The story isn’t all that unusual; Saint Paul has closed the outdoor rec fields at the Jimmy Lee Rec Center due to high lead levels in the soil.

Portions of the lower fields at the Jimmy Lee Recreation Center have unhealthy levels of lead, arsenic, mercury and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, according to soil test results. Lead is the greatest concern at this point, although officials don’t know the full extent of the pollution. A fence was to be put up on the perimeter of the 6-acre space Friday.

“It’s clear we need to limit access,” said Parks and Recreation Director Mike Hahm. He wouldn’t speculate as to what might happen in the future, saying test results will determine the next steps.

Jimmy Lee is on the north end of Frogtown and on the south end of the district of warehouses and light industrial plants that abut the rail yards.  It’s not unusual for soil to come up with high levels of all kinds of things in that area:

Officials estimate about 25,000 people use the fields for baseball, football and soccer each year. Baseball Hall of Famer Dave Winfield and Twins All-Star Joe Mauer played there as youngsters.

Also Bun and Zam.

But this piece isn’t so much about the lead levels.  It’s about asking everyone to keep an eye out for the first leftyblogger or media figure to blame this on unallotment.

Let me know, will ya?

Katie Kieffer on some of the stories Obamacare is crowding out of the news:

Blah, blah, blah. Stop talking about health care for 15 seconds. You have until at least March 18th to analyze Speaker Nancy Pelosi and streakerciser Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel bludgeon Congress to vote for Obamacare.

Let’s talk about the stories of legal manipulation and scandal that this administration is happy you aren’t paying attention to while you’re focused on jobs and health care.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember there’s  “B” section when legislative armageddon is on the front page…

…Nick at Night, ESPN, The Family Channel, A and E, FX, Home and Garden, Lifetime, the Cartoon Network, Tru TV, the Food Channel, American Movie Classics, Discovery, the SciFi Network, The Learning Channel, Spike TV for Men, Comedy Central, Bravo, MTV, Hallmark and TVLand have in common?

All of them are beating MSNBC in the Cable network ratings.

Who’da thunk that America would prefer Burn Notice reruns, Hannity, Reba and King of Queens reruns, World War II in ND, Dick van Dyke, jai-alai matches, Everwood and Sopranos reruns, Rescue Me, Rebecca Kolls, sobby chick-drams, Adult Swim, Conspiracy Theory, Anthony Bourdain, Mad Men, Dirty Jobs, Battlestar Galactica reruns, What Not To Wear, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, Reno 911, America’s Next Top Model and The OC to watching Rachel Maddow’s babble?

KSTP-AM program director Steve Konrad apparently smacked into a mattress on I94 last night while riding his motorcycle:

The crash happened about 6 p.m. on eastbound I-94 at Western Avenue. The mattress, left or lost by another eastbound vehicle, was in the left-hand lane, State Patrol Lt. Eric Roeske said.

A 2007 Ford Expedition was able to swerve and miss the mattress, but the 2004 Yamaha hit it and crashed, Roeske said.

Steven J. Konrad, 46, was taken to Regions Hospital in St. Paul. He was wearing a helmet, according to the State Patrol.

So pony up your prayers, hopes, crossed fingers, karmic imprecations or whatever your worldview calls for.

Via RealClearPolitics:The way the 2010 Senate races are shaping up, the Administration is going to need to use the nuclear option and/or reconcile pretty much everything in the next term, if these results hold up:

TOSSUP

• Colorado: Bennet (D)
• Illinois: Open (D)
• Missouri: Open (R)
• Ohio: Open (R)
• Pennsylvania: Specter (D)

LEAN REPUBLICAN

• Kentucky: Open (R)
• Nevada: Reid (D)
• New Hampshire: Open (R)
• North Carolina: Burr (R)

LEAN DEMOCRAT

• California: Boxer (D)
• Indiana: Bayh (D)
• New York: Gillibrand (D)

LIKELY REPUBLICAN

• Arkansas: Lincoln (D)
• Delaware: Open (D)
• Florida: Open (R)
• Louisiana: Vitter (R)

LIKELY DEMOCRAT

• Washington: Murray (D)
• Wisconsin: Feingold (D)

SAFE REPUBLICAN

• North Dakota: Open (D)

SAFE DEMOCRAT

• Connecticut: Open (D)

Better…

So let’s say, hypothetically, that a guy were to find a deal on a scratch ‘n dent Thinkpad T60 laptop (1.8gHz Core Duo, 60GB HD, 11.a/b/g wireless) that ships with XP. 

Would you – hypothetically – keep running XP on it, or flip to Ubuntu?

I’m looking My friend is looking for pros and cons here.

The big news among conservative bloggers in Minnesota this past week is that one of our own, my NARN colleague and longtime friend King Banaian, is running for the Minnesota House in District 15B. 

Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring compares Haws’ record with Banaian’s game:

A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of working with King, Rep. Laura Brod and Rep. Matt Dean on what essentially is a vision statement for Minnesota. The central theme to that document was essentially to get government out of the way so that Minnesota’s entrepreneurs would unleash their creativity in creating a more prosperous Minnesota.

That meant lowering taxes, shrinking the regulatory burden Minnesota puts on small businesses and keeping unfunded mandates to a minimum.

