Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

NAACP sued over the Central Corridor Light Rail project’s impact on businesses. The federal court twice ordered an analysis of lost business revenues as an adverse impact of the projects construction.

The government entities instead told the court there would be “no significant impact” on businesses due to light rail construction.

Photo taken this morning from the parking lot of McDonalds at University and Marion.

Just another vacant building, right?

 You see the old Saxon Ford dealership, abandoned in 2004, completely rehabbed by Dr. Vang, a Vietnamese dentist and local hero.

Wrong! It used to be the Hmong MN Professional Building!

“No Significant Impact.”

Joe Doakes

Como Park

You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet, right?

And if those eggs don’t look like the kind of eggs they have where the white liberals who plan things like Central Corridors live?

Eggs is eggs!

It’s been a lousy six months in the life of the Minnesota GOP.

Like an awful lot of Minnesota Republicans, I participate to try to work toward government policy that is fiscally sound and respects individual liberty – not because I personally feel I can bring any insights into the efficient operation of the party apparatus itself.  For the record, I offer no such insights; I stay on top of my household budget via the grace of God, a decent job and YNAB.  A business?  Never tried it.  Doubt it’d work.

That’s why we – and by “we”, I mean “the party at large”, as opposed to “Mitch Berg and others”, since as a precinct convener in 2009 I had as much impact on the election of the party chair then as I do now with no party office whatsoever – elect someone to run the party.  But to the extent I supported anyone, I did it in large part based on the things that a state party chair is supposed to do:  Raise money and run a business.

Tony Sutton is quite a fund-raiser.  And he has run a business or two.  Beyond that, it was all greek to me.

Anyway, the MNGOP is a mess, and a bunch of very motivated people have spent the last six months trying to un-bumfuzzle the whole thing.  Henco Commissioner Jeff Johnson led a group of people – all of whom were by no means huge fans of Tony Sutton – and have released their initial report.

A report from the Minnesota Republican Party on its troubled finances delivered a frank admission of “misreporting… questionable decision-making… and lack of accountability.”

The good news, according Jeff Johnson, chair of party’s financial oversight committee, is “for me the fact that we didn’t find any evidence that people were stealing money was reassuring.”

Which doesn’t mean there aren’t big questions to be answered:

Among the revelations were payments of $18,000 to an investigator for research on the legalization of marijuana. According to the report, the investigator, Tim Goar, also helped with media relations, but “Goar claims to have very few written reports and did not think he had saved any of his work. He says he had… only a verbal agreement with [Ryan] Griffin,” the party’s executive director. The report adds: “We were unable to successfully contact Griffin.”

Griffin’s name, and his apparent disappearing act, comes up several times. “Some of Ryan Griffin’s expense reports lacked documentation…. We were unable to successfully contact Griffin,” according to the report.

Griffin was paid $14,000 over his regular party salary for “legal services” and “legal advice.” But, the report noted again, “We were unable to locate any documentation detailing the services provided and were unable to successfully contact Griffin for more information regarding this issue.”

While there are those who will say “Oh, yeah?  I thought you said there was no stealing?  Huh? Huh? Huh?” I think the responsible response is that Johnson’s group are not criminal investigators; they are accountants.  They accounted for what they could, and raised the rest as questions to be answered in the next step.

This next bit will no doubt set the conspiracy-mongers to “puree”:

The report revealed that spinning off corporate entities was a common practice for the party. The party’s Midwest Leadership Conference in October was run under the auspices of MLC, Inc., which owes more than $26,000, primarily to the DoubleTree Hotel.

This is a fairly common practice in business; spin off separate entities to isolate the accounting (and, in a pinch, the debt).  Is it ethical when the money’s not there to pay for it?  That’s a valid question.

Johnson claims the expenses that led to the party’s $1.3 million debt offered “no big surprises because all the items we had known about” before the review. Still, some of the numbers are eye-popping — like $180,000 paid to a communications firm for a re-branding project, with more than $50,000 yet unpaid.

But the party’s review was designed to deliver “just the facts, not the judgment whether something was wise or not wise,” said Johnson.

At any rate, the party seems to have managed to trim (according to one account ) half a million off its debt; with the rest, it’s heading in the right direction.  It’s bad, but probably salvageable:

While the report was less than comforting in assessing the party’s shortcomings, Johnson voiced some optimism. “The simple fact is that most of these issues can be addressed by changes in our structure,” he said.

As we’ve noted in this space, not everyone is convinced.  Hell, I don’t have the knowledge, in and of myself, to be authoritatively convinced or not.  Just like three years ago.

Still, it’s my hunch we’re getting to the bottom of it.  My hunch and $2 will get you a cup of coffee, of course, but there you go.

Still…:

The report will not satisfy everyone, Johnson acknowledged. “There’s a small group of folks that want a full forensic audit,” he said, but the party can’t afford that.

I don’t know what a “full forensic audit” costs – but a cursory examination shows it’s a lot of money.  And “Forensic Audits” focus on finding fraud (sort of – indeed, the definition of the term itself seems to be under some debate), it might – might, maybe – be overkill for what the MNGOP needs, even if it could afford another 5-6 figure professional consulting bill right now.

And the GOP’s State Central Committee – the “Board of Directors”, as it were – made that call at its meeting last December, in a majority vote of its elected members.  And it’s their decision, right or wrong.  Not yours.  Not mine.

But here’s an idea (and it’s not mine, not by a long shot): All of you who want a forensic audit?  Raise the money, and pay for it!  Come up with the money it’d take to forensically audit 3-5 years worth of books for an organization the size of the MNGOP (and from what I read, you’d do well to get that for less than $50,000) and commit it to the job!

Actions speak louder than words!

That, or get in there and find actual evidence that Johnson’s investigation falls short in some key way.

I’m interested – very – in getting the GOP’s shop cleaned up.  Complete conservative dominance in Minnesota is the only thing that will prevent this state from turning into a cold Greece with boring food.  I’m not interested in paying  a lot of money donated by a lot of ma and pa donors in order to put a pelt on someone’s wall unless there’s at least a whiff of smoke.  Six months ago, it seemed pretty plausible. Today?  I’ll take some convincing.

Bring the smoke, the money, or the State Central votes.

I just haven’t seen it yet.

Remember when liberals opposed indefinite military detention of terror suspects captured on American soil?

Either do the libs or the President:

President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) today, allowing indefinite detention to be codified into law. As you know, the White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use it and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations.

But wait – isn’t this exactly what liberals were comdemning George W. Bush for?

The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield.

Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again.

