(SCENE:  At the Oceanaire – a tony seafood restaurant in Downtown Minneapolis.   Representative Paul Thissen, Senator Tom “Baby Got” Bakk and Speaker of the House Margaret Anderson-Kelliher are sitting at a table with five empty chairs.  Anderson-Kelliher, bored, drums her fingers on the table.  Thissen checks his watch, and Bakk rock nervously in their seats. )

(Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak enters the room)

THISSEN, BAKK and ANDERSON-KELLIHER, SIMULTANEOUSLY:  Hello, Mayor Rybak.

RYBAK:  Hey, Margaret!

(BAKK and THISSEN, deflated, go back to gnawing on toothpicks)

RYBAK:  Thanks for calling the meeting, Margaret.  What’s up?

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  I’d like to lay out some ground rules and strategy for the campaign.

(SEN. MARK DAYTON walks into restaurant).

RYBAK: That’s a great idea.  (Notices DAYTON).  Hey, Mark!

DAYTON:  Aaaaaaagh!   (DAYTON dives to floor, rapidly low-crawls to the table, furtively sits in chair).

THISSEN:  What’s the matter, Mark?

ANDERSON-KELLIHER – Shut up, er…

THISSEN: Paul…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: …whatever.  (Turns to DAYTON)  What’s the matter, Mark?

DAYTON:  (Affixing a lobster bib) Er, nothing.  Why?

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Just curious.  (Looks at menu, as former Senator MATT ENTENZA, with wife LOIS QUAM, enter the restaurant.

BAKK: “Hey, Matt…”

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  I said SHUT UP!

BAKK: You told Paul to shut…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Don’t care! (turns to ENTENZA) How are you today, Matt?

ENTENZA: I’m doing…

QUAM: (A little too effusive) He’s doing just fine, Margaret!  (ENTENZA abruptly stops).

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: Ah, excellent!

(A loud belch issues from outside the entrance.  Rep. TOM RUKAVINA walks in, pounding his chest.  He shakes out another mild belch).

THISSEN:  Hey, Tom…(Trails off as ANDERSON-KELLIHER stares him down; THISSEN looks bash fully at his menu).

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Excellent!  I believe that’s everyone…(counts noses)…except…

(Harps play in the hallway.  A little dry ice fog obscures the floor.  Sen. JOHN MARTY, hands clasped as if in prayer before him, moves across the floor as if floating, and lands like a hummingbird on the remaining chair.  A golden aura briefly suffuses the room, then vanishes).

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Hey, John.

MARTY:  May the blessing of my presence bring you peace.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: Er, yeah.  I called you all here today because voters are having a hard time telling the difference between us.  For the good of the DFL race, it’d be best if we all come up with some sort of differentiation between us before the convention.

RYBAK:  Primary.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Convention!

ENTENZA: Yeah, convention!.

QUAM:  Primary!

ENTENZA: Er, yeah.  Primary.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Convention!

THISSEN:  Convention, just like Margaret says…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  For the last time, shut the **** up! (ANDERSON-KELLIHER flings a salt-shaker at THISSEN, hitting him in the face.  He falls backward over his chair, and lies on the floor, motionless.  DAYTON dives for the ground).

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Like I said, convention.  So I’d like you all to think of things we can do to distinguish ourselves to the voters…

WAITRESS (Approaches with order pad in hand):  Hello, my name is Wendy, and I’ll be your…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  For the last ****** time, shut the **** up…

RYBAK: Er, Margaret?  She’s the waitress…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Oh.  Go ahead, then.

WAITRESS:  Er, OK.  Any drink orders before we order dinner?”

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Boilermaker.

RYBAK: Appletini, please.  Extra tini.

BAKK:  I’ll have whatever Margaret is having.

THISSEN:  (Groans incomprehensibly)

RUKAVINA: Grain Belt Premium!

ENTENZA:  I’ll take your house chablis…

QUAM:  He’ll take the house merlot, and so will I.

ENTENZA:  Er…yeah.

DAYTON:  A diet Pellegrini.

WAITRESS:  Sir, all Pelligrini is “Diet”.  It’s water…

DAYTON:  Two diet pellegrinis.

MARTY:  I shall have a glass of water.  But please bring it in gaseous form.

WAITRESS: Er…wait – you want a cup of steam?

MARTY:  As it is said, so shall it be poured.

WAITRESS:  Er, OK.  And would you all like to start a tab?

(All at table break up into uproarious laughter)

RUKAVINA:  Baby, you ain’t seen nothing.

(WAITRESS LEAVES)

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: OK.  I’d like everyone to say, for the record, what makes you different.  Paul?

THISSEN:  (Groans, puts hand on forehead).

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: OK.  Matt?

ENTENZA:  (Looks at QUAM)

QUAM:  He will raise taxes for a better Minnesota.

(ENTENZA nods enthusiastically).

RYBAK:  Well, I’ll raise taxes for a better Minnsesota, too.

BAKK:   Well, I won’t…

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: Yes, you will.

BAKK:  Yes, I will.

DAYTON:  I will raise taxes.  For a better Minnesota.  (Eyes door furtively).  I will.  I will.  I will.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  OK.  Not getting what I want here…

RUKAVINA:  I’ll raise taxes more for a better Minnesota!

