Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We can’t disarm Iran.  We need them to help Iraq take Tikrit away from ISISwhile we watch.Yes, Tikrit.  Saddam Hussein’s birthplace.  The town we conquered in 2003 and killed all the terrorists, then handed over to the Iraqi government after Saddam was dead.

We took it, we had it, we cleaned it terrorist-free.  Obama pulled out the troops in 2011 and the terrorists took it back.

At least Johnson had a rationale for taking the hill to show the Vietnamese we could smash them, then giving it back to show we could be reasoned with.  What’s Obama’s strategery?

Joe Doakes

On the one hand, using proxies to do your dirty work was always how smart emperors handled their foreign policies.

On the other hand, Obama is not smart.

First, credit where it’s due; Jeff Kolb is a guy who walked the walk; in a city full of political activists with big ideas, he settled for big accomplishments, running for and winning a seat on the city council in last fall’s GOP sweep in Crystal. Now, it’d be inaccurate to call Kolb a conservative ideologue; he’s a Republican.

And he wants you to be absolutely clear about one more thing:

Let’s get this out of the way right away. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of a Tea Party. I’ve never been to a Tea Party meeting. I don’t even drink tea. I know many people who have been involved with the Tea Party in one way or another, and many of them are fine people who care about their country, but choose to show it in a different way than I do.

And let’s be clear; I am a Tea Partier.  I don’t think that there’s any rational doubt that the Tea Party brought the GOP back – to the extent that it is back – from its 2008 nadir, and brought the party a relevance among the limited-government conservatives that had largely deserted the party.

But Kolb’s focus is here in Minnesota – and he gets some things right…:

Here in Minnesota, two opportunists in particular have done a great job of establishing themselves as self-appointed “leaders” of the Tea Party movement, they being Jack Rogers and Jake Duesenberg of the Minnesota Tea Party Alliance. They have a sweet URL that makes them seem extra legit, teaparty.mn and they operate the MN Tea Party PAC.

…and a few things wrong…:

Jack and Jake haven’t been as successful as the guys from FreedomWorks, only raising $8,200 in 2014. They spent $8,900. The irony of the deficit spending is probably lost on them. A total of $0 was spent to support the election of any candidates.

…but then that’s true of most Tea Party groups; very few endorsed, much less spent money on, candidates at all.

And he gets a few things that are worth talking about: 

Credit where credit is due, Jack and Jake may not raise a lot of money, but they have perfected the art of over the top symbolic gestures as a way to generate media coverage.

We’ll come back to that.   

A quick search of the Star Tribune archives shows Jack has been mentioned in 12 recent stories, Jake, sadly, only 6. In most of these stories you can find Jack and Jake bad mouthing Republicans. About the only candidate they seemed to like in 2014 was Jeff Johnson. Take from that what you will.

I sure will; I liked and supported Jeff Johnson.  Kolb, if memory (and a quick Google search) serves, supported the Scott Honour for Governor juggernnaut, and has joined in with the avalanche of second-guessing that followed Johnson’s loss.

But I came here not to slag on Kolb.   

Jack and Jake’s most recent stunt was an over-the-top tantrum aimed at notorious RINO Tom Emmer. Emmer, you see, chose to attend an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights march in Selma. Or as Jack put it: “a parade in Alabama.” You see, Jack and Jake would have preferred that Congressman Emmer instead attended a small gathering of local Republican activists, so those activists could yell at him about how he is a sell-out who hates the constitution or something because Emmer didn’t commit career suicide in his first vote in Congress by voting against John Boehner for Speaker of the House and/or didn’t think gambling with the safety of the nation was a good strategic move.

I saw Jack and Jake’s attack on Emmer for skipping the BPOU conventions to go to Selma, and thought it was extremely ill-advised; anyone who thinks freshman Congresscritters have a lot of freedom in their votes is either not paying attention, or is demigogueing like mad.

During the 2014 US Senate campaign Jack and Jake infamously told US Senate candidate Mike McFadden to “Go to Hell” during a meeting. I think it’s high time Republicans say the same thing to Jack and Jake. No serious candidate for office or elected official should attend any event sponsored by the MN Tea Party Alliance. The group seems to exist for the sole purpose of promoting Jack and Jake. It’s time other Republicans stop playing along.

Well, no.  That’d be a horrible idea.

Think Jack and Jake are hucksters?  What?  Hucksters in politics?  The hell you say.

