“Military Intelligence” is a both a sarcastic rejoinder about the meatheadedness of bureaucracy and a fairly smug standup comic’s conceit.  This past week, the assault on Obama Bin Laden after fifteen years showed the end result of intelligence work.

Of course, intelligence is rarely that spectacular, even in terms of end results.

Mostly, intelligence work involves thousands of hours of mind-numbing tedium trying to learn what ones opponent is doing, either in general in peacetime or in very specific terms in time of conflict.  It covers everything from listening to and decoding and translating millions of hours of radio transmissions, to compiling intercepts and triangulations of enemy’s radar and radio transmissions, to poring over photographs from satellite, reconaissance aircxraft, submarines and drones to figure out opponents’ numbers, equipment and intentions, to getting information from agents or reports from the battlefield and, most importantly, piecing information from all these sources together to form at least an educated guess as to what your opponent is doing, or planning to do.

The ultimate dream of every intelligence service? To be able to listen in on ones’ enemy’s most secret communications, and thereby know what he’s doing as soon as he does.

It is a dream, for the most part.  Almost invariably, the best your intelligence can do is piece together external signs into an educated guess.

But every once in a while the intelligence officer gets a lucky break.

Seventy years ago today was one of them.

———-

On the opposite side of the intelligence fact-gatherer is the array of people whose job it is to keep secrets from their enemies; from the soldier wearing camoulage, to the counterintelligence operator looking for signs of the enemy’s prying eyes with the aim of co-opting or neutralizing them, to the cryptographers inventing complex codes to try to stay several jumps ahead of the enemy’s cryptoanalysts decoding efforts and, in this case, the engineers who develop the machinery to make the job sustainable, fast and error-proof.

It was in 1918 that a German engineer, Arthur Scherbius, patented the first version of what would be the German solution to that problem during World War II – a machine that would become known as “Enigma”, and would be the result of an intelligence campaign that not only changed the course of the war, but led to developments that frame the entire Information Age.

A German "Enigma" machine.

This guy explains it pretty well; three rotors, each containing 26 embedded wires – one for each letter of the alphabet – performed simple ciphering of letters; if you pressed the “G” key, run through one rotor, might become a “W”.  Filtered through two more rotors, a “reflector”, and then back through all three, meant the initial character would be changed a total of seven times between the click of the key and the lighting of the lamp that gave the final results.  Then, after each character, the third rotor would rotate to its next position, meaning that the code cipher changed with every key stroke.  Every day, the combination of rotors and rotor starting positions was changed according to code books published by the various armed services; the first few characters of each message, already encoded, would tell the recipient (who had set the rotors to the same initial setting, per the code book) which further initial setting to use for each of the wheels, in theory making the system even more secure.

The Poles, as befits a nation surrounded by mortal enemies who bore it no good will, had developed a crackerjack intelligence service (much as Israel has throughout its existence).  In the mid to late Thirties, mathematician and cryptologist Jerzy Różycki working for Polish Intel’s Biuro Szyfrów (Cypher Burearu) began working out the mathematical methodology to at least start figuring out the initial cypher-wheel setting.

It was a start.

But the codes didn’t stay static.  The early Polish discoveries were eventually rendered obsolete by developments in the Enigma machine, and with their secure coding procedures.

Britain, too – with its long history in cryptography – recognized the importance of code-breaking in general, and Enigma in particular.  British Intelligence – MI6 – gathered the Polish refugees after Poland and France fell, and set up shop at the cold, barren estate of Bletchley Park.

And in one of the most intense frenzies of advanced pure applied mathematics ever put to solving a practical problem, the Brits began tackling the theoretical aspects of decoding messages intercepted from Enigma.

But it’d help ever so much to get hold of a machine.

———-

A German U-Boat, “U110”, had set off on March 1, 1941 on its second war patrol, under Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, who’d commanded the boat ever had since its commissioning the previous November.   Lemp was an experienced U-boat commander; while commanding U30, he sank the first Allied vessel to fall to a U-Boat in the war, the passenger liner SS Athenia.   U-110 was his second command.

U110. It was a sister-ship of the U505, which is on permanent display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

In the nine weeks it’d been on patrol, it had already sunk one cargo ship.  On May 9 Lemp, operating as a “wolf pack” with U201, closed in on convoy CB-318.

Lemp sank two merchant ships that day, approaching submerged and firing torpedos.  But on his last approach, he left his periscope up too long.  Accounts vary; one said Lemp was distracted by a malfunctioning torpedo, while another says he lingered to confirm a kill, without sweeping the horizon…

…to note that HMS Aubretia had sighted the periscope and was closing in.

HMS Aubretia. A "Flower" class corvette, basically a converted fishing trawler, it was one of hundreds of slow, dumpy but seaworthy ships of the class that tried to guard convoys from the depredations of the U-boats.

U110 dove fast – but Aubretia bracketed the submarine with a spread of depth charges which rattled the crew and popped valves open and, more importantly, gave Aubretia a firm sonar fix on the submarine.   Two more British destroyers – HMS Bulldog and HMS Broadway – closed in to help.

HMS Bulldog. Commissioned in 1931, it was an old ship that largely served on convoy escort duty thoughout the war.

Bulldog captured the sub on sonar, and dropped 15 depth charges.  Broadway closed in and did the same.

HMS Broadway. Formerly the USS Hunt, commissioned in World War One, it was one of the 50 overaged destroyers lent to the Royal Navy in exchange for bases in the Azores in 1940. It was a sister ship of the USS Ward which, with its crew of Minnesota navy reservists, will be a subject of a post in about seven months.

The depth charge attack did more than rattle the crew of the U110.  The power cut out, sprung valves started flooding the engine room, and Lemp decided to surface – if he could.  Compressed air valves were open, blowing water from the ballast tanks.   The boat made it to the surface, and Lemp ordered “Last stop, everyone off” – slang, it seems, for “Abandon Ship”.

The crew swarmed out the conning tower hatch. The crew of Bulldog initially thought the crew was coming up to turn its deck gun on the British destroyer – a last-ditch affair that could still be deadly at close range – so his machine guns opened fire as Bulldog’s commander, CMDR JOe Baker-Cresswell, ordered the destroyer to ram the sub, killing a few German sailors before it became obvious they were abandoning ship.

