I Said Roadrunner Once, Roadrunner Twice

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

  • Ed and I will be doing the “Headliners” show from 1-3PM Central. We’ll be talking the Iraq pullout, and interviewing Cynthia Schanno, who’s running against Dave Thune in Ward 2 for the Saint Paul City Council. And we may have a special surprise guest…
  • 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:

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Join us!

(Title courtesy Wallo)

Behold The New States Rights Standard-Bearer

I’ve got a bit of a dilemma here.

In trying to address the claims made in h this piece from Ian Millhiser in “Think” “Progress”, on a federal-level proposal for national reciprocity for carry permits, I faced a gnarly dilemma:  do I do a piece on “Think” “Progress”‘s efforts to cull selectively through facts to try to trash a conservative initiative, or do I do a piece on the congenital liberal inability to think through an argument logically?

The answer, unfortunately, is “both”.  Why choose?

The “National Right-To-Carry Reciprocity Act” has broad support in both chambers of Congress; Right-to-carry has been an untrammelled success throughout the United State for the past thirty years, with immense, intense support on both sides of the aisle at the federal and state level.

If the bill becomes law, it would allow nearly anyone to shop around for the one state that is willing to issue them a license to carry a concealed firearm, and then force other states to honor that license.

I’m not sure if Millhiser has really thought this through.  For example, they indulge the “progressive” conceit of looking in mock horror at the “red” state gun laws…:

Many states’ licensing rules for concealed carry are shockingly lax. Florida, for example, issued 1,700 concealed carry permits to people with “criminal histories, arrest warrants, domestic violence injunctions and misdemeanor convictions for gun-related crimes.”

…while, leaving aside for a moment the fact that the Florida story is a bit of bogus scare-mongering – the issues cited didn’t involve convictions, or “gun-related” misdemeanors serious enough to warrant denying their permit applications – it shows both “Think” “Progress”‘s myopia and ignorance of facts; carry permit holders’ crime records in “lax” states like Florida [1] are statistically no less impeccable than those in “strict” states like New York or, for that matter, states requiring no permit from the law-abiding, like Alaska, Arizona and Vermont.

Because Illinois is the only state that does not have a concealed carry law, the NRA’s bill would render out-of-state visitors immune to every state but Illinois’ licensing laws — so long as they obtained a license from a state that practically gives them away.

Right.  Because goodness knows if that happens, Illinois might get overwhelmed with gun violence or something.

OK,. back to my dilemma.  We established above that “Think” “Progress” is, like most (but by no means all) liberals, clueless about the reality of guns rights. Now, it’s on to the whole “couldn’t do logic in the throes of a full-bore Vulcan Mind Meld” bit.

Because Millhiser wants to throw out fifty years of “progressive” social policy!

Yet… forcing New York to honor Florida’s poorly vetted carry licenses…flies directly in the face of the right’s professed views on the 10th Amendment’s guarantee of states rights. The NRA’s bill is a direct attack on each state’s ability to determine on its own how best to protect the public’s safety.

Ultimately, however, this kind of fair weather tentherism is nothing new. Conservatives hate federal regulation of health care, until they want to invalidate state tort law or immunize the insurance industry from state consumer protection law.

There is a difference – legally and, if you care about America’s history and liberties no matter what your political stripe, morally – between “human rights”, especially those enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and the niggling impedimenta of government policy and regulation on  issues that are, let’s just say, a tad less exalted in this nation’s legal canon.

This country decided – with the 13th Amendment and, also, the blood of 600,000 dead Americans – that the Bill of Rights’s exaltation of inalienable human rights trumps the states and, for that matter, The People.  The Supreme Court, and generations of decisions pushed by generations of lawyers pushed for everyone from Dred Scott to the ACLU, has established that the states do not trump human rights.

Like the right to free speech and the press.  Or freedom of (and, apparently, from) religion.  And assembly.  And unreasonable (whatever that means under the prevailing legal winds) search and seizures.  And, now that Heller has been incorporated by McDonald, the right to keep and bear arms.

