May you and yours have a blessed Easter.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talkradio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• I’m back!  I’ll have MNGOP chair candidate Donald Allen to talk about what he’d bring to the office if elected.  Then Senator Dave Osmek will talk about the DFL’s hall of shame in the Senate this session.
• Brad Carlson is back on “The Closer” from 1-3 tomorrow.  Tune on in!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all four hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

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Join us!

I’m tired of writing about politics this week.  I need to do something to stir up my blogging mojo.

Regular political blogging restarts, most likely, next week.  ‘Til then, I’m going to follow through on an idea I first started noodling with close to three years ago, and see where it goes.  It’s another of my loooong series on pop music history.  But unlike my recent “Springsteen for Conservatives” series (which I had a stone-cold blast writing), I don’t have to try to keep up a cohesive narrative for weeks on end.

Which fits my attention span much better, these days.

———-

I graduated from high school in 1981.  I grew up in North Dakota, which is still a bit of a national punch line for “isolation” (although these days North Dakotans are doing most of the laughing), but in those days before the Internet, was much, much moreso.

Pop culture came to my hometown, Jamestown, much later than most of Western Civilization.  Until I was in elementary school, we only got two TV channels (or only two that Mom and Dad told me about, anyway).  Only Algore had the Internet in those days.

For a couple of years, we didn’t even have a movie theatre in Jamestown.  First the Grand Theatre on Main Street – a splendid old 1890’s opera house – got torn down to make way for the worst Holiday Inn in America.  Then the Star Theater closed, probably due to health code violations; stories of people reaching into their popcorn and coming up with a handful of rodent were standbys in Jamestown’s urban legend library at the time.  Without a theater?  Forget about catching the tail end of one of the great eras in American film; we didn’t even see Star Wars or Jaws until a year after the rest of the country did.

Oh, we caught little bits and pieces of seventies culture when I was a kid; books and magazines had those gawdawful swishy seventies fonts and typefaces; polyester and bell-bottoms and suits made of corduroy or denim cropped up.

Entertainment?  Well, I was too young to “get” some of the great stuff of the era, “The Rockford Files” and “Mary Tyler Moore” and the first “Bob Newhart Show”, among others.  But if you were a kid, it was the heyday of Sid and Marty Kroft, and the beginning of Hanna-Barbara’s thirty-year nadir – most everything the former cartoon powerhouse produced between 1968’s “Banana Splits”, which I hated with a passion even as a kid, until 1998’s “Powerpuff Girls”, which I loved as an “adult”.  And even then, I couldn’t stand much of it – from Gilligan’s Island reruns (to which my friends glued their faces every night after school) to The Brady Bunch, most of it annoyed me to one degree or another.

And as re music, which was then and now my primary whiff of pop culture?  Jamestown’s only two radio stations played either country or, at the station I started at when I was 16, something radio people used to call “Middle of the Road” – a little Beatles (not the “hard” stuff, mind you, like “Daytripper”), a little Top 40 (the mild stuff) and any variety of pop standard going back to the forties and fifties.  Think Ann Murray in her heyday.

Things changed  a bit in seventh grade, when I finally got an AM radio of my own.   Spinning the dial when I was home sick one day, I found radio stations from other places – WDAY in Fargo (which I’d been to maybe twice), KFYR in Bismarck, and – once I discovered night skip – WLS in Chicago.

And it was in eighth grade I discovered two things:

• The guitar.  I started teaching myself the guitar in the winter of eighth grade.  As a greasy-haired, acne-ridden, tall scrawny klutzy stringbean with no athletic aptitude, it was going to be my backdoor pathway to being cool.  And in a way it was.
• Rolling Stone magazine.  In my newly developed mania to be different than everyone else, I latched onto the flavor the the month, which was at that time the explosion in punk and new-wave music.  I figured that waving that as my personal flag was my ticket out of being gawky, non-threatening schlemiel Mitchell, and into being…dangerous Mitch.

And the punks of the day exercised a studious disdain for the mainstream of the day.  Whatever the mainstream was; from bloated art-rock holdouts like Pink Floyd, to the Album-Rock Top Forty warhorses like Bachman-Turner Overdrive, to the easy-listening pop of Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Brown and Fleetwood Mac, I cultivated a studied hatred of the whole noxious corporate (so I was told) stew that was Seventies music.

Oh, not all of it.  I liked Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty and Creedence Clearwater, all of whom had the seal of counterculture critical approval, sure (although I liked each before I knew that), but I also liked Boston because I had a blast learning to play their first album on guitar, critics be damned.  And I loved Heart because I was a 15 year old guy with a standard-issue set of hormones (and a thing for Nancy Wilson’s fingerpicking style). And as a guitar player and wanna-be showman, I loved Van Halen, and so did everyone else, quit lying.

