Everything Old Is New Again

I had a brief burst of nostalgia from my teens earlier this week.

I was filling in for Tom Taylor on the night shift at KEYJ on a lonely, chilly Sunday night when the AP said that Iranian “students” had sacked the US embassy.  Jimmy Carter was president – and, I figured, he would be for four more years  “I mean”, thought the young Democrat-leaning Mitch mind,  “who do the GOP have?  Baker?  Reagan?  Huh?”

The Iranian “students” are back at it – and so is the Democrat party’s out-of-his-depth President (emphasis added):

President Obama’s slow ride down Gallup’s daily presidential job approval index has finally passed below Jimmy Carter, earning Obama the worst job approval rating of any president at this stage of his term in modern political history.

Since March, Obama’s job approval rating has hovered above Carter’s, considered among the 20th century’s worst presidents, but today Obama’s punctured Carter’s dismal job approval line. On their comparison chart, Gallup put Obama’s job approval rating at 43 percent compared to Carter’s 51 percent.

As the story notes, Carter was well below Obama’s current numbers; Americans actually rallied around the president after the crisis erupted; Carter worked long and hard to squander that national mandate.

How does this compare with other presidents’ first terms?

According to Gallup, here are the job approval numbers for other presidents at this stage of their terms, a year before the re-election campaign:

— Harry S. Truman: 54 percent.

— Dwight Eisenhower: 78 percent.

— Lyndon B. Johnson: 44 percent.

— Richard M. Nixon: 50 percent.

— Ronald Reagan: 54 percent.

— George H.W. Bush: 52 percent.

— Bill Clinton: 51 percent.

— George W. Bush: 55 percent.

What’s more, Gallup finds that Obama’s overall job approval rating so far has averaged 49 percent. Only three former presidents have had a worse average rating at this stage: Carter, Ford, and Harry S. Truman. Only Truman won re-election in an anti-Congress campaign that Obama’s team is using as a model.

Just saying.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes in re a Carl Bogus column in the Strib:

Modern conservatives are stupid and wrong because they bitterly cling to obsolete sentiments about Commies and God, first articulated by William F. Buckley, Jr. in “God and Man at Yale.”

OR

Modern conservatives see government domination of industry, finance and medicine weakening us economically while free love, no-fault divorce, abortion-on-demand, flag burning and group-identity indoctrination weaken our moral fiber, both threatening to leave our country worse off when our children inherit it than when we inherited it; and we justly resent that trend.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

The Bogus piece purports that reading God And Man At Yale will explain everything you need to know about modern American conservatism.

I suggest that while there’s some merit to that, you can actually learn a lot more about the modern media by reading Bogus’ take on Buckley.

More tomorrow.

The Stench Of Revenge

I’m of many minds about  this story (the photos are at the link; it’s safe, but tasteless, for work).

Rossie Brovent wants £60,000 in damages from Ryan Fitzjerald.

Rossie, from Dayton, Ohio, US, wanted a scene from the Narnia trilogy inked on her back.

But thaaaat’s not what happened…

Instead she was left with a pile of excrement with flies buzzing around it.

Ms. Brovent’s ex-boyfriend had a reason…:

Tattoo artist Ryan turned rogue after discovering that Rossie had cheated on him with his best friend.

Thoughts:

  1. On the one hand – ick.  I mean – ick.
  2. On the other hand, it’s only in the details that it’s worse than most tattoos, especially full-back ink.  Note to people with full-back or ful-frontal tattoos; ugh.  Ugh ugh ugh.  That means you.   Ick.  I mean – yes, again – Ick.
  3. Seriously.  Call me a child of another era – one where tattoos meant that someone had been in the military (good) or prison (not good), but I think America is going to wake up someday from its fixation with tattoos the same way people woke up from hair styles they tried back in the seventies – except they won’t be able to get a hair cut and burn a bunch of photos to eliminate the evidence.  Nothing short of third-degree burns will get you out of that.
  4. Seriously, Mr. Fitzjerald – not classy.
  5. And yet I’m curiously impelled to give you at least some style points.

I see an Administration ban on drunk tattooing coming up.

UPDATE/CORRECTION:  When I wrote this, I wrote it more as a commentary on the battle of the sexes and on America’s gauche fixation with body art than as legal reporting.  I gotta confess, I also thought “reads like a hoax, and I’ll bet it’s henna”.

Which is good, since the story is…well, at least all of the names and the legal action are apparently fake, according to this story from which, I note, all mention of the existence or permanence of the tattoo itself is absent.

The Real Eighties: Girls Wanna Rock

“Music journalism” is, by and large, about as useful as road treadmills:

And one of its biggest, oldest, hoariest memes – nearly every “music journalist” trundles it out every four or five years or so – is to trot out a couple of female musicians and write glowingly about “women breaking into the testosterone-laced world of rock and roll!”.

They all need to take a pill.  It was all done, usually better, by 1984 or so.

Continue reading

Immigration: Six Theses

The GOP has been schizphrenic on immigration for as long as I can remember.

Which is understandable – because I think most of us Republicans, as individuals, are schizophrenic about it.  Or, to pick a less loaded term, we believe things that seem, on their surface, to be contradictory; we support immigration – we just want people to follow the rules and come to this country legally.

So I’m going to try to state the case, contradictions and all.

  1. I think it was Fred Thompson who really stated the true conservative case; we support a high, impermeable fence, but a wide, well-lit gate.
  2. As to that “wide, well-lit gate” bit – when I was at Dan Severson’s campaign launch, I heard a Latino minister talk about one of the dynamics behind illegal immigration; it takes someone 10-15 years for a Mexican citizen to legally come to this country.  Of course, there’s a chicken and egg dynamic here; we have plenty of Central American immigrants in this country – it’s just that many of them are here illegally.  It’s time to revamp how we handle legal immigration.  Indeed…
  3. ….we have to have a rational legal immigration policy.  Immigration – the legal variety – has always been one of this nation’s big strengths.  It’s more important than ever, as Europe’s demographics stagnate, China deals with the long term demographic fallout of the “one child policy”, and the developing world remains vastly younger than the Western world.  The US has been lucky – both Europe’s and America’s populations are ageing, as birth rates drop.  It’s immigration that’s prevented our society from ageing into obsolescence.  We’ll need more of that.
  4. OK, now to the high wall – when not only immigrants seeking jobs, but every zeta and narcotraficante that wants to drive a Hummer full of firearms across the border can do it with relative impunity, then talk about “do we need a border fence”, or at least something that forces people to come to this country via the legal route, is simply ridiculous.  This nation not only has a right to to protect its sovereignty – it is one of its few genuine obligations.  If the government can’t secure our borders, there is truly no reason for it to exist.
  5. Perhaps the real high wall we need is to keep out liberals and the media (pardon the redundancy) out of the US.  They both adopted a meme years ago – whenever conservatives refer to wanting to crack down on illegal immigration, painstakingly leave out the”illegal” bit.  The media and left (ptr) have been enaged in a decades-long effort to misrepresent the mainstream right’s approach to immigration.
  6. That being said – misrepresentation aside, what is the conservative approach to immigration reform and curbing illegal immigration?  Rounding ’em up and sending ’em back is certainly not practical, even if there were the political will to do it, which there is not.  OK – so what is a realistic approach?  You don’t want amnesty, fine – what is your answer?
For my purposes?  High fence, wide gate, deport all illegals that run afoul other laws (ban the “sanctuary city” – that’s the prerogative of churches, not municipal government).

