Here’s Walter Hudson’s article.

Here’s the link to the Saint Paul Globe.

Since it’s now politically incorrect to recognize gender in child-rearing, I’ll let you all sort it out.

Well, OK – we’ve had NARN on Sunday for over a year now.  But it was a sixties MOR music pun.  Don’t be a hater.

Happy Mother’s Day, all!

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!

• Brad Carlson was  on “The Closer” “The Headliner” yesterday.  Hope you caught it!
• I’ll be in from 1-3PM.   I’ll have Bob Johnson from the resurrected Saint Paul Globe, an alternative newspaper from a different political tack than you might expect.   Also Walter Hudson on the Legislature’s current version of Gay Marriage and how it’s not just a pure-hearted civil rights bonanza.
• (All times Central)

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

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Join us!

Brad Carlson and I swapped shows today.  Brad’ll be on from 1-3PM.

It’s a long story.  More tomorrow.

That’s how I greet this news.

In Eric Black’s three part series about the Second Amendment a few weeks back (part 1, 2 and 3), Black – writing in the MInnPost, which operates in part through the generosity of a big grant from the anti-gun zealot Joyce Foundation – notes the not-exactly-earthshaking conclusion that the Second Amendment can confuse people.

Ooh! Confederates! That must mean the MinnPost is writing about bitter gun-clinging Jeebus freaks again!  Seriously, MinnPost – I’m never letting you live this down.

And the underlying themes of his series were – as I read ’em – that the Second Amendment is:

1. Linguistically and legally inscrutable
2. Confusing
3. Obsolete.

We’ll address the first two of these today.

Black notes the definitions that vex a surface-level reading of the Second Amendment:

What’s a militia? If you aren’t in a militia, does this have anything to do with you? Or perhaps (and this is roughly the current Supreme Court interpretation) what if “militia” is just an 18th century word for all the able-bodied males in a state who had better have access to arms in case their state needs them to secure its freedom…But if “militia” doesn’t refer to an organized group, what’s “well-regulated” doing in there?

It’s a good question.  But it’s hardly a new one.

For much of US history, it didn’t need an answer – since hardly anyone questioned the notion that Militia meant…

…both.  The Militia Act of 1903 codified what had been followed in practice since the Militia Act of 1792; the the Militia was composed of…:

• The Organized Militia – the National Guard and the Naval Militia, and…
• the Unorganized Militia – every able-bodied male between 17 and 45 years of age who wasn’t a member of the Organized Militia.  In other words, everyone.  Including Eric Black.

But even answering “it’s in the law!” misses the most important point.

The answer to the question “What does the Second Amendment really mean?” started taking its currently definitive shape with the publication, about 20 years ago, of “The Embarassing Second Amendment“, by Dr. Sanford Levinson.  At the time, Levinson was a professor at the U of Texas School of Law; the article appeared in the Yale Law Review.

Levinson was and is an arch-liberal with portfolio, who described himself then and now as a card-carrying ACLU member who was very uncomfortable around the notion of civilians owning guns.   He’s no mossy originalist; he’s called for a Second Constitutional Convention.

The article – about 80 pages, half of them footnotes – is a highly detailed analyis of the textual, historical, structural, doctrinal, prudential and ethical history of the Second Amendment, its related case law, and analysis of all the above.

And the conclusion was all wrapped up in the title; Levinson, unabashed anti-gun liberal that he is, is embarassed to conclude that the “NRA” was right, and the gun-grabbers were wrong.

It came out a solid decade and a half before the Heller decision, but it was one of the key waypoints on the path between the silly, collectivist post-Miller-decision miasma and the Court’s curent stance on the issue.  It was the argument that started even arch-liberal Laurence Tribe on his path from dismissing the originalist interpretation (as Levinson notes in the article) to acceptance that the Amendment is in fact a right “of the people”.

The road to Heller and McDonald started with Levinson’s article.

And he started from the same question Eric Black did: what does “well-regulated militia” mean?

In textual terms – the strict reading of the words?  Not much help there: “The text at best provides only a starting point for a conversation. In this specific instance, it does not come close to resolving the questions posed by federal regulation of arms. Even if we accept the preamble as significant, we must still try to figure out what might be suggested by guaranteeing to “the people the right to keep and bear arms;” moreover, as we shall see presently, even the preamble presents unexpected difficulties in interpretation.”

