….but I’m smarter than you.

Enough about about Health Care reform. What do you think about Health Insurance Reform?

Obama reminds me of the guy that says

“Enough talk about me. What do you think about me?”

There are many and several ways America has expressed it’s disapproval of reform of health care reform via an ever-expanding liberal government growth plan.

It’s been three weeks since Massachusetts voters elected Scott Brown to the Senate, in large part because of his opposition to the health care confusion Democrats have sown. It’s been even longer since Americans at tea parties and lawmakers’ town hall meetings plainly told Washington they wanted no part of the health care elixir that Congress was peddling.

Still, our political elites, impressed by their own intellects, insist that the public will get the health care system they want the public to have, not the health care the public wants.

This was confirmed by the president when he told Couric he would not throw out the proposals that are stalled in Congress and start over, even though public opinion (see chart) strongly indicates that he should.

Everyone’s heard the message loud and clear save one man.

Unfortunately he happens to be the President of the United States.

“Just in case there’s any confusion out there, let me be clear,” Obama said. “I am not going to walk away from health insurance reform.”

You see what he did there? He smuggled the word insurance into his monologue. Make no mistake, a man of words, and only words, chooses them wisely. Also of note, Jimmy II also threw in his signature and so very very tired “let me be clear,” mantra; a sure sign he intends on being anything but.

America cares about jobs and the economy at the moment and for the time being the majority are satisfied with their health care and are dissatisfied with the size of their government. Obama is increasingly making himself an island on both fronts.

There was immediate skepticism from Mr. Obama’s own party that the forum would break the impasse. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) said he had reached out to Republicans “on several occasions” last year to seek their ideas and feedback. “I was, however, disappointed that these meetings did not result in any serious follow-through to work together in a bipartisan fashion,” he said.

So, it’s the Republicans’ fault that health care reform is pushing up daisies?

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) said he welcomed the outreach. “Obviously, I am pleased that the White House finally seems interested in a real, bipartisan conversation on health care,” he said in a statement. “The problem with the Democrats’ health-care bills is not that the American people don’t understand them; the American people do understand them, and they don’t like them.”

At least someone’s listening.

Tangent warning!

Riddle me this: if you could remotely control the President and somehow direct his actions to further derail his Presidency, and really light up Americans who are quickly growing angry at their government’s expansion into issues no one believes in or cares about, what might you do?

This?

Amid the growing fight over the accuracy of climate data, President Obama is seeking to have the federal government put its imprimatur [screeeeeeeeeeeeeeechhhhhhhhhh!-JR]

…that means approval; consent. I had to look it up.

on the science by calling for the creation of a new federal office to study and report on global warming.

Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat: “This service will be a vital part of our growing body of knowledge on climate change, and will be held to the highest standards of scientific integrity and transparency”

Right.

Sir, is that the Nancy Pelosi definition of transparency or the Barack Obama variant?

…oh, and re the “highest standards of scientific integrity”…is that the IPCC definition or the Al Gore version?

I thought so.

Barack, we love ya. You’re making all the right moves…you know…for the one-term-and-out deal.

Sadly, you’ll be a one-term president, and a mediocre one. At best.

Bob Collins broke the story; the mystery billboard is not only real, it’s in the ‘burbs of the Twin Cities:

National Public Radio is on the case; dissidents must be rounded up:

At first glance, it would seem to be from some person or group who isn’t thrilled by President Barack Obama’s performance so far — unless it’s a more ironic message from those who didn’t think too much of Bush and want to remind voters about him.

Anyone out there know anything about where it came from? Tell us and we’ll pass the word to Bob. As he says, we could do a little crowdsourcing.

Or, as we who remember the Clinton years refer to it, “scouting for the IRS”.

Paul Krugman doesn’t like Republicans very much. This is not a recent development. However the extent of his loathing often takes him along truly unique rhetorical paths. Such as the notion that Republicans are dooming America into non-existence, just like what happened to Poland a couple of centuries ago.

Lest you think I’m taking his words out of context, here’s how Krugman says it himself:

Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.

A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.

What this comes down to (surprise, surprise) is that cursed forty-first vote Republicans picked up in the Senate with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts to fill the former “Ted Kennedy seat.” Apparently once this happened Republicans devised a clever new scheme, never attempted before by any other Senatorial minority, to use to their advantage a bizarre and little understood Senatorial procedure called… get ready for this, it’s a pretty obscure one… the “filibuster.”

(more…)

I can say with absolute honesty that I would have preferred John Murtha left office standing up, after losing an election this fall.

Sadly, it’s not to be.  John Murtha passed away today after complication from gall-bladder surgery.

For all the policy stances I disagreed with, and the way he dealt with opposition (not well), one still must respect his story:

Born June 17, 1932, John Patrick Murtha delivered newspapers and worked at a gas station before graduating from Ramsay High School in Mount Pleasant.

Military service was in Murtha’s blood. He said his great-grandfather served in the Civil War, his father and three uncles in World War II, and his brothers in the Marine Corps.

He left Washington and Jefferson College in 1952 to join the Marines, where he rose through the ranks to become a drill instructor at Parris Island, S.C., and later served in the 2nd Marine Division.

Murtha moved back to Johnstown and remained with the Marine Reserves until he volunteered to go to Vietnam. He served as an intelligence officer there from 1966 to 1967 and received a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

He spent much of his political career as a “blue-ish dog” Democrat.  Indeed, he only became the toast of the left after coming out against the Iraq War.  In this, he was both wrong…:

Murtha’s criticism of the Iraq war intensified in 2006, when he accused Marines of murdering Iraqi civilians “in cold blood” at Haditha, Iraq, after one Marine died and two were wounded by a roadside bomb.

Critics said Murtha unfairly held the Marines responsible before an investigation was concluded and fueled enemy retaliation.

…and presciently correct…:

“This is the kind of war you have to win the hearts and minds of the people,” Murtha said. “And we’re set back every time something like this happens.”

Which, eventually, we learned.

I’m not one to let a political disagreement obscure the record of a great American.

RIP, John Murtha.

I’ve spent much of the life of this blog – eight years, now – railing against the evils of smearing by association. 

It’s a particularly slimy tactic in the hands of the not-very-bright, on all sides of the putative political aisle.  Being a conservative, I bag on particularly egregiously stupid examples from the left (like this, that, the other thing, this, and of course this), but of course it’s not limited to a party.  Much.

