Cam Winton is running for Mayor of Minneapolis.  Here’s the website.

I’ll be talking about the governor’s race, the Republican Party’s future…

…and in the second hour, I’ll have Minneapolis mayor candidate Cam Winton on the show, talking about his quixotic but altogether feasible campaign. 

Tune on in!

The Warehouse tax is going to cause all sorts of damage – and some GOP legislators want to do something about it:

Reps. Tim Kelly of Red Wing and Pat Garofalo of Farmington said lawmakers must act soon because the looming sales tax on warehousing services is already prompting businesses to delay planned warehouse expansions.

But the DFL could scarcely care less:

But a spokesman for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor governor dismissed the request as “a stunt, not a solution.

“The Legislature is coming back more than a month before this tax would take effect, which is more than enough time, if revenues permit, to review and possibly revise this tax,” Bob Hume, Dayton’s deputy chief of staff, said in a statement.

Hume is speaking like a bureaucrat and party stooge who thinks the private sector is the same of a hip club in Northeast Minneapolis.

The tax is already killing jobs!

Kelly said two large Red Wing businesses are delaying expansions because of the tax, and the prospect of losing those new jobs calls for quick action.

Stephen Lawrence, president and CEO of Lawrence Transportation Services in Red Wing, said a 6.5 percent sales tax on his company’s services would put them at a competitive disadvantage with firms in neighboring states, none of which has a warehousing tax. He said his business is considering building facilities in Wisconsin.

Governor Dayton was apparently waiting for Alida Messinger to tell Carrie Lucking what he was supposed to say about this.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Article in the PiPress claiming the economy is improving because there were fewer applications for unemployment.

http://www.twincities.com/business/ci_23550437/us-unemployment-benefit-applications-fall-346k

The article notes “Applications are a proxy for layoffs.” The reasoning is that as soon as you get laid off, you run down to apply for unemployment, which sounds right to me. Fewer people running down to apply means fewer people laid off means economy is better than it was.

You know, I’ve heard that “proxy” phrase before, last month. http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=36279 The economy was supposed to be getting better then, too.

And also back in March: http://www.middletownpress.com/articles/2013/03/14/news/doc5141c7d613225691011181.txt?viewmode=fullstory

Here’s the thing: the number of applications has hovered around 350,000 for the last year, and that’s consistent with the economy in 2003-04 which was the end of the recession caused by the Twin Towers on 9-11-2001. (Chart only goes back 10 years).

US Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance data by YCharts

 

So does the economy feel like it’s two years after 9/11? Does national security feel that way? A decade later, are we doing Better, Worse or Same?

Joe Doakes
Como Park

I’d love to hear the case for “better”…

…Paula Deen is gone…

…but Bill Maher remains.

One of the Minnesota establishment’s favorite fall-back lines is that our putatively-excellent education system drives the economy.

The evidence shows that it’s actually quite the opposite; a strong economy creates a niche for academics.

Education is not (or was not) training, although the distinction is fuzzy. Private colleges and universities were once the place for a few good men and even fewer good women. They were where we went to be sequestered from physical work, to learn, to mature, to develop communication skills and leadership confidence. Everyone else got calluses. No mammalian species could afford to take more than a few of its offspring, at the height of their fecundity and physical prowess, and isolate them to study Greek. In the 19th century, many didn’t live much beyond 50. Had we sequestered significant numbers from the age of 18 to 26 to pursue a doctoral degree in 1850, this would have converted their value proposition into an unsustainable expense. The popular terminal degree into the early 20th century was an eighth-grade diploma and for a very good reason. Families needed pairs of hands and strong backs. Colleges and universities did not drive the economy, but rather were able to expand as the result of industrialization and mechanized agriculture which improved the output of labor.

Yep, the world has changed; about 1% of the population grows our food these days, rather than the 98+% of 300 years ago. More of what we do to earn a living requires an “education” – which can mean anything from “literacy” to “training” to “developing a working understanding of a complex field” to, in some cases, “learning broadly and deeply about a range of disciplines and areas of human knowledge”.

But the article notes something that, when you read about most of mankind’s great advances, beats you over the head; academic credentials and major leaps in achievement aren’t especially correlated:

In just over 150 years, the likes of Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Steve Jobs changed the world, but they were far from credentialed scholars. Still today, the innovation economy is driven as much by enthusiastic, stubborn and impatient dropouts as by the credentialed. The imaginative and courageous accomplish more. The credentialed often check boxes in a regulatory role or debate rather than do.

The Birth Of The Modern,by the great British historian Paul Johnson, examines the number of things that make up what we call the modern world – everything from pants, the internal combustion engine, mass production, the repeating firearm, yellow paint and the hard-top road to motorized travel, the true “mass media” and the steam engine and true representative democracy – that started in the period between 1815 and 1845.

And in those societies – which were if anything more dominated by social and academic elites than they are today (for now, anyway), the things that defined what we call “modernity” were predominantly achieved by…

…the self-taught, hard-working, brought-up-by-their-bootstraps people with little formal education but great inspiration, intellect, and the ability to tie many disciplines together to make things happen.