But the worst mistake the GOP can make is to try to position itself as “above and better than” the Tea Party.  It’s bad PR, and its just not true.

Engage?  Call on BS?  By all means.

Boycott?

Bad idea.

The Clintons’ foundation, in addition to being tied to enough corruption to warrant comparisons between Hillary and Richard Nixon, is floating in influence-renting money from Middle Eastern nations that treat women like Marge Schott treated the domestic help, only with “death” instead of “venial little insults” involved.

But remember:  Koch!

Lorne Michaels is reputedly about to open a Chinese-cast version of Saturday Night Live in the world’s largest country.

Hard to believe it’s been 20 years since SNL’s been funny. 

And he won’t need to change the show’s political biases one bit.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Obama Administration says banning ammunition protects the right to keep and bear arms.

It’s as if their speech-writer is a computerized buzz-word generator.  Doesn’t make any sense, doesn’t have to, won’t fool anybody and isn’t intended to.  It’s just soothing white noise.

Joe Doakes

I’ve been observing this for the past few years – mostly from Obama, but the Minnesota DFL as adopted it as well:

1. Say whatever rhetorically fits the narrative
2. Don’t worry about your voter base – low-information, gullible people, many of them with advanced degrees – prodding into it too deeply.
3. Worry even less about the media bothering you with it.

It’s brilliant, really, if sliding into petty dictatorship is what you’re after.

The temps are in the fifties. More important, the temperature at 7AM is above 33 degrees.

And after a couple of lean-ish years, it looks like biking season starts for me at 7AM tomorrow!

I wrote a lot about biking to work from 2007 through 2010. Back then, I had a job in downtown Saint Paul. It had a locker room and a couple of really fun, obvious routes which – this is important – were alongside or near bus routes. That way, if I had a mechanical problem on the road (always a possibility, when I was riding my early-eighties road bike as I was at the time), the worst case was I’d get to work on time.

It’s been a little tougher since then. In 2011, I worked at a very bike-friendly company – in Minnetonka. It was a 16 mile ride each way – easy enough if you’re in shape, difficult if you’re not. So I spent much of the summer building up to commuting. This involved finding “park and ride” lots at varying distances from the office, a little further each week. Which led to a big leap around mid-summer; from park-and-rides in Saint Louis Park, seven miles from the office, to having to ride all the way across Minneapolis (where there are no park and rides), and do the whole 16 miles.

Which, at long last, I did – once. I rode 16 miles to work in the morning. And then I rode home that night. And as I got to the top of the long, grueling climb up Marshall Avenue, two miles from home, I got a call – my son was in the ER, the beginning of a three month ordeal that had me at the hospital most evenings, living on Jimmy Johns and Cosetta’s Pizza (yum) and losing most of the gains I’d made over the summer.

The next season – 2012, or Season 6 – I worked at a company in West Bloomington. A 22 mile, non-bike-friendly commute to a building that had no locker room. Biking was out. The next two summers – 2013-14, or Seasons 7-8 – I worked at a job that was nominally bike-friendly – they had a locker room of sorts (a shower stall in one of the men’s rooms) and a theoretically manageable distance (11 miles). But it was one of the worst routes in the Twin Cities; from Saint Paul backstreets to the brutal (if you’re out of shape) climb up Pilot Knob. Worse, most of the route wasn’t along any kind of transit; a blowout would mean an hour of pushing a bike to a bus route or to the office. I made a half-hearted go of it in 2013, and didn’t bother last year.

And it shows this year. I’m not in the worst shape I’ve been in, but I can see if from here.

But I have an eminently bikeable job this year, in a great route for getting back into shape (with some easy upgrades when I get my wind and legs back), a locker room, a place to park a bike, and a spring that, so far, is turning out to be excellent; I don’t recall the snow being melted and the tempersatures above 33 at go-time at all in the past years.

So I’ll see you out on the trail!

Black unemployment is double white unemployment, national average, after six years of The Lightworker.

Maybe we’ll just pass a law requiring the rate to drop…

By the standards of the preceding weeks, the activity at Hanford on the night of March 10th, 1945 was relatively quiet.

The Hanford Site, sitting on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington state, was the first large-scale plutonium production reactor in the world.  The facility had just produced the plutonium delivered for the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico a month earlier.  While that first batch of plutonium had taken Hanford over a month to produce, the site was now quickly shipping large quantities of plutonium every five days as the first atomic bombs were being assembled.  The work was top secret (few staff even knew what they were producing or why) and extremely dangerous.

