Let’s be clear about this: I do appreciate the leftybloggers and lefty pundits in the Twin Cities that can have a civilized debate for more than one round without diving straight into the name-calling.  They are rare, but given the number of “progressives” in the Twin Cities, there are still plenty of them.

That’s not just smack-talk.  I grew up in a liberal household, I was a liberal til my early twenties, and my parents still are (although all three of us Berg kids did in fact see the light), so I have no interest in demonizing or pointlessly antagonizing liberals; I have to visit them over Christmas, for crying out loud.

Anyway, I get along with Jeff Rosenberg just fine.  He’s a good guy.  Wrong about most things, but then so’s my Mom, and we get along too.

Anyway, Jeff bit on that most classic bit of inter-party smack talk, “The Real American”:

According to Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign, I’m not a “Real American,” because I live in a city.

That one seems to bug a lot of libs.  Which, to be fair, is what it was intended to do.  It’s “smack talk”; sorta like saying “your momma’s so fat, they can’t even find the search party they sent down her butt crack to find the missing airplane”; it doesn’t really mean that anyone’s missing, or that any of that could fit between “your momma’s” buttcheeks, or even that any of us have met your mother.

It’s just supposed to get you too angry to think about your game.  It gets me – the smack-talker – into your head.  It puts me in control.

And it worked!

Now, it is a fact that America’s urban areas tend to vote Democrat.  And it is a further fact that Democrats, while often proclaiming the depth of their patriotism, also have a really hard time with the idea of American exceptionalism; patriotism in a red county may be chock full of God Bless America and the Troops and “Shining City On A Hill”, while in a Blue county it is frequently more a matter of “We’re a lot less unlike France than we used to be, and with 12 more years of Obama and Dayton, we’ll get even better“, and yes, I know I’m simplifying things, but work with me here.

So it is a logical deduction that an urban American is less likely to believe that America is anything special.

Rosenberg:

Apparently, Palin isn’t the only one who feels that way. Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Lori Gildea feels similarly: I’m also not a “Real Minnesotan.” At least, that’s what she told an audience in Brainerd:

Jeff quotes a City Pages piece:

“I’m so happy to be in real Minnesota,” Gildea said.

Okay, well, maybe Gildea was just coming down from an acid trip, and couldn’t tell if she’d actually been in the state of her birth. Let’s give her a chance to explain.

“Outside of the Twin Cities,” Gildea clarified.

Darn those SCOM justices and their smack talk!  Now, we’re going to have 50,000 leftybloggers’ undies in a bunch!

And Rosenberg must be wearing boxers, because the bunch is obviously painful:

Got that, everyone? The only “real” Minnesotans are the ones who live outside of the Twin Cities, the place where most Minnesotans live. That made me wonder: Just what percentage of Minnesotans are real?

Warning:  A Democrat is about to attempt to work with empirical, geographical and demographic data.  This could get ugly.

That’s why I’ve put together a handy chart to give you an idea of how it breaks down. The chart uses the smallest possible definition of the Twin Cities, the seven-county area.

Here’s Jeff’s chart, for starters:

And can we get all you good Lakeville and Maple Grove “Real Minnesotans” to sound off here?  That’s not the smallest possible definition of the Twin Cities.

That would be, er, the Twin Cities; 667,646 people according to the 2010 census, between Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

So an accurate chart looks a little more like this:

I wasn’t sure if the exurbs were real; Gildea hasn’t yet clarified how many acres of land you must own to be a real Minnesotan.

All right.  Time for a cleansing breath, everyone.

(Whooosh).

OK.  If you’re going to get all knotted up over other peoples’ smack-talk, then the game is no fun.

Still, speaking on behalf of all conservatives, I’ll work with y’all on this.  Tell your buddies in the SEIU, MAPE, AFSCME, the MFT and the Teamsters to stop calling themselves “labor”, or at least “workers”.  I’m not in a union (anymore), but I most definitely work.  Indeed, among “real workers” in the private sector, 91% of us “workers” apparently aren’t “workers” according to “labor”.

As long as you wanna be all literal and all which, I stress, I don’t.  Not really.

That is all.

It was thirty years ago today that Controversy by Prince was released.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

Rhythm and Blues – R’nB – music had been through several phases over the decades, intertwining with “white” pop music on and off (on in the fifties through the late sixties, off in the seventies).

