The DFL-controlled House of Representatives is debating – surprise, surprise – a “Red Light Robo-Cop” bill that would contract a private company to get photos of red light violators and refer them to the cops:

 Supporters said installing traffic cameras at intersections would improve public safety. Chief author of the bill, DFL Rep. Alice Hausman of St. Paul, said she has found that red light cameras reduce traffic deaths.

I suppose Rep. Hausman’s constituents should be happy she actually showed up rather than subcontracting her job out to one lobbyist or another.

But Rep. Hausman isn’t the only DFLer who yells “off what?” when a lobbyist tells them to jump:

The committee chair, DFL Rep. Ron Erhardt of Edina, said he wanted the committee to vote on the bill but later decided to table it after a lobbyist for a company selling the traffic cameras sent him a note. Erhardt later told reporters that the bill did not have the support of the committee and would likely have been defeated. He said the committee may consider the bill later but only if there is enough support to pass it.

My big question today:  “has the DFL actually given office space in the Capitol and State Office Buildings to lobbyists?  Perhaps with staff?”

Last week, it came to our attention that the local lefty alt-media was shilling for the DFL meme that anti-gun Representatives felt “intimidated” by the presence of all the gun owners – people with carry permits who’ve passed criminal background checks, and are thus most likely less apt to resort to violence than, well, the Representatives and Senators on the panels – in the audience.

I feel I should respond to this.

I’ll neither confirm nor deny that I have a carry permit, a handgun, or permission to carry in the Capitol complex.  If I do, I would never carry openly, primary out of deference to the warped sensitivities of the ones complaining; “pick your battles”, I always say.

But I’ll urge you, gun-grabbing DFL legislator, to be intimidated.

Be intimidated by the fact that I, like most of the pro-Gun Rights people I know, know more about the issue than you do.  Be intimidated that I make the anti-gun, pro-gun control argument better than you, and better than Heather Martens, for that matter – and can then turn around and destroy it.  With facts, history, the law, and a lot of style.

Be intimidated by the fact that I, and most of the pro-Gun Rights people I know, take that superior knowledge out to my fellow MInnesotans, one by one, and win them over, just as we have been for 25 years now.

Be intimidated by the fact that I am one member of what was, 10 years ago, one of the most amazing grassroots political movements in Minnesota political history, the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance which, with no help from corporate donors or Rockefellers or PACs, started rolling a big heavy rock up a very high, steep hill in 1995 – and won the issue in 2003, playing a key role in flipping the House of Representatives along the way.

Be intimidated by the fact that GOCRA, and other gun rights groups and the people they represent, are coming back bigger and tougher and more focused than ever before.

Be intimidated by the fact that our movement adds more people every day than will ever show up at a gun control rally, and that every one of those people understands the issue better than any of the anti-gunners, and most of  you legislators as well.

Be intimidated by the fact that we have energy, savvy, and the grim determination to crush you, rhetorically speaking.  We’ve been through this before.  We’ve run the marathon – the seven-year battle to enact Shall Issue.  You’ve run the sprint.  Who’s going to be still up and standing and fighting in a year?  Two years? Four years?

My gun – if I have one, and if I’m carrying it?  That’s literally, figuratively and statistically the least of your worries.

Columbine massacre survivor Evan Todd has sent an open letter to the President and, by extension, all of the gun grabbers in government and their supporters.

It’s below the jump.

(more…)

The Minnesota DFL announced via its Twitter feed yesterday:

GAMALIEL, a faith-based network, and Asamblea de Derechos Civiles kick off “Dream for All” with vigil outside Bachmann’s WP office today.

— Minnesota DFL Party (@MinnesotaDFL) February 20, 2013

Rep. Bachmann doesn’t have a Waite Park office.

Nor was her “mobile office” in Waite Park yesterday.

Bills to address nonexistent problems, demonstrations at nonexistent offices?  Tomayto tomahto.

France’s continued Hollande from reality gets a rude wake-up call from America.

With an unemployment rate that’s been hovering around 10% for nearly four years, unemployment benefits that somehow manage to be the most generous in Europe and yet exclude thousands of eligible non-workers, and an attempted tax bracket of 75% on top earners, France clearly isn’t economically serious about domestic jobs.  That hasn’t stopped them from being seriously upset at the lack of foreign capital coming to their rescue.  Or when that same foreign capital criticizes the famous French non-work ethic.

When Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co’s Amiens Nord plant faced being closed,  threatening 1,250 jobs, Paris attempted to mediate a sale to Illinois-based Titan International.  Unable to get the French unions to move on any of their conditions, Titan’s owner, Maurice Taylor (last seen running for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996), fired off his answer on any potential purchase:

“The French workforce gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three,” Taylor wrote on February 8 in the letter in English addressed to the minister, Arnaud Montebourg.

“I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that’s the French way!” Taylor added in the letter, which was posted by business daily Les Echos on its website on Wednesday and which the ministry confirmed was genuine.

“How stupid do you think we are?” he asked at one point.

“Titan is going to buy a Chinese tire company or an Indian one, pay less than one Euro per hour wage and ship all the tires France needs,” he said. “You can keep the so-called workers.”

Taylor’s jab on going to China or India has to chafe Arnaud Montebourg, France’s Minister of Industrial Renewal, whose industrial policy has thus far been to scapegoat low-wage competitors.  Montebourg even blocked Indian steelmaker ArcelorMittal from buying a French plant in 2012, apparently proving that beggers can be chosers.

Who needs employers?

Taylor’s brusque reply may dominate the headlines (who are we kidding with ‘may’?), but the real story is France slowly coming to terms with, well, their unemployment terms.

Despite the reputation of being exceptionally generous, which they are, France’s unemployment benefits are reaching fewer and fewer unemployed.  Even as unemployment has increased, the percentage of beneficiaries has decreased – 44.8% of those eligible receive benefits, down from 48.5% in 2009.  Many eligible are being turned away, a situation brought to greater public awareness when an eligible beneficiary set himself on fire in protest for being declined.

Why are even eligible beneficiaries being told ‘non’?  Because as the French government auditor, the Cour des comptes (think of it as the French CBO), recently stated, the system of benefits is “unsustainable”:

The current funding system is expected to reach a deficit of 5 billion in 2013. According to the Cour, the French system is largely to blame for the deficit, as it is much more generous than similar benefits programs in neighboring countries. For example, the current allocation is between 63 and 93 percent of the previous incomes of the unemployed. In addition, the minimum compensation length for unemployment benefits in France is two years, compared to one year in Germany.

Such debts helped France’s credit rating fall to AA1, despite President Hollande’s pledge to reduce the deficit by the end of 2013.  With familiar rhetoric coming from another left-leaning politician, it’s little wonder what Maurice Taylor chose to acknowledge in his letter:

Socialist President Francois Hollande may take some comfort in the view Taylor expressed of Washington: “The U.S. government is not much better than the French,” he wrote…

We Real Americans – that defined as “Americans who support all ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights, the Second and Tenth as devoutly as the First and Fourth – know that giving any ground with the gun grabbers is a fool’s bargain.  The metrocrat Orcs will exploit any opening we Real Americans give them to harass us, badger us, turn us – the most law-abiding people in this country – into criminals.

The “assault weapon” bans are – or were – stupid, and would not affect crime in the least (or at least would never reduce it).  Magazine restrictions are also of no actual value as anything but harassing the law-abiding, as well as putting them (in rare cases) at a disadvantage to criminals.

But it gets worse.

This just in from GOCRA:  The worst of them all is up on the dock now:

The most dangerous bill this session is not a magazine ban, or an “assault weapon” ban. It’s universal registration, masquerading as “universal background checks.”

It’s called SF 458, and it will be heard on THURSDAY at the state capitol. GOCRA will be there to fight it. Will you?

I’ll give it my best shot.  Hope you can too.

Why is this bill so bad?  For starters, because it’ll tack $25 onto the sale prices of a firearm, plus $25 for permit to purchase – which makes firearms $50 harder to obtain for the poor (who are, after all, the ones the DFL wants to disarm…first).

Worse?  It’s registration!  It doesn’t go by the name, but that’s exactly what it is; a paper trail leading, over time, to every single gun in the United States.

This bill needs to be not just defeated; it needs to be crushed and humiliated.  Any outstate DFLer that supports it needs to feel the wrath of every gun owner in their district, sports or self-defense.  Any Republican who supports this abomination must be primaried and expunged from public life.

No retreat.

No surrender.