Health care?  It’s not a constitutional right.  It’s an entitlement; we can argue over whether it’s something that should be dealt with at the federal level, or that of any government, and indeed we have been arguing about it for the past two years, and I have a hunch we’ll renew it in 2013.  And while “progressives” have used FDR’s courts’ bogus interpretations of the Commerce Clause to federalize a lot of things, there is no rational way you can say Health Care exists on the same plane as Speech and Jury Trials.

Most conservatives and libertarians recognize this distinction; we are more or less absolute (with prudent exceptions) on issues of human rights, and reserving lesser issues to the states. Most “progressives” blur it, but at least recognize (and push!) federal supremacy on civil liberties issues, as they constantly remind you.

…provided they’re not scary, like commoners with guns.

So Mr. Millhiser is mistaken when he writes…:

In other words, the right’s lockstep embrace of the NRA’s concealed carry bill is just one more example of conservatives’ willingness to claim that the Constitution means whatever they want it to mean.

…because, indeed, it’s Mr. Millhiser, not conservatives, with the case of moral confusion.  Are human rights a federal issue, or not?

My stance is clear.  Mr. Millhiser seems to want it both ways.

UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION:  Why yes, my stance is in fact consistent.  I believe that specifics of gun laws should be a state issue, provided that they are consistent with the idea that the right to keep and bear arms is a right “of the people”.  Most state qualify, although I personally campaign for more “liberalization”.  Illinois’ law does not qualify.

Why We Need Better Self-Defense Laws. Maybe.

shooting  by reported carry-permit holder in South Minneapolis may just illustrate the problems facing the law-abiding citizen.

We’ come back to that.  First, the reported details:

A man was fatally shot Thursday night in south Minneapolis in what may have been a case of self-defense by another man who interrupted a robbery, police said.

Just before 10 p.m., police got a 911 report that someone had been shot in a parking area behind the Super Grand Buffet restaurant about a block west of Cub Foods near the intersection of Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenues, according to police spokesman Sgt. William Palmer.

Among all the shootings that have plagued that neighborhood – which is, by the way, my old neighborhood – over the decades, this one is distinguished by one factor:

When police arrived, a man with a gun who said he had a valid concealed-weapon permit told them he had interrupted the robbery of a woman in her 60s. The man said that he chased the robbers, a male and a female, exchanged fire and killed the male robber.

And if you’re a normal person with a living soul (and, of course, all the facts check out), that’s all it takes; guy interrupts two pieces of vermin not just robbing but (according to some media reports) pistol-whipping an older woman; and gives chase. Robber turns to shoot the good samaritan; samaritan shoots first.

But the Hennepin County Attorney’s office aren’t people – they’re prosecutors.  People who not only focus on the letter of the law, but the letters of the law that their bosses want empasized; they work for an office whose tacit purpose, run as it is by a DFL elected official, is to enforce DFL social policy, which is that only urban thugs and the police should have guns, and that we, the law-abiding, should be disarmed and docile.

Police took both the alleged female robber and shooter into custody while they investigate his account of the shooting. Two guns — one from the slain man, one from the shooter — were recovered, Palmer said.

On the one hand – especially if you’re a resident of a long-blighted neighborhood, or have ever had a grandmother – you can sympathize with the guy chasing the scumbags down. You might even root for the guy – I sure would.

But there are two problems here:

Self Defense Law Starts Our Shooter Out With Two Strikes – The problem with self-defense is that it is an “affirmative defense” – you’re saying “Yes, I killed the guy, but I have an excuse”.  In other words, you essentially plead guilty to murder, and spend the trial process fighting that admitted guilt by proving four things:

  • You had reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm. No problem in this case (as reported): scumbag, who had just pistol-whipped a defenseless woman, points a gun at the samaritan.  It’s reasonable.
  • Lethal force was justified under the circumstances – Hello?  It’s a gun.  Two down.
  • You weren’t a willing participant in the incident – This is intended to prevent people from claiming self-defense after, say, bar fights.  This wasn’t (reportedly) a bar fight.  Any rational person gets this.  But some pencil-necked dweeb with big political ambitions who is trying to parlay a U of M Law degree into a political career, sitting in a nice warm office with metal detectors and cops protecting him, can decide “the letter of the law is you can not be involved in the scuffle first”, forcing the samaritan to spend his life’s savings defending himself at trial.
  • You made reasonable efforts to avoid using lethal force – And that same pencil-necked lawyer can say “he made NO effort to avoid shooting the alleged robber!  He chased the poor disadvantaged fellow!”.

