Remember last spring?

When leftybloggers and the local and national media were scouring behind every dandelion for “racist tea partiers?   When the standard of “proof” was “suspicious ambiguity?”

As most of us who actually attended Tea Party rallies knew, it was all crap.

And now we have proof:

A new analysis of political signs displayed at a tea party rally in Washington last month reveals that the vast majority of activists expressed narrow concerns about the government’s economic and spending policies and steered clear of the racially charged anti-Obama messages that have helped define some media coverage of such events.

And there’s your thesis – the media has used whatever “racist” signs they did find to paint their entire coverage of the conservative revolution.   The gullible and/or depraved lefty “alternative” media has run with that meme, naturally.

Ekins’s conclusion is not that the racially charged messages are unimportant but that media coverage of tea party rallies over the past year have focused so heavily on the more controversial signs that it has contributed to the perception that such content dominates the tea party movement more than it actually does.

“Really this is an issue of salience,” Ekins said. “Just because a couple of percentage points of signs have those messages doesn’t mean the other people don’t share those views, but it doesn’t mean they do, either. But when 25 percent of the coverage is devoted to those signs, it suggests that this is the issue that 25 percent of people think is so important that they’re going to put it on a sign, when it’s actually only a couple of people.”

Conservatives can expect the media to slander us.  But it’s good to fight it.

This just occurred to me: Maureen Dowd may be the  Betty McCollum of columnists:

As I sat above the Hoover Dam under the broiling sun, I was getting jittery.

There was Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, speaking at the dedication of a bridge linking Arizona and Nevada 890 feet above the Colorado River.

As the politicians droned on and my Irish skin turned toasty brown, I worried that Governor Brewer might make a citizen’s arrest and I would have to run for my life across the desert. She has, after all, declared open season on anyone with a suspicious skin tone in her state.

The Irish never turn “toasty brown”.

And the only “suspicious skin tone” this country should open a season on is that waxy, corpse-like newsroom pallor.

Kidding.  I kid.

I direct you to Berg’s Seventh Law: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”

And so when lefties all over the internet started chanting about a “scandal” involving Republicans getting money from overseas, I thought “there has got to be a story about Democrats getting at least twice as much coming up shortly”.

Are these hunches ever wrong?  Don’t be silly. That’s why they’re called “Berg’s Law”, and not “Berg’s Half-baked Theory”.  Emphasis added;

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate criticizing GOP groups for allegedly funneling foreign money into campaign ads have seen their party raise more than $1 million from political action committees affiliated with foreign companies.

House and Senate Democrats have received approximately $1.02 million this cycle from such PACs, according to an analysis compiled for The Hill by the Center for Responsive Politics. House and Senate GOP leaders have taken almost $510,000 from PACs on the same list.

How did we maintain a democracy before blogs, talk radio and Fox news, anyway?

Dire Straits was, to me, the unlikeliest bunch of megastars of the Eighties.

And they were among the most interesting.

And it was thirty years ago today that the album that, to me, defined them as either “the most interesting megastars” or “the biggest interesting group” (*) was released.

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of Making Movies.

Dire Straits had come out of nowhere in 1978 with the mega-hit single “Sultans of Swing”, which introduced the world to the guitar style of Mark Knopfler, a former schoolteacher and guitar virtuoso who’d melded the styles of Chet Atkins, Richard Thompson and Eric Clapton into a thrilling melange of rootsy beauty.

Still, the first two albums – Dire Straits and Communique – were unsatisfying.  They had their moments, to be sure – but by the time one listened to them both back-to-back, it was easy to write them off as an eccentric hybrid of country and pop; niche players worth a listen, certainly, but nothing that was going to take over the world.

We know how the story ends, of course.  After 1982’s EP Love Over Gold, which established the band’s chops as a makers of quirky but consequential pop, came Brothers In Arms, which made them into Europe’s biggest superstars, record-movers and touring machines in the same league as Michael Jackson and Springsteen at the peak of their games.

Connecting the quirky alt-country band and the international pop powerhouse was Making Movies.

In an era of great pop songwriting, Tunnel had complex, literary lyrics – the title cut’s mad chase between a pair of lovers and the soldiers in the amusement park, starting with Bittan’s Rogers and Hammerstein-via-E-Street Band intro…

…and swerving between invocations of Chuck Berry, a sly latin influence, and a backstory that reads like a Dashiell Hammett short story.

And in place of the four-piece pub band from the first two albums, Knopfler stripped the band down to a power trio – John Illsley on bass, Pick Withers on drums, and himself – and added some judicious keyboards from Roy Bittan of the E Street Band.  And in place of the air-tight, three-minute guitar-centered song arrangements came a wide-open, almost symphonic sound, with songs that stretched out toward eight minutes on the title cut, allowing room for the band to stretch out, and use Knopfler’s guitar virtuosity for atmosphere rather than mere fretboard acrobatics.  “Skateaway”, a six-minute streetscape built around a reedy Stratocaster improvisation, really showcased Bittan’s organ and piano work, which paid subtle homage to Irving Berlin and George Gershwin in using the piano to evoke the atmosphere of a busy New York street and its star, a coquette on a pair of skates.

