…it’s time to do something about defending the Third.

…I’ve pondered the idea of this band covering this song:

…although it was more one of those “what if Napoleon had a B-52 at Waterloo” sorts of things.

Oh, yeah – it’s the E Street Band playing “Highway to Hell” in Perth Australia, as a tribute to native Perthian Bon Scott.

(Closed circuit to Tom Morello; lower your damn guitar.  You look like you need more fiber in your diet with your guitar cinched up around your ribcage.  That is all).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In 2012, St. Paul teen unemployment was 32%.   One-third of our young people could not find work, even at the state minimum wage of $5.25 per hour.

On Friday, St. Paul Mayor demanded the minimum wage be nearly doubled, to $9.50.

No employer could afford to hire you because you weren’t worth $5.25 per hour, but surely he’ll jump at the chance to hire you at $9.50, maybe several of you.  What could go wrong?

Joe Doakes

They can be interns for the Democrats.

Unpaid, naturally.

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!

• Today, I’ll be out at Gander Mountain in Lakeville for the US Concealed Carry Association’s semiannual open house.  I’ll be talking with Senator Dave Thompson, gubernatorial candidate, about his showing in the straw poll this past week.  Also, I suspect we’ll be talking with the crew from Armed American Radio, among others.   Come on out to Lakeville for the show; stay for the free shooting afterward!
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Tomorrow,  Brad Carlson is on “The Closer”!

(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
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• 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
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Heh:

I’d give it a shot, if I had the budget.

Won’t need it this weekend, though.  Tomorrow, I’ll be out at Gander Mountain in Lakeville for the semiannual “US Concealed Carry Association” open house event.  I’ll be talking with a slew of special guests, and catching you all up on the things gun-owning Real Americans have to watch out for and work against.

The highlight, of course, is tons of free shooting; go to a vendor table, give ’em your driver’s license, wait in line for a firing station, and you can test-fire just about any gun back in the vendor area.  Last year I test-shot samples from H&K, SIG, Smith and Wesson, Taurus, Ruger, CZ, Springfield and others.  This year?  Well, just stop on by.  It’s always an adventure. 

1-3PM tomorrow at Gander in Lakeville!

Text a few million friends about it.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is walking through a leafy, green park in the south suburbs of Chicago.

Turning a corner, he runs into three Chicago-area school administators:  Hanna PFLUG-NICHOLS, Nicole PRYMM, and Morghaine EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS.  They are standing astride the path. 

EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS:  Wait!  You are Mitch Berg.  You are one of those gun nuts. 

BERG: Er, I’m a Second Amendment activist.  I may or may not own or carry a firearm…

ALL THREE WOMEN:  Aaaaaaaagh!

PRYMM:  Don’t say it!

BERG:  Say what?

PFLUG-NICHOLS: That word!

PRYMM:  The “G” or “F” or “P” word.

BERG:  Er…”gun?”

ALL THREE WOMEN:  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS:  Why do you hate womynandchyldren?

BERG: Er, I’m sorry – but what brought this on?

PFLUG-NICHOLS: Um – because of the change in what we call “concealed killer” laws, we are being forced to put stickers on our schools. 

BERG:  You mean like this sticker here?:

ALL THREE WOMEN: Aaaaaaaaagh!

PRYMM:  That…shape!

EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS:  It looks like a Pop-tart!

BERG:  Those are stickers that your new concealed carry law requires buildings to have at their entrances if it’s illegal to carry inside. 

PFLUG-NICHOLS:  It’s disgusting.  To have theshapeof a…

PRYMM:  …a…

EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS: …er…

BERG:  Gun?

ALL THREE WOMEN:  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

BERG:   Look – Illinois put so many places off-limits to gun owners that it’s only fair that you warn them before they unwittingly become a felon. 

PFLUG-NICHOLS:  But theyshouldbe felons!

PRYMM:  I think they should all be in jail 

BERG:  Be that as it may, they are two orders of magnitude more law-abiding than the general public, and they generally work pretty hard to stay that way.  So why entrap them into a cheap arrest based on a technicality?

EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS:  Because I hate them.

BERG:  It’s a warning sticker. 

PFLUG-NICHOLS:  But it may cause people to think that since there’s a sticker saying that they can’t bring one into the school now, maybe they could have in the past? 

BERG:  You honestly expect school children to think that? 

PRYMM:  We expect what to think that?

EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS:  Those little pseudo-people that are all over all our buildings. 

