Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• I’m in the studio today from 1-3.  We’ll start with Brian Strawser and Mark Okern from Minnsota Gun Owners PAC, talking about the look ahead to the session and their endorsement of Julianne Ortman for US Senate.  Then – Stewart Mills, candidate for the US House seat in the 8th Congressional District!
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Tomorrow,  Brad Carlson is on “The Closer” from 1-3PM!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
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• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
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Join us!

You go into these tastefully-appointed homes in Crocus Hill and Highland Park, and, like a lot of comfy urban-but-not-too-urban neighborhoods full of college-educated middle-aged academics and non-profiteers and mid-to-upper-level government and institutional employees, the sense of their historical invincibility has been gone now for 2-3 years and nothing’s replaced it. And they felt invincible, like a historically-deterministic event, through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna achieve the utopia that their entire education said they would, and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to rote activism or Volvos or blind ideology or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or their posh education or anti-faith sentiment or anti-White-Republican-Male-Cliché sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Bring me the Baha Men and the dogs they helped escape!

Are the Kims just crazy or crazy as a fox?

If there’s any regime on the planet that’s been only a Turkish Angoran cat and a monocle away from being a James Bond villain, it’s been the Kim dynasty of North Korea.  From the regime’s nuclear weapons program, to attacking the South Korean navy, shelling a South Korean island, and even declaring a “state of war” with their southern neighbors last March, North Korea has created a reputation as a teetering, despotic dynasty constantly on the verge of either collapse or thermonuclear genocide.  Or perhaps both.

Such an image has been cultivated, in large part, by the cult of personalty surrounding the Kims – and nourished by the reputation of them engaging in downright theatrically outlandish acts of evil.  So it is any wonder that news reports have surfaced that Kim Jong Un didn’t merely executed his purged uncle Jang Song Thaek, the number 2 North Korean official, but fed him alive to 120 dogs? (skip ahead if you’re squeamish):

“Then 120 hounds, starved for three days, were allowed to prey on them until they were completely eaten up. This is called ‘quan jue’, or execution by dogs,” according to the Straits Times of Singapore. The daily relied on a description of the execution in a Hong Kong newspaper that serves as the official mouthpiece of China’s government.

“The entire process lasted for an hour, with Mr. Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader in North Korea, supervising it along with 300 senior officials,” the Straits Times said in a piece published Dec. 24, 2013, but only now getting traction in the United States.

There’s no report yet if when Jang Song Thaek asked Dear Leader if he expected him to talk, Kim Jong Un replied “no, Mr. Thaek, I expect you to die.”

All terrible Bond jokes aside, if the accusations sounds far fetched, it’s because they likely are:

The source is questionable, too. If the Chinese knew about how Kim’s uncle died, why didn’t they talk about it sooner and why did the story only leak out through a Hong Kong news outlet? The incident was first reported by the Wen Wei Po newspaper on December 12, yet it’s only now that The Straits Times has commented upon it – and only now that the Western media has started to take notice. The Straits Times is a respectable and widely read publication, but it’s often been accused of being the mouthpiece of Singapore’s ruling party and is staunchly anti-communist – so political bias is possible. Finally, we can’t dismiss the possibility that China itself has fabricated or at least encouraged the story to send a message to Pyongyang. Kim’s uncle was the architect of closer economic ties between the China and North Korea and there is thought to be a lot of anger about his death.

The story exists because it serves the purposes of all parties involved.  Kim Jong Un needs to maintain the aura of “crazy” that his grandfather and father created, for both foreign and domestic opponents.  Kim was reportedly the target of an assassination attempt last March by rival factions, perhaps being the impetus for Kim’s declaration of “war” later that month as an effort to put the country on a heightened security footing without exposing the weakness of his grip on power.

China loves the story because it gives them a further excuse to distant themselves from the hermit state after having lost their greatest internal political champion in Jang Song Thaek.  The South Koreans love the story because Pres. Park Geun-hye has taken a much harder line against the North, abandoning the “Sunshine Policy” of the 2000s in favor of a more Reaganesquse “trust but verify” approach (billed as “trustpolitik“ by some foreign policy pundits).

