Just saying.

While I live in District 66B, a district with little more hope for change than Kinshasa or Pyongyang have, there is hope elsewhere.

I spoke at a fund raiser for Diane Anderson last night in Eagan.  That was fun; she’s got some momentum, and with a little help from her friends she might just eject the far-left but otherwise-ineffective Debra Masin from the House this November.

Also – my friend and radio colleague, King Banaian, has his campaign website up and going.

He also has a campaign blog (above and beyond his day blog).  He wrote this bit which needs to be on everyone’s mind these days:

Also met a younger man tonight, perhaps 30, who has been told his job running a kitchen is in jeopardy because the restaurant needs to balance its books. I told him that I wanted to balance the state’s books with without* increasing the costs at his restaurant. It turns out his family has other restaurants, one of whom my son cooks at! I asked him to thank his family for me, because I know they treat my son well there.

But it is hard for restaurants to keep treating their workers well when government decides to disallow a young person from working for a restaurant for less than the minimum wage. It is hard for a restaurant to keep treating its workers well when we raise taxes on liquor (already the highest-taxed good in Minnesota and taxed 20-80% higher than in surrounding states.) It is hard to treat your workers well when the government decides your sole proprietorship making $300,000 in net revenue should pay higher taxes out of ‘fairness’.

All that out of a 3-minute meeting with a voter in north St. Cloud. And I get to do that every day between now and November.

If you live in Eagan or Saint Cloud, your mission is clear…

…then please stop by Granite City in Eagan between 5:30 and 7-ish.  I’ll be speaking at a fundraiser for Diane Anderson, the GOP-endorsed candidate running against incumbent Sandra Masin.

I think Ed – who lives in the district – will be there.  Certainly if you live in or near Eagan, you should stop down and help Diane win this very winnable district.

Hope to see you there!

First it was Badfinger.  Notwithstanding the fact that they were discovered and signed to Apple Records by Paul McCartney, were British, and were a four-piece band featuring tight-yet-raw vocal harmonies and jangly-yet-melodic guitars, they were a fun pop band with none of the Beatles’ baroque pretensions.  But because their debut singles, “Come and Get It” and “No Matter What”, sounded just a tad like lost, pre-“Sergeant Pepper” Beatles songs, you – the assembled hordes of slavering Beatles fandom – sniffed and said “it’s almost like they’re trying to be the Fab Four”.  And despite the fact that they managed to release some of the most glorious pop music of the seventies, at a time when the former Beatles were mired in tortured megalomania, dreary pop or labored soul-searching…

…they never quite escaped it.  To the world’s eternal loss.

Then it was The Knack – the overwhelmingly infectious power-pop sensation led by the mildly-creepy and now-late Doug Fieger – the cover of whose debut album “Get The Knack”…

…was reputed to look sufficiently like “Meet The Beatles”…

…to start a nasty little whispering campaign against the band.

And then there was Oasis, who in the early nineties were rumoured (with a “u”, since they were British) to sound like the Beatles.  The unreasoning parochialism of Beatles fans struck again (although I didn’t care so much, since it was only Oasis).

And now – Lady Gaga has committed the unpardonable sin of L sitting at John Lennon’s piano….

Lady Gaga’s stirring up controversy yet again — but this time all she did was play a little piano. A photo of the “Bad Romance” crooner seated at John Lennon’s famous white Steinway recently hit the Web, and Beatles fans are up in arms.

John’s son Sean Lennon posted the photo on Twitter with the caption: “With gaga at mom’s house, she’s belting on the white piano…” The instrument was a gift from The Beatles’ frontman to Sean’s mother, Yoko Ono, and it sits out in the open at Yoko’s home.

In the pic, the singer wears typically skimpy Gaga-gear (a skintight body suit and thigh-high fishnets) while singing and tickling away at the keys. The image drew an outcry from some Beatles fans who considered Gaga unworthy of the iconic instrument.

My only wish:  that if it was the piano at which Lennon “composed” “Imagine” or “Merry Christmas (War Is Over)” or “Just Like Starting Over”, that Jerry Lee Lewis would get to go all ape-wild on it sometime before he dies (Wait – Jerry Lee’s alive, isn’t it?  Why, yes, he is).  Or maybe Pete Townsend.

OK, I have two wishes; that I am able to live long enough to have at least one moment of my life, even at the very end, without baby boomers caterwauling about how in-freaking-credible John Lennon was.

He was not!

And tell that Gaga chick to keep her mitts off Keith Moon’s drum kit.

 The lastest KSTP-Survey USA poll shows Michele Bachmann up over Tarryl Clark by nine points with four months ’til the election.

Someone named “Alec”, a “diarist” at Minnesota “Progressive” Project, has a Matthews-y tingle running down his leg:

Someone else can write a nice front page post, but I am very excited by this. Bachmann 48, Clark 39. MOE 4%. Hard to believe the IP candidate only got 6%. With no name recognition, Clark is only down by 9. Bachmann is below 50% and her name rec is universal.

Four months ’til the election, with Clark benefitting from a blitz of advertising and friendly-to-fawning coverage in the Twin Cities media, before Bachmann has even really started seriously campaigning.  Seriously – Bachmann has yet to spend figurative dime one on her campaign.  There is no need to, not yet.

The “name recognition” is a red herring, too; all Bachmann’s negatives are in play, but Clark – a tax-and-spendaholic in a year and a district where that should be poisonous this fall – has only started to turn people off.  As “Alec” notes, she has no name recognition; that may be the best thing going for her so far.

And given the polarization of the numbers in the KSTP poll, I’m going to suspect that independents – who are breaking GOP nationwide – are not really sounding off yet.

Joe “Chloe” Bodell comments:

We’ll dig into the numbers later — but thanks to Alec for getting the news out to the ‘sphere.