I’ve known King long enough to know that he’s a man of gravitas and a great public policymaker. When I look at Rep. Haws’s record, what I see is a man who is a reactionary and a man who votes too often for status quo policies.

Central Minnesota needs a visionary leader. The only man fitting that description is King Banaian. That’s why we must elect King this November to represent the residents of HD-15B in the Minnesota legislature.

This is, obviously, a major initiative among conservative bloggers.  Knocking off an incumbent gravy-monger, even in a year that should have a big conservative tailwind, is never easy.  We have to all pitch in and help out any way we can.

In the interest of helping, I’m going to present King with ten bits of campaign advice that should, with any luck, smooth his path to Saint Paul:

10. Find a winning message, repeat it relentlessly to every voter in Saint Cloud.  That’s the easy part.  Heck, every blogger’s got a winning message for their candidate, right?

9. Easy on the Radiohead.  Seriously.

8. Find a snappier way to explain “The Austrian School” to the layperson.  Perhaps given you’re in Saint Cloud, “The Oktoberfest School” would be a good start.

7. Get a couple of barrels of that Armenian brandy, and apply, er, liberally throughout the district.  Seriously.  Yummy.  That was some good breakfast brandy.

6. Carry the NARN tradition of the Speed Round to candidate debates.  Hilarity will ensue. Hilarity means votes.  Maybe.

5. Don’t even think about using Joy Division to intro your stump speeches.  Dude.

4. Go for the gutter.  Counterintuitive?  Work with me, here.  You know how one classic bit of Radio 101 advice is “smile as you talk – it helps your voice?”  Same deal here.  Most politicians are frighteningly uninformed and inarticulate. You have to drag them into some semblance of sounding literate.  That’s never been KB’s problem.  Quite the opposite; he can actually explain how fed policy works.  And if he doesn’t work to pull his level of discourse toward a more general audience level, he’s going to get 100% turnout among wonks.  Between the economic-wonk base of knowledge and the mental pull toward the ‘Bottom”, everything should even out about right.

3.  Ixnay on the Oxsay.  This is Twins country. Just saying. 

2. Think of a snappy name for your lit drop.  I’m thinking “The Caucusus Caucus”.  You’re welcome.

1. Enlist a couple of liberal whackadoodles to start the “Dump Banaian” blog.  We all know that it was the doop-di-doos that gave Michele Bachmann her margin of victory in 2008.  Every point counts.  You’re an economist with Eastern European ties; perhaps you could pull some surreptitious strings and get George Soros to pony up for it.

There y’go, KB.  Go to it!

As noted on Tuesday, I’m an extremist – at least, according to the DFL, most of the Strib’s columnists and, apparently, Janet Napolitano.  This is the second of a seven-part series exploring just how extreme I am, and what being an “extremist” really means in society today.

The first and foremost reason I’m an “extremist” is that I believe in Liberty.

But what is liberty, exactly?

Liberty sounds simple, at least on the surface.  Liberty means You Have Rights. Of course, the left and the right believe in rights; a conservative believes that these rights are inalienable, endowed to us by our creator (whether God or Biology or Vishnu or a remarkable physical coincidence); a “progressive” might believe that, or that they are the output of a benign government that works in the peoples’ best interests.  Either way, nobody argues that we have the right (from whatever source) to speak, publish, assemble, worship, privacy and security in our persons and possessions, due process and vote; guns and abortion are contentions that I won’t argue here.

And for a conservative, “liberty” involves having the government keep its appetites under control, so that I have more of the “fruits of my labor” – money – for me and my family.  Larry Pogemiller’s assertions aside, I do know how to use it better than he does.  I’d also appreciate the liberty to defend myself, my family and my neigbhorhood from criminals, and it’d be great if government would quit diddling about with censorship.

But that’s the easy part.  Everyone agrees on most of those.

But what is “Liberty?”

———-

In Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1993 classic Blue, Juliette Binoche finds herself “free”.  And it sucked.

Blue, mind you, was the first part of Kieślowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy (White and Red completed the set), a three-film series based on the colors of the French (and, by the way, American) flag.  Each installment was based on a color, and its meaning; Liberte (Blue), Egalite, or Equality (White) and Fraternite, or Brotherhood (Red).

Liberte came to Binoche’s character, Julie De Courcy, early in the film; a young mother and wife of a noted composer, Mr. De Courcy accidentally swerved off a road and smacked into a tree, killing himself and their young daughter.  Binoche’s De Courcy survived – and then had to deal, not only with surviving, but dealing with real, true “Freedom”.   Julie discovered that Liberte – genuine freedom – is not just the right to do what you want, but something that has huge, sometimes unintended, sometimes very difficult effects on everyone involved with her.  Julie De Courcy spends a good chunk of the film trying to ensure she never again experiences the pain she felt in losing her husband and child – one of life’s most epic “failures” – and found that it was impossible.  Or, rather, that one loses more by preventing failure than by failing.  (It’s a fantastic movie, by the way – one of my ten favorite of all time.  It’s not your typical Hollywood fare, though; it doesn’t even qualify as typical French fare.  Kieślowski was an interesting character himself.  But more on him, and his films, some other time).

