Two weeks ago, when Representative Ryan Winkler shocked the parts of the world that can still be shocked by referring to SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas as an “Uncle Tom” – something even junior-high kids in North Dakota thirty-something years ago knew was a racist slap – the Twin Cities media did what it always does.

Cover for the Democrat. 

(And the Twin Cities leftyblogosphere?  To them, Clarence Thomas, a phenomenally accomplished man, is no different than Michelle Malkin or Star Parker or Alan West; a target for endemic bigotry first, human last, maybe.  When will Eric Pusey condem the racism on his “blog?”). 

Speaking of accomplished people, Chris Fields – a very talented politician who gave Keith Ellison as good a run as any Democrat’s had in the 5th CD lately, and is now the Secretary of the Republican Party of Minnesota and who is a businessman, a retired US Marine and, as it happens, black – wrote an editorial about how very, very objectionable the Winkler flap was.

Now, it’s the mushy institutional left, people like the Star/Tribune editorial board, that constantly remind us we need a “dialogue about race”.  Of course, when they say “dialogue”, they really mean “monologue, with our side doing all the talking and your icky conservatives doing the listening”

But in re the Winkler incident, it’s seem the Strib wants no monologue, much less “dialogue”.  Chris FIelds wrote an excellent op-ed about the subject of Winkler and his ignorant racist jape.  It was picked up by other papers – the Pioneer Press and the Mankato Times both ran it (it’s below the fold here). 

But the Strib?  Not so much as an impolite “F Off”. 

Winkler, who represents the lily-white, mushy-left heard of the Strib’s prime demographic, has gotten an unqualified pass from the entire Twin Cities media, which focused on his instant contrition in a way that’d would have seemed less jarring if it were something the Strib, the City Pages or MPR ever did for, say, Todd Akin’s verbal japes or Tom Hackbarth’s post-divorce wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time awkwardness or anything Ann Coulter has ever said, in or out of context. 

But it wasn’t. 

So why didn’t the Strib run Fields’ op-ed?  Is Fields not a compelling commentator on the issue?  Is his perspective not important?  Was his op-ed not well-written and excellent food for thought?  Yes, yes and yes.

Does it afflict someone the Strib’s editorial board and their friends very much want to see remain politically comfortable?  A thousand times yes. 

And so down the memory hole it, and the entire incident, will be shoved. They have their priorities.

Fields op-ed is below the jump.

(more…)

Democrats are starting to get defensive about the DFL’s Democrat Tax Orgy.

How defensive?

Sally Jo Sorenson, one of the very few Minnesota leftybloggers that doesn’t deserve to be under police surveillance, took time off from her busy schedule of amending incoming comments to have a screaming, body-function-control-losing cow tweet:

MNGOP troll blames “DFL anti-biz MORONS” in 2013 for June 2011 Unline [sic] relocation choice #mnleg #oops #stribpol bit.ly/1ahYf5i

The linked blog post notes that a Republican tweep blamed ULine moving its warehouse to Wisconsin on Governor Dayton’s warehouse tax, when ULine actually started making its plans for the move in 2011.

Well.  I guess that crunches it.  I’m going to have to draft a pained concession.  Bear with me a moment.

Ms. Sorenson,

Great point.  That rhetorical “oops” on Twitter completely invalidates the entire case against raising taxes in a recession.  With that, I guess we have to admit the DFL tax orgy, notwithstanding the fact that Democrat tax orgies never ever ever work, will not only have no effect, but will set the state’s economic blender to “puree”.  All by its lonesome. 

All because a Republican tweep bobbled a date on one event.  We sit corrected, and admit abject defeat.

Oh, wait – your entire point is invalidated too, because you misspelled “ULine”. 

I guess we’re both completely utterly wrong!

Don’t have a cow!  Or a melt-down!  Or go all emo on us!  It’s just a misspelling – albeit one that completely invalidates – by your own “logic” – your entire argument, whatever it is. 

Regards,

Berg

Of course, Sorenson missed the memo (or perhaps just isn’t being paid to fret about such things) about Navarre packing up shop and heading for Texas.  Or Red Wing Shoes and Laurence Transportation moving their warehouse plans across the Mississippi.  Or the other warehouses around Minnesota that are not-so-quietly eyeing locations across one river or the other.  None of those count…

…because of that darned Republican tweep bobbling the date for “Unline’s” plans.

That’s all it takes, apparently, to prove an economic plan unimpeachably correct. 

Of course, 2011 was a date we had a Democrat governor back into office promising a raft of business taxes.  And when the Republican party showed signs of unravelling; for those paying attention, 2011 was full of messages that Minnesota’s tax future was going to be a departure of some kind from the relatively conservative past; at the very least, the future promised uncertainty (and delivered it!).  Businesses hate uncertainty – they plan years, not weeks, ahead; perhaps the folks at “Unline” were more on top of the situation than we knew.

Or maybe not.  And it doesn’t matter, because it’s moot point.  Because once a “Republican troll” gets a date wrong, the entire argument is over!

