The IRS notes that the wave of Tea Partier threats and violence against that most intrusive and divisive arm of government, the IRS…

…well, isn’t:

The country’s chief tax collector pushed back Monday against assertions that working for the Internal Revenue Service has become more dangerous as a result of growing anti-government sentiment and the recent passage of President Obama’s health care plan.

“No, the risk has not increased,” IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said. “There has been a lot of stuff in the press about increased threats, which is actually inaccurate.”

…

Some liberal groups and bloggers also have raised fears that anti-tax and anti-government rhetoric employed on talk radio and by protesters within the “tea party” movement could incite violence against IRS agents.

Which was really what it was all about, all of it – the specious claims of racist slurs and threats, the victorian vapours about the tiny fringe of Tea Partiers with objectionable signs, and conservative talk radio as a whole – without exception; impugning dissent.

It’s kind of good to see, actually.  I remember how depressing it felt to realize that Bob Dole’s only campaign message in 1996 was “I’m not Bill Clinton”; about the only thing the Dems have so far going into November is an albatross of a “health care” plan, and constant chants of “teh teabaggerz are teh crazee, and we not be they”.

And that’s not so bad.

Insurance companies report that people, fresh from wondering when Obama would pay their mortgage and put gas in the car, are pawing after the free health care:

Questions reflecting confusion have flooded insurance companies, doctors’ offices, human resources departments and business groups.

“They’re saying, ‘Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?’ ” said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com. The California-based company sells coverage from 185 health insurance carriers in 50 states.

McLean said the call center had been inundated by uninsured consumers who were hoping that the overhaul would translate into instant, affordable coverage. That widespread misconception may have originated in part from distorted rhetoric about the legislation bubbling up from the hyper-partisan debate about it in Washington and some media outlets, such as when opponents denounced it as socialism.

Or it might be because that’s exactly how its proponents have been pitching it all along.

If there’s anyone that an extremist hates worse than their enemies, it’s an apostate.

For example, in all the decades of the battle between Palestinians and Israelis, the most dangerous thing to be remains a moderate Arab.

Likewise, to the American left, there’s no evil worse than any of “their” constituents – blacks, women, latinos, gays – going over to “the enemy”.

Now, there are plenty of conservative women, and they come in for some pretty mind-numbing disgraceful abuse if they rise to any kind of prominence.  But it was a partly academic exercise with blacks and Latinos for a long time; there are black, latino and asian conservatives, but not enough to make for a trend.

Now, of course, significant numbers of blacks are joining the Tea Parties.  How’s the left taking it?

Oh, how do you think?

“I’ve been told I hate myself. I’ve been called an Uncle Tom. I’ve been told I’m a spook at the door,” said Timothy F. Johnson, chairman of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a group of black conservatives who support free market principles and limited government.

“Black Republicans find themselves always having to prove who they are. Because the assumption is the Republican Party is for whites and the Democratic Party is for blacks,” he said.

Johnson and other black conservatives say they were drawn to the tea party movement because of what they consider its commonsense fiscal values of controlled spending, less taxes and smaller government. The fact that they’re black—or that most tea partyers are white—should have nothing to do with it, they say.

“You have to be honest and true to yourself. What am I supposed to do, vote Democratic just to be popular? Just to fit in?” asked Clifton Bazar, a 45-year-old New Jersey freelance photographer and conservative blogger.

Opponents have branded the tea party as a group of racists hiding behind economic concerns—and reports that some tea partyers were lobbing racist slurs at black congressmen during last month’s heated health care vote give them ammunition.

The reports were, in every case, lies; the $100,000 Andrew Breitbart offered for proof that anyone had actually lobbed a slur remains pristinely unclaimed.

But the larger point – that the left attacks black conservatives, as well as any of “its” voters, women or latinos, asians and gays – that start thinking for themselves – is more important.

