A groundbreaking new report by the Center of the American Experiment (henceforth CAX) shows what a lot of us are seeing in our own lives, social circles and workplaces: Minnesota sucks, and people are leaving.

Courtesy of the Center of the American Experiment

Says the CAX:

There’s no question that Minnesota’s tax policies directly impact economic growth and opportunity in the state. There is, however, great debate over whether Minnesota’s current tax policy and the proposals being considered in St. Paul promote or harm economic growth. Those who favor a higher tax rate argue Minnesota needs more revenue to fund the education and infrastructure necessary to sustain economic growth. Advocates for lower taxes argue Minnesota needs low rates to make Minnesota an attractive place to invest, work and grow a business.

Like most economic questions, making the direct connection between state tax policy and economic growth is difficult. As William McBride—chief economist at the Tax Foundation—admits, “the economy is sufficiently complex that virtually any theory can find some support in the data.”

And there will, no doubt, be controversy about this report (which you should read). But it’s conclusion (of sorts, with emphasis added):

Though data can deliver mixed messages, data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) point to one clear and worrisome fact: Minnesotans and their wealth are moving to Southern and Western states. Between 1995 and 2010, an average of $340 million in income—based on 2010 dollars—moved each year from Minnesota to other states—a movement totaling more than $5 billion over 15 years. The states that on net receive the most Minnesota income tend to be low tax states such as Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington.

“But wait!”, someone might interject. “Of course people leave. They retire to someplace warmer!”

But there are five – count ’em, five (5) – reasons this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Working Stiffs: For starters – would retirees move to Sioux Falls?

First, many of the leading destination cities are economic centers, not retirement centers. Retirees certainly account for a large portion of the people and income leaving Minnesota. Some of the places receiving the largest portion of people and income from Minnesota include retirement destinations like Naples, Fort Meyers, and Scottsdale. But there are a large number of economic centers in the South and the West that are clearly attracting many more workers than retirees. Cities like Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas, Austin, Sioux Falls, and Denver have all gained substantial numbers of people and income from Minnesota…if Florida and Arizona were removed from the list, the income from receiving states would still far outweigh the contributing states.

Working people have joined the retirees, in other words.

You Have To Retire To Be A Retiree: The Great Recession slowed retirement migration nationwide, as people either couldn’t afford to retire, or couldn’t afford to move anywhere warm:

Second, as migration and retirement slowed during the Great Recession, Minnesota continued to lose substantial income to low-tax states in the South and the West that are not the locus of retirement.

The net movement of income to Florida dropped from $149 million in 2008 to $77 million in 2009, the first time Minnesota lost less than $100 million to Florida since 1996. The movement of income to Arizona also dropped substantially. Despite these drops, most of the other top states receiving income from Minnesota showed either no change or a bump in the income received from Minnesota.

Both Texas and Georgia gained more income inboth 2009 and 2010, while states like Colorado, Washington, South Dakota and North Carolina remained in a normal range.

All The Cool Working Kids In Liberal Hellholes Are Doing It: Minnesota isn’t the only high-tax “progressive” cesspool experiencing this problem:

analyses of the movement of income to and from other states show similar patterns of movement from high tax states and to low tax states.

In his book How Money Walks, after analyzing the same IRS data set for the entire country, Travis Brown concludes: “When you look at the mapped data over this period of time an unmistakable pattern emerges: income moved from high-tax states to states with no personal income taxes or lower per capita taxes.”11 In addition, a recent Manhattan Institute report documents the “exodus” from California

http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=36025&TB_iframe=1&width=640&height=607 using the data.12 The authors found, “as a general rule, Californians have tended to flee high taxes for low ones.” Thus, California, a state with a similar tax climate to Minnesota but very different weather, is experiencing similar migration patterns.

Big question there: is Minnesota becoming a cold California, or is Cali becoming a cold Minnesota?

It’s Everywhere: It’s on page 11 of the report (I said go read it, dammit), but I’ll show it to you here:

Courtesy the Center of the American Experiment.

Look at all of your high-tax “progressive” cesspools – New England, New York, Jersey, California? Warm, cold, old and stodgy or young and full of “creative class” hypstrz – they’re all hemorraging people.