The song, with its off-handed asides to conversations up and down the street as the rollerskating heroine skittles through traffic, is almost a prototype of “Money For Nothing”, four years later – a song about an overheard conversation.

And “Romeo and Juliet”, an exhausted, last-call love song and one of Dire Straits’ most enduring masterpieces, stars Knopfler playing…the dobro, an instrument that hadn’t poked its nose out of the world of bluegrass in thirty years.

(Recorded months before MTV debuted, the video in all its painful lock-step literalism shows how very much in its infancy the art of the music video was).

While the album led with a lot less of the “geez, what an amazing guitar player is Mark Knopfler” than the first two albums, his virtuosity is, if anything, more amazing for its subtlety.  Check out the skirling timbres of the soloing in “Tunnel of Love” – the tone of the Strat fills out from the middle as the solo progresses, accentuating the sub-dominant notes in his slinky patterns in a way that, thirty years later, I’m still getting new insights into.  Or “Skateaway”, which is an etude on the uses of the nuance of the out-of-phase pickup pair and the volume pedal.  It may be one of the most subtly gorgeous albums in the history of the electric guitar.

Making Movies made the case that pop music could be literary, virtuosic – a work of layered, nuanced beauty.  It’s one of the reasons that this part of the eighties was such a glorious era in popular music.   Because I can see someone making an album like this today; I just can’t see it being the jumping off point for a huge popular success.

(more…)

Follow the bouncing Dayton funding.

Taxpayers League of Minnesota website here.

Sign up to be a poll challenger.

Minnesota Majority here.

The Sons of Liberty?  Right here!

Joel Demos’ website.  And his latest ad:

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 9AM-3PM.

• Volume I “The First Team” –  Brian and John are out on assignment today. Brad Carlson and Derek Brigham – part of the NARN’s rapidly-expanding farm club – will be filling in.  Sheila Kihne from Activist Next Door will be a guest during the first hour. Join the First Team from 11-1.
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I follow from 1-3PM Central.  We’ll have an exceptionally busy show: Phil Krinkie of the Taxpayers League will dissect the Dayton Budget, Dan McGrath will talk about the effort to clean up our electoral system and his organization’s reward for finding and convicting election fraudsters, Bradlee Dean on his new documentary, and Fifth Congressional District candidate Joel Demos!
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on hiatus from his regular 9-11 slot on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities, until after the election!  Hopefully when he goes back on the air, it’ll be “Representative Banaian”!
• And for those of you who like your constitutionalism straight up with no chaser, don’t forget the Sons of Liberty, from 3-5!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream).
• Podcast at Townhall, usually by Monday
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

As I’ve written in the past, single-sex marriage is not my marquee issue, personally.

Oh, I know what I believe; that marriage is about having kids, and kids grow up best with functional parents of both genders.  It’s a belief that should inform a lot of family-law issues (which is why I support gay adoption; two functional same-sex “parents” are not preferable to different-gender parents, but they are much better than a single parent, if that’s the choice.

But I think that as a rule government should stay out of most personal choices; that people should be able to sign a civil contract that ties them into a legal construct that gives them all the legal rights that a “Married” couple has – and that people like me should be able to opt out of the government contract and follow the purely religious contract that we believe in.  And if you belong to a religious demomination that can come up with a theological justification for it, then that’s your first amendment right – just as it’ll be mine to debunk it.

I’m not going to argue about it, either.

But the fact is that while Tom Emmer is not focused on gay marriage – this election is, quite rightly, about jobs to him – he also stands in sharp contrast to Dayton and Horner in that he does not want the issue decided by a DFL-dominated legislature or an “elite” court that jams the issue down the state’s throat.

Which is the subject of this ad:

Let the legislature do its damn job. For that matter, let the courts do their job, and interpret laws, not create them from whole cloth.

Emmer is right on this issue.  I think most Minnesotans agree.

Dayton wants our self-appointed “elites” to decide this issue.  Horner too, although he’s irrelevant.

Pass the word.

It’s go time for Republicans in Minnesota. And by “Republicans”, I mean conservatives, and people who can be convinced that Minnesota’s liberal traditions and Barack Obama/Mark Dayton’s takeover of society will leave us all the worse for wear.

If you live in the Third Congressional District, you are in a semi-competitive race – but Jim Meffert clearly doesn’t pack the gear.  Still, if you live and work in the Three and support the GOP and conservative ideals, you will need to hunker down, help out Paulsen and your local state House/Senate candidates, and maybe dig deep and see if you can free up a buck or two to help those races out.

