…that if we voted Republican, racist mobs would pervert the public discourse.

And they were right!

Joel Doakes from Como Park emails:

The neighbors fought to keep Buffalo Wild Wings out of their neighborhood completely, and lost before the St. Paul City Council, which is quite an achievement given this city’s track record.

Now the neighbors are back, bitching because it smells like fried food. Well, yes, you live next door to a restaurant. I live across from a ball park. Everybody has problems. That’s part of living in a city, rubbing shoulders, celebrating diversity.

If you want your own private estate, move to North Oaks.

Joe Doakes

Hell Is Other People.

It reminds me of the people who teamed up to ban cruising on Snelling and University during hot rod shows. These people live in a major city, but want it to sound like an Iowa corn field after dark.

“Progressivism” is always about trying to build utopia with legislation.

For years, I’ve said that measuring relative incomes is a lousy way to gauging a society’s economic success; it’d be much more useful to try to gauge, on an individual level, upward and downward lifetime income mobility. 

And voila – the NYTimes has released what it terms as a “ground-breaking” study on income and social mobility in America…

…and promptly turned it into a plea for more government intervention in the economy.

Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota.

“Where you grow up matters,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the study’s authors. “There is tremendous variation across the U.S. in the extent to which kids can rise out of poverty.”

I’ll take a break from the conclusions for a moment to show this pretty slick map from the Times piece:

It measures the probability that a child born into the bottom fifth of incomes would rise to the top fifth, which is noted in the graphic’s fine print as $70K by age 30 or $100K by age 45. 

The “study” shows correlation and doesn’t attempt to find causations – although plenty of lefty commentators have tried to do it for them. 

My native North Dakota shines, of course – the western parts of the state used to be relatively poor, and are now explosively wealthy.  But even the oil-free parts of the state, like my native Stutsman County, are solidly in the 20% range.

As, for that matter, are the more Republican-leaning parts of Minnesota.  And no, I’m not ascribing causation.  Merely noting a correlation. 

Back to the Times:

That variation does not stem simply from the fact that some areas have higher average incomes: upward mobility rates, Mr. Hendren added, often differ sharply in areas where average income is similar, like Atlanta and Seattle.

The gaps can be stark. On average, fairly poor children in Seattle — those who grew up in the 25th percentile of the national income distribution — do as well financially when they grow up as middle-class children — those who grew up at the 50th percentile — from Atlanta.

The article ascribes a few conclusions to the study; mainly, location matters, as does the proximity of wealth to poverty.  Which might seem to make sense – if a poor kid can see the consquences of applying oneself, they may well stand a better chance to improve their lot in life, maybe, hopefully. 

But as in the quote above, the article focuses on Atlanta (go ahead, read it) and juxtaposes it with Seattle, by way of noting that the Deep South is the biggest blotch of low income-mobility in the country. 

I’m going to suggest (and it’s only a suggestion, since I have neither the time nor money to conduct a full-fledged study elaborating on these results) that the cause of it all ties back to local society’s valueing upward mobility.  Big swathes of this country are descended fron pioneers and immigrants who saw upward mobility as an unalloyed good.  But for much of antebellum (and a good chunk of post-bellum) southern society, upward mobility was historically either a serious risk (for slaves, getting “uppity” could have life-altering consequences) or irrelevant (for “white trash”, who were a peasant class in every way but name, upward mobility was just not part of the vocabulary). 

So I’d say upward mobility is as much a matter of the part of society you were born into as it is geographical location (and the arrangement of “rich” and “poor” zip codes and the density of mass transit that goes along with it). 

Again, just an opinion.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHT:  I’m wondering – why can’t we do the same sort of analysis on schools?  Specifically, instead of analyzing school test scores, look at the progress (or lack of it) by individual student.  Especially when comparing traditional public school students with charter school students.

Paraphrasing a remark I saw from Jim Geraghty on Facebook this morning:

“Rescues from cars:  Zimmerman 4, Kennedy 0”.

Joe Doakes deform Como Park emails:

I didn’t understand my rights or responsibilities under the contract for deed.”

“ Okay, we’ll have the high-volume Contract for Deed Seller give you legal advice.”

Because otherwise where could you possibly find anybody who might know something about buyers rights or responsibilities under legal documents? It’s not like we have 30,000 lawyers in Minnesota, all looking for work. Granted, many of them don’t know as much about real estate as the professional flippers do – but seriously, you’ve put the Seller in the position of being Buyer’s legal advisor and you think that’ll stop fraud? Only a DFLer could make sense of this stupidity.

Maybe the idea isn’t to stop fraud. I suspect it’s much more the plan to just set the flipper up for the ethics claim. Flipper makes a profit (since all flippers make huge profits, none of them ever lose money on these shacks). Government can’t have flippers make profits, since like landlords and other business owners, we know they are rich and need to be punished. So to take the perceived profits from flippers we now impose on them the affirmative duty to be responsible for the buyer in the contract process. that way the claim is set up for the attorneys to pursue. Flipper had an affirmative duty to make sure the buyer got the best deal possible–from the flipper.

