To:  Tarryl Clark, DFL Candidate for MNCD6 nomination

From: Mitch Berg, un-American dissenter.

Re:  Public Image? Limited!

Dear Ms. Clark,

You’re running for Congress in the Sixth Congressional District.  It’s a fairly conservative district with some fairly liberal enclaves.  It’s obviously a district in major contention – but Michele Bachmann, the most unrepentant conservative in Minnesota politics, squeedged out a three point margin against not only Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenberg, but against a full court press from the mainstream media, the liberal cableocracy, and the nutroots.

Which says to me – though I am, I’ll grant, merely a simple peasant – that the Sixth is probably not a mother lode for nutroots campaigning.

So please, Ms. Clark; please please please keep campaigning away on Daily Kos.  I sincerely beg of you.

Someone emailed me this job posting:

The Minnesota Independent is seeking freelance reporter/bloggers to help cover politics at the state, county and local levels.
We’re looking for people from across Minnesota with reporting experience; a clear understanding of policy, legislation and the workings of state politics; and familiarity with recent developments in online news. A key criterion in measuring success will be the delivery of “impact stories” that inspire public debate and advance the common good.

This must be good news for Republicans; in the wake of the Obama onslaught, the “Independent” laid off most of its staff and whacked its freelance budget, causing former editor Steve Perry to be shocked, shocked that the whole operation was a propaganda operation.

If the Mindy’s usualy cast of donors feel the need to crank up the propaganda war, we must be drawing rhetorical blood…

Here’s the funny part (emphasis added):

The Minnesota Independent is part of a growing online network sponsored by the non-profit and non-partisan Center for Independent Media,

Non-partisan?

This quote from Britt Robson, after he got laid off in the CIM’s “Mission Accomplished” celebration:

Robson — who writes about arts for MinnPost and sports for The Rake — was caustic in his view [of] MnIndy’s Capitol overlords. He says CIM’s national staff was less interested in the organization’s professed mission — “a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that operates an independent online news network in the public interest” — than boosting the party of Barack Obama.

“I was working with them fairly closely during the Republican convention and privy to interoffice emails,” Robson explains. “The type of things non-local editors were into were very party-race stories, particularly stories that embarrassed Republicans and promoted Democrats.”

Paul Schmelzer – you’re a good writer.  You’re a reporter with some integrity.  Why on earth are you maintaining the fiction of non-partisanship?

which adheres to the Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ) code of ethics…

Obvious jokes redacted for excessive obviousness.

Hey, maybe Perry can come back now!

Conservatives often complain about judicial activism.

Many on the left, on the other hand, would much rather let judges make society’s important decisions.  Which is a bad idea in a democracy other than, y’know, the law, but more importantly depends on the integrity of the judiciary.

Which, sometimes, seems like a very bad idea:

Williams, 33, attended his cousin’s July hearing at Will County Courthouse in Joliet. His cousin, Jason Mayfield, pled guilty to a felony drug charge. As the judge sentenced Mayfield to two years probation, Williams let out a yawn, an involuntary faux pas in such a formal setting.

Circuit Judge Daniel Rozak thought the yawn was criminal and sentenced Williams to six months in jail, the maximum penalty for contempt of court without a jury trial.  Rozak’s order said that Williams “raised his hands while at the same time making a loud yawning sound,” causing a disrespectful interruption in court.

So in a strange turn of events Mayfield, the felon, will be able to walk freely, while Williams, the yawner, will have to spend at least three weeks behind bars for his offending yawn.

So in other words, the criminal walked, but the spectator had his life ruined; three weeks in jail plays hob on peoples’ jobs.

What was it they said about “absolute power?”

But it’s not out of character for Rozak.

Contempt of court charges are typically issued when a judge feels someone is challenging or ignoring the court’s authority, e.g., yelling at a judge, ignoring subpoenas, appearing in court drunk, etc.

But Rozak runs a tight ship. He has charged people who cuss in reaction to a sentencing and even jailed spectators whose cell phones interrupt proceedings. In fact, the Chicago Tribune found that Rozak has sentenced more spectators to jail for infractions involving cell phones than any other judge in Will County in the last decade.

Of the 30 judges in the 12th Judicial Circuit, Rozak has brought more than a third of all the contempt charges in the last 10 years.

I don’t suppose it’s possible to throw a judge out for frivolity?

I went to the Saint Paul City Hall – the museum of all that was spectacular about institution art-deco in downtown Saint Paul – the other day.

Now, as always when I go to City Hall, I make a religious point of leaving every piece of metal in my car – coins, cell phones, everything.

Naturally, the metal detector picked up something – the shoelace eyes on my shoes, in this case.  It always does, with everyone that tries to go to the courthouse.  Every time.

And so the sullen, cranky security guard (there is no other kind working at City Hall) made me, like everyone else that tries to go into the building, stand aside and hold out my arms and turn around, waving the little wand around until he ascertained that, yes, it was just the shoelace eyes.  As usual.  As with everyone who ever goes into the damned building.

It’s to the point where it’s not an exercise in security; it’s a little ritual the city, like every body of government that surrounds itself with this kind of “security”, does to show you, the citizen who’s boss.  “We can make you empty your pockets for our inspection, and make you stand in awkward positions and twirl on command, and if you don’t, Deputy Friendly will haul your ass to jail for “disturbing the peace” if he’s in a good mood and “making terroristic threats” if he’s not, so behave if you want to talk with your government masters, mere peasant”.

