Remember the movie Monty Python And The Holy Grail?  The part where King Arthur (Graham Chapman) battles the Black Knight (the voice of John Cleese) for the right to pass through the Knight’s land?

The solemn lesson; taunting is no substitute for action.

The DFL is hoping Minnesota’s voters haven’t learned that lesson.  On three issues this past week, the DFL has donned a red shirt to cover the bleeding and asked the GOP why they’re such a bunch of pansies about completely re-engineering government and turning the dominant taxpayer/government paradigm upside down.

Jobs: One reads more than a few leftybloggers who are chanting “The GOP said they were going to create jobs!  And yet it’s four weeks into the session, and they haven’t had a jobs bill yet!  Why’s that?  Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh?Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh? Huh?  Huh?”

Being DFLers, they may not be clear on the concept that the GOP is not going to write a bill – call it “House File 666”, just for our purposes here – saying “Employers must create jobs and  hire people, or the State Patrol will arrest them and a judge will give them an eleventy-billion dollar fine and take their business away from them”.

Silly?  Sure – but no dumber than what the Dems really think a job bill is:  government construction or entitlement projects hiring lots of (union) labor (to pay off the  markers the DFL owes them).

The GOP will cut spending and its attendant taxe and, as Tom Emmer proposed during his campaign, greatly streamline regulations.  The market will respond by starting new projects, hiring new labor.  That’s how it works in the real world.

The DFL is betting the typical voter doesn’t know that.

The Budget: Representative Ryan “Eddie” Winkler tweeted:

GOP so far has not passed a job bill, and are wimping out on their big budget cuts bill. But, they’ll deliver voter ID, guns and abortion.

Jeff Rosenberg of MNPublius – which is basically the same as Ryan Winkler, without the snazzy office – writes:

…this bill doesn’t solve our budget deficit. In fact, it barely even makes a dent, despite committing us to painful cuts.

Winkler’s idea of “wimping out” is tackling the behemoth $32 Billion budget, and its potemkin “$6.2 Billion deficit”, is filing one big honkin’ bill that does everything, in one, huge, conveniently veto-able package.

The Democrats are given to these sorts of things, of course – 2,300 page health care bills that nobody can possibly read in time and the like.  And such an omnibus spending-cut proposal  would make things really easy for the Governor and the DFL, which means it’d be pretty stupid.

Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch, speaking at a blogger conference call last night, said “that’s just absurd”.

The GOP majority (aaaaah) is doing this the right way; exposing every single piece of budgetary lard; making the DFL work to justify it in the harsh glare of public scrutiny.

It may make the DFL’s kept talking heads, Winkler and the various bloggers, itchy and nervous at the death of a thousand cuts t hey’re suffereing.  But that’s their problem. Their only priority is to keep government fat and happy, on the backs of the taxpayer.

Voter ID:  It’s pretty much been reduced to a chant; “Republicans want to keep people from the polls”.

The response, of course, is rubbish; the GOP wants to provide our dismal election system the tools it needs to ensure people only vote once, where they’re supposed to.  The GOP slso wants to provide voters the ID they need to be able to vote.  For free.  On us.  Gratis.

The DFL’s response is “It’s more complicated than that – what about the homeless?”  To which the GOP responds “we’ll have to figure something out; in the meantime, for the other 99.99% of the voting population, let us press ahead”.

To which the DFL’s  chanting heads respond…well, who knows?  The bottom line is, the DFL is fighting to keep voting anonymous and un-controlled, to their benefit.  They are not fighting to ensure the right of every Minnesotan to vote; they are fighting to keep the rules opaque enough to hide more abuses that benefit the DFL.  They should be ashamed.

But that’s never been their long suit, now, has it?

Being a DFLer means never wasting  a crisis – or a tragedy.

The Minnesota DFL is seizing on and exploiting the Tuscon Massacre in the special election campaign in House District 5B (Tony Sertich’s old seat):

A campaign brochure for Republican state legislative candidate Paul Jacobson depicting a hunter looking down a shotgun and urging voters to “take your best shot’’ while criticizing opponent Carly Melin has sparked outrage from some supporters of the DFL candidate.

Here’s the brochure:

Scary stuff, huh? A hunter, in his Elmer Fudd hat, holding a hunting shotgun. Just like most Iron Rangers do during hunting season.

Not sure if anyone is implying Carly Melin is, perhaps, rising out of a swamp and getting ready to fly south – most DFL memes really don’t make much sense.

The brochure, mailed this week to residents of Minnesota House District 5B, shows a person looking down the barrel and urges people to vote in the Feb. 15 special election to fill the open seat.

While the gun is not pointed at anything or anyone in particular, Melin’s photo is on the next page. The ad also calls Melin “a fake’’ and states that her campaign is “full of holes.’’

I’m starting to get the message; “criticizing the DFL in any way is a threat”.

Gary Cerkvenik, a longtime Iron Range DFL political activist and now a volunteer for Melin’s campaign, said the ad is eerily similar to attack ads last year that depicted several Democratic members of Congress in crosshairs. The ads were harshly panned after the attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords last month in Tucson.

And Gary Cerkvenik is “eerily similar” to a smart person, but he doesn’t quite pull it off.

“The media isn’t really liberal”.

I’ve read a couple of mildly interesting takes on that premise this past week.  Both are worth a look – partly on their merits, and partly as a measure of how much the media’s liberal bias itself serves as a sort of “instrumentation error” in any attempt to judge the media’s bias.

