Via Power Line, I see that the Strib has noted the fact that 100,000 (currently 103,000) Minnesotans have carry permits…

…which was first reported in this space on May 31; well over 1z00,000 Minnesotans currently have active carry permits.

The Strib is finally on the story – and there’s good news, and there’s bad news.

The bad news?  They – in this case. reporter Larry Oakes – still can’t resist a bunch of the usual clichés:

[A carry permittee named Pat Cannon] not a vigilante. He’s not a nut. He’s just another average Minnesotan who has acquired the power to kill.

Why do I suspect the Strib newsroom is the only place, besides a DFL meeting (PTR) that “Vigilante” or “Nut” would have been suggested?   I mean, you get used to it when the MSM talkes about gunnies – this sense that underneath it all it’s just a little “off”.

But here’s the good news – Oakes balances things out relatively fairly:

[Permit training instructor Evam] Easton said the permit holders he knows “are lawyers, real estate agents — especially women who have to show houses alone — landscapers, a video engineer, a network technician, a radio show host [Quite a few of the, actually – Ed.], a couple of legislators, a mediator who talks divorced couples through sticky situations … a lot of typical, average careers.”

And to his credit, Oakes finds a couple of “experts” who are not completely ludicrous on the subject:

“America has long had a gun culture, but now it’s becoming a carry culture,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at the UCLA School of Law and author of “Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.”

Winkler traces the roots of the shift to fears spawned by the social and political upheaval of the 1960s.

“People began to see the gun as something for personal protection, not just hunting,” Winkler said. Meanwhile, as gun-control advocates pushed to get handguns banned in Washington, D.C. and Chicago, the NRA “changed overnight” in 1977, Winkler said, from stressing support for hunters to focusing like a laser on the right to bear arms.

Those factors helped trigger a handgun rights movement that swept the country, and by 2011, 37 states adopted so-called “shall issue” permit laws, taking away officials’ discretion to deny permits to people who are of legal age, sound mind and have no criminal history.

Not a bad whack at history for an MSM piece, all in all.  And it’s perhaps a sign that the Twin Cities media is growing in office ever so slightly that Andrew Rothman is getting as many calls as some of the more risible antis:

Rothman said it’s no surprise that a greater proportion of permit holders live where the gun culture is generations deep.

“If you grew up in Minneapolis, it’s easy to believe that guns are just plain trouble,” he said. “But you don’t have that out in the country, and the square miles are huge. If you have a dangerous situation, the police can be 30 minutes or an hour away.”

And Oakes does in fact manage to get outside the traditional envelope of media sources:

[A woman], a 40-year-old professional from the Twin Cities, asked that her name be withheld for the same reason she started carrying: A man with a violent history is stalking her.

She got a restraining order, but even the judge who signed it told her it wouldn’t necessarily protect her. So both she and her husband got permits and carry.

“I don’t want to ever have to use it, and I would rather not have the responsibility,” she said.

So so far I have to give kudos to Oakes.

And I can’t fault Oakes for his editorial drive to lend some balance to what has, so far, been a favorable story about Minnesota carry permittees.

But I saw the next section head…:

A mixed record

…and my Martensdar went off.

“Martensdar” is that feeling any Minnesota Second Amendment activist gets when Heather Martens is about to be cited as an expert source in the Twin Cities media (see also: Jacobsdar, Daveschultzdar).

And lemme tell you, my Martensdar is one finely-tuned machine:

The law “has not been a net benefit to our society in any way,” said Heather Martens, executive director of Protect Minnesota — Working to End Gun Violence. “They promised that if lots of people had guns everybody would be safe. Here just [recently] we had a 5-year-old child killed while sleeping on a couch. I think we were sold a bill of goods.”

Maybe Oakes is new to the guns beat.  Or maybe – this is actually the most likely – he can’t find another anti-gun “expert” in the Twin Cities.  It’s plausible that Oakes doesn’t know the single fact anyone needs to know about Heather Martens.

So here it is:  If Heather Martens says or writes something about guns, it’s a lie.  

This blog has been documenting Heather Martens’ serial perfidy for almost a decade.  Her “Group” (it’s not a group), “Protect Minnesota”, has just changed its name, because after almost a decade nobody took her seriously under the old name, “Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota”.

And she’s in traditional form with the statement above, with two toxic lies in one paragraph:

• Nobody, but nobody, “promised that if lots of people had guns everybody would be safe”.  We showed with a preponderance of evidence that we’d be safer – and we are.  Violent crime is down in Minnesota – especially the parts with the strongest gun culture.
• The five year old was not killed by a carry permittee.  He was killed by a juvenile (you need to be 21 to get a permit, and 18 to buy a gun legally, which I’m pretty certain the gun involved in the murder was not) on a block that was in effect a self-contained criminal enterprise, among a group of a adults among which one might suspect few would qualify for a carry permit (due to criminal records), in a city that was, and remains, hostile to the law-abiding gun owner.

But that’s not all.

There’s some even more misleading information in Martens’ contribution to Oakes’ piece.

More on Thursday.

As I’ve noted repeatedly in the past, the best way to for a Republican, or a “Republican” for that matter, to get fawning approval from the media is to become one of those Republicans that bash conservatives and conservatism.   See Arne Carlson, Dave Durenberger, Judi Dutcher.

And so with Richard Posner.  via Federal Judge Richard Posner: The GOP Has Made Me Less Conservative : It’s All Politics : NPR.

Judge Richard Posner, a conservative on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, has long been one of the nation’s most respected and admired legal thinkers on the right. But in an interview with NPR, he expressed exasperation at the modern Republican Party, and confessed that he has become “less conservative” as a result.

Posner expressed admiration for President Ronald Reagan and the economist Milton Friedman, two pillars of conservatism. But over the past 10 years, Posner said, “there’s been a real deterioration in conservative thinking. And that has to lead people to re-examine and modify their thinking.”

“I’ve become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy,” he said.

Which is fine – the guy’s got a right to an opinion.

But NPR is making up facts.  Posner isn’t a conservative, never was a conservative, and hasn’t called himself a conservative in years.

What’s the rule when getting “news” from the mainstream media?

“Distrust but verify.  Then, almost inevitably, distrust some more”.

I don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here.

The demand for my first episode of “FACQ” was so immense, I thought I’d do a follow-up.