And it occurred to me – in an era when government is already out of touch with the citizens, and getting worse every day (because the agents of Hope and Change can’t be bothered by the hoi-polloi) – that there would be one great way to make government smaller, more sensitive to the people, and more responsive.

Remove the metal detectors.

Lose the security guards.

Let our city bureaucrats and elected officials know that when they make decisions that affect people, they are going to have to talk with them sooner or later, and they’re going to have to mind their manners, knowing that if someone gets out of hand, they’ll have the same recourse all of us taxpaying citizens have; call the police, and wait.

Carry this all the way up to the state and federal levels, too.  Perhaps if legislators, executives and employees had to handle “irate customers” the same way the kid at the counter at Wendy’s does, we wouldn’t need term limits.

Beat in mind, I don’t want any nuts to actually do anything to government officials or workers.  I mean, as long as we’re talking hypothetically, here.

…and makes the case for privatizing health care.

The House’s request to the pentagon to purchase new private jets fell victim to criticisms by citizens and politicians and was dropped this week.

U.S. House leaders have dropped plans to spend $550 million in the Air Force budget on passenger jets used by lawmakers and senior government officials, officials said on Monday.

The House of Representatives reversed the move to upgrade the executive jet fleet after public criticism, opposition from other lawmakers and the Defense Department had said it did not need more planes that it had requested.

So we saved $550 Million right?

Dropping the proposal doesn’t save money, as the total funding provided by the bill remains unchanged. It means the money that would have been used to pay for the extra planes will go to other purposes.

“Other purposes.” Read: we’re going to piss the money away either way.

These are the same people telling us that government-run health care will save money.

I’m going to leave the polls open on the “When Do We Have The Summer MOB Party” vote until tomorrow at noon.

(It’s the same codebox as before; if you’ve already voted, thanks!)

It was Saturday, August 11, 1979.  My first day “soloing” at KEYJ.

The station was a humble little 1000-watt operation, but Bob Richardson wanted it to do big things.  Bob’s goal for the station was to serve the community, and to Bob that meant news, information, weather and sports – and lots of all of ’em. 

So my Saturday morning shift – which I’d start in another week or so, after I earned my spurs soloing on the easier Saturday Night shift – involved an hour of music from 6 to 7AM, and then an hour of news, weather, sports, farm markets, local hospital reports, fire and police reports, the funeral home report and other such stuff, and then another hour more or less the same at 8, then two hours of music followed by “Trading Post” at 10AM (an on-the-air swap shop), then an hour of music, then another news-weather-sports hour, then usually a Class B basketball game from one of the outlying towns that’d been taped the night before (and would still keep the locals rapt around the radio).

But that was in the future. After a few weeks of training with John and Dick, tonight was my first solo.

I came in around 1PM for my 3 to midnight shift.  I got my news together (there’d be a news hour at 5PM, sorta like the three news/weather/sports/info hours on the morning shift, but only, like, one of them); I drank pop and calmed down and got my mind in order.

And then it was three.  Dick wrapped up his shift, and told the audience to stay tuned for “Mitch Berg, coming up next”.  And then it was off to AP Radio News.

Five minutes.

I sat down in the swivel chair, arranged my three-minute newscast in front of me (five wire stories, some American Legion baseball scores, the forecast and the current conditions), and cued up my first two records, which were (yes, I do remember then distinctly) “Bright Eyes” by Art Garfunkel, and “All Things Are Possible” by Dan Peek. Dick stood by.

The AP News ended, and I hit the cart (like an eight-track tape) with the KEYJ news theme.  “AM1400 KEYJ, I’m Mitch Berg with the news…”

…and that’s about all I remember, except that I got through the newscast fairly well, and then flipped the toggle to start Garfunkel on turntable one.

“Whew.  I got through it…” I started, and then stopped as Dick lunged across the turntable to the mike off.  I’d forgotten.  I’d started talking over a live mike.

I gritted my teeth; calm down. 

And it worked.  I got through my first hours’ worth of spots, dropins, breaks, the bottom of the hour news and weather (yes, we did news twice an hour), weathercasts and music without any more problems, well enough that Dick was able to leave after the first hour or so. 

And I was on my own. 

Sometime after the 5PM news hour (which I remember going quite well, thank you very much), my Mom and Dad stopped by (reminding me that Dick hadn’t locked up the street-level doors when he left), bringing a burger and fries from the White Drug cafe downstairs. I figured they were just being clingy; now that I have kids (gulp) the same age, I guess I know what they were really thinking.

I got through the evening, following the rhythm of the “clock”, or hourly broadcast schedule; network news, local news, music, commercials, weather, taking hourly transmitter readings, watching the sky eventually turn red and then indigo through the window over downtown Jamestown, the ancient remote transmitter controller smelling of ozone, the phone calls trickling in on a desultory August evening on the prairie; song requests, nut cases, high school friends with encouragement (or, of course, not)…

…and finally, at 11:55PM, signoff.  I opened the ancient black folder with the “liners” – the things that were there to be read regularly, like the signoff script. After a few weeks, I’d remember it as clearly as I still remember it today:

 “At this time Radio Station KEYJ in Jamestown, North Dakota, leaves the air.  KEYJ is owned and operated by KEYJ Incorporated, of 411 Main Street in Jamestown, North Dakota, and operates on a frequency of 1400 Kilocycles by authority of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington DC.  Please tune in at 5:55AM tomorrow as we resume our broadcast schedule.  On behalf of the entire staff and management of KEYJ, this is Mitch Berg wishing you good night”.