Forget about Jimmy Carter; it seems that Barack Obama has borrowed the most noxious and troublesome aspects of almost every previous Administration:

• From George W. Bush, the most troubling ingressions into civil liberty in the same of national security.
• From Bill Clinton, the most obnosxious two-faced hypocrisy and star-snuggling.
• From George HW Bush, the most obnoxious aspects of ofay patricianism.
• From Carter?  Obama may well turn out to be a less competent president.  But there’s a competition, there.
• From Ford?  Obama is to choosing Vice Presidents as Gerald Ford was to controlling his golf swing.
• From Nixon?  The same blithe assurance that massive intervention was just plain the right thing to do.
• From LBJ, Obama gets the ideal that for every issue, there is an exquisitely expensive government program or regulation, and a propensity to think “dirty tricks” are a normal political tactic.
• And from JFK, Obama takes the lesson that public relations is as good as competence.

Bring on November.

The good news;  Hennepin County residents are applying for carry permits at a record clip:

From January through April of 2012, the Sheriff’s Office took in 1,875 applications for permits to carry. In comparison, the department netted 1,220 applications during the same time frame in 2011– an increase of nearly 54 percent.

Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek said the increase surprised him because 2011 was the busiest year for new gun permit applications since 2003, which is when the permit law took effect.

If 2012 stays on pace, it will dwarf the previous year.

It is, in fact, good news to see more Henco residents taking their moral civic duty to be proficient with firearms seriously.

The funny part?

Two, really.  When Fox9 was presenting the report last night, in their little clip of putative analysis, they noted (by way of intended irony) that it’s odd so many people would get handgun permits since crime in Henco is down 38% this year.

Now, why would that be?

No, not entirely due to gun permits – to claim it would be wrong, and to demand it would be a straw man.  But every time a citizen gets a permit, the deterrent value of the statute grows – and Minnesota’s number of permittees is on the higher end of the national average.

Now, criminals aren’t known for reading newspapers.  And yet violent crime in Henco has dropped.

Why could that be?  Why, oh why?

Bonus:  Kudos and Brickbats:  Kudos to Henco Sheriff Stanek, who has by all accounts run an honest shop in re handling permit applications, even though he works for a government that gives Berkeley a run for his money.

And a kudo and a brickbat for Channel 9 News.  When wrapping up the story last night, anchorette Heidi Collins asked the reporter (Eric Runge, I think) if all these permits in the hands of law-abiding citizens were a cause for “concern”.

The reporter, to his credit, noted correctly that carry permit holders tend not to commit crimes, more or less.  It’s not a big reach; at any given moment in Henco, there are probably 15-20,000 people with post-2003 carry permits; since 2003, they have committed exactly zero murders, two homicides ruled justifiable, and countless defensive gun uses that deterred countless (because literally – nobody counts them) crimes.

The Strib has a bright idea about dealing with the Student Loan Crisis.

Joe Doakes from Como Park has a brighter one:

Instead of subsidizing the interest rate on student loans, just give ‘em the money outright. Typical Star Tribune solution.

Left unspoken is the fact the federal government took over student loans as part of Obamacare. Yes, the interest on student loans that is killing our young people’s futures was intentionally factored in to help maintain the illusion that Obamacare wasn’t a budget-buster. That’s also why student loans remain non-dischargeable in bankruptcy . . . the government needs that money to pay for Obamacare.

Also left unspoken are the obvious free-market alternative – let interest rates float to the market level and thereby help students decide on the real cost of college – along with the pernicious effect of “free money” causing skyrocketing education costs.

This is Liberal thinking at its worst – a bad idea supposed to be fixed by another bad idea. Positive feedback loop, anyone?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Now, I can see the Strib taking two approaches here:

1. Taking a step back and realizing the wisdom of the market’s – and Joe’s – idea, and…
2. Doubling down on socialism – accompanied by a smarmy Steve Sack cartoon ridiculing the notion of the market in education.

Any bets?

Oh, boy:

Warren’s Native American self-narrative has not held up to scrutiny, so far.  Worse still, that narrative has revealed a cruel irony in the form of Warren’s great-great-great grandfather, who was a member of the militia which rounded up the Cherokees in the prelude to the Trail of Tears.

Read the whole thing.

Let’s imagine, if you will, a big knob or dial with a scale from 0 to 11.

This dial measures…

…well, anything, really.  For purposes of this article, let’s measure “Liberty” – the prevalence of and respect for the rights to think, speak, act, work and prosper freely.

Let’s say the numbers on the dial mean something like this:

0 – You’re in a North Korean concentration camp.

1 – You are in North Korea, but not in a concentration camp.

2 – You are in Cuba – unfree, and most likely dirt poor.   Your only “opportunity” is found in a bottle of some kind.  You are fed, more or less, and cared for, sorta.  Like a farm animal, really.

3 – You are in Red China – unfree, and a little less likely to be dirt poor.  Like an animal on a farm where the back forty is “free range”, if Farmer Brown Hu lets you live back there.

4 –  You are in Greece – Rioting and living on the dole? You’re “Free”.  Starting a business or excelling on your merits, absent lots of graft and what the Mexicans call mordida (maybe the Greeks call it “Mordidos?”  I dunno), and faced with paying taxes to pay for the problems caused by the earlier excessive taxes?  Not so free.  You are fed well enough, and cared for (or should be, if the government can figure out how to balance its budget) – like a house pet with a badly-organized owner who’s going to have to file for bankruptcy if he doesn’t square his act away, and who seems unlikely to do anything of the sort after the weekend’s household elections.

5 – You’re in the Netherlands or France.  You are “Free” from most wants, and have lots of “Free” time – but taxes and regulations make entrepreneurship exceptionally difficult, although it’s a more orderly form of difficulty than in Greece.    Food and care from the government are plentiful (provided that taxes and borrowing are in turn also plentiful, which is a big “provided” these days); you are like a pet in a well-organized and happy home, albeit one that has to keep renegotiating its credit cards.

6 – You are in a highly regulated United States or the UK – think “the worst of the seventies, on turbo”, run amok.  Entrepreneurship is marginally more free than in socialist Europe, and the social “safety net” is almost as smothering and the taxes almost as debilitating.

7 – You are in what Newt Gingrich might call Mitt Romney’s America – with lower taxes, but still more regulation that the United Freaking States of America, the land of people who risked all to come to the new world to risk all, could do without, and still too many taxes.  A place that is essentially a welfare state with some doors of opportunity left open for the lucky and incredibly motivated (or connected) few.

8 – You are in an America that Ronald Reagan worked toward – where we have the government we actually need, but not too much, and where feeding government comes in second to feeding and educating your family and financing your dream of success – a place where the rising tide lifts all boats, and where we don’t level out the peaks to fill in the valleys, but where we (as Churchill said) spread a net over the abyss.

9 – You’re in the America that Ron Paul’s party line says he works toward; where government is stripped down to the bare minimum, and people have the responsibility – and opportunity – to fend for themselves.

