Disjointed random thoughts about Iowa:

• Let The Donnybrook Roll: I think the results last night were about the best possible outcome for the GOP as a whole.  All the talk of the nomination being a predetermined conclusion is on hold, at least for now (and hopefully for quite some time); whether you’re a western libertarian-conservative, an evangelical or a pro-business, law-and-order conservative, you have a dog on the race.  More importantly, all those dogs matter; the longer the social-con and libertarian dogs run even with Romney, the more he has to concede to them – us – to eke out the nomination.  And at the same time, Santorum is going to have to figure out how to appeal to activists and voters in New Hampshire, Florida and Utah (not his natural constituencies) as well as South Carolina.  The winner?  All of us who want a conservative who’s primed to kick Obama’s ass in November.
• Come Home, Michele:  You took your best shot.  And it was a very good shot – the first woman to get into the GOP caucuses, likely the first of many.  Maybe the first of several tries for you.  But it’s over now, and I think you know it (as this is written, rumors have it your next presser will be to bow out; we’ll see).  You need to come back to the Sixth District and win – I’m guessing 15 points this time – and use the mojo you’ve acquired over this campaign to move into leadership, and build that resume.  And, let’s not forget, work on that message discipline; as I’ve said, when you’re “on”, there’s scarcely a politician out there who can out-motivate you from the stump. On the other hand, there are times when you shoot yourself in the foot with a belt-fed M240G machine gun.  I’m not going to recount the times – the media and your various local obsessive stalkers will do that for us – but let’s call it a growth opportunity; the next time you get a communications director who knows what he or she is doing, take their counsel.

The premise is that the mainstream media wants Democrats elected, and seeks the defeat of Republicans.

It can be an unconscious thing – most reporters are liberals, so it makes sense that their coverage will subtly shade things – or a very conscious one (like, I suspect, the past 25 years of the Strib Minnesota Poll and HHH Institute Polls or the assembled life’s work of Lori Sturdevant and Nick Coleman).

And as we head into election time, the media faces one challenge – and the challenge is big enough to warrant bold italics.

The ideological media’s mission is to keep people from asking and answering the question “are you better off than you were four years ago) under any circumstances.

(Except in states like, say, North Dakota and Minnesota, where the mission is to obscure the reasons that people are doing, if not better than four years ago, at least better than the rest of the country, which is of course behind the Strib’s effort to portray Mark Dayton as the engine behind MInnesota’s success, despite his complete legislative failure).

Which brings us to the op-ed from the WaPo by Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation, dutifully h reprinted by the Strib the other day, and which is such a clear object lesson in the media’s approach to diverting Joe Public’s attention from the bold-italic question above.

No, really.  After the requisite sane and sober start…:

My advice in the weeks to come: Don’t let the giddiness of the campaign coverage distract from what will really matter.

…Vanden Heuvel all but restates my premise – “ignore how your’e doing and focus on these shiny rhetorical objects!” – word for word if not motivation for motivation; I’ll add emphasis:

Instead, pay attention to three issues that could affect the outcome of the election, even though they have nothing to do with the campaigns themselves:

It boggles the brain.

First, a surge in voting restrictions: In 2011, 14 states passed laws making it harder for certain Americans, particularly minorities and young people, to vote.

Leaving aside the patronizing bigotry – “minorities and young people” can’t find a driver’s license?  The franchise for which their forefathers fought and died isn’t worth the effort that it takes to get and carry a damn free state ID? – the issue is an attempt by the left to create a bloody shirt of grievance to try to motivate youth and minorities, who turned the election for Obama in ’08, and who are, inconveniently, looking to be extraordinarily un-motivated this time around (Afro-Americans, and Latinos).

The goal is to keep traditional Democratic constituencies from casting ballots, and methods include requiring voters to show government-issued IDs (which more than 1 in 10 Americans lack), reducing or ending early voting, and disenfranchising citizens with criminal records.

If I were a Democrat, I’m not sure I’d like Vanden Heuvel’s insinutation that the irresponsible, the criminal, and those to lazy and unmotivated the legal right to take an hour off from work to vote are their natural constituencies.

