Sarah Palin appeared at the Mall of America yestrday, signing copies of Going Rogue for a crowd that drove from all over Minnesota, started gathering at 5AM, waited for over six hours, and generally comported themselves well.

I said generally:

Not everyone shared that sentiment. While most who waited were orderly, Jeremy Olson, who police said has no permanent address, was arrested and jailed after a tomato he threw at Palin hit two Bloomington officers on the stage.

Who does Mr. Olson blog for?

On behalf of the 45-odd percent of Minnesotans who are demonstrably sane, I apologize for the State of Minnesota.  But this is nothing new, if you’re a conservative in Minnesota.  Their hatred deranges them; they think “my ends justify my means, no matter how dim and stupid my means are.  If I hate someone, then anything I do to them is justified, because they are teh icky”. 

Fortunately, he throws like a Minnesota leftist:

He was charged with fourth-degree assault on a police officer, a gross misdemeanor, and disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. Mall spokeswoman Erica Dao said the tomato landed nowhere near Palin and did not disrupt the signing.

So many metaphors. So little time.

For the benefit of all of you who were either not in Minnesota, or were too young to remember:  Before Jesse Ventura started his career making skepticism look moronic and trite, he was governor of Minnesota.

No kidding!  It’s like 37% of Minnesotans went to parties on election day, got really really hammered on cheap beer and loaded up on Taco Bell burritos, and decided “What the hey, let’s vote for a wrestler!  Duuuuude!  Hahahahaha!”

And while he will not go down in history as our least-successful governor – the economy obliged him by staying nice ‘n successful until just before he left office – he will go down in history as one of the closest calls Minnesota ever had.

“What do you mean, Mitch?”

I mean, if he’d gotten his way, V he’da bollixed things up so bad…

Ventura, who called the four years “a life experience beyond belief,” said his greatest failure was not consolidating Minnesota’s two houses of its Legislature into one body — unicameral. He pushed the issue heavily during his tenure, but it never came to fruition.

Think state government is a hopeless mess today?

From the Baltimore Sun’s “Ring Posts”:

Is there anything that you wanted to accomplish as governor that you didn’t?

Oh, yeah. My biggest failure was not getting a vote on unicameral – one house state legislature. We don’t need two houses. Nebraska is the only state that has unicameral, and in their 70- or 80-year existence of it, they’ve never had a special session due to the fact that they couldn’t find a conclusion to their budget.

That’s right, Jesse.  That’s just what we need; for government to pound out mo bigga budgets like crap through a goose.

And while I try to stay away from rhetoric like ” so and so was the stupidest moron who ever wandered to the head of the class”, if you read carefully between the lines  you can probably tell that that’s what I’d be saying about our former Governor, if I were to write such things.

But it’s a good thing I don’t say things like that:

At the state level, we do not need two houses. In fact it violates the Constitution because it’s supposed to be one person, one vote, but because you have two houses you have one person, two votes, because you have an elected representative and a senator.

{{facepalm}}

Anyway – all you conspiracy buffs out there?  He’ll be bringing that keen intellect to your field, now.

My condolences.

If you’ve been reading this blog any length of time, you’ll know that I tend to bite off…well, not “more than I can chew”, but occasionally I’ll tackle some big, involved projects.  My “Losing My State Religion” series – on my journey from public school supporter to fierce critic – was nine parts; my “What The Hell Is Wrong With The MNGOP” and “What The Hell Do We Do About The MNGOP” series are almost a dozen parts between ’em.  And the big daddy of ’em all, “Twenty Years Ago Today“, is somewhere north of 120 episodes (and four years plus) long. 

What makes it interesting is that I do pretty much all of the writing for this blog between 5:30 and 7AM, every morning, along with the odd scraps of time when things settle down in the evening or when there’s nothing going on on the weekend.  If I’m trying to do any reporting – calling sources, interviewing people – I squeeze that into breaks during my day job.  Until all those Scaifenet rumors come true, and some conservative sugardaddy whisks this blog away to full-time gig status, them’s the breaks.

Anyway – my megalomania has led me into a situation where I’ve got two of those series – “De Godenfar – The Norwegian Mob in America” and “Unintended Consequences, Predictable Responses” – going simultaneously.  Both of ’em take some work – “Investigative Fiction” and reporting are different, but neither of ’em grows on trees, time-wise.

And I promised new installments of both today.  And it just ain’t gonna happen.

So here’s the schedule for the rest of the week:

• “Unintended Consequences, Predictable Responses” – my series taking apart the Strib’s latest smear job on charter schools – will continue today, Wednesday and Friday.
• “De Godenfar – The Norwegian Mob in America” – will continue Tuesday, Thursday, and on into next week.

My urge to keep everyone informed and to manage expectations is exceeded only by my knowledge that nobody actuall gives a crap.  But while you can take a guy out of a “producer” job, you can’t take the producer out of the guy. 

That is all.

Tony Kennedy, writing in the Strib last week, addresses the latest charter school “crisis”:

Minnesota’s charter school movement, which sparked a national rethinking of public schooling nearly two decades ago, has been infected by an out-of-control financing system fueled by junk bonds, insider fees and lax oversight.

“Out of control”.

Interesting bit of hyperbole, there.  One might almost say it’s “unjournalistic”.

The vast majority of Minnesota’s charter schools putter away, doing their workadaddy hugamommy job of teaching kids, in rented quarters around the state.

Given the cost of rental property, especially in the Metro area, many charter schools gravitate toward low-rent warehouse, industrial and “incubator” space.  The western part of the Midway – full of low-rent office and warehouse buildings – is home to many charter schools; half a dozen are clustered within a few blocks of Fairview and University.  The rental space is affordable and up to code, generally – although if you’re used to public school spaces, to say nothing of showcases like Saint Paul’s Arlington High School, it’ll feel like you’re at a school set up in the garage.

And so some charter schools look for a home of their own, if you will, for reasons not a whole lot different than renters become homeowners; to have a secure home base; to be able to plan without the wacky exigencies of leasing; to have a “home”.

So some charter schools have found a way to own their own buildings.

It took some doing, of course – because state law forbids it, at least directly:

State law prohibits charter schools from owning property, but consultants have found a legal loophole, allowing proponents to use millions of dollars in public money to build schools even though the properties remain in the hands of private nonprofit corporations.

That’s one of those “tomayto-tomahto” things.  Another way to phrase it – arguably more fair and accurate – would be “state law prohibits charter schools from owning property, but they have found a legal loophole, allowing proponents to, in effect, rent their own schools from shadow corporations they set up to build and operate the property”.

The key to making it all work is the state’s lease aid program, which was created 11 years ago to help spur competition in public education by offering rental assistance to groups promoting alternatives to district schools. In the beginning, many charters were located in dumpy strip malls and received no real-estate grants.

But the once-obscure program has snowballed into one of the fastest growing expenses in the state, with building projects receiving little of the vetting that typically accompanies other public works.

It works like this:  the charter school’s governing board starts or affiliates with a company that, on the one hand, supervises construction and, on the other hand, floats a bond issue to pay for the building. 

Now, when a public body – say, the City of Minneapolis – floats a bond issue, they go into it with a certain amount of collateral; the city owns snowplows, artistic drinking fountains, computers, police cars, City Hall and other things that can be hocked to make the payments on the bond.  More importantly, they have taxing authority, meaning that if things get tight they can jack up taxes to make sure the payments get made. 

Big corporations, likewise, have collateral to put up against bonds they might float.  Not “taxes” per se, which is why corporate bonds are a little less popular and secure – a lot less secure in the case of, say, General Motors, after the Obama administration overturned contract law to make sure the unions got paid ahead of bondholders. 

But I digress.

