Who, me?  I have a liter of Tequila, a box of .38 hollowpoints, and a full tank of gas.  Why do you ask?

(more…)

Geraldine Hoff Doyle, the woman on whom the iconic World War 2 home-front “We Can Do It” poster and template for the “Rosie the Riveter” image was reputedly modeled, passed away today.  She was 86.

She didn’t know it at the time, of course; she’d had a still snapped for a news story by an AP photographer, and the wartime art machine took it from there.

Doyle didn’t realize she had a famous face until she was flipping through a magazine in 1982 and spotted a reproduction of the poster, her daughter told The New York Times.

It’s good to remember sometimes that the name “Rosie” used to mean “the Riveter”, rather than “O’Donnell”.  If there’s justice, maybe it will once again.

MDE’s Andy Post on Dayton’s appointment of Sue Haigh – former Ramco Commissioner and Registered Spending Offender – to head the Met Council:

Susan Haigh spent 10 years as a Ramsey Commissioner (1995-2005) and once proposed a 45% pay increase for herself and other board members.

Like Dayton, Haigh has also received disproportional amounts of campaign contributions from labor unions. Below is a part of her list of contributors from the 2002 re-elect campaign for Commissioner. Full report here.

2002 Haigh campaign contributors partial list, courtesy MDE

Dayton’s work on his cabinet contradicts what he told the Star Tribune in early December, where he stated he would likely appoint his Management and Budget commissioner and his Revenue commissioner given the tough budget work ahead.

Saying something and doing the opposite; as we learned during the extended back-and-forth over his budget proposals during the campaign, it’s something can get used to from Dayton.

Post also notes…:

Since that story was published, Dayton has appointed few commissioners, not including M&B or Revenue. However, he has had time to thoroughly plan his blue jeans inaugural ball, which has had wall to wall press coverage. Will the Governor-elect be prepared to lead Minnesota on January 3rd without a functioning cabinet?

Perhaps he thinks the SEIU and “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” will do all of the cabinetry for him.

More on Dayton cabinet appointments later today.

The meme made the rounds of the Sorosphere over the past few weeks, yet again; “Fox News viewers are less well-informed”.

Since it was a meme from the Sorosphere, I figured it had to be crap.

As always, that sense was correct:

It’s about twenty minutes worth of video, but it disembowels the “Fox Viewers Are Teh Dumm” meme.  Again.

Reminds me of how leftybloggers hand aortic dissections when they got the word that Limbaugh listeners were better-informed about current events than network TV viewers, and even with NPR listeners.

Moral of the story:  if a leftyblogger makes a factual assertion, assume it’s wrong, either factually or logically.  It’ll rarely steer  you wrong.

The piece is from last week – I was a bit remiss in not linking it back then, and I plead overwork – but Sheila Kihne has been unpacking the unholy alliance of “community organizers” and liberal churches in bringing stifling PC to the parts of Minnesota that actually pay their own way:

The Star Trib today featured another installation of it’s ongoing series on the wannabe martyr of suburban school reform, Eden Prairie Superintendent Melissa Krull. (Michelle Rhee she is not, but she’s sure trying hard to attain the same level of national adoration.) Our good friend Myron Orfield was back too with this Christmas message of goodwill:

From this article.

“This is a big decision for the school board and for the region — whether we’re going to have racially integrated school districts,” Orfield said. ”The implications [if the proposed plan fails] will be that there are a group of white racist parents who can stop integration in schools.”

I try very, very hard not to question intent. I try to believe that people are inherently good. But this statement is really beyond the pale.

But the lines for “the pale” have been pushed out to the point where demigogues like Orfield do believe slandering those who stand in their way is perfectly acceptable.

Read the rest of Sheila’s piece.  She had a great 2010; 2011 should rock.

It was 2008…

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party had been waiting since the 1960s for its next great political opening

Democrats achieved 60 Senate votes by an historical accident of prosecutorial abuse (Ted Stevens), a stolen election (Al Franken) and a betrayal (Arlen Specter). They then attempted to do nearly everything we expected, regardless of public opinion, and they only stopped because the clock ran out.

The real story of 2010 is that the voters were finally able to see and judge this liberal agenda in its unvarnished form. For once, there was no Republican President to muddle the message or divide the accountability. The public was able to compare the promise of 8% unemployment if the government spent $812 billion on “stimulus” with the 9.8% jobless result. They stood athwart liberal history in the making and said, “Stop.”

…and that was November of 2010.

Read the rest here.

Counterpoint:  Ezra Klein.

No, really.  That bad.

Conclusion:  Thesis debunked.

I was born 17 years after the Holocaust ended was shut down by American, Soviet, British and Free French troops.

I’d say “Genocide is a bad thing”.  But then Glenn Maxham of Duluth would get mad at me.

Who is Maxham? I dunno.  He’s a guy who claims to have “worked for three decades as a radio and television news director in the Twin Ports”, but all I really know about him is that he wrote a letter to the editor of the Duluth News Tribune.

For me, the strident pleas of right-wing dissidents to get government off our backs has a hollow ring, and I conjecture it comes from those unlikely to have personally experienced life in a nation under a truly oppressive regime. I have done so several times.

Hm.  That brings a whole new tilt to the study of right and wrong.

After all, I’ve never been gang-raped, had Muscular Dystrophy, been robbed at gunpoint, been swindled out of my life’s savings, had my family killed by machete-wielding ethnic extremists, had a bad overdose on adulterated cocaine, or killed anyone in a car crash, but I know I really don’t want any of them to happen.

Do I have the moral standing to believe that?  What gives one that sort of moral standing?

After spending a month in the old Soviet Union and in later visits to its puppet states of Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland, I witnessed the cruel, unjust use of power firsthand that made me realize the wealth of freedoms we enjoy to the fullest here in the U.S.

Ah.  So being a tourist in places where bad things are happening gives one that standing!  Experiencing a little of something bad qualifies one to criticize it!  Now we’re getting somewhere!

So – if someone kisses me under the mistletoe by surprise, get a bad cold, have to scrape graffiti off my garbage can, see my property taxes go up, get called “a white male”, spend a day recovering from some “off” chicken or knock over my neighbor’s garbage can, then I have standing to inveigh against rape, MD, blue and white collar crime, genocide, drugs or drunk driving?

But not until?

OK. I”m still confused.

At age 20 I was drafted during the Korean conflict. I spent nearly two years overseas, compensated with the GI Bill, which allowed me to finish college at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Now well into my retirement years, I live a comfortable life with the help of Social Security and Medicare. I am free to express my political views and free to travel anywhere in our 50 states without checking in with police at the borders to verify my identity and to provide details of my travel plans.

By contrast, I had my camera confiscated in the Soviet Union because I took a picture of still-frozen rivers in July while flying over Siberia. In Stargard, Poland, I was briefly jailed after a person in my party violated an inane law prohibiting pictures of train stations. In all of the Iron Curtain counties I had to leave my passport and room key at the hotel as a guarantee I would not stray outside the city. I was followed wherever I went, and my suitcase examined in each new hotel when I was not in my room. You get the picture.

Well, maybe I do, and maybe I don’t.

So  – until I take a trip through, say, Burma, I shouldn’t complain about military dictatorships?

Here at home, I’m growing increasingly weary of vague charges that we must “take back our country,” that liberals are legislating away freedoms and in general trashing our government, charges that are vacuous at best.

Now, I’m still confused, and I’m facing a bit of a dilemma.  If I make the “charges” less “vague” and “vacuous”, will Mr. Maxham get more “weary”?  Not having had my camera confiscated or my belongings fluffed by the ZOMO, do I have standing or leave to address the isssue?  Or should I go rent a Pole?

By Mr. Maxham’s leave, I’ll take a swing at it.

Rarely, if ever, have I seen an enumeration of denied freedoms by the malcontents. What specifically are those who call for a “restoration of freedoms lost” talking about? Cite examples.

