Dems must smell their own blood in the water for next year; they’re frantically trying to attack the notion that tax cuts help create jobs…

…in the minds of those who don’t check the facts.

This one’s been popping up on Twitter lately:

State-Level Tax Cuts Don’t Boost Job Growth Study Says bit.ly/X1m24L #wiunion #wiright #p2b #inunion #nhpolitics #stribpol #topprog

— America United (@Progress2day) May 31, 2013

So I looked at the link.  It’s from “Think” Progress, which is always a good sign that you’re about to descend into the fever swamp.

And it says…:

The five states that implemented deep tax cuts during the 1990s experienced slower job growth over the next economic cycle than states that did not, and none of those states experienced income growth that exceeded inflation, CBPP found:

And what states were those?

The post doesn’t mention ’em.  You have to look at the fine print on the handy graph they included:

Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts and New York?

Five states that were pretty much boom economies throughout the 2000s before the crash (perhaps because of the tax cuts in the 90s)?   States that in most cases had very little room for job growth – before the crash (at which point the “study” conks out), anyway?

This is sort of like the Dems’ slur against Romney – the Massachusetts economy grew slower when he was Governor (because it was already pretty much steaming along at full bore)!

Distrust, but verify.  Then, almost invariably, distrust some more.

The Chicago Sun-Times lays off its entire photo staff.

It’s a start.

Less than half of the wealth lost in the recession has come back in the “recovery”:

From the peak of the boom to the bottom of the bust, households watched a total of $16 trillion in wealth disappear amid sinking stock prices and the rubble of the real estate market. Since then, Americans have only been able to recapture 45 percent of that amount on average, after adjusting for inflation and population growth, according to the report from the St. Louis Fed released Thursday.

In addition, the report showed most of the improvement was due to gains in the stock market, which primarily benefit wealthy families. That means the recovery for other households has been even weaker.

To the extent unemployment is down, it’s in part-time jobs.  The average hours worked per week has dropped in recent months.

No.  You are not better off than you were four years ago.

Remember:  the goal is to find someone who agrees with you 100% on principle. Not 99%; if they fall to 99, you throw them under the bus. Electability is not only irrelevant, it’s a sign that they *could* compromise! Impure!

And if they’ve ever held office, and have ever compromised with the other side (or anyone!) on any issue for whatever reason (which every elected official in history has had to do, either publicly or privately – because that is the roots of the term “politics”), that’s prima facie evidence of impurity. Shun!

And if you lose the primary to someone you only agree with 80% (which is a zero, really), or the general to a candidate you agree with 0% – well, it’s irrelevant, because 99=0, anyway, and you can spend the next 2-6 years telling all the other rubes how what bovine sheeple (?) they are, and how screwed we all are for not listening to you.

Which is the real goal.

Clear on this?

A chunk of the next generation thinks a president siccing the IRS on his opponents is juuuuuust fine:

Remember; they’re college kids. “Tomorrow’s leaders”.

We’re so screwed.

Sometimes the wrong people get hold of them, and do stupid things, and then all sorts of innocent people get hurt.

What Jim Graves Says:  “Even though his would-be rivalRep. Michele Bachmann has decided to forgo running for re-election, 6th District DFL candidate Jim Graves said he’s not looking to change his campaign’s message or strategy going forward.”

What I’ll Bet Dimes To Dollars Is Really Happening At Graves HQ:   “Dammit!  We spent big bucks for those doctored “crazy eyes” posters!  Now what the f**k are we going to plaster all over Anoka?”

To:  The Twin Cities “Independent” Alt-Media
From:  Mitch Berg, uppity peasant
Re:  Terminology

All,

“Lamestream Media” is so 2007.  For that matter, saying something “is so…” a year is so 1998.

The term we now use is “in the bag for the DFL”.

That is all.

Joe Doakes of Como Park emails:

Question: Can you conceive of any set of circumstances under which you would take up arms against your own government?

Your answer determines your stance on the Second Amendment.

If you answer “Yes,” then logically you should insist on being able to possess weapons at least as good as the police and military will be using to suppress your rebellion, including ugly rifles and standard-capacity magazines, else your resistance is doomed before it begins and you might as well change your answer to “No.”

Because if you answer “No” – if you would never rebel against your own government but instead are willing to put up with any intrusion, any oppression, confiscation of property and beatings and rape rooms and even death squads – then you have no need of the Second Amendment. Nor of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth . . . you’re a willing slave to whomever holds power at the moment, no different from the lowest peon in any Third World Country.

May 29th is Patrick Henry’s birthday. How many Americans today would echo his most famous line? Or even recall what it was?

The relationship between people and government is one of the big gulfs between liberals and conservatives.

Conservatives believe government is, like the people that run it, imperfect and not fundamentally good. It, like they, need to be kept on a short leash. The Second Amendment is the choker chain in that philosophy.

Liberals believe people are fundamentally good. Government, they believe, is people. QED, government is good; attacking government is bad, since its not only people, it’s the Will of The People. In their world, that Will can never get so corrupted that a judge can’t fix it.

And conservatives believe that if it never becomes so corrupted that a judge can’t fix it, you can thank the Second Amendment, along with the First and Tenth.

There are times when “Republican” just isn’t good enough.  We need conservative Republicans.

I thought I’d drop in this Erick Erickson piece from RedState below the jump as a mental apertif.

