There’s some sort of football game going on this weekend.  The Bears aren’t involved, so it’s not that big a deal – really just a sideshow on the Road to Spring Training!

But it is to Brad Carlson – so I’ll be doing a double shot of NARN this weekend!

Tomorrow, Brad and I will be broadcasting live from “Holes for Heroes”, an annual ice-fishing benefit for veterans, out on Medicine Lake in Plymouth.  We’ll have all sorts of guests – organizers, veterans, and MNGOP gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson. 

And then on Sunday, I’ll be filling in for Brad on “The Closer” editing of the NARN.  I’ll have Marty Seifert, another of the GOP candidates for governor, on the show!

Plus all the usual NARN stuff!

Hope you can tune in for an All Berg Weekend on the Northern Alliance Radio Network!

I’m going to commit to you this longish piece by Jason Harrington, “Dear America: I Saw You Naked“, from Politico.  It chronicles his time as a grad student marooned as a TSA screener at O’Hare. 

Of course, if you’re reading this blog, it’s likely as not you aren’t a huge TSA fan.  And for all that, there are probably things in Harrington’s piece that’ll still get you mad.

But I am linking to this because it’d seem Mr. Harrington and I must have met. 

Because this person:

Every now and then, a passenger would throw up two middle fingers during his or her scan, as though somehow aware of the transgressions going on.

That’s me. 

Every time I fly.

What “gun safety” law would have prevented this?

Donquarius Davon Copeland, 19, acknowledged that he fired the .357 semiautomatic pistol that killed Rayjon Gomez and said he knew he’d hit somebody.

“I shot two times,” Copeland said under questioning by his defense attorney, Eric Hawkins.

Copeland’s admission Thursday came in a plea bargain in the Aug. 24, 2011, death of Gomez, whose death shocked Minneapolis. The victim was riding piggyback on a friend’s bicycle when he was shot.

Remember that?  A completely random killing of a kid, for no reason whatsoever.   It was a “revenge” shooting, done by people too stupid to know that “revenge” is supposed to mean “against the people who supposedly wronged you in the first place”.

They were cruising around in a van registered to a church pastored by the Taylors’ father.

“We were going to go down there and shoot at people,” Copeland responded to Hawkins when asked why they were driving around.

Just “shoot at people”.

Now, here’s the part I’d like to bring to the attention of all of you ‘gun safety” advocates.  I’ll add some emphasis:

Prosecutors said that as Taylor drove, Copeland and Catchings passed a .357 SIG semi-automatic handgun back and forth.

“Taylor suggested that Catchings and Copeland stop ‘talking’ about shooting someone and ‘just do it,’ ” Mabley wrote in an order last year.

Now, all you “gun safety” advocates; “.357 SIG” is a type of ammo, not a gun.  But it is, generally, found in higher-end firearms.   Not your cheapo guns.  Not the kind of firearm a typical 19 year old can buy – at a gun show, anyway.   The article is silent on where the gun came from – but I’m going to go out on a limb and say a couple of 19 year olds playing with a gun that probably didn’t go for less than $600 probably had a stolen firearm.

Pick any one of Michael Paymar, Ron Latz or Alice Hausman’s proposals from the last session; which one would have prevented this?

I’ll give you a hint.  None.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When I studied abroad in college, the best deal was to ride a school bus to Winnipeg then fly to Amsterdam and on to Paris.  The trip took 24 hours and cost $460 in 1979 dollars which is worth $1,500 in 2014 dollars.  Canadian air fares were cheaper than American because our government regulated air carrier routes, creating mini-monopolies that kept prices high.

Today, I can fly Minneapolis to Paris direct in 9 hours for $1,200.

The one thing that Jimmy Carter did right was de-regulated airlines and made air fare affordable for ordinary Americans.

Of course, letting airlines decide which routes are profitable means some people lose air service.  Liberals are still arguing we ought to start subsidizing small airports again so people don’t have to drive to hub terminals to catch a flight.  It’s all about fairness, you see, and equality.  People who live in Minneapolis can jump right on the airplane.  People from Thief River Falls, Granite Falls or Cannon Falls must drive to the Minneapolis hub airport.

Yeah, it’s not fair.  But it’s cheap.  And that covers a multitude of other sins.

Deregulation worked for airlines.  Wonder how it’d work for other industries such as, say, health insurance?

Clearly Joe hates womyn.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

The First Amendment protects the freedom to speak on political subjects, if you say liberal things.

The First Amendment also protects religious freedom, unless you’re a Catholic nun.

The Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms, assuming you’re a Liberal.

The Fourth Amendment protects us from government snooping, except for electronic snooping.

The Fifth Amendment protects us from government taking our property without compensation, unless it can’t deliver?

Hey wait a minute, we skipped one.  What about the Third Amendment?  The Third Amendment says citizens can’t be forced to provide room and board for government troops – no “quartering” is allowed without my consent.  The way things are going in Washington these days, Obama probably will assign me troops and if I decline, he’ll make me to pay the cost of putting up the troops in the Ritz.  And it’ll be legal, as a tax.

I better get started on that basement apartment.

Joe Doakes

“If you like it, you’ll be able to keep your spare bedroom”

Leni Riefenstahl was the world’s first notable female filmmaker, and the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century.  She created innovations in the technique and aesthetics of film still used not only in cinema, but in the filming of crowds and athletic events; some of the techniques you see at the Super Bowl are evolutions of techniques Riefenstahl pioneered in filming the 1936 Olympics.

But it’s not considered polite to applaud Riefenstahl in public with out an emphatic verbal “asterisk”, because of her association with the Nazi Party.  Her best-known work, Triumph Des Willens (Triumph of the Will) is an epic documentary and one of the world’s best known and most influential pieces of propaganda.

