It doesn’t quite rise to the level where it should be included in my “Climate Of Hate” page – the ever-expanding feature where I document the violent depravity of the American left – but it came close.
A woman at a union-organized protest outside a conservative alt-media conference spits on Andrew Breitbart (at the 7:20 mark):
This was after a group of protesters called him “homosexual” because of…the way he talks.
Mark Dayton flees the cameras of a Sioux Falls station after the last debate:
No plan. No answers to questions.
Why is he running for office, again?
Rick Rice is running for the Minnesota House of Representatives in MN44B against Ryan Winkler.
Rick Rice
…that Jimi Hendrix died.
I’m sometimes amazed that he ever made the big time with the utterly inept “Experience” – Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell – behind him.
Still, he could play the guitar like ringin’ a bell…
I’d never seen this one; my favorite Hendrix song, with my favorite solo (at least musically) played, infamously, with his teeth…
He’d be sixty-seven.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 9AM-3PM.
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(Title via THeads)
The other day, I paraphrased an old PJ O’Rourke quip; only in baseline budgeting can it be said one is “cutting” a budget when one merely reduces the “planned” increase.
Where have you gone, P.J. O’Rourke? Our state turns its broke eyes to you.
The local leftyblog buildup and and array of special interest pimps have been caterwauling “Emmer Plans To Cut $2 Billion From Health And Human Services!”. It’s a return to the Reagan era Democrat attack, “they want to starve the children and throw Grandma out into the street!”.
Like virtually everything the DFL and media (ptr) have said in this campaign so far, it’s either grossly lacking in context, or it’s a lie.
In this case, it’s both.
The Health and Human Services budget from the 2010-2011 biennium is 9.083 billion.
The “Autipilot” increase calculated by the State Office of Management and Budget, which assumes everything increases in proportion with previous requests and calculated “needs” for the 2012-12 biennium, was 12.0 billion. As Emmer notes in pretty much every stump speech, that’s a 32% increase. And there is nothing to say that budget, if left on autopilot or to the DFL (pardon the redundancy) won’t grow by that same rate in perpetuity, until it is the entire budget.
Mark Dayton’s budget “plan” stated no figure for HHS spending. Tom Horner plans to spend an incredible 12.14 billion – more than even the “autopilot” increase – a 34% hike in spending. To be fair to Horner, his stump rhetoric says that some of that spending is to go to getting people off of the HHS bandwagon. It’s a laudable goal – indeed, it should be part of future HHS spending planning. But leaving aside the fact that Horner hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected, and that the DFLers that survive in the legislature will make sure that all spending goes to entitlements, the fact is that in the middle of a deep recession when state unemployment has just topped 7% for the first time in decades, Emmer’s premise is that jumpstarting the economy and re-engineering our wasteful government is much more important. That’s the premise; it’ll be tested this November.
Emmer plans to spend 9.75 billion on HHS. Do the math yourself. That’s a 7% increase.
So the DFL chanting shrieking point is “Emmer is slashing two billion dollars from the HHS budget!” It’s buncombe, of course; for starters, there will be no actual official 2012-2013 budget until the next legislature and administration produce one.
The “budget” from which Emmer will “cut” is a hypothetical estimate, with all numbers basically entered via an opaque formula that is based largely on recent-past growth. It is not an actual budget.
And, most importantly, by every rational measure, Emmer increases HHS spending. Not as much as the DFL would prefer, and not to the extent to which they’ve jiggered the system, and not in a way that might not require HHS to prioritize its spending more wisely – which is, indeed, what Emmer’s plan calls for. But it is not a cut.
The DFL must be really worried – or really not think the citizens of Minnesota are very smart – if this is the best they can manage.
I’ll wager “both”.
I’m going to blow my own horn for a bit here.
I rock at predictions.
Oh, not always. I though the ’06 MN Senate race was going to be close; it was not. I thought McCain was going to make it a closer fight in ’08; I knew Coleman/Franken was going to be a nail-biter, and I was right – I didn’t figure it would turn out quite that way; I blame the Coleman campaign and the MNGOP for that one.
But I nailed the 2002 Senate race – Coleman/Mondale, after Wellstone’s death – almost to the point. I pegged the 2004 Presidential election almost dead-on; I only missed one of the states. I got the 2006 Gubernatorial race (albeit not the SOS or Auditors races), the 2006 and 2008 CD6 races, the 2004-2008 CD2 and CD3 races, and a slew of others pretty close to dead-on. And my finest hour at forecasting; I was 2-3 days off on the execution of Saddam Hussein.
So I’m predicting Emmer wins by 3 points this year.
But that’s not the point of this post.
The DFL, and the left nationwide, want nothing more than to get Michele Bachmann out of office. Only seeing Sarah Palin murdered would make [some of] them happier.
In fact, you can year the occasional lefty murmering in tones that sound as close as Minnesota Democrats ever get to joy and hope, “I think this is the year teh crazzee woman loses”.