It’s The Young Workers, Stupid: The fifth conclusion? Younger workers in their prime earning years are not moving to Minnesota:

The people considering a move tend to be younger and looking for better jobs and economic opportunities. Table 1 [on page 3 of the report]shows a steady decline in the average size of the households moving to Minnesota, dropping from households with 1.94 exemptions per return in 1996 to 1.75 in 2010. This drop suggests that fewer families are choosing to make Minnesota their home.

We’re getting an influx of college students and lonely drifters. Families in their peak earning years? Not so much.

The conclusion? The CAX puts it diplomatically:

The data reviewed in this report show first and foremost that Minnesota is consistently losing the battle to attract people and income to the state. Year after year the state on net loses thousands of people and undreds of millions of dollars. Regardless of how large the loss is, it is a loss which demonstrates Minnesota is not competing well with the rest of the country. That’s a fact that should be worrisome to every Minnesotan.

I don’t need to be diplomatic; the data show us that tough economies and high taxes didn’t even mix in the 2000s, when we had a government that was split between bobbleheaded spendthrift DFLers and responsible Republicans, and we held onto sanity by our fingernails.

Today? Anecdotally?

I can’t tell you the number of middle-class, hard-working, tax-paying people I know who’ve told me to pencil them in for anything happening more than 6-12 months out; they’re looking to move someplace where they aren’t forced to be happy to pay their hard-earned income for a Minnesota that just gets worse and worse.

Russian mobster buys $100M in Apple stock.

In 2015, look for Apple to release “iBurner”, the first intentionally-disposable iPhone.

To: GOP Senators Thst voted for the DFL’s Cash Grab
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re: Your vote

Take a Mulligan.

ASAP. Plead diminished capacity if you need to.

That is all.

Answering spam emails:

From: Carl Catlin <ccatlin[redacted]@yahoo.com>

To: [Me]

Sent: Monday, April 29, 2013 2:56 PM

Subject: Philippines Trip(Sad News)……..Carl Catlin

Just hoping this email has reached you well, I’m sorry for this emergency and for not informing you about my urgent trip to Manila, Philippines but I just have to let you know my present predicament.

Everything was fine until I was attacked on my way back to the hotel, I wasn’t hurt but I lost my money, bank cards, mobile phone and my bag in the course of this attack. Immediately contacted my bank in order to block my cards and also made a report at the nearest police station.

I’ve been to the embassy and they are helping me with my documentation so i can fly out but I’m urgently in need of some money to pay for my hotel bills and my flight ticket home, will definitely REFUND as soon as back home .

Kindly let me know if you would be able to help me out so I can forward you the details required for a wire transfer.

Waiting to hear back from you..

Sincerely,

Carl

My response:

Carl,

Bubbie!  Sorry to hear about your predicament.

I’d love to help, since I just know you’re good for the money.

Sorry to say, though, that we’re birds of a feather as always.  I, too, am in the Philippines, sightseeing near Manila, in the city of Las Piñas.  And I, too, was waylaid by ruffians.   Six of them.

I killed the first five – two with my bare hands.  The six, I let go, as is – as you’re well aware, my old friend – my wont.

As the sixth ran away, a Philipino policeman walked up to me to take the report.  As the sixth yegg ran toward the horizon, the policeman asked me if I was up for a wager; could I hit the blackguard?

Well, the ne’er-do-well was nearly 300 yards away, and I had a little .380 pistol, but you know how I like a bet – and what happens in Las Piñas stays in Las Piñas!  So I went all-in – all the money I had.

Well, I choked, and it took me two shots to fell the miscreant.  But a bet is a bet.

So I’m afraid I’m not only a tad short at the moment, but in the same boat you are.

Sorry about that.  Drat the luck!

Your friend,

Mitch

I’m dying to see the response.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

The federal government spent $890,000 on maintenance fees for bank accounts with no money in them. Watchdog groups say the government should close the accounts faster. They’re missing the point.

Suppose Congress gives Dog Gone a $500,000 grant to study how assault weapons exacerbate global warming. The government opens an account to hold the funds, Dog Gone receives period draws until the money is spent, and afterwards, the government audits the expenditures to make sure they were proper for grant funds. If not, Dog Gone must repay the money – so naturally, the account must be held open for her to pay the money into. If it takes a few years to complete the audit, the government pays fees to maintain an empty account.

