Tuscon schooing victim arrested for threatening a Tea Party leader:

One of the Arizona shooting victims was arrested Saturday and then taken for a psychiatric evaluation after authorities said he took a picture of a tea party leader at televised town hall meeting and yelled: “you’re dead.”

James Eric Fuller, 63, objected to something Trent Humphries said during the forum taped for a special edition of ABC’s “This Week” with Christiane Amanpour, Pima County sheriff’s spokesman Jason Ogan said. Fuller was in the front row and apparently became upset when Humphries suggested that any conversations about gun control should be delayed until all the dead were buried, KGUN-TV in Tucson reported.

Fuller was arrested on misdemeanor disorderly conduct and threat charges, Ogan said. While Fuller was being escorted out, deputies decided he needed a mental health evaluation and he was taken to a hospital, where he remained Saturday evening.

The hospital will determine when he will be released, Ogan said.

Let’s wait for the inevitable lecture on how the tone of our debate is driving people over the top, shall we?

On December 1, I published an excerpt from an email from a GOP recount observer.

Quoting myself:

This email, from a GOP election recount-watcher, has been making the rounds of local conservative activists.  I’m keeping the writer’s name off the record for now.

Emphasis is added by me:

Well, it’s been a good (better) day today here at Hennepin County for the recount. Lots of notable errors in judgment…

For instance, we found one precinct with ALL Dayton ballots challenged (103 total) that appeared to be a “mass” group of blank ballots run thru without a judge’s signature – all in a row. Shows how easily certain folks of a party’s persuasion can cheat so easily – and have it counted?

Let’s repeat that for those of you who glaze over:  103 votes, run through in a group, without a judge’s signature, apparently consecutively.

I asked the source of this email earlier this week what the resolution of this issue was.  The source wasn’t entirely clear on how things turned out: she or he sent me this message:

I think it was 102-103 ballots in Hennepin County (some precinct) that looked suspicious, and were run through the machine and counted in the total. What was believed was it happened after the polls (and machines) were closed and counted w/ a tape already generated…. Hence, the difference in the counts from registered voters vs. the machine counts…I was told the sequence and appearance of these ballots looked suspicious and forged, and now that I think about it, I remember one of the primary reasons they weren’t allowed was they were not properly signed off by the appropriate parties – yet, counted. If my memory serves me right, they were taken out of the totals once discovered.

Now, I’ve been getting regular, frequent emails for the past six weeks from a regular reader who is also a supporter of our current election system and, I’d suspect, of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie.   According to this person, it would be impossible for this scenario to have happened; that that’s just not how canvassing and recounts work.

That, of course, is one of the problems of blogging; when one is an actual, full-time, employed journalist, one has time to learn enough about the subject about which one is writing to comment on it with more literacy than when one has other things going on in life.

So OK, fair enough.  I’m way too buried with personal and day-job business to really dig into it all that much at the moment.  I guess, at least as regards this particular episode, the iron-clad integrity of the Henco elections staff, of Mark Ritchie, and of everyone involved is unimpeachable.  Until a better explanation drops into my lap. at any rate.

Which it’ll have to do, because – and this is an admission against interest – I have a hard time concentrating on that sort of anal-retentive, pointillistic, nit-picky, left-brain sort of thing.  God bless those who can – but I can’t.  Call it a learning disability, and a politically-imprudent one at that, but my brain just tunes out the finer points of the mechanics of recounts.  There’s a reason I’m not an actuary, an accountant, or a wedding planner.

And that’s that, I guess.

(more…)

Dire Straits’ single “Money For Nothing” was one of the iconic songs of the 1980s when it came out in 1985.  Chock full of reference to MTV and the styles of the era, and featuring a video that was fairly bleeding-edge computer animation (albeit very, very stylized) for the time.

It also created a brouhaha; the original, album version included a naughty word; three times, in fact.  “The little f***ot in the earring and the makeup?  Yeah, buddy, that’s his own hair…” and so on.    As songwriter, singer and guitar legend Mark Knopfler said at the time, the entire song was written in the second person, and was a conversation between a couple of delivery guys at a furniture store in New York, commenting on the MTV videos they were watching during the glory days of big new-wave hairdos.

It’s been a quarter century – but the controversy is baaaaaaack:

Classic Dire Straits track Money for Nothing has been banned from public broadcast in Canada – after receiving just one complaint 25 years after its release.

The global hit single came out on the band’s iconic fifth album, Brothers in Arms, in May 1985 and won a Grammy for best rock performance the following year.

But the original version included the word “faggot” referring to homosexuals, and although a cleaned-up edition was made available, Oz-FM in Newfoundland played the first edition in February last year.

The result was a single complaint – but the self-regulating Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has upheld it, and no outlet in the nation can now play Money for Nothing the way Dire Straits intended it to be heard.

The complaint said: “Money for Nothing was aired and included the word ‘faggot’ a total of three times. I am aware of other versions of the song and yet Oz-FM chose to play and not censor the version I am complaining about. As a member of the LGBT community I feel there is no reason for such discriminatory remarks to be played on air.”

And that’s all she wrote – notwithstanding that this is a very, very old rhubarb:

Dire Straits mainman Mark Knopfler has fielded angry reaction to the lyrics since the song first came out. He has pointed out the song is written from the viewpoint of a stupid character who thinks musicians make their “money for nothing” and his stupidity is what leads him to make ignorant statements.

Speaking in 1985 he said: “Apart from the fact that there are stupid gay people as well as stupid other people, it suggests that maybe you have to be direct. I’m in two minds as to whether it’s a good idea to take on characters and write songs that aren’t in the first person.”

Now, I’m not bringing this up because it’s a great case of PC run amok – although it is.

And I’m not bringing it up because it’s a great example of the lunacy of Canadian “Human Rights” law – although, again, it is.

I’m bringing it up because it’s the shape of things to come, if Julius “Seizure” Genachowski and Representative James Clyburn want with all their proposed interventions into the First Amendment – from the “Fairness Doctrine” to “Net Neutrality”; they want, and if not stopped they will get, a system where the First Amendment will be subject to the tastes, whims and tantrums of those who complain the loudest.

Alan Cross of Canadian service ExploreMusic comments: “The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is run by Canada’s private broadcasters. In exchange for the government not meddling, broadcasters have long promised to regulate themselves.

“It’s seen as much preferable to the arrangement in the US where the FCC – a government organization run by political appointees – carries a very heavy hammer when it comes to regulating broadcast content; or in the UK where Ofcom plays a similar role.