PRYMM:  Huh.  Are you sure? 

EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS:  I think so. 

BERG:  Look – you are less likely to be wrongfully shot by a carry permit holder than you are to be hit by lightning. 

PFLUG-NICHOLS:  By what? 

EFFENBERGER-BRONKOWSKI-GAIA-BEVINS:  Goddess-farts.

PFLUG-NICHOLS:  Ah. 

BERG:  As in, 5-6 times as likely to be hit by, er, “goddess farts” as by a law-abiding citizen with a legal firearm (flinches, realizing his mistake)

ALL THREE WOMEN: Aaaaaaaaaagh!

BERG:  Sorry….hey, I’m hungry…

(Pulls pop-tart from backpack.  Chews it into the shape of a volume of Shakespeare. 

PFLUG-NICHOLS:  Dead white European male!

PRYMM:  Fascist!

(And SCENE).

…that the rump Ron Paul crowd in the GOP is done stumping for Harold Shudlick right about…now?

So let’s see – for the second major state race in a row, the “Independence” Party fields a candidate who is calibrated to suck away a volatile constituency in the GOP.

And I’m going to guess that if anyone dug long enough (perish the thought) they’d find a few Alida Messinger bucks socked away in the kitty.

Not to sound cynical or anything.

The City Pages got out there are did that gumshoe journalism that they’re famous for, in noting that this photo…

…attributing a quote to Michele Bachmann, which has been sweeping Facebook for the past week, is in fact a hoax.

Just one problem: She didn’t say it, and a version of this fake quote has been circulating since 2011

Whew.  Of course, some version or another of that quote has been around for decades – P.J. O’Rourke noted something like it in Holidays in Hell, twenty years ago, if I recall correctly.  If you tell a liberal a conservative Christian supports snake-handling, they’ll believe it without question.

But this is good!  Actual fact-checking!

I’ll urge the City Pages to start working on this one:

Or maybe this:

It’s good that we have highly-trained info-ninjas, watching society’s ramparts.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Thomas Sowell has an interesting column that contains this line:

“Immigration laws are the only laws that are discussed in terms of how to help people who break them.”

He’s got a point.  If we applied Democrat’s immigration logic to other laws in a reductio ad absurdum analysis . . . .

There are 750,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, of which 400,000 are child molesters.  Applying the same criminal justice probabilities to child molesters as we do to other rape, we can assume there are 10 non-convicted offenders for every offender who was convicted.  Therefore:

There are 4 million child molesters in the United States, living in the shadows, unable to freely pursue their dreams.  They live in constant fear, looking over their shoulders for government agents.  They are forced to live in an underground, cash-based, off-the-books culture.  These are hard-working, productive members of society with families.  They pay sales taxes.  They would vote Democrat if they weren’t convicted felons.  Society must legalize their status, bring them out of the shadows, brush away the obstacles and make them full members of society. Do it now, for the children.

Okay, that’s idiotic.  And so is this latest round of immigration amnesty.  House Republicans selling their souls for Chamber of Commerce donations are killing their own party while they destroy the future of the nation.

Joe Doakes

Yet another reason the Tea Party really, really needs to complete its takeover of the GOP.

Behold the next generation of “progressive” women.

And be afraid for our society.  Be very afraid.

Ronald Reagan – by far the greatest president of my lifetime – would be 103 today. 

I’ll be doing my usual Reagan’s Birthday celebration; special dinner, talking with the kids (and, soon, granddaughter Watermelon, who will be old enough to learn the basics before too terribly long), jelly beans at the office. 

Of course, Reagan’s Birthday is more than just a fun holiday, commemorating one of the great men of Western Civilization, a man whose brief ascendancy may have bought the United States a few more decades of prosperity – indeed, existence in its current form – than it had any right to expect 35 years ago. 

No – there are a lot of people out there trying to steal Reagan’s legacy, to pervert it into something it wasn’t, to lie and deceive for craven and low purposes. 

And I’m here to steal Reagan’s legacy back. The lies are all over the place; the answers, the scathing debunquements, are harder to find. 

But not on this blog. 

“Reagan spent a lot of money!”:  Read your Constitution.  Presidents don’t spend money.  The House of Representatives does.  Tip O’Neil spent money like a meth hooker with a stolen Gold Card.  Yes, Reagan’s primary priority – the downfall of Communism – cost money, and a lot of it.  That spending was supposed to be met with cuts to entitlements.  Congress – which, for the first 3/4 of Reagan’s time in DC was entirely controlled by spendthrift Democrats – insisted on keeping the entitlement gravy train flowing.  Presidents aren’t dictators (although Barack Obama seems to have expressed his intention to test that thesis in his last State of the Union); compromises were made. 