I called this an eight-point race two months ago. Last month, after DFL-endorsed candidate Tarryl Clark won the primary with a 2-1 margin – against a woman that had dropped out of the race two months earlier – I upped that to ten.
Via Gary Gross at LFR, I see that events are well on track to prove me right. He quotes the SurveyUSA/KSTP poll:
Today, it’s Bachman 49%, DFL State Senator Tarryl Clark 40%. Compared to an identical SurveyUSA poll released 2 months ago, little has changed: each candidate is up 1 point.
Gross:
Two months ago, the Sorosphere highlighted the fact that Michele wasn’t above 50 percent. At that time, I said that it wasn’t that much under 50 percent and that that poll wasn’t that good of news for Tarryl.
Nine points.
That’s right between 8 and 10.
Not bad.
Just between us, Clark is running a terrible campaign. I’d say it even if she were the conservative Republican she isn’t; her entire campaign has involved reacting to Bachmann’s jabs. She’s done a fairly slick, expensive-looking ad poking back at Bachmann’s “Jim The Taxpayer” spots; that’s a lot of money spent reacting to Bachmann, which lets Bachmann set the agenda. Which is a good thing for Bachmann, but dumb campaigning. Her latest spot – where Clark, taking a whack at looking like a cover girl (and, truth be told, not doing badly at it; a guy’s gotta be honest), asks Bachmann when she’s going to vote to cut Congressional pay and staff costs. Not a bad spot, in and of itself, but I’ve yet to see Clark put forward a positive vision for herself in Congress – merely react to and bag on Bachmann. To be fair, there’s a place for that, and I don’t live in CD6, so I may be missing things. But from what I’ve seen, even if Michele Bachmann were wildly unpopular (she’s not) and even if this weren’t going to be a great year for fiscal conservatives (it will), it looks to me like Clark’s running a clumsy, inept campaign.
If you use Google Chrome for your browser, you may have had trouble reaching Shot In The Dark or a number of other Minnesota Organization of Bloggers’ blogs this past few days.
“Blogrolling.com”, the site on which we maintain the “MOBRoll”, or list of links to MOB blogs, apparently became linked to a site that distributes “malware”. This has bubbled into the virus-watching system used by Google (and possibly others), which trips a big, ugly “warning” page when you try to access pages using Blogrolling.com blogrolls.
I have temporarily removed the MOBroll until either Blogrolling resolves the problem, or a workaround presents itself, or I have the time and energy to move all 100-odd MOB blogs to a private list.
(I’m hoping Blogrolling gets on the stick, just between us…)
Remember that trip Al Franken took to Minneapolis to stump for “Net Neutrality” last month?
It ties into a new ethics complaint against the Senator by Senate Ethics Watch.
Check out MDE. More later.
Back when Hugh Hewitt was in town a few weeks back, I was asked to predict the biggest surprise in Minnesota this fall.
My response – while I thought an Emmer win might surprise some people, I thought the best potential was for Randy Demmer to upset Tim Walz.
Finally, the National Republican Congressional Committee agrees:
The National Republican Congressional Committee announced Thursday that they were elevating Walz’s challenger, Republican Randy Demmer, to their “Young Guns” list. For Demmer, it means the national party will provide him with additional support during the final stretch of the campaign.
Young Gun status will put Demmer on the map in GOP fundraising circles, which could be a crucial factor to overcoming his significant cash disadvantage.
It’d be great to win that district back.
The Cook Political Report rates Walz’s district as having an R+1 partisan voting index, but trending “likely Democratic” this fall.
“Randy Demmer has proven that he’s ready to take on incumbent Tim Walz, an out-of-touch Democrat who has blindly supported his party’s failed agenda of job-killing policies and reckless spending,” NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions, R-TX, said in a statement.
Look for a Minnesota Poll shortly showing Walz with a 20 point lead…
The Seattle School District bars an EdBlogger from a press conference:
Local blogger Melissa Westbrook, who writes for the blog Save Seattle Schools, was barred from asking questions during a press conference of the Seattle School Board yesterday, right before they approved the new teachers’ contract.
The district’s rationale was nothing new:
Beforehand, when Westbrook called up the Seattle Public Schools Communications Dept. to ask if she could be on the press list, they told her that she could attend, but couldn’t ask questions. Westbrook went anyway, thinking that if other bloggers asked questions, she would too. But reached by phone, Westbrook said that SPS refused to provide a press pass because she was not a “real journalist” and her blogs were more commentary than reporting.
Bear in mind, this story is being reported in “The Stranger”, Seattles version of the “City Pages”. And they got the absurdity of the district’s stance:
So I asked SPS if they had any set standards for press conferences. District spokesperson Teresa Wippel said the event was for media organizations that “provide unbiased coverage and subscribe to journalistic ethics.” By that, she means “the types of practices outlined in the Code of Ethics from the Society for Professional Journalists,” Wippel said. “It is our opinion that Ms. Westbrook’s blog does not fit into that category.”
The SPJ “Code of Ethics”? Protecting them from scabrous opinion “journalism?” Hah! Hah Hah! Hah Hah Hah!
