Two years ago, this blog led the Twin Cities media in documenting the extent to which liberal plutocrats and government employee unions were buying the gubernatorial race.

Because remember – money in politics is baaaad, unless it’s from a liberal plutocrat…

…like Alita Messinger, billionaire and scion of the Rockefeller fortune and, need we mention, ex-wife and chief bankroller of Mark Dayton.  She is the prime financier of a network of little-publicized groups – “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”, “Common Cause Minnesota” – that funnel vast sums of money into epic, toxic sleaze campaigns against Republican candidates.

And Alita Messinger is back with a vengeance.  While her epic sleaze campaign against Tom Emmer was able to eke out a win for her ex in 2010,. the uppity peasants went and elected a Tea Party legislature.

And uppity peasants are one thing up with which she will not put:

Philanthropist  [!!!!!!!!] Alida Messinger, the ex-wife of Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton, is putting big money into overturning Republican control of the Minnesota Legislature.

Fundraising reports released Tuesday showed that Messinger gave $500,000 to the WIN Minnesota political fund. That group funneled money to the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, a Democratic-supporting independent expenditure group expected to sink significant amounts into key legislative races.

Among others, they are pouring money into trying to unseat Doug Wardlow in Eagan and Dave Hancock in Bemidji.

Dayton is asking voters to give Democrats control of the Legislature for the second half of his term.

This story is Berg’s Seventh Law in action; months of caterwauling about the Koch Brothers and “ALEC” have been done, entirely and without exception, to either distract attention from Messinger and her fellow plutocrats’ flow of money, or at least to let them say “Yeah, but you do it too!”:

Messinger’s donations dwarfed all others to independent groups so far this year. Three Republican-oriented funds combined had $380,000 on hand.

In 2010, Messinger was a major donor to funds that ran ads attacking Republican Tom Emmer in the governor’s race, which Dayton won by less than 1 percentage point.

On the one hand, this election is the national debate writ small:  Dayton, like Obama, depends almost entirely on big donors – Obama on Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Dayton on the Hamptons and the government unions – to cling to relevance.

On the other?  The Democrats know they can count on at least 43% of the voters to be ill-informed enough to fall for their propaganda machine’s slop.

The GOP’s freshman class in the legislature brought a lot of good, hard-nosed, idealistic conservatives into office – Wardlow and Hancock and Roger Chamberlain and Mary Franson and King Banaian and many others included, many of whom are on Messinger’s hit list.  They’re counting on the disarray in the state party to help them.

The GOP – especially its freshmen, who largely kept their promises – need your support more than ever.  If there were ever a time for Minnesota’s conservatives – a true Army of Davids – to pull off an upset against the DFL’s League of Plutocrats, this is the time.

Because the GOP Freshmen are all that stand between us and Minnesota becoming a cold Greece.

Jim Treacher notes what many conservative observers have long known; that thing the leftymedia and lefty “alt” media refer to as “fact-checking” is really no more than Democrat narrative-buffing.

“Politifact”, it seems, is less interested in “facts” than in “upholding the Democrat side of the story“.

Matthew Hoy writes:

 

In 2009, Judicial Watch made a big splash when they revealed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been using military aircraft to travel to and from her home district in California to the tune of millions of taxpayer dollars.

The spendthrift nature of the Democrat-controlled Congress was a key election issue in 2010 and Speaker Pelosi’s extravagance was Exhibit A. In response, Rep. John Boehner promised that if the GOP took control of the House and he was elected speaker, he would fly commercial to and from his district. After Republicans won, he reiterated his pledge.

Which brings us to March 23, 2012 and this update at self-appointed watchdog Politifact. Reporter Molly Moorhead referenced documents from the House and the Congressional Research Service and came up with absolutely no evidence that Boehner has been asking for or receiving military transport to and/or from his district.

Going by the old theory that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, Moorhead and her bosses at Politifact, decided that this merited an “In The Works” label…

“In The Works.” You’d think it would be either “True” or “False,” but that’s just because you don’t know any better.

Treacher’s conclusion:

I like PolitiFact’s style: “We can’t prove you’re lying, Speaker Boehner. In fact, there’s absolutely no proof of our suspicion whatsoever. Nice try!”

Moral of the story:  Any time a Media or Democrat (ptr) figure calls themselves a “fact checker”, assume they’re a narrative-buffer until proven otherwise.

Make no mistake about it – Barack Obama’s been a disastrous president.  The only parts of his administration that have worked – the hunt for Bin Laden – he inherited primarily from George W. Bush.  His foreign policy has made the US an epic laughingstock.  And his domestic policy has nobody laughing.  His claim last week that the private sector is “doing fine” is emblematic of his Antoinette-y disconnect from real life in this country.

But he’s had one epic domestic policy success – one great shining success story that has made life better in this country, that has created good private-sector manufacturing and entrepreneurial jobs, and that has required no federal stimulus money whatsoever.  Far from it, in fact.

Barack Obama has spurred an epic boom in the American firearms industry, as Real Americans – genuinely and rightfully fearful that an administration that spent millions and sacrificed a federal agent in an attempt to smear the law-abiding gun owner – stock up on firearms against an unfettered second Obama term.

The fact that this boom in gun ownership coincides with a sharp drop in violent crime…

Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that violent crime decreased 4 percent in 2011. The number of murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults all went down, continuing a pattern.

…may just be coincidental – correlation doesn’t equal causation.  But we know better than that.

“This is not a one-year anomaly, but a steady decline in the FBI’s violent-crime rates,” said Andrew Arulanandam, spokesman for the National Rifle Association. “It would be disingenuous for anyone to not credit increased self-defense laws to account for this decline.”

Mr. Arulanandam pointed out that only a handful of states had concealed-carry programs 25 years ago, when the violent-crime rate peaked. Today, 41 states either allow carrying without a permit or have “shall issue” laws that make it easy for just about any noncriminal to get a permit. Illinois and Washington, D.C., are the only places that refuse to recognize the right to bear arms. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence did not respond to requests for comment.

They never do.

If the gun grabbers were right, we’d be in the middle of a crime wave, considering how many guns are on the streets. “Firearms sales have increased substantially since right after the 2008 election,” said Bill Brassard, spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), which represents the $4 billion firearms and ammunition industry. “There was a leveling off in 2010, but now we’re seeing a surge again.”

And as more Real Americans of all races, genders and orientations strap up – there were 16.5 million checks of the NICS database last year – not only has crime dropped, but the firearms industry has become one private enterprise that is, er, “doing fine”:

Sturm, Ruger & Co. sold 1 million firearms in the first quarter of 2012 – an amazing 50 percent increase from the first quarter of 2011. The jump was so steep that the company stopped accepting orders from March to May to catch up with demand for its products.

Last month, Smith & Wesson announced a firearm-order backlog of approximately $439 million by the end of April, up 135 percent from the same quarter in 2011. Sales in that period were up 28 percent from 2011 and 14 percent over its own predictions to investors. NSSF estimates the industry is responsible for approximately 180,000 jobs and has an annual impact on the U.S. economy of $28 billion.

So kudos to you, President Obama!  At least your policies are having one positive benefit.

And only one.

It was four years ago this summer that we first started trying to take stock of the City of St. Paul’s new “vacant building” policy.

Under this policy – passed in the spring of 2008 by the St. Paul City Council, with little fanfare – vacant homes that have been classified as Category II (needs work) or Category III (teardowns) need to be brought up to current building codes to get their certificate of occupancy restored.  Which, with a house built in 1920, is going to be $100,000-200,000 worth of work.  In Saint Paul, that’s on top of a house that probably got foreclosed with a bubbled-up $200,000+ mortgage which, in a distressed neighborhood like the East Side, the North End or Frogtown, is on a property that sits on a block with several other foreclosures, in a neighborhood with many more, and might go for $50,000 today.