I’ve repeatedly asked liberals to show me a single instance of a conservative woman, black or latino that their movement, and usually they themselves, haven’t tried to destroy.  The question remains unanswered.

I don’t think it’s going to change.

It’s April 6th – Tartan Day in America.  The day to celebrate all things Scots.

Today, Scots-Americans will to the traditional Tartan Day celbration; we’ll stream through downtowns across America, Saint Paul and Minneapolis included, clutching ill-concealed liquor bottles. wearing fake plastic kilts and red wigs,  and blaring on noisemakers (or bagpipes). Politicians and media people will prepend “Mac-” to their names and recite Keats and Burns before crowds of cheering onlookers.

Large, unruly parades led by bagpipe bands will step through slicks of vomit (tinted blue, from the blue-dyed stout and single-malt whiskey that’ll be lubricating the good times) amid hordes of tartan or blue-and-white clad, kilt-bedecked revelers, wending their way to both City Halls, where the crowds will paint their faces a merry Saint Andrew’s Blue and moon the government, bellowing “Ye can take our booze, but ye canna take our FREEDOM!”

The questions they should ask themselves is the ones all the rest of you should ask today; without Scots-Americans, would there even be an America as we know it?

From the framers of the Declaration of Independence to the first man on the moon, Scottish-Americans have contributed mightily to the fields of the arts, science, politics, law, and more. Today, over eleven million Americans claim Scottish and Scotch-Irish roots — making them the eighth largest ethnic group in the United States. These are the people and the accomplishments that are honored on National Tartan Day, April 6th.

So put some Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders or Simple Minds on your IPod (you do have some Argylls – right?  Or the Black Watch?

It’s Tartan Day, 2010.  Rejoice!

Attorney General Lori Swanson has declined the Governor’s request to join the states sueing to stop Obamacare:

She pointed out in her letter to him that Pawlenty can always file his own friend-of-the-court brief to side with the states fighting the law.

That prompted this response from Pawlenty spokesman Brian McClung: “Governor Pawlenty intends to participate in this litigation.” He refused to comment on whether the governor would file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting lawsuits filed by other states, hire his own lawyer or participate in some other way. “We are going to consider our options,” McClung said in an e-mail.

Hopefully that option includes finding someone to run for Attorney General to get the statist fossil Swanson out of there.

Yes, I said statist:

In rejecting the call for Minnesota to file a lawsuit, Swanson, in a written opinion, said Congress has wide latitude to pass laws to tax and spend and to regulate interstate commerce.

“Health care — which comprises over one-sixth of our country’s economy — substantially affects interstate commerce,” Swanson said. “The United States government has been involved for years in many aspects of health care, including Medicare and Medicaid.

“Interstate Commerce” has been the trojan horse that’s enabled the socialization and overregulation of far too much of our economies and lives, ever since FDR’s administration essentially repealed the Tenth Amendment seventy years ago.

Now we know what side Lori Swanson is on.

So we got any lawyers out there, MNGOP?

Women in Portland, Maine  W “protest” social mores and laws by marching topless about the place…:

The women, preceded and followed by several hundred boisterous and mostly male onlookers, many of them carrying cameras, stayed on the sidewalk because they hadn’t obtained a demonstration permit to walk in the street. About a thousand people gathered as the march passed through Monument Square, a mix of demonstrators, supporters, onlookers and those just out enjoying a warm and sunny early-spring day.

After the marchers reached Tommy’s Park in the Old Port, some turned around and walked back to Longfellow Square, but most stayed and mingled in the park. Some happily posed for pictures.

…and then getting outraged that anyone thought it was out of the ordinary:

Ty McDowell, who organized the march, said she was “enraged” by the turnout of men attracted to the demonstration. The purpose, she said, was for society to have the same reaction to a woman walking around topless as it does to men without shirts on.

However, McDowell said she plans to organize similar demonstrations in the future and said she would be more “aggressive” in discouraging oglers.