Does that mean the Stranger—which is quite clear about its opinions and makes no attempt to provide “unbiased coverage”—can’t ask questions? Or are they simply allergic to Westbrook, who asks questions that the District doesn’t want to answer? “It’s not like we are shunning off information to people who are not members of the press,” Wippel said. “Westbrook has lots of different ways to ask questions to the board.”
If it’s like the Saint Paul School Board, none of them work.
As for the Stranger, Wippel said we could ask questions because we were a news organization that provides opinion as well as news.
Westbrook—who often takes positions that The Stranger disagrees with—admits that her blogs are sometimes critical of the school district. But she argued that Mayor Mike McGinn’s office has always let her attend press events as a citizen journalist. “I got into the convention for Arne Duncan, and the American Federation of Teachers even gave me a press pass,” she said.
It’s this simple; government at all levels wants to control the message it puts out. When “journalists” were a predictable troupe of institutional repeat customers, it’s not that difficult. The more diffuse “journalism” becomes, the harder it is to control the message you put out to the public.
A neighbor writes:
Keep raising a stink about this. When our founders wrote the part about the freedom of the press, the press consisted of annoying, opinionated buggers who didn’t subscribe to any code of ethics and provided more commentary than reporting.
No problem.
By the way, someone will ask “if this bothers you, does it also bother you that the Tom Emmer campaign is shunning The Uptake?” I’m not sure about the Uptake bit – shunning alt-media bugs me, but the Uptake has swerved pretty far into being a pure lefty propaganda site – and it’s not the same situation anyway. The Emmer campaign isn’t a government body. Yet.
People today often believe that the United States started building up for World War II on December 8, 1941.
The fact is, the upper echelons of the Roosevelt administration saw war as more or less inevitable, going back to the thirties. FDR started one of the greatest naval shipbuilding programs in history back in the early thirties – partly as a “stimulus”, but largely because the Navy, which had slipped into obsolescence after its huge World War I building surge, was woefully unequipped to deal with the expanding Japanese fleet.
,_1938.jpg/300px-USS_Salmon_(SS-182),_1938.jpg)
USS Salmon; a make-work project in 1935, it became one of the workhorses of the World War II submarine fleet.
What’s even harder to explain – especially with an entire generation that has no concept of “selective service”, which has been gone for nearly four decades, is the extent to which warfare was an industrial, all-society undertaking. That was really a very rare thing, historically, having entire nations devote their entire industrial base and manpower to waging war against other nations. It really started, at least in the West, with Napoleon, who introduced broad conscription throughout France and the occupied territories to keep his armies (which, for all of Napoleon’s genius, suffered grievous casualties) manned. The US Civil War was the first to bring a developed nation’s entire industrial might to bear against an enemy; the Franco-Prussian War, the first to pit two developed industrial nations in mass war with conscipted masses of troops; World War I, lineups of the same on both sides.
Cartoon lampooning Napoleon's conscription
Big War and Big Government, naturally, go hand in hand; you can’t fight a big war without a big government, directing big industry and raising big manpower.
It was seventy years ago today that Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patron saint of Big Government, signed “peacetime” conscription into law. It was the first peacetime draft in American history. It ran, through three wars and the Pax Eisenhower, for 33 years.
FDR signs the Selective Service Training Act
It was a huge change in the way the US military, especially the Army, did its business. A “professional” army – volunteers who sign up to serve of their own free will, and often make careers of the service, and who treat fighting as their job – are usually able (says conventional military wisdom) to do things that draftees can’t.
Imagine this (and the imagination is difficult to impossible for those who’ve not been there, but I’m recycling things I’ve read from other writers who have); you’re advancing through a town; the Captain has told you to take the church, so you can use the steeple as an observation post. Your squad – eight other guys just like you, and a sergeant who leads you – takes fire from the church. One of your guys is hit, and goes down to the ground, screaming in pain. If you and your squad are volunteers, who’ve made a career out of training for this sort of thing, you are more likely to go about your mission, to haul the wounded guy out of harm’s way and put down covering fire on the church to allow one or two guys to get across the street and start chucking grenades in there. If you and your eight – well, seven – comrades are all draftees who had eight weeks of basic training and would all rather be driving tractors or jerking sodas or building pole barns or finishing high school back in Kansas or Chicago or Montana or California, your sergeant is going to have to work real hard to get you to run out under fire to get the wounded guy, and then aim you at the church to try to finish the job; you will be much more likely to hide out in a cellar and wait for someone else to do the job, if you can.
US Infantry advance through Waldenburg, Germany, 1945
And then, if mortar rounds start raining down, and you hear a tank moving up behind the church, who do you suppose it more likely to grab a bazooka and find a place to lay in wait, and who is more likely to sprint for the rear when the sergeant turns his back?