The conclusion?  It’s a Ben Domenech quote:

The Republican Party needs to understand that shrinking its policy aims to more modest solutions is not going to be rewarded by the electorate. Yes, they need to tailor their message better and find policy wedges which peel off chunks of the Democratic base (winning political strategy is built on an understanding that every drama needs a hero, a martyr, and a villain). But what’s truly essential is that the party leadership rid themselves of the notion that politeness, great hair, and reform for efficiency’s sake is a ballot box winner, and understand instead that politicians who can connect with the people and deliver on their limited government promises – not ones who back away from them under pressure – represent the path forward.

Especially worth remembering as the media tries its damnedest to pound the GOP back into the “great hair/nice suit/benign reformer” box…

…they jammed us into from 1976-2002.

Read the rest of it below the fold.
(more…)

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you live in a city.

And in that city there are 19 big companies.   They have everything that makes up a big enterprise – a CEO, executives, management, stores, labs, manufacturing plants – in your city.

And then the economy picks up.  And the 19 big companies hire more people, because a good economy means good sales, which means you gotta develop, build and sell all of those 19 sets of products!

So what’s the measure of the good economy?  “19”?  The number of big companies in your town?

We’ll come back to that.

Then, driven by high wages and the need to be competitive, the 19 companies outsource their manufacturing to the Philippines.  All the people in your town that earned a living from building things for those 19 companies are out of work.

How’s the economy measure?  Still a “19?”

And then the price of R and D rises, and the companies relocated their R&D labs to India and Singapore and Slovenia.  All your researchers are out of work.

Is your city still a “19?”

And then the economy tanks.  Stores scale back and lay people off, managers get RIFFed, the work force plunges.  Your town’s unemployment lines are getting longer and longer…

…but there are still 19 CEOs and corporate boards in town.  They administer companies that do their R&D and manufacturing elsewhere, and sell to whomever can afford the products through stores that are ever dingier and more understaffed.

But those 19 CEOs are still in your town.  So the town’s economy is healthy.  Right?

If you said “what, are you kidding?”, you might be a conservative.

If you didn’t, you probably think this piece by Dave Mindeman at MnpAct makes perfect sense.

North Dakota and Wisconsin taunt our borders with new signs that say – Our State Is OPEN For Business!

Everybody seems to be overlooking the basics here.

Sure taxes have some effect on business decisions….so do a lot of other things. Let’s look how Minnesota compares.

Now, let me make sure I reiterate; Mindeman is one of that tiny minority of Twin Cities leftybloggers that don’t need to be under police surveillance.

But when he says “let’s look how Minnesota compares”, what he really means is “let’s cherry-pick some non-sequiturs as absurd as the fictional list of company CEOs in my example above”.

No, literally:

The Facts: Minnesota has 19 Fortune 500 companies. Five are in the top 100. Fourteen in the top 300. United Health ranks the highest at #22. Minnesota ranks 17th in the nation for total GDP. We rank #14 in GDP per capita. Our current unemployment rate is 5.3%. Our high school graduation rate is 91.6% (National average is 85.4%) Persons with at least a Bachelor’s Degree – 31.8% (National Average – 28.2%) Median Housing Value – $201,400 (National Average – $186,200)

Let’s leave aside for a moment the factors that have nothing to do with measuring economic health (graduation rates are nice, and might – maybe – predict the future, economically.  Or they might not.  But if 100% of your town has masters degrees, but they’re all in Women’s Studies so the unemployment rate is 100%, what’s the real (hypothetical) measurement?);

We’ve got 19 Fortune 500 companies.  Bully.

Now – are those companies creating jobs in Minnesota?   Is 3M building new plants in Minnesota?   In fact, they literally exported one plant, with hundreds of jobs that used to be on the East Side of Saint Paul, to South Carolina.  And do you remember when they used to do R&D in the Twin Cities?  Welcome to Austin!

Medtronic?  Aren’t they contracting?  Well, here they are.  In Tennessee?  Not so much.

Boston Scientific?  Well, they’re not expanding anywhere – but it’s here in MN that they’re contracting fastest.

When was the last time Ecolab built a plant in Minnesota?  (Trick question; it was the seventies).

It’s not just big Fortune 500s, of course; Red Wing Shoes is eyeing a move.  Jostens is shifting jobs from Owatonna to Texas, the first of what will likely be many moves to lower-tax states.  We talked about the iron mill that’ll be built in North Dakota rather than the Range last week.

But we have 19 headquarters here.  Right?

Well, doy.  Of course we do.  If you’re a Fortune 500 CEO, where would you rather live – around Lake Minnetonka, the Guthrie, the Ordway, with Cathedral Hill restaurants and Galleria shoppping, or up in some holler in Mississippi, sweating through your underwear? It’s a no-brainer.  And that creates jobs – for management, for MBAs and upper management, sure – and their administrators and financial planners, and bartenders and caddies and nannies and gardeners, too.

But where are you going to build the plant, and create the jobs, especially for the people who aren’t management?  Who  don’t have the MBA and the BMW and the career spent networking among the corporate elite and the decades of experience in a field?

You did see the paragraph about all the “Minnesota” companies building plants elsewhere, right?

Mindeman:

So, how do we compare with our neighbors?

Vs. North Dakota: Sure North Dakota has a very low unemployment rate. A big surplus. And most of all an oil boom. But North Dakota doesn’t have a single company in the state on the Fortune 500 list.  Not one single business.

Remember that next time you run into an unemployed Ford Plant worker; “hey, you’ve got no job, but at least we’ve got lots of headquarters here!”.

