Nick Coleman, longtime disparager of blogs and “buh-LAW-gers”, is leaving comments on blogs.

Of course, it’s not like he’s venturing into dangerous territory; it’s only David Brauer’s  Braublog at MinnPost – an excellent blog, of course, even if overtly left-leaning and also a cruel joke on any German speakers who click in thinking they’re going to find a blog about beer.  It’s a safe place for Coleman, sorta – Brauer seems to be among the mass of news people who, for whatever reason, think Coleman is a fantastic, truth-to-power-speaking, afflicted-comforting-and-comfortable-afflicting gumshoe reporter with a (former) column.

Anyway – Nick’s working for a think tank these days.   I’m not sure what the job is, but as we noted a few months back, it seems to involve doing surface rewrites on MN2020 talking points.

As I noted in the most recent episode of my examination of Tony Kennedy’s Strib piece on charter school bonding, David Brauer’s been doing a decent, seemingly fairly dispassionate job of fact-checking the Strib’s assertions.

Coleman got involved in a comment thread at Braublog, opening with this bit here (emphasis added):

To avoid mention of [Twin Cities Federal Bank]’s top honcho Bill Cooper — who is a former chair of the MN GOP Party and still a player in conservative string-pulling strategies — in any discussion of charter school problems is difficult to do. But perhaps the better part of valor. Cooper’s “Friends of Education” sponsors 17 charter schools in Minnesota, including St Croix Prep. Seventeen!!??

Yep – seventeen.  Check them yourself.  They actually had eighteen, but they shut one of them down due to financial management issues.  If only public disticts and governments had that kind of integrity.

Cooper has become a walking argument for the case for a cap on the number of charter schools.

Coleman has a longstanding beef with Cooper – the whole story’s right here, here and here for those who care – tracing back to an incident in 2004 where the Strib got its knuckles rapped for defaming my friend and former NARN colleague, Power Line blogger Scott Johnson.  More on that later.

But I’m less interested in resurrecting blog history (even if it was a staggering blogging victory over the sclerotic mainstream media) than in poking at Coleman’s claim that Cooper’s schools are a “walking argument for the case for a cap on the number of charter schools”.

But charter schools are an areas where I, ahem, “know stuff”.

We’re going to take a head-to-head look at the competition between every Friends of Education school for which “No Child Left Behind” statistics exist (two of the school are too new to have them yet) and the public district in which they are located.

In the tables below, the columns mean the following:

• Took Math/Reading Test: Number of students in school or district that took the associated test.
• Math/Reading % Prof: Percent of students with “proficient” results.
• Low Income/Special Ed/ESL/Mobile:  The percent of students taking (respectively) the Math and Reading tests that were low-income, were receiving Special Education services, were English as a Second Language students, or had moved in the previous year.

Before we start, one observation:  In my three years’ experience in charter schools, I’ve noticed a few categories of students and parents who actually go to charters:

1. “Lifeboat Seekers“: Parents who are disgusted by their public school’s performance as a group.  These are the masses of Afro-American, Indian, Latino and immigrant parents who’ve observed the public schools’ dismal graduation rates, reprehensible achievement gaps and the contempt they feel for parents, and decided to move elsewhere.  They populate many of the inner-city charter schools, including the Friends of Education schools in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
2. “Motivated Shoppers”: Parents who are motivated  by what they see as the low standards and factory mentality of huge public schools, and are looking for a better educational experience for their kids – smaller institutions, more-challenging or more-responsive curricula, more-motivated teachers and staff and any number of other factors.
3. “Damage Fixers”: Parents whose kids individually floundered in the public system for whatever reason, from difference in learning styles to frustration with bureaucracy to simply desperately seeking a school experience that works for their kids.  As I’ve noted, I’m one of those.

So let’s compare Friends of Education schools with district schools, one by one.

Our first stop is Columbia Heights, with the Academy of BioScience:

This is an odd example; while the Academy of BioScience’s results are mixed compared to the district (better at reading, a little lower at math), it’s interesting to note that the Columbia Heights district’s numbers are so bad even for a first-tier suburb. Many of the school’s families are “lifeboat seekers”, looking for a better experience for their kids.

BioScience is a fairly new school; it’ll be interesting to see what the next few years bring.

Now, Plymouth – where Beacon Academy and the Beacon Prep school square off against the long-troubled District 281, a very large district covering Robbinsdale, New Hope and Plymouth

The Beacon schools get fantastic results – considerably higher than the local district.  The low-income numbers are lower than the district as a whole, but not dramatically so.  The Beacon schools attract the “Motivated Shoppers”; middle-class families of all ethnicities who are looking for a better school experience than the big-box warehouse schools give them; the numbers show they succeed.

Next, Anoka, where Cygnus Academy goes up against the state’s third-largest district, Anoka/Hennepin:

Cygnus’ numbers are significantly lower than that of its district.  But look at the Special Ed and “Mobile” numbers; Cygnus is a middle school that attracts kids who have trouble in the public system, the kids that the public system has trouble reaching.  The kids who’d be shunted into an “Alternative Learning Center” in the big districts, mostly to get them off the books – and then forgotten about.  It’s a small school, that catches difficult kids at a very difficult time in their lives; comparisons are difficult.

But Cygnus also points out why so many parents across demographic lines are as fanatical about school choice as they are.  One statistic that is not available anywhere is “how do charter school kids individually do over time?”  It’d be interesting to follow Cygnus’ kids’ individual arcs.  If only we had a media that could tackle a job like that…

Next, Eden Prairie.  Eagle Ridge Academy – a pseudo-Catholic school that, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll note is a former advertiser on my radio station, AM1280 –  caters to the “Motivated Shoppers”:

Eagle Ridge’s scores are about even with Eden Prairie – ostensibly one of the best districts in the state.  It also includes quite a few students who’ve had trouble in other districts (this I know from personal conversations with Eagle Ridge parents).  Of course, not everyone at Eagle Ridge is actually from Eden Prairie; it’s the destination for many “motivated shopper” families from many other districts – which is true for many, many charters.     I have no stats on Eagle Ridge’s “footprint”; my kids’ Saint Paul charters (none of them affiliated with “Friends of Education”) draw students from Forest Lake, Prior Lake and Hastings; Eagle Ridge, with its excellent academic reputation, is likely at least as widely popular.

Now, into the city of Minneapolis – where three Friends of Education charters face off against the state’s largest district.

The other charters have numbers that are broadly similar to the district at large (Long Tieng, a brand-new H’mong-centered school, had only one student of age to be tested this past year, so it’s a bit of an outlier).