Lemp, for his part, had ordered all the ballast tank vents and hatches left open – and, seeing Bulldog closing to ram, figured his ship, and its secrets, including the ultra-secret Enigma machine, would soon be 8,000 feet below at the bottom of the Atlantic.  His crew took to the water…

…as Baker-Cresswell decided it might be worth trying to capture the boat.  Bulldog veered aside, missing the stricken sub and ordering a boarding party led by Sub-Lieutenant David Balme, to get ready in the destroyer’s whaleboat.

What happened next is controversial; Lemp apparently realized his mistake, and started swimming back to the boat.  Accounts vary; some said he was shot by a British sailor, while others say he drowned while swimming.    Aubretia, Bulldog and Broadway picked up 31 survivors, about 2/3 of the boat’s crew.

At any rate, Balme’s crew reached the boat, and took hours to pilfer everything worth taking – including the Enigma and the boat’s entire supply of code books.

Sub-Lieutenant Balme's team rigging U110 for towing. The boat is down by the stern, due both to filling ballast tanks and flooding in the engine room due to the depth charging.

Hearing the tightly-controlled news, MI6 realised the coup the RN had pulled off – and how quickly the Germans would change their codes if they knew that U110 had fallen, intact, into British hands.  So Bulldog, which had been towing the boat to England, was ordered to quietly let it sink.

And the secret stayed put.  MI6 was able to use the captured machine and code books to complete their breaking of the Enigma codes.  For the rest of the war, “Ultra” – the mega-secret British code-breaking team at Bletchley – was able to read German communications at the highest levels in almost real time. German leaders, thinking they were sending messages in complete security, would communicate freely via Enigma – and Allied commanders would often have the messages nearly as fast as their German counterparts.

It was estimated that the complete cracking of Enigma shortened the war in Europe by two to four years.

———-

Or at least that was the public story.  Like so many things in the world of intelligence, the public perception of how things actually went down has been carefully manicured over the years, to throw the enemy du jour off the scent of what the various intelligence services, friend and foe, really know.

Because while most of the public history of Enigma, Ultra and so forth were written in the fifties and sixties and seventies, when MI6 decided to release a story, focused heavily on the events of seventy years ago today, the fact was that as early as 1932, the Poles were breaking Enigma codes (although it didn’t become public knowledge until the nineties), with the help of French Intelligence, which managed to steal a copy of an early German code book and deliver it to their Polish allies.  By 1937, the Poles estimated they were breaking 3/4 of Germany’s general staff Enigma-encrypted radio traffic – and with adequate staff (it was incredibly labor-intensive work), they could have gotten 90%.  Polish Intelligence knew almost as much about Germany’s plan to invade Poland as the Germans did.

Which is not to underestimate the importance of the capture of the U110 seventy years ago today.  It’s always better to have a working model – at the very least, to validate the incredibly complex mathematical models that went into the theoretical solutions.

But let’s go back to the whole “labor intensive” bit.

In order to help process the masses of information  that the complete cracking of Enigma unlocked, and to assist in cracking the rotor settings of German messages, one of the British codebreakers, Alan Turing, developed techniques – the logical “bombe” algorithm and the theoretical “Turing Machine” – which contributed to the eventual architecture of the digital computer.

And the first digital computers, developed at the end of World War 2, were largely developed to help support codebreaking efforts.

Seventy years ago today, the stuff of what was then science fiction crashed into very real life in the icy North Atlantic.

Fisking Lori Sturdevant is the new Fisking Nick Coleman.

Like Coleman, Sturdevant is a reliably monochrome columnist; practically her every word is predictable.  In fact, if anything Sturdevant is worse; Coleman at least had the occasional story about the community, something about a crime or a community institution where he could depart from “droning DFL hack” mode and actually write something worthwhile.  And, as I acknowledge over years, he did that occasionally.  Rarely, but it happened.

Sturdevant writes about nothing but politics – and her writing is entirely, 100% DFL chanting points.

Like yesterday, where  she burned 20 column inches parrotting Tom Bakk.

There’s nothing in the column that couldn’t have come from DFL Legislative PR flaks Beau Berendtson or Carrie Lucking; indeed, it reads in every particular like it does:

It must be acknowledged that the official line from the Legislature’s GOP majorities is that they don’t need to look for more revenue for the state’s 2012-13 budget, even though it’s $5 billion short.

(Of course, it’s not, and never was, except in comparison with the DFL’s wish list).

But it also must be noted that the GOP’s proposed fix to said budget contains a little north of $1 billion in presumed cost savings that no credible nonpartisan analyst will vouch for.

Sturdevant is repeating the DFL’s chanting point.  Minnesota Management and Budget is no more “non-partisan” than, well, Lori Sturdevant.  And the DFL was saying exactly as much, back when they were trying to pass off a bogus budget:

In the meantime, the GOP has gotten, well, “credible nonpartisan analysts” – ones” that don’t report to Mark Dayton, anyway – to “vouch” for their budget.

I’d love to see someone from the Strib defend the notion that Lori Sturdevant is anything but a DFL propaganda tool.

Chuckles Schumer demands a “Do Not Ride” list for Amtrak

Sen. Charles Schumer is calling for better rail security now that the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound has turned up plans to attack trains in the U.S.

“Anyone, even a member of al-Qaida could purchase a train ticket and board an Amtrak train without so much as a question asked,” Schumer said. “So that’s why I’m calling for the creation of an Amtrak no ride list. That would take the secure flight program and apply it to Amtrak trains.”

Of course, except for the tiny fragment of America living in the congested mid-Atlantic strip, Amtrak is largely on Amerca’s “do not ride” list.  Amtrak is an epic money pit.

In vast swathes of the US, terrorists would be the only person on an Amtrak train.

This should really help!

From the lefty playbook; compare apples to distributor caps, then use the results to give ones’ supporters the sense of victimizaiton that, you hope, will keep them chanting on cue.

