Here’s a bit of good news:  the American people distrust the mainstream media…

The majority of Americans still do not have confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 44% of Americans who have a great deal or fair amount of trust and the 55% who have little or no trust remain among the most negative views Gallup has measured

…and largely believe it to be biased to the left:

Here’s the part I think is dispositive – check out the numbers broken out by self-reported political category”:

For all of the extreme left’s caterwauling about the “conservatism” of the mainstream media, Democrats are three times as likely to say the news is “just about right” as Republicans – and almost twice as likely as “Independents”.

So while the mainstream media may not be “liberal” (although they are twice as likely to be OK with the status quo as conservatives), the Democrat mainstream certainly seems to be comfortable with the way things are.

I was talking with another Second Amendment activist last night about the story behind yesterday afternoon’s shooting on I-394 or, rather, what was missing from it.

Police said the officer had tried to stop the woman, who eventually pulled over along the median shortly after 1 p.m. Thursday on westbound Interstate 394 in Minnetonka.

“The lone occupant of the vehicle, an adult female, was in possession of a handgun and was subsequently fatally shot by the officer,” according to a statement from Golden Valley police.

“Was in possession of a handgun?”

OK – and what did she do with it?

The observation is that usually in these types of shootings – dead civilian, unhurt cop – if there are details that explain the cop’s actions, like “she picked up the gun, racked a round, yelled “I’m gonna kill you, copper” and pointed it at the officer”, those are all over the media.

And yet…

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office is investigating and declined Thursday night to release any additional details, including who the woman was, what led to the traffic stop and shooting, and whether she fired at the officer.

This will be interesting.

…when the TV anchors are suddenly feigning big enthusiasm over the WNBA and the Lynx.

That is all.

The Usual Suspects is one of my favorite movies.

In the movie, the legendary arch-criminal and unseen (?) antagonist, the Turkish uber-villain Keyser Söze, operates by the adage that to win, you need to be willing to go further than your opponent is – whatever that means.  To Söze, when his family was taken hostage by his drug-smuggling rivals, it meant killing the family first, as the rivals watched, dumb-struck – and then the rivals, leaving one alive to tell the rest of the cartel (before Söze killed him, and the rest of the cartel, and their families).

It makes for a great bit of movie characterization.

For politics in a representative republic?

Not quite as good.

———-

I’ve had one iron-clad policy on this blog; never, ever, Ever, EVER go after someone’s personal life, family or (non-elected) job just because their opinion differs from mine.  That’s how I run the blog – especially for my three pseudonymous co-bloggers; there is nothing in blogging lower than someone who uses anonymity or pseudonymity as a cover for unethical attacks..

In fact, I keep other bloggers’ personal lives and livelihoods completely out of bloggjng.  There’s a good reason for it.  For starters, it’s dangerous; peoples’ personal lives have nuances that can wash the unwary and the stupid up on the shores of Defamation Island without them knowing about it.  More importantly, it’s completely illogical; it’s the fallacy of the tu quoque ad hominem – the idea that some inconsistency in your opponent’s actions or claims yesterday undercuts his argument today.  Like, for example, if someone’s ever been ticketed for speeding, their opinion on transportation issues is discounted.

It’s stupid.

It’s also one of the most common themes in political communications, as practiced by the not-so-bright.  Accusing people of “flip-flopping” is generally dumb (I’ve “flip flopped” on gun control, abortion, government intervention, and conservatism itself since I was a kid; so did Ronald Reagan, for that matter.  To some Libs, that’s “flip-flopping”; to us, it’s a sign that we’ve thought about things, and gotten the right answer better late than never).

It’s a lot more sinister than that, of course; it goes way beyond discounting arguments.  There’s a school of thought – codified in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – that believes the best way to win in politics is to ratchet up the personal attacks about non-political issues to the point that none of your opponents can muster the emotional energy to stay in the contest; to bring things to the point where they fail Söze’s, and Alinski’s, test of commitment.

There is a pattern among the Twin Cities left; if you can’t debate someone on fact, you go for the smear.  The more outmatched they are, the more ugly and personal they get.

Which, given that a distressing number of leftybloggers usually has at most one round of “facts” to bring to a debate (because few of them have ever had to learn to debate like adults, since they’ve spent their entire lives in cities and colleges and unions run by “progressives”), means that almost any debate with a depressingly huge swathe of leftybloggers dives straight into the mud very early in any discussion.  It’s like the left, rhetorically, has raised a generation of kids with sense of how to carry on a civilized discussion, or manners, or conventional sense of right and wrong – but given them all guns and ammo.