This is good-to-great news, folks. – promoted by Joe Bodell)

Well, run this good-to-great news; at this point in 2006 and 2006, if memory serves (and I believe it does, but stop me if I’m wrong) Patty Wetterling was around nine points back in a bad GOP year, and Elwin “E-Tink” Tinklenburg was closer than that two years ago in a much, much worse year.

I’ve been predicting an eight-point Bachmann win by November.  I’m seeing no reason not to be optimistic.

 A lot can happen in four months, of course.

Gary Gross also covers the topic.

Next stop on our tour of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is…

…well, there’s the hard part.  It’s a blog that Ryan Rhodes has been running for even longer than Shot In The Dark has been on the air.  And practically every time I read it, it’s got a new name;  it started out as “Rambling Rhodes”, but there’ve  been so many names; “Sandwich of Doom”, “Mushroom of Dirt”, and stu only knows what else.  It’s currently “Stained Pants in a Ziploc Bag”.   Who knows what it’ll be tomorrow?

Well, it’ll be full of cool writing, anyway:

Ryan: I really thought I’d have my freelance check by now.

Caroline: I expect mine on the `5th.

Caroline: 15th, even

Ryan: The `5 only comes around during Leap Year.

Caroline: two years, then

Ryan: What’s sad is I initially couldn’t figure out how you made the ` symbol.

Caroline: magical keyboard

Ryan: I was looking at the “1” key, thinking “did she use the Wingding font for that or something?

Caroline: I hot wingdingin’

Ryan: Heh. Wingding. I’m just happy we live in a world that has a wingding font.
Wingding 1, 2 AND 3, no less.

Caroline: Totally. One Wingding isn’t enough. It’s kind of like Ghetto Booty in that way.

Ryan: OH MY GOD.

Ryan: I was JUST GOING TO PROPOSE A GHETTO BOOTY FONT.

Caroline: LOLOLOLO

Read the whole thing.  As in all eight years and change of it.

Principles can be painful.

I, as an occasional independent consultant, would just love to land a gig leading the User Experience design effort for a big world-facing institutional application.  I’d love the opportunity to pitch my skills to one of these institutions, convince them that I’m the right guy for the job, and bask in the eventual glory of a job well designed.  To say nothing of the payoff of 12-24 months’ lucrative work.

But if the big instutional customer were a front for AFSCME, the SEIU and the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, and the job was a website to help “community organizers” track union members who violated “Card Check” rules for future retribution, and to link these objectors to other union “assets” (goons) to service the transaction (throw bricks through their windows and kill their dogs), principle would tell me I would need to bow out of the gig.  No matter how much it paid.

Principle has its price.

Would bowing out of the project be a huge mistake?  Business hari-kiri?  From a bottom-line sense, it might very well be.   If “Mitch Berg Design” were publicly-held, it might even violate my fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders.  But if it’s my call, given that I oppose Card Check to say nothing of union thuggery, it wouldn’t even be a serious question.

One of the better, more thought-provoking conservative blogs I’ve encountered lately is “Minnesota Conservatives”, a duoblog featuring Minneapolis conservative Barbara Malzacher and 4th CD blogger “Shabbosgoy” – who’s a fairly well-known goy/guy in Saint Paul GOP circles, but I don’t know if his real identity is something he’s put on the blog yet, so I’ll hold off on that for now (note to self; find out why they’re not in the MOB).

Last week, Shabbosgoy wrote a post,  “On Saving The Emmer Campaign From Itself”, that caused a bit of a stir among Emmer’s followers.

Shabbosgoy’s (I’m going to save my fingers and call him SG from here on) premise is that Emmer’s “Waiter’s Wage” kerfuffle was a huge hit to the campaign.

Not fatal, of course…:

Not being glass-half-empty liberals, however, MC believes the campaign can right itself and move forward to victory in November. But the change has to be immediate, if not sooner. And the person who came up with the town hall seppuku should be tasered.

Let’s walk through them one by one:

1. Cancel the seppuku. Sure Emmer will be mocked but such pales in comparison to being tagged as the guy who wants servers to make $2.13 an hour. Such tagging has been ongoing all this week.

Let’s define our terms.

“Seppuku” (the political version, not the Japanese ritual self-disembowelment) is saying “I have no idea what E85 is” while in the middle of Minnesota’s Corn belt; it’s betraying a crucial tone-deaf ignorance.

Favoring a return to the tip credit – the exact system Minnesota used for tipped workers until 1990, and that is used in 43 other states to allow for the fact that tipped waistaff don’t rely on hourly wages for the bulk of their income – is a stance for principle; in this case, the principle that mandated minimum wages kill jobs.

Is it going to cost Emmer votes – especially given the way the agenda-driven media has reproted the story?  Perhaps among food servers; I’m sure waitrons at places in outstate Minnesota where the locals still consider a buck a lavish tip for a $30 tab will be un-thrilled by the prospect.  And understanding how tip credits work is important (and most people don’t); it only counts for time when the worker can get tips; not for time spent folding napkins or cleaning out the ice machine in back (which is paid at at least the regular minimum wage, and which is time that most decent food service workers like to avoid, the better to be out working tables and raking in tips).

Among people who run businesses?  Especially among bars and restaurants, whose profit margins have always been razor-thin?  Who’ve seen their bottom lines squeezed by $5/hour for every single waitress or bartender they have out in the house for the past couple of decades?  Or among parents of teenagers (ahem) who have a harder time than ever finding entry-level minimum wage jobs as the minimum wage has risen?

I’m not so sure.

2. If the death wish can’t be scrubbed, then Emmer should come out for making tips and gratuities tax-free. Who cares what it does to revenue? Just get on the right side of this issue politically.

That in particular is a good, princpled, conservative approach to the issue.  It’s also a federal issue controlled by the IRS, and most likely not something a governor can carry off.

3. Stop running for the endorsement. Emmer won. He can’t win with the narrow base that propelled him to victory. He’s in a general election race now and any campaign staff that can’t grasp the obvious ought to be waiting tables. We jest! Don’t shoot!

