When Van Jones yapped about the “American Autumn”, I’m sure he didn’t bank on Mark Steyn running with the analogy;

In case you don’t get it, that’s the American version of the “Arab Spring.” Steve Jobs might have advised Van Jones he has a branding problem. Spring is the season of new life, young buds and so forth. Autumn is leaves turning brown and fluttering to the ground in a big dead heap. Even in my great state of New Hampshire, where autumn is pretty darn impressive, we understand what that blaze of red and orange leaves means: They burn brightest before they fall and die, and the world turns chill and bare and hard.

So Van Jones may be on to something! American Autumn. The days dwindle down to a precious few, like in whatever that old book was called, The Summer and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I get the feeling an awful lot of the attendees at “Occupy Minnesota” treated America as a recycling project; if you’re done witn it, try to find a way to re-use it…

But better yet is his description of the “protesters” themselves…:

If you’ll forgive a plug for my latest sell-out to my corporate masters, in my new book I quote H. G. Wells’s Victorian Time Traveler after encountering far in the future the soft, effete Eloi: “These people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metalwork. Somehow such things must be made.” And yet he saw “no workshops” or sign of any industry at all. “They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going.” The Time Traveler might have felt much the same upon landing in Liberty Square in the early 21st century, except for the bit about bathing: It’s increasingly hard in America to “see how things are kept going,” but it’s pretty clear that the members of “Occupy Wall Street” have no plans to contribute to keeping things going. Like Michael Oher using his iPhone to announce his ignorance of Steve Jobs, in the autumn of the republic the beneficiaries of American innovation seem not only utterly disconnected from but actively contemptuous of the world that sustains their comforts.

Contempt for the creative class?

Yeah, Steyn’s got a point.

It’s 5:30, and the straw poll has been underway for half an hour.   Results are due out at about 6:30.  I’ll be here for the scoop,when it happens,

6:30 – Sutton is on stage w/the results.

• 0.2% Johnson
• 0.9% Huntsman
• 2% Santorum
• 3.3% Gingrich
• 4% Rick Perry
• 10.7% Paul
• 11.1% Romney
• 12.2% Bachmann
• 52.6% Herman Cain!

Talking with VOICES of Conservative Women’s Jen DeJournett.

Now talking with Linda Lee Tarver, outreach director for the Michigan GOP..l

Now we have Sarah Walker, of  the Coalition for Impartial Justice and  impartialcourts.org and the Minnesota Second Chance Coalition.

We’ve got Tony Sutton, MN GOP Chair.

Now, talking with Chris Fields, who’s running for the Congress in the Fifth CD.

Finally, Michael Brodkorb, deputy director of the MNGOP.

Without any further ado – below the fold is the second night of the legendary Capitol Theater gig, from September 20, 1978.

Enjoy

(more…)

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

• Ed is off on assignment today, so Brad Carlson and I will team up to do the “Headliners” show from 1-3PM Central. We had a great time from 5-7 yesterday – interviewing Michael Reagan, Rep. Chip Cravaack, Mark Jefferson of the RNC, and many more.  Who knows who we’ll get today?  Well, to some extent I do, since I book some of the guests too; we’ll have Chris Fields, who’s running for the GOP nomination to run for the US House against Keith Ellison. And that’s not even scratching the surface; tune in!  (UPDATE:  Guest schedule so far:  Jen DeJournett of VOICES of Conservative Women, Linda Tarver of the GOP RNC’s Outreach effort, Sara Wallace, and CD5 GOP candidate Chris Fields.
• 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)

Among the Bruce Fan nation, among the most legendary concerts ever were the three night stand the E Street Band did at the Captol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey on September 19-21, 1978, deep in the middle of the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour.

It was, by all accounts, a very special engagement – it was right around Springsteen’s 29th birthday, it the midst of a “comeback” of sorts, as Springsteen celebrated both the critical and commercial triumph of Darkness, and a tour where he was finally being regarded on a national rather than regional stage as one of the best live performers of the day.

The series was broadcast live on the radio – leading to the concert being among the most bootlegged concerts in history, with examples of widely-varying quality surfacing all over the place for the past 33 years.