But in historical terms?   Things are clearer:

Consider once more the preamble and its reference to the importance of a well-regulated militia. Is the meaning of the term obvious? Perhaps we should make some effort to find out what the term “militia” meant to 18th century readers and writers, rather than assume that it refers only to Dan Quayle’s Indiana National Guard and the like. By no means am I arguing that the discovery of that meaning is dispositive as to the general meaning of the Constitution for us today. But it seems foolhardy to be entirely uninterested in the historical philology behind the Second Amendment.

I, for one, have been persuaded that the term “militia” did not have the limited reference that Professor Cress and many modern legal analysts assign to it. There is strong evidence that “militia” refers to all of the people, or least all of those treated as full citizens of the community. Consider, for example, the question asked by George Mason, one of the Virginians who refused to sign the Constitution because of its lack of a Bill of Rights: “Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people.” 48 Similarly, the Federal Farmer, one of the most important Anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution, referred to a “militia, when properly formed, [as] in fact the people themselves.” 49 We have, of course, moved now from text to history. And this history is most interesting, especially when we look at the development of notions of popular sovereignty. It has become almost a cliche of contemporary American historiography to link the development of American political thought, including its constitutional aspects, to republican thought in England, the “country” critique of the powerful “court” centered in London.

One of the school’s most important writers, of course, was James Harrington, who not only was in influential at the time but also has recently been given a certain pride of place by one of the most prominent of contemporary “neo-republicans,” Professor Frank Michelman. 50 One historian describes Harrington as having made “the most significant contribution to English libertarian attitudes toward arms, the individual, and society.” 51 He was a central figure in the development of the ideas of popular sovereignty and republicanism. 52 For Harrington, preservation of republican liberty requires independence, which rests primarily on possession of adequate property to make men free from coercion by employers or landlords. But widespread ownership of land is not sufficient. These independent yeoman would also bear arms. As Professor Morgan puts it, “[T]hese independent yeoman, armed and embodied in a militia, are also a popular government’s best protection against its enemies, whether they be aggressive foreign monarchs or scheming demagogues within the nation itself.” 53

Which gets us into the third of Black’s conclusions, which we’ll come back to later in the series.

As to the notion that the “Right of the people to keep and bear arms” refers to a National Guard that the founding fathers didn’t envision:

Consider that the Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of he people to be secure in their persons,” or that the First Amendment refers to the “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It is difficult to know how one might plausibly read the Fourth Amendment as other than a protection of individual rights, and it would approach the frivolous to read the assembly and petition clause as referring only to the right of state legislators to meet and pass a remonstrance directed to Congress or the President against some government act. The Tenth Amendment is trickier, though it does explicitly differentiate between “state” and “the people” in terms of retained rights. 42 Concededly, it would be possible to read the Tenth Amendment as suggesting only an ultimate right revolution by the collective people should the “states” stray too far from their designated role of protecting the rights of the people. This reading follows directly from the social contract theory of the state.( But, of course, many of these rights are held by individuals.)

(If you haven’t read Levinson’s entire piece – you need to.  It’s one of the most politically influential law-review articles in recent history – and it’s not a bad read, either).

As to “well-regulated?”    Levinson doesn’t address it directly – in the parlance of the 1790s, it meant “can do the job”, or “can hit their targets”, a definition that’s changed in the past two-odd centuries -because it’s irrelevant.  It’s a right of the people, necessary to the preservation of a free state.  It’s a secondary question at most, in the lee of the real question “what is a right of the people?”.

As noted in Heller, it’s not an absolute right; states can ensure that people who aren’t good citizens, felons and the like, don’t get guns.  They can legislate the types of guns, within reason; the whole “can you get a flamethrower or a cannon” argument is a strawman, although it’s worth arguing on its own merits (if I’m a law-abiding schnook with a .380 or a shotgun, why wouldn’t I be with a howitzer or a bomb?).

The “What does the Second Amendment Really Mean?” argument – like the “The Second Amendment existed to protect slavery!” argument we dispensed with a few months back – is a manufactured controversy, a re-hashing of questions that were answered literally decades ago among those who pay attention to the issue.

But the gun control movement rarely makes its appeals to people who pay attention to the issue.