So with this bit from the City Pages:

Minnesotans who can’t afford their rent outnumber those who can, according to a new study released today, landing us dead last in a ranking of affordable housing markets in the Midwest.

The statement is…well, just wierd.

Over half of Minnesotans can’t afford rent?

Rent…where?

Which half of Minnesotans?

Don’t worry – the point isn’t about thinking:

The National Low Income Housing Coalition released numbers today showing that Minnesotans need to be making, on average, $15.79 an hour in order to afford a decent two-bedroom apartment. Most of us are not.

Well, yeah – most of “us” do, if by “us” you mean Minnesotans, who according to the Census have a median income of $56955 a year.

That’s only part of it, of course:

• For 2-person families, it’s $ 61,457.  That’s about $30 an hour (our two incomes at $15-ish per hour)
• for 3-person families, $74,371 – AKA $37 an hour (or two incomes at $18.50)
• 4-person families’ median incomes in Minnesota are $86,099.
• 5-person families average 83,143 – if you’re following along with the math, that’s like $42/hour, or two incomes at around $21.  But there we’re getting into three-bedroom apartment material.

Maybe by “us” the author, Jessica Lussenhop, means 20-something freelance “writers” who are trying to eke out a living at the City Pages.

The study considers paying up to 30 percent of one’s income on rent to be “affordable,” and the average fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $821 a month. The number crunchers figured you need to make $15.79 an hour to make that work, but the mean wage in the state is only $11.61. That means about 55 percent of us are paying more than we can afford on rent.

If “55 percent of us” are living alone on $11 an hour in a two bedroom apartment, then 55 percent of us are too dumb to be living on their own for long.

You’re you’re working for $11 an  hour, how about moving into a one-bedroom place?  Or getting a roommate ($22 an hour between you; plenty of money for that fabled two-bedroom apartment)?

In the metro area, the average rent skews higher for a two-bedroom–about $924 a month–and vacancy rates are at an all-time low of 3 percent. But the least affordable counties in the state are Winona and Aitkin Counties, and the problem is worst in the greater state.

“Rents tend to be cheaper, but there’s a real shortage of good affordable rental housing,” says Minnesota Housing Partnership researcher Leigh Rosenberg.

Their “data“

The goal of the study, of course, is to create the impression that the average Minnesotan can’t afford to live in Minneosota – presumably without government subsidies.

Let’s be clear, here:  “Public Art” is to art what “public restroom” is to rest.  I’m at a loss to think of any publicly-supported “art” that advances “art” in any way.  It could exist – my art trivia-fu isn’t the same as my music-fu – but it’s not leaping to mind.

I think public subsidy of art is a bad thing, both as government fiscal management and as art.

So when the idea of the “Legacy” amendment – diverting part of a one percent sales tax to the arts as well as natural resources – came up, I was skeptical.

But I thought “as long as the money goes to art education, it’d be the lesser of the possible evils”.  Art education is sorely neglected in our society; having some appreciation for art in its many forms is one of the things that adds depth and color to life, and it doesn’t matter if that art is a trip through the Minnesota Museum of Art or a little music or the occasional play (from the Ordway to some waaaaay-off-Nicollet startup house) to a good book.  Music – along with foreign languages – was one of the few things that kept me engaged with the idea of “education” at all during those miserable years from seventh through tenth grades; I’m hardly alone.

So if you have to spend money on “arts”, for the love of pete, spend it on bringing art in its various forms to schools and community centers and kids who, in our society, just don’t get exposed to much of it at all.

So how much could we have done for $45,000?

A Stillwater library paid that much in Legacy funds to bring in Sci-Fi author Neil Gaiman.   And Rep. Matt Dean was unhappy about it, and called Gaiman a “pencil-necked weasel”, which got Sci-fi nerds and GOP-haters all up with the victorian vapours:

(“Um, hullo? It’s “SF”, not “Sci Fy”.  Doy.  And don’t call me a “Trekkie”.  It’s Trekker, thank you very much”  There.  I wrote it so you don’t have to).

The feud between celebrity author Neil Gaiman and House Majority Leader Matt Dean took several bizarre twists Thursday, when lawmakers threatened retaliation against local libraries, Gaiman threatened retaliation against Dean, and the cast of characters expanded to include Snooki from MTV’s “Jersey Shore.”

Neil Gaiman, starving artist.

The action started when a House Republican committee chair said he is recommending a $45,000 cut in the Twin Cites’ regional library system budget to make up for the state Legacy money it paid last year to Gaiman for a speaking appearance.

Gaiman quickly defended his speaking fees, saying they are comparable to those charged by Snooki, the reality TV star.

And to be fair to Gaiman, if taxpayer money had gone to “Snooki”, I’d be even more irate.

“I won the Newbery Medal. I won the Carnegie Medal,” said Gaiman, who said he has 1.5 million Twitter followers. “I’ve written movies that were the Number 1 movie in the entire world.”

Well, that’s great.  Kudos.

You, Mr. Gaiman, are someone who has been rewarded bountifully for your talents.  I don’t begrudge a nickel of what you’ve earned…

…from the private sector.

But can anyone say, honestly, that $45,000 expropriated from all of us working schlubs for “arts and culture” is better spent on allowing locals to bask in the presence of a millionaire sci-fi writer than on, say, buying rental band instruments for a high school music program?  For keeping an after-school art program open?  For anything else?

Dean, R-Dellwood, got things rolling Tuesday by calling Gaiman a “pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota,” has since apologized. He said Thursday he did not direct Rep. Dean Urdahl, R-Grove City, who chairs the House Legacy Funding Division committee, to trim $45,000 from the regional library system’s proposed budget.

Dean’ comments, however, underscored the ongoing concerns of the Republican majority about Legacy money being spent on arts and cultural projects as the Legislature struggles to solve a $5.1 billion budget deficit.

Concerns?

Try outrage.  As someone who supports the arts, I’m stupefied at the tone-deafness of the library’s action.

Although my inner cynic isn’t surprised (I’ll be adding some emphasis):

The Legacy amendment, passed in 2008 with considerable financial support from arts groups in Minnesota, raised the state sales tax for 25 years to fund outdoors, clean water, parks and trails and arts and cultural heritage projects.

