“Scary? Honey, you’ve managed to make them boring, which is a much greater feat.” — Glenn Reynolds.

Context?  Sure, here you go.

Government officials wouldn’t…lie to the public to try to whittle back the Second Amendment.  Would they?

Tune in tomorrow morning on Shot In The Dark.

Two of the gun-grabbers’ favorite conceits:

• It’s guns – not criminals – that make the “inner city” dangerous (this pronounced always by unctuous white liberals like Jane Kay and Representative Heather Martens, who live in places like Linden Hills and Crocus Hill after doing their stint at Carlton or Saint Thomas)
• Nobody ever foils a crime with a gun

Both lefty memes were, um, shot full of holes earlier this week:

The victim of an attempted robbery in St. Paul took action when one of the robbers pointed a gun at him, firing his own gun and wounding one of the robbers.

No, it’s not Mario Van Peebles gone terribly to seed. It’s Michael Galloway, alleged accomplice to robbery. Photo courtesy of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press.

One of the robbers [Marcel Lee Galloway] simultaneously fired in the direction of the victim, who was not hurt, according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday.

Galloway was hit in the leg.

Yep – it was justified.  And in John Choi’s Saint Paul, you gotta figure the County Attorney’s office did its darnedest to prove it wasn’t.

The article relates that two men – listed as “VT” and “TG” – got off work in downtown Minneapolis, where they work as bar bouncers.  They drove to a check-casheria on University at Lexington, by the White Castle, around 3AM to cash their checks:

VT, who is 31, saw two males approaching them as he walked to the passenger side of the car and heard the sound of a gun racking a round. A man in a baseball cap, later identified as Galloway, pointed a gun at VT and told him not to move. VT told TG, who is 26, not to move because he feared they would be shot if they did.

The two scumbags lifted TG’s money.  VT hid his wallet before they could get to him.  The robbers frisked him, and found nothing – which has been known to make robbers upset.  I add a bit of emphasis:

“VT was afraid that he and TG were going to be shot” and reached under the passenger seat to grab his SIG Sauer P250 .45-caliber handgun, which he has a permit to carry, the complaint said. “VT feared the two men didn’t believe him when he said he didn’t have any money, and he was afraid they might come back.”

A SIG/Sauer P250 in .45.   Relatively inexpensive, reliable as the rising sun (like all SIG products), and – most importantly of all – at the scene.

The robbers crossed into a Dairy Queen parking lot and the man in the stocking cap raised his handgun and pointed it toward TG and VT.

VT then fired at the robbers, the complaint said, and the man in the stocking cap simultaneously fired once in VT’s direction. VT fired five times and his second shot struck Galloway.

The gunman ran off.  The police caught Galloway.

A couple of bets to place, here:

• The ninnies at “Protect”MN will list this as an example of “inner city gun violence” – even though it was self-defense.  Just watch.
• “VT” will turn out to be African-American, Latino or Asian.  And yes, there are Asian bouncers.

Any action on that bet?

By the way – while it wasn’t a “homicide” (Calloway will live) this is yet another defensive gun use carried out by Minnesota’s 160,000-odd carry permit holders.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Bankers were seriously panicked over the last shut-down, fearing government might actually stop paying welfare.  Bankers were willing to fund the welfare system while Democrats kept ratcheting up the hysteria to force the Narrative on the public.  How much of the bankers’ war-gaming was spent lobbying Republicans to turn the spigot back on?

Like the illegal drug business, banking is so immensely profitable that there is nearly no way to take them down from the outside.

And what happens in January, when the short-term-agreement ends?

For Christmas, all my kids are getting bricks.  Of .22’s.

Joe Doakes

This country does need a serious realignment.  Of course, every splinter party and every faction thinks the same thing. The problem is making sure the right splinter or faction drives that realignment.

Also – Joe, you’ve actually found .22LR?

In past months, I’ve showed you how not only big-media-alum group-blog MinnPost, but “No Rant, No Slant” Minnesota Public Radio are on the take from the Joyce Foundation – which funds “Protect MN”, the anti-rights group run by Rep. Heather Martens.  I speculated that it might be the reason that MPR has been so incurious about Martens’ astroturf group, and why the MinnPost – with all its pretenses to legitimate journalism – spent the past year giving Martens a public tongue bath.

