Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Part of my job is signing cover sheets attached to batches of documents submitted for recording.  This morning I’m busy.  I have to write my name on, like, ten separate sheets of paper.

If I were a pro ball player, my autographs would be worth $100 each.  Of course, our office charges $100 each for approvals.  But do I see any of that money?  NO!  It goes to the County Treasurer.

Oh sure, they claim it’s used to pay my salary and insurance and benefits but I’m not buying it.  I think management is getting rich off the backs of labor and stealing the fruits of my toils for their own greed, just like it says in this Public Employee’s Union Poster.

I need a union to protect me from being ground under the iron heel of management making me work indoors, in air conditioning, risking paper cuts every moment of an entire 40-hour week with only a few breaks for lunch, coffee and cigarettes.  I’m a slave, that’s all I am, just an indentured servant.  I am being cheated, I deserve a raise, I demand a raise and a bigger pension and better insurance, if I don’t get them, I’m going on strike and bring the entire system to its . . . . . .

///slap///

Thanks, I needed that.

So do these people.

Joe Doakes

As this is written, Ted Cruz is still filibustering. 

A couple of observations. 

On the one hand, a friend of mine – a disaffected Republican and Ron Paul supporter – snarked something like “Hey, Ted Cruz is filibustering Obamacare!  Western Civilization will be saved!  Oh, wait – no, we’re still screwed”. 

So let me get this straight; when some people launch quixotic grandstanding windmill-tilts against big government, taxation, spending and creeping statism, it’s a statement of rock-solid principle, but when others do it for the same reasons, it’s snark-fodder? 

I’ll have to chew on that one for a while.

Grandstanding:  As Michael Medved pointed out yesterday, the filibuster is, tactically, pointless.  The Senate – and its majority of Democrats – will support the President.  Period. 

Politically?  Medved among others also had a point:  Obama wants the government to shut down.  He benefits when he (and a compliant media) can pin pain on smaller government.  And while the sequester was a complete squib for him, a shutdown would provide an endless parade of calumny for the media, his Praetorian Guard, to force-feed the “for the children” voter segment. 

And that’s not the only reason a shutdown benefits Obama.

The Great Diversion:  Think about it.  Obama’s been in office almost five years.  What does he have to show for it?

• An economy that is creating nothing but part-time jobs (unlike all previous recoveries – a sort of economic,ex post facto”Berg’s Seventh Law”).
• Thousands of American guns sent across the border to the narcotraficantes, resulting in the deaths of American cops and Mexican children.
• Four Americans dead in a terrorist attack, who had the misfortune to be attacked in a place that apprently was serving as a hand-off point for a black-bag weapons-smuggling operation sending arms to a movement that is rapidly being taken over by Al Quaeda – leading to a year worth of stonewalling that looks more and more like a coverup.
• The Middle East is in worse shape than it’s been since the 80s, and our stature in the world has shrunk since Dubya left office.
• And a bold trip to where even Nixon never went; the Obama Administration appears to have used the IRS to stifle conservative political dissent.

And even if you get all of those out of the way, what is Obama left with?  Obamacare – a law with some popular provisions that needed to happen via one mechanism or another (portability, dealing with pre-existing conditions) but is, as a package, about as popular as mandatory ice-water enemas. 

What would better serve Obama’s purposes than to divert attention away from everything he and his Administration have done?

A government shutdown, I suspect, strikes this blog’s audience (as it does me) at first blush as a great idea.  But it plays right into Obama’s hands.

So Cruz should stop filibustering and take a nap – right?

But Not So Fast:  As we  noted earlier this morning, Americans are fundamentally conservative.  They don’t identify with the GOP at the moment – at least in part because the mainstream GOP, the Beltway GOP of the consultants, doesn’t reflect the conservative principals that Americans support. 

And they didn’t last year – which was why conservatives stayed home on election day, handing another term to Obama.

The Tea Party wave of 2010 went back underground. 

But it’s still out there.  The Gallup and Rasmussen polls show it. 

And while Ted Cruz’ filibuster isn’t going to defund Obamacare, and it’d probably be a very bad idea to let it shut down the government, it could be – if the GOP is smart enough, and I have doubts about that – a key step toward doing something that all of the GOP consultants in the Beltway can’t do and don’t really want to; mobilize the vast unwashed base of Tea Party conservatives, people who don’t like to identify as Republicans  but see perfectly well that Obama and our idiot Congress have us on the road to Palookaville.

Last year, the hard left in Minnesota put together an immense coalition of groups to defeat the marriage amendment…

…and then to push a reluctant DFL to support and pass a gay marriage bill.

And the problem with coalitions is they’re pretty much all made up of unlikely bedfellows, or at the very least people who can only stand each other so long.

As the Twin Cities best feminist, I’m naturally on the National Organization of Women’s Minnesota Chapter’s mailing list.

