Monthly Archives: February 2012

Crimes And Misdemeanors Against Fact

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Yesterday, I tackled a Strib op-ed by Jim Backstrom.  Backstrom, the Dakota County Attorney, wrote the latest in a long string of fact-challenged diatribes against the rights of the rigorously-law-abiding gun owner.

Now, Backstrom – who is not just an elected public official, but one in charge of enforcing the law by prosecuting accused criminals in Dakota County – has been misrepresenting facts  when it comes to the law-abiding gun owner for years.

Of course, we do have a First Amendment.  Freedom of Speech means freedom to lie like a sack of crap.  And as a general rule, I support the idea that the best way to respond to bad, stupid, misleading, lying speech is by responding with the truth, and more of it.  And I’m not changing that.

But I do have two questions:

Professionalism:  If a doctor were to go in the Star/Tribune and not just declare that, research notwithstanding, smoking cigarettes is in fact good for you, what would happen?  Would she be castigated?  Shunned by her fellow physicians?  Accused of professional malfeasance?  Have her records gone over by dogs trained to sniff out whackdoodelry?

Have her professionalism questioned for giving advice to the public that is directly counter to fact?

So why is it that Jim Backstrom – the chief prosecutor of one of Minnesota’s larger counties – is allowed, as a matter of professional integrity, to misrepresent Minnesota criminal law?  Because as I pointed out yesterday, that’s exactly what he did in yesterday’s op-ed, and in many before it.

Is there no requirement, legal or professional, that lawyers, especially lawyers who are public officials and officers of the court, refrain from actively and blatantly misrepresenting the laws they are charged with enforcing?

(Of course there is no legal requirement; I’d suspect that the same court decisions that allow cops to lie to suspects to trick them into giving information applies to county attorneys lying in the newspaper to the sheeple they’re responsible for herding).

Shouldn’t there be?

I mean, other than the next Dakota County attorney’s election?  Although as a point of principle, DakCo residents should take umbrage at a county attorney who lies about the law.  Even you liberals; if he misrepresents laws about self-defense, who’s to say the next one won’t be, I dunno, Voter ID?

The Same Old Song To The Same Old Beat: And yet again, the Strib prints without question or serious comment the opinion of someone who is simply empirically wrong about the subject.  On subject after subject, it’s been the Strib’s op-ed stock in trade for decades – and on none more than on the law-abiding citizens’ right to defend themselves.

The Strib continues to print the fact-less ravings of Heather Martens, Wes Skoglund, David Lillehaug, and of course Backstrom, without fact-check, without “gatekeeping”, without question, apparently for no other reason than (save Martens) they are big important (liberal) public officials.

Now, does anyone think the Strib would continue to publish, without question, op-eds from the doctor that claimed smoking was good for you?  Or would the circular-file his submissions after a while?

If that doctor were a powerful DFLer, apparently not.

Why Are Bakk, Dayton Taking Money From Children To Give To Zygi Wilf?

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I’m not much of a gambler, personally – but I support legalizing it more broadly at a state level.  I support it because it’s a tax on people other than me.

Cynical?  Sure.  Pass the ketchup.

Seriously?  For better or worse, gambling has its place in Minnesota.  For over two decades, proceeds from pull tabs – the most pointless form of gambling in history, but I digress – have gone to supporting Minnesota non-profits and charities.  Everything from youth hockey to local job training programs benefit from pull tabs.

And now, Tom Bakk and Mark Dayton want to raid that pile of money to give it to Zygi Wilf, according to Gary Gross at LFR.

The clinker?  Bakk’s proposal – “E-tabs”, a zippier, more IPod-enabled version of pulltabs to attract the kids – will take money from a pot that’s already dwindling; charitable gambling is already off by a huge margin in Minnesota:

There’s more reason for concern than those mentioned by Wilson. This House Research report offers a stunning opinion. The title speaks for itself:

2006-2010: Industry under Stress

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. This information is troubling:

  • Since fiscal year 2004, gross receipts from lawful gambling have declined by over 20 percent
  • For fiscal year 2008, the industry reported its biggest drop in state gambling taxes paid—a 12.8 percent decrease from the previous year due to the drop in gross receipts
  • Total receipts have gone from $1.500 billion in 2000 to $1.032 billion in 2009, a decrease of about 31 percent
Gary notes the part that confirms Bakk’s boundless cynicism:

Let’s remember that Sen. Bakk, then the chairman of the Senate Tax Committee, knew this information when he proposed this ‘solution’ to the Vikings stadium situation. This information raises important questions, more than I can address in a single post. The biggest questions go to politicians like Gov. Dayton and Sen. Bakk.

The first question I’d want answered is this: why would Gov. Dayton and Sen. Bakk propose using revenues from an “industry under stress” the last 5 years?

Because gambling is a unicorn.

Not literally, like a flying horse with a horn.  But DFL financing is always built on the idea that some sort of magical unicorn – “gamblers”, or “the rich” – will bring money to them for their grandest plans, and all they have to do is say “heeeeeer, unicorn!”

So Tom Bakk hears “gambling”, and thinks “money for nothing”!

Conservatives know that there is no such thing as money for nothing.

And Gary would like to point that out:

The next question I’d have for Gov. Dayton and Sen. Bakk is equally simple: Why would they put funding for charities and school sports programs at risk?

Good question.

Well, Senator Bakk?  Governor åDayton?  What’s the answer?  And there really are only two choices.  And one of them is “screw the kids, if I don’t keep the Vikes here, my voters will have a cow”‘.

Jim Backstrom: Still Wrong After All These Years

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Dakota County attorney Jim Backstrom has built a long career as a “tough on crime” prosecutor.

Unfortunately, among Second Amendment supporters, he’s built an even bigger rep as a useful tool to the gun grabber lobby.

Of course, the orcs in the gun-grabber lobby love him; he’s one few orcs in politics who can dare speak out without much fear of losing his elected seat (unlike nearly ever anti-gun DFL legislator outside the ultraliberal metro area).  He can say pretty much anything he, and they, want him to.

And as we’ve noted in the past, much of what he says is completely wrong; one must conclude that if he, an attorney, doesn’t know he’s wrong, then he’s an not fit for the job, and if he does he’s using his office to serve as a political tool and to mislead the public (as we first showed almost four years ago).

And he’s at it again, sounding off in the Strib about Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill in a piece which is long on noise and short on fact:

The Minnesota Legislature is considering changes to existing laws concerning the authorized use of deadly force. Supporters see these changes as affording law-abiding citizens the right to stand their ground and protect themselves when confronted by dangerous criminals. In truth, this proposal (HF1467/SF1357) greatly expands the legal boundaries for the use of deadly force and will have significant unintended consequences.

Remember that for later in the piece – his affirmative statement that the law “WILL” have nasty consequences.

We’ll come back to it.

Currently, Minnesota law authorizes the use of deadly force, without an obligation to retreat, when done to prevent the commission of a felony in a person’s home. When not in his or her home, a person can rightfully use deadly force to avert a threat of death or great bodily harm to themselves or another, provided the person first attempts to avoid the danger if reasonably possible. In all situations, Minnesota law properly requires that the response be reasonable and necessary given the gravity of the danger faced.