(more…)

…is when can I take it to work in the morning?:

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The US Bank building in downtown St. Paul was foreclosed last year. The River Park Plaza building across the river from downtown St. Paul also was foreclosed last year. I don’t know how many more are in the pipeline.

St. Paul Class A office space vacancy rate is 12%. As last report, Class B was 24% and Class C was 19%, for an overall rate of 21%.

This, five years into the “recovery.” This is not your grandfather’s recovery. It’s more like your grandfather’s Great Depression.

Joe Doakes

And that’s after the State of Minnesota rented a hog-pile of empty and underutilized space.

And, I’ll guess, before the whole “Vacant Macy’s” gets counted, to boot.  It’s not “office” space, after all; just a vacant block.

More “recovery” like this and Saint Paul might need to try to find oil under some of those refrigerated ice rinks Mayor Coleman just had to have.

This was the band I always wanted to have when I was in high school or, even moreso, college:

I mean, not necessarily with Steve Van Zandt (AKA “Silvio Dante”) sucking up all the oxygen – but a horn-based Stax/Volt knockoff kind of thing. 

Oh, don’t mind me.  I’ve been having one of those weekends where every single earworm was an Asbury Jukes song.  Which is far from all bad.

But here’s a a trivia question.  Look at the guitar player in the pink shirt (Bobby Bandiera) with the white guitar.  That very guitar appeared in a major motion picture (along with the rest of the band). 

Any guesses?

Whatever you thought about the Martin/Zimmerman case, the big loser was the American media. They – and their leftyblog camp followers – did, almost to a fault, an unforgiveably bad job of covering the case – from NBC’s editing Zimmerman’s 911 call to try to make him sound racist to their seeming unwillingness to get even the most basic facts straigth. (Classic example: how many of you read media accounts that said Zimmerman has “a round in the chamber, his hammer cocked and his safety off?” For starters, virtually every person who carries a firearm for self-defense, including every cop you see on the street, has a “round in the chamber”. Beyond that, Zimmerman’s pistol was a KelTec 9mm, a type I’m intimately familiar with; it’s what’s called a “double action only” pistol; there is no safety, and you can’t “cock” the hammer except by squeezing the trigger.

I know. Technicalities. But it’s not just the gun-geek stuff that the media bobbles.

In the wake of the Zimmerman verdict over the weekend, an insufficiently bright liberal on Twitter issued a tweet that included a link to this deeply ignorant hit piece from CBS last year.

It’s just as wrong this year as it was last; I’ll emphasize the :

(CBSMiami.com) – As some state lawmakers are calling for a re-thinking of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which allows people to defend themselves from danger without the need to first try to get away, an analysis of state data shows deaths due to self defense are up over 200 percent since the law took effect.

“Up over 200 percent”. 

That sounds like a big number.  Especially as against the fact that murder in general, nationwide, is down nearly half in the past 20 years. 

Seems like a…disconnect?

We’ll come back to that.

The shooting death of Trayvon Martin by an armed, self-appointed Central Florida crime watch volunteer who claimed he shot in self defense has sparked a national debate about Florida’s law, technically known as the Castle doctrine.

No.  No, it is not “technically known” as “Castle Doctrine”, which relates to removing the “duty to retreat”while you’re in your home.  Which was the law in Minnesota until the mid-2000s, by the way, but no longer. 

Until 2005, it was generally considered self defense if someone tried to get into your home or invade your property, so long as you could show deadly force was the last resort. In 2005, the “Stand your Ground” law removed the need to retreat before using force, even in public.

And there you go.  One of the reasons people on the left are so ignorant about Second Amendment issues is that the people they get their information from are, in fact, crushingly ignorant on the subject. 

“Castle” referred to  in your home.  “Stand your Ground” was elsewhere. 

According to state crime stats, Florida averaged 12 “justifiable homicide” deaths a year from 2000-2004. After “Stand your Ground” was passed in 2005, the number of “justifiable” deaths has almost tripled to an average of 35 a year, an increase of 283% from 2005-2010.

So what? 

If all of those shootings – 12 or 35 – were people shooting because they were in legitimate fear of death or great bodily harm, and where lethal force was appropriate, and the intended victim wasn’t a willing participant, then that means there are 35 rapists, stalkers, robbers and thugs off the street.

Each death is a tragedy, sure.  But so would be the deaths of those shooting in self-defense – and in every case, as a matter of law , that was the alternative with all 35 of those shootings; death, mutilation, kidnapping, rape. 

Don’t they matter?

Minnesota needs a Stand your Ground law.

Both times I went through Minnesota carry permit training, I had to absorb a massive amount of information, much of it potentially life-or-death. 

One of the big ones, both times?  Using a firearm in self-defense, even if it’s utterly justified in every way, is the second-worst possible outcome to a bad situation, at best.  The worst, maybe, is that you die – and if you shoot an innocent person while trying to defend yourself, that’s even worse.  Armed self-defense is incredibly fraught – legally and morally. 

And that’s if you do absolutely everything right. 

There was little to cheer about Saturday night at 9PM Central, as the jury announced its “not guilty” verdict. 

For Trayvon Martin’s family?  Having your child come to grief for no good reason is one of every parent’s worst nightmares.  I’ve spent many a sleepless night wracked with worry about my own teenage kids.  There but for the grace of God go many of us. 