Minnesota NOW and the Pro-Choice community as a whole contributed significant resources to the fight for marriage equality here in Minnesota. That is why we at Minnesota NOW were very disappointed to hear that the Minnesotans United PAC screens their candidates focused singularly on the issue of marriage for same-sex couples and that they will be providing funding to several legislators who have a history of voting for anti-choice legislation. We were told the Minnesotans United PAC will raise and spend resources to support legislators who voted for same-sex marriage – they have no other screens and are aware this model won’t work for all donors. We are truly saddened that the Minnesotans United PAC does not have our back when we need them. We are not equal until we are ALL equal.

Because infanticide is a civil right, dammit.

 We encourage you to direct your financial support to the Minnesota NOW PAC which screens candidates on all of our six core issues: LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, economic justice, racial equality, constitutional equality and freedom from violence. This will ensure your money is supporting a candidate that acts on all of your values, not just one.

All you DFL gay marriage supporters – are you going to take this sitting down?  Did you hear what they call you?

They listed 11 legislators – eight outstate DFLers and three Republicans (Kieffer, Peterson and Garofalo) who voted for the gay marriage bill – as being insufficiently pro-infanticide for their taste.

I may – in my capacity as the Twin Cities best feminist – start a new group:  “Minnesotans United For Womynandtheirchildren, Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgenders, Questioning And Others” (MUFWLGBTQAO) to campaign to resolve the battle between NOW and MUAF once and for all!

We noted this from a Gallup Poll last winter; voters prefer Republican ideas – until they hear they’re Republican.

A new Rasmussen Poll confirms this; voters trust GOP positions on most issues:

The only issues where Democrats prevail – Environment, Education, Social Security – are the ones most dominated by memes tailored to low-information voters.

John Hinderaker at Power Line – one of my longtime NARN co-hosts – writes:

There are some interesting findings. The Democrats (and some Republican pundits and politicians) are trying to stampede Republicans into a radical change on immigration policy, but Rasmussen finds that voters prefer the GOP on the issue, by seven points. Then there is gun control: after the better part of a year of Democrat and media hysteria on the subject, voters trust Republicans over Democrats by 46%-39%.

Given those numbers, you would think that Republicans will sweep in 2014–increase their hold on the House, and take the Senate. But that isn’t what voters have in mind. Rasmussen also finds that currently, Democrats lead Republicans in the generic Congressional preference poll by 40%-37%. It’s a paradox: voters prefer Republicans on the issues, but still lean toward voting for Democrats.

And like Hinderaker, I think there’s one guess why that’s true…

 I think it is obvious that the press’s ceaseless attacks on Republicans are part of the explanation. That is a longstanding problem, but the numbers suggest that Republicans will do best if they keep pounding away on the issues, especially the ones where voters are predisposed to favor them.

The other note for Republicans:  the issues where conservative Republicans win (according to this poll and the previous Gallup one) are the ones where the Tea Party took the lead four years ago.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

My wife watched the whole thing last night. I sat down at 9:30 to see the last half-hour. 15 contestants left. I looked at the line-up and picked the one in the yellow dress because she had the biggest chest. Yep, right on the money. So what’s the point of the rest of the contest?

I watched the last 5 contestants answering dopey questions, as if that final answer would the clincher that would help the judges decide. But they didn’t all answer the same question, of course, so no apples-to-apples comparison. How does that make sense?

Ms. Minnesota was asked something like ‘We’ve seen politician’s wives supporting their husbands lately, have they taken Stand By Your Man too far?’ and she said “No, because marriage is a life-long commitment so they should stand by their men. But their men ought to shape up.’ Yeah, she was the first loser to be sent home. What was wrong with that answer — not feminist enough?

Another was asked about Syria and chemical weapons. The contestant was against them and in favor of world peace. Well, duh, we all are. Nice, safe answer to an idiotic question. A third was asked about Miley Cyrus and twerking. She was against them, too, and also in favor of world peace. Ask a stupid question . . . .

Look, drop the questions, get out the measuring tape, lift your arms, girls, and let’s get this show on the road. We could have been done in 15 minutes and had time for a Rambo re-run.

As for the morons complaining that the winner is not American enough, two thoughts: one, none of us is “from here” originally, we’re a nation of immigrants and pretty girls can be descended from immigrants as easily as natives so STFU; and two, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn many of the bigoted comments are coming from leftists obeying Berg’s Seventh Law.

Joe Doakes

The American idiots who bagged on her were, pretty much to a person, morons.

The curious bit is the contortions this is sending Indians into.  Nina Davuluri, Miss America, was born in Syracuse, but her parents were from India.  While American liberals think America is the only place where skin color matters, the divide between light and dark-skinned Indians is a deep and ugly one.  Indians are noting that there is no way Ms. Davuluri could ever be crowned Miss India; she’s just too dark.

To:  MPR News
From:  Mitch Berg,Uppity Peasant
Re:  Re-Joyce And Be Glad

MPR,

Last week, in a similar open letter to the management at the news-blog MinnPost, I asked how they squared the fact that they were accepting sponsorship for their “news” coverage – let alone sponsorship from non-profit issue advocacy groups and the government that journalists are supposed to hold accountable – with professional journalism’s purported ideals and ethics.

