It was a year ago yesterday that a depraved lefty walked into the national Family Research Council headquarters a a pistol, 100 rounds of ammo, and the intention to kill every person in the office. 

He was stopped by a building manager and acting security guard, Leo Johnson, who, although shot twice, subdued the leftist gunman, who had walked into the lobby claiming to be a new intern.  Johnson asked for ID. 

After Corkins takes a suspiciously long time rummaging through his bag to produce identification, Johnson cannily stands up and walks around the desk to get a closer look at what Corkins is doing. Corkins bolts upright, gun in hand. Without the slightest hesitation, Johnson rushes Corkins, who fires twice. A bullet shatters Johnson’s left forearm. “And I just couldn’t hear anything, my arm just kind of blew back. So at that point I was thinking: ‘I have to get this gun,’ ” Johnson told The Weekly Standard. “That was my sole focus—I have to get this gun—this guy’s gonna kill me and kill everybody here.”

From there, Johnson somehow manages to push Corkins across the lobby and pin him against the wall with his bad arm. “I just started punching him as hard as I could, until I could feel his grip loosen,” recalled Johnson. Eventually he takes the gun from Corkins with his wounded arm. Before long, Corkins is subdued on the ground. Corkins now admits that it was his intention to shoot everyone in the building. There’s no question Johnson saved a lot of lives.

This was a genuine hate crime; the shooter, Floyd Lee Corkins, had a backpack full of Chick-Fil-A sandwiches he intended to smear into his victims’ faces after shooting them, apperently to suffocate the wounded. 

Johnson was a hero.  And you’ve heard scarcely a word about it in the mainstream media, who spent most of the past 18 months trying in vain to pound the utterly-non-bias-related Martin-Zimmerman case into a “hate crime”, and the past couple of years trying unsuccessfully to politicize the Giffords, Aurora and Newtown shootings.

And yet here was the real thing (and by no means for the first time).  And…

(crickets)

There are some illuminating contrasts between the media’s handling of the political dimensions of the Family Research Council shooting and the shooting of Representative Giffords. In the latter case, the media rushed to assume political motivations and were quick to blame, of all people, Sarah Palin…there is no evidence whatsoever Loughner saw this map or that allegedly violent political rhetoric—even “campaign” is a term borrowed from war—was in any way a cause of the Giffords shooting. That didn’t stop serious news organizations from lending institutional credibility to the irresponsible allegations…though Giffords was shot in January 2011, as recently as this year in an article on gun violence the New York Times saw fit to remind readers that “many criticized Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential nominee, for using cross hairs on her Web site to identify Democrats like Ms. Giffords.”

 And NBC news fairly raced to blame the Aurora shooting on the Tea Party. 

By contrast, the media handled awkwardly the revelation that Corkins admitted to plotting mass murder as a means of furthering a popular liberal cause. “A detail sure to reignite the culture wars that erupted around the shooting is the fact that Corkins told FBI agents that he identified the Family Research Council as anti-gay on the Web site of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” wrote the Washington Post during Corkins’s trial in February. It’s a little unseemly for a newspaper, when finally forced to confront actual politically motivated violence, to worry about the shooting’s impact on the metaphorical “culture war.” Particularly when irresponsible actors in that culture war continue to get a free pass from the media.

The SPLC – cited with grave solemnity as an authority by rafts of lefty bobbleheads – has become a bit of a hate group in its own right:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was once a laudable civil rights organization that sued racists and violent extremists. Now it regularly demonizes anyone who runs afoul of its knee-jerk liberal politics, and despite this it is still regularly cited by the media as a “nonpartisan” watchdog. Some of the SPLC’s newly targeted “hate groups,” such as pickup artists, are merely kooky or distasteful. Others singled out by the SPLC, including Catholics who go to Latin mass or Christian organizations similar to the Family Research Council, are well within the mainstream. Tellingly, the SPLC doesn’t just name the Family Research Council on its website—it posts the council’s address on a “hate map.” That map is still on SPLC’s website, and the organization refused calls to take it down after the Family Research Council shooting.

But they won’t. 

I bring it up because we’re seeing the same thing with the Widstrand beating in Saint Paul.  Now, to be clear, there’s no evidence that it was a “hate crime”, per se; in other words, there’s no evidence that any of the youths stood on a soapbox and bellowed “I’m doing this because I Hate Whitey”.  And for purposes of charging that brutal assault, evidence is what is needed.

But you can see, feel and hear the nervousness in official Saint Paul and Minneapolis government circles; as crime as dropped in most parts of the Twin Cities, it’s stayed steadily well above average on the East Side, the North End, the North Side, Phillips.  Parts of the East Side have been deteriorating before our eyes over the past decade, in a city that is generally mostly just stagnant. 

And yet nobody in offical Twin Cities circles will call the elephant what it is.  They hold official observances for the “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” misery-exploitation caravan – which exists to protest the deaths of children who look like the children of NPR executives – and studiously ignore the fact that black on black crime in the Twin Cities is astronomically higher than any other rate in the state.

2011:  As the GOP majority began working to try to tame Minnesota’s government monkey, the DFL prattled “the GOP is raising property taxes!”. 

It was baked monkey doodle, of course.  The GOP re-focused “Local Government Aid” toward its original mission, helping poor outstate communities, as opposed to subsidizing the urban DFL. 

But in 2012, it was one of the DFL’s big chanting points; “Elect us and we’ll lower property taxes!”, by restoring and boosting Local Government Aid. 