The proposed changes would eliminate the duty to retreat before exercising the right of self-defense in all locations and permit a person to meet force with superior force, including deadly force, if the individual reasonably believes such force is needed to resist or prevent the imminent infliction of substantial bodily harm, great bodily harm or death.

Which is true – and, the way Backstrom phrases it, sounds almost reasonable.

And from Jim Backstrom’s perspective – a County Attorney, who renders his judgments sitting snug in a warm, well-lit office with metal detectors and Dakota County deputies at all the entrances, drawing on his background in criminal law from the perspective of the prosecutor, with its leisurely fitting of circumstances into laws to try to generate indictments and sentences, like a law-school analytical exercise, no doubt it is.

But for a woman taking groceries out of her car in her garage on a dark evening, when an intruder comes slipping under the door in the dark?  Does she have time to parse the situation – “this is on my property, but not in my house, and that looks like a knife but what if it’s just a wrench?  Does he intend to rape and kill me, or just rape and beat me?  Because a beating might not meet the legal definition of “great bodily harm”…”

Or if you’re a good Samaritan who just saw a thug thump a woman in a parking lot, and you give chase, and the thug confronts you with a gun in a dark alley; do you have time to think “does my “duty to retreat” mean I should stomp on the gas and hope I get away before he shoots me in the head?  Does my car accelerate faster than a 9mm bullet?”

It’s in situations like these that law-abiding citizens make life-or-death decisions in split seconds under mind-warping pressure – and, nationwide, in state after state, do as close to a unanimously good job of it as any sector of society ever does.

But under current law, county attorneys like Jim Backstrom, in their offices surrounded by metal detectors and armed deputies and their walls of law books, get to decide “no, lady in the garage, you should have locked yourself in your car and called 911”, or “yes, good samaritan, it’s your duty to try to outrun the bullet.”

And in both cases, it’d be Jim Backstrom’s option to haul you into court, and face his limitless budget with your life’s savings in a battle where lawyers will parse your intent against the letter of the law as Jim Backstrom or his minions decide to try to present it to a jury, with the prize being your freedom.

All for doing the right thing, but in the wrong county.

Backstrom and the other county attorneys oppose the “Stand Your Ground” bill not because there’s been any statistical evidence it makes life more dangerous – there is none, and it does not – but because it would take away some of the County Attorney’s discretion in otherwise-legal self-defense shooting.

And by “discretion”, we mean “power”.

Not all of it, of course; Backstrom is reciting the same lie that the left’s other useful idiots babble on this case; while it’d modify the “duty to retreat” in Minnesota law under certain reasonable circumstances, it would not touch the other three elements of justifying the use of lethal force; one must still…:

  • not be a willing participant in the incident – no getting into bar fights, and pulling a gun when someone pulls a knife.
  • Have a reasonable fear of nasty consequences – Whatever level of death or harm the law says, it’s still gotta convince a jury.
  • Lethal force must be reasonable – You can’t shoot someone who’s running away, or already been shot and is no longer a threat to you, or cowering on the ground in terror at your display of resolution.  No matter what some leftybloggers say.
All of those factors are the ones that define a wrongful shooting.  “Didn’t retreat far enough and fast enough to satisfy a county attorney” is just the sort of bitchy technicality that, absent a gross transgression on any of the above, makes a mockery of justice in these sorts of cases.

This proposal creates a presumption that deadly force can be used against someone who enters a dwelling by force or stealth, and it expands the definition of dwelling to include decks, porches, fenced-in areas, tents, other structures, and occupied watercraft and motor vehicles.

Backstrom says that like it’s a bad thing.

This proposal inappropriately creates a subjective standard of reasonableness of the actions rather than the objective standard in current law. In other words, the issue becomes what was in the mind of the person using deadly force, rather than how a reasonable person would have reacted under the same circumstances.

And there, Backstrom is truly full of it.  The law doesn’t “create” a “subjective standard”; it merely takes some of the power for defining that “subjective standard” out of his hands – a place where he apparently believes it’s perfectly legitimate.

Such a law would, in essence, allow people to shoot first and ask questions later whenever they believe they are exposed to substantial harm, regardless of how a reasonable person would have responded under the circumstances.

Let’s be perfectly clear here:

County Attorney Backstrom is lying.

The law would not protect people who “shot first and asked questions later”, if they were a) willing participants, or b) they didn’t reasonably fear death or great bodily harm, or c) the force they used was not reasonable under the circumstances.

If this proposal were to be enacted, there would be numerous examples of situations where the law would allow an individual to shoot and kill in self-defense, even though a reasonable person would never have done so.

County Attorney Backstrom is still lying.  These laws exist all over the country.  The scenario County Attorney Backstrom describes has never occurred in any of them. 

Do we really want to allow a driver who believes he is being threatened with substantial harm in a road-rage incident to shoot and kill the other driver, rather than calling 911 or simply driving away?

County Attorney Backstrom is lying.   Let’s look at the law to see why; if the mythical shooter in this situation couldn’t prove that he wasn’t a willing participant and that he reasonably feared death or great bodily harm and that shooting was legitimate, any competent county attorney could prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

And if they couldn’t?  Then perhaps Mr. Backstrom might entertain the notion that the shooting was legitimate.

Do we really want the law to presume that a homeowner has the right to shoot and kill an unarmed person who has entered a garage to steal a bicycle or other personal property, without first calling the police?

County Attorney Backstrom is misleading the audience.   Was the fear of death or significant bodily harm reasonable under the circumstances?  Was lethal force reasonable?  Again – any competent county attorney could prove this.

And if I were one of Mr. Backstrom’s attorneys, I’d wonder how confident he felt about my abilities…

Do we really want to authorize the use of deadly force in response to a push, punch or verbal threat without any inquiry as to whether a reasonable person would have done so under the circumstances?

County Attorney Backstrom is using misleading rhetoric.   Determining what a “reasonable person” would have done is, in part, the job of the justice system.  And if Backstrom’s attorneys can’t prove that a “push, punch or verbal threat” isn’t a “reasonable” grounds for using lethal force, do you think that they’re competent enough to get the perp on “duty to retreat” grounds?

Another problem with this stand-your-ground-and-shoot-first expansion of the right to use deadly force is that it would apply equally to dangerous criminals. With no duty to retreat, anyone can claim they are responding to a threat of serious harm and are therefore justified in escalating the confrontation and killing the other person. And keep in mind that under this proposal it is their judgment, not that of a reasonable person, that is the controlling factor.

County Attorney Backstrom is using misleading, alarmist rhetoric that also presumes the reader is a moron.   “Dangerous criminals” already claim self-defense; the clown who shot Sergeant Vick in Saint Paul a few years ago tried to claim it.  The county attorney made short work of the claim; the perp could satisfy no element of the claim. neitherparticipation nor fear nor reasonableness of force; “duty to retreat” and “on my own property” weren’t even relevant.

Any competent county attorney can separate a reasonable claim of self-defense using the criteria that area already, and will continue to be, part of the law, without touching the areas covered by Cornish’s bill.

