Let’s hope 2010 is a better year for local law-enforcement than last year.

Although the Minneapolis PD seems to be off to a rocky start; an MPD SWAT officer has been arrested as a suspect in a long string of robberies around the metro:

Minneapolis police officer Timothy Edward Carson’s shift on Wednesday started at 9 a.m. But he wasn’t there.

By the time he told a supervisor he was running late at 9:30, the FBI says, Carson had robbed an Apple Valley bank and was well on his way to getting caught.

The bad news?  Carson was one of the cops that the MPD gives the big guns to, to go after the toughest and most dangerous perps.

The good news?  He might not be the brightest alleged bank robber we’ve run into:

The criminal complaint outlining the bank robbery charge against Carson shows that the trail of clues leading to his arrest began minutes before he allegedly robbed the Wells Fargo Bank on Pilot Knob Road.

At 8:37 a.m., Apple Valley police officer Kurt Schultz pulled over Carson’s white Mitsubishi Galant because it lacked a front license plate. Carson identified himself as a Minneapolis police officer and was allowed to go on his way.

At 9:17 a.m., Schultz was called to the bank on the robbery report. A minute earlier, a man in a black jacket and ski mask had robbed the bank. Armed with a handgun, he had ordered the tellers to give him money, which he put in a backpack, before fleeing to a light-colored vehicle parked outside.

So he (allegedly) gets pulled over, plays the Thin Blue Get Out Of A Ticket Free card, and then robs a bank in the same jurisdiction not a few minutes later?

In the meantime, the Feds are taking the Gang Strike Force case to a grand jury.

A federal grand jury will hear evidence on the Strike Force in February, according to two sources familiar with the investigation. The evidence is expected to include testimony from former Strike Force police.

Former members of the Strike Force have been approached by federal investigators to provide information about wrongdoing in exchange for leniency, sources said.

The investigation timetable is not clear.

Here’s to a better 2010.

Sex is, apparently, a very good thing:

Yoga instructor Sadie Nardini and her husband got an early start on their New Year’s resolution: In December, the New York couple decided to have sex every day for the entire month.

Nardini and her husband, a professional photographer, initially decided to have sex like bunnies in the hopes that all the activity might help them overcome his-and-her bad habits: cigarettes and chocolate, respectively. And indeed, the nightly trysts did help. But they also found, unexpectedly, that frequent sex made them feel better in other ways, too.

Nardini says they both slept better and had more energy, and she didn’t get a cold or the flu all month as she usually does in the winter. “Sex doesn’t seem at first glance to be the cure for what ails you, but there’s so many health benefits of having more sex,” Nardini says. “Anyone can be better served by having more sex.”

You know what would serve “some people” even better?  If they’d just shut the hell up!

In fact, the experiment was so successful, the couple plans to have daily sex in January, too.

Well, I hope they also plan to just shut up and…

…and…

…oh, shut up.

…last night, this crossed my mind.

Remember last November?

For starters, Democrats tried to spin their crushing, upset, turnaround defeats in Virginia but New Jersey as something other than “a referendum on Obama?” It was untrue, of course, but it’s understandable that they’d float it as damage control, and I’d never expect that the utterly compliant lefty blogosphere would repeat it as anything other than fact).

Then they tried to paint the New York 23rd District race, where a virtually unknown Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, running a ,last-minute, poorly-funded campaign against a liberal “Republican”, Dede Scozzafava, (who actually ran to the left of the Democrat, and spent more money against Hoffman than against her putative opponent),  very nearly won running against both of them, as a defeat for the GOP.  I’ve never really figured out the logic behind this – and being Democrat propaganda, it wasn’t intended for consumption by the logical anyway – but apparently it has something to do with Sarah Palin’s endorsement not causing the sky to open and rain ballots like it did for Obama.

Now, the “reason” given for this is that “It’s proof that the conservative movement is too partisan and extreme!” (ignoring, of course, that Scozzafava waas an extremist for the other side, in a district that had always voted for real Republicans).

But let’s take it at face value; let’s bite our tongues and accept for argument’s sake that Hoffman’s “loss” – and the temporary loss to the GOP of a fairly backwater House seat that will return to the GOP in about eleven months anyway – was a symptom of an “extremist” takeover of the GOP?

Very well.

So, all of you who were hopping up and down like poo-flinging monkeys over Hoffman; aren’t, then, the departure of the vastly more power Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan even more-proximate symptoms of the side-effects of the inflexible extremism of the Pelosi/Reid/Obama agenda?

Although it’s more or less dead and gone (unlike, thankfully, its author), I’m going to give a shout-out to Cake Eater Chronicles. The longtime MOB stalwart Cathy the Cakeeater was one of the most sparklingly original writers on the Twin Cities blog circuit.

And then, a few years back, she came down with ovarian cancer, which both led to some of the most gripping blog writing – writing, really – anywhere.

And, unfortunately, and indirectly to the end of the blog.

Oh, the spirit was sure willing:

Yes, that’s right: I made good on my threats to leave the state entirely, and am pleased to say that once I’ve registered to vote in my new homeland, I will be represented in the Senate by people who are not a. Stuart Smalley or b. Amy “I’m a publicity seeking whore” Klobuchar.  Their names rhyme with Fay Gaily Mutchison and Fawn Smornyn.

