Mention Irish rock megastars U2 to people, and the reactions you get will span the gamut.

To kids today, a generation after they first came out, it’s probably all about Bono – the peripatetic, bombastic lead singer who’s parlayed a magnificent singing voice and a global pop following into a second career as a global charity leader (and, it needs to be said, arch-capitalist).

To someone who came of age in the nineties?  I’d imagine U2 was to them what the Rolling Stones were to me growing up in the late seventies and early eighties; dissipated celebrities noodling with making sense of their megastardom, albeit with less drugs and model-banging, but with a lot more artistic pretension ladled on top.

To hipsters of all eras?  Once they left Dublin, they were trayf.

And U2 has been all of that to me, too (except maybe the hipster bit).

But mostly, U2 is the band that tied together two big strands in my own life.  And the main catalyst for this, their breakthrough album War, was released thirty years ago today.

And the strands it tied together for me, and with style, were faith and rock and roll.

(more…)

At the end of February – almost four months after the election, and 20 months before the next one – the Star Tribune does its explosive analysis of individual campaign contributions.

This, after a gubernatorial race where the DFL outspent the GOP on the order of 2:1, and a legislative race with a nearly-as-dismal margin.

And in a piece by Rachel Stassen-Berger with 23 paragraphs, Governor leading DFL donor Alida Messinger got one paragraph and a brief shout out in the lede.

Indeed, the raft of liberal plutocrats who have essentially taken over the entire DFL messaging operation took up exactly six of the 23 paragraphs, along with a brief mention that “Corporations and unions still pour cash into elections”.

The rest of the piece was largely focused on GOP individual donors who, it is noted, largely  sat out the election, or focused on single issues.  The influence of ABM, which essentially entirely controls the DFL at least in terms of message, is ignored.

Well, not quite:

Blodgett and others said she is not the type of donor who makes demands of the beneficiaries of her largesse.

Not “ignored”; “whitewashed” may be a better term.  I mean, if Jeff Blodgett says Governor Alida Messinger behaves herself, that’s good enough for me!

\Of course, when you can act unilaterally with impunity, demands are superfluous… 

With much fanfare, a few DFL figureheads are introducing a gay marriage bill:

“Minnesotans spoke so loudly during this last election refusing to adopt that proposed constitutional amendment. It was a very clear statement, and I think we’re now ready to take the next step, and it means everything to our families.”

Surrounded by supporters, Clark and Sen. Scott Dibble, who was instrumental in the anti-amendment campaign, said their side is prepared to combat the flood of national money that’s been promised against the proposal.

I’ve been saying since the opening day of the session that the DFL was going to stall on gay marriage – and they have.

And they’ll continue to; even the DFL’s house PR organs (including the MinnPost, from which I quote) note that the DFL leadership is going very slow:

Although DFL leaders have said they personally support same-sex marriage, they haven’t been overly enthusiastic in discussing legislative action with the press.

This is echoed in fundraising letters being sent to gay marriage supporters; outstate DFLers, already alarmed by the DFL’s gun grabs and a DFL tax bill that is going over outstate like a Lindsay Lohan one-woman show in Branson, are queasy about the bill; they remember (even if the media doesn’t) that the Marriage Amendment passed, often convincingly, in most of Minnesota; it was stopped by cataclysmic turnout in the Metro.

Where, unlike greater Minnesota, the issue is a winner for the DFL.

My fearless prediction:  the DFL will introduce the bill with much fanfare (ok, that’s not a prediction, that’s what happened).  It’ll quietly die in committee.  And the Alliance for a Better Minnesota will send its flying monkeys out next year to spin the death as perfidy by a GOP caucus that, in fact, controls nothing.

Final scorecard:  those who prosper from low-information voters: 1.  Gays who wish to marry:  0.

And so it shall stay.

Bob Woodward has spent the past four decades as a hero of the Left…

…until this past week, when he transgressed against The One.

Now?  He’ll never do lunch in DC again:

Bob Woodward called a senior White House official last week to tell him that in a piece in that weekend’s Washington Post, he was going to question President Barack Obama’s account of how sequestration came about – and got a major-league brushback. The Obama aide “yelled at me for about a half hour,” Woodward told us in an hour-long interview yesterday around the Georgetown dining room table where so many generations of Washington’s powerful have spilled their secrets.

Digging into one of his famous folders, Woodward said the tirade was followed by a page-long email from the aide, one of the four or five administration officials most closely involved in the fiscal negotiations with the Hill. “I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today,” the official typed. “You’re focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. … I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

 Woodward repeated the last sentence, making clear he saw it as a veiled threat. “ ‘You’ll regret.’ Come on,” he said. “I think if Obama himself saw the way they’re dealing with some of this, he would say, ‘Whoa, we don’t tell any reporter ‘you’re going to regret challenging us.’ ”

Oh, he’s got plenty more to go around.

A St. Paul Libertarian GOP activist sent this photo of a bus disgorging a load of…

…eight people in SEIU caps to protest in front of Wells Fargo.

To Mark Ritchie, I suppose that’s a mandate.

I first wrote about this episode three years ago; today is the seventieth anniversary of the Ryukan Raid,  in which ten Norwegian commandos with the British “Special Operations Executive” raided a hydroelectric dam that produced most of the world’s supply of “Heavy Water”, a key component of the process the Nazis were using to try to build an atomic bomb.

It was a good piece, so I’m going to re-run it, with a few suitable revisions.

———-

I’ll cop to it; after the 2009 “Nobel Peace Prize” award to a president who, as of the award deadline, had done nothing to warrant it, and has done even less since, my self-esteem-respect as an American of Norwegian anscestry has taken a bit of a beating.

