WELCOME, Instapundit readers!

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My neighbor AVERY LIBRELLE is concerned about gun violence.

We met at a local coffee shop, where we spoke over the sound of a group of locals that was keeping alive the tradition of out-of-tune folk music played by large, enthusiastic groups of the tone-deaf.

LIBRELLE:  We need to ban high-clip bullets and assault weapons!

ME:  Ugh.

LIBRELLE: “Ugh?”  What?

ME:  Oh, I’ve only been having this argument for 25 years.  For starters, they’re called “high-capacity magazines”.  A “clip” as a general term for “anything that holds bullets” is a bit of Hollywood slang.  Really explaining it requires me to get all pedantic about how guns work, and I know you don’t care, and explaining it really takes me off the topic, but here – let me show you this:

“Clips”, pretty much by definition, are not “high-capacity”.  To talk much more about it would be to go onto a tangent that only gun geeks really care much about.

LIBRELLE:  Well, the media uses them interchangeably.

ME:  Uh, yeah.

LIBRELLE:  Anyway – you can not show me a reason anyone needs a…what?  High-capacity “magazine”?

ME:  No, I can’t show you one.

LIBRELLE:  I knew it.

ME:  I can show you several. (more…)

Dear NHL,

It’s not you.  It’s me.

We’ve had some fun times, locally.  The 1991 North Stars playoff run?  Classic (I’ll continue our agreement not to discuss Game Six, however).  And that 2003 Minnesota Wild team?  Ah, good times.

We even overcame some painful memories, like when you left with that Alberta shopping mall developer for Dallas.  I was hurt.  But then I realized that a former booster for the North Stars was right when she said: “When [Norm Green] came here, he said, ‘Only an idiot could lose money on hockey in Minnesota.’ Well, I guess he proved that point.”

Since you came back it’s been nice.  Not the same, but nice.

But as I said, it’s not you, it’s me.  I just can’t take what will likely be a second lost season in nine years.  Especially with both sides of your lockout seemingly unwilling to even sit in the same room with a federal mediator and salvage, ala 1994-95, a condensed season and the Stanley Cup:

With the hockey season hanging in the balance, Saturday could prove to be a pivotal day on all fronts. The sides have less than a week to reach a new collective bargaining agreement to save what would likely be a 48-game hockey season….

The players’ association will conclude a two-day vote among its members at 6 p.m. Saturday that will determine whether the union’s executive board will again have the authority to declare a disclaimer of interest.

If the vote passes, as expected, the disclaimer can be issued, and the union would dissolve and become a trade association. That could send this fight to the courts and put the season in jeopardy. The disclaimer would allow players to file individual antitrust suits against the NHL.

Ok, maybe it’s a little you.

Having conceded the necessity of a salary cap after the last strike in 2004-05, the cap has risen from $39 million in 2005 to what will either be $60 or $65 million in 2013.  That’s more than a 12% increase every year.  And it’s not exactly that the NHL has been booming in popularity or revenue.  The Toronto Maple Leafs rank as the NHL’s most valuable franchise at $1 billion with $200 million in revenue generated each year.  Solid numbers, to be sure.  But paltry in comparison to other major American sports.  The NFL’s Dallas Cowboys bring in $500 million each year for a league with a cap of $120 million.  The NBA’s New York Knicks generate $244 million each year with a “soft cap” of $58 million – and that’s in a league where 14 of the teams are currently losing money.  12 of the 30 NHL teams are ending up in the red.  Even the mightly NFL, supposedly the pater familias of sports business, has three teams losing money.

At least the NFL and NBA have strong TV viewership.  The NHL saw the weakest TV ratings for the Stanley Cup in years, despite having two of the largest television markets represented in the series.  In that context, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman must be a negotiating genius to get NBC to agree to a 10-year, $2 billion TV deal.  Sure, it’s a pittance compared to MLB’s $3 billion, 7-year deal or the NFL’s $3 billion a year contract, but compare numbers.  The 2010 Stanley Cup finals had their best ratings in 36 years with 14 share of the TV audience.  That’s only a few hundred thousand more viewers than the average audience for a Sunday night NFL game which has a 12.9 share.