This has always been the great conundrum of militaries; small, professional armies of volunteers are more likely to perform reliably, even spectacularly. Britain’s army in 1914, the “Old Contemptibles”, was about 10% the size of the German and French armies. All volunteers, all trained to the highest standard (especially marksmanship; German units thought they were facing machine guns, not guys with bolt-action Enfields), they shredded the first waves of German attackers along their front. And the second wave. And so on. Until they got killed or wounded in subsequent waves. And were replaced by newbies and, finally, draftees. In the meantime, armies of draftees are frequently unreliable in combat, sometimes spectacularly so, especially when fighting on turf not their own.
And each nation dealt with this conundrum differently.
The USSR drafted millions of men (and women), many of them deeply unhappy to be fighting for Josef Stalin. For some, fighting for the Rodina against the enemy was enough; for the rest, the NKVD would wait with machine guns, to kill anyone who failed to carry home the attack with gusto and vigor. Stalin also made it clear that being captured, even while incapacitated, was a capital offense likely to lead to nasty consequences for families left behindTo the Russian draftee, victory was the only alternative to death. And they died in horrendous numbers, at both German and Soviet hands.
Soviet troops. It was pretty much "Win or Die" for Ivan, 2/3 of whom were killed during the war - many of them killed by fellow Russians.
Britain had never been comfortable with the draft. And so draftees, especially in combat units, joined regiments that had long, storied histories and traditions. Picture the United State Marine Corps, only a good 100 years longer, in many cases, and most of them drawn from the same area in the UK, fighting often with friends and neighbors. A British draftee infantryman wasn’t just a number in an anonymous, numbered unit, like an American soldier who might be underwhelmed to be posted to the 2nd Battalion of the 329th Infantry Regiment (which sprang into existence in 1942, and sprang back out in 1945); if he were from, say, Inverary, Scotland, he’d serve in the “Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders“, a unit with a long history of doing great things, led by officers and (especially) NCOs who had spent their careers marinating in that spirit. Britain being a fairly traditional, caste-based society, it worked in a way that is probably foreign to Americans who’ve never been, say, Marines.
British troops of the 7th Battalion, the Worcestershire Regiment - largely draftees from Worcestershire. The Woosters' history goes back to 1694.
In the US? A nation without much in the way of shared martial tradition (outside the South, which in fact provided a disproportionate number of soldiers and officers, then as now), but immense industrial power? We made up for any shortfalls in British-style esprit de corps and Soviet-style brutality with immense firepower. US troops may have been as reluctant a group of warriors as any mass body of draftees throughout history, but they had firepower beyond the dreams of their opponents and, largely, allies; from the rifle squads with their M1 Garands (the world’s first semi-automatic military rifle in general issue, which gave an individual grunt double the firepower of his British friend or German/Japanese enemy), to artillery and, finally, air support on a lavish scale. The US Army could blast holes through enemy positions that would have swallowed up regular armies or, given draftee behavior, made them hide out in shell craters and rubble until there was a fair chance of moving forward or backward without getting torn apart.
Sherman tanks and infantry in heavy going
Which is not to say draftees were cowards – far from it. And it’s not to say they didn’t become good soldiers; after thirty days in combat, they’d be as capable as any Ranger.
If they survived.
But, as befitted an army fielded by a technocratic, “big” administration, the US Army adopted a personnel policy that may have been as lethal an enemy as any Japanese machine-gunner or German mortarman.
The US Army’s personnel policy would be recognizable to a production manager at any factory; if you had a machine on a production line, you could keep that machine running 24/7, provided you kept it stocked with power and materials. And so the system was designed to keep the machines – the “Divisions” – stocked with supplies; fuel and ammunition and, by the way, guys in olive-drab uniforms. The ideal was that the units, the divisions and their component regiments and battalions, would stay in the front line more or less nonstop, like a production machine; the Army would just keep feeding men into the units to keep them up to full strength. But the newbies – “replacements” – would go, usually under cover of darkness, into units of complete strangers, to sink or swim, more or less. The ones that survived became highly proficient soldiers, because they had to – but the casualty rates among replacement soldiers fed into the line was horrendous.
GIs of the 28th Infantry Division in the Hürtgen Forest, 1944. The battle was one of the bloodiest in US history, and also the most pointless, serving no strategic purpose whatsoever.
It got to the point that the Army figured a replacement could do any job at all, with a little practice in the front line; raw replacements were sent not only to the infantry, but to serve in tank units, which suffered grievous losses as well (more on that when we get to the chapter on the Sherman Tank) but, theoretically, required some training to handle the complex mechanics of running the tank, to say nothing of firing a cannon and driving off-road in a 30-ton vehicle. The raw replacement crews fared very, very badly; during the Battle of the Bulge, a group of seventeen replacement tanks, with seventeen veteran crewmen as commanders and 68 rank newbies who’d never been in a tank before serving as drivers, loaders and gunners, was infiltrated by a single German tank, which destroyed each of them in turn, killing and maiming dozens as their crews vainly tried to figure out their complex machines, which they were driving for the very first time.
Sherman tank, knocked out in Normandy. Hatches are open; some of the crew may have survived.
