Chicago’s Delusional Mayor

In the video I posted last week, Chicago’s buffoon-in-chief Richard Daley stood in front of a table full of confiscated firearms and picked up a rifle (ironically, an old Russian Mosin-Nagant, the rifle of Stalin’s army), and “jokingly” offered to demonstrate the value of Chicago’s draconian-yet-ineffective gun ban by shooting a round up the reporter’s “butt”.

Well, the second rule of shooting is “know your backstop…”

Apparently in Richard Daley’s special little world, every gun is used for some kind of depravity or another:

Daley went on. “This gun saved many lives—it could save your life,” he said—meaning, I think, that getting that gun off the street might have saved many lives, including mine.

And he went on some more. “We save all these guns that the police department seizes, you know how many lives we’ve saved? You don’t realize it. First of all, they’re taking these guns out of someone’s hands. They save their own life and they save someone else’s. You cannot count how many times this gun can be used. Thirty, forty times in shooting people and discharging a weapon. I think it’s very important.

In other words, “Chicago has one of the highest murder rates in the US and is being paralyzed by gang warfare; imagine how awful it’d be if the law-abiding citizen could defend him or herself!”

“Next will be hand grenades, right? We’ll say that hand grenades are OK. I mean, how far can you go in regards to mass weapons? To me, any gun taken off saves thousands of lives in America. I really believe that, I don’t care what people tell me. You have to thank the police officers for seizing all these weapons. We lead the country in seizing weapons. This is unbelievable.”

Yeah.  Yeah, it is.

Daley reportedly has a vacation home in Michigan – a “shall issue” state.  It’s a wonder he hasn’t been shot thirty or forty times by now.

Under a month ’til McDonald!

A Companion Unobtrusive

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 and I follow from 1-3PM Central.  We’ll be interviewing Dave Thompson, former KSTP talk show host, now running to replace Pat Pariseau in the MN Senate.  Join us!
  • 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!
  • And for those of you who like your constitutionalism straight up with no chaser, don’t forget the Sons of Liberty, from 3-5!

(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:

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Why I Am A Second-Amendment Activist

I shoot because shooting is fun; it’s the best stress relief one can get alone; it’s the best way there is to ensure ones’ safety from violent crime.

But why am I a Second Amendment activist?  The honest truth – it’s exactly, precisely because of displays like this (safe for work, albeit crude and deeply stupid); it’s Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who was asked whether his city, ravaged by gang gun violence, is benefitting from having the strictest gun controls in the US:

Is Chicago’s idiotic (and possibly soon-to-be-unconstitutional) gun ban effective?

“Oh!” Daley said. “It’s been very effective!”

He grabbed a rifle, held it up, and looked right at me. He was chuckling but there was no smile.

“If I put this up your—ha!—your butt—ha ha!—you’ll find out how effective this is!”

For a moment the room was very, very quiet. I took a good look at the weapon. It had a long bayonet. (Was it seized during the Civil War?)

“If I put a round up your—ha ha!”

I am a second amendment activist because it’s a thumb in the eye of authoritarian scumbags like Richard Daley.

(Via Ed)

Defame Game

I used to be a Big-L Libertarian.  I left the GOP, disgusted that they’d sold the law-abiding gun owner down the river with the 1994 “Crime” Bill.  I joined the Libertarians because they were purists on liberty.

And in a room full of purists, it was easy to explain why believing in private property rights – a cornerstone of Libertarianism and, also, the United States – and the right to free association meant it was wrong to tell, say, a lunch counter owner that he had to desegregate his private property.  The proper response – in a room full of liberties purists who, as a general rule, are less racist than the population at large – is to not go to that lunch counter, and use your freedom of speech to let other people know that the owner ran a segregated lunch counter.

Of course, we rarely had to try to explain these things to people outside the room.  The Libertarians never won any elections – rarely got over a percent, in fact.

Ron Paul started changing that; he brought liberty-minded people into the GOP, and in some places took it over.

The Tea Party furthered this, sanding off (thankfully) some of Paul’s whackdoodle conspiracymongering and focusing on libertarian ideas of taxation, spending and the role of government – a discussion this nation desperately needs.

Rand Paul, running for the Senate in Kentucky, just got into trouble for getting into an argument about classical libertarianism in a forum that’s more concerned with squeedging attack sound bites out of people with elephants next to their names.

Howard Kurtz on the original interview that started the flap:

[Rand Paul] kept telling [MSNBC host Rachel] Maddow he was not in favor of discrimination. He would have marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He supported the law’s ban on bias in public institutions. “Am I a bad person? Do I believe in awful things? No,” Paul said.

But he would not, despite repeated prodding, say the government should legally bar private institutions from discrimination.

And in doing so, he was that one thing politicians all claim to be, but almost none are;  honest.  He’s not a racist – indeed, to principled conservatives racism (imposing group stereotypes onto individuals) is an absolute wrong; to a Libertarian the thoughts in ones’ heart, the things one says, and the company one keeps are none of the government’s business – but everyone must be rigidly equal before the law:

“I’m all in favor of and that was desegregating the schools, desegregating public transportation, use public roads and public monopolies, desegregating public water fountains,” he said.