So let me get this straight, Ms. McDowell; you want to “desensitize” society, as it were, to topless women…

…but you’re going to do it by not only parading about topless, but being “aggressive” about anyone that takes notice, thus giving the ebulliently-un-PC the two things they love to watch the most – boobs and confict?  It’ll be like a hockey game with partial nudity.

Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:

And that, right there, is the essence of the entire Progressive mind-set.  We acknowledge that we are legally free to wander around topless, but that’s not enough; we must control what the rest of you THINK about us wandering around topless.  Or else we’re victims.

That’s pretty much it.

One of the big political “stories” last week was the “threat” letter sent to thirty-odd US state governors, including Governor Pawlenty.

The City Pages’ “Blotter”  caught part of the “story’s” big problem;

[The putative senders’] agenda: “The Restore America Plan is a bold achievable strategy for behind-the-scenes peaceful reconstruction of the de jure institutions of government without controversy, violence or civil war.”

The letter’s message: Resign in three days, or we’re coming to get you.

Big whoop, Pawlenty told the AP.

And as much as I’ve bagged on the sloppy, trite, meaningless nature of most of the post-Steve-Perry City Pages existence, it’s here that they do a bit of due diligence that most of the rest of the Twin Cities media would have done well to emulate; they did some checking – or, to be accurate, they quoted some people who had some some checking:

And maybe with good reason. Mother Jones magazine traced the group’s Web site owner via a readily-available Internet domain search engine:

Turns out goftr.com and guardiansofthefreerepublics.com are registered to one Clive Boustred of Soquel, California–a British-educated former South African soldier with an apparent knack for “anti-terrorist warfare,” computer consulting, and conspiracy theorizing. The sites–and the “group”–appear not to have existed before he registered them, about two months ago.

In other words, “Guardians of the Free Republic” are no more a “movement” than, say, “Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota”.

So kudos to the City Pages; they didn’t buy the hype.

Which is more than we can say for much of the media.  I tuned into National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” last Friday.  And Saturday.  They carried the story with breathless credulity, noting that an FBI agent had noted that the “real threat” wasn’t so much from GotFR, but from  people who “might” be inspired to copy them, or follow through on the “Threat”. 

In other words, according to a chunk of the media and Barack Obama’s government, the opposition to President Obama is loaded with people who’d just loooove to start tossing governors from office without waiting for elections.

Which is, again, the meme we were talking about last week; the Administration, media and left’s (pardon the rare and difficult triple-redundancy) are trying to portray all dissent from Obama as teetering on the edge of extralegal depravity.

The planet apparently is slipping off its orbit; CBS put a shot of singer Jennifer Hudson into their post-final-college-hoop-game montage set to the song “One Shining Moment”:

It was at that point, my head sunk into my hands.

My list of analogies for what this felt like for me:

1) As if someone told me Target Field was a mirage and the Twins will be back in the Metrodome for the next 5 years.

2) As if a huge birthday party was planned for me and no one showed up.

3) As if I my team just lost in the NFC Championship game because there were too many men in the huddle.

I’ve got a better one: someone changed a montage.

I think I’ve finally found something more depressing than people who get suicidal over their team choking in the finals.

With all due respect to writer Seth Kaplan – sack up, little camper.  Your heart will go on.

Among the DFL’s “Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota”-chanting clacque, you rarely see much sympathy for tax cuts; suffice to say that once Obamacare kicks in, we won’t see any for a long, long time.

But when it comes time to try to save jobs, suddenly, even the hardest-core DFLers get religion; Governor Pawlenty just signed a series of tax exemptions intended to try to keep the Saint Paul Ford plant open.  The plant is scheduled to close next year; the law would incent Ford to retrofit the very old plant to build vehicles other than the Ranger pickup.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, who’s often been at odds with Gov. Tim Pawlenty over cuts in state aid to cities, applauded the governor for signing the bill later this morning.

