Here’s my biennial tradition – 100 reasons I’m voting for the Republicans, not the Democrats.

But this year, I’m not focusing just on the President.

Dan Lipp, HD65A

100. Because Dan’s a regular working guy from the neighborhood.

99. Dan is a Liberty guy.  He realizes, as all the smart ones do, that it’s not only through less government, but through rolling back some of the government we have, that this nation has any chance of prospering.

98. And the last thing the Midway needs is more DFL professional politicians telling us what regular working guys from the neighborhood need.

97. Because Rena Moran is one of those professional politicians…

96. …and one of the most extreme people in the Minnesota House.  Nothing useful will get done while her party is even close to influence.  And so I’ll be voting for Dan, and very, very much against Rena Moran.

Rick Karschnia, SD65

95. Because Rick comes from the world of business. And if there’s anything Saint Paul (to say nothing of our idiot legislature) needs, it’s more business people and fewer lawyers and professional career pols.

94. And while there are politicians in Minnesota more “professional” and “career” than DFL incumbent Sandy Pappas, it’s all pretty irrelevant.

93. Because Rick will be a Senator that votes for conservative and libertarian principle, at least conceptually in the mold of the Tea Party freshmen that did such a great job in the 2010-2011 sessions.

92. That stuff I said about Rena Moran being “extreme?”  She’s a a piker compared to Sandy Pappas.  If you look in the dictionary under “smug intransigence”, Sandy gets a two-page spread.

91. I’m voting for Rick and Dan because winning the Minnesota Legislature – keeping majorities in both chambers – will block Mark Dayton’s agenda.

90. Although it’s not Mark Dayton’s agenda.  Mark Dayton is really one of those disembodied brains kept alive in a jar, except he walks more or less under his own power.  But “his” agenda is really that of the unions and far-left plutocrats who own him in every meaningful way.

89. And defending our Legislative majorities will be a huge gut-shot to Dayton’s political future…

88. ….and help ensure he remains a one -term governor.

Tony Hernandez, MN CD4

87. I’m voting for Tony because he’s a Saint Paul guy with rock-solid integrity.

86. And because he’s done a great job of appealing both to liberty voters and conservative voters.

85. Because anyone that plans his wedding in mid-campaign is the kind of multi-tasker that can actually do things in DC.

84. Because his platform is the kind of thing that Americans of all political stripes should be able to agree with.  And that – not some kind of phony cross-aisle gesturing – is the essence of real bipartisanship.

83. And Betty McCollum is all about the empty gesture of bipartisanship…

82. …which doesn’t come close to covering the fact that she is among the most extreme, partisan Reps in the US Congress.

81. Because Tony’s a business guy, while Betty is a professional politician.

80. Because I’d rather have Tony working on writing up a new budget than Betty McCollum.

79. Because the Fourth Congressional District needs better.

78. Because Betty McCollum supported Obamacare, which is sending the health insurance premiums of working Minnesotans through the roof.

77. And because Tony will vote for repeal.

76. Because Betty McCollum supported the Central Corridor, which is gutting business in the Midway…

75. …while Tony knows better than that.

74. Because Tony is an independent thinker…

73…while Betty McCollum is a marionette whose strings are pulled by the Teachers Unions.

72. Because it’s a finger in the eye of all the blow-hard DFL jagoffs who bleat “this is a DFL town!”, as if having a one-party city is something to be proud of.

Kurt Bills, US Senate

71. Because Amy Klobuchar, media meme notwithstanding, is an extreme, partisan liberal.

70. Because a Bills win would give half the the Twin Cities media – which has cashed in much of what passed for its “integrity” to support the daughter of their ol’ buddy Jim Klobuchar – have a collective stroke over the loss.

69. Because Bills is a regular guy.

68. Because Bills is a Liberty candidate…

67…who endorsed Romney – because he realizes perfect IS the enemy of good enough!

66. And the Paulbots gave him holy hell for it.

65. Because for all her palaver, A-Klo is in the left-most third of the US Senate.

64. And this state is no longer a hard-blue state.  We don’t need two “progressives” in Washington; it makes us look stupid.

63. Because Klobuchar belongs to a party that believes you should spend first, and cover it with money exacted from “the rich” and, when that runs out, money borne down from heaven on unicorns.

62. Because the Chinese want you to vote for A-Klo.

61. As does Hugo Chavez.

60. Because I’d rather have Bills confirming our next Supreme Court justice than Klobuchar.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, President and Vice President

59. Because Mitt will crank open the big brass nozzle for domestic energy production.

58.  In so doing, Mitt will actually do the ultimate “green jobs progrlam”.  Here’s how – are you an environmentalist?  Then get used to the idea that “saving the environment’ is something that requires prosperity first and foremost.

57. And at this point in our history, that means “enough energy to fuel a prosperous economy”.

56. MItt gets that.

55. Barack Obama does not.  He believes that direct subsidy of untried technology will accomplish a “green revolution” by sheer brute financial force.  That’s never, ever worked. Ever.

54. Mitt will roll back – not stop, but positively roll back  – the orgy of regulation that Obama has unleashed in the past four years.

53. Obama will make good on his promise to President Medvedev; free of worrying about re-election, he’ll ratched up the war on small business that he started with a bang in the past four years…

52. …which have made the US a terrible place for small business.

51.  Romney will renew the Bush tax cuts.

50. Obama will sunset them – and add in many, many, many more of his own.

49.  Mitt has promised to enact the first cut in discretionary spending since the Reagan Administration – five percent.

48.  Don’t believe him?  See Messrs. Hernandez and Bills, above.  We can force him to make good on the promise (not that I think we’ll need to) – but we’ve gotta control Congress.

47. In fact, Romney will be the first president since Reagan fundamentally disposed to cutting discretionary spending.

46. Obama, naturally, will ratched up discretionary spending.

45.  Romney will put everything on the table – means-tests, raising retirement age, whatever – to reform Medicare and Social Security.

