Has it really only been two weeks since the Tucson Massacre?

Yep.  Two weeks and two days.  The media coverage has been so all-encompassing and intense, it feels longer.

Part of it is Rep. Giffords’ miraculous recovery so far.  Miracles fascinate us (although I have a hunch if it were a black guy, or an unattractive unelected white guy, we wouldn’t be getting the hourly updates).  And as disabled as this nation has been by Obama’s regime so far, I think America wants to see something recovering quickly.  Goodness knows the economy isn’t.

On the other hand, as Dr. Jonz at the Dogs points out, there is another massacre story out there – one we’re barely hearing about:

However, an even more gruesome, horrific, unspeakably evil, beyond-human-comprehension, massacre has been uncovered the last few days, and I believe that very few in the nation have heard about it. I am referring to the Philly abortion / infanticide / drug OD operation run by Kermit Gosnell – for over 30 years! The details are very grim, and are hard to believe, how any one human that has any heart, soul, or conscience, could perform such atrocities. The clinics’ acts included killing hundreds of live babies outside the womb, (including a procedure of snipping babies’ spinal cords in the back of their necks, like one would cut a string with scissors)…. but he also over drugged his patients who were in such intense pain, or had second thought about the procedures.

He also ran the most filthy, infected, unsanitary clinic imaginable, with blood, urine, discarded fetuses strewn everywhere. Finally, he engaged in every and any sort of criminal deceptive activity, to ensure he could perform any abortion at any stage, despite laws against late term abortions (falsifying addresses, falsifying medical records, etc). Think of the worst horror show / nightmare imaginable, and that would look mild compared to the depths that this monster carried out for 30 years. He did everything humanly possible to squeeze every penny out of his pregnant clients – regardless of patients’ pregnancy stage or mental and physical state – to the tune of about $1.8 million per year.

While abortion has never been my main political topic – I’m personally a pro-lifer, and think Roe needs to be reversed as bad law – the Gosnell story is enough to turn any libertarian into a pro-lifer; enough to make me want to grab some of those leftyblog/leftymedia hamsters who point to the murders of two abortion doctors in two decades by lunatic fringers and tell ’em “the score has swung waaaay past even”.

Jonz:

Again, though, I am sure that most will hear almost nothing about this story. Why? Because the babies were mostly minorities? Because the babies were only 24 weeks from conception? Because abortion is a taboo topic in the US? None of these justify allowing such horrific slaughter to go unrecognized in our society.

True.

Know what “justifies” it to the left and media (pardon the redundancy)?

Knowing that this story is going to impede the mission of safeguarding the civil sacrament of abortion.  Because human life – that of minority and poor mothers, as well as countless babies – just like fair and equal treatment of women, all go by the boards when the left, and “feminism”, feel that one of their political goals is in danger.

And so people just can’t know about it.

I am more concerned with what happens in our society beyond the prosecution of Gosnell and his accomplices. How did the Pennsylvania State Dept of Health and Human Services go 30 years, with either no – or inadequate – inspections? More people need to be held to account than just Gosnell. What makes this Philly massacre more tragic than the Tucson massacre, is that if people had done their jobs, many innocent lives taken in Philly easily could have been saved. Why as a society do we not value those lives, as much as the lives in Tucson?

Oh, that’s easy.

Tucson involved an elected, photogenic Democrat official.

Philly unphotogenic crimes and non-jet-set victims involve a judicially imposed “right” that’s more important than human life, than individual womens’ health, than the rest of the entire Constitution to a good chunk of our society, to its supporters.  To the hard left, protecting abortion is a civic jihad, more important than any individual (especially the declassé brown women who were Dr. Gosnell’s customers and victims.

I was on the air back in 1979 when the AP ticker clicked a “FLASH” story; “students” had seized the US Embassy in Iran.

For the next 444 days, the incident became a watershed in US society in so many ways.

Fifteen of the surviving hostages, and five survivors of the “Desert One” mission to try to rescue them, including a few of the charter members of “Delta” force, had a reunion over the weekend at West Point:

This reunion is not only about catching up with old friends, but also educating cadets who weren’t even born when the hostage crisis occurred. They are attending panel discussions about their experiences and Iran.

“We’re going to have people involved in a crisis in American history actually talk to the future leaders of our military about something that is very, very important,” said [former embassy press secretary Joe] ]Rosen.

In 1981, the hostages were flown to nearby Stewart Airport and driven in a caravan of busses to the military academy. Yellow ribbons and cheering crowds welcomed their return. Today, even in the snow covered hills, the feelings are just as warm.

The mayor of nearby Highland Falls NY had his townspeople put yellow ribbons in front of their houses, as well.

Temple University historian David Farber wrote a book on the hostage crisis called, “Taken Hostage” and says the crisis brought Americans together during a difficult time for the nation. Farber told Fox News, “This was a time of economic crisis. ” He says “that ironically in their debacle, in their frustrating experiences was a place where Americans could unify; Conservatives, Liberals, Democrats, Republicans… everyone was behind the dream of getting those hostages home safe.”