No one is more concerned about the safety and protection of Minnesota’s citizens than I am as one of our state’s prosecutors. But current Minnesota law establishing the right of self-defense and the justified use of deadly force adequately protects law-abiding citizens. These proposed changes would unnecessarily expand the law of self-defense and encourage the use of deadly force as a first thought in response to danger.

County Attorney Backstrom is oozing contempt for the law-abiding Minnesotan.  In no case, nationwide, in any of the states that have adopted “Stand Your Ground”, has this happened.  In state after state, the law-abiding American has shown him and herself to be a pretty capable judge of the situations facing them; a law-abiding citizen is about 1/5 as likely to shoot the wrong person in an altercation as a cop is (which isn’t a ding on cops; they arrive on the scene of a crime when things can be exceptionally confusing; a law-abiding citizen usually faces a binary choice; shoot, or die).

Does Mr. Backstrom believe Minnesotans are more depraved than the average American?

The taking of a life should be a last resort. It should not be encouraged as a first response unless the danger is reasonably apparent to us all.

Yeah, it’s a good thing I had a f**king county attorney to tell me that.

Dakota County – why do you keep returning this hamster to office?

Desperate Impact

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It’s one of liberalism’s most cherished tenets; “If you define what’s “for everyone’s good”, and force people to do it on pain of forfeiting property and liberty, nothing bad can happen”.

The City of Saint Paul – which is such a one-party state that North Koreans feel sorry for us St. Paul residents – has been practicing that bit of preaching for a couple of decades now.

Like most liberal-dominated cities, Saint Paul has for decades used its poorer neighborhoods – the lower East Side, Frogtown, the North End, and the pre-gentrification Selby-Dale, all formerly decent working-class neighborhoods that were gutted by other liberal, interventionist policies like “Urban Renewal” and the drilling of interstate freeways through the vacuum of political clout from which they suffered – as “warehouses for the poor”, convenient places for the DFL-run bureaucracy to put public housing and the welfare recipients who live in it.

Property values eroded by the freeways and the bureaucratic attention, property owners fled to the ‘burbs, leaving lots of property available for people to snap up at bargain-basement prices.  Which led to the city’s plague of “absentee landlords” in the eighties and nineties.

As often happens in neighborhoods blighted by liberal policy, crime rose.  Minneapolis’ Phillips and North Side neighborhoods, along with Saint Paul’s neighborhoods (and the remaining shards of unfashionably-black Rondo, which was almost completely wiped out by I94), with the departure of the people who’d made the neighborhoods ticked, fell into blight, decay and crime; as the “war on drugs” gave those people an outlet for their suppressed and unfashionable entrepreneurship, the crime wave grew big ugly teeth.

The City of Saint Paul decided to fight back by…attacking the “absentee landlord”.  The number of private, small landlords in the city – people owning less than ten rental units – dropped from thousands in the eighties to, by some estimates, hundreds today.

Crime didn’t abate – although it didn’t swell by quite the same numbers that it did in Minneapolis.

And so in the early 2000s, the city took another approach; fighting all landlords.  Thanks to eighties-era regulations, it’s very difficult for landlords to evict problem tenants, or do much of anything at all about them.  Nonetheless, the city discovered that it was simpler to go after “problem properties” extrajudicially, using the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections, than via using the police.   Landlords who objected were smeared as “slumlords” by an elaborate and extensive whispering campaign by city-government-affiliated DFL activists – sometimes accurately, often not, and in context a fairly shabby defamation.

And in 2004, a group of those landlords sued the city.  In Magner v. Gallagher, the landlords’ lawyers argued the theory that the city’s efforts had a “disparate impact” on the poor – which, indeed, they did.  Saint Paul’s policy – demonizing landlords – was precisely the same one at a policy level (and in most of the mechanics) that has made places like Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington DC such idyllic places to be poor.

“Disparate Impact”, of course, is one of the tools by which the Johnson-era federal bureaucracy has browbeaten banks, cities and landlords.  The Wall Street Journal gives a brief history lesson on the subject (emphasis added), which includes the fact that the theory is alive and well…:

The Justice Department started a special unit in 2010 to pursue disparate-impact claims, which don’t require proof of intent. Lower courts have loosely interpreted the Fair Housing Act to allow for disparate-impact analysis, which ignores other factors that affect lending decisions.

Bank CEOs have tended to settle these cases rather than risk bad publicity, and Justice has pocketed the cash to distribute to its political allies. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is also pushing a new rule to codify disparate-impact analysis under the Fair Housing Act, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is making such lending enforcement a priority.

…which ends in the fact that now, Saint Paul is the big bad banker.  The 1%er, the Daddy Warbucks on the wrong end of a “Disaparate Impact” suit.

If Saint Paul won the case – which has burbled up to the Supreme Court over the past eight years – it would weaken the use of “disparate impact” as a tool to blackmail and browbeat banks and the private sector.

And so the Obama Administration stepped in and pressured Mayor Coleman to drop the city’s response to the lawsuit:

St. Paul released a statement Friday saying it “likely would have won” at the Supreme Court but that “such a result could completely eliminate ‘disparate impact’ civil rights enforcement, including under the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. This would undercut important and necessary civil rights cases throughout the nation. The risk of such an unfortunate outcome is the primary reason the city has asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the petition.”

To sum up: St. Paul has spent taxpayer money for almost a decade fighting a case to force slumlords [See?  The city’s PR campaign made it all the way to the WSJ!] to provide the poor—including minorities—with better housing. But just as it was on the cusp of what it claims would have been a victory at the Supreme Court, the city withdrew its appeal under pressure from the Obama Administration and liberals who feared they might lose a weapon of dubious legality that they want to use to tell banks how and to whom to lend.

The piece concludes:

It’s enough to recall the old joke that liberals love the poor in theory—it’s the actual poor they have a problem with.

The poor are just another tool by which the left achieves and maintains power.  When they’re of use, good for them.  When they’re impediments, the join the Constitution, liberty and genuine fairness under the bus.

If there is a case that spotlights the cynicism of the American left at all levels better than this, I’d love to hear about it. 

Bob Johnson at the A Democracy blog has been covering Saint Paul housing issues, and especially Magner v. Gallagher, long before anyone else could figure it out.  He’ll be covering it long after they leave.

Bigger, Louder, Meme-ier!

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With great fanfare, the Democrats last week launched a devastating fusillade of rhetorical counterfire in the battle for the American Mind – or perhaps the American “Mind” – this past week with the splashy launch/relaunch of…

…well, a bunch of websites. To spread “the truth” about Barack Obama and his Administration.

RT Rybak took time off from finding ways to trade cops for bike paths to declare “We’re not going to take any baloney”.  And he seems a mayor of his word; reading the sites involved, it seems that the Dems are committed to giving “baloney” back, and upping the ante in the rhetorical luncheon-meat department.  Another lefty shill said that the “Ministry Of Truth” sites are a response to the “sleazy GOP money” from the likes of the Koch brothers – the left’s straw-boogeyman-du-jour.  Meaning that we’ll have Rockefeller, Soros and Big Union money to fight against big private sector money.