44.  Obama will try to scare people into carrying on with a doomed status quo.

43.  Because Romney will end the user of federal power to browbeat Catholics, Evangelicals and other principled people into paying for federal programs that mortally offend their – our – beliefs.

42. And Obama will supercharge the attack on religion.

41. Romney will end the ratcheting-up of the civil sacrament of abortion.

40. Obama will not.

39.  Obama’s Homeland Security secretary Napolitano has spent four years scapegoating all of the many petty dissidents whose rights are supposedly protected by the Constituition, putting pro-lifers, tax-reform advocates, second-amendment activists, “preppers”, school choice advocates and Tea Partiers on “terrorist” watch lists.

38. Romney is a member of a faith that has been persecuted for its beliefs in the past; I find it highly unlikely that he’ll continue to use the Federal government – especially Homeland Security – to persecute people who dissent from government in good faith.

35. And he damned sure knows “Religious Freedom” isn’t served by forcing religious institutions to pay for things that their beliefs hold morally repulsive;

34. Because Barack Obama has a long history of actively working for gun control.

33.  Because Mitt Romney may not be Ted Nugent, but he’ll get out of the way of the Second Amendment.

32. Because while racism motivates almost none of the opposition to Barack Obama, it motivates a massive amount of his support.

31.  Because of Sonia Sotomayor…

30.  …and Elena Kagan.

29. Because David Breyer is almost 76.

28. Ginsberg?  She’s 80.  And it’d be great to have those two replaced by responsible conservatives for the next 20 or 30 years.

27. And while I know not every Republican-appointed justice has turned out to be a legal originalist (hello, David Freaking Souder), it’s for sure that a John Kerry or Algore appointment would have been worse (and Roberts, as bad as his Obamacare decision was, may have done us a favor via the back door, calling OCare a tax issue rather than a Commerce Clause issue; at least tax issues are legislated rather than litigated).

26. Because Antonin Scalia is 76/

25. And so is Anthony Kennedy.

24. And you know what whomever Obama appoints will be a nightmare for the rest of most of our natural lives.

23. And the thought of both of them being replaced by liberal bobbleheads is too horrific to think of.

22. A Romney administration will treat “separation of powers” as a limit to be observed.

21. For the past four years, Obama has treated it as an obstacle to be breached.

20. Because while our nation needs to re-evaluate its defense strategy and the spending that supports it, we certainly do need a Navy larger than we had in 1917.

19. Because Obama has been shamelessly leaching credit from the SEALs who actually killed Bin Laden, and from the planners and intelligence people who made the mission possible.  Obama does indeed deserve credit for making the call (finally); that credit is paid in full.

18. Because Barack Obama bowed, scraped and deferred to every foreign leader that’d have him (except Queen Elizabeth), and seemed to be looking for more…

17. …and Romney just isn’t going to do that.

What are you doing reading this?

Get to the polls.  And vote.

Once, Democrats.  Just once.

UPDATE:  Welcome PowerLine readers.  Kudos on this one go to “MNCD4 Conservative”, on his eponymous blog.

From MNCD4 Conservative, video of an entire yard-full of GOP signs being stolen:

He’s been documenting a long string of these thefts and vandalism.  Read the whole thing.

Look at the video.  Does it look like kids out vandalizing for fun to you?  About as much as the SEALS that took out Bin Laden looked like yokels shining deer.

MNCD4 Conservative points out that he is one of CD4’s main campaign sign mavens, and that he sees very few Democrat signs vandalized – but many, many GOP ones:

I know opposing readers will say, “but your just ignoring or don’t see the other side”. And it is human nature, that if it doesn’t fit their world view, they tend to force things into the model that “its always the other side..”. Until something comes crashing in to upset the world as they know it. However, I specifically look for, stop, and often repair, every down/defaced sign I see [once I know whose it is and would have permission to do so]. I can only comment that, Pioneer Press articles aside, I have never found one to be other than Vote Yes or Republican when I have stopped. That’s a whole lot of improbability.

 

My project for next election: stake out my election signs, in such a way as I can get names and numbers when – not if – they get destroyed.

One outcome is certain tomorrow – the pollsters will finish last.

Give the pollsters of the 2012 cycle some credit – they’ve managed to straddle the fence, predicting a solid electoral victory for Barack Obama…and potentially a major popular vote win for Mitt Romney.

The top line of most of the recent polls has been easy enough to read.  The Real Clear Politics national average represents a statistical tie as Obama leads by 0.7% but the sheer numbers of polls showing slight edges to Obama in key states has the conventional wisdom pegging the President at somewhere around 290 to 303 electoral votes.  A step drop from 2008 but a large win by comparison to the recent histories of 2004 or 2000.

Yet the crosstabs of almost every pollster suggests a far different outcome as Mitt Romney holds a lead among unaffiliated/independent voters.  And the margins are anything but slight.  Romney leads independent voters by 7% with Fox News’ polling. By 9% with Rasmussen Reports.  12% according to two separate polls by NPR and the New York Times.  16% by Monmouth’s numbers.  And a jaw-dropping 24% by CNN.

The lead isn’t universal – Gallup has Obama up 1% among indies with Politico having a similar result…after deciding they would qualify more indies as Republicans following Romney’s 10% lead just two weeks earlier.  The trendline is obvious.  The question is how much does it matter to win independents?

Conventional wisdom in politics is like conventional wisdom about everything else – it’s right up until the point it’s wrong.  Whereas independent voters have been prized possessions in past elections, suddenly the value of these voters has been called into question:

It’s true that independents are a diverse group. But that’s mostly because the large majority of independents are independents in name only. Research by political scientists on the American electorate has consistently found that the large majority of self-identified independents are “closet partisans” who think and vote much like other partisans. Independent Democrats and independent Republicans have little in common. Moreover, independents with no party preference have a lower rate of turnout than those who lean toward a party and typically make up less than 10% of the electorate. Finally, independents don’t necessarily determine the outcomes of presidential elections; in fact, in all three closely contested presidential elections since 1972, the candidate backed by most independent voters lost.

