In the 1930’s, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty earned himself a place in literary infamy by whitewashing Stalin’s forced famine of Ukraine.

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias can at least take comfort in the fact that their junketeering whitewash of China’s authoritarian assaults on human rights has historical precedent, but will probably not lead to a Pulitzer that gets contested fifty years after their deaths:

Klein and Yglesias’ group was taken to tour a spanking-new village built on the outskirts of the northern city of Dalian. As Yglesias describes it, “back in 2006 the former “village” of rudimentary structures was razed and the government constructed a large and extremely nice park (it’s in a very scenic area), reforested the hillsides, and constructed a series of apartment complexes. The former villagers now live in modest but up-to-date structures.” But don’t worry about the forcibly displaced, Yglesias admonishes us, because, “[w]e spoke to one retired couple who was given four apartments—they live in one and rent out the other three to families who’ve either moved out to Cha’an from the central city or else moved to the area from less prosperous regions of China. The town’s current party boss said he was given five apartments.” Klein’s coverage on the website of the Washington Post was equally credulous. He informed his audience, “A conversation with some residents revealed that they didn’t just get one free apartment in the new building. They got four free apartments, three of which they were now renting out. And medical coverage. And money for furnishings. And a food stipend. And — I’m not kidding, by the way — birthday cakes on their birthdays. Sweet deal.”

The problem is, it’s not a “sweet deal” for most of the millions of Chinese displaced by development projects every years.  China has no real concept of private property; every hovel is considered state property, for the state to destroy as needed for any reason.

Big hydroelectric dam?  Millions relocated (with no documentary evidence of “sweet deals”).  Beijing holds the Olympics?  Over a million relocated.

Sweet.

Yglesias and Klein are on a junket managed and staged by a public relations firm based in Hong Kong called the China-United States Exchange Foundation. While the firm claims on its website it is a “non-government” organization, it would be impossible for it to operate without strictures imposed by the Chinese government. China has no concept of freedom of the press, and there is simply no way that the Beijing government would tolerate a group of American journalists traveling around the country with impunity. In other words, Yglesias, Klein, and their “fellow travelers” are being shown precisely what the Beijing government wants them to see. It is a non-governmental tour in name only. The fact that Klein and Yglesias report back on such obviously staged scenes without a hint of doubt raises serious doubts about their journalistic competence. The “sweet deal” that Klein alluded to above is obviously too – in fact, sickly – sweet. It is plainly obvious to anyone who knows a whit about China that they were visiting a stage-managed potemkin village.

The “Potemkin Village” – named after a Czarist minister who built a fake village to show Western visitors how well the Russian serfs were being treated (they were treated like slaves elsewhere in Russia) – is a great totalitarian tradition; dictators build a really, really nice demonstration of something controversial, to show how benign, even wonderful, it is.  Hitler even built a “Potemkin” concentration camp, Theresienstadt, to show visiting human rights dignitaries and, one presumes, the 1940’s anscestors of Klein and Yglesias, how good concentration camp inmates had it.

Sad to say, they bought it back then, too.

Leftyblogs:  Speaking “sweet deal” to power.

Taxi driver kills 12 in the western UK:

Armed with two weapons – a .22 rifle and a shotgun – Bird drove down the coast from Whitehaven where the first attacks took place, leaving a trail of carnage in his wake. Residents of the county were warned to stay indoors as police followed the deadly route, discovering more bodies as they went. At one point Bird abandoned his Citroen Picasso for another car which he then crashed near woods in the picturesque Lake District town of Boot. The body of Bird, a 52 year-old divorced father-of-two, together with his guns were found nearby.

Imagine how bad it’d be if the UK hadn’t completely banned guns!

(Although journalists can take comfort in the fact that nobody’s aiming up their butts).

I’ve bagged on the City Pages’ Matt Snyders a time or two for his flights into context-challenged, myopically-biased political writing.

But fair is fair; this piece on the “gun show loophole” is excellent, well-balanced, and…fair.

It kicks off with a conversation with this blog’s good friend Andrew Rothman…:

“If there’s an unequivocal opposite to growing up around guns,” says Andrew Rothman, “it’s being raised by New York Jews.” He puts down his glass of water and wipes his dark goatee with a napkin. It would be quite the outlandish statement were he not talking about himself.

