No, the title’s not bad grammar on my part.  It’s a great Steve Earle tune, from 1985 or so:

But yeah – since we’re on the subject, Dave Mindeman at mnpAct sniffs that “Minnesota Conservatives Are Not Satisfied“.

The conservativve [sic} wing of the Minnesota Republican Party is never satisfied. Shutting down the state government and a budget which focuses on massive cutting is not enough.

(It’s also fiction; the budget rose, the only things that got “cut” were for the most part the projected increases that the DFL-dominated bureaucracy demanded in 2009, and Dayton shut the government down, engineering it from the very start.  But let’s just let that slide for now).

Can you believe it? They are upset with the House committee chairs and are talking (get this) about subjecting some of them to primary challenges.

That takes cajones. (sic)

Well, think about it. If you’re a conservative, you spent a lot of time and energy working for Tom Emmer and a big slate of Republican candidates; though you were outspent by at least 2:1 by Big Labor, Big Oligarch and Big Dayton, you almost won the governor’s office, and you flipped both the House and the Senate.  You busted your butt, you wore out your shoes and your dialing finger.

And what did you get?  You got a GOP majority that…

• …raised spending, using the money from the February forecast, first, rather than making Dayton negotiate like hell for it.
• …dealt away Voter ID, Cornish’s Stand your Ground Law, and Zero-Based Budgeting, and…
• …to be fair, won a lot, and deferred some provisions important to conservatives ’til the less-charged, out-year session.

Politics in Minnesota put together an article that focused on the conservative angst. Three chairs in particular are mentioned:

They direct their anger at three high ranking House Republican committee chairmen in particular: Reps. Jim Abeler of Anoka, Pat Garofalo of Farmington and Steve Gottwalt of St. Cloud.

I was also interviewed in the piece – more on that in a bit – and while I haven’t read it (because I’m not a PIM subscriber), the bits I”ve seen made me sound a little more the zealot than I tried to present (not to knock Charley Shaw, the reporter, who does a great job with these things).

More on that in a bit.

Abeler has never been forgiven for voting for the gas tax override.

As I pointed out to Shaw, Abeler needs to earn his forgiveness.  He made a start this session.  He has a way to go.

As to the other two potential primary challenges Shaw mentioned – Pat Garofalo and Steve Gottwalt – I’ll believe ’em when I see them.  I operate under the phrase “perfect is the enemy of plenty good enough”, which drives some conservatives nuts, but that’s life, and Garofalo and Gottwalt are both imperfect and plenty, plenty good enough.

But here’s the part Mindeman doesn’t get; it’s none of his business.  It’s inside MNGOP baseball!  If the conservative wing of the MNGOP wants to flex whatever muscle it has, and either try to nominate more conservative candidates or drive the ones we have farther to the right, that’s our affair.  If it’s the wrong choice, electorally?  Well, Mindeman should be happy about that.

He’s not, and either is anyone else – because the conservative brand is waxing, and Obama and liberalism in general have coattails shorter than Daisy Duke.

Mindeman:

The logic of conservative thought processes is difficult to understand. The election was, in theory, all about jobs. But conservatives are most concerned about ideology.

It’s hard to know what Mindeman means by that. Does he believe that creating a healthier, free-er market – hence, jobs – isn’t part of our “ideology?”  Or doesn’t he believe that a bunch of competent adults can pursue fiscal issues and chew non-fiscal gum at the same time?

So no.  I, conservative, am not “satisfied” with the GOP today.  I’m happier than I was four or eight or twenty years ago – but we have a way to go.

And I’m having a lot more fun getting there than I used to.

That is satisfying.

Ahem.

At the risk of dispersing some of this blog’s usual decorum:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

(breathe)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I’m not usually one for end-zone happy-dancing.  But after all the “you are teh racist/sexist/anti-worker/anti-middle-class/teabagger!/Koch-sucker/crap all of us conservatives have had to sit through since the last election, frankly, I think we’re entitled.

Last night’s victory in Wisconsin, like the “budget compromise” in DC and the Minnesota state budget, weren’t unalloyed victories – but in this case, it wasn’t even as close as it looked for the Wisconsin Democrats.

Think about it, “progressives”; you just spent $40,000,000 of your unions members’ dues – twice as much as the entire campaign for the entire Wisconsin State Senate cost in 2010.

Twice as much as the GOP spent.

You did it, you said, because you just knew Wisconsinites, deep down inside, were a bunch of liberals!  Not without reason; Barack Obama won every single one of those districts in 2008.

You – every damn one of you – just knew that you’d flip three, four, maybe even all six seats!  Because – you just knew this – Wisconsin just BLEEEEEEEDS “progressive”!

Or at least you had to hope so – because this, along with this autumn’s vote in Ohio on a slate of reforms similar to Walker’s – could mark the beginning of the end, not of public unions, but of public unions as a critical, game-ending force in national politics.

Because in a few years, with more stories like this floating around out there, even more voters will see what a crock of crap you “progressives” have been selling for so long.

Your platform – which, when you strip away all of the happy-talk, is “we will force private sector workers to work ’til they’re 72 so public union members can retire with full benefits at 55” – just isn’t working anymore.

And what did you get for your tens of millions?