And that’s even if you leave the racial element out of it.  Which I will do – because so did the prosecution in the Zimmerman trial.  If it never came up at trial, it’s not an issue.  It’s a mind-warping tragedy – but not a racial incident. 

As to George Zimmerman?  Even if you leave out all the threats against his life – most of which can be discounted as easily as testosterone-driven chest-pounding, but by no means all of it – his life is never going to be the same.  It’s a rare, sick person that doesn’t feel some intense remorse over ending another human life, even if they did everything right.

As, as the court acknowledged, he did. 

So I’ll pray for both Zimmerman’s and Martin’s families, and Zimmerman himself; the horror of this incident likely isn’t done spreading its destruction and misery.  I urge you do to do the same via whatever means your worldview acknowledges. 

If you believe the court verdict – and in our system, we are supposed to – then Trayvon Martin made a very bad choice, resolving whatever issues he had with being followed by attacking Zimmerman, who in turn chose to defend himself, because it was reasonable to assume that had he not, he’d be the dead one today (unlamented in the media).  This fear he proved reasonable to a jury.  You can second-guess it, but it’s all wind in sails. 

Other people and institutions made choices – none of them of direct life or death import, but with implications that bear more directly on most of the rest of us who weren’t party to that shooting a year ago last spring. 

Never Waste A Dead Kid:  Barack Obama and his administration distinguished themselves by the depths of their cynicism.  They politicized this case before the blood was dry – and they did it entirely to cement black support in the 2012 election.  Is there a worse word than “cynicism?”

The Media:  The mainstream media did, almost universally, an unforgiveable job in “covering” the case.  They served as vehicles for the Administration’s narrative (NBC’s editing of Zimmerman’s 911 call to falsely make it sound racist), the prosecution’s disinformation (reading Zimmerman’s 911 call text as an angry outburst, where it was in real life more a resigned head-shake of disgust), and were universally as incurious about telling an accurate story as they were eager to exploit the tragedy into ratings (and political brownie points). 

Ask yourself this; how many media and leftyblog sources did you see refer to Zimmerman carrying his firearm with the “hammer cocked and the safety off?”   Zimmerman’s pistol had no safety; either does any revolver, or any of the Glocks your local police probably carry.  And there’s no hammer to cock.  And yet many media reports included that bit of tough-sounding but meaningless reporting.

Too gun-geeky?  OK – how many times have you seen the media refer to this trial as a racial incident?  Ask them – where in the case did the prosecution introduce race into the case?

They never did.  Either, naturally, did the defense.  It was a non-factor.

But that’s not sexy enough for the media. 

The Entire American Left, Especially The Media And Political Classes, And That Means You Reading This, Whomever You Are: Also unsufficiently media-sexy, apparently, were the 11,106 other African-Americans killed since Martin’s death – 93% of them shot by other African-Americans.  Be honest; if you can name one of their names, it’s because you follow North Minneapolis news (or whatever the blighted neigbhorhood near you might be).  Most of them are teenage boys, a few years older or younger than Martin. 

None of of those thousands of dead African-Americans was a sufficiently compelling stage prop for the Administration and the Media – pardon, as always, the redundancy – to exploit.

Leftyblogs:  Virtually all of them had their minds made up the moment Media Matters told them what to think.  The leftyblogs’ usual repetition of groupthink was the worst I’ve ever seen.  And I thought I’d seen it all.

On the NARN over the weekend I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin Williamson, the National Review writer whose latest book, The End Is Near (And It’s Going To Be Awesome) is a fascinating exploration of both the power of the natural human trait of adaptation to solve most problesm – and government’s immunity to it. The book is a smorgasbord of food for thought, and I highly recommend it. 

One of the key points is that politics, by the nature of its very immunity to agility and adaptibility, is the worst possible way to allocate resources in a complex society. 

With that in mind, Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Mayor of Dorset, Minnesota (a tourist town up North in Hubbard County), has a gimmick: they pull names from the hat to see who’s mayor. This year, it’s a 4-year old kid. By all accounts, the town is thriving under his administration.

Wonder if he’d consider moving to St. Paul? We could use someone a little more grown-up in charge of this place.

Joe Doakes

If the Mayor and the entire City Council were replaced by 4-year-olds, it would solve a lot of problems. 

No, I’m being neither glib nor hyperbolic.

George Zimmerman was declared not guilty at 10pm Eastern Time.

Let the demigogueing begin.

UPDATE: Let’s watch the media work to delegitimize the trial, even though judge Nelson seemed to be taking orders from Eric Holder.

UPDATE 2: Well, this was inevitable, wasn’t didn’t it?

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’m back, and I’ll be talking with Kevin Williamson about his new book, “The Emd Is Near (And It’s  Going To Be Awesome).  
• 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!

Amid the carnage of the massive Kursk offensive, on the morning of July 10th, the 1st SS Panzergrenadier Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler set out to create a small bridgehead as part of a larger advance on the settlement of Prokhorovka.  The Leibstandarte, once Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguards, were an elite SS unit, often spearheading attacks in the East.  Despite two days of tough fighting, the Leibstandarte made no progress against the Soviet 52nd Guards Rifle Division.