These ideals are – we are told – set forth in the “Society of Professional Journalists’ “Code of Ethics“. 

Now – in 2011, MPR accepted a grant from the Joyce Foundation supporting the production of a series, “Following the Firearm“.   As Joyce notes…:

The Center selected reporters working in the Great Lakes region and awarded them fellowships to enable them to undertake in-depth investigative reporting projects. The fellows also attended workshops to learn from experts in gun crime and gun policy. MPR News reporter Brandt Williams spent four months researching the story. The four-part series looks at the sources of Minneapolis crime guns, sentencing for gun crimes, the impact of gun violence on the African American community, and the challenges surrounding firearm tracing.

Now, as has been noted in this space, the Joyce Foundation is the primary sponsor of gun control groups in the United States.  They donate a lot of money to groups like Michael Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns“, the Violence Policy Center (whose “research” on Second Amendment issues is notable for its strident inaccuracy)…

…and the MinnPost, whose own “journalism” on the subject has been increasingly suspect for the past year or so; the MinnPost would seem to have turned into a PR firm for the “Gun Safety” movement.   

But enough about them; let’s talk about MPR.

The SPJ Code of Ethics’ “Accountability” section says that the journalist should…:

• Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.  So how does reporting news on a controversial subject that is directly sponsored by a group that is a generous advocate for one side of the story not a real conflict of interest?
• Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.  I’d say getting sponsored by a key pressure group – including having, according to Joyce, a parade of Joyce-approved “experts” paraded before your reporters – qualifies. 
• Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.  Seems pretty self-explanatory.
• Disclose unavoidable conflicts.  Was there disclosure?  Yep, there was, to a point; Joyce’s involvement was noted, although Joyce’s stake in the issue – its funding of gun control groups to the tune of tens of millions of dollars – was, near as I can tell, not. Strikes me as avoidable. 
• Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.  How does MPR News’ acceptance of sponsorship from a special interest group not qualify?

 Your series aired back in 2011 – and to be fair, it presented factual information without pushing a political point of view especially overtly.  But neither did it go out of its way – in my opinion as a news consumer, activist on the subject and one-time reporter – to present much considered dissent from material supporting Joyce’s desired narrative, either. 

Which would make for an interesting parlor discussion – not that MPR News is especially interested in parlor discussions with people outside the Journo tribe. 

But beyond that?  About a month after the Joyce-sponsored series ran on MPR, the MPR News website published a commentary piece by Heather Martens – director and one of very few members of “Protect Minnesota”, a gun-control group.  The piece was notable for its complete absence of fact; every single non-numeric assertion made in the “Commentary” was false.  Every single one.  

And since I can’t imagine MPR News would publish a commentary by, say, a 9/11 Truther, or someone who favors white supremacy on biological grounds at all, much less without some sort of dissenting comment, I thought it was odd that MPR News granted her the bandwidth they did.

“Protect Minnesota” is also sponsored – almost entirely – by the Joyce Foundation, which had underwritten MPR’s series the previous month. 

Am I connecting dots that don’t belong connected?

Perhaps.  But if MPR had allowed its reporting to be sponsored by the NRA, and then ran an unaccompanied op-ed by Ted Nugent, people would talk, wouldn’t they? 

I don’t expect an answer, of course; MPR News doesn’t like engaging people outside the tribe (as I found last year, when one of your executives mis-addressed an email telling an MPR News staffer not to engage with me, to me). 

But since MPR News spends such time and effort claiming the moral and ideological journalistic high ground – claims to which I’ve given public credence in the past – it’s worth asking. 

Even the SPJ Code of Ethics says so.

Sincerely,

Mitch Berg
Uppity Peasant

Read the rest of this entry »

(SCENE:  A darkened alley in Newark, New Jersey, on a dark, drizzly April evening.  A broken down school bus full of inner city middle-schoolers returning from a trip to the ballet in New York sits by the side of a dismal road, steam rising from its up-tilted hood, in front of a deserted chemical plant.  The driver, a cute, plucky Puerto Rican single mother of three named Maria LOPEZ, looks under the hood along with passerby Tobias “Wang Dang Doodle” JACKSON, a grizzled 60-something black man in a porkpie hat and a worn black suit.  Mitch BERG pulls up, driving a rented Ford Focus, and climbs out to try to render assistance, carrying a cell phone and a nearly empty bottle of lemon-lime Powerade).

BERG:  Can I help?  Has anyone called a tow or anything yet?

LOPEZ:  I called the police, the district and a wrecker, but there won’t be any help coming for at least an hour.

JACKSON:  Those infernal garages aren’t what they used to be. 

BERG:  OK.  Well, maybe we can figure out what’s wrong here…

(A black BMW sedan pulls up beside the bus.  Out pops a dapper African-American man, who walks briskly to the bus).

MAN:  Hi.  I’m Corey Booker, and I’m the mayor of Newark. 