No compromise on the rights of the law-abiding.

No mercy for the politicians who get it wrong.

Here’s the hearing schedule; all hearings are in room 15 of the State Capitol. Get there two hours early to get a seat in the hearing room, or use overflow seating with a closed-circuit feed of the hearings.

Please let us know if you plan to attend (and which session) by sending an email to volunteer@gocra.org.

Thursday, February 21
Noon: SF 235, 458, 69

Thursday, February 21
6 p.m.:  Public testimony on SF 235, 503, 69, 458, 557, 520, 400, 413 and 568

Friday, February 22

Noon: SF 503, 557, 520, 400, 413, 568

You can read summaries of all gun grab bills at the Gocra website.

And remember; don’t commit a felony! Only liberals get away with gun crimes, so please remember to notify the DPS as required if you intend to carry at the Capitol. GOCRA’s simple instructions are right here.

On a Saint Paul discussion forum, someone asked “what would you do to better the city if someone gave you a couple million dollars?”

It took me about two seconds to answer; I’ve been thinking about this one for years and years.

If someone gave me a couple million dollars my plan would look something like this:

1. Buy three adjacent blocks of blighted housing in a down-market neighborhood that’s been ravaged by the foreclosure crisis – Frogtown, the North End, the lower East Side.  There are some blocks where half the houses are foreclosed, vacant or demolished.  I’d like to find one of those – preferably one with an old storefront or two on one of the corners.
2. Remodel them, at least in terms of basics, leaving room for sweat equity.
3. Sell the houses on one of the blocks.  Price them at market rates – or half-price for nuclear families where  both of the heads of household had a clean criminal record and one or both had a carry permit and could prove they owned legal firearms.  Give a cumulative five percent discount for each of the following: veterans, charter or private school teachers, cops or firemen.  In other words, a family who had a veteran, a firefighter and a charter school teacher with a permit could get the house for 35% of the already-depressed market value.
4. Lop off another 10% of the balance if crime on the block and on surrounding blocks drops below neighborhood or city averages in, say, a year or two.
5. Give one of the storefronts to a small charter school rent-free for five years.
6. Wait three years and watch as the crime rate plummets, and property values rise.
7. Sell the other two blocks at the new, higher-value market rates; no half-off for permittees with guns, but offer cumulative ten percent discounts for carry permit holders with firearms, cops/firemen and charter/private teachers.
8. Plow the proceeds into repeating the process on neighboring blocks.
9. Watch as the neighborhood, strong, self-reliant, free-enterprise oriented and virtually crime-free compared to the surrounding area, starts to wake up, noticing that the parts of the city run by the DFL are failing while the part run according to traditional conservative values – theirs – is doing well.  People in my project, and around and about it, start to ask “so why do we keep electing clueless DFLers to all city offices?”.
10. Watch some more as control of Saint Paul flips from the DFL’s bobbleheaded one-party rule to conservative control, beginning an era of hard work that leads in modestly short order to a much, much better city.

I’m rarin’ to go.  Someone pony up!

The left’s been bruiting about a study that shows unemployment isn’t that badly affected by minimum wage increases.

For example, the study claims that a 10% hike in the minimum wage translates over time into about a 1% hike in unemployment among low-wage, low-skill workers – the ones that get minimum wage.

BikeBubba, over at BikeBubba’s Boulangerie, unpacks the meme in a way most of the study’s proponents seem unprepared to:

So let’s work with that.   Let’s assume, for what it’s worth, that “low wage workers” includes about the bottom quintile, or about 30 million workers.  So that 1% decrease in employment impacts about 300,000 workers, which is about the same number of people as are currently employed by Sears, Roebuck and Company–which now includes Kmart as well.  In short, three of every forty minimum wage workers would lose their jobs.

In short, even a 10% increase in the minimum wage impacts a LOT of people.  But of course, the story gets worse, as President Obama and Governor Dayton Messinger are proposing 24% and 31% increases in the minimum wage.  So we would expect, if the relationship were linear, that over 700,000 people would lose their jobs from Obama’s minimum wage proposal–seven out of forty–and we can thank God that Mark Dayton is not the President.