But as I’ve seen it all along, Emmer’s campaign has been about running on conservative principles all along – and selling those principles to the middle to convince them to move to meet him on the right, rather than scuttling toward the center.

The principle in this case is “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs” – or, more directly, “Get government out of the way of business creating more jobs”.  The loss of the tip credit has effectively tripled the cost of every waiter on a restauranteur’s or barkeep’s floor, giving them the option of slashing either profits or the number of waitstaff.  Emmer is proposing rectifying this.  The DFL and Media’s predictable response is “look at the money waiters might lose!” (when it’s not “where are the $100,000 waitstaff jobs?”); Emmer’s response, and that of his supporters, should be “but look at the jobs, averaging $8-15 an hour with tips, we’ll be creating!”.

4. Run on winning themes and speak of nothing else: lower taxes for all, less nanny-state interference in our lives, reduced state spending and the legitimate fear of the intellectually lazy DFL in control of the executive and legislative branches.

But I think that was Emmer’s point, if phrased inartfully and exploited deceptively.

5. Don’t take the post August 10th bait from Mark “Renoir-Toulouse Lautrec” Dayton. He’ll run a class warfare campaign and the tip-credit snafu only plays directly into that. Like most Democrats, he hasn’t had a new idea in decades. Point out he’s to the left of our wholly incompetent affirmative action President.

And here, SG is absolutely correct.

Finally, one friend of MC suggested something brilliant: bring in New Jersery Governor Chris Christie and campaign for real reform and not just tinkering around the edges. New ideas scare Democrats; so scare them!

I agree; Governor Christie is like the long-lost child of my own political idol, former Jersey City mayor Brett Schundler, who did for his city half a generation ago what Governor Christie is trying to do for the whole state today.

But here’s a question;  when it comes to tip credits, and the media and DFL’s (ptr) class-baiting response to the “story”, What Would Christie Do?

(Besides say “tip credits work in New Jersey”; the state is one of the 43 that allows ’em).

Voters will reward you. Look at what he’s doing in his state and think about what could be applied here to good effect. If Christie can have such success in New Jersey, MC holds out hope for this state of government workers.

Hope is good.

And to achieve hope, you need to start with a princple, and then move to achieve it.

And DFL/media caterwauling aside, I don’t think this past week has been a bad step on the way.

So Tom Emmer spent an evening waiting tables.

The real entree of the video, of course, starts around 2:55; he cuts to the real chase – we should stop taxing tips.

I’d love to see Margaret Anderson-Kelliher working as a barback.  Come to think of it, it might be good experience for after August 10.

The Minnesota Majority reports (via Fox) that Ramsey County is investigating felons voting in Saint Paul during the ’08 elections:

That’s the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes — fewer votes than the number of felons whose illegal ballots were counted, according to Minnesota Majority’s newly released study, which matched publicly available conviction lists with voting records…

…”We aren’t trying to change the result of the last election. That legally can’t be done,” said Dan McGrath, Minnesota Majority’s executive director. “We are just trying to make sure the integrity of the next election isn’t compromised.”

Naturally, the MNGOP is excited about this.

And, equally naturally, the DFL/media spin machine is not.

Writing at the MinnPost, Doug Grow – who was always almost as reliable a DFL shill as Lori Sturdevant – is on fact-check detail:

Now, some context:

• In the hyper-excited Fox News reports, Carruthers is quoted as praising the Minnesota Majority study.  “What I said is that they did as well as they could do given the data they had, but much of their data is not good,” Carruthers said.
• Of the 475 cases Minnesota Majority questioned, 270 examples were just not accurate, Carruthers said.

There are reasons for so many inaccuracies, Carruthers said. For example, because of data privacy laws, Minnesota Majority was able only to get year of birth of many of the people they claimed had voted illegally. But, for the group to be sure it had the right individual, it would have needed the actual date of birth.

“In a state with so many Johnsons,’’ said Carruthers, “you have many people with the same name born in the same year. You have to have date of birth, to be sure you have the right person.’’

I’m suspecting there aren’t that many Johnsons on the list. Just a hunch.

• Additionally, Carruthers said, Minnesota Majority would not have had access to changes in sentencing. For example, a person who initially had been sentenced to 10 years of probation may have had that probation reduced during the period of the sentence. At that point, the individual’s civil rights – including the right to vote – would have been restored.

Now, that might hold water.

Still, there were people who voted, or registered to vote, who were not eligible. That’s a felony, and if found guilty, they could face five years in prison and a $10,000, though Carruthers said that would be unlikely.

Not as unlikely as “reform” – or as Doug Grow is to answer the question “how many felons are acceptable?” in an election.

But I am so so so so glad that the likes of Grow are finally focusing on making sure media coverage is accurate.  Thank you, Doug Grow. Thank you so very much.

There’s still a month until the primaries.  Tom Emmer’s been crisscrossing Minnesota, doing what he does best – meeting people.  In his bio with Bill Salisbury in the PiPress, he estimates he’s met 100,000 Minnesotans.  I’d imagine that translates to 80,000 votes.

And the DFL still has a solid month before they have their coronation for Mark Dayton.  They are mired in an epic passion deficit, and (this has to be the most depressing part of all for the DFL rank and file) at the end of it all they have a Mark Dayton candidacy to look forward to.

And so the DFL has their minions pecking away at Emmer, trying to make electoral mountains out of molehills (which explains the heavily-contrived furor over Emmer’s off-handed remarks about wages for tipped workers); without Tom Emmer to kick around, all Dayton, Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, Matt Entenza and Tom Horner (remember him?) have for material is each other.

A few weeks ago, we talked about (and conclusively shredded) the DFL’s other contrived controversy – the Dems’ harping on Emmer to release his plan for fixing the deficit (before they do it themselves, naturally).

And like an old pair of birkenstocks, it’s baaack.  Mark Dayton wants Emmer to cough up his plan.