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Better…

WAITRESS (Carrying tray of drinks):  OK, that’s two house Merlots,  a Grain Belt Premium, two Boilermakers, an Appletini, two “diet Pellegrinis” a cup of steam, and (looks at THISSEN) some smelling salts.

THISSEN:  (grunts painfullly)

WAITRESS:  That’ll be $77.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER: No.

WAITRESS:  Er, maam?  I brought the drinks.  You need to pay up.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Shut up.

WAITRESS:  Maam?  This isn’t funny.  You wanna leave me on the look for almost $80 worth of drinks?

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  Shut up!

RUKAVINA:  Yeah.  Shut up!

WAITRESS:  I’m gonna call the police.

ANDERSON-KELLIHER:  (Stands at table)  Attention, everyone in the restaurant.  Please pay our drink tab!  It is for a better Minnesota!

(RUKAVINA, BAKK, RYBAK, QUAM, and ENTENZA applaud; DAYTON balances spoon on his finger; THISSEN groans)

MARTY:  As it is written, so shall it be done.  (MARTY disappears in a blinding flash of pure light).

And…scene.

I’m not sure what’s dumber; that besieged Danish “Mohammed” cartoonist Lars Vilks told a Swedish newspaper how he planned on dealing with killers who – according to some reports – American “Jihad Jane” was recruiting to try to assassinate him…:

The latest threat to Lars Vilks emerged yesterday when seven people were arrested in Ireland accused of plotting to kill the 63-year-old artist.

Mr Vilks responded by saying that he was ready for them. “If something happens, I know exactly what to do,” he said.

His home in southern Sweden now contains a barbed-wire sculpture that could electrocute potential intruders, a secure space to hide in and an axe which will allow him “to chop down” anyone breaking in through his windows.

…or that the press printed it.

Dear terrorist/stalkers/burglars; no boobytraps in my house.  Pinky swear.

The problem with gun control – one of the reasons that it’s finally stiffing with the American people – is that it burdens the law-abiding citizen for the crimes of society’s low-lifes.  It’s one of the reasons America is rejecting gun control; Real Americans can’t abiding punishing those who’ve done no wrong.

Hopefully that same impulse will swallow up this moronic idea:

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill are proposing a new national biometric ID card that would be required of all U.S. workers. WSJ’s Laura Meckler explains the proposal and the objections from privacy advocates.Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

In other words, force each individual American to validate him/herself, rather than deal with the real problems – open borders, and a socialist neighbor whose economy resembles what ours will

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/588e8cae-2d48-11df9c5b-00144feabdc0.html

Yet again, a cure that’s much worse than the disease.

Thriving businesses ship things.

They’re not:

The nascent US recovery could falter because businesses are still reluctant to invest in new equipment and technology, the head of global delivery and logistics company FedEx has warned.

“Business investment went up somewhat in the fourth quarter but is far below what it ought to be in a cyclical recovery like this,” Fred Smith, chairman and chief executive of FedEx, told the Financial Times.

FedEx has a decent record of predicting these things.  Which is the bad news.

Back when I wrote my “Secession Diaries” piece a few years ago, I joked about the militarization of the Federal bureaucracy:

The Prime Minister 1092 approved, presented the plan to Parliament, and within the month announced a plan to increase the Peace Force, and other military forces controlled by the Minister of Peace, to 150,000 men and women. Their weaponry was to be augented with stocks of former US Army weapons – tanks, artillery, etc – taken from depots around the USoC.

However, the powerful labor bloc in the Ministry of Labor worried about the concentration of so much power in the hands of the Ministry of Peace. They rammed through a measure allowing Labor to recruit and, if needed, draft 80,000 armed Labor Enforcement Police.

Suspicious of Labor and Peace, the Transport Ministry snuck in a measure allowing it to recruit or draft 75,000 National Highway Patrol, including a squadron of F-16 Tactical Traffic Control fighters.

Not wanting to be left out, the Ministry of Justice created a force of 45,000 Field Marshals. To prevent violence and terrorism in schools, the Ministry of Education was authorized to recruit/draft and train 50,000 Tactical School Patrols. The Customs Department followed suit with 35,000 Customs Patrol Inspectors, the National Endowment for the Humanities with 20,000 Special Museum Guards, the Ministry of Safety added 40,000 armed Emergency Workers, the Ministry of Housing with 20,000 Tactical Housing Inspectors, and even the Ministry of Sensitivity, which brought on 10,000 plainclothes Sensitivity Detectives.

Now, I thought I was exaggerating; I mean, the phenomenon swerved into the ridiculous during the Clinton years, but hyperbole is hyperbole.

Well, no. Hyperbole is reality.  The Department of Education is taking bids on some new equipment:

U.S. Department of Education (ED) intends to purchase twenty-seven (27) REMINGTON BRAND MODEL 870 POLICE 12/14P MOD GRWC XS4 KXCS SF. RAMAC #24587 GAUGE: 12 BARREL: 14″ – PARKERIZED CHOKE: MODIFIED SIGHTS: GHOST RING REAR WILSON COMBAT; FRONT – XS CONTOUR BEAD SIGHT STOCK: KNOXX REDUCE RECOIL ADJUSTABLE STOCK FORE-END: SPEEDFEED SPORT-SOLID – 14″ are designated as the only shotguns authorized for ED based on compatibility with ED existing shotgun inventory, certified armor and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.