“In Canada, if no one complains, the feeling is that there’s no need to censor it. But all it takes is one person making one complaint for the entire apparatus of the CBSC to come to full gallop.

All of the proposals to return the “Fairness Doctrine” involve returning a frightening degree (if you care about free speech) of control over broadcast licensing to pressure from citizens – and not even a lot of them; organization will count for more than numbers, just as it did before 1987.

The little jagoffs with the suits and the Yale ties?  Yeah, buddy – they want control.

It’s true that a big part of civility is what one says.  Things like calling someone you disagree with “Hitler” – bad.  Very very uncivil.

Another big part of civility is what you say back.  For example – if someone calls you “Hitler“, and you’re not actually a Nazi, “civility” involves responding to incivility in a civilized manner.

Civil responses:

• Ignoring the person who called you a “nazi”, because civil people ignore barbarians.
• Defuse the incivility with humor: “Er, no – have you tried to goosestep in shoes like this?”
• Look at  your attacker, affect a casual grin, and go “there you go again…”

Uncivil response:

• Call down the entire force of government to silence your opponent.

Remember – “civility” is a two-way street.

For years, South Dakota’s been pilfing  jobs from high-tax Minnesota for years, in a campaign that features radio ads and billboards around the Twin Cities comparing the states’ various, very different tax philosophies.

It looks like we’ll be seeing more of these campaigns.  John Edwards was right – there are Two Americas.  One of them is the states that’ll deal with budget deficits by cutting their spending.  The other will do it by raising taxes.

Wisconsin is in the first America. Illinois – which just passed a series of tax hikes that have Genghis Khan’s ghost coming back from the great beyond to tell the Illinois legislature “look, subjects can only pay so much tribute…”

Kim Strassel notes the contrast:

Illinois this week earned the honor of becoming the first state in 2011 to sock it to taxpayers, passing a tax hike the size of Lake Michigan. Citizens cried out, legislators deflected, but the most interesting response came from neighboring Wisconsin, where newly elected GOP Gov. Scott Walker had three words for Illinois businesses: “Escape to Wisconsin.”

Across the country, dozens of new governors are taking office, fine-tuning state-of-the-state addresses, polishing budgets. With each event we are seeing a growing national divide.

On one side are wide swathes of the country that this past midterm elected reformers intent on slashing spending and reviving growth. On the other are the holdout pockets—Illinois, California, Massachusetts, Connecticut—drifting further into the abyss of tax and spend. The chasm has huge implications, not just for local and regional politics but for Washington.

Mr. Walker is painting that gulf as big as the Grand Canyon, this week blitzing the Chicago media markets to let suffering Illinois businesses know that while their governor, Pat Quinn, levies a 50% increase in corporate income taxes, Wisconsin is working to enact the total elimination of corporate income taxes for two years for firms that migrate. The “Escape to Wisconsin” line comes from an old tourism campaign, but Mr. Walker thinks it sums up the business choice perfectly. “We’re going to send out that line to every employer in the state of Illinois,” he tells me

Speaking of which – Governor Dayton announced he’ll have a budget ready by February 15.  Remember – the Governor has told the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce that business in the state is “undertaxed”.  If his “team” does the same job it did over the summer, it’s going to be a long winter for the Administration.

(Perhaps he’ll call his critics “anti-gay”, like he did during the campaign…)

If there’s an upperclassman in the Legislature that seems ready to pick up Pat Pariseau and Linda Boudreau’s mantel as the champion of the Second Amendment in Minnesota, it’d seem to be Representative Tony Cornish.  Cornish – from Good Thunder, and a police chief in his non-legislative life – has been the Second Amendment movement’s legislative point man in the post-Personal-Protection-Act era.

And as a Second Amendment point man, he’s been busy this past week.

Sally Jo Sorenson at leftyblog Bluestem Prairie has a  critique.   To an extent, it’s one I expected; to another…:

Bluestem readers know that I favor gun rights, and my position might not be the most popular one in America right now, especially among my friends on the left. So be it.

…less so.  We in the Second Amendment Civil Rights movement are always well-advised to give our props to the outstate Democrats who supported the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, the Pre-Emption statute, and so many other of the bits of legislation that have made Minnesota suck less than it could have as re the human right to self-defense.

So: Props.

That being said, an article in the Mankato Free Press has left me scratching my head. What is state representative Tony Cornish, who chairs the Public safety committee in the Minnesota House, really asking for in Cornish: What if somebody had been at shooting and returned fire?

It’s not as academic a question as some on the left – maybe including Sorensen, maybe not, we’ll see later – think it is.

Cornish is suggesting no major changes in the way security is provided for state lawmakers. But his take on the Arizona assassination attempt of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, which killed six people and wounded 13, matches previous opinions he’s offered after shooting sprees: He wishes someone in the crowd had a weapon and had been ready to respond.

I can see the grandstanding on guns. I can see the pandering to those of us who support gun rights. It’s politically astute, and Cornish is as polished a politician as ever had a Good Thunder post office box as a mailing address.

What I can’t see is the logic, given the set of facts at the scene of the spree murder in Arizona. Slate reports in Gabrielle Giffords and the perils of guns: How an armed hero nearly shot the wrong man:

Almost.

The article – by the generally not loathsome Will Saletan – notes that Zamudio very nearly shot the wrong person:

Saletan:

But before we embrace Zamudio’s brave intervention as proof of the value of being armed, let’s hear the whole story. “I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready,” he explained on Fox and Friends. “I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this.” Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. “And that’s who I at first thought was the shooter,” Zamudio recalled. “I told him to ‘Drop it, drop it!’ “

But the man with the gun wasn’t the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. “Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess,” the interviewer pointed out.

And it would have.   It illustrates one of the major travails of self-defense – it’s full of risks.  There are thousands of self-defense shootings a year in the United States.  The shooter kills the wrong person about 1-2% of the time.  The rate for cops, by the way, is about three times higher; not because cops are irresponsible shooters (usually), but because they arrive on the scene of an incident later, when the situation gets more fraught and confusing.  A classic example: in Saint Paul a few years ago, the police got into a gun battle with a couple of armed robbers.  One of the robbers, hit by police gunfire, dropped a shotgun.  A passerby – a twenty-something guy – picked up the shotgun, perhaps hoping to get a piece of the robbers.  The cops, not knowing who was who, shot and killed him; in the confusion of the situation, there was no way to know he wasn’t one of the robbers.

Sort of like Mr. Zamudio almost did.  Only not being a cop, Zamudio is not legally indemnified against such mistakes.

