Prosecutor Susan Gaertner left the Minnesota governor’s race Monday, saying she didn’t want to be “a spoiler” in Democrat Margaret Anderson Kelliher’s quest to become the first woman to win the job.
Well, nothing like having a good reason.
The coast isn’t clear, though. Former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton and former state Rep. Matt Entenza continue to seek the Democratic nomination in the August primary.
Gaertner, the Ramsey County attorney, declined to endorse any of the candidates, but she said Minnesota has never come closer to electing a female governor.Kelliher became the first woman to win major-party endorsement for the state’s highest office when the Democratic Party backed her campaign in Duluth on Saturday.
“This is the closest Minnesota has yet to come to electing a female governor,” Gaertner said at a Capitol news conference. “That would be history-making.”
Wow.
I wonder if she’d have left the race if the Laura Brod had run and been endorsed?
I’ve been doing some digging – and I’ve found what really happened at a number of key moments of American history…
July 4, 1776: [Scene: Independence Hall, Philadelphia].
JEFFERSON: “OK, here it is. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to fully fund entitlement programs which have connected them with another, and to assume among the budgets of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Government and of Government’s God/Goddess entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of The Budget requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation and the costs, amortized over 30 years, of said separation, as adjusted for inflation, with due diligence paid toward the opportunity costs arising from said separation.
MADISON: “Good – but we need more on bonding. Could we go back to the bit on bonding?”
August, 1864: [Scene: The War Department, Washington DC].
GENERAL HALLECK: “President Lincoln, General Grant is a drunk”.
PRESIDENT LINCOLN: “Then perhaps all of our generals should have a bottle of whatever he’s drinking. (Turns to secretary) We’ll call the program “The Cheap Blend Surge”; we can fund it through an excise tax on player pianos!”
GENERAL HALLECK: “Capitol idea, sir!”
December 25, 1944: [Scene: a basement, Bastogne, Belgium. General MacAuliffe, commander of the US 101st Airborne division, which has been surrounded by seven German divisions for nearly a week, is approached by a German emissary under a white flag].
GERMAN: “General, vot iss your ansah to ze offer of zurrendah?”
MACAULIFFE: “Nuts”.
GERMAN: “Pardon me?”
MACAULIFFE: “Nuts – I cant’ find my slide rule. I’ll have to take the idea under advisement, but honestly, I’m not sure that we have the budget to support 12,000 POWs. Can we schedule a meeting on this?”
August 28, 1963: [Scene: The steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC].
MARTIN LUTHER KING: “I have a dream that one day this nation will be able to fund a program that will pay community leaders to organize us to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are entitled to an equal share of this nation’s budget!.'”
June 12, 1987: [Scene: The Brandenburg Gate].
RONALD REAGAN: “If you want peace, General Secretary Gorbachev, increase the funding for East Berlin’s transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation process! Secretary Gorbachev, open the books on East Berlin’s transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation process! Mister Gorbachev, tear down the barriers to fully funding the timely completion of the transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation documentation as part of the pre-design environmental impact and mitigation process preparatory to getting approval from the affected district soil, water and easement committees!” [1]
April 26, 2010: [Scene: a house in the Midway of Saint Paul (whose bathroom is the pride of the entire neighborhood]
FLASH: “The state can’t go through 4 more years of the same policies that have gutted they very budget items that made Minnesota great.”
Immigrant pioneers struggling through blizzards to eke a living out of the sandy soil. 241 Svens and Oles fixing bayonets and charging at 2,000 Bubbas and Billy Joes, saving the Union in the process. Doughty miners doing daily war with the rock beneath our feet for generations. Ingenious inventors working in obscurity to invent the modern flour mill, the gyrostabilized bombsight, the supercomputer, the pacemaker, the amalgamation of R’nB and rock’nroll, the greatest medical center in the world…
…whew. Good thing all of that was in the budget!
Thank you, State of Minnesota, for budgeting for life itself! (more…)
Our next stop in our trip around the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is Our House, by Minnesota’s public policy power couple, David Strom and Margaret Martin.
David and Margaret need no introduction; David has been every Minnesota lefty’s regional standin for Karl Rove for nearly a decade, since he made the Taxpayers’ League the DFL’s official boogeyman. Margaret is a bit lower-key, working as a free-lance policy research/expert/political knowledge fixer (I honestly have no idea) for as long as I’ve known them. They were for many years the NARN’s lead-in at AM1280 The Patriot, as co-hosts first of Taxpayers League Live and then the David Strom Show was one of the local conservative media’s weekly must-listens.
