A month ago, Chris Coleman – mayor of Saint Paul – was on a roll.  He was simultaneously running his 2009 mayoral campaign and a 2010 gubernatorial bid.

And then – he stopped.  He abruptly ended his goober bid five days ago.

Why?  In the horde of candidates stampeding for the bid at present, he’s certainly not the longest shot.

And yet he became the first to bail.

Why?

Because he’s nervous?

What happened to put a stop to all the DFL schmooze parties where Coleman and his gubernatorial competitors have been lining up to schmooze all the prospective DFL delegates and voters?Could it have anything to do with the fact that the one, lone candidate forum between Coleman and his opponent, Eva Ng, took place about 48 hours before on Tuesday October 6th- and that Eva Ng mopped the floor with Chris Coleman?

Answer after answer, Eva Ng answered with specifics; I will freeze property taxes at their current level and then I will cut them, I will set up business zones downtown to spur entrepreneurial growth, I will hold weekly ward meetings where citizens can speak with me as their mayor and their concerns WILL be addressed.

Chris Coleman’s answers?

Chris Coleman has been in politics long enough (Ward 2 City Councilman for 2 terms, ’97-’03) to know you NEVER have to answer the question which you’re asked, and in his case, maybe it’s better in a way that he didn’t. Then he would have had to talk about his property tax increases over the last 3 years in office- 9% in ’07, 15.1% in 08, 8.6% in ’09 and a proposed increase of 6% for ‘10, as well as fee increases. Oy!

I’m not going to say “he’s scared of losing”.  But Ng, by all rational accounts, trussed Coleman up like a  hog at the “Forum” (not a debate) and parted out the roast, ham and bacon.  She didn’t beat him, she crushed, stomped and napalmed him.

And the DFL smear machine is out in force.  And as Mike Huckabee said, in perhaps his greatest contribution to American politics, “when you’re taking flak, you’re over the target”.

Can Eva Ng win this thing?  Maybe.  If every single Republican in Saint Paul turns out.  And if each of them convinces a not-so-political neighbor that Chris Coleman and an all-DFL City Council is a screeching disaster, and that the Saint Paul School board has been so derelict in its duties that it deserves to be perp-walked out of 360 Colborne under a hail of spitballs?

Why, yes.  Yes, she can.

And I can’t think of a better reason that a DFL gubernatorial front-runner, or at least not-back-runner, would abruptly bail out on the race.

When you get a couple of drinks into some Saint Paul DFL activists, some of them like to get a poo-eating grin on their face and say, with the kind of force they don’t wind up putting into tooooooo much in their lives, “we own Saint Paul!”

As the new, excellent Saint Paul Republicans blog notes, it’s high time the rest of us agreed – and helped them realize exactly what that means:

And indeed they do. They own double digit percentage rates of unemployment and downtown vacancies, 2500 or so foreclosed homes, record deficits despite windfall tax profits from the housing boom, and a 40 point achievement gap between black students and white students in the public schools. They are completely and totally in charge- the lone republican in Saint Paul and Minneapolis resigned from the school board for greener pastures.

Let’s recall a little recent history:

1. When I moved to Saint Paul, George Latimer – a “liberal” in the two-generations-of-mildly-inbred-descent-from-Hubert-Humphrey model – was the mayor. The city was decaying slowly, a sleepy backwater that was feverishly investing in properties that, twenty-odd years later, are mostly white elephants on the city Port Authority’s books.
2. Jim Scheibel was next.  An idealistic noodler in the Jimmy Carter model, Saint Paul slipped further.
3. Then came two terms of Norm Coleman.  He started as a moderate DFLer – he even gave Paul Wellstone’s nomination speech at the 1996 DFL state convention! – but gradually the North Korean-influenced Saint Paul City DFL made his life such hell that he defected to the GOP in time for his second term.  Of course, this matters not an iota to an immigrant family with five kids trying to get by on three jobs; what matters to them (and me) is that taxes held steady, services improved, jobs came to the city (although we also got on the hook for projects like Rivercenter and the X; nobody said Norm was a movement conservative.  Just right on most of the issues).
4. Then followed Randy Kelly, a DFLer in the  model of Truman and JFK.  He continued Nahm’s line on taxes.  Between Norm Coleman and Kelly, Saint Paul had twelve great  years; lower taxes, the population held fairly steady…the place just felt like it was on the upswing.
5. And now, four years of Chris Coleman.  Taxes are up 42%.  The city bureaucracy isn’t just huge – it’s rapacious, seeking power like hungry tigers seek meat.  And the city feels like it’s dying; like it’s a Flint in the making.

Yep, DFL.  You own it.

