If politics were easy, everyone would be doing it.
If Second Amendment Human Rights politics were easy, Andrew Cuomo would be a poli sci professor at Lackawanna Community College.
After last week’s introduction of DFL Rep Deb Hilstrom’s gun bill – I call it the Good Gun Bill, as opposed to the DFL’s raft of gun grab legislation – there’ve been two annoyances; some Second Amendment activists have come to the opinion that it’s just another gun control bill, and some Republican legislators seem stand-offish to it.
Both are mistakes.
It’s Not Even A Compromise – Read the bill. I did. It does what all of us pro-Second Amendment people say gun bills should do; makes life harder for criminals, leave the law-abiding citizen alone.
Some might see Hilstrom’s an urban DFLer, or that the bill is supported by a major law enforcement association, and assume it’s a DFL shill. It’s not.
It increases sentences for gun-related crimes and ties up a loophole in Minnesota’s NICS data reporting that was supposed to have been tied up by the DFL legislature years ago.
That’s pretty much it.
Read the law; there is no stealth gun grab provision written in invisible ink. It’s all right there.
This is a bill that Second Amendment people should support on Second Amendment grounds. It is not an onerous compromise; it is the sort of thing Second Amendment groups have been proposing all along.
Optics – Rumor has it that some Republicans in the Senate are hinky about the bill because they don’t want to be seen to be operating with the DFL.
Let’s think this one through. There are three reasons this is just plain wrong.
For starters; as I noted above, this is a good bill. This is, indeed, the only good gun bill in the Legislature that has any chance of passing.
Second: You neglect the “security mom” voter at your own peril. They are a form of low-information or single-issue voter, all right – and there are a ton of them. And Sandy Hook freaked them out bad. Statistics – like the fact that both violent crime, including murder, including mass murder – are down 40% in 20 years don’t matter to them, and their votes count just as much as yours. They are the ones who bellow “we have to dooooooooooooo something!” after every tragedy.
And here’s a teaching moment; showing the “security moms” that “doing something” can actually be productive, and seizing the messaging on this issue – which is, by the way, one of the very few issues that seems to be breaking the GOP’s way so far this session – is a good thing.
And the fact is, you can not let the DFL come out as the unalloyed good guy on this one; do you want the DFL to be able to go to Greater Minnesota crowing that “WE were the ones with the common sense solutions on guns?” After the Metrocrats’ crimes against democracy last month?
Finally: this is a chance to throw the DFL-enabling media’s “Bipartisanship” slur back in their face. You know as well as I do the DFL only cares about bipartisanship when they’re in the minority – but working this issue, and winning it, gives you an instant hot-button to throw back into Lori Sturdevant and Keri Miller’s faces when they squirt their crocodile tears about “bipartisanship”.
Passing this bill shuts them up, it gives the low-information but not-too-addled voter their catch word, and it gives us a gun bill that actually does something useful.
If the MNGOP drops the ball on this one, it’ll be a very, very bad thing.
The Southern Poverty Law Center – which is sort of the intellectual NKVD of the hard left – is publicizing its “list of patriot groups” to be watched.
“Patriot” in scare quotes, by the way, is the SPLC’s shorthand for “hate”.
Here’s the list in Minnesota:
Alarm & Muster: The Modern Day Alarm Riders – Statewide: This is a national group. Gotta say I don’t know much about ’em.
Constitution Party – Redwood Falls: Huh.
Genesis Communication Network – Eagan: The broadcast home of libertarian on-air professor Jason Lewis as well as conspiracymongering huckster Alex Jones.
John Birch Society – Statewide: Question for you: outside of SPLC news releases, when was the last time you even heard of the John Birch society? I used to say that if the JBS didn’t exist, the left would have to invent them – but at this point, it’s more like “keep them on life support”
Oath Keepers – Statewide: The idea of getting law-enforcement agents and the military to pledge to uphold the Constitution even if asked not to is “hate”?
The Republic for the united States of America and The Republic for the united States of America — Republic Congress – Statewide: Huh.
So what did all of that money from DFL plutocrats buy in the 2012 elections?
Maybe a seat in the legislature, on the relative cheap?
Guest writer Bill Walsh found a correlation – not a link, mind you, but a correlation – that might bear some looking into.
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DFL Receives Tremendous Return on Investment from Election Day Stipends
The definition of correlation is “the mutual relation of two or more things.” For today’s discussion of the 2012 campaign finance reports, let’s focus on the correlation of two things:
Just days before the general election, the Minnesota DFL Party paid “canvasser stipends” to 40 individuals who live on or near Minnesota Indian reservations, especially the Red Lake Reservation.
The vote for president in the four precincts that make up the Red Lake Indian Reservation was 2,165 for Obama to 39 for Romney.
There’s nothing illegal about these two sets of facts, but they do make an interesting correlation.
The canvasser stipends totaled $13,400 and ranged from $200 to $500. They were all paid on November 5th and 6th, the day before and the day of the general election. They included a $3,500 payment to Jamie Edwards of Brooklyn Center for “canvassing coordination.”
Sixteen of the stipends were paid to people living in Bagley, Ponehah, Red Lake, and Redby, all precincts in and around the Red Lake Reservation. Six of the stipends went to the same street in Bagley: Wild Rice Loop. Four of the stipends went to the same house: 26681 Wild Rice Loop.
Five of the stipends were paid to addresses in Naytahwaush near the White Earth Reservation. The rest of the stipends are divided between the White Earth Reservation and the Mille Lacs Reservation.
So what did the DFL get for their money?
The easiest way to analyze the effectiveness of this program is to look at the precincts in the Red Lake Reservation, where we know the vote is 100% Native American.
Precinct
Obama
Romney
Ponemah
385
1
Red Lake Agency
826
17
Redby
606
15
Little Rock
348
6
Total
2165
39
In the four precincts that make up the reservation, the total vote for president was 2,165 for President Obama and just 39 votes for Mitt Romney. That’s 98% for the Democrats. The overwhelming DFL vote pattern continued down the partisan ballot. In the Ponemah precinct, the vote was 385 to 1. Just one vote for Romney? You would think ten or fifteen voters would have voted for Romney by accident.