All true.  And, as BikeBubba notes, probably still too pollyannaish; linear behavior is for sissies:

Of course, few things are linear in real life, and so I’ve constructed a model assuming that the actual productivity of labor is normally distributed somewhere above the minimum wage, and that those workers whose productivity does not exceed the minimum wage will lose their jobs.  If we assume that the current minimum wage deprives only 2.3% of these workers of work (-2 standard deviations), then we arrive at a mean productivity of $8.95/hour with a standard deviation of about $0.85.

And that means…

Shift the minimum wage to $9/hour, and we then predict overall job losses of approximately half of minimum wage workers.   Any historical comparisons?

Glad you asked.  From 2007 to 2009, there were three consecutive increases in the minimum wage exceeding 10%.  Here’s what happened to unemployment among young people:  it more than doubled as overall unemployment went from 4.6% to 10%.  When the increases in the minimum wage stopped in 2009, the trend in unemployment quickly stabilized and started to reverse.  In short, it’s exactly what one would predict if the productivity of entry level labor were normally distributed somewhere above the minimum wage.

 

Now granted, there were other things going on at this time, but reality is that it shouldn’t take a PhD economist to realize that when the price of labor rises, less of it will be demanded.  So if someone tells you he’s trying to increase the minimum wage for your good, let him know that you’d be thankful if he didn’t try to “help” you that way.

The only real way to “help” minimum wage workers is to teach them how to do median-wage jobs.

And the best way to do that – barring some flash of brilliance – is to stay in school, moderate your behavior so you can actually learn things, get a job and go to it every day without all sorts of drama, so you learn the behaviors that successful workers have, and learn a skill worth more, preferably way more, than whatever the “minimum” or “living” wages  are.

Increasing the minimum wage is not just pretty window-dressing on the poverty problem; it’s geometrically counterproductive.

Kudos to the Instalanche yesterday for our pal Ryan Rhodes, author of We Didn’t Build That, the story of he and his wife’s odyssey building a small business.

I’ve read it.  It’s worth the $4 Ryan’s charging on Amazon for it, and then some.  By all means, do!

Remember when the left thought Sarah Palin’s jaunty “I’m Not Retreating, I’m Reloading” was a lethal threat?

I know; any human being with an IQ above plant life knew that the left was being drama-queeny at best, cynically manipulating an argument for low-information voters at worst.

Beyond that?  It was Berg’s Seventh Law in action.  Because while there’s not a psychopath simmering inside every liberal, or even most, it’s an ideology that promotes and rewards it.

As with this “guy”:

I guess I’ll rethink my request of @letargets for a @maryfranson (don’t worry, Mary, I just throw used gum). #nogunspo.st/ffMEnx

— Richard Molby (@rvm4) February 20, 2013

@LETargets is, of course “Law Enforcement Targets“, a Minnesota company that’s gotten flak for making custom targets of armed children, senior citizens and pregnant women, to help de-sensitize police officers to the idea of shooting to kill any of them.

The police’s current focus on “officer safety” at the expense of “citizens’ safety” is certainly worth discussing.

Desensitizing people to killing conservative legislators?  It’s worth condemning.

The final part of Alice Hausman’s HF241` – her gun grab bill focused on so-called “assault weapons” – may be the strangest, most vaguely-written, dumbest of all.  It’d ban any…:

3.23(5) shotgun with a revolving cylinder

 

It’d seem to be aimed at the big, scary looking “Streetsweeper”-class shotguns, which do, indeed, have a “revolving cylinder” holding their rounds…:

And it’s not “semi-automatic” (not to get technical, but that means “weapon that uses the force of either the explosion or recoil to eject the empty cartridge and chamber a new round”; the Sweeper has a wind-up spring).

But it said “shotgun with a revolving cylinder”.  That also includes the Rossi Circuit Judge…:

…a popular .410-gauge varmint plinker.

And for that matter, it includes the extremely popular Taurus Judge (no relation)…:

…which is a pistol, sure – but a .410 gauge shotgun with a revolving cylinder (that also happens to fire .45 Long Colt pistol rounds as well.

Look – we get it.  Alice Hausman is subcontracting her bill-writing out to Heather Martens – who, herself, knows nothing about guns whatsoever.

The question isn’t “are Hausman and Martens and the rest of the DFL metrocrats on the Public Safety committee talking out their asses on the subject”.  That’s a given.

The question is “aren’t you DFLers embarassed?”

Endless fun awaits.