And when Republicans point to things like…:

• …the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities and their racket of funding arrogant avant-garde art while school arts programs go begging
• …the millions in annual funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which enforces a rigid political agenda on its own governance…

…as evidence that the public art funding bureaucracy is out of control, and the arts and culture advocacy communities are fighting against a legislative majority committed to cutting government waste, really, it seems it’s more than just arts education that’s lacking.

Gaiman is a successful “artist”, and a pretty wealthy guy:

Gaiman, reached Thursday afternoon, said he found the entire episode “very weird” and said he could win court damages from Dean, the leading Republican in the Minnesota House, should he choose to do so.

“If I actually wanted to come after you, dude, I could,” Gaiman said of

[For what?  Defamation?  Buncombe.  Dean made no factual assertions; he stated an opinion.  The opinion isn’t going to harm Gaiman’s standing in his community or his livelihood; it’ll likely do quite the opposite.  And malice?  Gaiman must be a sci-fi writer – Ed]

Gaiman said he would not file a lawsuit, but was considering other options that would be “so much more fun than going legal.”

There’ll be a Klingon character named “Deangrfx” in his next book, I’ll bet.  Socially-maladjusted twentysomething computer geeks will titter with glee.  Life will go on.

Gaiman also maintained that he received $33,600 for the four-hour appearance — a booking agency received the remainder — and said other appearances, outside Minnesota, have paid him more than $60,000.

And if they were paid for with tax money, then we really need to talk.

Anyway, fine – Gaiman’s not a pencil-necked weasel.

He’s just an unconscionable waste of tax money.

How many writing programs, or art teachers, or after-school music programs, could we have supported for what we wasted on this narcissistic frippery?

Governor Dayton tells the legislature to “suck it”:

Gov. Mark Dayton says Republican legislative leaders are underestimating his resolve if they think he’ll back off his plan to raise taxes on Minnesota’s top earners.

Fewer than three weeks remain in the legislative session, and Dayton and legislative leaders aren’t close to reaching agreement on a plan to erase a $5 billion budget deficit.

Dayton seems to be counting on the GOP reverting to its traditional behavior – bowing to media pressure and DFL browbeating.  Their most recent model – the “Gang of Six”, the GOP “moderates” two years ago who caved in on a DFL tax and spend bill.

And we know what happened there, don’t we?

It’s not the same GOP as it was two and four years ago.

Dayton said the Republican budget is more than $1 billion out of balance, and that they should agree on spending cuts instead of relying on budget savings that will never materialize…

…according to a Management and Budget director that serves at his discretion, using formulas that are not designed to account in any way for savings.

“This is real to so many thousands of Minnesotans and they won’t now, two months away from the beginning of the next biennium, even tell the people of Minnesota what it is they’re willing to do to them. And that I do not respect,” Dayton said.

Dayton is, of course, unwillling to point out that down his path lies madness; 20% spending hikes in this biennium will be followed by 20% more in 2013, and more after that.  And if the economy improves, and tax receipts climb with it?  All of that will be spent too.

Dayton doesn’t want to talk about that.

Dayton said there’s enough time to reach a deal but worries that Republicans aren’t going to budge on their opposition to tax increases. He said Minnesotans want them to compromise.

“They want us to work out our differences. So it seems to me that they have that responsibility. I have that responsibility,” he said.

57% of Minnesotans voted against Dayton.  He’s the one that needs to compromise.

The GOP?   No way.  They got sent there with a mandate.  They had best follow it.

First, the good news:  the call to civil rights activists earlier in the week was answered, big-time.  The Senate was overwhelmed with calls from human rights activists asking for a hearing on Senate File 1357, the companion to HF1467, the “Stand Your Ground” bill.   And the hearing will happen today.

And that’s the…well, not “bad” news.  Just another job that needs to get done.

The Senate is holding hearings today:

The Defense of Dwelling and Person Act of 2011 (SF1357) will be heard in the Minnesota Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee tomorrow (Friday, May 6) at 5:00 p.m.

There’s a catch:

Seating is extremely limited: you will need to arrive at 3:30 p.m. to line up for tickets, which will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis at 4:00 in Room 15 of the Capitol.

This is our first and best chance to really show the Senate that Minnesotans back this common-sense civil rights bill.

Minnesota civil rights activists have always shocked the legislature with the depth and power of their support.

Now’s no time to stop.

I’m going to try to make it.

Remember – the way to tell when “progressives” are lying about gun laws is “check to see if their lips are moving”.

Since we have hearings this afternoon, and there wil likely be a floor vote soon, it”ll be good to get clear on a couple of the “points” in the left’s “argument” against the Stand  Your Ground bill:

The Bill Does: Adds “Stand Your Ground” to Minnesota’s self-defense law. It removes  the requirement that an intended victim of violent crime must retreat from a place where he has a right to be before using deadly force in self defense.

The Bill Does Not: Allow people to shoot people who wander onto their property.  While the unclear and capricious “duty to retreat” is eliminated, the requirement that lethal force be reasonable, and the fear of death or great bodily harm be legitimate, do not change.  This is a point that Twin Cities’ “progressives” have been playing fast and loose.  Read: Lying.

The Bill Does: Enhance the “Castle Doctrine”. The proposal clarifies when and under what circumstances individuals can legally use deadly force to protect themselves in their homes and vehicles. It also creates a presumption that, when faced with an apparent home invasion, carjacking or kidnapping attempt, a person may use deadly force in self defense.

The Bill Does Not: Allow people to shoot people for trivial reasons.  “Progressives” want you to believe that the bill will allow you to shoot people who “give you the stink eye”.  They say this because lies are all they have.

The Bill Does: Prevent Gun Seizures During States of Emergency. It bans government agencies from seizing guns or ammo, revoking permits to purchase or carry, closing gun shops, or otherwise suspending our constitutional rights during civil emergencies. It also prohibits law enforcement officers from seizing a person’s gun (unless the person is arrested, and the gun is evidence of a crime).

The Bill Does Not: Give people a “get out of jail free card” for killing people when self-defense is not justified.