Now we’re getting somewhere!  He’s missed the list of freedoms we’ve lost and want back!

I’ll run down a quick list, in Amendment order – risking, as I do, Mr. Maxham’s wrath for commenting about Constitutional Freedoms without having had the entire Constitution suspended:

First Amendment: The FCC is working to establish “Net Neutrality”, which will eventually lead to censorship via the back door; they’ve also been working on getting the “Fairness Doctrine” back into effect.  If you speak out against a TSA goon, you stand a good chance of being arrested on specious grounds.  Campaign finance laws in effect ration speech (both in the “speech is money” sense of the term as well as finding ways to interpret literal “speech” as campaign contributions. Our freedom of religion and association are both under attack with “civil rights” groups sueing landlords who want to rent to coreligionists; there is legitimate concern that if gay marriage is legalized, US courts will follow the Canadian example and prosecute churches that refuse to recognize the practice.  Freedom of association is under further attack by lawsuits that prevent groups from choosing their memberships in even harmless ways.  In many states, recording the police, even in the Campus speech codes make “free speech” a choosy thing.  The Federal Election Commission is still working on ways to regulate blogs.  And there is a significant movement in government (including Keith Ellison) that wants to subsidize – in effect, nationalize – newspapers.

Second Amendment:  Most major cities still crimp the rights of the law-abiding citizen to keep and bear arms, as do a few states.  They adopt gun control laws that don’t inhibit crime, but make citizens criminals for exercising their constitutional rights. States enact arbitrary and unrealistic laws government self-defense, which in effect criminalize perfectly legitimate behavior in self-defense, on largely political and ideological grounds.   Classes of firearms are prohibited due to arbitrary, purely cosmetic and PR issues.  (Or is Mr. Maxham only concerned about the freedoms he values?  I gotta ask…)

Third Amendment:  OK, so far so good.

Fourth Amendment:  Police can seize and sell property on accusation for drug charges – not conviction.  Cities can use extralegal administrative/non-judicial means to seize property – or merely devalue it to the point of untenability – and remove residents on purely political grounds.   Property rights are routinely and constantly infringed by administrative edicts from government bureaus – pollution control, transit, economic development, zoning and other government bureaux.   Oh, and the TSA can grab your junk, and if you say “boo”, they’ll throw you in Guantanamo.

Fifth Amendment:   With allegations of sexual assault and domestic abuse, “guilt until proven innocent” is becoming the rule.   Citizens accused of drunk driving are routinely deprived of Fourth Amendment rights.  County social service agencies have immense extrajudicial power to intervene in family situations – sometimes needed, but other times either in error, or in conjunction with the designs of other agencies.

Ninth and Tenth Amendments:  The courts have let the Commerce Clause serve as a catchall to empower government regulation; the powers of the States and People – on property and land rights issues, election issues, education, healthcare and many other issues – have been sucked into the bureaucratic vortex.

General Economic Liberty: Government actions are subjecting me, my kids, my grandkids and my great grandkids to a mountain of debt.  When one is indebted against one’s own will, one is not free.  Here or in East Germany.

That was about five minutes’ work.  I’d continue, but I bet Mr. Maxham is getting “increasingly weary”.

No doubt many are well-meaning but are woefully misguided and seem to labor under the impression that, to be a genuine patriot, one must hate liberals and be anti-government.

Whoah, there, bigfella!  Where did “hate” come into this?

At the risk of “increasingly wearying” Mr. Maxham, since when does honest, spirited dissent, and trying to keep our government in check, equal “hate?”

By Mr. Maxham’s “logic”, when I tell my kids they can not build a skateboard park in my backyard (with my money!), that’s “hatred”.

I’d hope even Mr. Maxham could see that logic; if I need to translate it into Polish to give it more of that authentic eclat, I’d be happy to help out.

The health of our democracy depends upon having a healthy, effective, two-party system.

Now, I learned Latin in high school, not in ancient Rome – ha ha! – but I know a “non sequitur” when I see one.

There are, and always will be, many shortcomings in our system that need improvement.

Right.  The question is – do we have the right to address them, if we have never been tourists in the USSR?

Mr. Maxham, I’m here to help.  Please – send an enumerated list of people who you’d allow to protest against US government policy.

But when viewed in a comparative sense, our government ranks among the best in the world.

And a lot of us just want to keep it that way.   And once we know who Mr. Maxham would allow to work on that, we’ll get right down to business!

I fail to believe the negative tactics of the Tea Party, and its ultra-conservative sympathizers, can improve upon it.

All kidding aside, Mr. Maxham, why would you think anyone would care what you think about how we, The People, exercise our First Amendment rights to try to make our country a better place and keep our freedoms from eroding further than they have?

What – besides a tour to the Warsaw Pact – would have ever given you the impression that your dismissal of our efforts, and our exercise of our rights, had any merit at all?

Glenn Maxham worked for three decades as a radio and television news director in the Twin Ports.

Oh.

I started reading a couple of Minnesota liberal blogs yesterday, with an aim toward perhaps addressing some of their arguments as the session gets underway…

…and I stopped.  It just got too depressing.

Minnesota liberal bloggers – many, many of them – have real serious trouble with simple logic; with the rhetorical equivalent of subject-verb agreement.

About a year ago, I started a series of posts called “Logic for Leftybloggers”; it was, as I sketched it out, a 25 part bit on some of the basics of logic – little things like “why a tu quoque argument (which makes up about 40% of leftyblog posts) makes you sound like you need more fiber in your diet” or “how ridicule isni’t technically evidence” or “when your argument includes more red herrings than the entire Norwegian fishing fleet, you’re really only convincing fellow ijjits”.

But I shelved it, largely because searching through the backlog for the examples was, again, just too damn depressing.

Still, my little bout (or perhaps “spasm”) of reading leftyblogs has made me think; maybe that’ll be my New Years’ gift to discourse; dust off the series and post it during the coming year.  At the very best, it’ll improve the level of discussion at least some.   At worst?  Someone’s body may physically reject its own brain; I’d hate to have that on my conscience, but I am a giver.

I gotta think about this a bit.

For the past six or seven years (I’ve honestly lost count) we’ve been running the “Minnesota Organization of Bloggers”, the first blogging social organization in Minnesota, and still both the only non-partisan and the only genuinely fun one.

Now, that’s been a lot of fun.  I’ve met a lot of really great bloggers – conservatives, liberals (we don’t bite!), non-political, and every other kind you can imagine – and just plain really great people.

One thing we have not met is “nearly enough out-state Minnesota bloggers”.

It’s not for lack of some effort.  Back in 2005 or 2006 the MOB did a party at the Granite City in Saint Cloud where, I’m told, I sat at a laptop and set up the original incarnation of Gary Gross’ “Let Freedom Ring” blog, which has since become one of the essential conservative blogs in Minnesota.

But I’ll cop to it; the MOB is run by metro-area guys, and it’s mostly a metro-area group.

Aaron Brown at Minnesota Brown (Aside:  I am so glad that he beat Ryan Rhodes and Learned Foot to that title), reprinted at MinnPost, notes the same thing:

I’m biased, but it’s important for people outside the population centers of this country to get involved on the internet and demand attention for issues important to our communities. So much of the internet is similar people of similar opinions and lifestyles talking to each other.

I notice that less among conservative bloggers – but there is a definite “major city” bulge in the blogging demographic.  Perhaps it’s because in smaller towns, you think that on the off-chance anyone is interested in your opinion (that’s the small-town North Dakota guy talking, there), you run into them every day anyway, so why actually write and publish it?  I dunno, it’s a theory.

Even perhaps the ultimate small-market politics blog – Rob Port’s excellent Say Anything, which focuses on North Dakota politics – is a major-city blog, by NoDak standards; Rob’s in Minot, which is to North Dakota as Rochester is to Minnesota.

