It’s hard to believe that this particular angle on this story – about the shooting at the mall near Portland, Oregon, which happened a few days before the New Town, Connecticut shooting – didn’t get national coverage:

PORTLAND — Nick Meli is emotionally drained. The 22-year-old was at Clackamas Town Center with a friend and her baby when a masked man opened fire.
“I heard three shots and turned and looked at Casey and said, ‘are you serious?,'” he said.
The friend and baby hit the floor. Meli, who has a concealed carry permit, positioned himself behind a pillar.
“He was working on his rifle,” said Meli. “He kept pulling the charging handle and hitting the side.”

[Aside to shooters; poor gun maintenance actually saved lives.  Who knew?]

The break in gunfire allowed Meli to pull out his own gun, but he never took his eyes off the shooter.
“As I was going down to pull, I saw someone in the back of the Charlotte move, and I knew if I fired and missed, I could hit them,” he said.
Meli took cover inside a nearby store. He never pulled the trigger. He stands by that decision.
“I’m not beating myself up cause I didn’t shoot him,” said Meli. “I know after he saw me, I think the last shot he fired was the one he used on himself.”
The gunman was dead, but not before taking two innocent lives with him and taking the innocence of everyone else.
“I don’t ever want to see anyone that way ever,” said Meli. “It just bothers me.”

As it should anyone with a human soul.

But as the media celebrates the teachers in New Town as heroes for dying to try to protect their students – as it should – it’s high time we took a moment to praise our live heroes; the ones that choke back their fear and respond to unexpected trauma…

…and because they had the tools they needed to confront the trauma,  a deranged killer, at closer to even odds, were able to be live heroes.

. https://mobile.twitter.com/Vision365/status/279825506365472768

Miracle on Mainstreet details right here.

And here’s the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance.

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!

• I’m in from 1-3.  While I’ve tried to focus on Minnesota issues on the new Saturday show, let’s be honest; there’s only one headline topic today.  We’ll also have Erin Haust and Tim McShane on to talk about “Miracle on Mainstreet”, and Andrew Rothman on the outlook for Second Amendment issues in the next Minnesota legislative session.
• 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)
• Check out our new UStream video and chat .
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• Podcasts are now available on the AM1280 page!  (Saturday show is #2 – Sunday is #3).
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Greetings, City Pages Readers.  If you’ve been reading what certain gutless Tweeps have been writing – nope.  I don’t advocate arming elementary school kids.

I do point out – correctly – that Israel has been arming teachers for decades, to prevent, as it happens, mass school shootings.  And it’s worked.

This is, of course, a mindless, senseless tragedy, the kind of thing that makes you re-examine your faith in your fellow human, if you have any.  I urge everyone to send your thoughts, prayers or whatever you believe in, as well as a buck or two to whatever relief effort springs up when the time comes, to the families and community.

But let’s be honest, if we can, for a moment; look at just about every mass shooting in the past twenty years.  Schools, universities, malls, the Aurora theater, post offices, the entire City of Chicago.  What do they have in common?  They’re gun free zones, by federal, state or local law.

More below.

———-

Another deranged gunman has cut loose in another building full of people forbidden from being able to defend themselves and the children in their “care” by federal law.

Initial reports indicate the gunman – who was killed, somehow – was the father of one of the students.

How many more children need to die before we realize “gun free zones” don’t work?

UPDATE:  Count up the number of school shootings we’ve seen in the past decade and a half, including two in Minnesota (with 11 dead) – all in “gun free zones”.  What was that “definition of insanity” again?

In Israel, in the seventies, there were a number of attacks by terrorist gunmen on Israeli schools and school buses.  The Israelis responded…how?  By banning guns in schools, just to keep the law-abiding terrorists in line?

No. They allowed (and on field trips, required) teachers to be armed.  And it worked.  And it’s still working.

Over at MPR, Tom Scheck brings us the latest DFL chanting point; the “links” between two GOP legislators (Rep. Gottwalt and Sen. Hann) who pushed a healthcare privatization bill in the last session, and the insurance industry.

 State Rep. Steve Gottwalt, R-St. Cloud, led the GOP effort to cut spending in the state’s Health and Human Services budget when the Republicans controlled the Legislature. Now, both he and his Senate counterpart [Hann] have business links to the insurance industry, which has some other lawmakers asking whether the arrangement violates ethics rules.