I’ve been a little nervous about this for weeks.

Let me explain:

The Minnesota GOP is a shambles – but this state is full of conservative people.  And while conservatives are not the kind to stand around waving signs for any old thing, when you get us riled up, we turn out in droves, and we punch way above our weight.  One conservative out on the street speaking out is worth four or five figures of Alida Messinger’s money.

And the DFL knows this; they know that while they’ll get inundated with hard-working, well-informed, taxpaying folks when they propose radical and stupid legislation, that – unlike the people who turn out (and, often, are paid to turn out) for their events, they work for a living, don’t have unions giving them time off, can’t leave their lives on hold while they play politics for an extended time.

And so they’ve been proposing an avalanche of radical and stupid legislation:

• As I’ve noted (and will be noting today and tomorrow), a raft of gun laws almost bizarre in their absurdity.
• A rules change in the House seemingly designed to poke Republicans in the eye.
• A flip-flop on the “school shift” so seemingly clumsy it could come from a Betty McCollum speech.
• A groaningly extreme sales tax plan that only the Iranians would stick us with, one that not just tax experts and economists but even Democrats who work in the private sector think is stupid.

On the one hand, it’s the DFL getting control of the wheels and levers of power after ten years of incomplete control, which has to be a little like an ex-con looking for a hooker after ten years in jail.

Still, it’s made me a little nervous.  And I can’t be all wrong, because it makes Dave Thul nervous too.

There is only so much in the conservative activist excitement bank. You can get our people out once, twice, maybe three times in droves during a session, and after that fatigue as well as lack of vacation time come in to play. I can’t say with complete confidence, but it sure looks like the DFL is ramping up the outrage on issues they really don’t intend to make a full court press for-gun bans, tax hikes on the poor, tax hikes on businesses, ect. They are getting us to waste our ammo on targets that don’t matter, so we will be low on ammo when the real battle starts.

If there’s anything more insidious than overestimating your opponent, it’s underestimating them.

The DFL has to know that even in the best of times the GOP runs on volunteers (2000 and 2004) or the passion of activists who somehow scrape up the time and energy to move mountains (2002, 2010).

If you were Ken Martin Mark Dayton Alida Messinger, it wouldn’t be rocket science to see that the weakest link remaining in the GOP is the energy and passion level of the volunteers and activists that are, really, the party’s only real resource at the moment.

Alice Hausman’s gun grab bill focused on so-called “assault weapons” – now turns to shotguns.

Shotguns are a fearsome weapon, close-in – deadlier than assault rifles in some cases; British special forces have long used the Benelli semi-automatic hunting shotgun as their favorite weapon in the jungle.

But this part of Hausman’s bill is no less bizarre and ill-informed than the rest of it; it’d ban any…:

3.16(4) semi-automatic shotgun that has one or more of the following:

(i) a pistol grip or thumbhole stock;

(ii) any feature capable of functioning as a protruding grip that can be held by the nontrigger hand;

(iii) a folding or telescoping stock;

(iv) a fixed magazine capacity in excess of seven rounds; or

(v) an ability to accept a detachable magazine;

It’s aimed, seemingly, at weapons like the Russian-built Saiga…:

…which is basically a 12-gauge semi-automatic AK47.

But the Mossberg 930  – it’s semi-automatic, and holds eight rounds…:

…is also covered.

In the meantime?  It doesn’t cover pump-action shotguns with all the same goodies…:

…which are almost exactly as deadly.  But “pump” sounds quaint, while “semi-automatic” sounds, if you’re a DFL staffer or (who are we kidding) Heather Martens, vaguely evil.

I keep saying “it gets dumber”.  Because it does.  Stay tuned.

By February of 1943, the American military was starting to get use to combat.  For a military force that rivaled Portugal in size in the early 1940s, the U.S. Army had to undergo a rapid education in modern military tactics against better trained, sometimes better equipped opponents.  There had been plenty of bloodied noses in this trial-by-fire – Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Guadalcanal, the U-boat attacks of ’41/’42 – but one opponent remained to be engaged: the Wehrmacht.

On February 19th, 1943, American troops received their first education of German military tactics by the regime’s most noted teacher, Gen. Erwin Rommel.  The school was a dusty spot in the Tunisian desert known as Kasserine Pass.