In short, among the few who will care if yet another NHL season is lost will be NBC’s executives.  Don’t count me among the rest.

Sure, I thought perhaps I’d give you another chance.  You almost had me with the Zach Parise and Ryan Suter signings, until I realized that not unlike Kevin Garnett’s contract years ago, the signings represent exactly why your league is in decline and locked out.  I can’t continue worrying about someone who is so self-destructive.

So goodbye, NHL.  I hope you find someone who accepts you despite your many, many flaws.  I hear Canada’s single right now.

ADDENDUM:  Like the jilted lover who can’t accept being rejected, the NHL returns – at only the cost of half the season:

Rich Chere of the Newark Star-Ledger reports some details:

Deal to end NHL lockout tentative with 10-year CBA (opt-out after 8 years), 7-year contract limit (8 for own players) and $64.3 M cap ’13-14.

That’s right: After the NHL asked for a $60 million cap, the players got the League to move all the way to $64.3.

Even the NHL’s proposed $60 million cap is frankly too high.  The $64.3 million cap would currently place 22 teams under the limit (and the cap, of course, is a limit, not a minimum) and force 8 teams to shed payroll – including your Minnesota Wild.  All this in a league were nearly 1/3rd of the teams are financially struggling.

The end result?  The length of the CBA (10 years) probably means an increased exodus of teams from the US to Canada, as we just saw last year with the Atlanta Thrashers becoming the reincarnated Winnipeg Jets.  The NHL’s 90’s mistake of expansion in southern US markets is slowing coming back to bite them.  Moving some of the teams north would probably be the best economic decision but only further the NHL’s regional appeal.  Not the NHL has learned this lesson yet – the American cities proposed for expansion include decidedly non-hockey markets like Houston and Las Vegas.  We may see an NHL franchise contract before this CBA expires, which while being a PR letdown, might actually be what’s best for the league.

Here’s how to get to Education Liberty Watch to push back against the proposed social studies standards.

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.  I’ll have GOP House Minority leader Kurt Daudt in the 2PM hour, talking about the outlook for the GOP in this dismal-looking session.   I’ll also be talking with Karen Effrem of Education Liberty Watch about what we can do about the proposed social studies standards.
• 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!

You’re at a community council meeting in the gymnasium of your kids’ school.

As one of your neighbors drones on about easements for new curb construction, a gawky-looking 20-something man in a black trench coat with an unsettling look of demented purposefulness on his face walks into the meeting.  He walks to the front of the room and draws an AK47 from under his trench coat, and shoots the leader of the group, who slumps against the cinder-block wall, leaving a slick of blood streaked down to the floor.

“Hey!” says the guy in the seat next to you, a fortyish man with an impeccable gray beard and John Lennon glasses who works for a social-service non-profit, “he can’t do that!  This is a gun-free zone!”

The killer turns his gun on the crowd, and fires a shot into the mass of panicking people in their folding seats.  Pandemonium erupts as a geyser of blood and tissue sprays over the crowd from what used to be an obese fiftysomething woman’s head.

The man sitting next to you dials 911 on his cell phone as the crowd frantically gets up and tries to get out one of the three available doors.  As the man patiently answers the dispatcher’s questions, the young fellow fires again, blasting a hole in the chest of an elderly man who had been there to ask about putting a “Yield” sign on his corner.  He slumps to the ground.

Your brain activates your body’s “fight or flight” reflex pumping adrenaline into your system.  As the hormone takes over your brain, you focus with tunnel vision on the shooter; the cacaphony of the screaming crowd dies away – you are unaware of any noise at all, in fact.

You have, however, drilled a bit in the basics of how to respond to a lethal-force threat; you’re dimly but practically aware that you are not a willing participant in this episode, that you have a very real chance of sharing the fate of the speaker, the old man and the obese woman (death or maiming), and – since you live in a “stand your ground” state – you don’t need to futz with trying to retreat under fire.

You stand up and move to the side, stand clear of a small group of panicky women who are trying to extricate themselves from the mass of folding chairs and scrambling people, and draw your legally-permitted SIG-Sauer P250 9mm Compact (with a 13 round magazine) from the inside-the-belt holster at your back.  And you shoot.

