Joe Doakes from Como Park writes in re an incident over the weekend – a former semi-pro defensive end tackled an armed robber outside a Superamerica in Rogers:

Store customer sees crime about to happen, takes prompt action to stop robbery and capture suspect while police officer stands around watching, gets snotty remark from Chief of Police.

Lucky he didn’t get arrested for interfering with the officer’s observations, I suppose. Still, it’s annoying. The Chief could have said “Hey, thanks for the assist, man, we’ll take it from here; but for all you folks listening, don’t try this at home . . . unless you’re as big as my friend, here [big grin and fake punch in the shoulder].” That would have been classy. Now, the Chief just looks prissy. Jerk.

On the one hand, I’m sure there’s a liability issue involved; some nutcase will no doubt sue a police chief that is seen to encourage “vigilantism”.

On the other? I’m a fire-breathing law-and-order libertarian/conservative -and I’m getting more than a little concerned about the quality of the relationship between the police and the people.

It’s been my theory for a long time that liberals in Minnesota are incapable of carrying on an informed civil debate because in places like the Twin Cities – and in some careers, all of Minnesota – liberals can, or at least could until recently, go an entire lifetime without encountering a conservative thought.

From the left-safe, feminized public school system, through the eliminationist “progressive” ghetto of the university system, a young person can spend the first 20-odd years of their life without ever encountering a conservative opinion on a level deeper than a progressive’s cliche.  If they go into a career dominated by the left – teaching, academia, journalism, civil service work – and/or live in a place dominated by the left, like New York, Minneapolis or Madison, they can carry that ignorance well into middle age.

David French at The Corner has a similar, complementary observation; his thesis, that liberals in major liberal centers are much more prone to speaking and acting out of incivility and hatred, comes from the lack of diversity in these liberal centers:

The heartland of American leftism is less intellectually diverse than any large conservative community in the United States. The entire cities of New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. are less politically diverse than your average Evangelical megachurch.

Don’t believe me? In 2008, McCain/Palin won 73 percent of the Evangelical/born-again vote. By contrast, San Francisco gave Obama/Biden 84 percent of its votes. All the boroughs of New York City (except Staten Island) went for Obama by wider margins than 73 percent, with Manhattan giving Obama 85 percent of its votes. There were similar numbers for Philadelphia and Washington D.C. In other words, these major American cultural centers are less diverse than churches entirely filled with self-selecting populations of Bible-believing Christians. Leftists have greater group solidarity than Christians.

French quotes that noted liberal tool Cass Sunstein, in a Harvard Law Review article called “The Law of Group Polarization”:

 In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming. This general phenomenon — group polarization – has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, “radicalization,” cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism, and tribalism.

Which explains everything from Pauline Kael to Mike Malloy.

This next graf deserves to be a quote of the day somewhere:

 It is a truism of American life that unless a conservative turns off all technology, grabs a gun and a dog, and heads for the hills, he will be exposed to an avalanche of liberal thought and ideas — in education, television, movies, and the Internet. Liberals, by contrast, can and often do live lives isolated from conservative thought, and their ignorance of our ideas is starting to show.

I was very left-of-center when I was a kid; chalk it up to my family.  But it was in a place where, once I got out of the house, conservatism was everywhere.  I never had the luxury of thinking that my point of view was the only point of view – indeed, I converted to conservatism in college, largely due to the efforts of an English professor, of all things.

I was apparently lucky:

 I was first exposed to liberal ignorance of conservatism way back in 1991. I was a new law student and had just walked out of a class with my ears still ringing from the boos, hisses, and jeers at my conservative arguments. A classmate came up to me and said, “I wish they’d let you speak. I’d never heard anything like what you were saying and wanted to hear more.”

I was shocked. I was merely making a standard conservative argument — breaking no new ideological ground. “You’ve never heard an argument like that? Where did you go to college?”

“Princeton.”

Some liberal once told me: “Ignorance breeds hate.” I couldn’t agree more.

And if you’re a conservative in a place like, well, Wisconsin, you don’t need this explained.