If you live in the Fourth or the Fifth – you know you’re the underdogs. I’m one of you.  And yet you have great candidates with great messages, facing weak candidates (especially the Fourth CD’s Betty McCollum, one of the most inconsequential people ever to serve in Congress).  And you’ve been working; somehow, the GOP found a reserve of people whose spirits had not been trounced by decades of living in one-party cities, and have been campaigning in precincts that haven’t seen a GOP voter in a generation. We’ll come back to you.

If you live in the First District, you are seeing signs of hope; Walz is weak, Demmer is raising good money, Walz backed a lot of deeply stupid legislation – Demmer could pull this off.  Hang in there, and above all, keep working.

Of course, if you live in the Seventh and Eighth, you might be feeling like you just climbed into a car with the accelerator stuck to the floor.  Lee Byberg has raised more money than  Colin Peterson’s last generation’s worth of challengers combined, most of it local.  And Chip Cravaack has not only blown the lid off of the usual polling in the Eighth District, but uncovered what looks like a wave of populist conservative enthusiasm in that long-benighted part of the state.

I don’t want to get too excited, but Byberg, Demmer and Cravaack could all catch fire here.

I’ve never felt that about the Seventh or Eighth in all the years I’ve lived here.

Now – if you live in the Sixth District, Michele Bachmann is going to win by 10 points.  Maybe 12.   So while the leadership of the Sixth District will scream at me for suggesting it, I’m going to say “howzabout you take a moment to peel  off a few bucks to help out one of the swing districts?  Maybe help conquer one of the districts that hasn’t seen sane representation (or in the case of the Eighth, seen their representative at all) in a generation or two?

And if you live in the Second District, you know in your gut that if Shelly Madore gets within twenty points of John Kline, it’ll be with the aid of a lot of corpses in cemeteries in Apple Valley.  Kline is going to demolish Madore.  Now, in 2008 I suggested peeling off some money and some volunteer time to help out in some of the swingier districts, and Janet Beihoffer – the 2nd CD chair at the time – nearly took out a hit on me.  But I’m going to do it again.  John Kline is going to win, and win huge.  So will Bachmann.

So if you live in those districts and see fit, and want to help back up some of the confidence that’s buzzing around the state, please consider peeling off some volunteer time to drive from the Second to the First, or from the Sixth up to the 7th or 8th, to help Randy, Lee or Chip.  Or send a few bucks to Randy, Lee and especially Chip and, if you really want to pray for an upset that’ll shock the world, for Joel Demos and Teresa Collett.

Here’s where to start:

1. Randy Demmer
2. John Kline
3. Erik Paulsen
4. Teresa Collett
5. Joel Demos
6. Michele Bachmann
7. Lee Byberg
8. Chip Cravaack

More – much more – later.

That’s what my friend and radio patriarch Hugh Hewitt says.

But it’s going to be close, and you can count on the DFL cheating.

Minnesota Majority is taking the bull by the horns:

“We are putting a price on the heads of anyone who would attempt to organize people with the intent of cheating in our election,” explained Jeff Davis, president of Minnesota Majority, a coalition member organization. “We’ve received reports of organizers enticing people to vote fraudulently with small financial incentives such as gift cards. We’ve also seen evidence of this illegal practice in the official incident logs from the 2008 election. We will now offer individuals a more lucrative incentive for turning-in these organizers of voter fraud.”

The group launched their Election Integrity program last week to engage citizens to help detect and deter voter fraud. The program includes training people on how to spot fraudulent activity and a call center to handle reports of fraudulent activity by the public. Radio ads are now running to expand awareness of the program and recruit more “fraud spotters.” Another ad is planned closer to the election warning of the consequences of voter fraud and encouraging people to report suspicious election activity to a toll free number. Volunteers will log incidents in a database and refer to law enforcement as needed.

“We’ve got a really robust program here,” said Randy Liebo, an organizer with the North Star Tea Party Patriots who are also participating in Election Integrity Watch. “With a strong public awareness campaign that involves several media outlets and grassroots networking, we’re building a team of informed fraud spotters. Offering rewards for the identification and conviction of organizers of voter fraud strengthens our program even more. This is like a “wanted” poster placing a bounty on fraudsters. If you do the crime, somebody’s going to turn you in.”

We’ll be talking about the program with Dan McGrath on the NARN on Saturday, during the 2PM hour.

If all goes well, it could singlehandedly revive the economy in Ramsey county.

Minnesota thanks you for your service…

…by whizzing on your electoral franchise:

State Representative Dan Severson, candidate for Secretary of State, today alerted military absentee voters of disenfranchisement by the Minnesota Secretary of State in the 2008 election. “So far, I have identified about 80 overseas absentee voters from various counties across the state whose ballots from 2008 were rejected on a ridiculous technicality by Secretary of State Mark Ritchie,” said Severson (see list attached at link). “And all of the data isn’t in yet.”

