The MN Gun Owners Political Action Committee (MNGOPAC) has endorsed Stewart Mills in the Eighth Congressional District:

“Since he first entered the public arena, Stewart Mills has been an unflinching supporter of gun rights,“ said Mark Okern, Chairman, Minnesota Gun Owners PAC.  “Minnesota gun owners can count on Stewart Mills to stand firm for our Second Amendment rights 100% of the time.”

Mills entered the public policy arena in early 2013 when his video criticizing newly proposed federal gun control measures went viral.

“As a member of Congress, Stewart Mills will be a huge improvement over Rick Nolan for gun owners.  Nolan has repeatedly endorsed measures which would curtail our liberties and our gun rights, earning him an F from the NRA,“ said Okern.

I think this endorsement will help to highlight to Iron Rangers the yawning gap between what the DFL delivers – urban environmentalist embargoes on their livehilood, gun-grabbers and PETAzoids poking around in their gun cabinets, and ongoing taxpayer-paid infanticide that most of them oppose – with what they promise.

The problem with most – as in the vast majority – of media people when writing about the Second Amendment is that most of them haven’t the foggiest idea about the subject, and all of their sources on the subject are fellow liberals.

That’s the only excuse I can think of for this piece of suppurating journalistic drainpipe-meat from ABC News:

Gun owner and Second Amendment advocate Marlene Hoeber isn’t your typical member of the National Rifle Association. In fact, she isn’t a member of the NRA at all.

The Oakland, Calif., laboratory equipment mechanic regularly visits firing ranges, where, along with other members of her gun club, she shoots a variety of weapons. “Guns are fun to play with,” she says. She even makes her own ammunition.

But wait!  There’s a whammy!

She has no use, however, for the NRA’s conservative political agenda. By her own description, Hoeber is a feisty, liberal, transgender, tattooed, queer, activist feminist.

She belongs instead to another gun advocacy group entirely–The Liberal Gun Club–whose membership ranges, she says, “from socialists, to anarchists who can quote Marx, to Reagan Democrats.”

It’s also tiny – 1,200 members.  And I’m going to guess they’re in the Bay Area – the media only refers to a “Northern California Chapter” – and I’m going to guess they’re long on the “liberal”:

Its mission, she says, is to provide “a place for gun owners to talk to other owners about neat gun stuff, without having to hear how the president is a Muslim-usurper-socialist running a false-flag operation.”

Aaaaaand there you go.  (The NRA has no such institutional belief; to the extent you can find birthers in the NRA, I’m gonna guess you’ll find just as many “Bush took down the Twin Towers!” and “Trigger” types in the LGC.

Still, if they’re solid on the Second Amendment – let a thousand flowers bloom, I say.

Still, they could do with a little less narrative-mongering:

Although liberal gun owners are presumed not to exist, Gardner says they most certainly do.

There are plenty of Democrats in the NRA – and Minnesota’s Real American movement freely acknowledges we’d have never gotten Shall Issue permit reform without Democrat support.

Less paranoia.  More firepower.

Detroit mom repels three armed daytime home invasion robbers.

Her weapon of choice?  A “Hi-Point” carbine – a pistol-caliber semi-automatic rifle.  It’s lighter, handier, and doesn’t have the overpenetration of a full rifle-caliber rifle (or intermediate-caliber “assault rifle”), but has better accuracy and, perhaps most importantly, that “I’ve got a F***ING MILITARY GRADE RIFLE, AS***LE!” vibe about it.

Open note to the Detroit cop at the end; yes, you’re gonna get ’em – but how about a shout-out to the woman who actually took three scumbags off the street?

In related news, Nicholas Johnson, author of Negroes and the Gun, willl be joining me tomorrow on the NARN.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Interesting take on Halal foods from Scandinavia, where there is no racism, of course. Not like here.

It’s European.  It must be a better kind of racism.

I saw this idea in “Think” “Progress”…:

Five state lawmakers in Minnesota have decided to take on the “Minimum Wage Challenge” and live off of a typical budget for a worker who makes the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

…and I thought “I loved that skit the first time I saw a bunch of upper-middle-class liberals pretend to be poor to advance their narrative the first time I saw it – when Barbara Ehrenreich did it!”

