It’s in all the papers; today is the seventieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

All the TV stations will show the familiar footage – the USS Arizona, ablaze from several bomb hits, exploding, spewing a geyser of greasy smoke hundreds of feet in the air, killing 1,000 men in a matter of seconds; the blazing and capsized battleships on Battleship Row…

…the rows and fields full of wrecked aircraft…:

All that’s true.

One thing Americans rarely see, or have to study, is that Pearl Harbor was just one of many similar attacks all around the Pacific Rim.  At the same time as the Japanese carrier-based planes were attacking Pearl Harbor, more planes, launched from Taiwan (then called Formosa) attacked America’s huge base at Clark Field, in the Phillipines:

25 US bombers and dozens of fighters were destroyed on the ground.

:The Japanese also captured Hong Kong, crossing from occupied China and taking the British colony (with its garrison of Brit, Canadian, and Chinese troops) in a short, sharp, brutal battle:

Singapore – Britain’s easternmost colony and naval base – was attacked.  More devastating to the Brits, the naval expedition they sent to reinforce Singapore, the battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse, were sunk off the south coast of Malaysia by Japanese torpedo bombers:

The Prince Of Wales and Repulse (background) burning on the left side of the photo. The ship moving in the foreround is a British destroyer.

At the same time, the Japanese invaded Guam…

..and attacked Wake Island, of which more later this month.

It was, in short, the the biggest – in terms of area covered – attack in the history of warfare.  And it plunged the half of the northern hemisphere that wasn’t already at war with Hitler into the greatest session of human bloodletting in history. This blog focuses mostly on the smaller stories, and the unknown ones, in the war.  There were many at Pearl Harbor – most notably to this blog’s audience, the fact that the first shots fired that morning were fired by Minnesotans.  A gun crew of Minnesota Navy Reserve sailors from Saint Paul, crewing a cannon on the U.S.S. Ward, a refurbished World War I destroyer on antisumbarine patrol off the entrance to the harbor, spotted a Japanese midget submarine that was attempting to infiltrate the harbor.

The crew of the starboard four-inch gun on the USS Ward. Some of the men, mostly from Saint Paul, are still with us, thank God. Their gun is on the state capitol grounds, on the frontage road by the Vets building near Wabasha street.

The Minnesotans – using the very cannon that currently sits in the yard at the Veterans building, at the foot of Capitol Mall in Saint Paul – hit the submarine twice, sinking it before it could get into position.  I wrote about them four years ago.

Here’s the long and short of it; to a generation of Americans who think – with reason – that 9/11 was a catastrophe…well, it was.  But our nation’s power and ability to respond to the aggression was not affected.  Clearly not – our military riposte was sudden and overwhelming.

Now – imagine an attack that sank three or four of our Supercarriers, the mainstays of our Navy, in the matter of an hour, and cut off and isolated, say, Korea, leaving its tens of thousands of American troops isolated, cut off from supplies, devoid of air cover, and pretty well helpless, and left us more or less unable to respond in kind without massive effort and sacrifice, at all?

Because that, adjusting for modern military doctrine, is what happened on December 7.  That was where this nation was at seventy years ago at this hour; not just bloodied, not just beaten , but truly unable to respond.

And very few Americans alive today can imagine that.

A lawsuit against an Oregon blogger has prevailed, at least for now…

​A U.S. District Court judge in Portland has drawn a line in the sand between “journalist” and “blogger.” And for Crystal Cox, a woman on the latter end of that comparison, the distinction has cost her $2.5 million.

Speaking to Seattle Weekly, Cox says that the judgement could have impacts on bloggers everywhere.

It was a defamation suit.  The plaintiff alleged that Ms.Cox had written many things about him that were untrue and malicious; the judged tossed all but one of the counts, but since Ms.Cox couldn’t verify the truth of the statement – well, if you’d read my series over the fall about defamation, you’d know that can be a bad thing for the respondent.

“This should matter to everyone who writes on the Internet,” she says.

As well it should.  If you write malicious, defamatory things that aren’t true, there should be consequences.  I have no idea if Cox is or is not guilty of defaming her accuser – and I hope that justice prevails, whatever it is in this case.