And so Riefenstahl was ostracized for the rest of her long life (she died at age 101 in 2002) as a Nazi impresario, for her association with a regime that killed 11 million people directly and triggered a war that swallowed tens of millions.

I write a fair amount about music in this blog.  And when a major musical figure passes away, I often try to write something.

And in his way, Pete Seeger was one of the most important figures in popular entertainment, ever.

Not necessarily because of his music.  Oh, he had a few classics of American folks music, to be sure.  And dozens of forgettable songs – but that’s true for any songwriter, or any artist in any genre for that matter.

Many conservatives writing about Seeger’s passing note that he was a committed Communist.  It’s true – he was, and in a way that seems straight out of Orwell, as during this episode after Stalin and Hitler signed their non-aggression pact in 1939:

In the “John Doe” album, Mr. Seeger accused FDR of being a warmongering fascist working for J.P. Morgan. He sang, “I hate war, and so does Eleanor, and we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead.”…The film does not tell us what happened in 1941, when — two months after “John Doe” was released — Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. As good communists, Mr. Seeger and his Almanac comrades withdrew the album from circulation, and asked those who had bought copies to return them. A little later, the Almanacs released a new album, with Mr. Seeger singing “Dear Mr. President,” in which he acknowledges they didn’t always agree in the past, but now says he is going to “turn in his banjo for something that makes more noise,” i.e., a machine gun. As he says in the film, we had to put aside causes like unionism and civil rights to unite against Hitler.

For years, Mr. Seeger used to sing a song with a Yiddish group called “Hey Zhankoye,” which helped spread the fiction that Stalin’s USSR freed the Russian Jews by establishing Jewish collective farms in the Crimea. Singing such a song at the same time as Stalin was planning the obliteration of Soviet Jewry was disgraceful. It is now decades later. Why doesn’t Mr. Seeger talk about this and offer an apology?

It’s impolite in polite society to laud Riefenstahl after her association with a regime that murdered over 10 million people.  Fair enough.

So why does Seeger escape any questioning for doing so much to support a regime that may have killed five times as many?

But as Howard Husock noted in his classic essay on Seeger, his most lasting impact on American culture may have had little to do with music.

Because there was a time when Hollywood’s political ideals weren’t all that different than the rest of the country’s.  Seeger was a vital part of a movement that changed all that:

Adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, the Popular Front tasked communists in the West with building “progressive” coalitions with various institutions—including political parties and labor unions—that the party had previously denounced as bourgeois and corrupt. The front reflected fears haunting Stalinist Russia at that time. “Hitler had shown a strength that made Communist predictions about his imminent collapse seem grotesque,” observed left-wing historians Irving Howe and Lewis Coser… Following this new strategy, the American Communist Party suddenly asserted that it wanted to build upon, not destroy, American institutions. “Communism is 20th century Americanism,” Earl Browder, the American party’s general secretary, enthused, while extolling Abraham Lincoln in speeches.

This led to the creation of the “Popular Front”, whose mission was not so much to assault capitalism as to co-opt it.  And one of the institutions it marked for co-option was the entertainment industry.

And Seeger was a key cog in that machine:

It took a while for the Popular Front’s strategy to get results in popular music—and Pete Seeger was the catalyst. Many critics mark Elvis Presley’s arrival in the 1950s as a turning point in postwar American popular culture, not just because he injected a more overt sexual energy into entertainment, but also, they claim, because his rebellious spirit anticipated the political upheavals of the 1960s. But neither Presley nor the newfangled thing called rock ‘n’ roll had any explicit politics at the time (and Elvis would one day endorse Richard Nixon). A better leading indicator of the politicization of pop was the first appearance of a Seeger composition on the hit parade.

 

It happened in early March 1962, when the clean-cut, stripe-shirted Kingston Trio released their recording of Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Seeger’s lament about the senselessness of war and the blindness of political leaders to its folly soared to Number Four on Billboard’s easy-listening chart, and it remained on the list for seven weeks. “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” eventually became a standard, sung on college campuses and around campfires nationwide. At the time, the song proved one of the biggest successes yet of the folk-music revival then under way, and it marked a major improvement in Seeger’s fortunes. Not long before, his career had suffered from the fifties anti-communist blacklist. Now it was on a new trajectory—culminating in his 1993 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and his 1994 National Medal of Arts.

Seeger did not, himself, “make Hollywood leftist”.  But he was a key part of that transition.

Forget his music.  That was his real legacy.

Senator Dave Thompson has jumped about four months ahead of the usual pace and picked Senator Michelle Benson as his running mate.

The pick makes a lot of sense; Benson has been out front opposing Minnesota’s gathering healthcare debacle since before it was cool.

The only downside?   If Thompson wins, we’ll lose Benson in the Senate.

(SCENE:  Mitch BERG sits down at a small Vietnamese cafe on University Avenue.  He unwraps a Bahn Mi Dac Biet and is sitting down to read the newspaper when Avery LIBRELLE sits down in Mitch’s booth). 

LIBRELLE:  Hah, Merg!  The President sure pwn3d you wingnuts at his State of the Union the other night!

BERG:  Huh.  You thought so?  I thought it was a lot of pretty vapor.

LIBRELLE:  Hah!  He showed you wingnuts what was what!  Especially on issues of equality!  How women still make 77 cents to a man’s dollar…

BERG:  …yeah, that was bullshirt 20 years ago, when it was a matter of women taking more years off from their careers to have kids than men did.  And it still is.  Women with equal experience and records and credentials make about the same as men – within the bounds of statistical noise.

LIBRELLE:  Oh, he sure beat you up on the subject of the minimum wage!  Costco and Punch Pizza both start workers at $10 an hour!  If they can do it, anyone can!

