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.

The DFL controlled Minnesota state senate– perhaps concerned about the optics of giving massive pay raises to government officials in the state where in the “economic recovery” is affecting mainly, well, government officials – rejected Gov. Dayton’s call for the massive pain increases yesterday.

And Gov. Dayton is…

… well, not happy about it:

“Now I know how President Obama feels. I’m confronted with two hostile bodies of the Legislature,” Dayton told reporters hours after the state Senate voted overwhelmingly to put the brakes on the big salary increases to commissioners that Dayton had ordered.

Dayton said he trusted Republican House Speaker Kurt Daudt but would no longer deal with Bakk without someone else in room.

It’s not news; Tom Bakk and Mark Dayton don’t get along. It’s hard to blame Bock; the Iron Range is drifting slowly to the right, but Dayton’s administration is a wholly owned subsidiary of big metro money.

Maybe there is some devious political maneuvering behind what seems to a political layperson like an outburst, a tantrum. It’s entirely possible; I’m just not that bright.

But I’m wondering if this, here, might not be relevant sooner than later.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama says Muslims are ignorant, medieval racists.

Well, not in so many words. But the point of drawing a moral equivalency between Muslims, the Inquisition and slavery in the Old South is that all three examples are equally bad so we shouldn’t single out Muslims for disapproval.

Agreed. Except Christians abandoned the Inquisition and abolished slavery in the Old South, and thereby made the world a better place. Only one bad thing left for Christians to rid the world of, Mr. President. When should we expect you to get started on that?

Joe Doakes.

Western Civilization, Christendom and America fought through immense internal upheaval to deal with the latter two.

… And predicted this two years ago?

Less than two years after Minnesota raised its cigarette tax to one of the highest in the country, cigarette smuggling has become a growing business in the state. Now officials want more money to combat the problem.

Minnesota Department of Revenue officials seized or assessed untaxed tobacco products in more than 40 percent of the 374 retail inspections conducted through the first three quarters of last year. Before the cigarette tax jumped $1.60 per pack, or 130 percent, retail inspections found untaxed tobacco products only 8 percent of the time. The agency typically conducts 700 inspections a year.

Why, as it happens, you read it here first.

Not that it takes a rocket scientist to figure this out. But it seems the DFL has banned rocket science.

I riff pretty reliably on the history of the left’s fascination with gun control, which is entirely wrapped up in the history of American racism.

There’s a reason for that.

It’s utterly, completely true, as the left reaffirms daily.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama says we shouldn’t condemn Muslims for doing evil because Christians did evil during the Inquisition.

Really? You’re going with the: “Jimmy did it, too” defense?

Pathetic.

Joe Doakes

And we thought “it was George Bush’s fault” was getting old…

I’ll cop to it.  I’ve felt like assaulting people with those idiot “Coexist” bumper stickers on their cars…

…with the weapon of satire and mockery. Nothing more.

Unfortunately, Muslim thugs in neighborhood near Paris took a more aggressive line, pummeling a street artist who’d painted the platitude on one of their walls.

Four Muslims in Porte Dorée (the Golden door), a ghetto east of Paris, beat artist Combo after he refused to take down his Coexist street art. Combo suffered a dislocated shoulder, bruises and a black eye.

To be fair, I’ve been tempted to do the same thing to graffiti artists.  But again, only using the one-two punch of ridicule and derision.

Still, coexistence is possible:

We just have to be clear about our boundaries.

Charles Manson’s wedding is off again after the spree killer and cult leader discovers his betrothed really just wants to build a museum around him:

They apparently thought the Lenin’s Tomb-esque attraction would draw a huge number of visitors and make a lot of money.

But Manson, 80, apparently got wind of the plan and now no longer wants to marry Burton.
“He’s finally realized that he’s been played for a fool,” Simone told The NY Post.

It would have been an ironic turning of the tables…

The tourist attraction was also something of a non-starter because Manson believes he is immortal.
“He feels he will never die,” Simone added. “Therefore, he feels it’s a stupid idea to begin with.”

To be fair, I remember worse business plans back during the dotcom era.

Over the weekend on the Northern Alliance, King Banaian, Ed Morrissey and I got together for the long-threatened “Worst Music of the Seventies” episode.

We picked some true horrors between us; “Last Song” by Edward Bear, “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” by Lobo, “Convoy” by CW McCall, and on and on.

But the general consensus was, the worst of the lot was “I’ve Never Been To Me” by Charlene, one of Ed’s nominations.

If you’re of a certain age, or were accidentally exposed by other means, you’ve heard the song.  But just in case you haven’t heard it, I’ll put it right here for you.

WARNING:  You can’t un-hear this song

I remembered the song all too well – although not as well as I thought I did, which only means that the human psyche is designed to protect itself.  It came out in 1977, not 1979, as I thought I remembered. But I wasn’t completely off; Mary McGregor, most famous for her 1978 hit “Torn Between Two Lovers) released, heaven help us, a cover of the song in ’79, which was the one I remember playing at my first radio job.