But economist James Lindeman of the Heritage Foundation estimated that Reagan’s defense spending paid for itself, with interest, in the nineties; freed of a Soviet Union, America’s economy de-militarized, freeing up immense capital and capacity for civilian production.  The technology that went into making the sonar on the Los Angeles class submarines a top-secret wonder of the world in 1982 was turned into making cell phones smaller, lighter, more capable and downright cheap by 1997.  Bill Clinton’s boom economy was entirely the result of Republican policy; Reagan made the “peace dividend” possible, and Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Congress prevented Bill Clinton from spending it all on Hillarycare. 

“Reagan was teh dum!”:  This notion has been shredded by waves of scholars. 

Of course, the source of that slander was something more toxic than the slander itself.  Reagan was a regular, middle-class American with a degree from a humble, obscure midwestern college, who’d worked his way up through several fields – radio, acting, public relations and then politics – without any of the academic fripperies that the elite has come to regard as the price of entry to respectable success – degrees, and more degrees, from institutions whose main claim to fame is their claim to fame. 

Reagan had none of that.  He had vision, talent, and hard work – the same things the vast majority of Americans bring to the table. 

And that – today, when our academy has turned into a self-sustaining parasite class (not to knock any particular members of the academy who may be friends and occasional radio co-hosts of mine), that’s an example all Americans need.

“Reagan raised taxes”:  Yes, he did.  Eventually.  But not until the real work was done, and much less than he cut them in the first place. 

We talked about this a couple years ago.  Reagan’s tax cuts came early in his Administration, when the economy was, by some measures, worse than it was in 2007.  He slashed taxes – and (unlike the 2007 recession) the economy came storming back. 

The “tax hikes” came in his second term; they were a result of Tip O’Neil and the Democrat Congress reneging on a deal with Reagan.  They were less than 1/4 of the size of the cuts and, most importantly, they happened when the economy was booming.  Could the economy have boomed more without the hikes?  Absolutely.  But raising taxes when the economy is booming isn’t quite as blazingly stupid as raising them when the economy is crippled. 

There truly is no compararison. 

“The Soviet Union would have collapsed on its own”:  That’s one of those things that everyone agreed about – in about 1993.  Of course, reading those same ‘experts’ in the seventies and eighties was quite another story; almost to a person (as showed by Dinesh D’Souza in his essential Reagan bio,Reagan:  How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary President, they agreed in the seventies, the eighties, and even into the early nineties that the Soviet Union and the “Second World” it led were here to stay.  Many believed, on an intellectual level, that the USSR would one day collapse.  Not a one of them went on the record claiming it’d be in any of their lifetimes, to say nothing of “within a decade of Reagan’s inaugural”. 

But that’s history.  For me, it was very personal.  I grew up about 30 miles from the nearest first strike nuclear target, a Minuteman III silo, in the middle of a state with 329 more of them; missiles were almost as dense as oil wells, and covered much more of the state. 

And through most of my teens and twenties, I wondered – what would be the purpose of having children in a world that could get vaporized in half an hour? 

And having that threat ebb – having the bombers roll back from standby, having the Armageddon Clock back off a few minutes, moving the hammer back to half-cocked – answered that question for me; “don’t worry; life looks pretty likely to go on for the foreseeable future”. 

So my response to people knocking Reagan is the same as it ever was – polite contempt for their intellectual vapidity.  But for stealing Reagan’s legacy?  Perverting the facts?  Trying to forcibly bugger history? 

For that, there is no mercy. 

(Which is what you’ll find out if you waste space in my comment section disagreeing with any of the above.  While this blog tries to foster a lively discussion, on this issue there will be no dissent.  It’s my blog and I’ll censor if I want to).

I was reading a neighborhood Facebook group the other day.  A woman started spouting off about the “homelessness” in the Bakken oil fields, by way of hinting “maybe those people out there need much less of all that oil and exploration and stuff”.

And I thought – “Wow.  All those well-meaning Twin Citians – the media, the political establishment and just regular Metro-area folks – sure are concerned about the corrupting effects of jobs, prosperity, economic diversification and even a little wealth out there in the Badlands, aren’t they?

