Hamline University – my neighbor which, when it’s not trying to turn all of Minnehaha Avenue into its own back alley is busily expunging itself of all students that transgress its administration’s razor-thin comfort zone – has gotten itself in the news by, depending on who you ask, either bailing out of discussion with Tom Emmer for a position at the Business School, or responded to a mob of liberal dogmatists on the faculty who took a break from their four-hour-a-week teaching schedules to voice their larynx-shredding outrage at the potential affront to their school’s pristinely-PC heritage.

I suspect that there’s a little – OK, a lot – of both involved. It’s entirely possible to square both accounts; that there’s a game of “telephone” involved as to exactly how close Emmer was to a position at Hamline, and exactly which position and where – that’s Hamline’s official position – with the likelihood that a bunch of Hamline’s relentlessly-PC academic hothouse flowers stormed the President’s office to protest the potentially inhuman working conditions involved in having a conservative in their zone.

So I thought – what better way to divine the gestalt of an institution than to look at their “product” – their classes?

The following is a quick look at Hamline’s course catalog, skimming through various departments.

BIOL 3056 – PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL GENETICS

Goals: To acquire an understanding of the genetic basis for non-progressive political thought.  This is a business-academic partnership with the New York Times.  (Cross-listed with PSYC3056, “Abnormal Political Psychology”

POLS 5152 – GETTING RESULTS FROM POLLING

(This is an intercollegiate class taught by Professor Larry Jacobs of the Humphrey Institute).

GRVN 1001 – INTRODUCTION TO GRIEVANCE STUDIES

Introductory-level students will learn the scientific, psychological, legal,moral, cultural, financial, social, semiotic and textual bases of the world’s grievances against male heteronormative society. Final project will relate reasons student was culturally constrained from completing any coursework.

LART 1075 – ESSENTIALS OF LIBERAL ARTS

Freshman-level survey of the history of liberal arts and liberal education, and the imperative for cultural and intellectual diversity, and why wingnuts, teabaggers and God-botherers don’t count.

EDUC 4039 – DIVERSITY IN ACADEMIA

A senior-level seminar focusing on tools and techniques to ensure the classroom – pre-K, high school or graduate school – is a friendly, diverse mix of people of different  races, genders, potential genders, affectional orientations, meta-affectional orientations, religions and worldviews, classes, meta-classes and pseudo-classes, ethnicities, grievance groups, grievance-based ethnicities, affectional-orientation-based religions, who are progressive.

RELG 2250 – PHILOSOPHY AND THE HOLOCAUST

Answering key philosophical questions of the Holocaust, including “Would a loving God allow a Holocaust to happen to non-Republicans?”

WOMN 5204 – CHALLENGES IN FEMINISM AND WOMYN’S STYDIES

This class explores the responses to “woMEN” like Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Michele Bachmann and Ann Coulter, and the inevitable conclusions that result.  Concurrent with lab course WOMN 5205,

BUSN 3205 – ETHICAL BUSINESS PRACTICES

This Business School course explores the methods of conducting a successful business without excising excessive “profit” from the people.  Cross-posted with GRVN 3205, “Principles Of Grievance-Based Accounting”

 

MARK4059 – CHALLENGES IN MARKETING

Senior Business School seminar on issues involved in marketing in an era of failing schools, diminished literacy, endless adolescence and nonexistent expectations. Must be taken concurrently with internship at the Minnesota Federation of Teachers, MN-PIRG or the DFL.

POLI 3969 – GRASSROOTS ACTIVISM WITH STYLE

Taught by visiting adjunct Professor Alita Messinger.  Explores techniques for making plutocrat activism look like grassroots activism.

JOUR 3103 – PHILOSOPHY OF JOURNALISM

Cross-posted with POLS 3103 “Currents In American Progressivism” and PSYC 3103, “Practicum in Skinnerian Behavioral Conditioning”.

 

Wait – that was 11 classes.

I guess it’s academic inflation. I’ll give the extra one to Emmer.

Let’s all us conservatives run down to the “Planned Parenthood” clinic on Ford Parkway in Saint Paul, and block the door.

