Submitted without comment:

Former President Jimmy Carter has sent North Korea a message of condolence over the death of Kim Jong-il and wished “every success” to the man expected to take over as dictator, according to the communist country’s state-run news agency

To be fair to the former President, all those concentration camp inmates will make a heck of a market for Habitat for Humanity when they get released.

But Carter was never good at getting people released.  To be fair, Carter probabably think

Oh, wait – I submitted this without comment, didn’t I?

Sorry.  My bad.

At Hamline’s campus newspaper, Pravda On Snelling, student writer Zachary Knudson notes that notwithstanding the fact that his paper had reported that Tom Emmer had been hired, he had not.   It was an un-offer, Winston.  It never happened.

OK, the paper is actually called The Oracle, but you get the picture.

Anyway, Knudson’s piece tidies up some of the narrative loose ends of the Emmer flap – and leaves a huge, red, “McCarthyite” siren blazing.  Knudson quotes Professor David “Tailgunner Dave” Schultz:

Schultz said that after staff began hearing about the possibility of Emmer joining the Hamline faculty, e-mails were drafted by some staff members to be sent to administration outlining their concerns over the hiring of Emmer.

Schultz said that the faculty was concerned for two major reasons, including whether the political positions Emmer holds were incompatible with the university’s mission, specifically his stance on same-sex marriage.

“Two major reasons?”  What was the other?

As to same-sex marriage?  For starters, Emmer’s position on the issue is in line with that of well over half of Minnesotans, including, I suspect, a majority of Democrat voters.  Is it Hamline’s position that only people who believe in the overthrow of traditional marriage may teach at Hamline?

Given that same sex marriage is one of those “Things White People Like” – blacks and latinos are much more traditionally-minded on marriage than us crackers are – does that mean that the University must screen double-dog hard to get only politically pure black and latino faculty? Or do black and latino faculty get a pass on this issue?  How about the “students of color” – do they get a pass, or are they at Hamline to be re-educated?

And here’s the clinker; Emmer didn’t talk about gay marriage during the governor’s race.  Not at all.  Indeed, one of the reasons I supported him was because of an appearance on the NARN at the State Fair in 2009; when someone from the audience asked him what he thought about gay marriage, Emmer responded instantly “I don’t care – this race is about jobs and spending”. Only the DFL ” Alliance For A “Better” Minnesota” focused on gay marriage during the race; Emmer stayed focused on the economy.  And he may have left a lot of pro-tradtional marriage swing voters on the table – maybe enough to cost the election.

So what we have here is Hamline University essentially admitting that they have a McCarthyite screening process for political correctness; a faculty veto on faculty that represent, in fact, any kind of ideological diversity.

I caught this in the paper – Hamline University’s president, Linda Hanson, declares that “Despite Emmer fiasco, Hamline embraces diversity“.

This should be interesting:

Given recent events involving former gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer and Hamline University, I would like to bring perspective to the university’s continuous identity with the core values of our founders, the early Methodists of Minnesota, who envisioned Hamline as a place to educate citizens for lives of civic responsibility and service in an environment of open inquiry, critical thinking, civil discourse and high ethical standards.

Those remain our core values, lived out every day in our classrooms, on our campus, and in the business and civic community.

With an asterisk.  Always, always the asterisk; “unless it’s a conservative”.

Regretfully, we acknowledge that our process in our dealings with Mr. Emmer did not rise to the standards that Hamline University upholds as an institution. We take responsibility for that and do not take our shortcoming lightly.

“We take responsibility for that?”

How?

In what way do you or your “university” take “responsibility” for what happened?

Go ahead – read the entire op-ed.  There is not one more mention of the Emmer flap.  (Emmer is mentioned in the context of a gubernatorial debate that Hamline hosted).

Here is the fact, President Hanson; your university hired (this seems to be clear; the deal was done, according to my sources) Tom Emmer, a conservative Republican and former GOP candidate for governor.

A pack of pristinely-liberal professors (according to some sources), including (according to some more sources) Professor David Schultz, your university’s answer to Larry Jacobs and contender for Jacobs’ throne  as “the most over-quoted person in the Twin Cities media”, came to your office and demanded that the school not besmirch its faculty – who, to this observer and collector of stories, seem to fit Alan Dershowitz’ description of “diversity” in the Harvard Law School faculty, “people in skirts or with different-colored skin who think exactly the same” – laid down the PC law on you.  You and your administration buckled to what was nothing more than a case of intellectual cleansing.

And so when you write, apparently with a straight face…:

This does not, however, define or change the foundation upon which Hamline was established and has thrived for 157 years: one of diversity, open debate and the expression of divergent points of view.

…I, and many of your students and alumni who’ve written me over the years, and people who are familiar with your school’s record for priggish, selective, and always PC-slathered intolerance, are perfectly justified to ask “Really?  How do you figure?

Or, perhaps better yet, “What record of open debate and divergent points of view?”

Like most communities, Hamline has tension when we are discussing matters that pertain to civil and human rights.