Great example: one Twin Cities leftyblogger – a guy who shall remain unnamed, but is known to many on both sides of the aisle as “The Dwight Schrute of the Twin Cities leftysphere” – spent a few weeks waddling around grinning like a toddler who’d made a nice pants because he found a record of some checks I’d bounced, during a spell of short money and worse bookkeeping, almost eight years ago,.  Blathered it all over the place – as “evidence” that I shouldn’t talk about government budgets.  Now, I know the facts of the situation – something “Dwight” never had the integrity to ask about – so while it wasn’t anything i had cared to discuss publicly, it didn’t especially affect me.  The intention, of course, was to shut me up – not by dint of any facts “Dwight” could bring to an argument (he never has any) but by trying to make opposing them too costly in ways that have nothing to do with politics.  Because after ten years of failing at civil debate, it’s all they have.

Which brings us to Eric Austin.  He writes the Outstate Politics blog.  I’ve always gotten along with the guy..

But a while ago Austin apparently jumped onto one of the left’s most demented memes; that any “family values” Republicans whose family lives and histories aren’t pristine are “hypocrites” and beyond the ethical pale, rightly subject to any manner of ugliness.  He spotlighted a Republican legislator, Mary Franson, who’d recently been divorced, publishing some rumors about the circumstances behind the split.

As Lady Logician wrote yesterday at True North, Austin wrote about these rumors – as he put it, based on “two independent sources” who confirmed it to his own satisfaction.

Is Austin’s story true, or not?  Who cares.  It’s none of my business, or Austin’s, or yours for that matter (and if you’re someone who ever said “move on” or “it was just sex” during the Clinton administration, think veeeery carefully about your next answer).  Chalk it up to giggly prurience if you want – but that short-changes the depravity of the act.  It’s really part of the Alinski-ite dictum to scorch the opponent’s earth; to make engaging in politics against liberals too personally and emotionally costly to sustain.

LL posts a recording of a phone conversation between Franson and Austin – listen to it at the link above.

LL’s contention is that the story is a rumor; Austin apparently believes his “sources” are plenty good enough to justify writing…

…what?  A story about what should be the personal business of two people whose marriage was unravelling, with all the emotional shrapnel that always accompanies divorce?

Is it worth slopping the worst details of the worst episode in a family’s life out in front of the public – embarassing the parents, sure, but doing much, much worse for the children – to take a whack at a poliitician you disagree with about legislative politics?

Those last questions are usually rhetorical, academic ones.  In this case, unfortunately, it’s very literal.  LL notes, in what is the real crux of the article:

Then there is the point that Rep. Franson’s daughter was being bullied as a direct result of [what Austin wrote]. His only response was to accuse Rep. Franson of being directly responsible for the bullying of gay teens. His logic is highly flawed.

Listen to the recording, around the 2:30 mark; Franson notes that Austen’s allegations caused her daughter to get bullied at school.   Listen to his response after 2:30.  I’ll closely paraphrase; “so what about gay kids that get bullied?”

Catch that?

The message is this: Disagree with us, and not only are we going to work over every nook and cranny of your personal life, without regard to damage we may be adding to your family, but we will condone and abet the torture of your children – because you disagree with us”.  

LL notes:

 First off, there is the old adage that two wrongs don’t make a right. Second, Rep. Franson had no direct action in these children being bullied.

So what does Franson believe about bullying gay kids?  I don’t know – and it’s for sure that if Austin knows, it doesn’t matter to him; Franson and her daugther are bones to be chewed in service to Austin’s point. For all we, and Austin, know, Franson has risked life and limb to thwart gay-bashers in her private life. Speaking as someone who has put more on the line against the bullying of gays than Eric Austin ever has or will (long story), I believe bullying is bullying. no matter who it’s aimed at.  But in Austin’s world, the fact that I oppose a bill to create a special, double-dog class of victims makes me not only the same as a bully, but justifies smearing my personal life and making my childrens’ lives hell?

In re Austin’s apparent defense (via the audio in LL’s article) of Franson’s daughter getting tormented at school over what he’d written, LL writes:

Austin’s weak defense is even weaker when you realize that this man is a…

Y’see, there’s my conundrum.  I said I never, ever go after peoples’ (non-elected) jobs – and I don’t.  But Austin works in a field where he’s supposed to look after the best interests of kids.

And yet there he is, saying things that could reasonably be interpreted as justifying bullying.

I’m the kind of guy who gives the benefit of the doubt way too easily – but I’ll entertain some explanations.  Was Austin flustered and mis-speaking his real intent?  Did he try to drive down a rhetorical road that he didn’t have the gas to come back from?   Is there some context tucked in there that I missed? I’m open to suggestions.