Anyway – through the miracle of Youtube, videotapes of the concerts have finally been popping up over the past year or so.  I’ve been putting bits and pieces out there – but since the Springsteen fan/maniac community is so very thorough about keeping things like setlists and posting them online, I figured it was time to reconstruct these dates in all their original glory.

The concert is below the fold – the whole page takes some time to load, with all the separate video containers.

Enjoy.

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I spent some time last night listening to Terry Gross, her brow audibly furrowed, interviewing Jane Mayer of The New Yorker for the better part of an hour over “The Red Map Project” – a GOP project to target and win state legislatures in swing states.  Mayer focused on the contributions of one Art Pope to the GOP Legislative races in North Carolina:

“He and his family members have basically poured money into the state’s politics; $40 million is about what they’ve spent through their foundations,” says Mayer. “About $35 million of that has gone towards pushing a far-right political agenda in North Carolina. In the 2010 state races, where people don’t spend much money, he and the groups that he helped found — that were supposedly independent groups — spent $2.2 million. It doesn’t sound like a lot nationally, but it can make all the difference in the context of one state. So basically what you’re looking at is one very wealthy corporate captain who, when motivated enough, can exert enormous influence in a state.”

The influence Pope wields in North Carolina can be seen in the results of the 2010 legislative election. Republicans won 18 of the 22 races Pope or his organizations targeted. Roughly 75 percent of spending by independent groups during North Carolina’s state races came from accounts linked to Pope.

Sounds pretty serious – a rich guy deciding to do of his own free will, out in the open, what George Soros and Paul Allen and Alida Messinger and do of their own free wills with their own money.  Or what the AFL/CIO, Teamsters, SEIU and NEA and other groups do with their members’ money (whether the members approve or not – 42% of union members voted GOP in 2010, while their unions gave more than double that share to the Democrats), frequently laundered through layers of 527s and other front groups. .

But let’s take this at face value; “Fresh Air” and the New Yorker have blown the lid off of an out-in-the-open “GOP plot” to use freely-donated money in its capacity as free speech to try to win elections.  It’s what “journalists” do, after all – focus attention on campaign spending by Republicans.

But I had to check; has Terry Gross, or the New Yorker, spent any time on, say, George Soros’ “Secretary of State Project“, his well-funded attempt to put Democrats in charge of state election systems?

NPR?  Nope.  I guess they don’t rant or slant – against Democrats.

The New Yorker?  Any guesses?  If you don’t take that bet, you win!

The war against Republican/Conservative money in the electoral process continues apace!

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes that the group “occupying” the square at Henco Gov’t Center tomorrow will be running rampant:

Well, not rampant. The County will provide portable toilets and bike racks. Alcohol is banned, smoking is allowed on sidewalks only, tents are still being negotiated.

These people fancy themselves the heirs to Kent State or Tiananmen Square – rebels, risking all sticking it to The Man. They might as well be Kiwanis.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Or, y’know, Republicans.

Much of the developed world has been eulogizing Steve Jobs for the past couple of days.

The world may not need another obit – especially from a guy who hasn’t worked with any Apple products in 17 years, and owns only one old IPod.

But Steve Jobs has had an extremely large impact on my own life – or at least my livelihood.

Before the Apple Macintosh, computers were the province of the geek, the twidgie, the engineer.  They were functional tools, to do functional things; remember the term “Data Processing?”

Doing graphics was as much a mathematical as aesthetic project.

In conceptual terms, computers had a huge, obtuse vocabulary; a very literal one, in fact, in the forms of lists of commands, usually cryptic and often byzantine, to do…everything.  From seeing the files (itself a vocabulary term) that you had to actually doing anything with them, you had to know, or find, a long list of things to type into the machine – itself a foreign and unnatural process.  And then once you got past the process of finding your stuff, you had to actually try to accomplish something.  Remember WordPerfect, with its’ big blue page with not a single hint of what to do next, and the industry of classes to teach you how to use the program?   Or WordStar, with its array of “dot commands” inset into the text you were typing, to control things like indentation, formatting, font and everything else?  In both WordPerfect and WordStar (and early versions of Microsoft Word for DOS, if you remember it), you didn’t even see what your document was going to look like, other than a clunky and not-very-literal “preview mode”.