While challenging discourse always is welcomed and heard, Hamline has and always will stand firm on its core value — one that goes back to the very founding of the university: the value and respect for the dignity of every individual.

As Minnesota’s first university, Hamline has a long record of the responsible, civil and open exchange of ideas.

As president, I am confident we will continue our respected tradition of preparing students to be independent thinkers, prepared to make a contribution to their communities as engaged citizens and leaders.

I’m sorry, President Hanson.  Those are some nice-sounding words.

Your university’s record doesn’t support them any better than they supported the hiring of Tom Emmer.  Or the airing of any conservative view, anywhere on your blinkered, PC-addled campus.

“Taking responsibility” would be showing some accountability – showing how it is that conservatives aren’t idea non grata on your campus.

But I don’t suspect you can.

I’d invite President Hanson’s response, but I’m sure her faculty would pinch a loaf at the thought of their president communicating, not only with a conservative blogger, but a non-academic peasant whose only contribution to Hamline is not macing every piece of Hamline frat trash that’s puked on his lawn over the years).;

The long-delayed election for the Mayorship of the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers is officially underway over at the website of the Secretary of State, the Kool Aid Report.

The office of the Mayor of the MOB is a sacred honor – but the only real “benefit” the “winner” “gets” is in terms of health; via being presumed by various depraved leftyblog dolts to have actual editorial and policy control over MOB blogs, the winner gets a good laugh, and laughing is good for your health.

Debates will start this week, with elections coming soon.

Check it out.

I’ve been tangling with Karl Bremer for a long, long time.  Like,since long before any of us had ever heard of blogs.

Now, if this blog has had one iron clad standard, it’s that politics comes in behind humanity. This hobby – an offshoot of people doing what they believe – is frequently a stewing noxious morass of Alinski-ite ugliness. And so I never go after peoples’ jobs, their family lives, or, especially, parts of their pasts that aren’t germane to their political job.  Wherever else I may have fallen short, I’ve stuck to that.  

And beyond that?  Peoples’ lives are more important than their politics.

So it was a genuine gut-shot to read this last night:

Three weeks ago, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Tomorrow I start chemotherapy to try to destroy it. I’ve fought a lot of battles in my life and beaten some long odds. None of them have ever been life-threatening, though, so at this point, they all seem rather inconsequential.This one’s for real, and I’m going to need all the energy I can muster to beat it. Consequently, you may see a little reduction in flow here at Ripple in Stillwater. I’ll be recycling some old material to keep you entertained in the meantime

Best wishes and hopes that Karl kicks the odds in the ass.

I’m waiting for the first lefty/media (ptir) pundit to claim the “incongruity” between this story – violent crime is plummeting…:

Murders, rapes and other violent crimes dropped sharply in the United States in the first six months of 2011, continuing a downward trend that has lasted 4 1/2 years, the FBI reported on Monday.

The federal law enforcement agency said preliminary January-through-June figures showed the number of violent crimes declined 6.4 percent from the previous year, led by a 5.7 percent drop in murders and a 5.1 percent decrease in rapes.

In other violent crime categories, robberies declined 7.7 percent while aggravated assaults fell 5.9 percent.

The FBI’s regular statistical report did not give any reasons for the lower crimes nationwide. But the latest numbers provided further evidence of no crime spike coinciding with the tough economic conditions and high unemployment.

…and this bit here; gun sales are shattering all records this holiday season:

It’s the rise in female buyers that is perhaps most surprising – with more women buying guns than ever before, reported CBS Sacramento.

‘People are just coming in to protect themselves,’ an employee at TDS Guns in Rocklin told CBS Sacramento.

‘I think there’s just a lot of things going on in the world that are getting people thinking,’ the employee added.

The Firearms Dealers Association says the recent boom in gun purchases makes this the best holiday sales season in three years.

It’s not incongruous.  In this case, correlation equals causation.  Violent crime is dropping precisely because more law-abiding Real Americans are armed.  Criminals are stupid and often addled, but they’re not usually overtly suicidal; as the wave of shall-issue laws spreads across the nation and as sales of guns to the law-abiding citizens obliterate all previous records, more and more of them are figuring out that their chances of ending up like this are growing faster than their odds of going to jail.

More and more it’s apparent; it should be considered the duty of every law-abiding American to own and be proficient with a firearm.

:

Yesterday, in the latest installment of my “What The Hell…” series on the MNGOP (which may soon top my “Twenty Years Ago Today” series for longevity), Chad the Elder from Fraters Libertas left a comment:

At what point do we just say enough is enough and start all over with a new party? The current version of the Republican Party of Minnesota has proved incapable of taking advantage of a politically favorable climate and can’t even manage its internal matters. There is no leadership right now and I don’t see any on the horizon either. I’m usually aversive to third party talk, but short of moving to another state, what other option do conservatives in Minnesota have? No matter how much bailing we do, this ship is going down

Great question.

