Before I start, let me be crystal-clear on a key point: Gawker is to journalism what the “E” Network is to Edward R. Murrow.

Gawker sets a bar so low that nothing can get under it – save for its various copycats and spinoffs, Defamer and Awl and Oh, Noes, I Can Say Naughty Things About People I Don’t Like On The Intertubes and whatever the hell else was bubbled up from that entire suppurating puddle of intellectual pus, each of which limbo handily beneath that already-minuscule standard.

Clear?

Anyway – they’ve just discovered that not everything you hear on morning radio is spontaneous, and that some of the callers are actually actors.

On Monday we learned about a curious new venture from Premiere Radio Networks that offers radio shows “voice talent to take/make your on-air calls”—in other words, fake talk-radio callers.

And then we heard from a few folks in the business, and it turns out this is a thing!

That’s right!  Morning radio – all radio, really – tries to entertain.  And the fact is, most people just aren’t that entertaining.

And so when you tune into your chuckleheaded morning zoo, remember – there is no codecil in the social contract saying “we, the radio station/network, pledge that your entertainment is organic”.

Morning radio is not “journalism”.  (Either is an awful lot of journalism, as it turns out).

This confuses some people:

All of wacky morning drive-time radio, apparently, is populated by voice actors pretending to be jilted lovers—or in at least one instance, an aviation expert talking about a local plane crash…”Any time you hear something surreal on a morning radio show, it’s bullshit,” one veteran independent radio producer told me. “The great prank phone calls—they’re all fake. If it’s top 40, and if it has a morning show, then it uses actors.”

While Premiere’s “On Call” service is relatively new, there are several long-standing services that supply scenarios, story lines, and actors to desperate local morning shows. The problem is obvious: DJs have hours to fill, and if anyone is actually calling into the station, they are in all likelihood boring people with boring problems. Enter United Stations Radio Networks, a radio company co-founded by Dick Clark, who still serves as its chairman emeritus.

United Stations generates wacky characters and scenarios—basically mini-radio plays—and sends them out to shows across the country. “It’s, ‘Hey, can you pretend to hate black people for the next 15 minutes so we can get people talking?'” said the producer.

The Gawker has the victorian vapours, in this case, over a syndicated bit, “War of the Roses”, which KDWB’s “Dave Ryan Show” uses – but that’s just one of many.

It actually sounds like a fun gig:

Another strange one, he said, was when he was told to pretend to be a little person outraged at the way American culture becomes obsessed with Elves each Christmas. There was no scenario or storyline, just an opinion designed, presumably, to attract mockery. “I was supposed to be angry about the overmarketing of little people during Christmas,” he said. “They wanted a ‘little guy with a big voice.'” Aside from those cases, Burt said, he mostly played cheating husbands and boyfriends. “It was pretty surreal. I’d get an email with the radio station, the character, the set-up, and the number to call. The hard part was always having to deal with wacky fucking morning DJs. These are the things you do when you need to eat.”

Now, I have to wonder – given that there’s an apparent market for stupid phone bits, wouldn’t it stand to reason that there’s a concurrent market for stupid, risible blog writing?

This next bit (emphasis added) has gotta make you wonder:

Somewhat surprisingly, there’s nothing even remotely illegal about populating radio shows with fake characters and passing it off is real. The FCC does have regulations barring “hoaxes,” but that only bars stunts that “directly cause substantial public harm.”

(Um, yeah – the “War Of The Worlds” clause).

Run of the mill shitty gags, it seems, are OK.

I’m almost tempted to write the guy and ask if he knows that “The Real World” is kinda scripted, too…

Americans don’t need to stock up on potassium iodide to prevent radiation damage to the thyroid, says California:

State and county officials spent much of Tuesday trying to keep people calm by saying that getting the pills wasn’t necessary, but then the United States surgeon general supported the idea as a worthy “precaution.”

Americans do need to stock up on potassium iodide to prevent radiation damage to the thyroid, says…

…U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin was in the Bay Area touring a peninsula hospital. NBC Bay Area reporter Damian Trujillo asked her about the run on tablets and Dr. Benjamin said although she wasn’t aware of people stocking up, she did not think that would be an overreaction. She said it was right to be prepared.

Like all Obama Administration pronouncements, Benjamin’s will likely have a shelf-life shorter than that of the tablets on which she just caused a run.

Saint Paul.

I’ve lived here for most of the past 24 years.  I’ve owned a home here for 17 of them.

The population is shrinking.  Businesses are fleeing town.  The business occupancy rate downtown is around 20% – and that’s down a few points only because Metro Square is now government space.  That’s the only “business” growing in Saint Paul.

Business is ailing badly.

The DFL’s front-runners to replace Ellen Anderson in District 66 seat are Representative Alice “The Phantom” Hausman, who earned a 14% from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, and Representative John Lesch, who swung waaaaay to the center with a 16%.

Saint Paul, like all of Minnesota, doesn’t need another DFL extremist in the Senate.

One bit of business they do favor is the Central Corridor, the $1.4 billion-and-counting boondoggle that is going to shred the gritty but thriving immigrant business corridor down University Avenue.  The revival – almost entirely the result of Asian and African immigrant business people, and having almost nothing to do with the city’s dominant DFL culture – has taken what was a blighted street and turned it into a colorful, busy strip very much unlike the rest of the sleepy, underperforming city.

The Central Corridor will change all that, immediately driving many of these scrappy entrepreneurs out of business, and, if all goes according to plan, gentrifying the survivors out of the few neighborhoods that actually wind up prospering (other than the neighborhoods where the lucky construction worker live – everywhere from St. Cloud to River Falls).

Alice Hausman and John Lesch support this.