The Bill Does: Improve State Background Checks.  It requires the Minnesota Department of Human Services and state courts to make their background check records available electronically to authorized agencies, including the National Instant Background Check system (NICS), the “instant background check” database that controls handgun sales nationwide.  This process was supposed to have been in place 16 years ago – that’s your bureaucracy at work!  It should reduce purchasing delays and ensure that state and federal checks produce the same results.

The Bill Does Not: Make it easier to kill people in domestic arguments.  Just the opposite.

What The Bill Does: Create a more robust appeal process for denied purchase permits, and requiring that police chiefs and sheriffs whose purchase permit denials are overturned must pay the applicants’ legal costs.  Y’know – requires them to follow the law, rather than their bureaucratic whim.

The Bill Does Not: Give gun owners the right to kill deputies and cops that irritate them.  No “progressive” has suggested it would – yet – but you know those wacky “progressives”; it won’t take ’em long.

The Bill Does: Adds Universal Carry Permit Acceptance.  It updates Minnesota’s carry permit reciprocity standards, allowing people holding carry permits from any other state to carry in Minnesota (subject to Minnesota’s laws). This should result in a large increase in the number of states where Minnesota permit holders can carry, since many states allow other states’ permit holders to carry on a reciprocal basis.

The Bill Does Not: Let anyone kill anyone for trivial reasons.  Period.  End of sentence.  Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

The Bill Does: Give self-defense shooters the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven.  Currently, self-defense shooters must, in effect, say “yes, I’m guilty, but here’s my excuse” – a profound legal risk that not even serial killers face.

That’s really all that matters.

Regular commenter Golfdoc50 suggested that we put our rhetorical money where our literal mouths are as re my post this morning predicting the eventual release of the Bin Laden snuff pix.

You think Labor Day 2012? Let’s make some sport and have a pool to predict the day the first pictures leak. I don’t believe it will take that long, especially if the economy is in the toilet at the end of this year

Intrigueing and plausible theory.  One of many.

So post your predictions here; dates, along with your reasons in the comment section.  I’ll make a note to revisit this before election time.

Some Republicans have claimed that the DFL has spent the six weeks since the GOP introduced a balanced, tax-hike-free budget “loafing” and “running out the clock” (when they’re not clutching their pearls about the GOP ignoring the suddenly-“non-partisan” Minnesota Management and Budget fiscal notes).

But we know better.

The DFL has whiled away its free hours tackling the legislation that matters, dammit!:

• Thanks to Senate Minority (I can repeat that over and over all day long! – Ed) leader Tom Bakk, moose hunters are no longer encumbered by height limits on their moose stands!  All the better to eliminate the moose scourge!
• The state’s deficit in numbers of official mammals has been reduced from one to zero, thanks to the DFL!
• Joe Atkins (DFL, Inver Grove Heights), who is currently Ryan Winkler’s understudy as the DFL Minority Co-Snark (along with Rep. John “Jägermeister” Lesch [1]), tackled the vital work of trying to establish a state Pipe Band.

Thank you, DFL!

(more…)

Mark Dayton, 2010, goes all tactical on an outstate audience while pimping for that outstate vote:

“I have two loaded .357 Magnum pistols in my home right now in a lock box,” DFL candidate Mark Dayton told a crowd gathered Saturday at Game Fair, a hunting and fishing expo in Anoka. “I have a 9mm pistol at home. I have a twelve-gauge shotgun at home.”

Mark Dayton in 2011, acting like a Democrat with a lifetime “D” rating from the NRA:

Earlier in the day, by a voice vote, members of the House Judiciary Committee approved the bill, the first showdown of the legislative session over gun rights. Having now passed two committees, the bill is on its way to the full House.

The committee hearing was a low-key rerun of a separate one held last week that was jammed with supporters of the bill, who call it the “Stand Your Ground” measure, and opponents, who call it the “Shoot First” bill.

(I hope at least one supporter asked at least one of the antis “what do you think happens when you “Shoot Second” in a life-or-death situation?”)

Gun control advocates and organizations representing the state’s police chiefs, sheriffs and officers reiterated their opposition to the bill, which, they say, could endanger their members. “To us, this is a huge officer safety issue,” said Dennis Flaherty, executive director of the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association.

Dayton, himself a gun owner, said he will “listen carefully to the concerns of the law enforcement community.”

Dayton “listened to the concerns of law enforcement” in the same sense as he “listened to the concerns of grassroots liberals” at “Alliance for a Better Minnesota“.    The organizations “representing” the cops are, almost without exception, pro-DFL lobbying groups, run by cops that must, as a matter of survival, suck up to the Metro DFL mayors and city councils to push their agendas.

He added: “I understand and believe that somebody has a right, if somebody enters their home and is threatening their spouse or their children or themselves, to take preventive action, and I recognize the police are not going to always be able to be on the scene immediately. I’m sympathetic to those concerns, but this goes way beyond that.”

Um…how?

(Seriously.  Expect lots of DFLers to repeat the line “this goes way beyond that” – because that’s what DFLers do, repeat the lines their superiors tell them to use.  Ask them.  They never, ever have an answer).

Rep. Tony Cornish, R-Good Thunder, the bill’s sponsor, repeated his contention that “we like to call it the self-defense bill — it attempts to give more latitude to the homeowner.”

Brushing aside opponents’ contention that the change in the law would lead to an increasing number of dead trespassers, Cornish said it “doesn’t allow you to shoot someone toilet-papering your tree.”

The bill would expand what is known as the Castle Doctrine and has long been close to the top of the wish list for gun rights supporters, who say they should have no obligation to flee an attacker…

…while on their own property.

Although DFL majorities have been able to block it in recent years, it’s expected to face few obstacles in this session’s Republican-dominated Legislature.

Other than from Republicans who think that “Stand Your Ground” is a negotiating chit.

I don’t think that’ll work.

Republicans (and outstate DFLers), remember; we gunnies know who the real enemy is.  But we have looooong memories. We remember, in particular, the 1980’s and 1990’s, when our endless support was answered with…not much in the way of legislative progress.