Hell, why stop there? Let’s make this the law for car salesmen too. And plumbers. And bankers!!

Joe Doakes

It’s about creating the impression one has “done something”.

George Zimmerman – still in hiding from the mobs slavering for his head on a pike – steps out to rescue a family of four trapped in an overturned vehicle:

Zimmerman was one of two men who came to the aid of a family of four — two parents and two children — trapped inside a blue Ford Explorer SUV that had rolled over after traveling off the highway in Sanford, Fla. at approximately 5:45 p.m. Thursday, the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

The crash occurred at the intersection of I-4 and route Route 46, police said. The crash site is less than a mile from where Zimmerman shot Martin.

By the time police arrived, two people – including Zimmerman – had already helped the family get out of the overturned car, the sheriff’s office said. No one was reported to be injured.

Do you think Angela Corey would have risked breaking a nail to do that?

Suck it, haters.

Dunn Brothers coffee is a regional coffee shop chain (with some franchise inroads outside Minnesota) that sells really, really good coffee. In fact, as this post appears, I’m very likely drinking a Dunn Brothers medium roast.

But its corporate office had a really, really bad idea.

Dunns’ corporate headquarters is reportedly hosting Mayor Bloomberg’s “Plutocrats Interdicting Guns” (PIG)” “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” (MAIG) when they pass through the Twin Cities on their “Stick It To The Law-Abiding Plebeians” [1] tour.

Now, I don’t believe in boycotts – partly because they don’t work, but also because Dunn’s is a franchise operation that includes many independent businesspeople whose politics may be very, very different from the corporate line.

So I sent them this letter instead:

——–

Dunnbros,

I’ve been buying coffee at Dunn Brothers since you were a single store on Grand Avenue. Sometimes, when working near a Dunn’s, I’ve been known to go twice a day.

So I’m a little – ok, a lot – disappointed to see that Dunn Brothers corporate office is hosting Michael Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” tour.

Name notwithstanding, the group has nothing to do with illegal firearms; all of the group’s policy initiatives relate to attacking the law-abiding citizens’ human right to self-defense.

In the last 20 years, as gun laws have grown more liberal, violent crime has dropped sharply. The main exceptions are several of the cities whose mayors are in MAIG. MAIG has not a factual leg to stand on.

As a rigorously law-abiding guy, from a group that is two orders of magnitude less likely to commit a violent crime than the general public, I’m disappointed with your corporate office’s support of this group.

I urge Dunn Brothers’ corporate HQ to reconsider hosting MAIG.

Mitch Berg
Saint Paul

Sent from my iPhone

I grew up in pretty boring times.  If you’re reading this and you’re under the age of 86, so did you, really. 

And let’s be clear; when it comes to the march of human history, boring is good.  “May you live in interesting times” is often attributed as an ancient Chinese curse; it appears to be as “Chinese” as Leann Chin, but the sentiment is dead-on.  For most of human history (and the entire time before it), life was fascinating, brutish and short.

In contrast to most of human history, with its wars and plagues and cataclysms, human history as known to people alive today has been blessedly, wonderfully boring. 

Some react to the boredom by turning the idea of the collapse of civilization into entertainment, from campy “zombie” fiction (The Walking Dead) to breathlessly pompous asteroid fantasies (Armageddon) to moralistic sermons about being our own undoing (The Day After Tomorrow) to conjuring genocidal invaders from the world of fiction (from the sublime Battlestar Galactica  (the 2004 version, not the loathsome seventies one) to the ridiculous Independence Day). I find “end of the world” p0rn unseemly; I didn’t spend this much time and energy raising kids to laugh about the whole world collapsing.  (And may I add “stop being an idiot”).

Others react by hedging their bets against what, throughout human history, seems to be an inevitable. sooner or later; stocking up on food, land, ammo and other supplies to ride out a bad spell the best they can. 

What goes up must come down.  Things tend to move from a state of order to disorder. 

S**t Happens.

And it’s happening all around us. 

And not only is it inevitable – sometimes it can be a very good thing.

———-

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin Williamson of National Review Online.  We talked in re his new book, The End Is Near (And It’s Going To Be Awesome).   Like all of Williamson’s writing, it’s as breezy and readable as it is intellectually beefy.  He’s like a modern-day Paul Johson – and that’s a huge spiff.

I recommend you read it.  Like, go get a copy.  You’ll thank me later. 