Let’s take a look at the Ministry Of Truth’s array of websites:

KeepingHisWord.com could be better called “Rhetorical Needles Threaded.com”; it’s devoted to repeating Obama Administration chanting points.  But here’s an innovation; the type is really really big.  Each “article” is, basically , a sentence, carefully trimmed for easy memorization for people who don’t think that hard about things.  It is, intellectually and rhetorically, the next steup up from Duckspeak.

KeepingGOPHonest.com is more of the same, with a Green emphasis; the site recycles Gingrich, Santorum, Paul and Romney campaign hit points against the other campaigns.  It’s basically an RSS feed of the big four campaigns’ negative pieces, only dumbed down for, you know, the Democrat electorate.

AttackWatch.com is…Attackwatch!  It’s our old friend, better known to conservatives and other sentient people as “Stasi.gov.us”; still asking for people to report in to Zentralkontrolle about Badthink aimed at The One and His administration.

So what conclusions can we reach about the Democrat campaign, viewed through the prism of their Ministry Of Truth’s websites?

  1. They are admitting Democrat voters have no attention span. This stuff is written to the level and attention span of a third-grader with ADD.  They need Big Thoughts broken down into easily-memorized, quickly-chantable bullets, or sanitized, officially-sanctioned Big Humor
  2. They need to dodge the Big Question at all costs: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”  The answer hidden in plain sight on these sites is “Yes – if you are government”.
The Democrat Ministry Of Truth website;  full of type and fury, signifying nothing.

The Real State Of The State

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Governor Dayton will give the official State of the State address tomorrrow.

I figured I’d grab a jump on him, and – in my constitutional position as a freaking taxpayer – give the real state of this state.

You’re welcome.

Now – all rise.

———-

My fellow Minnesotans,

Thanks to eight years of responsible Republican – and conservative-enough – governorship, the state of Minnesota is doing…OK.   Unemployment is well below the national average.  Our schools, on a state-wide basis, don’t suck as bad as those in some other states.  As any good Scandinavian would put it, “we could be doing worse”.

But there is so much room for improvement.

Oh – you may be seated.  Sorry.

A good chunk of Minnesota’s establishment – government, educational, union and media – is stuck in the 1970’s.  It was an era when America had no economic competition – Germany and Japan were just starting to find their legs after World War II; China was still a Maoist dystopia; academic experts like Paul Ehrlich thought that India would be so wracked by starvation that it would always be what Somalia is today.

And in that environment, everyone got spoiled and fat.  The unions got used to demanding and getting pay and benefits around the country that were easy to support – provided we had no competition.  And American government, after three decades of aiming toward cradle-to-grave welfare, finally achieved it.

We did the same here in Minnesota.  Our business climate settled to favor big businesses, the kind that “partner” with big government the way that remora fish “partner” with sharks.  Our welfare state turned our cities into warehouses for the poor – an endless homework project for the state’s social service system, for which they’re always taking a grade of “incomplete”, claiming “the dog ate my homework”.

That, unfortunately, is exactly where one of our major parties, the DFL, is stuck.  They have not had a new idea since 1974.  Their entire worldview is centered around the idea “if we pretend it’s still 1978, maybe it’ll all be OK!”.

Minnesotans took a huge step toward reality in 2010.  We elected two chambers full of people who know that times have changed, and we have to stay ahead of the changes in the world around us, rather than just ignore them.

Oh, 8,000 Minnesotans who should have known better believed what the Alliance For A Better Minnesota told them rather than their own lying eyes.  And that’s being charitable; if I were a betting man, I’d say that if you left out all the ineligible voters, repeat voters and felons, it would have been Mark Dayton looking at an 8,000 vote deficit.  But that’s just a hunch.

So today we have a split government; a legislature with a powerful mandate, dividing power with a weak governor whose own party basically treats him like a coffee enema; he did beat their endorsed candidate, after all.

And so the DFL does what it always does when it’s up against the ropes; it lies.  The Alliance For A Better Minnesota – essentially a PR agency for what the “Occupy” movement, if you remember them, call “The One Percent” – has basically taken over the DFL.  And you can tell they’re lying when you see their fingers moving over keyboards, or whenever you see Denise Cardinal or Carrie Lucking on the TV.

And have any of you actually seen Denise Cardinal or Carrie Lucking in the same place?

And the media does what it always does when the DFL is up against the ropes; its editorialists declaim endlessly on the virtue of compromise.

My fellow Minnesotans, in response I say two things.

Number one?  Doy.  Compromise is part and parcel of politics.  But it’s something you do after you have the debate.  And when you debate, you bring the strengths of your own case, and explore and exploit the weaknesses in your enemy’s case. And you do your best to work the compromise in your favor – meaning, obviously, in favor of the agenda for which you were sent to office.  In other words, compromise is a negotiationl. And negotiations are always best made from a position of strength.

And so the GOP must use our strength – numbers, evolving demographics, mindshare – to make sure the “compromise” we get reflects the fact that we won.

And number two?   Bull pucks.  We won.  And we’re going to legislate like we won – like a a party with a vision for a much much better Minnesota – a Minnesota that’s not dependent on state handouts, a Minnesota that works and prospers.  A Minnesota that keeps Big Brother’s passive-aggressive benevolence in its place – there to take care of its allotted business, and there for emergencies, doing its mandated job.  And no more.

So what do we do this session?

The agenda is simple.

First – pass Reform 2.0.  Make government more user-friendly, especially for business.  Our permitting process is a sham.

Second – pass Zero Based Budgeting.  Our current cost-plus budgeting not only guarantees that we will soon not be able to afford our government, it also puts the our government – our “servant”  – in a position of being in arrogant, hectoring control of the whole state; of saying “you, the peasants, serve us first, and yourselves last”.  We need to flip that around.

Third – No budget increase.  We’re at 35 Billion. That is plenty.  Not one dime more.  Not even if the revenue forecast rises.  Minnesotans are working hard – and if the economy grows, the temptation is there to turn that into more revenue for government spending.  No.  Bullshit.  Rebate all surpluses.  And not via the DFL’s convoluted targeted rebates; rebate them in exact proportion of state income taxes paid.  If you pay in, you get back.  If  you don’t, then you already got lucky once; give someone else their turn.

Fourth – Reform our voting system.  It’s not just Voter ID – although that’d be a great start.  Abolishing vouching would also be a great next step.  Isn’t the franchise – for which so many hundreds of thousands of our ancestors fought and died – and the integrity of the election system that determines who runs our democracy, worth a tiny little bit of administrative conscientiousness on the part of someone claiming to be a “citizen” today?

Yes.  Yes, it is.

Fifth – Pass Representative Cornish’s Stand Your Ground bill.  I put it in my State of the State address for a reason; it’s not that it’s necessarily the fifth most important bill on the entire raft of legislation facing this state.  But symbolically, it’s a vital priority.  After reforming our government and our budgeting process and  holding the line on spending, letting government know, once and forever, that we the people are sovereign, and that our right to defend our lives and families supersedes both criminals’ peace of mind and prosecutors’ convenience, is vital.  Criminals should be afraid to go out at night – not we, the people.  And it’ll be a lovely thumb in the eye of the Metrocrats.  They deserve it.