Q: “So what do you think about Mitt’s “Swiss Bank Account”?
A:  “Fascinating.  Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Q: “Mitt made his money by short-selling America!”
A:  “Speaking of short-selling – how does the value of your house compare to four years ago?”

Q: “Is it moral that Mitt short-sold America?”
A:  “He didn’t – that’s a narrative repeated by people who don’t understand the term, intended for and repeated by others who also don’t have a clue.  Short-selling is a way of creating wealth out of the process of creative destruction.  It in turn creates more capital to create more jobs.  Speaking of jobs – are you better off than you were four year ago?

Q: “People don’t like Mitt Romney”
A:  “You know what people like less?  Being out of work.  Did you see last Friday’s jobs report?   Most of us are doing much worse than we were four years ago!”

Q: “Hahahaha!  Obamacare is constitutional!”
A:  “We’re working on it.  Now – are you better off than you were four years ago?”

Q: “Mitt’s wife rides a horse!”
A:  “I bet the horse is the only one who’s better off than he was four years ago.  Speaking of which – are you better off than you were four years ago?”

More as conditions warrant.

Today – up until 11:59PM tonight – is the big final push for the 2012 edition of the “Who Do Minnesota Liberals Hate?” Poll.

This poll – a biennial tradition since 2010 – takes a snapshot barometer of Minnesota Liberals (and those willing to speak on their behalf) and the current objects of their frothing, demented ire.

Leave your votes in descending order of ire – in other words, the first person on your list is the most-hated, the next one is right behind, and so on.  You can leave as many as you want, although the “sweet spot” is ten votes (beyond that you get steeply diminishing returns in the weighting of your vote).

Leave them here in the comment section, or send ’em to the email address “Feedbackinthedark@Yahoo.com” – and if you could put the word “Poll” in the subject line, that’d be just fabulous.

Tomorrow, we’ll start the two-day-long award ceremony!

Where was this when my kids were that age?  A Dallas entrepreneur is building a family-friendly gun range to help teach the next generation of Real Americans [1].

“One of the reasons we’re doing this is, when I had my boys, I didn’t have a place to take them and educate them about how to handle a gun safely,” Prince explained. “I really want families to be able to take their kids here and teach their young shooters how to shoot safely.”

No kidding.

Two rooms will be available for birthday parties.

“The age limit is eight years old. You have to be tall enough to get above the shooting table,” Prince said. “They’re not gonna be left unattended. Parents are gonna be one-on-one, or if there’s not enough parents we’ll have range safety officers here to show them how to do it safely.”

“We’re gonna do a lot of education here at this range,” he added.

The thing non-shooters never get?  It can be great education.  Shooting, done right, focuses the mind like any martial art – which, indeed, it is.   With proper supervision – we’ll come back to that – it can be a great thing to teach kids.

And, this being Texas, there’s a better than even chance most people get that:

The kickoff party Friday drew a big crowd and Prince was being well-received by his neighbors in Lewisville.

Denton County Commissioner Hugh Coleman said he was happy to have the facility in Lewisville.

“I am thrilled to add jobs and add to the tax base, and I think gun rights are for everyone,” he said.

But even in Texas, there are enclaves of Orcs:

But some see things in a different way. Dawn McMullan is a mom raising two sons in East Dallas, and she’s done some gun control advocacy in the past.

[And her past as a “gun control advocate” makes her precisely the least-informed, least-competent person to comment on the subject]

“It makes me very nervous,” she said. “I think eight-year-olds, developmentally, can’t tell the difference between play and reality sometimes.”

“And also to put it in a party or game atmosphere just seems to not respect a gun as much as we should respect guns,” she said.

Ms. McMullan has apparently never met a competent Range Safety Officer (RSO).  If good RSOs taught reading, there’d be no illiteracy.

And as re mixing kids and guns?  The dispositive factor in kids’ growing up with warped attitudes about gun violence is not “having shot”.  It’s “do his parents have a criminal record”, or “does anyone with a record live in the house”, and/or “is there someone in the house with a drug or alcohol problem”, or maybe “is someone in the house so addled that they leave guns lying around where kids can get at them in an idle or dumb moment?”

And even then – who’s going to teach the kids to leave the gun and walk away?  Someone who shows them the destructive power behind a gun, and then shows them painstakingly to walk away and tell a (competent) adult?  Or Ms. McMullan and her whole “guns are the forbidden fruit” schtick?  Hint, Ms. McMullan: that works especially well with teenagers!

But Prince said respect is exactly what he’ll be teaching.

“We truly believe it’s a right and a privilege to shoot and to bear arms,” he said. “But you have a responsibility to know how to do it well. It’s your responsibility to know how to take care of your gun and know how to use it.”

“Ignorance is not bliss in this situation,” he added. “Until they outlaw guns, people are gonna have access to them and should have access to them. And they need to be educated. Take the mystery out of the guns.”

Eagle Gun Range expects to open for business sometime in the late summer or early fall.

I’m smelling bonanza for some savvy Minnesota entrepreneur – and apoplectic strokes for not a few Minnesota lefty pundits.  Just saying.

(more…)

Ed Morrissey and I are taking a rare day off on the show today.

But make sure you tune in Friday, July 13 for a special program at the Ramsey County Fair!

Which conservatives do Minnesota lefties hate the most?

Your chance to vote in the “Who Do Minnesota Liberals Hate, 2012” poll runs today through Monday (at 11:59PM)!

Leave your top ten (or however many) nominations, in descending order of how badly the left hates them, in the comment section – or, if you prefer, send them to “Feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”.

The poll is shaping up even bigger than 2010 – with some major shifts in the rankings.

Make sure to make your voice heard!

WIth a (as yet unrevised) job number of around 80K – a fraction of what’s needed to meeting population growth – the unemployment rate held steady at 8.2% with this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers.

But the actual Labor Force Participation Rate also held steady at 63.8%.

That means the actual percentage of the work force that’s actually working – that 63.8% of people between the ages of 16 and 65 that are working, or trying to work, and haven’t been out of work for longer than a year, and less all of the unemployed – is actually 58.57%.