But as Ed, King and I played some of the worst music of all time, I took my mind off the pain by looking up factoids about the various songs.  And I learned some amazing stuff; careers started, lost and restarted; major names in the industry slumming between major breaks, or prostituting themselves to find their first major break.

And the story behind this wretched, wretched song was far from an exception.  It involves the classic story; a girl, a songwriter, a producer, and a douchebag disk jockey.

The Girl:  Charlene (born Charlene D’Angelo, although her first stage name was Charlene Duncan, after her her first husband, a justifiably obscure record producer.  She had some chops; she was 23 when she was signed to a subsidiary of Motown.

Yes, Motown.  Signed by no other than…

The Producer:  Berry Gordy, the Father of Motown and one of America’s legendary musical impresarios.  And he’s listed as one of “I’ve Never Been…”‘s producers.

Of course, not everyone Gordy signed was a Temptations or a Four Seasons or a Marvin Gaye, or even a Flaming Ember.  Gordy had his finger in a lot of different musical pies, and had a staff of people who cranked out music in all sorts of genres.

Which leads us to…

The Songwriters:   The song was written by Ron Miller and Ken Hirsch.  You may not have heard of them; not everyone can be Lennon and McCartney, Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King.  Someone has to be Freddie and the Dreamers, Billy Crudup, or Neil Sedaka.  And that was where Ron Miller and Ken Hirsch fit into the music business.

Not without success, mind you; Miller wrote a string of hits for Stevie Wonder (“A Place in the Sun”, “Heaven Help Us All”, and “Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday”), Diana Ross (“Touch Me in the Morning”) and a trove of other music that hovers just outside the edges of the American musical conscience.  And Hirsch was a professional co-writer, having teamed up with Hal David, Howard Greenfield, Doc Pomus, Gerry Goffin, Carole Bayer Sager, Paul Williams and a dog’s breakfast of lesser lights; he scored hits, albeit minor ones, for everyone from Ray Charles to Air Supply.

Together, they teamed up and, in the style of the times, wrote “I’ve Never Been To Me”.  And they gave it to…

…well, everyone.  R&B singer Randy Crawford did it first;  Nancy “Not The One From Heart” Wilson and Walter Jackson both did it the same year Charlene first released it, and the covers (including MacGregor’s, which was the only one to make serious bank before 1982) kept coming.

The lack of sales dogged Charlene; after her second album, Gordy dropped her.  She retired from the music business, and moved to England, where she married a Brit, Jeff Oliver.   Sh was working in a candy store in London in 1982.

The Douchebag Disc Jockey:  Scott Shannon is legendary in the radio business.  This may be good, or it may be bad, depending on your point of view; as a mid-market program director in the mid-eighties, he was one of the prime movers behind “CHR”, or “Contemporary Hit Radio”, which was what “Top Forty” became by the early nineties.  He also was one of the pioneers of the “Morning Zoo” format.   By the early nineties, he was one of the people that smaller-market program directors – including my boss at the time, at KDWB – worshipped and emulated.

If you don’t have a big background in radio, you might have heard of him one of three ways:  he had a really awful TV and radio countdown show back in the nineties; today, he’s one of the hosts of a show called “Dish Nation”, an ultra-cheapo knockoff of “TMZ” which takes footage from various morning radio shows around the country and edits them into a half-hour…well, ultra cheap knockoff of TMZ.  And he’s been the voice-over guy in all of Sean Hannity’s breakbeds since Hannity went national.

But in 1982, he was working as a program director in Tampa, looking to make a splash and make it to the bigs.  And while vaccuuming out the oldies bin, he came across Charlene’s 1977 flop.

And started playing it.

Nobody knows why.  Shannon officially said he liked the song; the more I read about the song’s resurgence, the more I think it involved an intoxicated wager that he, and the world, lost.

No matter; Shannon played it, and played it to death.  Major-market program directors in those days were basically herd animals; if they saw a PD adding a song to his playlist, they’d stampede to follow suit.  No, seriously; “Roxette” became a hit in the US because one PD, KDWB’s Brian Phillips, added them; dozens of other PDs ran in a panicked mob to add the song, not wanting to be left out of…well, whatever it was.

And so Charlene Oliver was dragged out of retirement, put into her wedding dress (really) and dragged out to an English major house to record a video, and became a star, briefly

The Aftermath:  The song went to #3.  And then disappeared.   As, basically, did Charlene.  Motown featured her in a huge publicity campaign, including the movie “The Last Dragon”, featuring cameos and music by a raft of new Motown stars (Vanity, DeBarge, Rockwell, and others, including Charlene).   The others garnered a brief career boost; Charlene faded back into obscurity.

So just remember, kids; talent and hard work might get you someplace.  But being in the right place at the right time has no substitute.

I was listening to Jack Tomczak talking with AFSCME’s Javier Morillo on the lesser talk station yesterday, about the Dayton pay raises.

Morillo said, out of one corner of his mouth, that there is no way you could find people in the private sector who deal with headcounts and budgets like these administrators do, at the same pay, even with the raises.