Like they should all go back to being season-to-season ranchers and farmers out in the middle of nowhere.  And speak when spoken to.

And then it occurred to me – that’s what it’s always like up in the Iron Range – only they never actually get to dig their mines, unlike North Dakota.  My native state actually managed to get something done – probably before the Strib and MPR knew what “Bakken” meant – before the suffocating hand of “benevolent, patronizing good will from their betters” descended upon them.

Lucky ND!

Am I the only one struck by the bitter, almost depraved, irony of the Vatican being attacked over a child sex abuse scandal and cover-up…

…by the United Nations?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emailed:

Congress foolishly passed laws that allow payday lenders to help poor people make it from one paycheck to the next.  President Obama – who vowed before God to faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress – doesn’t like that one (never has; when he was in the Illinois legislature, Obama backed legislation to ban payday loans).

Suddenly, federal bureaucrats have set about to undermine the law allowing payday loans and now to stonewall Congressional questions about it.

President Obama will learn of the operation by reading the newspapers and begin blaming “rogue” agents in 5 . . . 4. . . .3 . . . .

Joe Doakes

The definition of totalitarian; everything that isn’t mandatory is “rogue”.

I was about to head to work this morning when I remembered; it’s February 5. 

My blog’s anniversary.

I’ve been doing this for (counts fingers, removes shoe, continues counting) 12 years now. 

And I can honestly say two things:

• My motivations haven’t changed a whole lot since I started writing this blog.  I’m shouting into the void – political, existential, social, whatever – more or less for the joy I feel just making the noise.  When I started Shot In The Dark, I was a guy with a couple of kids and a job and a big gaping hole in my life.  My kids are grown – sort of – and the big gaping hole has been filled with a big group of friends, crusades, and just a lot of purpose that I was searching for around this time 12 years ago.  But underneath it all, there’s the sense that “I see things that need to be said.  If I don’t say ’em, who will?”   And I just plain enjoy it.
• The rewards, then as now, are all internal.  Which is good, since this blog has never made more than enough to pay for its hosting, really – and that’s more than I ever expected out of it.  I write because I love to write. I started this blog before I knew anyone else in the Twin Cities was doing it, to say nothing of there being an audience.  I get hundreds of readers a day; if I got half a dozen, I’d still love doing it.

I’m a conservative talking politics in a liberal metro area, so I’ve ruffled a feather or two – mostly the feathers of good people who can handle a little discussion.  I’ve made a few enemies – without exception, stunted, risible little people who don’t have the balls to face me in a face-to-face discussion, and whom I laugh about until I switch back to ignoring them.

Because they are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the friends I’ve made; other bloggers, readers, the other NARN guys and all the listeners that the show brought into my life, and all of the many, many people that all of this writing has brought me into contact with on the twelve-year journey that this blog has led me onto.

So anyway – thanks, everyone!

The Democrats are in trouble.  Obamacare is tanking, and the economy is “growing” at a pace that would have been considered a disaster were Barack Obama, the vessel of the left’s hopes and dreams, not President. 

And despite a concerted media attempt to black out the bad news, people are starting to talk. 

And so the left is doing its best to get people to talk about…other things. 

Any other things. 

So when my Twitter feed (actually a tweet from one-time SITD commenter “TimInStP”, one of the most incisive liberal minds ever to comment in this space) screamed “The GOP Just Named its Hot New Innovation Lab After a Nazi Pistol”, I figured it was worth looking into. 

It wasn’t.  I mean, it was from Gawker, which is to national liberal media what Minnesota Progressive Project is to Minnesota; ergo, not worth the time it took, to look into.

But as a view into the lengths the deranged left will go to to try to slander dissenters, it’s instructive anyway:

The Republican National Committee today excitedly announced the launch of a new startup lab to bring techies and creatives together, Silicon Valley-style, to get Republicans elected. Oh, and they named it for a Nazi gun, a type of ammo, and a philosophy that puts war before peace.

Welcome to Para Bellum Labs, America!

Para Bellum?  Why, I took enough Latin to know that means “prepare for war!”.

And Gawker got that part right.  Sorta. 

In fact, it’s part of an old Roman cliche, “Si vis pacem, para bellum”—if you seek peace, prepare for war. That’s been quite an inspiring little phrase through history, at least to militarists. It was especially inspiring to Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken, the German government’s arms manufacturer from the late imperial era to World War II.