Now, if you’re a tiny little entity – say, a barber shop – you can float a bond issue, presuming you jump through a few legal hoops.  Of course, most people won’t invest in your bond, since you have no collateral other than a Barbasol jar and some chairs, and you can’t raise taxes.  But entities somewhere in between the barber shop and GM can float bonds.  They have less revenue and fewer assets than Fortune 500 corporations; they have more than the corner barber shop; they can’t raise taxes on anyone.  So the bonds are a little, maybe a lot, secure an investment than a municipal or big-corporate bond.  Hence bond buyers expect more interest.

Now, the problem is that since the eighties, and the Michael Milken scandal (which, in those innocent days before Enron and Bernie Madoff, was considered a big scam), these bonds have had a name; a very pejorative name.  A name that the media uses for them as a sort of shorthand – perhaps not understading what it means, or perhaps understanding it perfectly but shooting for that whiff of pejoration that they need to sell the papers (and, perhaps, fulfill the mission that the story’s sources intended fulfilled):

In the past decade, 18 charter schools have been built with $178 million in junk bonds, with financing costs on some projects chewing up nearly a quarter of the funds raised. Twelve more charter schools have taken steps to buy or build facilities, and the state projects annual spending on lease aid to reach $54 million in 2013, up from just $1.1 million in 1998.

“Junk bonds”. 

The technical definitino of “junk bond” is a bond that isn’t rated by any of the big ratings services – Moody’s or Standard and Poor.   It doesn’t mean – to someone in the bond business – that a bond is bad, or good for that matter; merely that it’s un-rated.  Of course, rated bonds are generally considered safer than unrated ones – which is why the unrated, “junk” bonds have to pay higher interest. 

In a sense, “Junk Bonds” are no different than subprime mortgages; they are a way for a group that can’t ordinarily float a bond issue to get financing; the interest is higher and the terms are worse than the more-secure bonds – municipals and the like – but that’s how the market deals with getting financing to less credit-worthy people and organizations.  The only major difference is that nobody is requiring the Federal Government to pay for “junk” bonds that default.

But to “the American street”, the term “Junk Bond” has a corrosive connotation.  Now, I’m not sure if the Strib’s Tony Kennedy knew this – but I’m going to suggest that whomever his “sources” are on this story do. 

It’s not only unwarranted, but it paints charter schools with a brush that slops plenty of paint over onto regular schools, transit districts, water and soil commissions, and municipal governmetns.  Joe from Como Park – a person with considerable in-depth professional knowledge of how local government and bonding works, and who wrote to me under an assurance of anonymity – emailed me about the article:

…look at any small-town municipal bond for a fire station or sewer plant or for that matter, any school district building bond.  Local governments routinely pay hefty fees to financial consultants to help them with the bond process, people like the Ehlers firm mentioned [in the Kennedy article].  Bond financing is a highly regulated jungle of red tape and the people who know how to navigate it are worth their hire.  Criticizing charter schools for paying the same sort of consultant fees that school districts routinely pay for the same services is sheer gall.

People who know how bonds work, know that.  Most of Kennedy’s audience are, unfortunately, not part of that particular “in” crowd.

So why the concern?  Besides the money I mean?

Well, here’s one reason:

State lawmakers are frustrated by the building boom. Since 2000, at least 64 public school buildings in the metro area closed because of declining enrollment. Charter schools are responsible for recruiting away some of those students.

Voila; it’s the competition.  Charter schools are an example of “school choice”; parents are choosing; the district systems are losing.  The establishment sees that parents are fleeing; their response is to try to put a bookhself in front of the escape hatch.

“When district schools are closing, should we allow charter schools to build new buildings?” said Rep. Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, who was cleared in 2001 of legislative ethics charges for voting to boost lease aid even though he personally received the funds from a charter school he helped start. “These are being built with 100 percent state moneys, but who is minding the store on using that money well?”

More importantly, and disturbingly, Abeler was one of two members of the “Override Six” cleared by voters for voting to overturn Governor Pawlenty’s Tax Bill veto.  I don’t know Rep. Abeler’s voting record as re charter schools, but I’m going to guess from his statement above that he’s doing his best to stay nice ‘n tight with the Minnesota Federation of Teachers (please correct me if I’m in error). 

“Out Of Control” and “Junk Bonds”; that’s two inflammatory, almost disinformatory terms used so far to describe the charter school building boom in this piece.  Why not go for the trifecta?

Jim Markoe, a board member of both St. Croix Prep and the building company, said the insider payments were cleared by bond lawyers involved in the deal.

“Everybody has done everything morally, ethically and legally, and I’ll stand by that until the day I die,” Markoe said.

Sen. Kathy Saltzman, D-Woodbury, chair of the Minnesota Senate Subcommittee on Charter Schools, said lawmakers had no idea charter school insiders were taking such large fees on building projects.

“If they have enough lease aid to do bond deals that pay salaries or one-time bonuses to insiders, obviously they are getting more lease aid than they need,” Saltzman said.

“Insiders”.

It has such ugly connotations these days.  It was “insiders” that brought us the Savings and Loan collapse, the Enron debacle, the “backdating” scandal at local corporate giant United HealthGroup, and on, and on.

And the fees involved?  Issuing bonds is complex – as complex as a hundred mortgage closings all in one deal.  Attaching assets, taxes and collateral to what amounts to an otherwise-unsecured IOU – which is basically what a bond is, whether it’s issued by the United States Treasury or Kickapoo Creative Arts Charter and Construction – takes some fairly critical, and rare, expertise, both financial and legal.   Like getting a smooth house closing, or sueing a corporation, it’s not something that can be left to chance, or amateurs; professionals cost money.

On Wednesday, we’ll finish going through Mr. Kennedy’s piece.

And on Friday, we’ll take the concept of  “insider” a step further, and try to discuss Mr. Kennedy’s sources for this story, and their motivations.

Background:  I have been waiting roughly five years to say one thing.

Ahem.

At least our president won his war.

That is all.

Remember when the Obama administration was going to get the rest of the world to think the US was just dreamy?

No?

Either do the Brits:

In an interview with The Times, [British Defense minister] Bob Ainsworth said that the Government would not follow Washington’s promise to start pulling out in 2011. “You can’t put a time on it. You’ve got to look at conditions,” he said.

He accepted that the public would not tolerate the war “going on for ever”, but insisted there was no deadline for withdrawal. “Nobody is talking about a drawdown, we are talking about bringing more in there . . . but we are talking about transition.” He said that it would be wrong to set a date for the start of troop reductions.

His comments reflect dismay at the highest level in the British Armed Forces about Mr Obama’s suggestion this week that US troop withdrawals would start by mid-2011. Britain expects to have substantial forces on the ground in Afghanistan for at least five or six more years.

It’s depressing to see how adept Obama is at undercutting our allies’ governments – from his yanking the rugs out of under the Polish and Czech governments on missile defense, to leaving Georgia undefended by anything but a phalanx of furrowed brows, to now basically telling the Brits (and the many smaller allies, the Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Lithuanians, Norwegians and others who’ve spent years fighting alongside the US) that all of this expense and sacrifice is intended to do no more than bring the whole exercise in for a “soft landing” in time for Obama’s next election bid.

I don’t follow golf much; good lord, who cares?  I mean, if I played, it’d be one thing – I am my family’s only male non-golfer, so far – but I don’t. And so while I know Tiger Woods is the shiznit when it comes to golfers, I can’t say as I much care. 

And so my reactions to his domestic travails ranged from “gee, a superstar with no sense of consequences, how friggin’ shocking” to “Oh, no, crazy billionaires with cars”.

But there was one other angle; the bit about Elin Nordegren allegedly attacking Woods, and eventually beating his car with a golf club.