Said the mayor:

“This legislation gives Saint Paul the means to do our part in protecting the workers at the Ford Plant. As Ford continues to look at their options, this bill stands as evidence that the City of Saint Paul, and its world class workforce, are ready to work with them in any way we can to keep this plant open.”

That’s right, Mayor Coleman.  Just imagine how many businesses would come to Saint Paul if all our taxes were lower!

Les Lucht, a good friend and Ford employee, writes at Ademocracy to thank everyone involved:

Little background on the plant is over 90 years old, The machines are over 25 to 30 years old.
It would cost about 1 billion to clean up the site. And the City and State will lose more than 90 millions dollars in taxes. Beside other business nearby will close additional taxes loss of one to two millions in loss of taxes. Plus another 750 unemployed employees, loss of more tax dollars.

Southern state have got federal aid to get job there. mainly auto companies. And to keep them.

I’m opposed to state subsidies on principle, and a tax cut that Peter gets but Paul doesn’t is pretty much a selective subsidy.  But Lucht is right; the market for big auto plants is like the market for stadiums; governments at all levels have skewed the market by being in the game so very deeply.

One of the reasons Senator, professors, academics and “intellectuals” make such lousy presidents is that they feel the need to micromanage everything. 

One of Jimmy Carter’s great failings – among many – was his need to have his fingers stuck deeply into everything his government did, from noodling with the specifics of the various farm bills to directly interacting with the commanders of the Desert One raid as the mission progressed.  A president is supposed to delegate.

Micromanaging is bad.

Especially when the president gets down to trying to  micromanage people’s opinions, as with last week’s 17 minute answer to a Town Hall question:

His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, “F-Map”). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as “FICA”).

I’m getting a headache just reading about it.

Always fond of lists, Obama ticked off his approach to health care — twice. “Number one is that we are the only — we have been, up until last week, the only advanced country that allows 50 million of its citizens to not have any health insurance,” he said.

A few minutes later he got to the next point, which seemed awfully similar to the first. “Number two, you don’t know who might end up being in that situation,” he said, then carried on explaining further still.

“Point number three is that the way insurance companies have been operating, even if you’ve got health insurance you don’t always know what you got, because what has been increasingly the practice is that if you’re not lucky enough to work for a big company that is a big pool, that essentially is almost a self-insurer, then what’s happening is, is you’re going out on the marketplace, you may be buying insurance, you think you’re covered, but then when you get sick they decide to drop the insurance right when you need it,” Obama continued, winding on with the answer.

Leaving aside that it’s lousy oratory – running off at the mouth like that is rude; it’s the prerogative of someone who believes his time is worth much, much more than yours.

It was 1952.  In the lifetimes of the Americans who were of prime voting, earning and thinking ages, the 25-50 year olds who make up the Great American Middle, there’d been a great Depression, one (or for the older ones, two ) world wars plus a nasty “police action” in Korea, and more turmoil in general than people today can comrehend.

And as popular as Franklin D. Roosevelt had been, and as tightly as his administration’s policies had wound themselves into the lives of everyday Americans, the thought of extending his legacy to six terms was too much for many Americans.

And so when the Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson, the GOP responded with Dwight Eisenhower – war hero and, by today’s standards, a moderate.  And whatever you can say about the next eight years (baby boomers made a great show of rebelling against the era’s staid placidity; their parents, who’d come home from World War II having had a lifetime’s worth of excitement by age 25, didn’t have a problem with placid), it was a great time for America.

So could the GOP do it again with General Petraeus?

Americans have never been so disgusted with their politicians. More than three-quarters of Americans disapprove of Congress. President Barack Obama’s favourability ratings have slumped to below 50 per cent and he is no longer trusted or believed by many who voted for him…Many voters yearn for an outsider, someone with authenticity, integrity and proven accomplishment. Someone who has not spent their life plotting how to ascend the greasy pole, adjusting every utterance for maximum political advantage.

Say what you will about Barack Obama, but he, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, is the consummate professional politician; it’s hard to see what he’s done in his entire life that hasn’t played into preparing for a career in politics.