The underlying premise is the government should give grants in the first place. Reject the premise. Don’t give her the grant. Then there would be no account to pay maintenance fee on. We’d save far more than the million in maintenance fees.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Talk about attacking symptoms…

It was ten years ago yesterday that the Minnesota State Senate passed the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, making Minnesota a “Shall Issue” state.

I was there, back during this blog’s infancy.  I sat in the gallery in the Senate and watched as the Metro DFL did what they always do on Second Amendment issues; lie as fast as they can.  I cringed a little as the Senate Metrocrat DFLers came back from recess theatrically donning flak jackets to express the fear that was really their only message.

That and crushing, embarassing, vindictive provincial ignorance; I cringed more when I tried to talk with the Code Pinkos that showed up.  The Women Who Lunch With Style made quite an impression with the media, who gave them slavish coverage, then as now – but they were embarrassingly ignorant about the law involved‘  No, I do mean ignorant.

And the media was as in the bag for the orcs then as they are today; indeed, today the connection is financial as well as ideological, with the MinnPost being the recipient of big money from the anti-gun-zealot Joyce Foundation .

The Metrocrat orcs predicted blood in the streets; Wes “The Original Lying Sack of Garbage” Skoglund claimed he feared being stalked by “gang-bangers with carry permits”, apparently having access to a list of gang-bangers who had clean criminal records who felt the need to pay $100 and get training to use the guns they already have illegally.

They also predicted maybe 90,000 Minnesotans would get permits eventually.

Today the total is somewhere over 140,000.  And in ten years, there’s been one unjustifiable homicide by a post-2003 carry permit holder, a rate of .036/100,00, as opposed to the state’s rate of around 1.4/100,000; Minnesota carry permittees are roughly 40 times safer than the average Minnesotan.

As in the 39 other shall issue states, the streets didn’t run red with blood.  Indeed, not much happened; nearly no murders, exactly two justifiable self-defense shootings (which are not “good” things, but certainly beat the alternative), this one and this one.

After ten years, the Minnesota Citizens Personal Protection Act’s legacy is this:

• Reduced violence: Minnesota’s murder rate is down nearly half since 2003; violent crime in general, nearly 15%.  That’s not entirely the responsibility of the MPPA – but it’s the exact opposite of what the DFL-Media noise machine warned us about.
• Grassroots Matter:  The battle to pass the MPPA mobilized a huge army that represents a silent majority; people on both sides of the aisle, or no side, who care about human rights and civil liberties enough to get involved in an abstruse issue, and donate to it heavily with time, treasure and energy.  The victory of the MPPA – from no traction at all to victory between 1995 and 2003 – was among the great bits of genuine grassroots politics in Minnesota history.
• The Road Goes On Forever: And remember – always, remember – the way The People, regular workadaddy, hugamommy schlumps with day jobs and mid-size late-model used cars, dwelling far behind the fashion curve and well outside NPR’s target market demos, humiliated the elite of the DFL, Representatives Paymar and Martens and Hausman and Senator Ron “I Went To Harvard” Latz, providing conservatives one of precious few whiffs of victory in a dismal session, splitting the DFL into two, providing one of the most priceless images of the year; a helpless hapless extremist faux-elite metrocrat orc declaring majority to support to a crowd where the good guys outnumbered them 40:1.  Every time.

The troops at GOCRA – helped, this year, by the NRA – won the victory ten years ago, and continue to defend your human right to protect your self, your family, your property and your democracy today.  If you’re not a GOCRA member and you care about protecting your human right of self-defense, please sign up now.

To the orcs?  Keep fearmongering, Representatives Paymar and Hausman.  Keep lying, Representative Martens and County Attorney Backstrom; keep sucking the filthy toes of the heirs of Stalin and Pol Pot, Doug Grow.  We may be mere peasants, but we beat you ten years ago, we humiliated you this year, and we will always beat you.

To the good guys?  Thanks, and happy anniversary.

No news here; the Sequester, like every “school layoff” in every city that isn’t Detroit, is basically the same as everyone’s old alcoholic significant other threatening to kill themselves; an abusive, co-dependent way of browbeating and bullying people into giving in.   The “cuts” – really a whiz-in-the-wind reduction of an increase – are designed to gull the gullible and intimidate the weak and dependent.