They own the Coleman-Franken-ACORN recount disaster, the light rail boondoggle (they still insist that University and Snelling is not congested), the smoking ban that was the death of many many restaurants and bars, and they even own the over 300 million in debt-620 million in unfunded pension liability-and 380 million in deferred maintenance over at the Saint Paul Public Schools (with 608 million of regular revenue, not counting this years Stimulus Funds). The People of Saint Paul are literally crying for change- a new beginning- but on election days some strange compulsion sets in to vote for party, not for change and a better future.

There’s a lot of dissatisfaction out there, although not from the city’s dominant class, its’ phalanxes of public union employees, who seem to be perfectly fat ‘n happy. At the expense of the rest of us.
But if you’re a private sector homeowner, or a landlord, or a family?

What has the DFL’s “ownership” of this city done for you?

Saint Paul is a one-party town.  There is no more political diversity in Saint Paul government that there was in Ceaucescu’s Romania (although the Saint Paul DFL isn’t quite that bad.  Yet.  I’m kidding, of course.  I’m a kidder.  I kid).

Whatever your political beliefs – even if you’re a principled liberal, for that matter – a functioning multi-party system is essential if you want to ensure some sort of accountability, to say nothing of vigorous debate, in government (if you’re an unprincpled liberal, of course, you want Saint Paul to be a little Chicago.  But then, I’m not writing to you, if that’s what you are).  Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as they say – and the Saint Paul DFL has absolute power.  Even if you are a DFLer, you have to realize that can’t end well.

Anyway – the Saint Paul Mayor’s race is the single biggest race in the state in 2009.  And the Saint Paul School Board race is a battle for “control” – and by control, I mean “complete, unfettered” – of the state’s second largest school district; Tom Conlon, the board’s only Republican and, as it happens, the only elected Republican official anywhere in any governmental body in Saint Paul, resigned to move out of state over the past winter.  Every single elected official in Saint Paul is a DFLer.

And it shows.  Saint Paul’s property taxes are up over 40% since Chris Coleman took office; services, I assure you, are not.  Either is crime – but after years of being one of America’s safest major cities, crime in Saint Paul is on the upswing even as it declines in Minneapolis.  There are entire office towers downtown that could collapse, and nobody would notice, because virtually nobody works there.  There are probably 4,000 vacant houses in the city, and property values are falling faster than Lorenzo Lamas’s career bell-curve, and neither shows any sign of slowing, much less reversing.

And the school system is a shambles.  After a decade of playing the “Celebrity Superintendant” game, and spending like they had their own currency press, the Saint Paul schools’ graduation rate is almost as low as the tax increases are high; around half of our students graduate; shameful as that is, the rate is much, much lower among minorities.

So I want you all – even if you don’t live in Saint Paul – to tune on Saturday.  Because we have an opportunity here.

It sometimes feels like being a Republican in Saint Paul is like being a Spartan at Thermopylae (“Our tax hikes shall blot out the sun!”  “Then we shall protest in the shade!”) – but there are quite a few of us out there.  Anywhere from 28% to 40% of the city votes Republican in Presidential and Congressional elections, when the turnout (largely among government union workers who can’t even read the “R” word, and bobbleheaded college kids whose only reflex on encountering cognitive dissonance is to “hiss” like a pearl-clutching Victorian) is huge.

But as the party showed us in Highland Park two years ago, if every Republican turns out, and makes sure every Republican turns out, we can shock the world city. 

So please tune in.  We’ll be talking with Mayoral candidate Eva Ng, as well as school board candidates Pat Igo, John Krenik and Chris Conner. 

And we’ll be talking about how each of you, no matter where you live, in or out of Saint Paul, can help push this thing over the top. 

Saint Paul needs your help.  We’ll show you how.

This will be on Saturday, from 1-3PM, on Volume 2 of the Northern Alliance Radio Network.

Robert Kaplan, one of the best war correspondents working today and, as an “Atlantic” writer, hardly a tool of the GOP, on Obama’s Afghanistan policy.

Kaplan, the author of Imperial Grunts (which sounded some of the first warnings about the impending failure in Afghanistan, back in the day when even John Kerry was a believer), says there’s not much good news on either side of the aisle:

When it comes to foreign policy, Republicans and Democrats are each suspect in their own way. Republicans used to be the party of competence in world affairs. They lost that aura during President George W. Bush’s first six years in office, when he mismanaged the wars both in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The Democrats, for their part, are often accused of being wobbly on national security, lacking both toughness and gumption. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama’s recent handling of the war in Afghanistan plays to those charges. Being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize will only intensify the perception that he is a weak war leader.

Kaplan’s not only entitled to his opinion about Bush, but given his background in the subject, the opinion deserves a serious listen.