Vanden Heuvel trots out a slew of innuendos that cater to the ill-informed – who clearly are a Democrat constituency:

In Texas, for example, a concealed handgun license is a sufficient form of voter identification, but a university ID

Because a carry permit actually is evidence that one is a permanent resident at an address, in a way that a university ID is not.

In Wisconsin, a voter without an ID needs a birth certificate to get one, but a voter without a birth certificate needs a valid ID to obtain one.

Then…change the state law?

In Tennessee, a 96-year-old African-American woman was denied a free voter ID because she didn’t have a copy of her marriage license.

Right.  Because government never makes mistakes.  And because outlier cases define the issue.

NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous has described the efforts as the most coordinated attack on voting rights since the days of Jim Crow.

And if you can count on anyone for measured, logical rhetoric when the time comes to distract people from the question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”, it’s Benjamin Todd Jealous (/sarcasm off).

There’s a larger philosophical question that is ripe for debate – “is it possible to make it too easy to vote?  One should not discouragie people from voting, of course, but the Democrat model of corralling everyone they can find and driving them like compliant sheep to the polls – frequently not knowing anything about the issues or the candidates – doesn’t speak well of our democracy.

But that’s not the issue, here; it’s “watch the media work start to work overtime to try to divert the voter’s attention away from the real questions in this election.

Tomorrow, the next rhetorical shiny object – big bad money (from Republicans only, naturally).

Minnesota’s last living Medal Of Honor recipient, Mike Colalillo, has passed away.

He was awarded the Medal for an action near Untergriesheim, Germany on April 7, 1945 – bare weeks before the end of the war, at a time when the battle in the West alternated unpredictably between Germans eager to surrender to any Western army, and fanatical SS or Hitlerjügend holdouts who fought ferociously.

Colalillo encountered the latter, according to this story in the Winona Daily News:

“Inspired by his example, his comrades advanced in the face of savage enemy fire,” the citation read.

When his pistol was disabled by shrapnel, Colalillo climbed onto a friendly tank and manned its machine gun. And, as “bullets rattled about him, fired at an enemy emplacement with such devastating accuracy that he killed or wounded at least 10 hostile soldiers and destroyed their machine gun.”

After that gun jammed, he borrowed a submachine gun from the tank crew and continued the attack on foot. When his company was ordered to withdraw, Colalillo remained behind to help a wounded soldier cross “several hundred yards of open terrain rocked by an intense enemy artillery and mortar barrage,” the citation said.

Colalillo was later sent to Washington, where President Harry S. Truman presented him with the medal on Dec. 18, 1945.

A few years back, at the dedication of the Minnesota World War II memorial, Ed and I were slated to interview Colalillo.  The interview fell through – the dedication ceremony ran too long.  As much fun as I had talking with the mass of World War II veterans that day, missing out on talking with Colalillo was a major loss.

There’ll be an announcement this Saturday on the NARN re the schedule for the 2012 Minnesota Organization of Bloggers Winter Party.

Tune in

For all of the talk about the GOP’s debt, Tom Scheck at MPR notes that the DFL is also the red:

There has been a lot of attention given to the finances of the Republican Party. It should be noted, however, that the DFL Party is also facing a debt.

DFL Party Chair Ken Martin said the party has a debt of roughly $210 thousand heading into 2012. Martin said the party had a debt of $750 thousand at the start of 2011.

Not huge news – this blog reported on the $750K debt years ago.

The funny part is reading the comments in the MPR piece.   You get the impression that a lot of DFLers are shocked that the press would bother with the DFL.  Further proof, I think, that Democrats expect the media to be on their side, when push comes to shove.

It’s part of the reason Twin Cities DFLers seem to be unable to meet conservatives in a ratoinal debate, ever; their entire worldview is formed by schools, colleges and a media that barely recognizes alternatives to the left exist.

The Strib editorial board made the latest installment in its effort to make Governor Dayton appear to be anything other than utterly worthless and an utter failure in the first year of his misbegotten term in office.

 “But the DFL governor’s overall performance to date has been strong enough to win over skeptics, rally support from unexpected sources and earn the grudging respect of partisan opponents.

Who – Kelliher and Entenza supporters?

He has turned his political slogan — “Building a Better Minnesota” — into a credible description of not just intentions, but accomplishments.”