Then, I tripped the final cart – George Beverly Shea’s version of The Lord’s Prayer, which ran about two minutes.  As the last strain died away, I tripped the switch that shut off the output stage plates on the transmitter, about a mile away on east edge of town, watching as the power gauges dropped to zero, like watching an ozone-spewing giant dozing slowly off.

I signed off my transmitter logs, shut off the lights, locked up the studio, production room and offices, and walked down the stairs to the street. I locked the front door, carefully stowed the keys (the first I’d ever been entrusted with!) in my pocket, and walked home down Jamestown’s hot, sweltering, nearly-vacant Main street. 

It had been a brutally hot summer day, and it was still a hot, sticky night.  I steered clear of the streetlights as I walked down Second Avenue to my parents’ house – in this hot, dry weather, they drew so many mosquitos and junebugs they looked like yellow-gray tornados spotted every 100 yards or so; walking through the cloud of bugs meant getting chewed up alive by North Dakota mosquitos, and having to bat junebugs out of your hair. 

But I didn’t much care.  I was hooked on the only drug that has ever really excited me, my whole life – the feeling that something I said, wrote or did could impact someone else (positively, of course).  The thought that something I said into a microphone could affect the life of someone I had never met, miles and miles away.  The idea that someone out there would actually be paying attention to me and what I was telling them; waiting for their kids’ baseball scores, or to find out where the fire was, or whether to head for the basement because a tornado was bearing down on them. 

I silently calculated the hours until my next shift.

Congrats to Sergeant Tom – aka Flash’s eldest son – on completing his hitch in the Marines.

As of last Friday, my son has completed his service with the United States Marine Corps. He currently is attend Engineering classes in Southern California. I hope he will find some time in his busy schedule to come home and visit his family.

I remember Tom from about age 12, of course – my stepson used to babysit him and Flash’s other two boys.  That was a very long time ago; I last saw Tom about 18 months ago.  A hitch in the Green Machine certainly turned him into a grownup.  I literally had not seen him since he was in junior high.  And there he was, on my front steps, looking like…a Marine sergeant!

And he had quite the career; he made Sergeant in under five years, which in a Corps not known for overpromoting is quite an achievement.  He did a tour in Anbar, as well as steaming all sorts of roundy-rounds in the Mediterranean.

Anyway – congrats, Tom, and good luck in your post service life!

In my years of fisking Nick Coleman, it’s easy to pick his worst work.  It’s his hackery immediately after the 35W bridge collapse.

But if I could say anything for the guy over the years, it was this; he may have been a hack who was in bed with the local establishment, but at least he was his own hack.

Nowadays?  Ew.

His latest “column” at the Strib lacks the one thing that distinguished Coleman; he’s apparently turned to slathering his own brand of incoherent, un-fact-checked, prejudicial, and almost-always wrong bilge onto other peoples’ press releases.

Coleman attacks charter schools.  Or, should we say, his masters at his current gig would seem to have told him to attack charter schools.  We may never know.

But that’s what he’s doing – and as usual with a Nick Coleman column, he’s full of it.

Back-to-school supplies are on sale and the annual report on schools that are not making adequate progress is due out any day (expect another rise in falling performance), so this is a good time to look at the performance of Minnesota’s charter school movement, which was going to lead us all into a bright 21st century for better, smarter public education.

Oops. Not doing so great there, either.

Charter schools give parents a choice – and in the city, it’s a choice we’re taking by the thousands.

Which is, after all, the only reason private-school graduate Coleman cares.

Improving learning outcomes for students of color? Nope.

Well, actually, yep.

Outperforming traditional public schools on achievement tests? Nope.

Actually, when you compare apples and apples, yes.  Remember – charter schools…:

1. …don’t have an Alternative Learning Center system to get all the “problem” kids off the books
2. …have disproportionately high numbers of poor kids, non-native english speakers, and the kids that the traditional school system is failing in droves. Which is why we’re leaving the public system in droves.
3. …actually give parents who don’t have the money to go to a private or suburban public school  – or who live on one the Indian reservations, where the public schools are an even bigger disgrace than the urban public systems – a choice. And some hope.

But other than that…?

It would be easy to argue that the charter school movement has fallen flat, and I have said as much before.

And we all know how reliable Coleman’s predictions have been.

But the charter school crusade has grown too large and expensive to dismiss.

Which is just absurd.  Charter schools cost less per student than the public schools.

Coleman is, of course, reading note-for-note for the MN2020 report on charter schools – which a slew of charter school supporters pretty roundly debunked two months ago.  In other words, he’s using out of date and inaccurate information in pursuit of an agenda. That’s bad enough.

Next he swerves into just making things up:

It is eating into severely limited funding for education and has blurred the lines between church and state (and not just at one Muslim school, but among many charters loosely basing their educational approaches on religious values whose adherents think they should get public tax dollars to inculcate them).

Coleman is referring to Bill Cooper’s “Friends of Education” schools, which borrow many aspects of Catholic education without actually teaching Catholicism.  Their results are, by the way, uniformly excellent; each and every one of the Friends of Education schools outperforms any public school district in the state (go here and look up schools run by “Friends of Education”).

