For a non-lawyer, trying to figure out what the SCOTUS justices are really saying when they talk is a little like the Oracle of Delphi trying to predict the next day’s action at Canterbury.  Lots of figurative sheep entrails and the like.

But in yesterday’s hearing for S McDonald V. Chicago, this bit here sounded modestly encouraging to this mere layman:

In oral arguments Tuesday, the justices signaled they are ready to pivot off a 2008 case, which overturned the handgun ban in the federal enclave of Washington and extend the right to “keep and bear arms” to states and localities.

Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, considered the swing vote on the nine-member court, observed that the right to possess a gun has a “fundamental character” akin to freedom of speech. A decision in the case is expected this summer.

Aside:  After years of being the flip vote on issue after issue after issue, I wonder if Anthony Kennedy has double the ego of all the other justices?

I attended my House District convention – 66B – last night at Falcon Heights City Hall.

We had a few fewer people than the Ron Paul-swollen 2008 turnout, but it was pretty solid, and uncommonly well-informed, I thought.  Lots of tea partiers mixed it up with some of the stalwarts,  making an interesting mix of people.

Of our seven delegates selected to go to the CD4 convention next month, an informal survey showed five were at least initially committed to Tom Emmer.

As to the resolutions – normally both the most time-consuming and least-productive part of the conventions?   Things clipped along pretty fast – we voted for blocks of resolutions, paying individual attention only to the ones that people chose to debate indivually, maybe a quarter of the suggestions that came up from the caucuses.

The parts I thought were interesting:

• Gone were the endless pro-life resolutions.  No, no change in heart – but I suspect most people genuinely believe that the MNGOP’s platform is sufficiently anti-infanticide.
• There was, however, a resolution to remove the pro-death-penalty plank in the state party platform.  While it’ll no doubt die on its way up the food chain, it was interesting in that it passed the district convention by a close margin – for conservative reasons.
• Someone – not me – had actually gotten resolution forwarded from the caucuses that seconded John LaPlante’s idea (which I enthusiastically endorse) of erasing the state platform and replacing it with a short statement of princples.  It failed, I believe, but only barely.  2012 is the year.

Onward and upward!

Mayor Richard Daley (Orc, Chicago), defender of Chicago’s racist curtailment of the human right of self-defense, pleads victim:

“We have the right for health and safety to pass reasonable laws dealing with the protection and health of the people of the city of Chicago,” Daley said.

Really?

When were you thinking of passing a “reasonable” law?

Because all your gang-crime-infested city has is a ban on the law-abiding citizen’s right to defend themselves against the scumbags that make Chicago among the most dangerous in the country.

Get back on that, m’kay?

He’s a sick man.

Gore suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

…and Dementia.

“an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”

…just so you know, he’s talking about Man-Made Global Warming, not the Obama administration.

The Problem: While daytime temps are well above freezing, clearing off the streets fairly nicely, the morning temps are still a little chilly; the lows are going to be out of the teens, at least, but still plenty below freezing.  It’s not too cold to ride – that’s why we have caps and gloves, of course.  But it does mean all that melt-off freezes which, along with the big ridges of never-plowed snow left over from earlier in the season, should make the morning ride kinda treacherous.

But afternoons?   Hmmmm.

The Solution: I’m pondering throwing my bike on the bus tomorrow morning and teeing up the season a ride home through the unseasonably warm afternoon rush hour. 

Developing, as they say.

Look – I have utmost respect for the ideals of the scientific method; the rigor and skepticism that one must bring to genuine inquiry.

