As we noted this morning, most of the DFL representatives on the Public Safety Finance committee spent a good chunk of the time during yesterday’s hearings not listening to testimony about the gun grab bills their caucus was copying and pasting from Andrew Cuomo introducing, and letting a registered lobbyist sit in for one of them.

And then there was this; a Second Amendment activist (writing on Facebook) noted that he approached Duluth DFLer Erik Simonson – who introduced a dumb gun control bill of his own, of which more later – about a bill to “ban body armor” – based on the canard that mass-murderers just love to use body armor.  The bill is written so broadly that it’d include – and require a $100 fee and a background check – protective gear for motorcyclists, paintball players, snowmobilers and, near as I can tell from reading the bill, Highland drummers (whose drumheads are made of Kevlar these days).

The activist went to Simonson (I’ll add emphasis):

I approached Rep Simonson after the hearing in a very polite manner and introduced myself. I told him that some snowmobile and motorcycle jackets not only contain Kevlar but state it right on them. Helmets are made of Kevlar and I believe but am not sure paintball jackets could have Kevlar in them. The Rep said “I am not going down that road. I am not going to have a bunch of exemptions carved out”. I replied “So you want me to have to pay a $100 dollar fee to register my snowmobile jacket? Very curtly he said “I am not going down that road” and turned away…

In other words, “Don’t bother me with the details, peasant!”.

So many questions.  Did Representative Simonson even know what was in “his” bill?  Because all of the DFL’s raft of gun grab bills read like they were cribbed from someone else.  Andrew Cuomo, maybe?

And all of you snowmobilers, Highland drummers, paintballers, and industrial protective equipment users?  You need to contact Rep. Simonson.  His number is 651-296-4246; call him (email doesn’t have enough impact these days).

Ask him.

Especially all of you snowmobilers, motorcyclists and industrial protective equipment users in Duluth.  To say nothing of Second Amendment supporters.

Aren’t the Democrats the ones who complain that their opposition is in the back pocket of lobbyists?

We’ll come back to that.

We’ll also come back to this:  until redistricting last February, I spent close to two decades in the old House District 66B, which was represented by long-time DFLer and teachers union mouthpiece Alice Hausman.

Hausman, speaking at an event for which she apparently couldn’t find a lobbyist to substitute for her.

Republicans in the district used to call her “Alice The Phantom”, because she was rarely seen out and about in the district, except for the odd photo op.  Redistricting put her in 66A – but she’s the same Alice Hausman she ever was.

Like I said, we’ll be back.

——–

I went to the Capitol last night.  As usual, the number of pro-Second Amendment people dwarfed the number of orcs – in the overflow room I was in, it was 100 to about five, and that was much closer than it usually gets.

While all of the Republicans on the Public Safety committee stayed through the full three days of testimony, a variety of the DFLers picked up and left the hearings.

Hearings for the bills their people were introducing.  Representative  Hilstrom, Savick, Schoen,  Simonson and Slocum were largely absent from the morning’s testimony – at least, testimony from opponents of the gun grab bills.  I’m going to hazard a guess they’re present for the votes.

But more egregiously, Representative Hausman was absent for the readings of both of her gun grab bills – the magazine capacity bill and the “assault weapon” grab.   Which is not uncommon in the House; Reps have busy schedules, and it’s not uncommon for other representatives to fill in for them.

So who read Hausman’s gun grab bills?

Heather Martens, “executive director” (and, likely one of about three actual members, and that’s being charitable and assuming that they don’t actually charge to be members) of “Protect Minnesota”.

Heather Martens, exploiting an earlier crime victim in front of the Minnesota House.

(No, I’m not kidding.  The late Joel Rosenberg used to tell stories of going to “Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota meetings – Martens had to rename the group again after what was left of CSM’s credibility evaporated a few years back – where Martens presided over a table with nothing but Second Amendment activist ringers.  Not a single actual gun-grabber showed up for these meetings)

Martens – who, as has been noted in this space for the past decade, rarely if ever says a single truthful or factual word about the gun issue in public – read both of the bills to the committee for the record.  It’s the job the Representative is supposed to do.

This was brought up to Michael Paymar, the committee chairman.  He said it was fairly common for people to fill in for Representatives in front of the committee.

Which may or may not be true, but I’m going to hazard a guess that those people who fill in are almost never registered lobbyists.

I say “almost never”, because it’s against the House of Representatives’ purported “Permanent Rules“:

2.39 EXECUTIVE BRANCH OR LOBBYIST PRESENCE IN COMMITTEE. No House committee, division or subcommittee shall permit any member or staff of the executive branch, registered lobbyist, or lobbyist principal, to be seated at the committee table with members of the House during official proceedings of committees of the House.

“Presenting a bill to the committee” certainly counts as being “seated at the table with members of the House”.

So the facts are these:

• Representative Hausman was absent – according to staff, off doing non-House business – during the introduction of not just one but both of her gun grab bills
• Both of her bills were read by a registered lobbyist
• If a Republican had done this, there’d be an uproar
• BONUS FACT:  After all of the DFL’s whinging about “model bills” last year, in an attempt to impugn ALEC, all of the DFL’s gun grab bills are cribbed from legislation in other states, and are pretty obviously not just model bills, but really stupid ones

So there you go, District 66A. Your voice has been given over to a special interest group.