DWM started using the “parabellum” phrase as a name for its signature guns—first, the light machine gun used by the Kaiser’s best during World War I, and then its most iconic gun: the Parabellum Pistole, or the Luger pistol…Yep, Nazi parabellum!

So let me get this straight:  Because the Republican startup used a phrase that was also used by, among hundreds or thousands of others, a German company (in corrupted form) in 1908 to describe a pistol that was used, 30 years later, by a regime that wouldn’t even start to form for fifteen years, the GOP “named its lab after a Nazi gun?”

Oh, it gets better.

The gun was so popular in the Third Reich that its ammunition—one of the first to use a slug that was 9 millimeters in diameter—became known as “9 mm parabellum,” which you can find now at your local gun store.

It was nowhere near “one of the first” 9mm rounds (and if you walk into your gun store and ask for “9mm Parabellum”, the clerk will know you learned everything you know about guns from video games; it’s “9mm Luger”, or “9×19”).  And the “Parabellum” pistol (usually called a “Luger”, or a “P-08” in German) was so popular among the Nazis that they phased it out of production in favor of the Walther P-38, which was simpler to produce and easier to maintain in the field…

But wait!  P-38 was the same designation as the plane flown by America’s top fighter ace, Superior Wisconsin’s own Richard Bong! 

Richard Bong was a Nazi!

(Calms down).

Oh, yeah – most police in America today carry 9mm pistols.  Are they also Nazi sympathizers?

Gawker is like a lobotomy that you don’t have to pay for.

Obamacare is going to eliminate 2.5 million jobs over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office:

It said the equivalent of 2.3 million workers would be lost by 2021, compared to its previous estimate of 800,000, and that 2.5 million workers would be lost by 2024. It also projected that labor force compensation would be reduced by 1 percent from 2017 to 2024 — twice its previous estimate.

Although the CBO projects that total employment and compensation will increase over the coming decade, that increase will be smaller than it would have been in the absence of the healthcare law.

The findings immediately roiled the debate over the healthcare law on Capitol Hill ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

The CBO’s director was pretty blunt:

“All our analysis led us to conclude the effects of the [healthcare law] on labor force participation would be a good deal larger than we had thought originally,” CBO Director Doug Elmendorf said. “Fundamentally, the Affordable Care Act provides subsidies to lower income people and those subsidies phase out … that will have some effects on discouraging labor supply.”

This is on top of the fact that the “job growth” we have (or that the Administration said we had up until December; it’s actually gotten worse) wouldn’t get us back to 2006 levels until the 2020s.  Sometime.  Maybe.  Barring any other problems. 

Like Obamacare. 

By all means, Democrats – keep changing the subject.

Michael Barone writing in the WashEx notes that Henry Waxman and George Miller, the last two members of the Democrat “Class of 1974” – the huge class of liberal Democrats that swept into office after Watergate – to have “served” continuously since ’74, are retiring.  (Two other members – Chuck Grassley, one of few Republicans, and Rick Nolan, who spent three terms, retired in 1980, and was re-elected in 2012, are the only two other members of the class).

And the class of 74 left a noxious legacy indeed.  For all the bemoaning of “extremism” and “polarization” that the likes of Lori Sturdevant do (usually blaming it on the Tea Party), it was in fact the “Class of ’74” that got that ball rolling:

chairmen against whom a certain number of signatures were gathered.

San Francisco’s Phil Burton, who had shrewdly backed many ’74ers, gathered a sufficient number of signatures for every chairmen. Three were defeated by the newly enlarged caucus, including one, first elected in 1940, who addressed the freshmen as “boys and girls.”

Election of committee chairmen became routine, and it meant that anyone seeking a chair had better have a voting record in line with the Democrats’ liberal majority. For example, Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, first elected a month before Pearl Harbor, shifted suddenly from Right to Left.

And it was then that the Democrat Party began to truly shed its honorable, post-WW2-era legacy and become the extremist party it is today.  (It took twenty years for the Congressional GOP to adopt the similar rules).

And lest you think it was all inside-the-beltway wonkery?

The Class of 1974 also shifted the House and the congressional Democratic party from hawkish to dovish. One of its first acts in March 1975 was to block funding for South Vietnam when it was under attack by the North. Saigon fell in April.

They coarsened our political discourse, they worked tirelessly to blow up the national debt (with great success!), and they directly aided and abetted genocide, with the blood of millions on their hands.

