“I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” (J. Wellington Wimpy, “Popeye” canon).

“As your attorney, it is my duty to inform you that it is not important that you understand what I’m doing or why you’re paying me so much money. What’s important is that you continue to do so” (The Samoan lawyer in Hunter S. Thompson’sFear and Loathing in Las Vegas).

“But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good” (Allison Benedikt, Slate, “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person“, Slate’s DoubleX, August 30, 2013).

The promise of big government – from Stalin’s “Five Year Plans” to Obama’s “Hope and Change” – is always just down the way.  Around the corner,  The light at the end of the tunnel at the end of the tunnel you’re in.  It’s just one five-year plan away. 

And when you’re living in a city run by people who think we can build a better life through more light rail, then waiting for utopia is OK, more or less, provided you’re not one the eggs that gets broken to make the omelet, whether you’re a University Avenue business or a Kulak.  (at least until you can find a way to sell your house) is a perfectly fine option. 

But when it’s things that are the here and now?  Like you and your future? Your kids and theirs?

Now it’s personal.

Allison Benedikt writes for Slate  –     to be exact, one of their clubby pseudo-feminist brandettes, DoubleX.  

And while the quote above does spell out the thesis of her piece pretty well, there’s always more to mock:

Some Of Us Are More Equal Than Others:  Give a point to Benedikt for at least giving a shout-out to human nature, especially the human nature of socialist institutions:

Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.)

But of course, it is a perfectly fine argument against both; intentions aside, universal systems always end up being two-tracked systems; one for the plebeians, and another for those who have to manage them; public schools and Obamacare for most of us, but “elite” schools and exemptions for thekommissars, for Chelsea and Sasha and Malia and Matt Damon’s spawn (who will, naturally, grow up to manage the plebes). 

But that’s not the main argument (not that an actual “argument” is warranted) against Benedikt’s “idea”. 

The Unicorn School System:  According to Benedikt, if we’re all forced into the public school system, it’ll improve because parents just won’t stand for it.

So, how would this work exactly? It’s simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.

Perhaps you are.  For a while, anyway.  I speak from experience, having spent years trying to get the Saint Paul Public Schools to be anything more than a malignant pathology. 

But the simple fact is that when pseudo-intellectual dabblers like Allison Benedikt say things like…:

And parents have a lot of power.

…that’s where you know she’s either never had to deal with a truly malignant administration, or her definition of “power” is different than yours and mine.

Parents have the “power” to come in and stuff envelopes and help chaperone field trips and do whatever the system wants warm bodies to help with.

Push back against institutional stupidity in the curriculum?  Scrutinize the plans the system has for your kids?  Demand better out of “standards”, or – more importantly – teachers and programs?

You quickly find that “parental power” – especially in a one-party Democrat controlled city where the School Board is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the most extreme wing of the Democrat party – is a black humor chanting point. 

Not to say they don’t want your help, as Benedikt correctly notes: 

In many underresourced schools, it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the job. Everyone, all in.

But always, always, the only “power” that the system recognizes is the “power” to work within, and to feed your efforts into, The System.  The System as it is prescribed by the thinkers of deep thoughts.  Not by you.  Perish the thought.

Alas, Egg:  Your only real “Power” in Benedict’s fever-swamp dream, though, is the “power” eggs have in your Sunday omelet:

There are a lot of reasons why bad people send their kids to private school. Yes, some do it for prestige or out of loyalty to a long-standing family tradition or because they want their children to eventually work at Slate.[See also “Higher Ed Bubble”]But many others go private for religious reasons, or because their kids have behavioral or learning issues, or simply because the public school in their district is not so hot. None of these are compelling reasons.

Not for other peoples’ children, they’re not, perhaps – provided you’re the very sort of utterly illiberal person that rates the “liberal” tag these days. 

But you only get one shot with your children.  And the education your child gets – as opposed mere “schooling”, which is a distinction most “liberals” miss – has a lot to do with how they do in life. 

Benedikt seems to think that having a couple of “lost generations” –

And “how our children do in life”, in aggregate, has everything to do with the future of our country – our economic performance 30-50 years from now.  

By the way – if we have a couple of lost generations of badly-educated people (our kids and grandkids), then from what basis are we going to build any “improvements?” 

The Cure Is The Disease:   Of course, school itself isn’t the problem.  Is it?