…

Kasserine Pass was not the first time American troops had come under German fire, but it would become the most notable of the early engagements following the Allied invasion of French North Africa.  Operation Torch in November of 1942 was the largest Allied invasion of the war thus far, placing 107,000 British and American troops in Morocco and Algeria.  Coinciding with the British offensive at El Alamein, the goal had been a grand-scale encirclement of German and Italian forces in Libya and western Egypt.  Instead, Hitler doubled-down on the North African front, committing 250,000 more troops and drawing the Allies into another protracted desert campaign.

American troops in Tunisia: the Allies lost more men in 11 days at Kasserine Pass than in 6 months at Guadalcanal

(more…)

The next stop on our dissection of HF241 – Alice Hausman’s gun grab bill focused on so-called “assault weapons” – is, I’ll be honest, mind-bogglingly obtuse.

It would ban…:

 (3) semi-automatic pistol that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and has one or more of the following:

(i) any feature capable of functioning as a protruding grip that can be held by the nontrigger hand;

(ii) a folding, telescoping, or thumbhole stock;

(iii) a shroud attached to the barrel, or that partially or completely encircles the barrel, allowing the bearer to hold the firearm with the nontrigger hand without being burned, but excluding a slide that encloses the barrel; or

(iv) the capacity to accept a detachable magazine at any location outside of the pistol grip;

This is aimed at the various semi-automatic pistols that have been teased into a vaguely military-looking appearance, like the “Uzi Pistol”

…which are, literally, pistols with little collapsible stocks on them.  They are mostly famous for appearing in movies in the hands of gang-bangers, which is no doubt why Heather Martens some DFL staffer added them to the bill.

But it also includes our old friend the Mauser C96…:

…which can add a stock to make it a light carbine (for horse-mounted troops in the 1800s), and is a big collectible.   No, I had a friend who owned one.  It’s not that far-out.

(I didn’t forget the Browning HP35…

…which the DFL staff and/or Heather Martens didn’t think about, apparently because it’s not appeared in any gang-banger movies or TV shows, but also has a 13 round magazine, so the DFL will want to ban it anyway…)

Later today:  Yes, this bill gets dumber still.

A Virginia Beach pizzeria shows how the Second Amendment movement is winning mainstreet:

Slice by slice, one Virginia Beach pizza shop is showing its support for the Second Amendment by offering fifteen percent off pies to gun owners.

“All they have to do is show me that they’re carrying a weapon or they can show me their concealed weapons permit and they can get the discount,” says All Around Pizza owner, Jay Laze.

Laze started the offer after a Utah frozen yogurt shop made headlines earlier this month for also giving gun toters discounts.

Note to Minnesota companies: did you see how many people turned out for both gun rallies over the past three weeks?  1,200 on a Saturday at a rally put on by a regular schmo who just wanted to make a difference?  Close to 200 for a Wednesday morning rally that got no promotion and no advertising, and wasn’t even affiliated with a gun group?

You want some of those numbers through your door?

“I thought it was a great idea and I was wondering why nobody here was doing it,” he says. “It should be happening all around the country.”

That reminded me of an “urban renewal” idea I had a few years back.  I may touch on that tomorrow or Wednesday.

…”there are no civilian uses for an AR-15″.

Detroit-area man repels two would-be armed robbers.

Fox 2 News Headlines

There is something to be said, when one is facing two people with handguns, for having the most intimidating-looking gun in the building.

There are libs who would say “well, maybe it’s just the receptionist, owner and security guard’s time”.

The first recorded Dorner tattoo:

I’ll bet dimes to dollars Tarantino is already scavenging the film rights.

Bill Glahn – who’s been blogging for a couple of years, but has really jumped out as a go-to blog since the election – notices a huge change in the DFL’s tone, starting the second week in November:

For some reason, Dayton is given credit for proposing a “no-gimmick” budget, but he continues the biggest gimmick from the last budget for another four years.

More troubling, the new Democrat majority in the state legislature ran on ending the school shift as one of their top issues.

And “ending the shift” was one of the DFL’s biggest – and most dishonest – rhetorical cudgels:

Freshperson state Senator Melisa Franzen used the school shift as one of her top issues. Senator Franzen was elected from Senate District 49–covering Edina and parts of three other SW metro suburbs–in what was recognized as the most expensive race for the Minnesota state legislature in 2012. Some $600,000 was spend by various entities for a job that pays $31,140 per year.