“After the 2008 election and during the subsequent U.S. Senate recount, Ritchie sent a memo (see attached) to county election officials instructing them to reject the absentee ballots of overseas voters—most of whom were military voters—if they did not have a ballot application to accompany the ballot,” explained Severson.

Should I mention that active-duty military tends to vote pretty consistently around 70-80% Republican?

(more…)

The latest SurveyUSA/KSTP poll has Dayton up by five – with a margin of almost four points.

After a steady stream of TV ads and roughly two dozen debates, Minnesota’s race for governor remains without a clear front-runner.

DFLer Mark Dayton is the leader in the latest KSTP/SurveyUSA poll with 42 percent. He’s five points ahead of Republican Tom Emmer, who came in with 37 percent. Independence Party candidate Tom Horner is at 14 percent.

I haven’t seen any crosstabs or anything about the methodology – and I’ll follow up when I do.

My theory – none of the likely voter models properly accounts for the enthusiasm and turnout anomalies in a “wave” election.

(CYNICAL MITCH chimes in: “or how many Democrat “likely voters” are dead, or voting in more than three precincts”)

Long story short – don’t let the media get you down.  Emmer’s gonna win by three.

My predication that Michele Bachmann would win the Sixth District race by ten points is sounding better and  better as we go:

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.

If my theory is correct – if none of the polls’ likely voter models properly account for Republican turnout and enthusiasm – then ten might be conservative.  But I’m not going to get irrationally exuberant.

Remember a few weeks ago, when “Common Cause Minnesota” – a “non-partisan” organization that seeks “transparency” in campaigning (also speech rationing) – filed a complaint against the pro-business PAC “Minnesota’s Future” because it got a contribution from the Republican Governor’s Association.

To help illustrate the financial trail behind Citizens For A Better Minnesota’s complaint, I’ve prepared this graphic to show you the money trail involved.

Pretty crazy-complicated, huh?  Those folks at Common Cause Minnesota sure know how to protect all us stooped citizens, don’t they?

So courtesy of Derek Brigham, let’s take a look at the transparent, clear, path that money takes in getting to the Dayton campaign from…well, you take a look.

Now, I’m no accountant.  I asked Common Cause to come on the Northern Alliance a couple of weeks ago to discuss their complaint.  I heard nothing back – not so much as a tweet.

I’m of Scandinavian descent.

I’m not naturally wired for optimism.

But down in my gut, this feels like it could be Chip Cravaack’s year.

Maybe it’s the fact that Oberstar’s got so many friends in high places, and yet so few in his district.

Maybe it’s that poll from two weeks ago.

I dunno.

I’m just feeling good about this race.

Ryan Rhodes, who usually focuses his blog on Fail and AIDS, turns his gimlet eye to politics.  He analyzes the Tea party…

The TEA in Tea Party stands for “Taxed Enough Already,” which is punchy enough, I guess, but it strikes me as somehow, I don’t know, unconvincing, and definitely not in the least bit funny. If I were to try and organize a national political movement–which I totally could, believe me–I’d want to label it with an acronym everyone would want to rally around immediately.

…and creates a movement whose time may yet come:

To that end I, Ryan Rhodes, am hereby forming the Society Against an Unjust System Advancing Government Excess. This SAUSAGE Party is guaranteed to catch on nationally, and it will be open to everyone, although I suspect there will probably be more men than women. The message of the SAUSAGE Party is similar in scope to that of the Tea Party, but it’s not vulnerable to the same “tea bagger” taunts and similar such juvenile verbal and literary attacks.

So, I decree: Forward, my fellow SAUSAGE Partiers! Together, we can take all those juicy House and Senate seats and put the meat back in Congress! Oh, and Emmer and Demmer, you’re welcome to join us.

It’s not the wurst idea I’ve seen this season.

To: All Inner-City Parents with kids in the Minneapolis or St. Paul School Districts

From: Mitch Berg, who’s been there, pretty much.

Re: An Invitation

All,

I’m Mitch Berg.  I live in Saint Paul.  A few years back, I pulled my kids out of the St. Paul Schools, and went into the charter system.

And when I got into the charter school system, I was astounded at what I saw; in Saint Paul, the vast majority of the families were black, latino or asian.  Many were recent immigrants.   And they were among the most passionate advocates for school choice I’ve ever met.  Because they – you – are not stupid.  You can see that your school districts have among the worst “achievement gaps” in the nation between your kids and white kids.  You know that our educational-industrial complex’s boasting about the quality of our school system rings hollow along Plymouth Avenue, and down Rice Street.

Most of the parents I met, like most of you that I’m writing to now, naturally, voted DFL.  Not a few of them spat tacks at the mention of Republican politicians.