The group will meet local people at a wine and cheese party, attend the Army-Navy basketball game, and reflect on the meaning of their ordeal. They will also meet five survivors of the ill-fated rescue mission that resulted in the crash of helicopters that killed 8 U.S. servicemen.

The West Point Chief of Staff, Colonel Charles (Gus) Stafford, was one of the cadets who welcomed them home in 1981. He told Fox News that “to physically see those people here and know how happy they were and that they were and home and they were free, it just made your heart burst, it was wonderful.”

The reports noted that this is really the first time that the bulk of the former hostages, and their would-be rescuers, have been gathered together in all these years.  Given all that’s happened in the past thirty years – especially the past ten – it’s a crying shame.

For those who weren’t around back then, it’s impossible to overstate how important the Hostage Crisis actually was, even today:

• It changed the media; it gave Cable News Network, which launched months after the hostages were seized, a subject for the sort of instant, 24/7 coverage that we now live with, day in and day out.  ABC turned Ted Koppel’s nightly reports on the hostage crisis into the long-running “Nightline” , the Big Three’s first nod to the notion that the traditional news cycle was dead.
• It changed the military.  Desert One followed on the tails of several military debacles – Vietnam, the Mayaguez incident – that showed the US military had a very difficult time adjusting to wars that weren’t like World War 2.  The response launched a push for reforms that led to sweeping changes in the military and, in 1987, the civilian control of the military, with the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1987.
• It changed politics.  While conservatism had been creeping its slow way back to the fore of GOP politics for some years, the crisis – and the Desert One debacle – fatally undercut the Carter administration, which was clearly overmatched.  It helped sweep Ronald Reagan into office, which not only ended the crisis, but changed much of the world we live in today.

Reading about the reunion has been a fascinating blast from the past.

Republic of Korea special forces recapture a tanker from Somali pirates, killing eight, capturing five, and rescuing the entire crew unharmed (except for the tanker’s captain, who suffered a non-lethal gunshot wound):

President Lee Myung-bak went live on national television to announce the successful conclusion of the five-hour operation, 1,300 kilometers northeast of Somalia.

Mr. Lee told the country South Korea will not tolerate future attacks on any of its nationals.

ROK special forces, with help from unspecified “other nations”, apparently snuck up on the tanker:

News reports say a navy ship from Oman was on the scene to support the South Korean operation.

On board the Malta-flagged chemical tanker was a crew of 11 Burmese, eight South Koreans and two Indonesians. It is operated by South Korea’s Samho Shipping.

Military officials in Seoul say a South Korean naval destroyer, the Choi Young, with 300 special forces aboard, tailed the hijacked ship for days before moving in early Friday.

The ROKS Choi Young. Because I can, that's why.

I know, I know; look for peaceful solutions, they’re impoverished, yadda yadda.

But 21 innocent sailors are free today.

Yay, ROK!

The DFL’s “Forecast” for this biennium calls for a 37% increase in Health and Human Services (HHS) spending.

And the DFL is portraying any spending proposal less than a 37% increase as a “cut”.

And the media is, for the most part, carrying that meme without question.

Bob Collins at MPR does, in fact, question it, although his piece’s headline, “Despite warnings of cuts to child protection, House committee passes cuts in human services”, manages to hit the “decreasing the increase is a cut” and “the GOP is balancing the budget on the backs of womynandchyldryn and the poor” memes with admirable economy.

Jessica Webster, a staff attorney for Legal Aid, said the bill will hurt more than just children. “One of the things that’s frustrating, when we get these pieces of legislation, there’s nothing here that shows the people who receive these services,” she said. “Low-income people who are sick, who have serious injuries, poor people who have ill or injured children, battered women in battered women’s shelters, people living in homeless shelters, homeless youth, displaced homemakers, the developmentally disabled, people with low IQ, people who are mentally ill. All of these people are unable to work.”

The thing is, the GOP’s bill doesn’t “cut” anything from the previous budget.

But Republicans said they were not cutting the programs, since the programs had already been cut by lawmakers in their last-minute deal with then Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

“These folks having genuine needs, but over the last year or so, what this bill does just maintains… so what was done in the last year would be continuing,” Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer said. “You hear some of these phrases …. what we do is we make spending permanent.”

The bill continues the cuts to which Governor Pawlenty and the DFL-dominated legislature agreed in the last budget.

And it sends the message that HHS spending will not be going up by a over a third.

Health and Human Services are going to have to stretch their dollars further, just like the rest of us.

One of the more noxious bits of effluvia from the last, DFL-controlled legislature was a bill tightening the restrictions to “authorize”, or sponsor, charter schools.

Because of this law, a whole lot of charter schools are on the bubble:

Two years ago, state lawmakers approved a new law that makes authorizers more accountable for the financial and academic performance of the schools they sponsor.

“I think the new law is great and it’s really going to strengthen and make more consistent the quality of authorizing,” said Cindy Moeller, the head of Student Achievement Minnesota, or SAM.

SAM is an approved charter school authorizer, and Moeller was at last week’s open house, pitching her organization as a possible charter school sponsor.

The law is a result of several waves of hysteria about charter school “financial performance” whipped up by a series of specious think-tank reports on the schools’ fiscal accountability.