I asked – does this involvement go any higher in the Twin Cities’ “progressive” political world?

I asked, and Bill Glahn answered – ten months ago.  Joyce is a huge financial backer of “Take Action MN”, a non-profit that verges on being a political party in its own right, a descendent of “Progressive Minnesota”, which had its own unseemly connections with “non-partisan” institutions.

Glahn:

The Joyce Foundation of Chicago, Illinois, was founded by Iowa lumber heiress Beatrice Joyce Kean.  This $760 million foundation has been involved with TakeAction since near the beginning of the Minnesota non-profit’s existence.  Joyce’s 2006 Annual Report (p. 25) shows a grant of $350,000 to be paid out to TakeAction over two years, “To develop and promote a political reform agenda focused on campaign finance, judicial, and voting rights reforms.”
Joyce’s 2009 IRS Form 990 reveals that the $350,000 grant to the 501(c)(3) TakeAction Minnesota Education Fund was renewed in 2008 for two additional years, “for ongoing efforts to reform and strengthen democracy in Minnesota.”[12]
Joyce’s 2011 IRS Form 990 reveals that, yet again, the $350,000 grant to the TakeAction Education Fund was renewed in 2010 for two additional years, “For advancing a political reform agenda that encompasses election administration, voting rights, campaign finance, redistricting, and judicial independence.”[13]

The Joyce Foundation’s website indicates that the TakeAction Education Fund received an additional $150,000 in 2012 for one year, “For advancing a democracy reform agenda using legislation, community organizing, movement building, coalition work, and unexpected alliances.”
Unexpected alliances?  In any event, the seven-year total of grants from the Joyce Foundation to TakeAction equals $1,200,000.

So let’s break this down:  The Joyce Foundation heavily sponsors “Progressive” non-profits, including “Take Action MN”, “Protect MN”, and (I strongly suspect) “Common Cause MN”.

And they pour money into at least two “non-profit” Minnesota media outlets that have pretensions to respectability; Minnesota Public Radio and the MinnPost.

I’ve sought comment from both organizations in the past, without success.  I’ll try again.

All of this carefully obfuscated money going to support “campaign finance…reforms” is one thing.

Going to buy friendly media coverage?

And finding willing takers, in an industry whose “code of ethics” tells journalists who avoid financial entanglements in their “journalism?”

The surviving Pythons are going to get the band back together.

From the Declaration of Independence, with emphasis added :

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

From the Journal – again, with emphasis added:

Copies of two subpoenas we’ve seen demand “all memoranda, email . . . correspondence, and communications” both internally and between the subpoena target and some 29 conservative groups, including Wisconsin and national nonprofits, political vendors and party committees. The groups include the League of American Voters, Wisconsin Family Action, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, Americans for Prosperity—Wisconsin, American Crossroads, the Republican Governors Association, Friends of Scott Walker and the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

One subpoena also demands “all records of income received, including fundraising information and the identity of persons contributing to the corporation.” In other words, tell us who your donors are.

Oh, yeah – and since the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel may be one newspaper that might occasionally take its lips off of the Democrat party’s boy parts long enough to worry about that whole “holding government accountable” thing…:

The investigation is taking place under Wisconsin’s John Doe law, which bars a subpoena’s targets from disclosing its contents to anyone but his attorneys. John Doe probes work much like a grand jury, allowing prosecutors to issue subpoenas and conduct searches, while the gag orders leave the targets facing the resources of the state with no way to publicly defend themselves.

And hey, just in time for campaign season!

I’ve always tried to stay hopeful for the future of this country.  But it gets harder and harder every day.

History we can use.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This is an actual ad promoting Obama-care.

It’s real (I checked Snopes). The message is that young women should buy Obama-care so they can get free birth control pills and therefore have as much sex as they want, without worrying about the consequences.

