Background:  In 1992, I was working a temp job in downtown Minneapolis.  I had two kids, with another one on the way fairly shortly.  I was making $6.50 an hour.  I can’t complain, of course; it beat having nothing, and I got it through the good graces of a friend of mine whom I’m sure I never thanked nearly enough; I re-learned how to use computers (I’d never worked with a PC before), which enabled me to get my first technical writing jobs…

…the next year.

But it was still 1992.  And things were tight.

Anyway – downstairs from the temp job, a new bar/restaurant opened.  And I walked by it every day on the way to/from the bus.  And the smell coming from the place was fantastic; I fantasized about the hamburgers the place must have had for months.  Years, really; to me, that smell reminded me of hope for years; to this day, I associate the smell of frying hamburger on the street with being broke, stressed out and hopeful.

And back in 1992 I told myself; someday, when I have enough money, I’m going to splurge on a burger and a beer for lunch at that very downtown Minneapolis joint.

And while things got better – I got my first good job as a technical writer in 1993 – I somehow neglected that pledge.  For 17 years.

But recently, on a well-deserved day off, while meandering around downtown Minneapolis, I saw the place – it’s still there – and thought “I really should do this”.

So I walked in, and ordered a Summit and a burger.

And it was…

…adequate.  That’s all.

Some dreams are best left dreamy.

I was going to write a post about yesterday’s game – but I dropped the keyboard.

A commenter (Flash, from Centrisity) left me a  note in yesterday’s post about the game – really about big sports fans – in which I referenced Berg’s Fourth Law, which notes that the more people start to think the Vikings won’t choke, the more likely they will choke.

Generally a team favored to win, and win big, that ends up losing, is a choker…If the club from MN gets spanked, I’d call that a choke, if they lose by anything less then 10 Points, I would be hard pressed to call that a choke.

Which would ordinarily be one of those things you’d decide to settle at Flash’s garage over the summer.

But then, Flash decides to try to deny settled science:

As for Berg’s law, another one bites the dust! The Local Media was on the Bandwagon the instant Favre showed up in Chilly’s SUV, and after 17 games, the remain contenders. Win or Lose, another Faux Berg Law is tossed to the wayside.

Nope.  Indeed, yesterday’s result only reinforces Berg’s Fourth.  The exuberance did seem almost rational; if you leave out the turnovers, the Vikes actually played a better game in terms of offensive stats than the favorite Saints did, which is a little like saying “other than the assassination, Mrs. Lincoln loved the play”. Favre had a good game against a brutal Saints pass rush, shaking off over a dozen hits and leading the team effectively.

But when the blackened redfish chips were down, and the time came to convert that great offensive effort to points to put the Saints away, what happened?  Two Peterson fumbles, one inside the five – and, the biggest buzzkill of all, that last pass, where Favre converted what could have been a simple 5-10 yard dash to set up a decent-percentage field goal that would have ended the game into one of the dumber interceptions I’ve seen since high school, sending the game into an overtime that the Saints would not waste.

One needn’t call that a choke – but if you pick some other word, I’m sure the etymology will eventually reveal it to be a synomym.

At any rate, it was a great run for the ‘queens.  It was one of those rare seasons when I actually paid attention to the NFL after the Bears dropped out of contention (which, after a smokin’ hot start, happened pretty quickly).

But at the end of the day, I end the “Mitch is interested” phase of the season right where I always do…

…by noting that Twins pitchers and catchers report in just about four weeks!

One of the minor bummers of the hectic slam-bang that this last few years have been is that my blog-reading has fallen way off.  I keep a few of the day-to-day essentials on my Google RSS Reader, but there’s just no time, usually, to randomly surf through blogs at the moment.

Which is, of course, one of the reasons I’m doing this series.  Because I know that the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers has a slew of fascinating productions that I want to reconnect with – and, more importantly, connect to new audiences.

With that in mind, the next stop on our trip around the MOB:  Crazy But Able

CbA has turned into a bit of a group blog – but it’s always been John Wilson’s blog.  And John (and crew) has been plugging away for quite some time now.  John and his wife Peggy are also neighbors of mine (more or less; I run into them periodically around the Midway).

And if there’s a blogger that’s almost eclectic enough to give our own Bogus Doug a run for his money, it’d be Wilson.  Music?  Electronics?  Language?

I liked this post:

We won a turkey in a random drawing in our apartment complex. All residents were entered. Makes me wonder how many random drawings and contests we’ve lost.

Also of note: What English sounds like to foreigners:

See more funny videos and Music Videos at Today’s Big Thing.

From the original website: “An Italian singer wrote this song with gibberish to sound like English. If you’ve ever wondered what other people think Americans sound like, this is it.”

Next step: getting Bob Dylan to make a cover of this.

I’d love to see a Bob Dylan/Michael Stipe duet.

Anyway – that’s Crazy But Able. Read ’em!

To:  The Experts

From: Mitch Berg, Keen Observer

Re: Stop

Dear experts of the world,

Every single time there’s a major disaster, you solemnly intone that after three days, you’re not going to recover any survivers trapped beneath any rubble.