And it was fascinating, watching the cognitive dissonance when I mentioned to them that in May of 2007, when the DFL proposed a bill that would cap the number of charter schools in Minnesota, the DFL voted an almost-straight ticket in favor of capping charter schools (six of them broke with the party, only one of them from the metro). The GOP voted as a straight ticket against the cap, which was defeated by the skinniest of margins.

Let me re-emphasize that, all you parents out there: the DFL voted to cut off your kids’ lifeline, the charter schools that you all quite rightly judge to be your kids’ best shot at a quality education.

Today, the NAACP urged parents like you to pull your kids out of the Minneapolis Public Schools. But they did it for all the wrong reasons:

The Minneapolis branch of the NAACP on Wednesday urged parents to consider pulling their children out of the Minneapolis School District in response to Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson’s recommendation to close North High School.

I understand – North is, to some people, a center and rallying point for that troubled community.

And to the administration?  Well, it’s part of their meal ticket:

The accusations were an affront to Johnson, who grew up in segregated Selma, Ala. “We have the responsibility of providing a high quality education to our students regardless of where they live,” Johnson wrote in a statement to the Star Tribune. “All of our students deserve educational opportunities that will prepare them to be global citizens. I am committed to providing them with those opportunities.”

Parents – if someone, a salesman or a boss or a teacher, spoke that kind of empty gobbledygook to your face, you’d laugh at them and walk away, wouldn’t you?

The woman said nothing!

Look – closing North High should be a cause for celebration; North High, with its atrocious achievement and yawning achievement gap and by-the-numbers mediocrity that fully lived out what George W. Bush called “the racism of low expectations”, was just a cog in a machine that devalued your children just as surely as any plantation owner ever would have 160 years ago; a symbol of an education establishment that exploits your children no less cynically than any drug kingpin. Oh, their intentions may be more benign than Simon LeGree’s and Plukey Duke’s, but when it comes to the education your children got at North – at any Minneapolis Public School, or Saint Paul for that matter, look me in the eye and tell me that the intentions made a stitch of difference?

[Minneapolis NAACP President Booker] Hodges issued a statement calling for parents “who value their children’s education or future [to] seriously consider other options for educating their children.”

And I – a cracker descended from North Woods rock farmers, myself – will stand up and yell “Amen”.  Hodges is right.

Now is the time to free your children from the Minneapolis Schools’ racism of low, or no, expectations.

Of course, the Minneapolis School Board and the Minneapolis Public Schools are only the tip of the iceberg, just as they are in Saint Paul.   The problem is that the cities’ school districts are controlled by people who owe their livelihoods and futures to the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, and the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party, first and foremost.

Not to you.

Not to your children.

And they are counting on you – the African-American parents, the Latino families, the H’mong clans who votes for them by imposing margins in every election, year in and year out – to remain ignorant of the fact that for all of the DFL’s yammering about education spending, it is the GOP that supports your right to choose where your kids go to school.  It is the GOP that supports initiatives like School Choice, Charter Schools and, in many states, Vouchers to give you, the motivated, dedicated parents that I see and know from my time as a charter school parent, the power and tools – to say nothing of economic freedom – to make those choices and make them stick.

You can say “he’s just talking politics”.  And you’re right – this is about politics.  But politics control your childrens’ education just as surely as their teachers’ qualifications do.

So look at the record.  The DFL – the Democrats, the people you have been voting for since time immemorial – are actively supported by those who are harming your children.

You want hope, for your children, for real?  It’s time for change.

As Daniel Henniger notes in the Journal, the rescue of the miners was  a victory of the free market:

It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.

Amid the boundless human joy of the miners’ liberation, it may seem churlish to make such a claim. It is churlish. These are churlish times, and the stakes are high.

In the United States, with 9.6% unemployment, a notably angry electorate will go to the polls shortly and dump one political party in favor of the other, on which no love is lost. The president of the U.S. is campaigning across the country making this statement at nearly every stop:

“The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper.”

One of Minnesota’s gubernatorial candidates has the same precise message.

Uh, yeah. That’s a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that’s right. Ask the miners.

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill’s rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock’s president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That’s why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.

A remarkable Sept. 30 story about all this by the Journal’s Matt Moffett was a compendium of astonishing things that showed up in the Atacama Desert from the distant corners of capitalism.

Samsung of South Korea supplied a cellphone that has its own projector. Jeffrey Gabbay, the founder of Cupron Inc. in Richmond, Va., supplied socks made with copper fiber that consumed foot bacteria, and minimized odor and infection.

Chile’s health minister, Jaime Manalich, said, “I never realized that kind of thing actually existed.”

The profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at the mine rescue site.

So by all means, Democrats – keep focusing on killing that spirit off.

When after a year of joking that Obama might be  re-run of the Carter years, suddenly it seemed that that might be the best case?

