Yesterday, we noted that critics like Kay Hymowitz are noticing young men today are “angry”.  They attribute it to the usual dog’s breakfast of feminist conceits; the young men are a little misogynistic, a little bit childish, a little bit full of inchoate rage over “poliitcal correctness” and changing gender roles.

I pointed out that while those roles are certainly changing today, they are no more jarring to the male sensibility than they were at any time from the 1960’s through the 1980s; I might argue that after three generations of “women’s liberation” and the broad acceptance of what used to be “Feminism’s” goals, young men today aren’t suffering any culture shock that men didn’t have, and much worse, a few decades back.

And we noted a scholarship program for “white” (more than 25% caucasian) males, which the Southern Poverty Law Center will no doubt classify a “hate group” before long.

And at the beginning of it all, we noted that subcultures that are attacked, persecuted, segregated or singled out over the long haul tend to adapt to it, in ways that address immediate-term survival over long-term good.

Why are 20-30-something males ostensibly turning away from dating, mating, and our society’s “courtship ritual” as it’s evolved in recent decades, in a way that their older brothers, uncles and even fathers and grandfathers didn’t?

———-

Back when I was in fifth grade, I had my first male teacher.  Mr. Buchholtz was a big guy, a former football player who’d done a hitch in the Navy in Vietnam.  He was the first male teacher any of us had had.

And he did all sorts of things – showed us how to tackle, how to to do karate kicks, let us play “tackle pomp” and “cops and robbers” and “army”, complete with “guns” we made out of sticks, the whole line-up of things that might have mortified the women who’d taught us through fourth grade, had those women not come up through an educational system that let boys be boys.

And when I said let boys be boys, I meant “let them both exercise those “boy” traits – physicality, aggressiveness, spatial literacy – and learn to control them and use them appropriately.  You could play “cops and robbers”; you couldn’t accost Mary Jo Helmbarger with the toy gun and scare her.

Of course, the classroom itself was pretty well designed for girls, who develop verbally before boys do.  It all evened out.

And that was the system, thirty years ago.  Maybe even twenty-five years ago.

Mr. Bucholtz would be the subject of administrative discipline today, and most likely ostracized by his colleagues.

It was about twenty years ago that the theories of Harvard professor Carol Gilligan started to gain currency.  It was Gilligan’s theory that young girls suffered in school because boys, being more aggressive, were quicker to raise their hands and get attention; that young girls were neglected, and the neglect caused them to suffer – because the education system was just too masculine.  The theory – publicized in countless books by scholars, pop-psychologists and ideological feminists – was that boys’ innate aggression intimidated girls into being quiet and not getting their questions answered in class (among other charges), which in turn beat down young girls’ spirits, which was a form of systemic discrimination that had to be overcome.

And the educational academy reacted immediately.  Schools moved to start clamping down on “boy” things – aggressive play, games like “cops and robbers” and playground football and all the other ways boys have worked off their energy during recess since the dawn of the “sit your butt in the chair and learn what we tell you to learn” model of education.

Now, psychology has known for decades that if you make a person bottle up “who they are”, it’s going to cause psychological damage . It’s one of the reasons schools have bent over backwards, for example, to support gay students; because, they just know, if you make a person deny what they are for long enough, it’s going to cause damage.

Enlightened people would never think of demanding a gay student stop being gay.

But virtually overnight in pedagogical terms, it became the fashion to force boys to do just that; to bottle up who they were.   I’ve been noticing this for almost as long; I remember having this conversation when my stepson was in school, in the early nineties.  In one memorable conversation with a woman who was a teaching assistant at the University of London’s graduate educational psychology program back in 1998, I put that basic premise out there; her response, straight from the textbook of the day, was “yes, boys acting like boys is a pathology that gets in the way of good education”.  Direct quote.

Of course, Carol Gilligan was wrong. Christina Hoff-Summers, in The War On Boys, pointed out that Gilligan’s “research” was not only almost completely exempted from peer review, but Harvard wouldn’t release any of the raw data or methodology that led to her conclusions – which was, in those days before “man-made global warming”, considered pretty bad form.  Hoff-Summers pretty well shredded Gilligan, and the outcomes of the mania that had by this time swept the educational academy…

…but it was really too late.  School became a fairly dismal place for boys.  Especially the boys that couldn’t “go along to get along“.   Acting too much “like a boy” – being too aggressive, not channelling their energy into acceptable forms, which meant “being verbal, not physical” – could get a boy drugged into compliance.  Most outrageously, teachers started demanding  boys get drugged into compliance, and making the system make those demands stick.  In other words, raduates of the least academically-rigourous programs offered at most universities felt themselves empowered to act as practitioners in a field that took graduates of the most rigorous field, but one that even those practitioners know is still only vaguely understood.

Can you imagine what’d happen if science came up with a drug that could suppress a homosexual child’s identity?   The very fact that the idea had been researched would be condemned with vein-bulging fury, to say nothing of the actual act of producing and prescribing the drug.  And the furor would be right.

And yet our education system has been forcing half the student population to be something other than what evolution, brain chemistry and their physiology make them, and being drugged into submission and classified as “special ed”, and plopped onto the failure track  if they don’t go along.

And it’s having an effect.  The number of girls in college increased – from right around to slightly under half in the ’80’s, to closer to an estimated 60% of the population in the very near future.  It’s even more pronounced in the humanities and soft-sciences.   It’s gotten to the point that the mainstream media who trumpeted Gilligan’s “research” twenty years ago are fretting about the lack of men on campuses today.  If 12 years of school have been turned into an ugly ordeal, why should they stretch it out to sixteen years – even assuming that their drug-addled, special-ed sodden academic records allow them to get into a college.

So the question I’d like to ask Kay Hymowitz – the author of the book Manning Up that I went after yesterday – is “why are you asking why young men are shunning the dating life, when the real question is why do you expect young men who’ve had traditional masculine roles beaten down and treated as pathologies to be overcome  for their entire educational career and  young lives to suddenly turn into Prince Charming when they turn 22?”