But I’m with Brown on this next bit:

Whether it’s a good liberal blog [sic] like Bluestem Prairie or a conservative one like Small City Mayor, a Range-based creative outlet like Mesabi Misadventures or a niche blog like my friend C.O.’s Alaska-based What’s in the Shop, it’s important that people know that there’s a world outside of the 494/694 box where life is different, some would say better.

OK, I would say better. But that’s just me.

It is important.  And I’ll just point out that my never-ending quest to find more non-metro bloggers continues as well.

If you’re a reader anywhere, but especially in outstate MN, and you have a blog (or have an urge to get into the game), let me know.

New York’s snow-plowing disaster was apparently a union labor slowdown, says the NYPost:

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

Allowing government workers to unionize has always been a stupid idea, but that cow’s pretty much left the barn.  For now.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

With unions/Democrats (pardon the redundancy) at a low ebb nationwide, look for a lot more of this.

And bear in mind, I have nothing against unions.  Just as companies and producers and wholesalers try to work the market for their products to their advantage in a free market, so should labor.  Unlike most DFLers, I’ve actually been a union member.

But when unions control government – as they do in places like, well, the Twin Cities – this is what you get; public safety is a chip in the collective bargaining stakes.

Jeff at MNPublius aims big.  After taking his de rigeur shot at departing Governor Pawlenty (trying to portray one of Minnesota’s most significant governors of the past 100 years as “nothing special)”, Rosenberg reviews a list the Governor released of his major accomplishments, and asks:

In eight years, what would we like a similar document from the Dayton administration to include?

If I were a DFLer, I’d be hoping for “at least four years of actual credible service before retiring to Vail rather than losing the 2014 election”, as opposed to a 2014 “Look back at Governor Prettner Solon’s Year In Office”.   The Vegas Over/Under on Dayton’s actual time in office is hanging around two years; bookies are betting on “alien invasion” as the trigger.

Rosenberg has a wish list:

Here are a few accomplishments I hope Mark Dayton will be able to spotlight:

* A fairer tax system in which the rich pay the same percentage of their income as the poor and middle class. [Notwithstanding the fact that “the rich” are both undefined and already overtaxed]

* A sustainable budget that’s in the black, with a significant budget reserve to cushion the blow in the next recession. [That’s one of the left’s most irritating memes; the idea that government should skim just a leeeeeeetle bit more out of the parts of our society that actuall produce wealth, to make sure that the part that doesnt’ – government – needn’t want for a thing when all of the useful people are suffering.  Kinda shows where their loyalties lie, if one needed any clarification]

* A thriving economy, with new business being created and established businesses making Minnesota a destination [Ah.  How would Jeff propose that “Governor Dayton” do that?  Perhaps by passing a law requiring business list Minnesota as a destination?  What sort of miracle does Mr. Rosenberg propose that “Governor Dayton” do to mandate this?  Will it be the “fair tax system”, or the “surplus”, that’ll make Minnesota a “destination?”  ]

* A fully-funded social safety net and educational system. [Both have all the funding they need, and always have.  Holding the “social safety net” – aka “subsidy of poverty” – above the rest of the economy merely creates a permanent class of government service consumers, removing any motivation to get off poverty.  And our education system needs reform, not more money to feed Tom Dooher’s addictions]

* Innovations in education that reverse Minnesota’s decline nationally and internationally during the Pawlenty years. [“Insert Miracle Here”.  Minnesota’s “declines” are almost universally expressed in terms of “how lavishly we fund government”.  To the extent that there have been declines, they’re the same ones shared by all statist societies in trying to compete with more  nimble, more  market-driven societies.  Minnesota’s “Golden Age” happened at a time when the world was still recovering from World War II; a fat, happy, unionized workforce and a big, dumb government were survivable errors in 1970, since there was no competition; today, if we don’t change the path that the DFL and Rosenberg would put us on, they’ll merely make us a Cold California]

* Equal marriage for all Minnesotans. [Ah.  So that’s what’s holding the economy back.]

What accomplishments do you hope the Dayton administration will produce? Leave your own additions in the comments.

I hope he accomplishes a graceful exit in 2014, turning office over to a good conservative governor.  The media would caterwaul that the new governor is an “extremist”, but they’re too busy wondering if the DFL will become a third party by 2020.

January 3: Session kicks off.  Mark Dayton throws a “blue jeans” inaugural.  Musical highlight: the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” Choir singing “Look For The Union Label”.  For four solid hours.

January 4:  The Humphrey Institute releases a poll showing that 80% of Minnesotans want the Legislature to pass Mark Dayton’s budget immediately.  Bloggers point out that the poll included only respondents from Kenwood and Crocus Hill. MPR reports that it’s a nice day for a bowl of Cream of Rice.

January 5: The Star Tribune’s Joe Doyle starts a three part series on “obscene corporate profits” and how they benefit “the rich walking among us”.

January 6: Dayton releases his first budget, calling for $40 billion in spending. Delivering the announcement in blue jeans with the SEIU Singers humming “We Are The World” in the background, Dayton notes that he plans to increase revenues to $41 billion. “We’ll finally have a surplus!” he exclaims, as a crowd described by the Star/Tribune as “50,000 womenandchildren at risk” applauds in the Capitol rotunda.  The plan calls for big tax hikes on “obscene corporate profits” and “the rich walking among us”.

January 10: The last of Dayton’s Iron Range supporters are finally bailed out of the Ramsey County lockup after the inaugural.

January 12:  Speaker Zellers refers the Dayton budget to the House Very Special Boom Zoom Committee” – actually a group of legislators’ children wearing “Junior Representative” t-shirts.  Bill dies, and is colored on, and has juice spilled on it.

January 16:  Lori Sturdevant notes that “a seasoned group of bi-partisan policy wonks say that the GOP risks getting tossed out by an angry mob if they don’t raise taxes.  Conservative bloggers point out that “bi-partisan” in this case means DFL and Green Party members.  Presented with the allegations, WCCO TV reports that Brett Favre just loves Chipotle Big Bols.

January 19: Governor Dayton submits a budget bill involving $42 billion in spending and $ 45 billion in taxes.  “A three billion dollar surplus”, Dayton announces to a group of senior citizens (“at least 20,000”, according to the Strib’s Pat Doyle) at the Hockey Hall Of Fame in Eveleth.  “It’s like a billion hat tricks!”.  Keith Ellison solemnly proclaims that the only reason not to vote for the bill is “racism.  Racism from all you crackers.  Pay the **** up, crackers”.

January 27: Speaker Zellers forwards the bill to the House Budget Committee.  The Mississippi House Budget Committee.  Which loses the bill.

February 3: The Humphrey Institute releases a poll showing that eleventy-teen percent of Minnesotans demand tax and spending hikes.  KARE 11 News finds eleventy-teen people on the street that agree.  Frank Newport of the Gallup Group points out that ‘Eleventy-teen” isn’t even a real number, but something Dennis the Menace used to say to show that he couldn’t count.  Rachel Stassen-Berger responded with a piece on “The Override Six, Two Years Later:  Profiles In Courage And Extremism”.

February 18:  Governor Dayton, speaking at a homeless shelter in Brooklyn Center, holds up James Blount, a three-year-old boy, in front of cameras; notes that “this boy is going to go hungry because of GOP extremism and intransigence tonight”.

February 19:  Conservative bloggers point out that the “boy”, Blount, was actually a schnauzer that had wandered over from a nearby housing development.  Eric Black of the MinnPost responded with a piece on how animal shelters are suffering under GOP rule.

February 27:  Dayton submits his third budget, a $39 Billion plan that is very similar to the budget he proposed during the campaign.  Conservative bloggers point out that it has exactly the same problems it had during the campaign; it assumes “the rich” (in this case, Minnesotans who are still employed) will pay the taxes rather than moving or getting Mark Dayton’s financial advisor, that the state can fire contractors whose jobs are both legally mandated and involve skills the state’s workforce doesn’t actually have, among many others.