And throughout high school, I loved loved loved The Who, because Pete Townsend was a vainglorious pseudointellectual arrested-art-school adolescent drama duke, and I was a vainglorious wanna-be pseudointellectual actual-adolescent drama duke.

But, nearly alone in Jamestown North Dakota in the late seventies and early eighties, I sniffed derisively at the mainstream, at BTO and Bad Company and Pink Floyd and Shooter and Head East and REO Speedwagon and Styx and Kansas and Emerson Lake and Palmer and Ted Nugent and Rush, and the R ‘n B and Country Western of the era, and waved the flag for The Clash, the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Dictators, Elvis Costello, the Cars (but only the first two albums), Television, The Police, Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army, the Pretenders, eventually U2 – and some of the more-traditional bands that kept or gained their critical cred during the New Wave; Petty, Springsteen, Bob Seger, Dire Straits, even AC/DC.

I was, in short, a teenage wanna-be hipster douchebag.

And being a wanna-be hipster douchebag with a garage band beat the crap out of being a greasy-haired acne-ridden geek who couldn’t run a fast break without slamming into the opposing team’s bench.  As high school identities in rural North Dakota in the late seventies and early eighties went, it was a big step up.

———-

Well, I’m not 15 anymore.  And I don’t have to adopt an attitude to throw in peoples’ faces, because when you’re a Republican in Saint Paul, one is a fish swimming in a contrarian sea with no need for artifice.

And a few years back I started listening to some of the music from the Seventies – much of which I’d spent the eighties through the mid-2000s aggressively ignoring in an ever-more-vestigial burst of “too cool for thou” – with a much more open mind.

And I thought I’d write about it a little.

Maybe once a week until I run out of ideas, anyway.

…I offer that should a certain Japanese megacorporation ever have to file bankruptcy, I’ve already filed my claim on the blog post title “Tempus Fujitsu“.

That is all

It was twenty years ago today that U2 played their famous -and controversial – gig on the roof of Los Angeles’ late Republic Records:

It was the video that brought on two reactions from me:

1. I’m not so much afraid of heights (I used to be a lighting gaffer) as I am afraid of edges.
2. Speaking of Edge – I think this was the video that first made me wonder if he was turning into a male Irish Greta Garbo.

So the “debate” among the DFL candidates for the non-partisan Minneapolis mayor’s race took place yesterday.

What happened?  Probably nothing all that newsworthy; it was a debate of DFL candidates.  

For a non-partisan race.

Of course, Cam Winton – who is running as a fiscal conservative and social moderate – was left out of the debate since he’s not a DFLer (anymore).

There’s been a flurry of emails between Winton and the Humphrey Institute.  And I personally wrote Dr. Larry Jacobs and the Humphrey Institute to get clarification on the debate about the debate.

The debate looks a little like this – and I’ll paraphrase both sides, since the email trail is a long one:

Winton: The Humphrey Institute should not be running partisan debates for a non-partisan race.  It violated the Humphrey Institute’s mission.  And shunting him to the separate “losers debate” with the likes of Leslie Davis and, I dunno, Howling Cat LeLouche and Fancy Ray McCloney and having a DFL-only debate is a straight up sign of bias.

Jacobs:  The Humphrey Institute is aware that there is intense competition for the DFL endorsement – and this debate is analogous to the intra-party debates in the run-up to, say, the Presidential or Gubernatorial primaries.  The Humphrey Institute invites plenty of Republicans to marquee events, and Winton is going to be the subject of a separate event with plenty of media coverage [other than the “Losers’ Debate”]

Perhaps Jacobs’ explanation – that the partisan debate is a nod to a traditional endorsement process  – makes sense, in and of itself.  Maybe.  The Minneapolis mayor race is officially non-partisan, so the “endorsement” should be meaningless – but we all know that in Minneapolis, it’s not.   It’s an important bit of PR in Minneapolis, a city full of people who vote party first and foremost.

And that’s the part that sticks in my craw.

So here’s a question for Dr. Jacobs: since the DFL-only “debate” is designed to inform voters in advance of an endorsement that is…

• officially meaningless, but…
• worth much in terms of intra-party public relations,

then it follows the entire exercise of the debate is a DFL PR event.

Yes, kudos to Dr. Jacobs and the Humphrey Institute for doing the “make-up” appearance with Dr. Jacobs.  It was the right thing to do, certainly.

But I’ll stifle my endemic snarking about the DFL mien of most regional pseudo-government institutions (like Humphrey) and ask, seriously – why does the Humphrey Institute carry on with an event that the changes in Minneapolis’ electoral system has turned into nothing but a DFL campaign event?

Now, this is one of those stories where there are really a couple of levels.