• That’s two points lower than when Barack Obama took office.
• Thats 7/100 of a percent better than in October of 2009, when unemployment peaked at 10%.
• It’s half a percentage better than when participation bottomed out two months later, in December of 2009.  Which was a very brief downward spike, by the way – with rates in general being right about where they are today.  Equal to the worst rates at the “bottom” of the recession.
• That’s almost five points lower that the best rate under the Bush Administration – and two and a half points lower than the worst rate Bush had (as he left office).  A fairer comparison?  Its 3.5% worse than the bottom of the rate during the post-9/11 recession.

Face facts, America.  There is no recovery.  Obama’s “economic policy” is a joke.

If America votes for four more years of this, it deserves what it gets.

Update:  It’s worse if you’re Hispanic.

Update2:  And worse still if you’re black.

Four years ago, “youth” – America’s younger voters, in all their smug, insufferable, know-it-all energy – helped sweep The One into power.

Today?  They seem a little less thrilled with things as they have turned out:

In the four years since President Obama swept into office in large part with the support of a vast army of young people, a new corps of men and women have come of voting age with views shaped largely by the recession. And unlike their counterparts in the millennial generation who showed high levels of enthusiasm for Mr. Obama at this point in 2008, the nation’s first-time voters are less enthusiastic about him, are significantly more likely to identify as conservative and cite a growing lack of faith in government in general, according to interviews, experts and recent polls.

Polls show that Americans under 30 are still inclined to support Mr. Obama by a wide margin. But the president may face a particular challenge among voters ages 18 to 24. In that group, his lead over Mitt Romney — 12 points — is about half of what it is among 25- to 29-year-olds, according to an online survey this spring by the Harvard Institute of Politics. And among whites in the younger group, Mr. Obama’s lead vanishes altogether.

It’s possible this may be Obama’s greatest legacy; a generation that – if they think about it, and here’s hoping there’s enough innate intelligence among them to overcome the complete lack of critical thinking in public education today – is completely soured on the idea that big government is, or has, or is equipped to reach, the answers.

Years ago, my old friend Moonbeam Birkenstock – who is much farther left than I am to the right – announced, with great noise and fury, that he was through paying the portion of his taxes to the Feds that went to defense.

“I refuse to contribute to the US military, which exists only to murder children and bomb innocent people” bellowed Birkenstock as we talked at a party.

I grinned a smug grin, pulled a pocket-sized copy of the US Tax Code from my pocket, and announced “You are teh LIER!!!  Nowhere in the IRS Tax code can you find a single reference to rifles or bombers or bombs or any sort of military hardware at all!”.

Moonbeam pulled a can of mace and gave me a long, wet blast in the face.  And as I coughed and hacked and wiped tears from my eyes, I knew I deserved it.

———-

Eric Austin is a liberal blogger from somewhere in central Minnesota.  We’ve run into him before – in one case, admitting in an audio passage that he condoned the bullying of the child of a conservative legislator because, in his words (seriously – follow the link and listen to the audio, if you can stomach it – it may be one of the most vile, reprehensible things I’ve ever heard) her mother had voted against a bill making bullying gay kids extra special illegal.

But that was then.  This is now.  Perhaps Austin’s rhetoric has improved with time and maturity?

Local conservative layabout, Gary Gross, has been churning out quite a few posts since the Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act is, in fact, Constitutional. Any one of those posts could be the subject of another episode of Gross Inaccuracies but who has the time to keep up with a single childless unemployed blogger who lives off the government he loathes.

OK, ixnay on the whole “improvement” and “maturity” thing,  I’d say I’m curious how Mr. Austin thinks this sort of ugly, personal name-calling advances his, or any, argument…

…but I’m not curious.  It’s easy.  The fact is, it’s incredibly easy for Minnesota liberals to grow to what passes for “adulthood” these days – through their feminized public schools, a university system that marginalizes and expunges conservative dissent from the dominant narrative, and a media that accepts liberalism as the baseline for good and, via its leading figure Jon Stewart, “snark” as its main rhetorical cudgel – without having the foggiest idea how to debate a conservative, or even what real civilized debate is.

Which is why most liberals’ “arguments” start with ad hominem and tu quoque (“Look! My opponent said or did something that is inconsistent with something else he says or does!  That invalidates his entire argument!”) and proceed through…

…well…

Today’s episode of Gross Inaccuracies concerns the most ludicrous of these most recent posts about how terribly awfully no good it is to now have Romneycare (oops, I mean Obamacare). Gross fawns over an exchange on Fox News between Sarah Palin and the token Democrat on the show about how there really are DEATH PANELS in the Affordable Care Act.

Here is the relevant part of the exchange from Palin:

There’s a faceless bureaucratic panel and the acronym is the IPAB and the I-P-A-B, what that will be is that is a board that will tell you, Bob, whether your level of productivity in society is worthy of receiving the rationed care that will be the result of Obamacare.

Now there is a board called the Independent Payment Advisory Board but its purpose isn’t anywhere close to what Palin suggests. The duty of the board is to find ways to keep Medicare spending from growing out of control. However, one of its provisions specifically states that it may not recommend “rationing” care.

Right.  So – like my friend Moonbeam Birkenstock in the example at the top of this post, Palin has completely botched the entire factual basis of the argument…

…well, no.  She has assigned a role to one piece of the bureaucracy that will be practiced by another piece of the bureaucracy.  It might be a government agency, or as Austin notes from the mandate tax law…

From the Affordable Care Act:

‘‘(ii) The proposal shall not include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums under section 1818, 1818A, or 1839, increase Medicare beneficiary cost- sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria. [emphasis mine]

So what this means – if you accept it at face value – is that the law will not deal, in and of itself, with rationing.  That can is being kicked down the road.

Which brings us to a key fact of this debate, one that Obama and Obamacare’s supporters either don’t know or don’t want you to know.  It’s true that there will likely never be a room somewhere in northern Virginia with a brass plate on the door engraved with the title “Death Panel Conference Room”, and that nobody in whatever bureaucracy takes over Obamacare will have “Death Panelist” on their job description.

But in modern health care insurance parlance, the term you look for is “Case Management” (sometimes “Care Management”).  The term was spawned in the eighties, in the HMO industry, to cover the intersection of insurance, medicine and actuarial science.  And it’s the part of the health care insurance industry that goes through the utterly rational process of answering the question “if we have one transplantable liver, do we give it to the 43 year old guy with the curable degenerative enzyme disorder whose productive life expectancy will be increased by (on the average) ten years, or do we give it to the 70 year old chain-smoking diabetic alcoholic who has already run past her life expectancy given her current state of health”

To the 43 year old who gets the liver, it’s how the system works.  I suspect to the family of the 70 year old, the body that made that decision could be viewed as a “death panel”.