But firepower won the day. The Germans and Japanese had little respect for American infantry (although units that spent enough time in the line with low enough casualties to develop some collective experience earned some grudging praise), and German tankers ridiculed the Americans’ Sherman tanks – but our enemies around the world all feared American air power and, especially, the artillery, which was accurate, quick to get on target, and available in crushing weight.
American 155mm self-propelled gun - mobile and crushingly powerful
And so we won the war with an army of draftees. And we fought the next one to a standstill with the younger brother of that same army, only on a shoestring.
And then the son of that army went to Vietnam – just in time for war to change. A military designed to shred tank attacks with artillery, armor and air power was very poorly adapted to fighting peasant guerrillas in a counterinsurgency war. Draftees with enough firepower could bludgeon an industrial enemy into submission at acceptable cost – but winning a war that involved as much winning of hearts and minds as destroying enemies in close combat was another whole animal.
US troops in Vietnam
And the American draftee adapted, yet again – but again, at immense cost.
Today’s the birthday of our last draft. Some would bring it back; they’d do it for reasons that would have resonated with Franklin D Roosevelt.
I say good riddance.
Even as I deal with teenage kids.
If you blinked last Monday, you missed Betty McCollum’s “town hall” meeting. Indeed, if you sneezed at the wrong time, you may have missed the part where she or any of her staff called it a “town hall”, themselves.
I had a prior engagement – but Doug Bass attended.
Not that it was easy:
I actually didn’t know it was advertised as a “DFL Town Hall Rally” until I got to the event. But doesn’t the phrase “DFL Town Hall Rally” sound contradictory, oxymoronic? If they said “DFL Rally,” it would be clearly understood as a partisan event. If they said “Town Hall Meeting,” I believe it would be generally understood as a non-partisan event. So the very phrase “DFL Town Hall Rally” sounded odd to me.
As I headed to Macalester, I was thinking to myself “Whose idea was it to have a town hall meeting at 5:30 pm? There are a lot of people who aren’t going to be able to make it.” I then realized that this wasn’t a bug, it was a feature, a mechanism of keeping inconvenient people away from the event.
Doug noticed something I did not; I’ll add emphasis:
When I got to Macalester College, one of Teresa Collett’s volunteers saw me, and we started chatting. He showed me the press release for the event, which was issued on Friday, the traditional day where news goes to be buried. And not just any Friday, mind you, the Friday three days before the event, and the Friday the day before September 11, where the nation’s attention is elsewhere. The only media outlet that covered the event was Minnesota Public Radio, which let the abovementioned “Town Hall Rally” oddity pass without comment.
And this may be the quote of the day:
I thought to myself “This isn’t a Town Hall Meeting, this is a flash mob! A secret, moonless midnight flash mob!”
And the conclusion?
This event was a Potemkin Town Hall meeting, an event created for the purpose of being able to claim that a Town Hall meeting took place. The scheduling, the publicity, the audience made it nothing of the sort. It was a treachery within further treacheries.
Read the whole thing.
So we had the “flash mob”, and we’ll have two more coming up with friendly audiences – a union hall and another.
That’s a lot of “appearances” for Betty McCollum.
Maybe being in a “D+13” district doesn’t feel as secure as it used to…
(And yes, now would be a perfect time to pitch in a few bucks for to Teresa Collett’s campaign. The CD2 leadership hates me when I write this, but you live in the Second, where John Kline is going to win by thirty on a bad day, it’d be cool if you could peel off a buck or two for Teresa, who actually seems to have a shot. And/or for Joel Demos, who’s running the funnest underdog campaign I’ve seen since Harley McClain. And for that matter for Randy Demmer and Chip Cravaack, both of whom have quietly moved into positions to have decent shots against Walz and Oberstar).
…the real story was this: Mark Dayton dropped eight points in the SurveyUSA/KSTP poll. Emmer was up four. They’re in a statistical tie.
Leftybloggers point out that the crosstabs changed; this SUSA/KSTP poll had equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, while the previous one polled more Democrats.
Not enough more to completely explain an eight point drop, of course.
I’m waiting for this story…:
Two undercover federal agents infiltrated the violent Pagans biker gang and smashed a plot to kill rival Hells Angels members with homemade grenades, authorities said Wednesday.
Nineteen Pagan members — including a 70-year-old man — and associates were rounded up in coordinated, early-morning raids in Long Island, New Jersey and Delaware. An explosive device packed with nails and 34 guns was seized.
…to be plugged as “right-wing tea party terrorism”.
Two observations about last night’s SurveyUSA/KSTP poll:
It’s A Miracle! KSTP and a slew of other media played this story like it genuinely showed Tom Horner moving into the race. As one wag noted, this is the first time in polling history that a candidate under twenty points, getting half the numbers of the second place candidate, has given the media a tingle up their legs. KSTP breathlessly compared Horner to Jesse Ventura who, they reminded us, had only ten points at this point in the 2002 race.
The comparison ignored two key facts: the Independence Party had had absolutely no traction, anywhere in the country, since Ross Perot (then calling his vehicle the “Reform” Party) threw the 1992 election to Bill Clinton; and, lest we forget, Tom Horner was never a professional wrestler. He will not draw the bobbleheaded election-day-voter in with his fame, since he has none (other than his years as an MPR commentator), and he’s not talking about sealing any deals by cutting license fees on jet-skis.