But while people might accuse the Bush administration of bobbling the high-level strategy, Obama’s greater-included sins seem to include a key tenet of basic leadership:

It’s perfectly legitimate for Obama to review Afghanistan strategy and troop numbers. But by calling into question the very strategy that he put into place earlier in the year, when he called Afghanistan the “necessary war,” and promised to properly resource it, Obama is courting charges from the right that he is another ineffectual Jimmy Carter—that other Nobel Peace Prize winner.

But what Obama’s second-guessing of his own strategy in fact suggests is poor policy coordination at the White House. There’s more than a passing similarity between the White House’s hiccups on health care and its confusion on Afghanistan. In each case, the executive branch went forward on an issue without being fully staffed out, or in agreement on the specifics.

Going “Charge!  Er, no, wait, left face and march!” isn’t the kind of thing that inspires confidence.

Furthermore, in this highly networked media age you only get to fire a general once. It’s not like the Civil War era, when Abraham Lincoln could quietly relieve one commander after another until he found Ulysses Grant. Last May, the Obama Administration fired Army Gen. David McKiernan, then the commander in Afghanistan, in a particularly humiliating manner. McKiernan wasn’t a failed general; he simply wasn’t the best man for the job. Yet he’ll forever be known as the first wartime commander to have been relieved of his duties since President Harry Truman fired Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Korea. The Administration chose Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal to take his place. It was during the selection process for the new general that a policy review would have made sense—though only behind closed doors. And the time to roll out a new or adjusted strategy would have been when McChrystal’s selection was announced, so that he could become the face of the new policy.

The Administration had many months, beginning the moment Obama was elected, to recalibrate Afghan strategy. Yet it’s now in the position of publicly questioning the fundamental wisdom of the general it has chosen. The position Obama’s now in is similar to that of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld some years back—appearing not to be listening to his generals. If the president doesn’t agree with his field commander, that’s fine. Just don’t make a public spectacle of it.

Obama still hasn’t learned that life isn’t all a Chicago city council meeting; you don’t get mulligans on the big calls:

Even if Obama does end up making the correct decision on Afghanistan strategy (by which I mean adding troops, since counterinsurgency is manpower-intensive), the public agony over his deliberations may already have done incalculable damage. The Afghan people have survived three decades of war by hedging their bets. Now, watching a young and inexperienced American president appear to waiver on his commitment to their country, they are deciding, at the level of both the individual and the mass, whether to make their peace with the Taliban—even as the Taliban itself can only take solace and encouragement from Obama’s public agonizing.

Oh – and remember all that hope and change Obama was going to bring to our public image abroad?

Obama’s wobbliness also has a corrosive effect on the Indians and the Iranians. India desperately needs a relatively secular Afghan regime in place to bolster Hindu India’s geopolitical position against radical Islamdom, and while the country enjoyed an excellent relationship with bush, Obama’s dithering is making it nervous. And Iran, in observing Washington’s indecision, can only feel more secure in its creeping economic annexation of western Afghanistan. So, too, other allies far and wide—from the Middle East to East Asia, and Israel to Japan—will start to make decisions based on their understanding that Washington under Obama may not have their backs in a crisis. Again, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama only plays to such fears.

As with everything Kaplan writes, read the whole thing.

He couldn’t beat the buh-LAW-ggers…

…so he joined them.

The subhead says he’s “unbound and unbowed”.

This oughtta be good for a yuk or two.

Brisket, marinated 12 hours in Pepsi, rubbed with pepper and allspice, then 13 hours in the crock pot with potatoes, onions and carrots, served on Kaisers with Famous Daves’ barbeque sauce.

God Bless America.

To: Star/Tribune

From: Mitch Berg, one-time subscriber

Re: A Fine Idea

Dear Star/Tribune,

 The next time one of the gabbling bobbleheads you call “columnists” or “editorial board members” warns us that the Twin Cities will become a “Cold Atlanta” if we don’t fund a rail line or a gay forensic dance troupe or just hike taxes through the roof, do try to remember that sometimes those wild-eyed southerners have some really good ideas.

This is from yesterday, in the Atlanta Journal/Constitution (with emphasis added by me):

After listening carefully to readers and thinking deeply about the modern role of a newspaper in elections, the AJC Editorial Board is taking a new approach to election coverage, beginning with this November’s elections.

Going forward, our board will use its unique position to work for readers in pursuing with candidates the issues that are critical to the future of our community. The board will provide readers with clear, concise information about candidates’ positions and records. The AJC will no longer endorse political candidates.

I know, I know – the Strib, or at least its editorial board and opinion page, are an adjunct arm of the DFL communications office; when your master calls, you bark like a well-trained puppy.

Just saying.  Your relentless editorial bias has cost you more readership than you know.

That is all.