Or, rather, the compelling [reasons] (behavioral or learning issues, wanting a not-subpar school for your child) are exactly why we should all opt in, not out.

Among the most popular alternative schools – Sudbury, Waldorf and some private and charter Montessori schools – they don’t actually tell the children “you have to learn to read at a specified level by age 7”.  They assume that children, who are born with an innate drive to understand the world around them, will learn to read, and read very proficiently, at their own speed. 

And they’re right.  Barring serious physical or mental handicaps, every child does learn to read.  Long story short; there are no reading difficulties in a Sudbury or Waldorf schools.

It’s a piece of cake, really; those kids have just finished becoming fluent in a language (in some cases more than one); reading is comparatively simple in comparison.   Compare this to a public school, where kids are exhorted and threatened and cajoled into reading by an arbitrary point in time that is politically vital but, to the child, utterly meaningless – or be stuffed into “remedial” class, shamed, humiliated and, in short order, put on the “problem child” track. 

A friend of mine whose kids went to a Sudbury school – where every single child, no matter how damaged, learns to read by age eight, frequently by teaching themselves – notes that if learning to speak “to grade level” by age four was a government priority, you’d have rooms full of five year old “remedial speaking” students, being “remediated” at exquisite expense by unionized “educators” supervised by ranks of administrators. 

The point?  To Benedikt, your kids’ problems are even more reason to force them into the public schools – when there’s overwhelming evidence that in many cases school itself causes many of the problems in the first place.

This is especially true for boys – where a generation of academic feminism has turned public and most private education into a harrowing, self-destroying prison.  The system we have now might not have been designed to hamper boys’ development and turn education into a self-abnegating drudgery that they are only too happy to escape at the earliest opportunity – but how would it be any different if it had been? 

The system destroys our boys today.  We’re one academic fad away from doing the same to girls. 

And Yet Even Benedikt Knows The Answer:  Benedikt yammers on and on about the imperative to…

…what?  Help our kids?

No.  To support the institution.  To sacrifice a few generations of our kids’ well-being to support…what?  Not education, but the institution of publicly-funded schooling, and the industries – academia, textbooks, consultants, administration – that feed off it. 

And yet Benedikt herself hovers near the real answer – probably without knowing it:

I believe in public education, but my district school really isn’t good! you might say. I understand. You want the best for your child, but your child doesn’t need it. If you can afford private school (even if affording means scrimping and saving, or taking out loans), chances are that your spawn will be perfectly fine at a crappy public school. She will have support at home (that’s you!) and all the advantages that go along with being a person whose family can pay for and cares about superior education—the exact kind of family that can help your crappy public school become less crappy.

In other words, the crappiness of the school doesn’t matter, provided that the parents care enough. 

Good, engaged parents – the ones P.J. O’Rourke called “the ones with the eternal good common sense to give a shit” – are the answer.  And as Benedikt herself says, with good parents, the schools don’t matter.

Which is exactly what a generation of home-schoolers and charter-schoolers, not to mention private schoolers, have discovered; good parents do solve problems.

And in their capacity as good parents, many of them discover that avoiding the public schoolsisthe answer. 

She may not learn as much or be as challenged, but take a deep breath and live with that. Oh, but she’s gifted? Well, then, she’ll really be fine.

So why not cut out the sneering, incompetent middlepersons?

Bonus Question For Allison Benedikt:  When you’re in a nursing home someday – a public one, naturally, since one must assume you think old folks should all have the same treatment, just like kids – are you OK with being taken care of by the kids who grew up under the “lost generations” you seem to be comfortable with saddling our children with?

 Today, we’ll wrap up our – I love this – tenth year broadcasting from the Minnesota State Fair! 
Brad Carlson and I have enjoyed broadcasting from our booth on Machinery Hill – on Underwood, just south of Murphy, right next to the Home Depot pavilion:

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 Today, I’ll be hosting – and talking with Senator and Gubernatorial candidate Dave Thompson, and Representative Mary Franson. 

Tune in from 5-6PM, or listen on IHeartRadio or at the AM1280 website!

Say what you will about Dubya. He spent like a lib, after all.

And say whatever you’d like about Iraq. Well-advised? Perhaps not, in retrospect.

But when we went to war with Iraq, we did it with 40 other nations and the UN.