And some of us warned you back then – while the DFL would certainly tuck into the job of wrenching more money out of the parts of the state that pay their way, there’d be no guaranteed cuts in property taxes…

…because the state has nothing to do with what counties charge.

Nothing.  Zip.  Nada.  Zilch. 

But the voters – maniupulated by a lot of emotional issues, and not thinking all that clearly – turned the House and Senate over to the DFL.  And the DFL raised taxes, and jacked up LGA payments to their friends in Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Duluth. 

And then what?

What the hell do you think?   Property taxes aren’t going to budge!

Joe Doakes from Como Park noticed it, and emailed:

St. Paul’s budget proposal has no layoffs; instead, there are new hires and expanded services, which the City Council President Lantry attributes to Local Government Aid received from the State of Minnesota.

Two weeks ago, Governor Dayton and the DFL promised that LGA would produce $120 million in local property tax relief instead of new spending.

But DFL politics aren’t driven by actual results.  All that’s necessary, in a state where the media mostly takes its marching orders from Alida Messinger, is that someone says taxes will go down, probably. 

And that’s exactly what’s happening. 

Doakes:

Nope, not in St. Paul. St. Paul taxes stay the same. The LGA gets spent on fun stuff, not boring old property tax relief. Again.

Joe Doakes

And by “fun stuff”, we mean more government employee union jobs. 

At any rate, I’ll claim a big win here – taxes in Saint Paul won’t drop, and they’ll probably rise.  Taxes in Minneapolis and Duluth will also stay the same, although there will be more “services” that serve precious few at exquisite cost.

The DFL lied.  And it’s you, the taxpayer, that’s paying the price – being taken for a ripe suck at both the state and (most) local levels. 

The funny part?  The DFL’s apparatchiks are still claiming taxes are dropping, even though they aren’t. 

It’s almost like they don’t expect the regional media to fact-check them, or give any coverage to those who do.

A woman with a carry permit breaks up a robbery at a Denny’s in Houston:

At around 4 a.m. Thursday, a man who does not want to be identified, said his brother was robbed by six men with guns at a Denny’s off the Gulf Freeway in southeast Houston.

“I don’t know if it was random or someone set him up. Because he got his own label,” said the victim’s brother.

His brother’s wife was in the restroom at the time, but when she exited the restroom she saw the group of suspected robbers. Police said that’s when she pulled out her gun and shot at them.

“She said she came out of the restroom and saw my brother on the floor. That’s when she started doing what she gotta do. She got a license and she’ll do anything to protect her kids and my brother,” he said.

Police said there was a shootout, but it is not known how many shots were fired at the time. However, police said the gunshots did hit cars in the parking lot.

No word of any charges filed against the woman; if there were, I suspect we’d have heard of it.  

But Texas has a “Stand your Ground” law.  Law-abiding citizens involved in otherwise legitimate self-defense shootings (i.e. in which they are not willing participants. 

The “elites” don’t get it.

Us proles?   We’re smarter.

…but there are people in this world who I wouldn’t mind hearing had been chained in a basement and eaten by mice. 

Just saying.

For years, I’ve thought that it’d be a good idea to hold prosecutors – say, Mike Nifong – criminally liable for malicious prosecution. 

And the fallout from the Zimmerman case isn’t changing that belief even a little.

“No guns in capitol!”,
Michael Paymar says amid
Capitol Police.

Mulligan Session!
The only real question is
which “Fail” to start with.

The NARN is Fair-bound!
Again, the constant battle
against the cheese curd.

Chaos in Egypt.
How often must I explain
it’s not that “Morsi”.

35 choices
as Minneapolis votes.
“Instant” runoff? Hah!

The history books
Say we’re created equal.
Some, moreso, I guess.

Ryan Winkler called
Clarence Thomas “Uncle Tom”.
Thomas: “Sorry – who?”

Zygi Wilf? A crook?
He seemed so above reproach!
Who woulda thunk it?

Governor Dayton
sees Alida, starts to sweat.
“No more shock collar!”

Welcome, darling kids!
Time to meet your new sitter
Sal “Bug-Eyes” Rossi.

Read the rest of this entry »

During the work day, I don’t blog.  I’ll occasionally see articles or things I’m interested in writing about, and use the WordPress mobile app to put the links, titles, jottings about subjects, or whatever I can out into my Drafts folder, so I can pick them up in the morning when I do my actual blogging. 

So I dug into my Drafts folder this morning and found a piece at the top of the pile – probably from yesterday – entitled “A Problem Of Focus”.

With nothing in it.  No link, copy, not even a hint of what I was thinking when I wrote the title.

Which makes more sense the more you think about it.

To:  The World
From: Mitch Berg
Re:  This Say I

All:

This is in re the phrase “What Say You?”.  It’s been popping up a lot in conversation over this past few years. 

What say me?  Me say “It’s a linguistic anachronism that’s become a pretentious cliche”, that’s what me say.

Me say kill with fire.

That is all.

As we noted last week, Rep. Michael “The Kia Hamster” Paymar is proposing a bill to ban citizen carry at the Capitol complex.

Keep this in mind:  to carry at the Capitol, a citizen (as opposed to a law enforcement officer) must have a valid carry permit – which means that they…:

• have passed a background check
• passed a training course that certifies they know the law and the pract
• are over 21
• have no record of remotely serious violent behavior
• are among a population that is two orders of magnitude less likely to commit any crime at all than the general public

…and have notified Capitol Security that they – a legal citizen – intend to carry in the Capitol complex within the limits of the law. 