These lopsided results can be seen on the other reservations but it’s not as obvious. For example, the precinct that includes the town of Naytahwaush on the White Earth Reservation (Twin Lakes Township) voted 185 for Obama to 29 for Romney.
The Native American vote only added to the victory margin for President Obama and Senator Klobuchar in Minnesota, but it had a more profound effect on the makeup of the state legislature. In House District 2A for example, DFLer Roger Erickson defeated Rep. Dave Hancock by 1,829 votes. His margin on the Red Lake Reservation was 1,916 votes. It’s hard to win a legislative district when you lose four precincts by almost 2,000 votes.
Again, I am not alleging anything illegal happened here. On its face, it is just a correlation. Historically, there is no reason to expect that Native American voters in Minnesota would vote in favor of the Republican ticket. But the 98% vote total should at least raise some questions.
The $13,400 spent on this canvasser program is a drop in the bucket compared to the millions spent on the 2012 election by both sides. Certainly the tribes in Minnesota give more campaign money to Democrats than Republicans, but their advantage is not as lopsided as it is with the unions. And the political interests of the tribes down south with successful gaming operations don’t always line up with the tribes up north.
There are two approaches to this problem for the Minnesota Republican Party heading into the 2014 election.
One approach would be to make sure we have poll watchers in all of these precincts next year to make sure the election is free from intimidation and voter fraud.
But a better and more long-term approach would be to directly reach out to Native American voters and convince them our plans for economic opportunity, entrepreneurship, job creation and especially education reform deserve a stronger look. This outreach needs to be sincere and should include a two-way conversation that results in real proposals put forward by our leaders at the legislature. We can easily show the policies of the DFL have not benefited Native American families and they are taking their votes for granted.
This outreach needs to start now, not just days before the election. And it needs to involve a commitment to make life better, not just $13,400 in election day stipends.
Back during the Clinton era, [Baucus] faced a choice: support an assault weapons ban urged by a president from his own party and risk angering constituents who cherish their gun rights, or buck his party. He chose the ban, and nearly lost his Senate seat.
This was in ’94. The media downplays this, giving all credit for the GOP’s electoral turnaround to Gingrich and the “Contract With America”. And as much credit as Gingrich deserves, the gun issue, in the wake of the noxious gun grabbing provisions in the ’94 “Crime Bill” contributed a big chunk to the GOP’s electoral victory.
That was then. This is Montana:
Now, as he begins his campaign for a seventh term, Baucus faces the question again. For weeks, gun foes have sought assurances he would oppose the assault weapons ban. But it was only this past week he said he would oppose it.
That decision alone doesn’t settle the issue for his re-election campaign. His opponents are watching closely, eager to pounce as he navigates a series of other gun control proposals, including an expected call for universal background checks.
Baucus’ predicament is one that a group of Democrats like him in the West and South are facing. They hail from predominantly rural regions of the country where the Second Amendment is cherished and where Republicans routinely win in presidential elections.
This, of course, was part of the story of 1994, nationally.
It was also part of the story in Minnesota in 2002; DFLers in greater Minnesota who followed the gun-grabbing line of the Metrocrat orcs got swept out of office en masse.
Which is one reason so many House DFLers signed on to the Hilstrom bill last week – to deny the GOP a cudgel…
Arts criticism is, by its very nature, interpretation.
And the human trait of confirmation bias makes it possible for just about any human being to make just about any case for any art. It’d be hypothetically possible for someone to try to show that Raskolnikov, the protagonist in Dostoëvski’s Crime and Punishment, is really a homoerotic metaphor. Of course, the burden is on the person making the case that the interpretation is meaningful, or in fact not complete balderdash – a burden nobody has met in re Crime and Punishment or, to the best of my knowledge, ever attempted.
Music is among the more emotionally-evocative art forms – for me, anyway, and I know I’m not alone.
This entire series started last fall, just round election time. A friend of mine – a fairly mid-level Democrat organizer and consultant type – tweeted a while back something to the effect of “Have any of you Republican Springsteen fans actually listened to the music?”
My response; Yes. More than you have, and likely will. Springsteen’s been one of my musical favorites since my mid-teens, including my brief stretch of time as a liberal, into my early twenties. If anything I became a bigger fan after I became a conservative.
Springsteen didn’t become overtly political until much later in his career. His music was expressly non-political until at least the mid-nineties; his Ghost of Tom Joad album was the first to really noodle around in politics (and do it generally badly – Joad is one of his least-remembered records).
Indeed, at the height of his career he made a point of being studiously non-political, at least in terms of the partisan scrum. Liberals chortle about the 1984 episode where Springsteen rebuked Ronald Reagan for trying to co-opt “Born in the USA”; they – and the media that still mention the event – forget that days later, he did the same to Walter Mondale for trying to make his own hay out of the episode. Leftist rock critics like Dave Marsh – who was for decades my favorite rock critic, notwithstanding his habit of injecting his infantile socialist politics into every issue, and even as I started realizing “rock critics” were even more useless to this world than paparazzi and Kardashians – hooted and hollered about the political implications of Springsteen’s much-publicized donations of hundreds of thousands of dollars to charities along the way during his Born in the USA tour, ignoring the fact that conservatives as a rule support private charity.
As Springsteen got older, and his career cooled off a bit in the nineties, he got more overtly political – at about the point where his most notable right-of-center fans, the Chris Christies and Laura Ingrahams and Tim Pawlentys (also me) got more “out” about their fandom. Which led lefties to sniff, in their usual way, “you do know he’s a liberal, don’t you?”
Which led us to here.
———-
Springsteen during his, ahem, Glory Days was expressly non-political – but it’s entirely possible to listen to a song like “We Take Care Of Our Own” and identify, at least with the sing-along points, as a conservative.