Still, there are those from whom we expect better.  Or like to think we do.

Erik Black at the MinnPost – the dean of Minnesota political reporters (or, I guess, one of a classroom full of deans, once you add in Pat Kessler, Mary LaHammer and Bill Salisbury), makes noises about also rejecting the whole stupid game in this piece about the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which Governor Pawlenty will be attending:

In February, Gov. Tim Pawlenty will take his undeclared campaign for the Republican presidential nomination back to Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC, as it is always called, is a  major annual gathering of conservatives and an opportunity for Repub candidates and might-be candidates to strut their stuff before various elements of the party base (although CPAC, which is put on by the American Conservative Union, is technically non-partisan).

Among the co-sponsors of the conference one finds a name one hasn’t heard much since the mid-20th century — the John Birch Society. As a refugee from that century, I can tell you that when your mom and I were kids the “Birchers” (I use the term I grew up using and mean no offense by it) were a leading symbol of right-wing extremism.

Of course, “right wing extremism” is a term that’s more or less lost all meaning, largely because of the efforts of the news media of which Eric Black has been a part for his entire working life.  I joke about it; “if a fiscal-conservative socially-libertarian constitutional originalist orders a pizza in the woods and no liberal is there to hear him, is he still an extremist?”, I ask, constantly, when people refer on the left and in the media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) to everyone from Tom Tancredo to (this makes me mildly dizzy) Tim Pawlenty as “extremists”. 

But Black, being all responsible, rejects the whole stupid game.

Or…does he?

So this is an obvious set-up to play the always popular “dissociate yourself” card. Under the rules of that card game, everyone involved in CPAC (including Pawlenty, as a speaker) has to repudiate the Birchers or be tainted by association with the most extreme thing the group ever said or did. It’s fun and easy to play (see Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright) but also stupid and demeaning (ibid). A letter-writer to the Strib played the card early this week, asserting that Pawlenty’s attendance would amount to an endorsement of Bircher views.

Well, so far, so good – although I think it’s fair to observe that the MinnPost is no better than the rest of the left-leaning mainstream media at focusing attention on the right’s fringe players; the nutcase with the racist sign at the Tea Party, the stars-‘n-bars-flying redneck at the Second Amendment rally, the Tenth Amendment’s long-dead associations with slave-owners-rights.

But Black is better than that.  Isn’t he?

I actually did inquire of the spokester for Pawlenty’s undeclared campaign whether the governor might want to comment on whether his willingness to speak at an event co-sponsored by the John Birch Society implied any association between his views and theirs, but the calls and emails (over several days) received no reply.

And why would that be?  Because Black works for an organization that is pretty up-front about working for the “enemy?”  Or merely because the very question is, to quote Black himself in the context of this very issue, “stupid and demeaning?”

Still, I cannot bring myself to play the card.

Am I overly cynical, or do I detect a silent, implied “when did the Governor stop beating his wife?” in Black’s repudiation of the whole “stupid, demeaning” issue?

Because if there is no story there – if there is no evidence throughout Pawlenty’s career of any sympathy, overt or otherwise, for the Birchers – then why write about it at all?

I was surprised and interested to learn that the John Birch Society was still in business. But, as this recent NYTimes where-are-they-now feature indicates, they are still kicking, based in Grand Chute, Wis., (near Appleton, Oshkosh, Green Bay), still believing in what its leaders call a satanic conspiracy to take over the world.

Right.

So what?

Black gives a brief lesson on the history of the Birchers – they’re anti-UN, anti-Communist, and have espoused some pretty wacky things over the decades – and then cuts to what passes for his chase:

So, back to the present. If Tim Pawlenty wants to be president, he certainly must say what he thinks the U.S. relationship to the U.N. should be, but he doesn’t have to start from any particular that he agrees with the long-standing JBS position just because he spoke at a conference co-sponsored by the JBS.

Right.  Especially since “sponsorship” is a come-one, come-all thing, as opposed to an implication that a “sponsor” has any special ideological traction:

Of course, Pawlenty is no more implicated in JBS’s beliefs than any of the many other speakers, which includes other leading undeclared presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Mike Huckabee was scheduled but has canceled. Sarah Palin was invited but has declined. The current list of speakers, co-sponsors and exhibitors is available here.

Right.

So – the story is…what?  That no candidate needs to apologize for being at an event sponsored (in tiny measure) by a splinter group that nobody’s taken seriously since the Johnson Administration?

Why, that’d be like saying that one needn’t discount the opinion of Mark Dayton, Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, Steve Kelley, John Marty and Taryll Clark even though none of them have renounced the activities of International ANSWR (who are involved in much left-wing agitation), since none of them have expressly shown sympathy for America’s last Stalinist fringe group.  It’d be another “why did you stop beating your wife” moment.

Pawlenty needs to improve on that showing more than he needs to repudiate the John Birch Society, but he really needs to return my calls anyway.

To answer a question that Black himself considered “stupid and demaning?”

Just curious.

The Gawker – which serves as a model and poster-child for the dumbing down of the alternative media  – notes that Fox News sandbagged Jon Stewart.

And how do they know this?

Fox News has generously placed the full, unedited conversation between Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart online, so we can see precisely how unfairly and deviously Fox edited the interview in order to weaken Stewart’s case: A lot!

News flash; opinion shows edit things to reinforce their dominant opinion.

But here’s the interesting question – and perhaps the Gawker, whilst still in full dudgeon over the abuses heaped on Stewart, can be inveigled to ask this one:  since Fox made the raw footage available, when will ABC and CBS make the full footage of the Gibson and Couric interviews with Sarah Palin available?

If “Faux” can actually do the right thing, while ABC and CBS cling to the fiction of their institutional detachment on the one hand while stonewalling the truth on allegations that they did to Palin pretty much what O’Reilly seems to have done with Stewart, what does that say about the mainstream media?

(Other than “nothing that hasn’t been amply proven before”, I mean).

Hunch:  If I asked a reporter, perhaps one of those talking media heads on “On The Media”, I’d expect some laborious treatise on how the “serious” media need to keep their footage secret to uphold the standards of the “profession”.  Or something equally ripe.

And we thought TV weatherpeople overreacted to snowstorms.

King, North Carolina slapped on some amazing, draconian – and utterly irrelevant – restrictions during their recent round of flurries, imposing a curfew, banning alcohol sales, and banning the sale of firearms and ammunition, or possession of either off of one’s property.