No one around here shall be surprised by the Star Tribune’s confusion of a deliberate expansion of government with the genesis of a sustainable economic recovery.

From new dishwashers for the Albert Lea School District to a new counterterrorism police force to patrol buses and trains, federal stimulus money is pouring in to Minnesota and has directly preserved or created 11,800 jobs so far, state officials reported Monday.

I am sure the dishes at Albert Lea need to be washed and there is no doubt buses and trains need to be kept safe but federal stimulus dollars might just as well be called what they are; broad-based spending of future taxpayer dollars.

Normally called pork but in the heat of a crisis caused by liberal meddling during the watch of another Nobel Prize-winner, the very same wasteful practices that used to give liberals a bad name are now lauded for their “stimulation.”

But of what?

Management and Budget Commissioner Tom Hanson said statistics showed that the stimulus money “puts people to work,” and was having a “snowball effect” by indirectly sparking more job growth. As an example, he said, a highway construction job in Minnesota made possible with federal stimulus money might cause a company to buy a bulldozer from Tennessee that also meant jobs for workers at an out-of-state factory.

…or they might not buy that bulldozer because they might not be stupid enough to think that this economy is coming back any time soon. One project awarded by and funded with government dollars does not a recovery make.

Smart business owners and consumers alike are now finding ways to make the old bulldozer do the work instead of buying a new one simply because the bank will lend them the capital. Easy credit is long gone for the foreseeable future and even if it wasn’t, businesses and consumers will not soon be lured again into the tender trap of “buy today, pay tomorrow.”

The American consumer can no longer drive two thirds of our economy and like their banks, will spend the next several years rebuilding balance sheets by paying off debt, shoring up diminished retirement accounts and accumulating cash reserves to replace buffers formerly consisting of home equity credit lines and credit cards.

As for “Stimulus” spending and it’s true impact, any relief, dubious as it is, will continue only as long as the stimulus dollars keep flowing. Don’t believe that? Just ask your local car dealer how they’re doing now that the Clunkers Cash has dried up.

Government dollars are probably well spent on temporarily extending unemployment and health care benefits until workers claw their way back into the workforce, but continuing to borrow, tax and spend to create temporary relief will cause potentially permanent and devastating damage to our economy, leaving us worse off in the long run.

It is this very prospect, the fallout of our continued fiscal irresponsibility, that is sparking interest in stripping the US dollar of it’s current de facto status as the world’s currency. A national disaster that at best would force us to quickly revert to a low-wage manufacturer nation and at worse result in a catastrophic collapse of the dollar and our economy.

In either case, a catastrophic collapse of the Democratic Party’s reign looms inevitably as the inexorably slow recovery and sustained unemployment will surely outlast the diminishing effects of empty rhetoric, impotent stimulus packages and the patience of unemployed workers.

In the mean time, President Obama and his misguided policies serve only to distract and delay the healing that only the forces of capitalism can effect; the painstaking process of reorienting, realigning, innovating and ultimately forging true and sustainable models for America’s next economic era.

Six-year-old Cub scout brings scout knife/fork/spoon doodad to school…

Six-year-old Zachary Christie was so excited to become a Cub Scout that he brought his camping utensil to school. The tool serves as a spoon, a fork and a knife, and Zachary wanted to use it at lunch.

…and gets treated as a terrorist (emphasis added).

What Zachary didn’t know was that the gizmo violated his school’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. And now the Christina School District in Newark, Del., has suspended the first grader and ordered him to attend the district’s reform school for 45 days.

I’ve been through this sort of self-lobotomized administrative cretinism myself.
Question:  How many intelligence and ethics tests does one have to flunk to be a school administrator these days?

World oil and gas reserves E are vastly, vastly higher than predicted:

The World Gas Conference in Buenos Aires last week was one of those events that shatter assumptions. Advances in technology for extracting gas from shale and methane beds have quickened dramatically, altering the global balance of energy faster than almost anybody expected.

Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, said proven natural gas reserves around the world have risen to 1.2 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, enough for 60 years’ supply – and rising fast.

“There has been a revolution in the gas fields of North America. Reserve estimates are rising sharply as technology unlocks unconventional resources,” he said.

Gas reserves in particular are seemingly immense – and, being a clean-burning fuel already, should obviate the need for “clean coal” (which is still on the drawing board).

Downside; pundits are seeing this news and saying it pre-empts the need for new nuke plants.  Let’s not get cocky, here…

Back at my first usability/human factors gig about ten years ago, a very smart systems analyst (who is an occasional reader of this blog) gave me a piece of advice on how to analyze problems.

Any proposed solution exists, really, on two planes – Policy and Mechanism.  Policy is “what you want”.  Mechanism is “how you get what you want”.  Policy is your goal, mechanism is the work it takes to achieve it.  You need both, formally or informally; great work without a coherent goal, or “policy”, is like pushing hose up a hill; great policy that can’t be implemented by any attainable “mechanism” is just baked wind.