I’ll oversimplify; the book has a few major premises:

• Politics is the worst possible way to allocate scarce resources.  Not because people are evil or democracy is wrong – but because while every other aspect of life has evolved, politics remains essentially unchanged over the centuries.  Politics is a perfectly valid way of dealing with many of the human condition’s issues – contracts, justice, dropping bombs on people who try to kill you, issuing restraining orders and the like.  But for purposes of driving the allocation of our society’s resources, it just doesn’t work.
• No, really.  It’s a disaster.  Our national debt is hanging around a years’ worth of our national GDP.  But the unfunded mandates that nobody wants to talk about currently equal, roughly, the GDP of the entire planet.  As in every single bit of economic output from every man, woman and child on the planet for a full year.  Every Big Mac sold, every Android Phone built, every bag of rice hauled in from a paddy in Bangladesh, every Justin Bieber download sold, everything – just to pay our nation’s mandates.  And most of the world’s other “advanced” economies are the same, and maybe worse – they have no senses of dynamism, little familiarity with the notion of “Creative Destruction”, and even nastier senses of societal entitlement than Americans have developed.  Go ahead – tell a Greek that she can’t have nine weeks’ vacation. 
• It literally can not go on.  It’s like trying to run a family when your significant other is running off to Ho Chunk with the credit and debit cards six days a week.  It is not sustainable.  No matter how vigorously the world’s political bodies affirm their interest in building roadmaps and finding solutions, bla di blah di blah, it is virtually inevitable that the system is going to misallocate its way straight out of business.   Only instead of a divorce or a painful stretch of credit counseling, it’s going to involve some degree or another of the government running out of money, presuming it stops short of taxing every Big Mac sold, every Android Phone built, every bag of rice hauled in from a paddy in Bangladesh, every Justin Bieber download sold, everything. 

So eventually, and pretty much inevitably, government is going to grind to a halt. 

And to Williamson, that’s the good news.  Again, read the book.  You’ll thank me.   Because once you get government out of the way, things actually look pretty good.  We’ll come back to that later.

And you can thank the good folks in New Orleans, Detroit and – soon, I suspect – Camden New Jersey for giving us a previous of how it’s going to work.  Or not work.

And if you think about it, there is some good news in there. 

More tomorrow.

In the his frankly bizarre speech in re the Martin/Zimmermaas case last week, President Obama asked:

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these “stand your ground” laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened?

Of course, the hypothetical question is a stupid one. Obama’s not a stupid man, of course; he knows thatbeing followedisn’t, in and of itself, not enough to convince a reasonable person that one legitimately and immediately fears death or great bodily harm.

The three key words are…:

• Reasonable: would a jury buy the idea that being followed constituted a threat that was…
• Legitimately lethal, not eventually, but…
• Immediately?

“Feeling” threatened – notwithstanding the bleatings of liberal bloggers and politicians – is not reasonably a legitimate, immediate threat of death or great bodily harm. Had ZImmerman, say, jumped out of his truck, tackled Martin, and started beating his head against the sidewalk? That’s another story – as the jury affirmed last week.

But as a literal answer to an immediate, current social question? It’s a good question.

And the answer is “Yes, black people can and do “stand their ground” when under attack, and do so successfully”. Indeed, twice as often per capita (in Florida) as white people:

But approximately one third of Florida “Stand Your Ground” claims in fatal cases have been made by black defendants, and they have used the defense successfully 55 percent of the time, at the same rate as the population at large and at a higher rate than white defendants, according to a Daily Caller analysis of a database maintained by the Tampa Bay Times. Additionally, the majority of victims in Florida “Stand Your Ground” cases have been white.

African Americans used “Stand Your Ground” defenses at nearly twice the rate of their presence in the Florida population, which was listed at 16.6 percent in 2012.

One hundred thirty three people in the state of Florida have used a “Stand Your Ground” defense. Of these claims, 73 were considered “justified” (55 percent), while 39 resulted in criminal convictions and 21 cases are still pending.

Forty four African Americans in the state of Florida have claimed a “Stand Your Ground” defense. Of these claims, 24 were considered “justified” (55 percent), while 11 resulted in convictions and nine cases are still pending.

Now, for a racist law, it seems to be pretty darned color-blind.

Maybe the Administration should stick with trying to find all the guns they gave to the narcotraficantes.

Battlefield Earth may have competition for the worst movie ever made

“I censored myself for 50 years when I was a reporter. Now I wake up and ask myself, ‘Who do I hate today?’” – Helen Thomas

The Grand Dame of the Washington Press Corps files her last report.  Will they regret giving her so much deference?

——

The memoriams to Helen Thomas have thus far ventured no where near hagiography-status, due largely to the anti-Semitic statements and acrimonious questions that defined her later years.  But to follow Thomas’ career trajectory is to follow the style and influence of the mainstream media.  Thomas admirably fought her way into the newsroom, asked probing questions with at least a veneer of respect (hence, her concluding remarks of “thank you, Mr. President” after every presidential press conference), and then devolved into a caricature of an angry, biased reporter holding some extremely ugly and racist views.

