The Nobel Peace-Prize-winning Obama Administration has been beating the war drums like John Bonham has risen from the dead and wants to get through the gig so he can trash the hotel already

And still we’ve seen no sign of Madea Benjamin.

Or Cindy “Absolute Moral Authority” Sheehan.

Or Code Pink.

Their relatives are starting to get nervous.

If you have any information as to their whereabouts, please call 1-976-PEACECREEPS.

Thanks.

“I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” (J. Wellington Wimpy, “Popeye” canon).

“As your attorney, it is my duty to inform you that it is not important that you understand what I’m doing or why you’re paying me so much money. What’s important is that you continue to do so” (The Samoan lawyer in Hunter S. Thompson’sFear and Loathing in Las Vegas).

“But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good” (Allison Benedikt, Slate, “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person“, Slate’s DoubleX, August 30, 2013).

The promise of big government – from Stalin’s “Five Year Plans” to Obama’s “Hope and Change” – is always just down the way.  Around the corner,  The light at the end of the tunnel at the end of the tunnel you’re in.  It’s just one five-year plan away. 

And when you’re living in a city run by people who think we can build a better life through more light rail, then waiting for utopia is OK, more or less, provided you’re not one the eggs that gets broken to make the omelet, whether you’re a University Avenue business or a Kulak.  (at least until you can find a way to sell your house) is a perfectly fine option. 

But when it’s things that are the here and now?  Like you and your future? Your kids and theirs?

Now it’s personal.

Allison Benedikt writes for Slate  –     to be exact, one of their clubby pseudo-feminist brandettes, DoubleX.  

And while the quote above does spell out the thesis of her piece pretty well, there’s always more to mock:

Some Of Us Are More Equal Than Others:  Give a point to Benedikt for at least giving a shout-out to human nature, especially the human nature of socialist institutions:

Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. (Yes, rich people might cluster. But rich people will always find a way to game the system: That shouldn’t be an argument against an all-in approach to public education any more than it is a case against single-payer health care.)

But of course, it is a perfectly fine argument against both; intentions aside, universal systems always end up being two-tracked systems; one for the plebeians, and another for those who have to manage them; public schools and Obamacare for most of us, but “elite” schools and exemptions for thekommissars, for Chelsea and Sasha and Malia and Matt Damon’s spawn (who will, naturally, grow up to manage the plebes). 

But that’s not the main argument (not that an actual “argument” is warranted) against Benedikt’s “idea”. 

The Unicorn School System:  According to Benedikt, if we’re all forced into the public school system, it’ll improve because parents just won’t stand for it.

So, how would this work exactly? It’s simple! Everyone needs to be invested in our public schools in order for them to get better. Not just lip-service investment, or property tax investment, but real flesh-and-blood-offspring investment. Your local school stinks but you don’t send your child there? Then its badness is just something you deplore in the abstract. Your local school stinks and you do send your child there? I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.

Perhaps you are.  For a while, anyway.  I speak from experience, having spent years trying to get the Saint Paul Public Schools to be anything more than a malignant pathology. 

But the simple fact is that when pseudo-intellectual dabblers like Allison Benedikt say things like…:

And parents have a lot of power.

…that’s where you know she’s either never had to deal with a truly malignant administration, or her definition of “power” is different than yours and mine.

Parents have the “power” to come in and stuff envelopes and help chaperone field trips and do whatever the system wants warm bodies to help with.

Push back against institutional stupidity in the curriculum?  Scrutinize the plans the system has for your kids?  Demand better out of “standards”, or – more importantly – teachers and programs?

You quickly find that “parental power” – especially in a one-party Democrat controlled city where the School Board is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the most extreme wing of the Democrat party – is a black humor chanting point. 

Not to say they don’t want your help, as Benedikt correctly notes: 

In many underresourced schools, it’s the aggressive PTAs that raise the money for enrichment programs and willful parents who get in the administration’s face when a teacher is falling down on the job. Everyone, all in.

But always, always, the only “power” that the system recognizes is the “power” to work within, and to feed your efforts into, The System.  The System as it is prescribed by the thinkers of deep thoughts.  Not by you.  Perish the thought.

Alas, Egg:  Your only real “Power” in Benedict’s fever-swamp dream, though, is the “power” eggs have in your Sunday omelet:

There are a lot of reasons why bad people send their kids to private school. Yes, some do it for prestige or out of loyalty to a long-standing family tradition or because they want their children to eventually work at Slate.[See also “Higher Ed Bubble”]But many others go private for religious reasons, or because their kids have behavioral or learning issues, or simply because the public school in their district is not so hot. None of these are compelling reasons.

Not for other peoples’ children, they’re not, perhaps – provided you’re the very sort of utterly illiberal person that rates the “liberal” tag these days. 

But you only get one shot with your children.  And the education your child gets – as opposed mere “schooling”, which is a distinction most “liberals” miss – has a lot to do with how they do in life. 

Benedikt seems to think that having a couple of “lost generations” –

And “how our children do in life”, in aggregate, has everything to do with the future of our country – our economic performance 30-50 years from now.  

By the way – if we have a couple of lost generations of badly-educated people (our kids and grandkids), then from what basis are we going to build any “improvements?” 

The Cure Is The Disease:   Of course, school itself isn’t the problem.  Is it?

Or, rather, the compelling [reasons] (behavioral or learning issues, wanting a not-subpar school for your child) are exactly why we should all opt in, not out.

Among the most popular alternative schools – Sudbury, Waldorf and some private and charter Montessori schools – they don’t actually tell the children “you have to learn to read at a specified level by age 7”.  They assume that children, who are born with an innate drive to understand the world around them, will learn to read, and read very proficiently, at their own speed. 

