Even some DFLers – the thin film of them that actually have to manage things in the private sector – are figuring it out.

This piece has made the rounds; it’s from the San Fran Chronicle, in a piece that gurgitates a whooooole lotta Minnesota myths:

“We’re screwed,” [Printing company owner Dik] Bolger said, if the tax goes through. His 79-year-old company competes nationwide and overseas for work with major brands like Chanel. “If you’re bidding for a $100,000 job on a national basis and tax expenses push you a couple of percent higher, then I’m not competitive.”

And I’m hearing this from businesspeople – some political, some not, and mostly off the record – all over the place.

For generations, Minnesotans lived out the progressive argument that high taxes and high services were what gave the state its fabled quality of life.

One thing Minnesota Democrats never, ever get; the “Minnesota Miracle” – creating a high-tax, “high-service” system that actually prospers – depends on several factors:

• Being the uncontested biggest economy…
• …within a national economy that has no serious competition (as the USA did not, between 1945 and the mid-seventies)…
• …allowing near-unbridled prosperity…
• …which supports boundless government spending.

Chicago-area National Guardsman survives Afghanistan; gets killed at home:

On February 2, Cook, was shot and killed while in a car near his grandmother’s East Chicago house where he was taking Antoine for a visit. The veteran was found on top of his little boy, shielding him from the 15 bullets that pierced the car.

” He saved his son he made sure that before he left the last thing he did make sure his son was okay,” said Norwood.

Antoine was hit, too, in the left leg. Another bullet skimmed his right and a third grazed the toddler’s head.

Police believe Cook’s murder was a case of mistaken identity, possible retaliation for another shooting just days before. The couple was planning their wedding, and a future.

And I’ll start a countdown before some lib on Twitter says “Hey!  Indiana’s not Illinois!  They’re a shall-issue state with relatively liberal (meaning conservative) gun laws!”

Yeah.  But East Chicago is not just part of the Chicago metroplex; it’s a run-down industrial suburb full of oil storage tanks and down-market housing; it is more or less to Chicago what Bayonne is to New York.

It’s a blip of Chicago-style violence, along with Gary and Hammond (and, downstate, Indianapolis) in a state that’s relatively placid by comparison.

It’s not the guns.  It’s the sociology.  Big, Democrat-controlled cities full of the social pathologies they bring are just plain more dangerous.

I wrote this piece five years ago yesterday, on the 25th anniversary of what had to have been the most famous crime in North Dakota history, the Medina Shootout.

Not much has change for me, or the story, since then.  So while I usually don’t re-run pieces, I’m going to basically just update the piece from 2008.

———-

I was a 20 year old college kid working a grindingly-boring Sunday afternoon shift at KQDJ Radio in Jamestown, ND on February 13, 1983.

I was doing what I usually did on those boring Sunday shifts; playing records, doing homework, taking transmitter readings.

Then, the police scanner in the “newsroom” next door, which normally burbled with the desultory reports of DWIs and bar fights and traffic stops that make up the lives of most small town cops, suddenly erupted.  There’d been a shootout; officers were down; cops and sheriff’s deputies were being dispatched to Medina, a town of about 400 people about 35 miles west of Jamestown on I94.

It took hours to untangle the story, which became perhaps the most famous crime in North Dakota history, the Medina Shootout.

Two US Marshals, dispatched from Fargo to try to arrest a group of tax-protesters affiliated with the neo-Nazi-sympathetic “Posse Comitatus”, had been killed in the shootout that ensued.  Their leader, Gordon Kahl, and several others fled the scene.  The scanner reported ambulances on their way to the hospital in Jamestown bringing the wounded, which included Yorie Kahl, criticially injured by a gunshot; in one of the many ironies that day, Kahl’s life was saved by the doctor on duty in the Emergency Room that day, Dr. Evan Kostick, father of my high school pal David (himself a doctor today), and one of Jamestown’s tiny Jewish community.

The scene of the shootout when the first TV station, from Bismarck, arrived on the scene.

Yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of the shootout.  The anniversary passed without much notice in the regional media.  Five years ago it was another matter; the Fargo Forum led the coverage; others from the Bismark Trib pitched in; former Forum staffer James Corcoran wrote “Bitter Harvest”, the definitive book on the event, relating not only the shootout and the apocalyptic trial of the survivors, but the social sturm und drang that the event caused on the Northern Plains.

———-

Times were brutally tough in the Dakotas in the early ’80s.  The rest of the US was slowly recovering from a recession; it’d be hard to call what happened on the Plains anything less than a depression.  What the foreclosure crisis is to the inner city today, the farm crisis of the ’80s was to the Great Plains.

The Medina water tower. The tower was there in 1983, although without the antennae.

Some farmers – and some of the workers whose livelihoods depended on agriculture, which in North Dakota back then accounted for pretty much every job in the place – did what human nature naturally bids some people to do; blame someone else.  And for some – like Kahl and a thin film of like-minded people – it wasn’t a big leap from “losing your farm to the bank” and “losing your farm to Jewish Bankers”.  The Times’ review of “Bitter Harvest” notes:

The book that turned his head at an early age was ”The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,” and it was written by Henry Ford.