The first; this bit in the New York Daily News.

I won’t quote the piece, by Joshua Greenman, at length – partly because as I write this (at 5:45AM on Tuesday morning) the NYDN site is not loading.  But the piece’s overall premise is “the media isn’t biased because conservatives wrote the political dictionary”.  The money passage:

It’s hard to know where to begin in dismantling the Republican canard that Democrats control the media. Fox News is the most popular 24-hour news network by a whoosh and a cachung. Rush Limbaugh is the most powerful radio host, and lots of little Limbaughs line up behind him. Sarah Palin is the biggest media-political crossover star. And in an increasingly fragmented Internet, the Drudge Report continues to drive more political traffic than any other website. In italics and bold, to boot.

We see the hole in Greenman’s logic, here, right?

Greenman cites as evidence Republicans “wrote the dictionary” a series of media and pundits who were spawned as a response to liberal control of the media.  It’s like saying “Mitch Berg, Mr. D and Minnesota Democrats Exposed control Twin Cities’ political debate” when we are in fact the antagonists, not the protagonists.

The New York Times doesn’t decide what words we use, nor does CNN or NPR. Our political vocabulary comes from the mouths of crafty conservatives, and that’s the ultimate proof that they steer the conversation.

Obamacare. Pity the poor congressional and White House staffers who spent hours coming up with the bromidic name “Affordable Care Act” only to see the 2,300 page bill (which Republicans complained Obama played far too passive a role in shaping) get labeled, for all eternity, “Obamacare.” This of course, is an update of the equally elegant Hillarycare. It’s interesting to note that both were used, from the get go, as slurs, unlike, say, “Reaganomics.” (Compare this to, say, “No Child Left Behind,” which has never for a second been called Bushducation – though that would have been pretty catchy.)

Greenman should take a course in the mechanics of language; catchy phrases have to be easy to say; “Bushducation” is almost impossible to pronounce…

…but that’s a digression.  According to Greenman, acceptance of conservative-driven language is a sign that the media never was liberal…:

Using the supposedly massive megaphone of the Liberal Media, Democrats, who were sensitive – hypersensitive, in my mind – to the Obamacare implication, tried to replace it with a blander formulation emphasizing insurance regulation.

…which is sort of like saying “if the receiver drops the ball, then the quarterback must have thrown a basketball”.   The fact that conservative catch phrases, er, catch, isn’t a sign the media is conservative; it’s a sign that the people are.

John Harris and Jim Vandehei in Politico make a more rational case; it’s not so much that the press is “liberal” as they prefer the appearance of “bipartisan process” to any actual policy outcome:

That is, they believe broadly in government activism but are instinctually skeptical of anything that smacks of ideological zealotry and are quick to see the public interest as being distorted by excessive partisanship. Governance, in the Washington media’s ideal, should be a tidier and more rational process than it is.

I’ve “joked” in the past that when I work at a company, and a manager joins a group and introduces himself as a “process person”, it’s time to get your resume polished up; the group is doomed.

It’s a little cynical – but you know what they say, a cynic is an idealist who got mugged by experience.

The problem with “process people” is that when process meets people, entropy wins, sooner than later; invariably, processes need someone to run them.  Someone just like the reporters:

In this fantasy, every pressing problem could be solved with a blue-ribbon commission chaired by Sam Nunn and David Gergen that would go into seclusion at Andrews Air Force Base for a week, not coming back until it had a deal to cut entitlements and end obesity.

Bill Clinton’s best press came when he made a deal with Newt Gingrich on the budget, and George W. Bush got favorable coverage when he reached a deal with Ted Kennedy on education reform and in the brief period after Sept. 11 when the terrorist attacks brought Washington together.

Harris and Vandehei’s point is that Obama has been exploiting this tendency to get better press – and it’s working:

Obama is taking advantage of the press’s bias for bipartisan process, a preference that often transcends the substance of any bipartisan policy. (See: GOP, Dem lawmakers sit together)

It was an easy choice. In the wake of the Democratic rout in November, for instance, it would have been political suicide to risk letting taxes go up. So Obama shrewdly ignored his own party’s liberals and made a big show of wanting to cooperate with Republicans on the Bush tax cuts — and reaped a bonanza of favorable news stories as a result.

It would help explain the likes of Doug Grow and Lori Sturdevant and their constant, unseemly pining for the 1970s and MNGOP that was “Republican”, but in no way conservative; it’s about process, not vision or outcome.

But all of us who polish up our resume when we encounter that bobbleheaded “process-oriented” MBA have a point; process without keen vision is just paperwork and churn.

And even if Vandehei and Harris are right, and reporters, editors and producers are leery of aggressive partisanship, which may be true in some cases – it leads to the same result; people who gravitate toward “process” to manage public affairs tend to be people with fond views of government activism.

Same result; different rhetoric to get there.

Gotta hand it to my radio colleague and Hot Air blogger Ed Morrissey.  While he’s a little off the beam on football predictions and seventies music, he’s totally inside Keith Olbermann’s head.

He called it the day after Olbermann walked out of MSNBC; The Worst Pundit In The World, is apparently going to Algore’s “Current” network:

Mr. Olbermann, his representatives and executives from Current TV declined to comment on the move, but they did not deny that the channel, which counts former Vice President

Al Gore as one of its founders, will become at least one partner in Mr. Olbermann’s future media plans.