10 – The pure Big-L Libertarian Ideal.   Government guards the borders, enforces laws regarding order and property rights, and adjudicates contracts.  That’s it.  You are free to succeeed or fail precisely according to your merits and work.  And if you fail?  Social policy, especially the whole “Safety Net” thing, is in the realm of society – the individual and their own organic institutions (the church, Packers Nation, trade unions, the Elks, the NRA, the Oprah Book Club or whatever).

11 – One more than ten.

Where do you want to live?

That’s one way of looking at life, anyway.

———-

I was listening to Jason Lewis the other night – something I don’t get to do nearly enough.  And he looks at political life a little differently; “You’re either for freedom, or against it”.  Instead of a dial from 0 to 11, you have a light switch, or an LED; it’s on, or it’s off.

How accurate in measuring anything in life is a lightswitch?

Is your marriage either wonderful, fulfilling and perfect or utterly miserable, abusive and dysfunctional?

Is your job either your dream come to fruition or something that makes you want to stick a gun in your mouth every morning?

Are your children either endless joys that make you thankful to wake up every day or little deviants on whom you can’t find enough dimes to drop?

If your marriage, job and kids aren’t perfect, do you instantly file for divorce, quit, and look up a pack of travelling gypsies?

Of course not.  So – is all of American political life really a choice between either “North Korean Concentration Camp Inmate” or “One More Than Ten?”

Of course not.

You put up with your spouse’s imperfections and insanities (or, in about half of marriages, you don’t).  You tough out a job you may not like until something better comes up (or doesn’t).  You try to focus on and bring out the best in your children, and get them to the point where you can say “I did the best I could”, and others answer “We can tell”, and you both keep a straight face.

Everything in life has a “dial” that goes from zero to 11 – your marriage, your job, your kids…

…and political life isn’t any different.

There are two political battles going on today, if you are a conservative and a Republican.

The big one is against Barack Obama.  Obama’s America is at or below a “Six” right now, and – measured by executive branch action – heading south.  He’s putatively targeting a “five” – but his deficit spending, as any sane conservative knows, pretty much inevitably leads to “four”.  Which, then, can just as easily lead to overreaction on the part of government and those who’ve come to depend on it – the Democrat constituency – that leads to points south of four; see “The Weimar Republic”.

So if you’re sitting at a 5.5, and your options are “Five and dropping” or “Seven (at worst) with the potential to move up, if you keep engaged and don’t let up the pressure?”, what would you take?

Which leads us to the other – and first – battle we face; between those who answer that question “If I can’t get at least a nine, then I don’t care and I’m going to stay home”.

Now, during the caucus and endorsement process, I’m all for accepting no substitutes – for pulling like hell for whomever your ideal candidate is, and eschewing compromise like the plague.

But once the endorsement process is over, there’s another time for choosing.  And if you’re a conservative Republican, at any level, your choice is, ineluctibly, this:

You held out for your ideal.  Now it’s time to choose; the US is at a 6, maybe a 5.5, today. Another term of Obama and we’ll be a weak 5, maybe headed south.  The only realistic choice right now is – at worst – to increment the counter to a 6+.  Maybe a 7, maybe shooting for an 8 if we get a good Congress.  You will not get your 9 or 10 in this election – and if the needle slips further, and more Americans slide into dependence and choose that comfortable, entitled “Five” on the big dial of political life, it’ll become much, much harder to budge things upward again.

Do you let the dial slide?  Or do you push the dial up?

There is no other option.

What do you say?

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

A friend wants a .22 revolver to teach a kid to shoot. Double action are scarce. Single-action cowboy replicas are plentiful. Autos are everywhere.

For an absolute novice, which is the best trainer?

And who’s got one to sell?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Good question.

And an important one.  Since it is the moral duty of every law-abiding American to be proficient with firearms, training the next generation is vital.

So what do you all suggest?

Obama launches re-election bid in a half-empty arena:

During the speech, Obama ripped into the presumptive GOP nominee and discussed nation building at home, but the most newsworthy item of the day was not the talking points Obama delivered: it was the crowd… or lack thereof.  According to ABC News, the Obama campaign had expected an “overflow” of people.  Instead, the arena looked half-empty.

I listened to a little of the speech itself.  I’m biased, of course – I never really bought into the supposed brilliance of Obama as an orator, although he has certainly been a capable-enough speaker – but he sounded strained and shrill, like Paul Wellstone with a rounder tone.

 The Columbus Dispatch reports that Obama organizers even had people move from the seats to the floor of the gym in order to project a larger crowd on television.

Oh, my.  Not so good, for a “light worker”.

Might be even worse than that, though:

The official Barack Obama Tumblr boasts a figure from ThinkProgress that 14,000 attended the event–70% of the stadium’s seating capacity.

And we all know how lefties count crowds.  If they claim 14,000, it may well have been somewhere between 140 and 1,400.

It’s a campaign faux pas to hold an event in a room that isn’t full; to promise the media a more-than-capacity crowd then fall this far short of that promise is utter incompetence.  In 2008, Obama ran a near-flawless campaign, buoyed by enthusiasm and effective organizing.  But it’s not 2008 any more, and on day one of the 2012 campaign, Team Obama has already made an embarrassing blunder.

I’m hoping for change.

Hollande, looking sauced

France goes on a holiday from financial reality and makes Sarkozy pack.

The future of the European Union (and worldwide markets) may hinge on the following question: Is François Hollande a “fool or a knave”?

Hollande, seeking to become France’s first Socialist President since François Mitterrand, won a narrow victory Sunday over Nicolas Sarkozy – ending the Fifth Republic’s brief and troubled flirtation with mildly conservative economic policies.  Hollande’s election was not only a victory for a Socialist Party in political disrepair but for his former domestic partner and 2007 Socialist nominee (remember, it’s France) Ségolène Royal.  Whether his win proves to be a defeat for the economics of the EU will have to wait to be seen.  As the UK’s Telegraph details, (having asked the above question about Hollande’s political motivations), France faces extraordinary fiscal challenges:

Today, the top corporate tax is 34.4 percent (compared to 15.8 percent in Germany) and France has a €96 billion budget shortfall, which caused it to lose its high credit rating. The absurd 35 hour week largely remains in effect. Here’s the most damning statistic: government spending now accounts of 56 percent of France’s GDP. It’s only higher in five other countries in the world – including Iraq and Cuba.

Keep in mind, these figures were after 5 years of Sarkozy’s supposedly “draconian” policies and political rule by his center-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP).  Hollande, in theory, wants to undo the same policies through increased progressive taxation, including the creation of an additional 45% for income above 150,000 euros and capping tax loopholes at a maximum of €10,000 per year.

In an economic era defined by deficit spending and a general lack of funds, François Hollande seems intent to upend the Franco-German alliance that has sought to force austerity measures on the rest of the EU.  “Germany doesn’t decide for all of Europe,” Hollande intoned during the campaign.  Yet what is the alternative?  A nation drowning in debt can no more spend it’s way solvent than a fat person can eat themselves thin.