Now here’s where the case gets more important: Cox argued in court that the reason her post was more factual was because she had an inside source that was leaking her information. And since Oregon is one of 40 U.S. states including Washington with media shield laws, Cox refused to divulge who her source was.

But without revealing her source Cox couldn’t prove that the statements she’d made in her post were true and therefore not defamation, or attribute them to her source and transfer the liability.

Here’s where it gets skeevy:

Oregon’s media shield law reads:

No person connected with, employed by or engaged in any medium of communication to the public shall be required by … a judicial officer … to disclose, by subpoena or otherwise … [t]he source of any published or unpublished information obtained by the person in the course of gathering, receiving or processing information for any medium of communication to the public[.]

The judge in Cox’s case, however, ruled that the woman did not qualify for shield-law protection not because of anything she wrote, but because she wasn’t employed by an official media establishment.

So – the rules change if you get a paycheck from a legacy media organization?

I’m not sure if Cox is guilty or not – but the mainstream media should get no special protections the rest of society don’t get.

I remember going to my first Fourth Congressional District convention.  It must have been in 2000; it was long before I had a blog.  I had been elected as a delegate from House District 66B; this was my first Congressional District convention, and my second convention of any kind at all.

And I sat in my chair, and waited for all the democracy to kick in.

And it did.  We listened to about two hours worth of speeches, if I remember correctly, before we got down to business.  Which was…

…about two hours of debating rules and picayune aspects of the Constitution.

Not the US Constitution, or even the Minnesota one.  The Fourth Congressional District COP Constitution.  And a group of three or four people, who seemed to live for this sort of thing, basically alternated back and forth on the microphones as the chair and parliamentarian fielded, processed and wove an ever-expanding web of motions, sub-motions leading to amendments, amendments to amendments…

…all to answer a question on the order of “do we allow the rules to be suspended to move the treasurer’s report in front of the teller’s report on the agenda?”, or something equally earth-shaking.

Of course, two things became clear:

1. This wasn’t entirely about convention rules; there was some subtext at work; old feuds, the detritus from years of people doing politics together resurfacing in the form of a squabble over some picayune aspect of parliamentary procedure or other.
2. But for some of them, it genuinely was about convention rules.  There are people on this earth who genuinely get exercised about that kind of stuff.

Judging by the utter boredom on the faces of the first-time conventiongoers around me – many of them last-time conventiongoers – I was hardly alone.

People who are drawn to the GOP don’t tend to be people who enjoy sitting in meetings, much less arguing about picayune parts of parliamentary procedure.  They – we – tend not only to be goal-oriented rather than process-oriented people, but to be the type that actively eschew politics for its own sake, preferring to actually change society for the better. It’s the same sort of things that draw people to the Libertarians or the Constitution or Green Parties – the urge to actually get out there and solve problems rather than sit in rooms and argue procedure until your butt falls asleep.

And yet to any party – the sheep-like DFL, of course, but the GOP too – are drawn people who do just love the whole “being a party” thing; people who love navigating the bylaws and codedils and playing politics, on the most venal possible level, for its own sake.

The rift over the weekend between Emmer Campaign and the Seifert/Party Establishment crowds was a bit of deja vu.  There may be no more beaten-down organization in this country than the Saint Paul Republican City Committee and its various wards and districts.  So nobody, perhaps, was more surprised than Saint Paul Republicans a few years back when, hard to the heels of two devastating electoral losses state and nationwide, Republicans captured a community council deep in the heart of stereotypically-DFL-dominated Saint Paul…

…and promptly proceeded to watch the victory dissolve in infighting, squabbling, backstabbing – the kind of stuff the Saint Paul City Committee is usually known for.

Too many Republicans seem to have forgotten Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment; duke it out with Republicans, but keep it in the house.  Never, ever bag on fellow Republicans in public.  Even ones you disagree with.  Even ones who you detest.   Especially not to the media, who are – never ever forget this – working for the other side.