But let’s take him at his apparent word.  What do you suppose Eric Austin – or the rest of the Minnesota leftyblog community’s pack of Alinsky-addled ethical Oompa Loompas – would say if Medtronic sold their grandmother a pacemaker that was 20% defective, because of Obamacare’s hike on medical device taxes?  Or if their restaurants cut Democrats’ portions 15% to make up for revenue lost to the smoking ban?

If, say, a conservative college professor docked students grade points equal to the tax increases the students favored?

They’d howl like stuck cats.

Rightly so; it’s unethical, and in the first case illegal.

There’s really little point in conservatives doing more than pointing this sort of behavior out.  It is all most of the Minnesota leftysphere can do.

The takeaways:  Conservatives have to not only smarter than their opponents, they and their families and their supporters have to be a lot tougher.

Bonus question:  There’s a technical term for someone who uses fear to affect a political end.  What is it?

———-

We all know how The Usual Suspects ended, right?

(more…)

A few weeks ago, when I was in Minneapolis to speak at the SD61 special endorsing convention, I had the pleasure of meeting Chris Fields, who is running for the GOP endorsement to run against Keith Ellison in the Fifth.

And as Nancy at True North discovered, Fields is an imposing guy with a compelling story:

Fields grew up poor in the South Bronx and said he made “horrible choices” in his youth – including accidentally burning down his home while playing with matches at 5, and taking up smoking at 13.

And a conservative grew in the Bronx:

He lived in Section 8 housing and during that time his 24-year-old stepfather bought 3 buildings for $1 each, creating a co-op with the help of donations and volunteers. Fields says that investment now holds over $45 million in assets. He learned a valuable lesson from his stepfather — that anyone can make a positive difference.

After working on Wall Street, Fields joined the Marines and retired an officer after 21 years. Having served in the Middle East, he offers first-hand knowledge and perspectives of the complexities of fighting terror and maintaining a military presence.

It’ll take a confluence of several things to unseat Ellison in a district like the Fifth:

1. A wave of discontent with the Democrats and DFL so immense that nobody, not even Ellison, is invulnerable.
2. A GOP organization that goes against decades of history and gets hordes of volunteers out on the street.
3. A solid outreach to the minority vote that has become so important in both of the Twin Cities (an area where the DFL has been falling increasingly short, as they basically assume those votes are in the bag from the word go).
4. More fundraising than any Republican has managed in the Fifth in forever.
5. A Fifth District that’s been diluted (possibly)
6. A really good candidate.

Joe Doakes notes that Obama is singing conservatives’ tune:

President Obama slipped and called for a flat tax:

The president welcomed the charge. “I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher is class warfare,” he told the Rose Garden crowd of 200. “I think it’s just the right thing to do.”

Exactly!  Everyone should pay the same, flat tax!

Cool: I propose 15% flat tax across the board, no exemptions, no deductions, no credits. Employer withholds it so no income tax form to file because there’s never a refund. Lay off half the IRS and taxpayers save trillions in lost productive hours, no longer filling out silly forms.

Almost seems too good to be true to you?  Of course it does:

Of course he didn’t mean that. He meant something different entirely. But hey – you offered it, we’ll take it, thanks.

Pass that bill and make him look stupid vetoing it.

Note to John Kline and Erik Paulsen: wanna get carried back to Washington in January 2013 on the shoulders of twenty million people who’ve had enough?  Take Obama up on his newfound desire for tax fairness, and introduce the flat tax.

Obama is losing ground to every Republican candidate:.

A new McClatchy-Marist poll finds that Obama looks increasingly vulnerable in next year’s election, with a majority of voters believing he’ll lose to any Republican, a solid plurality saying they’ll definitely vote against him and most potential Republican challengers gaining on him.

Even in potential matchups where he leads, Obama in most cases has lost ground to the Republican.

And we do mean any Republican candidate:

The biggest gain came for Palin, the former Alaska governor who hasn’t yet announced whether she’ll jump into the fast-changing race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

After trailing Obama by more than 20 percentage points in polls all year, the new national survey, taken Sept. 13-14, found Palin trailing the president by just 5 points, 49-44 percent. The key reason: She now leads Obama among independents, a sharp turnaround.

I still firmly believe that Obama will turn this around – indeed, by next year, if the Democrats don’t gain 2-4 seats in the Senate, flip the House back, and win the presidency with a five point margin, they should feel completely humiliated.

But I’m running out of ways to get from here to that end result.

Minnesota’s legislative auditor released a report yesterday that, as every local media outlet noted, “raised questions” about Minnesota’s burgeoning online school market:

Even as they surge in popularity, online schools in Minnesota are troubled by high dropout rates, poor math scores and inadequate state oversight.