Up next – probably Tuesday – the notion that the Second Amendment is just plain obsolete.

As yesterday’s vote in the House showed, Minnesotans don’t tolerate putting civil rights through popularity contests.

The message was loud and clear – if you oppose civil liberty (even for something that’s not a civil liberty, but a private contract that society has over the years turned into an entitlement), you are a bigot, and will be called a bigot until you shut up and go away.

Excellent!

Now that all you newly-minted libertarian absolutists have won your battle, you’ll need something to occupy all that energy; you’ll need new targets for they keen-eyed intellectual nimbleness you’ve developed over the past 18 months of shouting over your opponents that they are bigots.

There is a small minority of Minnesotans who, operating from a racist, sexist, paternalistic, authoritarian notion of the social order, have been working to systematically working to deny Minnesotans of a vital civil right that is not only enshrined in the constitution but one that we were all born with an instinct to practice, one every bit as powerful as the instinct to procreate, and much stronger than the urge to mate – self-defense.

These bigots – whose intellectual lineage traces back to the slave-owners’ desire to neutralize his property – want to force you to deny how you’re born.

So I urge you to join my new group, “Minnesotans United For All Liberties”, and help drive bigotry from our state.

Will you join?

Or are you a bigot?

(Written with a nod to Dave Thul, whose wisecrack sent me off to write this…)

So after yesterday’s passage in the House, it looks like gay marriage is a shoo-in.  The Senate will pass it like diarrhea through a bum’s lower GI tract, and Governor Messinger will sign it, possibly by Tuesday.

I’ve said it a million times; gay marriage means different things to me.  As a small-l libertarian, I don’t know that there’s not a case for allowing two consenting adults to sign a contract.  As a Christian, I think same-sex marriage is like playing tennis without rackets; it sort of misses the point of what marriage is, at least as I understand it.   As a member of a political minority in a place where the majority is deeply authoritarian, I think it’s just a matter of time before the state’s bureaucracy and an aggressive and recession-ravaged plaintiff’s bar starts suing people – photographers, bakers, tailors – who won’t work with gay couples, and eventually churches that demur.   As a divorced guy, I think “what the f**k are you gays thinking?  Gays have more disposable income per capita than breeders; a few years of exposure to the legal industry should bring you back down to earth”.

But this post isn’t about bad news.  This post is about finding the bright side of gay marriage in Minnesota.

To wit:  the Top Ten Benefits of Same Sex Marriage’s eventual enactment:

Bonanza!: My friends in the Family Law business are going to be able to upgrade their vacation plans!  Gays currently earn more than breeders, per capita; that’ll change now.

Won’t Bakk Down!:The DFL loses a wedge issue; since gays can now marry, the DFL is going to have to find another small, aggrieved, but wealthy and influential minority with an injustice to flog.  They don’t grow on trees.

The Honeymoon Is Over, And Cost A Metric Poo-ton!:  Gays can stop futzing over “Marriage” and start wondering where the hell all their tax money is going.  Now that their value as a wedge is nearly exhausted (“bullying” is going to play out pretty quick, here), it’ll be time for Gay Minnesota to figure out its political future.

The Battle Is Over, And We’re In A Metric Poo-Ton Of Doo-Doo!:  Republicans can stop futzing with marriage and start wondering where in the all their tax money and their political future is.

Walk On The Wild Side!:  Now, committed middle-class Christians can start learning civil disobedience, ignoring state marriage licensing.

Let’s Play Football!:  Chris Kluwe can get so focused on his punting now.

Back Of The Bus!:  The African-American community – which was even less favorably disposed to gay marriage than the mainstream white evangelical community – now has further evidence that the DFL wants them to shut up and sit at the back of the bus until they’re called on – on election day.

Honesty Can Prevail!:  The DFL can stop pretending to care about gays. The Teamsters and SEIU can go back to beating them up like back in the day.

A Learning Opportunity!:  The interesting thing about this debate was that the best debating on the behalf of gay marriage was done by libertarian conservatives, who made the libertarian and, to a degree, conservative case that there’s no reason to keep consenting adults out a contractual system that the other 98% of the the population gets.  The left’s argument – especially on the “Lefty Street”, the thousands of “progressive” bobbleheads who turned out to chant and eventually vote – ran more along the lines of “you are teh bigot!”.  So now that they’ve won, perhaps the left can put some of that extra energy into teaching their young adherents the rudiments of logic.  Unless, of course, having masses of stupid, smug, ignorant, sloganeering, chanting-bot followers is exactly what they want.