I was going to fisk the Strib’s fluff-job – but Luke Matthews already did it over at True North.

And his response was about the same as mine:

Huh?

Did someone set a bale of marijuana on fire in the offices of the StarTribune?  Rather than rebut the entire article, which is as laughably contrived and fictional as to make Dr. Seuss blush, I’ll give a recap of Governor Dayton’s abysmal year as the “Face of the DFL.”

Governor Dayton was inaugurated in January of 2011 and since then his performance has been going downhill fast.  He slapped together a ridiculous budget with every kind of payoff imaginable to the public sector unions and his DFL political cronies.  He proposed a gargantuan increase in spending and a myriad of tax increases.  These tax increases couldn’t begin to cover his explosive spending proposals, but that didn’t deter him.  It wasn’t just unreasonable, it was ridiculous.

The legislature looked at the farce, turned on the shredders, and calmly inserted his proposal page by page into the garbage.  Not even the minority DFL caucus put up much of a fight.  The budget ignored reality, would have stymied economic growth in the state, and didn’t even pretend to be for the population as a whole.  It was a bad joke.

Beyond that?  When the Governor went on a whirlwind tour of the state to try to flog his idiotic budget and buttress support for his shutdown, The People shut him down cold, sending him back to St. Paul with his hat in his hand.

What this is is the beginning of the media’s effort, as unpaid arms of the DFL, to try to make Governor Dayton appear to be a capable,much less formidable, opponent for the upcoming session.

Part of my interview with WCCO-TV made it past the cutting room floor last night.

You gotta look fast; I’m up around 1:40, and done around 1:50…:

…and I basically restate the obvious. But thanks to Pat Kessler for the call!

I don’t care much about polls released almost a year before an election.

But I tilt an ear toward some of the market-driven polls – Intrade and such – because people aren’t just giving opinions; they’re banking money on outcomes.

Just a tilt, mind you.

And with that in mind – the various market-driven indices are showing mixed results for the fall:  as of Saturday, they’re showing…:

• a 54% likelihood Obama will retain the White House
• a 21% chance the Dems will retain the Senate, and…
• a 33% chance they’ll take the House back.

It is, of course, a moving set of indices:

The chart shows how these three main predictions have shifted during the course of the year. Obama had a small spike when Osama Bin Laden was captured, but otherwise he’s been on a slow decline for most of the summer and early fall, with a slow resurgence in the late fall and early winter. The Senate has been relatively steady with small spikes corresponding to shifts in specific seats, including retirements and announcements of new candidates. The House has shown the most flux with a steep decline that mirrored the President’s, but continued longer into the fall. Yet, it has taken a sharp turn towards the Democrats in recent weeks:

Here’s the chart:

I can’t help but think that the unsatisfying nature of the GOP campaign so far hasn’t helped.  I’m going to guess things switch up after Super Tuesday…

…and bog back down again when the media goes all-in for Obama around Labor Day.

As of today, AM1280 is making a big programming change.

The Walter Winchell Mark Levin show will be moving back to the 11PM-2AM slot.

And – this part, I like – the Dennis Miller show will be moving up to the 8-11PM shift.

And I’ll cop to it, I love it.  Not a huge Levin fan – but I love the Miller show.

So now, hopefully everyone’s happy.  But for one, I certainly am.

It’s long been the policy of this blog to never, ever endorse candidates.  Partly because it seems arrogant – I mean, who cares what I think?  And partly because even if I do have any influence over what people think about how they vote, I’d much prefer that that influence go to helping, in whatever way I can, to get anyone who’d be influence by my opinion to think more confidently for themselves instead.

But today, I’m going to break with that tradition.

On this, the eve of the Iowa caucuses, I’m going to give an unqualified, fervent endorsement for Paul.

Paul represents one of the  most important things I believe – the need to push libertarian legislation and policy into the mainstream of American political thought.

Oh, yeah – just so we’re clear, I’m talking about Senator Rand Paul.

I know.  He’s not running for President – not this time.  And that’s fine – because I’m not endorsing him for President.

I’m endorsing his approach to pushing the ideas and ideals of liberty into the mainstream of Republican politics.

