Don’t forget – tonight is “A Meal With Mike”, a chance to get together with AM1280 mid-morning guy Mike Gallagher.

Tickets are $90; sales end at 5PM sharp.

Here are the details; hope you can make it!  Brad Carlson and I will both be there; hope you can be too!

Remember last summer’s stunt, where a smokin’ hot babe filmed herself walking for hours through Manhattan, and the response she got from men along the streets?

A Jewish journo- member of a a minority that could teach American academic feminists a thing or two about what real oppression is – did the same thing through the streets of Paris.

And the results are…

…well, pretty demoralizing, for those who’d like to think the human race has learned anything over the past 70 years.

At first, Corporal Ellis didn’t understand what he was seeing.

Two stranglers, dressed in U.S. Army field uniforms easily two sizes too big were limping down by an access road to the airbase on Iwo Jima.  At 9:30 in the morning, they weren’t hard to spot, seeing that the small island, not even a third the size of Manhattan, was mostly flat other than the imposing volcanic mountain of Mount Suribachi at the extreme southwest end of the island.  The men were Asian and looked extremely malnourished.  They put up no fight as Corporal Ellis took them into custody.

At the airfield, the men identified themselves as Yamakage Kufuku and Matsudo Linsoki, members of a Japanese machine gun unit and part of the island’s defense force.  They felt ashamed that they had defiled their orders to resist the American invasion.  Their American captors had assumed the men were from a nearby Chinese ship, as their story seemed too unbelievable to be taken seriously.

It was January 6th, 1949.

Such was the tenacity of the Japanese soldiers who met U.S. Marines on February 19th, 1945 – one of the few land battles of the Pacific War that saw more American casualties than Japanese.

—

Iwo Jima (Sulfur Island in Japanese). Iwo must have felt like Hell for the 70,000 Marines and 22,000 Japanese troops who fought on this tiny, isolated island in the middle of the Pacific

By the beginning of 1945, there was barely any pretext of victory for Japan’s military planners. (more…)

The weather in the Dardanelles – the strait that ran through Constantinople, connecting the Mediterranean and the Black Sea – was rough.  Cloudy skies and choppy seas lashed against the Ottoman forts that dotted the coastline.  Emerging from the gray horizon, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, one of the most modern battleship of the era, let loose a volley from her deck guns, beginning a long-distance bombardment.  Behind her sat a large joint Anglo-French fleet of mostly older battleships.  This was no pin-prick attack.  The fight to clear the Dardanelles and force the Ottoman Empire out of the war had begun.

It would end less than a year later, and in humiliating defeat for the Entente.

—

A Beach Too Far – 568,000 Allied troops crammed into the narrow beachheads along the Bosphorus

No one expected the Ottomans to put up a fight. (more…)

The Pontiac Tribune has published its list of legislators that’ve pulled their weight to limit federal government power…

…and MN Senator Branden Peterson is on the list.

We need a whole bunch more of them, but it’s a good start.

Kudos to Senator Petersen!

It gets old, always, always, always repeating “if a conservative said this, the media would collectively crap a cinder block”.

But it’s always true.

But former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg said something that would put him squarely in David Duke territory; emphasis added for the dense and dazed:

“It’s controversial, but first thing is all of your — 95 percent of your murders and murderers, and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops. They are male, minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city in America,” Bloomberg is heard saying in the newly released audio.

And his prescription?  Well, it’s meant to sound a little more benevolent than something a Klansman would say, but spiritually it’s the same exact thing:

“That’s where the real crime is,” he added. “You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed. First thing you can do to help that group is to keep them alive.”

“Keep them alive” – by disarming the victims.

Forget dog whistles; this piece is full of racist foghorns.

And it puts an exclamation point on the most important premise related to the gun control issue today; it is today, as it was in 1968, and 1866 and 1842, an instrument of keeping ethnic minorities disarmed, helpless and in “their place”.

Rarely as they as obliging as to say it in as many words, as Bloomberg is recorded saying (and the media is doing its best to scrub all mention of the tape’s existence); even Heather Martens is smarter than that (thus far).

Do the world a favor; make sure a black DFL voter hears this.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The media is full of news about ISIS attacks. The President wants authority to bomb ISIL.