Let’s look at that last statement in greater detail.

On the surface, it’s 100% correct.  Jerry Ford, John Kerry and George W. Bush all won the independent voter demographic and all three lost the popular vote (although not the election in all three cases).  Bush won indies by 2% and lost by 0.5% in an electorate that was 4% more Democrat than Republican.  Kerry won indies by 2% as well but lost by 3% in a tied partisan affiliation election.  And Ford, amidst a massive movement of Republicans to Independents post-Watergate, won that block by 4%…the largest margin for a losing candidate and done in an electorate with a 15% Democratic advantage.

The trendline here is simple as well – a narrow advantage among independent voters guarantees nothing other than perhaps a close election.  But compare Romney’s margin among indies to past performances.  Obama won indies by 7%.  Clinton won indies, despite an independent candidate on the ballot, by 8% in 1996 and 6% in 1992.  Bush Sr. won by 14% in 1988 and Reagan by 28% and 25% respectively in his two races.

Can Romney win independents and still lose the election?  Of course.  But only if a few other conditions arise.  The electorate has to be strongly Democrat.  Many pollsters are using D+8ish models ala 2008 even as 825,000 voters in eight key battleground states dropped their Democrat registration.  Or Romney could lose a key chunk of Republicans to offset his gains among indies.  That too seems unlikely as Democrats have held voter identification advantages every year since 1972 except in 2002 & 2004 – and the largest Republican advantage was 1% in ’02.

Some have argued that Romney’s lead among independents is simply a reflection of dissatisfied Republicans having left the party but whom will still vote conservatively.  It’s not a bad theory and it’s supported by some evidence.  Gallup has Republicans at 28% and Independents at 38%.  Pew has Republicans at 25% and Independents at 36%.  Yet neither Gallup or Pew reflect such a shift in their presidential polling.  Gallup has Obama up 1% among indies, as previously stated, and Pew has Romney up only 3%.  If Republicans just dropped the ‘R’ from their ID, someone forgot to tell them.

The end result isn’t actually about who wins on Tuesday.  Regardless of the  outcome, most of the pollsters have made a series of startling errors.  Either they’ve completely whiffed on properly defining party IDs within whatever likely voter model they’re using or they can’t accurately identify independent voters as a demographic.  Simply put, the numbers don’t match.  Obama can’t win if he loses the largest party ID block by high single or low double digits.  Conversely, Romney can’t lose if he wins independents by those kinds of margins.

The question in doubt tomorrow isn’t whether the pollsters erred but on which end of the spectrum.  We’ll find out for sure on Tuesday.  The pollsters will have to find out how they went wrong starting on Wednesday.

ADDENDUM:  Over at Mr. Dilettante’s, D pithily surmises the conundrum of the 2012 polls:

One thing will be decided this time — either polling is broken, or the time-honored tradition of reporting and observation is obsolete. It’s a fascinating question to resolve.

…bring a camera.  A smartphone works just fine.  Be on the lookout for irregularities.

Reports are already filtering in from the U of M – students are being encouraged to double-vote (in their home districts and at the U).  It is a fact that the Democrats will cheat; they believe their ends justify their means.

So be watchful.  And report irregularities to the poll-watchers and the Minnesota Majority – don’t go taking the rules into your own hands; you could be wrong, and that’d be embarassing.

But keep an eye peeled.

Stand aside, Gallup and Rasmussen and PPP and SUSA.

It’s time for “Poll In The Dark” – the most prestigious poll in America (that I’ve worked on personally in this cycle.

Put in your predictions; it should be great fun on Wednesday comparing them with reality.

My high school friend Nuke wanted to do something for the GOP this election season.  But he wasn’t sure what to do.

But he does make a mean sign.  So he decided to get out on the street.  Literally.

For the past couple of weeks, he’s been standing on the footbridge over Highway 55 at Winnetka, during the afternoon rush, holding signs and waving at passing traffic.

I joined him up on the overpass on Friday.

We got a few thumbs-down, and a few middle fingers – yes, I am #1 – but a lot more honks in agreement, and not a few people bellowing their agreement out the window.

Anyway – Nuke’s going to be up on the overpass tonight, Monday night, one last time before the election.  Give him a honk or a thumbs-up if you’re passing by.  Or bring a sign of your own.

As I pointed out a couple years ago, American democracy does have one fairly reliable bellwether:

The fortunes of the Chicago Bears.

And who is leading the NFC North today?

The Bears.

And who snuffed out Tennessee 51-20 yesterday?

Yep.  The Bears.

Look, say what you will – but history doesn’t lie.

Ever since the idea of the Marriage Amendment was broached, I’ve been deeply, intensely ambivalent about it.

On the one hand, I’m a libertarian-conservative.  Indeed, I’m a libertarian-conservative before I’m a Republican.  I think government should get out of the way of peoples’ rights.

And that means gay peoples’ rights, too.  One of the fundamental tenets of all conservatism, especially libertarian conservatism, is that we are all equal before the law. Or at least we should be.

But I’ve found many of the arguments against the Marriage Amendment to be intensely disohonest.

“If you don’t support gay marriage, you are a bigot”: Nope.  Not only do I support equal rights for gays, but I guarantee you I’ve put more on the line against genuine hatred of gays than you have, pretty much whoever you are.  (No, I’m not going into details).  Anyone using this ‘argument” – it’s not an argument, it’s just browbeating – needs to shut up, go down to the courthouse, and officially renounce their right to vote; they don’t deserve it.

“It’s about rights”!:  If only it were.

I support – and have always supported – civil unions, because they equalize gay couples’ civil rights. But when you suggest civil unions – which are (or can and should be made to be) exactly the same in terms of tax, probate and other legal rights as marriage – as a compromise, the fangs come out.  “It’s a second-class institution!”, they say – which completely upends the “it’s about rights” argument.  It’s not about rights, it’s about a status.

“It’s about love!”:  Now we’re getting somewhere, sort of.