It is based on a 1918 treatise called ”The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which purported to be the minutes of a cabal of Russian Jews plotting to destroy Christianity and the white race and take over the world. Ford wrote ”The International Jew” in 1920, and it was not until 1929 that he finally conceded that ”The Protocols” was a fabrication concocted by czarist Russian anti-Semites.

Even so, as a young man in the 1940′s, Mr. Kahl believed it totally. He had considerable encouragement. He came of age at a time when the velvet voice of the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest who reached into almost as many homes with his weekly radio show as Fred Allen, broadcast some of the nastiest anti-Semitic propaganda ever heard on the airwaves; when Gerald L. K. Smith established the Jew-baiting Christian Nationalist Crusade in Arkansas and gained a national following, and when Gerald Winrod, an apocalyptic fundamentalist preacher in central Kansas gained tens of thousands of adherents to a movement that came to be known as the Jayhawk Nazis.

Winrod’s son, George Gordon Winrod, kept the ministry alive.  I remember his followers leaving corrosively anti-semitic leaflets under the windshield wipers of cars in the church parking lot when I was in ninth grade.

Nobody in my circle bought into it, of course – but we all knew people for whom it rang true.  There was an audience, out there.

And they – like Kahl – weren’t necessarily easily identifiable:

When Mr. Kahl came home from World War II, he was 25 years old, and he was regarded as a hero. He had shot down 10 enemy planes as a turret gunner on B-25′s, and he had won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, two air medals, a Presidential unit citation and two Purple Hearts. That was not all the metal he brought home. Surgeons never did get out all the shrapnel he took in the jaw, chest and hip.

Kahl in World War 2

So the combination of hard times and ready scapegoats found some adherents.

———-

Kahl escaped that day; with two federal agents dead, the federal law-enforcement machinery sprung into place.  Two blocks from the house where my father still lives in Jamestown, in Stutsman County’s then-brand-new courthouse, the FBI and an alphabet soup of other federal law-enforcement agencies set up their command post; local hotels were jammed with brusque men and women in sharp suits and/or, occasionally, battledress utilities.

Kahl

And they were not happy.  Rumors began to circulate; the Feds were tramping about the prairie with big, nasty boots; they were conducting no-knock raids, presuming the locals guilty until proven innocent, acting like a hostile occupying power – or so said the rumors.

The previous summer, I’d worked at KDAK, a little station in Carrington, a town of about 2,000 about 40 miles north of Jamestown.   The station had also just hired a new “News Director”, a pretty mid-20-something named Peggy Polreis who’d just come from Carrington’s newspaper.  One of my jobs had been to make her broadcast-worthy.  I did a good job.

One day, a few days after the shootout, Peggy got a tip from a source that the Feds were going to search a farmhouse near nearby Fessenden.  She arrived on the scene to find that the press were being cordoned away from a farmhouse located a solid half-mile up the road, behind a shelter belt.

Peggy slipped away from the group, and crawled – so the story went – a quarter of a mile along the shelter belt, keeping out of sight of the cops.  She was, apparently, the only non-cop to see what happened.

The police – and, as I recall, a North Dakota National Guard armored personnel carrier – had surrounded the farmhouse.  A dog darted from an outbuilding; a policeman shot the dog dead.  The gunshot sparked more gunfire, and before long the farmhouse was completely riddled with bullet holes.  Finally, the police moved in…

This is a photo, as I recall, from the search near Fessenden. That’s an M-114 Armored Reconnaissance Vehicle on the right, a ND National Guard vehicle that was pretty much the only armored vehicle in the state at the time that wasn’t intended to carry cash.

…to discover the farmhouse empty.

It was one of many incidents that angered, and occasionally alienated, the locals from the Feds.

———-

How you look at the events of that winter (and the ensuing spring and summer, when the manhunt for Kahl led to a final shootout in Arkansas that left Kahl and another Christian Identity supporter dead) depends on who, and where, you were back then.

If you were a local, you knew that North Dakotans tend to be good, law-abiding people; they’ve voted Republican in pretty much every Presidential election since statehood, making them marginally less conservative than Utah.  And yet the Posse, and Christian Identity, found recruits and adherents – and it was no mystery why.  Radical fringes were no stranger to the plains; the Non-Partisan League, the Grangers, the Bund and other fevered activists had gestated in the area in response to other crises since the 1890′s.

The seven Kahl case defendants

So we weren’t surprised that some of the locals were sympathetic.  It was a minority – a small one – but it drew attention.  One of them even wrote and recorded – on a home cassette player, I think – a song praising and rooting for Kahl, during the manhunt and before the final fatal shootout in Arkansas.  It got a little play – mostly from news organizations who were reporting on the acceptance Kahl, the Posse and other extremists got from the area.

If you weren’t from the area, and didn’t understand it, it must have seemed odd.  And maybe a little scary.

