Ed and I are setting up to follow MIchael Medved at the Minnesota State Fair.

Today, we’ll be talking with Senator Dave Hahn, who’s running for the gubernatorial nomination, as well as our sponsors at Heartland Tours, and the folks from Tee It Up For The Troops!

5-7!  Join us!

Jeff Johnson, over at the Hennepin County Taxpayer Watchdog blog, notes that HenCo is spending taxpayer money to lobby for higher taxes

Bottom line (and pardon my crudeness): Government is giving the finger to the taxpayers of Hennepin County as it spends taxpayer money to lobby the legislature for increased taxes on those same taxpayers.
The Project began several years ago and is funded jointly by the counties of Hennepin, Ramsey and St. Louis, the cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth and the school districts of those same three cities. Each entity allocates approximately $10,000 each year to the Project.

Money taken from the children’s mouths, in the case of the school districts.

The Project essentially funds one “consultant” (who happens to work for Matt Entenza’s liberal Minnesota 2020 think tank) year after year to prepare a report that pretty consistently says the same thing: Minnesotans are not taxed enough. That report is then used to lobby the legislature for increased taxes, apparently in hopes of obtaining more money for cities, counties and school districts in Minnesota.

And, indirectly, to support the advancement of any number of other MN2020 objectives, including the harassment to extinction of Minnesota’s charter schools.

Government’s chief objective, at least in Henco, Ramco and Duluth, seems to be purely to perpetuate itself.

“Kathy”, in a komment on Jeff Rosenberg’s bit on Bachmann’s “wrist” remark over on MNPublius:

Not only should Michele Bachmann supporters slit their wrists in solidarity with this crazy loon, they might as well slit their throats as well.

The scary part?  “Kathy’s” vote counts the same as a smart, functional person’s does.

The scarier part?  I have yet to see a single leftyblogger oppose the murder of conservatives.

(Oh, I’m being tongue in cheek.  I just don’t think most of those people are).

Ed Schultz bags out on one of his radio shows:

Its been an interesting couple of months in Ed Schultz news, which is never usually an interesting news category unless you find men who consider shouting insults to be keen political analysis to be interesting

I don’t, as a rule – but when Schultz is involved, you have to handicap a bit. 

First Schultz and his North Dakota rival Scott Hennen (full disclosure: I guest host for Hennen and have my own show on his station) announced a partnership whereby Schultz would host a morning show on Hennen’s recently-acquired AM station in southeast North Dakota and debate with Hennen himself once a week on Hennen’s morning show.

This sparked a great deal of criticism of Hennen which I never quite understood.  I understand that a lot of people don’t like Schultz (including many on his own side of the political divide), but as far as Hennen goes what’s wrong with debating with the other side? 

The whole “if you talk with the “enemy” some of it rubs off on you” school of thought is something that irritates the piss out of me when it’s liberals doing the whinging. It doesn’t bother me any less among conservatives. 

Anyway, last week during the Hennen vs. Schultz debate Schultz got so angry he hung up during the program.

If it was anything like last year’s “debates” between Schultz and Michael Medved, I’ll bet it didn’t take long.  Schultz wasn’t Medved’s intellectual peer.  He isn’t Hennen’s equal.  For that matter, Tonya Harding outmatches the guy.

Then Schultz pulls the plug on his radio show on Hennen’s station.  We can at least be glad that Schultz didn’t get so angry that he got drunk and punched a girl (as he’s been known to do) but even so that seems like a sissy move.

Sissy?  Perhaps.

“The move of a guy who is trying to fight way above his intellectual weight class”?  Definitely.

I was reading Dusty Trice today when I was reminded of something from over the weekend:

Over the busy opening weekend a few DUSTYTRICE.COM tipsters were volunteering to help tape over at the Patriot Radio booth.

Yes, indeed, they were.  We had three gubernatorial candidates – Paul Kolls, Pat Anderson and Marty Seifert – on Saturday.  Laura Brod was also on King’s show, although she’s not a candidate.  They were on for half an hour each.  And for that entire time, a couple of guys stood, holding a video camera, slurping it all up.  For two hours.

And on one level, I thought “wotta life – standing for two hours in the sun, videotaping every single thing a candidate says, waiting for a “flub”. 

And on the next level, I thought “it doesn’t matter what the candidates say, because the best they can hope for is to be merely wrenched out of context; whatever they say will be called “hateful” or “crazy” anyway”.