(SCENE:  The cockpit of a US Navy F-18 Super Hornet strike fighter.  The plane, loaded with JDAM precision-guided bombs, flies through the clear desert skies as the camera closes in on the PILOT).

PILOT:  “Cobra Two Five, On Station”

CONTROLLER (flying in an AWACS plane over the eastern Mediterranean):  “Welcome to Syria, Cobra Two Five.  We’ve got an air support call from “ABU”.  Go ahead, Abu”

ABU: (mildly distorted, on the radio) “This is Abu Fuad Hadji Al-Ramshish.  We are trying to advance through Al-Khebab, and there is a group of government tanks blocking the way”.

PILOT:  “Copy, I’m five minutes out…hey, wait.  Abu Fuad Hadji Al-Ramshish?

ABU:  “That is correct”

PILOT:  “Didn’t a bunch of Marines call me in on an ground support strike against you near Fallujah back in 2005?  Weren’t you an Al Quaeda commander?”

ABU:  “Why yes!  I thought you sounded familiar, Cobra Two Five!  Call sign…er…Mobster?”

PILOT:  “Er, yes.  Wow.  So you’ve switched…”

ABU:  “Oh, merciful heavens, no.  Your bomb missed me, I left Iraq, I got promoted, did a tour in Afghanistan…”

PILOT:  “Hey, me too…”

ABU:  “…and now I’m here”.

PILOT:  “Well, I’ll be”.

ABU:  “Small world, isn’t it?”

PILOT:  “And now I’m flying air support for…uh…”

ABU:  “For me, an Al Quaeda operative.  That is correct.”

PILOT:  “Huh.  OK.  Well, Cobra Two Five, I’m at the IP”

CONTROLLER:  “Weapons Free, Cobra Five, clear to go hot”

ABU:  “Good shooting, Mobster.  And then die, American infidel pig dog”.

The US Senate has one black member – Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Naturally, he wasn’t invited to yesterday’s 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech:

“Senator Scott was not invited to speak at the event,” Greg Blair, a spokesman for the South Carolina lawmaker, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The senator believes today is a day to remember the extraordinary accomplishments and sacrifices of Dr. King, Congressman John Lewis, and an entire generation of black leaders. Today’s anniversary should simply serve as an opportunity to reflect upon how their actions moved our country forward in a remarkable way.”

The event organizers didn’t completely exclude Republicans from the event — former President George W. Bush, for instance, received an invitation, but he couldn’t attend as he is recovering from surgery — but the slate of speakers was filled with names such as former President Clinton, Gov. Martin O’Malley, D-Md., Oprah Winfrey, Jamie Foxx and others.

Showing the lefties a white Republican doesn’t violate the narrative.

A SCOTUS justice?  A Senator like Scott elected the hard way (wonder if Ryan WInkler thinks he’s an “Uncle Tom?)?  A black conservative woman like Condi Rice?

That violates the narrative.

We’re heading toward the close of the year’s broadcasting at the Minnesota State Fair!

Brad Carlson and I will be broadcasting from our booth on Machinery Hill – on Underwood, just south of Murphy, right next to the Home Depot pavilion:

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 Brad’s on today.    He’ll be talking with Caitlyn Stenerson and Angie Hasek about their recent mission trip to Israel.  It’s going to be a fun conversation!

Tune in from 5-6PM, or listen on IHeartRadio or at the AM1280 website!

Steve Lonegan, the GOP hopeful running for the New Jersey Senate seat against Newark mayor Corey Booker, mentions the civic issues that dare not speak their names:

“They had another murder in the streets of Newark yesterday; a 20-year-old girl shot to death in the streets of Newark. There was another shooting not far from there,” Lonegan told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

“That puts them at close to 50 deaths this year in the city of Newark. I mean it’s like becoming the murder capital of New Jersey. Violent crime is actually up now since Sharpe James was mayor – up above last year of the James administration.”…Lonegan also ripped into Booker on education and employment, saying that Newark’s high school dropout and unemployment rates were appalling.

Not that Newark has ever been Atlantis, but if crime and dropout rates are both rising since the “third way” mayor and, in some circles, the political Son of The Light Worker took office, that’ll call for drastic measures.

Like the media blacking out all evidence that maybe Booker isn’t the next coming. 

Just like they did for Obama.