And they’re right.  Barring serious physical or mental handicaps, every child does learn to read.  Long story short; there are no reading difficulties in a Sudbury or Waldorf schools.

It’s a piece of cake, really; those kids have just finished becoming fluent in a language (in some cases more than one); reading is comparatively simple in comparison.   Compare this to a public school, where kids are exhorted and threatened and cajoled into reading by an arbitrary point in time that is politically vital but, to the child, utterly meaningless – or be stuffed into “remedial” class, shamed, humiliated and, in short order, put on the “problem child” track. 

A friend of mine whose kids went to a Sudbury school – where every single child, no matter how damaged, learns to read by age eight, frequently by teaching themselves – notes that if learning to speak “to grade level” by age four was a government priority, you’d have rooms full of five year old “remedial speaking” students, being “remediated” at exquisite expense by unionized “educators” supervised by ranks of administrators. 

The point?  To Benedikt, your kids’ problems are even more reason to force them into the public schools – when there’s overwhelming evidence that in many cases school itself causes many of the problems in the first place.

This is especially true for boys – where a generation of academic feminism has turned public and most private education into a harrowing, self-destroying prison.  The system we have now might not have been designed to hamper boys’ development and turn education into a self-abnegating drudgery that they are only too happy to escape at the earliest opportunity – but how would it be any different if it had been? 

The system destroys our boys today.  We’re one academic fad away from doing the same to girls. 

And Yet Even Benedikt Knows The Answer:  Benedikt yammers on and on about the imperative to…

…what?  Help our kids?

No.  To support the institution.  To sacrifice a few generations of our kids’ well-being to support…what?  Not education, but the institution of publicly-funded schooling, and the industries – academia, textbooks, consultants, administration – that feed off it. 

And yet Benedikt herself hovers near the real answer – probably without knowing it:

I believe in public education, but my district school really isn’t good! you might say. I understand. You want the best for your child, but your child doesn’t need it. If you can afford private school (even if affording means scrimping and saving, or taking out loans), chances are that your spawn will be perfectly fine at a crappy public school. She will have support at home (that’s you!) and all the advantages that go along with being a person whose family can pay for and cares about superior education—the exact kind of family that can help your crappy public school become less crappy.

In other words, the crappiness of the school doesn’t matter, provided that the parents care enough. 

Good, engaged parents – the ones P.J. O’Rourke called “the ones with the eternal good common sense to give a shit” – are the answer.  And as Benedikt herself says, with good parents, the schools don’t matter.

Which is exactly what a generation of home-schoolers and charter-schoolers, not to mention private schoolers, have discovered; good parents do solve problems.

And in their capacity as good parents, many of them discover that avoiding the public schoolsisthe answer. 

She may not learn as much or be as challenged, but take a deep breath and live with that. Oh, but she’s gifted? Well, then, she’ll really be fine.

So why not cut out the sneering, incompetent middlepersons?

Bonus Question For Allison Benedikt:  When you’re in a nursing home someday – a public one, naturally, since one must assume you think old folks should all have the same treatment, just like kids – are you OK with being taken care of by the kids who grew up under the “lost generations” you seem to be comfortable with saddling our children with?

Here’s my favorite:

In today’s American culture, if you aren’t being constantly validated, you’re being persecuted.

It’s among the conclusions of Nancy French’s piece reviewing the Time article about the growing wave of “child-free” people  – who, finding that our society values children, are finding themselves less-validated and, ergo, persecuted. 

(“Child-Free” is as opposed to “Childless”; childless means “can’t have kids, or just haven’t found the right person, time and situation to try”, while “child-free” means “choose to avoid having your life center around something other than yourself…”

Oops.  Now I’m persecuting.

An alum’s observations on homecoming week at Macalester College in Saint Paul – which, if you’re not from the area, is sort of like Oberlin or Bard or any of a slew of other relentlessly lefty four-year colleges.

President Obama went on the air to say that if he had a father who was in his late eighties and fought on Okinawa, he’d look a lot like Delbert Belton.

Well, no.  He didn’t. 

The beating death of Belton last week was a huge story in the media all last week.

Well, no. It wasn’t.    Outside the conservative alt-media, the story – like the previous weeks’ death of Christopher Lane – was all but embargoed. 

Described as “the kind of nice old man who’d become your friend in minutes,” World War II veteran Delbert “Shorty” Belton was assaulted by two teens in the parking lot of the Eagles Lodge in Spokane, Washington, at around 8 p.m. on Wednesday. He died in the hospital Thursday morning.

Belton’s death has already gone viral, and is uncovering deep racial divides, simmering anger and disgust with the media. Most pointedly, many are asking: Why has the death of Belton — and similarly the death of Australian college student Christopher Lane in Oklahoma — largely been ignored by a media which was, only a couple of weeks ago, absolutely obsessed with the Trayvon Martin/ George Zimmerman case. Both the Belton and Lane case feature victims who died in race-related attacks. The only difference between the Belton and Lane cases compared to the Martin case is that they feature white victims and black assaulters. 

Not to mention serious allegations of explicit racial motivation that were never part of the Martin/Zimmerman case – at least the one that went to the jury, as opposed to the media narrative. 

The problem, of course, is that this nation’s “conversation about race” is a monologue.

Imagine the media’s response if the genders were reversed in this commercial.

Victor Davis Hanson documents how h Obama’s crippling naiveté on human nature is devolving into dark comedy:

The almost eerie hatred for Obama seen in Egypt — among the military, the Islamists, the Egyptian Street, and even the secular pro-Western reformists — in part derives from a sense that Obama tried to cajole them all with cheap commonalities [the Muslim elements in his family history, his cosmopolitan childhood, his ethnically-mixed ancestry] and mytho-histories rather than negotiate often conflicting national interests through tough transparent talks.