Side note: in a world where arts academics avoid hard sciences and hard-science people sneer at arts majors, it’s amazing how cross-displinary the great achievers truly were. In 1820, a great engineer like Robert Fulton or James Watt had to be a talented artist and communicator; artists like Robert Turner were highly versed in the physical world.

Which is something modern academia beats out of the rare academic that tries to practice it.

At any rate – the conclusion?

So what’s the problem? One problem is recognizing that academia follows the economy and doesn’t lead it…

And creating an economy with too many academics with too little academic work to do merely devalues academia itself. You get situations like in Greece and Spain, where college graduates find themselves lucky to get 10 hours a week as a barrista – or like in the US, where chemistry professors sit for years tweeting about politics while worthy younger academics shuttle around between non-tenure-track make-work jobs, eternally…

…while the real work of innovating and building goes on elsewhere.

It was the Clinton playbook; the response to any PR threat to the President was a three-part cantrip:

• Deny that there ever was a problem.  That was good enough for a lot of low-information voters.
• Delay any reckoning.  If the Administration and its proxies in the media could create the sense that a story was “old news” and that we should “Mooooooove On”, it was a victory.
• Destroy the messenger. 

The Obama Administration has polished the Clinton playbook to a fine sheen; in terms of teamwork in executing the three-part play, they’re like a NASCAR pit crew. 

Oh, yeah – they’re in the “Deny” and “Delay” phase with the IRS scandal.  And it’s working – at least among low-info Democrats, who are bleating “there’s no scandal” on cue. 

Lately, the party denial-and-delay line is “Hey!  The IRS targeted liberal groups, too!”

The line depends on the consumer being too dense to know the difference between “examine some…” partisan groups, and “targeting an entire movement”. 

Oh, yeah; it’s false:

The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) sent a letter Wednesday to congressional Democrats telling them that while several liberal groups may have gotten extra scrutiny, the IRS didn’t necessarily target those — but it did do so for conservative groups.

“TIGTA concluded that inappropriate criteria were used to identify potential political cases for extra scrutiny — specifically, the criteria listed in our audit report. From our audit work, we did not find evidence that the criteria you identified, labeled “Progressives,” were used by the IRS to select potential political cases during the 2010 to 2012 timeframe we audited,” Inspector General J. Russell George said.

He said that while 30 percent of groups that had the word “progressive” in their name were given extra scrutiny, 100 percent of groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names were pulled out for strict scrutiny, which involved what the IRS since has said were invasive and inappropriate questions.

Democrats have argued that the IRS‘ scrutiny of applications for tax-exempt status hit both ideological sides equally, which would cut at the GOP’s argument that it was politically motivated. Instead, Democrats have said the scrutiny is the natural result of a jump in applications after campaign finance rules changed following the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case.

Read the whole thing.

And no; it’s not even close.

One of the least useful arguments against gay marriage was “so it’s about love?  So if you love your goat, or a child, you could marry them?”

Neither goats nor children (age of consent laws notwithstanding) have standing to sign contracts, of course.  It’s kind of a strawman.

But the other, inevitable part of the argument is “so what about polygamy?”

Remember – it’s all about love, and civil rights.  And groups of people most definitely do sign contracts.  So who are we to hold our antiquated “monogamous” standards over polygamists’ heads?

No, it’s not a strawman: 

What’s magical about the number two?

In fact, you could argue that there is an even better argument for polygamy than for same sex marriage. For one thing, there’s a long tradition (just look at the heroes of the Old Testament.) It’s also intimately tied to religious practice, which means that by prohibiting polygamy, we might also be undermining the “free exercise thereof.”

Why should we impose our values on others?

Now, you might say that there is historical evidence to support the fact that polygamy is bad for women and children. This is sophistry. The truth is that right now about half of all marriages end in divorce, and lots of kids are already struggling, so it’s not like traditional marriage is a panacea. Besides, nobody is forcing you to be a polygamist. This is a choice.

And unlike gay marriage, which is entirely a modern Western social construct, Polygamy has occurrred througout human history, including our own. 

There are practical reasons, too. It’s harder and harder these days to make ends meet. As a man, I can only imagine how much more efficient it would be to have one wife in the workforce and another wife at home with the kids. This would be much better for the children than shipping them off to some nursery school. And having three parents is a lot better than having just one … or none.

Yesterday’s SCOTUS decision, and last fall’s election in Minnesota, had clear-ish verdicts; “marriage” is “about love” and “civil rights”.

So what – legally – is the difference between a monogamous and polyamorous family unit, since those are the standards?

On Tuesday, lefties squealed like stuck cats that the SCOTUS were a bunch of racist fascists for repealing the parts of the Voting Rights Act that said that the states of the Old South – in many of whom blacks have better election turnout than whites – should forever be judged by their pre-1960 election records.  States Rights were a bad thing!

Yesterday, the same precise lefties danced in the streets due to the SCOTUS’ getting the feds out of the way of states rights. 

Just making sure we all follow this.

I don’t so much care about the repeal of DOMA itself; I thought it usurped laws that should be reserved to the states, and why shouldn’t gays pay into the divorce industry like everyone else anyway?

