer Side of Life” and many others, were refreshingly un-suffocated by the conventions of folk that weighed down so much of the rest of the genre.

Lightfoot comes in for particular abuse for his biggest, best-known hit, “Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald”.  Some call it “boring”.  Well, people are entitled to their own opinion; “Fitz” is an example of one of the most-abused folk forms, the “Really really long historical ballad” (which Lightfoot has done before, albeit without quite the same sales). But I always loved the song, partly because being from North Dakota, maritime lore is in my bones, and partly because the notion that, in 1976, when disco and dreary singer-songwriter treacle and Bachman Turner Overdrive ruled the airwaves, the notion that a five minute song about a shipwreck would sell a zillion songs should have been a plot for one of those “a couple of underdog guys hatch an improbable plot to make a zillion bucks in a scheme that everyone says has got to be a flop” movies.

So yeah.  I’m supposed to hate Gordon Lightfoot.  But I don’t.

There were three people who turned me into a conservative.

Four, if you count Ronald Reagan.  But before I, who grew up very much a liberal, could embrace the idea of conservativsm that Ronald Reagan put out there – and let’s remember that to a liberal Ronald Reagan, especially the version of Reagan that liberals discussed amongst themselves, was a very scary figure –  someone had to soften me up.

The first was Jimmy Carter.  He created a lot of Ronald Reagan voters. And with the “Malaise” speech and his relentless “America Last”-ism, he gave me a good start up the ladder.

The second was Dr. James Blake.  He was the head of the English Department at Jamestown College.  He was also that rarest of creatures – a college English professor who was also a conservative. The son of a New York cop, Blake described himself as a “Monarchist”; whatever, he also made me read Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, and Doestoevskii and Tolstoii and Solzenitzyn and, for that matter, P.J. O’Rourke.  I may have been the last person in Western History to have been pushed up the ladder to conservatism while majoring in a humanity.

But Carter’s impetus was negative; Blake introduced me to the high-level reasons conservatism was not only better, but indeed vastly preferable for intellectual and personal freedom.

But it was Jack Kemp who first connected those ideas to daily life for me; to money, to jobs, to the nuts and bolts of running a government and a society.  While Reagan focused on the big picture – as, indeed, a President and leader should – Kemp tackled the machinery.

In the wake of the Carter malaise, he was one of Reagan and Stockton’s foot-soldiers for supply-side economics. He first filed his tax cut bill – which became known as “Kemp-Roth” when it finally passed, in 1981 – in 1977, long before supply side economics was a household word. Kemp was more than an adherent; he was a pioneer.

“Every time in this century we’ve lowered the tax rates across the board, on employment, on saving, investment and risk-taking in this economy, revenues went up, not down”, he said – and, as a major mover and shaker during the Reagan years and George HW Bush’s HUD secretary, he worked to follow through, advocating privatizing public housing (a policy on which Clinton’s HUD boss Henry Cisneros followed through, after carefully rechristening it to get credit for his boss); many of the “welfare reforms” that happened during the Contract for America were ideas that Kemp had been instrumental in not only thinking up, but whose bureaucratic angles Kemp had worked through.  Kemp was the giant on whose shoulders the welfare reformers stood.

Kemp was a native of Los Angeles, the son of a small businessman who went to a small college, mainly because it was his best shot at getting to the pros as a football player.  He was a journeyman quarterback for years…

…he was present at “The Greatest Game Ever Played (before the ’86 Super Bowl)” – the Colts/Giants NFL championship game in ’58 – as a third-stringer on the Giants’ taxi squad. He was cut or traded by five teams before he latched on with the Buffalo Bills, back when the AFL was a separate league.

He led the Bills through a series of great seasons, before and after the merger with the NFL, before injuries slowed him down.  He was drafted to run for the US House in 1971 by the GOP, and he stepped away from his contract with the Bills to run his campaign.

Maybe it was the humble roots, the non-Ivy-League background, the years of struggle and failure before hitting it big, his self-taught nature that made Kemp a face of conservatism for the little guy. I’ve often said that Reagan’s great strength was that he translated Hayek and Friedman into something accessible to pretty much everyone; Jack Kemp turned those ideas into things of substance.  “The supply-side claim is not a claim. It is empirically true and historically convincing that with lower rates of taxation on labor and capital, the factors of production, you’ll get a bigger economy.”