The Ongoing Bluff

The Strib’s Mike Kaszuba on why the Vikes threats to move are likely as not just a cheap bluff, not unlike your teenager threatening to run away.

It’s about the numbers:

If the National Football League were to let the Minnesota Vikings leave the state over the team’s inability to get public financing for a new stadium, it would be tampering with what has been a golden goose.

Television ratings for the Vikings in recent years have been among the best in the league, according to the NFL and Scarborough Sports Marketing, a New York-based subsidiary of the Nielsen Company and Arbitron Inc., the media and advertising ratings giants.

And it goes beyond market share:

The percentage of Minnesotans who watched a game on television, attended a game or listened to one in a given year consistently tops 60 percent, said Bill Nielsen, vice president for sales at Scarborough Sports Marketing. “Over [the past] 11 years of data, the lowest [rating] was three-fifths of the market,” he said.

More importantly, Nielsen said, polling shows that Vikings fans fit the demographics most sought by television advertisers. “Vikings fans make more money per household than the total [Minnesota] market, their homes are worth more, they’re more likely to be employed full time, more likely to be college educated,” he said.

Read the whole thing; TV ratings don’t make the Vikings move-proof, by any means.  But the Vikings are trying to shake up the voters with the threats (see teenager reference, above).

“Well, Golly, Elmer – We’re Gonna Have To Hire A Fella From Minneapolis To Help Us Spend This Money!”

(NOTE:  For purposes of comedic affect, the author, Mitch Berg, is going to write most of this piece in an affected “North Dakota” accent.  The author notes in advance that the written patois actually sounds a lot more like a rural Oklahoma accent with overtones of rural Tennessee.  The author acknolwedges this, but notes that trying to write in an accent from the movie “Fargo” has little comedic affect, and is almost equally linguistically inaccurate, and begs your indulgence.  And now, on with the actual posting).

I been moved down here from North Dakota since nigh on 25 years now.  Back before I moved to the big city and all its temptations and lights, I didn’t know how to write so good.  Being from a rurl state and all, edumacation wasn’t our strong soot.

In fact, untel we got some people from the big city to come and tell us how to run our lifes. we was just a bunch of loosers who ain’t know how to do much but drive plows and drink beer.

Thanks to the people from the big city, I now know how to write dern gooder than I used to.

They done the same thing with gummint back in my home state.  Back before the big city folks came to North Dakota (or Nodak, as us all calls it), we ain’t known how to run a gummint as well as the folks in Minnesota.  Oh, we balanced our budgets for years, back when the budget been small and the state barely had a pot to whiz in.  But we were not as advanced as the people in Minnesota, who kept growing their budgets and battling over budget defecates, whatever they are.

Now, back in my home state they done found Awl.  Big Awl.  Lots of awl.  The whole western half of the state is like Saudi Arabia now.  Awl is everywhere.  And all these big-city folks, like Minnesota Public Radio, have been trying to tell the folks back home what a bad deal that is, how having money and stuff is making the state all miserable – which I kinda thought been funny, since I’m old enough to remember the eighties, when farming fell into the same kind of depression that housing is in now, and a good chunk of the state’s farms got foreclosed on and you could buy entire little towns for the price of the paperwork it took to print the deed.

Anyway, awl’s done changed all that.  And that means there’s a lot of money plumb coming in to the state’s coffins.

And shore nuff, a big city guy, Dave Mindeman from MnpAct, is telling all them hicks what’s best for ’em:

North Dakota is getting a little bit cocky.

There is a movement going on in the frozen tundra to put the elimination of property taxes on the ballot in 2012. Can you imagine? No property tax statements. Nothing.

Cocky?  That word ain’t never describe my kin back home.  “Passive Aggressive” is the one I hear more often, but I have no idea what that means, because none of us are smart enough to know what them words means.

Anyway, Mindeman has a word or two fer us hayseeds:

Now, granted, North Dakota can afford to do this. We all know about the oil boom going on in the western part of the state. Oil revenue taxation is a major windfall. So, the money lost on eliminating property taxes can probably be recovered.

Provided we all isn’t too stupid!

But I digest.

But that’s not the problem.

Cities and counties utilize property taxes for a very specific pupose (sic). Local services. Let’s say this all comes to pass. The local city councils and county boards have no assessed income from the property valuations. What happens?

Well, the state legislature would have to appropriate it. A kind of massive LGA if you will. Cities and counties would have to compete for state dollars…..a kind of massive “pick me…pick me” distribution.

Which is sort of what LGA has become in Minnesota.

Budget calculations would be in reverse mode. Instead of taking the base line of assessments and then deriving priority needs based on what you can collect, city and county governments would estimate what is needed and then lobby the state to get it.

All that’s true.

But since Mindeman brought up LGA (pardon me as I momentarily abandon the patois of my native land and get to some writing here), let’s take a look at some history.

A little over forty years ago, Minnesota noticed that there were, to paraphrase John Edwards, “Two Minnesotas” – an outstate Minnesota that was aging rapidly, was tied to agriculture (which is intensely cyclical) and mining (which wasn’t, but was also falling off rapidly as the US steel industry obsoleted itself), and the Metro area, which was young, highly educated, growing rapidly, and making a lot of money.  There was a significant disparity of wealth in the state.  The powers that be at the time decided it’d be useful to take some state revenue from the wealthy parts of the state and use it to help the poorer parts – at the time rural and outstate – pay for some of the infrastructure of modern life.  Now, as the Twin Cities and Duluth shrank and got poorer (mostly as a result of DFL policies), the original intent of LGA has been perverted beyond it’s original scope – but that’s a story for another blog post.

Now, remember the bit above about the disparity of wealth between the Twin Cities and, say, Thief River Falls back in the late sixties?  And LGA’s justification – enabling the Thief River Fallses of Minnesota to afford a new school and some traffic lights that they couldn’t manage on their own tax bases?

Multiply that disparity by an order of magnitude in North Dakota.  Towns like Williston, Dickinson, Bismarck, and even flood-ravaged Minot are booming; real estate values are soaring, to the point where it’s making it impossible for the Air Force people who’ve been the stable mainstay of the area economy for the past sixty years to live in the area.  An apartment in Williston costs about as much as an apartment in Manhattan or San Francisco. And it’s creating ripples of scarcity that are jacking up prices all the way across the state – including places like cha-cha Fargo (itself prosperous on the fringe of the oil economy as well as a tech boomlet) and less-blessed places like my own hometown, Jamestown, which is well outside the Bakken oil patch and has, like much of the state between Fargo and Bismarck, a shrinking, ageing population with an income base that is still tied to agriculture, tourism and the military, and whose property values are holding steady even as prices rise.