But Justice Scalia’s dissent on the DOMA decision was instructive:

“The Court is eager—hungry—to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case. Standing in the way is an obstacle…”

The Court has “power to decide not abstract questions but real, concrete ‘Cases’ and ‘Controversies.’ Yet the plaintiff and the Government agree entirely on what should happen in this lawsuit. They agree that the court below got it right; and they agreed in the court below that the court below that one got it right as well.”

“What, then, are we doing here?”

Parts of the majority decision read like a Media Matters press release.

Nina Totenberg on NPR this morning:  “…the federal government will be broadly extending benefits to gay federal employees, as can be expected from an administration that has always supported gay marriage…”

2009:  Obama’s Justice Department files a brief supporting DOMA. 

But don’t you dare say NPR is biased.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

US Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, in part on the ground that states should have the right to decide the definition of marriage, the federal government has no Constitutional authority to do it.

Glad to hear States Rights making a comeback with the Left. Let’s remember this when Obama, Feinstein and Bloomberg call for national gun control legislation.

Joe Doakes
Como Park

Attention, liberals; now you’re all “Tenthers!”

Governor Alida Messinger Mark Dayton, 2011:  “Rorra rammma hassa humper thunt”.  (Translation:  We’re only raising taxes on the top 1%)

Govenor Alida Messinger Mark Dayton, 2013:  “OK, poor people gotta pony up too!

The DFL’s current tax plan not only raises taxes on all Minnesotans across the board, but actually raises taxes on the poorest Minnesotans by more than the wealthiest.

2013 Minnesota Tax Bill Incidence Analysis by minnesoda238

Down below is the key table, showing net tax hikes by income “decile”:

That’s right – not only did taxes rise more for the bottom 20% than for the top 10%, but under the DFL plan taxes rose more for the bottom 10% than for Dayton’s friends, family and neighbors in the top 1%!

To add stupid insult to pointless injury – the report (prepared by Dayton’s employees) notes that the taxes on the lower deciles might drop because of “property tax relief”.  But that assumes that city and county governments will pass “their” local government aid raise on to taxpayers, rather than plowing it into more spending – an assumption that history shows is too stupid even to laugh at.

This is the change you hoped for, Working Minnesota?

What to say about the SCOTUS striking down parts of the Voting Rights Act?

The Act was intended to add federal oversight to elections in states with long-standing patterns of discrimination in voting, and gross disparities in turnout.

In 1960, about 70% of whites in Mississippi voted compared to under 7% of blacks.  The most recent figures show blacks in Mississippi have higher turnout than whites.

Is it time for the feds to give the states back what is under the Constitution their sovereign right, subject to further litigation in cases where actual discrimination does still exist?  Well, so says the SCOTUS.

Naturally, the left is playing this as “Voting Rights for Blacks Gutted!”, which is disingenuous at the very least, but it’s what they need to do to get ready for what will no doubt be a tough election for Democrats in 2014.

Perhaps its time for the Feds to look at elections in Minnesota.

SCENE:  At the DFL headquarters, on Plato Boulevard in Saint Paul.  Chairman Ken MARTIN is sitting in his office.

(Carrie LUCKING of the Alliance for a Better Minnesota walks in.  MARTIN springs to attention, salutes).

LUCKING:  As you were.    (MARTIN sits as LUCKING settles into an overstuffed leather recliner)

LUCKING:  So what’s going on?

MARTIN:  Well, we’re hitting the GOP over their War on Womym, we’re telling Minnesotans that taxing the 1% will make them taller and smarter, and…

LUCKING:  That’s not what I mean, and you know it.

MARTIN: Beg pardon?

LUCKING:  Beavis is at it again.

MARTIN:  Beavis?  You mean Represntative Winkler?

LUCKING:  Yes.  His tweet yesterday embarassed the party.  Summon Bakk and Thissen.

MARTIN:  Summon Bakk and Thissen!

(Tom BAKK and Paul THISSEN enter the room.  They stand attention and salute LUCKING, who returns the salute.  They remain standing).

LUCKING:  Explain!

(BAKK smirks at THISSEN with a look of badly-concealed contempt).

THISSEN:  I don’t know, your highness.

LUCKING:  Doesn’t he know he must clear all utterances with me before making them?

THISSEN:  Yes, your highness.  Normally calling black conservatives racist names is perfectly acceptable.

LUCKING:  Right.  But not this time.  How about the media?

BAKK:  Only Rupar has written about it so far.

LUCKING:  Who gave him permission?

THISSEN:  Nobody that I know of.  But it’s mostly been damage control so far, so it should be OK.

BAKK:  And Michelle Malkin and Dana Loesch.

LUCKING: Who?

BAKK:  The Filipina Pole-Dancer and some chick who probably boffed Grover Norquist to get a job.

LUCKING:  Ah.

(Through the window, we see Ryan WINKLER walking toward the door.  He’s singing Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back”).

LUCKING:  Let’s get his explanation.

(WINKLER walks into room, salutes LUCKING – who doesn’t return salute. He awkwardly releases salute…)

WINKLER:  Your highness?