You got two – one that everyone knew we were going to lose, and one squeaker against a guy with lots of personal electability issues,  The rest of them – even the Darling-Pasch race, which started the evening’s returns with Pasch winning – weren’t even close.

And Shelly “MAKE NO MISTAKE, WE ARE IN A WAR” Moore?  Yep, you were in a war.  And you were Italy.  And even with all that union money for those obnoxious, “A Better Minnesota”-style TV ads, and all those union people trawling the streets, and all those Twin Cities “progressives” coming across the river to help out?  Not to gloat, but that was the sweetest victory of them all last night, at least for a Twin Cities conservative who got to watch that race close-up from across the Saint Croix.

Sixteen points.

And the Democrats’ Holperin seat is looking kinda squishy in next week’s round of recalls.  Your two pickups could very easily turn into one by this time next week.

Scott Walker has been affirmed; Barack Obama has been refudiated.

You want to call this a war?  You know how those end, right?

It’s been one of the left’s counter-tacks both in St. Paul and DC this past few months; they get that knowing, smug little curl in their lips (you can see it even if they’re writing on Twitter or a blog) and that semi-animated look that says both “Ooh, I have a chanting point that is just going to Pwn3 you!” and, almost inevitably, they are about to get rhetorically shredded (although they never know that in advance.  Never, ever) and titter “Oh, yeah, GOP?  So where are the jerbs?”

To which one responds “What jobs do you want?  A bunch of government jobs – perhaps those “shovel-ready” “infrastructure” jobs that The One was yapping about two years ago?  Which were at best glorified temp jobs designed to buff up union dues collections, and at worst just more money to be spent after being extorted from the private sector or the private sector’s grandchildren, to help the government pick the desired winners and losers?”

Which generally makes them pause a moment, and repeat “where are the jerbs?”

“You want jobs…er, “jerbs”?  Deregulate large swathes of our economy; the energy sector, for starters, if you wanna make the whole western half of this country and the Gulf Coast perform like North Dakota.  That’d put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work and, more importantly, do something no government “jerb” has ever done; create new weatlh, make a bigger pie for us all to split”.

The usual response, after a slack-jawed moment or two, is “your ugly”, including the spoken bad punctuation (don’t ask me how, they just do it), but every once in a while you get one who just sits with that vegan deer in the headlights look.

I take pity on them.  “Government can create “jerbs” by deregulating industries”.

“Hah!”, they respond.  “I told you government could create jerbs!”

It’d be a worthwhile trade.

Four months ago, liberals nationwide and locally proclaimed the Tea Party “dead”.

Today, it’s “responsible” for the collapse of western civilization!

Liberalism means not caring if you get called on your own BS!

But let’s be fair; liberals aren’t supposed to think about what they’re chanting – that, indeed, is why they’re called chanting points.

No – they’re told “if you want your (rhetorical) dinner, you chant away”.

And so they do.

By the way – saying “the Tea Party is responsible for the debt downgrade” is like saying “the kid was responsible for the Emperor being naked”, or “the victim shouldn’t have been wearing that provocative skirt.  What a slut”.

I like to bike.  My current commute is 16 miles each way, if I do the whole thing (and I usually don’t; most days, I’ll throw my bike on the rack and drive to a park-and-ride and bike the last 8-10 miles,although my goal by the end of bike season, November-something with any luck at all, will be to ride the whole thing at least once a week).

Jason Lewis’ accusations notwithstanding, bikers pay all sorts of taxes; for starters, very few of us bike exclusively; most of us drive cars, and pay gas taxes, and as I showed some time ago, those of us who mix biking and driving actually benefit the rest of you taxpayers and gas-buyers.

I mention all of this purely to set up the fact that I’m not one of those conservatives who thinks bikes are in and of themselves a communist conspiracy, and that bikers have been sucked, wittingly or not, into some “progressive” vortex.  It’s just not true.

But like most conservative bikers, I do the odd theatrical facepalm when I see the institutionalized arrogance of the Bike über Alles crowd.  And we have just such a case on display in St. Paul’s Mac-Groveland neighborhood.  A “non-profit”, “Transit for Livable Cities”, is proposing a “bicycle boulevard” – not much unlike the one on 39th Street in south Minneapolis, which I accidentally discovered this past weekend, and which seemed oddly devoid of bikes when I saw it – straight down Jefferson Avenue.  And to do it, they want to make Jefferson, especially at Cleveland Avenue, virtually impassable to cars.

St. Paul Public Works plans to move forward this year with a grassy, bicycle-friendly median along Cleveland Avenue at Jefferson Avenue that has drawn both praise and criticism from residents in the area who are weighing the merits of a narrower crossing.

The median would force northbound and southbound traffic along Cleveland Avenue to slow and traffic along Jefferson Avenue to make right turns.

Public Works has tentatively proposed that the median go before the St. Paul City Council on Aug. 17. If approved, construction could begin in October or November.

Cleveland is the main way of getting north and south from Highland to the Midway.  Having a big gnarly bottleneck at Jefferson will not just be a huge pain, but it’ll squeeze traffic into the side streets or bump it over to Fairview, which is already overtaxed; with light rail contruction, getting north and south through Saint Paul anywhere west of Lexington (so far) is a sisyphean nightmare.