February 28: The Star Tribune “Minnesota Poll” claims that Minnesotans want the Dayton budget passed, that the people want to carry Governor Dayton through the streets on their shoulders, and that violence is about to break out against the Minnesota GOP.  Bloggers point out that the survey was conducted entirely at one “Drinking Liberally” event in Minneapolis.  Informed of the allegations, KTCA’s “Almanac” embarks on a three-week special on the history of Danish cooking in Minnesota.

March 20:  Speaker Zellers assigns the budget to the House Government Operations and Finance Committee.

March 28:  Rep. Quam (GOP) of Byron demands that the DFL members of the committee play a game of Twister on the House floor if they want the budget to get out of committee.  The committee members comply.

April 8:  Nick Coleman, writing his new colum in the Wayzata Shopper, remembers when his father was running things.  “The wingnuts wanted to play Twister for a better Minnesota”.

April 12: The Dayton budget comes to a vote in the House.  It loses decisively, on state party lines.  To signify the defeat, Speaker Zellers ties the budget to a string hanging from the ceiling of the House chamber, and members of the House Republican Caucus whack at it like a piñata.

April 15: Speaker Zellers tells a cheering crowd of 10,000 at the Tea Party rally on the capitol grounds that the budget is dead on arrival.  Six pro-tax protesters stand across the street wanly chanting in favor of the Dayton budget.

April 16: The Strib editorial reports that a crowd of “dozens” at the Tea Party rally were evenly split, showing the deep partisan divide in Minnesota politics today.

May 1: , Governor Dayton start making contingency plans for a shutdown.  Bloggers point out that the Governor’s plans include evacuating the Governor’s office to Vail, and euthanizing animals in all state parks.  Told of the allegations, Keri Miller of MPR wonders on the air “whatever happened to bipartisanship?”

May 14: A day ahead of the deadline, the GOP Caucus introduces a $33 Billion budget that makes steep spending cuts and balances the budget with no new taxes.  It passes on a straight party line vote, is sent to the Senate, which also passes the budget by the end of the day.  The bill is sent to the Governor.

May 15  Mark Dayton appears at the Hockey Hall of Fame, dressed in a Minnesota Wild Uniform, with Minnesota hockey legend John Mayasich, to veto the GOP budget. “Minnesota demands that we do the responsible thing and pass my budget without all this debate and democracy and crap”, he says, as Mayasich looks on.   Bloggers point out that “Mayasich” is actually Alliance for a Better Minnesota chair Denise Cardinal in a bald wig.  Told of the allegations, KARE 11 news re-runs the January 4 Humphrey Poll.

May 16:  The Strib runs a piece by reporter Pat Doyle, an expose of the “Casualties of the Shutdown”.  Doyle, clearly gunning for a Pulitzer, writes a heartrending tale of Minnesotans standing in line at soup kitchens, of families (mostly “womenandchildren”) living in huge “Zellerville” on the Capitol Mall living on McDonalds coffee, and people lining up to throw themselves off the High Bridge.  Bloggers point out that government hasn’t actually shut down yet, that nothing Doyle wrote had actually happened, and that the piece was clearly pre-written weeks earlier and run by mistake.  Told of the allegations, MPR’s Keri Miller runs a two-hour broadcast on “How Blogs Provide A Chilling Effect On Free Speech”, featuring a bipartisan panel of Larry Jacobs and Nick Coleman.

May 17: Dayton demands the Legislature pass his budget.

May 18: Nobody at the legislature responds.

July 1: Minnesota’s state government shuts down.

July 2:  The Strib re-runs the Doyle piece.

July 22: The state budget office notes that business activity is increasing, and tax receipts are rising.

July 23: The Strib editorial board runs an extended interview with Elmer Anderson, who gruffly demands that Minnesota Republicans “think about what’s best for Minnesota” and adopt Dayton’s budget immediately without any of that “commie wingnut debating crap”.  Bloggers point out that Elmer Anderson died in 1998, and “Anderson’s” rhetoric read like Nick Coleman writing with a bag over his head.  Told of the allegations, MPR’s Mark Zdechlik embarked on a two-week series on “What we can learn about Democracy from the Iroquois”.  Salient observation: the Iroquois tradition of “Local Tribe Aid” was considered inviolate.

August 18: The State Budget Office notes that, with no government expenditures and business thriving, the state is in a surplus.

September 2: Katherine Kersten’s column, “Happy Days Are Here Again”, notes that Minnesota is in a much better state with the government shut down.  Lori Sturdevant muses in her column that in Wendy Anderson’s day, the governor would have told the State Patrol to arrest Kersten for “making terroristic threats”.  Bloggers point out that that is utterly absurd, there is no record of any such demand, anywhere.  There is no response to these allegations.

September 23: With no budget in place and government shut down for weeks, Mark Dayton, operating from his office in Vail, orders the National Guard called out to react to what Dayton’s press secretary Tinucci calls the “Terrorist Threats”.  Bloggers point out that the “threat” was the conclusion of Sturdevant’s slanderous column about Kersten.  The National Guard’s commandant says “the paperwork is in process, call back in July”.

September 24: Dayton exercises his unallotment power on the GOP’s budget.  Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch is left visibly speechless on hearing the news.

September 25: Finished with his line item vetoes, Governor Dayton signs a 27 billion dollar budget.  Alliance For A Better Minnesota’s Denise Cardinal notes that “Mark Dayton has always been the budget-cutting candidate”.  But Andrea Outrage-Guevara, president of Minnesota’s “Alliance of WomynAndChildryn”, speaking at a rally on the capitol grounds that drew “Millions” (according to the Strib), demands that all budget cuts be reinstate immediately or “Dayton will be ousted”.

October 15:  Dayton, relocated his office from Vail, sits on a whoopie cushion left in his office by Tony Sertich.

I have thirty inches of snow sitting on my lawn and just wrote a check to Elijah’s Tree Service for the removal of two trees felled by an ice storm that came before Thanksgiving this year. He would have been here sooner but I was like 1000th on his list.

I’m cold and I’m looking for some Global Warming about now.

I have been skeptical of global warming ever since I studied it’s origins soon after Algore’s largely discredited but hugely profitable movie An Inconvenient Truth was foisted on an gullible liberal public.

Jettison the “science” or the politics, and I’m still amazed at the amount of people that believe we have the capacity to predict the weather ten or a hundred years in the future when repeatedly, even comically, meteorologists with all their Doppler and satellite technology, can’t predict the weather accurately beyond twenty four hours.

Nothing makes fools of more people than trying to predict the weather. Whether in Los Angeles or London, recent predictions have gone crazily awry. Global warming? How about mini ice age?

Once the warming failed to appear as predicted, Global Warming conveniently became “Climate Change” as if to say that any change in the climate, despite evidence of eons of extreme and catastrophic cold and warm cycles occuring before we got here, are now caused by us.

Since at least 1998, however, no significant warming trend has been noticeable. Unfortunately, none of the 24 models used by the IPCC views that as possible. They are at odds with reality.

The sight of confused and angry travelers stuck in airports across Europe because of an arctic freeze that has settled across the continent isn’t funny. Sadly, they’ve been told for more than a decade now that such a thing was an impossibility — that global warming was inevitable, and couldn’t be reversed.

This is a big problem for those who see human-caused global warming as an irreversible result of the Industrial Revolution’s reliance on carbon-based fuels. Based on global warming theory — and according to official weather forecasts made earlier in the year — this winter should be warm and dry. It’s anything but. Ice and snow cover vast parts of both Europe and North America, in one of the coldest Decembers in history.

Is it arrogance or ignorance?

No matter what happens, it always confirms their basic premise that the world is getting hotter. The weather turns cold and wet? It’s global warming, they say. Weather turns hot? Global warming. No change? Global warming. More hurricanes? Global warming. No hurricanes? You guessed it.