Or as a liberal, for that matter:
Liberals “take care of their own”, too – by getting the larger society to subsidize them; conservatives do it, of course, by trying to make opportunity ubiquitous and giving people the freedom to succeed as well as fail. To quote Winston Churchill, liberals level out the peaks to fill in valleys (although not that level; Springsteen is well into “the 1%”, has been for 30 years, and will be the rest of his life); conservatives spread a safety net over the chasm.
But this series has largely been about the messages that don’t need to be debated – the messages that resonate with conservative fans because their messages resonate completely with what it takes to be a conservative.
And that’s what this series is about; resonance. Sprinsteen, despite his best efforts, resonates with conservatives…
…and – here’s the important part – he does it especially when he’s being apolitical.
One of my favorite songs in my crowded list of favorite Springsteen songs is “Land of Hopes and Dreams”:
So listen to it:
Grab your ticket and your suitcase
Thunder’s rollin’ down this track
Well, you don’t know where you’re goin’ now
But you know you won’t be back
Well, darlin’ if you’re weary
Lay your head upon my chest
We’ll take what we can carry
Yeah, and we’ll leave the rest
Big wheels roll through fields
Where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams
Gospel-revival-style show-stopper? Sure.
Metaphor for everything conservative believe about America, the exceptional nation, the “Shining City on the Hill?”, where all of us…
This train…
Carries saints and sinners
This train…
Carries losers and winners
This train…
Carries whores and gamblers
This train…
Carries lost souls
I said this train…
Dreams will not be thwarted
This train…
Faith will be rewarded
…are equal in the eyes of God and the law?
Seriously – there may have been descriptions of the conservatives’ vision of America in the rock and roll era that are this good. But have there been any better?
The question – at least in re Springsteen’s greatest music, from ’74 to about ’87, with a bit of a surge after 2002, the “Holy Trinity” (Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River), Nebraska, Born in the USA, Tunnel of Love and The Rising and a few other odds and ends along the way – isn’t “why do conservatives find resonance in much of his best music”…
…but, vagaries of personal taste aside, how could they not?
People in society at large are starting to notice what I wrote about six years ago; the public schools are insane asylums, run by the inmates, when it comes to Zero Tolerance.
Recent cases – a boy pointing a pop-tart “shaped like a gun”, boys being suspended for playing cops and robbers with finger guns, the usual – are old hat for me, personally.
Glenn Reynolds reaches the same conclusion I the better part of a decade ago; it’s not just about the petty, venal harassment of children (almost inevitably boys) on idiotic grounds; the worst part is what it teaches the children:
And that’s the problem with all of these cases. Our
justification for putting massive amounts of taxpayer money into public schools is that they’re supposed to teach critical thinking. But stories like these — and they’re legion — suggest that the very people who are supposed to be teaching our kids how to think are largely incapable of critical thought themselves.
A Pop Tart gun, a finger gun, or a toy gun — even a pink one that shoots, gasp!, soap bubbles! — isn’t any danger to anyone. Nor is playing with toy guns a sign that a kid is mentally ill or dangerous. It’s a sign that a kid is a kid.
When schools and teachers react hysterically to such non-threats, they’re telling us one of two things: Either that they lack the ability to respond realistically to events or that they recognize that there’s not any sort of threat, but deliberately overreact in order to stigmatize even the idea of guns. The first is educational malpractice; the second is educational malpractice mixed with abuse of power. Neither inspires confidence in the educational system in which they appear.
I vote for “educational malpractice mixed with abuse of power”, by the way; if you accept the idea that the left has turned the public schools into indoctrination centers – and more and more, I do – then that’s a no-brainer.
But Glenn’s mistaken as well; I’ve seen no evidence that the public schools care even a little about critical thinking.
Background: It is a fact that the two places in the United States with the worst rates of firearm crime are…:
The states of the deep, deep South, with their Scots-Irish tradition of casual, clannish violence, honor killings, and so on.
Cities with tight gun controls. Like Chicago, which is more dangerous per capita than Afghanistan these days, at least in terms of gun violence. And if Rahm Emanuel theatrically bans IEDs, five’ll get you ten you start seeing those, too.
Now, when you mention this to gun-control advocates – who are usually urbanites, frequently with much schooling (as distinct from education), and some of whom at least try to go through the motions of an informed and civil debate – many will furrow their brows and intone one or both of two things:
“But wait! There are cities with tight gun controls, like New York and San Francisco, with low gun crime rates!”
“Yes, cities like Chicago and Washington DC have tight gun controls and high crime rates. But the guns that are used to carry out the crime come from places with lax gun laws!”
Zip Guns, Zip Codes: Of course, just as it’s misleading to splotch crime rates across entire states – or states with significant populations, shaddap about Wyoming and the Dakotas – as it is to draw the same conclusions about politics or the economy, it’s equally as misleading to do the same with metro areas. Just as Illinois as a whole is relatively safe (with a murder rate of 5.5 per 100,000, just a little above the national rate of 4.7/100,000), the city of Chicago as whole is modestly less-than-catastrophic, with a 15.9 per 100,000 murder rate; that’s only triple the national rate, double that of Minneapolis, and five times Saint Paul’s murder rate.
And especially true in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis and New Orleans and Baltimore and Atlanta, where you have wide swathes of disparity in income and society. And less so in cities like San Francisco and Manhattan, which have largely become gentrified and too-expensive-for-the-poor, and have managed to export their criminal element to Oakland or Newark.
Balance: To the second point? If Chicago is more dangerous because its criminals are able to get guns from suburban Illinois or and from surrounding states, why aren’t those surrounding counties and cities anywhere nearly as dangerous? A fifth of guns used in crime in Chicago come from Indiana, a state with a crime rate a point lower than Illinois and about a quarter that of Chicago. About 4% come from Wisconsin, a state with a crime rate half that of Illinois (and much of even that concentrated in Milwaukee, whose crime rate is not much better overall than Chicago, and for most of the same reasons) and less than a fifth that of Chicago.