In other words, they declared a police state. Over snow.

It’s over – sort of. Mayor Frank Burns and Police Chief Dwight Shrute have lifted some of the restricti0ns:

Authorities lifted a curfew and alcohol restrictions in King on Sunday, but said a state of emergency declaration remained in effect until Monday.

Authorities said the state of emergency declaration would continue until Monday 9 a.m., barring any unforeseen circumstances or severe changes.

OK, I was pulling your legs about the Burns and Shrute bit. Not that it isn’t fully appropriate.

The rest of it, though?

Effective Sunday afternoon, alcohol restrictions and a curfew were lifted. All other remaining restrictions would continue until Monday, said Paula May, King police chief.

Other restrictions include a ban on the sale or purchase of any type of firearm, ammunition, explosive or any possession of such items off a person’s own premises.

Also on Sunday, the emergency shelter established by the American red Cross at West Stokes High School was closed.

“We appreciate the support and cooperation of everyone with our efforts to keep the citizens of King safe,” May said.

Well, to be fair to the citizens of King, it sounds like if they didn’t “support and cooperate”, they might have wound up spending the weekend in an emergency shelter of a different kind.

Anyone know where a guy can contribute to a campaign to recall Hauptmann “Chief” May?

I’d be remiss if I missed the fact that today is the official Shot In The Dark holiday – Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Reagan is a great conservative hero for what he wasn’t as well as for what he was.  In an era when people thought the entree to political leadership was a degree from an elite university and a lifetime spent currying favor and working within the establishment, Reagan was a small-town midwesterner who’d gone to an obscure college and spent most of his adult life doing other things; a sportscaster, an actor, a pundit.  He was well into middle age before he got into electoral politics.

This confounded his critics, who believed that the true measure of a 50-something man of accomplishment was a degree he’d gotten when he was 22.

He was, in short, pretty much like the rest of us – as Dinesh D’Souza noted, an ordinary man who became an extraordinary president.

He really had two great accomplishments.  For starters, he had an uncommon gift for translating immensely high concepts – the economics of Hayek, the philosophy of the Federalists – into terminology that resonated with people who’d never sat through a politicial science seminar.

He also had a singular knack for envisioning a goal, and focusing on it with a genial ruthlessness that drew his supporters down the path, no matter how difficult, and outlasted his opponents, no matter how well entrenched.

He convinced a demoralized nation coming from an era of spirit-sapping lethargy that we were a shining city on a hill:

 And he talked the greatest criminals in history into putting down the gun and putting their hands up:

 Conservatives need to constantly remind themselves that a leader like Reagan only comes along once in a lifetime, if that.

And yet today we may be seeing the ultimate tribute to Reagan.  Millions of Americans are rising up and doing the Reagan thing for themselves.  Knowingly or not, they’re standing astride the Keynesian stream and yelling “Hayek”.   They’re going to the polls in places like Massachusetts and saying “If you want prosperity, tear down this stupid statist tradition”.  They’re gathering in their hundreds of thousands and saying “our nation is a shining city on a hill – and it’s not because of our bureaucracy; it’s because of our indivisible prosperity and  sacred liberty!”.

That millions of Americans are channeling the best of Reagan as we approach his centenary – he’d have been 99 today – is perhaps the best legacy of all.

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.  So much to talk about; session, Caucuses, the Tea Party Convention, Mr. Brown goes to Washington, the disintegration of Global Warming, unemployment, and so much more.
• 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!

When I read Max Blumenthal’s smear piece on James O’Keefe yesterday, something about it didn’t pass the stink test.  Part of it is that it was, well, written by Max Blumenthal, son of Sid “Dirty Liar” Blumenthal, who is one of the Dems’ big smear merchants.  Part of it, as I noted yesterday, is that a lot of the piece looked like assumptions based on assumed guilt by association.

I was, od course, right.  David Weigel writes for the Washington “Independent”, a site that’s under the same “Center for Independent Media” umbrella as the Minnesoros “Independent”.  But while Weigel is a pretty committed lefty, he’s also a reporter with enough integrity that I usually pay attention when he writes.

And he’s un-thrilled by some things in Blumenthal’s piece, and the blog post that led to it.

Read the whole thing – which takes down, point by point, pretty much everything in the Blumenthal piece, from the left. on a pure fact-checking basis.  The guilt-by-association that Blumenthal laboriously-yet-lazily declared, based on second-hand sourcing that putatively traced back to Weigel, would seem to be largely debunked.

One of many samples:

In my original post, I wrote that “O’Keefe’s position at the Leadership Institute gave him some ownership of the event, but in general the crowd consisted of conservatives and libertarians who wanted to see some controversy.” What I meant was that unlike the reporters in the room or the college students watching the spectacle, O’Keefe was Epstein’s co-worker. He didn’t wander in off the street — he knew his colleague was planning an event, knew it was so controversial it was moved out of the building, and he tagged along. But to some readers, that sentence suggested that O’Keefe was, indeed, a planner of the event. He absolutely wasn’t.

There’s some sloppy reporting on the left:

I’m really not used to being part of a story like this. In one week, James O’Keefe — who I’ve been writing about for months — has been linked to an organization that gave me a fellowship (the Collegiate Network) and an event I happened to be at in 2006. So I apologize for giving the impression that I confirmed all the details of the OPP and Salon stories, and I’m glad that The Village Voice has clarified its own reporting using my research.

Which isn’t to say that Weigel’s not going to close ranks with the rest of his crowd…:

As for my original point that there’s a conservative subculture that indulges in extremist politics with the expectation that no one will find out and care — well, I stand by that, and I think this episode has gone some way toward changing that.

…because he’s right; in and among the ranks of conservatives, there are some nutcases.  It’s in my interest as a mainstream center-rigtht conservative to note that it’s a vanishingly tiny minority (which is the truth, although it never quite vanishes; they get slavish drive-by coverage whenever there’s a Tea Party, for example); it’s in the left’s to create the impression that it’s the majority.

Which is why Blumenthal wrote the piece, omitting all exculpatory context and torturing Weigel’s statements out of all resemblence to reality to begin with.

So I’ve been playing guitar for a long time.  33 years next month, in fact.