Julian Assange waxes poetic about his “ordeal” in London, ending with an impassioned demand for…well, everyone to leave him and his website alone:

He also urged the American government and US President Barack Obama to “do the right thing” and for officials to “renounce its witch hunt against Wikileaks”. He also urged them to drop their “war on whistleblowers”.

He added: “The United States must dissolve its FBI investigation. The United States must vow that it will not seek to prosecute our staff, or our supporters.

“The United States must pledge before the world that it will not pursue journalists for shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful.

“There must be no foolish talk about prosecuting any media organisations. The US administration’s war on whistleblowers must end.

“There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”

I actually don’t have much of an opinion about the leaks that got Assange into this situation – the diplomatic traffic that was allegedly leaked to Wikileaks by Private Bradley Manning.

But I don’t give a whole lot of credit to Wikileaks as journalism.  Their first real introduction to Minnesotans was their publishing, in 2008, names and credit card information gotten from a hacking attack on Norm Coleman’s campaign site.

While the “journalistic” community painted Assange’s toenails about the attack, this was not “journalism”; it was political bullying and browbeating.

And I hope Assange does, in fact, wind up in jail, if only over that episode.

It started almost as a joke.  Two years ago, as I watched the Alliance for a Better Minnesota run Governor Dayton’s campaign (let’s be honest) behind a set of memes that a modestly intelligent junior high kid could have shredded, I observed that the Dems seemed to be basing their campaign on winning over “Low-Information Voters” – at its most charitable, people whose entire political worldview is shaped by soundbites, chanting points and slogans.

But the idea that the Democrats realize that the (let’s be charitable here) not-very-well-informed are the present, if not the future, of the Democrat and DFL parties started to gel earlier this election cycle, as the Dems’ array of chanting-point-bots lined up, one after the other, behind the ideas that…:

• There’s a Republican “war on women”
• That Medicare is fine.  Juuuuust fine
• There there is no voter fraud problem
• The Tea Party is violent
• The Koch Brothers and Grover Nordquist are conservatism’s puppetmasters
• That the economy is really picking up speed.  (“Just look at that Dow Jones!” bellow leftybloggers who haven’t wiped the spit off their monitors from when they were writing about “The 1%” and “The Banksters!”.

Still, it seemed so simplistic.

I said “Seemed”.  Because the Obama campaign has just made it official.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talkradio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• Ed should be back today.  We’ll be talking polling, Medicare, and Gauthier, among other things.
• Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – is on from 1-3 on Sunday.
• The King Banaian Show! – King is on AM1570, Business Radio for the Twin Cities!  Join him from 9-11 every Saturday!

(All times Central)

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

• AM1280 in the Metro
• streaming at AM1280’s Website,
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• UStream video and chat (at HotAir.com or at UStream) (I don’t think it’ll happen this week)
• New – send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• Podcasts are now available on the AM1280 page!  (Ed and I are #2 – Brad is #3).
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Normally, with stories like that of Duluth-area DFL state Rep. Kerry Gauthier – who was caught en flagrante Clinton with a 17 year old outside a Duluth rest stop a few weeks ago – I’d say “the double standards astounds me”; the media have been largely, er, keeping their hands off the story.

There’s a notable exception; the Duluth News-Trib is not amused at the extreme paucity of information from the cops in re this case, including information they are required by law to release:

As Stahl reports, the Minnesota State Patrol and Duluth police at first flat-out denied a request by the News Tribune for public information pertaining to the “suspicious activity” at the rest stop. They refused even though Minnesota law clearly requires certain information on calls made to the police for service be made public. That includes the date and time of a call, the agencies involved, the nature of the request for police, and witnesses to the incident. The Minnesota Government Data Practices Act also states that agencies should release “a brief factual reconstruction of events associated with” a police call.

After the News Tribune informed the agencies what records should be public under state law, some information was released. But only details on the time, date and place of the call were released. All the newspaper — and the public, by extension — was told with regard to the reason for the police response was “suspicious activity.” That’s hardly “a brief factual reconstruction.” The State Patrol and the city of Duluth then passed the buck to the other with regard to who should release such a reconstruction.

Minnesota mainstream media (the News-Trib excepted) observes double-standard favoring DFLers; dog sniffs dog.  As old as our 10,000 lakes.  Cops – who were happy to blather about, say, Rep. Hackbarth, down to their personal opinions, when no personal contact, much less crime, occurred – are keeping mum about a favored DFLer.