The required date of delivery is March 22, 2010.

Interested sources must submit detailed technical capabilities and any other information that demonstrates their ability to meet the requirements above, no later than March 12, 2010 at 12 PM, E.S.T. Any quotes must be submitted electronically to the attention of Holly.Le@ed.gov, Contract Specialist (Contract Operations Group), with a concurrent copy to xxxxxxx.xxxxx@xx.gov, Contracting Officer (Contract Operations Group)

So why does the DoE need riot guns?

Jokes about unruly kids are noted in advance.

To: Kevin Spacey

From: Mitch Berg, Fan

Re: Career Opportunities

Dear Mr. Spacey,

It’s been a long time since you lit up the small screen with your performance as Mel Profitt on Wise Guy (perhaps the most unjustly-obscure great TV show of all time).  Verbal Kint?  Even American Beauty?  Seems like forever.

So I know you’ve been working hard to get back out of the dinner theater circuit.  So no doubt your agent told you this would be a great idea.

Perhaps you need to shoot for The Usual Suspects II: Weekend At Keyser’s.

Just saying.

That is all.

Bill Sparkman was murdered by anti-government zealots spurred to a homicidal rage by Michele Bachmann and the Northern Alliance.  Er, wait.  Nope.  My bad.

Then the guy who crashed a plane into the IRS office in Texas was a tea-bagging mouth-breathing conservative.  Oops.

Then the guy who shot the Pentagon cops ended up being a Glenn-Beck-listening dittohead.  D’oh. This isn’t going well at all.

OK  – any guesses how this “story” turns out?

A woman talking on a cell phone during a movie didn’t take kindly to being “shushed” by another moviegoer. Or at least her boyfriend didn’t.

In a drama that turned more lively than the one on screen — “Shutter Island” — the boyfriend allegedly attacked and stabbed the “shusher” in the neck with a meat thermometer. Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore said the stabbing occured Saturday during a screening of the Martin Scorsese film.

Remember – if we ban kitchen accessories, only criminals will have them:

The victim was attacked by the woman’s boyfriend and another man. Deputies say he was stabbed in the neck with a meat thermometer.

Anyone checked Kos lately?

Remember 2008, 2006, and 1996?  When conservatives, disaffected by the GOP and the people who’d represented it in Washington, stayed home in droves?

Sorry, Dems; it swings both ways:

Is President Obama losing his base?

Liberal and progressive organizations that helped propel him to the White House are turning on him now, little more than a year after he took office. Their collective discontent, on issues from health care to nuclear energy to the handling of terrorism suspects, could mean bad news for Democrats during this fall’s congressional elections.

One wonders if anyone’s regretting rejecting Hillary?

Polls show that liberals and blacks still approve of the job Obama’s doing. That approval, however, doesn’t necessarily mean they will make the effort to vote, and many of the activists and groups that worked to get people to the polls in 2008 say they’re not inclined right now to help Democrats in the fall.

Now, I”m not going to get too excited about the polls; the base will most likely rally around their guy, at least partially.

But if the base ain’t buying it – and not turning out 100% – what will the undecideds and “independents” do?

As we noted earlier, the unintended consequences of a new Obama administration regulation will be worse than the “crisis” it was intended to solve:

Several airlines, including Fort Worth-based American and Houston-based Continental, say they will cancel flights rather than risk paying stiff penalties for delaying passengers on the runway…Under new federal guidelines that take effect next month, airlines can be fined up to $27,500 per passenger if a plane is stuck on the tarmac for longer than three hours.

With the new fines, a delayed MD-80 could cost American Airlines close to $4 million, and a fine for a full 757 could cost more than $5 million.

So to avoid the huge hit – which doesn’t discriminate between reasons for plans taking off late – airlines will cancel flights that show even the slightest chance of getting delayed on the ground:

“It’s unavoidable that more flights will be canceled to avoid fines,” said American Airlines spokesman Steve Schlachter. “It’s one of the unintended consequences of a bill that has no flexibility.”

A spokesman for the U.S. Transportation Department said airlines can avoid fines by doing a better job of scheduling flights and crews.

“Carriers have it within their power to schedule their flights more realistically, to have spare aircraft and crews available to avoid cancellations” and to rebook passengers when there are cancellations, said Bill Mosley, a department spokesman.

Which is something that could only come from a government bureaucrat (or a libertal tax hike advocate).  Weather and its affect on other airports is the main reason for delays; flights are scheduled months in advance (or so Orbitz tells me; check it yourself).  And at a time when competition, regulation, taxes and fuel costs are already trimming airline margins to the bone, “spare planes and crews” are things that only government can realistically afford.  And remember – today, as we noted in my previous post on the subject one flight in 10,000 is currently more than three hours late in taking off.  Many times more than that will be cancelled, now.

The DFL is heading toward a convention that will bestow its usual “kiss of death” to whomever gets it – usually the candidate that makes the “progressive” activists that control the party the most tingly; this will lead to a summer of hammer-and-tong DFL fratricide leading up to a September primary that will determine the real candidate for governor.

This combined with the fact that the DFL is in a historically disorganized state, and heading into a headwind of disaffection with Barack Obama and a GOP with new leadership at its head and a Tea Party chasing it to relevance, and the DFL and its minions are desperately in need of a sideshow to draw attention away from their own cage match.

