Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A man was beating his girlfriend with a metal rod outside their Florida apartment. A neighbor saw it and spoke up. The man then attacked the neighbor. She shot him. He died. No charges were filed. Police said she had the right to defend the domestic abuse victim (Defense of Others) and also the right to Stand Her Ground to defend herself. Result: abuser dead, girl friend recovering, neighbor free to go.

That result could not happen here.

Minnesota is a Duty To Retreat state. Girlfriend had a Duty to Retreat from her boyfriend as he was beating her with the metal rod, if she could safely do so. Neighbor, when exercising the right of Defense of Others, “steps into her shoes” meaning if the jury decides girlfriend could have retreated, then girlfriend could not shoot abuser to stop his attack and neighbor can’t either.

When neighbor intervened and abuser attacked her, she had her own Duty to Retreat, if she could safely do so. And since abuser wasn’t originally attacking neighbor but only attacked her when she tried to stick up for domestic abuse victim, that makes neighbor the instigator of the confrontation between neighbor and abuser.

Lesson to learn: do not intervene to protect domestic abuse victims. Let the abuser beat her as long and as hard as he wants. Let the police clean up the mess when they arrive.

That’s the law in Minnesota, courtesy of Governor Dayton and DFL Rep. Paymar.

Joe Doakes

“Gun laws” aren’t about keeping people safer. They’re about keeping people subservient.

That’s as opposed to laws aimed at curbing crime, rather than people’s politically-incorrect lifestyle choices.

For better or worse – and I think it’s largely “better” – I’ve tried to keep a high level of cultural literacy, not only about the US but around the world.  At most, I’m a jack of many cultural trades, and goodness knows a master of none, but I do try. 

One positive upshot is that I know – again, for better or worse – that different cultures see things differently than we do, sometimes for reasons that may baffle us, but that make perfect sense to them for reasons that, again, baffle us. 

Downside?  You find out that many foreigners are just as stupid as many Americans are.

Earlier this week Chris Lane, an Australian baseball player going to college in Oklahoma was murdered by a couple of teenagers; the teenagers were reputedly bored and looking for something to do, and murdering Lane apparently scratched that itch for them. 

And in a burst of non-sequitur worthy of Heather Martens or Jim Backstrom, Tim Fischer – a former Austrialian deputy Prime Minister and a prime mover in the disarmament of Australians during their spasm of gun control in the nineties – has urged a boycott of the US by Ozzy tourists:  

“Tourists thinking of going to the USA should think twice,” Fischer said.

“This is the bitter harvest and legacy of the policies of the NRA that even blocked background checks for people buying guns at gunshows.

Fischer is toking from the same bong that Jim Backstrom and Heather Martens are bogarting:

• While I’ve seen no information as to where the “youths” got the gun, I’m going to suspect that it was via a source that would not be subject to a background check in any state, or any country, anywhere in the world. 
• For that matter?  The shooters were all, every last one of them, minors.  None of them can legally own or carry a firearm.  The NRA is all about keeping guns away from people who legally must not.  And five’ll get you ten there’s at least one criminal record among the bunch.
• Take a look at the few policies that actually have had a positive effect on violent crime; the NICS database in the form it was enacted, sentence enhancements for using guns in crimes, and of course concealed carry.  All the ones that actually work were supported by the NRA.  Every. Single. One.

Fischer keeps dragging on the bong:

“I am deeply angry about this because of the callous attitude of the three teenagers (but) it’s a sign of the proliferation of guns on the ground in the USA,” Fischer continued.

“There is a gun for almost every American.”

And yet the crime rate plummets.

And yet the crime rate is lowest in the places with the most  guns in the hands of the law-abiding, and highest where that right is the most abridged.

Oh, make no mistake; there are parts of the US I don’t advocate Ozzy tourists coming to.  Places where the culture has been so degraded by the devaluation of family, of social institutions, and cultures that glorify violence and devalue human life – which describes Moonshine Holler, Kentucky and Meth Circle, Suburbia as much as Crack Boulevard in Detroit. 

The NRA didn’t bring us any of those, Mr. Fischer.

Freedom-loving, energy-rich Northern Colorado is drawing closer to seceding from the rest of the Democrat-addled state:

“The concerns of rural Coloradans have been ignored for years,” William Garcia, chairman of the Weld County Commissioners, said in a statement. “The last session was the straw that broke the camel’s back for many people. They want change. They want to be heard.”

Three other rural counties — Cheyenne, Sedgwick and Yuma — also plan to place the 51st state referendum on the fall ballot. At least three more counties plan to consider the proposal this week at their commission meetings, said Jeffrey Hare, spokesman for the 51st State Initiative.

Known for its agriculture and oil and gas production, Weld is the largest of the Colorado counties exploring a break with the state after the legislature’s sharp turn to the left with bills restricting access to firearms and doubling the state’s renewable-energy mandate for rural areas.