Good riddance.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Rush anticipated the President would call for an increase in the Minimum Wage to $10 per hour in the State of the Union address.  A caller said Republicans should see his $10 and raise him to $30.  That would make people to see how silly the Minimum Wage is so they’d stop talking about it.

That’s a bad idea.  The Minimum Wage is an emotional issue – poor people are suffering because wicked businesses won’t pay fair wages.  Explaining the economics of it in a logical, orderly, methodical way is proof that you’re a heartless bastard who doesn’t care about fairness and hates the poor.

Feeling is easy and everybody does it.  Thinking is hard so nobody does it.  Playing to Democrat strength is a bad idea just as raising the minimum wage is a bad idea.  Don’t offer $30, don’t even offer $10: they might just take you up on it and later, when the bad consequences hit, it’ll be your fault for suggesting it.

Yes, Democrats will call you heartless.  That will suck.  Tough.  Embrace the suck and do the right thing anyway.

Joe Doakes

There is a short list of things that the GOP – despite its inner, “go-along, get-along” tendencies – really really can not compromise on; the compromise itself will not only make things worse, but will be used against the party and all those trying to un-screw things after this past five years.

It’s Caucasus night throughout Minnesota tonight.

Mount Ushbra, Georgia

Throughout the state, people will be joining their favorite tribe, dancing traditional their traditional folk dances, getting drunk on fermented goat milk, arranging marriages, and firing guns randomly into the air.

At the end of the evening, all the tribes will declare war on each other, duke it out, and adjourn til next year.

A Caucasus event in Chaska, 1994.

Hope to see you there.

UPDATE:  Ooops.  My bad.  Tonight is Caucus night.  Not Caucasus night.  I regret the error.

Tonight’s the night the the four major parties in Minnesota (the GOP, the Independence, and the DFL/Take Action Minnesota) pick the delegates that will lead to the endorsements to run for the major offices – Governor, Senate, and the various Congressional and State Legislative seats.  If you don’t like the way your party is working, tonight’s the night to try to do something about it.

I’ve never been to a DFL caucus, but I know Republican caucuses are usually not a huge time investment, especially if you duck out before the endless debates over the meaningless resolutions. Which I usually do.

DFL and Take Action Minnesota canvassers at caucus night, South Minneapolis, 2012.

If you’re new to caucuses, here’s the deal:  the point is not to write resolutions about issues that matter to you.  It’s to get people who support your candidates for the various offices – Governor, Senate, Congress, the Legislature – elected as delegates to the various rounds of conventions.

• If you get selected as a delegate tonight, you’ll go to your “BPOU Convention” – that usually means your legislative House or Senate district, although in outstate Minnesota it might mean your county party convention – in March.  Those usually happen on a weekday evening, an hour or two.  No big deal.  There, you’ll endorse legislative candidates, and elect delegates to go to your…
• …Congressional District convention, in (I think) April.  They usually eat up a Saturday morning.  There, you’ll endorse people to run for Congress, and elect delegates to the…
• State Convention, in May, in Rochester.  This eats up a couple days.  There, the delegates that are at the end of the chain will endorse candidates for Governor and Senator.

It seems convoluted – but it makes sense, more or less.  To the extent the “Ron Paul” faction took over the GOP two years ago, or the Tea Party four years ago, or Michele Bachmann did it in the 6th CD eight years ago, they did it by getting their people out to caucuses and electing delegates that moved up the chain and elected more delegates. That’s pretty much it.

(On the DFL side, the conventions are run according to a system designed for utmost political correctness, so they are long and grueling, and lead to a series of conventions that end in the endorsement of candidates who will then lose in the primaries to whomever Alida Messinger and Take Action Minnesota support).

For further information on where and when your party’s caucuses are:

• MNGOP Caucus Information
• MNDFL Caucus Information
• Independence Party Caucus Information

Hope to see you there!

A move has begun in Oklahoma to get the state out of the marriage business.  While the news story on the subject phrases it as “prohibiting marriage”, what the proposal would really do is end the practice of issuing government marriage licenses, and leave the institution of marriage – or whatever – to the individual.

If you wanted to marry in a church – provided the church recognizes your form of union – then mazel tov.   And if they don’t – or you’re just not that religious, anyway – then you would just write up a contract, and live by it.

Of course, this proposal will likely rile up both extremes; the extreme left has come to regard redefining marriage (in the eyes of the state, anyway) as its big victory; this would be removing the issue from the table, which would be a slap in the left’s face akin to turning the Stonewall Bar into a condo development.