That’s the conclusion of a state audit released on Monday that shows how the virtual schools, whose full-time enrollment has tripled in recent years, are faring.

Sounds dodgy, right?  It certainly did in the hands of much of the Twin Cities media, who just loooove a scandal.

Well, not necessarily. The auditor – the estimable James Nobles, perhaps the single most reliable source in Minnesota government – noted an honest caveat:

It’s unclear why many online students are falling short academically, said Legislative Auditor James Nobles, adding, “We need to find out, is there anything more we can do for these students?”

I’d like to raise the same question in followup that I raise whenever flaks for the Minnesota Federation of Teachers point out standardized test scores at charter schools; measuring individual schools, or schools as a group – especially schools like charters and online schools, which cater so heavily to students who for whatever reason don’t click in traditional sit-down factory-model schools – isn’t nearly as meaningful as measuring the response and performance of individual students over time, and aggregating the individual students’ net changes over time.

During the 2009-10 school year, Minnesota’s full-time online students finished only 63 percent of the courses they started. Just 16 percent of those in high school were proficient on state math tests, compared with 41 percent in the same grades at schools throughout Minnesota. And fully one-quarter of the 12th-graders dropped out by the end of the school year, vastly more than the 3 percent of all students who did so statewide.

And without some aggregate idea of where that mass of students started academically, and what brings them to online school in the first place,  none of the numbers means much.  The figure on senior dropouts is particularly puzzling; what would prompt a quarter of seniors to drop out?  I suspect it’s something a lot deeper than “online school”.

To be fair, the Strib article I’m quoting notes this:

Advocates of online learning point out that many students are already behind academically when they enroll. “The majority of the students that come to us were struggling in their previous school, and they’ve come to us as an alternative,” said John Huber, head of Insight School of Minnesota, an online high school guided by the Brooklyn Center School District.

But dimes’ll get you dollars that MN2020 cites this report as a reason to abolish online schools (as well as charters) and drag those kids back to the factory schools many of them are fleeing in the first place.

Reading Derek Thompson’s piece on  “Millennals” in the Atlantic, it was easy to feel depressed about the future of “Generation Y”.  I had to keep remind myself “watch the selection bias – watch the selection bias…”

And eventually my patience was rewarded; I’ knew we’d eventually find a kid who didn’t make me want to slap them:

“You just have to buckle down and stop whining.”

I’m a Gen Y’er and feel pretty content with American society. I went to a run-of-the-mill liberal arts college (without a prestigious scholarship), majored in the humanities, and set off to work. Before I started graduate school, I had several jobs, some good, some not so good. But I reminded myself that my sole goal in life at this point should be to make as much money as I can and pay off loans.

And, y’know, learn to be marketable – but why quibble?

This piece makes it seem as though Gen Y’ers are all altruistic academic/athletic super workers, and they simpler aren’t. Many Gen Y’ers complain about the lack of jobs, but refuse jobs they don’t want to do. It’s equally dumb to apply to jobs you’re not qualified for (just because you have a college degree doesn’t automatically qualify you to run a retail store, for instance. Granted, it’s not rocket science, but it’s understandable why store managers would want to hire professional and mature workers with experience).

After reading some of the other Gen-Y’ers, I’m amazed that one of them recognized this.

I understand that many regions are more depressed than others, but I still feel there are plenty of jobs out there to keep one busy. I washed dishes, I cleaned cars, I dug ditches, waited tables, and was even lucky enough to score a couple of high(er) paying internships at respectable firms. You just have to buckle down and stop whining.

Words to remember at every stage of your life, whatever your generation.

More later…

It was an uncanny coincidence – if you assume that leftybloggers operate as independent agents, and why, oh, why would one assume that every one of them, from Daily Kos down through Penigma, takes their chanting points from Media Matters for America just because they’ve all been chanting them not merely in unison but in strict top-down sequence for almost a decade now, after all? – to watch the leftyblogs and leftytweeps all chanting the same basic thing almost simultaneously yesterday.

Leftytweep Chris Shields – a semi-frequent kicktoy in this space – twote yesterday:

@ChrisShields There wouldn’t be a need to tax the rich to create jobs if the rich were actually creating jobs.

Gosh – why would “the rich” – let’s broaden that out to “entrepreneurs”, “job creators” and “business” – not be throwing caution to the winds and creating jobs with gay abandon?