I pondered this in Minnesota; a similar movement would be less a matter of the productive parts of the state “seceding” from Minnesota than of kicking Hennepin, Ramsey, Dakota, Anoka and Saint Louis Counties, and the Iron Range, out of the state.  And I suspect that’s a little constitutionally dodgier…

Forming a state isn’t easy: Even if the ballot measures pass, the Colorado state legislature would be required to amend the constitution to configure the state’s borders and refer a request for a new state to Congress.

Approving a 51st state would require a majority vote of both houses of Congress, although the Constitution doesn’t require the signature of the president, Mr. Hare said.

In other words, it won’t happen until the GOP controls both chambers (if then, given the performance of the Boehner caucus).  With any Democrat majorities at all, the idea would be dead in the water.  Can you  imagine what’d happen if Democrat parts of states didn’t have GOP regions to pay their bills for them?

“Again, folks say this can never happen. However, we are starting to hear from disenfranchised groups all over the country,” said a post on the 51st State Initiative’s website. “We are truly a divided nation. It is possible, if not likely, that we may not be the only group requesting from Congress the formation of a new state.”

A line that hovers before me in blog and news-site comment sections like a red cape in front of a bull; “most economists agree”. 

Forbes’ Louis Woodhill has at that oldie-but-goodie:

Let’s be blunt. Whatever economics is, it is not a science. Unlike physicists, who can predict an asteroid’s closest approach to earth within a few miles when it is still 100 million miles out in space, economists can’t accurately predict this quarter’s GDP. Indeed, they are still arguing among themselves about what “really” happened 83 years ago.

In light of the economics profession’s track record, it is hilarious to hear pundits and politicians say things like, “Most economists agree…” as if this mattered…It has been said that generals are always preparing to fight the last war. Similarly, at the time that our current “Pretty Good Depression” started, most of what central bankers knew (or thought that they knew) had to do with “fighting inflation,” which was the last great monetary “war.”

The post itself is entitled “America Doesn’t Need Monetary Policy, And It Doesn’t Need Economists”.  It’s a long read, and worth every bit of it.

Although since some of my best friends are economists, I’ll stick with “America doesn’t need to pay undue attention to them on a policy level”.

Imagine the media’s response if the genders were reversed in this commercial.

The dip in unemployment…wasn’t. 

Jobless rates dropped in only eight states in July from the previous month and rose in 28, the Labor Department said on Monday, as employment gains sputtered.

The slight improvement in employment last month came after jobless rates fell in only 11 states in June from May.

From July 2012, unemployment rates decreased in 36 states and the District of Columbia and increased in nine, the department said.

And in many of the states where unemployment “dropped”, it happened because the number of people in the workforce shrank.

And it’s getting worse, as employers increasingly ditch full-time employees for part-timers.  Forever21 is the first company to explicitly do away with full-time non-management employees in their stores, but they won’t be the last:

Although the ethical nature of Forever 21’s decision is debatable, it is both rational and understandable. A company that boasts regularly low prices and frequent, sensational sales, Forever 21’s competitive success is largely dependent upon its ability to maintain low manufacturing and operational costs. The ACA is an undeniable burden on this principle, and Forever 21’s management has the prerogative to take any legal measures necessary to avoid raising the costs of its products.

It is a decision that will pose moderate public-relations consequences for the company and it is an unfortunate result for its employees, but it is a pragmatic choice for any profit-driven company to make. Forever 21 will subsequently be just one of many others to take such an action if the ACA isn’t revised or repealed.

Victor Davis Hanson documents how h Obama’s crippling naiveté on human nature is devolving into dark comedy:

The almost eerie hatred for Obama seen in Egypt — among the military, the Islamists, the Egyptian Street, and even the secular pro-Western reformists — in part derives from a sense that Obama tried to cajole them all with cheap commonalities [the Muslim elements in his family history, his cosmopolitan childhood, his ethnically-mixed ancestry] and mytho-histories rather than negotiate often conflicting national interests through tough transparent talks.

A good way to get beaten up in the hallway at a tough school is to assure the local king-of-the-hill thug that both of you really have a lot in common. In some sense, Obama’s entire Middle East policy mirrors the hilarious scene in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, where the white punk attired in pseudo-gang attire believes he can out-jive gangbangers into leaving his girl alone. He can’t. Obama has unfortunately become such a wannabe in the eyes of unapologetic Middle East gangsters.

Read the whole thing.

I keep coming back to Berg’s Seventh Law…

…no.  That’s not accurate.  Berg’s Seventh Law keeps coming up in the news. 

The Democrats’ attempts to paint issues as “racist” and “gender-hostile” – declaring “Wars on Women” on behalf of the GOP, for example – are getting ever-more frenzied (and in the case of the left’s Minnesota messaging operation, the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota, clumsier and more ham-fisted). 

Why?

The answer, as with nearly everything the Democrats say about the GOP, is tucked away into Berg’s Law.  The Law reads:  “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”. 