And so if the notion of Local Government Aid made sense in Minnesota forty years ago – and Mr. Mindeman, if you preferred the post-2002 LGA system to the pre-2002 one, let me know, since I suspect you did not – made sense, then why doesn’t it make sense in smoothing out the vastly wider disparity in North Dakota today?

The temptation would be to overcompensate for what your budget actually needs. To ask for more with the expectation that there will be a reduction.

But think about that. Every city and county would be asking for extra and their state representatives would then have to petition the entire legislature to grant the requested amount. Monetary requests would soon get out of hand and the state would be picking winners and losers across the board.

You mean – like the LGA system in Minnesota?

Not pretty.

Maybe, just maybe, you can make that all work in a booming economic time that North Dakota has for the moment. But these oil booms are always temporary. And the future is not going to be about oil….it’s about alternative fuels.

North Dakota could lock themselves into an LGA problem that makes Minnesota’s ongoing issue look like a piece of cake.

They could if’n (oh, dear, I find myself slipping back into my native patois again) the whole “how to run a demercratic gummint” thing is just too hard fer them to figger out.

Mebbe we could send them some kids from the Wellstoned Center to hep them with all that complicated gummint and thinkin’ and stuff.

The problem is that taking that local decision making away from the local government officials that have the best chance to understand local needs, is a prescription for chaos.

Even more chaotic than the scramble for housing in Williston.

Even more chaotic than the scramble among logicians to figure out exactly what Mindeman means; is LGA a good idea in Minnesota, where the income disparity done switched isself around in the past forty years (outstate supports the Metro, today), but a bad idea in NoDak, where the disparity issue is the same as it was in Minnesota in the seventies, only much bigger?  And if so, why – because North Dakotans are too dumb to figure out an idea and process that Minnesotans have turned into such a finely-tuned success story over the past forty years?

I think that’s what you city folk call “Sarcasm”.  I saw it on Jon Stewart the other night.

To Be Frank

Frannie, Freddie, I got an offer ‘ya can’t refuse, see…

Barney Frank decides his 2012 re-election is another entity that’s too big to fail. 

 The coverage of a politician’s announcement of their retirement, not unlike the coverage of their eventual passing, usually reads as an enduring time-capsule.  From their fame to their foibles, a few key sentences will forever define a politician who has left the political limelight. 

Retiring 16-term liberal Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank had plenty of fame (fierce conservative critic; first openly gay member of Congress) and foibles (a prostitution scandal that nearly ended his career), all of which were extensively covered by the press as he announced that due in part to redistricting, he was choosing to forgo another run.  Yet to read or listen to the mainstream press’ coverage of Frank’s farewell tour, nary a word was spoken or written about what should be Frank’s infamous, enduring legacy:

 ‘These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

 

 While the media’s hagiography of Frank dominated the afternoon news cycle (CNN called Frank “a teacher” of Congress), others noted that “Fannie, Freddie Lose A Friend In Frank” as Investors Business Daily‘s headline remarked. 

His role as the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the Great Recession would have defined Frank’s legacy had he been a Republican.  Frank’s determined ability to ignore the housing bubble until it was too late to save Fannie or Freddie or avert the financial crisis played a not-insignificant role. And when Fannie and Freddie finally failed, together they accounted for nearly 12 million subprime and other low quality and risky loans (40% of outstanding loans at the time).  Most of the loans existed to meet the affordable housing goals that Frank, and others, argued so passionately to protect at a projected cost to taxpayers of $400 billion.  But despite being among those in Washington “at the wheel”, outside of a few more conservative publications, Frank has largely escaped the Joseph Hazelwood-esque blame of running the American economy ashore.

Frank’s defenders can rightly point out that he did not become chairman of the HFSC until after the 2006 elections; implying that the Fannie & Freddie reign of error happened solely due to the previous Republican majority.  Such a defense gets the dates and times correct, but little else.  The expansion of housing lending authority had roots in the 1990s, not the 2000s and had Frank worked with Republican efforts to constrain Fannie & Freddie, instead of insisting that there were no problems, legislation might have been adopted in the early 2000s that could have lessen (not prevented, as some may argue) the financial crisis.

Frank tried to undo his part in the Fannie & Freddie story, telling Larry Kudlow in a 2010 interview that “it was a great mistake to push lower-income people into housing they couldn’t afford and couldn’t really handle once they had it” while expressing hopes that Fannie & Freddie would soon occupy the dust-bin of poorly constructed governmental program history.  Of course, Frank’s preferred methods of “reform” could easily add another $5 trillion of debt to the country’s maxed-out gold card of credit.

The Real Eighties: Anything Goes

In 1978, the Swedish pop band ABBA – one of the biggest artists of the seventies – built “Polar Studios” – a top-of-the-line recording studio..  It was exquisitely expensive, even by the standards of the day, what with the acoustics and top of the line mixing console and peripherals and all.

And, a few years later, in 1981, got even moreso; the group spent over half a million dollars, reportedly, just for a new 3M digital recorders, making Polar the world’s first commercial digital recording studio. All for a recording studio that had about as much recording power as your cell phone today.

And in 1981, ABBA released The Visitors, the first commercial record recorded purely using digital technology.

It was the only notable thing about the record.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

One of the eighties’ biggest artists was Bruce Springsteen.

If you’ve read this blog at all, you know I’m a big Springsteen fan – starting in the late seventies.  The eighties were hog heaven for a Bruce fan, of course; The River was a classic, Born In The USA was an inescapable hit, and Tunnel of Love was a wonderful, if very downbeat, record.

But today we’re going to focus two other albums from the era.

Nebraska came out in 1982.  After the rock and roll thrill ride of The River, Nebraska was unsettlingly bleak; a downbeat homage to Woody Guthrie chock full of songs about murderous drifters and regular schmucks driven over the edge.

I mean, this was the “single”…

…or as close to it as they got. Nobody mistook it for Madonna or the Culture Club – or for1984’s Born in the USA, which was right behind Thriller among the top sellers of the big-selling decade.

(Seriously – bleak):

It was a jarring shift, after the rock and roll thrill ride of The River.

And yet in some ways, Nebraska may have had a greater effect on popular music today – at least, the business of popular music – than any of his others.

Because it was, in its entirety, recorded on one of these little numbers:

It’s a TEAC Tascam four-track cassette deck.  It allowed a musician – or anyone, really – to record four tracks of music onto a conventional audio cassette (and I’ll let everyone in the house over the age of 32 or so explain what a “conventional audio cassette” was.  Thanks).  It was the same basic sort of technology that the Beatles used to record all of their albums (albeit there was a certain amount of engineering technique involved with that).  And it ran for under $1,000 – well within the range of many hopeful musicians, to say nothing of platinum-sellers.