And so while I’m the last person in the world to try to turn the recent revelations that Dr. Bruce Ivins – the FBI’s prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five Americans, who killed himself as the investigation closed in – was a cross-dressing …:

After the Department of Justice last month formally closed its probe of the 2001 anthrax attacks, the FBI released the first batch of documents detailing the years-long investigation that ended with officials concluding that Bruce Ivins, a government scientist who committed suicide in July 2008, was responsible for the mailings that killed five victims. The records, released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests, portray Ivins as becoming increasingly unhinged as it became clear that he was the principal target of the FBI’s “Amerithrax” probe. Additionally, the memos–a selection of which you’ll find on the following pages–reveal how agents examined every aspect of Ivins’s life, monitored his e-mails, searched his trash, and were even surveilling his Maryland home at the exact time he was inside overdosing. Despite being an FBI target, Ivins was often forthcoming about the details of his strange obsessions and private life. For example, as seen below, when agents executed search warrants in late-2007, an FBI supervisor asked Ivins if he was worried about those raids. Ivins said he was, noting that he did things a “middle age man should not do,” adding that his actions would “not be acceptable to most people.” He then noted that agents searching his basement would find a “bag of material that he uses to ‘cross-dress,'” according to an interview report.

…stolen-panty-sniffing…

Three months before his suicide, surveillance agents sifted through trash Ivins left at his curb and discovered that the beleaguered scientist was disposing of pornographic magazines, fetish titles, and 15 pairs of stained women’s panties. When an FBI lab analysis of the underwear showed that semen was detected on 14 of the garments, a grand jury directive was issued to obtain DNA from Ivins.

…Obama supporter…

In a July 2008 e-mail, Ivins wrote that “Dick Cheney scares me. The Patriot Act is so unconstitutional it’s not even funny.” He added, “I’m voting for Obama!”

…with an odd sense of priorities…:

A laboratory co-worker reported that Ivins hated the New York Yankees and thought New Yorkers were “elitist.”

…into some elaborate generalization about people with whom I disagree about politics, my respect for science means I have to admit I have no evidence that says I should discount the theory, either.

It’s science.  Just saying.

(more…)

Government employment is the only growth sector in the economy right now…Stern (president of the Service Employee International Union [SEIU]) wants to see this trend continue.

John “Policy Guy” LaPlante, writing at True North, h talks about his experience at his first-ever BPOU convention last Saturday.

It’s a good story – read the whole thing, naturally, because reading John LaPlante is just a generally good idea.

Now, my own BPOU convention – District 66 – is tonight.  An  I echo John’s misgivings about one key part of the proceedings that generates a lot of heat, but almost no light at all; the resolutions for platform changes:

You say you want a resolution? As I paged through the packet we all received upon registration, I saw what I had dreaded: Page after page of the party platform, with changes that had been suggested during caucus night.

Why did I dread this, aside from the obvious time sink? First, it meant listening to people talk about items that are of marginal interest, at best, to a state party: the federal budget, the federal tax code, federal agencies, and foreign policy.

I spent a fair amount of time at precinct caucuses trying to filter out some of these, reminding people that nobody in state government has anything to do with, say, prosecuting the war in Iraq, or approving or opposing trans-American highways.

Second, some of the proposed changes are simply bad. One proposal was to repeal the federal income tax “and replace it with nothing.” Given the dynamics of Washington, that would lead to more deficit spending and thus (perhaps) hyperinflation. The measure narrowly failed, and I noticed a delegate in front of me shake his head. Another measure called for the “separation of school and state.” I rise and speak against the resolution, pointing out that the public-good argument for taxpayer funding of schooling is very strong. This is not, I continued, mean that government needs to actually run all schools. Indeed, we would be better off giving people vouchers or tuition tax credits, and let parents choose from among privately run schools and government schools. A defender of the resolution came after me, saying, in part, “we need vouchers.” Of course that’s a rejection, not an extension, of the “separation of school and state” argument. The resolution fails, narrowly.

There are a lot of resolutions that are spawned by angry people who’ve come to precinct caucuses to try to change the world; writing a resolution seems to be a fine way to give that concern a voice.  Which is fine, except that debating them inevitably ends up sucking up an hour of time at precinct caucuses, and will eat up much of the time tonight.

A third problem with the resolutions is that some are simply redundant. There were two resolutions on term limits (again, on the federal level), with specific numbers on years and terms. A third simply says something like “Heck they ought to just go home,” which is a spurt of outrage more than anything.