LOPEZ:  Hello, Mister Mayor!

BOOKER:  Hi.  We don’t have much time.  The CIA just called me.  A band of Serbian narcotraficantes are apparently en route from the docks in Elizabeth to pick up several drums of methamphetamine stored in that disused chemical factory, and they’re not above killing everyone that gets in their way.

BERG:  Isn’t this a job for the police?

BOOKER:  They’re all busy.  It’s up to us. 

BERG:  I hate it when that happens.

JACKSON:  Newark police are, let us say, sub-optimal. 

BOOKER:  Be that as it may, we’re going to have to get these children out of the way before the Serbian narcotraficantes get here and kill everyone in their path.  You, maam, and you, sir (points to LOPEZ and JACKSON), start walking those kids to safety in that community center on the other side of that culvert.  You, sir (points to BERG) and I need to divert them to provide cover. 

BERG:  Er…OK. 

(LOPEZ and JACKSON start to herd the kids out of the bus and into the ditch).

LOPEZ:  Hurry, kids!

JACKSON: Remember, gentlemen – fire and movement!

(In the distance, a pair of panel vans stop and disgorge 20 Serbian narcotraficantes,all carrying AK47 assault rifles.  They form a skirmish line and start charging toward the bus.  Scattered shots ring out as the line moves forward.  LOPEZ and JACKSON start the children running in single file down the ditch by the side of the road as a few sparks fly from the bus’ chassis).

BOOKER:  You flank them to the right.  I’ll draw their fire. 

BERG:  Flank them with what?  Your state’s idiotic gun laws bar me from bringing my legal handgun, much less something I can use against…

BOOKER:  GO!

(BOOKER springs to the left, waving his arms wildly.  BERG, nonplussed, crawls to the right and crosses the road.  The Serbian narcotraficantes fire picks up and their charge gathers speed, as they yell “get the meth!  get the meth!” in Serbian)

(BOOKER dodges incoming bullets in a complex, acrobatic display that makes The Matrix look like that old SNL “Bears Fans” sketch.  An RPG fires, the rocket tracing an angry red slash across the field.  BOOKER catches the rocket by the tail and throws it back at the Serbian narcotraficantes; it explodes, sending several Serbs diving for cover as others blaze away at the Mayor).

(Berg, in the meantime, as closed the gap with the Serbs, who are focused on blazing away at Mayor BOOKER.  Having no weapon, he looks around, and sees a puddle of New Jersey rainwater.  He ducks down and starts filling the Powerade bottle).

(Two more RPG rounds rocket toward the Mayor.  He catches them, cross-handed, just before they’d have impacted his chest, and in a grandiose double-pirouette, throws both rounds back at the Serbs.  One splashes into the mud at the feet of Branko SLRBÇ, the leader of the Serb narcotraficantes.

SLRBÇ (yelling in Serb with subtitles):  Is this even plausible?

(The round explodes, and SLRBÇ vanishes in a gout of gore and flame). 

(The second round slams into the grill of the first of the narcotraficantes’ vans, exploding it in a gout of flame.  The rest of the Serbs go to ground, panicked and pinned down).

(BERG caps the bottle of New Jersey rainwater, and with a mighty heave, throws it at the second van, which explodes into brilliant blue and green flames).

(The surviving Serbs get up and run back up the road toward their rally point, a giant Exxon sign which, unfortunately for them, gives the local cops plenty of light by which to apprehend them).

BERG (soaking wet, walks back to Booker, who is somehow still dry):  Wow.  How did you do that?

BOOKER (As police cars pull up all around them)  It’s all in a days work for the Mayor of Newark. 

(BOOKER tips his hat and climbs into his car, and – notwithstanding that a dark cloudy night fell over two hours earlier – drives into the sunset as LOPEZ, soaking wet, walks back up the freeway.  She and BERG look at each other, drenched, before embracing in a passionate kiss as the camera pulls back to a wide shot of the full post-battle vista).

(And SCENE)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

That wasn’t a mass shooting in Chicago, it was a gang war. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you, as soon as the high-speed rail line is completed.

“Senseless and brazen acts of violence have no place in Chicago and betray all that we stand for,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Friday. “The perpetrators of this crime will be brought to justice and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I encourage everyone in the community to step forward with any information and everyone in Chicago to continue their individual efforts to build stronger communities where violence has no place.”

Pretty much exactly what President Obama said about Benghazi. That didn’t turn out so well for us either.

I can’t stop laughing at this.

But you’d have to be a real language geek to know why.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was listening to MPR News the other day.

I heard a “Jennifer Vogel” on the air.  She’s working for MPR’s “Ground Level” project.  Her mission – and that of the “Ground Level Project” – “focuses on complex issues playing out in Minnesota’s cities and towns”

Check out the page above.  Ms. Vogel is spending all sorts of time in Greater Minnesota.

She sounded familiar.

So I checked the archives.  Yep – it’s the same Jennifer Vogel who wrote the seminan patricial classist rant, “F**k The Suburbs“, for a Seattle version of a City Pages-style Village Voice knockoff – an article which provided us all sorts of fun in this space back in 2004.