Which is a hunkydory discussion point among libertarians and Jeffersonian liberals; to them (us?), government has no place telling people they must not offend with their speech, their associations, or the use of their private property.  Among libertarians (big and small), at least as an academic discussion, allowing racists their constitutional rights to speak, associate and use their property as they wish does not in turn make one a racist – merely one who knows what government’s role is supposed to be, and the proper response to loathsome private beliefs, speech and behavior is evangelism and good speech.  It’s one of those poli-sci discussions that big-L Libertarians love to have, in the abstract.

But in politics, abstract questions have many layers of real manifestations:

“How about desegregating lunch counters?” Maddow said.

Mark Tapscott in the WashEx writes about the dim-witted feeding frenzy that ensued:

If the bloody waters that appear in the midst of such a shark frenzy make you uncomfortable, better get used to it. Odds are good that Paul is only the first of many Tea Party linked candidates whose inexperience in political combat with the media will spark such bloodbaths in coming months.

No such flap enveloped Scott Brown in Massachusetts probably because he had some prior experience as a Republican state senator in dealing with a hostile media in Massachusetts.

But many more of the Tea Party endorsed candidates who will gain visibility in the congressional campaign in coming months will, like Paul, be making their first-ever foray in seeking elective office. Like babes, they will go into brutal hand-to-hand combat with Establishment GOP, then Democratic opponents and their sympathetic journos, all of whom are seasoned veterans.

And when it comes to trying to frame your opponent, truth comes in a distant third to “making up a good chanting point to cleverly defame your opponent” and “making that chanting point so simple that any drooling SEIU droog can remember it”, in the hopes of taking a brief soundbyte of a statement intended as part of an academic discussion, and turning it first into “Rand Paul hates civil rights”, and thence to “Republicans are racists!”.

It’s poison for rational debate – but then, that’s not what the left, scared out of their minds by being on the wrong side of a populist tsunami, cares about.

The left is, of course, deeply hypocritical on the subject; via the ACLU, they are scrupulous about some peoples’  rights to speak and associate without question; somehow, the media managed to square the ACLU’s support for Nazis marching in Skokie with the idea that it didn’t mean the Democratic party sympathized with eliminationist anti-semites.   The rights of conservative college students, of course, don’t rate similar scrupulousness.

The lesson is a simple one, though.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know a couple of key truths for new politicians to remember when campaigning:

  1. The media is in the bag for the Democrats.  Duh.
  2. The media will cover for the “nuances” in the Dems’ positions; Rep. Keith Ellison, for example, will no more be grilled over whether his support for Hamas means he indirectly supports the extinction of Israel than Obama would be for his “bitter gun-clinging Jesus freaks” quote.
  3. But they will find the energy to go over everything you say and do to find something that can be presented to the undecided to caricature you and frame you as part of the meme they are complicit in circulating about conservatives.
  4. The left, believing as they do as a matter of historical, philosophical fact that “the ends justify the means, don’t care that they toss the entire context of what you say, and in effect lie about and defame you.  As long as it frames you so they win.

In ordinary times, by the way, this would be the point where I”d say “by the way, I oppose discrimination, and think Rand Paul was an idiot to try to get all academic on “nationa” TV on a subject as loaded as discrimination”.   But that doesn’t seem to be enough to keep the smear machine at bay, these days.

The Good Guys Win One

Will this story appear in the Strib?

A shooting occurred uring an armed robbery attempt in Excelsior overnight. It happened at the Lakeshore Market on Highway 7 shortly after 10:30 pm. Two men wearing masks entered the store and encountered a clerk with a gun. Police chief Brian Litsey says at least one of the robbers was shot and wounded.

Being Excelsior, there’s a decent chance that the shooter will not be considered the real criminal.

Still, chalk one up for the good guys.

Democrats: A Time For Choosing

Rob Port notices that have a hard time answering the question “what is the Tea Party?”

Back when the tea parties were first rising to national prominence as a political movement the unifying talking point from Democrats was that they were really nothing than GOP astroturf. They were being organized by “Republican operatives” and conservative “special interests” according to any liberal you cared to ask. Tea party activists actually had to work long and hard to make it clear that they weren’t just some quasi-official Republican splinter group.

But now that the tea parties have showed some staying power, and have proven that they’re going to have an impact on the 2010 midterm elections, Democrats have decided that a better talking point is to cast the tea parties as being anti-Republican. Thus driving a wedge between Republican candidates and the thriving political movement that’s going to push a lot of them to victory.

It’s a fact, and always has been; the Tea Party is independent of the GOP.  And may Teepers take pains to point out they’re not Republicans, they’re fiscal conservatives.  I’m fairly sure that’s behind a good chunk of the “defection” from Tom Emmer that the MPR/Hubert Humphrey Institute poll purported to show; they’re keeping their options open until they’re convinced which candidate is the best for taxes and spending.

Does anyone actually think Tom Horner or Mark Dayton is going to be that candidate?