Oh, his father, Ron Paul?  The guy breaks my heart.  Yeah, he’s a big-L libertarian and all, but even if you leave out the racist rants from thirty years ago (and even if we do, the media won’t allow the electorate to ignore them – and the electorate should be aware!), he’s basically claiming he can balance the budget on the back of defense, while he’s proposed nothing as far as cutting and reforming entitlements, which is basically saying “the dog ate my homework” if your campaign is ostensibly based on, y’know, reforming government.

No, I’m endorsing Rand Paul for the very reason I’d love to be able to endorse his father.  When I left the GOP in 1994, I did it because I wanted to belong to a party that believed in Liberty, the Bill of Rights, Originalism, and the whole idea that this nation is built on inalienable rights, not entitlements deeded to us by the Government.

And I spent four years interacting with people whose entire involvement in politics was to endlessly reiterate pure ideology, secure in the knowledge that they’d never have to actually tackle a budget or try to downsize a bureaucracy, since none of them were ever going to get elected to anything, ever.  Ever.  And I came back to the GOP, reasoning that it’d be easier to get the GOP to adopt enough Libertarian ideals to be palatable, and still be able to get people elected to get some – enough – of those ideals moved into some sort of policy.

Ron Paul has been a GOP Congressman for a long, long time.  And he’s had a positive effect on the GOP – when he’s bothered to exert his influence in the party.  But in 2008, when it became clear the nomination was far out of reach, he endorsed Libertarian party candidate Chuck Baldwin for President.  Which is marginally less useful that lighting up that endorsement and burning it – and set a noxious example for Paul’s followers; if you don’t get what you want, walk away.

An example too many of his followers claim they’ll follow, if Paul doesn’t win the nomination.  It’s especially true of the “Young Republicans” who, we are told, are very solidly behind Paul – and, some say, likely to sit out the election if Paul doesn’t get nominated.  Which is – I’ll be tactful – a lousy idea, this notion that you’ll “teach the GOP a lesson” by rewarding the US with another term of Barack Obama.

Parties don’t “learn lessons”, they reflect commitment.

And if you take your toys and go home, that’s exactly what will happen; the GOP will reflect your (withdrawal from ) commitment; Obama will benefit from it.

Answer this honestly; do you believe the nation will be better off under Obama than under even purported “RINO” MItt Romney?  Why?

And that’s why I’m endorsing Rand Paul – not for President (yet) but because he, unlike his father and way too many of his father’s supporters, knows that politics is a marathon, not a sprint; and that the cause of Liberty is better served by working within, and sometimes fighting like hell within, a party that is sympathetic (if not always actively enough) to Liberty, as opposed to the party that believes it’s just another word for having your wants satisfied.  And he knows that if he and his Liberty-loving followers don’t let up, they can get it all – elected, and  the opportunity to get their ideals actually enacted into law.

UPDATE:  Commenter “Courier J” notes that I got the name of the Libertarian Party’s candidate in 2008 wrong – it was Bob Barr.

I was only partially wrong, of course; Rep. Paul came on the Northern Alliance when he was in town for the “Campaign for Liberty” event, just before the RNC (the same day Sarah Palin was chosen as McCain’s running mate).  He gave a fairly churlish interview in which he urged conservatives disaffected by McCain’s coronation to check out Larry Hagelin (of the Natural Law party), Barr, and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, whom Paul eventually did endorse.

Which was, of course, the point of my post.

…if the Mayans were so good at predicting things, they’d have predicted the Spaniards coming, met them at the beach, and killed them first.

Just saying.

Dear Twin Cities (and National) Media:  please use this handy guide for identifying firearms.

It’s vetted by the NYTimes, so you just know it’s right:

Via regular commenter Seflores and Ace.

NOTE:  OK, on a more serious note:  this is a subject where the media’s vaunted “fact-checking” is more often than not humiliatingly bad.  And it’s on a subject where the vast majority of Americans are better-than you are or could reasonably make them.

Why not admit ignorance, shut up and learn something?

It’s time once again for that grand tradition in Twin Cities blogging; it’s the sixth-annual, 2011 edition of the Shootie Awards.  These awards commend the worst – and, ever-so-rarely, the best – in Twin Cities (usually-but-not-always alternative) media.