If the guns – and the access to the guns – were the problem, then Montana, North Dakota and Mississippi should have sky-high crime rates too…
…oh, wait: while Montana (2.6/100,000) and North Dakota (1.5/100,000 in 2010) have very low murder rates, Mississippi is at 7/100,000 (with no urban areas making the top list). Not much different than Minneapolis; triple Saint Paul; half of Chicago’s murder rate, even with its Deep South pathologies fully and stereotypicallyundisturbed.
So here’s the question: if access to guns is the problem, why aren’t the places from which Chicago criminals get their guns as overrun with crime as Chicago itself is?
The number of gun-industry firms refusing to do business with government bodies that attack the Second Amendment (like my company) has more than tripled.
Wilson Combat, a custom pistol manufacturer located in Berryville, Arkansas, joined the movement on February 28 stating the following:
“Wilson Combat will no longer provide any products or services to any State Government imposing legislation that infringes on the second amendment rights of its law abiding citizens. This includes any Law Enforcement Department, Law Enforcement Officers, or any State Government Entity or Employee of such an entity. This also applies to any local municipality imposing such infringements.”
Wilson lists the states included on its no sale policy as: California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Washington D.C. and The City of Chicago, Illinois.
Fearless Prediction: the Department of Justice will start prosecuting refuseniks on 14th Amendment grounds.
(Note: when I say “fearless prediction”, that means it’s not really a prediction. That means I’m being hyperbolic, while realizing that reality has a way of overtaking my hyperbole more often than not).
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talkradio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!
I’ll be on from 1-3 today. I’ll be talking about my trips to the Capitol this past week, Doug Grow’s really really dumb column, why Republicans should support the Hilstrom bill, a little about Rand Paul, and a big announcment. We’ll also be talking with Twila Brase about the Health Insurance Exchange (HIX) bill, and with Dr. John Kern about the DFL’s bid to abolish teacher basic skills tests.
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:
The Shorter Anti-Unionization Activist: “Unionization would force us to,raise prices. Forcing us to unionize to accept state aid payments would cause me to stop accepting kids who get state assistance. Providers can already join the union; in eight years, out of 11,000 providers, exactly 57 have joined. I already work hard on improving the quality of the care I provide. By the way, the stories of unethical behavior on union reps’ parts in the card check process are true and omnipresent. We are independent businesspoeple! If we wanted to work inside of a larger organization, we’d have stayed with our old careers!
The Shorter Rep. Nelson (author of the union jamdown bill, and a carpenters union activist in his per-legislative life): Unions all help provide better quality care, training, and standards.
The Shorter Response To Nelson From Providers: Um, those are the job, in order, of existing licensing authorities, and myself.
The Shorter Pro-union Daycare Provider: I’m a loving nurturing person. I teach my kids. Aren’t teachers unionized?
The Shorter Union AFSCME Rep’s Case, with the actual thought completed in parentheses This bill won’t force anyone into a union! (It’ll merely give a mass of unlicensed fly-by-night providers the right to compel all you licensed providers to unionize to if you get state money.
The Shorter Committee Chair Joe Mullery: Unions don’t skim anything.
The Shorter Mary Franson (leading opponent of jamdown, and a former provider herself):. This bill isn’t about improving care. It’s about enriching union officials and funneling dues money to the DFL-supporting unions.
The Shorter Carly Melin (27-year old second term rep who was carted directly to her district after graduating from Hamline Law just in time to meet residency requirements, and neither has kids nor any notable non-legislative post-law-school job history): Hey! Don’t insult the unions!
The Shorter Results:. Six in-the-bag-for-the-unions DFLers “yes”, five Republivans “no”.
Here’s the photo and the caption from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, March 6, 2013.
Rob Doar with the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance holds up a Ruger 10/22 Assault Rifle as a visual aid on day two of hearings on proposed new gun laws the House Public Safety Committee in the State Office Building in St. Paul, Minn., on Tuesday, February 5, 2013. He was arguing that the proposed law would make certain versions of gun illegal depending on what he called ‘cosmetic changes’. (Pioneer Press: Ben Garvin)
Read that again: “Ruger 10/22 Assault Rifle.” You realize it shoots ordinary .22’s, right? Yes, it has all the bells and whistles to look like a heavy-duty killing machine, but it’s still just a .22. And it’s semi-auto, meaning one-shot-per-trigger-pull. A true “assault rifle” is a machine gun: hold the trigger and it shoots until empty. This isn’t one of them. This is a baby wannabe. It’s good for shooting at tin cans but not much else.
It’s like the Asian guys who put mag wheels, spoilers and loud mufflers on their Honda Civics. Looks cool, yes; but it’s never going to win NASCAR. That tricked-out Honda is not a muscle car and this tricked-out .22 is not an assault rifle.
The fact the reporter believes this plinker needs to be as heavily regulated as the M-16’s that Marines carry in Afghanistan tells you all you need to know about the Media. The fact Democrats on the committee agree with him, that’s the really scary part.
They keep telling us there is no Liberal Bias in the Legacy Media. Ignorance, maybe. Stupidity, possibly. But definitely not Liberal Bias. It’s stuff like this keeps me from believing them.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Joe is right, of course.
The hard part is turning low-information news consumers into informed voters. It’s also the mandatory part.
In 2008, waterboarding people who had been captured in action against American and allied forces, or caught acting as terrorists around the world, was the absolute nadir of evil; terror suspects deserved the full protection of American due process.
In 2013, many of those same people are on board with killing Americans, on American soil, using drones.
It’s not quite like Then-Senator Messinger Dayton closing his Senate office back in 2005 and fleeing to Minnesota, leaving his staff and the rest of Congress to toil away under threat of terrorist attack.
But one wonders now a Minnesota native like Al Franken can show his face in public after his performance yesterday.
Minnesota’s junior Senator closed his office yesterday in the face of one of this season’s array of “Snowmageddons”.
Lights out!
And from what was Senator Franken protecting his staff?