Indeed, it would appear that most of Helen Thomas’ biography resides in her later years as she viewed American foreign policy through a Star of David lens, leading even prominent liberals to ostracize her.  Much of the coverage of her passing, from news reports to her Wikipedia page, focus largely on her 2010 comments on Israel, declaring that Israelis should “go home” to Europe and the United States.

Thomas’ start in the media was anything but controversial.

The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, Thomas worked as a reporter for the United Press in 1943 on “women’s topics” – essentially fluff articles on baking and clothing.  It wasn’t until the mid-1950s, after having written the equivalent of Washington gossip columns, that Thomas was able to cover major federal agencies and far more noteworthy news items.  From her post as the head of the Women’s National Press Club and later a White House correspondent during the Kennedy administration, Thomas was able to get women a greater role in journalism – having previously been denied access to organizations like the National Press Club and events like the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Worthwhile accomplishments, to be sure.  But having spent most of her professional life fighting for acceptance, even once Thomas was in the door, she couldn’t stop her role as an endless antagonist to those she personally disagreed with.  Thomas was most certainly not an “example for journalists,” although her behavior of biased reporting and lack of decorum has definitely been followed by many current reporters.

Thomas’ defenders often claim she was a bitter pill to politicians of all stripes.  Of course, Thomas’ White House harangues for Democrats typically involved criticizing them for not moving further left, as she once famously declared that Barack Obama was not liberal.  Bill Clinton “personified the human spirit” while George W. Bush was the “worst president in history.”  When Thomas joined the Hearst Syndicate in 2000, whatever restraint she had held before vanished, hence her above quote about being able to “hate” whomever she pleased.

From trail-blazer, to provocateur, to angry activist with a byline – does that not also describe the evolving role of the mainstream media in the past 60 years?  Thomas was unfortunately another trendsetter in the end – a forerunner of the mixture between opinion and reporting; of a style of journalistic coverage that smears ideological opponents and debases politics regardless of facts.  Stephen Colbert might recoil at the thought, but Helen Thomas was one of the originators of the “truthiness” that Comedy Central’s mock conservative loves to sling at others.

I’m a liberal, I was born a liberal, and I will be a liberal till the day I die. – Helen Thomas

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 at the Car Craft Summer Nationals, at the State Fairgrounds. Stop on by!
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• 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 my new UStream video and chat channel (don’t ask)
• 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!

 The IRS Scandal has its roots in DC. It’s not local to Cincinnati, it’s not non-partisan, and President Obama is not isolated from it:

Ms. Hofacre of the Cincinnati office testified that when she was given tea-party applications, she had to kick them upstairs. When she was given non-tea-party applications, they were sent on for normal treatment. Was she told to send liberal or progressive groups for special scrutiny? No, she did not scrutinize the applications of liberal or progressive groups. “I would send those to general inventory.” Who got extra scrutiny? “They were all tea-party and patriot cases.” She became “very frustrated” by the “micromanagement” from Washington. “It was like working in lost luggage.” She applied to be transferred.

For his part, [IRS lifer and tax exemption expert Carter] Hull backed up what he’d told House investigators. He described what was, essentially, a big, lengthy runaround in the Washington office in which no one was clear as to their reasons but everything was delayed. The multitiered scrutiny of the targeted groups was, he said, “unusual.”

This goes all the way to Obama-appointed officials; it’s absurd to think that the President’s inner circle wasn’t intimately involved in the persecution of dissent.

The Administration is running the Clinton-era play, the one they always run when they’re up against it; Delay, Deny, Destroy. 

Maryland Rep. Cummings is doing the Deny part, and doing it absurdly badly:

It was Maryland’s Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel’s ranking Democrat, who, absurdly, asked Ms. Hofacre if the White House called the Cincinnati office to tell them what to do and whether she has knowledge of the president of the United States digging through the tax returns of citizens. Ms. Hofacre looked surprised. No, she replied.

It wasn’t hard to imagine her thought bubble: Do congressmen think presidents call people like me and say, “Don’t forget to harass my enemies”? Are congressmen that stupid?

Mr. Cummings is not, and his seeming desperation is telling. Recent congressional information leads to Washington—and now to very high up at the IRS. Meaning this is the point at which a scandal goes nowhere or, maybe, everywhere.

By Cummings’ logic, Nixon was innocent because he didn’t jimmy the door at the Democrat office at Watergate.

The American Left is obliging enough to give me a world of confirmation that Berg’s Seventh Law (“When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”) and its various corollaries are pretty much dead-on reflections of human nature filtered through leftist politics.  Berg’s Seventh gets most of the attention. 

But Berg’s Eighth Law has had its place in the sun this past few weeks. 

The law reads “American liberalism’s reaction to one of “their”constituents – women, gays or people of color – running for office or otherwise identifying as a conservative is indistinguishable from a sociopathic disorder”.  And the left here in Minnesota’s been flying their evidence like a battle flag this past few weeks.