Dave Mindeman at mnpACT shocks the world with a candid admission:

I have to say that I am with Mark Dayton on this one.

Someone check the space-time continuum.

The 2010 election for governor is too important to not start laying the cards on the table. We should be demanding some detailed options for balancing the next budget.

Demand away!

But Emmer, being the underdog in this race, is smart enough to know that he gets one shot at getting through to the mass of Minnesota voters.  It”ll be after the reality of a Mark Dayton candidacy has sunk in.  It’ll be when people outside the wonk class start thinking about this election.

Dayton’s tax plan is certainly open to criticism. That’s fair. But to me, the criticism is never going to ring true unless alternatives are put out to the public.

The problem is that nobody cares if Emmer’s plan “rings true” right now, because it’ll be released to a roomful of pundits and party hacks.

No – coughing up details right now is what those who are running behind do.  Entenza – stuck in third and on electoral life support – came up with some “details” a few weeks ago – something about green jobs and unicorns.  It seems not to have lit his campaign on fire.

And in perhaps the best symptom yet that the DFL endorsement remains the kiss of death, Kelliher is dipping a toe in:

Margaret Anderson Kelliher is getting closer to some specifics. She laid out an outline in a presser today:

“As Governor I will make those earning more than $250,000 to pay their fair share. I will demand an end to sweetheart deals that shelter tax dollars overseas, and close foreign corporate tax loopholes. “As Governor I will fight waste, fraud and abuse against state government. I will make necessary budget reductions while protecting students from cuts in the classroom, senior citizens in nursing homes, and basic essential services for Minnesota’s most vulnerable. “And as Governor I will use temporary budget tools to transition our state to long-term economic stability.

(Bonus question:  Find any item in that list that pertains to anything but the government and its institutions.  Jobs?  Tax Burden?  Regulation?  Stick a fork in it, Kelliher.  It’s over).

Emmer is doing what  he needs to do to have any hope of prevailing against the voters that matter – the ones that don’ t write for newspapers or blogs – against a full-court DFL and media press in less than four months.

The demand for “details”, today as a month ago, has nothing to do with informing the public, and everything  to do with tactics in a race where the DFL knows it’s going to need a lot of public relations hocus pocus to cover a deadly drought of ideas.

It was one of the Senate’s stranger friendships; Barry Goldwater and Paul Wellstone.  The two were at the opposite extremes of American politics, but they admired each others’ passion and commitment to their principles.  They became fairly close friends.  Wellstone even attended Goldwater’s funeral.

But that doesn’t mean that Wellstone was ever remotely tempted to vote as a fiscal conservative, or that Goldwater broke ranks with conservatives from his friendship.  Admiration only goes so far.

Even in notoriously liberal Minnesota, crowded as its Metro and Arrowhead areas are with invinicble DFL voters, this could be a rough year for the Democratics.

And it’s when times get tough that some people, at least, start reaching, hard, for plans.

Grace Kelly, noted 9/11 truther writing at Minnesota “Progressive” Project, believes she has the answer.  She notes that the “Goldwater/Wellstone” phenomenon means that people who are passionate about their principles often have more in common, politically, than mushy moderates who vote more on the basis of pragmatism or, as with so many moderates, last-second gut reaction. She even has a graphic:

So far, so good.

But then comes the unsupportable conclusion:

This model would suggest that persuading strong Republicans who hate Emmer politics,  would be a persuasion that would stick until the election and possibly even create more Democrats.

Well, that’s simple.  Because while many highly-committed conservatives will get along, at least socially, with many highly-committed liberals because of the same “birds of a feather” phenomenon that made friends of the likes of Goldwater and Wellstone, you will find very, very few “conservatives” who support outrageous tax hikes, featherbedding state employees’ unions, or out-of-control spending.

Break into the strong Republican social networks and wonderful other things would start happening because the opinions are held on false information and false logic.

That’s right.

Because nothing endears one to a social network into which one is trying to “break” like exuding the belief that “everything you believe is wrong” (especially given that history shows conservatism to be pretty much inevitably right about the things that really matter).

An outsider has a hard time changing the group, however an insider could really be impressive. So why are we leaving these groups alone again?

If I had to guess?  The DFL is leaving us alone because there is no huge reserve of conservative Republicans who disagree with Emmer’s politics, or who would do anything with any DFL policy (much less the far left ones) other than line their bird cages with ’em.

Hope that helps.

As much as I’ve bagged on the press for their hatchet-jobbery as re the Emmer campaign, I’ll give well-deserved kudos to the PiPress’ Bill Salisbury for doing a fair, balanced piece that shows the reasons that a lot of us gravitated to Emmer in the first place.

Anecdote alert:

Tom Emmer’s father was struggling to keep his Edina lumberyard afloat during a deep recession in the early ’80s.

One day, his dad ordered his sons to put on their suits and ties and his wife and daughter to don dresses and climb into the family’s backyard swimming pool.

“We sat in the pool, water up to here,” Emmer recently recalled, holding his hand to his chest, “and he took a picture.”

At Christmastime, his father mailed the photo to friends and family with this message scrawled across the bottom: “The Emmers almost went under last year, but we’re coming out with a splash this year.”

Emmer, the Republican-endorsed candidate for Minnesota governor, said his father’s declaration symbolized how he learned to face adversity and obstacles.

“You need to take responsibility for those situations, stand up tall and make the best of it,” the three-term state representative said during a late-June campaign bus ride across southern Minnesota.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Democratic Governors tell the President that bucking the beliefs of 70% of the American people might not work so well for them:

At the Democrats’ meeting on Saturday, some governors bemoaned the timing of the Justice Department lawsuit, according to two governors who spoke anonymously because the discussion was private.

“Universally the governors are saying, ‘We’ve got to talk about jobs,’ ” Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, said in an interview. “And all of a sudden we have immigration going on.”

He added, “It is such a toxic subject, such an important time for Democrats.”