Picture this:  You’re at the Hiawatha Avenue railroad yards.  It’s 5AM.  Trucks – which have been busy rounding up dissidents all night long – line up and unload their cargoes, to be stuffed onto boxcars by gangs of SEIU thugs with attack dogs.  At 8AM, the trains pull out, hauling thousands of dissidents off to “re-education” camps in Idaho and eastern Wyoming.  Their only crime?  Speaking out against the Obama Administration; winding up on Janet Napolitano’s enemies list; getting denounced by their DFLer neighbors to the DFL “Hope and Change” tribunals.

At the camps in Idaho, they live in unheated barracks, eat potatoes (albeit Idaho potatoes), and learn proper thought by hauling wheelbarrows full of dirt from one pile to the other.

This is the vision of Jeff Rosenberg, of MNPublius.  This is the world he wants.

Well, no – he doesn’t specifically say so.  But he doesn’t speak out against it!

Oh – he’s talking about Rep. Michele Bachmann:

Well if I thought her rhetoric was overheated before, that’s nothing compared to a speech she recently made to a group of Denver conservatives:

“This cannot pass,” the Minnesota Republican told a crowd at a Denver gathering sponsored by the Independence Institute. “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.”

I’m gonna go out on a limb here; Bachmann grabbed the wrong metaphor in the heat of a rhetorical moment; you don’t slit your wrist, you poke your finger or thumb.  It’s a guy thing anyway; nobody expects a chick to have a command of it.

Does “whatever it takes” include violent, armed revolution? Because her rhetoric over the past year doesn’t seem to rule that out in any way.

I just sat slack-jawed for a while when I read that.

I still am.

Let me be absolutely clear for our conservative readers. Free speech is protected, and Bachmann has the right to voice her opposition to health reform. However, sedition and fomenting violent rebellion are most definitely not protected.

Well – problem solved! 

By the way – while Bachmann said nothing about armed revolt of any kind, it’s good to see lefties suddenly getting upset about violent opposition and anti-American sedition.

Bachmann needs to cool it before the birthers-with-guns movement turns into something even more insidious.

Perhaps Rosenberg means “before the “birtherns with guns “movement” turns into a movement”.  There’ve been three incidents, none involving illegal activity, much less violence.

Indeed, every single incident of violence at every town hall meeting was precipitated by a Democrat or one of their sympathizers.  Every one. 

Who is it we have to worry about, here? 

 I, for one, would hold her partly responsible.

Like there was a lot of doubt about that.

Just so you don’t forget – Saturday, September 12th is the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers Fifth Anniversary Gala.

 We’ll be at Keegans, starting around 6:30ish, going until people get tired or ejected. 

It’s open to….everyone!  Bloggers, blog fans, blog hangers-on, people who like good Irish beer, you name it!

RSVP if you’d like, to “feedbackinthedark”, over at Yahoo dot com.

Back during the concealed carry debate in Minnesota, I can’t count the number of casually anti-reform people – including one DFL lobbyist/activist type who, while not an elected official, exerts a fairly hefty influence over politics in the Twin Cities – that I talked to who asked “why not require people to carry openly?  I mean, why not show people that you’re carrying?”

Which of course shows how screechingly ill-informed most anti-concealed carry activists are; the Minnesota Personal Protection Act allows people to carry openly.

But leaving aside the fact that requiring open carry would have the effect of tipping violent criminals off as to who was armed, most people who have permits don’t carry openly for the simple reason that “Gun” is a pretty powerful message.  In a generally-disarmed place like the Twin Cities, openly carrying a gun – completely legally – would be a little like walking around naked; it could be completely innocent, but at the very least it’d tend to dominate the conversation, and at the most could get people pretty upset. 

At this year’s annual Gun Rights picnic at the Harriett Bandshell, where dozens of utterly law-abiding citizens stood, ate and kibitzed, many of us carrying permitted firearms, a bystander was heard sputtering into a cell phone demanding a police response.  Now, it was a legal picnic full of legal people doing a legal activity, and someone had taken the liberty of telling the police what was going on, so nothing happened.  But as a general rule, keeping guns out the way among crowds that might not necessarily be with the good guys is considered tactful.  At least.

Just because you can openly carry your firearm doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Now, when you mix guns and politics?  The messages are even more pronounced.  The symbolism gets through to even SEIU members.

