I’ve been trying to figure out what to write about Dan Lacey’s blog/cartoon/orthodox-Catholic-outsider-art-fest/huh-wha, Faithmouse, ever since I started writing this series.

Laceys’ a local cartoonist and artist who’d been getting some international play (he’s being published in a UK magazine, now; he’s gotten his stuff in the NYTimes).  A few years back, when the City Pages still openly recognized conservative blogs, Faithmouse won the rag’s “Best Conservative Blog” contest…

…which set a lot of conservative bloggers to wondering.  Lacey is orthodox Catholic and very very pro-life; he also admits to “wandering toward the center” in one long discussion forum thread, which to the City Pages is probably all the same.  It’d be a stretch to call him a “conservative blogger”.

What his stuff – the Faithmouse cartoon and his other art – is, is edgy, thought-provoking, genre-bending, maddeningly elliptical, uncompromising, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes looking like the downstream side of a fever dream or paint-huffing acid-dropping Hunter S. Thompson bender rendered in ink or acrylic, the kind of thing that’s prompted some of his critics to hop up and down like poo-flinging monkeys and call him a “pornographer”.

He’s also by a long stretch the best cartoonist within a day’s drive of the Twin Cities’ blogosphere.

I particularly liked this piece; God and Michael Jackson:

It’s not all safe for work.  But then not all art should be.

Thank goodness Canada’s got socialized healthcare!

As we are constantly told by lefties who are trying to englighten us about our own dismal healthcare system, all Canadians (and Britons, Swedes, French and Japanese) love their healthcare system, and would never, ever trade for our medieval, benighted healthcare system.

Like Danny Williams, premier of the Canadian provinces of Labrador and Newfoundland, who’s getting some much-needed medical attention:

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams is set to undergo heart surgery this week…

Wow.  Best of luck, Mr. Williams.  Glad to see that you are covered by Canada’s first-class healthcare system, which serves the health needs of its citizens so very very well…

…in the United States.

CBC News confirmed Monday that Williams, 60, left the province earlier in the day and will have surgery later in the week.

Oh.

Fouad Ajami on the descent of Obama from near-deification to merely human:

The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.

The nation’s faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.

I unpacked that last bit – and realized that that’s the bad news.

It’s not that we, The People, elected an unqualified, inexperienced empty suit as the most powerful person in the world; we’ve done that before.  It’s not that we allowed a full-court media press to get him elected over a slate of more-qualified candidates based purely on conjured-from-whole-cloth star power.

It’s that this is how “the People” operate in festering third world hellholes; they look not merely to government, but to government run by outsized personality cults, to “save”them.

If you change the “America” references in Ajami’s post to “Argentina”, the Obama story becomes painfully similar to the Juan and Eva Peron story.

Juan was a socialist demigogue who was elected several times; after his death, his vacuous but attractive wife Eva took over, winning over Argintinean (and world) glitterati, but instituting gigantistic, prosperity-leaching socialist programs that left Argentina – which had clambered up to the lower reaches of the “First World” – sodden with debt and helpless by the time the economy tanked in the seventies.

There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune.

“Don’t cry for him, Chicago”.

Kevin Ecker is not one of the more obscure MOB bloggers.  Everyone knows Kevin.  An unapologetic paleocon, one of the founding junta at True North, Kevin is also the foremost Second Amendment blogger in the Twin Cities (although Carnivore at TvM gives us all a run for our money).  And he’s been doing Eckernet for a long, long time – actually going back to February 10 of 2002, which was five days after I got started.

Did I say unrepentant paleo?  Yep.  Kevin’s never been shy about mixing it up with the GOP establishment, even in his capacity as an activist:

The conservative agenda is clearly popular right now, it’s a gimme for the Republicans right?? Wrong.  Polls show conservatives simply don’t trust Republican legislators, and they have a lot of reason to.

But Tea Party activists have to eventually side with Republicans don’t they?? No, not at all, and Scott Brown’s election proved it.  Scott Brown got his volunteers from the Tea Party movement.  He raised over a million dollars a day via the internet.  His campaign existed largely outside the Republican Party structure.  Republicans always promise lower spending and smaller government, but when they get to Washington they feed the government hog instead.  When Scott Brown promised the same, the public, especially the Tea Party activists responded with great enthusiasm.  The Scott Brown campaign didn’t just exist outside the Republican Party structure…..it THRIVED.