Note to any Democrats who actually have to deal with the American people; it’s all about the ideology.

Allegations of rampant vote fraud…

…brought by Democrats against Obama, from the 2008 Democratic Primaries.

Read the whole thing.

And then ask yourself if you really believe it all stopped cold at the end of the Dem primary/caucus season.

Suddenly, this song – admittedly wrenched out of original context – seems to be merely dumb, rather than crushingly stupid:

It’s as if a lightbulb switched on sometime since 2006!

via YouTube – Let’s Impeach the President – Neil Young.

LeBron who?

It was seventy years ago today that the Battle of Britain officially began.

It’s hard to remember, but seventy years ago today – within the lifetime of a huge number of Americans -Western Civilization itself was on the ropes, and the Nazis commenced what they hoped would be the endgame.

It was that bad.

———-

It’s hard to imagine to us, today, engaged as we are in a counterinsurgency war that is very nearly a decade old, how different war was in 1940 than today.  It was very, very fast, in the same way that we conquered Hussein’s Iraq very, very quickly, with huge armored columns sweeping across the plains and clouds of aircraft pummeling opposition far behind the increasingly-meaningless “front line”.  And remember – it had been ten scant months since Hitler had conquered Poland, three months since the lightning campaigns in Denmark and Norway (where the Allies had finally pulled out seventy years and one month ago today on June 10, 1940); not quite two months since Hitler had conquered the Netherlands and Belgium; less than a month since France had capitulated.

In four months – less time than it takes to get through the Stanley Cup playoffs – all of Western Europe, save Switzerland (which watched the Germans warily from their mountain fortresses, mobilized for war on the one hand and needing to accomodate a power that completely surrounded them on the other), Sweden (also ready for war, also surrounded by German or German-allied territory), Spain (where Francisco Franco remained friendly to his benefactor Hitler, while studiously avoiding entering a war he realized would gain him nothing) and Germany’s ally Italy, had fallen.

It was also incredibly bloody by our standards today.  The six weeks between the invasion of the Low Countries and the surrender of France led to 65,000 French killed and missing;
Britain lost nearly 20,000 dead and captured and twice as many wounded; the Dutch lost nearly 10,000 dead and wounded in two weeks, the Belgians twice as many in about a month.  The Germans lost 27,000 dead conquering France, with at least as many wounded.  And the victory, crushing as it was, cost about a third of the strength of the German air force, the Luftwaffe.  That’s over 100,000 dead, not counting civilians, in less time than it takes for your tax refund to arrive if you file by mail.

A section of Boulton-Paul Defiant fighters in formation.

So when German troops lined up along the English Channel, the big question was “what now?”  The obvious answer was “invade Britain”.

But this hadn’t been done successfully since 1066; in the nine hundred years since, Britain had built the world’s most powerful Navy, which if left to operate with impunity would shred any invasion attempt…

…unless it was impossible to operate because of crushing German air superiority.

German Messerschmidt 109 fighter

This was a novel, radical change in warfare even since World War I, 22 years earlier; the idea that there was a third front, the sky, that could control movement on the land and sea and make it impossible to successfully resist.  It was complete German control of the air that hamstrung Poland’s resistance, that gave Germany’s shoestring invasion of Norway the advantage it needed, that drove the Dutch to surrender, that finally doomed France.  Because Germany controlled the skies, Stukas broke up French counterattacks and troop concentrations as German fighters mowed French bombing counterattacks down like sheep.

And the Germans knew they’d have to control the sky over Great Britain to have a chance of holding the Royal Navy at bay long enough to get ashore in Britain to face what might have been an anticlimactic battle against a British army that had left most of its equipment in France while evacuating from Dunkirk.

Hitler knew he needed to capitalize on his momentum.  He also needed to give the exhausted Luftwaffe time to recover, bring in new pilots and planes to replace casualties, and start over again, and give his Navy time to muster enough ships and barges to carry an army cross the Channel, especially after the grievous casualties they’d suffered in Norway over the previous three months.

So the Luftwaffe‘s first mission, which would occupy the first month of the Battle of Britain, scarecely touched British soil at all. 

———-

So as fraught as the date and the events were, the Battle of Britain started with a bit of a whimper.   The Luftwaffe was exhausted from the Battle of France – and so, to slow down the tempo and allow for training replacement crews, the first month of the Battle was spent sparring over the English Channel.

German Heinkel 111 bomber - theretofore most famous for bombing Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War - over the Channel.

Stukas, with powerful fighter escorts, descended on British convoys through the Channel.  The British being on defense, they had to try to cover all the convoys equally; being at the limits of the ranges of the Spitfires and Hurricanes that stood the patrols, the British advantage in radar (of which more in a month or so) was of little value.

German Stukas. While history records that the Stukas were badly bloodied in the Battle, they went on to be among the most efficient ship and tank-killing planes of the entire war.

And so the two air forces spent the month like a couple of boxers in the first round, poking at each other, feeling out each others’ games.

Artists impression of a 92 Squadron Spitfire approaching the white cliffs of Dover during the opening stages of the Battle.

For the merchant ships and the Royal Navy in the Channel below, of course, it was another matter; casualties in this first month became so heavy that the Admiralty stopped all convoy shipping in the Channel.

British ship gets a close call from a German bomb

And so the first phase of the final battle for the future of western civilization went to the Germans by a close nod.

But things would pick up in August.

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 talking with David Weigel, late of the WaPo, as well as Barry Hickethier (running for MN Senate against Larry Pogemiller).  We’ll also be talking midterm elections, and much much more.
• 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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Joe Bodell at Minnesota “Progressive” Project  thinks he’s onto something:

Although I will take credit for “Waitergate”. Seriously, why has no one thought of that yet?

I’m nothing if not eager to answer questions.