With such elite units gaining no ground, both German and Soviet local commanders believed the solution to breaking the stalemate at Prokhorovka was more armor.  Little could they have known they were setting the stage for one of the largest (if not the largest) tank battle in history.

Armor All: 300/400 German tanks squared off against maybe as many as 870 Soviet tanks in the largest mobile armored battle in history

(more…)

To: Rep. Ryan “Beavis” Winkler
From: Mitch Berg, uppity non-Harvard prole
Re: Uncle

Evasive action, stat!

That is all.

The DFL ran in 2012 on a series of issues that – you heard in on the blogs first – were entirely buncombe. 

So let’s take stock of the things the DFL Alliance for a Better Minnesota said for which they need to be held accountable over the next 17 months or so:

“Property Taxes Will Drop”:  For the past six years, the DFL has been yapping that cuts in Local Government Aid forced property taxes to rise.  It’s a lie, of course; the “cuts” forced city and county governments to make tough choices about their spending, and made them justify their spending to their own taxpayers, rather than passing the bill off to the rest of the state with few if any questions asked.  And as I showed back in 2010, cities and counties jacked up property taxes by vastly more than the amount cut from LGA.  In the meantime, many cities learned to live without LGA entirely; it is they that are subsidizing everyone else’s spending. 

Prediction: the “extra” money from the state will almost entirely be consumed with extra spending (in fact, every single penny of “new” LGA sent to Minneapolis and Saint Paul will go to new spending).  Cities and counties will almost universally raise their property taxes, or at best hold steady.  Any exceptions?  They’ll prove the rule. 

That Economic Outlook:  The Minnesota left has been jumping up and down and beaming like toddlers that made good pantses about a “study” put out by the Philadelphia Fed a few weeks ago that showed Minnesota was clobbering Wisconsin in economic growth.

The “study” also showed that Minnesota was clobbering North Dakota.   Indeed, the “study” showed North Dakota in the bottom 10%, along with Wisconsin. You’ve heard what a wasteland North Dakota is, right? 

Oh, yeah – along with Minnesota in the “yay” column were fiscal and employment basket cases Illinois and California.  Economic powerhouses like North Dakota, Texas and Florida?  In the “Meh” column. 

Do with that information what you will.

But beyond that?  It was a short term analysis of growth, based on exceedingly transient indicators.  And to the extent that it had any value, remember: Wisconsin is still digging out from under decades of wastrel Democrat regimes.  And except for smokers, Minnesota is in the last couple of weeks of the result of over a decade of policy largely controlled by responsible GOP governors and legislatures.  The GOP never got everything they wanted – the shared the legislature from 2002-2008, had only the governorship in ’09-10, and both sides of the legislature but no governor in ’11 and ’12 – but at worst, Governor Pawlenty ran his veto pen red-hot and staved off the worst DFL-predations; at best, they were able to impose some restraint on things. 

But on August 1 – less than three weeks from now – that all changes.  Warehouse taxes, business taxes, wealth achievement taxes (make no mistake, income taxes don’t tax the “wealthy”, they merely penalize people who work for high incomes, leaving trust fund babies like Mark Dayton and Alida Messinger blissfully alone) and a raft of new regulations go into effect, penalizing businesses and – slowly – making Minnesota a lousy place to do business.

It’s already having an effect; Minnesota has sunk to the lowest ranking for new business creation in the nation.  More will surely follow.  And the raft of new regulations is going to brutalize the already somnolent mining industry; it’s literally cheaper and easier to build a tailing-recycling smelting plant in North Dakota and ship the ore – rock! – there than it is to build it where the actual ore is, here in Minnesota. 

Feeling good about that DFL vote, all you Iron Rangers?  This is your livelihood, being exported to a state that already has more jobs than it can fill. 

So over the next year, people have to ask themselves; outside of state government union jobs, who’s really benefited?

Prediction:  Other than “liberal plutocrats”, the answer will be “nobody”.

The Deficit:  The DFL and its toadies in the mainstream media did their by-the-numbers prancing last week over the news that the state’s economy generated $400M more revenue than expected. 

That, of course, was the last quarter of GOP-driven rules. 

In fact, as House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt noted on Twitter, we raised more money with the budget the Democrats called “the All Cuts budget” than Governor Messinger Dayton did with his All-Tax budget. 

What’ll happen this time next  year?

Place your bets.

“We Did It For The Children”:  After a couple of years of efforts to pay off the “Education Funding Shift” – a DFL-spawned accounting gimmick that the GOP adopted to compromise with rapacious DFL minorities and governors in years past – the GOP had most of the “shift” paid down.  The growth in the economy – not the Democrat tax hikes – paid that “shift” down.  The DFL will want to claim credit – and the media won’t challenge him on it in the least.

Over the next two years, education will get more expensive, and the achievement gap…

…will go unmeasured, since the DFL worked overtime to remove accounability from its biggest, most influential bloc of government-union supporters.

But we’ll know.