———-

Hollywood certainly knows nothing of the area, and understands less about it.  But that didn’t stop it from making a made-for-TV movie, based rather loosely on Bitter Harvest, in 1991.  Line of Duty: Manhunt in the Dakotas starred Rod Steiger as Kahl, andMichael “Family Ties” Gross as an FBI agent from New York who flew to the state to help solve the crime.

The show got the basic facts right; the names, the places (most of the show was putatively set in Jamestown), the timeline (sort of).

But the Hollywood take on the area, and the locals, was bemusingly warped.  Part of it was the Central Casting version of small-town people; although North Dakota is a place where you can hear the Fargo accent (“Yah, sure, you betcha”) in a hundred little main street cafes and bars, the show had the local farmers speaking with cornpone Arklahoma drawls.  The locals, to Hollywood, were out of Gomer Pyle or, given the sinistry of the subject matter, maybe Deliverance.

Rod Steiger as Kahl, during the shootout scene.

Worse?  While there was support for Kahl (and even more criticism of the Feds’ heavy-handedness, arrogance, and occasional contempt for due process in the way they carried out the manhunt in the immediate wake of the shootout), Manhunt in the Dakotas showed something that was almost an active guerilla movement, with rocks and shots aimed at passing police cars, threats, Gross (and Larry Hunt as “Chief Walters”, a composite and sympathetic Jamestown police chief) being harrassed while driving in the countryside, and – in the movie’s climactic scene – the two walking, nervous, down “Jamestown”‘s main street as the “local radio station” played the pro-Kahl song (with a cheery intro from the DJ), both of them keenly aware of the hateful gazes of the locals (by now all of them seemingly Kahl-sympathizers) boring through them both, as if they were fully-bedsheeted Klansmen scurrying through Compton.

“Main Street in Jamestown”, from “Manhunt in the Dakotas”. Note the 1986 Honda Civic wagon inserted into a story set in 1982. Also note the movie theatre – and I’ll point out the relative lack of local significance to “The Alamo” in rural North Dakota. Perhaps that’s why all the “Locals” in the movie had Arklahoma accents.

It was crap, of course, factually (no station in the state played the song, except as news) as well as socially (Jamestown is a college town of 16,000 that hosts a state hospital, and a school for the profoundly disabled, where Kahl had little traction; Kahl’s base of support was out on the isolated drift prairie).  But it was interesting, seeing how inscrutable “flyover land” was to the people who actually produce these things, and the almost-superstitious fear the place engenders.

———-

That part of North Dakota is a huge place in terms of the land and the sky; the human geography is much smaller.  In the 27-odd years since I left the place, whenever I meet other expats, it’s hard to go more than thirty seconds without finding a common acquaintance.

It’s the same with events.  Besides Dr. Kostick, and Peggy Polreis, I knew Darrell Graf – Medina’s police chief at the time (and Graf has actually turned up on this blog) and people in his family.  Scott Kopp was another – a guy I remember as a Stutsman County deputy who lost a finger from a Kahl shot that could have done much worse.  Another guy – a Medina cop who was on the periphery of the action – was my friend’s sister’s boyfriend (and, the last I checked, husband of about twenty-five years).

The internet can make you acquainted with even more people.  Scott Faul – one of the Posse members who was arrested, tried and did prison time for his role in the shootout – had a blog, although it hasn’t been updated since the first time this piece ran.

Thirty years is a long time, even out there.  But memories are longer still.

I sent the following to Nick Coleman – the “Executive Editor” of Twin Cities’ videoleftyblog The Uptake, which appears to have jettisoned all pretense of being anything but, well, a videoleftyblog – after reading his email to the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance last night:

Mr. Coleman,

I caught your note to Andrew Rothman on Facebook.

As a rigidly law-abiding gun owner, I have a special interest in policing my own.

So if you would please: from whom are you getting this “growing sense” at the Capitol?

Any actual legislators you could name? Did they have complaints about any specific behavior, from any particular attendees?

If they felt intimidated, was there a reason they didn’t notify Capitol Security – who said, Mr. Rothman noted, that the crowd was better-behaved than most?

Finally, Mr. Coleman – as you have publicly acknowledged being a carry permit holder, how do people “find it possible” do do anything around you, knowing that you may be armed? It’s a serious question.

Thanks in advance.

Mitch Berg

Uppity Peasant

I’m not exactly expecting an answer.  The one time Nick answered a question of mine, it was…

…well, memorable.

Emailed from a source in the Senate:

“Guns…Gays…and Growin’ Government!”

And I’m not sure even the gays are going to get what they want this session.

I had a chat with Avery LIBRELLE, a liberal friend of mine at a local coffee shop in Saint Paul; Avery had just gotten off from a shift of answering phones for MPR’s pledge drive.

LIBRELLE:  I’m glad the DFL are talking about raising the minimum wage.  It’s time the working poor caught a break.

ME: Well, that’s kind of untrue.  Most of “the working poor” work for more than whatever the minimum is.  The vast majority of people earning the minimum wage are young, entry-level workers.  Very few people over the age of 16 actually make the minimum wage – and those over 25 that do usually do it because of choices, good or bad or indifferent, that either they or their parents made.