This – if all the facts are as reported, as I am assuming they are – is why we need more reforms to Minnesota’s self-defense laws like those proposed in the past several sessions by Tony Cornish.  A key reform would be to do what many states do, with great success; give self-defense the presumption of innocence until proven guilty; make the Assistant County Attorney prove the self-defense shooter didn’t meet the criteria of a self-defense shooting.

“But that’ll make it easy for people to shoot each other over fender-benders!  Or because someone thinks they got the stink-eye!”  Nope.  Think of every non-justified shooting – like, second-degree murder – that you can remember.  Find one that that meets the four critera above.  Good luck with that.

I’m going to hope that saner heads prevail in this case.  Of course, the Henco Attorney’s office has a long record of not having many of them, when it comes to the law-abiding citizen’s right to self-defense.


Where No Problem Exists

Governor Dayton – a wholly-owned subsidiary of the SEIU, AFSME and the MFT – has formally pulled back on his push to unionize in-home daycares.

That’s “formally”.  Dayton The unions that own Dayton want those 11,000 monthly dues workers.

The Strib publishes an op-ed by a couple of daycare providers who are fluffing for the Union:

To us as family child-care providers, the care and education of Minnesota’s children isn’t just a business opportunity. It is a vocation. We provide a supportive and loving environment for the children we serve, allowing parents to go to work without worry.

Right.  That’s what we pay y’all for.  And pay and pay and pay, as I remember from my kids’ earlier childhood.  I’m told it’s worse today.

When state government shut down last summer, many of us were forced to decide whether to stay open without receiving Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) payments or temporarily close our doors. A lot of us stayed open so that parents could keep working.

We needed to make a case to the state of Minnesota that CCAP funding was vital and necessary for all who received it. We needed a strong voice at the State Capitol. We joined together to ensure that the needs of children and their working parents were heard.

You joined together – as citizens frequently do.  It’s a First Amendment right, in fact.

We’ll come back to that.

More recently, we read the Oct. 3 commentary “Too many questions on day care union.” The authors, state Sens. David Hann and Mike Parry seemed puzzled by the question “what is the problem we’re trying to solve?”

Well, to be honest, Senators, one of the most important problems we face is the fact that many at the Capitol aren’t aware that there is a problem.

And after reading this op-ed, I’m still pretty convinced that the only “problem” this solves is “plummeting union membership”.

In forming a union, we seek to have a stronger voice as we advocate for one another and for the families we serve. We would have the opportunity to share our concerns more effectively as an industry.

Well, thanks, but no.  I am not aware that parents – your customers, not your management, by the way – are paying you for “advocacy” or for “sharing as an industry”.  They – we – want our kids taken care of, at a reasonable price.  We can “advocate” for our kids just fine.

We could ensure that the state, as a partner with us, is fully aware of the challenges we face as we continue to improve and standardize how we care for Minnesota’s kids.

And there’s another problem; I don’t want the state as a “partner” in caring for my kids (if I had any in daycare); I want them tucked safely away in the background.

And if you are talking about advocacy in dealing with the various state daycare support programs that providers depend on when working with low-income families?  Then form a group that, unlike the unions, isn’t a de-facto wing of state government itself!

Attention, Occupy Wall Street / Minnesota

Obama still gets more money from Wall Street than all GOP candidates put together:

Despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data.

Obama’s key advantage over the GOP field is the ability to collect bigger checks because he raises money for both his own campaign committee and for the Democratic National Committee, which will aid in his reelection effort.

As a result, Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data. The numbers show that Obama retains a persistent reservoir of support among Democratic financiers who have backed him since he was an underdog presidential candidate four years ago.

So – will “Occupy Wall Street” move its masses (I slay me) to DC?  Or are they really just a Potemkin protest run by the Democrats?

As Long As We’ve Got Our Priorities Straight

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Bridges deficient. Millions needed for repairs. No money in budget because . . .

. . . the money was diverted to light rail.

Priorities, people. Focus on priorities.