There’s no reason for this, of course.  State Capitol police happily admit they’ve never had a whiff of a problem with a legal carry-permittee carrying a firearm at the Capitol.  No outbursts, no threatening behavior, no nothing.

Oh, Paymar and his metrocrat pals funneled out a fake meme in the in-the-bag media that legislators were feeling “intimidated” by all the citizens with firearms in the hearing rooms.  I don’t doubt that there were a few metrocrat ninnies who do wet their pants at the sight of a firearm alone. 

But Paymar was deflecting – trying to draw attention away from the fact that his proposals were getting creamed.  Even in a legislature controlled by Metrocrats.

What would be less humiliating for a legislator:  to claim that a mob with guns killed your bill, or the fact that even your own party deserted your cause? 

That is the only reason Paymar is proposing this change in the law. 

It’s stupid, of course.  Andy Aplikowski writes:

There were how many murders overnight in the Twin Cities? We have rampant gang warfare being carried out on the streets, but the highbrow lawmakers and bureaucrats are more focused on taking guns out of the hands of peaceful law abiding citizens. They are far less dangerous than violent criminals

We know that.  So does Paymar.  This proposal isn’t about facts. 

———-

The Real Americans that stymied Paymar last spring are not sleeping through this.  We’ve got work to do on Tuesday:

The Advisory Committee on Capitol Security will hold two meetings to consider changing current law to ban concealed carrying of firearms by permit-holders in the state Capitol.   The first meeting will be held this Wednesday, August 14, from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on 75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Room 107.  This meeting will focus on discussion of current law and policy, and there will be no public testimony heard at this meeting regarding firearms on the Capitol Complex.  To view the agenda for this meeting, please click here.

On Tuesday, August 20, this committee will meet again from 10:00 am to 11:30 am at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on 75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Room 107 to discuss policy changes to current standards regulating firearms on the Capitol Complex.   Please attend this meeting and OPPOSE these changes to current law that would ban concealed carry in the state Capitol.  Public testimony will be heard (though time may be limited).  If you wish to testify, please submit your name in writing to angela.geraghty@state.mn.us.  To view the agenda for this meeting, please click here.

Please plan to arrive at least an hour before each meeting.  Remember, with a permit, concealed carry is lawful in the Minnesota State Capitol and other state buildings in the area if you have notified the Commissioner of Public Safety of your intent to do soin advance

Tuesdays are rough – they probably are for most of us in the private sector, and as little as the DFL knows about the private sector, they surely know that.

But I’m going to do what I can. I hope you will too.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

No recent evidence of global warming but Minnesota Department of Commerce wants to know what Minnesota insurance companies are doing to save the planet.

I think Governor Dayton is worried about a different climate changing…

“What do you think about the beating of Ray Widstrand?”:  I don’t. 

“What are you talking about?  It was a horrible episode!  And it’s getting international attention” – Of course it was.  And not only did it happen in my city, but it was like four blocks from where I used to live, out on the East Side.  It was a crappy neighborhood 24 years ago, and if anything I think it’s gotten worse.  An episode at a gas station out on East Minnehaha three years ago – not far from my old house, in a neighborhood which has decayed immensely since I lived and worked there over 20 years ago – may have been one of the scarier nights of my life (and I’ve had some scary ones). 

“Is that a commentary on Saint Paul?” – Yep.  When I first moved to Saint Paul in 1987 – the end of George Latimer’s reign, the beginning of Jim Scheibel’s single term – the city felt depressed, in a malaise.  Tired. 

Afterwards came 12 years of relative “can do!” under Norm Coleman and Randy Kelly – years, when the city grew (some), prospered (by our standards), spent too much but had somethingto show for it. 

But since Kelly left?  Taxes have boomed.  Housing values have plummeted.  Crime has risen (not to Minneapolis levels, and it’s fairly concentrated, but it’s worse than it was).  The city feels tired, bored, and in a rut – the standard stuff you get from cities with one-party government.  The government’s stakeholders get the gold mine, and the rest of us get the shaft. 

“Back to the Widstrand case.  50 youths from at least two east-side gangs brawling in the street.  At least four people accosting a passerby and stomping him into a coma, with a swelling brain and a minimal chance of survival.  Certainly you have an opinion” – Of course I do.  I pray he recovers, and experiences a miracle among people with these sorts of awful brain injuries. 

“But isn’t this a racial incident?” – Apparently not.  No media outlet has mentioned race, so apparently nobody involved in the assault was in any way ethnic. 

“You’re wimping out, Merg!  It’s time for a Dialog about Race!” – Cut the crap.  Race, along with gender and gender orientation, is a subject where “dialog” is nonexistent; where Minnesota’s dominant culture – the radical left – has imposed a structure where the “Dialog” is always between Good (their side) and Evil.  Academia, the media, government and government’s influential stakeholders all uphold that framework at every turn. 

In other words, the “dialog” about race is the rhetorical equivalent of the “dialog” between Mr. Widstrand and his attackers.   It’s a monologue; hell, it’s really more of a rant.  And it destroys reason and civil discourse just as surely as mob beat-downs destroy peoples’ lives. 

So I’ll leave the “dialog about race” to the ranters and the masochists.  I’ll continue as I always have – treating people as individuals rather than labels, and defending myself and mine from those who don’t. 