But it’s on days like today – the 70th anniversary of the Norwegian raid on the Vemork heavy-water plant at Ryukan, Norway – that I get a bit of that old Norse møjø back.

You may not have heard the story – largely because most American history teachers are illiterate about history, and partly because the font of all historical knowledge for most of them, Hollywood, transformed the event into an Anglo-American triumph (the atrocious Heroes of Telemark).

Like much of what you learn about “history” from Hollywood, it’s BS.

A little scientific and historical background:  nuclear reactors need something to “moderate” their fission reactions – i.e. to keep them under control.  The United States program used a mixture of Cadmium and Graphite.  The Germans, for reasons best explained by a physicist, chose Deuterium Oxide – aka “Heavy Water” – a compound found in infinitesimally tiny quantities in all water.  All you need to do is refine it out of all the regular water.

And in all of Europe in the early 1940s, there was exactly one facility that could refine bulk lots of Deuterium Oxide in the quantities a nuclear weapons program would need; the Vemork plant near the village of Rjukan, Norway.

Vemork sat by a hydroelectric dam – so both  water and the electric power needed to find the Heavy Water were available in immense abundance.

The British had wanted to attack the plant ever since they learned of its significance.  The British “Special Operations Executive” – a wartime organization that sat at the intersection of intelligence and special operations, much like “Special Operations Command” in the US does today, and whose American analogue, the “OSS”, became the anscestor of the CIA and US Special Forces – established an agent inside the plant (Einar Skinnarland) who smuggled out blueprints and paved the way.

In October of 1942, an SOE reconnaisance team with four more Norwegian operators (Jens Anton Poulsson, Arne Kjelstrup, Knut Haukelid and Claus Helberg), men who’d fled to the UK after the German invasion and undergone commando and intelligence training, were infiltrated into Norway to reconnoiter the area for a followup British commando raid.  The four men were air-dropped into a remote area far from Ryukan, and skied for days through the gathering mountain winter before they could even begin their mission.

A plan came together…

…and then completely unraveled.  The followup British commando raid to attack the plant failed catastrophically, with gliders and tow planes crashing in the snow and all the commandos either dying in the crashes or being caught and executed by the Gestapo, after revealing under torture the target of their raid.  The Germans reinforced Vemork, in case the Brits tried again.

The four-man recon team had to not only survive a mountain winter, but do it with an alerted enemy actively searching for them, and stay on the grid and able to assist the followup mission that had to come.

Later that winter, it fell to them and six more Norwegian commandos to finish the job.

The six reinforcements – Joachim Holmboe Rønneberg, Knut Haukelid, Fredrik Kayser, Kasper Idland, Hans Storhaug and Birger Strømsheim – dropped into Norway, linked up with Poulsson, Kjelstrup, Haugland and Helberg, and carried out the plan.

Bypassing the heavily-guarded bridge that ran 600 feet above the Maan River, the team descended from the plateau above into the river gorge, snuck across the icy stream, up a cable tunnel, and through a window.

They encountered a caretaker – who turned out to be a Norwegian who was happy to help.

The team placed the bombs – which destroyed the entire 1000-pound heavy-water supply – and escaped unscathed.  The Germans dispatched 3,000 troops to try to catch the commandos – but all escaped, with six of them staying in Norway to carry on the battle, and the other five skiing to Sweden to return to the UK to carry on the war.

Being lucky and skillful, they all survived the war.

Being Norwegian, most of them lived long, healthy lives afterwards; all but Idland lived into the 1990’s; Poullson and Knut Haugland in the past few years, Strømsheim just last December.  Haugland was probably best-known to Americans, having participated in Thor Heyerdahl’s famous Kon Tiki expedition in the late forties. Joachim Rønneberg is still alive.

There are those who say, with some factual backing, that the German nuke program could never have caught up with the US program, even without the Vemork raid.

Perhaps.

Thanks to eleven brave underdogs and their mission, patched together against impossible odds, we never needed to even try to imagine what London and Moscow would look like as craters.

PBS’ Nova did an excellent documentary on the Vemork raid and its larger context, the Nazi nuclear weapons program.  It includes  a useful bio page on the whole group of Vemork raiders.  This site also explains the raid, and the science, in excellent detail.

The BBC also did a documentary – some forty years ago, now – on the subject. Hopefully it’ll stay available for a while:

It’s funny; listening to the guys from the raid (when I heard them on a different documentary from about ten years ago, since removed from Youtube), you’d think you were looking at and listening to old Norwegian guys at a Lutheran church lutefisk dinner in Park Rapids – and then you remember these are guys who sailed across the North Sea, went through British commando school, airdropped into Norway, spent a winter in a forester’s cabin living on reindeer meat and moss, and then carried out the kind of raid that ends up in the history books.

Every American schoolchild should be forced to listen to Rønneberg’s send-off at the end of the third installment of the documentary (around the 7:50 mark):

You have to fight for your freedom. And for peace. It’s not something that you have every day; you have to fight for it every day, to keep it.  It’s like a glass boat; it’s easy to break.  It’s easy to lose.

Whenever the Nobel committee embarasses Norway, I remember them, and feel much better, mange takk.

———-

Nearly everything I needed to write about today’s anniversary, I wrote three years ago – with one exception.

For most of the past 40-50 years, the conventional wisdom was that the Vemork raid, and the equally-daring followup the next year (in which Norwegian resistance fighters and SOE agents sank a ferry boat carrying the little heavy water that’d been salvaged by the Nazis) merely “bounced the rubble” of the German nuke program; that the bravery, endurance and ingenuity of the ten Norwegians was a great human story, but had little to do with affecting the outcome of the war.  The Nazis were never close to having a bomb, says the revisionist history.