LIBRELLE:  Well, it’ll be good for them, too.  More money is good, right?  It stimulates consumer spending when workers have more money!

ME:   Well, yeah, but where does that “more money” come from?

LIBRELLE:  Employers!

ME:  And…?

LIBRELLE:  They’ll pay more!

ME:  Er…why?

LIBRELLE:  Because the law will say so!

ME:  Um…no, they won’t.

LIBRELLE:  Sure they will.  $9.50 is more than $7.25!

ME:   Well, yeah – any minimum-wage worker will get more money per hour.  But it doesn’t mean their employers will spend more, especially in a tough economy.

LIBRELLE:   Well, that’s Bush’s fault.

ME:   Be that as it may, look at it this way.  Let’s say a store owner has $100 an hour to spend on payroll at her small business.  That’s her labor budget; it’s what she can afford to spend, given the revenues she brings in, on labor, on top of materials, rent, utilities and a modest wage for herself – and just to keep from going crazy, I won’t add in all the service taxes she’ll be paying under Governor Messinger’s Dayton’s tax proposal.  Currently, that allows her to employ about 14 people at minimum wage.   If the minimum wage goes up to $9.50, that means she can employ ten people.

And that’s not even counting the changes to the payroll tax, which bring it down to more like nine.  And that’s leaving out healthcare.  So – nine employees get a raise, and five get laid off.  Meaning the nine who are left are going to have to work a whole lot harder.

LIBRELLE:   The employer can just budget more for labor!

ME:  Yeah, there’s not actually room in her budget to increase her labor costs by close to 50%.  Not unless her business’ revenues zoom upward which, by the way, isn’t happening these days.

LIBRELLE:  She can take it out of her salary!

ME:  Did you catch the part about her having a “very modest” salary after all her expenses?  If she tacks $40 an hour onto her labor costs, she’ll be working for free – which is less than the minimum wage.  She may as well close the business, then – which means instead of laying off five, she’ll be putting all 14 out of work.

LIBRELLE:  Maybe the workers should unionize!

ME:  And that’ll increase revenues how?

LIBRELLE:  Why do you hate children?

(And SCENE)

I used to read a lot of liberal bloggers.  I don’t so much anymore; part of it’s the time; part of it is that there are so few good ones.

A few Minnesota liberal blogs – one in particular, but I’m not naming names – have a particularly annoying habit when they get pressed in an argument with a rare conservative commenter; if it’s not going well for them, one of the blog’s writers will dig hard to wrench context hard enough to find some sort of offense in the comment; he’ll feign the Victorian Vapours at the (contrived) offense…

…which has the side-effect of taking the focus of the debate off of, well, the debate.

I’m not sure I’m surprised to hear this next story – that the Minnesota DFL is using the same precise tactic after having been shredded in the marketplace of public opinion last week.

I am a little surprised at the person asking the questions.

From: Nick Coleman <[redacted]@[The Uptake].org>

Date: Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 8:15 AM

Subject: guns at capitol query

To: [redacted]@gocra-mn.org

Joe, Andrew, et al:

There is a growing sense at the Capitol that the presence of so many guns during last week’s gun control hearings affected the process, or even intimidated Legislators. Would you please comment today for a story I am writing for The UpTake?

Is it possible to debate guns in a room full of guns?

Thanks,

Nick Coleman

Executive Editor, The UpTake

www.theuptake.org

651-747-[redacted]

Oh, good lord.

The “Growing Sense” is weasel words for “a conclusion that we can’t actually substantiate”.

A little background here: a carry permittee – a person who has passed a background check and taken a training course – can get permission to carry in the Capitol and the State Office Buildings by informing the head of Capitol security they intend to do so.

And those notifications spiked big-time before Gun Week, last week, as carry permittees – out of symbolism or the practical desire not to have to sweat storing their firearms in their cars – filed with the capitol cops.

Are some legislators intimidated by the existence of firearms?  No doubt.

Are they right to be intimidated by a population that is two orders of magnitude less likely to commit any significant crime than the general public?

No more than they would be to feel “intimidated” by exercise of free speech, worship, press (or radio) or assembly – although some of them are.  And they’re wrong then, too.

And the cutesy final question: “Is it possible to debate guns in a room full of guns?”  Given the reality – carry permittees are safer to be around than just about anyone – the answer is “just as possible as it is in a room full of speech, assembly or religion”.

But let’s cut the crap: the only “growing sense” is among the DFL Caucus’ PR flaks (and, let’s be honest, Alida Messinger and Carrie Lucking) that they need to do something good ‘n Alinsky-riffic to try to undercut the groundswell of popular opinion that swarmed the Capitol last week and humiliated the DFL representatives and their copy-and-pasted bills.

Andrew Rothman, VP of the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance, had a response too.  It’s below the jump.  And it includes a classic story about Heather Martens, from the late Joel Rosenberg, that is perhaps one of the best examples of the hyperbolic hypocrisy of the gun-grabber movement…

…and its’ new stenographer, Nick Coleman.