Chanting Points Memo: The “Republican” Horner

Luke Hellier at MDE finds more background on the “Republican” Tom Horner:

“What they (MCCL) set out to do could have a dramatic impact in 1997,” said Tom Horner, of the Bloomington-based public policy firm Himle Horner Inc. “The involvement of the pro-life community makes the end-of-life decisions much more of a political debate than an individual issue or medical concern.”

“What will start to emerge is the recognition that there has to be a move away from the fee-for-service,”

Never worked in the insurance business?  “Fee For Service” means “Pay money, get insured”.

Managed care means “pay money, have a case manager or a committee of reviewers decide what care is cost-effective for you”.  You could even call it a “death panel”, although that’s sorta inflammatory and makes liberals irate.

Horner said. “And more and more people will have to be moved into managed care with some limitations, and that is going to be a pretty difficult task.”

Especially because people don’t want it.

Hellier:

Horner’s position in favor of “moving away” from fee-for-service and into “managed care with some limitations” simply means health care rationing—the denial of care to those who need it.

Managed care isn’t problem in and of itself;  it was a market response to rising healthcare costs in the seventies. The problem, if you value individual choice in health care, is that Horner pushed government healthcare.

Why does the media continue the meme that Horner is a Republican in any way?

With All Due Speed

The Minnesota state budget is a good 50% higher than it was when Jesse Ventura took office – when things were not half bad in Minnesota.  Yet if you believe the DFL and the Media (pardon the redundancy) things are falling apart from lack of money.  And, they say, if Tom Emmer is elected (via the “tomemmersminnesota” website) things’ll get much much worse with a governor who actually wants to hold government accountable for its spending.

Speed Gibson To asks the question that nobody in the Twin Cities media can ask:

We obviously just aren’t making the necessary investments in transportation, education, and health care. But that begs a rather obvious question in a state with an unquestionably above average tax burden: where then IS all that money going?

That’s what we’re going to find out in Tom Emmer’s Minnesota. I, for one, can’t wait.

Me either.

Chanting Points Memo: The Humphrey Institute Poll

So yesterday Minnesota DFLers were grinning like toddlers that’d just made a good pants at this MPR report that referred to this Humphrey Institute poll that showed Dayton beating the DFL primary field, and – more importantly – beating Emmer.

But the media reports on this poll have been, to be charitable, sloppy.  To be less charitable, they tip us off at the very least to the Humphrey Institute’s and most likely the media’s bias.

For those of you from out of state, the Humphrey Institute is a University of Minnesota think tank that is largely dedicated toward – wait for it – “better”, bigger government.  It tends to be a DFL feeder program.

The story is up-front about the criteria for the DFL primary poll (I’ve added emphasis):

Among likely voters, Mark Dayton (38%) leads Kelliher (28%) and Entenza (6%) in the contest
for the August 10th primary to choose the Democratic Party’s nominee.

That is as opposed to “registered voters”; likely voters are the ones who are most likely to actually make it to the polls.

Now, here is what the Humphrey institute wrote about the GOP race:

The most striking and unusual pattern in the Dayton/Emmer match-up is that a third of
Republicans are defecting from their Party’s candidate, an unusual pattern within the GOP
electorate. Dayton is drawing 11% of Republicans as compared to the 3% of Democrats
supporting Emmer. This may be a temporary blip as Emmer launches his campaign or a sign
that his conservatism may pose a challenge to unifying his party against Dayton.

“Defecting?”

Interesting word choice; it implies that a third of Republicans started out firmly in the Emmer camp, but have left.  Is there some prior poll over the past two and a half weeks – which was when Emmer was endorsed in the first place – that showed Republicans were completely united?  Sure, there are still some Seifert supporters with ruffled feathers; there are some Ron Paul people who are making a point of remaining undecided; there are still some Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger “Republicans” – read “Democrats with better suits” – lurking around the party.

Which means Emmer’s got his work cut out for him – and the campaign knows that, just as they knew it when they lost the straw poll at the GOP Central Committee meeting by a fairly decisive margin.

So is it a sign that Emmer’s “conservatism” is a problem?  It’s possible – but it can not possibly be inferred by any of the data in a single, initial poll five months before the election.

Not that the Twin Cities media will say so.

And They Say I Shoot In The Dark

The latest MPR/Humphrey Institute poll shows Dayton leading the DFL field:

A new Minnesota Public Radio News/Humphrey Institute poll shows former Sen. Mark Dayton with a comfortable lead over the other two candidates competing in the DFL gubernatorial primary.

This is good news for Tom Emmer; Dayton is a national laughingstock with negatives just south of Anastasio Somoza.  If he wins the primary, I’m seriously looking forward to November.

The DFL primary race isn’t all that close at the moment:

The poll of 701 Minnesota adults, which was taken May 13-May 16, shows Dayton is the favorite among likely DFL primary voters by a 10-point margin: 38 percent to 28 percent over House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher.

Dayton, Kelliher and former state Rep. Matt Entenza are competing for the DFL spot on the general election ballot. Entenza received just 6 percent of support in the poll. Whoever wins the August DFL primary will face Emmer in the November election.