I remember my first precinct caucus, where we had no less than eight different resolutions calling for the outlawing of abortion.  Which is not only redundant within the caucus, but unnecessary, since the MNGOP Platform is not a pro-choice manifesto even now.

Even though it wasn’t 2008, I did see some Ron Paul-style activists at work. I missed the discussion a resolution to “abolish the Federal Reserve Board and allow free enterprise money and banking.” Unfortunately, I think that one passed. (Just now I noticed another sentence—tell me this is NOT in the platform already, please—“Opposing any movement toward a North American Union including any NAFTA superhighway.”)

The Ronulans made for an entertaining District 66 meeting two years ago; we had to wade through a solid ninety minutes worth of debate on resolutions – most of which had little to no bearing on the state offices we were dealing with!

But here’s the LaPlante’s most interesting point – the one I really wanted to get to when I started this post:

Finally, the document is simply too long. As I told several people, God had 10 commandments; why should a political party have a 17-page (or whatever) platform? At that length, the platform becomes not the statement of general principles that it should be but an internal version of the “Christmas tree” bills, passed by Congress and Legislature alike, that Republicans say they abhor. A paragraph here, a sentence there, many an article in the present platform is an attempt to buy off the support of certain factions in the party. (Maybe I should offer a resolution to abolish the platform and start over, and limit it to 100 words!)

Which got me to thinking; come the next Precinct Caucuses, I may propose exactly that.

Something along these lines:

Whereas the Minnesota Republican Party platform has become a long, meandering collection of sops to its own internal special interests, and…

Whereas no document this long and fragmented can possibly attract people to it on its own merits,

Be it resolved that the Republican Party of Minnesota shall scrap its existing platform, and replace it with the following statement of principles:

“As the Republican Part of Minnesota stands for liberty, the free market, and individual initiative, we resolve to support and uphold in every way the following principles:

• Liberty: lower taxes, less regulation, and a focus on freedom, whether economic, intellectual or political.

• Prosperity: the promotion of the freedom of the market to bring the most opportunity to the most people, and the promotion of merit that drives this prosperity.

• Security: the defense of this nation from enemies abroad, the protection of its citizens from crime and criminals at home, and the security of our borders.

• Culture: The recognition that America is a melting pot that welcomes newcomers who come with a desire to join in our novel experiment, enjoy freedom, wealth and a brotherhood of common principle, rather than view it as a candy store to be plundered.

• Limited Government: A government that is focusing on whether you’re smoking or eating Big Macs is a government that has too much time, money and power on its hands.

• Family: the belief that government needs to uphold, rather than undercut, the basic building block of all healthy societies, the family. “

Yeah, I borrowed it from here; why re-invent the wheel?

Yep.  February, 2012, I’m gonna do it.

So what we have here…:

ACORN employees caught on video apparently advising a couple posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend to lie about her profession and launder her earnings did not commit a crime, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office said Monday.

The office began its investigation Sept. 15, the day after the video was released online by the conservative activists who posed as an outlaw couple seeking help buying a house. It was but one in a series of such videos filmed at ACORN offices around the country that sparked a national scandal and helped drive the organization to near ruin.

…is the admission that there is no law against telling people how to set up a brothel in Brooklyn. Which, to be fair, is probably also the (lack of) law in your county, too (Rent a building, get a no-interest loan from a city community development fund, get some hookers).

Will the left portray it as “ACORN did nothing wrong?”

“We are gratified that the district attorney, after a thorough investigation, found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by ACORN,” said a statement by Jean Sassine, a spokeswoman for the organization that has replaced ACORN’s Brooklyn operation.

Well, not there, anyway.

But give it time.

UPDATE:  But was the Brooklyn DA in the bag for ACORN?

Thomas Sowell comments on the perils of an administration dominated by academics; intellectuals; elitists.

What do you think of the Obama administration…?