Dave Mindeman at mnpAct wants to direct the reader to the sideshow they’re counting on – the neck-and-neck GOP endorsement battle between Marty Seifert and Tom Emmer:

The Emmer vs. Seifert free for all on the GOP side of the governor’s race is heating up. Both sides are capable of some prolific attack dog politics. And it will get nasty.

It is gradually developing into a conservative base vs. party establishment fight. Emmer is increasingly drawing endorsements and support from conservative bloggers, conservative activists, and conservative leadership. Seifert has support from old line party leadership and the more traditional Republican base.

Which is an interesting way for the local leftysphere to put it, given that both Emmer and Seifert are routinely portrayed as “conservative extremists” whenever they’re mentioned in any other context.  But it’s not untrue; Seifert’s got the organizational mojo, Emmer’s a conservative firebrand and the best stump speaker in Minnesota politics today.

The two have developed a recent history. Emmer had challenged Seifert for Minority Leader a few years back and then refused to vote for him for Speaker in 2009. Emmer has been waiting awhile for this opportunity and he is cashing in.

Add to all of this the fact that delegate strength to the convention is nearly evenly divided and you have the makings of an old style, no holds barred, nasty party convention.

Yep.  The GOP convention is going to be a donnybrook, very possibly crazier than the 2002 convo.

It is noteworthy that Seifert has been particularly critical of Emmer’s voting record of late. The in-depth research style has the definite ring of a Brodkorb type tactic. Although the former MDE attack blogger has been careful to be neutral in his capacity as party deputy chair, his fingerprints are almost detectable in the current Seifert strategy.

It’s no big secret; Seifert’s the “insider”.   The party has several years invested in Seifert as minority leader.

But this – and the idea that for every yin there needs to be an opposite yang – leads Mindeman to a fatally flawed assumption or, if you are more cynical, to the gaping whopper the DFL wants you all to believe about the MNGOP in the upcoming election; the sideshow, if you will, to try to distract the voters and encourage the DFL troops as they go through their own cage match this summer.

He starts out OK…:

Looking over the general Republican landscape, let me make a speculation…and mind you this is only an opinion.

The conservatives are putting a vested interest in Emmer. He is emerging as their consensus choice. Emmer has a wind at his back as he makes his case for the convention.

Yep.  The GOP’s conservatives are using the endorsement process as it was intended to be used; as the time to reject compromise, to declare “death or glory”, to come home with their shields or on them; to campaign for the most conservative candidate left in the race.  They don’t want the consolation prize; they want it all.  And correctly so; now is the time to fight like hell for the brass ring.

Seifert’s supporters, by the way, are doing exactly the same thing.  Because now is the time for the fight.

But it’s on May 2 that Mindeman’s theory goes to pot.

If Seifert manages to wrest the nomination away from Emmer in a bloody convention, you will see a party that will go into the fall campaign divided. A conservative backlash might just stop the conservatives from coalescing around Seifert, reducing his turn out and possibly moving toward some other third party or maybe even forming one.

Let me take you back in time to 2002.  Brian Sullivan – who was and is every bit as conservative as Tom Emmer – had the backing of the conservative base.  Tim Pawlenty – who held the same position in the GOP caucus that Seifert does today – and Sullivan were every bit as closely locked together as Seifert and Emmer are today.   And some of the punditry, especially on the left, predicted exactly the same result; that Sullivan’s supporters would stay home, that conservatives would break away, that the GOP would battle itself into irrelevance.

But the convention, as long and brutal as it got, had exactly the opposite effect.  To win the endorsement, Tim Pawlenty had to adopt one of Sullivan’s key driving points – the Taxpayers League’s “No New Taxes” pledge.  And for the imponderably vast majority of Minnesota conservatives, that was more than enough.

Tim Pawlenty took the pledge – and, more importantly, has honored it for eight years, now.  And I, as a fire-breathing conservative talk show host, could care less if he took a trip to the arctic with Will Steger that had absolutely no policy ramifications, as long as he stuck to the point that mattered – stymying the DFL’s plan, “spend like crack whores with stolen gold cards”.

In short, the bruising endorsement process had exactly the effect it was supposed to; a candidate won, but as a result of his fight to get endorsed, he took the keystone of his challenger’s platform to the Governor’s Mansion with him.

Emmer may have a better chance of holding the party together but he is going to carry some baggage as well.

Nope.

Look – I’m not backing any particular candidate, at least not publicly.  Not yet.  But I’ll tell you this; even if you are a stone-cold Tom Emmer zealot, you have to realize that not only would Marty Seifert be a better governor than any of the DFL’s pack of hamsters, but that Marty Seifert’s voting record in the House is more conservative than Tim Pawlenty’s ever was.   Seifert is a conservative.  As conservative as Emmer?  Perhaps not – but plenty good enough.

So campaign like hell for whomver your candidate is – Seifert or Emmer.  Because for once,  conservatives are in a win-win situation.   Whomever gets the nomination will be a better, more conservative governor than any of the alternatives available to us today.  Neither will be perfect – but perfect, as they say, is the enemy of “plenty good enough”.

There will be blood.