And with a little creative use of the monitor circuit, you could easily mix three tracks down to one, and leave yourself room for a couple more instruments, allowing a single musician to record a full-band demo with all the instruments and vocals.  Just like I did from 1984 through 1990 with its even cheaper competitor, the Fostex X15:..

…which listed for $399 at Marguerite’s Music in Moorhead in the summer of ’84, and allowed me to do demo tapes where I’d record…

  1. a guide guitar and metronome on to track 1,
  2. Drums and bass onto 2-3, and a new rhythm guitar onto 1,
  3. Bounce drums and bass down to 4,
  4. Organ (a Farfisa combo that I found in a pump room in my college chapel, actually) onto 2
  5. Bounce the rhythm guitar and organ onto 3,
  6. Do vocals and a lead guitar part onto 1 and 2, respectively,
  7. Mix the whole thing down onto another cassette deck.

Nebraska sold a few million.

I did not.

The point, though, was that not only was the cost of recording technology dropping, but the idea of being able to record an album in your kitchen or basement and put it out and sell copies was…

…well, still far-fetched.  Springsteen could do it because he’s well, Springsteen.  And he wrote great music.  And had a record label that wanted to put his stuff out there.  And back then, the record label was the gatekeeper.

It would take the Internet to change that – as well  as a jump back to ABBA and The Visitors and Polar Studios.

Their digital recording suite cost a solid half a million back in 1980.

Ten years later, when I was at KDWB, a suite perhaps an order or two of magintude more powerful cost the station about $50K.

Ten years later, the first round of home digital recorders – including the Korg D8…

….put a home digital recording console with eight tracks of digital recording power – every bit as much power as KDWB’s sysem if not more (albeit a little less flexibility – it was a home studio, after all) into a handy carry-along package similar to the Tascam, for under $1000 – where the Tascam had been twenty years earlier.

And today, Apple gives away “GarageBand”, a piece of home recording software combining the recording power of Polar Studios (albeit not the acoustics and peripherals) with a recording GUI that was sci-fi material in 1990, and digital sound modeling technology that was pretty thrilling stuff ten years ago.

Don't look now, but somebody's trying to imitate Jimi Hendrix, circa 1966.

…allowing a home musician to record dozens of tracks, process them using digital modeling that was the province of the pro ten years ago, and put it out via the Internet and start the process of marketing it via the Intenet, all on a home PC that…

…I did say Apple “gives it away” (provided you drop at least $700 on a Macintosh product), right?

And that was one of the big legacies of eighties music; two of the currents that would lead to the rise of the Do It Yourself musician, and, some say, the downfall of the major record labels – the idea of do-it-yourself music and the growing ubiquity of technology – really teed up in the early eighties.

Calculations

We’re heading toward the big show, when it comes to redistricting; oral arguments start next week, and we’re about five weeks away from a putative decision, just in time for Minnesotans to find out what precinct they get to caucus at.

And things are still very much in flux.

Jake Grovum at Politics in Minnesota has an excellent piece that sums up the main issues involved in the redrawing of the state’s lines.

The big yak about the Legislative (and, let’s be frank, GOP) plan is that it combines all of Northern Minnesota into one big Eighth district; it lumps a bunch of conservative northwestern Minnesota in with the always-Trotskyite Iron Range.

The single northern district plan prompted howls of protest from DFLers, especially on the Iron Range, but some say the demographics may force the five-judge panel to consider exactly that kind of realignment.

“The GOP map in the northern district is something that the panel is going to take seriously,” Jacobs predicted.

The DFL would very much like to protect the DFL’s one-time sinecure, and make it (in their dreams) easier for a DFLer to retake in 2012.

But the simple fact is the state’s demographics are changing; the Range and the Twin Cities are shrinking, along with much of outstate Minnesota – and the ‘burbs and exurbs are booming.  Those are facts, found in the census.

Not in the census, or through any other empirical source, but I will bank on it being true – the DFL-dominated regions are shrinking precisely because they are DFL-dominated regions.  The Range is dying, partly because the market for steel got priced overseas back in the sixties through the eighties, and partly because the DFL has spent decades trying to kill off any surviving parts of the mining industry (although somehow apparently believing that as long as there’s a strong union, the workers will continue to get paid for being there).

And as to the Twin Cities?

The metro-area corollary to the outstate dilemma is how to best balance the booming suburbs and exurbs with a mostly stagnant, yet distinct, urban core.

And the metro area is, I suspect, an even better example of my theory; sixty years of lock-step DFL domination, fiscal profligacy and politicized social policy have sent a fair chunk of the Metro area scampering for the ‘burbs.  You can see twenty or thirty years into the future by looking at an area’s schools – and when double-digit percentages of Minnesota’s parents, especially ethnic minorities, are decamping from the metro school systems in favor of charter schools and open enrollment in the ‘burbs, that doesn’t bode well for the Cities’ futures; to paraphrase the great political scientist George Clinton, when parents free their kids minds from the metro school systems, their asses will follow.

And they’ve been following for a generation now, and it’s only accelerating.  The DFL – and their retinue of astroturf activists at Draw the Line, Common Cause MN, the Minnesota Council of Non-Profits and Take Action Minnesota – desperately want the redistricting process to ignore this, and to give disproportionate representation to areas that do not have the population to deserve it, because the people are voting with their feet.

It’s this dynamic that points to perhaps the strongest advantage for Republicans — both in congressional and legislative districts.

The demographics are in the GOP’s favor. Republican attorneys already persuaded the five-judge panel to consider a more expansive 11-county metro area rather than the traditional seven-county region.

The entire mission of groups like Draw The LIne and Common Cause is to try to prevent, or forestall, that realization.

And they don’t care how they have to torture fact to do it.

More later this week.

City Business?

A little bird in Minneapolis sent me an invitation.

Not, it’s not to me.  It was to someone else – for a $100/plate fundraiser for Minneapolis’ Ward 3 Councilcritter Diane Hofstede, featuring Governor Dayton, Rep. Phyllis Kahn,City Council president Barbara Johnson, and a galaxy of Minneapolis DFL stars.

Not my kind of crowd.

The interesting bit, though, is the stationery.

That’s City of Minneapolis stationery.

For an election fundraiser, this coming Thursday night.

Is this kosher?

Or is this just another of the petty little bits of corruption that attend life in a one-party city?

UPDATE:  I’m informed that the letter and the use of the letterhead is kosher.  It says “not printed at taxpayers expense” in the lower left corner.

That answers that question…

Sustainable Train Of Thought

Did you know I’m a clairvoyant?

Either did anyone else!

SCENE:  Tanya Grumpleman-Morriss, 21, a Grievance Studies major at Bard College, is making her new sign for the next day’s “Occupy” Rally.  The entire scene takes place in her head.

GRUMPLEMAN-MORRISS: My last sign was such a success…

I need to come up with something equally catchy, profound and cogent.