Liberty is not just the freedom to do what you want; it’s the freedom to screw up royally.

It’s that last part that’s the problem.

Failure is hard.  Nobody likes it.  It hurts.  Sometimes, it’s disastrous.

And averting disaster – cheating the idea of failure, on a personal and societal level - is a key part of “progressivism”, which believes that human failure, or at least many of them, can be ameliorated, prevented or outlawed.  In ways small (campus speech codes) and large (the welfare state), “progressivism” tries to insulate people from failures small (being offended) and large (wanting for material necessities).

But failure is a key part of improving the human condition.  People, as individuals, learn more from failure than from success.

And what happens to a person who is never allowed to fail?  Exactly what society is learning today as the children of a generation of “helicopter parents”, insulated from serious consequences for much of anything from falling off bikes to losing baseball games to failing classes, grows up unmotivated and glutted with unearned “self-esteem” and utterly unaware of how to fail, and thus how to really learn.

The same goes for societies.   After every epic failure of capitalism has come the “creative destruction” that comes at the crossroads of enlightened self-interest and learning from failure; that, in turn, leads to success.  Or more failure.  And the cycle continues.

And societies efforts to outlaw failure (beyond the utterly necessary efforts to prevent starvation and abject misery) have backfired.  The unintended consequences of outlawing failure are worse, in many ways and in the long term, than the pain that society tried to prevent in the first place.  Generations of comprehensive welfare have led a huge subculture that seems incapable of surviving without government help (or so they seemed; welfare reform efforts, in states that implemented them, turned the pathology around, just like letting your kids sink or swim will reverse excessive dependence on you); trying to prevent a segment of society from “failing” to own houses helped lead to an epic market distortion that led to the recession/depression we’re in today.

Failure is not only a fact of life; it’s not just sometimes a good thing; failure is, in fact, essential to development, whether you’re developing a child, a business, an economy or a society.

True liberty, really, is the freedom to fail (although not the freedom to maliciously or criminally inflict the consequences of your failure on other people) and, then, to learn from the failures, to fail again, to rise, to fall, and rise again – each time just a little better, if you’re doing your job right.

To bottle that up – to ban failure – is to ban true success.

And that’s what I support – the human right, the “liberty”, to fail and to succeed on one’s merits.

Yep.  I’m an extremist.

New immigrants to the US are avoiding the traditional destinations, says a “new” study:

New immigrants who once flocked to the large “gateway” cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago are now heading for smaller metropolitan areas like Detroit and Minneapolis, Colorado Springs, Colo., Sarasota, Fla., and El Paso, Tex., according to the the study, released by the Lusk Center for Real Estate at the University of Southen California. The census data used for the study didn’t take into account respondents’ legal status.

“Every city in the US is getting a sizable immigration population,” said Gary Painter, director of research at the Lusk Center and co-author of the study, in a phone interview. “We are no longer a country where immigration is largely confined to just a few places.”

The study, in and of itself, is a bit of a political football – or at least, interpreting it seems to be:

The typical immigrant seen in these new places is likely to have been in the US fewer than 10 years, he says, whereas the typical immigrant in a larger city has likely been here much longer. The implication of this is that new immigrants probably have less English language skills, are less likely to be integrated, and are less likely to own a home.

“We found that the immigrant communities in these smaller metro areas are much less developed,” Mr. Painter said. “The questions we need to ask ourselves are ‘what sorts of policies do we want to pursue because of this?’ ”

Which, one might suspect, might be a result of them being newer immigrants.

And yes, the politicians are getting out their knives to carve out their respective bits of grievance:

“Given the negative attitudes towards immigrants, the incessant persecution by immigration agents, and the lack of jobs,” says Jorge-Mario Cabrera of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, “immigrants may believe that smaller cities offer all the right options: a place to live unnoticed, a somewhat welcoming environment, and less competition for lower-paying jobs.”

Still others question whether it’s too soon to draw too many conclusions because of the heated political climate, the recent downturn in the economy, and the coming 2010 census.

“This study is only looking at home ownership and may be overtaken by the next census,” says Karthick Ramakrishnan, who studies immigration patterns and demographics at the University of California, Riverside. “There are many variables that need to be examined because of the push and pull over immigrants – some declaring that they drag the economy down and others saying it props them up.”

The thing is, this isn’t really news.  We reported on the demographic trend almost three years ago, here at SITD.  Leaving aside the immigrants who come to America to escape crime, pettifoggery, warlordism and the rule of mens’ whims (wouldn’t moving to Chicago be redundant if you were from Sarajevo or Mogadishu?), immigrants aren’t stupid.  Lower crime, more jobs and better taxes draw them as they do all the rest of us.

We’ve been down this road before.

I first heard this during the Carter Administration.  I first heard it seriously during the Clinton years.  Jews, tired of the Democratic party’s one-sided approach to Israel, will eventually bolt from the Tics.  Someday.  Maybe.  Honest.

I’m starting to think American Jews are to Israel the way American Catholics are to pro-life politics; the theoretical tie frays when you get down to specifics; “progressive” politics beats out the purported big issue.