Liberal icon Rahm Emanuel made famous the line “Never waste a good crisis” this past political cycle and it appears when one doesn’t present itself they’re perfect content with creating one.

Nothing can disprove their thesis. Not even the extraordinarily frigid weather now creating havoc across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The Los Angeles Times, in a piece on the region’s strangely wet and cold weather, paraphrases Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert as saying, “In general, as the globe warms, weather conditions tend to be more extreme and volatile.”

Got that? No matter what the weather, it’s all due to warming. This isn’t science; it’s a kind of faith. Scientists go along and even stifle dissent because, frankly, hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants are at stake. But for the believers, global warming is the god that failed.

Hmm. A failed messiah? That sounds familiar.

Why do we continue to listen to warmists when they’re so wrong? Maybe it’s because their real agenda has nothing to do with climate change at all. Earlier this month, attendees of a global warming summit in Cancun, Mexico, concluded, with virtually no economic or real scientific support, that by 2020 rich nations need to transfer $100 billion a year to poor nations to help them “mitigate” the adverse impacts of warming.

Hmm. A transfer of wealth? That sounds familiar too.

This is what global warming is really about — wealth redistribution by people whose beliefs are basically socialist. It has little or nothing to do with climate.

But is there any scientific method for predicting the weather, you know for those of us who would be genuinely concerned for future generations if a global climate threat manifested itself in earnest?

…pay more attention to Piers Corbyn, a little-known British meteorologist and astrophysicist who has a knack for correctly predicting weather changes. Indeed, as London’s Mayor Boris Johnson recently noted, “He seems to get it right about 85% of the time.”

How does he do it? Unlike the U.N. and government forecasters, Corbyn pays close attention to solar cycles that, as it turns out, correlate very closely to changes in climate. Not only are we not headed for global warming, Corbyn says, we may be entering a “mini ice age” similar to the one that took place from 1450 A.D. to 1850 A.D.

For those of you Algore disciples that can’t do math…that’s four hundred years of this. If man is causing a warming of the planet, now might be the time to step it up a bit.

Or move South.

Miami is experiencing its coldest December in 115 years, according to the local branch of the National Weather Service, where employees have exhausted their thesauruses trying to describe the anomaly. (One of them, Dan Gregoria, settled on this: “very rare.”)

HEADLINE IN THE MIAMI HERALD ON MONDAY “Time to Pull Out Those Winter Coats Again”

…Okay. Farther South.

When looking at spin from the left over this next few months – which will involve an epic battle between responsible, austere, adult GOP legislators and a profligate, irresponsible, spending-addicted, passive-aggressive, grossly-dysfunctional DFL governor and legislative minority – look for the following checklist items:

1. Opposing [a spending proposal] will harm the children (or the elderly, the vulnerable): The examples of this “harm” will frequently be non-sequiturs.
2. Opposing [the spending initiative] will be an epic catastrophe: Notwithstanding any data or history to the contrary.
3. Opposing [a spending initiative] is a sign of immaturity (or mental illness, depravity)

:  You’re a bad, bad person.

Dave Mindeman of mnpACT runs through the checklist; the subject du jour is education, but the same template will be repeated for every other subject – LGA, MNCare, high-speed rail, nursing homes, whatever. 

Dave’s not had the best fall, of course:

I haven’t posted much lately as I evaluate looking into the new year. It has been a pretty depressing evaluation in regards to policy issues, which, again, are going to be difficult to make progress in.

My top priorities have been education and transportation….and frankly, both look to be losers in the coming legislative session.

 Oddly enough, education and transportation are among my top priorities – and they look to be winners in the coming session.   But there’s some cognitive dissonance involved, I suspect.

I am especially disheartened by this news story regarding my local school district, ISD – 196 (Rosemount-Apple Valley – Burnsville). It is a situation that is apparently becoming all too common.

As Republicans continue to preach the idea that we are overspending and budget bloated, wouldn’t you think that a high priority like education would at least be meeting its budget needs?

Check off #1, up above. 

What are the “budget needs?”  And how do we know if those “needs” are being met? 

District 196’s enrollment was 27,954 in 2008 – which was off -1.9% since 2003; the average American school district grew by 1.6%, and the average district in Minnesota shrank an average of 3%, a number that hides huge disparities in growth; the Minneapolis Public Schools shrank 22.6%, while exurban districts like Elk River, Prior Lake, Saint Michael and New Prague grew in the 20-30% range. 

District 196 employed 1,720 teachers in 2008, which was down -1.4% from 2003.  That’s at odds with growth in teacher numbers nationwide (up 4%, 2.5 times as fast as student numbers grew)) and Minnesota (up .3%, even as the number of students dropped).   The district spends $9,611 per student; of that, 90% – $8,646 – goes to teacher compensation, which is in line with national and state averages ($8,366 and $8,381, respectively, which are 81% and 82% of the respective per-pupil costs), figures which rose by 32-34% over the five year period, versus national and state average increase in the 22-28% range (the stats are all here;  . 

The district spends at the state average, and their budget grew considerably faster than state averages, even as the teaching staff shrank by a lower margin than the general enrollment, and the amounts spent per student rose by considerably faster than the national averages.

And yet, says the Pioneer Press, “parents” are “footing the bill for teachers“. 

What concerns me the most about this article is that ISD 196 is not a poor district by any means. And by all accounts, it is one of the best managed Districts in the state. Yet, they are resorting to outside funding by parents. Isn’t there something amiss here?

What is even more disheartening about this is that if an affluent district like 196 is doing this, where are the poorer districts going to turn?

To we, the taxpayers, of course.  Minneapolis and Saint Paul spend a solid 30% more per student than the Rosemount district, to the tune of $12,000-$13,000 per student; their changes in per-student spending on overall budgets and teacher compensation is commensurate with Rosemount’s, well into the 20-30% range.

If we think we are having difficulty with the achievement gap now, how much worse will it be in the future if this funding problem continues?

Check off #2.  The only link between per-student spending and the “achivement gap” – and I’ll admit it may be a specious one, but numbers are numbers – is an inverse one; the higher Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s districts spending goes, the worse the achievement gap gets, while the solutions that do work seem to have little to do with spending – or the public school system, for that matter.

Are tax cuts that important? Are we willing to risk the educational future of the next generation because we think we need to pocket more money? Do you really think that last November’s election said that?

The election said “it’s time to look at these questions empirically, rather than through the ideological “throw more money at the problem” lens that the DFL uses”.  So yes and no. 

Oh, yeah – check off #3:

Somewhere, somehow, we have to come to terms with the idea that we have to pay for things. We have been dumping responsibility for our problems on future debt. And then the same people who do the dumping complain about the debt.

It is frustrating and an endless circular argument.

The “Greatest Generation” has given rise to the “Dead Beat Generation”. We pay for nothing…we aspire for nothing.

We have become shiftless leaches that will leave our children with a legacy of mediocrity.

“Give us what we want or your are an awful person who wants our children to starve”.

Look, Tom Dooher wants your money, and he’s saying something not far removed from the caricature in the previous line. 

Against that, the facts are that spending doesn’t correlate with achievement – anywhere – and that spending on education, like all government spending, is disproportionally focused on labor and pension costs.  Labor costs, thanks to the Teachers Union stranglehold on district compensation policies, has little to do with achievement; pensions have even less.

But the unthinking, unreasoning approach is “we have to pay for things”, the unspoken message being that we, the taxpayers, must not examine what it is we are paying for. 

So is it a surprise that the “spend at any cost” school of thought works through the checklist, arriving inevitably at the conclusion that questioning The Machine is a sign of some sort of depravity?

Take a  number.

Yesterday, I fisked a Lori Sturdevant column.  Not for the first time, and not for the last time.

But I missed something.

