Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism – as we finish eight years as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• Ed and I will be doing the voodoo we do from 1-3PM.  Today we’ll be talking about the primaries, the great Obama poll scam, contraception redux, and why the Minnesota GOP seems so eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
• Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – is on from 1-3 on Sunday.
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  Join him from 9-11 every Saturday!

(All times Central)

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Today’s “Compare and Contrast” feature pits the “American Legislative Exchange Council” – also known as “ALEC”, and also also known as “This Year’s DFL Boogeyman” – against the “National Conference of State Legislatures“.

“Who”?

Exactly.

Let’s compare them, point by point:

Agenda:  The group promotes a partisan point of view.
ALEC:  Yes – center right.
NCLS: Yes – center-left.

Pushing Agenda:  The group writes “model legislation” that, if passed, would further its agenda, and distributes it to its legislative members (because all legislation needs to be submitted by an elected legislator, naturally).
ALEC:  Yes.  As, by the way, do other conservative think tanks; Cato, the NRA, whomever.
NCLS: Yes.  As, by the way, do liberal think tanks, as well as the political action wings of all the unions.  Especially the NEA.

Content Of That Agenda:  The group promotes an agenda that its opponents find debatable.
ALEC:  Yes – and that fact has pushed the more-deranged reaches of the left to the point where the liberal “attention” has become self-parody, and has gotten to the point where “Berg’s Seventh Law” applies.  Two years ago, they babbled about the Koch Brothers to cover the fact that Alita Messinger was pouring millions into the Minnesota campaign.  This year, yapping like obedient dogs about “ALEC” will obscure the fact that the unions and groups like the NCLS will be doing the same, and much, much more, just by simple dint of there being more of them.
NCLS: Yes – although you don’t hear much about it.

Who Pays The Dues To Join The Group To Learn About The Agenda?:  Both groups charge dues, which by definition makes them “not lobbying groups”.  Someone has to pay for legislators to join and remain “members”.
ALEC:  The members pay their own dues.
NCLS: Dues are paid by the state, using taxpayer money.  One source with background in legislative matters tells me the dues amount to over $300,000 in state money a year.  That’s money that’s being taken from the children to pay for our legislators to think like this.

Attention Group Gets From Its Detractors:  What’s the group’s profile among its opponents?
NCLS: Not much.  Even though it promotes an institutionalist, big-government agenda, and does it with public money, you rarely if ever hear about the NCLS’ actions or agenda.  Or those of the National Education Association, which does all the same things – promoting policy, writing model legislation, trying to inveigle legislators into sponsoring it, yadda yadda.  Or the same operations at AFSCME, MAPE, the SEIU, and on, and on, and on.
ALEC:  The group is to the left in 2012 what “birth certificates” were to the fringe right in 2009, what “Bush’s cruise missiles” were to the “fringe” left in 2004, what “black helicopters” were to the paranoid right in 1996; a stalking horse for their lunatic fringes at best, justification for its own excesses at worst.

Hope we’ve settled that.

After almost a year of listening to the DFL chide the GOP for “borrowing” money from the schools (actually just delaying some of the payments from one budget year to the next (notwithstanding the fact that Mark Dayton’s “budget” proposed an even bigger “loan”, naturally), the DFL is now proposing continuing the “delay” to refill the budget reserve.

Well, not “the DFL”, per se, but the Strib editorial board.  But that’s a distinction without a difference; the editorial board serves as the DFL’s trial balloon launcher.

And launch they do:

Budget reserves don’t get a lot of love at the State Capitol.

Throngs don’t congregate to shout “Don’t raid our reserves!” Lobbyists don’t line the corridors plotting strategies to plump up reserves or shield them from attack.

It’s a pity that they don’t. Adequate reserves are the taxpayers’ insurance policy.

“Insurance policy”…against what?

Hard times?

Like the ones we’ve been in for a few years now?

They guard against disruptive cuts and/or tax increases when an ill-timed financial calamity strikes.

For a family budget – for people who earn their money – a budget reserve makes ample sense, and is a priority.

For a state?  Keeping a billion dollar reserve – that’s $200 for every man, woman and child in the state of Minnesota – is yet another case of the Strib editorial board DFL saying “Tough times schmough times; keeping government running comes first; bend over, it’s tax day!”

The best “budget reserve” for government is to spend not only less than its means – its revenues – but much less.  Let revenue drop to where the budget is when things turn dodgy.  That means the next time times turn good, do not treat the new revenue as a sign that it’s time to have more permanent spending…

…which is exactly what the faux Republicans like Arne Carlson, stealth DFLers like Jesse Ventura, and of course the Strib Editorial Board DFL do.

Reserves are necessities for a family.  They’re a luxury for government – something to plump up only when revenues are increasing so fast that even a DFL legislature can’t try to spend it fast enough.

Let’s be clear on two things:

1. Domestic abuse is bad.  Don’t abuse your significant other.  Physically, verbally, emotionally.  Just don’t.
2. If you are male in Minnesota (or, pretty much, anywhere), you need to get over the idea that you have any right to self-defense.  If a kerfuffle turns into a rhubarb and thence into scuffle, even if the woman clearly starts the fight, if the police are called and she has so much as a bruise on her wrists (from pummeling the male), and the male doesn’t have a meat cleaver stuck in his forehead, it’ll be he that goes to jail, and run into a domestic abuse charge in which he may not legally be “guilty until proven innocent”, but in which guilt is designed to be incredibly easy to prove, unless you are wealthy enough to afford quite the lawyer.  (Some of our more depraved leftybloggers, and at least one idiot state legislator, will no doubt copy this paragraph and tweet “Berg Supports Domestic Abuse!”.  Far from it.  Seriously, you’ve been warned).

Cook was jailed and charged with domestic assault by strangulation, which can carry a prison sentence of up to three years.

But in a phone call to a police detective 20 days after the incident, Baker recanted her claim about the choking. She said she started the fight and had beaned Cook from behind with one of her shoes, cutting him behind the left ear.