And he was always a conservative Republican who spoke to the little guy first and foremost, as befitted perhaps a Rep from Buffalo; “There is a kind of victory in good work, no matter how humble“, he once said.

And as I moved to the city and started plying a trade – first as a bush-league conservative pundit, and then as a schmuck trying to make my way, and then again as yet another bush-league pundit, Kemp was consistently a voice and an inspiration to those of us who sought to break the noxious liberal strangle hold on places like Saint Paul.  And like many like me, I took inspiration from another Kemp protege in Jersey City, where Brett Schundler, a Reagan Republican who was very much in the Kemp mold, won three terms as mayor and tranformed his city.  When I’ve said that the Minnesota GOP will never really contest control of Minnesota until we make a play of it in the Cities, I’m echoing Kemp;  “There really has not been a strong Republican message to either the poor or the African American community at large“, he once said, nailng one of the enduring chinks in the GOP’s (albeit not conservatism’s) armor.

People say the GOP needs another Reagan.  That’s true to a degree, of course.  But Reagan spoke of truths that are eternal enough that pretty much anyone can remember them; freedom, limited government, security. Reagan took on the world.

Jack Kemp took on mainstreet, one store-owner, voter, program and American at a time.

What the GOP really needs, stat, is a few dozen Jack Kemps; people who can spread the gospel to everyone from the local town hall meeting all the way to the Beltway, and back again.

The turnout for “pledge week” this week (it’s not really “pledging”, it’s just passing the tip jar, really) has been really good, so I’m going to make it “Pledge Four Days” instead.

As I noted before – I’d do the blog for the sheer love of the game, but knowing others are interested as well helps a lot.

Thanks for all of your support.

It was 30 years ago today that Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Last week, Webster School in Saint Paul voted to change its name to “Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary School”.

Do I roll my eyes and shake my head when my local school district subscribes to a personality cult for a president that’s been in office just a skosh over three months?  Of course.  Indeed, it strikes me as the kind of second-hand hubris (I don’t know a better term for “participating in others’ hubris”) that I can see people looking back on in, say, five years, shaking their heads, and saying “well, maybe we were a bit rash…”

But the real problem is  Ain this thread, on E-“Democracy’s” Saint Paul forum.  Saint Paul school board member Ann Carroll chimes in later in the conversation:

Now just hold on here a minute! Some of the posts on this topic are veering
way too close to racist comments, which is not tolerated on either this
Issues Forum or by SPPS.

“Racist comments?”

Read the thread.  Before Carroll chimed in, one commenter (Gary Fishbach, friend of this blog and a noted Highland Park Republican) dropped a couple of pleas for fiscal sanity.  A couple of DFLers responded.

And then Carroll cried “Racism”.

You’ll examine the thread, as I did, in vain for the faintest sign of racism…

…unless you believe, as Carroll seems to, that criticizing the name change, for any reason, is itself racist.

I’ll be asking Ann Carroll for comment.

The name change is just plain dumb – although not, perhaps, as disturbing as the curriculum change.  “Service Learning” is education establishment shorthand for “shanghaiing students into serving as free labor for non-profits”. Like so much that passes for normal in the Saint Paul and Minneapolis public schools, it’s got very little to do with education, but much with paying chits to the educational establishment’s supporters, and making sure future generations get healthy doses of koolaid at an early age.

Starting about November 5, I figured that Obama, and especially the Congress’ Democrats, after being thwarted for almost thirty years, would not be able to resist overreach.

Hugh Hewitt, writing from the road on his “100 Days Tour”, writes:

The energy of the tea parties and which we see on our tour of the country may not be a majority movement yet, but it clearly indicates that the new president has blown off the idea of a new politics and a new bipartisanship, and that the signal has been received loud and clear. The unaligned voters of America thought they might be electing a post-partisan, post-ideological president but already know –and will learn again and again– that what they actually got was a hard left ideologue with a wonderful reading voice. Bait-and-switch has never gone over very well with Americans.

By the way – do try to make it to the “Obama’s First 100 Days” get-together at the Convention Center, a week from tonight.  Go here for details.  I hope to see you there.