The presence of Olbie and his staff in the building will double “Current’s” viewership.

Two years ago, the Democrats in Washington used their eroding majority to jam Obamacare down over the American peoples’ objections.

The DFL in Minnesota has learned their lesson; notwithstanding that a crushing majority of Minnesotans support reforming our election system to proof it against abuse, the DFL is wheeling out its big guns most annoying Representatives and most specious memes to try to oppose Mary Kiffmeyer’s HF210.

Here’s Minnesota Majority’s video on the subject:

It’s in the DFL’s interest to oppose it, of course; a fraudulent and dishonest vote is pretty much invariably a DFL vote.

Yesterday was the centenary of Reagan’s birth.

A sweep through Twitter and the leftblogs saw the usual wave of fact-challenged, context-denuded twaddle the left always rolls out when the topic turns to Reagan; deficits, tax hikes, the debt, the Soviet Union would have fallen anyway, Iran/Contra  (to which the answers are “the deficits paid for themselves, the hikes came to a small fraction of his cuts, hello Tip O’Neill, and nobody’s perfect”, respectively).

But just like during the glory days of the Cold War, when Sovietologists would pore over Soviet television broadcasts and reading Pravda and Izvestiya to find the subtle hints the regime would send via its official media, you can find a lot between the lines of the offical news organs of the American left as well.  In this case, National Public Radio.

Over the weekend, NPR ran a piece on Reagan’s 100th birthday.  The piece largely focused on…Barack Obama’s various mentions and tributes to Reagan, and the comparisons some (on the left) make between Obama and the greatest American president of any of our lifetimes.

Toby Harnden at the Telegraph notes the meme, by way of pointing out the cold water some of us are throwing on it:

Perhaps more surprising is that there is a new claimant to the Reagan throne this year: President Barack Obama. Having once routinely derided Reagan as, in the words of Democratic greybeard Clark Clifford, an “amiable dunce”, the liberal establishment is now seeking to embrace him.

Obama first tried to grab Reagan’s mantle three years ago when he cited the Gipper as a way of taking a shot at the Clintons by saying that the Republican had “changed the trajectory of America” in a way that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton had not. Reagan, he added, responded to a feeling that “we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship”.

Harnden correctly points out what NPR wouldn’t; it’s just plain wrong:

Some Republicans fear that Reagan is facing a posthumous political emasculation by Democrats who play down his conservatism and recast him as a squishy conciliator.

There is little doubt that Reagan would have been dryly derisive of Obama’s policies and presidency. “Government is like a baby,” Reagan once quipped. “An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

Obama, by contrast, views government as a kindly nurse and the people as the baby. According to his mindset, the people should submit to those in government who know better and whose role is to make decisions and control the purse strings.

Comparisons between their speaking styles are both superficial (delivery is important – and still not the main point) and wrong (Reagan kept delivering great speeches from the beginning of his administration ’til the end; Obama’s fabled oratorical chops have seemed more rote and canned over time).

Just saying.

This American Life, an NPR program, is a wildly mixed bag of a radio show; it’s frequently excellent, evocative, and sometimes leads you to some wondrous insights.  For a show that is entirely by, for, and about upper-middle-class, college-educated, espresso-guzzling, Prius-driving white liberal hipsters, it’s very often worth the hour it takes to listen.

Still, for those of you in my audience that produce TAL, I feel I need to clarify something.

Funny: The Onion, America’s great parody newspaper.  While it’s not quite as quirky and unpredictable as it was ten years ago (the move to New York from Madison didn’t make the paper any funnier), it’s still a weekly treat.

Not Funny: Listening to The Onion’s editorial panel not only making the sausage (which is mildly interesting)…:

…but analyzing the process to death, like they’re a group of philosophy professors debating the meaning of existence itself.   A bunch of journalism profs at a Columbia forum couldn’t possibly sound more pretentious and joyless.

Note to Onion and TAL staff; you’re not curing cancer.  Lighten up already.

Common Cause has a newly-discovered sense of The Principles over filibuster “reform”:

In 2005, Common Cause vigorously defended the filibuster when some Republicans proposed invoking the “nuclear option” to end the filibuster of judicial nominees. From a 2005 press release:

Common Cause strongly opposes any effort by Senate leaders to outlaw filibusters of judicial nominees to silence a vigorous debate about the qualifications of these nominees, short-circuiting the Senate’s historic role in the nomination approval process.

“The filibuster shouldn’t be jettisoned simply because it’s inconvenient to the majority party’s goals,” said Common Cause President Chellie Pingree. “That’s abuse of power.”

Today, however, Common Cause is actively supporting filibuster “reform.” It’s one of the campaigns highlighted on Common Cause’s website. Now Common Cause argues that the filibuster is “an historical accident” and a tool of obstruction.

We see this in Minnesota, of course – Common Cause filed a campaign finance complaint against Republican political action committees, but ignored vastly more convoluted and less-transparent machinations by the likes of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” and its maze of PACs and contributors.

Common Cause’s president has ignored repeated requests to come on the air and explain the odd double standard.

It wouldn’t matter, but for the fact that parts of the Twin Cities media continue to call Common Cause “non-partisan”.

Today would have been Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday.

When I was in my early twenties, growing up amid the missile fields of North Dakota, I used to wonder what was the point of having kids?  They’d all wind up dying in a nuclear war anyway – even if I could afford to have any, which given the economy of the Carter years (and, naturally, the first half of Reagan’s first term) seemed unlikely.