At the surface, this is a story about liberal hypocrisy; a Pennsylvania NAACP leader blames a rape victim for tempting a couple of football players into perfidy:

In shocking comments, the president of the Steubenville chapter of the NAACP places the blame for the rape case that has shocked the nation on the 16-year-old victim.

Royal Mayo, a lifelong resident of the Ohio city that gained national infamy following the rape of the girl by two Steubenville High School football players, says that attention should be focused on the role of the young woman, whom he calls the “alleged victim,” saying she was drunk and wanted to go out with one of the football players. He also claims that other teens involved in the incident were let off easy, because they were “well-connected.”

Yes, yes, I know – official for a liberal organization violates PC kashrut with great gusto, exposing the left’s deep-seated hypocrisies, yadda yadda.  An example of the left’s war on women.  Same as it ever was.

But I’m here to issue a challenge to conservatism’s assembled linguists, the movement’s neologic engineers.

These stories are with us always.  They are constant blog fodder, and have been ever since most people still thought “blog” was a sound associated with gas-station burritos.  And these stories almost always need to plod laboriously through explaining something along the lines of “if a Republican or conservative would have said this, the media and the left’s chanting-point-bots (ptr) would be howling for blood, but since it’s one of their own, they’re silent”.

We need to come up with a snappy, dismissive word or short phrase to wrap up that meaning.  If I were a lefty and this were twitter, I’d make it a hash tag with an acronym: “#IAROCWHSTTMATLCPBPTRWBHFBBSI1OTOTS”, but that’s almost worse than having to type out the explanation.

So set to it, real men of linguistic genius!  We need a single word or short phrase that goes Alinsky on this pattern, and does it with style!

Speaking of Governor Cuomo – “Paul” writes:

Early on, I was struck by the boilerplate language in the [assault weapon ban] and magazine ban bills … And then I read this:

From the middle of the article:

“A Cuomo administration source is flatly denying the governor’s claim that his new anti-gun SAFE Act was carefully drafted, saying the governor himself wasn’t even aware of some provisions when it was hastily enacted into law.”

“The governor thought the limit on the size of [gun] magazines would only apply to assault-style rifles, not to handguns,’’ said the source.

“That’s why there’s the big problem now with handguns, among other things in the statute.’’

The legal sale of virtually all semiautomatic handguns will soon be impossible because Cuomo’s law limits the size of bullet-holding magazines to seven shots [or, at least temporarily, not – see below], virtually none of which are manufactured for sale.

“Much of what’s in the law was drafted by people connected to Mayor Bloomberg and the Brady Center, not by the governor’s staff,” the source said. “That’s why there are so many problems with it.’’

Much like Representative Martens from 66a and the Colorado experience of having 4 MAIG full time lobbyists parachute in and haunt the halls of government, We are getting boilerplate laws that have PROVEN they don’t work.

 Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing and expecting a different result? Maybe if we do it harder this time …

Oh, it’s all that.

And it’s also another example of Berg’s Seventh Law – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”

Remember last year, when the GOP controlled the legislature and the lefty message machine’s boogeyman-du-jour was “ALEC” and their “model bills” – no different in any way than the model bills put out by every political action group from the teachers union to the AARP, but framed as a dirty word for the low-information voter by the DFL message-bots?

These aren’t the first bills – especially in re guns – that’s looked like it was copied off the web and pasted into a Word file and submitted, so far this session.

Andrew Cuomo’s magazine-size restriction – the one from which Representatives Hausman and Martens cribbed their proposed bill last month – is DOA:

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s seven-round limit on magazines sold in New York will be suspended “indefinitely” by a measure in his $136.5 billion budget set to be passed this week, Dean Skelos, a Senate majority leader said.

The ban on magazines holding more than seven bullets was set to start April 15. Cuomo has said the law needs to be rolled back because manufacturers don’t make seven-round holders. The measure was a center piece to a gun law the 55-year-old Democratic governor pushed through the legislature in January, making New York the first state to respond with tougher gun regulations to the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre.

Not sure what they mean by “seven round holders”; I suspect it means because of the vast number of firearms that are designed for eight, ten, fifteen or more rounds that can’t be magically refitted to hold seven.

Not, I’m sure, that Cuomo wouldn’t just press ahead anyway, but…

You build a better mousetrap – or urinal – and they will come.

A minor league baseball team in Pennsylvania will become the first professional sports franchise to offer urine-controlled video games in its restrooms when the season starts in April.

Used beer is now liquid assets – in gaming terms, anyway.

Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley IronPigs will debut the “Urinal Gaming System” in its men’s bathrooms—the custom urinals feature a “pee controlled” video screen that will entertain fans as they use the restroom.

Well, it’s good to see good ol’ American ingenuity finding a problem, stepping up and solving it…

The system is designed by a British company called Captive Media—in a demo for the urinal, the company shows a snowboarding slalom game in which the character is controlled by where the player pees.