As long as we actively suppress, and oppress, boys acting like boys – especially by way of learning how to be responsible boys, and thus responsible men, the way they always have – then Kay Hymowitz’ dating malaise is just the tip of the iceberg.

This has just got to piss Nick Coleman off – and, commensurately, leave Chad the Elder pretty stoked:

That’s a Libyan freedom fighter with a UND Fighting Sioux T-shirt.

Politically-incorrect here; a sign of freedom there.

Just goes to show you – wherever tyranny needs to be toppled, whether in Saint Paul or in the Sahara, North Dakotans, or our clothes, will be there.

It was a Sunday afternoon, at my weekend gig at KDWB.  It was 5PM, and I was back at the pop machine.  Joe Hansen was grabbing a coke.

“So, ah, the boss fired one of our board ops”, he said, in his typical indoor voice, which was loud enough to shush R. Lee Ermey.

It clicked.  “S0 – they’re hiring someone to replace him?”, I asked.

They were.  Joe told me to contact Leighton Peck, the boss at K63 – KDWB-AM, once a storied Top40 AM station from the glory days of rock and roll radio – and let him know I was interested.

Tomorrow.  For sure.

Two years ago, a small number of Tea Partiers carried guns to the rallies.

In every single example, the owners followed applicable state laws; they either had permits for open-carry, or were in states that didn’t restrict open carry of handguns and/or long arms, whichever were applicable.

And for all of the left’s barbering on the subject, not one single episode of violence was ever, not once, pinned to a Tea Partier, save for a single threatening phone call, and that caller’s been convicted.  Not that the left didn’t try; every time a Tea Partier sneexed or looked the wrong way, someone tried to claim there was violence, racism or both. The only actual physical violence involving the Tea Party was carried out by counterprotesters and supporters of liberal congresscritters at Town Hall meetings.

But those Tea Partiers with their guns (which, for the record, I found counterproductive; no sense inflaming your opposition’s most paranoid instincts for no good reason) were legal – with no excpetions that I’m aware of.

Not so much this alleged episode:

Dozens of rounds of live ammunition were found outside the Capitol Thursday morning, law enforcement officials said.

Dane County deputies found 11 rounds near the State street entrance Thursday morning, said UW-Madison Police Chief Susan Riseling. Twenty-nine rounds were found near the King Street entrance, and one round was found near the North Hamilton Street entrance, Riseling said.

Department of Administration lawyer Steven Means is asking that the Capitol be cleared for a security check.

Riseling said all the bullets were 22-caliber long rifle hollow points. Officers were conducting a sweep of the grassy areas and bushes outside the Capitol.

Bear in mind that Wisconsin is one of few states where it is  completely illegal for a civilian to get any carry permit under and circumstances.

So if it’s true – we’ll check back – it means that some pro-union protester is walking around with an utterly illegal firearm.  (Or that some protester is dropping ammo around to freak people out.  Either way…)

Take a culture. Any culture (or sub-culture, really).

Deprive them of choices.  Stuff them into ghettos, literally or figuratively. Punish them just for the simple act of being who they are. Make their identity the subject of scorn and abuse within the larger society.  Actively denigrate their traits, their identity – their being.  Lather, rinse and repeat for a few generations.

What do you get?

Cultural pathologies.   The world’s full of them:

• Russians, with over a thousand years of rule by strongmen and monarchs who used systematic abuse as a fundamental tool of power, have the most exaggerated sense of cultural Stockholm Syndrome imaginable.  It’s been quipped by not a few Russophiles that Russia is generations away from being comfortable with western-style liberal democracy; the peoples’ cultural memory is as utterly tied to abuse as any battered spouse after leaving a thirty year marriage; as awful as it is, they keep finding more of it.
• Jews the world over exhibit all sorts of stereotypical cultural traits – insularity, fatalism, and on and on – that sociologists have linked to the centuries of segregation, pogroms, and mass-murders epic and small that they’ve endured.
• African Americans are still showing the cultural ills bred during 400 years of slavery; the black male, in particular, is still fighting with the marginalization he suffered under slavery, which lives on in far too many black families (and is glorified in way too much of the current popular culture); after 400 years of seeing signs of “uppityness” – education, initiative, individual thought – punished ruthlessly, it’s not hard to see why the culture’d have a hard time recovering in between 47 and 146 years.
• White Trash, too; southern white working-class non-land-owners were treated little better than serfs until the civil war, and not much better after.  Most of the ills that affect the white south – rural crime rates that in places like Louisiana and South Carolina overtop most urban areas, poverty, the Cyrus family, limited regard for education, the general sense of low expectations – trace back to the Antebellum period, where poor non-land-owning Scots-Irish crackers were expected to be cheap labor and foot soldiers.

And now, a full 49% of American society.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

A couple of stories popped up on the radar the other day that led me to a topic I’ve been stewing over writing for quite a while now.

Author Kay Hymowitz is the author of the best-seller Manning Up, which argues that twenty and thirty-somethings today are putting off adulthood, preferring instead to remain in a sort of arrested adolescence she terms “pre-adulthood”.

The Wall Street Journal published excerpts; she got some feedback.  And she wrote about it in the Daily Beast by way of defending her premise:

But a lot of the responses unwittingly proved my point—and another one: Men are really, really angry. Consider: “We’re not STUCK in pre-adulthood, we choose it because there aren’t any desirable American women. They’ve been bred to abuse men.” This fairly typical response that appeared at the Seattle Post Intelligencer website: “Sorry ladies. In the age of PlayStation 3s, 24-hours-a-day sports channels, and free Internet porn, you are now obsolete. All that nagging, whining, and stealing our hard earned cash have finally caught up to you.”

Shocked? I wasn t. During the last few years researching this age group, I’ve stumbled onto a powerful underground current of male bitterness that has nothing to do with outsourcing, the Mancession, or any of the other issues we usually associate with contemporary male discontent.

Hymowitz focused largely on “men as potential mates for women” and the dating lives of the age group, of course, and her observations reflect the scope…:

No, this is bitterness from guys who find the young women they might have hoped to hang out with entitled, dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling—and did I mention gold-digging?…Women may want equality at the conference table and treadmill. But when it comes to sex and dating, they aren’t so sure.