Speaking of which, I wonder if they ever got that little problem with the Washington Avenue Bridge – as in, “is it and its old-fashioned truss construction, not too different from the old 35W Bridge, strong enough to handle trains zipping over it” – resolved?

Luca Brasi Speaks

I haven’t written a lot about the Vikings stadium controversy.  Partly it’s because I have little to say other than “build what you want, but don’t use any taxpayer money”. Partly it’s because I’m too busy saying “Go Bears”.

And partly because Mr. Dilettante has it covered.

His series on the ongoing Arden Hills shakedown – up to seventeen parts and counting – touched on the visit to Minnesota by the NFL brass who, in an example of the worst optics I’ve seen in this sort of a situatiion since the CEOs of GM and Chrysler flew to Washington in corporate jets to talk with Congress, pulled up to the site of the shakedown talks in a limo.

And he commented on the remarks by the NFL’s spokesman, former Goldman-Sachs employee Roger Grubman:

And in case you were thinking that the Los Angeles option isn’t real, Grubman offered this bon mot:

“To me, if I were a Minnesotan, any alternative other than Minnesota would be equally as bad,” he said.

Got the message? That Grubman is crazy, man. You don’t know what he’ll do. He’ll move the team to Wichita if that’s what it takes. He’s nuts and he’s serious. He’ll take your team away in the blink of a gimlet eye. You better pony up, rubes valued citizens of Minnesota.

So the question is out there. Do we build Zygi World in Arden Hills on the old ammo dump site? Or does the NFL drop the bomb? As much as we’ve all tried to pretend otherwise, I suspect we all knew this moment was coming. The NFL and the Wilfs are going to give Minnesota one chance to answer.

Of course, Jacksonville has worse financials and is a market that, unlike Minnesota, has almost no NFL tradition and doesn’t have a fifty-year record of selling out games even during turkey seasons like this one.  Rationally, they are a much better candidate to move to LA.

But the NFL, and our DFL governor, don’t want you to think rationally about this. They want you bouncing between hazy purple and gold nostalgia on the one hand, and Grubman’s little leash-yank on the other.

Read Mr. D’s whole series.

An Interview With Every Pseudonymous “Progressive” Alt-Media Figure

I sat down with every pseudonymous “progressive” alt-media figure at a local watering hole the other day.  Here’s the transcript.

ME: So why do you all write pseudonymously?

THEM: Because we want to be able to write things under the cover of anonymity for which the consequences of using our own identities would be anything from bothersome to legally dodgy.

ME: Thanks.

OK, it was a short interview.

But they stuck me with the tab.  None of them would sign the receipt.

Congratulations Are In Order

The DFL retains two absurdly-safe Senate seats in special elections last night:

In Brooklyn Center, registered nurse Chris Eaton won the seat formerly held by DFL Sen. Linda Scheid, who passed away this summer after a six-year battle with cancer. Rep. Jeff Hayden, an incumbent legislator who represents south Minneapolis, will take the Senate seat of DFL Sen. Linda Berglin.

Hayden and Eaton will now enjoy a one-to-four-year vacation, as they join Tom Bakk’s do-nothing Senate DFL caucus.

Grand Jury In Crow Wing County: Day One

Yesterday, Crow Wing County (CWC) Attorney Don Ryan held the first day of his grand jury deliberations.  While the CWC Attorney’s offices don’t release details of grand jury probes, virtually everyone involved in last year’s Crow Wing County voting irregularities case – over a dozen people – have been subpoenaed.

What happened?

We don’t know – grand jury proceedings aren’t public.  The panel is scheduled to meet through tomorrow.

However, this is going to be a doozy of a story on Thursday, or whenever the grand jury releases its indictments.  Or doesn’t.  Either way.

Occupy Your Wallet

Remember back in 2009?  When the Tea Party rally came to Saint Paul, did its business, set about the task of changing Minnesota and the US, and paid their own bills – which, naturally, launched a round of conspiracy theories as to who paid for the materials and porta-potties and so forth?