Minnesota as a whole said “enough!” last fall – putting the DFL into the minority in the Senate for the first time since Senate elections became partisan, almost 40 years ago.

So Saint Paul is “represented” by a group of people who are hostile to business – small and big – who actively seek the destruction of the American dream for one gritty, scrappy street full of immigrants; reps whose only response to challenge is to raise taxes, or to echo Mayor Coleman’s whining that the citizens of Bemidji and Owatonna will be forced to subsidize less of the failure.

One of them – Hausman or Lesch, or one of three other DFL challengers – wants to replace Ellen Anderson in the Senate.

Does Saint Paul need another extremist in office?  Yet another DFLer who answers only to “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” and the public employee unions?    Yet another DFLer who has never run a business or balanced a budget?  Yet another DFLer who wants to keep shoveling money into a failing school system while killing off the charter schools that offer so many of our kids the only hope they have of a decent education?

Yet another DFLer who believes that the Eritrean hair salon owner must be required to work until she’s 70 so the city’s unionized bill collector can retire at 55?

Or is it time for real change?

I’m asking you to support Greg Copeland; if you live in Senate District 66, I’m asking for your vote for Copeland on April 12.  If you live outside SD66, I’m asking for money (donate here to help Greg meet the goal of overtopping $3,000 by Monday to get state matching funds), and time to help with the race.

Saint Paul deserves better than the choice of two (five, whatever) big-spending, union sock-puppets/career politicians.

Yes, we can.

You can follow the Copeland campaign in many, many places:

Twitter – “@CopelandFor66”

Facebook: Greg Copeland for Senate

And the campaign website (which will be expanding soon).

Republicans endorsed Greg Copeland to run in the April 12 special election to replace Ellen Anderson in Senate District 66.

Copeland is the former manager of the city of Maplewood.  He has a long record of improving city services and cutting spending.

Here’s the press release:

Republicans in Saint Paul’s Senate District 66 have endorsed Greg Copeland to run in the April 12 special election. Ellen Anderson is vacating the district after nearly two decades in office.

“We are running this race to win”, says Copeland, former manager of the City of Maplewood.

“Last fall’s elections show that people across all party lines are concerned about the economy, the efficiency of our government, and this nation’s future”, Copeland said. Copeland is running on a platform of job creation and property tax reform. “I’m running to protect families and businesses from job-killing

taxes and ballooning government spending. The people of this district deserve a representative in the Minnesota Senate who will work on their behalf over the next two years as part of the majority”.

Here’s the deal; Greg needs to raise $3,000 in $50 increments  to qualify for state matching funds (you can donate more, but only the first $50 count toward the $3K threshold).  If you can spare a buck or two, please help out!

The conventional wisdom is that Republicans cant’ win in the city.  Conventional wisdom exists to be skewered.

He’ll be appearing on the Northern Alliance on Saturday at 2PM, and on the Sue Jeffers show Saturday at 5:30ish.

I was thinking of an old Soviet-era joke that I remember from high school.  A radio station in Minsk was broadcasting a chat show.  A commentator declared “Minsk is the most beautiful city in all of the Soviet Union”.

A phone call comes on the air. “What do you think about the  rumors that the Americans have a nuclear missile that would wipe out any Soviet city?”

The commentator promptly declared “Smolensk is the most beautiful city in the Soviet Union”.

———-

Kerry Miller at MPR spent an hour this morning talking about the perils of partisanship and the supreme virtue of compromise.

Here’s the blurb:

Depending on your political outlook, Gov. Scott Walker was either showing leadership or over-reaching when taking on the unions. In today’s highly-charged, partisan climate, is it possible for politicians to play to their base without going to extremes?

The interesting bit is the guests:

Now, there’s a balanced panel – not only do we have a progressive from the East Coast, and one from the West, but we have one that works for an academic “progressive” hothouse, and one from the putative “private sector”!

Just saying, MPR – when the entire conversation about “compromise” is framed in terms of “how do we get conservatives to stop acting like conservatives”, and the one about “partisanship” sounds entirely like “why do you conservatives have to disagree wtih us”, we might question your commitment to balance.

Or at least Miller’s.

The ongoing disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant shows the perils of following the left’s policy on nuclear power.

The debris from the first hydrogen blast had barely settled when DFL-affiliated bloggers and tweeps started chanting “yeah, good job trying to lift Minnesota’s nuke moratorium!  Haha!  You are teh stupid!”.

We’ll come back to the DFL’s dim-witted politicization in a moment.

The headlines paint a dire (and direly confused) picture of the situation at the Fukushima plant, it’d seem nuke opponents have a point. Things sound bad.

But let’s make sure we’re clear on the facts: the Fukushima plant, like all Japanese plants, were designed to withstand ground motion equal to twice that occurring in a 1000-year quake – which in that part of Honshu is in the low 8-point Richter range (it’s not a perfect measurement scale, since Richter measures energy release, not ground motion).  The Japanese earthquake was 9 points on the Richter scale – 5-10 times as intense. And yet by all indications so far, the containment vessels – the steel, lead and concrete capsule that contains the actual reactor cores – are holding up.  It was the release of the intensely interactive fuel from the core – many thousands of times more intense than the fairly limited hydrogen and steam-borne radiation we’ve seen from Fukushima – that made Chernobyl the disaster it was.  Bear in mind, Chernobyl had no containment vessel.  The reactor cooling at Fukushima, of course, seems not to have been up to the damage it suffered in the earthquake and tsunami – or, more directly, to the complete loss of the power grid and backup diesel generators to run the cooling systems.