The revisionism needs to be revised, though.

Tim Gawne, who’s spent a considerable amount of time researching ORNL’s archives and the Weinberg papers, recently came across a declassified Nov. 8, 1945 memo from Weinberg and L.W. Nordheim, the first physics director at the Oak Ridge lab (then called Clinton Laboratories), to Compton. Weinberg, who later directed ORNL for 18 years, died in 2006.

“We are writing in order to correct what we believe to be a very prevalent misconception concerning the state of the art as known to the Germans in 1945,” Weinberg and Nordheim wrote in the three-page memo, noting they had read a few of the relevant German documents.

There has been a lot written, of course, regarding Germany’s work on the atomic bomb and various analyses. I’m no scholar on the topic, by any stretch, but the Weinberg/Nordheim memo seems to offer a more generous assessment of Germany’s progress than some other post-war reports and subsequent analyses.

They addressed multiple questions in the memo, including a concluding one, “What bearing does this have on the general question of our ‘secrets’?”

Here’s part of their answer:

“On this we can presume to speak only as individuals.

“The general impression from the German reports is that they were on the right track and that their thinking and developments paralleled ours to a surprising extent. The fact that they did not achieve their chain reaction is primarily due to their lack of sufficient amounts of heavy water.

“In one of the reports a vivid description is given of the German efforts in this respect. The heavy water factories in Norway were designed for a capacity of 3-4 tons a year and were successfully operating during part of 1942 and 1943. This capacity would have been sufficient for the construction of a pile (reactor). However, the production was interrupted by sabotage and finally the main factory was destroyed by a bombing attack. Toward the end of 1944 plans were made to initiate production of heavy water in Germany and to use enriched uranium in order to reduce the material requirements.

In other words, the Germans never came close to having the bomb – in large part because due to the Vemork Raid, they could never get a reactor built.

Former Governor Ventura, if you’re reading this – and I am sure you are – I have to tell you that an apology is in order.

I am sorry.

For four years – including the first year of this blog’s life – I claimed that you were the biggest embarassment in the history of the state of Minnesota.

That crown – or belt, as the case may be – has been passed.  Mark Dayton, when he was a Senator, gave you a run for your money, but it was a transient thing.

But today, there’s no doubt. Keith Ellison is a morbid humiliation to everyone in this state that has the faintest interest in not looking stupid:

Representative Ellison is further proof that Minnesota Liberals never have to learn the art and craft of civil debate; they, like Ellison, come up through school systems where liberalism is taught as the social baseline, and universities where conservatism is treated as an aberration.

Listen to as much as you can. It’s cringeworthy.

I got to talk with the guy one time, on an online talk show. The guy really is more brittle and facile than I thought he was.

So I’m sorry, Jesse. I mean, I was right and all – you were a train wreck. But that was back when train wrecks were just fun rides, back in the cha-cha nineties, when consequences were dim and far-off – not like today, when the future of the Republic seemed as dire as it has in my lifetime.

To:  Everyone in the USA
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant who’s been through it all before
Re:  “Sequestration”

Hey, everyone,

You may not remember this, but we’ve been through all this before.  Remember the “partial government shutdown”, back in the nineties?  It was a whole big nothing-burger.

Oh, the Clinton Administration tried to make sure that the people felt whatever pain was generated – closing parks, cramping down on the voters.  But as a rule, the whole thing affected nobody.

And here in Minnesota, we had a “complete” shutdown two years ago (which, again, wasn’t – the courts kept most of the government going as “essential”).  It lasted a few weeks.  Then Governor Messinger Dayton abandoned it, when he realized Minnesotans, for all his efforts to squeeze and scare them – shutting down state parks and highway rest areas, threatening to lay off teachers – barely noticed any difference.  While the media did its best to prop up the Messinger Dayton line, the people of Minnesota heard the gales of calumny but saw and felt a big fat nada burrito.  Even Governor Messinger Dayton – as cosseted and isolated from reality as his staff keeps him – noticed; on his trip around the state to whip up support for the DFL budget, he saw tepid crowds of union droogs, and a few professional protesters, and realized he had nothin’ (which may be why Dayton makes so few public appearances these days).

So it’s time for “sequestration” – the “radical” budget cuts that Obama and the super-di-duper commission agreed to as a stick to lead everyone to the “carrot” of an actual federal budget.  We’ve been waiting nearly 1,400 days for a budget from the Democrat-addled Senate, so Washington figured a “stick” was needed.

By the way – how radical and drastic are those cuts?:

Yep. They’re not even cuts.  They’re reductions in the increase.  Indeed, almost completely worthless, if cutting spending is your goal, but really nothing but a fart in the wind; sort of like “dropping HBO” in your family budget, even though your gas bill is rising and your teenage kids are costing more and more.

Obama will try to make “sequestration” hurt; he’ll slow down the TSA lines, he’ll gundeck some ship overhauls and clamp down some military maintenance budgets, he’ll inveigle some big cities to lay off a few cops and teachers, he’ll shut down Yellowstone as the cameras record photos of crestfallen children.  Hell, Joe Biden may even personally try to close the gates at Disney World.

But there is no there, there.  It’s a scare tactic, engineered by Obama and his compliant media.

It needs to be ignored.

That is all.

SCENE:  Adriana and Michael GONZALES, age 30 and 32, owners of a small family commercial cleaning business and parents of three children, are walking through the woods near Minnehaha Park.  It’s foggy and foreboding.

ADRIANA: Mike, did you see something in the woods?

MICHAEL:  Yeah.  Looks like – guys in helmets?

ADRIANA:  This is weird.

MICHAEL:  No kidding…

(They stop, noticing three people in medieval knight costumes – Tom BAKK, Ryan WINKLER and Heather MARTENS – astride the path).