“Speaking of defense – did you say on the radio that you’d take your gun and charge at those 50 people?” – Good God, no.  The only people who could possibly take that away from what I said on the air Saturday must have spirochaetal paresis, or have had a massive stroke. 

Nope – I said pretty much the opposite.  The way Minnesota law is set up, even though the law says you can use lethal force to defend yourself or others from death or great bodily harm, it’s a bad idea.  Partly because it’s incredibly dangerous; it’s incumbent on the “good samaritan” to only engage with the people providing the immediate threat of death or great bodily harm, and the danger of shooting someone who may well be involved, but isn’t providing an immediate threat – to say nothing of having a shot pass by and hit a completely innocent person – is just too great.  And the county attorney will pick over your response in the most pointillistic detail imaginable.  And that’s just the legal danger; there’s also the literal physical danger; while one is dealing with an immediate threat, there’s no telling how many other people will turn into immediate threats to your life and health. 

And that doesn’t even get into “Stand your Ground” issues.  In Minnesota, outside your house, you have a duty to retreat if reasonably possible to avoid using lethal force.  Even if someone’s getting kicked to death?  Well, that’s a question that the county attorney will be happy to argue over, and over, and over with your attorney, at $250 an hour, with your freedom and entire future on the line.  Will you win?  No.  Even if you win in court, you’re still going to be $50,000 or more poorer, and that’s even before the civil suits get started, and don’t get us started on the psychological impact. 

So no.  Assuming adrenaline doesn’t trigger a flight response, I’d hope for the presence of mind to call the police, and to videotape things on my phone if possible. 

Now – if Mr. Widstrand had had a gun…

…but he didn’t. 

And cases like this are among the reasons people do get their permits and carry firearms with them. 

Hypothetically.

“How about them Twins?”- Shut up.

(SCENE:  A lecture room at an esteemed university.  As 30-odd students take their seats and set up their laptops, Professor Evelyn MUNCHENBERG-SCROGGINS welcomes an older man, Avram COHEYN – a frail 80-something man with thin white hair covered by a Yarmulke.  COHEYN sits on a chair next to the professor’s podium.

MUNCHENBERG-SCROGGINS:  Class?  (Din gradually subsides).  I’d like to welcome Mr. Avram Coheyn to the class.  He’s a native of Poznan – do I have that right? (COHEYN smiles and nods), and he’ll be talking with us about his experiences in the Holocaust.  I’d like  you to give him your undivided attention, and come up with some good questions for him at the end of his talk.  Mr. Coheyn? 

(Class applauds politely as COHEYN rises)

COHEYN (speaks with faint Polish-Yiddish accent):  Thank you, Professor Munchenberg-Scroggins.  And to all of you, also, my thanks.  I am Avram Coheyn.  In Sosnowiec, Poland I was born, in 1929.  And from 1941 through 1945, in a variety of concentration camps I was kept.  By the Nazis…

(Corey KRETINOWSKI, a 21-year-old political science major, leaps to his feet).

KRETINOWSKI:  Godwin’s Law!  

COHEYN: (Stops, puzzled).

KRETINOWSKI:  Godwin’s Law!  He mentioned Nazis!  (MUNCHENBERG-SCROGGINS shifts uncomfortably in her seat)

COHEYN:  Er – what is this “Godwin’s Law” of which you speak?  Of this I have not heard…

(Jane PLATT-WANCKER, a severe-looking 22 year old anthropology major, rises): “It’s a law on the internet or something.  When you mention the Nazis  you get banned”

(Ian BIMMLER, a 21 year old Victimology Studies major in a “Che” T-Shirt):  It’s the law that says when an argument goes along, there’s going to be someone who wrecks it with a Nazi reference”

KRETINOWSKI:  So, dude, your argument is shut down because you mentioned the Nazis.

COHEYN:  Er…what?

(Stacy KREEFELD, a 21 year old Womyn’s Studies major with a “Question Authority” button on her Mao cap):  I think it means that your argument is done.

KRETINOWSKI:  Whenever you mention Nazis, everyone gets to tune you out because mentioning Nazis means you don’t have an argument!

(A few students clap, while a few others look on, confused, and others stare blankly at their desktops)

(Bree EPSTEIN, a 20 year old Sociology major, speaks up):  Mr. Coheyn, I don’t mean to lecture, but perhaps you should try to tell your story without any references to Nazis.  It might make your argument better.

COHEYN:  An argument?  What is this, argument?  I’m telling my story!  When I was 13 year old, my family and I were rousted from our home in Poznan, and force-marched through the cold to the railyard, and packed onto trains by the Nazis…

(KRETINOWSKI, KREEFELD and BIMMLER simultaneously yell): Godwin’s Law!  Godwin’s Law!

COHEYN: What?

KREEFELD:  You keep mentioning Nazis!  Godwins Law says that means whatever you’re saying is invalid!

COHEYN:  What?  What is this madness?  Do you mean that saying the name of the…(catches himself)…National Socialist German Workers’ Party (a few students trade puzzled looks) means I get you crazy kids yelling “Godwin whatsis” at me?  This do I have right?

(A few students nod). 

COHEYN:  When I was 15, I escaped from a concentration camp.  A year in the woods I spent, fighting with the Partisans, fighting so that what we went through, my children and their children and my childrens children freynde would never forget – and now, to me you say I can’t say “Nazi”…

(Several students): “Godwin’s Law!”  (A few titters of juvenile mirth follow)

COHEYN: …without your verkachte yapping?  Distinguished professor Munchenberg-Scroggins, for this you have to say what?

