I never really “got” Louisiana.  It always seemed to me that the big selling point of the entire state’s culture was indolence interspersed with bouts of toxic drunkenness.

Bloomberg says there’s a reason for that;  it’s a statistical fact:

In Louisiana, where the humidity is as thick as the gumbo, people prefer to take it slow. Hunting, fishing, and outdoor sporting activity may have earned Louisiana the nickname “Sportsman’s Paradise,” but new data indicate that the more popular pastimes are sleeping, goofing off, and watching television.

In a new ranking by Businessweek.com based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Louisiana claims the top spot as the country’s laziest state. To be clear, by “lazy” we do not mean lacking work ethic or engagement. Rather, it is a measure of leisure time spent doing sedentary activities compared with activities that require more physical effort, such as exercising and even working. Mississippi and Arkansas came in second and third, and while states in the south and southeast are represented heavily in the list, such East Coast states as Delaware and New York placed in the top 20.

The average for the U.S. population: 8 hours, 35 minutes sleeping; 2 hours, 38 minutes watching television; 44 minutes socializing; 18 minutes relaxing; and 3 hours, 23 minutes working. Looked at another way, Louisianans over the course of a year spend on average 3,285 more minutes sleeping and 9,855 more minutes watching television than the national average.

But while growing up why would I, in particular, find the whole “Big Lazy” culture so foreign and incomprehensible, when so much of the rest of our culture seems to lionize it so?

In North Dakota, the least inactive state, people sleep 8 hours, 4 minutes; watch 2 hours, 19 minutes of television; socialize for 40 minutes; and relax for 22 minutes. The average time North Dakotans spend working is just over 5 hours.

Ah.  Now I get it.

Joel Demos may need more than a great web ad to beat Keith Ellison in the Fifth District. He’ll probably need the National Guard. The Fifth, aka “Berkeley on the Prairie”, is one of those districts where the DFL could endorse a package of pork chops and get 50% of the vote.

Still – if great ads won elections, Demos could start measuring the drapes in Ellison’s office.

There is no more thankless job in the world than running for CD5 (or CD4, across the river, which is just as bad).

But if Republicans in the city couldn’t hope for miracles, we couldn’t hope for much at all.

Al Franken?  Treating the Senate like a comedy club?

Go figger:

Franken, who was presiding over the chamber from the dais, gesticulated and made faces while McConnell explained his opposition to Kagan, according to witnesses.

The television cameras broadcasting the speech on C-SPAN remained fixed on McConnell, missing Franken’s antics from the Senate president’s chair.

McConnell grew increasingly angry as Franken made fun of him before a crowded public gallery and Senate aides lining the chamber walls. Senate aides said they were shocked that Franken would flout the decorum of the chamber during such a solemn occasion.

After McConnell finished his remarks, he walked up to the dais and rebuked him.

“This is not ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Al,” McConnell said, making reference to Franken’s career as a writer and actor on NBC’s long-running comedy show, according to a witness who overheard the exchange.

While Franken offered his apologies, I can’t imagine that it’s even occurred to most of the thousands of people who’ve served in the Senate over the centuries to even think about mocking another speaker.

But we tried to warn you.  Yes, we did.

First non-crushingly-humid night in weeks.

Sleep actually felt good.

So my “wake up at 5:30 AM to blog” routine got sidetracked.

More perhaps later today.

To hear the local left and media – pardon the redundancy – you’d think Target came out advocating killing puppies.  In fact, for the left and media (ptr), it may have been even worse – committing apostasy.

But is the “news”  bad for Emmer, the “MNForward” PAC, or even for Target?

There are a couple of reasons I’m going to suggest “no”.

Dayton’s Already Won The Base: A friend of this blog once suggested to Tom Emmer that he needs to quit trying to win the conservative base.  There may be a point to that.  But this issue – especially the “Emmer is Anti-Gay” slur, about which more below – is the same thing in reverse; it’s the left’s attempt to inflame the lefty base over some of their big code words; “anti-gay” and “corporate money”.  It’s possible that people who haven’t been converted to one side or the other might pay attention to this story – but for a variety of reasons, I think that at the very very worst this story has short legs.

That Sweet Stench of Desperation: But there is a reason to try to get the lefty base all riled up – because they are in the midst of a lethargy that reminds me of Republicans in 2008 or 1996.  The widespread, outside-the-party-meeting passion is all on the right these days.  The DFL knows it – and has do to something to get their base to give a damn, especially given the spectre of having to go out and get people excited about Mark Dayton in less than a week.  And so the left needs to create a boogeyman.

Now granted it’s a purely negative campaign – “Vote for Dayton or…um…there’ll be a conservative in office!”.  But consider the alternative; “Vote for Mark Dayton; he’ll tax people who work hard enough to earn over $250K, and probably the rest of us too.  And then…um…”

And a negative campaign is better than no campaign at all.

Emmer Is Not Anti-Gay: There are probably a thick dollop of DFLers and not-that-smart independents who hear “supports traditional marriage” and think “hates gays”.  But people in the real world, the world of the intelligent, do in fact know that the vast majority of people, regardless of their politics, both accept gays as equals and, judging by the voting on gay-marriage referenda nationwide, do not accept the idea of gay marriage.  It’s a bit of cognitive dissonance; smart people see cynical people saying “that means he’s rabidly anti-gay” to dumb people, and shake their heads in disgust.  And, jokes about “Governor Ventura” aside, most people are smarter than that.

Although perhaps the Emmer campaign needs to send the sound bite from his appearance on the NARN at last year’s State Fair to those who believe A4aBM’s slur:

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What do you think about gay marriage?