Nothing astounding.

What is astounding?  A 56 year old guy at a Swap Meat with a 17 year old apparently does not violate Minnesota’s statutory rape laws.

Well, that didn’t take long.  It’s Eric Boehlert, from Media Matters – George Soros’ attack-PR shop – on Twitter. Emphasis added to keep me from puking:

@EricBoehlert #kindalame former Navy SEALs don’t have guts to admit they’re running a GOP, anti-Obama campaign; http://nyti.ms/N2nYYj

I think the “anti-Obama” bit is pretty obvious.  As is the alternative to Obama.

As to the guts?

Just for a fun Friday diversion, go through this article.

1. Substitute all references to “the coast” to “Minneapolis and Saint Paul”
2. Change all references to “The interior” to “The Iron Range”
3. Change the high-speed rail references to “Minneapolis to Duluth or Rochester” or whatever the current pipe dream is.
4. Change the other California references to Minnesota ones.
5. Save it away in case the DFL winds up with a couple of years of majorities with a sitting DFL governor.

You’ll save some time.  You’ll need it for job-hunting.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“Ask not what your country can do for you.  Ask what you can do for your country!” – John F. Kennedy

“Thank Goddess – Adults having sex with 17 year olds is vaguely technically legal in Minnesota!” – every DFLer in Duluth.

Remember back in 2004? When a bunch of Navy Vietnam vets dared criticize the account their former commander, Senator and former Lieutenant (JG) John Kerry, gave of his time in Vietnam, and were rewarded with a scabrous campaign of character assassination by the left’s plutocracy that has entered the lexicon – “swiftboating” – as a synonym for “we don’t care what you say, you must not attack our candidate in any way”.

So I’m dying to see how the Dems try to defame these guys:

Maybe they’ll demand to see the SEALs’ income tax returns?

“They wanna put y’all in BUD/S”?

There were 321 war crimes committed by the Nazis in World War 2.

“Nonsense”, you say.  “321 would have been a slow week at Dachau, or an off-day at Auschwitz.  That figure is absurd to the point of being a form of Holocaust denial!”

“Nonsense”, one might respond.  “There were a total of 321 convictions for war crimes at the end of the war.  Thus, there were 321 war crimes!”

Absurd, huh?

Counting convictions doesn’t measure the extent of a crime, or any other activity.  At most, a count of convictions measures the number of people suspected, investigated, arrested, indicted, tried and then convicted for one or more activities.

Joe Doakes of Como Park notes the similar absurdity of measuring election issues by counting convictions:

Dog Gone and I have been chatting at Penigma (yes, I know I said I would quit; it was a slip but really, I can quit any time I want).

Hi, Joe.

 She’s convinced voting irregularities are not widespread because convictions are not widespread. There were only 26 felony-level convictions as of 2010 and that’s insignificant in an election with 2.9 million votes cast.

By that standard, rape is rare because there are few convictions. DUI is a minor nuisance because everybody pleads to Reckless Driving so there are few convictions for DUI.

And as some lefties claimed a few years ago, North Dakota was the most corrupt state because it had the highest convictions-per-capita rate for corruption.

And nobody was killed in the Sikh temple in Milwaukee – because nobody has been convicted and with the shooter dead, nobody ever will be. No conviction, no murder. Those six bodies in the Coroner’s Office? They’re just resting (Sikh prefer kipping on their backs).

Except . . . there are six dead bodies lying on slabs. It really happened. Whether or not somebody gets convicted, those six people are still dead.

Counting murder convictions is not the best way to count murders victims. The best way to count murder victims is to count dead bodies left by murderers. Similarly, the best way to count illegal votes is to count votes cast by ineligible persons, not convictions for illegal voting.

The County Attorneys surveyed in 2010 confirmed they investigated 1,531 cases of illegal voting. They know the votes were cast. They suspect the people casting them shouldn’t have, which is why they were investigated. Some cases were false-positives so they aren’t a problem. The rest – whether or not the prosecutor chose to file charges – are votes that everyone agrees should never have been cast. But they were cast and counted into the 321 [!!! – Ed.] vote total that put Franken over the top. And Franken was the 60th vote in the Senate needed to make Obamacare filibuster-proof.