You fire several times – because of the adrenaline, you lose count at 1.  But your training guides you; of the five rounds you do fire, two dig into the cinder-block wall behind the shooter.  The next catches him in the right shoulder.  Your fourth shot drills through the top center of his chest, severing his trachea.  The fifth hits him in the lower-right abdomen, drilling through a mass of soft tissue and ricocheting out into the tile floor.

The second hit interrupts the shooter’s air flow and dazes him.  The shooter drops the rifle (and its 27 remaining rounds), and slumps to the floor, lying in a rapidy-expanding pool of blood.  He bleeds out, and is non-responsive when the paramedics arrive.  He’s pronounced dead at the emergency room.  In his trench coat was a bag with nine more magazines – 270 rounds – and a pistol.

Question:  The original speaker, the obese woman, the old man and the shooter are dead.  Are there three homicides, or are there four?

Well, that’s easy enough.  There are four people dead.  Four homicides.

Question 2:  Are those four homicides the same?   Or was one – that of the shooter – in balance, a net moral good, if not an unalloyed, morally unambiguous one?

How you answer that tells us a lot about how you perceive this next story.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Expert says mass shootings not increasing, it just seems like it.   Hat tip: Instapundit

On the other hand, haven’t we had more mass shootings under President Obama than any other President?  Wonder why he makes people crazy . . .

Joe Doakes

Como Park

The worst mass murders in US history – Oklahoma City, the Bath Michigan school bombing – involved no shooting at all, and Bath took place in the twenties.

Read the article Joe linked, by the way.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Not every high school needs a cop on-site to protect students from firearms. St. Thomas Academy students know very well how to handle their weapons, their rifle team is going to the national championships. Go Cadets!

Joe Doakes

It’s amazing they aren’t all dead, what with all that contact with guns and stuff.

But congrats, Cadets!

But Joe?  Be careful.  The DFL can fix that.

They told me that if I voted for Mitt Romney, sexism would win.

And they were right!

Biden, greeting Senator-Elect Heidi Heidtkamp (D – ND): “Spread your legs, you’re gonna be frisked!”.

Remember – Biden is on the ticket for all of that “gravitas”.

To:  The Saint Paul City Council
From: Mitch Berg, one of your few remaining ATMs
Re:  Your work ethic

The Saint Paul City Council, having saved the downtown economic scene, balanced the city’s budget without gang-raping the city’s few remaining productive taxpayers, preventing a free-fall in property values…

…sheesh, I’m sorry.  I was laughing.  But it wasn’t the mirthful laugh of the happy and carefree.  It was more the resigned hacking cough of the guy in the engine room of a ship whose captain just keeps on ramming icebergs, since he’s still technically “afloat”, just to see what’ll happen.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.  The City Council wants to ban scary guns, provided that they’re just the ones in the hands of the law-abiding Minnesotan:

At the Wednesday, Jan. 2 council meeting, they amended their annual request to lawmakers to include a crackdown on semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazines.

They join a chorus of municipal bodies, politicians and Hollywood celebrities clamoring for tighter gun laws in the wake of the horrific school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.

Let’s summarize here:

• The council of a stagnant city with a shriveling business base and whose only real resource anymore is “cheap-ish housing in a crap market” has…
• …wasted city time to pass a meaningless resolution to…
• …punish the vast majority of gun owners, the scrupulously law-abiding ones, because of…
• …something they didn’t do, urging an action that…
• …has never, ever, not even once, had a positive effect on violent crime, but indeed is positively linked to higher violent crime rates.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

As our “leaders” debate how to solve the fiscal cliff, the President seems intent on making sure the rich pay most of it.

Let me just note some of the “tax the rich” schemes that already have been tried and found to be failures at best, counterproductive at worst: Window tax,Brick tax, Wallpaper tax,Hearth tax, and Yacht tax.

Look, here’s the deal:  rich people are rich, they’re not stupid.  Jack tax rates too high and they’ll simply move and take their money with them.

In every one of these schemes, the rich altered their behavior to avoid the taxes, the poor didn’t pay taxes anyway, so the burden fell squarely on the middle class – too “rich” to be exempt, too poor to escape.

President Obama is a Harvard scholar.  His advisors are the smartest in the world.  He cannot be unaware of history.  Why is he intent on repeating it?