Wait a minute – that’s not the same name. Did I miss a corporate merger, or is the President using shyster tricks to limit his request to The People’s Front of Judea while ignoring the Judean People’s Front and all the other Crack Suicide Squads? “So sorry, can’t do anything about that group, they’re not ISIL, hands are tied, damn those Republicans.”

With George Bush, I never had these doubts.

Joe Doakes

On the one hand, it’s good to bespecific about ones’ enemies, since it’s easy to create more of them.

On the other hand, one doesn’t get the impression that’s why the Obama Administration is being obtuse…

And me, too.

This piece – “What Isis Really Wants“, by Graeme Wood, in that noted conservative tool The Atlantic – explains ISIS in political, social and theological terms better than any single thing I’ve ever read.

It’s a long read, but a valuable, even vital one.

The entire piece is essential, it was almost pointless to pull out a quote.  But in a nation that is tired of war, with significant antiwar political movements on the left and right, and with people from all political perspectives engaging in much wishful thinking about ISIS, I thought this was the essential bit:

We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.

One can neither reason with nor rationally deter an inbound kamikaze pilot.

I try to avoid the old blogger’s crutch “read the whole thing” – so when I say it, I mean it.  By all means do.

…his darnedest to turn the US into at third-world country, it’s at least a little reassuring to see that it goes both ways.  Almost alone among post-colonial African nations, Botswana chose free markets, representative democracy and a fair, equally-applied rule of law.

Hopefully Obama – and Governor Dayton – can learn something from them…

Last week, Senator Ron “I went to Harvard – I bet you didn’t go to Harvard, did you?” Latz tabled Senator Petersen’s digital privacy bill, likely killing it for the rest of the session.

And yesterday?

For the third consecutive session, lawmakers have sparred over whether LPR “hits” on innocent people should be deleted immediately—what privacy advocates want, or kept for 90 days– what law enforcement wants.

This session, a 90-day retention bill sponsored by Sen Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, over protests from Sen. Branden Petersen, R-Andover, who authored a competing bill arguing for zero retention. While the committee opted not to move forward with Petersen’s bill, Latz’s bill headed to the Senate floor for a vote.

In other words, Sen. Ron “we are all created equal, but some of us are more equal than others” Latz, who also led last sessions push to create a paper trail on all firearms purchases, wants to keep a 90 day record of everywhere everyone has been in a car.

Let’s let that sink in for a little bit; the DFL jammed down legislation that puts the state in charge of all of your personal and health data; they tried their darndest to register the movement of every firearm in the state; they successfully defended one was electronic surveillance; and now, thanks to Sen. Latz, they will have a 90 day record of your travels.

NOD TO POLITICAL REALITY:  It’s entirely possible that Latz has submitted the “90 day retention” bill as  a sop to his police and prosecutor organization benefactors; that he referred it to the Transportation committee to so it gets tabled without Latz’s fingerprints on it; that he’s playing both sides.

I don’t care.

If Senator X submitted a bill calling for the sterilization of black males to fight crime, even at the behest of a big contributor, even knowing that his political maneuvering was going to see that it went nowhere, it’d still be a loathsome bill.

And so is this one.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Former New York Mayor Bloomberg suggests we take guns away from Black males aged 15-25 because that’s the group that commits most of the murders.  He’s partly right.

Nobody aged 15-20 – Black or White, Male or Female – should be carrying a pistol since it’s against the law for anybody under 21 to buy, possess or carry a pistol.  Yes, take those guns away.

And nobody aged 21-25 – Black or White, Male or Female – should be carrying a pistol in public without a Permit to Carry since that’s also against the law.  Yes, take those guns away, too.

If we could enforce those two sets of existing laws, we’d take illegally carried pistols out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them in the first place and that should take a bite out of gun crime.  It’s a wonderful idea but, as always, the devil is in the details:  how do you pick those people – and ONLY those people – out of a crowd?

Maybe if we limit the focus to illegally carried pistols?  Gun murders are mostly committed with pistols and pistols contain a big chunk of metal.  Metal detectors set at reasonable sensitivity could find concealed pistols without singling out every single person for frisking.

Anybody who sets off the metal detector gets waved aside for further processing.  Show me your Permit to Carry and Driver’s License and you’re on your way.  Minimal intrusion.