And we’ll kick off the awards with the first statuette:

The Walter Winchell Award For Cool, Dispassionate Reportage – For 2011, it wasn’t hard to pick out the story that’d lead to someone getting the award; the Darren Evanovich shooting in Minneapolis last October, in which a Mr. Evanovich  was shot by a legally-armed citizen in self-defense, was tailor made to bring out the prejudices and provincialism – dare I say, “rant and slant” – in the Twin Cities media.  And as the Henco Attorney’s office investigated and kept the official story close to its institutional vest (turns out Evanovich and his sisters had allegedly done several such capers), and as the Twin Cities Second Amendment movement – the sole source of legitimate, unbiased information on gun-related news, I’m more convinced every day – waved its arms and yelled “Hey, there’s some facts that need reporting here!”, the Twin Cities media took ever-increasing liberties with un-released facts, including a touching portrait of Mr. Evanovich’s family from Channel 5’s Tim Cherno, and a high-level (and grossly-premature) second-guessing of the wisdom of Minnesota’s concealed-carry law from MPR’s generally-excellent Bob Collins.

But at the end of the day, the award was an easy one; it goes to the Strib’s Matt McKinney, who took the sparse info from the Minneapolis Police Department’s news release on the case, interspersed a lot of humanzing detail about Mr. Evanovich, and keystoned his report with the line of the year; that the shooter – still anonymous – had…:

…a state permit to carry a pistol, and he had one with him. He chased the robber behind a restaurant and shot him dead.

As Mr. D famously added, we could be grateful he didn’t add “…just to watch him die”, but really, would it have been necessary?

Two days after the story ran, Henco attorney Mike Freeman declared the shooter a hero, while tut-tutting that his actions should only be untertaken in the extreme – which drew a response of “d’ya think?” from every Twin Cities shooter.

The Gordon Jump “As God Is My Witness, I Thought Turkeys Could Fly” Award:  The living will at the Minnesota Independent finally ground on down to its “do not resuscitate” clause.  Three years after being shaved down to a skeleton crew, and after two years of doing not much but providing commentary on “Uptake” videos and writing about Bradlee Dean, the crew of “liberals with deep pockets” that kept the Mindy in the chips – and on salary – from its “Hey, Gang, let’s do a show (on George Soros’ dime!)” origins, through its Steve Perry/Erik Black/Paul Demko-sporting salad days, to its lonely and oblivious end, finally decided to call in the fire and pee on the dogs.

The Just Plain Too-Dumb-To-Fisk Award – In all my years of blogging, I’ve seen a lot of pretentious, entitled, stupid writing.

Only once have I seen something so completely bereft of insight and intelligence, yet so utterly clogged with smug entitlement, that I had literally nothing to say.

Hinda Mandell’s Strib op-ed last September, in which she found racism in coffee labelling, reset the counter on smug, entitled and parochial.  It was really too weird to be “so bad it’s funny”.  And if you followed that, you are probably too smart to read Hinda Mandell.  Or something.

The “When Did You Stop Beating Your Husband” Award for Innuendo-Based-Journalism – It’s one of the Twin Cities’ leftysphere’s favorite “journalistic” techniques; “cover” a “story” by “asking” loaded “questions” about the “subject” of one’s “reporting”, so as to imply there’s “substance” to the “reporting” beyond the “question” itself;.   And while it’s hard to filter through all the entries in this category – do Twin Cities leftybloggers have any other technique for reporting on stories that they don’t actually have the facts to close the deal on? (Doh!  Now I’m doing it!), it’s foremost practitioner is in no doubt whatsoever.  Award-winning jouralist Karl Bremer wins the award (!) and spikes the ball in the endzone with two “winning” entries in this elite category; his innuendo-laden mischaracterization of the status of Michele Bachmann’s law license last summer, distinguished by being nearly devoid of actual fact, and his breathless questions about Bradlee Dean’s association with a financial planner who was in trouble with the law (whom Bremer apparently wasn’t curious enough to find out was also in trouble with Dean – Dean had sued the subject of the story).

The Billy Graham “Blinding Flash Of Epiphany” Award For Renewed Interest In Absolute Moral Rectitude In Politicians – goes to every Twin Cities leftyblogger who, in 1997, bleated “It’s only sex!  Mooooove on!  Just mooooooooooove on!  Peoples’ personal lives aren’t of any political importance” in re the Clinton/Lewinski flap, but suddenly re-discovered their inner tittering moralistic junior high nerd when news of the Amy Koch fiasco blew up.