It’s very hard to answer that without using language that is totally inappropriate in polite society. But it is quite clear that they believe it is their job to take decisions out of the hands of the voting public.

So what is Obama’s area of competence? Does he step out of it every morning when he wakes up?

From Michael Yon’s Facebook page:

Yesterday at 0735 local, a suicide car bomb attacked a US convoy crossing a bridge only about ten minutes from the major base called Kandahar Airfield. The car bomb blew an MRAP off the bridge, killing a US soldier and injuring several others. Another bomb had been planted under the… bridge. This bridge is easily defensible and of great significance.

Just another bridge?

Not hardly:

Yet while some troops go weeks or longer with no showers, fighting in rough conditions with no amenities, many troops on this base play hockey or, just the night before, had stopped nearly everything to watch the Olympics. Meanwhile, a bridge of strategic importance sat thinly guarded just minutes down the road. And so now, the bridge is damaged and large military vehicles and fuel trucks cannot use it. There is no reasonable way around.

Priorities?

Today we talk about an offensive in Kandahar, yet there is a General here who cannot guard a single bridge just outside the gate. That bridge is our LINK TO KANDAHAR. Meanwhile, soldiers who are doing six month easy-tours complain about R&R and morale boosters, while many soldiers who serve full-year combat tours don’t take showers.

Why are live bands streaming into here? What is this, an Amusement Park or a War?

That General needs to be fired. Dead weight at the top cannot be tolerated.

Yon is the Ernie Pyle of this generation.  It’s a shame the mainstream media won’t recognize it, although I suspect Yon doesn’t care.

…when I pee.

Authorities believe Wash. man electrocuted by urinating on downed power line after car crash

It’s been made clear to me that I need to get off the fence with the Gubernatorial race.  Now is no time to be silent – and so I will not be silenced.

I endorse John Marty for the DFL nomination for Governor.  He is the only candidate who doesn’t completely profane the notion of the “progressivism” the DFL represents.

So I urge all you DFLers to get out there and support Marty for Governor.

Please.

Or Mark Dayton, if Marty’s dropped out by the time you read this…

The Supreme Court will be discussing the McDonald case tomorrow.  This case has the potential to be one of the most important human rights case in recent American history; at issue is the power of pettifogging state bureaucrats and demigogues to regulate your right to protect your and your families’ lives and property from the scumbags that the aforementioned bureaucrats and demigogues can not. 

The usual pack of orcs and their sympathizers are doing the usual public-relations maneuvering in advance of the ruling:

Gun control advocates think, if not pray, they can win by losing when the Supreme Court decides whether the constitutional right to possess guns serves as a check on state and local regulation of firearms.

In other words, anti-human-rights orcs like the Brady Factory Organization and the Violence Preservation Policy Center are hoping to lay the groundwork for many state impositions on the human right of self-defense, rather than a coordinated federal one.

The justices will be deciding whether the Second Amendment – like much of the rest of the Bill of Rights – applies to states as well as the federal government. It’s widely believed they will say it does.

But even if the court strikes down handgun bans in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill., that are at issue in the argument to be heard Tuesday, it could signal that less severe rules or limits on guns are permissible.

Well, duh. 

This is one of the more absurd fallacies that the left brings up whenever the subject turns to the less-upmarket neighorhoods of the Bill of Rights, the Second and Tenth Amendments; most people agree that we need to have some government, some regulation, some restrictions to prevent the worst-case scenarios.  Opposing absurd, onerous and, yes, unconstitutional actions, regulations and restrictions doesn’t negate this.

The National Rifle Association and virtually every pro-human-rights organization already favor, and push, the only kind of regulations that actually matter – rules and restrictions that are onerous to criminals and those who should not have guns.

And the orcs?

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence is urging the court not to do anything that would prevent state and local governments “from enacting the reasonable laws they desire and need to protect their families and communities from gun violence.”

But of course, Brady’s and the VPPC’s idea of “reasonable” always means “onerous to the law-abiding”.  No exceptions.