So why the unseemly frenzy in the Democrats’ claims of “Racism” and “Wars” on Women? 

Because the GOP, in at least one key metric, is clobbering the Democrats on “diversity”:

Obama aides like his political strategist David Axelrod and Gaspard have for years been sensitive to the irony that in the age of Obama, Republicans have done a better job than Democrats of bringing diversity through their ranks. That, and the personal warmth many in the Obama orbit also feel toward [Newark Mayor and NJ Senate hopeful Corey] Booker, has helped set him up as arguably the best-connected super-junior senator in recent memory.

The Law also explains why the media went to such comically, unseemly links to try to portray the Tea Party as “racist” – because the Tea Party may have been the most un-self-consciously racially diverse political movement in recent history. 

The lesson is clear; on gender and diversity even more than most topics, don’t listen to what the Democrats say.  Listen to what Berg’s Seventh Law says they’re really saying.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

There are 300 million people in the country and those Nasty Evil Republicans who implemented the sequester plan devised by John Kerry’s Super-friends Super-committee cruelly will afflict 57,000 children who can’t go to Head Start this Fall.
The article lists the complaints. No free daycare. No free dental screening. No free lunch.

Wait a minute, I thought Head Start was intended to give poor kids a leg up so they could compete academically. If it’s just another welfare program that affects a vanishingly small percentage of Americans, and those only because of hard policy choices made by a bi-partisan committee hand-picked by the President . . . what’s the problem?

But wait, it’s not only kids who are affected. 57,000 kids account for 18,000 government-funded jobs to be cut or reduced, a ratio of 1-3. That’s W-A-Y better than the ratio of Maria to the Van Trapp kids, and they managed to learn somehow anyway, during the war even.

Joe Doakes

But Julie Andrews paid no union dues, so nobody cares…

As Gary Gross notes, the DFL seems at the very least to be floating as a trial balloon that they’re doubling down on the warehouse tax. 

It’s outside the scope Governor Dayton Messinger wanted for the special session. 

I’m torn on this one.

On the one hand, I think that if the warehouse tax goes into effect, it’s going to be a disaster.  And the DFL, and its Praetorian Guard, the media – will spin it – the job losses, the dislocation, the businesses heading across the Saint Croix, the Red, and Duluth Harbor – as a Republican problem because…well…because Gay Marriage, for the Children.  Or something like that. 

On the other hand, this absolutely is the Democrats’ fault.  “Governor” Dayton signed it, I suspect, without even bothering to get Bob Hume to Ask Carrie Lucking to ask Alida for permission to read it reading it.  Being a Democrat, and a couple generations removed from the generation of Daytons who knew anything about running businesses, it didn’t matter to him. 

This is the sort of issue that conservatives – Republicans – should win big, provided that we’re in a party that has the equipment and expertise to fight a message war.

So can you see why I’m worried?

The Strib ran an editorial from the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch over the weekend, entitled “A senator, scrutinizing ALEC? How dare he.”.

The headline sounds like it was written by Eric Pusey.  The rest of the editorial isn’t much better.  And the fact that the Strib runs it – ergo folds it under their own editorial umbrella – is something we need to highlight. 

The “Senator” involved is Dick Durbin – the guy who wants to bring back the “Fairness Doctrine”, among his many other atrocities. 

And it shows the Democrats, and the Strib’s, hypocrisy on many levels.  Pardon, as always, the redundancy.

Selective Indignation – Yet Again.  The “scrutiny of ALEC”, as we’ve noted in the past, is itself intensely hypocritical – but we’ll come back to that.

On Aug. 6, Durbin sent a letter to about 300 current or former corporate members of ALEC to ask a couple of simple questions. The assistant minority leader wanted to know whether the organization or corporation was still a supporter of ALEC and whether they backed “stand your ground” laws (“For Minnesota think tank, ALEC haters’ witch hunt hits home,” Aug. 14).

Now, just think for a moment what’d happen if, say, Mitch McConnell sent letters to companies asking if they supported Planned Parenthood? 

Think about it for a minute. 

The Strib editorial board would lose bowel control from the sheer anger.  Keri Miller would devote a week of her “Daily Buzz” or whatever they’re calling “Mid-Morning” these days.  It’d be one of those “Chilling Effects on Democracy” that seems to accompany any conservative activity in the minds of the media, only worse. 

Dance, Boogeyman!  Dance! – And why is Durbin so concerned about ALEC? 

In September, Durbin plans to convene a subcommittee hearing to study [“Stand Your Ground”] laws in light of the Florida verdict acquitting George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Inasmuch as ALEC’s support was critical to Florida’s 2005 decision to pass the nation’s first stand-your-ground law, it seems reasonable to ask ALEC’s members and funders whether the Trayvon Martin case changed their minds.

The bad publicity ALEC received after an unarmed Martin was shot dead by Zimmerman led many corporations to withdraw their support for ALEC.

