Two years ago, this blog led the Twin Cities media in documenting the extent to which liberal plutocrats and government employee unions were buying the gubernatorial race.

Because remember – money in politics is baaaad, unless it’s from a liberal plutocrat…

…like Alita Messinger, billionaire and scion of the Rockefeller fortune and, need we mention, ex-wife and chief bankroller of Mark Dayton.  She is the prime financier of a network of little-publicized groups – “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”, “Common Cause Minnesota” – that funnel vast sums of money into epic, toxic sleaze campaigns against Republican candidates.

And Alita Messinger is back with a vengeance.  While her epic sleaze campaign against Tom Emmer was able to eke out a win for her ex in 2010,. the uppity peasants went and elected a Tea Party legislature.

And uppity peasants are one thing up with which she will not put:

Philanthropist  [!!!!!!!!] Alida Messinger, the ex-wife of Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton, is putting big money into overturning Republican control of the Minnesota Legislature.

Fundraising reports released Tuesday showed that Messinger gave $500,000 to the WIN Minnesota political fund. That group funneled money to the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, a Democratic-supporting independent expenditure group expected to sink significant amounts into key legislative races.

Among others, they are pouring money into trying to unseat Doug Wardlow in Eagan and Dave Hancock in Bemidji.

Dayton is asking voters to give Democrats control of the Legislature for the second half of his term.

This story is Berg’s Seventh Law in action; months of caterwauling about the Koch Brothers and “ALEC” have been done, entirely and without exception, to either distract attention from Messinger and her fellow plutocrats’ flow of money, or at least to let them say “Yeah, but you do it too!”:

Messinger’s donations dwarfed all others to independent groups so far this year. Three Republican-oriented funds combined had $380,000 on hand.

In 2010, Messinger was a major donor to funds that ran ads attacking Republican Tom Emmer in the governor’s race, which Dayton won by less than 1 percentage point.

On the one hand, this election is the national debate writ small:  Dayton, like Obama, depends almost entirely on big donors – Obama on Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Dayton on the Hamptons and the government unions – to cling to relevance.

On the other?  The Democrats know they can count on at least 43% of the voters to be ill-informed enough to fall for their propaganda machine’s slop.

The GOP’s freshman class in the legislature brought a lot of good, hard-nosed, idealistic conservatives into office – Wardlow and Hancock and Roger Chamberlain and Mary Franson and King Banaian and many others included, many of whom are on Messinger’s hit list.  They’re counting on the disarray in the state party to help them.

The GOP – especially its freshmen, who largely kept their promises – need your support more than ever.  If there were ever a time for Minnesota’s conservatives – a true Army of Davids – to pull off an upset against the DFL’s League of Plutocrats, this is the time.

Because the GOP Freshmen are all that stand between us and Minnesota becoming a cold Greece.

Berg’s Seventh Law – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – is going to be one of the dominant themes of the both the Presidential and the Minnesota Legislative campaigns.

We’ve been subjected to a solid year of caterwauling about the Flying Koch Brothers – who donate a fraction of what George Soros has pumped into liberal politics over the years – and “ALEC“, which “donates” ideas and the model legislation, which is pretty much what the Teachers Union does (except the Teachers donate lots of money too).   And above all, we’ve been subjected to years of liberal do-gooder fronts like “Common Cause” telling us that money in politics is baaaaaad.

Why?

To draw attention away from the extent to which the Democrats are controlled – not “supported”, “controlled” – by plutocrats.

Here in Minnesota, the DFL has basically handed its entire message operation over to “Alliance for a Better Minnesota“, the PR arm of a network of fundraising groups, unions and, especially, wealthy liberals.  They’ve even put Ken Martin, former administrator of part of that network, in charge of the DFL – which is, really, a measure of how much the DFL has become the instrument of the will of a small pack of liberal moneybags.

More on that later.

With Obama’s support among the middle class, small business and blue-collar whites in free fall, and enthusiasm among Latinos, women with kids and the unemployed young stagnant, Obama really has only one important constituency locked up:   the extremely wealthy, and Hollywood.  And since the regular “big-money” donors – people who donate between $500 and $2,500 to the campaign – are bailing on Obama…

…well, you see the conundrum, here, right?  Where’s Obama going to go for money other than the people who still support him completely, and lavishly?

And with that said, who is he going to listen to when it comes time to try to enact policy?

Obama has seen enough Architectural Digest-type interiors in Park Avenue triplexes and Beverly Hills mansions, and on the block in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, where every house is owned by a billionaire, to develop an expertise in Louis XV walnut commodes and Brunschwig & Fils fabrics.

He’s also had plenty of chances to absorb the advice of the kind of rich liberals who like to give money to Democratic presidents. And the evidence that he has taken some of that advice is his initiatives on three controversial issues, each of which involves serious political risk.

Barone spells out how plutocrat money drove Obama’s positions on gay marriage, government-paid contraception and abortion (and the jamming the bill for both down on churches that oppose them on religious grounds), and…

The third issue is the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil produced from tar sands in Canada to United States refineries and create thousands of jobs in the process.

Earlier this year, Susie Buell Tompkins, John Kerry’s fourth-biggest money-raiser in 2004, picketed outside an Obama fundraiser at San Francisco’s W Hotel to protest the pipeline. She wanted Obama’s State Department to block it because she thinks tar sands production hurts the environment and the planet.

Our neighbors the Canadians, who are not unconcerned about the environment themselves, disagree. The pipeline’s promoters say it would produce 20,000 American jobs and would tend to lower U.S. gas prices.

Obama came out on Tompkins’ side and blocked the pipeline.

And enacting non-fiscal, mostly-social policy pushed by plutocrats is great politics, because plutocrats represent real people -right?

If the same-sex marriage reversal seems somewhat risky politically and the contraception mandate considerably riskier, the Keystone pipeline decision seems downright foolish politically. Voters tend to favor it by two-to-one margins — and if they’re not aware of it, the Republicans (and maybe the pro-pipeline unions) will make sure they are.

The priorities of the well-connected, donation-happy and frighteningly well-off will continue to drive Obama’s policy.

And when your liberal friends – and the DFL’s trained chimps like “Common Cause’s” Mike Dean – plump about the evils of money in politics, ask them to clarify who’s money they’re talking about.

As Jim Treacher notes in The Daily Caller, “It’s appalling and undemocratic to raise more money than the Obama campaign” .

Or something. David Axelrod is purporting to be alarmed by a Politico story on how Republican super PACs are planning to spend $1 billion on the election.