In this toxic climate, perhaps the only public institution that has increased in prestige in recent years is the American military. Its officers are looked upon, as General George Patton once noted, as “the modern representatives of the demi-gods and heroes of antiquity”.

Or at least people of integrity who’ve had to prove their worth with more than just school rankings and voting records.

Where better to look for Obama’s successor, therefore, than in the uniformed ranks? Not since 1952, when a certain Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War, was elected President, have the chances of a military man winning the White House been more propitious.

Within those ranks, no one stands out like General David Petraeus, head of United States Central Command, leader of 230,000 troops and commander of United States forces in two wars. Having masterminded the Iraq surge, the stunning military gambit that seized victory from the jaws of defeat, he is now directing an equally daunting undertaking in Afghanistan.

The story doesn’t end there, of course – it barely begins there.  Nobody knows if Petraeus is interested in running, or much of what he’d stand for, policy-wise.  Which was, of course, Ike’s story as well.

Still, the possibilities are intrigueing.

A few years ago, as the ’08 campaign was heating up, up, you started seeing the stories, asking “are evangelicals leaving the GOP?  The story was like so many – an idea looking for a trend – that fairly screamed “someone’s trolling to get ahead of a curve that doesn’t exist yet”.  (The answer, by the way, was “no – evangelicals just stay home if they’re not thrilled with their choices.

So I’m not sure what to think of this story, a CNN poll showing Democrats joining the Tea Parties:

They are not typical Tea Party activists: A woman who voted for President Obama and believes he’s a “phenomenal speaker.” Another who said she was a “knee-jerk, bleeding heart liberal.”

These two women are not alone.

Some Americans who say they have been sympathetic to Democratic causes in the past — some even voted for Democratic candidates — are angry with President Obama and his party. They say they are now supporting the Tea Party — a movement that champions less government, lower taxes and the defeat of Democrats even though it’s not formally aligned with the Republican Party.

I spoke at the Constitution Day Tea Party last year, and I took a very informal poll of my own; I asked people to give a shout and wave their arms when I mentioned their label of choice.  There was a small film of people who responded to “Democrat”.

The CNN poll, wonder of wonders, found…more or less the same thing:

To be sure, the number of Democrats in the Tea Party movement is small. A recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll shows that while 96 percent of Tea Party activists identify themselves as either Republican or Independent, only 4 percent say they are Democrats.

On the other hand, you can see where some Democrats – especially the blue-collar ones that stand to be damaged the most by Obama’s plans – might find some resonance; their parents did the same thirty years ago when Jimmy Carter presented them with the same dismal future.

Some of these disgruntled voters are taking part in the current Tea Party Express tour. The tour began in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada, on March 28 and is making 44 stops across the nation. It ends in Washington on tax day — April 15.+

Which is where I’ll be – at the State Capitol for the Minnesota Tea Party, after work on April 15!

See you there!

May you and yours have a blessed Easter.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network is taking the Easter weekend off.

We hope you and your family have a blessed and happy Easter weekend.

The greatest fear of a genuine conservative is government inflicting too much power on society.  The greatest fear of a genuine liberal is that government lacks the size and power to govern society.

Hold those thoughts.  We’ll come back to them.

———-

There are a lot of reasons to distrust government.  The least of them is that nothing guarantees it will ever be able to help you when you need it.

It’s happened.  Katrina, of course, was a debacle.  Before that?  It took only a videotaped beating and an unpopular “innocent” verdict to turn one of our major cities into a war zone – one from which government withdrew, leaving the citizens to the mercy of the mob and to their own devices.

And the most inspiring scene from that entire miserable episode was that of Korean shop owners, armed with their own rifles and shotguns, patrolling their storefronts and rooflines, bringing order to anarchy.  As stores burned all around them, they and their property remained safe – because when government couldn’t safeguard them, they did it for themselves. 