Are you proud today?

As conventional forces went, they were an unconventional bunch.

The unit was weighed down by equipment (70 pounds of gear per man), experience (most were second-line reservists) and age (older draftees).  Their leader was forged in the classic mold of the British eccentric, perfect for a forgotten front against a larger opponent filled with combat veterans.  But neither the obstacles or the odds daunted the men of the King’s Liverpool Regiment and 2nd Gurkha Rifles, together better known to history as the Chindits, as the crossed into Japanese-controlled Burma on February 8th, 1943.  Their mission would be part of the beginning of the modern-era of Special Forces.

…

The Burma that the Chindits marched into was far from friendly territory – even before the Japanese invasion.

Burma had been among the last of the British possessions captured in the colonial era.  The Anglo-Burmese wars of the mid-19th Century sapped the Burmese monarchy and military, leading to fall of the capital Rangoon after the Third Anglo-Burmese war and the absorption of Burma into a province of India in 1886.  The Burmese populace responded with a grueling four-year guerrilla war followed by decades of hostility.

The Rising Sun In Burma: the Japanese were welcomed as liberators but massacres of civilians like at Kalagong village quickly revealed the Japanese as far more brutal colonial masters

(more…)

This was forwarded to me in an email chain the other day – one of those “please forward to your friends” kinds of things.

Now, I never, ever forward email.   I probably don’t even forward email that I should, sometimes.

But this, I figured, was worth forwarding to a lot more people than I could ever pick out of my email address book:

Holocaust denial isn’t exactly mainstream today – but since I first interviewed high-profile revisionist Ernst Zündel in 1987, it’s gotten a lot less outlandish, too.

And that’s bad; the worst evils are the ones that have become banal and commonplace.

Numerous reports from the Capitol today indicate that Minneapolis 5th Ward Councilman Don Samuels brought a group of school children from Minneapolis to the Capitol to help the DFL pack the hearing rooms at the Paymar/Hausman gun grab hearings.

One correspondent wrote on Facebook:

The children Don Samuelson exploited, I witnessed holding paper signs saying, among other things, “No Guns” as they left the building.

I’m waiting on more photos from the Capitol.

Anyone recognize what school it is that’s sending kids, during the school day, to serve as DFL campaign props?

Twenty-odd years ago, when I first got involved in Second Amendment politics, the DFL controlled both chambers of the Legislature and the Governor’s office as well.

And so there was a constant tug of war every time a putative gun control measure came up.  Real Americans from greater Minnesota would pack hearings at the Capitol to oppose the bills.  So the DFL would jockey the hearing times, dates and places around to try to shake off as many outstate voters as possible.

It worked, to an extent; the Real Americans would only outnumber the orcs 600:20 instead of 1200:20.

In the days before there was an internet, that took some doing.

Today?

There are more hearings  planned for 10AM and 6PM today.  For the latest information, go here.

Democracy.  To the 2nd Amendment movement – it’s about showing up and being counted.  To the DFL, it’s about keeping the wrong people from showing up.

Today would be the 102nd birthday of the greatest president of my lifetime.

People say “there’s no Ronald Reagan in American politics today”.  And they’re right – but as his son Michael told me in an interview a few years ago, it’s not that there couldn’t be.

Because Reagan had three great talents:   he was a great, natural communicator (who, unlike a lot of “natural communicators”, honed his craft with relentless discipline);  he developed a vision and he stuck to it with determination and focus; and most importantly for today’s  conservatives, he knew how to build coalitions, rather than exclude people from them.

We have plenty of people who can communicate well, although the conservative movement has had its share of duds in that department too.  And we have not a few who can visioneer with the best of them  – in fact, with the rise of the Tea Party, our movement’s best years may be to come, provided they keep the faith.

But as to building coalitions?

Today, we’re better at building silos.

Reagan did something that conservatives are terrible at today; he got social conservatives (at the peak of their notoriety and political cachet), blue-collar Democrats who the economy had turned into instant fiscalcons, Jack Kemp-style economic hawks and paleocons together…

…by focusing remorselessly on what they agreed on;  fixing the economy, and ending Communism.

And once in office, that’s what he focused on.  Oh, he paid lip service to issues that were to him tangents – and lip service from the world’s greatest bully pulpit ain’t chicken feed. But he didn’t fritter his political capital away with excessive natterings about issues that were tangential to his vision, and the vision his coalition all agreed on in electing him.  He spoke eloquently on issues – many of them – and that speaking had its effect.

Some call that an abdication; it was in fact a matter of leaving that work to the members of his coalition (example:  he exerted very little executive effort on abortion and gun control – but the efforts to roll both back at the state and local level started to coalesce during his time in office anyway – in part because of his leadership from the bully pulpit.  But for all that, always, the focus was on “dancing with the one what brung him” to DC at the head of an impossibly-diverse coalition; his rock-solid, bone-simple two point agenda, fixing the economy and toppling the Commies.