It was in 1995, after a stunning electoral win, that I left the GOP.  Part of it was the 1994 Crime Bill; I thought that if the GOP could acquiesce with such a noxious piece of legislation when they held the political uppoer hand, what good were they?  I mean, they were happy to take money from all of us gunnies – and then they screwed us?

Part of it was the ongoing legacy of Arne Carlson.  He was a Republican who governed more like a liberal than the DFLer he replaced. He spend surpluses like a meth whore with a stolen platinum card.

I’d had enough.  I joined the Libertarians, and even ran for office (and won at least a moral victory).

And then I looked at what it’d take to make the Libertarians – or any “new”, as opposed to “Third” , party a contender.

Think about it:

• A presence statewide- as in, people, on the ground, in all 134 House Districts, organizing…
• Volunteers – the people who drop the lit and plant the lawn signs and make the phone calls – are effectively employed.  Of course, volunteers, at least beyond the tiny fringe of true believers any party will draw at least a few of, only tend to come out if you show the slightest chance of actually mattering.  Which comes from having that “statewide presence” above, as well as…
• Money – yep, it’s the oil that greases the skids of American politics. And while you can work the odd little miracle here or there without much of it, retail politics is much better with than without.  Which means you need…
• Fundraising infrastructure – you need money people; people with money, and (more importantly) people who can talk people with money out of that money for a new party.    Oh – and as we’ve discovered in the MNGOP, you need…
• Management – Parties like the Constitution, the Greens, and the Libertarians tend to be “run” by people who are long on ideological zeal, and short on accounting, fundraising, and people-management.  And that’s OK – because there’s no money to account for, nobody donating more than the odd few bucks, and nobody to manage.  Once you get to the level where you have fundraising going on, and payroll to make, and schedules to follow, and FEC and MNCFB rules to be aware of? All the zeal in the world is of no use if you wind up broke, with unpaid workers and disorganized campaigns and in a world of hurt from the Feds and State.

One of the most enduring myths of World War 2, along with “the cowardly French” and “the incompetent Poles”, is “the inept, gutless Italians”.

Of course, with the Italians there is plenty of circumstantial evidence.

In 1940, Italian troops were routed in Mussolini’s attempt to invade Greece.  The Germans had to rescue the Italians – a humiliating setback for Mussolini.

The Italian attempt to join Germany in invading France was stopped cold by France’s line of border fortresses.  Italian gains in France were measured in yards, not miles.

Then, early in 1941, the Italian army in North Africa was demolished, with hundreds of thousands of POWs, by a much smaller British force.  This required the Germans to send Erwin Rommel – the leader of the Panzer group that had cut France in half the previous summer – to intervene with the German “Afrika Korps” – leading to a seesaw year and half of battling across Egypt and Libya.

Italy had several strikes against it, militarily.

Socialism: “But wait, Merg – Mussolini was a fascist!  Literally! Fascists are the opposite of communists!”  Only if you’re a professor with Marxist leanings.  Fact was, Mussolini made the trains run on time by nationalizing them – and much of everything else.  Since he seized control in 1922, Mussolini latched onto a vision of building a bigger, stronger Italy through aggressive government intervention in industry and economy.

As a result, Italy was deeply in debt when the war began; money that Italy could have used to modernize its military – to say nothing of its economy – was being paid out in debt servicing.

Just like in Obama’s USA.

Evolution: Italy was still a developing country in 1940.  Italy’s industrial GDP was only a sixth that of France or Britain.  It was still primarily an agricultural nation.

Bad Gear: In part because of industrial backwardness, but more because of the crushing debt burden, Italy’s military equipment was backward and largely obsolete, and sparse even so.

Not only was Italy’s primary tank during the war – the Fiat – yes, Fiat – Carro Armato M13/40 – a hopelessly obsolete mid-thirties antique even though it was built in 1940…

…but only 3,500 of them were built during the entire war – less than two months’ worth of production for the American Sherman tank.

Italy’s main fighter plane?  The Fiat (!!!) CR42…

A pair of CR42 biplanes.

…which was distinguished by being the last biplane in first-line service with any major air force.   It was, by the way, an excellent biplane fighter – which, in the life-or-death of air combat, is a poor consolation prize.

Italy’s rifle?  The “Terni”- the Mannlicher-Carcano M1891 – was, as its model number shows, entering its fiftieth year of service.

It was a small, underpowered turnbolt rifle with an obsolete and troublesome mechanism.  Worse, Italian doctrine and industry felt it sufficient for the Italian infantryman to be issued with 36 rounds of ammunition as his basic combat load.  Bubba Schlockdorf carries more ammo into the woods to hunt deer in the fall.

Bad Leadership: All armies to one extent or another distinguish between officers and enlisted men. Officers are usually separate from the men – largely so life-and-death decisions don’t get colored by being excessively close to the men.

The Italian military took this to a highly dysfunctional extreme.  Officers in the Royal Italian Army – remember, fascist government aside, Italy was still technically a monarchy – subscribed to many of the worst habits of militaries in monarchies; the enlisted men combined terrible living conditions, lousy pay and miserable status as draftees with a fairly weak non-commissioned officer corps.