Well, “Occupy MN” certainly hopes you don’t.  The weeks-long excellent adventure for college “progressives” and superannuated hippies has cost you, the over-taxed Minneapolis and Henco taxpayer (and let’s be honest, probably the rest of us too)  a quarter of a million dollars

The cost of Occupy Minnesota protests is starting to add up for Minneapolis police. Tuesday afternoon, Sgt. William Palmer says the total cost to the Minneapolis Police Department is closing in $100,000.

Palmer says the city has had to pay $43,500 for approximately 726 hours of overtime. “While the MPD has worked proactively to reduce overtime this year, these hours were unavoidable,” said a statement from Minneapolis police.

Additionally, Minneapolis police say approximately 1,245 hours have been spent in the planning and support of the protest prior to the overtime. The cost for this time is approximately $56,000, according to numbers released by Minneapolis Police Department.

Minneapolis is broke, remember?

And Henco is on the hook too:

These costs are only for the Minneapolis Police Department.

Hennepin County officials said Tuesday their costs for supervision and management is $152,295.

Let’s start chanting.

“They Are The One-Hundredth Of A Percent Of The 99%!”

Met Council: “Promises Are For Peasants”

You’re hearing a lot of “right on time” happy-talk from the Met Council on the Central Corridor’s building schedule.

And it is a fact that the project seems to be on time in terms of getting track laid.

But carrying off a major rail construction project in the middle of a busy (work with me here) city is like creating and then raising a baby to adulthood; getting laid is the easy part; it’s the details afterward that’ll kill you.

And so it seems to be with the Central Corridor, according to an excellent piece in the PiPress from Frederick Melo earlier this week:

The front of Jack McCann’s University Avenue office buildings east of Raymond Avenue has been torn up since April. That’s when Central Corridor light-rail line work crews dug up his yard to get at water lines.

McCann said it was understood the crews would return to repair the broken sprinkler pipes now sticking out of the ground. But they haven’t.

“They didn’t come back and restore it,” McCann said. “It’s shoddy work.”

Instead, work crews installing the new transit line are focusing on meeting a Metropolitan Council deadline for reopening a three-mile stretch of University Avenue between Hamline Avenue in St. Paul and Emerald Street in Minneapolis.

By Nov. 30, they’re required to open two traffic lanes in each direction, or face penalties of $10,000 per day.

Will Walsh Construction reach the goal? Some business owners doubt they’ll get the four lanes open and complete related projects by that date.

And it’s looking more and more like if they meet it at all, they’ll meet the “letter of the law” – getting the streets more or less open – rather than tying up all the loose ends….

…which are killing business up and down University.

I’ll urge you to read the whole thing.

Grand Jury In Crow Wing County: Today

Today, Crow Wing County (CWC) Attorney Don Ryan is convening a Grand Jury.  As noted last week, county attorneys don’t customarily reveal the subject of a grand jury’s deliberation – but we do know that Monty Jensen and Al Stene, two principals in the case this blog wrote about last year in which it appeared that staffers from a home for vulnerable adults were filling out ballots for their charges.

The Grand Jury is going to be in session, officially, through Thursday.  We likely won’t hear much about the proceedings until they’re over.

I’ve run down the story’s chronology a few times, most recently last week.

I published this bit, last week – but it was buried in the middle of larger PDF file.  I thought I’d break this one out a bit.

It’s the list of people who took out absentee ballots last October 29 – the Friday before election day.

You can see Monty Jensen, who pops up at 4:31 on the list.

And you can see Jim Stene, at 4:18  – who was legally entitled to vote but, according to his father Al, had no interest in voting and no knowledge of how government works (even answering “Gerald Ford” when asked who the president was).

And you can see Daniel Carel (4:24) and Crieg Ruesken (4:21) who, as we showed last week, are under guardianship and unambiguously not allowed to vote under Minnesota law

The list shows that Stene, Carel and Ruesken all voted at the time that Jensen said he saw the group from the Clark Lake group home voting, and at which he alleged that he saw their ballots being filled out by staff.   This contradicts statements in the mainstream and alt-media that nobody from Clark Lake was in the building at the time Jensen claimed.

I’ll be bringing you the news from the Grand Jury as soon as I find out more.