EMMER:  I don’t care!  [Audience laughs]  No, seriously – I believe marriage is about procreation – but this next election is all about jobs.

I suspect that’s not too far afield from what the vast majority of Minnesotans – regardless of their politics  – believe.

It’s Not A Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay World:  Look – in any population, you’re going to find 1-2% of the people are actively gay, and probably 1-2% of the population who genuinely hate gays.  In between you have the rest of us; people who would fight for a gay person’s right to political and legal equality (to say nothing of their right not to get beaten up), but need to be convinced about gay marriage.  And among that 96% are not a few people who either care enough about politics to ask “er, how is this “anti-gay?”, and not a few more who say “someone hates gays?  Sack up, fellas, I got plenty of people who hate me for being a Korean grocer/white Christian/Lebanese mortgage broker/Armenian professor/Jew.  Life’s tough; have a falafel and join the freakin’ club”.   Either way, playing the victim card only gets you so much traction when times are as tough as they are.

Especially because…:

MNForward Is Right: MNForward’s agenda has nothing, bupkes, to do with social policy.  It’s about trying to make sure we get a responsible government – one whose policies will not actively trash this state’s already dicey business environment.  Jobs are hard to find these days; the last thing we need is to make it harder to create, get and hold (private sector) jobs.

James Carville said it; “it’s the economy, stupid”.  And deep in their conference room down on Plato Boulevard, you just know the DFL has to admit to itself that this is a lousy year to be selling dime-store socialism – but it’s the only card in their hand.  And so they have to draw attention away from it, which leads to…well, see the “Sweet Stench of Desperation” section, above…

I think that when the dust settles on this that, even if the media manages to hush up the genuine discussion about A4aBM’s funding and the speciousness of the “anti-gay” claims, that Tom Emmer and, most likely, Target will both come out ahead.  The whole flap reeks of last-ditch desperation.

And even Minnesota voters don’t get that silly.

Three weeks ago, Shot In The Dark showed you that “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, which has been funding the avalanche of anti-Emmer attack ads, is an astroturf group funded by the Dayton family and their friends, relatives and cronies (60%, give or take) and the unions (around 40%).

Today, Pat Kessler’s “Reality Check” on WCCO does the same.

Somebody on Twitter pointed me to this PiPress  story claiming that Target’s stock value is suffering because of its donation to MNForward, which is supporting Tom Emmer in this fall’s Minnesota Gubernatorial race.

“Shares in the Minneapolis-based discount retailer have declined 3.5 percent since the morning of July 27, when Target Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel first defended the donation, prompting critics to call for a consumer boycott,” Tom Webb writes for the Pioneer Press.

Perhaps things are finally sinking in at Target headquarters. Last week, Target execs issued a statement amidst all the public scrutiny, saying that they’re brainstorming ways to make amends.

“At Target, we listen to our guests, our team members and our communities — and we have heard them on this issue. We are committed to doing better and regret that we have let down our team members and guests. We are evaluating ways to make sure they know the high value we place on our relationships with them,” Target folks said in a statement.

Interesting claim.  Could it be that Target’s stock price took a hit precisely because of the news of its donation to a PAC supporting Tom Emmer?

That would be very bad indeed.

So I took the liberty of checking the stock prices for four leading consumer big-box stores for the past month or so.  I compared:

• WalMart – in red, on the chart below.
• Target – the slightly lighter blue line (Google quotes didn’t let me change colors…).
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average – the darker blue line.

If you look at the chart, it certainly looks like Target stock did take a dip starting on the 27th of July when, as “Change.com” noted, the flap over the Emmer donation first surfaced.

Of course, the red line for famously orientation-blind and non-fabulous “WalMart” is flat to very slightly improved in that period, too – and seemed to take a slight dip on or around the 27th, as well – not nearly as pronounced, but a dip nonetheless.

So I figured I’d broaden things just a bit.  I picked some more big-box retailers:

• WalMart – in red, on the chart below.
• Costco – in orange below.
• Family Dollar – in dark green, on the chart below.
• Target – Finally, the blue line.

Note the longer scale of the chart below; it’s a month, so July 27 is about a quarter of the way in from the right;

All of the retailers are soft-to-wobbly on and after the 27th – and especially the 23rd through the 27 – with one exception; the dark-green “Family Dollar” chain, whose attitudes about gay marriage are unknown but whose market is downscale and distinctly recession-friendly.

And I thought – “Downmarket Family Dollar doing well, mid-to-low market WalMart and Costco flat to down, mid-to-uppish Target just a tad down…”

So I checked to see if there was a correlation, bringing some higher-end stores into the mix.I added:

• Target remains bright blue, WalMart remains dark red.
• Abercrombie and Fitch, which has spent years and millions courting the gay market (including gay Republicans) is dark green.
• Macy’s, whose marketing and politics are fairly subdued but which earned a “Perfect 100” from the Human Rights Campaign for gay-friendliness (along with – hey, HRC smear victim Best Buy!) – is yellow.

Wow.  On or about July 27, all of the upmarket retailers started taking a dive, more  or less in parallel with Target!  Abercrombie bounced back, of course; Macy’s is down, just a tad more than Target is.

Apparently the market is punishing many companies, regardless of their donations to Tom Emmer!

Or maybe – juuuuust maybe – there was a major announcement about consumer confidence released on or about the 27th that showed bad results for consumer spending or something – a trend that miiiiiight just favor lower-budget stores like Family Dollar, WalMart and Costco, while being a little harsher on slightly higher-concept operations like Macy’s, Abercrombie and Fitch, and Target.