But it’s not always about spirit:

It’s somewhat of a longish story that I will endeavor to simplify: the chemo-induced nerve damage in zee hands and feet was deemed permanent in August, and since I have a weird desire to be productive in the winters (never mind to go out of doors on occasion) the husband and I, at the end of October, packed up our belongings and moved south to observe and record the wild ways of the Texas hippies of Austin.  After some interesting stops and starts along the way, we’re finally moved into our new place, the husband will be opening his new store tomorrow, and I can finally sit down and get some work done.  I’m more grateful than I can say because the husband decided to upend his business and to, essentially, start over so that I can be as pain-free as I can get.  He’s a good guy and I am not worthy of him.

Enh.  I’ve met ’em both.  They both deserve the best, and I think they got it.

This post, in particular is one that grabbed my attention – indeed, was where this “around the MOB” series started in the first place.  Breast Cancer has, apparently, the best PR agents in the world – because an alien coming to earth and reading indicators in our society might think that only breasts and lungs ever get the disease.

Cathy’s had enough of it too:

It’s the fifth of October, and I’ve officially had it with the color pink.

Pink, in case you’re an Eskimo and don’t have either a tee vee or the ability to whip down to the grocery store to purchase some seal steaks, is the color of Breast Cancer Awareness.  October is, officially, Breast Cancer Awareness month.  Yesterday, we tuned in to watch the Bears beat the snot out of Detroit, and what were the husband and I treated to?  Pink gloves on the big, badass players, pink ribbons on their helmets, pink towels on the sidelines, pink bills on ball caps, etc.  The other day, while in Austin, I was asked at the checkout line (mind you this was also on the 29th of September.  Not October 1st.) at the grocery store if I wanted to donate money to breast cancer research.  When I went to my usual coffee date at the local Bou with Mr. H. yesterday, the entire store looked like a Pepto Bismol addict had puked all over.  The employees asked me if I wanted to buy a pound of “Amy’s Blend,” part of the proceeds of which would go to breast cancer research, and then they asked me if I would like to donate a pound to a woman who was going through treatment.  I politely said, ‘no, thank you,’ and then walked away.  One of the employees, who has been there a while and knew me when I was bald, shot a very understanding glance in my direction and shrugged.

All of it makes me wonder if anyone cares if I, as an ovarian cancer survivor, live or die because I didn’t get the trendy cancer.

The “good” news is, if you want to catch up with the whole oeuvre, there’s a finite amount.

Anyway – all the best, Cathy, and thanks for a great run!

It’s the fifth of October, and I’ve officially had it with the color pink.

Pink, in case you’re an Eskimo and don’t have either a tee vee or the ability to whip down to the grocery store to purchase some seal steaks, is the color of Breast Cancer Awareness.  October is, officially, Breast Cancer Awareness month.  Yesterday, we tuned in to watch the Bears beat the snot out of Detroit, and what were the husband and I treated to?  Pink gloves on the big, badass players, pink ribbons on their helmets, pink towels on the sidelines, pink bills on ball caps, etc.  The other day, while in Austin, I was asked at the checkout line (mind you this was also on the 29th of September.  Not October 1st.) at the grocery store if I wanted to donate money to breast cancer research.  When I went to my usual coffee date at the local Bou with Mr. H. yesterday, the entire store looked like a Pepto Bismol addict had puked all over.  The employees asked me if I wanted to buy a pound of “Amy’s Blend,” part of the proceeds of which would go to breast cancer research, and then they asked me if I would like to donate a pound to a woman who was going through treatment.  I politely said, ‘no, thank you,’ and then walked away.  One of the employees, who has been there a while and knew me when I was bald, shot a very understanding glance in my direction and shrugged.

All of it makes me wonder if anyone cares if I, as an ovarian cancer survivor, live or die because I didn’t get the trendy cancer.

…then the Democrats can be assured to start trolling the prisons.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday tossed out Washington’s law banning incarcerated felons from voting, finding the state’s criminal-justice system is “infected” with racial discrimination.

In other words – because the system is discriminatory because it ostensibly jails too many minorities, the deprivation of voting rights to all convicts is wrong.

Who could possibly make such a ruling?  (emphasis added; listeners to Hugh Hewitt may recuse themselves from the question):

The surprising ruling, by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, said the law violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act by disenfranchising minority voters.

The decision is the first in the country’s federal appeals courts to equate a prohibition against voting by incarcerated felons with practices outlawed under the federal Voting Rights Act, such as poll taxes or literacy tests.

So – being convicted by a jury of one’s peers (or pleading out of one’s own volition) is the same as poll taxes and literacy tests imposed on the law-abiding?

The two-judge majority apparently was persuaded by the plaintiffs’ argument that reams of social-science data filed in the case showed minorities in Washington are stopped, arrested and convicted in such disproportionate rates that the ban on voting by incarcerated felons is inherently discriminatory.

In retrospect, I suppose we should be thankful they didn’t impose electoral affirmative action, giving two votes to every convict.