LUCKING:  Explain yourself.   You tweeted this yesterday:

WINKLER:  Well, in my defense, I didn’t know “Uncle Tom” was racist.

BAKK:  What?  It’s up there with the “N”-bomb! A white guy using a term to refer to a black guy as a cringing, servile piece of chattel?

WINKLER:  Well, there’s some debate about that.

BAKK:  Not in like 150 years.

WINKLER:  Well, my bad.  And since when is it bad to bag on oreos who vote Republican?

LUCKING:  That’s immaterial.  What the hell else have you been writing? (Takes out pearl-encrusted iPhone, starts flipping through WINKLER’s twitter account) Oh, what the hell…:

And if Virginia wants a battle flag back from their war to defend slavery, they can march to Minnesota and take it.

— Ryan Winkler (@RepRyanWinkler) June 25, 2013

WINKLER: What?

LUCKING: The Civil War’s been over for nearly fifty years.

THISSEN:  At least!  And the ACLU won!

LUCKING:  Look – give me your Blackberry.  I need to see what else you’ve got in your Drafts.  (WINKLER hands over phone).

LUCKING (Flips through phone):  Wait – calling Representative Hillstrom “Screechy McMenstrual?”

WINKLER:  Is that bad?

LUCKING:  Yes!

WINKLER: But she was derailing Representative Martens’ gun bill!

LUCKING:  Thanks be to Alida that never went out.

THISSEN (quietly):  Still, you save that sort of thing for Republican lawmakers.  Like Tara Mack or Mary Franson.

WINKLER:  Ah.  Point taken.

LUCKING:  Didn’t you learn anything at Harvard Law School?   I mean, the school that great minds like Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz teach at?

WINKLER:  Dershowitz?  Ah!  Good ol’ Schlomo the Money-Grubbing Skinflint!

(LUCKING, BAKK and THISSEN glare at WINKLER)

WINKLER:  What?   Wait – that, too?  You gotta be kidding…

(And SCENE)

Friday night, I was out with some friends out at a bar on Lake Street in Minneapolis.  I’d heard there was a thunderstorm warning – but I didn’t expect the deluge we got.  I think the wind got up to 60-70 miles an hour on Lake.  The power went out, and stayed out.  As I walked back to my car (unscathed, thank goodness, unlike a few cars up and down the street), I thought “this is gonna be a doozy”.

I started trying to find my way back to Saint Paul; I drove around South Minneapolis, checking out the extent of the damage and the power outage; the damage lessened the further east you went, but many roads were blocked; there were pockets of power up into the thirties, but for the most part Minneapolis was blacked out down to 46th, sometimes 50th and further.

Along about 10 o’clock, I wondered “what’s Saint Paul like?”  And for that matter the rest of the metro?

So I flipped to WCCO, expecting to hear their usual severe-storm-and-aftermath patter; Mike Lynch and a crew of newspeople talking about the storm, and taking calls from people around the metro with their observations.

LYNCH: “Tom in Prior Lake, go ahead”.

TOM IN PRIOR LAKE: “Ya, da wind come up and a maple tree about yea big fell down on da shed”

LYNCH: “How big?”

TOM IN PRIOR LAKE: “Yea big”

This is how WCCO has been doing weather since the earth’s crust cooled.

So I flipped the radio to 830 – no, it’s not a preset on my car.

And what did we get?

“Best of Mischke”.

Weather on the 20s.  I think.

And now the world has changed for the worse.

…what would happen if a Republican tweeted this:

It’s Ryan Winkler, the Eddie Haskell of the Minnesota House of Representatives.

And if he were a Republican, you can be sure that the Strib, the City Pages and the rest of the Twin Cities media would be giving him a rhetorical proctological exam.

UPDATE:  Mirabile Dictu, Rupar did write about it.

Winkler twote Rupar:

@atrupar I did not understand “Uncle Tom” as a racist term, and there seems to be some debate about it. I do apologize for it, however.

— Ryan Winkler (@RepRyanWinkler) June 25, 2013

He didn’t understand it was a racist term?

I’ll just let that one sit there on its own.

A comment I got off-line from a neighbor got me thinking a little more about (I puke a little in my mouth to say it) last week’s bizarre little Nick Coleman blog post.

I focused on his fabrication of facts in re the cancellation of an open carry event scheduled in conjunction with the “Open Streets” event in Minneapolis this past weekend.  Coleman – the current “Executive Editor” of lefty videoblog “The Uptake” – essentially created a story from pure vapor; in the original latin, I believe the term was “de anus“. 

But there was another aspect to the story that should draw even more brickbats – including from “Uptake” readers and putative “progressives” that actually think about what their “movement” says and how they say it.

Here’s Coleman from his piece last week – starting with his ofay classist jape:

Imagine how reassured you would feel when hundreds of bearded guys from Andover and Elko show up in North Minneapolis or the Summit-University area of St Paul (“Open Streets” events will take place in both of those communities later this summer) with Bushmasters and Brownings slung over their shoulders or Glocks and Rugers hanging from their paunches.