And back when I was 14 and was just starting to play, “cheap” guitars were really, really awful.  By “cheap”, of course, I meant the kinds of guitar you found in department stores and catalogs for under about $200.  They had anemic electronics, terrible workmanship, necks that felt like polished telephone poles, and wouldn’t stay in tune for more than half a song.

The advent of the global economy, computer-assisted manufacturing and mass-marketing of musical instruments has had the sort of effect that the free market was supposed to; not only can you find guitars for under $300 today that rival the quality of some of the axes that went for $600 1980 dollars thirty years ago, but it’s even dragged up the quality of some of the few remaining knockoff brand guitars you can find at Target and WalMart, which aren’t professional-quality, but aren’t embarrassments either.

Anyway – I’ve been playing a long time now.  And that whole time, I’ve been playing three guitars:

• A mid-seventies Ibanez “Lawsuit” SG that I wrote about a while ago.  It’s my most recent purchase, by the way, in 1979.
• A 1960 Fender Jazz that’s been hotrodded way out of spec, and will be the subject of an upcoming HGF.  I got it for $150 in 1978.
• A “Ventura” acoustic I bought for paper route money when I was 14.  It was $140 in 1977, which made it kinda low-end, but it has a nice high-end tone that actually made it a decent recording guitar.  Needs some bridgework.

And so I’ve been thinking – maybe it’s time for a new toy?

I’m spurred somewhat by my kids.  I’ve been teaching them how to play.  Bun plays a Yamaha acoustic that she got for Christmas two years ago.  She’s picking it up at her own pace, and she’s not bad.

Zam?  He’s got mad hand-eye coordination; he’s picking it up real fast.  I got him a guitar – a little Jackson electric, on mind-warping special at Guitar Center before Chistmas – and a Peavey amp.  And he’s doing really good.  He could have some talent.

So the other day we went to Guitar Center – which, it occurred to me, was the first father-son “hobby” junket we’ve taken in many many years.

And we both fell in love with the same instrument; a tobacco-sunburst single-cutaway beauty with hot electronics, a gorgeous, smooth action, a slick neck, a dense but comfortable body…’

I looked at the headstock.  “Paul Reed Smith”.

“No wonder it played like a dream; it’s a Smith”.  I braced for sticker shock as I reached for the price tag.  Paul Reed Smiths are traditionally hand-made wonders that sell for well into four digits.

I looked.

Under $400.

Turns out Smith’s new SE line are factory-built guitars – and while a discerning guitarist can no doubt tell the difference between one of the hand-built high end models, the SEs are pure joy expressed in wood and wire.

So if I get a bonus this year…

Just saying.

DISCLOSURE:  Nobody paid me to write this.  But they sure could.

The Obama Store closes:

This time last year, the Obama Store was teeming with customers. Ideally situated in the basement of Washington’s Union Station, the store was filled with consumers eager to buy anything with Obama’s likeness while others took pictures of the life-size cut-outs of the president and first lady. Now, the Obama Store is boarded up.

How quickly things change in a year.

This follows almost exactly a year after “Obama 1260”, Washington DC’s all-liberal talk station, switched formats – to conservative talk.

Gotta hand it to the late proprietors; they certainly saw a trend:

The Obama Store was capitalism at its most brilliant rawness; find a market and exploit it quickly. The store made possible one-stop shopping for all of your tacky Obama merchandise needs. T-shirts! Hats! Calendars! Hand-warmers! Keychains! It was like something out of Spaceballs (“Obama: The Flame Thrower! The kids love this one.”). The store carried every imaginable product with the words “Obama” and “Commemorative,” except, notably, the Obama Chia Pet.

Obama got 93 percent of the vote in DC.  That may have been more than even in the Fifth District.

Dana Milbank sniffs down his patrician nose that Scott Brown, a Republican, is voting with his party:

The self-styled “independent” senator spent the rest of the session repeating GOP talking points about tax cuts for all, going “back to the drawing board” on health-care reform, and being “the 41st vote” to sustain filibusters.

I’m wondering; did Dana Milbank wax similarly pithy when Al Franken finally made it to Washington and promptly handed his leash to Harry Reid?

Does anyone remember when conservatism was dead?

It’s the biggest condundrum of conservatism; there are so many of us.

Some are social conservatives, motivated by the decay of our culture.  Others are fiscal hawks, alarmed by the Administration’s mortgaging of our great-grandchildrens’ futures. There are security conservatives motivated by the war, libertarian conservatives driven by conservatism’s fundamentally hands-off approach, and not a few Republicans, whose loyalty is to the Party first and foremost, and of course every possible permutation of these options and probably not a few others.

I described my own philosophy a few years ago: “I view politics as a tug of war. A series of tugs-of-war, really – one for each issue that’s out there, at any level, from National Security to Welfare to Cheese Price Supports. At the center of each debate is a mud pit; a ribbon in the exact center of each rope shows how well each team is doing.  My role in that tug of war is to affect that compromise by pulling to the right like there’s no tomorrow. So I pull like mad, and the ribbon over the mud thus inches a little closer to the right. Others, of course, pull against me, trying to edge the ribbon to the left. I know there’ll be a compromise; I know that the harder I pull to the right, the more people will (if I’m doing my job) be convinced to pull with me, and the farther to the right that ribbon – the “final” results of the compromise – will be.”

Now, the conventional wisdom is that the ideological differences between Republicans – all the different flavors of conservative and not-so-conservative Republicans – is going to eventually destroy the party.  My traditional response: if people fight the tug of war for all they’re worth up through the endorsement of candidates, but then get behind the winners – even the ones that aren’t perfect – come election time, we’re good.  That is, of course, historically difficult, but you have to start somewhere.

The other possible solution – one I never really thought about all that hard until the unprecedented Tea Party movement; simply accept the myriad other differences, and unite behind the issues that really matter.

And as Jonathan Martin notes, that may be starting to happen:

It may not be all that hard in a favorable political environment for skilled Republicans to bridge or blur the ideological divide between the conservative activists who dominate the party and the more moderate swing voters whom candidates need to win office.

Scott Brown has become the toast of Republicans nationally by winning Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat in Massachusetts even though he supports abortion rights. Conversely, Republican Bob McDonnell defied predictions that he was too far to the right to attract moderate voters to win a landslide in the Virginia governor’s race.

Let’s add that two of the few bright spots in 2006 and 2008 for Minnesota Republicans – Michele Bachmann and Erik Paulsen – were both people who ran to the right of the conventional wisdom in both of their districts, the “Red with waxy Blue buildup” of the Sixth District, and the harder purple of the Third.