“Is it wise to build nuclear power plants in areas prone to very serious earthquakes and tsunamis” is a very, very valid question.  It is a fact that engineering can make almost anything withstand almost any disaster imaginable – but the costs escalate drastically, as well.  Power utilities can no more afford to buy plants that can survive every possible disaster than you can afford to buy a car that will protect you from every possible highway accident.  Perhaps building nuke plants in active high-risk quake zones, or low-lying coastal areas, isn’t so smart.

You’ll note, by the way, that Minnesota is prone to neither earthquakes nor tsunamis.

Now, according to the latest reports from Japan, the biggest radiation danger is coming from a fire in a building that contains spent nuclear fuel – uranium that no longer can support a nuclear reaction, but is still radioactive.  It’s being kept, basically, in a swimming pool – because water is an incredibly effective radiation shield…

…unless it boils away due to a fire in the building, which seems to be what may be happening.

Now, the people at Fukushima are dealing with conditions that are unimaginably difficult – even finding food to eat in that area is difficult, without having to deal with a damaged nuke plant and all the things that can go wrong.

But the best way to prevent nuclear waste from getting caught up in a building fire is to get it out of the building, and put it someplace where a fire is both impossible and irrelevant.  Say, miles underground.

Which has been proposed in the United State for over twenty years; the Yucca Flats waste storage facility would have made  disasters like the potential blazing waste plume at Fukushima impossible.  But the American left – the “environmental”  movement, in this case – scuppered that idea.  Partly because of the danger of transporting waste by rail (real, but manageable); partly because of danger to future generations thousands of years from now if the signage, for example, got obscured.

Which leaves us with fifty-odd nuclear waste sites more or less like the one at Fukushima today – including two in Minnesota – vulnerable, in extreme circumstances, to the same kind of disaster.

Thanks, Democrats.

But the issue of waste disposal can’t be laid at the feet of the DFL alone; it’s a national issue.

What we can lay at their feet is the economy-crippling shortsightedness of cutting off Minnesota’s energy-production nose because of an accident that could not be replicated in Minnesota, or for that matter most of the US; with a 45-year-old reactor design, arguably built in an inadvisable place, with backup power that couldn’t withstand twin disasters that are exceedingly rare to nonexistant away from the American west coast.

Especially given that advances in nuclear technology promise to make proposed nuke plants meltdown-proof by replacing mechanical and human safeguards -which are fallible – with the laws of physics.

To: Legislature

From: Mitch Berg, Overburdened Taxpayer

Re: Public Financing for Vikings Stadium.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Not just no, but hell no.

That is all.

Two weeks ago, the DFL in the House and Senate together provided exactly one vote for the Dayton Dustbowl budget.

There was, of course, a theatrical letter from Dayton telling the various DFL caucuses not to vote for at – but there’s more than a little evidence that was sent to cover the fact that hardly any DFLers were going to vote for it anyway.  These things do not happen by accident on Capitol Hill.

Anyway…

Via the sources that he has so many of, Michael Brodkorb (via MDE) has released a copy of the DFL Legislative caucuses’ takes on the budget.

Here you go:

Indeed, so far this session looks like it’s been a three months vacation for the DFL.

The GOP released its detailed budget proposal yesterday.

Via MDE, here’s the breakdown:

It’s the “live within our means” budget the GOP has been talking about since the beginning.  No tax hikes – small cuts, indeed, for some Minnesotans.

The Strib:

Etched in billions, the dramatic battle pits DFL Gov. Mark Dayton’s fight to raise taxes against Republicans, who insist that spending must come down.

Dayton quickly rejected the Republican plan.

“Earlier today the governor reiterated his belief that budgets are a reflection of values and priorities … Based on the spreadsheets the GOP put out today, it appears those values and priorities are cutting education, cutting health care, cutting jobs, cutting veterans and raising property taxes,” Dayton spokeswoman Katharine Tinucci said.

Of course, there is not a cut to education.

With little middle ground apparent, Capitol veterans say the fight already has the markings of an extended session that could drip from a timely May adjournment into the summer.

Totally worth it.

The House and Senate, which released slightly different budget blueprints Thursday, would spend almost $1.3 billion less than Dayton proposed on health and welfare programs.

Those outlines give the programs — which eat up a third of the state spending — a bit more money than they are now getting but not enough to keep up with projected health care costs.

And, as we’ve noted many times, the projections and how we arrive at them are a huge part of the problem.

The lawmakers added some sugar to their budget medicine. The Senate plans to build in tax cuts for businesses, while the House wants an income tax cut for middle-income Minnesotans.

Either of them would be a perfectly fine idea.

House Minority Leader Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, called the House move misleading.

“They’re putting money into the pockets of middle-class Minnesotans with one hand while they’re reaching into the other pocket of middle-class Minnesota families with the other hand,” he said.

Rep. Thissen:  Please show us the portion of the budget that requires DFL-dominated city governments to jack up property taxes.

Get on that right now.  Goodness knows you’re not doing anything else.

Wisconsin investigators announced on Friday that they’d figured out who sent the really really stupid death threats to Wisconsin’s GOP senators:

On the day Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed his Budget Repair Bill into law, authorities announced they had identified the sender of emails that threatened to kill the Governor and Republican members of the State Senate who supported the proposal.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice, Division of Criminal Investigation and the Wisconsin Capitol Police say they have investigated numerous threats against elected officials over the last four weeks. Thursday Night, the Division of Criminal Investigation identified and located a subject suspected of sending at least two of those threats.

“The Division of Criminal Investigation takes these kind of threats seriously and will follow through with the investigation and prosecution whenever possible,” DCI Administrator Ed Wall said.

Upon questioning, the suspect subsequently admitted to authoring and sending two e-mails threatening to kill the Governor and members of the Senate.