And every single time, you are wrong:

French rescue workers pulled a 24-year-old man alive from the rubble of a hotel in Haiti on Saturday, 11 days after an earthquake devastated much of the country.Wismond Jean-Pierre, who had no visible injuries but was severely dehydrated, was immediately loaded into an ambulance and taken to a hospital for treatment.

Lt. Col. Christophe Renou, a rescuer with the French team, called the three-hour effort “a miracle” as he was briefly overcome with emotion. Other members of the team — assisted by American and Greek workers — were seen weeping with joy following the rescue.

“This is God,” Frank Louvier, the chief of the French rescue team, said as he pointed to the sky.

Your lesson is clear, experts; shut up and dig.

That is all.

Ambulance Driver takes the vitals on Obamacare and Massachusetts; it’s potentially worse for the Dems than they thought (emphasis added):

ObamaCare is deader than Julius Caesar.

But that’s not the only thing to learn from this bombshell of an election. The Brown campaign is now saying that while voter opposition to Congress’ health care reform was strong, their internal polling pointed to Brown’s stance on terrorism to be his biggest wedge issue.

Brown was consistent in his message that terrorists did not have a right to a tax-payer funded lawyer, that they should be brought before military tribunals and not the Federal Courts, that detaining them without trial was fine with him and that waterboarding was not torture and was a technique that should be used to garner information.

Ambulance Driver believes that a vast majority of Americans agree with this and those elected officials who have misjudged the electorate on this issue now have a lot to think about.

I suspect that the current Administration has grossly underestimated how concerned about security  – not just “War on Terror” security, but in a larger sense as well – the American people are.

A year and a half ago, pundits speculated that Barack Obama, if elected President, would either work to move the country far to the left in pursuit of a liberal ideology and to satisfy decades of pent-up liberalism or govern from the center in the interest of furthering his personal ambitions and extending the pinnacle of his political career.

The first year of the Obama Presidency ended all speculation. Ideology trumped ambition, and it’s been a disaster for the President and for Democrats.

January 20th marked the beginning of his second year and also served as a demarcation between the pre-Brown and post-Brown era for the Obama Presidency.

This week offers peril and opportunity for the President to elucidate his New New Way Forward, if like many Democrats recently, Obama acknowledges the Coakley defeat as the comeuppance that it was.

Mr. Obama’s campaign-style speech here capped one of the most bruising weeks of his year in office. The President traveled to this swing-state manufacturing town ostensibly to deliver a speech about jobs and the economy, but instead he repeatedly veered off-script to interject pledges to battle his political foes over health care and other issues “so long as I have breath in me.”

Sadly for alert Democrats and in an inconceivable dream scenario for Republicans, instead of shifting gears from health care reform to job-creation; to align Washington with the rest of America, Obama opted this week to cement his station as an ideologue. Without regard for fairness, public sentiment or for that matter, securing a second term, the President declared war on the banking industry, sending the market into a minor (thus far) sell-off, undermining sentiment tied to economic recovery, and positioning himself within a new Democratic sub-minority, of, well, he and Nancy Pelosi. Even Barney Frank has said “Uncle.”

Save for later the discussion of the fact that his edict fails to recognize the corruption and culpability of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both being spared, and the fact that we already have procedures in place such as increasing reserves and FDIC premiums to protect the system and “punish” banks for taking on excess risk. I’ll also forego the well-worn but valid discussion of the of the fact that much of the risk-taking at issue was forced upon them by government policy and that some of the corporations and practices Obama named specifically had nothing to do with the financial crisis.

[Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner is concerned that the proposed limits on big banks’ trading and size could impact U.S. firms’ global competitiveness, the sources said, speaking anonymously because Geithner has not spoken publicly about his reservations.

He also has concerns that the limits do not necessarily get at the root of the problems and excesses that fueled the recent financial meltdown, the sources said.

Lawrence White, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a former regulator, said Obama’s proposals were “a solution to the wrong problem.”

Ironically, these policies may result in the transfer of some pretty good jobs from Wall Street to Europe.

The new rules would ban the use of a bank’s own capital for hedge fund or private equity investment, or for trading unless it was directly connected to client activity.

However, some foreign banks believe they could escape the ban by switching their operations from Wall Street to London or continental Europe.

What Obama’s proclamation does represent is a presidency inexorably out of sync with America; especially the meaty middle, whose voice was heard load and clear in Massachusetts this week. A years’ experience has done little for a man who has never held a real job, owned a business, or exhibited a basic comprehension of the fundamentals of economics or a genuine acknowledgment of the gift that is free enterprise.

Mr. Obama’s display of anger with big financial institutions and insurers may not reassure voters who are dubious about his proposed solutions to the country’s economic problems.

Barack Obama has essentially been out of touch his entire, calculated, and increasingly apocryphal political career and may soon find his presidency floundering having sailed his most avowed mission to reform America’s health care system into a tsunami of taxpayer revolt.