GRUMPLEMAN-MORRISS rips a big square out of a box for a big-screen TV.

GRUMPLEMAN-MORRISS:  Hm.  It’s a beautiful night.  The stars are like crystals.  Hm.  There we go!  “It’s a Crystal Night for the 1%”

She scibbles the saying frantically onto the sign.  Then she goes to the dorm fridge and grabs a Red Bull.

GRUMPLEMAN-MORRISS: (quaffing the Red Bull)   Hmm.  I’m on a roll.  What else?  I’m so tired of having to worry about the future.  We need to come up with a…a final solution!  

She frantically tears out another square from a Macintosh box.

GRUMPLEMAN-MORRISS: ” We need a Final Solution to rebalance our society!”  (Whispers sotto voce): Perfect!

She gets up and makes a cup of coffee with one of those Keurig individual coffee makers.

GRUMPLEMAN-MORRISS:  Maybe we need to ennoble the concept for working for a living…Hey!  Perfect!  

She frantically rips out another square.

GRUMPLEMAN-MORRISS: “Dear 1%: Work makes you free!”

She admires her handiwork.

GRUMPLEMAN-MORRISS: Goddess, those Teabaggers are culturally illiterate!

The Talk Remembers When

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

  • Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – moves to 1-3PM starting tomorrow!
  • Ed and I are on from 1-3PM Central. We’ll be talking about the week in review – a little bit of political this, a little bit of electoral that.  Tune in!
  • 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!

The Real Eighties: Play Guitar

This week in “The Real Eighties” is dedicated to the impact of new technology on popular music.

Earlier this week, we talked about how the tumbling price of synthesizers – almost invariabely keyboard instruments – affected the entry point to creating some form of music.

It wasn’t just keyboards.  In a sense, the eighties was the golden age of the guitar hero.  We talked about that a bit last week – the golden age of the guitar pyrotechnicist which started in the late seventies, but really took hold in the eightes.

The change in technology sparked a trend in the music press – articles predicting that the revolution in technology would make the guitar obsolete, as people flocked to new, cheap keyboards.

Of course, technology had exactly the same effect on guitarists.  As the price of sound-processing technology kept dropping, it became possible for guitarists to create entirely new approaches to the instrument.

More below the jump (so the rest of the page can actually load…)

Continue reading

Happy Thanksgiving!

Here’s Ronald Reagan’s Thanksgiving address from1985:

He’d just rescued the nation from almost two decades of irresponsible spendthrift government,setting the stage for the greatest run of prosperity this nation had ever known.

Kinda makes you hope anything can really happen, doesn’t it?

Anyway – I hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving!

Not The Most Myopic Response I’ve Gotten, But It Is A Low Bar Indeed

To: “Ed Brayton” of “Free Thought Blogs”

From: Mitch Berg, “Right Wing Conspirator”

Re: Your Response Has Made Me Slam My Face Into My Palms So Many Times My Forehead Is Getting A Callous.

Ed,

I noticed in my pingbacks that you responded to my obit of the Minnesota “Independent” / Minnesota Monitor

Here’s the dumbest thing anyone has said so far about the transition that the American Independent News Network is undergoing. It’s the usual right-wing boogeyman being trotted out: “Soros pushes the ‘flush’ lever.” Sorry, but AINN had not received any funding from a Soros organization in years.

Maybe – and irrelevant.

For starters, Soros-funded organizations were involved with the franchise early in its existence; the deliciously-ironically-named “Center for Independent Media” got its start in a spare office at “Media Matters”, and you can’t get more Soros-backed than that.

Which is fine – Soros has First Amendment rights, too.  The problem was, for the first year or two of the blog’s existence, “editor” Robin Marty stonewalled and denied there was any connection – up until Eric Black confirmed, as he left the blog for the greener (fiscal) pastures at the MinnPost that yes, Soros was one of the sugardaddies that kept the lights on.

Beyond that, though, Mr. Brayton?  “Soros” is a sort of shorthand on the right for every “liberal with deep pockets” that is practicing checkbook advocacy, from Alita Messinger to Michael Moore to everyone in between. Sort of like “Fox News” is the lib’s code term for the left’s belief that the media is really conservative, or “ALEC” or “Koch Brothers” or “Richard Mellon Scaife” are the belief that conservative thought just has to be inorganic and merely a front for some sort of shadlowy Scrooges in the background.

These people really do think that anyone who has ever gotten money from any organization that Soros has given money to actually works for Soros and that he calls the shots — even if there hasn’t been any such funding relationship in a long time.

{Facepalm}

No, we really don’t “really do” think that.

What we do think is that, somehow, the Mindy – which has never run ads, but has always paid its “staff” the kind of money that no conservative blog with the Mindy’s middling-to-low traffic numbers ever gets – is getting its bills paid by someone who feels the need to underwrite “progressive” media.  Is it George Soros?  Or is it someone else?  For purposes of criticizing the liberal alt-media, it’s a distinction with only an academic difference.  y t

It’s just another way life on Planet Wingnuttia differs from the reality on this planet.

But only if you ignore all context.  Which is just another way life on Planet Progressive Alt-Media differs from the reality on this…oh, wait, you already used that.

Oh, and he also says that the organization has “always been a hothouse flower – something that couldn’t exist without massive outside support.” Well, yeah. That’s how non-profit journalism works. It’s how the entire non-profit sector works, including a million different conservative foundations. Few non-profits would exist without lots of outside support. How terribly shocking.

Right, the faux vapors are cute, and all, but the point is that non-profits generally exist for a reason – to promote the sale and use of ketchup, or to lobby for flax farmers, or to reach an audience.  Many of us wondered what was that attending purpose to the MinnMon / Mindy franchise over the past six years of being floated – in relative luxury, if you’re a mid-level blogger like, well, me.  Its demise is just one data point toward the conclusion that “we were right to wonder”.

The commenters at the Minnesota Post do even worse.

[Wait – didn’t you say that I wrote the “the dumbest thing” ever said on the subject? How many superlatives can you give in one posting? – Ed]

And another, Mike Izon, gets even dumber:

It’s because of the lawsuit. They know they will lose and you can’t get money from a news organization that isn’t making money anyways.

The lawsuit he is referring to is the one filed by nutball extraordinaire Bradlee Dean against AINN and Rachel Maddow. And I laughed out loud at the idea that there are people out there deluded enough to think that has anything to do with the decision to close down some of the AINN sites. I’ll have more on that in a separate post.

Do keep us posted.

That is all.

Shutdown: Let’s Do It Again

Last summer’s government shutdown, according to Minnesota Management and Budget, was a wash:

A nearly three-week Minnesota government shutdown in July over a budget impasse left broad public frustration, but little impact on state finances, the state’s budget office said on Tuesday.

The longest and most expansive state government shutdown in Minnesota history left 19,000 government employees sitting at home and shuttered road construction projects, state parks, highway rest stops, the state lottery and horse racing tracks.