The Phoenix Woman Award For Excellence In Rhetoric – For this year, this award goes to AM950 host Matt McNeil for – I’ll try to be tactful, here – face-palmingly inappropriate response to the Breivik shootings in Norway on Twitter.  Further proving that if there was a “Fairness Doctrine” for doy, AM950 would be off the air.

The Mister O’Brien 2+2=5 Award For Analysis – This one goes to Minnesota Progressive Project’s Eric Pusey who, in the middle of complaining that nobody was covering the dreary, addled “Netroots Nation” and all the media were over at the companian, interesting, hospitable, babe-packed “Right Online” conference, noted for his blog’s brief national audience that the Strib is really a conservative tool.

The Tina Brown Award For Turning A Prestigious News Organization Into A Showy, Shallow, Shrill Joke – Goes this year, as every year, to Tina Brown for the job she’s done turning “Newsweek” into something no self-respecting grocery-store will stock next to the National Enquirer.  In this case, for out-doing Dump Bachmann at picking the least-flattering possible portrait of Michele Bachmann to further their ‘Journalism”, and doing it with such bald-faced aplomb that the National Organization of Women, which normally wouldn’t pee on Rep. Bachmann if she were on fire, objected.

The Quickster Award For Excellence In Blog-Product Launch Marketing – is almost as easy to judge this year.  What better time to put a capstone on a decade of frothy, often fact-challenged obsession with former activist, former State Senator, current Representative and Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann than when she’s riding high in the polls!  None!

But the crew at Wiley and Sons waited to publish The Madness Of Michele Bachmann,  a Hugh-Hewitt-like assemblage of eight years of blog posts by Eva Young, Ken “Avidor” Weiner and the award-winning Karl Bremer until Bachmann’s star had risen, set, and was calmly fermenting in the middle-to-bottom of the GOP presidential pack, and probably generating less interest (outside the rage-y bsessives that frequent The Dump) than Tim Pawenty.

The Cicero Demosthenes Award For Excellence In Political Rhetoric – This one is always a tough one.  Which Twin Cities leftyblogger has brought the most to the expansion of the glory of written English rhetoric?

The nominations were compelling indeed:

• “Two-Putt” Tommy Johnson, who raised “I know you are, but what am I?” to something of a low art form
• Karl Bremer and the “Did you stop beating your wife?” school of reporting (which see above)
• University of Minnesota professor Bill Gleason, who brought spam sites into their rightful place as news sources.

But as to the winner?  The choice wasn’t so much “who” as “why”.   “Robert Erickson”, the nom de douche of Nick Espinosa, achieved the simulacrum of “progressive” rhetoric on two different levels in the past year.  His mastery of the “Call and chant” form of speech, which he perfected at weeks and weeks of “Occupy MN” protests (he’s actually “Dieter” in this video here) was surpassed only by his pioneering of what is, truly, the dominant form of progressive rhetorical articulation; meeting ones’s opponents with a cloud of glitter.

You hear that?  It’s the ghost of Demosthenes.  He’s crying.  I’m sure it’s joy.  Really.

And finally, the award di tutti awardi of the Shooties lo these many years…:

The Charles Townsend Award, the keystone award of these entire festivities.  Charles Townsend was a British Parliamentarian in the 1770′s, whose response to the growing “Tea Party” in the colonies was a marvel of patrician contempt…

“And now will these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength & Opulence, and protected by our Arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”

…was worthy of Larry Pogemiller or Nick Coleman.  Or Ryan Winkler.

On the Sunday, July 3 edition of the Esme Murphy show, Elliot Seid  – the capo for the Twin Cities Service Employees International Union (SEIU) said in re the state’s budget squabble, and the legislative majority’s unwillingness to accede to a 22% state spending increase, and tax hikes to match, in the middle of a recession, said “We don’t have a spending problem. We have a revenue problem!”.

And that’s it for this year!  Bus your own tables on the way out – we had to lay off most of the union kitchen staff to make our budget – and we’ll see you for next year’s Shooties!

Happy New Years, All!