Oh.

I’m waiting for urine-controlled Asteroids.

But I won’t hold my breath. This should be an interesting bit of Title IX litigation.

Adam Carolla on the effects of welfare on its recipients:

Sorry to post Bill O’Reilly, but it’s where the quotes are:

O’REILLY: Did she ever discuss that with you? What was her attitude about getting the assistance from other people?

CAROLLA: Her attitude was, one day when I said to her from the mouth of babes, I just said: Mom, why don’t you just get a job and then we wouldn’t have to do all this. And she said, if I get a job, I’ll lose my welfare. And, she really should have just handed me a pack of cigarettes at that point, because it’s probably the worst thing you could do to a nine year old.

But I learned, at that point, that this is valuable. I don’t have the white privilege guilt that many other people in the media have. I understand what it’s like to be on the dole. And it doesn’t make these people any stronger. You hobble these people; you take away the one thing they have, which is dignity, and the ability to pull them out of this mire. And they can’t because you’ve atrophied their muscles by doing everything for them.

So here’s my question:  in the unlikely event Lefties accept Carolla’s statement (as opposed to excoriating and symbolically excommunicating him from the lefty communion), will those same people apologize to Mary Franson, who said essentially exactly the same thing last year?

Just curious.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Senator Franken’s monthly newsletter arrived.

He co-sponsors legislation to reverse federal law and let us unlock our cell phones and choose our own carriers. Airwaves are interstate commerce so properly federally regulated. Free market is good. Excellent work, Al. A+

He sponsors a poetry contest for children of military families. This is pandering, Al, not substantive help for veterans or their families; but it’s a harmless waste of time that could be spent doing worse things. C.

He co-sponsors federal legislation to give Minnesota money for courthouse security, arising out of the shooting in Cook County two years ago. How much to spend on local courthouse security is not a federal issue, it’s a county issue, Al. F

He co-sponsors a meaningless resolution to keep wrestling an Olympic sport. Might as well urge The Donald to drop the Miss USA swimsuit competition. It’s a private entertainment business decision, Al, not a federal issue. F

Overall grade: D+

Talk about grade inflation.

2013: Governor Alida Messinger Mark Dayton says he’s shocked, shocked to find that projections regarding the gambling revenue that were a vital part of the state’s “contribution” toward the new Vikings jamdown stadium were developed with input from the gaming industry:

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton says he wasn’t aware that projections of how much revenue new forms of charitable gaming would generate for the Vikings stadium were developed with input from the gambling industry.

But the head of the state gambling control board said the consultations with businesses — which were needed to create a new model from scratch — were repeatedly discussed in public.

And a former lawmaker who pushed the charitable gaming legislation in the state House said he thinks the governor is trying to distance himself from projections that now look wildly optimistic.

“People are just looking for places to point blame, that’s all,” said John Kriesel, a Republican former state representative from Cottage Grove.

Cue the harps.  Let’s flash back to 2013:  Governor Messinger Dayton, after meeting with Roger Goodell and his goons, is led by his leash to the forefront to lead a jamdown of a stadium deal; at the head of a NFL-paid campaign that convinced Helga Braid Nation – the lowest-information voters in a state full of union bobbleheads – that the Vikings were on the very verge of moving from one of the NFL’s strongest market.  The Braids inveigled  most of the DFL and a few deeply-misguided Republicans into voting for a plan that some of us warned you at the time had no chance whatsoever of succeeding.

Today? If only Christian Ponder could throw as hard as Dayton passes the buck:

“I think it should have been disclosed,” Dayton told the Associated Press. “I think obviously in hindsight, given the serious overestimation that occurred, that those sources should have been disclosed very publicly in the very beginning and people could have exercised the caution that probably was due given those sources.”

But is Dayton telling mumbling the truth?

Tom Barrett, head of the gambling control board, said it always was clear that gambling firms were being consulted on the new devices, costs and other issues relevant to building a revenue projection.

A presentation from the gambling control board to the Senate Taxes Committee in December 2011, for example, states the board plans to gather “input from industry representatives.”

“The input was helpful, but they didn’t drive (the process),” Barrett said of the gambling firms. “They were asked, ‘Do you see any problems with the methodology?’ And in defense of what was before the board and how we approached it, I still stand behind the methodology.”

The fact is, there’s plenty of blame to go around.  Most of the DFL, and all too many GOP legislators, were cowed by the NFL and the Helga Braids.  The GOP – which then held the majority in the Legislature – allowed Idiot Stadium to become the most important issue in a session that should have been about reforming government.  Most of the DFL were their usual vote-grubbing craven selves.

But the buck – especially the buck that involves the actions of an executive branch that pushed in its own passive aggressive style for this jamdown – stops with the Governor.  Whoever that is.    