Costs for lost revenue from compliance with taxes, the lottery, the state parks and preparation leading up to the shutdown totaled about $60 million, but Minnesota also saved about $65 million in compensation not paid to state workers.

That, of course, was why the shutdown only lasted three weeks; Dayton left Saint Paul to go outstate, saw that nobody really cared, and realized that his gambit to squeeze Minnesotans into compliance with his tax-hiking platform was doomed.

Indeed the capsule summary shows a slim $5 million profit.  Here’s where I’ll call BS.  If the MMB – which is an executive office which reports to Mark Dayton – says it’s a $5 million profit, the state likely made out much better than that.

No, I have nothing to base that on – but experience watching the DFL-dominated bureacracy.  Which, in Minnesota, is both unsupportable and usually accurate.

Just saying.

Conservatives For Romney?

I don’t have a dog in the presidential fight yet.  I’m nowhere close to picking a candidate.

Oh, I am advocating – for principles.  Seeing which candidate best articulates what I believe in – whatever that is – is the real test for me.  And none of the candidates is perfect.  None of them ever are.

Other than me.  And I’m not running.

Of course, now is the time to be an uncompromising purist.  If you support Santorum?  Paul? Perry?  Accept no compromise!

I’ve got some of the same problems with Mitt Romney that most of us conservatives do; he’s the “establishment” pick, for starters.

Which is funny, since I caucused for him four years ago – because he was the conservative option in the field.

Joel Pollak at BigGov makes the conservative case for Romney.

The first part is one that the anybody-but-Romney crowd are downplaying – the wages of “electability”:

First, while Obama might drive even more voters to the conservative cause in his second term, he could make lasting changes along the way–especially on the Supreme Court–that would frustrate conservative political goals for generations.

Imperfect as Romney may be, it’d be much better to have him nominating people for the SCOTUS.

Second, foreign policy could return to the fore in 2012–and Romney is one of the few candidates who has a well-informed foreign policy consistent with Ronald Reagan’s tradition of American global leadership.

I’m a lot more comfortable with Romney on foreign than domestic policy.  And Romney has a better command of the issue than any of his opponents.

Of course, domestic policy is what this election is going to be about.  And while Romney may not be “the conservative” candidate, on business and economic issues I think he’s conservative enough.

Finally, while Romney is not quite the establishment figure he is often made out to be, there is something to be said for having an establishment, even one in need of reform. After the dramatic changes of the past decade, Americans are eager for stability. That is a fundamentally conservative impulse, and one that an establishment leader could satisfy.

Democrats believe the best charge against Romney is that he is a “flip-flopper.” It’s not Romney’s inconsistency that worries conservatives, but his underlying convictions. Yet if we consider that the Supreme Court may strike down all or part of Obamacare next spring, and that even a Democratic Congress failed to pass climate change legislation, we may be able to look past the most problematic of Romney’s previous positions.

Sue Jeffers hates it when I say “perfect is the enemy of good enough”.  Down that road, she yells at me, lies mushy importent Arne-Carlson-style RINO-ism.

Which is true.  But down the other road – uncompromising purism – lies the Libertarian Party where, untroubled by ever needing to govern by dint of having been elected to, well, anything, they can sit about their conventions and think big, pure thoughts.  Politics is about, well, not so much being impure, but about making compromises with the other side(s) from a position of such electoral strength that as much of your pure agenda as possible survives.

Michael Reagan put it well when Brad Carlson and I interviewed him at the Midwest Leadership conference; a key facet of his father’s greatness was not his purism – George Will wrote an entire book on how impure a conservative Reagan was – but on his ability to bring the impure to his side.  Which meant compromise.  The sort of thing the “anyone but Romney” crowd eschews today.

As they should – today.  And through the caucuses.  And all way to the Republican National Convention, if need be!

But if he gets the nomination – is he conservative enough?  That’s a great way to start an argument these days in conservative circles:

Romney may not have courted Tea Party support, but he has tacitly adopted key points of its conservative agenda–repealing Obamacare, cutting federal spending, and fixing the entitlement system.

Conservatives should consider supporting Romney–and do so while understanding that unlike Obama’s left-wing base, we will have to be as strong a check on a president we have elected as we have been against one we have opposed.

And that is the big takeaway; for Republicans, the Presidential race is only a quarter of the battle.  To really put a ding in the juggernaut of Obama’s legacy, we have to eject Obama, and take the Senate, and hold and preferably extend our lead in the House, and consolidate and expand our gains at the State level.  Partly to support (we hope) a new president.  And party to keep that new president honest – meaning conservative.

The Real Eighties: Fascination

This week’s episodes in my “Real Eighties” series are about the influence of technology on the decade – and by “decade” I mean “from about 1980 to 1986 or so”.

The biggest influence?  Traditionally, becoming a working, performing, record-selling musician was the culmination of a process that took as long as becoming a doctor; a musician in any genre, from classical through pop, would spend years, even decades, learning the craft, whether it was playing guitar or piano or singing or whatever, well enough to make it in the bigs.  The rock and roll era changed that, somewhat – musicians could get contracts, airplay and sales with less experience and polish.  But the musicians that became known as musicians, even in the rock and roll era, were the ones that either paid their dues in years of working on the craft – artists and craftsmen as diverse as James Burton, Pete Johnson, Steve Cropper and Reg “Elton John” Dwight – and the occasional prodigy (think Eric Clapton and Richard Thompson and, for that matter, Jimi Hendrix).

Punk rock forwarded the idea that amateurism – inspired or, usually, not – could be music, and that music was as much about attitude as craft.

And when that attitude was combined with newly-relatively-cheap technology – frequency-modulated digital synthesizers and sequencers – it became possible for someone who had not spent his/her entire adult life learning how to play an instrument to not only sound good, but impressive.  It’s a trend that’s accelerated over the past thirty years, with Auto-Tune obviating the need to learn to sing and programs like GarageBand putting technology that, in 1981, was found in half-million dollar studio setups on peoples’ laptops for free.

Anyway – the trend led to an awful lot of dreck, naturally – Men Without Hats, anyone?

But it had its upside.  One of the uppiest was Human League, who, along with Thomas Dolby (see yesterday) were famous for being able to make all this new technology sound…well, musical.  And beyond that, human.

And at their best, they were very, very good…

…using the synthesizer to walk the line between familiar and new sounds, and as an expressive medium in a way that’d largely eluded earlier (and, I’ll speak editorially here, a lot of later) efforts at electronic music.

So to the extent the stereotype was right; the revolution in technology brought forth a wave of electronic pop, much of it dreadful. Just as every advance in technology always has, and still does.

“The Administration Has Never Supported “Occupy”, Winston”

John Nolte notes that  the media is frantically backing and filling and trying to remove all record that the Obama administration ever supported the “Occupy” movement:

Two months ago, the White House, Democrats, and the MSM were all sure that the #OccupyWallStreet movement would save them in 2012. With thousands of astro-turfed morons in the streets raging against Wall Street, Obama’s allies hoped to use said morons to create a silver lining in the economic cloud he himself created.