By some estimates, about 90 million people in the U.S. own a total of some 200 million guns.

Of which only a tiny percentage of either ever use a gun for nefarious reasons.  Which doesn’t prevent the anti-human-rights crowd, and their willing or ignorant dupes in the media, from trying to play the “scary numbers” game:

Roughly 30,000 people in the United States died each year from guns; more than half of them are suicides. An additional 70,000 are wounded.

Of the 15,000 that are not suicides, the decided majority are related to the “War on Drugs”‘; of all the foul play killings, the vast majority are carried out by people with criminal records, who demonstrably should not be allowed to have guns in the first place.

But those aren’t the ones that concern the orcs:

Chicago is defending its gun laws at the high court. Mayor Richard Daley said a ruling against his city would spawn even more suits nationwide and lead to more gun violence.

Gosh, Mayor Daley – you mean, more of the violence that our nation’s most violent city’s complete ban on all civilian gun ownership has utterly failed to dent? 

That would be the smart question.  But Daley isn’t talking to smart people, or people who care about human rights:

“How many more of our citizens must needlessly die because guns are too easily available in our society?” Daley said at a Washington news conference last week that also included the parents of a Chicago teenager who was shot on a bus as he headed home from school.

Annette Nance-Holt said her only child, 16-year-old Blair Holt, shielded his friend when a gang member boarded a bus and began shooting at rival gang members.

“You might ask, ‘What good is Chicago’s handgun law if so many of our young people are still being shot?'” Nance-Holt said. “All I can say is, imagine how many more would be if the law were not there.”

None.  Or, very likely, less.  Because this sort of crime – mass gang shootings with utter arrogant impunity – are pretty much the sole province of the city full of disarmed citizens sheep .

For those of you who don’t eat up SCOTUS trivia for the fun of it, the McDonald case is all about setting the precedent that the Heller decision that the Second Amendment right “of the people” means people, not the “National Guard”, must be observed by the states:

In earlier cases applying parts of the Bill of Rights to the states, the court has done so by using the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, passed in the wake of the Civil War to ensure the rights of newly freed slaves.

The court also has relied on that same clause – “no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law” – in cases that established a woman’s right to an abortion and knocked down state laws against interracial marriage and gay sex.

This is the approach the NRA favors.

Justifyably so.

But many conservative and legal scholars – as well as the Chicago challengers – want the court to employ another part of the 14th amendment, forbidding a state to make or enforce any law “which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”

Hopefully the “privilege” of citizens sheep to be “immune” from protecting themselves will get laughed out of court.

The deliberations should take place tomorrow – this blog will cover the discussion to the best of my ability.  As with Heller, we’ll probably get the decision in June.

Suffice to say I’ll be watching it.

People who’ve been blogging a long time sometimes lament “are there any new blogs out there?”

Why, yes – there are.

Today’s stop on the MOB tour is Joe Blogs, by Joe Markham.  Markham’s an engineer by training, an IT project manager by trade, and apparently hasn’t put “archives” on his site  yet, so I have no idea how long he’s been at it.

But there’s some good stuff.  I liked this breakdown of the “jobs” claims for the proposed Vikes’ stadium:

The Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission saw a presentation for a new Vikings Stadium today. This built on information from an Economic Impact report by the same people. Among all the information presented were these nuggets:

• -36 Month Construction Time-line
• -$577,000,000 in “personal earnings” during construction
• -13,400 jobs
• -4,600,000 labor hours

With my handy-dandy calculator, I get some interesting results. Average the  dollars over the jobs for three years, and you get the princely sum of $14,353.23 per year, about $7.18/hour.

Now this is a low-ball figure. Some fraction of those jobs are part time, and most of those jobs will not last the full three years.

One of the other numbers in the stadium proposal is the 4,600,000 labor hours. Over the 13,400 jobs, that’s just 343.3 hours per job, or only about 2 month’s work.