In the meantime, they’ve been in operation for years.  If there had been any violations of the Establishment Clause at any of them, in a state full of intrepid gumshoe reporters teachers union monkeys like Nick Coleman, I suspect we’d have heard about it.

Nothing.

But Coleman surely probably knows that. Why would he attack Friends of Education with nothing but a scabrous innuendo?

Personal history, perhaps?

More than that, charter schools have created a huge tax-supported playpen where entrepreneurial start-up schools have been loosely supervised and unscrutinized by education officials who are accountable to the approval or rejection of taxpayers.

Leave aside Coleman’s clumsy shot at being a D-list Studs Terkel knockoff.  Leave aside the blatant misinformation (charter schools are supervised by the same body that supervises public schools).  Let me just ask Coleman, my fellow Saint Paul taxpayer; what “accountability” do you think the Saint Paul district has to you and I?   And if you say “the school board”, then you are obviously more comfortable with untrammeled, partisan, one-party systems than I am.

Minnesota was the first state to allow charter schools (in 1991), which were designed to overcome the limitations of an education system that had become a sacred cow. Today, you can’t find a holier cow than the charter school movement. Any questions can get you branded as a stooge for unionized teachers, big gummint and mandatory euthanasia for free thinkers. Guilty, guilty, hmmm … maybe!

If only there were a website where I could just link to instant descriptions of some of Nick Coleman’s lazier flights of rhetorical fancy.

Nevertheless, it is clear that Minnesota’s charter schools (almost 150 of them now, with 28,000 students) are as much a part of our educational problem as they were supposed to be a solution. Many charters have been beset by management problems, undertrained staffs and a lack of adequate financial controls. The furor over TiZA, the troubled Muslim charter school in Inver Grove Heights, is only one example of a much broader mess: Too many charter schools do not get adequate oversight, especially from one system that works — elected school boards that answer to voters.

And here, Coleman assumes that you either are completely unaware of reality, or is trying to make sure you stay that way.

What are the graduation rates at the Minneapolis and Saint Paul public school systems?  Less than half.  How about for minority students?  Less than that. What do they cost?  Vastly more than the state averages per student, and getting worse, and they’re both still constantly on the brink of financial catastrophe and begging voters to pass supplemental levies (which charter schools never, ever get).

And who controls those systems?  DFL and Teachers-Union-dominated elected school boards.  The elected school boards have utterly failed, and still fail to provide any faint shred of accountability, much less rectifying the disaster in any way.

After nearly two decades of “experimenting,” charter schools need to be held to stricter financial controls, educational performance standards and public accountability. It is also past time to put a cap on the number of charter schools, and the present 150 is more than enough. The urgent need now is not for more charter schools, but better ones. And that requires shutting down the bad ones.

Excelent, Mr. Coleman.

Can we hold public schools to the same standard?

More than 80 percent of charter schools were found to have serious financial or management problems during 2007, according to a review of state records done by the liberal think tank Minnesota 2020. That group’s executive director, John Van Hecke, finds it ironic that charter schools, built on a promise to make education more responsive, have avoided the scrutiny traditional public schools must face.

Quoting John Van Hecke?

Oh, please.  Go ahead.  Make my day.

“When they were launched, the battle cry was, ‘We’ll be better than traditional public schools,'” he said. “Now it’s, ‘Don’t hold us to the same standards as traditional schools.’ But the public clearly is demanding more and more accountability over how its money is spent. And the answer is more and more oversight, from the Education Department and the Legislature.”

No, Nick and John.  The public is asking for more charter schools – and, more to the point, more school choice.  1/8 of Saint Paul parents have left the SPPS; even more have left the Minneapolis system.  They’ve decamped for suburban districts using the state’s open enrollment system, to private and parochial schools, and for charter schools.

So  look for MN2020 and Nick Coleman to propose repealing open enrollment any time here.

One might surmise, by this point, that Coleman knows nothing about the subject that he’s not told by others – that he’s reading off of MN2020 talking points. That Mr. “I Know Stuff” might be just vamping it, like a marionette being twirled about by a giggly master; like a monkey.

And you’d be right:

In addition to millions spent on per-pupil aid for charter schools, up to $1,200 per pupil is spent in state assistance to help buy or rent charter school space (this at a time when public enrollment is shrinking and surplus education buildings stand vacant). These “lease aid” payments will balloon by 23 percent this biennium, to a whopping $85 million, and much of that total is going into a muddled mess where payments continue even after buildings are paid for and tax-paid real estate winds up owned not by the public but by the charter schools themselves.

Really?

The property is “owned by the charter schools themselves?”

Interesting.

Because charter schools are not allowed to own property.

They can not own their buildings.

Wow.  I guess he doens’t “know stuff” after all.

Nick Coleman is a senior fellow at the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University. He can be reached at nickcoleman@gmail.com.

I’d love to see the crap their “junior fellows” put out.

UPDATE:  I’ve been corrected – charters can own buildings, they just can’t buy ’em with public funds.  Which was what Coleman was talking about, so it doesn’t impact my point in any way.