But Roger L. Simon thinks things may be, honestly, seriously, maybe changing, probably:

But I suspect something is brewing. [The Tics'] kind of excessive and weirdly paternalistic attitude to the state of Israel, directed so clearly from the top, seems to come out of a kind of unexamined personal animus. The long record that Obama has of friendship with virulent enemies of Israel has not gone unnoticed.

Whatever the etiology, group love affairs with political parties cannot help but be self-destructive. They may begin in a burst of mutual admiration but they will almost always devolve into a self-desturctive “taking for granted” that could only work to the benefit of one party (if that). The love affair between African-Americans and the Democratic Party has been similarly useless for blacks. In the forty years I have lived in Los Angeles, I haven’t noticed life getting significantly better in South Central, a region of the city in which Republicans are about as scarce as killer whales.

Right.  See also Detroit, DC, Philadelphia and Minneapolis.

This doesn’t mean I think Jews or blacks or anybody else should become Republicans. They should think for themselves and even change sides when it’s advantageous. For Jews, Obama’s behavior is indeed a “teaching moment.” The bizarre over-reaction to a minor incident in Israel should serve as a wake up call.

I say the odds are it’s all wishful thinking.  But who knows?

Jerry Brown orders a surge to counter insurgent activity in California:

Faced with the daunting prospect of being significantly outspent by his Republican opponent, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown spoke to a labor group Tuesday and urged them to go on the offensive.

“We’re going to attack whenever we can, but I’d rather have you attack,” Brown said at a gathering of the California delegation of the Laborers’ International Union of North America in Sacramento. “I’d rather be the nice guy in this race. We’ll leave [the attacks] to … the Democratic Party and others.”

You mean, like when George Soros pours a bunch of money into “independent” groups to help you?

I suspect Moonbeam will be fine.

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for GOP candidate Meg Whitman, said Brown’s pitch was unseemly and perhaps even illegal.

“I think this is pretty clear evidence that Jerry Brown is actively seeking independent support to prop up his campaign from the unions attacking Meg Whitman,” Bounds said. “And more importantly, I think, it’s Jerry Brown in his own words laying out a very cynical campaign strategy that’s playing fast and loose with the campaign rules in California.”

But it’s comedy gold.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t pass on something I flaked on yesterday; my friend and longtime Northern Alliance Radio colleague King Banaian is running for the Minnesota House.

The Twitter account for the campaign will be @kingforhouse — please find it, follow it, and watch for more.  I feel like the Facebook fan page looks too plain tonight so we’ll get to that tomorrow.  And for those who have inquired about online donation, thank you so much.  We will get that up tomorrow as well, along with an address for those preferring the paper variety.

We might need to run a trip from the Cities up to St. Cloud for lit-dropping and campaigning one of these next weekends.

I’ll be passing on news from the Banaian campaign as it’s warranted.  It’d sure be nice to eject Haws from office.

D’ya suppose we can book Banaian on the NARN broadcast at the convention?

Old blogs never fade away.  They just die.

I read somewhere once upon a time that 95% of all blogs in existence have less than five entries, ever.  That’s close to my own personal average, actually; I’ve started close to a dozen different blogs over the years; a blog for NARN show prep, several special-issues blogs, and my favorite, “Scandalmanac”, a short-lived production during the Bush years that chronicled would-be “scandals” that the Dems tried to foist on the people (which, in retrospect, I wish I’d have not only carried on with but expanded; tracking Sarah Palin’s various “scandals” and their respective denouements would have been a fine public service, if only to contrast the productivity and fecklessness of the Democrat smear machine.

When most people stop blogging, they just…stop.

But Marty Andrade – an excellent writer, former talk show host (at KYCR and St. Cloud’s KNSI) and a conservative intellectual who in a less-imperfect world would be working full-time as a policy wonk, somewhere – has managed to neither die nor fade away, blog-wise. 

The story could have been familiar enough; Marty the writer’s life got more complicated (or so I surmised from his blog), so Marty Andrade the blog started, he thought, to suffer.

So Marty (writer and blog) seemingly repurposed themselves.  Marty Andrade morphed from a stream of original (and excellent) writing into a peripatetic stream of links to other peoples’ interesting stuff.

Like this:

Centuries later, lost Shakespeare ‘found’? – Yahoo! NewsQuote:”Some scholars believe Lewis Theobald’s “Double Falsehood,” first performed in London’s West End in December 1727, was based substantially on the Bard’s “Cardenio.” ”There is definitely Shakespearean DNA,” said English literature professor Brean Hammond, who has worked since 2002 to determine if “Double Falsehood” has Shakespearean roots. Arden Shakespeare, an authoritative publisher of the Bard’s works, has released an edition of the play edited by Hammond — a decision the publisher acknowledges is controversial.

Arden’s general editor, Shakespeare scholar Richard Proudfoot, agrees with Hammond and says there is no absolute way of knowing if “Double Falsehood” is based on Shakespeare’s work, but he argues it is a “sufficiently sustainable position” that it represents the play in some form”

Sorta like Instapundit with less “heh”ing and “Indeed”ing.

I’ve lately found myself visiting MA just to give my brain a random trivia jumpstart.  I like that kind of thing.

And so should you.  Make Marty Andrade a stop on your daily prowl about the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers.