The “Kims-as-crazy” story angle ensures no sizable shift in policy on the Korean peninsula, even though there has been a massive shift away from the reconciliation that the Sunshine Policy (1998-2008/9) attempted.  In an effort to extort South Korea and drive a wedge between them and the U.S., the Kims’ reckless behavior accomplished the exact opposite.

So perhaps the Kims are simply crazy after all.

As Minnesota’s anti-civil-rights movement ramps up for a lavishly-funded effort to try to paint infringing Minnesotans’ civil rights around the edges as “reasonable” and “responsible”, it’s worth noting that this past few weeks and months have seen a bit of a surge in actual evidence that we Real Americans have the stronger factual hand.

For starters, the Centers for Disease Control, in a metastudy commissioned by the Administration earlier this year, noted that…well, basically everything the Second Amendment Movement has said on every corner of the issue is right.

Then the National Institute for Justice – the part of the Department of Justice that does surveys and research and other hard stuff – concluded that assault weapons bans do nothing but make the banners feel good, and that closing the “gun show loophole” is more or less irrelevant since 71 percent of guns used in crimes currently come from straw purchases or theft.

And finally, a new study by Mark Gius at Quinnipiac released past few weeks shows (from the abstract) that…

… states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murder rates than other states. It was also found that assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level. These results suggest that restrictive concealed weapons laws may cause an increase in gun-related murders at the state level. The results of this study are consistent with some prior research in this area, most notably Lott and Mustard (1997).

When you’ve lost the Obama CDC, you’re really in trouble.

So it looks as if Richard Carlbom, the Illegal Mayors Against Guns, and “Protect” Minnesota are going to have to fight the emotional case, since the factual case is even more against them that it was before.

In other words; same as it ever was.

It’ll just be a slicker emotional campaign.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It’s the start of a new year, when Christians remember The Flight Into Egypt.  Suppose President Obama were to read about it in the Bible.  He might notice modern parallels.

The Wise Men were looking for a New King, someone to fundamentally change the government.  Herod was already King and didn’t want to be replaced.  He ordered all sons under the age of two, to be killed.

President Obama, reading this, might realize Jesus was predicted to oppose government.  That makes Him a bitter-clinging-religious-terrorist.  Herod’s Massacre of Innocents was simply an Executive Order preemptively issued for National Security reasons.

Suppose President Obama, inspired by historical precedent, issued his own Executive Order that all White-Males-Two-And-Under should die.  But since there are so many sons and so few federal government employees to kill them, suppose the Order included an Employer Mandate: all employers are required to kill the White-Male-Two-And-Under sons of their employees, or be fined out of business.

Suppose some employers claimed that a government mandate to kill children of employees violated the employer’s religious beliefs under some ancient fringe religion, something about “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”  And not just churches that employ janitors, but businesses that employ people to sell fried chicken or woodworking tools or cabinetmakers, suppose they objected, too.

If a Supreme Court Justice stopped the killing until the Court could hold a hearing, would the New York Times tut about threatening the security of the nation?

If the Employer Mandate didn’t require Employers to actually kill the sons, merely to hire someone else to kill the sons for them, would that be okay?

If the Department of Hunting Sons (DHS) issued a rule saying certain employers were exempt from killing one-and-two-year-olds, they only need to kill unborn sons to comply with the law, would that make it all better?

What’s it going to take to get these fundamentalist whackos to see The Light?

Joe Doakes

I’m going to start calling Democrats “Obama Fundamentalists”.

Maybe “Bitter, Obama-Clinging Fundamentalists”.

Are “Avery Librelle” and “Moonbeam Birkenstock” guys or girls?:  Isn’t it perfectly obvious?  I think that’s pretty clearly answered here.  Or at least I think so.