My joke may have been correct:

The most important fact to take from the September unemployment report released last week is that almost three years after the recession began the economy was still losing jobs! Almost 100,000 (95,000) additional jobs were lost last month from the economy overall. That makes 400,000 jobs lost since May. Moreover, in a regular annual benchmark revision to calibrate unemployment rates for updated data, the BLS reported a further 366,000 jobs lost for March. The total number of Americans unemployed stands at almost 15 million (14.8).

Malaise?  The kids’ve got it!

Based on the long standing history and rhythms of the American economy, we should have had a booming recovery by now. Even more so, since the deeper the recession the stronger the recovery. Real economic growth in the first 4 quarters of Reagan’s recovery from the deep 1981-82 recession was a whopping 7.7%. Even the recovery under President Ford from the deep 1973-74 recession sported real economic growth of 6.2%.

But under President Obama we are already in another downward spiral, with real growth falling from 5% in the fourth quarter of 2009, to 3.7% in the first quarter of this year, to 1.7% in the second quarter.

Moreover, as the brilliant economist John Lott explained for FoxNews.com yesterday, the base unemployment rate has been stuck at least at 9.5% for 14 months now, over three full percentage points higher than the average unemployment rate during the recession. Since Obama became President, the U.S. unemployment rate has increased faster than 25 of 30 other major industrialized countries, as reported by the Economist.

Rumors that Obama is planning a stimulus for junior hockey in time for the next winter Olympics are at this time unconfirmed.

Andrew Miller, guestblogging at MinnPost as well as at his own Miller Stop, ponders the future of North Minneapolis now that the Minneapolis School Board plans to shut down North High:

North Side is across the river from where I live and it’s an area I generally avoid. It’s the city’s crime center — have a look at this map of shots fired — and a less than ideal place to move your family or send your kids to school. That has to change. Great cities don’t let entire neighborhoods die.

Should North shut down, what will replace it?

In Waiting for “Superman” — yeah, I know, another tired reference — director Davis Guggenheim illustrates how a struggling school harms the overall health of a neighborhood.

The movie makes an interesting premise – but ignores an equally interesting one.  Do bad schools kill neighborhoods?  Or do schools reflect their neighborhoods?

Students at North continue to show the lowest math and science proficiency in the city. In 2010, just eight percent of juniors were proficient in math while four percent of the student body was proficient in science.

How do things improve for these students when their school shuts down? Where do they go?

I realize lots of people get nostalgic about their old schools.  Even utter failures like North.

But just as the New Orleans city schools took the rebuilding from Katrina as a cue to try to fix their school system – which, to be fair, may not have been as bad district-wide as North is – perhaps it’s time for the Minneapolis Public Schools to try something new.

Eventually, the city must destroy and rebuild the North Side. Maybe that starts with closing the doors at North and exploring innovative solutions to educate and mobilize North Side youth.

Where will they go?  Probably to one of the other Minneapolis schools – huge, anonymous factory schools.

We’ll talk “innovative solutions” below.

Maybe we need to take some of the tax dollars spent on crime enforcement and invest in neighborhood programs to keep today’s youth from being tomorrow’s felons. Maybe the school district needs to realize you can’t go $10 million over plan on a project many deemed frivolous in the first place.

The North Side has been at a crossroads for years and it’s beyond me how cozier digs for the Minneapolis School District leads to better education for area youth.

It’s beyond anyone who pays attention to how education really works.  But it does reflect Mark Dayton’s education plan; throw more money at the status quo, where administration trumps teaching every time.

North High School is the story of a community in peril and a community in need of action.

Right.  But the “ac  tion” is what’s important.

This’d be a great opportunity for Minneapolis to try to try a different tack than the one that’s failed most urban school districts.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Don’t Build A Big School: Replace North with several smaller, neighborhood schools, each with a principal, an assistant, a secretary, eight teachers and 200 kids.  A school where the principal and every teacher knows every kid by name.
• Tell The Union to Go Pound Sand and turn the more successful charter school operators loose in North Minneapolis.  Create a “Charter School Zone”, similar to New Orleans.  Turn the whole system on the North Side over to people with new, better ideas.  This will, necessarily, lead to the smaller schools I call for above.

None of these will ever happen, of course.   School boards love big factory schools, which they see as monuments to their own wisdom and perspecacity. Charters scare the unions. The existing system keeps big superintendents in their big salaries.

But think about what we could do?

Gary Gross shocks nobody by endorsing my friend and radio colleague King Banaian in House District 15B, the eastern part of the Saint Cloud metro area.

And he explains why. I’ll cut out most of the summary; you go and read:

1. King understands what makes an economy tick…Simply put, it’s been painful listening to the DFL in past legislative sessions because their understanding of basic economic principles is all but non-existent.

2. …King will set sensible priorities that limit the reach of government while still funding the things that government is responsible for doing.