Like most shallow lefties (which I was until about 1984), I was terrified of Ronald Reagan when he was elected.  “He’s going to send us all off to fight in Saudi Arabia!”, I chanted along with all the other bobbleheads – proving that “the facile meme aimed at the ill-informed” isn’t a post 2000 phenomenon.

But somewhere along the way, between 1980 (when I knew Jimmy Carter was a boob, but I would have gargled Drano rather than vote for Reagan, had I been about five weeks older and able to vote) and 1984, when I furtively punched the butterfly ballot for Reagan but didn’t tell anyone, not even my closest friends, about it (because I didn’t want them to lump me in with “those” conservatives, the Jerry Falwells and the like), I changed my mind.  It wasn’t all Reagan, of course – my college English major advisor, Dr. Blake, gave me a great primer on the real principles of conservatism – but also on how Reagan embodied them.

And let’s be honest; Reagan explained those principles, the timeless ones, Hayek and Jefferson, Adams and De Tocqueville, better than anyone that’s had the bully pulpit he’s had to do it from.  And he was doing it long before he became President:

And while there were pundits and thinkers who believed the Soviet Union couldn’t last forever, they were both in the minority and, well, pundits and thinkers.  Not those who could do something about it.

Reagan did something about it.

And so we, the people who remember and the ones who’ve learned – like the crowd of twentysomethings at the Reagan’s 100th Birthday bash at O’Gara’s on Friday, none of whom could possible have remembered Reagan himself – commemorate the life of the greatest president we’ve seen…

…even as we recognize that he represents a past that needs to guide, not obsess, us today.

Today is Shot In The Dark’s ninth birthday.

I was working at a dying little dotcom nine years ago.  I was reading a Time article on the “new breed of young conservative intellectuals”.  They profiled Andrew Sullivan and his “blog”.  I checked it out.  I saw the link to Blogger.com.

And when I got home, after dinner, I set the thing up, and it was off to the races.

And the race has not stopped for more than a weekend since then (barring a one-week break when my ISP died back in 2004).

Anyway – thanks!

More next year, God willing!

You can tell a lot about a kid’s personality bright and early in life.

Bun, my oldest, was rash and obstreporous even in the womb, tumbling and kicking and trying to have things her way from the very beginning [1].  She was born about the same way; starting right around her due date, flailing away through a couple of days of labor and a very difficult delivery, before coming out, taking a deep breath, and taking a nap.

And she’s approached most of the things in her life that way.  When she was a baby, she started trying to get up on her feet early; she stumbled and flopped and banged into things and, finally, lurched into standing more or less by accident.  And when she saw people around her talking, she didn’t bother with being perfect at it; she started babbling away almost immediately, and left the “figuring out what Bun is saying” thing to us for the first few months.  Potty training?  Same deal; months and months and months of almost, until the pieces fell together.

My youngest, Zam was just the opposite.  He watched his sister walk for month, before slowly hauling himself to his feet and…well, walking, with pretty decent coordination, without a whole lot of drama.

Zam, was just the opposite.  Potty training?  It felt like he waited until second grade (he was really only three, but when you’re waiting to change that last diaper, time loses some meaning) – and then, pow.  Done.  From poooey diapers to hitting the seat pretty much overnight, when he was ready.

Talking?  Zam watched, and listened, and clearly was churning the whole concept of “speech” over in his head for months and months.  Until finally, one day, when his mother said “would Zammy like a ba-ba?” Zam looked at her and replied “Yes, Mother, I’d very much like one; go a little easy on the heat, though, I don’t have an azz-BEST-toast lip”.

And before he was born?  Same thing.  Zam was very quiet – disconcertingly so, after Bun.  It made me nervous.  And he was two solid weeks late when he was born, when the plopped out after eight relatively placid hours of labor, as if he didn’t want to come out until he was really, really ready.

Just like with the bathroom, fifteen years later.

But for all of  his calm, patient, studious deliberation, which which he’s approached so many things, from learning to talk to learning the guitar, Zam certainly has not gone slow with one thing.  The eighteen years between 12:15AM on Feburary 4, 1993 and today shot past like they were hardly there.

Anyway – Happy Birthday, Zam!

[1] I bet Janet Napolitano calls me a “potential pro-life terrorist” for saying conception was “the very beginning”.  I’ll keep you posted.

As Reagan once said, “It’s not that liberals lie.  It’s just that they say so many things that are not so”.

Now, if you’ve read this blog for a while, you know two things:

1. I, among very few partisan bloggers in the Twin Cities, make a concerted effort to try not only to remain civil, but to create some sort of a productive, or at least neutral, relationship with leftybloggers – or at least the ones that are worth the effort.  And there are a few.  Rare, but few.
2. It’s really not easy.  It gets frustrating, dealing with so much bad logic for so long.

Which brings us to this bit by Eric “Big E” Pusey, covering Senator Howe (R – Red Wing) and his effort to restructure the renters rebate.

The piece – and if you guessed it’d be entitled “Why Does Senator John Howe Hate Renters?”, you’re right, but you needn’t get cocky, since one out of four posts on every Minnesota leftyblog starts with some variation on “Why Does Someone Hate Something?” – starts: –

On the Senate floor today, Sen. John Howe (R-Red Wing) tried to explain how canceling the renter’s credit is a good idea. The Senate was debating the Republican’s $1 billion cutback’s bill. This is basically a tax increase on all renters.