Much about recent events reflects basic politics: Smart politicians have always calibrated their ideological profile to fit local circumstances.

Ergo Mitt Romney.

But after conservative activists chased liberal Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava out of a special election in New York’s 23rd District last fall, some worried that activists were pushing the party so far to the right that it would be unable to compete nationally.

Earlier last year, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs crowed that Rush Limbaugh was the real leader of the Republican Party.

So far, though, it seems clear that Republicans who deviate from party orthodoxy or downplay social issues can be successful as long as they are not egregiously out of step with the base and are savvy enough to harness populist anger at Washington to their benefit.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough.  And a candidate that is for cutting spending has a head start toward “good enough”.  Because remember – a candidate that might be softer on immigration or gay marriage than you want, but is right on taxes and spending, is more likely to take your side on the social issues than their Democrat opponent anyway.

Conservatives have been looking for something to re-unite the movement ever since Reagan left office.  This time, it’s not a person.

That shouldn’t be a problem.

One of blogs’ mai purposes is to give people a place to just plain vent.  Some do it well.  Some find something in it that works for them for a long, long time.

Scud, from Flyoverguy, is one of them.

Flyoverguy started, like a lot of MOB blogs, back in 2004.  And Scud’s been writing ever since, although a little less frequently lately.   Maybe there’s less to vent about?

I don’t know.  But he shares a lot of venting material with an awful lot of people these days:

In short, I don’t root against President Obama because I hate America. I root against President Obama because I hate his vision for America. It is those like President Obama who see America as a dark and dangerous place that requires earth-shaking change along European lines. It is those like President Obama who feel that Americans are nothing special — and that America is nothing special. As Obama himself put it: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” In other words, America is not exceptional — it’s just because we live here that we feel it is. And the American people are not exceptional — they are merely Greeks or Brits or Russians or Chinese or Frenchmen born within our borders, with values no better or worse than their foreign compatriots. Obama’s belief in America’s unexceptionalism — his view that America’s government, not her people, is the formative force in her values; his view that the American people bear the stain of racial, sexual and military guilt; his view that America must abandon her scrupulous adherence to equality of opportunity in favor of equality of result, traditional morals in favor of alternative ethics, and liberty of enterprise in favor of redistributionism — that set of beliefs is antithetical to what makes America great.

Keep it going, Scud!  I’m with ya!

Today is this blog’s eighth birthday.

I”m not going to engage in much navel-gazing here, except to note that I’ve had this blog going far longer than any given job I’ve ever held.  I’ve been doing it since before my kids were teenagers. 

It’s been hugely fun, of course; it’s given me a social life, it led me back into tak radio (the first big love of my life) and it’s given me something constant, every day, in a life that usually gravitates toward chaos.

The only real change in eight years (besides a sweeping change in “look and feel” almost seven years ago, long overdue for an update) has been adding my friends Johnny Roosh, Bogus Doug and First Ringer over the past year and a half. And that, too, has been fun.

Anyway, thanks for reading all this time.  I’m always amazed at how this blog has gone over, over the years.  For almost the first year, my daily visitors went from single digits to maybe 40 a day.  From there, it’s grown to over 2,000 unique visitors a day.   Some someone’s having fun!

Anyway – thanks!

It was 17 years ago at 12:18AM that my youngest, Zam, came into the world.

He was two weeks late, which should have tipped me off to a lot of things. 

And it’s been an interesting almost-two-decades. 

Anyway – Happy Birthday, Zam, and many more!

Speaking of birthdays, today is also the 264th birthday of Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko.

Born in the gray area where modern-day Belarus, Lithuania and Poland meet, Kościuszko was the son of a petty Polish/Lithuanian noble.  In his youth, he was a bit of a polymath, studying at the University of Warsaw’s version of what’d today be called an ROTC program, then moved to Paris, intially to study art.  He quickly discovered the military was more to his interest, and essentially audited his way to a fairly keen understanding of the miltiary art and science of the day. 

Not finding a place in the Polish military or of any of Poland’s neighbors, and hearing of the start of the American Revolution, he sailed to America – and then read the Declaration of Independence,  He experienced an epiphany, finding a philosophy in it that matched the one he’d been incubating for some time.  It affected him to the point where he swung a meeting with Thomas Jefferson, which turned into an hours-long intellectual free-for-all.

Appointed an engineering officer, he was sent to Fort Ticonderoga, near the hostile Canadian border.  He noticed a huge chink in the fort’s defenses, and recommended a fix – which was ovwerruled by his commander, an event that makes Kościuszko the secular patron saint of all IT leaders.  As if on cue, the Brits exploited the very gap that Kościuszko had tried to fill, forcing the Americans to abandon the fort.  Kościuszko led a brilliant rear-guard retreat, and was then ordered to design some sort of line of defense to prevent Albany from falling.

This Kościuszko did – at the town of Saratoga, New York.  The Brit attempt to storm Kościuszko’s lines on their way to Albany and conquest of the entire Hudson Valley came to grief at the Battle of Saratoga – generally considered along with Princeton and Trenton to be the military turning points of the Revolution.  It was the battle that convinced the French to throw in their political and eventually military lot with the rebels – which, let us never forget, made victory possible.

He then went to the southern front, which remained very much in play until well into the 1780’s.  His engineering work played a key supporting role in the turning of the tide and eventual victory in Virginia and the Carolinas. 

At the end of the war, Kościuszko was a hero; Congress appointed him Brigadier General, and granted him an expanse of land in Virginia, which Kościuszko willed to the cause of buying the freedom of southern slaves (including those of Thomas Jefferson), on his was back to Europe.

In Poland, he joined the new, expanding army of the young Polish/Lithuanian republic – in time to see Prussian betrayal in the face of Russian aggression.  Kościuszko led his troops to decisive victories over the Russians at the battles of Włodzimierz  and Dubienka – but Poland’s small army couldn’t hold back the Russian tide, and King Stanislaus August eventually surrendered, and the Second Partition of Poland was effected, carving up Poland and Lithuania between the Russians, Prussians and Austrians.