Two thoughts:

1. Buying Obama-care to get free birth control pills is like buying a house to get the free toaster.

And

2. Iowahawk is right: it’s amazing how much of modern feminism seems to have been thought up by horny teenage boys.

Joe Doakes

Most of liberalism and its attendant ideologies seem like the product of one form of arrested adolescence – self-righteousness, intense moralism mixed with minimal knowledge, or that know-it-all-ism that every 18 year old has, and that most 55-year-old Saint Olaf grads who still have Wellstone stickers on their Subarus never lost.

…or, alternately, gets paid by the list.

For Buzzfeed writers, either is likely.

Now, I’ll be working on a worst-to-best list for Scrubs.

The Twin Cities’ conservative blog scene has been at it for over a decade now. 

And it was inevitable; from its high point in the mid-oughts, where there were dozens and dozens of bloggers scratching away at all corners of Minnesota’s body politic – from international megablogs like Power Line and Ed Morrissey’s Captain’s Quarters and then Hot Air, all the way down to a maze of smaller niche blogs that live on in memory and the Internet’s wayback machine – time has taken its toll – in both the tempus fugit sense of the term as well as the time it takes people with jobs, families, hobbies and lives to actually write something of any value. 

And so outside of Hot Air and Power Line – neither of which have ever been primarily Minnesota blogs – and Lileks, who covers everything in the universe, sometimes simultaneously – the “thousands lights” of Minnesota local blogging have shrunk to a fairly manageable number.   Some – like the great Sheila Kihne – have taken their talents out into the corporeal world of activism (with a little Twitter to keep people up to date).  Others – the essential Gary Miller, long of Truth Vs. The Machine, has moved is oeuvre to Facebook as his politics have moved toward the libertarian. 

(It’s odd that the solid Big-L libertarians never really developed any serious bloggers in Minnesota.  My observation; most of them don’t seem to believe they need to convince anyone outside the club, and many of them are pretty terrible at it.  Opportunity missed, in my book). 

But many of them are still at it – putting out superior material monthly, weekly, or even more often.  And they’re worth visiting a lot more than you likely do. 

And as one of the ones that has been getting consistently, surprisingly high traffic for better than a decade now, I feel a little remiss in that I haven’t always spread as much attention around as I should have. 

I’m going to try in my tardy way to fix that today. 

Of course, my NARN colleague Brad Carlson has been cranking away pretty non–stop for a long, long time now. 

And Mister Dilletante is still writing superior stuff, on the average more than daily, which is how often you should be visiting The Neighborhood. 

Brad and D are pretty eclectic – music, religion, politics, home and family life, Wisconsin high-school football (or maybe basketball – given the scores D writes about, it’s kinda hard to tell) – which is in fact one of the things I like about the better Minnesota proto-conservative blogs; in contrast to Minnesota’s little collection of herniated-sounding, self-righteous, self-referential, usually shrieky leftyblogs, most of the the conservative-blog holdouts have more than one topic.  In some cases, many, many of them.

Along those lines – Joe Deal’s Red Squirrel Report is all over the map.   And Ryan Rhodes has  been writing longer than me, and has covered a dizzy range of subjects, from politics to intestinal chemical warfare to the trials and travails of owning a small business to, a few years back, the gut-shot heartbreak and slow, miraculous inspiration of the story of his preemie twins. 

If Ryan Rhodes contributes no more than this meme to western cultural life, his life will have been well lived. But there’s so much more at his blog.

And while family and career have slowed down the writing at Fraters to more of a weekly thing, they still cover the waterfront. 

As does one of my favorite low-key reading pleasures, Mary Louise Pivec’s wonderful Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry.  What can I say?  Casual and low-key?  Yep.  And always worth the visit.  I’m always happy I clicked over. 

I’ll never mix up Casual Sundays with Minnesota Hockey Mom – who usually writes about hockey, and, well,  being a mom, but has branched out all over the place – but I read it as regularly as I can as well. 

Of course, there are bloggers who cover shorter stretches of the waterfront with a more focused passion.  Katie Kieffer has slowed down to roughly weekly  on her “business for  young adults” blog, as she works on a very different writing project – but she still sounds off, and is always a delightful read.    Gary Gross has been at the business of covering Central Minnesota politics for almost nine years now at Let Freedom Ring, and his biggest days are (I have this on very good authority) just in front of him.  As in, over the next few weeks.  Seriously – stay tuned.  And Tea Party stalwart Walter Hudson is an essential read at Fightin’ Words.