Via Polimal, the Teachers Union is going to sit on its hands until it figures out who the winning (DFL) horse is going to be:

Education Minnesota president Tom Dooher said today the statewide education union won’t endorse a candidate for governor before the party conventions. The union’s political action committee isn’t scheduled to meet until May. He said they have no plans to meet before then. The DFL convention is set for April 23-25 and the Republicans will gather April 29 to May 1.

Amazing how that timing worked out, isn’t it?

EdMinn is, of course, a kingmaker in Minnesota politics, not only for their delegate count, but because of their deep, deep pockets.  Expect lots of ads this fall from EdMinn and its related “non-profits” showing children being tossed from schools into the street if Emmer or Seifert are elected.

Why no endorsement? Dooher says Education Minnesota says the candidate pool is deep this year and they are going through a “very exhaustive process” to make sure they endorse a candidate that will be a strong partner in moving education forward in the state.

In plain English:  the DFL convention doesn’t matter, and EdMinn is keeping its powder dry for the only contest that matters – the DFL primary race, which is sure to be a donnybrook, with four of the thirteen DFL candidates pledging to ignore the endorsement.

I’m not going to say that the most frustrating arguments are the ones where your opponent reduces your case to its most absurd extreme.

You:  I think it’d be fun to go to Burger King.

Opponent:  Why do you hate McDonald’s?

You get used to arguments like this if you have junior high kids, psychotic neighbors…

…and if you’re a conservative blogger.

Penigma, writing at Penigma, kinda goes there in a piece that eventually gets around to its real point, his thesis that government regulation had NOTHING to do with the meltdown of the financial system.

I said eventually.  He leads off by accusing me of sophistry, which is fine but incomplete (I got to sophistry after freshmanstry.  But then I proceeded to juniorstry and seniorstry), and more or less irrelevant – because unlike so much that goes on at SITD, it’s not about me.  It’s about my longtime blog associate Johnny Roosh:

JR apparently holds some sort of position in financial services, and has described himself as being a “financial planner.” We’ve asked a few times what licensure he holds (Series 7 would be pretty standard) – but he hasn’t answered.

Nor should he.  It’s nobody’s business.  I’ll vouch for Roosh’s credentials as a financial planner – he’s got golf clubs, even!

Now, Penigma does skirt close to a serious point, here.  I’ve bagged on anonymous bloggers.  But the problem is the ones that use their anonymity to take cheap, defamatory personal shots at other people while shielding themselves from consequences.  There are a few of them in the Twin Cities leftyblogging community; fearless about going after other people, but queasy about their blogging affecting their day jobs.  My answer has always been that nobody should write anything for which they’re not ready for the real consequences under their real name.  Roosh (and First Ringer, another SITD writer who stays under the radar for vocational reasons) meet that standard.  Otherwise I’d have never invited them to join SITD.

And as it happens, Roosh’s “anonymous” (but, I assure you, extant) credentials have no bearing on the issue in Penigma’s piece.

But since we’re on the subject, Penigma claims second-hand expertise on the subject at hand:

I can’t claim to be a great expert on financial services – I work in investment banking, dealing with large cash movement and the reasons for the appetite (or lack) of banks for deposits and the desires of brokers to make ’spread revenue’ with the cash they have on hand. But, I DO work with some people who are VERY experienced in financial services, people reasonably well-known on Wall Street.

Now, Roosh’s license as a financial planner doesn’t necessarily make him an expert on macroeconomics in and of itself; being literate about economics does.

But claiming to know all sorts of well-known people on Wall Street – Republicans, no less! – is another thing altogether.  So it’d be useful for Penigma to provide the names of these Wall Street sources, so that people can gauge their, and his, credibility.

Because so much of what they (via Penigma, natch) say beggars reason so completely.

I’m not sure he is properly licensed, and frequently he makes comments which belie the suspicion that he is not, for he, like our former pest troll KR, claims that it was governmental regulation which caused the recent econimic meltdown/catastrophe.

This takes us back to my first paragraph; Penigma has reduced Roosh’s argument (and mine, and King Banaian’s, and that of virtually every conservative with an interest in the issue) to an absurdly simple, and utterly misleading thesis, which Penigma helpfully reprises:

Yet, when you want to hate the government, you look for any excuse.

Never chalk up to “hate” what can be better explained by “reason”.

I don’t know a whole lot of people, outside of blog comments, who say that government regulation, alone and by itself, caused the meltdown.

But it’s a simple fact that behind each of the factors that Penigma cites that Penigma’s powerful but anonymous Wall Street friends cite for the meltdown, the hand of the Fed lurks.

2. People were overly incented to do deals – so they did bad deals when the good deals ran out.
Some of these kinds of deals were:
a. Many companies sold their bad debts off to other companies packaged up into deals with many parts, claiming they were good investments (i.e. derivatives)

Right.

And what incented companies to go for these deals?

The fact that government, via a series of initiatives during the Clinton and Bush administraitons – promised to underwrite the deals.

b. Other companies effectively sold their debt exposure (insurance against loss) telling the buyer they were good ideas to hold the risk (Credit Default Swaps).

And what was the initial impetus for these sales?

The government mandate, driven by Clinton/Bush-era legislation, for Fannie and Freddie to underwrite all this debt.

c. Still more companies bet long with what was supposed to be ‘low risk’ money – namely money market funds. When their bets failed, the underlying money fund collapsed.