Obama’s goal was pretty simple; create (indirectly, through the unions that’ve been paying the freight for these “protests” all along) a sense that there was a mass movement protesting against the anonymous forces that were keeping the little guy down (but not, of course, the Obama administraiton, which had uncontested control of Congress for two years).

The hope was that by repeating this message incessantly, enough voters could be convinced that Wall Street, and by extension, evil Republicans, were to blame for our chronic unemployment, record deficits, and stillborn economic growth. President Obama who?

 And Obama jumped on the “movement”- his movement – from the beginning:

Now, of course, “Occupy” is rapidly becoming about as popular as Nickelback with voters.  And the AP is dutifully doing damage control for the President they desperately want to keep in office:

And it looks as thought the Associated Press has decided to start the memory-holing with the following:

“Democrats See Minefield in Occupy Protests

NEW YORK (AP) — The Republican Party and the tea party seemed to be a natural political pairing. But what may have seemed like another politically beneficial alliance — Democrats and Occupy Wall Street — hasn’t happened.”

Insert record scratch here.

Sorry AP, but the only reason Democrats see a minefield is because they’re standing in it.

Nolte helpfully exhumes some history that the Dems would rather have disappear – stories of Dems jumping on the Occupy bandwagon:

House Democrats. And look, the story about House Democrats endorsing Occupy is an AP story!

Top Democrats.

Nancy Pelosi.

A President named Obama, who said of Occupy, “We are on their side.”

…The SEIU.

The association between the Democrats and the “nazi-endorsed rat-infested rape camps” needs to pop up again next October.

America: “Occuwhat?”

The “Occupy” movment is drawing a big “meh” from the “American Street”:.

[A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll] finds that 56% of Americans surveyed are neither supporters nor opponents and 59% say they don’t know enough to have an opinion about the movement’s goals.

The survey, however, does show an increase from 20% to 31% in disapproval of the way the protests are being conducted.

Just goes to show you that enough rats, filth, theft, untrammeled entitlement, assault, murder and rape will make even Americans sit up and take notice eventually.

Redistricting: Redefining “Middle”

Minnesota’s redistricting process – mandated by constitutions all up and down the governmental food chain to reallocate our congressional and legislative representation after accounting for changing populations – usually goes a little something like this:

  1. The party in the power in the legislature draws maps that favor their desired outcome, more or less.
  2. The opposing party draws maps that favor their desired outcome, more or less.
  3. Either neither of them wins legislative approval, or the sitting governor (generally) vetoes the legislature’s final product.
  4. The process goes to the courts, which draws its own map, imposes it on the state, and leaves behind some legal precedents and pseudo-legal guidelines (“preserve communities of interest”, “keep districts compact and contiguous”, etc, etc) for the next time through the process.
  5. Lather, rinse and repeat.

And we’ve followed that basic process this time.  The GOP-controlled legislature, led by Rep. Sarah Anderson, drew up a congressional and a legislative map.  According to Kent Kaiser of the “Draw The Line Minnesota” (henceforth DTLM) “Citizen’s Commission on Redistricting” (which I”ve written about at some length in the past – about the commission’s sham nature, Kaiser’s protestations about the commission’s process and DTLM’s opacity, and in the end about the joke they played on us all), the Legislature’s map hewed pretty closely to the precedents set over the past forty years or so of court decisions on the subject.  It did seemingly create a map with four safe-ish conservative seats, three safe DFL seats, and a fairly swing-y district.  The DFL association of various non-profits checkbook advocacy groups that does all the ground work for the DFL cried foul, of course.

Wrongly, I suggest.  The parts of this state that lean DFL – Duluth, the Twin Cities, the Range – have shrunk, at least partly due to people moving away from them and to the parts that actually work.  Which are largely GOP-leaning; the exurban Metro from the third tier of ‘burbs on out, the Rochester area, the drive-through land between Maple Grove and Saint Cloud.  Places with responsible, frugal, in-their-limits municipal government and good schools.

“Draw The Line Minnesota” (DTLM) submitted its congressional and legislative maps next.

And then, finally, last week, with much ado, the DFL’s current caretaker, Ken Martin, released the DFL’s official submissions (congressional and  legislative), to a chorus of catcalls…

…from the DFL.  The plan lumped Betty McCollum and Michele Bachmann into one large (and conveniently DFL-dominated) east-metro district – without telling McCollum:

The Minnesota DFL Party submitted a congressional redistricting plan Friday that would place Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum into a district with GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann…The plan has prompted McCollum’s chief of staff to send an e-mail criticizing the proposal.

 

“The DFL Chair and his high-paid lawyers have proposed a congressional map to the redistricting panel that is hyper-partisan and bizarre,” McCollum’s chief of staff Bill Harper said in the email. “Their plan ignores the judge’s redistricting criteria and it insults established communities of interest, particularly in the Twin Cities East Metro. Congresswoman McCollum has faith in the judges on the panel to draw fair political boundaries that will serve the best interests of all Minnesotans.”

That answers the question “is Bettymac capable of thinking a thought that isn’t blessed by her party’s higher-ups, anyway.

Dave Mindeman of mnpACT wonders:

I can’t decide for sure what the DFL strategy was here. Obviously, the elimination of Bachmann from a safe district was the main goal, but alienating your solid incumbents is an unnecesary side bar. As far as numbers go, a tweak to shore up Walz and another tweak to make Cravaack a little more vulnerable would have accomplished pretty much the same split guaranteed….a 5-3 DFL majority. The DFL lines work to that 5-3 with eliminating Bachmann….the tweaking of current lines would have been a 5-3 without Cravaack.

Mindeman, like a lot of DFL pundits, accepts it as a matter of faith that they’ll beat Cravaack next fall, in much the same way that they accepted that he’d get 30% of the ballot in 2010.  But that’s not really the subject of this post.

No, it’s that I, too, wonder what the DFL’s strategy is.

And to explain the strategy, I think I’m going to refer to the newly-minted “Berg’s Twelfth Law of Hyperbolic Empiricism”.

To wit:  “The humorous or hyperbolic explanation of “progressive” behavior is likely, in direct proportion to the recklessness, extralegality, deviance or confrontiveness of the “progressive” actions being analyzed, to be the correct explanation“.

And knowing that, the hyperbolic reason – “they are trying to release something so far removed to the left that the courts, applying their traditional Scandinavian conflict-aversion to the issue, in trying to split the difference between the DFL and Legislative plans, will find “the middle” is about as far to the left as the DFL really wanted in the first place”.

I’d put money on it.

The Real Eighties: Beep Oink Squawk

All this month as we go through eighties music, I’ve been trying to establish that the one great stereotype of eighties music – that synth-pop was the dominant genre of the decade – is, at thirty years remove, overrated.