David Axelrod

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@davidaxelrod

This election aside, anyone who cares about our democracy should be appalled by this: bit.ly/LedsqA

30 May 12

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Um… Why? Are these guys going back to saying super PACs are evil, now that we all know their own PAC, Priorities USA Action, sucks? “Being better at this than we are is a threat to democracy!!”

It’s Berg’s Seventh Law (“When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds“) in action; it’s easier to declare something the Democrats do badly a vice than it is to do it better.

It’s happening on an even bigger scale in Minnesota, where the DFL and its media enablers have spent the past six months painstakingly attacking the utterly innocuous and mundane American Legislative Exchange Commission as Alita Messinger’s network of plutocrat-and-union-funded organizations make ready to try to buy this election.

More on that later this week.

Speaker Zellers and Senator Senjem had barely brought the gavels down on the session when the DFL’s paid PR organs – Alliance for a Better Minnesota, Common Cause and the unions – and their unpaid ones in the media started chanting the meme: it’d been a “do-nothing” legislature.

That is, of course, objectiively wrong.  The GOP went into the session with big plans, and threw itself into carrying them off.

The DFL and Governor Dayton went into the session with smaller plans:

• Run out the clock
• Veto everything they could
• Hope redistricting would pull their chestnuts out of the fire come November.

It’s not a bad strategy, really; it ties in seamlessly with the DFL’s strategy this past several elections: “lie about everything convincingly enough to sway the stupid vote”.

But in addition to being a really really cynically ofay political strategy, it’s just plain not true. Here’s a sampling of what the “do-nothing’ legislature managed to get past a sluggardly DFL minority and a Governor whose only activities this past session were vetoing legislation and kissing Roger Goodell’s ass:

• Brought the deficit from the “nearly seven billion” of two years ago to a billion dollars and change in surplus today.
• They passed a Voter ID Amendment, which promises to help make MInnesota elections less like Chicago’s
• Furthered policies that led to the creation of 41,000 jobs – almost making up for the 47,000 jobs lost jn 2009 and 2010 when the DFL controlled the legislature.
• Brought Health and Human Services spending increases down from the double digits under DFL mismanagement to just over the rate of inflation.
• King Banaian’s “Sunset Advisory Commission” did something I do not believe any DFL government has ever done; eliminated government offices that had outlived their usefulness.
• Tort Reform
• Changes in school choice laws.

Oh, yeah – and they passed a ton of other bills, which Dayton then vetoed.

Put another way:  a legislature elected by over 50% of each district’s voters was stymied by a governor elected by barely over 40% of the people.

But that matters not to Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota, and its new astroturf spinoff, “Alliance for a Better Legislature”.  WIth nothing to show for their own session, the DFL and its astroturf partners’ only really strategy is…:

• Find a big lie
• Tell it constantly
• Peel off enough stupid people…
• …or fake and duplicate people to flip the Legislature while they still can.

One of this blog’s more consistently popular long-running features is my “Climate of Hate” page, in which I keep a running tally of episodes of liberals exercising their hatred of conservatives, usually via violence.  I started it at the height of the liberal media’s obsession with trying to find and pin an example of violence –any violence, any violence at all – on the Tea Party, to underscore the invariable accuracy of Berg’s  Seventh Law: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds“.   And there are a lot of misdeeds.

And as we sift through the collapse of the media’s concerted, deliberate effort to frame the Martin case as a racial hate crime (and armed self-defense as a disaster, just to keep white liberals interested in the death of a black kid), it occurs to me – we need a similar feature for Media Witch Hunts.

What I”m looking for is cases where the media arrived at a conclusion prejudicial to some conservative institution or belief, looooong before the facts warranted it.  Especially if the facts were completely at odds with the conclusion.

It’s too early to say with the Martin case – but a few other examples pop to mind:

• The Duke Lacrosse Team case.  Not that rich lacrosse players are a “conservative institution”, but the case had a political side too…
• Tawanna Brawley
• The 35W Bridge Collapse, which a good chunk of the Twin Cities media tried to politicize before actual engineering set in.
• Anthropogenic Global Warming
• The Burkett Papers / Sixty Minutes piece about George W. Bush’s Air National Guard record.
• The Evanovich Shooting.  The Twin Cities media lionized the “victim” before they had to admit (quietly) that he was a thug.

I think I’ll call it “The Conservative Is Obviously Guilty”.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s revelation that NBC altnered the tape of George Zimmerman’s 911 call to bump up the “Racist” factor comes the news that Zimmerman didn’t say “It’s a f****ng coon”, but rather “It’s f***ng cold“.

CNN cleaned up the audio from the 911 call.  I took a listen to it.  While some quibble, it seemed pretty clear to me that Zimmerman was saying it was “f****ng cold”.  You be the judge.

If that’s the case – and I believe it is – then what we have here is a case of the media (aka “Obama’s Praetorian Guard”) committing a series of calculated lies, or at least making a curiously congruent set of unwarranted assumptions, that might not have been carefully designed to whip up racial tensions on the part of blacks (to draw their attention away from their catastrophic unemployment rate under Obama) and against civilian gun ownership (so as to make white liberals like “Spotty“, among many others, care about just another dead black kid) – but it’s hard to see how events and news would have unfolded differently if they had been trying.

We saw all of this here in the Twin Cities last fall with the Evanovich case; until Mike Freeman, the Henco prosecutor, exonerated the shooter, the local media was doing its absolute level best to whip up exactly the same combination of racial and anti-gun frenzy.

I was going to invoke Berg’s Seventh Law: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”  But it doesn’t completely appliy.  It’s actually a contender to be a corollary to Berg Seven, if not a law unto itself:

“Any time the liberal media (to say nothing of leftyblogs) “reports” on guns or race, they should be distrusted but verified.  And then, almost invariably, distrusted some more“.

I lost count of the cases in point decades ago.

Always, always, always – when you see stories in the mainstream media about conservatives’ moral crimes and misdemeanors, remember two things:

• Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – has never been challenged, much less repealed.
• It’s the liberal press.  If’s most likely either painstakingly stripped of context, if it’s not an outright lie.

With that in mindThe Gateway Pundit notes an example of the media jumping all over the story of a “Tea Party Leader” accused of rape.

Untrue?  Naturally.  The guy had no connection with any Tea Party organization that anyone with the Tea Party could identify.

We have, of course, run into this before in Minnesota – during the 2010 campaign, Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros “Independent” ran a piece claiming that some schlub who left a profane and insulting message on the AFSCME voice mail was a “Tea Party Organizer”, notwithstanding the fact that not a single actual Tea Party organizer had ever heard of the guy.

If Charles Manson called himself a Tea Partier, the media would run with it.