And when anyone tries to come out of the building – for any reason – we’ll shove them back inside, and not let them get out.  No matter what.  Got your kids with you and need to get home?  F***  you, you’re not leaving.  Done with work at the end of the day?  F*** you, you’re not leaving.  [1].  And if the media asks us any questions, we’ll shout/chant them down, and walk away howling like testosterone-sotted dogs. And if someone gets antsy and starts shoving?  We’ll shove them back, chanting and screaming!

Would that be “non-violent?”

I mean, if  I did it, which no mainstream conservative has done, or intended to do, naturally.  Other than that?

“Occupy?”  That’s a different kettle of organic quinoa.

Megan McArdle notes:

What’s more disturbing, however, is that my reading, and private conversations, have uncovered a number of people who think this is all right–and who consider the real outrage to be the rumor (now squashed, I believe) that an old lady was knocked down by Occupy DC protesters*.

 

I am shocked that anyone would make this argument. This is outrageous. I don’t know any people on the left who would think that this behavior were “non-violent” if it were, say, aimed at abortion clinics. It’s bad enough that many of the occupiers seem to put as little thought as possible into the space they share with many fellow citizens. A sizeable number of them now seem to have decided that physical intimidation is a legitimate tactic with which to express their rage and frustration.

 

I have no doubt that support for these tactics is a minority sentiment on the left. But where are the condemnations that our left-wing commentariat were so eagerly demanding from the right a year ago every time Michelle Bachmann or another tea party figure said something stupid?

No “Tea Party” rally ever did this to anyone, ever.

Never.

Not once.  Nothing close.

“Occupy” is a movement that believes its ends justifies its means.  I don’t think we’re done with this.

[1] It’s a wonderful day for a “Goodfellas” reference.

There is no issue facing this state for which Representative Phyllis Kahn (DFL, Berkeley-via-Minneapolis) can’t come up with a tortuous government intervention.

The Vikings stadium? Natch; she wants to the state to sell shares, Packers-style, to give the state and “the people” a 70% share in the team:

The community ownership idea has been floated before but Rep. Phyllis Kahn, DFL-Minneapolis, said Monday she would introduce legislation to require Gov. Mark Dayton and the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission to work with the National Football League to make it happen. The commission owns the downtown Minneapolis Metrodome, the team’s home for nearly 30 years.

“Dayton asked for all ideas to be put on the table and that’s exactly what I’m doing here,” said Kahn. “No single idea [for funding a new stadium] has gained enough traction to pass the Legislature.”

But remember – this isn’t a 1920’s-era Wisconsin businessman proposing the idea.  It’s Phyllis Kahn, a woman for whom I’d make a joking comparison to some off-the-charts lefty whackdoodle, except that I can’t really think of anyone in Minnesota that’s farther out than her, so it just doesn’t work.

And, given that, we have to ask “what would a publicly-owned Minnesota Vikings look like under a plan involving Phyllis Kahn?

10. The Vikings would be at the Legislature begging for Local Government Aid every odd-numbered year.

9. The team would be required to participate in affirmative action to ensure they signed enough minorities.

8. The team name would need to be changed to something more reflective of Minnesota’s changing ethnography.  Something less violent.  In tune with the changing times.  Perhaps “The Minnesota Womyn”.

7. The team’s training camp would need to provide vegan options in the cafeteria.

6. The actual footballs would have to be made with no animal products.

5. NFL Players Association: Out.  SEIU: In.  (Bonus:  No need to change uniform colors).

4. The team would have to open roster spots for women, the handicapped, transgendered and non-athletic.

3. Rather than referees, each game would be decided by the crowd reaching a 90% consensus on all alleged rules violations, followed by a restorative justice process.

2. The team would be required to travel to the games via mass transit or bicycle

1. Blocking and tackling would need to be done verbally (including well-defined “safe words”) rather than via violence.

Others?

John Anderson at Youth for Western Civilization notes that the U of M Duluth is spending lots and lots of taxpayer money enforcing political correctness:

At the end of September, while engaged in public campus outreach at University of Minnesota-Duluth, a conservative activist handing out Constitutions was both threatened by a self proclaimed Black Panther and harassed by the Director of the Office of Cultural Diversity, Susana Pelayo-Woodward. The Black Panthers are, in the grand scheme of things, small timers who rely on intimidation by street activists but don’t have much of any real influence on society. Susana Pelayo-Woodward is another matter, an administrator with an entire bureaucracy behind her. The question is what are Minnesota taxpayers getting out of this?