Of course, John Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives  is sort of a rhetorical daisy-cutter; he’s had his occasional ready-fire-aim moment, along with his home runs with bases loaded.  Which will his next post be?  It’s always fun to wait and see. 

And the big new event has been Bill Glahn’s blog, perhaps the most essential new political blog in Minnesota since Sheila Kihne was killing giants, 3-4 years ago.  His entire series on following the trail of money among Minnesota’s liberal political “non-profits” is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what’s wrong with Minnesota politics today – and stuff I’d say Minnesota’s mainstream media doesn’t have the balls to write about, except the problem is more a matter of “financial independence from big lefty money” than “courage”. 

Anyway – if you’ve been feeling the need to broaden your horizons, your assignment is clear.

UPDATE:  I knew I’d forget one.  Andy Aplikowski has been doing superior analysis at Residual Forces for roughly forever, and I can’t believe I neglected him when I first wrote this.  My apologies.

Bill Glahn has been doing the work the Twin Cities media hasn’t won’t in covering the big, unseen unreported-on force in Minnesota politics:  Take Action Minnesota.

Even among people who know that TAM exists, I think few know exactly what they’re into, and how the organization works:

Charity Status—whether legal or not, I object to TakeAction’s abuse of its tax-exempt non-profit charity status. Unlike the traditional political party—whose role the group is increasingly displacing —TakeAction can accept tax-deductible contributions from anonymous donors. Despite my best efforts at discovery, we really do not know who contributes the millions of dollars that fund TakeAction’s operations.

Quasi-Party Status—although TakeAction operates much like a political party—recruiting and financing candidates, conducting campaigns, and getting out the vote—it does not have to abide by the same laws on transparency and accountability. It acts as a closed political machine—answering to its (unknown) donors, but not to voters and taxpayers in the same way that the Democrats and Republicans must answer.

They also sit among a warren of offices for similar “progressive” “non-profits” – “ProtectMN”, “Wellstone Action” and others – in the Griggs Building, in the St. Paul Midway.  This isn’t just a happy accident, or entirely the product of the Griggs’ very low rent.  The network shares much more than just an address; phone banks, lists, staff, know-how.

You should read Glahn’s entire series on the subject:

My latest “Who Is TakeAction?” Series:

·         Part 1—Political philosophy

·         Part 2—TakeAction takes over city politics

·         Part 3—All the cool kids went to this year’s Progressive Prom

My original TakeAction Minnesota Series:

• Part 1–Intro and the 2010 election for Minnesota Governor
• Part 2–Follow the Money, as it spins around inside the TakeAction network
• Part 3–Tracking down the money to its sources
• Part 3A—More donor names and dollar amounts
• Part 4–The lobby machine
• Part 5–The 2012 referendum on Voter ID
• Part 6–Updating Part 5 with final 2012 money figures
• Part 7–TakeAction Goes to Washington

The entire series is excellent.

Although Glahn also observes:

[S]imply from a journalistic viewpoint, the rise of TakeAction as a political force is a major story—one that has received almost no coverage from Minnesota’s legacy media. In contrast, oceans of ink have been spilled over the Tea Party and its relationship to the Republican Party. There is a man-bites-dog story waiting for an enterprising reporter to pick it up.

This is not an accident.  It’s a case of Berg’s Seventh Law in action.

And most of the Twin Cities media shares TAM’s mission, whether they admit it or not (and whether their friendly coverage/non-coverage is being purchased by some of the same donors or not).

Matt Damon needs to eat his shoe.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The big news at the Minnesota Continuing Legal Education Real Estate Institute was same-sex marriage passed this Summer and how does that affect spousal rights in Minnesota?

I thought the biggest laugh was this section of Minn. Stat. 517.201:

“Subd. 2.Rules of construction. When necessary to implement the rights and responsibilities of spouses or parents in a civil marriage between persons of the same sex under the laws of this state, including those that establish parentage presumptions based on a civil marriage, gender-specific terminology, such as “husband,” “wife,” “mother,” “father,” “widow,” “widower,” or similar terms, must be construed in a neutral manner to refer to a person of either gender.