Who’s Watching The Kids?: The DFL promised that unionization of daycares would improve childcare. 

Easy prediction: the price of childcare will rise, as its availability drops.  More poor Minnesotans will be squeezed out of the market.  The Democrats will need to add a new subsidy program to try to lower the prices whose hikes were their fault to begin with. 

There’ll be more.

He wanted to thank Judge Debra Nelson – the judge presiding over the Zimmerman show trial – for finally knocking him off the perch as the worst show trial “Judge” in history. 

Bonus question:  To where do you suspect “Judge” Nelson will get an ambassadorship if she manages to craft jury instructions that will ensure a conviction on something?

This animation is an oldie but a goodie. It shows the spread of “shall-issue” laws since the 1980s.

To make it perfect, there should be a “thermometer” showing annual violent crime rates per 100,000.

It’d drop by nearly half in the time covered by the animation, by the way.

Josef Stalin called.

He wants his theatrical version of a “justice” system back.

President Obama’s Justice Department was involved in organizing protests around the Martin/Zimmerman trial, and according to Sanford’s police chief, hijacked what should have been a local investigation:

Bill Lee, who testified Monday in Zimmerman’s second-degree murder trial, told CNN’s George Howell in an exclusive interview that he felt pressure from city officials to arrest Zimmerman to placate the public rather than as a matter of justice.

“It was (relayed) to me that they just wanted an arrest. They didn’t care if it got dismissed later,” he said. “You don’t do that.”

When Sanford police arrived on the scene on February 26, 2012, after Zimmerman fatally shot unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, they conducted a “sound” investigation, and the evidence provided no probable cause to arrest Zimmerman at the scene, he said.

It had nothing to do with Florida’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law, he said; from an investigative standpoint, it was purely a matter of self-defense.

The part that annoys me the most about this trial? 

Not just that everyone has picked their sides, based purely on political grounds – even though that’s supposed to be the jury’s job.

No – it’s that our federal government is doing to this trial what they tried to do with “Fast and Furious”; use it to general political benefit for the Administration.  In this case, using a dead 17 year old – whatever the circumstances – as a stage prop to whip up an electoral response in time for the election.  And they’ll try to do the same for the next round of elections, too. 

I use the term “show trial” advisedly; that’s exactly what the Administration is trying to turn it into.

The trial is, in a sense, the least of the problems coming out of this sorry episode.  Our Federal government has added “using the system” to “using their proxies in the media” to affect the “justice” system toward political ends. 

They can do it to anyone.

There’s an old saying: “when the people fear the government, you have dictatorship.  When the people fear the government, you have freedom.”

The government is surely afraid of us; they call half of us “terrorists”.  But I wouldn’t call what we have now “freedom”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Fannie went broke in 2008 so Congress put them into conservatorship to bail them out. Private firms invested in Fannie and Freddie assuming they’d continue to be bailed out but in 2011, Congress changed the bail-out terms. The investors are suing the federal government for making changes to the bail-outs for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It’s gotten to the point where people not only expect bail-outs, they expect better and more generous bail-outs, and sue to get them.

Stop the madness. No more bail-outs.

Joe Doakes

Our society needs a 12-step group; Free Money Anonymous.

Its’ been a mainstay of totalitarian life, from Lenin and Stalin through Orwell to today’s North Korea; “If you see something, say something – to the komissar!”

And now it’s coming to America (with emphasis added):

Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”

Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.”

Potential for abuse, you think?

On the other hand, if there’s a toll-free number, it’d be a monkey-wrencher’s dream.

The Illinois Legislature overrode Governor Pat “The Fascist Orc” Quinn’s veto of the bipartisan carry law, bringing the state at long last into compliance with the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.

“This is a historic, significant day for law-abiding gun owners,” said Rep. Brandon Phelps, a southern Illinois Democrat who, in 10 years in the House, has continued work on concealed carry begun by his uncle, ex-Rep. David Phelps, who began serving in the mid-1980s. “They finally get to exercise their Second Amendment rights.”

The Senate voted 41-17 in favor of the override after a House tally of 77-31, margins that met the three-fifths threshold needed to set aside the amendatory veto. Quinn had used his veto authority to suggest changes, including prohibiting guns in restaurants that serve alcohol and limiting gun-toting citizens to one firearm at a time.

I have little doubt that the City of Chicago will continue to try to fight against the law-abiding citizens’ right to keep and bear arms; inconveniencing criminals is bad politics in Barack Obama’s hometown. 

But this is a great day for freedom.

I got this letter from “Protect Minnesota” recently.  “Protect Minnesota” was what Rep. Heather Martens (DFLiar – HD66A) had to rename “Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota” when it turned out her constant lying had damaged whatever credibility the old brand had.

For those who’ve missed earlier installments of my coverage of Ms. Martens, here’s what you need to know; every single substantive thing she had said about gun issues, ever, throughout her career, has been a lie.  Every.  Last.  Word. 

Here’s her letter:

Dear Heinrich ,

It’s been several weeks since the Minnesota legislature went home. Despite passing one bill to fund improvements in Federal gun background check data, the legislature left gaping loopholes in the law that still allow people who shouldn’t have guns to get them easily.