MICHAEL:  Er, who are you?

BAKK:  We are the Knights Who Say “Living Wage!”

WINKER:  We are three elected representatives…

(BAKK nudges WINKLER, points toward Martens, who is gazing distractedly at a squirrel. WINKLER shrugs)

WINKLER: …who roam the forest spreading social justice!

(MICHAEL and ADRIANA shrug)

WINKLER:  If you wish to pass through this forest, you must appease us!

ADRIANA:  Er…OK?  With what?

WINKLER:  You must hire…a Minimum Wage Employee!

MICHAEL:  Cool.  I was hoping to do that.  We’ve got more business than the two of us can handle.

BAKK: Silence?

MICHAEL: Huh?

WINKLER:  You must pay them…nine dollars per hour!

ADRIANA:  Oh, no.  We just need people to do basic cleaning.  We can pay a bonus, but it’s not worth $9 an hour…

BAKK:  And you may not cut your other employees’ hours or benefits to pay the training wage rate, which is itself higher than the federal minimum wage!

WINKLER:  Or lay them off!

BAKK and MARTENS: Or lay them off!

ADRIANA:  Well, then we just can’t hire anyone!

BAKK:  Be happy to pay for a Better Minnesota!

ADRIANA (to MARTENS): So what are you doing here?

MARTENS:  Guns on a bed of escarole make a wonderful snack.  So much better than killing people!

(Sounds in distance:  Minstrels playing over the clip clop of horses, as Governor DAYTON, riding a white charger, appears at the head of a retinue of knights and minstrels.

MINSTREL (as lutes and flutes play in the background) Brave Sir Mark ran away / bravely ran away away! / When terror made its presence known, he bravely turned and scampered home…

DAYTON: Blargle not blargle sure blargle not blargle blargle!

MICHAEL to ADRIANA (whispers): This is a weird place…

MINSTREL: He wasn’t afraid to face Roger Goodell / or tell Alida she’s not so swell / brave brave brave brave sir Mark…

DAYTON:  Blargle!  Blargle not blarg!

MICHAEL : So what if I can’t afford it?

WINKLER:  It’s against the law!  Don’t ask questions!

ADRIANA:  We could just take our business to North Dakota!

BAKK:  Hah!  And for what?  Money?

DAYTON: Blargle!

MICHAEL:  Well…yeah!

WINKLER:  But you can’t get MPR in North Dakota!

ADRIANA:  Yes, I can – we paid for that, too.

BAKK:  But in Minnesota, you will soon have unionized daycare!

ADRIANA:  I like the daycare we have just fine.

WINKLER:  But you can pay more for them!

MARTENS:  It’s a known fact that daycare that costs more is better for children.  Especially if you ban guns.

MICHAEL:  What the…?

DAYTON: Blargle blargle!

ADRIANA (pulling a Texas brochure from her purse and looking at MICHAEL):  This is a silly place.

The couple walk past the jabbering knights.

And SCENE.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Turns out that the city council, acting as the HRA board, has allocated “$35,825 to settle costs related to the site. The HRA acquired the property from the Selby Area Community Development Corporation (SACDC) in December in exchange for $50,000.00 that the corporation owed the city. Since then, city staff learned there were delinquent taxes on the property.”

Why is it that the government can’t get a budget to balance? Could it be incompetence like this? They accept a pig in a poke, in payment of the last pig in a poke? They took a property in payment of a debt without first checking to see if it’s encumbered? Morons. I could see that with granny who takes the neighbor’s lot not knowing better. But this is the city, with it’s nearly limitless resources and unlimited access to the property records.

Bet you a nickel some of those delinquent taxes were special assessments for sidewalk shoveling levied by . . . the city itself!

Joe Doakes, Como Park

It’s Saint Paul.  The left hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.  This is no right hand.

Conservatives joke that liberals just. Don’t.  Get. Economics.

We joke, at times, that at some point a liberal is going to push for a “living wage” statute calling for a $100/hour minimum wage as a means to end poverty, followed by a bill barring any layoffs and banning bankruptcy.

It’s a joke.  Some liberals shake their heads and go “yeah, yeah, we’re not nuts”.

And then something comes a long to prove that they really, really are that dissociative.

Rep. Ryan Winkler (D St. Louis Park), also known as “The Eddie Haskell of the House” – is introducing a “Kill All” amendment to House File 92 that bars businesses from laying off workers, cutting hours or benefits due to minimum wage increases. 

I’m going to write that again, just to let it sink in.

Winkler’s bill would make it illegal for businesses to lay off workers, cut hours or benefits due to minimum wage increases.

No, I’m really not making it up; I’ve added emphasis to the original:

(c) Notwithstanding paragraph (b), during the first 90 consecutive days of employment, an employer may pay an employee under the age of 20 years a wage of :

(1) $6.07 per hour beginning August 1, 2013;

(2) $7.24 per hour beginning August 1, 2014;

(3) $8.41 per hour beginning August 1, 2015; and

(4) the rate established under paragraph (d) beginning January 1, 2016.

2.11 No employer may take any action to displace an employee, including a partial  displacement through a reduction in hours, wages, or employment benefits, in order to hire an employee at the wage authorized in this paragraph.