From Ryan Winkler’s “Uncle Tom” jape, to the flurries of racist hatred facing every ethnic-minority conservative, from Michelle Malkin to, lately, Larry Elder (and don’t get me started on the political misogyny shown to conservative women), it’s been a banner couple of weeks for lefty bigotry. 

I, for one, have a dream; that my children will grow up in a world where they’ll be judged not by the political label that Media Matters and “ThinkProgress” put on them, but on the contents of their hearts…

To: American Psychiatric Assocation (APA)
From: Mitch Berg, uppity peasant
Re: Cyberphrenia

To whom it may concern,

Please accept the following submission for the sixth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-6), whenever you release it:

Cyberphrenia: a personality disorder which presents with a complete dissociation between the subject’s “online” and offline personalities.

This usually (but not uniformly) manifests as a subject developing an “online” personality that manifests as negative ideation ranging from mild impulse-control and conduct disorders to symptoms resembling full-blown sociopathy or narcissistic personality disorder.

Keep me posted.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Compare the headline in the paper where the incident actually happened with the headline in the local paper.

In this one, the guy shot himself by accident:

In this one, the gun “went off” and shot him:

The subtle difference is the PiPress article makes it sound as if the firearm can spontaneously discharge at any time; the implication is it’s too dangerous to have one around so we should ban them all, for the children.

What media bias?

Joe Doakes

There may be no subject on which the media is both less balanced and less competent than firearms.

For exampe, the media meme that George Zimmerman “had a round in his chamber, his hammer cocked and his safety off” when the confrontation with Trayvon Martin started.  He was carrying a Kel-Tec 9mm.  It’s a double-action only pistol, a type I hypothetically might have a lot of experience with.  You can’t cock the hammer, and there is no safety.  And of course he had a round in the chamber; that’s where they belong – provided you don’t have a cocked hammer.

SCENE:  MITCH is sitting on the light rail, heading from the Mall of American downtown to a Twins game. 

At Bloomington Station stop, Avery LIBRELLE, Cat SCAT and Gutterball GARY get on the train.  MITCH turns toward the window and dons sunglasses, but LIBRELLE notices him.  The three amble to him, stumbling awkwardly as the train starts moving, and sit surrounding him even though the car is otherwise empty. 

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Mitch.  You racists won.  Hope you’re proud of yourself. 

MITCH:  Um…if I ask “what are you talking about?”, would that imply I actually want to know?  Because I’m not sure…

SCAT:  George Zimmerman was acquitted.  It proves the system is racist. 

MITCH:  Um…huh?

LIBRELLE:  The case was entirely about race!

GARY:  Yeah!  Yeah!  All about race!

MITCH:  Neither the prosecutors nor the defense ever mentioned race during the case. 

SCAT:  Well, the 911 call proved that Zimmerman attacked in a racist fury. 

GARY:  Yeah!  Yeah!  Fury!

MITCH:  Listen to the audio yourself.  He sounded disgusted, depressed and dejected.  All of the pique came from the prosecution and media’s slanted reading of the transcript. 

LIBRELLE:  Zimmerman called Martin a “f****ng coon”

GARY: Yeah!  Yeah!  Rage!  Ragey wingnut!

MITCH:   No, he said it was “f****ng cold”. 

GARY:  Yeah, “right”. 

SCAT:  Zimmerman contradicted his own story. 

GARY:  Yeah!  Yeah!  Counterdicted! 

MITCH: Not according to the Sanford police chief, who said his story held up entirely through multiple rounds of questioning. 

LIBRELLE:  Yeah, well, he was a wannabe cop who disobeyed a police order not to follow Martin. 

GARY: Hah!  Yeah!  Police order, stupid Right-wing nut job!

MITCH:  There was no police order.  A dispatcher is not a cop, and can’t give orders. 
When Zimmerman said he was going to follow Martin, the dispatcher said “we don’t need you to do that”.  It was vague, and it was utterly non-binding. 

SCAT:  Martin had every right to be on the street.

GARY:  Yeah! Yeah!  Yeah!  Yeah!

MITCH:  Right.  So did Zimmerman. 

LIBRELLE:  Huh? 

MITCH: Zimmerman had a right to be on the street, too. 

LIBRELLE:  Not if he was stalking Martin. 

GARY:  Yeah !  Stalker!

MITCH:  “Stalking” is a pretty loaded term.  He was following.  Advisable?  Maybe, maybe not, but not remotely illegal. 

SCAT:  But he was acting like a wannabe cop. 

GARY:  Wannabe!  Wannabe!

MITCH: That’s a pejorative interpretation of Zimmerman’s long-past behavior.  There’s no law in wanting to act like a cop, in any case.  And, er, how someone “acts” doesn’t justify being assaulted and having ones head bashed into the ground like some kind of MMA fight.