And in about 1990 it went back to “off”, and stayed there.

But for a brief stretch of time – part of a decade, really – R’nB and rock and roll and white pop co-mingled in a dizzying melange of creativity.

And after about 1990, black and white music split again, never again to meet.

So for about five years in the eighties, black and white music intersected and overlapped again – rock, R’nB and everything in between…

…when “everything in between” included everything that was going on in the early eighties – twitchy synth-pop, the fragments of punk, the beginnings of rap, and of course classic rhythm and blues.

And Controversy covered it all.

It started with the title cut, a slinky funk rave-up:

As usual, Prince recorded almost all the instruments –  but the beginnings of the “Revolution”, one of the great funk bands and one of the great rock and roll bands, were starting to coalesce; Bobby Z Rivkin, Lisa Coleman, Brown Mark, Dez Dickerson and Matt Fink (on drums, keys, bass, guitar and keys, respectively) all turned up on Controversy.

And while the previous couple of Prince albums – Dirty Mind and Prince before that – had seen some experimenting, Prince was starting to cover a lot of stylistic turf.  It included his first shot at politics…

…the groaningly-simplistic gospel-via-synth-pop “Ronnie Talk To Russia”, to perhaps the greatest late-night slow-dance grind ever…

…”Do Me Baby”.

I’m covering Controversy party because it’s a great album – and mainly because it sets up the burst of untramelled creativity Prince launched in about a year that’d lead to one of the most amazing decades a single artist has ever had in the pop music era.

So stay tuned.

Flea Partiers in Boston spit on, curse, throw bottle at Coast Guardswoman:.

The Coast Guard in Boston confirmed that a woman in uniform was harassed and spat upon by Occupy Boston protesters.

The woman was walking to the train and said protesters spit on her twice, called her foul names and even threw a water bottle at her.

Just like the grandparents in the seventies.

Or maybe it was their parents.

Heck, maybe it’s them.

In this week’s coverage of the Crow Wing County voter fraud allegations, I reported that Crow Wing County (CWC) Attorney Don Ryan is empaneling a grand jury this coming Tuesday – and while Ryan hasn’t announced the subject, he’s subpoenaed Monty Jensen, who has brought allegations that Clark Lake Group Homes staff bussed mentally handicapped residents to the CWC Court House and filled out their ballots for them.

I have also learned that Al Stene – the father of Jim Stene, a 15-year resident of Clark Lake Group Home – has also been subpoenaed.   The Stenes spoke at the CWC Commission last spring in an emotional testimony that showed Jim Steme – who suffered heartbreaking brain damage in a near-drowning accident as he tried to save his sister in an accident in his teens – hadn’t the slightest interest in politics, and thought the current President was Gerald Ford.  Stene – who is not legally barred from voting – had been a Clark Lake resident for 15 years, and had never voted before last fall, and claimed before the CWC commission to have had no interest in voting.

That is as opposed to the four residents we spotlighted yesterday who were legally barred from voting, in as many words on court orders, who did in fact also vote – in every case, for the first time, last fall.

I may have more – much more – before the grand jury meets on Tuesday.

(Cross-posted at True North)

Yesterday, I asked a question about the various “bullying” laws the left is proposing.

I asked – would it be considered bullying if I were to steal a young lesbian’s “Lady Gaga” CD – music that she found important in helping her discover her own identity – and to threaten to destroy it in an elaborate “ceremony” designed entirely to mock stereotypes of lesbianism.

I took a poll – and most agreed with me that that action would be bullying.

Of course, I’d never do such a thing.

But the real reason for the question was to ask liberals; if my hypothetical example was “bullying”, what would this be?

Because to me, the only difference between PZ Myers’ stunt from few years back – giggling about descrating a host from a Catholic service – and the sort of bullying that’s got lefties all exercised is the lack of a gay victim.

Not sure why this bit – from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” – popped to mind:

It just sprang to mind. Just like…pow:

By the time they got to Woodstock, they were half a million strong. But by the time they assembled on Freedom Plaza on Tuesday morning to plan the day’s civil disobedience, they numbered only 53.