As I moderated the “Where Do We Go From Here” event last week at the Blue Fox, and listened to some of the friction and cat-calling across the party’s various factions, I thought there was a lot of focus on what divided us.  And so my final question to the panel was “what do we all – all of us, from socialcons like Andy Parrish to libertarians like Marianne Stebbins, actually agree on?”  Because that is the only real way forward for any of the factions – since if any faction takes Parrish’s (tongue in cheek?) advice and forms a separate party, it’s the road to mutual palookaville, with multiple parties that are less than the sum of the parts they once were.

So for my annual Gipper Day celebration, it’ll be the usual; jelly beans at my desk, taking the kids out to dinner to talk about what Reagan’s legacy has meant in their lives (other than the uninformed, out-of-context crap the DFLers in their lives’ll say)…

…and asking my fellow conservatives “what do we agree on?”

Remember – Saturday’s our special broadcast at Gander Mountain in Lakeville.

We’ll be out at Gander Mountain doing a special broadcast sponsored by the US Concealed Carry Assocation.  We’ll have a bunch of special guests, including Armed American Radio host Mark Walters, firearms instructor Michael Martin, and perhaps some special guests (again, probably not including Ted Nugent)

(Neither confirming nor denying) .

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

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…or on AM1280 The Patriot!

David Brauer of the MinnPost – which seems to be peeling more of the wrapper off the idea that it’s a partisan DFL PR site every week, perhaps filling the “void” the Minnesota “Independent” left – tweeted about the crowd at the hearings for the Paymar Gun Grab yesterday:

#stuffwhitepeoplelike “@hartbeat11: Rm 10 at MN SOB filled with people interested in gun legislation.campl.us/nToK”

— David Brauer (@dbrauer) February 5, 2013

Now, David’s a good guy.  About as white as they get, by the way, but I do try to focus on the content of mens’ souls rather than the color of their skin.  Not sure where I got that.  But I digress.

I thought about responding…:

#StuffWhitePeopleLike – see also “Any MinnPost columnist or staff meeting.

Because it is hilarious – southwest Minneapolitan Brauer, at the head of a staff of middle-class, NPR-listening, Volvo/Subaru/Prius-driving U of M/Saint Olaf/Carlton/St. Thomas grads that is more Caucasoid than the Hutchinson Rotary Club, yipping about the skin color of Second Amendment activists?

As is often the case, Nancy LaRoche had a better idea:

 

.@dbrauer: You should visit Bill’s Range in Robbinsdale, then retract that silly #stuffwhitepeoplelike hashtag.

— Nancy LaRoche (@nwlaroche) February 5, 2013

Brauer’s defense – everyone on both sides was white, and it’s “interesting who got defensive”.

Because the role of journalists is to “afflict those who are peevish about being perpetually slandered”, I guess.  Especially as the Twin Cities’ media aids and abets the DFL in setting up the debate over Paymar’s gun grab bills as a contest between poor, beset, multiracial urban Minnesota and white, callous, redneck outstate Minnesota.

I’m glad I stopped caring about politics.

Think of it: I was spared writing about the last legislative election, an event so vacuous it made reality TV seem interesting. If there was any serious discussion of an important national issue — the state economy, the level of control outside lobbying groups have over both parties but especially the DFL, the fact that the “Stadium Deal” is built on sand, Minnesota’s deteriorating education system, the impact of Governor Messinger’s Dayton’s tax plan outstate, the ongoing embarassment is Gopher football — I missed it.

Instead, we got a campaign of misrepresentations, exaggerations and outright lies. The DFL were by far the worst offenders, but the GOP field didn’t distinguish themselves either.

But hey, that’s Minnesota politics.

But then the fortieth anniversary ofRoe V. Wade happened.  A sudden societal change in focus from eternal truths to personal convenience and a razor-thin definition of gender rights ended up in the massacre of tens of millions of humans whose only crime was not being able to pay taxes yet.

And the very air changed. Winter – the most wonderful time of the year – suddenly turned somber. You looked at the small children around you differently, like you look at Auschwitz survivors; miracles who somehow evaded a bloody gauntlet.

Obama struck that note in his moving speech at the Newtown memorial service, for another, much smaller group of child victims who at least got to live outside the womb for a little bit. Speaking for us all, he said: “We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.”

Nice words, but somehow not enough. Not nearly enough.

That’s when I figured I should write a blog post about it. During my 11-year career, every time some demented soul would defend the Democrats’ civil sacrament of Infanticide, I’d get up on my soap box and let loose with a withering diatribe about abortion, the National Organization of Womyn and weak-kneed feminist-lobby-upsucking politicians. Did it about 130 times, give or take.

And in every case the main effect was – nothing.  Certainly not the outcome I’d hoped for.

Still, I thought I’d give it one more stab … er, chance.

Obama’s speech – which some saw as unrelated, but dead children are dead children are dead children, baby – was fine as far as it went, but it didn’t go very far. Neither have any of the other responses I’ve heard.