It only took a few years for popular resentments against the Russians to ferment into a revolt, which Kościuszko led, and became known as Kościuszko’s Uprising.  The revolution succeeded in tossing Russian troops from much of Poland, including Krakow and Warsaw – largely, again, with the help of victories by Kościuszko.  But internal power struggles weakened the uprising just as the Czar sicced the full brawn of the Russian army on the Poles, crushing the uprising and  sending Poland back into servitude that would last until 1918. 

Kościuszko was wounded and captured, and spent time in prison in Petrograd, before being released (and negotiating the release of thousands of Polish political prisoners in Siberia).  He went to Switzerland, where he died in 1817, an epic hero in three nations.

I’ve always loved Kościuszko’s advice to young people:

To do honor to your family and yourself and at my recommendation, you must reread what follows every day so that it will be engraved on your memory on which your well being will depend.

Rise at four in the summer and six in the winter. Your first thoughts must be directed towards the Supreme Being; worship Him for a few minutes. Set yourself to work with reflection and intelligence, either at your prescribed duty carried out in the most scrupulous manner, or perfect yourself in some science in which you should have true mastery. Avoid lying under any circumstances in your life, but always be frank and loyal and always tell the truth. Never be idle but be sober and frugal even hard on yourself while indulgent to others. Do not be vain nor an egotist. Before speaking or answering on something, reflect and consider well in order not to lose your point and say something stupid. Never fail to give due recognition under any circumstances to the person who is in charge of your well being. Anticipate his desires and his wishes. Pay close attention with proper humility. Look for an opportunity to be useful. As you are a foreigner in the country, redouble your concern and efforts to gain trust and preference over the natives legitimately by your merit and superior knowledge. If a secret is entrusted in you, keep it religiously; in all your actions you must be upright, sincere and open; no dissimulation in your speech, do not argue but seek the truth calmly and with modesty, be polite and considerate to everyone, agreeable and obliging in society, humane and helpful to the unfortunate according to your means. Read instructive books to embellish your mind and improve your spirit. Do not degrade yourself by making bad acquaintances, but rather those with high principles and reputation thus your conduct should be such that the whole world approves it and that wherever you may be it will be considered irreproachable.

I’ve always loved the fact that my son Zam shares a birthday with him.

Last April 15, I was walking around the Capitol grounds during the first Tax Day Tea Party.  There were thousands of people there.  The imponderably vast majority were just plain workadaddy, huggamommy Minnesotans who were upset about the Administration’s gargantuan mortgaging of our great-grandchildrens’ futures – people like me and, I suspect, most of you.

But as I wandered about, pondering what I was going to write about the event, I noticed a few people who I’d charitably call “fringe”.  Including a few people with some anti-immigration signs that I could accurately call “groaningly racist”.

And I thought…:

1. “Great; a dozen people out of 5,000 look like racist buffoons; you know who will get all the news coverage, don’t you?”
2. “I’ll write about the Tea Party, and some leftyblogging wannabee moral watchdog will post one of those pictures, with post that says “Mitch Berg supports anti-hispanic racism”.

Declaring guilt by association – often the faintest, most tendentious assocation possible – is an oldie but goodie among those who’ve been 86ed from the marketplace of ideas.  We saw this in the Twin Cities last year when local leftyblogger Jeff Fecke smeared Kevin Ecker and, by extension, all True North writers, for writing approvingly about a story about an anti-immigration activist who, it turned out much later, was also a neo-nazi.

The point?  Guilt by very tenuous, context-free association is stupid.

And after a year of eating their lunch, it’s perhaps inevitable that James O’Keefe, of the classic ACORN “Pimp” stings, is on the receiving end, this time in a hit piece by Max Blumenthal at Salon.

The first part; set it up so that everyone you disagree with is in the same boat as your victim:

Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James O’Keefe’s past political stunts are feigning shock at his arrest on charges that he and three associates planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed the 25-year-old O’Keefe as a creative genius and model of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe, called him one of the all-time “great journalists” and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his undercover ACORN video. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared he should have earned a “congressional medal.”

Now, the whamma-jamma charge:

His right-wing admirers don’t seem to mind that O’Keefe’s short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O’Keefe at a 2006 conference on “Race and Conservatism” that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30  on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People’s Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O’Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. But O’Keefe and fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein soldiered on to give anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.

Wow. 

That’s a pretty serious charge, if it’s true.

Of course, it’s not.

How do we know?   Onward:

According to One People’s Project founder Daryle Jenkins, O’Keefe was manning the literature table at the gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism. OPP covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Jenkins told me the table was filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly.  The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. “We can say for certain that James O’Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that,” Jenkins said. O’Keefe’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client’s role in the conference.

But they responded to Larry O’Connor, at Breitbart’s Big Journalism.  Who notes:

We would think that Mr. Blumenthal at Salon or Stephen Thrasher at the Village Voice, as responsible reporters, might have called Mr. O’Keefe to get his response to the allegations made in an obscure blog.  But no.  Instead they ran the story and (in the case of the Voice) actually added new and juicy lies to the myth.

Well, here at Big Journalism we think it’s a good idea to actually seek the truth.

So we spoke with James O’Keefe today.  This is what he tells us:

1. He was not “manning a table” at the event
2. He was not involved with the organization or operations of the event.
3. He attended the event with many of his Leadership Institute co-workers since it was right across the street from their building in Arlington, Va., and it was organized by other LI associates.
4. The organizer who is being called a “White Supremacist” is half Jewish and half Korean.
5. One of the panelist was an African-American named Kevin Martin.
6. The event was forced to move to a Georgetown University building in Arlington, not at a cross-burning.

We know all this because we called Mr. O’Keefe and asked him.  Which is more than other media outlets have done.

And, to be fair, more than any lefty does when “reporting” on this sort of defamatory character assassination.

We also spoke with Daryle Jenkins of One People’s Project, the man who started this entire legend.  We asked if he had a photograph that actually showed O’Keefe “manning the table” as has been reported, and he said that this cropped photo was all they had.  His claim that Mr. O’Keefe “manned” the table of literature is based on eye-witnesses who were at the event…

…Mr. Jenkins only produced the name of one witness:  David Weigel who, at the time was a reporter with Reason Magazine. 

Weigel is a noted lefty alt-journalist and, as noted in this blog, among the better among the species.

We called Mr. Weigel and he denied ever telling Mr. Jenkins that Mr. O’Keefe was “manning the table.” Indeed, he has already gone on record denying he said that.