…but I think she missed a much, much bigger point.  Men, especially younger men, are angry – and it’s not just about dating, mating and sex.

She gets ever so close to the real point, too:

So, is this what Susan Faludi famously called the backlash? Is it immaturity, as my own book seems to suggest? Is it the Internet as an escape valve for decades of pent-up rebellion against political correctness? Or, is it just good, old-fashioned misogyny?

(Hymowitz’ theory is it’s a little of all of the above, plus the “men aren’t used to competition” slur, plus a broad upset over dating/mating gender roles, which have changed, partly, for women but not for men, in case you’d rather not read the whole thing).

Hymowitz missed the real story – or perhaps the real story was outside the scope of a book and article whose purpose seemed to be to reassure a generation of jaded younger women that they’re OK, it’s all those guys who have the problem.

There was another bit of news last week that is interesting to juxtapose with Hymowitz, though.

———-

Earlier this week, a Texas non-profit announced it was going to start giving scholarships for white guys.

The “Austin American-Statesmen” reports a Texas nonprofit group called the Former Majority Association for Equality is behind the scholarships.

Texas State University student Colby Bohannan says he launched the group after returning from the Iraq war to find there were college scholarships for women and minorities, but white males were left out.

Bohannan and his friends will start giving out 500-dollar scholarships this summer.

It’s a stretch to call it “racist”; applicants need to be 25 percent Caucasian, so the skinheads who fret about “mud people” aren’t likely to be much assuaged.  It’s certainly politically-incorrect, of course – a point in its favor.  Our self-appointed elites are tittering, of course – not just the giggly bit from the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove, but the inevitable droning jeremiads from the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose stock in trade is finding hatred in every box of Cheerios:

“It looks to me like a simple provocation,” says Mark Potok, who monitors hate groups for the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. “These people have fallen directly into the ever more popular myth of white oppression in America. The reality is that whites, to this day, have enormous privileges in landing scholarships and have real advantages in finding places at good schools.”

Potok says he isn’t impressed by the Former Majority Association for Equality’s avowed benign intentions, pointing out that professional racist David Duke, of the European-American Rights Organization, has used similar anodyne arguments while making a big show of sending money to poor whites in Appalachia. Potok also cited one of Duke’s favorite tracts, racial theorist Wilmot Robertson’s influential and wildly popular 1972 book, The Dispossessed Majority, which argued that the relative population decline of the United States’ white founding stock, compared to rise of non-Caucasians and immigrants, was allowing the nation to fall under the pernicious influence of foreign interests and Jews.

Potok is doing the SPLC’s usual voodoo, finding correlation and claiming causation, and doing a poor job even of that.  Is “White Oppression” an absurd case to try to make?  Sure.

But Potok, Bohannon and Hymowitz all came —-> || <—-that close to hitting an actual point.

Simultaneously!

Are white males oppressed?  Not in any meaningful way.

Are young males of most races angry, and perhaps reacting to that anger detrimentally?  Very likely.

Is it because they face changing gender roles in dating?  Maybe, but then so did my generation.  If anything, the change was more radical thirty years ago. when the entire change in gender models at home, at work and in society was both brand new and being taught as a crash course.   Today, young men express puzzlement that women their age can have sex without guilt just like they (purportedly) do; thirty years ago, it was that women could earn a living without guilt.

But guys in my age bracket, and not a whole lot after, had one huge advantage over today’s young men.

More tomorrow.

“…the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

Winston Churhill

Now hear the new poster child of the socialist movement in Amerika, Michael Moore:

Moore On Wealthy People’s Money: “That’s Not Theirs, That’s A National Resource, It’s Ours”

“They’re sitting on the money, they’re using it for their own — they’re putting it someplace else with no interest in helping you with your life, with that money. We’ve allowed them to take that.

Michael Moore thinks the wealthy should give it back.

I say, you first Michael.

Brian McLung:

Also on Thursday, expect Dayton’s tax increases to get an airing in the Senate (11:00 a.m.) and House (3:00 p.m.) during their floor sessions. This will give DFLers a chance to put their mouth where the money is – by casting a vote for multi-billion tax increases proposed in Dayton’s budget. What’s the over/under on the number of DFLers willing to stand with the Governor?

We’ll be watching.

Count on it.

Pet Peeves?  This may be the big one.

I drive the speed limit.  I have a serious distaste for both tickets and legal ambiguities;  the money I’d lose betting whether the cops will give you five or ten miles per hour over the limit is better spent on things I enjoy.

And when the roads are bad – as they have been, more often than not this winter – I have no, zero, nada problem doubling the distance between the car in front of me and driving at a speed where I’m comfortable I’m not going to endanger myself, or others.  And if youare “stuck” behind me, and don’t like it, don’t worry – I won’t be in front of you forever.  And I’m fine with getting there alive a minute later than I’d have arrived otherwise, and if that minute is eating you that bad, then you need to plan better.

Of course, I grew up in a place with real winters – and, may I add, a place where people actually do know how to drive in the winter.

Unlike the Twin Cities.

Naturally, those days when I’m doing 50 in a 55 zone through the blowing snow and one-block visibility, or 35 in an icy 45 watching tow trucks trying to pull cars out of ditches and snow banks on either side of the road, and bearing left and right to avoid the spinouts, there is always some nunb-nuts who will tailgate, or honk, or some moron in an F350 or an oil-belching Volvo crusted with “Obama” stickers, that will take its first opportunity to go sailing past, and crank it up to their normal speed limit plus ten – often with a honk and an obscene gesture (answered with a better one).

It’s stupid.  And if you are the only one that gets hurt, that’s bad enough.

But when your idiot impatient road picque hurts others, especially those whose only “crime” is knowing their limits, then there should be a special spot in heck for you, for you are truly a douchebag.

Kari Pfannenstein says her daughter — a bubbly, eccentric 17-year-old who marches to the beat of her own drum and is a friend to all — is now fighting for her life because drivers pressured her into going too fast on icy roads.