The slap that knocked her into the wall was a reflex to that, she claimed.

She also acknowledged punching him and pulling out three of the shoulder-length dreadlocks he wore at the time. (She later testified she kept one of the dreadlocks.)

She also told the detective that Cook’s slap had ruptured her left eardrum. With that information, prosecutors amended the criminal complaint to add a count of third-degree assault, which accused him of causing “substantial bodily harm” by breaking her eardrum.

The injury healed by itself.

Before the case went to trial, prosecutors offered Cook a chance to plead guilty to one of the felonies in return for a three-year probated sentence. He rejected the deal.

Baker maintained her recantation when prosecutors called her as a witness. She took the blame for the fight turning physical, saying she’d been drinking that evening, didn’t handle booze well and had made up the choking allegation because she was mad at Cook and wanted to see him jailed.

So that goes to show you – the domestic abuse system works!  Provided that you’re a millionaire who can afford a top-flight lawyer and the plaintiff actually admits to having lied about the whole thing.  Oh, and here’s hoping he can recover from ten games’ suspension to make the roster and keep your exceptionally-hard-to-achieve career.

All you guys living in trailer parks in Elko or duplexes in Minneapolis or ramblers in Hugo who might run afoul a similar situation?  Without the whole “top flight lawyer” bit?  No, no – it doesn’t work that way for you.

When I saw that Eric Black – formerly of the Strib, now at the Minnpost – had written a piece entitled “Redistricting maps give DFL advantage in legislative races, but …”, I went “uh oh”.

I mean, Eric Black is no leftyblogging bobblehead.  He’s one of the Deans Of Minnesota Political Journalism (although to be fair Minnesota Political Journalism has more deans than the MNSCU system).

And while I don’t want to frame the redistricting in especially partisan terms, the fact is that the maps didn’t really adequately reflect Minnesota’s most important current demographic trend – people fleeing the failed DFL-controlled Twin Cities and Duluth, and moving to areas that actually work, which are universally and without exception GOP-controlled.   They bent over backwards to maintain the Twin Cities’ control over Minnesota politics, especially at the Congressional level.

Now – before I get into Black’s actual piece, here – let’s go over a tiny little bit of the theory of journalism.

Print journos know that the number of people who actually read any given point in a story drops, almost geometrically, the further into the story you get.  If 1000 eyeballs scan the headline, 100 might read the opening paragraph or two.  Of those 100, 10 might plod through the middle.  If there’s a jump, or if it takes longer than a few minutes to plod through, barring some immediate personal interest, 1 might get to the end of the piece (the numbers are made-up, but they’re neither gratuitously far-off nor conceptually wrong).

So copy editors write headlines that try to lure as many eyeballs as possible into the story – and generations of editors have groused at reporters “don’t bury the lede” – because in print news (and its red-headed stepchild, online journalism), the first impression may be the only impression you get.

And with that headline and its key message- DFL ADVANTAGE!!!! – ringing in my mind, I tucked into the rest of the story:

When the new decennial map of Minnesota’s legislative districts was unveiled in late February, most neutral observers said the DFL had won the battle for a favorable map. But the degree of the DFL victory may have been understated. If the map is destiny (which it isn’t, but it can change the odds), the DFL may have a decent shot at taking back control of both houses of the Minnesota Legislature in the 2012 election.

The degree of DFL victory “may have been understated”.

That’s the lede.  And ledes are important for that portion of Minnesota’s population that reads past the headline – which, as we established in the headline, says the maps were a big win for the DFL (“but…”).

And who – other than those “neutral sources” – is behind this claim (and I’ll add emphasis):

DFL State Chair Ken Martin recently told me that the way his party scores the partisan lean of the new districts, the DFL has at least a slight advantage in 73 House districts and 34 Senate districts. If (a big “if” unless and until it happens) the DFL candidates were to prevail in those districts, it would give the party a substantial (73-61) majority in the House and a bare (34-33) single vote majority in the Senate.

So after a headline and a lede that proclaim that the DFL was the big winner, we get the source – Ken Martin.  The Chair of the DFL, after coming from “Win Minnesoita“, which is part of the DFL money shell-game that pays for all the DFL’s attack ads (and thus, all of its messaging, period).

That’s it.

So to the reader’s perception, the story really says THE DFL HAS A HUGE ADVANTAGE (according to the head of the DFL).

And we know this…

To be precise for the total political wonks in the audience, the DFL has developed a methodology that looks – precinct by precinct – at DFL votes across the last many elections. (As you can imagine, the partisan breakdown of a precinct can vary from year to year and from race to race within a given year.) The DFL method massages the numbers into what it called the DPI (Democratic Performance Index) of each precinct. And now that they know which precincts go with which state House and Senate districts, they can calculate which districts have a DPI of greater than 50 percent, which means that the DFL should have an advantage in winning and hold that seat.

…because the DFL did a bunch of math…

Before you get too excited (or upset, depending on your partisan preference) you should know that:

a) Martin didn’t release the map of the DFL-leaning districts nor the numbers on which the calculation is based, so skeptics cannot check his statement;

b) The Pioneer Press, which published a similar calculation, reached a significantly less favorable DFL number on the Senate map. (The Pi-Press analysis did indicate that the DFL has the map potential to take back control of the House and gain ground – but enough for control – in the Senate); and

c) Everyone that I interviewed for this post assured me that, while the map is important, it is neither the only nor even the most important thing.

…which was likely b*llsh*t, and even the media knows it.

But it’s worth, apparently, putting as an unvarnished headline and lede.

Why?

Because it’s one of the narratives the DFL wants spread far and wide; their success is inevitable.  Don’t ask why – they won’t tell you.  Just keep repeating it, Dems.  Just interenalize it, conservatives!

The DFL’s main hope this election is to drive down conservative enthusiasm – which slaughtered them two years ago – and try to create some sort of bandwagon effect on the left.

Prediction:  An upcoming Minnesota Poll or Humphrey Institute survey will show that A MAJORITY OF MINNESOTANS (from a sample that over-counts DFLers 3:2) APPROVE OF DAYTON’S JOB AS GOVERNOR.