The Tea Party is the most popular movement in the country, far outpacing both the Democrats and Republicans.  And now they’ve proven they can do more than just stand around and make noise in town halls and in web forums on the internet.  They can make or break an election, even in hostile territory.  The Republican Party hasn’t yet figured out that they need the Tea Party, but the Tea Party movement is slowly waking up to the fact that they don’t need the Republican Party.

If you’re not reading Eckernet – well, your mission is clear.

Remember ten years and two months ago?

The world was waiting for the calendar to flip over to 2000; more importantly, we waited to see if the world’s computers would shut down, with drastic results (most of them didn’t).

And as the rest of us celebrated the new Millennium, always on the periphery of things was a thin little film of nerdy, adenoidal pedants clucking away, their voices like Comic Store Guy in “The Simpsons”; “Er, helLO?  There was no Year Zero; the Millennium doesn’t begin until 2001″.  These people – most of them frustrated wannabe scientists who worked at petty government jobs or as office temps – were largely and justly ignored.

The point?  Keep your technicalities; there’s a larger point here.  We’ celebrated the end of a thousand years of years beginning with “1” (and, for all of us in IT, the end of the biggest crash preventive maintenance job in IT history, so far).

The other point – the one I’m writing about today?  Pedants who huff and phumpher about petty technicalities often miss the forest for the trees.

Such is Jeff Van Wychen at liberal think tank “MN2020”, who recycles the hottest non-story of April 2009 among the lefty clucking classes; he’s T fussing about the purported misuse of history by the “Tea Party” Movement.

An image used by the modern tea party movement shows colonial patriots dressed as American Indians dumping tea off of ships into the Boston harbor in December of 1773.  When it comes to selecting a signature event, today’s “tea partiers” have chosen poorly.  The tax protests of modern tea partiers have nothing to do with the Boston Tea Party of 1773.

Van Wychen – whose organization exists largely to misappropriate facts for partisan ends – certainly has the textbook story of the Boston Tea Party

The impetus behind the Boston Tea Party was the Tea Act of 1773.  In response to colonial outrage, Parliament repealed most of the taxes imposed through the Townshend Act of 1767.  However, the hated tax on tea was left in place as a demonstration of Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies.  Irate colonists would have none of it.  Tea laden ships were not allowed to land in New York and Philadelphia.  In Boston, tea was taken from the ships and dumped overboard.

Which caused the good folks at “MA1820” to post handbills sniffing that they weren’t unrepresented, since His Highness George III was charged by Almighty God to represent them.

Well, no, I’m not being especially facetious.  We’ll come back to that.

The outrage of the colonists was not about the price that they were forced to pay for tea because of tax; in fact, the price of tea declined in the American colonies as a result of the Tea Act because the East India Company was allowed to directly export tea to the colonies rather than having to go through middlemen in London.  The rage of the colonists was not about the amount of the tax; rather, they objected to the principle of any tax imposed upon them by government officials that they had no voice in choosing.

Modern tea partiers can make no such claim of “taxation without representation.”

Maybe, maybe not.

Van Wychen and everyone who chants the “Tea Party is bad history!” meme are wrong for two reasons.

The first:  When I accuse Jeff Van Wychen of being a “Wet Blanket” who “doesn’t have a leg to stand on”, and that my response to his point will “knock his socks off” and “drive him up the wall”?  What do you see?

Someone reading that could, in theory, read that and wonder if Mr. Van Wychen is an amputee made from soggy wool, and that the impact of my rhetoric will literally leave him barefoot and wedged up against the ceiling.  But that someone would have had to have learned English from a 100 year old textbook in the jungles of Burma, because each of those terms has assumed different, non-literal meanings in American English.

So too with “Tea Party”.  The Boston Tea Party was indeed a historical event – but the term Tea Party has had an idiomatic meaning, referring to any group of plucky underdogs taking a symbolic stance against big, distant, uncaring government.  And until the Tea Party Movement made every leftist in America into a pointillistic historical pedant, even they understood it.  And indeed, they do today – but the mission of left-leaning “think” tanks like MN2020 is to try to discredit the opposition.  And so it goes.

But just for laughs, let’s hew to the literal, historical story of the Boston Tea Party.

Van Wychen:

At the federal level and in all 50 states, taxes are imposed by elected representatives.  You might not have voted for the current officeholders, but you still had the opportunity to vote.  Americans and Minnesotans today are taxed with representation.  Thus, there is no connection between modern tax protesters and the patriots who dumped tea into the Boston harbor nearly twelve score years ago.