Sixth – get the Met Council out of the rail baron and utopia-planning businesses.  In a metro with cheap land and horizontal sprawl, light rail makes no, zero, nada sense.  And forcing people into high-density developments to justify those rail lines is downright stupid – not just a waste of money, but a vile overreach on the part of government.

In Mitch Berg’s Minnesota, the government is the servant, not the master – and we, the people, continually affirm it.  Just like training a dog; if we, the people, give the government constant, consistent discipline, it might just learn its place and be useful enough not to put down.

Although government, like any dog, must know that if it craps on our carpet again, it’s going in the car for that drive “out to the country”.

In Mitch Berg’s Minnesota, government scrimps and saves, and the people keep most of what they work for.  We have the government we need, not the government the governing class wants.

In Mitch Berg’s Minnesota, the people work out a compromise with government from a position of strength, and the government knows its place.

And that’s the state of the State of Minnesota.  It could be worse.  It should be much better. And only Mark Dayton and his one-percenter minions stand in the way.

So to sum up the whole address; let’s show this state who’s boss.

Thank you.  God Bless Minnesota, and God Bless America.

Government By Remote Control

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Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

The City intends to change the zoning of properties along Front Avenue between Dale Street and Rice Street. That means you can’t sell your land for as much money. Naturally, landowners are upset.

Here’s why: if your land is zoned for Industrial Uses and the building on it is a warehouse, you have a Conforming Use and any future owner can continue to use the land for a warehouse. But if the city changes the zoning of your land to Residential, then your warehouse becomes an Existing Non-Conforming Use. You – and future owners – are severely limited in what you can do with it. You can’t expand. If it burns down, you can’t rebuild. You can’t even guarantee the future owner will be allowed to keep using it as you did. So naturally, the future owner won’t pay as much for it as he would have before the zoning change.

Yes, the City has the power by law to do it. But destroying people’s land values through regulation is not a trifle. It shouldn’t be done lightly.

Key line in the article:

“Because no one who lives or does business in that area was involved in the current planning effort, community members and city officials agreed that the plan needs a second phase of study.”

Nobody who knows anything about the neighborhood was involved in the plan. It was dreamed up by urban planners in government and academia.

The crux of the piece – and it ties into so much about living in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and any one-party autocracy:

This is how liberals think. We’re so smart we don’t even need to VISIT the neighborhood to know what to do in it. We have a plan for an ideal neighborhood so tough luck to you.

This is classic Saint Paul government in action; make a grand sweeping change “for the good of the peasants” – and then sit back and look amazed as the unintended consequences mount.

Another great – and bigger – example; almost four years ago, the city passed an ordinance requiring most vacant properties to be brought up to the latest building codes before they could get back their certificates of occupancy.  This means a foreclosed house with a bubbled-up paper value of $200.000 in Frogtown, the North End or the lower East Side, which might net $40-50K today, mostly on the value of the land it sits on – would need an additional $100-150K to make it actually salable – meaning the banks would be into properties for $300-350K apiece, guaranteeing a loss of a quarter million dollars on each property they sold.

I asked a few sitting members of the City Council about this.  They didn’t respond “the banks will make up for it with volume!”, but close; one councilperson said – I’m paraphrasing here – the  mortgages are owned by companies with lots and lots of money, so it’d all be OK.

In other words, money came from unicorns.

The results?  The Saint Paul housing market is worse than most.  There is a glut of property on the market; as mortgage companies opt to let properties go into tax default rather than  take quarter-million-dollar baths on them, they revert to state ownership; the state then generally hands them back to the city, which then either sells them to non-profits for a pittance, hands them over to public housing, or sells them on occasion to remodelers who meet the city’s absurdly high qualifications for a nominal amount, sometimes a dollar.

So do you want to pay $188,000 for a property on the private market, or do you want to pay a buck?

Saint Paul is a beautiful city with an incredibly ugly government.

For All The Marbles

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Stephen Hayes at Weekly Standard writes about the bold, principled conservative we’ve all been waiting for – but who’s gotta defend his seat in Wisconsin first.

It’s a great article about Scott Walker – and it ably lays out both Walker’s outsized accomplishments (especially against Wisconsin’s Democrat machine, which is better than Minnesota’s only because it’s out of power):

Walker came to office in the Republican wave of 2010. He inherited a mess. Under his profligate predecessor, Jim Doyle, state government had operated almost as a slush fund for public employee unions. Giveaways to teachers and others put the state on an unsustainable fiscal path, so Doyle raised some taxes and threatened to raise others. He raided a state fund set up to cover medical liability, essentially stealing contributions doctors had made to the pooled account. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against that pilfering, but the money had already been spent. Even after budget gimmickry that would make Fannie and Freddie blush, the official deficit was $3.6 billion.

Just over a year later, Walker and the Republicans in the state legislature have nearly eliminated the deficit. For the two-year budget cycle, the state will show a $143 million shortfall because the stagnant economy has resulted in lower tax receipts than had been projected. But the shortfall is for the first half of the cycle; Wisconsin will run a surplus in the current fiscal year. And Walker said last week that he will eliminate the remaining shortfall without raising taxes. It’s a credible claim. He reduced the deficit without raising taxes. In fact, one of his first moves upon being sworn in was to cut taxes on businesses. His subsequent reforms have allowed property tax receipts to go down for the first time in years—by some $47 million.

He also writes about the outsized consequences if Walker loses:

For conservatives, the fight is about much more than one man in one state. A Walker defeat would send a message that political courage does not pay and political thuggery does. Walker doesn’t like to talk about the effect the past year has had on him and his family, but it hasn’t been pleasant. He has been subjected to numerous death threats. His wife, Tonette, has been verbally assaulted more times than she can count. His two teenaged boys have been targeted on Facebook. His modest home in Wauwatosa has been the site of several union protests. Last month, a protester outside Walker’s State of the State speech told State Senator John Kleefisch that his wife, Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, is a “f—ing whore.”

I think it’s time to start a “Minnesotans for Walker” group.  The unions are going to go all-in on this election – because if they lose, it’ll be katie-bar-the-door.

If it weren’t for that Presidential election thingie, this would be the most important election of this year.

“Thanks For Your Service These Past Ten Years…”

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“Especially all that combat and stuff.  Now pack your things and security will escort you out“.

The Pentagon plans to cut 67,100 soldiers from active and reserve Army units and the Army National Guard in the five years starting Oct. 1, as well as 15,200 from the active and reserve ranks of the Marine Corps as part of an effort to save $487 billion over a decade, according to the budget sent to Congress today. The Navy and Air Force would lose fewer people — 8,600 and 1,700 respectively — because of their role in a strategic shift toward the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East.

I wonder if the Department of Labor will file a disparate impact suit?

Democrats: “The Unicorns Will Bring The Money”

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Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:

The President’s budget plans to spend 4 trillion next year. We expect to take in about 2 trillion, leaving us short 2 trillion dollars.

His spending estimates for the next 10 years are no lower, so call it $40 trillion total of which we’re short 20 trillion. That’s the Deficit.

His cuts and tax increases propose to reduce the deficit by 4 trillion over that same period. 4 of the 20 trillion.

Meaning he expects to rack up another 16 trillion dollars in debt over the next 10 years, and that’s if everything works perfectly.