Sorenson:

One thing Zamudio didn’t have was the training required of every carry permit holder in Minnesota, and under Arizona’s laws, there’s no telling how effective a random good citizen can have been in the situation.

Which cuts both ways; Minnesota’s concealed carry training focuses on legalities, not tactics.  The record nationwide among law-abiding citizens, with or without training, is generally very good.

Certainly, Loughner, who had purchased his Glock legally, was aware of the fact that anyone in the crowd or nearby (like Zamudio) could be carrying. He was not deterred.

Insanity, like drugs and booze, both make their victims a little dodgy on consequences.

Cornish suggests that more people start carrying at the Capitol; it’s legal, and there’s nothing stopping a law-abiding citizen who follows the rule for the premises to do so. But his concerns about the state capitol’s design and the nature of the foot traffic inside make me wonder whether counting on an attacker being a “coward” in the face of returned fire is much defense at all.

I’ve noticed that among the left when they’re talking about guns and citizens’ right to self-defense; criminals turn into infantry.  The sound of 230 grains of steel-jacketed hurt sailing by at 750 feet a second is enough to make just about anyone turn and high-tail away; the military works long and hard to train people to go about their business with bullets whizzing past.  Most criminals won’t.  Oh, some will; the odd veteran (like the ex-Marine who shot the two Saint Paul cops in 1994), the very high, the extremely dissociative.  But most people, criminal or otherwise, have a pretty finely-tuned self-preservation instinct.

But here’s where Rep. Cornish is important; situations like Mr. Zamudio’s are also full of legal pitfalls.

Imagine this.  You’re in Saint Paul.  Betty McCollum has decided to come out from under her rock, and in a moment of not being distracted by shiny objects, she decides to do a public appearance (this requires some suspension of disbelief).  You attend.  Being a law-abiding citizen with a carry permit, you bring your piece, tastefully hidden in your pocket.

As Rep. McCollum stands on the platform surrounded by Teachers Union goons, you see someone next to you raising a gun.  With nightmarish slowness as the adrenaline warps your perception, the woman – wearing a “Public Option NOW” T-Shirt – fires three shots.  Thankfully, she shanks the shot high and away, and misses the Representative and everyone else – but she’s firing a Glock, so you know there’s more where that came from.  You draw (as you responsibly note that your “backstop” is a cement-block wall, and that there are no innocent parties in the line of fire), and fire two shots at center mass, just like Joel Rosenberg taught you.  The target drops to the ground.  You call 911 first, and then your lawyer – again just like Joel taught you – perhaps saving as many as a dozen lives (one for each bullet the woman’s Glock still had in the magazine).

Were you right?

In terms of overriding moral principles?  Hell yeah.

Under Minnesota law?  You’re only as safe as your County Attorney’s relative level of anti-gun zealotry will let you be.  Since someone’s dead, the police would pretty much have to arrest you.  Ramco Attorney John Choi and his minions could note that Minnesota law requires four elements for you to claim self-defense; you can not be a willing participant, you have to reasonably fear death or great bodily harm, you have to make a reasonable effort to disengage, and lethal force has to be reasonably appropriate – where “Reasonable” means, in every case, “would convince a jury”.   And if they wanted to (and it is entirely a matter of their discretion) they could point out that while, yes, it’s nice that you saved all those lives, you didn’t try to retreat, and the woman wasn’t actually shooting at you, so your fear of death or mutilation wasn’t reasonable.  And if you get a jury full of Merriam Park harpies with “You Can’t Hug A Child With Nuclear Arms” stickers on their Volvos and Subarus and Prii, then it’s off to jail with you.

Perhaps Rep. McCollum will send you a Christmas card in jail?

Rep. Cornish has tried in successive sessions to introduce bills that’d take some of the ambiguity out of Minnesota’s self-defense law; to remove the very ambiguous requirement to try to retreat, and also to stop requiring people to assess the motives of someone who breaks into their home.  The DFL legislature gundecked…er, sorry, scuppered those very sensible bills (with a leg up from a compliant media).

And whether you call it “grandstanding” or “being a great American”, now is Rep. Cornish’s time.  There’s a conservative majority, and a Governor who bragged on the campaign trail about having twin .357s in a gun locker in  his house.

And that’s why Cornish is important.

There’s something about every addiction.  Something that reminds the addict of the rush, the cool part, of their addiction.

To me, it’s the faint smell of ozone  you get around electrical equipment that was part of the atmosphere, literally and metaphorically, in every radio station.

I’ve noticed you get a lot less of it at AM1280 than in the stations I grew up with; radio’s become a solid-state, computerized industry, and computers just don’t give off ozone like the stacks and racks and rooms full of 1930’s-1950’s vintage relays and tube  preamps and wired electrical gear in the KEYJ studio I grew up in, or the 60’s-era remotes and ’70’s satellite demods and 1950’s diesel generators at KSTP-AM; you can get the faintest whiff of it in the engineering bay, upstairs from our studio bunker.

Just enough for the smell to trigger the memories.

———-

It’d been a week since I had talked with “Mister Ed” at the Mermaid.  After almost four years of head-banging futility, it was dizzying how fast the process of getting onboard at KDWB had been.

What was not dizzying was my actual job.  I’d be a phone screener/producer/gofer for the station’s Sunday disc jockeys – which, in radio terms, meant the weekday people doing their obligatory weekend shift.  I’d be making something like $6/hour, for six or eight hours of work on Sunday afternoons.

It was a toehold in radio, after all those years.  The pinkie toe on my left foot, but a toe, nonetheless.

And today, January 13, was my first day.

I drove from the house in Saint Paul to Thresher Square, on Third Street by Chicago Avenue, more or less kittycorner (at least conceptually) from the Metrodome, parked in the side lot, and opened the front door with my brand-new key.  I took the elevator up to the third floor…

…and stepped back into the world of the addict.  The hustle and bustle – even on the weekend, in its own way.  The burble of speakers.  The throb of different audio signals – KDWB’s “Contemporary Hit Radio” (what used to be called “Top Forty”) groove mixing with the oldies at “K63”, KDWB-AM, as they wafted out the door of the engineering room.

And the ozone.  I could smell just a hint of it; from the amps in engineering, from K63’s twenty-year-old control board, from wherever.

I was back in the ozone.

I wandered past the unoccupied receptionist desk, down past a row of offices across from a glass wall looking out over the building’s atrium, past K-63’s small studio (manned by a wan, swarthy-looking fellow who pointed me two doors down to the FM studio).  The “on-air” light was on.  I stood in the hall as a wiry guy with an impossibly deep voice talked through a break.  He “hit his post” (radio jargon for “talked over the song’s instrumental intro, bitting off “One Oh One Point Three, Kay Dee Dubbleyou Bee” a fraction of a beat before the song’s vocal kicked in), and flicked the mike off.   I knocked twice and opened the door.