The piece answers that – read the whole, infuriating thing.

Of course you’re paying for it:

Overall, the Office of Cultural Diversity at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, a branch campus of the University of Minnesota with less than 10,000 undergraduates, has a budget of $656,770 for this year. $32,572 of this amount is taken from students in the form of mandatory student fees they must pay on top of tuition costs, and nearly all of the rest comes from Minnesota taxpayers.

Ms. Pelayo-Woodward makes over six figures, with benefits…to do what?

For the most part, the Office of Cultural Diversity is an employment program for aging leftist activists without marketable job skills like Susana Pelayo-Woodward. Salaries and benefits for full time staff make up two thirds of the budget, and much of the rest is comprised of travel reimbursements for staff, salaries for student employees, and ‘professional services’ from leftists which are not employed full time. Only $1000 is spent on student assistance, an amount marginally higher than the phone bill of $775.

Read the whole thing.

In the immediate wake of the anniversary of 9/11, Micheal Moore is reminding us who the real victim was.

Him.

He’s declared himself the “most hated man in America” – and he’s started with a quote from Glenn Beck:

 ‘I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it … No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out [of him]. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ band, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore’, and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realise, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I’m not sure.”

Now, I don’t care for Glenn Beck much.  Honestly, I don’t care for his show.

And since we do have to try to run a country together, I’ll urge everyone to refrain from threatening each other.

But it’s worth noting that if I thought someone seriously was threatening me, I’d be talking to the police.  It’s not academic; I’ve gotten threats (although it was a while ago); if Moore didn’t file a restraining order against Beck at the very least, then I think it’s safe to say that he wasn’t especially worried about it.

To be fair to Hemmer, I was not unaware that my movies had made a lot of people mad…Why was I still alive? For more than a year there had been threats, intimidation, harassment and even assaults in broad daylight. It was the first year of the Iraq war, and I was told by a top security expert (who is often used by the federal government for assassination prevention) that “there is no one in America other than President Bush who is in more danger than you”.

Odd, that, Moore contributed to that danger to the President – y’all know that, right?

How on earth did this happen? Had I brought this on myself? Of course I had. And I remember the moment it all began.

Well, I remember the moment I began to completely detest everything about Moore.  It had something to do with this:

That’s Moore in “Bowling for Columbine”, badgering Charlton Heston about…well, stuff that neither Heston nor the NRA had any culpability for.  It was the noxious capstone in a reprehensible movie.

Still, Moore has been on the wrong end of some weirdos:

But the worst moments were when people came on to our property. These individuals would just walk down the driveway, always looking like rejects from the cast of Night of the Living Dead, never moving very fast, but always advancing with singleminded purposefulness. Few were actual haters; most were just crazy. We kept the sheriff’s deputies busy until they finally suggested we might want to get our own security, or perhaps our own police force. Which we did.

We met with the head of the top security agency in the country, an elite outfit that did not hire ex-cops, nor any “tough guys” or bouncer-types. They preferred to use only Navy Seals and other ex–Special Forces. Guys who had a cool head and who could take you out with a piece of dental floss in a matter of nanoseconds. By the end of the year, due to the alarming increase of threats and attempts on me, I had nine ex-Seals surrounding me, round-the-clock.

And right there is the reason I detest Michael Moore.  He’s spent a good chunk of his career attacking the law-abiding American’s right to defend themselves from, well, exactly the stuff that Moore is worried about.

And those of us who can’t afford to hire a bunch of Navy Seals to deal with life’s crazies have every reason to wish Moore would…

…get smarter.

Earlier today, I wrote about an op-ed from over the weekend in the Strib.  Reading it, I assumed that the piece – by “Hinda Mandell”, formerly of Edina – was incredibly bad, overly over-the-top, broad-to-the-point-of-unfunny, stereotype-clogged parody.

Mandell is, in fact, a real person, with a twitter feed of her own; Ms. Mandell is apparently a real mid-level “communications” academic whose brief seems, ironicaly, to include parsing communication so finely for the wispiest hint of perceived victimization that “communication” of any type will eventually be rendered impossible.  The article was apparently on the level.  Not to mention the first thing I’ve ever read that was actually too dumb to be on Minnesota Progressive Project.