I saw that, and I damn near cried.  It was beautiful – the silhouette of an American citizen with a rifle, doing what big, stupid government can’t, drawing the metaphorical line in the sand and saying “You, evil, shall not pass”, and facing down the mob, and on their little corner or in front of their little store, winning.

They were the militia.

Not the idiot nutslaps in Michigan who are serving as the media and left’s current boogeymen on the subject.

Indeed, we all are.  That’s the law.  The Second Amendment says so – boiled down to 21st century parlance, it says “since freedom needs to be defended, the people shall have the right to own guns, and use them”.   Heller declared that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” means “you and me, the law-abiding citizens”.   God willing, McDonald will say “and it means the same thing in ever corner, nook and cranny of the union”.    It is the duty of every law-abiding citizen who pays more than lip service to liberty to own a gun and be proficient with it.

Now, go back to that first section.  The great difference between liberals and conservatives is the question “who’s in charge”. 

Last year during the Tea Parties, much of the media and about half the nation  got the victorian vapours over a few reports that Tea Partiers had brought firearms to the rallies.   And it was instructive to see peoples’ reactions to the news that nobody got arrested, because in the jurisdictions involved, it was perfectly legal.

About half the country rolled their heads in horror; “what if someone had shot somebody?”  Some even suggested that the possibility that one of these law-abiding armed citizens would step out of line was cause to restict the Second Amendment.

The other half went “Well, duh!”.  They know that the law-abiding citizen is a law-abiding citizen, whether he’s carrying a wrist rocket or an M14 or a flamethrower for that matter.  Our rights, they know, front and center in the heart of their soul, are not dependent on what our dumbest neighbors might do!.

To the liberal, a citizen who believes society is a free association of equals who consent to be governed, and who believe that consent must be earned, and who arms himself to reinforce the point, is threatening; “who governs him?”, the liberal asks.  The conservative responds “Unless I’ve actually broken a law?  I do!”.   That defies the liberal’s vision for what “society” is.

Tough.

The big nasty untold (by the media) secret of the economy at the moment is that only government is hiring.  And if that stays the case, the country will never be prosperous; prosperity granted to by at the someone else’s sufference (and someone else’s expense) isn’t “prosperity”, it’s being a pet.

If America’s economy is to recover, it’ll be when American business recovers.  Not the “too big to fail” businesses, mind you, because if a business is “too big to fail”, it’s too big to really do anything new, innovative or transformative.  (Indeed, the concept of “too big to fail” needs to be taken out and smothered).

No, America will be back when entrepreneurs can invent the better mousetrap.

And a bill by Senator Dodd seems to try to ensure that that doesn’t happen, by making it very difficult for “angel investors” – investors operating largely outside the formal banking system – to operate.

There are three changes that should have a particular effect on angel investors, a catch-all category which includes everyone from friends and family members who invest in a startup, to unaffiliated wealthy individuals, to side investments made by venture capitalists acting on their own.

Frist, Dodd’s bill would require startups raising funding to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then wait 120 days for the SEC to review their filing. A second provision raises the wealth requirements for an “accredited investor” who can invest in startups — if the bill passes, investors would need assets of more than $2.3 million (up from $1 million) or income of more than $450,000 (up from $250,000). The third restriction removes the federal pre-emption allowing angel and venture financing in the United States to follow federal regulations, rather than face different rules between states.

And boy, nothing’s gonna help small business like waiting four months for government review, limiting the investor pool and subjecting entrepreneurs to the most restrictive regulations available between the states and the feds.

Several investors have written pointed critiques of the bill:

• Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures said startups will be “hit by shrapnel” from the bill.
• Robert E. Litan of the Kauffman Foundation, which researches entrepreneurship, wrote, “It is difficult to know why these provisions are in a much larger bill whose primary aim is to address the fundamental causes of the recent financial crisis.”
• Mike Masnick at tech policy site Techdirt described the restrictions as “somewhat horrifying.”