(UPDATE: Commenter Master Of None points out, the above section refers to a training wage – a wage that employers may pay for up to 90 days – and says it’s not quite as dire as I’d made it out to be.   I disagree; Winkler’s bill raises the already existing training wage, causing all the same problems that raising the minimum itself does, which negates most of the utility of a “training wage”, as well as starting some sort of enforcement mechanism to painstakingly adjudicate all disputes related to training and minimum wages.  Because Minnesota businesses needed more niggling regulations)

And as the Obama Administration launches into permanent quantitative easing, Winkler wants to key the minimum wage to inflation, ensuring that no wages will ever keep up with inflation:

2.14 (d) No later than November 1 of each year, beginning in 2015, the commissioner  shall determine the percentage increase in the rate of inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers, United States city average, as determined by the United States Department of Labor, during the most recent 12-month period for  which data is available. The minimum wage rates in paragraphs (b) and (c) are increased by the percentage calculated by the commissioner, rounded to the nearest cent. The new minimum wage rates determined under this paragraph take effect on the next January 1

In other words: Ryan Winkler wants to…:

• arbitrariliy set wages (higher than the federal minimum, no less!)
• bar business from compensating for the arbitrary change in labor costs in any way but by increasing revenues in the middle of a crap economy (which Dayton’s business service taxes and Obamacare are making worse by the day).

It’s the sort of thing any Economics 101 student knows is madness if he or she wants to get better than a “C”.

Bonus Question:  Do you think Rachel Stassen-Berger, Tom Scheck, Tim Pugmire or John Cronyn will bring any of this up with Winkler or the leadership that enables him?

The media practices a little Pauline Kael syndrome on the gun issue in this piece, which notes the shocking conclusion that “women” – meaning in this case “wealthy liberal women from the most liberal city in the United States” – don’t like guns much.

And in so doing, we mark the rise of a new breed of victorians:

Gun violence is the kind  of issue, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, “that has real potential to mobilize waves of women voters and waves of office-holders.”

“What’s different here is Newtown. That cut a lot of different ways to a lot of different women.”

Perhaps.

Smart women – smart guys, too – realized that the only real defense against evil with guns is good people with guns.

Dumb women?  And men…?

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., a member of the Congressional Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, is eager to get Congress on the record on gun issues. She supports tighter restrictions.

“If we can force votes on these bills on the floor of the House and the Senate, where everybody has to be on record, it’s going to make it very clear to a huge segment of the population — that being women — of where people stand. And I think that will inform the decisions people make at the ballot box,” said Speier.

Yes, Ms. Speier, by all means get those votes on the record.

Because women are the fastest growing segment in the gun-owning population.  Across racial, social, economic and political boundaries, women are buying guns and learning to shoot faster than men are (largely because guys are more likely to have already started).

And maybe in your ofay Bay Area district, a majority of women will snif and vote against the proles with the guns.

East of the Sierras?

The article does, however, cut to the heart of the anti-gun movement:

Behind the scenes, an influential network of female philanthropists based in San Francisco is working to make sure the issue remains prominent, particularly to women.

Shortly after the Newtown shooting, members of the 20-year-old San Francisco-based Women Donors Network began hearing from their 200 members, all of whom donate at least $25,000 a year to progressive causes and individuals and politicians.

Collectively, they contribute $150 million a year to various causes and politicians, the organization says.

And there’s your battle.

The Second Amendment movement is millions of Real Americans who turn out to rallies, testify at hearings, vote for Second Amendment candidates, and above all own guns without incident for their entire lives.

The Orcs?  A few obscenely wealthy crones who write big checks to astroturf groups like “Protect Minnesota” and the “Violence Policy Center”.

Did I say “Astroturf?”

Among the women’s organizations at the forefront of the issue is Moms Rising, the 1.1 million-member activist organization co-founded by Berkeley resident Joan Blades.

“Moms Rising” is a reboot of the “Million Mom March”, the group with “1.1 million members” (no doubt anyone that visits the website is counted as a “member”) that can never muster more than three “members” for an event in the Twin Cities.

Gun violence touches every neighborhood, said Moms Rising executive director Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. Twice in the past year, her children’s private schools in Seattle have been on lockdown because of the threat of a person nearby brandishing a gun.

“We had a national awakening with the (Newtown shooting),” Rowe-Finkbeiner said. “It is something that a lot of women — and men — could relate to.”

And I love the imagery; a bunch of upper-middle-class crones who can write $25,000 checks and whose kids are snuggled into private schools trying to set the agenda for women in Chicago, on ranches in Montana, in North Minneapolis – many of whom are just starting to realize that gun bans don’t save people; people do.

Her lips are moving.

More below.

———-

The Strib’s longtime outdoor writer Dennis Anderson wrote an excellent profile of state representative Tony Cornish over the weekend.  Cornish, with the departure of Pat Pariseau and Linda Boudreaux from the Legislature, has taken on the role of key defender of the Second Amendment in the Legislature:

In St. Paul, however, where he’s the face of gun rights at the Capitol, he’s sometimes less popular, even downright loathed, particularly this legislative session, when a minor blizzard of gun bills has been introduced.

Not to worry, Cornish says confidently, he and other Republicans have enough votes, along with those from rural DFLers, to block any proposals that gun-rights advocates oppose.

“They won’t pass,” he said.

A one-time city cop, deputy sheriff, conservation officer, police chief and, yes — speaking of big guns — Army tank commander, Cornish legally packs what he advocates, either a .40 caliber Glock on his hip — if he’s wearing a sport coat — or a Smith & Wesson in his pocket.

“After being shot at a couple of times and receiving a number of death threats, and never knowing whether I might come across someone I arrested years ago,” he said. “Well, I guess after 36 years as a peace officer, I’d just feel bare without it.”

Plain-speaking, Cornish seems at times a throwback among legislators, reminiscent, in his forthrightness, of Charlie Berg, the onetime DFLer, onetime Republican, mostly independent lawmaker from Chokio in west-central Minnesota.

Sometimes underestimated, in that respect he’s also not unlike the outwardly wacky but ultimately effective retired Sen. Bob Lessard of International Falls.