Marine Le Pen should be proud.  The leader of the supposed ultra-conservative (more social nationalist) National Front and daughter of the 2002 run-off presidential candidate announced her intention to leave her ballot blank – a signal to the 18% who voted for her to ensure Sarkozy’s defeat.

Sarkozy would hardly be recognized as “conservative” across the Pond.  Three of his ministers were leftists.  He pushed for legislation to fight global warming.  He worked to help Socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn become head of the IMF (when Straus-Kahn wasn’t trying to plow room service).  Far more damning, Sarkozy’s response to the 2008 economic meltdown was vintage Socialist – declaring that “laissez-faire capitalism is over” and decrying “the dictatorship of the market.”  Yet, he raised the retirement age, cut taxes and attempted, unsuccessfully in the end, to ween France off the entitlement teat.

How the markets react may be the most important question in the aftermath of Hollande’s victory.  Coupled with the showing of Alexis Tsipras in Greece – whose policies mirror Hollande in a desire to tax the rich and delay debt repayments – the concern over the fate of he EU will renew Monday morning.  Greece had agreed to impose pension and wage cuts in return for two international rescues worth 240 billion euros.  Either the policy continues or the payments stop.  An end to payments would suggest an economic amputation from the Euro Zone, with Greece either leaving or being forced to abandon the Euro.  A Greek departure could easily start a domino effect in the EU and send worldwide markets into a tailspin.

Hollande may be forced to continue may of the policies he publicly campaigned against.  Short of a desire to commit economic suicide, he has little leverage to do otherwise.

Broken and burnt, its nearly 14,000 inhabitants starving and weary of 6-months of near constant aerial and coastal bombardment, the final holdout of American and Filipino resistance to the Japanese invasion of Philippines succumb.  The island of Corregidor, affectionately known to American troops as “The Rock”, and triumphed as the “Gibraltar of the East,” had finally fallen on May 6th, 1942.

The last redoubt for the "Battling Bastards of Bataan." As their saying went, "no mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam."

What ended in an American defeat had been a Japanese embarrassment for months.  Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, commander of the 14th Imperial Army, had been tasked to deliver the Philippines (and the critical port of Manila Harbor) in a brisk two months.  Instead, Homma found himself dragged into a slow war of attrition against nearly 80,000 American and Filipino troops on the Bataan Peninsula and unable to use Manila Harbor as the gun batteries of Corregidor’s Fort Mills swept the surrounding bay.  For months, Japanese propaganda repeatedly claimed that Bataan and Corregidor were about to fall followed by weeks of silence.  Despite Japanese forces pushing aside Allied forces on all fronts, Bataan and Corregidor remained a strategic thorn in side of Japan’s military planners.  Without Manila Harbor, supplying troops invading the raw material rich areas like Malaysia and Indonesia would become even more difficult and could bring the Japanese advance to a halt.

Resistance may have inspired Americans back home and frustrated Tokyo, but the defense of Bataan and Corregidor had been badly botched.  Despite his accomplished military resume (including being Army Chief of Staff, Field Marshal of the Philippine Army & Commander of US Forces in the Far East), Gen. Douglas MacArthur refused to follow the army’s War Plan Orange 3 strategy of retreating into Bataan and holding up with enough supplies until reinforcements arrived.

Yes, the Japanese used flamethrower on American bunker positions too. Here we see Japanese troops fighting against American positions on the Orion-Bagac Line on Bataan

Instead, MacArthur wanted to meet the enemy on the beaches – a near strategic impossibility on an archipelago.  Coupled with a failure to defend the airbase on Clark Field on December 8th, resulting in the loss of American air support, supplies for the defense of the Philippines were scattered across the islands when the first Japanese troops came ashore.  Despite a numerical parity with the Japanese (nearly 80,000 versus 75,000 Imperial troops), the lack of even basic supplies on Bataan put American forces at a significant disadvantage.  By April 9th,  the Japanese had breached the Orion-Bagac Line, among the last lines of defense in the US strategy of Bataan, and Major General Edward P. King agreed to surrender the 75,000 US and Filipino troops who remained.  MacArthur and his superiors had seen the writing on the wall even earlier, transferring MacArthur to Corregidor in March and then Australia.  MacArthur declared “I shall return.”  10,000 Filipinos and 650 American POWs didn’t as they were shot, stabbed and starved in the Bataan Death March.

American and Filipino POWs from Bataan. 60,000 Filipino troops were among those who suffered on the infamous "Bataan Death March"

Bataan had fallen but Corregidor had not.  The tiny 3.5 miles long by 1.5 miles wide island posed a political dilemma both in Tokyo and Washington. The battle for control of Philippines was most assuredly over, but 14,000 soldiers and civilians continued to block Manila Bay – seemingly unreachable by both Japanese bombers and American reinforcements.  Protected by the vast underground bunker and tunnel system on Malinta Hill, armed with an independent water pump and vast (if shrinking) supplies, and stocked with numerous anti-aircraft guns and naval batteries, Corregidor was earning the “Gibraltar” description.

The Island's main defense. Corregidor had 45 gun batteries stationed over the island, but most were from WWI

The Japanese had already discovered that Corregidor would be a tough nut to crack.  Early in the invasion, on December 29th, 91 Japanese bombers, the whole of the local Japanese bomber air force, hit the island with nearly 50 tons of explosives.  The bombs did little; the American AA guns did more – shooting down 7 planes.  The attacks continued until Jan 6th, with Japanese planes dropping their payloads at higher and higher altitudes to escape AA fire.  Unwilling to suffer further losses, the air fleet was moved to Thailand and General Homma refocused his attention on Bataan.

Tunnel vision: the sight for most American soldiers on Corregidor during the siege

Corregidor wasn’t regularly targeted again until February as Japanese artillery was able to set up positions close enough to hit the island.  By then, life on the island had settled into a dreary routine. When the men were not building fortifications or going about their daily chores, they had little to do.  Rations had been cut in half at start of January and an island that was built to house only 6,000 was overwhelmed with civilians and political refugees, including Philippine President Quezon who gave his second inaugural address amid an air raid while sheltered in the Malinta tunnel system.

 

Mac's staff car. The general himself had long since left

The fall of Bataan brought the full weight of the Japanese Army back on Corregidor.  By now, troops were down to 30 ounces of food a day with drinking water rarely getting distributed.  And with the arrival of the 22nd Air Brigade, the Japanese air attack had returned with vigor.  An estimated 365 tons of bombs were dropped on Corregidor and in one day alone, May 4th, 1942, 16,000 shells hit as well.  Worse for those trapped on the island was the realization, post Bataan, that their only options were death or brutal imprisonment.  There would be no rescue operation, no American Fleet arriving to save the day.  The longer they held out, the greater they aided the overall war effort, but at the likely expense of Japanese retribution.