The Independence Party is the product of a much more trivial era in politics. Times were good in 1998, and had been for a long time. History may not have ended, but it was sure taking a break. People felt they could afford to spend a vote on a joke.
Horner’s no joke, but he’s no Ventura. And that’s why neither he nor any other IP candidate will ever win a race.
Debateable: But the debate itself didn’t suck. I listened to most of it; Rick Kupchella, formerly of Channel 11 and now with “Bring Me The News“, ran a great show.
After years of listening to trite, softball questions that served mainly to let candidates tie their talking points together in sequence, Kupchella went for the guts. His first questions set the tone; to Horner, “do you matter?”; to Emmer, “are you an extremist?”; to Dayton, “can you handle the pressure?”.
Who’da thunk it? Debates as political journalism. Never thought I’d see the day.
So I caught the Channel Five news just now. Channel Five’s 10PM news opened with a stock shot of Jesse Ventura, and asked “could we be heading for a repeat?”
This was how they kicked off their segment on the latest KSTP/Survey USA poll.
I braced myself for another three way race, like back in 2002.
In fact, Dayton was down to 38 (from 46 in the last Survey USA poll); Emmer up to 36 (from 32), and Horner was at…
18. Up from 9.
And here’s a prediction; he’s peaked. And if he hasn’t, he’ll be taking voters from the DFL.
Emmer’s proposes cutting $400 million or so from higher ed.
Listening to the left’s caterwauling, you’d think this was all coming out of student’s pocketbooks.
But Emmer also proposes shutting down one of our extra MNSCU schools. Minnesota is overstocked with them; we could do without one of them.
And a note here – while the media has been carping about Emmer’s need for budget “details”, the Dayton “plan” includes no details on higher education spending of any kind. Horner’s plan calls for a tab of nearly three billion, plus abou$360 million in “investments”, minus something in “redesign”. Government is fun for wonks, isn’t it?
For the past two months, we’ve had the Big Left – the DFL and media – asking “When is Emmer going to come out with the details of his budget plan? We need details! Gotta have details! Where are the details! He owes us details! The people need details! Bring the details! Where’d he put the details? Does he have any details? Can’t run a campaign without details! I’ll bet he has no details! The other guys have details! Cough up the details!”
I pointed out, quite correctly, back in June that it’d be stupid for Emmer to release the details, because it’d merely provide the DFL and media a chance to frame Emmer’s proposals long before the vast majority of voters started to even care about the race. Emmer is operating at a serious financial deficit compared to the deep pockets of the Dayton family and their union sycophants, so he had to husband his sunday punch – The Plan – until the Minnesota Street actually started to give a crap about the election.
Well, now people are starting to pay attention. And Emmer has dropped his entire plan.
And Emmer has made public more details than the other two candidates put together.
And as we saw earlier this week, lots of Dayton’s details just don’t add up – and Horner’s not even going to put his plan through the MN Dept. of Revenue vetting that was seemingly so vital to the Left and Media (ptr) when Emmer’s vetting was still ambiguous.
So – now what?
(Fearless prediction: “high-level conceptual elegance, and trust in the native intelligence of Minnesotans to understand a plan on their own” will replace “details” as the supreme virtue of budget plans).
The Battle of Britain had been going on for three months when, seventy years ago today, the greatest battle of the entire campaign took place in the skies over Britain.
History records this date as the turning point of the Battle of Britain.
In fact, it had happened the day before.
We’ll get back to that.
———-
In the first three phases of the Battle, the German Luftwaffe had been pursuing a simple mission – take control of the skies over the UK to make way for the invasion. And so it plinked at convoys, attacked the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) radar bases and aircraft industry. Due to failures in their intelligence, they constantly believed they were on the brink of extincting the RAF, while the British strength in the air kept increasing (at least in terms of planes and pilots; the level of experience was waning due to casualties, as new pilots struggled to learn the ropes that’d keep them alive long enough to make a difference).
And yet the RAF kept meeting the Luftwaffe’s raids, in greater and greater strength.
And so by the 7th of September, the Luftwaffe was fairly well exhausted. A change in tactics was called for.
Rather than the (relatively) precise raids against airfields and factories (to say nothing of the extremely difficult job of attacking radar installations) of the previous month or so, the Luftwaffe, with its experience levels falling as fast as its fatigue level was rising, saw a need to change tactics; from many, many smaller raids against airfields, to larger, more compact, easier-to-escort raids against big targets that were easy for less-experienced replacement crews to find.
German Heinkel 111 crew
Like London.
On September 7, the Luftwaffe launched its first, day-and-night-coordinated attacks against the docks on the East End of London. The Docks – vital for moving commerce and supplies to and from the Thames river – were surrounded by the working class neighborhoods and teeming slums of the East End.
Damage in the East End of London
It was a horrendous massacre, of course. London was bombed for 57 consecutive days and/or nights. 50,000 Londoners died in The Blitz.