The Strom’s blog motto is “Live like a liberal, vote like a conservative”. For me, that’s always been one of the blog’s big hooks; the Stroms live in North Minneapolis, a little red island in a sea of moldy blue. The juxtaposition between their actual and political lives is interesting, especially for those of us who don’t necessarily fit the traditional mold of “how a conservative is supposed to live”.
The Stroms have had a busy year, so the blogging has taken a justifiable backseat. Fortunately for the Stroms, Our House and their public, they have a reliable backup when they don’t have time to do a lot of political writing (and writing on other blogs – Martin also runs the Minneapolis Crime Watch blog, featured in this space a few weeks back); they are the Twin Cities’ foremost bird-bloggers:
Two conversations with a DFLer acquaintance of mine.
March, 2010: “Well, of course I call them “teabaggers”. Some of them sent bags of tea to Congresspeople! Why, I have no idea whatever you could be taking offense at! Honest!”
April, 2010: “Did you hear that Rush Limbaugh calls the Administration “The Obama Regime? Why, that’s not just insulting – that’s seditious!”
Now that the DFL has endorsed Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, they get to answer the question “we endorsed who? How? Why?”
The DFL endorsement is a traditional kiss of death. The DFL’s real candidates, Dayton and Entenza and Gaertner, are all going directly to the primary – itself an indication of how out-of-touch the DFL’s power elite and activists are.
The conventional wisdom is that the GOP, which will have a candidate this weekend, is going to have a three month head start on the actual campaign, while the DFL dukes it out among itself until the August primary.
The conventional wisdom omits that the Strib is going to be running interference for the DFL:
Republicans claimed to be gleeful over Kelliher’s endorsement. GOP Deputy Chair Michael Brodkorb said Kelliher has presided over an “ineffective Legislature.” He visited the DFL convention to watch its party contest.
GOP gubernatorial candidate Marty Seifert said, “While the Republican Party will be united behind one candidate in less than a week, the DFL will have a bruising primary battle for months.”
But Democrats were quick to praise their convention for its civility. “This was the most courteous, cordial convention I can remember,” veteran delegate Randy Schubring, of Rochester, said Saturday.
So what? Let’s see if they can say that in July.
Republicans may not be able to say the same thing. In advance of Friday’s gathering to pick the GOP gubernatorial candidate, Seifert and Tom Emmer, both members of the state House, waged a heated, testy fight for their party’s nod.
The two men have battled inside the party for years, developing a bitter rivalry even before they were leading candidates for their party’s endorsement. Their supporters appear to have no end of enmity for their rivals, shaping a battle thatwill spill onto the GOP convention floor.
Rubbish. There is an end to the emnity. It’s what conventions are for, for starters.
And if for some reason the GOP forgets what’s really at stake in this election, there a couple hundred thousand Tea Partiers (or as the Strib says, “dozens”) out there who’ll be happy to remind them.
It’s in the Strib’s interest, of course, to try to fan the conflict – or any conflict the can find – within the GOP. Because if Kelliher is the DFL’s idea of a gubernatorial candidate, it’s gonna be a rough summer for the DFL and, thus, the Strib.
Fearless prediction: expect a “Minnesota Poll” showing Kelliher with a decisive lead in the very near future.
In the past year you took away my favorite b-list cheesecake actress, Britney Murphy. You took away my favorite libertarian-conservative columnist, William Safire. And you took away the inventor of one of my favorite guitars, Les Paul.
I just want you to know that Barack Obama is…
…still the worst president of my lifetime. Don’t take him.
I wanna kick his ass at the ballot box in two years.
I humbly beseech thee, your deeply imperfect servant Mitch.
Israel sensibly boycotted Obama’s nuclear summit in Washington. Israel has recently been treated with such hostility by President Obama, the Israeli prime minister avoided what looked like a set up for some Islamic nations dictatorships to turn the occasion into an anti-Israel forum. Thanks to Obama, we have a nuclear proliferation summit in which Israel, a nuclear power, is pushed away – but where Liberia shows up.
Unforgiveable enough. To damn with nearly nonexistant praise, it could be said that Israel is a hot potato.
Still less forgiveable is his treatment of Poland:
It is hard to imagine how Poland’s treatment by Obama could have been worse. It was a week of shock and grief for the Poles – a close NATO ally that has sent large forces to fight alongside America in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama used the Iceland eruption as an excuse to cancel his trip to the funeral of Poland’s president and top leaders killed in the air crash. But those of us who live in Eastern Europe know that Cracow Airport was open and Obama could have flown in there. A president who respected true friends and sacrifices in blood would have made a serious gesture. Not Obama – he took off to play golf and did not bother to take a few minutes to sign the consolation book at the Polish Embassy on the way to the course.