It’s abetted, of course, by a Twin Cities media that was even more in the bag than usual; sports is big money for most of the media, and potentially salvation for the Strib, at least temporarily; the money the Strib would earn selling the land needed for the stadium development drove the arm-twisting that led the stadium from Arden Hills back downtown, and it drove and drives the paper’s entire coverage of this sorry debacle.  The Strib served as Roger Goodell’s PR agent just as surely as Governor Messinger Dayton served as his lobbyist.

The Saint Paul media world is holding its collective (heh) breath, wondering if Chris Coleman is going to announce a campaign for a third time as mayor.

You can read the whole MPR piece here – it notes that Coleman has jacked up taxes at a record pace, as well as the DFL’s defense (“stuff costs money!”).

But I wanted to focus on this quotelet:

Taxes may be higher, but Coleman said residents are getting their money’s worth.

“If we’re going to have a great city that’s a safe city, a literate city, a fun city, a great place to live, you have to invest,” Coleman said. “And I think our citizens have continually said, ‘Yes, we’re prepared to pay for those things.”

So let’s run those claims through the “Saint Paul Residentmeter”.

• Safe – Well, it’s better than it was in the eighties, when parts of Frogtown and the lower East Side were pretty malevolent.  But it’s not that much better.
• Literate – Saint Paul’s school system has among the worst achievement gaps in the country. Parents who can – especially minorities – are leaving the system as fast as they can.
• Fun – If you’re a hockey or Ordway fan, Downtown is a fine place.  There are some niches of fun to be had depending on what floats your boat.  And some of our older traditions (WInter Carnival, Grand Old Day) and even some newer ones (Crashed Ice) are pretty cool.  But the most fun thing about Saint Paul most of the time is the fact that we have Minneapolis next door.
• Great place to live – Well, it’d better be.  We’re paying enough – and God knows you can’t sell a house in this town, with the city unloading all those foreclosures for a song.
• Great city – Great?  The city is feeling a lot like it did during the Scheibel years; beaten-down, depressed.  Saint Paul is not recovering from the recession as fast as Minneapolis, and the slow job recovery is actually better than the recovery in housing prices (there isn’t really much).

Saint Paul is showing all the ills that generations of one-party rule bring to a city.

As I noted yesterday, there’s going to be a debate among the candidates for Mayor of Minneapolis.

The DFL ones, anyway.

Cam Winton – a former DFLer who is running a fiscally-conservative, socially-moderate campaign with backing from Republicans and DFLers who get that Minneapolis is rapidly going broke and frittering scarce resources away on “nice-to-haves” while the necessities go begging, has a murder rate three times the state’s (and double Saint Paul’s), and the city careens toward a pension meltdown – wrote to Dr. Larry Jacobs at the Humphrey Institute to ask why.

The letter is below the jump.

(more…)

James Taranto notes that while “Universal Background Checks” will have no effect on crime – serving as they do only to further harass and hamper the law-abiding, and price more low-income shooters out of the market – they will infringe on peoples’ privacy rights.

Currently, Federal Firearms License (FFL)-holding dealers perform these background checks online or via phone.  FFLs, by the way, are pretty tightly regulated; it’s not something you get for the asking.  On the other hand, Universal Background Checks would require all private transfers to get the background check.

And that means everyone:

Currently access to the FBI’s background check system is limited to licensed firearms dealers, who have an incentive not to abuse it lest they lose their license. If it’s opened up to all prospective sellers of guns–that is, to everybody–what’s to prevent someone from abusing it, say by requesting a background check on [Anti-gun WaPo columnist] Greg Sargent, who presumably has no interest in acquiring a gun?

The system only gives a yes-or-no answer as to whether the putative buyer is eligible to own firearms under federal law. But if you’re looking to dig up dirt on someone, a “no” answer on a firearms background check would give you a nice clump of it.

It’d put a big info-trawling tool into the hands of the unethical.

Think that won’t get abused?

Look at the last ten years in the history of Twin Cities’ leftyblogging and ask if you want that crowd to have access to a “there’s trouble here!” flag on every man, woman and child in the country.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

To keep our law licenses, Minnesota lawyers must take mandatory training in Eliminating Gender Bias in the Legal Profession, generally “taught” by women lawyers and judges. My most recent session was a disappointment. When a man pays good money to be insulted and humiliated by a powerful woman, she should be wearing fishnet.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

When I got divorced, law required people to take a “co-parenting” class – which amounted to a couple of very angry women telling the guys in the room they’d better not skip out on their kids.  The cherry on the sundae?  My particular session was held at a “women’s center” in Minneapolis, where the guys all got glowered at by large women in Doc Martens as we walked to the bathroom.

I only had to do that once, though.  Every couple of years?  That’d get old.