After years of insisting he’s “Not the DFL’s Monkey”, rumor has it that former Strib columnist Nick Coleman attended “Drinking Liberally”, the weekly local liberal party that, like most local liberal events, isn’t local at all.

Connect the dots, people.  Connect the dots.

…and Perez Hilton sought permission to film a video in your living room, whatever your opinion of gay marriage, you might tell Hilton “Karma’s a Bizzatch”, that actions and words have consequences, and to sack up and go do his filming in, say, Miss Oregon’s place.  Right?

In the same light, and even though I’m not Catholic, I can’t help but wonder why Ron Howard is making hay with allegations that the Vatican might have obstructed filming of his latest Dan Brown fiesta of anti-Catholic defamation?

When you come to film in Rome, the official statement to you is that the Vatican has no influence,” he said. “Everything progressed very smoothly, but unofficially a couple of days before we were to start filming in several of our locations, it was explained to us that through back channels and so forth that the Vatican had exerted some influence.””Was I surprised? No. Am I a little frustrated at times? Sure,” he said.

Nevertheless he said he felt that he was able to preserve the overall “Angels & Demons” experience despite the restrictions by recreating scenes on sets. For the Sistine Chapel alone, some 20 members of the production crew — posing as tourists — took photos of all the frescoes, floor mosaics and paintings of the tiny chapel where popes are elected — until they were told to stop, the film’s Web site says.

Did I say “anti-Catholic defamation?” Why, yes I did.

Ad Age notes that  antimicrobials and hand sanitizers are doing a land office business:

Consumers stormed to the web to learn how to cope with the flu and hit drugstores looking for hand sanitizers and remedies; health groups turned to Twitter to calm fears. The Mexican Tourist Board looked for ways to protect the country’s third-largest industry, while the U.S. pork producers, fearing a sales falloff, endeavored to get the word “swine” out of headlines.

Friends who work for local companies in the sanitation and medical products fields report that sales are brisk.  A source at a local company that produces hand sanitizers for clinics reports that business at the company store – usually very slow, with the odd employee strolling in for a pen or t-shirt – involved four and five-deep lines at the cash register last week, with the store using a full-time order bagger for the first time in anyone’s memory, as empoyees stocked up on alcohol gel and antibacterial hand soap.

The MSM are abuzz with their assessments of Brack O’Bama’s first one hundred days and as my Blog Boss so aptly pointed out, they are missing the real story here.

Ever notice how you’re not seeing as much public opinion polling about the President these days?  Especially in the MSM?

There’s a reason for that:

According to Gallup’s April survey, Americans have a lower approval of Mr. Obama at this point than all but one president since Gallup began tracking this in 1969. The only new president less popular was Bill Clinton, who got off to a notoriously bad start after trying to force homosexuals on the military and a federal raid in Waco, Texas, that killed 86. Mr. Obama’s current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises.

Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll tells a very different story from what the Obama Broadcasting Network would have you believe.

Jimmy II is in trouble.

Polling among those that “Strongly Approve” of the President thus far remains relatively steady ranging from 44% at Inauguration to 35% as of today.

That’s not surprising. Liberals don’t know what’s hit them yet….the broken campaign promises, the rapid erosion of what is left of our nation’s financial resources, the vast expansion of The Entitlement Society^™, the socialization nationalization of everything within arm’s reach…they still have the “Change Has Come” commemorative plates on their mantles and are still being instructed to harbor anger for (i.e. blame) the Bush Administration for all ills domestic, foreign and individual.

The real movement underlying the erosion of Che Obama’s approval ratings is among those who “Strongly Disapprove”; doubling from an Inauguration Day low of 16% to 32% as of today. It’s only a matter of time before one spills into the other as America wakes to the leftist agenda of our President and his thugs.

Rasmussen’s daily poll tracks the differential between the “Strongly Disapprove” and the “Strongly Approve” results.

Does this movement translate into Conservatives growing some cojones or is it a groundswell of both parties’ constituents realizing the error of their choice last November? Most likely a little of both.

In any case, it would appear the pendulum is swinging back to reality.

And fast.

Change^® is coming.