Gotta hand it to the DFL.

They’re playing a pair of “fours” this election.   But they’re playing them for all they’re worth.

Intellectually and politically, the DFL is running on fumes this year.  The closest thing they had to a legislative agenda – “tax the rich!” – stalled and died in the legislature.  The regional economy is slowly (sloooooowly) obsoleting their “We have to tax our way out of deficits!” meme.  They’re looking at Obama’s eroding popularity and hoping that the President’s coat tails are like the ones on a tank top.   And redistricting, for all of the partisan media’s backing and filling, looks to be mostly a wash in the near term, and reflects long-term demographic changes that can not bode well for the DFL (other than the progressives’ great long-term fairy tale, “lots of potential liberals are immigrating to the US”, which is of course true provided that we allow generations of new Americans to stay ignorant about what this country’s about – which is, of course, Democrat policy).

In response, the DFL really has only a few points to run on:

“Aren’t Those Republicans Awful People?”  In 1998, when the Democrats had a skirt-seeking missile in the White House, they responded by teaching a generation of American teens that oral sex wasn’t really sex at all, and demanding that we all just Mooooove On.  The French were laughing at us after all.

Now, after a low-grade “sex scandal”, Mary Fransion’s manufactured gaffe and a few other minor incidents, expect the Party of Infanticide to plead “family values”, making me wonder if all those teenagers from the Clinton era – now pushing thirty – will need years of therapy to sort out the mixed messages.

“Just Look At The Economy!” Minnesota’s economy is doing better than most.  Not North Dakota-good, but not bad.  The DFL and media (ptr) will work overtime to convince Minnesotans that correlation – Mark Dayton is governor and the economy sucks less than the rest of the US – equals causation, scrupulously ignoring that it’s the GOP majority in the Legislature that have done all the positive work this past few years (and, likely as not, eight years of Pawlenty’s leadership and four years of his stymying of the DFL that set the stage for the relative level of health we have).

“We Saved The Vikings!”  And they’ll save snowmobiling and binge-drinking, too, if they have to!

The mainstream media – especially the Strib, which profits from the current Dayton/Bakk plan – spun this as a partisan issue (and part of it was; principled conservatives joined a few principled liberals, like John Marty, in rejecting Wilfare), playing up Dayton and Senate Majority Leader Bakk’s “leadership”, and only incidentally scratching the surface of their plan, which seemed to rely on money borne down from heaven on the backs of unicorns. (You can go to MPR to read what I was reporting on two weeks ago, if you’d like).

Of course, with the Senate tabling the bill, that’s looking a little dodgy.  But no worries – the Dems still have the big daddy of them all:

“It’s Inevitable!”  One of my favorite aphorisms is an old Hungarian saying: “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”.

The DFL apparently read it too.

The DFL and the media – and on this, as few other issues, when I say “pardon the redundancy”, it rings truer than usual – are doing their best to portray this next election as an inevitable winner for the DFL, for…well, whatever reason.  Redistricting favored them (more on that probably later today), or people are sick of GOP squabbling and want the government to “get things done”, or demographics make it inevitable, or the economy is racing back so fast that Obama’s coattails are going to lift them up, or Minnesotans just loooooooove keeping their beloved government fat and happy…

…or all of the above.  Because the best way to win an election may not in fact be to appear as if you already have – but it doesn’t hurt to add it in there, either.

So this blog will spend a good chunk of the next seven and a half months covering the DFL Ministry of Truth’s attempts at psychological warfare.  There’ll be no shortage of material.

Sources at the Capitol tell me that the Employee Freedom Act – the proposed Right to Work Amendment – is in trouble.

The sources tell me the House GOP caucus leadership is going wobbly, and some caucus members are nervous about the money the unions say they’re going to bring to bear.

It’s time to call your House GOP caucus and its members, especially if you’re a constitiuent.  Encourage them to support the amendment.  Polls show the people support Right to Work by a significant margin.

Fortune favors the bold – and the DFL noise machine will play this like a victory they earned.

House GOP Caucuse:  Please stop the wobbling.

I’ve had not a few things to say about the family law system in this country, and in this state, over the years.  The disintegration of the family is a plague on the society – and needs to be addressed.

But while we’re working on fixing that, there’s some slightly-lower-hanging fruit to deal with; the divorce and child custody systems.

As I noted earlier this week, there’s a proposal in the Senate to create a “rebuttable presumption” that joint physical custody is, in fact, in the best interests of the children in divorces.

Joe Doakes – a lawyer – writes:

I was a divorce lawyer for a dozen years in the late 80’s-early 90’s. My experience and research is 20 years out of date but I think [the proposal to create a presumption of joint physical custody] is still good law.

Minnesota divorce law contemplates two kinds of child custody: legal custody (which parent makes decisions about the kid’s religion, education, medical attention) and physical custody (which parent does the kid live with).

Legal custody is usually shared because even if Mom and Dad can’t live together, they generally can set aside their differences long enough to make important decisions about health and education. The proposed law would not change that.

Minnesota’s physical custody statute 518.17, 2011 Minnesota Statutes, sets forth a list of detailed factors the Court must consider before awarding physical custody to one parent or the other when joint custody is sought. The fundamental test is “best interests of the child.” One of those factors is “primary caretaker” and the factors to determine who that was, were set forth by the Minnesota Supreme Court in Pikula v. Pikula, 374 N.W.2d 705 (1985) as:

“ . . . (1) preparing and planning of meals; (2) bathing, grooming and dressing; (3) purchasing, cleaning, and care of clothes; (4) medical care, including nursing and trips to physicians; (5) arranging for social interaction among peers after school, i.e. transporting to friends’ houses or, for example, to girl or boy scout meetings; (6) arranging alternative care, i.e. babysitting, day-care, etc.; (7) putting child to bed at night, attending to child in the middle of the night, waking child in the morning; (8) disciplining, i.e. teaching general manners and toilet training; (9) educating, i.e., religious, cultural, social, etc.; and, (10) teaching elementary skills, i.e., reading, writing and arithmetic. . . . “ Pikula, at 713. [case attached]

For convenience, I’ll call this the “primary caretaker” system as that seems to be the emphasis.