Hmmm.

So congrats, gays!

CORRECTION:  House, not Senate.  You seen one group of extreme liberal dogmatists, you’ve seen ’em all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Is it morally wrong for a company to take advantage of school boards by selling them Bulletproof Whiteboards that are impractical if not outright dangerous?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

He’s talking about this little number here:

…which, I have to admit, I thought was  hoax.  Between the cop who looked like he was doing a bit on Reno 911, to the notion of confronting violence with an hand-held shield – an idea the real world gave up during the Renaissance, I thought it was maybe a Daily Show spoof mocking people who think it’s possible to stand up to shooters, when I saw the video of it being rolled out at Rokori high school, west of the Twin Cities.

It’s apparently not:

You’ll notice that an 18″x20″ whiteboard will only cover part of the head and torso of even a relatively petite teacher like the one in the photo. An active shooter would have no trouble at all shooting over, under, or around the armor, easily killing the person holding the armor with any firearm.

From the manufacturer’s website.

In the bizarre and unlikely event that an active shooter didn’t just simply shoot around the whiteboard, there is an apparent assumption that a teacher or administrator holding the armor would be capable of retaining it as it is struck by the impact of a bullet or a shotgun blast. Do we really expect that an average teacher or administrator is going to be able to handle the concussive force of a bullet and to retain the whiteboard in a defensible position?

It is far more likely the board would simply be shot out of their hands or the teacher knocked down with the first or second shot, if the shooter doesn’t simply opt to shoot around the 18″x20″ panel. If a shooter armed with a shotgun loaded with slugs or buckshot were to fire at close range against the whiteboard, there is the distinct possibility that the whiteboard would be ripped from the defending teacher’s hands and turned into an injury-producing projectile itself.

Then, there is the problem of the armor not actually being bulletproof.

As noted on the Hardwire LLC website, the armor is rated NIJ 3A, which will in carefully controlled conditions stop a majority of pistol bullets and shotgun blasts. However, this armor class will not stop intermediate-caliber rifle rounds as small as .223 Remington, much less have the desired effect on more substantial rifle rounds.

The whiteboard concept, allegedly inspired by the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, would not have stopped or even slowed down the shooter in that instance. He was armed with a rifle chambered in .223 Remington that would have sliced through the armor.

It’s a risible idea – another example of “security theatre”.

As John Edwards used to say, there are two Americas when it comes to dealing with mass shooters in schools; the not-serious America, which yaps about lockdowns and “ballistic blankets” and hand-held kevlar whiteboards and everything but the only thing we currently know that stops active shooters – a person resisting with lethal force – and serious America, which is confronting the ugly reality of mass shooters with the sobering reality that once the shooting starts, armed resistance is the only answer.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota House passes an increase in the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour.

Sure, it’s the highest in the nation; but if they made it $100 per hour, we could ALL be rich.

Cheap bastards.

Joe Doakes

Where’s the ambition to do Big Things, Joe?

Make it $500 an hour.  In a 2000 hour year, that makes everyone a millionaire!

In the book Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams described a grossly-overpopulated planet dealing with its problem by radical means.  The plan involved building two spaceships to fly the population to a better world.

They built the first one, and loaded up all of the – er, let’s say “less essential” populations; I forget Adams’ list, but today it could be reality TV stars, TMZ-bait, Youtube sensations, Taylor Swift’s exes, and millions of society’s other useless mouths, and shot it into space.  They were told that the rest of the people would be coming.

Soon.

As soon as they finished the next spaceship.

Honest.

——–

A Dutch company is taking applications for a one-way mission to Mars, to start a Mars colony.

And they‘re getting a slew of applications:

“These numbers put us right on track for our goal of half a million applicants,” said the founder of Mars One, Bas Lansdorp. “Mars One is a mission representing all humanity and its true spirit will be justified only if people from the entire world are represented. I’m proud that this is exactly what we see happening.”

Here’s the part I found…intrigueing?  Well, deja vu at any rate:

According to the company’s chief medical officer, Norbert Kraft, Mars One is eschewing the usual astronaut candidates – scientists and pilots – in favour of YouTube fanatics and internet people, “because what we are looking for is not restricted to a particular background.”