Why are Republicans even thinking about letting him repeat it?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

The Saint Paul Macy’s is closing in March.

Macy’s is closing its St. Paul store this spring, leaving downtown without a major retailer and bringing to a close 50 years of continuous department store operations at the Wabasha Street location.

Store employees were to be told this week that the store will shut down in late March, according to sources who did not want to be named.

On the one hand, it’s not really a surprise.  The place has been a morgue for years.  The only reason it stayed open as long as it did was to stay within the terms of a loan from the city back in 2002.  Since they hit the ten year nut, a few million dollars are going to be forgiven, store or no store.

So to summarize:  No store, no more payback, no anchor retail in downtown Saint Paul.

No nothing.

On some St. Paul list-servers, some DFL-leaning residents are feeling chipper about it: “maybe Target will buy the space?”

I only worked downtown for about four years – but this was actually fairly busy, as I recall.

Nonsense.  Target didn’t get to be a huge retailer by being stupid.  Saint Paul is not a retail destination – if it were, there’d be no such announcement from Macy’s.

(“But Macy’s is just stupid!”, some might respond – but their share value is clipping along rather well, so whatever their other faults, they seem to know a bit about keeping their stores profitable).

I’ll predict the following:

• If there’s a free-market tenant for the building?  I’ll say look forward to the world’s largest Dollar Tree.  Complete with three floors of parking.
• But much more likely?  It’ll be rented out to the State of Minnesota, or some other agglomeration of government entities.  Likely as not by consolidating people in from smaller rentals around downtown.

Bottom line?  Six decades of DFL control have left downtown Saint Paul a ghost town, populated only by wan holdouts, scrappy and bargain-hungry small businesses, a few corporations that haven’t quite pulled the trigger on relocation yet, hipsters (waaaaay down by the Farmer’s Market), a few lucky businesses (up by the XCel and the Ordway, assuming hockey comes back someday), a lot of state offices, and – for about a catastrophic third of the office space – nothing at all.

While I realize that St. Paul’s city government – strangled as it’s been by one party rule for sixty years now – didn’t specifically set out to make Downtown into a cold Flint, I have to ask – if they had, how would things be different?

Dear Saint Paul Voters:  Remember that “Definition of Insanity” joke?  Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result?

Pretty funny, huh?

Kevin Williamson brilliantly sums up why people vote as they do, and what conservatism needs to do to have conservatism reach people.

To sum it up absurdly briefly: different ethnic, gender and social groups have different tolerances for risk; people with higher risk tolerances tend to vote conservative; ironically, “progressivism” is riskier in the long term.  Convincing them is the hard part.  What do you have better to do?

At various points in reading it – it’s 6,000 words – I thought about doing a couple of pull-quotes a day for two weeks.  I may do that still.  It is that good – and by “good”, I mean “very, very thought-provoking about what motivates people to vote conservative or “progressive””.

Read the whole thing when you get some time to spare.

UPDATE:  Mr. Williamson will be joining me on the Northern Alliance Radio Network on January 12.  Hope you can tune in.  This oughtta be good.

Sic Transit Gloria Rock et Roll

The 400 Bar is likely an ex-bar.  It’s pining for the fjords.  It’s no longer nailed to its perch.

A message newly posted on the club’s website — which has been devoid of show listings or any updates since November — was the first confirmation that the building at 400 Cedar Avenue S. would be changing hands. It reads:

“After 17 years of presenting shows, we’ve closed the old building on the West Bank. Thanks to all the great music fans and artists who’ve worked so hard to make the 400 what it is. An online auction featuring some of the club’s memorabilia starts this weekend at www.400bar.com. See you in 2013.”

The bar’s operators for those 17 years, Tom and Bill Sullivan, are staying mum on the changes and letting O’Brien do the talking. And he’s not saying much. He did say that the building has been bought by Abdighani M. Ali, who is an assistant director of the south Minneapolis charter school Banaadir Academy and a Somali and Muslim community leader. Ali, however, could not be reached for confirmation.

I only played the 400 once, back in the eighties, back when its stage was about the size of a pool table.  But I always loved the place’s dingy vibe.