The facts, however, are…:

• Neither the ACA nor Medicare nor Medicaid will need to “Create” any such “panels”, because Case Management has been a fact, and a key part, of health care insurance, for three decades now.
• As Governor Palin notes, as the side-effects of the ACA drive more physicians from the industry and raise the cost (in terms of scarcity versus demand) of many of the more dramatic procedures, “Case Management” (a much drier and less dramatic term than “Death Panel”) will need to decide more and more who will get first crack at the limited supplies of medical miracles – livers, chemotherapy, hours on dialysis machines, whatever – and who will get “Palliative care” to make the slow degeneration to death (or disability, or whatever the end result of the condition being treated, liver disease, cancer, kidney failure or  actually is) more tolerable.
• Lest you missed it, this is a fact of life in the health insurance business today.   The difference, of course, is that most people can find alternate paths to treatment today; there’s more than just the one, government, path to the treatment they need, if the insurance industry gives them flak.  When private insurance is inevitably priced out of the market – as it will be after a few years of Obamacare undercutting them with losses underwritten by taxpayers – then there’ll just be one avenue for getting care.  That’s it.

While Palin continues to use a lie that has been repeatedly debunked by fact checking organizations and was even named the Lie of the Year by one,

Not by “one” – by “Politifact”, which has been pretty well shown (via the “Lie of the Year” canard and some even more egregious episodes) to be less a “fact checking” organization and more a Democrat propaganda mill.

Austin takes issue with Gross’ explanation of the various bureaucratic roles involved, and reaches some conclusion:

Let’s take a couple things here, Gary. First, the Independent Payment Advisory Board doesn’t look at any “individuals” but rather looks at the Medicare system as a whole and it explicitly states in its mission that it shall not recommend “rationing” health care. Second, the phrase “quality adjusted life years” is not used ANYWHERE in the Affordable Care Act.

This, Austin calls a “lie”.  At the most, of course, it’s an “error” – “Lying” requires some intent to deceive.

And, like my friend Moonbeam at the top of the story, the only immediate error (or, if you’re a liberal talking about a conservative, “lie”) is in mixing up different layers of administrators.

Sophistic niggling about different layers of the bureaucracy is the kind of thing that sends tingles up law students and bureaucracy-nerds’ legs.  But in terms of the actual effect of Obamacare on real people, they’re all distinctions without differences.  They are all parts of a system that will, inexorably, lead to increased shortage, hiked costs and diminished availability.

Which will be arbitrated by some body, somewhere.

And you can call it a “Case Management Process”, a “Death Panel”, or a “Happy Time Commission” for all anyone cares.  The result in terms that real people, real taxpayers, care about is always, and can only be, the same.

And with those immutable facts in place, I suppose responding to dissent with snark and ad-hominem is better, to some, than just admitting you’re wrong and addressing that whole “why do you promote the bullying of children?” thing.

Who do Minnesota Liberals hate?

Feel free to particpate in this vital sociological research through Monday night at 11:59PM!  Just leave your list of the top ten or so in the comment section (or email it to “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”), in order from most to least hated.

Results will start coming out on Tuesday.

Nominees so far are below the jump.

(more…)

Via the Christian Science Monitor, here’s the Fourth of July story we should be really proud about in this day and age:

My father left a mud-hut village in Pakistan to come to America, hoping to receive some technical training. He hadn’t counted on falling for America, but that’s what happens to unsuspecting visitors. And the world is becoming a better place for it.

Dad enrolled at North Carolina State University more than 50 years ago and earned an engineering degree. On a brief return to Pakistan, he met my mother at a wedding – their own. As you might have guessed, it was an arranged marriage.

The prefabricated couple decided to spend “just a few years’’ in the United States because of the job opportunities here. But they took on more of America than they had bargained for.

That immigrant passion for America was first described to me by a university president who noticed that foreign students are susceptible to a peculiar effect that warps their plans and bends their dreams. If they return to their homeland, they wish it were more like America, and will work to make it so. Often they choose not to go home, or choose to return to America after a while.

The article – which you should read, all of it – swerves through how America can, and does, moderate extremist Islam, by way of explaining how and why immigrants “fall crazy in love” with America.

And this is a potent lesson the week after this country took its biggest step ever toward serfdom; why is it that people have been coming here for centuries?

For the goodies?

Or for freedom?

Who knows how bad  episode would have been…

The armed gunman, 53, murdered a bailiff, 47, a locksmith, 33, and the prospective new tenant of the flat, 45, in the south-western city of Karlsruhe with shots to the head before taking his own life.

The bailiff had two bullets in his thigh before he was finished off.

The victims were tied up and ‘executed’, according to the local prosecutor. ‘This was a planned act and we are dealing with four cold blooded murders,’ he added.

…if Germany didn’t have gun laws every bit as draconian as violence -addled Chicago!

It’s hot, sticky and miserable.  And we’re in the middle of a political campaign amid a terrible economy.

We need a party!

It’s time for the Eighth (I think) Annual Minnesota Organization of Bloggers Summer Party!

So clear your calendars for Saturday, September 8.  It’ll be a perfect day to shake off the whir of late-August, Labor-Day and Back-To-School mania with a couple cool beers and a cigar or two, if you’re so inclined.

The location?

That’ll be announced later this week.  When I confirm everything.

Yeah, I know – commuting in the winter sucks.  And shoveling and hauling kids to the bus stop and winter heating bills and spinouts and having the whole city shut down by blizzards are all trying.  I get that.

But given a choice between this reeking, stinking, bug-infested, malarial, allergy-ridden, dripping, moldy, plague-ship weather like we have now, and the crisp, bracing zip of a cool winter day – say, anything above 10 degrees – there is only one sane choice, now, isn’t there?

I’m not talking sloppy, dirty, road-boogery-y, long-overstayed-its-welcome, hacking cough and tickle in the back of the throat on top of cabin-fever-y February weather.  I’m talking December, maybe early January, when the pollen is a distant memory and the cold is just a cool, bracing tang in the air.