No news flash here; domestic abuse is a bad thing…

…unless it’s aimed at a guy, when it apparently turns into comedy gold:

On Saturday night’s episode, the NBC sketch comedy show made light of Tiger Woods’ scandalous week, satirizing reports – denied by the golfer – that his wife, Elin Nordegren, attacked him prior to his early-morning car accident on November 27 with a sketch featuring Keenan Thomson and host Blake Lively.

So what was the controversy? 

However, the show’s musical guest was Rihanna – a victim of domestic violence earlier this year from then-boyfriend Chris Brown — prompting concerns from several media outlets that the show’s humor was insensitive from some corners.

Insensitive to Rihanna?  Perhaps – although the incident opened a can of legal whoopass on Brown that his career might not survive, not that that’ll make anyone but Brown especially upset.

But what about Woods? 

“It was another sketch that gave us pause,” noted PopEater in an article titled “‘SNL’ Lampoons Alleged Violence in Tiger Woods’ Marriage,” on Sunday. “We think, had the genders been reversed, ‘SNL’ wouldn’t make light of the potentially violent situation.”

Er, d’ya think?

Society observes a cancerous double standard; domestic violence against women is a serious crime – while violence against men is treated with all the solemnity of Ma Kettle whacking Pa Kettle with a rolling pin. If Nordegren had, for whatever reason, had an affair – or even alleged affairs with (ahem) six people, it would have been equally narcissistic – and if Woods had scratched up her ace, or attacked her car with a golf club, that would have been the story, and everyone from the local cops to all the morning zoo idiots around the country who’ve been tittering at Woods’ predicament (and social life) would be singing a much more serious tune.  Saturday Night Live would find nothing funny about a putter bent around Elin Nordegren’s head.

It’s politically incorrect to observe that women are just as violent as men are – but it’s the truth:

Several studies of domestic violence have suggested that males and females in relationships have an equal likelihood of acting out physical aggression, although differing in tactics and potential for causing injury (e.g., women assailants will more likely throw something, slap, kick, bite, or punch their partner, or hit them with an object, while males will more likely beat up their partners, and choke or strangle them).

Of course, men are considered guilty until proven innocent when it comes to domestic violence – and while I don’t know whether there are grounds to accuse Elin Nordegren of violence, it wouldn’t matter; violence against men is devalued so systematically as to be a freebie.

Evidently Adrian Peterson fears Brad Childress more than the Edina Police Department having been clocked on his way to practice at 109 MPH in his Purple BMW 7-Series [Ugh!-JR] on the Crosstown Highway 62.

Minnesota Vikings All-Pro running back Adrian Peterson – or “Purple Jesus” as he’s known to Vikings fans

[sound of record scratching fading to tires screeching]

“Purple Jesus”  ?

– is one of the fastest men in the NFL. Turns out, he’s also one of the fastest men on a certain suburban Minnesota freeway, where police clocked him and his (model unknown) BMW going 109 mph in a 55 mph zone.

I’ve watched or listened to most of every Vikings game this season and haven’t once…not once…heard the moniker “Purple Jesus” let alone heard it applied to Adrian Peterson.

Have you?

Riddle me this:

What Would Jesus Do if he was late to practice?

Would he even need to practice?

Would Jesus be a first-round draft choice?

Would he have to wear a helmet?

Would he drive a BMW?

All crucial questions for our time, indeed.

In any case, sounds like our “Purple Jesus” will need to get a ride from Steve Hutchinson from now on.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network is live at the Ice Fishing show, at Rivercenter in downtown Saint Paul.

• The King Banaian Show – On AM1570, “The Businessman”, from 9-11.  King’s broadcasting from Saint Cloud, at long long last (and, alas, that means not at the ice fishing show.  Sorry, folks).
• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John are on assignment today, so join KKMS’ “Jeff and Lee”, from AM980 The Believer, dipping their toes into the world of political talk from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed is also off on assignment today, so I’ll be up from 1-3.  I’ll be talking with Rep. Kurt Zellars about the state budget deficit (it’s gonna be mighty mighty mighty big); James Lileks will also be joining the show at some point or another.  Tune in!
• And don’t forget, our long-time colleagues David Strom and Margaret Martin lead things off on the David Strom Show from 9-11AM on AM1280!

(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 of course, make sure you fan us on Facebook.

Join us!

Like this one, ripped from the headlines:

Prostitutes Offer Free Climate Summit Sex

But just because the joke writes itself doesn’t mean we can’t, too.

Have at it, readers!  The comment section is open for your versions of the story – and like those Danish doxies’ ministrations, it’s absolutely free, although that offered by the Scand0-Strumpets, the  “Happy Ending” will be purely rhetorical.

 Two reviews of Sarah Palin’s book – sort of.

On the one hand, we have local leftyblogger “Penigma” from, well, Penigma.  You’ll recognize him from this blog’s comment section; after years of telling him to “start his own blog”, he went and did it a while ago.  And while this may be taken as damnation by the fainest emanation from a penumbra connected to “praise”, it does in fact suck less than most regional left-wing blogs. 

Anyway, Pen writes:

Bob Schieffer, long-time CBS newsman, political conservative, and host of “Face the Nation”, has described her book as, “This is Sarah Palin’s turn to get even, as it were.”

He goes on to describe her national political future and the book as, “I think she’ll be a great attraction as an amusement. She’s interesting, she’s a celebrity. But I can’t imagine that she has much future in politics, I really don’t.”

While I give mad props to Schieffer – who is indeed one of the rarest critters in the world, a conservative in the upper reaches of the mainstream media – his very status makes him the wrong person to ask about a populist phenomenon like Palin.  His perspective – like that of George Will, to pick a not-entirely-random example – is that of someone who’s more time talking with Presidents and Congresspeople than, say, plumbers and ranchers.

I bring this up because it’s the same mistake the nation’s “elites” made about Reagan.  He’d never played the paper chase; his BA was from an undistinguished college in the middle of nowhere – he couldn’t be as capable as a Yalie, could he?  His “credentials” didn’t involve any time at Columbia School of Public Policy! He’d never worked for a think tank!  How could he have a future in politics?!

The “elites” were wrong about Reagan.  Are they wrong about Palin?  We’ll see. 

We’re going to meet someone familiar next:

A little more than a year ago I told a local conservative blogger (just after the Republican National Convention) that Sarah Palin was an albatross, that her political star was ascending temporarily because she was an unknown who had given a fiery speech, but as her past and especially her comments became public, she would be a boat anchor on McCain’s campaign.

If memory serves, I’m that “conservative blogger”.   Memory may not serve, but the conversation (a comment thread, if memory serves, and more and more it does not) rings a bell.

I was told by that blogger that I was mistaken, that Palin “was exactly what the campaign needed right now.” His point was of course that to the “tea party set” McCain was too liberal, and so to get the ‘base engergized” an issue light-weight, but ultra-conservative photogenic candidate like Palin was needed.

Well, no.  For starters, I have never said that Palin was a lightweight.  Indeed, I repeatedly expressed that I believed she was vastly more qualified to be President that the one we got.

It should go without saying that, being a conservative, a woman’s photogeneity is secondary to her accomplishments and talent, of which more in a bit here.  And while I realize that “from Sacramento, Denver is way out east”, Palin is no “ultra-conservative” in any sense that matters to, y’know conservatives. 

But he got the rest of it right; Palin was what the campaign needed; indeed, Palin was the only reason the 2008 election wasn’t a 15 point debacle.

Perhaps that was the case for the right-wing base, but as the election bore out, it was the undecided and independent voters, not the base, who would ultimately decide the election and who needed to feel ‘safe’ with the VP candidate, and Sarah Palin made virtually no one feel safe thinking she was John McCain’s heartbeat away from being President.

I think it’s highly monumentally implausible that, as bad a year as it was for Republicans and as polarizing a person as Palin was, that a single voter anywhere in the country felt “safe” with Joe Biden. 