It started:

Minneapolis and St. Paul sit on either side of the upper Mississippi River, in what amounts to the middle of nowhere. For three hundred miles in any direction, there are no cities of size, only prairie, gas stations, and big open sky. We may be on the Mississippi but no one comes here by boat. There are no containers from Japan piling up on the dock. People arrive by bus and car, dusty and road-worn, mostly from the small towns of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas–places where ambitious and misunderstood kids grow up despising their parents’ lives.

OK, a lot of us who move from what Vogel calls “The Big Nowhere” think those sorts of things – at one point or another.

But Vogel – like most writers for freebie lifestyle ‘zines, and by “most” I mean “every one I’ve ever met“, who are by the way white and upper-middle-class to a geometric fault – saw racists behind the hedges:

As the city changed, the “family values” folks moved away. However, they didn’t move all the way away. Oh, no. They moved to the suburbs. Tract housing began to sprawl in all directions as many wild-eyed whities climbed over each other to get the hell out of town. And good riddance, I say. Except that these defenders of all that’s wholesome have formed a band around the city, a ring of red that’s threatening to strangle the very idea of beneficent government.  

You get the idea.

Read the whole, depressing thing.   Or don’t.  You really do get the idea; Vogel hates conservatives, and seems to loathe the sort of people…

…that MPR has her reporting on today.

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t begrudge that she got a job.  They’re hard to get in that racket these days.  A lefty “Journo”‘s gotta wait until a generation of former Strib and WCCO reporters dies off before they can hope for a gig at a non-profit or in the DFL Comms Office.  These are tough times.

And who knows?  Maybe Vogel has grown up in the past nine years.  Maybe she has learned to see people as more than collections of stereotypes classified by exterior decorating choices, zipcodes, ethnic food preferences and skin tones.  Maybe she’ll approach the people she’s reporting in Greater Minnesota with less of the seething, patrician, classist contempt she showed nine years ago.

I do like to believe the best in people.

Yeah.  Maybe that’s it.

(PS:  Here’s a story idea for Ms. Vogel:  More immigrants are moving to the suburbs than the city these days. Sounds like an idea for an article! You’re welcome).

Last month, Australia tossed aside its Labour government and installed a conservative one.

Two weeks ago, voters in Norway followed suit, installing a center-right government.

And over the weekend, German voters defied polls that pointed toward a slim win for Angela Merkel’s center-right Christliche-Demokratische Union (Christian Democrat Party, or CDU), giving the CDU what exit polls show may well be an absolute majority in the German Bundestag (Parliament):

An early projection by the state broadcaster ARD on Sunday evening showed Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrat party (CDU) winning 301 seats in the 598-seat Bundestag, enough to form a government without a coalition partner. Later projections suggested, however, that she could fall just short of an absolute majority.

Exit polls and early results put the CDU on 42.5 per cent of the vote, a lead of 17 points over the main opposition.

It had been expected that Mrs Merkel would be forced into a “grand coalition” with her main socialist opponents, the Social Democrats. The early results suggested that she might avoid this.

We’ll see.

I try not to take too much comfort in historical parallels – but in the late seventies, you saw a similar wave of countries whose voters woke up to the fact that the economic system couldn’t be sustained under the liberal status quo.

Nancy Pelosi:

“But overwhelmingly for the American people, this [Obamacare] is a liberation,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on CNN today.

Words mean what they say they mean, dammit.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Capitol Police told not to help Metro Police during the Navy Yard shooting, but to stay to protect the Capitol.

Same excuse for why we didn’t send troops to Benghazi:

“GEN. DEMPSEY: They weren’t told to stand down. A stand down means don’t do anything. They were told to — that the mission they were asked to perform was not in Benghazi but was at Tripoli Airport.”

Geez, you’d think they were all a bunch of government union employees protecting their turf.

 Suddenly, the reports of a second and third man wielding AR-15’s makes sense. They were there, then suddenly they weren’t there. Now we know why the cops have stopped looking for them. What we don’t know is how many people died when they retreated.

And I doubt we will.  Not from the American media, anyway.

So many links from today’s show:

• Here’s the Scott Honour for Governor website. It was a pleasure talking with the candidate.  More governor candidates coming soon!
• More information helping fight the Childcare Union Jamdown.  Thanks to Senator Michelle Benson and to Voices of Conservative Women.
• And don’t forget to see Congressman Darryl Issa – one of the leaders in fighting government overreach.
• Finally – here’s “Feed America’s Children“.  They’re matching every dollar of donations 5:1 – so please give.

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 back in the studio today.  Big show today – Gubernatorial candidate Scott Honour will join us.  Then Senator Dave Osmek on the new wrinkles in the DFL’s Local Government Aid scam.  Senator Michelle Benson will talk with us about the big federal injunction against the Daycare Union Jamdown.  And Lee Michaels will talk about AM1280’s “Feed the Children” benefit.  
• Don’t forget the King Banaian Radio Show, on AM1570 “The Businessman” from 9-11AM this morning!
• Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” from 1-3 tomorrow. Tune on in!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all four 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 (don’t ask)
• 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!