(Some leftyblogger will chime in here with “what about the Override Six?  What about Arne Carlson and Dave Durenberger?”  Only half of that chime-in is dumb; Carlson and Durenberger endorsed Democrats and used their remaining political capital to attack the GOP; while as a Norwegian-American I might not have used the term “Quisling”, Tony Sutton was absolutely right to toss them from the party.  As to the Override Six – it was endorsing activists that got ride of two of them, and the voters that got the others).

A fair chunk of the GOP – the part of it that is into the “party” stuff more than the “getting government off our backs” bit – needs to remember what the actual goal of all this party-mongering is.  It’s not more party-mongering.

Much more later this week.

A Ramsey county judge has told Governor Dayton, the SEIU and the AFSCME that they’re going to have to go back to shaking down small businesses the old-fasioned way – without state goverment help (for now):

Just two days before ballots were set to go out, a Ramsey County Judge has halted the upcoming election on child care unionization by issuing a temporary restraining order. Ramsey County Judge Lindman said the matter should go through the legislature instead.  He also said the election was “very harmful to all of the parties involved.”

The entire bid to unionize childcare workers get more dues-paying members to prop up their budgets and political efforts is going to have to Plan B – actually make sure it’s a debate:.

Judge Lindman set a hearing on the injunction for January 16th.  “It means we have more time to educate providers and get the truth out,” Hollee said.  “It gives me hope.  We’re small business owners and I keep telling people, who’s next?”

More on the NARN in coming weekends.

If you’re old enough to remember the seventies and early eighties, you remember the isolated stories of the Japanese soldiers who lived in the jungles of New Guinea and other parts of the South Pacific that our troops had bypassed, who’d gone into the wilderness awaiting word from their leadership that never came.  They never heard of HIroshima, the surrender, the complete collapse of their military, and finally the rebirth of Japan as a fairly pacific society and then industrial giant.

And they staggered out of the jungle, three and sometimes almost four decades later, wearing improvised and native clothes, their rifles long-rusted into uselessness, amazed that Japan had surrendered, their Emperor had renounced the war that “he” had (by proxy) sent them to fight, and that life – and fact – had gone merrily on without them.

Anti-gun zealots are the new Japanese-Soldiers-who-never-got-the-word.  Exhibit 47839203943823983290 – this fellow, “Capper”, from the perhaps-incongruously-named blog Cognitive Dissonance, about a dissonant decision at a gun show in Wisconsin:

It has been recently reported that Waukesha County, deep in Republican red, has expanded its ban on concealed carry to other county buildings besides the courthouse and the administration building.

What was not reported is that it is also possible that when a person or group rent one of their facilities, like the expo center or a park, they can ask that the facility be marked as do not carry and that the county will honor that request.

The only reason that I even bring this up is that I’ve heard that at least one group, renting the Waukesha County Expo Center, has availed themselves of this new rule.

It’s not so much a “new rule” as it is “part of Wisconsin’s carry permit law“: from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s fairly capable summary of the law, “You can’t carry concealed at law enforcement buildings, prisons, jails, secured units or secured mental health institutions, courthouses, courtrooms, beyond security checkpoints in airports, on school grounds and premises, in taverns if you’re drinking alcohol, at special events such as concerts or games where organizers don’t allow it, at colleges or universities where prohibited, in businesses or on private property where the owner prohibits or limits concealed weapons”.  In other words, a lot like Minnesota’s law (but apparently without the idiotic posting requirement).

I’m going to issue an O’Rourke alert here; “LIfe is full of ironies, for the stupid”.  Not to say that Mr. Capper is stupid – far from it – but generally if someone finds “irony” in the mundane, it means they haven’t looked far enough for the not-so-“ironic” explanation.

Ironically, if my information is correct, that group is none other than the Bob and Rocco Gun Show. My source indicated that it wasn’t Bob Pucci that wanted this, but the national franchise. They said that there’s been too many accidental shootings by people bringing in their concealed weapons and, either through clumsiness or ineptness, have had the gone accidentally go off shooting the vendors.

Sorta.  Like most such restrictions and such events, it was actually a matter of a lawyer at an insurance company waving a big financial surcharge at the franchiser, because of the elevated risk that it might happen.  It has much less to do with people “bringing in their concealed weapons” than it does to people bringing in weapons at all, because – remember this? – Wisconsin didn’t have a concealed carry law until November 1.