Dividing the personal earnings by the labor hours gives you $125.43 dollars per hour – a very nice rate. But as seen in the previous calculation, you wouldn’t get it for long.

Bottom line: If you want a stadium, fine. Don’t try to justify it as a jobs program, though. It doesn’t add up.

Cool – finally someone to help King Banaian on the numbers beat!

Make Joe Blogs a stop on your own MOB tour!

According to MDE, Tom Emmer is now in a statistical tie with Marty Seifert for the GOP Gubernatorial nod, with more than enough undecideds to completely change things by convention time, coming out of last weekend’s “Super Saturday” orgy of district conventioneering.

This means a bunch of things.  The remaining “Basic Political Organizational Unit” (BPOU – a legislative district in more populated areas, a county outstate) conventions are going to be fu-u-un (mine is Tuesday).  If you ever felt neglected at a convention before, that’s over.  And if things keep going this way, the state convention is going to be a donnybrook, perhaps every bit as intense as the 2002 MNGOP convention, where the vote for the gubernatorial endorsement took 16 days and 389 ballots.  Seeing as I’ll be covering the convention with the Northern Alliance this year, I can hardly wait.

But here’s the important part:  This is the one, single, solitary time in all of electoral politics when compromise truly is worthless.  Now is the time to get out and stand unstintingly for whatever it is you believe, and pull like crazy to see that those beliefs are enshrined in your candidates.  If you think Marty Seifert is the one hope the MNGOP has to hold onto the governor’s office (other than, of course, the DFL), then get out there and take no prisoners at your BPOU convention.  If you think Tom Emmer is the one person with the plan to save Minnesota, then come home with your shield or on it!  Carry the battle on at the Congressional District conventions, if you are selected as a delegate; when things progress to the convention in Minneapolis, then carry on the battle to the hundredth ballot, if need be.   Now is the time for principle to win out over compromise, politics and pragmatism!

And then, if you’re a Republican, once the last ballot is cast and the winner gives his acceptance speech, it’s time to look at the candidate.  If he’s the guy you supported all along, congratulations.  If not, ask yourselves two questions:

1. Look at what the nominee stands for.  Can you honestly say you agree with 70% of it?  And if you disagree with him on a few issues, but agree on most – or, even more so, if you disagree on a few issues that are not vital to Minnesota’s future, or over which the Governor really has no say anyway (I’m looking at all of you who clucked about Tim Pawlenty’s brief and fairly meaningless dalliance with the global warming cult, as if the Governor of Minnesota would be able to control the environment)?  Then bury the hatchet, and do it immediately.  Because the important question is…
2. …even if you disagree with the GOP nominee on 29.9% of issues, do you suppose you might disagree with one of the DFL’s pod of gabbling hamsters, Margaret Anderson “Ze Legislachah is an instrument and I am ze musician!” Kelliher and Mark “DUCK!” Dayton and Tom “Look, a shiny object” Rukavina and RT “look, tax money!” Rybak and John “All your health insurance are belong to me” Marty, even more?

If you can honestly say that you disagree with Tom Emmer or Marty Seifert more than any of them, then by all means, vote your conscience.

But if you believe that some vote that Tom Emmer or Marty Seifert took two years ago somehow makes them less fit to be governor than some vacuous DFL bobblehead, and you plan to sit the election out because of it?  We need to talk.

On the one hand, I don’t know that anybody quibbles about Lori Sturdevant being a bought-and-paid-for (figuratively) tool of the left – someone who is the mirror opposite of the “extremist” conservatives she clutches her pearls and complains about during the course of every single legislative session.  She’s pretty well thrown in with the radical dogmatic left; there’s really no need to argue about it.

Except that she’s still employed by the Strib; there, she writes as a “general” columnist, which might tell the uninformed reader that she’s actually passing on unvarnished, “objective” information, rather than shilling for the DFL.  Sturdevant is no more detached or “objective”  in covering politics than David Brauer or Brian Lambert.

But how would the casual Strib reader know this?