The European Union is collapsing. China has new cities standing empty and provinces in revolt. The Mid-East is ready to erupt again.

So I axe ya – who’s going to lend the United States government $16,000,000,000,000.00?

And who’s going to pay it back?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Why, we’ll tax the rich, silly!

Support Starbucks

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Since they’ve solved all the nation’s other problems, President Obama and his minions and the media (pardon the redundancy) are going back to liberal basics; they are beating the drums for gun control (there’s a much bigger piece on the subject coming soon).

Part of this is some renewed activity on the part of the myriad astroturf gun control “groups” – almost invariably tiny groups of addled activists – to try to push the anti-human-liberty agenda.   These groups and their tiny but clout-enhanced coteries of followers – whom I affectionately call “orcs”, because they represent everything Tolkien intended with his fictional soldiers of darkness – are trying, with the full connivance of the mainstream media, to agitate for gun control, or at the very least enhanced harassment of the law-abiding gun owner.

Starbucks is in the crosshairs.

When the orcs approached some national coffee chains, they found a willing audience that was in tune with the shallow, showy, shrill politics of their most stereotypical customers – shallow, showy, shrill liberal coffee drinkers. Some national chains banned guns (in the hands of the law-abiding citizen – carry permit holders and the like) on their premises.

Starbucks held the line for liberty, enacting a policy that deferred to local laws – as any sensible business should.

For supporting the human right to self-defense, I'll say "thanks" in part by giving them a free ad on my site.

The orcs are organizing to try to boycott Starbucks.

An anti-gun group is attempting to organize a nationwide Valentine’s Day boycott of Starbucks over the coffee chain’s gun policy.

Starbucks does not ban guns in its stores; rather, it defers to local laws. The National Gun Victim’s Action Council (NGAC) says that amounts to a pro-gun policy that endangers customers.

Gun owners, and other civil rights activists, are rallying to support The Buck tomorrow.  If you support civil rights, do the following:

  1. Go to Starbucks on Tuesday.  I don’t care if the thought of spending $2 for a cup of coffee galls you – it does me too.  But swallow your pride and buy a damn cup.  And then…
  2. Tell the manager why.  I never go to Starbucks.  But I will – because of their principled stance.  I will tell the manager to his/her face exactly why I’m supporting them.  Leave a tip for the barrista, while you’re at it.
  3. Go to Starbucks.com, or their Facebook and Twitter pages, and tell them what you told the manager.  Be polite, professional and civil; don’t get in their way; maybe just leave them a note.

Too often we gun owners – like conservatives as a whole, when social issues come up – are as quiet and unassuming as our concealed firearms.  Orc groups – the NGAC, “Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota and the VIolence Policy Center make up for their dearth in numbers by making lots of noise (having a sympathetic media doesn’t hurt ’em, of course).

It’s time to speak up.  And caff up.

Chanting Points Memo 2012: Third Verse, Same As The First!

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It’s been almost two years since I launched what’s become one of those blog’s most popular features that doesn’t involve waving guns at drug dealers – the “Chanting Points Memo”.

Since we’re heading into a  new campaign, I figured it was time for a reset – a “relaunch” of the Chanting Points Memo.

What’s a “Chanting Point?”  From the Dictionary In The Dark, here’s the conventional definition:

Chanting Point:  (Noun)  Similar to a “talking point”, but intended to be recited by rote (often as part of large real or virtual crowds) rather than critically analyzed.

The term – and the idea – was sparked during the 2010 by the DFL response to Tom Emmer – which was almost entirely something I christened “chanting points”; bits of rhetoric that may or (generally) may not contain a grain of “truthiness”, but aren’t designed so much for substantial policy discussions as they are to be chanted by crowds, either in person or online.

I’ve related the story before: the term occurred to me in the summer of 2010 at the Minnesota State Fair.  Ed Morrissey and I were sitting on stage, across from the DFL booth, talking about the ongoing negotations that led to Obamacare back in 2009 and 2010.   A compact fiftysomething woman in a full Frankenware ensemble strutted to the middle of the audience area, folded her arms, and started shaking her head back and forth.

“Would you care to discuss this?” I asked her, getting ready to take the mobile microphone and hike out into the audience.

She took a deep breath as I stood up, and yelled “PUBLIC OPTION NOW!  PUBLIC OPTION NOW! PUBLIC OPTION NOW!”.  She then turned on her heels and scampered away as fast as her busy little legs could carry her.

Ed and I noted that that was about as close to a substantive argument that most Minnesota DFLers came then, and now.

Words designed to be bellowed over ones’ competition.

Chanting points.

The point is, people don’t have to understand the chanting points, much less the truth; they just have to be gulled into voting DFL.  It’s not about elucidating issues or informing the public; it’s about swinging the ill-informed just enough to gain and retain power.

It’s another election.  And the DFL has another set of chanting points rolled out;

  • “Right To Work costs jobs!”
  • “If you support traditional marriage, you’re a bigot!”
  • “Voter ID disenfranchises voters!”
  • “The rich aren’t paying their fair share!”
  • “Dayton’s pork-barrel “Jobs” bill will create jobs!  Cutting taxes, rationalizing regulations and cutting the size and scope of government will cost jobs!”
  • “The American Legislative Exchange Conference (“ALEC”) controls the Legislative GOP with their shadowy conspiracy!  And any lack of evidence of this conspiracy is proof of a coverup!”
  • “Citizens United distorts and perverts democracy!” (a message passed along in a campaign paid for by liberal plutocrats and unions rolling in member dues).

None of the points ever stand up to logical scrutiny or analysis – and aren’t intended to.  They are intended to be chanted at people who aren’t informed, who don’t analyze and scrutinize logically.

Image courtesy Lassie from True North.

Follow along in the “Chanting Points Memo” category.  Pass ‘em around.  Learn ‘em.  It’s gonna be a long campaign.

Chanting Points Memo: Nothing Here But Us Extremists

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I was out of town last week during Governor Dayton’s frankly weird performance, referring to supporters of the “Right To Work” amendment as “Extreme”.

More on that – it ties in closely with my piece on the DFL’s new PR effort to flood the state with unsupportable memes on wedge issues designed to fool the uninformed and gullible – later this week.

It’s just interesting to note how many “extremists” there are out there, according this SurveyUSA poll covering Minnesotans’ attitudes on the Gay Marriage, Right To Work and Voter ID amendments seem to show that a majority of Minnesotans are, by Governor Dayton’s self-indulgent standard, “Extremists”.

Let’s go through the numbers one issue at a time:

Marriage Amendment

This is the weakest of the bunch so far; it’s winning by 47-39, and over the top in most of the cross tabs (other than 18-34 year olds, cell phone users, Democrats, Liberals and people making over $80K a year).

This is in line – and maybe a little better – than the results I found in the fall of 2010, when a Lawrence Poll showed that Minnesotans’ preferences swung strongly to Tom Emmer when they were clear that Emmer supported referenda or legislative rulings on the issue, while Dayton and Horner both supported legislating the issue from the bench.

The problem is that these numbers aren’t nearly good enough to pass the bill, given one quirk in Minnesota’s law when voting on constitutional amendments; blank votes are counted as “no” votes.  Everyone who supports an amendment must vote affirmatively “yes”.