 Some of you know my political backstory – I’ve written about it a time or two.  In 1994, disgusted by the GOP’s capitulation to Clinton on the 1994 Crime Bill along with George HW Bush’s reversal on taxes, I left the Republican Party and joined the Libertarians. 

Over the course of four years, I did what most libertarians do; thought big thoughts about liberty.  I also ran for office under the Big “L” banner – and did better than I thought I would.

But it was mostly thinking big thoughts.  Libertarians were big on debating principles, and even bigger on deriding those who, by their calculus, didn’t – or at least those whose principles weren’t drawn in as big, stark letters as their own seemed to be, to them and each other. 

I left the Big “L” after about four years.  I had – and have – principles. 

• One of them is “don’t screw up the country, and try to prevent other people from screwing it up too bad”. 
• Another?  A slight modification of Buckley’s Eleventh Commandment:  “Vote for the most acceptable candidate, from a fiscal, security and liberty perspective, that can win. 
• One last one?  “Perfect is the enemy of good enough”.  If I eschew imperfect candidates – say, candidate who champion my principles 51%-85% of the time – then I’m doing my little bit to make sure someone who agrees with me even less, as in “0-15% of the time” (that’s the current, extremist version of the DFL’s track record) is actually running things.  Raising taxes.  Vacuuming my personal info into “MNCare”.  The whole nine yards.

 And I figured there was a better chance of doing my part toward that end, and actually having some effect in the great scheme of things, by working within an actual party that had a chance of doing something useful than via endless navel-gazing in the Libertarian echo chamber. 

And so I left the Libertarian Party – partly because the party line on foreign policy and national security is (I’ll be charitable) simplistic, but mostly because the Big “L” Party is never, ever, going to have anything to do with passing actual policy into law; the most it can ever hope for is to serve as a spoiler, taking liberty voters’ votes away from the other parties, mostly the GOP.

And in 15 years of varying involvement – from observer to amateur pundit to even-more-amateur activist – the party has come a long way.  In 1998, Arne Carlson’s legacy loomed large in the party; today, it’s virtually gone, and good riddance.  It’s been largely squeezed out (everywhere but in the media’s consciousness) by an uneasy, sometimes fractious assembly of business conservatives (who may or may not care about social issues or liberty), Tea Partiers (who focus on the “limited government” aspects of “liberty”) and, over the past couple years, “Liberty Republicans”. 

These last came to the party in 2012 as an organizational juggernaut that acted about as “libertarian” as a North Korean synchronized dance team – at least in terms of taking control of party functions and sending people to Tampa.  The best of them – the ones in CD4 were among ’em – brought with them the pragmatism that led to a couple of really promising campaigns.  The worst of them – I’m not naming names – left us a display of nihilistic principles-over-pragmatism that bordered on onanistic. 

None quite as dismal, thankfully, as the recent resignation by a group of libertarian Maine Republicans, who resigned in protest over…

…convention rules?

Walter Hudson has an excellent piece over at Fightin’ Words on this whole deeply dumb incident.  And I think there are lessons for both of the “sides” of the debate in the GOP – especially the “Liberty” clicque’s penchant for walking away from it all when the “establishment” doesn’t carry them up to the front of the room on their shoulders:

The critical failure which informs this move manifests from activists’ perception of the party as a servant which ought to work on their behalf, rather than a vehicle which must be actively steered in a desired direction. If I had a nickel for every time I heard an activist whine about the party not treating them well, as if that were its purpose, I’d be set for life…This common sentiment from libertarian activists completely absolves them of any responsibility for changing the party. Instead, they proceed from the rather absurd notion that Republicans ought to advocate views they do not agree with in order to earn libertarian support. That’s not how politics works.

Or, in many cases, endless prate and gabble about how stupid – racist, homophobic, war-mongering – Republicans are for not folding like a Wal-Mart end table. 

And then there’s this line’s first cousin – the “Under Thirty” crowd.  The GOP, we’re told, must embrace the Ron Paul Agenda in whole because so many under-thirty conservatives and Republicans are so very libertarian.   More on this next week.    

Libertarian Republicans need to dispense with the notion that their “individual integrity” is defined by the party’s compliance to a libertarian agenda. Holding the reigns of power in a party office does not mean you “support” every little thing anyone in the party says or does. If resignation remains the default response to any deficiency within the party, it only enhances the victory of those who remain.