 

Attempting to emulate the Occupy Wall Street protests, Washington activists and some out-of-town guests set themselves the lofty goal of occupying the Hart Senate Office Building. “We are there to shut the place down!” organizer David Swanson told his small band of followers.

Or, for that matter, this one – from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”:

Honest.  No idea whatsoever why it jumped to mind:   

But how to do this with only a few dozen demonstrators? Well, Swanson said, they could push all the buttons on the elevators — the way naughty children sometimes do in apartment buildings. “There are people who are wanting to go into the elevators and fill them and not get out and push all the buttons,” he said. “If you like that, do it.”

This set off a lengthy debate in Freedom Plaza, at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 14th Street NW, as activists came to the microphone to argue the pros and cons of elevator disruption.

“Let’s face it, our numbers are not enough to shut this building down,” said the representative from Veterans for Peace. “I think pushing elevator buttons is stupid.”

You go and read the whole thing while I figure out why those who movie clips came to mind.

As I noted yesterday, the Brainerd Dispatch has reported that Crow Wing County Attorney Don Ryan has empaneled a grand jury for this coming Tuesday.

:While Ryan has not officially announced the subject of the grand jury, he has subpoenad Monty Jensen, the Brainerd resident and disabled veteran whose video claiming to have seen disabled adults having their ballots filled out by group home staff at the Crow Wing County Courthouse the Friday before the last election, in late October 2010.  (I carried the video here, a video that got me an Instalanche right around election day last year).

The case has followed more or less the following rough chronology:

1. The Crow Wing County (CWC) attorney Don Ryan ordered an investigation by the CWC Sheriff’s office.
2. After a Sheriff’s investigation (which interviewed Monty Jensen’s estranged father, but ignored at least one actual witness to the alleged voter fraud), Ryan decided that, in his discretion, there was no case.
3. An avalanche of calumny from the media and the lefty alt-media descended on Monty Jensen.
4. Al Stene, father of James Stene, a resident at Clark Lake Group Home, found that his son – who suffered serious brain damage in a near-drowning accident at age, and knows nothing of politics – had been apparently inveigled into voting.  Stene was outraged.
5. Eric Shawn of Fox News picked up the story.
6. A group of activists have spent much of this year digging for more information.

Which brings us to today.

A source close to the case has provided me with four sets of documents:  each of them a court order showing a Clark Lake Group Home resident to have been placed under guardianship and had their rights to vote explicitly rescinded, and the Crow Wing County absentee ballot lists as well as the ballot envelopes,all indicating that they voted.

Copies are provided below the jump.
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But if I saw these two mug shots in a photo array with no other context…

Delbert (L) and Timothy Huber

…I’d probably guess they allegedly “shot someone over $50 and some tractor parts”.

According to the criminal complaint, Tim Larson arrived at his father’s small farm to find 81-year-old Delbert Huber and 45-year-old Tim Huber on the property. The two men said they were hired by Larson’s father to do the chores on the farm while Norman Larson was out of town. The 43-year-old son told the Hubers to move their farm equipment and come back Monday because he was going to be there all weekend.

Records show Delbert Huber was upset as they left because the Hubers had to move their equipment and also thought Larson stole $50 from Tim Huber’s wallet. Court records also show the older Huber thought someone took tractor parts from them.

According to the complaint, the two men returned to the farm the next morning and after a brief argument, Delbert Huber shot Tim Larson once in the chest with a rifle, killing him.

Huber later called the sheriff’s department to say he shot and killed a man.

They are, of course, innocent until proven guilty.

An “Occupy LA” speaker exposes the id of the “Occupy…” movement and the radical left:

Occupy L.A. Speaker: “One of the speakers said the solution is nonviolent movement. No, my friend. I’ll give you two examples: French Revolution, and Indian so-called Revolution.

Gandhi, Gandhi today is, with respect to all of you, Gandhi today is a tumor that the ruling class is using constantly to mislead us. French Revolution made fundamental transformation. But it was bloody.

India, the result of Gandhi, is 600 million people living in maximum poverty.

So, ultimately, the bourgeoisie won’t go without violent means. Revolution! Yes, revolution that is led by the working class.

Long live revolution! Long live socialism!”

The posturing of a spoiled post-adolescent?

Sure.  So were the worst atrocities of the Cultural Revolution.