The problem was that computers required you to learn their vocabulary, and to learn to work with the computer. Jobs – and, from the very beginning, Macintosh – realized the process of making the computer work with you, rather than the other way around – and beyond that, to make them help you accomplish things that made intrinsic sense regardless of the technology.

Like typing and drawing, sure…

Jobs changed that by slashing the “vocabulary” – from “DIR” and “CD HOMEWORK/HISTORY” and “cat *.exe” and “roff termpaper” to point, click, and drag; from having to know what the the computer needed, to a simple set of actions that would make it do what you needed.

And to do that required a new class of IT worker – people whose job it was to help understand what users really needed out of software (and hardware, and everything else, really), and to work with programmers and analysts to, essentially, make software at least suck less,and, with enough effort and vision, basically disappear from the equation – to essentially get out of the way between the user and what they were trying to accomplish.

I did say “with enough effort and vision”.  It’s harder than it looks.  I fell into “User Expeirence” in its various forms in 1994,and made it my career in 1998, and have been doing it ever since.  When I got into the field, it was almost unknown in the Twin Cities – no more than a dozen of us, I don’t think.  Even today, it’s in the low hundreds, if that.

It’s a fascinating field.  And while it’d exist without Steve Jobs – it was actually started in World War 2, to make flying aircraft more intuitive and less dangerous – and it might even have reached the influence it has on technology design that it has today, eventually, it would have been an evolutionary process.  And evolution is slow and sloppy.

Jobs was a revolutionary – and the revolution was getting technology out of your way.

And it’s ingenious.

———-

I didn’t say I’d never bought an Apple product, other than the IPod.  That’s true.  But I do have a Jobs computer.

In the eighties, after he was first exiled from Apple, he founded “NeXT”.  And in an era when DOS computers used amber or green text monitors and books full of keyboard commands, and the Mac was still in its infancy, the NeXT brought a sleek, powerful DisplayEPS monitor with a fully-realized Graphical User Interface with a fully-developed user interaction idiom allowing users to accomplish breathtakingly complex things with simple actions (and a UNIX core for the geeky stuff that made DOS look like the rickety piece of garbage it was).

A NeXT screenshot circa 1988. What was your DOS monitor doing back then?

It came at a cost, of course; a new NeXT would run $4-6,000 at least (in an era when a new 286 PC could top $3,000, to be fair).  I got one at a fire sale as one of the last existing NeXT consulting companies folded, for $50.  And it was still better than the Windows 95 box I had at home.

And owning it conferred so much geek cred on me that I know I got at least one job purely because I owned it…

———-

I thought for a while – what’s the best way to explain how Jobs “got technology out of the way?”  And then it hit me.

I’ve been becoming fascinated by the Hammond B3 organ lately.  I want to learn the instrument. I’m somewhat hampered by being not at all a good keyboard player – but the tone and harmonic dynamics of the instrument are boundlessly intriguing to me.

And Wednesday night, right about the time I’d heard Jobs had died, I checked out Mac’s “Garage Band” on an IPad.  It’s got a fairly slick little B3 emulator – one where you can work the drawbars and presets to get the various tones out of the instrument, and plug in a MIDI keyboard to actually play the registrations you set up.

Which is cool – it gets the technology of the computer out of the way, and gives me a direct simulation the instrument to play.

Which leaves me the hurdle of having to conquer the technology of playing the keyboard.  Which I can do, more or less.  Long story.

But then Apple went one better – focusing on the task (“making the organ play something”), it gives you a simpler mode:

A set of vertical bars – one for each chord in a selected key (the key of A, for example, includes A, D, E, G, F#m, Bm, C#m and Bdim,I think).  Tapping the lower bar plunks a bass note – the farther down the scale, the lower the registration.  Pressing the middle and upper bars plays the chord on the “keyboard” – the farther up, the higher and brighter and louder the registration; lower down the scale gives you a mellow, subtle sound, while pressing the very top sounds like you’re going to blow the cone out of your Leslie speaker.  The very top bar?  It gives you a B3 with all the bars pulled to the stops and everything cranked; think Tom Scholtz at the beginning of “Long Time”, or Danny Federici during the “from the churches to the jails” part of “Jungleland”.