But check out the poverty and ESL numbers – they’re sharply higher than in the public distsrict.  These are lifeboat schools;  reading between the lines of New Millenium and Long Tieng’s mission statement, they deal with a lot of H’Mong kids who’ve slipped between the public system’s cracks which, for minority kids, are often yawning chasms; it’s replete with education-speak references to kids in gangs; these are the schools that parents go to because the public system has failed them completely.  Minneapolis Academy is a “back to basics” institution drawing motivated parents who want a better, higher-content learning experience than the Minneapolis public schools offer, one less likely to shunt their kids down through the cracks that swallow so many “urban youth”.

Next, Saint Paul.  Saint Paul is already crowded with charter schools, many of them focusing quite capably on “lifeboat seeker” and “damage fixer” families; there are large, excellent charters serving H’Mong, African-American and Latino families.

Friends of Education’s two charters in Saint Paul cater to the motivated shoppers, and the numbers show it:

The performance numbers at Nova – a traditional/”classics” school – and Yinghua, a Chinese-language-immersion charter school – are spectacular.  Now, I can see a pro-public school demigogue jumping on the fairly low low-income and special ed numbers as a sign of discrimination – it’s a meme among charter school detractors that charters can pick and choose their students, which happens to be untrue.  Many Saint Paul charter schools, and schools in the immediate area, like Tariq Ibn-Ziyad and General Vessey, two very different non-FoE schools in the south ‘burbs that have very different models but cater to many inner-city parents, cater to the “lifeboat” and “damage repair” families (I can recommend some excellent ones from personal experience).  And the huge low-income numbers in the Saint Paul schools are at least partly a result of all the parents that have either pulled their kids out of the district (to charter, parochial, private and suburban schools), or moved their families out completely.  Saint Paul’s district is intensely dysfunctional.

It’s also a fact that Nova and Yinghua offer programs that are a bit outside the mainstream; Nova‘s program is rigorously classical, focusing on grammar, logic and rhetoric; Yinghua is a chinese-immersion program.  They cater almost by definition to the “discerning shopper”.

And what’s wrong with that?  We have a problem with choosing academic success?

Next, Rosemount/Apple Valley/Eagan:

The big public district is one of the better ones in the metro; Paideia Academy’s test scores don’t differ significantly.

Friends of Education has a school in Saint Cloud:

STRIDE Academy is as stark an example as I can find of the effect of a small, motivated educational community on a charter school; while STRIDE’s low-income numbers are sharply higher than the St. Cloud public district, the achievement numbers are sharply better.

Next, Bloomington:

Seven Hills beats Bloomington.  Now, the now-income numbers are lower; a “classics” education (see Nova, above) is a hard sell for a lot of mainstream parents.  But the next time you see some charter-school opponent saying “charter schools can pick and choose their kids”, ask them for proof.  Watch them squirm.

More or less the same holds true in Stillwater:

Again – St. Croix prevails over one of the state’s higher-scoring, best-regarded public districts.

“But there’s no comparing the numbers!”, the charter opponents will holler.  That’s true; that’s part of the point.  While there may or may not be a link between class size and achievement, there almost certainly is with school size.  A school where the principal knows all the students is going to be a lot harder to get lost in that one where the principle hides from the student body behind armored doors, and the superintendent has a driver to whisk her between meetings.

Coleman takes a whack at Cooper, whose mission at Friends of Education is to foster experimentation:

He isn’t “experimenting.” He’s building a rival education system, at taxpayer expense, that is draining resources from traditional public school districts…

Yes, it’s a rival system.  And by any rational measure, the rival does a better job, certainly with a population with whom the public system is failing.

And it’s “draining resources”, to an extent – but it’s also draining students.  And it’s draining students much faster than resources; charter students get about $10,000 a year, and no local public bonding.  Now – divide the budget at the Saint Paul Public Schools by the number of students:  a $500,000,000 budget divided by 38,000 comes to about $13,000 per student.  The public districts hypothetically profit $3,000 for every student they lose to a chater…

…and pushing a conservative “values” agenda that closely mimics his own conservative Catholic beliefs.

And it works.

Need we say more?

Avoiding mention of him is like avoiding the 800-pound gorilla at the tea party. You don’t want to piss him off. I know: Cooper canceled a TCF advertising contract at the STRIB a few years back when he was displeased by a column I wrote…

Right.  Nick Coleman’s a victim, doncha know.

But I don’t want to get back into that; I’ve had my fun with Coleman, and frankly charter schools are more important to my family and I than any of Coleman’s agenda-driven prattle.

But when Coleman, and the “think” tanks he parrots, say “Bill Cooper is a case study in the need to cap the number of charter schools”, you are now equipped to respond “no – he’s a case study in the need to abolish the public system and go all-charter”.

I’ve long had a theory:  In the 1980’s, the CIA infiltrated the gangs of Los Angeles and New York, and convinced them that holding handguns and even bigger arms sideways was not just “cool”, but proper shooting technique:

It must have worked much better than most government conspiracies; by 1985, a Minneapolis cop told me that the safest place to be in a gang fight was the target; unfortunately, the most dangerous place was 45 degrees off the line of fire, in your living room, watching TV.  This was grimly true, of course; there’d just been a gangbanger shootout in North Minneapolis where a half dozen urban yoots stood on each side of the street and blazed away at each other, hurting none of their enemies but paralyzing a boy in a second-floor apartment half a block off the line of fire.

Anyway – the John Woo grip has saved the life of a policeman, albeit at the cost of the Woo-gripping gunman:

A Times Square bloodbath was narrowly avoided because the machine-pistol-toting thug who fired at a cop flipped the gun on its side like a character out of a rap video, causing the weapon to jam after two shots, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

When scam artist Raymond “Ready” Martinez held the MAC-10-style gun parallel to the ground, it caused the ejecting shells to “stovepipe,” or get caught vertically in the chamber, the sources said. The gun is designed to be fired only in a vertical position.

If he had fired the weapon — which had another 27 rounds in the clip — properly, Martinez, 25, could have killed the hero cop pursuing him and countless others walking through the swarming tourist mecca Thursday morning.

The NYPD owes at least one life to rap videos, and John Woo’s oeuvre.

A toast…

Wonder if this conspiracy is going to get on the Jesse Ventura show?

Palin contra Shatner.

So while the uncovering of the East Anglia CRU Email scandal is into its third week with scarcely a peep of direct coverage, it seems the usual suspects are hard at work trying to shore up the thesis, on a public relations and political front (although certainly not a scientific one).

I flipped on MPR twice this weekend, more or less at complete random.

The first time, I turned the show on to Speaking of Faith – the normally-excellent Minnesota-based production that explores religion and faith in all its many flavors, to normally-fascinating depth.  The show is one of MPR’s few regular programs whose podcasts I listen to punctiliously.  But today…:

A conversation about climate change and moral imagination with environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben. He’s been ahead of the curve on this fantastically complex issue since he wrote The End of Nature in 1989. We explore his evolving perspective on human responsibility in a changing natural world.