You only attack the left?  Why don’t you go after the miscreants on the right?  Especially in the GOP?:  That’s a fair cop, sort of.  Partly because we have a state full of media, “progressive” groups, “watchdog” non-profits and bloggers (pardon the serial redundancy) who already watch the right.   I’m adding balance in my homespun little way.  And partly because I generally agree with the right.  Because I’m a conservative!

And I attack the left more than the right because I reasonably believe that “the right” – conservatism – is a generally better, more valid, more noble idea than the “progressivism” of “the left”.  And “the left” is currently on the ascendant in this state and the US.

You will note – if accuracy is what you seek, and I’m just sure it is – that the most-viewed post in the history of this blog is entitled “Note to Bill Frist:  You Suck“.

You know who Bill Frist was.  Right?

So that means you’re biased!:  Well, duh.  I am, and I make no bones about it.  Although another part is this; I don’t do much “reporting” on whatever’s going on in the GOP’s bureaucracy because, frankly, the subject – bureaucracy – bores me.  You’ll note I rarely write about the inner workings of the DFL, either, and when I do, it’s usually to link to someone else’s writing.

Covering bureaucracies is like watching paint dry, or watching writers from the oldMinnesota Independenttrying to meet people at bars; it’s slow, nothing much happens, and it’s pretty predictable.

Conservatism is dead.  Millennials are deserting the GOP.  It’s time to update your approach:  That’s not a question.  But it brings up two questions.

First:  Since when have people under thirty ever been Republicans or conservatives?    Good lord, I’m almost as sick of hearing society has to jump to the wishes of “Millennials” as I am about Baby Boomers.

Second:  Why?  One of conservatism’s beliefs is that new ideas face a fairly stern burden of proof.  Which isn’t sexy for, say, marketers to try to sell, and it’s not something “young people” are disposed to believe, but it’s true.   So put your “new” ideas out there, and let’s debate!  The kicker is, ideas in the world of society and politics are like pop music; there really are no new ideas.  They’ve all been around for a while, and most of them are untried for a reason.  Which isn’t to say that something new, or a new take on something old, isn’t possible; it’s just that you need to make the sale.

Can you make the sale?

There is no difference between Republicans and Democrats!:  Again, mostly statements, not really questions, here.  But if that were true, wouldn’t at least one Republican have voted for Obamcare? 

So what about your various stalkers?:  Oh, them?  One of them has been pretty tame for a while here, as far as I can tell.  The other – well, I’ve been ignoring him for over a year and a half.  I think he misses the attention – he’s reportedly gone quite over the edge recently but – here’s the kicker – I wouldn’t know.  I read “his” material less than I read the Strib. 

Who do you support for Governor and Senator?:  I’m starting to develop some preferences.  But I’d never talk about ’em publicly. 

Part of it is that I genuinely don’t have my mind made up completely, and all the candidates have a lot more questions to answer – some of the, many many many more. 

And part of it is that if I did come out and express a preference now, five months before the convention, it’d be kinda hell on bookings for the show, now, wouldn’t it?

Keep ’em coming!

Our labor force participation rate is such that employment, for all the jabbering about the current ~7% rate, is scarcely better than it was in 2009.  Investment is still glacial (except in the stock market – which is not the same as “investing in the economy”. 

Kevin Williamson at the National Review may be the single best writer in America on the subject of government and its effect on the nation, the economy, and The People.  He combines off-handed humor with blistering, airtight analysis. 

And as such, I highly recommend you read his New Years’ wrapup, “A Year of Fear“.  The whole thing is worth reading.  But I’m pulling out the conclusion, about the effect  uncertainty has in crippling an economy. 

“But wait”, lefties say; “my pension fund is going great guns!  The Dow is over 15,000!”

Yeah, it is.  And that’s a little like seeing your car idling at 10,000 RPM and assuming that’s because it’s raring to go. 