The last act on Corregidor began on May 5th as 790 Japanese soldiers invaded.  Pushed by strong currents between Bataan and the island, landing proved difficult, especially under American fire.  Quickly bogging down, the initial invasion fared better than the 785 reinforcements who landed in the wrong location opposite the 4th Marines.  Most of this invasion force was killed, with the survivors escaping along the island’s edge to join the main invasion force.  Together, they pushed forward and captured one of the main battery stations.  A desperate US counterattack with 500 Marines failed as another 800 Japanese troops arrived, along with several tanks.  With Japanese troops just yards away from the Malinta tunnel complex, housing civilians and 1,000 injured troops, Gen. Jonathan Wainwright radioed Washington with a simple message: “There is a limit of human endurance, and that point has long been passed.”   By 1:30pm on May 6th, the last of American and Filipino forces had surrendered.

The last American holdouts pose for Japanese propaganda

Survivors were marched in downtown Manila as trophies of war.  The “lucky” made it to Japan as slave laborers.  Gen. Wainwright eventually returned home a hero despite his concern that his status as the highest-ranking American POW would have made him a military and social pariah.  Wainwright would receive the Medal of Honor for his defense of Bataan and Corregidor.  The only voice of dissident?  Gen. MacArthur – despite having won a Medal of Honor for the same defense.

Wainwright and MacArthur’s opponent also had his reputation defined by Bataan and Corregidor.  General Masaharu Homma was relieved of command after his failure to quickly defeat the Americans and retired from military service.  Homma resurfaced after the war as accountable for the Bataan Death March and was found guilty.  On April 3rd, 1946, almost four years to the date of the surrender of Bataan, Homma was executed by a firing squad of Americans and Filipinos.

Jack Tomczak is from The Late Debate.

We also featured Dave Osmek, who is running for Senate nomination in SD33 against Connoe Doepke, and Cindy Pugh, who is running for the endorsement against Steve Smith in HD33B.

And here was my piece on the rumors in the 4th CD.

Adam Yauch – “MCA”, of the Beastie Boys” – dead of cancer at 47:

Mr. Yauch, who went by the moniker MCA, had been battling cancer since 2009, when a tumor was discovered in his salivary gland. He did not come to the Beastie Boys induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April and his treatments for the illness forced the group to delay the release of their last album “Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2.”

Emerging from the hard-core punk scene in New York in the late 1970s, the Beastie Boys were the first white group to successfully sing rap songs and have remained popular for more than a quarter century. Mr. Yauch co-founded the group with Mike Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) as a punk band in 1981 and first began experimenting with hip-hop the following year, when they released a 12-inch vinyl rap spoof “Cookie Puss.” All three were teenagers from affluent New York families when they met.

But in 1986, they crossed into the rap mainstream with “Licensed to Ill,” which was the first hip-hop album to hit No. 1 on the albums chart and featured hits like “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” and “Brass Monkey.” It was just the first of a string of hit records, like 1989’s “Paul’s Boutique,” 1992’s “Check Your Head” and 1994’s “Ill Communication.”

And the fun times from my twenties just keep on passing along.

I wrote about the Beasties at some length last year, in my “Real Eighties” series,in my “Things I’m Supposed to Hate But Don’t” series, and life with the Beasties in the clubs back in the day, when Paul’s Boutique was just about the best thing in the history of hip-hop.

Here’s one of my favorites:

No Sleep Til Brooklyn!

The left and media are crowing – quietly, if one can indeed crow quietly – about the “Drop” in the unemployment number, from 8.2 to 8.1% in April.

They are being a lot more subdued about the much more important number; only 63.6% of the labor force from age 16 to retirement is participating in the labor market.

So when you take 8.1% out of that number, it means only 58.45% of the American work force is actually working right now.

Here are some fun facts about the employment figures:

• The month Barack Obama took office,  60.58% of the people were working.
• In June of 2009, when the recession officially “ended”, the number was was 58.46% – marginally better than last month.
• In October of 2009, when unemployment peaked at 10%?  58.5%.
• George Bush’s numbers went between a low of 61% (as he left office) and a high of around 63.5% in December of ’06.
• Wanna chalk Bush’s numbers up to the mortgage bubble?  Not so fast: there are about 4.5% fewer people employed now than at this time ten years ago, as the economy was recuperating from the Dot Bomb

So many people have left the labor force, it’s literally gone off the top of the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s chart:

Looks like they need a new chart.

So what happens to an economy when less than 3/5 of the labor force is actually working for an extended period?

…to say “Osama Bin Laden believed CNN, CBS, NBC and MSNBC would be friendly to him” – but it’s hard to read this report  from the left leaning Guardian  as much of anything but:

Osama bin Laden pondered the merits of US television news channels as he considered how to extract the best propaganda benefit from the tenth anniversary of 9/11 last year, and concluded that CBS was “close to being unbiased”.

But an American-born media adviser for al-Qaeda warned Bin Laden to beware of the broadcasters’ “cunning methods” as he described Fox News as a channel in the “abyss” that should “die in anger”, CNN as too close to the US government and MSNBC as questionable after it fired one of its most prominent presenters, Keith Olbermann.

Al Quaeda heart Keith Olberman.

No, no, no – again, a cheap shot, saying “terrorists endorse everyone but Fox”.  That’d wrong, wouldn’t it?

And of special interest to bloggers:

But [Bin Laden] also wondered if it would be good to work with an American channel, suggesting CBS as “close to being unbiased”. Bin Laden added that the organisation should approach a British journalist, Robert Fisk of the Independent, and other reporters to press home the message that the major powers would be better concentrating on climate change than pursuing al-Qaida.

Why yes, that Robert Fisk.

It’s been popping up on leftyblogs and leftytweets for the past couple of days – the Minnesota GOP is “Anti-NFL”.

It’s odd that Democrats in Minnesota have picked National Football League to rally around, given their long history of union-busting, affiliations with organized crime, and – most germane, here in Minnesota – making a huge industry out of jacking up states and cities for taxpayer-funded subsidies to support the one-percentiest people of all, professional football owners and players.

The NFL have developed a routine; demand the public pay for stadiums (so they and their owners don’t have to).  When taxpayers and the lawmakers they elect balk, exploit “fan loyalty” (the greatest source of wasted energy in the universe) by threatening to move the team to some other city.  Play the local political parties against one another, like colonials playing tribes against each other, to browbeat the politicians into caving in.

Naturally, Mark Dayton and the DFL, driven by pure cynicism as they are, have taken the bait.  “The GOP will let the Vikings leave!”, they whine.  “They’re part of our cultural legacy!”

And it’s true.

They’re part of that rancid little corner of our “cultural legacy” that says “Give me something for nothing!  Take other peoples’ earnings to pay for my recreation!  My and my family’s obsession with a billionaire’s enterprise justifies taking money from you and your family, by force.  Skål Vikings, suckers!”