BERG:  We talked about that yesterday.  Neither Costco nor Punch are representative of all, or even many, small businesses that employ low-skill workers…

LIBRELLE: Stop right there,you one percenter!  There is no such thing as a “low skill worker”!   Every worker’s skills have value, and every worker’s hard work is vital – indeed, more vital than the bosses!

BERG: Um, what now?

LIBRELLE:  That’s right!  Mitt Romney was frequently not at his desk at Bain Capital – but the janitors had to be there picking up the trash!  No janitors, no major deals!

BERG:  And, uh, we’ve been through that before too.  You think that if a janitor just started picking up stuff at random out on the street, it’d generate value?

LIBRELLE:  Don’t you value clean streets?

BERG:  Er, I already pay a bunch of public union workers with better pensions and insurance than I’ll ever have to do exactly that.  But let’s make sure we’re clear on this – all work is equally valuable?  So if a receptionist and a bunch of janitors sit down outside the bus station and start answering calls and cleaning things, a multi-billion dollar venture capital firm will spontaneously form around it?  Drawing billions in capital and the people who know how to negotiate its use?

LIBRELLE:  Happens all the time!

BERG:   Right.  But let’s look at the other half of your statement – the idea that all skills are useful, provided one works hard.

LIBRELLE:  They are!  All hard work must be rewarded!

BERG: All hard work?

LIBRELLE:  Yep.  The harder the work, the  more valuable it is!

BERG:  So someone who works sixty hour weeks for six months and spends half of his life on the road closing the financing for a deal that opens a factory that provides hundreds of jobs is worth the same as someone who, hypothetically, hammers rocks into smaller rocks as a form of artistic statement for sixty hours a week?

LIBRELLE:  Same?  The rock-breaker should make more!  He…

BERG: …or she…

LIBRELLE:  …of course, works very hard!  Have you ever operated a hammer?

BERG:  Sure I have.  Have you?

LIBRELLE:  The union would break my knees if I did – and I may file a grievance against you, for that matter – but I know the basic theory.  It’s hard work.  Much harder than computing spreadsheets and talking with banksters and sitting on airplanes.

BERG:  But it generates no value!

LIBRELLE:  Says you!

BERG:  Er, yeah.  Sez me!  The act of breaking rocks into smaller rocks for twelve hours a day is of no value to anyone!  It’s even a terribly inefficient way to make gravel!

LIBRELLE:  Perhaps to your bougeouis, one-percenter sensibilities!

BERG: Any rational person’s sensibilities!  I mean, here’s a test for you:  How much are you willing to pay, from your own pocket, for someone to break rocks into smaller rocks as a form of artistic statement?

LIBRELLE:  Well, Merg, that just shows how ignorant you are about economics!

BERG:  You don’t have an answer, then?

LIBRELLE:  The real question is this:  how long do you really think girls should sit in jail for having an abortion?

(Dish of pho arrives at table)

LIBRELLE:  Excuse me – I ordered pho.  What is this?  You charge $5 for a bowl of noodles with crud in it?

(And SCENE)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama celebrated the 41^st anniversary of Roe v. Wade with one curious omission – he never mentioned the word “abortion.”

Instead, he dwelt on access to health care, reproductive freedom, right to privacy, safe and healthy communities, opportunities to fulfill their dreams . . . what a snooze.  That same litany of mushy feel-good platitudes could roll across the Teleprompter any day of the week.  We’re here to talk about killing babies, something like 50 million of them since the decision was issued.  And according to Democrats, that’s a good thing. Fine, then say so.

It’s almost as if the President is afraid to speak the plain truth, for fear people will recoil from it.  Perhaps we haven’t been de-sensitized enough.  Might be time to recycle some Dead Baby jokes from my junior high school days.  Remember those?  Can’t remember the last time I heard a Dead Baby joke.  Perhaps with 50 million of them piled up, it’s not funny anymore.

Joe Doakes

One can hope.

How many Planned Parenthood executives does it take to change a light bulb?

None.  They just declare darkness a woman’s right.

I watched President Obama’s 5th State of the Union out at the Cinema Grill in New Hope last night, at a party thrown by Americans For Prosperity, hosted by Siri Freeh and some guys. 

Main observations?  Well, first things first; this was the first time in a long time I’ve sat through an entire speech by this president.  And he’s still a first-rate orator.  Dad was a speech teacher, and I grew up listening to great speeches on LP (and have quite a few on my iPhone), Kennedy and Churchill and Martin Luther King and many more.  Speech is the family business.  And in a nation full of politicians who are usually groaningly awful public speakers, Obama is very, very good. 

Unfortunately, pretty much everything he said was vapor; Obamacare has nine million members only if you count Medicare subscribers who were already on the plan; we have “eight million jobs” at a time when we should have have many, many more in a normal economic recovery.  The unemployment rate is “dropping” only because people are leaving the work force.  Obama’s executive orders are either meaningless, skirt the Constitution, or both. 

The usual stuff.  Better people than me have fact-checked it and found it wanting.

For my part?  Three things jumped out at me.

Thunderous Silence:  Last year’s SOTU’s marquee issue was guns.  The 2013 State of the Union’s message to the law-abiding gun owner?  “Shut up or get cut up”. 

This year?  One fairly tepid paragraph – and the Democrats’ applause was more of the “golf clap” variety. 

Clearly, leading with guns hurt the Democrats last year; it nearly lost them the Colorado legislature, and it’s mobilized Real Americans in a way that has to have the Administration thinking of 1994 and 2010 (and Minnesota DFLers of 2002). 

I think the paragraph was a sop to the far-left, and not by any means an indication that the Administration or its minions are going to ease off their assault on the Second Amendment.  They’ve just switched from a frontal assault to a guerrilla war. 

Picking Artisan Cherries In 20 Pound Buckets:  I laughed out loud at the two businesses the President chose to trumpet his “income equality” “vision” last night; Costco and Saint Paul’s  Punch Pizza. 