All applicants have to do is pay the application fee, which ranges from $5 to $75 – in the US, it is $38 – and then submit a video in which they answer three questions.

Huh.

I’m going to run over to Google Translate to see if “Bas Lansdorp” is Dutch for “Slartibartfast”.

Just a hunch.

The DFL’s mulligan on the Care Provider Union Jamdown bill worked this time.

This story is from Demko at the MinnPost:

The vote came just two days after the bill, sponsored by Sen. Sandy Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, stalled in the finance committee on an 11-11 vote. Two Senate DFLers — Terri Bonoff of Minnetonka, and Barb Goodwin of Columbia Heights — joined all Republicans in voting against the controversial measure, which could affect upwards of 20,000 workers.

On the second vote, Bonoff joined her fellow DFLers in voting in favor of sending it to the floor. Goodwin again voted against the proposal.

Bonoff’s explanation was an early-morning chuckle:

Bonoff made it clear that her vote was not an indication that she supports the unionization proposal. “Make no mistake, I’m not changing where I stand on this bill,” she said.

But Republicans argued that a vote to move the bill to the floor — even without any recommendation — was no different than voting in favor of it. “Don’t fool yourself,” said Sen. Michelle Fischbach, R- Paynesville. “This is just like voting yes.”

The DFL are in a jam, of course; if the unions don’t get thousands of new dues-paying members, stat, the DFL’s major non-Alida-Messinger, non-plutocrat funding stream dries up solid pretty quick here.

If it stalls anywhere else, look for DFL legislators to go on hunger strikes, and then start taking hostages.

I almost wrote “more hostages”, but that’d be a little dramatic.

Wouldn’t it?

Over the past 20 years, society’s largely made it illegal to just be a boy.

For a while, it was an openly-held belief in educational-psychology circles that the niggling traits of typical boyhood – a penchant for rough play and exploratory violence, a disdain, at least through one developmental stage, for verbally-based social interaction (that’s what girls do) in favor of getting outside and mixing it up – were pathologies that needed to be cured, or at least harnessed.  As documented by Christine Hoff-Summers in her classic The War On Boys, “making boys more like girls” became a bit of a crusade in the educational academy during the 1990s and 2000s.  Recess – with all its ritualized rough and tumble – was curtailed, supervised, sometimes abolished.  Via means social, pedagogical and chemical, “educators” tried their darnedest to get boys to sit down, shut up, and get verbal.

It’s led us to a generation of kids who’ve been medicated to a fine sheen, who remain in a state of suspended adolescence well into their thirties in many cases, and in the worst case who don’t know the limits of roughness and violence, since the rituals by which they used to learn how to process that testosterone – rough play, stylized roughhousing, the occasional fight that usually ended in friends staying friends who knew who not to mess with – have been scolded, punished and drugged out of existence.

I don’t know who the woman is who wrote this piece; she sounds like she could be any of a few thousand middle-aged moms in Edina alone, at least in the first couple of grafs.

So, I think that instead of teaching our kids NOT to be violent we need to teach them HOW and WHEN to be violent. We have so many stories of people standing around watching others getting assaulted or verbally attacked and we don’t know why. We have thousands of self-defense classes all over the country. We have anti-bullying programs that tell us to stop bullying but offer no concise steps telling us how. Honestly ask yourself, if you don’t know that you can physically defend yourself, would you really step in to verbally confront someone who is being physically and verbally threatening? I know I wouldn’t.

If we are to raise boys who are willing to step in when a girl is being attacked or fight back when a boy is being vicious, we are going to have to admit that we DO expect violence in some scenarios and teach them the fine lines to walk within. Why wait to learn self-defense as an adult? Why not let them learn it, as they are growing up, with the guidance of their parents? Maybe not all is violence is so bad after all.

Force isn’t necessarily violence.  And not all violence is bad.

And we have raised a generation kids that don’t know the difference.  And it’s our fault.

And by “our fault”, I mean “all you feminists who banned boyhood’s fault”.  Just so we’re clear on that.

…for all time the quaint, pollyannaish notion that the “elite” media exist as anything but a Praetorian Guard for the Democrat party.