Good news, Mitch, you are no longer a Husband or Father, you now are a person of either gender implementing the rights and responsibilities of a spouse and parent.

Frankly, I prefer “Interchangeable Marital Unit” or since we all know which role men are assigned in divorce court: “Cash Cow.”

Joe Doakes

Here’s Senator Ortmann’s campaign site.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• I’m in the studio today from 1-3.  I’ll be talking with Senator Julianna Ortmann  about her campaign to topple Al Franken  
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Tomorrow,  Brad Carlson is  back!  I“The Closer” airs from 1-3 Sundays!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all six hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my new UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

It’s been a long, long time since TV stations “signed off”, at least in major metro areas. TV’s been a 24/7 business ever since cable became a dominant part of the media world.

But when I was a kid, the sign for “now it’s time to be tired” came when Channel 4 in Fargo would reach the end of its broadcast day – it may have been around midnight, if I remember correctly – and the orchestra would get rolling, and this piece of film would start:

And then, for the next minute or two…:

And then? Lulled by Leo Mann’s voice-over and the silent test pattern, you’d be jarred back to reality by REALLY LOUD STATIC as the carrier signal went silent, turning the frequency over to a universe full of random electromagnetism.

It always felt and sounded jarring; to go from the orderly humdrum of late-night small market TV to the transcendent ethereality of “High Flight”, to silence – and then, cacaphony.  It was unsettling – that feeling of going from “something” to “nothing”, of going from watching a coherent signal from Fargo to random, formless signals that’d skittering about the universe for billions of years, ending up as “snow” on a cathode ray tube. 

I usually wished I’d fallen asleep earlier – and eventually learned to hit the power knob before the “Indian” was done.

Minnesota – the state of 10,000 “progressive” advocacy groups.

And some of those advocacy groups run some very slick, polished, professional PR efforts.  Or – like the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota, or “Protect” Minnesota –  at least loud and well-funded ones.

And then there’s the Douglas County DFL. 

The DugCo DFL runs a twitter feed that’s always a useful barometer for whatever the left end of the DFL’s intellectual bell curve is “thinking” has been told by the people paid to do their thinking for them. . 

This went out on Twitter the other day:

@dc4DFL: Australia has a Minimum Wage of $16.88 per hour. Minnesota needs to seriously raise ours. #mnleg #stribpol

Wow.  “Seriously”.  That sounds like quite the imperative.

So let’s compare and contrast.

The unemployment rate for Minnesotans aged 16-24 is 11 percent.  Note that in Minnesota (and most of the US), full-time students aren’t considered “in the labor market” in the same sense as someone working for a full-time living. 

And in Australia?   It’s 19% “not fully engaged” (neither working nor studying full-time).  And if you compare apples to apples – drop full-time students from the “work force” – then close to a third of Australians between the ages of 15-24 are neither working nor studying full time. It’s a little under a third if you count only Australians from 20-24. 

Bear in mind (and I say this more for the benefit of people who’d read what the DugCo DFL says seriously than for most of this blog’s audience) Australia’s economy isn’t currently mired in one of the most dismal recessions in their history.  Their growth was hit by the global financial crisis over the past six years – but not like ours. 

So – even in a relatively healthy economy, Australia’s unemployment and underemployment among younger, lower-skilled workers is much higher than in Minnesota. 

Of course, Australia’s high minimum wage is one of the products of the Labour government…

…that was just tossed at the polls two months ago.  While I saw no evidence that the minimum wage was a pivotal issue, an artificially high minimum wage is part and parcel of the whole raft of “progressive” policies that stagnate economies. 

Uncle Ryan Winkler might want to find himself some smarter stenographers.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It’s nice to have a modern leader in office.

In the olden days, Congress passed the laws and the President faithfully carried them out. Nowadays, Congress passes laws and the President does as he chooses. He faithfully carries out those parts of the law that he likes, when he feels like it, exempting friends and delaying implementation at whim. And if a problem arises, no need to go back to Congress for amendments, he changes the law of the land by press conference.

President isn’t really a fitting title for that sort of leader. King? Supreme Leader?