3. King’s devotion to limited government will send a signal to businesses that spending will finally be put under control…

5. King knows that there are tons of regulations that don’t serve a useful purpose…

And he concludes:

Simply put, I’m not voting for King just because he’s my friend. I’m voting for him because his policies (a) will get Minnesota’s economy back on the right track and (b) will eliminate the overregulation that’s strangling Minnesota’s businesses.

The fact that he’s my friend is just a great bonus.

If you live in the greater Saint Cloud area, consider not only voting for him, but helping him in the home stretch.

Sheila Kihne – whom I christened the Minnesota conservative blogosphere’s “Rookie of the Year” at an event the other night – unleashes a Scott-Johnson-caliber take-down of Mark Dayton’s entire biography over at Activist Next Door and True North, tying together his years as a radical hippie/”School Teacher”, his lamentable Senate career, and his mental health and chemical dependency issues.

Almost-but-not-quite conclusion:

Do we see a pattern? [Read her piece.  You will see a pattern – Ed.]

Here are two facts:

1. During his very first job out-of-college as “a teacher”-Mark Dayton couldn’t handle the pressure- he took time off to protest and he quit in the middle of a school year for “personal reasons.”

2. During his last job as U.S. Senator- He couldn’t handle the pressure in D.C.– he shut down his office and started drinking to deal with the stress.

The media has covered for him, but worse than that they’ve actually lied for him. For years every profile has perpetuated the myth that Dayton is hard-working. He may be a hard-campaigner (who isn’t?), that doesn’t mean he’s a hard-worker. I know people who are great at getting jobs, but once that goal has been met—they get bored, complacent, or overwhelmed. He reminds me of Obama in this regard. He’ll work his butt off to accomplish a goal that involves some self-fulfillment, but when reality doesn’t match his expectations, he simply can’t handle it.

With a $6 Billion budget deficit…we need somebody who can handle it.

Go and read the whole thing.

Over the past few weeks, the MNDFL and the Dayton campaign have been trying to hammer on the fact that Tom Horner – who voted for Obama, and hasn’t publicly supported a conservative Republican for office in years – is “A Republican”, just like Tom Emmer.  They also note that former governor Arne Carlson and former senator Dave Durenberger – liberal Republicans who rejected Ronald Reagan while he was in office – are endorsing Horner.  Who, by the way, is a “Republican” who proposes a tax-and-spend agenda only marginally less noxious and big-L liberal than Mark Dayton’s.

“What about that big tent?”, they snark.

The quick answer is that the tent is plenty big; all who favor limiting government and holding the line on spending are welcome.  Neither Horner, Durenberger nor Carlson have ever stood for either.

But since we’re on the subject of big tents…

Yesterday, Maurice Hinchey had to get Bill Clinton out to Binghamton to try to rescue his re-election bid and save his House seat. Today, Republican challenger George Phillips trumps Hinchey with a surprise endorsement from former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat who has a track record of backing common-sense Republicans.

So all you DFLers who were trumpeting the Carlson and Durenberger endorsements last month; shall I expect you to start sending checks to George Phillips?  Because Ed Koch is obviously the reasonable, responsible, non-extreme, big-tent Democrat?

Of course you should – if you follow your own logic.

And then, after the election, you can send Randy Kelly a few bucks and an “attaboy” for fighting for principle back in 2005.

Assuming you really believe all that “big tent” crap.

We Republicans don’t need a big tent.  We need to get as many people as we can to crowd into the tent we have, with us.

Mark Dayton’s latest ad claims that, while Minnesota schools have “failed”, that “Mark Dayton was a teacher”, and that he “knows what needs to be done” to fix education.

Does he, then?

By that, do they mean teachers should only show up 1/3 of time when they’re teaching, and quit in the middle of the year?

Or do they mean the state should push the same kind of alternative licensure that put Dayton in the classroom in the first place.

Or do they just mean that we taxpayers should just shut up and give them all the money the union demands via the DFL?

Since I just went to school in North Dakota – a state that spends much less per student, and gets better results – I need this explained to me.

John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson responded to my story last week about the internal polling in District 32B.

Scott adds a note of cautious sobriety:

Over the weekend John noted Mitch Berg’s assertion regarding a possible Republican surge in a part of Minnesota’s Third Congressional District (House District 32B). The poll in 32B that Mitch cited should actually raise a cautionary warning for the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer.

Let’s be absolutely clear, here; caution is definitely in order.

We’ll come back to that.

Comparing the poll numbers to the 2008 electoral results in the same state House district, Emmer is running 7 points behind Rep. Erik Paulsen, 9 points behind John McCain and 12 points behind Republican State Rep. and House Minority Leader Kurt Zellers.

Right.

The point of the story isn’t that all is rosy for Emmer, even in this district.

The point was that things are better than some of the media’s been portraying them.