There are two reasons, Joe:

1. The Association of Sentient Pundits has declared a ten year moratorium on “…gate” analogies, over a year ago.  “They’re overused to the point of self-caricature”, said Rajiv-Bob Singh, spokesman for the ASP.  “We found it necessary to declare a moritorium for the preservation of the pundit trade”.
2. Um, because while very few waiters make $100K, allowing for the Tip Credit will allow restaurants to hire twice as many waitstaff (or make other improvements, or take a profit in the notoriously lean hospitality industry), while all but a thin film of waitstaff won’t notice the difference, since they’re getting their money from tips anyway.   In other words, “Waitergate” (sorry, ASP) is a cutesy label in search of a controversy – and try as the media and the leftyblogs may to manufacture a controversy, the dog just don’t hunt.

I’m always happy to help.

Brian Lambert, writing at The Same Rowdy Crowd, laments the the state of journalism’s self-congratulatory, clubby order of high-priests-of-information that allowed Rolling Stone to “scoop” the establishment press (or should we say, the more-establishment-y press) on the McChrystal story; the idea that RS beat the NYTimes and the rest of the mainstream/dead-tree/agenda/establishment media to the story mortifies him…

…and strikes him as part of a larger pattern:

As bad/squirrely as McChrystal’s attitude was, as revealed in the Rolling Stone piece, I don’t know that it compares to the spectacular failure of what I facetiously refer to as “business journalism”. Talk about an off-site publicity/fanzine approach coverage. There’s no question the Pentagon and Congress will cut off access in a split second if they think you’re likely to print something negative. But on a Main Street level, where homey little Mom and Pop operations like UnitedHealth, Denny Hecker, Tom Petters, etc. operate, the coverage, until the moment of (shocking!) collapse is invariably one of uncritical reverence and, well, fanzine adoration. Jack that up to the national level and you see prevailing attitude toward AIG, Lehman Brothers, CitiGroup and Goldman, Sachs … prior to the implosion.

In other words, the “gatekeepers”, the Fifth Estate, the institution that it is claimed comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, the one that constantly tells itself and whomever us us still pay attention that it is what keeps Democracy viable, isn’t doing its job.

Of course, if you’re a Twin Cities conservative, it’s not news; the entire weight of the Twin Cities media has been harnessed to the DFL’s needs for so long it’s hard to care anymore.

So if the “establishment” media don’t actually dig out the hard stories, and exist primarily to get their collective id in the form of Barack Obama or other such sonorous bobbleheads elected to office (and obstruct and defame their party’s opponents), then what early good do any of them serve?

Sullivan links to a blog post by ex-Marine and award-winning writer, Davis Morris, who says, “It’s an unfortunate staple of Beltway journalism that has bled over into war reporting that most reporters are loathe to burn their sources by writing derogatory things about them. To be blunt, most reporters are as career-obsessed as the officers they’re interviewing and they don’t want to poison the well. This is doubly true if the officer being interviewed is a four-star general. There is a simple reciprocity involved: if you want to be invited back to ride on The Boss’s helicopter, if you want continued access, you’d better not write about his soft spot for strippers and gin.”

Substitute “business reporting” for “war”, and “CEOS” for mere “officers” and “executive jet” for “helicopter” …

Or substitute “covering state senate and US senate votes” for business or war, and “Barack Obama” for “CEOs”…

…and you get the same idea.

Are we seeing a pattern yet?

Now, Matt Taibi, also over at Rolling Stone, (on the blog), weighs in ripping Lara Logan. (Does the title, “Lara Logan, You Suck”, tell you anything?) CBS’s implausibly good-looking Chief Foreign Correspondent for essentially accusing Hastings (of the McChrystal expose) of unprofessional journalism.

Taibbi, who has written some terrific stuff about Wall St. sharks (post-facto, alas), holds nothing back defending the “outsider” journalism game from the Revenge of the “insiders”.

“I have been there, when some would-be “reputable” journalist who’s just been severely ass-whipped by a relative no-name freelancer on an enormous story fights back by going on television and, without any evidence at all, accusing the guy who beat him of cheating. That’s happened to me so often, I’ve come to expect it. If there’s a lower form of life on the planet earth than a “reputable” journalist protecting his territory, I haven’t seen it.

Which is, of course, where we bloggers come in. We have beaten the stuffing out of the mainstream media so many times we’ve lost count.    And we’ve taken the MSM’s demonstrable lack of integrity from meme to joke to truism to weary bromide in less than a decade.

So – why should anyone care what they say anymore?

Can we finally stick a fork in the entire milieu of the “professional journalist”?   Extinguish the entire cult of the high priests of knowledge?  Acknowledge the fact that the “journalistic profession” (actually a glorified craft, even at its best) is a fossil?

The “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” – an astroturf group sponsored by a consortium of DFL-linked pressure groups – has been behind much of the smear-mongering against Tom Emmer so far this campaign. They’ve occupied themselves with a klutzy false-flag website, a couple of twitter accounts (one of baldfaced propaganda, and one, “StuffEmmerSays”, that tried to mock Emmer statements but actually made him sound like Ronald Reagan to the point I spent the last month mocking it as a pro-GOP site; it seems to have worked, and the account seems to have demised).

And if that’s the best the DFL can do, this election’s not going to be nearly as hard as I’d worried.

“A4aBM” ran the first anti-Emmer ad of the campaign this week; and the Republican Twitterverse has been redounding with bits and pieces of the information A4aBM got wrong.

Long story short; the ad is warm runny bulls**t.

Claim #1: Audio: “Tom Emmer sided with Governor Pawlenty and opposed a plan that would force corporations and CEOs to pay their fair share of taxes”  ABMBackup: “On May 18, 2009, Emmer voted against the second attempt at a DFL- written FY2010-2011 revenue bill…

Sounds pretty gnarly, huh?

The Truth: Tom Emmer did not cast a vote on this roll call.

Oh, my.  You mean, A4aBM got a fact wrong?

Well, the ad is 0-1 so far.