The citizens against the Jefferson Avenue Median have a facebook page.  And Joe Soucheray – who benefits from being one of few mainstream conservative commentators who don’t froth against biking for no reason takes the proposal apart.

More later…

The National Rifle Association has come out defending Michele Bachmann against Newsweek Magazine’s scabrous “Queen of Rage” cover piece on Michele Bachmann:

One of presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s major political opponents is defending her against what it says is blatant sexism on the part of Newsweek magazine.

Wait – did I say National Rifle Association?

Ooop.  I meant…the National Organization of Women!

Monday, the National Organization for Women (NOW) spoke out against Newsweek’s most recent cover, which features an extreme close-up of Michele Bachmann and the title “The Queen of Rage.”

“It’s sexist,” NOW president Terry O’Neill told TheDC. “Casting her in that expression and then adding ‘The Queen of Rage’ I think [it is]. Gloria Steinem has a very simple test: If this were done to a man or would it ever be done to a man – has it ever been done to a man? Surely this has never been done to a man.”

The NOW, of course, is myopic; it happens to (conservative) men in the liberal media all the time.

Still – when even NOW notices that the liberal media observes a toxic double standard when covering women who happen to be conservatives, that should tell you something.

Of course, if you’re award-winning journalist ® Karl Bremer, what it tells you is that them uppity wimmins is gettin’ off the reservation agin:

Gender politics at its worst–NOW defends Michele Bachmann over Newsweek cover. Sad. http://t.co/ZG9YO8g #stribpol

Remember; it’s only offensive if it doesn’t benefit the left.

Shelly Moore – the Dwight Schrute of Wisconsin politics – lies so blatantly, even the left-leaning Politifact can’t help but notice.  One of Moore’s recent flyers drew Politifact’s attention:

For one, Moore plays loose in stating the impact of Ryan’s Medicare proposal. At one point, her flier says it would “eliminate Medicare as we know it.” In another, it says the plan would “end” Medicare.

For those who turn 65 before 2022, the program would not change. And for the others, Medicare would change dramatically but it would still exist, PolitiFact Wisconsin noted in ruling False a MoveOn.org claim that Medicare would be abolished in 10 years.

And best of all, her flyer misquotes an actual person:

And, last but not least, we called the woman pictured under the flier’s headline: “Lyda Haskins of River Falls Can’t Afford For Medicare to End.”

Haskins, 85, told us that she would have no trouble without Medicare even if it were taken from her — which it would not be, under the plan.

“It’s laughable that I wouldn’t be able to afford it,” Haskins said. “They should have not have done that.”

Haskins, whose daughter Alison Page ran unsuccessfully against Harsdorf in 2008, is well known in the area.

Haskins said she was not told her name would be used, and was not aware that Medicare would be an issue in the direct mail piece. She said she agreed, along with her grandchildren, only to be pictured generically as a Moore supporter.

Which earns Moore an unplaudit:

The flier’s claims are false, barring new information, and the misleading nature of the presentation pushes this into ridiculous territory.

That’s a Pants on Fire.

If you live in the greater Hudson / St. Croix River area, you have a chance today – to help continue saving Wisconsin from its ruinous, California-like fixation on spending, and from forcing the private sector to work ’til it’s 72 so the unions can retire at 55.

While this blog doesn’t do endorsements, I’m just going to say vote early and often for Harsdorf.

According to Drew “Don’t Call Me Michael” Westen, Obama’s problem is that he wasn’t interventionistic, imperial, demigogic…progressive enough!

No, I’m not going to quote it.  Read it.  On an empty stomach.

Since there’s been another wave of media and political talking heads claiming, apparently seriously, that “there is no liberal media”, I thought I’d point to this latest bit by W. Joseph Campbell on Patrick Pexton, the WaPo’s latest “ombudsperson”.

In his five or so months as ombudsman, Pexton hasn’t dared touch the electrified third rail about the Post, which one of his predecessors, Deborah Howell, gamely if belatedly addressed.

That’s the Deborah Howell, the late publisher of the PiPress and, it should be added, Nick Coleman’s stepmom.

That’s a decided lack of intellectual diversity in the Post’s newsroom. In mid-November 2008, shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, Howell wrote in her ombudsman column:

“I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”

Howell’s column quoted Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism as saying that “conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It’s inconceivable that that is irrelevant.”

Howell’s column itself was very worth a read.

It was 12:25PM, August 8, 1991.

It’d been two and a half days. since the labor had started – late Monday night, at the corner of First Avenue and Eighth Street, outside the Target Center. We’d been at the “KDWB Star Party”; one of the few bennies, at least for me, of working at KDWB was the concert tickets. And Bun, in the womb throughout the previous nine months, had always mellowed out when loud R&B music came on in the nightclub where I (and Bun’s mother, who worked in the same bar, and who I long ago promised never to write about in this blog, and I won’t, except to affirm that my daughter Bun does in fact have a mother) worked.  But not that night.  Months of kicking – Bun was a hyperactive little thing – turned into actual contractions.

For two days.

And finally, on Wednesday, August 7, around 4PM, the contractions dropped down to less than five minutes apart.  We raced to the hospital – Regions today, Ramsey County back then…

…where an arrogant little Hindi resident timed the contractions at just over seven minutes.  She sent us home…

…where they promptly dropped to ninety seconds apart.  Which led to another frantic drive to Ramsey, where they stayed at every ninety seconds…

…for the next eighteen hours.