I’m almost getting tired of asking “can you imagine if a Tea Partier had said this?  Any Tea Partier?  Ever”?

Well, imagining is all you have, because it never happened – but it didn’t take that much for the media to find things to condemn the Tea Party over, either.

As I noted earlier today, the Crow Wing County Attorney’s office is empaneling a grand jury starting next Tuesday.

I have learned since then from a source close to the case that the Crow Wing County Attorney has evidence that four residents of the Clark Lake chain of group homes in the Brainerd Lakes area, whose names were found on the county’s absentee voter list for the 2010 election,  had court orders ruling them ineligible to vote.

More tomorrow.

According to the Brainerd Dispatch, a grand jury is being empaneled in Crow Wing County next Tuesday. 

Crow Wing County Attorney Don Ryan on Tuesday confirmed a petition to convene the grand jury was filed.

However, Ryan is prohibited by law from saying what the grand jury is being called to consider. By law, what transpires in the grand jury chamber is kept secret.

However, the Dispatch notes that Monty Jensen has been subpoenaed to testify:

In the fall of 2010, Jensen said he was at the courthouse when residents of a group home, who were accompanied by staff members, were voting. At the time, Jensen said what he witnessed crossed the line of proper voter assistance and amounted to the manipulation and undue influence of vulnerable adults.

We covered this last November, in what was one of the highest-traffic stories this blog has ever covered; Jensen, in a series of videos that this blog helped go viral, claimed to have seen residents of a group of group homes being assisted with their voting in a manner that allegedly violates state law.

Crow Wing County Attorney Don Ryan initially declined to pursue much of an investigation – the law allows the county attorney a lot of discretion in such matters.  Sources close to the story, however, indicate that the investigation carried out by the Crow Wing County Sheriff’s Department was “a sham”, which seemed to focus more on Monty Jensen’s bona fides than on the charges he’d made; while Jensen’s father (from whom Monty Jensen had long been estranged) was interviewed extensively, while more than one witness to the actual alleged incident went allegedly uninterviewed.

Since last winter, of course, more evidence has surfaced; at least one resident who had not been ruled incompetent to vote and stated no interest in voting turned up on the absentee voter rolls – not “illegal”, perhaps, but very possibly exploitation of a vulnerable adult.

It is not currently publicly known whether further evidence has prompted Ryan’s action.

In Minnesota, a first-degree murder charge with a life sentence may only come from a grand jury indictment. Election law issues may also be brought to the grand jury. A prosecutor may present factual information to see if there is enough to justify proceeding forward with an indictment in a bank robbery, for instance.

This represents a major reversal on the Crow Wing County Attorney’s part.  As such, a Grand Jury makes sense; while some indictments (like First Degree Murder) require grand jury findings, others are brought to give a County Attorney cover, as if to say “the indictment wasn’t my call; it was the Grand Jury’s decision”.

Let’s make sure we’re clear on what happened at the Ramsey County Charter Commission last night.

The 10-8 vote did not impose a tax  It rejected an amendment the county charter that would have allowed a referendum on the Ramco Commission’s agreement with the Vikings to ask the state to exempt the plan from a referendum on a sales tax hike to pay for the stadium – which is contrary to state law and the county’s charter.

There are really only four things, now, that can come between Ramco’s taxpayers and a generation of paying Wilfare:

1. If your state legislator supports this boondoggle – a give-away to Zygi Wilf and the DFL’s trade-union water-carriers – they need to hear from you.
2. The downtown “Brotherhood” will have to find a way to steal the project for downtown Minneapolis.  Don’t rule this out.
3. The Ramco Commission needs to hear from we, the residents, that this must not pass.  I doubt it’ll work, but it’s worth at try.
4. Ramsey County voters will need to wake up and realize what a bunch of hamsters the DFL-dominated Ramco Commission is.

The following is hypothetical.

Let’s say that a young lady in my neighborhood “came out” as a lesbian.

And that a key part of her “coming out” as a lesbian was, what the heck, the music of Lady Gaga.  Her Lady Gaga CD (I know, kids don’t buy CDs – let’s say it was a gift from her parents) was a key part of her figuring out her identity, and thus very important to her, personally.

Not judging [1].  Just positing.