Simple; most of them don’t.  Which is just fine by whomever is paying the bills.

Oh, yeah –Sturdevant favors single-payer healthcare, as she makes perfectly clear in her weekend mash note to Roseville senator John Marty, who I’d say has served as a sort of dimestore Paul Wellstone, except that the left and Sturdevant would likely think of that as a compliment.

The possibility that Americans would join hands and buy health care all together has found no traction in Washington.

[Aside:  Notice with Sturdevant how “bipartisanship” is always something warm and fuzzy like “joining hands” when it’s a DFL initiative like socialized medicine, but some sort of climate of mean hatred when it’s something like tax cuts?]

But at the DFL-controlled Minnesota Legislature, the idea has been quietly marching through committees, three in the Senate, one in the House.

If something is “quietly marching” – just like Martin Luther King! – then  it must be a great idea, right?

Well, no – the DFL, which never met a spending program that didn’t make a tingle run up its leg, has a supermajority in the Senate and an almost-veto-proof margin in the House.

The Minnesota Health Plan is propelled in the Senate by former and current DFL gubernatorial candidate John Marty, a seven-term legislator from Roseville. Marty recognizes that with GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty in office, a single-payer health plan has no chance to become law this year.

But health care politics will change rapidly in the next few years as the status quo becomes increasingly untenable, the senator predicted.

The whammy here is that the system by definition can only get less tenable – because it is perfectly tenable today.  Sturdevant, being a bobble-headed repeater of DFL talking points, likely doesn’t know it, but John Marty does, and is lying; 92% of Minnesotans have insurance already, of one kind or another.  And insurance in Minnesota, regulations aside, is fairly affordable compared to states like New York or New Jersey.  And of the 8% who don’t have insurance, the vast majority either don’t want it, which should be their right, or are part of a relatively tiny minority who actually can’t get any insurance.

His plan will gain adherents because it would cure more of what ails the costly health care system. It would insure everyone, cover all medical needs, provide the purchasing clout needed to reform the way medicine is practiced, and thereby drive down premium costs.

If I can perform no other service in this debate, I want to make sure you, gentle reader, who is likely to go to a healthcare protest,can read behind the code words Sturdevant just used.

• “Insure everyone” – even if you don’t want it, orif you like the plan you have now just fine!  Even if you move here strictly for the free health care (with no intention of paying anything meaningful into the system).
• “cover all medical needs” – they do mean all medical needs; viagra for 68-year-old real estate agents; chemical dependency treatment; sex change operations; since John Marty and the extreme left wing of the DFL is involved, abortions will be part of the package at some point or another.
• “provide the purchasing clout needed to reform the way medicine is practiced” – which is a nice, benign way of saying “provide a monopoly that can dictate prices to doctors”.  Who, inevitably, leave the business.  Which, inevitably, constricts the supply of care.  Which either means the state raises what they pay, or start rationing the care that is available.  Which is precisely what has happened in every single state, county or nation that has ever socialized healthcare.
• “drive down premium costs” – in the same way that union healthcare plans “drive down co-pays” – by passing the costs on to other people.  And when it’s government involved, you know where the buck stops starts, right?

Sturdevant:

Marty pegs the savings in total state health care spending, public and private combined at 20 to 25 percent.

Provided the conditions of the “pegging” stay static – which never, ever happens.

That claim faces a mountain of skepticism, even from his fellow DFLers, because he is talking about “government-run health care.” But his notion isn’t to put the Legislature in charge. It’s to create a quasi-governmental agency with a board selected by nonpartisan county commissioners, empowered to contract with local and regional providers of health care services and manage their care.