The FAA Controller furloughs were a great example; the furloughs will save a fraction of the FAA’s consulting budget, or travel budget, or any number of other expendables that don’t directly affect the agency’s mission.

But squeezing the flying public shows the peasants who’s boss.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Local community celebrations suffer from Obama Administration tax-hike hostage-taking: “Give us the money or the fly-boys get it.”

Note this quote: “Maj. Darrick Lee, spokesman for the Thunderbirds, said a typical season averages about $9.75 million and the Air Force needs to focus its resources now on its mission in Afghanistan.”

Seriously? We’re cutting back airshows all the sudden because we need a lousy $10 million to fight the war in Afghanistan? Dude, we spend that every hour over there and there’s no end in sight.

An entire season of Air Force goodwill (and recruitment advertising) that also directly boosts local economies costs about the same as two Obama vacations; a grant to redesign Southwest Canyon Road in Beaverton, Oregon; or the missing first payment on bankrupt car maker Fisker’s federal Green Energy subsidy loan.

I could understand cutting airshows if the federal government suddenly got Libertarian Fever and cut airshows IN ADDITION to these other boondoggles . . . but the administration shows no sign of fiscal prudence, only political punishment. Longer lines at airport security, laying off air traffic controllers, grounding military flying teams: these are directly aimed at making life miserable for ordinary taxpayers who haven’t demanded higher taxes quickly enough, so they must be punished for it.

Hostage-taking used to be a gangster tactic, now it’s Democrat standard operating procedure. That should tell us something.

Joe Doakes

Spare the rod, spoil the taxpayers.

The New York Times – the apogee of American journalism, yessirreebob – has reported that a government program started under the Clinton Administration to settle discrimination claims by black farmers in dealings with the Agriculture Department was rife with fraud.

It started out as a small, measured payout.   The Justice Department thought it might wind up costing less than they’d feared.

They were wrong.

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.

The deal, several current and former government officials said, was fashioned in White House meetings despite the vehement objections — until now undisclosed — of career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination. What is more, some protested, the template for the deal — the $50,000 payouts to black farmers — had proved a magnet for fraud.

“I think a lot of people were disappointed,” said J. Michael Kelly, who retired last year as the Agriculture Department’s associate general counsel. “You can’t spend a lot of years trying to defend those cases honestly, then have the tables turned on you and not question the wisdom of settling them in a broad sweep.”

You haven’t seen me say this often on this blog, but read the whole NYTimes piece.

And then ask yourself – where have you seen it before?

Oh, yeah – Andrew Breitbart covered it.

Two years ago.

And the paid leftymedia – led by Soros’ pet reporterettes at Media Matters – has spent the entire time since claming it was a symbol of conservative racism.

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 in from 1-3PM.   I’ll be talking with John Kern about what a really, really lousy idea all-day Kindergarten is.
• Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” from 1-3 tomorrow. Tune on in!

(All times Central)

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

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via UStream video and chat
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Put those Amy Winehouse records away.

Wherever you are, Duffy, take five.

Kelly Clarkson?  I love you, hon, but take a knee and listen up.

Nicky Minaj?  Lady Gaga?  Taylor Swift?  Take a seat.
(more…)

It’s a Doakes twofer today:

The Left was aching for the Boston Bombers to be White Males so they could lecture us that whole thing was Our Fault; but Chechnyan Muslims don’t quite fit the bill for that. Can’t blame Islamic terror, that was supposed to have ended when Barak The Slayer single-handedly killed Wicked Osama Bin Laden and then respectfully threw his body into the ocean, in accordance with newly discovered traditions of that desert religion.

But wait – the two boys didn’t act without reason. They were forced to blow up the Boston Marathon, they had no other way exercise their First Amendment Right to protest The War in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They’re not terrorists, they’re Code Pinkers!

And who started the war in Iraq, with his yellow cake lie, cowboy ways and headlong rush to war?

OMG, the Boston Marathon bombing really IS Bush’s fault!

Like Anthropogenic Global Warming – it’s a thesis that can never be found false, since all evidence that proves it false is teased into proving it.

The DFL Senate passed an education bill that includes all-day kindergarten, but eliminates proficiency testing to graduate from high school.