Well, no.  A bipartisan majority of the legislature realized that Martens’ various bills – copied and pasted as they were from New York and California – wouldn’t change criminals’ ability to find guns; they’d just register the guns of the law-abiding, for further targeting by law-enforcement when and if the political winds swing that way. 

We’d never tolerate that sort of treatment of the First Amendment.  Why the Second?

Martens:

We can’t afford to wait for another mass shooting, so we are not letting up in the push for change. We need your help to have one-to-one conversations with voters about what is at stake, and how they can push common sense state and Federal laws. Can you join a phone bank tomorrow? Click here to help phone on Wednesday, July 10, at TakeAction in St. Paul. (Pizza and air conditioning provided!)

Not that there was any doubt that “Protect MN” was part of the ultra-left hive, but the fact that TakeAction – which, like “Protect MN” is an astroturf group funded by unions and liberal plutocrats – just happened to lend “Protect” a phone bank should tell you something.

With more than 75 percent of Minnesotans supporting universal background checks for gun sales,

…according to a push poll whose results have been reported with flagrant disregard for the context of the original survey question; tomayto tomahto, I know…

we had great success engaging voters all over the state, generating thousands of phone calls and emails to legislators.

Martens has been showing an interesting pattern since her bills got tubed by solid bipartisan majorities (which included a bipartisan majority of all House members signing on to co-author a bill that was a direct repudiation of Martens’ bills (channeled via the likes of Michael Paymar and Alice “The Phantom” Hausman); she’s been reduced to trying to turn defeats into victories, at least in the minds of her utterly uninformed followers.

“Thousands” of calls?  By all accounts, calls ran 50:1 against Martens’ bills.  Even the MinnPost’s Doug Grow, who gets at least part of his paycheck from the same place Martens does (the anti-gun Joyce Foundation contributes at least five figures to both “Protect” MN and the MinnPost, which I suspect is in major part behind the MinnPost’s atrociously ignorant and ludicrously slanted coverage of Second Amendment issues this past year), said it was more like a thousand, as if that was a major accomplishment.

In 2013, we didn’t have time to build the power it takes to reverse the long-term effects of gun-rights extremist propaganda. But we have the public on our side, and we can make the change we need, as long as we keep at it!
Click here to join us and our friends at Mayors Against Illegal Guns for the first in a series of summer phone banks!

And there you go.  Two astroturf groups sponsored by liberal plutocrats and government unions (fluffed by a “news” outlet sponsored by those same plutocrats and their plutocrat-supported foundation) are joining with a group of liberal politicians in another astroturf group funded by another liberal plutocrat to try to keep all us unruly peasants in line.

I’ve said it for twenty years, now; the extreme left has always led with the class-warfare rhetoric – and yet on this, the most populist issue of them all, it’s the left who are the patricians, and the gun rights movement in all its bipartisan and non-partisan millions who are the uppity peasants demanding real freedom. 

I might just have to sign up for that phone bank.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn (Orc) is trying his best to try to stymie the inevitable – also the will of the people of Illinois – by dawdling over his veto of Illinois’ bipartisan carry permit bill.

But the bill passed with greater than a 60% majority, and Quinn’s bitchy little veto is likely to get squashed like the legislative cockroach it is.

For days, Quinn has been pushing for alterations to a bill that would end Illinois’ status as the last state in the nation to ban the concealed carry of weapons in public, which the state must do by Tuesday to meet a federal appeals court’s deadline.

And here’s further proof – to paraphrase Fred Thompson in The Hunt For Red October – that Democrats don’t take a dump without trying to gull the low-information voter (with emphasis added):

Quinn recently has been highlighting Chicago’s violence, saying recent shootings show the need for tougher gun laws.

Chicago has the the “toughest” gun laws in the US today, if by “tough” you mean “against the law-abiding citizen”. 

This is so obvious, even Jane Kay and Doug Grow might understand it. 

“There will be a showdown in Springfield,” Quinn told the crowd gathered in Chicago for a bill signing on anti-gang legislation. Afterward he told reporters that lawmakers should examine his changes carefully.

“I don’t think they should override common sense. I don’t think they should compromise with public safety,” he said.

Because ten dead over one weekend “despite” a complete civilian gun ban isn’t “compromise” enough. 

P.S.:  By the way, don’t you dare say there’s media bias.  From the original AP story, with emphasis added by me:

While Quinn’s changes which include a one-gun limit and a ban on guns in establishments that serve alcohol have been embraced by Chicago’s anti-violence advocates, they’ve received a cold reception from lawmakers.

Pejorative much?

As if gun owners are “pro-violence advocates”?

A shooter friend of mine posted this on Facebook:

LOGICAL GUN CONTROL
In 1863 a Democrat shot and killed Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States .

In 1881 a left wing radical Democrat shot James Garfield, President of the United States who later died from the wound.

In 1963 a radical left wing socialist shot and killed John F. Kennedy, President of the United States .

In 1975 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at Gerald Ford, President of the United States .

In 1983 a registered Democrat shot and wounded Ronald Reagan.

In 1984 James Huberty a disgruntled Democrat shot and killed 22 people in a McDonalds restaurant.