I’m not sure – and I can’t find the data at the moment – but I’m going to say this is likely BS; I doubt they lost any significant revenue, at least not for long  Maybe I’ll find out more soon. 

But what Durbin is doing is trying to is…:

• do his bit to keep waving the bloody shirt of the Trayvon Martin case around, to keep the base riled up, and…
• do the same thing to ALEC’s sponsors that the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota did to “MNForward’s” sponsors in 2010; smear them. 

ALEC and the groups are right to tell Durbin to stick his request from whence he got his “Fairness Doctrine” proposal. 

Proof That the Strib knows DFL Voters are Incurious Lemmings Who Are Content To Let Others Do Their Thinking For them – The Pospatch, via the Strib, does the “Wizard of Oz” schtik for the low-information NPR-listening voter:

The group creates cookie-cutter legislation with the primary goal of enriching the corporate bottom line.

As opposed to the National Education Association, or the Teamsters or SEIU or AFSCME, which create cookie-cutter legislation to enrich their leadership.  Or the “Violence Policy Center”, which creates cookie-cutter gun grab legisaltion for state legislators – like the bills Representatives Paymar, Martens and Hausman wasted four months introducing in this past session, all of which were to one degree or another copied and pasted from laws in New York and California.  Or the Joyce Foundation, which not only supports gun control groups like the VPC and “Protect Minnesota” (which provide cookie-cutter legislation on Second Amendment issues to ignorami like the Metrocrat Caucus) but also partisan media outlets masquerading as “objective” media, like the MinnPost, to carry Joyce’s proxies’ water in the public information sphere. 

“They May Be An Untransparent Hack Pressure Group, But They’re Our Untransparent  Hack Pressure Group!”   – This next part is comedy gold, provided you have the capacity to laugh at the bald-faced  disingenuity of the media.  I’ll be adding emphasis:   

This is what makes this war of words so interesting. The real purpose of ALEC is to allow corporations and wealthy benefactors to avoid state ethics disclosure laws. As the nonprofit group Common Cause has meticulously noted in its complaint to the Internal Revenue Service, ALEC pretends it’s a nonprofit charity when really it’s a highly sophisticated lobbying organization that allows corporations to launder their donations without showing taxpayers which lawmakers they are buying and selling.

As opposed to “Common Cause”, which – in deep contrast – pretends it’s a nonprofit charity when in fact it is a highly sophisticated lobbying organization that allows liberal plutocrats and “progressive” advocates and groups to launder their donations without showing taxpayers which lawmakers they are buying and selling. 

That’s how the corporations want it, and that has nothing to do with freedom of speech or other constitutional protections. It’s deceit, plain and simple, and it has a negative effect on the legislative process.

Catch that?  The media – it’s the Pospatch, officially, but this editorial is no less cookie-cutter than a Lori Sturdevant article or an AFSCME-sponsored bill, let alone the ALEC bills it yaps about – is leaning on the purported “deceit” of “ALEC”, which acts, in every way, exactly like every group like it anywhere in American politics, but has been selected as the boogeyman by the Big Left, to draw media attention away from groups like…

…Common Cause, for one, which actually is everything that this editorial claims ALEC is, with comprehensive dishonesty about its own motivations thrown in for good meaure.     

“Corporate America has the right to express its opinion,” Durbin said in an interview. “The difference here is this is a secret operation and they’ve become a major political force.”

Unlike those plucky outsiders at Media Matters.  Or the Joyce Foundation.  Or AFSCME.

Or the “Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota”. 

The sooner the Strib goes out of business, the sooner Minnesota has a chance – slight though it may be – of learning the truth about what’s going on around them.

For the real story, go here and read this.

To:  All Conservative Senators
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  We Need The Truth

Senators,

It’s time to send a letter to corporations who donate money to Planned Parenthood, asking them for specifics about their positions on “Reproductive Rights”. 

Please see to this immediately. 

That is all.

PS:  Please forward this to every liberal non-profiteer, union official, “journalist” and blogger – the ones that actually think, rather than copying and pasting press releases, anyway – that you can.  And do it before noon.  I want their reactions.

If you packed the entire world’s population together equal to the densities of some of the world’s major cities, how much area would that entire population cover?

This, and many other questions, are answered among the “40 Maps that will Help you Make Sense of the World”

This stuff is like crack to me.

It’s gotta be tough to be the Strib Editorial Board.

On the one hand, you are joined to the DFL at the hip.  You run what is in effect the DFL house organ.  

On the other hand, you’re not only trying to run a business – you’re running a business in a dying industry and a garbage economy.  Alida Messinger has you on speed-dial.  You worked overtime – well, you had your people work overtime – to see Mark Dayton and a couple of DFL legislative majorities elected. 

St. Paul and Minneapolis mayoral property tax bids for 2014 came in Wednesday and Thursday, respectively, and with them the strongest indication to date of how much change in Minnesota’s property tax climate was wrought by the 2013 Legislature.