“Hey, I’m Mitch”, I said.

“Heeeey.  Spyder Harrison”, in a booming voice two octaves below mine. After the introductions, he sent me to the other end of the hall, to the break room, to get him four – count ’em, four – cups of coffee, each with three sugars.   He set them on the console table, on the far corner from the control board and the “log” paperwork – and seemed to forget about them.

I spent the day learning the Top Forty Gofer trade; I pulled each hour’s music and commercials, in order, and had them stacked on the console table ready for each hour, half an hour before the top of the hour.  When Spyder ran a contest, I answer the phone (Hint:  When he said “We’ll take caller 101”, it was really more like caller four); while Spyder recorded his conversation with the caller, I ran the board, playing songs and spots (and never, ever talking on the air; an absolute, inviolable rule), watching as he slashed the tape of the “interview” with the winner into a neatly-packaged twenty-second audio gem, with a razor blade, on reel-to-reel tape, with seconds to spare before his break.  He took the board, quickly fine-tuned the tape’s cueing, opened the mic as I got back in the producer seat, and started his patter…

“101.3 KDWB, we have a winn-ah!  Who’s this?”, he said, rolling the tape to the sound of Ashley or Brandi or Cari from Brooklyn Center or Maple Grove or Richfield’s disembodied voice replied off the tape, timed perfectly, sounding like it was a live phone call.

And we did it again next hour.

After a couple of hours, Kris Adams – a short, ebullient twentysomething woman with dark brunette hair in a Dorothy Hamill hairdo – came into the studio to take over.  The station’s former graveyard shift jock, she’d gone part-time (I learned that afternoon) to pursue voice-over work (quite successfully) and have a real life – including getting married (the month before).  We had a great chat as the shift wore on through the afternoon; contests, phone calls, stacking hours…

…and then my first day in radio – sort of – in three and a half years was over.

I walked out, and drove home, the smell of ozone still knocking around my brain.

Deficit, Schmeficit; Jesse Jackson Junior feels nervous:

Just last week, the House voted to slash its operating budget by 5 percent, or $35 million, as part of the GOP drive to reduce federal spending the cut the deficit.

Jackson wants that money restored, plus 10 percent, in order to augment security in the Capitol and in districts, where he said some lawmakers may need to hire security for constituent events and install surveillance cameras in their district offices.

“After the events of last weekend, it is clear that our district staffs are vulnerable,” Jackson said in an e-mail. “Members should have the resources and the latitude to take appropriate security measures in order to protect themselves and their staffs.”

Representative Jackson: there were over 430 homicides in Chicago last year; that’s seventy Tuscons, each one as bloody, horrible and ghastly as the one in Tuscon.  There were 25 murders in December – more than four Tuscons, over the holiday season.

The people in your district are hunkered down against a three-year-long rash of gang warfare; more prosaic, perhaps, than an insane man shooting up a congresswoman and her constituents at a store, but really no less insane.

Hire an off-duty cop when you make your rounds of your constituents, if you still do that, and shush.

Lawmakers are also nervous about security inside the Capitol complex, despite the hundreds of armed police officers who already guard it each day and the extensive screening required for those entering Capitol Hill buildings

And those “lawmakers” are being just a tad dramatic.  The Capitol has been like a maximum security prison – only for people coming in – for decades.

Forbes says F the Twin Cities are the number four Job Market in the US:

“The Twin Cities, and Minnesota in general, has a much more diverse economy than many other parts of the nation,” said Vang. “While our heart goes out to all those individuals who are unemployed right now, our economy tends not to be as hurt as bad as nationally because we are never dependent on one sector. We didn’t extend ourselves as far out during the home mortgage crisis as other cities did so that gave us more breathing room for our economy to return.”

Hmmmm.

Of course, the market isn’t great for everyone:

One of the thousands hoping for an economic recovery is Riordan Frost, 22, of St. Paul. Eight months after college graduation, Frost is still looking for…

For what?

…a public policy job.

“Left college with high hopes, thinking ‘here I am world,’ and it turn out that way, sadly,” he said.

Maybe young Mr. Frost will take the opportunity to find a career someplace other than trying to run society.  At age twenty freaking two.

Frost tried plan B, which was looking for retail jobs and a job at movie theatres — all without luck. He is now working as an unpaid intern at the MN 2020 organization as a transportation policy associate.

Or maybe not.

Anyway – DAMN YOU, Governor Pawlenty.

Mr. D. on the Wellstone Tuscon memorial with the President, and on the left’s newfound love of “civility”:

Civility comes from mutual agreement. It cannot be imposed by one side on the other. And it certainly can’t come until those who were party to the baseless calumnies heaped in recent days step forward and accept their responsibility for it. We can have an honest debate if we have honest debaters.

President Obama gave his allies on the Left a chance to climb down from the untenable place they have chosen to occupy. It is my hope that those allies will see fit to use the opportunity he has provided. If they do, the debate that so many people claim to desire will happen. If not — game on.

For myself?  I’ll sit in the back of the bus, and hide my knive so nobody brings a gun.

The state of Illinois is experiencing the fiscal shit storm of the century. Minnesota isn’t far behind.

The difference? There’s a chance Minnesotans won’t get the shaft like like our friends in Illinois just did.

Our hard-won and just-in-time GOP majority, if our elected representatives stay true to their mission, will force a different tact in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn defended a massive increase in state income taxes passed by lawmakers Wednesday and promised to quickly sign the measure to help heal the state’s ailing finances.

Lawmakers worked overnight to pass the increase to raise the personal income tax rate from 3 percent to 5 percent for four years — a 66 percent increase. Corporate income taxes also will rise, but Quinn rejected the notion that it would decimate businesses.

Then again, that’s not the point. The point is that governments both State and Federal will continue to spend beyond their means as long as they know that they can always raise taxes down the road.

The rate increase might be the biggest any state has adopted in percentage terms while grappling with recent economic woes. Nevertheless, Illinois’ tax rate would remain lower than in several other states in the region.

Some comfort that must be. They’re less worst.

“It’s important for their state government not to be a fiscal basket case,” Quinn told reporters outside his Capitol office.

Legislative leaders rushed early Wednesday to pass the politically risky plan before a new General Assembly was sworn in at noon, taking a slice out of the Democratic majority and removing lame-duck lawmakers willing to support the tax before leaving office.