This bit of wet, icy hell outside:
Politico reporter Byron Tau had photo of the sloppy carnage elsewhere in the District:
Somehow, I doubt Norm Coleman would have closed his office for this.
I was down at the State Capitol yesterday for a press conference, as Representative Deb Hilstrom (DFL Brooklyn Park) introduced the gun bill/s we talked about yesterday.
The bills, as we noted yesterday, would exert the state to solve actual problems – close gaps in the background check system, add mandatory penalties for using guns in crimes or possessing them illegally…
…y’know. Controversial stuff.
At the presser, I saw a big group of legislators from both chambers and both parties lining up to support Hilstrom’s proposal. Reps, Senators, Democrats, Republicans – it was probably the most bipartisan assembly I’ve seen that wasn’t in the lounge at the Kelly Inn after hours.
Not just legislators; guys in uniform. They weren’t just there for the fun of it – guys in uniform never are. No, they were from the Minnesota Sheriff’s Association.
And I saw media. Oh, lord, did I see media.
And Heather Martens was there, naturally; where there is truth about the Second Amendment, Martens will be there. To lie. And lie and lie and lie (note to the media who bothered to speak to her; she has uttered not one substantial word of truth in her years at the capitol. Ask me).
And the “groups” she represents put out a call for their “membership” to turn out in force to oppose this bill – probably remembering the hundreds of Second Amendment supporters who turned out daily to oppose the DFL’s gun grab bills a few weeks ago.
We’ll come back to them.
One person who was not there was Doug Grow, from the MInnPost.
To be fair, I haven’t seen Grow in person in over 20 years; I might not recognize him.
But judging by the story he wrote about the conference, and the bill itself, even if Grow was there, his story was pre-written, and would have appeared in exactly the same form had Mothra emerged from the Supreme Court chamber shooting flame from wherever Mothra did whatever he did, since I never watched the movie.
Rep. Debra Hilstrom, DFL-Brooklyn Center, has discovered again that there is no comfortable middle ground when the subject is guns.
At noon at the Capitol, Hilstrom, standing with Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek and Rep. Tony Cornish, the gun-toting legislator from Good Thunder, introduced a gun bill that she said “can bring people together’’ on the volatile subject of guns.
“Gun-toting”.
Scare quotes.
No, no bias here.
The Astroturf Consensus
Grow, like most of the Twin Cities mainstream media, labors under the delusion that there’s a large, organized mass of people supporting gun control, and that they were out in force yesterday.
Her words were still echoing in the Capitol when critics, who had hoped for much stronger actions from the Minnesota Legislature, lambasted the effort of Hilstrom and a bipartisan group of 69 other legislators to “close gaps’’ in current state gun law.
“This is just a band-aid over a huge problem,’’ said Jane Kay of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, an organization formed in the days following the mass shooting of school children in Newtown, Conn.
Only in America can a two-month old pressure group with fewer members than there were legislators standing behind Hilstrom get the breathless adoration of the media. Which is what “Moms Demand Action” and “Protect Minnesota” both are; astroturf checkbook advocacy groups funded by liberal plutocrats with deep pockets – with “membership” numbers in the single digits.
Provided they share the goal of fluffing the left’s withering narrative on gun control.
Of course, Grow wasn’t the only offender; Pat Kessler of Channel 4 asked Hilstrom why the bill included no universal background check which, he asserted, “70% of Minnesotans oppose”.
The correct answer – the polls ask people about background checks without explaining the consequences of those checks as the DFL and Governor Messinger Dayton currently propose them; they will result in a de facto gun registry, which is a necessary first step to universal confiscation.
More on gun-related media polls in another piece soon.
The Pre-Written Story
But Grow himself is the real problem here. His piece, while short on the sort of insight that actually engaging people on both sides of the issue might have given it, is long on evidence that Grow wrote the story long before yesterday’s press conference.
There’s the inflammatory reference to every leftymedia member’s favorite boogyman:
The bill has the support of the National Rifle Association, presumably because it does nothing to require background checks on all gun sales and because it does nothing to restrict sales of military-style weapons or even the quantity of rounds in ammunition magazines.
Well, no.
The bill has the support of gun-rights organizations because instead of wasting time and effort putting niggling restrictions on the rights of the law-abiding that didn’t affect crime in any way the first ten years they were tried, they actually address the real problem; criminals, the insane, the addled, and the holes in the data the state sends to the Feds for the background check system.
(And while the NRA makes a nice, recognizable, stereotyped boogeyman for the lazy propagandist, the NRA actually has very little to do with the day to day heavy lifting of the gun rights movement in Minnesota. It’s the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance that turned out 500 or more people a day to attend the gun grab hearings a couple of weeks back. Grow either doesn’t know that, or doesn’t want people to know that. You know where my money is).
More evidence that Grow wrote the story entirely off of DFL and “Protect Minnesota” chanting points?
Despite the fact that it’s a bill that authors hoped would unite people, it seems to be dividing. Yes, there was a mix of Republican and DFL representatives standing with Hilstrom, Cornish and Stanek. But there were no law-enforcement organizations represented at the news conference where the proposal was unveiled.
That’s false.
Here’s the video of the press conference:
See all those guys in uniforms?
Scroll in to 1:12. That’s Sheriff Rich Stanek, Hennepin County Sheriff, speaking on behalf of the Minnesota Sheriff’s Association.
Either Grow is lying, or he wrote the entire story with no knowledge of the facts of the story.
Short On Fact, Long On Jamming Words Into Peoples’ Mouths
Grow follows by saying…:
There also were no DFL senators, though presumably the bill will be as attractive to outstate senators as it appears to be to many outstate DFL representatives.
Grow throws that in there as if it’s a substantive fact related to the bill itself. It’s not. While most outstate legislators no doubt remember the DFL debacle of 2002, it’s also more than plausible Tom Bakk wants to keep his powder dry.
In other words, presence of no DFL senators is a non-factor, unless you’re a low-information reader.