This is a chanting point that the DFL’s been working up for a while here.  The DFL’s beef is that…

…some Democratic lawmakers are raising questions about the arrangement.

“I can see why the owner of the business was pushing for the bill. It’s more business for him,” said Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville. “The fact that [Gottwalt] is now working for him, I’m disappointed in that.”

Health insurance brokers backed the legislation, championed by Gotttwalt’s counterpart in the other chamber, state Sen. David Hann, R-Eden Prairie.

The incoming chairman of the House ethics committee, Rep. Tom Huntley, DFL-Duluth, said: “If these are payoffs, then the ethics committee needs to look at it.”

And if there are not payoffs – and there aren’t – then will Huntley, Marty, and the idiot leftyblogger chanting point bots apologize to Hann and Gottwalt?

Read Scheck’s piece for the details.

But I have a few questions, here:

Who else are you going to have working on healthcare finance policy? A bunch of lawyers and social workers?  Who knows the financial side of the healthcare industry better than people who, y’know, work on the financial side of the healthcare industry?

Aren’t we cherrypicking the outrage we choose to feed to the media, DFL?  Shouldn’t we bar teachers from committees on education appropriations?  .  Union activists oughtta be at least recusing themselves from votes on Right to Work and unionizing daycare and personal care workers!   Do we want lawyers writing laws?  And don’t be trying to hide, there, Erin Murphy; I’m told you were the executive director of a nursing lobby group, and became the ranking DFLer on the Healthcare Committee.  Or Ryan Winkler, who is employed (heh) at Ted Mondale’s government-data-mining software company, sounding off about legislation that’d involve another data-mining company?

Of course, the DFL finds these kinds of non-corrupt “corruption” all the time, while practicing it themselves.

If only we had some institution – maybe with printing presses and transmitters, and people whose job it was to run down little facts like this?  Perhaps those people working for that institution could think of themselves as a holy, truth-seeking monastic order?  Call themselves “high priests of gatekeeping”, perhaps?

Just a thought.

By the way – lost in the contrived, DFL-agenda-driven “hubbub”:  the program that Gottwalt and Hann developed has been a huge improvement for the Minnesotans it was intended to serve.  “Healthy Minnesota” gives its participants vouchers enabling them to buy a standard insurance plan on the open market; it’s cheaper than UCare, and the participants get better, more personally-focused coverage than provided by the state. There are gaps – every insurance plan has ’em – but it was, as advertised, a huge improvement over UCare at lower cost.

In other words, it’s a government program that does what it’s supposed to do, and saves money to boot.

But “big business” is invovled, and that thought apparently gives DFLers explosive diarrhea.

… if a Republican activist had said this:

Me either.

The bad news:  Management at the KC Star is asking two employees to decide which among the two will be laid off:

You could call it the “Hunger Games” approach to layoffs – one that’s getting a big thumbs-down from workplace experts.

Hunger schmunger.  I call it the “Michael Scott” approach.

The Kansas City Star recently told two of its journalists, Karen Dillon and Dawn Bormann, that only one of them could keep her job — and the employees themselves would have to decide who should leave the company, according to the media blog JimRomenesko.com.

Dillion confirmed the report in an e-mail to NBC News, but did not provide any more details. The investigative reporter has worked for the Kansas City Star since 1991, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The good news?

Well, there really isn’t any.  Although the idea that yet another left-toady publisher is circling the drain is probably a nice consolation prize.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

People said I was daft to build a castle in a swamp; I built it anyway. It sank into the swamp.

They need new tracts of land.

I heard this last week on “Poligraph”, MPR’s self-styled “Politifact” homage.

“Poligraph” reporter Catherine Richert was “fact-checking” statements from the GOP and DFL about the state budget.  She quoted Governor Messinger Dayton:

You know,[the wealthiest] were paying the higher rates during the 1990s when President Clinton was in office, and we enjoyed boom years in the states. We had the highest real per capita family income in 1999 than we’ve had in our history. Since then, we’ve dropped almost 9 percent from that high in the aftermath of the Minnesota tax cuts in 1999 and 2000, and also the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.” – Gov. Mark Dayton”

You don’t have to be a economist, or even a conservative, to understand where this is wrong.  You merely have to be somewhat curious, and care a little bit about history.