Patterico, from a larger analysis that you should read in its entirety:

To me, the biggest concern flowing from this decision is the precedent that federal courts can now make sweeping declarations about the discriminatory nature of the criminal justice system based on dubious studies by sociology professors. (More about that in the extended entry below.) The implications are potentially staggering and go far beyond felons’ right to vote. If federal courts can declare the entire system of criminal justice in a state (or the country!) to be racially discriminatory, you could see an invalidation of Three Strikes laws or any other recidivism statute. You could see a sweeping invalidation of laws prohibiting felons the right to possess firearms. And that could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Commenter carlitos points out another potentially disturbing impact of the decision: its potential effect on rural districts with big prisons. Given that the decision explicitly extends to currently incarcerated inmates, you’re potentially looking not just at a huge bump in the number of Democratic voters as a whole, but also very concentrated bumps in districts that otherwise would likely be reliably Republican.

On the upside, who needs ACORN when you can get the Aryan Nations to do your registration for you?

I’ON a more serious note, I’m curious; the lefty squawked like stuck cats when they thought (erroneously) that the Heller decision might be misconstrued to give firearms rights to convicts – but today, dead silence.  Although I’m happy to attribute the bliss to ignorance, I’m wondering what people actually thin about this…

…and hoping that Alito, Thomas, Roberts and Scalia stay very, very healthy until this one gets to the SCOTUS.

Conservatives  are now #1:

The increased conservatism that Gallup first identified among Americans last June persisted throughout the year, so that the final year-end political ideology figures confirm Gallup’s initial reporting: conservatives 40% outnumbered both moderates 36% and liberals 21% across the nation in 2009.

And it’s not just a little bit:

Since 1992, there have been only two other years — 2003 and 2004 — in which the average percentage of conservatives nationwide outnumbered moderates, and in both cases, it was by two percentage points (in contrast to the current four points).

Three more years of Obama bode well for that gap, I think.

But the interesting question for me is “what does conservatism mean” these days.

Expect a much longer piece on the subject later this week.  I can say that, since I was working on it long before I saw this poll result…

This might be better than Ed Schultz running for Senate…:

This morning, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder reported that retiring Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) may be offered a job in the Obama administration. “Privately, senior White House officials have communicated to Dodd their belief that his position was untenable. A sinecure or administration position is likely,”

It’d be like George W Bush putting the Department of Justice under Randy Cunningham.

Buddhapatriot is another of the “Class of ’04” blogs.  Things’ve been a little slow, but he’s always worth a read.

Like this post, near and dear to my heart, on living on the fringes of the big conservative tent:

I was thinking again this afternoon, after hearing Hugh Hewitt hawk “Intelligent Design” on his radio show, about how weird it is for me to have become this “right-wing” Republican five years ago.

How can I hang out with conservatives if I’m anti-death penalty, anti-tort reform, anti “Marriage Amendment”, against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and for open border immigration?

Well, in case you hadn’t read my previous post on the subject, it’s because many leftists are just thoroughly icky people.

Support your local MOB blog!

Via, ironically, the Sun:

A STAR primed to explode in a blast that could wipe out the Earth was revealed by astronomers yesterday.

It will self-destruct in an explosion called a supernova with the force of 20 billion billion billion megatons of TNT.

I look for it on cable in three months.

If someone who goes to a “Tea Party” is a “Tea Bagger”, then shouldn’t fans of Ed Schultz be called “scum baggers?”

Apropos not much.

———-

Well, it was apropos not much, until I caught this bit of late-breaking news; according to the HuffPo,  Fast Eddie Schultz is thinking about running for North Dakota’s newly-open Senate Seat.

MSNBC talk show host and liberal firebrand Ed Schultz is considering a run for Senate in his home state of North Dakota following the abrupt resignation of Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) on Tuesday evening.

The longtime talk show host, who was until recently based out of Fargo, North Dakota, told the Huffington Post that “there is a lot to think about” after he was approached by Democratic leaders in the state about a possible run. But the possibility is there, even if a decision is far off.

A brief tangent:

Dear Lord:  If I say my prayers and eat my vegetables, can I please please please please please watch Fast Eddie Schultz flame out against John Hoeven?  Just once in my life?

The MSNBC host, who has lengthy ties to the state, said he was called last night by Dorgan who, in a rather suggestive question, asked Schultz how old he was. Hours later Boucher was on the phone asking Schultz to consider a run for the Senate seat.

“I asked him very point-blank if this was an official ask.” Schultz said. “He said, ‘Yes it is’. I’m flattered. I’m honored.”

His “ties to the state” include time as a legendarily peevish sportscaster and, later, cut-rate Limbaugh clone who flipped his political allegiances about eight years ago, to the relief of conservatives everywhere. 

I MCed a “Debate” between him and Michael Medved almost two years ago.   In it, he showed that if he weren’t allowed to bellow, bluster and wave his hands like a puffy, red-faced pocked Mussolini, he’d be overmatched in a battle of wits with Jessica Simpson. 

Oh, yeah.  And he’s a dick.  After my turn at MCing his “debate” appearance, during which I (like my co-host Matt Entenza) questioned both Medved and Schultz aggressively but civilly, he called me “Mitch Craig” on the air, and referred to me as an “a-hole”.   Not that being called names fazes me – puhleeze, I get worse from my own family – but it just shows you what a class act that intellectual flyweight Schultz really is.