…especially any of you that have ever used the term “teabagger” to refer to a conservative exercising his/her free speech, and/or written any conservative grass-roots action off to “astroturfing”:

1. So I take it you’ll be ignoring all of the “research” and “data” coming from Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota from now on.  Right?  Because y’all seem to take them pretty seriously today, even though the “group” is essentially one woman, Dr. Rebecca Thoman (who is an OBGYN, not an emergency room trauma surgeon, by the way), and her majordomo, Heather Martens.  If they go to a demonstration, and they call on their “friends” at “Million Mom March”, they may draw half a dozen people, mostly out-of-work professional activists.  Indeed, various second-amendment activist friends relate stories of going to C”S”M meetings where shooter “ringers” outnumbered the anti-gun activists by several to one – where “one” is an absolute number, not a ratio.
2. Let’s accept, for the moment, that all of the conservative response at Town Hall meetings, and all of the Tea Parties, are in fact being coordinated by some cabal of right-leaning “astroturf” groups.  OK – so what?  Do you think that just because someone sets a meeting and says “let’s protest”, that it’ll draw a crowd?  Especially a crowd of conseratives – people who never come out to picket, wave signs or chant slogans?  With Democrats, of course, it’s ture – to paraphrase Fred THompson in The Hunt for Red October, Democrats don’t take a restroom break without some gropu gtelling them where to go or what to do.  But conservatives?  Election day is the biggest “demonstration” most conservatives ever make it to, ever, their lives.  So even if  there were some shadowy cabal out there, what makes you think people would come to the town halls and tea parties if the anger wasn’t very , very genuine?  You can start an astroturf group – but that doesn’t mean people will come, and bring the passion that the anti-Obamacare dissidents bring.  Just watch a “Million Mom” or “Code Pink” or ACORN demonstration for proof.

Of course, you do know that’s the truth – which is why the campaigns to mock, dismiss and intimidate these outbursts are being coordinated from the White House itself.
But since “astroturf” is newly “un-american”, I figured I’d give all you stalwarts in the lefty alt-media a chance to show your consistency.

Go to it!

It good to know I’m not the only one drawing this conclusion these days….

What we’re seeing in Washington these days is beginning to look like Jimmy Carter II.

Carter, like Barack Obama, started out with the idea of stimulating the economy.

His plan was to give every taxpayer $50, then throw in a few billion for tax cuts and public works programs. Simple, right? Wrong: In Washington, this soon became very complicated. Within a month, the package grew from $20 billion to more than $31 billion — a significant amount in the 1970s.

Ah, those were the days. Elitist liberal miscreants like Obama pissed away mere billions instead of trillions.

Obama is losing momentum and spending political capital as fast as stimulus dollars. Will he change course?

In April of his first year in office, Carter finally threw up his hands and scrapped the whole idea. He had dithered for four months. He had nothing to show for the effort. By then he was fatally diminished, his authority substantially eroded.

With the Obama administration, a similar unraveling is well under way and gathering momentum. Voters are increasingly restive. The country is souring on Obama’s gargantuan policy ambitions. The sense is growing that he has grossly overplayed his hand.

Regrettably, I think Obama is more committed than Carter was to government engorgement of the private sector. Let’s not underestimate of the damage Obama, Reid, Pelosi and their posse are prepared to perpetrate on America.

Like Carter, Obama looks increasingly like a president out of step with the times. Like Carter, there is a large gap between what voters expected based on the measured and moderate tone of his campaign and what began unfolding after his inauguration. Obama ran as a centrist, but he is governing from the left.

Surprise! (not)

In an NPR poll, a plurality of Americans opposed Obama’s health care efforts. In a recent Rasmussen poll, those who strongly disapproved of the president’s performance outnumbered those who strongly supported him by 11 percentage points.

Immaterial. Obama is smarter than we are and knows what’s best for us. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Many legitimately fear that if not stopped, Obama and the Democratic Congress will take this country well beyond the point where the public sector starts to “squeeze the life” out of the economy.

Too late. I believe we’re calling it the Great Recession.

It’s not too late for Obama to make a major adjustment. Bill Clinton’s initial months were equally turbulent. He was savvy enough to make a mid-course correction — but it came only after the election of a Republican Congress. On his present course, Obama is making that eventuality increasingly likely.

Then again, Bill Clinton was a fiscal conservative, compared to Obama and Bush.

Last week, I announced that the next MOB party is scheduled for August 22.

Some said “the notice is too short”.

So I’ll do something unprecedented in MOB history:  Throw it open to a vote.  The choices:

August 22 (a week from this coming Saturday).

September 12 (the weekend after the state fair is over, and autum is kicking in).

Upsides to the 22nd – I need a drink.

Upsides to the 12th – more time, fewer summer distractions, weather should be good, and there’s a chance that cigar patios will be legal again.  More on that later today.

So vote early and often!

Note that I’ve set this so everyone gets one vote – not a daily vote.  Joke votes will be your final answer.

About a week ago, the left was all-atwitter at the thought that Sarah and Todd Palin – evangelical fundamentalist “Family Values” conservatives – were getting divorced.  These were largely the same people who found it delightfully ironic that the Palins – being pro-lifers – would have a daughter who’d get pregnant while 17.

