While I’ve assumed most mainstream media is filtered through a statist lens for decades, now, there was a time I assumed that news organizations – made up of reporters like the ones I used to work with and, occasionally, was – would, if they bothered to cover a story at all (because who needs coverage of the IRS scandal, or Mark Dayton’s mental state, after all?) at least endeavor to get the basic facts right. 

Not even the whole “are the facts of a highly-charged story about a contentious issue correct”, like Rolling Stone’s rapidly-unravelling UVA rape story. 

No, little things – like “does the story actually exist“?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In 2012, the heads of big Minneapolis law firms wrote a letter in the Star Tribune against The Marriage Amendment, warning they wouldn’t be able to recruit the best and brightest lawyers if it passed.

So how’s that been working out for them?  What statistics are kept on gay Minneapolis lawyers to see if they were right, or if they were lying?

Joe Doakes

People still think it was about achieving empirical results?

(SCENE:  Mitch BERG is sitting in the waiting room at the dentist’s office, waiting on a checkup. Avery LIBRELLE enters the room, holding a throbbing tooth.  BERG tries to hunch down behind his magazine – but LIBRELLE notices him).

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!  (Speaks with difficulty through pain) Thereth  an epidemic of rape on American univerthity camputheth.

BERG:  Wow.  Your mouth sounds painful. 

LIBRELLE: You’re dodthing the queththion!

BERG:  Well, no, I…OK, so how do we know about this “epidemic”?

LIBRELLE:  Becauthe American univerthitieth thay tho. 

BERG:  (Wincing in pain as LIBRELLE thpeakth) So in other words, university administrations, carrying out their own home-grown investigations, driven by a feminist lobby that actively disparages the idea of due process for those accused of rape, and with a vested interest in resolving all ambiguous cases – say, cases where everyone involved was blind drunk and there were no witnesses, or even the occasional malicious accusation – as rape, say there’s an epidemic. 

LIBRELLE: Yeth.

BERG: So you think data coming from university administrations – who act in these cases primarily as political rather than criminal-justice bodies – are the appropriate people to investigate allegations of felonious assaults which our society justifiably regards as second only to murder in moral gravity?

LIBRELLE: Of courthe.  Who elthe knowth more about thtudentth than the univerthity thythtem?

BERG:  OK.  So in the same vein – who knows more about priests than their various dioceses, arch-dioceses and the Vatican?  When priests were being accused of sexually abusing children, by your logic, the church was right to try to deal with it by itself.

LIBRELLE:  OF courthe not. 

BERG:  How so?

LIBRELLE:  Of courthe not. 

BERG: No, I mean why do you think not?

LIBRELLE:  And I anthwered you.  Of courthe not. 

BERG:  That’s no answer.

LIBRELLE:  Yeth it wath.

(ASSISTANT calls BERG’s appointment; LIBRELLE attempts to get up and leave the room ahead of BERG)

BERG:  Um, hello?

LIBRELLE:  Get an exthternal invethtigation, thucker.

(And SCENE)

If you don’t support Elizabeth Warren in 2016, the terrorists have won.

…inveighs me to pray for a safe outcome for everyone in the siege in Sydney, where latest reports say the police have stormed the Lindt cafe where Iranian cleric named, according to press accounts, Man Monis has been holding between 15-30 hostages.  According to Australian press reports, Monis is on bail after being charged with murder and sexual assault, and has spent the past several years sending hate mail to families of Australian service people killed in action – sort of a Muslim Fred Phelps.

And I do pray for exactly that.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit part of me hopes the sonofabitch got two shots in the head.

UPDATE:  Clearly the entire story is BS.

Mr. Monis, the alleged hostage-taker, was allegedly armed with a pump-action shotgun – which is, at close range, more deadly than any “assault rifle”.  Monis has been convicted of harassment, and was out on bail on murder and sexual assault charges.  In addition, Australia has strict civilian gun control.

There’s just no way a person with Monis’ record could get a gun!  That would be illegal.

A Long Island woman, jailed for being a Tea Partier, wins big bucks in her lawsuit:

Southhampton cops searched her and found a legally owned rifle that she was transporting from a nearby rifle range. She contends a deputy sheriff arrived on the scene later and said to her, “I bet you are one of those Tea Party people.” When Genovese said she’s gone to Tea Party rallies, he allegedly said, “You’re a real right-winger, aren’t you?” and “You are a ‘Teabagger’” and then added that she’d be arrested for terrorism to make an example of other “right wingers.”
“Ms. Genovese was subjected to a level of abuse because [authorities] did not share the same political views as she did and saw this as an excuse to deny her even the most basic civil rights,” her lawyer Frederick Brewington said.​​

Winning money is nice – but that’s one thing government officials are never short of, time whining notwithstanding.