In the year (plus) since, Palin has time and again proven herself to be a goof-ball, a daffy ill-informed, fire spewer ready to mouth idiocy like death panels,

(Show of hands:  Anyone tickled pink that a Democrat – someone from the party of Saul “Frame Your Opponent!” Alinsky – is complaining that a “dumb” conservative has out-framed them on their pet issue?)

and one who talks about having to ‘work for a living’ (as compared to a ‘community organizer), but who then went and quit her job because she was not seeking re-election.

Which, at this remove, is a move that makes more and more sense.  Had she stayed in office, the Democrat Smear Machine (R) would have kept lobbing an endless series of phony, borderline-defamatory “ethics complaints”, whose only purpose was to provide grist for the chattering classes’ mill, at Palin.  It was a risky move, and we’re three years away from knowing if it’ll pay off, but it gave Palin one key advantage; it allows her the time and bandwith to define herself, especially with that most important of tasks for any conservative – to outflank the media and define herself directly to the people.  Again, it’s a risk – but what did she have to lose?

She berated Levi Johnson – who maybe even deserved derision, but she appeared cheap and petty

Really?

That’s an interesting “but…”.  Levi Johnson knocks up her daughter, and then goes on a defamatory spree in the media attacking not only her (no big whoop if you’re a public figure) but her daughter?  And responding is “cheap and petty?”

The mainstream media and the Sorosphere (pardon the redundancy) have observed a fascinating double standard in re the Levi Johnson “scandal”; while most people agree that Johnson is a disgusting low-life, Palin’s response (which has been both low-key and fully proportionate to what any parent should do in defense of their children and grandchildren) has been pilloried for no better reason than “she’s a family-values conservative, she deserves what happens to her”.

 and got into a national TV fight with David Letterman – a stupid move that could have resulted in her becoming the same kind of clown Dan Qayle proved himself to be with “Murphy Brown”/Candace Bergen.

“Could have?”

Leaving aside the fact that the two episodes were utterly different (Quayle was criticizing a fictional character, albeit quite correctly; Letterman told a disgusting joke about a child; if I were A-Rod, I’d have bitch-slapped Letterman long before Palin’s fairly mild response got on the air) – it didn’t. 

That this women continues to enrapture the right-wing tea-party crowd speaks only to their enormous ability at self-delusion (rivaled by Palin’s own ability in that regard).

Ah.  Really?

“Self-delusion” means “to decieve oneself into believing something that isn’t true”.  I’m not quite sure what “Penigma” means by calling either Palin or the “Tea Party Crowd” “self-deluded”, and he’s not helpful enough to elaborate. 

But here’s the part that got my dander up:

She appears to be a petty and shallow back-biter, looking more like a mean-spirited and dishonest hick queen dressed up in Versace than a serious and educated candidate and this books seals that impression in gold-plated tell-all tin-foil hats.

“Hick Queen dressed in Versace?”

For starters, the term “Hick” is less onerous than “Nigger” in one, and only exactly one, way; lower-class rural whites were never formally enslaved, never had their rights systematically stripped away due to that status and their skin color, and got the slur due to a condition applied by society rather than birth and ethnicity alone.  It is a thoroughly disgusting, demeaning slur that deserves no less approbation than, say “dirt-worshipping heathen”.  It demeans and dehumanizes based not only on the most trivial, surface aspects of personality, but aspects that are in Palin’s case completely inaccurate and wrong. 

And what does “Hick Queen in Versace” mean?  That them backwoods wimmins should know their place and not pretend to be above their station?  Feminists, you wanna take this one?

Can anyone imagine a liberal referring to, say, Mike Huckabee as a “Hick King?”  Of course not – because Huckabee, being male, is not an apostate.  And it’s to apostates that all the worst punishments are reserved.

And when Pengima says “s books seals that impression in gold-plated tell-all tin-foil hats”, my first question is…

…well, it’s “Huh?”  I have no idea what that means.  I even tried to diagram the dependent clause; I got hung up on the concept of the “tell-all hat” before giving up.

But my second question is “Really?  How does it “seal” that impression?  What part of the book did you read to get that impression “sealed?”  Did you actually read  the book?”

Of course he didn’t.  The “book” didn’t “seal” anything; Penigma’s preconceptions, like those of most of her critics, did.  And it’s about the Big Left’s canonical line (at one point, I’d have called it a “talking point”) about Palin, or indeed about any conservative woman (Latino/Afro-American); she’s “teh crazee/extremist/out of touch not “elite” enough/a hypocrite”.

But retired Brigadier General Anthony Tata did read the book.  And A he “sealed” an entirely different impression, to say the least:

When I got about halfway through the book I set it down, stepped outside of my Washington, DC townhouse and went for a run around the U.S. Capitol. Listening to the Outlaws, Marshall Tucker Band, and Lil Bow Wow (my daughter slipped that one in there) on my iPod, the recurrent thought in my mind was that this woman is far more qualified to be president of the United States than the current occupant of the White House.

Which is something an awful lot of us noted before the election – and in which this Administration’s hapless first year has borne us out.

When I completed the journey that is Going Rogue, I wrote down five things:

–She is a positive role model for all Americans
–She is an executive, takes on hard problems and makes tough decisions
–She has tremendous energy, balance and intellect
–America shafted itself in this last election
–Alaska is lucky to have her

Oh, and a sixth, Sarah Palin could be the next president of the United States.

She certainly could.  And not just because Obama set the bar so low Jimmy Carter must even be feeling good right about now.

Her book washes away all doubts that any reader might have had about her readiness to be president. She comes across as exceptionally bright, dedicated, and passionate about public service. Her moral compass is strong, pointing true North in this case. And she has a wicked sense of humor.

Which are a slew of things that liberals dislike under any circumstances; when they occur in a woman  (or a Latino, or Afro-American)? They must be destroyed.

The most salient take-away from Going Rogue for me was what I admired most in her campaign, which was that she had been in charge as either a mayor or a governor whereas none of the other candidates on either ticket had. Having been a commander several times in the military I know that there is a huge difference between being a hardworking and important staff officer and an ‘alone at the top’ commander. No matter how fancy the title, executive officer or Senator, at the end of the day, you are recommending to someone who actually makes the decision.

As a Governor, mayor or commander, you have the unparalleled responsibility to actually make decisions that have ramifications. There is little training that can prepare you for all those heads turning in your direction when it is decision time. You can’t blithely abstain on a vote or hide behind the guy in front of you, because you own the decision.

Remember all those “present” votes during the two whopping years Obama spent in the Senate?  Did you think it was just an abstract thing?

Case in point is Obama’s inexcusable delay in making a decision on Afghanistan. His indecision, cloaked as ‘sleeves-rolled-up-pensiveness’, is an indicator that he was, at a minimum, unprepared to be commander in chief…Palin, on the other hand, demonstrates decisiveness and vulnerability. Is she prepared for the enormous breadth of responsibility of president? I think she’s ready for the hard part, which is making tough decisions. She’s no “Ruminator-in Chief”, that’s for sure, and if the American people think a second year back bench senator was ready to be president, I’m not sure we’ve got the right rubric out there.

Palin’s got warts; of course, so does every other person in the world.  It’s one of the reasons many of us love Palin, political aspirations notwithstanding; we have kids who givegive us hell; we got through college in fits and starts, and didn’t have time or resources to play the “paper chase” game; most of us tried a couple of different courses in life before settling, at least for now, on what we are.  And she’s not the “perfect” candidate, whatever that is.  But  Conservatism does not expect politicians to be the revealed font of perfection.  Quite the opposite; the imperfection of people and the temptation of power are two of the many, many reasons we advocate limiting government power.