South Dakota state senator Mike Rounds introduced a bill to institute a waiting period in SoDak for abortions.   Great, but the bill wouldn’t directly prevent abortions, or exact any vengeance for the tens of millions already murdered.

Tens of millions!

The thing missing from the Abortion debate so far is anger — anger that we live in a society where tens of millions of little human beings, each of no less moral weight than any of you reading this blog, can disappear into the Nacht und Nebel and all politicians are worried about is offending our society’s Sandra Flukes.

That’s obscene. Here, then, is my “madder-than-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore” program for ending abortion in America:

• Repeal Roe V. Wade and all law based upon it. Roe is badly written and just plain bad law, and more trouble than it’s worth. It offers an absolute right to abortion, but does it in by digging up eminating penumbras, which is an absurd extension of civil rights.  We haven’t had a convention to find all the other emanating penumbras.  And surely our founding fathers, whatever they were emanating, didn’t picture the eugenics industry we have in this country today.  Abortion should be an emergency treatment, not a right.
• Declare Planned Parenthood a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and PP has killed as many people as Stalin did.  (I would also raze the organization’s headquarters, clear the rubble and salt the earth, but that’s optional). Make abortion a felony. If some people refused to stop performing them, performing a 150th-trimester one on them, using the same tools they use to scrape “fetuses” out of uteri works for me.
• Then I would tie Terry O’Neill of the NOW and  and Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood to the back of a morgue van and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on abortion.

And if that didn’t work, I’d adopt radical measures. None of that is going to happen, of course. But I’ll bet abortion will drop.

(more…)

Matt Yglesias, a deeply logic-challenged person with a grievously warped sense of moral order, is nothing if not a reliable toady of the Obama Administration, or for that matter any other Democrat for whom he shills.

And so it’s truly crocodile tears I cry for him as he relates the difficulties involved in starting a small business in the City That Big Progressive Bureaucracy built, Washington DC:

My wife and I bought a new place, and instead of selling our old condo, we’re going to rent it out. And thus I became a small-business man.

Or, rather, I’m becoming one. Entrepreneurship—even on the smallest and most banal scale—turns out to be a time-consuming pain in the you-know-what. My personal inconveniences aren’t a big deal, but in the aggregate, the difficulty of launching a business is a problem and it may be a more important one as time goes on.

Why yes, Matt. It just may be.

He relates in painstaking detail the rigamarole it takes to set up a “business” whose only product is an overpriced condo:

In the District of Columbia, I need to get a simple Basic Business License to rent out a single dwelling. After puzzling over the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs website for a bit, it became clear that step No. 1 was actually to file form FR-500 with the Office of Tax and Revenue, which you can do online. Then it was time to hustle down to the DCRA (which closes at 4:30 p.m.) to file the paperwork. Once there, I learned that filing the FR-500 online wasn’t good enough—I needed a hard copy. Fortunately, the Office and Tax and Revenue was right across the street, so I went there and refiled. Then it was back to the DCRA to stand in line to get a number, wait for the number to be called…

It goes on from there.

Yglesias does make one good observation…:

Not that I expect your pity. I don’t even pity myself. Going through the process, I mostly felt lucky to be a fluent-English-speaking college graduate with a flexible work schedule. But the presence of a stray pamphlet offering translation into Spanish, Chinese, or Amharic seemed like it would be only marginally useful to an immigrant entrepreneur. A person who needs to be at her day job from 9 to 5 would have a huge problem even getting to these offices while they’re open.

Yep.  Very, very true.

Yglesias asked for this kid of government – and I don’t mean in the figurative, “you voted for Barack Rex, take your medicine, Ivy-League hamster!” sense of the term.  I mean literally; one of his articles was  entitled “Regulation Breeds Innovation“.

It does indeed.  Black markets and off-the-books sublets are, in fact, a form of innovation.

Side note:  He didn’t build that.

To: President Obama
From: Mitch Berg, Cranky Peasant
Re: Your visit.

Mr. President,

Your visit to the Twin Cities yesterday, the media assures us, was not just because it was yet another city that is utterly safe territory for you.  It’s because, supposedly, Minneapolis is a leader in “curbing gun violence”.

Let’s put it on the table.

While Minneapolis has the highest violent crime rate in Minnesota, its crime rates have been dropping over the years not because of anything the Minneapolis DFL establishment has done – they have been utterly useless, in fact – but because Minnesota is, despite being a purple-addled state, a very gun-friendly place.  State law prohibits cities from having different gun laws from the rest of the state – and the rest of the state is as solidly pro-Second-Amendment as anyplace west of the Mississippi.  We have good, solid carry permit law; law-abiding Minnesotans aren’t harried by excessive stupid laws…

…like people in your native, crime-ridden Chicago are, and like you want the rest of us to be.

Minneapolis, along with Saint Paul, are the parts of this state that most aggressively hassle gun law-abiding gun owners.  Left to their own devices, both would happily turn into little Chicagos (in more ways than just guns).  And they are the parts with the most crime.

That, as they say, is all.

(PS – Well, OK – not “all”.  Henco Sheriff Stanek actually has the right idea:

As a strong supporter of the 2nd amendment, Sheriff Stanek talked about how the problem is one of access.