We did our waiting, long before most of you were in office.

Nachman at Loyal Opposition notes the endless entertainment that is Representative Phyllis Kahn.

Speaking in committee yesterday re the Marriage Amendment:

After some other elected official complained that the Legislature should be working on the budget shortfall and not on unimportant things like defining the core unit of civil society, Representative Phyllis Kahn (DFL-Minneapolis, the one who signed on to a bill sympathizing with the supporters of murderous anti-Semites), questioned why there is no statutory enabling language in the amendment, then wondered aloud if defining marriage as “only between one man and one woman” means one time only, or successive marriages?

The bottom of stupid fell out of the world at that point.

With a nod to Glenn Reynolds: heh.

The Nook – the teeny little Saint Paul bar and burger joint that burned down last December – is set to reopen today:

The restaurant, located on Hamline Avenue, across the street from Cretin-Derham Hall High School, has been around since 1938.

Their specialty was the Juicy Nookie, a burger stuffed with cheese. The restaurant was even featured on the Food Network show, Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.

I need say no more.

Few of the Democrats’ 9/11 memes irritated me more over the years than the one in which Michael Moore has cavorted and romped like an obese sweaty pixie for all these years; that George W. Bush was distracted and incompetent because after he got the news about 9/11, he finished reading My Pet Goat to a bunch of first-graders…

…while his staff frantically figured out what was going on.

The kids to whom he read – now juniors in high school – are finally getting their say:

There has rarely been a starker juxtaposition of evil and innocence than the moment President George W. Bush received the news about 9/11 while reading The Pet Goat with second-graders in Sarasota, Florida.

Seven-year-olds can’t understand what Islamic terrorism is all about. But they know when an adult’s face is telling them something is very wrong — and none of the students sitting in Sandra Kay Daniels’ class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School that morning can forget the sudden, devastated change in Bush’s expression when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered the terrible news of the Al Qaeda attack. Lazaro Dubrocq’s heart started racing because he assumed they were all in big trouble — with no less than the Commander-in-Chief — but he wasn’t quite sure why. “In a heartbeat he leaned back and he looked flabbergasted, shocked, horrified,” recalls Dubrocq, now 17. “I was baffled. I mean, did we read something wrong? Was he mad or disappointed in us?”

I’ve always felt – with good reason – that the Democrats who ragged on Bush for finishing the story also believed that government works like an episode of  West Wing or 24; that omnipotently competent bureaucrats always have instant real-life knowedge of everything that goes on around them, that they can zoom in on everything that happens across the land and instantly make perfectly-calibrated decisions.

Real life, even at the highest level of government, isn’t like that.  Especially when an unprecedented situation like 9/11 is breaking out.  Nobody in the Federal Government knew what was going on on 9/11, and it showed; at one point there were reports of as many as six hijackings, and a bomb blast at the State Department, among many others.

And one of the things a leader does is keep things in perspective while chaos is breaking out all around him.

All sorts of similar kid fears started running through Mariah Williams’ head. “I don’t remember the story we were reading — was it about pigs?” says Williams, 16. “But I’ll always remember watching his face turn red. He got really serious all of a sudden. But I was clueless. I was just seven. I’m just glad he didn’t get up and leave because then I would have been more scared and confused.” Chantal Guerrero, 16, agrees: even today she’s grateful that Bush regained his composure and stayed with the students until The Pet Goat was finished. “I think the President was trying to keep us from finding out,” says Guerrero, “so we all wouldn’t freak out.”

I’ve often wondered – what did the Dems think the President was supposed to do in the opening seconds of the war?  Jump up, run to the Presidential limo, and order an attack on…someone, somewhere?  Tell NORAD to scramble planes (they do that on their own, although on 9/11 they weren’t equipped to track aircraft inside the US)?

Or keep his composure and not send everyone around him – a classroom full of first-graders – into a blind panic until he actually had something to act on?

Even if they didn’t freak out, it’s apparent that sharing the terrifying Tuesday of 9/11 with Bush has affected those second-graders in the decade since — and, they say, made the news of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s killing by U.S. commandos on Sunday all the more meaningful. Dubrocq, now a junior at Riverview High School in Sarasota, doubts he’d be a student in the rigorous IB, or international baccalaureate program, if he hadn’t been with the President as one of history’s most infamous global events unfolded. “Because of that,” he says, “I came to realize as I grew up that the world is a much bigger place, and that there are differing opinions about us out there, not all of them good.”

The whole piece is worth a read.

A pity Time magazine couldn’t have run it, say, six years ago…

There’s a blizzard coming in from the southwest.

A blizzard of common sense, that is. Senators Ortman and Roebling, and Representative Hoppe have introduced an amendment requiring the state budget to be not only “balanced”, but in fact statutorily two percent inside our means; government spending would be liminted to 98 percent of revenues:

“This amendment establishes spending limits based on current law revenue sources,” said Senator Ortman. “The proposed amendment also ensures steady and reliable budget reserves by directing excess dollars into the reserve, which cannot be spent except in emergencies involving health, safety or welfare of citizens of Minnesota.”

There’d be my one quibble; that’s $600 million per biennium that should, by all rights, stay with the taxpayers.

But it’s a great start.

Senator Ortman added: “This is a positive solution for Minnesota’s spending problem. State Government budgets in the 21st Century cannot maintain a 1970’s tax-and-spend mentality. We should limit spending to only 98 percent of the actual funds available, which will force prioritization of spending that is long overdue.”…

Here’s the important part (emphasis added):

…“We have more government than we can afford; this amendment will end the problem of auto-pilot growth in our state budget,” said Senator Ortman.

“If we would have had this amendment in place, we would not be in such a difficult financial situation now,” said Senator Robling, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee.

This is a must-pass.

Representative John Kriesel is getting plaudits from the crowd that normally wouldn’t spit on a Republican if he were on fire, because he opposes the GOP’s Marriage Amendment proposal:

John Kriesel, R-Cottage Grove, is the first Republican in the Minnesota Legislature to announce his opposition to a proposed amendment to the Minnesota Constitution that would ban same-sex marriage, according to the Star Tribune. The bill has cleared a committee each in the Minnesota House and Senate, and Kriesel said he’s working hard to convince his Republican colleagues that the amendment is a bad idea.