Illegal voting doesn’t have to be widespread to be a problem – a small number of targeted crimes can change a nation. That’s why it’s important.

Seriously, is that so hard to understand?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Because understanding it would negate a narrative that I suspect the DFL has spent years and millions building.

And no, we don’t have a conviction to prove that.

Yet.

One of the Twin Cities most utterly respected leftybloggers [1] had some questions about my traffic.  I said I got about 2,500 pageviews a day (I actually misspoke and said “visits”, but I meant page views, since visits are fairly meaningless – not that I don’t appreciate each and every one of them.

OK, actually it wasn’t “questions” – he claimed I was inflating my numbers.

So here’s a screenshot from this month’s logs:

I haven’t actually looked at my server logs in a year and a half, maybe two; I actually am doing about twice as well as I thought, with a recent swerve into much much better than I thought.

Not that it matters that much to me; I’d do the same blog if I got five visits a day.  Just saying.

Again, apropos not much.

(more…)

I’m not going to get into the politics of the shooting at the Family Research Council headquarters.

Neither are the leftymedia.  In stark contrast to…

• the Aurora shooting, where NBC’s Brian Ross falsely identified shooter Holmes as a Tea Party organizer
• the Tucson massacre, where the blood hadn’t dried before the leftymedia gravely blamed it all on Sarah Palin’s rhetoric
• The Discovery Network incident, in which a nutcase with a gun and a bomb took over the network’s lobby.  It was blamed on conservatives, until it turned out James Jay Lee was a Zero Population Growth advocate inspired by Obama’s “Science Czar” John Holgren (at which point the story disappeared)
• the Pentagon Subway shooting, which the left and media (ptr) blamed on the Tea Party until it turned out John Patrick Bedell was a lefty (at which point the story disappeared)
• the Austin, TX airplane crash, in which a lone pilot crashed a light plane into the skyscraper housing the Austin, Texas IRS office.  Blamed, naturally, on the Tea Party, until it got out that Joseph Stack was an anti-Bush zealot (at which point the story disappeared)
• The death of Bill Sparkman, which the media hurried to pin on Michele Bachmann, until it turned out he was a lefty too (at which point the story disappeared)

…the media are being very circumspect about politicizing the incident.

Why, maybe they’ve learned their lesson!

Or maybe they are, as always, serving the narrative, if they bothered to note the incident at all.

After his little allusion to slavery, Biden’s next campaign speeches will, I predict, eventually include:

“If we’re going to beat the GOP hate machine, we’re going to have to step on the gas.  Before the Republicans turn on the gas.  Zyklon B” – speech to Jewish Federations of America convention.

“Beating the GOP hate machine is going to involve digging deep. Like when you’re trying to exhume an unidentified corpse from a crime scene” – remarks the Jacob Wetterling Foundation

“If Romney thinks he can balance the budget without raising taxes, he’s all wet.  Like you will be after he pushes you across the Rio Grande” – speech to Latino Democrat Association gathering.

Remember when they called Dan Quayle dumb?

No huge surprises in the primaries yesterday – at least not at the polls.

But the big news in my book?  The Strib’s poison-pen endorsements went 1 out of 3, with an asterisk on that “1”.

In the northeast subs, Karin Housley beat Eric Langness despite getting a snide, snotty, insincere little pseudo-endorsement from the Strib that served mostly as a free ad for the DFL candidate, wannabe professional politician Julie Bunn.   Hopefully Housley will go on to earn much tut-tutting from the Strib’s editorial board (or, let’s be honest, Lori Sturdevant, who seems to set the board’s political barometer).

But it was in the western subs that the Strib truly came a’cropper.

In HD33B, Tea Party activists (“community organizer”? Hmmm) Cindy Pugh pummeled career Representative Steve Smith by more than 2:1 – notwithstanding that the Strib gave Smith a glowing endorsement.  Glowing – but hardly surprising; while Smith had a few conservative issues (he was a solid Second Amendment supporter and had a Taxpayers League scorecard not too out of line with many GOP leaders), the DFL could count on him to vex the conservative caucus on some key issues.  That, of course, is why the Strib endorsed him.