And that suspect has reportedly confessed

News that the state Justice Department has identified one suspect in connection with death threats sent to Republican state senators comes as at least a minor relief to Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend).

“They caught someone? Good,” he said Friday night. “I am waiting to hear the background of the type of person who would do such a devious thing.”

Just so we’re clear, National Public Radio has raised questions about the editing of James O’Keefe’s piece on NPR’s news coverage being for sale:

One “big warning flag” [Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member for broadcasting and online at the Poynter Institute]  saw in the [edited] tape was the way it made it appear that Schiller had laughed and commented “really, that’s what they said?” after being told that the fake Muslim group advocates for sharia law. In fact, the longer tape shows that Schiller made that comment during an “innocuous exchange” that had nothing to do with the supposed group’s position on sharia law, David reports.

Tompkins also says that O’Keefe’s edited tape ignores the fact that Schiller said “six times … over and over and over again” that donors cannot buy the kind of coverage they want on NPR.

Scott Baker, editor in chief of the conservative news site The Blaze, tells David that after watching the two-hour video he came away with the impression that the NPR executives “seem to be fairly balanced people.”

Well, at least in their approach to covering news, perhaps.

They still don’t like Republicans much:

Still, [NPR spokeswoman Dana Davis Rehm] added, Schiller made some “egregious statements.”

As we said yesterday, those included Schiller calling the Tea Party a “weird evangelical” movement that has helped push the “current Republican Party” to become “fanatically involved in people’s personal lives.”

As Time magazine’s James Poniewozik writes at his Tuned In blog, “the close-up look [at the longer tape] doesn’t let the executive, Ron Schiller, off the hook. But it shows O’Keefe edited the short version of his video to fit his anti-NPR agenda. Explaining why both things can be true at once requires, well, a lot of context.”

If O’Keefe edited his piece to falsely imply that NPR was selling favorable coverage, that’s a bad thing.

But O’Keefe didnt’ have to do anything to coax a voluble anti-conservative opinion out of Schiller.

“It was just Schiller’s personal opinion” is the defense I’ve heard from not a few of NPR’s defenders.

But  O’Keefe’s editing had nothign to do with departed NPR CEO Vivian (“No Relation”) Schiller and her News chief when they  vetted the firing of Juan Williams for appearing on Fox News, over an interpretation of his remarks about Muslims that was so grossly lacking in context as to be a virtual defamation.

Or – given that it was long before O’Keefe entered the public eye – the hand-wringing that the left, the establishment at NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and their various hangers-on over the appointment of two Corporation for Public Broadcasting board members who had donated money to Republicans.  Left-leaning pundits agonized over the “potential for politicization” that the Bush-era appointment might point to…

…in a way that they just seem not to be with NPR’s new CEO-designate, Joyce Slocum – whose donations to Democrats seem not to be a danger to democracy according to those same pundits.

In other words, NPR doesn’t need to be paid to have contempt for conservatives.

Kudos to Katie Kieffer, who just got her first article published in Townhall today.

I get the impression there’s  not much middle ground when it comes to John “Johnny Northside” Hoff.   I didn’t entirely know that when I first wrote about his defamation trial last week.  People either seem to support him for his crusading against mortgage fraudsters in North Minneapolis, or they detest him for being a showboating publicity whore who plays waaaay below the belt, publishing his targets’ phone numbers, home addresses and employers when he really wants to screw with ’em.

That, in fact, was my first encounter with Hoff; back in 2007, he vowed in the Minnesota Daily to stalk Republican National Convention delegates at their hotels.

One of his subjects, a Jerry Moore – a community organizer who went to work for the University of Minnesota – became the target of Hoff’s ire, after Moore’s involvement in a mortgage fraud scam (for which some people went to jail for long terms, but in which Moore was never convicted).  Not satisfied with the results of the legal system, Hoff turned the attention on the University, drawing enough attention to Moore that the U fired him.

Moore sued, for defamation and “Tortuous Interference” with his employment.  The proceedings dragged on for the better part of two years, before ending Friday with a jury awarding $60,000 to Moore; $35K for damages, $25K for emotional distress.

Not for defamation – libel, in this case – but for “Tortuous Interference” with Moore’s employment.   The ruling seems to have been that while Hoff’s postings didn’t meet the legal standard for libel, which in Minnesota means…:

1. Party A (Hoff) says something about Party B (Moore) to Party C (Hoff’s readers, the public)…
2. …which is untrue…
3. …which has a reasonable chance of harming Party B’s livelihood or reputation…
4. …and, if Party B is a public figure, he must prove Party A’s intent was malicious – and “public figure” can mean “even in a limited sense”, as in a community organizer or, for that matter, a blogger.

…they did interfere illegally with Moore’s employment.

Since the court classed Moore as a “limited public figure”, a defamation suit was all but impossible; to win, a blogger would basically have to write something utterly untrue, be told it was untrue, and respond via email “I don’t care, I’m going to get you not matter what!”.

That was a “hypothetical” example.  Scout’s honor.

Anyway – the defamation suit got tossed, but Hoff lost on “tortuous interference”, whose legal definition I’m not at all sure about; some commentators (David Brauer among them) immediately tweeted that the case was eminently appealable.

Abby Simons at the Strib covered the story – and it’s not quite so clear-cut:

Jane Kirtley, a U of M professor of media law and ethics, called the lawsuit an example of “trash torts,” in which someone unable to sue for libel, which by definition involves falsity, reaches for another legal claim. She predicted the verdict will be overturned.

“This is based on expression, and expression enjoys First Amendment protection,” Kirtley said. Just last week, she said, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protected the Westboro Baptist Church’s antigay protests at military funerals.