Then – utterly hypothetically [2] – let’s say that I stole that CD from her.  Because I – again, very very hypothetically – want to mock and taunt gay people [3].  And I very explicitly carried out that mocking and taunting to shame, harass and ridicule her for being gay,because I just don’t like gay people, and want to make her life miserable.

Let’s say that the young lady went to the media – or bloggers, anyway – to try to get the CD back.  And I responded by arranging an elaborate ceremony to not only destroy the CD, but do so in a way that mocked the girl’s anguish and lampooned the stereotypes of gay, lesbian, and Gaga culture.

Under the various “bullying” laws being proposed in Minnesota and the federal level, would this be bullying?  And I mean the incident as a whole, without parsing out its individual components.

Would I be “bullying” the girl?

Please vote.

UPDATE:  And if you support the various bits of bullying legislation, please support the case that this is bullying in the comment section.

By the way, I voted “yes”.

Yes, there’s a follow-up.  Tomorrow.

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Keith at Redneck Crackers And Beer wonders if  Delta Airlines has just been messing with us:.

I posted back in July that the Essential Air Service program was out of date, needed to be repealed, and cost the tax payers millions of dollars.

This is the government subsidy program that keeps airlines flying to cities that otherwise couldn’t support airline service on their own.

With the news that the program was on the chopping block, Delta announced – as they frequently do – that they’d have to start cutting service to these cities.

Whaddya suppose happened next?

 Just out of curiosity I checked Delta’s website recently and noticed that only a few of these towns have been dropped and several have picked up regional jet service who only had turboprop service previously.

Huh.

So the question is, was Delta just playing the people in these small towns to lobby their congress-critters to pass the EAS bill to keep the pork rolling in to places that can’t afford commercial air service, and want the rest of us to pay for it?

Why not?

The tactic – “keep paying us for something that people won’t pay for, or at least pay as much for – naturally on their own”  – is as predictable as every play in the Vikings playbook.  Every school district and Local-Government-Aid-accepting city in Minnesota does it every year at budget time; “keep the swag coming, or we’re going to have to cut you off!”

Obama jobs plan fails in the GOP-controlled Senate:

The Senate defeated President Barack Obamas job-creation package on Tuesday in a sign that Washington is likely too paralyzed to take major steps to spur hiring before the 2012 elections.

Well,naturally. The Senate is controlled by the GOP.  What else could happen?

UPDATE:  Oh, silly me.  I always mix up the House and Senate.  The Dems control it, right?

(Mitch checks)  Wow.  Sure enough.

Obama had barnstormed around the country to pressure his Republican opponents to back his top legislative priority, but he did not pick up a single Republican vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate.Two Democrats, facing re-election in conservative states, also voted against the measure.

Hm.  So – is Washington “too polarized”, or are Barack Obama’s coattails shrinking again?

It’s one of those weeks in the history of this blog I used to dream about around this time last year, when I was basically donating a couple of hours a day (usually 5-7AM and/or 9-11PM) to blogging for the Emmer campaign and the rest of the GOP slate, then racing to the day job, then feeding the kids, then the evening routine, and then – often as not – more blogging.  Back then, I was existing on caffeine and adrenaline and that buzz you get when you’ve got a feeling you’re really onto something.  The pace was frantic, and there was this amazing intensity to blogging…

…that burned me out hard.  After the election, it was probably February before I really got my mojo back.

If I’ve noticed one thing in almost (yeep) ten years of writing this blog, it’s that there’s a cycle to things; the “storms”, if you will, when you’re riding a rocket and on a constant adrenaline buzz are memorable, of course; the 2010 Gubernatorial Election, the 2008 race and the coverage of the Republican National Convention (and, mostly, the protests against it), the 2006 race and the naked media bias, and of course being one degree of separation from the explosion of Rathergate back in 2004, sitting in the studio at the Patriot as John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson were riding in on the curl that’d wash Dan Rather out to palookaville.

And after the storm, if you will, comes the hangover; the days, or weeks, when you can barely think about writing; when you’ve thrown everything you have into it, and don’t think you have any more.  It’s the kind of thing that’s ended more than a few blogs much better than mine.  Me?  I get through the hangover by getting through it; I love writing, even when I hate writing, so I make sure I, well, write.