I laughed out loud at both examples. 

Costco is not WalMart.  It’s a completely different business model.  It carries a tiny fraction of the number of individual items that a WalMart or Target or Cub Foods does; they are located in fairly well-to-do areas.  The idea is to provide high service for limited items to a well-off market, using higher-skill workers in what is, in the world of big-box retail, more of a high-service environment.  There are many fewer classic “entry-level” jobs at Costco; they aim to hire skill and retain it – in an environment and business model that finances it.  In short, very few of even their lowest-level workers are “low-skill” in the classic sense of the term. 

They don’t pay minimum wage, because they don’t have “entry-level” jobs; they choose to pay more to attract a higher-skill worker. 

Punch is similar; it’s a high-end pizzeria in a posh neighborhood that aims toward a high-value clientele on Grand Avenue in Saint Paul; I wouldn’t doubt that in a neighborhood full of “living wage” activists, starting people at $10 an hour is good marketing.  But Punch Pizza is no Taco Bell; it’s a tony niche retailer that gives a robust markup for an uptown dining experience.  And again – I’m going to suggest that Mr. Punch gets to pick and choose who he hires. 

And in both cases, Costco and Punch are exercising their free will to hike their base wage.  Maybe it makes sense given their business model.  Maybe it’s a gamble that’ll backfire on them.  But it’s something the market – not the law – will sort out. 

For now. 

Outsourcing Liberty:  But the biggest laugh-out-loud line of the night was when the President ran down (a very indulgent interpretation of) his foreign policy “accomplishments”. 

He said “From Tunisia to Burma, we’re supporting those who are willing to do the hard work of building democracy. In Ukraine, we stand for the principle that all people have the right to express themselves freely and peacefully, and to have a say in their country’s future”. 

And I couldn’t stop myself from replying “But here, we sic the IRS on dissenters!”. 

For all President Obama’s soaring, deft rhetoric, and all his vaporous claims, that is the real truth of Barack Obama’s five years in office; underneath the flowery messaging, an ugly, repressive. authoritarian reality, jamming a square free people into a round statist hole. 

And that’s the state of our union.

Justine Bateman is 47, and a sophomore at UCLA majoring in Computer Science. 

Yep, that Justine Bateman.

Ann Coulter is proving my point; liberals don’t know how to debate conservatives

However, there is at least one Republican who wants to appear on The Ed Show. You might have heard of her. Her name is Ann Coulter.

She wants to be on The Ed Show so badly that she actually called Schultz a “lying pussy” as an apparent means of motivation. She did this on Twitter last night in response to Schultz saying that Republicans don’t like to appear on his show.

The full tweet reads: “Invite me on your show, you lying pussy.”

Will Coulter’s call to action work? Time will tell.

It won’t.

There are some liberals who have the cojones to meet conservatives face to face and have that kind of discussion.  R.T. Rybak was one; he came on the NARN a few years back.  We had a great time.

But the sub-genre of liberals of whom Schultz is part?   Their entire oeuvre depends on never, ever leaving the echo chamber.  They do their bullying purely from within their little circle jerk.

Like a vast swathe of Twin Cities liberals – they splinter like Wal-Mart end tables when they have to try to sustain an actual debate.

Because most Minnesota liberals can not debate .

Schultz is a classic example.  The painfully polite and effortlessly erudite Michael Medved made him look like a badly-trained dog at a debate in the Twin Cities a few years back; Schultz was reduced to trying to mock Medved’s Harvard degrees, and calling yours truly (a co-moderator of the event) an “a-hole” on the air the next day.

I’ve spent six years now trying to invite Amy Klobuchar, Al Franken, Betty McCollum, Keith Ellison and even Representative Heather Martens on the NARN.   Bupkes.

Even a barking seal like Schultz knows his limitations.  If he let Coulter in the studio with him, within ten minutes of the mikes going live he’d be trussed up like a turkey (rhetorically speaking) and sputtering like a badly tuned lawn-mower (not rhetorically).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Green Line of the Blight Rail will open on June 14.

Okay, so what’s the betting on it actually starting that day, versus the usual government delays?  Should SITD have a pool?

Joe Doakes

Good question.

I say it’s like the opening of the Ventura Trolley; there’ll be a train running down the track on June 14.  It’ll be loaded with dignitaries and Met Council back-slappers.  That trip will be followed by days or weeks of “testing” and “training” time built into the schedule to allow all the slop time they need.

Like the private sector – only more.

The Strib is discontinuing its “Contributing Columnists” column – or at least the part of it that featured conservatives like Katherine Kersten and Jason Lewis – in favor of installing Doug Tice as the paper’s sole voice of “dissent”.

Now, I’m acquainted with Doug.  I’ve interviewed him.  He’s a good guy, and a good reporter.

But having him serve as the sole voice of dissent on the Strib’s DFL-blue columnists’ row?

Bill Glahn writes about the changeover:

If such a thing is possible, I participated in a useful discussion on Twitter last night. The principal participants included my internet radio partner—St. Paul attorney John Gilmore—Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial page editor Scott Gillespie, and former editor and current Southwest Journal columnist David Brauer.

Prompting our conversation was the apparent decision by the Star Tribune to discontinue the weekly Sunday Opinion page “Contributing Columnist” feature, in which non-liberal voices rotated through about once a month. The feature included columns from conservative author Katherine Kersten, conservative radio talk show host Jason Lewis, and centrist politicians Tim Penny and Tom Horner.

That space is to be filled by a weekly column from current Star Tribune staffer D.J. Tice. I’ve met Mr. Tice on a number of occasions and have read his work for years. Not to damn him with faint praise, but he strikes me as a reasonable sort, very middle-of-the-road.