MUNCHENBERG-SCROGGINS (Looks up from iPhone):  I can see both sides, here. 

BIMMLER (Shouts):  This is what democracy looks like!

(A few students clap and cheer). 

COHEYN:  What?  Millions died, my family along with – and because of some stupid internet rule, their names I can not mention? 

(Students fidget, looking amongst themselves)

COHEYN:  Because from what happened there are probably some things we can learn!  That there are things we, today, can learn about that ordeal, do you not see?  Huh?

(More fidgeting)

COHEYN:  With this I am finished! 

(COHEYN stomps from the room, as the shadows and sun form, completely at random, a series of shapes on the window that read “While invoking Nazis can be lazy rhetoric, lazy invocations of “Godwin’s Law” are, if anything, a bigger hurdle to effective communication, in that they give the invoker an unearned sense of intellectual accomplishment” before disappearing. )

(And SCENE)

Not sure this news would have helped my kids’ mother twenty-odd years ago – but I’d have enjoyed it.

An economist looks at the studies linking alcohol and coffee to birth problems, and finds less there than meets most OB/GYNs’ eyes:

One big worry about drinking during pregnancy is that it will result in child behavior problems later. One of the best studies of this issue was published in 2010 in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. What makes it a reliable study? The sample group was large (3,000 women), and the researchers collected information about maternal drinking during pregnancy—not afterward. The study also followed the children of these women through the age of 14 and looked at behavior problems starting at age 2.

The other thing I liked about this study was that it was run in Australia, where recommendations on drinking during pregnancy are more lax than in the U.S. Because the rules are more permissive, Australian women who drink occasionally aren’t necessarily the kind of women who go against medical advice; it’s more likely that differences in drinking levels there are just random variation. Drinkers in the study were classified in five groups: no alcohol, occasional drinking (up to one drink a week), light drinking (2-6 drinks a week) and moderate drinking (7-10 drinks a week).

The researchers compared the mothers’ drinking level at 18 weeks of pregnancy with the children’s behavior issues at age 2. They found that 11% of the children whose mothers did not drink during pregnancy had behavior problems—versus 9% of the children of light drinkers and 11% of the children of moderate drinkers. (Nearly 14% of 2-year-olds whose mothers occasionally drank had behavior problems, but the difference is small and, statistically, could have occurred by chance.) The results were very similar for older kids.

There is much, much more.  Read it, and tell a pregnant friend…

…and even if you don’t have one of those, there’s a lot in there about how to read scientific studies.

“You didn’t build that”.

President Obama said it to America’s entrepreneurs during the campaign; the not-remotely-muted message was that “private sector innovation follows public sector investment” – that without roads, there’d be no car company; without airports, there’d be no aircraft. 

On the state level, one of Governor Messinger’s budget czars made essentially the same statement at a meeting of government and business leaders in Thief River Falls last year; without government to build the infrastructure, entrepreneurship would be doomed to failure. 

On the one level, it’s wrong – unless the entrepreneurs and their employees not only weren’t paying plenty of taxes, but hadn’t already paid their taxesforall that infrastructure all of their lives, and their parents, and grandparents, back to statehood. 

But even beyond that – and I can’t believe I and many other conservative pundits didn’t note this at the time?   It’s just not true; infrastructure tends to follow innovation.

A great example – which came first, the car or the road?

Henry Ford and dozens of other auto makers put a car in almost every garage decades before the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956. The success of the car created a demand for roads. The government didn’t build highways, and then Ford decided to create the Model T. Instead, the highways came as a byproduct of the entrepreneurial genius of Ford and others.

Read a little about the history of the automobile.  When cars were expensive, handmade playthings of the wealthy, roads, were few, far between, and largely wretched outside the cities, where they existed at all.  The normal “road” in the greater US in 1900 was a cow path or a wagon trail.  Early cars were as likely to be found driving along railroad tracks as anywhere else. 

And what happened next?  A huge federal road-building initiative? 

No!  Ford mass-produced the Model T, which brought the car financially into reasonable reach for working-class Americans.  Other auto makers followed suit. 

And then the roads got built: 

Moreover, the makers of autos, tires and headlights began building roads privately long before any state or the federal government got involved. The Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway for cars, pieced together from new and existing roads in 1913, was conceived and partly built by entrepreneurs—Henry Joy of Packard Motor Car Co., Frank Seiberling of Goodyear and Carl Fisher, a maker of headlights and founder of the Indy 500.

And this was the pattern for advance after advance in industry and “infrastructure”; the canal boat led to the government canal; the burgeoning steamship industry led to everything from seaports to the taming of the Mississippi; commerce, not Algore or even the Department of Defense, built the Internet. 

And the business in Thief River Falls which Governor Messinger’s budget apparatchik owed its existence to infrastructure?   Not only had they paid their fair share for the infrastructure that exists (more than their fair share, actually, given Minnesota’s business taxes) over the past 40 years, but it was the company’s existence that gave Thief River Falls the need for significant infrastructure in the first place. 

It’s time government – especially the arrogant, preening, narcissistic variety practiced by the DFL – learn its place.

To: Representative Ryan “Beavis” Winkler”
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Your Minimum Wage Thing

Rep. Winkler,

Here’s what technology has to say about your minimum wage hike.  Read it and think. 

That is all.

PS:  No, it’s not.  I know you’re not paid to think about these things; yours is not to reason why.  But those who support you?  Maybe not in your stu-foresaken district, but in the rest of Minnesota?  There might be hope.  And so I write.