Ryan Rhodes figured it out before me – and after almost ten years of blogging, he’s just as worth reading as he ever was, by the way. He commemorated Ms. Mandell’s raving with the gifts of art…

…and fisk.

Who says there’s a higher education bubble? Note to aspiring communication students: Avoid the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, lest you come out of college much, much, MUCH dumber than when you went in.

Anyway – I guess there are a couple of lessons from this whole thing:

• We have too many academics.
• The higher ed bubble is about to explode. And when it does,and if (heaven forfend) Hinda Mandell has to find another gig, wouldn’t it be ironic if she had to get a job as a barrista?

I apologize for the error.

I’m off to tell my farmer friends to stop referring to “Hard Red Spring Wheat“, before Hinda Mandell claims they’re bigoted against Native Americans.

An actor friend of mine tells me that the hardest roles to play are “dumb” people.  It’s easy to play the less-intelligent too broadly, like a bunch of “dumb people” cliches.  Making them sympathetic, nuanced and interesting?  That’s hard.

Parody is kinda the same.

The Twin Cities conservative blogosphere has more than its fair share of brilliant satirists and parodists – people who attack with humor, and by getting inside their targets’ styles, peccadillos…heads for comedic yet pointed effect.

The roll call is long and distinguished; “Sisyphus”, “Nihilist in Golf Pants”, “Wintryminx”, Brian “Saint Paul” Ward, Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci and Ryan “Dirty Shroom” Rhodes are all known quantities who dominate in print (and conservatives going by the names “Spotty”, “MNob” and “Phoenix Woman”, their true identities unknown, do spot-on sendups of smug, overpraised, overwrought “progressive” bloggers); Tom “Swiftee” Swift is by far the most talented, iconoclastic visual satirist in the Twin Cities; and of course, James Lileks is the Segovia of multimedia satire.

Doing good adversarial satire is like playing a dumb person; it’s easy to do badly, and very hard to do well.

So I’m puzzled as to who wrote this Strib parody masquerading as “op-ed”, entitled “The subtle racism around us (even in a cup of coffee)”.  With a stable of satirists like we have in the Twin Cities, we could certainly come up with something less over-broad and hamfisted.

For starters, the “writer” is “named” “Hinda Mandell”, and is purportedly an “assistant professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology”, who graduated from Edina High in 1998.  Why not name “her” “Golda Schimmelfarb-Williams, adjunct visiting scholar in Victimization Studies at Radcliffe”, while you’re at it?  Have her come from North Oaks? Maybe have her complain about her asthma and constantly ask if it’s too cold in the room and start sentences with “oy vey” before nattering about white privilege?   If you’re going to run with the cliché, why not go all-in?

Cliché is not satire, and stereotype is not parody.

Anyway – with that out of the way, the piece is about that ultimate “progressive” cliché, hYpStR coffee!

What do you do when a favorite coffee shop features various coffee blends with racially tinged names?

Just a tangent here; twenty years ago, when gourmet coffee shops were a new thing, and I would order a cup at the Dunn Brothers by Macalester College.  And I’d occasionally ask – “are all you liberals aware that the coffee you’re ordering, from Ethiopia and Java and the Celebes and Peru and Venezuela, supports a lot of ugly, authoritarian regimes?”

They’d stare blankly.

Just a tangent.  Apropos nothing.

Emphasis is added below as “Ms. Mandell” continues:

I was sitting in this beloved joint in New York recently, with its hipster-hippie ambiance, when I overheard a conversation. I’m convinced that the barista and customer, both white, were oblivious to the racially charged nature of their utterances.

Asked the customer: “What type of roast is the Jungle Roast?”

The barista, who looked on the younger side of 20, answered: “It’s a darker roast.”

I sat there flabbergasted. These two women were engaging in a practical conversation — is the coffee a light or dark brew?

But because of the name of the roast — and its richer flavor — they were in fact reinforcing the notion of the jungle and its people as “dark.”

Now, this is funny – but pretty rote.  An overweening liberal petty academic,finding racism in coffee?  It’s freshman level stuff.

Perhaps you think I’m making too much of a simple exchange.

Oy.  To the serious parodist, saying “maybe you think I’m making too much of this” is like waving a sign saying “I’M PRETENDING TO HAVE THE VAPORS FOR COMEDIC EFFECT.  PLEASE LAUGH NOW”.