The change is in the right direction, but it’s more modest relief than the Editorial Board had hoped for, particularly in St. Paul.

As I’ve predicted for the past year, and correctly noted yesterday, the hikes to “Local Government Aid” will not lead to any meaningful property tax cuts anywhere in the state, least of all in the Twin Cities and Duluth.  True enough; Minneapolis is instituting what’ll be a fairly cosmetic cut for most people.  Saint Paul is, ostensibly, holding its taxes steady – which is not a cut at all:

Mayor Chris Coleman — who is seeking a third term this year — recommended that city levies be held flat next year. He called it a “no-drama” budget. But for St. Paul homeowners hoping for a partial reversal of the big increases in recent years, it was a disappointment. The City Council should aim lower as it sets next year’s levy.

While each city’s budget will benefit from a state infusion next year, the Twin Cities are not twins in city government size, scope and fiscal condition. St. Paul is in many ways the needier twin, more dependent on state aid, which was slashed in 2003 and has only this year begun to recover, and on homeowner taxes, which rose steeply in response.

This year’s $10.1 million LGA increase does not quite fill the $11.5 million gap projected for next year’s St. Paul budget before more state aid arrived.

Just as promised, Saint Paul isn’t putting one red cent toward reducing property taxes.  Its budget remains a grab bag of goodies for Chris Coleman’s and the City Council’s key stakeholders, the unions and the non-profits. 

Anyone who expected otherwise was deluded.  Anyone who told you it’d be otherwise is either naive or lying. 

So what is the Strib editorial board, then?

It was a year ago yesterday that a depraved lefty walked into the national Family Research Council headquarters a a pistol, 100 rounds of ammo, and the intention to kill every person in the office. 

He was stopped by a building manager and acting security guard, Leo Johnson, who, although shot twice, subdued the leftist gunman, who had walked into the lobby claiming to be a new intern.  Johnson asked for ID. 

After Corkins takes a suspiciously long time rummaging through his bag to produce identification, Johnson cannily stands up and walks around the desk to get a closer look at what Corkins is doing. Corkins bolts upright, gun in hand. Without the slightest hesitation, Johnson rushes Corkins, who fires twice. A bullet shatters Johnson’s left forearm. “And I just couldn’t hear anything, my arm just kind of blew back. So at that point I was thinking: ‘I have to get this gun,’ ” Johnson told The Weekly Standard. “That was my sole focus—I have to get this gun—this guy’s gonna kill me and kill everybody here.”

From there, Johnson somehow manages to push Corkins across the lobby and pin him against the wall with his bad arm. “I just started punching him as hard as I could, until I could feel his grip loosen,” recalled Johnson. Eventually he takes the gun from Corkins with his wounded arm. Before long, Corkins is subdued on the ground. Corkins now admits that it was his intention to shoot everyone in the building. There’s no question Johnson saved a lot of lives.

This was a genuine hate crime; the shooter, Floyd Lee Corkins, had a backpack full of Chick-Fil-A sandwiches he intended to smear into his victims’ faces after shooting them, apperently to suffocate the wounded. 

Johnson was a hero.  And you’ve heard scarcely a word about it in the mainstream media, who spent most of the past 18 months trying in vain to pound the utterly-non-bias-related Martin-Zimmerman case into a “hate crime”, and the past couple of years trying unsuccessfully to politicize the Giffords, Aurora and Newtown shootings.

And yet here was the real thing (and by no means for the first time).  And…

(crickets)

There are some illuminating contrasts between the media’s handling of the political dimensions of the Family Research Council shooting and the shooting of Representative Giffords. In the latter case, the media rushed to assume political motivations and were quick to blame, of all people, Sarah Palin…there is no evidence whatsoever Loughner saw this map or that allegedly violent political rhetoric—even “campaign” is a term borrowed from war—was in any way a cause of the Giffords shooting. That didn’t stop serious news organizations from lending institutional credibility to the irresponsible allegations…though Giffords was shot in January 2011, as recently as this year in an article on gun violence the New York Times saw fit to remind readers that “many criticized Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential nominee, for using cross hairs on her Web site to identify Democrats like Ms. Giffords.”

 And NBC news fairly raced to blame the Aurora shooting on the Tea Party. 

By contrast, the media handled awkwardly the revelation that Corkins admitted to plotting mass murder as a means of furthering a popular liberal cause. “A detail sure to reignite the culture wars that erupted around the shooting is the fact that Corkins told FBI agents that he identified the Family Research Council as anti-gay on the Web site of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” wrote the Washington Post during Corkins’s trial in February. It’s a little unseemly for a newspaper, when finally forced to confront actual politically motivated violence, to worry about the shooting’s impact on the metaphorical “culture war.” Particularly when irresponsible actors in that culture war continue to get a free pass from the media.