Among Sturdevant’s pleas – a bit from a group calling itself the “Civic Caucus” – demanding that the GOP-controlled legislature get its budget and revenue proposals in front of the Governor (and, naturally, the media that put him there) bright and early in the session.

Sturdevant called “Civic Caucus” a “non-partisan” group of “Seasoned Policy Wonks”.  I took the liberty of checking; they are no more “non-partisan” than I am, only pretty universally either DFLers or Carlson-era RINOs.

Still, that doesn’t in and of itself invalidate them.

Nonetheless, since it was Sturdevant doing the writing, it did in fact occur to me – if Lori Sturdevant wants the GOP majority to put in a budget by April 1 – or March 1, or whenever – that strikes me as a prima facie reason to get it to the governor along about May 20 or so.  To provide it any earlier would merely give the DFL’s retainers and henchpeople in the media time to try to fight the PR war against the budget, on the DFL’s behalf.  Why give the DFL and media (pardon the redundancy) seven to eleven weeks of lead time?

I’m not sure when the GOP majority had it in mind to produce a budget.  But I’m thinking if Sturdevant wants it sooner, then “later” is a fine plan.

President Obama likes to pretend that he’s delivered on a good chunk of his agenda.

But as Salon notes, it’s just not so:

A few broken promises, like Obama’s pledge to shutter the prison at Guantánamo Bay, are well known. But there are plenty more campaign promises that have disappeared down the memory hole — and that Obama would prefer to stay there. Here is a sampling of five:

Read the whole thing, if you’d be so kind…

Yet another “study” made the rounds a few weeks ago claiming that Fox News viewers are less well-informed than the average news consumer.

These things have been going around and around – and getting debunked – for so long, it’s hard to even pay attention anymore.   There will, inevitably, be a savage debunking.  It never fails.

And so there is; the “study”, accepted as gospel by everyone from your slack-jawed corner leftyblogger to the HuffPo to the NYTimes (pardon the redundancy) isn’t worth the electrons it was printed on.  The study:

• Didn’t test what it claimed,
• The data collected supported opposite conclusions than what was claimed,
• The “study” contained a trick question
• It contained baseless conclusions.
• It presented highly disputed conclusions as fact – and, in the bargain, it presented policy points from left-of-center groups as the “Truth”, differing from which meant that one was “misinformed”.

In short, the “study” was no more valid than, say, a Humphrey Institute poll.  Oh, yeah – and it’s funded by George Soros.

The whole debunk is on video here.

Watch it, and remember – if more than one liberal group claims something to be a fact, 99% of the time it is a lie.

I joined the Minnesota Libertarian Party back in 1994.  I’d been a conservative – ergo a Republican – for something like ten years at that point.  But I was disgusted with what I saw as the pusillanimity of the GOP Congress in the face of Bill Clinton’s power grab.  Not just Hillarycare; it was the widespread caving-in on the 1994 Crime Bill, with its noxious gun control provisions, that disgusted me with the GOP.

So I joined the Libertarian Party of Minnesota (LPM).  Not as a super-active member, of course – my kids were one and three years old, at the time, so there was little enough chance of me being a full-time firebrand. 

But I was hardly alone.  The mid-nineties may have been the high-water mark for the Libertarian Party – the LPM and nationally.  I don’t have the figures in front of me (and I don’t really care to look it up at the moment), but the Libertarian Party reached something of a high-water mark in the mid-nineties.  The party was endorsing candidates for offices, from city councils all the way up to President, like it hadn’t at any time before or since. 

The thing that appealed to many newly-minted Libertarians, myself included, was the absolute purity of Libetarian Party dogma.  There was no compromise on personal liberty!  Freedom ruled!  Liberty was the Law!

Our enthusiasm had the advantage of being utterly unfettered by any sense of having to make any of the compromises that come from actually having to govern anything.  The number of big-L Libertarians that had been elected to significant office, ever, was vanishingly tiny.  Outside of ornery, contrarian environs like the rural West, New Hampshire and Alaska, it was rarer still.

The LPM – and the LPUSA – were a haven for a lot of people, like me, who were very, very clear on what they wanted.  They – and I – were very very unclear on how the sausage was made.   Politics is a two-stage process;  Stage 1 is pulling like hell to get your beliefs – wrapped up in the form of a candidate – into the election.  It’s the part that takes place within a “party”, usually – and includes all the various roots of the term “Party”; one is “particular” about which candidate ones’ “party” endorses,  one exhibits “partisanship”. 

 Stage 2 is when that candidate is (hopefully) elected, and has to actually try to govern, either by sitting on a deliberative body like a city council, a county commission, a Legislature or a Congress, with people with whom you may disagree, to actually make the sausage.   It’s when the various forms of the word “politics” start to apply; one must “politely” (by the standards of the governing body) work with other “politicians” to achieve enough “polity” to enact your beliefs as “policy”.

My fellow Libertarians and I had the Phase 1 bit down cold.  We knew how to agitate!

We – I – were a little less clear on Phase 2, at least at the time.

It took me about four years to realize the LPM was never going to get to Phase 2, and that the GOP was my best bet for working for a party that would, someday, reflect enough of my beliefs to let me get behind it. 

And today – 12 years later, on the eve of swearing in a new, conservative-with-tinges-of-small-“l”-libertarian legislature – I feel pretty well vindicated. 

But some of the same dynamic I saw in the big-L Libertarian Party – the enthusiasm for the “Phase 1” process, the agitation and enthusiasm and the pulling like hell for ones core beliefs – is very much at play among the hordes of newly-minted conservative activists.  We saw it in spades a couple of years ago, when GOP caucuses were inundated with Ron Paul supporters.  They stormed the caucuses, full of piddle and vinegar, all fired up to enact “Dr. Paul’s” policies.  Many got discouraged when the GOP – those who’d in the party for years, doing all that boring “Phase 2” stuff – didn’t embrace them with open arms.  Some stuck around, long enough to see the Tea Party – a tidal wave of new activists that dwarved even the Ron Paul tide – sweep the GOP into power in a wave of “Phase 1” fervor. 

Now we’re into Phase 2. 

And some of the people who’ve had to do all that tiresome Phase 2 stuff – all the words that share their roots with “politics”, the ones that require persuasion rather than ardor, and even occasionally compromise rather than absolutism – are nervous.  

And much as the Phase 1 firebrand in me hates to say it, some of them have a point.

Lori Sturdevant isn’t one of them – but she at least troubles herself to talk with some people who do:

U.S. Rep. John Kline, soon to be Minnesota’s most potent gavel-wielder in Congress, shared his take on the Minnesota mood when he paid the Star Tribune Editorial Board a visit last week.

“I don’t know the last time when we saw a mood like this. It’s amazing,” said the Second District Republican, who’s soon to chair the House Education and Labor Committee. People are frustrated, scared, angry, impatient, confused — “all, I would argue, with justification,” he said.

That’s the sound of lots and lots of people who are doing the “Phase 1” stuff, many of them for the first time in their lives.

About that last sentiment: Kline said he regularly hears mixed messages from his south-suburban constituents.

“On the one hand, people want Congress to get things done, to make things better, to get the economy going again, to do something about jobs,” he said.

But let him profess support for something favored by a Democrat — say, the Obama-Republican tax deal that took a bipartisan pounding on its way to enactment last week — and Kline is deluged with a different message: “I didn’t elect you to compromise.”

The wave that swept all those newly-minted Republicans into office is heavily made up of people who are new to caring about politics at all, much less about all the inside-baseball “Phase 2” stuff. 

Maybe “you” individually didn’t. But “you” collectively did. Collectively, U.S. and Minnesota voters have elected divided governments.

So far.

 It’s the will of the collective “you” that’s supposed to count in running a democracy. When voters put the levers of power into the hands of more than one party, governing isn’t Burger King. You can’t have it your way — not if you expect to get anything done.