That Minneapolis and Saint Paul are full of vapid Prius-driving government-employed Saint Olaf grads with infinite senses of social entitlement and who’ve never had to confront the notion that there are people out there who disagree with and live life differently than you, in ways other than skin color and sexual orientation isn’t up for debate. 

But here’s the interesting bit:

Here’s a neat mental exercise: Try to imagine hundreds of inner-city residents carrying weapons at the Andover Family Fun Fest, July 13. Just because they can.

Now, as I noted last week, to Coleman – as dork-fingered and inarticulate a Studs Terkel-wannabe as has ever occupied space in a newsroom – “inner city” means “black, Latino and Asian”.  And maybe not Asian. 

And so I’d love to know what Coleman had in mind when he imagined “hundreds of inner city residents” with guns out in the suburbs. 

Is he envisioning an apples-to-apples comparison – hundreds of black, latino and asian citizens over the age of 21 with carry permits and clean criminal records and passed training classes on their resumes?  People among the 140,000 Minnesotans with valid carry permits (the application doesn’t collect ethnic data) who are several orders of magnitude less likely to commit any crime than the general public? 

People like the ones I ran into at Gander Mountain at their Carry event over the winter?   Responsible, adult citizens exercising their legal right to own and carry firearms (once deemed suitably responsible under this state’s legal code) who happened to be black, Latino or Asian?  People that I – who have lived in the Midway for 25 years, but am apparently too Anglo-Scandinavian to qualify as “inner city” – would have no qualms mingling with, armed or not, because they’re just like me – a rigorously law-abiding citizen?

Or is Coleman – grandée and resident-for-life of leafy, lily-whiter-than-Lakeville neighborhoods like Tangletown and Crocus Hill – picturing do-rag-clad teenage thug wannabees, Los Reyes with face tattoos and Hmong tough guys in “rice rocket” Honda Civics – the cliche du jour “inner city” caricature among our media’s pallid chanting classes?

If it’s the former, then I have to ask Coleman; do you think a carry permittee who happens to be black or latino is a better, more reliable citizen than your “paunchy, bearded” honky walking cliches?  Do you have any statistics to bear that out?  (Because the real stats show they’re exactly identical).

If it’s the latter, I have to ask The Uptake; do you accept this form of racism from your staff?  Especially when you layer it atop the giggly homophobia that’s been Coleman’s stock in trade for his entire career?

Because if Bradlee Dean or Jason Lewis or Michelle Fishbach had made a jape about “inner city” residents, or about how living on a submarine can turn people gay because “You have the hot cot thing going on there”, you’d be baying at the moon. 

I know, I know.  If moral consistency were a “progressive” value, “MoveOn” and Sandra Fluke would never exist as media figures, and the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” would be utterly silent.  Asking is a purely academic exercise.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Although I am not aware that any nation in history that succeeded in battle with women as its front-line warriors, we will.

I am skeptical but willing to be proven wrong, if it can be done safely. There is a waiting list a mile long of good men wanting to become Navy SEALs. If a woman can beat them playing by the same rules, fine with me.

But if not – if she needs special rules because she’s not physically and mentally tough enough to become a snake-eating, bone-breaking killer – then this is worse than a bad idea, it’s another Benghazi back-stabbing in the making. Everybody on her special operations team is put at risk, no different than if they put flabby, middle-aged me on the team.

What usually happens when Sally The SEAL can’t do the job is simple: it becomes a “team lift” like they do at Target. What once was a one-man job becomes a two-person job. Having re-defined the job it downward, then the Pentagon can truthfully say “she can do the job” as it now exists. Best example: end of the movie GI Jane with Demi Moore. Firefight on the beach, SEAL team leader hit, new recruit Demi Moore breaks cover to dash out and drag him to safety BUT CAN’T DO IT ALONE . . . so another team member breaks cover to run out and assist her. Of course, in the movie neither the guy helping the little girl nor the guy waiting to be rescued get killed for their chivalry. But in real life? Her lack of physical ability puts two other team members at risk.

Worse, the helicopter has a limited number of seats to transport SEAL team members. Commanders can’t afford to fill those seats with people who can’t physically do the job. So we can call her a SEAL and give her the uniform and the medals, but unit commanders will work hard to ensure her role becomes communications, intelligence analyst, spotter, or some job that doesn’t involve the physical duties she can’t perform. More of the dangerous work will go to the big guys because there are fewer of them to share it. No chance for the big guys to advance to those prime slots as women will fill them right out of the gate.

What will the military do long-term? Probably start a new, more secret, more exclusive club where the men who join really can count on the standards being kept. The military will bury the membership, the very existence. Like the show The Unit. The Unit does not exist so it’s exempt from politically correct insanity. The SEALs were secret. Delta Force was secret. And while they were, they were the best. Now, they’re a social experiment. President Obama should rename the SEALs as “The Lightworker Brigade.”

Seriously, if women in front-line combat positions were a good idea, wouldn’t other countries have tried it before? Wouldn’t it be the standard model around the world already? Not talking about women taking up arms in desperate conflicts like the siege of Stalingrad or Israel (which has been pretty much a desperate situation from the day it was founded), I mean where are the female SAS troops, the female Foreign Legionnaires, show me the photos of Hildegard the SS-trooper?