Yep. 

Principles – or at least saying you have them, as opposed to having to defend them against a lifetime of real-world experience – are easy.  Convincing other people about them is not.

No one has ever “learned their lesson” from an activist resigning in protest. The concept ignores political reality and smacks of a narcissistic valuation of one’s political worth. “Oh, you resigned?! Well then, let me completely realign my entire worldview in order to get you back,” said no party officer or elected official ever.

And the corollary of that truth, as I’ve been saying for years; political parties don’t “learn lessons”.  They respond to the will of those who show up. 

Which is why I, and my impure mutt’s-breakfast of conservative and libertarian and pragmatic beliefs keep showing up.

Read Walter’s entire article, if you would please.

It’s gonna be another fantastic day at the Great Minnesota Get-Together!

Brad Carlson and I will be broadcasting from our booth on Machinery Hill – on Underwood, just south of Murphy, right next to the Home Depot pavilion:

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 I’ll be on the air today.  My guests will be:

• EJ Haust – from Project Veritas, as well as many other venues of activism
• Cam Winton, independent candidate for Mayor of Minneapolis

Tune in from 5-6PM, or listen on IHeartRadio or at the AM1280 website!

 On the one hand, I’ve always said that if we have to have public broadcasting (and make no mistake about it, we do not have to have it, but work with me here), I’d vastly prefer to have more little community-supported stations like KFAI and KBEM in Minneapolis, or KAXE in Grand Rapids – small stations that report local news and talk about local stuff – than monolithic, huge-money institutions like MPR (whose behavior is exactly like that of the monopolistic robber barons that would give their prime audience the victorian vapours).   Give me twenty little stations that work within and respond to their communities over a monolithic Borg that becomes a culture unto itself (at our expense). 

Part of it is because I do, as a matter of principle, believe that government money should be spent as close to its source as possible.

And partly because public broadcasting, especially at the micro level, is a little like an episode of Portlandia come to life. 

Case in point:  New York’s community station WBAI – which was in many ways the model for stations like Minneapolis’ KFAI – is circling the drain.  And it’s happening precicsely because it is governed by a form of “democracy” so sclerotic that even Portlandia hasn’t spoofed it yet.

WBAI is an affiliate of the Pacifica Radio Network, of which more later.  The station’s been in business for over five decades, and would seem to be an institution…:   

But huge debt and a dwindling membership have left both WBAI and Pacifica starved for cash. The station, one of five owned by the foundation, has operated in the red each year since 2004, accumulating more than $3 million in net losses, according to Pacifica financial statements. In addition to WBAI, Pacifica has stations in Los Angeles, Washington, Houston and Berkeley, Calif., and feeds content to more than 150 affiliates.

Site note:  At the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, King Banaian, Ed Morrissey and I were on the air during Sarah Palin’s electrifying first speech to the crowd.  On the other side of the curtain from us was the Pacifica booth – which is some pretty drastically bad event planning, putting the most conservative station in town across a curtain from the most liberal network in the country, but whatever.

During the run-up to the speech, the Pacifica anchors – who looked like barristas at that coffee shop that broke away from that other coffee shop for not pushing the vegan scones hard enough – were doing the sort of level of commentary you’d expect from, well, Minneapolis leftybloggers; “she looks like the third runner-up for head cheerleader”, or “maybe the caribou can shoot back”, that sort of thing.

Anyway – Palin started her speech.  And for those who weren’t there, and don’t remember the doom-y feeling that the whole inevitability of John McCain gave us all, it was electrifying.  The three of us jumped up at our seats, cheering; I think King may have yelled “We Are Not Worthy!”, although maybe that was me.  I dunno.  

Anyway – one of the Pacifica crones leaned through the curtain.  “Shhhh!  We’re doing radio!”

Anyway…:   

Among Pacifica’s debts are more than $2 million in broadcast fees owed to Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!,” the network’s most popular show.

Radio “for the 99%” being put out of business by a show that charges like a bunch of 1%ers.  Ironic.

The funny part is, Pacifica – and its company-owned subsidiary, WBAI – have the power in their hands to fix things.  It’s a board-run station.  That should fix things – right?

 But critics have long said that its top-heavy governance, with large local boards and frequent, expensive elections, have put the organization in a constant state of gridlock, and that unless Pacifica reforms it will simply govern itself to death.

