No, that’s not (just) the Gophers’ ranking in Big 10 football.

It’s the Mercatus Center (and George Mason U’s) assessment of Minnesota’s relative level of freedom among the fifty states:

The state’s taxes are higher than average, but otherwise the state’s fiscal policy does not deviate much from the norm. Minnesota spends more than average on parks and public welfare. Selective sales taxes (not including alcohol, tobacco, and utility taxes) and individual income taxes stand out as particularly high.

On most regulatory policies Minnesota fits comfortably into the middle range of the states, but the state does stand out in a favorable manner for the quality of its court system and for miscellaneous regulations—mostly due to lack of a certificate-of-need (CON) law. On the other hand, Minnesota scores poorly on health insurance and labor market freedoms. Mandated benefits add 53.7 percent to the cost of a policy without mandated coverages, and the state requires both rate bands and “prior approval” of new rates in both the small group and nongroup markets.

On both firearms and marijuana policies, Minnesota is quite a bit more regulated than the average state. The state is ripe for change in both areas.

And to those among you who will doubtlessly call Mercatus a conservative tool, here are their recommendations:

• Trim taxes and spending in [areas suggested earlier in report].
• Roll back health insurance mandates (for example, mandates for speech and hearing specialists, osteopathy, dietitians, occupational therapy, reconstructive surgery, port wine stain removal, ovarian cancer screening, infertility services, and Lyme disease treatment). Even having average health insurance mandates would have raised Minnesota four places on regulatory policy.
• Enact legal recognition of same-sex partnerships.

Cool widget in this study? If you believe that single-payer healthcare and gun control equal freedom, you can do your own map using your own criteria.

For for it.

As it happens, my fairly libertarian map (stressing personal, fiscal and regulatory freedom)…

…tracks pretty closely with the original.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minutes of meeting of Chief of Naval Operations and staff:

CNO: “You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have? ”

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Hint:  buy stock in armature companies.

To: Strib “Hot Dish Politics” Blog
From: Mitch Berg, long-time ex-subscriber
Re: Narrative

Hey,

This is a screenshot of the online Strib this morning: 

The Strib is devoting its usual vast space to whatever it is that advances the DFL’s narrative and undercuts the party’s opposition.  In this case, the non-story that a pro-marriage group compared their opposition’s propaganda effort to that of the Nazis.

I know.  Baaaaad marriage group.  Godwin Godwin Godwin.  No Nazis here.

The thing is, I’m scanning back through a decade and change of Strib coverage, looking for evidence of earnest tut-tutting about eight solid years of what was at one point the cultural left’s supreme intellectual statement, the “Bushitler” reference…

…and, mirabile dictu, I’m finding not a thing.

This comes, of course, at the end of a solid decade of clucking from the Strib editorial board about the need to “return civility (like we had when the DFL and the “Independent Republicans” were basically the same party with different hairdos) to politics”, wrapped up with constant badgering about the “toxic influence” of all the “vitriol” that the right-wing alt-media (and sure, maybe the left juuuuust a little, but mostly the right, according to the Strib, ignoring a decade and change of inconvenient fact) was making politics ugly and hateful and just not as fun for y’all as it was when Elmer Anderson and Wendell Anderson and Nick Coleman Senior painted each others toenails on the floor of the House Chamber.

And so a pro-traditional-marriage group has transgressed the narrative and compared the gay-marriage crowd with Josef Göbbels, and the Strib makes certain the left’s high-horse dudgeon is transmitted verbatim.

Because goodness knows the mainstream left has been so very, very scrupulous about being true to and literate about history in dragging Hitler references into the national conversation.

The thing is, there is a time and a place for invoking totalitarians.

There are legitimate comparisons between things we see today and things people saw 80-85 years ago in the streets of Germany; the drift of one side or the other to the extreme, the use of extremely martial rhetoric (“Wars” on this and that and the other group, designed to get one constituency or the other whipped up), the beating up boogeymen, the use of compliant media to serve as a regime’s praetorian guard…

…well, I’m getting ahead of myself, now.

Suffice to say, Star/Tribune, that your concern for civility and the historical sanctity of Hitler references (says me, mit meine Nebenfäche auf Deutsch und Geschichte, und die Jahre ich an diese Subjekte studiert, and you can look up exactly what that means on your way to learning the damn subject for real and not at the trite, Hollywood-via-Junior-High history level most Americans know it) is observed, its hypocrisy noted, and its sincerity mocked without mercy.

That is all.

Ten years ago, Colorado Springs University had a bit of a sexual assault problem.

Back in 2003, they legalized concealed carry for permitted adults on campus.

And what do you suppose happened?

Since then, according to Students for Concealed Carry, the number of forcible and non-forcible sexual assaults dropped sharply, falling 90 percent from a high in 2002 to a new low in 2008.

“This is a big surprise” said nobody who follows this issue, ever.

While Colorado Democrat Joe Salazar suggested that women could not be trusted to carry guns on campus because they might not know when they’re being raped, a young woman who was raped on campus because she was not allowed to carry a firearm, despite having a permit, has said otherwise.

Read the whole thing.  The rape survivor’s narrative digs at the idea of passive resistance, and even police presence, as legitimate deterrants to sexual assault.