Despite the fact that his policies have been soundly rejected and support within his own party is eroding, Obama’s political capital and popularity aren’t completely exhausted. The opportunity remains to move quickly to realign his presidency with the pressing needs of an American citizenry that haven’t yet completely lost hope in him.

most continue to like and respect the man they gathered around televisions to watch sworn in as president on a cold noon hour a year ago, and most still hold out hope for his presidency. Yet many also worry that, in his quest to mobilize government to solve the nation’s problems, he may have moved too far too fast.

If Obama’s upcoming State of the Union address focuses on restoring full employment, judicicious enhancements to the regulations that govern our financial system, and a renewed confidence in America’s ability to recover, rebuild and prosper once again, Obama’s may find his stock rising again.

“In his State of the Union, Obama has to slim down his ambitions. It should be short and simple and focus on jobs.”

“Obama has to decide whether he wants to be a transformational president, which looks optimistic at this stage, or merely an effective president,” says Bruce Josten, head of government affairs at the US Chamber of Commerce

Odds are, Obama will continue on his latest vector: vilifying banks, demonizing those who would dare seek an honest profit, penalizing employers, mushrooming the federal government and broadening an ongoing orgy of government spending under the guise of economic timulus, which is almost as dirty a word now as health care reform.

In short, Mr Obama’s nightmare January could easily slip into a nightmare February. “Unless and until the president changes the way his White House, works, things are going to continue to go badly for him,” says the head of a Democratic think-tank.

In turn, this will continue to fuel the tea party movement, mobilize the middle, neuter the left and manifest a Jimmy-Carteresque dreamscape only the most opportunistic Republicans could envision before last Tuesday night.

Only Obama’s teleprompter knows which path the President will chose.

One of the reasons I’m a committed fair-weather fan is that  people like this drive me nuts; in this case, a guy describing the effect of the Vikes’ last big playoff choke had on his “life” (emphasis added):

“Gary Anderson ruined it for us. Laces out man, just blew it,” said Vikings fan Abby Binder.

“I think I was in seventh grade, I remember it pretty vividly. Gary Anderson, he ruined my life,” said John Ayres.

“I was in college, I was in Iowa City, Iowa. I will never forget that day. It was a horrible, horrible day. So I’m looking for redemption tomorrow,” said Mike Stevens.

Ms. Binder and Mr. Stevens:  they are a football team.  Mr. Anderson: get a grip.

The article goes on to note that some of the fans are resorting to superstition…:

To make sure the Vikings clobber the Saints, some fans will count on superstition to get a win.

“I wear my number 40 Kleinsasser jersey for every game,” said Nicole Schellenberg.

“I’m not really a superstitious person, but last weekend against Dallas I did wear my Jared Allen jersey, so I will be sure to have that on tomorrow night,” said Stevens.

…unaware that Berg’s Fourth Law of Media/Sports Inversion replaces superstition with empirical science:

Berg’s Fourth Law of Media/Sports Inversion – The Vikings will be contenders until the moment the local media actually believes they will be contenders. At that moment – be it pre-season or Week 12 – the season will fall irredeemably apart.

With that in mind, everyone sing along with me; they gonna choke.

They’re gonna choke bad.

Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown’s campaign may have caused a small surge in truck sales.

“I’m Scott Brown, I’m from Wrentham, and I drive a truck”

Al Cerrone, owner of a local GMC dealership, claims, “We’ve gotten eight to 12 phone calls from people asking, ‘Do you sell trucks like that?”’

Why Yes! And we sell Brown trucks and they come in an assortment of colors!

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.  We’ll be talking about this very, very busy week – Brown, Specter, the SCOTUS, Coleman opting out of the race – and interviewing Pat Anderson (GOP candidate for State Auditor) and Andy Cilek of the MN Voters Alliance on the Voter ID initiative.
• 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!

(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!

The Saint Paul Saints – our single-A minor-league team – is doing its best to help the Vikings not choke this coming weekend:

MIDWAY STADIUM, MN (January 21, 2010) – In support of a movement begun by [some lame sportsradio morning show], the minor league baseball team that plays its home games at Midway Stadium will remove the “S” word from both the beginning and end of its name and will be known simply as “The Paul” through Sunday.  The Minnesota Vikings are in the midst of a run to the NFC Championship Game, and The Paul wouldn’t dare utter the name of this week’s opponent.

On Tuesday morning The Paul’s Executive Vice President Tom Whaley appeared on [the aforementioned lame morning show].  Whaley was asked by the trio to become the first in a long line of companies, cities and more to remove the “S” word from their name.  Not only did Whaley agree to support the effort, but he and the club have also decided to incorporate the name change during their 2010 season.

Whaley knows, of course, that given the Vikings’ post-season habits, we’ll all be looking forward to The Paul season sooner than later.

Via Joe Bodell at MN “Progressive” Project, it seems that Rep Tim Walz’s  (DFL, MN 1st District) feet are cooling down in re the notion of passing the Senate Obamacare bill.