In 1986 Patrick Sherril a disgruntled Democrat shot and killed 15 people in an Oklahoma post office.

In 1990 James Pough a disgruntled Democrat shot and killed 10 people at a GMAC office

In 1991 George Hennard a disgruntled Democrat shot and killed 23 people in a Luby’s cafeteria

In 1995 James Daniel Simpson a disgruntled Democrat shot and killed 5 coworkers in a Texas laboratory

In 1999 Larry Asbrook a disgruntled Democrat shot and killed 8 people at a church service.

In 2001 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at the White House in a failed attempt to kill George W. Bush President of the United States

In 2003 Douglas Williams a disgruntled Democrat shot and killed 7 people at a Lockheed Martin plant.

In 2007 a registered Democrat named Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32  people in Virginia Tech.

In 2009 a registered Democrat named Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 and injured 32 at Ft. Hood, Texas

In 2010 a mentally ill registered Democrat named Jared Lee Loughner shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed 6 others.

In 2011 a registered Democrat named James Holmes went into a movie theater and shot and killed 12 people.

In 2012 Andrew Engeldinger a disgruntled Democrat shot and killed 7 people in Minneapolis

In 2013 a registered Democrat named Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people in a school.

One could go on, but you get the point, even if the media does not.
Clearly, there is a problem with Democrats and guns.

SOLUTION: It should simply be illegal for Democrats to own guns.

I don’t entirely endorse the data – I’m  not sure we can ascribe politics to dementees like Ho, Loughner or Holmes.  Or alleged jihadis like Hassan, for that matter; by that logic, the 9/11 hijackers were Democrats, too. 

And I’m extremely leery about junk psychology “studies” that ascribe defects or pathologies to other peoples’ politics – especially politics I disagree with – it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that Democrats are very frequently much angrier than the rest of us; the farther left they are, the more out there they seem. 

So may be the conclusion is “keep guns out of the hands of rabid statists”. 

I can live with that.

Doug Grow – DFL stenographer and reporter for the Joyce-Foundation-supported MinnPost – is convinced that the GOP is lying about the effects of the Warehouse Tax.

Exhibit A?

Grow writes about the Red Wing Shoes’ opting out of building a new distribution center in Red Wing; it’s something we wrote about here in SITD a few weeks ago.  

According to Grow, the GOP’s line is wrong because the executives involved didn’t step out on stage and burn an effigy of Tom Bakk as the cameras rolled. 

Business Is Hard:No, really; asked if the tax was the sole reason Red Wing Shoes deferred its expansion…:

Sachen couldn’t say that it necessarily would have.

Would the project definitely go ahead if the tax were eliminated?

Sachen couldn’t say that was necessarily the case, either.

He did say that the company, which has a facility in Potosi, Mo., is “in talks with Potosi.” But again, he wouldn’t say that there’s a direct link between the tax and the warehouse project.

Who’da thunk it; a businessman whose business depends, on a certain extent, on not pointlessly pissing people off over politics in this rent-seeking environment, gave an honest answer; there are many reasons that a company does or does not go ahead with an expansion.

Which on the one hand means there’s not a smoking gun hovering over “jobs that won’t be created” leading back to the DFL’s Warehouse Tax (point for Grow).  And on the other hand, it means that there never will be that smoking gun. (Take a point away from Grow). 

By the way – Democrats get hurt when conservatives say they don’t understand economics or business.  Reading this next bit, one would have to say “hurt” is probably less appropriate than “chastened”:

Additionally, it should be noted that the Red Wing Shoes warehouse wouldn’t create jobs — other than construction ones in building the warehouse. Rather, it would allow Red Wing to consolidate its current the five warehouses into one facility. Those warehouses, by the way, employ about 80 people, a number that would not increase with a new warehouse.

Er, yeah. 

Making the business – and the efforts of those 80 existing warehouse workers – more efficent gives the business more profit.  Which gets used to hire more people, design more shoes, improve existing products…heck, even just make staying in Minnesota more tenable.  Which means those 80 warehouse jobs stand less risk of becoming 40, or 20, or 0 warehouse jobs. 

It’d also speak to the long-term commitment on Red Wing’s part to keep those jobs in Red Wing, rather than someplace else. 

Leave The Gotchas To The Comedians: Of course, it’s not just Doug Grow.  Dave Mindeman of mnpAct thinks he’s got the DFL Warehouse Tax’s MNGOP critics over a barrel:

In addition, Rep. Garofalo apparently missed the June 28th Star Tribune clarification on where the tax actually applies…..

Myron Frans, state revenue commissioner, said Dayton has asked him to study the issue, and he has spoken with Red Wing officials about their concerns. He said the tax only applies when the producer or manufacturer purchases warehouse or storage services from another firm.

Garofalo offered no other examples of a potential problem. Thus the Red Wing Shoe factory will NOT be affected by this tax.

In other words, Rep. Pat Garofalo is, as usual, making it up.

And Mindeman deigns to condescdend:

I would hope this legislator will someday learn to get the facts right before making another condescending statement of inaccuracy.

Um, yeah.