(more…)

Stay classy.

That is all.

One of the fundamental tenets of the “classical liberalism” that is the basis of modern conservatism is the idea first recorded by John Locke – that men form governments to protect life, liberty and private property; that private property was in fact a cornerstone of real liberty, and that protecting it against the depredations of government and of other people is a key justification for having a government.  To put it in Andrew Sullivan’s words – because it’s his definitions of “classical conservative” that I’m using as the basis for this exercise – “Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked”.

If we have no property rights, then we have no rights.

Now, John Locke isn’t a common theme in the history of rock and roll.  And private property has had a mixed history in popular music; it’s been a metaphor for rites of passage (Jan and Dean’s “409”), or the high life (“Baubles, Bangles and Beads” by everyone from Eartha Kitt to Frank Sinatra) and a yardstick for swagger (“Beamer, Benz or Bentley” by gangster-rapper Lloyd Banks), but also for evil (“I’d Love To Change The World” by Ten Years’ After’s called us to “Tax the rich, feed the poor, ’til there ain’t no rich no more”).

And you can look in vain for references to Locke or Payne or Franklin – in Springsteen’s catalog, and can find plenty on his later albums and his real life as re politics that contradicts them all.

But this series isn’t about proving Springsteen is, personally, a conservative (faith-based blogger Dog Gone’s endless repetitions notwithstanding); it’s about explaining why his music resonates with conservatives.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

One problem with gun control is over-breadth. To keep firearms out of North Minneapolis, we must ban them statewide, even nationwide and perhaps worldwide, or else they’ll just trickle back in as people move around.

Maybe the problem is freedom of travel? That doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution or the amendments, it’s a right invented by the Supreme Court and the early cases dealt with travel Between states. But what about travel Within a single state? Can we limit that?

Perhaps Minneapolis could impose reasonable restrictions on travel into or out of North Minneapolis? Close off all but a few streets, set up a checkpoint and search everyone coming into the North Minneapolis Sterile Zone for ugly guns and high-capacity magazines. That would create a safe and peaceful Gun Free Zone where it’s most needed but still allow people in rural Minnesota to keep firearms for hunting and self-defense. Nizel George would not have died in vain.

Reasonable restrictions on a right that’s not even mentioned in the Constitution. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Saint Paul could use the same idea – a wall around the city, with a fee to get out – for economic development!

The Constitution doesn’t mention anything about “no walls around cities!”

SIDE NOTE:  It’s amazing how life can derail a guy’s plans.  While – as is my wont with these long series – much of the rough material was put together in October and November, I held off on actually putting it into a written form, thinking it’d give me something to do during the two-month stretch between the election and the opening of the state legislature, when I’m usually too burned out on politics to care much.

Of course, this past eight weeks of battling for the Second Amendment has derailed a bit of that plan.

But while the battle against Barack Rex carries on, it’s time to make time for the fun stuff.

Or what is for me the fun stuff, anyway.

———-

This is a quick one, though.

(more…)

Can you imagine if a Republican legislator did this?

Video of registered gun-grabber lobbyist Heather Martens introducing a bill for “Representative” Alice Hausman last week at the Capitol.

The DFL – including committee chair Michael Paymar, the night of the hearings – claim that lobbyists speak the the committee all the time.

But this isn’t just “speaking to the committee”. This is introducing a bill for consideration by our elected representatives.

Hausman claimed that she had other committee assignments – but the committee she chairs didn’t meet on Wednesday night.

Are the people of Minnesota – even you liberals – going to tolerate having your representation handed over to registered lobbyists?

The good news?  Big Country is re-uniting…

…sort of:

The reconfigured Big Country — with The Alarm’s Mike Peters filling in for the late Stuart Adamson and the new addition of original Simple Minds bassist Derek Forbes — will release its first new studio album in 14 years this spring and embark on a world tour that will hit the U.K., Europe and North America.

The band — also featuring guitarist Bruce Watson and drummer Mark Brzezicki, plus Watson’s son Jamie on guitar as well — has announced that the 12-track The Journey is recorded, mixed and mastered and due to be released sometime this spring. No further details about the album, the band’s first since 1999′s Driving to Damascus, have been revealed.

The bad news?  Tony Butler isn’t part of the project.  Big Country’s marquee memorable element was the ingenious guitar interplay between Adamson and Watson – but more subtly, the subdued vocal harmony between Adamson and Butler set the Scottish band apart from many lesser guitar-driven post-punk bands of the era.

The “Maybe Good, Maybe Bad, and I’ll Decide When I Hear It” news?  The bombastic, hyperbolic, prancing, posturing, preening Mike Peters fit in wonderfully with The Alarm, which was a gloriously bombastic, hyperbolic, prancing, posturing, preening band.  Big Country, behind all the bagpipe-y guitars and celtic imagery, was a very measured, controlled, “Type A” band.  Having Peters singing in Big Country’s old stuff is like having Steven Tyler sit in with Simon and Garfunkel.