Back during the high times of the early 2000’s, Democrats assuaged their self-righteousness about poverty by reading Ehrenreich’s Nickeled And Dimed.  Ehrenreich – an upper-middle-class congenital “progressive” who has lived her life by her parents’ dicta “never cross a picket line and never vote Republican” – made a great show of pretending to live as a minimum wage worker in various parts of the country.

It was BS, of course.  Ehrenreich approached minimum wage life the way you might expect someone who’d never had to do it.

And I wouldn’t expect much better from the DFLers that’ll be doing this iteration of the stunt:

Rep. Frank Hornstein (D) told CBS Minnesota that it made him take more notice of his costs. “An orange juice was $1.79. That’s not something that I would normally notice,” he said after getting breakfast from McDonald’s Dollar Menu. “Making the decision to take the bus today versus taking the car will save me a little money for dinner. For food,” he added.

Another lawmaker who lives far from the capitol, Rep. Shannon Savick (D), said, “I can live on what they set for food. I don’t eat a lot,” but she worried about transportation. Where she lives, “if you don’t have a car, you don’t go anywhere, because there is no public transportation. Driving will cost more than what they’re allowing me.” The other three participants are Democratic Reps. Karen Clark, John Lesch, Jason Metsa.

I first became a Second Amendment activist in the eighties.  It started out as an intellectual exercise – during my KSTP show from 1986-1987, it was mainly a libertarian though exercise.  It became much more personal in 1988, when I thwarted a break-in in my Saint Paul duplex with a .22 caliber handgun. 

At the time, there were eight “shall issue” states – states where the government was obliged to give carry permits to demonstrably law-abiding citizens who applied.  Most of the rest of the country, including Minnesota, was “may-issue”, better described as “arbitrary issue”, where getting a permit usually required some sort of social or poltical connection.  New York City was famous for denying permits to commoners but issued them liberally to celebrities and tycoons; the police chief in Bloomington Minnesota issued exactly one permit to a woman – his wife. 

And for over a third of the country, it was impossible to get a carry permit at all. 

And the burgeoning of applied Second Amendment rights since then has been one of the epic grassroots political victories in American history. 

David Kopel, writing at Volokh, charted the progress.  As of today, 2/3 of the American people live in shall-issue states, and non-issue states have dwindled – technically – to zero.  Arbitrary issue is now about 14%. 

And even that doesn’t fully show the magnitude of the swing:

Moreover, some parts of the Yellow “may issue” states are already issuing permits as if they were Green [Shall Issue]. In New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Delaware, permits are issued by local authorities, and in some jurisdictions, local authorities issue in a manner consistent with respect for the right to bear arms. Permits are rarely issued in Maryland, and are extremely rare in New Jersey.

The six hold-out states are increasingly isolated. Not counting tiny Rhode Island and Delaware, the four larger hold-out states each are all bordered mainly by Green [Shall Issue] states. (Mass. by upper New England and Connecticut; NY by Penn., Vt., and Conn.; NJ by Penn.; Maryland by Penn., Vir., and WV). It should also be noted that in two of Delaware’s three counties, permit issuance is often approximately what a Green [Shall Issue] state would do.

Big Liberalism posits itself as a battle between the little guy – “the 99%” in their self-serving lore – against the cigar-chomping “Monopoly Millionaire” tycoon caricature.  But the gun issue has shown the American political dichotomy as it really is; the plebeians are the majority of Real Americans who trust each other with civil liberty, versus a self-appointed patrician “elite” who believe that government (which disproportionally represents them) should have an unquestioned monopoly on force.

 Minnesota.  The state where everything that isn’t mandatory, is banned. 

Or at least someone will be busy trying to ban it. 

Phyillis (who else?) Kahn is tackling Big Flavored Water, and the scourge of second-hand water vapor:

The bill would mean you could not use an e-cigarette in indoor buildings or public spaces that ban smoking, just like traditional cigarettes.

E-cigarettes have exploded in popularity. So far, there have been no conclusive medical studies on their health impact and that has e-cigarette fans saying let’s wait before we put on any restrictions.