“Gun ownership isn’t a privilege, it’s a right guaranteed by the Constitution,” said Sheriff Stanek. “We have an access problem; people already prohibited by law from owning or buying a gun should never have access to firearms. We shouldn’t impose on the rights of law abiding citizens to try to solve this problem. Gun control alone will not solve the complex problem of guns and extreme violence.”

Indeed, as Chicago shows us, it’ll only make it worse).

Isaac Morehouse has a piece on his blog about the top ten benefits of regular blogging.

(The keen-eyed observer will note that Morehouse’s blog has had gaps of 3-11 months over its five year run – but the article is so good I don’t care):

1. Self Discipline – Like all disciplines, it makes you a better person; more in control of your schedule and habits. It is empowering to do something on a regular basis.

For one reason or another, getting up at 5:30 nearly every morning to write has become just a part of life.

2. Self Translation – You hold a set of beliefs and ideas about the world. You may not even know exactly what they are, but they exist. Blogging helps you translate those ideas into a form that you and others can use.

In the time I’ve been writing this blog, this has been true.  When I started writing Shot In The Dark, I was a conservative, and a modestly well-read one – but still, much of what I believed was unformed and squishy, and there were huge gaps in what I knew.

And both are still true, to some degree.  But much less so than before I started.

3. Self Education – You have no idea how much you know, or how capable you are of understanding and explaining things. Once you start blogging, you’ll be surprised to discover what a genius you are.

Well, maybe not “genius” – but I’ve learned a lot about a couple of issues – education, Astro-Turf groups and so on – that I’d never have had occasion to learn otherwise.

4. Observation – Every day you are taking in loads of sensory information. You see news clips, billboards, emails, people; you hear music, talk, etc. When you start to blog you learn to find meaning in the things your senses take in, and find story lines. You learn to observe.

And – this was cool – eventually you start finding the unexpected, hidden storylines.  That’s kinda fun.

5. Humor – The things noted above are often hilarious, you just don’t always realize it at the time. Regular blogging helps you recreate experiences you’ve had, which often reveals their hilariousness.

I’ll get back to you on that one.

6. Writing – Blogging ain’t great literature, but it can be. Any kind of writing regularly will improve your skills. Blogging will especially help you learn to be more concise and interesting.

Would that it were always true.  Or even true more often.

Still, I’ve seen examples of people who genuinely did improve as writers over time.

7. Self Knowledge – You may not know your area(s) of interest and expertise – regular blogging will help you discover what you are interested in and good at as you begin to see patterns and reoccurring themes in your posts.

Writing this blog has certainly opened up some interests I’d never have had otherwise.

8. Experimentation – Blogging allows you to be a pundit on any issue. You can comment on things you normally don’t have time or knowledge for. You are allowed to speculate and think out loud on a blog in ways that more formal media do not allow.

Heh .

9. Crash-testing – Blogging regularly will inevitably produce some pretty good writing. Blogging every day will help you get all kinds of stuff out, and then look back and see if any of it is worthy of refinement and publication elsewhere. It’s a great testing ground for ideas, themes, articles, outlines, etc.

I wouldn’t say it’s “inevitable” – but that’s very true.

And for me, it’s the best “show prep” there is.  The traditional rule of thumb in talk radio is “spend an hour of show prep for every hour you’re on the air”.  But in a typical week I’ll spend 5-10 hours writing, most of it about stuff I want to talk about on the air.  I don’t like to walk into the studio, sit down and start broadcasting cold – but I can.

10. Archiving – Regular blogging for just a year can result in hundreds of articles on hundreds of topics. You will develop an archive of your thoughts and a record of how they’ve evolved over time. When someone asks for your opinion on an issue you won’t have to start from scratch. You can send them a link to that time you expressed it so well.

Which is, of course, a two-edged sword.  After a long time writing, you generate a lot of material.  It’s hard to keep track of it all.  Sorting it into categories and adding tags helps; a decent search engine (thanks, WordPress!) helps too.

Anyway, Morehouse’s post on the one hand tells me things I’ve known for a while, and on the other hand codifies them in a handy “Top Ten”-style format for convenience.

After all that, it’s almost anticlimactic to say that today is this blog’s 11th birthday.  The yearly anniversaries up through ten were kind of a big deal – but after 11 years, writing this blog is more or less a part of life’s rhythm to me.

I started this blog thinking I’d be happy if I got five readers a week.  My daily audience is into four digits now, and has been there since about 2004, which never fails to astound me.

Anyway – thanks for stopping by all these years.

North Korean missile pr0n:

Bonus: “We Are The World”?

I’m just running on a hunch here – but I’m going to guess that if this is a “solution to global warming”, then so “are” gun control, single-payer health care, shuttering charter schools and abortion.

A few of the local Sorosphere’s dimmer bulbs (“gee, thanks for narrowing it down, Mitch!”) have been doing the end-zone happy dance about this story.

Note:  It’s not me.  No relation.  Never even heard of the guy.  I couldn’t even find Bayport without Google.

That, as they say, is all.