I’ll digress to ask – if public school districts had to operate under the same rules and scrutiny as charters, how many do you suppose would survive?

[Minnesota Charter School Federation president Eugent] Piccolo does not expect all 64 schools currently in limbo to close — but some could. That’s why he’s lobbying state lawmakers to extend the current arrangement by a year, a move that would help schools like the St. Paul City School.

“The school’s been around for 13 years, I’d hate for it to close just because of a process,” noted Nancy Dana, superintendent of St. Paul City School. Her current sponsor, the St. Paul School District, is not reapplying.

It’s up to the state education department to approve new authorizers. David Hartman, supervisor of the Minnesota Department of Education’s charter school division, said schools are right to be anxious. But he’s confident the outcome will be positive.

And that’s going to be worth watching; Mark Dayton’s Education Commissioner Brenda Casselius is, near as I can tell, no friend to charter schools.  Charter school advocates will have to watch and see if there’s any slowdown in the approvals for authorizers.

If there’s been a gratifying story so far this year, it’s that the GOP majority in the Minnesota Legislature isn’t wasting any time.  It’s going out and taking the fight to the DFL bright and early, with proposals to pare back the current budget, curb automatic budget increases, and trim the headcount at the state’s largest employer, The State.

It’s what the Tea Party sent ’em there to do; that’s all to the good.

The DFL, for its part, is doing what parties that are used to be one-party governing bodies tend to do; sitting back and hoping that it’s all a big aberration.

According to Dave Schultz, left-leaning Hamline prof and occasional blogger, it’s a bad idea.

For the DFL, anyway:

This is a naive strategy. It is effectively one that says when the voters regain their sanity they will again vote for Democrats. This is a purely defensive and passive strategy. It depends on the steps and missteps of others in order to get elected. This is the fundamental problem with the Democrats for the last 40 years. In 1972 McGovern’s slogan was “Come home America.” Notice how well it worked. In 1984 Mondale’s was “America needs a change.” It did not work. The failure of both candidates was in part the inability of Democrats to offer a compelling narrative to counteract that of the Republicans. Democrats cannot always count on disgust with the GOP and missteps by the latter to get elected. They need to offer a narrative, to provide a set of policies that serve as an alternative. They need to stand for something

Additionally, Democrats need to fight back if they want to win.

The problem is, the DFL hasn’t had to stand  for anything other than its institutional imperatives (“More union jobs”, “more spending”) in recent memory.  And it’s only been recently that they had to “fight” for anything; it’s only been in the past eight years that the MNGOP didn’t work almost as hard as the DFL to enact DFL policies; it  was only in this past eight years that the MNGOP differed enough from the DFL in terms of concrete policy to be measured and had enough power to make it matter.

The Republicans know how to do that. The Democrats don’t. After 2008 the GOP developed a plan, a message, recruited well, and they took advantage of the Democrats screwing up or failing to define themselves and the GOP. Right now I see little sign that the state DFL is doing any of that.

I disagree; the DFL is trying to define the GOP.  That’s why you’re hearing all of the “continuing the failed policies of the last eight years” talk.  Unfortunately for them, they’re trying to define the GOP as something a majority of MN voters agreed with last November.

Yes, the opposition making mistakes creates an opportunity. But you need to do more than that to win and then to govern effectively. Begin now defining the narrative and themes for what the party stands for. Do focus groups, recruit candidates, and develop a game plan now regarding how you plan to take back the legislature and govern.

And there’s the DFL’s problem.  For all their barbering about “who’s the bigger tent?”, the fact is they are defined by the people whose hands are inside the puppet; the government and trade unions, and the metro left.  The DFL is not amenable to being overtaken by a transformational groundwell, as the GOP was by the Tea Party, growing pains and all.

The DFL is going to have to put ever-thicker layers of lipstick on the union-jacketed pig to try to fool the gullible.

The day before this past election, I linked to a piece of video of a man – Monty Jensen, a Brainerd resident, disabled Army veteran, and government worker – who claimed to have witnessed what appeared at the very least to have  been some odd behavior – and at most appeared to be voter fraud.

The original video is here.   The story brought this blog among the biggest surges of traffic it has ever had.

The story seems to have stalled, for the moment – partly because it’s been on a lot of peoples’ back burners, and partly because…

…well, we’ll get back to that.

As noted in this space back in November, Monty Jensen filed an affadavit – sworn under oath to be truthful, under penalty of a potential charge of perjury – with Crow Wing County attorney Donald F. Ryan, on November 1 – the day before election day.  His affadavit recited what he’d seen, pretty much as he related the story to me – which is as concise a summary of what Jensen alleges as there is.  Go and read it and refresh your memory.

And for the next six weeks, not a whole lot happened.  The Crow Wing County Sheriff’s office did an investigation;  in due course, County Attorney Ryan said that there was no evidence of voter fraud.

And that was pretty much that.

Well, at least as far as official channels in Crow Wing County were concerned, so far.

But that’s not the entire story.