And these factors that undercut the notion that “the system is biased against men” – it’s really a matter of counting up how many factors each parent “wins” – and points you to the truth; it’s biased against traditional male gender roles.  Parents can be “tied” on every single factor in determining custody – every single factor – but if the children spend four days a week with Mom as the main caretaker, and three with Dad, then that’s the factor that’ll settle custody.

From what I’ve read in the news accounts, there doesn’t seem to be any dispute about the basic facts: the primary caretaker system gives Mom custody 85% of the time; single-mother households struggle with poverty; and children raised in poverty in single-parent households fare less well than children raised in poverty from two-parent households.

Mothers are different than fathers; there’s a reason humans evolved to have one of each in the “ideal” household.  Girls who grow up with impaired relationships with fathers statistically grow up with self-respect issues, depression and all sorts of trouble finding surrogate daddy figures in their lives.  Boys without fathers simultaneously grow up unable to process anger effectively and, perversely, risk averse; mothers are not generally temperamentally the physical risk-takers among kids’ parents.

There doesn’t seem to be any dispute with the conclusion that the primary caretaker system is an abysmal failure for many children.

From those facts and that conclusion, it seems fair to say that the primary caretaker system is NOT in the children’s best interests.

Now, saying the primary caretaker system is bad doesn’t mean this proposed legislation is good. But if we’re convinced the primary caretaker system is not in the children’s best interests, then it follows that we have a moral obligation to junk it. For the children.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

There are arguments against the presumption of joint physical custody.  Feminists insist that it’ll allow “abusive fathers” to raise children; the law would, in fact, allow proof of abusiveness to “rebut” the presumption – which would give men actual legal rights, which irks feminists.  Currently, as many as half of all allegations of abuse during divorces are shown to be false, raised purely to affect the custody process.  And it works.  Requiring allegations of abuse to meet a legal standard to rebut the presumption of joint custody would be a huge step forward.   That’s why feminists hate the proposal.

The “family law” lobby’s objections, if anything, are more cynical.  Their line is “if a couple can’t get along well enough to settle their differences enough to stay married, how can we possibly expect them to act in their kids’ best interest?”  Of course, one of the reasons divorces are so ungodly emotional is because it’s a winnter-takes-all system that costs hundreds of dollars an hour and ends with one party – usually the father – exiled from the kids’ lives.  The system – and the worst of the lawyers who earn their living from it – carefully fan that fear.

Any legislator, GOP or DFL, who opposes this proposal is going to get a molten-hot earful from me.

Another liberal state.

Another state where you can practically register your dog as a voter:

The video, a sequel to O’Keefe’s “Primary of the Living Dead” in New Hampshire, shows a Veritas agent entering various voting places around the state of Vermont, giving a different name each time. Each time, he is given a ballot without showing an ID, to his disbelief.

In the video, the agent repeatedly requests (but does not take) a Republican primary ballot. As he explained to Breitbart.com: “We wanted to remind viewers this is not a partisan issue. This is a situation wherein anyone — Republican or Democrat — can exploit the system.”

The new video follows in the wake of a highly-politicized media attack on Mr. O’Keefe after his exposure of voter fraud in New Hampshire. Those videos resulted in calls from the left for O’Keefe’s arrest. However, the videos soon resulted in the New Hampshire State Senate passing a new bill requiring voter ID.

This comes on top of the expose on Minnesota’s comical voter registration system last month.

Just a hunch – but a few hundred more of these and we may just reach a tipping point.

Conservatives are not engagled in a “war on women”.

But liberals are.   If there is one thing liberal dogmatists hate worse than a conservative,it’s an apostate.  

And to a liberal, a woman and/or an ethnic, racial or or social minority is a “liberal” by dint of having been born – and so if they become conservatives, they are by definition apostates.  And since Ameircan liberalism is about whre Wahhabi Islam is today, in an intellectual sense, they have about the same attitude toward apostates.

But it seems that, at least for the worst of the left’s Wahhabi, self-marinading in hatred is costing them.

Feeling pressure in the wake of the Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke controversy, Bill Maher recently said he could say disgusting things about Sarah Palin and other women because he’s on HBO and doesn’t have sponsors.

Apparently the White House doesn’t completely agree, for according to Politico, David Axelrod, one of Obama’s right-hand men, has cancelled an upcoming appearance on Maher’s Real Time:

Maher is only the worst of the offenders. Indeed, hatred of apostate minorities, women, “working person” or social minority is a pathology that nearly every liberal, from Maher down to the most hackneyed leftyblog, seems to share.

The only answer is for real people to call them on it when they see it.

Or so says the latest CBS/NYTimes poll,which shows The One’s approval ratings taking a hit:.

President Barack Obama’s approval rating went from a positive 50 – 43 split last month to a 41 – 47 negative one in the newest CBS News/New York Times poll. But that only brought his lead against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney down three points nationally in the poll, 47 – 44, having been up on Romney 48 – 42 in February.

Because if he were a cracker that was destroying the economy and working toward a radical transformation of our national ideals, he’d be a shoe-in already.

Like many conservatives, I watched the video of Obama cuddling up to the usual dog’s breakfast of radicals in college..

…and thought “OK, that’s maddening, but it’s hardly anything to run a campaign on”.

I mean, many of us said, did and wrote things in college and high school we’d not like to have turn up now.  I was a liberal, for crying out loud.  The platform I wrote for 1980 North Dakota Boys’ State would have made Paul Wellstone look like Ron Paul.  I’d rather it nor turn up, if you catch my drift.

But the President’s past isn’t going to defeat him – and only partly because, like Mark Dayton’s mental health and alcoholism, the media will cover it up for all they’re worth.  No, it’s just not the kind of thing most Americans outside the conservative wonk class will ever care about.  