“That’s a $170 tax increase on every renter in Minnesota,” Sen. Scott Dibble (DFL Mpls) said.

Well, no.  It’s a cutback on a rebate that renters get.

In Minnesota (if you don’t live here), renters are entitled – via a niggling, sliding, income-based formula – to a refund of a piece of the property taxes paid by their landlord on the property they’re renting.  On the one hand, if you’re poor – and up until about 18 years or so ago, I certainly was – it is an annual tradition in Minnesota; waiting for the rebate check.  When I was a single guy making $12K a year and paying out $300 amonth in rent in 1989, it was a nice little $400 bump.

Of course, that money comes from somewhere – the state’s gross property tax receipts, in this case.

And with that pool dropping, as property values decline and foreclosures continue mounting, it’s high time the state re-jiggered the formula.

Pusey doesn’t see it that way, naturally.  He quotes Howe’s speech to the Senate:

It’s [the renter’s credit] actually encouraging people to stay in that renter mode, and not achieve what we want people to move forward. If we want to be “progressive”, we need to help people to achieve their dreams and their goals. And we shouldn’t hold them back. I view a renter’s credit as something that holds people back. It doesn’t encourage the type of behavior that we want. It doesn’t encourage the type of dreams and hopes that people can achieve to having their home ownership. And it runs counterproductive to other things that we do.

First of all, he keeps using the word “progressive.” To quote Inigo Montoya from the movie “Princess Bride”: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

(Entirely possible, but that doesn’t mean Pusey gets it right…)

Secondly, isn’t it the Republican mantra on taxes that people should keep more of their own money or something? So why is it a good idea to take away this tax break for renters? Oh … I get it … they’re not millionaires …

Pusey doesn’t get it.

People should keep their own money – poor, rich, and everyone in between, myself included.

But don’t  mistake the renters rebate for “people keeping their own money’; it’s a rental housing subsidy that gives tax revenues back to certain “targeted” constituencies – renters making less than $30K or so a year.  While landlords (and regular homeowners, who have nobody to pass the costs down to, even more so) get clobbered with property taxes (especially if you’re stuck living in a DFL-plagued city like Saint Paul), renters get a piece of that money directed back to them.

Wouldn’t it be better to just lower taxes, and let the rental market pass the savings down to the renter?

Indeed, the market for rental prices is affected by a dizzying number of variables, most of them tied, directly or indirectly, to big government.  “Affordable Housing” – houses and apartments that might not make it into Architectural Digest, but are inexpensive – is zoned out of existence by utopian City Councils from New York City to Saint Paul, to be replaced by tax-funded Public Housing and/or “affordable housing”, built and subsidized by taxpayers but not remotely “affordable” except maybe in the out-of-pocket cost to the government client “renter”.   The taxes to make more “affordable housing” combine to make housing, ironically, less affordable and, in bad times, contributing to a vicious cycle that forces out home owners (by foreclosure or tax fatigue), lowering property values, and thus tax revenues, thus requiring more tax increases…

At its worst, the “Renters Rebate” insulates the poor from the profligacy of city government; if they didn’t get part of the price of their over-taxed rental property rebated to them, perhaps they would take a closer look at the stupidity of their city and county governments, the same way the profligacy of the 2009-2010 DFL legislature and the 2009-2010 Congress made so many Americans do the same before the last election.

Look – the formula’s being re-jiggered.  People will still get rebate checks.  They’ll get smaller.

Perhaps it’s time those renters took a moment to ask where the money comes from, and why.

I wonder if Eric Pusey would care to help do that?

(And isn’t it hilarious that the Democrats call the Bush Tax cuts – which cut taxes across the board, from billionaires to minimum wage owners, a “subsidy” and “spending”, while the portion or the renter’s rent that goes into property taxes is not?)

Speed Gibson is writing about immigration in this piece.  But he trips into a much, much bigger issue:

From a recent Minneapolis Star Tribune Editorial: Making the case for immigration reform. The opening paragraph exposes the manifest non-sequitur that follows:

The firings of 700 immigrant workers by Chipotle Restaurants in Minnesota underscores the country’s urgent need for significant immigration reform.

We are clearly not talking about 700 immigrants here. They are (alleged) illegal aliens.

And Speed does what anyone who learned both debate and English does; he defines his terms, in terms of the language we all purport to understand:

To review, immigration is a legal process. Those who engage it successfully are called immigrants and are granted access to the country in question. Among non-citizens, those that are not immigrants are aliens, both legal (tourists, e.g.) and illegal. To again conflate illegal aliens with actual immigrants is obvious deception and insulting to those actual immigrants. But of course liberals cannot win this argument on facts as this editorial again demonstrates.

And Speed’s right.

And yet you will listen in vain for any such logic anywhere on the left or in the mainstream media that carries the left’s water.

Because above and beyond the battle over “reforming” immigration, there is a much bigger fight going on – and the left is kicking our butts at it.  It’s the battle for the language.

One of the skirmishes in that battle has been the 25 year long, largely successful battle to neutralize the terms “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien” in the media.  Both terms are actively disparaged outside overtly conservative circles; calling someone an “illegal immigrant” can run one afoul of some campus speech codes.

The point being if people stop saying illegal immigration is, well, illegal, they’ll stop thinking it’s a crime.