Regardless of their political donations.

Oh, yeah – and while Target is off a bit since July 27, it’s still up over the month.

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers – their “local” of the teachers’ union – having spent a couple of decades fighting charter schools, is now setting up its own

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers is trying to become the first teachers union in the country to authorize charter schools.

The union hopes it can help create a network of “guild schools” run by unionized teachers and focused on professional development and effective teaching practices.

As we noted in my charter school series last summer, charter schools operate under some tight financial constraints – the kind of thing that would kill most public schools.  One of the ways they make it is by hiring non-union teachers.

So it’ll be interesting to see if  a “guild school”, with its higher costs and big union pension, can even survive – or if the union extracts some sort of concession from boards and the legislature.

Almost more interesting than the new charter market is the implied strife within the cozy public school racket between administrators and teachers:

“The education system has become very heavy and weighed down, and it sits on the backs of teachers,” said Lynn Nordgren, president of the Minneapolis union. The guild schools will “maybe have enough flexibility [for teachers] to do what they know is the right thing to be doing for kids right now.”

On Saturday, the American Federation of Teachers announced that it is giving the Minneapolis union a one-year, $150,000 “Innovation Fund” grant to help it pursue its goal…As an authorizer, the Minneapolis union couldn’t require schools to be unionized, but Nordgren said, “We’re hoping the teachers will be unionized, because we think a union of professionals makes a stronger school and a stronger profession.”

And from the Union brass?

Tom Dooher, president of Education Minnesota, the statewide teachers union, acknowledges that unions are sometimes skeptical of charters, which in Minnesota have a mixed track record.

“We’re skeptical of poorly run schools, whether they’re charters or not,” Dooher said. “But the idea of having teachers in charge of the schools and running the policy is something that we think should be happening anyway. If [the Minneapolis union] believes they have the capacity to authorize and run one, more power to them. I think it will be good for kids in Minneapolis.”

“Oceania has never been at war with Eurasia, Winston”.

I’ll be following this…

The new generation just might turn out OK after all…:

Okay, so I’m in the Costco on Coors on the Westside and am browsing through its tables of books for sale and in between “The Best of Tent Camping” and “Shi*t My Dad Says” is F. A. Hayek’s classic “The Road to Serfdom.”

I was so shocked I damn near dropped my 30-pack case of Bud Light. I’ve come to ignore looking for books in Costco because, although the prices are good, we’re talking John Grisham, James Patterson, and Nicholas Sparks. I’m not a book snob, but I like to read really good writers of fiction, or really good writers of non-fiction. Not formulaic he-said, she-said, predictably plotted genre books.

And Hayek is not one of those.

Now, the only question is “will people read a paper book anymore…”

Don’t forget – the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers’ Summer Extravaganza is Saturday, August 14, at Keegan’s Irish Pub in northeast Minneapolis!

RSVP in the comment section, or go to Facebook and check in there.

The topic of the breakup of the United States bounces around every once in a while.  Often it’s a comic subject – as last year, when a Russian tycoon predicted we’d break up into six countries each aligned, conveniently, with a European or Asian power (or Latin-American “power”).

It’s been rattling about lately because of the newfound acceptance of what used to be Big-L Libertarian rhetoric, since the rise of Ron Paul.  To a big-L libetarian, naturally, liberty comes before government.

We’ll come back to that.

Erik Black at the MinnPost has been writing a series of posts on “understanding tentherism”, which has been a useful, challenging exercise (and which deserves a more-detailed set of answers, but I haven’t had the time what with having to keep Minnesota safe from Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota and all).  There was, naturally, no commensurate hand-wringing in 2004 over the wave of lefties who called for breaking the Blue states off to join Canada, but then apparently the left has a sense of humor about their own wackos that they don’t share with the right’s.

But I digress.  Black says:

The more I obsess on it, the more convinced I am that Tentherism is the key to the biggest ideological divide in American political culture. It takes the perpetual argument about how big the government should be and how much it should do, and attaches to the adoration of the founders and the framers and the belief in the Constitution as our secular/sacred text.

Which is an interesting assertion, and one I’ll address in a future post.

But long story short, I think Black has things backwards.  We’ll come back to that in a bit.

Black notes with the sort of shock that the left always shows when the subject comes up – feigned or real – that some conservatives are actually engaging in edgy rhetoric about the subject that must never be mentioned…:

Yes, secession.

If you think the civil war talk is crazy, did you notice that a sitting congressman, who is a candidate for governor of Tennessee, said last week that he hoped the next couple of election cycles would come out right “so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government?”

Hard to take that as anything less than an assertion that states have a right to secede and that if things keep going the way they are going, some states might exercise that right.

Monday that Tennessee guv candidate, U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, said that if he is elected Tennessee will not secede from the union, although there was no takeback of the assertion that it could.

“Could” Tennessee, or any state, secede?  We fought a war at least in part over the question once upon a time – but that’s really neither an answer nor the subject that interests me.

Black says “tentherism” is the key to our current political divide.  I say it’s a byproduct of the real key.

And the real key to “the divide” in America today is one’s answer to these two questions.

First:  To what does an American truly pledge his/her allegiance?  To…:

A) America the physical entity with four million square miles of land, and its government with its capitol and it’s branches and bureaucracies and fifty sub-governments with their sub-branches and sub-bureaucracies?

B) Or is it to the one thing that created America – the idea of liberty, that we are all created equal, that we are a nation under a creator that endowed us with inalienable rights which no government has the legitimate power to take away?