And as Stanley Kurtz notes,  the present is the outrage, and the future should be the real weapon against Obama:

I don’t quite hold with either view. The debate is miscast, both because it treats the past and present as sharply different, and because it assumes we actually know and understand what Obama has been doing these last three-and-a-half years. I disagree. Many aspects of Obama’s present–to say nothing of his plans for the future–are as guarded and mysterious as his radical past. In fact, the poorly-known side of Obama’s world makes the clearest sense only when you combine research into his past and present alike….There are many aspects of Obama’s current policies that the public knows little or nothing about, and seemingly familiar things that are still poorly understood. When you put the total picture together, the links between Obama’s present and past can be drawn much more convincingly than many now imagine.

That’s the slow, steady drip in the background, for those of us who are paying attention; if Obama wins re-election, and has either house of Congress, he’s going to go on a hopey-changey orgy.

Found on the truck of a Walker supporter in Madison:

This is not the mark of a movement that believes things are going well.

A friend of this blog who describes himself as “born in Browerville, raised and educated in Clarissa, still own hunting land outside of Clarissa”  resonded to the weekend’s Jon Tevlin column:

My apologies on letting Tevlin out of Todd County without teaching him manners and common sense. I am not sure where in Todd County he lived but he is an embarassment to those of us who were properly educated and reared in those places.

Don’t be so hard on yourself. Anyplace can produce a stenographer for the DFL.

After the Franson “story” broke the week before last, the DFL thought it was onto a Don Imus moment. And they needed one – their somnolent legislative caucus

They were disappointed when the story started to fade – even most DFLers can tell when context is being waterboarded.  It was dropping off the radar last week when the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” stepped in to demand an apology and try to fan the flames among their droogs.

It didn’t work. The protests planned for Rep.Franson’s lawn drew, according to one report, three droogs.

But the droogs on the street are afterthoughts to the DFL. They have them in higher places.

Jon Tevlin – aka “Nick Coleman 2.0” – seems to have gotten his marching orders, “file an indignant piece about Franson”, in by deadline,which was apparently back when the DFL was still flogging the story.

And Tevlin’s piece hits all the points Alita Messinger and Ken Martin desperately want to be hit:.

 When Rep. Mary Franson compared people who get food stamps to animals in the wild, beholden to humans who feed them,

Huh?

I wonder if Tevlin even knows how bizarre that is.

she was being blissfully ignorant of a growing number of people who live in a certain region in Minnesota.

Namely, her neighbors.

Really, Jon Tevlin, ace reporter?

And how do you know what Mary Franson is “ignorant” about?  She lives there, works in daycare, campaigns there every two years.

I’m going to suggest she’s less “blissfully ignorant” than Jon Tevlin is invincibly arrogant-enough to write columns in first-person omniscient.

Before she made jokes about people on food stamps, or SNAP, she might have asked around, or just looked at the website for Todd County, which is in her district. There, she would have seen a recent report that both food stamps and medical assistance are up dramatically in Todd County.

Soaring, under her watch.

And here, the ethical reader has a dilemma: does the Strib employ a columnist who is stupid enough to believe a state legislator’s “watch” has direct impact on poverty in her county?  Or do they employ one who’s so cynical and in the bag for the DFL propaganda machine that he writes garbage like this in hopes that the readers are too stupid to know any better?

To my mind, it’s a toss-up.

The assumption behind Franson’s logic is that people who get assistance do so because, like animals used to being fed, they get lazy.

No.  They get dependent.  “Lazy” is when columnists crib their chanting points from “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” .  “Dependent” is when you honestly don’t know another way than being on the dole.

Compare and contrast:  “Jon Tevlin is too lazy to dig beneath his own arrogant, smug, entitled, DFL-pimping preconceptisons”, versus “Jon Tevlin is dependent on DFL / ABM chanting points for his material on this issue, to the point where he has no idea how to find the real facts about the issue”.  See the difference?

OK.  Maybe not in Teviln’s case.   Because as we see, he’s both:

But the report from Todd County Social Services shows quite the opposite. The unemployment rate is relatively low, 5.8 percent.

Now, I get confused – is that “on Mary Franson’s watch”, too?

People are working, and working hard, but the fact is they just don’t get paid very much.

Right.  There’s a recession going on.  Perhaps Jon Tevlin has heard?

Need, Rep. Franson. Your constituents, about 8 percent of them, need help because the businesses in your district can’t or won’t pay them enough to live on, and can’t or won’t provide them with health care.

And here’s where both dependence and laziness rear their slothful, indolent heads.  Franson was talking a general principle; Tevlin is talking details – the temporary needs of people having hard times.  Which, I’m sure Tevlin would find if he weren’t dependent on ABM for his chanting points, the GOP broadly supports.

Franson probably thinks these people are slackers, too, no-goods leeching off the public.

And Jon Tevlin “probably” wrote about a third of this column.

Except for this next bit:

Franson might not know these people — her neighbors — very well, but I do.

I lived in Todd County and graduated from high school there. Yes, some of the people who took assistance were lazy or drunks. But mostly they were people like the old woman across the street, whose husband had died many years ago, or like the people who toiled on poor dirt farms, or waited tables at the local restaurant.

Yes, they were even people like my dad, who after working for 40 years at Honeywell had a brain aneurism and had to rely on Social Security, pension, and food stamps for a while.

My dad accepted food stamps because he believed in responsibility, responsibility to feed his kids even though he couldn’t work.

In other words, “my story about real, genuine, acute need – and, more accurately, the emotions it churns up – trump your statement of high-level principle”.

It’s a logical fallacy.  It’s an argument based purely on emotion – which, to be fair, is the only kind of argument Tevlin’s DFL masters can make.   You can’t top it, the logic goes, so you have to just shut up, or appear cold and heartless.