Now, all Pfannenstein can do is hold her daughter’s hand a pray for her to recover from two skull fractures, a lung contusion and other injuries.

“Every time, I say, ‘Drive Safe,’ and she says, ‘I always do,’” Pfannenstein said.

The Dassel-Cokato High School junior was heading to school on Wednesday morning with her friend, Sade Clay, in the seat next to her.

“I never thought this would happen,” Clay said, recounting the crash. “Kristina started sliding and tried to correct herself and slid into the oncoming lane, and our car turned all the way around and a Suburban came — and that’s all I remember.”

I’ve pretty well taught my kids to ignore morons on the road.  That means you.  You know who you are.

Nearly one Minneapolis public school family out of four has decettamped from the Minneapolis Public Schools, to either the suburbs (either relocating or merely sending kids to school there, under the state’s open enrollment law),  private or parochial schools, or in many cases charter schools.  In Saint Paul, it’s closer to one out of eight; either way, that’s a lot of parents who’ve decided that the public school system just doesn’t do the job for them.

I was one of them.  I pulled my kids out of the public system five years ago.  With one of my children, the big public high school just didn’t pack the gear.  With the other, it was more like child abuse.

The big statistic is this; in the inner city, charter school students in the inner city are very predominantly minority, poor, and speak English as a second language.  Their parents – like me, only black and H’mong and Latino, and with serious complaints about the achievement gap – are among the most passionate advocated for charter schools you can possibly find.

And they – we – having been voting with our feet.  And the Teachers Unions hate it when families get uppity.

The Teachers Union and the DFL (pardon the redundancy) appear to be starting one of their periodic orgies of attacking charter schools, and is apparently yelling “Jump”; Kackel Dackel at Cucking Stool, a dutiful leftyblogger, yells “off what?”:

“Charter schools are designed to boost student achievement” says the advertisement. That put me in mind of a post that Rob wrote last spring:

Charter schools crash and burn in Minnesota

(The link is to a Rob Levine piece that notes that, yes, some charter schools have closed ignominiously.  Some schools’ sponsors or administraitons got in over their heads.  Some did their best, but the rules are just plain tighter for charters.  And yes, when you put government money out there, some shylocks will find ways to take it; inner-city DFL political correctness certainly played a role; that is a story worth an entire article on its own.

According to Rob’s post (and statistics from the Minnesota Department of Education in it), charters fail at a rate seven times greater than public schools in Minnesota.

Which, if you think about it, is a really pointless statistic.  Charter schools can fail – and sometimes they do.  They have no safety net.  If they are badly-managed, they can close – as Bill Cooper’s “Friends of Education” did with one of their schools that didn’t pack the gear – or can be shut down by the Department of Education.  What happens when a district school, or an entire district is badly-managed?  They ram through a tax levy (and if the DFL gets its way, they won’t even have to ram it past voters) and fix things.  If the failure is academic, they waddle through the interminable “No Child Left Behind” system, with years on probation and, eventually, a “closing” that resembles a shell game more than a sheriff’s sale.  Public school districts can even declare bankruptcy, and reorganize (at exquisite taxpayer expense); if a charter school goes bankrupt, it’s done.

How about academic failure?  Public high schools are insulated from failure by the “Area Learning Center” system; kids who are dragging down the curve and who don’t drop out are shunted off the books to “ALCs”, where their grades don’t count against the school’s, and district’s, averages; they’re the district’s mulligans.  Charter schools – which, contrary to some lefty propaganda, don’t get to pick and choose their students – have to work with what they’ve got.  Before the Department of Education can shut things down, the parents often largely vote with their feet, again.

It’s easy for a charter school to fail.  It’s very, very hard for a public school to fail.

So who writes this propaganda? The website listed is publiccharters.org. Although its primary purpose seems to be lobbying, it’s a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit, with just under six million dollars in gross receipts for 2009. There is no information in the linked 990 identifying donors, and the website is likewise silent.

Worth looking into, don’t you think?

No, not really.  I mean, big whoop; non-profits set up a non-profit to publicize themselves.  (But do you know whose donors would be interesting to uncover? I digress)

But while Kackel Dackel is interesting in badgering those he disagrees with, and it’s never really all that interesting, he’s really left a big rhetorical clinker hanging out there; the implication that charters really don’t boost student achievement.  The Department of Education – and teachers-union flak groups, like “MN2020” – periodically publish “studies” showing that charter schools lag the public schools’ achievement.

These “studies” always, invariably, without exception fail to control for demographics; every single one compares apples with axles.  They also fail to control for motivation; many families go to charter schools after the public school system has nearly extinguished their kids’ interest in learning and given up on them.  Fortunately, I did that, at least in part – in response to one of MN2020’s endless, Teachers-Union-funded hit pieces, I compared apples to apples.  And then I did it again.

More in coming weeks, as the DFL/Unions/their pet non-profits/the leftyblog chanting party ramps up the attack.

Ann Althouse notes that some of the protesters are starting to lose it:

I see some people descending into irrationality — beginning to form a cultish mentality that demonizes outsiders. Meade was at a demonstration, photographing it. A demonstration is — to a clear-thinking person — a collection of people asking to be seen, wanting to be photographed. Yet when they perceive that Meade isn’t one of them they flip — it’s a Flip camera — into fear. Meade had been trying to talk to them rationally about why the pro-Walker woman might not want to debate her ideas in that setting, and instead of seeing Meade as a citizen who’s finding out what’s going on and helping 2 women who are surrounded and outnumbered, they spread their “plant” theory. And it’s not just a theory. They know he’s a plant.

Context?  Sure – read the piece.

Barack Obama and Mark Dayton are both pinning their economic development hopes on “green jobs” – jobs directly related to environmental hysteria.

At least one of those initiatives is squibbing, so far:

Well, here’s the big scorecard for all sales of [Chevy Volts and Nissan Leafs] thus far:

• Volt: 928
• Leaf: 173

Ouch. The big questions, of course, revolve around one word: “Why?” Is ramping up production and deliveries still a problem? Is demand weak? Are unscrupulous dealers to blame? When will sales start to climb? And what are these numbers doing to plug-in vehicle work at other automakers? We don’t know all the answers, but for more on February auto sales, click here.