Of course Minnesota has the Fortune 500s.  Minnesota benefitted from what mattered to people, and companies, when population patterns were largely set, back in the 1800s and early 1900s;  proximity to resources, plus water, rail and eventually road communication, which led to an urban center; this center became the center the upper-midwest region, the part of the country west of Chicago and north of Omaha and Saint Louis and east of Denver.   The era when the big Fortune 500s we currently have were largely formed.  An  era that, according to some thinkers on the subject, is on its tail end, and will be over someday soon.

In total GDP, North Dakota ranks 50th out of 51 US economies – and although they do better in per capita rank (20th); of what value is a low GDP with a total population that would fit into Hennepin County?

Leaving aside that Mindeman brushes aside an amazing statistical anomaly – a state that was poor, with a low, agriculture-related GDP fifteen years ago, that is now batting thirty spaces above its weight, in league with the big, inflation-adjusted coastal economies – like it’s no big thing, he gets the real question backwards.

What could Hennepin County – whose unemployment and crime lead the state, whose schools are among the worst in the state, whose achievement gap is a state disgrace, and whose major city is rapidly fulfilling Joel Kotkin’s predictions of the obsolescence of the big central city – do if they used their resources, their inherent dynamism and their talents as wisely as North Dakota has?

North Dakota may be having an economic “boom”, [Why the scare quotes, Dave?  It’s a boom.  No bones about it!] but why would any business consider a major move to a state that has a total market of about 800,000 people and a GDP that is about 1/8 of Minnesota’s? Really?

So many problems with that statement.  So many confirmations that DFLers just don’t get economics.  Where to start?

Mindeman is reliably imprecise when has asks “why would any business” move to North Dakota.

Any business?

Best Buy?  3M?  Starkey Hearing?  They’re not going to move to North Dakota.  What’d be the point?

You want to start a trucking company?  You’ll be making money hand over fist.  A machine shop in Minot?  You’ll be working three shifts seven days a week the moment you open your doors.  A house-cleaning service?  Accounting firm?  Security company?  Contract law firm?  Gas station?  Hotel?  You’ll have more business than you can handle.

Mindeman runs through all the neighboring states – focusing especially on the relative dearth of Fortune 500s in Iowa and the Dakotas – and asks:

Again, is that the type of market that can attract major business?

Why the obsession with “major” businesses?

The “Fortune 500” is an arbitrary set of companies (or was – it hasn’t actually been published in ten years), set by the editorial staff of a magazine.  It focuses, by definition, on the 500 biggest companies, in terms of sales, profits, assets, market value, and employees.

Not growth.  Not innovation.  Just sheer size.

Are these companies the major sources of American economic dynamism?  Of innovation, strength, or even new hiring?  No.  They are not.  Small business is.

Sure there are plenty of people moving out of Minnesota and heading south, but that has been a weather trend that has been going on for decades. Our population is holding better than any of the states that border us.

Another factoid that Mindeman sails past like a mile marker on 94 headed west for good.

Why have people been leaving for decades?  Why is Minnesota on the cusp of losing a Congressional seat?

If you think it’s the weather – the Dakotas are growing.

Let’s put the question this way; if you’re a financial researcher with an MBA, your best shot at a job is in one of the big metro areas, with a big company.  Ditto if you work in political non-profits – you go where the politics are.  Big cities.

But if you’re a person with a high school education, maybe with a child to support and some bills to pay, which state would you rather be in right now – North Dakota or Minnesota?

Republican talking points are only so much hot air.

Minnesota’s quality of life is thriving and we are the Midwest model for business.

That’s what the facts say.

And maybe in a future post Mindeman will explain exactly why, in terms other than “CEOs per acre”.

Maybe.

Good Politico profile on CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson, the one reporter in all of mainstream media who’ll actually confront Obama.

I loved this bit here (emphasis added):

Attkisson is a dogged reporter, driven by a strong skepticism of government. Producers at CBS News once nicknamed her “Pit Bull,” a source said, because she gets on a story and won’t let go. But that is seen as both a strength and a weakness. Her drive can produce great journalism, but it can also cause her to push stories to the point that colleagues — especially those of a more progressive bent — suspect a political agenda.

Didja catch that?  Doing what was one called a journalist’s “Job”, reporting on government, is now evidence of an agenda.

Anyway, it’s worth a read.

And it’s worth wondering – what if the Twin Cities had a reporter like this?  One that cared more about reporting news than being accepted by the Twin Cities’ “elites?”  Other than Tom Hauser, I mean?

After eight years in office, Michele Bachmann is retiring from Congress:

A few questions for the audience:

Who Is Emanuelle Goldstein?: Extremists like the MNDFL has become need enemies.  The Minnesota Left will need to invent a new bete noir, someone on which to focus all their  insecurity and hatred, to keep them motivated.  Bachmann has served this role for over a decade and a half, between her Congressional, State Senate and educational organizing careers.  Bachmann bedeviled the local left by seeming to thrive on their hatred, turning it back on them with a wink and a smile and a dismissive quip.  So who does the MNDFL’s depraved, insane fringe pick as their new Demon?

Next?:  The Sixth is one of the few districts in the state with a deep bench of solid, polished GOP contenders.  Who should run to replace Michele?

Dead Air?:  With Michele Bachmann out of public life, what will Jack Tomczak talk about?

(I’m a kidder.  I kid.  I love Jack and Ben’s show.  But still…)

Tarry Not:   Does Tarryl Clark already have her U-Haul loaded up, or what?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Rogue IRS Agents targeted conservatives.