It’s crap, of course; nobody, least of all conservatives, denies that human circumstance and human frailty creates need.  Nobody, least of all Franson, has said anything about changing that.  But the larger point – that welfare does create dependence, and it does – gets obscured by the inflammatory emotion, both of the “can you top this” story and, behyond that, the defamatory slander of the DFL/ABM’s chanting point.

Yes, I said “Tevlin’s DFL masters”:

The war on women apparently now joins the war on the poor.

Two narratives for the price of one.  He’s lazy and dependent, but he’s thorough.

Keep going, Strib.  Has anyone thought about what happens when your paper becomes nothing but a DFL news release ‘bot?

A lot of you Strib employees will be on food stamps, for starters.

One upside of having a news site like the MInnPost:  while they are fashionably center-left, they are not completely in bed with the Sports-Industrial Complex.   Since they don’t “sell” any more “copies” on Vikings game days, they can actually report, y’know, facts.

Like this bit by Marlys Harris on the top five things they’re not telling you about the stadium.

Although it may be telling that they ignore the two parts that are directly traceable to the DFL – RT Rybak’s unfulfillable promise re the Minneapolis sales tax, and the complete fantasy behind Tom Bakk’s gambling revenue proposal.

Still, the more reporting people do on this mass-fleecing, the better.

The next time someone from Public Radio asks why conservatives distrust public media and think it has institutional bias, I’ll tell them to listen to this Bob Garfield piece on “On The Media“, in which this official NPR production does a demise dance for Rush Limbaugh, and ask in return “why would anyone think otherwise?”

Joe Doakes from Como Park is also watching the legislature:

Have you seen this?

Present law presumes parents will share Legal custody (decision-making about school, health, religion, etc.) but has no presumption on sharing Physical custody (where the child actually lives). Present law says the court does whatever it decides is in “the best interests of the child” which, in practical terms, infrequently results in shared physical custody.

Very true.  Courts are under the impression that if a couple can’t get along well enough to stay married, they certainly can’t decide on something like custody.

It’s not entirely wrong – but on the other hand, the divorce process itself – especially the “winner take all” nature of the custody system, which adds a huge extra dollop of stress to an awful time in everyone’s life.

The fact is, every couple can choose joint custody; they just need to bury their differences long enough to reach an agreement on the kids’ future that’ll convince a judge that they’re acting in the kids’ best interests.

But most parents don’t do that.  Partly because of their own emotions; partly because stress and strife means billable hours for lawyers.

And those lawyers spot a threat:

Instead, one parent gets “possession” of the kid and the other parent visits occasionally. Statistically, it seems to result in physical custody awarded to women most of the time, leading to single-mother families and absent fathers.

This law would attempt to change that by creating a rebuttable presumption that divorcing parents should share their children’s lives about equally, with obvious exceptions for abusive situations.

Feminists, including the National Organization of Women, oppose these laws for some obvious reasons – a single-mother society is a feminized society – and some less obvious; child support has become the new alimony, and the industry that’s grown around it supports not a few non-profit industries.

The public policy rationale for the proposal starts in Section 7 at line 7.1.

Considering that this law might help men, the Star Trib’s take was amazingly supportive.

There is mounting opposition from divorce lawyers, battered women’s advocates and Democrats.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

This comes up every few years. It’s opposed by a range of interests – feminist DFLers and fundie evangelicals.

But the plague of single parenthood – meaning children who grow up with only one parent – is exacerbating all of our society’s pathologies (boys who grow up without fathers have a hard time processing anger; girls without fathers have vastly higher tendencies toward teen pregnancy and depression) and causing some new ones.  Teachers report a plague of children who never, ever get outdoors; single mothers, with a higher tendency toward fear of what’s going on around them on top of their normal female risk-averseness, are more likely to keep their kids indoors rather than letting them outside to play. And it’s causing all sorts of problems.  And single parents are just plain overworked; anyone who’s ever played basketball knows it’s easier to play one-on-one than zone.

(No, not every single parent every time. It’s a statistic,not an individual indictment).

This bill does need to pass.

Chris Fields for Congress!

And here’s where  Cindy Pugh‘s site will be next week. She’s running against incumbent Rep. Steve Smith in 33B in the Deephaven, Spring Park and Mound area.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism – as we finish eight years as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• Ed and I will be doing the voodoo we do from 1-3PM.  Today we’ll be talking jobs reports. Right to Work, and we’ll be talking with Cindy Pugh, Tea Partier and candidate for MN Senate who is mounting a primary challenge to Steve Smith.
• Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – is on from 1-3 on Sunday.
• 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,
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Join us!

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

The statement  (about 2:00 minutes in)

The predictable response.

My thought:

One basic rule of economics is: if you subsidize something, you get more of it.

Liberals approve of targeted tax breaks for things they like: electric cars and solar panels. Liberals approve of government subsidies for things they like: sports stadia and college classes. Liberals support these public expenditures because they know that without public subsidies, people wouldn’t pay for the Volt or the Vikings. As a result, the companies that produce products nobody wants to buy voluntarily (General Motors or Solyndra) become dependent on government money and can’t survive without it.

Clearly, some expenditures of government money influence private behavior and create dependency.

Welfare gives out government money, but only to those who follow its rules. Does welfare influence people to change their private behavior to qualify? Some do, certainly. Do continued welfare payments influence people to continue to behave in ways that qualify – passing up jobs or sending the other parent out of the home? Again, some do, without doubt.

Do long-term continued welfare payments influence people to become dependent on welfare? There are plenty of social scientists who’d agree.

If welfare payments follow the same economic principles of behavior influence as any other subsidy, and if Democrats know this but insist on funding welfare anyway; then it’s fair to say Democrats support programs which foster dependency on government, that keep people trapped in narrow behavioral ruts, discourage freedom, initiative, self-sufficiency and independence.

Now, to point out this truth, are politicians required to speak in short, literal prose sentences? Are metaphor and simile prohibited in public discourse? Was Martin Luther King, Jr. really sleeping when he had his dream? Did Bobby Kennedy really ask why things never were – is there a tape of it?