Bam!

(Note to Apple:  include some sort of gesture to make a palm glissando possible, and you’ve got me…)

And I sat down and played “Refugee” and “Sixth Avenue Heartache” and “Jungleland” – not just like the record, but pretty darn cool.

Because technoloy got out of the way.

And that is such a great thing.

At any rate – RIP Steve  Jobs.

In the world of the Springsteen Fan, strewn as it is with legendary concerts (including everyone’s first Springsteen show, let’s be honest), there are a few shows that are regarded in the canon as legendary.

One of those is the series of concerts on September 19-20, 1979, at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ.  It was on Bruce’s home turf, as his commercial and critical rocket was starting to take off and the E Street Band was turning into one of the most legendary touring outfits in the history of the business.  It also was part of a tour that followed three years of litigation that kept him from recording and performing much after his initial breakthrough with Born to Run.

The shows were broadcast on the radio – and are thus among the most bootlegged live performances in history.

And now, via the miracle of YouTube, all the songs from both nights – 25 on the 19th, 22 on the 20th – are available on video.

And tomorrow and Saturday nights, I’m going to run them both, in their original order, here on Shot In The Dark.

Because I’m in the mood to go see Springsteen.

CBS has apparently gundecked Sharyl Attkisson, after she exposed the White House’s spittle-flecked response to her reporting on the media’s complicity in “Fast and Furious”, the Administration’s attempt to tie Americans’ gun rights to Mexico’s drug war:

Yesterday, CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson told radio show host Laura Ingraham that the White House yelled and swore at her over her reporting on the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal tied to the deaths of two U.S. law enforcement agents. Attkisson also revealed that she’d also been yelled at by the Justice Department.

Today, I called CBS News in an attempt to interview Attkisson. I was told by CBS News senior vice president of communications Sonya McNair that Attkisson would be unavailable for interviews all week. When I asked why Attkisson would be unavailable, McNair would not say.

I’ve also heard from a producer at another media outlet that has previously booked Attkisson that they tried to book her since she made news with the Laura Ingraham interview yesterday. They were also told that she would be unavailable.

And, by the way, don’t you dare call CBS biased.

“Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) – and this weekend’s “Occupy Our People’s Plaza In Extremism” (OOPSIE) – are taking their orders from the Democrat hierarchy:

The front page of the http://occupywallst.org/ proudly announces that numerous union groups will be present in New York today to join demonstrators in marches taking place this afternoon.

“Together we will protest this great injustice. We stand in solidarity with the honest workers of….MoveOn.org,” states the website, as well as listing numerous other organizations.

What is MoveOn.org?

MoveOn.org is a lobbying organization that routinely backs Democratic candidates. The group aggressively supported Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign and is now “Perhaps the lead lobby organization for his policies….apart from Obama’s own Organizing for America,” reports Source Watch.

At about this point, some “progressive” will chime in “but but but the Tea Party was controlled by the GOP”.  Nah. I mean, there was all sorts of cross talk – like, me, among many many much bigger and more important people – and plenty of Tea Partiers, Conservatives and Republicans, individually and as groups, shared beliefs and goals.  There’s overlap, to be sure.  But the Tea Party scared, and challenged, the mainstream GOP in a way similar to the Ron Paul challenge in 2008, only many, many times bigger.  The Tea Party changed the GOP – not the other way around.

All the reeking hippies and college bobbleheads and union slackers and MoveOn.org yentas and Code Pink harpies in New York and, this weekend, in Minneapolis?  They’ve got it exactly the other way around.

And it’s going to be fu-u-u-un pointing it out to them.

It may be the world’s greatest apocryphal quote:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

Apropos nothing, nearly half of US households get some form of federal money or another:

Nearly half, 48.5%, of the population lived in a household that received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2010, according to Census data. Those numbers have risen since the middle of the recession when 44.4% lived households receiving benefits in the third quarter of 2008.