Not a word of controversy or skepticism to be heard, naturally – and this from a show that gives intellectually-ravenous credibility to every variety of lack of belief as well as all of the world’s manifestations of it – just the blithe acceptance that man-made global warming is a fact, and that collectivizing our society is our only real hope.

Still, it was better than On The Media – a program for whom leftist apologetics seems to be an unstated given.

For years, George Monbiot has written for the British newspaper The Guardian about the dangers of man-made climate change and how the denial industry sows confusion. But when he wrote recently “we’re losing,” it seemed a surprising admission. He explains why, despite scientific consensus, much of the public remains unswayed.

Quote of the day: Brooke Gladstone asked Monbiot about Copenhagen.  “I’ve heard many people who wish we just had a huge Communist world government, so we could just do what needed to be done”.

Runner-up quote of the day? Monbiot on the East Anglia scandal (!):  “This was a disaster – we have to make sure our science is absolutely foolproof”.

Sorry, George – that train left the station.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 9AM-3PM.

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John or some combination thereof kick off from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I are up from 1-3.  In addition to the usual “week in review” stuff, we’ll be talking with Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess, author of I See Rude People.  We’ll also interview Brooke Kilgarriff, Miss Minnesota for 2009; she’ll be talking about going to Vegas next month for Miss America, as well as her benefit work for Children’s Miracle Network, including her CD, Carry You Through.
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on from 9-11 on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  We’re broadening the franchise; two stations, now!
• 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 by Monday
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• And make sure you fan us on Facebook!

Join us!

Tomorrow’s Northern Alliance (Volume II) broadcast is going to be especially fun.

First, Ed and I will be interviewing Amy Alkon, author of I See Rude People. 

I’m looking forward to this; society has gotten a lot less polite and civil out there.  We’ll talk with Amy about how all of us people of ethics and manners can coexist with all of the sleazeballs, h0-bags, jagfingers, scumwads, drooling autolobotomites and other moral and ethical amoebae out there.

And after that, we’ll be talking with Miss Minnesota 2009, Brooke Kilgarriff.  She’s going to Las Vegas to vie for the Miss America 2010 title in a few weeks; we’ll catch up with her (we had a blast talking at the State Fair) and especially to plug her CD, Carry You Through…

…which is a benefit for the Children’s Miracle Network.

Anyway – please join Ed and I from 1-3PM tomorrow on AM1280 The Patriot, over the air or via the stream.  You can also join Ed’s live stream at Hot Air (check tomorrow). 

And go ahead and “fan” us on Facebook when you get a moment!

About twenty years ago, I read a fascinating profile of and interview with Gus Hall, longtime head of the Communist Party of the USA and perennial CPUSA presidential candidate. 

The thing that struck me about the profile – which appeared in the Strib but was syndicated, if memory serves, from the NYTimes – was that it was set in the CPUSA’s New York headquarters, described as a shabby, run-down office in a crappy part of immediately-post-Dinkins-era Manhattan.  The interviewer described Hall – then in his eighties – and the other commies at the interview as seeming like ancient veterans who gathered to pine for the good ol’ days – with the added hilarity reading the ancient Stalin-cuddler Hall testifying to his belief in and zeal for the CPUSA’s political relevance.

I thought about that, reading a WCCO piece on a smoochfest with Walter Mondale the other day.  Mondale, the former Attorney General, Senator, Jimmy Carter’s veep and Ronald Reagan’s second speed bump, spoke to the “fellows” at the Humphrey Institute, a branch of the U of M that is an academic arm of the DFL in all but name; he basically told all of us political kids to get off his lawn.  Esme Murphy is the reporter.

And he is not amused:

 The 81-year-old Mondale talked of his displeasure at the lack of civility in Washington. Back in the ‘70s, Mondale says, the divide wasn’t as great, and animosity was left for the Senate and House floors. Mondale said, “As Tip O’Neil used to say, ‘politics ends at six o’clock,’ and it did; we would all go to parties together.”

Sorry your social scene petered out, Fritz.  But if you recall, the state of this nation was really really awful back when O’Neill and his little club of drunks were picking at Nixon’s remains, and walking over Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

But Mondale didn’t just chalk up the level of discord to the lack of a decent cocktail hour. He reserved some sharp barbs for the cable talk shows. He blasted “the cable shows’ unremitting diet of poor manners and gross simplification” of key issues.

Right.  Far better to have things as they were in 1974, when Walter Cronkite and Dave Moore told people what to think, and all of the peasants knew their place – on their knees, thankful for a Better Minnesota – and that was that.

And he decried the death of moderate voices on both sides of the aisle. On a recent visit back to Washington, he said, he chatted with Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Mondale said, “Specter told me there are no moderates anymore.”

The funny part?  Mondale would consider himself a “moderate”.

It wouldn’t be a mainstream Minnesota media politics story without a reference to Larry Jacobs, the Keyser Söze of Twin Cities politics:

At the end of the luncheon, the Humphrey Institute’s Professor Larry Jacobs said the spacious room would soon be remodeled to include a tribute to Mondale.  A perfect idea to bring together two icons of such similar views and who shared the same position on our national stage.

There was a  huge difference, of course.  While both presided over a post-Depression Minnesota where Democrats and Republicans differed hardly at all, Humphrey rose to prominence at a time when Democrats were still Americans first.  Mondale was no screeching yippie – but his political peak came when the DFL, and the larger Democratic Party, believed that America certainly could be a great country – but certainly not until the whole country mirrored their every belief.

CORRECTION:  Wow – coulda sworn Mondale was Governor for a while.  My bad. 

Blah.

I have a final installment of “Unintended Consequences, Predictable Responses” – my response to the Strib’s piece on charter school bond financing.  I’d originally plotted it to run today, but between family stuff, work, and being sick yesterday, I never got to finish it.

The third, and possibly a fourth, installment should run next week.

Talking Points Memo on why lefties hate Michele Bachmann:

Michele Bachmann (R-MN) sat down for an interview with MinnPost, and among other things was asked why she is the object of so much loathing among liberals.

“I don’t know. I’m a lovable little fuzz ball!” said Bachmann.

I am starting to get the impresison that Bachmann has the one thing any conservative woman must need to stay in the game without going nuts; the ability to keep her most deranged detractors firmly in perspective.

Which is a nice way of saying “mocking them”.

 “I have no idea what they would have to fear. I guess you would have to ask them; they would have the better answer to your question. I am doing my job. That’s what I was elected to do. I don’t fear the left, and maybe that’s part of the loathing that they feel toward me. I’m not afraid to speak out on conservative positions and on issues.

Which is, of course, the problem for the left; wimmins are supposed to be barefoot, pregnant and dewy-eyed over Obama.