CBS News has been busted gundecking coverage of Benghazi that afflicts the Administration narrative

The biggest Benghazi-related story that took place outside of the House Oversight Committee’s hearing room today is this item in Politico, regarding CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. She’s the reporter who famously drew White House officials’ profane ire over her unapologetic pursuit of the Fast & Furious scandal story; now she’s apparently facing searing criticism from another source: Her own bosses. Why? Because she’s been covering the Benghazi story too aggressively

Read the whole thing.

If Bohner and Cantor don’t get a select committee on Benghazi going yesterday, then what the hell is the point of even having an opposition party?

I got this yesterday from a source at the Capitol:

 “People are beginning to whisper the words:  Special session.  As of late yesterday afternoon, the final Finance bill (Transportation/Public Safety) was finally released, which included a 7.5 cent gas tax increase.  With not a single omnibus bill back from conference committee and [Transportation/Public Safety] still in the Tax committee (and you can’t take up any bill until 3 days of notification), there is no way we will have a complete budget prior to 5/15, at the earliest.

Also, wasn’t it Tom Bakk that said we won’t take that up until we have a budget?  

With not ONE omnibus bill to run the State government on the Governor’s desk, we don’t have a budget.”

Let that rattle around your noggin for a bit; the DFL that ran by telling the people (wrongly) that the MNGOP was focused on social issues has just spent nearly the entire session trying to unionize daycares, grab guns and legislate gay marriage – and stands a chance of needing a special session because the DFL Senate, House and Governor can’t agree with each other. 

This is what happens when you put the arrested adolescents in charge.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes (and I’m adding emphasis to a particularly huge point):

Just ran to the post office to mail a baby book to my daughter-in-law.  Caller to Rush commenting on the Gosnell abortion trial says the problem is lack of meaningful sex education in the schools.  We should be teaching kids more than abstinence-only because that doesn’t work. Kids need to be taught that unwanted pregnancy is a possible consequence of sex and how to use birth control to practice safe sex.  Two thoughts:

 

Things must have changed since we were kids, because in the mid-70’s we knew about condoms and carried them faithfully, against the vain hope of ever needing one.

 

We don’t teach children about firearm safety in the schools because firearms have such powerful mystique in our society that giving children more information about them only leads to overwhelming desire to experiment, with disastrous consequences. The same isn’t true of alcohol, drugs or sex, of course.

 

Joe Doakes

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Heather Martens wants a do-over on gun control. Sandy Pappas wants a do-over on daycare unions. What, we just keep voting until the plebes get it right? Is that how this “democracy” thingy works? I never quite understood that.

Joe Doakes

Think of the DFL as diners at a four-star restaurant.

They paid good money for that coq au vin, or office; for what they paid, they’ll keep sending it back until everything’s perfect.

Crime in general – especially crimes committed with guns – is down over the past 20 years.

Not just down.  Down drastically.  As in “the kind of thing that should be provoking celebrations in the streets”.

And yet Americans think crime is rising (emphasis added):

The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%. However, guns still remain the most common murder weapon in the United States, the report noted. Between 1993 and 2011, more than two out of three murders in the U.S. were carried out with guns, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found.

But is the word getting out? 

Despite the remarkable drop in gun crime, only 12% of Americans surveyed said gun crime had declined compared with two decades ago, according to Pew, which surveyed more than 900 adults this spring. Twenty-six percent said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.

And how does that happen?

It’s unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such violence is up. The mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., were among the news stories most closely watched by Americans last year, Pew found. Crime has also been a growing focus for national newscasts and morning network shows in the past five years but has become less common on local television news.

There’s nothing “unclear” about it.

On a non-partisan level of cynicism – crime makes for ratings.  If it bleeds, it not only leads – it sells papers and gets people to tune in.

The fact that the “guns are out of control” narrative supports the Administration for which the mainstream media serve as a Praetorian Guard?  Two hits for the price of one.

Charles Ramsey, the rescuer of the three kidnapped women in Cleveland, in what may be one of the greatest television interviews of all time:

Runner-up lines of the day:

“Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway…She homeless or she got problems. Only reason she runnin’ to a black man.”

Winner line of the day?

When [Anderson] Cooper mentioned the FBI reward related to information for Amanda Berry whereabouts, he said, “I tell you what you do, give it to them… you know I got a job anyway,” and pulled out his paycheck that he just picked up.