Palin is real. She takes counsel of her fears and continuously comes back to her foundation of family, God, state and nation for reassurance and guidance. She has strong moral guideposts that she uses to navigate the shark infested political waters. Reading about the decisions Sarah Palin faced at multiple levels of government reminded me of something my command sergeant major in the 82nd Airborne Division used to say when we faced a tough decision together: “Sir, when you’re right, don’t worry about it.”

Palin is right on many issues such as energy policy, defense, business, and size of government.

And underneath the carefully-arranged slime jobs, the impeccably-unflattering editing of her first, ill-advised round of interviews with Couric and Gibson, and the endless torrent of hatred disguised as “humor” from the left, that’s what many of us still love about Palin; she’s right.  Above and beyond her personality and history and record, she stands for what I stand for“.

As her father said, “Sarah’s not retreating; she’s reloading.”

We should hope so, because she’s precisely the kind of leader America needs.

Need I repeat that Gen. Tata read the book?

Read the rest of the review – which includes a Hillary Clinton story that sets this whole thing off perfectly.

One of the basic rules one must always follow when dealing with government is this: anything government does, for whatever reason, will have unintended consequences.  These consequences will pretty much always be as bad as or worse than whatever problem the original action was supposed to rectify.

When Minnesota legalized “charter schools” – publicly-funded schools run by site-elected boards rather than the city/district board, under a “charter” from the district – they barred charter schools from using district money directly to buy school buildings.  The stated reason was to keep charters out of the real estate business. 

The consequence was that charter schools had to rent space.  And in a busy real estate market (like the Twin Cities were) or in a small town (especially like the many Indian reservation charter schools), it can be hard to find a space that’s suitable, or even up to code, to use as a school space for 50-300 or more kids. The state provides, as part of each charter student’s funding allotment, a certain amount ($1,200/year) of “lease assistance” – which is in fact part of the roughly $10-11,000 per student that charters receive in the Metro.

Regular “district” public schools get a huge advantage in this area; they can use public bonding and tax levies to build their buildings.   While both involve the inconvenience of having to convince voters and/or governmental bodies to float the bonds, once that’s done the schools have it fairly easy; having a big school district or city behind your bonds makes bonding a relatively inexpensive proposition – or at least gives the district plenty of size and time to hide and amortize the costs.

But charter schools aren’t allowed to use public funds to buy buildings.  Being relatively tiny entities, they aren’t usually big enough to float any kind of meaningful bond issue themselves.  But there’s a loophole; a charter school can found or affiliate with a separate construction company, which can float bonds and build a building for the school.  Many schools are doing exactly this, including at least one Saint Paul charter.

But since the schools and their affiliated companies are small, their bonds aren’t backed with the kind of infrastructure and collateral that support bonds for cities, counties and school districts.  A

The DFL establishment in Minnesota – and few things in Minnesota are more “establishment” than the Minnesota Federation of Teachers – hate charter schools.  Via their proxies in various “think tanks” like MN2020, they’ve been trying to cap and, eventually, kill charter schools for quite some time.  Last summer, I joined with a number of charter school advocates to flense a MN2020 “report” that grossly distorted a series of Department of Education findings about Charter school accounting practicices – but the endless drip-drip-drip continues.

 Via Speed Gibson, the Strib’ s Tony Kennedy wrote a piece earlier this week exposing issues with the practice of issuing “Junk Bonds”.  It covers the facts, more or less, while missing a much larger subtext.

And while I started out doing a garden-variety fisking, this is actually a much bigger story than that – and needs more than one impossibly-long blog post to cover. 

So I’m going to address the article – and, no doubt, the political motives behind the article – in one of my patented several-part series, starting Monday.

Andy DeLigio, ace investigative reporter, has gone farther inside the Norwegian Mob than anyone who’s lived to tell the tale.

Let’s pick up with part one of the story.

Inside The Norwegian Mob

Andy DiLigio

“Your people are  from what part of Norway, then?”

Jeff Hartelowen looks at me with a focused but blank concentration as I sit across the table from him at the Ace Cafe in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota.  In his early fifties, with thin, graying blond hair and ruddy red cheeks over a beard that needs trimming, he looks like he could be any of the other farmers sitting around the cafe, drinking his Folgers and eating krumkakke. Indeed, he is one of the farmers.

But he’s more than that.  He’s known by a name that’s never, ever said in public, and almost never in private; De Godenfar.  “The Godfather”.   And from this cafe in rural Minnesota, he runs the biggest, most powerful – and yet most secretive – syndicate in the history of organized crime.  A syndicate that is so powerful it manipulates the other crime syndicates at will – and yet remains not only unknown, but its very concept sparks derision at the very idea.

Hartelowen is sitting at a table with his Rådgiver (Norwegian for Consigliere), Art Yetterboe, and Hartelowen’s oldest son Chuck, a beefy 6’4 inch guy with a light blond mullet, leaning back in his chair, his sorel boots tapping nervously on the cement floor, cradling a Big Gulp mug he’s just filled with Folgers.

“Finnmark”, I respond.  “They were Saani”, I add, to account for my swarthy, Mediterranean features.

“Reindeer herders, then?” Yetterboe asks.

“Oh, yah”, I answer, adopting the local patois.

“Hm. Interesting” the elder Hartelowen  respondes.  “OK, then”.

And he starts to tell me the story.

———-

The tale of the Norwegian Mob started in 1891, when a 15 year old boy, Bjørn Knudsson, from the village of  Hjerteløven in Sør-Trøndelag, landed at Ellis Island.  His backstory was unclear – his father, Knud, had apparently been ostracized for applauding after the special music in church – but the clerks at the Immigration station, mistaking his naming his hometown for his last name, entered him in the record as Bjørn Hjerteløven, the name he carried until his death and gave to his family.

The ferry carried him from Ellis to the teeming, reeking streets of the Lower East Side, where young Bjørn took a job delivering ice.

It didn’t take long to figure out where the power was on the Lower East Side; his boss paid protection to the Scunzillis, the Italian gang that ran the local cartage rackets, while the landlord of the sleazy tenement he lived in paid protection to the Fitzpatrick gang of Irish thugs.   

Being neither Irish nor Italian, Hjerteløven was not welcome to join either gang; being Norwegian, he had no desire to.  But he noted and processed two key facts about these gangs as he went through his days and observed their actions, their comings and goings throughout the neighborhood.   

• Being aggressive people from demonstrative ethnic groups, they resorted to violence on the drop of a pin.
• Their gangs were “secret societies” in the sense that Nicole Ritchie is “garboesque”.

Hjerteløven hatched his plan.

———-

On a hot July day in 1892, Bart Sklopnik, another ice deliverer, called in sick.  He complained of stomach pains after having had a traditional dinner of Lutefisk and  Rømmegrøt at the apartment of his co-worker Hjerteløven.  Being a stolid, thrifty Scandinavian, Hjerteløven volunteered to cover his route. 

Sklopnik’s route included the home of both Don Guiseppe Scunzilli, capo of the gang that bore his family name.  And his regular route included the home of Dougall Fitzpatrick, head of the Fitzpatrick gang.

He stopped at the Fitzpatrick’s brownstone on Delancy Street. 

“Top ‘o the mornin'”, said Colleen Fitzpatrick, answering the service door.  “Fifty pounds, lad”.

“Oh, yah”, Hjerteløven responded.   He hauled his load into the house – and then, as planned, stop and did a theatrical double take at the photograph of Dougall Fitzpatrick.  “Oh, it’s a small world, aint it?”

“What fer ya be sayin’ that missus?” Mrs. Fitzpatarick asked, as if on cue.

“Oh, nuttin”, Hjerteløven responded.  “He just ordered some ice from me yesterday, for some drinks he was making.  Over at dat Italian lady’s place…”.

“Scunzilli?” Mr.s Fitzpatrick asked, her face already during redder.