The conclusion is the big beef, here; I’m adding emphasis:

The Obama administration has achieved a special distinction here: Investors are faced with considerable uncertainty vis-à-vis how it might interpret rules as compared with the Bush or Clinton administrations — and also about how it might interpret rules as compared with the Obama administration the day before yesterday. Now you see a mandate, now you don’t. And as bad as it is in 2013, the seething hostility of Elizabeth Warren is ascendant on the left, a fact that offers very little encouragement to entrepreneurs and investors considering illiquid, long-term positions — things like factories, stores, and buildings, as opposed to easily liquidated investments in financial instruments.

Another common lefty complaint?  “Companies are too focused on profits!”

Many on the left complain about the “financialization” of the U.S. economy, while unwittingly helping to encourage that very phenomenon. Given a choice between dividing up his investments between a couple of hedge funds and financial firms or locking it up for ten years in an assembly line in Indiana, a sane man will consider the question of uncertainty and predictability. And under current conditions, the assembly line is a risky bet.

Perhaps 2014 will be the year in which we learn the value of predictability. Who can say?

Read the whole thing. 

Better yet, get an Obama supporter to read it.

Big week coming up Saturday on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, so I thought I’d start talking about it now.

First, I’ll have Brian Strawser and Mark Okern of the Minnesota Gun Owners PAC, talking about their endorsement of Julianne Ortman and the year ahead in the legislature (hint: it’s going to be another doozy).

Then – Stewart Mills, CEO of Mills Fleet Farm and candidate for the US Congress in CD8, will join me to talk about his race.

Hope you can tune in.  Or join the show at 651 289 4488!

Who were the people who allegedly robbed and beat former Minneapolis mayoral candidate Mark Andrew for his iPhone?

“Johnny Northside” runs down the yoots’ family tree.  The piece includes a couple of “I assumes” and at least one anonymous but “well-connected” source, but if you connect the dots the way Mr. Northside does, it looks like Mr. Andrew’s assailants are part of quite a family syndicate.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

As I predicted back when Obama first announced this, the military is watering down the standards so women can pass the test to serve in combat roles.

Can’t do 3 pull-ups?  For crying out loud, I can probably do 3 pull-ups and I’m 35 years older and 150 pounds heavier than these women. Hope to God we never need them do to anything strenuous to defend the country.

It’s a pretty sad day for the Marines when boosting your own fat ass over an obsticle is deemed a “team lift.”

Joe Doakes

 

All that’s true. But it could be worse. If the military adopts Common Core, Marines will be trained to run toward what they can reasonably infer is the sound of gunfire. And Naval Aviators will merely have to show they reasonably tried to get the hook onto the third wire…

It’s New Years Day, and as such it’s time for a tradition unlike most others – the Seventh Annual Shootie Awards, “honoring” the “best” in Minnesota blogging, talk radio, and social and alt-media in the same way D-Con Mouse Pellets honor the best in rodent culture.

The Nick Coleman/Brian Lambert Memorial Award For Broadcast Excellence: With the virtual demise of the Twin Cities’ liberal “AM950”, you’d think we’d be going begging for a recipient for this traditional honor.

Not so.

This year, the award goes to Minnesota Public Radio’s Keri Miller.

Don’t get us wrong; Miller is not a thud-witted radio pretender like Coleman was, nor a chuckling Uptown caricature like Lambert.  Miller has a multitude of approaches; one minute – say, when interviewing any Republican or conservative – she’s acerbic and aggressive, badgering and hectoring and interrupting to the point it’d be fairer to say she “occasionally allows her conservative guests to interrupt her interruptions” (Mike Wallace’s ghost reportedly wanders the miles of halls at MPR urging Miller to “dial back the cranky, toots”).  The next minute – when a DFL politician, dependent or employee is on the air, usually – she’ll sound as if she may be giving the guest a back massage.  The real show of Miller’s expertise?  As Bill Glahn notes, she’ll even do both during the course of the same interview!

So fear not.  The legacy of Brian Lambert, Nick Coleman and Andrew Colton lives on.  Whoever Andrew Colton was.