I know, my lack of instant acceptance reveals me as a raciss, sexist, homophobe and besides, I have no proof it won’t work. Conceded, but I think it’s a bad idea to wait until I can offer the same proof as Tim the Enchanter . . . look at the bones, man! Look at the bones!

Joe Doakes

The publicity the SEALs have gotten recently may well be their undoing, unless the military develops the kind of policy backbone it hasn’t had in a few decades.  The Army unit formerly known as “Delta” – which hasn’t even gone by the name that replaced “Delta” in well over a decade – seems to have done more or less what Joe ascribed to the fictional “Unit”; adopted complete silence for both bureaucratic as well as operational security.

There’s also a long-standing rumor (that the Army and other sources constantly deny) that there’s an even-more-secret sub-unit in the unit formerly called “Delta” that does have mixed-gender operators at some level.  Intelligence people (and people who read about ’em) have long known that mixed-gender couples attract less attention from security than guys traveling alone, in pairs or small groups.  The theory is the mixed-gender unit does the “location scouting” in denied territory, using that basic tidbit of human psychology…

…but that, even if it’s true, is more a matter of espionage – at which women have a long and distinguished record – than fitnessfor knife-point combat.

Kurt Zellers announced his candidacy for Governor yesterday, entering an increasingly crowded field.

And seconds after his announcement, the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” – Alida Messinger’s union-and-plutocrat-funded attack-PR firm, henceforth “ABM”  – was out with the party line on Twitter:

@ABetterMN: Failed Speaker Kurt Zellers led a historic era of partisan politics. WATCH: http://bit.ly/16ukH99 #wrong4mn #mn2014 #mnleg #stribpol

(I wonder how “forcing daycare providers and personal care attendants into a union against their will so the DFL can get another $2M a year in “donations” will be spun as “non-partisan” by ABM and the media that parrots their chanting points without question?)

ABM, of course, is run by “Executive Director” Carrie Lucking.  She’s a former junior high social studies teacher who now runs Messinger’s little message shop; she ran the epic, toxic sleaze campaign that barely squeedged Mark Dayton over the top against Tom Emmer’s flawed campaign in 2010, and packed the polls with the uninformed in 2012. 

But what about in between?

Dave Thul was the first with the story:

@davethul: The irony of @ABetterMN’s ‘failed candidate’ mantra? Their Exec @CarrieLucking left teaching to become a Failed Campaign Manager. #stribpol

She was a “failed” campaign manager, working for a woman who had a failed marriage to a failed Senator. 

Oh, the video about Zellers that Lucking links to?

You be the judge.  But I’d call it an epic failure.

Carrie Lucking:   Remember – the greatest president of either of our lifetimes, Ronald Reagan, was a “failure” running for president.  Once.

Lori Sturdevant has a mission.

The DFL – and the PR machine that includes bodies as inseparably-“diverse” as the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, the Joyce-Foundation-funded MinnPost and theStribeditorial board (which has close links to all three of the above) worked tirelessly to try to make Minnesota “Happy to Pay for a Better” state. 

The dim and querulous gave them the Legislature and Governor they dreamed about and paid for. 

But the parts of this state that actually produce the wealth that Our Better Government needs to siphon (and siphon, and siphon some more) are showing signs that they’ve had enough.  That the snapping sound that the fat, lazy, over-entitled riders upon the camel of state enterprise have been hearing is the sound of camel vertebrae giving up the ghost.

And Sturdevant’s apparent mission is to try to shame the camel for all that wobbling.

Our Innumerate Overlords – Sturdevant’s old club-mate Nick Coleman once famously declared that journos were better than bloggers because they “know stuff”, by dint of having written about “stuff” down the long, lonely, ink-smeared decades. 

Sturdevant, like Coleman, continuously show what a low bar “stuff” turns out to be, when it comes to the realities of business and economics:

The numbers always seemed screwy to me. If congressional action allowing all states to apply their sales taxes to online purchases would net Minnesota a cool $400 million a year, as the state Revenue Department keeps saying, why was the new “Amazon tax” only slated to bring in about $5 million per year?

Because – as anyone who followed the Vikings Stadium funding fiasco, or the course of any sort of cigarette or sin tax in history, can tell you – the figures that bureaucrats give when they’re trying to sell a tax are always higher than what you actually get.  Because people and companies modify their behavior, their purchasing, their lives if need be to try, try, try to keep more of their hard-earned income and profits. 

Oh, of course Sturdevant won’t report it that way:

The answer became obvious last week. Amazon unkindly cut off its Minnesota-based advertising affiliates with a bare two weeks’ notice to avoid collecting sales tax on Minnesota purchases starting July 1.

Right. 

And why would they do that?

Two possible reasons:

1. Because acting as an unpaid tax collector, in addition to shaving money off their own top line, hits their bottom line as well; it involves building systems and hiring people to not only do the collecting, but to handle dealing with the inevitable squabbles over collections with the state governments involved.  As only a small minority of states tax revenues on online sales, it’s just not worth it.
2. They’re big nasty ugly meanies.