Of course, every time the “G” word pops up in the Twin Cities mainstream media, the media beat a path to the door of Heather Martens, “Executive Director” (also likely only actual member) of “Protect Minnesota”.  Maybe the editors insist, and she’s the only anti-gun person in their collective rolodex.

The media seems to be unaware of the simple fact that every single substantive declaration about the gun issue, that Heather Martens has ever made, beyond the gurgitation of the odd statistic, has been a lie.

Every single one.

Without exception.

I have been documenting this in this space for over a decade now.

And Dennis Anderson’s piece, like every piece of coverage Martens has ever gotten in her misbegotten public life, is more of the same; I’ll add emphasis to the most dissociative of Martens’ lies:

” [Cornish says the] …background-check system needs to be improved, but it’s complicated and it will cost money,” he said. “If we mandate upgrades to the system, we’ll have to get it right, and it’s going to cost money.”

Heather Martens of Protect Minnesota, a group that would like to see gun laws tightened, wants Cornish to go further.

“We just don’t agree with him, and we don’t think he operates in good faith,” Martens said. “He believes guns are an unlimited right, no matter how many people die. We believe gun deaths can be prevented and that prevention is warranted.”

Martens is ranting – and she’s counting on the public to be both stupid and gullible too.

Cornish, like every single significant pro-Second-Amendment figure, anywhere, believes that there are limits:  criminals, the insane, the chemically-addled, at a fair and clear statutory point, must not get guns.  People who use guns to commit crimes must be punished.  People who get carry permits must know the laws and know how to handle their guns without hurting themselves or others.

Those are limits.  Those are gun controls that, unlike anything Heather Martens says (or hands off to the legislature), actually work.

Cornish disagrees. Background checks on gun sales between private parties? “No.” Restrictions on modern sporting arms, or what commonly are called assault-style rifles of the kind he uses to hunt coyotes? “No.” Prohibition of high-capacity magazines? “No.”

“None of those will reduce crime,” he said. “And none of those bills will pass. We’ve got the votes to block them.”

Thank God for Tony Cornish.

And in the Almighty’s own way, thank God for Heather Martens.  The harsh, incoherently-gabbling, upper-middle-class elitist pathological liar symbolizes the myopia and hypocrisy of the gun control control movement as capably as anyone since Carl Rowan.

Republican “xeroxes” a bill:  Leftymedia chants indignantly.

Democrat not only copies and pastes a bill from a special interest group, but allows that special interest’s registered lobbyist to sit in in the role of a legislator to introduce and read the bill into the record?

{crickets}

Berg’s Seventh Law may be the single most prescient thing I’ve ever written.

I’m gonna give you a two-fer here.  We’ll cover two of Andrew Sullivan’s definitions of what makes  a conservative in one article, since they’re both just a tad thin.

The first of the two – “Conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism“?  Gotta confess, that one’s pretty thin throughout the history of rock and roll.  I’ll cop to it; other than “meeting beneath that giant Exxon sign”, or driving out to Greasy Lake, or meeting at Mary’s Place, it doesn’t pop up much.

We’ll let that one slide for now.

The other – “the Conservative recognizes the need for prudent restraint on power and passion?”

Well, there’s always “Roulette”, the often-bootlegged anti-nuke anthem:

Which isn’t really close, but it’s such a cool recording I don’t care much.

More seriously?

We’ll be back with the final parts of this series later in the week.

I’ve never been much of a movie-goer.

Part of it is that for much of my childhood – the part where real movie addicts got “going to the theater” in their blood – my hometown didn’t even have a theater.  There were always other things to do.

Part of it is that I spend so very little time in front of the TV watching things – and while I spend plenty of time in front of the computer, it’s almost always writing, either for work or, well, this.    The rare times I sit still and try to just consume, I usually fall asleep.

So the list of great movies I’ve never seen, or seen parts of, but not in sequence, or not the the whole thing, is a very long one.

One of them, until this past weekend, had been Schindler’s List.  Believe it or not.

But it was on FX on Saturday night.  And I took a rare night of doing nothing, and chugged a Red Bull and watched the whole thing.

Never seen it?  Don’t go in on a night when you’re feeling down on the human race.  Here’s the scene where the Nazis decide to ship the Jews out of the Krakow Ghetto:

It gets worse, and more depressing.

It’s because humanity, at its core, is rotten.  That fact is at the core of the Judeo-Christian worldview, and it’s been proven in the absolute human absence of that worldview, which was one way you could describe the Holocaust.

How to describe humanity?  I’ll leave it – partly for a little comic relief – to one of the greatest philosophers of our time, Dr. Perry Cox:

With that in mind, what actually separates us – the United State of America – from what you  saw in the video above?

Two centuries of small-“l” liberal democracy?  Sure.

A legal system that, at the moment, works?  You bet.

But Germany was a western country.  It was part of Western Civilization; the home of Bach, Händel, Schubert, Einstein (speaking culturally, not in terms of borders), Kafka, Beethoven.  Not a “liberal democracy”, necessarily, by the time Hitler took office – Germany had suffered some very hard times.

And that’s the point.

It took a bad outcome to a war, and a decade and a half of economic misery to turn what was one of the wealthiest, most educated “first world” nations, the culture of Mozart and Schubert, into the stormtroopers.  It took a demigogue at the head of a mass movement, one who tapped into long-standing cultural antipathies toward a cultural boogeyman at an opportune time, to turn the nation of Göthe into the nation of Amon Göth:

Has our Democracy ever been threatened with this?

No – leaving out all of history’s imponderable “what ifs“, we have not.

And how do we assure it stays that way?