Bodell:

One of the remaining options for the health insurance reform effort is for the House of Representatives to pass the Senate version of the bill verbatim, thus avoiding having to send a modified bill back to the Senate for debate, where it would likely die thanks to 41 votes being stronger than 59.

Which, of course, the Dems could “fix” by invoking the “Nuclear Option” – changing the Senate rules to allow cloture, or the shutting down of filibusters, on a majority vote rather than needing the traditional 60 votes.  Which they are loathe to do, since it’ll come back to haunt them when the Senate changes hands again, and that change looks to be closer at hand than they’d figured a year ago.

So it’s back to parliamentary tactics 101:

Thus, [the Tics] need to figure out where House members stand — several have said various things about whether they would vote for the Senate bill, and TPM is making a list — and Minnesota’s Tim Walz looks like he falls into the “maybe” category.

I got the following statement from Walz’s spokesperson:

Congressman Walz has not taken an official stand on whether he would vote for the Senate health care reform bill verbatim if it were put before the House. However, the pay-for-value Medicare reimbursement provisions that currently exist in both bills are an extremely important consideration.

So the absence of a public option in the Senate bill doesn’t sound like a deal-breaker for Walz — but unless it looks like there could be 218 votes for the Senate bill, members are likely to be very skittish about making public pronouncements one way or the other.

“Skittish” is a good word for it.  Walz squeaked into office in 2006 by beating “Moderate” Republican Gil Gutknecht in one of the worst elections for Republicans in recent memory (until 2008).  He represents a largely red district in the rural southwest part of Minnesota, hundreds of thousands of acres of conservative farmers surrounding a tiny blue outpost in Mankato.  He’s right to be skittish; he must looking at Byron Dorgan and Earl Pomeroy’s contortions, and Collin Peterson’s deep ambivalence about throwing himself on a sword for Barack Obama in his very similar Seventh District, and calculating his odds.

CORRECTION:  Yeah, I know – Walz is the First, not Third, District.  I’m a Saint Paul guy.  Anything west of Lyndale is a purely academic concept to me.  As is the concept of “a responsive Congressperson…”

I was listening to NPR’s reliably center-left “Marketplace” last night.  And I almost pulled my car over from shock.

They did a piece on a union health plan.  The union – a hospitality workers union in Los Angeles – does things the old fashioned way; it collects its dues, and essentially runs its own private clinic where members essentially get unlimited healthcare for, basically, almost nothing out of pocket.  The report focused on the dental clinic, where workers pay $3 for a filling, $20 for a root canal, and $6 for an office visit.

The actual fees are paid out of a trust fund paid for by the employers, who pay a little over $4/hour into the union workers’ health plans.

It adds up to over $50 million a year, which for some 7,000 union workers and their dependents, means all-inclusive medical benefits, plus dental, which brings us back to [dentist working at the union clinic] Roger Fieldman. There’s a downside to providing good care at cheap prices.

FIELDMAN: We have a high no-show rate. Because essentially their dentistry is almost free.

The clinic’s no-show rate — that’s patients who miss appointments and didn’t call to cancel — is 20-25 percent. In his old private practice it was 5 percent.

FIELDMAN: We might have a two-hour appointment for some complex surgery, some dental implants, and then they just don’t show up! And for two hours of doctor and assistant time, what is the value of that? $1,000? More? The patient’s paying $6.

$6 being the fee for no-shows.

[Plan administrator] THROCKMORTON: When it’s only $6, there’s very little incentive, if it’s not convenient, for them to keep the appointment.

In other words, there’s no incentive to not waste all of that care.

And dentistry is relatively cheap.  But the waste goes into much bigger-ticket services as well:

Throckmorton says if there’s one thing he’s learned after balancing the books and the union’s trust fund all these decades it’s this: That when money is not a factor, people do not think much about waste.

Take, for example, the emergency room.

THROCKMORTON: We have no emergency room charge.

Some members will use the emergency room at any sign of sickness.

Sound familiar?

THROCKMORTON: If there’s any doubt about it, they go.

Or just because it’s convenient. Because there’s no co-pay.

THROCKMORTON: Now they can’t evaluate them and tell ’em, you’ve just got a cold, you don’t belong in emergency care. The hospital is obligated by law to see them in the emergency room. The cost is a minimum of $700.

Which the fund, of course, pays for.

Of course it sounds familiar.  The State of Minnesota’s employees were griping about similar services when they struck a few years back; they were horrified, horrified, at the thought that they might have to pay copays (which were still a fraction of what all the rest of us private-sector proles pay).

We’ll come back to that.

Now, for years the union didn’t make a big deal about how much health care people used. They wanted to give their members the most access to care. Until the recession slammed the hospitality industry.

THROCKMORTON: It was just almost like driving off a cliff.

Union workers’ hours fell 20 percent. Employer contributions, of course, dropped. The fund was spending more than what was coming in.

The story goes on to tell us that the union is raising some modest copays for some of the services, including $50 to hopefully prod customers into trying services other than the emergency room.