Thus few could have anticipated the explosion outside the site that knocked out power to the reactor’s cooling pumps.  Without electricity running the cooling pumps, the reactor could have easily melted down.  Who could have known the military value of Hanford, yet alone where to strike at such a vulnerable part of the site?  The answer was even harder to believe – the explosion had been the result of a billion-to-one shot; a bomb from a Japanese Fu-go or “fire balloon.”

—

Fu-go yourself: the Japanese launched 9,300 “fire balloons”, or Fu-go’s, at North America in the later months of the war. Highly ineffective, they nevertheless caused considerable concern in Washington

From the moment Japanese bombs had fallen on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial High Command had dreamed of striking the American homeland.  And while there were a handful of incidents throughout 1942 of Japanese submarines shelling the U.S. and Canadian coasts, these were, at best, singular attempts to cause panic.  A concentrated campaign against the American interior had not been given serious consideration.  An earlier proposal of putting the Japanese equivalent of a submarine “wolf-pack” together to strike Los Angeles on Christmas Eve in 1941 had been dismissed amid Japanese concerns about potential retaliation. Read the rest of this entry »

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is walking in Fort Snelling State Park, scouting his bike commuting routes.   

Avery LIBRELLE rides past on a recumbent bike; large orange flag flutters above, and bright strobe lights on front and rear repeatedly flash.  

LIBRELLE:  Haha, Merg!  You wingnuts are all hopped up over Benjamin Netanyahu and his speech.   But he’s lying.

BERG:  How do you figure?

LIBRELLE:  He predicted Iran would have the bomb by 1999.

BERG:  Right.  Maybe that’s the information he had.  And maybe he was trying to stir some action on a subject that is of great importance to Israel – the idea of a country that continuously publicly pines for Israel’s extinction and death to all Jews getting nuclear weapons.

LIBRELLE:  He lied, Merg!

BERG:  He said something that turned out not to be true.  If you can prove he intended to decieve, sure, then it was a lie.  If not, then it was an error.

LIBRELLE:  Either way he completely blew his credibility!

BERG:  So if a leader ever gets anything wrong, it destroys his credibility forever?

LIBRELLE:  Absolutely!

BERG:  OK, glad we have that established.  So, do you remember this diagram?

President Obama’s prediction for unemployment rates if we just invested trillions of dollars in, as it eventually turned out, giving cash to big banks.  He was completely wrong.  So – does that destroy his credibility?

LIBRELLE:  You’re a racist and you hate women.

Now – can you give me a push up the hill?  I have to get to a candle-sniffing.

And SCENE. 

The Mozilla Firefox browser seems to be slipping into second-tier status, after nearly 2 decades as one of the go to web browsers.

Is it lagging technology?

Or is it user anger over the politically correct ouster of former CEO, Brandon Eich?

Personal experience in the IT business says the former is certainly a factor – but there’s evidence that the witchhunt is accelerating things.

I got a high, hanging change-up for you here.

Please see to it.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Benjamin Netanyahu urges Congress to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Barack Obama disagrees. Who’s right?

Ayatollah Khamenei, the highest religious leader in Iran, believes the Shia messiah will arrive as soon as Israel is destroyed. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the highest political official in Iran, believes Islam is required to destroy Israel and then, the United States. They’ve said so for a decade, repeatedly, unwaveringly. And they continue to pursue nuclear technology, lying to the United Nations, cheating inspections and breaking promises.

The Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area packs 3 million people into 500 square miles. That’s half the population of Israel living in an area the size of Hennepin County.

A one kiloton nuclear weapon can destroy about 80 square miles, not much damage in an area so large. That’s why America built MIRV warheads – Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles capable of dropping several bombs from one missile, spreading the damage much farther. The Iranians don’t have MIRVs, yet, but the same effect could be achieved by dropping small bombs from many jets, or shooting many nuclear rounds from tanks.

Or better still, suicide bombers could detonate bombs on building rooftops built miles apart. The US Army’s Mk-54 SADM (Special Atomic Demolition Munition) weighs a little over 50 pounds and literally fits into a backpack. Backpacks could be placed in minivans left on parking ramp rooftops. Nuclear bombs could be quietly infiltrated one-at-a-time over months until enough are assembled for a massive strike.