“I grew up believing guns were bad,” he continues. “That’s what my parents taught me. But they also taught me to read. That was their first mistake.”

…and somehow managed to go to press without a quote from this blog’s other good friend (and my own carry permit training instructor), the ubiquitous Joel Rosenberg.

Snyders, by his own account, attended three gun shows trying to find a seller who’d let him buy a piece without running him through all the legal hoops – as the media and the gun-control groups who tell them what to think assure is is inevitable:

“So, um, what’s the difference between a Glock and a Beretta?” I asked.

A stupid question in this environment, and also a suspicious one. It’d be like attending the Cannabis Cup and asking a vendor the difference between hashish and marijuana.

“Well, Glocks are easier to use, I suppose, with a trigger-on-trigger safety, instead of an external lever,” he says. “Beretta, on the other hand, is a more traditional pistol with a hammer instead of a slide.”

I opt for neither, going instead with the Hi-Point. He hands me a clipboard containing a questionnaire—the background check required of all licensed firearms dealers. The so-called “gun show loophole” refers to sales between two individuals. The occasional guy walking around with a rifle and makeshift price tag are not required to check in with the national criminal database each time they make a sale…

…”You have your permit to purchase, right?” asks the vendor.

The answer to the question was an unfortunate no.

“No permit to purchase?” he said. “You’re shit outta luck, my friend.”

You might be surprised that the City Pages would cover the issue fairly – indeed, I was. 

Again.  Because it was in the winter of 1994, as the “shall issue” movement was just gathering steam in Minnesota, that I saw the first fair, balanced piece about concealed carry…

…in the City Pages.  Written by none other than Steve Perry.  So it’s not without precedent.

Snyders took Rothman’s carry permit training class – and like a lot of beginners, did pretty good.  He also catches the appeal of shooting like few people I’ve read on the left:

After five minutes and 25 rounds of warm-ups, it’s time for the test. An inexplicable wave of adrenaline washes through my arms and torso as I clumsily load five 9mm rounds into a magazine. I slap the magazine into the handle grip of a midnight-black semi-automatic Glock 17, and take aim.

Pop! Pause. Pop! Pop! Pause. Pop! Pop!

After seeing the five shots land true, Rothman instructs me to reload ten more rounds and squeeze them off. I oblige. Nerves settled, I begin to understand the elusive appeal of the gun. To be in control of a tool this powerful and deadly is to experience a visceral, almost intoxicating degree of autonomy. It’s sort of like the initial few days of giddy emancipation one feels after receiving a driving license, all contained in a flex of an index finger.

I won’t tell the other guys,” Rothman says as the target reels back six additional feet, “but you’re shooting a perfect score so far.”

The words of encouragement proved to be a jinx. The next two shots veer five inches off-target, one high and to the left, the other just high. Ignoring the occasional spent shell casing peppering my head, I continue to blast away, each shot about two seconds apart. I regain control and finish with a score of 146.

I’m now eligible for a permit to carry in Minnesota.

Kudos on the score and the story.

(But I got a 149…)

The Sixth Annual Minnesota Organization of Bloggers (MOB) Summer Extravaganza is scheduled for Saturday, August 14.

We figured the Saturday after the primary, right at the top of the dog days of summer and before the State Fair kicks off, would be a good time to throw a party.

We’ll be following up with a location shortly.

Hold the evening open!

Before Algore invented the Internet, he had Tipper were purportedly the models for the book and movie Love Story.

The sequel may not be such a feel good hit:

Former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, are separating after 40 years of marriage.

No global warming there…

I read this…:

A WOMAN “affixed” herself to a fence on the grounds of the White House today and then doused herself with an “oily substance”.

…and thought “good thing it’s not an un-pluggable sewage break”.

A couple of years ago, Karl Bremer – free-lance shrieking-point-bot and Bachmann Derangement poster child – humiliated himself and his client, Steve “Don’t Ask Me To Sing Oh Sherry” Perry by making up, from whole cloth, a story; that the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers was not only a conservative group, but one where the content was centrally driven by the MOB’s leadership.

In a perfect would, Bremer would look at the membership of Penigma in the MOB and commit purely-figurative rhetorical seppuku.