How you answer that is “the key” to the divide. Is America the ideal of liberty?  Or is it a government?

That’s the easy question, of course; plenty of people – especially those who see themselves as principled liberals or Liberals – will answer “B” almost by reflex.

Of course, there are not a few people out there who are solid “A”s – Pete Stark’s “the Constitution is irrelevant, and the Fed can pretty much do what it wants” outburst is the A-list version, but he’s hardly the only “government uber alles” activist among America’s suit class.

Still, Stark and his ilk are basically cartoons.

But there’s a second question.

If our government decayed to the point where it could realistically be said to have rejected the ideals that this country is ostensibly built around, and there is no realistic electoral or legal remedy, is it a citizen’s duty to…:

A) Suck it up and go along with it, because it’s our government, dammit, or…

B) Find a place and/or a means to re-instate those ideals, even if it means starting a new country that actually does enshrine what America really means?

That’s where the question gets interesting.

I’m imagining certain peoples’ answers even as I write this.

So if the United States’ federal government ever abrogated the Constitution to an extent that was utterly, unmistakably a thumb in the eye of the notion of the “government of, by and for the people” – say, if presidents stopped handing over power peacefully, or if one branch of government shut down one of the others – would the states (forget the people for a moment) have a duty to stay in the country if they had a better idea?

(more…)

While we’ve been focusing a lot on the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” and their serial lies about Tom Emmer (currently accuracy rate climbing up toward 0%), the other DFL candidates haven’t done a whole lot better in the accuracy department.

Matt Entenza has been running a very dirty campaign…against Tom Emmer.  Not against Mark Dayton or Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, of course, behind whom he’s running a wan third place in the DFL primary race.

But that hasn’t kept him from spending nearly $4 million on ads so far this cycle – more than Tim Pawlenty spent in his entire winning campaign in 2006, and more than Tom Emmer might spend in this entire cycle, too.

And for that money, he’s gotten ads that aren’t any more accurate about Emmer than A4aBM’s dreck.

When I first saw  Entenza’s “Education” ad – which makes the very “tenther”-y claim that Entenza will withdraw from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) – I thought that the ad’s claim that Emmer supported NCLB didn’t pass the stench test.  I have spent the past two weeks trying to get confirmation from the Emmer camp (which should hush those of you who’ve been yapping that I am “with the Emmer campaign”, capisce?), so MPR’s Catherine Richert, at MPR’s Polinaut “Poligraph”, got the story first.

I thought, like so many of these scabrous “vote” claims you see in Dems’ ads, that it was a report about an out-of-context vote that was muddied by some sort of procedural or parliamentary foible or another.  I was right:

Entenza’s campaign says Emmer voted against a plan to drop No Child Left Behind in 2008. And at first blush, it would seem that way.

But parliamentary maneuvering on the House floor muddied the intent of the amendment Emmer voted against. It didn’t just end the program; it contained other unrelated provisions.

It’s a tenet of conservatism unto the point of dogma that we want education pushed to the state and, preferably, local level; we take unjustified flak for wanting to abolish the Department of Education.  Emmer is – so we’re told! – nothing if not a thoroughgoing conservative, and Richert’s got the records to prove it.  I’ll add emphasis as appropriate:

In early 2009, Emmer co-sponsored a bill that would have prevented implementation of No Child Left Behind.

Later that year, Emmer told Minnesota Public Radio that he opposes No Child Left Behind.

“I object to the federal government having any law that tells the state of Minnesota, more importantly parents of children in the state of Minnesota, this is how your schools are going to be run,” he said on Dec. 11, 2009.

Emmer supports holding teachers accountable, spokesman Bill Walsh said. He just doesn’t think the federal government should tell the state how to do it.

That’s more like it.

In a radio ad that’s part of the same series, Entenza claims that Emmer proposes “devastating thirty-percent budget cuts”.  That’s another ancient, ripe, stinky rhetorical turd that we thought we’d dispensed with almost two months ago.  Alas, like all DFL propagandists, Entenza’s people apparently believe they can trust to some kind of diminished capacity and short attention span on the voters’ part.

And with Ventura and Franken on our collective electoral conscience, they may have a point.  But we can try to shoot for better, can’t we?

Nick Coleman, longtime bete noir/kicktoy of regional conservative bloggers,  is back on the beach:

The message was eloquently written, but crystal clear. For one year now, Coleman had been a senior fellow at the school’s Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement. He’d tacked his title onto his opinion columns in the Star Tribune each Sunday. Now the school wanted him gone.

Budget challenges had caused the school to reconsider the fellows program, wrote Joe DesJardins, the school’s vice provost. But the real reason for Coleman’s ouster was spelled out in DesJardins’s carefully chosen next words.

“Unfortunately, many of our alumni and friends interpreted your by-line as a Senior Fellow of the McCarthy Center as an implicit SJU endorsement of the opinions you express,” DesJardins wrote. “This has brought St. John’s into the political sphere in ways that we had not anticipated and think is not in St. John’s best long-term interest.”

I’ll give Mr. DesJardins the benefit of a doubt; perhaps he was one of the monks, and he’d swore a vow of never reading the Strib, just like most otherwise independent-thinking and well-informed Minnesotans.  Perhaps he had no idea about Coleman’s decades-long career as a DFL cheerleader, his “Air America Minnesota” talk show, and his history.

And it’s not like he had any road to Damascus moments while working for “Big Mac”; he pretty much romped and played in familiar territory, cheerleading the DFL establishment and catcalling the usurpers.