Why was the money supposedly low-risk?  Because the government artificially lowered the risk.

d. Still MORE companies wrote mortgages with zero income to debt requirements, or wrote HELOCs with equity percentages above 100%, or agreed upon mortgages with HUGE balloon payments that they should have had zero expectation the customer would be able to pay when the interest rate or the balloon shot up.

And why did these companies change their policies?

Because the government mandated Fannie and Freddie assume the risk!

Second – Wall Street knows it full well too. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone worth a damn actually blame CRA

Well, perhaps among Penigma’s legions of powerful-yet-anonymous Republican friends on Wall Street.

Elsewhere?  Not so much.

Note to Penigma:  please provide the names and credentials of anyone laughing.

Audio, too.

I wonder if the 55 MPH speed limit, a product of his protracted era of malaise, wasn’t more of a factor in retrospect, of the quick demise of his executive branch career?

Meanwhile, over thirty years later, the government is relaxing in favor of allowing citizens to use their own judgment.

The 55 mph national speed limit enacted in 1973 in response to the first Arab oil embargo was justified as a means of conserving fuel. In 1987, the law was changed to allow speeds up to 65 mph. But the Republican Congress elected in 1994 did few things more popular than repealing the limit altogether in 1995.

Virginia will become the 34th state to boost interstate speed limits to 70 mph or higher. In big, empty states such as New Mexico, Idaho and Nevada, posted limits on rural interstates can be as high as 75 mph.

I have noticed when traveling longer distances that no matter what car I am driving, I tend to feel most comfortable just above 70 mph. The roads and our cars seem to be designed for that speed.

Left to their own devices, American drivers confronted with an open stretch of interstate highway tend to drive at about 70 miles per hour—whatever the legal speed limit happens to be.

But doesn’t speed kill?

both fatalities and fatality rates on U.S. highways are declining even as speed limits rise. The U.S. Department of Transportation last week reported that its latest estimate of highway deaths in 2009 is 33,963—the lowest number since the government began keeping these grim records in 1954. The fatality rate is estimated at 1.16 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.

Modern cars and light trucks have an average of 225 horsepower under the hood and sophisticated safety systems such as traction control. They are designed to cruise comfortably, safely and efficiently at between 65 and 70 mph—if not faster, particularly in the case of the autobahn-burners German luxury brands sell.

Anything above 75, I feel I almost have to be “too attentive” to the road and am unable to enjoy the ride.

Anything below that…I get bored.

How fast do you drive?

I take occasional issue with my fellow AM1280 host Bradlee Dean on some questions political and theological, even as I support his program, “Sons of Liberty”.  “Sons…” does for politics what his late, long-running show on AM980 The Believer did for religion; take it back to its original fundamentals; going back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on The Patriot more or less like referring to Luke and Saint Paul on The Believer. 

Neither program is/was for the faint of heart or the mushy of belief.  Like I said – I disagree with Dean on some things as strenuously as I agree with him on others.

But knowing Bradlee as I do – he’s a great guy, and I’ve had a lot of fun watching his kids grow up over the years during our mutual Saturday time slots – I got a kick out of Andy Birkey’s odd little swat at Dean in the Mindy yesterday (emphasis added):

You Can Run But You Cannot Hide, the front group for the punk rock ministry of Bradlee Dean…

“Front group?”

Now, perhaps Birkey was writing imprecisely.  But a “Front” usually implies some level of deception – like the Mob using a laundry as a front for a drug operation, for example, or someone setting up a potemkin news organization to serve as a campaign propaganda outlet.  That kind of thing.

Just between you (pl) and me, whatever Bradlee Dean is, he’s not especially reticent about who he is or what he or “You Can Run…” represents.

Back to Birkey:

… took his brand of fundamentalist Christianity to a DFL gubernatorial meet-and-greet several weeks ago…

Several weeks ago?

Then why cover it on a “news” site? 

Did Birkey just hear about it?  Or was it a slow news day at the Mindy?

Or did John Marty need to place a story showing how he was duking it out with all those teabagging fundies to make his gubernatorial campaign seem like less a relic from the nineties?

There was some other stuff, but I lost interest.  Sorry.

I’m an extremist.

No, really.  Janet Napolitano, Nick Coleman, scads of intellectually-incontinent leftybloggers and the Coffee Parties all say so.

Calling anyone to the right of Larry Pogemiller an “extremist” was a standard practice in Minnesota politics long before any non-poli-sci wonk ever heard of Saul Alinski.  For generations, anyone in Minnesota who stood outside the great DFL-and-”moderate”-GOP, “marching-boldly-toward-the-future-hand-in-hand toward the collective vision of our betters” ideal was called an extremist (provided they were on the right. And of course, bits and pieces of it have leaked out in the national culture; the idea that Rush Limbaugh listeners were a “vast right-wing conspiracy” responsible for the bombing of the Murragh building was the moment it all got really serious – the first time the (wife of a) sitting president had ever tied a perfectly legitimate free speech activity to mass-murder and terrorism.