Perhaps this is further proof that the DFL endorsement is the kiss of death?

Kelliher received the DFL party endorsement last month. Dayton did not seek it and DFL Party leaders punished him for that by barring him from the state convention. Still, Dayton is getting more support from Democrats.

It wouldn’t be a major-media story about Minnesota politics without a long series of quotes from Larry Jacobs:

“This poll is a real slap in the face to the Democratic Party,” said University of Minnesota political science professor Larry Jacobs, who oversaw the poll.

Jacobs, who heads the Humphrey Institute’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, says it’s not just that Dayton has a big lead over Kelliher among likely DFL primary voters. The poll shows Dayton is considerably more popular than Kelliher with women in the party…Kelliher has campaigned aggressively on the notion that she could become Minnesota’s first woman governor.

“DFLers, are you ready to make some history? Are you ready to make history together?” she said the party’s convention in Duluth.

This being a Humphrey Institute poll, you can expect passive-aggressive context-free sniping at the GOP:

When it comes to the general election, the poll shows only Dayton would win against Republican Tom Emmer. But Dayton would win by just 4 percentage points, well within the poll’s margin of error of 5.8 percentage points.

The poll shows Emmer beating Kelliher or Entenza, but, again, not by enough to be statistically significant.

The MPR story doesn’t indicate if the poll was of registered or likely voters – which is a fairly key bit of context to omit, in that it allows the inescapable Jacobs to have his way with context:

While Emmer has no primary battle on the Republican side, the poll indicates he faces a challenge in uniting the GOP behind him.

A third of the Republicans who responded to the poll said they were either undecided, supporting a Democrat or backing the Independence Party-endorsed candidate Tom Horner.

Jacobs says for the sole Republican candidate to have only two-thirds of party members backing him is extraordinary, and not good news for Emmer.

“Emmer, perhaps because he’s too conservative, is struggling at the outset to rally and unite Republicans,” Jacobs said. “Now, there’s a lot of time to campaign and Emmer, unlike other Republicans who’ve run for governor, is really a new name for many Minnesota voters, so we’ll have to see how that develops. But at this point, the [result] is a red flag.”

Emmer faced a similar hurdle winning the endorsement.  And let’s never forget that he’s alreadty facing the Twin Cities’ media’s usual slur of anyone running to the right of Arne Carlson, the “Too Extreme” meme that the media is doing its duty to help spread (along with a fair chunk of the media’s concerted effort to paint Tom Horner as Republican enough to soak up votes).  Horner eats up 10% in the poll, although the IP is always overepresented in these polls (or has been since 1998, anyway).

But outside the 35% of Minnesotans who will never ever ever vote for a Republican of any sort, there are three dynamics at work:

First:  When people meet Tom Emmer, they stand a good chance of becoming converted.

Second:  When people meet Mark Dayton, they stand a fair chance of falling asleep.

Third:  The media will be doing its best (and the DFL’s bidding) to keep voters from doing either 1 or 2.

Go Toward The Light

I took a look at the “Independence” Ventura Party’s “Principles” page yesterday.

On the one hand, it’s a well-written statement, not far removed from the output of this effort within the GOP.

But I thought this bit here was interesting:

We are what we are and we don’t pretend to be something we are not. Our word is good and we are accountable for the promises we make. In our personal actions and party affairs, we seek to exemplify the same fair, open, and democratic processes we advocate for our government. Before we evaluate others in the light of our principles, we stand first in the light ourselves.

Wow.  Excellent!

So how’s about we have Tom Horner “stand in the light” and release his client list from his years as a political consultant?

So we can see the various causes he’s championed in his years as a wonk consultant.

So the people of Minnesota can perhaps judge for themselves if the media are lying to them about him being a “Republican” in any sense that the term should mean.

Go toward the light, Tom.

Shifting Priorities

There’s an old Soviet-era joke that I remember from when I was a kid.  A Soviet radio station in Minsk was broadcasting a talk show.  The host said “Minsk is the most beautiful city in all of the Soviet Union”.  

A caller rang in, and asked “what do you think of the story that the Americans will be targeting nuclear weapons at all of our biggest, most important cities?”

The host immediately chimed in saying “Smolensk is the most beautiful city on all of the Soviet Union!”.

Two years ago, when the DFL ran former sergeant Steve Sarvi against (retired Marine colonel) John Kline in CD2, and former Marine lawyer Ashwin Madia against Erik Paulsen in CD3, military service was high on the DFL’s list of qualifications.  Very, very high, in fact.

This past year – especially with former Navy fighter pilot Dan Severson running on the GOP slate for Secretary of State, and former Navy helicopter pilot Chip Cravaack running against Jim Oberstar in CD8, that particular meme has disappeared from all DFL chanting.

But I have a hunch it’s going to disappear a lot more:

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in Connecticut finds Blumenthal with just a three-point advantage over Linda McMahon, 48% to 45%. Two weeks ago, he led the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment by 13 percentage points. The New York Times story broke late Monday; the survey was taken Tuesday evening.