This is reminiscent of Mr. Van Wychen’s colleague John Fitzgerald’s claim last summer that public schools were more accountable than charter schools, because public schools have elected boards.  I read that claim, and then compared my own kids’ charter school – where the board responds to 200-odd parents, is mostly turned-over every year, and is the launching point for nobody’s political career – with the Saint Paul School Board, which spends half a billion dollars a year, does a terrible job, and can only be gotten onto with the aid of the Teachers’ Union and the DFL and an awful lot of money.  Am I “represented” on the Saint Paul School Board, to which I pay more and more taxes every year?  In theory.   Am I better-represented there than on my charter’s board?  Don’t be an idiot.

Oh, there is an elected Saint Paul School Board.  But as a political minority in a one-party town, the only vote that really mattered in the end was my protest vote – pulling my kids out of the Saint Paul Public Schools, forever.

Now, I’ve spoken at two Tea Parties.  And the Tea Parties are really quite extraordinary events, gathering people from all political parties, and no political party at all, together with one big thought in mind; get government back under control.

And those people feel like an awful lot of fiscal conservatives felt over the past eight years; the same way we Saint Paul conservative parents feel at school board election time; that we may have an elected official out there sent from our districts who passes all sorts of legislation, but we – the people who favor fiscal responsibility – really aren’t represented at all.

And so we exercise our First Amendment right to protest, to try to change that elected government.  And we’re doing it under the banner of an idiom that, let’s be honest, everyone understands.  Just as everyone understood that 2000 was the Millennium that everyone really cared about.

And – mirabile dictu – it’s working, or starting to; Democrats are running scared, Mr. Brown is going to Washington and Mr. Christie has gone to Trenton and pretty soon Messrs Reid and Dorgan will be going back to Reno and Bismarck.

Which prompted the Big Left into a paroxysm of juvenile name-calling, and, today, inveigled Jeff Van Wychen to play history teacher.

Modern tea partiers have constitutionally protected free speech rights.  Indeed, a fact-based debate over taxation is healthy and should be encouraged

By your leave, my liege.  And that is exactly what we are doing!

.  However, those who advocate for low taxes and less public investment should not misappropriate historic events that have nothing to do with the cause they espouse.

Have a beer, Jeff.  The debate is fact-based, and the Tea Party idiom is perfectly well understood; everyone with an IQ above plant life knows it, just as they knew “Remember  Pearl Harbor” meant “shoot Germans and Japanese, build weapons, support the war”, rather than “sit and commemorate”.

Nor should they pretend to be any more patriotic than the rest of us.

I’m not sure if anyone actually has – and I doubt Mr. Van Wychen is, either.  I think that’s just become one of those strawmen liberals throw in to make sure we know they’re victims, too.

Craig Westover also tossed Mr. Van Wychen into the rhetorical harbor which, lest Mr. Van Wychen get upset, I hasten to add that I’ve qualified with the term “rhetorical”; Mr. Van Wychen need neither don a Speedo nor find a beach towel.

It’s precinct caucus night.

“But where’s do I go, Mitch?”

The MNGOP has it all right here.

You can also follow, and post on, your caucus on Twitter using the #MNGOPCaucus hashtag.  You can also add an MNGOP Caucus Twitter Ribbon to your avatar (I refuse to call it a “Twibbon”, I’m sorry) at this link, if you’re so inclined.

It’s pretty simple; if you’re there, you come in, you vote for precinct officers (someone can feel free to don my mantel as precinct chair!), you vote for delegates, you vote for resolutions, and at the end you get to vote in the “preference poll”, the straw poll for Governor among other races.  (Note; while the DFL lets you vote the preference polls and just leave, in the GOP the preference polls are the last event of the evening).

It’s going to be a fun year; the Tea Party crowd will hopefully turn up and continue the work the Paulbots started two year ago, reinvigorating and pushing the party to do better.

(And if you’re looking for a DFL “Assimilation Brings Joy” meeting, go here)

You think you have it bad, what with being “represented” by a legislature that looks at your wallet like a crack whore looks at a misplaced Platinum Card, and being slandered by a bunch of talking heads who aren’t fit to carry your gig bag?

Try living in the UK, where not only are private firearms banned, but defending oneself is a crime, and burglars have more rights than you do.

Conservative David Cameron, of course, wants to change that:

I almost said “it’s hard to believe he’s getting opposition”, but then I live in a city that won’t let the Army run it’s little M16 simulator on its recruiting truck.

I’ve taken my share of flak from public-school-uber-alles advocates for saying that the best way to resuscitate K-6 education is to abolish it.