Click for full-size image

The share of people relying on government benefits has reached a historic high, in large part from the deep recession and meager recovery, but also because of the expansion of government programs over the years. (See a timeline on the history of government benefits programs here.)

Obama may or may not win this next election – but the left has done one of the crucial bits of homework needed to ensure their power forever.

Chris Fields, as we’ve noted before in this space, is running for Congress in the 5th CD.

He’s running a design contest to pick his campaign logo.

Go and chime in!

The “N-Head” “controversy” – which was the most contrived, yellow bit of journalism since Rochelle Olson’s hit piece on Alan Fine back in the ’06 race in MNCD5 – may not be what knocks Rick Perry out of the presidential race.  Indeed, there are months before the fat lady sings, and anything can happen.

But Perry is making some unforced errors.  And it looks as if Mitt Romney is making some moves toward testing the thesis that he’s “the most electable Republican”.

Now, let’s be clear ; Romney’s never been my candidate, but he’d be light years better than Obama.  Indeed, except for John Huntsman and Mike Huckabee, every GOP contender (I know, Huck’s not in the race; work with me, here) would be a better president than Barack Obama, especially if we flip the Senate this next session; on dealing with the economy, Mitt Romney at the head of a Tea-Party-motivated two-house majority to temper whatever flecks of “moderate” impedimenta he still has would be just the cataract of common sense this nation desperately needs.

There is danger here, of course.  “Berg’s Law” – the immutable laws of human and political behavior that I’ve compiled over the years – pretty clearly apply here.

I’ll cite the relevant ones:

Berg’s Eleventh Law of Inverse Viability: The conservative liberals “respect” for their “conservative principles” will the the one that has the least chance of ever getting elected.

The McCain Corollary To Berg’s Eleventh Law: If that respected conservative ever develops a chance of getting elected, that “respect” will turn to blind unreasoning hatred overnight.

The Huckabee Corollary the McCain Corolloary To Berg’s Eleventh Law: The Republican that the media covers most intensively before the nomination for any office will be the one that the liberals know they have the best chance of beating after the nomination, and/or will most cripple the GOP if nominated.

No ambiguity here.

It’s why the media has given the likes of McCain, Huckabee and John Huntsman such “favorable” coverage; in the hopes of building them up into contenders that’d sap the real Republican front-runner, or even fatally weak nominees that they could then turn around and demolish (vide McCain).

Now, I think the Democrats and media (pardon the redundancy) are in a bind here; they hate Perry, obviously; if nominated, he’s win in a landslide, so the media is on full-blown destructo alert; unfortunately, Perry is obliging.   But they really wanted to prop up someone like a Huntsman, who is indistinguishable from a mainstream Democrat, or Huckabee, who is more of the same plus the kind of pro-lifer that’ll get the social libs exercised enough to maybe squeedge out some votes.

Romney?  He’s not a Tea Party favorite, but most of the Tea Party is driven by common sense, not purist ideology; the Tea Party is as much about rejecting socialism as it is adopting pure conservatism.

And that may sum up Romney’s appeal; he’s not a pure libertarian ideologue; nobody will ever mistake him for Ron Paul.  But he’s conservative enough on the issues that matter – the economy, business – and he’s got a lifetime of experience actually executing on that ideology, unlike the current resident.

So yeah, if Romney is the nominee, I won’t need to hold my nose to work and vote for him.  He’s not perfect, but he’s way more than “good enough”.  On a stage full of candidates who would all be better than Obama on every issue, Romney (along with Perry and Cain) stands out from the pack on the issue – the economy.

Could Herman Cain still blow this thing up?  It’s fun to think so; I’d hate to think that our race was already decided 10 months before the convention, 2-4 months before the first caucus or primary.

At any rate, as (I think it was) Mark Steyn noted on the Hewitt show the other day, the GOP race really has devolved  to “who is going to be Marco Rubio’s running mate?”

Polls taken 56 weeks before the election have a very dodgy record predicting real elections.

But they do make for good entertainment.