“Is dat the name?  Could be”, Hjerteløven replied.  “Probably weren’t nuttin”. 

He left the house.

Four hours later, at the Scunzilli brownstone in the middle of Sklopnik’s route, while putting a fifty pound block into the icebox in the kitchen, he waited for Antonia Scunzilli, the wife of the clan’s leader Guiseppe, to strike up the inevitable conversation the damn always-talking Italians wanted to have.

Sure enough…

“So youse ain’t da regular ice guy?”

“Nope”.   Two beats of silence.  “I’m Bjørn Hjerteløven”

“Antonia Scunzilli”.

Hjerteløven looked at Scunzilli, feigning surprise.  “Oh, wow.  Well, dat’s a surprise then”.

“What?” Scunzilli asked, in that way people ask when they’re used to getting their answers right way.

“Oh, it’s just dat you look like a regular lady”.

“What’s ‘dat supposed to mean?”  Scunzilli asked, getting red under the collar.

“Oh, it’s just dat dat Fitzwhatsis guy said you was…y’know…a little butch, if you know what I mean.  But he’s obviously mistaken”.  Hjerteløven paused for a brief rhetorical flourish.  “Very mistaken”.

Mrs. Scunzilli paused from her building rage for a moment to thank Hjerteløven for the compliment, as he excused himself.

———-

The New York papers over the next few weeks were filled with stories of inter-gang warfare, as the Irish and Italian gangs slaughtered each other in the streets. And then, a week later, as quickly as the violence had started, it ended.

Bjørn Hjerteløven moved into a town house on Park Avenue three weeks later.  And for the next several years, an uneasy peace reigned between New York’s gangs – one that neither the police nor the newspapers could explain.

In 1895, Hjerteløven married Gerda Tørstensdottir.  In short order, they had four children; Lars, Berndt, Knud, and the youngest, daughter Ingrid.

And it’s there that the next generation of the story picks up.

More soon.

To: Richard Daley, Mayor, Chicago

From: Mitch Berg, occasional visitor.

Re: Hahahaha

Dear Mayor Daley,

As you and your minions dig in to fight against the rule of law in the McDonald case (scheduled to go before the Supreme Court on March 2), just thought you’d like to check out a little bit of foreshadowing, courtesy of Justice Scalia in the Heller decision. I call it “foreshadowing” because I’m gonna guess it covers the tack you and your lawyers are going to try to take (I’ll add some emphasis for the benefit of your “community organizers):

Justice Breyer moves on to make a broad jurisprudential point: He criticizes us for declining to establish a level of scrutiny for evaluating Second Amendment restrictions. He proposes, explicitly at least, none of the traditionally expressed levels (strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, rational basis), but rather a judge-empowering “interest-balancing inquiry” that “asks whether the statute burdens a protected interest in a way or to an extent that is out of proportion to the statute’s salutary effects upon other important governmental interests.” Post, at 10. After an exhaustive discussion of the arguments for and against gun control, Justice Breyer arrives at his interest-balanced answer: because handgun violence is a problem, because the law is limited to an urban area, and because there were somewhat similar restrictions in the founding period (a false proposition that we have already discussed), the interest-balancing inquiry results in the constitutionality of the handgun ban. QED.    We know of no other enumerated constitutional right whose core protection has been subjected to a freestanding “interest-balancing” approach.

I’m no lawyer, but to the best of my knowledge the key use of “interest-balanced” enquiry was to distinguish slaves from free men.  (I could be wrong).

The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government—even the Third Branch of Government—the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges’ assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future judges think that scope too broad. We would not apply an “interest-balancing” approach to the prohibition of a peaceful neo-Nazi march through Skokie. See National Socialist Party of America v. Skokie, 432 U. S. 43 (1977) (per curiam). The First Amendment contains the freedom-of-speech guarantee that the people ratified, which included exceptions for obscenity, libel, and disclosure of state secrets, but not for the expression of extremely unpopular and wrong-headed views. The Second Amendment is no different. Like the First, it is the very product of an interest-balancing by the people—which Justice Breyer would now conduct for them anew. And whatever else it leaves to future evaluation, it surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.

To translate it for your lawyers, Mayor Daley:  Really really really wanting to keep black people disarmed doesn’t count as a constitutional governmental power.

And in conclusion:

We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution. The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns, see supra, at 54–55, and n. 26. But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home. Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.

We affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

I doubt the Supremes have the power to order you to be chased from office with a rock-and-garbage-throwing mob, but it’d seem just.

Arguments on March 2.  Decision sometime in June. I may take a vacation day; who knows, I might even go to Chicago.

That is all.

So what we have here are “Scientists”, caught red-handed trying to doctor data, jiggle the “Peer Review” process and defame rather than scientifically refute their critics, in a scam whose goal was to secure their funding and, by the way, bring epic and unprecedented political power to their (inevitably liberal) political benefactors – which is, by any measure, fraud.  Which is a crime.

But Barbara Boxer – the stupidest person ever to serve as a US Senator – knows who the real enemies are:

“You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate,'” she said during a committee meeting. “Whatever it is, the main issue is, Are we facing global warming or are we not? I’m looking at these e-mails, that, even though they were stolen, are now out in the public.”

The e-mails, from scientists at the University of East Anglia, were obtained through hacking.

That seems an odd thing to state as a conclusion; I’ve heard that it’s equally likely they were obtained from a conscientious whistle-blower.

At any rate,  Boxer seems to be serving the dictates of her lord and master Rahm Emanual, and is putting this crisis to good use:

Boxer said her committee may hold hearings into the matter as its top Republican, Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), has asked for, but that a criminal probe would be part of any such hearings.

“We may well have a hearing on this, we may not. We may have a briefing for senators, we may not,” Boxer said. “Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated.

“This is a crime,” Boxer said.

The biggest crime of all is that Barbara Boxer has a job more responsible than serving burgers at a truck stop.

Democrats Diane Feinstein and Dick “Turban” Durbin – who have long been the Dems’ official trial-balloon-floaters for assaults on free speech like the “Fairness Doctrine” – are proposing an amendment to a Senate bill (S.448) clarifying the press shield law.

And it’s aimed squarely at citizen journalists like you and I.  Via RWN, here’s the amendment text, with some emphases added:

AMENDMENTS intended to be proposed by Mrs. FEINSTEIN (for herself and Mr. DURBIN )

Viz:

In section 10(2)(A), strike clause (iii) and insert the following:

[a “journalist” is shielded if he/she] (iii) obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity—

(I) that disseminates information by print, broadcast, cable, satellite, mechanical, photographic, electronic, 1or other means; and

(II) that—

(aa) publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical;

(bb) operates a radio or television broadcast station, network, cable system, or satellite carrier, or a channel or programming service for any such station, network, system, or carrier;

(cc) operates a programming service; or

(dd) operates a news agency or wire service;

In other words, you need to be an employee of a news business.  All of us hobby hacks in our pajamas in our basements are out in the cold.

In section 10(2)(B), strike ‘‘and’’ at the end.

In section 10(2)(C), strike the period at the end and insert ‘‘; and’’.

In section 10(2), add at the end the following:

(D) does not include an individual who gathers or disseminates the protected information sought to be compelled anonymously or under a pseudonym.

This would seem to be aimed at the likes of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles – provided they’re not employed by a Major News Outlet, of course.

Leaving aside the obvious indication that this is the Democrats’ way of circling their wagons around ACORN – this is a fascinating look into the authoritarianism of the Democrat party at work.

The conservative blogosphere is dominated by independents who cover their fields of expertise, whatever they are (this blog: music, financial planning, wine, tomatos and Minnesota politics) for the pure, unadulterated love of the game.  From Power Line (which covers all they survey) to Speed Gibson (who patrols the ramparts of northwest-suburban education), we mostly do it because we want to, money be damned. 