And he is.  This blog has mixed it up with Tice, and come away better for the discussion.

But here’s the beef:

To my taste, he comes across as more Joe Lieberman than George Bush. Perhaps, though, I will be pleasantly surprised by his work in this new role.

If you go waaaaay back to when Tice was with the Pioneer Press, he was…Republican.  Low-key, not especially ideological.

Mr. Brauer was among those cheering the move, telling us that the current conservative lineup was not “worthy” and did not “best showcase” our side of the aisle.

I’ve had that same discussion with Brauer, among others on the left.   I asked – in a city full of highly capable conservative writers (John Hinkeraker, Walter Hudson, Ed Morrissey, Bill Glahn himself, Scott Johnson, Erin Haust, and on a good day yours truly), what was the problem?  Finding a new conservative to fill the space would be a cakewalk!

And Glahn has the same question I did:

What makes a conservative “worthy”? It is a willingness to support the larger progressive cause? In Part 1 of this series, I quote National Review’s Jonah Goldberg on the liberal view of what the proper role of conservatives should be in the national discourse,

“Good conservatives… should know their place and gladly serve as Sherpas to the great mountaineers of liberalism, pointing out occasional missteps, perhaps suggesting a slight course correction from time to time, but never losing sight of the need for upward ‘progress’ and happily carrying the extra baggage for progressives in their zealous but heroic quest for the summit.”
For another view of a worthy role for conservatives, in Part 2 of this series, I quote the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto as he reviews a piece by Time magazine’s Joe Klein on the subject of ObamaCare,

What Klein wishes for is a division of labor in which the two parties would cooperate to make government bigger. He’d like the Republicans to reinvent themselves as a non-ideological party devoted to effective management, which would allow the Democrats to focus on expanding government. In such a world, Democrats would face no serious resistance to their legislative efforts, and there would be less risk of ObamaCare-style failures because the elephants’ job would be to clean up after the donkeys.

There’s all that; a decade of reading Lori Sturdevant’ll tell you that the views above are more common than not.

But the other subtext I got from discussing this with Brauer was the idea that their idea of a “worthy” “conservative” is someone who might be incrementally to the right of the rest of columnist’s row – enough to allow plausible deniability of bias without being too threatening – but most importantly, someone who knows the secret journalists’ handshake.

In other words – someone who is a journo first and foremost, and a dissenter from the group orthodoxy…somewhere down the list. 

Is it a make-work program in an industry increasingly full of people scrambling for jobs with non-profits or PR firms?

Or is it sometime more?

And are people (like, occasionally, a very frustrated me) being shortsighted for saying “a pox on their house and all like them?”

Glahn says yes:

For the reader, the absence of dissenting views—or when rebuttals are allowed only to hand-picked issues at certain times—reinforces the impression that no credible opposition exists to the progressive worldview or that there exists no viable alternatives to liberal policies. As a result, conservative election triumphs (like Scott Walker’s) or the failure of progressive initiatives (like MNsure) catch the reader by complete surprise: from faithfully reading the Star Tribune, they would not be aware such outcomes were possible.

This, of course, ties into my thesis – that most Minnesota liberals never learn how to debate conservatives, and conservatism, because they never actually encounter it as anything but a punch line, a defamatory stereotype, or a crisis.  From our DFL-owned school system, through our university system in which “questioning authority” means “from the left only”, to the non-profits and academic and government union jobs that absorb so much of the regional left, they never have to confront considered, intelligent dissent – because the institutions that “inform” them carefully filter everything about conservative dissent that can’t be turned into a Sack cartoon from them. 

I still believe that even a liberal newspaper and its readers would benefit from a regular conservative presence on its pages. Thoughtful conservative commentary that describes, week-in-and-week-out, a workable alternative set of policies based on a competing worldview would force liberals to sharpen their arguments and readers to expand their horizons.

I believe the mainstream media hit a fork in the road over the past few decades; inform people, or serve a political end.  They made their choice, and they’re going to keep running with it.

And while I have the utmost respect for Doug Tice, he’s less a dissent from the Strib’s suffocating groupthink than he is the “good cop” to a room full of rhetorical “bad cops”. 

It’s not actually dissent.

Via Instapundit:

Also, from Taranto:

It’s not that hard to categorize Wendy Davis: She was among the category of “single mothers” who are married to rich dudes.

Heck, if you don’t have to be single to be a single mother, it stands to reason, or whatever [WaPo columnist and Davis apologist Liza] Mundy is substituting for it, that you don’t have to be a mother either. That would make your humble columnist a single mother. So don’t judge us.

I think piling on is utterly appropriate.

(SCENE:  Mitch BERG is sitting on a chair at a book store, trying to figure out which Reagan biography to buy.  Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, a twenty-something graduate of Saint Olaf, and of Camp Wellstone, sits at the next chair.  She gradually notes BERG’s haul of books).  

BIRKENSTOCK:  You should have no right to read that garbage.

BERG:   Huh.  Well, fortunately, “rights” aren’t granted or denied by “the People”.

BIRKENSTOCK:   Yes they are.

BERG:   Um, what?

BIRKENSTOCK:   Read the Constitution.  It says “We the people”.  Rights come from The People.

BERG:   Er, the founding fathers understood rights to come from The Creator.

BIRKENSTOCK:  Hah!  You mean religion?  That’s what the founding fathers were fighting against.  That’s why we have the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, not the Archbishop of Canterbury, administer the Oath of Office.

BERG:  That’s completely irrelevant.

BIRKENSTOCK:   Of course it is.  Our Constitution gives us freedom from religion.

BERG:  That’s the French constitution. Not ours.

BIRKENSTOCK.  John Hancock was a lawyer, not a minister!

BERG:   Also irrelevant.  The “creator” who endows our rights might be God, Allah, biology or random coincidence; it doesn’t establish a state view of what Our Creator is.