Investors offered more criticism on Twitter, with Slide vice president Keith Rabois tweeting, “Anyone still need more evidence that Obama and the Democrats intend to destroy Silicon Valley and the dreams of entrepreneurs?”

Anyone who didn’t figure that out before November of 2008 shouldn’t be working with other peoples’ money in the first place.

Read the whole thing.

And ask yourselves “why would Chris Dodd, a Senator with connections to Wall Street and the formal banking system so tight that he’d embarass a Republican, introduce a bill like this?”

Today’s stop on the tour around he MOB is Mr. Dilettante’s Neighborhood.  D has been writing steadily – very steadily, as in generally a couple of pieces a day – since 2005, at his own blog and several others around the MOB. That’s to say D is prolific.  If nothing else, it’s good to know that someone else out there writes for the sheer fun of writing.

And while D is, like a lot of us, into writing politics, he likes to have fun with it too:

As many of you know, I write catalog and web copy for a decent-sized privately held company. Sometimes in the course of my duties I am asked to write catalog copy for gag gifts. One of the products I wrote for an upcoming catalog is the “Poop Bank,” which is a coin bank that is shaped like a pile of, well, poop. Rest assured, my presentation of this item was tastefully rendered and you’ll be able to see it for yourself when the catalog comes out in the fall. (By the way, the link is to our vendor).

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only person writing about poop banks this week. A couple of reporters for the Washington Post were describing a steaming pile as well:

The Obama administration plans to overhaul how it is tackling the foreclosure crisis, in part by requiring lenders to temporarily slash or eliminate monthly mortgage payments for many borrowers who are unemployed, senior officials said Thursday.

Banks and other lenders would have to reduce the payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower’s income, which would typically be the amount of unemployment insurance, for three to six months. In some cases, administration officials said, a lender could allow a borrower to skip payments altogether.

This is madness, of course.  Let us count just some of the ways:

And he does.  D is one of those bloggers who, in a just world, would be getting 10-20 times the traffic he does.

So your mission is clear!

The arrests of nine “[insert inflammatory catchphrase here]” “Christian Militia” members in Michigan have focused America’s attention the American media and those who still pay attention to it on the “problem” of “militias” which, by the way, have been shrinking since their heyday in the 1970s through early 1990s.

During the 90s, “militias” became the Democrat boogeyman, after a number of well-publicized and very ugly incidents; the Medina shootout, the Ruby Ridge massacre, and of course the Oklahoma City bombing.  Under fire during his first term before his epic setback in the ’94 elections, the Clinton Administration sought to distract the nation with a huge, sinister, conspiratorial internal enemy, the “militia movement”; the 1994 Crime Bill, larded with civil rights violations that dwarfed much of what had the left up in arms during the Bush administration, was at least partly in response to this huge “movement”…

…that, except for the actions of Timothy McVeigh (who, says the government, was not acting as part of a huge shadowy conspiracy), had almost no affect on crime or any other area of life in the US – certainly not as compared to the “war on drugs”, which was a product of a perfect storm of social engineering from both the right (“drugs are bad”) and the left (decades of welfare dependence and warehousing the poor in the inner city).

At any rate, even though the numbers of people involved in the lefty boogeyman version of “militias” was never big, and has dropped since the nineties, the image that the left propagates – paunchy, hate-clogged, drawling,  white rednecks in camouflage with AK-47s – is a control panel full of hot buttons for the left, purpose-designed to scare – is back, for the moment at least, bigger and badder than ever. 

Because with a Tea Party afoot across the land and the President’s poll numbers falling faster than Hillary Duff’s career bell curve, there are lots of center-to-left voters to be scared back into line.

And fear’s first cousin is ignorance.  I’m getting deja vu all over again from the comments, the blog posts, the talk show calls; the left is duly frightened of the great, unwashed horde (and the tiny, unconvicted band that was the excuse for the left to declare “militias” the boogeyman of the month again). 