I consider Penigma a blogchild of mine, albeit of the red-headed stepson variety; after years of leaving, er, let’s say “acerbic” comments in this blog’s comment section, the eponymous “Penigma” (who commented on this blog under a variety of names, and whom I’ve known for twenty solid years, and to whom I owe at least one personal debt of gratitude going back long before either of us thought “blog” was anything but something that happened after cheap beer and gas-station burritos) took everyone’s advice and started his own blog, about this time two years ago.  “Pen” met his co-author, “Dog Gone” – another old friend from more or less the same long-moribund social circle, from the late eighties – via this comment section.

So Penigma’s a leftyblog, and thus wrong about pretty much everything – but it’s well worth a read.  And a read.  And a read some more.  Because I’ll give the staff of Penigma this much:  if you’re tired of the traditional three-paragraph blog post, Penigma will be, let’s just say, a change of pace.  Somewhere in the ether, Leo Tolstoy is smiling.

But “Dog Gone”‘s piece about the impending end of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is fairly good and, as it happens, comports with what a large chunk of mainstream conservatism also believes…well, about Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, anyway.   And the overall tone of the blog is a lot better than the petulant romper rooms full of spoiled rhetorical toddlers that make too many leftyblogs such a waste of energy.

And unlike some leftyblogs – the supremely thin-skinned and gutless Barbara O’Brien’s Mahablog, for example – the discussion at Penigma is often fairly interesting.

At any rate – when doing your daily prowl of Twin Cities leftyblogs, drop by Penigma and say hi!

In thirty hours over the weekend, Chicago had a bloody weekend:

[I]n a 30 hour period, 25 people were shot, and one man died from his injuries.

The fatal shooting happened early Sunday in the 5100-block of S. Laflin.

This barely a week after Mayor Daley risibly trumpeted the safety benefits of Chicago’s total ban on guns in the hands of the law-abiding in one of the most “Baghdad Bob”-like press conferences in history.

Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis said nearly half of the shootings appear to be gang-related.

He said there are no suspects in any of the cases.

I’m dying to get to the next liberal who tries to make the case that banning guns for the law-abiding has any value at all.

Bring on McDonald, baby.

Last week, someone asked “what about Rochester”.

Interesting questions.

The “Big Three” – Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth – are interesting cases in that they have all been run by more-or-less DFL-dominated regimes for all of recent memory; the Norm Coleman/Randy Kelly years in Saint Paul were an anomaly in that you had moderate DFLers (Coleman eventually became a Republican) running the show. 

All three cities have been represented by various flavors of DFL – from moderate to crypto-maoist, with a huge “progressive” preponderance – at all levels, from Washington DC all the way down to city council.

Rochester is a lot more interesting.  It’s a stereotypically Republican town – although it certainly has a powerful DFL involved in the city and region’s politics, being represented by Tim Walz as part of the First Congressional District.

 And Rochester gets significant Local Government Aid – although in 2009 it amounted to $71 per Rochester resident, as opposed to $343 per Duluther.

But the big difference is in population:  Rochester is actually the third-largest city in Minnesota now, and has grown 14% during the Pawlenty years, as the Twin Cities grew slightly and Duluth shrank.

As a result – while the Twin Cities “tax Capacity” has been fairly stagnant (less due to collapsing property values than to the fact that the Cities have no place to grow; surrounded by ‘burbs, they can’t annex anything), while Rochester’s has grown 53% during Pawlenty’s administration.

Rochester is expanding physically, of course, and that helps the tax base (and helped shrink the city’s LGA by about 30% during the Pawlenty years).  But the demand for the space it has is growing, and the health of the local and regional economy plays a role; the city wouldn’t be expanding if there weren’t jobs for people to do.

 Correlation doesn’t equal causation – but the fact that Rochester has a functional two-party government certainly can’t hurt its prosperity, compared with the stagmant one-party miasma of the Twin Cities.

Still – notwithstanding the fact that Local Government Aid, which was instituted to help move money from the state’s wealthy urban/suburban areas to the stagnant outstate area (call it “municipal welfare”), it currently awards the state’s Big Four cities, where just over one in five Minnesotans live…

…with well over half of the Local Government Aid…

…which means twice as much Local Government aid per resident goes to Duluth, the Twins and Rochester…

…as to the rest of the state, even with Rochester’s proportion shrinking by almost a third.