I’ll go with “Czar”.

They should give the Beltway media really snazzy uniforms. Like the Swiss Guard.

…the President’s “fix” were to throw the entire insurance market into complete chaos?:

The debacle threatens to swamp Obama’s entire second-term agenda, raising questions about his competency and credibility. Polls released this week show the president’s job-approval rating at a historic low and a majority of voters saying, for the first time, that he isn’t trustworthy.
“A White House interested in stabilizing this presidency would want to leave no stone unturned in the effort to deal with both those problems,” said William Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton who’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a center-left policy research center…Insurance companies already have devised plans for next year, received the necessary approval from states and begun to sell policies. They aren’t required to continue to offer their existing policies and state insurance commissioners aren’t required to approve those 2013 plans.

“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,” Karen Ignagni, the president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents the industry.

What was it that Kevin Williamson said? Politics are the worst possible way to allocate resources?

(SCENE:  at a chi-chi coffee shop in South Minneapolis.  Mitch BERG’s eyes go a little wide with sticker shock before he orders a light roast with room for cream and Splenda)

(As BERG turns to leave, he notices a table with three diners – Carpal POX, Garth MULLER and Viktor VON SCHLIEFFENBERG-MOLTKE.  He tries to slip out the door, but MULLER notices him).

MULLER:   Mitch!  Come over here! 

BERG:  OK.  (He puts his coffee on the table and sits).

Read the rest of this entry »

Today is “Give to the Max” day.

It’s basically a fundraising event for non-profits.

“Someone” (a plutocrat with deep pockets) is matching the first $10k donated to “Protect MN” today. This is notable – if they get anything, it’ll be the first donations they’ve gotten from inside Minnesota. *

But the good guys are in the game. MNGOPAC – the MN Gun Owners PAC – is in action, raising funding for good, pro-2nd Amendment candidates.

And it’d sure be cool if the good guys beat the tar out of the orcs today.

Anyway, here’s where you can help out.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Can you imagine a songwriter today trying to sell these lyrics:

“When some loud bragger tries to put me down and says his school is great,

I tell him “What’s the matter buddy, ain’t you heard of my school? It’s number one in the state.”

So be true to your school, just like you would to your girl . . . “

Even with thumping base loud enough to flex the car windows and rattle the bumper, there’s no way this song would sell.

Kids these days.

Joe Doakes

True, but to be fair, a lot of times these days it’s the parents that’re bailing on their kids schools.

While we all knew that Obamacare was going to be a fiasco – and many of us who work in IT were putting specific parameters around the term “fiasco”, by the way – there was always a least one pleasant sideline:

Adriana, the Obamacare girl.

Now, I’ve worked in healthcare IT.  Executives in the trade have this notion that having a non-threatening, smiling woman on a website make the site a more pleasant, less-threatening experience. 

There might be something to that.  I dunno.

There might also be something to making the site actually work. 

But I digress.  According to ABC, Adriana is a Columbian immigrant, a legal resident, married to a citizen, and her photo was obtained through a – what else? – government program trading free family photo sessions for the rights to use the photos on Healthcare.gov.  That’s right.  Our government is trillions in debt, but on hiring camera models, they scrimp like Kazakh rug-traders. 

And  we’re told that  the cataclysmic self-immolation of the site has brought out the crazies – and some of them have found Ms. Adriana:

She learned over the summer that her photo would be on healthcare.gov’s main page, but she didn’t realize it would become so closely associated with the problems of the glitchy website.

“I mean, I don’t know why people should hate me because it’s just a photo. I didn’t design the website. I didn’t make it fail, so I don’t think they should have any reasons to hate me,” Adriana told ABC News.

Anyone who blames a camera model for a system’s technical fubars deserves to lose their current insurance, if you know what I mean.

Ms. Adriana:  Shot in the Dark needs a spokesmodel.  The site works.  And the locals – at least, the ones who agree with me – aren’t batspittle crazy.  And the pay is exactly the same as you’re getting from the Feds.

Por favor – podría considerar mi oferta.  That’s all I’m saying.

One of the Democrats’ most annoying conceits is that they are the party of empirical reason, while conservatives are a bunch of faith-based “anti-science” snake-handlers. 