Because when you weather the hangover, you get to days like today.  The calm before the next storm, if you will.

Oh, it’s really only calm on the surface.  There is a ton of stuff going on behind the scenes.  Stories that have been under the radar for months that are about to break back out into the open.  Projects that have been bubbling along for years that are about to re-erupt  (my “This Was The Year That Was” project, the thirtieth anniversaries of the great albums of the early eighties, is about to start ticking again – and of course, my “World War II: Fact And Myth” series is really just getting started, although a good chunk of it through 2014 is already written).

And of course, another big election.   Maybe the biggest one since 1980, really.

So that’s one thing I’ve learned – there’s a cycle.

The other thing I’ve learned?  The first rule of the “Calm Before The Storm” is “never talk about the calm before the storm” and ruminate that the next couple of months on this blog are going to be all pastoral and low-key.  It’s the best guarantee that something is going to blow up big-time in the next week.

No.  I know better than that.

I’m of two minds about the closing of Tariq Ibn Ziyad Academy, the Muslim-centered charter school which went bankrupt over the summer.

The good news?  All the lefties who’ve been sniffing their derision about Katherine Kersten’s “lack of reporting experience” will have to eat their words (or would, if being a “progressive” didn’t mean never being held accountable in the media); as Scott Johnson notes, Kersten broke the story at a time when the Strib as a whole, along with the rest of the media, wouldn’t touch it.

Thanks to the work of Katherine Kersten, the Star Tribune has owned this story. Yet it cannot have been a pleasant experience for her to have worked on the story while inside an organization that would sooner have served as TiZA’s public relations arm than investigator or whistleblower. In its pathetic editorial postmortem on TiZA, the Star Tribune jumped straight to the ACLU lawsuit without including in its chronology the fact that one of its own writers broke the story. By contrast, the ACLU Minnesota acknowledged Kersten’s role in uncovering the scandal from the outset of the lawsuit. Wouldn’t a genuine newspaper want to tout its key role in the events? Why is this story different from any other story

Isn’t that what “journalism” is supposed to be about?

Well, maybe once upon a time…

I know, I know.  Separation of church and state. It’s a good thing, in the long run.

The story of TIZA – the Tariq Ibn Ziyad Academy, an Islam-centered charter school that at its peak had schools in the north and south-east metro – was one that inspired passions in a lot of people.

The fact that it was a charter school at all brought in the “progressive” clans against it.

The fact that it “mixed church and state” naturally exercised the ACLU, which has had the school in court for years over the Establishment Clause lssues first reported by Katherine Kersten.  Scott Johnson at Power Line reports that the recent dump of legal papers from the case reveals…:

In one motion filed with the court, the Minnesota Department of Education disclosed a few of the items that TiZA had been hiding. Among the department’s discoveries in the litigation was the fact that TiZA had made multiple misrepresentations to the department. These misrepresentations included potential conflicts of interest between TiZA and its sectarian landlord, TiZA’s relationship and shared resources with its sectarian co-tenant, and the sectarian nature of TiZA’s curriculum. According to the department, these misrepresentations formed the basis for the department’s determination that TiZA was operating legally.

 

Of course, Kersten notes that even in carrying out the suit against TIZA, the ACLU revealed its own institutional bigotry:

Samuelson chuckled. In fact, “If this school had been Catholic, we would have sued them years ago.”

And the fact the school was aggressively Islamic in focus – although not, as far as we’ve seen, in an aggressively anti-American sense, but apparently enough so, as Kersten noted – angered conservatives.  Which, in turn, angered “progressives”, as Kersten also noted:

Rep. Mindy Greiling — then chair of the House K-12 Education Finance Committee — publicly called on the paper to fire me for “gross distortion of the facts.” TiZA is “a school to be emulated, not hated,” she told the Minnesota Independent.

Because if a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and nobody is there it hear it, it’s still apparently “hate”.

Lost in the tangle between immovable institutions and unstoppable advocates, of course, are the real losers in this story; the children.   And I don’t mean that in the “progressive’s”  “for the chilldren” caricature sense; I mean it in the sense that any human, especially a conservative, tries to protect the generation that is the future

Because whatever TIZA may have done to offend, well, everyone, it did one thing – teach kids – very well.