In her campaign literature, Franzen listed education as her top issue area, and the school shift as her top education issue. “Paying schools back will be a top priority for me,” she writes on her campaign website. Her campaign piece No. 1 (p. 3) mentions “the accounting shifts and gimmicks used to balance the budget.” Piece No. 2, (page 2) has as bullet 2 of her vision, “pay back the $2.4 billion borrowed from schools.” Her piece No. 5 focuses on education and (page 2) has as her first education priority “pay our schools back.” Her piece No. 8 touts her “bipartisan” endorsements and (page 2) lists “pay back our schools” as her first agenda item. She writes, “Melisa Franzen will balance the budget honestly without gimmicks.” Likewise, this Franzen piece shows an adorable toddler and implores the voter to support Franzen’s efforts to “pay back our schools.”

You may also recall – and recollection is all you have, since the media will never mention it – that the GOP passed a bill, with bipartisan support, that would have had the “shift” paid back by now.

Governor Messinger Dayton vetoed it, at the apex of a whisper campaign by the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” (the attack-PR group run by his ex-wife, who also holds his pedigree papers) that the GOP’s plan was “a gimmick”, although not a single DFLer, when pressed, could say what the “gimmick” was.  Messinger Dayton vetoed it entirely to give the DFL a campaign issue.

Glahn notes the results:

What a difference an election makes. During the campaign, ending the school shift was the No. 1 issue, now…we’ll get to it in 2017. Senator Franzen now faces the prospect of running for re-election in 2016, not having achieved her top priority, unless her colleagues reject Gov. Dayton’s budget and do the right thing by our children.

And Alida Rockefeller Messinger will never give them permission to do that.

The next section of HF 241 – Alice Hausman’s gun grab bill focused on so-called “assault weapons” – is a little bit confusing:

3.4(2) semi-automatic pistol, or any semi-automatic, centerfire, or rimfire rifle with a fixed magazine, that has the capacity to accept more than seven rounds of ammunition;

Does this section mean “any semi-automatic pistol with a magazine capacity of over seven rounds” is banned, as well as fixed-magazine rifles?  Or does it only refer to “semi-automatic pistols with fixed magazines of greater than seven rounds”?

I’m not trying to be tendentious here; it could refer to semi-auto pistols with fixed magazines, although I can think of only one…:

…the Mauser C96, and it has an eight-round fixed magazine.

But I suspect it means “semi auto pistols with more than seven round magazines, or any semi-auto rifle with a fixed magazine of greater than seven rounds”.

Which means this pistol…:

…the classic Colt M1911 .45 calibre with its seven round magazine, is legal, while this one…:

…the SIG P220 .45 with its eight-round magazine, is not.

Huh?

Beyond that?  “Semi-automatic rifles with fixed magazines” holding more than seven rounds include…:

…Grampa’s M1 Garand from World War 2.

The WW2-era Swedish Ljungmann I used to own?

Ten-round semi-detachable magazine (you could detach them, but only for cleaning or clearing jams).

Or the SKS – a Russian design that’s become one of the most popular deer-hunting rifles in America?

Yep, it’s got the ten-round fixed magazine.  It’s cheap (under $300 up until before the election) and ubiquitous – and, apparently, an “assault weapon” in Alice Hausman’s curious little world.

HF 241 – Alice Hausman’s gun grab bill focused on so-called “assault weapons” – has morphed from a list of ugly-looking army-type guns into a recipe book written by people who don’t understand much about guns, but know they really really don’t like them.

Rather than write one long article about this deeply stupid bill, I’m going to break it down in terms of its pure, specious illogic over the next day or so.

The first part of the bill bans any…:

(1) semi-automatic rifle that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and has one or more of the following:

(i) a pistol grip or thumbhole stock;

(ii) any feature capable of functioning as a protruding grip that can be held by the nontrigger hand;

(iii) a folding or telescoping stock; or

(iv) a shroud attached to the barrel, or that partially or completely encircles the barrel, allowing the bearer to hold the firearm with the nontrigger hand without being burned, but excluding a slide that encloses the barrel;

Put briefly, if the rifle has a detachable magazine (the thing that holds the bullets) it can’t have a pistol grip, a forward handgrip, an adjustable stock or – this is confusing – the wrong kind of thingie wrapped around the barrel.