Don’t forget – tomorrow evening is the 9th or 10th annual Minnesota Organization of Bloggers Summer Party.

We’ll be at Keegan’s Irish Pub in Northeast Minneapolis – just west of Hennepin on University, across from Surdyk’s. 

The party starts at 7, and runs until everyone leaves – and I’m usually there until midnight at least. 

Hope to see you there!

To:  Joel Kramer (CEO/Editor), Roger Buoen and Susan Albright (Co-Managing Editors) Don Effenberger (News Editor)
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  They Get What They Pay For

Esteemed Editors:

I was never much of a reporter.  I could always do the “who, what, when, where, why and how” of a story just fine, and earned a living at it, off and on.  But it was never really my thing.

But I do remember, when I worked in the business, that the fastest way to get a reporter, producer or editor up on their back legs was to suggest that journalism partner with business or government to do the job.  They would say – with righteousness rivaling any Baptist minister or Trappist monk – that Journalism’s mission was to be a check and balance on government, business, anyone with power.    To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.   Any whiff of filthy lucre was to be kept on the other side of the thick wall and locked door that separated the Sales department from the newsroom. 

Media analysts – I’m thinking Garfield and Gladstone’s “On The Media” on NPR, and the whole Romanesko borg – go through gyrations worthy of a Talmud symposium sifting through the ethics of mixing journalism and money. 

Now, theMinnPosttalks a big game about journalism.  And you’ve certainly staffed your site with a lot of people with long pedigrees in the regional news business.  And Brian Lambert. 

But I’ve noticed on one issue that your site gets a fair chunk of money from from the Joyce Foundation.  The Joyce Foundation also bankrolls most of the major gun control organizations in the United States, including Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts and “Protect Minnesota“. 

And along with this financial link, the MinnPost’s coverage of Second Amendment issues has gotten more and more slanted, and not a little bit risible in the bargain:

• Doug Grow has positively fawned over Heather Martens and Jane Kay (of “Moms Want Action”, another astroturf anti-gun group that gets money from the same pool of liberals with deep pockets that bankrolls Protect MN and, I suspect, the MinnPost); his coverage has been less “journalism” and more “holding a rhetorical slumber party”.  His piece on Rep. Hillstrom’s counter to the Paymar/Hausman gun grab bills – one of which Martens, a lobbyist, read into the record, a bizarre flouting of House rules – was so devoid of fact I concluded it could only have been written in advance. 
• I’ve got nothing but respect for Eric Black as a journalist – but his coverage of Second Amendment issues and their Constitutional history this past year has been a fount of inspiration for us on this blog. 

The MinnPost gets big bucks from Joyce, and starts a wave of anti-Second-Amendment (I’ll be charitable) cheerleading.  Coincidence?

Which leads us to this week, and Susan Perry’s piece on an academic “study” on gun violence.  It was a puff piece about a junk study…

…and it was sponsored – as noted in the story’s headline – by UCare.  An arm of the government of the State of Minnesota.  Now, leave aside that that government is currently controlled by the extreme metrocrat wing of the DFL party.  Here’s the question:  if journalism is supposed to hold government accountable, should be finacially beholden to government?

Or does that only count when it’s not a DFL sacred cow being promoted?

Because when your “journalism” is being done at the behest of issue-oriented non-profits and the government you’re theoritically supposed to hold accountable, isn’t it really just public relations?  Or campaign media?

Thanks,

Mitch Berg
Uppity Peasant

How Doakes from Como Park emails:

Libya will let reporters interview the terrorists who blew up our consulate in Benghazi, but not FBI agents who want to arrest them. The area where the terrorist live is too dangerous.

One word, Mr. President: Noriega.

Joe Doakes

Carter is actually looking pretty good in comparison these days.

The US 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has slapped slapped an injunction on the daycare union jamdown::

Officials of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which is representing Minnesota providers who oppose unionization, said they received notice late Thursday that their motion for an injunction blocking the law was granted by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.

According to lawyers for the group, that means the child-care union election cannot take place until the injunction is lifted. The appeals court said it wants to wait to see if the U.S.Supreme Court decides to hear an appeal on a related case dealing with unionization of home-care workers. That case is called Harris v. Quinn.

Its just a stop in the way – tw battle isn’t nearly over.

But its great news anyway.

Rep. Franson, one of te leaders in the fight against the jam down, released a statement

“While the legal battle over this law is far from over, I’m happy Minnesota moms and dads and their childcare providers can be breath a little easier for now as the threat of forced childcare unionization is no longer imminent.”

The good guys and gals have ha to work themselves to exhaustion against an exceptionally well-funded union push. This ha to feel good.

It’s gonna be a gorgeous evening Saturday – and I hope you can make it out to the 9th or 10th annual Minnesota Organization of Bloggers Summer Party, at Keegans Irish Pub in Minneapolis.