So let’s reset:

Here is the story they actually have:

James O’Keefe attended a forum years ago that dealt with race and politics.  The forum was located at a Georgetown University building (that’s right, a 21-year-old man attended an event on a college campus).  The forum had as one of its three speakers a controversial figure, Jared Taylor, with a track record of making racist statements.  He was being debated by two other people including Mr. Martin (taking issue with the racist figure).  Mr. Taylor has also appeared with Phil Donohue, Queen Latifa and Paula Zahn on their TV shows to debate race.  Are the audience members of the Donohue show racist for sitting and watching that debate?

Honestly, that isn’t much of a story.  But… you put Mr. O’Keefe at a table full of racist literature and you say that he was manning the table.  And you say you have a picture proving it.  And you make it sound like he was one of the organizers of this event.  And you call the event a “White Supremacist Conference”.  Well… now you’ve got a story.

Only problem:  It’s all a lie.

And when it comes to lefty character assassination – the only weapon they have against an activist who’s spent the last year eating their lunch in front of them – that’s the best they can do.

Let’s go back to Blumenthal’s piece, and see if we can pick out the code words and manglings of context:

O’Keefe’s racial issues can be seen in many of his prior stunts, of course. The notorious ACORN videos highlighted images of himself dressed as a pimp, deceptively edited through hidden camera footage as he baited African-American office workers into making statements that could be perceived as incriminating.

“Baited African-American office workers”.  So is Blumenthal suggesting O’Keefe avoided baiting white ACORN sleazeballs?  Or is he just trying to create a sense of phony victimhood?

There were also lesser-known but equally inflammatory  spectacles like the “affirmative action bake sale” O’Keefe and his conservative comrades held when they were students at Rutgers University.

 During the event, O’Keefe stood at a table in the center of campus offering baked goods at reduced prices to Latinos and African-Americans while whites were forced to pay exorbitant amounts. (Native Americans, he announced, would eat free.)

In other words, it satirized the insulting, demeaning aspects of affirmative action – the sort of thing that, if done by politically-correct “performance artists” to conservatives would get an NEA grant.

Next, Blumenthal digs back age…18?

By O’Keefe’s own account, his racial troubles became acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of Rutgers University’s dormitory system. In an online diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially assigned. O’Keefe claimed his next roommate was “an Indian midget … who smelled like shit.” The roommate left, however, and was replaced by “a greek kid.”

Stop the presses; a teenager saying something stupid. 

Or, should I say, maybe saying somethign stupid, since even Blumenthal’s carefully-cropped context gives itself reasonable doubt:

 The new roommate complained to a residential administrator that O’Keefe had called his neighbors “niggers,” prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He rejected the accusation as a “complete lie,” writing, “I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call anyone any names.”

So – was O’Keefe a hardened 18 year old racist, or a wet-behind-the-ears teenager caught up in a bigoted setup, or something in between? 

We can’t answer the question – but Blumenthal did, anyway.

The following year, despite this record, O’Keefe secured a dream job in the conservative movement, employed by the Leadership Institute, a Northern Virginia-based outfit that serves as the movement’s most prolific youth training operation. There, O’Keefe met Marcus Epstein, a fellow ideologue who as editor of a conservative publication at the College of William and Mary assailed Martin Luther King Jr. for “philandering and plagiarism” and challenged his patriotism and Christianity.

Catch that?  Martin Luther King must not be questioned in any way.  In other words, in Max Blumenthal’s special little world, Political Incorrectness equals racism.

Together, O’Keefe and Epstein planned an event in August 2006 that would wed their extreme views on race with their ambitions. Epstein invited white nationalist  Jared Taylor [see above] and homophobic white-grievance peddler John Derbyshire of the National Review

Um, huh? 

Again – asking politically-incorrect questions is racism?

According to a post on the white supremacist Web site Stormfront, Taylor and Derbyshire debate “the role of race in policy decisions and the racial future of the Republican party.”

And here Blumenthal has descended into pure fantasy.  Republicans are constantly discussing, debating and arguing about racial issues; “how do we get blacks, hispanics and asians, who all should be Republicans due to their interest in, respectively, eduation reform, social conservatism and free markets. 

So what was said at the debate?  Blumenthal doesn’t trouble himself to tell the reader.  Indeed, the only “racist” act in the story seems to be the fact that the story was reported in Stormfront, which is certainly a racist site.   But what did they say?

Third parties have been palookaville for a lot of good and important – and not a few stupid and bad – ideas in American history.

The Grangers, the Non-Partisan League, the Libertarian Party, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, the Greens, the Reform Ventura “Independence” Party and many more movements and movers have grandiloquently decided that they needed a party of their own…

…which, once the followers’ original fervor cooled, became a marginalized non-entity.

Which isn’t to say third parties haven’t had their effects.  Ross Perot probably put Bill Clinton into office.  Ralph Nader probably returned the favor in 2000.  A swelling of Libertarian sentiment helped push the 1994 “Contract with America”.

Now, the most powerful force in American politics today (after the Teachers’ Unions) is the Tea Party movement.  And as a group of ‘partiers gathers in Nashville, some are pondering the idea of starting a third, “Tea” Party – because neither of the major parties is just right for the Tea Party, or so they say.

Which is not only a bad idea in the long term – see above – but tosses away the Tea Parties’ biggest advantage.

Mark Tapscott:

Third parties have mostly failed thanks to immense institutional ballot access obstacles erected by the two major parties, and the challenge of overcoming geographic separation over vast differences in order to achieve timely concerted action.

But the Internet enables these new armies rapidly to overcome distance and resource limitations that would hobble a traditional third-party attempt, and instead focus effectively on bringing to bear consistent demands with widespread public support on decision makers.

They can also, if they choose and organize to do so, impose enduring consequences on recalcitrant or witless decision makers, as Martha Coakley found out a few weeks ago in Massachusetts.

The Tea Parties, being a decentralized movement that depends less on big top-down direction and more on ubiquitous communication and decentralized grassroots action, have a huge advantage that would get squandered by forming a third party:

The issue then for Tea Partiers and political elites alike was posed by [Instapundit blogger Glenn] Reynolds in a recent Examiner article: When political movements can “bubble up from below, and self-organize via the Internet, what will happen to the political class?”

Going the traditional third-party route will lead Tea Partiers to a dead end. Taking over the GOP probably should be pursued in any case, but even if successful would only win half the battle and likely would be temporary in any case.