TIZA got the kind of results that many charter schools, and all urban public schools, should envy and try to emulate.  The student body was 80% low-income. 2/3 of them spoke English as a second language, Both of those are huge handicaps in the pbulic schools – but TIZA got math and reading test scores that clobbered most schools of all types, everywhere in the state (and nationwide).

Whatever you think about the different issues and parties involved, TIZA certainly seems to have something right.

The ACLU is following its brief in sueing the school for violating the separation clause, and Kersten was right to blow the story up years ago, and Scott Johnson did yeoman service in preventing the Strib from shoveling the story down the memory hole.

But let’s not pretend that there’s only one side to this story.  While TIZA may have skirted the Constitution, and as Scott noted may have benefited from an institutional Captain-Renault-ism on the part of the MN Department of Education, it was good at one thing – teaching low-income students, most of them not native speakers of English – how to do math and read.

In English, as well as Arabic.

Remember when Senator Barack Obama and the rest of the American left waxed pious about the legal rights of anti-Ameircan combatants?

Most of the left would rather you didn’t.  But they did.  One of their favorite legal betes noir during the Bush years was Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, who wrote the memoranda that found legal justification for “enhanced interrogation”, prompting many on the left to call him, personally, a “war criminal”.

Well, he’s back, and he’s laughing last, as it were:

Let’s give partial credit where it is due.  Apparently the Obama administration argues that al-Awlaki was a legitimate target because he is a member of an enemy engaged in hostile conduct against the United States.  At least Obama has figured out that the war on terrorism is in fact a war, and that it is not limited just to Afghanistan.  We should be thankful that Obama officials have quietly put aside the arguments they made during the Bush years that any terrorist outside the Afghani battlefield was a criminal suspect who deserved his day in federal court.  By my lights, I would rather the Obama folks be hypocrites in favor of protecting the national security than principled fools (which they are free to be in the faculty lounges both before and after their time in government).

Therapists and 12-steppers ask “would you rather be right, or would you rather be happy?”

I think Yoo is probably both right now.

While at the “Occupy Minnesota” “rally” over the weekend, I saw a few signs saying that “Labor Creates Wealth”.

Now, I’ve got nothing against labor.  I work for a living; without someone to build things to sell, capital and management will be more or less out to dry.

But does labor create wealth?

For those of you who believe this, I’m going to propose an experiment.

1. Do some work.  Any work at all.  Dig a ditch, draw a painting, ride a bike from downtown to downtown, bake a tray of cookies, write a blog post, play guitar in the skyway, build a dog house, make your bed, it doesn’t matter.  Just do some…labor.
2. Check to see if you have gotten any “wealth” – money, food, lodging, coffee beans, green stamps, trading cards, coupons, strings of beads – by simple dint of having labored.

 I’m guessing “no”.  And without wanting to spoil the experiment, I’m going to speculate on exactly why. 

Without someone willing to pay you something for that “labor”, the “labor” you did in #1 above was just something you did for fun (hopefully; I mean, you didn’t really expect to be paid, did you?)

And who is it that finds someone who needs, and is willing to pay for, a ditch or a drawing or for you to ride your bike, or is hungry for cookies or your insight or your music, or needs a dog house?

Management.

Now, you could very well be your own manager – it happens all the time.

And unless you dig with your hands, draw with your blood, inherited a bike, conjure flour and sugar and chocolate chips and butter and heat from pure mind power, can ethically blog from the library, imitate a guitar with your voice, or pound nails with your face, someone needs to “invest” in a shovel, a pencil, a bike, ingredients and a stove and gas, a computer, a guitar, and a hammer and some wood, in the hopes that they’ll generate a “return” on the investment – money or food or lodging or whatever you get for your labor.  Again – you could be the investor!   But without someone – you, your mom, a venture capitalist, or a bank listed on the NYSE – to “invest” in making sure you have the tools you need to make sure your labor produces something to take to market, you’ll be, well, pounding nails with your face, as it were.

It’s called “Capital”.

Ken Burns has a new documentary series, about Prohibition.

Lori Sturdevant shows her ability to tease the wrong lesson out of history – or, more accurately, the lesson she wants her less-informed readers to find:

[The series] doesn’t pound on the lessons for today that spring from the nation’s disastrous ban on the sale and purchase of alcohol between 1920 and 1933. It did not need to.