It was a little after noon when, fogged with fatigue, I noticed that we weren’t alone in the room anymore.  There were nine doctors and eight nurses (or so I recall), and one of the doctors was holding what looked like salad tongs, and it occurred to me that “they didn’t talk about this in childbirth class”.

And out of the daze, at 12:25PM, came a little baby girl (I discovered it for the first time; we wanted it to be a surprise), pale and covered in blood and disconcertingly quiet.  She’d been in some form of fetal distress – hence the crowd of doctors and the salad tongs.  But in a moment or two, she caught her wind, and that moment after birth was the last quiet moment any of us ever had.

And I stopped measuring time from when I started my life in the big city, and started measuring it in terms of a family. And it’d be almost fifteen years before it’d occur to me to think a whole lot about the five and a half years before, when I’d started in Jamestown North Dakota a newly-minted college graduate, who got tired of waiting for his real life to begin, and decided on a drunken whim to move to the big city.

Bun came first.  A year and a half later came Zam.  Two weeks later, my first IT job, as a technical writer at a packaging engineering company, writing “how-to” manuals for machines that put Wheat Thins into bags and stuffed the bags into boxes (I’m not making that up), which led to jobs writing everything from the business plan for a supercomputer company software division to a user guide to a system that brokered end-cap space at grocery stores to the highest bidders.  And then – driven by the same restless boredom that had led me to Minneapolis in the first place – into teaching myself a new trade, one that hadn’t really taken off in the Twin Cities yet, “User Centered Design”, by which a guy with a BA in English could become an IT mover and shaker.

But that was all in the next seven years.  Twenty years ago today, I was a nightclub DJ and part-time radio guy, bored out of his mind and living one paycheck away from oblivion who still harbored ambitions of breaking back into radio, but was starting to realize it could never happen.  Not in this life – the life I was in, at that moment.

Now, I was Dad.

And all my time got measured from that moment, from then on.

———-

I think this is the end of Twenty Years Ago Today.  I started the series in September of 2005, really more as a present to my kids – so they could know, perhaps, what and who I was before they were born, in the event it ever occurs to them to wonder – than as something that fit into this blog.

From here on to the present day?  They are the story. And they were both there for all of it.

Oh yeah – and happy birthday, Bun!

I’m told that CNBC’s Jim Cramer, host of “Mad Money”, and I have a bit of a resemblance.

So – if Thompson Building and Remodeling, who’ve been sponsoring the Northern Alliance for most of this past five or six years, hires me to endorse their services, even though I don’t make any “Cramer” references whatsoever during the ads, is Thompson “impersonating Cramer?”

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Jill Burcum isn’t the worst, most in-the-bag-for-the-Democrats Strib editorial writer.  That “distinction” floats at random between Lori Sturdevant, Jon Tevlin and most of the rest of the staff.

And I don’t mean that to sound as nasty as it probably does.  If more of the Strib’s editorial writers were in Burcum’s “I’m a DFLer, but I don’t want to come across like an obvious house shill” weight class, the Strib and its editorial would be less a laughingstock.

Still, priorities are priorities.  Burcum takes umbrage, on behalf of Morgan Freeman, at the latest ad for Sheila Harsdorf in her battle for the Wisconsin Senate in the district just across the St. Croix from the Metro against  Shelly “WEEEEEEEEEEEEEE BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED UNIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON” Moore.

The latest attack ad on Wisconsin state Senate candidate Shelly Moore instantly prompts this question: How’d they get actor Morgan Freeman to do the voiceover?

The reality is that it’s not Freeman, whose authoritative voice made him a logical choice to play God in the hit film “Bruce Almighty” a few years back. Instead, the slippery group funding the ad found somebody who sounds just like Freeman.

So what does Burcum suggest?  That established voice-over guys be able to trademark the timbre and tone of their voices, so nobody else can sound like them?

Because Burcum sounds serious:

The [organization funding the spots’] latest effort is nothing less than a fake celebrity endorsement of Moore’s opponent, Republican Sheila Harsdorf, in the recall election taking place just across the border.

Baloney.  The guy’s voice sounds like Morgan Freeman, in the same way that I look like Jim Cramer.  Did he say “I”m Morgan Freeman?”  No.  Does his voice say “I’m detached and authoritative, like Morgan Freeman’s?”  Sure.  Is it of any legal or ethical weight?  If it is, then everyone with a passing resemblance to a celebrity who swerves into the public eye in any way loses their stock in trade.

(And this lawsuit, by Bette Midler against a soundalike who sang one of her songs on a commercial, tucks in the legal case.  Being a soundalike isn’t in and of itself an issue; Midler’s suit got tossed).

Let’s try this, and see if Burcum squawks.

“DFL and RINOs good.  Conservatives bad.  Vote for Sheila Harsdorf!”

Now, was that actually Lori Sturdevant endorsing Harsdorf?  Of course not.  Did I try to leverage the coincidental resemblance of the line I wrote with a regional celebrity’s trademark dogmatism?  Perhaps, but so what?   Does a celebrity own their tone, their timbre and cadence and presentation?