Garofalo has actually worked in the private sector.  I know this because we worked for the same company, once upon a time; it was he that actually introduced me to the Drudge Report back when we were both minions at a local Fortune 500.

And he knows – as all of us who work in the private sector and pay attention to things do – that businesses rarely make decisions based on single factors, or on short-term stimuli.  Running a significant brick-and-mortar business (shaddap, consultants) is the ultimate long bet; it involves considering everything; access to the needed workforce, communications, supply chain, price to get product to market, taxes…

…and long-term outlook. 

Red Wing – and Laurence Transportation in Red Wing, who also held off on a warehouse expansion that will be directly affected by the DFL’s Warehouse Tax – is betting against Minnesota in the long term, given the way the climate looks now.

And since Mindeman wants to play the “they curiously ignored a Strib article” game, it’d seem he missed one too; Navarre is up and moving to Texas.  It warehouses products – providing the “value add” that the state is taxing – and also works in e-commerce, which is getting slapped by the DFL’s Amazon Tax. 

So it’s gone:

That was the first time the 30-year-old Minnesota firm had said publicly that it planned to move not just some of its warehousing operations but also its headquarters to the site of its recently acquired Speed FC e-commerce operation based in Texas. Navarre acquired Speed FC Inc. last November for $50 million in cash and stock.

Was it just the DFL’s Warehouse Tax?  Or the DFL’s Amazon Tax?

No.  But both of them, and other changes to the state’s business tax code, had to look ugly to a business that’s already losing money – money that will probably be made up by consolidating operations in a lower-tax locale alone. 

If you’re one of the almost 300 employees being pink-slipped, do you think it makes a difference?

They Also Think Penelope Garcia Is Like A Real Investigator: Back to Grow’s column, where in a quote of Governor Dayton’s chief of staff Bob Hume, he shows that…:

• he is aiming his piece at economic low-information voters, or…
• …he’s an economic low-information voter himself:

Hume is commenting on Garofalo’s call for a special session to get rid of the tax.  If you work in the  private sector, see if you can spot the clinker:

Bob Hume, the governor’s deputy chief of staff, made it clear that a special session is not in the offing.

“This is a stunt, not a solution,” Hume said in a statement. “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.”

A whole month?  To make a decision affecting the profitability, well-being or survival of a business?

These decisions get made based on long-term outlook.

And while the state’s long-term outlook is subject to debate, let’s remember that when the DFL-shilling media says things like…:

To date, though, the Minnesota economy is humming at a far healthier rate than the economies in such business-friendly states such as Wisconsin and South Dakota.

…that the economy still largely reflects Republican policy, set when the state had responsible two-party rule (shaddap about Ventura) between 2002 and 2012.   The DFL’s tax and spend orgy still hasn’t largely gone into effect; even the first of the taxes have been wending their way through the process for about a week now, and the worst is yet to come.

Get back to us in a year. 

Around election time, preferably.

Speaking of gun rights – GOCRA sends an advisory:

There is a new astroturf group calling themselves “American Rifle + Pistol Association.” (Here’s the URL — I recommend against giving them PageRank by posting it, though: http://amriflepistol.com/ )

And I won’t post it as a link, for precisely that reason.

They are Obama-cheering, gun-control-supporting, MSNBC-watching, Moms-Demand-Action-loving, MAIG-parroting gun banners.

Don’t be fooled. DO spread the word.

Every few years, the left tries to float one potemkin “gun group” or another.  I can remember at least three over the years – and the ARPA is no exception. 

Here are the screenshots that show [Peter Vogt] the Connecticut converted to Texan Chairman of American Rifle & Pistol Association who is an Obama supporter who is pushing Bloomberg/MAIG’s gun control campaigns while helping to promote Moms Demand Action, a group trying to pressure companies to ban lawful concealed carry so gun owners can’t carry in public anymore and convince gun retailers to stop selling the most popular guns in the country.

They can’t beat us, so they’re going to try to co-opt us.

And they think this is the first time we’ve seen them try it.

We broke down the GOP race for US Senate here.  We now take a similar look at the Governor’s contest.

—–

To listen to the polling establishment that gave us Govs. Mike Hatch, Skip Humphrey and the ’02 version of Sen. Walter Mondale, Republicans should just give up any notion that Mark Dayton could be defeated in 2014.  Dayton posts a 57% approval rating, up from 43% just this past February.  Of course, Tim Pawlenty was sporting a 54% approval rating around this time in his first-term, in what turned out to a nail-bitter of an election decided by Mike Hatch’s failure to attend his anger management class.  And Dayton’s polling numbers, like most politicians, seem to go up when the legislature is out of session and thus his name is off the front pages.

Unlike with the Senate race, GOP interest in the gubernatorial nomination is high and has attracted among the best Republican office-holders still standing after 2012.  The highest profile Republicans may have passed on running (Pawlenty, Coleman, Kline, Paulsen), but if the current crop of candidates represents the GOP “B Team,” they’re certainly stronger than the 2010 field.  And unlike 2010, they probably are more aware of what advertising deluge awaits the winner from the Alliance for a Better More Expensive Minnesota.

(more…)