So in other words, this Ruger Mini-14 is legal…:

…while this one is illegal…:

…even though the two are functionally exactly identical.

Exactly. As in, there is no difference, down to and including the magazine size.

Oh, it gets dumber.  Yes, the bill would ban this rifle…:

…which is functionally exactly identical to this rifle here:

Both are Ruger 10/22s, perhaps the most ubuquitous .22 caliber plinking rifle in the country.  They are mechanically identical – but one has furniture that offends Alice Hausman’s sensibilities.

Dumber still?  If you like sniping at varmints, this 10/22 is just as illegal as the “tacti-cool” one above:

It’s the same gun, with the “thumbhole stock”.  And if you want to have an adjustable stock, so your kids can shoot the same rifle you do?

Yep. Banned.

Every last one of them is precisely mechanically the same; same ten-round detachable magazine (it pops out of the stock just ahead of the trigger guard), same low-power .22 round.

In other words, Hausman’s gun grab isn’t aimed at even the most tangential definition of “Deadliness”; it’s entirely focused on cosmetic features that have nothing to do with a weapon’s effect.

They get dumber.   More later today.

…that raising taxes in a recession isn’t face-palmingly stupid:

“In case you haven’t seen a sales report these days, February (month-to-date) sales are a total disaster,” wrote Murray in a February 12 email to executives. “The worst start to a month I have seen in my (about) 7 years with the company.”

The recent hike in payroll taxes is dragging down sales for discount retailers like Wal-Mart. With less disposable cash in their wallets, lower-income shoppers have less to spend.

The bad news comes on the heels of a lackluster January for the major retailer.

“Have you ever had one of those weeks where your best-prepared plans weren’t good enough to accomplish everything you set out to do?” wrote Walmart Vice President for U.S. Replenishment Cameron Geiger in a February 1 email to Walmart executives. “Well, we just had one of those weeks here at Walmart U.S. Where are all the customers? And where’s their money?”

If we – the “middle class” – have 5% less money between payroll taxes and Obamacare, then that’s 5% less to spend at Walmart.  Or Patagonia, or MPR’s pledge drive, or what have you.

Most of us know this.

Democrats in DC and Saint Paul, it seems, do not.

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 out on assignment today.  Filling in for me will be Erin Haust of the Minnesota Conservative Examiner and much, much more.  Erin’ll have some guests on the show – tune in and find out!
• 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:

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One of the Public-Education pimps’ big chanting points is that “charter schools don’t perform as well as public school!”.

And in terms of top-line statistics, there’s something to that. Many charter schools – especially ones catering to low-income, inner-city, immigrant and Native-American students – have lower standardized test scores (although as I showed several years ago in delivering one of my uncountable drubbings to Nick Coleman, many charter schools beat the pants off their public district neighbors).  The reason, I suspect, is that in most cases those students have already been chewed up and spat out by the public system, and are going the charter route to try to get back on track.  It was certainly true in the charter schools my kids attended.

Indeed, I think the only really meaningful measurement would compare differences in improvement or deterioration in individual students before and after transferring from public to charter schools, compared with comparable students that stayed in the public system.

But beyond that?  You’ll look long and hard for these figures in the mainstream, DFL-allied media:

And as all of us both brace for more “paying for a better Minnesota” and simultaneously watching the cities’ public schools slide even further into disgrace, this next bit (emphasis added) is fun reading:

As if these scores weren’t impressive enough, Best, Friendship, and Harvest are able to achieve them with much less money than the Minneapolis Public Schools district. Here is a comparison of 2012-13 per student spending in the district versus at these schools:   MPS = $23,020   Best = $11,987   Friendship = $13,677   Harvest = $10,958   One has to wonder: Would these schools have been able to achieve these results under the aegis of the large bureaucracy of the school district? Or, does their independence help generate and inspire creative solutions that often elude large systems?   Not all charters work. But the students at Best, Friendship, and Harvest would tell you that theirs do.

And so would their parents.

(BONUS QUESTION for MNGOP “Strategists”:  Why is it, again, that you refuse to have Republican candidates approach charter parents in the city, to tell them that the DFL wants to destroy the charter school system?  That’s gotten you what over the past seven years, exactly?)