If a politician were to say that Democrats treat welfare recipients as if they were pets to be fed and sheltered but never allowed to run free, is that really an act of vicious hate speech equating poor people with animals? Have we all forgotten the difference between literal speech and illustrative speech?

If I speak the Truth in vivid imagery, what’s the objection: that I used the imagery . . . or that I spoke the Truth?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Only the right – that is, left – people are only supposed to tell the truth, and then only “the truth” that’s been approved by their various superiors.

Do I have to keep explaining this?

I don’t want to become one of those blogs that carry party press releases (I very rarely do this) and is all about calling people to one kind of action or another.

But this blog has always been about grassroots politics – mine, sure, but everyone else’s as well.

Anyway – the Right to Work amendment gets its hearing the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday.

I have it on good authority that some of the more moderate Republicans on the committee are getting a little squishy on this amendment.  They are afraid of all the union money that’s going to come into the state.  Fact is, the union money will always be there – but with RTW legislation popping up everywhere, it’s going to be spread a lot thinner than it will be in two or four years.  If not now, when?

So if you’ve got a senator on the committee, give ’em a call.  Encourage them to support the Right to Work amendment.  Encourage ’em to remember why they got sent there – and if it’s not a Freshman in the Senate, also encourage ’em to remember how they got the majority.

This just in:  Astroturf protesters heckled Mary Franson in the House Ag Committee, trying to overturn the 2010 election results by demanding her resignation over their context-mangled attack on her.  (The issue was in danger of fading from the headlines; the left can’t afford that)

Here’s her response – emphasis added:

Intimidation and bullying are hallmarks of the far left. The protesters here today exemplify the abusive nature of their political involvement by demanding my resignation and silence. They don’t engage on the tragedy of dependency and poverty because they have no solutions, only threats and theatrics.

No one is fooled or persuaded by these Alinsky tactics and far from resigning, these astro turf events only make me more committed to helping the poor out of poverty. My constituents support my efforts to change that status quo. The public knows stunts when it sees one and today’s orchestrated, manufactured “protests” are just that.

Mary Franson

The poor aren’t animals – but huge swathes of the DFL are a bunch of hyenas.

Mary is under a lot of fire right now – and it’s becoming more and more depraved.  She could use a call from some real Minnesotans, supporting her.

The DFL – as I noted earlier today – has been trying to make rhetorical hay out of mangling the context of a Mary Franson video (I wrote about this earlier) which, they say “compares welfare recipients to animals”.

The fact is, both parties see the citizen as animals.

The DFL View

"Bad Citizen. BAD!"

In the DFL view, the citizen is an animal.  A pet, at best.  One that might perform a useful service, or might not, but one whose existence is defined by its relation to its Master.

Does SHE deserved to be disenfranchised?

And we all know who The Master is, in the DFL’s world.

Of course, when it suits them, the DFL views the citizen as a different kind of animal:

Downtown Maple Grove, 2040, to the DFL's eyes.

Of course, as every good master knows, pets need discipline – and herd animals are just plain dumb.  Which means the masters need extra tools and power to make sure the animals get taken care of.

Elliot Seid (on ATV) on election day

At election time, or when it’s time to plump up numbers to justify a program’s existence, they see you, citizen, as livestock.  To be kept fed and contented until you’re needed for, er, other things.

The Conservative View

To a conservative, the citizen is a different kind of animal:

The CD4 GOP Committee meeting last Tuesday

Not necessarily “wild” – there are rules, after all – but free.  With liberty, dignity and free will of their own.  They don’t have “masters” – their packs have leaders.  And those leaders can be disposed of when they aren’t doing the job (although we humans have a more civilized way of doing it, unless the pack is Democrats and you are Jimmy Hoffa).

Mass transit, "animal"-style

These animals are, nominally, on their own – with no master, there’s nobody to crack up a can of Alpo.  But the pack does look out for the pack – of its own free will.  None of the animals starves – because that’s the way these animals treat each other.

How would you rather your government see you, you animal, you?

I went with the Morrisseys to see “Act Of Valor” last Saturday.  You’ve probably heard about it; it’s the movie ostensibly about Navy SEALs starring, well, Navy SEALs.

The film’s gotten mixed reviews from the usual film-critic suspects.  Some point to the quality of the acting (while there are a few C-list actors playing terrorists, CIA agents and government officials, everyone in a US uniform is a serviceperson, mostly active-duty SEALs); others say that the script swerves from simplistic to outright jingo; some call it a “recruiting film”.

But it’s gone over gangbusters with the critics that really matter, the audience; it crushed the (admittedly lackluster) competition to be the top-grossing movie  in the country in its first weekend out, the weekend before last.

I don’t go to a lot of movies – the last two I saw in a theatre during their first runs were True Grit and, before that, Gran Torino.  But I figured it was worth a quick review.

First, A Minor Quibble:  There are few things I find as tedious as people who pick over otherwise-watchable movies looking for continuity errors.  There are entire sites devoted to the practice – and beyond the few really obvious howlers, the practice bores me stiff.

That said, there was one error that stuck in my craw – and maybe mine alone, among people who were not in the Navy.  After the initial raid into Costa Rica (I won’t give any spoilers), the “LT” – the commander of the SEAL platoon that stars in the movie – is standing on the deck of the USS Bonhomme Richard, an “Amphibious Assault Ship” built to carry Marines and their helicopters (and the odd Harrier jump jet) to wherever they need to attack.  It looks like an aircraft carrier – and it literally is, in that it carries aircraft, in the form of helicopters and vertical take-off aircraft.

But in the scene after the raid, the “LT” is standing on the deck, talking with his wife on a satellite phone; he has to wait while an airplane (an S3 Viking antisubmarine patrol plane) gets shot off the deck by a steam catapult; think the opening sequences in Top Gun.  The scene ends with a long-shot of the Richard, its deck covered in choppers, and not a fixed-wing plane in sight – because the ship has no catapult to launch big fixed-wing planes.

It’s a minor quibble – but we North Dakotans are a seafaring race, and we take our ships seriously.