• Skyrocketing regulation: The regulatory environment for business – big and small – is getting downright ugly.   There is no realistic chance it’s going to improve during an Obama administration, or while the Democrats control half of Congress.
• The Obamacare of Damocles: Obamacare is already killing jobs, and it’s three years away from going into effect, so we’ve seen nothing yet.
• Taxes Kill: Obama’s initial round of taxes – aimed at “the rich” who are also the investors who provide capital for investing in new business – put a huge chill on job creation.  His “new” “jobs” “plan” may be worse.  They all lead up to…
• Uncertainty: Nothing is ever certain in business, but managing uncertainty is a key part of a good manager’s job.  And when there’s this much uncertainty – in regulation, expenses and taxes, to say nothing of the markets that are all also affected by the same regulations, taxes and expenses – the prudent response is to cut expenses and wait and see.

I find it fascinating that “progressives” like Mr. Shields think that the response to this is to “tax the rich to create jobs”.

Another “progressive” responded to the above:..

Business fears the future, so they hide under the bed where they clip coupons.

…and, when reminded of the need for prudence…

You remind me of the Vikings, who instead of playing to win, play not to lose. How’s that working out?

Which proves the old conservative adage that when it come to business, liberals are generals in the bedroom and whores on the battlefield.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus note that if the Obamessiah weren’t president, they’d be ‘marching on the White House’:

Unhappy members of the Congressional Black Caucus “probably would be marching on the White House” if Obama were not president, according to CBC Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.).

So…why not march?

I mean, all us crackers did it, right?

“If [former President] Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House,” Cleaver told “The Miami Herald” in comments published Sunday. “There is a less-volatile reaction in the CBC because nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president.”

In other words, the only reason not to march is…racism

There are those who say that political blogging is dead – replaced by Twitter.

To explore the issue, I present a Point/Counterpoint debate between myself and my evil twin brother Jed.

MITCH:  Is political blogging dead?  Who cares?  As long as I enjoy doing it, it’s alive!

JED: Solipsistic as always, Mitch.  The larger point is this; if all political communication is going to have to squeeze down to 140 characters (less links), then completing the de-evolution to Duckspeak is really just a formality.

The winner:  Both of us!

Michael Hansen was freed last month after six years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

And now the county attorney has finally dropped the charges, aborting the new trial that was called for last summer:

…Douglas County Attorney’s Office dropped all charges against him and said it “no longer believes that it can prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The exoneration came after a judge in July had vacated Hansen’s conviction and ordered a new trial based on evidence presented by the Innocence Project of Minnesota, saying that there was evidence that the Ramsey County medical examiner might have given “false or incorrect” testimony at the first trial. He was released from prison in August.

The death of Hansen’s daughter was a tragedy.   His conviction and imprisonment were partly the result of a bureaucrat’s botch…

In a review whose results were issued early this month, Ramsey County said [Ramco medical examiner Michael] McGee complied with all state laws and with his contract with the county.

…(in other words, “the dog ate his homework, but the rules say there’s nothing you can do about it), and the assumption that the father had to be guilty.

McGee couldn’t be reached for comment Sunday.

Erika Applebaum, executive director of the Innocence Project of Minnesota, said that if anything can be learned from Hansen’s experience, it’s that juries should not blindly accept all expert testimony.

Naturally, The System doesn’t like mere peasants getting uppity and questioning their “experts”; they’ve been bellyaching about juries asking too many questions – the “CSI Effect” – and in some places is taking action to stymie those exact questions.

It’s not the only question being raised about the work of McGee, the Ramco medical examiner whose testimony put Hansen away  Without casting specific aspersions on the work of McGee specifically – there will be plenty of litigation that’ll address those questions – perhaps the real answer is to have prosecutors and “experts” that flagrantly bugger justice start serving some of the time they rip from the lives of the innocent.

Sometimes, in order to try to understand those with whom you disagree, you have to try to put yourselves in their mind; to try to think like they do.

We’ll come back to that.

Last week, I saw that Spotty from Cucking Stool wrote what seemed to be yet another take on the left’s most threadbare post-Tea-Party meme; in this case, it was…:

Tea Party brigade struggles to put out BWCA fire

I assumed it was yet another tilt at the “If you don’t support all government, you oppose all government” meme.  Hardly worth a read, in and of itself; if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it all you need to.

It started out with a clip from a Strib piece about the rigors of firefighting in the Boundary Waters

Plywood walls were plastered with maps showing the growing footprint of the wildfire that’s raging across Minnesota wilderness of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Dozens of officials summoned to help subdue the blaze that has consumed more than 100,000 acres of forest…

Read the Strib piece for more.

“Spot” picks up…

…I was about to say “the narrative”, but that’s not quite right.  A narrative, certainly.  One of a choice of narratives?  I dunno.  Anyway:

The quote and the picture are real enough and from the Strib, but the headline — obviously — is fictional.