Far better that the sheriff deputy spend four days in jail himself; who qualified immunity” is supposed to cover police officers carry out duties they can reasonably be expected to perform; political persecution is not what we hire them for.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Another flawed, biased, incorrect study by big-shot economists proving the raising the minimum wagehurts poor people most.

Clearly deniers.  Won’t admit settled science.  Overwhelming consensus of experts in the field.  Like Hilary.

Joe Doakes

Like – what was Nick Coleman’s version of it?  Like peasants attacking the observatory with pitchforks and torches?

Today, I’ll be taking a bit of a day off on the NARN to take care of some political business.

But filling in for me today – a real blast from the NARN past:  John Hinderaker and Brian Ward!

What will he talk about?  It’s anyone’s guess – and I won’t be there to worry about it.  But tune in anyway!

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!

It’s an easy time to feel pessimistic about America. 

Forget the fact that we have the worst president in history (althought that doesn’t help much).  Part of the disaffected right would have you believe that our entire political class, GOP and Democrat, are about the same.  I see your objection – Boehner’s depressing cave on spending – and raise you Ted Cruz and Justin Amash and a few good Tea Party Republicans.

But yet I feel some optimism. 

Part of that is I’ve pretty much internalized Kevin Williamson’s The End Is Near (And It’s Going To Be Awesome), a masterpiece from last year about the inevitability of the eventual collapse of the current political system, and how, if we’re lucky and work hard, it could actually free up some space for the free market to actually solve things.

Along those same lines comes this piece from Victor Davis Hanson.  You need to read the whole thing – but this was buried near the conclusion:

America is not saved by our elected officials, bureaucrats, celebrities, and partisan activists. Instead, just a few million hardworking Americans in key areas — a natural meritocracy of all races, classes, and backgrounds — ignore the daily hype and chaos, remain innovative and productive, and dazzle the world.

The silent few of a forgotten America have given the entire country an astonishing standard of living that is quite inexplicable.

The road to that paragraph is well worth travelling.  Go there.

Some liberal blog has given us this handy list of places at which to do your Christmas shopping. 

Could there be a better metaphor for life in “progressive” America in 2014 than this photo?

Thanks, fumingly furious progressives!

Don’t forget – tomorrow is the Minnesota Gun Rights Seminar and Member Meeting.

It’ll be at the Chaska Community Center starting at 9AM. Come out, hear some great speakers, and find out what the good guys are going to be doing in the coming year.

And most important: become one of the good guys.

For more info, check out the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (Web, Facebook, Twitter)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Office feminist managed to get the big stapler jammed. Spent 10 minutes banging on it, couldn’t figure out how to use the needle-nose pliers to get the retaining clip off the hinge pin so she could remove the staple head to clear it. Had to ask one of the men in the office to do it: took him two minutes, works like a charm.

Good thing that’s not sexist at all. Wouldn’t want anybody to be oppressed by any patriarchal stereotypes. Might have to spend the next month in diversity training.

Joe Doakes

Heads will no doubt roll.

The new GOP majority in the Minnesota House of Representatives is going to try to capitalize on the red/blue, rural/urban divide down which the votes broke last month.

This is a mixed bag of good and bad – more about that later today – but we had a little blast from the past in the reporting on the subject.

One of the left favorite mediums in discussing America’s culture war is one floated most famously by the loathsome Paul Krugman in the middle of the last decade – The idea that Blue America pays more taxes, and Red America is a net consumer of government, taxpayer paid aid.

Krugman’s thesis ignores a lot of inconvenience details; the effect that massive amounts of federal land and military bases in sparsely populated states has on calculating net government “aid” (as if the wing of B1 bombers in North Dakota are as good as cash in the pocket for the locals), to say nothing of the distorting affected the sheer numbers in the various farm bills. Not to mention the fact that blue America has higher per capita income (not to mention cost-of-living); suddenly, Paul Krugman opposes progressive taxation?

In reporting on the Minnesota GOP’s new tack, Minnesota public radio Tim Pugmire notes:

The latest numbers from the nonpartisan Minnesota House Research Department show the seven-county metro area pays 64 percent of the state’s taxes and gets back 53 percent of the major tax aids, credits and refunds. By comparison, the 80 non-metro counties pay 36 percent and get back 47 percent.

seems like a pretty cut and dried number, right?

So how much of that disparity was a result of road and farm spending in sparsely populated counties?

How much stems from the state’s decades of spending truckloads of money on the iron Range, where the standard of living and per capita income is relatively low, but state spending is extremely high?