For the record:  Fast Eddie Schultz is an ignorant, moronic blowhard; if intelligence and wit were gasoline he’d run out of gas halfway around the inside of a Cheerio.  He actually is as dumb, knee-jerk and hate-choked as the lefty cliche about talk radio would have you believe about his competition.

Run, Eddie.  Run.  I dare you.

Growing up in North Dakota, you got the impression not much changed.  Ever. 

The retirement of Byron Dorgan prompted me to do some checking – and I had no idea how little changes in North Dakota politics.

Bear with me. 

Dorgan’s been in the Senate for 18 years (following twelve more in the House).  He succeeded Kent Conrad, who kept a pledge to serve only one term (and promptly turned around and won North Dakota’s other Senate seat when Quentin Burdick died immediately before the election, in 1992, after serving since 1960).  Conrad succeeded Mark Andrews  (whom Dorgan had succeeded as North Dakota’s House representative in 1980) in an upset election in 1986.  Andrews had succeeded Milton Young, who had served as North Dakota’s senior Senator since 1945.

Young himself succeeded former governor John Moses, who died after only two months in office.  Moses had succeeded Gerald Nye, who’d served since 1925.

So – except for the 12 year interregnum with Andrews and Conrad, and Moses’ tragically-foreshortened term, North Dakota’s “Class Three” Senate seat has been held by exactly three men in the past 85 years.

The other seat, part of Class 1?  The combination of Conrad and Quentin Burdick takes us all the way back to 1960;  he succeeded the legendary “Wild Bill” Langer (but for a few months with former governor Clarence Brunsdale, who was appointed when Langer died in office), who’d held the office since 1940, succeeding former governor Lynn Frazier, who’d held the office since 1923. 

So – seven men have accounted for almost a century in representing North Dakota in the Senate (and among them they account for much of the same time in the House, too). 

Almost equally odd?  While Young, Burdick and Andrews were all fairly typical pre-Reagan Republicans from a famously Republican state, Dorgan and Conrad are both relatively to the left among red-state Democrats, Nye was an anti-war isolationist, and Langer was a prairie progressive in the “Granger” mold, with not a few allegations of corruption chasing him through his career; he was something of a Huey Long-type figure as both Governor and Senator, with the record to show for it.

Nothing really does change much, it seems, in North Dakota.

What is Germany? 

It’s a land, and its people; it is defined by geography, and by a mystical connection of ethnicity, people and language; the Germans call it “Volk“, which literally means “Folk”, but whose metaphorical meaning is far, far deeper – indeed, deeper than most Americans can gather, given our cultural history.  It ties Germans – ethnic Germans, born in Germany who grow up speaking German – to a place, a history, and a culture.   The same holds true for most of the world’s nations; the French, the Uighur, the Naga, the Swedes and Navajo and Russians and Malay and most other nations in between.   It’s one of the reasons that while one can immigrate to Germany or France or Nagaland or Sweden, one can not “become” French or Navajo or Swedish; it’s how you’re born.

And no matter what form each of those governments have taken over the years, it’s always been the same country.  Germany has been Germany, whether governed by the Holy Roman Emperor, dozens of dukes, Kaisers, gangs, Führers or a stable parliamentary Democracy, Germany is always Germany (or France, or Malaysia, or Sweden, or…).

And if part of Germany (etc) – say, Rheinland-Pfalz wanted to “leave” Germany? 

It’s an absurd question.  It’d be like you or I wanting to “leave” the human race and become a python.  You were born human.  You can be nothing else.  Rheinland-Pfalz has always been German; come democracy or dictator, it always will be.

Rheinland-Pfalz  can no more depart Germany and become part of, say, Canada than you can become a python.

———-

So what is America?

Well, we’re not a people united by land, culture, history, language and ethnicity, that’s for sure.  Even taking the hyper-simplistic far-left route and saying we’re “a nation founded for the benefit of white anglo-saxons” ignores the fact that white people of Anglo-Saxon descent have spent the last five centuries making killing other white Anglo-Saxons, and similar white Mediterraneans and Slavs, to an art and science.  The idea that you can create a cohesive nation out of Irish and English, or of Germans and Poles, or French and Spaniards, would have been considered absurd at any other place and time in history.

So what is America, if not ethnicity and culture and language?

Is it a piece of real estate between Mexico and Canada with a government in Washington and fifty regional offices?  A political collection of 300-odd-million people who exist for no reason other than to be a political collection of 300-odd-million people?

Or is it a cohesive series of radical ideas that happened to find 200-odd years of generally-successful political traction – ideas like “all people are created equal” and people being “endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights”, especially “life, liberty andthe pursuit of happiness”?

That’s a fairly simple question: most people will answer the latter.  It’s basic high school civics (or it used to be; I shudder to ask what kids are learning today – but that’s another issue).

At least, they’ll answer the latter under normal circumstances.  It’s when things get dicey that the answers get more interesting.

———-

In a comment thread the other day about an effigy-lynching in Plains, Georgia, a commenter wrote “are you aware that 33% of Georgians believe Georgia should secede from the Union – do you STILL think it’s specious to suggest they advocate a climate of hate.”

Leaving aside the gaping, almost-unbridgeable logic gap – secession does not equal “hate”, not in any logically coherent sense – it was an interesting question.