We’re not done with far-fetched:

“I do think something is out of whack when he’s a part of it and a liberal columnist can’t be,” Coleman says of Kennedy.

“I do think something is out of whack when he’s a part of it and a liberal columnist can’t be,” Coleman says of Kennedy.

It makes it sound like the termination was political.  Which might make more sense if Amy Klobuchar weren’t giving the center’s next lecture, and the center blog didn’t have a subtle but distinct patina of Obama worship.

What Coleman didn’t know was that efforts to unseat him from St. John’s had been brewing for months.

Bob Labat, a 1959 St. John’s grad who has donated to the school every year since, noticed Coleman’s columns right away. Labat found Coleman grating—a quality he considered inappropriate for someone associated with the Catholic school.

“He has every right to be as caustic and as strong in his opinion as he wants to be, but when you’re also writing on the masthead of an academic institution, that’s a problem,” Labat says.

He wasn’t alone. In September, Len Busch, who has given $20,000 to the St. John’s theology department each of the last three years, authored a handwritten message about Coleman.

“As long as St. John’s has this man on the payroll, I will no longer give my money to St. John’s,” Busch wrote. “I will not support lies and false statements and half truths about anyone.”

A lot of us former Strib subscribers know the feeling.

But I don’t whistle past graveyards.  I hope Coleman lands a gig soon.  While there’s no shortage of material, one must neither take things for granted nor wish ill on people; I don’t believe in Karma, but I do think what goes around comes around.

So best of luck, Nick.

There’s nothing a tyrant hates worse than an apostate.

When the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – a radical fascist and anti-semite who hob-nobbed with Hitler and rooted for the Final Solution – first started agitating against Jewish immigration to “Palestine” before World War 2, he turned his goons loose on…

…moderate Arabs.  Not the Jews.  Because like tinpot tyrants the world over, the Grand Mufti knew that while virtually none of his people were going to convert to Judaism, plenty would be perfectly happy to seek accomodation with them; radicalism had to be made safer than peace, to keep his base in line behind him.

And tyrants, petty and otherwise, the world over have repeated the pattern; Lenin killed the Socialists and Mensheviks to consolidate his power before going after the Czarists.  Franco killed the moderates and accomodationists, as did his communist opponents.

I’m not going to say that the DFL and its friends at the various PACs – Alliance for a Better Minnesota and so on – are in that league.  Perish the thought.

Over the past week or two, the regional and, now, national left have been in high dudgeon over Target’s donation of $150,000 to MNForward, a political action committee that seeks to send gays to re-orientation camps in Colorado.

{scrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatch}

Wait.  That can’t be right.  Let me look…

Whew.  OK, I had that wrong.  MNForward is a pro business PAC.

But you’d never know it from the left’s response to Target’s donation of $150,000 to MNForward, a Political Action Committee whose entire focus is on business, and the notion that a DFL governor would be a disaster for Minnesota businesses already suffering from a lagging economy and among the highest corporate taxes in the nation.

Of course, Target is far from the only company giving money to MNForward.  Best Buy and Hubbard Broadcasting (both former employers of mine), Polaris, Davisco, Red Wing Shoes, Regis (whose founder, Myron Kunin, gave $5K to “Win Minnesota”, which is the money-laundering cutoff for “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”), Securian, Pentair, Federated Insurance, the Insurance Federation of Minnesota, and Cold Spring Granite have so far ponied up something around $900,000, which is a few bucks more than the Daytons and Alida Messinger have contributed all by themselves, and less than half than what they, their plutocrat cronies, and their union supporters have given to A4aBM and “Win Minnesota” alone, so far in this race (and sources tell me A4aBM will eventually spend ten million, mostly in Dayton and union money, this cycle).  That’s less than a quarter of what Matt Entenza has spent so far, most of it attacking Emmer.

Of course, Hubbard Broadcasting is the #4 TV station in a four station market; they’re so desperate for ratings, they’ve begun experimenting with the radical notion of not appearing relentlessly left-of-center – the experiment is only partial, and the jury is still out.  Polaris and RedWing pretty much serve blue-collar clienteles; you don’t find a lot of urban “progressives” on snowmobiles or wearing steel-t0ed work boots.  Most people have no idea food processor Davisco exists, but they’re rural and thus off the radar for the urban progressives.  And most people can get a vague idea from their titles what Securian, Federated, Cold Spring and IFM do – but none of them are linked with “progressive” ideas or, to most people, any ideas at all.  (I know what Pentair does, but the odds are pretty good you don’t…)

But Target, and to a lesser extent Best Buy?  In addition to immense charitable giving to a very eclectic array of community groups and schools (Target in Minnesota’s leading corporate charitable donor, and their money helps support dozens of public, charter and alternative schools), both led the way on “diversity” in the Twin Cities.  They are widely regarded as “progressive’ companies, and both have long put their money where their corporate mouths were when it came to acting “progressive”.  Both actively worked to support GLBT employees; I knew not a few gay managers at Best Buy, and their orientation seemed not to harm their careers in the least; I’ve never worked for Target, but friends who have tell me it’s at the very least the same.  And that’s a good thing – because both companies led the way in recognizing that a person’s orientation has nothing to do with his or her productivity, talent or merit.

So what happens when a “progressive” company donates to a candidate that dissents from the economic policies of the party that has tried to seize the word “progressive?”

They’re seen as apostates – “traitors”.  And Big Progressive – that combination of Big DFL, Big Labor, Big Gay, Big Open Border, Big Academia and so forth – know that they must destroy apostates.