Since then, trying to link anything – Second Amendment ctivistm, critizing free trade agreements, being a hardliner on immigration, being a pro-lifer or an uppity Libertarian or a tax protester, whatever – gets one called an “extremist” first, with questions not asked later.  Several non-profits – including the inexplicably-well-regarded Southern Poverty Law Center – make a cottage industry out of McCarthyizing all non-”progressive” thought by linking all of it to some form of fringe extremism or another.

It’s rubbish, of course.

But I figured – maybe it’s worth a look.

Maybe I am an extremist!

This is the first part of a seven-part series, coming out on alternate blogging days ’til it’s done.

Joe Bodell at MN “Progressive” Project, in the tradition of those great Americans Frank Burns and Dwight Schrute, wants to know; “did you go, or have you ever been, to a Tea Party?”

At what point does society recognize that an elected leader’s public speech has crossed the line into the territory of sedition?

About two seconds before it crosses into “witchcraft”.

Oh, give me a break.  It’s as serious as anything else in Bodell’s point.

Wikpedia’s definition:

{{facepalm}}

(Note:  When someone leads off an “argument” with a dictionary definition of a word, they are insulting you.  When they lead off the “argument” with a definition from Wikipedia, they are insulting themselves.  And you).

I digress…

Sedition is a term of law which refers to overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority as tending toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent (or resistance) to lawful authority. Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws. Seditious words in writing are seditious libel. A seditionist is one who engages in or promotes the interests of sedition.

The answer is simple, Joe.  “Sedition” is a “crime” that gets trotted out to criminalize dissent, and bully people into compliance, acquiescence and silence.

For example, if I say “Keith Ellison is a brittle, vindictive little man who is more suited to teaching Grievance Studies at a community college than representing a great city like Minneapolis in Washington, and I urge you to vote against him”, and the “local authority” in Mr. Bodell’s Wikipedia reference (sknx) “deems” it to be rabble-rousing, and has perverted the laws to make “sedition” illegal, they could sic the goons on me.

Glad I could help.

Fortunately, our “local authority” is bound by the Constitution, whose First Amendment protects my right to have an opinion about Keith Ellison just as much as it does the right to make statues of the Virgin Mary out of dung, or Joe Bodell’s right to pass off McCarthyistic misapplications of archaic, authoritarian laws as “reasoning”.

Or Michele Bachmann’s right to get a crowd whipped up against Joe Bodell’s government:

Just this past weekend, Michele Bachmann spoke at a Tea Party rally in St. Paul, saying

“But mark my words, the American people aren’t gonna take this lying down,” Bachmann later said. “We aren’t gonna play their game, we’re not gonna pay their taxes. They want us to pay for this? Because we don’t have to. We don’t have to. We don’t have to follow a bill that isn’t law. That’s not the American way, and that’s not what we’re going to do.”

After which she told people to go into the woods with Grampa’s Garand and start shooting revenooers?

Well, no.  The Representative was calling people to “resist” at the ballot box and at Tea Parties and Town Hall meetings (assuming we haven’t seen the last of them) and on the phones.

Which is still legal, by Joe Bodell’s leave.

An MPP reader happened to be in the neighborhood of that rally, and noted that there appeared to be many more Wisconsin license plates nearby than one normally sees in St. Paul.

(Huh?  First – does Joe Bodell ever spend time in Saint Paul?  Second – and I repeat; huh?)

Curious. In any case, I’m fairly certain that if Congress passes a bill…and the President signs it (despite those same Republicans playing footsie with the crazies who fervently believe him not to be a natural-born American citizen), the bill. becomes. law.

(And goodness knows one must not play footsie with people with bizarre fringe views, must one?  Because having fringies and other lunatics show up at ones’ party sure destroys ones’ credibility, doesn’t it?)

Anyone care to disagree?

I’d raise my hand here, but I’m afraid Joe Bodell will call the State Patrol or something.

OK, Joe, it’s fairly simple.  If a bill. becomes. law, I get to work to change it, in the Legislature, and/or by changing the legislature.

But if it walks like a duck and talks like a seditionist, at what point do we call the damned thing one thoroughly seditionist waterfowl?

It’s simple, Joe.  You can call it “sedition”.  You can even call together a group – call it the “Minnesota Anti-American Activities Project” hearings, if you’d like – and have them declare it anything you want.  Call it sedition, or witchcraft for that matter. And the rest of us will do what Americans do whenever people do that kind of thing.  Laugh at it, and maybe come up with a snappy term for trying to criminalize dissent.  “Bodellism”, perhaps?

Nah.

It just seems like that invoking a term that was last used as an authoritarian and not-very-constitutional infringement on civil liberty in 1918 is something you do when you don’t have a very good factual argument.

Riding to work was a huge rush yesterday morning – especially racing down Cathedral Hill with a brisk tailwind!

Riding home from work, on the other hand, was a character-building ordeal, plodding up Cathedral Hill into a howling headwind.

Note to self:  Figure out how to get the wind to shift during the day.

Mission clock is at T minus 60.

If you missed the MOB Winter Party last Saturday night at Ol’ Mexico, I feel sorry for ya. 