Marriage is not about “love”.  Love is a vital part of a marriage, of course.  But saying marriage is “about two people loving each other” trivializes marriage.

Of course, the institution has become more and more trivialized over the past fifty years or so.  The cultural left has tried to give marriage, the institution, the death of a thousand cultural cuts over the past generation or two.  No-fault divorce has, over time, led to such a debasement of the institution that the term “starter marriage” is tossed about with a chuckle and a wink in polite society.  “But what about all the people who used to stay in miserable marriages for fifty years?”, the well-meaning cultural lefties respond.  No argument here – a miserable marriage is a terrible thing…

…for everyone but one participant.  The children.  One of the cultural left’s most self-indulgent conceits is that children are happier with divorced, “happy” parents than married miserable ones.  It is simply not true.  The children are happier if their miserable parents put on a happy face and sack up and focus on raising them rather than indulging their own happiness (barring real, serious abuse – which, Lifetime movies notwithstanding, is a minority).  It is a fact, and it is immutable, and ignoring it destroys children and turns them into miserable dysfunctional adults.  And about half of parents today aren’t up to the job.

While cultural critics of traditional marriage point out that marriage has taken many forms in many societies, and even evolved considerably in our own society, when you strip away all the variants, it always boils down to A Guy and A Gal getting together to try to have and raise children.  Sometimes more than one guy, more often more than one gal, but usually one of each, and with a gender-count invariably stuck at two.

And the fact that society sees marriage as something other than “the best place to raise children” that is perhaps the greatest symptom of the trivialization of the institution.  When gay marriage advocates say “you don’t need to have kids to be married” – they have a point.  The Catholic Church until recently wouldn’t marry people that didn’t procreate; in some protestant parts of Western Europe until fairly recently, an engaged couple wouldn’t marry until they were expecting.

The institution has become so trivialized that in many parts of the country, it’s becoming a formality for a minority; in some major Blue-state cities, most co-habiting couples are not married.  In some parts of the country – by no means all inner cities – most babies are born out of wedlock.

And all of us – cultural conservatives and liberal alike – have allowed it to happen.

“Why shouldn’t all these wondeful, loving gay families have the same status as conventional families?”:  This one’s a little better.  Given the epidemic of single-parent homes in this country, and the social pathologies it’s producing, I’ll say this; if a child has a choice between being adopted by a single parent or a gay couple, I’d say go with the couple; if nothing else, it’s a lot easier to raise kids when you can do one-on-one or double-team defense than if you have to play zone.

And somewhere in that statement is a backhanded reason I’d almost support gay marriage in and of itself; the way the argument’s been presented so far, every gay couple is a perfect, loving pair of superparents, as opposed to us nasty, dysfunctional, human breeders.  If you were to legalize gay marriage, at least gay couples would be liberated from their image as perfect superhumans; the TV show Cops would no doubt soon feature police responding to an impeccable Warehouse District loft to drag a drunk (and impeccably-coiffed) guy in a husband-beater T-shirt and boxers down to jail after a domestic disturbance, as the bloody-nosed partner yells “I love you, Derek!  I’ll be here when you get back” through his tears.

I’ll return from facetious-land now.

But here’s one big gnarly fact of human emotional development that the left – not just the gay marriage movement, but the entire cultural left (many of whom are as homophobic as the most caricatured southern baptist) – want to kill and bury; Gender matters.  There’s a reason that the social institution we call “marriage”, throughout human society, is always a mixed-doubles sport; because whatever you believe created humanity in all of our complexity – God, biochemistry, L. Ron Hubbard or remorseless fate – created us so that as the human mind develops emotionally, all other things equal, it is best served by having a male and a female parent.   There are vast swathes of studies showing that, all other things being equal, kids develop best emotionally with two parents, one of each gender.  Female parents – mothers – provide empathy and nurturing and show boys what women are supposed to be like; Fathers teach risk-tolerance and socialized aggressiveness and show their daughters what a guy is supposed to be, ideally (and yes, that’s in functional families, and yes, any individusal person and couple may be different).  Single-parent households produce children who lack one of those sets of traits in their upbringing.

Which isn’t to say that gay parents can’t do a good job; they just bring a double-helping of one set of tools to the table.

But that’s OK – it’s a non-issue; I support gay adoption, because it’s better than many of the alternatives.

That is why the left’s argument that a vote against gay marriage is like a vote for Jim Crow, for “Separate but Equal”, for slavery, is so very wrong.  Black and white men are biologically the same species; so are black and white women.  But men and women are, in fact, very very different – and they’ve very different for a reason.

Men and women, black and white, should all have equal rights under the law.  Even if their affectional orientation is toward the same sex.

———-

Dennis Prager had an excellent article in the National Review last week:

Proponents of same-sex marriage ask: Is keeping the definition of marriage as man-woman fair to gays? Opponents of same-sex marriage ask: Is same-sex marriage good for society?

Few on either side honestly address the question of the other side. Opponents of same-sex marriage rarely acknowledge how unfair the age-old man-woman definition is to gay couples. And proponents rarely, if ever, acknowledge that this unprecedented redefinition of marriage may not be good for society.

Prager cuts to the crux of the issue; it’s really two issues:

• Should gay couples have the same rights as straight ones?:  There’s no real moral case they shouldn’t have the same legal rights.  And in fact every single one of the rights that a couple can get by getting married – the ones that aren’t available one way or another right now – can be legislatied without needing to redefine marriage.  Every last one of them.
• Is it in society’s best interest allow marriage to be further re-defined?”: The dilution of what marriage is supposed to be – a vehicle not for “Love” or even “Happiness”, but for raising children as functionally and effectively and with as much emotional health as possible – is behind many of this society’s current ills.  Crime, addiction, the disintegration of the school system – all of them trace, more or less directly, to the disintegration of the Western idea of family.

And answering both of those questions honestly – if you take either of them seriously, and many of the partisans on both sides of the debate do not – is difficult.