In other words, it made school worth less, but gave us more of it, for more money.

But Sen. Sean Nienow, R-Cambridge, criticized the bill for eliminating the current test high school students must pass to graduate.

“A student no longer has to pass a test, or get any score on a test, and a student doesn’t have to demonstrate proficiency to graduate. What does that mean? It means your diploma is meaningless,” Nienow said.

What is means is that the Mother State wants to start indoctrinating your kids full-time a year earlier (for now), and that “learning” isn’t really the objective, and that if you want your kids to by anything but duckspeak-chanting little drones (especially if you live in Minneapolis, Saint Paul or Duluth), you need to get them out of The System.

Wonder why Obama’s gun grab legislation tanked – and, beyond that, why Obama quietly tried to appropriate the “guards in schools” idea for himself?

Because the American public – the part west of the Hudson and east of the Sierra Madre, anyway – is closer to the NRA than they are to Obama:

After the NRA school-guard strategy was roundly denounced as outright crazy by the pundits, — the editors of theNew York Times called it “delusional, almost deranged” — President Obama came out with … aproposal for armed guards in schools. It is no small feat for an out-of-touch, on-the-ropes organization to get the president to basically endorse its signature policy proposal at a time of national debate.

But, then again, it turned out that 55% of Americans supported the NRA proposal. Turns out, it was the people calling it crazy — like the editors of the New York Times— who were out of the mainstream.

Meanwhile, pundits denounced gun-rights activists who said that the right to bear arms is in part a protection against government tyranny. Only a crazed militia type could possibly believe that, right? Except that — go figure — 65% of Americans see gun rights as a protection against tyranny. And only 17% say they disagree. Once again, it’s the critics who appear to be out of the mainstream.

We Second Amendment Human Rights activists have always known this, of course.

We just have to keep coming back and proving it every few years.

And I suspect we always will.

…I voted Romney, and didn’t refudiate Sarah Palin’s rhetoric, people inflamed with ideological vitriol would wander the streets inflicting violence.

And they were right.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In 1996, the Minnesota Supreme Court adopted the requirement that every lawyer licensed in Minnesota periodically attend Continuing Legal Education classes on Elimination of Bias. It’s been 15 years. Has any progress been made? What measurement is used to determine the extent to which bias has been eliminated from the legal profession? Donald Rumsfeld, pondering the problem of Middle East terrorists, famously asked: “Are we killing them faster than we’re creating them?” What metric is the Supreme Court using to measure reduction in bias in the legal profession?

In other words, how will we know when we’ve won? And if, as I strongly suspect, the answer is “it never will be possible to eliminate bias in the legal profession,” then aren’t we wasting a lot of time and money chasing unicorn dreams? The practice of law is tough enough these days, and the cost of days off to sit in class plus the fees for the classes themselves are passed along to the customers along with rent, taxes and all other overhead. And if it turns out the insulting, humiliating and degrading classes are making lawyers MORE biased rather than less . . . .

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Given the record of most government programs – a war on poverty that made us poorer, urban renewal that made cities crappier, education spending hikes that are followed by stupider students – it doesn’t seem unreasonable.

MPR News asked yesterday:

How do you know when the news you read is true?

That one’s easy; I don’t.

Everything you read or hear or watch on the news is subject first and foremost to…

1. The facts that are available to the reporter at the time they have to produce the report.  In late-breaking news about spectacular events, these facts are very often wrong.   After that comes…
2. …the reporters’ deadlines.  Especially in broadcast media, especially Cable TV with its 24 hour cycle; they’ve gotta put something on the air.  So often as not they’ll report what they have, whether it’s complete or reliable or not.   After that comes…
3. …the institutional bias of the news organization.  Now, as I’ve written in the past, I don’t necessarily think that all news media start out in the morning in a conference room with an editor exhorting the staff to “go out there and win one for the Democrats!”, except at the MinnPost, which seems to have taken over the Minnesoros Independent’s niche.  But I think it’s fairly clear that most reporters’ personal backgrounds, educations, social networks and frames of reference are largely left of the proverbial center, and that at the very least confirmation bias is as much a factor in reporting the news as it is among consumers.