And this WaPo-ABC Poll is certainly good entertainment:

Overall, 55 percent of Americans expect a Republican victory next year. Fewer, 37 percent, predict that President Obama will win reelection. A majority of independents sense that the GOP nominee will prevail, but there is a gaping difference between party loyalists.

Fully 83 percent of Republicans say the GOP nominee — whoever he or she may be — is likely to claim the presidency next year. Among Democrats, far fewer, 58 percent, say they think Obama will win a second term. A third of Democrats expect a GOP win; just 13 percent of Republicans sense a repeat for Obama.

All the usual caveats apply.

Tangential question: I wonder if Nate Silver will use this poll to handicap the next election?  Or maybe he’s learned his lesson?

Just curious: how is last Saturday’s column by Lori Sturdevant anything but a campaign donation to the DFL?

I’m not going to fisk the whole thing.  Fisking Sturdevant has become a bit like fisking Nick Coleman; after a few years, you start to feel like you’re writing the same bit over and over again.

It’s got all her usual hallmarks; the gauzy, soft-focus mash note to some DFLer or another (Taryll Clark, in this case), the hook-line-and-sinker swallowing of some progressive group or another’s “non-partisan” line (Common Cause and Draw the Line, in this case)…

…and of course, the double standard.  Always, always the yawning double standard.

We meet our old friends “Draw The Line Minnesota”:

But the court’s final authority hasn’t kept Draw the Line Minnesota’s 15-member, multipartisan commission from behaving as if it had the power to draw the lines (hence its name).

In short, it’s showing what an independent redistricting commission would do, if Minnesota had been wise enough to create one — as 12 other states have.

And later

Draw the Line is a project of the Midwest Democracy Network, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and the Minnesota Council of Non-profits, and is funded by the Joyce Foundation and the Bush Foundation. Its commission includes a mix of known devotees of each of Minnesota’s major parties, plus a handful of that rare breed — true independents.

Why doesn’t Sturdevant favor the reader with any numbers?

Because they show how disingenuous she’s being.  The “multipartisan”  commission includes 2 Republicans, 1 “Independence Party” member and 12 who are either DFL activists, activists for groups that are closely aligned with the DFL, or people who work at institutions that are little but feeders for the DFL.

So to Sturdevant, “Draw The Line Minnesota” – which is bankrolled by four “progressive” pressure groups – and its “multipartisan” yet almost completely liberal-dominated commission – is “independent”, while…

…well, you could see this coming, couldn’t you?

More telling: Top GOP operatives and money-raisers have formed Minnesotans for Fair Redistricting. It’s a sway-the-court group that’s hired top legal talent — including former state Chief Justice Eric Magnuson — to argue for a GOP design.

Got that?  Draw The Line, the multi-state non-profit group funded by liberals with deep pockets, is suddenly a plucky underdog, while Big Bad GOP is riding into town on a steamroller powered by stacks of Jacksons.

Apparently Sturdevant thinks that David Lillehaug and the rest of the DFL Lawyers Koffee Klatsch are working pro bono?

Draw the Line Minnesota is a buck-a-plate beanfeed compared with the GOP’s steak-and-lobster operation.

Does Sturdevant have any numbers to back up the comparison?

Of course not.  Nobody does.  Other than an audible from Mike Dean on “The Late Debate” the other night, none of the players have disclosed their funding, and we have precious little basis for fact-checking any of them at this point.

We only know one thing; whatever Sturdevant writes will be calibrated to serve the DFL’s interests.

And, despite insinuations by conservative bloggers, it is not a DFL front group.

Ah.  Well, that settles it then.  Lori says so.

I mean, sure; it’s literally a fact (as far as we can tell) that none of these groups are literally part of the DFL.

And John Wilkes Booth was not a Confederate soldier, but they shared enough goals where it didn’t really make a difference in the end.

And Lori Sturdevant isn’t literally a flak for the DFL, in the sense that “Ken Martin signs her paychecks”; their purposes just happen to be 100% congruent.

.One of the reasons that the left’s various attempts to counter the Tea Party have all failed, and will continue to fail, is that when you look at these hamsters, they just don’t look like America.  They look like superannnuated hippies and adenoidal poli-sci students and Macalester professors and the like.