BIRKENSTOCK:  It doesn’t matter!  Read the Constitution!  It starts with “We The People”.   Rights come from people!

BERG:    That’s exactly what the founding fathers fought against – the idea that rights come from people, rather than from being born a human being.

BIRKENSTOCK:  So where does it say that in the Constitution?

BERG:   It doesn’t.  The idea that Freedom and Liberty are “inalienable” human rights – that humans are born with, not granted by government – comes from the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers and the other writings that set up the intellectual framework for the Constitution.  “We the People” were forming a goverment to, as the Preamble to the Constitution continues to say, “secure” the blessings of Liberty.  In other words, the freedoms are ours because we’re born human.  Our government’s job is to protect those liberties.  And ideally no more.

BIRKENSTOCK:  Yeah, but the Constitution said nothing about slavery!  They were hypocrites!

BERG:  Well, no – it was a huge argument in 1789, and it stayed a huge argument until 1865.

BIRKENSTOCK:  Slavery was ended by the 13th Amendment.  Who enacted that Amendment?  The People!

BERG:   Was slavery right before The People enacted the 13th Amendment?

BIRKENSTOCK:  Of course not.

BERG:   Why?

BIRKENSTOCK:  The People said so?

BERG:   How about before The People said so?

Let’s try an experiment, here.  Let’s say that 51% of the people agree that the First Amendment is wrong, and there is no right to speak freely, and government has the right to censor speech.  Is that right?

BIRKENSTOCK:  Well…no.

BERG:   Why?  If rights come “from The People”, then “The People” can take them away.

BIRKENSTOCK:  But the founding fathers were wrong about slavery!

BERG:   That supports my point, not yours.  The Founding Fathers realized how very imperfect humans were.  Slavery would be a key example of this.  It took fourscore and seven years, and the bloodiest war in US history to fix the mistake.  Now – if rights come “from The People”, all it would take would be a repeal of the 13th Amendment to make slavery legal.

And the fact is government could make all these rights illegal – but that would be illegitimate, and make the government illegitimate.

BIRKENSTOCK:  So what about countries that don’t recognize rights like trial by jury?

BERG:   They have their own constitutions.  They are, however, wrong.  The idea that other countries are wrong about human rights is one of the reasons we had a Revolution, and started a country based on the ideal that human rights precede and are superior to government power.

BIRKENSTOCK:   Pfft.  Where does the Constitution say anything about how to run a just society?

BERG:   It doesn’t.  It enumerates the powers government has, the powers reserved to the states, and reserves all others to The People.  Or at least that’s what the Tenth Amendment said, before it got gutted.

BIRKENSTOCK:  Hah!  So rights do get abridged by The People.

BERG:   Yep.  And just like slavery, it’s illegitimate.

BIRKENSTOCK:  You’re a Tenther!

BERG:   Damn straight.  Anyway – if you believe that rights come from government, or even The People, then there is logically nothing that says we can’t revoke free speech, religion, press, assembly, the right to keep and bear arms, the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, due process in criminal cases, and the whole shebang with a 51% vote.

BIRKENSTOCK:   Sure there is!

BERG:   What?

BIRKENSTOCK:  People want to be freeeeeeee!

(BIRKENSTOCK gets up, and dances away up the aisle)

BERG:   Wow.

BIRKENSTOCK:  (Yelling in the distance) Why do you hate womyn?

(And SCENE)

(Note – for those of you who think I try to make my antagonists in these little dramatizations sound “off”?  This conversations is a virtual word-for-word recreation of a conversation I had on Twitter with a DFL operative.  There are liberals who actually believe this).

Ezra Klein has left the WaPo, to start a new blog to help readers “contextualize” the news.

Unlike about 20,000 news and politics blogs.  Including this one. 

But Ezra Klein – with a little help from friends like Matt “One-Man Education Bubble” Yglesias – is going to bring special “context” to the news. 

Here was an example of the sort of “context” Klein and Yglesias bring “to the news”, from an excellent adventure they had on the Chicom tab a few years back.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A global warming skeptic thinks he has figured out why the computer models don’t match the thermometer outside – the government data is wrong.  Not accidentally wrong, but intentionally wrong.

According to his January 19, 2014 blog post, the US government lowered the temperature readings from years gone by but left alone current temperature readings.  That makes it look as if the Earth was colder in the past and getting warmer nowadays.  They converted a 90-year cooling trend into global warming by faking the data.

The most graphic illustration is the fifth chart down the page, an animated chart of US Temperature that shows how changing the data changes the result.  Look for this chart on the website and watch as it changes.

Next thing you know, you’ll be saying that the Government is using the executive branch to stifle speech.

There must be a legislative session coming up; the MinnPost – a local group-blog funded by liberals with deep pockets employing a rogue’s gallery of recycled local big-media people – is back on the gun beat.

Last week, Susan Perry – their “consumer health reporter”, whose sloppy reporting on this subject we’ve repeatedly, even routinely, beaten up in this space – wrote a fluff piece about a metastudy (a repackaging of the data in other studies) appearing in the Annals of Internal Medicine that shows that having a gun in the home doubles chance of a murder, and triples the chance of suicide.

And it reminded me of an episode from twenty years ago.

Let’s flash back, shall we?

The Gullible, Biased Hack Beat:  Back in the early nineties, the anti-gun media (which was most of them, back then) breathlessly recited a factoid; a study in the New England Journal of Medicine had showed, we were told, that a gun in the home was 43 times as likely to kill the owner, or someone the owner knew, than it was to kill a criminal.

The media reported this uncritically, without question, much less the faintest pretense of analysis of the data that led to that very specific number.

Of course, some Real Americans in the Second Amendment movement did dig into the study, back when “the internet” was still “Usenet” for most people.