There is no evidence that they harm even the consumer (at a level beyond that caused by coffee or energy beverages, to say nothing of alcohol), much less anyone else. 

And people enjoy them – which, in Minnesota, is a big red flag:

Since she opened her e-cigarette shop in Uptown, Sina War, an ex-smoker herself, has seen a surge in business.

“Electronic cigarettes allows me to have the same habits and allow me to cut the nicotine level down,” War said.

War says Rep. Phyllis Kahn’s bill will hurt those trying to quit traditional smoking. 

“Having her include this in the clean air act makes electronic cigarette smokers who use this to quit smoking, go back to where they were 10 months back,” War said.

But it’s for your own good!  Because the DFL cares!

Kahn says she is concerned about the explosion in popularity of e-cigarettes.

“They are everywhere. Now, just think were they are going to be a year from now,” Kahn said. “Just remember, we are not banning it. We are just regulating it the same way cigarettes are.”

“Just think were they are going to be a year from now”

Enjoying flavored water vapor and, maybe, quitting smoking? 

I suspect tobacco tax revenue is playing its role.

(Title courtesy Gary Miller)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberal rag Washington Post finally notices that student loans prevent young people from buying a home.  And it’s getting worse as home prices are starting to climb in some areas.  Holy Study Hall, Batman: debt is Bad!

Geez, ya think?  It all comes back to the Instapundit’s observation on middle class markers. That’s the mentality that got us into this mess.

Middle class people need decent jobs.  Decent jobs require college degrees.  College is expensive so government gives out student loans to help people achieve the middle class marker of having a college degree to get a decent job.  Makes sense, right?

Middle class people own their own homes.  Homes are expensive so government guarantees home loans to help people achieve the middle class marker of owning a home.  Seems reasonable, doesn’t it?

Everything sounds great until we realize that student loan debt makes students ineligible for guaranteed home loans.  Worse, we can’t give debt relief to students because the profits from student loan interest payments are pledged to pay for Obama-care — we need the money from Peter’s student loans to pay Paul’s health insurance premiums.

Wouldn’t be so bad if homes were more affordable except the reason home prices are high is the Fed is pumping $60 Billion Per Month into the banking economy to shore up home prices so existing homeowners feel like we’re in a recovery, thus freezing out future generations from buying.

Do you ever wonder what would happen if we just stopped?  Just . . . stopped?

Stop subsidizing student loans.  What would happen?  Colleges would restructure themselves to become affordable.

Stop subsidizing banks.  What would happen?  Banks would adopt sensible banking practices to stay afloat.

Stop propping up home prices.  What would happen?  Home prices would collapse now so our children can afford to buy them (you and I are hosed already, we’ll never see prices return to save us).

Stop propping up any sector of the economy, just let everyone sort it out themselves.  Could it truly be any worse than what we have now?

Joe Doakes

That which can’t be sustained, won’t. That which can’t be sustained but is by brute government force, will – until the money runs out.

And it’s gonna run out.

The worst kind of political errors are ones where conservatives give liberals an unearned moral victory in a grab for the high ground. 

Carly Melin – who was a 25 year old HamLaw graduate who was airlifted to northern Minnesota precisely in time to meet residency requirements to run for the seat for which the DFL had hand-picked her, when she was elected in 2010 – is taking on Big Law Enforcment on their opposition to the proposed Medical Marijuana bill, in this case in an interview in a Northern Minnesota newspaper (emphasis added):

[INTERVIEWER]: Gov. Dayton has said he will not sign the medical marijuana bill this legislative session if it does not have support of law enforcement. In fact, he made a campaign promise to that effect. The Minnesota Law Enforcement Coalition has made it clear they will not endorse the bill. Where does that leave you?

[MELIN]: We never expected the bill to be passed as written. We expected to use it as a starting point to discuss legislation going forward. Unfortunately, the Law Enforcement Coalition will not discuss specific provisions of the bill with us, and have instead stated that they are opposed to the legalization of medical marijuana for any purpose. In other words, they have a blanket opposition. This makes it very difficult to have a conversation on how to shape the bill.