As a result, Italian regular units’ morale often collapsed in the field under fire.

But Italian non-regular units – units selected from men who wanted to be there, and who were motivated to kick ass – fighter pilots, and especially men who fell under the very loose category “specal forces?”   That was another story.

It was seventy years ago tonight that Italian “special forces” carried out one of the most devastatingly successful special missions in the  history of warfare – one that very nearly changed the course of World War II.

———-

Ever since the Italian fleet had been gutted at Taranto the previous winter, the British fleet had kept the Italian Navy bottled up in harbor.

But seventy years ago tonight, a tiny team of six Italian Navy frogmen riding three torpedos that had been converted into transports launched from an Italian submarine.

An Italian manned torpedo. It was designed to carry two men, and a demolition charge, to the target; the men would swim to shore and attempt to escape.

They slipped past the harbor defenses, and left a set of demolition charges underneath the British battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, as well as a Norwegian oil tanker.

HMS Queen Elizabeth

And in the wee hours of the morning, all three charges exploded, ripping the stern off the tanker, and sinking the two battleships.  They sank in shallow water, and both were recovered and returned to action…

…after a year during which their absence was badly felt in the Mediterranean.

The six Italian marines were captured by Egyptian police and turned over to the British.

At any rate – one of the enduring myths of World War II was “the Italians were incompetent cowards”.  And – like “The French ran like scared bunnies” and “the Poles rolled over” – it’s as true as any wartime oppo propoganda ever is.

One flap I missed in this morning’s rundown of the present and future of the MNGOP was the railroading of Brandon Sawalich.

Sawalich was arrested last week for driving a truck with expired tabs.  The airport police grabbed and detained him, and initially moved to charge him with a gross misdemeanor that means, essentially, “tax evasion on wheels”…

…before they discovered a “clerical error” that showed his tabs were six, not 18, months out of date.  Anyway – it led Sawalich to bow out of the MNGOP Chair race (prematurely and for all the wrong reasons, according to some, and I don’t entirely disagree).

Mr Dilettante covered the “story” as well as anyone – and by “story”, I don’t mean Sawalich’s utterly mundane offense, but the media’s approach to covering a prominent Republican, which D accurately termed more a “rectal exam” than news coverage:

So, Sawalich is out of the race, has paid for his tabs and is presumably going back to being a private citizen. End of story, right? If you thought so, you don’t understand the modern media environment. The Star Tribune saw fit to add a completely gratuitous paragraph to the end of his account, detailing events in Sawalich’s life that happened 8 and 10 years ago, respectively. If you want to see what they are, you can click on the link, but I’ll not share them here. Sawalich is apparently 36 years old, which means that the events in question happened when he was less than 30 years old. In other words, even though he is now out of the race, Sawalich was Emmerized.

To the editorial board and, I suspect, not a few of their reporters, Republicans are like wild boars; you have to make sure they’re dead.  There’s no such thing as overkill.  Classic example; the Strib’s coverage defamatory lynching of Alan Fine in 2006; 32 column inches about a “domestic violence arrest” that never resulted in a conviction, had no physical evidence, and was completely expunged, that ex-wife in question had herself garnered a domestic violence record, and the widely-abused nature of these sorts of charges – all to smack down a candidate who might have gotten 35% with a tailwind and without a Ventura Party candidate who made moderate-to-Republican noises.  Such are the precautions the media must take to ensure the victory of a deeply-flawed, yapping little schnauzer like Keith Ellison.

There’s a message in that last paragraph — if you would seek to be a prominent Republican, or even prominent in the inner workings of the party, you can expect to have every indiscretion of your life shared with the world. So you’d better damn well keep your light under a bushel.

That’s what Alinsky preached.  It’s what the DFL – and their willing accomplices in the media – practice.  It should surprise nobody.

Kim Jong-Il, one of the few foreign leaders to whom Barack Obama hasn’t managed to show obsequious deference, is dead at 69.

Kim – who has presided over the most perfect realization of socialism in history, and has the concentration camps to prove it – died of an apparent heart attack.

Perhaps his most appropriate memorial:

Wow.  It was a rough week for the Minnesota GOP, wasn’t it?

It’s not entirely a rhetorical question.  We’ll come back to that.

———-

When I am smack in the middle of a crisis, there are a few little aphorisms and bromides that I run through my mind; like rosaries if you’re Catholic, or mantras if you’re a meditator, or the Lord’s Prayer for that matter.  They tack on a bit of pithy temporal wisdom, and help put the mind…well, not so much “at ease” as “into focus”.

Keep Your Head Down And Your Thumb Up Your Ass And Keep Walking. – It’s an old British Army infantryman’s saying; let’s presume it’s a metaphor; it is certainly a crude way of saying “the greatest virtue is perseverance”.

A little less profane? This Too Shall Pass.  – most of you know this one.  It’s an ancient Sufi saying; Abraham Lincoln used it.  Nothing bad – or good – lasts forever.  Life – and poliitcs – is a marathon, not a sprint.