A good way to get beaten up in the hallway at a tough school is to assure the local king-of-the-hill thug that both of you really have a lot in common. In some sense, Obama’s entire Middle East policy mirrors the hilarious scene in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, where the white punk attired in pseudo-gang attire believes he can out-jive gangbangers into leaving his girl alone. He can’t. Obama has unfortunately become such a wannabe in the eyes of unapologetic Middle East gangsters.

Read the whole thing.

I keep coming back to Berg’s Seventh Law…

…no.  That’s not accurate.  Berg’s Seventh Law keeps coming up in the news. 

The Democrats’ attempts to paint issues as “racist” and “gender-hostile” – declaring “Wars on Women” on behalf of the GOP, for example – are getting ever-more frenzied (and in the case of the left’s Minnesota messaging operation, the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota, clumsier and more ham-fisted). 

Why?

The answer, as with nearly everything the Democrats say about the GOP, is tucked away into Berg’s Law.  The Law reads:  “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”. 

So why the unseemly frenzy in the Democrats’ claims of “Racism” and “Wars” on Women? 

Because the GOP, in at least one key metric, is clobbering the Democrats on “diversity”:

Obama aides like his political strategist David Axelrod and Gaspard have for years been sensitive to the irony that in the age of Obama, Republicans have done a better job than Democrats of bringing diversity through their ranks. That, and the personal warmth many in the Obama orbit also feel toward [Newark Mayor and NJ Senate hopeful Corey] Booker, has helped set him up as arguably the best-connected super-junior senator in recent memory.

The Law also explains why the media went to such comically, unseemly links to try to portray the Tea Party as “racist” – because the Tea Party may have been the most un-self-consciously racially diverse political movement in recent history. 

The lesson is clear; on gender and diversity even more than most topics, don’t listen to what the Democrats say.  Listen to what Berg’s Seventh Law says they’re really saying.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails in re the Target memo flap:

The memo is offensive? Why? they’re training people NOT to use stereotypes like these.

Complaining about this is like complaining about the Texaco exec who repeated what the diversity trainer said about Black jelly beans.

Even if the stereotypes in the memo were offensive, is the memo CORRECT?

Nobody cares about that, anymore.

Joe Doakes

Only political correctness really matters.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

US Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, in part on the ground that states should have the right to decide the definition of marriage, the federal government has no Constitutional authority to do it.

Glad to hear States Rights making a comeback with the Left. Let’s remember this when Obama, Feinstein and Bloomberg call for national gun control legislation.

Joe Doakes
Como Park

Attention, liberals; now you’re all “Tenthers!”

SCENE:  At the DFL headquarters, on Plato Boulevard in Saint Paul.  Chairman Ken MARTIN is sitting in his office.

(Carrie LUCKING of the Alliance for a Better Minnesota walks in.  MARTIN springs to attention, salutes).

LUCKING:  As you were.    (MARTIN sits as LUCKING settles into an overstuffed leather recliner)

LUCKING:  So what’s going on?

MARTIN:  Well, we’re hitting the GOP over their War on Womym, we’re telling Minnesotans that taxing the 1% will make them taller and smarter, and…

LUCKING:  That’s not what I mean, and you know it.

MARTIN: Beg pardon?

LUCKING:  Beavis is at it again.

MARTIN:  Beavis?  You mean Represntative Winkler?

LUCKING:  Yes.  His tweet yesterday embarassed the party.  Summon Bakk and Thissen.

MARTIN:  Summon Bakk and Thissen!

(Tom BAKK and Paul THISSEN enter the room.  They stand attention and salute LUCKING, who returns the salute.  They remain standing).

LUCKING:  Explain!

(BAKK smirks at THISSEN with a look of badly-concealed contempt).

THISSEN:  I don’t know, your highness.

LUCKING:  Doesn’t he know he must clear all utterances with me before making them?

THISSEN:  Yes, your highness.  Normally calling black conservatives racist names is perfectly acceptable.

LUCKING:  Right.  But not this time.  How about the media?

BAKK:  Only Rupar has written about it so far.

LUCKING:  Who gave him permission?

THISSEN:  Nobody that I know of.  But it’s mostly been damage control so far, so it should be OK.

BAKK:  And Michelle Malkin and Dana Loesch.

LUCKING: Who?

BAKK:  The Filipina Pole-Dancer and some chick who probably boffed Grover Norquist to get a job.

LUCKING:  Ah.

(Through the window, we see Ryan WINKLER walking toward the door.  He’s singing Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back”).

LUCKING:  Let’s get his explanation.

(WINKLER walks into room, salutes LUCKING – who doesn’t return salute. He awkwardly releases salute…)

WINKLER:  Your highness?

LUCKING:  Explain yourself.   You tweeted this yesterday:

WINKLER:  Well, in my defense, I didn’t know “Uncle Tom” was racist.

BAKK:  What?  It’s up there with the “N”-bomb! A white guy using a term to refer to a black guy as a cringing, servile piece of chattel?

WINKLER:  Well, there’s some debate about that.

BAKK:  Not in like 150 years.

WINKLER:  Well, my bad.  And since when is it bad to bag on oreos who vote Republican?

LUCKING:  That’s immaterial.  What the hell else have you been writing? (Takes out pearl-encrusted iPhone, starts flipping through WINKLER’s twitter account) Oh, what the hell…:

And if Virginia wants a battle flag back from their war to defend slavery, they can march to Minnesota and take it.

— Ryan Winkler (@RepRyanWinkler) June 25, 2013

WINKLER: What?

LUCKING: The Civil War’s been over for nearly fifty years.