 Q: Why do you believe MN’s law enforcement agencies are so adamantly opposed to medicinal marijuana?

A: There are many individual members of law enforcement who are supportive of medical marijuana. In fact, one of them is a co-author of the bill, Rep. Dan Schoen, state representative and police office from Cottage Grove, MN. Law enforcement in northeast Minnesota have discussed some flexibility, which is a lot further than we got with the statewide leaders. It is the head honchos and lobbyists down in St. Paul who are the problem. Marijuana being illegal is big business for law enforcement. The forfeiture of property relating to marijuana crimes brings in big revenue to law enforcement agencies. They are worried that legalizing medical marijuana is a step toward the decriminalization of marijuana, which in turn would impact their budgets. I hope that isn’t the basis of their opposition to medical marijuana because there are sick Minnesotans in need of this medicine, but in my experience carrying this legislation they primarily express concerns that this will lead to the recreational use of marijuana.

Leave aside the potential benefits of legalizing recreational marijuana use (I’m not a weed kinda guy, but it’s cut out one of the foundations of the Drug War that’s made parts of Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Richfield and the Brooklyns such lovely places); this is pot for sick people.  Nothing more. 

Melin’s right – and it’s galling for a libertarian-conservative.  Allowing cops, district attorneys and the like set medical policy is just as stupid as letting letting health insurance companies write a national healthcare law.  The entire reason for the opposition is the protection of their own little fiscal fiefdom. 

As Craig Westover points out on Facebook (I won’t link to it, since not all of you are Facebook members), this is a fundamentally conservative stance, getting government out of the relationship between doctors and patients. 

This is an issue where conservatives – especially those who care about liberty in its many forms – should be out front.  Not cowering before a law-enforcement group that is largely beholden to “progressivism”.

The conclusion of Peggy Noonan’s latest is really a self-contained message on its own:

What happens to a nation whose elites laugh at its citizens?

What happens to its elites?

It barely needs context.

But the context is damning enough, and I urge you to read it.

One of the things you learn by studying “progressivism” (as starkly opposed to classical liberalism) is the contempt its practitioners have for their subjects.

Er, citizens.  Sorry.  That was a slip.

Micheal Barone reviews a book – ““The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.” by Fred Siegel – and  runs down some history of this contempt, a history lesson you just didn’t get in high school:

Progressivism was repudiated in the landslide election of Warren Harding in 1920, at which point disenchanted [post-Wilsonian] liberal thinkers turned their ire against middle-class Americans who, in the “Roaring ’20s,” were happily buying automobiles, refrigerators, radios, and tickets to the movies.

The novels of Sinclair Lewis, the journalism of H. L. Mencken, and the literary criticism of Van Wyck Brooks heaped scorn on the vast and supposedly mindless Americans who worked hard at their jobs and joined civic groups — Mencken’s “booboisie.”

I’ve always been annoyed by the retroactive regard Mencken gets – but given his resonance with our intellectual “ruling class”, it makes disturbing sense. 

These 1920s liberals idealized the “noble aspiration” and “fine aristocratic pride” in an imaginary Europe, and considered Americans, in the words of a Lewis character, “a savorless people, gulping tasteless food,” and “listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.”

This contempt for ordinary Americans mostly persisted in changing political environments. During the Great Depression, many liberals became Communists, proclaiming themselves tribunes of a virtuous oppressed proletariat that would have an enlightened rule…The supposedly mindless 1950s, Siegel recalls, were actually a time of elevated culture, with thousands of Great Books discussion groups across the nation and high TV ratings for programs such as Shakespeare’s Richard III, starring Laurence Olivier.

And let’s not forget the left’s tenuous relationship-of-convenience with rationality:

Liberals since the 1920s have claimed to be guided by the laws of science, but often it was crackpot science, like the eugenics movement that sought forced sterilizations.

Other social-science theories proved unreliable in practice. Keynesian economics crashed and burned in the stagflation of the 1970s.

The academy and the media it spawned has spent nearly 100 years trying to give Real America an inferiority complex. 

Read the whole thing.

Who used to look like an extra from “Gangs of New York”, and married way, way up twenty years ago today?