It’s a scientific fact that, in the long view, most peoples’ memories of winter are like this…

…while to most normal people, the kind of heat wave we’re in now is a lot more like this:

And the household pests!  In this kind of weather…:

…versus the winter:

Seriously, it’s hardly a choice.

Another day and a half left to vote in the “Who Do MN Liberals Hate” poll.

Give us your top ten Minnesota conservatives that liberals hate, in descending order of hatred.

Results later this week!

UPDATE:  Chalk it up to the heat, but it occurred to me; I ran one of the most important contests in the SITD schedule during one of the worst traffic weeks of the year.

So I’m extending voting through 11:59PM, Monday, July 9, with results to be released starting Tuesday, July 10 and the finals on July 11.

God Bless America!

Maybe it’s all the Beach Boys songs that are such a part of our shared cultural heritage.

Maybe it’s the residual effects of the American school system’s three months off in the summer.

Maybe it’s Madison Avenue’s effect on the cultural zeitgeist.

But Americans are supposed to love summer.

To Americans, summer is fun; barbecues, baseball, boating at the lake, fun fun fun in Daddy’s T-bird…

…and, fact is, I like all that.

But for most Americans, summer looks a lot more like this…

…with, on weeks like this, a heaping helping of this:

Don’t get me wrong.  I love summer – provided I can be violently physically active, preferably biking (with its built-in breeze).

But I’m:

• one of ten Minnesotans whose family didn’t accumulate some kind of lake property back in the fifties, so summer is a matter of trying to stay functional between bouts of  non-misery
• not a teacher
• battling hay fever that is intensely aggravated by the heat and humidity, so when I say “stob” I really mean “dode go”
• a cold weather baby

…and you can have this hot, steaming, humid, mangrove-swamp-dwelling dripping crap.

That is all.

The biggest burden of Obamacare – one of the biggest entitlement programs in US history – will be borne by middle class taxpayers.

The “99%”.  Or rather, the half of the 99% that pay taxes, and maybe then some.

The left will try to divert this, saying that the penalty for not buying insurance is, in and of itself, not the biggest tax increase in history.  And they’re right.

But it’s not the only tax that Obamacare imposes, and imposes squarely on the middle, entrepreneurial and working classes.

Gary Gross notes that Obamacare is a 21 tax salute for Minnesotans:

That includes a job-killing (or at least job-deferring, which if your’e unemployed is the same as a job kill) .9% addition to the payroll tax to pay for Obamacare, as well as a tax on dividends.

All of which, let us not forget, defiers the one thing that actually  can help America get on top of the heath care crisis – job creation and recovery from the Obama recession!

They said that if we voted for John McCain, we’d get secretive, imperial government that’d rule by decree and conceal its activities from the peasants.

And they were right! DEA Freedom of Information Act rejections have doubled since 2008:

Despite President Obama’s 2009 executive order requiring agencies to err on the side of disclosure when processing Freedom of Information Act requests, the Drug Enforcement Agency exempted a record number of FOIA requests in 2011 in nearly every category.

But it didn’t set records just in 2011: According to a comparison of publicly available data from FOIA.gov, the DEA rejected more FOIA requests in 2009, 2010, and 2011 than it did during the last year of George W. Bush’s administration.

It gets complicated.  I urge you to read the whole thing.

After spending the last few years doing its best to kill off businesses on University Avenue, the Met Council is embarking on yet another effort to get people to go to places most of them never went in the first place, and can’t get to now because of all the light rail construction.

Joe Doakes of Como Park responds:

I’d like to shop Central Corridor but I can’t get there – it’s torn up for miles, even cross streets – and will be until 2014. What’s the point of inviting customers to a destination they can’t get to?

Wonder who these ad people are related to, or who they knew to land this contract.

Joe Doakes

To be fair, you can get to these destinations.  Although the route resembles something from the first Indiana Jones movie at times.

So the other day on Twitter, I took the liberty of congratulating Lynn Cheney for “marrying” her partner.  I took the liberty of pointing out that Cheney, lesbian though she is, has a rare and glorious ability to shred through lefty chanting points.

A couple of  liberals on Twitter, smelling rhetorical trap, tried to turn that into an endorsement of gay marriage and/or a position on the Marriage Amendment this fall.

Naturally, I’m not falling for any of that.  The fact is, I’m personally, deeply ambivalent about gay marriage.  And about the Marriage Amendment that will be addressing the issue in Minnesota this fall.  And about marriage, regardless of the genders of the participants, for that matter.   One of the liberals accused me of “moving the goalposts”, as liberals always do when one introduces logical or moral nuance into an argument (remember – they’re the smart ones, and the only ones allowed to have nuance or observe gray area in their world views).

But notwithstanding the lefties’ attempt to back me into a rhetorical box of their making, which I brushed aside with ease and style (as always), it did start me thinking; it’s getting toward November.  I mean, it’s four months away.

And I’m still undecided about the Marriage Amendment.

As I’ve written in the past, the Marriage Amendment is…

• On the one hand, a bad idea:  The libertarian in me bristles at the idea that the government should be telling people what to do in their personal lives.  Marriage is a contract; if two people have standing to sign a contract, why not?  Animals and children cant’ sign ’em, after all.
• On the other hand, the Amendment is a great idea: It should bring out social conservatives to vote.  Look, I hate using peoples’ personal lives as grist for the political mill, but it’s the coin of the realm.  And the long-term survival of this country does in fact depend on the political extinction of the current version of “progressivism” and its vessel, the Democrat party.  If this issue is a milepost on the way to the extinction of the DFL, I’m all for it (although I think the Voter ID Amendment will be much more useful in that regard).
• And on still a third hand, a good idea: because it’ll force gay marriage proponents to learn to actually debate an issue, rather than browbeat their opponents, which seems to be just about the only “debate” tactic any of them knows.

Because on the one hand, I believe government should stay out of peoples’ personal lives.

On the other, I believe “Marriage” is mostly a religious institution.

On the third hand, I find most of the arguments for gay marriage just as illogical as some of its proponents find “because Jesus said so”.  A quick sample, off the top of my head:

“Support Gay Marriage or we’ll thow things at you”:  This video clips is making the rounds; a young Marriage Amendment opponent tossing glitter at Amendment supporters at a demonstration outside General Mills:

He tosses glitter at old people, toddlers – and then has a hissy when people get mad at him.