No.  There will be coffee, and shouting, and more coffee, and pictures of delegates sleeping at 2AM with drool coming out of the corner of their mouth, and more coffee, and Excedrin, and five or ten or fifty ballots, and concession and acceptance speeches, and handshakes, and meetings, and buried hatchets and smoothed feathers, and looks out the window at the Tea Partiers who are done asking nicely for results.

And on the morning after the final gavel, there will be a campaign that hits the road at the head of a mostly-unified GOP that has a three month headstart building a winning campaign, on its way toward capping off an epic comeback.

There will be coffee, drool and victory.

Three words to live by.

“Show me the cases of ACORN being convicted of fraud!”, the lefty demands upon any criticism of the “community organizing” group.

It’d help if the charges were actually investigated:

Milwaukee police officers sat on their hands for months last year instead of investigating possible voter fraud cases from the 2008 general election.

Must be just some hate-clogged “teabagger”, right?

It’s an incredible claim, but it’s coming from a credible source:

Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf, the Milwaukee County prosecutor responsible for overseeing campaign and election issues.

“Honestly, the Milwaukee Police Department largely ignored your double voter (and other) referrals received in January 2009 for the first six months of 2009,” Landgraf wrote in an e-mail to a city elections official on Jan. 26.

So ACORN is “innocent”.

In their defense, they’re out on the golf course looking for the real frauds.

…probably fifty years before CGI, when people actually had to do the impossible:

That’s The Ross Sisters, from 1944.  And it’s 90% amazing (especially the shot starting around 2:45), 10% kinda creepy.

(From my high school classmate Dena’s Facebook page)

Gotta say one thing about the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers; there’s no shortage of economists.

Phil Miller writes Market Power, an excellent, consistent, fairly prolific blog that covers family life, Missouri sports and, yes, copious economics.

And his timing is perfect.  I was just floundering through writing a post about  Joe Conason’s idiotic Salon column saying the Tea Parties would leave the US open to catastrophes like Haiti’s response to their earthquake.

Miller, naturally, does it better:

3.  On the one hand we have Haiti, an impoverished country hit by a magnitude 7 earthquake.  The result was hundreds of thousands dead and terrible damage.  On the other hand we have Chile, hit by a magnitude 8.8 earthquake, much, much worse than the quake that hit Haiti in terms of sheer seismic power (the Richter scale is based upon the base-10 logarithmic scale).  Like the Haitian quake, this one was centered near a major city and it caused considerable damage.  Unlike the Haitian quake, it also generated a tsunami that inundated coastal regions of Chile.  It was a double whammy for Chile.  But the death toll was much smaller than in Haiti (just over 700 dead from what I last saw).

Why the difference in death tolls?  One argument can be made that Chile’s building codes were stricter than Haiti’s.  That is true.  But you also have to point to Chile having enough wealth and income to be able to afford having stronger building codes.  You have to be able to take care of the basics – basic food and shelter – first before you take care of the fancy stuff – fancy food and shelter.  Where does wealth and income come from?  Generally speaking, from strong market institutions (HT Art Carden).  Why does Chile have stronger market institutions than Haiti?  Bret Stephens points to Milton Friedman.

Ironically, Friedman’s Nobel Prize ceremony was punctuated with protests for his having been associated with the Chilean dictatorship.

Phil Miller’s Market Power; all the Missouri, none of the Keynesianism.

Speaking of schools – the head of the Detroit Public School board, which graduates less than a third of its students, albeit at exquisite expense – writes like an illiterate:

The school board is led by Otis Mathis, who wrote a mass email last August:

Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?

And here’s the beginning of an email to supporters a few days ago that started with this:

If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

Remember when MN2020’s John Fitzgerald said that the big advantage public systems had over charter schools was that you could elect the school board?

Some punch lines write themselves.

Mark Krikorian at NRO-Online is un-thrilled by the census’ intrusivness, too:

Fully one-quarter of the space on this year’s form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government’s business (despite the New York Times‘ assurances to the contrary on today’s editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks “What is Person 1’s race?” (and so on, for other members of the household). My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don’t do it.

I think I’ve done that.  I also registered for Obama’s “Organizing for America” email blasts as “Beinrich Bimmler” (20 extra points for those who get the reference).

Krikorian actually has a better idea:

Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — “Some other race” — and writing in “American.” It’s a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, “American” was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.

So remember: Question 9 — “Some other race” — “American”. Pass it on.

I’ll plan on it.

Toyota’s unintended acceleration issue may be real, or it may be a combination of factors which probably include opportunism, a litigious society, and the fact that some people have big feet.

Who knows – it’s probably all of the above. One thing I do know is that if I were behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius (I know, I know, just try to imagine it if you can) and the accelerator seemed to be stuck, the first thing I would do is…

…call 911?

“I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car, and it just did something kind of funny … and it just stuck there,” he said at a news conference outside a Highway Patrol office. “As I was going, I was trying the brakes … and it just kept speeding up.”

[Jim] Sikes said he called 911 for help, and dispatchers talked him through instructions on how he might be able to stop the car. But nothing worked.

…or so he says.

Mr. Sikes, with all due respect, are you trying to tell us that you couldn’t put the car in Neutral, or Park, or turn off the ignition? …but you could pick up your phone and dial 911?