“Certainly our public school systems can be revived”, they – “they” being people who usually don’t have kids in inner-city public school systems – protest, “rather than destroying them and starting over”.

Perhaps, in the sense that “perhaps I’ll be squiring Scarlett Johannson around town for Valentine’s Day”.  We have no evidence of this, of course; the performance of most large urban school districts is poor, and deteriorating, even as we pump more and more money into the systems.

With – as  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan notes – one huge exception.  As noted in this space in recent months, the New Orleans Public School system was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.  Already worse than most urban school districts in terms of performance, achievement gaps and graduation rates, the NOLA public schools were quite  literally blown away.

And Secretary Duncan has observed that that’s been a good thing:

ABC News’ Mary Bruce Reports: Education Secretary Arne Duncan said today that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans” because it gave the city a chance to rebuild and improve its failing public schools.

In an interview to air this weekend on “Washington Watch with Roland Martin” Duncan said “that education system was a disaster. And it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that we have to do better. And the progress that it made in four years since the hurricane, is unbelievable.”

The Education Department confirmed the quote to ABC and Duncan released the following statement in response: “As I heard repeatedly during my visits to New Orleans, for whatever reason, it took the devastating tragedy of the hurricane to wake up the community to demand more and expect better for their children.”

The American Educational/Industrial Complex (I credit the term to my friend, leftyblogger Erik Hare)  – the confluence of unions, administrator, bureaucrats and educational academics that are married to the current system – has got to be going to red alert over this statement – the first from a high-ranking Federal official that the best way to save public schools is to destroy the system and start over.

Especially since, as noted in this blog, one of the vital keys to this improvement seems to be the proliferation of charter schools in New Orleans.  Charter schools – schools chartered by the local district and operating with each student’s slice of the district’s tax money, but sponsored by an eduction-related entity and controlled by a site board directly accountable to the school’s parents and staff – are controversial; the educational-industrial complex desperately wants them eliminated, resorting to serial hatchet-jobbery in states like Minnesota, where the state government is controlled by a DFL (Democrat)-majority legislature more in bed with the Teachers’ Unions than Elliot Spitzer was with Ashley Duprè, despite the fact that when one compares apples with apples, charter schools perform better.

As they’re discovering in New Orleans, loud and clear enough that even a bureaucrat can figure it out.

Our next stop on our tour around the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is Downing World.

One of the fun things about the MOB is realizing that there’s this huge undercurrent of smart, motivated, boundlessly interesting people out there, all over the place.  And you never know when you’re going to smack into one of them.

If only rhetorically.

David Downing lives in Saint Paul, has a diverse bunch of interests, and has been blogging pretty steadily for almost six years now.

Given my interest in schools, this post caught my attention:

Orphanages, though, are passe. They’re considered old-fashioned. Inhumane. Draconian. Mckenzie writes:

When Newt Gingrich suggested in 1994 that many welfare kids would be better off in orphanages, Hillary Clinton declared the proposal “unbelievable and absurd.” Conventional child-welfare wisdom hasn’t changed much since.

Families — blood or foster — should raise children, the modern, progressive, liberal mindset says. Not government. Not institutions.

They conveniently ignore the 800-lb. irony in the room. I’m surprised that I hadn’t caught it until now.

The same modern, progressive, liberal types who find institutional child-rearing so offensive tend to be the same people who want the public schools to take over more and more of what used to be the responsibilities of parents. After all, the government and professional educators know best. They’ll feed the kids breakfast. Teach them about sex and drugs. Teach them values (whose, exactly?). Provide after-school care. Provide summer programs. They want the schools to take over as many parental responsibilities as possible, even when kids have parents!

So, they hold both of these ideas at the same time: 1) An institution called an orphanage couldn’t possibly raise children as well as substitute parents. 2) An institution called a public school can raise children better than their actual parents.

Read the whole thing (from mid-January).

Downing cranks out something a couple of times a week, and everything I saw looked like good stuff.

Check out a new MOB blog every day.  I mean, I am, so why not?

Tomorrow is caucus night in Minnesota.

Republicans will gather at hundreds of community centers, schools, city halls, auditoriums and libraries around the state to vote for resolutions, local party leadership, and – most importantly – delegates to go to their House District (called “BPOU”, in curious MNGOP parlance) conventions, there to begin a process of delegate selections and candidate endorsements that will end at the State Convention from April 29 through May 1; each round of conventions will, in turn, endorse state legislators and representatives, Congressional candidates, and candidates for Governor as well as the other constitutional offices, and any local races in play.