So A4aBM and its cronies in the “Human Rights Coalition” – a Big Gay group – have spent the past week painting Target, that most progressive of companies in that most progressive of places, Minneapolis – as “anti-gay”.  Because of a contribution to help Minnesota’s business climate, supporting a candidate who Big Progressive wants – needs – to paint as “anti-gay”.

(Is Emmer “anti-gay”?  He’s been on record supporting traditional marriage amendments; he’s also said on the Northern Alliance that it’s really a side issue for the governor – as it in fact is.  Is supporting traditional marriage “hate”?  Is it “rabidly anti-gay”, as a gay co-worker of mind called it?  I think it devalues the term “hate”, but as PJ O’Rourke said, I’m not a liberal, so I’m not an expert at stuff I know nothing about…)

And so Target and Best Buy, the “apostate” “progressives”, must be destroyed, while the Polarises and the Hubbards and the Securians and Pentairs get left alone; no “progressive” is ever going to start doubting the mother faith because a snowmobile manufacturer or a rural food processor or a granite company supports Tom Emmer.

But “progressive” Target and Best Buy?  That’s a threat.

And so the thoughtcrime must be punished.

The economy is ailing, and probably heading for a long-term double-dip recession.  Unemployment will above nine percent for a long, long time. Government (and government-assumed) pension obligations will soon crush what’s left of the government’s budget. We have terrorists stalking us.  Our political process is broken, controlled by big-government liberals that collude with the media to shape perceptions – and perception is reality!

So let’s focus on what really matters, shall we?

Favre has informed the Vikings he will not return to Minnesota this fall, according to multiple reports.

Favre has sent text messages to teammates saying, “This is it,” league sources told ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter.

Ahem:

SHUT UP!

SHUT THE HELL UP! WHO THE HELL CARES!

This is like the TWENTIETH FARGING TIME Brett Favre has put a market and a sport and its bobbleheaded acolytes and its drooling hangers-on through this – let me take a breath to ensure I stay charitable – BRAIN-DAMAGED STUPID CHARADE.

SHUT UP!  I DON’T CARE!

That is all.

I’ve been watching the Florida District 22 race, where Allen West is running against Congressman Ron Klein.  It’s a tight race, but a vital one.

I’m hoping this ad helps:

A congressman with this kind of integrity?

I’m dying to see this guy in a debate with Betty McCollum…

In an op-ed in the Strib, the Freedom Foundation’s Jonathan Blake  Jo unload’s on the left’s (and media’s) hypocrisy on Target (emphasis added):

The recent uproar over Target Corp.’s $150,000 contribution to MN Forward, a business-friendly political action committee that is running ads in favor of a probusiness gubernatorial candidate, has officially become a media phenomenon, covered in virtually all of the state’s newspapers, blogs and TV newscasts. It’s even made national news.

Meanwhile, Minnesota’s largest public employee unions have already spent five times that sum, more than $750,000, on the upcoming election, virtually all of it in support of a single political party and its allies. That story has been relegated to deep inside the local section, if it is covered at all.

That’s because the owner of the “local section” has a dog in the fight.

Their refusal to endorse Emmer in a primary that he’s going to win by 90 points is kind of a tell…

I still laugh at this one:

I’ts mighty tempting to bring the same skill-set to process analysis…

Earlier this morning, we busted Jeff Rosenberg at the DFL-congruent MNPublius carrying the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota’s water in a piece riddled with factual errors.

And when you catch someone carrying foul, deceptive water, it’s best to go back to the well.

Here’s what A4aBM had to say about the legislation in question:

In fact, records show that the Minnesota County Attorneys Association opposed the bill Emmer introduced, as well as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Office of Public Safety.

At least A4aBM got that part right – as far as I can tell, anyway.  But that should not be a shock; the County Attorney’s Association will always oppose any law that takes away discretion and power from county prosecutors, or inconveniences them in anyway.  Emmer’s laws would have…:

• allowed drunk drives to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and…
• …allowed those convicted of DUI to get some of their rights and privacy back after ten years of good behavior.

That is all!  Of course, it would mean that county prosecutors would have to prove people guilty to the standard of reasonable doubt rather than have the accused considered guilty until proven innocent. And Mothers against Drunk Driving would, it is safe to say, repeal the Bill of Rights if it meant they could lower the blood alcohol content to .06%.

But that lone bit of factiness is lonely in this press release:

The attorneys testifying in favor of the law were private attorneys who, according to their web sites, defend those arrested for drunk driving.

Yes, attorneys Weidner and Stokes defended drunk drivers.  And, as I showed in this morning’s piece, they also did family, child custody, criminal defense, prosecution, personal injury and product liability and – in the interest of completeness – litigation against drunk drivers.

A4aBM either is too sloppy and stupid to check this out, or they are actively trying to deceive the public.  I’m voting for “b”.

“Emmer is trying to run from the fact that he introduced a bill that lessened penalties against drunk driving,” said Denise Cardinal, Executive Director of Alliance for a Better Minnesota Action Fund.

I see no evidence that Emmer’s “running from” anything.

Because do you know who else supported Emmer’s “implied consent” bill?  The one that would have treated accused drunk drivers as innocent until proven guilty – exactly the same as Democrats want terrorists in US custody treated?

Former Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Judge Eric Magnuson. And DFL attorney general Lori Swanson. [EDITOR’s NOTE:  While I’m told the Attorney General’s office did in fact support the bills because the Implied Consent hearings are an immense cash and time suck, I am still looking for the actual cite.  When I find it, I”ll un-strike it – Ed]

A source close to the story emailed me:

Weidner told me last night that the AG actually supported this bill. He is going to find the letter they sent…He also told me Chief Judge Magnuson supported it and threatened to end implied consent hearings b/c they cost so much.