At the risk of sounding provincial, I trust Euro media more;  they’re at least honest about their political biases.  You read the Frankfurter Allgemeine for a center-right take (by European standards), and Die Zeit for a perspective from the left, and make up your own mind.  European media dispenses with the fiction of objectivity, and for that I trust them more.

Dina Temple-Raston’s report re the Boston Marathon Bombings the other day was a classic example:  before the dust had settled, the first words out of her (and NPR’s) mouths in re possible suspects were that the FBI was looking at “right-wing extremists” because it was Tax Day, and Hitler’s birthday, when they worry about right-wing attacks on government and foreigners.

Now, I’ll take Temple-Raston at her word that she reported something someone in the FBI said about the subject at some point.  And given deadlines and the urgency of the story, she and NPR had to put something on the air.

The problem is that Temple-Raston’s report would make someone who doesn’t pay much attention – or who implicitly trusts NPR news – think that there IS an actual pattern of “right-wing” violence of any kind, to say nothing of spectacular attacks like Boston, associated with Tax Day, or that there’s some pattern of “right-wing” violence against foreigners in the US.

Neither is the case.

It’d have been like a news organization reporting the Catholic church’s sex scandals going to great pains to say “the FBI wants to rule out the gay community first”, when there had been no behavior that would have led anyone to casually conclude that the gay community was ever involved.

It would have been a made-up association; a symptom of systematic bias.

Just like “right wing violence on Tax Day”.

And yet NPR floated it as “news” until facts caught up with them.

So as with all news, I distrust but verify.

Businessman Scott Honour threw his hat into the ring for governor yesterday.

“I love Minnesota. But I fear that our state is headed in the wrong direction, and under the wrong leadership. I know that the same people with the same political resumes are not going to solve our problems,” Honour said in a mass email. Honour has not run for any major political office before in Minnesota and several Republicans have said they may be interesting in challenging Dayton as well.

As soon as Honour made the announcement, Carrie Lucking tweeted:

I think Honour might have more yachts than Romney, judging by the pics. Potential slogan: Yachts for MN! ow.ly/i/1XQ6P

— Carrie Lucking (@CarrieLucking) April 24, 2013

and…

I’m surprised Honour doesn’t have a Scrooge McDuck money pool in the back yard.

— Carrie Lucking (@CarrieLucking) April 24, 2013

and…

I imagine Honour is against asking the rich…er, I mean him…to pay their/his fair share.

— Carrie Lucking (@CarrieLucking) April 24, 2013

Lucking, of course, is Executive Assistant Director of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, an organization largely bankrolled by a Rockefeller heiress, largely launched to aid the career of a feckless trust-fund baby; the organization is attacking a guy who actually earned his money, unlike any of Lucking’s benefactors.

And so it’s on to another campaign battling for the low-information voter.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

And therefore, we should take away firearms from White people so they don’t kill themselves; and take away firearms from Black people so they don’t kill each other. Solving two problems with one solution – brilliant!

Joe Doakes

How much easier would life be if we just let government do our thinking for us?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

John Kerry, Secretary of State, offers to withdraw United States missile defense batteries from the Far East, if China will agree to restrain North Korea from launching nukes at us.

We’re outsourcing the defense of our nation to China.  Well, why not?  They’re already our biggest creditor.  What could possibly go wrong?

Joe Doakes

Como Park.

On the one hand, that was a common tactic in the colonial era; turn one of the tribes in an area of your interest against the other, thereby neutralizing everyone and keeping order.

On the other hand, that only worked when you had some power and influence; the Danes could never get the Sikhs to turn against the Hindi to colonize India; the British could.

And we’re becoming more like Denmark, only deeper in debt.

Public opinion is driven by mass caprice.  When the subject is “American Idol”, that’s fairly harmless (and where the hell is Ruben Studdard?).

When the subject is our civil liberties – especially the ones that are less popular with the coastal media “elites” that would set the popular tone? Less so.

P.J. O’Rourke, many of you know, is a conservative humorist and, as such, one of the great public intellectuals of the past forty years.  In his classic A Parliament of Whores  – which is rapidly pushing 25 years old and in a just world would be required reading in every high school civics class – O’Rourke summed up the capriciousness of democracy, defending the contrarian idea that our democracy is, in fact, protected by the most counterintuitively autocratic institution of them all, the Supreme Court.