“This is what the board does,” Ms. Reese said in an interview: “It fiddles while Rome burns.”

Those same problems were on display at a public WBAI board meeting last week in an arts space in Lower Manhattan. Despite the layoffs just days before, the first 25 minutes were devoted to a procedural debate about the night’s agenda, with frequent mentions of Robert’s Rules of Order. Occasional shouts of “fascist!” and “go back to the N.S.A.!” rang out from listeners in attendance.

It’s like a Saint Paul City Committee meeting, only with a budget. 

And I loved this part:

Berthold Reimers, WBAI’s general manager, reported that the station had $23,000 on hand and was scouring Craigslist and other sites to furnish new, cheaper studios in Brooklyn. An Ikea chair was bought for $40, he said. “That’s the cheapest we could possibly get.”

The story was silent as to whether anyone objected because Ikea is non-union.

But that’s another part of the problem with public broadcasting; their concept of money is so very different than the real world’s.  If you get a chance to take a tour of MPR’s facilities in downtown Saint Paul, do.  If you’re a radio geek, you’ll think you’ve died on gone to radio heaven.  The broadcast studios are not one degree behind the technological fashion curve.  They look almost like TV studios, without the cameras.  And then you pan back, and realize that there are two of them – so Cathy Wurzer needn’t hurry to get out of Keri Miller’s way.  If you’ve ever worked in commercial radio, and spent part of your Saturday afternoon figuring out why your 30-year-old control panel is fritzing out, you can relate in not being able to relate.

Anyway – read the whole article. 

And apply it to your favorite lefty non-profit.

With the school year almost upon us, Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The new standardized 5th Grade reading test is tougher than the old one. Student scores dropped 20 points from last year.

Statewide, the percentage of White Students deemed to be reading at their grade level dropped from 87% to 65%, Black Students dropped from 57% to 32% (it’s not clear from the article whether White includes Asian and Hispanic as only two categories were given).

In St. Paul, less than half the students were at grade level in math, reading and science.

30% of all state and local spending goes to education but half our kids are below the standards for their grade level. We’re not getting our money’s worth.

Joe Doakes

Education Minnesota is a little like the Samoan Lawyer in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas; to paraphrase, it’s not important that you know what you’re paying for, or if you understand what you’re getting for your money; it’s merely important that you pay promptly and in full.

It’s gonna be a fun day at the Minnesota State Fair, with the Northern Alliance Radio Network. 

Brad Carlson and I will be broadcasting from our booth on Machinery Hill – on Underwood, just south of Murphy, right next to the Home Depot pavilion:

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 Brad will be talking with Representative John Kline (R – MN CD2)

Tune in from 5-6PM, or listen on IHeartRadio or at the AM1280 website!

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit:

Hmm. Seeking a coalition of the willing to take down an Arab Ba’athist dictator over WMDs. Where have I heard this before?

How many times do we need to repeat it?

At least so far Obama’s copied the parts of Bush’s administration that actually worked.  Now he’s treading into “squib” territory.

Now, any radio station can compete on weekdays, when network shows lock horns with other network shows for mere money.

But the real acid test for a radio station is how do they do on the vital weekend shift – when stations cut the network crap and have to get real.

And so as the Northern Alliance Radio Network rapidly approaches ten years on the air, it’s with a tingle of homer pride that I relate the big news; this past month, AM950’s sole entry into the local weekend talk market, “LeftMN Radio”, realizing that Brad Carlson’s “The Closer” edition of the NARN dominated them in every possible way, gave up the ghost and cut their losses.

The show – which used to broadcast for an hour on Sunday afternoons, during the last half of Brad’s show – was hosted by Steve Timmer, and also by Tony Petrangelo and Aaron Klemz, two of the precious few Minnesota leftybloggers who don’t deserve to be under police surveillance.

Citing Klemz’ departure for a job at “Minnesotans Against Mining”   “Friends of the Boundary Waters” as an excuse for leaving the air, the show apparently had its last broadcast either last week or the week before (the show’s blog, near as I can tell, lists shows according to their preceding Monday). 

I’ll count it as a win.  A minor one – certainly not like driving Ron Rosenbaum from AM1130’s weekend lineup, much less making them surrender the entire talk format on weekends a few years back – but yet another win for the little station that could.  Between that and Dennis Miller making “The Late Debate” flee to mornings, and it’s been a great summer for AM1280. 