Today’s “Compare and Contrast” feature pits the “American Legislative Exchange Council” – also known as “ALEC”, and also also known as “This Year’s DFL Boogeyman” – against the “National Conference of State Legislatures“.

“Who”?

Exactly.

Let’s compare them, point by point:

Agenda:  The group promotes a partisan point of view.
ALEC:  Yes – center right.
NCLS: Yes – center-left.

Pushing Agenda:  The group writes “model legislation” that, if passed, would further its agenda, and distributes it to its legislative members (because all legislation needs to be submitted by an elected legislator, naturally).
ALEC:  Yes.  As, by the way, do other conservative think tanks; Cato, the NRA, whomever.
NCLS: Yes.  As, by the way, do liberal think tanks, as well as the political action wings of all the unions.  Especially the NEA.

Content Of That Agenda:  The group promotes an agenda that its opponents find debatable.
ALEC:  Yes – and that fact has pushed the more-deranged reaches of the left to the point where the liberal “attention” has become self-parody, and has gotten to the point where “Berg’s Seventh Law” applies.  Two years ago, they babbled about the Koch Brothers to cover the fact that Alita Messinger was pouring millions into the Minnesota campaign.  This year, yapping like obedient dogs about “ALEC” will obscure the fact that the unions and groups like the NCLS will be doing the same, and much, much more, just by simple dint of there being more of them.
NCLS: Yes – although you don’t hear much about it.

Who Pays The Dues To Join The Group To Learn About The Agenda?:  Both groups charge dues, which by definition makes them “not lobbying groups”.  Someone has to pay for legislators to join and remain “members”.
ALEC:  The members pay their own dues.
NCLS: Dues are paid by the state, using taxpayer money.  One source with background in legislative matters tells me the dues amount to over $300,000 in state money a year.  That’s money that’s being taken from the children to pay for our legislators to think like this.

Attention Group Gets From Its Detractors:  What’s the group’s profile among its opponents?
NCLS: Not much.  Even though it promotes an institutionalist, big-government agenda, and does it with public money, you rarely if ever hear about the NCLS’ actions or agenda.  Or those of the National Education Association, which does all the same things – promoting policy, writing model legislation, trying to inveigle legislators into sponsoring it, yadda yadda.  Or the same operations at AFSCME, MAPE, the SEIU, and on, and on, and on.
ALEC:  The group is to the left in 2012 what “birth certificates” were to the fringe right in 2009, what “Bush’s cruise missiles” were to the “fringe” left in 2004, what “black helicopters” were to the paranoid right in 1996; a stalking horse for their lunatic fringes at best, justification for its own excesses at worst.

Hope we’ve settled that.

If the Minnesoa left has a boogieman in this cycle, it’s the “American Legislative Exchanage Conference”, better known as ALEC.

Founded and run by that other perennial boogieman of the hysterial left, Grover Norquist, ALEC pushes a conservative agenda by hosting get-togethers and suggesting legislation to – wait for it – legislators.  Mostly conservative ones.

Sort of like the AFLCIO, the Ntaional Rifle Association, National Education Association, and practically every other  organization that  pokes is nose into legislation at the state level.

For the past year, a phalanx of leftybloggers and regional media have been passing on the meme hat ALEC is somehow different.  More sinister.

Some have called ALEC a “lobbying” group – which is odd, inasmuch as legislators actually pay to join the group.

Now,the coverage “coverage” of ALEC throughout the lefty alt-media has been utterly uniform in what it mentions (model bills!) and also what it omits (paid memberships), to the point that I’d bet money that the entire campaign is being run by “Media Matters” or some other lefty spin organization.

Just a hunch, mind you.

I bring it up because Beth Hawkins piece earlier this  week about an ALEC initiative on education legislation which reads in its entirety like a news release from a lefty attack-PR firm…

…but omits a number of the key facts that one might expect a “reporter” to provide in covering a “story” – the who, what, when yadda yadda.

Last week, the Minnesota House of Representatives did not meet on Thursday or Friday. The state Senate held a handful of hearings Thursday, but was in recess Friday.

Which was terribly convenient for those members of the Republican caucuses who are also members of the secretive, controversial American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which recently issued members this invitation to a confab where it was to roll out its 2012 legislative agenda:

 

You can plug your nose and read Hawkins’ piece for the details,such as they are.

Hawkins channels Sally Sorenson, snarking that the recess “was terribly convenient” for liegislators who are also ALEC members.

So – who went?

Anyone?

Hawkins tacitly admits she hasn’t a clue – and tries to fob her negligence as a reporter off on the legislators:

If you want to know whether your elected official was one, you will have better luck calling and asking as a constituent than reporters have had.

It’s striaght out of Jesse Ventura’s “Conspiracy Theory”; lack of evidence is, itself, evidence of a coverup!

“It’s complete BS”, said a source on Capitol Hill familiar with the issue.  The source was not aware of any legislators attending the event – “maybe one”, and that seemed like a long shot.

Read the piece.  See if you can find anything in it that doesn’t look like it came from a press release.

And then remember Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection:  “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”

The left is harping on ALEC because the the left’s pressure groups – “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”,and the various unions’ political arms – are about to launch a wave of smear and noise that dwarfs ALEC by many orders of magnitude.

It’s what the media – “alternative” and otherwise does; create whispering campaigns about conservative conspiracies to draw attention away from the real thing.

I’m open to other explanations.

We’ve been talking for quite a while now about the activities of “Draw The Line Minnesota“, part of a chain of astroturf pressure groups being established across the Midwest to put pressure on the redistricting process.

My prediction a few months back, when “Draw The Line” started pitching its game to the usual fawning suspects in the media: there would be an elaborate show of “multipartisanship” for the media to show to the world – sort of like the Congress of Soviets in the old USSR.  Then, “Draw The Line” would release the maps – elaborately gerrymandered maps, which would favor the DFL to an absurd degree – that they were going to release all along.

So far, I’m batting about 1000.

Well, OK – about .800.  I didn’t bank on “Draw The Line” getting a squeaky wheel like Kent Kaiser into the mix.  A few weeks ago, he wrote a letter to the Judicial Redistricting Board pointing out that the bipartisan “Citizens’ Commission” was a sham – a group of well-meaning, earnest people who were being used as window-dressing for a conclusion, and a redistricting solution, that’d been decided in a locked back room well out of public view, and which was a gerrymandered DFL-centric abomination.