Richert’s response:

Dayton made this statement in response to a question about Republican concerns that a state tax increase on the wealthiest to close the budget gap, which has been a priority for Dayton, and the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts on the federal level would hurt the state’s economy.

Dayton was arguing that their logic is flawed because tax cuts don’t always correspond with a strong economy.

Well, no.  Governor Messinger Dayton was correlating prosperity with a causation, higher taxes and a Democrat president.

Now, I’ll give Catherine Richert the benefit of the doubt; as a self-styled “fact-checker”, she’s hobbled by needing to refer to other “Fact-checkers”, the WaPo and the woefully-misnamed “Politifact”, whose institutional bias in these matters is itself a fact:

It’s true that the wealthiest paid more in federal income taxes during the Clinton years. Clinton raised the top marginal rate from 31 percent to nearly 40 percent. It also happened to be a time of strong economic growth, partly because of Clinton and George H. W. Bush’s broader fiscal policies, which lead to lower interest rates and lots of activity on Wall Street, as reported by the Washington Post and PolitiFact.

Well, if the WaPo and Politifact say so.  The paragraph itself shows the extent to which MPR’s reporting on the subject is based on the major media’s narrative; those “broader fiscal policies” involved a very pro-business climate, tax hikes notwithstanding.

Richert, the WaPo, Politifact, and Governor Messinger Dayton glossed over – or didn’t know – the larger historical causation for the correlation:

• Clinton got to cash Reagan’s “peace dividend”
• Gas prices were around a buck a gallon,
• Clinton raised taxes, it’s true.  But a GOP Congress didn’t let him raise them nearly as much as he’d wanted to, not to mention defeated his attempt to socialize healthcare, and forced Bubba to govern, tax hikes notwithstanding, as a conservative (especially relative to Dubya’s spending).  Remember how liberals squealed about Clinton’s “conservative” nature?  Back when Minnesota liberals spoke about the “Democratic Leadership Conference”, the moderate, pro-business Democrat caucus, the way they talk about the Koch brothers today?

As stated, it was a strawman; of course tax cuts don’t always bring prosperity, not by themselves.  And tax hikes don’t always gut the economy – provided the other fundamentals are working.  In the nineties, the other fundamentals of the economy – energy, capital, investment climate, relative levels of regulation, fairly conservative legislative branch, world markets – were humming right along.

That is just not the case today.

Correlation does not equal causation.  It’s a maxim of logic.

But not of “fact-checking”:

George W. Bush slashed those tax rates; Minnesota lowered its tax rates around this time, too.

Assuming Dayton is talking about the national decline in real household income – real per capita family income doesn’t exist – it’s true that it took a 9 percent nosedive after 1999, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Right.

But not as a result of the tax cuts.

Which was what Dayton’s statement – intended as red meat for the low-information voter that is Dayton’s main constituency – insinuates.

I’ll give Richert’s “fact-check” a grade of “Obtuse”…

…for taking dubious “Facts” from discredited and biased “fact-checkers” to reinforce studiously avoid assailing an illogical and factually and historically void narrative by Governor Dayton.

BONUS:  John Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives also tags Richert for some fairly incurious reporting on the Campaign Finance Board.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The hype around the “fiscal cliff” reminds me of the hype around Y2K which supports my suspicion that’s all it is – hype.

If the GOP fails to cave in, we automatically enact the spending cuts adopted by John Kerry’s Super Committee and cut the monthly shortfall in half. We don’t cut the Budget in half, just the amount we’re Short each month.

We’ll still be spending ourselves into bankruptcy, only not as fast. That should be okay with Democrats, shouldn’t it? Incrementalism, and all that?

Joe Doakes

Como park

Like most of the Democrat (and DFL) agenda, it’s there to gull the gullible…

…and draw attention away from the real problem; the upcoming debt and entitlement crunches.

Hey, how about that upcoming royal baby?  Lindsay Lohan’s sex life?  X-Factor?

Anyone?

In 1987, Florida became the eighth state, and the first large state, to adopt a “shall issue” law requiring the state to issue carry permits to applicants with clean criminal records, no record of drug abuse or alcohol problems and no known record of violent mental illness.