The SPLC – cited with grave solemnity as an authority by rafts of lefty bobbleheads – has become a bit of a hate group in its own right:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was once a laudable civil rights organization that sued racists and violent extremists. Now it regularly demonizes anyone who runs afoul of its knee-jerk liberal politics, and despite this it is still regularly cited by the media as a “nonpartisan” watchdog. Some of the SPLC’s newly targeted “hate groups,” such as pickup artists, are merely kooky or distasteful. Others singled out by the SPLC, including Catholics who go to Latin mass or Christian organizations similar to the Family Research Council, are well within the mainstream. Tellingly, the SPLC doesn’t just name the Family Research Council on its website—it posts the council’s address on a “hate map.” That map is still on SPLC’s website, and the organization refused calls to take it down after the Family Research Council shooting.

But they won’t. 

I bring it up because we’re seeing the same thing with the Widstrand beating in Saint Paul.  Now, to be clear, there’s no evidence that it was a “hate crime”, per se; in other words, there’s no evidence that any of the youths stood on a soapbox and bellowed “I’m doing this because I Hate Whitey”.  And for purposes of charging that brutal assault, evidence is what is needed.

But you can see, feel and hear the nervousness in official Saint Paul and Minneapolis government circles; as crime as dropped in most parts of the Twin Cities, it’s stayed steadily well above average on the East Side, the North End, the North Side, Phillips.  Parts of the East Side have been deteriorating before our eyes over the past decade, in a city that is generally mostly just stagnant. 

And yet nobody in offical Twin Cities circles will call the elephant what it is.  They hold official observances for the “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” misery-exploitation caravan – which exists to protest the deaths of children who look like the children of NPR executives – and studiously ignore the fact that black on black crime in the Twin Cities is astronomically higher than any other rate in the state.

2011:  As the GOP majority began working to try to tame Minnesota’s government monkey, the DFL prattled “the GOP is raising property taxes!”. 

It was baked monkey doodle, of course.  The GOP re-focused “Local Government Aid” toward its original mission, helping poor outstate communities, as opposed to subsidizing the urban DFL. 

But in 2012, it was one of the DFL’s big chanting points; “Elect us and we’ll lower property taxes!”, by restoring and boosting Local Government Aid. 

And some of us warned you back then – while the DFL would certainly tuck into the job of wrenching more money out of the parts of the state that pay their way, there’d be no guaranteed cuts in property taxes…

…because the state has nothing to do with what counties charge.

Nothing.  Zip.  Nada.  Zilch. 

But the voters – maniupulated by a lot of emotional issues, and not thinking all that clearly – turned the House and Senate over to the DFL.  And the DFL raised taxes, and jacked up LGA payments to their friends in Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth. 

And then what?

What the hell do you think?   Property taxes aren’t going to budge!

Joe Doakes from Como Park noticed it, and emailed:

St. Paul’s budget proposal has no layoffs; instead, there are new hires and expanded services, which the City Council President Lantry attributes to Local Government Aid received from the State of Minnesota.

Two weeks ago, Governor Dayton and the DFL promised that LGA would produce $120 million in local property tax relief instead of new spending.

But DFL politics aren’t driven by actual results.  All that’s necessary, in a state where the media mostly takes its marching orders from Alida Messinger, is that someone says taxes will go down, probably. 

And that’s exactly what’s happening. 

Doakes:

Nope, not in St. Paul. St. Paul taxes stay the same. The LGA gets spent on fun stuff, not boring old property tax relief. Again.

Joe Doakes

And by “fun stuff”, we mean more government employee union jobs. 

At any rate, I’ll claim a big win here – taxes in Saint Paul won’t drop, and they’ll probably rise.  Taxes in Minneapolis and Duluth will also stay the same, although there will be more “services” that serve precious few at exquisite cost.

The DFL lied.  And it’s you, the taxpayer, that’s paying the price – being taken for a ripe suck at both the state and (most) local levels. 

The funny part?  The DFL’s apparatchiks are still claiming taxes are dropping, even though they aren’t. 

It’s almost like they don’t expect the regional media to fact-check them, or give any coverage to those who do.

A woman with a carry permit breaks up a robbery at a Denny’s in Houston:

At around 4 a.m. Thursday, a man who does not want to be identified, said his brother was robbed by six men with guns at a Denny’s off the Gulf Freeway in southeast Houston.

“I don’t know if it was random or someone set him up. Because he got his own label,” said the victim’s brother.

His brother’s wife was in the restroom at the time, but when she exited the restroom she saw the group of suspected robbers. Police said that’s when she pulled out her gun and shot at them.

“She said she came out of the restroom and saw my brother on the floor. That’s when she started doing what she gotta do. She got a license and she’ll do anything to protect her kids and my brother,” he said.

Police said there was a shootout, but it is not known how many shots were fired at the time. However, police said the gunshots did hit cars in the parking lot.

No word of any charges filed against the woman; if there were, I suspect we’d have heard of it.  