To:Ron Paul, Personality Cultist and Former Presidential Candidate
From: Mitch Berg, Crabby peasant and former big-L Libertarian
Re: Dumb

Mr. Paul,

Y’know, I try. I really do.

But when I see things like this on Twitter…:

Chris Kyle’s death seems to confirm that “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn’t make sense

— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) February 4, 2013

…I’m more than a little tempted to say that the best thing you can do for your libertarian cause, and those of us who subscribe to at least parts of it, it so shut up and find yourself a little piece of pasture to go out to.

And go out to it.

Please.

That is all.

Posting this on Facebook yesterday caused a bit of a kerfuffle.  Some Paul supporters asked me why I was attacking Libertarianism.

I’m not, of course; I am a libertarian-conservative, and have been since long before it was cool.  I was – and am – criticizing Ron Paul.  But it’s a little discouraging how many of his supporters conflate the two.

A constituent of Michael Paymar’s writes:

Michael’s domestic partner, Laura Goodman, is a former police officer and now head of security at St Kates.

I think Micheal needs to be asked if there are any semi-automatic handguns in his home and how large are the magazines?

Maybe Ms. Goodman owns nothing but M1911s!

The Northern Alliance Radio Network will have a very special live broadcast next Saturday.

We’ll be out at Gander Mountain in Lakeville (I’ll be out there scouring for ammo anyway) in a special broadcast sponsored by the US Concealed Carry Assocation.  We’ll have a whole slew of special guests, including Armed American Radio host Mark Walters, firearms instructor Michael Martin, and perhaps some special guests (probably not including Ted Nugent)

(I said probably) .

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

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…or on AM1280 The Patriot!

First things first: Charlie Quimby of “Growth and Justice” and Dave Mindeman of MnpACT are two of a small, select set of Minnesota liberal bloggers who needn’t be under police surveillance or at the very least restraining orders.  I’m just giving credit where it’s due (although the idea that a group can be named “Growth and Justice” yet still stand for neither is just a tad bemusing).

But over this past week, both of them assailed Rep. Pat Garofalo’s statement on this past week’s “TPT Almanac” program; the Lakeville Republican claimed, in what struck me as a bit of hyperbole, that the broadening of the state’s sales tax to cover clothing will “destroy” border communities like Moorhead.

Always on the lookout for hyperbole to dissect, Mindeman and Quimby were on the job pronto.

Quimby was – as is his unfortunate wont – dismissive, in a post subtitled “Do We Believe Our Lying Eyes?”

Back in 2007 when Growth & Justice was presenting its Invest for Real Prosperity tax proposals to the legislature, I recall a member waxing nostalgically about his parents hauling the family across the North Dakota border to buy untaxed clothing in Minnesota.

The point of his anecdote was that if Minnesota lowered its sales tax and broadened its tax base—as economists recommend—this lucrative cross-border school clothing traffic would dry up, with terrible consequences for Minnesota’s border city retailers.

We’re hearing a version of the same tale…This week, Rep. Pat Garofalo objected on TPT’s Almanac: At the Capitol. He reported that a North Dakota Democrat was proposing eliminating the state’s tax on clothing as a form of tax relief.

“Retail businesses in border communities like Moorhead will be destroyed,” Garofalo said, attracting blogger Dave Mindeman’s skeptical response:

Mindeman interspersed some facts with the snark (which is to his style what dismissal is to Quimby’s) in his piece, noting – correctly – that North Dakota has a 5% sales tax, onto which Grand Forks and Fargo lard 2% in city sales taxes.

Oh my God….how would Minnesota compete?…Garofalo loves that flaming rhetoric doesn’t he?

Fact: North Dakota sales tax is currently 5.0%. Fargo, ND which is the booming ND metropolis across the river from Moorhead adds a 2% city tax. So here is the facts. Under Dayton’s tax proposal, Moorhead (which adds no city tax) would be 5.5%. Fargo would charge 7.0% Clothing may be exempt in the future, but Moorhead will still have clothing under $100 exempt as well.

And like most DFLers, Mindeman, like Quimby, can’t resist taking a homer shot at the Dakotas:

But let’s suppose North Dakota finally drops its state clothing tax just when the gap with Minnesota is closing.

Then what? Will Minnesota border towns really suffer? Were North Dakota retailers in the thriving cities of Fargo and Grand Forks suffering in silence all these years?

To which Quimby assents – with, to be fair, an actual study with real numbers:

As the Minnesota legislator said in that 2007 hearing, should I believe you or my lying eyes?…Looking at the literature studying economic activity in response to sales tax rates, I found research that supports the following points:

Response to differences in the sales tax depends on proximity of border communities. In other words, the farther you have to drive to avoid the tax, the less likely you are to do so.

How much does distance matter? A 2010 Utah study of local option sales taxes PDF* that investigated distance as a variable found increasing the tax rate lowers taxable sales (all else held equal) when there is a jurisdiction with a lower tax rate within 5 km, or about three miles. The effect disappears altogether within about 40 miles. This is to be expected for low-cost goods and everyday commodities. But it also appears to hold for expensive major purchases such as new or used automobiles.

All of that may be true.