The Larry Jacobs “Most Overquoted Person in the Twin Cities Media” Award:  This award – which has also gone to Professor David Schultz of Hamline University, a relentless liberal who seems to be regarded as the only knowledgeable source on Minnesota conservatives – is rarely a huge surprise.

But let’s give a nod to tradition; the award this year goes to none other than Larry Jacobs himself, especially in honor of his NYTimes piece declaring Minnesota the winner over WIsconsin in the blue vs. red economic battle, even though Minnesota’s experiment with spendthrift liberal government hadn’t really taken effect yet.

The John Najarian Memorial Award for Surgically-Precise Sarcasm:  This award goes to this blog’s good friend John Gilmore at his blog Minnesota Conservatives, who satirized with a brilliantly straightened face the ideal of reading Twin Cities liberal bloggers in a piece which, tart tongue notwithstanding, is an essential read, even down to its ingeniously snarky title “On It:  Reading Minnesota’s Liberal Blogosphere“.  The mark of Gilmore’s pithy genius?  He mixes in some sincere, legitimate, deserved compliments; to the excellent if equally snarky Tony Petrangelo, and the City Pages’ Aaron Rupar (Gilmore says he has ” a large measure of personal style that’s impossible to pick up in any journalism class”, which is true; while Rupar punches his ticket as a DFL water-carrier, we must give credit where due; Rupar isn’t the onanistic panty-sniffer his colleague Kevin Hoffman is) and Sally Jo Sorenson, who can be annoyingly juvenile but is a capable reporter with – improbably – a sense of integrity).

But then comes the payoff – “compliments” that, to those who’ve followed Minnesota’s liberal ‘sphere for any time at all, are just howlers; Eric Austin has “an admixture of deadliness and humor” (only his logic is funny; his “deadliness” is against those who can’t fight back).  And attorney Gilmore must be paying some intra-professional respect to Steve “Spotty” Timmer, calling him an essential read notwithstanding Timmer’s very dubious grasp (or misleading explanation) of the law.

But the true mark of Gilmore’s genius?  In a piece ostensibly urging people to read liberal blogs, he directs people to read Minnesota Progressive Project, which is a little like introducing people to French cuisine with a tastefully-arranged Merde au Vin Flambé   – a cunning double-cross if there ever were one.

Anyway – bravo, John!  Oscar Wilde applauds from the great beyond!

The George Santayana Memorial “He Who’s Forgotten History Is Condemned To Be A Liberal Academic” Award: This year, it goes not to an academic,per se, but to a blogger.

Sally Jo Sorenson – who, I take pains to note, is one of those rare Minnesota liberal bloggers who doesn’t seem to deserve police surveillance – is a perfectly fine writer.  But one might assume that she skipped a few history classes to concentrate on the Poli Sci, if  you catch my drift, not that I have a “drift” or anything.

The “Minnesota Nice” Award:  Minnesotans are an accomodating bunch.  If one of us needs some help, someone will no doubt be there to pitch in (see also:  Rep. Martens, above).

And so last year when Governor Messinger Dayton announced his budget, it was a natural assumption that Carrie Lucking – Executive Directrix of “Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota” – would be there to tweet about the picayune details found deep inside the Governor’s big, thick budget.

Notwithstanding the fact that the details were buried deeeeeeeeep inside a budget that had supposedly been available to the public for precisely 13 minutes when Lucking wrote the tweet.

Some cynical wags said it had to be because Lucking had to have gotten a copy from Bob Hume, a senior staffer for Governor Messinger Dayton and, rumor and innuendo and a rogue Strib article had it, either Lucking’s boyfriend or spouse.

Me?  I think Hume and Dayton got their copies from Lucking, after Messinger dictated it.

Anyway – all that cooperation?  It’s just nice.

The “The Media, The Media, The Media’s On Fire! We Don’t Need No Water, Let That Liberal Institution Burn!” Award: This one goes to the entire mainstream-media “Fact-Checking” racket, which seems to have morphed more into a “Democrat Ministry of Truth” than it even started out.