So sales prices have plummeted – median home prices in Saint Paul crashed by nearly half from 2007 to 2011.

And as those prices plummet, the odds of getting a refinance dwindle away to nothing, increasing the likelihood of more foreclosures.

You were warned.

It’s starting to have an effect that the local leftymedia is starting to notice, even if they misattribute its caues.  The Daily Planet, a non-profit left-leaning news site, has a report from the East Side:

Active in her church, outdoors often with her home daycare, and prone to taking long walks, Carol Overland is one of those ladies who everybody in the neighborhood knows, or at least recognizes. She’s lived on St. Paul’s East side for 35 years.

In the last three years, she’s noticed something new. “They put up a blue sign or a white sign and it’ll say ‘Notice of Foreclosure,’” she said.

“There’s one house right up here,” she said, pointing. “There’s a house down here. There’s a house on Cottage. There’s two houses going down towards Ivy.”

It’s a piker, of course; one could find blocks around Payne and Maryland where half the houses were vacant, at one point.

A recent report by the interfaith non-profit ISAIAH titled “Lost Homes: How the foreclosure crisis has hit the East Side and North End of St. Paul,” describes the crisis. Members of the organization are pressuring city officials to implement solutions laid out in the report.

We’ll look at the “solutions” in the report tomorrow.

“There’s this silent, selective tornado that’s just touching down and—Bam. Bam. Bam,” said Jonathan Zielske, pastor at Hope Lutheran Church, near Overland’s home. “If it were a real tornado or a real flood, city officials would all rush and try to do something.”

A real tornado or flood is not controllable by humans.

This disaster, on the other hand? It’s got the fingerprints of the Saint Paul City Council, just as surely as those of Bank of America, all over it.

The coalition is pushing hardest for a foreclosure mediation program that would encourage bank representatives and foreclosure candidates to sit down with a third-party mediator and come up with a solution that works for everyone. They argue that mediation could prevent foreclosure for some homeowners and offer a graceful exit for others.

The solution would address charges that banks have pushed homeowners out only to resell homes at prices the original owners could have afforded.

In other words, the banks are “charged” with lending home-owners one amount – say, $200,000 – and then not writing that down to $110,000.

Who’d have thunk it?

More tomorrow.

Just keep repeating to yourself, Democrats: “Single-payer is the only option!  Single-payer is the only option’!  Single-payer is the only option“.

The primary Democrat message this year seems to be to try to make every possible Democrat constituency feel like the most noble-possible victim.

We’ve got the “war on women”, “war on immigrants”, “war on over-charged college students”…

…and now, the “war” on those most-benighted victims in our society, teachers, according to this bit by Jeff Kolnick of the university formerly known as Mankato State U of M Marshall.

He tees it up with the story of his friend, a teacher, who is busy…

…surviv[ing] furlough days that cut short his pay as well as the education of his students to save money in tax-starved California.

There’s your first tip-off that our writer is approaching this first and foremost from the left; California is hardly tax-starved.  Cali is indeed a bounty of taxation – it’s why business is leaving the state as fast as it can move.

No. California isn’t tax-starved.  It’s spending-addled.

And after all this service to his community, instead of receiving praise and thanks he has a target on his back. Conservative forces in America have made public school teachers public enemy No. 1: If our schools are failing, blame the teachers. If our states are broke, it is the pensions of the greedy teachers. You name the problem and teachers are the cause.

Well, no.

Teachers, as individuals, aren’t the problem.

It’s the way they, their academy, and especially their public employees’  union and the government that, in California, that union pretty much controls have committed the state to pay for teachers and their (very very early) retirement first, and worry about balanced budgets second if at all, that are.

But Mr. Kolnick doesn’t seem to be interested in economics:

I am sick of it…

…conservative forces blame public school teachers for everything. A colleague of mine related a story to me about a person who blamed public school teachers for failing our students. The person complained that Minneapolis and St. Paul schools failed young people of color and he put the blame squarely on teachers and teacher-preparation programs.

Mr. Kolnick is listed as a history professor at the school formerly known as Marshall.  I bring that up because I’m trying to imagine what would happen if one of his students brought him a paper that started “A friend of mine says that The Jews were behind 9/11.  This paper will demand accountability from The Jews”.  I’m going to guess Kolnick’d send it back for a rewrite – right?

“Conservatives hate teachers because someone that my teacher friend placed as a conservative had an irrational complaint?”

Fed up with this garbage, my friend responded that his kids got a first-rate education in the Edina public schools with teachers who had union contracts and graduated from the same teacher-prep programs as the teachers in the Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts.

Let’s stop blaming the teachers and think about public education in terms of the evidence.

Yes, let’s indeed.

Because identical licensing notwithstanding, Minneapolis and Saint Paul graduate less than 3/5 of their students, and a minority of black, Latino and Native American students.  Afro-American, Hispanic and Asian families – who may be personally conservative, but currently vote overwhelmingly DFL – are deserting the city schools, decamping for charter schools and, via open enrollment, the suburbs.

And these are districts that are at the front of the pack for per-student funding, year in, year out.

And I’d suggest that if Mr. Kolnick wants to wave the various teachers’ paper credentials and bureaucratic certifications in those parents’ faces, he not do it while standing on 50th Street or Afton Road, in front of those parent’s cars, as they head to Edina and Woodbury.

But Mr. Kolnick said we needed to make this argument about “evidence”.   What’s his?

The attack on teachers is not about educating our young people. It is about ending public education and collective bargaining. It is about taking public dollars from public institutions and turning them over to for-profit corporations.

So Mr. Kolnick’s “evidence” is a paragraph of Democrat cant about unions.

There is no “attack on teachers”, there is a reasonable questioning whether our society can survive by forcing most of us to work until we’re 75 so that teachers – to say nothing of principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, special ed coordinators, and the other throngs of public employees that work in the system but never set foot in front of a classroom –  can retire at 55.

And since Mr. Kolnick asks; since when is collective bargaining “about education?”  For that matter, can you honestly say that the current public education system – not teachers, individually or as a group, but the institution, the entire educational/industrial complex – is “about education?”

In 1995, free-market evangelist Milton Friedman wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post calling for the privatization of the public school system. Now almost 20 years later, we are on the verge of seeing his ideas become a reality…In December 2005, a little less than a year before he died, Friedman wrote of an opportunity to privatize public schools in New Orleans after the tragedy of Katrina. He called for a radical reform of schools because they failed the students. “New Orleans schools were failing for the same reason that schools are failing in other large cities, because the schools are owned and operated by the government”.

OK.

So?

How is this, in and of itself, either wrong or, for that matter, an “attack on teachers?”

The sole purpose of public educational institutions is to educate. They may not be perfect, but they have only one goal.

And that’s at best a platitude, at worst a statement of complete ignorance.  Public schools have always had ulterior motives; “creating better citizens” (free of all those radical immigrant ideas) in the 1800s, or creating a society that reflects the goals of the educational academy today (diversity, multiculturalism)…

…and, above all, to serve as a big interest group and voting bloc, to gain and hold control of the government apparatus that feeds it.

Which is not a knock on teachers as individuals; lest Mr. Kolnick dive further into stereotype, my father, two grandparents and my sister are teachers.

But teachers as an institution demand that I work until I’m 75 so that they can retire at 55 – and vote relentlessly liberal to enforce it – and on the other hand work for a system that, for many of is, is an abject failure, whatever the individual teachers’ personal professional merits.