But Texas has a “Stand your Ground” law.  Law-abiding citizens involved in otherwise legitimate self-defense shootings (i.e. in which they are not willing participants. 

The “elites” don’t get it.

Us proles?   We’re smarter.

…but there are people in this world who I wouldn’t mind hearing had been chained in a basement and eaten by mice. 

Just saying.

For years, I’ve thought that it’d be a good idea to hold prosecutors – say, Mike Nifong – criminally liable for malicious prosecution. 

And the fallout from the Zimmerman case isn’t changing that belief even a little.

“No guns in capitol!”,
Michael Paymar says amid
Capitol Police.

Mulligan Session!
The only real question is
which “Fail” to start with.

The NARN is Fair-bound!
Again, the constant battle
against the cheese curd.

Chaos in Egypt.
How often must I explain
it’s not that “Morsi”.

35 choices
as Minneapolis votes.
“Instant” runoff? Hah!

The history books
Say we’re created equal.
Some, moreso, I guess.

Ryan Winkler called
Clarence Thomas “Uncle Tom”.
Thomas: “Sorry – who?”

Zygi Wilf? A crook?
He seemed so above reproach!
Who woulda thunk it?

Governor Dayton
sees Alida, starts to sweat.
“No more shock collar!”

Welcome, darling kids!
Time to meet your new sitter
Sal “Bug-Eyes” Rossi.

(more…)

During the work day, I don’t blog.  I’ll occasionally see articles or things I’m interested in writing about, and use the WordPress mobile app to put the links, titles, jottings about subjects, or whatever I can out into my Drafts folder, so I can pick them up in the morning when I do my actual blogging. 

So I dug into my Drafts folder this morning and found a piece at the top of the pile – probably from yesterday – entitled “A Problem Of Focus”.

With nothing in it.  No link, copy, not even a hint of what I was thinking when I wrote the title.

Which makes more sense the more you think about it.

To:  The World
From: Mitch Berg
Re:  This Say I

All:

This is in re the phrase “What Say You?”.  It’s been popping up a lot in conversation over this past few years. 

What say me?  Me say “It’s a linguistic anachronism that’s become a pretentious cliche”, that’s what me say.

Me say kill with fire.

That is all.

As we noted last week, Rep. Michael “The Kia Hamster” Paymar is proposing a bill to ban citizen carry at the Capitol complex.

Keep this in mind:  to carry at the Capitol, a citizen (as opposed to a law enforcement officer) must have a valid carry permit – which means that they…:

• have passed a background check
• passed a training course that certifies they know the law and the pract
• are over 21
• have no record of remotely serious violent behavior
• are among a population that is two orders of magnitude less likely to commit any crime at all than the general public

…and have notified Capitol Security that they – a legal citizen – intend to carry in the Capitol complex within the limits of the law. 

There’s no reason for this, of course.  State Capitol police happily admit they’ve never had a whiff of a problem with a legal carry-permittee carrying a firearm at the Capitol.  No outbursts, no threatening behavior, no nothing.

Oh, Paymar and his metrocrat pals funneled out a fake meme in the in-the-bag media that legislators were feeling “intimidated” by all the citizens with firearms in the hearing rooms.  I don’t doubt that there were a few metrocrat ninnies who do wet their pants at the sight of a firearm alone. 

But Paymar was deflecting – trying to draw attention away from the fact that his proposals were getting creamed.  Even in a legislature controlled by Metrocrats.

What would be less humiliating for a legislator:  to claim that a mob with guns killed your bill, or the fact that even your own party deserted your cause? 

That is the only reason Paymar is proposing this change in the law. 

It’s stupid, of course.  Andy Aplikowski writes:

There were how many murders overnight in the Twin Cities? We have rampant gang warfare being carried out on the streets, but the highbrow lawmakers and bureaucrats are more focused on taking guns out of the hands of peaceful law abiding citizens. They are far less dangerous than violent criminals

We know that.  So does Paymar.  This proposal isn’t about facts. 

———-

The Real Americans that stymied Paymar last spring are not sleeping through this.  We’ve got work to do on Tuesday:

The Advisory Committee on Capitol Security will hold two meetings to consider changing current law to ban concealed carrying of firearms by permit-holders in the state Capitol.   The first meeting will be held this Wednesday, August 14, from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on 75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Room 107.  This meeting will focus on discussion of current law and policy, and there will be no public testimony heard at this meeting regarding firearms on the Capitol Complex.  To view the agenda for this meeting, please click here.

On Tuesday, August 20, this committee will meet again from 10:00 am to 11:30 am at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on 75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Room 107 to discuss policy changes to current standards regulating firearms on the Capitol Complex.   Please attend this meeting and OPPOSE these changes to current law that would ban concealed carry in the state Capitol.  Public testimony will be heard (though time may be limited).  If you wish to testify, please submit your name in writing to angela.geraghty@state.mn.us.  To view the agenda for this meeting, please click here.