Nice move. Screw the people and vacate.

The tax increase will be coupled with strict 2 percent limits on spending growth. If officials spend above those limits, the tax increase will automatically be canceled. The plan’s supporters warned that rising pension and health care costs probably will eat up all the spending allowed by the caps, forcing cuts in other areas of government.

Here’s a novel idea. How about a spending freeze? Everyone else has had to do so. Why not government?

House Speaker Michael Madigan said Republicans should have supported some parts of the plan instead of voting against everything. The proposal passed the House on Tuesday night 60-57, the bare minimum. No Republicans backed the measure there or in the Senate, where the measure passed 30-29.”They’re on the sidelines. They don’t want to get on the field of play,” the Chicago Democrat said. “I’m happy that the day has ended.”

But Republicans noted they were not included in negotiations. They also fundamentally reject the idea of raising taxes after years of spending growth.

…but there apparently weren’t enough of them to prevail. Luckily for Minnesota, we painted our House and Senate Red just in time.

“We’re saying to the people of Illinois, `For eight years we’ve overspent, now we’re going to make it your problem,'” said Rep. Roger Eddy. “We’re making up for our mistakes on your back.”

The increase means an Illinois resident who now owes $1,000 in state income taxes will pay $1,666 at the new rate. After four years, the rate drops to 3.75 percent and that same taxpayer will then owe $1,250.

Republicans predict the tax eventually will be made permanent.

That ladies and gentlemen is what we call “The Slippery Slope.”

“It’s a cruel hoax to play on citizens to say this is temporary,” said House Minority Leader Tom Cross, R-Oswego.

Funny how that works for liberals. Tax cuts are always temporary. Tax increases are always permanent.

Republicans also accused Democrats of doing irreparable harm to Illinois families and businesses. Business leaders decried the proposal as a job-killer.

“Based on this particular legislation the only businesses that will benefit are the moving companies that will be helping many of my members move out of this particular state,” said Gregory Baise, head of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association.

I suppose having a sense of humor has served him well lately.

Governors of some neighboring states quickly jumped on the issue. Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who took office last week has already proposed a tax cut for businesses that relocate to Wisconsin from other states, invited companies to head north.

Atta boy. I’m still coveting.

“Years ago Wisconsin had a tourism advertising campaign targeted to Illinois with the motto, ‘Escape to Wisconsin,'” Walker said Wednesday in a statement. “Today we renew that call to Illinois businesses, ‘Escape to Wisconsin.’ You are welcome here.”

“And we won’t tax you up the wazoo!”

Quinn scoffed at the notion. “Lots of luck to them, but that’s not going to happen.”

Except for the fact that it already is.

Democrats also bristled at being blamed for the state’s financial problems, although they’ve controlled the governor’s office and both legislative chambers since 2003.

Thank God that never happens in Minnesota (crosses fingers).

Superintendent Silva S released her plan for overhauling te Saint Paul schools yesterday.  And all I can say is, I’m glad my kids are done with the SPPS.

The plan involves some ideas that are, frankly, perfectly good and drawn from common sense:

The decades-old option for St. Paul parents to bus their children to virtually any school in the city would be largely dismantled as part of a three-year plan laid out Tuesday by Superintendent Valeria Silva that also pledges cost-savings, higher student achievement and greater consistency among schools.

Saint Paul switched to a school-choice system back in the eighties, in the wake of an epochal federal lawsuit against the Kansas City schools that required the district to offer the same choices to every student that were available in the wealthiest district – a requirement that was translated into a plethora of magnet programs, and massive busing to get students to the programs.

The plan has its ups and downs:

Neighborhood Schools:  I’ve advocated for neighborhood schools – small, geographic schools located near where the kids live – for a long time.

The plan gets the “Geography” part, more or less.  But the keys to making small neighborhood schools work are

• They’ve gotta be small
• They have to be places parents feel good sending the kids.

The problem is, a lot of these “neighborhood” schools will be the same big warehouses we have today, only drawing their students from a different blotch on a map.

The Good Effort After Bad?: Among my biggest concerns: reading between the lines of Silva’s statements, it looks as if she’s looking to focus her efforts on improving district test scores.  Speaking of the magnet system, Silva notes…:

…it works well for the high-achievers, she said, while offering virtually no benefit to low-income students and students of color and thus not making a dent in the “significant achievement gap in St. Paul Public Schools.”

And so the high achiever is going to have to plunk down into a seat and plod along until their less-school-oriented classmates decide to catch up?

This is, of course, one of the great dangers of the factory-model public school system; the idea that you have a one-size-fits-all “model” of education that has to work for every student.  But that’s a separate discussion, one we’ve had before.

And one we’ll have again soon – because it’s  another of the “features” of Silva’s plan:

The Home Office:  Silva wants the school’s programs to be more…alike:

Overall, Silva pledged to implement more centralized control over the way material is taught in classrooms and money is used by schools, as a way to ensure a consistent experience from school to school.

The devil is in the details with this one; at its worst, it means that the city’s teachers are going to be even more driven by centralized curriculum planners than they are now.

Magnets:  It seems to be a big rollback of the idea of the Magnet school.  Conservatives bag on the magnet schools, largely for the wrong reasons.  It’s a simple fact that not every kid is wired to respond to the same program.  Different peoples’ brains – and kids are people, let’s remember – respond to different subjects.  Every brain is different- and trying to force them all to be the same just makes the different-enough ones that don’t have the support or compulsion to “make it” check out of the idea of “education”, sometimes for years, sometimes for the rest of their lives.  Speaking for myself, junior high was a complete wasteland except for languages and music. Some kids’ brains get cranked up by working with their hands, some by science, some by reading, some by just getting outside and running, for crying out loud.  The one-size-fits-all cookie cutter school is a good way to make sure most of the kids we just describe think of school as a gruelling duty to plod through (at best).

Unfortunately, in my experience the Saint Paul schools didn’t do magnets especially well.  Most of the  magnets did double duty as “neighborhood” schools; the “magnet” program in art or science had to also account for not a few kids who weren’t there to learn art or science!

One of Silva’s motivations is to reverse the slide of students and families from the district schools; while the district is losing students slower than Minneapols, it’s still lost 1/8 of its enrollment in recent years.

We’ll see.ite.

“Although we don’t yet know the official cause of yesterday’s [Fill in terrible event] in [Fill in location of terrible event], it seems obvious that the irresponsible and inflammatory [Pick one:  “vitriol” or “anti-government budget proposal]” ] coming from [Pick any three from the following list:  the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, the current GOP majority in the House of Representatives, the Taxpayers League, Christian fundamtntalists, the NRA, extreme pro-lifers, Fox News] are the prime suspects.”