Rogue low-level AFT agents in Phoenix ran machine guns to Mexican drug lords.

What does it say about the leadership, when low-level employees feel emboldened to break the law while on the clock?

Best case scenario:  When the cat’s away, the mice will play.  It could be the underlings ran amuck from lack of leadership.

Worst case scenario:  There’s a new sheriff in town.  It could be the underlings did exactly as they were told.

Joe Doakes

Why, it’s almost like they’re having a big party over there.

Who coulda seen this coming?

Representative Michael Paymar got an op-ed placed in the PiPress last week.  He used the space to complain about the way the session turned out for his gun control agenda.

Now, as I noted a few weeks back, Paymar has settled into the legacy of Wes Skogland – who I once nicknamed “Lying Sack of Garbage” for his facility and fluency at lying about guns, gun laws, and the law-abiding gun owner.

And this op-ed is no exception.

The legislative session concluded, sadly, with very little progress on preventing gun violence.

Well, no.

The murder rate in Minnesota – with and without guns – has plunged over the past 20 years, and especially the past ten, as Minnesota’s gun laws “liberalized”.  Minnesota is a much safer place today than it was in 1993.

That’s progress!

But that’s not the kind of progress Skoglund…um, Paymar – wants.

So what did Paymar want?  And what was the purpose of this Op Ed?

It’s simple:  to deceive the people – especially the low-information voters the DFL depends on.

The Magic Disappearing Months:   His first complaint is that his raft of bills just didn’t get enough time:

I’m disappointed that legislators didn’t have an opportunity to vote, or even debate, sensible gun control measures like background checks.

Well, yes.  They did.

The DFL-controlled legislature spent endless weeks debating gun control bills in committee.  They started in late January, and ran into April.  The DFL launched nearly a dozen gun bills – everything from background checks to re-jiggering the concealed carry law to confiscating guns with magazines larger than seven rounds.  There were many hearings.

Paymar just didn’t like what he heard.  Minnesotans turned out in force against his agenda.

It was a show of resolution even the DFL couldn’t ignore.

The real debate – the one in Minnesota’s homes, streets, businesses, VFWs – has been held, and resolved.  The DFL lost.

“Look At My Bloody Shirt!”:  Paymar next tries to turn to numbers – and, again, lies about ’em:

It is not surprising the public is cynical about politicians and political parties. Every year, 12,000 people die from firearm homicides and 18,000 more from firearm suicides, and yet, our elected officials continue to abdicate their responsibilities.

Again – according to what?

The firearm murder rate, nationwide and in Minnesota, is a fraction of what it was when Michael Paymar’s talking points were written in the eighties.

Paymar: 

After the unimaginable massacre of 20 children at Sandy Hook and the shootings at Accent Signage in Minneapolis, a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, a movie theatre in Aurora Colorado, a political gathering in Arizona, a college campus in Virginia, a high school in Colorado, and the random shooting in Oakdale — not to mention the thousands of gun deaths in our cities — I thought we had reached a tipping point.

And we did reach that tipping point.  It was over a decade ago, when a majority of  Americans realized that none of the DFL’s gun bills would have prevented Sandy Hook, Accent, or any of the other shootings that the DFL waved about like bloody shirts in the hearing rooms.  None of them would have saved a single life in any of those atrocities.

And most Americans – not the low-information NPR-listening hamsters that vote for Paymar, but the real ones – know this.

And that was the tipping point.

Follow The Money:   Paymar notes that:

The hearings were informative, demonstrating that preventing mass shootings and reducing gun violence in our communities are both challenging and complex... We can’t ignore the conditions that give rise to gang activity and violent crime. We can’t ignore the glorification of violence as a means to settle conflicts.

Although ignore them we did.  Why?  It’d be easy to say “because the key stakeholders in creating each of those problems – our disastrous urban education system, an urban culture that glorifies violence, and a Hollywood that rakes in billions from glorifying mayhem, are respectively key Democrat power blocs, constituencies and donors”.

But just because it’s easy, is it necessarily wrong?

Details, Details:  Paymar moves on to his final attempt at legislation:

I authored the Gun Violence Prevention Act. This legislation would have given law enforcement the ability to deny a permit to purchase handguns or semi-automatic military-style assault weapons if the applicant was determined to be a danger to self or others. The bill would have tightened up laws on “straw purchases” of firearms that often end up in the commission of crimes. The centerpiece of the bill was universal background checks — extending checks to gun-shows, Internet sales and private sales. Sales to relatives and hunting rifles were excluded.

The bill also removed due process by denying appeals to those wrongly denied, by giving law enforcement sweeping power to act like shrinks, and adding a level of bureaucracy to handing down firearms to ones next of kin and, above all, required all firearms transfers to go through federally licensed dealers – requiring a payment of a fee to both the police and the dealer, a system that’ll add a minimum of $50 to the price of every firearm, and likely more, as a substantially similar law did in California.

While criminals found other black-market means of getting firearms, avoiding the background check system completely – because criminals don’t work within laws, much less obey them – the poor were even further priced out of the market.

Reductio Ad Paymar:   Paymar continues:

The NRA and its affiliate organizations claim that background checks are an infringement on Second Amendment rights. They claim that background checks won’t prevent crime or mass shootings — that only law-abiding citizens will be inconvenienced. If that’s the case, then perhaps we shouldn’t require background checks on any purchase of a firearm…But in 1999, after the mass shooting at Columbine High School, the NRA’s leader, Wayne La Pierre, told Congress, “It’s reasonable to provide mandatory instant background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes for anyone.” What has changed?