Calling 911 in this situation affords the citizen a calm, cool professional, at the ready to tell you what you already should know, but it also affords said citizen the opportunity to convert what should have been a thirty-second emergency (assuming it was real) into a matter of public record and with a little added drama, a spectacle. On a slow news day, you might find video of your melodrama on every channel and across the interweb.

Bing!

Alerted by emergency dispatchers, a California Highway Patrol officer was able to catch up to Sikes’ Prius and used the patrol car’s public address system to instruct Sikes to apply the brakes and the emergency brake at the same time.

The trooper said after the incident that he could smell the Prius’s brakes burning, even at that high speed.

I smell something too, but it’s not burning brakes.

Over at Minnesota “Progressive” Project, a writer named “MNBearBud” plaintively asks “Can Minnesota Elect a Bold Progressive Governor in 2010?”

It’s a mash note for

As I have been helping out at a couple different DFL Conventions in the past couple weeks I have been hearing something that kind of disturbs me. The following quote is a paraphrase of several like it that I have heard.  “Minnesota is not ready for a bold progressive Governor, we need a nice slow moderate progressive.”  

I find this remark to be quite interesting given the present state of affairs with Gov. Tim Pawlenty running what used to be a great Minnesota right into the ground.

[So far “into the ground” that our unemployment rate is better than most of the nation in the midst of the Great Depression “Recession”.  But I digress – Ed.]

Our State Legislator can pass progressive bills, but they get stopped in their tracks by the Governor’s office. This is exactly what happened with GAMC. Yet, as much as people want progressive change, there are those who think that a bold progressive guy like John Marty just cannot be elected Governor. I am going to the State Convention as an alternate delegate for John Marty and I stand by that decision.  

The plea is something I hear from a lot of “progressives”; “why can’t we have another Elmer Anderson or Floyd Olson, and have him now?”

Well, the answer is simple.  No, Minnesota will not have a bold “progressive” governor this go-around.

Here’s why:

• The term is wrong.  “Progressivism” isn’t progress; it’s statism.  It’s glopping the deadening morass of government onto the life of our state.  I know – I’m nitpicking terminology.  I’m doing it for a good reason.  “Progressivism” as practiced by the MNDFL isn’t progress; it’s back to the thirties.
• But language-nerd nit-picking aside, sure – it’s possible a “progressive” might get elected.  The conventional wisdom tells us that a conservative just can not win the governor’s race in Minnesota this year.  Just like the conventional wisdom said that Skip Humphrey and Roger Moe would win the governor’s race, that Erik Paulsen ran too far to the right to win the Third, and that Michele Bachmann’s goose was cooked in 2008.  So it’s possible that a “progressive” might win the gubernatorial race. 
• But if he or she does, he or she will not be “bold”.  He or she will be fighting hard to float an agenda, because the MNGOP is going to either take back a chamber this year, or come very close.  The progressive will likely be a fairly timid one, by necessity.
• And while I said above that it’s “possible” the DFL could win this year, that’s just prudency beating optimism.  The GOP, even in this most miasmically-blue state, has a tailwind this year.  Obama is chasing the independents away from the left, although Twin Cities liberals, stricken with Pauline Kael syndrome, might not see it in their daily lives.   The DFL field – Marty, R.T. Rybak, Mark Dayton, Tom Rukavina, Margaret Anderson-Keliher, Paul Thissen, and Matt Entenza – are the people behind our serial multi-billion-dollar deficits, borne of the DFL’s extended orgy of irresponsible spending.  Their answer – heap more taxes on the peasants to keep the lords in Saint Paul fat and happy – is flying with fewer and fewer Minnesotans.  And both GOP candidates are not only well-placed to ride that wave, but one of them will be on the ground, running at the head of a newly-energized MNGOP and tens of thousands of newly-minted tax hawks in the Tea Party movement, during the first week of May, while the Minnesota  “Nude Thugs In The Shower” party will face three months of duking it out until the primary (because the DFL party endorsement, other than in great Democrat years like ’06 and ’08, is a traditional kiss of death).   Will it be enough to put “the Conventional Wisdom” to the pike yet again?  We’ll see.
• And just look at the Nude Thug lineup:  Marty? Rybak? Dayton?  Rukavina?  Anderson-Kelliher?  Thissen? Tom “Baby Got” Bakk?  Entenza?  I’m sure there’s a genetic engineering project out there that might be working on building a less-interesting, less-inspirational person than any of these, but scientists say results are years away. And the DFL is melting down almost as fast as the national Tic party is; four years of being unable to overcome the leadership of a lone governor has made them ornery and peevish.  And ornery and peevish don’t win elections.  But the DFL message, no matter which DFLer burbles to the top, is going to be “I’ll spend more, I’ll raise taxes more, and I hated Governor Pawlenty more still!”  I don’t think that’s going to be a winner this year.

After years of critiquing the public schools, I’ve seen any number of rationalizations from their defenders in education (who, in Minnesota, largely control the DFL party) and the media (who, in Minnesota, are largely in bed with the DFL) and the crop of “think tanks” that routinely mix people from the media, DFL and education.  Kids spend too much time playing videogames; parents don’t support teachers; unallotment; “diversion” of funds to charter schools.

I’ve seen bad teachers blamed – but rarely in left-leaning publications like  Newsweek, and never in an article that notes that a sitting Democrat administration is participating in the blaming:

Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate—an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not.