Why, that’d be my friend and long-time radio colleague Ed Morrissey and his wife Marcia, that’s who!

Congrats to the Morrisseys, and may they have many, many more anniversaries!

My biggest complaint lately is “the blog doesn’t have enough puppy pictures”.

I’m a uniter, not a divider.

The Congressional Budget Office has released one of those rare financial reports that has both sides crowing and declaring victory.

Who you believe – or weight the highest – likely depends on your economic literacy, politics, and what you do for a living.

The headline on NPR  – “CBO: Minimum Wage Hike Could Boost Paychecks – And Cut Jobs” – left wiggle room both ways:

Whatever you already believed about raising the federal minimum wage, you now have more ammo for your argument, thanks to a report released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, titled “The Effects of a Minimum-Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income.”

Yes, you’re right: Raising the wage in steps to $10.10 an hour by 2016 would push employers to cut jobs — about 500,000 of them, says the CBO, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress.

On the one hand, according to one reading of the report, a hike to 10.10/hour – about 40% – would “lift nearly 1 million” out of poverty, and put money into “wallets of workers who are eager to spend”, and give a “raise” to 16.5 million people.

But then there’s those 500,000 jobs lost.

By the way, that’s about the softest estimate you can imagine; the CBO report itself says “As with any such estimates, however, the actual losses could be smaller or larger; in CBO’s assessment, there is about a two-thirds chance that the effect would be in the range between a very slight reduction in employment and a reduction in employment of 1.0 million workers” – meaning about a 30% chance that over a million jobs would be lost.

I’d bet those odds.

Oh, yeah – and “the poor” aren’t necessarily working for minimum wage, and it’s not “the poor” who’ll be getting most of the benefits:

Just 19 percent of the $31 billion would accrue to families

with earnings below the poverty threshold, whereas 29 percent would accrue to families earning more than three times the poverty threshold, CBO estimates.

That’s three dollars going to the middle class – mostly teenagers and other children of moderately well-off families – for every two going to “the poor” (that actually get to keep their jobs).

So like the protagonist in “Sophies Choice”, what do you do?  Make life marginally easier for “the poor”, at the expense of creating many more of them?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We have a law student intern in my office. She’s taking Constitutional Law – Liberties, taught by a leftist female law professor who expects students to analyze abortion cases by finding the flaw in the conservative reasoning since, obviously, abortion is a constitutionally protected right and any attempt to infringe it is horrific. The whole notion of “original intent” is just a code word for slavery over women’s bodies.

So . . . we believe it’s self-evident that God gave you the right to life, but not until you’re born? God has a waiting period that only Harry Blackman could divine? Until the waiting period ends, society can unilaterally decide you have no rights and can be killed at whim, same as a pre-war Black, a Nazi Jew, a Soviet Kulak?

I suppose that reasoning is consistent with the President’s assertion that he has the power to order the execution of American citizens without trial on mere suspicion of terrorism. But it’s not exactly comforting. I sure hope Liberals in the government don’t decide to unilaterally revoke the rights of Christians or Conservatives. It would suck to be a refugee from my own country.

Joe Doakes

I think whole parts of this country are going to be refugees from “our own country” before this is done.

The Marriage Amendment and the legalization of gay marriage is a gift that just keeps on giving.

Walter Hudson writes about the socialcon push to unseat Dave Fitzsimmons – I almost called it a “Fatwa” before catching myself – and its commentary about the state of the MNGOP in 2014.

First things first:  Fitzsimmons is a Tea Party and libertarian-conservative stalwart – a guy who ran on rock-ribbed libertarian-conservative principle, and delivered on it during his freshman term in the House.

Hudson:

Cycle after electoral cycle, activists pine for candidates who will stand on principle and do the right thing regardless of political consequence. Cycle after cycle, candidates claim they will meet that challenge and take bold action to serve their constituents. Cycle after cycle, voters remain disappointed by bland performances delivering lack-luster results.

Perhaps we get what we deserve. Perhaps we only say that we want bold statesman who will do the right thing without regard to their next election. Perhaps we actually reward bland performance while punishing aggressive leadership.