And, unfortunately, it’s a rookie flub that telegraphs a descent into hamfisted absurdity rather than good parody:

But consider, too, that while eavesdropping I was sipping on a luscious coffee blend that the shop calls Jamaica Me Crazy. It’s seasoned with fresh cinnamon. Maybe that’s what they drink in Jamaica? I don’t know, since I’ve never been there.

But I do know that if the coffee was labeled Protestants A Plenty, Catholics Be Crazy, Jews be Jivin’ or Blacks Be Boppin’, there would be an uproar. Of course, Protestants and Catholics, as part of the religious mainstream, do not typically face the brunt of prejudice in the United States.

As I drank my French Roast this morning, trying to recover from last night’s Irish coffee and Swedish meatballs, I shook my head.  Too obvious.

And most know that intolerance against Jews and blacks is not publicly accepted. Blatant bigotry is easy to spot, while covert bigotry — where an entire group is used to sell coffee — can be easier to stomach and therefore ignore.

Right there – that’s the bit that threw it over the top.

The key to great parody is painting a picture of your target that is just sympathetic enough to be plausible.  It’s the touch that separates a good parody – Dwight Schrute, for example – from a bad one, like Stephen Colbert.  Is Hinda Mandell sympathetic?  About as sympathetic as a turd on your kitchen floor – a turd that nags and hectors you about the racial overtones of the dark stain you used on your bedroom floor!

It’s been nearly a decade since I learned one of my biggest life lessons. Difference is all about perception.

For instance, perceiving that coffee that is roasted to a darker hue is “dark”?

Seirously – calling this “satire” is like calling someone who walks onstage and bellows “Durrrr! I am teh DUMMY!” “acting”.  Whoever is writing this “Mandell” character just swerved past parody into group defamation.

I mean, how is this – “Durr, I am a spoiled, cossetted pseudo-academic who draws lessons that impugn others from my own provincialism!” – any different?

Do I embarrass the cafe manager by saying something? Do I become complicit by ordering a medium Jamaica Me Crazy with steamed milk, please?

Yes, unknown parodist – we got it.  “Hinda Mandell” is tortured by the racism in the mundane.  Let it go.  I’ve given up on finding a reason to like “her”; I’d settle for believing “she” was plausible.

Deciphering these messages might be the easier part. Figuring out what to do with them afterward is a lot harder.

The scary part is, someone apparently wants us to believe we have an entire academic discipline to help people “figure out” “hidden racist messages” in everyday objects – if you believe that “Hinda Mandell” is real.

But I think we all know better.

On Tuesday, I took a rare chance to listen  to the Dennis Prager show.  I don’t get out much over the mid-day, so it was fun.

He started talking about San Francisco’s probably-upcoming ban on pets. I expected him to bag on it.

He didn’t. According to Prager, it’s a good idea.

And by the time he got done talking, I agreed.

Think about it; San Francisco’s ban on pets follows closely follows moves to ban circumcision, McDonalds Happy Meals, Junior ROTC and for all I know having more than one child are a spectacular lesson in what “progressivism” really means.

The old joke is that under liberalism, everything that isn’t mandatory is banned- and San Francisco is getting closer and closer to it every day.

And what a wonderful lesson for people  – having an object lesson in the inevitable end-result of progressivism right there for all to see.

It’s like a lab experiment – for everyone!

Music rights are a funny thing.

When I was in radio, I learned that music rights and royalties work something like this:

1. To play music in public – on a radio station, television show, movie, in-store muzak, jukebox, elevator, nightclub, TV or radio commercial or whatever – you pay a fee to one of the big three music licensing agencies – ASCAP, BMI or SESAC.    The agencies distribute the fees to the songwriters (the names that used to be listed under the song title in incredibly tiny type on old albums and .45s)  via an incredibly complex (the better to hide the cheating) formula.
2. If you didn’t pay the licensing fee, the songwriter and publisher could haul you in to court and charge “mechanical royalties” – better known as “a court judgment”.

And that’s pretty much it.