Here’s what’s changed; the Democrats.

Twenty years ago, it was possible for gun rights supporters to find common cause with the likes of, for crying out loud, Paul Freaking Wellstone.  In the nineties, the NICS system was set up via the bipartisan efforts of people who actually wanted to deal with crime, rather than disarm society.  The NICS system – supported by the NRA as well as liberals – actually made an impact in crime.

The Democrats – especially Paymar and the DFL, wasted months of legislative time this session pursuing bills that would never have had any effect on crime.

“All My Friends Say I’m Right!”:    Paymar reels off an unsurprising list of supporters:

The Supreme Court has been clear: Reasonable gun restrictions do not infringe on the Second Amendment. Polls show that 70 percent to 80 percent of Minnesotans support background checks — Democrats, Republicans, metro and rural. The Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, neighborhood groups ravaged by gun violence and Gov. Dayton all support background checks.

The poll was an absurd push poll; of course people support background checks – in the abstract.  I support background checks, in the abstract.

The devil is in the details.  The bill Paymar offered was rife with opportunities for abuse, and one that even the dumbest SEIU member could see would have no meaningful effect on crime.

“Why Don’t All You Child-Killing Scumbags Want To Have A Meaningful Dialogue With Me?”:    Paymar closes with a call to dialogue:

Also, upon reflection, I wonder if there is room for dialogue and common ground between both sides on this volatile issue. I was vilified by some for my advocacy for gun control. But, when I had chance to talk to gun-rights folks face to face and with my legislative colleagues (especially from rural districts), we found areas of commonality. We all care about our children’s wellbeing. We all want to keep firearms out of the hands out of people who shouldn’t possess them. We all want our communities to be safe places. Is it possible to end the demonization of each other? Is it possible to listen to different perspectives? We can and must find solutions to prevent gun violence.

As one of the people who vilified Michael Paymar with remorseless accuracy, I’ll answer that.

You want dialogue, Representative Paymar?  Excellent.  I’m more than up for it.  Let’s talk. Perhaps we’ll both learn something.

Your interest in “dialogue” might seem more sincere might seem more authentic if you hadn’t just supported Representative Alice Hausman’s HF241, which called for the confiscation of firearms with magazines of more than seven rounds.  Not background checks; confiscation.

It might seem a little more sincere if your own efforts at “Dialogue” reached out to people other than fellow legislators and people inside the clubby little anti-gun clique that you surround yourself with:

Jane Kay, Heather Martens and Rep. Paymar after a gun bill hearing.

That’s Heather Martens, leader and (it’s reasonable to suspect) sole member of “Protect Minnesota”, a woman who’s yet to make a single true, non-numeric statement about firearms.  Ever.

And next to her, Jane Kay, who tweeted during a hearing:

You want “dialogue?” Talk with the real people involved in this issue. Not satirical cartoons like Heather Martens. Not hate-choked extremists like Kay. The real people.

Until you do, all your talk of “dialogue” is just vapor.

In fact, I’ll meet you halfway.  Please come on the Northern Alliance Radio Network one of these next Saturdays.  It’ll be a real dialogue – complete with an articulate opponent.

I’ll direct you to an excellent op-ed by James Sherk in the Strib yesterday.   It’s about the lunacy of the AFSCME daycare jamdown bill, passed last week and signed by Governor Dayton.

You should read the whole thing – it’s as good a digest of the absurdity of the bill as I’ve read, and I’ve read them all.

But the important part is “where does this go?”

The most likely place is “to court”; the daycare providers have already started working on a lawsuit to enjoin the law from going into effect.

And for the providers’ sake – and the sake of the kids who are going to lose daycare, and the families whose daycare budgets are about to get gang-raped by fat guys in AFSCME T-shirts – I hope the suit works.

But this is Minnesota, where you can reliably count on courts to find some picayune reason to uphold the left’s status quo ante.  So what happens if the courts don’t spike the law?

Sherk looks to history:

In 2006, the SEIU persuaded then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm to let them organize Michigan home-care workers reimbursed by Medicaid. Most of these home-care workers are family members caring for disabled relatives. This saves the state money by avoiding expensive institutionalized care, while enabling parents to care for their disabled children.

These home-care workers made strange candidates for unionization. Parents certainly weren’t going to go on strike against their children. But Granholm allowed the SEIU to mail ballots for an organizing vote. Most parents ignored the mailers; fewer than one-fifth sent them back. However, the SEIU mobilized its supporters and won a majority among those who voted.

Which is exactly what AFSCME and SEIU (which is angling for a piece of the Personal Care subsidy) are hoping; that, and flooding the market with “providers”, including unlicensed childcare providers who haven’t provided in years, but will vote for the union.

Perplexed parents soon began seeing union dues deducted from their Medicaid checks. The union charged families hundreds of dollars a year without providing any services. One father complained to a reporter:

“We’re not getting anything from them [SEIU]. We’ve tried to contact them, and they don’t even bother to respond. I don’t even know what they could do to help. Considering the dues money we’re sending them, maybe they should come over and baby sit our kids so we could have one night out.”

The situation didn’t last. Corruption charges forced the president of the Michigan SEIU local to resign. After Gov. Granholm left office, the Michigan legislature terminated the program.