The docks of East London blazing at the height of the Blitz
It wasn’t the first indiscriminate bombing of civilians in history; the Japanese had bombed Shanghai in 1937; the Germans, Warsaw and Narvik and Rotterdam.
It wasn’t the worst bombing of civilians during the war, of course; by war’s end, 50,000 would be the toll for a single night’s firebombing raids on Tokyo and Hamburg, both of which killed as many people as died in two months of the Blitz.
Londoners sheltering from The Blitz in "the Tube", the subway system, which was a highly effective bomb shelter.
But this was the first time the western world had seen itself subjected to constant, calculated bombing of civilans – not a distant, exotic place like Shanghai, or an isolated outpost like Warsaw, but one of Western Civilization’s crown jewels. Not a tactical exercise in terrorism, like Narvik or Rotterdam, intended to cow a government into a quick, cheap surrender, but an extended campaign to bludgeon a whole people into surrender.
And so for weeks, the Luftwaffe pounded London, day and night.
Firefighters cool down the rubble on the East End
But on September 14, a meeting of Oberkommando West (OKW) in Berlin, with Hitler, his top generals, and Erhard Milch (a World War I fighter ace who was Hermann Göring’s #2 in the Luftwaffe, and was sitting in for his boss while he was at “the front”, in France, inspiring the troops), Hitler decided that the idea of actually taking control of the skies over Britain to make way for a military invasion was hopeless, at least for the rest of 1940.
Rather, Hitler decided to switch to pure terrorism – as he himself said, to seek to “create eight million madmen” from the stress of constant air attack, to the point where the British people would demand Churchill make a separate peace with him.
And so to kick off this effort, seventy years ago today, the Luftwaffe launched the greatest series of raids of the Battle thus far – indeed, the greatest single day of coordinated air attacks in the history of the world to date. Two immense waves of bombers, escorted by every fighter that could fly, swept over the UK for the entire day. Every single operational aircraft in Keith Park’s 11 Group flew at least one combat sortie that day – the most intense day of engagement of the entire Battle for the RAF.
Heinkel 111s over southern England
And the losses for the Luftwaffe were catastrophic. 60 planes were lost (to 26 for the RAF), a casualty rate of over 5% for that single day’s raiding. Piled on top of the three months’ pace of attacks and toll in dead and captured men, it was the last straw for the Luftwaffe; they reached the same decision the RAF had reached earlier in the year, and that the US Army Air Force was very nearly forced to reach three years later; daylight bombing against an organized, determined enemy was too bloody and costly. The Luftwaffe’s ranks of aircrew, especially bomber crews, had been bled white and worked to exhaustion. As bad as the situation had been for the RAF,
It was the last day of serious daylight mass bombing. The Luftwaffe switched to night bombing, and never operated mass waves of bombers in daylight again – which, given the technology of the day, meant that any attempt to systematically attack militarily-significant targets went by the boards.
A German Junkers Ju-88 bomber, crash-landed near Whitstable, Kent
And two days later, on September 17, Hitler quietly ordered all preparations for the invasion of England cancelled. He formally left the option open to re-consider the following spring – but by that point, his focused had moved east to Russia.
It’d be a mistake to say the Battle was “won” seventy years ago today, although it was the biggest single days’ casualties for the Luftwaffe (the RAF claimed 176 planes shot down, nearly triple the actual score); rather, it’d be safe to say that the threat that European Civilization would be extincted through the destruction of Britain ended.
And they knew it; for while the Battle of Britain was characterized by bad intelligence on both sides, the primacy of British technology, especially at codebreaking, showed its hand. British cryptologists deciphered a German radio message from a Luftwaffe transport officer telling his airlift units – the ones that’d carry the supplies for the airborne bridge that’d supply Nazi paratroopers – to stop stockpiling supplies for the invasion. No supplies? No airborne attack. No airborne attack? No invasion.
Bletchley Park, a country manor converted into the headquarters of British code-breaking during the war.
So while Churchill never let on, he knew that the threat was over for the foreseeable future.
London was bombed horribly for the next several months, along with many other British cities. But from this day on, the outcome was never really in doubt again.
Churchill addressing the House of Commons
It had been three weeks since Churchill had given his “Never was so much owed by so many to so few” speech at the House of Commons, a speech best known for its seminal quote:
The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All our hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day…
Overlooked by many is the real importance of the speech; Churchill’s reference to most signficant foreign-policy development of the month – the growing investment of the United States in the fate of Western Europe:
Some months ago we came to the conclusion that the interests of the United States and of the British Empire both required that the United States should have facilities for the naval and air defence of the Western Hemisphere against the attack of a Nazi power… We had therefore decided spontaneously, and without being asked or offered any inducement, to inform the Government of the United States that we would be glad to place such defence facilities at their disposal by leasing suitable sites in our Transatlantic possessions for their greater security against the unmeasured dangers of the future.… His Majesty’s Government are entirely willing to accord defence facilities to the United States on a 99 years’ leasehold basis…
Two of the 50 World War I-vintage US destroyers lent to the UK. Had Britain not prevailed in the Battle, Lend Lease would have been a dead issue
Undoubtedly this process means that these two great organisations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking out upon the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.