Oh, well – with the Uptown, the Union, MacReady’s and (the unlamented) Fernando’s gone, the Mitch Berg Nostalgia rock and roll tour has pretty much three stops – the First/Seventh, the Turf, and the Cabooze.

Which, as much as I get out these days, is probably going to still be pretty grueling.

When you try to debate the Second Amendment with a “reasonable”, “moderate” gun control advocate, they frequently take great pains to reassure the audience “we’re not coming after the rights of the law-abiding citizen!”. 

And maybe some of them, the (mini-van full of) rank and file of the Minnesota gun grabber movement, believe it.

But their leaders?  Not so much.

Joan Peterson is the doyenne of “Protect MN”; think “Mussolini” to Rep. Heather Martens’ Count Ciano. 

And her manifesto is…well, manifest, if you just bother to read it.

Mark Okern of the Minnesota Gun Owners PAC did.  Read the whole thing. 

And remember it during the next session, when the gun grabbers try to play “reasonable”.  Joan Peterson is the real thing; the movement’s inner id, the one with no compunctions about saying what she’s really after (since in her life she’s apparently never needed compunctions of any kind).

Read it.  Circulate it among your friends, especially shooters that might go squishy.

Last week:  the Lower Hudson Journal News – an anti-gun rag in metro New York – published an interactive map of all legal carry permit holders in Rockland and Westchester counties of New York.

This week?  They’ve hired armed guards:

A Clarkstown police report issued on December 28, 2012, confirmed that The Journal News has hired armed security guards from New City-based RGA Investigations and that they are manning the newspaper’s Rockland County headquarters at 1 Crosfield Ave., West Nyack, through at least tomorrow, Wednesday, January 2, 2013.

According to police reports on public record, Journal News Rockland Editor Caryn A. McBride was alarmed by the volume of “negative correspondence,” namely an avalanche of phone calls and emails to the Journal News office, following the newspaper’s publishing of a map of all pistol permit holders in Rockland and Westchester.

“Negative correspondence?”   You mean, threats?

McBride had filed at least two reports with the Clarkstown Police Department due to perceived threats. However, the police did not find the communications in question actually threatening. Incident-Report 2012-00033099 describes McBride telling police she was worried because an email writer wondered “what McBride would get in her mail now.”

Police said the email “did not constitute an offense” and did not contain an actual threat.

When did American journalists turn into such pansies?

(It’s a rhetorical question.  It happened about the time they decided to be high priests of information in the employ of the left).

You, the peasant, shouldn’t have guns; they, the patricians, must – to protect themselves from you, the peasant.

See how it works?

…even as Congress flagellates our grandchildren with debt and inflation looms around the corner, that some things never change.

Like the excitement America feels for the marriage of Hugh Hefner and Brittney Cummings Ashlee De La Tata Desirée Van Hondestijl “Crystal Harris”:

Hefner, 86, married fiancée Crystal Harris, 26, in front of family and a few close friends at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles on Monday, the magazine publisher confirmed on Twitter.

“Crystal & I married on New Year’s Eve in the Mansion with Keith as my Best Man. Love that girl!” he Tweeted early New Year’s Day.

The bride wore a floor length strapless gown in soft pink and the groom wore a traditional black tuxedo, Playboy Enterprises said in a statement.

After the ceremony came a private reception with a champagne toast and the bride and groom cut the wedding cake.

And then the incident zone wedding was put under quarantine as the guests and all furniture were sprayed with emergency disinfectant.

Just look at the lovely couple:

The dog is the only one of the lot that should be voting, if you catch my drift.

Still, after a decade (?) of hearing about Kardashians and “Real Housewives”, Hef almost seems…wholesome, doesn’t he?  In comparison, I mean?

And the pre-nup has to be a work of engineering not unlike the Verezzano Narrows bridge.

Remember when Obama was a “moderate” on guns? When he spent a couple of years trying to show Americans he wasn’t that kind of Chicago pol?

Yeah, I didn’t either.

In 1994, the backlash against Clinton’s raft of gun laws was a key part of the Republican Revolution that swept the country; the likes of Newt Gingrich wanted us to think it was all “Contract with America”, and that was the marquee event to be sure, but for a whoooole lot of people, it was the Democrats voting for (and some GOPers caving to) the anti-gun panic that drove votes.