Politically Correct

John Anderson at Youth for Western Civilization notes that the U of M Duluth is spending lots and lots of taxpayer money enforcing political correctness:

At the end of September, while engaged in public campus outreach at University of Minnesota-Duluth, a conservative activist handing out Constitutions was both threatened by a self proclaimed Black Panther and harassed by the Director of the Office of Cultural Diversity, Susana Pelayo-Woodward. The Black Panthers are, in the grand scheme of things, small timers who rely on intimidation by street activists but don’t have much of any real influence on society. Susana Pelayo-Woodward is another matter, an administrator with an entire bureaucracy behind her. The question is what are Minnesota taxpayers getting out of this?

The piece answers that – read the whole, infuriating thing.

Of course you’re paying for it:

Overall, the Office of Cultural Diversity at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, a branch campus of the University of Minnesota with less than 10,000 undergraduates, has a budget of $656,770 for this year. $32,572 of this amount is taken from students in the form of mandatory student fees they must pay on top of tuition costs, and nearly all of the rest comes from Minnesota taxpayers.

Ms. Pelayo-Woodward makes over six figures, with benefits…to do what?

For the most part, the Office of Cultural Diversity is an employment program for aging leftist activists without marketable job skills like Susana Pelayo-Woodward. Salaries and benefits for full time staff make up two thirds of the budget, and much of the rest is comprised of travel reimbursements for staff, salaries for student employees, and ‘professional services’ from leftists which are not employed full time. Only $1000 is spent on student assistance, an amount marginally higher than the phone bill of $775.

Read the whole thing.

Sparring

As Americans from coast to coast scratch their heads and wonder about US troops being deployed to Uganda, it’s a good time to remember when brinksmanship really took a nation to the brink.

It was 70 years ago today that the destroyer USS Kearny was torpedoed.

USS Kearny

In the wake of the Battle of Britain – mainly, with the strong indication that the United Kingdom would survive – Franklin D Roosevelt ordered the beginning of “Lend Lease” shipments to the British.  He also traded fifty World-War-1-era destroyers to the British in exchange for bases in the Azores and Canada.

Which was just diplomatic business, really; it meant the US was taking sides, to be sure, but it didn’t put any Americans into harms way.

Now, October of 1941 was pretty close to the nadir of the Battle of the Atlantic, as far as the UK was concerned.

Part of convoy in 1941, shot from a British cruiser.

German U-Boats were sinking British and allied merchant ships far faster than they could be replaced – and killing about half of the even harder-to-replace merchant marine crews with each ship that sank.  And beyond that, the supply of “escort” ships – the destroyers, frigates, corvettes and sloops that tried to protect the merchant ships from the submarines’ depredations – was getting destroyed as well; Britain’s destroyer fleet had suffered grievous casualties at Dunkirk, in the Mediterranean, and defending Norway, as well as to the U-boats.  And the emergency building programs to replace them weren’t close to breaking even with the loss rate, much less making up for lost ground.

Churchill later confessed that of all the situations he faced during the war – Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Siege of  Malta, the titanic battles in the Western Desert – only the Battle of the Atlantic genuinely frightened him.  Britain was within a hair’s breath of being starved into submission.

So what did put Americans into harm’s way was FDR’s concord with Churchill that, to help the British focus their endangered fleets of escort ships until the huge wartime shipbuilding programs could take effect – hopefully before Britain was starved to the negotiating table – American ships would escort Britain-bound convoys into the mid-Atlantic, to a hand-off point where British and Canadian forces would take over.  Roosevelt made it known that US ships would attack any U-Boats that crossed their paths.

This act – escorting war materiel to a belligerent power, and threatening to take military action against any interference – abrogated, practically and legally, any claim America had to its “neutrality”.  Which didn’t stop Roosevelt from waging the propaganda war to claim neutrality; he called the escort efforts “Neutrality Patrols”.

It was while on “Neutrality Patrol” that the Kearny and three other American destroyers were sent on a very un-neutral mission.  A Britain-bound convoy was being overwhelmed by a U-boat “Wolf Pack”, taking terrible losses; the four American ships were sent to assist in the convoy’s defense.

Which is not what “neutral” powers are supposed to do.

And it was at about 4AM on the morning of October 17 that the German submarine U-568 fired a spread of torpedoes, one of which hit the Kearny in its forward boiler room.   It was later speculated that the commander mistook Kearny for a British destoyer.No matter – eleven US sailors were killed.