This follows on two other just-plain-stupid insults against the Poles; his neglect of the 70th anniversary of the German invasion, and his unilateral bailing out on the missile defense system on which the Kaczynski administration had burned up tons of political capital.
Finally, the US Ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, insulted America’s closest ally in Central America by called the Honduran Congress’ removal of President Zelaya last year a “coup d’etat.” (Llorens’ letter to Wall Street Journal, April 14). Now Honduras is a genuine democracy and the removal of Zelaya was done lawfully and with the support of the majority of the Honduran Congress. The removal was no coup – it was an appropriate act to stop an out of control president who tried to overthrow the constitution by grabbing an illegal second term.
In context, it’s almost forgiveable; it’s the kind of thing you see in Chicago all the time.
Remember when people called Obama “smarter than Bush?”
Alienating three close allies in one week is quite a trick, even for a president as inept in foreign policy as Barack Obama. However, it fits a pattern. President Obama has never shown any understanding for the basic rules of foreign policy which include cultivating allies, avoiding unnecessary friction, and doing one’s homework. These things happen because Obama is fundamentally uninterested in foreign policy. It is part of a pattern that began when Obama was elected to the Senate.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the only parts of “smart”, “intellectually curious” president’s foreign policy that actually work are cribbed from “the dumb one?”
Not only is Obama mostly uninterested in foreign policy, but his instincts are bad because at bottom, he doesn’t believe in advancing America’s interests. Moreover, perhaps because of his own jaundiced view of American history, he seems to be instinctively contemptuous of people and nations that are pro-American.
Wonder how Obama will be billing among Europeans in 2012?
Someone sent me an email about my post from Friday re the Seifert/Emmer DUI flap. The writer noted that she believed the current laws are hunky-dory, because:
Alcohol affects people differently; one person might be fine driving with a .08 Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) while another might act, in theory, like Foster Brooks.
Prudence says that the suspicion of due process we’ve come to accept with DUI arrests – immediate loss of license – is OK.
The fact that they were arrested is sufficient grounds to know there’s a problem.
Driving is a privilege, not a right.
The writer had a point about the alcohol imits. Alcohol affects people differently. And “laws” require objective measures. And while we’re being objective, we should note that there is virtually no evidence that BACs below .1 contribute to fatal accidents (other than the fact that the government calls every accident in which a participant registers a BAC as a “drunk driving accident. Every one. If a meteor fell out of the sky on a car driven by someone who’d had three beers in two hours, it’d be called a “drunk driving accident”. This is done at the behest of groups like MADD, who have become quite unhinged over the years; it’s dishonest at best).
So it’s correct that a BAC level doesn’t tell us everything. Is the person measuring a .08 after having been a .16 six hours earlier, but is sobering up fast? Is it someone who had four shots in thirty minutes, and is on her way up to a .18? Is it a high school kid and inexperience drinker and new driver who had three beers in two hours and is speeding around like Mario Andretti with all sorts of liquid driving skill, or is it a 35 year old experienced driver who is driving just fine but has a broken taillight and runs afoul of a cop who needs to fill his quota?
The question you have to ask yourself is “is the law’s intent to curb drunk driving deaths, or is it to create criminals by criminalizing a fairly common behavior?” Since there is no objective evidence that casual drinkers with ’08s cause deaths on the highway (that’s all people well north of .1), and the serious problems are most normally caused by repeat offenders who routinely driver well above .1, it’s most likely the latter – especiallly when you consider that the law distinguishes not one iota for the circumstances behind ones’ mild intoxication. When the sheriffs put up a roadblock and start breathalizying people wholesale and corralling everyone who blows a .08, they’re not asking themselves “is this person on the up or down swing, do they have a history, can they rationally be expected to be a problem”.
No, they’re just racking up the fines. DUI is HUGE moneymaker, in fines, whiskeyplate fees, forfeited vehicles, court workloads (requiring more court staff, which feeds bureaucratic empires) and so on. It’s in the state’s interest to make sure there are more arrests. Cynically, it means they control more people (which Emmer’s second proposal would have partially rectified); without the cynicsim, it is an amazing amount of money coming in to government and government’s friends, the State Bar.
I was shocked when I wrote about this a few months ago that something close to 10% of Minnesotans have had some kind of drunk driving arrest. 10%? That’s astounding. Are 10% of the drivers on the road a danger? If that were true, none of us should be on the street.