——–

On a related note, someone from the League of Minnesota Cities has been discussing my series on Twitter.  He notes that LGA has not risen or fallen in a straight line over the Pawlenty years; if you look at LGA statewide and for individual cities, it bounced up and down quite a bit. 

That is a fact. It also doesn’t change my conclusions, which are…

• …that for all the left’s caterwauling about Pawlenty “leaving a mess” after eight years by cutting LGA, that local governments have seized far more of this state’s wealth via property tax hikes than they ever lost from LGA cuts, and…
• …even if you accepted the initial necessity of a “municipal welfare” program like LGA to transfer wealth from the once-wealthy Metro to the once-stagnant-to-impoverished Greater Minnesota, the program has reversed itself, and become a program to launder the profligate spending of the Metro DFL through the rest of the state’s taxpayers, as well as…
• …a political cudgel the DFL uses to squeeze voters, by simultaneously holding hostage programs that directly impact the taxpayer (firefighters, libraries) even as they jack property taxes far beyond any actual LGA cuts

Most worrisome?  If a DFL governor is elected and the DFL retains control of both houses of the Legislature, you know that while the Metro’s property taxes will not budge significantly downward, the statewide taxes to cover the promised “restoration” of LGA (with “cost of living” increases) will zoom upward for all Minnesotans as well. 

Thursday – what about the parts of the state that don’t get in on the LGA gravy train?

…for next weekend, you should oughtta stop by the Mudd Lake Organic Summer Fest in Watertown.  Ed and I will be doing the NARN out there, and we’ll have a bevy of special guests.

More as the week progresses!

Every once in a while an article comes along that makes the scales drop away and makes me go “ah hah! That’s how it is!”

I’m a conservative.  Have been for over 25 years.  And in all that time, there’ve been two things that have bothered me:

1. The media’s fixation for mixing up “republicans” and “conservatives”.  This is always a problem in Minnesota, with GOP’s history of having collaborated with the DFL’s spending orgies in the seventies and eighties, and having had Arne Carlson as governor for eight years, which seems to make every DFL pundit feel entitled to remind conservatives “but Tom Horner was a perfectly legitimate Republican!”  Since some of the people who say this are smart, savvy political observers I have to figure they’re being willfully obtuse, but in the cases of many non-conservatives, I can’t help but think it’s just ignorance.
2. “The Southern Strategy”.  Way back in the pleistocene epoch, Richard Nixon supposedly started spinning the GOP’s message to play to the fears of white southern racists.

Well, I’ve been a conservative since Reagan’s second term, and I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever met a geniunely racist conservative or Republican.  Not one.  (And I’m not going to superimpose the fact the the most gleefully racist person I’ve met in my entire life was a DFL organizer onto the rest of the party. You’re welcome).

And so for decades, I’ve wondered what form of conservatism people were talking about when they mentioned either of the above.

Jacob Weisberg summed it up well in, of all places, Slate; there are really three different kinds of conservatism:  Northeastern (“moderate”, outwardly secular, tends to work within in big government; think Mitt Romney) and Southern (conservative, evangelical, with a racial aspect), which were the two main faces of conservatism from the 1950’s through the 1990’s.   Weisberg notes:

The big drama of the GOP over the past several decades has been the Northeastern view giving way to the Southern one. To see this transformation in a single family, witness the shift from George H.W. Bush to George W. Bush.

The third branch of conservatism:  Western.  It’s small-l libertarian, Tenth-Amendment-friendly, small-government, and on the rise:

You see this in the figures who have dominated the GOP since Barack Obama’s election 19 months ago: Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rand Paul. You see it in the right’s overarching theme: opposition to any expanded role for government, whether in promoting economic recovery, extending health care coverage, or regulating financial markets. You see it most strongly in the Tea Party movement that in recent months has captured the party’s imagination and driven its agenda.