On December 17 – after the Crow Wing County Sheriff’s Office investigation had wrapped – the Minnesota Freedom Council sent a letter to then-representative Dan Severson, long-time Minnesota House rep for the area and recently defeated in a bid to replace Mark Ritchie as Secretary of State.

The crux of the letter was a list of 13 questions (any typos are my fault):

Questions that remain unanswered:

1. Were all parties interviewed for testimony?  Clearly this is not the case since no-one approached the other eyewitness (Mr. Jensen’s girlfriend).  How can this be a “complete” investigation?

2. Was the party or parties involved with the possible voter fraud positively identified by the two eyewitnesses?  If not, how can anyone be sure that the Crow Wing County Sheriff investigators are talking to the same suspect?  We have two conflicting testimonies; one says she was simply “filling in ovals where there were dots” on the ballot.  The other said the disabled voter didn’t say in the voting booth but a “few seconds” and never had a pencil or pen in hand and didn’t have time to talk to their assistant about their voting preferences.  Maybe there are two different people.  How do we know?

3. Why was there no official report that has been put forth stating the reasons for dismissal with the findings of fact that can be confirmed or contested?

4. Of the statements that were taken, were affidavits filed for each of those statement under penalty of perjury?

5. Was a list compiled of all the individuals who voted under this complaint, and were they identified as being eligible to vote?  (ie. did any of them have their voting rights revoked under court order ruling them “vulnerable adults”, and were they registered to vote in the district?)

6. Since this was four days prior to election day and Minnesota does not have early voting for elections, what statute was used to allow this early voting, and were any of the individuals that voted vouched for by any resident managers?  Many may have residency outside their group home (this is only acceptable on election day (MN statute 201.061 Subd 3)

7. Was it determined how may voters were helped by this group home workers?  Minnesota statute 204C.15 Assistance to Vot3rs states that “no person who assists another voter as provided in the preceding sentence shall mark the ballots of more than three voters at one election”.

8. Were there election judges present at the Crow Wing County Auditor Office?  Voters who need assistance may request aid from two election judges who are members of different major political parties.  All voters who need assistance should have this option availble.

9. Why hasn’t Mr. Jensen been asked to identify the Crow Wing County Auditor employee who stated “you don’t know the half of it, this was the fourth group today”.

10. When we asked (county auditor) Deb Erickson if she know if there were any disabled people or residents from group homes voting late on Friday October 29th, she said she didn’t know.  Why then did Deb Erickson contact Jared Peterson, on Monday November 1 after [Monty Jensen’s] affidavit was filed?  (According to KSAX article).  Seeing that the Auditor is not an “investigator”, this opens up a question of conspiracy.

11. Why were there two investigators assigned to the case interviewing Mr. Jensen’s estranged father?  Were they investigating Montgomery Jensen?  They had time to send investigators to interview someone who has no relationship to the case, but not the other eyewitness?

12 Under MN Statute 201.175, a grand jury must be called to present the evidence and let the grand jury determine whether ot proceed [with indictments].  Why wasn’t one called?  Did the Crow Wing County Attonrey usurp the power of the grand jury by ruling on his own?  Or did the Crow Wing County Attorney purposely avoid gathering enough evidence (including interviewing the other eyewitness) to force the calling of a grand jury?

13. There conflicting testimony by the eyewitnesses.  Crow Wing County Attorney said there is “no evidence” of voter fraud.  If two credible eyewitnesses can not convict someone guilty of voter fraud then how could anyone ever be convicted without an outright confession?  You cannot bring cameras or recording equipment and there is no one there at the county monitoring for abnormalities.

It is our opinion that this investigation brought forth even more questions than it answered in trying to resolve legitimate concerns in the voter fraud case involving the disabled.

If the worker was identified as stated by the County Attorney as the person in teh complaint, was that person compelled to submit an affidavit?   If she did and the statements are of conflicting facts (ie. “the person walked away and was pulled back to the booth only to wander away again at which time the worker filled out the ballot and put it into his hand” vs. “they told me the answers to the questions and I filled in the oval for them”. ) then the issue is to be forwarded to a Grand Jury for investigation.  If she did complete an affidavit then th issue should be forwarded to the Grand Jury to complete the in depth investigation by evenly weighted statements of fact.  It is not the County Attorney’s prerogative to simply dismiss the issue as not having merit.  Arbitration of issues of this importance are determined by a group of peer,s not that of an elected [official].

In short, the matters in question have not been adequately addressed, nor has a written report been forthcoming.  The gravity of the charges would dictate that not only is further investigation required nd should be forwarded to a Grand Jury, but that the State Attorney General’s Office should be advised in the matter and an opinion sought on whether Crow Wing County Attorney Mr. Ryan has violated statute by “refusing or intentionally failing to faithfully perform” his duties as County Attorney.v>Your immediate action is requested.

The questions raised in the letter make a useful framework for addressing the rest of this story.   I’ll be addressing one or two of these questions a week for the next couple of weeks.

At least one other Twin Cities reporter is working on this story.  It’s going to be an interesting week or two.

Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen compares Obamacare repealers to Nazis:

“They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels,” Cohen said. “You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it.  Like blood libel.