Doesn’t that make you feel better knowing that Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature has now made it possible for any fool to walk around armed without even taking an inadequate four hour training course?

And here we are with the Japanese Soldier bit again.  Perhaps “Capper” never heard – legal carry permittees nationwide, over the past thirty years, have proven themselves not only two orders of magnitude more law-abiding than the average citizen, but vastly more competent than them as well.

And one thing Mr. Capper definitely has in common with the Japanese soldier; the soldier never had any need to read Wisconsin law.  Mr. Capper needs to, but apparently hasn’t; the law requires a training course.  It’s not the specialized training course you have to take in Minnesota – but it’s training.  Although there has been no link shown between training classes and safety; carry permittees are equally safe and reliable in states that don’t require training as in those that do.

And they wonder why we are recalling them….

Back into the jungle, Capper.  Walker is going to be in office for another three years.  And even if he does get recalled, it won’t be over this; even hard-core Democrat states – see Oregon, Washington and Connecticut – have shall-issue laws that are in no danger of repeat.  Because they work.

Sayonara.

So let’s check out this NPR story on Illinois battle to try to keep Sears’ jobs in the state, and other states’ battle to get them:

Thousands of jobs are on the line in a competition between states over the corporate headquarters of Sears. Several states are offering tax incentive packages to try to lure the company away from Illinois, including one bid from Ohio that’s worth up to $400 million.

Why would that happen?.  Can you spot it?

The Sears Holding Corp., parent company to Sears and Kmart, says it is seriously considering the offer after Illinois lawmakers failed this week to approve a package of tax incentives aimed at keeping Sears and [the Chicago Mercantile Exchange] from leaving.

The story shows the folly of “corporate welfare” – government picking winners and losers with taxpayer money. :

“I think that the proposed help for Sears is more than adequate to keep them here, and I hope we can put the movement together this month to get that job done,” he says.

Of course, corporate subsidies are sort of like narcotics; once you get through the starter drugs, you need more and more powerful stuff to keep the same buzz going.

But – and I’ll say, I was amazed at this – NPR did actually cut to the “root cause” of the issue:

Quinn and his fellow Democrats who control Illinois’ Legislature have been taking heat from the business leaders for raising the state’s income tax rates last January to help close a gaping budget deficit.

Oblique?  Of course.  But it’s further proof; taxes kill.

Last week was a big one for the Republican Party of Minnesota.

On the eve of the winter Central Committee meeting, chairman Tony Sutton resigned.  As I noted last week, Sutton – and his deputy until last October, Michael Brodkorb – were transitional figures for the MNGOP.  Speaking as a D-list pundit rather than an insider, they did a great job of making the party more available, and giving access to the party and its people to the only media they have on their side, the conservative alternative one.

Of course, there was the matter of the budget.

On the one hand, Sutton spent some money.  The party is at least a half million in debt.

On the other hand, the MNGOP had a big challenge; in the middle of a terrible economy, to try to beat the DFL…

…well, no.  The DFL isn’t really a party anymore.  It’s a holding company that manages a brand and farms out the actual work, and fundraising, and spending, to outside groups like Take Action MN and Alliance For A Better MN and Alida Messinger (whose idea of fundraising is reaching into her purse for a checkbook) and Minnesota’s unions (whose idea of fundraising is taking dues from their membership, 46% of whom vote Republican, and giving 92% of it to Democrats).  Anyway – Sutton and the MNGOP had to fight against an avalanche of outside and union money.  It takes money to fight money.

On yet another hand, at the party level, the spending doesn’t seem to have worked; the GOP lost all of the races for which it was primarily responsible – the State Auditor, Attorney General and Secretary of State races.

On another of those hands, it was sitll a great cycle for the MNGOP brand.  Perhaps you recall – we won quite a few races.  Flipped the House and Senate. Came within 8,000 votes of winning the governor’s race; I’m convinced there’d be at least 8,001 do-overs for Emmer if we held the election today). It was a good cycle.

Then again, those races were mainly the job of the Legislative GOP caucuses – which did a great job of raising and distributing money effectively, and helping with the campaigns that made such a huge, crucial difference last election and (more importantly) last session.