Or from the significant disparity in income and cost-of-living between the Twin Cities and the rest of the state?

What might be a more useful comparison; compare different types of spending per capita between the Metro and greater Minnesota: The metro might be getting pretty seriously shorted on agriculture spending – but I’m going to guess the per capita transportation spending has shifted greatly towards the metro in recent years.

The point? Like Paul Krugman’s misleading black and white comparison of two numbers, the real story is a lot more complicated than the media is showing you.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We’re number One – in presidential motorcades. And room service tab.

Absolutely un-blinking-believable.

As my buddy quipped: “For that kind of money, we could have bought Port Au Prince and held all future meetings there, for free!”

Joe Doakes

It’s all getting just a little bit banana-republican.

Don’t forget – this Saturday, December 13 is the Minnesota Gun Rights Seminar and Member Meeting. 

It’ll be at the Chaska Community Center starting at 9AM. Come out, hear some great speakers, and find out what the good guys are going to be doing in the coming year.

And most important:  become one of the good guys.

For more info, check out the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (Web, Facebook, Twitter)

To:  Students of Harvard Law School
From: Mitch Berg, Angry Dean
Re:  Test Schedules

Dear Most Annoying Students in the World,

Starting at 8AM Monday morning, please line up in the front hall of the administration building in alphabetical order.  You will all be issued refund checks.  Because clearly we at HarvLaw have failed you as an institution.

The evidence – you all know that term, right? – is right here:

Those Harvard students have produced an open letter, in which they demand that their examinations be delayed. “Like many across the country,” its authors claim, students “are traumatized” and “visibly distressed” — to the extent that there is now a “palpable anguish looming over campus.”

I hope I’m long dead before I have people from big law firms writing me, chocking back their outrage at his institution for turning out such a vacuous pack of hamsters and calling them not only “lawyers”, but “Harvard Law School Grads”.

The “national crisis” that has been provoked by the cases of Garner and Brown, they argue, has left them with no choice but to “stand for justice rather than sit and prepare for exams.” And, like their brethren at Columbia, they contend that their “being asked to prepare for and take our exams in this moment” amounts to their “being asked to perform incredible acts of disassociation” — requests, which taken together, have led them “to question our place in this school community and the legal community at large.”

I can’t wait to see you vacuous children of boundless class privilege try that on a client in the real world; claim the violence inherent in the system makes it impossible for you to come into the office and work on your cases.  But at least you won’t “question your place in the legal community at large”, because by that point you’ll be transferring to the “fast food community”.

Justifiably so.

The bottom line? That students must be given “the opportunity to reschedule their exams in good faith and at their own discretion.”

And in good faith, I, your dean, will allow you and your faith and discretion to move your exams to any time another law school will let you, provided you get admitted.

Pick up your checks.  You haven’t failed. I have.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Popular Mechanics asks “Could we build a Ring-world?”

Dude, we can’t even build a FENCE.

Joe Doakes

Moderate your expectations, folks.

In February, I’ll have been doing this blog for 13 years.  And in that time, I’ve been through just about every kind of cycle there is – all between 5:30 and 7AM, weekdays.

Some days – especially in the runup to election time – the material just comes from I have no idea where; I sit up at 7AM, and I’ve got five posts written for a day, and two for the next day, and I wind up taking notes for several more on my phone during the day (major shout-out to the WordPress app for smart-phones!).

Others?  It’s like dog-paddling through maple syrup to get anything done at all.  Which is part of the point, for me;  developing the self discipline to write something every day I’m physically able.  It’s helped in a lot of other parts of my life, so it’s a big net gainer for me.

This last month has been different.  And it occurs to me why.

Two years of DFL majorities in the Legislature have meant no down-time; the Democrats made a big run at Second Amendment rights in 2013 and again last session; the customary stretch of downtime between election and session, where I normally write about music and history and leave politics alone, evaporated.

This is my first fall without substantial politics to write about since the fall of 2011.  And it took me a while to remember how to deal with those two months of inter-MN-political writing doldrums.

The answer, of course, is to take a deep breath and find other things to write about, things I enjoy rather than out of some misguided notion to try to save the world.

And everything’s pretty darn good, once I get past that!

Two truisms at play in this story:

1. If someone has to mandate your equal outcome [*], then you probably really aren’t equal.
2. Economics 101:  Forcing people to pay more or less for a good or service than they naturally would will distort the market.  Force the price up, and you’ll get a black market.  Force the price down, and you’ll get less of the good or service.

With that in mind, see if you can see both currents in this piece, about developers in NYC and their reaction to being forced (as a condition of a bailout) to include “Market-Rate rentals” which are, in fact, well below the market rate.