We’ll start at 7PM, and go until everyone decides to leave, which is usually around 11 or 12 or so.  Whatever works.  Just stop by.

 The MinnPost – a non-profit-run institutional blog established the the intention to get a jump on the next wave of institutional journalism – gets a whole bunch of money from the Joyce Foundation.  Joyce also bankrolls Minnesota’s “largest” gun grabber group, “Protect Minnesota”, and Michael Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns”, as well as paying academics to deliver the conclusions they want. 

Is that financial relationship related to the fact that the MinnPost has, whenever the subject of guns and the Second Amendment is at hand, turned itself into a risible propaganda organ for the gun-grabbing extreme left?

From Eric Black’s recycling long-obscure legal theories about the origins of the Second Amendment to Doug Grow’s naked puff-piecemongering in support of Heather Martens’ checkbook advocacy group, the MinnPost would seem to be working hard to earn the $50K or so they got from Joyce. 

The latest?  Susan Perry, a “Health” reporter who has pulled her weight in the past on theMinnPost’santi-gun beat. 

Confederate soldiers! With guns! Defending slavery! This is what the MinnPost think you, the law-abiding gun owner, genuflect to.

Yesterday came this piece, entitled…

Well, no.  We’ll get to the title in a bit.  But I’m going to pull a quote from the end of the story first.  I’ll add emphasis for weasel words and a particularly dim strawman:

“Although correlation is not synonymous with causation,” write Bangalore and Messerli, “it seems conceivable that abundant gun availability facilitates firearm-related deaths. Conversely, high crime rates may instigate widespread anxiety and fear, thereby motivating people to arm themselves and give rise to increased gun ownership, which, in turn, increases availability. The resulting vicious cycle could, bit-by-bit, lead to the polarized status that is now the case with the US.”

“Regardless of exact cause and effect, however,” they add, “the current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis purporting to show that countries with the higher gun ownership are safer than those with low gun ownership.”

So – seventeen paragraphs into a nineteen paragraph article, we hear that the reasearchers aren’t actually drawing conclusions (in attacking a “widely quoted hypothesis” that nobody quotes at all). 

Which is a bit of a letdown for a story whose headline…:

“Idea that ‘guns make a nation safer’ is debunked in study”

…fairly screams “We’ve got a big big big conclusion here!”

 The Rhetorical Slalom Between The Strawmen: I’ll throw this out to the shooters in the audience.  Was this premise…:

The idea that “guns make a nation safer”

…as new to you as it was to me?

Anyway – the “premise”…

…is not true, according to a study published today in The American Journal of Medicine.

In fact, the study found just the opposite: Countries with a low rate of gun ownership have significantly fewer gun-related deaths than those with a high rate.

Right.  In the same way that areas where couples marry have higher divorce rates than areas where they just shack up. 

The study – and Perry’s piece – are honest, in a very dishonest sense; they scrupulously point out that gun death rates are, mirabile dictu, lower in places fewer guns.  But the “study” is equally scrupulous in avoiding apples to apples comparisons, or correlating their conclusions to any data that doesn’t fit inside their razor-thin premise…

…which is to attack a case (“Nations with few guns have higher gun crime rates!”) that, for the life of me, I’ve never heard a single credible person make – about nations, anyway. 

Cherry-Picked:  Perry notes that…

The U.S. leads in gun ownership — and gun deaths

The analysis found that the United States has far and away the highest rate of gun ownership, with 88.8 privately owned guns for every 100 people (“almost as many guns as it has people,” Bangalore and Messerli note)…The United States also has the highest firearm-related death rate: 10.2 deaths per 100,000 residents…At the other end of the spectrum are Japan and the Netherlands. Japan has a gun-ownership rate of 0.6 guns per 100 people, while the Netherlands’ rate is 3.9.

Those two countries also had two of the lowest death-by-gun rates: 0.06/100,000 for Japan and 0.46/100,000 for the Netherlands.

But neither Japan nor the Netherlands is fighting a “Drug War”; neither nation has policies that have turned their inner cities into shooting galleries, controlled by people who have nothing to lose by resorting to violence to protect their markets, using entry-level employees who grow up in a culture that glorifies violence and ignores consequences. 

Neither Japan nor the Netherlands has a major geographical region dominated by a culture that was practicing duelling and honor-killing and treating violence as a way of life long before there was a United States – a culture whose crime rates are, at worst, on par with the worst of the inner cities. 

Indeed, both Japan and the Netherlands are extremely homogenous countries; homogenous societies tend to be pretty placid – until they have to flirt with heterodoxy (ask the Koreans and the Ainu in Japan, or the Indonesians in the Netherlands).

Indeed, Perry’s article points – unwittingly – at the truth:

The only country that was a bit of an outlier was South Africa. It had a relatively low gun ownership rate of 12.5/100, but a high (the second-highest, just below the U.S.) gun-related death rate of 9.41/100,000.