Emmer, however, is in a serious three-way race. Perhaps the best comparison is to the 2006 gubernatorial election, in which Tim Pawlenty also faced a strong Democratic challenger (Mike Hatch) and an Independence Party candidate (Peter Hutchinson). Pawlenty drew 55 percent of the vote in 32B; Zellers drew 48.5 percent. Pawlenty did nearly 8 points better in 32B than he did statewide…This is an area in which a Republican gubernatorial candidate has to rack up the vote if he is going to win the election.

Comparisons with 2006 are useful, but not airtight.  Tom Horner is a much stronger candidate than Hutchinson was – although in the end he’ll sap  more from Dayton than Emmer.

It is time for a gut check in the Emmer campaign. The campaign is not going well, and the campaign leadership needs to wake up. The situation is not dissimilar to the situation in the 2008 Senate recount. The Coleman campaign buried its head in the sand about the need to play hardball. I am told Emmer’s campaign thinks it is on track, but the numbers in 32B don’t support their belief. The Emmer campaign needs to run as if it is 10 points behind Mark Dayton.

And there, Scott is right.  And my point wasn’t to make the Emmer campaign feel complacent.  Indeed, my point isnt’ aimed at the campaign at all.  I’m not Power Line or Hot Air; nobody in any position of power reads me.   I’m just Shot In The Dark. My audience is a whole lot of workadaddy, hugamommy Minnesota conservative voters.

Voters who have been the target of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s” fraudulent attacks on Emmer’s ethics and character in their “DUI” ads.

Voters who are the targets of the Twin Cities’ in-the-bag-for-the-DFL media when they bend over backwards to give the voters all the news that fits (the media and DFL’s narrative) about Emmer.

Voters who are the targets of the perennially ludicrous Minnesota Poll.

They are targeted because the DFL knows Dayton is a pair of threes – a terrible Senator, a man with an exceptionally dodgy personal history – and they know that their only hope is to keep Republicans home, or inveigle them to vote for Tom Horner.

They need to convince Minnesota conservatives that there is no hope.

To the extent that the current polling is accurate, it reflects that this effort has been successful.

So far.

And yet there is hope.  And yes, while Emmer’s had an exceptionally rough campaign, this is winnable.

I’m saying Emmer by three.  I’m going to do my damnedest to make sure every conservative – of every party – and everyone who might not be a conservative, but can read the numbers and can see the disaster Dayton would be, comes out on November 2.

And I’m not going to let the media and Mark Dayton’s hacks – paid and otherwise – have any of those voters jumping off the ledge.

The rescue of 33 Chilean miners, is underway.  The men, trapped for 69 days half a mile undergound, are supposed to start coming out soon.

The missile-like capsule that will carry 33 miners to fresh air and freedom was lowered into a nearly half-mile-long rescue tunnel Tuesday night. Steam rushed from the hole into the frigid desert air — a sign of the humid, sauna-like conditions the men have endured for 69 days.

It’ll be one of the great rescues in history:

The rescue attempt is risky simply because no one else has ever tried to extract miners from such depths, Davitt McAteer, who directed the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration during the Clinton administration. A miner could get claustrophobic and do something that damages the capsule. Or a rock could fall and wedge it in the shaft. Or the cable could get hung up. Or the rig that pulls the cable could overheat.

“You can be good and you can be lucky. And they’ve been good and lucky,” McAteer told the AP. “Knock on wood that this luck holds out for the next 33 hours.”

Prayers, invocations of karma, or best wishes of whatever kind you prefer are all pretty much required here.

Video from the scene.  As this is written, it looks like the capsule is being pulled up.

9:06 – looks like the capsule is near the surface – wow, there is is.  Looks like a tight fit, in the tunnel and inside the cage.   Empty – must have been the dry run.

9:09 – they’re loading up Manuel Gonzales Pavez, the mine rescue expert.

Pavez

It looks like the President Echenique of Chile was giving him a pep talk.  There was a loud cheer…followed by more waiting.

9:19 – and Pavez is on his way.

9:30 – Group at the shaft head is singing songs to pass the time.  Accoridng to the schedule, Pavez should be half way down.

9:36 – Video from the mineshaft.

Courtesy ABC/Chilean State TV

9:51 – the capsule is loaded and ready to haul up.

Capsuled hauled up just before midnight, Chilean time.

10:11 – The first miner makes it to the surface.  His son and wife were there to meet him; the boy – sixish – burst into tears as he ran to meet him.

The first miner out.

32 to go.

10:16 – Roberto Rios Seguel, a Chilean Navy special forces medic, is going to go down in the next car to help triage the men below.

Seguel

10:41 – Seguel arrives 2,000 feet below the surface.

Chilean Navy medic Seguel arrives in the mine.

11:08 – Mario Sepulveda is getting near the surface:

Wife of Mario Sepulveda

11:10 – Mario Sepulveda, the second miner to get out, is on the surface.

Mario Sepulveda sees the first air in over two months.