Social conservatives – or at least the short-sighted ones – will howl like stuck cats, too; many of them see government as a vehicle for building society in their image, no less than the far left does.  But it is short-sighted; by getting marriage out of the public sphere, they can save the traditional version of it now that “let’s let government define our social mores” thing is backfiring badly.

By getting the state out of marriage, everybody wins; traditional marriage can sprout where it’s bloomed; “alternative” ideals of the institution can grow between whomever wants them.

Of course, the extreme left isn’t looking for a win-win.   And we’ll have to see about the social right.

But for now?  The idea is a brilliant one.

Michael Bloomberg and the Joyce Foundation are pouring ever-more money into the gun grab debate.  They are going long on the idea that upper-middle-class white liberal guilt (for which all gun control events serve as, for lack of a better term, anti-pep rallies) will become an electoral force in the next election.

But over the past few years, according to Gallup, Real Americans have made their case pretty convincingly to the people:

The Gallup poll shows that “55 percent of Americans… are dissatisfied overall with American gun laws and policies.” Among the dissatisfied, 16 percent are Americans who believe gun control laws should be rolled back.

Gallup notes that this is a change from a historical trend in which the dissatisfied usually want stricter gun laws. But in January 2014, the 16 percent of dissatisfied Americans who actually think gun control is too strict is up more than three times what it was in January 2013, while the number of those who want more gun control has fallen from 38 percent to 31.

Read the whole thing.  The upshot is, the popular case for strangling the civil right of self-defense is dying the big death, outside the circles of the plutocrat liberal elite and their media and non-profit waitstaff.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Operation Choke Point?  Never heard of it.  But it sounds believable, for this bunch.

You think that because we’re in America, you can do business with any other legal business you like?  No, the government will TELL you who you can do business with, and on what terms, or you’ll never do business again.

Sound like something you’d hear from a Chicago gangster?  Hmmm, I wonder why?

Joe Doakes

It’s the Washington way.

The real celebrity passing here in the Twin Cities over the weekend was “Jasper”, long-time star of James Lileks’ Bleat blog and namesake of “Jasperwood”.

And recipient of probably the most beautiful elegy ever written for a dog. 

I’m going to hug Clu when I get home tonight.

UPDATE:  Fixed the link.  The perils of blogging from an iPhone.

Yesterday would be the 110th birthday of my grandmother, Beatrice Berg.

I need to get a little clearer on some of my family’s lore – my immediate family has always been terrible at passing its stories down.  Near as I can tell, she was the older daughter of a Norwegian immigrant farmer and immigrant from Sør-Trøndelag, Berndt Græsli (anglicized to Gresley), born not far from Thief River Falls, MN.  She grew up in or near Middle River.

When she was in her late teens (as I recall the story) she took up with a couple of her aunts – who were, according to the accounts I’ve heard, the sort of thing that they’d write Lifetime movies about today; a couple of flinty, hard-bitten businesswomen who were in the business of starting photography studios around northern Minnesota.  Grandma worked at a few of these studios, learning the trade.

It’s there that Grandma Bea did something that, likely, most of you are acquinted with.  She was working at the studio of Eric Enstrom in the small northern Minnesota town of Bovey, when…

…well, I’ve never heard the definitive story; some of it, I got from my parents; others, from a Jamestown Sun piece from the 1970’s that I still remember.  The stories include various elements from the following narrative, all of which I’ll relate just for simplicity’s sake.  One day she met an old guy in a mainstreet cafe, Charles Wilden, a travelling salesman namedwith a striking visage, whom she introduced to Enstrom.  And then helped dress the set and assisted with the photo shoot, and helped do some of the hand-coloring of the print afterward (along with Enstrom’s daughter – like I said, the story gets complicated).

Whatever the facts were – and most of them certainly were true – the end result is upper-midwestern art history:

“Grace”, by Eric Enstrom

Nearly every dining room in the Upper Midwest seems to have a copy of “Grace” hanging on the wall – or so it seemed when I was a kid. It’s the Minnesota State Photograph.

Grandma went on to work at a slew of photography studios.  At one of them, she met my grandfather, Oscar.  They got married, had Dad…

…and then Oscar died.  Grandma ran the studio herself for the next twenty-odd years.

For all the yapping about “strong women” from feminists, I don’t suspect many of them could have carried my Grandmother’s purse.