Big answer:  Because people don’t buy the hype, and you cannot create a market by decree.

I’d like to take a moment to talk a little more about the Senate Media Credentialing rules discussion from yesterday.

First – thanks to the working group, who did the vast majority of the work.  The group included (as noted elsewhere) David Brauer of the MinnPost, Michael Brodkorb (the Executive Assistant to the Majority Caucus, Rules Committee Executive Director Cullen Sheehan, Minority caucus communications director Beau Berentson and Senate Sergeant-At-Arms Sven Lindquist.

Now, here’s the important take-away; if the full Senate passes the change (it’s supposed to come up on the floor on Thursday), the Minnesota Senate will have the most transparent, open and non-partisan media process of any state government body in the United States.   Literally – there are a few legislatures that are in the same ballpark (Montana springs to mind) but there are none better.

And for that, I have to give my kudos to Michael Brodkorb – who in addition to being a mover and shaker in the MNGOP and the Majority caucus is a former blogging powerhouse, my former Northern Alliance colleague, and my friend.  He was the driving force behind the working group, which in effect makes him the prime mover behind the reforms.  The reforms themselves do nothing to benefit the MNGOP majority for which he works; as such, they could be fairly termed “statesmanlike” of the governing majority (and yes, it is a fact that the DFL members of the Rules committee supported the changes as well).  A good idea is a good idea, no partisan label needed.

Which made it interesting to flip through the comments in David Brauer’s original post on the proposal and the working group.  Brodkorb derangement syndrome is a real, serious issue among Minnesota’s comment-section keyboard warriors.

Brodkorb isn’t the only target, naturally;  Mark Gisleson, who to my knowledge has ever had a positive affect on anything, ever, wrote:

Don’t do it. If you do, you’re acknowledging that you are the equivalent of Mitch Berg, and that’s a libelous assertion because Mitch is a partisan blogger and radio host who will never cut a liberal an even break, whereas your work is objective, and not driven by liberal politics.

Gisleson is, to be tactful, raving and utterly un-based in fact; I was there to make sure the entire alternative media, left, right and utterly unaligned, could get access and be treated as “journalists” and reporters, with the same rights (and responsibilities) as the “real” ones.  I was there every bit as much to represent the likes of left-wing media like “The Uptake” and Minnesota “Progressive” Project as I was for True North and Minnesota Democrats Exposed and, for that matter, Shot In The Dark.

Not to push a “conservative” agenda. Period.  And Brauer, although he was added as “the token lefty”, was equally party-blind in his approach to the proceedings.

(And lefties should be a lot more careful about terms like “libel”; if being associated with me defames David Brauer, it would only be among people who are so deranged with partisan paranoia that the other key part of a libel charge, “damage to the victim’s reputation”, is pretty much a moot, if not negated, point.  Just my opinion, of course).

But enough of that.  The real message is that, if the Senate passes the bill (and from what I hear, even the DFLers who’ve been asked have approved), then the mission, to provide a better, more open, non-partisan means of access to our lawmakers to the New,  Alternative media – left, right or none of the above – and eliminate the old system that subjected the new media to the partisan whims of the sitting majority – is accomplished.

And that’s all that really matters.

I’ve been blogging for a long, long time.  And I’ve pretty much seen it all, by this point; angry bloggers, angrier bloggers, apoplectic bloggers, incontinently-angry bloggers and everything in between…

…but as much as I’ve seen, been and done, there are still few things that wrap a smile around my mug like really impeccable parody.

Parody is among the most difficult tools in the writer’s toolbox; the bad parodists merely ape their targets with facile caricature; the mediocre ones get the surface  cadence, patterns, accents, but miss the deeper rhythms and driving gestalts.

The truly great parodists – Benchley, Swinburne, Calverley, “Saint Paul”  Ward – “get” the very essence of that which they’re parodying.

And it’s a dying art.  Hardly anyone practices it well these days; it’s emblematic that Weird Al Yankovic may be the banner parodist of our time.

Or so I thought, until a little bird twigged me to the blog Mercury Rising – the deepest, most knowing, down-deep-in-the-pit-of-the-gut parody of a “feminist” blogger, awash in group cant and overheated groupthink and smug pseudo-intellectual entitlement masquerading as critique…

…and, wonder of wonders, is a local blog!

The question isn’t “is this brilliant parody”; reading this bit here – one of a  Wildean smorgasbord of bon mots twisted by such deftly rendered spoofs of “rage as if unto incontinence”, words nearly failed me.

One example among the parade of genius:

“This is exactly the sort of thing right-wingers love to do. See, for example, Mitch Berg and his buddies at “Protest Warrior”. So it’s no surprise that they’re trying the same old agent proschlockateur silliness.”

…”Phoenix Woman” executes the logical equivalent of a triple negative that actually makes perfect contextual sense; “she” is writing, putatively, about alleged conservatives supposedly planning (loudly and in public!) to carry out a violent false-flag at the union demonstrations in Madison; “she” invokes “Protest Warrior”, a group from the 2004 era that lampooned liberal protest memes – signs, chants and the like – with all the vein-bulging belligererence of Stephen Colbert…

…and yet “she”, Phoenix, knows that – and what’s more, “she” knows you know that, and “she” also knows you know they know that…

…and yet “she” carries it off so well that the question isn’t “is it great parody?”, but rather “what conservative writer has the parodic chops to carry it off?”

Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci?  I asked – it’s not him.

Ryan “Dirty Mushroom” Rhodes? He’s too busy.

Lileks?  No – even James isn’t good enough to subdue the tics in his own utterly-developed style enough to so totally not only inhabit a character, but twist it back on itself so brilliantly.

Mr. D?  Gary Miller?  Kouba?  Ringer?  Bogus?  Mall Diva or Tiger Lily (or both)?  I thought about each of them – and unless each has been sandbagging us all for all these years, I don’t think any of ’em has it in them.   Close, but…no.