It’s absurd, of course. Absent any kind of objective data linking .08 BAC with statistically significant numbers of fatalities (to say nothing of being *responsible* for them, which is another whole thing), it’s about nothing more than criminalizing behavior.
The letter from Sandra Berg cast aspersions about Rep. Emmer’s support for two bills in the legislature last year (18 years after his most recent DUI arrest); one that would allow those accused of drunk driving to keep their licenses under certain circumstances, and another that’d take DUI arrests off the public record after 10 years of good behavior.
Here’s the deal principles are hard. The thing about a principal is that it can hurt you as well as help you. Due process and “innocent until proven guilty” are principles, which most of us agree are good ideas. But sometimes those principles mean an alleged murderer goes free due to a hung jury. Ouch.
So when the letter writer writes “I think the arrest is sufficient prima facie grounds for [seizing licenses on arrest rather than conviction] to be a prudent thing” – well, isn’t that true for EVERY crime? Think of what we could do for street crime if we just locked up everyone accused of any crime at all! Or if we gave cops portable “Field Lethal Injection Kits” to use on accused murderers!
Saying “Driving is a privilege” doesn’t cut it; it’s a privilege that is a vital part of being able to earn a living for most people. The fact is, in every other crime judges have (per the Fifth Amendment) the right to consider extenuating circumstances in assessing the accused’s circumstances between arraignment and trial; someone accused of five murders who has a twenty year criminal record and a speedboat waiting to take him to Venezuela might not get bail; someone in jail for the first time for having 15 unpaid parking tickets might get sprung for $100 and no other consequences. Why is drunk driving any different? Why can someone who got a .08 and has no record at all get the incredible burden of being without a drivers license, the same as someone with a .2 who’s already had several accidents and arrests?
Because a well-heeled, emotionally manipulative pressure group has made due process an unfashionable principle, that’s why.
So here’s the question; do you believe in the principles of due process and innocence until proven guilty by court and jury? Or do you only believe in it for crimes where there is no emotional baggage attached?
Margaret Anderson-Kelliher has won the DFL endorsement to run for governor.
Future footnote Anderson-Kelliher sings "It's Raining Men" at a karaoke bar in Maplewood last month
For those of you from out of state, this is a traditional ceremony that marks the beginning of the process for a DFL politician retiring from politics; all the real candidates are running in the primary.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 9AM-3PM.
Volume I “The First Team” – Brian and John or some combination thereof kick off from 11-1.
Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed is back; we’ll be up from 1-3. TONS of stuff to talk about today, plus an interview with State Auditor candidate Jeff Wiita.
The King Banaian Show! – King is on from 9-11 on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities! We’re broadening the franchise; two stations, now!
(All times Central)
So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:
I’m going to the State GOP convention next weekend.
As I’ve said elsewhere – I don’t do endorsements, myself. I told the people at my district who I’d be voting for as a delegate; I suspect the campaigns both know.
For the record, either Marty Seifert or Tom Emmer would be a better governor than any DFLer, living, dead or yet-unborn, as the leader of this state. I’ll work myself to exhaustion for whomever wins the nomination.
Now, over the past few days there’s been a roiling froth about the campaign; the Seifert campaign sent delegates a letter from a Republican activist, Sandra Berg (no relation that I know of) regarding a couple of DWI-related charges, that his competitor, Tom Emmer, got 19 and 29 years ago – questioning not only his character due to the arrests, but some legislation he backed that’d have had the effect of treating drunk drivers as innocent until proven guilty and making DUIs private information after ten years of good behavior – in other words, allowing people who’d made a dumb mistake to function and get their lives back.
Drunk driving is an emotional issue – made all the more so by groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the rest of the drunk driving lobby. It’s understandable; anyone who’s lost a loved one to a drunk driver is justifiably motivated to seek change. But the .08 blood alcohol level limit is a ludicrious waste of resources, and the resources spent on hammering on first-time, only-time offenders with low levels of intoxication are largely a complete waste.
Question: Does saying the above mean I “support” or am “soft on” drunk drivers and drunk driving?
But it’s ludicrous to treat attempts to make the system fairer and more rational as “sympathy for drunk drivers”. Almost as ludicrous as assuming two mistakes made a generation ago are defining traits about a late-fortysomething guys’ judgment.
The Minnesota GOP needs to do a lot better than this.
This isn’t affecting my choice at the convention – whoever he is – one iota.
Veteran Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.) last Thursday accused her primary opponent, Gregg Kravitz, of pretending to be bisexual in order to pander to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender voters, a powerful bloc in the district.