This sort of thing is happening throughout the English language.  I’ll be writing about it at some length in the next few weeks.

While the generally-accepted language will still met me do it…

…from Today’s Star Tribune:

Diane Ruffcorn, Audio Darts aficionado and Lead Economist for the Obama Administration.

It was February 3, 1991.  I’d been working my side gig at KDWB for a few weeks.

It was a pretty menial gig by radio standards; come in on Sunday afternoons to work with Spyder Harrison and Kris Adams.  I did get the occasional call to come in on weeknights to produce Spyder’s weekday evening show – which was four solid hours of pure adrenaline.

But this was not one of those days.  The weekend gig was fun.  Low-key, but fun.

But it wasn’t the kind of radio I really dug.

During my last radio gig – my stint at KSTP-AM which, it pained me to remember, had ended almost four years ago, I’d tacked an extra layer onto my radio addiction.  In addition to the addiction of the ozone and the pace and the buzz, there was the intellectual addiction you got in talk radio – the buzz you get mixing it up with an unpredictable, sometimes hostile, sometimes drunk, sometimes dissociative audience.

After that?  Spinning records (more like “firing off tape carts”) didn’t have the same buzz it did when I was 16.

Still, it was a gig.  It kept me in the business, more or less, for 4-10 hours a week.  And as long as I had to have a menial, crummy job, it might as well be one in the same industry as the one I wanted to be in.

But how to make that work?  I pondered that constantly.

I may have been pondering it when a big, swarthy guy with black hair, piercing eyes and a bushy porn-star mustache walked into the KDWB studio.

“Hey, Spyder”, he said in a booming voice that set the stack of carts on the console rattling.

“Hey, man”, Spyder responded in his off-air voice, which was basically the same as his air voice, an octave above “whales only” range.

The swarthy guy looked at me.  “Hey, you the Mitch Berg that used to work for Don Vogel?”

I brightened up.  “Yeah”.  I was amazed anyone remembered that.  And maybe validated, just a little.

“Cool, man.  I’m Joe Hansen.  We gotta talk sometime!”.

I made a mental note.

By the way, I was a guest on Marty Owings’ “Minnesota Capitol News” on Wednesday evening, live from the gallery over the Minnesota House of Representatives, in a brief panel with Professor Doug Rossinow from Metro State, talking about the Gubernatorial election.  Tom Emmer and Dave Fitzsimmons were also on the show – it should go without saying that was a fun interview.

Tune in!

Al Gore weighs in on the veracity of Global Warming while half of America is freezing their asses off under five feet of snow.

“As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming.”

“Scientific Community” as in research scientists who rely on government grants to feed their kids in a recession, right Al?

Just remember folks:

1. If it snows, it’s Man-Made Global Warming.
2. If it doesn’t snow, it’s Man-Made Global Warming.
3. The earth has often times been much warmer and much cooler than it is now but since we got here it’s our fault.
4. Celebrities are experts on everything.

Gore said that increased moisture in the air – a result of global warming – can lead to increased snowfalls.

…and if the air is dry, or moist, or in between, it’s Man-Made Global Warming.

Oh, and don’t forget, Al Gore invented the internet.

…at least something good happened.

No, I’m not serious.  What do you think I am, a leftyblogger?  I don’t believe in “karma”, but I think what goes around comes around, so I have to believe there’s at least a little cosmic payback going on for his “teabagger” slurs from two years ago.

Still – while I believe Anderson Cooper is a poster child for the Hollywooding of the American “news” media, Violence, especially physical violence, is a bad thing.  People – please, stop hitting each other.

There is a more important, and sinister, story behind this; there appears to be a push by pro-Mubarak forces to push the western media away from the story.  There’s a method to the madness; they’ve seen how radicals the world over (and there’s at least a fair case to be made that there are radicals behind, and using, the popular unrest for their advantage) use the western media, especially American media, to manipulate world opinion, frequently with grossly-mangled context.

Liberty as we understand it in America is a wonderful thing – one we should try to export.  But before you can have liberty, you must have stability, and the rule of law.  Is Egyptian society stable enough, and are their society’s institutions mature enough in their approach to the idea of the rule of law, to be reasonably sure that what replaces Mubarak will be better?

In Turkey, one can reasonably say “I think so”, and support the case.

In Iran?  Michael Ledeen has been making that case better than anyone in the media for half a decade at least.

Tunisia?  Syria?  Egypt?

Sorry to say, I’m less hopeful.

A source in the Twin Cities talk radio industry tells me that KTLK-FM’s Chris Baker is being replaced by longtime KSTP great Bob Davis, “effective immediately”.

I’m going to run this down when I get a chance.

If it’s true, it’s great news for Bob, and for Twin Cities talk radio listeners.

UPDATE: It’s on the KTLK website.  I guess that’s official enough for me.

Congrats, Bob!

UPDATE 2: According to Brauer, Baker quit, and Davis is just temping.

Minnesota Public Radio wants to know “What are the sounds that symbolize your community?”

Given that my “community’s” sounds are best represented by the likes of Ryan Rhodes and Learned Foot, perhaps MPR will be sorry they asked.

But perhaps we should find out.

One armed guy can make a huge difference.