A case study presents in Wright County, where activist-turned-legislator David Fitzsimmons serves Minnesota House District 30B. This Saturday, Fitzsimmons will seek his party’s endorsement in the face of three challengers hoping to wrest it from him.

Two years ago, Fitzsimmons was a shoe-in for endorsement and handily defended a primary challenge before earning his freshman term. His victory seemed predestined, given the conservative leanings of his district and a well-earned reputation for effective activism on behalf of his party and its candidates.

Hudson notes that in a party full of talkers – myself included – Fitzsimmons is a do-er.  He’s a guy who’s actually made things happen; a long-time activist, he engineered Tom Emmer’s campaign up through the convention (before handing it off to less-successful management), and has been a founding chair of the GOP Liberty caucus.  He’s been a right-libertarian Godfather, including to Hudson himself:

Coming up through the Tea Party, I learned the ropes from candidates and activists who owed their political education to Fitzsimmons. His name became synonymous with expertise, hard work, and discernment. He blazed a trail of credibility which up-and-coming activists were able to follow into the Republican Party, growing its ranks and sharpening its conscience.

And, as Hudson notes, with that sort of resume he could have followed the usual Freshman route and made himself a very small target while he learned the Saint Paul ropes and built a political career.

But that’s not who David is. He didn’t go to Saint Paul to be something. He went there to do something. When the opportunity to make a difference presented itself, he seized it at great risk to his political future.

Long story short:

1. With the collapse of the Marriage Amendment and the sweep to power of the DFL, the passage of a gay marriage statute was a foregone conclusion.
2. Fitzsimmons – a gay marriage opponent – tried to offer an amendment that would have made same-sex marriage a matter of civil law, preserving clergy’s right to abstain from performing or recognizing same-sex marriages on religious grounds, thus protecting the First Amendment freedom of religion in a way the DFL wasn’t going to.

Hudson:

Democrats consented to the amendment. However, Fitzsimmons knew that his amendment could be stripped out of the final bill unless he sat on the conference committee which would reconcile the House and Senate versions. To ensure his place on that committee, he would have to vote for final passage.

Surely, he understood the political fallout which would occur in Wright County – likely the most conservative political district in the state – if he voted yes on final passage. He also understood that voting yes was the only way to ensure some protection of his constituents’ religious liberty.

As the vote for final passage took place, Fitzsimmons watched the vote totals to make sure his would not decide the question. Only once it was certain that the bill would pass did Fitzsimmons cast his vote for final passage, securing his place on the conference committee to preserve his amendment.

I’ve seen arguments over the mechanics of the amendment; I’ve seen none that convince me Fitzsimmons offered his amendment for reasons other than the ones Hudson detailed.

I’ve only been acquainted with one of Fitzsimmons’ challengers – Dayton city councilman Eric Lucero.  While I’m told Lucero is a capable enough activist, the first impression I took away was that he didn’t really speak to any issues beyond marriage (and information security), that he was fairly inarticulate about even those issues, and that he couldn’t possibly fill Fitzsimmons’ shoes.

And the propensity to judge an entire political career – a stellar one, one of the ones that needs to be emulated all over this state, one of the ones this nation is going to need thousands more of if it’s going to survive – by a disagreement over the mechanics rather than principles behind a single vote – is one of the Minnesota GOP’s biggest handicaps today.

District 30B’s activists have a chance to make a clear declaration on this, one way or another, at their convention.  Here’s hoping they choose wisely.

Clarence Thomas notes that it’s the white liberals that, in modern times, are the racists, stupid:

The worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, [were] by northern liberal elites, not by the people of Savannah, Georgia,” [said Justice Thomas].  “My sadness is that we are probably today more race and difference-conscious that I was in the 1960s when I went to school,” he said, the Daily Mail reported. “To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Georgia, to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up.”“Differences in race, differences in sex. Somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah. Every person in this room has endured a slight. Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them — left them out. That’s a part of the deal.”

You’ll note that Thomas hasn’t filed a hate crimes lawsuit against Representative Ryan “Uncle Tom” Winkler – or indeed, mentioned the snarkly little fella at all.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving is asking for DUI checkpoints in Minnesota:

Mothers Against Drunk Driving gave Minnesota low marks in its new state-by-state evaluation of DWI laws.