Blumenthal is the anointed replacement for Christopher Dodd in Connecticut.  The NYTimes ran a story busting him saying he’d been in Vietnam when he had not.

To be fair, he spent the last years of the Vietnam War in a Marine Reserve unit in DC.

To be even more fair, isn’t that the kind of thing that the left raked George W. Bush and Dan Quayle over for?

Dung DUNG

After 21 years, Law and Order is going off the air.

I haven’t watched LandO Prime in close to ten years – since Angie Harmon left, maybe Elisabeth Roehm’s first season, if memory serves.  The show had some left-of-center sympathies back in its early years – which didn’t seem all that out of place during its first decade.  You’d expect a show about NASCAR drivers not to be conservative?

There are those who paint the show with broad brush based entirely on the past ten years or so of over-the-top lefty sympathies…:

Does anybody really care that Law & Order is finally going off the air after 21 years? I don’t sense the pangs of nostalgia that usually accompany such an announcement. News that Mary Tyler Moore, Cheers or M*A*S*H were going dark prompted lots of Essays About The Show’s Enormous Cultural Impact. Law & Order? Not so much.

The show squandered a pretty powerful legacy; had it left the air after 12 years, it might have gotten a bigger send-off.  The show is the father of the police procedural drama; the success of LandO helped launch a slew of other near-clones (CSI) and derivatives (House), and, indirectly, a cable network (TruTV and its real-life procedural fare).

And for all the show’s definite liberal bias this past ten years or so – which was getting unbearable even then – the show did have its moments of powerful balance.  Its episode on the death penalty, done about the time New York reinstated capital punishment early in Sam Watterson’s tenure on the show, was an excellent, balanced piece on the ambivalence about the practice.  It even did a show, during Angie Harmon’s hitch, that may have been one of the very few I’ve ever seen on network television on portraying the case for the right to keep and bear arms.

Of course, that was over a decade ago.  I’ve seen maybe three episodes of LandO since then; the show ran out of gas about the time the opening credits started displaying “INSERT NAME HERE” in the “Junior DA” and “Younger Cop” slots.  And as the creative fumes sputtered out, the show turned to a constant diet of conservaitve boogypeople – Ann Coulter standins and “militias” and crazed Christians stacking up abortion doctors like cordwood.  I’d imagine that someone learning about America from Law and Order would think the right wing in America is dangerous.

Too Far

The Supreme Court of Minnesota (SCOM) sent Minnesota’s government into a tizzy a few weeks ago when they tossed Governor Pawlenty’ s unallotment – his legal line-item veto – of  billions in spending in the previous budget.

Via NewsQ, Senator Julianne Ortman says the SCOM swerved into activism in throwing out the unallotment – and the decision was based on politics:

In the courts’ analysis, and to justify their preferred result, they reasoned that the language of the [unallotment] statute was ambiguous. They implied a condition into the statute that didn’t exist, holding that unallotment may only be used after the Legislature and governor have already adopted a balanced budget.

Apparently Chief Justice Magnuson’s majority believed its decision would resolve the current disagreement between the governor and Legislature, but it had no such result. The 70-year-old statute was the agreed-upon method between Minnesota’s executive and legislative branches for resolving an impasse like the one we have just seen: the House and Senate DFL leadership could garner enough votes to pass a revenue-raising bill, but they could not muster enough votes to override the governor’s veto. The unallotment statute was one tool available for breaking an impasse — one that many disagreed with in these circumstances, to be sure, but a tool we cannot live without.

Members of Minnesota’s judicial branch should never have inserted their views into the issues between the political branches. These judges over-reached their own constitutional authority, which is restricted by the Separation of Powers Clause, Article III, Section 1, which provides that no branch can usurp or diminish the role of another branch.

Our system is such that there  could be consequences…:

If his actions were heavy-handed or overly political, voters in the next election could hold accountable those who supported his actions. If voters agreed, as I did, that the governor’s use of unallotment was absolutely necessary in response to our state’s historic economic and financial crisis, then they could act accordingly in 2010. Instead, the court got political.

Which would involve people – and the media – paying attention to what the SCOM does.

Just A Hunch

I got the strangest sensation last week.  I haven’t had this sensation in the longest time.  Maybe a brief flash in 2000, but it wasn’t quite the same thing.

The DFL realizes that they’ve got nothing.

The Strib referenced Ben Smith in Politico this morning, saying that…:

Pawlenty appears to have run the table on the Democratic majorities in both of the houses of the legislature, forcing them to drop plans for new surcharges and scrap their top priority, an expansion of federal and state-funded health care for some of the state’s poor. They also enacted spending cuts that a court recently ruled Pawlenty could not make himself.

He will complete his two-term tenure at the end of this year having fulfilled his pledge not to raise taxes, with his approval ratings in positive territory, and having largely avoided the pragmatic compromises that often bedevil governors in polarized party primaries. His success gives him the accomplishments to match his conservative rhetoric, and set a high bar for other ambitious governors facing budget crises of their own in this lean year.