Next, A Major And Overlooked Spiff:  The cinematography is amazing.  Many have written about the  helmet-cam perspective shots during the firefights, so I expected heart-pounding, heavy-breathing first-person point of view shots.

But the rest of the movie is visually stunning on many levels.  The direction of action shots above and beyond the firefights is amazing; a scene where someone is being rolled into a carpet is not only edited with a blurry crispness that conveys the blurry confusion of the moment, but includes a shot from a rolling camera to complete the disorientation

The just-plain-cinematography – from the visual feasts of the Costa Rican jungle or the streets in the Philippines to the claustrophobic-yet-panoramic night fight scenes – was excellent, and often stunning.  If it weren’t for all the suicide bombs and exploding heads, parts of the movie could be shot for “Planet Earth”.

And visually speaking, it all comes together in one scene, where a bunch of drug-cartel sicarios who’ve been chasing the SEALS through the jungle wind up on the business end of a couple of boat-mounted miniguns during an incredibly adrenaline-blast exfiltration scene.  Between the cinematography, the film and sound editing and the direction, it’s an incredible visual of the mayhem on the business end of all that firepower; it’s an amazing bit of visual art, and I don’t mean that from an “America F**k Yeah!” or a “firepower pr0n” perspective.  Realistic?  I don’t know, I’ve never seen three miniguns hit a pickup truck.  Visually overpowering?  You bet.

The Acting: I’d heard all the stories, pro and con, about the movie’s “stars”, the SEALs (all credited pseudonymously, none of whom appear on the movie’s IMDB page) and their acting chops.

I’ve got three answers.

First – the goal of great acting is to make you forget you’re watching a performance.   Did the SEALs make me forget?  Yes and no.  There were scenes – mostly when the SEALs are off-duty and waxing colloquial – when you’re acutely aware that they’re saying lines from a script.  A few scenes play like high school theatre.  Not bad high school theatre, mind you – it takes a decent director to get things as close as they are.  I drove home thinking “if the movie were an indy film at Sundance about barristas in Seattle confronting their sexual confusion at an “Occupy” protest, starring real barristas, it’d be hailed as fearless and daring cinema”.

But – secondly, and perhaps obviously? – it was the scenes involving the SEALs plying their craft, doing the sort of things that in real life would send the most grizzled Hollywood stunt veteran running to his union to file a work rules grievance, that most made you forget you were watching a performance because, really, you weren’t.  The battle scenes, shot with a buzzy combination of traditional shots and rattly helmet-cam footage and edited to a modern sheen, tightly-edited enough to make Paris Hilton and Rosanne Barr look kinetic?  Sure, of course.

But if you’ve spent your life watching Hollywood action-adventure and war movies, with their somersaults and John Woo gun grips and all the other cliches that have grown up around the genre, one thing that impresses about the SEALs in the battle scenes is the extreme economy of their action.  There’s none of the dashing and Jackie-Chan-like somersaulting and pseudo-ninja buncombe of so many Hollywood movies on the subject;  my impression wasn’t so much “this is accurate” as “this looks real”.  There’s a difference.

The third bit about the acting is related.  There’s an interrogation scene – I won’t spoil it – starring the “Senior Chief”, the intelligence analyst of the platoon, an older SEAL (late forties, I’d guess) who has settled into middle age in the same way a rattlesnake settles into a cave; of the entire SEAL platoon, he, whoever he is, radiates the most effortless menace, with his grandfatherly (or Taliban-impersonating-ly) beard and his arklahoma accent and sense that he’s not trying to radiate anything.  He interrogates a suspect – again, no spoilers.  I joked with Ed afterward that the scene played like a community theatre production of 24.  I meant it as a compliment; as the Senior Chief drawls through his lines, there was also the acute sense that he wasn’t performing; that he knew the psychology behind what he was doing at a level that goes way deeper than Stanislavsky could ever teach.  He said his lines plenty capably; but he lived the role.  And while the scene took  some dramatic license – it took about five minutes, rather than the days or months it would have taken in real life – it was very, very effective.

Jingo – There are those – mostly on the left in Hollywood – who deride the movie as a “Navy recruiting film”.   There’s something to that; the closing credits are very, very long on people with ranks and billets in various Navy Public Affairs offices.  And Tom Clancy gets a producer-level credit.  Still, Obama-supporting Hollywood shouldn’t complain; since the President has both based his strategy on having lots of SEALs and other special operations forces while simultaneously cutting the regular militaries from whence those troops come, they’d best hope it works.

Beyond that, though?  As imperfect and occasionally mawkish as the film may seem to the jaded film fan’s eyes, it’s not Top Gun, or Rambo, much less Charlie Sheen’s Navy Seals.  There is a resemblance to Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan; all of them pay homage in their own way to a “greatest generation”.  The closing crawl broadly refers to all manner of those who risk all for others, and for all the rest of us – everyone from firemen to fighter pilots to lifeguards.

But I thought – what’s the perfect film analog?  And in thinking of the movie’s “narration” – by “The Chief”, a real-life chief petty officer who is the platoon’s second in command – it occurred to me. not since John Wayne’s The Green Berets has there been a movie that unequivocally held up the “Warrior Ethos” – duty, honor, sacrifice for a greater good – as unironically good things.

And even that wasn’t quite right.

The narration is the bookend for the movie – and to a life-long civilian, it almost sounds like something from a cartoon, at first.  “My father told me the worst part of getting old was that people stopped seeing you as dangerous”, it starts.  But as it dissolves into the movie’s opening scenes, and then wraps back in at the end, as a paeon not to “appearing dangerous” – which is, itself, counterintuitive to most people today – but to the even more counterintuitive-to-our-culture notion of an almost-monastic dedication to something the rest of the culture considers distasteful, foreign, or just something for others to do, whether that something is going into burning buildings, repairing people in inner-city emergency rooms, or going where the bad guys are and killing them quickly and violently.

And then I figured out why it was so hard to find a movie since the mid-sixties that so unironically exalted that way of life; because there really hasn’t been one.