If you accept that Marriage is supposed to be about creating and raising children, that gay couples deserve equality as citizens before the law, and that thousands of years of human development, and reams of studies, are correct in showing that children develop best – all other things being equal – by being raised by mixed-gender couples (while legally allowing that gay adoption is preferable to single-parenthood), then the conclusion is…:

• We need to socially de-trivialize marriage:  and I mean this in a radical way.  This means not only eliminating no-fault divorce, but also getting churches and secular authorities that perform weddings to more-aggressively dissuade couples from marrying when they shouldn’t, and yes, to maybe even quit marrying couples who have no intention of having kids, too.  In for a penny, in for a buck.
• We need to recognize that “marriage” – in the “institution in which children are raised” sense of the term – is no more a “right” than childbirth.  Men and women want to have kids, but biologically, only women can (but not without a starter).   Ditto with marriage as an institution intended for raising children.  It’s something anyone can want – but for the children, in most cases, all other things being equal, it should be a man and a woman.
• It’s time to enact civil unions, because not all couples will be mixed-gender, and they do raise kids, and absent the biological and emotional advantages of mixed-gender couples, many of them do a perfectly fine job of it.

———-

One thing that is not difficult, in our litigious society, foreseeing what’ll happen if gay marriage is legalized; any refusal to recognize it will be stomped flat in court.  Because Marriage is not the only institution that’s been trivialized; so has the right to free association.

Are you a baker that doesn’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding?  A photographer that won’t photograph ’em?   And eventually and inevitably,, a church that refuses to perform ’em?  Bend over and grab your legal ankles; the ACLU and, likely as not, city/county/state “Human Rights” bureaucracy will no doubt come calling.

“But the First Amendment won’t allow that!” is a cop-out, not an answer.  The First Amendment will prevent these absues exactly as the Second Amendment protected the gun owners of New Orleans from gun confiscation, or the First Amendment protected Eugene Debs’ freedom of speech, or the Fourth Amendment prevents property forfeiture on accusation of a drug crime, or the Tenth prevents abuses of the Commerce Clause; only with hard work and costly legal action.

Let’s be honest; the Constitution only protects those that make it protect them, and have or create the power to make it protect them.

———-

So I’m probably going to vote for the Marriage Amendment.  Not because I don’t support equal rights for gays – Civil Unions do, in fact, confer equal rights, and I support them.  And not because I don’t think same-sex couples can’t raise kids – they can, although not as well as a mixed-gender couple, all other things being equal.

No, I’m going to vote for the Amendment because it’s one of many things our society needs to do to de-trivialize the notion of what marriage and family really are.  I believe society needs to get serious about the idea of what family is, and should be – and at the same time, give gay couples the rights they need to function in raising their own families (however they get them), and while protecting the First Amendment rights of free association of those who disagree with the idea of gay marriage from the inevitable depredations of the grievance industry.

So to some extent I’m going to hold my nose when I do it – but I’m voting for the Marriage Amendment.

(more…)

New Yorkers, disarmed by generations of nannystate government, are more or less helpless as those who disregarded the city’s gun control laws flow into the vacuum left when the city’s veneer of civilization – cops and “the system” – got blown away last week.

Residents in parts of Queens – where law enforcement is as scarce as power – are trying to “arm” themselves as looters and armed robbers prowl the neigbhorhood:

Thugs have been masquerading as Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) workers, knocking on doors in the dead of night. But locals say the real workers have been nowhere in sight, causing at least one elected official — who fears a descent into anarchy if help doesn’t arrive soon — to call for the city to investigate the utility…

…“We booby-trapped our door and keep a baseball bat beside our bed,” said Danielle Harris, 34, rummaging through donated supplies as children rode scooters along half-block chunk of the boardwalk that had marooned into the middle of Beach 91st St.

“We heard gunshots for three nights in a row,” said Harris, who believed they came from the nearby housing projects.

Carly Ruggieri, 27, who lives in water-damaged house on the block, said she barricades her door with a bed frame. “There have been people in power department uniforms knocking on doors and asking if they’re okay, but at midnight.”

And another local surfer said he has knives, a machete and a bow and arrow on the ready. Gunshots and slow-rolling cars have become a common fixture of the night since Hurricane Sandy.

When owning guns is a crime, only criminals will have guns (and the Department of Homeland Security isn’t wild about people stockpiling food, either).

So demented is Mayor Bloomberg – an Obama-endorsing Quisling pseudo-Republican – that he doesn’t even want the National Guard going into Brooiklyn.  Too many guns.

Mayor Bloomberg has snubbed Borough President Markowitz’s impassioned plea to bring the National Guard to Hurricane Sandy-scarred Brooklyn — arguing that approving the Beep’s request would be a waste of federal manpower and turn the borough into a police state.

“We don’t need it,” Mayor Bloomberg said on Wednesday during a press update on the city’s ongoing Hurricane Sandy cleanup. “The NYPD is the only people we want on the street with guns.”

Markowitz demanded the National Guard’s help just an hour before Bloomberg’s press conference, claiming that the NYPD and FDNY are “brave — but overwhelmed” by all the challenges Sandy brought when it visited the borough on Monday night: flooding, power outages, and looting.

“All of our resources have been stretched to the limit,” Markowitz said. “In the name of public safety we need to send more National Guard personnel into Coney Island, Manhattan Beach, Gerritsen Beach, Red Hook, and any other locations.”

Markowitz hopes that the sight of an armed soldier would deter criminal activity in the still-unaccessible evacuation zones — such as the rash of break-ins that took place in Coney Island hours after Sandy kissed the borough goodbye — but the Mayor said the NYPD was more than capable of handling the job.

“There are plenty of locations upstate and in surrounding states where they don’t have a police department the size of New York and they can use help [from the National Guard],” said Bloomberg.

Markowitz said he was surprised by the Mayor’s response, but was sticking to his guns.

“We stand by our statement 100 percent,” said Markowitz spokesman John Hill. “We hope the governor will listen to our request.”

It might scare the thugs.

Sue Jeffers is running for Ramsey County Commission

Michele Bachmann – perhaps you’ve heard of her? – is running for a fourth term in the US Congress.