“We have some pretty clear values and principles in mind that we adhere to and when it relates to those core values and principles we don’t compromise on,” Pawlenty told POLITICO in an interview Monday after what he said was two hours of sleep on each of the two previous nights. “When it comes to issues around the role of government taxes and amounts of spending and other things, those are core values and principles by which we set our compass, and we stay strongly on that course and we battle.”

It’s a good piece.  You should read the whole thing. 

Perhaps the crux is right here; Pawlenty seems to have aversion-trained the DFL:

“Democrats have always known that a tax increase means a veto. As a result, there has been a grudging acceptance among Democrats that any package negotiated with the governor will not include tax increases,” Nelson said.

And this put the last piece into the (possibly completely-spurious) puzzle.  Maybe it’s just me, of course – but over the course of the past few weeks, it feels as if the Minnesota DFL has run out of gas.  They seem tired, like a boxer that’s gone a few rounds too many – as, in the legislature, they have, squandering four straight legislatures of prohibitive majorities but getting turned back by Governor Pawlenty at every juncture.

And if you’re a DFLer, after having beaten your head against a wall for four different sessions, culminating in agreeing to spending cuts that the Minnesota Supreme Court had just sent back from unallotment – snatchign political defeat from the jaws of a dubious legal victory – what do you have to look forward to?

A summer duking it out in a primary between a failed Speaker of the House, a former Senator that’s a laughingstock of the entire nation, and a former State senator who’s a pariah in his own party (not to mention Tom Horner who, ostensible former affiliations aside, is a moderate Democrat in policy terms, and who will draw away many, many more DFL than GOP votes). 

And when you pick from among those three deeply-uninspiring choices, you’ll stepping out into a hurricane; a GOP candidate not only at the head of an energized party out for four years of payback, but well-sited to bring in a huge chunk of the “Tea Party” vote.

It’s showing in a lot of ways; the DFL is skulking quietly away from the debris of the budget session tossing a few pro forma “Cold Omahas” and “we deserve betters” around; their big response to the Emmer campaign so far is to chant that he’s an extremist and to avoid any actual discussion comparing policy like a vampire avoiding sunlight.

Politics is cyclical; being a Democrat today must feel a bit like being a Republican (as distinct from a conservative) in, say, 2006; out of energy, out of ideas, needing a huge intellectual jumpstart.  Oh, they’ll pull something together for the campaign, but you can practically feel the fatigue.

 It won’t last forever, of course.

Not that we can’t try.

Bananas, Crackers & Nuts

Perhaps Woody was just merely testing a plot to the sequel?

Woody Allen has a strange take on the democracy that allowed him to become rich and famous.

The “Scoop” director said it would be a cool idea for President Barack Obama to be dictator for for a few years.

Why?

So he could get things done without all the hassle of opposing views getting in the way.

In an interview published by Spanish language newspaper La Vanguardia (that we translated), Allen says “I am pleased with Obama. I think he’s brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him.”

But wait – there’s more!

The director said “it would be good…if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”

In other news, Allen revealed that he has redubbed Obama’s inaugural address and centered it around a secret egg salad recipe.

Release the Kagan!

The mystery, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce that has been Elena Kagan might be granted a little more clarifying light with the release of her Princeton and Oxford theses:

The White House says it soon will release two theses Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan wrote while attending Princeton and Oxford — ending a game of cat-and-mouse that erupted on the Web after Princeton asked a conservative website to remove her thesis for copyright reasons.

Some conservative critics contend that Kagan’s 1981 Princeton thesis — called “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933” — shows Kagan’s allegiance to, or at the very least her affinity for radicalism, a notion Kagan’s supporters reject.

Reams of paper like Kagan’s theses will be released between now and the beginning of her confirmation hearings and volumes of ink will be spilled analyzing ever sentence she’s ever uttered or written.  But when it comes to illuminating Kagan’s actual judicial philosophy, the evidence that points to whether Kagan is a Harriet Miers or Ruth Bader Gingsburg nominee remains like much of her legal practice – theoretical.

Too Small To Matter

I’ve got two teenagers.  Both are looking for work, more or less; Bun washes dishes at a restaurant one day a week, so she’s got sometihng, but it’s very, very hard to find anything much better.  Zam isn’t even having that much luck.

In other words, it’s as bad as when I was 17 and 18.

The problem is, by the time I was 21jobs were everywhere, and the economy was on puree. I had more jobs that I knew what to do with by my junior year of college.

That’s just not going to happen with this recession.  White Castle’s CEO reports that just one provision in Obamacare is going to utterly gut low-income hiring:

Jamie Richardson, a White Castle executive, says, “We’ve been working on this internally from a number of different perspectives. One [provision] that has [us] the most concerned is the $3,000 penalty that kicks in when an employee’s portion of a premium exceeds 9.5% of Household Income.” Richardson elaborates, “In present form, this provision alone would lead to approximate increased costs equal to over 55% of what we earn annually in net income (based on [our] past 4-year average). Effectively cutting our net income in half would have [a] devastating impact on the business — cutting future expansion and more job creation at least in half. Sadly, it makes it difficult to justify growing where jobs are needed most — in lower income areas.” And that’s all from just a single provision in a 2,700-page act.