And on the final hand, if you look at the budget today, it’s hard to tell where the money went, or who we even owe money to.  And it’s causing quite a bit of dissent within the party; at last weekend’s Central Committee meeting, the budget – which normally gets rubber-stamped without a lot of thought by a room full of delegates that just want to get out of there – was tabled until a meeting in the near future.  And that is going to be a donnybrook, as new Deputy and Acting Chair Kelly Fenton and the remains of Sutton’s Executive Committee face a Central Committee that is laced with dissenters who are looking for solid answers.

And the media just loves it; as the Party airs three years of dirty laundry in public and monday-morning-quarterbacks the 2010 election cycle.  (Anyone seeing the wisdom of the DFL’s approach – not really being a party at all – yet?  All of this happens in private, in the offices of non-profits that answer only to themselves and their hand-picked boards, with not an iota of elected scrutiny).

The media – which is, now and always, in the bag for the DFL – is going to love this.

And yet the GOP – which, for all its faults, is the only actual transparent political party in this state (if only because nobody, but nobody, cares about the Independence Party) – is going to have to get through some of this BS to go forward.

So – what the hell do we do about the MNGOP, at this fraught and unprecedented fork in the road?

That’s the subject this week.

A trusted source says had the following all written up long before the election for MN GOP Deputy Chair was held:

MN GOP’s _________ Represents Big Business, Divisiveness, and Bigotry #stribpol

Well, OK – no, there is no source, and I don’ t know what Ed had on his laptop.  But I’m pretty sure his headline was written, at least mentally, well before Kelly Fenton won the Deputy Chair vote yesterday.

And the rest of his post was easily-enough predictable; like a fair chunk of the Minnesota Left, he’s disappointed that the Minnesota GOP didn’t take Saturday’s Central Committee meeting as an opportunity to “move to the middle” and do more of the DFL’s work for it.

Never.  Never never ever.

So sorry, Minnesota Left.  You’ll have to do your own campaigning keep getting Alita to pay for doing your campaigning

Jack Tomczak and Ben Kruse host The Late Debate on FM95.9, which is in the Anoka-Ramsey area.  If you’re outside the Patriot’s listening area and don’t have a computer handy, and are in the northwest ‘burbs between 10-midnight Sunday through Thursday, I grant you special dispensation to listen in.

I’m at the MNGOP Central Committee meeting, at the Doubletree in Bloomington.

It’s a pretty big day here; Tony Sutton resigned last night (it’s been in all the papers).

Sutton was, I think, a transitional figure for the party.  The MNGOP has always been a very top-down party, Sutton presided over a party leadership that opened up the party to the grassroots more than any previous one – but whose institutional inertia still was heavily loaded towards insiders.   Such is the nature of political parties (the DFL is about the same, only different – it’s all about insiders from the various non-profts that are carrying most of the water for the actual party these days).

And it’s perhaps inevitable that Sutton’s record is mixed; he did a great job of scouting up major donors in a tough economy.  He also spent a lot of money – with good reason (we had an election to win, after two very bad cycles).

Unfortunately, his budget, in addition to being in deficit, was a bit opaque.  A group of activists is circulating a flyer saying that the GOP needs to provide the Central Committee’s delegates need to get not just the budget, but all the information leading to the budget, including a complete list of who the party owes money to, and how much.  And until that happens, there is really no excuse for passing the budget as submitted.  In the interest of disclosure, I was involved in writing thier flyer; the group involved represented a wide range of opinion; some long-time Sutton dissidents, some supporters with questions, some people who just want to see the party get on the right track and capitalize on the very real gains we picked up last election cycle.

Here’s the flyer:

The Republican Party of Minnesota Is Broke

It Is Your Job To Fix It.

 The MNGOP Is In Crisis

The Minnesota GOP is broke.  Worse?  Nobody knows how broke it is.

Ask the leadership for a balance sheet – nobody can provide one.  There is no transparency to this party’s budget process.

We’ve read the party’s list of creditors – and then read in the Star/Tribune that the party owes people who aren’t on the list.  Why?  Good question.  Nobody in this room can tell you.