Grow next swerves through fact – and in so doing, undercuts his own premise. I’ll add emphasis:
Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, and the chairman of the House public safety committee, has indicated he has no desire to have the bill heard by his committee. Paymar is pushing a bill that would require purchasers of guns at flea markets and gun shows to go through background checks.
Yet, given the large number of co-authors with Hilstrom, there likely are ways for the bill to weave its way through the legislative process.
Yes. There are a large number of co-authors; so many they had to submit it not one, not two, but three times to get them all on. Over half of the House is signed on as authors of the bill.
Michael Paymar wants to thwart the will of the representatives of over half of Minnesota’s voters?
Putting Thirty Shots From An AR15 Into A Strawman
Finally, Grow takes his whacks at some of the legislators who’ve violated the DFL’s narrative:
[Representative Tony] Cornish, usually a lightning rod in the gun debate, said he was taking a different role regarding the fate of this bill.
“Several of my statements (in the past) have been controversial,’’ he said. “Today my role is to be a peacemaker.’’
No sooner had he said that than he uttered a statement that raises the hackles of those hoping for stronger gun measures.
“I want to thank the NRA for helping (on the bill),’’ he said. He went on to say that the bill “contains nothing for gun owners to fear.’’
Er, who’s “hackles” got “raised”, here? And why?
Was it the involvement of the NRA? Your dog whistles aren’t our problem.
Or was it the quote about gun owners having nothing to fear? Is that the actual goal, here?
Hilstrom, in her seventh term, refused to talk about her true feelings of the bill. Rather, she kept speaking of the importance of “passing a bill that will solve real problems.’’
She did point out that she never has sought the endorsement of the NRA and that in the past she has received a “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ from the NRA.
OK.
So what?
If she’s doing the right thing – which, for a majority of Minnesotans, is “solving problems”, rather than attacking the law-abiding gun owner – then I don’t care if she’s a life-time “F” rating. And I don’t care about her true feelings; I don’t care if she’s being used as an escape hatch by the DFL to get out of the embarassment of the Paymar/Hausman gun grab bills.
Guess Who!
Finally: I owe the Twin Cities media an apology. I’ve said that Larry Jacobs is the most over-quoted person in the Twin Cities media. And he is. David Schultz is right up there.
But in the “single-issue” category, Heather Martens – “Executive Director” and, near as we can tell, one of less than a half-dozen members of “Protect Minnesota” (and de facto representative of House District 66A) and a woman whose entire body of public assertions is lies, dwarfs them all:
Heather Martens, executive director of Protect Minnesota, derided the bill as “NRA-approved.’’
Boo! Boogeyman! Hiss!
Listen, MinnPost-reading dogs! There’s your whistle!
“Any bill that fails to address the gaping holes in our background check law falls far short of the public’s demand for the right to be safe in our communities,’’ Martens said in a statement.
And there’s another lie. The bill does address the gaping hole that exists in the background check laws.
No, not the misnamed “gun show loophole”, which is another media myth. The real gap is the data that the state isn’t sending to the feds; the Hilstrom bill fixes it.
GOCRA’s Mountain, Grow And Martens’ Molehill
Leaving aside the fact that Grow got pretty much everything in this story wrong – and wrong in a way that suggests not only that he wasn’t at Hilstrom’s press conference but that he wrote the whole thing straight from chanting points long before Hilstrom took to the microphone – the most pernicious thing about Grow’s story is that it tries to create the impression that there’s a genuine battle between two titanically-powerful sides to this debate.
There’s not.
In terms of legislators? A bipartisan sample of over half of the House is on board co-authoring Hilstrom’s bill(s). A thin, runny film of metro-DFL extremists is backing the Paymar/Hausman/Simonson gun grab bills.
In terms of the public? Last month, GOCRA put out a call for people to come to the Capitol. And they did.
No, really:
“Protect Minnesota” and “Moms Demand Action” put out a call yesterday for people to come out and protest against Hilstrom’s bill.
Here they are:
Well, not literally. But no, other than Heather Martens, nobody showed up.
There are literally more DFL legislators co-authoring Hilstrom’s bill than there are members of “Protect Minnesota” and the “Moms Demand Action” put together.
“We Hope For Better Things; It Shall Rise From the Ashes.” – City of Detroit’s motto.
Those words were written in 1805 to memorialize a Detroit school burned to the ground. 208 years later, Detroit still hopes for divine intervention, this time from the Michigan capitol.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s proclamation of a “financial emergency” in Detroit was the culmination of a decades-long municipal car wreck. Between 2000 and 2010, the city lost 237,500 inhabitants — an estimated 1/4th of the population. One in 20 homes were foreclosed upon during the height of the recession. The city remains $327 million in the red with $14.9 billion in unfunded city pension plans. By comparison, the entire state of Michigan’s biennial budget is $49 billion.
While Detroit has been slowly crashing into a wall of economic reality, a busload of corrupt and incompetent city officials have rubber-necked their way past the myriad of issues confronting the city. In the last decade, Detroit saw 131 convictions of government officials, a number defined by the reign of ousted Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Even the federal government last year withheld millions in grants from Detroit over concerns of corruption. The city’s reaction? We’re not as bad as Chicago when it comes to corruption, so what’s the big deal?
The Roosevelt Warehouse or Detroit School Book Depository. A fire in 1987 did some damage to the building but was abandoned despite most of the inventory being usable. No effort to recover science and sports equipment, scissors, crayons, and books was ever made and now all sit on the floor in ruin
Synder’s appointment of an “emergency manager” to oversee the Detroit budget and pension plans has elicited howls of protests from the usual suspects:
“[Emergency managers] can unilaterally tear up union contracts, take over pension funds, make and repeal laws, sell public assets, the list goes on,” he said in an earlier interview with The Huffington Post. “Imposition of the EM must be understood in the context of the many other methods conservatives are using today to suppress democracy –- especially among people of color and people in poverty.”