Eric Kleefeld, the writer, tries to answer Bachmann’s question – sort of:

Bachmann has previously wondered why Democrats don’t like her. We’ve collected some of the reasons — such as her having called for revolution against President Obama’s Marxist tyranny, and calling upon conservatives to slit their wrists and become blood brothers in the fight against the Democrats on health care, and many other examples.

I”m always fascinated that the party of “nuance” gets so flatly literal when a conservative woman talks. 

But here’s a serious question:  whenever a woman “comes out” as a conservative, she is instantly branded “teh crazee”, “extremist”, “stupid”, and the whole range of petty defamations.  For Bachmann, of course, it’s old hat – her detractors date back to before her time in the State Senate, when she started the Maple River Education Coalition; the regional left has been sputtering over Bachmann for over a decade.  The contradiction is grating; Bachmann is vastly more accomplished than Betty McCollum, and no more “extreme” to the right than McCollum is to the left.

But I am assured by various liberal friends out there that “there are consevative women that we can respect”.

And I disagree.  Until we reach some critical mass of conservative women in this country, I suspect that every single woman who comes to prominence as a conservative will draw the attentions of the liberal machine.  I can not thing of a single woman of any prominence as a conservative at any level, from local through national, that doesn’t draw the same exact response.

So prove me wrong.  Name a conservative woman of any prominence that hasn’t gotten smeared beyond reason.  And by “conservative”,  I mean conservative; not Christine Todd Whitman or Olympia Snowe.

Ready?  Go.

I’m interested in keeping up with each of these things…:

1. Shaun Cassidy’s latest career evolutions
2. Vikings trivia from the seventies
3. Reading Frankie Yankovic’s biography
4. Pat Buchanan’s Super Bowl picks through the years
5. Paint jobs on BOAC airliners from the fifties

…more than The Kardashians.

And the list is probably not done.

That is all.

Today is the 234th birthday of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps – one of the oldest military units in constistent existence in the history of the world.

“Dutch Marines?”

Siddown.

The Dutch Korps Marijniers were, like most Marine Corps of the sail era, initially soldiers who fought on ships.  Like the US and eventually British  (as well as French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian) Marine corps, they gradually formed into a separate ground-combat unit specializing in amphibious warfare.

During the opening weeks of the German Blitzkrieg into the Low Countries in 1940, the Germans rated the Dutch Marines as the tougest opponents they faced; it was a unit of Marines in Rotterdam that kept the Panzers from linking up with the Paratroopers, which led the Germans to their infamous terror-bombing attack to break the stalemate. The Marines’ main theater of operation, though, was in the Dutch East Indies – today Indonesia – where their resistance to the Japanese, while effective, was doomed; their homeland conquered by the Nazis, they were fighting without supplies, spare parts or any kind of direction from the home office.

After the fall of the Netherlands, many Marijniers escaped to the UK and, eventually America, where US Marine Corps trained a brigade of Dutch. This unit became the core of the modern Nederlands Korps Marijniers, long one of NATO’s elite rapid deployment units.  They’ve spent most o the past forty years training to fight in Norway against the Soviets, alongside US and British Marines.

And at a time when the world seemed befuddled about what to do about terrorist attacks, in the seventies, it was the Korps’ special operations unit, the Bijzondere Bijstands Eenheid, a hostage-rescue unit equivalent to the British SAS, the US “Delta” and the German GSG9, carried out one of the first notable successful hostage rescues.

Iraq and Afghanistan?  Sure.

Anyway – happy birthday, Dutch Marine corps!

We continue with Andy DiLigio’s expose on the Norwegian Mob in America; the Capone years.

Inside The Norwegian Mob In America

Andy DiLigio

It was 1947; the funeral of mobster Alfonse Capone, at a cemetary in south Chicago.

In attendance were a small collection of ageing ex-gangsters, a few newspaper reporters, a couple of not-all-that-surreptitious Feds…

…and a single middle-aged man in a US Postal Service uniform.

——–

Colorful mob capo Al Capone had cut a bloody, flamboyant swathe through American organized crime.  He co-opted entire city governments, including those of Chicago and Saint Paul.  He took out bloody vengeance on friend and enemy alike for slights real and imagined, business and personal, up to and including the Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Of course, all of his power and influence traced back to legislation – Prohibition – engineered by a shadowy cabal of Norwegian-Americans; The Volstead Act was initiated by John Volstead, born “Vralstad” in the Norwegian-American community of Granite Falls, initiated into the Mob at Saint Olaf, the outwardly-bucolic campus in Northfield, Minnesota that has served as a training ground for so many Norwegian mobsters.

Eventually, Capone got too powerful.  The Feds made a great show of floundering about trying to shut down Capone and his gang.

And then – in the late twenties – the FBI plucked a young agent, Elliot Ness, from obscurity, and “tasked” him with trying to bring Capone down.

And on the surface, he was having absolutely no luck at all.

Capone, like most of the Italian, Irish and Russian/Jewish gangs that the Hartelowen family ran like puppets, lived large and flaunted his wealth and power.  And yet, he made certain to keep his legal bases covered.  He owned so many judges, prosecutors and cops in Chicago (as well as his summer home, Saint Paul) that nobody could ever bring a case against him.

Worse still?  Agent Ness noted in his diary that Capone was absolutely, rigidly punctilious about the one thing Ness had counted on to try to bring down other mobsters.  From a report to J. Edgar Hoover, in Ness’ handwriting, from the Ness personal papers:

My informants tell me that Capone lacks the one achilles heel of most mobsters; he is punctilious to the point of obsessive-compulsion about filing his taxes.  We have a recording of a conversation with one Capone staffer, a “consigliere” named Vittorio D’Amato; “that’s the Chicago way; you get five dollars in income, you put one of ’em in the bank; you get a tax form, you put it in the mail!”.

Mr. Hoover, if he is this punctilious about paying his taxes, I have no idea how we’re going to break this case.

Yours,

Ness

P.S. No, I have not seen a gladiator fight.

And yet, within the year, Ness was able to write to Hoover:

Mr. Hoover,

I just had the most extraordinary break on the Capone case.  An anonymous informant left me a message saying that Capone had not filed taxes for seven years.

And, oddly, the next morning, I came to the office to find that someone had left a Chicago Street Department barrel with dozens of un-postmarked manila envelopes addressed to the Internal Revenue Department, from Mr. D’Amato, Mr. Capone’s accountant.  Many of these envelopes were rain-damaged and heavily weathered and stained apparently by the effluvia of other trash, while others – newer ones – were relatively pristine.  In these envelopes were contained all of Mr. Capone’s tax documents for the previous eight years.

Mr. Hoover, I believe this gives us leave to prosecute Mr. Capone for tax evasion.

I’m not sure if you or “Mr. Giggles” believes in God, Mr. Hoover, but after this, I’m a believer.

With Warmest Regards,

Elliot Ness.

Within the year, the federal government sought and got a conviction against Capone, who served eleven years in prison.