It is also true and unfortunate that often the weakest teachers are relegated to teaching the neediest students, poor minority kids in inner-city schools.

And the union:

Nothing, then, is more important than hiring good teachers and firing bad ones. But here is the rub. Although many teachers are caring and selfless, teaching in public schools has not always attracted the best and the brightest. There once was a time when teaching (along with nursing) was one of the few jobs not denied to women and minorities. But with social progress, many talented women and minorities chose other and more highly compensated fields. One recent review of the evidence by McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, showed that most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound high-school students. (Finland takes the top 10 percent.)

Of course, grades aren’t necessarily an indicator of that innate ability to teach – and while teachers (especially in small, rural districts and many troubled urban ones) don’t make spectacular money, the pay and benefits are pretty excellent in much of the profession.

I maintain that money isn’t the hitch – and the stats seem to bear that out.  We’ll come back to that.

The unions are a problem – a huge one – but not the only one:

At the same time, the teachers’ unions have become more and more powerful. In most states, after two or three years, teachers are given lifetime tenure. It is almost impossible to fire them. In New York City in 2008, three out of 30,000 tenured teachers were dismissed for cause. The statistics are just as eye-popping in other cities. The percentage of teachers dismissed for poor performance in Chicago between 2005 and 2008 (the most recent figures available) was 0.1 percent. In Akron, Ohio, zero percent. In Toledo, 0.01 percent. In Denver, zero percent. In no other socially significant profession are the workers so insulated from accountability.

The unions have done one thing that’s immensely more damaging to education than insulate their membership; they have turned education into a 12 year procedural assembly line, bolting bits of knowledge onto students subject entirely to union-directed work rules that treat students like cars or coffee makers.

The article goes through some of the changes that are burbling up through the system – largely outside of the union system and the mainstream academic academy; Teach for America, Knowledge is Power, and charter schools, all of which are highly successful, and thus targets of intense counterpropaganda from the establishment.

It is difficult to dislodge the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out. Using nonunion charter schools, New Orleans has been able to measure teacher performance in ways that the teachers’ unions have long and bitterly resisted. Under a new Louisiana law, New Orleans can track which ed schools produce the best teachers, forcing long-needed changes in ed-school curricula. (The school system of Detroit is just as broken as New Orleans’s was before the storm—but stuck with largely the same administrators, the same unions, and the same number of kids, and it has been unable to make any progress.)

The big bellwether?  The Obama Administration is actually on board with the dissatisfaction:

The teachers’ unions—the National Education Association (3.2 million members) and the American Federation of Teachers (1.4 million members) are major players in the Democratic Party at the national and local levels. So it is extremely significant—a sign of the changing times—that the Obama administration has taken them on. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is dangling money as an incentive for state legislatures to weaken the grip of the teachers’ unions…

And that’s starting to weaken the force of the unions’ Thin Plaid Line:

One of the unions, the AFT under Randi Weingarten, seems to realize that sheer obstructionism won’t work. “One of the most hopeful things I’ve seen is that the union people don’t want to spend so much time defending the not-so-good teachers anymore. I think the pressure of accountability is paying off,” says Haycock of the Education Trust. “They know they will be held responsible if they are defending teachers who aren’t any good.”

The danger, of course, is that while the current Educational-Industrial Complex – unions, academia and politicians – are a self-serving monster that gets terrible results, it’s not stupid.  We’ve been through these reform drives before.  Remember the Reagan-era initiative to get more, better teachers into the profession?  Remember the Bush-era demands for accountability?  All were either successfully resisted by the Educational-Industrial Complex and the Thin Plaid Line, or absorbed, neutralized, neutered.

While the Administration’s actions, and the success of non-traditional systems like charter schools and New Orleans’ system provide hope, we’re going to need something along the lines of the Tea Parties to save our educational system.

Remember when Obama was going to “restore” America’s respect around th world?”

Either do most Americans:

The Democracy Corps-Third Way survey released Monday finds that by a 10-point margin — 51 percent to 41 percent — Americans think the standing of the U.S. dropped during the first 13 months of Mr. Obama’s presidency.

Democracy Corps and Third Way lean just a tad to the left, which makes this next bit absolutley hilarious:

“This is surprising, given the global acclaim and Nobel peace prize that flowed to the new president after he took office,” said pollsters for the liberal-leaning organizations.

It was surprising – the the same way it shocked us that Milli Vanilli wasn’t all that talented.

But the numbers apparently were bad enough that even DN/3W couldn’t whitewash ’em:

On the national security front, a massive gap has emerged, with 50 percent of likely voters saying Republicans would likely do a better job than Democrats, a 14-point swing since May. Thirty-three percent favored Democrats.

“The erosion since May is especially strong among women, and among independents, who now favor Republicans on this question by a 56 to 20 percent margin,” the pollsters said in their findings.

A dedicated lefty might respond “yeah, but that’s just polling Americans”.  True – which is something the poll has in common with Presidential elections.

More importantly, though?  The whole “America lost respect during the Bush years” meme also pretty much polled only Americans.  Most foreigners who answer public opinion polls hate America, while a significant subset simultaneously hope to immigrate…

…may get their marginal yuks referring to Republicans as “wingnuts” or “the stupid party”, we will always have the “Naked Thugs In Showers Party“.