So what if a third of Georgians (allegedly) favor secession?

Let’s call the original question:  what is America?  Is it a place, or is it a series of ideas?

Ideas – right?

Right.  

But what if America stops representing those ideas?

———-

I’m not sure who I’m more angry at:

1. Democrats today, for their long, concerted effort to frame every discussion about the Tenth Amendment, to say nothing of the purely rhetorical idea of “secession”, in terms that are usually variants on “Oooh, you support slavery“.  It’s cheap abusive rhetoric that makes rational discussion impossible.  But then, that’s the goal. 
2. The Confederacy, for giving the left the eternal opening to forever tie the concept of states rights to slavery and Jim Crow in the first place.  Of all the liberties that should be the turf of the States and The People by the grace of the Tenth Amendment – commerce, regulation, taxation, and everything in the Bill of Rights – those geniuses just had to tie us and the whole issue to the “right” to own and oppress other humans.  Thanks for nothing, Bubba.

So to a big swathe of the American people, discussing something as benign as the Tenth Amendment, to say nothing of the much-more-loaded idea of secession, is a little like mentioning Keyser Söze; it’s just not something you do in polite company.

And some of the people who do talk about secession are, to be polite, a tad overheated; I chided some of the more drama-prone elements on the right, and before that some of the more spoiled, overweening, whiny elements on the left for taking, ironically, more or less the same approach; “the government isn’t what we want it to be, so let’s secede rather than bring things back into balance at the polls”.  Any talk of “secession” is, in our current situation, utterly misguided.

And conservatives who say “But Obama’s different” are just as wrong, so far, as the idiot liberals who frothed about the coming re-education camps and predicted Bush wouldn’t leave office last year.  Obama’s grabbing power, sure – but it’s hardly the first time in American history we’ve had an Administration gather more power to itself.  Polk?  Lincoln?  FDR?  Nixon?  Clinton?  Bush’s spending?   The mission, again, is to repudiate Obama at the polls (and I’m a lot more confident this will happen now than I was even six months ago).

But what if at some hypothetical point in the future the American goverment does stop being about “all people are created equal” and being “endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights”, especially “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”?  What if – hypothetically – a big chunk of the United States ceased to believe in any of those ideals – or adopted a version of those ideals that was so perverted as to be unrecognizable?

Would the rest of the nation be bound to go along with it, because of a precedent set in 1865 over a dispute that had, in the end, was over an issue that everyone but everyone today agrees had no lasting objective merit (slavery and oppression)? 

Or should their allegiance be to the ideals themselves?

Next up on  our trip around the MOB is Brad Carlson, one of the longer-running blogs in the MOB.

Brad always surprises you.  The first time you meet him, you think he’s one of those mild-mannered, workadaddy/hugamommy conservatives from Ramsey…

…well, OK, he is that.  But he was also one of the mainstays of the Twin Cities’ late, lamented “Protest Warrior” chapter – sharp, funny, friendly.  And he writes a darn good blog.

I liked this piece from last month, about Tiger Woods’ fall from “grace”:

But then I quickly asked myself why I was so taken aback. I mean, I didn’t know Tiger personally. I merely saw the utter phenom who did things on a golf course that had literally never been seen. So from that, how is it I could draw the conclusion that he was a man of integrity, a model citizen if you will? It’s not unlike how I felt when I learned of the secret life of Kirby Puckett. I saw a gifted, jovial athlete on the baseball field but knew of literally nothing that took place in Puckett’s personal life. And that is a life lesson that I have learned the hard way. No matter how genuine and polished a person may appear, we never know what goes on behind closed doors.

Support your local MOB blog.  You never know what you’ll be running into!

I grew up in North Dakota; I was born in Rugby, and grew up and graduated from high school and college in Jamestown.  I was 19 before I saw a city bigger than Fargo.  The place is still a huge part of me.

And for my entire cognitive life, Byron Dorgan’s been in politics.  He was appointed Tax Commissioner when I was five years old, at age 26; he was elected to the House, succeeding Mark Andrews, when I was a senior in high school in 1980.  He was elected to the Senate 18 years ago.  He’s been a politician virtually his entire adult life – and much more than mine.

As you’ve no doubt heard, Dorgan’s not running for re-election:

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) announced this evening that he’s retiring at the end of his term, a shocking development that threatens Democratic control of his Senate seat next year.

Dorgan was up for re-election in 2010, but the third-term senator wasn’t facing any strong Republican opposition– but was facing the growing possibility of a serious challenge from popular Gov. John Hoeven (R-N.D.).

Cassy Fiano, writing at the Greenroom, echoes a common mistake among those who don’t follow NoDak politics:

The Democrats are dropping like flies, and this gives the GOP just one more potential opening. North Dakota was won by John McCain in the election last year, and it’s entirely possible that Dorgan would had been defeated anyways.

Well, perhaps – but Mac had nothing to do with it.  North Dakota has voted Republican in virtually every election since statehood – but Dorgan went to the house in 1980, not only succeeding a popular Republican (Mark Andrews, who went to the Senate), but bucking the Reagan tide in one of the reddest states there is.  He survived the Gingrich revolution quite handily.