Jenna from Shoreview sent me this story; an owl attacked several suburban-Chicago dogs:

Fresh from an Army tour in Iraq, Evans’ daughter Amy was visiting for the holidays with her husband, five kids and two dogs. One of her dogs, Ramadi, a 7-pound shih-poo (a mix between a shih-tzu and miniature poodle), was in the back yard with her parents’ rottweiler, Eli, and their 70-pound boxer, Sadie.

“When I came out the door I saw Sadie on top of something and thought it must be another dog, but it was really dark so I couldn’t see,” Evans said.

He called the rottweiler inside. Little Ramadi came running too, dragging something, with Sadie giving chase.

“Suddenly I realized an owl had its talons sunk into Ramadi and Sadie was trying to get it off of her,” Evans said. “When they got to the door we were able to separate Sadie from the owl and my wife pinned the owl to the ground with her foot as I ran to get some gloves.”

According to some sources, the long winter is making owls a little more bold in their hunting.

Me?  I think we need to devote some scientific effort to domesticating the owl.  I think police owls would be a lot more cool than police dogs – and police dogs aren’t un-cool themselves.

Apropos not much.

It’s been my contention for quite some time that Heather Martens – “Executive Director” and likely sole steady member of “Protect Minnesota”, and unelected Representative from House District 66A – has never, not once in her entire career as an anti-civil-rights pundit, made a single original statement that was substantially true.

Martens (center) adjusting the leashes on Jane Kay of “Moms Demand Action” (left) and Rep. Paymar (even farther left, but to the right of the picture) last week.

Martens’ weekend press release about last week’s legislative actions didn’t just continue the pattern: it was an epic howler that deserves to be sent to every state legislator, with a goal of getting Martens laughed out of the Capitol by everyone that cares about the truth:

NRA Lobbyists Fail — Background Checks Move to House Floor

Yesterday, the Minnesota Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee passed H.F. 285, a bill that would ensure background checks for all pistol and assault weapon purchases at gun shows. The bill passed 10-8 and will head to the House floor. Despite only covering gun shows, Rep. Paymar, the chair of the committee, has vowed that H.F. 285 will ensure that universal background checks are debated on the House floor. Click here to read the whole story.

How many ways is this story wrong?

What “NRA Lobbyists” “failed”?:  While the NRA has sent a rep to put in an appearance at one hearing, all of the heavy lifting against the DFL’s gun grab bills was carried by the MInnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance – which, unlike “Protect Minnesota”, is an actual grass roots organization with thousands of actual members, hundreds of whom came out to support civil rights over this past month while “Protect MN” managed, on a good day, maybe a dozen.  Martens is lying.

With More “Failures” Like This…:  Martens’ posting is an attempt to put lipstick on a pig.  Gun-show background checks – which are useless in preventing crime, would have saved not a single life at Newtown or Virginia Tech, and are only a burden to the law-abiding citizen – are the very last of the measures with which the extremist DFL metrocrats marched into battle last month.  The Metrocrats and Martens have been decisively rebuked by bipartisan majorities on…:

• Ugly Guns Untouched: Banning “Assault Weapons” – which proved useless in preventing crime from 1995-2005.
• Citizens Not Hamstrung In Face Of Violent Criminals: Restricting magazine sizes – again, useless in preventing crime of any type, much less mass killings.
• The Law-Abiding Citizen Prevailed: Making Minnesota’s carry permit laws more niggling and onerous – from the effort to run applications past unelected police chiefs rather than elected sheriffs, to eliminating recourse for unjust denials, the DFL tried to make law-abiding carry permittees – among the safest constituencies in all of Minnesota, with a violent crime rate a couple of orders of magnitude below the general public (including metro DFL activists)
• Success Has Many Fathers: Failure Is An Orphan: Most importantly;  a bipartisan majority of the entire House, including many DFLers, signed on to a bill specifically targeted as a rebuke to “Protect Minnesota” and the extreme Metrocrat left.  Half of the House, over 100 total members from both parties, co-authored the Hilstrom bill; Paymar’s bill had eight.

And all of this with a DFL legislature that is fundamentally disposed to support Martens and her organization’s agenda.

Viewed against that context – which, naturally, neither Martens nor her sycophants in the regional media will never provide – the conclusion is inescapable; “Protect Minnesota’s” 2013 agenda been a complete failure.

But Martens has successfully defended her title as least truthful lobbyist on Capitol Hill.  So at least there’s that.

Cam Winton is running for Mayor of Minneapolis.

Winton – a former DFL activist who told of seeing the economic light after going into business – is running as a fiscal conservative and social moderate, and not as an endorsed Republican, per se.  I attended his kickoff rally a few weeks back in Minneapolis, and had a pretty singular experience for a GOP activists, standing in the same room and cheering along with people who’d opposed the marriage amendment (which Winton also opposed) and listening to Ashwin Madia, a couple of lesbian marriage activists, and Winton’s business partner extolling the candidate’s virtues.