And reading the comments to the video are enough to make you truly afraid for this nation’s future.  If the next great cultural war is fought on the fields on logic, ethics and fact, we’re screwed blue.

I’m not going to say “this is the best argument that gay marriage supporters can muster” – notwithstanding the fact that it’s the best a lot of Amendment supporters can muster, it’s clearly not a great argument.  But much of the Minnesota gay movement has tied itself to the glitter bomb as its primary positive case.

Color me unconvinced.

Still, the better ones have challenges as well.

“Civil Rights aren’t the subject for popularity contests”: Of course they are.  The government and media spent years demonizing people who supported the Second Amendment, in order to shave those rights back as far as they could.  And ask German-Americans about the popular laws enacted during World War I, or Japanese Americans during World War II.

“But those were mistakes”.  Sure.  But that’s a separate question.  We constantly subject rights, including rights purportedly enshrined in the Constitution, to popularity contests.

“You antis are hung up on a word”.  Well, sure – the idea that “marriage” is a religious institution, while “civil unions” are not.

But let’s be honest – everyone is hung up on a word.  Try this exercise with your favorite local gay marriage proponent – and by this, I mean the reasonable one, the one that can hold a civil argument (we’ll get to the others later):

YOU:  Allowing for the fact that no major faith group (outside some dissenting congregations here and there around the US) sanctions gay marriage, and none of them do so on theological grounds, what are your reasons for wanting gays to marry?

GAY MARRIAGE SUPPORTER (GMS):  So that gays have rights to visitation, so they can visit each other in the hospital and have power of attorney, inheritance, the various tax benefits, the ability to transfer custody of children in cases of death or disability, those sorts of things.

YOU: OK.  So it’s a legal thing.

GMS: “Yep”.

YOU:  OK.  So I propose that we adopt Civil Unions.  It’s a contract between two adults of majority, conferring every single one of the rights you mentioned and a few others you (well, OK, I) forgot, just like marriage.  Only it’s called a “Civil Union”.

GMS: That’s not OK.  People would view that as a second class institution.

YOU: But you yourself said this was about rights.  You’ll get every single right that a married mixed-gender couple gets.  Exactly the same resolution to every single situation under the law.  What’s the difference?

GMS: People will think Civil Unions have a lower status.

YOU:  Hm.  So a parallel institution that is exactly legally equal to straight marriage is not acceptable because…

GMS:  Because you are hung up on a word.

YOU: Gotcha.

“Because Marriage is about love!”:  I have to clamp off my own personal cynicism about marriage to answer this one.  But even being idealistic for a moment?  No, it’s not.  Ask anyone who got married for “love”.  “Love’ carries you through about the first two years, if you’re lucky.  After that it’s about a lot more than “love”.

Which is not to say that gay couples don’t have whatever that is.  Just that the “Marriage is love” chant is a stupid one even for straights.

Still, it’s better than this one:

“A Gay couple would be better than so many of the straight couples out there!”: Have you noticed how every gay couple that anyone ever refers to is Ozzie and Harriet these days?  And those Ozzy and, er, Ozzy couples always get compared to straight couples that are like Joan Crawford and whoever she was married to?

Gay marriage supporters have painted not so much gay marriage, but gays who want to marry, as just plain better human beings that all us nasty, angry…human straights.  It’s becoming a bit of a stereotype – the doting, impeccable, perfect gay couple, always a better option than…whatever the option was.

Which is every bit as debilitating a stereotype as some of those other gay stereotypes.

“Marriage is a right, and we don’t restrict rights”:  There are really two responses buried in there.

Of course we restrict rights.  My right to keep and bear arms, to pick one example – which is important enough to be spelled out in the Constitution, and incorporated onto the states by the  McDonald decision – is restricted in all sorts of ways; I have to show ID to buy ammo, much less a gun; felons can’t buy ’em, and on on, and so on.

And marriage?  Yep, restricted all over the place.  You can’t marry your first cousin – not even “for love”.  You can’t have several spouses – not “for love”, or even because your religion, Mormon or Muslim or Hefnerian, allows it.  Not even if first cousins or multiple spouses make better parents than your uptight old straight parents did.

But beyond that – is marriage a “right?”

The US Constitution doesn’t say anything – except by omission, in the Tenth Amendment, which reserves everything not covered in the Constitution (and thousands of tons of case law, naturally) to the States and People, unless the Supreme Court can find a penumbra enanating something else (see: “right” to murder the unborn – which should not be viewed as a right, btw; one persons rights can not infringe another person’s rights; abortion not only infringes the “Fetus'” right to life, in many cases it destroys whatever rights may be scattered in and among the father’s many, many legal obligations).  And the state of Minnesota defines marriage as a guy and a gal.  Which is fine – laws were made to be changed, if you have the political muscle to do it.  Go for it.

For most of human history, “marriage” has been about making, raising, securing the safety and maintenance of, and protection of children.  Which, at various times, meant that the infertile, the old and the otherwise child-“free” weren’t elegible.  In some parts of the world, “marriage” doesn’t happen until there was a baby on the way (including, until not that long ago, some parts of rural Holland).

Of course, that’s not how we’ve observed things for quite some time, with senior citizens and the “child-free” marrying, and with many, many more having children without bothering with marriage (or knowing each others’ names, in some cases) at all.

And so while “…because we’ve always done it this way” isn’t an especially satisfying answer for supporting the Marriage Amendment in and of itself, either are any of the arguments I’ve heard against it.

See the conundrum?

(Lefties on Twitter needn’t answer…)

Two years ago, in the run-up to the mid-terms, I ran a poll that was one of my favorites in the history of this blog; what Minnesota conservatives do liberals hate the most?

It wasn’t a huge shock that Michele Bachmann won, naturally.  But I wonder – with two years passed, how have things changed?

And so it’s time for the second stab at a tradition unlike any other:  the 2012 edition of “Who Do Minnesota Liberals Hate?”