Perhaps A4aBM has evidence that Magnuson (and, so my source says, the Attorney General’s office) are also “soft on drunk driving?”

I’ll be interested in seeing if A4aBM or Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius, who’ve led the way in trafficking the “alternate realities” about this story, plan on accounting for those facts.

As re A4aBM, I’m going to suggest they’re just going to keep lying – down to the simplest of facts:

Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Tom Emmer’s campaign made false claims on Wednesday when it stated that prosecutors asked Emmer to sponsor a bill that lessened penalties for drunk

In other words, “Emmer lied about talking with prosecutors”.  It’s quite an accusation.

But even the Dayton-friendly Star/Tribune debunks that claim:

Emmer referred most questions on the bill to Stillwater attorney Tom Weidner, who works for a law firm that handles prosecution for 10 municipalities in Washington County and also does criminal defense, including DWI cases.

So why does the A4aBM, and sites like MNPublius who serve mainly as DFL press release vehicles, so brazenly repeat such bald-faced lies?

Because they assume the voter is stupid, and they still think in the pre-blog paradigm that assumes that absent any dissenting opinion they’ll stay that way.

Let’s see what we can do about that, shall we?

Joan Vennochi in the Boston Glob: The Dems are now the party of patrician privilege:

From Newport, R.I., where Kerry’s “Isabel’’ was berthed before heading to Nantucket, to Rhinebeck, N.Y., where Chelsea Clinton was married in a mansion modeled after Versailles, today’s Democrats are looking more like Louis XVI than Tip O’Neill.

Kick in the First Family’s vacation plans for Martha’s Vineyard, and there’s a real air of Marie Antoinette & Co. retreating to idyllic gardens, while Fox News whips up revolutionary flames. The ethics charges against Representative Charles Rangel of New York are added foie gras.

Of course we see that in Minnesota politics as well; while the left sniffs down its aquiline nose at Tom Emmer’s bourgeois upbringing and suburban base, Mark Dayton is hard at work buying another election to put next to the others in his collection – with scarcely a word from the local media (which is too busy carping about the “corruption of money in politics”, apparently, to bother).

When it comes to politics this year, you need to remember the following rule of thumb; when the DFL or one of their affiliated blogs writes about Tom Emmer, you need to distrust, and then verify.  Because the ratio of BS to truth is the worst I’ve ever seen.  Ever.

When I was a kid, growing up in small-town North Dakota, one of my dad’s best friends was a lawyer.  The guy took all sorts of cases; wills, divorces, probate and wills, criminal defense, criminal prosecution, civil litigation, commercial litigation, contracts, and pretty much anything else that came through his office door.  He was also in the rotation for public defender duty, and for helping out the prosecution, and he did a stretch as municipal judge (carefully watching for conflicts of interest).

So if I were to write this lawyer “was a defense attorney”, someone could read the above and bellow “HAH, Berg,  you are teh lier!  He is a civil litigator!”  And you’d be right.  And you’d also be proving you need a reality check.

The law, especially small-market law, is full of such things; small-town prosecutors contract with general practice lawyers to help with caseloads without adding headcount; small-town public defenders offices may not even have a lawyer, but get lawyers from the local bar (legal, not liquid)  to help out; it’s not unknown for an indigent accused murderer to be represented by someone whose “specialty”, if you can call it that, is probate.

And let’s not forget those lawyers have to keep their fields straight, as a matter of professional ethics, while avoiding conflicts of interest.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Last week, Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius figured he’d “caught the Emmer campaign lying”.

Emmer’s opponents have been carping for months about the fact that Emmer:

1. Got drunk driving-related convictions in 1981 and 1991 – twenty and thirty years ago.  When he was 19 and 29.
2. He paid his debt to society, decades ago, exactly as he was supposed to.
3. During the 2008 session, he pushed two bills:  one that would have given convicted drunk drivers some of their rights back after ten years of good behavior, and one that would have upheld the radical notion of considering drunk drivers innocent until proven guilty.We’ve talked about this before.

The left has spent the past week or so spending a half a million dollars of Alita Messinger’s money talking about the DWI “issue”; the offenses, and Emmer’s supposed “soft on DUI” policies.

That’s all bad enough.   But as we’ve learned this past few weeks, “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” is a reliable liar.  More on that at noon today.

I’m less used to calling Twin Cities’ DFLbot-blog MNPublius on basic integrity.

But this piece at by Rosenberg, entitled “Emmer’s DWI bill written at the request of DWI attorneys,” walks up to the line between ambiguity and deception, piddles on it, walks back, jumps into a monster truck, spins cookies on the line, and drives across past the “FLAMING FIB-VILLE, 2 MILES” sign at 80 miles an hour.

Here’s “the scoop”:

I already wrote about this a bit below, but I buried the lede. The more I think about this, the more I think it’s a major story that Tom Emmer’s DWI bill was written at the request of DWI defense attorneys, especially because he’s obviously trying to mislead the public about that:

On his campaign website, Emmer said: “At the request of local prosecutors, Rep. Emmer agreed to author their bill to reform the court system and how DWIs are handled. The legislation prepared by the prosecutors and other interested parties with the assistance of nonpartisan House research staff would have provided incentives for early and immediate prosecution of first-time offenders.”