THISSEN:  At least!  And the ACLU won!

LUCKING:  Look – give me your Blackberry.  I need to see what else you’ve got in your Drafts.  (WINKLER hands over phone).

LUCKING (Flips through phone):  Wait – calling Representative Hillstrom “Screechy McMenstrual?”

WINKLER:  Is that bad?

LUCKING:  Yes!

WINKLER: But she was derailing Representative Martens’ gun bill!

LUCKING:  Thanks be to Alida that never went out.

THISSEN (quietly):  Still, you save that sort of thing for Republican lawmakers.  Like Tara Mack or Mary Franson.

WINKLER:  Ah.  Point taken.

LUCKING:  Didn’t you learn anything at Harvard Law School?   I mean, the school that great minds like Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz teach at?

WINKLER:  Dershowitz?  Ah!  Good ol’ Schlomo the Money-Grubbing Skinflint!

(LUCKING, BAKK and THISSEN glare at WINKLER)

WINKLER:  What?   Wait – that, too?  You gotta be kidding…

(And SCENE)

…what would happen if a Republican tweeted this:

It’s Ryan Winkler, the Eddie Haskell of the Minnesota House of Representatives.

And if he were a Republican, you can be sure that the Strib, the City Pages and the rest of the Twin Cities media would be giving him a rhetorical proctological exam.

UPDATE:  Mirabile Dictu, Rupar did write about it.

Winkler twote Rupar:

@atrupar I did not understand “Uncle Tom” as a racist term, and there seems to be some debate about it. I do apologize for it, however.

— Ryan Winkler (@RepRyanWinkler) June 25, 2013

He didn’t understand it was a racist term?

I’ll just let that one sit there on its own.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Although I am not aware that any nation in history that succeeded in battle with women as its front-line warriors, we will.

I am skeptical but willing to be proven wrong, if it can be done safely. There is a waiting list a mile long of good men wanting to become Navy SEALs. If a woman can beat them playing by the same rules, fine with me.

But if not – if she needs special rules because she’s not physically and mentally tough enough to become a snake-eating, bone-breaking killer – then this is worse than a bad idea, it’s another Benghazi back-stabbing in the making. Everybody on her special operations team is put at risk, no different than if they put flabby, middle-aged me on the team.

What usually happens when Sally The SEAL can’t do the job is simple: it becomes a “team lift” like they do at Target. What once was a one-man job becomes a two-person job. Having re-defined the job it downward, then the Pentagon can truthfully say “she can do the job” as it now exists. Best example: end of the movie GI Jane with Demi Moore. Firefight on the beach, SEAL team leader hit, new recruit Demi Moore breaks cover to dash out and drag him to safety BUT CAN’T DO IT ALONE . . . so another team member breaks cover to run out and assist her. Of course, in the movie neither the guy helping the little girl nor the guy waiting to be rescued get killed for their chivalry. But in real life? Her lack of physical ability puts two other team members at risk.

Worse, the helicopter has a limited number of seats to transport SEAL team members. Commanders can’t afford to fill those seats with people who can’t physically do the job. So we can call her a SEAL and give her the uniform and the medals, but unit commanders will work hard to ensure her role becomes communications, intelligence analyst, spotter, or some job that doesn’t involve the physical duties she can’t perform. More of the dangerous work will go to the big guys because there are fewer of them to share it. No chance for the big guys to advance to those prime slots as women will fill them right out of the gate.

What will the military do long-term? Probably start a new, more secret, more exclusive club where the men who join really can count on the standards being kept. The military will bury the membership, the very existence. Like the show The Unit. The Unit does not exist so it’s exempt from politically correct insanity. The SEALs were secret. Delta Force was secret. And while they were, they were the best. Now, they’re a social experiment. President Obama should rename the SEALs as “The Lightworker Brigade.”

Seriously, if women in front-line combat positions were a good idea, wouldn’t other countries have tried it before? Wouldn’t it be the standard model around the world already? Not talking about women taking up arms in desperate conflicts like the siege of Stalingrad or Israel (which has been pretty much a desperate situation from the day it was founded), I mean where are the female SAS troops, the female Foreign Legionnaires, show me the photos of Hildegard the SS-trooper?

I know, my lack of instant acceptance reveals me as a raciss, sexist, homophobe and besides, I have no proof it won’t work. Conceded, but I think it’s a bad idea to wait until I can offer the same proof as Tim the Enchanter . . . look at the bones, man! Look at the bones!

Joe Doakes

The publicity the SEALs have gotten recently may well be their undoing, unless the military develops the kind of policy backbone it hasn’t had in a few decades.  The Army unit formerly known as “Delta” – which hasn’t even gone by the name that replaced “Delta” in well over a decade – seems to have done more or less what Joe ascribed to the fictional “Unit”; adopted complete silence for both bureaucratic as well as operational security.

There’s also a long-standing rumor (that the Army and other sources constantly deny) that there’s an even-more-secret sub-unit in the unit formerly called “Delta” that does have mixed-gender operators at some level.  Intelligence people (and people who read about ’em) have long known that mixed-gender couples attract less attention from security than guys traveling alone, in pairs or small groups.  The theory is the mixed-gender unit does the “location scouting” in denied territory, using that basic tidbit of human psychology…

…but that, even if it’s true, is more a matter of espionage – at which women have a long and distinguished record – than fitnessfor knife-point combat.

A bit of legal background first:  A Minnesota carry permit isn’t a “Concealed Carry” permit. It allows a permittee to carry a firearm, either concealed or openly.   Now, most permittees carry concealed; partly because there’s no sense in showing a criminal who it is that might oppose them, and partly because we live in a society where some people become fairly unhinged around guns.