And no, it’s not like the three “factions” have uniforms and sub-conventions:

On many issues, such as guns, taxes, and immigration, Southern and Western conservatives come out in the same place. They get there, however, by different means. The fundamental distinction is between a politics based on social and cultural issues and one based on economics. Southern conservatives care about government’s moral stance but don’t mind when it spends freely on behalf of their constituents. Western conservatives, by contrast, are soft-libertarians who want government out of people’s way on principle.

Which is a fine answer to one of the left’s latest chanting points; “I wonder if conservatives would be such budget hawks if they knew they’d lose social security?”

Southern Republicans are guided by the Bible. Western Republicans read the Constitution. Seen in historical terms, it’s the difference between a movement descended from George Wallace and one that harks back to Barry Goldwater.

Weisberg:

The GOP’s Western tone of recent months summons the ghosts of Goldwater’s disastrous but transformational presidential campaign of 1964. Goldwater didn’t care about religion—he was a Jewish Episcopalian who once said that Jerry Falwell deserved a kick in the nuts. He wasn’t focused on racial politics—there aren’t many black people in Arizona. What mattered to him was limiting government and preserving liberty. To Goldwater, political freedom was inseparable from economic freedom, a view distilled in his most famous phrase, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” To call this politics Western is a matter of its Bonanza style as well as its anti-statist substance. Goldwater boasted a Navajo tattoo and liked flying planes, shooting guns, and playing the tables in Las Vegas. Western conservatism succeeded on a national scale when Ronald Reagan kept the cowboy look while easing up on Goldwater’s honorable, self-defeating consistency.

It’s not a bad description – although liberals like Weisberg always, always, always omit the second half of Goldwater’s famous dictum (“extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the defense of justice is no virtue“; the whole statement kinda sets the left’s false context on its ear.

Tea Party darling Rand Paul’s objection the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is clearly Goldwater’s, not Wallace’s. Wallace and his followers resisted civil rights because they wanted to maintain segregation. Goldwater favored integration but thought the civil rights bill infringed upon private property rights and free association.

Read the rest of the article; Weisberg doesn’t believe Western Conservatism has intellectual legs.

I disagree, naturally; more in coming weeks.

After watching a huge national disaster on the Gulf Coast, a propensity to golf while the world falls apart, a dearth of press conferences, a slew of risible verbal faux pas, a year of ramming unpopular legislation down the peoples’ throats, adopting and accelerating all of the aspects of the current War on Terror Man-Caused Disaster that were considered so noxious three years ago (including every single element of the Patriot Act), and watched epic corruption up to the White House Door, I thought  “When will our media – which was so punctual about “investigating” each of these things before 2009, get on the stick.

Victor Davis Hanson says have no fear!

Somewhere around the millennium, a new style of aggressive, public-interested, and astute reporter began sermonizing in print, advising on the Internet, and lecturing us on television. At the time I mistakenly assumed that reporters were too often partisans who were creating new, almost impossible standards of probity in order to embarrass conservative opponents: they wanted Republican scandal first, news second. But now, I see that they were simply laying nonpartisan new ground rules for the Bush administration so that they could later prove their integrity and professionalism when a member of their own faith would come into the new crucible of public examination. There was never, you see, a hate-Bush media. So we will shortly see that now as they unrelentingly turn their scrutiny on Barack Obama and his legion of ethical and competency lapses.

Onward and upward!

Bill Maher  wants Obama to be a “Real Black” President:

Bill Maher: “I thought when we elected a black president, we were going to get a black president. You know, this [BP oil spill] is where I want a real black president. I want him in a meeting with the BP CEOs, you know, where he lifts up his shirt so you can see the gun in his pants. That’s — (in black man voice) ‘we’ve got a motherfu**ing problem here?’ Shoot somebody in the foot.”

Shall we chalk this up to racism?

Or maybe he was just falling-over drunk, like a “real Irish” comic?

You are a leftyblogger.

You write a post that is so chock-full of long-debunked shrieking points that there’s no room for any information of value that  you might, improbably, know.

In and among the mindless uncritical droogs who support you with more of the same, a small group of pro-civil liberties people with actual facts on the issue at hand set you straight.

What do you do?

You delete their substantive and fact-clogged comments about the time they start to make you look like the un-informed naif you are; when even that doesn‘t work, you declare those who disagree with you “propagandists”, and take your toys and run away.

Not that anyone should expect better.