“I outed him as a straight person,” Josephs said during a fund-raiser at the Black Sheep Pub & Restaurant, as some in the audience gasped or laughed, “and now he goes around telling people, quote, ‘I swing both ways.’ That’s quite a respectful way to talk about sexuality. This guy’s a gem.”
Kravitz and Josephs are duking it out for the Dem nomination to run for the Pennsylvania State House. Thus the protected classes purity test.
Kravitz, 29, said that he is sexually attracted to both men and women and called Josephs’ comments offensive.
“That kind of taunting is going to make it more difficult for closeted members of the LGBT community to be comfortable with themselves,” Kravitz said. “It’s damaging.”
But others said the remarkable quarrel itself was a sign of progress.
“We’ve hit a new high point when candidates are accused of pretending to be gay to win a seat,” said Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News and a pioneering civil rights advocate.
It’s nothing new, of course; Bill Clinton pretended to be black, and Joe Biden pretends to be handicapped.
So why are the Democrats seeing militiamen under every rock, and Oklahoma City comparisons around every corner?
Not because of any evidence, of course; the rallies themselves are so peaceful that some police departments hold them to a looser standard than the loopier anti-war demonstrations. And the fact remains that every known act of actual political violence in the past several years has been left-on-right.
No – as with anything else Bill Clinton does, it’s about a poll:
Dig past the headline of the Pew study and one discovers why Bill Clinton is insinuating that “demonizing” government could cause another Oklahoma City bombing. If these numbers are at all close to reality, something one can hardly doubt just now, the American people have issued a no-confidence vote in government, at both the national and state level. To the extent one believes in the “consent of the governed,” consent is being eroded.
This report isn’t bad news for the Democrats. It’s Armageddon.
Remember – the Democratic Party’s big platform is “Government Brings Good Things To Life”.
The survey compares views sampled in 1997 with now. The “now” is the Democrats’ problem. The survey took place this mid-March. After one year of the charismatic, ever-present Barack Obama, after passage of the party’s totemic health-care bill, after spending zillions on Keynesian pump-priming, the American people—well beyond the tea partiers—have the lowest opinion ever of national government.
A year ago, 54% said government should exert more control over the economy; a year later it’s 40%.
Some 58% say Uncle Sam is interfering too much in state and local affairs; 53% want “very major reform” of the federal government. After health care passed in March, Pew re-sampled in early April: Trust in government rose—to 25% from 22%. Inspector Clouseau would call that a “bmp.”
Barack Obama’s speeches are filled with the Democrats’ core claim to legitimacy: Government must and will do good. It must “act.” But in a crucial period when voters across the political spectrum were losing faith in that core claim, the Democrats lost any self-protective sense of what they were doing with public budgets. Barack Obama took a rising reservoir of public trust for his party (62% said they liked the Democrats in January 2009), and emptied it. Since he took office, the percentage of people who want smaller government and fewer services has risen, to 50% from 42%.
Better late than never – although be watching for the pundits to start scolding the American people about “Schizophrenia” for voting for a statist one cycle and a bunch neo-libertarians the next.
If that doesn’t help, start looking for pieces on how “the American people don’t deserve Barack Obama!” shortly after.
The below is not a fearless prediction. Call it a hunch.
If you live in the Second Congressional District, you know John Kline is going to win; if Shelly Madore wins the primary, Kline – even in a bad year, like 2008 – would win by 15 points, conservatively, and this won’t be a bad year for Kline. If “Powers” survives, it’ll be 30-40 points.
If you live in the Third, it might be a little closer; Paulsen’s got a tailwind, and had a great freshman term. DFL-endorsed candidate Jim Meffert is a solid 10 point dog, and I think that’s being nice.
Likewise in the Sixth; Michele Bachmann, who won two squeakers against a full court press from not only the regional left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) but the national ones, during two terrible years for Republicans, is going to win by a comfortable ten points, no matter which victim the DFL nominates.
Of course, the DFL pays it all back in the Fourth, Fifth and Eighth districts were, even when the GOP comes up with a strong candidate (as the Fourth District GOP did in endorsing Teresa Collett this past weekend), the media colludes to make sure that Keith Ellison, Betty “Dissent Is Violence!” McCollum and Jim Oberstar are never held accountable for any of their actions, even if knowing them would convince the overwhelmingly-DFL constituencies to vote otherwise, which seems doubtful at times.
But in the First? Tim Walz, who ran as a “moderate” DFLer to unseat moderate Republican Gil Gutknecht in 2006, but has spent his entire term in office as Nancy Pelosi’s ultraliberal lapdog, and voted for the Obamacare plan that is pretty sure to gut the health care for most of the First’s residents, and gut-shoot the Mayo Clinic, has got to be vulnerable. Randy Demmer is a strong candidate who survived a bruising convention (seven ballots last weekend) for the chance to run against Walz.