Let me take a moment to say that Governor Palin was ever-so-slightly in error, calling the attacks on her (implying that her rhetoric caused the Tucson shooting) a “blood libel”.  The term she may have been looking for was “gutless slander by a bunch of worthless, cowardly scumbags”.

But I digress.

“The Germans said enough about the Jews and people believed it–believed it and you have the Holocaust.  We heard on this floor, government takeover of health care.  Politifact said the biggest lie of 2010 was a government takeover of health care because there is no government takeover,” Cohen said.

Actually, “Politifact”‘s story about “The Biggest Lie” was, in fact, the biggest lie.

And Steve Cohen needs to join his Democrat friends in retirement.

Katie Kieffer on  the mixed messages Obama is sending China – aka “America’s Lienholder”:

Mixed messages are useful if we want confuse, frustrate or anger another country. They are not useful in diplomacy or relationship-building. Mixed messages are dangerous because they make the U.S. appear weak and untrustworthy. Here are some of the mixed messages that we’ve given China, our biggest debtor and whose central bank owns $896 billion in Treasury bonds:

What, you think I’m doing to just paste the whole thing?  Read the post.

Sheila Kihne at The Activist Next Door is tired of seeing conservatives doing the media’s work for them.

She assails Chris Christie for throwing Sarah Palin under the bus on the Sunday Methane Circuit over the weekend:

Here’s what [Governor Christie’s] answer should have been to any questions about Sarah Palin:

“There is nobody more hated by the media than Governor Palin. How exactly is she supposed to act when the media tried to lay the blame for a mass-murder on her? Look, you’re trying to get me to distance myself from a fellow conservative and I won’t do it. People are mad at you– they’re more mad at you than they are President Obama or Governor Palin. They’re mad at you because you’re incapable of doing your job as the free press and reporting the news to the American people without your constant spin. Perhaps you guys should buy some steno pads with the words ‘Who, what, when, where, how, how much?’ imprinted at the top of the page.’ Maybe that would help.”

That’s the “Palin answer” men of the GOP. Why is it that the ONLY Republicans with high name-recognition who demonstrate valor, strength, and courage are women? Sarah Palin is more of a man than any of these guys.

Well, to be fair, Palin’s never had to face down the Jersey unions.

And isn’t it sad that we now have to look to the wilds of Alaska for some ruggedness and true grit? To quote a great 80’s tune: “Where have all the good men gone?”

They’re all over the place – but Sheila makes a great point – and you need to read her entire piece for it, but I’ll synopsize it here:  conservatives need to quit playing along with the Democrat and Media (pardon the redundancy) effort to turn the vocabulary of our language itself into a liberal tool to be used against us.

We conservatives (as opposed to Republicans) are going to little in the way of dispassionate balance, to say nothing of help, from the media; we have to do it for ourselves.

Sheila does “the Palin Answer” pretty well.  I’m going to suggest a few more areas where conservatives, locally and nationally, need to stick together in the face of the left and media’s (ptr) chanting points:

• We Have A $6.2 Billion Deficit:  Correct response: “No, we don’t.  We have a forecast that is $6.2B larger than the last revenue projections.  It is not a budget.  It can – and must – be trimmed, and the “autopilot” assumptions that keep leading to these absurd numbers need to be abolished”.
• The GOP Budget Attacks Education: Correct response: “There is precisely zero link between education spending and achievement.  Minnesota, North Dakota, the District of Columbia and South Carolina spent, respectively, $10.1K, 9.3K, 16K and 9K per student in 2008; while picking “objective” measures of achievement are difficult, by most standards (SAT scores, to pick an arbitrary one) North Dakota and Minnesota are statisatically identically high in achievement; the D of C and South Carolina are both at the bottom of the heap.  No, indeed, since 80% of what we spend on education goes into faculty and staff salaries and pensions (!), all “education spending” really measures is the excellence…of the Teachers’ Union’s clout.”
• “We Can’t Balance The Budget On The Backs Of The Poor!”:  Correct response: “The GOP proposals would make harder to expand the pool of people who can get entitlements from the state.  The “forecast” proposal would increase Health and Human Services spending by 37% – that’s thirty seven freaking percent – in the coming budget.  That’s not just ridiculous, not just absurd; it’s obscene.  The DFL goal of expanding the subsidies of poverty (and, especially, of the HHS bureaucracy) beyond what’s needed to prevent hunger and other abject poverty must not be done on the backs of the taxpayers!”

Sheila’s on to something.

More?

Headline on this morning’s PiPress story

Minnesota Republicans fire first shot in budget showdown

Has anyone checked Salisbury for firearms?

(Via Joe Doakes)

CNN contributes to “civlity”, apologizing for references to “crosshairs” referring to Democrats in Chicago…:

[King] is attracting a lot of notice — and some ridicule — in the blogosphere for his on-air apology after a guest used the word “crosshairs” during a report on Chicago politics Tuesday.  (The guest, a former Chicago reporter, referred to two rivals of mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel, saying Emanuel is “in both of their crosshairs.”) “We were just having a discussion about the Chicago mayoral race,” King told viewers.  “My friend Andy Shaw…used the term ‘in the crosshairs’ in talking about the candidates out there. We’re trying, we’re trying to get away from that language. Andy is a good friend, he’s covered politics for a long time, but we’re trying to get away from using that kind of language.