The Just Remember, Libruls are Teh Smrt Award: I’ve noted it before; the Democrats should have been able to impose some kind of gun control law this past session.  They controlled the legislature, and they have a governor who does whatever his ex-wife tells him to do.  They couldn’t have asked for a more favorable situation – other than the whole “Minnesota is closely divided between the GOP and DFL” bit.

But the DFL House Metrocrat caucus’s gun-grab brain trust – Representatives Paymar and Hausman – not only introduced a raft of draconian assaults on the Bill of Rights (all of them crudely copied-and-pasted from other state’s bills) guaranteed to inflame the peasants.

Alice Hausman, introducing a resolution declaring Steven Colbert funny

Best of all?  When it came time for Hausman (who represents Saint Paul’s House District 66A in the same way Prince Charles of Wales “represents” the Welsh) to introduce one of her gun-grab bills to the House Judiciary Committee, Hausman was nowhere to be found.  So Chairman Paymar, likely in violation of House rules, allowed Martens – a registered lobbyist – to do Representative Hausman’s job, reading the bill into consideration.

Rep. (apparently) Heather Martens (DFL 66A) exploiting the victim of an earlier tragedy

Rumor has it the DFL will just let Alida Messinger, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros sit on the house floor and cast their votes for them in 2014.

The Cicero/Demosthenes/Socrates Award For Excellence In The Advancement Of Keen-Eyed Rhetoric:  The gun control movement in Minnesota hired Richard Carlbom, PR-chitect of the Gay Marriage law, to help them try to jam down anti-rights legislation in the next session.

One of the reasons was the comedic ineptitude of the Minnesota gun movement’s current leadership.

And while Representative Heather Martens has earned plenty of brickbats for her tone-deaf, unintentionally comic performances over the past decade or so (and a Shootie award or two, including this year, which see), the breakout performer was Jane Kay of “Moms Want Action”.  It’s a safe bet that a big part of what will no doubt be the gun-grab movement’s push toward calming, “reasonable” talk about “responsible” laws and “sane” approaches is to try to counter the Jane Kay’s legacy as a purple-faced hate-clogged caricature who, notwithstanding a slopped-on coat of feminist sloganeering, managed to simultaneously make her message cheaply sexist (while utterly un-sexy) and self-marginalizing at the same time.

If Richard Carlbom spends his first three months doing damage control, Kay is part of the reason.  And for that, she earns the award, and earns it well!

The Walter Duranty Award:  Among Minnesota’s “Libertarian” “movement” – which coalesced around the Ron Paul campaign in 2012 to seize a disproportionate control of the MNGOP – were quite a few one-time, there-and-gone “activists”, a gratifying number of very sharp people who did a good job in bringing solid, needed libertarian politics to the MNGOP, and – at the very core – a group of smirking, preening, frat-boy-esque self-styled “Anarcho-Libertarians” who really were only there to pee in all the peasants’ Wheaties and then slap themselves on the back and laugh at the complaints.

Now, if the question is “is our government too powerful” and “do we need to limit the power of government over the individual”, I’m with you.  Government is too big.  We need to carve much of it out and toss it away.

But just as the “peace” movement 30 years ago wasn’t about “nuclear weapons” but “US nuclear weapons”, the Liberty Fratboys rose as one to applaud Edward Snowden’s assault on big intrusive government (qualified yay)…

…as Snowden applauded Vladimir Putin’s human rights record.

The “Every Junior High Impressed-With-Himself Chess-Club Prig” Award For Intellectual Rigor:  After a long absence from this award, it almost feels like old home week, as we award this to a man who was once a candidate for a Shootie Lifetime Achievement award.  That’s right – Nick Coleman, gone from the Shooties for years, is back, and he shows that he’s still at the peak of his game, where “his game” means “autoerotic and homoerotic japes delivered with all the grace of a Danish jazz band”, and “peak” means “same crap, different year”.  This piece – which laces Coleman’s usual oeuvre of erection jokes with a long train of outright fabrications – was almost a return to the Nick Coleman of his Strib Columnists’ Row glory days, except including the fact that nobody with an IQ above plant life read it.  And for that, we salute Coleman.  It’s not like we give these things away.