Set off the metal detector and no Permit to Carry?  Voluntarily show me the leg brace that set it off or wait here for police to frisk you.  Slightly more intrusive, might be ways to mitigate it (state-issued “metal plate in head” card gets you through without frisk).

Probably only install them at large gathering places like Vikings stadium, shopping malls, Super Target and nightclubs in downtown Minneapolis . . . but if society wants to get serious, the Mayor has at least given us food for thought.  We have the technology.  Do we have the willpower?

Joe Doakes

Joe errs a bit – in most states, 18 year olds can own guns, and in many they can get permits (although not Minnesota, where a 20 year old military veteran can come home from a year in Afghanistan, or from driving a nuclear submarine, and not get a permit). For better or worse.

As the Middle East spirals into war, the economic “recovery” continues to enrich Wall Street but skip Payne Avenue, and the national debt stands ready to leap from “OMFG that’s high!” to “OMFFFFFG that’s really murtha-farging high!”, our nation’s political class is deeply enthralled with the departure of cable TV star Jon Stewart from The Daily Show, and What It All Means.

Oliver Morrison at The Atlantic confims my thesis that nobody named “Oliver” who isn’t also named “Wendell Holmes” or “Hazard Perry” ever did anything worthwhile, in this bit of brow-furrowing and navel-gazing over why there’s no “conservative Jon Stewart”.

I’m not going to bother pull-quoting the article a whole lot; the guy’s name is Oliver, for chrissake.  There’s really one big thing you need to know about the article.

The One Big Thing You Need To Know About The Article:  It’s wrong.

Three Theses:  To be fair, Morrison takes a game whack at it; the piece is unexpectedly short on much overt condescension and patronization.  Morrison thinks there are three potential reasons that there’s no “conservative Jon Stewart”:

• There are fewer conservative comedians
• “Political humor has a liberal bias”
• Conservatives and Liberals have different senses of humor

None of them is right; one of them is a classic example of self-absorbed tone-deafness.  Two of them come close, but not for the reason Oliver “Who The Hell Names Their Child Oliver” Morrison thinks.

The Number Game:  There are fewer conservative comics.  Indeed, there are fewer self-identified “conservatives” in most “creative” fields; writing, music, art, dance, film, and certainly comedy.

Morrison cites an academic – Alison Dagnes, a poli-sci prof at that home of comedy, Shippensburg University – who says conservatives are less likely in particular to be drawn to the lifestyle involved in getting established in “comedy”; awful hours, lousy pay, a very steep learning curve with rare tangible rewards is just the beginning; “success” adds in endless travel, often crummy working environments, and very long odds of ever being able to support oneself, barring getting that shot at the big time.  There’s probably a point there; given a choice between putting in ten years in crappy nightclubs, or ten years at a bank or factory or software company or pretty much anywhere else, most conservatives will take the, er, conservative choice.

And I think there’s something to this.

And I think Morrison and his panel of experts missed an offshoot of this thesis that illuminates the truth a lot more effectively.

We’ll come back to that.

A National Healthcare Plan Walks Into A Bar…:  The second theory – political satire fundamentally favors the left – is easier to dispatch.  The idea is that the reality of this world is just plain easier for the left to tackle than for the right.

In what I’ll be nice and call “support”, Morrison quotes Prof. Dagnes:  “Conservatism supports institutions and satire aims to knock these institutions down a peg,” she wrote.

Which is true in a sense – conservatism supports tried-and-true intellectual, moral and political institutions – and complete baked wind in another; there is no institution bigger than the government, and networks of governments, that liberals support.

Morrison goes a little further – and comes as close to the truth as this thesis gets:

Theorists have been trying to explain humor as far back as Plato. The ancient Greek philosopher said humor got its power from the pleasure people get when they feel superior over others, laughing at their foibles and flaws.

We’ll come back to that one as well.

Teri Gross Is A Gas:  The third theory; conservatives and liberals prefer different strains of humor.

One of Morrison’s pet academics trots out the claim that liberals prefer irony while conservatives prefer hyperbole.  Morrison’s “evidence”:  the difference between Stewart and Rush Limbaugh; against Stewart’s “deft satire” (big talk for mugging and snark – and I’m a Stewart fan) – Morrison cites Limbaugh’s referring to Sandra Fluke as a “slut” as the apotheosis of his sense of humor.