I love this next quote:

The Obama administration’s economic policy seems to involve dividing businesses into two categories: too big to fail, and too little to matter.

Alternately:  “too big to fail” and “future employees or wards of government”.

Horner, “Republican”

The media has been breathlessly trying to set up Tom Horner as a “non-extreme” Republican alternative to Tom Emmer.  For some, it’s a matter of conflating “Republican” and “Conservative”.  For others, it’s a simple desire to spoof the GOP for the DFL’s beneift.

But the more you look at Horner’s political record – which, let’s make sure we’re clear on this, is entirely as a political consultant, as opposed to “an elected official or representative” – the more you realize that Horner’s entire career is built on making government bigger.

This blog, and many other Minnesota conservative bloggers, will be going over the Horner record in coming weeks.

The upshot?  It’s looking pretty likely that Tom Horner will make a good, smallER government alternative to the DFL – but no Republican to the right of Ron Erhardt in his or her right mind should look at Horner as anything but “DFL Lite”.

The Next Big Case

Two years ago,, when the Heller case set the precedent that the Second Amendment right “of the people” meant “people” and not “the National Guard”, it left two questions:

  1. Would the case apply to the states?  Heller referred to the federally-controlled “District of Columbia”; McDonald, which was argued last March and whose decision is due next month, should fix this.
  2. What are the “reasonable restrictions” that the court referred to?

It’s an important question – because the orcs who oppose the human right of self-defense like to believe that human rights are commodities, and they are the dealers:

Mark Snyder, an amateur biathlete, wanted to buy a
.22-caliber bolt-action rifle for target shooting and figured the
process would take about a week. After nearly six weeks, six visits to
police departments and $300 in fees, he secured his rifle.

“I was not expecting a free ride,” said Mr. Snyder, 45, “but this is
an obstacle course they put in place.”

“Suuuuuure it’s your right “as a person”; now go get me a…shrubbery“.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia’s 32-year
ban on handguns in 2008, a victory for the gun-rights lobby that
seemed to promise a more permissive era in America’s long tussle over
gun ownership. Since then, the city has crafted rules that are proving
a new, powerful deterrent to residents who want to buy firearms.

Legal gun owners must be registered by the city, a red flag for many
in the gun-rights community concerned that registration lists could be
used to confiscate firearms. The District limits the number of bullets
a gun can hold and the type of firearm residents can buy. It requires
that by next year manufacturers sell guns equipped with a special
identification technology—one that hasn’t yet been adopted by the
industry.

This shows Real Americans two things:

  • We’re going to have to win this battle in every single legislature, city council and Congress in the land, and…
  • …more importantly – given that so many of the people who drive opinion on the left are so very un-bright –  the years and years we’ve spent educating people  aren’t over.

By the way, DC’s murder rates has dropped since Heller.  Who woulda seen that coming?

It’s Paté. Honest.

A political consultant’s main job, if you think about it, is to try to convince as many people as possible that a crap sandwich is really made out of paté and bread.

We’ll come back to that.

The weekend’s big brouhaha in re the Minnesota state budget was over the proposal to dump low-income Minnesotans from our own state system into Obamcare, so that Minnesota could cover more able-bodies single adults, among many other budgetary issues.

Pawlenty held tough.

So, as a matter of fact, did GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer (with emphasis added by me):

First of all, we should be grateful to Governor Pawlenty for once again protecting Minnesota families and businesses from tax increases. Economic recovery in Minnesota will come faster because we had the strength to hold the line on taxes.

But any recovery will be stopped in its tracks if the next governor “opts in” to Obamacare early by enrolling thousands of Minnesotans onto the federal health care roll at irresponsibly high costs, ignoring Minnesota’s nation-leading reforms in health care delivery.

With this deal, the next governor will have that power. I am announcing today I will not use it if elected this November. I also challenge my opponents (including Speaker Kelliher, who pushed for this power in closed-door negotiations) to tell Minnesotans where they stand on this issue immediately.

Emmer, in fact, voted “no” on this shift.

Now, let’s return to that opening thought about political consultants.

Tom Horner, the former “Republican” consultant, is running for governor under the “Independence” Ventura Party banner.  He released this statement:

The budget deal negotiated by the Legislature and Governor Pawlenty is a reflection of Tom Emmer’s Minnesota with the DFL leadership’s seal of approval…Instead of facing up to the hard choices, legislators have created a budget deficit that will be as much as $9 billion in the first year of the new governor’s term. 

In other words, “It’s paté!”.

Seriously – while the DFL is chanting “Horner is going to take votes away from Republicans”, read this…:

Minnesota needs a goverrnor who is willing to make the hard choices to honestly balance the budget and invest in job creation, education and innovation, even if that means the next governor only serves one term. That’s the commitment I’m making. Emmer and Kelliher have made it clear that their political futures are more important than Minnesota’s economic future.Could Minnesota’s current budget have been balanced honestly and without gimmicks? Absolutely, but the process had to start at the beginning of this legislative session, not in the 11th hour. A balanced budget would include revenue from broadening the sales tax base; repealing some of the $11 billion in tax expenditures that go mainly to the wealthy; and, increasing the tobacco tax. A Racino would raise additional dollars while giving Minnesotans who gamble the security of casinos that are publicly regulated.