Well, actually, we do.  But what I mean is…

…well, anyway, congrats!

The Nancy Pelosi “You Won’t Know What It Means Til You Do It!” Award For Wishful Planning:  MNSure.  Duh.

The Claudius Caesar Award For Excellence In Praetorian Guardsmanship:  This is always a hotly-contested award – and getting moreso every year, as the “objective” media slides ever-more into the bag for the left.

This year it was a tight, tight race, nearly a coin toss.  Both of the contenders in the final two exemplify the trend of “objective” “mainstream” media allowing (left-leaning and/or pro-big-state, pardon the redundancy) groups to underwrite “journalism” and “news coverage”.

At the end of the day, we decided to give the runner-up spot to Minnesota Public Radio News – a news organization that has not just any arm of government, but MNSure, perhaps the most controversial executive-branch project in the state this past year, as a sponsor for Keri Miller’s Morning Circuit – an MPR News production.   A casual reader might note that this is a conflict according to the Society of Professional Journalists’ “Code of Ethics” (while the pros know, of course, that the SPJ code is nothing but a framework by which journalists evade all accountability).

The prize, however, goes to the MinnPost, whose coverage of Second Amendment issues this past year, while posited as “journalism”, was delivered with five-figure annual grant from the “Joyce Foundation” – which, the MinnPost never bothered to tell the reader, also sponsors most of America’s major gun-control groups, as well as “Take Action Minnesota”.  So not only was there a never-explicitly-stated imperative for the MinnPost to slant its coverage – but the coverage itself was shoddy and risible, ranging from historically myopic to ludicrously badly-reported to just-plain-false and propagandistic, devolving eventually into an extended rhetorical tongue-bath for Minnesota’s incompetent gun -grab movement.

The capstone of the whole year?  Accompanying one of the MinnPost’s pieces (citing a long-obscure and generally-debunked theory that the Second Amendment was instituted to defend slavery), the site decided to use this as an symbol for Second Amendment support:

Yep. Confederate soldiers. Because that’s what all of you law-abiding gun owners are – to the Joyce-Foundation-supported MinnPost.

In a just world, a news organization with integrity would apologize, not only for the post-hoc slander, but for its misleading, slanted and, frankly, bought-off “journalism”.

The world, of course, is not a just one.  Does the MinnPost have integrity?

Oh, it’s a new year, full of promise, isn’t it?

The Charles Townsend Award – In 1765, British parliamentarian Charles Townsend, in noting the Colonies’ protests against the Stamp Act, said:

“And now will these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength & Opulence, and protected by our Arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”

Townsend’s statements sum up the arrogance of the professional bureaucrat, the institutional utopian, the Masters of the Universe who believe they were sent here to keep us peasants from crapping in our beds.

And for the first time in the history of the Shooties, the Townsend award goes not to a stupid statement by a politician, but a photo that gloriously sums up Minnesota under DFL rule in 2013:

Governors Zygi Wilf and Mark Messinger Dayton

Yes, it’s Zygi Wilf in a paroxysm of glee over all those taxpayer dollars he’s going to be marinating his tush in – but it could just as easily be Javi Morillo, or Elliot Seid, or Greta Bergstrom or Carrie Lucking, roiling in glee and amazed that they’ve been able to put one over on the rubes, as our “Governor” wonders what this thing on a long stick is and hopes Alida doesn’t take away his driving privileges.

You have to give them the money to know what the money is!  Or something!

Or we’ll lose the Vikings!

Anyway – as long as there’s a New Years in Minnesota, there’s a Shooties.  See you next year!

(Here are the previous Shootie winners, going back to 2006)