You really have two options:

Have faith that government will always stay good.  Or at least “not evil”.  That judges and courts and laws and tradition will always hamstring not only the tyrants and murderers, but the tyrants who are murderers.  That, irreducibly, means trusting to human nature.  And it can, hypothetically, work.  And it can, hypothetically, fail miserably.

But that is the leap of faith that Second Amendment opponents like Alice Hausman and Heather Martens and Rahm Emanuel want you, The People, to take.

The other option?

Make sure the people – no, The People – are equipped to make certain government stays on the straight and narrow.  Make sure the people have not only the right to tell the government “you’re getting out of bounds”, but the ability to enforce it.

Want to see what the Second Amendment is about?  This is it.  Preventing what you see in Schindler’s List – preventing government from turning on the people, from metastasizing into a self-sustaining engine of evil.

That is the choice; trust in human nature’s desire to curb its worst aspects, or counterbalance it with sheer numbers.

I’m not saying the likes of Alice Hausman and Heather Martens are depraved totalitarians.

I am saying that depraved totalitarians need a society full of Hausmans and Martenses and Bidens and Emanuels and Michael Paymars, people more willing to empower government in spite of knowing the failings of human nature than they are to trust The People, to have a shot.

And that’s why some of us fight for the Second Amendment.

Craig Westover – maybe the best libertarian-conservative intellectual writer in Minnesota today – took the “con” side of the minimum wage debate in the Strib last week, and stuck the landing:

Consider studies “proving” that when the minimum wage is raised, employers do not raise consumer prices. Because other economic forces are always in play, indeed, little quantitative effect may be seen in an industry affected by the minimum wage. What remain unseen, however, are the qualitative effects of the arbitrary wage increase on the industry and quantitative effects on the economy as a whole.

Raising prices is not as simple as changing an item’s price tag. Prices are always determined by what the market will pay and not by what the vendor needs or wants to charge. Not all cost increases can be passed on to consumers in higher prices.

If raising the price of a product or service in response to an increase in minimum wage drives the price higher than some people are willing to pay, they will buy less of the product or stop buying the product altogether and switch to substitutes.

Consequently, while some workers benefit from an increase in minimum wage, others in supplier industries suffer through job loss or lower wages resulting from the reduced demand for their products and labor. Eventually, even the boost in income for the few is offset by higher prices and lower future wages brought on by reduced economic growth — a net loss for them and the whole community.

Studies that claim to affirm the harmlessness of the minimum wage have to cherry-pick their criteria pretty closely.

Read Westover’s entire piece.

And Westover only covers the pure economics.  Libertarian-GOP activist Jake Barnett, writing about Westover’s piece on Facebook, adds:

“Craig Westover makes a sound economic argument here. Personally, I think that’s only half the issue. A significant portion of campaign contributions of those who make social justice arguments about the minimum wage come from trade and government unions. It just so happens that the majority of Union Contracts are tied to the minimum wage, and the pay of workers under these contracts would rise a result of a passage of this bill. I’m sure we’ll hear well intended emotional arguments from the dupes on the left who believe politicians seek first to help the poor, but we all know better. A DFL led legislature and Governor wish to increase their campaign funds for the next cycle, and this is an easy way to do so while pandering to their base. Now where’s that mission accomplished banner?”

SEIU will be waving one around the the end of the session.

Dime’ll getcha a buck the banner will be made in China.

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 back!  I’ll have Senator Julianne Ortmann to talk about the raft of gun-grab legislation the DFL is spooling up. Plus Cam Winton, conservative candidate for Mayor of Minneapolis. 
• Brad Carlson is back on “The Closer” from 1-3 tomorrow.  Tune on in!

(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  – hopefully.  
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488!
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Tomorrow on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, I’ll be talking with…:

• Senator Julianne Ortman about the Senate’s latest round of gun grab proposals
• Cam Winton, conservative candidate for Mayor of Minneapolis.

Tune in from 1-3PM tomorrow on AM12980 The Patriot!

To: Rahm Emanuel, Capo Di Tutti Politici, City of Chicago
From:  Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant
Re: Today’s US 7th Circuit Decision

Dear Mayor Emanuel,

Suck it.

That is all.

Two weeks ago, we noted that “Representative” Alice Hausman handed the job of reading “her” gun grab bill over to registered lobbyist Heather Martens.

Martens represents “Protect Minnesota”, a gun “safety” “group”.  I put “group” in scare quotes, because if the “group” has more than half a dozen “members”, I’d be frankly amazed.

But “Protect Minnesota” has a big budget, and big-money donors.  They are what’s called a “Checkbook Advocacy” group – a “public interest” group with few if any members, but lots of money and powerful lobbyists.  “Protect Minnesota” can be fairly and accurately called “astroturf” – fake grass roots.

So – Alice Hausman turned her chair over to a checkbook advocacy group.

We’re not done yet.

Earlier this week, we wrote about the bipartisan push to scupper the “RoboCop” bill in the Legislature.  As we noted, DFL committee chair Ron Erhard was basically a marionette for  yet another checkbook advocacy group, the “Traffic Safety Coalition”.

The TSC is another checkbook advocacy group affiliated with the Robocop industry – which is closely politically and financially tied with Chicago strongman, former Obama majordomo and possible Democrat presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel.

John Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives unpacks the various groups involved; refer to the link just above for the ties to Emanuel:

  Shortly after I received the cheerleading email for this legislation, I sent it to a number of extremely competent republican activists. Suffice it to say that we tweeted the results of what we found simply by using The Google.

Could not, you know, alleged reporters do the same? Work backwards from the front group Traffic Safety Coalition to Redflex, the Australian company who bought four lobbyists (and apparently at least two GOP senators) to push the legislation, to Resolute Consulting, who “manages” the Traffic Safety Coalition non-profit! Who owns Resolute Consulting? Greg Goldner, a thug who has greased the skids for the loathsome, greasy Rahm Emanuel.