They found that the data came from King County, Washington, during a period of several years in the late eighties.  And the “43:1” ratio actually broke out, over the period of time, to nine justifiable deaths of criminals that the shooter didn’t know, against something like 380-odd other firearms deaths.

And of those 380-odd firearm deaths, the vast majority were suicides – enough to account for 36-37 of the “43”.  Of the remaining 6 from the “43” – 50-odd firearms deaths – there were a few accidents; the rest were murders or manslaughters of one kind or another.  And note that it only counted the presence of a gun in the home, not whether it was used; if someone broke into your home and shot you as you were peeling potatoes at your kitchen counter, but there was a gun in the house, it went into the “43”.

Suicide is obviously a problem – but it doesn’t depend on firearms.  Japan, where guns are unobtainable, has double the US’ suicide rate.   But leaving out suicides, the rate dropped to more like six to one.

But there were other clinkers in the way the “43:1”, or even the 6:1, figures were generated, and related to the public by a media that, at best, didn’t know what it was talking about and, at worst, didn’t care.

Walt White Knew Jack Welker!:  The phrase “gun owner or someone they know” was the first problem.

Someone who shoots himself, obviously, is “killing themselves or someone they know”.  But then so is a drug dealer shooting a rival, or a customer that owes them money, is “killing someone they know”, as is a gang-banger shooting a long-time rival So is a woman shooting an ex-husband that’s been stalking and threatening her.  So is someone killing a robber that they had met, even once, ever.

The NEJM study didn’t distinguish between those types of killings.  The “1” in the “43:1” ratio only included justifiable homicides where the shooter had never met the victim.

Why So Bloodthirsty?:  Did you notice that the only “good” results in the New England Journal study – the “1” in “43:1” – were the nine justifiable killings of complete strangers?

Leaving aside the likelihood (indeed, fact) that some of the homicides of acquaintances were justifiable – why is a justifiable killing of a complete, malevolent stranger the only legitimate use of a firearm?

The study didn’t account for deterrences of other crimes.  A gun used to scare away a burglar or a stalker doesn’t have to kill anyone to have a beneficial effect – deterring a felony without a shot being fired.

The Real Results?:  So when you take the numbers from the “43:1” ratio, and then…:

• factor out suicides (which are a problem, and were the vast majority of the deaths in the study, but are entirely different than crimes committed with malice against others)
• move the justifiable homicides of “acquaintances” – ex-spouses and the like – into the “good” column”
• Account for the “bad” shootings that involved someone who was drunk or high, or had a criminal record
• Add in estimates of the number of crimes that would have been deterred by law-abiding citizens with guns in the same area during the same period

…then the original New England Journal of Medicine study’s numbers came out more like this:

• A gun in a home in which one or more residents had a criminal record, drinking or drug problem was equally likely to be involved in a murder or unjustified killing as it was to deter a crime.
• A gun in a home without any of those problems was dozens or hundreds of times as likely to deter a crime (depending on the estimate of deterrences you accepted – from the conservative FBI estimate to the much more expansive estimate by Gary Kleck, which by the way tracks pretty well with the Centers for Disease Control’s recent work on the subject) as to be involved in an unjustifiable homicide.  That’s dozens at least, hundreds at most. 

So How About Sue Perry’s Article?:  A quick scan of the metastudy in Annals shows that it (or, more proximately, the studies it mines for data) does not, in fact, control for…:

• drug abuse
• Alcohol abuse
• criminal records

…among the subjects in the “study”.

Like the reporting on the NEJM study twenty-odd years ago, it considers firearms in a vacuum, without accounting for any of the human factors – criminal activity of the owner, sustance abuse issues, or mental illness.

Neither does it distinguish between justifiable homicide – which accounts for 2-3% of all firearms deaths in America in a given year – and murder, manslaughter or accidental deaths. 

It’s junk science…

…well, no.  It’s junk social science, which is the worst kind.

Susan Perry is doing junk reporting of junk non-science, to report a meaningless, junk conclusion. 

Why?

Remember:  The MinnPost operates with the assistance of a large annual grant from the Joyce Foundation.

Follow the money. Journos do it – when it’s not Alida Messinger or Michael Bloomberg’s money, anyway.

The Joyce Foundation also funds…

•  “ProtectMN”, the closest Minnesota gets to an actual gun control “organization”,
• “TakeActionMN”, which essentially serves as an unregulated “progressive” political party whose mission is to drive the DFL to the left.  It may be the most successful political party in Minnesota today – precisely because the laws that apply to the GOP and (to some extent) DFL don’t apply to it. 

All “journalism” about guns – and politics and general – from the MinnPost must be considered with that in mind.

So why would the MinnPost publish a continuous chain of stories about Second Amendment issues that range from bad science to bad history to bad scholarship to really, really bad reporting? 

Because, I suggest, it’s what they’re being paid to do.   

There was a time when “journalists” would have recoiled at any suggestion that their coverage was bought and paid for to secure some special interest’s narrative. 

Those days are long past us – to everyone who pays attention.

Gerald Molen – who co-produced Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016 as well as Schindler’s List– on the politically-motivated harassment of D’Souza:

“I’m a little bit taken aback by the whole thing because he’s such a great American,” Molen said of D’Souza on Newmax TV’s “Steve Malzberg Show.” The conservative writer and commentator understands the process in America and how it works, Molen said. Molen, who also produced the Academy-award winning “Schindler’s List,” said he has not spoken to D’Souza since he learned of the indictment, and wouldn’t make comments about the specific case until he’s learned all the facts. Still, he said he would not be surprised if the probe is politically motivated. Asked by Malzberg if he ever felt threatened or had any feelings they should not have been making the film, Molen answered, “No. This is America. I’ve never had that feeling,” adding, “I’ve never had the occasion to think that I had to fear my government. I never had the thought that I had reason to think I had to look over my shoulder until now.”