That race was never really in doubt; Pugh had a huge lead from time the first returns came in.

The nail-biter came in Senate District 33.  Connie Doepke – the former Representative who decided to buck the SD33 Republicans’ endorsement of Dave Osmek – jumped out to an early lead, which became the only real cliff-hanger of the evening.  With every wave of precincts that came in, Osmek whittled away at Doepke’s lead, until close to 11PM, when with three precincts to go Osmek took the lead.  The final margin was 107 votes in favor of Osmek.

As Buckley once said, you should vote for the most conservative candidate who can win.  Both Pugh and Osmek are running in a district that is solidly Republican – something like plus 22, if I recall correctly.  I suspect they’ll both win comfortably.

Housley faces a tougher race; the northeast subs of Saint Paul are just about neutral, and the media will be out to try to re-install Bunn.  Housley will need some help.

To: Mitt Romney
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Budget Talk

Dear Governor Romney,

The next time the media asks you “what’s the difference between your budget and the Ryan budget”, you need to response “unlike the Obama budget, it exists”.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Liberals (Dog Gone springs to mind) are fond of citing a 2010 study by the Minnesota County Attorneys saying voter fraud isn’t a problem. Here it is for your reading pleasure.

It wasn’t a study by the County Attorneys. It was a study by two anti-Voter-ID groups who sent a one-page survey to County Attorneys then “summarized” the results.

County Attorneys reported 1,531 investigations of felony-level illegal voting in the Coleman-Franken election. 66% of those investigations resulted in Not Chargeable decisions, so 1,010 cases were dropped. Of those dropped cases, between 50-80% were dropped because the state couldn’t prove the felon knowingly voted illegally. Apparently, felons think they can vote despite the law saying their conviction bars them, so we let them!

Of the remaining 24% of investigations that had been completed and charged (10% remained incomplete at the time of the survey), the survey said:

outcomes were nearly evenly distributed in the following categories: dismissed due to lack of evidence; heard in court; found guilty; and found to commit election fraud

So by my math, that’s 1531 cases x 90% complete = 1377 complete x 66% Not Chargeable = 909 Not Chargeable and 468 Charged -:- 4 = 117 in each category = 117 per category x 2 categories of convictions = about 234 total convictions.

Liberals like to claim that a mere 234 convictions for felony voting out of 2.9 million votes case means there is no real problem with voter fraud. Since there is no real problem, conservatives who push Voter ID must have some hidden agenda. Hey, felons are mostly Blacks, aren’t they? And if felons can’t vote, that law falls disproportionately on Blacks. Conservatives must hate Blacks! That’s it – this whole Voter ID thing is just cover for racisssss laws.

Except . . . we know for certain there were 1,531 illegal votes that should never have been counted . . . but they were. How many felons voted for the Republican instead of the Democrat? Half? Not likely. Far more likely that the disproportionately Black felon population voted like the Black non-felon population. In 2008, with Barak Obama at the top of the Democrat ticket, it’s far more likely that the vast majority of felons voted for Franken.

Counting convictions is the wrong measuring stick. Count illegal votes instead. Take 1/3 of those 1531 felon votes off Coleman’s pile (510) and 2/3 off Franken’s pile (1021) and suddenly, Franken’s 312 win becomes a 199 loss.

Felons for Franken, indeed.

Now, let’s talk about another thing that conservatives worry about but Liberals don’t. In that same election, there were 2,000 votes cast by Dead people, which is plainly impossible and should not have been counted . . . but they were. Whose pile should they come off? Which party historically depends on the “dead vote” to win elections?

Headlines are easy. Math is hard. Democrats know that which is why they incessantly confuse the issue. That’s why this report matters.

Felons for Franken. Stiffs for Stuart Smalley. Fair elections. Pick one.

That’s the big fallacy of the status’ quo’s defenders; it defends on a bit of legal circular logic.  They only count convictions – but convictions are driven down by the fact that “I didn’t know” is a defense in the vast majority of ineligible voter cases.  And they ignore the dead voters, and the thousands of provisional ID cards that are returned to the SOS with “nobody at the address”, and the absurdly false addresses (nine people listed a small town laundromat as “home”) – because there are no convictions.  And there never can be.  Because the system doesn’t find them.  So there can never be any. And the wheel goes ’round.