April King is running for MN Senate in SD42.

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 is on assignment; I’ll be soloing today from 1-3.  We’ll be talking with Representative Michele Bachmann, to SD42 candidate April King, and Ramsey County Commission candidate Sue Jeffers.
• Brad Carlson’s show – “The Closer” – is on from 1-3 on Sunday.

(All times Central)

So tune in to all four 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) .
• 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!

The bourough’s au pair

Michael Bloomberg dresses up as Ray Nagin for Halloween.

Perhaps the symbolism is apt.  As New Yorkers and assorted guests from around the world gather in Staten Island to race in the New York City Marathon, Gotham’s Mayor finds himself running for his political life.

With the Eastern seaboard in shambles, power and transportation cut off to some boroughs in New York, and 19 dead at the Marathon’s starting line alone, it’s not hard to see what Mayor Michael Bloomberg thought he was accomplishing by pronoucing that the run would continue, Sandy or not.  The Marathon has been held every year since 1970 (a relatively short time for a city with a history stretching into the early 17th century).  A continuation of that tradition could project a calming influence on a battered city and provide Bloomberg the sort of popularity boost badly needed amid his sagging approval ratings.

Instead, Mayor Mike is being seen as diverting police and rescue resources from a city in dysfunction while simultaneously diverting his attention to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.  That Bloomberg has couched his work in the latter as due to Obama’s nearly nonexistent work against “climate change” might strike Gothamites as a sick joke from a Mayor whose lack of flood preparation has submereged their city while unleasing an estimated 8 million-plus rats from the sewers.  Bread and circuses might be the order of the day, but rat-traps, canned goods and diesel might be required.

Gotham hasn’t suffered this much since Tom Hardy donned a goatse mask.

Writing in The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead has penned what might be the penultimate political obituary of Michael Bloomberg, save for whatever New York’s technocrat-in-chief plans for the remainder of his term.  For if its anything like his third, it won’t be much:

The Mayor decided to run for a third term, but he was caught by his own term limits. The hacks on the City Council made clear that they wouldn’t give him an exemption from term limits unless the limits were lifted for everybody else. Disgracefully, Bloomberg took the deal and helped the corrupt political class destroy his greatest achievement….

The third term saw the Mayor struggle for a theme. His issues grew smaller and smaller: saturated fats, Big Gulp sodas—did Bloomberg really think it was worth wrecking term limits to campaign for these things? The air leaked out of his national political ambitions and the city waited patiently for his tenure to end.

Left unspoken in Read’s otherwise expansive review of Bloomberg’s legacy are the series of public-service failures that predated Hurricane Sandy.  The late 2010 snowfall that bedeviled most of the country snarled NYC’s traffic for days, leading even Bloomberg to sheepishly declare that “we’ve looked at some things that we probably could have done better.”  A city that had made significant progress against crime (a holdover from the Giuliani days), reversed itself in 2012 as crime stats rose for the first time in 20 years.  One of Bloomberg’s few public successes had been handling Hurricane Irene; the lessons of which apparantly weren’t taken to heart a little over a year later.

It is those failures, and many smaller ones, that strike at the heart of what was once Michael Bloomberg’s appeal – results-oriented governance.  Bloomberg may have been a cold, aristocratic figure who lacked much of a “common-touch” with the plebs of NYC, but he stood between many average New Yorkers and the army of liberal partisans who saw City Hall as Grand Central Station for a variety of socioeconomic engineering ideas.  So what if Bloomberg liked to chase grandoise ambitions of national office or dabbled in Nanny-state legislation that brought him media acclaim?  As long as the power stayed on, the trains ran on time, and crime was down, who cared if your fried chicken tasted like crap since it wasn’t cooked with trans-fats?  For most New Yorkers, it was the small price of electoral business.

In politics, like business, people are willing to pay for flaws as long as they outweigh the perks (witness the long lines for the latest iPhone).  Today, few New Yorkers will be thinking about sodium intake or banned salt shakers.  But they will be asking themselves if Michael Bloomberg cares more about his agenda than the city’s.

ADDENDUM:  Mayor Mike listens – sort of – and cancels the NYC Marathon.  But not without casting a few stones at those who criticized his decision to Keep Calm & Run On:

“We would not want a cloud to hang over the race or its participants, and so we have decided to cancel it,” Mr. Bloomberg and the organizers said in a joint news release. “We cannot allow a controversy over an athletic event—even one as meaningful as this—to distract attention away from all the critically important work that is being done to recover from the storm and get our city back on track.”

Paul Ryan is coming to Minneapolis on Sunday afternoon.

Tickets are free; sign up here.

See you there.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In the Vice Presidential debate, Candidate Paul Ryan was asked what role his Catholic religion played in his personal views on abortion. Chad the Elder at Fraters Libertas linked to a piece by George Weigel that imagines a different answer from Ryan. That got me to pondering what role my faith played in my views on abortion? It turns out the answer is: “None at all.”

I believe all people are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure those rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Do those words ring a bell at all? Remind you of Eighth Grade Civics, perhaps? They should – they’re straight out of the Declaration of Independence, the written explanation to the world of what the Founding Fathers were trying to accomplish and why they believed their actions were just. Those are not Catholic beliefs; they’re American beliefs that form the intellectual and moral basis for our nation.

Government’s job, first and foremost, is to protect innocent life. And an unborn child, well, life doesn’t get more innocent than that. A government that fails to protect the lives of its unborn children is failing its essential purpose. A government that forces its citizens to subsidize the deaths of their own unborn children . . . that’s unspeakable.

Some object that the Constitution gave no votes to women, and counted slaves as even less, so the Founders clearly didn’t believe in their own stated principles and neither should we. That claim asks us to believe the Founding Fathers were pro-choice, they actually meant to include a woman’s right to kill her unborn child as a fundamental right protected by the Constitution, but they had trouble articulating the concept so they left it implied in the emanations and penumbras of the Bill of Rights. That analysis doesn’t square with what we know of the people who helped write the document itself and the pamphlets describing it. And it doesn’t relate to the Catholic faith, which is the question at hand. Whatever defects hindsight lets us see in the Founders or their work, their concept of what good government is intended to do must reflect their own opinions, not projections of ours.