Thank you, Rahm “It Home” Emanuel.

Nurses in a Brit hospital allow a man to die of dehydration:

Kane Gorny was so desperate for a drink that he rang police to beg for their help.

They arrived on the ward only to be told by doctors that everything was under control.

The next day his mother Rita Cronin found him delirious and he died within hours.

She said nurses had failed to give him vital drugs which controlled fluid levels in his body. ‘He was totally dependent on the nurses to help him and they totally betrayed him.’

He worked for Waitrose and had been a keen footballer and runner until he was diagnosed with a brain tumour the year before his death

A coroner has such grave concerns about the case that it has been referred to police.

So that’s how you get accountability from government healthcare; you die under suspecious and hideously cruel circumstances.

And they say we peasants will have no options.

Iranian sock-puppet “president” Ahmadinejad says 9/11 was an inside job…

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday called the September 11 attacks on the United States a “big fabrication” that was used to justify the U.S. war on terrorism, the official IRNA news agency reported.

…guaranteeing him a post-term job either on Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, or writing for Minnesota “Progressive” Project along with 9/11 truther Grace Kelly.

It’s good to see the lad planning ahead.

Michael Moore is pledging to whip Obama and Democrats in Congress into shape – liberal shape – if he is named the next White House chief of staff. And Moore vows to sleep in the White House basement and work for $1 per year if the president hires him.

“Now, don’t get too giddy with excitement over my offer, because you and I are going to be up at 5 in the morning, 7 days a week and I am going to get you pumped up for battle every single day,” Moore writes in a letter posted on his Web site that he said was sent to Obama. “Each morning you and I will do 100 jumping jacks and you will repeat after me: “THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ELECTED ME, NOT THE REPUBLICANS, TO RUN THE COUNTRY! I AM IN CHARGE! I WILL ORDER ALL OBSTRUCTIONISTS OUTTA MY WAY! IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DON’T LIKE WHAT I’M DOING THEY CAN THROW MY ASS OUT IN 2012. IN THE MEANTIME, I CALL THE SHOTS ON THEIR BEHALF! NOW, CONGRESS, DROP AND GIVE ME 50!!”

Okay, put aside for a moment the unrestrained use of all-caps…and the call for a dictatorship…before Michael Moore orders congress to do 100 jumping jacks and 50 push ups, I’d like to see Michael Moore do…just one…of either.

Just one.

One floppy man-boobs jumping jack.

“With or without Michael Moore, Democrats are in for a rude awakening in November”

…but with Michael Moore they’d be in for a rude awakening when they find two years’ worth of chicken wing bones and empty Snack Pack Pudding cups in the basement of the White House.

I laughed my brains out watching this BBC piece about “Fulla”, the highly successful Moslem competitor to the Barbie Doll.

No, not about the doll itself – I mean, cool and all.  Yaaay free enterprise!

The yuks came from the BBC’s video viewer.

I’ll put the spoiler below the jump.

(more…)

I was listening to MPR last night, and caught an episode of “MPR Presents” that reprised a speech by the honorable Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey.  Mayor Booker has apparently had good results running Newark, a city that is one of America’s longest-running punchlines due to its blight, violence, corruption, incompetence, and history of crime both organized and random.

Booker is a Democrat, Afro-American, and in many ways from the same model as President Obama; from upper-middle-class roots (his parents were IBM executives), and a former “community organizer” (spending a few years living in one of Newark’s projects, and several months in a motor home which he’d park at drug-traffic-prone intersections around the city).

Unlike Obama, he’s actually had some substantial effect on his city.  Crime has fallen under his administration, and after hiking taxes in the first year of his term, he’s held the line on budgets and spending since then.  He’s far from the most profligate liberal in New Jersey public life; like Barack Obama, he was elected to his biggest office to date in 2006; one might be forgiven for wishing that if the Democrats had to pick a not-overly-experienced candidate for pure camera value, they’d picked Booker instead of Obama.  This is, by the way, a statement against interest for me; he’s a liberal.  But one should give credit where it’s due, while working to do better still (and noting that it was a Republican, Brett Schundler, who first showed that a corrupt Jersey cesspool could have potential, in Jersey City in the nineties).

Booker’s also a highly edumacated person, for those of you for whom paper credentials obtained before age 27 are important; Booker has bachelor and masters from Stanford (where he became pals with liberal shrieking head Rachel Maddow), a Rhodes Scholarship to Queens College at Oxford, and a JD from Yale. He was also an all-Pac 10 football player at Stanford.

And as I listened to him speak, I was reminded of the great media meme from eight years ago, when waves of America’s pseudo-intelligent tittered like snarky eighth-grade girls when George W. Bush pronounced the word “Nuclear” “NOO-kyu-lar”.   This, the born-again mean girls declared, was a sure sign of stupidity.

Anyway – I listened, interested, as Booker, the highly-educated, very accomplished mayor of one of America’s most intransigently-difficult cities, spoke about a meeting with Colin Powell.  Booker asked Powell what was the greatest threat facing America.  Was it terrorism?  Poverty?  Income imbalance? Was it…

“NOO-kyu-lar proliferation?”

Wow.  I guess he’s really not only an idiot, but white trash to boot.