Next week, the state of 19 million people will cross the threshold to a million active permits:

Applications for the permits in the state of 19.1 million people have doubled since 2007. Only 0.3 percent of the more than 2 million total permits issued since 1987 have been revoked, said Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam.

“Floridians who are obtaining these licenses are obtaining them for the right reason and are using them in an appropriate way,” Putnam said.

Florida’s adoption of concealed carry in 1987 was the Battle of Gettysburg in the war over the Second Amendment.  For the previous twenty years, gun control had gone from “nutty racist fringe” to “dominant racist ideology”; a majority of Americans, the stats said, supported banning handguns; guns in the hands of the law-abiding were banned not only in authoritarian cesspools like Chicago and DC, but in placid burbs like Morton Grove, Illinois.

Bur since Florida flipped the orcs the finger, the tide has turned…

…everywhere but in the mainstream media.  Reuters – who wrote this story – notes…:

Florida has been a bastion for gun owners, with some of the most expansive laws on the books regarding who can carry weapons and when they can be used.

OK, we’ll call that a flub by someone who doesn’t know the issue (or gets their information from the media):  the United States has the expansive law, the Second Amendment, that says we all have the right, granted by God or whatever creator you believe in, to keep and bear arms.  States may place prudent restrictions on that right.  Florida merely has among the most enlightened set of restrictions.

But this…:

A state law that can make it difficult to prosecute shooters who claim self-defense has come under scrutiny following the shooting death of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in February.

…is proof that we’ve got a ways to go.

“Stand your Ground” laws don’t “make it difficult to prosecute”; they shield the law-abiding, legitimate self-defense shooter from spurious, agenda-driven legal harassment. And in the vast majority of cases that don’t get politicized by a president during an election year, they work well.

Anyway – congrats, Florida!

The US 7th Circuit has struck down Illinois’ civilian firearms carry ban:

The state of Illinois would have to allow ordinary citizens to carry weapons under a federal appeals court ruling issued today, but the judges also gave lawmakers 180 days to put their own version of the law in place.

In a 2-1 decision that is a major victory for the National Rifle Association, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said the state’s ban on carrying a weapon in public is unconstitutional.

“We are disinclined to engage in another round of historical analysis to determine whether eighteenth-century America understood the Second Amendment to include a right to bear guns outside the home. The Supreme Court has decided that the amendment confers a right to bear arms for self-defense, which is as important outside the home as inside,” the judges ruled.

And there’s your importance of Heller and McDonald, right there.

“The theoretical and empirical evidence (which overall is inconclusive) is consistent with concluding that a right to carry firearms in public may promote self-defense. Illinois had to provide us with more than merely a rational basis for believing that its uniquely sweeping ban is justified by an increase in public safety. It has failed to meet this burden.

Boy, has it ever.

David Sigale, an attorney who represented the Second Amendment Foundation in the lawsuit, called the decision by the appeals court in Chicago “historic.”

“What we are most pleased about is how the court has recognized that the Second Amendment is just as, if not at times more, important in public as it is in the home,” he said. “The right of self-defense doesn’t end at your front door.”

I loved the little bit of closet fascism buried in this next graf (emphasis added):

 Mayor Rahm Emanuel said through a spokesman that he was “disappointed with the court’s decision.” The city is reviewing the opinion and will work with others “to best protect the residents of Chicago and still meet constitutional restrictions,” Bill McCaffrey added.

Comandante “Mayor” Emanuel:  your city is a war zone.  The best thing you can do to “protect the residents” is require each of them to become proficient at firearms.

(more…)

To:  Arby’s
From: Mitch Berg, very rare Arby’s eater
Re:  Bo Dietle

Dear Arby’s:

I applaud you for dropping “RB”, the annoying pseudo-hipster who spent the past two years warbling “It’s good mood food!” at the end of your commercials.  Paradoxically, he inevitably eroded my mood.

But I have to ask: who green-lighted the current campaign, with “Bo Dietl”, the crusty “New York Detective” yammering about where the meat gets sliced? Trying to jam a meat slicer through a drive-through window?

It’s fast food, people. We know it’s all replicated from genetically-modified generic protein product.  And the fewer fast food joints have slicers, the fewer fingertips I bite into.

You’re not curing cancer, here.  Please see to this.