Please plan to arrive at least an hour before each meeting.  Remember, with a permit, concealed carry is lawful in the Minnesota State Capitol and other state buildings in the area if you have notified the Commissioner of Public Safety of your intent to do soin advance

Tuesdays are rough – they probably are for most of us in the private sector, and as little as the DFL knows about the private sector, they surely know that.

But I’m going to do what I can. I hope you will too.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

No recent evidence of global warming but Minnesota Department of Commerce wants to know what Minnesota insurance companies are doing to save the planet.

I think Governor Dayton is worried about a different climate changing…

“What do you think about the beating of Ray Widstrand?”:  I don’t. 

“What are you talking about?  It was a horrible episode!  And it’s getting international attention” – Of course it was.  And not only did it happen in my city, but it was like four blocks from where I used to live, out on the East Side.  It was a crappy neighborhood 24 years ago, and if anything I think it’s gotten worse.  An episode at a gas station out on East Minnehaha three years ago – not far from my old house, in a neighborhood which has decayed immensely since I lived and worked there over 20 years ago – may have been one of the scarier nights of my life (and I’ve had some scary ones). 

“Is that a commentary on Saint Paul?” – Yep.  When I first moved to Saint Paul in 1987 – the end of George Latimer’s reign, the beginning of Jim Scheibel’s single term – the city felt depressed, in a malaise.  Tired. 

Afterwards came 12 years of relative “can do!” under Norm Coleman and Randy Kelly – years, when the city grew (some), prospered (by our standards), spent too much but had somethingto show for it. 

But since Kelly left?  Taxes have boomed.  Housing values have plummeted.  Crime has risen (not to Minneapolis levels, and it’s fairly concentrated, but it’s worse than it was).  The city feels tired, bored, and in a rut – the standard stuff you get from cities with one-party government.  The government’s stakeholders get the gold mine, and the rest of us get the shaft. 

“Back to the Widstrand case.  50 youths from at least two east-side gangs brawling in the street.  At least four people accosting a passerby and stomping him into a coma, with a swelling brain and a minimal chance of survival.  Certainly you have an opinion” – Of course I do.  I pray he recovers, and experiences a miracle among people with these sorts of awful brain injuries. 

“But isn’t this a racial incident?” – Apparently not.  No media outlet has mentioned race, so apparently nobody involved in the assault was in any way ethnic. 

“You’re wimping out, Merg!  It’s time for a Dialog about Race!” – Cut the crap.  Race, along with gender and gender orientation, is a subject where “dialog” is nonexistent; where Minnesota’s dominant culture – the radical left – has imposed a structure where the “Dialog” is always between Good (their side) and Evil.  Academia, the media, government and government’s influential stakeholders all uphold that framework at every turn. 

In other words, the “dialog” about race is the rhetorical equivalent of the “dialog” between Mr. Widstrand and his attackers.   It’s a monologue; hell, it’s really more of a rant.  And it destroys reason and civil discourse just as surely as mob beat-downs destroy peoples’ lives. 

So I’ll leave the “dialog about race” to the ranters and the masochists.  I’ll continue as I always have – treating people as individuals rather than labels, and defending myself and mine from those who don’t. 

“Speaking of defense – did you say on the radio that you’d take your gun and charge at those 50 people?” – Good God, no.  The only people who could possibly take that away from what I said on the air Saturday must have spirochaetal paresis, or have had a massive stroke. 

Nope – I said pretty much the opposite.  The way Minnesota law is set up, even though the law says you can use lethal force to defend yourself or others from death or great bodily harm, it’s a bad idea.  Partly because it’s incredibly dangerous; it’s incumbent on the “good samaritan” to only engage with the people providing the immediate threat of death or great bodily harm, and the danger of shooting someone who may well be involved, but isn’t providing an immediate threat – to say nothing of having a shot pass by and hit a completely innocent person – is just too great.  And the county attorney will pick over your response in the most pointillistic detail imaginable.  And that’s just the legal danger; there’s also the literal physical danger; while one is dealing with an immediate threat, there’s no telling how many other people will turn into immediate threats to your life and health. 

And that doesn’t even get into “Stand your Ground” issues.  In Minnesota, outside your house, you have a duty to retreat if reasonably possible to avoid using lethal force.  Even if someone’s getting kicked to death?  Well, that’s a question that the county attorney will be happy to argue over, and over, and over with your attorney, at $250 an hour, with your freedom and entire future on the line.  Will you win?  No.  Even if you win in court, you’re still going to be $50,000 or more poorer, and that’s even before the civil suits get started, and don’t get us started on the psychological impact. 

So no.  Assuming adrenaline doesn’t trigger a flight response, I’d hope for the presence of mind to call the police, and to videotape things on my phone if possible. 

Now – if Mr. Widstrand had had a gun…

…but he didn’t. 

And cases like this are among the reasons people do get their permits and carry firearms with them. 

Hypothetically.

“How about them Twins?”- Shut up.