It reminds me of something I wrote two years ago about the 25th anniversary of the Medina Shootout, and Hollywood’s reflections on all those crazy people between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre:

But the Hollywood take on the area, and the locals, was bemusingly warped.  Part of it was the Central Casting version of small-town people; although North Dakota is a place where you can hear the Fargo accent (”Yah, sure, you betcha”) in a hundred little main street cafes and bars, the show had the local farmers speaking with cornpone Arklahoma drawls.  The locals, to Hollywood, were out of Gomer Pyle or, given the sinistry of the subject matter, maybe Deliverance. 

Worse?  While there was support for Kahl (and even more criticism of the Feds’ heavy-handedness, arrogance, and occasional contempt for due process in the way they carried out the manhunt in the immediate wake of the shootout), Manhunt in the Dakotas showed something that was almost an active guerilla movement, with rocks and shots aimed at passing police cars, threats, Gross (and Larry Hunt as “Chief Walters”, a composite and sympathetic Jamestown police chief) being harrassed while driving in the countryside, and – in the movie’s climactic scene – the two walking, nervous, down “Jamestown”’s main street as the “local radio station” played the pro-Kahl song (with a cheery intro from the DJ), both of them keenly aware of the hateful gazes of the locals (by now all of them seemingly Kahl-sympathizers) boring through them both, as if they were fully-bedsheeted Klansmen scurrying through Compton.

It was nonsense, of course – and, like the “militia” mania that served to distract parts of America from Bill Clinton’s foibles, and is being rolled out now to distract us from Obama’s economy, and scare “moderates” into line behind The One, it’s a cynical lie.

More tomorow.

Peter Suderman notes that the Federal Communications Commission is poking its nose into regulating the Internet.

But that’s not the main issue.  The question is not whether we need the FCC at all:

The FCC’s entire approach is to rule by impulse and expand its reach whenever and wherever possible. Recent FCC actions include investigating the approval process Apple employs in its iPhone App Store, mulling whether and how phone companies might upgrade their networks and passing judgment on various consumer devices of minimal likely importance, such as the Palm Pixi.

The FCC is a crank-and-wire institution in a nanocircuit age:

When the FCC was launched in 1934, backers argued that airwave scarcity justified its existence. In an age of information overload, with a nearly infinite array of media choices available to anyone with a mobile phone or broadband connection, no such argument can be made. Yet rather than shrinking, the FCC has ballooned, growing its budget by more than 60 percent between 1999 and 2009.

The FCC is one of many government agencies that an administration that cared about responsible, limited, unobtrusive government could eliminate in toto without anyone noticing.

Look –  polls three years before an election are meaningless.  I doubt Reagan was doing all that well in April of 1982, to pick a pointed example, and we all know how that turned out.

As we get closer to the Presidential election, incumbency, a full-court press by a biased mainstream media and the GOP’s lack, to this point, of a barn-burner candidate may well even things out for Obama, if things don’t go even further south (as they very well may).

But today’s Gallup results show that maybe, just maybe, P Americans are waking up and finding that they spent 2008 with electoral beer goggles, and they’re not crazy about what they woke up with, and they’re starting to gnaw their arm off to get away, just maybe:

Americans anxious about unemployment and the economy increasingly blame President Obama for hard times, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, amid signs of turbulence in November’s midterm elections.

Last week’s jubilant signing of the health care overhaul, Obama’s signature domestic initiative, seems to have given the president little boost. Instead, his standing on four personal qualities has sagged, and 50% of those surveyed say he doesn’t deserve re-election.

“People are still hurting; a lot of people are still struggling, and I think a lot of what we’re seeing in the polls reflects people’s views on the economy,” says Rep. Chris Van Hollen, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Note to the GOP:  betting on  your opponent to “keep screwing up” is not a “strategy”.  Get out of the lesbian strip clubs and get a message together.

That is all.