The SCOTUS – and the Constitution that the SCOTUS is supposed to protect – is that way because it’s intended to be immune from the vagaries of public opinion.

Here’s the money quote from Parliament (with emphasis added):

“In the final D-day invasion results, Normandy was a decisive winner, with 54% of the votes, while 43% of American soldiers thought we should re-invade North Africa and only 4% favored a massive land, sea and air attack on the folks back home.” There wouldn’t even be any democracy to defend if our every national whim were put into law. We’d sacrifice the whole Constitution for those lost kids on milk cartons one week, and the next week we’d toss the Rights of Man out the window to help victims of date rape.

After every crisis large and small – drug abuse, naughty words in music lyrics, gay marriage, food poisoning, people opposing gay marriage, mass murder – there are, inevitably, calls to reconsider whether freedom is really all that much more important than public safety.

And always, always, there’s someone out there willing to profit politically from those calls.

Especially when there are children involved.  Propose cutting welfare?  “Children will starve!”.  Propose paring back teachers union benefits or pensions? “Kids will turn stupid.  Invade Iraz?  The anti-war movement ten years ago made a grab for “absolute moral authority” by parading Cindy Sheehan in front of the cameras, after she lost her child (an adult who’d volunteered for the Army) in Iraq.  And it worked – until Sheehan went batspittle crazy and started making Mike Malloy look pretty well-balanced.

Anyway – this impulse is never as powerful as after an ugly mass shooting – and Sandy Hook, in which a deranged “adult” targeted children because they were children, was the ugliest since the Stockton Massacre in 1988.

There’s no question about it; losing a child is the most awful thing a parent can experience.     It strikes a chord in just about every parent, one way or the other.  It’s impossible for a parent not to feel something way beyond sympathy.  Some respond “I have to protect my children”.

Others respond “someone’s gotta protect my children”.

A group of the Newtown/Sandy Hook parents were flown to Washington last week, their every motion from leaving their homes to getting on Air Force One to arriving at the White House to listening to President Obama’s angry rant over the failure of his bill recorded in minute detail.  (It’s worth noting that it was only the right Sandy Hook parents were invited – and that for some reason no parents of black kids murdered in Chicago showed up)

They believed, I’m sure, very sincerely that the Senate’s bill – which would not have impeded their kids’ murderer in the least – was the right response to their childrens’ deaths.

But the prominence they got in the media – from a President who was desperate to pass his bill in the Senate, to get his vote in the House to try to use guns as leverage in swing districts in 2014, and to draw attention away from debt, deficit, spending, taxes, an ongoing war and the gathering disaster that is Obamacare?  That was pure, distilled cynicism.

Twin Cities talk show host Bob Davis – morning guy at AM1130, which is a cheap copy of AM1280, and a guy who gave me my first shot at trying talk radio again, ten years ago last January when I filled in for him for an evening on his old KSTP-AM night-side show – has taken a ton of flak for his remarks about the exploitation of the Sandy Hook parents and their grief (and especially other parents’ fear):

I have something I want to say to the victims of Newtown or any other shooting, I don’t care if it’s here in Minneapolis or anyplace else: Just because a bad thing happened to you doesn’t mean that you get to put a king in charge of my life. I’m sorry that you suffered a tragedy, but you know what? Deal with it, and don’t force me to lose my liberty, which is a greater tragedy than your loss.

I’m sick and tired of seeing these victims trotted out, given rides on Air Force One, hauled into the Senate well, and everyone is … terrified of these victims. I would stand in front of them and tell them, ‘Go to hell.’

The comment has gotten the usual manufactured outrage by the national leftymedia, and the inevitable chest-thumping “come here and say that!“.

The responses – on both sides, really – miss two key points:

• Davis is fighting cynicism – the Administration’s exploitation of the parents – with cynicism; major-market radio lives by the dictum “all publicity is good publicity”.  Wanna picket the station?  Send hate mail?  Burn Davis and Emmer in effigy in front of the TV cameras?  The folks at the station say “Great, go for it!”. The station can’t pay for publicity like this.  (No, literally – they can’t.  KTCN’s owner Clear Channel is freaking broke).
• Davis is right – but is focused on the wrong people.