I finally did pull the car over (because I was, like, home from the store) and listened to the end of the story (which you should either listen to or read, at the link above); and then I yelled “OK?  It’s that it?  Close the circle!”

The story, interesting though it was, squibbed on two huge connections.

First: Hello?  This is a big reason healthcare is so expensive!  Most of America’s insured population gets insurance paid for by third parties, and are insulated from the true cost.  Third parties (with the union plan in the story being a fairly extreme example) not only hide the real cost, especially the real cost of waste, from the consumer, but also pump money into the system for the limited supply of care; it’s economics 101 that this is a recipe for immense price inflation.

Second: This is exactly how “single-payer” healthcare works, on the care side of things; when people don’t have to think about what they are somebody is paying for their care, they become casual about using it.  Which stretches the resources that are available.  Which means someone needs to react – either by introducing a bit of market discipline (adding copays, as the union in the story did) or rationing the care that the members get (as the UK, Canada, France, the Netherlands and Japan do). 

But then I suppose if you can’t count on NPR to cover for the big left, you can’t count on anything.

After I go and ridicule Arlen Specter for demanding that Michele Bachmann stay barefoot and pregnant with all the other good wimmins, I’m chagrinned to note that, according to my betters at the LATimes, Specter was a victim.

Michele Bachmann’s blabbing drives Arlen Specter to patronize

“If she hadn’t been all uppity and talking, my inner sexist would have stayed tucked carefully away”.

My apologies.  Sincerely.

Some posts practically write themselves.

Jennifer “J-Lo” Lopez, on the fairly unforgiveable “Lopez Tonight” show, calls Sarah Palin a naughty name:

The controversy sprang from her use of a particular word to describe Sarah Palin. She calls Sarah Palin ‘la carbona,’ a Spanish word which means bitch.

J-Lo calling Palin a “crazy bitch”?

Um…

…yeah.

The headline is that Arlen Specter told Michele Bachmann to shut up and get back in the kitchen.

Not quite in the headlines?  Even if you leave out Specter’s little sexist jape, you hear Bachmann clobber Specter on all the points that are going to be big and key this fall; jobs; prosperity; everything but more and more and more regulation.

David Kaplan, writing at the Daily Planet, is onto yet another mortgage modification scam:

With the foreclosure rate in the metro area still soaring, struggling homeowners face a new and more sinister threat – unscrupulous scam artists.  With ads claiming they can help you keep your home while eliminating your mortgage and property tax, a group calling themselves “Slavery to Sovereignty” is the latest in a long line to take advantage of residents who are desperate for help.

And yes, this one is aimed at the most scam-vulnerable:

At least one ad from the group ran in a newspaper that reaches a largely-immigrant audience, but the small group that gathered at Sabathani Center on January 9 appeared to be a mix of local African American residents as well as recent immigrants.

Perhaps worst of all?  The alleged scammers are retired “public servants”:

People listened eagerly and had many questions as Peter “PJ” Johnson, a retired Minneapolis Parks Police Officer, and his partner Abagail Conley spoke.

Johnson and Conley claimed they could eliminate participants’ mortgages and all tax liabilities in return for $12,500.  Mr. Johnson said the program would take anywhere from six months to three years, but was quick to point out that there were no guarantees.

Read the whole thing.

I was driving through my neighborhood the other day, and I came up to one of those stupid traffic roundabouts that appeared at intersections near key community activists’ houses over the past few years.  Not just any activists, mind you – the ones that yap and howl the hardest over “traffic calming”.  These are the people behind the latest plague of city-funded weirdness in the Midway; the enigmatic, oblique (“confusing”) signs, the placards begging people to drive slow, and finally, the stupid roundy-rounds.

Now, this has been one of the worst winters on record for streets in Saint Paul.  And I don’t know that anyone figured on that when they designed the stupid roundabouts; they’re very difficult for city plow trucks to plow around.  So the roadway around the stupid roundabout is an impassible mass of rutted ice ridges radiating away from the stupid round-about; if you’re not bouncing around like a four-year-old that snuck some Red Bull, you’re sliding down the ice sideways directly at oncoming traffic.

Suffice to say, I was not “calmed”.

It was shortly after this incident that I checked out Conservative Cravings.

We first met “Family of Five”, author of  Conservative Cravings, at last summer’s MOB party.  He debuted the blog right around that time.

And I’m happy to see Fo5 has been working away in the meantime.  I liked this one:

Traffic calming is just another way of saying, quit driving through MY neighborhood.

70th St in Edina has been there a long, long time. It’s main function is connect Hwy 100 to the Southdale Mall business district and then onto York Avenue. Since Hwy 100 is one of the oldest freeways in the metro area and Southdale Mall was the first indoor mall in the United States, I would venture to guess that the connection between these two points dates back before any of the current residents on 70th St. That would mean that when they purchased their home, they would have been aware of the purpose of the road, it’s speed limit (currently 30 mph) and all the surrounding development. Why buy a house on a street that does not fit your lifestyle and then try to get the city to work around your desires?