But the decision to go the EM route has also gained critics on the Right, with one National Review writer declaring Snyder’s decision, in hyperbolic form, a “uniquely American way to dictatorship.”
The Emergency Manager legislation has gone through a number of iterations over the years, including one version, Public Act 4, that was opposed by the unions and defeated on the ballot last November. PA 4 would have allowed EMs to effectively run cities, with their authority superseding that of city officials. Instead, with PA 4 defeated, Snyder is falling back on the format of an older PA – one that while still not allowing EMs to be fired by the city, doesn’t grant them the power to abrogate collective bargaining or dissolve local governments.
The United Artists Theater. The theater is actually part of an 18-story high rise built in 1928. The historic building was such an embarrassment that the exterior was refurbished before the Super Bowl in 2006. The interior remains as seen.
Despite the fact that no one will be declared dictator, or even Pontifex Maximus, Snyder’s decision has prompted Detroit’s City Council to fight tooth-and-nail against any EM, filing an appeal against the state. One official who isn’t planning on fighting Lansing is surprisingly Detroit’s Mayor Dave Bing. Like the rest of the city government, Bing isn’t happy about Snyder’s power play, but unlike the rest, Bing is willing to work with any EM. Speaking at a City Hall press conference, Bing stated that “we need to stop BSing ourselves,” a quote perhaps applicable to more than just an acknowledgment that an emergency manager would be imposed on Detroit whether they liked it or not.
An emergency manager invites micro concerns – with 83 cents of every Detroit police and fire payroll dollar being spent on pensions by 2017, what use is an EM without the ability to unilateral restructure pension and/or contracts? But the macro concerns of the decision are far more troubling. How do you save a city that won’t save itself?
The Lee Plaza Hotel lobby. The Lee Plaza is on the United States National Register of Historic Places.
H.L. Menchken famously declared that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Detroit has certainly being getting it “good and hard” for decades, and like an S&M enthusiast whose forgotten their safe-word, doesn’t know how to stop. Bankruptcy may be an option, but it doesn’t address the billions in underfunded liabilities. And considering all bankruptcy would do is force Detroit and its creditors to negotiate, there’s not much more that an EM would do for the situation except provide a political scapegoat for the necessary hard choices to come. It should be little wonder that Mayor Dave Bing isn’t fighting Snyder’s executive decision – he’s probably relieved someone else will being taking the slings and arrows (in Detroit; statewide, the move is very popular).
Yet what happens after the dust settles? Even if Snyder’s EM hacks Detroit’s budget into the black, will the political machinery or populace live with the decisions? Or, having avoided any connection to the policies implemented to take Detroit on the long road to fiscal solvency, will the business of City Hall simply revert to usual?
Snyder’s technocrat lean may be well-intended, but in the case of Detroit, is only delaying the city and its voters coming to terms with their decisions. Although on the plus side, Snyder’s move is the first job created in Detroit in years.
The Obama administration denied an appeal for flexibility in lessening the sequester’s effects, with an email this week appearing to show officials in Washington that because they already had promised the cuts would be devastating, they now have to follow through on that.
In the email sent Monday by Charles Brown, an official with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service office in Raleigh, N.C., Mr. Brown asked “if there was any latitude” in how to spread the sequester cuts across the region to lessen the impacts on fish inspections.
SEE RELATED: Democrats pull out race card in sequester game
He said he was discouraged by officials in Washington, who gave him this reply: “We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that ‘APHIS would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.’ So it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.”
Where have we seen this before?
Right here in Minnesota, during the 2011 State Budget shutdown, when Minnesota bureaucrats did their level best to make the shutdown disproportionally onerous.
Minnesota: where next years’ stupid Democrat ideas are tried out this year!
After a month of barbering and nattering about dim-bulb gun-grab bills, there’s a chance at returning to sanity at hand.
Over the noon hour, Representative Deb Hillstrom – a DFLer from Brooklyn Park and a prosecutor by trade – introduced a new bill. And this bill has the potential – unlike all of Hausman, Paymar and Simonson’s vacuous, time-wasting, copied-and-pasted twaddle – to actually do some good.
Hillstrom’s bill treats law-abiding citizens like law-abiding citizens, and punishes criminals for committing crimes.
It’s been submitted three times – one, two and three – although all three are identical. This, according to a second-hand source, is a way to get around the maximum number of authors.
To summarize; the bill:
Facilitates the reporting of criminal and mental health commitment data to the national NICS database (more or less as Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill would have done before Governor Messinger Dayton vetoed it last year. The bill also cleans up the time lag in Minnesota’s reporting of such data.
Creates a mandatory sentence enhancement for violent felons. Many cities in Minnesota have similar laws; Saint Paul has one (although Susan Gaertner pretty much always used it as plea-bargain fodder when she was County Attorney). This would provide a five year sentence for violent felons in possession of firearms; for a second and subsequent offenses, the sentence would be 10 or 15 years, respectively.
Makes false reporting of a gun theft a gross misdemeanor.
Establishes categories of people ineligible to possess pistols or “assault weapons” (and, except for kids under 18, any firearm at all), including people with records of juvenile delinquency (including those who’ve been shunted into pre-trial diversion programs for violent crimes), those who’ve been committed for mental illness or drug abuse, people with regular or gross misdemeanors in the previous three years (including gang crimes, hate crimes, building zip guns, stalking, fourth-degree burglary or rioting), cops with substance abuse issues, people with domestic assaults in the previous three years (or domestic assaults with firearms, ever).
A five year mandatory sentencing enhancement for using a pistol or “assault weapon” in a felony (with 10 and 15 years for repeat offenders).
The bill also provides a due process for people who’ve been civilly committed to get their firearm rights back.
The bill is a huge step in the right direction; it actually punishes criminals, rather than law-abiding citizens (as Paymar, Simonson and Hausman’s bills do).
Rep. Hillstrom – a metro DFLer – is to be complimented for introducing it.
Of course, it needs to get through committee. The members of the Public Safety Finance Committee (names and numbers are below the jump) need to get flooded with phone calls supporting the Hillstrom bill.