And while I try not to find ‘wisdom” from Hollywood, I have always loved the line “The Only Way Home Is Through Berlin”.  It was Tom Sizemore’s line in Saving Private Ryan; it means the job isn’t going away, so put your head down, and your thumb yadda yadda.  I usually think of it after “This too shall pass” – because “this” frequently won’t “pass” without a hell of a lot of work.

And one way or another, that’s pretty much what we have to do.   Tough it out.  Shake it off.  And remember what matters.

And we’ll come back to that too.

———-

Here’s another saying I love to remember at times like this:  it’s from P.J. O’Rourke; “LIfe is full of ironies, for the stupid“.

The blog posts and tweets started almost immediately after Tony Sutton resigned – “What?  The party of fiscal respnsibility is a half a million in bet?  Isn’t that ironic?”  And after Amy Koch resigned, and after Senators Hann, Gerlach, Senjhem and Michel held their press conference in which they revealed the “inappropriate relationship with a male staffer”, out they came – “G’huk’, g’huk – the “party of family values!  How ironic!” said the pack of …

…I was about the call them “drooling misanthropes”, but the American Union of Drooling Misanthropes called; they don’t want ’em. I’m at a loss.  I’ll just leave it there.

People make mistakes; they err; they sin; that people aren’t perfect and can’t be perfected, especially not via politics and laws, is a key tenet of classicla conservatism.  People make mistakes; there are consequences.

The GOP leadership got out ahead of the story on Friday, more or less. About this, John GIlmore at Minnesota Conservatives wrote:

Then, as if to mock sanity, four lumbering senators, full to overflowing with themselves, held the Hindenburg of press conferences. Sens. David Hann, Geoff Michel, David Senjem and Chris Gerlach decided that a press conference of apparently endless proportions would be the best response to the unfolding calamities. Michel spoke and far too much. All the men sounded like Rush Limbaugh’s new castrati and the local premiere female conservative radio talk show host Sue Jeffers acidly noted today the lack of inspiration, push-back or general strength. Instead it was all hang dog and maybe the press will not flay us overly much. Please like us!

On the one hand Jeffers and Gilmore were right – the four Senators should have dug into the DFL and the Media; I think the phrase “anyone who said, in 1998, that “it’s just sex, and peoples’ private lives, and just moooooove on, because peoples’ personal business that doesn’t affect their jobs doesn’t count” should be sure to shut up” should have popped up.

On the other hand, can you imagine the GOP trying to sit tight and hope that the media wouldn’t get the story sooner than later?  And we all woke up on Monday morning with John Croman or Erik Black screaming “What was the MNGOP covering up?”

Because that was, pretty much, the alternative.

———-

Anyway – that was last week.  What about this week?

About the Koch kerfuffle:  calm down.  People make mistakes; sometimes they do the wrong thing.  As we noted above, conservatives know this (although Republicans don’t always).

Conservatism – and, when it’s working, the GOP – is about principles, not people.  People fall short; principles give you something to strive for.

The Democrats, and DFL, are all about people, and cults of personality; Mark Dayton won this past election not by dint of any princples or beliefs or even non-laughable campaign promises, but by a combination of Dayton’s name ID (as much about the Daytons stores as Dayton’s time in the Senate) combined with a sleazy, ‘third-party” personality-assassination campaign against Tom Emmer.

People come and go.  Principles go on.  The GOP must not go into this next session playing hurt.  We have the upper hand; if the Sutton and Koch stories weren’t intended to whittle that upper hand away to benefit the DFL, the media wouldn’t cover it to the extent they are (in the way that they didn’t cover the DFL’s own financial woes two years ago).

The Republican party is really two things – a set of principles (these days, largely conservative), and a non-profit organization with an office and a (acting) chairman and staff and a budget.

And it’s that last bit – fixing the Republican Party of Minneosta, Inc. – that’s going to be the big job.  GIlmore:

The way forward is straight forward. The wounded must be tended to, with simple basic human decency. The selection of the RPM Chair takes on even more importance although everyone seems to be looking for a magic bullet of a candidate. That candidate doesn’t exist. Senate leadership has much to account for; misdirection won’t work this time.

John sticks the landing – and that’s where you come in.  The MNGOP – the non-profit political party, not the principles – has often operated below the radar for activists. That has to change; at this next State Central meeting on December 31, people are going to have to buckle down and demand answers; where’s the balance sheet?  Who do we owe money to?  Why?  That’s just the beginning.   If party leadership doesn’t have the information needed for the Central Committee to make informed decisions about the budget distributed to the Central Committee by 12/31, the budget must be tossed.   We can accept no more excuses.

———-

So if you’re a Republican?  Gilmore wrote:

Today has been quiet although MC was reduced to tears when receiving a phone call in the middle of Costco detailing the human cost of these events. There’s nothing quite like crying in public, is there?