But the wheel has indeed squeaked.  Last night on “The Late Debate” (as reported by Gary Gross at LFR), Kaiser took on “Draw The Line” again:

Prof. Kaiser made news by telling the listeners that Common Cause MN were distancing themselves from the Citizen Commission because 2 of the members, Prof. Kaiser and Anne Mason, were Republicans.

That clearly violates one of the top two priorities listed on DTL-Minnesota’s website:

“The campaign seeks to create a better redistricting process in Minnesota that uses the following principles:

1. The redistricting process should be independent and nonpartisan, to minimize the influence of elected officials and political parties in creating districts to their own political advantage.

2. The redistricting process should be transparent to the public”

As Gross pointed out, the commissioners did try to do the job as advertised – something for which I didn’t credit them in advance:

Actually, the Citizens Commission tried living up to both principles. DTL-Minnesota’s powers-that-be corrupted the process, first by making the Commission a partisan effort, then by having Linden Wieswerda draw the redistricting maps, then embargoing the maps until they were filed with the Special Panel on Redistricting.

So if you take Kaiser at his word – and I do – even Common Cause is giving up on the fiction so consistently aped by the media that the “Citizens’ Commission” is anything but window-dressing.

So let’s step through the chronology:

1. The Minnesota Legislature passed a redistricting plan – drawn largely entirely by Republicans (which is one of the prerogatives of winning), but which met the letter and spirit of the body of redistricting law that has sprung up around this process over the past forty years or so.
2. Governor Dayton – notwithstanding the fact that the DFL had no counterproposal – vetoed the Legislature’s map, sending it to the courts.
3. A group of left-“leaning” groups – Common Cause, the Minnesota Council of Non-Profits, the League of Women Voters and Take Action Minnesota – propped up “Draw The Line Minnesota” (DTL).
4. DTL formed the “Citizens’ Commission”, a 15 member panel with two identified Republicans, intended to take “public feedback”.  This, they did.
5. DTL also deployed some cool web toys, allowing pretty much anyone to try to draw their own redistricting map…
6. …which, as we later found, was more or less the equivalent of giving noisy kids in the back of the car a coloring book so they’ll shut up on a long trip.  DTL, notwithstanding all its talk of “transparency”, hired a longtime DFLer to draw its real maps, in secret, and embargoed until the deadline to hand them over to the judicial panel.  The “Commission”‘s feedback was basically a sham.

I think it’s interesting; when I appeared with “Common Cause Minnesota’s” Mike Dean on “The Late Debate”, I invited him onto the NARN;  he had been palavering for the previous two hours about the need for multipartisanship, after all.  His response – I published “Fairy Tales” about “Common Cause”.  (I admittedly erred in the actual source of some of the organization’s funding, and in the scope of one IRS 990 form I produced – which didn’t change the ideology behind their money one iota).

As we can see now, Dean was committing an instance of Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”

Who’s telling fairy tales, now?

If you were paying attention during the Wisconsin recall (also every other political campaign since the rise of the alt-media in the early nineties), you could not only note that the left was claiming that conservative billionaires were influencing the media – you could have predicted it.

Because you, a discerning media customer, know of Berg’s Seventh Law:  to wit, “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.

So you just knew this was going to come out:

Conservative foundations have poured big bucks into new Wisconsin websites that do original opposition research supporting Republican candidates.

[Note to conservative billionaires; some of us in Minnesota would be more than happy to help]

But it’s not like deep-pocketed liberal institutions are sitting on their hands.

Foundations created and funded by billionaire philanthropist and noted liberal George Soros have sunk money into two new media projects in the state – the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and MapLight.

And – you guessed it – it’s a lot more money than there was on the conservative side.

Read the whole thing.

Over the weekend, the usual pack of Sorosbloggers and Trotskytweeps came out with a “story” – that recently-re-elected Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge David Prosser had “choked” one of his fellow justices.  The “progressives” were in high dudgeon, which is about the only kind of dudgeon any of them can do.

Having read a lot of lefty alt-media, I thought I’d defer my judgment, based on two key rules one must follow when appraising the leftymedia:

1. Everything they say is a crock of s**t until proven otherwise, and it is rarely proven otherwise.  I know – that sounds harsh.  But on “story” after “story” after “story”, it’s proven true.  If a leftyblogger writes it, distrust and then verify.  You will almost invariably end up distrusting some more.
2. Remember Berg’s Seventh Law, which for those of you who don’t remember, reads “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.

So what about the allegations against Prosser?

What do you think?

To be fair, there are competing stories; Justice Bradley (one of the court’s stable of liberals) claimes Prosser attacked her; other witnesses disagree (emphasis added):

…the justices were arguing over the timing of the release of the opinion, which legislative leaders had insisted they needed by June 14 because of their work on the state budget. As the justices discussed the case, Abrahamson said she didn’t know whether the decision would come out this month, the source said.

At that point, Prosser said he’d lost all confidence in her leadership. Bradley then came across the room “with fists up,” the source said. Prosser put up his hands to push her back.

Bradley then said she had been choked, according to the source. Another justice – the source wouldn’t say who – responded, “You were not choked.”

In an interview, Bradley said: “You can try to spin those facts and try to make it sound like I ran up to him and threw my neck into his hands, but that’s only spin.

“Matters of abusive behavior in the workplace aren’t resolved by competing press releases. I’m confident the appropriate authorities will conduct a thorough investigation of this incident involving abusive behavior in the workplace.”

Ann Althouse owns this story among the blogs so far.  She says:

I’m reading the Journal Sentinel’s account as referring to 3 — not 2 — sources, with 2 of the 3 versions portraying Bradley as the aggressor: “the source… another source… [a]nother source….”

I want to know not only what really happened at the time of the physical contact (if any) between the 2 justices, but also who gave the original story to the press. If Prosser really tried to choke a nonviolent Bradley, he should resign. But if the original account is a trumped-up charge intended to destroy Prosser and obstruct the democratic processes of government in Wisconsin, then whoever sent the report out in that form should be held responsible for what should be recognized as a truly evil attack.

So far, if I had to speculate (and that’s what I’m doing), it looks like Bradley threw a shrieking fit and hauled off on Prosser, then dried to engineer a press hit against Prosser, and cry “abuse!” like some feckless Jerry Springer guest when busted.

I could be wrong.

But I’m feeling pretty comfy with that interpretation of the events so far.

When I coined the various “Berg’s Laws“, they were – doyyyyyyy – tongue in cheek.

And yet for all that, they are absolutely impeccable reflections of human nature . Especially Berg’s Seventh Law:

Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection – When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.

It popped into mind this past week, when Governor Dayton, the DFL and the media (pardon the serial redundancy) accused the GOP of “theatre of the absurd” in its budget process.