LIBRELLE:  He had a round in his chamber, the hammer cocked and the safety off!

GARY: Yeah!  Yeah!  Yeah!  Round off and safety in the chamber!

MITCH: Um, just about everyone who carries a firearm carries a round in the chamber.  Including every single person with a revolver.  And let me ask you – who told you the “safety was off and the hammer was cocked”?

SCAT:  It’s just facts!

GARY:  Yeah ! Yeah!  Yeah!  Stupid wingnut!  Facts!

MITCH:  Right, the KelTec 9mm that Zimmerman carried has no cockable hammer, and no safety catch.  It’s a “double action only” pistol; the hammer only cocks when you squeeze the trigger.  There’s no need for a safety, so there is none.   I know this from years of familiarity with KelTec pistols. 

LIBRELLE:  The injuries Zimmerman suffered aren’t consistent with being punched.

GARY:  Yeah!   Yeah!  Yeah!

MITCH:  Right, but they are consistent with being beaten against a cement sidewalk. 

SCAT:  This case is proof that “Stand your Ground” laws are racist. 

GARY:  Yeah!  Racisss!  Yeah!

MITCH:  “Stand your Ground” was never at issue, since the Defense showed that retreat was never an option; they didn’t even opt to go for a “Stand your Ground” hearing, since the law didn’t apply to this case.  Not even a little bit. 

LIBRELLE: …

SCAT: …

GARY:  …

MITCH: How about those Twins?

(TRAIN stops at Franklin Avenue.  SCAT, LIBRELLE and GARY abruptly get up and climb off the train, which pulls away as the three’s eyes all go wide with fear). 

LIBRELLE (receding into distance as train pulls away) Hey!  Where’s the 331 Club? 

And SCENE

This is your Obama economy, part oh-who-the-hell-remembers:

The residential real-estate rebound suffered a setback in June as housing starts unexpectedly fell to the lowest level in almost a year, curbing how much construction contributed to U.S. economic growth last quarter.

Believe harder and faster, people!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Even Black people agree that Blacks are more racist than Whites or Hispanics.

Plainly, the poll itself, is racissssssss.

Joe doakes

Well, clearly.  Because if you say you’re not racist, it means you are.

And if you say, do or thing something racist, you’re a racist – unless, apparently, you’re a liberal blogger.

GREETINGS, MN “PROGRESSIVE” PROJECT READERS:  Great to have you here.  Quick point of order, though; I don’t say racism is “a liberal problem”.  Merely that “Dog Gone’s” rationalization of her use of the term “Uncle Tom” is itself self-indulgent, illogical and corrosively specious. 

As she says it, racism is when “You do or say something racist when you make an unfounded claim about someone on the basis of a race or an attribute to race”.  That’s just wrong.  It’s when you attribute any trait, positive or negative, to someone based on their race.  And Dog Gone’s judgment of whether something is or is not “unfounded” is the same precise logic redneck peckerwoods use when they say “N***er ain’t racist, cuz there’s black n***ers and there’s white n***ers”; in other words, the idea that using a a racist term to describe someone is ever “founded”.

And is someone going to seriously claim that the term “Uncle Tom” isn’t racist, whether you believe it’s “founded” or not?   Say what you will about Justice Thomas’ legal and personal history (liberals seem drawn to the fiction that he’s unqualified to be a SCOTUS justice, but Sonya Sotomayor is), but who out there can build a case that calling him “a slave who brown-noses his masters to curry favor” isn’t racist? Unless your name is Tom and your siblings have kids, “Uncle Tom” has no other meaning. 

As to her constant claim that conservatism is racist?  Leaving aside the fact that the claim is bigoted in and of itself, it’s also ideologically nonsense.  While there are no doubt conservatives who, individually, are racist (just as there are racist liberals as well – indeed, the most gleefully racist person I’ve ever personally met was a mutual acquaintance of Dog Gone’s and mine who happened to be an east-side Saint Paul DFL ward heeler), one of the bedrock tenets real conservatives observe is judging people as individuals, not by their class, gender or, yep, race. 

Martin Luther King was no conservative Republican, but he dreamed that his children would be judged by the contents of their hearts, not their color – and that (hold the stereotypes most of you no doubt romp and frolic in) is a conservative ideal. 

I’ve known Dog Gone for 20-odd years, more or less, and sincerely hope she’ll pull her mind out of the fever swamp sooner or later.  She could be better than that.

Your comments are welcome; I moderate everyone’s first comment (to cut down on spam), but unless something is slander or pointlessly inflammatory, I approve everything, because unlike certain blogs I enjoy a vigorous discussion.