So why has the use of 70th St been OK for the last say 40 years and now it needs changing? Squeaky wheels get the grease

Conservative Cravings.  Not just a MOB member, but very timely.

Check him out!

Nancy Pelosi takes a crack at interpreting Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts:

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, said on Thursday that Democrats remained committed to passing far-reaching health care legislation, but she said that the House would not simply adopt the Senate version of the bill and send it to President Obama in part because of problematic provisions that she said contributed to the Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election on Tuesday.

Yeah, that’s it. The good citizens of Massachusetts made good use of all the time and visibility that Congress has allowed for the study of the proposed health care bills. Joe the Plumber, Bill the Banker and Sally the Social Worker gave haste to reading the Senate version, comparing it meticulously to the House version.

It was some clause of some paragraph of some provision somewhere that displeased them and made them turn on hapless old Martha and her saggy queen mother, Nancy.

I wonder if exit pollers were asking voters “was it the fourth paragraph of the Senate version as it contrasted the fifth paragraph of the House version that changed your mind? Or was it the font?”

“Unease would be a gentle word in terms of the attitude of my colleagues toward certain provisions in the Senate bill,” Ms. Pelosi said.

I can picture Pelosi saying that on camera while over her shoulder and out of focus, Democrats, overstuffed briefcases under their arms, papers streaming out of them, are seen fleeing like rats from a burning building.

America is pretty okay with their health care as it is for the time being and would rather their government help them find a job and quit spending their great great great great grandchild’s retirement. Nancy Pelosi may be the only liberal in Washington that didn’t get the message Tuesday evening.

“Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

Air America is ceasing live broadcast operations today:

In a statement to employees of the New York-based network, Air America’s chairman, Charlie Kireker, wrote: “It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.

Air America gets its last ratings book

To be fair, I figured it would have been out of business by 2006 at the latest.  Apparently there were enough liberals with deep pockets and shallow understandings of the broadcast market to flog the corpse for another four years.

“The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America’s business. This past year has seen a “perfect storm” in the media industry generally . . .

Generally?  Sure!

But there’s one specific exception to that very broad generality; one niche within the larger format of political talk radio that was, is, and is slated to remain profitable – indeed, is prospering on an epic scale. 

That’d be the conservative talk radio that Air America set out to try to knock off, way back in March of 2004 – indeed, the very month that the Northern Alliance Radio Network got started.

Victors

Air America launched in March, 2004, and styled itself as a liberal alternative to conservative talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. Although at one point its programming was heard on as many as 100 stations nationwide, it ran into financial trouble early. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October, 2006, and was sold to new investors for $4.25 million in early 2007.

It was never as close as even those numbers make it look.  Most of Air America’s “as many as” 100 stations were small, low-power operations on the fringes of their markets; when the network launched, it paid for its air time on its three most important affiliates (New York, LA and Chicago), and quickly ran out of money to do even that.  Indeed, the vast majority of its distribution came from Clear Channel, which also distributes Air America’s putative enemies Limbaugh, Hannity and Glenn Beck.  Air America programming was only really competitive in one market on one station (KFI in Portland Oregon) and then only for about a year.  Indeed, the only liberal talk that is remotely successful is Fast Eddie Schultz (who really is as dumb as liberals think conservative talk is), and Stephanie Miller, who basically does Laura Ingraham’s show with a lefty slant.

So goodbye, Air America.  You were good for a few laughs, back when we even cared about your existence (and that ended pretty much back in ’05). 

Stop by and say hi.  We’re the ones that are still on the air.

A few weeks ago, someone in Saint Cloud posted a fairly scabrously racist poster, defaming the Somali community.

My friend and radio colleague King Banaian, who is not one to cry “racism” prematurely,  says the poster was pretty bad.  And the “somali community” took, at least at first blush, the course every real American should take; by meeting bad speech with more, better speech.

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, along with the one Somali speaker, they recruited some SCSU faculty.  And university faculty are (King’s company excepted) rarely people to go to for “real American” responses to anything:

Somalis are upset, and rightly so. When the campus announced that its Somali student organization wanted to hold a speak-out, that seemed a very reasonable thing to do. The best way to deal with hateful acts is by speaking about them. But the news report this morning about this event contains two statements that I found deviated from speaking against the cartoon. And, unfortunately not a surprise, it comes from two faculty. First,

Luke Tripp, a professor of community studies, said the same “conservative white” mind-set led to the election of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater.

So is it that voting for Rep. Bachmann (as a thin plurality did in the past two elections, which were famously awful for Republicans at large) makes you a racist?  Or that being a racist (as Mr. Tripp apparently believes most “conservative whites” are) make you vote for Michele Bachmann? 

Or both?

King:

This is an outrageous accusation. It says that anyone who voted for Rep. Bachmann has the same mind-set as the scribbler, is capable of being the scribbler, and is a reprobate. By what perverted analysis do you determine the moral principles of tens of thousands of area citizens that voted for this woman, many of them twice?

[Need I remind you – there’s your tax dollars at work!]

What inspires a man to take a speak out against hateful speech of his students as an opportunity to engage in the worst stereotyping of political opponents?