The Emmer campaign identified the “local prosecutors” as Tom Weidner and Sean Stokes, and said they are based in Stillwater, Washington County. Stokes and Weidner are attorneys specializing in DWI defense, according to the website of their law firm Eckberg, Lammers, Briggs, Wolff & Vierling. [Emphasis mine]

Local prosecutors? Excuse me? Once again, Emmer may not technically be lying, but he’s also definitely not being straight with us. He’s trying to make it sound like this bill was written to help local law enforcement officials, when in fact it was written at the request of DWI defense attorneys.

“Emmer may not technically be lying”?  No.  He is in fact telling the truth.  Knowing that Stokes and Weidner worked both as contract prosecutors and “DWI Defense Attorneys”, I asked a source familiar with the case in which capacity the two lawyers operated while discussing this bill:

The only thing I know about that is that Weidner said no cities asked them to ask for bill & Stokes id’ed self as [prosecutor] during testimony.  Probably fair to say Weidner and Stokes argued for bill based on their prosecutor experience, but not b/c of any city’s request.

Now, if Jeff Rosenberg would like to suggest that Tom Weidner and Sean Stokes – who are, let’s remember, officers of the court – blurred the ethical boundaries of their field while giving testimony to the Legislature on these bills, I’m sure the Bar Association would be interested in hearing about it.  Bring actual evidence, of course.

However, if you believe WCCO, in a story they ran when this “issue” first came up before the MNGOP convention, that’s just not true; Weidner and Stokes do prosecution work.

But OK – so maybe Rosenberg doesn’t know how the practice of downmarket law works.  That’s hardly a grave offense, is it?

Well, no.  But a misleading presentation of facts is.

Using the facts above, Rosenberg writes that Emmer wrote the bill  “…at the request of DWI defense attorneys”, and that Weidner “…must have been acting in his capacity as a defense attorney” and declares “Stokes and Weidner are attorneys specializing in DWI defense, according to the website of their law firm Eckberg, Lammers, Briggs, Wolff & Vierling….You can see that these are clearly not the people who should be responsible for crafting our DWI laws”.

He accompanies this claim with a screenshot from the law firm’s website that shows Weidner and Stokes “specialize” in DUI law.  This has, in fact, been the chanting point among local leftybloggers and twitterbuildup; “Emmer operated on behalf of DWI defense specialists”

So I checked the website.

Turns out Kevin Weidner also “specializes” in Personal Injury and Wrongful Death, Auto Accidents (including, ironically, sueing people who kill or injure people in DUIs!), and  general Criminal Defense (of everything from juvenile crimes to murder).  And there’s more; check out his page at the firm.  And that doesn’t include the contract prosecution work.

And in addition to DUI, Sean Stokes “specializes” in Family Law, Divorce, Child Custody, and general Criminal Law.   Here’s his bio page.

So the left’s defamatory meme notwithstanding, Weidner and Stokes are not “DWI  Defense specialists”; indeed, as we’ve seen above, they litigate for both the plaintiff and defendant in DWI cases for their practice, in addition to prosecution work for whom the client, the plaintiff, is Washington County.

(Is it even possible to “specialize” in a firms’ entire criminal and family area?)

So, to use Rosenberg’s term, MNPublius and the rest of the Minnesota Sorosphere that is spreading the “Emmer works for DWI defense lawyers” meme aren’t “Technically” lying; they are just presenting a set of facts that is so cherrypicked and misleading that nobody reading their account stands a snowball’s chance in hell of learning the truth.

So – why does the local left feel the need to spread such a defamatory lie?  Because  lies are  the only weapon they have against Tom Emmer?

And Jeff Rosenberg – why is MNPublius, once a leftyblog with integrity (Aaron Landry notwithstanding) participating in such a transparent wad of buncombe?

At the very least, shouldn’t your piece have been titled “Emmer’s DWI bill written at the request of after consulting attorneys who defend and sue DWIs, among pretty much every other area of criminal and family law, as well as DWI prosecution”?

It doesn’ troll off the tongue, but it’s more accurate.

———-

Do the state a favor, Minnesota Left; put a fork in this stupid meme.  Move on to your next lie.

We’ll be waiting.

The Dems did a premature victory lap on the economy last week, at Obama’s last speech in Detroit.

The Detroit Money Pit – The Corner – National Review Online.

General Motors and Chrysler are much better off because Bush gave them $24 billion and Obama gave them another $60 billion. Any company would be. Pouring federal dollars into businesses does improve their bottom lines, but that doesn’t mean it helps the overall economy. The real question is: What would have happened to that money if the government had not spent it in Detroit?

The government shouldn’t plan on getting its money back. President Obama concedes that the $24 billion Bush spent — more than NASA’s annual budget — is gone for good. And Obama’s claims to the contrary, the money he spent isn’t coming back, either.

We’ll never know what the private market could have done; that money’s gone.

General Motors would have to command a market value of more than $70 billion for the taxpayers’ stake in the company to be worth what Obama paid for it. Since General Motors’ highest-ever market valuation was $52 billion in 2000, at the peak of the dot-com boom and the SUV craze, that seems improbable — especially since Obama’s new miles-per-gallon regulations won’t let them build as many of those highly profitable SUVs. At the end of the day, the government will still have sunk tens of billions of dollars into GM and Chrysler with no hope of recovering it.

Caught this in the Jamestown newspaper from a couple of weeks ago.

Jamestown’s Bruce Berg scored a hole-in-one at Hillcrest Golf Course on Thursday.

Not bad for being ten days after his seventy-somethingth birthday.

Congrats, Dad!

I’ll be on AM1100 The Flag with Rob Port at 6:35 to talk about the Governor’s race.

You can listen in here:
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