To: You know who you are
From: Mitch Berg
Re: A Peeve, A Mission

If you have ever used the word “disrespect” as a verb, we are probably enemies.

That is all.

About ten years ago, there was a  Saint Paul city council rep – it’d probably be redundant to note that he was a “progressive” – who was a died-in-the-wool public school-support machine.  Looooved those public schools.  Hated hated hated homeschools and charter schools and private schools.  Thought school choice created separate, unequal school systems.

Naturally, the councilperson’s son went to Saint Paul Academy.

“Progressives” have given any number of examples of such hypocrisy; Chelsea Clinton and the Obama kids would never be allowed in a public school, even as their parents fought against meaningful school choice for the children of the less fortunate. 

Anyway – Matt Damon, outspoken supporter of more tax funding for the schools that are supposed to be good enough for all us proles, isn’t going to risk  his own children in the public education cesspool:

 Actor Matt Damon is a strong supporter of America’s public schools. Just two years ago, the star spoke passionately about the importance of public schools at a Washington DC “Save our Schools” rally. In fact, the actor is so impressed with public school teachers that he has demanded they receive a pay raise. That passion and conviction, however, does not apply to Damon’s own children, who will not be enrolled into the Los Angeles public school system.

And the excuse is almost too stupid for “progressives” to buy.

I said “almost” (emphasis added):

In an interview with the Guardian published Saturday, Damon revealed that he had just moved to Los Angeles from New York, but that he didn’t “have a choice” when it came to putting his four daughters into private schools. The multi-millionaire did say that it was “a major moral dilemma” and then made the bizarre excuse that the public schools aren’t “progressive” enough.

That was a leap in logic not even Jason Bourne could make.

Level-setting:  Berg’s Laws are pretty much inviolable rules of human (largely political) behavior based on years of observation.  And while Berg’s Seventh Law gets most of the action these days, Berg’s Tenth is getting a workout, too.

Berg’s Tenth Law reads:

Berg’s Tenth Law of Quantum Context: When a liberal says a conservative is “lying”, the odds of the “lie” being merely an ambiguity triggering some form of cognitive dissonance increases in geometric proportion with the volume and stridency of the liberal’s declaration. Here are the references in this blog to Berg’s 10th Law.

 It’s a nice broad (but iron-clad) law.  But sometimes laws need corollaries.

Which brings us to “The Santorum Corollary” to Berg’s Tenth:

The Santorum Corollary to Berg’s Tenth Law:  If the news media reports something askance about a conservative’s behavior, a full look into the facts will almost invariably show that it was reported with key context missing. 

That’s almost invariably.  People misbehave; sometimes they’re conservatives, sometimes they’re apolitical, and sometimes they’re liberals; the media reminds us of the conservative ones, anyway (sometimes in an onanistic frenzy).

But the Santorum Corollary is nearly airtight, as in this week’s episode; the lefty “alternative” media thought they heard Rick Santorum saying something weird – or so they were told by the HuffPo, which is paid good money to do “progressives'” thinking for them:

Here’s the “story”, as reported by the HuffPo:

Speaking to anti-abortion group Students for Life after receiving an award last month, Santorum attempted to explain what he saw as an enthusiasm gap between liberal and conservative activists. During his speech, a clip of which can be seen above, via Right Wing Watch, Santorum argued that the pro-choice movement infuses passion about abortion rights into “every aspect of their life.” He said that because of this, showering at a gym had become an “uncomfortable” prospect for students.

(Switching into leftyblogger cant):  Oh, noez!   Can I haz weird? 

(Back to English):  Showering around pro-choicers is “uncomfortable?”  That sure sounds…off, doesn’t it? 

But the HuffPo said it!  And thus it must be The Revealed Truth!  Every leftyblogger took the “story” as gospel in the tittering, Junior-high cadence that is the lingua francaof the “Reality Based” alt-media community. 

But was it accurate?

Have you read the Santorum Corollary yet?    Of course not!

From the Byron York piece that the HuffPo wrenched out of context…:

“In July, members of anti-abortion group Students For Life, the group Santorum was addressing, complained that they had been bullied by pro-choice activists after using facilities at an Austin Y.”

“The group had come to the area to show support for anti-abortion legislation then being debated at the state Capitol, and had made last-minute arrangements to use showers at the gym. They did so one night, with the students entering the building in shifts wearing blue shirts, indicating support for the bill. After the first night went without incident, the Y contacted a director at Students For Life and asked them not to return.”

According to the director of the anti-abortion group, YMCA staffers stated that abortion rights activists had intimidated them into making the decision:

“Said, again, ‘You guys [the pro-life students] were respectful. We have no problems with you, in particular, however there were some people that support abortion who talked to our staff, intimidated them.’ They actually said that they felt threatened, and they asked us not to come back,” [Students for Life director Alexa] Coombs said.

So apparently its the pro-infanticide crowd that gets hinky about cognitive dissonance…

…and feels the need to sexualize their own bigotries. 

Now, who are the weird, skeevy ones?

Just so we’re clear on that.

They don’t call it “Blue” America for nothing:

In a new YouGov poll, 53 percent of Democrats say that the American dream is no longer achievable. By comparison, 55 percent of Republicans say the dream is still achievable. By the same percentage, 27 percent, Republicans think the dream is not achievable and Democrats do think it is.

But when combined in a single question about the American Dream, the poll finds that the dream is slipping away in the minds of most Americans.