Among those testifying at his trial was his postman, Lars Hartelowen.  Who testified that everything always seemed above-board at the Capone residence.

———-

As I sat, drinking Folgers and eating krumkakke at the Ace Cafe, Jeff Hartelowen indulges in a rare outburst of emotion – a mild chuckle.

“That was Dad’s (Lars’) greatest accomplishment; getting all them Italian mobsters to spend time in Saint Paul.  Right under our noses.  They thought they owned the place, ya?” he says, smiling in a way that seems to pull his face unnaturally, “but they didn’t make a move that wasn’t being watched by us”.  His Rådgiver Yetterboe and his son grin.  “And Elliott Ness?

“What about him?” I ask, not quite following. Yetterboe shakes his head.

“Well”, says Hartelowen, patiently, “who do you think Ness was really working for?”

Next week:  Gødfellås

Is Barack Obama from another planet?

Mystery as spiral blue light display hovers above Norway (while Obama was in Norway?)

The mystery began when a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain in the north of the country. It stopped mid-air, then began to move in circles. Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky.

The light bears some resemblence to Obama’s logo!

Are his people trying to beam him back home?

Is there a way we could assist them?

Extraterrestrial citizenship would certainly play into the Birthers argument.

Bad wins.

50% of voters now say they prefer having [BHO] as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they’d rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that’s somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country’s difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited.

I’m not a huge Bush fan being a far-right fiscal conservative so count me out, but Change is coming. Soon.

To:  Twenty-Something Pantload

From: Mitch Berg – Bike Sympathizer

Re:  Next Time, You Get An Elbow In The Choppers

You know who you are.  You’re a twentysomething hYpStR.  You ride one of those trendy retro three-speed bikes with the cargo racks, in which you’d stuffed your backpack, some books, and (I have no doubt) your IPhone.

You were riding up Wabasha last night.

Now, I’m sympathetic; I usually ride up Wabasha at the end of the day, when I’m biking home.  It’s that existential near-death experience that kicks off my ride home by making me appreciate life so much more.

But there’s a difference, here.  I ride on the street.

I first saw you as I was walking up the sidewalk to the bus stop, as the cold was settling in.  I heard a voice behind me, curtly demanding “excuse me”.  I turned around; you were whisking past someone walking on the sidewalk behind me. You sailed past me, crowding me toward the wall just a little bit.  You pedalled up the sidewalk, brushing a lady who was carrying a baby, as you tried to thread the needle between people getting on the 3 bus.  You seemed – by your speed, as well as your “arrogant enough to have been a Loring Cafe waiter during their heyday” – to think it was our job to get out of your way.

Just saying; next time you try that, make sure Dadders is still paying your dental insurance.

That is all.

With yesterday’s “blizzard”, and today’s relative chill, I think it’s time to declare 2009 biking season closed.  (*)

As I mentioned earlier, it was a rough year for biking; much of my summer got eaten up with family business that kept me off the road for most of July and August.  Biking in the fall, at least for me, takes a certain amount of momentum – and I had none.

Still, I managed to bike through much of September, a good chunk of October, a bit of November, and I even squeezed in one rare, chilly December ride.

And it was a good year in political metabiking, too; the case the biking is more conservative than not biking was proven pretty conclusively.

But I think I’m gonna call it for the year. But I’ll be shooting for a March start date in 2010.

See you then!

(*) And yes, I know people are still on the road.  That’s hardcore.  More power to ’em, but it’s not for me.

Neither have I.

…and I’m married to one, and blog with one.

I’m feeling the love from Norwegians here at home but as my Lefse-loving colleague posted mere minutes ago, Obama is not feeling the love from Norwegians abroad.

Norwegians are incensed over what they view as his shabby response to the prize by cutting short his visit.

Okay, so you’re nonplussed. Let’s apply a modicum of analysis to the situation.

You gave the Peace Prize to a President via a nomination and selection process that began in late 2008 and was closed to candidate submissions in February 2009. The President at that time hadn’t even exhausted a roll of toilet paper in the Presidential Potty. At least that would have been an accomplishment.

As it were, at that point in time, and arguably at the current one as well, the President had not advanced the cause of peace, or frankly any cause for which he campaigned so vigorously.

Even the President himself said he didn’t deserve it. In this case I don’t think he was employing his signature brand of transparently false humility. I think he really meant it.

It would appear the Nobel committee has so depreciated the value of their vaunted prize that even the winners think it a joke.

The White House has canceled many of the events peace prize laureates traditionally submit to, including a dinner with the Norwegian Nobel committee, a press conference, a television interview, appearances at a children’s event promoting peace and a music concert, as well as a visit to an exhibition in his honour at the Nobel peace centre.

You might have considered the consequences of awarding your “prize” to an opportunistic fraud like Al Gore and America’s (heretofore) worst President, Jimmy Carter. Word has it  Kanye West is on the short list for 2010.

The visit will test Obama’s rhetorical skills as he seeks to reconcile acceptance of the Nobel peace prize with sending an extra 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan.

Of course, because troops have never brought peace to anyone anywhere, right? God only knows what form of “peace” Norway would have today without the Russian troop invasion of 1944, liberating Norway from the (then fleeing) Germans. Maybe Hitler would still be hiding out at the foot of the Galdhøpiggen.

White House officials said that Obama, who was planning to work on the final draft of his speech on his flight from Washington to Oslo, would directly address the issue of the irony of being awarded the peace prize while escalating the war.

Just his speed as he just finished one featuring the irony of spending our way out of the federal deficit. Wait’ll he tries to plug his teleprompter’s 120 volt American plug into those goofy European outlets.

Choke.

The Norsks will have the last laugh then.

Remember when Obama was going to make the rest of the world love and respect us?

Either does the rest of the world.  Obama, who saw fit to give King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia a full-tongue butt-smooch and bruised his forehead scraping before Emperor Akihito, blew off King Harald of Norway – a nation that’s always been a friend of the US, is the anscestral home of millions of Americans (myself included) and has walked the same rhetorical tightrope the President himself is attempting; giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the President, while contributing troops to the war effort in Afghanistan since the very beginning.

Norwegians are incensed over what they view as his shabby response to the prize by cutting short his visit.

The White House has cancelled many of the events peace prize laureates traditionally submit to, including a dinner with the Norwegian Nobel committee, a press conference, a television interview, appearances at a children’s event promoting peace and a music concert, as well as a visit to an exhibition in his honour at the Nobel peace centre.

He has also turned down a lunch invitation from the King of Norway.

Bad move, Mr. President:

According to a poll published by the daily tabloid VG, 44% of Norwegians believe it was rude of Obama to cancel his scheduled lunch with King Harald, with only 34% saying they believe it was acceptable.