Of course, there’s dead silence now that Dan Riehl and Stacy McCain blew the lid completely off the entire fabricated hatchet-job story:

Just in case anyone has arrived late at this news, here are links to major items, arranged in chronological order, in the development of the “Gryphen”/Griffin story:

• Aug. 1: “Palin Divorce Gossip ‘Completely False'” — American Spectator
• Aug. 1: “Quote From Sarah Palin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 1: “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check It Out” — American Spectator
• Aug. 2: ‘Mommy, Why Does My Kindergarten Teacher Lie About Sarah Palin?’ — The Other McCain
• Aug. 2: “Is This Sarah Palin’s Gryphen?” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 3: “Don’t Threaten Dan, Griffin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 4: “E-Mail to Jesse Griffin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 4: “Jesse Griffin: Troubling Revelations” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin’s Been Lying to His Friends, Too?” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin Explained” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin Just Keeps Lying” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Give Jesse Enough Rope” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin: Latest Developments” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Real Facts, Riehl Theory” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 6: “Exit, Lying: School’s Out for Anti-Palin Blogger Jesse Griffin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 6: “Of Moonbats and ‘Minions'” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 6: “What Is Jesse Griffin Telling Us?” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 7: “Why Did Jesse Quit the Kindergarten?” — Riehl World View

Of course, when it comes to media attacks on conservatives, truth isn’t realy a requisite.
Any of you “Yaaay, the HIPPOCRETS are getting divorced!” folks out there have a comment?

Let’s establish this in advance:  Congresspeople get unlimited franking, immediate and usually slavering access to the mainstream media, and usually a fan-club of alt-media types – bloggers and talk radio, whether left or right – to help them get their views out.

It’s practically impossible to “silence” a United States congressperson.

Now – I keep asking this, but every time I think “this can’t possibly get any worse”, I’m always unpleasantly surprised.  I ask the question “do you remember three years ago, when “dissent was the supreme form of patriotism””?

Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, writing in USA Today, doesn’t want you to think they do (emphasis added):

These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views — but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.

Are you people embarassed yet?
Nancy Pelosi – you live by Alinsky, you die (rhetorically) by Alinsky.  Didn’t he revolutionize civil dialog?

At any rate – it’s the facts that get us to these meetings.  The nation will be bankrupted.  The healthcare system – the best in the world – will be destroyed.

One America speaks its mind.

The other America stomps the first America while it’s lying on the ground.

To: Service Employees Internation Union

CC: President Barack Obama

From:  Mitch Berg Nazi  mobster  part of immense conspiracy   insurance company hack  Citizen

Dear SEIU:

I’ll be attending quite a number of events related to “Obamacare” for the duration of this administration.  I will be speaking out.

I dare you to try to mix it up with me.

Just so you have no excuse, I’m this guy:

Try to get in my face.

I dare you.

That is all.
With no due respect,

Mitch Berg

Obama and his ilk are selling the July economic numbers, telling us the stimulus is working, the recession is ending and the economy is on the mend.

Businesses shed “just” 247,000 jobs in July, far fewer than the 330,000 most economists and Wall Street analysts were looking for. As bad as that still sounds, July’s toll was only two-thirds the monthly average since December 2007, when the recession began.

So your carotid is still gushing blood, but it’s coming out more slowly now.

It’s not that there isn’t good news to be had, it’s that politicians are connecting dots that shouldn’t be connected.

Americans are desperate for some good news, and this recession will someday be behind us, but our recovery will have nothing to do with wasteful government borrowing and spending. A recovery will come from small businesses and free enterprise, finding ways to succeed despite the government’s increased burden in the form of inflation and ultimately, higher taxes on everyone.

As such, we’re bracing for the inevitable self-congratulatory back pats from the White House and Congress, lauding their own economic stewardship for pulling us back from the abyss. On Friday, President Obama said his policies “rescued our economy from catastrophe” while building “a new foundation for growth.”

Don’t believe it. Claims that higher taxes and a total of $2 trillion in stimulus, TARP and bailout spending this year have turned the economy around are unconvincing. Indeed, they’re farcical.

As economist Casey Mulligan noted on the New York Times blog after dissecting second-quarter GDP data, total stimulus at the state and federal levels amounted to about $12 per person. That’s stimulus?

Suggesting that government is responsible for what looks to be a rather weak recovery is an insult to all the small private companies and millions of laid-off workers who bore the brunt of bad government policies over the past two years.

I will put my party hat on when banks start lending, businesses start hiring and consumers start spending. On that day we’ll have a true recovery. At the same time, I will be watching the beach for the inflation title wave that will be the unavoidable result of “Stimulus,” “Cash for Clunkers,” corporate bailouts and “pedal to the metal” fed monetary policy.

In the mean time, whatever Obama says about the economy from now on, you can pretty much disregard.

Twelve years ago, Clinton Derangement Syndrone swept many reaches of the American right.  Fringe-y conservative pundits claimed Clinton had done everything from murdering Vince Foster to giving prisoners AIDS-tainted blood to (I’m getting a little foggy on the story) make money from the hike in blood prices (?).

Over the past eight or so years, the debt was repaid with loan-shark interest; Bush Derangement Syndrome (he brought down the Twin Towers, doncha know) spawned at least two broadast radio networks and most of MSNBC’s current lineup.

But this pathology is evolving into an uglier, more virulent pathology.  Because while distrusting the government is normal (and to a certain degree healthy), when the government and its attendant “elites” start assuming the people are some sort of mass of depraved animals, it’s a very bad thing.

Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winner, is shocked – shocked – that people are upset about Obamacare.

And he just can’t find a historical precedent for the anger he thinks he’s seeing:

That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.

(Because members of Congress, especially those who support Obama, just can’t get heard in this day and age, can they?)

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And, Paul Krugman, you can’t find any examples of union goons beating up dissenters in 2005, either, can you?