Now, most of us know better.  And among them, writing at that noted conservative tool The Atlantic, is Mischa Fischer:

In his first State of the Union Address in 1790, George Washington told Congress, “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature.” He went on to call science “essential” to our nation. Two hundred and twenty years later, in his first inaugural address, Barack Obama vowed to “restore science to its rightful place.”

The president’s insinuation plays into the common perception in the media, electorate, and research community that Republicans are “anti-science.” I encountered that sentiment routinely in nearly a decade working for Republicans on Capitol Hill, and it has become more commonplace in the broader political discussion.

And of course, it’s not that no problems exist:

I’m the first to admit that there are elected Republicans with a terrible understanding of science—Representative Paul Broun of Georgia, an M.D. who claims evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell” is one rather obvious example—and many more with substantial room for improvement. But Republicans, conservatives, and the religious are no more uniquely “anti-science” than any other demographic or political group. It’s just that “anti-science” has been defined using a limited set of issues that make the right wing and religious look relatively worse. (As a politically centrist atheist, this claim is not meant to be self-serving.)

The two solitary issues on which the left banks this meme are evolution and global warming.

As to evolution?  A Christian with a literal, fundamentalist reading of the Genesis story is going to object to the idea of evolution.  But the allegorical interpretation – which is the one the vast majority of contemporary politically-conservative Christians follow – is not in any way incongruent with the idea of evolution.  People of faith – including Christians – have always been leaders at scientific enquiry:

Members of all faiths have contributed to our collective scientific understanding, and Christians from Gregor Mendel to Francis Collins have been intellectual leaders in their fields. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, wrote a New York Times bestseller reconciling his faith with his understanding of evolution and genetics…Yes, an embarrassing half of Republicans believe the earth is only 10,000 years old—but so do more than a third of Democrats. And a slightly higher percentage of Democrats believe God was the guiding factor in evolution than Republicans.

And I’m going to hazard a guess that that percentage breaks down along “allegorical vs. literal reading of the Genesis story” lines. 

And then there’s global warming – the left’s current “which is heavier, a witch, or a duck?” meme:

On global warming, conservative policy positions often seem to be conflated or confused with rejection of the consensus that the planet has been warming due to human carbon emissions…Of the many Republican members of Congress I know personally, the vast majority do not reject the underlying science of global warming … Conservatives believe many of the policies put forward to address the problem will lead to unacceptable levels of economic hardship. It’s not inherently anti-scientific to oppose cap and trade or carbon taxes. What most Republicans object to are policies that unilaterally make it more expensive in the United States to produce energy, grow food, and transport people and goods but are unlikely to make much long-term difference in the world’s climate, given that other major world economies emit more carbon than the United States or have much faster growth rates of carbon emissions (China, India, Russia, and Brazil all come to mind).

Beyond that?  The Left rejects science – or embraces ideas that are no less faith-based and anti-empirical than the most zealous biblical literalist, particularly under the rubric of “social science”, which is frequently less “science” than “applied rhetoric”  – on a raft of issues:

• Pro-infanticide activists plead that life begins when a “fetus” exits the womb, whenever that is, and that a “fetus” in the uterus at 38 weeks gestation is just a mass of tissue – ignoring that preemies born as early as 22 weeks have gone on to live normal, healthy (if very difficult, early-on) lives, and that keeping preemies born after 28 weeks alive is, if not “routine”, at least very common.
• Gender-Identity Feminists have tried for decades to obscure and ignore the fact that men and women are physiologically, biologically, emotionally and intellectually different – and to enact that enforced ignorance in policies that go beyond “equality before the law”. 
• Gun grab activists are almost to a person allergic to valid statistics. 
• Green Energy activistshave gotten the government to “invest” billions in “green energy” scams that can not and will not in the foreseeable future ever address our society’s base power needs, while turning hatred of nuclear power into a near-religious expression of faith over empirical fact. 

And many more; the article compares the two sides’ relative commitment to hard science, and you should read the whole thing.

Moral of the story?  Next time some lefty bobblehead calls himself part of the “fact-based” community, smack ’em with a beaker.