“Of all the things he is cancelling, I think the worst is cancelling the lunch with the king,” said Siv Jensen, the leader of the largest party in opposition, the populist Progress party. “This is a central part of our government system. He should respect the monarchy,” she told VG.

It’s going to be an interesting trip:

The visit will test Obama’s rhetorical skills as he seeks to reconcile acceptance of the Nobel peace prize with sending an extra 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan.

White House officials said that Obama, who was planning to work on the final draft of his speech on his flight from Washington to Oslo, would directly address the issue of the irony of being awarded the peace prize while escalating the war.

The Nobel peace committee has been criticised for awarding Obama the prize before he has any major accomplishments in international relations.

I think it’s gonna go a little something like…

“Dear…um…Nobel Committee.  I…um…am not George Dubbya Bush!”

On its third week in operation, a North Star line train crapped out during rush hour.

They went to Plan B:

Metro Transit sent two buses to Target Field in Minneapolis to pick up the 120 passengers aboard the 2:05 p.m. train, which never left the station, and take them to the five suburban stations along the Northstar line. The buses left about 3 p.m. and took 90 minutes to reach Big Lake, compared with the train’s normal 51 minutes, said Bob Gibbons, spokesman for Metro Transit, which owns the train.

An extra forty minutes?  Not counting the time it took for the buses to show up?

Ouch.  I wonder how that set with this woman, from the opening a few weeks back?

Kate Pound of St. Paul, was one of them and had one of the more complicated commutes. She rode her bicycle to a bus stop, transferred from the bus to a light-rail train and then to Northstar at Target Field. She departed the Big Lake station via a Northstar Link bus to her job as a geology teacher at St. Cloud State University.

“It’s great, it’s cheaper, I’m doing the right thing in terms of my carbon footprint,” she said. “But what if I’m late and miss my connection in Big Lake? As long as I don’t get stuck, this is the way to go.”

“As long as I don’t get stuck”.

Remember – there’s one outbound train in the morning, and one inbound train at night.

Come to think of it, I wonder how all those Rube Goldberg-like bike/bus/bus/rail/bus commutes are faring with the blizzard we have going on?

 As I was digging in for a long bout of reporting to dig into some of the numbers behind Tony Kennedy’s piece in the Strib last week, I noticed that David Brauer at the MinnPost had already done the job.  Read the whole thing; it finds, as I’ve always found in digging through think tank material on charter schools, that there is a lot of carefully-jiggered context and punctiliously-selected facts.

One example:  the Strib piece trumpeted a “3600 percent increase in lease aid”.  Brauer added a helpful bit of context (and I’ll add some emphasis):

Given the front-page headline (“Junk bonds fuel a building spree …”), readers could be forgiven for assuming that charter construction was the big factor behind lease aid soaring 3600 percent in 15 years.

But the building boom had little to do with the spending boom. Here’s what did:

“Charter lease aid sees fast rise in use” because charter enrollment is rising fast. Since 2004, lease aid has been capped at $1,200 per pupil unit. (The state weights pupils based on their grade level; kindergarteners lower, high schoolers higher.)

Though a few schools are grandfathered in at a higher amount, the $1,200 cap hasn’t budged since ‘04, and you can see the impact on average per-pupil aid:

Unfortunately, when it comes to owning infrastructure, “economy of scale” becomes an issue.  It’s one of the reasons that the big public school districts have consolidated rural schools and abandoned neighborhood schools in the cities; it’s cheaper, in some ways, to run one building for 1,200 students than six buildings for 200.  As the administrative overburden on schools increases, there’s been an inexorable push to centralize more schools, build more, bigger buildings…

…which, I maintain, has been a huge problem for public education.  While the link between large classroom sizes and academic performance is arguable at best, I strongly suspect (but am unaware of any hard data at the moment) that big schools breed huge problems.  The anonymity of huge schools (like Saint Paul’s Central High, with around 2,000 students) makes it easy for a student to get lost in the shuffle, to feel disconnected and uprooted (I’m writing from the experiences of at least one of my children, here). 

One of the programs that public school supporters constantly bring up in support of public schools is the “International Baccalaureate” (IB) program.  IB programs do indeed get good results.  Part of it is that they focus their efforts on the kids who do excel at the “sit your butt in the chair, do what you’re told when you’re told to do it, and spend your evenings doing homework” model of education.  Not everyone works well in that kind of system – I’d have floundered – but the other key factor is IB programs are smaller.  At Central, the IB is a “school within a school”; all the staff know all the kids, and vice versa; it’s the rough equivalent of a smaller neighborhood school, substituting an intellectual “neighborhood” (the “elite” nature of the IB student base) for a traditional neighborhood. 

Which is one of the beauties of the charter system; when my ex-wife and I pulled our kids out of the Saint Paul schools, they ended up at charter schools with less than 200 kids each.  All the staff knew all the kids, and most of the parents; the parents largely got to know each other and many of the kids.  Most importantly, the kids felt they belonged to a larger group – something kids seek out instinctively. 

They certainly seek it out at the big factory-model schools; if the school or an athletic team or a church group doesn’t provide it, they’ll find it in the form of “the wrong crowd”; gangs, or whatever social circle is convenient; in a huge school, which is almost purpose-designed to alienate kids who don’t get with the program, there are plenty of alienated, disaffected, “dropped-through-the-cracks” kids to fall in with.

After dealing with that, a charter school was a blessed respite of sanity.

So when a school opts to try to build itself a permanent home base, through the thin loophole allowed in state law, by affiliating with a construction company, several things happen.

1.  The school floats a bond issue.  Since the bonds are for a small organization, they are not rated by Moody 0r Standard and Poor – hence, they’re called “Junk Bonds”.
2. Being “Junk” bonds, and because a charter school can’t pass a tax levy to make the payments, the interest rates are higher. 
3. Since the interest rates are higher, there’s an imperative to get more revenue through the door, to buff up the cash flow. Since “lease aid” is capped at $1,200 per student per year, that means that to have enough revenue to both build the buiding and service the debt, they’ll need to get more students into the building, to get more of those $1,200 allotments.

Which drives up class sizes.

To lure the investors they need for new buildings, some educators are abandoning the intimate campuses their founders envisioned and are building large schools that look more like the conventional institutions that some families are fleeing. Some charter school advocates say the build-your-own trend could undermine an education movement built on small class size and parental involvement.

“It destroys the intent and initial purpose behind all of it,” said Paul Simone, director of the Math and Science Academy charter school in Woodbury, a National Blue Ribbon award winner under the No Child Left Behind Act.

But the problem isn’t “the charter school movement”.  The problem is the laws under which charter schools have to operate.  They are public schools in every way except their individual “corporate” governance; they use public money, but are controlled by a site-elected board. 