How do we count the ways?

Because academia, especially in lefty bullpens like “Community Studies”, promotes both extremism (and its bedfellow, bigotry) and unaccountability?

Because “Professor” Luke Tripp, who lives a comfy, cushy life as an (I’ll assume) tenured professor in a make-work “discipline” that is essentially a left-wing echo chamber, has developed both a deep sense of the bigotry that acc0mpanies marinading ones’ intellect in comfortable agreement for a whole career, and the tendency of too many such academics to say what they want, and hiding behind “academic freedom” to prevent himself from being held accountable?

Mr. Tripp; I invite you to come on the Northern Alliance Radio Network one of these weekends to defend your defamatory claim; I invite my St. Cloud and SCSU area readers to please forward this challenge to “Professor” Tripp (not that I think he has either the intellectual integrity or the balls to take me up on it).

Today former cover girl and presidential candidate John Edwards admitted that he is in fact the father of Rielle Hunter’s 2-year old daughter. However, it is being reported that Edwards needed proof first.

So he asked former aide Andrew Young to perform above and beyond the call of duty.

“Get a doctor to fake the DNA results,” Young said Edwards told him. “And he asked me … to steal a diaper from the baby so he could secretly do a DNA test to find out if this [was] indeed his child.”

The results? Conclusive. The diaper was full of shit, just like her father.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Dave Mindeman’s take (on his MnpACT blog) on the gubernatorial election. His basic assumption; without Norm Coleman in the race, the DFL will take the governor’s office.

I noted that that conclusion would indeed reflect the “conventional wisdom” in Minnesota, normally; that Minnesota likes center-left DFLers and “moderate” Republicans.

Of course, there are all sorts of larger reasons the “conventional wisdom” could come up lacking this year; Obama’s plunging popularity will sap votes in the DFL’s traditional powerhouses, the Twin Cities and their first-ring suburbs; the “tea party” movement and its populist offshoots are going to bring an energy back to the GOP’s powerhouses – the third tier of ‘burbs on out, the south east and southwest parts of the state, the Red River Valley – that they lacked during the dismal dismal years of Bush’s second term, when you could palpably feel the exhaustion on the part of an awful lot of the volunteers that are the backbone of the MNGOP.

But there’s one other thing that I think the DFL/media (as always, pardon the redundancy) miss in their assessments. 

Not to indulge in name-calling – that’s not my intent, here – but there’s an intellectual laziness behind the overuse of the term “extreme”.  It seems everybody to the right of Arne Carlson gets labeled “Extreme” by the left and their allies on the editorial boards.

It is, of course, a crude but effective way to frame the debate for the left; labelling everyone and every thought of the opposition as “extreme” at every possible mention.  If you’re a conservative, you’re not just pro-life, you’re a “pro-life extremist”; you’re not just for limited government, you’re an “extreme Tenther”; you don’t just favor constraining spending and cutting taxes, you’re an “extremist”; any Second Amendment activists…well, we’re used to being called that and much worse. 

Marty Seifert

A big part of me would like to think that this bit of framing is showing signs of backfiring – as with the term “teabagging”, which the left turned from a junior-high snark into a fairly universal slur to, through relentless overuse, a two-edged sword that says more about them than the actual protesters. 

“Extreme” is different.  While there’s a certain amount of self-caricature in the left’s overuse and devaluing of the term, I think the left has fallen into an even more pernicious trap; after calling everyone to the right of Arlen Lindner an “extremist” for a generation now, they’ve come to believe it.

The left has been working overtime to label Tom Emmer (and, comically, Marty Seifert) as “extreme” conservatives, smug in the belief that as long as they apply the label (and the media dutifully uses it at every opportunity), then it’ll stick with the people, while the “reasonable”‘, non-“extreme” left will mop up the votes, because (so say the left and media) that’s where Minnesota really is.

But they haven’t heard Tom Emmer speak to a mixed crowd.

Tom Emmer

Here’s the thing people like Mindeman miss about Seifert and – especially – Emmer; they state the conservative case to the middle and the undecided better than any recent conservative figures in Minnesota politics.  While some previous conservative leaders in Minnsota have been seen (rightly or, more usually, because of media connivance) as exclusionary dogmatists, the two GOP frontronners can actually get out in front of an undecided crowd and make an appealing, articulate, solid case for why those in the middle should be over with us on the right. 

And while it’s entirely possible that someone among the left’s pack of hamsters – Rukavina or Kelley spring to mind – can do the same, I’ve seen little to no evidence that they can preach to anyone that’s not fundamentally disposed to be in the choir.  And given how fast Obama, Pelosi, Reid and (let’s be honest) Kelliher have been piddling on independents this past year, I think it’s fair to say that Emmer and Seifert will have a more sympathetic audience than they might have a year or two ago.

So I’m a lot less convinced that having the left/media merely chanting “extreme!  extreme!” over and over again – as well as it’s served them in previous elections – is going to do the job for them this time.