Governor Dayton is going to pay back the unions that bought his office for him – and he doesn’t care how much of your money he spends to do it:

In his relentless effort to pay back the unions for his close victory in 2010, Governor Mark Dayton is sending the state’s lawyers into court Thursday July 18th to argue against a group of childcare providers who are trying to block implementation of a new law. The new law was passed over strong Republican opposition in the 2013 session and will force childcare providers, most of whom are small independent businesses, to join a union.

…unless they stop taking state money, which means the availability of daycare for low-income parents is going to drop. 

Thursday’s court action is just the latest in a long running battle between Mark Dayton and small childcare providers who take care of Minnesota children while their parents go to work.

• Shortly after his election, Governor Dayton tried to force a union vote on childcare providers through executive order. That action was blocked by a Minnesota district court judge who ruled Dayton had grossly overstepped the limits of his power.
• With the help of $11 million in campaign spending from his union allies, Gov. Dayton succeeded in flipping both the House and Senate in 2012 into a more union-friendly Democratic majority.
• During the 2013 session, despite overwhelming opposition from childcare providers and parents, Dayton and his new legislature passed a law that will force small independent childcare providers into a union against their will. The law will also drive up the cost of childcare for all Minnesota families while leaving fewer choices for those with lower incomes.

If you’ve got time to make it to a court hearing, tomorrow (Thursday) would be the day for it.  It’ll be at 9:30AM in room 15E of the Federal Courthouse in Minneapolis. 

Governor Dayton is turning his back on Minnesota families by asking for the lawsuit to be dismissed. Show your support for Minnesota families by attending the hearing.

You can be sure plenty of hangers-on in purple and yellow shirts will be there.

A man intervenes when a teenage boy was acting illegally in his neighborhood.  The boy charges the man.  The man shoots in self-defense.  The man is acquitted.

Oh, yeah – the man, Roderick Scott, is black, the teenager, Christopher Cervini, was white. 

That’d be why you’ve never heard of the case:

Not guilty: The verdict in the manslaughter trial of Roderick Scott. After more than 19 hours of deliberations over two days, a jury acquitted the Greece man in the shooting death of Christopher Cervini, 17, last April.

“I just want to say thank you to the people who believed in me, who stood by me,” Scott said following the verdict. “I still have my regrets for the Cervini family; it’s still an unfortunate situation for them. I am happy that at least this chapter is over.”

And both sides in this case in suburban Rochester, NY should be thankful that their gawdawful tragedy didn’t become a stage prop for anyone’s re-election bid.

 I’ve bagged on Nate Silver in the past.  His methodology ends up calling races accurately – but, I suspect, it’s mostly through the benefit of a point spread that would forgive a lot of errors.  My favorite example – his 2010 prediction that Governor Dayton would win by six points (with an eight point margin of error). 

And so I’m not going to put in a big champagne order just yet.

But he’s smelling Democrat blood in the water next year.  In the Senate:

 A race-by-race analysis of the Senate, in fact, suggests that Republicans might now be close to even-money to win control of the chamber after next year’s elections. Our best guess, after assigning probabilities of the likelihood of a G.O.P. pickup in each state, is that Republicans will end up with somewhere between 50 and 51 Senate seats after 2014, putting them right on the threshold of a majority.

After last year, I’m keeping all pollling at arm’s length, of course.

Almost three in four small businesses plan to lay off workers, cut hours, and replace full-time employees with part-timers due to Obamacare:

“Small businesses expect the requirement to negatively impact their employees. Twenty-seven percent say they will cut hours to reduce full time employees, 24 percent will reduce hiring, and 23 percent plan to replace full time employees with part-time workers to avoid triggering the mandate,” said the Chamber business survey provided to Secrets.

Under Obamacare, just 30 hours — not the nationally recognized 40 hours — is considered full-time. Companies with 50 full-time workers or more are required to provide health care, or pay a fine.

I’m wondering if Obama’s apologists in the media have figured out that if the unemployment rate is “dropping” but the underemployment rate is rising, something might be going wrong?

If you’re a conservative who’s spent the past decade or two assailing theStar Tribune’srigorous editorial pro-DFL, pro-“progressive”, pro-leftist bias, there’s some good news.  

Sorta.

But we’ll get back to that later.   

Jay Larson of Saint Bonifacius t is apparently upset about the Zimmerman verdict, and has apparently seen enough episodes of Law and Order that he feels himself quite the Monday Morning county attorney, in an op-ed that the Strib opted to run in preference to goodness knows how many intelligent pieces they could have run:

In response to the July 15 editorial “Due process plays out in Zimmerman case”: Really?

It is a given that the state of Florida was dragged into the Zimmerman case kicking and screaming because of public pressure from the black community.

Now, I’m sure to Mr. Larson that means something different than it does to people who actually care about justice.

For most of us, the fact that the State of Florida – which is never shy about prosecuting people they believe to have committed crimes, and carrying out sentences with frothy abandon (from a large, full prison system to a legendarily-busy electric chair) didn’t opt to press charges was pretty clear evidence that there was no there there; that the homicide, tragic as it is, was justified on its face under the laws on the books in the sovereign state of Florida. 