And utterly misleading, since the article relates not at all to the Tea Party, to budgets, to…well, anything but the rigors of firefighting.

There is, in fact, some controversy whether the Forest Service moved fast enough after the fire was started by lightning and whether logging should have occurred after the blow down in 1999…

Which is a fascinating subject, perhaps – I’ve written about it here – but, Spot informs us, it’s really not why we’re here.  Not at all:

Which brings me to the real point of the story. Walter Hudson, the spittle-flecked chair of the North Star Tea Party Patriots,

I’ve met Walter Hudson many times.  He’s been to several MOB parties.  He’s actually a pretty soft-spoken, measured kinda guy.

So why would “Spot” call him “Spittle-flecked?”  Let’s think like our opponent…

Racism is the only reason.

Well, no. It’s not.  Let’s go back to the top of the piece; let’s try to think like our opponent to understand him.

Why would one completely mangle the context of an op-ed to take a roundabout, groaningly false whack at the character of someone disagrees with?  Let’s try to put ourselves in the mind of…whatever our pseudonymous, utterly unknown writer is…

Nope.  I still got nothing.

Maybe some clue will come to us as we continue through the piece:

[Hudson is] speaking to the adoption of a supermajority requirement to raise taxes in Minnesota, but here’s what Walter thinks of social goods:

Government ought not “function” to any whimsical end. Government should function only when its aim is proper, only when it protects individual rights.

You can read how Walter concludes that a simple majority vote is whimsical; I’m not going to try to explain it.

Having read both Hudson’s actual piece – which concludes “Government’s mandate is not to “function” at any cost. Impasse, gridlock and shutdowns are not inherent evils” – and tells the DFL and its supporters that there is much more to “majority rule” than browbeating the minority into submission, and says not one thing about government’s essential services, like protecting lives and property – firefighting, a subject even Ron Paul agrees is a legitimate government service – I don’t honestly think Spot could explain it any better than he explains Minnesota’s self-defense law.

But maybe there’s some hidden flash of insight in his conclusion:

What is whimsical is the fact that Walter heads a group with the word “patriot” in it. Patriots love their country. Walter’s patriotism extends no further than the tip of his nose, or his stomach, whichever sticks out farther.

So “Spot’s” whole piece is…a laborious personal insult?  Whose underlying “point” seems to be that “patriotism” is not only keeping government’s every whim funded, but funded without the need for real consensus?

I’m open to further suggestions.  I’m rhetorically tapped.

This whole “understand what your opponent is thinking” bit is a lot harder than I thought.

To:  Walgreens
From: Mitch Berg, Former Customer
Re: So Long, And Thanks For All The Drugs

To Whom It May Concern,

I’ve been a Walgreen’s customer for years now.

No more.

Recently, one of your pharmacists in Michigan opted not to be a victim of violent crime when two armed men charged him at 4:30AM.

Your pharmacist, Mr. Hoven, responded correctly:

Drawing his own gun, Hoven fired at the attackers and drove them off, saving not just himself but two Walgreens co-workers as well as the pharmacy’s valuable prescription drugs.

By way of saying thanks, Walgreens fired him.

Hoven, in an interview with the Benton Township Herald-Palladium, said he had acted out of fear. “The adrenaline was taking over,” he said. “You could have probably taken my pulse from my breath, because my heart was beating that much.” Only 42 seconds elapsed, start to finish.

However, Walgreens, your store has a “no weapons” policy – which says, in effect, that your superstition about gun owners is more important to you than your employees’ lives.

While I respect the rights of employers to set conditions on employment, this is an unreasonable requirement for a law-abiding, legally-permitted citizen.  Legally-armed, law-abiding Americas are better Americans, better citizens, better employees and better risks, at large, than the unarmed ones (and especially the illegally-armed ones).

At any rate, until Mr. Hoven is re-hired, and restitution paid for his firing (last May), I will never spend another dime at Walgreens, and I’m going to convince as many people as I can to follow suit.

That is all.

Mitch Berg

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism!

• Ed and I – The Headliners – will be on from 1-3PM Central.
• Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – will be up tomorrow, from 6-7PM!
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  Join him from 9-11!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six 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
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(Title courtesy Wallo)

Run a conservative African-American – Alan West or Condi Rice or Thomas Sowell, for all I care – against a white, nay Scandanavian, liberal.

Who do you think I’ll vote for?

Does it make me an anti-white “racist?”

…that they are tired of politicians who “act like politicians” – who calculate everything they say to a fine, calibrated sheen, in order not to lose a single vote.

And then you encounter the exceptions – and you realize why so many politicians do measure what they say so very very carefully.