Ross Douthat, writing in the NYTimes a week before the Massachusetts special election, managed to get past his internal Pauline Kael to read the signs…:

Brown’s race might actually end in triumph, rather than a close defeat.

…but he tripped onto two excellent points; the press’ brief fantasy that the left controlled the online world is over, and online political involvement is a very two-edged sword.

The Brown victory showed that the left’s bought-and-paid-for surge online from 2006-2008 has peaked:

But win or lose, he’s demonstrated there’s no necessary connection between online organizing and liberal politics. The Web is just like every pre-Internet political arena: ideology matters less than the level of anger at the incumbent party, and the level of enthusiasm an insurgent candidate can generate.

The left invested millions and millions buying an online presence after 2004; the right wing involvement in the blogosphere and in social media remains a pretty organic phenomenon.  And as we saw in Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York, organic phenomena and passion mix pretty well.

But that’s not really new turf.  Douthat next went into perceptions:

It’s like other arenas, too, in its capacity to disappoint idealists. Indeed, it may be crueler to dreamers, because it offers an artificial sense of intimacy with politicians, without delivering any practical results. You can be Sarah Palin’s pal on Facebook, or have Barack Obama’s running-mate selection text-messaged to your cellphone. But Washington is still Washington, the legislative process is still the legislative process, and the power of an online community matters less than the power of the powerful.

Well, duh.

This is the bitter lesson many net-roots types have drawn from Obama’s first year in office. The promises of transparency have given way to the reality of backroom deal-cutting. The attempts to turn the campaign’s online community, weakly re-dubbed Organizing for America, into a permanent political force have flopped. In a recent post on the Web site Personal Democracy Forum, Micah Sifry captured the free-floating sense of anger with Obama’s governance: “The people who voted for him weren’t organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests … sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting.”

I’d say “duh”, but then I did just above, and one must not repeat oneself.

Still, we tried to warn the Obamabots about this last year; all that talk of reinventing government is the kind of thing that attracts utopians, the kind of people who think you can change human nature through sheer passion (or legislation).

But next, Douthat steers into the weeds:

If liberals are feeling disillusioned, though, their right-wing imitators [Er, no, Ross – the conservatives were here first, and we’re still better – Ed.] may be ripe for an even greater letdown. The Obama administration has at least gone some distance toward enacting an agenda that the net-roots left supports. The “right roots” activists are rallying around politicians who are promising to shrink government without offering any plausible sketch of how to do it. When Scott Brown pledges an across-the-board tax cut and sweeping deficit reduction all at once, he’s setting the conservative grass roots up for a major disappointment.

Douthat betrays his coastal media center-left myopia; just as Obama had a model for his agenda (FDR), we’ve got Reagan, who did it all; not “at once”, but it did sorta show the way.

But more importantly, Douthat’s wrong; conservatives don’t – or shouldn’t – get involved in politics to give meaning to their own lives.  And that a thin film of them might do that doesn’t change the fact that that sort of naive idealism is absolutely anathema to conservatism.  Government – even good government – is at best an enemy with whom you have a truce; at worst, it’s something to be strangled in self-defense.

If you do meet a conservative that invests themselves in politics the way Obama’s legions of naive hamsters did, please – set ’em straight.

I’ll cop to it.  I don’t know much about Cold Hearted Truth.

I try to know most of the people involved in MOB blogs; I can usually name at least someone on the staff of many of the MOB blogs, and I often as not recognize them at the parties.

I can not place Cold Hearted Truth.  And they are pretty skimpy on the details on their blog; no bios, no chronology (I have no idea when they started), not a lot of clues about the people behind the blog.

But they are conscientious, writing lots and lots of good stuff.  They are  certainly conservatives, lest there be any doubt:

Certainly skewed by the one GOP commissioned poll that shows Brown up double digits, but perhaps that offsets two seperate polls that were commissioned by the Democrats.

Interestingly, it is being reported by insiders that Coakley’s own internal polling has shown her down in the three to five percent area, so maybe the average showing Brown up two points is fairly accurate?

Perhaps this can be a learning experience!

Anyway – Cold Hearted Truth, an excellent way point on a journey around the MOB.

The irrepressible Dennis the Peasant examines the results of Tuesday’s Massachusetts’ Senate election, and declares it more like Imperial Japan’s experience in the 1942 Battle of Midway, than the more common metaphor of Napoleon’s Waterloo.

The third and final type of failure is catastrophic failure, and it is also a complex failure. For catastrophic failure to occur, the failures of learning, anticipation and adaptation must all be present at the same time. As one would suspect, catastrophic failure is nearly always as wide in scope as it is irredeemable. A perfect example of catastrophic failure would be the defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy at Midway in 1942. (See Parshall and Tully’s superb Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway for a detailed application of Cohen and Gooch’s methodology.)

Although Cohen and Gooch never suggest so, it seems obvious to me that their methodology has an obvious application in the analysis of political – as opposed to military– failure. Here’s my stab at just an analysis of the defeat of Obamacare in 2010.

This is one of those read the whole thing times.