Relax.  Sack up, people.  Your dog didn’t die.  It’s a political party; we’re not curing cancer, here.  A politician fell short of our ideals; our party’s management revealed some deficiencies.

Question:  How much worse would this have been had it come out last March?  Or next October?  We’ve got 10 months to turn this thing around.  And not only is that doable – it’s also an eternity in politics.
———-
So where do we go from here?

To cop one more line from Hollywood:  Ed Harris in Apollo 13.

No, not “failure is not an option”, because it certainly is.  A bad one, but an option.

No, it’s the other one, the one the business writers never get but every Churchill fan does;

“With all due respect, sir, I believe this’ll be our finest hour”.

We owe ourselves, and this state, no less.

This too shall pass.  Of course, it’s going to be hard – but the only way home is though Berlin.

So it’s time to put your head down and…

…well, you get the idea.

On Saturday I was complaining sardonically about “not having enough to talk about” on the NARN show.

It was a josh, of course; Ed and I had eight or ten hours of material.

But a friend and high school classmate of mine who lives in Wisconson dropped me a line:

You could always cross the border and discuss all the “pain” Governor Walker has caused the working man. I just got my property tax bill and saw a 5% decrease. I must be a masochist because I want more of that type of pain.

Which is interesting to read, given the noise and fury (signifying, it seems, bupkes) that the Dems are spreading over the effort to recall Walker for…well, doing what he promised to do when he won the election last year.

Read Ann Althouse for her take on the recall’s progress. She’s optimistic.

It was eleven years ago today that Kirsty Maccoll was killed in a boating accident in Mexico.

Kirsty who?

Hush up and grab a seat.

(more…)

Ed writing on Lightsquared.

Kool Aid Report is back.

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

• Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – is on from 1-3 on Sunday.
• 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.  You can probably expect a look at the week’s raft of GOP debates, as well as a look at this week’s churn in the MNGOP and the media and left’s sudden change of heart on matters of the heart and state.
• 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).
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Hamline University – my neighbor which, when it’s not trying to turn all of Minnehaha Avenue into its own back alley is busily expunging itself of all students that transgress its administration’s razor-thin comfort zone – has gotten itself in the news by, depending on who you ask, either bailing out of discussion with Tom Emmer for a position at the Business School, or responded to a mob of liberal dogmatists on the faculty who took a break from their four-hour-a-week teaching schedules to voice their larynx-shredding outrage at the potential affront to their school’s pristinely-PC heritage.

I suspect that there’s a little – OK, a lot – of both involved. It’s entirely possible to square both accounts; that there’s a game of “telephone” involved as to exactly how close Emmer was to a position at Hamline, and exactly which position and where – that’s Hamline’s official position – with the likelihood that a bunch of Hamline’s relentlessly-PC academic hothouse flowers stormed the President’s office to protest the potentially inhuman working conditions involved in having a conservative in their zone.

So I thought – what better way to divine the gestalt of an institution than to look at their “product” – their classes?

The following is a quick look at Hamline’s course catalog, skimming through various departments.

BIOL 3056 – PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL GENETICS

Goals: To acquire an understanding of the genetic basis for non-progressive political thought.  This is a business-academic partnership with the New York Times.  (Cross-listed with PSYC3056, “Abnormal Political Psychology”

POLS 5152 – GETTING RESULTS FROM POLLING

(This is an intercollegiate class taught by Professor Larry Jacobs of the Humphrey Institute).

GRVN 1001 – INTRODUCTION TO GRIEVANCE STUDIES

Introductory-level students will learn the scientific, psychological, legal,moral, cultural, financial, social, semiotic and textual bases of the world’s grievances against male heteronormative society. Final project will relate reasons student was culturally constrained from completing any coursework.

LART 1075 – ESSENTIALS OF LIBERAL ARTS

Freshman-level survey of the history of liberal arts and liberal education, and the imperative for cultural and intellectual diversity, and why wingnuts, teabaggers and God-botherers don’t count.

EDUC 4039 – DIVERSITY IN ACADEMIA

A senior-level seminar focusing on tools and techniques to ensure the classroom – pre-K, high school or graduate school – is a friendly, diverse mix of people of different  races, genders, potential genders, affectional orientations, meta-affectional orientations, religions and worldviews, classes, meta-classes and pseudo-classes, ethnicities, grievance groups, grievance-based ethnicities, affectional-orientation-based religions, who are progressive.

RELG 2250 – PHILOSOPHY AND THE HOLOCAUST

Answering key philosophical questions of the Holocaust, including “Would a loving God allow a Holocaust to happen to non-Republicans?”

WOMN 5204 – CHALLENGES IN FEMINISM AND WOMYN’S STYDIES

This class explores the responses to “woMEN” like Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Michele Bachmann and Ann Coulter, and the inevitable conclusions that result.  Concurrent with lab course WOMN 5205,

BUSN 3205 – ETHICAL BUSINESS PRACTICES

This Business School course explores the methods of conducting a successful business without excising excessive “profit” from the people.  Cross-posted with GRVN 3205, “Principles Of Grievance-Based Accounting”

 

MARK4059 – CHALLENGES IN MARKETING

Senior Business School seminar on issues involved in marketing in an era of failing schools, diminished literacy, endless adolescence and nonexistent expectations. Must be taken concurrently with internship at the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, MN-PIRG or the DFL.