In this case the “armed guy” was Bishnu Shrestha, a retired Gurkha soldier – a Nepalese soldier serving in either the British or, in this case, Indian army – and his “Khukri”, the iconic short sword of the Gurkha soldier.  A group of forty bandits waylaid a train in a remote jungle area, and started shaking down the passengers and, finally, trying to rape one of them:

The band of about 40 robbers, some of whom were traveling as passengers, stopped the train in the Chittaranjan jungles in West Bengal around midnight. Shrestha– who had boarded the train at Ranchi in Jharkhand, the place of his posting–was in seat no. 47 in coach AC3.

Shrestha

“They started snatching jewelry, cell phones, cash, laptops and other belongings from the passengers,” Shrestha recalled. The soldier had somehow remained a silent spectator amidst the melee, but not for long. He had had enough when the robbers stripped an 18-year-old girl sitting next to him and tried to rape her right in front of her parents. He then took out his khukuri and took on the robbers.

Khukri

“The girl cried for help, saying ´You are a soldier, please save a sister´,” Shrestha recalled. “I prevented her from being raped, thinking of her as my own sister,” he added. He took one of the robbers under control and then started to attack the others. He said the rest of the robbers fled after he killed three of them with his khukuri and injured eight others.

During the scuffle he received serious blade injury to his left hand while the girl also had a minor cut on her neck. “They had carried out their robbery with swords, blades and pistols. The pistols may have been fake as they didn´t open fire,” he surmised.

Informed of the incident, Janet Napolitano promptly added Shrestha to her watch list of “potential terrorists” (until told that he wasn’t actually an American citizen), and Jerry Nadler decried the “vitriol” in the conversation between people and bandits in India.

Shreshta, on the other hand, is being feted:

The Indian government is to decorate Shrestha with its Sourya Chakra, Bravery Award and Sarvottam Jeevan Raksha Medal and the 35-year-old is leaving for India Saturday to receive the first of the awards on the occasion of India´s Republic Day on January 26.

“The formal announcement of the awards will be made on Republic Day and on Independence Day on August 15,” said Shrestha, whose father Gopal Babu also retired from the same 7/8 Platoon of the Gorkha Regiment around 29 years ago.

His regiment has already given him a cash award of Indian rupees 50,000, and decided to terminate his voluntary retirement. He will get the customary promotion after receiving the medals. The Indian government will also announce a cash bounty for him and special discounts on international air tickets and domestic train tickets.

Of course, he’s a highly-trained member of an elite infantry regiment; don’t try this at home, as they say.

But to cite the old Hindu saying – Vishnu made man; Kholt made men equal.

At least I think that’s the Hindi spelling of Colt…

(Via my neighbor Pete)

As I noted a while ago, I have been tempted for quite some time to write a long, long series of posts trying to explain the basic logical fallacies to leftybloggers.  I do this – or would do it, if I ever get the project underway – to improve the quality of the alt-media debate in Minnesota.

A good one to work first might be “correlation doesn’t equal causation”.

Because in the case of the four GOP voters who split from the majority to vote against the GOP’s first budget bill, it’s safe to say that correlation doesn’t equal much of anything.

Dave Mindeman at mnpACT thought he was on to something the other day:

Rep. King “Landslide” Banaian gave me a bit of a surprise the other day. I saw his vote on the House authorized $1 billion cut legislative package and surprisingly, the conservative, former SCSU Scholars blogger, voted NO….voting with the Democrats.

Well, no.  Remember – correlation doesn’t logically lead to causation.  He voted – it is safe to say, although I’ve not interviewed King about it – against one of the proposed cuts.  King would gargle Drano before he voted “with the DFL”.

Banaian works at St. Cloud State as an economics professor and represents St. Cloud and the surrounding area. The kicker here is that he won his legislative race by a 10 vote margin. Which means that, unlike Senator Newman and his selective constituent recognition, Mr. Banaian is probably wise to consider all comers.

It’s good that Mindeman has discovered this tenet of democracy.  Many DFLers, especially in the Metro, never need to learn any of this stuff.

Except I had assumed that Banaian was one of those true believer, first principle guys. He generally talks of government spending with utter disdain and one would think that this particular bill would certainly meet those first principle ideals.

Well, you know what they say happens when you assume…

After all, it hits that unnecessary Local Government Aid and outrageously out of control Higher Ed spending… as well as all of the Commission offices in the executive branch. Would have assumed that to be a no-brainer for Banaian.

I’m  not sure – I haven’t interviewed King, or Kriesel, or the other two Republicans who voted against the bill on its first pass.  Of course, either has Mindeman.  But I’m going to suspect that those were not the reason.

Yet, that pesky RED button went up. Explanation?

Well, Doug Grow at Minnpost, looked into this and found this quote:

And, as we discussed the other day, Grow was as wrong as Mindeman.

The Republican proposal calls for the continuation of cuts made to state colleges by Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the Legislature to bring the budget in balance last year. Those amount to $184 million for public colleges, including Banaian’s employer, St. Cloud State.

“We’ve taken a couple of pretty serious hits already,” Banaian told an Associated Press reporter in explaining his opposition to the bill. “To do this on extending an agreement by a previous Legislature and a previous governor didn’t seem like the right vote for St. Cloud at this time.”

What?

So those particular cuts were OK last year, but (ahem) not so good this year? Would that be 10 votes worth of caution, Rep. Banaian?

Well, maybe – but both Mindeman and Grow strip out some key context; SCSU took some serious cuts; a lot of King’s voters think it’s time for the U to take its lumps.