The reason?  Like many farm states, which are mostly famously conservative, North Dakota is addicted to pork.  The various federal Farm Bills are the staff of life – at least politicially.  And Byron Dorgan brought home the pork for a generation.  Not “dumb pork” – none of the Ben-Nelson-style legal graft.  Just lots and lots of farm bill subsidies.

And so a generation of North Dakota farmers has voted for Republicans – even Nixon and Dole – while sending Dorgan (and his successor as Tax Commissioner, Kent Conrad, and Earl Pomeroy – all of them porkocrats) to Washington to keep the swag coming.  And time is money in Washington; Dorgan’s seniority made him one of the most powerful men in the city.

But this year is different.

A recent Rasmussen poll showed him losing to Republican Governor John Hoeven, 58% – 36%. This would’ve scared the pants off of Dorgan… especially considering that Hoeven hasn’t even said that he’s going to run yet.

And the biggest question of this election isn’t “how big will Hoeven’s margin be”; it’s “will he run?”  Hoeven’s been a very successful governor; North Dakota is one of four states to have no budget deficit last year; North Dakota’s schools’ results are as good as or better than Minnesota’s, for vastly less money per student; the state rode out the recession in some style, and not entirely because of the oil boom.  In a just world, he’d be a presidential candidate; he’s one of the most accomplished governors anywhere.

But he’s been reticent so far about committing to run for higher office.  That’ll be the big question.

The Politico:

In his statement, Dorgan said his retirement was borne out of the desire to spend more time with his family.

And Beria died of a cold.

Democratic Senate campaign officials only found out about Dorgan’s decision within the last 24 hours. Dorgan began calling Senate leaders on Tuesday afternoon to inform them of his decision to retire, according to Senate insiders.

He had previously given no sign that he wasn’t going to run for re-election or was even considering retirement and had been raising money for his 2010 campaign.

Could it be that Dorgan finally found a third rail even he couldn’t jump over?

Obamacare is a famously unhealthy product to push in North Dakota, whose population veers between a fairly elderly population outstate who stand to take a huge hit on healthcare with the demotion of Medicare, and a fairly young population in high-tech and university-dominated Fargo and Grand Forks.

Could it be that the rabid partisanship of the Pelosi/Reid Axis has led a Democrat two key Democrats (along with Senator Dodd) to jump before they get impaled?

I’m not one of those conservatives who reflexively bashes government employees’ intelligence, motivations and personalities.  Some of my best friends – people I know, with brains and honorable motives – work at all levels of government, in all kinds of jobs.  Not a one of them went into government because it was the only job they could qualify for (well, mostly; there’s no real private-sector market for fighter pilots).

Government, itself?  That’s another story.  I believe in closely scrutinizing any government agency, especially those that aren’t directly involved with defending our nation’s security.

Apropos not much – but we’ll come back to it.

The Strib is shocked, shocked, in the wake of the alleged Abdulmutallab bombing attempt, that privacy-rights activists ever opposed full-body scanning at airports:

Even more troubling is the extent to which privacy activists have been able to influence the political debate and restrict the use of whole-body imaging scanners in U.S. airports. To rally the opposition, the term “virtual strip search” has been used, conjuring images of Transportation Security Administration TSA screeners huddled around computers ogling the most shapely passengers.

Right.  Because TSA employees are ascetic monks, immune to temptation.

That ridiculous scenario was too much for our elected officials, and the House overwhelming passed a nonbinding measure in June to prevent the scanners from being used for primary screening. The brainpower behind the amendment, rookie Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, referred to screened images as “TSA porn” and came up with this wonderful but ill-informed sound bite: “Nobody needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure an airplane.”

The Strib editorial board chides the privacy activists for their close-mindedness, in terms that stop just a little short of “why do Rebublicans hate airline passengers?”.

Now, I don’t have a huge problem with full-body scanning in and of itself, as a form of technology.  It’s what it represents – and what the Strib, and by extension the rest of the left and media, have seemed to embrace over the past eight years – that is the problem.

The implication on the part of the Strib is that we, the public, should shut up and undergo whatever indignity our betters decide is best for us, because that’s our betters’ job.  It puts all of the many burdens – inconvenience, implied suspicion, humiliation – on the travelling public. Of course, these measures are all, universally, reactive – which means that terroriosts will find a way around them (if they haven’t already); the scanning, with its intrusion and indignity, will also be useless.  Not that it’ll go away.

But the Strib has consistently opposed the measures that’d put the burden on the would-be terrorists; they opposed wiretapping Americans for whom there exists a reasonable suspicion.  When a group of citizens reacted with suspicion to a group of Muslin clerics whose behavior seemed, at this remove, stranger than Abdulmutallab’s, the Strib pilloried them, and those who defended them, as racists.  The Strib couldn’t possibly abide by the concept of “profiling” – focusing security’s efforts on those most likely to cause problems, 20-40 year old middle-to-upper-middle-class Muslim men – even though that’s precisely what Israel’s El Al, one of the biggest terrorism targets in the world, has done to make themselves perhaps the safest airline in the world.

In other words, the Strib is fine with measures that demean and degrade you, Joe and Jane Citizen, provided that they are utterly politically correct, and without regard to the fact that they are in the long run completely useless.

Thanks, Strib.  Same to you.

Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh throws the mother of all political curveballs.  Or did he?

With the speed of Ferdinand Magellan on crack strapped to an Apollo rocket engine, news that actor/liberal activist icon Tim Robbins had contributed thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to conservative Republicans candidates – including Minnesota’s own Michele Bachmann – circumnavigated the blogosphere.  To Robbins’ ideological allies, the news proved more shocking than learning that Susan Sarandon is actually Robbins now former lover, and not mother:

Loyal Dems would undoubtedly be gobsmacked to learn that, if Federal Election Commission records are to be believed, Robbins has not only donated regularly to Democratic candidates over the past 18 years, he also has written checks to conservative Republicans. In the 2006 election cycle, according to public records, the actor gave $5,000 to 10 Republican candidates for the House and Senate—including, most shocking of all, Minnesota’s resident wingnut, Rep. Michele Bachmann. Why such largesse to the enemy? Former GOP congressman J.D. Hayworth of Arizona, who lost in 2006 despite Robbins’ $500 donation, was baffled and surprised when I reached him over the weekend. “Maybe because I covered the Durham Bulls as a sports broadcaster in the late 1970s and early ’80s?

The concept that the former Bob Roberts actor would have willingly contributed to any candidate with an ‘R’ next to their name is admittedly disarming – especially in light of Robbins and Sarandon’s past support for such candidates as Ralph Nader (leading Robbins to pen an op-ed defending his vote in the Nation).  But the FEC doesn’t distinguish between individuals and simply names submitted by a campaign committee from a check.  While a search for Tim Robbins in California produces results as seen below…

ROBBINS, TIM
LOS ANGELES, CA 90064
SELF EMPLOYED/ACTOR

…it also gives other, less entertainment-related results for multiple Tim Robbins living in the Los Angeles/Beverly Hills area.  Considering Robbins lists himself supposedly as anything from self-employed to a producer, or director, or actor and there are at least 7 different Tim Robbins in the industry, the possibility that multiple Robbins have been lumped together is not only feasible but likely.

And perhaps the most likely reality is that Robbins, well, simply goofed.  Almost all of Robbins’ supposed Republican donations took place in 2006, suggesting anything but a longstanding pattern of support to conservative candidates or causes.  

Unless Robbins suddenly starts showing up at Bachmann rallies and publicly endorsing her, I’m chalking this up to error – either on Robbins’ part or on overly zealous writers for The Daily Beast.

It’s not like I’m going to completely stop the proceedings like an MPR pledge drive…

But every April, I usually pass the hat.  I figured that tax day was an inauspicious time to do this, so I figured I’d jump the gun  a tad this year.

Now, as everyone knows, I’d do this for free; I don’t even want to calculate the hourly rate of return over the past eight years, between the rare blog-ads check and the occasional raid on the tip jar. And that’s fine – the rewards from blogging are never financial.

But as always, I much appreciate any spare electronic change that might drop through the cracks.

Thanks!

…it falls to people like me to pass this kind of thing along.

Y’know, I have always done my best to distinguish the parts of public broadcasting that do make a credible effort at being “public” as opposed to “the pet project of a set of well-heeled constituencies”.

But most of the good news is here in Minnesota.  National Public Radio is a depressing gulag of smug, preening, upper-middle-class, “I can’t believe anyone isn’t like us” liberalism.

Evidence? From National “Public” Radio, ‘Learn To Speak Tea Bag’.

Nope.  No bias here at all.

I’d love to get the point of view of some of my public radio friends on this one.

Boots On, by one “John Galt”, has been around for a while.  It’s not the highest-profile MOB blog, but it’s mighty good – hard-right, unapologetic, consisten and articulate.

Galt attended a Ramsey County “Truth In Taxation” meeting a few weeks back.  And he didn’t like what he saw:

Last but not least, don’t forget the 25% pay raise the County Commissioners voted themselves about 18 months ago. I just checked–the pay for the regular comm’rs is $82,400, and the chair takes home just shy of $85k. Someone who recently ran for comm’r told me this is supposed to be a part-time job. I’m betting when you have to dole out money to golf-course developers, developmentally-disabled helpers, oversee library additions, consider the needs of “corrections nurseries,” on top of your compost and mulch production and whatnot, it’s more than a part-time job.

But this is precisely the point. They’ve MADE it a big job. They’ve usurped authority and responsibility that properly belongs to families and churches and universities and non-sectarian NGOs and on and on, and then they want to don a halo and call themselves brilliant for a property tax levy that will continue to increase 2.7% per year for the next two years, while unemployment is pushing 10% and landlords can’t raise rents.

AND they want to whine. When an elderly lady got up to complain about the sky-high salaries the comm’rs pay themselves while failing to get the hedgerows cut back along the road, I happened to be in the front row and heard Tony Bennett mutter, “that was three years ago.” I’m sorry, Mr. Bennett–relevance? What if it was 3 years ago, would it be right for you to scowl and mutter under your breath at an elderly constituent? Mr. Bennett clearly fails to appreciate the phrase “public servant,” or realize it applies to him.

Check it out!

This is a closed-circuit message for the readers of this site who graduated from Jamestown (ND) High School in 1981.  The rest of you can rejoin this blog with the next post.  Thanks.