And there may be something to that.  Most people who can hold their own in the private sector and look for more out of a career than a pension (outside of law enforcement and fire, the military, teachers and a few other fields) look at government work as a purgatory of eternal frustration and career stagnation.

But out of the other side of his mouth, he said that the salaries still aren’t competitive with the private sector.

So if the salaries are not competitive, the “talent” still isn’t going to get attracted from the private sector (or, apparently, local government). So why have the raises?

It doesn’t make sense as a “talent acquisition” measure; Morillo admitted as much.

But as an expanded payoff to the political class?

There, it makes perfect sense.

Jon Stewart is leaving the Daily Show.

Wherever shall I get my daily dose of smug mugging for the camera…:

…in front of an audience of trained chimpanzees who’ve been conditioned to respond on cue?

Colbert, I guess…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Federal Reserve doesn’t like Sen. Rand Paul’s proposal to have the federal government audit the Federal Reserve.
“Who in their right mind would ask the Congress of the United States — who can’t cobble together a fiscal policy — to assume control of monetary policy?” Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said during an interview with The Hill.

Well, Thomas Jefferson, for one. Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution:

“To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures . . . .”
The Founders knew Congress wasn’t going to be made up of experts so they adopted the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) which, in those days, meant Gold or Silver coins of a known weight and purity. Easy to recognize, hard to counterfeit, holds its value internationally and over time.
Modern experts can argue whether the gold standard is good or bad, but one thing’s for sure – it’s much harder for a privately held corporation to flood the market with trillions of dollars’ worth of gold coins in response to political pressure than it is to dump $40 Billion dollars of electrons into the economy, month after month, without any oversight at all.
Joe Doakes

Remember how the Catholic Church used to kill people who translated the Bible from Latin to “Vulgate”, regular languages?

Sometimes it feels like the government wants to put its entire body of laws, constitution included, in a separate language that nobody understands.

And looking at the way our schools are performing these days, that language just might end up being English…

Last week, David Chanen of the Strib wrote a piece – a decent one, actually – about the straw-purchase flim-flam that put a gun in the hand of Ray Kmetz, the New Hope shooter who was legally barred from owning guns at all.

And the story omitted something that almost no story about guns in the Twin Cities media has, in recent or even distant memory.

There was no obligatory, supercilious, and utterly wrong quote from Heather Martens!

Of course, several commenters, starting with Mr. D, got it within minutes of my posting this morning.  Y’all know me too well.

Still, this is a virtual rupture of the space-time continuum.

What next?  A Strib piece about politics that doesn’t quote Larry Jacobs?

I feel like anything is possible!

The DFL is in the midst of an extended campaign of sniveling about the amount of money in politics.

A look at this list of independent expenditures registered from the 10 Minnesota House races that flipped last election shows you why:

The DFL spent more.  Sometimes a helluvva lot more.  And it didn’t work.

Courtesy John Rouleau of the MN Jobs Coalition, via Twitter.

The candidate with the most indy spending in each race is color-flagged.

Of 10 races, DFL groups outspent GOP groups in eight of them, notching a little over 10% more independent spending.  And that doesn’t even tell the whole story.

• Remember all the whining Zach Dorholt did the Twin Cities media did on Zach Dorhold’s behalf about big money in his district?  His independent expenditures were 20% higher than Knoblach’s.
• The GOP spent more on Peggy Bennet than the DFL wasted on Shannon Savick – by about $4,000.  That speaks to what a terrible campaign Savick ran, and what a lousy term she had in office – and the power of the grass roots that turned out to bounce her.  Don’t screw with the Second Amendment outstate!
• On the other hand – Erickson vs. Hancock (over 2:1 in favor of the DFLer) and Fritz vs. Daniel (almost 3:1 for the DFL?)  Holy cow.
• Against that, the GOP indies only outspent the DFL in two of the flips; the Bennet/Savick race, as already noted, and a 15% margin in the Heintzelman/Ward race.

So no wonder the DFL is so concerned about rationing money in politics; theirs didn’t work.  They need less competition.

Last week, the Strib ran a story about a gun issue – a story by David Chanen about New Hope city hall shooter Ray Kmetz and his illegal access to a shotgun, via an illegal straw buyer.

And something was missing.

Did anyone notice it but me?

Leave your guesses in the comment section:  answer over the noon hour.

Mark Dayton defends the pay raises he unilaterally gave out to key members of Minnesota’s political class some of his senior underlings:

Republicans say the raises are outrageous, especially because many commissioners were already making six-figure salaries. But Dayton said the salary hikes were necessary to attract and retain top talent to state government. He says it also puts state pay in line with other units of government.

“I want the best people, and I want them to be able to support their families,” Dayton said. “Obviously the salaries are a lot of money, but I’ve had people leave state government, my commissioners, to go over to local governments and make 50 percent more than I was able to pay them.”

I’m not sure what astounds me more; that Dayton can get away with this, or how it is he figures that local government is getting “the best people”.

As we’ve seen, lots of money doesn’t get “the best…” anything in government.

Unless it’s not “the best” results they’re talking about…