Do we really want to let corporations be responsible for teaching our young people? Come on, let’s get real.

“Come on, let’s get real”.

It’s always a treat to debate a classical Socratic logician.

Let me ask this:  if we presume a teacher is in fact capable, what difference does it make who pays them – a corporation, or a government body?

And if you can honestly answer that question in terms that aren’t foremost about defending the defined benefit pension, you’ll be doing better than Mr. Kolnick, so far.

Jeff Kolnick is an associate professor of history at Southwest Minnesota State University.

Submitted without comment.

“The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.” – Abraham Lincoln.

As a matter of full disclosure, I’m a worker-bee volunteer at the Tony Hernandez for Congress campaign.

When I mention this to people in my relentlessly-DFL neighborhood – and among some of my stalkers on Twitter – I get some fairly predictable responses:

• “Wow.  Sounds like a difficult race“.  Stipulated!
• “You are teh looser! Bettty MacGolum will win teh race, and you shoud not even try two stop her!” More below.
• “Why?”

The “why” is easy; to win.  To send the first Republican to Congress since the 1940s from CD4.  Not to “move the needle”, or to make the DFL spend money to keep Betty in office, although both will be byproducts of a campaign to win the Fourth CD.  But this isn’t about half-measures and consolation prizes; it’s about winning.

Of course it’s a difficult race.  In 2010 – as good a year for the GOP as we’ve seen in recent years – Betty McCollum trounced Teresa Collett by 2:1 which, ironically, is the same margin of IQ that Teresa had and has over the Congresswoman.  Name every candidate in recent memory in the Filthy Fourth – Ed Matthews in 2008., Obi Sium in 2006, Patrice Battaglia in ’04, Linda Runbeck in ’00.  Every one of them would have made a better Congressperson than Betty McCollum who, near as we can tell, serves no purpose other than pom-pom girl for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

(No, seriously – read and listen to her.  She talks like a junior high kid trying to get through a civics class presentation.  Look at her website sometime; she seems inordinately proud of having rid America of the scourge of National Guard ads at NASCAR events – which seems to be her signal accomplishment.  Or something).

Nobody doubts that this is going to be a very, very tough race.  Just as the CD8 race in 2010 and the CD6 bout in 2008 were very, very tough races.  Nobody doubts that the DFL considers CD4 “their” turf.  And for the next ten years – until the next round of redistricting, with ten more years of DFL mismanagement driving more and more people out of Saint Paul and its’ more DFL-addled inner ‘burbs – it may well stay that way.  That’s life.

But CD4 isn’t the same district it was in 2010.

The way I see it, there are five paths to victory for Tony Hernandez.  And he is going to need to take all five of them for this to be a victory, or even an especially close race.

It’s Not Your Grampa’s Fourth CD – Redistricting didn’t do Betty any favors this time.  Where the old Fourth was as solidly DFL as could have been designed – Saint Paul and a bunch of DFL-addled inner ‘burbs – the New Fourth includes the entire swath east of Saint Paul all the way to the Saint Croix River, including Woodbury, Lake Elmo, Stillwater, and a slew of other suburbs full of people who, in many cases, fled the blight that the DFL brought to places like Saint Paul., Roseville and Maplewood.  They’ve spent years working hard, building communities run in many cases by good, solid, thrifty, competent conservative GOP city and county governments – working far to hard to see it all dumped in the sewer of incompetent, spendthrift, venal DFL perfidy that seems to have chased them down.  This is especially true of the wave of minorities who’ve moved to places like Woodbury, seeking decent schools and streets safe from that most noxious DFL constituency, petty criminals.

This is especially vital for Asian-American voters – those who moved up and out of Saint Paul to Woodbury because they were tired of a school system that marginalized their young men, and the ones who still live there and whose businesses along University have been sacrificed by the New Mandarins of the Met Council.

And for Latino voters, who came to America to find the kind of opportunity that McCollum seems to think awaits them only by dint of Government favor.

There’s also the little matter of all those Stillwater people sitting in endless traffic jams all summer because of the years McCollum spent opposing a new Stillwater bridge (before shamelessly flip-flopping).

It’s possible they may vote DFL.  We’re going to try to fix that.

Betty Is Long Past Her Shelf Date – McCollum has been in Congress for what?  Ten years?  And the interesting thing is this – election in, election out, her numbers just keep dropping.  Wave year or slow year, fewer and fewer people turn out to vote for her.  Oh, the unions keep funding her, and lavishly so, but when it comes to actual voters, even in landslide Democrat years, people just don’t care about her that much.

And they don’t have to – in a “safe” district where the DFL can traditionally run a set of wind-up chattering teeth and count on 55% of the vote.

But the Fourth isn’t like that any more.  It used to be a 70-30 district, maybe 65-35 in a bad year.  Now it’s probably more like 60-40.  Which is still a tough race – but it’s also about where the 8th CD was two years ago.  And we know how that turned out.

No Coattails:  The DFL can usually count of 40-odd percent of Minnesotans voting for whatever piece of crap the Democrats endorse for President, Govenror or Senate.  It’s a fact of life.

But Americans are much worse off than they were four years ago.  And to the extent Minnesotans are better-off, it’s because of GOP policies held to by Tim Pawlenty against the DFL’s best efforts, and by a GOP majority against Mark Dayton’s obstruction.

Now, the DFL’s paid PR arms – Common Cause and Alliance for a Better Minnesota – will be doing their best to try and obscure and confuse that fact.  It may even work – the 2010 gubernatorial election showed that 43% of Minnesotans are ill-informed, incurious, or just gullible – but they’ve got their work cut out for them, because in this election, Barack Obama is going to have all the coat-tails of a Daisy Duke tube top.

It’s Not Your Grandfather’s GOP:  While the Fourth CD GOP seems to be planning to be irrelevant in the coming election, it’s a different GOP than in previous years.  The Ron Paul surge brought a flood of new, passionate voters, activists and candidates to the fore.  In the past, I’ve challenged them to make sure they express some of that passion down-ticket from Ron Paul and Kurt Bills – and to a gratifying extent, many of them are.  There are more young Republicans running credible campaigns this year than in any year I can remember; unlike previous years when half the GOP legislative candidates were “warm bodies on the ballot” that didn’t fund-raise or door-knock, every single Republican race in CD4 this year is a real effort.

And that’s not all.  Four years ago, when it came to outreach among New Americans and minorities, the GOP had nowhere to go but up; it couldn’t have gotten any worse.  But over the past two years, conservatives – especially Dan Severson and his crew – have been actually doing the long-neglected work of building relationship among all those New Americans.  Will it make a difference in this election?  Perhaps – and the effort is as much about 2020 as about 2012.

So will the combination of newbie fervor, outreach and Obama and Dayton’s underwhelming record make a difference?

We’ll see.

Just Plain Passion:  Tony’s running a hard, aggressive race.  He’s got some good people working on his campaign – one of the fruits of the previous 4th CD GOP “establishment’s” effort to find and train campaign-management talent.  The campaign has nothing to lose, everything to gain, and is doing something the GOP in the 4th has tried before – taking the battle to the enemy – but hasn’t had the resources to pull off.

Will those five paths lead Tony to the Capitol?  Well, if I, a simple volunteer, have anything to say about it, absolutely.

Will it be a brutally tough race?  Absolutely.  But I’ll send you back to the Lincoln quote at the top.

And of course, these races don’t happen without help.  Tony’s campaign needs volunteers – and unlike some previous campaigns in the district, if you volunteer, you will be put to work!