Why settle for half a victory when Tea Partiers have within their grasp as an independent third force to be the decisive influence in both major political parties?

The Tea Parties could very well take over the GOP.

But when I spoke at the Tax Day Tea Party, I made a point of asking the crowd “what party do you belong to?  Raise your hand if you’re a…”, and I riffed through the list of parties.  And people who didn’t care about parties at all.  The biggest round of applause were Republicans, with “A pox on all their houses” second – and behind that, plenty of DFLers.

The Tea Parties aren’t affiliated with parties.  That’s a strength (I add some emphasis):

There is no mystery about what most Tea Partiers seek — a limited, transparent government that listens to them and resists ideologues with millennial blueprints to remake America in their own image, minimal taxation and regulation, strong national defense, and an unapologetic commitment to American exceptionalism abroad.

Tea Partiers should seek out or field candidates in both major parties who support those aims and do everything possible to elect them, then hold their feet to the fire of accountability. Just imagine a bipartisan Tea Party Caucus with sufficient numbers in Congress to drive the national agenda.

That could be a conquering army like none before in American politics.

Which is, of course, exactly what the Tea Party – and the country – need.

Next stop on the MOB tour: Forrest Chad Wilkinson.

I’ve never met Wilkinson (that I know of), but I feel like I read him a lot anyway; he’s fairly prolific on Facebook.  But his blog is fairly new by MOB standards; it started last year.

Wilkinson reads like a classic tea party libertarian/conservative.  He’s a Navy veteran – a sonarman, who seems to have that “sonarman” personality in his writing (and if you know enough “bubbleheads”, you know what I mean).  But he’s also a stable hand for a living, a line of work I hadn’t encountered since I left North Dakota.

And I liked this “day in the life of a stable hand” piece, from which I’ll excerpt a bit:

Some, when taken together go at such different paces that you are nearly pulled in two between the slow poke and the “I want my hay” quick-stepper. Lots of pulling in both directions can leave you very frustrated, especially when your trying to shut a paddock gate snaphook and chain. Ahggg!

Sheesh, lets get these animals out of the barn and get some peace and quiet so we can get the stalls cleaned.

Some, like Sulivan, are such a pacing bother that they go out early and, being part of a set of four, he can go out with Max right now. Then I can get Dancer out on the return and start to take advantage of the back and forth pattern as I enter and leave one end of the barn, then the other, leading horses out to paddocks and their morning hay.

It’s kinda like being a bartender at an unruly road house, or a manager at a hotel with very noisy and demanding customers.

You can’t lead these two together but you can those two, but one has to have his halter removed at the paddock gate, he has a sore that is healing on the nose.

And on and on it goes, every day at many horse barns throughout Minnesota, as it has for decades, centuries…

And this barn eventually returns to a relatively normal routine as the horses go out into this winter wonder-land, snorting and stomping into paddocks, jumping and kicking…and rolling, lots and lots of rolling and then getting up and shaking and settling into some nice hay.

Now to clean the stalls.

It is kind of fun in its own annoying way.

So check out Forrest Chad Wilkinson!

I attended the GOP caucuses in 66B last night.

Attendance was down from two years ago, which answers the question “will the Paulbots keep their energy and influence?”   But it was way, way up from two years before that , which is a good thing; non-presidential-year caucuses are frequently painfully slow.

In my precinct, the Seifert machine was in full effect; Marty won my precinct pretty handily.

Statewide?  Emmer closed the polling gap he had at the Central Committee straw poll; he’s just a tad over 10 points behind Seifert.  Hann got about five points, so he could well be in a position to be a kingmaker at the state convention in May.

So it’s off to the BPOU (in Saint Paul, that’d be State House District) conventions on March 2!

I was a biology major for one semester.  I’m not going to claim to be an expert on science or the scientific method.

But then, either should Algore.

But I digress.  One of the key tenets of the scientific academy is the notion of “peer review” – the idea that scientific work is going to get a rigorous going-over by other scientists, to try to find weaknesses, errors or gaps in the thesis.

At any rate, more details are emerging about how climate “scientists” got their “universal consensus”:

Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. What makes science special is that data and results that can be replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the end.

But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid detail.

Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics. And the correspondence raises awkward questions about the effectiveness of peer review – the supposed gold standard of scientific merit – and the operation of the UN’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The bottom line?  The “scientists” involved in the scandal engaged in back-channel back-biting no less venal and stupid than you’d find at the most vapid Humanities department, to get their pet theory (and all of its attendant funding) accepted.

The scientists involved disagree. They say they were engaged not in suppressing dissent but in upholding scientific standards by keeping bad science out of peer-reviewed journals. Either way, when passing judgment on papers that directly attack their own work, they were mired in conflicts of interest that would not be allowed in most professions.

Read the whole thing. And the next time some chattering hamster chants “the science is settled”, ask them if they have the faintest clue what that means.

Okay, so I’m not going to make a habit of defending the President but…uhhh, Senator Reid, it already is.

I mean c’mon!

Read that quote.

Las Vegas is the poster child for where people shouldn’t be spending their money…by design!

A city whose mantra is “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas^TM” isn’t aiming to be the wholesome venue where Pa Ingalls brings Ma, Half-Pint and the rest of the clan for a family vacation.

During the president’s town hall meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, he discussed the need to curb spending during tough economic times.  “When times are tough, you tighten your belts,” the president said.

True.

“You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage.

True.

You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.”

True.

The president’s comments come nearly a year after he criticized companies that received federal money for taking corporate junkets to Las Vegas.

Should Americans not have a problem with that?

“You can’t go take that trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on taxpayers’ dime,

(unless your name is Nancy Pelosi)

” he said at the time. Local business leaders say Nevada tourism suffered last year in part because companies canceled trips to Las Vegas in the wake of the president’s comments.

Or I might respectfully offer another theory…maybe…just maybe…it was because….of a recession…that occurred…oh…give and take…all of last year?!

Not to worry: I think America has figured out that there is a very low correlation between reality and whatever the President says.

Besides…

President Obama is scheduled to visit Las Vegas this month.

…to apologize and find someone to bow to.

UPDATE:

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said during a hastily called news conference that Obama is no friend to Las Vegas and would not be welcomed here if he visits.

“I’ll do everything I can to give him the boot,” Goodman said. “This president is a real slow learner.”