Republicans have faith in the idea of America; Democrats – according to this poll, and no, I don’t know the methodology, and just like all those “Democrats are teh smrt!” polls that leftybloggers like to gurgle and coo about like toddlers that just made nice pantses, it’s nothing you necessarily want to bank your retirement on.

But it doesn’t flunk the sniff test, now, does it?

Michael Paymar is back.

His attempt to make the law-abiding gun owner pay for the Newtown Massacre squibbed in the last session; even his own party deserted his effort; even some sensible DFLers like Rep. Hilstrom threw Paymar and his metrocrat extremists under the bus.

But he and his buddies in the mainstream media are trying a different tack; around the time his bills bogged down amid party defections and an avalanche of public opposition, Paymar and the metrocrat extremists started a whispering campaign that the legislators were “intimidated” by the number of citizens who showed up at the hearings with firearms – legally, naturally (the law allows people to carry in the Capitol complex if they are legal carry permittees and they notify the head of Capitol security).

Of course, it is an objective fact that Paymar is vastly safer in a room full of carry permittees – who’ve passed background checks and completed training in the subject – than he’d be in a room full of, well, DFLers. Or any other private citizen. Because it’s an objective fact that carry permittees, nationwide and in Minnesota, are a couple of orders of magnitude less likely to commit any crime than the general public are.

But Paymar wants to continue the slander of his fellow citizen; he’s authoring a bill for the next session that’d clamp down on citizens carrying in the Capitol complex.

It’s not just a solution in search of a problem, of course; it’s a bitchy little slap at the law-abiding citizen.

I can’t wait until he’s in the minority again. 

The inevitable result of across-the-board minimum wage hikes?  Fewer minimum wage jobs.

Case in point; as minimum wages around the country rose during the 2000s, McDonalds started pre-cooking its hamburger patties, so they’d only need to be reheated in the stores.  This got rid of most of the traditional “burger-flipper” jobs, the ones that liberals sneered at but provided hundreds of thousands of opportunities for teens and others entering and re-entering the workforce to learn how to show up for work on time and do a good job at something. 

But there was always the front counter.  Right?

Maybe not; McDonalds is testing thousands of touch-screen kiosks in France:

The move is designed to boost efficiency and make ordering more convenient for customers. In an interview with the Financial Times, McDonald’s Europe President Steve Easterbrook notes that the new system will also open up a goldmine of data. McDonald’s could potentially track every Big Mac, McNugget, and large shake you order. A calorie account tally at the end of the year could be a real shocker.
The touch screens will only accept debit or credit cards, adding to the slow death knell of cash and coins. This all goes along with an overall revamp of McDonald’s restaurants worldwide aimed at projecting a modern image as opposed to the old-fashioned golden arches…

Winkler is spending his between-session time agitating for a minimum wage hike bill. 

Minnesota’s young and poor should ask him to stop doing them any more favors.

Maybe if there was a touch-screen kiosk of some kind…

The left-leaning media – meaning “most of the media” – is tittering and cavorting about the sparks that’ve been flying between New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. “GOP CIVIL WAR”, they bellow, as if it’s something new.

It’s not.

There are three different definitions of “Conservative” in American political life:

• Northeastern Conservatives: Comfortable with big government, socially moderate-to-liberal on social issues (defined broadly; it refers to education, welfare and immigration as much as abortion and gay marriage), assertive on defense, tolerant of massive intrusions in the interest of internal security. Their focus is less on shrinking government than on getting the best value for the tax dollar. Think Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Chris Christie – or for that matter Norm Coleman. Don’t think Michael Bloomberg; he’s not a conservative in any way, shape or form.
• Western Conservatives: Favor aggressively limiting government. Generally socially libertarian (at least on a policy level; they may or may not be personally conservative), frequently vague on defense, favor law and order but opposing massive law-enforcement overreach. Favors shrinking government intrusions in the economy and personal life. Think the Tea Party and the pols that are aligned with it, including Rand Paul and, largely, Rick Perry.
• Southern Conservatives: Comfortable with big government, conservative on social issues, hawkish on defense and law-and-order. There aren’t many major contenders from the Southern school in this campaign.  Huckabee’s a southern-con.  You could make a case Dubya was one, too. 

So the Christie/Paul kerfuffle isn’t just a battle between candidates; it’s a battle between fundamentally different schools of American conservatism.

And after reading both of them, it’s clear; they’re both right.

Christie Was Right – Libertarians, when it comes to national security, frequently are lost in la-la land. I’ve long since lost count of the Ron Paul supporters who sincerely believe that Iran would be a great friend of the US if we just acted nice to them (and left the Israelis to their own devices with no further ado). Not a few libertarians are just as lost in the fog as Vietnam-era anti-war liberals when it comes to one of history’s great facts; societies that practice war eat societies that would eschew it for breakfast.

Sure – the relatively peaceful, relatively liberal democracies of the West did in fact eventually defeat the warmongering totalitarian Nazis, to pick an example – but only at staggering cost and dislocation.

If you accept that war happens, and that sometimes those wars come to us against our national will, and that it’s better to win them than lose them, then some form of effort to gain intelligence about ones’ enemies’ intentions is one of those things that one trades for, among other things, casualties. And don’t kid yourself – intelligence-gathering has been an incredibly intrusive force in Americans’ lives in the pasts; FDR ordered his intelligence and counter-intelligence services to read every single piece of snail-mail, every telegraph, and eavesdrop on every single phone conversation entering and leaving the United States during WWII.