The Kearny, with the hole in its forward "fireroom".

There really were two stories here.

One would be reflected in the nation’s slow slide into war.  FDR had been setting the nation up for war for years; the National Guard and the nation’s industry had been mobilizing for over a year.  The “Neutrality Patrols” were essentially daring Hitler to hit first.  And he would; in two weeks’ time, another American destroyer, the USS Reuben James, would be sunk by another U-boat in another similar incident, this time with much greater loss of American life.  And the “Neutrality Patrols” would become, in all but name, combat missions.  In many ways, at least as regards the battle in the Atlantic Ocean, Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war was just this side of a formality.

One other story – not nearly as famous – would be reflected in the fact that “only” 11 American sailors died in the incident, and the Kearny survived, afloat, and was repaired to serve out the rest of the war (to be mothballed in 1946, and to be finally scrapped in the early seventies). It was the resolution of an engineering issue that had been roiling naval architects for a generation.

Kearmy, undergoing repair at the Boston Navy Yard

The Kearny, like all fast warships of the day, was steam-powered (gas turbine power was a generation in the future, and diesel engines don’t have nearly the power output per ton of power plant for ships this size).  Now, it’s more efficient to put the steam turbines (which drive the propellors) together near the rear of the ship, and the boilers together as close as possible near the boilers – more efficient in terms of space, engine efficiency, and cost.

But that also means that a bomb or shell or torpedo hit in the boiler room, or engine room, will knock out either all steam power or all engine power.  And so US naval architects started separating boilers and engines.  Now, destroyers are long, narrow ships – with a length to “beam” (width) ratio of 10:1 (your cruise ship may be more like 6:1) – so that meant half of the ships’ lengths were eaten up by a boiler room, an engine room (for the left propellor), and then another boiler room and the engine for the right prop.  It meant that a ship could – as the Kearny did – take a hit that would knock out one engine unit, but still allow it to steam to safety.  Now, a “destroyer meets torpedo” encounter usually ended with a sunken destroyer, and it usually did, throughout the war; life on destroyers was the second most dangerous one in the floating Navy, after submariners.  But this design redundancy made American destroyers, and the British and other foreign ships that copied it, able to survive damage that would have acrippled and sunk similar ships, and often did.

Beyond that, the Kearny incident first displayed what would become one of the US Navy’s great strengths during the war; damage control.  The US Navy stressed damage control in a way that no other navy did – allowing US Navy ships to survive damage that frequently did leave other nations’ ships crippled or sunk.

More on that later next year.

A Good Question In Dire Need Of An Answer

I’ve asked myself – when I’m not busy lampooning the demonstrations and their overkill media coverage – why are the Twin Cities media covering “Occupy Twin Cities” as lavishly as they are?

FInally, Jason DeRusha from WCCO asks the same question:

Reg Chapman and I were talking in the newsroom last night about how the coverage of the protest itself probably should stop fairly soon. Frankly, the fact that crowds haven’t really mushroomed tells us something about Minnesotans. Perhaps we’re not really the protesting type; perhaps this crowd of protestors doesn’t resonate with the middle class working people who are upset about Wall Street, mortgages, bank fees, etc [Ding ding ding – Ed]; perhaps it’s getting cold.

I think we oughtta run with the “Doesn’t Resonate” bit.

On the NARN show over the weekend, “Swiftee”, my old friend and conservative gadfly to the stars, made a great point when he called in; the Flea Party could have been a mass phenomenon, had it stuck with being for corporate perfidy what the Tea Party was to big government.  Let’s face it; the Tea Party’s roots are in revulsion at the government picking winners and losers and deciding which private enterprises are “too big to fail”.

The Flea Party blew it, of course; what could have been a outlet for a lot of legitimate outrage and concern on the part of Middle America either turned into a “progressive” platform or was never intended to be anything but.  And by “progressive”, I mean the worst side of “progressive”-ism; the groupthink, the chanting, the nods back to the miasma of the early seventies that still make a lot of Americans above the age of 45 queasy.