They call him The Seeker

After 46 years in politics, will Wisconsin’s electorate ask of Tommy Thompson who are you?

To appropriate Israeli politician Abba Eban’s historic quote about the Palestinians, it can be said that former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

The father of welfare reform and four-time gubernatorial winner in a state whose political environment was more blue than purple at the time, Thompson seemed like he was destined to advance on the national stage.  A presidential run in 1996 or 2000 would not have seemed a far-fetched idea.  Instead, Thompson made a quixotic bid in 2008.  Likewise, Thompson could have easily sought the U.S. Senate back home, with even conservatives hoping he’d run as recently as 2006 or 2010.  Instead, at 70 years of age, Thompson has bet on a political return after a 14 year electoral absence.

And for the moment, it’s a bet that Thompson is winning.  Despite an expensive and bruising primary against three other strong candidates, Thompson narrowly emerged the victor.  But after facing a self-funding primary opponent in Eric Hovde, Thompson enters the general election with a $3 million to $350,000 deficit against Democrat Tammy Baldwin.  Worse for Thompson, the double-digit polling lead he held as recently as May has turned into what Real Clear Politics averages out to basically a tie.  And this against the most liberal member of the House of Representatives according to National Journal‘s Vote Rankings.  Baldwin isn’t merely blue, she’s downright phthalo.

Some of the factors weighing down Thompson’s numbers are easy enough to spot.  Thompson has been attacked from the Right for more than a year – the Club for Growth was airing anti-Thompson ads as far back as August of 2011 and spent $1.7 million on the race.  The result may not have been a Thompson primary loss, but the ads definitely turned Thompson’s approval/disapproval numbers upside down, 43% to 39%.  And Baldwin hasn’t been simply waiting for the Republican primary to end to start her campaign as she’s already spent $4.6 million preparing the November battlefield.

But the largest factor holding back Thompson is himself.  A man who first came into office in 1966 is poorly set to capture the zeitgeist of an electorate that has tired of career politicians.  And while Wisconsin voters are less inclined to vote Democrat, as was the case in 1986 when Thompson was elected governor, they’ve also become less inclined to cross party lines in their voting habits.  Thompson’s blue-collar appeal that helped him win in union strongholds like La Crosse or Green Bay doesn’t mean as much when union households (or any other reliable Democrat constituency) will no longer even consider voting for someone with an ‘R’ next to their name.

None of this is to suggest Thompson can’t win.  In fact, he may already be slightly ahead as a Marquette poll has him up 5%.  That’s a far cry for a former governor whose lowest re-election percentage was 58% and still a distance away from a race that looked in the bag merely months ago.

It’s not the size of the gaffe that counts, it’s the motion of the back-pedaling

Joe Biden isn’t known for subtext – just text.

While the national media has treated Biden as something between a 21st Century Spiro Agnew and that crazy uncle who overstays his welcome during the holidays, Republicans have (dare I say?) celebrated Joe’s Bidenisms as occasional forays into the truth.  If Barack Obama represents the modern Democratic Party’s super ego, Biden represents it’s id – the innate instinctive impulses and primary processes.

All of which makes Joe’s latest bombast not terribly surprising:

Campaigning in southern Virginia on Tuesday, Vice President Biden told an audience that Mitt Romney’s approach to regulating the financial industry will “put y’all back in chains,” a remark that triggered a flurry of Republican criticism, including a sharp rebuke from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

“Look at their budget and what they’re proposing,” Biden said. “Romney wants to let the – he said in the first hundred days, he is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They are going to put y’all back in chains.”

Biden made the comments at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in Danville, where he kicked off a two-day campaign tour of southern and southwestern Virginia. He spoke before what appeared to be a racially varied audience of 900 people, and one prominent Republican suggested that his language could be interpreted as racially divisive.

The fallout fell on equally predictable lines.  The Romney camp tweeted that the comments were “outrageous” and reporters spent the afternoon filing bylines with stories repeating the VP’s gaffe.  If anything didn’t go according to script, it was the Democrat response – refusing to acknowledge any error in judgement and actually doubling down on the comment.  Biden’s attempt at “clarifying” his words still repeated the claim that Romney/Ryan would “shackle” the middle class.