So here’s what I’m asking; if you live in the Second, Third or Sixth Districts, it’d be great to run up a huge score on the Dems. Heck, it’d be great to knock ’em into third-party territory!
But if you could see your way clear to spare a few bucks to send to the First, to help Demmer overcome his cash deficit, that’d be a great start.
I’ve long been ambivalent about the “war on drugs”, to the point where I’ve come to favor ending it. Combining the American appetite for drugs with prohibition means that the market favors the more desperate, ruthless criminals – which is why Mexico is more dangerous than Iraq right now; more Americans have died of non-overdose-related causes – gang crimes and robbery-murders, mostly – directly attributable to the “War” than died in Vietnam.
Those who weren’t within whiffing distance of a college campus or a reggae concert may not have realised that Tuesday was ‘4/20’, the celebration-cum-mass civil disobedience derived from ‘420’ – insider shorthand for cannabis consumption.
…I’m reminded of the the simple fact that pot smokers are the most irritating people in the entire world.
Worse than Rosie O’Donnell talking in a Fran Drescher voice.
Worse than Crispin Glover and Al Gore doing a rap duet.
Worse than whatever you’re imagining.
So I think we should legalize pot. I also think we should legalize hitting cheeba monkeys with bats.
“The governmental policies in the United States of America are a damper, a wet blanket,” Wynn said. “They retard investment; they retard job formation; they retard the creation of a better life for the citizens in spite of the rhetoric of the president.”
…Wynn said Wednesday he was concentrating his efforts on Macau and would skip potential opportunities in Las Vegas.”I don’t think the Las Vegas market at the moment beckons a large investment,” Wynn told Bloomberg “The economic outlook in the United States, the policies of this administration, which do not favor job formation, do not encourage investment at all.”
Think the Chinese aren’t going to raid the US for companies that are mobile enough to take advantage of tax havens like Macau?
I’m thinking about the time I went to the Al Franken Obamacare rally. And as they came out of the rally, and engaged in the odd debate or argument with us protesters, many of them duly parrotted the Obama party line; “he’s cutting your taxes”!
President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days.
VAT Taxes are a money machine. They also sap money from every stage of the economy.
It does for everyone. It’s a fact – or at least, it’s as close to fact as three generations of marketers have been able to determine – and since a lot of them got very rich, they must have known something.
When I was in music radio, a program director told me that programmers and music companies track demographics by when listeners reached adolescence; teenage emotions and hormones and angst and lack of perspective (between ages 12ish and 25ish) combines with whatever music happens to be happening at the time to create a bond that tends to follow people through their lives. Which is why “classic rock” stations are so huge, and “college rock” and “alternative” stations traditionally were not; they like to catch people with their adolescent memories about the time that they also start to earn lots of money to spend with advertisers.
Of course, somewhere along the way that emotional connection and immediacy fades. People get perspective. They grow up. They get other emotional focuses – children, careers – that depend less on big hyped up emotions than on being slow, steady and there.
So I don’t feel music the way I used to. Oh, I still love music – but it’s different. It’s more mental. I take apart a song’s production, lyrics, the mechanics of the whole thing in a way I didn’t when I was a teenager. I enjoy playing guitar (and a few other instruments, too). I don’t get the highs and lows from music the way that I did when I was 17 – but now that I have a 17 year old, I can see all the things about that age that I don’t miss, too.
Few songs illustrate the change, for me, better than Pete Townshend’s Empty Glass. Townshend’s first solo album came out thirty years ago today.
The album – recorded as Townshend and The Who were recovering from the death of Keith Moon – was a grab bag of different themes, which could be summed up as “I’m Pete Townshend. I’m almost forty, and nobody knows anything about me other than via the band I’ve been in since I was 18 – which has just collapsed. Who am I?”
Who was he?
He was a chain yanker. Even if Townshend had been a musical nonentity, I’d love him for his love of yanking writers chains; reading his old interviews were like watching a Monty Python sketch unfolding in real time. (Dave Marsh’s essential bio of The Who, Before I Get Old, has a zillion stories about Townshend’s love of popping the media’s balloon). And he yanked madly on Empty Glass; “Rough Boys”, dedicated to the Sex Pistols and his daughters, started the whole “uh, is he gay?” thing…:
He was also a pop songwriter. “Let My Love Open The Door” was inescapable in the summer of 1980
And he was a big chunk of The Who; a few of the songs (Gonna Get Ya, Jools and Jim) played like Who demos.