The advice was given to me in an engineering context, from someone who worked on the “mechanism” side, to someone who designed and validated “policy” by the ream. 

But it applies in politcs as well.  There are groups in politics who are neck-deep in policy, but who can’t implement anything; the Libertarian Party jumps to mind as a group with lots of policy, but no real ability to implement anything (since they never, ever get elected to anything; Ron Paul was the first Libertarian to actually start to implement some “mechanism” to Libertarian policy, by trying to co-opt the GOP).

Of course, for everyone involved in any place where the real world impacts theory – where “mechanism” and “policy” have to be made to match when they don’t want to, knows that that can be mighty difficult.  In the world of technology, making “mechanism” deliver on “policy” is called “engineering”.  Your policy is “I want to drive across the river”; the initial mechanism says “gravity and fluid dynamics make it literally impossible, and the river is too wide to just throw boards across it”; your job is to solve the problem.

And in “real world” politics, where ideals (“policy”) of necessity get corrupted by political reality (“mechanism”), there is a push and pull between What You Want – often expressed as “What You Believe” – and “What Is Realistic”, or “What Can Happen”, or most importantly “What We Can Either Ram Past The Opposition, Or Get Them To Agree To In Some Form”.  It’s also called “politics”.

The point being, most human endeavor occurs out of the tension between what you want, and what you can actually get.  It’s as true when building a bridge or a ship or a bipartisan compromise as it is when your kids bug you for money for their latest expensive obsession.

When it comes to politics, it hits all sides.  If the world obeyed liberal “policy”, then Lyndon Johnson’s “War On Poverty” would have resulted in a surrender ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri by 1970. 

And we conservatives have the same battle to fight.  Conservatives all follow, to one degree or another, certain first principles and core tenets of our belief system.  Of course, some of us emphasize different parts of those principles – I’m more a growth and security guy than a social conservative – and others pay them lip service while they focus, to be polite, on the “mechanism” side of the equation (with Duke Cunningham being an extreme example).  

The upshot?  No pure ideal survives its first brush with reality unscathed.

Although Dave Mindeman of “mnpACT” m seems to think conservatism is not only immune from this, but so immune that conservatives should be held to the standard of absolute idealism.

Or at least, that Pat Anderson, GOP gubernatorial candidate and former State Auditor, should:

GOP Governor candidate Pat Anderson wrote an opinion piece in the Star Tribune a few days ago, which gives a pretty good summation of why she could never be elected Governor of Minnesota.Her problem is that she thinks the Free Market is actually “free” and that “limited government” approaches can succeed. The evidence says she is wrong on both counts.

Right – if by “evidence” you mean “the results we have after Republicans have to try to jam their beliefs – “policy” – through legislatures full of people who believe other things“.

Republicans constantly preach to us about the dangers of government expansion. How less government is good government. Yet, their free market and limited government approaches never adhere to any semblance of real principle and the approach they do use is blatantly biased toward corporate America. Free markets? Not here, not now.

Let’s take the so called free market. How is it that Republicans can elmininate government involvement in the societal areas where government really needs to be — such as the social safety net…..and yet can’t eliminate the corporate subsidies that drastically distort competitive forces?

There is actually a good question there, one that has much occupied the Minnesota and National GOPs.  “Corporate Subsidies” are both anathema to real conservatives on a “policy” level, and have been one of those things that have been exacted from politicians (who have been by no means all conservative or even Republican, by the way) at a “Mechanism” level to garner support for differnet initiatives.  Which, for better or (usually) worse is how politics actually works.

There’s also a great counter-question, too; turn Mindemann’s statement around.  “How is it that Liberals can push government involvement into all areas of society regardless of “government need” (whatever that is), and …..and yet can’t eliminate the problems for which they tried to justify eliminating competitive forces?” 

Dave, if you answer that, please feel free to phrase your answer in the terms of the same degree of ideological purity you demand of Pat Anderson.

And without the strawmen, please:

GAMC is cut completely in unallotment. But JOBZ and Tax Increment Financing and building stadiums are never eliminated in the “limited government” approach?

While Tax Increment Financing is a targeted tax cut, which is a core conservative principle (except for the “targeted” part), I don’t know that you’ll find a whole lot of actual conservatives who support JOBZ or stadium subsidies.

Why should large corporations get incentives to move to this state? How does that translate to “free” markets? Isn’t that unfair to smaller but local businesses?