You wouldn’t run your business this way.

It’s our job, as State Central Committee delegates, to fix this. 

State Central delegates are like a business’ board of directors; we provide a check and balance on management.   Delegates need all of the party’s information to make sound decisions. See Article II of the party bylaws for a job description.

We Propose A Solution – And We Need Your Help.

·        We need a plan to eliminate excessive debt, increase fundraising and win elections.

• We need full disclosure, accountability and transparency to form and implement this plan.
• We need a line by line analysis of the budget; where do the numbers come from? Are they effective uses of money? Is old debt included in these numbers?

To get the information you need to do your job as a delegate, you need to vote “No” on the proposed budget. 

 

There needs to be a discussion on the budget, the plan to get out of debt and on the party’s leadership.  Rubber-stamping the proposed budget will just kick the problem down the road.

Vote “No” on rubber-stamping the proposed budget.

A number of delegates are planning on submitting a motion to reject the budget and demand all of the needed information.

Not sure I’ll be able to hang around long enough to see that.  The acting chair is talking rules right now.  The joke is that they’re trying to bore any dissidents to death.

I got a bunch of responses over yesterday’s piece on the $800-million-and-change budget surplus announced yesterday.

Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:

Yesterday, we were told to expect a budget shortfall of a nearly a Billion dollars. Brace for cuts.

Today, we’re told we have a surplus of a nearly Billion dollars. Spending spree!

That’s a swing of TWO BILLION DOLLARS overnight.

Two things:

A. How can the preliminary estimates be off by that much money? And

B. Do you wonder why I have absolutely no confidence in this administration?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Lack of confidence in the Dayton regime is always, always justified.

Others wrote – via email, twitter and in the comment section – that the sudden increase smells like a ploy, and I did my endzone happy dance too early.  It means either…:

• Dayton told his Management and Budget office to show a surplus to help bail him out on the stadium issue, or…
• …he told them to find some more money so the GOP would relent on spending; since he can’t browbeat them into raising taxes, he’ll try browbeating us into spending money, that, quote, “we already have”.

My answer: doesn’t matter.  If the surplus doesn’t exist, the Governor needs to be called on it.  If it does, it needs to be rebated to the taxpayers, or at the very most pushed to the schools to eliminate the DFL’s big shrieking point the “budget shift”.

At any rate – either way, the Legislative GOP majority needs to stay the course that it was sent to Saint Paul to carry out.

The unedited video of the fifteen minutes leading up to the UC-Davis pepper-spraying incident. It’s about fifteen minutes, and not fantastic quality…:

…because, let’s face it, ubiquitous electronics aren’t always a blessing.

But it sort of turns the media’s and “Occupy Movement’s” (pardon the redundancy) narrative about the incident on its head…

Minnesota Management and Budget announced today that, notwithstanding original reports that today’s budget forecast was going to be a billion dollars light, today it was announced that the state is 876 million in the black.

Let’s be clear about something; we have this surplus because the state’s economy grew.  And it grew because Mark Dayton’s gigantistic spendthrift agenda was thwarted in the Legislature.

And the credit goes to two groups:

1. Minnesota’s businesses, for hiring people (or at least hanging on and laying off fewer of them), keeping them working, and paying for that work.  I think it’s safe to say they did this because of the efforts of…
2. The GOP-controlled legislature, for holding the line on the budget even as well as they did.  While – as the Strib notes – economists note we’re not out of the woods economically, especially because we are tied to the national and international macroeconomy, it could have been a lot worse.  (And with an 8,000 vote swing, it could have been a lot better, but we can’t cry over spilled milk).

…that while  Obama has aggressively flirted, to the point of tongue-kissing, with the “Occupy” “movement” since day 1, and the media has been fluffing the “grassroots” “uprising” more aggressively than an up-and-coming production assistant on a pr0no shoot…

…that those days are over.

Friendly wager:  Once the “Occupy” “novement” turn on Obama, they disappear from the news.

Or maybe the media just finds some time to cover the killings, rapes, assaults and other capers and hijinks.

I was up late last night, on The Late Debate with Jack And Ben.

Which means I wasn’t up early this morning blogging.

It’ll be a light day today.