So let’s assume the numbers in this poll’s “Not Sures” – 4% overall – break evenly between Yes and No on election day, bringing the actual results to 49-41 in favor; then “Not Votes” stay on the sidelines, becoming “No” votes, making the final vote a bare 51-49 against.  That’s not counting “Ritchie Votes”: the dead, people being vouched into multiple districts, people who aren’t legally entitled to vote, and the like.

Even without that, the measure loses by default. By this count, the Marriage Amendment needs to arf up at least three more points – five as insurance against “Ritchie Votes”.

With a state this polarized, it’s a tall order.

Right To Work

Minnesota is much less polarized here – and it shows.  Governor Dayton’s memes on the subject have been more fact-free and desperate than usual – “right to work states have lower wages!”, he declared, ignoring the other context (closed shop states tend to be more urban, coastal and have much higher costs of living as well as wages) – showing how hard the DFL is going to have to dig for votes on this issue.

“Right To Work” leads 55-24% overall.  It leads in every single cross tab – the narrowest is 35-32 among identified liberals.  Bad news for the DFL – it leads among women even more than among men; more among the young than the old;

More importantly?   Even if you take the 12% “not sure” vote and split it evenly among “Yes”, “No” and “Not Voting” , the numbers become 59-28-13, which really means 59-41 (remember, blank votes become “No”, as noted above).  Even if every undecided voter decides to side with the unions – in other words, the hopelessly unrealistic breaks, things about as likely as me getting a third date with Amy Adams – or just sit the issue out, the issue ends up at 55-45.

It’ll take a lot of “Ritchie Votes” to beat “the extremists” on this issue.

Photo ID

Perhaps the best news of the poll is that the left’s idiot memes about Voter ID – “it disenfranchises the poor, the elderly and college students – are falling not so much on deaf ears, but ears that mock their idiocy.

During the 2010 campaign, the meme of the right was that Voter ID had 2-1 support in Minnesota.  The SUSA poll shows it’s actually 3-1 with a bullet; the measure currently leads 70-23.

The cross tabs?  Again – the measure is more popular among women than men (73% of women favor it, vs. 66% of men); more among younger voters, with a 77-20 lead among 35-49 year old voters); more among the educated (71-24 among college grads ys 63-23 among high school grads); about evenly across all income bands; even by 69-24 in the Twin Cities.

Most significantly?  Only 4% of Minnesotans are undecided on the subject, and 4% more claimed they’ll “not vote” on the issue.  Even if every single undecided voter is convinced to vote against the issue or sit it out, the measure passes 70-31%.

Even Mark Ritchie will have a hard time rigging this one.

Takeaways

Caveat up front; the conclusions below presume the SUSA poll is accurate.  The poll is of registered voters, rather than likely voters, which is inherently less accurate on the one hand, but traditionally skews things to the left on the other hand; for purposes of the conclusions below, I’ll presume those two factors roughly cancel each other out.

GOP legislative candidates need to closely align themselves with the Right To Work and Photo ID issues.  They need to hammer on their support for Right to Work and Voter ID, and the positive things that both bring to this state – more jobs, and an election system with actual integrity (although Voter ID is only one of many reforms needed).

The Marriage Amendment strikes me as a loser for GOP candidates – not because it’s off the ideological beam (although as a libertarian conservative, I’m less enthusiastic about it than some Republicans), but because presuming that this poll is accurate, candidates will spend more time and effort supporting the amendment than being supported by it.  By tying themselves to amendments that seem likely to pass overwhelmingly and which show the deep wedge between the DFL and the GOP, on issues where the DFL is both wrong and diametrically opposed to a crushing majority of Minnesotans, the GOP wins free votes; the Marriage Amendment will cost time and effort to prop up at the polls.  Not to say the votes can’t be found, but it’s going to take a lot of time and effort – which is the job of the various pro-marriage groups, not candidates.

The other takeaway, in light of the Governor’s prate and gabble on the subject(s)?  In every case, with all three of these amendments, the conservative, “extreme” position is the mainstream.

But we knew that.

See more on the subject from Ed Morrissey.

Minor Penalty for (Not) Checking

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What’s one way to guarantee fighting will remain a staple of professional hockey?

Have Ralph Nader argue against it.

Reading his open letter to Gary Bettman, you can tell Nader hasn’t watched too much hockey in, say, the last several decades. After conceding there is no evidence directly connecting fighting to brain injuries…he says, “[r]epeated head trauma has shortened the careers of Pat LaFontaine, Eric Lindros, and Keith Primeau.  Currently, concussions are threatening the careers of Pittsburgh Penguins’ superstar Sidney Crosby and the Philadelphia Flyers’ Chris Pronger.”

 

First thing’s first: How many of those guys got concussions from fighting? Primeau maybe?

The off-ice deaths of Derek Boogard, Rick Rypien, and Wade Belak (all of whom Nader cites in his impassioned plea for new rules attention) have certainly re-focused discussion on how the NHL is addressing the issue of concussions and brain injuries.  Every sport is rightly doing so.  But changing any of the rules of hockey likely won’t significantly reduce concussions when the players on the rink are getting bigger, stronger and faster.  Witness the NFL where despite a litany of new rules designed to protect players most at risk for such injuries (QBs, WRs & DBs), concussions were only increasing (167 in total in 2010; the 2011 numbers haven’t been finished but were up to 146 by only week 12).  And this in a sport where fighting might earn you a five week suspension, not a five minute one.

If rules need to be adjusted to reduce concussions, it ought to be on the amateur levels where the differences in size and talent are more extreme than on the professional.  A 2010 Canadian study of junior hockey showed a higher rate of concussions per game than anything the professionals have to worry about.  And those concussions had nothing to do with fighting since fighting is already banned in such leagues.

If the NHL wants to take steps to finally ban actual fist-a-cuffs in games, fine by me.  But let’s not pretend that doing so accomplishes anything related to reducing brain injuries.

This Is Radio NARN!

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

  • Ed is out on assignment today, so I’ll be in to do the voodoo I do from 1-3PM.  Today we’ll be talking religious freedom, Santorum vs Romney, Voter ID, and we’ll be talking with Rep. Michele Bachmann about her re-election bid in the Sixth.
  • Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – is on from 1-3 on Sunday.   He’ll be talking with Rep. Bachmann, too; tune in!
  • The King Banaian Show! – King is on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  Join him from 9-11 every Saturday!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of sanity. You have so many options:

  • AM1280 in the Metro
  • streaming at AM1280’s Website,
  • On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
  • UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream) .
  • Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
  • Podcasts are now available on the AM1280 page!  (Ed and I are #2 – Brad is #3).
  • And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Damned Lies And Statistics

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Earlier this week, I noted that the WaPo released a Presidential preference poll that…:

  • Bucks all current polling and shows President Obama firmly in the dirver’s seat, which…
  • releases no crosstabs or backup data for mere consumers to use to judge the poll’s context, parameters or validity.

As I predicted, only faster, the Strib is already on board.  Joe Doakes – making a rare two-fer today – wrote to ask about h this column by Sue Hogan at the Strib:

“Catholics” is a pretty broad label. Abortion advocate John Kerry claims to be Catholic and so do openly-gay parishioners at St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis as well as traditionalists who attend St. Agnes in St. Paul.