Make no mistake about it; government needs to know that the people do in fact have the final veto, should they get genuinely out of line – suspending the Constitution, abrogating democracy, descending into genuine tyranny.  And the government should know that each and every one of us gun-owning citizens is not going to be giving up our Second Amendment rights without a fight – and that fight will be rhetorical and political, God willing, as long as we do have a functioning democracy.

But at a town hall meeting? Oh, I get the idea – but it’s a bad plan.  While you may be trying to express “Don’t Tread On Me”, there are those – mostly, but not entirely, from the pants-wetting class – who will take it as “I’m Treading On You”.  Which is the last impression one wants to leave people with in a civil society.

So while I get the idea, the fact is that Obama hasn’t suspended the constitution.  Oh, he and his Chicago-like administration are playing fast and loose with a lot of our rights, and they need watching. 

When when you’re talking town hall meetings – notwithstanding the fact that when congresspeople and the President are involved are usually really just decorative window-dressing when it comes to “participatory democracy” – leave the guns at home.  Even if you’re legal (as all the people in the incidents two weeks ago were).

We need to force the President and his dupes to stay on subject. 

Minneapolis police investigate Minneapolis police softball team for a violent drunken binge:

The Minneapolis Police Department’s internal affairs unit is investigating a police softball team after an alleged night of drinking and brawls.

The softball game itself was in Northeast Park last Tuesday, where Minneapolis police took on Minneapolis firefighters.

By the time the off-duty Minneapolis officers arrived at the Double Deuce strip club, still in their softball uniforms, the owner told FOX 9, the cops were so intoxicated that the bouncer wouldn’t let them in the strip club.

OK, so that’s one thing. 

But this…:

The owner says the officers even started flashing their badges, trying to intimidate the bouncer. And in retaliation, one of the officers allegedly urinated on the club’s wall. The incident was caught on video.

With closing time nearing, the team went to Mayslak’s Bar a few blocks away. The owner and staff told FOX 9, the officers picked a couple of fights and told patrons no one could stop them because they were all cops.

Outside the bar, one of the cops allegedly assaulted a man, who was passing by, after he tried to break up one of those fights.

The Minneapolis Police Department’s internal affairs unit has been making the rounds at the northeast bars, looking for witnesses, trying to get the story straight.

The audio on the Fox9 report said that people are reticent about talking; they don’t want to get on the wrong side of the police.

Fresch Fisch – a longtime friend of this blog and of the NARN – attended F Rep. McCollum’s “Town Hall Meeting” at Macalester last night.

Yes, I was there with my big red sign that read “More debt? Print more money?”. I got in, one of only 400. I would presume that more than a couple thousand were there by 6:00 PM, and the show didn’t start till 7:00PM.

Astroturf?  Betty had it! 

And could you believe it? The place was packed with pre-made Obama signs that said “THANK YOU”. I didn’t see any pre-made signs from the insurance lobby, just simple homemade signs.

Part of me wishes I could have been there – but I couldn’t have made it by 4PM anyway. 

Anyone else make it?  Please leave a link or a comment…

It was seventy years ago this morning that Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II in Europe – beginning what was, in a sense,the end of a war that’d begun 25 years earlier, taken a 21 year break, and then re-ignited, killing tens of millions of people directly on the battlefield and, in ways never before seen in human history, off of it.
In another sense, it began the final act of the Old World – the world of European dominance, of its kingdoms and alignments and customs defining “civilization” for the rest of the world – and was the beginning of the world we have today, a world who’s denouement is at this moment very much in play.

But that’s a story we’ll recap in seventy more years, God willing.

———-

In reading the story of the German Blitzkrieg into Poland most of my cognitive life, I became fascinated with the history of Poland – or, really, of all of the smaller European states that Hitler swallowed up.  A lot of legends sprang up around each of these nations and their record during the awful year that followed the invasion of Poland.

I would like to address some of them.

———-

Poland started the war with a couple of strikes against it.

For starters, its terrain is just not defendable.

All of its major cities sit on a broad, flat plain, cut by few rivers (whose banks are, largely, not major obstacles to much of anything).  The road from the German or Russian border to the capitol in Warsaw, or its industrial heartland around Katowice/Sosnowiec, or its intellectual and cultural heart in Krakow has no more physical speed bumps than a drive from Fargo to Grand Forks.