But the effects of an individual tax like the Sales Tax, and its nuts ‘n bolts comparison with other sales taxes, while potentially interesting and certainly economics-class-fodder, are the trees that help you miss the forest.

For the real comparison between the states’ tax burdens – not just sales taxes, mind you, but taxes across the board – you need to ask yourself a key question:

“What did I see last time I went to the Moorhead/Fargo area?”  Or you could fill in the “East Grand Forks / Grand Forks area”, or the “Breckenridge / Wahpeton” area, or for that matter the “Worthington/Sioux Falls” metro area?

For starters, you’d know they’re called “Fargo/Moorhead”, and “Grand Forks/East Grand Forks”, “Wahpeton/Breckenridge” and “Sioux Falls”.  Because in every case, the North/South Dakota side is where the action is.

And it’s not just force of habit; it’s not even close.  The Minnesota sides of each of these metro areas (or clusters, in the case of Wop/Breck) are sleepy, moribund and dismal out of all proportion to their North Dakota neighbors.  They’re not competitors in any meaningful way.  They are all sleepy little bedroom communities with highway exits; whatever commerce, dynamism and action is happening in the area is happening west of the Red (or the Bois de Sioux, or County 17, as the case may be).

Forty years of wide tax disparity – Minnesota has the #7 overall tax burden in the US, while North and South Dakota are 35 and 49, respectively) has left a clear choice to all of those places; move west, and keep more of what you have.  The choice was more nuanced, of course, 40 years ago – when North Dakota was a sleepy agrarian backwater.  Today, with my home state an economic dynamo in both energy and technology, things are a little clearer-cut.  And at any rate – as noted by Quimby and Mindeman – fluctuations in the sales tax, or any individual tax, are background noise to the larger effect of decades of disparity; the Dakotas have better business climates; while the western 3/4 of both states are limited by their sparse populations (which is why working on the rigs out in the Bakken pays so very very well), but Fargo, Sioux Falls and Grand Forks are all well-developed cities with young, highly-educated populations and, at least in North Dakota, K-12 schools that are as good as or better than those in Minnesota.

So once you take a step back and stop the pointillistic crabbling about this remark or that individual tax rate, you see that the real issue is the long-term effects overall tax burdens have.  As the Dakotas prosper more generally and gain more people and – as seems to be their goal – turn more of that prosperity into tax relief, that disparity is only going to get starker.

Put briefly – the reforms of the sales tax won’t destroy Moorhead, because tax policies took care of that forty years ago.  There’s really not that much to destroy.  It’d be like harming business in Saint Anthony compared to Minneapolis; who’d know?

So here’s another question:  Up until 2 years ago, Wisconsin was addled by governments more dementedly “progressive”, as a rule, than ours.  That changed in 2010, right about the time Minnesota seemed to have some hope of shucking off some more of the dross of DFL legislative control.  Now, as NPR noted last week – in a report I’ll be going over later this week – Minnesota’s economy is stronger as a whole than Wisconsin’s.  But the improvement in Wisconsin since 2008 is dramatic;it’s improving fast, bouncing back from decades of neo-socialist perfidy.  What’s going to happen in Minnesota?

What do you think?  We’re raising taxes in the middle of a recession!  What happened in California, Illinois and France?

That said – we won’t know what’s going to happen until things tamp down for a while.  Will Minnesota’s government remain the shiny toy of Alida Messinger’s band of plutocrat dabblers and union fixers?  Will Republicans retain control in Wisconsin?  If so, give it a few years.  Then we’ll check back.

As to Fargo versus Moorhead?  That train left the station decades ago.  Changing the sales tax one way or another is just bouncing the rubble, as it were.

If this Atlanta woman had had a gun with only seven rounds in the magazine…

The woman was getting out of the shower when she was met by a strange man with a kitchen knife, police said. They said there was a struggle in the bathroom, and she fell in the tub. Police later identified the man as Israel Perez Puentes, a Cuban national who lived in Alpharetta.

“The male was armed with a kitchen knife, a struggle ensued between the two of them. She fell in the bathtub injuring herself,” Gwinnett police spokesman Edwin Ritter said.

The woman tried to fight the man off with a shower a rod, and he forced her into her bedroom, police said. They said she told her attacker she had money in the room. But she grabbed a .22-caliber handgun and shot the man nine times, police said.

Police said the man ran out of a back door and collapsed in the yard. He later died at the Gwinnett Medical Center. The victim, who was injured in the scuffle, was also taken to the hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries. Police have not released her name.

…she might very well know what a Thanksgiving turkey feels like.

If a thanksgiving turkey knows what it’s like to be raped and then stabbed.

Point being, there are times – and they are not uncommon – when seven shots just aren’t enough.

The Star-Tribune editorial board brutalized a key component of the Messinger Dayton and DFL tax plan over the weekend.

The editorial starts out with a half-squib…:

We urge Dayton to reconsider and the Legislature to reject a sales tax on business-to-business services, a tax idea the Star Tribune has long opposed. While expanding the consumption sales tax to a larger share of the economy and reducing its overall rate, as Dayton proposes, is sound tax policy, taxing businesses’ service inputs is anything but.