And of course, money.  Betty McCollum can count on her masters, the government unions, to prop her up with close to a million dollars this cycle (because “Money in politics is evil”, as long as it’s not Democrat money).  If Tony’s gonna win – or qualify for any of the big national donors – he’s gotta earn money here at home.  If you can pony up a few bucks, please do.

Jesse Ventura was nothing but a fraternity prank run amok.  If you want to really shock the world – as in, make Chip Cravaack’s victory look like a fart in a tornado – let’s give Tony’s campaign a push.

I take this from the “Inevitable End-Results of Progressivism” files not so much because I believe this proposal  is especially surprising…:

A Swedish political party is taking a stand against upright urination.

At a county council meeting Monday, the Left Party, or Vänsterpartiet, tabled a motion that would require office washrooms to be genderless with a sit-down-only requirement, reported the news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå.

…as because I’m astounded a DFLer like Phyllis Kahn hasn’t already proposed such a bill.

What have we been telling you as long as this blog has existed?

The businesses along University Avenue that the Central Corridor doesn’t starve out of existence now, during the construction phase, it will either price out of existence in the few areas – around the stops in the less-blighted areas – that get gentrified, or starve out the business in between that are beyond easy dead-of-winter walking distance from the stops that can’t also afford to build off-street parking for customers.

But those last two are well in the future.  We’re still in phase one, starving out the businesses we already have along Uni:

Ne Dao is worried. Business at her normally bustling grocery store has slowed the past two weeks, and she fears it will only get worse once the massive light-rail transit construction project lands on her doorstep.

Ask the Panellis, from the late, great Caribe Bistro; it doesn’t get any better.

Many of the Asian businesses located along the five-block stretch of University Avenue recently dubbed the Little Mekong business district say they’re losing customers and sales. Business owners blame the road construction that is making way for the Central Corridor light-rail line connecting downtown Minneapolis with downtown St. Paul.

The road work on their stretch started in March and is expected to finish in late October. At University and Western avenues, the owner of Mai Village restaurant says she’s had to lay off the hostess and cut back from 10 servers to five because of the drop in business.

The problem was clearly inherited from George W. Bush.

Seriously?  I know the Mai Village.  The Mai was started probably close to twenty years ago, one of the wave of businesses started along Uni in Frogtown by Asian immigrants – first the Vietnamese, then the Hmong – who took the blighted stretch of the avenue between Lexington and the Capitol and turned it into, if not “Architectural Digest” fodder, at least a place with people, traffic, commerce, jobs…

…life.

Not the kind of life the DFL approves of – it’s not the kind of thing that fits the DFL’s vision of what Saint Paul’s Main Street should be.  Caribou. Patagonia, and lots and lots of government offices and non-profits.

Little Asian restaurants, founded by families who risked everything to leave Communist dictatorships to come to America, pooled their resources after years of working at scut-work jobs, leased ratty-looking little holes in the wall in blighted neighborhoods, built them into successes (and eventually nicer buildings, at least for those who kept their businesses on the avenue), and eventual hard-won prosperity?

Disposble!

This year, Mother’s Day, typically her busiest day of the year, was a dead zone.

“I don’t know how long we will survive,” said My Dung Nguyen, who along with her husband, Ngoan Dang, have owned Mai Village on University Avenue for more than 20 years.

The construction – as predicted in this space and in the spaces of everyone who really pays any attention to these things – has led to a long chain of destroyed businesses, wiped-out lifes’ savings, and misery in among all the dislocation for us Midway residents.

The sound of Bobcats and work crews, coupled with the dust they’re kicking up, have left her rose-filled haven of a patio empty because customers don’t want to sit out there in the middle of a construction zone.

“My customers, some of them tell it to me straight. They say, ‘I love your family. I love your food. But I’m sorry, I won’t come back until the light rail is done,'” Nguyen said.

What can I say?  If you’re ever down on Uni and are looking for a great Vietnamese meal, give the Mai a try.  They – and every business along Uni that isn’t part of a national chain with cash reserves to ride out the construction – will need the help.

Institutional Minnesota – the white, upper-middle-class part of it that was born here and never had to sail across a shark and pirate-infested ocean and learn a second, difficult language and start their lives over in a strange, cold land – is responding as usual; with blithe arrogance disguises as effort:

“Change is hard for many people. We’ve heard this from businesses elsewhere on the corridor and in other areas,” said Laura Baenen, a spokeswoman for the Central Corridor Light Rail Project.

“Change is hard for many people” is the “I’m sorry you were offended by what I said” of the social engineer.

Along with the arrogance, we have the out-of-context diversions:

Baenen noted that more businesses have opened on the entire corridor in the past year than have closed. From March 2011 to March 2012, 64 businesses opened on the corridor — including Washington Avenue, University Avenue, and Cedar and 4th Streets in downtown St. Paul — while 59 closed.

I’ll just bet they have.  There’s a lot of cheap space available now!

Now – how many of these “businesses” are non-profits that will bring no meaningful commerce to the Avenue?

I’ll get back to you on that.

And it looks like there’ll be more cheap space, as things are shaping up now:

The Asian restaurants are the ones that have been hardest hit, Thoj said. “Just in Little Mekong area, most of the restaurants are seeing a 25 to 50 percent loss. We have about 12 eating establishments. They all drop in customers during lunch and dinner.”

Back at Mai Village, Nguyen says the vision that the Metropolitan Council has of light-rail bringing prosperity to Little Mekong is still a long way from happening.

In the meantime, she says she and the other longtime owners are just trying to hold on to see that day.

“We put our heart, our time, our everything in here,” she said. “We would like to see it a success if the light-rail is done. But that is a big question.”

Silly eggs.  Your hearts, time and everything exist at the pleasure of the DFL’s omelet machine.

These are people who did everything right.  They rejected socialism for freedom.  They threw everything they had into succeeding – with very little to no government help – in a new, sometimes hostile land.  And they succeeded.   Indeed, the only mistake most of them made – it’s a statistical fact – was voting DFL.

And there’s noplace else to take a boat to, this time.

Berg’s Seventh Law – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – is going to be one of the dominant themes of the both the Presidential and the Minnesota Legislative campaigns.

We’ve been subjected to a solid year of caterwauling about the Flying Koch Brothers – who donate a fraction of what George Soros has pumped into liberal politics over the years – and “ALEC“, which “donates” ideas and the model legislation, which is pretty much what the Teachers Union does (except the Teachers donate lots of money too).   And above all, we’ve been subjected to years of liberal do-gooder fronts like “Common Cause” telling us that money in politics is baaaaaad.

Why?

To draw attention away from the extent to which the Democrats are controlled – not “supported”, “controlled” – by plutocrats.

Here in Minnesota, the DFL has basically handed its entire message operation over to “Alliance for a Better Minnesota“, the PR arm of a network of fundraising groups, unions and, especially, wealthy liberals.  They’ve even put Ken Martin, former administrator of part of that network, in charge of the DFL – which is, really, a measure of how much the DFL has become the instrument of the will of a small pack of liberal moneybags.

More on that later.

With Obama’s support among the middle class, small business and blue-collar whites in free fall, and enthusiasm among Latinos, women with kids and the unemployed young stagnant, Obama really has only one important constituency locked up:   the extremely wealthy, and Hollywood.  And since the regular “big-money” donors – people who donate between $500 and $2,500 to the campaign – are bailing on Obama…

…well, you see the conundrum, here, right?  Where’s Obama going to go for money other than the people who still support him completely, and lavishly?

And with that said, who is he going to listen to when it comes time to try to enact policy?