And it was in that crowd, I thought, that one might see a successful challenge to DFL hegemony in Minneapolis; a candidacy that attacks the DFL’s weak spot in Minneapolis – its incompetence at running a city – while ignoring the GOP’s big weaknessses in places like Minneapolis.

Now, some – including my friend John Gilmore – have asked “is Winton Republican or conservative enough?”   He, and they, point to the fact that Winton is a former Democrat, and was in fact a prominent enough activist through 2008.

As a former Democrat myself, I’m pretty forgiving of Road to Damascus conversions.  And if you want to grill a candidate to assess the sincerity, or at least integrity, of their beliefs, then a debate could be a fine place to do it.

And there’s the problem.

———-

The Minneapolis mayor’s race is an expressly non-partisan one.  Party identification doesn’t appear with candidates on the ballot.

The Humphrey Center – the U of M’s Poli-Sci think tank and, if you ask conservatives, DFL hatchery and retirement home – is hosting a debate of these candidates this coming Wednesday.

The DFL ones.

Let’s rephrase that for impact; the Humphrey Institute – a public institution whose mission is at least ostensibly not “furthering the DFL’s interests and hindering their opposition” – is hosting a debate for a non-partisan office in the city in which the Institute resides.  And they’re only inviting DFL candidates to it.

According to the Winton campaign, he has been invited to a second debate.  At this second debate – which will have virtually no media coverage – Winton will appear on a panel with Bob Carney and Leslie Davis, a couple of perennial candidate who are shunted into a side-debate to isolate the comic relief from the “Real” race…

…which, the Humphrey Institute has decided in its infinite institutional wisdom, is among the DFL candidates, who will get the “real” debate.

This brings up a couple of questions:

Is the Humphrey Institute serving as a DFL campaigning tool?: Why the seemingly arbitrary cutoff at “DFL”, in a race where every candidate goes to the final ballot (Minneapolis uses “ranked choice” balloting, resulting in slow, unreliable elections with no need for party endorsements or primaries.   Having a fully-partisan “debate” is not only against the Humphrey Institute’s stated mission – it’s supposed to be irrelevant to the contest at hand.

Is this a debate or a DFL campaign rally?:  The Humphrey Institute’s planned event will include five DFL candidates who differ on policy only in the most tangential incidentals. That’s not a “debate”, it’s a support group meeting.

“Debate” implies “difference of opinion”:  But this “debate” – the one the U of M will actually publicize, the one the media will attend – studiously ignores a sharp, articulate candidate who sharply differs from the DFL on some issues where the DFL itself knows it’s vulnerable – spending, taxes, regulation, public safety, infrastructure.

I asked the Humphrey Institute’s Dr. Larry Jacobs about this last week.

I’ll have that part of the conversation tomorrow.

…that if we didn’t tighten up gun laws, there’d be shootings over parking quarrels.

And they were right; a Minneapolis man was shot in the head over a double-parking argument:

A 30-year-old man was shot in the head Sunday morning after a confrontation over a car that was double-parked, police said.

The shooting happened about 3:30 a.m. in the 7100 block of South Maplewood Avenue in the Marquette Park neighborhood, police said, one of three shootings overnight that left three people wounded.

Police said the 30-year-old man was shot in the head after an argument, ran west and fell in an alley where an ambulance picked him up and took him to Advocate Christ Medical Center. He was “walking, talking, breathing, living,” according to police.

Damn.  We gotta ban guns, I guess…

…wait.  I don’t recognize any of those landmarks.  Let me check…

…Oh, jeez.  I’m sorry.  It was Chicago, the crown jewel in Big Gun Control’s tiara.

Not sure how I bobbled that.

I apologize.

The Monday Morning Quaterbacking over electronic gambling heats up.

Two gambles that haven’t paid off

When breaking down the various back-up funding plans for the Vaseline Dome, one step was neglected – the finger pointing.

For a funding mechanism that was originally billed to deliver $35 million in revenue per year, and continuously revised down to $17 million and then $1.7, the process of assigning blame should have been viewed as inevitable.  But like a legislative Atlas, who would shoulder the majority of the ownership of such a flawed model?  Gov. Mark Dayton, who was so publicly aggressive in his defense of a new stadium?  The hapless former Republican legislative majorities who acquiesced to the bill?  The Star Tribune, whose rampant conflict of interest with any Metrodome-site construction should have called into question their vocal support?

No, the Star Tribune has decided the real culprit are the gambling firms that provided the electronic pull-tab games:

While flawed, the gambling board’s sales estimates were extremely detailed, including the number of bars and restaurants that would adopt e-gambling, the number of devices in play, what hours they would be played and how much money would be wagered.