To be fair and accurate, MADD will dock points from any state that doesn’t allow law enforcement to perform random no-knock breathalyzer and urinalysis raids in the middle of the night.

No, almost:

MADD, in particular, calls upon state lawmakers to legalize sobriety checkpoints, writing that they “will give law enforcement the tools needed to cut drunk driving fatalities.” (The organization also recommends requiring ignition interlocks for all convicted DWI offenders.)

Minnesota is currently one of just 12 states that doesn’t allow law enforcement to conduct sobriety checkpoints.

Clearly there’s a drunk driving crisis in Minnesota.

Well, no.  There’s not.  Minnesota is well below the national average in the percentage of automobile deaths related to alcohol and alcohol impairment.

And despite MADD’s blandishments, there’s considerable evidence that random checkpoints aren’t especially effective at getting drunk drivers off the road, much less saving lives, as compared to the perfectly effective roving patrols.

Alcohol-related deaths on the road are down nearly 50% in the past 25 years.

But if MADD thinks shoving the police state’s foot in the door up to the knee by gutting the Fourth Amendment even more is the answer, maybe it’s time for America’s voters to send them off to political happy hour.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Our Friend has a post on Penigma explaining why Stand Your Ground is a bad idea because a certain legislator who might support such a bill, if it came before the legislature, was Not convicted of a crime in another state.  Okay, he wasn’t convicted – he wasn’t even charged – but another guy Was charged and has Not been convicted either.  So that proves that Stand Your Ground is bad legislation.

Attacking the man instead of attacking his idea might prove the man is a bad man, but it doesn’t prove the idea is a bad idea.  That’s why an Ad Hominem argument is a logical fallacy and unpersuasive to thinking people.  Which, apparently, does not include Our Friend or, presumably, the people who read her blog.

So does that mean I applaud bad men, celebrate them, and approve of all their actions?  Obviously not; and even if I did, that still wouldn’t mean Stand Your Ground is a bad idea.

It’s too bad the legislator isn’t a Black man because then Our Friend’s opposition to his ideas would be racissss.  Can’t you just hear the heads exploding all across Mac-Groveland?

Joe Doakes

The number of liberals – especially Minnesota liberal bloggers, but including not a few higher-level operatives – who can conduct a rational debate using the basics of logic, and without wallowing in all manner of logical fallacies, is disturbingly tiny, and supports my contention that Minnesota liberals are terrible debaters because they never have to learn how to debate rationally.

SCENE:  Mitch Berg is at the pharmacy, refilling a painkiller prescription.    He notices a tap on the shoulder.  It’s Mr. Victor VON SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE, professional fraternity organizer, and Vice Chair for Education at the 5th CD Libertarian Party.

VON SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE:  Hey, Berg!

BERG (holding an acheing jaw in dire need of a root canal):  Hey, V-Molt.

VON SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE:  What did we say about that?

BERG:  Oh, OK.  Hey, Viktor.  What’s up?

VON SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE:  You’re a Christian, right?

BERG:  Yep.

VON SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE:  Kurt Tischer said “Everyone is born an atheist and an anarchist. People have to be taught religion and statism.”

BERG:  That’s an attack on faith, right?

VON SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE:  Of course.

BERG:  People are also born babbling unintelligibly, utterly self-centered, unable to live independently – without their family, which is the ultimate autocracy – and crapping and peeing all over the place.  Are these also desirable traits?

VON SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE:  Clearly you are a RINO.

BERG:  Clearly.

(And SCENE).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I previously wrote that the Evil Koch Brothers were not the Number 1 largest political contributor.  Turns out, they’re not even in the top 50.

If anybody is influencing politics and buying elections, it’s not them.

Pikers.

Joe Doakes

And guess who the biggest infusor of cash into US politics is?

Over the years, I’ve been codifying bits and pieces of (mostly liberal) human behavior into what I call “Berg’s Laws”.

I’m adding a new…well, not so much “law” as corollary to a law; an observation completely supported by the law.