The roots of Prohibition the series identified are still visible. Moralists still try to tell other people how to conduct private lives.

And other “moralists” respond to conflict by trying to get big government to impose utopia on the “enemy”.

“There’s a chance the children of immigrants – or gun-clinging Jeebus freaks – might believe things that are inconvenient to those who control society; let’s centralize and standardize education under the government!”

“Guns scare us aren’t how civilized people settle their problems; let’s ban them from the highest level possible!”

“We don’t like too much (of our opponents’) money in politics; let’s create federal laws to make sure elections are unpolluted by (our opponents’) money!”

In small towns — the “real America,” in Sarah Palin’s parlance — many people still look askance at urban habits. Americans of longer standing still wish immigrants would change their ways.

And the fact that all people are “we-ists” mean that it will ever be thus; that people, including urban people, will intrinsically trust people who are more like them, and be less sympathetic to people less like them.

Prohibition’s message for 2011 in Minnesota and the rest of the nation seems to be a warning: Allow these roots to sprout and grow, and the consequences could well be unpredictable and undesirable.

And the other, bigger, real-er lesson?  The “we-ist” with the printing press gets to decide which ‘we-ists” get called ‘good” and “noble” and “upstanding”, and which don’t.

Well, they did, anyway.

That

Q: “Is it time to bench McNabb and start playing Christian Ponder?”

A: Who cares?  Four months ’til spring training starts!

That is all.

I went to “Occupy Minnesota” yesterday, around noonish

And I recorded a video.

Yes, the camera work is bad; the city is occupied, so I had to be careful.

UPDATE: I’m informed that a leftyblogger has brought out video of the last Tax Day Tea Party Rally, by way of comparison.

Which just goes to show you that reading leftyblogs is its own…well, if not “punishment”, it’s at least it’s kinda self-limiting on its own, if you observe even the most rudimentary logic.

I mean, it was in the low thirties at 8AM on April 16 – as opposed to 80-something at noon on a gorgeous Sunday. Heck, even the leftyblogger who’s doing the tittering, who usually shows up with his video camera to try to mock Tea Party attendees, skipped it.

And we’re not talking about the Tea Party – which, to the left and media (pardon the redundancy) bounces back and forth between “irrelevant and pathetic” and “singly responsible for everything that’s in the Democrats’ way”, often at the same time.  We’re not talking about “Occupy Wall Street”, which has gotten absolutely slavish coverage from all the media (for its message of “the media are ignoring us!”).  If the Tea Party is a risible nonentity – which is what the leftyblogger in question usually would have you believe – then his point is a dog bites man story.

The fact that “Occupy Minnesota” is a joke, however, flies in the face of the repeated assurances from media at all levels, though, that this really really is bigger than the Tea Party.

Get back to us when they’ve completely swayed the 2012 election.

And don’t please hold your breath.

Tea Partiers:  Leaving the world a little cleaner than they found it.

Occupy Wall Streeters: Filthy spoiled pigs:

The owners of the park – a private park whose compact with the city allows anyone to be there atany time – released a statement that says…:

…“because the protestors refuse to cooperate…the park has not been cleaned since Friday, September 16th and as a result, sanitary conditions have reached unacceptable levels.”

“They’re just making life miserable for the working guy,” bar owner Mike Keane told CBS 2′s Dave Carlin

I wonder how the “Hippies For Obama” rally went?

To: The Regional Mainstream Media
From: Mitch Berg, Prole
Re: Your Coverage of the “Overentitled, Overeducated White People For Big Government” Rally

All,

“Field of Dreams” was a great movie. And one of its hook lines was, indeed, “If you build it, they will come”.

But repeating “The rallies are building! The rallies are building!” (koff koff Alix Kendall and Tom Bultler) several times every newscast doesn’t actually mean that this exercise in Obama-fluffing is ever going to become an actual populist “uprising”

That is all.

MBerg

(PS – Seriously – I know you want to have a big headline story, but this is the kind of stuff that people are going to be laughing about for years.  The Channel Nine morning news at 7AM devoted a solid four minutes to the protests, clogged with references to “watching the nationwide protests as they spread across the country”, as if it’ll actually happen if you say it once an hour).