A Queens luxury tower that was bailed out by the city is blocking the large terraces of a few affordable units so tenants above with tiny balconies don’t get jealous, one resident claims.

Erin McFadzen chose her middle-income — and rent-stabilized — corner apartment at Long Island City’s new Q41 building because of its wrap-around terrace.

But when she moved in, half of it was fenced off by what she calls a “Jurassic Park”-style barricade.

The ugly 6-foot-high wire barrier also interferes with views from every window of her sixth-floor, $2,186-a-month pad.

“We’re caged in,” McFadzen told The Post.

“Every time someone comes over, I have to explain why the fence is there . . . and tell them we’re rent stabilized, like it’s a badge I have to wear,” she said.

And the tenants aren’t the only innumerate ones; the developers (read the story, for crying out loud) are just as bad.

The innumeracy washes over us in waves in this piece:

1. Rent Control/Rent Subsidy (as well as the city’s systematic demonization of landlords, much as Minneapolis and Saint Paul are doing, although not nearly as effectively as NYC does – yet) is exactly why it’s impossible to find an affordable apartment in NYC.  “If you make a good or service worth less than it would naturally be, there will be less of it”.
2. The city shouldn’t be bailing out failed developers – so the developers shouldn’t be complaining that the bailout comes with strings attached requiring them to include rentals for much lower rates than the market would ordinarily bear.
3. Real estate in New York being as much about image as value, the “low-income” tenants shouldn’t be surprised that the developers are doing something to give the residents paying the actual market rates some sense that they’re getting something justifying the premium that they’re paying for the upscale places they’re renting.  And in that case, that means making the the full-rent balconies a better deal than the cut-rate ones.  Even just by the seemingly bitchy means they used.

If governnment has to make you equal, you’re probably not.

[*] Civil rights legislation is, of course, not an example of this; civil rights and liberties are not given to us by a landlord, but by our creator.  Nobody can justly take them away.  Housing is not a right – much less a specific class of housing for a specific price.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Courts struck down obsolete “one-man-one-woman” marriage laws because gays were treated unfairly.

Incest laws prevent birth defects . . . but gay couples don’t have that problem. So should gay cousins be allowed to marry? And what about Muslim cousin arranged marriages – shouldn’t we respect that culture?

Once you begin pulling out the foundation stones of the social framework . . . .

Joe Doakes

What, in all honesty, prevents any group of two or more people with legal standing to sign contracts from getting “married”, anymore?

SCENE:  Avery LIBRELLE is waiting at the light rail station on University Avenue. 

Seeing Mitch Berg driving past, LIBRELLE leaps and, incredibly, sails through BERG’s passenger side window and lands sitting upright in BERG’s passenger seat.

BERG:  What the…

LIBRELLE:  Hahahahahahahahaha, Merg!    You and your conservative teabagger friends “won” the South!  Now, you can keep it?

BERG:  Um, right.  Mary Landrieu lost, leaving not a single Democratic Senator, Governor or Democrat-controlled Legislative chamber in the entire old Confederacy. 

LIBRELLE:  Yeah!  You got all the racists!    The journey you started in 1968, when you inherited all the racists with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, is complete!  You guys got the KKK vote!

BERG:  You’re still babbling about the so-called “Southern Strategy?”

LIBRELLE:  Yes!  The racists, upset about the Civil Rights Act, all voted GOP!

BERG:  OK – let’s accept for a moment purely for sake of argument that the South is more “racist” than the rest of the country – which is deeply debatable, but again, it’s for argument’s sake – and that people vote first and foremost over racial issues. 

LIBRELLE:  Yep.  Absolutely!

BERG:  OK.  So the South voted for Nixon – but then, so did Vermont and California and, in 1972, Michigan, New York State, and even ultraliberal Minnesota.  So they’re all racists, too, right?

LIBRELLE:  The South were voting their consciences, though!

BERG:  Were they indeed?

LIBRELLE:  Even though these rhetorical questions of your always end up with me falling into a trap that makes me look stupid and uninformed, I’ll say “hell yeah!”

BERG:  OK – so the Democrats controlled every single southern Congressional delegation until 1994.  And the GOP didn’t win a majority of southern Governor’s offices, to say nothing of state legislatures, until well into the 2000s. 

By the way – the Klan hasn’t been a factor in Southern Politics since the sixties, maybe the seventies at the very latest.  So it would be more realistic to say that Republicans oversaw the extinction of mainstream racism in the Deep South. 

(BERG’s car pulls up to stoplight.  LIBRELLE steps out, walks between traffic to nearest train station).

BERG:  Avery?  Avery?