“I find it really hard to believe that there was a degree of emotional distress caused by this reporting that outstrips that suffered by [a Marine’s] family,” Kirtley said.

The verdict also surprised U of M law professor William McGeveran, but he wasn’t so certain that it will be easily overturned. Appeals courts tend to give a lot of credence to jury verdicts, he said.

Leaving appellate law issues aside, the lessons for bloggers seem fairly clear:

Learn what “Defamation” is, and don’t do it.  The short form?  Don’t present as facts things that can damage other people’s livelihood or reputation, if they are not true (things that are clearly presented as opinion are another matter). If you write something damaging, believing it to be true, and it turns out not to be the case, issue a correction; correcting an error is a pretty clear indicator you’re not acting out of malice.

Know when to stop. There are a few bloggers – mostly but not exclusively on the left – who can’t leave the story where the story ends.  They go to their subjects’ homes, or they publish where their subjects work.  They attack their subjects’ families.

It’s been my personal policy since the beginning to leave peoples’ jobs out of the story (unless it is a part of the story, legitimately.  And that means not creating a story out of someone’s job or family; there are a few regional bloggers who will write stories theorizing that other bloggers, for example, write on company time; I figure that’s between the blogger and their employer).   Families?  Always, always off-limits – including trying to find ways to make the families of people I disagree with into stories.

The point isn’t my own facility for horn-blowing; it’s that not only is going after peoples jobs, families and personal lives (that aren’t parts of the story) scuzzy; until the “Johnny Northside” case is resolved, it’s legally dicey as well.

As, I think, it should be.

Ed Kohler has a roundup of other coverage.

UPDATE:  Just so I’m clear on this: it’s a very, very good thing that Hoff was found not guilty of defamation.  It’s pretty clear that he stayed within the letter of the law.

David Brauer at MinnPost on the verdict:

The award left media lawyers flabbergasted because, as Faegre & Benson’s John Borger puts it, “If the statement was true, there should be no recovery. There is caselaw in Minnesota that the providing of truthful information is not a basis for tortious interference.”

Hoff’s lawyer, Paul Godfread, says “we will file any post-verdict motions that are appropriate.” Two common ones: filing for judgment based on a matter of law, and a motion for a new trial. The former wouldn’t challenge the jury’s fact-finding, instead arguing there is only one proper legal conclusion — no monetary damages.

The question “which prevails, the jury verdict or the case law?”, is one of those things that lawyers get rich hashing out.

But I have  question, especially for the media über alles types that have adopted Hoff as a cause celébre: let’s make this a hypothetical case, not directly related to Hoff vs. Moore.

Hypothetically, let’s say that a blogger wrote something incendiary and damaging, but true, about a nemesis’ activities – activities which happened in the past, at (let’s say) the nemesis’ last employer.

Nemesis has moved on since the activities about which Blogger was writing. The Blogger, in addition to pointing out his Nemesis’ past activies, carries a vendetta against the Nemesis into the present.  The Blogger starts a campaign against his Nemesis, intending to damage the Nemesis, to cost him his job, damage his reputation (above and beyond damage caused by the factual story from the past).  The vendetta is above and beyond, really separate from, the actual story about which the blogger reported.

Should the First Amendment protect not only legitimate free speech, but the malicious use of the reporter’s platform to harass the subjects of his/her reporting?  (I ask this stipulating that I’m not saying Hoff did this – although an ethical person might be forgiven for being concerned about some of the lengths he goes to to attack his targets).

OK, it’s not totally hypothetical; back in 2005, a major leftyblog (TBogg or Kos or one of the other big loony bins) published John Hinderaker’s home and office phone numbers; hundreds, maybe thousands called; being readers of major leftyblogs, they were a pretty depraved bunch.  They were trying to get Hinderaker fired.  Not because his day job – a lawyer for a major law firm – had anything to do with the story, or was even three degrees of separation away from it.  It was a  malicious attempt to attack Hinderaker’s non-blogging, non-activist livelihood.

Was Hoff’s attack on Moore’s post-mortgage-fraud proceedings career warranted?  Was it protected by the First Amendment, or was it tortuous interference?

UPDATE 2:  Well, there’s a possible answer; Eugene Volokh writing at the Volokh Conspiracy:

Even if Hoff was trying to get Moore fired, people are constitutionally entitled to speak the truth about others, even with such a goal. (The tort actually requires either knowledge that such a result is practically certain or a purpose of producing such a result, but I take it that here the allegation is that Hoff wanted Moore to get fired.) The First Amendment constrains the interference with business relations tort, just as it constrains the infliction of emotional distress and other torts. See NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982); Blatty v. New York Times Co. (Cal. 1986) (speech constitutionally protected against a libel claim is also protected against an interference with business relations claim); Paradise Hills Assocs. (Cal. Ct. App. 1991) (same); Delloma v. Consolidated Coal Co. (7th Cir. 1993) (“permitting recovery for tortious interference based on truthful statements would seem to raise significant First Amendment problems”); Jefferson Cty. Sch. Dist. No. R-1 v. Moody’s Investor’s Services (10th Cir. 1999) (holding that interference with business relations and interference with contract claims can’t be based on expressions of opinion). The same should apply to the closely related interference with contract tort. See, e.g., Jefferson Cty. Sch. Dist.

Not positive that I think this is a good thing – but going back to my hypothetical, it also seems that the best answer to this is the proverbial “more good speech”

Unlike our First Lady, I have almost always been proud of my country, and to be an American.

Never more so than when I see things like this; it’s a chopper crew from the USS Ronald Reagan delivering supplies to Japan.

Yes, it was a bit of fun:

Kevin Binversie is from Lakeshore Laments.

My original piece on the Crow Wing County case, and my first and second followups from last week.