If so, Burcum might be getting a call from Doug Grow’s lawyer.

A (presumably) couple had (an apparently) gnarly breakup.

Cops are called.

But that’s not the whole story…:

​”Gotcha” moments don’t come more classic than the one that happened in Montgomery County recently.

The Sheriff’s Office blotter says two officers were called to an apartment to investigate a sexual assault.

“The alleged victim stated to the deputies that her 26-year-old male friend had sexually assaulted her,” the report says.

Fair enough, and with that friend standing in the same apartment, no big manhunt needed.

And your typical womyn’s studies major would have convicted the guy and given him a lethal injection right about there.

But wait!

Not so fast: “Upon further investigation the deputies watched a video recording the male had made that showed the female telling him that she was calling the police because he was making her leave the apartment and she would tell the police he assaulted her.”

Hope it turns up on “Smoking Gun’s World’s Dumbest…” one of these days.

We’re live at the Washington County fairgrounds, on the east edgeof Lake Elmo.  We’re by the south entrance (and the sun is atmy back, so I can’t see what I”m typing)so stop out and say “hit”!

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism from 9AM-4PM, live from the Washington County Fair!

(Google map right here)

• Ed and I – The Headliners – will be on from 1-3PM Central.
• Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – will be up next, from 3-4!
• The King Banaian Show! – King is onAM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  Join him from 9-11!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all five hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream).
• Podcast at Townhall, usually by Monday
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

It’s the ultimate “progressive” rhetorical trick play; “progressivism” is, by definition (and the establishment run by “progressives” makes the definitions!) what is best for The People; all sane people want what’s best for The People; if you don’t want what’s best for The People, you’re insane.

It’s not just idle rhetorical chatter.  In the USSR, from the time of Lenin all the way through the Gorbachev regime, political psychiatry was an instrument of state oppression; state “psychiatric” institutions were an integral part of the Gulag.

And Obama’s minions are at it again:

MSNBC host Martin Bashir interviewed Stanton Peele, a psychologist and an “expert on addiction,” this afternoon. Bashir urged Peele to psychologically evaluate supporters of the Tea Party. “It reminds us of addiction because addicts are seeking something that they can’t have,” Peele said. “They want a state of happiness or nirvana that can’t be achieved except through an artificial substance and reminds us of the Norway situation, when people are thwarted at obtaining something they can’t, have they often strike out and Norway is one kind of example to one kind of reaction to that kind of a frustration.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy, and to buff up their atrocious ratings.  But thanks for the video, guys. 

Bashir later asked: “So you’re saying that they are delusional about the past and adamant about the future?”

“They are adamant about achieving something that’s unachievable, which reminds us of a couple of things. It reminds us of delusion and psychosis,” Peele responded.

“Our opponents are crazy”.

It’s aimed at the Tea Party, but its audience is really all those progressives – good, decent people in their native habitat – that Big Progressive has to convince to believe that conservatives are less human than they are before the next election.  Because that’s what mass movements whose only real stock in trade is inchoate anger have to do; convince their followers that their enemies are beyond the pale, and deserve what’s getting dished out to them.

They are preparing the mental ground for what is going to be an incredibly ugly campaign.

More, probably, Monday.

It’s no secret – Obama’s priority isn’t the economy.  All that “I’ll be fine being a one-term president” was so much baked wind; he wants four more years to get his addled agenda across.

The guy’s got a nation to destroy:

Of course, this by no means is an indication the President has lost the Huffington Post. Arianna, Alex, and everyone at this liberal abomination will be campaigning for the former junior senator from Illinois next year as if he’s a close relative.

But the disappointment on the left is palpable, and if the economy really is double-dipping, it will be interesting to see whether the rats leave the ship or figure out a way to blame it on Republicans.

And it’s in this cycle that the Tea Party, and all of those millions of newly-minted fiscalcons, needs to earn its bones.

As NewsBusters previously reported, there already is an effort underway to use the debt ceiling agreement as the culprit for any downturn.

Whether or not the American people will buy it is another thing altogether.

The media is already working overtime try to rig that part the equation.

I’ve been listening to some of my fellow conservatives – especially Tea Partiers – complaining about the debt ceiling deal, in terms that start with “it’s awful” and often as not end with “well, it was a great run – time to start hiding gold under the mattress”.

To which I answer, as appropriate, “what did you expect when we only control the House?” and “if you’re not storing gold, ammo and food even in the good times, you’re nuts”.  But I digress.

Ed Morrissey – with whom I co-host a radio show every Saturday on AM1280 – notes in The Week that it wasn’t a perfect victory for the Tea Party – there was no way for that victory to happen, at least not via democratic means, in this Congress with this President – but it was a victory nevertheless:

Who won, and who lost? Did anyone win? If we gauge winners and losers by the reaction from politicians and activists across the political spectrum, no one was satisfied with the deal reached between Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress and President Obama. Though it is arguably true that few actually advanced their agenda much in the deal, that doesn’t mean everyone came out of this deal equally worse off. Indeed, despite some dissatisfied rumblings from within the Tea Party, one lesson is clear: They succeeded in transforming Washington.