Before you ask – It’ s not me. Sheesh – I wish.  I have a piece of the waterfront that I cover pretty well, but as parody goes, I bow at the feet of whatever master is behind this.

So the only question is – what conservative blogger is behind this savage, ingenious parody?

The literary world awaits.

It was a big day yesterday.

I kicked off by testifying at the Senate Rules Committee over proposed rules changes for credentialing reporters.  I wrote about this yesterday.  David Brauer and I each spoke briefly to the committee – led by Majority Leader Amy Koch and President Fischbach, with Tom Bakk leading the minority side.

We each answered a few questions, and then the committee went on to discuss all of the amendments proposed to the Senate rules – everything from dress codes to rules for disciplinary hearings.

One funny (in a very wonky sense) moment; there was one passage in the proposed media credentialing rules that both Brauer and I had questioned, which would have required people applying for “session passes” – credentials good for the entire session – to apply 30 days before the session started, in order to get published in the Senate’s media directory.   Brauer and I both pried into it – but the provision stayed.  I had mentioned that perhaps a web-based directory might make more sense than the traditional paper one – but that one fell under the “if it ain’t broke…” clause, so I didn’t make a big deal.

Conservative Senator Warren Limmer, however, moved to strike the deadline from the rules; after some discussion with the Sergeant at Arms, the deadline was removed by a nearly-unanimous vote.  Brauer whispered “that may be the only time in history you’ll see Limmer carrying the water for David Brauer!”

After that, it was over to the House, for an appearance on Marty Owings’ “Capitol Conversations” with Marty Owings.  I was on a panel with Sarah Janecek, as well as former DFL State reps Karla Bigham and Paul Gardner.  That was a fun time.

Then it was off to the House District 66B convention, where I was elected deputy district chair.

It was a long day, but a fun one…

America cried out.

And the cries were answered.

The Charlie Sheen Random Rant Quote generator is here.

…and if you want to know where Scott Walker is trying to take the State of Wisconsin, read this.

If you weren’t depressed about The Obama Economy before,  you will be after you read this.

Matthew Boyle in the Daily Caller writes about Politico’s Amie Parnes, who covers the Michelle Obama beat…

…where “cover the beat” means “relentlessly flaks for her supposed subject”:

Politico

reporter Amie Parnes is a watchdog, but not in the traditional journalistic sense. Critics say Parnes is a vigilant protector of Michelle Obama’s public image, a beat reporter who acts as a press agent for the official she covers.

Parnes’s fawning coverage of the first lady has inspired Betsy Rothstein of FishbowlDC.com to launch a “Parnes-o-Meter,” which ranks Parnes’s pieces about Michelle Obama on a scale of 1 to 10 kisses. “People have asked me, over and over again, for the past three weeks, ‘Why do you hate Amie Parnes? Why do you have such a personal thing against her?’” Rothstein told The Daily Caller. “The fact is that I’ve never met her. I don’t know her and this isn’t personal. It’s totally professional. I’ve watched her work, I’ve read her work, day in and day out, and there is never anything, not even slightly, critical of the first lady. It’s absurd coverage. As a media reporter, I don’t know how I couldn’t point that out.”

To the leftymedia, criticism equal “hate”.  Fascinating.

Now, please read Boyle’s entire piece; it does a great job of setting up one of the more egregious cases of media bias out there.

But it brings up a fascinating idea; why not adapt the Parnes-O-Meter to covering the regional media?

Why not rate regional media for the soft-balliness (?) of their coverage of Mark Dayton and the DFL?

Rate the coverage on a scale of 1-5 smooches?

I’ll work on some objective (!) criteria.  It’s almost too good not to run with…

It was April 28, 2003.  I sat in the public gallery of the Minnesota State Senate, with a legal pad (this back when WiFi was kinda rare, much less Air Cards), scrawling madly on a legal pad, writing down the salient points of the debate going on below – the final debate on the (intial) passing of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

As I sat there, I knew three things as clearly as I could see Ellen Anderson theatrically donning a flak jacket:

1. After 16 years of reading, study and activism, I knew more about this issue than most of the legislators on the floor, and any of the Capitol Press contingent – the Pat Kesslers and Laura McCollums and even Bill Salisburys – in the building.
2. Had I been able to do what reporters were able to – go out on the floor after the close of debate, to interview the likes of Wes Skoglund and Ellen Anderson and Linda Berglin – I could have gone a long way toward presenting the public a much better, clearer, more complete accounting of the issue than they got from the mainstream media – which, to be fair, had come a long way, at least in terms of fairness, in the previous seven years.
3. I would not get that chance – because I was not “the media”.  I was just a mere peasant with a blog.  And that just didn’t count, back then.

The media landscape has changed since 2003 – a lot.  And Minnesota has led the way; bloggers, especially conservatives, have blazed the trail for the rest of the alternative media, knocking down walls that had stood for generations between “media” and democracy.

But not in the Minnesota state capitol.

As of the beginning of this session, there were two ways to get media credentials to the Minnesota State Senate:

• Be a reporter who worked for a short list of old-media outlets that were spelled out, word for word, in the Senate Rules; newspapers like the Strib and the PiPress; radio stations like WCCO and KSTP-AM, which hasn’t deployed a fulltime reporter to the Capitol since Cathy Wurzer worked there, back when I worked there, in 1986, and MPR.  The big TV stations.  And that was about it.
• Get vouched in with the Sergeant at Arms by a Senator or caucus staffer.  These were usually “day passes” – short-term access to cover debates on hot-button issues.

It was both an anachronism – there is no mention of new media anywhere in the Senate rules – and a political football.  Things came to a head in the 2009-2010 session, as the DFL caucus gave credentials to “The Uptake” – a very liberal group videoblog – but denied them to Saint  Cloud conservative talk show host Dan Ochsner for being “partisan”.

The worm looked like it was turning this session; early on, the the Senate, now controlled by the MNGOP, denied credentials to all partisan news outlets, including the Uptake.

This was the road to madness – and, likely, litigation.