We’ll come back to that.   Rolling Stone is “covering”  Michele Bachmann’s campaign in…

…well, the same way all the media are “covering” it:

Michele Bachmann hasn’t exactly gotten her campaign off to the best start. It’s bad enough to confuse movie legend John Wayne with serial killer John Wayne Gacy and crazily insist that John Quincy Adams was a founding father at the age of nine…

Because goodness knows we can’t have a gaffe-prone president or vice president atop the executive branch…

…but now she’s gone and pissed off Tom Petty. The Minnesota congresswoman played “American Girl” yesterday when she walked onstage at a rally, and Rolling Stone has confirmed reports that Petty’s management team immediately sent the Bachmann campaign a cease and desist letter.

So I’m wondering – provided that Bachmann’s campaign paid her licensing fee, what recourse does Petty really have?

I mean, for over 20 years Rush Limbaugh has been using “My City Was Gone”, by the ultra-socialist Chrissie Hynde, as his theme song, right? Hynde can’t have been thrilled

Say, if I were to play “American Girl?”

Would he object? Even if I were to be a rebel…

…and reject his california-liberal politics?

Because I certainly won’t back down. (Wait – I don’t like that song that much).

Because a good chunk of the right is singing…

Anyway – this one’s for you, Mark Dayton and Tom Bakk and Paul Thissen:

…you knew that was coming, didn’t you?

…when you didn’t dare question the patriotism of those who dissented from a rush to war?

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is questioning the priorities of lawmakers criticizing the U.S. intervention in Libya.

She’s asking bluntly, “Whose side are you on?”

Remember when that kind of question would’ve earned a government figure (or anyone) a curt “don’t question my patriotism!”?

The DFL and media (pardon the redundancy) have got a new buzz phrase, “quality negotiation”.  It’s what they supposedly want out of the current impasse in Saint Paul.

Let me just say for the record that if the DFL aren’t whinging like a bunch spoiled ten year olds, it’s not a “quality negotiation”.

Speaking of which, the Strib adds to the “quality” of the negotiation – my definition of it, at least- with via Min this piece by one Brian Rusche, the “executive director of the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition”, a group that is to religious group what the association of chiefs of police or Alliance for a Better Minnesota are to cops and Minnesotans – a DFL pressure group.

Rusche apparently thinks his churches own the trademark on “princple”:

Minnesota’s legislative leaders are locked in a protracted dispute with the governor, not about the quantity or quality of government output, but out of devotion to a single number: $34 billion.

Legislative leaders insist that all other policy considerations must take a back seat to the singular goal of keeping general-fund revenues and expenses at that amount for the next biennium.

Bla bla bla.

This next bit is the irritating part, the part that needs to be refudiated with prejudice; the part where Rusche abuses his cachet as a “religious ” leader:

This is numerology without principle. It treats one general-fund number like an idol, a number to be prized above the concerns and needs of our citizenry.

This is a mind-numbingly, corrosively stupid statement.

The GOP is operating from set of principles. To be fair, these are fairly new to Minnesota government; government is our servant, not our master.  Government needs to live within its means; it needs to prioritize, just like we taxpayers need to.  If “citizenry” “needs” some parts of government, we need to cut back on the parts the “citizenry” doesn’t need.

Rusche illustrates – no doubt unintentionally –

Finding a worthy general-fund baseline number with which to base all policy decisions is very, very tricky. Minnesota has relied on one-time strategies to prop up general-fund revenues, especially during recessions.

We’ve drained reserves, cashed out the tobacco endowment and spent federal stimulus dollars in efforts to address a structural deficit that has haunted us for a decade. Add accounting shifts and gimmicks, and we’ve been able to disguise revenue shortfalls and delay a true reckoning, until now.

That’s because government has been run by people – Republicans as well as Democrats – who regarded government as a big  fun machine with lots of levers and knobs to play with.   A big huge benefit machine where, if you hit just the right combination of those buttons and levers, you’d get all sorts of good and wonderful things for the people.

And after a generation or two of that, we’re broke.

And the principle has changed. It has to.  Government the way Arne Carlson practiced it – spending money like a crack whore with a stolen gold card during the cha-cha times, turning surpluses into permanent spending, and making up for it with taxes when things turn ugly – is utterly unsustainable.

And – are you listeniong, Mr. Rusche? – it’s immoral and stupid to carry stupid, thick-necked profligacy on the backs of the taxpayer.

“Progressives” – or at least, way too many of them – hate the free and open interchange of ideas.