’81 people – the artist formerly known as Ruth Newman is starting work on the 30 year reunion.

If you’re a classmate, there’s a Facebook group, and/or an email address if you’d prefer.  I won’t post ’em here, but send me an email at “feedbackinthedark” which is at Yahoo dot com, and I’ll get you the info.

I’m already looking forward to it!

It’s high time we threw a MOB Winter Party.

The MOB has always thrown its parties at Keegans, largely because the group really was born at Keegans; Terry Keegan has always shown bloggers (and, let’s be honest, the Northern Alliance) a lot of love, and it’s only right to show it right back  What kind of person doesn’t take care of his/her friends, especially friends who’ve been under attack by people as venal and stupid as Minneapolis’ city government?

And rest assured, this coming summer at Keegans, with the cigar patio open, will be fantastic, and I’m looking forward to throwing a MOB event and more than a few Blogger Trivia Nights at the Northeast Minneapolis hangout.

But given that it’s the dead of winter, and MOB parties tend to draw so well, it’s time to expand the horizons just a little.  We have another establishment that’s on the plate here that not is not only run by one of the good guys, and not only faces a dismal, short-sighted, nanny-statist city government, but has a good-sized indoor party room that’s gonna be nice for a big, indoor party.  They have no cigar patio – but face it, in this weather only North Dakotans sit on patios to smoke cigars.

More details later.  But suffice to say, a MOB part is in the works, very very presently.

Stay tuned.

…that this loathsome incident…

A doll found hanging off a Main Street building in Plains is causing controversy.

Controversial enough to get the United States Secret Service involved.

Witnesses say it was an image of President Barack Obama with a rope around his neck, and the display was found hanging in one of the city’s most recognizable sites dedicated to former President Jimmy Carter.

…will:

a) be blamed on the “climate of hate” that all conservative opposition to Obama is being speciously linked to, and

b) eventually be found to be a hoax by a lefty trying to discredit conservatives.

I said 75% safe.  Not a lock, just fairly confident. 

We’ve been down this road a few times.

Ezra Klein, former “giggly fratboy” at the old Pandagon blog, exhibits what is becoming an increasingly concerous conceit among the left today; he seems to believe that everything about American democracy started from scratch last January, including that pesky need to limit government’s reach and scope.

And he’s been toking from the same bong Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman have been bogarting regionally:

The modern Senate is a radically different institution from the Senate of the 1960s, and the dysfunction exhibited in its debate over health care — the absence of bipartisanship, the use of the filibuster to obstruct progress rather than protect debate, the ability of any given senator to hold the bill hostage to his or her demands — has convinced many, both inside and outside the chamber, that it needs to be fixed.

Again with the curious definition of “bipartisanship” – “doing what the Democrats want” – which is technically “monopartisanship”.

This might seem an odd moment to argue that the Senate is fundamentally broken and repairs should top our list of priorities.

No, Ezra Klein, it’s exactly the moment I expect Democrat propagandists to argue that the Senate is broken – when they’re not getting their way.  When they’re putting a bill before the American people and their hired board of directors that most of the American people don’t want, and they want it jammed down the collective throat for the peasants’ own good.

It’s not an “odd moment” at all.

After all, the Senate passed a $900 billion health-care bill last month. But consider the context: Arlen Specter’s defection from the Republican Party earlier this year gave Democrats 60 votes in the Senate — a larger majority than either party has had since the ’70s. Democrats also controlled the House and the presidency, and were working in the aftermath of a financial crisis that occurred on a Republican president’s watch. This was a test of whether a party could govern when everything was stacked in its favor.

And in response, the Democrats have floated a bill that, if I were Ezra Klein, I’d whinge “isn’t bipartisan”, but was rather drafted by the most extremely left-of-center Congress of my lifetime.

But I’m not Ezra Klein.  I’m not under the convenient, circumstantial delusion that government’s primary purpose is to enact a vision (mine, as it happens), even to the point where it must be changed to accomplish exactly that.

Government – especially its legislature – isn’t supposed to be an assembly line.  If things are working correctly, it’s more of a tropical rain forest.  Only the absolutely strongest animals, or bills, survive.  That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Sorry, Ezra.  Just because your agenda is dying on its merits doesn’t mean you get to change the rules.

I’ve had people ask me “why didn’t  you write about [a blog] as part of your “Around the MOB” series?  Is there some sort of implied slam against [the blog I didn’t write about]?”

Of course not.

The point of the series is to bring a little exposure to some of the blogs in the MOB that might get a little less traffic.  Blogging can be a very lonely hobby; it’s one of the reasons we started the MOB in the first place, to bring a little social life to a monastically-introverted pastime; we are not a political organization, but rather a purely social one.

Of course, some of the MOB blogs get all the recognition they need, and need no introduction.  So I skipped (to pick the first example) Anti-Strib because, let’s face it, they’re big.  Everyone in the Twin Cities who reads blogs knows about Anti-Strib.  They need no introduction.

So if you’re looking for pithy little insights on Powerline, Lileks, Fraters Libertas or for that matter Anti-Strib, you’ll be waiting a bit.  Most of you read them all already – indeed, my referral logs show that a lot of people stop by Shot In The Dark after reading one or the other of them.

So write your own pithy insights about them!