And by “a society”, I mean “modern, NPR-listening, Volvo-driving, St. Olaf-attending, upper-middle-class white-as-the-driven-snow urban America”.  People who’ve never had to learn to deal with cognitive dissonance, because they’ve experienced so little of it.

By the way – if I did have a carry permit (or a handgun, for that matter), I doubt I’d ever find an occasion to carry openly;  in Saint Paul, there’d be too many people getting erroneously exercised over it.  I like to pick my battles.  In other parts of the state, it’d be less of a battle.

Pick Your Battles

That is, in fact, one of the most important lessons from carry permit training; the best way to use your permitted firearm is not at all.  Never.  Using a handgun is, at best, the second-worst possible outcome to an altercation.

And if you talk with most carry permittees, you find that that lesson has sunk in.  When someone flips them off in traffic, they don’t flip back; they “wave with all five fingers”, as a carry permit instructor of mine advised.  More so?  If they see a dangerous situation brewing – a bar fight, a skeevy situation – they make themselves scarce.

Because nothing is harder to talk your way out of than a shooting.

A permitted firearm is there only for when the battle picks you, and there’s nothing – nothing! – you can do about it.

And Minnesota permittees are pretty good about picking their battles.  In ten years, there has been precisely one unjustified homicide carried out by a permittee.  That’s a murder rate a couple of orders of magnitude below the rate for the general population, and bordering on “infinitely”.

Avoidance

Earlier this week, a group called the Minnesotans for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms decided to try an awareness raising event; holding an “Open Streets – Open Carry” event at an “Open Streets” event in Southwest Minneapolis.

The “Open Streets” events are, of course, a metro-wide series of glorified block-club parties.

Twin Cities’ gun groups have, of course, done open carry events for years; most notable were the “Open Carry Picnics” at Lake Harriett.  You may have heard about them – but not because anything untoward happened there.

The intention?  Have a picnic.  Pull up a grill and some lawn chairs and socialize.

Period.

Unfortunately, MNRKBA picked the one in Southwest Minneapolis – a neighborhood full of Saint Olaf/Carlton liberals who are not well disposed to cognitive dissonance.  They called in their connections.

And Don’t You Dare Call The Media Biased!

The Strib and the City Pages covered the story…

…well, no.  The two papers served as PR agents for the neighborhood’s indignant.

“Gun Rights Groups Plan To Pack Heat At Open Streets” read the City Pages headline.

“Pack Heat” is one of those things reporters write about carry (open or concealed) when they don’t really understand it, but know they feel contempt for it anyway.

As to the Strib?  “Gun Owners Target Twin Cities Street Fairs For Coming Out Party“?   If you think the title is loaded, go ahead and count the number of times writer Mary Lynn Smith uses the phrase “gun-totin'” in her article.

Loaded much?

But it’s not just the articles that are the problem.

Catnip For Ninnies With Authoritarian Streaks

Check out the comments.

Especially the ones threatening violence.   Anonymity and a public forum certainly brings out the online courage in a lot of people, doesn’t it?

Over on the MN-RKBA Facebook page, one woman stated she’d go out of her way to pick a fight with an open carrier, and then lie to the police to try to get the carrier arrested (the comments were deleted).

There were just too many people expressing an intent to cause some sort of mischief, legal or otherwise…

…over something that is every Minnesotan’s legal right, should they choose to exercise it.

Battle Picked

With the threats, and remembering the basics – avoid dangerous situations – the MN-RKBA decided to call off the open carry events.

Not because they were asked to, nicely or not.

Not because they didn’t have every legal right to be there, just like any other community group.

Because a bunch of wannabe thugs threatened to create a thing all responsible carry permittees always avoid; a situation.

I Did Say Ninnies, Didn’t I?

Of course, Heather Martens and “Moms Demand Action” – who are as devoid of “victories” as they are of any history of factual statements on the issue – are trying to claim this as a victory for the gun-grabber movement.  Both are apparently try to exploit this event as a “win” for their hapless groups.

And there’s one more ninny.  Indeed, the big kahuna of Twin Cities lefty ninnies.  More at noon.

Martens and Jane Kay are, as usual – as always – lying.  Neither “Protect MN” nor “Moms Demand Action”, nor any “organized” anti group, had any role or say in this.  Nor a case.

No, the entire decision was over the obvious potential for trouble.

And anyone who claims otherwise is lying, or trying to gin up drama for their personal, political or PR gain, or both.  Most likely both.

But again, more at noon.

Australia’s Prime Minster, Julia Gillard, flogs the “Gender War” card…

…with the kind of results the American electorate would do well to heed:

But the ploy has backfired with a poll in Fairfax Media showing male voters are abandoning Gillard and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and there is little sign of more women getting behind her.

The telephone poll of 1,400 voters found that since the last survey a month ago Labor’s standing has continued to slide, led entirely by a seven percent exodus of men.

Under a two-party vote, the conservative opposition would romp home in the September 14 elections with 57 percent (up three points) to 43 percent (down three points) for Labor.

Two possible conclusions:  either 1) there are limits to “war on women” rhetoric, or b) Australian voters are just plain smarter than ours are.

I’ve written about this in the past.  It’s worth another visit.

I’m very ambivalent about Father’s Day.  I used to say I was of two minds – but it’s more like three minds these days.

On the one hand, I’m thankful for the father I have.  My dad was just about the best father a guy could ask for (and still is), in just about every way.  The part I didn’t appreciate about him until I had older kids of my own?  Most guys  learn about being a father, for better or worse, from their own fathers.  My grandfather died when my Dad was five, though.  My grandma raised Dad, and as good a job as she did, she wasn’t a father.  Fathers bring different things to their children than mothers do – including the whole “How to be a dad” thing.  So Dad was kinda winging it.  And I’d like to think that, in the immortal words of Dr. Perry Cox, “he could have done a lot worse”.  Part of the spirit of Father’s Day for me is acknowleding him.  So thanks, Dad!