Remember Rod Grams’ defeat of Ann Wynia?

Does Al Franken remember it?

It’s New Years Day, and as such it’s time for a tradition unlike most others – the Seventh Annual Shootie Awards, “honoring” the “best” in Minnesota blogging in the same way D-Con Mouse Pellets honor the best in rodent culture.

The Nick Coleman/Brian Lambert Memorial Award For Broadcast Excellence: There wasn’t much to report on this year, since I’m not even sure KTNF – the Twin Cities’ former “Air America” affiliate – is on the air anymore (although it still has a website, so I guess it still exists, more or less).  At least, not in the Twin Cities.

But the Shooties are everywhere, including Fargo.  And it didn’t escape my notice that among the many Minnesota lefties babbling about MN Representative Mary Franson was KFGO (Fargo) sportscaster-turned-leftyblog-“talk show host” Mike McFeely.  After repeating some slanders that were debunked even by some of Minnesota’s less-depraved liberal bloggers long ago, McFeely got roundly  slapped down by his management (who must be getting tired of slapping the hapless McFeely, whose ratings  reportedly badly lag the rest of KFGO’s WCCO-like happy-talk lineup).

But he wasn’t done.  He poked his nose into the District 8A race in an op-ed in a local paper that was just a little too clever in its selectiveness about facts to be really termed “incompetent” or “illiterate” – but left you with the same feeling when you were done.

It was a little like…a sportscaster trying to write about things other than grownups chasing balls around fields.

And not since Frank DeFord has that ever been pretty.

The J. Wellington Wimpy “I Will Gladly Pay You Never For Your Vote Today” Award:  This award goes to Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk.  After benefitting mightily from a campaign against the “Marriage Amendment” with a counter-campaign asking Minnesotans why gay couples should be treated as second class citizens, why people who love each other should be discriminated against, and why we should mistreat people who share the same goals we all do about our families and kids, Bakk answered the question; “because it might hurt the DFL in the coming session, that’s why“.

It’s been explained that Bakk is counting on one level of court or another to strike down Minnesota’s gay marriage ban.

Now there’s a profile in courage for you.

The George Santayana Memorial “He Who’s Forgotten History Is Condemned To Be A Liberal Academic” Award:  It’s not strictly Minnesota – but Amitai Etzioni brought back one of the great punch lines in the history of the American gun control debate last month.

In the seventies, at the crest of the gun control tide, one of the big gun grabber organizations – I want to say it was the “National Coalition to Ban Handguns”, which I believe morphed over the years into the “Violence Policy Center” – gave out “Gun Free Home” signs to people who wanted to put their support for gun control on their front door.

Didn’t last long, of course – homes with the signs had a burglary rate at least an order of magnitude higher than their neighbors.  The signs disappeared faster than the campaign.

And Mr. Etzioni proved Dennis Prager’s dictum that “it takes an elite university education to be this stupid” by suggesting gun-grabbing families give it another try.

The “Minnesota Nice” Award:  The Minnesota left spent a year and a half convincing Minnesotans that love, not dogma, was the answer.

And what love they preached:

Seen at an anti-Marriage-Amendment gathering at the State Fair.  Courtesy Andy Parrish.

It passed without a peep from the Twin Cities media, who were apparently still spent from their years of trolling Tea Party rallies for any hint of deviance.

It could happen to anyone, I guess.

The “The Media, The Media, The Media’s On Fire! We Don’t Need No Water, Let That Liberal Institution Burn!” Award: goes not so much to “Politifiact”, but to the final positive conclusion reached this past year that Politifact is less concerned with “fact” than with fluffing the left’s narrative, and is of no more value than “The Daily Kos” for finding “facts”.

The Dennis Prager “It Takes A University Education To Be This Stupid” Award:  This award is always a brutal slugfest among many – indeed, an entire academy – full of contenders.  But the clear winner was Jeff Kolnick, from Southwest Minnesota State University, for this gale of unsupported illogical logorrhea that the Strib favored as an op-ed, and that would have been returned to any freshman comp student as poorly argued and unsupported.

The Just Remember, Libruls are Teh Smrt Award: Awarded, this year, to Steve Timmer’s copy-editor, whoever it is.