…and only Democrats:

Seven uses of “crosshairs” in just the month before the Tucson attacks, and just one of them referring to an actual wartime situation.  And one reference to Sarah Palin herself as being in “crosshairs.”

And not just Palin.  On September 14, Mark Preston, CNN’s senior political editor, referred to another controversial politician, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, as being “in the crosshairs.” “Michelle Bachmann is raising lots of money, raising her national profile,” Preston said on September 14.  “She is in the crosshairs of Democrats as well.”

The problem, of course, is that “civility” as it’s being discussed – on both sides, but mostly on the left – is always about making the other guy civil.

The Minnesota GOP yesterday put the Minnesota budget – for the current bienniium  – up on the hoist and start working:

Minnesota House and Senate Republicans today introduced an early action budget bill that takes immediate steps to reduce the budget deficit by $1 billion. The bill reduces spending for state agencies by $200 million in the current budget while making other one-time spending cuts permanent, reducing the long-term deficit by another $840 million. The early budget bill represents the first phase of the Minnesota Legislature’s budget balancing plan for the next two years.

The bulk of the changes involve making Governor Pawlenty’s unallotments permanent, and starting to tackle the issue of the absurd “autopilot” increases that have the less-curious in the media and most of the leftysphere chattering about “$6.2 billion deficits”:

“We need to prevent automatic spending increases that are included in the state government budget, and passing this budget bill will keep some of state government’s expenditures at current levels,” said House Ways and Means Committee Chair Mary Liz Holberg, R-Lakeville. “For the most part, the budget bill includes spending levels that were approved by the DFL-controlled Legislature and Republicans at the end of the 2010 legislative session,” said Holberg.

More on this budget – and the response from the DFL and media (pardon the redundncy) – tomorrow.

Socialized medicine in the UK is broken…and it took them sixty years to figure it out.

As the House moves to repeal the nationalization of health care, Britain plans to take a scalpel to its National Health Service, opening it up to competition and letting doctors and patients call the shots.

Geez. We hardly allow that now.

It was both a stunning admission and a damning indictment of socialized medicine when British Prime Minister David Cameron in effect admitted that the holy grail of nationalized health care, the British National Health Service (NHS), was broken and in need of fixing.

While critics of his plan are already saying it could lead to backdoor privatization of the NHS, Cameron stopped short of suggesting that is his aim. Founded in 1948, NHS could be called the “third rail” of British politics akin to our Social Security.

Which is what will happen to Obamacare if allowed to progress against the will of most Americans. It reminds me of one of my financial planning tenets: A luxury becomes a necessity twenty four hours later.

“We need modernization on both sides of the equation,” he said in his speech. “Modernization to do something about the demand for public health service, and modernization to make the supply of health care more efficient, which is about opening up the system, making it more competitive, cutting out waste and bureaucracy.”

ObamaCare promises exactly the opposite, increasing demand and coverage to the point of collapsing the system, taking decisions out of the hands of physicians who promise to quit in droves and putting it in the hands of a regulatory behemoth that decides who gets what care and when.

“Paging Doctor Dover.”

“Paging Doctor Ben Dover.”

The news just broke; North Dakota’s long-serving Democratic-NPL senator Kent Conrad is retiring after 2012:

President Obama said in a statement that he was “saddened” about the news of Conrad’s retirement but added: “I look forward to working with him during the next two years on the important issues facing our country.”

Conrad, who currently chairs the Senate Budget Committee, has been in office since 1986 and risen to become one of the most influential — and intellectual — policy makers operating in the nation’s capital.

Conrad had been open about his ambivalence about running for another term and had taken several actions in recent months that suggested he was leaning against running again.

Conrad turned down a chance to chair the Senate Agriculture Committee — an industry of huge import in North Dakota — to stay on at the helm of the Budget committee and supported the debt commission report, a decision that would have almost certainly put him in political hot water in the context of a political campaign.

And with that, North Dakota’s trifecta of Congressmen, which two years ago was pound-for-pound among the most powerful threesomes in Washington – Conrad, plus Byron Dorgan, who retired last year and Earl Pomeroy, who was soundly thrashed last November – leaves the stage after a combined total of something close to eighty years in Congress, leaving traditionally-conservative North Dakota with a decent shot of being represented by…conservatives.

Wisconsin looks to be in the mood to join the 21st century and recognize the law-abiding citizen’s human right to self-defense:

“You’re going to see a concealed carry bill pass the Legislature, I have no doubt,” Chris Danou, a Democratic legislator from Trempealeau, Wisconsin, told the LaCrosse Tribune newspaper. “The question is what kind of bill it’s going to be.”

Guns are a big part of Wisconsin culture as hunting is popular in the state, which has vast areas of forest and agricultural land. But it has traditionally restricted gun ownership and carrying weapons.