As to me?  Having kids, and getting to raise them, was the most important thing in my life.  Still is.  And up through about age 11, it was almost purely wonderful and rewarding.  Now, getting my kids through their teenage years and into their twenties has been – I’ll be diplomatic – a challenge.  But if it were easy, everyone would be doing it, wouldn’t they?  On that level, Father’s Day means saying “We survived another year!”.  And that’s not so bad. 

The third thing, though?  Father’s Day makes me angry. 

Our society systematically devalues fatherhood.  It’s the most flagrant in our current urban culture, where a strong majority of babies are born into fatherless homes, where teachers are reporting an epidemic of risk-averse kids afraid to go outside because they’re being raised by risk-averse single women, where entire generations of  young men are growing up with no masculine role models in their lives until they get into their teens – when all the role models are bad. 

But it’s not just in the neighborhood.  It’s all over our society.  Hollywood and Madison Avenue’s model for the mainstream father is Homer Simpson – incompetent, borderline-depraved, saved only by his preternaturally competent, all-enduring and (at least on TV ads) improbably out-of-his-league wife (and sometimes daughter and, occasionally sons before they get the lobotomy that seems to go along with fatherhood in that special little world). 

The current trend in feminist-dominated academia echoes Margaret Mead’s quip from fifty years ago – “men are a biological necessity and a social accident”.  The education system is increasingly marginalizing boys and men of all ages; medicating their masculine traits and treating them as social disorders, shunting boys who refuse to comply and conform onto the “Special Ed” track, making “education” a punitive death march for boys who don’t get the message “go along, get along, conform, keep your butt in the seat and speak when spoken to”.  And that policy is bearing rancid fruit; before long, women will outnumber men in higher education 3:2, with the margin even more grotesque in Education (ensuring the vicious cycle will continue) and the social “sciences” (ditto). 

And while the situation has improved in recent years in many states, the fact is that for many men, “fatherhood” is a legal state of eternal debt and denial; ejected from any meaningful presence in their childrens’ lives by a court system that spent a few decades acting as an agent of Big Feminism and county social service bureaucracies that still largely do, men are relegated to the role of occasional visitors and ATM machines and, often, much worse; a shocking percentage of “domestic abuse” allegations are brought purely to manipulate the system during divorce actions. 

So for a fair chunk of the fathers in our society, “Father’s Day” is a cruel mockery.  And it’s a symptom of the current system that I find I need to hasten to add “I’m not talking about the abusive ones, or the fathers that are nothing more than sperm donors”, as if they’re the majority. 

I focus on the first two views of the holiday, because I’m a lucky guy on both counts.  But let’s be mindful, on this most tongue-in-cheek and pollyannish of all the Hallmark Holidays, that there’s another side to the story.

They said that if I voted Republican, that government officials would launch vendettas against dissidents and dissenters.

And they were right!

A Texas high school principal has launched a vendetta against a student who gave a flaming counterculture speech…

…referencing God and the Constitution

[Remington] Reimer, a senior at Joshua High School, made national headlines on June 6 when officials cut off his microphone in mid-speech after he strayed from pre-approved remarks and began talking about his relationship with Jesus Christ.
Reimer, who has received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, thanked God for “sending His only son to die for me and the rest of the world,” the Joshua Star reported.
The following day the principal met with Reimer’s father and informed him “that he intended to punish Remington for his perceived misdeed.”
“Specifically, he threatened to send a letter to the United States Naval Academy advising them that Remington has poor character or words to that effect,” Sasser told Fox News.

After consulting with a school attorney, the principal temporarily retracted the threat, Sasser said.

Just a liberal snit that got overblown?

Principal Mick Cochran defended the school’s decision to cut off the audio feed.
“The district has reviewed the rules and policies regarding graduation speeches and has determined that the policy was followed last night,” he told the Star.
The Joshua ISD issued a statement to MyFoxDFW noting, “student speakers were told that if their speeches deviated from the prior-reviewed material, the microphone would be turned off, regardless of content. When one student’s speech deviated from the prior-reviewed speech, the microphone was turned off, pursuant to District policy and procedure.”

Nothing, naturally, about launching a vendetta to try to screw up the kid’s adult life.

The only real question I have:  when will Mr. Cochran be hired as the Saint Paul superintendant?

Saint Paul’s business sector is collapsing.  If downtown business occupancy rates are under 30%,it’s only because state government has been renting so much of it; the City is also party to the destruction of the downmarket but once-at-least-breathing University Avenue business strip.  Crime is rising, the school system is garbage (although the superintendent is doing the usual fine job of pre-emptively foisting the blame on the taxpayers), and with over 1,000 vacant properties (with many more forfeited via one path or another to the city, which is busy dumping them on the market for peanuts after filtering them through the non-profit system that helps install so many of the City Council in office), it’s impossible to sell a house without getting the fiscal Abner Louima treatment.

The Saint Paul Council, and Mayor Coleman, are at a loss for a response other than “tax the living crap out of whoever in the city still pays taxes”.  And building indoor ice rinks and traffic roundabouts and bike expressways.

So when it comes to the whole “run a responsible city government that doesn’t impede the city’s success”, the Saint Paul City Council is a big fat flop

But everyone’s got their sweet spot.  The St. Paul City Council does excel at worthless smug symbolic frippery:

St. Paul became the first city in Minnesota to formally resolve that federal military spending needs to be trimmed.