And now, they’re bringing the magic to the Twin Cities:

Minneapolis, MN. – After this Saturday’s open forum in Stevens Square Park, through a group consensus, we now stand firm in our plans to unite at the Hennepin County

Government Plaza. This plaza is the new focal point for the OccupyMN movement.

Previously our plans were to stand in solidarity with those that occupy Wall Street by rallying at the steps of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

“Stand Firm?”  “Stand in Solidarity?”

Hey, “protesters”; Jane Fonda called; she wants her 40-year-old florid rhetoric back.

The plan has changed to reclaim the Government Plaza as the “People’s Plaza”.

It is time to establish a new system that values people over profits. We are the 99% and we are moving to reclaim our mortgaged future.

They’re going to “reclaim” big government property…for big government?

The Minnesota Occupation Begins:

October 7th, 2011 at 9:00am

The People’s Plaza (Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! – Ed)

300 South 6th Street

Minneapolis, MN 55487-0999

(Hennepin County Government Center Plaza)

I was briefly tempted to go there and videotape the Cantina Band scene that must certainly ensue.

Then I remembered – I have a family to spend time with, and an actual life.

We’ve gotten a zillion questions; finally, I have an answer.

The Northern Alliance Podcasts are available here.

The one labelled #2 is Ed and I.  #3 is Brad “The Closer” Carlson.

Pass the word.

Yes, a new page is suppoed to be on the way.

UPDATE:  IT doesn’t work in Chrome, for whatever reason.

Prenege – To go back on a promise even before it was supposed to be accomplished.

Why, yes – I did spend a bit of time talking redistricting over the weekend, now that you mention it.

On the NARN, it was my pleasure to interview MNGOP Chair Tony Sutton and his deputy, Michael Brodkorb (punctuated by a surprise appearance by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker; I’ll be posting the podcast link as soon as I find it) about the redistricting process and all the outside money the left is pouring into Minnesota to try to skew the process in their favor.

And then, last night, I drove out to Ramsey to appear on “The Late Debate” with Jack Tomczak and Ben Kruse.  I was on a panel with Gary Gross of Let Freedom Ring, Mike Dean of “Common Cause Minnesota”, and Kent Kaiser, who is part of Draw The Line Minnesota’s (DTL-MN) “Citizens’ Commission”.  In the interest of accuracy, I’ll note that in my piece last week, I lumped Kaiser in with the Commission’s liberal hypermajority, because I personally didn’t know any better; Kaiser is of course well-known in GOP circles as one of the good guys; I regret the error…

…especially since he was the unquestionable star of last night’s debate.

I’m not going to try to reconstruct the whole thing from memory – you can check out their podcast at their site, and Gary Gross did an excellent rundown of the proceedings over atLFR.

I’ll recap this bit, though; I walked in there with two main points:  I walked out with four:

Who’s Politicized?:  As Kaiser noted, the GOP legislative majority’s proposal follows the letter of the law, and the spirit of the last several judicial decisions, pretty closely.  The DFL’s map was…well, nonexistant.  They never drew one up.

It was Governor Dayton’s veto that was, as Kaiser noted, exceptionally politically capricious.

And this entire process recaps a pattern we started seeing during the 2008 election, and rose to a crescendo in last year’s gubernatorial race; the DFL isn’t so much a political party as it is a political holding company, outsourcing its actual policy and boots-on-the-ground work to its “strategic partners” – the unions, and the array of astroturf pressure groups like “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Take Action Minnesota”, MPIRG, and “Draw The Line”.

Outside Money: Behind all of Draw The Line and Common Cause’s noble chatter about getting people involved – nay, getting them interested – in the redistricting process, the fact remains that a raft of “progressive” organizations are doing their level best to try to jimmy the redistricting in their favor, in a census period in which GOP-leaning districts exploded and DFL-districts continued withering.  The demographics aren’t a state phenomenon – and either is the left’s effort; “Draw The Line” is a regional, not state, entity, focusing on trying to attenuate (at least) the gains the GOP should get from pure demographics.  More below.