The left, on the other hand, has built up a network of “business” entities and non-profits, from the pseudo-newspaper-y “MNPost” to the not-very-covert propagandists at the “Center for Independent Media” (parent of the Minnesoros “Indepdendent”), at exquisite cost; one might now presume that this money was spent to get ahead of the legislative curve that the Feinstein/Durbin proposal represents, as a further attempt to shut down independent, non-government-vetted thought in this country.

This is Obama’s America.

Everyone’s heard of “The Mob”.  The “Cosa Nostra”.  The “Mafia”.  The Italian organized crime syndicate, ostensibly established on the principles of Omerta, the fabled, iron-clad code of silence, is ironically the most famous, best-publicized organized crime syndicate in the world.  The “secret brotherhood” of the Mob has been the subject of hundreds of movies, many of them Oscar-winners.  It’s been immortalized in thousands of books, TV shows and other staples of popular culture.

In short, the Mafia is about as “secret” as Linday Lohan’s battle with substance abuse.  And a big part of this immense, society-choking wave of publicity comes at the hands of Italians – Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, Robert Di Niro, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Joe Pesci, James Gandolfini…

There are, of course, other ethnic organized crime outfits; Jewish and Irish syndicates were once very powerful in the US; the Russian, Japanese, Albanian and Vietnamese syndicates are visible and brutal.  The Armenian mob dominates Twin Cities business radio on Saturdays.  They all have one thing in common; someone talks about them – to cops, prosecutors, the media, writers, producers or whatever.  There is always some body of knowledge out there about each of these organizations.

But there is one organized crime syndicate that dwarfs all the others in terms of reach, power, brutality and especially secrecy.  And nobody knows about it.

———-

In the movie The Usual Suspects, the ubervillain Keyser Soze is a human macguffin, a supercriminal whose power and menace is multiplied by the fact that nobody has ever seen him and lived; that nobody knows if he really even exists. He is, one character says, “a story mothers tell their kids when they misbehave; like Keyser Soze will get you in the night”.

Soze is fictional.

But there’s a syndicate that’s all too real – rendered all the more sinister by the fact that it has mastered the key to secrecy; make denying its very existence less a matter of fear than utter putative preposterousness.

It hides in plain sight, behind a cloak of its utter improbability

———-

Reporter Anthony DiLigio has undertaken one of the most daunting feats in the history of investigative reporting.  I’m going to quote his piece pretty much in full, as he goes…

…Inside the Norwegian Mob.

The story begins Friday in Shot In The Dark.

I was pulling out of the Rainbow parking lot on Universityi around 6:30 last night, and noticed a small clutch of Saint Paul cops pulled up at the corner of Pascal and University.

“Nothing new there”, I thought.  It’s not uncommon to see the cops pulling over drunk drivers, thieves, footpads and petty thugs up and down Uni after dark; it’s common enough in broad daylight in fact.  I started filing it away…

…until I heard a “THUMP THUMP THUMP” sound through my open window, along with the kind of aggressive barking that doesn’t come from taking Fido out for a walk.

I was waiting to pull onto northbound Pascal to get home when I heard it, and sensed more than saw some kind of frenzied activity through the brightly-lit windows of an office space upstairs – a “computer repair shop and mini-arcade” that always seemed to be in the exact wrong location for either business, above an auto garage and a vacant former clothing store.  Then I heard something new – a bright splintering sound.  I focused on the office, as the big picture window overlooking University shattered, and a black-clad figure tumbled out in a welter of glass, landing on the sidewalk ten feet below on  his side.  He was instantly surrounded by cops, although the cars between the scene and I, fifty yards away, obscured the action.

I pulled out onto Pascal, and noticed that my way home was blocked by a couple of big, black police vans – SWAT trucks.  I wheeled over onto University, parked in front of a vacant building, and walked over as close as I could get to the scene.  The jumper, not apparently bad-enough-for-wear to rate an ambulance, was being led away.  Two or three early twenty-something Afro-American men were sitting, sullen and uncomfortable-looking, in chairs visible through the window, surrounded by officers in kevlar “Fritz” helmets and flak jackets.

It appeared to be a drug raid, but of course nobody was talking.

Observation:  Don’t know if I want to hear anymore how “outgunned” the police are on the street these days.  Every single officer I saw was carrying an M4 carbine, not one degree behind the current special operations fashion curve;

A:  A conservative lead-in.

Anderson Cooper – famous for impeccable silver-gray executive hair and his ability to throw politically-correct tirades on cue, and who is most famous for chuckling “it’s hard to talk when you’re tea-bagging” about a story about the Tea Parties – is getting clobbered in the ratings (empasis added):

The respected [sic] CNN anchor has seen his numbers slip significantly through the past year. His 10 p.m. show, “Anderson Cooper 360,” has declined 62% in total viewers and 70% in adults 25-54 from November 2008, according to Nielsen figures.

Last month, in Cooper’s time slot, Fox News’ “On the Record” attracted an average viewership of 1.9 million while “360” averaged 672,000; repeats of MSNBC’s “Countdown” and HLN’s Nancy Grace show averaged 655,000 and 458,000, respectively.

But in the ad-friendly 25-54 demo, those same repeats won out over Cooper with 224,000 (MSNBC) and 214,000 (HLN).

Wow.  That’s a pretty precipitous dropoff.  What on earth could have caused it?

Cooper — who became an overnight sensation during his Hurricane Katrina coverage — surely deserves better ratings

[Oh, really?  Do tell – Ed.].

From the start of 2009, he began losing a huge chunk of his nightly audience.

So what happened? Let’s see: There’s no presidential election to ramp up ratings

[What?  Fox’s competing show has a Presidential race to cover? Please elaborate – Ed.];

there’s heavy competition from centrist [sic] CNN’s noisier rivals (see: Fox News, the No. 1 cable news channel); there’s people catching up on DVR-ed TV shows in the late evening; then there’s the loss of Lou Dobbs in the 7 p.m. anchor chair, among other possible factors.

There’s that.

And the whole “incurring the wrath of everyone to the right of Arne Carlson with his moronic “tea-bagging” crack”.

But yeah.  Dobbs.

 This just in from an alternate universe in which Barack Obama was President of the United States on June 6, 1944; this is his proclamation announcing the invasion continued surveillance and aggressive patrolling actions in Normandy.

Soldiers, Sailors and Airpeople of the Allied Relief Force!

You are about to embark upon the Great Shout-Out At Hitler, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world – even those very, very many parts of the world whom we have aggrieved in the past –  are upon you. The hopes and prayers of security-loving people everywhere march, walk, and roll in their wheelchairs alongside you.
In company with our brave Allies and brothers-and-sisters-in-arms on
other Fronts, you will bring about the prevention of the German human-caused-disaster machine from conquering any more territory until further communityorganization can take full effect, as well as, the bringing to justice in a court of law of the Nazi tyrants, who were the responsibility of the previous administration anyway, over the oppressed and, it needs to be said, at times oppressive peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a world with adequate social spending.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your opponents are is well trained,
well equipped and man-made-disaster hardened. He will fight savagely.
They are, indeed, haters.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great setbacks in negotiations to preclude further man-made disasters. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity  to wage war on the ground, while erroneous collateral damage is being paid for out of an international trust fund. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in money and political will, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained lawyers and organizers, as well as all of you alternate-resolution specialists. The tide has turned! The free men and women of the world are marching together to send a message to Mister Hitler; stop advancing!

I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in dealing with this epic man-made disaster. We will accept nothing less than sending a very serious message!

Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Me upon this great
and noble undertaking.

                          SIGNED: Barack H. Obama
                          President
                          United Communities of America

1977:  Home ownership should be increased via government incentives and if necessary penalties for those that don’t lend money to people that can’t pay it back.