But when it comes to real estate, they are hamstrung by the unintended consequences of a law that not only puts them at a big economic disadvantage to public schools, but to private and parochial schools as well.  Public schools, being big public entities backed by big taxing authority, can float bonds at very advantageous rates; parochial schools operate with the tax advantages, as well as demographic strengths (and weaknesses) of a faith community; private schools can charge whatever tuition the market will bear, are less restricted in terms of fundraising, and the big ones can build endowments.

So why not allow charters to piggyback onto public bond issues, to build their buildings at the vastly lower interest rates that this would allow? 

Or why not allow charter schools to lease vacated public school buildings from their local districts?  Policies on this vary from district to district; some allow it, others don’t.

Why not, indeed?

For purposes of the Strib’s “investigation”, and the non-profits like MN2020 who have charter schools in their crosshairs, it’s because the goal isn’t to make charter schools viable; it’s to kill them off.

Friday: Coincidental similarities?

Obama’s approval ratings are the lowest of any president at this point in their first term, since they started keeping records:

President Obama’s job approval rating has fallen to 47 percent in the latest Gallup poll, the lowest ever recorded for any president at this point in his term.

Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and even Richard Nixon all had higher approval ratings 10-and-a-half months into their presidencies. Obama’s immediate predecessor, President George W. Bush, had an approval rating of 86 percent, or 39 points higher than Obama at this stage. Bush’s support came shortly after he launched the war in Afghanistan in response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

It’s best not to get too excited; Ronald Reagan’s numbers were only two points better at this point in 1982, and Bill Clinton was only five points better – and we know how both of those turned out. 

Yes, we do.  Reagan had a solid plan for solidifying our tanking economy and fixing the foreign-policy nightmare of the seventies.  And Clinton was well on the road to getting chastened for his overreach on healthcare, after which he triangulated so far to the right that he actually ran a more fiscally-responsible adminsitration (with the aid of GOP majorities in both houses) than his successor.

Obama?  So far, we haven’t gotten to that point yet:

President Barack Obama outlined new multibillion-dollar stimulus and jobs proposals Tuesday, saying the nation must continue to “spend our way out of this recession” until more Americans are back at work.Without giving a price tag, Obama proposed a package of new spending for highway, bridge and other infrastructure projects, deeper tax breaks for small businesses and tax incentives to encourage people to make their homes more energy efficient.

Great news if you’re a highway worker!  Or a window installer!  Not so much elsewhere, of course.

I’ll await details on how Obama next plans to spend his way out of deficit.

The networks are running a riveting 911 call audio tape of an elderly woman describing in detail the efforts, for over ten minutes, of an intruder to gain entry to her home.

“They need to hurry. He’s going to break this thing open. When he does, I’ll have to kill him and I don’t want to kill him,” Jackson said during the 911 call.

Gun in hand, she asks the dispatcher for guidance, essentially seeking legal advice. Can she kill him? The dispatcher seeks counsel from a colleague and in essence, gives her the go-ahead to use lethal force and potentially take his life if he gains entry.

And he gone done it.

Using patio furniture to smash through a window, convicted felon Billy Dean Riley didn’t realize he just brought a lawn chair to a gun fight.

“Once he smashed the glass out he stepped into the residence and she used the shotgun to fire one shot which hit the intruder center of the chest and (he) fell back out of the house”

He be dead.

Is she in trouble?

No.

Many states including Oklahoma have adopted the “Castle Doctrine” which essentially stipulates a homeowner can defend his or her home from an intruder with deadly force and can deliberately shoot to kill without legal consequence (save the resultant need for carpet cleaning).

A Castle Doctrine (also known as a Castle Law or a Defense of Habitation Law) is an legal doctrine that arose from English Common Law that designates one’s place of residence (or, in some states, any place legally occupied, such as one’s car or place of work) as a place in which one enjoys protection from illegal trespassing and violent attack. It then goes on to give a person the legal right to use deadly force to defend that place (his/her “Castle”), and/or any other innocent persons legally inside it, from violent attack or an intrusion which may lead to violent attack. In a legal context, therefore, use of deadly force which actually results in death may be defended as “Justifiable homicide” under the Castle Doctrine.

Oklahoma happens to be a “Castle State,” while others have a “duty to retreat” clause wherein the homeowner has a duty to get out of the way of the would-be offender, others grant the homeowner a “stand your ground” clause. I was curious as to the Status of Minnesota.

The intentional taking of the life of another is not authorized by section 609.06, except when necessary in resisting or preventing an offense which the actor reasonably believes exposes the actor or another to great bodily harm or death, or preventing the commission of a felony in the actor’s place of abode.

Minnesota as it were, is a stand your ground state as long as you are in your home. It gets murky outside the home and in public areas, despite attempts to strengthen the law in the interest of would-be victims of violent crimes.

Hmm. I wonder if one’s comment section is considered a place legally “occupied” by the owner and as such…uh, never mind.

MITCH ADDS: Er, not so fast here.  Minnesota’s law is incredibly murky in this area  One of the elements of an affirmative self-defense claim in Minnesota is that the home-owner has to make every reasonable effort to disengage and de-escalate, where “reasonable” means ‘would convince a jury”.  How reasonable is “reasonable?”  It depends on how zealously anti-gun your local prosecutor is.  In Granite Falls, a simple “go away, I have a gun” might get you off.  In Saint Paul, fleeing your attacker until you’re in the very last closet in the very furthest room from the burglar’s entry point might be enough to keep the prosecutor off your back, but that’s no guarantee; the prosecutor might maintain that if you’d actually given the burglar your gun and kids, he’d have gone away and you’d have averted a fatal shooting.  The jury might or might not be another thing – but that means a trial, which means hiring a defense attorney and burning up a whole lot of money.

Rep. Tony Cornish proposed a “stand your ground” bill in the ’07 legislature, back when the grownups still controlled one chamber in the legislature.  It got completely slandered by the ill-informed, in-the-bag media, which called it a “shoot first” bill; has anyone considered the ramifications of shooting second, by the way?  Anyway – a stand your ground law would be a good thing; it’d define how far you have to back down on your own property, instead of leaving it up to prosecutors’ discretion. 

It’s yet another reason we need to win the legislature back this year.

Today, we resume with the third installment of Andy DiLigio’s “Inside The Norwegian Mob”.

Inside The Norwegian Mob

Andy DiLigio

After Bjørn and Gerda Hjerteløven got married, in 1895, the Norwegian crime syndicate grew to unprecedented power and influence in New York, by quiet but ruthless control of its proxies in the Italian and Irish organized crime syndicates.  The Italian, Irish, Jewish and other gangs made boundless money, and secured unlimited political power, second-hand, for Hjerteløven and his small, ultra-secretive band of Norwegian co-conspirators.   By 1910, Hjerteløvens had made millions, and concealed it with the same quiet but ruthless effieciency he did everything else; he subtly exploited their Italian/Irish leaderships’ taste for the ostentatious high life to distribute money to a cleverly-hidden network of modest, Norwegian-owned businesses – bakers, tailors, bartenders, gun merchants, pasta wholesalers and the like – in the most ingenious, bulletproof money laundering scheme in all of history.  Indeed, it wasn’t for nothing that North Dakota – heavily settled by Norwegians covertly linked to the mob – became the world’s largest source of the durum wheat used to make pasta; it both laundered money and exerted control over Hjerteløven’s mediterranean minions.