Most intriguing, though – back then, to me as a Christian who oozed rock and roll – was that Townshend was a relentlessly inquisitive spiritual seeker whose music had always knocked about the idea of faith. While Townshend was still a few years away from sobriety, the best parts of Empty Glass are all about his relationship with his higher power – “A Little Is Enough” and especially the title cut, which oozes fatigue for the distractions of this world…
Why was I born today
Life is useless like Ecclesiastes say
I never had a chance
But opportunity’s now in my hands
I stand with my guitar
All I need’s a mirror
Then I’m a star
I’m so sick of dud TV
Next time you switch on
You might see me…oh.what a thrill for you
I’ve been there and gone there
I’ve lived there and bummed there
I’ve spinned there, I gave there
I drank there and I slaved there
I’ve had enough of the way things been done
Every man on a razors edge
Someone has used us to kill with the same gun
Killing each other by driving a wedge
The song was originally recorded as a demo by The Who – and it was a lot more nihilistic; “Killing each other, then jump off the ledge”.
And yet at a time in his life when he was drinking a bottle of Remy Martin a day, Townshend saw God as the eternal bartender:
My life’s a mess I wait for you to pass
I stand here at the bar, I hold an empty glass
And truth be told, I’ve seen worse explanations. (And on his subsquent solo albums, we’d see better – but we’re a few years away from that).
And so while the windmilling, guitar-smashing attempt to make art out of adolescent angst long ago wore thin on me, Empty Glass, and “Empty Glass”, still click for me. Not the same way they did thirty years ago. Maybe better, in their own way.
NOTE: Among conservatives who are too young to remember Townshend’s musical glory days, he’s perhaps, tragically, most famous for his arrest on child porn charges a few years back. Althought Townshend was never charged, and the police took pains to say they believed his story about researching the subject for a book exploring alleged abuse when he was a child, some social-conservative bloggers don’t believe it.
To which I reply “where the hell have you been?” Does anyone believe there’s a crime anywhere in Western Civilization where the police are less likely to accept “I was doing research!” for an answer without some pretty good reason, and mountains of proof, than anything to do with the sexual abuse of children? That a prosecutor is likely to give up on a career-building celebrity case, on one of the most emotionally-wrenching topic there is, without damn good reason? It’s a crime that is as close to “guilty until proven innocent” as any in the Western justice system; people look crosswises at you for uttering the phrase “Kiddie Porn”. And yet the police, and the prosecutors, let Townshend walk away without a single charge or a slap on the wrist.
What does this tell the discerning observer?
At any rate, I’m writing this to say that the post is about the album; any discussion of the kiddie porn incident will be deleted without any warning or fanfare.
Kal Penn, the “Harold and Kumar” star who left the TV series “House” to take a puff patronage job in the Obama administration or campaign (whatever), was apparently robbed at gun point in Washington.
TMZ has learned Kal Penn — aka Kumar from that “White Castle” movie — was robbed at gunpoint early this morning while walking in a neighborhood in Washington D.C.
Law enforcement sources tell TMZ Penn claims a man carrying a gun approached him around 1:20 AM and took his wallet and other personal property.
Clearly fraud is involved. Guns are illegal in DC.
The Republican Party stands on the brink of an epic comeback. Dropping to near-third-party status in 2006 and 2008 in Washington and in state houses around the country, things looked very, very bleak for the GOP.
But the Obama administration’s overreach, and the Democrat-dominated Congress’ ham-fisted pettifoggery in enabling the overreach, and the spontaneous uprising of millions of people, including many “swing” independents with a bad case of political “coyote uglies” for the Democrats, are what’s causing the Dems’ problem. The National GOP is not.
Now, a lot of people – including, until the last year or so, me – misunderstand what the national Party is supposed to be for. It is in charge of fund-raising, logistics, and support for national GOP candideates. It is not the ideological clearinghouse for the GOP as a whole; that’s the candidates’ job.
So as messed-up as the National GOP seems to be, what with staffers going to lesbian strip joints and Michael Steele showing his malaprop collection (granted, with the connivance of a media that likes its’ black people to be quiet and stay on Democratic political plantation), that’s not the problem. Or at least not much of it.
The Democrats are bleeding right now because the American people want something other than an eternity of debt and a future of servitude to the government.
And except for some uppity conservatives – Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Jim DeMint, Tom Coburn and a small legion of others – the party’s response seems to be “we’ll get to fixing things when we get around to it”.
Look, I get it; politics is about compromise, and right now the GOP, being a superminority party in Congress, is having to fight like hell to even get bad compromises. That’s life, when you lose elections.