There are parking ramps at Mall of America, downtown Minneapolis, Southdale and Maple Grove Crossing. Terrorists could drive their minivans to their assigned parking ramps at 5:00 a.m., set their timers for 12 hours, take a Metro Transit bus to catch the Empire Builder at the Amtrak station and be drunk in Chicago when Keith Ellison’s congressional district disappears.

If a schmuck lawyer in St. Paul can figure this out, people who spend their entire lives studying warfare in the Middle East can figure it out. Taking down Tel Aviv would be more difficult only because the Israelis work very hard to prevent it. And because the Iranians don’t have nukes. Yet.

The Obama Administration asks us to believe that religious fanatics who are literally on a mission from God will turn aside from carrying out the mission when they finally have the means at hand. I am not persuaded.

Joe Doakes.

The administration doesn’t believe it – and to be fair, most people don’t, either.

“Normalcy bias” – the belief that tomorrow will probably be about the same as today – is a fairly normal phenomenon among individuals, to say nothing of institutions.

At 6 AM on December 7, 1941, most Americans believed there would eventually be a war with Japan. Most would have said you were nuts if you had said you believed that they’d be in the middle of it within two hours.

Here’s the Minnesota Republic.

And here’s the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance; come out Thursday to rally for the three good gun bills.

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,

• Andrew Rothman of GOCRA on the good and bad gun bills in the legislature right now, and your chance to help out
• Allison Maass of the Minnesota Republic – the University of Minnesota’s conservative newspaper –” freedom of speech” at the University.

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!

To:  The Entire Gay Movement:
From:  Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re:  The Mote

Dear Every Gay In The World,

I’m Mitch Berg.  I’m a conservative – but I can’t say as I’ve ever hated gays.  Indeed, I’ve probably done more to fight the overt, physical hatred of gays than most of you have.  And the simple fact is, after over a decade as a single parent, I have barely had time or energy to put into my own sexuality, much less bother with anyone else’s.

Now, I’ve had my beefs with you all – the whole “if you oppose gay marriage, you are teh bigot!” campaign was a crime against logic.

And while I don’t believe anyone would “choose” to be gay, there’s actually nearly no evidence that it’s genetic, either.  Most of what I’ve read makes me think it’s an adaptation.

And y’know what?  I don’t care; God loves you all, and it’s not for me not to, even if I were so inclined, which I’m not.

I don’t care much for “identity” movements, since they tend to politicize things that ought not be politicized.  But I get it; decades of repression, yadda yadda.  I’ll call it square.

But I’ll just say your whole “want to be accepted” thing would sit a lot easier with real humans if Dan Savage hadn’t appointed himself your spokesbeing.  Emphasis added by yours truly:

A few days ago, Savage told the Family Research Council’s Josh Duggar of “19 Kids and Counting” to “go f**k yourself” after Duggar posted a picture with Rick Santorum. Savage then made a child molestation joke against Pope John Paul II, and now he’s going after the GOP. After Ben Carson said that he believes being gay “is absolutely a choice” in an interview with CNN March 4, Dan Savage tweeted out: “Being gay is a choice? Prove it: Choose it yourself. Suck my dick.”

Dan Savage; anti-bullying crusader.

Please pass the word to Mr. Savage (and I ask this not because I think y’all have a secret underground network, but just on the off-chance that someone out there knows that big arrogant trained chimp) that he would seem to find cognitive dissonance more threatening than does the most inbred redneck.

And that’s a bad thing.

That is all.

I mean, the jokes pretty much write themselves.

I’ve always liked Curt Schilling.

Partly because he was a great pitcher, instrumental in breaking the Red Sox’ World Series curse.

Partly because he’s one of very few baseball players to come out of the closet as a conservative.

And partly because he opened a can of medieval online whoopass on some internet creeps who tried to professorbilly his daughter online.

Some Twin Cities leftybloggers might be feeling the heat.  Just saying.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

First thing I do before cleaning my gun is load up all the bullets, including one in the chamber, and cock it with the safety off. Then I set it by my kid and go looking for rags and stuff. Always. Because it’s only sensible and what could go wrong?

This guy, too, evidently.

Some days, you just wonder.

Joe Doakes

The painful lessons are all around us.