Unions need to modernize and adapt to the 21st-century economy. But forcing disadvantaged families to pay dues out of their government benefits is the wrong approach. Unions should reinvent themselves to provide services modern workers value, not tap into money meant for children and the disabled.

But when you have a two-chamber majority and a compliant governor, tapping is so much easier.

If you’re a Minnesotan who provides, or uses, home daycare?  Or is, or uses, or knows a personal care assistant – whether an indy, a family member or a regular worker – whether the courts throw the law out or now, you need to remember this come next year.

The legislators who gave us this abomination need to pay at the polls.

A liberal acquaintance of mine on Twitter told me yesterday that this bit spelled out the case against the NRA “in a logical way”.

@tjswift2 @mitchpberg Reading the piece actually makes the point quite logical. Even if you don’t agree with it. @jruha

— John Shannon (@JohnTShannon) May 28, 2013

It’s by John Fugelsang.  Now, I do try to seek civil conversation, but Fugelsang is becoming to the left what Bob was to Baghdad; people who quote or cite Fugelsang are justly derided as ninnies; he’s best ignored completely, or as we conservative bloggers say, “Billied”.

But since the lefty tweep took the trouble, let’s show all the ways in which this piece (transcribed below) does not lay out any case with any logic.

It’s almost too densely-misguided to even “fisk” in the classical sense.  For starters, let’s stick with calling out the individual misstatements, evidence-free chanting points and distortions in blue.  Like this:  {Chanting Point!} 

Maybe you’re someone who, like the majority of Americans, supports the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, but you feel kind of creepy about the weapons-grade cretins who run the NRA and do all they can to keep Americans {Ad-hominem – name-calling!} safe from any gun laws that might keep Americans safe.  {Assertion made without evidence; not a single gun law proposed would have “kept” a single American “safe”}

Well, you’re not alone. And this is why: loving the Second Amendment while opposing the NRA is every bit as natural as loving Jesus while opposing Westboro Baptist Church.

Let’s take a break here.  This is straight out of Saul Alinsky.  Linking a mainstream organization of regular Americans – five million of us – with the “God Hates Fags” church?  Seems a stretch.

In fact, Wayne LaPierre’s fake constitutional rights lobbying group  {Perhaps Fugelsang would favor us by telling us how the lobbying is “fake”?} that gun manufacturers use to buy off congressmen actually has quite a bit in common with the revoltingly fake Christians of Westboro.   {The “Buy Off” meme is an interesting one; we’ll come back to that…} 

You see, Westboro is to Christianity what Jesus was to ignorance, hatred and inbreeding. They travel the country holding these vile, un-Christian protests at the funerals of anyone evil enough to live in a land that doesn’t stone gay people to death, Leviticus-style. They don’t want to hate gays — they’re just doing it because God commands them and they’re only following orders. It’s like Nuremberg, but with very bad teeth.

There’s a sign that Fugelsang’s piece is targeted at the insufficiently bright; he has to explain who Westboro – the church that pickets soldiers’ funerals – is.

These guys don’t picket outside gay bars or gay bathhouses or gay dance clubs or Lindsey Graham’s Senate office. Just places guaranteed to cause the most outrage possible – like funerals. Then when someone tries to stifle them, they engage in First Amendment lawsuits.  

Then you’ve got the NRA. And please understand, when we talk about the NRA, we’re not talking about their members. {Oh, heavens, no!} In Frank Luntz’s 2012 poll of NRA members, 87 percent said they believed Second Amendment freedom went hand in hand with preventing gun violence. That’s responsibility.

But you wouldn’t know that from the group’s leaders. Under the stewardship of Wayne LaPierre, or as I call him, “Il Wayne,” the NRA has become the front for gun manufacturers, the guys who’ve cashed in big time since Newtown.

So much “wrong” packed into two paragraphs.

Where precisely does Fugelsang think the NRA gets its leadership?  Who does he think elected, and re-elected, LaPierre?  The members – whom current events show to be among the most engaged, informed voters (especially on gun issues and the NRA itself) out there.

And the “Front for Gun Manufacturers” meme is one that the left bruits about without ever showing what the problem is.  It’s as if gun manufacturers, staring at legislation that would in many cases actively destroy their market – between the various confiscations, limits and price hikes that the bills would impose on the law-abiding and the law-abiding alone, don’t have a right to take up common cause with the biggest nationwide organization that’s on their side?

If someone tried to ban NPR, you don’t think Volvo or Patagonia or Starbucks would pony up for the defense?

They’re the reason why in America it’s now easier for a civilian to buy lots of weapons designed to kill lots of people really fast than it is for you to remember your old MySpace password.  {What the hell is he talking about?  This is just barking lunacy} 

But while they’re protecting profits, they’re also juicing up profits through fear-mongering mailings about how Obama’s coming to confiscate your weapons.

Here’s a little tip, Skeeter: The fact that you’re able to heavily arm yourself while publicly calling Obama a gun-grabbing tyrant is pretty much proof that he’s not.

And there’s your proof that liberal never have to learn how to debate conservatives.  I’ve heard that last bit countless times, even here in Minnesota during the session; if a noxious provision – a useless and price-gouging background check, a magazine restriction with a confiscation provision – hasn’t been signed into law yet, it doesn’t exist, so shut up about it.

But only if it’s about guns.  Not like abortion, or defunding NPR, or defending traditional marriage, the very whisper of which is cause to rally the liberal troops.