That is all.

I walked out Monday morning to carry a bag of trash to the dumpster.  The alley was spotlessly plowed.  In Saint Paul, we have to contract for our own alley plowing; on my block, we pony up about $20 a year to hire a guy who, as luck has it, lives on the same block, so he has to plow the alley to get to work and back home again.

Anyway – blocks in Saint Paul that can work together are generally plowed quickly and effectively.  Mine’s luckier (and works better) than many, perhaps, but it works.

Which is great, because it gives you a nice clean bit of pavement to get a running head start onto the side streets.

I’ve seen roads this bad in Saint Paul – but usually only after double the snowfall.  Sunday was a bunch of snow – 12-14 inches or so – but we’ve certainly seen worse.

But Tuesday morning, it took me 70 minutes to get from the Midway to Highway 5.  That’s ten minutes worse than Monday.  Along the way, I saw…:

• A truck with a horse trailer vainly spinning its tires for ten minutes, trying to get traction in the middle of traffic.  On Snelling, southbound on the almost imperceptibly gentle grade north of Selby, by O’Gara’s.
• A row of cars on a steeper hill, behind a car that was spinning like mad, trying to find some scrap of traction.
• God only knows how many fender benders
• And, on Fairview southbound toward Ford Parkway, as I skidded for – I kid you not – half a block (ABS brakes rattling, feet eventually pumping) toward the cross street, a Honda Civic skidding in behind me, going waaaaaaay too fast.  I took the last bit of directional control I could find and steered for the plow bank.  The Civic, driven by a rattled-looking woman and coated with “Vote No” and “Obama” stickers, sailed past and into the intersection – and then gunned it across, through the red light.
• And finally…streets in Bloomington that were in perfectly fine shape.

The City of Saint Paul seems to have gotten behind the eight ball; mid-day yesterday they put up an announcement on their website, which explained that…:

It has been repeatedly commented that the roads seem worse today than yesterday. That is a true statement,particularly at the intersections the roads are worse. The temperatures overnight caused what had snow had started melting to freeze as ice. The situation at the intersections is then made worse as drivers accelerate spinning their wheels and when they don’t move as fast as they thought accelerate even further creating more heat and water making the situation worse – Not better. (Tip: when at an intersection and stopped take your foot off the brake and let the car begin to move on its own and accelerate slowly. If wheels start to spin back off the accelerator until car starts moving again)

This morning we began adding sand to our salt mix to provide some grit. As of noon we have placed just over 700 tons of salt on the street. This is almost three times the amount of salt we use in a typical snow event. While we are working on our salt conservation we are NOT going light on salt. in fact, at 11am, we increased our application rate by 30% to 100% to help cut the thicker snowpack. The conditions at this time warrant the need for more salt and that is what we are doing.

That’s all fine – and there are some good tips in there.  And there’s no knock on the plow drivers, who are definitely out plowing roads.  And the announcement is right, inasmuch as the snow fell on warm ground (remember how recently the temps were in the forties?) and then got hit by snow and a cold snap.

But here’s a question directed at a city government that has jacked up property taxes by nearly half in the past few years, and whose surrogates respond to any guff about taxes “how do you think we pay for snow-plowing?”:  for the past two nights, I’ve driven north on a Snelling Avenue that feels like an Andean goat path, a jarring washboard ride that I think may have rattled a filling out of my tooth…

…until I get north of Larpenteur.  Where it gets nice and smooth and dry and safe.

Ditto Hamline, Lexington, Fairview, Cleveland…

…American Boulevard, France Avenue, Penn Avenue…

…you get the picture.  What do all of them know that the City of Saint Paul doesn’t?

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Saint Paul never plows alleys and only plows residential streets during “snow emergencies” long after the snow is packed down by traffic.

Businesses privately plow parking lots and residents privately plow alleys, but what good are they if the street isn’t plowed?

St. Paul should allow residents to hire private side street plowing. Do it block-by-block and give a property tax credit to those who join. We’d get better service, plow operators would prosper, streets would be safer, city would save money. What’s not to love?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Not sure if it’s “allowed” or not, but the guy who does my alley also gets one of my block’s side streets.   I think of it as our little oasis of street sanity.

This past few days, we’ve needed it.