The House GOP Caucus reponded – but “Berg’s Seventh Law” could have sufficed.

Becuase for all of the Governor’s chatter about “absurd drama”, it’s he that’s been stalling.  Which is, naturally (and according to Berg’s Seventh) behind the chatter:

To help the process along, the Legislature requests of all governors that they submit their bills within 15 days of their recommendations. This year, that deadline was March 1.

How mal has the governor’s feasance been?

Agriculture funding bill, introduced March 28, 27 days late.

State government finance bill, introduced March 28, 27 days late.

Health and human services budget bill, introduced March 28, 27 days passed deadline.

Transportation finance bill, introduced March 22, 21 days too late.

Environment and natural resources funding bill, introduced March 22, 21 days too late.

Higher education bill, introduced March 21, 20 days too late.

Governor’s tax increase bill, introduced March 21, 20 days after the deadline.

Education finance bill, introduced March 17, 16 days passed the deadline.

To recap: After failing to meet the deadline to even get his own budget bills considered by the Legislature, Governor Dayton is now demanding the Legislature meet his new arbitrary deadline.

The reason for this – as for most instances of Berg’s Seventh – is simple; Dayton can count on the fact the media will carry and promote his narrative, to cover his own slow, ponderous tracks.

Bring video cameras.  Lots of them.  And don’t interact with a “union” protester without at least one camera on you.

Because yesterday, the unions and the other organizations leading the protests were warning their members “not to be provoked” by the Tea Party counterprotesters.

And you know Berg’s Seventh Law:

Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection – When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.

Or planned misdeeds.

So keep those cameras spinning.  Because the media will hang everything that goes wrong on you, and you know it.

Remember – whenever lefties attack conservatives practices or ethics, it’s to cover up their own, er, shortcomings.

Katherine Kersten – just about the only decent columnist at the Strib these days – notes the bleeding obvious and, of course, Berg’s Seventh rearing its head:

Since Nov. 2, we’ve heard lots of grumbling from Minnesota Democrats. In a year of unprecedented GOP gains across America, they’re not satisfied that their candidates won every statewide office in our state (subject to a recount in the governor’s race).

DFLers, it seems, are sore that they didn’t win the Minnesota House and Senate as well — completing their sweep. They don’t seem to grasp that the tide that washed through the Minnesota Legislature was a nationwide phenomenon, as voters shouted “enough” to a Democrat-led glut of taxes, spending and deficits. Today, Republicans hold more legislative seats across the country than at any time since 1928.

DFLers should be counting their blessings. Instead, from their blinkered perspective, the GOP’s capture of the Minnesota Legislature appears aberrant and dreadful. And they’ve found a bogeyman to blame: Minnesota businesses. Their gripe seems twofold. First, business, through independent groups like the Coalition of Minnesota Businesses, spent too much — i.e., “bought and paid for” the Legislature. And, second, business groups unconscionably exploited voters with negative advertising.

Kersten caught it.

I caught it.

A good chunk of Minnesota’s voters caught it.

The DFL doesn’t want people to catch it (emphasis added):

We hear this so much that the reality comes as a surprise: Minnesota Democrats and their allies actually outspent Republicans and their allies in 2010 roughly 2 to 1, though final totals won’t be known for some time.

The Senate DFL caucus raised four times more than the Senate GOP caucus, and the House DFL caucus raised two times more than its GOP counterpart. The DFL state party raised over three times more than the state GOP. Mark Dayton raised more than one and a half times what Tom Emmer did.

But Dayton, the DFL and their benefactors, just don’t want you to know that:

Contrary to the DFL mantra, voters’ attention to business groups’ message was perfectly logical. On Nov. 2, the No. 1 issue was jobs — how to grow them, how to keep them here, and how to attract new, job-creating businesses to our state…Without business’ involvement, Minnesota’s electoral field would largely have been left to Democrats and their biggest donors: public employee unions such as Education Minnesota, AFSCME and SEIU, and Indian tribes with big-bucks casino interests.

Look for a huge PR and media campaign against corporate and business spending, including solemn “analysis” pieces at the Strib and MPR.

Some of my liberal readers have been asking what I think about the Tom Hackbarth story.

My response; I can’t think much, since there’s really not much story. KSTP-TV’s piece reads, pretty much in its entirely:

State Rep. Tom Hackbarth was carrying a pistol when he told St. Paul Police he was jealous and looking for his girlfriend.

Officers took the gun from him calling his behavior “borderline terroristic.”

We’ll come back to what the police said and, more importantly, did.

The House GOP leadership reacted quickly and, under the circumstances, appropriately, suspending Hackbarth from his slated committee chairmanship for the next sessoin pending some sort of resolution.

Now, predictably, the regional leftymedia is in full dudgeon over this story.  As is their wont, they are filling in the blanks with a whoooole lot of innuendo, supposition, and flat-out fantasy.

As PJ O’Rourke once said, “I’m not a liberal, so I’m not an expert at stuff I know nothing about”.   I’m not going to pretend to have answers.  Indeed, all I have are questions.

Everything Is Stalking:  The accusations against Hackbarth aren’t all that clear; he was accused of “stalking-like” behavior by the always-articulate Saint Paul Police Department.  No charges have been filed.

That last bit is rather vital; no charges have been filed.

Remember – in the world of domestic law, including “abuse”, “domestic violence”, “stalking” and the like, men are considered guilty until proven innocent.  If the police had had anything beyond suspicion, they’d have come up with something.

Was Hackbarth doing something inappropriate?  It’s possible.  Very, very possible.  Hackbarth is separated, after 25 years of marriage.  Being “separated” is an emotional Cuisinart set on “mangle”;  a lot of hitherto-buried emotions run very close to the surface; people do things that they’d never normally do in real life (and I’m pleading the Fifth Amendment at this point).

So what did Hackbarth do?  We don’t know; not at all, other than “not enough for the SPPD to charge him with anything at all“, but apparently enough to draw their interest.  We’ll come back to that, too.

That complete lack of known facts hasn’t stopped the regional leftyblog brain trust from jumping to conclusions like a bunch of synchronized Shamu clones at a rhetorical Sea World.

Conservatives – Guilty Until Proven Anything At All:  The City Pages’ Hart Van Denburg gets the “who, what (sort of), when, where, why and how”, in his piece on the incident – and still manages to squeedge in some innuendo to fill in the factual blanks:

Republican state Rep. Tom Hackbarth went looking for a date the other day in a Highland Park alley, with his Smith and Wesson .38 strapped to his waist.