Kevin Williamson came out with an excellent piece this past week, comparing transit policy to “progressive” policy on education (and, for that matter, firearms, although Williamson doesn’t connect the Second Amendment to his thesis.  Which is fine – that’s what I’m here for).  Our current school and transit systems are largely designed by the “haves” – people with power as much as money – to foist upon the “have nots”.  That’s why superhighways and transit lines always run through lower-income, usually ethnic neighborhoods – and why schools in minority areas are disproportionally awful.

Transit – like education – is sort of a “powerful person’s burden”.

Along those same lines, a neighbor emailed me some observations about some of our local potentates rolling up their sleeves (and pant cuffs) to take to the frozen streets by bus to…well, hit the taxpayer up to fill in the money pit a little more:

I happened to see on Twitter that some legislators are using transit this week. Said one, “transit users are less stressed.” He’s not interacting with the same transit passengers that I interact with!

On their tweets, they all look a bit too happy to be real transit riders, too. They definitely aren’t interacting with the people on the bus at all, or they wouldn’t be smiling. Like the Pulp song “Common People” that I learned about after William Shatner covered it- “I said pretend you’ve got no money, She just laughed and said, “Oh you’re so funny.” I said “Yeah? Well I can’t see anyone else smiling in here.”

For fun and games, see tweets with hashtag howweroll.

It reminds me of those pix of Senators Franken and Klobuchar, and Congresspeople McCollum and Ellison, and Representative Martens, riding the train…

…back on that long, slow opening day last June, looking all Jane Goodall “Peasants in the Mist”, smiling like they’re worried Kim Jong Il (or Greta Bergstrom, pardon the redundancy) are going to feed them to hungry dogs if they don’t smile hard enough.

,,,at this proposal, from the usual assortment of Metrocrat hamsters.  It may be the worst anti-gun bill, and the most toxic attack on civil liberty, in recent years.

It would essentially allow any cop or domestic violence victim to claim you brandished a firearm and have the authorities remove all firearms from your house and person.

Without even a hint of due process.

I say again; without even a plaintive whiff of due process.

Now, this bill is DOA in the House; Tony Cornish, a legislator who makes Ted Nugent look like Oprah Winfrey on Second Amendment issues, is chair of the Public Safety Committee; the DFL may as well deliver the bill directly to the paper shredder.

So why do it at all?

Politics:  Because Ron “Did You Know I Went To Harvard?” Latz is running the show in the Senate public safety committee, so it’s pretty much guaranteed a floor vote.  Which means a bunch of GOP senators will be on the record with “no” votes, which will be dutifully relayed during the 2016 campaign as “Senator X voted to give firearms to domestic abusers and people who threatened cops!” by the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota.

That’s my two cents worth, of course; I have no doubt that Ron Latz would love to send SWAT teams to the home of every law-abiding gun owner on principle, but the political realities don’t support it right now.

We’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: GOCRA is taking this bill very seriously, and so should you:

Everyone has moments in life where things seem hopeless. A death in the family, a job loss, PTSD from military service, a divorce… Responsible gun owners know that a doctor or psychologist can help. But this bill would encourage doctors to trick you into signing away your rights!

Imagine: there you are. You’re hurting. You go see a professional. He listens, then says he can help. He gives you a pile of forms to sign. Buried among them is a form created by this bill — one that puts you on the NICS no-buy list. “Voluntarily.”

Call your legislator. Tell them this bill needs to be killed with fire.

The Nobel Prize Committee is having very public, very angry second thoughts about giving The Lightworker a Nobel Peace Prize to kick off six years of expanded warfare.

Skal Norge.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In the olden days, honest Democrats praised expertise:

Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz) wrote this about “Terrorism” by Benjamin Netanyahu, released in 1986:

“Few are as well equipped to bring us this message as Netanyahu. He currently serves as Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations. Netanyahu not only distinguished himself as a commander in many operations for his country’s military but served for several years as the executive director of the Jonathan In stitute, a Jerusalem research foundation on terrorism. He has been touched in the most personal way by modern terrorism. His brother, Lt. Jonathan Netanyahu, died leading the historic Entebbe rescue mission and is the namesake of the institute.”

President Obama says Netanyahu lacks credibility because he’s been wrong about Iran before, predicting bad things that haven’t happened yet. Meanwhile, the UN says it can’t finish its inspection because Iran is still lying about its nuclear program

.

Joe Doakes

Just has everything Obama says has a shelf date, so this everything in the Democrat past.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is setting up a grill on his porch, getting ready for a little pre-spring grilling.  Victor VON-SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE pulls up, parks his car, and walks up the sidewalk to BERG’s porch.