It projected 2,500 sites would be selling electronic pulltab within six months, or nearly 14 bars and restaurants joining in per day….

Nearly a year after those projections were made, about 200 Minnesota bars and restaurants offer electronic pulltabs, not the 2,500 that had been predicted. Electronic bingo games have just been introduced.

Average daily gross sales for electronic pulltabs have increased to about $69,000, but sales per gambling device have declined.

The firms may have been making bad assumptions about the capacity for Minnesota to support increased charitable gambling, but at least the firms’ figures came out of experiences in states like Montana, South Dakota and Oregon.  Still, the basic math of the gambling mechanism was public knowledge long before it was formally added to the final bill.

Minnesotans spend about $1 billion in charitable gambling, which equals the comparatively paltry sum of $36 million in revenue.  The Vikings stadium, requiring $35 million a year to cover the State’s $348 million share, would necessitate charitable gambling to either double to $2 billion or entirely overrun the current charitable competition.  In that light, it’s little wonder that other charitable organizations were not asked for their opinion.  A decision that now is being heavily criticized as charities across the State say some version of “I told you so.”

All the finger-pointing in the world doesn’t help hide the reality that the responsibility for flawed legislation needs to rest with the political leadership that authored it – a fact even the Star Tribune acknowledges:

“There was a willful blindness … driven by pressure politics,” charged David Schultz, a Hamline University political analyst and a professor of nonprofit law…

“This was a deal that was going to happen no matter what,” Schultz said. “The governor wanted a stadium. The money couldn’t come from the general fund. The charities had been asking for electronic games.”

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talkradio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• I’m out on assignment, so Erin Haust will be filling in for me today.
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When you’re a conservative, distrust of the media – like most large institutions – is part and parcel of the job.

You probably accept that, for whatever reason – from systemic bias to cultural confirmation bias to being paid off by George Soros – that the media has a comprehensive bias toward the left.

And you notice it on some issues more than others.   For example, you notice that anti-gun groups – for example, “Protect Minnesota”, led by Representative Heather Martens (DFL – 66A), a woman who has never, not once, uttered a substantively accurate or true original statement about guns or the Second Amendment – gets breathless, slavish coverage from the Twin Cities media, whose mania for “balance” obscures, in their coverage, the fact that the pro-Second-Amendment movement includes thousands of actual activists, while Martens’ group and the other antis muster…

…well, Martens and about a dozen of her pals.

And it doesn’t take a political rocket scientist (?) to notice that while their groups have virtually no electoral clout, Martens is apparently a big enough cheese among DFLers on Capitol Hill that she gets treated like, well, a Representative herself.

So after the hearings broke up last night, I watched who went where for a bit.

After he got done with the media, Rep. Paymar lit his afterburners and ran for the bleachers to meet Representative Martens and Jane Kay from Action Moms:

Kay, Martens and Paymar, talking about how much clout they have when those Million Moms finally show up. Someday. Honest.

DFL stenographer and former Strib columnist Doug Grow – now with DFL PR shop MinnPost – painted Jane Kay’s toenails:

Grow, Kay

Hey, maybe his story about last night won’t be pre-written!

And at the end of the night, you had pretty much every anti-gun activist in town gathered with the DFL PR coalition:

Grow, Kay, Nick “I’m Not The DFL’s Monkey” Coleman (from “The Uptake”), a staff guy and Martens talking, presumably, about what a bunch of wingnuts their opposition are.

Us gunnies? We had the fun down front:

Second Amendment attorney David Gross mixing it up with an anti who claimed we should “learn our history”, that firearms confiscation had nothing to do with the Holocaust. The anti, by the way, reportedly had walked up to the child of one of the GOCRA members in attendance and said “You’ll grow up to be a better person than your father” at a hearing last week. These people ooze class, don’t they?

Same as it ever was.  Back next week.

Jane Kay is the leader of “Moms Demand Action”, which is what they renamed the “Million Mom March” after they realized they actually had about two members in Minnesota.  While more objectively accurate – it might be better still to call it “Mom Demands Action” – I’m not sure if they considered that the name sounds a little like a made-for-Cinemax movie.

I’m sure she’s a perfectly lovely human being and all.  But the contempt she feels for those who disagree with her is emblematic of the intellectual entitlement the anti-gun crowd brings to the table.

She tweeted this (from a protected account, naturally) last night:

She seems to be of the opinion that you can either care about the Constitution or children, but not both.

Of course, Ms. Kay, I own guns precisely because I care about my children – enough to defend them in some meaningful way.  And because protecting them – and eventually, teaching them to defend themselves and, God willing and yet heaven forfend, my grandchildren, is one of the paramount duties a parent has.

I’d love to discuss this with Ms. Kay.  But it’s hard to get past the air of invincible condescension.