The parents?  Yep, they’re awash in grief.  They’re trying to bring some meaning to a really, really horrible loss.  I sympathize with them.

Every parent worthy of the title does.

And the people who booked them on Air Force One, and who made sure they got prominent placement (some might say “overkill”) in the media, and who made sure they were staring down from the gallery at the Senators as they voted on the President’s bill, which would have been meaningless in fighting crime, would have made law-abiding gun owners more vulnerable to confiscation, and which was never intended to do anything but increase the Democrat party’s fortunes in 2014?

Them?

They can go to hell, all right.

…or for that matter anyone else associated, however spuriously, with the American Right, do you think this would have ever been written?

…that, for some reason, isn’t getting saturation media coverage.

An attempted mugging in a school parking lot in Detroit after hours was thwarted when one of the intended victims, a 70-year-old girls’ basketball coach, fought back with a handgun:

Police sources say the coach was walking the two girls to their cars when two men allegedly approached and one pulled out a gun and grabbed him by his chain necklace. The coach then pulled out his gun and shot both of them, according to sources.

One of the attackers was found dead in the median on Lafayette Boulevard, and the other was taken to a local hospital, according to police sources. We’ve learned that both of the men had attended the high school, and one had been recently expelled.

But remember; according to the left – experts on self-defense that they are – not only is arming teachers a bad idea, but concealed carry never helped thwart a crime.

They said that if I voted for Mitt Romney, our institutions would become overwhelmed with caustic sexism.

And they were right!

West Virginia teen Jared Marcum, who was arrested for wearing a pro-Second-Amendment T-shirt to school came back with 100 of his closest friends:

Jared, a student at Logan Middle School, was arrested and suspended Thursday after he was pulled from a cafeteria line and told to remove or turn his shirt inside-out an order he refused.

“I’m still confused, thoroughly confused,” he told a local TV station. “The school didn’t even make a statement to the news agencies, much less myself.”

The schools did what they always do; demand unthinking conformity and enforce it with unreasonable fury – a day’s suspension and an arrest.

Marcum points out that while he was arrested for being disorderly, the evidence tells another story:

School officials told the eighth-grader Monday that his one-day suspension was appropriate because he was being disruptive.

Mr. White said Jared was exercising his right to free speech and did not disrupt anything.

Video evidence in the case, Mr. White said, indicates that the situation in the cafeteria deteriorated when a teacher raised his voice while confronting Jared. Other students jumped up on benches and began chanting Jared’s name.

“I think the disruption came from the teacher,” Mr. White said.

Can’t wait for that video to get released on Youtube.

Marcum went back to school along with 100 fellow students who also wore Second Amendment t-shirts paid for by a local pro-human-rights group.

The more the merrier, I say.

One of the left’s favorite chanting points this past few months has been that, supposedly, Minnesota’s job growth under an all-Democrat regime has outstripped that of newly-Republican Wisconsin.

Conservatives responded that Wisconsin was shaking off the after-effects of decades of “progressive” incompetence, and would take a while, while in the meantime Minnesota was still coasting on having had ten years of one combination of GOP governor or legislature or another.

Well, the coasting’s stopped:

There was a “substantial vacation” in U.S. entrepreneurial activity last year—but nowhere was it as pronounced as in Minnesota.
That’s according to The Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, a report compiled by the Kansas City, Missouri-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The study essentially defines entrepreneurial activity as being tied to the launch of new businesses, and it is meant to serve as an indicator of business-creation activity across the United States.
The report found that there was a national lull in entrepreneurship in 2012, when roughly 514,000 entrepreneurs opened new businesses each month, down from 543,000 in 2011.
The report defines entrepreneurial activity based on how many adults per 100,000 residents started a new business each month during the year. Minnesota fared the worst, with only about 150 out of 100,000 residents opening businesses on a monthly basis.

Minnesota has always been a difficult place to start a business.

Run a Fortune 500?  That’s a whole ‘nother thing – although ask yourselves how many Fortune 500s based in the Twin Cities are building non-retail operations in the state these days.

But how about Wisconsin?

This MPR story a few months back shows that while Wisconsin is lagging, a big part of the reason is that the Badgers are overcoming so much negative intertia from when the Democrats had full reign over the place.