By opposing background checks at gun shows — checks supported by 90 percent of Americans — the NRA guarantees that guns can be legally bought through the gun-show loophole by felons or third parties who sell to felons. And then those legal guns just kind of disappear, get sold a few more times, and when the cops recover those weapons years later from a killing that wiped out a playground full of kids, the NRA can say, “Look, illegal guns! Background checks wouldn’t have stopped anything.” See, who needs the black market when you’ve ensured that bad guys can get guns freely on the open market?  {In junior high writing class, the story would then end “And Then I Woke Up”.  The scenario exists only in John Fugelsang’s imagination} 

Background checks only infringe on your Second Amendment rights if you’re a felon, a terrorist or criminally insane. And if you’re all three, you probably already work as an NRA lobbyist. {Not just an ad-hominem, but a really stupid one} It’s all about the money.

Westboro ignores the teachings of Jesus and takes one line of Leviticus out of context to justify their homophobic evil.

The NRA ignores the Second Amendment’s “well regulated militia” part and takes one line out of context to justify their blood-soaked greed.

The NRA ignores nothing – “well-regulated” meant “can hit what it shoots at” in 1787, and it still does.  But Fugelsang, like every liberal who skis this well-worn rhetorical slope, ignores the whole “right of the people” bit.   In his blood-soaked ignorance.

OK. It’s time for the home stretch.  The part where Fugelsang – who has become one of the  lefty alt-media’s name-brand public intellectuals, their sine qua non of debate – closes his case with eloquent logic, a command of fact, and calm reason:

Homophobia is an insult to God, and opposing gun safety is an insult to living people.  {That’s right!  If you smear the label “gun safety” on a polished turd like Michael Paymar’s background check bill – which will never deter a single crime – you love death!}

These groups are both rackets and they’re both doomed. Because the WBC has made untold Americans realize, “Hey, I don’t want to be like that.” {The NRA’s membership has increased by over a quarter since Newtown} 

And now, the deal closer – the all-important final sentence: 

And Wayne LaPierre’s complete indifference to the consequences of gun proliferation makes more NRA members realize every day, “Dude, maybe I’m OK with my own penis size.”

All that buildup…for a dick joke?

(I could throw in a “Berg’s Seventh Law” reference here, but that’d be gratuitous)

Here’s the scary part:  it’s no dumber than most of the left’s arguments.

But John Fugelang?  Not so much.

The left is using the regulatory system to try to shut conservatives up.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The IRS denied or delayed 501(c)(4) applications for conservative groups. So what, tax law is too confusing to understand anyway.

It’s not a tax law matter. It’s a free speech matter. The IRS denied conservatives their free speech, which helped Obama get re-elected. Here’s how it works:

Candidate Joe needs money to buy advertising to convince ordinary voters to Vote For Joe. Candidate Joe raises money by asking for donations. The implied promise is the more you give, the more likely Joe will take your call telling him how bad HR 123 will be for the people he represents.

Ordinary voters can’t afford to buy access so Congress imposed individual contribution limits. But clever people work around those laws through bundling donations or establishing political action committees or educational non-profit groups to amplify donors message loud enough to be heard by voters and politicians. The tax code section that governs these groups is 501(c)(4). Both sides use it to get their message out.

If one political party can use IRS to delay approval of the other political party’s tax status until after the election, then people won’t donate and the message won’t get out to the voters to Vote For Joe. Joe will lose because the IRS delay has the effect of denying Joe’s donors their freedom to pool their money to buy political speech.

This isn’t about hazy guidelines or bumbling management. Democrats used the power of government to silence Republicans. This is a direct attack on our First Amendment rights. That’s why it matters.

Joe Doakes

The IRS is just the national incarnation of this issue.

The DFL has been doing the same thing for years here in Minnesota.  Scarcely a single conservative or Republican active in Minnesota politics avoids having some DFL apparatchik file a Campaign Finance Board complaint against them at some point – or many points – in their political career.  These filings usually come with a flurry of breathless media coverage – designed, naturally, to give the likes of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” a chanting point to use against the candidate.

The accusations usually fall flat, after the race, with no media coverage.

We saw this writ small and dim a few years back, during the 2010 campaign, when a couple of DFL bloggers with deep pockets and lots of extra time on their hands filed a CFB complaint against the King Banaian campaign.  As we pointed out in this space, there was no there there, and the CFB agreed – but, I suspect, it wasn’t about any actual complaint.  It was about getting the low-information voters who are the mainstay of the DFL effort to chant something on cue – and, mostly, about trying to use the bureaucracy to shut conservatives up.

Look for more of this at all levels.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A colleague at work is reliably liberal. I can depend on him for the latest liberal spin on any issue.

The reason people are upset about the high cost of education is: students are greedy. They expect to retire too early, which makes the cost of education seem like a bad investment. If they were willing to work until 70 or later, then the education investment would pay off.

In completely unrelated news, William Mitchell Gay College of Law is offering buy-out packages to tenured law professors. Not because the school is bloated and has lost sight of its core mission in a time of declining enrollments when most of its graduates can’t find work, but purely as an altruistic measure out of the goodness of their hearts. No word on whether they’re cutting diversity administrators. But they did change the school mission from teaching law to offering a degree in practical wisdom, no doubt to defend against false advertising claims.

In Wonderland, the White Queen advised Alice to practice believing impossible things. Some people don’t need practice, they’re Minnesota liberals.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Devaluation:  whether currency, society, the individual, it’s all part and parcel of “progressive” government.

On Veterans Day, you thank the servicemen  you can.