So yeah.  I’m anti-NFL. Zygi Wilf and Roger Goodell can, and should, pay for the stadium by themselves; he can dig it out of  his pocket, float a private bond paid for out of proceeds from Vikings enterprise revenue and tapping the vast amounts of private equity that’s been sitting on the sidelines for years.  Or offering stock in a Vikings Stadium enterprise, complete with shopping, parking rental and hospitality, that would be a license to print money.  Or from charging drifters for illicit services at bus stops, for all I care.

But if you care about what’s right, and moral, and ethical?  Everyone should be “Anti-NFL’.

The NFL’s racket has to stop.  Someone has to stand on principle.  If not us, now, then who and when?

Mitt Romney has been making great hay in recent weeks comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter.

In some ways, Carter had it much tougher than Obama did last year, and his big moment of command decision was a much bigger risk.

Mitt was referring to Obama’s (correct) decision to pull the trigger on the Bin Laden raid, of course.  On the one hand, it would have been a tough decision for any President – sending American troops into harm’s way deep inside a “neutral”, “friendly” country on the basis of intelligence tips.

But Obama had at his disposal a military with ten years’ experience fighting a hard war overseas – and at the point of that spear was a special forces community (including many units from all four services, including the SEALs) that has had a decade of very hard experience doing every kind of mission that can be imagined, and some that can’t be.  From tracking fugitives to winning tribal political fights to rescuing hostages, the US military, especially our various special operations forces, have done it all.  And they’ve all done it together – the Navy’s SEALs operate with the Army’s special ops helicopters and the Air Force’s special ops aircraft seamlessly, without the inter service rivalry that so paralyzed earlier US efforts.  And they flew from a base they knew well, in a part of the world in which they now have a total of a decade (maybe two) of experience, using equipment that’s been tried and refined in ten years of continuous conflict.

So while it was a tough decision, “are they capable of pulling it off?” was not one of the variables.

When Jimmy Carter pondered “Operation Eagle Claw” – an incredibly ambitious plan to rescue the American hostages in Iran – he had a few dodgier variables to deal with:

• The US military had just gone through a traumatic, un-earned defeat, and an equally-traumatic defunding in the wake of Vietnam.  The seventies were a terrible low-point in the US military; there were Army units in Germany rated combat-ineffective due to drugs and crime; equipment was old and unreliable.  Conservatives actually short Carter a bit on defense; a few of the reforms that came to fruition under Reagan first germinated under Carter.
• The military’s pre-Nunn/Nichols command structure was a breeding ground for political infighting and turf-guarding.  Over-officered and underutilized, the Pentagon’s inter-service rivalries made this year’s GOP primary battle look sane and rational.
• The various special forces – not really recognizable to anyone who follows the field today – were in disarray, treated with deep suspicion by regular military officers, who regarded them as unreliable, unpredictable cowboys after the uncoordinated way they’d been employed in Vietnam.   And they’d had no real success at rescuing hostages.  While the British Army’s SAS, the German federal police’s GSG9, the Dutch Marines’ BSE and Israel’s Sayaret Matkal had all carried out successful hostage rescues (in buildings, a hijacked plane in Somalia, a railroad train and an airport, respectively), the US military’s attempt at rescuing closely-held hostages, the utterly snake-bit Mayaguez raid in 1975, had been a thoroughly-botched disaster.
• “Delta”, the US Army’s new counterterrorism unit, was brand new and untried in this sort of action.  While its troops were all experienced and many had seen action in Vietnam, this was its first live raid.  And the other troops involved in the raid – the Navy and Marine choppers and Air Force planes that carried the unit into action, the Rangers that guarded the “Desert One” airbase from which the raid was launched – had never trained together.
• Helicopters in 1980 were ubiquitous – and still only thirty years old.  They were still famously unreliable – much worse than today. The SEALs rode into Pakistan in choppers that benefitted from the lessons learned the hard way in 1980, not to mention 1991.  Which helped the SEALs, but not Jimmy Carter or Delta on its first big mission.
• Iran was a much bigger country, more explicitly hostile to the US.
• Finally, after acknowledging all those variables – the mission itself was much more complex.  It involved flying from an improvised base in a friendly but neutral country (Oman) to an improvised base in the middle of the desert (Desert One), then to another hidden base in the desert (Desert Two), travelling from the base into the heart of Teheran via truck, seizing not only the embassy and the hostages but the stadium across the street to serve as an exfiltration point for the helicopters to land in, and then flying back to Desert One, and thence by plane back to Oman.  That’s a lot of moving parts.

So Jimmy Carter pulled the trigger on a raid with many, many more variables than the Bin Laden raid, all of them bad.

And it showed.  Eagle Claw was a resounding failure, one that took down whatever part of his presidency that the economic stagflation might have left standing.

So a rare bout of kudos to Jimmy Carter.  He held, and played, a much weaker hand than Barack Obama did.

This weekend’s gonna be a fun Northern Alliance Radio Network.

For starters, I’ll have Jack Tomczak and Ben Kruse from “The Late Debate” on the show to talk about…well, lots of stuff.  It’s been a busy month for Jack and Ben.  ’nuff said.

After that?  We’ll have Dave Osmek and Cindy Pugh.  They’re running for the GOP endorsement against (respectively) Connie Doepke and Steve Smith, out in the western subs.  If you want a more conservative MNGOP, this is where it starts – tossing the moderates, electing the conservatives!

Also, we’re a week and a half away, but I’ll be doing a special Mother’s Day broadcast, filling in for Brad Carlson on “The Closer”.  It’s gonna be a fun one!

So tune in Saturday on the Northern Alliance Radio Network.

As most of you know, I oppose the death penalty.

And even that’s not quite right – I favor it for every reason but one – the inevitability that an innocent person will, between human imperfection, the politics of the prosecution system, bad defense, the emotions of death-penalty cases and just plain bad luck, be executed.

(And I was right about that).

But I’m writing today to say I’m willing to make an exception. Someone busted out Willy’s American Guitars in Saint Paul.

That’s like plundering the Vatican; like jacking up Graceland.

There is no punishment cruel or unusual enough for these people, when they’re caught.

“Remember when we put that webcam in the office of that loafing professor, and posted the video of him tweeting for eight solid hours? Even during his bathroom break?”

Scarlett laughed, twirling her hair in her finger as I fed her a grape from the basket.  “What a dweeb.  He tore up that picture of the basket full of puppies I left on his desk!”.  She wrinkled her nose exaggerated-but-real distaste.

We were on a beach blanket by one of the ponds in Central Park, on a gorgeous day in 2005.  Kite flyers and jump-ropers and dog-walkers meandered around – but I don’t remember hearing or noticing them, or any of the other thrum of the big city.  It was just Scarlett and me.

“I do!.  How could I forget?”  I had to hurry before she put a strawberry in my mouth.