Oh: Redflex got into a lot of trouble in Chicago, too. If you’re too corrupt for Chicago, you set some kind of record. Redflex actually stopped trading its stock recently because of investigations into its affairs.

And Gilmore notes the laziness of the local media’s “coverage” of the story:

Worse, the Traffic Safety Coalition is lazily termed by the Star Tribune as “a national non-profit.”

A non-profit! Lars Leafbladism™ strikes again. If it is a non-profit, only pure motives can obtain. A front group for a thug PR guy of Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago? Why, who would suggest such a thing?

Well, nobody in our media, to give the rhetorical question a literal answer…

A few days ago, I published a slightly-tongue-in-cheek Urban Renewal plan, based around selling houses in blighted neighborhoods to people with stakes in the community and the means – firearms – to defend them.

Not a few times in my life I’ve shaken my head at the onrush of events and thought “My fiction is the tortoise; fact is the hare”.

A non-profit in Houston is giving shotguns to law-abiding citizens in crime-ridden areas.

(more…)

I try to stay civil about most things.

Unlike my more demented detractors (you know who you are), I try to argue issues, not personalities.

So with that in mind, some take umbrage when I call the sides in the gun control debate “Real Americans” and “orcs”.  It’s really fairly simple; either you support the Bill of Rights, all ten Amendments of it, the Second and Tenth along with the First and Fourth, at the very least in terms of their intent, or you might as well be a North Korean kommissar.

Anyway – the Minnesota State Senate yesterday voted on a resolution upholding the Second Amendment.

And the DFL voted against it – voted against the Second Amendment – on a straight line party vote.

What this means is that the Senate DFL wants you to know that “we’re not coming for your hunting rifles and shotguns – yet.  We just want to leave our options open”.

This photo needs to be sent to every outstate, exurban and second-tier suburban household in districts with DFL Senators.  To the DFL, the Constitution is just a series of means to their ends, and “liberty” is a quaint hindrance.

At least some police departments are, finally, teaching the victim pool in our nation’s “gun free zones” that sitting quietly and waiting to be butchered doesn’t actually prevent any deaths.

Law enforcement agencies have begun adopting a new policy on so-called “active shooters,” encouraging civilians to take safety into their own hands and take down gunmen who threaten them at work or school.

This approach is gaining momentum in the wake of tragic incidents in Newtown, Connecticut and the Oikos University shooting in Oakland.

At San Jose Evergreen Community College, police have trained teachers, staff and students to follow specific guidelines during this kind of emergency.

The campus police chief credits this training for their coordinated response last December when a gunman was thought to have entered one of their buildings. “Some folks even said I know now whether it is time to hide or the right time to fight back,” said Chief Raymund Aguirre.

Fighting back works.

As we saw in the Clackamas Mall shooting, three days before the Sandy Hook shooting last winter, fighting back with a gun works even better.

Eventually someone will put two and two together; if resisting murderers is good, resisting them with lethal force is better.

We’ll have a related story – and one that ties in with my “Urban Renewal” piece the other day – coming up at noon.

I met my old friend Avery LIBRELLE at an “Au Bon Pain” in New Prague the other day.

LIBRELLE:  So  you keep writing that you think liberals in Minnesota never really learn how to debate conservatives.

ME:  Yep.  It’s true.  A liberal in Minnesota can come up through primary and secondary education systems that more or less subtly reinforce liberal dogma, go to a university where conservatives need not apply and where conservatism is treated as a cartoon by professors who themselves never learned to respect critical thinking much less practice it, and then go into a career in academia, journalism, government, the non-profits, unions, education – fields where conservatism is pretty much frowned on. To be fair, conservatives in Utah or Wyoming or North Dakota may have the same problem – although schools, universities and non-profits in those states largely aren’t magically conservative.

LIBRELLE:  Well, I’m here to prove you wrong.  I’ve been boning up on debate tactics by reading all of the prominent Minnesota leftybloggers.

ME: Ah. Excellent.  OK.  So let’s debate.  Pick a subject!

LIBRELLE:  The DFL’s gun safety initiatives.

ME:  Hm.  OK.  I can dig into that one.  The DFL’s gun grabs will at best make no dent in crime, and at worst make it worse.

LIBRELLE:  That’s just cray cray.

ME: Um – huh?

LIBRELLE:  That means “Crazy”.

ME:  I know what it means.  Would you care to go into details?

LIBRELLE:  It’s cray cray.  As in very cray.

ME: Er…OK.  Any actual factual assertions you’d like to make?

LIBRELLE:  I think “it’s cray cray” is plenty.

ME: Hm.  OK.  Let’s move on to the sales and business service taxes.  They’re going to gravely handicap Minnesota business.

LIBRELLE:   Yeah (makes scare quotes in air) “right“.

ME:  Um – say what?

LIBRELLE: Yeah (makes scare quotes in air) “right“.

ME:  Er…

LIBRELLE:  That means “I suppose that makes sense, if you’re a wingnut”.

ME:  OK.  How about the DFL gutting the mining industry up in the Iron Range, or for that matter trying to strangle the frac sand mining business in the southwest?  The metro area environmental liberal lobby seems to have pretty much seized control of the DFL.

LIBRELLE:  Why do you hate the children?

ME:  That’s not an answer!  That’s an insult and a deflection!

LIBRELLE:  Hah!  The wingnut is having a meltdown!

ME:  (Deep breath).  OK.  How about election fraud.

LIBRELLE:  There’s not a single reported case anywhere.

ME: Yes there is.

LIBRELLE:  There’s not a single reported case anywhere.