On Memorial Day, you remember the ones you can’t.

Today I’ll be doing what I do most Memorial Days – stopping by the memorial to the USS Swordfish, which I wrote about a few years ago – on my way about all the rest of the things the day brings.

Hope you have a good day, and that you all remember why we have the day off.

Details on the Minnesota Warriors, who’ll be having their Hall of Honor game on Monday.

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.   We’ll be talking with the Minnesota Warriors about their game on Monday.  Also the close of the legislative session.
• 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!

Jamestown, North Dakota.

15,000 people.  At confluence of the James and Pipestem rivers, about 90 miles west of Fargo.  Home to a state hospital and psychiatric prison (which sounds like something the MN DFL would build for Republicans, but it’s really pretty normal), a school for the profoundly handicapped, a college (my alma mater, as it happens), and a whooole bunch of agricultural businesses…

…and, soon, an iron mill.

A North Dakota company plans to build a $60 million iron producing plant near Jamestown, N.D., using iron ore concentrate from Minnesota.

A subsidiary of Bismarck-based Carbontec Energy Corp. called E-Nugget North Dakota LLC has unveiled plans to churn out 100,000 metric tons of iron annually using North Dakota sugar beet residue in the mix instead of coke coal.

It’s an interesting project; the plant will extract ore from tailings from the old iron mines up north that used to be economically un-feasible to extract.  There are millions of tons of now-usable ore piled up up north.

It’s Minnesota ore, and the research has Minnesota ties…:

The E-Nugget iron making process was developed by Carbontec and Michigan Technological University over the past five years, including large-scale batch tests at a Minneapolis facility, John Simmons, president of Carbontec, said Monday. The company already has plans to expand to a 300,000-ton plant if the startup goes well.

But the plant is being built in North Dakota.  Granted, it’s Jamestown, which – as it’s been throughout most of it’s history – has been safely tucked away from excessive prosperity.  100 miles east of the oil fields and their jobs, and 90 miles west from cha-cha, booming Fargo (yes, I said “cha-cha Fargo”; it makes sense in context), Jamestown is one of few parts of North Dakota that isn’t overheating economically so far.

But it’s not Flint or Newark or Cleveland.  It’s not even Minneapolis, much less Grand Rapids or Virginia, unemployment-wise.

So why there?

Simmons said the Jamestown site is well-situated because of easy access to sugar beet residue feedstock and also because it is adjacent to a Great River Energy power plant and directly on the BNSF rail line. He said the iron ore concentrate could move from the Grand Rapids area to North Dakota in rail cars that move western coal east but generally have been empty on their return trip west.

“We can get the right quality material from Grand Rapids and the rail routes make sense,” Simmons said.

So let’s get this straight;  Jamestown ND, which is about 90 miles from the sugar beet waste, and probably 300 from the iron ore tailings, gets the plant.

Why’s that?

Magnetation expects to start construction on a fourth plant northwest of Coleraine this year. That plant will produce 2 million tons of concentrate [that’s the part you dig up, before you process it into iron] annually and will be ready to feed a new Indiana pellet plant the company now is building to supply partner AK Steel with iron ore for its furnaces by 2015. That new Itasca County facility is expected to employ another 160 people. The Coleraine plant ultimately will shift to get its ore from traditional open pit mining. (The company has shelved plans to build a recovery plant at Calumet.)

 

Simmons noted Carbontec also created an E Nugget Minnesota LLC and considered building the plant in Minnesota using wood waste from logging sites as the reductant or binder. He said the company chose North Dakota instead, in part because it’s so much easier to get permits in North Dakota.

Score one for the DFL Environmental Lobby!  More jobs exported to North Dakota!

Let’s let that one sink in; between taxes and permits, it’s cheaper to ship rock 300 miles than it is to process it in Minnesota.

Thanks, Minnesota DFL!

“Protect Minnesota”, the checkbook advocacy group run by Representative Heather Martens (DFL-HD66A), usually complains that gun control is supported by the vast majority of Americans and Minnesotans; that they are the real majority.

They put out this graph showing what groups spend what:

And it sure looks like the pro-gun groups outspend the orcs, doesn’t it?

But what does the graph not tell you about political spending on this issue?

The NRA gets get the uncountably vast majority of its funding from individual members; the orcs like to complain that they’re funded by the firearms industry – as if that were in and of itself a black mark against the group, even if it were true in any meaningful context.

I’m not familiar with the NSSF’s funding, and I know the GOA is even more grassroots than the NRA.

As to the Brady Factory and the VPC?  Both are funded by the Joyce Foundation.  As to “Mayors Against Illegal Guns?”  It’s largely funded by big-government utopian plutocrat Michael Bloomberg and his circle, and most of that money seems to go to paying the group’s members’ bail and legal costs.

A slew of bars in New Jersey, including 13 franchised TGI Fridays, were busted for selling caramel-colored rubbing alcohol as top-rail scotch, among other things:

At one bar, a mixture that included rubbing alcohol and caramel coloring was sold as scotch. In another, premium liquor bottles were refilled with water – and apparently not even clean water at that.

State officials provided those new details Thursday on raids they conducted a day earlier as part of a yearlong investigation dubbed Operation Swill.

Twenty-nine New Jersey bars and restaurants, including 13 TGI Fridays, were accused of substituting cheap booze – or worse – for top-shelf brands while charging premium prices.

That would explain a lot of the “top shelf” scotch I’ve had, come to think of it…