And while Poland knew very well that it was surrounded by a couple of rapacious dictatorships who, as they had through all of history, meant it nothing but ill, and they did their best to prepare for eventualities, they did something that’s all too familiar to modern IT executives; at a time in history when military technology was evolving at a pace that the world had never before seen (and in many respects hasn’t seen since), the Poles, like the French, laid their cards on the table early, standardizing and mass-producing equipment that turned out to be obsolete a mere 5-10 years after it rolled off the assembly line.  The Polish Air Force was mass-producing the Pzl fighter plane and the Karas fighter-bomber at a time when the Germans had just started developing the planes with which they’d launch the war, the Bf109 fighter, the Ju87 Stuka dive bomber, the He111/Do17/Ju88 bombers.

(The French military, like the British navy, likewise bet long on mid-thirties technology that served it less effectively than later designs). Likewise, they built thousands of tiny, two-man machine-gun armed “tankettes”, state of the art in 1933 but useless as anything but mobile machine guns in 1939 against the German tanks that were just going up on the drawing boards.

By 1939, Poland was just starting to produce the excellent “7TP” tanks – as good as any German Panzer…

…but it was too little and too late.

To help make up for that, the Poles had a few advantages; the Air Force’s pilots were spectacularly well-trained; indeed, the Polish pilots who escaped after the Blitz to the UK, and got to fly first-rate modern fighters like the Hurricane and the Spitfire in 1940 turned out to be among the RAF’s highest scorers in the Battle of Britain.

In the days before radar, they were supported by a large, comprehensive ground observer network that did a surprisingly good job of detecting German air raids and vectoring Polish fighters onto the target.  The Polish Navy, in contrast (and as an ironic result of its relatively lower standing at budget time) standardized rather later, and went to war with some of the finest equipment in all of Europe; the Blyskawica-class destroyers and Orzel-class submarines (both built in Holland) were among the best anywhere, certainly outclassing anything in the German or British navies.  And, since they were standardized late and in dire  economic times, there were exactly two of each in service.

The Poles had one other thing; centuries of vassaldom to the Germans and Russians.  Other than the brief Republic of Krakow in the mid-1700’s, and the 21 years of independence (marked by a war for survival against the Soviets), Poland had been under one boot or another since the end of the Jagiellonian era. The Poles wanted their freedom.  And even though the government in 1939 was at least partly a dictatorship – a response to a paralyzing indecision in the face of both the Great Depression and the gathering threat from east and west – Poland was an outpost of small-“l” liberal sentiment.  It also built an intellgience service that, like that of many counteries surrounded by enemies (see Israel), disproportionally excellent; indeed, Polish Intelligence helped with one of the great coups of the war; it was the Poles that made the first inroads into breaking Germany’s “Enigma” encryption system.  The Polish mathematicians fled to the UK, and joined with the British thinkers at Bletchley Park to complete the job.  The fact that the Allies could read Germany’s “secret” transmissions in near-real-time (by cryptology standards) was one of the key factors in winning the war; without that, the U-Boat offensive in 1941-43 would have likely succeeded in starving Britain to the negotiating table with Hitler.

Unlike France – misconceptions about whom we’ll address on their own 70th anniversary, in about eight months – this gave Poland a deep will to fight.

It wasn’t enough, of course – but it came a lot closer to evening things up than contemporary propaganda credits them.
———-

Two myths grew up around the German invasion of Poland; that the Polish Air Force was destroyed on the ground in the opening minutes of the campaign, and that the Polish Army’s cavalry was such a medieval throwback, it resorted to charging at tanks with lances.

Both are propaganda myths spread by the Germans and parrotted, in a story all too familiar to modern consumers of news, by an incurious, uninformed Western news media.

———-

The Polish Air Force was not caught on the ground.  Far from it; they dispersed away from their major airfields, according to pre-war plans that recognized not only the Luftwaffe’s superiority in numbers and equipment – by this point, German bombers could outrun Polish fighter planes – but Poland’s few aces in the hole.

And when the German bomber streams started appearing over Poland, the observers saw and heard them, and phoned in the information to HQ, who vectored Poland’s old fighters into position to do the only thing they realistically could against planes that were faster than their own; wait in ambush over the targets, take the most direct approach they could to their targets, and fight like hell.

And they did.  The Polish Air Force shot down over 230 German planes during September of 1939, about 250 more were damaged, many of them beyond repair.  The Lotnictwo Wojskowe lost about 100 shot down or otherwise destroyed by enemy action, with about as many being lost as the pace of the German advance, and later the Russian invasion, made repairs impossible and swallowed up the warning network and, finally, teh airfields themselves.