Are Biden’s comments “outrageous”?  No, not by comparison to the media’s attempt to quasi-defend them by providing the sort of context that often seems to be missing from similar Republican errors.  Soledad O’Brien led off Anderson Cooper’s 360 by looping numerous Republican officials using the term “unshackle” (ergo, Biden was justified).  Politico decried the “death of the high-minded campaign” and despite having only one negative Romney example (in which he hit Biden for a 2007 comment about coal killing more Americans than terrorists), the website placed cover page photos of both contenders, suggesting that both camps have equally contributed to the debasing of the campaign.

Such defenders of context were no where to be found just days ago when Mitt Romney’s factual ad hitting Obama’s new welfare policies had politicos and pundits seeing racial politics.  Dan Milbank even unleashed a column that Romney’s ad “incites bigotry.”  Perhaps a conservative commentator will rush to pen a piece that explains how Biden’s comments were an attempt at “dog whistle” politics to African-American voters that not only will get published in a major newspaper but go by unchallenged by the Praetorian Guard of the Old Media.  But I wouldn’t suggest anyone hold their breath.

The issue shouldn’t be whether or not Joe Biden said something racial but that its become an acceptable part of the political discourse to accuse your opponents of putting voters in a form of bondage that doesn’t involve a safe word.  Such a mangled attempt to turn a phrase may pass for the talking heads at MSNBC or on whatever ham radio frequency that Air America continues broadcasting from, but without negative consequences, politicians will continue to feel free to double down on the harshest language possible.

It’s 8PM as I write this, and I’ll be covering the primary here and over on Twitter.

8:05:  Just waiting for results at the SOS website.  And waiting.

8:07:  And waiting.

8:12:  And waiting.

8:15:  And finally a result.  Sort of.  Lyle Koenen has two votes over Larry Rice in SD17.  That is two, as in 2 votes.  For the privilege of getting clobbered by Joe Gimse this fall.

8:23:  14 vote lead for Connie Doepke in SD33 with about 4% reporting.  Gonna be a long night.

8:30:  With about 10% of the votes in, Cindy Pugh beating Steve Smith 2:1 or more.

8:40:  No votes in from CD8 yet.  CD1 has 4% in, Alan Quist up by about ten.

9:07:  Big surge of votes for Osmek in SD33; he went from a five point deficit to well under a point.  Fingers crossed.   Pugh WAY up.

9:26:  Pugh’s been called the winner in HD33B.  She hammered Steve Smith by better than 2:1.  The west is red!  At the moment,with a little over 20% reporting, Osmek is behind by 35 votes.  He’s been picking up ground all evening (for the last hour and a half, anyway).

9:54: Cliff-hanger time.  Three precincts to go in SD33, Osmek behind by 12 votes.  He’s been gaining a few votes with every precinct all night; will he pull this out?  And will Doepke go for the recount if he does?  Looks like Quist is going to tip Parry.

10:36:  Still waiting on those last three precincts.  Going to bed.  This liveblog is over.  Good luck, Dave!

On the one hand, Fareed Zakaria – the perpetually hapless hack for the left – has been suspended for plagiarism.

On the other hand?  At least when he plagiarizes, he has a chance of sounding smart.

On his dim little CNN show a few weeks back, in the immediate aftermath of the Aurora shooting, Zakaria noted perfunctorily that (and i’m paraphrasing closely here) “while some people note that there might be a link between psychology and gun violence, you are entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts; it’s all about the availability of guns”.

In so doing, he ignored, well, the facts:

• Crime is broadly down nationwide – a drop that has closely paralleled the skyrocketing sales in guns.
• Notwithstanding the nationwide trend, violence is steady to up in places with the tightest gun control – Chicago and DC.
• On the other hand, it’s been generally down in New York, which has gun laws that Benito Mussolini would love.
• On the other hand, crime is lower still in many places with gun-friendly shall-issue laws…
• …and plenty high in other places with shall-issue laws, like the Deep South, with a culture of violence that started long before the age of civilian firearms (where crime is well above the national average, but has also fallen faster than the national average).
• Even in areas that are ostensibly identical, violent crime rates vary wildly.  Minneapolis and Saint Paul are part of the same metro area; by state statute, they have identical gun laws.  And yet Minneapolis’ murder and violent crime rates are a dramatically – as in, 50% – higher than in Saint Paul.