All that red meat rhetoric with “first principle” shouts of storming the castle seem to fade when looking toward a new election cycle.

One wonders if Mindeman has read HF2.

Once that passes, I suspect all this “King voted with the Dems” nonsense will be forgotten.

Certainly by Mindeman.

Yesterday, the Campaign Finance reports for the last Gubernatorial election came out.

And the media finally noticed – sort of – what you learned on this blog last July; Mark Dayton outspent Tom Emmer 2:1, and that most of the money came from “outside groups”.

MPR had the best report, at least compared to the rest of the Twin Cities media:

Democrat Mark Dayton and his allies spent significantly more than Republican Tom Emmer and his allies to win the race for Minnesota governor.

Alliance for a Better Minnesota, a group working to elect Dayton, spent $5.7 million in the race, helped by big contributions from labor unions and Dayton’s family. Most of Alliance’s money was spent on ads criticizing Emmer.

“Most of” it.  Heh.

I’m going to add some emphasis here:

Labor unions spent more than $2.2 million to help elect Dayton, with money coming in both before the election and afterward to help the recount effort. The Democratic Governor’s Association spent $1 million, and Dayton’s family and his ex-wife gave more than $900,000.

Tom Scheck’s piece yesterday included a sound bite from Ken Martin, the head of “Win Minnesota”, a PAC that funneled money to “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” (ABM):

Ken Martin, who ran the umbrella group that financed The Alliance for a Better Minnesota, says donors were energized to elect the first Democrat to the governor’s office since 1986.

“People invest in politics on all sides, and it’s not for any other purpose than to support the candidates that they feel are going to best represent what they believe in,” said Martin. “Frankly, the payoff is a better Minnesota, and they believe Mark Dayton was the candidate to make that happen.”

Martin’s statement implies that there was some huge groundswell of grassroots financial support in $20 and $50 donations from Ma and Pa Minnesota.  There was not; the money to run Dayton’s sleazy smear campaign came from big institutional donors, national Democrat sources, and Dayton and his family.

More emphasis added below:

Alliance for a Better Minnesota outspent the two groups backing Emmer — MN Forward and Minnesota’s Future. Minnesota’s Future, funded mostly by the Republican Governor’s Association, spent $1.4 million on the race. MN Forward, who received contributions from businesses like Target and Best Buy, spent nearly $1.8 million.

Catch that?  That, of course, is why the DFL spent six months caterwauling (with the help of their kissin’ cousins in the media) about the “corrosive effects of corporate money in politics”  Minnesota business managed to contribute all of 2/3 what unions did.

Can’t have that, can we?

By the way, it’s interesting that business donated $1.8 million to the conservative, pro-business Emmer, while…:

On the DFL side, companies including Kwik Trip, Anheuser-Busch, Pfizer and SuperValu gave a total of $88,000 to groups helping to elect Dayton and support him during the recount.

Unfortunately, I already patronize none of these companies.

Dayton’s campaign also outspent Emmer’s. Dayton spent $5.3 million in 2009 and 2010, helped by a $3.9 million in loans to himself. Emmer spent $2.8 million.

That’s a lot of Renoirs.

Naturally, the chattering classes’ objections about “the toxicity of money in politics” referred to corporate money.  Not labor unions, and not trust funds from South Dakota.

I haven’t managed to do a lot of radio writing lately.

It’s  a shame; the last time I really covered the business in this blog in any real deep detail, KSTP was still a conservative talk station, more or less; KTLK was still following some idiot consultant’s advice and steering toward the middle of the road. WCCO had changed little in decades; Air American Minnesota was still a contender at the low end of the ratings scale with WWTC (where I broadcast, then and now).

More importantly, perhaps?  Radio ratings back then were measured by Arbitron, more or less the same way they were measured back in the sixties.  Abritron would mail out diaries to carefully selected users, who would spend a few months filling out everything they listened to on the radio, in quarter-hour increments.

Today?  KSTP went sports-talk last year; KTLK went conservative; WCCO is poking around looking for a new identity now that the audience that kept them on top for decades slowly fades from demographic signficance.

And the big news?  Ratings are now largely done with “Personal People Meters”, devices that people carry around that “hear” radio stations, and pick up on an inaudible code in the signal the stations transmit.  It’s a little controversial – it favors the kinds of music stations that people just leave on as background music (“Jack FM” and WLTE “The Lite FM” are particularly strong under PPM), while shorting stations that have more purposeful listeners (like, say, talk radio).

But all that is background noise to the real news in the Holiday 2010 PPM ratings.  AM1280 is the #22 station in the market (in the relatively meaningless “all listeners age 12+” category.  The cool part, of course, is the numbers; notice the “cume”, or cumulative audience, for the period.  WWTC gets statistically the same ratings as  Hubbard’s “Chick Talk 107” with about 40% of the audience, and 2/3 the numbers that the 100,000 watt KTLK-FM gets with about 1/5 the listeners.

What that means is that the Patriot’s listeners are loyal – especially on the weekend, where the key measurement is called “Time Spent Listening”.  The average KTLK listener tunes in for twenty-odd minutes; the typical Patriot listener is well over 45 (and, on the Northern Alliance, the average listener, statistically, listens for about an hour every hour).

And KTNF, the former Air America station?  It’s dropped to a 0.4 share.  Almost too low to measure.  Almost into “dead skunk bounce” territory.

I guess Ed Schultz doesn’t reel ’em in like he used to.