Which is as patronizing a few as one can take; Limbaugh walked back and apologized for the “slut” slur – and Limbaugh’s humor is a lot more subtle than that.  Limbaugh has a keen ear for affectation, and weaves his impression of it into a very sneaky, deft satire that sneaks up on you if you hear it, and that’s easy to miss entirely (as liberal critics tend to) if your frame of reference is entirely stereotype (as it is with liberals slumming it and listening to Rush).  Camille Paglia gets it – but Camille Paglia is the rare lefty that can park ideology long enough to form a coherent, dissident opinion, and much of the left hates her for it.

But again – there is a grain of truth here.  We’ll revisit that grain in a bit.

Funny People:  There is, however, one thread that all three of Morrison’s theses have in common, that I believe does explain pretty capably why liberals dominate “comedy”.

If there’s one thing I do in fact like less than Jon Stewart, it’s self-indulgent social-“science” studies that torture often sketchy, minimal and/or out-of-context data to reach a self-serving conclusion, usually some flavor of “liberals are smarter, more enlightened and better people”.

With that in mind, I’m going to cite a bunch of research in that general weight class.

This blog has cited over the years – usually with tongue firmly in cheek – numerous surveys showing that conservatives are happier than liberals; they have better sex lives, they’re less angry, more open-minded and accepting of cognitive dissonance.  Again – I mention them tongue-in-cheek…

…while noting that it confirms by (admittedly biased) observations in the real world.

Now, the thing about comedy is is that it doesn’t come from happiness; it comes from pain, anger and hurt.  And it shows; many standup comics are among the most dismal human beings you can imagine – although by no means all; I have some very good friends who are comics, and wonderful people.  Still, at the time of my life when I spent a lot of time with comics – when I was producing Don Vogel, almost thirty years ago – I noticed it; standup comics were disproportionately angry, peevish, churlish, oversensitive and cranky.

If conservatives are happier – and you can take or leave the studies at your leisure – then it’d stand to reason that they’d feel less desire to use humor to pass the anger on down the comedic food chain to the next less-fortunate sap.  Happy people don’t feel the need to pass misery on.

And that, I suspect, is why there isn’t a “conservative Jon Stewart”, and likely never will be.  And never needs to be.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/why-theres-no-conservative-jon-stewart/385480/

…people are supposed to prefer the mainstream media over the alternative media is that their “layers and layers of gatekeepers” ensure that the public gets the news that really, really matters.

The liberal noise machine that largely spent eight years calling George W. Bush “Bushitler” is worked up into a lather because a St. Paul Pioneer press reporter referred to the practice of constantly taking “selfies”(using a snap of Sselfieaddict Pres. Obama as his example) as making one look like a “assclown.”

Sports reporter Kevin Cusick, who wrote the blurb, later walked it back, apologizing for the use of the term, and changing it to “self absorbed celebrity.

He was right both times. I’m not fond of the term “assclown” – or its dumber cousin, “asshat”, both of which sprang out of a trend in the early days of blogging to jam terms together more or less at random to try to insult people. There are many more artful terms that can and should be used.

But while the occasional selfie is a harmless indulgence, Cusick was right the first time; the President is starting to act a little bit like Miley Cyrus.

This is only news because of government-run media.

It’s been happening in the US for half a decade.

Yet another advantage of the free market.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Lawyers are required to take Continuing Legal Education. I’m thinking of giving a class on the subject of “Making Minnesota Muslim-Friendly.”

The auditorium would be broken into sections marked by signs: in front, Men; behind them, Women; back row, Menstruating Women; and one small area of standing room right by the door, GLBT.

In the aisle entering the room would be a table with a cardboard box of scarves and another filled with rocks.

As everyone enters the auditorium, I’d tell them “This seminar involves inter-active role playing. Please take a rock from the box. Women should also cover their heads with a scarf.”

To start the lecture, I’d ask people to move to their assigned sections. Nobody would move to the Menstruating Women section, of course, it’d be too humiliating. And probably no GLBT. So I’ll ask for volunteers “just for role-playing purposes” and if I get none, I’ll assign some.

Next, all good Muslims must understand that homosexuality is not only a sin, but a crime. That’s what the rocks are for. Everyone pick up your rocks, turn toward the GLBT section and prepare to throw. Except you Menstruating Women, you’re unclean, you don’t participate, you can sit back down.