To: “Barry One”
From: Mitch Berg, Justice Warrior
Re: Fundraising

After pop tart du jour Lena Dunham used her latest book to elaborately but coyly accuse you of raping her while attending liberal cesspool Oberlin College (IDing her “rapist” as a Republican, which is about as subtle at Oberlin as identifying a “choreographer” is in Montana), I wondered how long it’s be before you sued.

And it seems we may be edging toward an answer.

So just to tell you – I will offer you two hours on my talk show, any time of your choice, to raise money any darned way you want.

Have your people call my people.

That is all.

…is so bad, even Larry Jacobs can’t shill for it anymore.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

So those of you who follow this post through to the bitter end will be ten feet tall and armor plated in about fifteen minutes.

There’s an election in two years – and the Democrat Party has decided to try to kick off the battle via the medium of the popular song.

There are three contenders, and they’re all pretty freaking awful.

But American needs to know; what’s the worst of the noxious bunch?

Let’s meet the offenders.  Then let’s get down to voting.

Contender #1 – The Hillary Clinton Country-Western Song: This is Hillary’s opening bid for popularity in a part of the country that would rather catch a stream of projectile diarrhea than vote for Hillary Clinton.

It’s got everything that people in America’s heartland look for in a leader: central-casting “country” people; folksy abbreviations on videos (“Learnin’ Hindsight’s Always Right”, “‘Cuz Our American Dream’s At Stake”), because we like our videos to do their local patois the same way Hillary Clinton does it in her speeches – clumsy and patronizing; clunky, greasy references to inside-the-Beltway chanting points (“let’s smash that glass ceiling!”, indeed).

Hard to pick the biggest groaner; for my money, it’s the moment around 1:50, where the hot babe on the motorcycle gives the guy a ride on the back. That’s right, guys – you’ve been living in two-income families for a generation now, but deep down inside you’re all still sexists!

You just know some consultant – in my mind’s eye, “he” looks like Pajama-Boy – got major kudos for this idea. Maybe even got it stolen by a bigger consultant.

The video reportedly cost the Hillary PAC a million dollars to make.  I have a hunch most of it went to AFTRA fees for the guys in the band – the only four males in Los Angeles would could pull of “Country Western Band”.

Or is the worst song…

Fauxcahontas’s Faux Faulk Frenzy:  On the surface, it seems like Elizabeth “I Lied About Being Cherokee” Warren’s song couldn’t be any more different;  lazily-written, badly-sung pseudo-“folk” music is as organic to the cultural left as Whole Foods, Terry Gross or Gluten-Free Coffee.

And whomever produced this atrocity got some of the surface anti-glitz “glitz” as right as Hillary’s crew got “country” wrong.  “Run Fauxcahontas Run” has lots of the veneer of bad coffeehouse folk music; the big chorus stretches eleven syllables to cover fourteen syllables of rhythm; the dork-fingered guitar-playing sounds so much like it’s being played by a Sylvia-Plath-obsessed Vassar women’s studies major…

…that you know it can’t be.  It takes professionals – session musicians earning triple the musicians union scale – to play that badly, that well; it takes a professional singer to to edge that close to sounding like a lesbian slam poet without serving into pure caricature…

…as much as the lyrics do.

Before It Was Hilarious:  Of course, the control for this experiment was this little ditty from 2008, a classic hymn to The One…

…complete with adoring crowds chanting, Nuremberg-style, in the background.

Nothing more needs to be said, right?

Please?

A Time For Choosing:  OK – so what is the worst Hymn to a Candidate ever?

This may be the most important vote you take this year.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

One reason I love reading Mark Steyn is he has a gift for choosing exactly the right word, or recognizing one when chosen by another.

The Pedestrian Crossing diamond isn’t enough, the government must add the diagonal arrow below. Because without it, motorists would panic, scanning the sky and ditches and rear-view mirror, saying “What? What? Pedestrian? Where? Where?” So road crews add the helpful diagonal arrow pointing at the crosswalk, to let motorists know where to look for pedestrians crossing the street – in the crosswalk.

“The lower sign is an exquisitely condescending touch. A nation whose citizenry is as stupid as those markers suggest they are, cannot survive. But, if we’re not that stupid, why aren’t we outraged?”

“Exquisitely condescending.” Yes. Precisely correct. We, the bureaucrats, are so clever and you, the driving public are so stupid, that we must add the diagonal arrow pointing to the crosswalk lest you mow down an entire class of schoolchildren on a field trip because the diamond sign wasn’t a sufficient hint.

Joe Doakes

i’ve always loved Steyn’s way with the word.

And “exquisitely…” Is one of the most wonderfully effective yet underused adjectives in the book.