Who did they poll?

How was the question worded?

Silly Doakes.  Raw data is for gatekeepers.

Let’s take a look at Hogan’s piece:

A majority of U.S. Catholics support President Obama’s decision to require religious institutions to include birth control in health insurance plans, according to two new polls.

A poll by the Public Religion Research Institute in Washington, D.C., found that support among Catholics (58 percent) is higher than that of the American public overall (55 percent).

And who exactly is the “Public Religion Research Institute?  They describe themselves as “non-partisan”, which pretty much inevitably means “left-leaning”.  You be the judge.  Their piece on the poll doesn’t go into a lot more detail than Hogan’s puff piece.

Likewise, a Public Policy Polling survey commissioned by Planned Parenthood found that Obama’s position enjoys support from 56 percent of American voters. Of the Catholics polled, 53 percent agreed with the president.

Meanwhile, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops continues to decry the president’s decision, saying that it violates religious freedom.

And as we’ve noted in the past, PPP voter polls trend left of reality.

Look – I’ve expressed my skepticism that the Catholic Street really cares that much about the issue, or that the “middle management” would choose Vatican doctrine over progressivism.  It could be that the polls are accurate.  Since they seem to confirm my hunch, that’s a point in their favor [1]

But who did they poll?  What questions did they ask?

And, more importantlly, why aren’t they teliling us who they polled and what they asked?

Remember – distrust but validate.  Then, usually, distrust some more.

Continue reading →

Light Friday, Heavy Saturday

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Posting will be light-ish today.

Tomorrow, of course, is another story.  We’ll have Rep. Michele Bachmann on the NARN, which is always a fun broadcast.

If you really need a time-killer, I’ll submit for your approval my list of my favorite SITD posts since 2006, although if you need to kill time that badly I’m not sure if that’s such a good idea.

Anyway – enjoy the Friday and the weekend, and tune in tomorrorw!

Fairness

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Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Ramsey County doesn’t take credit or debit plastic for recording fees for deeds, mortgages, etc., only checks or cash.

The recording fees can easily be $150.00. Who carries that much cash? Who carries a checkbook anymore?

The Credit Union put an ATM in the lobby for the convenience of customers, employees and the cash-needing public.

The ATM doesn’t meet the requirement of the Americans with Disabilities Act: it doesn’t have Braille keys.

Result: if everybody can’t use it, then nobody can use it. We pull it out.

So that makes everybody EQUAL, in having no access to funds. Everybody suffers together EQUALLY. I suppose it’s FAIR. But is it HELPFUL?

Does this application of the law actually make things BETTER for persons with disabilities, or worse? At least the old way, you could have a friend punch in the numbers so you could get your money. And you did bring a friend, right, to drive you here — because how else did you get to an office located across the river and not on a bus line? So you have a friend, you have money in the bank, you have documents to record . . . and we send you away. To be fair TO YOU, the disabled person. You’re the one we’re protecting with this law. You’re the one we’re “helping.”

We’re from the government and we’re here to help you. Why aren’t you more grateful?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

But remember, handicapped people who are traipsing back across the river to find cash: if you complain about government regulations, it’s back to tainted beef and sewage in your water!

Give thanks to Dear Governnment!

Now!

The Not-So-Paper Bull?

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This morning, I wrote to agree with Chad the Elder that the Catholic grass roots didn’t look like they cared that much about religious freedom – in part because a Catholic (indeed, Christian) laity was pretty much desensitized. like the fabled “frog in boiling water”, to the effects of losing that freedom, and that their leadership hadn’t done much to change that in a few decades.

On the other hand?  Maybe there’s some hope:

Catholic leaders are furious and determined to harness the voting power of the nation’s 70 million Catholic voters to stop a provision of President Barack Obama’s new heath car reform bill that will force Catholic schools, hospitals and charities to buy birth control pills, abortion-producing drugs and sterilization coverage for their employees.

 

“Never before, unprecedented in American history, for the federal government to line up against the Roman Catholic Church,” said Catholic League head Bill Donohue.

 

Already Archbishop Timothy Dolan has spoken out against the law and priests around the country have mobilized, reading letters from the pulpit. Donohue said Catholic officials will stop at nothing to put a stop to it.

Hopefully it’s not too little too late.

 

Chanting Points Memo: Beth Hawkins’ “Complete BS”

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If the Minnesoa left has a boogieman in this cycle, it’s the “American Legislative Exchanage Conference”, better known as ALEC.

Founded and run by that other perennial boogieman of the hysterial left, Grover Norquist, ALEC pushes a conservative agenda by hosting get-togethers and suggesting legislation to – wait for it – legislators.  Mostly conservative ones.

Sort of like the AFLCIO, the Ntaional Rifle Association, National Education Association, and practically every other  organization that  pokes is nose into legislation at the state level.

For the past year, a phalanx of leftybloggers and regional media have been passing on the meme hat ALEC is somehow different.  More sinister.

Some have called ALEC a “lobbying” group – which is odd, inasmuch as legislators actually pay to join the group.

Now,the coverage “coverage” of ALEC throughout the lefty alt-media has been utterly uniform in what it mentions (model bills!) and also what it omits (paid memberships), to the point that I’d bet money that the entire campaign is being run by “Media Matters” or some other lefty spin organization.

Just a hunch, mind you.

I bring it up because Beth Hawkins piece earlier this  week about an ALEC initiative on education legislation which reads in its entirety like a news release from a lefty attack-PR firm…

…but omits a number of the key facts that one might expect a “reporter” to provide in covering a “story” – the who, what, when yadda yadda.

Last week, the Minnesota House of Representatives did not meet on Thursday or Friday. The state Senate held a handful of hearings Thursday, but was in recess Friday.

Which was terribly convenient for those members of the Republican caucuses who are also members of the secretive, controversial American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which recently issued members this invitation to a confab where it was to roll out its 2012 legislative agenda:

 

You can plug your nose and read Hawkins’ piece for the details,such as they are.

Hawkins channels Sally Sorenson, snarking that the recess “was terribly convenient” for liegislators who are also ALEC members.

So – who went?

Anyone?

Hawkins tacitly admits she hasn’t a clue – and tries to fob her negligence as a reporter off on the legislators:

If you want to know whether your elected official was one, you will have better luck calling and asking as a constituent than reporters have had.

It’s striaght out of Jesse Ventura’s “Conspiracy Theory”; lack of evidence is, itself, evidence of a coverup!

“It’s complete BS”, said a source on Capitol Hill familiar with the issue.  The source was not aware of any legislators attending the event – “maybe one”, and that seemed like a long shot.

Read the piece.  See if you can find anything in it that doesn’t look like it came from a press release.

And then remember Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection:  “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”

The left is harping on ALEC because the the left’s pressure groups – “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”,and the various unions’ political arms – are about to launch a wave of smear and noise that dwarfs ALEC by many orders of magnitude.

It’s what the media – “alternative” and otherwise does; create whispering campaigns about conservative conspiracies to draw attention away from the real thing.

I’m open to other explanations.