Competition: One of DTL-MN’s priorities – because it’s one of the priorities of its supporting groups (Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the MN Council of Non-Profits and Take Action MN), is “competitive elections”.  On a policy level, this goal – making sure that politicians are accountable to electoral pressure from their voters – is laudable enough.

It’s at the implementation level that it either breaks down or shows its ideological stripes, depending on your point of view.  Minnesota is a divided state – but not evenly or consistently divided.

Let’s look at the example of a hypothetical state of about five million people, which is closely divided on a statewide basis – but where the division stacks up as follows:

• An urban core – three, really – of about a million people that votes about 70/30 Democrat.
• An outer-suburban and exurban ring that votes, in a good year, maybe 52-55 percent GOP.  Let’s assume a huge year, and say it’s 55-45 GOP.
• The rest of the state – about half the population – which, to arrive at the sort of dead-even split that the last three statewide elections have shown, would be divided about 52-48 in favor of the GOP.

Of course it’s not hypothetical at all.  Minnesota is exactly that; a couple of big blue boils, the Twin Cities and Duluth, two Congressional and 20 legislative districts that routinely deliver 70+% to the DFL, surrounded by an exurban ring that, in a blowout year, might go 55-45 GOP (only two GOP-owned legislative districts topped 70% GOP, as opposed to 20 for the DFL), and an outstate that tips a little bit GOP, but is close enough to send Tim Walz and Collin Peterson to Congress.

So to make Minnesota “competitive” across the board, the legislative map would have to look like a couple of bicycle wheels, with spokes radiating out from the Marshall-Lake Bridge (and Canal Park in Duluth) all the way out to the state’s borders; the Congressional map would look like a big Key Lime (mmm, Key Lime) pie.

That is, of course, not acceptable practice.  New boundaries must, as much as possible, preserve existing community boundaries.

The answer, of course, is that Common Cause want the Republican parts of Minnesota to be competitive, and to leave the DFL-dominated Twin Cities and Duluth, and their 20 districts, pretty much alone.

“When did you stop beating your minorities?”: As Gary noted at LFR last week, there is a noxious little bon mot tucked away in the DTL-MN’s site:  “Historically, redistricting has been done out of the public eye, without meaningful public input, and used to dilute the voting power of communities of color“.

A group of “protesters” – the left’s latest attempt to launch a counter-tea-party, largely people who are upset that Obama’s campaign promises have joint-and-severally squibbed out, and therefore insist on his re-election – are supposed to be occupying Hennepin County Government Center today.

Question:  How is that different from last week?

First things first:  Pardon the fact that I’m linking to Infowars.

But this was just too good to miss:  the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters are truly, truly stupid people:

The zeal for totalitarian government amongst some of the “protesters” is shocking. One sign being carried around read, “A government is an entity which holds the monopolistic right to initiate force,” which seems a little ironic when protesters complain about being physically assaulted by police in the same breath.

One woman interviewed by Kokesh also announces her intention to help Obama to capture a second term. How can a self-proclaimed Occupy Wall Street protester simultaneously support the man whose 2008 campaign was bankrolled by Wall Street, whose 2012 campaign is reliant on Wall Street to an even greater extent, and whose cabinet was filled with Wall Street operatives?

My favorite moment – where by “favorite” I mean “scares the crap out of me” – is the nebbishy little product of, no doubt, an exquisitely expensive post-secondary education at 1:45:   “There are certain things called civil liberties which are limitations on democracy”.

Home prices should be flatlining through the rest of the decade,  according to a Risk Managers’ association survey:

 The survey conducted by the Professional Risk Managers’ International Association for FICO, found that 49 percent of respondents do not expect housing prices to rise back to 2007 levels for another nine years. Only 21 percent of respondents said they would.

Home prices are unlikely to recover before 2020 and mortgage defaults will persist for years, says a survey of bank risk managers out Friday.

How’s that bailout working for you, President Obama?

I’ll be on The Late Debate with Jack and Ben at 10PM.

I’ll be appearing with Gary Gross of Let Freedom Ring, Mike Dean of “progressive” astro-turf group Common Cause MN, and Kent Kaiser of the “Citizen’s Commission on Redistricting“.