Following the goverment’s instructions, as the fight in central Poland became impossible, they retreated to the mountains in the south, and after the surrender made their way, by air or car or foot, first to Romania, then through Africa or Iran or the Mediterranean, then to France (where many fought with the French air force) and finally Britain or the USSR.

———-

The other legend – the horse-cavalry charges with bugles blowing and lances waving – is more pernicious.  It’s a propaganda legend, of course, one started as a German reponse to a Polish tactical victory.

In the opening days of the war, Poland had plenty of horse cavalry; they were in the process of trying to retired horses in favor of tanks and armored cars, but the Depression had slowed the process (as it did, by the way, in the US, whose cavalry was still largely horse-mounted in 1939 as well).  They didn’t fight in the classic sense of the term; think of them as infantry on horses, using the greater mobility of being mounted to help cover more ground, but dismounting to fight on foot when the action started.  And while they had lances, they were for ceremonial occasions only; they weren’t carried in the field.  There was never an intention to fight the way cavalry had always fought – the saber charges, the bugles, the mounted dashes.

Usually.

In the opening days of the war, a squadron of Pomeranian cavalry under Colonel Julian Filipowicz, patrolling in the corridor below Gdansk (Danzig, at the time), encountered a German infantry battalion which, tired from advancing and from a brisk fight with a Polish infantry unit across some nearby railroad tracks, was resting in an open field.

Col. Filipowicz’ unit – about 300 cavalrymen – while scouting the area, found the Germans.  As is so often the deciding factor in modern war, they saw the Germans first, and were able to act accordingly.  They deployed some modern weapons – Browning M2 machine guns, first built in 1918 and still found on every US Army tank today – to back up a charge led by some very old weapons, the cavalry saber.  Filipowicz, seeing an unprepared foe, ordered a charge.

And it cut the German battalion to pieces, killing dozens, wounding hundreds, and leaving the battalion combat-ineffective for quite some time.

As the Poles completed several passes, a unit of German armored cars happened on the scene, and turned their cannon and machine guns on the Poles, causing heavy losses and sending them back into the woods, to fight another day.

German photographers, travelling with a group of tanks that responded to the debacle, photographed a number of the dead Polish troopers alongside the Panzers.  The German propagandists spread the report –  the Poles were stuck in the medieval era! – as a morale booster.  And the tall tale, rather than the story of the boundless courage of Filipowicz’ men, stuck.

———-

It wasn’t the last bloody nose the Poles gave the Germans.  When the Germans pushed the Poles back to Warsaw, they tried to storm the city using the same tanks that had led them across the North Polish Plain.  The Sixth Panzer Division was ordered to attack the city.

The tanks moved into the warren of streets that made up Warsaw’s western suburbs…

…and got swallowed in a morass of antitank guns, molotov cocktails (which wouldn’t earn their name until the following winter, from the Finns, about whom more in a couple of months) and booby traps.

The Sixth Panzers lost sixty tanks – about a third of its armored strength – in the first day of its assault, a catastrophic hit.

Warsaw would have to fall the old-fashioned way – through infantrymen advancing from house to house.

———-

Or through treachery.

Stalin, as part of his temporary alliance with Hitler, invaded Poland about this time, destroying whatever hope for resistance that the Poles might have had.  It was all she wrote.

Oh, they fought on anyway; tens of thousands of Poles went to the UK or the USSR to carry on the war; hundreds of thousands more fought with the various guerrilla groups, the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) which hampered German movements throughout the war and in 1944, as the Soviets approached, seized control of much of Warsaw (and were beaten down as the Soviets stopped in the city’s eastern suburbs and refused to cross the Vistula River).  The Poles, realizing their excellent but tiny navy had no chance, ordered their most modern ships – their destroyers and submarines to feel to the UK in the opening hours of the war; Orzel, brand new out of the shipyard, ran to Sweden, and was interned (placed under arrest, essentially).  The crew escaped, and stole the sub from the docks; the Swedes had seized all the boat’s charts and navigational gear, so it sailed across the Baltic, and through the treacherous Skagerrak, and across the North Sea by guess and by gosh.

The Poles had scant hope holding against Hitler from the west; against both of their hereditary enemies, they had none.  The clock ran out fast on the Poles.  The nation’s story was one of the great tragedies of the past 100 years; winning their freedom, having it seized, held hostage by one dictator and then another for two generations.

It’s also one of the great inspirations; after all that, they took their freedom back…

….and with it catalyzed a shot at freedom for the rest of the Second World.