But then it’s a new band, with only Watson and Brzezicki back from the original lineup.  So here’s to clean slates.  And – maybe – they’re coming to the US:

Big Country is due to open its previously announced 14-date tour of the U.K. and Ireland on April 12, and will follow that with a just-announced European tour that opens May 14 in France (see full dates below). The band says U.S. and Canadian dates are “to be announced shortly,” and that further European dates are planned for later in 2013.

Will I go if they come to the Twin Cities, Madison or Chicago?

Hell yeah.  It’ll either be a great night, or an epic train wreck.  I’m up for either, but I’ll hope for “great night”; dreams, as they say, stay with you.

Clinton Romesha becomes the fourth living Medal of Honor recipient, for his actions at the ill-fated Forward Operating Base Keating:

“I’m feeling conflicted with this medal I now wear,” Romesha told reporters outside the West Wing after the ceremony. “The joy comes from recognition for us doing our jobs as soldiers on distant battlefields, but is countered by the constant reminder of the loss of our battle buddies, my battle buddies, my soldiers, my friends.”

Eight U.S. soldiers were killed in the fighting and other 22 wounded, including Romesha, who was peppered with shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade in the hip, arm and neck. But he fought through his wounds to help lead other soldiers to safety, defend the burning camp from encroaching Taliban fighters, personally taking out at least 10, and retrieve the bodies of the fallen Americans.

And although he’s not a native, I’m going to give a  homer shout-out:

Romesha grew up in the small town of Lake City, Calif., and deployed out of Fort Carson, Colo., fulfilling a tradition of military service shared by his grandfather, his father and his brothers. He now lives in Minot, N.D., with his wife and three children and works in the oil fields.

That’ll be a conversation starter in Minot.

I’d hope to run into the sergeant next time I’m in Minot – but I’d imagine he’ll be busy.

The Strib “Hot Dish” notes that Rep. Alice “The Phantom” Hausman is taking some flak over her “bump and run” act last week; as we noted last week, Hausman introduced several gun grab bills, but didn’t stick around to hear the testimony:

Hausman excused herself Wednesday morning after introducing the assault weapons bill, saying she had another appointment, and did not attend Thursday’s session focusing on her bill to ban larger ammunition magazines.

Hausman said she had other commitments as a committee chair and was told her bills would not be voted on. Rather, Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, chairman of the House Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee, said ideas contained in many of the bills would be included in a larger, gun-violence measure that will be assembled and voted on later this month.

Now, this brings up one surprise and two issues.

The surprise:  Rachel Stassen-Berger is flirting with reporting something that might conceivably not advance the DFL’s interest.  I thought I saw a flying pig along 394 this morning.  Kudos, Rachel!

The first issue:  while Second Amendment supporters were piqued at Hausman for fleeing any questioning of her gun grab bills, the big problem was that she turned that job over to a registered lobbyist.  If a Republican – any Republican – did this on any issue, the assembled media elite, the Schecks and Cronans and Stassen-Bergers that prowl the Capitol, would be asking some very probing questions.

The other issue?  I’ll add emphasis:

That meant that Hausman, who is not on the public safety committee, was “not a decision-maker,” she said, and was presenting bills that were put together by Protect Minnesota. She said she meant no disrespect to the testifiers.

Remember last year, when Alida Messinger’s “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” paid for a chanting campaign against the “American Legislative Exchange Committee” (ALEC) for submitting model legislation for legislators’ consideration?  Why, you’d have thought democracy itself was at risk.

But there it is in plain black and white; the DFL majority is cribbing legislation from an extremist gun-grabber group that has among the worst records for truthfulness and veracity anywhere in politics – only the Ku Klux Klan and the “Joe Isuzu PAC” do worse – and, apparently (judging by the petulance and illiteracy of the DFL’s responses to the testimony against their gun grabs) without having read them themselves.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I wonder if shooting a policeman’s family is considered Domestic Terrorism such that President Obama can issue a Secret Kill Order authorizing the drone operators to drop Hellfire missiles on this guy Dorner?

I know he’s accused of serious crimes and I assume this is the same level of enthusiasm and dedication the LAPD puts into every homicide investigation without showing any favoritism at all because of who the victims were or who the accused killer is; but I’ve got to admit, it is a bit comical that the largest and best equipped police force in the world can’t find one guy supposedly camping in the mountains. God help them if LaRaza ever decides to get serious about reclaiming California.

Actually, this situation sounds familiar. A terrorist with a $1 million price on his head hiding in the mountains and nobody can find him to end his reign of terror. They need to call in . . . Barak “The Slayer” Obama!

I see there’s an update – he’s not the first, some cattle rustlers in North Dakota were the first. So I guess that makes it okay, then.

Joe Doakes

Now that Janet Napolitano is finding terrorists (right-wing ones, anyway) under rocks, I imagine we’ll find out sooner than later.

…that if we passed “Shall Issue” handgun carry bills, people would be spraying gunfire indiscriminately all over the place.

And they were right – it’s happening!

Common threads are noted in red.