They shouldn’t, it doesn’t, it totally is, and it’s an utterly non-partisan “tool”; the biggest corporate subsidy stories and boondoggles- Target’s Minneapolis development, Best Buy’s conquest of Richfield, the USBank Westside Flats developments, the entire hole that New Brighton dug itself – have been the province of the states’ biggest assemblies of liberal whackdoodles.

And in regards to “limited government”. This libertarian approach that is based on “Constitutional” grounds feels that government should only due what it was originally mandated to do.

So, I assume that means we eliminate Social Security and Medicare for starters. That is not a governmental role — security in retirement is an individual responsibility. If you do not acquire the means to support a retirement, it is too bad. Keep working or live with relatives.

And again with the distinction between “policy” and “mechanism”.  If we were operating from a blank slate, or a slate that could be blanked, then it would be a tenet of purist, limited-government libertarian/conservative policy that huge interventions (and distortions) like Social Security and Medicare should be eschewed. 

But the fact that both of those trains left the station 1-3 generations ago notwithstanding (creating the multi-generational dependency on government that they were arguably intended to in the first place), most conservatives recognize the need, as Winston Churchill put it, to “not level out the peaks to fill in the valleys, but to spread a safety net over the abyss”.  So when you see Mindeman echoing stuff you’d more usually hear from an orthodox big-L Libertarian, like this…:

We must also get out of government welfare of any kind. The poor are on their own. Depend on charities or beg in the streets. Not our collective problem.

…it’s inflammatory, simplistic balderdash, of course; you will find very few conservatives who don’t recognize some imperative to keep people from starving, especially given forces that are sometimes beyond the individual’s control (and usually the “unintended” consequences of government actions anyway – like the Great Depression and our current troubles themselves!).  That liberals confuse “cradle-to-grave entitlement” with “safety net” shouldn’t be held against conservative policy.

Buy why do we give subsidies to Exxon? Why are there farm subsidies to corporate farmers? Why do we prop up grain prices? or dairy prices? or why do we pay farmers to leave land idle?

Why?  Because successive generations of politicians – mostly liberals – enacted programs to make farming “safer” and “more secure”; they created a national farm policy that has destabilized agriculture to the point that the majority of the farmers the program was intended to stabilize are now working in factories and shopkeepers and carpenters, and their children are programmers and teachers and everything-but-farmers.  But where they failed in securing individual farms, they did succeed in making sure the big farmers that are left, and the political establishments they support, conservative and liberal, are utterly dependent on government subsidy.  Again, it’s a bipartisan failure.

Which is why conservative “policy” would be to trash all these corporate subsidies as the debilitating interferences they are – and why reality has these subsidies so interwoven into the farm economy that it’d take a political effort far beyond the attention span and pain threshold of any American politician of any party, to fix.

Government is only limited when the constituency that gets downsized has no power or money to contribute to the political collective. That isn’t limited government — that is special interest government.

Well, no.  It’s a manifestation of De Tocqueville’s classic dictum, “Democracy will only survive until people discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury”. 

And for all the preaching that candidates like Pat Anderson give to us regarding their “limited” government approach and their free market systems, they are never really adovcating either of them….and if elected, they never will.

Tell you what, Dave Mindemann; why don’t you lefties sit back and give actual conservatives a prohibitive supermajority that’d allow us to wipe the slate clean for ten years or so, and get back to us on that, OK?

So over the weekend I was out on Snelling Avenue, down around Saint Clair street, along the east edge of the Macalester College campus.

For those of you not from the area, Mac is the standard by which other left-leaning Twin Cities’ post-secondary institutions measure their leftism.  It’s Berkeley (or at least Oberon) on the Mississippi.  It’s Kofi Annan’s alma mater, for crying out loud.

Anyway.

Mac was a hotbed of Obama support; Obama, according to Mark Ritchie’s office, got 225% of the vote on campus last November. [*]

Anyway – down by Saint Clair, someone hung a seven-foot-tall black and white “Change” poster with the iconic “Obama” image on it, on the side of an apartment building facing Snelling.

But when I caught it out of the corner of my eye, it looked less like Obama than…

…er, Peter Lorre.

And at second glance?  Yep.  Still Peter Lorre.

Just saying.

(more…)

There are grounds for honest disagreement on gay marriage.  The disagreement centers around the definition of what “marriage” actually is; to most proponents of gay marriage, it’s just a contract, a legal agreement enforced by the state.  To most opponents, marriage is a religious institution; indeed, in the exceedingly unlikely event I ever get married again, I believe I’ll join the growing number of people I know who’ve eschewed getting a state marriage license, if only to tell the state “you really have nothing to do with this”.

So if I turn around and fail to support gay marriage (as opposed to civil unions, which I do support), you can accuse me of a lot of things, including of being wrong on the issue.  Wrongly, of course, but that’s your right.

One thing you can not accuse me (and by extension other opponents of gay marriage) of is cowardice and hypocrisy.