VON-SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE: Hah, Berg!  The  GOP doesn’t have the guts to say anything like this:

BERG: So you’ve got what, here? A slick, cutesy meme about what the Libertarian Party would do, if it were in power?

VON-SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE: Yep! The GOP doesn’t have the balls to say anything of the sort!

BERG: Huh. I guess you’re right. But I’ve got a question for you.

VON-SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE: Shoot.

BERG: Does the Libertarian Party have “the balls” to say anything like this?

MITCH BERG will save 8 TRILLION DOLLARS

by INSTANTLY PRIVATIZING THE ENTIRE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!

 

WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY DATING SCARLETT JOHANNSON AND JENNIFER LAWRENCE!

Has the Libertarian Party said anything like this yet?

VON-SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE:  Well, no…

BERG:  Statists!  RINOs!  Impure!  Unable to talk the big-enough-talk!

VON-SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE:  But…but…you can’t actually make any of that happen!

BERG:  Right!  And the Libertarian Party can’t make anything it says happen either.  So go away and don’t come back until the Libertarian Party can talk really big!

VON-SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE glumly shuffles back to his car. 

And SCENE.

There’s not much happening on Second Amendment issues – that the mainstream media wants to report on, anyway; I never expected they’d cover the local Real American Second Amendment Human Rights movement going on the offensive, especially.

But there were a few half-hearted attempts to roil the pot this past week.

Channel 9 noted last week that carry permit issuances are off by 1/3 in the past year – while leaving it to the reader to figure out for themselves that they’re still running 2.5 times ahead of 2010, before the Obama Panic started.

Regional lefties tried to make a little hay over these numbers:

Individuals with permits to carry committed 1,320 crimes in 2014, according to reports from law enforcement. Only 20 of those crimes involved the use of a pistol to commit the crime, while more than half of these crimes were DWIs or other traffic offenses that had nothing to do with firearms.

In other words, a group making up 3% of the population commits a tiny fraction of 3% of the state’s “gun crimes” (and let’s ignore for a moment that “gun crimes” means everything from murder – there were none – to inadvertently carrying a gun in a post-office).

Simple fact; law-abiding gun owners are better citizens, on the average, than the typical Minnesotan.

More context?  There are now about 180,000 Minnesotans with carry permits.  Ten years ago, the House Research office figured that a maximum of 90,000 would get their cards; I figured it’d peak around 55-60,000, since most “shall-issue” states tended to level off around 1% of the population.  We’re around triple that now. And while the numbers will likely drop (and could drop to zero, if we pass “Constitutional Carry“, which won’t happen until 2017 at best), they have completely blown away even supporters’ most optimistic predictions…

…in every way but literally, as MPR’s Bob Collins noted in a story earlier this week that pointed out that…:

“They thought the streets were going to be running with blood, but statistically, it hasn’t shown itself as a problem in terms of an increase in the amount of gun crimes,” Cmdr. Paul Sommer of the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office told the Star Tribune.

He’s right. More than 10 years after the pitched battle over the law, it’s clear the hyperbole from both sides was overwrought. We’re not ducking road-rage shootouts, but we’re not fending off criminals, either, the Pioneer Press said.

Well, Collins is half right.  The opponents’ hyperbole – as was predicted in this space – turned out to be the same onanistic fantasy that it’s been in every other state that’s adopted “shall-issue” permitting.

But what was the “hyperbole” among the supporters?

There was none.  No credible supporter predicted that we’d see groups of law-abiding citizens with carry permits holding off crooks like a beleaguered Vietnam-era firebase, up to their knees in enemy bodies and spent cartridges.   We predicted at the time, in fact, nothing spectacular; just a slow, quiet diminution in crime.

Although I’d love to ask Bob Collins “why so bloodthirsty?”  There haven’t been many self-defense shootings by permittees – we’ve reported on several in this space over the years – although each of them involves an innocent person who is alive that likely would not have been without a gun.  And the stats don’t reliably count the number of deterrences that don’t involve anyone getting killed (like this one) much less without shots being fired.

It’s not much ado about nothing.

In Minnesota, Gov. Mark Dayton and his DFL majority achieved a “Surplus” (read: government got more out of the economy then it had even planned to) by jacking up taxes to unprecedented levels.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker is on track to achieve a surplus through pure economic growth.

Which do you suppose is more sustainable?