And whenever one of the Italian or Irish gangs got to be  “too big for its britches”, as Hjerteløven used to say, he’d engineer a bloody gang war that’d eviscerate both gangs’ leaderships.  In the rare more dire situations, Hjerteløven would subtly invoke government sanction, using his iron-clad Scandinavian passive-agression to turn the other non-Scandinavians’ own brutality and aggression against the more dem0nstrative, overtly-aggressive non-Scandinavians.

But Bjørna Hjerteløven’s greatest, most ingenious work was yet to come.

New York was getting too small for him.  He needed to expand the family’s horizons.

In 1917, as the US lurched into World War I (in which Hjerteløven’s three sons, Lars, Berndt and Knud all served), Bjørn and Gerda Hjerteløven took a trip via railroad (coach class, naturally) to Bemidji, Minnesota, ostensibly to visit Bjørn’s sister Helge.  But the trip included a side-jaunt to Granite Falls, during the 1917 Congressional recess, to visit Andrew Volstead, who was at the time one of Minnesota’s congressional delegation, and the chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

And who was, as it happened, the son of Jon Einartson Vraalstad, a Norwegian immigrant.  “Volstead” had been born Vraalstad or Vrolstad, and had anglicized his name before attending Saint Olaf College in Northfield – which has long been one of the great incubators of the Norwegian mob.

The details of the meeting are long lost to history –  if, indeed, the Norwegian mob’s legendary secrecy allowed them into history at all – but in the subsequent session, Volstead introduced the “Volstead Act”, which passed the following December, and was ratified as the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution within two years, prohibiting the production, distribution or sale of alcohol.

The investment of time paid off immediately.  Mobsters took over the illegal booze trade, kept in line behind the scenes by by Hjerteløven’s constant gang wars.

And as the Hjerteløven boys came home from the First World War, Prohibition had made their family the richest, most powerful and most feared family in the world – although virtually none of the world knew anything of it.

By 1920, with an organized crime empire that had exploded outward from New York with federal help, Bjørn Hjerteløven sent his sons forth to manage the rapidly growing empire.

Knud moved to rural Lindstrom, Minnesota, and opened a dairy farm – largely to provide land under which the family could bury hoards of cash.

Lars decamped for Chicago, and – per the norm for Norwegian mobsters – took an exceedingly modest cover job with the government.

Berndt moved to New Jersey, where he opened a small bar in rural Monmouth county.

But before any of that, Bjørn Hjerteløven changed the family name, anglicizing it to “Hartelowen”.

And it was as “Hartelowen” that the family (not “the Family”; too ostentatious) consolidated their iron grip on organized crime in America.

Thursday – the entirely-Norwegian-instigated rise and fall of Al Capone.

This one was in the WaPo:

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

But be careful, WaPo and Public Enemy; you might look for Jesse Ventura to do an episode on “Why did a rap group in 1990 predict the 9/11 attack?” on Conspiracy Theory.

(more…)

Reading Salon’s vacuous interchangeable 20-something “music writer”, who seems to be  encountering a bit of cognitive dissonance over the runaway success of Taylor Swift:

Feminism is confusing sometimes! As I’ve lamented before, it occasionally compels me to defend the anti-feminist likes of Sarah Palin and “Twilight,”

(Note to conservatives, who actually will get this:  Palin is “anti-feminist”.  No extra points for guessing what this writer’s sine qua non of feminism is, now, is there?)

and if that weren’t bad enough, now I can’t figure out what to make of this year’s platinum success story Taylor Swift, recently nominated for eight Grammys. I haven’t thought much about Swift, but I’m generally inclined to agree with ladybloggers like Amanda Hess and Sady Doyle, two smart writers in their 20s who have concluded that the 19-year-old’s songs reinforce some not-so-woman-friendly stereotypes in extremely annoying ways. But today, with a typically excellent post about pop culture’s promotion of patience as a girl-powerful virtue, Hess got me wondering — not that she meant to — about whether there might be a legitimate feminist argument in favor of Taylor Swift.

Let’s see; she started writing music when she was a pre-teen, actually worked on being able to sing without the miracle of Auto-Tune, play an instrument or two, and build a career at an age when most of her peers are, well, writing dreary politically-correct drivel for web-zines.

First, let’s acknowledge some major points in the Not Feminist column. As Hess says, “Taylor Swift sings songs about waiting around, being a princess, and crying for her ‘Romeo’ to rescue her from her dad, who is so mean. Then, she makes videos for these songs where she is literally waiting in an ivory tower for her prince to come.”

Goodness.  Indulging in fairy tales. A form of “literature” that’s been around for thousands of years, for good reason; people like ’em.  Hence they’re popular.  And what, homophonically, is the goal of writing and performing “popular” music?

I don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here.

And that brings us to the crux of the “Is Taylor Swift good for women?” debate, which — exceptions like “White Horse” aside — really comes down to Taylor Swift, lyricist, vs. Taylor Swift, public figure. It’s her superstardom (and apparent business savvy) itself that provides the most compelling pro-Swift argument. As music critic Ann Powers wrote in the L.A. Times last year, “Swift might play a princess in many of her songs … but in the studio she’s her own boss, writing and producing those fairy tales.” Hess is unconvinced: “This is the Sarah Palin theory of feminism. If she’s a woman, and she does stuff, it’s feminist…”

Well, of course.  Being a woman and doing stuff isn’t as important to “feminism” as being a woman and believing all the same stuff, word for word and note for note, that the modern, academic notion of gender-identity feminism tells women to believe.

It’s why a Sarah Palin, a Michelle Malkin, a Michele Bachmann or a Laura Ingraham or Ann Coulter or Katherine Kersten or even a Taylor Swift – women who’ve actually accomplished something without having to either demanding allowances for their gender or, for that matter, losing any ground due to it – can be called “anti-feminist” with a straight face, while mainstream, academic gender-identity feminists can wipe out decades of “workplace equality” and “no means no” rhetoric overnight on behalf of, say, Bill Clinton.

Because the fact is this; to a modern, academic gender-identity feminist, a “feminist” who’s never amounted to anything outside of a make-work pseudoacademic university “Women’s Studies” program, but who supports abortion without question, is a feminist, while a pro-life women who’s moved mountains through skill, determination and the force of her own merits who is pro-life is not.

Put another way – it’s “framing the argument” for the not-so-bright.