Back in college, when I was still a liberal, I was involved in the elections for the leadership of the Young Progressives.

I campaigned in favor of Rebekah Zildjian-Grothman.  Her opponent, Joshua-Micah Belcher, got wind of this.

“Mitch – don’t drop out of college if I win!”, he said at a meeting.

“I had no plans to”.   It seemed simple enough.

Oddly enough, all his posters had fine print at the bottom; I was standing by the bulletin board outside the cafeteria when Angie Schlegel pointed it out;  “I disclaim responsibility if Mitch Berg drops out of college shoul I happen to win”.

Angie looked at me, concerned; I shrugged my shoulders.  “I have no idea what he’s talking about”, I said, baffled.

The election happened.  Joshua – excuse me, Joshua-Micah – won.  As he gave his acceptance speech, he looked at me.  “And now, we’re going to watch Mitch Berg kill himself!”.  He reached into his pocket and handed me a “Withdraw From College” form.

“Huh?”

“You were going to drop out of college if I won!”

I threw the form back at him.  “That was a story you made up…” I started.

“Don’t change the subject!”, he bellowed.

———-

The DFL’s current “tactic” (scare quotes fully intentional) is, if anything, dumber than my fictional story above.

Let’s walk through the facts:

1. While setting up the 2010-2011 budget back in 2009, the DFL-dominated legislature, using the auto-pilot formula they use for these things, forecast a budget of almost $39 billion.  The increase – 21%, overall – was predicated on inflation (relatively low) and putative increase in demand for services.  The forecast was nothing more than the DFL’s wish list. it was focused entirely – 100% – on forecast increases in demand and price.  Nothing more.
2. The leadership of the then-DFL-controlled legislature subtracted the then-forecast revenues – around $32 billion – from the forecast, and declared that there would be a “$6.2 billion deficit”, primarily to put pressure on then-governor Tim Pawlenty.
3. The GOP – first during the Emmer campaign, and then after the November elections – declared that they could do a budget that would live within what were forecast to be government’s means; as of 2009, that was $32 billion.
4. During the 2010 Governor race, Mark Dayton made it clear that he was going to treat the $39 billion forecast as the gospel for the budget.
5. In response, Tom Emmer made it clear he and the GOP would not raise taxes, but force government to live within its means (and reform the system to help that happen.
6. Once it became clear that revenues were going to rise.  Tom Emmer made it a key part of his campaign; “living within our means” meant $33 or $34 billion.  Not $32 billion.
7. Emmer lost – but the MNGOP swept to commanding majorities in both chambers of the legislature.
8. The new GOP majorities made it clear that they were not going to raise taxes; that living within our means, and reforming our government and tax systems to make that possible were the orders of the day.
9. Time marched on.
10. Mark Dayton released his budget – which was greeted with all the enthusiasm of Vanilla Ice’s sophomore album.  Last week, Dayton had make a grand show of telling the DFL not to vote for his budget when the GOP brought it to the floor – to cover the fact that nobody was going to anyway.

At this point, the DFL knew what was coming; that the revenue forecast was going to show exactly what Emmer predicted, that government’s “means” were going to grow to $34 billion, and the GOP was going to use that fact.

And so they started perhaps the most cynical, transparently-desperate political memes I can remember – worse than my ol’ buddy Joshua-Micah’s, from so many years back:

The GOP’s all-cuts budget is late!  And if it’s not all cuts, then they’ve failed!

Put concisely, it was “the party that released all-tax-hike budgets in mid-April the past four years wants you get outraged that the GOP is releasing a balanced, no-tax-hike budget in March”.

The GOP released its budget last week – a budget that lives within government’s means – those means being $34 billion in revenue.  And the DFL’s chant-bots have been trying to cash that meme in.

House Minority leader Paul Thissen launched a broadside on the House DFL caucus Facebook page:

Apparently, “living within our means” is not as easy as the Republicans made it seem to Minnesotans on the campaign trail. Republicans promised Minnesotans that $32 billion was more than enough to balance the budget and that it could be done holding school children, seniors, and the disabled harmless.

And Thissen is lying.  The GOP never said “government’s means” was $32 billion, now and forever.

Today’s release of Republican budget targets proves that the magic act Republicans promised Minnesotans is running into hard reality. The $32 billion that was enough a week ago is now more than $34.

Thissen, and the DFL’s, plan is pretty transparent.  With a weak governor, no legislative power, and a $39 billion wish list, they are trying to convince Tea Partiers – including the moderate DFLers that deserted the party last fall – that the GOP, the party of no tax hikes and the $34 billion budget, are the spendthrifts.

This is the hallmark of a party that is desperate for a win – and fully confident that the media will not seriously question them about such a transparent bit of spin.

As a result, middle-class Minnesota taxpayers should start guarding their wallets against a Republican pick-pocket budget characterized by hidden taxes.

That’s another oldie but goodie, a very cynical bit of carefully-waterboarded context; “if the government cuts LGA, it will hike property taxes”.  That is, of course, the job of the local governments involved.  It has nothing to do with the legislature.

And hard-working Minnesotans should also guard their jobs. We know that the Republican budget will do more harm to Minnesota’s fragile economic recovery than a balanced approach. Cutting nearly 50% of Jobs and Economic Development, raising property taxes – the largest tax businesses pay already, and slashing the workforce are a recipe for job killing, not job creation.

Another bit of cynical distortion; the “Jobs and Economic Development” spending creates very few jobs and very little economic development, for the money we’ve poured into it.

Republicans heralded $300 million in new tax cuts for middle and lower income earners.

And that is a lie.  The “new taxes” will come from city councils, who can no longer camouflage their own spending by having state taxpayers subsidize it for the.  And as we showed last year, those city councils are run by DFLers.