Anyway, now I’m off to try to find a less-lethal route to work.

Anybody know where I can hire a Sherpa?

Steven Crowder went to a demonstration, and all he got was a stupid…

…union goon punching him in the face four times:

Quick, lefties! When did this happen at a Tea Party?

Project! Hurry!

I saw Argo a few months back.  As I noted at the time, it was an excellent movie; engrossing, well-acted, and good enough that I forgot I was watching Ben Affleck.

But as I watched it, it was pretty inevitable – something stuck in my craw.

The narrative – especially the narrated backstory, taking us back to the CIA-engineered topping of the last pre-Shah president, Mossadegh – was suspiciously heavy on anti-American cant, but light on the role Jimmy Carter’s pusillanimity played in installing the mullahs to begin with.

Andrew Klavan at PJM notes that this is part of a larger and more ominous trend; Democrat-friendly Hollywood rewriting history in the only textbook that matters, anytmore, pop culture:

This sort of Democrats-do-no-wrong and Republicans-do-no-right propaganda is subtle but pervasive in Hollywood historical movies. Consider Charlie Wilson’s War, a strong Tom Hanks film that celebrated a Democrat’s role in the Cold War. In both the film and the book, the right wingers who made Wilson’s efforts possible are denigrated. And just the fact that Hollywood found practically the only 80′s Democrat who did anything to help Reagan defeat the Soviets — whereas they’ve never made a tribute to Reagan himself — is telling.

And after that movie came out, do you remember how many leftybloggers suddenly became experts on the end of the Cold War – at least, Hollywood’s version of it?

This is precisely what Conservatives have to learn to counter. The newspapers and history books may get it right — may — but it’s the movies people will remember. I’ve quoted him before, but I’ll do it again. When former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had his questionable actions rewritten as heroism in the dishonest film Fair Game, he said, “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember the period.”

The imagination is the only nation where Democrats get it right. We need to conquer that country.

Put another way – low-information voters’ votes count the same as the rest of ours.  We can’t keep ceding them to the Dems in perpetuity either.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

December 11, 2008, Bernie Madoff charged in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

December 11, 2012, President Obama’s “fiscal cliff” negotiating position: “Madoff was a piker.”

Joe Doakes

Como Park

What was it Stalin said?  “Fifty Billion is a crime, Twenty Trillion is a statistic?”

Something like that.

People ask me why I oppose the death penalty

I say “because of the inevitability that we’ll convict and execute an innocent person, which is both morally wrong and absolutely avoidable”.

The reply is “give me some reasons to believe that could ever happen”.

And I respond “I’ve got 141 of them since they re-legalized the death penalty.  Including one very recently“.

“But they were never executed!  The system works!”

“Well, not for this guy.  They’re down to arguing over which judge has the legal standing to declare him innocent, which is  welfare for lawyers, and is just delaying the inevitable; crap  science and incompetent, lazy prosecutors killed an innocent man.  So what do we do about that?”

“Cut down on frivolous appeals!”

The latest numbers – from the Met Council website – show that the Northstar Line is an even bigger cash suck than we’d predicted it’d be.

Click to see chart at a readable size.

Ridership is off sharply.  Operating subsidies are up; each ride on the Northstar line costs the taxpayer over $20.  That’s per ticket.

A source at the Capitol who’s been working the numbers on Northstar writes:

“One more point. The NorthStar lovers like to point out that one of the reasons that the numbers are down is because the Twins have sucked the last two years. Well, there does seem to be some truth (taken with a two-ton tablet of salt) to that…the numbers from April to October do give you the sense that the Twins could have an impact.

The source anticipates some of the counterarguments:

Of course, this ignores the fact that we, here in Frostbite Falls, tend to be rather sedentary during the colder months. Heck, just look at freeway traffic in the summer months, which is always higher than winter months.

But look at the numbers: Even if you give them ALL the increase in riders for Twins games, the differential averages to 1,026 per game. That’s down from 1,340 per game in 2011. If you’re gonna bank your success on Twins game riders…good luck with THAT.

The fact is, the Twins could win back to back World Series and the Northstar Line would still be hemorrhaging money.

Birger Strømsheim passed away over the weekend, at age 101.