What possible difference is there between now and then?  Between the Social Security debate and Obamacare? I’ll let you take a moment and turn that keen, Princeton-trained mind on solving that little riddle as we move on?

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

Paul Krugman:  you seriously claim you can’t find any expression of anger in the past, say, eight and a half years, any expression of rage that overtopped the banks of sanity?

OK – that’s two jobs for that keen, Nobel-prize-winning intellect to tackle.

We’ll take a detour through crummy journalism…:

So this is something new and ugly. What’s behind it?

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, has compared the scenes at health care town halls to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000 — the demonstration that disrupted the vote count in Miami and arguably helped send George W. Bush to the White House. Portrayed at the time as local protesters, many of the rioters were actually G.O.P. staffers flown in from Washington.

But Mr. Gibbs is probably only half right. Yes, well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs. Key organizers include two Astroturf (fake grass-roots) organizations: FreedomWorks, run by the former House majority leader Dick Armey, and a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.

…because goodness knows a movement like Krugman’s, which depends on MoveOn.org, ACORN, the NEA and the SEIU to get crowds out for events can’t stand the thought of political action groups actually…organizing politics!

But with that out of the way, let’s move on to the casual class defamation:

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

Michael Savage told me that the only way Paul Krugman could win a Nobel Prize was by providing sexual favors to Nobel committee members. I think he just might be right.

“Wow”, you might say – “That’s defamatory”.

It would be, if I meant it.  It’d take a bit of scabrous (and in this case fictional) libel from a “source” whose only motivation is hatred for Paul Krugman, and waters it down with just enough weasel words (“he just might be right”) to give myself some ethical wiggle room.
So let’s unpack Krugman’s last paragraph – which is easily the most cynical, stupid paragraph I have ever read in the Old, Gray, Increasingly Demented Lady.

• So Paul Krugman – do the “Birther” “movement” – a paranoid conspiracy theory rejected by the vast majority of Obama’s opponents – and opposition to Obamacare – which is based on an empirical reading of the supply and demand for healthcare, as well as the real-life experiences of healthcare consumers in Canada and the UK – actually share a “driving force”, or do they only “probably” share one?   Because when you say…
• “…we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers”, and you “wouldn’t be surprised” if it was plenty?  That’s called “weasel words”.  You don’t know.  And worse, your only “source” is…
• …Dick “Turban” Durbin, who is one of the weasels being pummeled in public, and whose contempt for the opinion of the American Peasant is summed up by his support for reintroducing the “Fairness” Doctrine, and whose hostility to dissent is famous.

What is the difference, precisely, between Krugman’s real paragraph and my made-up one?

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites…But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.

And in Paul Krugman’s special little world, “right wing intensity” can only come from some depraved, immoral motive.

That is the legacy of the Obama administration, so far; dissent is worse than unpaatriotic; it is depraved.

They hate you.

(Via Mr. D @ TvM)

…at about this time that my oldest, “Bun” (not her real name) was born.

Her mother had gone into the “slow” labor three days earlier (at a KDWB Star Party, after Bell Biv Devoe’s set).  About four the night before she’d gone into hard labor – which subsided as soon as we got to Ramsey County Hospital.  A supremely arrogant resident, an Indian woman, sent us home – where the contractions jumped to one every 45 seconds the moment we got to the front steps.

Eighteen hours of back labor later,  the room flooded with doctors and nurses; I was too dazed to realize “this is probably a bad thing”.  She was going into fetal distress from all the pushing; she had a salad tong delivery just in time to avoid a caesarian.

She’s been about the same at getting to places on time ever since.

Anyway – it’s been a wild 12 years.  Happy Birthday, Bun!

CORRECTION:  Whoops – it’s been 18 years.  I had to double-check it.  Didn’t seem possible.  But yep, sure enough – Bell Biv Devoe hasn’t even been on top 40 radio since 1991.

So ow.  Yeah.  My oldest is 18.  My legal obligations just officially dropped in half.  I say “officially”, of course; she’s not going anywhere for a while, yet.  My “whack upside the head” factor, OTOH, doubled. The phrase “time flies” is terribly overused – but it’s true.  It doesn’t seem possible.

Anyway – happy birthday, Bun!

Tim Pawlenty ripped the federal CARS “Cash for Clunkers” program this week.

It makes no sense, he said on his weekly radio show, for the federal government to bail out a company such as General Motors and then give consumers as much as $4,500 to buy a car from GM.

“It makes everybody feel good,” Pawlenty said, “but because we own GM, we’re just paying ourselves back. It seems a little odd.”

Car dealers respond predictably…

“I think the governor’s comments are unfortunate and maybe ill-informed,” said Scott Lambert, executive director of the Minnesota Auto Dealers Association. “This program has clear benefits to it. The only downside is that it’s using taxpayer money

We wouldn’t want to nit-pick where the money’s coming from.

…but it’s stimulus money that’s working. It’s promoting some of the biggest economic activity the state has seen all summer.”

Maybe so, but what happens when the program stops?

It’s akin to Billy Mays endorsing cocaine.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 11AM-5PM. 

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John or some combination thereof kick off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed is back, and we’ll be up from 1-3.  It’s a safe bet we’ll be talking about our new Emperor and his SEIU retainers, Obamacare’s travails…everything but Paula Abdul.
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King is on next, dishing his own personal brand of conservative hurt from 3-5.  Check it out.
• And don’t forget, our long-time colleagues David Strom and Margaret Martin lead things off on the David Strom Show from 9-11AM!