About this time a month ago, Senate GOP Caucus Communications director Michael Brodkorb – who is also the deputy chair of the MNGOP, a former blog star from his days running Minnesota Democrats Exposed, and incidentally my former “Northern Alliance Radio Network” colleague  – asked MinnPost’s David Brauer and I to participate in a working group to revamp the rules.  The goals were pretty simple; to…:

• Remove the partisanship from the process of determining who was a “journalist” and, more germanely, which “journalists” got credentials.
• Set up a fair, transparent, non-partisan process for apportioning these press credentials that both protected the interests of the legacy media (which have invested a lot of time and money in covering the Capitol over the years) with the imperative to legitimize and normalize access from the New Media.
• Make the process fast, simple and inexpensive for the non-partisan Senate staffers – the Sergeant at Arms’ office, the Senate Information Office and the Department of Administration – to run, and to add no extra burden or, in these cost-conscious times, expense to the process of administering press credentials.

Brauer was there in his rather unique capacity as both a vet of the  mainstream media and a reporter for a site that is a little bit old and a little bit new-media.  Me?  Although I’ve worked in the MSM, I was there mostly to represent new and, I suspect, explicitly partisan media.

On both the left and the right.

Last week, the working group – Brodkorb, Brauer, Majority Caucus staffer Cullen Sheehan, minority-caucus staffer Beau Berentson, Sergeant-at-Arms Sven Lindquist and me – had its last meeting, and handed off our final recommendations.  The recommendations went through the (non-partisan) lawyers, past us for one more round of making sure the lawyers were saying what we thought we were saying, and, today, to the Senate Rules Committee where, if all goes according to plan, Brauer and I will be testifying later this afternoon.

Brauer on the results:

Here’s what would happen if Senators approve our recommendations:

The Sergeant-at-Arms — a nonpartisan staffer — would administer the credentialing process. Senators and partisan staff are expressly prohibited from intervening unless a journalist appeals his or her rejection. (More on that in a bit.)

Believe me, nobody — not the politicians, not the Capitol press corps — wants to define who is a journalist. However, because Senate space is limited, we decided on a fairly low bar: Applicants for a session-long credential must include three pieces in any format in the past year on “matters before the legislature.” That can include blog posts, video, etc.

The proposed rules state “any opinion in such pieces is immaterial” for credentialing. Does this mean more “ideological” journalists will get credentials? Almost certainly yes.

Count on it.  I’m going to make a note to file next year.

But the Minnesota and U.S. Constitutions don’t limit freedom of the press to perceived non-ideologues.

However, publications “owned or controlled” by lobbyists, political parties and party organizations “shall not be granted credentials.” Lobbyists are currently barred from the Senate floor.

The entire proposal, post-counsel, is here.

Credentialing, by the way, means…:

• You can get in line for one of the six seats on the Senate floor (stage-left from the podium), or ten seats reserved for media in the Gallery. Four of the floor seats are reserved for the “mainstream” media that rents space in the Capitol basement; the other two are “first-come, first served” seats for any other credentialed media.  Four of the ten gallery seats are reserved for TV cameras from the lessees downstairs, if they show up.
• You can get material – agendas, roll-call votes and so on – from the Senate Information Office.
• After the final gavel, you can go on the floor to interview Senators – provided that you follow the decorum rules and the Senate’s unwritten dress code (.  This is one thing that media people can do that the general public can not.

The most important part of these changes?   There is no partisan input into who is a “journalist”, or who is granted credentials.  The entire process is run by non-partisan staff, working to standards that leave the process open to pretty much anyone who wants to cover the Senate and who can make a fairly minimal commitment – writing three articles, not being a lobbyist or a party employee, following the decorum rules – to just about the lowest-possible barrier of entry to the term “journalist”.  You’ll need to apply for your session pass thirty days before the session kicks off.

And unlike the current system, there is recourse if you’re denied.  Brauer notes:

The Sergeant’s office has 14 days to review an application. That means if you want to cover opening day, get your application in by mid-December. It also means you can’t just drop in on the Capitol and declare yourself a journalist. (There’s a separate provision for day passes.)

If the Sergeant’s office rejects an application, the reasons must be spelled out in writing. One legal advisor strongly suggested having an appeals process. Therefore, the matter would go to the Senate Rules committee, which must issue a decision within 14 days.

This does bring politicians into the mix. The concept is that the Senate is the final arbiter of its rules (short of the courts, where applicants can always turn). Could Senators bum-rush an applicant they didn’t like? It’s possible. But unlike the current process, the debate would occur in public and be governed by their rules, which again, forbid consideration of opinion.

The upshot:  bloggers, talk-radio hosts, videobloggers, and traditional news media will be considered journalists, for purposes of getting credentials, if the Rules Committee and then the Senate passes the proposal.  Partisanship will not be either a disqualifier or a factor in apportioning access.

Having a good alarm clock, however, will.

I think it’s a fair trade.

Now that Mark Dayton has proposed to jack the taxes of Minnesotans making over about $150,000 up to 10.95%, and those who earn over $500,000 to an unprecedented 13.95% – one dollar out of every seven they earn – it seems there’s a little ambiguity on who “the rich” are.

Who are “The Rich?”

Let’s break it down for you.

The Rich Are Not…: DFL uber-donor Vance Opperman, who donates millions to the DFL’s pet causes, and whose income comes largely from dividends and investments.  He’s not rich.

The Rich Are…: The guy who runs the small consulting shop that landed you the IT gig with the company that was hiring.  He and his wife – who does the accounting – might break $200K for the year.  They are “the rich”, in Mark Dayton’s world.  Not Vance Opperman, silly reader.

The Rich Are Not…:  John Cowles, who donated $2.4 million to help start the Guthrie – in 1960, when that was serious money.  Who used to publish the left-leaning Star Tribune, and who ponied up to help found the center-left MinnPost a few years back.  He’s also given tens of thousands of dollars to the various groups that funded the epic, toxic sleaze campaign that helped squeedge Mark Dayton into office.  Cowles, with his money coming from dividends and trusts and all the usual shelters that the super-wealthy can afford?  What, you thought he was “the rich?”  Of course not!