The Elvis Costello “Shut Up Or Get Cut Up” Award:  No contest this year.  It goes ot U of M Professor William B. Gleason.

While spending this past year exercising his beaver-like work ethic in his demanding job as a chemistry professor at the U (as opposed to writing thousands and thousands of tweets about the subjects of some impotent outrage on U of M time – no, perish the thought), Gleason filed a specious FCC complaint against Jack Tomczak of The Late Debate – at the time, heard on a little potboiler of a station in the north suburbs.  Tomczak, taking his infant daughter with him, went to the U of M to try to see Gleason hard at work curing cancer and stuff, and recounted the expedition on the air.  Gleason filed his meritless complaint.  The station’s management showed why they’re managing an obscure gospel station, and folded like a cheap end table, and whacked the show…

…which moved over, eventually, to a full-time slot on AM1130, with a paycheck and an audience.

(Gleason also filed a “harassment restraining order” against Tomczak, in court – but failed to show up for the hearing.  Clearly, this was because of his grueling research schedule.  Not, good heavens no, because he’s a narcissistic bully who runs like a scared bunny rabbit, like all bullies,  when he’s stood up to.  Perish the thought).

The Benito Mussolini “The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend” Award:  In a related incident, this goes to MinnPost’s Brian Lambert, for uncritically (as in, “like a trained bobblehead”) siding with Gleason in the above episode – because Tomczak was a former Michele Bachmann aide, and thus beyond the local lefty snark-based media’s self-imposed pale.

The Cicero/Demosthenes/Socrates Award For Excellence In The Advancement Of Keen-Eyed Rhetoric:  This goes to the entire Twin Cities left, the apotheosis of whose entire argument over this past year (outside of those paid for by Alida Messinger) was the handful of glitter thrown at their enemy du jour.

The Jordan Daycare Providers’ Association Award For Excellence In Airtight, Unreasoning Groupthink:  This one was too hard to choose; it had to go to Just About The Entire Minnesota Sorosphere for their disgraceful conduct in re Rep Franson’s comments about the state and dependence culture.  After a video in which she said dependance treated people like animals – as in, pets or livestock, dependent on a benevolent master – the local left translated it (context be damned) into “The Poor Are Animals!”, and sat back and giggled.

Franson laughed last, of course (as noted waaay above).

The “Every Junior High Impressed-With-Himself Chess-Club Prig” Award For Intellectual Rigor:  This dolt, who argued (in, what else, the Strib ) that liberals are right and conservatives are wrong because, well, liberals are right and conservatives are wrong.

The Blog Neologism Of The Year:  This one goes to Mr. Dilettante, for “Helga Braid Nation“, describing the mass of Minnesota voters whose primary argument for subsidizing Zygi Wilf’s real estate investment with your money and mind was that they dressed like stylized Vikings.

Yeah, that was about all there was to it.

The Nancy Pelosi “You Won’t Know What It Means Til You Do It!” Award For Wishful Planning:  This one is shared between Governor Dayton, Ted Mondale, and “Helga Braid Nation”, for pinning much of the funding for the stadium subsidy on a form of gambling whose receipts have been dropping for decades, that doesn’t really jibe with how Minnesotans gamble, and whose machines can’t get state approval, leaving even more of the subsidy in the lap of the Minnesota taxpayer than before.

The Claudius Caesar Award For Excellence In Praetorian Guardsmanship:  This is another shared award, between the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute and the entire Twin Cities media, who conspired to keep video of a particularly dissociative, rambling, downright bizarre Mark Dayton speech hidden from the public.

And finally, the capstone of all the awards in this annual event…:

The Charles Townsend Award – In 1765, British parliamentarian Charles Townsend, in noting the Colonies’ protests against the Stamp Act, said:

“And now will these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength & Opulence, and protected by our Arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”

And this year’s winner is Jim Schowalter, head of MMB, who – at a meeting of business leaders at an outstate company shortly after Barack Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That” jape, basically said…

…the same thing; that Minnesota business exists because of Minnesota government, so we should all shut up and be happy to pay for a better Minnesota or there will be consequences.

That’s it for this year!  But have no fear; every year provides a bounty of material for which I give daily thanks.

Til next year!