Obama has seen enough Architectural Digest-type interiors in Park Avenue triplexes and Beverly Hills mansions, and on the block in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, where every house is owned by a billionaire, to develop an expertise in Louis XV walnut commodes and Brunschwig & Fils fabrics.

He’s also had plenty of chances to absorb the advice of the kind of rich liberals who like to give money to Democratic presidents. And the evidence that he has taken some of that advice is his initiatives on three controversial issues, each of which involves serious political risk.

Barone spells out how plutocrat money drove Obama’s positions on gay marriage, government-paid contraception and abortion (and the jamming the bill for both down on churches that oppose them on religious grounds), and…

The third issue is the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil produced from tar sands in Canada to United States refineries and create thousands of jobs in the process.

Earlier this year, Susie Buell Tompkins, John Kerry’s fourth-biggest money-raiser in 2004, picketed outside an Obama fundraiser at San Francisco’s W Hotel to protest the pipeline. She wanted Obama’s State Department to block it because she thinks tar sands production hurts the environment and the planet.

Our neighbors the Canadians, who are not unconcerned about the environment themselves, disagree. The pipeline’s promoters say it would produce 20,000 American jobs and would tend to lower U.S. gas prices.

Obama came out on Tompkins’ side and blocked the pipeline.

And enacting non-fiscal, mostly-social policy pushed by plutocrats is great politics, because plutocrats represent real people -right?

If the same-sex marriage reversal seems somewhat risky politically and the contraception mandate considerably riskier, the Keystone pipeline decision seems downright foolish politically. Voters tend to favor it by two-to-one margins — and if they’re not aware of it, the Republicans (and maybe the pro-pipeline unions) will make sure they are.

The priorities of the well-connected, donation-happy and frighteningly well-off will continue to drive Obama’s policy.

And when your liberal friends – and the DFL’s trained chimps like “Common Cause’s” Mike Dean – plump about the evils of money in politics, ask them to clarify who’s money they’re talking about.

I’m doing a little campaign volunteering these days, for the Herndandez for Congress campaign.

There’s a ton of work to do – but if there was ever a year when a Republican could upset Betty McCollum, this is one of them.  Tony needs plenty of help, by the way – financial and volunteers.

But for tonight?  Tony’s going to be appearing at “Ignite the Right”, at the Blue Fox in Shoreview.  Tony’ll be on the bill with US Representative Michele Bachmann and GOP Senate candidate Kurt Bills.

The event, sponsored by the North Metro Tea Party, will take place at the Blue Fox, in Maplewood.  Social hour starts at 5:30, with the program kicking off at 6:30.

The Blue Fox Bar and Grill is at 3833 Lexington Avenue North in Arden Hills.

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I’ve got nothing in particular against marijuana.  I’ve never smoked it, in part because I’m just not a “mellow” kinda guy – if I did a drug, it’d be cocaine, hands (and nose) down.

And I personally support legalizing pot.  Making this cheap commodity the focus of a federal prohibition has contributed to untold deaths and incredible misery in America’s inner cities. Decriminalizing pot would at least remove some of the expense and dislocation that our failed “war on drugs” has caused.

But with all that out of the way?  Stoners annoy me.  There is nothing in the world more annoying that numbed, hemp-reeking munchy-grubbing cackling drone of the Chiba Monkey set.   I’ll sit in a chair and listen to Shakira’s fingernails on a chalkboard all weekend before I listen to stoners babbling in Shaggy-Doo cant without forcing bongs down peoples’ throats.

So I’m glad to see that, along with Hollywood, government worker unions and plutocrats, America’s muzzy-headed hemp-clad frito-guzzling bong-o-nauts are among Obama’s big hopes in the coming election, as several state roll out pot legalization bills at least in part to try to turn out America’s Dave Matthews-listening, cheeto-searching, High Times-reading, neo-comatose Baked Caucus to vote for Obama.

Getting more young people to vote has long been a Democratic fantasy, since they tend to vote so heavily Democratic. But past attempts to bong the vote have been disappointing, in part because stoners aren’t the group anyone would most count on to bother filling out a ballot. Ahead of the 2010 midterms, The Wall Street Journal ran the story, “Democrats Look to Cultivate Pot Vote in 2012,” noting that California’s pot-legalizing Proposition 19 was being studied to see if similar measures “could energize young, liberal voters in swing states for the 2012 presidential election.” But exit polls that year showed no spike in young voter turnout, and marijuana legalization was the top issue for just 1 in 10 voters, the Los Angeles Times reported.

(Also carefully note, all you Paul supporters who think pot legalization is your path to the presidency)

Last night, the paid flaks at “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – the astroturf PR group financed by the Dayton family, Mark Dayton’s ex-wife Alita Messinger, a bunch of their liberal plutocrat friends, and the unions that own Mark Dayton, put out a tweet:

Good thing Gov. Dayton vetoed the law: Study says ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws increase homicides  http://ow.ly/bwUQs   ‪#mnleg  ‬‪#stribpol‬

Now, as always – when ABM says, writes or posts anything, one is best to do…

…what?

I don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here.  What does one do?

Distrust, then verify.  Then, almost inevitably, distrust some more.

So let’s look at the study and, as ABM would have the ill-informed voter believe, this wave of fresh murder begat by “Stand Your Ground”.  The study was cited in a WSJ Law Blog post:

In April, more than a month after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, we looked the incidence of justifiable homicides in states with “stand your ground” or “castle doctrine” laws like Florida’s.

In general, such laws grant people more leeway to use lethal force on an attacker. More than 20 were passed after Florida’s in 2005. They typically do at least one of the following:

• Remove a person’s duty to retreat in places outside the home

• Add the presumption that the person who killed in self defense had a reasonable fear of death or harm  [subject, in ever case I’m aware of, to a hearing establishing that that fear was reasonable]

• Grant people who killed in self-defense immunity from civil lawsuits [provided, of course, they are found to have acted in legal self-defense; currently, a woman killing a stalking rapist is only as safe from being sued back to the stone-age by her rapist’s family as the least bobble headed jury that can be empaneled]

So let’s look at the study’s conclusions (and I’ll add emphasis):

Justifiable homicides nearly doubled from 2000 to 2010, according to the most recent data available, when 326 were reported. The data, provided by federal and state law enforcement agencies, showed a sharp increase in justifiable homicides occurred after 2005, when Florida and 16 other states passed the laws.

While the overall homicide rates in those states stayed relatively flat, the average number of justifiable cases per year increased by more than 50% in the decade’s latter half.

Now, let’s put that number into two bits of context.

First;  the “doubling” – 160 or so killings up to 320 and change – amounts to less than 1% of the people killed in unjustifiable homicides every year.

And every single one of them involves someone who was ruled to have had a legitimate fear of being killed or maimed, killing an attacker first.

These “homicides”, every one of them, occurred in lieu of a rape, murder, kidnapping or aggravated assault.  In every case, the alternative to those 320-odd justified homicides would have been an innocent person dead; a woman raped; a child kidnapped, a person beaten into a vegetative state.

The study – and ABM – would have you think that’s a bad thing.  Or at least have you not think about it very hard.

Speaking of the study – what about it?

The answer, [Texas A&M Professors Mark Hoekstra and Cheng Cheng] conclude, is [that “Stand Your Ground” does not deter crime]. In fact, the evidence suggests the laws have led to an increase in homicides.

From the study:

Results indicate that the prospect of facing additional self-defense does not deter crime.  Specifically, we find no evidence of deterrence effects on burglary, robbery, or aggravated assault.  Moreover, our estimates are sufficiently precise as to rule out meaningful deterrence effects.