Sturdevant wants the Strib’s readers – which is a synomym for “low information voters”, these days – to pick “2”.  Emphasis added:

The state’s tax collectors allowed that they were not surprised. They’d been expecting as much from Amazon, said Revenue Commissioner Myron Frans. It’s what the tax dodger, er, online retailer has done in at least seven other states. Hence the measly forecast for tax collections from online sellers with Minnesota affiliates.

And there you go; the left’s most noxious conceit; that productivty and its consequences – profit – belongs to government first and foremost; that trying to keep more of it for yourself, having done all the actual work to produce it and all, is a thoughtcrime. 

To avoid having to deal with the administrative and fiscal overburden, not to mention lending legitimacy to a tax that may well be unconstitutional, isn’t good business; it’s a moral offense.  Or so Sturdevant will keep chanting.

And chanting:

(The official name for the new sales tax provision is “affiliate nexis.” It’s not a new tax, but a new requirement that when an online seller has a Minnesota affiliate, the tax on its Minnesota sales must be collected by the seller at the time of purchase, rather than being reported and paid later by the consumer — as all consumers faithfully and fully do every year, right?)

Dunno, Lori.  Do you?

“Atlas!  Knock Off All That Damn Shrugging!” – Up next, an irony that provokes a chuckle every time I see it, which is every time Sturdevant writes about the relationship between government and the people who pay for it, which is every other column; she rails against choice – when it’s The People doing the chosing:

The Revenue Department had been urging enactment of the Amazon tax since DFLer Mark Dayton became governor, even though it was known to be tricky to forecast and fairly easy to dodge.

Truth be told, much the same can be said of most of the $1 billion or so in annual tax increases enacted by the 2013 Legislature.

And after thirty-odd years, Sturdevant still hasn’t figured it out; when you build a spending plan based on making other people – “the rich”, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, the “haves” – pay for your stuff, those other people might just get other ideas. 

Ms. Sturdevant?  Your Institutional Hypocrisy Is Showing – Sturdevant avers that there might be some PR issues with the DFL’s / Alida Messinger’s (pardon the redundancy) “Happy To Make Other People Pay For Our Minnesota” plan: 

For example, the howl that went up from the warehouse industry about a sales tax that will start applying next April to its business-to-business transactions was accompanied by credible threats that warehouses would move to Hudson, Wis.

Right.

Even before the session ended, tax planning seminars popped up offering to coach well-heeled Minnesotans about ducking the new 9.85 percent income tax rate…Then there’s the $1.60-per-pack boost in the cigarette tax [which] might be the easiest to dodge of all. Cigarette sellers just across the Minnesota state lines — and on Minnesota’s Native American lands — can prepare for land-office business after July 1, when Minnesota smokes will become the most expensive in the region…The kind that involves spending six months and a day in no-income-tax Florida? That’s evidently tolerated.

And yep.

Was there another tax “for a better Minnesota” that elicited a howl of protest from a Minnesota institution?  One that threatened to put a 5.5%-to-6.75+% ding in an industrly that’s already shrinking by several points a year? 

One that pays Sturdevant’s paycheck, maybe?

You’ll search Sturdevant’s column in vain for any sign that she’s called her bosses “tax evaders” for having acted in their own enlightened fiscal self-interest.  

Guess the Strib – whose editorial board and occasionally newsroom shilled tirelessly for DFL candidates – doesn’t want A Better Minnesota, unless someone else is paying for it either. 

Keep that in mind in the next section.

She’s Head-Slappingly Ignorant Of Economics And Business – But I’ll Bet She’s Got History Down Cold! – Sturdevant next wraps herself in the flag.

I don’t think she knows it’s the Soviet flag:

…I’ve observed that in the rest of Minnesota, tax avoidance within “perfectly legal” parameters is socially acceptable behavior — so much so that people brag about it to their friends. Those who engage in it count themselves as patriots, and by today’s lights, they may well be. But they don’t think like the fellows in 1776 who pledged to their new venture “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Further proof – were any needed – that the Strib not only caters to low-information voters; they’re trying to create more of them.

The American Revolution was about much more than taxes! It was about defining a new relationship between the Individual and Government – one where the Individual and the fruits of their labor had worth, merit and standing every bit as important as that of government’s; one where government was afree association of equals, not a petty noble demanding tribute of cringing vassals. 

And that whole “STOP FUSSING WITH YOUR SELF-INTEREST, KNAVE!” thing is something you yell at someone you want to have acting like a cringing vassal.

(Speaking of history, Sturdevant adds “In 1933, Farmer-Labor Gov. Floyd B. Olson [Oh, Lord, here we go again – Ed.] made Minnesota a tax outlier. He pushed through a Depression-shocked Legislature the state’s first income tax, one of the few in the country. It was based on ability to pay and dedicated to education, which was struggling just then”.  Does Sturdevant wonder why Minnesota continued to lag the national economy for the next thirty years, until the “Minnesota Miracle?”  No?)