POLI 3969 – GRASSROOTS ACTIVISM WITH STYLE

Taught by visiting adjunct Professor Alita Messinger.  Explores techniques for making plutocrat activism look like grassroots activism.

JOUR 3103 – PHILOSOPHY OF JOURNALISM

Cross-posted with POLS 3103 “Currents In American Progressivism” and PSYC 3103, “Practicum in Skinnerian Behavioral Conditioning”.

 

Wait – that was 11 classes.

I guess it’s academic inflation. I’ll give the extra one to Emmer.

I have a few for today.

It’s virtually inevitable that some lefty commentator – probably a leftyblogger, but very possibly a media commentator – will blame yesterday’s shooting in Grand Marais on Minnesota’s concealed carry law.

It’s also pretty much a lock that the Strib and MInnPost’s columnist stables will paint the departure of Amy Koch as Senate Majority Leader as “proof that conservatives are becoming too unruly and powerful”, notwithstanding the fact that Koch is a conservative.

Just saying.

Let’s be clear on this; I oppose government funding for stadiums.  All of it.  Any government.  Ever.  End of sentence.

Zigi Wilf could afford to build his own stadium.  But the status quo in the sports industry today is to treat stadia as a public good – which is a loathsome perversion of the idea of “public good”.

The big “Zero” in this debate so far has been Governor Dayton. The Governor’s entire approach to this issue could be summarized as “Hey, you guys – get something done! I don’t want the NFL goons tramping through my office again”; it’s what peple call “leading from the rear”.

And if there’s a hero? It’s the Senate GOP Caucus. It was the Senate Republicans – especially Senator Robling – who’ve managed to cut the crap and get “both” sides – the NFL, the state, and the various local and county governments who,alternately, crave the crowds and commerce but who’ve gone all Ron Paul about paying the tab, and of course RT Rybak, who wants to commit his city full of compliant DFL sheeple and ripe business sucks to a big share of the tab…

…which is dumb, but hey, I didn’t vote for him. Anyway – for cutting to the chase, and getting Zygi Wilf out of all of our pockets and fixing him up with a politician who actually believes he has the political oomph to stick his city with a $1000/head bill.

Am I cynical to say “it’s your problem, now, Minneapolis”?  (No, I’m not being a hypocrite; I have been to exactly zero Vikings games at the Dome since 1987 – and even then, I was working).

On a bit of a tangent – this is a great example of an issue where principle and politics are completely at war.  It is a fact that if you’re a conservative, spending public money on stadiums is anathema.  It’s also a fact that this is a state full of voters who want their damn football team, and they don’t really care (or think that hard about) who pays for it.  Emphasis on “voters”.

It’s not the ideal solution – especially if you’re in Minneapolis – but the fact that we have a (potential) solution is entirely due to the Senate GOP caucus.

Christopher HItchens, one of the last of a dying breed of intellectual progressives commentators, has passed away after a two-year battle with cancer.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

Hitchens was a contradiction in ways that didn’t used to contradict each other; an irascible wit; fiercely civilized; an open-minded and spiritually-questing atheist (among an atheist scene that has become more dogmatic, rigid than Wisconsin-Synod Lutherans, and intellectually dead to boot), a progressive who sought human progress.

Props to our friend Katie Kieffer, who not only made John Hawkins’ 40 Best Conservative Columnists Of 2011 list…

…but made it to #10, just ahead of our other friend Dennis Prager.

Congrats, Katie!

Going back almost four years, this blog has been covering (OK, linking to other conservative bloggers who’ve been covering) the malfeasance, misdirection and/or sloth of former Ramsey County sheriff Bob Fletcher in re his policy on issuing handgun carry permits.  At his nadir, he was rejecting one out of eight permit applications. That’s a lot of human rights being trampled on.

It was one of the reasons such an unholy alliance – “progressives” angry about equally-egregious accusations about the sheriff’s first amendment record, and conservative gunnies – united to topple Fletcher in favor of Bostrom.

It’s been a year. How’s it going?

For the answer, I turn to – of all people – Grace Kelly at MN “Progressive” Project:, who to be fair hated Fletcher long before most people did.  .

It has now been almost a year in office for the new Sheriff Bostrom. How is the gun permit processing going? Basically, using our best evidence, it looks like it is going well. Although there are some unexplained numbers.

Which are, in turn, unexplained. I did mention it was Grace Kelly, right?

The first error is to give permits to people who should not have received permits. We rarely find out about those errors. We usually discover those permit errors only when a crime is committed.

And nine years after the first passing of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, we’re still waiting for the first such case.   I’ll call that a win, for Bostrom and everyone else.  (For those who aren’t up on the issue – there were quite a number of permits issued to people under the old, “discretionary” system to people who should not have gotten them; people with crime records and the like).