“We don’t know officially know exactly what [Pick one:  “Put the gun in [the suspect’s] hand” or “caused the [natural or man-made disaster]” ], but vitriol from the right, which polluted much of American politics from 1992 to 2000, and started again in 2009, is surely the prime suspect.”

“We only know one thing for sure; it is for us who remain to speak for the victims; “[Pick one:  “Quit your dilly-dallying and approve the Democrats’ budget proposal” or “take a fresh look at sensible gun control]” ]; while you’re at it, perhaps it’s time to look into reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, to make sure those without voices – Congress, the mainstream media and The People – aren’t drowned out in the flood of vitriol from [Pick any three from the following list:  the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, the current GOP majority in the House of Representatives, the Taxpayers League, Christian fundamtntalists, the NRA, extreme pro-lifers, Fox News].”

“-30-“

Watching The Today Show this morning, I saw very, very little talk about “vitriolic conservatives” in the coverage of the Giffords shooting.

And now, even the Arizona Republic is putting its foot down on Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Democrat who blamed conservative rhetoric for the shooting before the blood had even dried at the Safeway.

Fair enough – he was emotional.  But then he repeated the charge yesterday.  And even the Republic is saying enough is enough:

And, in response, we have to say at last . . . enough. Enough attacks, sheriff. Enough vitriol. It is well past time for the sheriff of Pima County to get a grip on his emotions and remember his duty.

With each passing hour, we learn more about the 22-year-old suspect. And everything we learn adds to the profile of a deeply troubled young man detached from reality. There is nothing to date that suggests any partisan motivation for his crimes, whether right-wing or left.

Dupnik needs to recall that he is elected to be a lawman. With each additional comment, the Democratic sheriff of Pima County is revealing his agenda as partisan, and, as such, every bit as recklessly antagonistic as the talk-show hosts and politicians he chooses to decry.

When even some parts of the mainstream media (we know, the NYTimes is beyond hope) get it, maybe there’s some hope.

I grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota.

One of the town’s main industries is, and has for 130 years been, the North Dakota State Hospital, a place that’s seen a century’s worth of psychiatric fads – from restraint to sterilization to electroshock to drugs – come and go.

In the seventies, the fad – driven by the ACLU and the social “sciences” academy – was deinstitutionalization.  Mandates passed in the late seventies saw a good chunk of the State Hospital’s population converted from inpatients to outpatients.  Some of these outpatients had noplace else to go, so they gravitated down the hill into Jamestown itself.  To this day, some of them wander the city’s “loop” – First Avenue, Tenth Street – day in, day out, drinking coffee and doing whatever their various combinations of disorders and medications tell them to do.

One of those former inpatients was “Kenny” (name changed, partly for his privacy, partly because after 20-odd years I don’t actually remember it).   Of all the characters that came down the hill, Kenny was pretty distinctive.  He wore a red, military-style beret with some sort of badge worn on front, commando-style, and a brown vest adorned with all sorts of military patches – all home-made – and embroidered with “Satan’s Angels” on the back.  He and his girlfriend, “Sue”, would wander the loop together.  They were also regulars at the bar at the Holiday Inn where I worked after my junior year of college.  Kenny would park all evening in a stool and tell stories of his time in a “Marine Special Forces” unit in Vietnam; of battles fought in jungles we’d never heard of…

…because they didn’t exist.  He told stories of units that didn’t exist, and places that didn’t either.  He told stories that real Vietnam vets heard and scoffed at – but nobody really pushed it with the guy, not that I saw – because he looked and sounded mentally ill.

And so for years, Kenny and Sue wandered the streets of Jamestown.  Time rolled on.  I moved to the Cities.  And one day, four or five years later, someone from Jamestown told me Kenny had strangled Sue to death, and been shot by the police in a standoff.

Question:  On whose vitriolic political rhetoric should we have blamed the murder?

With the brush of what fringe political thinker could we tar Kenny’s demented act?

As the world learns more about Jarred Loughner, the unlikelihood that any “political rhetoric” had even the most oblique role in causing his atrocity over the weekend is becoming more and more clear to just about everyone.

Everyone that hasn’t been waiting for something to come along to shut up the newly-uppity right, anyway.

America’s village idiot Paul Krugman tipped his hand, comparing the episode to Oklahoma City in his deeply depraved column over the weekend.  But he wasn’t entirely off base; there was at least one valid comparison to 1995.

Back then, Bill Clinton had just seen his agenda repudiated at the polls with the second-greatest mid-term drubbing in recent memory.  The left lost both chambers of Congress for the first time in more than a generation.  Clinton needed something to get his message across; his administration didn’t “waste the crisis”; Hillary as much as blamed the horror on Rush Limbaugh and his “rhetoric”.

It was, of course, “rhetoric”, itself.

Today’s left isn’t wasting the Tuscon massacre.  Carolyn McCarthy (D[emigog], NY) is using the crisis to introduce gun control legislation of the type that utterly failed to prevent her own husband from being murdered in New York, or to keep Chicago from being the most dangerous city in the Western Hemisphere north of Juarez – a place that suffers as many deaths as Tuscon once or more a week.

And James Clyburn wants to redefine free speech as, well…:

The shooting is cause for the country to rethink parameters on free speech, Clyburn said from his office, just blocks from the South Carolina Statehouse. He wants standards put in place to guarantee balanced media coverage with a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, in addition to calling on elected officials and media pundits to use ‘better judgment.’

‘Free speech is as free speech does,’ he said. ‘You cannot yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater and call it free speech and some of what I hear, and is being called free speech, is worse than that.’

Clyburn used as an example a comment made by Sharron Angle, an unsuccessful U.S. senatorial candidate in Nevada, who said the frustrated public may consider turning to ‘Second Amendment remedies’ for political disputes unless Congress changed course.

Clyburn’s lying, by the way; Michael Medved addressed Angle’s “second amendment remedies” comment last August (here’s the audio).  Angle was not calling for armed insurrection…

…but as we’ve seen throughout the left’s reaction to the Tuscon massacre – as during the Healthcare debate, with its spurious claims of violence – what people actually say and do isn’t really the issue.

I apologize.

You see when it snows like this – you know, constant, fine, light snow, the roads get slippery and when you hit the gas you slip and slide.

You sit and spin.

The thing is…ever since I got this car with all-wheel-drive, when I hit the gas, I just go.