I anticipate some vocal objections will arise. Those of you objecting, you’re out of line. God has laws, given to us by his Prophet. I have applied the laws to this classroom, you’re breaking the law. That makes you a heretic. If you don’t fall back into line, you’ll have to join the other sinful criminals in the stoning area to be put to death for your crimes against God.

Not True Islam? Tell me, what is True Islam? Islam isn’t like Catholic, where one guy decides what we all believe. Islam is like Protestant, where every group decides what it believes, all beginning from the same sacred text but spinning off into groups as diverse as Wisconsin Synod Lutheran, Old Order Amish, Shakers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Methodists and the Salvation Army. There is no more “True Islam” than there is “True Christian” and attempting to discredit my flavor only proves how evil you are, and justifies my religious obligation to kill you lest you corrupt others with your wicked words.

If you don’t want to stone gays, fine, you can come up here in front with me. We’re going on a field trip after class, swing by my house for some guns and off to Temple Beth Israel to kill the Jews. You can help with that.

At that point, I can announce the end of role-playing. Take off your scarves, drop your rocks, sit where you like, take a deep breath and let it out slowly. That was just role-playing. This is still Minnesota.

But remember this: what you experienced for a few minutes in play life, millions of people live in real life under Sharia rule as it’s actually practiced around the world, and not even the strictest form, as I didn’t insist on women wearing shapeless clothing and hiding their faces so they wouldn’t distract the men by their lustful ways, or having a male relative accompany them. In predominantly Muslim countries, women are subservient to men. Gays are killed. Freedom of speech does not exist. Freedom of worship does not exist. And we’re not even going to discuss female genital mutilation, honor killings or gang-rape as punishment for adultery.

There is a massive conflict between Islam and Minnesota that multiculturalism and respect for diversity simply cannot bridge. Either we become like them – which it should now be apparent you would hate – or we drop the pretense of diversity and insist they become like us.

So . . . how much should I charge for the class?

Joe Doakes

Are you kidding? They’re lawyers. $250 an hour plus expenses.

It’s been a rough year or so for Heather Martens.

It seems like just yesterday that she was not only serving as the chairperson (and almost solitary member) of “ProtectMN”, an astroturf checkbook advocacy antigun group, but de facto Minnesota State Representative for House District 66A, doing both her own job and that of Representative Alice Hausman (notwithstanding being a paid lobbyist, which is supposedly against House rules).  But it was in fact two years ago.

Last year, the worm turned for Heather Martens.  Flush with Michael Bloomberg’s money, the regional anti-gun movement hired a slew of PR professionals to carry the victim-disarmament movement’s legislative water.

And nobody has ever accused Martens of being a PR professional.  Inept? Sure.  Incapable of making a substantial true statement on the gun issue?  Utterly.

And so during the 2014 session, Martens was largely sidelined.

Oh, she still had her ace in the hole; for the past decade and change, no editor anywhere in the Twin Cities media would consider a story about firearms complete without a (false, laughable) quote from Martens.  She was to gun issues what Larry Jacobs is to every other political topic.

But then, a few weeks, back, the unthinkable happened; the Strib published a story on a gun policy issue that passed on quoting Martens.

Does this mean the Twin Cities media has finally realized what every other sentient person in the universe on both sides of the gun issue has known for over a decade – that Heather Martens is to competence and knowledge on Second Amendment issues what Mark Dayton is to hip hop?

Let’s not get carried away, here.

But let nobody think that Ms. Martens is going to fade too gently into obscurity, no matter how objectively richly deserved.  She sent out an email blast to her “supporters” this past week, including a little bird.  Bits of emphasis are scattered throughout by me:

Dear Mr. D’Artagnan,

The gun extremists have pulled out all the stops. They’ve introduced a bill to repeal all permitting and background check requirements to buy and carry firearms. The gun extremists tried to repeal our life-saving Minnesota law before, and we stopped them — but we couldn’t have done it without you.

Can you help us stop this dangerous bill?

Two questions, here:

• What bill are they talking about?
• If, as Martens claims, “we stopped them”, then why do they need everyone’s help to stop it again?