Result:  The Great Recession.

2009: Access to banking services should be increased via government incentives and if necessary penalties for those that don’t offer banking services to people that don’t have any money.

Result:  [insanity]It’ll be different this time folks.[/insanity]

A report from the (coincidentally insolvent) FDIC:

Consider defining a national shared government-industry
goal to lower the number of unbanked and/or underbanked
individuals and households…

There are people that have never been banked?

Do you know anyone that is “underbanked”

“[There is] an imperative for government and industry to expand financial access to the substantial number of households that have never been banked,”

…or “unbanked” (!!!!!!!!!!!)?

A push to extend basic services such as accounts to poorer communities with patchy credit histories would be especially sensitive because of the role of the subprime mortgage crisis in sparking the recent turmoil.

Ya think?

Not having enough money to need an account was the most common reason cited for staying outside the banking system. One third of households that no longer had accounts said they closed them because of the cost of maintaining them, such as minimum balance requirements, service charges and overdrafts.

“As a society, we should make banks cover these people.”

That’ll have a positive outcome.

But wait! We already have a solution here in the Twin Cities…it’s called Twin Cities Federal*. $50 for opening up a free checking account; $25 for referring your friends, open 7 days a week.

The bank for the underbanked…no TARP required, thank you.

*Johnny Roosh does not endorse Twin City Federal and was not paid a fee to mention them. Yet.

I came across this on my cyber paper route today and it caught my interest as a Scotch/Whiskey/Bourbon drinker (in moderation, of course)…

“We can make so much more of malt whisky as an industry,” said Thomson, 54, who submitted plans for local government approval on Nov. 12. “We haven’t even begun to tap into the potential interest.”

Economic gains in China and India are fueling a growth market for the better booze.

I like to sip Glenfiddich, Jack Daniels and recently started a bottle of Old Weller Antique 107 (thanks Dad).

What are your favorite malt spirits?

I’ve long felt that the MNGOP’s best shot at a pickup in 2010 will be in the First Congressional District (CD), where DFLer Tim Walz beat incumbent moderate Gil Gutknecht in 2006.  Walz was a middling-to-weak candidate, but a likeable enough guy who ran far enough to the center to eke out a win in the second-worst election for Republicans in recent memory.   Incumbency has its privileges, of course; Walz solidified his position last year against a very weak GOP candidate in the worst year for Republicans in recent memory.

Still, if there’s a vulnerable DFLer in the state, it’s Walz; he’s a mushy center-left Congressman of no real distinction, one who’s followed whomever’s ridden the biggest horse in his three exceedingly vanilla years in Washington.  A good conservative reflecting the overall realities of the district and, let us not forget, a better year for Republicans, could make 2010 the year Tim Walz goes back to whatever it was he did before he went to Washington.

The Cook Report is showing early signs of agreement, demoting the race in the First from “Solid” to “Likely” Democrat – and this long before the GOP has even begun winnowing its five contenders down to find a candidate.

In the book and miniseries Band of Brothers, “Easy ” Company (E Company/506th Airborne Infantry Regiment) is led through Normandy and Operation Market-Garden (the invasion of the Netherlands) by Dick Winters – the protagonist and real-life hero of the story.   After Market-Garden, Winters is promoted to battalion executive officer; he’s replaced by another excellent officer, who is shot and gravely wounded by a nervous sentry.  That officer, in turn, is replaced by a Lieutenant Dike.

In the book (and, as narrated in the movie by Dike’s first sergeant, Litman, in the miniseries), it’s revealed that “Lt. Dike’s biggest problem wasn’t that he made bad decisions.  It’s that he made no decisions at all”. 

During the Battle of the Bulge, at the defense of Bastogne, the competence of his platoon leaders and NCOs – the sergeants and corporals who do most of the moment-by-moment leadership – saved the company.

But after the Bulge, during the long series of counterattacks to drive the Germans back out of Belgium, Dike’s inadequacy as a combat leader led to a crisis.  In a counterattack to retake the town of Foy, Belgium, Dike’s led the company into an exposed positi0n, halfway between the shelter of the woods and the town full of Germans.  Raked by machine gun fire, pummeled by concealed artillery, and needled by snipers concealed in the town ahead who alone kill or wound six of the soldiers, the company was in a bad positi0n; to retreat would lead the company back across open ground and lead to needing to do the whole thing over again.  To advance would involve casualties and a very tough fight with some very skilled German defenders.  And to stay in place involved getting shot or blown up at the Germans’ leisure. 

Dike made one decision – an ineffective half-measure sending a platoon on a fruitless, pointless flanking maneuver that led to casualties and nothing much else – and then froze up.  Winters, watching from not far behind, ordered Lieutentant Speirs, the aggressive, Scottish-born platoon leader who would carry the company through the rest of the war, to take the company.  He made the tough but instant decision; attack.  Get into the town.  Root the Germans out and get the battle over.

It cost casualties – but fewer than the company lost as it floundered about in the field, waiting for a definitive decision.  It was a tough call, one that could have ended in disaster to be sure.  But it carried the day.

I have no idea whatsoever what prompted me to think of that.

The Associated Press h compares Iraq, before and after the war, with perhaps some surprising results:

U.S. TROOP LEVELS:

_October 2007: 170,000 at peak of troop buildup.

_Nov. 30, 2009: 115,000.

CASUALTIES:

_Confirmed U.S. military deaths as of Dec. 1, 2009: at least 4,366.

_Confirmed U.S. military wounded (hostile) as of Nov. 30, 2009: 31,572.

_Confirmed U.S. military wounded (non-hostile, using medical air transport) as of Oct. 31, 2009: 39,232.

I did expect that; it’s not unusual that many more troops are injured in accidents than in combat.

_U.S. military deaths for November 2009: 11, one of the lowest monthly death tolls since the war began.

_Deaths of civilian employees of U.S. government contractors as of Sept. 30, 2009: 1,442.

_Iraqi deaths in November 2009 from war-related violence: at least 93, the lowest full monthly figure since The Associated Press began tracking Iraqi deaths in May 2005

I’d snark that it’s more dangerous to be a civilian in Chicago than an American serviceman in Iraq – but that’s been true for almost two years.  What is shocking is that the death rate, per capita, isn’t a whole lot different than the per capita murder rate in Chicago .

_Assassinated Iraqi academics as of Nov. 23, 2009: 432.

_Journalists killed on assignment as of Dec. 1, 2009: 141.

What?  No count of lawyers and “reality TV superstars?”

COST:

_Over $705 billion, according to the National Priorities Project.

Cheaper than healthcare, and has the salutary effect of killing Al Quaeda terrorists.

OIL PRODUCTION:

_Prewar: 2.58 million barrels per day.

_Nov. 24, 2009: 2.34 million barrels per day.

Halliburton!  Halliburton!  Halliburton!

ELECTRICITY:

_Prewar nationwide: 3,958 megawatts. Hours per day (estimated): 4-8.

_Nov. 4, 2009: Nationwide: 5,890 megawatts. Hours per day: N/A.

But…but…didn’t Michael Moore assure us that Iraq before the war was a paradise?

TELEPHONES:

_Prewar land lines: 833,000.

_Oct. 4, 2009: 1,250,000.

_Prewar cell phones: 80,000.

_Oct. 4, 2009: an estimated 19.5 million.

Which may be one reason we’re winning; the insurgents are too busy texting to aim.

WATER:

_Prewar: 12.9 million people had potable water.

_Oct. 12, 2009: 21.2 million people have potable water.

SEWERAGE:

_Prewar: 6.2 million people served.

_Oct. 12, 2009: 11.5 million people served.

How long ago was it that the left assured us that things were worse, and would never get better?

The history of the Cold War teaches us that the left’s next steps will be denial, bargaining, anger and co-option.