The blog post doesn’t go into details about the study – but this paragraph is nonsense on several levels.

• So was the study “sufficiently precise” to account for other factors in changing murder rates?
• Did it account for the deterrent effect that John Lott proved that the concealed carry laws that usually accompany “Stand Your Ground” provide?  Because if those laws are already deterring violent crime, there’s a smaller pool of violent crimes to deter.  Right?

Which leads them to concludes…:

In contrast, we find significant evidence that the laws increase homicides.

But what kind of “homicides?”

Suggestive but inconclusive evidence indicates that castle doctrine laws increase the narrowly defined category of justifiable homicides by private citizens by 17 to 50 percent, which translates into as many as 50 additional justifiable homicides per year nationally due to castle doctrine.

But if they’re justifiable – a response to a lethal threat – then why is this a problem?

Is the death of a rapist the same as the death of his victim?

More significantly, we find the laws increase murder and manslaughter by a statistically significant 7 to 9 percent, which translates into an additional 500 to 700 homicides per year nationally across the states that adopted castle doctrine.

And there, the researchers find causation in a correlation.

Which came first – the rise in violent crime, or the rise in killings in self-defense?

Thus, by lowering the expected costs associated with using lethal force, castle doctrine laws induce more of it.

This is patent nonsense.

The study seems to make several key errors of logic:

• Considering “justifiable homicides” a bad thing. And they are, in a very real way; they’re the second-worst possible outcome of a lethal-force situation. But giving the same moral weight to the death of someone who was killed for providing a deliberate and grave threat to another person, who responded by shooting?  That’s madness.
• Not providing full context for the numbers – the researchers ascribe a hike in all homicides to the “lowered cost” of self-defense.  But we don’t know which murders are attributable to which motive.  Also, we don’t know how many of the un-justifiable homicides were justifiable, but hung up on one technicality or another in court (see George Zimmerman).

 

This increase in homicides could be due either to the increased use of lethal force in self-defense situations, or to the escalation of violence in otherwise non-lethal conflicts. We suspect that self-defense situations are unlikely to explain all of the increase, as we also find that murder alone is increased by a statistically significant 6 to 11 percent.

I find that number intensely suspect, and will be looking into it.  My sniff-sensor tells me that number is BS – murder rates in general are dropping, nationwide, and given the number of states with stand your ground laws, it seems unlikely that there’s any link.

As the authors note, the increase in homicides may not be viewed by everyone as “unambiguously bad.” It could be driven by individuals protecting themselves from imminent harm by using lethal force. But it could also be driven by an escalation in violence that, absent the “castle doctrine,” wouldn’t have ended in serious injury for either party, they say.

Or it could – no, it would  – be substituting deaths of criminals for deaths of the innocent.

I caught this yesterday in a piece on MPR about the number of legislators, mostly DFLers (because it’s mostly them that got ushered out of office in 2010) that are trying to get their jobs back:

In a year when about 20 percent of the Minnesota Legislature plans to retire, there are also 20 former state lawmakers working hard to get back to the Capitol.

The list of former legislators attempting political comebacks is dominated by Democrats. Some are trying to win open House and Senate seats created by redistricting. Others are taking on incumbents to try win back the seats they lost.

Yadda yadda.  That’s fine – they want that pension.  A DFLer’s gonna look for taxpayer money to use up.  It’s understandable.

Less understandable was this statement:

[Former Eagan rep Jim] Carlson said he thinks many of the DFL candidates share a common motivation.

“I think a lot of us think the voters made a mistake in 2010, and we probably can reverse that mistake,” he said.

“You voters sure are stupid!  But via relentless repetition, even a moron like you, simple voter, can get it right eventually”.

I really do hope that that Carlson’s opponent – maybe it’s Doug Wardlow, but I’m not sure – prints that statement up on T-shirts.  It may just be a contender for a 2012 Shootie Award.

Ebony & Irony

The media begins to chum the political waters for race-baiting.

There was little doubt that race was one of the larger underlying narratives of the 2008 presidential campaign.  The election of the country’s first African-American president, by the largest popular vote margin in twenty years, was widely hailed by Barack Obama’s supporters as a sign that racial relations had truly improved.

And now, what of the electorate that gave Obama 69 million votes, 365 electoral votes, and an 8% margin of victory?  According to the polling analyst du jour, America has not only returned to being a land of racist voters but, in fact, always was:

Though many people believe that our first African-American president won the election thanks in part to increased turnout by African-American voters, Stephens-Davidowitz’s research shows that those votes only added about 1 percentage point to Obama’s totals. “In the general election, this effect was comparatively minor,” he concludes. But in areas with high racial search rates, the fact that Obama is African American worked against him, sometimes significantly.

 

“The results imply that, relative to the most racially tolerant areas in the United States, prejudice cost Obama between 3.1 percentage points and 5.0 percentage points of the national popular vote,” Stephens-Davidowitz points out in his study. “This implies racial animus gave Obama’s opponent roughly the equivalent of a home-state advantage country-wide.”

Apparently Obama was supposed to have won by 11% or even 15%.  Or maybe simply by acclamation.

Where is this thesis of latent racism coming from?  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard University, who gleaned his insight from that fount of all wisdom – the Internet.

Stephens-Davidowitz coupled internet search histories with racially charged words with searches for “Obama”, compared them to results for the 2004 election, and faster than you can google “the Bradley effect,” surmmerized that Americans are actually super secret racists.  And if you believe the liberal-leaning polling outfit, Public Policy Polling, you may need to add roughly one-quarter of African-American voters to the ranks of the racists since they’ve soured on Obama in North Carolina.  Perhaps Stephens-Davidowitz is saving that study for after he get his doctorate in an unrelated major.

There are a few issues within Stephens-Davidowitz’s thesis that most people wouldn’t contest.  Racists still do exist in some places in America and the electorate’s view on the condition of race relations has plummeted since Barack Obama’s election:

A myriad of reasons explain such stark polling data, but it doesn’t help that the media consistently attempts to propagate stories that seek to find racists around every corner.  Especially in political coverage which implies that to oppose President Obama is to oppose him based on the color of his skin.  It’s false and deeply insulting.

It’s also an attempt to prepare the battlefield post November.  As Stephens-Davidowitz concludes:

The state with the highest racially charged search rate was West Virginia, where 41 percent of voters chose Keith Judd, a white man who is also a convicted felon currently in prison in Texas, over Obama just this May. Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, and New Jersey rounded out the top 10 most-racist areas, according to the search queries used.

…

 

What does this mean for this year’s contest? “Losing even two percentage points lowers the probability of a candidate’s winning the popular vote by a third,” Stephens-Davidowitz explains. “Prejudice could cost Mr. Obama crucial states like Ohio, Florida and even Pennsylvania.”

 

The narrative is set.  If Barack Obama loses re-election, the nation of progressive, racially-harmonious voters will have suddenly become extras in a remake of “Deliverance.”  But is this exactly a wise political strategy?  It’s bad enough when one party blames their defeat on the electorate being stupid enough to fall for the rhetoric of the opposition, but what is there to be gained from inferring that voters are racists?

Do Republicans need to counter that if you vote for Barack Obama, you’re secretly a religious bigot who hates Mormons?  Sheesh.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

I went with my son-in-law looking at used cars this weekend. Have you seen the prices? Shockingly high. With incentives, rebates and interest rates, brand-new costs the same as used.

You do, indeed, pay a lot these days for that “pre-depreciated” option.

The used vehicle market seems to be distorted: there aren’t enough used vehicles so the scarcity has driven up demand and with it, price. It’s as if some giant vacuum cleaner sucked up millions of perfectly good used cars and crushed them to get them off the market. Weird.