The codecil to that – one that the Tea Party needs to remember?  Politics is not like a championship game, with a final end result that stands for all time.  It’s a season – one that never actually ends.  It’s one where everything that happens in this game – hurt quarterbacks, momentum gained and lost, everything – affects the next game, and the game after that, and games played after your children take things over.

The example I keep coming back to: handgun carry reform in Minnesota.  When Concealed Carry Reform Now first formed, and started trying to change Minnesota’s racist, sexist, patriarchal weapon carry laws, they couldn’t even get time to talk with legislators – with “friendly”, Republican ones.

I can’t help but feel that some of the Tea Party conservatives who are complaining about the debt ceiling deal today would have fumed about the unfairness of it all back then, thrown in the towel and spent the next six years silently stewing.  But I’d hope it’d be a teaching moment.

Because the next year…well, only a few legislators talked with CCRN.  But it was more than the previous year.  And CCRN’s mailing list bloomed, and outstate voters started paying attention.

And the next year?  A few more legislators opened their doors.  And CCRN’s mailing list started having an effect – legislators started hearing from more people, which opened still more doors.

And the next year?  There was talk of a bill.  It never happened, but legislators were getting the message in droves; CCRN’s volunteer lobbyists were getting audiences with key legislators.

And the next year?  Well, the CCRN mailing list grew some more, and the DFL had to start playing defense.

And the next year?  And the following?  More of the same.  The DFL – and their point man on the issue, Wes “Lying Sack of Garbage” Skoglund – had to crank the smear and lie machine up into full force, since it was becoming clear they had no basis in fact.

And the next year?  There was a bill – and it died on the table (as I recall – I could very well have the specifics wrong, but it doesn’t really detract from the point).  And CCRN’s mailing list told voters which legislators voted against it.  And they got an earful, and a few of them – outstate DFLers who’d voted against the bill – lost their return tickets to Saint Paul.

And the next year?  We won.

(And two years later, we won again, after a DFL-pet judge struck down the law on ludicrously selective grounds).

Viewed from the perspective of 1995, and 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002, we lost, lost, lost, lost, lost, lost, lost and lost again.

And yet without all the effort – and there was a lot of effort – expended from 1005 through 2002, there would have been no victory.

And the victory wasn’t won by simply wanting it badly enough – although you gotta have that.  It was won by playing grassroots politics better than the other side.  We – the pro-Second-Amendment movement – had to win over a lot of hearts and minds in the legislature, the media, and on Mainstreet Minnesota.

The Tea Party did transform American politics – once. It did it by convincing the American people last Fall that they had the best ideas for taking this nation forward.

And now they need to do it again – to win the Senate, the White House, and a bunch of State Houses and Legislatures, enough to really, seriously, totally revamp the way this nation views the relationship between The People and government.

And it’s not a sprint, or a single game; it’s a marathon, an endless season.  Something that’ll challenge many Americans’ addled attention spans.

All the better.

35W Bridge Memorial vandalized two days after opening:

Construction worker Rob Bailey went to the Mississippi River on Monday evening, as he had every Aug. 1 for the previous three years, to remember his co-worker and friend Greg “Jolly” Jolstad.

He watched as a new memorial to the 35W bridge collapse was unveiled about a quarter-mile upstream from the site of the tragedy.

“I go down there to pray every year at 6:05 p.m.,” said Bailey, who had just stepped off the bridge moments before it collapsed.

Two days after making his pilgrimage, he was stunned to hear that the memorial had been vandalized, with 22 stainless steel letters ripped out of a message affixed to the memorial’s granite wall.

The vandals in the Twin Cities are getting out of control.

On the one hand, it’s just plain depressing.

On the other hand, it’s tempting to buy two walls on a high-vandalism street, like University or Lake or whatever.  Paint them both a pristine white.  Post one of them “Free Public Graffiti Mural”, and the other one “No Graffiti”.  See how many people go out of the way to deface the “No Graffiti” wall.

And maybe taze them.

While driving between meetings yesterday, I listened to the first part of Keri Miller’s interview with Juan Williams.

Williams, of course, was the commentator who split his time between Fox News and National Public Radio – even serving as a talk show host on NPR on occasion – before being fired for admitting on the O’Reilly show to sharing many Americans’ nervousness about obvious Muslims on aircraft after 9/11 (while stressing – and the media reports, especially NPR’s, always left this part out – that it’d be wrong to base policy on the sort of stereotypes he was admitting to).

I’m going to paraphrase the part I heard.  Feel free to validate it at the show link.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: Because we can’t have an honest conversation as a nation until we admit to the fact that this is how we feel.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: Now, let’s be honest – there was more than “reverting to stereotype”.  I urged people to remember that’s now how we set policy in this country.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: In and of itself, I don’t. But it’s an honest part of the conversation; if political correctness forces us to stifle acknowledging it, it’ll leak out in other ways.

MILLER:  So why did you revert to stereotype?  Do you think that elevates the conversation?

WILLIAMS: Um…hello?

Miller’s point seemed to be not so much that humans must conquer stereotype; it’s that having them, or at least admitting it, is itself a base, evil thing.

I’d love to propose an experiment.

Some evening when Ms. Miller is making her way from The Loft and one of her “Talking Volumes” programs to a brie and chablis tasting party in Kenwood, she should run across a group of thirtysomething white males in full biker gear, smack across her path.  Let’s measure her heart rate.  See if she is indulging in any stereotypes.