Here’s the rules, such as they are:

• Put together a list of who Minnesota liberals hate the most, this year.
• Put it in descending order of hate:  in other words, “1” is highest, “10” is lowest.
• Theoretically, you can put as many as you want on your list – but since the list is in descending order, adding more than 10 or 15 will mean that the “passion index” of some of the lower members of your list will get shorted.  So while you <i>can</i> add many, many to your list, it’s best to keep it to 5, 10 or at the outside 15-20 names.
• Leave ’em in the comment section of this post (or send them to “feedbackinthedark@yahoo.com”, with “POLL” in the subject line).
• If you don’t put in a specific order, I’ll just take them in descending priority from whatever list you DO provide.

I’ll run the flights starting Thursday, with the top ten on Friday.  Nominations will be taken until 11:59PM on Wednesday.

In all seriousness, here;  this poll is a serious academic attempt to measure the intellectual id of the liberals in Minnesota.

So start arfing up those lists!  This post will be periodically moved to the top of the blog’s post list.

(more…)

Disease:  The deference that politicians show the imperial media.

Cure:   New Jersey Governor Christie, who ate and spat out a reporter at a press conference over the weekend:

Reporters were told the governor would only answer questions about a major problem at a water treatment plant, according to the Newark Star-Ledger.

Yet one reporter proceeded to ask an unrelated question involving the state legislature, as seen in video of the press conference from Monmouth County.

Christie, cutting him off, said: “Did I say on topic? Are you stupid? On topic, on topic. Next question.”

I have got to find the video.  And loop it.

As the reported tried to follow up, the Republican governor again interjected and ended the press conference.

“Thank you all very much, and I’m sorry for the idiot over there. Take care,” he said before walking away.

Of course, that’s the hallmark – and tool – of someone who isn’t worried about re-election, one way or the other.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I always liked this quote from Stranger in a Strange Land:

“ . . . a politico-judicial decision unparalleled in jug-headedness since Doheny was acquitted of offering the bribe Secretary Fall was convicted of accepting.”

Well, unparalleled until [last Thursday].

United States Supreme Court upheld Obamacare requirement that everybody buy health insurance or pay a penalty on the grounds that although the law says it’s a penalty, it’s really a tax, and therefore Constitutional. But it’s not an actual tax because if it were, it would be unconstitutional. So it’s a tax, but not a tax.

Chief Justice Joseph Heller, writing in the majority…

And Minnesota Supreme Court upheld DWI convictions based on the Intoxilyzer breath test machine because the State showed that more likely than not the machine was accurate. You’re guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of .08 Or More because the .08 shown on the machine probably is correct.

And society’s downward spiral continues.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

“Because government says so and wants to” is becoming a binding precedent.

It was a tiny desert coastal town, notable only for its modest railway and relative proximity (a scant 66 miles) to Alexandria.  Even today, El Alamein is small, home to only 7,400 people total.  But on July 1st, 1942, the town whose name in Arabic stands for “two flags” saw 250,000 men under various national flags collide in one of the most important battles of World War II.

…

For nearly a year-and-a-half, the war in North Africa seemed stuck on a bloody Mobius strip.  With infrastructure at a bare minimum and lines of supply stretching from Axis Tripoli in the West and British Alexandria in the East, the battles in the desert took on a repetitive nature.  One side would score a crushing victory, over-extend their ability to be resupplied or reinforced, and the other side would counter-attack until they too had simply exhausted their gas, ammo and food.  Heat, time and distance gave the desert tremendous power over armies.  The sands of Libya and Egypt soaked up fuel and blood in massive qualities, bits of which are still being discovered today.

Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel: The Desert Fox befuddled Britain for 1 1/2 years in Libya. At El Alamein, his signature strategy of outflanking proved impossible

Few mastered the limitations of the desert better than German General Erwin Rommel.  Rommel had arrived in Libya on the heels of an impressive rout of the Italian 10th Army.  Using small amounts of armor striking quickly through the vast desert interior, 36,000 British soldiers under Gen. Richard O’Connor managed to outflank and capture 130,000 Italian troops plus much of Cyrenaica (eastern Libya) including the key port of Tobruk.

Rommel didn’t need to emulate O’Connor, having been one of the pioneers of rapid, outflanking armor as part of the German strategy of blitzkrieg (lightning war).  Rommel’s own 7th Panzer had developed the nickname “Ghost Division” in France since even the German High Command often had no idea where Rommel was or where he was heading.  Arrogant, egotistical, and unwilling to follow orders he personally disagreed with (Rommel disobeyed orders for him to kill enemy prisoners, civilians and Jews), Rommel was also a tactical genius.  Protected by his successes and friendship with Joseph Goebbels, “The Desert Fox” was given a free hand in North Africa.

Claude Auchinleck: Halted Rommel twice and was the victor of El Alamein. His reward? Replaced and largely forgotten by history

The British were less graced with military leadership in North Africa.  A revolving door of generals came and left Cairo, each seemingly unable to master the Deutsch-Italienische Panzerarmee for more than a few fleeting moments.  It didn’t have to have been this way.  If not for large portions of the British Army in Egypt being recalled to fight in Greece, Richard O’Connor’s victory over Italian Libya might have been complete.  Instead, despite a numerical advantage over the Afrika Korps in both men (150,000 versus 96,000) and tanks (179 to 70), by the end of June of 1942, the British had retreated to Mersa Matruh – 100 miles inside Egypt and the furthest retreat thus far in the campaign.  The British commanding general was relieved again (this time it was Lt. Gen. Neil Ritchie, for those who cared) and in a desperate move, the Commander-in-Chief of Middle East Command, Claude Auchinleck, personally took over operations.

Auchinleck, nicknamed “The Auk” by his men, had taken over command before.  The C-in-C of the Middle Eastern Front since the summer of 1941, Auchinleck had relieved Sir Alan Cunningham in November of ’41, saving the British Army from defeat.  But Auchinleck either couldn’t delegate authority well or had poor resources to draw from (maybe both) and now found himself having direct control over the British 8th Army.  His first decision sent panic across Egypt.

“The Auk” knew Mersa Matruh was not defensible – at least not with the 8th Army in the condition it was in.  To the south was yet another giant open flank of desert, the kind that Rommel had used again and again to defeat British forces.  Lacking natural defenses and perhaps not trusting that his tank commanders could match Rommel’s in open battle, Auchinleck made the risky decision to retreat to the railway junction of El Alamein.