Paul Wellstone was one of them; he pretty much shot from the hip and said whatever his heart put on his sleeve.  He was, of course, so thoroughly in tune with the the Minnesota mainstream media’s “Wish I coulda been at Woodstock” id that it never really cost him.

And then there’s Michele Bachmann.  A woman who proves the old saying “when a lefty calls you “crazy”, it’s their way of saying “you’re smarter than me” [*], she’s also the exact opposite of a Tim Pawlenty or a Norm Coleman; as I discussed almost three years back, if Coleman and Pawlenty are like political engineers, calculating out all their angles so that they don’t spring any rhetorical gusset plates and get dumped in the political river, then Michele Bachmann is like a jazz saxophonist, improvising, sometimes without a net.  When it works, it works, like Dizzy Gillespie improvising around a theme.  And when it doesn’t?  Gillespie used to repeat sour notes a few times, to make it seem intentional; in jazz, it works.  In politics?

Enh.

At the last Republican debate, Bachmann mentioned some unfortunate claimed outcomes from Governor Perry’s HPV vaccination campaign.

A couple of medical ethicists picked up on that statement, and theatrically demanded the details.

Mr. D from Mr. Dilettante’s Neighborhood found some irony in that:

I would assume that [the ethicists] both understand that releasing medical records is a dicey proposition, given the strictures involved. And it’s hardly surprising that the news media aren’t mentioning that these two ethicists are asking for a course of action that would be considered unethical. Would the parent of a child really consent to havving their child’s medical history splashed across the airwaves and the internet? Would you?

Not sure I’d want it mentioned in a speech, either, but there are different levels of intrusiveness involved here – some of them with legal implications.

But Mr. D. seems to have had that same feeling I got, too:

Having said that, Bachmann is wrong, wrong, wrong about vaccinations. The anti-vaccination folks are playing a dangerous game and Bachmann was exceptionally foolish to play along in the hopes of gaining a temporary political advantage over her rival, Rick Perry. Whether Perry’s approach to the matter was wise or not is tangential to the larger point, which is that vaccinations have greatly improved public health and saved the lives of millions of people.

To be fair, I don’t think Bachmann was playing to the “anti-vaccination” people so much as the “I’ll see to own kids’ vaccinations without any of your executive-ordering, thank yoiu very much” crowd.

Not that the left or media (pardon the redundancy) will help distinguish the two.

[*] OK, it’s not an “old saying”.  I made it up.  But I don’t think it’s especially inaccurate.

RedSquirrel, writing at the Red Squirrel Report blog, relates what he apparently posted at Stasi.gov.us “AttackWatch.com”.

It’s your informant, ‘Joe’, again. I feel that it’s my duty to blow the whistle on the gang of right-wing miscreants and troublemakers known as The MOB (The Minnesota Organization of Bloggers). I have been working undercover inside that organization, and think that I have their trust.

Two of the MOB bosses, Ed Morrissey and that reprehensible rapscallion, Mitch Berg host The NARN (Northern Alliance Radio Network) on 1280 AM The Patriot. They slander and smear The Messiah regularly, using the public airwaves. I have been monitoring their program for about seven years. Morrissey regularly writes hit pieces for that….that queen of right-wing slime, Michelle Malkin.

A brief point of order;  nobody should feel they’ve “earned the trust” of Ed and I.  We are endlessly devious.  It’s why, for example, we engineered the results of this week’s “Most Valuable Blogger” contest at WCCO – to do for that august competition what Algore, Yassir Arafat and Obama himself did for the “Nobel Peace Prize”. 

But yes – it is a fact we are attacking President Obama, where “attacking” means “exercising our First Amendment rights to dissent while we’re still allowed to”.

Scary!

Sergeant Dakota Meyer is the first living Marine to earn the Medal of Honor in the war on terror:.

In the course of six hours [after an ambush in Afghanistan in September of 2009], survivors said, Corporal Meyer and his driver, Staff Sgt. Juan J. Rodriguez-Chavez, led five fights into the ravine toward Ganjigal. Four times they helped recover wounded men, first Afghans who were pinned down and later Americans similarly trapped.

After the corporal freed Captain Swenson, the captain joined him in the fighting while an Army platoon nearby declined to help. On the last trip they recovered the remains of three Marines and a Navy corpsman. By then, according to the Marine Corps’ account of the fight, Corporal Meyer had killed eight Taliban fighters and stood up to several dozen more. (A fifth American later died of wounds suffered in the ravine.)

“Dakota later confessed,” the president said, of the fighting in Ganjigal, “I didn’t think I was going to die. I knew I was.”

The key criterion for the Medal of Honor is heroism “above and beyond the call of duty”.  That’s a phrase the world of business – and Hollywood, naturally – have devalued to the point of meaninglessness – for civilians, anyway.