Congrats Brad!

Durable goods orders off over 7% in July. 

Look for people who make durable goods to start laying more people off.

More time for them to enjoy all the hope and change.

Here’s my favorite:

In today’s American culture, if you aren’t being constantly validated, you’re being persecuted.

It’s among the conclusions of Nancy French’s piece reviewing the Time article about the growing wave of “child-free” people  – who, finding that our society values children, are finding themselves less-validated and, ergo, persecuted. 

(“Child-Free” is as opposed to “Childless”; childless means “can’t have kids, or just haven’t found the right person, time and situation to try”, while “child-free” means “choose to avoid having your life center around something other than yourself…”

Oops.  Now I’m persecuting.

It was twenty years ago this month that one of the most seminal essays in the history of the broad “Liberty” movement in American politics was published.

The essay was “A Nation Of Cowards”, by Jeffrey Snyder, in the fall edition of “The Public Interest”. And in those days just before the commercial dawn of the Worldwide Web, it was a sensation among people who supported the human rights enshrined in the Second Amendment.

Twenty years ago, I was pretty downcast about the future of the Second Amendment. Things did, indeed, look fairly dire. The nation had been through 25 years of nonstop anti-gun propaganda. Guns were banned outright, or subjected to extensive niggling regulations that made them effectively illegal for private citizens, in much of the country. Carry permits in most of the US were to some degree unattainable, the province of of the well-connected and the official.

And beyond that? The idea of “liberty” in conservative politics seemed to be ever less in fashion.

And then came “A Nation Of Cowards” – a fiercely intellectual demolition of the anti-gun-control arguments that did for the moral case against victim disarmament what Sanford Levinson’s “A Nation Of Cowards” did for the legal case; set the standard, and galvanized a decade and a half of activism that turned the battle around.

And today, we need the article more than ever.

And so I’ll reprint it in its entirety below. If you’re a lawyer for any publication involved, sure, whatever, send me a cease and desist, and I’ll take it down.

But until then, read it.

(more…)

An alum’s observations on homecoming week at Macalester College in Saint Paul – which, if you’re not from the area, is sort of like Oberlin or Bard or any of a slew of other relentlessly lefty four-year colleges.

President Obama went on the air to say that if he had a father who was in his late eighties and fought on Okinawa, he’d look a lot like Delbert Belton.

Well, no.  He didn’t. 

The beating death of Belton last week was a huge story in the media all last week.

Well, no. It wasn’t.    Outside the conservative alt-media, the story – like the previous weeks’ death of Christopher Lane – was all but embargoed. 

Described as “the kind of nice old man who’d become your friend in minutes,” World War II veteran Delbert “Shorty” Belton was assaulted by two teens in the parking lot of the Eagles Lodge in Spokane, Washington, at around 8 p.m. on Wednesday. He died in the hospital Thursday morning.

Belton’s death has already gone viral, and is uncovering deep racial divides, simmering anger and disgust with the media. Most pointedly, many are asking: Why has the death of Belton — and similarly the death of Australian college student Christopher Lane in Oklahoma — largely been ignored by a media which was, only a couple of weeks ago, absolutely obsessed with the Trayvon Martin/ George Zimmerman case. Both the Belton and Lane case feature victims who died in race-related attacks. The only difference between the Belton and Lane cases compared to the Martin case is that they feature white victims and black assaulters. 

Not to mention serious allegations of explicit racial motivation that were never part of the Martin/Zimmerman case – at least the one that went to the jury, as opposed to the media narrative. 

The problem, of course, is that this nation’s “conversation about race” is a monologue.

We warned the DFL.  “Go ahead – raise cigarette taxes – the most regressive tax there is.  Watch what happens.  People will go out of their way to avoid paying the tax.  Just you watch!”

And the DFLers – and their camp followers in the local Sorosphere – assured the,selves “Naw!   People won’t drive miles out of their way for…cigarettes.  No way. It people aren’t that manic about not paying for A Better Minnesota”

But at a price break of almost two bucks a pack? <A href=”http://kfgo.com/news/articles/2013/aug/19/cigarette-buyers-flee-minnesota-to-avoid-tax-hike/”>Of course they are</a>.

The Northern Alliance Radio Network is back at the Minnesota State Fair!