We lay there on the blanket for what seemed like hours, staring into each others’ eyes.

“You like me, don’t you?” she finally said.  “Even though our politics are completely the opposite?”

“Of course”, I answered.  “There are some things more important than politics.  I mean what if…”

She interrupted me with a long, warm counter-kiss.  We didn’t say much more before adjourning back to the hotel.

——–

She looked at me, her cheek reflecting a little of the moonlight coming through the window.  She pulled the covers up over her shoulders.  “That’s what I like about you”.

“Well, I mean…”

“No, not that, she chuckled as I finished off a now-lukewarm glass of room service champagne.  “No, I mean, you treat me so…nice.  Like a regular person!”

“Why would I not?” I responded, sitting up on one elbow.

“Well, I know I didn’t always think of conservatives as people”, she said, sounding mildly abashed.

“It’s OK.  We all grow”

She smiled, and wrapped her arms around me again.  “I like that…”

———-

AUTHOR’S NOTE:  “Scarlett” was a “Compression” of several different girlfriends, situations and scenarios, real and imagined.

I mean, everyone seems to be doing it these days.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Delta Airlines (which bought Northwest) is stationing older, smaller jets in Minneapolis so they can use their bigger, fancier jets elsewhere around the country.

The article quotes a guy from the Metropolitan Airports Commission, a frequent flier from West Publishing, and an Economics Professor at the U of M who discusses in-flight entertainment. All are appalled at the change.

The implication is the government ought to FORCE Delta to base nicer airplanes here, which is the typical solution for the Strib. But it’s frustrating that the entire article misses the obvious free-market solution. How stupid are these people?

And how stupid do they think WE are?

The answer to those last two questions is just too depressing.

Question:  What’s the best way for a Republican to get an op-ed printed in the Strib?

Answer: Throw a rhetorical urine-soaked balloon on the GOP.

I can’t say anything about Joe Repya that others haven’t said better; notwithstanding the fact that he’s spent the last three years telling anyone whose ear he could bend but mine that “every time Mitch Berg opens his mouth, someone leaves the GOP” after a falling-out with the editorial staff at True North (proving that he has me confused with someone with actual power), Repya’s a great living American who’s served in three wars and contributed immensely to his country and his political worldview.

Would any of that get him a plum spot on the op-ed page in the Strib?

Perhaps.  But he is reading out the GOP.  And that gets anyone kicked to the front of the queue:

For the Republican Party of Minnesota (MNGOP), 2011 may have ended with a thud, but 2012 is shaping up to be a very bad year indeed. Will the MNGOP survive the one-two-three punch it has taken since the beginning of the year? Some within the party leadership are unsure.

“Some…” people should form a fifth literary perspective; like First Person Omnisicent, only using unnamed-yet-omniscient Third Persons as the actual agents of the perspective.  ‘Some People”, listed without any other context, can support just about any stance imaginable.

Within the party leadership?  I’m sure “some” are feeling pretty pessimistic now.  “Some” are also feeling hopeful.  “Some” more still are no doubt just hoping to carry on.

And it’s irrelevant.  We’ll come back to that.

First, the party of fiscal responsibility found out that its trusted and twice-elected party chairman, Tony Sutton, resigned after over-spending nearly $2 million the party did not have.

We talked about this last week; the “Tu Quoque Ad Hominem”; “Oh, look!  You claim you stand for fiscal responsibility, but you’re behind on your rent!”.  It’s the shortest of all short-bus insults.  Leaving aside that institutions, like people, learn more from their mistakes than from their successes, it’s also a fact that no institution’s principles ever live up to the transgressions of its individual members.  As if Dave Thompson and King Banaian and Mary Franson’s work in the Legislature is undercut by bookkeeping problems in a body whose only connection with them is an endorsement from a district committee.

No matter.

We’ll come back to that.

The party, it appears, had no checks or balances on its leader. Since MNGOP is flat broke it has not been able to conduct a forensic audit to see if any inappropriate spending took place.

That news is in fact six months old. As watchdog (or as DFL lackey Jon Tevlin calls him, “watchdog”) Jeff Johnson’s put it, the forensic audit would have cost a ton of money, and led to the same results they have now.

On Dec. 31, 2011, the party faithful elected a new chairman, Pat Shortridge, hoping, it seems, that he could work some of his Enron lobbyist magic and bail the party out of its financial mess.

I’m wondering – what’s Repya’s point, here?  Shortridge lobbied for Enron.  Is he saying that any association with Enron, at any level, in any capacity, makes one dishonest?  Everyone?

That seems a little stretchy.

The party had been under Federal Election Commission (FEC) scrutiny since 2006, when Sutton was the party treasurer from 2005 to 2009. The FEC finally leveled a heavy fine of $170,000 for the period of 2006-2008. The party now faces even more FEC review and possible fines.

Now, for whatever reason, Repya likes to tie me to the former management at the GOP.  It’s a bit of an overreach; in 2008-2009, the highest office I’d ever held in the GOP was precinct convener.  I didn’t know a whole lot about the inner workings of the Minnesota GOP.  I didn’t even know where the office (three miles from my house) was, to be honest.  I did know that I’d gotten to know Michael Brodkorb as a blogger, and got him on the air as a NARN co-host, and counted him as a friend, at least in a vocational sense.  And I don’t cave on my friend.  I’ve never run a business that employed more people than me, I do well to keep my own budget in line (thank God for Quicken and YNAB); I was almost as unsophisticated at how politics is done (and still am).  So I wasn’t especially equipped to criticize Sutton’s management as Treasurer, or Chair.

Truth be told, I’ve never wanted to care much about the inner workings of the MNGOP.  All I really care about is getting conservatives elected to office and affecting policy.   Parties are the vehicle to doing that – hence, I try to get and stay involved – but energy spent fighting inside the party is energy not available to destroy the DFL at the polls.

I’ve taken some flak for that.

And just this week, the landlord of the party’s St. Paul headquarters filed court papers to have the GOP evicted for failure to pay rent.

Which is true.

Or was.  It’s old news now.  The new management at the MNGOP is doing what hundreds of thousands of other people have had to do when circumstances or their own irresponsibility have left them behind on their bills; worked out a deal.

As if all this were not bad enough, with a second punch the party of personal responsibility and family values was rocked by a sex scandal involving former party deputy chairman Michael Brodkorb and his state Senate employer, then-Majority Leader Amy Koch.

Repya seems to be borrowing his lines from Two Putt Tommy.

Are the party’s principles diminished because there are some who don’t live up to them?

It was a sordid little episode (not least due to the media’s 24/7 attention – which they’d never have paid to Democrats in similar, or worse, positions (I’m talking about you, Barney Frank, John Edwards, Tony Weiner and Bill Clinton. Move on!  Just mooooooooooove on!