It means doing things that are far, far beyond what one is ordered, or reasonably expected, to do.

The sort of thing that makes a sergeant deserve salutes from four star generals.

For almost thirty years, the stories have been floating about among music fans; Steven “Miami Steve” Van Zandt – perhaps best known today as “Silvio Dante” – supposedly spent the “video” budget for his debut album on an abortive feature-length movie.

He did this when he was riding about as high as a sideman rides; coming off a couple of legendary tours (Darkness and The River) as one of Springsteen’s onstage foils, he left the E Streeet Band to go out on his own. He started a “band” of sorts – a collection of all-stars and unkowns he called “Little Steven And The Disciples Of Soul”.  And he recorded – mostly live, around a couple of mikes in one big room – a debut album, Men Without Women, which earned about every critical plaudit that mattered, and still is one of my three favorite albums of the rock and roll era.

Buit I have never seen the movie.  Even my old drummer, as enthusiastic a bootlegger as I’ve ever met, had never seen it.

And even though Youtube’s been on the air for years and years, only the tiniest bits of the video – a terrible transfer of the single, “Forever” – made it onto YouTube…

…until very, very recently.

Someone finally hit the jackpot.  They clipped out the segment for the song “Save Me”, which on any given day may be my favorite single song of the rock and roll era, and yes, that means up there with “Racing In The Street”, “The Card Cheat”, “Freedom Park” and “Have A Good Time But Get Out Alive”.

Ignore the pointless two-minute ramp, and the atrocious technical quality and, for that matter, the atrocious idea of basing a feature film around an album (which, as Van Zandt notes with a rueful chuckle these days, never actually had a script, and it shows); the song starts around 1:45 or so:

The thirtieth anniversary of the album is coming up in a few months.  More when we get there.

People remember all the wrong music from the eighties.

Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:

From yesterday’s paper.

Click to see full-size image

Does it seem as if the Left is a little desperate to find something, anything, good to say about the President?

The ones that aren’t giving up on him completely.

The part about the GOP victory in NY09 on Tuesday that the mainstream media are carefully skirting – many  more socially-conservative Jews oppose gay marriage:.

Voters interviewed Wednesday pointed to their opposition to same-sex marriage and Turner’s pro-Israel politics as factors that swayed them to pick a Republican. It was the first time in nearly a century that the GOP has won the Ninth Congressional District, which includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

Research and polling on gay marriage at the polls varies widely – some say voters oppose it, others differ – everyplace but one; the actual polls.

So far, anyway.

As we saw with the Sally Jo Sorenson bit over at Bluestem, apparently lefties have a hard time distinguishing between different levels of authority.

Sorenson confused “students” with “emplioyees”, “monks” and “inmates” in her piece.

And “Alex” at Minnesota Progressive Project (MPP) seems to conflate “free speech” with “seizing control”

The headlines write themselves.

At MPP, it might be better if they did.  But I digress.

The Mn GOP, led by Pat Garofalo (R, Big State Government), don’t want any more funding increases for local schools. The what is easy. We need to dig deeper, and ask why. Interfering with local school boards is the epitome of the heavy hand of state government sticking its nose in where it doesn’t belong.

“Alec” is responding to the gangs of Republican commandos that have been bursting in to local school board meetings and holding them at gunpoint threatening to kill everyone unless they abandon their special levy drives.  Tony Sutton and Michael Brodkorb, festooned with bandoliers and carrying Dirty Harry revolvers, sneer and cackle like Snidely Whiplash as they demand the school boards lower their budgets or else…

…well no.  Of course not.  The GOP is doing what political parties – and unions, and PACs, and 527s, and groups of people, and individuals with blogs or standing on soapboxes on the street, for that matter – do; telling voters what the truth is (most of the schools boards got more from the state), and asking local property owners if they really  need another tax increase.

Have Minnesota Republicans given up on small, local government?

Well, no, “Alex”; we’re merely participating in it.

Democrats seem to find that threatening.

A lot.

Govenor Dayton, by all accounts, is considering issuing an adminstrative fiat that would unionize daycares.

Senator Roger Chamberlain writes:

As many of you know the governor is considering signing an executive order to unilaterally unionize thousands of private sector employees.

It is unwarranted and unnecessary. It will increase costs and kill jobs.

If you do not want this to happen, give him a call; encourage others who use daycare services or run a day care to do the same.

Here’s the Governor’s contact information.

If there’s one thing the budget impasse showed us, it’s that the Governor can take a hint, if it’s big and broad and unmistakeable enough.

Over at True North, Tom Steward covers the issue.