But when it comes to life after January, 2011? Now is not the time to compromise. Now is the time for a bold, strong, clear vision that shows all those disaffected, disgusted people who are dumping the Administration and rejecting Pelosi and Reid that there is an alternative, not just ofay, incrementalist reaction.
More importantly, the party needs to not merely atone for its role in getting us here – the corruption and democrat-style spending from 2000-2008 that helped put the Dems in office in the first place; it needs to reverse that course in a way that nobody can mistake.
The National GOP and all of its candidates need a message that says “we are for stoppping the growth, rolling back the regulation, reinstating economic liberty, cutting taxes, re-limiting government, and undoing the damage of the past ten years”.
I’m getting that from Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Paul Ryan. We get it from Chris Christie. When we need it, Tim Pawlenty shows it.
We need a party of Chris Cristies, Paul Ryans and Sarah Palins; we need to show the American people that we are on a mission.
And for the most part, we are not.
There are millions of voters waiting to be convinced. I ran into hundreds of them at the Tea Party last week; they want to be convinced.
A few weeks ago, I spent a little tax refund money on a corporate-surplus Lenovo Thinkpad T60. I love it so far – fast, clean, tons and tons of memory, and of course I’ve been using Thinkpads at one job or another for the past 12 years or so, so I don’t take any convincing about what good machines they are.
But it’s got one interesting bug that’s got me stumped.
The wireless adapter will run just fine – indeed, it gets a signal pretty much everywhere in the house, which is something I’ve never managed with laptops before this.
But periodically, the Adapter will switch itself to “disabled”. The period varies – it can run just fine for a day or two, or it can flip in ten minutes. I usually wind up going to the Network Connections control panel and clicking to Enable the Wireless Network Connection (which will usually spawn an “Enabling” dialog, and then flash a quick “Enable failed” message. Then I reboot Windows (XP) and things work fine.
Anyone know what the problem is, and what I can do to fix it?
The latest Rothenberg Report should put a damper on the regional left’s most-treasured shibboleth. Along with Erik Paulsen in the Third District, Michele Bachmann’s race has been promoted from “Republican Favored” to not even competitive.
U.S. Reps. Michele Bachmann and Erik Paulsen have been dropped from the Rothenberg Political Report’s list of competitive House races. Previously the the two contests had been rated as “Republican favored.”
Rothernberg is bullish on the party as a whole…:
Stuart Rothenberg is predicting wide gains for the GOP in November. So far in this election cycle, he has moved 44 contests towards the Republicans, while just four races have become more favorable for Democrats.
“Substantial Republican gains are inevitable, with net Democratic losses now looking to be at least two dozen,” Rothenberg writes. “At this point, GOP gains of 25-30 seats seem likely, though considerably larger gains in excess of 40 seats certainly seem possible.”
That doesn’t mean Republicans, and Tea Partiers, should let off the pressure. We really need to do two things; deliver the Dems a defeat even more crushing than Clinton took in 1994, something that’ll send a generational message; “don’t socialize the US” (and, preferably, also make the Dems a third party, sooner or later).
And above all, we all need to make sure a big victory doesn’t make the GOP complacent. This vote, as it stands now, will be a referendum on Obama, not an approval of any coherent vision in the alternative from the GOP. Other than a few obstreporous conservatives like Bachmann, there really is no competing vision from the GOP yet.
And as we found in 1994, and Obama found in 2008, referenda against a sitting or departing adminsitration have short legs.
The Tea Parties rallied to protest, and call attention to, the Obama Administration’s ruinous financial policies (which, to be fare, are in a few instances continuations of Bush-era policies, only accelerated many times over).
The response: “some of you might get violent!”
Don’t change the subject. We were talking about the Obama Administration’s ruinous financial policies.
If I’m talking with you, or commenting on your blog, about the the Obama Administration’s ruinous financial policies, and you start babbling about “the avalanche of violence”, I’m not even going to take time out to remind you that every single act of actual, as opposed to threatened, violence this past year has been committed by a leftist of one kind or another. Every single one. No exceptions.
No. I’m just going to tell you “don’t change the subject”.
And if I’m talking with Bill Clinton (unlikely as that may be) about the Obama Administration’s ruinous financial policies, and he starts prattling about Oklahoma City, I will tell him “don’t change the subject”, too.
Changing the subject when you’re backed into a corner in a debate is the mark of a poor debater or a weasel lawyer.
Changing the subject to defame the person who is beating you in an argument – and we are beating you, Democrats, nationwide, and we’re going to beat you like cheap brisket this November – is the mark of the poor debater whose got everyone’s worst interests at heart.