2008:  Joseph Sparkman is found hanging from a tree in a rural area with “pro-GOP” graffiti scrawled on him.  The media leaps to conclusions, blaming the right.  It turns out Sparkman, as one of his last demented acts on earth, opted to try to use his death as a crude smear of the conservatives he hated, including Michele Bachmann.

2009:  After the media publicly assumed a Republican or “Tea Partier” vandalized the Colorado Democrat party headquarters, it was discovered that the vandal, Maurice Schwenkler, was a Democrat hoping to smear his opposition.

2010: After Joseph Stack flew his plane into an office building in Austin TX, the media assumed he was a right-winger.  He turned out – naturally – to be a left-winger.  

2012:  ABC News broadcasts report – picked up by other media – that James Holmes, the Aurora theatre shooter, was a Tea Party activist.  He was very much not.

2013:  After a killing spree teed off by a screeching, shrill leftist political screed, Christopher Dorner’s left-wing politics pass with scarcely a mention in the media.

It seems an odd time for them to rediscover the virtues of detachment, doesn’t it?

…to paraphrase Albert Einstein, is to keep trying to use taxes to engineer society even when you know it doesn’t work.

Last month, we talked about Governor Messinger’s Dayton’s plan to jack up cigarette taxes by a buck a pack.  Raising cigarette taxes never works; revenues plummet because people avoid the taxes the best they can, and if taxes get high enough they switch to the inevitable black market, and even the purported health benefits tend to stall once the casual smokers get priced out of the market.  And, for all the DFL’s palaver about progressivism, cigarette taxes are the most regressive tax there is.

So what could be better than Governor Messinger’s Dayton’s $.94/pack hike?

Ann Lenczewski’s proposed $2.83 per pack – up $1.60 from the current $1.23 in total state taxes – is like Messinger’s Dayton’s proposed hike, only more so.

Kim Crockett from the Center of the American Experiment, quoted in the left-leaning Daily Planet:

But the taxes are seen as regressive — meaning they affect a larger share from those least able to pay, and, according Kim Crockett, chief operating officer for the Center of the American Experiment, the goals of decreasing smoking and increasing revenue can sometimes conflict.

She cautioned against raising the price of cigarettes to the point where there are unintended consequences. She said the state could expect to see more smuggling of the product — casual smuggling by those who cross state lines to purchase the product if it is cheaper, but also commercial smuggling by large-scale operators bringing the product to the state for sale.

“This undermines both the revenue goals and the health goals of higher cigarette taxes,” she said. Additionally, she questioned the anticipated revenue projections.

The DFL are acting like spoiled teenagers who got the car taken away from them for misbehaving with it – and finally got it back, and are acting like now they’re really gonna stick it to Mom and Dad.

Pleased to meet you, can you guess my name?

Plenty of sympathy (and a $1 million reward) for the devil in Southern California.

Former Marine and LAPD officer Chris Dorner promised to wage “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare” against his former employer in his bizarre manifesto.  Five days into Dorner’s declaration of war against the LAPD, starting with murdering the 28 year-old daughter of a police officer and her fiancé, it appears Dorner has made good on that threat as there has been little “conventional” in the reaction to his crimes.

If Dorner believed that gunning down two innocent people, and two other police officers, would result in greater scrutiny of the LAPD, it was a bloody gamble that’s paid off.  In a matter of days, the LAPD has gone from dismissing Dorner’s account of the reasons behind his firing to re-opening the investigation.  LA Police Chief Charlie Beck denied the move was an attempt to “appease” Dorner.  It’s more likely an attempt to appease the public amid an ever-growing series of errors in the Dorner manhunt.

Who might have guessed that the LAPD would be Dorner’s biggest ally in his murderous attempt to move public opinion?  Thus far, the LAPD has managed to shoot one older woman in the back, terrify her daughter, and shoot at a thin white man in a supposed case of mistaken identity with a large black man.  Much was made in the media of Dorner’s military experience as a rationale for why authorities have been unable to find him in the resort community of Big Bear, where Dorner is said to be hiding.  But there’s little rationale for a trigger-happy police force that seems to be playing right into Dorner’s hands.

And Dorner most certainly seems to have some sense of the media impact of his actions.  Writing in his manifesto screed, Dorner claimed:

“The department has not changed since the Rampart and Rodney King days. It has gotten worse,” Dorner wrote. “I know I will be vilified by the LAPD and the media. Unfortunately, this is a necessary evil that I do not enjoy but must partake and complete for substantial change to occur within the LAPD and reclaim my name.”

Apparently part of the “necessary evil” was taunting Monica Quan’s father Randall with a phone call in which he said Quan “should have done a better job of protecting his daughter.”  Don’t worry, Dorner didn’t “enjoy” that.

What Dorner might have had a harder time anticipating was a vocal minority insistent on turning him into a folk hero:

Supporters of Christopher Dorner, the former LA policeman turned “cop killer,” have shown up online, with tweets and fan pages on Facebook. Some call Dorner a “hero” for writing a nine-page manifesto alleged on racism and corruption within the LAPD.