The other error is to deny permits from people who should have received permits. The best hard evidence is a court allowing a permit on appeal. When appeal is upheld, our tax payer dollars pays [sic] the lawyer’s fees, otherwise the person wanting the permit pays. Usually the cost is about $3000.

From what I’ve been told, $3,000 would be pretty cheap.  Fletcher rang up – according to the late Joel Rosenberg – over half a million dollars in attorney fees awarded to plaintiffs   under the appeal provisions of the MN Personal Protection Act.

Lawyers loved Fletcher…:

Marc Berris used to make jokes that Ramsey county was sending his kids through college just based on the gun permit appeals…[he noted] that no client paid him quite like the Ramsey County sheriff’s office. For years, Berris made a killing by taking on former Sheriff Bob Fletcher. …However this year there are no pending cases in the court appeal process. Neither the Sheriff’s office nor Andrew Rothman, executive director of the Minnesota Association of Defensive Firearm Instructors has heard of any pending court cases… So by the measure of court appeals, it appears that the gun permit process is being applied correctly.

And in terms of numbers?

By another measure, the rate of denial has gone down from a Sheriff Fletcher high of 13.5 percent in 2007 to  4.7 percent of applications, this year through November. This is still higher than 1.7 percent state average. So if the appeals process shows that permits are properly denied, then why are Ramsey county numbers higher?

I’d be tempted to say that it’s all those DFL voters…

…but Hennepin county’s denial rate is, if anything, below the state average.

The war in Iraq is officially over.

Thanks to all the 1.5 million servicepeople who fought there over the past eight years.

To the families of the 4,500 who died – I’m sorry.  This country – and the people of Iraq – owe you more than anyone can ever pay.

Without baked goods – Rosettes, krumkake, lefse, and all the other varieties of baked sweets that make Norwegian cuisine such a joy during the holidays – having a Grinch steal Christmas is really more or less irrelevant.

And “lack of butter” is the grinch this year:

An acute butter shortage in Norway, one of the world’s richest countries, has left people worrying how to bake their Christmas goodies with store shelves emptied and prices through the roof.

The shortfall, expected to last into January, amounts to between 500 and 1,000 tonnes, said Tine, Norway’s main dairy company, while online sellers have offered 500-gramme [That’s about 14.4 ounces – Ed] packs for up to 350 euros ($465).

More reasons to give thanks you’re an American…

In a sense, this is one of the most glorious elections I’ve seen in a quarter century; for the first time, there is no “moderate” Republican.

“But wait!  Romney’s a moderate!”.

Well, by some standards, and on some issues, sure.  But as I started explaining Monday, there are really three main currents in American conservatism:  about this for quite a while; we have…:

• Northeastern Conservatism:  Comfortable with big government (and generally very hawkish on law-and-order issues), but generally pro-business and anti-government-intervention, at least in re the economy.  We’re talking Romney, Giuliani, Chris Christie, the earlier Rockefellers, and George H. W. Bush….
• Southern Conservatives:   Think Mike Huckabee and, to an extent, George W. Bush. We’ll come back to that later.  Anyway – standing well aside and hectoring them both – these days, from the high ground, in virtual control of the GOP grass roots – are the…
• Western Conservatives:  Libertarian on social issues (at least as re government is concerned) and budget hawks.  They are big on Small Government.  Ron Paul is as far out as the GOP gets in this department; most of us Hayek buffs fit in here.

I was reading this bit here, by Walter Russell Mead, on the legacy of the battle between Hamilton and Jefferson in the founding of the Republican.

Jefferson, of course, was the godfather of the libertarians; he believed in a weak federal government facilitating a very decentralized nation run, at the end of the day, by a free association of equals.  He believed the US should reside in splendid isolation, at least as re intervening in foreign affairs (until the Barbary pirates became too big an issue to ignore, politically or economically, at which point he created the Navy and Marine Corps we have today.

Hamilton?  He believed in a republic led by an elite that had the power to intervene in society – including a strong federal government.  Hamiltonians are a big part of why the US is a major world power.  They’re an even bigger part of why we have a huge national debt and a rampant national bureaucracy.

And both Hamilton and Jefferson appear both to the right and left of center; “Progressive” Hamiltonians are behind everything from the New Deal to, well, everything Obama has done.  Conservative Hamiltonians – think “Northeastern Conservatives” – believe in federal power, if not necessarily the bureaucracy to feed off that power (for example, the conservative case for the healthcare individual mandate).   Southern Conservatives?  They’re a lot more Hamiltonian than you might think; it was federal power that brought the South into the 20th and 21st centuries.  Western conservatives are Jeffersonian, to a degree – except, in many cases, on defense.

So to a degree, nobody is a purist.

The last 100-years of American history has been largely Hamiltonianism run amok.

But what about our politics today?

Here’s my attempt to illustrate our current field:

All of this leads up to talking about the Mead article I cited above. More on that later this week.