So when Zakaria – one of the most noxious anti-Second Amendment orcs there is – says “you’re not entitled to your own facts”, what he really means is “ignore the facts that gut the chanting point I’m repeating”.

Good riddance.

As John Edwards said, there are two Americas; an America that knows we need to unleash the economy and reform entitlements, and the part that plans to vote for Barack Obama.

But how to describe those two Americas?

• “Deadliest Catch America” vs. “Keeping Up With The Kardashians America?”
• “Producer America” vs. “Consumer America”?
• “Mom and Dad America” vs. “Santa Claus America”
• “Pack Mule America” vs. “Unicorn America”

I listened to a news item on the radio the other night.  In the middle of a couple of DFLers talking about their primary contest today, the radio reporter inserted a clip of Minnesota GOP chairman Pat Shortridge commenting on the state of the DFL.

“It doesn’t matter who they run”, Shortridge said, “It’s a contest between Extremer and Extreme-est”.

And I thought – “is this really news?  Taking time out from a story about a DFL primary for a GOP official to bag on the DFL?  That’s not news.  That’s not Man Bites Dog.  That’s not even Dog Bites Man.  Party chairs bagging on the opposition is Dog Sniffs Dog”.

Thats’ what I thought.

Or I would have – had it happened.

But there was no radio story about Pat Shortridge bagging on the DFL, dropped incongruously into the middle of a story about a couple of primary races.

That’d be weird, wouldn’t it?

Naturally, it doesn’t end there.  I said there was no story including an incongruous quote of Pat Shortridge bagging on the DFL in the middle of a story about a DFL primary.

But for some reason, Tim Pugmire, of Minnesota Public Radio News – whose putative motto is “No Rant, No Slant” – in the middle of a story about the GOP primaries in the west Metro, opted to drop in a quote from MInnesota DFL chair Ken Martin about the nature of the GOP races:

Democrats offer a much different theory.

“What you’re seeing on the Republican side right now is truly a civil war, where you have an already pretty far right Republican party being challenged by people even more to the right who feels those Republicans haven’t done a good enough job being conservative up at the Capitol,” said Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota DFL Party.

So why is the opinion of Ken Martin – who was imposed on the DFL by Alida Messinger to cut out the intellectual middleman – of any news value in the middle of a story about a GOP primary race?  Is he offering any opinion that would surprise one about a GOP primary?  Does his insight – “Republicans are teh extreem!” – surprse anyone?  Again – it’s not news.  It’s dog licks dog.

Now, had Martin had said “I believe this race in face defines the Minnesota mainstream”, that would have been news.  Along with the next week’s story, “Ken Martin found dead in ditch with Alida Messinger’s stiletto marks on his throat and electrical burns on his genitals.”

But as it is, what Pugmire gave us was a freebie DFL mention which was of no news value, but certainly made for a nifty little free ad.

Democrats who unctuously and tiresomely lectured us that “there are no Death Panels” (there are; it’s called Case Management) will smugly declare “Paul Ryan wants to kill Grandma” (whereas Ryan’s plan is intended someone can take care of Grandma – and Grandpa – after 2024).

Jim Geraghty goes into details, not that you really need them.

The Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance has released its candidate scorecard.

Be advised that anyone that didn’t return their scorecard gets an “F*”, based on the assumption that people who don’t return questionnaires are trying to hide their sentiments until after election time.  I think that may have been a fair assumption ten years ago; In the case of many Republican candidates – for instances, District 65’s Senate and both House candidates – I think it’s more a matter of pro-gun libertarians not wanting to hand the DFL another cheap chanting point in a tough area.

And let’s give credit where it’s due; while I’ve railed against Steve Smith’s record in many areas, he’s been a solid Second Amendment vote, although I don’t see Cindy Pugh being any less a supporter.

At any rate, there you go.  Vote accordingly.