Playing poker with a pair of deuces, Thissen is passing on the most transparently cynical set of chanting points I can recall in all my years of watching Minnessota politcs.  Thissen can get away with these statements – lies, grossly-waterboarded context – because he knows the mainstream media statewide won’t disturb his narrative.

Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring responded as well;  you should read the whole thing.  Money quote:

I’ll just be blunt. Rep. Thissen isn’t an impressive leader. His credibility doesn’t exist because his constant sky-is-falling predictions aren’t believable. People might or might not agree with the Republicans’ plan. I suspect more do than don’t because that’s how they voted in November and because people understand that spending $34 billion is substantially more than spending $30.7 billion.

Gary’s right.

Worst case?  That’s what the DFL is counting on; the idea that there are enough Tea Partiers who will see “Two Billion more in spending”, and ignore the “that’s what we have”.

Years ago, I heard a great cliche while I was playing poker. That cliche applies to this situation. Sometimes, the best way to throw a hand is away. The DFL’s hand is awful. Their plans aren’t that appealing. It’s time for the DFL to admit that it’s time to throw this hand away and return to the proverbial drawing board. They won’t win this hand with the hand they’re playing.

I wish I could be as sanguine as Gary.  The DFL is counting on there being a majority of the population that pays no attention beyond the chanting points they and their compliant media present for them.  The last election showed he’s a little over 43% right.

The message, if it comes up at the water cooler?  The GOP budget lives within the state’s means, without needing to jack up taxes to do it.  There are hikes, there are cuts – but it’s a sane, sensible budget for tough times.

Thissen, like my old pal Joshua-Micah Belcher, thinks if he can deny it often and loudly enough, people will believe it.

NOTE: I know, I know – neither my college friends Zildjian-Grothman nor Belcher actually existed.

It should go without saying that this blog’s prayers are with the people of Japan, and everyone in areas covered by the tsunami warning.

We’ll wait for an update from regular commenter Terry, who is (presumably) safely esconced way up on a mountain somewhere in the islands.

Someone in Wisconsin (presumably) has an active fantasy life:

The State Department of Justice confirms that it is investigating several death threats against a number of lawmakers in response to the legislature’s move to strip employees of many collective bargaining rights.

Among the threats the Justice Department is investigationg is one that was emailed to Republican Senators Wednesday night. Newsradio 620 WTMJ has obtained that email.

The following is the unedited email:

———-

Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.

WE want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and the people that support the dictator have to die. We have tried many other ways of dealing with your corruption but you have taken things too far and we will not stand for it any longer. So, this is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records.

We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, we decided that we wouldn’t leave it there. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message to you since you are so “high” on Koch and have decided that you are now going to single handedly make this a dictatorship instead of a demorcratic process. So we have also built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent.

This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We Will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Rep. Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. We feel that it’s worth our lives to do this, because we would be saving the lives of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. YOU WILL DIE!!!!

Well, isn’t that special?

Andrew Exum, a former Ranger officer who blogs at Abu Muquwama (which is affilaiated with the Center for a New American Security) on a a factoid about the “rebel”, eastern part of Libya:

I was looking through the Sinjar documents (.pdf) today because I remembered (incorrectly, as it turns out) that Benghazi had sent more foreign fighters to Iraq than any other city in the Arabic-speaking world. On a per capita basis, though, twice as many foreign fighters came to Iraq from Libya — and specifically eastern Libya — than from any other country in the Arabic-speaking world. Libyans were apparently more fired up to travel to Iraq to kill Americans than anyone else in the Middle East. And 84.1% of the 88 Libyan fighters in the Sinjar documents who listed their hometowns came from either Benghazi or Darnah in Libya’s east. This might explain why those rebels from Libya’s eastern provinces are not too excited about U.S. military intervention. It might also give some pause to those in the United States so eager to arm Libya’s rebels.

Of course (as a commenter notes) it could be that Qaddhafi used Iraq as an excuse to get ride of Muslim militants that could just as easily have bedeviled him.

But the Middle East is like unravelling an onion.

After weeks of endless whinging from the DFL (“where is the GOP’s budget?  Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh?”), the GOP Senate Caucus released its budget targets…

…weeks and weeks earlier than the DFL majorities did in the past two biennia.

Here’s the press release:

Leaders of the Senate Republican Majority Caucus have announced their budget targets for their forthcoming proposal to solve the state’s budget deficit. The overall budget spending level is set at roughly $34 billion for the 2012-13 biennial budget.

“Our caucus is committed to living within our means and not raising taxes,” said Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch (R-Buffalo).

The targets announced by the Senate Republican Majority protect funding levels for education, health and human services and increases funding for the judiciary.

“These targets protect the core constitutional requirements of state government. However, we absolutely have to scale back in the projected growth and spending,” said Senator Claire Robling (R-Jordan).

“These are appropriate spending levels for 21st Century state government,” said Deputy Majority Leader Geoff Michel (R-Edina).

Scraaaaaaaaaatch

Wait – Geoff Michel?

I thought the GOP was ruthlessly excising dissenters?  That’s what the DFL says!

Of course, they also have spent the last two months chanting about an “all-cuts budget”.

I guess everything the DFL says is suspect, huh?

Back to the presser:

“We will be incorporating substantial, real reform measures in our budget package to meet these budget targets. It is imperative that we reform and change the way government operates in order to contain runaway, autopilot spending increases and grow the economy.”

Moving forward, Senate Committees will continue hearing bills in a timely manner in order to meet the earliest committee deadlines in recent history. March 25 is the final date for finance committees and divisions to report appropriations bills. April 29th is set as the final date for committees to act favorable on bills in their house of origin and May 6th is the final date to advance bills or companions of bills that met the first deadline in the other house.