Innuendo; as Ven Denburg himself notes elsewhere in his story, Hackbarth has a carry permit.  Connecting his “stalking” and carrying a gun is convenient, and connecting the two certainly fits the institutional left’s narrative about conservatives, shooters and social interactions.  But it’s an innuendo unsupported by any actual facts – like, say, arrests or charges or any indication of intent that’d link the two factoids.

Which takes us to innuendo number 2:

The Most Important Right Of All:  Van Denburg continued:

He chose an odd place to park his pickup truck, too: The Planned Parenthood clinic lot, where security cameras caught him on tape.

Saint Paul’s pro-abortion community has come to regard all of Ford Parkway as its private property.  While the building itself doesn’t jump out at you, once you do know what you’re looking for, it’s hard to escape the fact that there is more going on in the neighborhood than just a baby-disposal mill.  There are apartments, stores, the Highland Park library, houses…people all over the place.  Ford Parkway is not all about Planned Parenthood.

But you’d never know that from the leftymedia’s reaction.  Was “near the Planned Parenthood Clinic” an “odd” place to park, as Ven Denburg called it?  Or was it a place to park his pickup, that happened to be near Planned Parenthood?

A justifiably skittish guard at the Ford Parkway clinic called the cops to report an unidentified man carrying a gun on the property. No surprise there.

More innuendo.  “Justifiably” skittish?  Planned Parenthood’s “justifiable” skittishness has led to a “justifiable” suspension of large chunks of the First Amendment within eye-and-earshot of the clinics in Saint Paul and elsewhere around the country.  And now, apparently, the Second Amendment as well; being seen with a firearm that is legal and permitted under Minnesota law “justifies” Planned Parenthood’s rent-a-cops calling in the heat?

What other civil liberties does Planned Parenthood get to selectively excise?

Worse, naturally, are the “Feminist” bloggers.  “Red Sonya” from the always-incontinent Shakespeare’s Sister tries Hackbarth and finds him guilty based on…well, you guessed it, more innuendo:

Who the hell decides that, after meeting someone for coffee, you are immediately entitled—nay, obligated—to make sure that she’s not with another man?! Oh, stalkery entitled douchebags with unchecked privilege and no sense of boundaries who believe that women are their property and have no respect for their autonomy, that’s who!

Perhaps.

Or people (male and female – it swings both ways pretty equally) whose senses of boundaries are temporarily (one hopes) warped by their current circumstances.

Or both.  We don’t know – because “Red’s” take is based entirely on filling in the factual blanks with a whole lot of PC filler.

While stalking is frightening enough, the loaded gun makes this even scarier. Hackbarth does have a permit for concealed carry, so his actions weren’t illegal.

Buuuuuuut…

But since he began his controlling behavior immediately after meeting this woman, I’m skeptical of his ability to shrug off this event—and, from his twisted perspective, her “lie”—without having a douchetantrum of massive proportions.

What a wonderful world, where people can issue the binding diagnosis of “douchetantrumitis” (let me check the DSM-IV for that one) while knowing zero facts whatsoever.

When guys like this escalate, altercations easily become fatal with the addition of a loaded gun to the mix.

And they much more easily don’t.

Look – it goes without saying that stalking – or even just being excessively clingy after less than a whole lot of dates – is a bad thing.  And it doesn’t excuse any bad behavior to add “don’t discount the weirdness that comes with the whole emtional bumper-car ride that goes along with divorce, because everyone reacts differently, and most everyone does something that they’ll wind up regretting one way or another, whether it’s getting married to the first person you sleep with or blowing all your money on strippers maybe just having a real hard time getting used to the differing expectations people have in the dating world after being off the market for most of three decades”.   Readjusting to single life can be a real bitch.

[Side note to conservative grownups in the audience; watch some idiot leftyblogger take that last sentence and run a post entitled “Berg Excuses Stalking”, ignoring that bit at the front where I said “It doesn’t excuse bad behavior…”.  It’s pretty much inevitable – Ed.]

The Victorian Vapours:  Oh, yeah – Hackbarth had a gun.  After his run-in with the SPPD, it was confiscated.  And then, after all was said and done, he got it back.

But the presence of a firearm – especially in the hands of a conservative, anti-abortion Republican who is engaged in liberal innuendo-fodder – acts on leftybloggers and lefty journalists like a green-and-yellow cape does on a Vikings fan.

The normally sensible David Brauer left a comment in a Facebook thread:

[O]f course, it seems like creepy potentially violent stalking, but then again, these gun dudes carry their pieces around everywhere. it’s like their wallet. and of course, he was in scary, scary Highland. It’s no Cedar, Mn!

Well, doy.  It doesn’t do you any good if you don’t have it with you when you need it.

And check out the leftyblogs (rhetorically, mind you – don’t actually read then) for the number of references to the fact that the revolver was “fully loaded”.   Huh?  You’d carry an empty gun?  To what – butt-whip a robber?  Or a half-loaded one?  For what – impromptu games of Russian Roulette?

Grrr. I’m sorry.  Dumb people bug me.

Oh, yeah – let me reiterate; he got the gun back when the episode was over.  Which may not be any sort of testimony to Hackbarth’s alleged actions or state of mind, but it is a pretty good sign that he did nothing remotely illegal – and that’d be in an area of law where telling a woman that those pants do make her butt look bigger is fifth-degree domestic assault, a misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail and a $10K fine.

(The above sentence is intended as satire.  The first idiot leftyblogger – and I’ll stipulate that that isn’t entirely a redundant phrase – that tries to run that into “Berg advocates stalking and makes light of domestic violence” will both incur my disinterested wrath and be lying, anyway.  Just don’t go there).

Berg’s Seventh Law?:  Remember – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.  The leftymedia is romping and playing with the Hackbarth story because somewhere out there there is a video of a DFL legislator standing outside an elementary school in full S&M garb, bellowing expletives at a first-grade teacher that spurned his advances, waving a katana.

No, I can’t prove it.

Any more than any of the innuendoids above can prove any of their stuff.

But it’s a law, after all.

UPDATE: Welcome, “Developers are Crabgrass” readers.

Which is sort of like saying “hey, look at all the leptons”.  Both of them are at present largely hypothetical, abstruse constructs.

Oh, yeah – read my piece above.  Zaetsch is lying, as usual.  The guy wouldn’t know “factual” if “factual” spiked his Metamucil.  Read my actual post – something Zaetsch, or whomever sent him the link, clearly didn’t do – and decide for yourself.