Sturdevant displays a certain amount of wonky provincialism here; shutting down a tax-and-spend orgy, whether in St. Paul or in Washington, is “getting stuff done”.

From my perch in the Capitol basement, I’ll be watching to see whether the new crowd in charge of state government will be similarly devoted to accomplishment, rather than intent on keeping their respective bases satisfied.

Well, no.  I mean, it sounds nice and all, but  if you’ve been following Lori Sturdevant any length of time, you the only “accomplishment” she cares about is “enacting the DFL’s agenda”. 

But what the heck, it’s the holidays.

They have ample reason to be. The statehouse gang lacks Congress’s opportunity to do relatively little immediate harm if they do relatively little. In state government, the constitutional requirement that the budget be balanced every two years presents an unyielding choice to DFL Gov.-elect Mark Dayton and the Republican majorities-elect in the Legislature: Make a deal, or shut down government operations come July.

Sturdevant makes that sound like a bad thing.

Kline correctly pointed out that in both parties, activists are “exceptionally vocal right now, and more engaged than they have been over time.” The Internet has given them all spyglasses and megaphones, which they train as eagerly on their allies as their opponents. Those tools leave a false impression with some elected officials about the activists’ political strength.

I”m going to suspect that this past November’s elections may have left a very, very accurate impression of that strength.

Dayton and the new GOP legislative leaders put on a fine show of bipartisan comity last week after their first private meeting. They said all the right words about searching earnestly for common ground on job creation and government streamlining.

But, on other occasions, they’ve also said they plan to stick to the policy guns they fired during the fall campaign. Dayton will assemble a budget proposal that emphasizes an income tax increase for the wealthy. Republicans will counter with budget bills built on “no new taxes.”

Quick side note here; watch that “no new taxes” talk.  Sturdevant is going to be doing her usual job – the DFL’s bidding – in trying to make the GOP’s stance seem like an extension of the Pawlenty years.  In fact, the GOP was sent to Saint Paul with an even clearer mandate; cut the spending.

If those base-pleasing, no-new-compromise exercises consume every legislative day from January until early May, my sense is that the mood of the Minnesota electorate is going to be quite sour.

Stuck as she is in her wretched ink-stained ivory tower at 425 Portland, perhaps it’s understandable that Sturdevant missed the news between Christmas Eve of 2009 and November of 2010; the mood is already sour.  That’s how Barack Obama and the DFL both squandered overwhelming advantages in Congress and the Legislature in two short years.  The  peasants are pissed!

Last week, the Civic Caucus, a bipartisan group of seasoned policy wonks, began preparing a formal call for a change in the Legislature’s usual calendar.

And as a general rule, anything coming from “bipartisan” groups of “seasoned wonks” should go in the kill file immediately.

By law, Dayton must offer his budget proposal on or before Feb. 15. The Civic Caucus wants the Legislature to follow suit a few weeks later with at least its revenue and spending targets, said the group’s coordinator, Paul Gilje.

“Every session, everybody is so frustrated with the way everything comes out at the last minute,” Gilje said. “This time, the divide is so well-understood early on. Why not get the options on the table early? Why not open the way for an intelligent statewide discussion for how to reconcile the differences, rather than waiting till the end?”

Oh, I have a sneaking hunch you won’t have to wait all that long for the GOP’s proposal.

As it stands, the draft statement the Civic Caucus is circulating doesn’t specify a deadline for the Legislature to produce its budget. I have what may be a fitting suggestion: How does April Fools’ Day sound?

It sounds like someone had to dig into the cliche bag to find an ending for their column.

Look – the political establishment in this state – and Sturdevant is nothing if not their dutiful scribe – has been barbering for years about how badly they want more people to get involved, to be stakeholders, in their government.

Now they got it. 

We just must all be the wrong kind of people.

…it was a fantastic Christmas.  One of the best in years!

Although the temptation is always there to switch the family to the Russian Orthodox church.  With its January 6 Christmas.

Think of the savings on gifts!

(Note to any Russian Orthodox readers;  No, I’m not going to switch churches purely for the savings.  Just pointing out one utterly non-faith-related upside to your church’s particular calendar).

(Waiting to see what the Anti-Faith-Police have to say about this…)

Minnesota Public Radio’s Mark Zdechlik notes that Minnesota could very well see a lot more nail-biter races, because…

…well, we all know how this works, don’t we?  Minnesota is more polarized, and the parties are more extreme.  Right?

Analysts say elections have become so close because Republicans and Democrats share almost the same number of supporters and that both sides are becoming more extreme and more polarized.

And who’s the source?

You only get one guess!  Hurry!  (Emphasis added)

University of Minnesota Political Science Professor Larry Jacobs…

Oh, who the hell else?

I wonder – does the Humphrey Institute give some sort of spiff to reporters for quoting Jacobs in every single story about politics at any level anywhere in Minnesota?

If every single news outlet – MPR, WCCO, the Strib, the PiPress, the MinnPost – quoted Mitch Pearlstein of the conservative Center of the American Experiment, do you think someone would squawk that they were adopting a partisan point of view?

So given the largely  monochromatic, left-of-center pedigrees of the Humphrey Center’s faculty, why does this monopoly on sourcing in the Twin Cities media pass unmentioned?

…said politics in Minnesota has been reduced to something akin to tribal warfare; most Democrats and Republicans are dug-in so deep they wouldn’t even consider supporting a candidate from the other side.

“You’ve got kind of the Hatfields on one side and the McCoys in another,” Jacobs said.

Far better, to some in the Twin Cities “intelligentsia”, to return to the seventies, when all politicians came to us in generic yellow boxes with black lettering, all spouting more or less the same center-left institutional twaddle?  When you had your choice between John Marty and Arne Carlson – ergo no choice at all?

Jacobs said this year’s governor’s race is a good example of the polarization. He said that Republican Party candidate Tom Emmer was probably the most conservative statewide candidate we’ve seen nominated on the Republican side in the state’s history, or at least since World War II.

They always put this like it’s a bad thing.

He was nominated – they know that, right?  It’s not as if Karl Rove flew in and gave the guy the nomination personally.

With the exception of DFL Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s lop-sided 2006 victory, the past three statewide elections have shown core Republicans and Democrats in Minnesota are evenly split.

Because winning with a majority has become so difficult, Jacobs said election strategy in Minnesota has become all about ripping the opposition and appealing to the base.

And, um, trying to scare off independents by showing that your guy is really ahead, appealing to the Bandwagon Effect.  Right, Dr. Jacobs?

Question:  If I had access to Lexis/Nexis, and could divide the number of stories on politics in the Strib, PiPress, WCCO, MPR and the MinnPost featuring quotes by Dr. Jacobs by the total number of stories on politics, would the result be over or under 25%?

To:  The new Republican majority in Congress

From: Mitch Berg, First and Fourth Amendment Buff

Re: In re the FCC

Dear new majority,

Please see to abolishing the Federal Communications Commission.

Julius “Seizure” Genachowski, Obama’s current puppet as chairman of the FCC’s board, is involved in an epic power grab that indulges the classic liberal conceit that “if we can make the law say it’s right, then it must be right”.  Scott Johnson shreds Genachowski’s legal approach.  Kevin O’Brien gets the rest of it in this Cleveland Plain Dealer op-ed, noting that Genachowski’s latest power grab has something for everyone to hate:

[MN Senator Al] Franken wrongly believes the FCC can make the rules. He just finds what is proposed too generous to big corporations — a legitimate concern. When the feds make rules, they tend to preserve the primacy of whoever the industry leaders are at the time. As Franken wisely notes (now, there’s a phrase you may never see in this space again), if the big boys like it, be suspicious.

[SC Senator Jim] DeMint, while properly dismissing the FCC’s authority to require anything at all of Internet providers, is more worried about a government takeover of the Internet. He’s right, too.