Thank God – in more ways than one – for Charles Ramsey.

Last week reported that entrepreneurial activity in Minnesota was the worst in the entire US.

But the whole country is reeling.

Usually the “recovery” from a recession is a great time to start a business; in the “creative destruction” cycle, it’s the time when creativity happens; as money starts to flow again, people start businesses.

But not this time.

Glenn Reynolds:

So what’s to blame for this change? A lot of things, probably. One reason, I suspect, for a job market that looks more like Europe is a regulatory and legal environment that looks more like Europe’s. High regulatory loads — the product of ObamaCare and numerous other laws — systematically harm small businesses, which can’t afford the personnel needed for compliance, to the benefit of large corporations, which can.

Likewise, higher taxes reduce the rewards for success, making people less likely to invest their money (or time) into new businesses. And local regulatory bodies, too, make starting new businesses harder.

But I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t cultural. Since 2008, this country hasn’t celebrated achievement or entrepreneurialism. Instead, we’ve heard talk about the evils of the “1%” ” about the rapaciousness of capitalism, and the importance of spreading the wealth around. We’ve even heard that work in the public sector is somehow nobler than work in the private sector.

Countries where those attitudes prevail tend not to produce as much entrepreneurialism, so it’s perhaps no surprise that as those attitudes have gained ascendance among America’s political class and media elite, we’ve seen less entrepreneurialism here.

The process of changing this nation from a culture of building and innovating into one of consuming and demanding has taken decades.  But Obama seems to be close to closing the circle, creating the first nation to go from benign tyranny to freedom and all the way back.

Watch for the the chuckle-and-snark set from the leftymedia to their yapping to “puree” over this:

The Rush Limbaugh Program is considering ending its affiliation agreement with Cumulus Media at the end of this year, a move that would bring about one of the biggest shakeups in talk radio history, a source close to the show tells POLITICO.

Should the move take place, 40 Cumulus-owned radio stations would lose the rights to the most popular talk radio program in the country. In addition, the show might be picked up by competing regional radio stations in Washington, New York, Chicago, Dallas and other major markets.

Now, the left’s been trying to paint this as a rejection of conservative talk radio, and specifically a result of the “boycott” of Limbaugh after the Sandra Fluke kerfuffle:

According to the source, Limbaugh is considering the move because Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey has blamed the company’s advertising losses on Limbaugh’s controversial remarks about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student. In Feb. 2012, Limbaugh referred to Fluke as “a slut” because she had called on congress to mandate insurance coverage of birth control. The subsequent controversy over those remarks resulted in a significant advertising boycott.

“Significant” in terms of headlines.  It was a fairly minor event, commercially – some companies regretted taking part pretty quickly.

But its greatest significance might be giving Lew Dickey an out for his incompetent management.  Cumulus  – whose management has always skewed left of center, politically – is one of the most rapidly-collapsing of the old big-media holding companies.

Here’s their stock value over the past ten years:

Lew Dickey and the left-leaning wastrels in management are looking for an excuse for their own dismal performance.  Limbaugh and the Fluke flap provides them a handy out.

And that’s all it is.

But look for the chuckle-and-snark set – who only know what they’re told about the radio industry – to try to present this as a verdict on Limbaugh, or on conservative talk radio.

It’s not.

Joe Doakes emails:

Pointing this out is, without a doubt, racisssss

Click the image to go to the original article.

Joe Doakes

The article from which the map came notes that Democrats are busily trying to recruit stolid pro-gun candidates in red states, even as they work to try to attack the Second Amendment at the national level.

The answer? Maybe ban guns in the hands of Democrats?

Nah.  Maybe Democrats need to realize not only that their party are hypocrites on this issue (in Minnesota and nationwide), but that guns are the least of the issues where that’s true.

Or last week, I guess:

You might have heard of the Timberwolves, who apparently have played basketball against Jason Collins in recent years.

From Mr. D.

As I noted about a week back, being a Second Amendment activist for any length of time – I started in the late eighties – is a little like being Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day; every time the argument cycles, you wind up answering exactly the same questions.  Over and over and over.