Better yet, leave a comment and engage in the discussion.  If you’re used to the level of conversation over at all the blogs that are part of the “Stillwater Asylum” – “Lloydletta”, “The Dump”, “Crabgrass” and wherever Bremer is ranting and whatever pseudonym Weiner us using these days – you’ll find things are a whooooole lot more rational here; you have to bring some intellectual game, in a way you’re not used to .  Give it a shot!

Berg’s Seventh Law – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.” – remains one of the most accurate formulas in American politics today.

The left has been caterwauling about “Corporate Money in Politics” – the fallout from the Citizens United case, which allowed corporations to donate money to political campaigns.  They’re concerned, so they say, about money “polluting politics”, and want it stopped, stopped, for our own good.

Berg’s Seventh Law says that they are trying to draw attention away from their own activities.  And the Law is a law for a reason; it’s always right:

A record $87.5 million has been spent by one union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, to elect Democrats. Paid not by voluntary contribution from its members, but by forced union dues from workers—who are paid by taxpayers.

I’m opposed to unlimited spending by any outside interest group or individual, and I believe full disclosure should be required on all campaign spending. Thanks largely to the Supreme Court ruling on the Citizens United case, however, the law encourages this political money pornography. But it’s laughable to hear President Obama and the Democrats suggest that this is somehow a Republican phenomenon.

Six of the top 10 overall political action committee spenders are union groups, with the vast amount of contributions supporting Democratic candidates. The spending by labor unions, with AFSCME as Exhibit A, makes a mockery of President Obama’s bogus boogeyman scare tactics about supposed shadowy foreign interests—a charge to which CBS anchor Bob Schieffer asked David Axelrod, “Is that all you got?”

Contrary to what Obama and the Democrats would have us believe, the Tea Party is largely fueled by small-dollar donations from American citizens in amounts of $200 or less.

Here in Minnesota, unions and the Dayton family and associates have been pouring money into the PACs “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” and “Win Minnesota” and “The 2010 Fund”, to the tune of double Emmer’s campaign fund.  Most of the money is from out of state.  Almost all of it is in huge chunks, as opposed to the small donations that have floated the Emmer campaign – a phenomenon first noted in this blog in 2002, when it came out that the average donation for the “populist” Paul Wellstone was five times as large as the average donation for Norm Coleman, even though both had about the same amount of donations.

The DFL; Democracy For Lease.

A few years ago, I codified “Berg’s Seventh Law“, an iron-clad law of political behavior:

When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.

Now, when I started seeing the usual flock of DFL spokesbloggers warning that the GOP was sending “an army of thugs” (that’d be the Minnesota Majority’s $500 reward for info leading to the arrest and conviction of people intimidating voters), I figured it was something of an argument after the fact; Mark Dayton’s entire campaign so far has been an exercise in rhetorical voter intimidation.

Think about it; how do you get someone like Mark Dayton elected?  He’s a terrible candidates; stiff, brittle, a trust fund baby with an awful record and amessage that is diametrically out of tune with  a huge swathe of the post-Obama electorate.

The only way to get him elected is to make Republicans stay home.

And that’s really been the crux of the entire Dayton campaign; there has been precious little talk of “why Dayton would be a great governor”, because nobody, even a large part of the DFL (remember, Dayton only won the primary by a cat’s whisker) believes it.  The entire DFL campaign has been negative.

Still, trying to convince people to stay home is one thing.  Actively attacking your opponent’s campaign is another.

In Saint Paul, Republicans have long believed that the DFL was sending people out into the streets to vandalize, steal and destroy Republican campaign material, especially lawn signs.  I think I’ve had one lawn sign survive a campaign – and while I’ve been perfectly willing to chalk it up to bored kids vandalizing things (and even just to bored , DFL-voting Hamline University kids, since often my GOP signs would be stolen or destroyed, while my neighbors’ DFL signs would remain untouched), somtimes it did seem a little too systematic to be completely random.

And while I don’t believe this is necessarily evidence that the DFL is systematically trying to destroy Emmer signs, it certainly does show that some DFL activists are not above mere vandalism, but serious overkill.

A DFL activist, Frank Dolinar, was arrested yesterday for burning Emmer signs:

The man in question is Mr. Frank Dolinar. Mr. Dolinar is a former Professor at Saint Cloud State University. His LinkedIn page says his one interest is “electing DFL candidates.”

Dolinar

Just remember – whenever the DFL starts babbling about Republican “thugs” and “voter intimdation”, start looking for DFL thugs trying to intimidate you.

Because it never, ever, ever fails.

I direct you to Berg’s Seventh Law: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”

And so when lefties all over the internet started chanting about a “scandal” involving Republicans getting money from overseas, I thought “there has got to be a story about Democrats getting at least twice as much coming up shortly”.

Are these hunches ever wrong?  Don’t be silly. That’s why they’re called “Berg’s Law”, and not “Berg’s Half-baked Theory”.  Emphasis added;

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate criticizing GOP groups for allegedly funneling foreign money into campaign ads have seen their party raise more than $1 million from political action committees affiliated with foreign companies.

House and Senate Democrats have received approximately $1.02 million this cycle from such PACs, according to an analysis compiled for The Hill by the Center for Responsive Politics. House and Senate GOP leaders have taken almost $510,000 from PACs on the same list.

How did we maintain a democracy before blogs, talk radio and Fox news, anyway?

Al Franken is at -6 on the “passion index”, according to Rasmussen via the Strib:

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters in Minnesota finds that 50 percent of voters in the state approve of the job Senator Al Franken is doing, including 25 percent who strongly approve. That’s unchanged from surveys in November and January. On the other side of the ledger, 46 percent disapprove, 31 percent strongly.

The reason, of course, is yet more proof of Berg’s Seventh Law; while the Dems routinely tell the world that John Kline, Michele Bachmann and Erik Paulsen went to Washington to promote an “extremist” partisan agenda, Al Franken – “progressive” author and failed “Air America” host – actually did get elected after running a campaign based purely and expressly on being an obstreporous, Kos-friendly extremist.

Meanwhile, Rasmussen found that 67 percent approve of how Senator Amy Klobuchar is performing, with 42 percent who approve strongly. The overall approval rating is a nine-point increase from November. Just 30 percent disapprove of Klobuchar, including 15 percent who strongly disapprove.

A-Klo, on the other hand, realizes the great political truth; that once you’re a Senator, politics is mostly about not losing.  Playing it safe.  Not making the dumb mistakes. Barring the uncontrollable (like Norm Coleman running against a media shooting star in a bad year for Republicans – twice!), being an empty skirt is a recipe for a long career in Washington.

Berg’s Seventh Law – when liberals defame conservatives, they’re projecting – just keeps gaining evidence.