Now, the left?

I’ve never forgotten the howls of rage from my various liberal gay acquaintances when Paul Wellstone betrayed them and voted for the Defense of Marriage Act.  Now, bear in mind that in his first Senate race against Rudy Boschwitz, Wellstone got about 155% of the gay vote in Minnesota; they palpably expected big things from him.

And they got them – albeit not the “big things” they expected.  They learned the hard way; Paul Wellstone could do math.  Wellstone could see that for all the thousands of gays and gay supporters who turned out at gay marriage rallies, many many times as many people opposed changing marriage – including the imponderably vast majority of blacks and hispanics who, reliably Democrat though their votes are, broadly oppose gay marriage with a vehemence that’d make a Southern Baptist blanche, and without whom no Democrat can win a normal election.

And I, and many other conservatives, asked “so, gays?  Here’s palpable evidence; the left views you, as a group, as such a reliable bunch of votes that they can regularly betray  you (and remember, while roughly 125% of gays voted for Bill Clinton, he also backed down on gays in the military – for exactly the same reason that Wellstone did on DOMA); how long are you going to sit and take this?”

Apparently for all eternity:

Rainbow flags fluttered above the crowds near the White House as tens of thousands of gay rights supporters rallied to demand that President Barack Obama keep his promises to end discrimination against gays and also let them serve openly in the military.

“Hey, Obama, let mama marry mama” some chanted Sunday. Others cried out, “We’re out, we’re proud, we won’t back down.”

Gays:  the Democrats see you like a spousal thumper sees a spouse; as someone they say and do anything they want to, without fear of anything ever changing.
Does anyone out there, gay or straight, for or against gay marriage, doubt that Obama can do the math, too?

Kudos to Pakistan’s army, which pulled off one of the most dangerous, difficult missions there is over the weekend:

Pakistan’s army says commandos have caught the last militant who attacked its headquarters and took dozens of hostages.Spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas says the capture Sunday morning brings to an end a 22-hour standoff in the garrison city of Rawalpindi outside the capital.

He says the final militant who was caught is wounded.

The raid involved shooting the terrorist “guarding” the hostages with a suicide vest before he could detonate himself and everyone in the room.  It’s the kind of thing that looks easy on “The Unit”, but we all know better than that.
The good news: they did it (losing two commands, three hostages, and killing four terrorists in the process).

The bad news: it looks like Pakistani commandos are getting lots of practice.

Second observation:  The AP’s slugline for the story, “Pakistan nabs last attacker, ends siege of army HQ”.

Is the end result of an incredibly high-risk commando really a “nab?”

Oh, yeah – and as Roggio notes, it kinda shut down the Pakistani Army for 18 hours in the middle of a war.  Can anyone imagine what’d happen if the Pentagon dropped off the grid for 18 hours?

…more irritating than armchair generals barbering about things about which their only actual knowledge is gathered at second or third hand.

But after forty-five years of reports that the M-16/M-4 series of rifles are M extremely unreliable and susceptible to jamming in any conditions that are less than optimal (Vietnam’s humidity, Afghanistan’s pervasive dust)…:

In the chaos of an early morning assault on a remote U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips’ M4 carbine quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn’t work either.

When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. soldiers lay dead and 27 more were wounded. A detailed study of the attack by a military historian found that weapons failed repeatedly at a “critical moment” during the firefight on July 13, 2008, putting the outnumbered American troops at risk of being overrun by nearly 200 insurgents.

…perhaps it’s time for the US military to cut the crap in its procurement system and break down and buy a rifle that leave our servicepeople with an overpriced, underweight club when the heat is on.

Just saying.

Adolph Hitler was a vegetarian.  He eschewed (yuk yuk) meat as a matter of principle.  Most American vegetarians are Democrats. 

The Democratic Party shares a trait with Hitler. 

Adolph Hitler loved dogs.  He couldn’t bear the thought of harm coming to one of man’s beste freunde.  Barack Obama famously owns a dog, a puppy, the selection fo whom was his major accomplishment in his first three months in office. 

Barack Obama, therefore, has something in common with history’s greatest mass murderer.

Stupid?  Well, yeah.  And tongue in cheek.

Unlike this bit of hilarity:

A top Democratic National Committee official reacted furiously to a statement from Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele mocking — and describing as “unfortunate” — President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.

“The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists – the Taliban and Hamas this morning – in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize,” DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse told POLITICO. “Republicans cheered when America failed to land the Olympics and now they are criticizing the President of the United States for receiving the Nobel Peace prize – an award he did not seek but that is nonetheless an honor in which every American can take great pride – unless of course you are the Republican Party.“The 2009 version of the Republican Party has no boundaries, has no shame and has proved that they will put politics above patriotism at every turn. It’s no wonder only 20 percent of Americans admit to being Republicans anymore – it’s an embarrassing label to claim,” Woodhouse said.