What followed would be known as “Ash Wednesday.”  British Command in Cairo assumed Rommel would be in the heart of the Nile valley in days and began frantically burning anything of military value.  With Alexandria only 66 miles away from the front, Auchinleck made contingency plans to construct bunkers east of the city and flood the Nile to slow the enemy advance.  Even the Axis believed the fall of British Egypt could arrive at any minute.  Benito Mussolini, wishing to create his own “Hitler at the Eiffel Tower” moment, flew to Libya and anxiously awaited his victorious march into Cairo.

Deutsch-Italienische Panzerarmee: the majority of the Afrika Korps was, in fact, Italian

Auchinleck may have been making back-up plans, but he knew what he was doing.  El Alamein was an unknown dot on a dusty map in Cairo, but in military terms was a modern Thermopylae.  Hedged by the Ruweisat Ridge and the Qattara Depression to the south, Rommel would have to go through the Sahara itself to outflank the 8th Army – a distance and environment too far and too harsh to overcome.  Rommel would have to mount a frontal assault on a relatively small front of 20/30 miles.  The British had foreseen the potential of this area even before the war, building pill boxes and mine-fields in the open terrain.  Rommel would fight a numerically superior force in a brutal, head-to-head battle.  There would be no flanks to turn this time.

The First Battle of El Alamein didn’t start well either for the Axis on July 1st.  The 90th Light Infantry Division, whose mission was to clear the coastal road, wandered off and found themselves pinned against a South African division.  The main lines of attack, led (as always) by Panzer divisions, spent most of the first day under air assault by both British planes and desert storms.  By the time they made their target destination of Deir el Abyad, the 18th Indian Infantry Brigade had already hunkered down with their 25-pound, heavy artillery guns.  Fierce fighting into the night gave the Afrika Korps the ground but at a high price – only 37 tanks remained.

The 8.8cm FlaK gun: the German transformation of an anti-aircraft weapon into an anti-tank gun was key in the early North African Axis successes

While the next two days were a mix of battles without a clear front line, the coastal road necessary for the Axis advance remained in British hands.  Sensing that the offensive was stalling, Rommel pulled back armored units from the desert in an attempt to shore up the 90th Light Infantry’s hard fighting.  It had no effect.

Auchinleck too had a sense of the direction of the fight and sent the New Zealand 2nd Division along with the Indian 5th to outflank and surround the German 90th Light Infantry.  They ran head-long into the Italian Ariete Armored Division.  The Italians foiled the effort to surround the 90th Light Infantry, but at a cost – only 5 of their tanks remained.  By July 3rd, the entire Afrika Korps had at best 26 tanks left.  The dream of bathing in the Nile was dead – for now.

The View at the Time: El Alamein was viewed, at best, as a bloody stalemate. Few understood that Rommel had reached the end of his supply line. The Nile was no longer a goal but the state of mind of the Afrika Korps

In truth, both sides were exhausted.  The British had been on the run for weeks and the Axis had few offensive options left.  The tank and infantry battles ceased.  The battle of supplies started.

Rommel had been receiving 34,000 short tons of supplies a month back in May of 1942.  With naval patrols hitting Italian shipping and British bombers attacking his supply lines, Rommel’s troops were down to 5,000 short tons by the end of June.  Vehicles too were in short supply.  4,000 had made it to Libya and the front in May.  400 made it in June.  In contrast, not only were the British getting new supplies every day, but within a week, two new Indian Brigades and a new Australian Division were now at El Alamein.

Renewed fighting on July 8th reflected the imbalance.  Depleted Panzer groups mostly counter-attacked, trying to stop Australian units from overrunning the center of the line.  Despite heavy Australian tank losses (as much as 50%), within a week of fighting, the Germans had suffered nearly 6,000 casualties and lost Signals Intercept Company 621.  The company, a forward unit charged with picking up British radio signals and other intelligence, had been Rommel’s strategic ace-in-the-hole.  By the middle of July, Rommel had lost most of his tanks and now his ears and eyes on the front.

"Mancò la fortuna, non il valore" (A failure of fortune, not of valour). A Italian marker at the site of the furthest advance of the Axis armies in Egypt

The tide had turned.  But now the coastal road was no longer blocking an Axis advance but a British one as Auchinleck was determined to destroy Rommel once and for all.  In late July, having now twice tried to push the Axis out of the El Alamein region, Auchinleck launched a furious armored assault with Operation Manhood.  Not only were the Germans expecting the offensive, but not for the first time, British forces got lost in the desert.  Anti-tank defenders got separated from their tank units, some brigades stumbled into mine-fields, and in general communication was poor.  Even with having told Berlin that “the situation is critical in the extreme”, Rommel was able to counter the attack, causing 1,000 British and Australian casualties for no gain.  Rommel would not be in Cairo but nor would Auchinleck be in Tripoli anytime soon.

But how had the British been unable to defeat Rommel even after his forces had suffered terrible losses?  Largely it was about coordination.  British units simply hadn’t been trained well enough for joint aerial, infantry and armored action.  But the terrain too hurt the British once the tables had been turned.  Like Thermopylae, the battles were contained on narrow ground and the defenders had plenty of time to prepare.  El Alamein’s natural defenses bled the fight out of the Axis and returned the favor to the British.

The cost of battle: at least 23,000 British & German troops were killed or wounded at El Alamein. Italian deaths are unknown but considerable

The significance of the First Battle of El Alamein was lost to the British Command in London.  Claude Auchinleck might have stopped Rommel and saved the critical shipping artery of the Suez Canal, but he had done so at a frightening loss of men and material against a smaller force.  Nevermind that thus far Auchinleck had been the only commander of any nation to beat Rommel, “The Auk” was seen as a command liability.  Auchinleck was offered a revised C-in-C command for Persia and Iraq (the Middle Eastern Command was now split in two, with Egypt and Libya a separate office) but turned it down.  He would resurface by 1943 in India in a similar role and was credited, in part, in changing British fortunes in the Indian/Burmese theater of operations.

To replace Auchinleck, British Command chose Gen. William Gott – a corps commander with excellent tank skills.  But Gott never took command.  On route, his plane was attacked and Gott was killed instantly by a Messerschmitt round through the heart.  Instead, a Home Defence Lt. General by the name of Bernard Montgomery was named the new C-in-C of the Middle Eastern Front.

Montgomery would get his own chance at Rommel at El Alamein that fall and the end result would be quite different.