A resolution sponsored by St. Paul City Council member Amy Brendmoen unanimously passed the seven-member board Wednesday, Oct. 10. It asks the state’s congressional delegation to support shifting funding priorities from military operations to the needs of local communities.

“The bottom line for me is that federal spending impacts the money that goes to local initiatives,” Brendmoen said.

Of course, some of our old friends are involved (emphasis added):

 Wednesday’s council meeting was attended by members of various anti-war and social justice groups, as well as state Sen. Sandy Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, and anti-war activist Coleen Rowley.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, a professor [shouldn’t that have scare quotes? – Ed.] of Justice and Peace Studies at the University of St. Thomas, said that if every American taxpayer received a bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, St. Paul taxpayers’ share would total an estimated $1.7 billion over the past decade.

I guess you have to be a highly-educated “peace studies” “professor” to think “military spending” is done in the form of “government goodies” coupons that can be redeemed for more ice rinks and light rail trains.

But what if that putative 1.7 bill had been available for local spending, rather than exacted by the IRS or borrowed from China?

With people like Sandy Pappas and the Saint Paul City Council in charge, we’d have gotten $1.7 billion more in ice rinks, drinking fountain art and electric cars for city employees.

This sort of thing is apparently all the rage among PC liberal circles these days:

Other major cities to pass resolutions in favor of trimming military spending are Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Hartford, Conn. Rowley said peace activists have approached the city councils in Eagan and Lakeville but have yet to receive responses. They also plan to approach Apple Valley, Inver Grove Heights, Shoreview and Mounds View officials in coming days.

If we could trade “trimming the defense budget” with “sending the city councils of Saint Paul, Philly, LA and Hartford to Afghanistan”, I think it’d be a fair trade for everyone.

The Good News:  Esquire has named Mila Kunis “the Sexiest Woman Alive”.

Now, titles like that always made me wonder; do they wait until the previously reigning “sexiest woman alive” dies, relinquishes her throne, or gets un-sexy?  Or do they kill off last year’s winner?

Anyway – the bad news:  Kunis has that deep-down ugly:

“The way that Republicans attack women is so offensive to me,” Kunis exclaims. “And the way they talk about religion is offensive. I may not be a practicing Jew, but why we gotta talk about Jesus all the time? And it’s baffling to me how a poor person in Georgia can say, ‘I’m a Republican.’ Why?”

Esquire is to politics as Vogue is to hunting, of course.

So to go out on the good news:

Nobody cares what Mila Kunis thinks about politics.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes in regard to a comment thread the other day about my issues with Apple maps (with emphasis added)…:

Sanity posted this comment to a prior post on SITD:

1. Sanity on October 2, 2012 at 9:26 pm said:

“. . . I don’t have a choice about who to buy electricity or water from. Those are regulated utilities because they have a monopoly. I do, however have the choice of buying an iPhone versus Samsung vs not buying a smart phone at all. Mitch chose to buy the Apple product, knowing that he is supporting a pro-gay rights company. I find that interesting.”

For crying out loud, how long does it take Sanity to do his shopping?

Let’s see, Fiber One or Fiber Plus? Hmmm, how to decide? Price? Fiber content? Taste?

No, that’s all irrelevant. How do their company executives feel about homosexuals – that’s the important thing! Fiber One is made by General Mills, which opposes the marriage amendment, meaning General Mills is Pro Gay. Okay, Fiber One it is.

Now, Land O’Lakes milk or Roundy’s?

Honestly, do people live like that? How can they stand to think that way?

Joe’s right – I mean, if a cell phone manufacturer advertised itself as “ambivalent about gay rights”, it’d be at least irrelevant to my purchasing decision (well behind “do the maps work?”), and most likely detrimental (I mean, not only is it unseemly, but marketing via social wedges is off-puttingly cynical).

But yes, Joe, people most definitely do live like that.   And not just commenter “Sanity” (who is, I suspect, one of the “Penigma” hive).  In fact, just about everyone is like that in one way or another.

I’m conservative.  As a conservative, poitics aren’t the be-all and end-all of my life; it’s a hobby, like playing guitar or blogging.  But my religious faith?  That is important.  It plays into the major, and most of the minor, decisions in my life.  For example, in 12 years of being single a second time, I haven’t dated an atheist – or even anyone who’s not some variety of Christian.  In something as vital as “a potential life partner”,. some sort of agreement on the basic nature and meaning of life is fairly vital.

As re the company that makes my cell phone?  Not so much.  As long as they don’t trade slaves or donate too promiscuously to Democrat and anti-liberty causes (as the company that used to own Pepsi, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell did for many years with their support for The Brady Organization – until a boycott from people like me got them to reconsider), I don’t really care.

For liberals, on the other hand?  It’s a stereotype that politics are more important than religion for liberals – but stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason.  In a dozen years on the dating market (more or less enthusiastically) I’ve never had a conversation with a self-identified liberalette go south over my religion, my taste in music or my choice of cell phone.  But I have had three or four send me emails oozing horror when they discovered I was a conservative.  “I could never date one of…you“, they say.  Prodded, a few have replied to the effect of “because I think having some agreement on the basic nature and meaning of life is fairly vital”.

So even if all you have to go by is stereotype (as is the case with the commenter in question) and assume I oppose “gay rights” – I don’t, and have likely done more against anti-gay bigotry than most liberals anyway – it betrays one of the great aspects of the left-right culture clash; for conservatives, politics is a necessary evil, a chore you do for the greater good, like cleaning the septic tank, so you can get to what matters.

For liberals, politics and its attendant optics and messaging and symbology – let’s call it “liturgy” – are the point.

The commenter in question needs to remember that.

Also learn basic logic.