Claim #2: Audio: “They cut funding for education” ABM Backup: “On April 18, 2007, Emmer voted against HF 6, the K-12 funding bill, which passed the House with a huge bipartisan majority of 119-13. On May 8, 2007, Emmer again voted against the bill as it was re-passed on a similar 119-14 vote…

Voted against it twice?  Emphasis added:

The Truth: After April 18, 2007, there were no additional votes taken on this bill that year.  During the 2008 session, this bill was used as a “vehicle” and a delete-all amendment was added completely changing the bill.  The vote they reference on May 8, 2007 was actually a vote on May 8, 2008 and it wasn’t a vote on the bill but, rather, a procedural vote on whether the bill should be taken from the table.  Emmer voted against taking the bill from the table.

You’re trying to say A4aBM lied about the real intent of voting on a picayune procedural technicality in the life of a background-noise bill to try to smear Tom Emmer?  Say it isn’t so!

0-2 so far.

Claim #3: Audio: “[Tom Emmer and Tim Pawlenty] cut funding for education.”

The Truth: There is nothing in the bill cited that included a cut to education.  In addition, KSTP’s Tom Hauser recently had this to say about the claim that Governor Pawlenty cut education funding: “As for Pawlenty cutting education funding, that’s not true.  According to the education department, per pupil funding has gone up since 2004.”

0-3 – well, more like 0-4, really.

Claim #4: Audio: “[Emmer voted to cut] job training.”

The Truth: Nowhere in ABM’s backup is there any support for this claim.  “Training” is mentioned only once in the legislation, and that is in reference to home ownership education.  This bill had nothing to do with job training.

Zero for five.

Claim #5: Audio: “[Emmer and Pawlenty cut] job training and health care”.  On screen: “Source: Minnesota House Journal, 4/25/2005”

The Truth: According to the Minnesota House of Representatives Journal, the House was not in session on 4/25/2005, meaning there could be no Journal of the House for that day.  The Alliance’s citation, therefore, does not even exist.

So the lesson for today is, whenever “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” speaks, distrust and then verity.

Because the DFL asssumes that you, the people, are too stupid to know any better.

Here’s a little more wisdom from my daughter’s State of Minnesota-certified, Minnesota Federation of Teachers accredited teacher:

Whitey <3 Meth!: Said the teacher, “If meth didn’t exist, there would be no drug law reform, because white peole do meth, and the goverment doesn’t want white people in jail”.  Didn’t they say the same thing about cocaine 25 years ago?

Dumb Cops: Speaking in a cornpone accent: “I don’t know, man, I”m just here to beat up black people”, even though, said the teacher, the cop has no ideas what the laws are.  Not to say cops are infallible – far from it – but a top-to-bottom racist conspiracy? Hm.

Slavery Altered The Physical World:  “Hurricanes follow the path of the slave ships”, apparently as God’s punishment for slavery.  Apparently hurricanes were mostly found in the North Sea before the 1400s as vengeance for the Vikings?  I dunno.

Slavery Altered Evolution: “Sharks, to this day, folow the route of the slave ships”, as a matter of evolutionary adaptation; according to the teacher, sharks “evolved” to live in the subtropical trade wind zone because of the centuries of slaves being tossed overboard from slave ships (as opposed to, y’know, because the sub-tropics are crawling with aquatic life?)

Anyone but me thinking “Hey, good thing he’s not teaching them Intelligent Design?  Whew!”?

You live, you learn.

After eight and a half years of covering the journalistic geography in this town, some of the basic contours are as well-known as my bike ride to work; Lori Sturdevant will be a dozey DFL hack; Nick Coleman will be a thud-witted and utterly predictable DFL hack; Brian Lambert will be a rapier-witted but peek-a-boo DFL hack.

It’s rare that there’s anything new to cover.

And to be fair, the Strib’s John Tevlin isn’t exactly “new”; to be fairer, most of us who’ve been blogging for a while have sort of gotten numb to the Strib’s columnist’s row; we’re like drug addicts who need more and more of our chosen drug to even get a buzz.

Fortunately (?), the latest Tevlin column is dumb enough to crack the silt-like coating of ennui that chokes me whenever I try to read the Strib’s opinion pages.

When I read in Tuesday’s paper that Tom Emmer, the GOP-endorsed candidate for governor, claimed that three servers at the Eagle Street Grill in St. Paul “take home over $100,000 a year,” I high-tailed it over to the restaurant to get a piece of the action.

Reporter races to cover a story in a bar?  Flea bites dog as it bites man.

Emmer chose Eagle Street for a campaign stop to argue that the state should drop minimum wages for workers who earn tips, which he claims would help small businesses.

I wasn’t the first one in the door, but I was close. A guy with “Kevin” stitched on his shirt waited on me.

“Can I have an application for one of those $100,000 jobs?” I asked. Kevin looked like I’d just done a dine-and-dash on him, and I sensed it had not been a good day on Eagle Street.

I’m interested in the reaction the left in the Twin Cities – the DFL, the various echelons of leftybloggers at their command, and the Strib – have had to Emmer’s suggestion that the hospitality industry might benefit, and create more jobs, by returning to the same exact law Minnesota observed until 1990 – allowing restaurants and bars to pay less than minimum wage, because food servers can be expected to make more, sometimes much more, in tips; as Emmer noted, sometimes much, much more.

The reaction:  “What?  Every waiter and waitress will make $100,000?  Waiting tables pays better than being a low-level Java programmer?”, every one of them seems to find it amusing to ask in mawkishly mock amusement.

I sometimes wish they’d turn that keen sense of, um, humor to some of the other, more-carefully-focus-grouped claims that candidates put out there:

“Haha, Mark Dayton – so when we “tax the rich“, our whole five billion dollar deficit will vanish, right?  Poof, gone, ancient history?  Cool!”