Ted Kaczynski, the “Unibomber”, lived in a house, high in the Rockies.  It was made of wood.  Brad Woodhouse’s name involves Wood and Houses.

Brad Woodhouse has something in common with one of America’s great domestic terrorists.

When did you stop blowing people up, Brad Woodhouse?

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.  Today, we’ll be talking about the Peace Prize.
• And you might ask “what about the Final Word?”  Well, there’ll be an announcement coming very soon about King’s future radio plans, and let me tell you, it’s gonna be a good one.  That’s all I can say at the moment.
• 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 four (at the moment) 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 by Monday
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!

Join us!

…and all of Obama’s voters, that it’s been nine months, and Osama Bin Laden hasn’t been taken into custody yet?

Still at large.  But why?

Wasn’t that supposed to have been dealt with by now?

(more…)

Today is Leif Erikson Day, an actual national holiday named after the real first European to reach North America, nearly 500 years before Columbus.

The date has nothing to do with Erikson’s birthday or the date he discovered Vinland – both of which are lost to history. 

October 9 is, however, according to the Wikipedia article on the subject…:

…because the ship Restauration coming from Stavanger, Norway [from whence my mother’s maternal grandfather came about seventy years later], arrived in New York Harbor on October 9, 1825 at the start of the first organized immigration from Norway to the United States.

You’re welcome.

Mo Rocca again, from Twitter:

Barack Obama : Nobel :: Marisa Tomei : Oscar

Heh.

But to be fair there’s no way Obama could pull of that opening scene from Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (pbui).

Now, it’s not that there’s any objective standard for the Nobel Peace Prize or anything…

…but I gotta ask my liberal commentators, many of whom are excited about Obama’s surprise, um, victory…

…how do  you explain this?

“Life is full of ironies, if you’re stupid”

— P.J. O’Rourke

———-

Europe is beginning to seethe with contempt for the US – partly over the Administration’s early social gaffes, and partly because of its fecklessness.

The Administration sold the Poles and Czechs down the river, causing two nations that have risked boundlessly to express their allegiance to the US to openly wondering if the US is good for its obligations.
Israel is nervous that the US has abandoned it – or at least that it will when the chips are down, one day.

Georgia is still rebuilding from when the Soviets Russians gang-raped it.

Our president bowed to a tin-pot potentate.

Afghanistan is spiralling into the toilet.  (Thankfully, the grownups were in charge long enough to buy Iraq a decent chance).

The Administration is pushing socialism, which is inevitably disastrous for the environment, and gundecking capitalism, which is the world’s best hope for benefitting the environment.

Iran is building nukes, and there’s not a damn thing we can (or will) do about it (short of defend against them – which the Administration eschews on dogmatic grounds).

China – a nation that’s killed tens of millions of its own people –  is ascendant, while the US,which as recently as twenty years ago freed hundreds of millions, is rapidly neutering itself.

Naturally, Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, citing his outreach to the Muslim world and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation.

Of course, after Algore, “cheapening the brand” is all very relative.

Um, “congratulations”, Mister President.

UPDATE: Or as Mo Rocca says on Twitter, “Nobel Peace Prize officially awarded to “Not George Bush.” Most passive aggressive Nobel ever?”

UPDATE 2: Nominations for the Peace Prize were due by the end of January.

Ten days after Obama was inaugurated.

UPDATE 3: A friend of mine wrote asking if the Onion hadn’t pulled the ultimate hoax.  He wasn’t alone.

UPDATE 4: Jeff Rosenberg from MNPublius:

Extraordinary efforts? I’m sorry, but what extraordinary efforts has he made? This prize should be given for a major lifetime achievement, and while I like Obama, this is really, really jumping the gun.

Even lefties – some of them – are astounded by this.

UPDATE 5: A prize winner who actually earned one – Lech Walesa, 1983 winner and former president of Poland:

“So soon? Too early. He has no contribution so far,” former Polish President Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, said Friday. “He is still at an early stage.”

Also, his record since the nominations closed, on February 1, has been so utterly dismal…

The Dems are starting to turn the crank for another “S”-word.

Confronted with big job losses and no sign the U.S. economy is ready to stand on its own, Democrats are working on a growing list of relief efforts, leaving for later how to pay for them, or whether even to bother.Proposals include extending and perhaps expanding a popular tax credit for first-time home buyers, and creating a new credit for companies that add jobs. Taken together, the proposals look a lot like another economic stimulus package…

Wait for it…wait…for…it…

….though congressional leaders don’t want to call it that.

No.

I bet they do not.