No, I mean flooded. And get your representatives, too, whatever side they’re on.
To hear the President tell it, the sequester cuts are so deep, so devastating, the very existence of the nation is threatened: mass poverty, rain of fire, dogs and cats living together, the end of days.
The actual amount of spending cuts that take effect in 2013 is around $50 billion.
By odd coincidence, the US foreign aid budget for 2013 is also around $50 billion.
Seems to me any fifth grader could figure out a way to implement the sequester cuts without harming a hair on any American’s head.
The question then becomes: is the President smarter than a fifth grader?
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Perhaps a more relevant question: does he need to be?
I officially announce the start of a new, awesome business.
Because the market is so really really hot these days, I think I’m going to make it a gun manufacturer.
Our first design will likely be a semi-auto only license-build of the classic Heckler and Koch HK91. I’m going to call it the “Paymar”.
The “Berg Mark 1 Paymar”, a licence-built copy of the HK91.
A great design – like a Gull-Wing Mercedes – is hard to improve on.
And while we have yet to produce our first actual rifle for our showroom on University Avenue (which we got dirt cheap thanks to the light rail construction), we already have a policy; no sales to state or federal governments that pass laws infringing the Second Amendment. Bazinga. Nothing.
And the company outlet store – which, as I envision it, will also have a cash bar and a shooting range -but not in that order? We will have one policy; law-abiding shooters are welcome!
OK, so maybe the business is still a pipe dream – I have yet to assemble my first firearm of any type.
But if you are a shooter friendly store, let us know. And get the sticker.
Have you seen how we swarm the legislature? Imagine that kind of traffic coming through your door.
Just saying.
And if you know any Second Amendment friendly businesses? Pass the word.
After wasting a solid two weeks of the legislature’s time with a raft of gun grab bills that had no business seeing the light of day, the DFL is back at it.
Michael Paymar is pushing a rights-crushing omnibus gun bill so obnoxious it needs to be handled with tongs – a bill that punishes the law-abiding first, and worries about criminals…uh, they’ll get back to you on that.
In the meantime, the House GOP will be announcing an alternative bill later today – one that goes after criminals, and leaves the rights of the law-abiding citizen where they belong.
And call the members of the House Public Safety Finance Committee and tell them that the Paymar bill isn’t fit to wipe the hindquarters of a sick goat on a 100 degree day.
Via GOCRA, here’s the contact info for the committee, along with some commentary on each individual committee member:
Let’s show Rep. Paymar’s that Minnesotans oppose his assault on our rights by defeating his bill in his own committee. Ask them to SAY NO to the Paymar bill (HF237) and SAY YES to the GOCRA-approved alternate bill.
Representative Michael Paymar (DFL) – Chairman 651-296-4199
E-mail: rep.michael.paymar@house.mn You can suggest that Rep. Paymar simply scrap his bill and sign on to the alternate bill.
Representative Paul Rosenthal (DFL) – Vice Chairman
Rep. Rosenthal authored HF294, which would gut the civil rights protections of Minnesota’s Permit to Carry Law by allowing sheriffs to deny permits on the weakest of grounds. Tell him he should be working to punish criminals, not law-abiding citizens.
Thank Rep. Hilstrom for her strong rejection of registration schemes, as well as magazine and rifle bans, and thank her for supporting the alternate bill. (One newspaper has reported that she will be the alternate bill’s chief author!)
Rep. Mullery has been an opponent of gun rights for a long time. Remind him that if we work together, we can improve mental health and conviction reporting, and make our existing laws work better.
Remind Rep. Schoen that as a police officer, he knows who the real bad guys are: they’re not the law-abiding Minnesota gun owners, and they won’t follow new gun control laws any more than they follow the existing ones.
Rep. Simon is a smart, principled lawyer: he knows that the Supreme Court has affirmed the right to keep and bear arms as an individual right. He also knows that stripping due processdoesn’t make us more free or more safe. But you can remind him anyway!
Rep. Simonson is a new representative. Remind him that gun control is DFL Kryptonite: it has cost the House its DFL majority before, and it will again.
Representative Slocum is a co-author on several gun control bills this session. Tell her that focusing on the bad guys, not law-abiding gun owners, is the place to start.
Remind Rep. Uglem that the Second Amendment is not about hunting — it is a fundamental human, civil and Constitutional right, worthy of the strongest protection.
As the investing world celebrates the all time nominal high of an archaically-weighted index of an ever-changing basket of stocks, there is another – this time unprintable asset – that appears in all-time high demand – firearms. Smith & Wesson just released earnings not only with record high revenues but increasing their outlook dramatically for fiscal year 2013.
The surge in ‘background checks’ and sales since the election (and furthermore since the Tragedy in Newtown) continues (+29% YoY) and as SHWC notes “The tragedy in Newtown has understandably inspired an important national discussion about how to cope with violence in our communities – we possess a broad range of products and a highly flexible manufacturing operation. Taken together, these allow us to be highly responsive should the market and/or legislative developments drive a change in sales mix.”
Note to my financial planner, should you happen to be reading this today; I really, Really, Really hope you plunked a ton of my portfolio into S&W, Sturm Ruger and Glock USA when I mentioned it last fall…
The Fix’s Chris Cilizza’s annual poll of the best political blogs by state has given this blog a bit of a jolt of levity over the years – 2009 and 2011, anyway. And the latest list is out.
I know, the suspense was killing you.
This years’, however, seems to be less a paroxysm of lefty fanboy turnout than previous years. Cilizza’s list:
Well, I’m happy and thankful for the recognition for True North. It helps make up for the fact that TN’s staff – especially Nancy LaRoche and Derek Brigham – put in a lot of hard work for not a whole lot of payback.
One can’t begrudge Eric Ostermeier his position, of course. And the poll seems to recognize, as many of us do, that Sally Jo Sorenson of BSP is one of few Minnesota leftybloggers who doesn’t seem to need either police surveillance or court-ordered medication.