We drew about 80 people, which is up there with the totals we drew at the legendary MOB parties three and four years ago.  It didn’t seem as crowded; we had the party room at Ol’ Mex to ourselves, which left a little more elbow room that Keegans’ serpentine main room (although I’m thinking having the Summer Party at Keegans’, with cigar patio back in commission, sounds just fine to me).

As to who showed?  Well, pretty much the usual who’s who of Twin Cities blogging: Chad and Brian from Fraters Libertas (along with Mrs. Elder and the three Mini-Elders), King Banaian from SCSU Scholars, Ed Morrissey (who came bearing, um, Canadian cigars – thanks, Ed!), our NARN producers Tommy and Jon, Doug Bass, John “Policy Guy” LaPlante, the Night Writer, Reverend Mother and Tiger Lily, Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci, David Strom and Margaret Martin, Nachmann from Loyal Opposition, Jessica from the late Pianomomsicle, Katie Kieffer from KatieKieffer.com, Swiftee from the late Restraining Order, Toni Backdahl from the MN Tea Party, Derek Brigham and “Lassie” and Guy Collins from Freedom Dogs, Robin from A Girl’s Gotta Vent, Sheila Kihne and Laura Hemler and their husbands, Jamie Delton (Legislative candidate in St. Paul as well as proprietor of Delton Digest), Teresa Collett (candidate for the Fourth District Congressional seat), Mr. and Mrs. D from Mister Dilettante, Andy Aplikowski from Residual Forces…

…and I’m not gonna pretend I can remember too many more!  But there was a first; we had a table of five people show up who’d heard about the party at the “Kill the Bill” rally at the Capitol earlier in the day.  They knew nothing about blogs, but figured it’d be a fun party to crash.  Thanks!

If you wrote about the party, leave a link in the comment section!

Anyway – stay tuned for the MOB Summer Party, coming up right around State Fair time.

Bike out:  Check.

Tires topped up:  Check.

Bag/Backpack for hauling my crap to work:  D’oh.

Last minute trip to WalMart?  Check.

Mission clock is at T minus thirty minutes.

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

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

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

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

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

I saw this news last week…:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

…and thought “oh, great”.

Not that I don’t think some balance is in order.  After having kids and stepkids in one school or another for the past twenty years, there’s no question that the public education system is biased to the left, especially in whatever pass for “humanities” in the public schools.  History education in particular is a joke; I’ve spoken, exasperated, about this in the past; my kids have gone years where all they studies were slavery and civil rights.  Important, sure.  Episodes with big impact on many of the kids’ lives?  Absolutely.  The only things, practically, worth studying?  Hardly.

And on the occasions where other parts of history and current events were studied?  Yeah, pretty much “America last”; the few kids who are even exposed to the ideas of “liberalism” and “conservatism” seem, for some reason completely unknown to me – to come out of school with the idea that “conservatism is about the right to own slaves and the freedom to let old people freeze”.  Nothing new there.

So the idea of “balance” seems, on the surface, to be an improvement.

The problem is, I don’t want either side – any side, really – writing the history books “favorably” to themselves.  I’m not one of those people who ever thought teaching kids the dates and places and events was such a bad thing; tell kids what happened, and show them what other commentators – not textbook writers – have written about the events, and let them make up their own minds.

“But Mitch!  Kids are stupid! They don’t have what it takes to process all that information!”  So do you think they’re processing the pre-digested stuff that’s slanted one way or the other?  Hell, most history teachers haven’t processed most of what history actually means.

The big question with this Texas fracas is “how good an idea is it for committees of politicians, most of them pretty ignorant themselves, to be determining what goes into textbooks and curricula?”

Meanwhile back in my hometown of Jamestown, ND, they’re getting ready for more flooding, as the two reservoirs north of town fill to records.

Now, Jamestown is built at the confluence of the James River – the world’s longest non-commercially-navigable river – and Pipestem Creek.  Both rivers drain a huge basin in central North Dakota (and South Dakota as well) into the Missouri River.  Given their huge watershed, both rivers are fairly sensitive to fluctuations in water supply; in the eighties, during a very dry period, the James barely flowed.  On other other hand, before the James was dammed up in the ’50s, a wet season could leave Jamestown half-submerged. (The Pipestem also flooded, in 1969, leading to another dam in the seventies).  So in theory, Jamestown should be flood-proof – unless it’s been a very wet winter and both reservoirs are nearly full.

Suffice to say it’s been a very wet winter:

Jamestown and Stutsman County should prepare for the same combined releases as they did during the 2009 floods, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, which changed its forecast for the James River and Pipestem Creek Friday.

The corps’ had originally estimated releases of 1,800 cubic feet per second. The new forecast recommends building emergency levees to handle combined releases of 3,200 cfs from Jamestown and Pipestem reser-voirs — the same level the two dams released at the peaks of the 2009 flood.

1,800 to 3,200 cubic feet per second.  Bear in mind the usual combined release from both dams is about 30 cfs.

According to the corps, the 0.5 to 1.5 inches of precipitation received in the James River Basin this week changed the situation and now reservoir pool levels could exceed 1997 levels, according to the “most likely” forecasts. The upper range of forecasts indicate reservoir pool levels could reach the same levels as in 2009, said Col. Robert J. Ruch, Omaha district commander for the corps.

It’s going to be another flood-prone year throughout the upper Midwest.