I think that’s exactly the effect the Obama Administration is looking for.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is walking through a car parts store, looking for a new filter wrench.  As he checks through the options, Avery LIBRELLE spots him and closes in to initiate a discussion.

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG: Um…hello, Avery?

LIBRELLE:  Your so-called “IRS Scandal” is a huge fraud!

BERG:  Well, no – the IRS itself admitted it targeted conservative groups for stonewalling and extra scrutiny.  And an amazing number of conservative pundits and organizations have come under extraordinary levels of punitive investigation in the past few years.

LIBRELLE:   But you don’t know that Obama ordered it!

BERG:  Gosh, d’ya think?   They’ve completely stonewalled any investigation of anyone higher than their currently-designated scapegoat, Lois Lerner.

LIBRELLE:  Maybe too free.  (unwraps the wiper blade).

BERG:  I’m just amazed at the number of DFLers who feel the need to wriggle away from their party’s policies using “implausible denial”, perhaps the dumbest form of argumentation ever.

LIBRELLE:  Yet another installment in the war on women.  (Starts brushing teeth with the wiper blades).

BERG:  Clearly.

And SCENE.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Conservative turned down by liberal photographer. This is not a problem because “Conservative” is not a Protected Group under civil rights law and therefore not entitled to legal rights. He has no rights because we say he has no rights. It’s purely a matter of definition.

Baby killed, chopped into pieces. This is not a problem because Unborn Child is not a Person and therefore not entitled to legal rights.

800,000 Tutsis killed by Hutsus in Rwanda, 1994. This is not a problem because Tutsis are Enemies of the State and therefore not entitled to legal rights.

Jew gassed to death in Nazi Germany. This is not a problem because “Jew” is not a Full Citizen and therefore not entitled to legal rights.

Black man whipped to death by White man – in 1820. This was not a problem because a Negro was a Possession and therefore not entitled to legal rights.

Sooner or later, wouldn’t you think people would begin to notice a pattern? That when a society gets comfortable using its legal institutions to over-ride rights divinely given to all human beings, things end badly?

Now let’s talk about modern Democrat electoral tactics, and where they’re likely to take the country.

“It’s the law” is the new “we’re just following orders”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I was thinking of changing careers to become a writer but the Blue section represents an income of zerowhereas the $100,000 group is the sliver of Green.  Odds not looking so good to be a paid professional.  I think I’ll keep pelting Mitch with emails; he can publish what he likes and delete the rest.

The crazy thing about American copyright law is they assume nobody will write or sing or paint without guaranteed income from the performance.  But my experience is you can’t stop people from writing and singing and painting, just for the pleasure of it.  Sure, it’d be nice to make a few bucks to support the hobby, but artistic spirit is wholly unrelated to business management.  Mitch couldn’t stop writing even if he had to pay out of his own pocket for the privilege of keeping up the website to post his writings. [Wait, he does?  Well there you go, proves my point].

Which, by the way, is how I know Barak Obama didn’t write his own books.  He’s not a writer.  He’s a talker.  A very good talker, yes, but oral storytelling is a completely different artistic ability from writing.  Mitch can’t stop writing.  Obama can’t stop talking.  That’s just in their character.

And that makes me wonder . . . Hilary will be the next President.  What’s in her character?  What is it that she just can’t stop doing?

Joe Doakes

I was thinking of changing careers to become a writer but the Blue section represents an income of zerowhereas the $100,000 group is the sliver of Green.  Odds not looking so good to be a paid professional.  I think I’ll keep pelting Mitch with emails; he can publish what he likes and delete the rest.

The crazy thing about American copyright law is they assume nobody will write or sing or paint without guaranteed income from the performance.  But my experience is you can’t stop people from writing and singing and painting, just for the pleasure of it.  Sure, it’d be nice to make a few bucks to support the hobby, but artistic spirit is wholly unrelated to business management.  Mitch couldn’t stop writing even if he had to pay out of his own pocket for the privilege of keeping up the website to post his writings. [Wait, he does?  Well there you go, proves my point].

Which, by the way, is how I know Barak Obama didn’t write his own books.  He’s not a writer.  He’s a talker.  A very good talker, yes, but oral storytelling is a completely different artistic ability from writing.  Mitch can’t stop writing.  Obama can’t stop talking.  That’s just in their character.

And that makes me wonder . . . Hilary will be the next President.  What’s in her character?  What is it that she just can’t stop doing?

Joe Doakes 

Oh, what difference does it make?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My Dad taught himself to play “Oh! Susanna” on the guitar.  The clever juxtaposition of opposites in the lyrics made us kids laugh: “rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry.  The sun so hot, I froze to death, Susanna don’t you cry.”

Stephen Foster may have been an early advocate of global warming because alarmists are singing the same blues today – it’s cold because it’s hot.

The reason we’re freezin’ is not the season, it’s that there is no pleasin’ the freezin’ chillun drivin instead of standin’ at the light rail station.

Joe Doakes

And then with a very unpleasin’ freezin’ and wheezin’ the light rail crashed to the ground.

Then some go-kart Mozart was checkin’ out the weather charts, seeing if it was safe outside, and some early curly-wurly sat up in his hurly-burly and asked me if I needed a ride.

I guess Springsteen was on top of the weather back in 1973…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Mark Ritchie lies to a person, who quits a job in Ohio to move here, then fires her in six weeks because the job isn’t what it was billed.

Previously, the courts said the city and county were liable but Ritchie is immune because he’s state.  And that’s completely different, of course, although we can’t say exactly how or why that’s the public policy.

I swear, this court of appeals is the worst I’ve ever seen it for lacking common sense.

Joe Doakes