Here’s the big chart; today’s targets are blue, Dayton’s “Dustbowl” budget is red:

You’ll note that it’s not an “all cuts” budget – the DFL meme that the compliant media has been going along and using for the past two months.   The Tea Party would have liked to have seen some cuts – but the important part is, the budget lives within the government’s forecast revenue.

The other important part?  This is just the beginning.  Our government, as Amy Koch pointed out in her statement, needs to get away from its current funding model, with its “autopilot” spending increases.

King Banaian’s bill, HF2, will be a big next step on that.  As we get into the budget brouhaha, we’ll need people to start keeping the pressure up on their Reps and Senators to push this bill along – or we’ll just be repeating this past three biennia, with automatic forecasts being turned into bloated budgets and absurd deficits.

There’s plenty of work to do, here.

In the wake of last Tuesday’s Crow Wing County Commission meeting, the Brainerd Dispatch has the latest on the story.

If you recall the video I ran yesterday, showing Monty Jensen, Ron Kaus and Al and Jim Stene speaking in front of the Commission, you’ll remember the powerful allegation that the staff at the group home (run by the Clark Lake group of group homes) had fraudulently gotten Jim Stene to vote; Stene himself – who suffered serious brain injuries in a near-drowning incident when he was 12 -alleged that the group home staff had coached his vote.

County Attorney Ryan was un-thrilled by this:

At the Tuesday meeting, Ryan took issue with Stene’s statements, saying Stene misrepresented their conversations when speaking to the board.

Ryan said when he sat down and spoke to James “he personally informed me he did want to vote not that someone made him to vote. …

Which will be an interesting he-said/he-said to work through.

But if – as the Minnesota Freedom Council has alleged – Jim Stene has been judged mentally incompetent to vote, and his name is on the absentee voter roll, then there’s a legal issue right there.

And even County Attorney Ryan agrees there’s some smoke (I’ll add emphasis):

“I think it’s a bad thing to come in and try to create an issue in an open forum setting and when it will be televised,” Ryan said. “There currently is an investigation pending into the exploitation of a vulnerable adult.”

In December, Ryan reported his office did not find evidence to substantiate a Crow Wing Township resident’s claim of voter fraud. On Nov. 1, Montgomery Jensen of Crow Wing Township filed a complaint with Ryan’s office.

I’m awaiting an update on when Fox will broadcast Eric Shawn’s report on the voter fraud allegations.

Yesterday, we noted that Governor Dayton has turned down all of the proposals from regional radio stations for what has become a Minnesota tradition, the governor’s talk radio show.

I had initially thought Dayton had a point for turning down the offer (albeit not for his petulant reaction); the audience would be smaller.

It’s not true, of course:

‘CCO says the Saturday slot has roughly the same number of listeners as Pawlenty’s time, around 50,000.

Indeed, they may be a better audience than the Friday one; weekend audiences stay tuned in longer.

But McClung points out that the Governor’s response – again, leaving out the petulance – makes no sense:

The other issue was that during the Pawlenty era, the show was on WCCO in the metro and was syndicated by Minnesota News Network and picked up by around a dozen or so Greater Minnesota stations, including stations in most of the key outstate markets. This time around MNN had teamed up with liberal stalwart Air America (owned by one-time congressional candidate Janet Roberts). Dayton had a choice between a solid metro station with a time slot he decided was an “insult” or a liberal metro station with little reach and a good Greater Minnesota network. He chose none of the above.

The KTNF/Minnesota News Network was an odd combination; MNN is a fairly sane, safe, sober operation, while KTNF is the “Ed Schultz” station.  Still, MNN has decent statewide reach.

But not only are KTNF’s ratings almost too low to measure (they’ve fallen off the cliff after the demise of Air America), but the audience is one of the least-desirable, economically, in the  metro – middle-class white people who aren’t smart enough for MPR.

And Dayton already owns that demographic.

I’ve been leaving aside Dayton’s petulant response, so far.  But let’s address it now.

McClung:

Frankly, Dayton’s attack on WCCO is embarrassing for him and makes the situation a lot worse. As usual, there was another option. Dayton and his team could’ve said that in this modern age, radio is simply outdated. They could’ve decided to do a radio show via the Internet, without commercials, that citizens could listen to live at the time of Dayton’s choosing or via recorded podcast. They could’ve even teamed up with BringMeTheNews.com, who made a bid for the show.

During my nearly six years with Governor Pawlenty I had a chance to be his sidekick for more than 250 weekly broadcasts. It was a great way to have a dialogue with the people of the state. But no radio station is under any obligation to provide a governor with any certain time slot or access to other stations. Dayton made a serious error in how he responded, but he could attempt a recovery by using new technologies. Of course, then there would be the inevitable Data Practices Act request to see exactly how many Internet users are tuning in….

My conspiracy theory: Dayton never intended to do the show in the first place.  Jesse Ventura was not a good talkradio host, but he knew how to work the medium.  Tim Pawlenty wasn’t a talk show host at all, but he was affable, unflappable,l and quick on his feet; his weekly hour was consistently good stuff, well worth a listen.

Whatever Mark Dayton’s virtues may be as a human, a citizen and a politician, his radio style isn’t high on the list.  Even in the friendliest and most controlled interviews – Keri Miller at MPR, who all but painted his toenails on the air – he sounded uncomfortable and tentative.  And  let’s not get me started on how his voice sounds on the air.

But since you did – he sounds like he’s still doing his morning gargle.  There.  I said it

So I think – sorta – that his intention was always to turn down the radio show; doing it couldn’t possibly gain him anything.