Numerous supporters on Twitter are calling the alleged murderer a “Dark Knight.”One Facebook page calls him “the hero LA deserves, but not the one it needs right now … He’s a silent guardian, watchful protector against corruption, he’s our Dark Knight.”

There’s even a “I support Christopher Jordan Dorner” Facebook page with over 7,000 “likes.”  The page’s creator is already promising “t-shirts, buttons, stickers + bumper stickers” because nothing says respectful, intellectual debate like mass marketing a psychopath.  Hey, it worked for Che Guevara.

If Dorner really was the “whistleblower” he wants to define himself as, there were a myriad of ways for him to get his message out other than with a gun.  But his entire narrative of the LAPD is at odds with perception of the department.  After the disgrace of the Rampart scandal in the late 90s, where 70 officers were implicated in misconduct with a gang strike force, the LAPD has seen a surge in popularity.  A 2009 poll put the LAPD at a nearly 80% approval rating.

Most of Dorner’s criticisms of the department aren’t exactly Serpico-level indictments, but rather tales of harassment and bureaucratic lethargy.  Hardly grounds for a killing spree.  Unless, of course, Dorner isn’t the “Dark Knight” wish fulfillment figure for some in Southern California but at heart just a deranged, vengeful man.

To: Rep. John Lesch, HD66B and closet authoritarian
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  “Local Control”

Rep. Lesch,

Last week, at the House Public Safety Finance Committee hearings on the DFL’s various gun grab bills – the one that’d funnel all carry permit applications through the local police chief, if applicable, rather than the county sheriff – you kept repeating “it’s about local control”, as if you were one of those old pull-string toys with the little tape recorder inside.

Little story for ya, here, Leftenant.

Perhaps you recall; back in the bad ol’ days before the Minnesota Citizens Personal Protection Act, when we had a discretionary-issue system where getting a permit depended entirely on ones’ connections, one of the metro-area police chiefs – I think it was Bloomington – said he’d never, ever, ever, ever give out a permit to a common peasant (although he issued one to his wife, as memory serves).

Now, if citizens wanted to voice their displeasure at the transparent unfairness of the system, they had to organize a battle to win the mayor’s office – at whose pleasure the chief served.  Not the citizens’ – the mayor’s.   Which means you need to go a couple of levels of government removed from the citizen in the street to voice any meaningful dissent from the system.

But then the MPPA got passed. And the Sheriffs’ offices got the job, statewide.

And perhaps you remember this, Rep. Lesch:  your old buddy Bob Fletcher got caught denying three times as many permits as any other sheriff in the state, including Hennepin County.  And a huge percentage of those denials, when contested, were coming back losers for the County, costing Ramco a ton of money.

And it was us shooters – of all races, genders and social levels or, put briefly, the people – who were part of the coalition that tossed Fletcher from his job at the polls.

That – a law enforcement official who answers directly to us, as opposed to the local machine and bureaucracy – is what “local control” is.

That is all.

The media is acting like this is a big story:

A Sri Lankan prisoner who tried to hide his mobile phone during a search of his cell was caught out when guards heard ring tones from his rear-end, a hospital official said on Friday.

The 58-year-old convict had to be admitted to the national hospital in Colombo where doctors later retrieved the handset from his rectum.

Heck, that’s nothing.  Mark Dayton has most of the Twin Cities media in about the same place.

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’ll be at Gander Mountain in Lakeville from 1-3 today for a special broadcast sponsored by the United States Concealed Carry Association.  We’ll be interviewing “Armed American Radio” host Mark Walters, writer Ron Pincus, and firearms instructor Michael Martin, as well as Rob Doar from the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance about this past week’s hearings at the Capitol.
• 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 . (Sunday only)
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Join us!

Don’t forget – the Northern Alliance Radio Network will have a very special live broadcast tomorrow out at Gander Mountain in Lakeville.

The show will be sponsored by the US Concealed Carry Assocation.  We’ll have quite a few special guests, including Armed American Radio host Mark Walters, firearms instructor Michael Martin, and perhaps some special guests.

Join us out at Gander Mountain in Lakeville from 1-3 PM tomorrow…

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…or on AM1280 The Patriot!

I was down at the Capitol last night watching Representative Martens testify.  My friend AVERY LIBRELLE was there, wearing a “Freedom not to get Shot” button.

LIBRELLE:  Gun violence is out of control!  We need fewer guns on the street!

ME: Well, no.  It’s down by nearly half in the past twenty years, as the number of civilian guns has grown by nearly half.   In fact, the gun crime rate is dropping pretty much every where but in places like Chicago, which continue to defy the Supreme Court and the Constitution and ban civilian gun ownership by the law-abiding citizen.

LIBRELLE!  Hah!  We won’t stop crime in Chicago until we have a comprehensive national policy on guns!

ME: So you’re saying Chicago’s murder rate is the fault of Indiana, Wisconsin and downstate Illinois?

LIBRELLE: Yes! Those guns in Chicago come from outside the city where guns are legal!

ME:  So if “availability of guns” is the problem, then why isn’t crime in all those other areas also booming?

LIBRELLE:  You support slavery, don’t you?

(And SCENE).