And from a newsman’s perspective – as I noted in my video from “People’s Plaza” on Saturday – there’s really no there there, if you leave either your barely-covered ideology or the news guy’s natural desire to be there with a camera when the molotov cocktails start flying and the hats and bats come out, or at least something qualifying as news happens. Which, it seems clear, isn’t likely to happen.

But the bigger issue is that the crowd is smallish, and there just isn’t news happening.

Face it – retreaded hippies and SEIU members and college activists chanting and making demands isn’t even dog bites man; it’s dog licks dog.

And in fact, that’s where I’m inspired by [a bit of viewer email he’d gotten]. Because we stop covering the protests or protestors doesn’t mean we stop covering the issue that motivated the original Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City.

What are the economic questions you want answered?

Question – and I’m not trying to be snarky, but I largely stopped watching most mainstream TV news years ago: what economic questions have you (WCCO and the larger media, not DeRusha personally, although the question is aimed at him) covered?

The role of the government intervention in creating the housing bubble?

The role of Obamacare and the administration’s mania for regulation in stalling hiring?

The real effect of three years of people chanting “tax the rich”, with a nudge and a wink and a “this is change you can believe in!” from sitting administrations in DC and Saint Paul, has had on entrepreneurship and expansion?

They’d all be great starts.

If you want that kind of coverage, you need to make your voice heard.

Well, there you go!

That, and tell Esme Murphy to stop painting the toenails of DFL politicians on the air.

The Spirit Of ’72

On the one hand, Barack Obama is throwing in his lot with a “mass movement” of professional protesters and  bobble-headed self-important “post”-adolescents…

Barack Obama, US president, offered more support for protesters against the global financial system after a weekend of demonstrations in cities around the world,

…more or less like George McGovern did.

On the other hand, he still wants as much of that Wall Street money as he can salvage:

but called on them not to “demonise” those who worked on Wall Street.

So perhaps they’re learning…

Aaron Come Lately

The Northern Alliance Radio Network was the first all-blogger talk show in the United States – heck, the whole world – when it went on the air in 2004.

Since then, there have been a few other blogger/activist focused radio shows; there was one in Boston back in 2005, and as I recall one, maybe in Colorado (not sure).

Of course, Jack Tomczak and Ben Kruse have been doing “The Late Debate” for a while now on a small chain of stations in the north ‘burbs and Saint Cloud; it’s an excellent show that you should check out.

The idea went badly off the beam a few years ago, when KTNF, the former Air America affiliate in the Twin Cities, started putting leftybloggers on their afternoon drive show, before discovering that none of them had anything interesting to say.

And now, perhaps, a much better plan; Aaron Brown, one of Minnesota’s better leftybloggers, debuts tonight on KAXE, a community station in northern Minnesota.

And from Brown’s description, it looks a little more like “The Northwoods Home Companion” than “Fast Eddie Schultz Lite”:

I knew things were getting serious when I hired the jug band. Have you ever hired a jug band? There’s a certain feeling after you do a thing like that – neither good nor bad, a sense that you have altered the universe in an unpredictable way. Da’ Elliott Brothers out of Duluth will bring three musicians and a couple dozen instruments.

We’ll have a company of actors – Pete Pellinen, Marty and Michelle Rice, Josh Anderson and Scott Hanson performing an original radio drama written by the up-and-coming writer Matt Nelson, a Hibbing native. There’ll be a couple of original sketches and a set of lumberjack stories by Matt’s dad Ed. And I wouldn’t be a showman if I didn’t promise some surprises and special guests.

I actually share Brown’s fascination with the great tradition of live radio (read the article); I’ve had the odd dream of doing something similar…

…but different.

Anyway, break a leg, Brown.

I’ve Gone 500 Miles, Got 500 To Go

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism live from the Midwest Leadership Conference!

  • Ed is back from assignment (I think), so we’ll be doing the “Headliners” show from 1-3PM Central. We’ll be talking 9-9-9, and interviewing Cynthia Schanno, who’s running against Dave Thune in Ward 2 for the Saint Paul City Council..
  • 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
  • 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).
  • Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
  • Podcasts are now available on the AM1280 page!  (Ed and I are #2 – Brad is #3).
  • And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

(Title courtesy Wallo)