In the interest of science, naturally.

UPDATE:  Over on Twitter, “NarnFan” wrote the summary for this piece that I wasn’t caffeinated enough to hatch myself:

To the extent we can’t hold a complected thought about this stuff, we are screwed manifold ways.

People can yell “racist” at one another ’til they’re blue in the face; the fact is, it’s human nature to be “we-ist”.  People are always most comfortable around people most like themselves; Keri Miller would no doubt be no more comfortable and relaxed among, say, white rednecks than would Cornell West.

Especially if there’s a “history”; Armenians might be forgiven for being leery of Turks; European Jews of a certain age might keep Russians, Poles or “Aryans” under close watch; blacks of any socioeconomic class in Los Angeles might be forgiven for being wary of tattooed, teenage and twentysomething Latinos.

Americans were attacked, and 3,000 of us murdered in cold blood, by people who caught us at our most vulnerable – stripped of weapons, jammed like cattle into aluminum tubes.  Not every Muslim attacked us – and I’ll strenuously exclaim that many Muslims serve this country with great honor, including the Pakistani-American who was reported to have gone on the Bin Laden raid.

To say “you are a bad person” for acknowledging the real human need to see to one’s own self-preservation, itself, retards the conversation that Ms. Miller said she was trying to “advance”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The question I’d like to see asked:

 

If Congress doesn’t reduce spending to less than or equal to realistic revenues, creditor nations will decline to buy more debt and the President will be forced to decide which checks his administration won’t mail.

 

If you were President, which checks would you hold back, and why?

 

The question is merely a hypothetical today. But if the economy doesn’t recover soon . . . well, military planners run war games all the time, trying to anticipate problems and create solutions before we’re facing disaster with only moments to react in panic. Why not politicians?

 

Joe Doakes

Como Park

It’s a tough question.  Tougher still because I’ve been told (haven’t looked it up myself, yet) that we could shut down the entire daily operations of our government – Congress, the SCOTUS, and the entire Executive Branch, including all the Cabinet departments, including Defense and Health and Human Services, and still not attack the deficit; it’s the entitlements. (I need to look that up, obviously).

All the usual conservative suggestion – shutting down the Department of Education, defund NPR, privatize the National Endowment for the Humanities – aren’t even a whiz in the wind.  What we need is to cut entitlements – Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Obamacare – and cut them radically.

Which means not just cutting spending, but changing the way this nation looks at retirement and health insurance.

OK.  So go to it.  What do we do?

The Hill’s annual “50 Most Beautiful” feature is one of DC’s less-essential but least unpleasant traditions.

And, as Eric Ostermeier at Smart Politics notes, it’s changed this year:

When The Hill released its annual 50 Most Beautiful People list earlier this week, there was one striking difference from the D.C. publication’s lists it had published over the last several years.

Republicans apparently just got a lot more beautiful.

The 50 Most Beautiful People list is a water cooler-worthy collection of photos and brief bios of D.C. staffers, lobbyists, Capitol police, members of the House and Senate, and other workers in and around the federal government.

And The Hill finally noted that the party of Kristi Noem and Sarah Palin has finally upended the party of Bella Abzug:

Smart Politics content analyzed the last five years of these annual 50 Most Beautiful lists and found a marked change in 2011’s edition compared to the previous four years.

From 2007 through 2010 Democrats crowded out GOPers, with 111 Democrats profiled as the most beautiful (56 percent), compared to just 70 Republicans (35 percent) and 19 independents or non-partisans.

In 2011, however, only 16 Democrats appeared in The Hill’s spread (32 percent) compared to 27 Republicans (54 percent) and seven others.

This is a mystery?

Go to “Drinking Liberally” and then a MOB party. You’ll figure it out.

Chris Cilizza has released his annual list of “Best State-Based Political Blogs” for 2011.  It’s a list for all fifty states.  Cilizza hastens to note that…:

The best political blogs list is entirely driven by Fix readers and commenters. Many of the blogs below are partisan and may use language and/or images that neither The Fix nor the Washington Post condones. To be clear, we are not endorsing the view of the blogs on the list. Instead we intend to serve as a gateway for interested political junkies to pick and choose your favorites.

So here are the lists for…:

Minnesota

• Bluestem Prairie
• Capitol View
• Dump Bachmann
• Hot Dish Politics
• Minnesota Independent
• MinnPotus – that one took me a second: they meant “MinnPost”, apparently.  Whew.  I was afraid a blog about Bachmann and Pawlenty had snuck past me…
• Smart Politics
• True North – Well, all right!  Congrats to Derek, Nancy, AAA, Jonz, Nancy ,Cindy and Matt!

So True North got on the list, against the MPR, Strib and Humphrey Institute house blogs, a Soros joint, The Dump (hey, give ’em their due; they’ve always known how to get the media to pay disproportionate attention to them) and “Bluestem”, which gets points for being one of about three Minnesota leftyblogs that’s neither obviously clinically deranged, nor employed by the DFL/Soros/some “progressive” institution nor seemingly written by a press-release bot.