The Rich Are…:  Grandma’s oncologist.  The guy or gal who spent eight years working his or her ass off taking the hard courses in high school and college to get into med school, then more of the same to survive the weeding-out process during four years of education, an internship and three years of brutal residency designed to test his/her mettle for the field, leading to post-doctoral training leading to a board-certification and then a few decades of experience that make him able to  help Grandma to turn her cancer into a harrowing cautionary story rather than an early good-bye to the grandkids.  After all that, the doctor and his/her spouse – a hospital administrator, as luck would have it – earn a little over $500K, of which about $40,000 currently goes to the state of Minnesota.  Since they – not John Cowles – are “rich”, that tab is going to go up to almost $70,000.  Doc and spouse, of course, still have options; that place in Prescott is looking mighty nice right now.   Which Prescott – Wisconsin or Arizona?  I think they’d both love to have an Oncologist for a neighbor, especially since they’re “rich” – don’t you?

The Rich Are Not…:  Mark Dayton, whose net worth is somewhere between $3,000,000 and $12,000,000 (or was, back in 2006, the last time he deigned to report his net worth according to the Minnesota Birkeydependant.  It’s mostly tax-sheltered, of course, off in tax havens like South Dakota or all those other states where people aren’t so Happy To Pay For more government.  Which makes them ideal for trusts, where trust fund babies like The Governor can keep his money!  So even though Governor Dayton has Renoirs to sell to finance his gubernatorial campaign, he’s not The Rich.  Nosirreebob.

The Rich Are…:  You, if you are (to pick an example from my own social circle) a programming consultant who started working as a code jockey right out of college, and spent a decade or so honing your skills as a software enginer.  You write good, tight code; you’ve stayed up on all the advances, and are fluent in not only several programming languages but in many of the arcane architectural environments that seem to so completely tribalize software these days.  You’ve moved on up; from your first job, making $24K a  year as a COBOL programmer for, say, Best Buy back in 1989, you’ve worked your way up to being a pretty indispensible part of some big, business-mission-critical projects.  You’re a hired gun, and a good one, and you get paid pretty well for it;  you bill $85 an hour or so, and work for six-month stretches on high-profile projects.  Tack on the salary from your spouse – a corporate HR benefits administrator who makes about $55K – and that means you make about $$225K on a good year; more during up years, less when the market’s off.  Not enough to have Renoirs to sell, but plenty comfortable.  Good thing, too – you pay for your own retirement, and write your own checks to Medicare and Social Security.  You know better than to complain – but you’re both one layoff or cut contract or downturn away from living on savings until the market turns up again.  Oh, yeah – your state tax bill is going to rise from $17K and change to almost $25,000.  Because you, you greedy bastard?  You are rich!

Unlike Vance Opperman, John Cowles or Mark Dayton.

Hang your head in shame, plutocrat.

CORRECTION – MAYBE: I’ m told that the 13.95% rate only applies to income over $500,000.  It changes the math…

…but not the principle.  “The Rich”, according to Daytons’ budget proposal, are people who earn income, as opposed to the rich, who make their money from capital gains and dividends and can afford to shelter their income in ways “The Rich” usually can’t.

Frank Buckles – the last surviving American veteran of World War I – has rejoined the rest of his comrades.  He passed away yesterday, age 110.

Buckles, who also survived being a civilian POW in the Philippines in World War II, died peacefully of natural causes early Sunday at his home in Charles Town [West Virginia], biographer and family spokesman David DeJonge said in a statement. Buckles turned 110 on Feb. 1 and had been advocating for a national memorial honoring veterans of World War I in Washington, D.C.

There are two known WWI survivors left in the world; an Australian man and a British woman, 109 and 110 respectively.

Buckles in 1917 and 2007 - via NBC

Buckled certainly had an action-packed life:

Buckles served in England and France, working mainly as a driver and a warehouse clerk. The fact he did not see combat didn’t diminish his service, he said: “Didn’t I make every effort?”

An eager student of culture and language, he used his off-duty hours to learn German, visit cathedrals, museums and tombs, and bicycle in the French countryside…

…In 1941, while on business in the Philippines, Buckles was captured by the Japanese. He spent 3½ years in prison camps.

“I was never actually looking for adventure,” Buckles once said. “It just came to me.”

I’d often wondered; what must it be like to be the last of…any group, much less a group of nearly five million?

“I knew there’d be only one (survivor) someday. I didn’t think it would be me,” he was quoted as saying in recent years.

RIP, Frank Buckles.

Budgets.

Mark Dayton has one.  It involves scraping money out of “the rich”  (more this noon) and a lot of fiction about money the state can save on contractors and what it can squeeze out of “snowbirds” (which will cost the state more in legal fees than it will ever take in), but it’s a “budget”.

The GOP will release a budget.  The DFL, per its usual mode, is yapping and cavorting around demanding the budget now.  There’s no reason for that, of course – the GOP can afford to let Dayton take a few punches (from everyone, apparently, but the media) and come out with a budget in plenty of time for the statutory end of the session.  It’ll be mostly cuts; it could include some allowances for new revenue (hint to the GOP; think “hold the line”), but it’ll be a responsble, sane, sober budget.

The DFL in the Legislature?

Oh, what do you think?

The car is rolling, but nobody is at the wheel. These people truly have no concept of what being the minority is.

Last Friday, Gordon “Gordy Walnuts” Hintz went all verbally Tony Soprano on his Wisconsin Assembly colleague, Republican Michelle Litjens, bellowing “You are f**cking dead” after the Assembly voted to pass Governor Walker’s Budget Repair bill.

Hintz – who has other issues going on – has apparently offered an apology:

An Oshkosh Assemblyman apologized to a colleague Monday for comments he made on the floor of the Assembly last week immediately following a vote on a contentious budget repair bill.

Litjens said she accepted the apology, but has asked the Assembly leadership to discipline Hintz.

Milwaukee talk show host and blogger Charlie Sykes broke the story – and wonders, accurately I think, if it would have ever been heard if not for alt-media attention.

Obvious exit question: would Hintz have apologized or even acknoledged the comment if I had not broken the story on my show/blog this morning?

Oh, what do you think?