My son-in-law can afford a replacement vehicle so I suppose that makes him a 1%-er. I have no idea how single mothers or low income minority families do it. The burden is falling on those least able to afford it. Good thing this isn’t the result of some well-intentioned Bush-era government program or there’d be Hell to pay.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

No kidding.

Because if an Administration were to make “imposing scarcity for a necessity – affordable transportation – on low-income Americans” a “first 100 days” priority, some might think that Administration didn’t have the good of this country’s poorest at heart.

That’d be just weird, woudln’t it?

National Review ran yet another dissection of the complete collapse of Detroit last week.

One of the key lessons – giving unions carte blanche neither bolsters middle-class wages nor general prosperity:

One lesson to learn from Detroit is that investing unions with coercive powers does not ensure future private-sector employment or the preservation of private-sector wages, despite liberal fairy tales to the contrary, nor do protectionist measures strengthen the long-term prospects of domestic firms competing in highly integrated global markets. We cannot legislate away comparative advantage or other facts of life. But the problem of unions’ coercing distortions in the private sector is at this point a relatively small one, given the decline of unionization outside of government. Organized labor being a fundamentally predatory enterprise, its attention has turned to the public sector, where there are fatter and more stable rents to be collected.

Also – taxing ones’ way to prosperity is merely the road to madness:

The second important lesson to be learned from Detroit is that there are hard limits on real tax increases, a fact that will be of more immediate significance in the national debate as our deficit and debt problems reach crisis stage. Even those of us who are relatively open to tax increases as a component of a long-term debt-reduction strategy must keep in mind that our current spending trend is putting us on an unsustainable course in which our outlays will far outpace our ability to collect taxes to pay for them, no matter where we set our theoretical tax rates.

Detroit was a cold Greece long, long ago.

 But tax rates are not the only incentive: Google is not going to set up shop in Somalia. Healthy governments create conditions that make it worth paying the taxes — which is to say, governments are a lot like participants in any other competitive market (with some obvious and important exceptions).

And one of the keys to that is that creating a “healthy government” isn’t much different than creating a “healthy teenager”, in health doesn’t’ mean “giving them everything they think they need”.

The benefits of being in Detroit used to be worth the costs, but in recent decades millions of people and thousands of enterprises large and small have decided that is no longer the case. It is not as though one cannot profitably manufacture automobiles in the United States — Toyota does — you just can’t do it very well in Detroit. No one with eyes in his head could honestly think that the services provided by the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan are worth the costs.

The lesson there:  while government is necessary to create the legal stability needed to do business of any kind, when government’s main mission becomes sustaining itself, it defeats that purpose.

The third lesson is moral. Detroit’s institutions have long been marked by corruption, venality, and self-serving. Healthy societies have high levels of trust. Who trusts Detroit?

Without some other overarching reason to stay there?  And in Detroit – without the location and markets of a New York (I’m thinking in the Dinkins era, of course) or the resources of a New Orleans or the weather of a Miami?  There’d be no reason.

What is true of Detroit is true of the country. Our national public sector not only is bloated and parasitic, it is less effective, less responsible, and less honest than that of many other developed countries, including New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and Germany. I am not an unreserved admirer of Transparency International’s global corruption-perceptions index, but I believe that it is in broad outline accurate. Liberals are inclined to learn the wrong lessons from the relative success of countries such as Canada or New Zealand, concluding that what we need is a bigger welfare state, government-run health care, etc.

And as it’s true for the nation, it’s true for Minnesota.

Who has spent the last year trying to expand the coercive power of Minnesota unions, by trying to unionize home daycare providers and expending boundless political capital on stopping the Right to Work amendment?

Whose entire substantive platform (other than “create chanting points for the Alliance for a Better Minnesota”) is “raise taxes?”

Whose administration is focused on obstructing efforts to curb corruption and safeguard the state voting system?

I’m not saying Mark Dayton is trying to be a Detroit-style governor.

I’m just saying that if he were, I can’t think of anything he’d be doing differently.

Maybe “get indicted for something”.  Other than that, I got nothing.

The answer is “Yes, if you’re an aspiring monk who’s taken a vow of poverty.  Then, you’re 40% of the way there“.

For the benefit of conservatives in the audience, I thought I’d give quick primer on how to answer questions you may commonly get from Democrats and “Indepdendents” as we ramp up for the Presidential campaign.

Q:  “What do you think about Obama’s record in pursuing the War on Terror?”
A:   It’s fine.  Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Q:  “What about the “War on Women?”  Any comment?
A:   There is none.  Are women better off economically now than they were four years ago?

Q:  “What about George Zimmerman?  Doesn’t he speak to a larger racial issue in this country?”
A:   It’s in the hands of the Florida courts, and none of us are parties to the case.  Are Afro-Americans better off than they were four years ago?

Q:  “How about the corrupting influence of money on politics?”
A:   Don’t know.  Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Q:  “Wouldn’t a new stimulus help us build more infrastructure?”
A:   No.  Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Q:  “So don’t you think conservatives are un-thrilled about Mitt Romney?”
A:   Don’t care.  Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Q:  “What about Medicare?  Won’t the Paul Ryan plan kill it?”
A:   What’s more important – that seniors are cared for, or that a specific program survives?  Anyway – don’t care.  Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Q:  “Didja see where Mitt Romney was allegedly a bully in high school?”
A:   Are bullies doing better than they were four years ago?

Q:  “Doesn’t Bain Capital destroy jobs?”
A:   No more than does George Soros.  Now – are you better off than you were four years ago?

Q:  “Would you like eggroll or wontons with that?”
A:   Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

Any questions?

“Netroots Nation” was held, as it always is, in the midst of a throbbing Progressive success story.  This year, it was Providence, Rhode Island – a city that, lying as it does at the nexus of organized labor and organized crime, is the perfect metaphor for the “Netroots”.

It was held in downtown Minneapolis last year.  I spent some time people-watching in between events at “Right Online”, which (usually) follows Netroots around the country to show the world what people with jobs and lives look like.

I shot this video of the Netroots crowd last year, at the 331 Bar in Minneapolis after the convo wrapped for the first day:

No, I’m a kidder. I kid.

But this year, the kids at Netroots – who make the goth kids on South Park seem pretty chipper even in normal times…:

…look even sprightlier.

M John Fund apparently lost the annual National Review poker match, and drew the job of going to Providence to cover the event.

Now, the Netroots kids weren’t particularly high on Obama last year.  It’s apparently gotten even worse:

It wasn’t only last Tuesday’s jarring defeat of public-sector unions in Wisconsin, or President Obama’s refusal to campaign in person against Governor Scott Walker — or unease that the Supreme Court may be only weeks away from sweeping much or all of Obamacare onto the ash heap of history. On Friday, in the middle of the conference, President Obama famously declared that “the private sector is doing fine,” calling into question his campaign’s basic competence in getting out a coherent message.

Indeed, enthusiasm for Obama was decidedly absent from this year’s gathering. Administration officials weren’t invited to attend (Valerie Jarrett and others have appeared in the past), and President Obama limited his role to an unpublicized surprise video shown to delegates late on Saturday, when many people had already left. “Change is hard, but we’ve seen that it’s possible, as long as you’re willing to keep up that fight, I’ll be right there with you,” Obama offered. Not exactly a stirring call to arms, and the tepid applause his video garnered can’t have pleased Team Obama.

That’s the problem with personality-cult politics; if the personality doesn’t start either delivering on his promises or killing off all rivals, things go flat pretty fast.