As in most states with any hope at all, the thwarting of the human right of self-defense was entirely a function of liberal zealotry defying the will of the people:

Twice in recent years the Wisconsin legislature passed a law allowing concealed carry but Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle vetoed it. Doyle left office this month and was succeeded by Republican Scott Walker.

Walker said last week that he expects a concealed carry bill to emerge as early as spring, after the legislature tackles more pressing issues such as job growth and the budget, and that he will sign the bill.

Walker’s got the right priorities, of course.  But here’s hoping Wisconsin joins the ranks of the civilized soon.

Via Politico, a great piece on  Michele Bachmann’s future, and what she may need to do to get there.

She could go waaaaay up – or stay pretty well put, at least in terms of national GOP politics.

Her style certainly makes waves:

Bachmann came under fire in 2007 after she had claimed, in an interview with a local newspaper, to “know of an Iranian plan for the partition of Iraq in which Iran would control half the country and set it up as ‘a terrorist safe haven zone’ and a staging area for attacks around the Middle East and on the United States.”

Some Republican lawmakers said Bachmann has worked hard on other committees and proved herself sufficiently to win the prized intelligence slot. Despite her vocal reputation, that could help her rebrand herself as more lawmaker than showstopper and boost her credentials for a run at higher office, such as the White House or, more likely, the Senate.

“That ultimately would be in the view of the voters, but certainly it would help,” said a Bachmann aide of the committee assignment. “We feel like that would be a good thing, to bring a different dimension in; she’s a tax lawyer, so she’s usually weighing in on economic issues … this adds a layer to her experience.”

Worth a read.

Construction  starts on the Union Depot in downtown Saint Paul today:

Construction crews are starting a $243 million renovation that will turn St. Paul’s historic Union Depot back into a hub for trains and buses.

Demolition begins Tuesday after a groundbreaking ceremony with elected officials including U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum and St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman. Crews will start clearing space for train tracks and bus lanes.

The renovation will transform the building into a station connecting future light rail and high-speed trains with buses and bicycles.

So we’re spending money we don’t have to build a depot for transportation that nobody uses to get to a place nobody goes.

Do I have that right?

How cool must it be to be in Wisconsin right now?  All-GOP executive and legislative branches?

Scott Walker taunts Illinois:

The Open for Business road signs will be placed along the state roadway border crossings, where the state has traditionally touted the name of the current Governor.

“These signs proudly proclaim Wisconsin is open for business,” said Governor Walker. “Along with the symbolic nature of these signs, there are going to be substantive changes to the way our state government treats job creators. The pro-growth initiatives I support stand in stark contrast to those policies being discussed in our bordering states. These signs are aimed directly at job creators to make them aware that they are welcome here. As our neighbor states make it more difficult for private employers to create jobs, they can ‘Escape to Wisconsin .’”

Hope it works.  It’d be fun to teach hamsters like Illinois – and Mark Dayton – a lesson.

The RNC bids adieu to its chairman. 

It was only two years ago in the wake of a confidence shattering election that establishment Republicans gambled on redesigning the party’s infrastructure on a foundation of Steele.   As Maryland’s former lieutenant governor and losing ’06 Senate candidate, Michael Steele had few direct qualifications for what was largely a managerial role, save a brief term as the Maryland GOP’s chair.  Instead, Steele (and the RNC members who supported his election in 2009) seemingly envisioned the chairmanship as the role of Promoter-in-Chief.  And after two gaffe-filled years of Steele tickling his tonseils with his heels while racking up Obamaesque debts, the RNC not only parted ways with Steele but likely also with the mindset that elected him.

The laymen’s criticism of Steele’s tenure would be to endorse what the Baltimore Sun wrote of him in 2002, that Steele “brings little to the team but the color of skin.”  And Steele most certainly was an affirmative action hire – but more for his policies than pigmentation. 

With the GOP routed by a supposedly moderate sounding African-American orator, the party was willing to promote a poorly Xeroxed copy of the same qualities.  The mere prospect of improved outreached to independents, young voters and minorities was enough for some to stomach Steele’s more centrist than center-right orthodoxy. 

So what if Steele was pro-choice, was against the war in Afghanistan, insulted the party’s conservative base, and played the race card against his own party when it suited him – he was going to give the Grand Old Party a “hip-hop” makeover.  Steele was so out of sync with the times, he was one giant clock around his neck away from becoming the Republican Flavor Flav.

All might have been forgiven had Steele simply done his job.  But while the zeitgeist of the conservative base was moving away trusting the party appartatus, Steele was trying to buy private jets as the RNC was enduring questions about expenses at bondage-themed nightclubs.  The result?  Fundraising lagged as the RGA became the defacto home of the Republican establishment despite the fact that Steele’s face was on TV more than the RGA’s Gov. Haley Barbour.

In such a light, there’s little wonder the RNC elected Reince Prius.  Reece Priebus.  Reese Pieces.  What’s-his-name or to the voting members, Not Michael Steele.  Priebus saw a tremendous political turnaround in Wisconsin, in part due to the party’s ability to win back the trust of Tea Party sympathizers without alienating independents. 

The task before Priebus is certainly much larger than what he faced in Wisconsin, but unlike Steele will hopefully succeed or fail outside the media limelight.