Some of the questions -“aren’t you compensating for something?” – are stupid conceits.  Some – “isn’t a gun in the home many times more dangerous to the owner or people he knows than to criminals?”, or “wasn’t the Second Amendment put in place to protect slave holders?” – are well-worn, long-debunked tropes that keep coming back, just like the villain in the last two minutes of a monster movie.

And others?  Well, despite both sides’ oversimplifications, they keep coming back because the Second Amendment is a complex issue, full of historical, linguistic and legal nuance.

Notice I said “complex”.  Not “inscrutable”.  Because it’s Groundhog Day, and everything, including answering nearly all the questions, has happened before.  Maybe several times.

Eric Black – one of the phalanx of deans of Minnesota political journalism – wrote a series a few weeks back at the MinnPost (which is the recent recipient of a big grant from the Joyce Foundation, an anti-gun group that lavishly funds anti-gun astroturf groups around the country).  The first of the three parts, “The Second Amendment is a Mess“, came out probably three weeks ago.

Confederate soldiers. With guns. Be afraid; your betters have declared that the Constitution is all about slavery.  Except the First Amendment, and of course the emanations of penumbras that give us abortion.  But I digress.  Prejudicial? Do you think?  The MinnPost ran this in a piece about the Second Amendment, and I’m never going to let them live it down.

In stating the case that the Amendment is “a mess”, Black writes:

…the interpretation of any law must start with the actual language of the law as enacted. So, for today, let’s just put the text of the Second Amendment under the microscope. Here is its full text:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

It’s a marvelously unclear statement, to modern sensibilities – and yet for some reason it defined a policy, more or less, through nearly 200 years.  Until the 1960s, nobody really questioned that the “…right of the people” in the Amendment meant anything different than “of the people” meant in the First, Third or Tenth Amendments.

We’ll come back to that.  I’ll return to Eric Black…

…while noting that I’m getting that feeling Bill Murray had during the last three-quarters of Groundhog Day; it’s deja vu:

It’s a disaster. Seriously. Here’s just a sample of problems it presents.

What’s a militia? If you aren’t in a militia, does this have anything to do with you? Or perhaps (and this is roughly the current Supreme Court interpretation) what if “militia” is just an 18th century word for all the able-bodied males in a state who had better have access to arms in case their state needs them to secure its freedom even though they might not actually “belong” to what we 21st century-types would recognize as a militia, like a National Guard unit that you actually joined and were trained by and that actually has a command structure.

A fair point…

But if “militia” doesn’t refer to an organized group, what’s “well-regulated” doing in there? Who gets to decide whether the (actual or theoretical) militia you are in is well-enough-regulated to trigger (no pun intended) whatever impact the militia clause has? Who is doing the regulating? The state? The United States? The (non-existent but theoretical) organization of all the gun-owners in the state acting as self-regulators?

…and a vexing one.

Indeed, Black’s series seems to focus on three allegations about the Second Amendment:

1. It’s linguistically and legally inscrutable
2. It’s confusing
3. In an era where the US has a standing military, it’s obsolete.

But the first two were rendered null and void nearly a generation ago.    And the third exhibits a myopia about history, to say nothing of the Constitution, that needs to be actively fought.

But none of them are new. Indeed, it’s been nearly 20 years since the first two points were put out to pasture among people who are serious about the issue of the Second Amendment.

As to the third?  Stay tuned.

We’ll come back to that on Thursday.

I’ve long said that the upside to any change in the law recognizing “gay marriage” would be that finally, once and for all, we could dispense with the notion of the Magic Gay Couple; more loving, more solid, more just-plain-worthy than all of us dirty imperfect Breeders.

Cable TV host David Tutera and his, er, husband are well on the way toward resolving this cultural problem:

On Tuesday, People magazine reportedTutera is divorcing Ryan Jurica. They married in Vermont in 2003 and had a domestic partnership in California. The two had been together for 10 years and are expecting twins via a surrogate in July.

Tutera filed the divorce papers in Los Angeles Superior Court on April 19, citing “irreconcilable differences,” according to People. He has been separated from Jurica since Jan. 1 and is seeking full custody of the children. Tutera does not want to pay spousal support and requests Jurica take responsibility for the legal fees.

The breakup saga took a wild turn Wednesday when TMZ reported Jurica filed his own papers in Connecticut. He reportedly claims the TV host has a sex addiction and visits prostitutes.