Twin Cities lefties  petitioning to oust Chick-Fil-A from it’s single Twin Cities location at the U of M campus.

Legal language is a funny thing.  And by “funny”, we mean “funny weird”, not “funny haha”.

One of the left’s latest chanting points – abetted by Todd Akin’s groaner last week – is that a group of GOP legislators co-sponsored a bill, HR3, better known as the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion” bill.  The title more or less explains the bill.

In the original version of the bill’s language, the term “forcible rape” was used.

Of course, in the post-Akin political news cycle du jour, there is only one type of rape; it’s eminently PC to say “all rape is rape”.

And certainly non-consensual sex is, always, rape.  No argument about it.

Of course, not all “rape” is “forcible”, by definition.  If a 56 old guy has consensual sex with, say hypothetically, a 16 year old guy, it’s statutory rape – meaning “no force was used, but it’s still considered rape since the 16 year old is not of the age of consent”.

We’re splitting linguistic and legal hairs, of course.

Splitting hairs is something Third District DFL candidate Brian Barnes wasn’t doing when he accused his opponent, incumbent Republican representative Erik Paulsen, of drawing a distinction between “Rape” and “Forcible Rape”.   Here’s a statement from Barnes’ announcement for a press conference today:

According to Brian Barnes, “The voters of our district deserve the facts on Representative Paulsen’s positions on important issues, such as his vote to support H.R. 3.

Yep, they do.  And here they are; whatever the reason for the language, it is for Paulsen’s purposes irrelevant – because Paulsen was neither an author nor co-sponsor of the bill.

The word “forcible” was removed from the bill long before Paulsen got his first chance to vote on the bill – which he did, along with a strong bipartisan majority of the House.

This is a further example of how the Barnes’ campaign,. like most Democrat campaigns this year, are trying to rope in “low-information voters” – people driven by slogans and chanting points, who don’t really think that hard about the issues.

It’s not the most egregious example from the Barnes campaign, though.  More later today.

A friend of mine went to Chick-Fil-A appreciation day yesterday.

He was not alone:

Holy Buckets! What a day. I had been to the University to scout out the location on Tuesday. There was no line for any of the food places on Tuesday including Chick-fil-a. There were not a lot of people there yesterday but as I looked around the tables there were Chick-fil-a packaging on about 20% of them. That was representative of the number of food outlets in Coffmann Union.

But it was a different story today! We arrived shortly before 11:30 at the UofMN. Spent $3 on parking. We got down to the lunch place where you have the choice of Panda Express, Chick-fil-a, Baja sol, Topio’s, Cranberry Farms, Greens to go, maybe some others.

There was a small line in front of Chick-fil-a when we got there. Fellow freedom-lovers were apparent in the crowd so we struck up conversations with them. One of them will hopefully send me his picture of me in front of the Chick-fil-a sign. We sat down with our DELICIOUS sandwich and waffle fries (outstanding). I watched the cashiers. There were 4 today compared to 2 yesterday. They were very busy with bag after bag of Chick-fil-a product going out the door. We left about noon and the line was out the door and around the corner. We headed for the exit and there was a swarm of freedom lovers (I recognized a couple of them in the group) coming in. We got to the elevators that led to the parking garage and a family of about 7 was getting off, saw our cups with the Chick-fil-a emblem and asked, “How do I get to that place?” pointing at our cups.

[An unnamed fellow diner] and I kept talking about the warm feeling we had along with happy taste buds and a full tummy.

Maybe I should bring Chick-Fil-A to the polls this November.

In the modern media consciousness, there is no more noble, pure-as-the-driven-snow construct in all of humanity than the Gay Couple.

Now, I have nothing against gay couples.  Indeed, while I believe that God or Evolution or remorseless fate or random biology or whatever you believe in did in fact create male and female parents for some very good reasons – they are different, and both bring things to the child-rearing process that the child needs and that the parent of the other gender lacks – that for example it’d be preferable to have adoptive kids raised by gay couples than, say, single parents.  If nothing else, they can play one-on-one instead of zone defense against kids.  You laugh, but it’s important.

But the debate about gay marriage has nothing to do with children (and if it did, gay couples would eschew marriage, since the divorce industry is the worst thing for children). Indeed, you can listen to gay marriage supporters for years – as I have – and hear scarcely a mention of children (which is true of way too many straight couples too).

But here’s the one reason I’d like to see gay marriage pass.

Currently, gay couples – at least, the sort of gay couples that intend to get married – are portrayed, inevitably, as saints and angels walking among us.  Kind, loving, perfect parents, in a relationship placid enough to shame a fifties sitcom family.   And go ahead and read any thread about gay marriage on Youtube; the thread will be full of teenagers saying “I’d take any gay couple over my parents” (although I suspect you’d see some of those same kids saying the same thing on video threads about the Partridge, Manson and Ganbino families.  Teenagers are like that).   And always, always, always, whether in anecdote or media report, gay couples are juxtaposed with straight couples – who fight, get divorced, get arrested, have the sorts of problems real couples have these days.

You never see the couples where one partner is flopped on a sofa in front of a TV, halfway through a twelve-pack, while the other partner is screaming at her about how she could have been something until she met her.  You never see the cop cars in front of gay couples houses, frog-walking a boxer-clad handcuffed gay guy out to the car while the other, in a tank top, bellows “I love you, Earl!” from the porch of the trailer and vows to come and bail him out.

The reason is most likely political correctness (and the fact that gay couples, having to adopt kids as they do, do have to be highly-motivated and just-about-perfect, at least for a while).

And if gay marriage were legalized, one minor fringe benefit would be that gay couples would actually “get” to be human.

Or at least the media – news, entertainment and otherwise – might start portraying them as humans.  Which is another matter altogether.