“I look at it as: We are all equal,” Kriesel told the Star Tribune. “It is not right. I can’t do it. I’m very upset about this vote. I don’t like it. I think it sends the wrong message. You live once in your life and I’ve learned that the hard way. You never know when it is going to be your time. People fight to find happiness….You find someone you love and now other people are saying because I don’t consider that normal, you can’t do it?”

Two things to set straight first:

One: I have nothing but respect for Rep. Kriesel.  He’s earned it, over and over.  The fact that he got elected to the House was one of the most satisfying victories of a very satisfying election season last year.

Second: As a libertarian-conservative, I’m perfectly fine with letting people live their lives their own way; I support legalizing many drugs, and support civil unions as a civil contract.

But I – along with a sharp majority of Minnesotans – believe Marriage is a fundamentally religious institution, above and beyond its status as a civil contract.  Every one of the world’s religions, barring the odd splinter (shaddap about Episcopals), agrees.

And when we say “marriage is, to us, a religious institution”, the best argument the gay marriage proponents have come up with so far is “no it’s not”.

Which is where I have to push back.  “Marriage” is really two different things, depending on who you ask;

• it’s a set of contractually-defined rights (from inheritance to power of attorney to standing in custody trials during divorce) and obligations (most noticable when things don’t go well)
• It’s an ordination for one’s Creator that you and another person are ordained to be together.

Of course, not everyone believes in the same Creator, or even that there is one; notwithstanding this, we are all created (by whatever you think created us) equal before the law of the land.

Most of the gay marriage activists I’ve heard are after the former; the latter seems to draw fewer (although there are plenty of people who want to induce major Christian denominations to recognize gay unions).

So there’s the dilemma for the principled libertarian Christian; in a secular sense, I can agree with Rep. Kriesel, that in re forbidding gays from forming civil contracts…

“It’s just wrong,” Kriesel said. “There is not anything that can move me on this.”

…while on the other hand being equally unmoved to renounce what I (and most Minnesotans) believe about the sacred institution of marriage.

In a sense, I think the Amendment would be a good thing for the proponents of gay marriage, inasmuch as it’d force them to state a case for radically changing the institution that sways the people.  The gay movement’s current strategy is to take everything to court (or to radically “progressive” legislatures), and chant that everyone that opposes them is a “hateful” “bigot”.  They desperately need to do better, if they want to convince anyone but a judge.

Especially someone like me – who doesn’t believe marriage is a “right” (or even necessarily a great idea), even for straight couples, but that equal protection before the law absolutely always is.

It’ll be interesting to see what issue it’ll be that demotes Kriesel back to “just another Republican” to the Minnesota Independent.  There’s always something.

File this under “casting pearls before swine”, but I’ve finally snapped.

The Twin Cities’ “alternative” media is where logic goes to die.

So today will be the first of a 2,000 part series trying to introduce bloggers (and I’ll say “of all stripes”, but we all know who I really mean) to some of the rudiments of carrying on a logical argument.

(And yes, a few conservative bloggers as well.  Illogic isn’t the exclusive province of “progressive” bloggers.  Not at all.

Today’s installment: the Tu Quoque Ad Hominem.

With the “Marriage Amendment” working its way through the Legislature, and likely to not only get through but win big in the fall of 2012, the usual framing is underway from the left.

In and among the usual (“bigot!”  “Hateful!” and so on) comes the question “I wonder how many of the people voting for this amendment are divorced?  Why should they be telling anyone about marriage?”

Leaving aside that that only makes sense if you presume that gay marriage is immune from divorce – and it is not – it’s an example of the Tu Quoque Ad Hominem – which presumes that if someone has ever said, done or believed anything different than what they are currently arguing, then the current argument is wrong.

Now it’s true that, all other things being equal, only one of the two positions can be right (if, indeed, they are black and white, right or wrong issues with no gray areas, which accounts for rather few things in real life) – but that has nothing to do with whether the current position is, in and of itself, wrong.

The fact that someone’s earlier positions, statements or actions disagree with a current position, statement or action could stem from lots of things; that the person has changed their position for good reason; that they’ve grown, either as a human being or “in office”; that that he or she is a hypocrite (meaning “holds other people to moral positions to which they don’t hold themselves”), that he or she merely hasn’t thought things through all that well, or that they’re just plain flip-flopping.  Or maybe more than one of them.  Whichever – it doesn’t, in and of itself, invalidate their current argument.

There may be other reasons the argument is invalid – reasonable people can disagree on, to go back to the original example, gay marriage; some may even change their positions over time.  But some prior inconsistency doesn’t even make, much less prove, the case.

Go forth and sin no more.

You’re welcome.

(It’s about this point that some joyless scold – I’m thinking “Tild” or “Spotty” or “Minnesota Observer”, will dig diligently through my blog and find some example of me using exactly this logical fallacy – in effect, saying “Mitch Berg shouldn’t be yapping about logic, since he has been illogical”.  And the circle turns).

Conservatives win majority in Canadian parliament:

Canadian voters have radically redrawn the country’s political landscape, handing the Conservative Party its long-sought majority in an election that decimated the Bloc Québécois and humbled the Liberals.

For the first time in history, the New Democratic Party will form the Official Opposition after an extraordinary breakthrough that propelled the party to more than 100 seats.

Looks like Canada has the same coastal/interior, red/blue split we do:

The extent of the transformation is startling. The Liberals now hold just four seats west of Guelph, Ont.

But not entirely:

The Conservatives, formerly shunned by Toronto voters, won nearly half of the seats in that city, twice as many as the Liberals.

If you don’t follow parliamentary politics – even in relatively sedate parliaments like Canada’s or Germany’s – getting a majority is a much bigger deal than in our mostly two-party Congress.   It’s a sign that, at least at the moment, there’s a pretty decisive mandate. And while Canadian conservatives

The night belonged to Stephen Harper, who put his party over the top after five years of minority government and becomes just the third Conservative leader since Confederation to win triple victories.