Remember three years ago, when the wahabbi global warmingists were demanding “scientific Nuremberg trials” for global warming skeptics – as if belief in sound science were akin to a war crime?

Yep. Unethical.  And it should be investigated.  Not as a war crime, naturally; more like fraud, with the complicity of vast swathes of government, academia, the media and the UN:

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate Files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

Senator Inhofe also called for former Vice President Al Gore to be called back to the Senate to testify.

“In [Gore’s] science fiction movie, every assertion has been rebutted,” Inhofe said. He believes Vice President Gore should defend himself and his movie before Congress.

To be serious for a moment, I’m not sure Algore’s little flight of fancy – as damaging as it was – deserves criminal investigation.  Ignominy will do.

But for a bunch of “scientists” and politicians who tried to gin up a worldwide fraud to bring money and political power to themselves (allegedly)?

I think it’s worth a look.

Today’s “Worst Olberman In The World” award goes to Keith Olberman.

I’d know that what we’re seeing at the Tea Parties is, at its base, people who are afraid – terribly, painfully, cripplingly, blindingly afraid…

Olberman alone makes Berg’s Seventh Law settled science.

Remember Berg’s Seventh Law?  “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are projecting.”

Or is the word I’m looking for “transference”?

At any rate – remember when the left insisted the Tea Parties were “astroturf”, or fake grass-roots? 

Oh, what do you think?

A Web site popped up in January dedicated to preventing the tea party’s “radical” and “dangerous” ideas from “gaining legislative traction,” targeting GOP candidates in Illinois for the firing squad.

“This movement is a fad,” proclaims TheTeaPartyIsOver.org, which was established by the American Public Policy Center (APPC), a D.C.-based campaign shop that few people have ever heard of.

But a close look reveals the APPC’s place in a complex network of money flowing from the mountainous coffers of the country’s biggest labor unions into political slush funds for Democratic activists.

Here’s how it works: What appears like a local groundswell is in fact the creation of two men — Craig Varoga and George Rakis, Democratic Party strategists who have set up a number of so-called 527 groups, the non-profit election organizations that hammer on contentious issues (think Swift Boats, for example).

Lefties would insist that the Tea Parties themselves would be the same.  Notwithstanding the fact that other than Dick Armey’s think tank’s high-level message-mongering and a few approving pieces on Fox news, nobody’s come up with the faintest

Varoga and Rakis keep a central mailing address in Washington, pulling in soft money contributions from unions and other well-padded sources to engage in what amounts to a legal laundering system. The money — tens of millions of dollars — gets circulated around to different states by the 527s, which pay for TV ads, Internet campaigns and lobbyist salaries, all while keeping the hands of the unions clean — for the most part.

The system helps hide the true sources of funding, giving the appearance of locally bred opposition in states from Oklahoma to New Jersey, or in the case of the Tea Party Web site, in Illinois.

And this whitewash is entirely legal, say election law experts, who told FoxNews.com that this arrangement more or less the norm in Washington.

Such a shame that the Supreme Court opened poltics up to big money, huh?

Here’s a story that’ll make the media wonks on NPR’s On The Media knit their brows with academic exasperation:  Fox News is the most trusted news net:

A Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, 10 percentage points more than any other network.

Thirty-seven percent said they didn’t trust Fox, also the lowest level of distrust that any of the networks recorded.

I could jump up and down and invoke Berg’s Seventh Law (when liberals defame conservatives, it’s pretty much always pre-emptive projection), but this story actually brings up a much more interesting question.

The numbers hint at that question, being split among ideological lines:

There was a strong partisan split among those who said they trusted Fox — with 74 percent of Republicans saying they trusted the network, while only 30 percent of Democrats said they did.

CNN was the second-most-trusted network, getting the trust of 39 percent of those polled. Forty-one percent said they didn’t trust CNN.

Each of the three major networks was trusted by less than 40 percent of those surveyed, with NBC ranking highest at 35 percent. Forty-four percent said they did not trust NBC, which was combined with its sister cable station MSNBC.

Thirty-two percent of respondents said they trusted CBS, while 31 percent trusted ABC. Both CBS and ABC were not trusted by 46 percent of those polled.

Of course, the wonk class – hanging out at the cocktail parties as they do with their pet media figures – are “deeply concerned”, and chalk it up to some form of defect among the hoi polloi:

“A generation ago you would have expected Americans to place their trust in the most neutral and unbiased conveyors of news,” said PPP President Dean Debnam in his analysis of the poll.

Which, neither he nor apologists for the American media will tell you, is actually an anomaly worldwide.  In most of the world’s nations, press outlets have an overlying political orientation; The Times and The Frankfurter Allgemeine are center-right, Die Zeit and Le Monde are center-left, The Guardian is neo-socialist.  Like Fox, they report the news basically straight – but they are honest about their papers’ political worldviews.

The purported American media tradition says, on the other hand, that reporters and news outlets are to be not only completely detached – which violates several laws of human nature.  And this detachment – some of them persist in calling it “objectivity” – is enforced by nothing more than their more-or-less earnest say-so.

There’s a longer discussion about the nature of the “objective” American media, and how it’s not necessarily a huge conspiracy that they trend left-of-center while strenuously denying any bias.

But the main point is this; the European system works – provided that one believes that the news consumer is well-informed enough to account for his/her news outlets’ institutional biases.

The real question is “why does the American media and wonk establishment find this idea – that the people can do their own filtering without needing to trust to the dubious “objectivity” of “gatekeepers” to do it for them – so threatening?

Debnam:

“But the media landscape has really changed, and now they’re turning more toward the outlets that tell them what they want to hear.”

Debnam echoes the line that regional media wonks – and institutional media “criticism” shows like NPR’s On The Media (which is more of a labored weekly apologetic for the media’s excesses and liberal slant than anything) – will likely use in discussing the news; that bias about which the media is forthcoming is worse than unstated, denied bias is not only a bad thing, but a symptom of some deeper pathology among the simpletons who bypass the elites’ gatekeepers.

It’s a line that sounds, more and more, like “the peasants are revolting”.

(Disclosure: I haven’t watched a network newscast from any network, barring the odd emergency special report, in years and years).

Gallup has Obama’s approve/disapprove numbers dead even.

Oh, that Gallup.  They must be working for Karl Rove, too.

Question, Democrats:  As more and more polls show Obama in freefall, will they all be in bed with Fox, too?

And since Zogby has predicted a Democrat victory in every race since 1984, would it be safe to say that a) he’s in bed with MSNBC, and b) you lefties’ snarking about Rasmussen’s supposed Fox-friendliness is an example of Berg’s Seventh Law?