If you lined up the Founding Fathers and told them the President of the United States believes dead babies are not a tasteless joke but official government policy, required – required, mind you, by the very Constitution those Founding Fathers gave us – they would weep for shame.

It is the law in the United States today that taxpayer funded, partial-birth abortions for under-age girls, without parental notification, are a Constitutionally protected right. President Obama definitely would appoint Supreme Court Justices to preserve that system. Candidate Romney might not. Given that my choice realistically is limited to those two, I stand with the Founding Fathers. I stand with innocent life. I choose Romney.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I’d be pro-life even if I weren’t a Christian, based on the grounds above, as well as what I wrote way back when; even pro-choicers can’t decide when a “fetus” is “viable”

After the 2004 elections, as Democrats whinged and caviled about the ravages of life under George W. Bush, I wrote a long story about life after a breakup of the United States into, broadly, red and blue America.

An epic hurricane strikes the upper Atlantic seaboard.  And the recovery was…:

 Worse? The relief effort – the attempt to bring food, fuel, clothing, even fresh water to the storm’s victims, especially the hundreds of thousands left homeless or without power – was bogged down by a civil and bureaucratic turf war that beggared the imagination.

 

Dennis Kucinich, Minister of Peace, ordered units of the Peace Force to the affected area. But at the edge of the damaged areas in Boston, Providence, New York, Hartford, Philly/Camden and Trenton, the convoys of troops were met by teams of armed agents and lawyers from the Ministry of Disaster Preparedness, the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Housing. Under court order, the MODP agents ordered the MOP troops to hand over their weapons; most complied. These weapons – rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers – were handed over to Housing and Labor agents, and hundreds of AFL-CIO, Teamsters and AFSCME members who’d been deputized as “provisional agents”, who proceeded to go door to door serving pre-printed injunctions against homeowners carrying out repairs without union labor on the job. Homeowners who failed to comply were arrested, and their insurance payments attached by the unions as damages by drumhead civil courts issuing summary judgements under the Emergency Law Act of 2008.

Some said the chapter was over the top.

In the wake of Sandy, I’m not sure it went far enough.  An electric line repair crew from Alabama was sent packing in Jersey for being non-union:

Crews from Huntsville, as well as Decatur Utilities and Joe Wheeler out of Trinity headed up there this week, but Derrick Moore, one of the Decatur workers, said they were told by crews in New Jersey that they can’t do any work there since they’re not union employees.

The crews that are in Roanoke, Virginia say they are just watching and waiting even though they originally received a call asking for help from Seaside Heights, New Jersey.

The crews were told to stand down. In fact, Moore said the crew from Trinity is already headed back home.

I really can’t make it up fast enough.

Bloomberg carries on with NYC Marathon:

T]hose urging the city to halt the run believe that the thousands of Marathon volunteers could direct their efforts towards post-Sandy relief and cleanup, “and they also argue that the event will divert thousands of police from important hurricane-related duties.” But despite petitions circulating, work started up again yesterday on the Marathon route.

A tipster, who wishes to remain anonymous, told us there were lots of workers in and out of the park today, who had “started before the storm and then came back starting yesterday.” Trailers are lined up from around 71st to 66th Streets on Central Park West, a food truck was set up today, and “generators have been sitting there at least a week.” The tents that were taken down prior to the storm have also been set back up, and there is a stage set up near 73rd Street.

Considering all the volunteer help and NYPD attention that’s already being diverted to the Marathon, the added sight of generators and food being channeled to the event is probably going to strike some New Yorkers as a little misplaced—we’re thinking of the ones who are currently lined up waiting for the National Guard to ration out MREs and bottles of water.

Can you imagine if a Republican mayor – who’d just endorsed, say, George W. Bush – had done something like this?

…in New York…:

View more videos at: http://nbcnewyork.com.

…remember: Obama’s Department of Homeland Security thinks that people who store food and supplies are dangerous.

Lefty talk show host urges gay Romney supporter to kill himself.

Twice.

Wonder if this would be covered by any applicable “bullying” statutes?

Hey, it’s not just Republicans who blow each other up!

Awkward: Governor Dayton v. MN DFL

Flames that warm the heart.

I went to the minute clinic at Target the other day for a flu shot.

After I got the shot, I was astounded to see a nurse walk into the room with a bag and a tube.

And then a doctor, at the head of a small surgery team (anaesthesiologist and a couple of nurses) pushing a surgery cart, all scrubbed in and ready to go.

And after that, another small team of doctors and nurses carrying an Eskimo cooler.

And finally  buxom Swedish woman in low-cut set of white scrubs and white short shorts.

“Um, what?” I started speaking.  “All of this for a flu shot?”

“Oh, heavens no”, said the nurse as she tossed the syringe in a passing child’s backpack.  “Carrie”, she said, pointing to the nurse with the bag and the tube “is here to give you a colonoscopy.  And Jeff and his team”, she said, pointing to the surgical crew and their gear as they nodded and smiled under their surgical masks” are here to remove your appendix.  And Dr. Stavronakis’ team”, she said, pointing at the people with the cooler, who waved back, “are here to transplant you a new liver.  And Inge is here to give you a massage”.  Inge grinned.

“Er…”, I started, “that’s great – but I’m just here for a flu shot.  I don’t need a colonocopy – not just yet – my appendix and liver are both fine, knock wood, and as to the massage – well…”

“So you believe people don’t need colonocopies, appendectomies, liver transplants and massage?”

“Sure – people do.  Just not me, at this particular visit, knock wood”.  I looked at Inge, who was starting to pout a bit.  “Well, except for…”

The nurse glared at me sternly.  “Don’t you believe in medicine?”

“Well, sure, but if it’s medicine I don’t need, why do it?”