Brad Carlson and I will be broadcasting from our booth on Machinery Hill – on Underwood, just south of Murphy, right next to the Home Depot pavilion:

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Brad and I will be teaming up for today’s show; we’ll be talking with…:

• Princess Kay of the Milky Way!
• Senator Roger Chamberlain
• House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt
• Senate candidate Mike McFadden

Tune in from 4-6PM, or listen on IHeartRadio or at the AM1280 website!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Obama Administration has a 69-point plan how the federal government can better respond to hurricanes in a time of global warming. The underlying premise is the federal government should do anything. The premise is wrong, it should do nothing

First, there is no Constitutional authority to spend money to rebuild people’s houses after natural disasters. Second, there is a perfectly viable alternative way to achieve the objective of not having to endlessly rebuild coastal areas.

If you built in a flood zone and get flooded, no federal money to rebuild. And if you do rebuilt, you must build on stilts, which is so expensive nobody will do it and without government guarantees, they couldn’t get property insurance anyway. Those who can afford to build will self-insure. Attrition will solve the problem of damaged buildings and the abandoned ground eventually will revert to coastal wetland barriers, at no federal cost at all.

Sometimes the right answer really is: do nothing.

Joe Doakes

But “doing nothing”, even when it’s the right thing (not) to do, creates no government union jobs.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – at least in the world of Twin Cities talk radio. 

That’s right – the Northern Alliance Radio Network is back at the Minnesota State Fair!

Brad Carlson and I will be broadcasting from our booth on Machinery Hill – on Underwood, just south of Murphy, right next to the Home Depot pavilion:

View Larger Map

 Brad is live on the air from 4-6PM today.  His guest line-up starts with former Miss Minnesota Siri Freeh and Senator Dave Hann – and if that’s just the opening act, you can imagine where it goes from there!

Tune in, or run over to Brad’s blog to find out more!

I feel like smacking an MSNBC host like a piñata.  A Piñata full of crap. 

In this case, it’s MSNBC contrib Joy Reid, who said on the air:

“There’s this sort of neo-Confederate thread that runs through this pro-gun movement and NRA movement,” she said this afternoon while discussing the recall elections for Democratic state lawmakers in Colorado that were spurred by their support for gun-control legislation.

Confederate Soldiers! This photo (courtest of the Joyce Foundation-supported MinnPost – is what the Big Left thinks you, the law-abiding gun owner, are. Hey, it was in the MinnPost – and they’re Real, Badge-Carrying Journalists!

 

 Reid also argued that gun-rights advocates and the National Rifle Association are hypocrites because they oppose the new restrictions on gun rights signed into law by Colorado governor John Hickenlooper while advocating for states’ rights and the Tenth Amendment.

Perhaps someone could explain to the ingenious Ms. Reid that it was Coloradans that are voting on the pushback against Hickenlooper are, well, from Colorado.  The NRA is a private organization; the Tenth Amendment doesn’t regulate its activities. 

But it’s great to see an MSNBC drone invoke the Tenth Amendment!

“The NRA will come in, helicopter in and undo [those laws],” she said.

If the NRA had the power to make and unmake the law, this might be a better nation. 

But it’s not actually the case.

Half of the Minnesota “Patch” “hyperlocal news” sites are going to be closing or consolidating in the next few months:

Kevira Voegele, associate regional editor for Minnesota, emailed staffers over the weekend to inform them that 13 of the state’s 25 Patches would need to land a partner — a media organization that would assume some responsibility for their operations — or face closure within 60 days.

It’s a nationwide problem for AOL-owned Patch, which is closing or consolidating 300 of its 900 local websites coast to coast. 

In Minnesota, the Patches slated for closure or consolidation failing a partnership are Apple Valley-Rosemount, Burnsville, Eden Prairie, Fridley, Golden Valley, Hopkins, Inver Grove Heights, Lake Minnetonka, Mendota Heights, Plymouth, Roseville, Shakopee and Southwest Minneapolis.

Sites that will continue to operate as usual include Eagan, Edina, Lakeville, Maple Grove, Minnetonka, Northfield, Oakdale, Richfield, Stillwater, St. Louis Park, St. Michael and Woodbury.

In my experience, the Patch chain – at least in Minnesota – was just as sclerotic and left-biased as of the local newspapers that they couldn’t quite replace.