Join us on Monday, Feb. 23 at 10:30 in Saint Paul to stand up for your values — for the right of every child, from every neighborhood, to live free of the fear of gun violence. Click here to RSVP. A program from 11-1 with testimonials and a legislative issue training will be followed by visits to legislators for those who sign up.

If you can’t be there in person, please make a donation today to help cover the costs of the event.

Thank you for all you do,

Heather Martens

I’m tempted to show up.

There’s an old Hungarian saying; “the best way to become wealthy is to appear is if you already are”.

It’s true – and it applies far beyond wealth.  One good way to get promoted is to dress, and perhaps act, like your boss.  Acting as if one is happy in a relationship can make you…happy with the relationship.

Amid all of the squawking and clucking about college educations and credentials – how little we got for all of Barack Obama’s education, how much Scott Walker has accomplished without a formal piece of paper – one of the most important lessons for people to learn, especially younger people just starting out, is how to take what you do know and turn it into something useful.  And sometimes, it’s more a matter of taking what you think you know and you’re sure you can do.

I’ve told a few of those stories; how I wasn’t actually formally qualified for either of my post-radio careers, technical writing and user experience; I’d had no formal training in either.  I just found opportunities, did what it took to get hired, and then worked like a sled dog to deliver the goods.

I love a good Horatio Alger career story; I’m drawn to them.

And NPR gave us a great one over the weekend – the story of Adrián García Márquez, who’s been a spanish-language sportscaster for, well, pretty much every spanish-language sports broadcasting operation the past decade and change; he’s pretty much turned into the Jack Buck of spanish sportscasting.

And he had a start for the record books; he started out as a strugglingl minor leaguer – until he and his girlfriend got pregnant:

So he got a part-time job with the promotions department of San Diego radio station Jammin’ Z 90. A few months in, he started DJing overnight.

“In my heart, I didn’t want to be a hip-hop disc jockey,” he says. “I mean, I loved it. But I wanted to go to sports.”

But a radio station was a radio station, and working there was better than nothing.

Actually, these days it’s frequently not.  But this was still the nineties, and Spanish radio still makes decent money, so let’s rejoin the story:

Then, he remembers, a colleague told him, “I have a buddy of mine who told me that he has a buddy that knows this guy” who wanted to broadcast a handful of San Diego Flash games in Spanish on TV. (At the time, the Flash were an A-League soccer team — basically a minor league team, Garcia says.)

There was a problem, though. To get a sportscasting job, he says, you have to have a demo tape of yourself actually calling a game — a college game, a high school game, any game.

“How do I get a demo, on the fly, out of nowhere, having zero experience? Make one. Fake one, basically.”

I did the same thing, back in 1986, to cajole my boss at KSTP into letting me have a talk show.  It worked – although not as well as it did for Márquez.

But Garcia didn’t have one.

“So how do I get a demo, on the fly, out of nowhere, having zero experience? Make one. Fake one, basically.”

He looked around the house to see what he could use.

“I did have a Sega. I did have [the video game] FIFA Soccer, 1995 edition,” he remembers. “So I pop that into the console, I recorded the beautiful crowd chants that they had. Because technology was advancing, so it sounded like a real soccer game. So I figured, I’ll grab that crowd noise, and put it on the tape.”

He put the soccer chanting in the background, called the video of a recorded soccer game, turned it into a tape…

…and the rest is history.  More or less.  Read the whole story.

And pass it on to a kid.  Because ones own ingenuity is as important as ones credentials, unless you’re trying to be a cardiac surgeon or an engineer.  And college (and education in general) these days seems to do a fine job of squeezing that out of kids.

Sheila Jackson Lee – one of the dumbest, least effective members of Congress: graduated from Yale.

Scott Walker – one of the best, most effective governors in America: attended Marquette but didn’t get a degree.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals exclaim that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s lack of a college degree proves he lacks knowledge.

I knew a guy who was frighteningly well educated. He could tell you why it rained, when it was going to rain, what made it rain . . . he just didn’t have enough sense to come in Out of the rain.

Knowledge is not wisdom.

Knowledge is learned in college; wisdom is won in the world.

I wish our current President had more worldly wisdom and not so much college knowledge.

I sincerely hope our next President does.

Joe Doakes

Anyone still talking about where they went to college more than five years after they graduated, unless there in an academic field, probably has nothing to be proud of in their post-college life.