The nurse sighed an exaggeraged sigh.  “Oh, whatever.  That’ll be $400,000”.

“What?  All I got was a flu shot! You charged me for a colonocopy, an appendectomy, a liver transplant and a massage!”

“Oh, shoot.   I’ll fix that.  But…are you sure?  Because medicine is pretty important…”

———-

There are some reasons we have government.  Defending the country, making and enforcing laws (preferably just the ones we need, although that cow left the barn eighty years ago), enforce contracts – nobody really argues about those.

And there are some other functions that all but the most Libertarian among us can tolerate; I think the Centers for Disease Control is a good investment.  While Libertarian cases for privatizing infrastructure are tempting, it’s just a matter of fact that they have been mostly government endeavors – and as such, less useless than most others.  And most people agree that government, in general, should provide some level of support for some social safety net – especially for people in temporary, dire need.

And there is no more temporary, more dire need than an epic natural disaster, one that strains private resources (even those not already overstrained by supporting big government) and mangles infrastructure in a wide area.  Most people agree that the government, in some form, has a place in dealing with huge disasters – coordinating and supporting relief after the fact, and helping with the planning to prevent them by facilitating public and private efforts to mitigate disasters before the fact (see also: virtually every levee, dijk and storm-surge mitigation system ever built).

But there are those – like the (fictional, thank merciful heavens) nurse in my example above and the New York Times (which isn’t fictional – not yet), who believe that you can’t just stop with the government you really, rationally need; it’s all or nothing.  To them, Government is a Cable TV subscription; you want FEMA, the Interstate Highway System and the Navy?  You gotta also take dairy price supports, multigenerational subsidy of poverty, bloated bureaucracy, trillions in entitlement spending, vast federal intervention in credit and property markets – a fiscal colonocopy, to run with my example, and no, muscle relaxants are not  covered under Obamacare.

The lefty chanting point-bots have been chattering like busy little meerkats over Romney’s remarks about FEMA, as if hypothesizing on principle that a huge, inefficient bureacracy might not yield the best disaster-relief bang for the taxpayers’ buck is the same as stating as a matter of policy that the bureaucracy should be shut down in mid-disaster.  It is a fact that FEMA is a huge, costly bureaucracy with a long history of wastefulness and ineffectiveness, home of one waste scandal after another going back to the Carter years (although the left only observes it when Republicans are in office); to make matters worse, it’s been folded into a bigger, even more wasteful and less-effective bureaucracy, the “Department of Homeland Security”.

Apparently if I point out that both bureaucracies – which I support with my tax dollars – are bloated, inefficient and have wide swathes of corruption, I should expect not to ask for help if there is a disaster.

And apparently I’m not supposed to ask “rather than have a permanent sub-cabinet-level bureaucracy with tens of thousands of employees to plan for emergencies that states and individuals are, or should be, planning for, why not simply create regional preparedness forums for state, private and federal groups and resources, and appoint a “Disaster Czar” with proven executive disaster management experience to facilitate the coordination of state, private and federal resources on an ad hoc basis?”, because that’s unpatriotic.

I ask “why can’t we just have the government we need?” – and the only real answer seems to be “because we just don’t do it that way anymore”.

And “This won’t hurt a bit”.

Joe Doakes of Como Park emails:

“I, Pencil” is a famous Economics essay that makes this startling claim: Nobody knows how to make a pencil.

Consider the ordinary No. 2 lead pencil children use in grade school. No single person knows every piece of knowledge needed to make a pencil: forest management for the wood; polymer science for the paint; ore mining and refining for the metal and graphite; how to make whatever the eraser is made of; and the manufacturing process to bring the components together. A pencil is a simple tool but the result of a complex set of discrete processes, all of which must work in perfect harmony. If enough elements are removed, the result is not a pencil. If what you needed was a No. 2 lead pencil, removing some of the essential elements of a pencil leaves you worse off than you were before the changes were made.

President Obama’s recent “The First Time” campaign message uses a losing-your-virginity sexual theme to advise young voters that their first vote should be cast for someone who cares about women getting birth control, not somebody who studies in the library; in other words, someone cool and casual, not someone boring but permanent. The thinking underlying this ad is similar to the thinking behind the sexual revolution that led to the gay marriage movement and all are delusions dangerous to long-term societal stability.

 

The concept of marriage looks as simple as a pencil but it’s actually a complicated collection of rights and policies. Before 1970, the family was the fundamental organizational unit of society because, as Robert Heinlein famously noted, it was the most successful institution ever devised for protecting children while preserving family wealth. Marriage was hard to get into (blood tests, waiting periods) and hard to get out of (good cause required and alimony paid). But the incentives were good: sex outside marriage was illegal, children born outside marriage were denied rights, unmarried couples were denied tax breaks and were social outcasts.

The sexual revolution convinced us the individual should replace the family as the focus of society. Satisfying the desires of individuals became more important than sacrificing for one’s family. The changes to society were slow to manifest but breathtaking in scope. No-fault divorce made marriage temporary. Child custody assumptions turned fathers into powerless, occasional visitors. Abortion made casual sex outside marriage risk-free. Childhood illegitimacy and poverty rates skyrocketed while test scores plummeted and child abuse and neglect rates exploded.

A society focused on individual gratification at the expense of children’s futures cannot prosper long-term. By every economic and social measure, people raised in traditional families today are miles ahead of single-parent or never-married families. 40 years of evidence shows Heinlein was right. The sexual revolution removed some of the essential elements supporting traditional marriage and as a result, society is worse off.

Gay marriage advocates assure us that re-defining “marriage” away from one-man-one-woman won’t hurt the institution of marriage a bit. I can’t agree. I think we’ve already stripped the pencil of the eraser, metal holder and paint. If we strip the lead out, what’s left won’t be a pencil at all. That’s not a problem if we have ballpoints and highlighters and crayons to substitute for the pencil. But what’s the substitute system for protecting children and preserving family wealth? What’s the substitute for the next generation, and the one after that?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

More tomorrow.