And if you have a vision for the Minnesota Republican Party, now’s the time to speak up.

I’ll be going, of course; I’m the convener for my precinct in the Midway.  I’m hoping we continue the fantastic turnout from the 2008 cycle; that year, the hordes of energetic Ron Paul supporters stormed the gates, and in so doing energized the party, motivating it to actions that had eluded it for many years.

This year, the Tea Party movement – a cousin of the Paul campaign, but broader and not focused on any personalities or, indeed, any parties – will no doubt dominate the discussion at the conventions.  While the Tea Party movements are, in fact, non-partisan, there is just no room for that sort of populist-libertarian philosophy in the DFL, and the Independence Party is a joke that will likely lose major-party status this election.  (And yes, I have friends in the IP, so I know this’ll lead to an argument or two – but it’s the truth; the “Independence” Party, AKA “DFL Lite”, without Jesse Ventura, is just another self-marginalizing third party, existing only as a spoiler; even Minnesotans, as flighty as they are, are getting tired of the joke.  Any party that can consider Dean Barkley a serious candidate deserves to fade, and quickly).

Who’s doing to be the winner?

We won’t know for sure until we get to each level of endorsing convention, of course.  But the big ‘tater is obviously the Minnesota Governor race, along with the various Constitutional Office races (Secretary of State, State Auditor and Attorney General).

For governor, it’s a tough call this year.  There are three great conservatives running for the nomination this year; Dave Hann, Tom Emmer and Marty Seifert.  Each of them has a fairly impeccable conservative record (tempered by, yes, a few of the compromises that politicians always wind up making in a deliberative body like the legislature; the only people who can manage pure and uncompromising in their political records are those who have no political record at all).

The real question for me?  Which is the conservative who will do the best job of going to “independents”, and convince them to move to “the right?”

That’s the thing I’ve gotta figure out by tomorrow night.

What’s everyone’s sense this time around?  Leave a comment, and vote in the poll…

I’ll be taking votes through Tuesday. Who’s the frontrunner?

The Earth is getting warmer!  And Humans are causing it!

Don’t question the theory, peasants!  It is SETTLED SCIENCE!

No, really! It’s all solid peer-reviewed science, and when the peers speak, you peasants must hold your filthy tongues!

In its most recent report [the IPCC] stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

Silence, Peasants!  When we say “the science is settled”, it means “go away and talk about last night’s Desperate Housewives” or something, and let the Elites think Big Thoughts.

Via Roger Ebert’s twitter feed:

Kathryn Bigelow wins the [Directors Guild] Award for “The Hurt Locker!” That makes Locker the favorite for Best Picture in the Oscars.

Now that is good news.

I loved Hurt Locker when I saw it last summer; if you haven’t seen it, by all means do.  It is one fantastic movie, and I’m hoping it hits the Oscars like a 152mm shell wired to a homemade detonator.

Rhetorically speaking.

To:  Japan

From:  Mitch Berg

Re:  Protests

While I can certainly appreciate that an American military presence on your soil may cramp your style and make you upset…

Thousands of protesters from across Japan marched today in Tokyo to protest against U.S. military presence on Okinawa, while a Cabinet minister said she would fight to get rid of a marine base Washington considers crucial.

Some 47,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Japan, with more than half on the southern island of Okinawa.

Residents have complained for years about noise, pollution and crime around the bases.

…please don’t feel me disrespectful in noting that you had a grade-A chance of averting this whole situation up through December 6, 1941.

Just saying.

That is all.

President Obama seems to have realized that capital gains aren’t a chief concern of business owners and instead is now focusing on a $5000 per capita tax-credit to business that hire new employees.

WSJ: The details of the initiative, which Mr. Obama is expected to highlight when he visits Baltimore today, include a $5,000 tax credit for every net new employee in 2010. This credit would be retroactive to the beginning of the calendar year and could be received on a quarterly basis, if the business so chooses. In addition, employers would receive a tax credit to cover Social Security payroll taxes on wage increases.

As a small business owner that is in fact looking to hire someone in February, I can finally say that the President is proposing a policy that will

1. make me think twice about my plan to bring on a contract worker vs. hiring them full time; which is to say paying the self-employment taxes and
2. make me think twice about making it a full-time permanent position now versus a later date.

Tax cuts across the board would still be a better idea and the macro issues and effects related to this proposal have yet to be debated but I for one am pleased with the President’s initiative.*

*No, someone didn’t hack into my laptop to write something positive about Barack Obama.