Anyone who barbers about where someone went to college, unless that person is operating on the child or building their bridge, is probably an idiot.

How to sign up for the Legislative Evaluation Assembly event!

And here’s the link to today’s show music.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show, Will be talking about Gov. Dayton about his executive pay raise mania and his spat with the Senate. Will also talk about Jon Stewart, and what conservatives and liberals find funny. Scott Walker’s college degree “problem”, and much more!

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! 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!

I have a college degree.

And other than writing for some portion of my living for pretty much my entire adult life, I’ve never really “used it”.  My BA was in English, with minors in History and German (and two courses short of a minor in Computer Science, although it was the type of computer science that is pretty obsolete today).  Most of what I use for a living, I picked up on my own – and yes, college certainly helped me “learn how to learn”, which has been the stated justification for humanities degrees among the independently-non-wealthy for decades.

So college was good for me; I’m glad I went.  But a degree doesn’t say all that much about a person.

Least of all an “elite” degree.  The best thing an Ivy League degree says about a person is that between the ages of 14 and 17, they knew enough to play the paper chase with enough excellence to punch all the tickets that “elite” school recruiters were looking for, because they had a sense of the importance of that most important byproduct of an “elite” education; access to the alumni directory.  And that’s the best thing it says.   The other things it says – legacy admission, overentitlement, educational stage parents – are less salutary.

In the meantime, many of the greatest Americans – from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Gates – had no college education (at the least).

So after eight years of stonewalling about Barack Obama’s college transcripts, the media is suddenly obsessed with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s college career – which was cut short when he dropped out to start his career.

Will that scupper Walker with the American people?  Charles CW Cooke says there are a couple sides to that question:

How effective the approach would be during a general election is anybody’s guess, for at present Americans exhibit a strange and inconsistent attitude toward their dropouts. In theory, this is a nation that was built by the rebels and the nonconformists — more specifically, by the recalcitrant revolutionaries of Valley Forge, the chippy entrepreneurs of the frontier and of Silicon Valley, and by the ambitious Lincolnian auto-didacts who looked at their conditions and sought to improve them on their own terms.

Indeed, many of the great advances in human history came from the self-taught autodidact.

In practice, however, America is becoming increasingly rigid and Babbit-like. When a given individual makes it without school, we lavish him with praise and with adulation and we explain his rise with saccharine appeals to the American spirit; when our own children suggest that they might wish to dropout, however, we tut-tut and roll our eyes and make sneering jokes about Burger King.

There are, of course, two Americas:

This is no accident. Rather, it is the product of an increasing tendency among college-educated Americans to regard the letters after their names as a distinguishing mark that renders them as part of a special, exclusive class. By willfully conflating their established educational achievements and their presumed intellect or societal worth — in Dean’s words, their “education” per se — these people extract every last ounce of social value from their investment, and make it appear as if the only way to compete with them is to join them…Sorry, Mr. Walker, you have the wrong colored dot on your forehead to run for higher office.

I think a person whose life has been focusing on accomplishing things would make a nice switch from a President with all sorts of credential who has accomplished nothing.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is waiting for new tires to be put on his car.   

Bill GUNKEL, former Republican who is now chairmain of the Inver Grove Heights chapter of “Former Republicans for Ron Paul”, walks in.

GUNKEL:  Boy, is the GOP in trouble!

BERG:  Huh.  Hey, Bill.  Why do you say that?

GUNKEL:  Because a GOP legislator in Montana proposed legislation to ban yoga pants in public!

BERG:  Wait – that proposal was unanimously tabled by the GOP-dominated committee to which it was introduced, without so much as a hearing.   They killed it.  Dead.

There are many reasons to read Kevin Williamson’s piece about the departure of Jon Stewart from The Daily Show.  It may be the best single thing I’ve read about Stewart.

But I’ll leave you with this bit:

There are funny conservatives and funny liberals, but they tend to be amusing in different ways, which is why liberal efforts to replicate Rush Limbaugh’s success have failed in the same way as conservative efforts to replicate Jon Stewart’s. It takes a left-wing sensibility to have Lenny Bruce’s career; it takes a right-wing sensibility to have Evelyn Waugh’s.

And it takes a bottomless well of stupidity to rely on either mode of humor for a meaningful map of the world.

And fortunately for Stewart, that bottomless well is everywhere these days.