To Jay Larson – who apparently believes Sam Waterson was a real lawyer – it means the “justice” system does, and should, respond to whomever cheers or jeers the loudest.   

Due process? What due process? I was appalled at the lack of zeal with which the prosecution tried this case. It allowed the key witness, a young uneducated black girl, to testify without being properly prepared — a girl for whom English was her third language and who was quite evidently intimidated.

“English was her third language?”

Does that sound racist to anyone but me?

And to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to trial with the witnesses you have, not the witnesses you want.  While Mr. Larson would apparently have preferred the prosectors hire Halle Berry to play the role of Ms. Jeantel, it would seem to be an irreducible fact that the “uneducated” Ms. Jeantel was the best the prosecution could find on one years’ notice. 

Next, the prosecution brought the lead detective, who was supposedly there to bolster the prosecution’s case. He testified that he was certain that George Zimmerman was telling the truth. Why did he say that as a prosecution witness?

Offhand, I’d say “that he felt committing perjury would be a bad career move?”

I’ll give Mr. Larson of Saint Freaking Bonnie this much; he apparently watches a broad range of TV.  In addition to the diet of Law and Order that apparently qualifies him to back-seat-drive the prosecutors’ office, he also apparently watches enough CSI or NCIS to fancy himself quite the investigator:  

There were so many inconsistencies in George Zimmerman’s story of the events that night it was absurd to think that he was telling the truth. For instance, Zimmerman said that Trayvon Martin punched him 25 times and slammed his head against the sidewalk an additional 25 times.

If someone has been hit in the face 25 times, that person is going to exhibit a lot of bruising and swelling around the lips and eyes. Zimmerman had none. If his head had been slammed against the sidewalk 25 times, where is the concussion, where is the blood, where is the swelling?

Well, he doesn’t look quite curb-ready in these crime-time photos:

I’m neither a doctor nor Jay Larson, but this looks painful.

And I suspect when you’re getting your head slammed against a cement sidewalk ones count might not be utterly accurate.  Adrenaline makes detailed actions like “keeping running totals of how many times you’ve been punched and slammed to the pavement” difficult; also.  And I know this not just because the slamming illogic and assumption of Mr. Larson’s piece is making it difficult to think – it is, but it’s not from adrenaline, trust me – but because it’s one of those things they teach you in carry permit training, if nowhere else.   

How could Zimmerman have been constantly screaming if his mouth was covered by Trayvon’s hand and blood was running down his throat from his broken nose?

Question.  Perhaps because his mouth wasn’t constantly covered, perhaps?

 Where was the blood that should have been on Martin’s hands?

If he was slamming the head on the ground rather than punching it – as, by the way, the prosecution said he did?  There’d be no blood. 

How exactly did Zimmerman pull out his gun from his interior holster if he was laying on it? (Additionally, it would have been covered by Martin’s legs if Zimmerman was truly on the bottom as he claimed.)

Good point.  Clearly Zimmerman had his gun drawn as he walked onto the scene, pointing it where he was looking like a wanna-be cop, and waited until he’d been pummeled into near-submission before shooting. 

Alternately; the holster was accessible enough – which isn’t that hard to believe if Mr. Martin had normal legs, or was sitting facing Martin rather than away from himn, pinning the gun to Zimmerman’s stomach with his butt.

As to this next bit (in which I’ll add emphasis)…:

There was no due process in that courtroom. The only process exhibited there was the Jim Crow process of the old South. Granted, this wasn’t the lynching of a black man after a quicky trial. Rather it was the unlynching of a white man who murdered a black child.

I’m wondering if Mr. Larson is even a capable enough writer to know that he’s tacitly admitting that the malicious prosecution and mob-rule attack on Zimmerman was a “lynching”. 

Oh, yeah – the “good news” I talked about at the top?  Here it is:

For years, I’ve believed that the Strib editorial board would cherry-pick the letters and op-eds they’d print.  Now, that’s their right – but I’ve believed (not without justification) that they did it to slant the perception of their reading public by printing letters and op-eds from well-spoken, thoughtful (if usually wrong) liberals, along with a distortedly-pejorative sample of conservatives that sounded like cranks, crackpots and stereotypes.

And the “good” news would seem to be that the Strib, by printing the likes of Mr. Larson, is now giving the left at least a little of the same short, dismal shrift. 

It’s fairer, I suppose.  But is it really progress?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails in re the Target memo flap:

The memo is offensive? Why? they’re training people NOT to use stereotypes like these.

Complaining about this is like complaining about the Texaco exec who repeated what the diversity trainer said about Black jelly beans.

Even if the stereotypes in the memo were offensive, is the memo CORRECT?

Nobody cares about that, anymore.

Joe Doakes

Only political correctness really matters.