Rain, snow, small animals, volcanic ash. Nothing can stop me!

Yes!!! It’s like I’m a God!!!!!

Lord of the Lanes! Baron of the Boulevard! Potentate of the Interstate!

Four-wheeled power – an advantage, right?! Sure…if you’re not in front of me when the light turns green.

And when you are, I get so very anxious. I’ve become an all-wheel-drive snob and I’m not proud of it.

“C’mon! Letsgo letsgo letsgo letsgo letsgo letsgo letsgo letsgo letsgo! What?! Are you paid by the hour!!!”

(not that there’s anything wrong with that)

It’s like being the guy that gets frustrated and everyone thinks is so annoying because his Mensa IQ affords him the luxury of “getting” things so much quicker, but then he has to wait until everyone else catches up while he rolls his eyes.

He’s not the one that gets the girl, is he.

Like that insipid commercial for AT&T where the portly passenger with the fastest network gets the download quicker than everyone else in the car, and laughs out loud. Thirty more seconds go by and the rest of the passengers get the download and do the same.

They’re the popular ones. They’re late, but having all the fun.

It’s lonely at the top.

This winter we’ve had way more than our share of snow and as a result we’ve been sitting in lines, three lanes wide, like cattle in a slaughter line, waiting waiting waiting to get to the office or home.

And there I sit, with the power to go go go!!!  …if it weren’t for the 1985 Crown Vic in front of me.

It’s like a curse.

God I miss my Harley.

Barry is selling it but not everyone is buying his form of plagiarism.

President Barack Obama said U.S. job growth is improving after a government report showed employers added 103,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell to 9.4 percent in December from 9.8 percent in November.

In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama today credited steps taken by his administration to reduce taxes and encourage business investment with helping to restore economic confidence and boost hiring.

Really Barry? Steps taken by your administration are responsible for discouraging people from looking for jobs?

A little perspective might be indicated at this juncture, with all due respect, Mr. President:

Although the jobless rate dropped substantially to 9.4% in December from 9.8% a month earlier, the Labor Department said Friday, employers increased payrolls by only 103,000. Economists say that is barely enough to keep up with natural growth in the labor force. Much faster employment and enduring job gains—on the order of 200,000 jobs a month—are needed for lasting improvement.

The decline in the jobless rate, paradoxically, was partly a sign of economic weakness—many people have given up on finding jobs, and thus were not counted as unemployed. Some 8.4 million jobs were shed during the recession, and in 2010 just 1.1 million were added.

Between you and a Congress that was almost gutted of your ilk in November, you’ve spent billions and billions of dollars that we don’t have…sacrificing our nation’s very solvency to create a few hundred thousand jobs when millions and millions have been lost?

Employers in the U.S. added fewer jobs than forecast in December, confirming Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s view that it could take “four to five more years” for the labor market to completely mend.

…and that may be just as optimistic and his assertions that the latent, yet unrealized effect of the trillions of “quantitative easing” will be quite manageable down the road.

Payrolls increased 103,000, less than the median projection of 150,000 in a Bloomberg News survey, Labor Department figures showed yesterday in Washington. The jobless rate fell to 9.4 percent, partly reflecting a shrinking workforce as discouraged Americans stopped looking for work. [emphasis mine-JR]

Lest we not forget why those [JR does that thing with your fingers that denotes quote-unquote] “steps” were taken by [again] “his administration.”

Mr. Obama attributed increasingly optimistic economic forecasts in part to the deal he negotiated last month with Republicans to extend Bush-era tax rates for all, along with unemployment benefits, a payroll-tax cut and assorted other tax breaks.

A deal decried by liberals. A deal that was essentially forced upon him. A move that Obama could have made two years ago had he truly been focused on jobs then.

It is a product of the aforementioned “shellacking” (in the President’s words no less) in November coupled with a sashay to the middle to save what little is left in his political capital account.

President Obama may owe former President Bill Clinton a few finder’s fees, considering all the former Clinton aides he’s been bringing into his administration to help him get through the next two years and win a second term.

Maybe my title should be “Back-Peddler in Chief.”

Pat yourself on the butt Mr. President.

Mission Accomplished.

Unfortunately, much of the advice available on the web is downright ridiculous.

You mean like this:

STEP #8: Play Dead. If you’re shot, lie down and play dead.  With any luck, the shooter will not come over and finish you off.

Uh, no. If I’m shot, and it’s possible, I’m going with:

STEP #7: RUN! If the shooter actively shoots at you, run away in a zigzag pattern.  You’d be surprised how difficult it is to hit something that’s moving like that.

I’ll play dead when I am.

Since I haven’t done it, at least in writing, I’d like to send this note into the ether in the hopes that some of it skitters about the cosmos and finds its way to Rep. Giffords and her family, and those of the other victims of last Saturday’s shooting.

To the families of the six dead: nothing can replace your loss, or make up for the arbitrary, demented nature of it all.  I can only hope and pray that you find some peace and comfort, sometime.  I am sorry beyond words for your loss.

For those wounded: I  hope you recover completely physically – and as completely as possible, mentally, spiritually and emotionally.

And to Representative Giffords: I pray that the miracles keep coming.

In all sincerity, I thank the God we both believe in that the bullet took one of the infinitesimal paths it could have taken through the human brain that left you (as I write this) not only alive, but responsive enough to leave doctors optimistic about your prognosis.

I know you have a couple of young children.  The thought of being yanked away from them by any of life’s arbitrary caprices – to say nothing of this sort of evil – used to haunt me when my kids were that age; I hope you and yours are together again as soon as humanly possible.

Political differences should be tabled at times like this.  It should go without saying.

Anyway – for whatever its feeble worth, I hope for the best for all of you.

Oops.  Sorry about the “rhetoric”.  Gotta watch me – I’m a loose cannon…

…DOH!  I mean, I’m a ticking time bomb…

AAAAAGH! I mean “I’m on Janet Napolitano’s Watch List because of  my beliefs”.  Whew.  OK.  Made it.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.  The Minnesota Legislative session.

Back during the campaign, when I’d do appearances at campaign fundraisers and the like, I frequently signed off my brief talks with challenges to everyone there; to the voters, the challenge was “on November 3,  your work really begins; you’ll need to keep these candidates true to their promises”.  And to the candidates, it was an allusion to the legend of the Spartans, to told departing warriors “come back with your shield, or on it“…

DOH!  Sorry – another bit of inflammatory rhetoric!  Paul Krugman will be displeased!

Breathe.  Center.  OK.