Hey, at least a conservative blog got on the list this year – in a state that’s spawned two of the most powerful blogs anywhere in the business, Powerline and Captain’s Quarters  (which got assimilated into Hot Air) and where the organic conservative blog scene True North digests every day is the biggest, most vibrant in the country.

Hm.  Makes sense now.

Anyway, congrats to all.

The folks at “Zenergo”, a new pop-culcha website, have run my old piece, “Music Appreciation” – my brief chronology of the rock and roll era – as the inaugural piece in their “music” section.  With my permission, even.

It was kinda a fun read, then and now.  Glad someone else liked it!

Is the New Yorker’s account of the Bin Laden raid accurate?

History will tell us – maybe, someday.  Maybe not.

But fact, trail-obscuring fiction, or somewhere in between, it’s a gripping read.

(Does it seem likely to you that a SEAL – one of the “quiet professionals” – would say what the article says he did, the title of this post, on shooting Bin Laden?  It seems just south of plausible – but you wanna think so, anyway…)

It was Friday, August 2, 1991.

After my second interview a few days earlier, I got a call very quickly asking me to come in for a third interview. That was good.

I’d also found out from Joe Hanson – the keeper of all broadcast lore in Twin Cities radio – that I was on a short list; me and my co-worker at KDWB, Steve Konrad (who was going by the air name “Wally Pike”, and was producing the “Steve Cochran” morning show.  It was down to the two of us.

The previous weekend, Steve had walked in to the control room at K63, and we’d chatted about the incongruity of it all.  I laughed, and pointed out that I had some pressure; I had a baby whose due date was four days away.  “Gotta figure out how to pay for it”, I chuckled, not feeling all that funny at the moment.

But it was time.  I drove out to the KSTP studio, out on Highway 61 in Maplewood, and was ushered into Morris’ office.  I sat at a table with Morris and a consultant.  The consultant will remain nameless – partly because I don’t entirely remember his name, and partly because really, all broadcast consultants are the same.  This guy was one of about 500 consultants around the country who were claiming credit for Rush Limbaugh’s emergence as the savior of AM radio.

We chatted for a bit, we talked about my vision for the station.  I had thought out a pretty coherent one; get people to work on the ABCs of broadcasting – the station IDs, the cross-promotion, better call screening (not “tighter” so much as more strategic – bumping better callers, and women, farther up in the queue, that sort of thing), which would move some of the responsibility for the shows’ pacing to the producers, who had been operating as a bunch of glorified board operators for the past couple of years.

There was some give and take; the consultant was poking away pretty hard – but I don’t think he stumped me.

After about 45 minutes, Morris said “I have no doubt that you have the intellectual background and experience to do the job.  My biggest concern is that you’re going to try to get on the air”.  She knew, naturally, that that had been my big goal.  And it still was, to be honest.

But I fielded the hopper; “that’s not what this job is about.  I’ll have other focuses”.

Then the consultant fired back.  “So you did a conservative show?”  I affirmed.  “Why do you think Rush Limbaugh is as successful as he is?”

“Because there is a huge base of conservatives out there who have been grossly underserved by the traditional media, and who are finding a voice on talk radio that they’ve never really had before”.

“No!”, he pounced.  “Rush is successful because he’s irreverent.  Because he takes politics and has fun with it.  He could be talking about sports, or cars, or real estate; as long as you’re having irreverent fun with the topic, it’s all the same”.  He extolled Bob Yates (of whom I was a big fan), and Turi Ryder (of whom I was not, but who was someone the station had hired at the consultant’s direction) as examples of where talk radio was going.

I put the pieces together in my head.  They see me as a political talk partisan. Steve Konrad is the producer of a “comedy” talk show.  He sees “comedy” with a thin topical veil as the future of talk radio.  He’s got his mind made up already. 

I could feel the water leaking into the boat.  I started bailing.

“Have you ever heard of a guy named Don Vogel?”

“I’ve got his tape, but I haven’t heard it yet”.

“I used to produce him.  Give him a listen.  It’ll show that I’ve got good chops at both kinds of talk radio”.

Things slowly fizzled after that.  They thanked me for coming out.  And the body language said that that was as far as I was going to get.

———–

I found out on August 6 – my baby’s due date – that I didn’t get the job.  And that Steve Konrad had given his two weeks’ notice at KDWB.

I also heard some other things – things I’d suggested in my second and third interviews.  The station’s hosts got a lot more punctual about “formatics” – giving the station’s IDs in and out of breaks, giving several of the four Arbitron diary identifiers every they did an ID.  Barbara Carlson softpedaled her “political insider” persona, in favor of her “big crazy personality” one.

And a few months later, Don Vogel started on the afternoon shift, in place of the afternoon guy they had in place that I’d mentally noted I was going to get rid of anyway.   His producer – in his first fulltime radio job – was Tom Mischke, who’d been the “Phantom Caller” during my time producing Don.

Oh yeah – and when Joe Hanson, whom Steve Konrad eventually hired to produce first Mischke and then Jason Lewis, next worked with me on the Northern Alliance back in 2004-2005, he told me the consultant had finally averred that his whole “people don’t care about conservative talk because they care about conservatism” line was the biggest mistake he’d made in his career.

So I made an impact – not that I got anything out of it.  And it did grate on me.  Bad.

But the time was coming fast to move on from that part of my life.