And like winning wars, staying a jump ahead of your enemies is an ugly, messy thing; it’s the sausage you really don’t want to see getting made. Like fighting crime – there’s a trade-off between liberty and effectiveness. A perfect police state might, hypothetically, be crime-free (at the cost of being, in essence, a criminal state itself); a pure libertarian state might be “Crime-free” in that, having no government, it recognizes no crime.

Say what you will about libertarian purism; if you stop short of anarchy, then defending your society from those who’d harm you is the most direct justification to have a government in the first place. It’s one of the few really good reasons to have a government; without defense (and courts to enforce contracts), really, what truly useful purpose do they serve that the private sector doesn’t do better?  If government can’t keep the people safe from foreign aggression, why have it in the first place?  Even libertarians that aren’t anarchists largely agree on this, right?

If you think you prevent airplans from crashing into skyscrapers, or underwear bombers from blowing your kids out of the sky as they come home from London, happens by just squirting good-will at the world, you are completely nuts. 

But Wait – Rand Paul Is Also Right! – But then you’re also nuts if you believe that government doesn’t take a mile for every inch you give it, or that “Defending the Nation” is a static, unchanging thing. 

All of you national-security hawks who say “The FISA Courts, into which was have no visibiliity and into which there is exceptionally limited oversight, are ample protection of due process for Americans” have apparently forgotten the IRS scandal.  Or Fast and Furious.  Or the trampling of the Fourth Amendment, or the growing militarization of the police. 

In short, law and order conservatives who are pollyannaish about government are no less addled than those who are pollyannaish about the role of unilateral good-will in keeping the world at peace. 

“We’re from the government and we’re here to help” is no less a joke coming from the NSA than it is from the Fish and Wildlife Service.   Just as liberals would suspend the Bill of Rights to cut CO2 emissions, some conservatives – especially the ones that are comfortable with “the System”, and there is nobody who can grow more comfortable with “The System” than a federal prosecutor like Christie – are perfectly fine saying “would you trade the Fourth Amendment for getting that drug dealer out of your neighborhood?”

As to defense?  The libertarians are wrong, we need a strong one.  But the definition of “a strong defense” changes, and changes radically, over time.  Is it the right time to engage the American military in an endless counterinsurgency that might be better suited to intelligence and proxies to carry out (uh oh, now the Libertarians and Liberals will get upset) when the Russians and the Chicoms are taking the world in a much more convention direction again?

The point being that re-assessing what the nation’s strategy actually is, and how the military forwards it, and what kind of military we need to do the job isn’t “anti-military”. 

Above all?  Due process needs to be more than just an inconvenient speed bump for the authorities – or what’s the point of pretending to be a “representative Republic” anyway?

I’m not a person who nurses a lot of peeves.

I’m pretty much live and let live; I have my foibles, you can have your peccadillos. 

But if there’s a trait among journalists that annoys the piddle out of me, it’s their tendency to imbue journalism with the attributes of a holy calling, and its institutions with a significance that was absurd even back when “journalism” ostensibly meant something. 

But there’s never been anything quite like this.

Ruth Marcus writes in RCP, with emphasis added:

Don Graham’s decision to sell The Washington Post was his reverse Sophie’s Choice moment.

She had to decide which cherished child to save and which to send to the gas chamber. Don and the Graham family weren’t forced to make an anguishing choice but did so anyway. They relinquished the newspaper they love in order to protect it.

If the comparison sounds hyperbolic, you don’t know the Grahams.

And Ruth Marcus is as tone-deaf as Ryan Winkler. 

If it were any other business – including yours – it’d be just the daily thrum of business happening to theWaPo. 

Do newspapers have any greater significance to society, especially the parts of society that don’t work for the newspapers?

If that was ever the case, it was long before the Big Media whored itself out to the Big Left.  To the extent that newspapers ever played a role in civil society, it was when they still saw themselves as a check and balance on government.  Rather than just conservative government. 

Good riddance.  Hope Bezos shuts it down.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emailed:

No wonder gun control advocates all sound as if they’re talking from the same playbook. They are.

Thank GOD they’re not getting their sample talking points and draft legislation from a special interest group like ALEC. Because that would be wrong.

Joe doakes

Five’ll get you ten this campaign is financed in large part by the Joyce Foundation, which, along with victim-disarmament groups like “Protect Minnesota”, funds the “objective journalists” at MinnPost.

UPDATE:  The original version of this post – complete with comical typos – shows the danger of trying to blog before one’s first cup of coffee.  In the bathroom.  On an iPhone.

On the one hand, correlation doesn’t equal causation.

So I’ll restrain my end-zone happy dance at the news that gun crime in Virginia has plummeted as gun sales boomed:

Firearms sales rose 16 percent to a record 490,119 guns purchased from licensed gun dealers in 2012, according to sales estimates obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
During the same period, major crimes committed with firearms dropped 5 percent to 4,378.
“This appears to be additional evidence that more guns don’t necessarily lead to more crime,” said Thomas R. Baker, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs who specializes in research methods and criminology theory.

See also: the rest of the freaking country.

Bit remember – correlation isn’t causation. Knowing that people who live near Mosquitos are prone to getting malaria doesn’t mean Mosquitos cause malaria. But that knowledge can help lead you to the cause. Mosquitos carry malaria.

Do more guns decrease crime? Not necessarily. But there’s enough patterns in enough places to give you an idea that there’s something to investigate that has to do with the availability of guns to the law-abiding.