…you gotta check this out.

Auto Show photos through the years.

As I pointed out this morning, the notion of the “Budget Deficit” is at best a bit of manipulative spin; at worst, it’s an outright fraud on Minnesota voters and taxpayers.  Especially taxpayers.

We walked back a couple of the more toxic myths about the Minnesota budget this morning, including the thing all Real Minnesota Taxpayers have to keep trying to hammer home with your friends, relatives and neighbors; the “deficit” is a fraud.

And yet that’s only scratching the surface of the myths in this deeply abusive media meme.

“Were Balancing The Budget On The Backs Of The Poor”: On the one hand, Minnesota pays among the most-generous welfare benefits in the country – “good” enough to draw people to Minnesota to cash in. It’s seem we have some room to pare things back without really hurting anyone. But the statement itself is yet another fraud.

And on the other hand, if hard times call for shared sacrifice, then why are “the poor” exempt from…keeping their funding the same, or at the very most to an inflation-adjusted increase, as well as a trimming of the most gratuitous fat?

And by that, I mean as opposed to having “Health And Human Services funding  jacked up by, ahem, 37% – which is what the DFL-dominated Legislature “forecast” for the 2012-2013 biennium two years ago (see page 4 of this PDF file).

Is the DFL planning for 37% more poor  people?  Or are we going to subsidize the poverty we have 37% more?

“Holding The K-12 Budget SteadyWill Gut Education”:  Except that the DFL’s budget “forecast” planned to increase K-12 funding by 7.6% – with almost all of it going to increasing Teachers’ Union salaries and headcount.  It’s yet another case of the DFL trying not only to insulate its biggest constituency – government and its employees – from  the economy the rest of us have to live with.

Budget cuts will “force” property tax hikes: Yet another bit of fraud. Cuts to “Local Government Aid” will make local governments responsible for (more of) their own spending, which is currently taken care of by state taxpayers.  Local Government Aid was intended to help smaller, poorer cities afford some of the amenities they couldn’t afford – luxuries like water treatment, sewers, actual roads and the like.  It has become a subsidy of DFL-controlled city governments.

Indeed, the budget is chock-full of little deficit-building subsidies for one DFL favored class or another.  The legislature is going to be addressing quite a number of them – in the interest of controlling the deficit – soon.

Stay tuned.

I’ve been fiddling about with trying to find more oblique, writer-y ways to say it – but sometimes the direct approach is best.

Talk of a $6.2 Billion deficit is a fraud.  People who refer to is are mistaken at best, lying at worst.

What we have is not a $6.2 billion deficit.  It’s a little more like this:

Imagine you take your kids to McDonald’s once a week.  Your son, a budding DFLer, demands that you add a weekly trip to Murray’s for the family once a week.  You refuse.   Your idiot child goes to the media and tells them that you are “cutting the budget by $300 a week“.

What do you do?

Give the kids the trip to Murray’s and quit complaining?

You must be a DFLer.

The Budget Deficit Is Based On A Wish List: The “deficit” that the DFL and media – and even a few Republicans – are talking about is exactly the same thing. It’s assessed against the “2012-2013   Budget Forecast“.

Which, you may note, is a forecast.  Not a “budget”; a forecast.  The “budget” is something the legislature hashes out on odd-numbered years for the following even-and-odd-numbered pair of years (called a “biennium”); in 2009, the Legislature passted the budget for 2010 and 2011.

That, and only that, is the “budget”.

The “forecast”, on the other hand, is what the budget will be in the following biennium, assuming that the budget increases according to current assumptions, legal mandates, and legislative wishes.

So the forecast comes partly from “baseline budgeting” – starting with the current budget for a deparment and guesstimating how much more of that department’s “services” will be “needed”.  In some cases, there are legal mandates involved, And in most of them, there’s the DFL’s urge to leave  a huge budgetary turd the GOP’ doorstep.  Because whatever the cause, the DFL legislature that just got sent packing “forecast” the budget jumping from $30.266 billion to $38.591 billion – a 27.51% jump.

Did you increase your family budget 27.51%?

No.  And either did the government – yet.  Because the budget process – the one that leads us to the actual budget – just started, really, last week.

The “Structural Deficit” Is A Cop-Out: It is true that there are legal mandates to increase parts of the budget. The answer is deceptively simple; if you have a structural problem, the best – albeit not necessarily easiest – way to fix it is to fix the structure.  Put another way,   these mandates need to be reassessed, and most likely abolished. House File 2, sponsored by Rep. Banaian, will be a good start; it’ll start to chip away at the current practice of increasing spending for programs on autopilot; every government department will have to justify its spending and, in its most gratifyingly Scandinavian feature, sic the Legislative Auditor on state agencies with an aim toward sunsetting them when their usefulness has passed.

The most important thing to remember, though – and tell your co-workers and family members and neighbors, if the topic comes up – is, once again, this:

The “Budget Deficit” is a fraud.

Lets’ dignify  your absurd allegations with speculation –  more than they deserve.

All it proves is that a conservative with Alzheimers is a better president than a liberal.

That is all.