Still, it is a fact that the ubuiquity of inexpensive new technology took a genre that was a pseudoacademic curiosity in the late sixties…

A 1970 Moog synthesizer

…and an expensive art project in the seventies, became a mass-market musical commodity in the eighties.

A 1983 Yamaha DX7. Digital, light, reliable, and $2,000, it was the basis for much of the sound of the1980s.

It got to the point, with instruments like the Yamaha DX and Roland Juno-series synths, that synths became replacements for conventional instruments like pianos, basses,organs, and (more or less) horn and sections.

And in and among the “Men Without Hats” and “EBN-OZNs” and other assembly-line synth-pop detritus, there were a few artists that stood out, to others, and to me.

There was Thomas Dolby, most famous for the iconic synth-pop top-forty hit “Blinded Me With Science”. Here’s a recent performance of “One Of Our Submarines”, another early ’80s tune…

Pete Townshend once called Dolby the first synth-pop artist he encountered who made the synthesizer sound like there were actual humans involved.

I remember having endless arguments about the Pet Shop Boys back in 1986. I didn’t get ’em back then.

Gotta confess: I dug A-Ha. Partly the fact that they were Norwegian, partly the cool/iconic rotoscope video…

…and partly because I just plain liked a good chunk of their supernaturally-accessible brit-via-Oslo pop. So sue me.

Of course, not all technological development involved new, or entirely new, technology. Germany’s Einsturzende Neubauten, for example,which may have been the inspiration for Mike Meyers’ “Sprockets mit Dieter” bit on SNL, mixed industrial noise, with…

…well, more industrial noise and synths, among other things.

More tomorrow.

Auditions

The Occupy movement is still looking for the big moment that the media – who are still largely sympathetic – can flog into an epochal, or at least society-altering, event.  It’s called a “Kent State Moment” – which, as Zombie at Pajamas Media notes…:

…when modern liberal pundits wish for an OWS “Kent State moment,” they’re not wishing for fatalities, but rather for the appearance of that one photograph which will reverberate around the world and forever establish the Occupiers as oppressed victims. It is the photograph, not the shootings, that is the “Kent State moment.”

 

The "Kent State Moment".

The Dorothea Lange Moment

So far, they haven’t got it — not for want of trying. For the last several days The San Francisco Chronicle has helpfully featured a slide show of nominees on its Web site to hopefully stir up interest in one or another iconic martyr image, but so far, no Occupy photos have quite caught on, Kent State-style.

And here in Minneapolis, with our city’s long tradition of great regional theatre (and all the would-be actors that that scene draws to the city)?

On Saturday, a group of “occupiers” went to the former (?) home of a U of M lecturer that’s been foreclosed for some time now, and, um, “occupied” it.  The police responded.  And as the first serious snow of the season fell, one of the dimmer bulbs among the “occupiers” decided to stand in the path of one of the cop cars.

The cop opted to give the lad a nudge (as opposed to jumping from his car and cuffing him then and there which, to be fair, was what the young buck was looking for):

Twitter glowed all weekend with reports that a cop had “tried to run an Occupier down with his car”, and “attacked” him with a “lethal weapon”.

Same-Sex Marriage: Six Theses

As we start heading toward the next round of elections, both sides – the GOP and the DFL – are planning to make the biggest electoral hay that they can out of the Same Sex Marriage issue.

The GOP majority in the legislature put the issue of a Marriage Amendment on the ballot for next year.  The issue might just overshadow all other issues on the ballot, short of the presidency itself.

Just a couple of observations:

  1. Both Sides Need It To Be An Issue:  there’s evidence that the GOP left a lot of votes on the table in the 2010 gubernatorial election when Tom Emmer didn’t make gay marriage a key campaign issue.  Naturally, gay marriage is a bloody shirt that the DFL can wave at its constituents; they think it’ll get people to turn out.
  2. Neither side wants this issue to be resolved:  You caught the bit about this being a vote getter – or at least a perceived vote-getter – for both sides, right? It’s not just this election; however this amendment turns out next year, it’ll be an electoral carrot and stick for both parties to dangle out there for years to come…provided it’s not actually resolved, one way or the other.
  3. The GOP Has More To Gain By Keeping It As A Public Issue: While I agree with Andy Aplikowski that Minnesotans are generally a fairly socially libertarian bunch, I think that when you add up the math for the GOP, it’s a lot easier to get to “landslide win” if the evangelicans turn out for you.  And while evangelical conservatives will turn out for economic issues, throwing them some social red meat surely can’t hurt.  Can it?
  4. The DFL Has More To Lose: The Democrats nationwide are scrambling to give their base – to say nothing of independents – a reason to turn out next November.  Saddled with a turkey of a President, a Senate with approval lower than Mullah Omar, a slew of Senate seats at risk, the unions’ attempt to outsource agitation to the “Occupy” movement dissolving in a welter of filth, crime, sexual assault and counterculture dissipation, and Progressivism in the heartland rocked back on its heels by two-chamber flips in Wisconsin and Minnesota, the DFL needs to be able to wave the bloody shirt of “bigotry” at its gay and gay-sympathetic constituents.
  5. The DFL Needs It More: If the Democrats nationwide are in a public relations bind – still running against George W. Bush, looking forward to a campaign that has to answer the question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” with “Hey! Mitt Romney has weird hair!”  – the DFL is worse.  They’re not really even a party anymore; The DFL is a shell that basically administers outsourcing contracts with “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Take Action Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”, “Common Cause”, “Draw The LIne” and other checkbook advocacy groups that do most of the “party’s” actual work; think “the Hessians”.  DFL could use something to get people to remember they exist.  (But they’ll likely subcontract this out to “Minnesotans For Marriage Equality”, a fully-owned subsidiary of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”.  Yes, it’s fictional, but you know that’s basically how it’s going to work, don’t you?)
  6. The DFL Doesn’t Want Single-Sex Marriage Legalized: Think about it.  They’ve been nominally for gay marriage for thirty-odd years.  And from 2006, and especially 2008, through 2010 the DFL had absolute control of the Legislature; it was two chambers against Tim Pawlenty.  Now, the DFL maintains that a majority of Minnesotans support same sex marriage.  So if they actually believe that, why not push it through in the 2008 or 2010 sessions, when they had overwhelming control, were riding high on two landslide victories and the Obamascenscion?  “Because Pawlenty would have vetoed it!  Why waste the votes?” is the usual answer.  So why not bypass Governor Pawlenty and go for an amendment?  Or use that purported majority of Minnesotans that favor the issue to either override the veto, or use it to get Republicans voted out of office back in 2010?  There really are only two reasons; one would be that there just isn’t that much of an electoral demand for same sex marriage – but we just know the DFL wouldn’t blow smoke up the state’s skirt, would it?  The other reason is that it’s not in the DFL’s interest either to push this issue (in the oh-so-unlikely even they’re lying) or, I suspect most likely, they don’t really want same sex marriage legalized; that would take it off the table as a get-out-the-vote issue.
Discuss.