The idea that this is all about consumer protection and a level playing field is plainly ludicrous. It’s just another a power grab, nobly camouflaged in the familiar progressive guise of Making Life Fair.

Leftyblogs’ cases for Obama’s power grab usually involve plaintive pleas of “why shouldn’t everyone have equal access to the Internet?”.  For the same reason that I don’t have equal access to your refrigerator or your retirement account; it’s not theirs.  The Internet’s costly grows almost exclusively due to private investment; it’s not been a government or academic preserve since DARPA let the genie out of the bottle.  The Internet is not like the broadcast spectrum, as dubious as the FCC’s case is for regulating even that.

The end result would be an Internet tied up in rules and regulations, with government setting rates and stifling competition. It can’t go any other way, because it never goes any other way.

In a speech announcing that the FCC would ignore the courts and dare the Congress to stop it, Genachowski unwittingly explained just how unnecessary it is for his agency to “protect” us:

“Internet companies have started as small startups, some of them famously in dorm rooms and garages with little more than a computer and access to the open Internet. Many have become large businesses, providing high-paying, high-tech jobs in communities across our country. It’s the American dream at work.”

The rest of the speech was unadulterated bunkum, but he was right about that.

It’s time to shut down the FCC.  Please see to this ASAP.

Use the Air Force if necessary.

That is all,

MBerg

It was thirty years ago today that Warren Zevon released one of the five greatest live albums of the rock and roll era – and perhaps the best summary of his own career that he’s ever managed.  The album was Stand In The Fire.

Zevon, of course, died a few years ago, after a long battle with lung cancer.  Which was a jarring experience; rock stars aren’t supposed to die of long-term wasting diseases.  They’re supposed to flame out in car crashes like Johnny Ace, or drug overdoses like Keith Moon or Jimi Hendrix, or on epic drinking binges like Bon Scott, or drug-induced sudden flashes like John Entwistle, or suicides like Pete Ham or Kurt Cobaine, with enough loose ends and unresolved potential to do a romantic-era British poet proud.

Zevon certainly showed the potential to join that crowd; he floated to his commercial and creative peak on a cataract of booze, and a drug or two as well.

And sometime in the early eighties, he hit close enough to bottom to realize he needed to change his ways.  He gave up drinking, went into recovery…

…and, like a lot of artists who give up addictions, seemed to lose a bit of his spark for a few years, releasing albums that, for some time, didn’t quite have the same feel they’d had before.  Zevon got his muse back, of course – a different one than he’d had on Exciteable Boy and Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School – but he was writing some great music before his diagnosis with cancer, which led him to finish his final, Final album, The Wind, just before he died.

And I’m going to speculate that Zevon was very, very glad he had the twenty-odd years of sobriety after he went through spin-dry.

But I wondered – if Zevon had checked out after 1980’s Stand In The Fire, would he be regarded as one of the greatest untold stories in rock history?

Stand was recorded during a two-night engagement at The Roxy in Los Angeles.  Recorded with a group of obscure-ish but impeccably tight LA sidemen (David Landau and Zeke Zirngiebel on guitars, Roberto Piñon on bass, Bob Harris on keys and Marty Stinger on drums), the album featured an audibly blotto Zevon singing gloriously over-the-top versions of a slew of Zevon classics, and shoulda-been classics

The title cut is a big, brawny three-chord anthem featuring a simple but layered call-and-answer chorus that you can hang a side of beef from.   Next is “Jeannie Needs a Shooter”, which started life as one of many songs Springsteen didn’t use on The River; he gave it to Zevon, who rewrote it into one of the great “teenage death-rock” songs of all time.  A hilarious “Exciteable Boy” is followed by a taught, glorious “Mohammed’s Radio”, full of ad-libs (“Even Jimmy Carter’s got the highway blues!”) and ended by wonderful, four-part a-capella ending; the song, like most of this album’s highlights, eclipses Zevon’s studio originals.

“Werewolves of London” is big, boomy, sloppy, and full of drunken ad-libbing (“I ran into Jackson Browne drinking a Piña Colada at Trader Vic’s; his hair was per-feeeeect!“)

Side two (speaking in vinyl terms) was even better, opening with a brawny “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and “The Sin”, Zevon follows by steaking “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” back from Linda Ronstadt, who’d had a big hit the song) and the albums’ highlight, a jackhammer-y “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”, which had been a fairly perfunctory ode to la vida local on his 1977 major label debut, but turned into an over-the-top, anthemic foot-stomper here, and closing (in its original version) with a rafter-shaking cover of “Bo Diddley’s a Gunslinger”.

The album rarely pops up on “best-of” lists today.  It’s a shame – because it was one of the great achievements of the golden age of the “live album”, which, it occurs to me, is something you just don’t see anymore.  Stand in the Fire, like Cheap Trick’s Live at Budokan, showed the listener a side of the artists that they’d never have gotten otherwise, and captured the energy and spontaneity of great live performers doing what they did best.  In Zevon’s case, it sent off the seventies with a shout and a stomp and a double for the road.

If you can find it, it’s an amazing record.  Give it a shot.

More and more young people are failing physically and academically. Who’s to blame and whatever shall we do?

It’s been well-documented that many high school grads are now too fat to meet the U.S. military’s physical requirements. Now it turns out that many of those same kids may be too dumb.

Hmm. Can they vote?

The nonprofit Education Trust released a first-ever report this week showing that more than one in five young people don’t meet the minimum standard required for Army enlistment.

Nonprofit? Nothing against the Education Trust, but that means benevolent, non-partisan and unbiased, right?

Among minority candidates the ineligibility rates are higher: 29 percent. In Minnesota, the disparity for black applicants was even more startling: 40 percent were found to be ineligible. Among Hispanics in Minnesota the rate was 20 percent, but among whites, it was 14.1 percent.

Who’s to blame? How can we fix this? Can we commission a bureaucracy and empower it with generous funding to tackle this issue or might there be a way to skip all that and draw a self-serving conclusion via a first-ever report and save the trouble?

This is more a distressing indictment of the U.S. education system than it is a testament to today’s Cheeto-eating, Xbox-playing youth, say the authors of the report.

…ignore the Cheetos and the Xbox, folks. Those are what we call outlying data points…they lie outside our predetermined conclusion.

It strips away that illusion that the military can be an easy landing ground for those not bound for college, and it suggests that national security is at stake.

Whoa! What?! National Security?!!

(!!!)

Well then, by all means we must move forward will all due alacrity and resolve!

By that of course I mean we must increase funding to education, create a National Department of Parenting, appoint Michelle Obama as its head, and tax the rich to pay for it for surely they are culpable for this.

“Our schools have to be upping their game if we are going to supply the military with the kind of folks they are going to need 15 years in the future”

“The welfare and security of our nation is one and the same as the welfare of our young people,” said Amy Wilkins, vice president for government affairs and communications for Education Trust.

Thank you. Without this first-ever report in hand, we might have thought this alarming issue was a distressing indictment of American parents, who by their absence, abuse or worse yet, their apathy, have raised a generation of fat, dumb kids.

It’s good to know they’re off the hook and our wiser, more educated overseers are eager to absorb yet another personal responsibility.

Today a grateful nation (or about 50% of it) commends you for your tireless service in the interest of an ever growing and burdensome federal government.

All I want for Christmas (that I haven’t already gotten) is this:

Why does my Thinkpad T60’s monitor turn off within 1-3 minutes of booting or coming out of sleep/hibernation?     And how can I get it to stop?

If I put it into sleep or hibernation, it’ll usually turn back on, but only for a few minutes at most – then it’ll turn off again.

I have a hunch it’s one of those stupid inscrutable Thinkpad config settings that someone at Lenovo needs to get pummeled over.  But I can rarely get it to stay on long enough to get the stupid Thinkpad config screen to come up.

Anyone have any ideas?

(And “switch to Linux” is tempting, but I really really have to do my post-Christmas balancing of the checkbook in Quicken…)