The lowering and broadening the sales tax is a fine idea, but broadening it to the point where it takes $2.2 billion more out of the state economy during a recession is just plain stupid.

But taxing business services?

Messinger Dayton may have done the impossible:  forced the Strib and me into a common cause.

We’ll get to the common cause.  First, the Strib accurately describes the inevitable consequences of this tax plan in a way they never did with the Governor’s personal or political record, which shows, I guess, their priorities, but better late than never I guess:

A tax on business-to-business services would distort the choices businesses make about purchasing or keeping in-house accounting, legal and computer services. It would favor large companies with big back-office operations over small firms. It would put Minnesota engineering, architectural, scientific and consulting firms at a disadvantage. And it would turn the sales tax into a price inflator of every Minnesota-made product through a process economists call “tax pyramiding.”

For example, a law firm would pay tax on its cleaning service, and add that cost to the legal bill it sends to a trucking company, which would pay tax on that bill and pass the cost on in its charges to a farmer, who would pay tax yet again on the whole accumulating amount. At that point, the state’s long-standing policy of not applying sales tax to food will have faltered.

To answer the inevitable question:  of course the Strib editorial board is acting in its own enlightened self-interest:

Consider the impact on one particular industry sector — one this Editorial Board serves and understands well — advertising, information and communications. Providers of those services together employ nearly 68,000 Minnesotans. Many of them serve clients outside Minnesota and compete with rivals around the country and the globe.

The American Association of Advertising Agencies ranks the Twin Cities ad industry ninth-largest nationally and second-largest in the Midwest. It reports that none of the top eight markets have a tax commensurate with the one Dayton proposes. A cautionary tale can be found in Florida, where in 1987 a sales tax was placed on advertising and a range of similar services. An advertising boycott quickly ensued. So did a repeal of the tax, only six months after its passage.

It could certainly happen here.  Of course, the spending that’s being matched with that revenue under the Messinger Dayton / DFL budget won’t get repealed any time soon…

But here’s the issue where, for the first time ever, I find myself on the same side of the barricade as the Strib:

More than large enterprises would be affected. Sole proprietor David Aquilina, a “strategic storyteller” whose PR business is based in Minneapolis, said he would be contractually obliged to absorb all of Dayton’s proposed 5.5 percent tax.

“I will have to pass along the full cost of the tax to my employee: me,” Aquilina said. The proposed tax “would effectively impose a 5.5 percent cut in the top-line revenue of my business and in my income.”

The tax would apply to lawyers, accountants, cleaning services, networking jobbers, PR flaks like Aquilina – and freelance IT architects like yours truly, who frequently work “corporation to corporation”, and have nobody to pass the cost of the tax on to.  And it will favor the big IT solutions shops, who can absorb the extra top-line costs and pass them on – although they won’t be much happer about it that…

…I almost choke to say it…

…the Strib and me.

The BLS numbers for January came out last Friday.  And they showed what pretty much everyone expected them to show after the holiday and the election wore off; the economy still sucks.

The headline story is that unemployment crept up again, to 7.9%, after dropping (putatively) to 7.7% in November.

But in my book the real story is this; even with the top-line unemployment number under 8%, the work force participation rate is stuck at 63.6%, right where it’s been for three months after blipping above and below that figure for most of the past year.

Which means when you take the 7.9% unemployment rate out of that low labor force participation rate, you get 58.58% of the workforce actually working.

That compares to: 60.58% – exactly two points higher – when Obama took office (with an unemployment rate of 7.8%).  That translates to six million fewer people working in the labor force now, even with an unemployment rate that’s supposedly nearly the same.  Or to  58.50% in October 2009, when unemployment peaked at 10%.

That’s right; even with the unemployment rate supposedly two points lower than the recessions nadir, the actual portion of the population working is nearly unchanged.

And to show how in-set this recession is?  Here’s a list of

As you can see, the average of monthly employment rates (after taking the unemployed out of the participating labor force) is lower than it was when the recession supposedly bottomed out.

This isn’t a recovery.  This is an extended coma, with neither improvement nor much deterioration beyond the already awful state we’re already in.

And for 53% of the American people, it was apparently just good enough.

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!

• Brad Carlson and I will be out at “Holes for Heroes“, on Medicine Lake in Plymouth, from 1-3 today.  It’s a benefit for wounded veterans, and it’s a great cause.  We’ll also be talking with Kurt Zellers about this week in government taxation.
• I’ll be filling in for Brad 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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Join us!

We’ve got a big weekend coming up on the NARN.

Tomorrow, Brad Carlson and I will be out on the ice on Medicine Lake for “Holes for Heroes”, an annual ice-fishing tourney and benefit for wounded veterans.  We’ll be talking with Kurt Zellers about his week in the House Tax Committee and the outlook for Governor Messinger Dayton’s tax proposals.

And then on Sunday I’ll be filling in for Brad, as he watches the Adequate Bowl.  (Traditionally called the “Super Bowl”, although without the Bears it’s hardly “Super”.  I’m just being honest here.  Don’t be hating).