Yet it’s the third punch that has many within the strong national defense party wondering if there is any chance for MNGOP to survive the upcoming election in November. In a stealthy, below-the-radar maneuver, most of MNGOP has been taken over by the Ron Paul movement…When asked whether they would support Mitt Romney if he wins the nomination, many Paul supporters said no, unless he selects U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ron Paul’s son, as his vice presidential running mate.

It’s true. And lots of Gingrich and Santorum supporters said the same thing.  And it remains to the rest of us to convince them, if we can, since the Paul crowd is all full of whiz and vinegar and doing their end-zone happy dance these days.

But they did, in fact, out-organize “the rest of us” – including an awful lot of us who agree with 80% of what they say, albeit not about Ron Paul – just like we said they’d have to do when they were bellyaching about not being carried to the podium on the establishment’s shoulders in 2008.  They learned something.

That more than anything has the establishment MNGOP in a dither. Rightly or wrongly, they see many of the young, undisciplined and politically naïve Ron Paul movement members as anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-national defense and pro-legalization of drugs.

Just as Repya (and the Democrat pundits, and not a few others) mix up the party’s larger principles with the actions of its agents and administrators, they also confuse the party’s operations with the party’s messages.  The MNGOP – the people who work in the office at 525 Park, until they can find someplace cheaper, anyway – don’t really do policy.  That’s the job of the candidates.  Oh, in theory the party is supposed to make sure its candidates can follow its platform – but that document is as large as the Talmud, and contradicts itself in so many ways that few have even read it (and I’m going to be pushing this next two years to adopt the ten-point statement of principles from a few years back).

Which is a niggling little point that addresses a larger issue; I don’t suspect that the Paul crowd’s policy initiatives are the issue (barring the odd anti-semitic whacko that might slip through – and we know there are a few of them) that’d tar the party’s image and electability.  No, it’s the idea that that the entire leadership at the GOP could get tossed hither and yon and everyone would have to start over with the rebuilding process.

Repya:

If, as in 2008, Ron Paul fails to endorse the party’s nominee and his minions go home, the national GOP will be hard pressed to beat President Obama.

Well, there’s the good news.  Paul is probably not going to do that.  He’s retiring – but he wants to leave his movement to his son, Rand.  And Rand is working within the party, and is working to bring his dad’s views into the mainstream, an effort many of us appreciate.  Paul’s not going to mess that up; he’s most likely going to be a team player, this year.

Fingers crossed, naturally.

I don’t have a crystal ball to see how all this will end.

Nor, it seems, does he have any news to offer that dozens of other bloggers haven’t been pounding on for months and months.

But that’s not why the Strib printed this op ed.

But from where I’m sitting it does not look good for MNGOP, which won the state House and Senate in 2010 and whose lawmakers are all up for re-election.

And whose legislative caucuses – who actually won the 2010 elections (the MNGOP’s slate got swept), and which is feeling fairly confident outstate – have nothing to do (Koch notwithstanding) with any of the MNGOP’s flailing.

The DFL smells blood in the water and sees an opportunity to regain both legislative chambers. We are very possibly witnessing the death of MNGOP as we know it. If so, it will have died from within, not from outside causes.

And on one level – so what?  The MNGOP runs conventions, prints stuff, raises funds and occasionally does some messaging.  It’s only really heavily involved elections for governor, Senate and the constitutional offices, and only Senate is up this year, and I don’t think any of the Senate campaigns has ever counted on much help from the MNGOP.   The MNGOP has to rebuild.  It’s a fact.  They’ve got two years to do it (Senate race aside).  They’re working on it.

And on another level?  Who cares, even more.  The principles by which Republicans try to run and win elections – limited government, lower taxes, national and local security, upholding the family, individual liberty – live on no matter what happens to the party, and even no matter how those principles might get betrayed by its managers or legislators.  There should be accountability – and there has been.

Most of us know that.

And I’m going to guess that the Strib would never carry an op-ed saying anything of the sort.

Is the MNGOP in a sorry state?  Of course it is!  While I believe the new management is well on the way to bringing the GOP back to the right path, the party is on a fiscal diet that conservatism in Minnesota doesn’t need, facing the fiscal wealth of the unions and Alita Messinger, and with the Strib working as an unpaid PR flak for the DFL.  It’s a bad situation.

Let’s not pretend that any of this is news, though.  The only thing that’s newsworthy is that a Republican is telling it to the Strib.

They loooove that.

UPDATE: Although, mirabile dictu, they carried a letter to the editor that did!

Did you know that John Kerry served in Vietnam Barack Obama ordered the attack on Bin Laden?

It’s true!  He did!

It’s entirely possible that the “Would Romney Have Done It?” ad will be forgotten in a few months, long before the election.

But not if I can help it:

Brandon Webb, a former SEAL who spent 13 years on active duty and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said: ‘Bush should get partial credit for putting the system in place.

‘Obama inherited a very robust package with regards to special ops and the intelligence community. But Obama deserves credit because he got bin Laden – you can’t take that away from him.

I mean, give credit where it’s due…

‘My friends that work in Special Operations Command (SOCOM) that have been on video teleconferences with Obama on these kill or capture situations say that Obama has no issue whatsoever with making decisions and typically it’s kill. He’s hitting the kill button every time. I have a lot of respect for him for that.’

…with the operative phrase being “where it’s due”.

But he said that many SEALs were dismayed about the amount of publicity the Obama administration had generated about SEAL Team Six, the very existence of which is highly classified.

‘The majority of the SEALs I know are really proud of the operation but it does become “OK, enough is enough – we’re ready to get back to work and step out of the limelight.” They don’t want to be continuously paraded around a global audience like a show dog.

Or a campaign pamphlet.

$77 per ticket per game.

That’s what the taxpayers will be paying to subsidize the Vikings stadium if the legislature caves in on the deal.

I’m getting those figures from that teabagging wingnut John Marty:

If the bill for the Minnesota Vikings new stadium passes the cost to taxpayers will be $77.30 per ticket, per game, for 30 years, according to an analysis by state senator John Marty, who submitted his findings to his colleagues yesterday (see his full report below). If the taxpayers of Minnesota think $77.30 is too much, Marty has even worse news: the real cost is much greater because his calculation does not include the value of the property tax exemption on the stadium and the parking ramps, nor the value of the sales tax exemption on construction materials.

Never thought I’d post a letter from John Marty that I agreed with – but here you go.

Letter 2.From.sen.Marty

In the meantime, Governor Dayton is holding a lot of key reform proposals – tax reform, LIFO – hostage behind a crowd of chanting purple-clad bobos who’d light their charcoal with the Bill of Rights to get the taxpayers to pay for their recreation.

And pay.

And pay.

If we don’t stop the NFL’s ongoing plunder of state and city taxpayers, who will?

Because if we pay for it now, they’ll be back in 31 years looking for another one, just about the time we finish paying $77 a freaking seat for the one we don’t have yet.