The Law in question is Berg’s Fourteenth:

 The more strenuously a media organization identifies itself as “fact-checkers”, the more completely their “fact checking” will actually be checking statement for congruency with liberal conventional wisdom.

I’m adding the brand-new but utterly-sensible Maddow Corollary:

The same goes for science

I did it after reading this Glenn Reynolds piece in the NYPost, pointing out the facts behind the latest blitz of self-congratulatory articles by liberals lauding themselves for their greater supposed belief in science than conservatives.

These articles always trip the BS detector, naturally; they’re like the articles pointing out the”science” showing that liberals having higher IQ, or are less racist, or other such fripperies; bad science to reinforce a bad and – more importantly – meaningless conclusion.

Of course, as Reynolds points out, the whole tendency goes a solid level of illogic deeper.  He starts by noting that in 1974, a University of North Carolina sociologist Gordon Gauchat noted that in 1974, conservatives had a demonstrably higher likelihood to trust science than liberals.  I’m going to add some emphasis: 

Gauchat points out, correctly, that you can’t lay the blame at the feet of biblical creationists and anti-evolutionists, who were no less common in 1974. Nor is sheer ignorance responsible, as the decline in trust rose with education.

So wait – the more educated a conservative, the less likely he or she is to trust science?

Why, that suggest that this lack of trust isn’t just love of snake-handling, doesn’t it?

Why yes.  It does:

Instead, he suggests that it’s the increasing use of science as ammunition for big-government schemes that has led to more skepticism.
There’s probably something to that, but if you read the actual paper something else becomes clear. Despite the language in the coverage, it’s not science as a method that people are losing confidence in; it’s scientists and the institutions that purport to speak for them.

Reynolds does what everyone needs to do when they analyze polling information; looks at the original questions.

Gauchat’s paper was based on annual responses in the General Social Survey, which asks people: “I am going to name some institutions in this country. As far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in them?” One institution mentioned was “the scientific community.”
So when fewer people answered “a great deal” and more answered “hardly any” with regard to “the scientific community,” they were demonstrating more skepticism not toward science but toward the people running scientific institutions.
With this in mind, a rise in skepticism isn’t such a surprise.

Of course, people today have less faith in general in “institutions” than they used to.  Journalism, the police, the courts, the government, all are less trusted than they used to be.

So has…not “science”, as in the “scientific method”, but the institutions that run it, and especially the ones that use it toward their political ends.

“Science” – in the form of institutions – earned that distrust.  And that’s a good thing – because the root of science is skepticism.

And the push to jam down the beliefs of institutions, simply because they’re institutions, is unskeptical and, beyond that, illogical.  It is in fact a logical fallacy, the “appeal to authority“, which is also unskeptical and unscientific:

We accept arguments not because they come from people in authority but because they can be proven correct — in independent experiments by independent experimenters. If you make a claim that can’t be proven false in an independent experiment, you’re not really making a scientific claim at all.

And saying, “trust us,” while denouncing skeptics as — horror of horrors — “skeptics” doesn’t count as science, either, even if it comes from someone with a doctorate and a lab coat.
After a century of destructive and false scientific fads — ranging from eugenics to Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” scaremongering, among many others — the American public could probably do with more skepticism, not less.

Conservatives aren’t less scientific.  After a few years of “debating” liberals, it’s painfully clear we’re more logical.

We’re just less likely to trust someone with a PhD and a lab coat who’s come for our freedom, simply because he has a PhD and a lab coat.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Our oldest son is a Senior Chief Petty Officer stationed near Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.  He sent this photo of his front yard, taken Tuesday, February 11, 2014.

They received 8-1/2 inches of new snow with sleet and freezing rain expected [late last week].

More proof of global warming?

Joe:  All evidence supports global warming.  As does all lack of evidence, and all contradictions in evidence.

(The real question isn’t so much “is the climate changing” as “if it is, would the best response be to give unlimited power to the United Nations and groups of unelected, meritless bureaucrats to sandbag the world’s economies even further at the time when they need prosperity the most”?).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Damn that global warming, Philadelphia just broke a snowfall record.

Joe Doakes

Joe, read the memo:  it’s “darn that climate change“.

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