…and show me a Republican who actually belongs in the party – someone who favors limited government, prosperity, low taxes – who would vote for any of this…

…paté?

Lykkelig Syttende Mai!

 

Today is the 106th anniversary of the Norske Revolusjon – when Norwegian patriots rebelled, casting off the brutal, authoritarian hand of the Swedish monarchy in an epic cataclysm that ended with a titanic battle in the hills outside Oslo, ending in a crushing Norwegian victory that sent the demoraized Swedes into a panicked retreat in the short term, and a social tailspin in the long run.


After the battle, and when the treaty was signed that granted Norway its hard-earned independence, General Olaf Haraldsson proclaimed:

Med allmektige Gud som vitne i dag, jeg sverger før du at fra i dag fram til slutten av tid og norsk skal noensinne baugen ned før en svenske. Det er bare galt

Words we cal all live by?  I think we can all agree on this.

So happy birthday, Norway!

Of course, other than the dates and the flag picture, nothing in the story above is real.  Syttende Mai is really the anniversary of the 1814 adoption of the Norwegian Constitution, which didn’t really make the country independent.

And there was  no Norwegian revolution; indeed, Syttende is an exceedingly non-martial holiday, focusing mostly around kids’ parades.  Not even any fireworks.

But we could have kicked Sweden’s butt…

Racing Toward The Wrong Finish Line

Conservatives see government in the same way as we do the guy who cleans out the septic tank.  It’s dirty work that we’d rather not do, and we’re willing to pay a fair price to have it done, but at the end of the day we want a fair deal done, and then we want it to go away.

Liberals  see government like a factory; you put stuff in one end, you get cool stuff out the other.  The more stuff you put in, the more cool stuff you get out!  And if everyone works together to make sure that factory gets all stuff it needs put in, there’ll be no shortage of cool stuff coming out!

Lori Sturdevant in the Strib  writes;

 A case of the “what-ifs” hit me last week. I was listening to state Sen. Linda Berglin describe her clever ploys for drawing down more than $7 in federal health care money for every new $1 the state spends while still cutting spending overall — and musing about Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s vow to send her handiwork to vetoland.

What if the Legislature’s ablest health care head had been allied these last eight years with one of the state’s most politically gifted governors? What if instead of being sparring partners, Berglin and Pawlenty had been real partners in remaking health care?

Then we’d have gotten what we had from time immemorial through the end of the Ventura years; a government that, like any other addict, can always find a rationalizion to spend more.

Slower growth in state spending is the new normal, and Pawlenty has applied a heavy foot to the brake. Through eight years, the GOP governor has muscled more fiscal restraint into state balance sheets than did any of his predecessors in the previous half-century.

Re-read that last paragraph. 

And everyone finish the last sentence:  “…, no thanks to the DFL, the Mainstream Media and Lori Sturdevant”. 

It’s crucial now for state government to maximize the bang of every tax buck. Large-scale reform is in order. And in a politically purplish state with a penchant for electing divided government, reform requires bipartisan partnerships.

Plenty of them should have been possible in the past eight years.

Rubbish.

While politics is about compromise, bringing real epochal change to government – in this case, breaking Minnesota’s (and especially Minnesota’s “elites'”) smug, smarmy addiction to taxes, spending, entitlement-mongering and wastrelcy – is about taking control and showing the side that you will accept nothing less than a change in the way business is done. 

The DFL have shown great willingness for “bipartisanship” – where “bipartishanship” means “acting like DFLers”. 

No more.

It’s time to get serious with our “elites”;  with a small, finite list of exceptions (responding to attacks on our nation, finding kidnapped children, taking care of families of servicepeople, cops and firemen who are killed or seriously injured protecting us all), “bipartisanship” is the wrong response to the challenges that face us.  Partisanship – fighting for divergent ideas that everyone believes are better solutions than the other sides have to offer – is what makes for better government.

Not necessarily more impeccably-smoothly funded government – but keeping government fed is not our mission, either.

King Of Opportunities

You’ve no doubt heard; Larry Haws is retiring from the Minnesota House:

Because you’re a friend and supporter, I wanted you to know first about my decision to not seek re-election. Five years ago I offered myself as a candidate for public office in Minnesota out of a deep sense of appreciation of the issues important to the people of District 15B.

Our friend and my radio colleague King Banaian is the GOP endorsed candidate for the House in 15B.  Running for an open seat is easier under any circumstances; with the current anti-incumbent, anti-tax-and-spending tailwind, King’s gotta be feeling pretty good about his chances today.

Which doesn’t mean all you Saint Cloud Republicans shouldn’t be turning out in huge numbers to help; it’d be great to be able to not just win, but obliterate the DFL.