And of the countries on the list, South Africa is the only one with a significantly – indeed, pivotally – heterodox society.  One with massive urban dysfunction, to boot. 

Which might lead the rational observer to conclude – or see a correlation, anyway – that guns don’t kill people; societal dysfunction does.

Math Is Hard, And Psychiatry Is Harder:  But let’s look at the “gun death” numbers Perry actually does deign to report – the relative gun murder rates in the US, the Netherlands, Japan and…:

[…the] United Kingdom also ranked low on both lists. It has a gun-ownership rate of 6.2 per 100 people and a gun-death rate of 0.25 per 100,000.

But fully half of the US “gun death rate” is suicides.  And the suicide rate in the US (12/100,000) is half of Japans (21.7/100,000), and equal to the UK’s (11.8), and both the US and UK are 50% higher  than the Dutch, at 8.8/100,000. 

We’re not sure if the “study” concluded that guns and depressed, mentally-ill or chemically-addled people don’t mix, or not.  Perhaps the Joyce Foundation will write a grant to study that?

No?

Is This A Strawman, Or A Begged Question?: Perry’s piece continues:

Their conclusion: “There was no significant correlation between guns per capita per country and crime rate, arguing against the notion of more guns translating into less crime.”

This is the third time in Perry’s piece the “notion” that anyone is comparing national gun rates to crime – at least in nations with working legal and law-enforcement systems, which is what the “study” is limited to. 

And for the record, I’m at a complete loss as to a single credible pro-gun advocate who’s made that claim – between nations.  The variables – societal heterodoxy, cultural conditions, criminal justice issues, different judicial systems – are far too complex to make such a case in an intelligent way. 

But when you start eliminating variables?   By just considering different firearms ownership rates in the US?  It’s not rocket surgery – even I can do it, even though I don’t have to because John Lott et al already did.  At worst, in the United States, places with higher legal gun ownership are very generally safer. 

And that’s just a correlation.  I’m not ascribing causation.

And unlike Susan Perry, I’ll admit that without any obfuscation.

So Let’s Summarize:  Susan Perry’s article reports on a non-comprehensive study whose own authors admit it’s a non-“debunk”-ment, that reached no meaningful conclusion about a premise that nobody advanced. 

Follow The Money:  We mentioned the Joyce Foundation – which bankrolls both the MinnPost and the state’s “largest” gun control group. 

One might ask – is it possible to expect honest “journalism” from a publication that has a financial interest in reporting an organization’s slant on the news? 

I’ll ask – because as Perry’s article notes in its heading, in addition to the Joycers…

This content is made possible by the generous sponsorship support of UCare.

So not only is the MinnPost an organ of an anti-gun extremist group, it’s also on the payroll of…

…the State of Minnesota.

Edward R. Murrow would vomit.

As you know, I am a Second Amendment activist.   This blog has always reflected this; indeed, the first post on this blog was a gun rights article.  It’s one of my most active topics. 

So consider that when I say this:  Starbuck’s CEO was right to ask gun owners to please not carry openly in his chain’s stores.

It’s his business – and annual “Starbucks Appreciation Days” aside, the vast majority of his chain’s clientele is going to be people on the political center-to-left – people who, rightly or wrongly, find firearms disconcerting. 

Bear in mind he’s not posting his stores to tell concealed carriers to keep their guns out; he’d just appreciate Real Americans not rattling the ninnies among the center-left masses who stop by every day for their Frangelicaccinos. 

That’s it. 

The Bill of Rights enumerates our rights to speak, publish, assemble, worship and keep and bear arms.  That means you have the right to give a pro-Vikings speech in front of a Packers bar, to march your Communist Re-Enactor club through a suburb full of Holodomor survivors, hold a southern Baptist revival meeting outside a mosque, or carry your firearms into a gathering of Vegan Nuns for Cesar Chavez.  Not only are none of them good ideas, all of them are just plain bad manners. 

Along those lines?  There is no genre in libertarian alt-media than the bobbleheads who film themselves walking down the road with an AR-15 slung over their shoulders, almost literally begging for a cop to pull over and ask what he’s doing, allowing the bobblehead the opportunity to lecture the cop on what the law really says.  The bobblehead is right – but it’s still stupid.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Initially, media assumed he was a right-wing kook NRA member killing innocents with an assault rifle.

Now, it turns out he’s a liberal Obama fan with mental health issues who drives a Prius and used an ordinary shotgun.

So we’ll never hear another word about him.

Joe Doakes

Many mainstream media also transformed the Queens native into a “Texan”.

Note to all you folks thinking of moving to North Dakota to start cashing in on the oil boom:  North Dakota is cold.  

There aren’t a lot of trees.  And outside of the eight or nine significant-sized cities (Fargo, Grand Forks, Jamestown, Devil’s Lake, Bismark/Mandan, Minot, Williston, Dickinson, and maybe Valley City), there just aren’t a whole lot of people. 

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Fascinating article in “First Things” about an aspect of Warren Zevon I did not know the first thing about.