(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:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream)
• Podcast at Townhall (usually uploaded by Monday morning).
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!

Join us!

…and apparently failed out as well.

Ten Democrats, including our own embarrassment, Al Franken, are flirting with the idea of turning a near global economic collapse into a full economic collapse. In the name of what? An ever-evolving political land-grab called Global Warming Cooling Climate Change.

The Chinese have already grown in both their skepticism of our solvency as well as their ability to wreak havoc on a US economy that has only recently been moved from the ICU.

Ten Senate Democrats whose votes are pivotal to the success of climate legislation urged the Obama administration on Thursday to support levying tariffs on goods from countries that don’t limit their greenhouse-gas emissions.

…Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, Carl Levin of Michigan, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and Al Franken of Minnesota.

From a friend, mentor and founder of a successful money management firm, Peter R.:

“Let’s collect a carbon tariff on imports so we don’ t offshore our carbon production. I’m sure that a trade war with China won’t affect their desire to finance our deficits.”

Those deficits being the bi-products of the failed Bush/Obama “Stimulus” packages and the recently resuscitated CARS fiasco, among a myriad of other unfunded, wasteful and ineffective government expenditures.

The wars of the future may be fought on the internet and in the currency markets. We have allowed the Chinese to gain the upper hand via decades of arrant government fiscal policies. We have found ourselves in the unenviable position of relying on their goodwill.

This is no time to hug a tree.

I never paid that much attention to John Hughes.

Don’t get me wrong.  I saw most of his movies.  I loved most of them; Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes Trains and Automobiles, even Home Alone – all of them were fun, clever, well-written…

…but not, in my case, because they captured what teenage life was really really like, as MPR’s film critic noted yesterday in reporting on Hughes’ passing from a heart attack yesterday.  It struck me as being a great look at what teenage life was really really like in Evanston Illinois.  Not where I came from, I grumbled.  And I was in my twenties by this point, and kinda past the whole “teenage” thing (He did contribute what I’d call one of my life’s mottos; “You can never go too far”). 

And still I loved the movies; Breakfast Club was wonderful; Pretty In Pink rocked my world; I don’t laugh any less at Ferris Bueller now than I did 20 years ago; Planes Trains and Automobiles was not only hilarious but poignant.

But while I knew and loved the movies, I didn’t know so much about Hughes himself.  Hughes was almost a brand in his own right, like “Kleenex”; say “John Hughes Movie”, and everyone knew the basic formula right off the bat.

Allison Byrne Fields has the best piece I’ve seen yet, ever, on Hughes the person, told from the perspective of a teenage penpal of Hughes’:

“I’d be honored to be your pen pal. You must understand at times I won’t be able to get back to you as quickly as I might want to. If you’ll agree to be patient, I’ll be your pen pal.”
For two years (1985-1987), John Hughes and I wrote letters back and forth. He told me – in long hand black felt tip pen on yellow legal paper – about life on a film set and about his family. I told him about boys, my relationship with my parents and things that happened to me in school. He laughed at my teenage slang and shared the 129 question Breakfast Club trivia test I wrote (with the help of my sister) with the cast, Ned Tanen (the film’s producer) and DeDe Allen (the editor). He cheered me on when I found a way around the school administration’s refusal to publish a “controversial” article I wrote for the school paper. And he consoled me when I complained that Mrs. Garstka didn’t appreciate my writing.

Read the whole, wonderful, poignant thing. 

You can never go too far.

One of the biggest whacks upside the head of the local blogging/trivia community this past year was the Met Council’s ruling that bars that’d established “smoking patios” outside their premises had to pay fees on that extra square footage as if it was indoor, year-round revenue-generating space.  This has forced Twin Cities’ bars to shut down the practice of having special patios for smokers, especially cigar buffs.

Of course, it’s been a bigger whack upside the head for the bar owners themselves.  Already on the ropes from the smoking ban, the extra smack to their summer revenue (summer is already a slow time for most bars) has pushed many Twin Cites establishments up to and in some cases over the edge.

And in a rare move for a bureaucracy, the Met Council seems to be considering responding to the pressure from bar owners and their patrons.  There’ll be a hearing this coming Tuesday afternoon to reconsider the fee structure.  I’m not sure if there’s time to salvage the summer (or if the provision will be lifted in time to set up a patio for the MOB party)…

…but I am sure that the region’s anti-smoking gestapo will take a break from whinging about the “orchestration” of town-hall meeting outrage over healthcare to organize plenty of people to come to the meeting to bitch about secondhand smoke.

This is where you come in.

Bureaucrats take phone calls seriously.  They – the smart ones, anyway – know that every phone call represents 100 people who didn’t call them.  One call represents 100 like-minded people; it’s public relations truism.

And so it’d be great if you could take a moment to contact the members of the Met Council.   Here they are.  Please take a moment and leave them polite, reasoned messages asking them to reconsider their policy; it’s killing bars, putting people out of work, and playing into the hands of chain restaurants and establishments.  Phone is better than email, but either is vastly better than letting the other guys have the stage to themselves.

Of course if you are free on Tuesday, here are the details:

Proposed Changes to the Service Availability Charge (SAC)Rules Regarding Outdoor Spaces Public Information Meeting: 1 p.m., Chambers

I might…just…be able to make it.  Fingers crossed.