Sturdevant, knowing she can’t dazzle you with brilliance, is baffling the gentle reader with – well, Sturdevant.Again with the code words:

• “Quasi-governmental agency” – Being “quasi-governmental” is like being “quasi-pregnant”.
• “nonpartisan county commissioners” – Please.  County commissioners are as non-partisan as, well, Lori Sturdevant.
• “Empowered to contract with providers and manage their care” – A phrase that is so carefully crafted as to be almost dazzling in its misleading brilliance.  But if this board is “empowered” to compete against private health insurance companies, they do it with government subsidies, which drive down the apparent cost (because everyone’s premiums appear cheaper if someone else is paying for them!) and increase at least the initial fund of money available.  Which puts the private companies at a disadvantage and eventually drives them from the market.  Which leaves the “quasi”-public plan as the main player in the market.  Which, as more people flock to use the artificially-low-priced services, costs the taxpayers more.  Which means the board will “negotiate” lower prices with providers.  Which means providers leave the business (as they have in Canada, Sweden, the UK, France and every other place where socialized healthcare has been attempted). Which means that either the wait for services grows longer (as they have in Canada, Sweden, the UK, France…), or the “board” gives in and pays out higher prices, but then either has to make up the difference by charging higher premiums (which nobody can afford by themselves because, remember, you’re paying for Honest Eddie’s little blue pills and Dave’s sex change as well as little Raymond’s appendectomy), or raising taxes – which won’t solve the problem right away anyway, since replaceing doctors and nurses takes years, and doesn’t work if you’ve made medicine a wretched government job anyway.

Sturdevant:

That should sound familiar to the 13 rural (and Republican-dominated) counties of PrimeWest Health, a county-based health care purchasing system for low-income people that’s been turning in impressive cost savings in recent years.

But if it sounds familiar, it’s just the voices in the listener’s head, because there is virtually no similarity.

While PrimeWest Health may well run into exactly the same pathologies that we noted above, and for exactly the same reasons – like the Massachusetts health system did – it is at least something that makes more sense than Marty and Sturdevant’s fantasy; it attempts to solve the real problem (uninsured low-income people) rather than the imagined one (insuring everyone for everything).

That, indeed, has been the greatest danger of the healthcare debate lately; aided and abetted by people like Al Franken in last week’s rally, and Lori Sturdevant in the media, the left-voting crowd in Minnesota is chanting less “public option now!” and more “it’s just like free enterprise!”, without knowing just how wrong they are.

Right after the inauguration last year, I was guesting on Marty Owings’ internet talk show Radio Free Nation (which still appears on Saturday nights).  The show was pretty diverse; you had a center-lefty (Marty) and a group of far, far, far lefties.  And me.

Anyway – I made a fearless prediction for them.  Barack Obama would not get us out of Iraq; he would not resolve the Afghan situation; he would not close Guantanamo or end rendition; and he would not change  Bush-Administration policies like the Patriot Act.

Was I right?

Well, duh; it doesn’t take any more of a rocket surgeon today to figure out that Obama is an emptier suit on foreign policy and defense than on most topics than it did a year ago.

The funny part?  He tried to do it on the sly:

With virtually zero debate – or media attention – President Barack Obama has signed a one-year extension for what many considered the most crucial and controversial aspects of the USA PATRIOT Act. The provisions, set to expire Sunday without the signature of Obama, include extensions to allow:

-1) “roving” wiretaps, permitting surveillance on multiple phones and e-mail addresses.

-2) court-approved seizures of records and property in anti-terrorism operations.

-3) surveillance on “lone-wolf” foreign nationals, who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group.

Originally set to expire in December, a two-month extension was passed by Congress late last year.

Simple fact:  Dick Cheney is Barack Obama’s foremost counterterror strategist.

God broke off a chunk of ice and sent it out into the ocean. It’s so large it will solve the looming Global Warming Disaster (run for your lives!) for the surrounding area for decades to come.

An iceberg the size of Luxembourg split off from Antarctica and could disrupt global ocean patterns and weather systems for decades, according to scientists cited in The Times of London on Saturday.

Although the impact was not expected to be felt for decades, the iceberg could block the production of cold, salty water, known as “bottom water,” which could lead eventually to cooler winters in the North Atlantic.

In other news, Luxembourg is still a country. I checked.