“We are intensely aware that we are and must be the government of all Canadians, including those that did not vote for us,” Mr. Harper said.

This election was every bit as big as 2011’s was in the US:

Parliament was radically remade. The fragmentation of the 1993 election has been reversed, with the Conservatives and NDP emerging as national parties with support across all regions of the country, although the Tories find themselves in an unusual position, as a majority government with just a handful of Quebec seats.

Rumor is it’s because Canadians are sick and tired of American “progressives” threatening to move to Canada.

It didn’t take long for people to note that Bin Laden was killed on the 66th anniversary of Hitler’s death.

Michael Yon has an even more poignant, and in hindsight more satisfying, anniversary.  It was the sixth anniversary of the death of Farah, a little girl killed by a car bomb likely set off by an Al Quaeda sympathizer in pre-surge Iraq:

Major Mark Bieger found this little girl after the car bomb that attacked our guys while kids were crowding around. The soldiers here have been angry and sad for two days. They are angry because the terrorists could just as easily have waited a block or two and attacked the patrol away from the kids. Instead, the suicide bomber drove his car and hit the Stryker when about twenty children were jumping up and down and waving at the soldiers. Major Bieger, I had seen him help rescue some of our guys a week earlier during another big attack, took some of our soldiers and rushed this little girl to our hospital. He wanted her to have American surgeons and not to go to the Iraqi hospital. She didn’t make it. I snapped this picture when

Major Bieger ran to take her away. He kept stopping to talk with her and hug her.

The soldiers went back to that neighborhood the next day to ask what they could do. The people were very warm and welcomed us into their homes, and many kids were actually running up to say hello and to ask soldiers to shake hands.

It was perhaps the most iconic photo of the war; perhaps one of the most so of any war.

I hope his 72 virgins all have crabs.

The credit for the news of the deqth of Bin Laden fairly goes (in addition to the intelligence, military and even some local Pakistanis)  to the President.  If it’d failed, it would have rested on his shoulders; it’s only fair that we credit him for the risk he took –  different though that risk is from the ones the SEALs, the Army chopper pilots and the rest of the guys on the ground took.  To be honest, given his record so far, I’d have expected him to have launched a Predator strike – something that would have killed him (or someone) without the political risk – but also without the certainty.

Now, here’s the part I’m looking forward to; watching the left walk back the fact that so much of the policies – and so many, I suspect, of the discrete military and intelligence activities that led to this day – were continued under the Bush administration.

Which, again, is no knock on Obama.

But I’m looking forward to seeing the reactions of the elements of the Twin Cities media who, 24 months ago, were acting like a bunch of 15 year old girls who’d just gotten Justin Bieber tickets after having been allowed into the presence of Seymour Hersh, who was talking (along with Walter Mondale) about a story from “upcoming book”:

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

According to Hersh, this mattered  because…:

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

It was JSOC troops – officially SEALs, along with Army Special Operations Aviation, but JSOC missions reportedly mix in other troops, Rangers and “Delta” and other units pretty liberally – that carried on the “execution”.

Just saying.

Over on Facebook, Gary Miller writes about the killing of Bin Laden:

[I have] as much blood lust as the next guy, but has the sinking feeling folks don’t realize OBL got everything he wanted: U.S. brought to the brink of insolvency; the very freedoms we went to war to protect we voluntarily took from ourselves; our prestige in the region irrevocably sullied; our military depleted; our best and our brightest killed and maimed, and — the cherry on top — martydom.

True to a degree.

He had plenty of help bringing ourselves to insolvency; Medicare Part D and “Too Big to Fail” and eleventy-trillion dollars in public pensions all play their role as certainly as did the war.  We “gave up” some freedoms during the War on Terro – but no more than we took away from ourselves over “the war on drugs” since 1970, and we didn’t give up the means to get them back (a guy can dream). We never had much prestige to sully in the Middle East, to be fair.   And he was going to be a martyr even if he died choking on a sandwich.

As to the best and brightest…well, there’s no clever quip there.

Lori Sturdevant demands that we “Just say no to wedge politics” in a piece called, conveniently, “Just say no to wedge politics…”

As six middle-aged, white male Republican legislators — all married in the eyes of Minnesota law — left the briefing room Tuesday after announcing their push for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, they couldn’t avoid passing DFL Sen. Scott Dibble on his way inside.

…bv invoking a really, really stupid wedge.

(Dibble is, by the way, middle-aged and very, very white.  He happens to be gay).

How does one look a colleague in the eye or speak a civil greeting, right after announcing an intention to make that colleague’s marriage forever illegitimate?

I craned my neck to see what expressions passed between them. Darn. Too far from the door to get a good look.

“They nodded,” Dibble, a three-termer from Minneapolis and currently the Senate’s only openly gay member, reported afterward. “One or two might have said ‘Hi.’ … That’s what makes it all the more odd that they are willing to effectively dehumanize me.”

We’ll come back to this in another post later today.

But hey, Lori  – good job avoiding those wedges.

Let’s be clear on this – the only reason the DFL (as opposed to gay activists, like Dibble) care about this is that when the vote comes for the amendment, the DFL is going to lose.  Maybe lose big.  As I pointed out during the election, there’s polling out there that suggests that Minnesotans strongly oppose changing the traditional definition of marriage.

If it were otherwise – if there had been any indication that Minnesotans craved single-sex marriage – the DFL would have introduced an amendment legalizing it in 2007, when they took complete control of the legislature, or in 2009, when their control became utterly stifling.  Even had Pawlenty vetoed it, they’d have gotten GOP votes on the issue made public, and hammered them on it in the ’08 and ’10 elections.  If there were a majority of Minnesotans who favored gay marriage.

But there is not.

And so the DFL is desperate to avoid being forced to put votes on the line on this issue.  Because they know that, along with the Cornish “Stand Your Ground” Bill and Voter ID, most Minnesotans, especially outstate, Gay Marriage is a loser for them – and since the DFL’s only hope is to expand outstate (they can hardly control the Twin Cities and Duluth and the Arrowhead more thoroughly than they do), this is not part of the plan.

More on Gay Marriage itself later today.