“So, Matt Entenza – if we put just another two billion dollars into our education system, that will prevent one single more Afro-American kid from being shunted onto the “fail track”?  Just another two billion?  OK – so for ten billion, can we get every single kid in the Minneapolis school system into Yale?”

“Margaret Anderson-Kelliher – if we spend more money on “stimulus” work for the public employees unions…” – OK.  Sorry.  I can’t even get sarcastic about that anymore.

One thing I can get sarcastic about still is the contempt Jon Tevlin feels for working people:

Yeah, I said “contempt”.

“I’m a columnist at the newspaper across the river, and I could use a pay upgrade,” I said. “When can I start?”

I came prepared for a job interview, just in case. Even though I had no experience waiting tables, as a columnist I have plenty of experience being insulted by drunks late at night. I did tend bar for about three weeks at a place called the Goosetown Lounge, in New Ulm, to augment my paltry salary as a cub reporter, and I am known to mix a pretty good margarita.

A good waiter or bartender can take years to not only learn the tricks that separate the great from the OK – including the greatest trick of all, getting a job at a place where people spend lots of money and tip really really well.  I’m not sure if Jon Tevlin thinks that the waiters at, say, Manny’s – people who earn $200 tips on tables that run up $1,000 tabs – are the “cub reporters” of the food service business, or if he thinks he could impress one of the staff at the Saint Paul Grill with his bartending tales.

But in waiting, as with just about every other trade – carpentry, user experience design, medicine, plumbing, running a checkout station or a bookstore, the law – it takes years of experience to rise to the top of the trade.

Looking at the likes of Frank Rich, Mo Dowd, Lori Sturdevant and Jon Tevlin, it’d seem that journalism is the exception to the rule.

The owners said they have loyal employees who earn a good living, but that the tip credit change would save them more than $30,000.

One longtime bartender familiar with Eagle Street said that based on prices and clientele, he’d be surprised if anyone who relies on tips at Eagle Street makes much more than $50,000.

Oh.

Well.

So a worker who makes, by any measure, a modest but potentially-comfortable living from a job that requires no formal education or training, and who literally won’t notice the “cut” in the minimum wage, is offset by the fact that, I suppose, not every waitress is making $100K…or…huh?

Wade Luneburg, secretary-treasurer for Local 17 UNITE HERE, said such a cut would hurt many workers who barely get by.

Some servers and bartenders earn a decent living, he said, “but if you are talking about someone at the Whistle Stop Cafe in Slayton, they are usually women making very little in tips who have no health insurance,” said Luneburg.

With the likes of Jon Tevlin and Wade Luneburg, it’s always the stupid extremes; waitstaff either make more than registered nurses, or they are one step below crack whores.

“What Representative Emmer is saying is really reprehensible.”

Well, no.  Tevlin and Luneburg are being reprehensible; they’re doing their best to hop up and down and heap ignorant mockery on a statement that was, at the end of the day, perfectly correct; waiters who are making $25-50K a year won’t notice the money they lose to the tip credit; the woman at the Whistle Stop in Slayton might just have more options when the Whistle Stop’s competition can afford to hire another waitress (and maybe someone can teach out of state Minnesotans that a quarter is not a suitable tip for a $20 ticket.  Just saying).  Or maybe not.  There are no guarantees…

…except one; raising minimum wages cuts the number of entry-level jobs.

By noon, the owners had already fielded numerous angry calls. In fact, Geisen said, “lobbyists” who set up the Emmer appearance were on their way down to smooth things over and correct his quote, something that seems to be a full-time job these days.

Sort of like correcting Nick Coleman used to be.

Geisen ran off to fight another fire, and I had to feel for the guy. So I threw down another buck.

“That’s for Tom Emmer,” I said.

I was just trying to do my part, the poor giving back just a little bit to help out the rich.

The bad news?  The Strib just keeps getting dumber.

The good news?  The DFL must be really desperate to be spending this much effort courting the “waitress at a crappy 3:2 bar” vote, and courting them this badly.

Writing over at True North, Sheila Corbett Kihne – a former restaurant hostess – explains to the likes of John Tevlin and pretty much every leftyblogger how the restaurant trade works…

….since it seems none of them know anything about the business at all:

Now- let’s look at a basic scenario. Waitstaff gets paid $6.00 per hour by the employer- employer is given the OPTION to pay them $2.50 an hour and the employee has to make up that $3.50 per hour in tips. That equates to one table per hour with a Republican customer and a $18 tab (or with a Democrat a $24 tab.)

Employer saves $3.50 per hour, $140 per week, $560 per month, $6,720 per year multiplied by an entire waitstaff this is a TON of money. Money that would most likely be spent on expanding or improving the business. (Newflash to those who have never been in the restaurant business: there is not a lot of extra cash and most cash gets thrown right back into growing the business or saving money to handle the downturns.)

Perhaps a restaurant owner chooses to hire a better chef at a higher salary, word gets out that the food is excellent and business grows. Perhaps they decide to take out some new advertising to bring in new business. Perhaps they open a new patio or buy some nicer tables and chairs. Maybe they save up to open a second location. All of these things could give them the competitive edge they need to survive in this crappy economy. And if they’re able to survive they don’t have to layoff employees, if they’re somehow able to thrive maybe they can even hire more employees. Have you been to a restaurant lately? Unless it’s McDonalds, they’re all struggling. How much in commercial property taxes does the government lose when one closes? How much in sales tax, income tax?

Sheila also notes a factoid that virtually none of the Twin Cities’ media’s chattering classes can bother to mention; 43 states currently have the law that Emmer is proposing; as I’ve noted here in the past, Minnesota had the same law until 1990, when a DFL-controlled legislature insisted the lot of waitresses would improve greatly with a mandatory minimum wage – which, combined with Minnesota’s deeply stupid smoking law has left a lot of waitstaff out of work over the years.

Bun’s teacher says that owning guns is perfectly hunky dory – and that if you shoot someone in self-defense on your property, you need to “drag them into your house; they can’t do anything to you then”.