Birger Edvin Martin Strømsheim was born Oct. 11, 1911, in Alesund, Norway. His parents had a small farm. In addition to his son, survivors include a daughter, Liv Kristen Oygard; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Aase Liv, died in 1997.

“Birger who?”

Well, if you read this blog, you’ve met Mr. Strømsheim before.  He was one of the commandos who, seventy years ago this February, destroyed the German heavy-water operation in a daring raid on the Norsk Hydro plant in Rjukan, Norway.  I won’t rewrite the whole story (’til February, anyway), but here’s the piece I wrote about the raid a couple of years back.

Strømsheim didn’t start out that way, though; he had no military experience.  When Germany occupied Norway, he was working as a contruction contractor; he even found work building barracks for the occupiers, before escaping to Scotland:

 After the Germans took control of Norway in 1940, Mr. Stromsheim and his wife were among many people who left for England. Mr. Stromsheim had not been a soldier in Norway, but he became part of the Special Operations Executive, which the British formed to support and coordinate resistance in the occupied countries of Europe.

The mild-mannered Strømsheim, an expert cross-country skier and hunter, became an explosives expert, and the leader if not commander of the raiding party.  Older than the rest of the team, his calm stoicism (even by Norwegian standards) anchored and centered the rest of the team on the raid.

  He and other members of the mission at Norsk Hydro received medals from several Allied countries. In 1965, Hollywood produced “The Heroes of Telemark,” a film starring Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris that included shootouts, dramatic chases through the snow and love scenes. The soldiers roundly panned the movie as unrealistic.

 “He saw that,” Mr. Stromsheim’s son said. “He didn’t like it. It was too glamorous.”

And totally unbefitting the men who actually did the job.

RIP, Birger Strømsheim.

They told me that if I voted Romney, government would be taken over by wealthy special interests.

And they were right!

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!

• I’m in from 1-3.  We’ll be looking ahead at the DFL-controlled legislature, and going over a DFL hypcrisy on a key social issue.  We’re also scheduled to be talking with Marianne Stebbins, architect of the Ron Paul faction takeover of the MNGOP, on her movement and how the various bits and pieces of the MNGOP can play nice and actually win elections.
• 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)
• Check out our new UStream video and chat .
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• Podcasts are now available on the AM1280 page!  (Saturday show is #2 – Sunday is #3).
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

I hereby promise that when Scarlett Johannson and I start dating, I’ll let her drive the car half the time.

“But Merg”, you may say, “that’s an empty promise!  You and Scarlett will never ever ‘date’!”

“True!”, I’ll respond.  “Just like this “promise” from Governor Messinger Dayton!”:

When asked about legalizing same-sex marriage after Minnesotans defeated a constitutional amendment defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, Dayton said he would sign a bill if it comes to him. But he said he’s unsure if the Legislature is ready to consider the issue.

In other words – it’s an empty promise.  Tom Bakk started weaseling out of all of the DFL’s happy-talk about what a fundamental right marriage is, as we discussed last week.

Because if you’re paying attention to the Minnesota Left, marriage is about love…

…until it would hurt the DFL’s chances in the next round of elections.

“Love” is less important to the DFL than maintaining power.

All of you social liberals, and libertarians, and moderates, and people who bought the DFL/ABM/MU4AF’s gauzy message?  All of you instant celebrity drugstore-cowboy pseudo-liberty activists s who said that the only reason to oppose gay marriage was bigotry?  All of you gays who keep voting for the DFL?

You have, every last one of you, been hoodwinked.  You have been played for fools.  I am more likely to be trading driving duties with Scarlett Johannson than you are to see the DFL move to legalize gay marriage in the next two sessions. 

Especially all you gay Minnesotans.  You are of no value to the DFL as happy, married people.  Only as perpetually angry, socially influential votes they can count on.

And that, as they say, is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Pioneer Press repeats the DFL line on the budget – we’re only short $1.1 billion.

• I don’t think the numbers work. We’re short $1.1 billion for day-to-day operating expenses. We short-changed schools $2.4 billion last time but we’re paying back half of that so we’re still short $1.2 billion for that. PLUS we need something for inflation because even if government employees get no raises, the cost of everything from paper clips to blacktop keeps going up.
• It’s more like $2.5 billion we’re short. Tell the truth: we have our own fiscal cliff right here.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

We’ll see.