– a speech that pointed to the next big phase in the war in Western Europe, the growing involvement of the United States, which in the next 15 months would end in Hitler’s declaration of war against America, which was the real tipping point in the West.
And yet it was the events of seventy years ago today that turned those developments into the basis for the great return of 1944, rather than a fallback position for a nation in mortal danger.
Here’s the part I’ve been looking forward to; Emmer plans to fundmantally reform Local Government Aid:
The Emmer plan calls for reforming Local Government Aid to focus solely on public safety and critical infrastructure needs. Over several decades, LGA expanded to an often politically targeted subsidy for many local governments – in the process paying for non-critical services. An Emmer administration will reform local government aid giving certainty to local units of government as they plan their budgets.An Emmer Administration will immediately sit down with the League of Minnesota Cities, Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities and Association of Minnesota Counties to identify mandate reforms that will elevate unnecessary burdens on local units of government.The Emmer plan calls for reforming Local Government Aid to focus solely on public safety and critical infrastructure needs. Over several decades, LGA expanded to an often politically targeted subsidy for many local governments – in the process paying for non-critical services.
Where do we start on this one? LGA has become a vehicle to allow local government to launder their spending through the rest of the state’s taxpayers, avoiding accountability with their own taxpayers. Especially the DFL-addled governments of the Twin Cities and Duluth, which get LGA funding 2.5 times greater per capita than the rest of the state.
An Emmer administration will reform local government aid giving certainty to local units of government as they plan their budgets.
It’d add accountability to local governments (which will be spun as “higher property taxes” by DFL-dominated local governments, terrified of the backlash their own citizens might eventually visit on them when they actually have to be responsible for their own spending).
This reform is long, long overdue.
Make no mistake about it – our K12 education system needs to be reformed on a level that goes way beyond spending.
But most of this state doesn’t know it yet. K12 education is like social security; criticism has to be very limited if you want to get elected to office. It’s sad but true.
Here’s Emmer’s proposal on the education budget:
Tom Emmer calls for holding K–12 education funding harmless in the next biennium. Tom Emmer is committed to ensure that this critical spending of the budget is not reduced.
Let’s make sure we remember that Dayton’s budget cranks up the spending – but most of that goes to paying “the shift”. More on that below.
An Emmer administration will be focused on reprioritizing existing K–12 funding to address critical needs. Changes in priorities can be accomplished without undermining local school districts’. Additionally an Emmer administration will create urban school district empowerment zones and reduce state mandates by allowing school districts to have greater authority to operate their districts and reduce state mandates for all school districts.
The empowerment zone idea is a good one.
Also bear in mind that Emmer, unlike Dayton, is going to leave charter schools alone. Inner city parents who have fled the district schools will still have a refuge while the state works on re-organizing urban schools.
As far as that shift goes:
An Emmer Administration will begin identifying a repayment schedule in FY2012-13 and plan to begin repaying the shift in FY2014–15. Enacting the Emmer Jobs Agenda and putting Minnesotans back to work, the economy will grow and repayment may be triggered more quickly.
In the meantime, it’s a bill we can pretty justifiably postpone for now.
Dayton Says: “Taxing the Rich” will raise four billion dollars.
The MN Department of Revenue says:
This proposal adds a new top bracket at a rate of 10.95% starting in tax year 2011. The 10.95% bracket is set at $150,000 for married joint filers, $75,000 for married separate filers, and $130,000 for single and head of household filers. The new bracket is not adjusted yearly for inflation although the bottom brackets are adjusted for inflation in keeping with current law. The tax year impact is as follows:
And the end result, according to the MNDoR?
Tax Year Impact
______ ($000s)_______
TY 2011 $752,800
TY 2012 $813,600
TY 2013 $879,100
In other words, cranking the tax on “the rich” to a confiscatory 8 to 11% (actually 10.95, but let’s be honest here…) brings in less than half of what the Dayton budget “plan” says it will.
But even that is over triple the tax hike that the completely DFL-dominated Legislature could pass at the height of Obamamania.
Mark Dayton’s budget is DOA. Electing him – or “Mini-Mark”, Tom Hornery , whose plan is marginally less profligate and, at this point, vastly less-vetted by the in-the-bag media – would be colossal wastes of time.
Mr. D. at MinnPost and over at the Neighborhood points out that it’s been a rough week for the First Amendment, what with Kathleen Sibelius calling down the smack on Obamacare critics and Justice Breyer pondering making the whole nation a crowded theater (for purposes of protecting Qu’rans, anyway).
And he asks an interesting question:
I don’t mean to be flip about this, but let’s ask a hypothetical: would it be okay to burn a Koran if it were wrapped in an American flag? And if not, on what basis should the Koran (or a Bible) be afforded greater protection than an American flag?
That whole “government of laws, not men” thing is looking pretty sick these days.
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