I read yesterday that the Met Council is going to start whacking bus lines along the Central Corridor, to make sure that the infernal train is the only option the rider has.

I was going to write about it – but Joe Doakes of Como Park beat me to it:

Since we’re already building the Damned Train, this makes half-assed sense, I guess.

Right now, there are three busses to get from downtown St. Paul to downtown Minneapolis:

• 16 – runs every 10 minutes on University, stops at every corner
• 50 – runs down University but only stops at major corners
• 94 – runs on I-94 but gets off a few places on University [and long I94]

We’ll eliminate the 50 entirely because that’s exactly what the train will do – run down University and hit major intersections. Sensible.

We’ll cut back the freeway bus to weekdays only. If you want to rush from downtowns on weekends, take a taxi or ride the train. That makes sense.

We’ll cut back on local bus service to every 20 minutes. This doesn’t make sense.

First, where’s the bus going to drive? In the parking lane? But we took out the middle of the street to install the train and that meant we changed the parking lane to a driving lane. But now we’re going to leave a bus in the parking lane? Why do we need a bus blocking up traffic on University when there’s a perfectly good train right next to it?

Second, as every bus rider knows, 20 minute departures that means the bus departs downtown every 20 minutes but traffic lights and delays make them bunch up on the route. If you want to ride from Frogtown to Walmart, wear warm clothes: the next three busses will all come in a big pack and if you miss them, you’re standing for an hour. Unless you take the train. Which, if you were going to take the train anyway, then why bother with busses?

Do we really need a simultaneous and parallel public transit system to stop at every single corner on University?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

That, of course, is the big problem – well, the second-biggest problem, behind “it’s a huge waste of money that will cost $10 in public money for every $2 ticket that’s sold” – with the Central Corridor:  it’s the wrong kind of train for the street.  “Light Rail” is supposed to zip along at 55mph between stops that are a mile or so apart – not chug along at the speed of traffic along University between stops.  And the “mass transit” traffic along University is not people zipping between downtowns; they mostly drive or take the 94 or the 50.  The traffic along Uni is people going from WalMart or Rainbow or Cub or CVS or Plasma Hut to home, where “Home” isn’t a condo along Washington in Downtown Minneapolis, but a house or apartment on Sherburne or Thomas or Iglehard, tucked away close to University.

It’s the wrong kind of train – it should have been a trolley, if you had to have a train; a “light rail” train should have gone down the median on I94, or ducked through the existing rail rights-of-way between Northeast Minneapolis and Frogtown.

This is what central planning does to peoples’ lives.

I posted about this yesterday – but it came out in the afternoon, after most people have read my blog for the day.

So I’ll try this again:  I would like to ask you a favor.  Get out on Twitter and “Follow” Tony Hernandez’ Twitter account.

Tony’s running for Congress in Minnesota’s Fourth CD – my district, the district of Betty McCollum, who has been taking up space in the US House for a long, long time.

Conventional wisdom says the race can’t be won – that the 4th is just tooooo Democrat.

It’s not true, of course; it can be won.  Redistricting shaved down the DFL advantage from 70-30 to maybe 60-40.

And the Dems’ ugly secret – Betty McCollum isn’t even that popular among DFLers.  Her vote totals just keep dropping.  Oh, she raises all sorts of outside money – but her “passion index”, even in 2008., was pretty low.

I live in CD4, and I’m not going to lie – I’m ready for it to take ten years to make the GOP in CD4 a viable party.

But with a little help, we juuuuust might be able to jump-start things a bit.

Whaddya say?

Found Wednesday’s Stillwater Gazette story about candidates filling in the Stillwater and Washington County area; I’ll add some emphasis:

In District 4, U.S. Rep Betty McCollum is challenged in the Democratic primary by Diana Longrie and Brian Stalboerger. The winner of that race faces Republican Ron Seiford and Independence Party hopeful Steve Carlson.

Huh?

Missing someone?

The GOP’s endorsed candidate is Anthony Hernandez, who b eat Seiford 195-5 in the endorsing convention.  Seiford is going to take that seething pot for Ronmentum to the primary this August, not that anyone cares.

Now, I’ve always believed in Hanlon’s Razor – never chalk up to malice what might better be explained by laziness, overwork, under attention or whatever.

I’ve notified the editor.  We’ll see if there’s a correction today.

What this does tell us is that we Republicans in the Fourth CD have to have our own media.  Please “follow” Tony on Twitter.  Check out his website.  If you can donate a few bucks, or volunteer, so much the better.

The Fourth CD is always a long shot.  But via a combination of…:

• Redistricting making the district a lot more competitive
• Betty being a terrible candidate
• Tony being a great candidate
• All of that “Ron Paul” energy boinging around the 4th CD
• All those Stillwater and Washington County people who are wondering what Betty was thinking, voting against the new bridge…

…this is actually doable.  Provided we get a 150% effort from everyone, of course.

You’ve been hearing it all over the place since it started sinking in among Democrats that their anointed candidate, Tom Barrett, was not going to pull off the win in Wisconsin last Tuesday – not even close.

Once the “Coin Toss” turned, for Dems in Wisconsin and nationwide, into a “Lunch Toss”, they – and their enablers in the mainstream, public and lefty media – started looking for excuses, for reasons that the ineluctable forces of history turned out to be very, very eluctable.

Among the first was the notion that Barret was outspent by 6:1.

It would sure make a reassuring story – “we didn’t get beat on ideas, we got beat by money”.

There are three answers to this meme:

Answer 1:  It’s Just Not True – The problem is, according to that noted conservative tool the WaPo, it’s really more like 2:1:

Now, Walker out-fundraised Barrett in Wisconsin, as well as outside the state.  But the part Dems never, ever tell you is that the Dems, as usual, outspent the GOP on independent expenditures by over $1.6 million

As everyone knew they would.

But they got outspent by the Walker campaign.  Which brings us to the second point:

Answer 2: Boo Freaking Hoo – So the Democrats got outspent?

In a recall that they forced?

There is not one single person in the entire Wisconsin Democrat party that knew that there would be no campaign finance restrictions on the race?  And that the GOP would call in every dog it could for this fight?  That Reince Priebus wouldn’t run his rolodex red-hot to defend the win he earned back in 2010?  And that the Tea Party wouldn’t absolutely slam the organizing?

Because there are only a few possible explanations:

• There was, in fact, nobody who knew .  It’d seem to be a drastic mistake, forcing a recall without knowing the laws involved.  Just saying.
• They knew, but figured that sheer Fleebagger passion would carry them through.  It’s the kind of hubris that is explainable, if not necessarily excusable.
• They knew, but figured the GOP would screw it up.  Not a bad assumtion, under normal circumstances.  But the GOP – or at least the Tea Party-influenced part of it – is learning.

At any rate, it was the Wisconsin Democrats who asked for the recall.  So they got outspent?

Sucks to be them!

Answer 3: Hypocrisy – So winning an election by spending lots of outside money is a bad thing?

Well, tell it to Mark Dayton, whose 8,000 vote margin of victory was paid for by…:

• An epic toxic smear campaign financed by Alita Messinger, a scionette of the Rockefeller family who dumps millions of her own money into Minnesota astroturf groups, which managed to convince just enough low-information voters that Tom Emmer had a DUI to cost him whatever…
• The DFL-friendly travesty of an election-registration system didn’t provide Dayton.
• Which, by the way, outspent Emmer and the GOP by at least 2:1.  More like 3:1, if memory serves.

In Minnesota, you have truckloads of outside money financing outreach to dumb voters and creation of illegal voters to win elections for the DFL.

I’ll await your peals of outrage.

And await.

And await.