This Batter Doesn’t Go On Fish – No, Sturdevant casts her lot with George III, and the generations of petty self-appointed nobles that have spent the past five decades trying to roll back the relationship our founders fought to create:

They don’t even think about taxes in the way that their parents and grandparents did, economist Stinson noted.

“People who lived through the Depression knew that bad things could happen to good people. They knew that government is necessary when that happens,” he said recently.

Cry us a river.

The state had the whole “help people when times are tough” thing licked by the mid-seventies.  Everything government could do that it should be doing was being paid for, with plenty left over, before Ronald Reagan took office. 

No, the current growth in Minnesota’s spending – and the DFL’s tax and spend orgy – has nothing to do cushioning good people from Bad Things.  

• It’s about making sure government employee union members can retire at 55 – even if the rest of us have to work ’til we’re 70 to pay for it.
• It’s about giving billions of dollars to billionaires, to pay for other peoples’ entertainment.
• It’s about making the parts of this state that work hard, save their money, and pay their bills pay for the parts of this state that don’t. 
• It’s about paying for an “education” system that educates less, abjectly fails vast swathes of our state society (although it mostly fails black and brown kids who don’t look like the editorial board’s kids, so that gets politely ignored), indoctrinates more, and more and more seems to act as a money-laundering mechanism for the teachers union and Big Administration.
• It’s about paying chits back to the people who paid for the DFL takeover in Saint Paul. 
• It’s about enabling the continuing abuse of the state’s productive class.  Battered Spouse Syndrome depends on the victim knuckling under not only to abuse, but to the emotional manipulation that make it possible and keep going on.

In a state where the media is arrogantly and completely in the bag for the Tax and Spend party, where the big institutions are all in bed with and get paid by the Taxers and the Spenders, where elections themselves look to any intelligent person to be rigged to keep the Taxers and Spenders in power, how else are those who actually produce supposed to register their opposition?

With our feet – figuratively, and sometimes literally.

Like any other battered spouse, the only way to end the abuse is for the victims to realize that they have to break it off, and keep it broken off, no matter how hard they berate, belittle and attack you. 

No means no, Lori.

Michael Bloomberg is apparently running his anti-gun 501(c)4 non-profit using City of New York assets:

Domain names for [Mayors Against Illegal Guns] were registered in 2006 by the New York City Department of Information and Technology, and have remained on official city web servers ever since.

Yet the group’s “action fund,” through which [Mayor Bloomberg] has piped at least $14 million of his own money in ads over gun control this year alone, is registered as a 501c4, a nonprofit “social welfare” group with the same tax status as, say, the Karl Rove-linked Crossroads GPS or Organizing for Action, President Obama’s grassroots arm. And it raises questions about why a website associated with the group is being managed by City Hall.

…on the dime of New York city taxpayers, no less. 

In fact, the various pieces of the mayor’s efforts appear as a confusing muddle online, with sites that are ostensibly not part of the 501c4 nonetheless being visually dominated by entreaties to click through to the ones that are. There’s little indication that these are different entities with different oversight.

At minimum, the use of a city web server and city employees underscore what critics have long derided as a blurring of the lines between government resources and Bloomberg’s own multi-billion-dollar fortune, his company, and his pet interests in his three terms as mayor.

The answer?  “Shut up, they explained”.  Their ends justify their means, silly peasant.  It only remains for you to be Happy To Pay For it. 

It’s the New York (and Chicago, Philadelphia, Trenton, Boston, Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Baltimore and, by the way, Minneapolis and Saint Paul) way.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

There was a thunderstorm [Thursday] night. The 6:00 a.m. news [Friday] morning was comical. The Anchor ponderously intoned there was a storm last night and sent us to the Weatherman, who pointed to radar weather map as he told us the storm had left our area, then we cut to a pretty young woman standing in the rain on the side of a road as cars drove around a puddle, who breathlessly explained that the storm left standing water on some roadways.

20 years ago, the Anchor would have said “Well, that was some rain last night, a real gully washer. In sports, our Minnesota Twins will host the . . .” and that would have been the end of it.

This may explain the media penchant for going along with the global warming hype. 20 years ago the weather was just a section of the newscast. Now it’s become huge business, with it’s own teams, trucks, radar installations, even it’s own networks and network feeds that the locals contract from. So the weather forecasting industry has a vested interest in making everything spectacular, dangerous, dazzling, tittilating. Follow The Money – global warming is a natural fit for the whole expansion of the weather forecast industry.

Joe Doakes

Following the career of former Channel-11, current (I think) Channel 4 weatherman Paul Douglas is illustrative, as it’s pretty well tracked the growth of “Weatherman As Celebrity”. 

In the eighties and nineties, Douglas’ side-line business – building weather-presentation software for broadast – was part and parcel of the growth of the Weather as Entertainment part of today’s newscasts; it brought action, zooming clouds, interaction between radar, maps and the presenter that made the weathercast seem like a little movie production of its own.  It made Douglas pretty wealthy, I’m told – nothing wrong with that – and helped him become the Twin Cities’ first weather “celebrity”. 

And he was one of the first to board the Global Warming train.

Tim Holden’s website. 

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