The bit of rhetoric, in context, is generally understood to mean “fight the good fight, politically; don’t put your re-election ahead of the princples for which we’re sending you to Saint Paul”.

It’s good to see the GOP legislative majority is making its first moves this week.  We’ve got two bits of news to report.

More Nukes!:  With energy prices spiking just in time for the hardest winter in decades, it’s perhaps great timing for the GOP to push for the repeal of Minnesota’s dim-witted 17-year-old “moratorium” on nuclear power plants.

Bills to end the 17-year ban will be introduced today in the House and Senate, with a House committee scheduled to vote on the proposal Tuesday. The chief sponsors will be state Rep. Joyce Peppin, R-Rogers, and Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch, R-Buffalo.

With new Republican majorities in both bodies, the legislation is expected to pass easily. Then its fate would be up to Gov. Mark Dayton, who has opposed the effort because there’s still no plan to deal with the highly radioactive nuclear waste generated at those plants.

And of course, that’s wrong; there is a plan.  It’s merely been gundecked – DOH, sorry, I mean it’s been sabotaged by generations of soggy-headed environmentalists who apparently prefer coal power, or energy-starved poverty, to nuclear power.  “Environmentalists”, inevitably, from the DFL and their farm team, the Greens.  “Environmentalist” like Paul Aasen, Dayton’s pick to head the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, a man who targets – AAAGH – job creation and economic growth as remorselessly as Sarah Palin targets a caribou.

Both parties agree it would take years for a new plant to be approved and built. But they differ on the impact of the legislation and the need.

Republicans contend the ban, put in place in 1994 as part of a package allowing dry-cask nuclear-waste storage, must be lifted to allow serious planning to begin. Many Democrats say utilities can do that now; they just can’t act on it.

I bolded that last bit there; doesn’t that sound like someone who looooves regulation, and has not the faintest sympathy for people who actually accomplish things?  Can’t you see them giggling about that at their after-session soiree?

Xcel Energy, which owns the Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear plants, has said it has no plans for another nuclear plant.

Which might have something to do with the moratorium currently in effect…

Republicans contend there’s a greater need for the added baseload electrical generation capacity than Democrats will concede.

Democrats also have argued that ratepayers should be protected from immediate construction costs and overruns.

“I’m really concerned about our energy needs in the future,” Peppin said.

Democrats said they’re surprised Republicans are putting such an emphasis on lifting the ban.

“I’m surprised that with the huge challenges that we are facing … that that is one of the priorities they are pursuing as one of their top issues,” said Rep. Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, the House minority leader.

I can see where it might surprise Thissen.

Someone who is actually concerned with real economic growth, on the other hand, might see where inexpensive domestic power might be important for companies that are contemplating doing business in a place that is, frankly, chilly.  Perhaps the DFL believes heat comes from the Heat Fairy; most of us know better.

Jobs Jobs Jobs:  At 2PM – two hours after this post appears – the GOP Caucuses will be announcing their legislative jobs plan.  No details are available as this is written.  Stay tuned.

John McCormack on exactly how dark the Pawlenty horse is at The Weekly Standard…:

Because Pawlenty has been less coy than other likely presidential contenders about whether he’ll run, he’s generated less interest while the press is concentrating on who’s in and who’s out. And because he sparked little enthusiasm when John McCain considered him as a vice presidential nominee in 2008, he’s perceived by some as unlikely to be a finalist this time. But as he steps out into the national spotlight, Pawlenty hopes his record will attract notice. He may, in fact, be the most underestimated Republican presidential candidate​—​one who could appeal to the Tea Party and the Republican establishment.

As I wrote about Pawlenty just before he left office (it seems like it was just last week), Tim Pawlenty gets short shrift from many orthodox conservatives – at least, those who don’t believe that perfect is the enemy of just plain good enough.  Pawlenty wasn’t the perfect conservative.  But let me put this to you;  would you prefer a President who might be mushy on C-list issues like ethanol subsidies, or non-issues for governors like AGW, but who is as genuine and realistic a tax and spending hawk as there is on the national stage who can still get elected – or four more years of Obama?

Of course there are other choices – at the moment.  More on that later.

Just saying – the GOP could do, and has done, much worse.

I wasn’t going to write about this until I saw he’d written about it first.

Ryan Rhodes – who’s been running the “Rambling Rhodes” (among many other names) blog for about as long as anyone in Minnesota has been blogging, and has been a regular commenter on this blog ever since I’ve had comments – had a rough December.  He and his wife’s twins – Finn and Zoey – were born very, very prematurely, weighing a pound and a half apiece.

Finn died on New Years’ Eve.  But Zoey is hanging in there.

Unfortunately, the tragic turn of events that greeted us at the end of December, as well as the gaping hole left in our lives by Finn’s passing, has numbed my wife and me considerably when it comes to the sheer medical miracle that Zoey is still with us and fighting strong. We’ve been so mired in grief and sorrow, the everyday fact of Zoey’s continued existence almost seems like it’s the least fate could give us. Nay, owes us.

But, she is alive. And, it is rather miraculous.

She was delivered via C-section at a paltry 1 lb. 4.5 oz. I like to use the analogy of her being the size of a TV remote control, but that doesn’t really convey the reality. Her tiny size didn’t register for me until I saw her footprints alongside the footprints of my first son, Aiden, when he was born at 8 lb. 15 oz. The difference is truly staggering, like Andre the Giant next to Vern Troyer. And I remember thinking, 15 months ago, how the hell we were going to keep AIDEN ALIVE.

The delicate balance of drugs, medications, fluids, oxygen and general environment required to keep a 24-week old preemie alive is ridiculously complex. Each time I visit Zoey, I have to practically squint past the banks of machines and monitors to see the little wriggling putty of flesh that is my daughter.

He walks through the concentric miracles of both technology and infant physiology that are helping Zoey hang in there:

The lungs, which are about the most undeveloped organs in their whole bodies, can somehow be persuaded to kick things into developmental gear. It’s not an exact science, but the organs that are normally one of the last ones asked to perform can be coaxed from the bench and perform a game-saving series of plays that can make even the most die-hard pessimist hope, optimistically, for a victory. Preemie lungs are the Detroit Lions or the Cincinnati Bengals, or an expansion team.

Today was a good day. A much-needed good day. For all of us.

Tomorrow? Who the f*** knows?

But, you know what? I’m hopeful, and that’s huge.

So I’ll urge your to direct your prayers, karmic imprecations, best wishes or whatever your worldview calls for to Ryan, his wife, Aiden and, of course, Zoey.