Over on this thread at MinnPost on the cancellation of “Sons of Liberty” on AM1280, a commenter sniffed “Freedom of speech has been stretched to the limit by “Patriot” radio”.  And I’d love to ask – what are the “limits” of free speech?   (And, by the way – for all of you who got the vapors over Brad Dean’s radio show or prayer in the house – are you OK with lefty host Randi Rhodes repeatedly calling for then-President Bush’s murder?  Or with Ed Schultz calling his talk-radio better Laura Ingraham a “slut”?  Just curious).

To many progressives, apparently, the limit is “whatever challenges what I believe“; students at Georgetown turned out to sign a (staged) petition to censor conservative websites:

“The undersigned hereby adamantly demand that the United States government shut down right wing hate sites. The hate speech propagated by sites like the Drudge Report, Hot Air, Instapundit, Big Government, and others must not be allowed to corrupt our political discourse any longer. These sites are dangerous not only to truth and freedom but also to our society as a whole. BAN THEM NOW!”

This is at Georgetown, mind you – incubator for our nation’s putative future elites.  And it’s not pretty; it might be time to look into getting some new “elites”.

Ed Morrissey – whose site was specifically targeted in the petition – quotes some of the new power generation:

“There has to be some control,” one young woman says. “I mean, freedom of speech is good, but, there is a certain modicum of control — I mean, look at the Tea Party.” Yeah, look at that freedom of assembly and freedom of political speech that garnered so much support that Republicans won more new seats in a midterm election than either party had in 72 years. We have to control that kind of thing! I particularly liked the one woman who signed the petition because sites like ours “cause a lot of debate.” Oh, heavens, no! Not debate! Why, then one might have to actually pay attention and think for one’s self!

Most common reaction to the question, “What do you think of the First Amendment?” was “I think it’s great, but ….” Maybe Georgetown should consider remedial Civics and American History classes.

I’d say Georgetown, and much of the public education bureaucracy, is thinking “Mission Accomplished” right about now.

It’s nothing new, of course.  Back in 1986, on my old graveyard-shift show on KSTP, I interviewed some members of “Women Against Military Madness” after their leader, Polly Mann, called for censorship of media that didn’t promote the “peace at any price” line.  With a straight face.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes (with occasional emphasis added):

Watch this video when you’re sitting down but not eating. At first, it looks like a typical chick-fight: slapping, hair pulling, minor kicking, nothing major. Certainly no reason to suspect the victim is in danger of Great Bodily Harm. Keep watching until you get to the 2:00 mark, then STOP it. Seriously, don’t watch the ending yet.

Here’s the video:

Remember – STOP THE VIDEO at the 2:00 mark.  Don’t peek.

If the victim in this video had been a pistol permit holder who resisted the assault by brandishing the pistol, would she have been justified?

Should she have run away, out the door into the parking lot where the attackers were waiting? Where else could she have retreated to, the bathroom where the attack started? The kitchen where the staff stood around watching but not helping? Was she legally obligated to flee McDonalds? How? Where?

What if the third time the attackers returned, the victim felt she was too weak and battered to safely flee so she drew her permitted pistol and opened fire? Would that use of force have been justified as self-defense?

In Minnesota?  Currently?  A county attorney, sitting in a warm office with a cup of Starbucks on her desk and a Sheriff’s deputy guarding the building will decide that according to whatever abstruse legal theory she thinks applies, and whatever political priorities her superiors have committed to.

Now, turn the video back on.

The problem with present self-defense law is that up until the minute of that video, any reasonable observer would have said no, deadly force is not justified, it’s just some chicks acting stupidly. There’s no danger of serious harm so no right of self-defense. But watch the ending again.

That’s the danger of allowing the prosecutor and jury, sitting two years after the fact, with six months to spend analyzing the evidence from every angle while experts debate the proper course of action. The last few seconds of that encounter changed lives forever. Should the victim have been legally obligated to endure it? Or should she have had the right to prevent it?

Should she have been able to Stand Her Ground, using deadly force if necessary?

Gotta smash some eggs for a better society, right?

Right?

Empirical research has proven in recent years that people who favor smaller government, by whatever label – conservatives, Tea Partiers, whatever – are smarter, better-informed, better-educated and more generally successful at life, are generally happier, more generous,  and are even better in bed than big-government people by whatever label (liberal, “progressive’, yadda yadda).

And now, we have proof that not only are we as a whole less racist than big-government advocates…:

Social scientists usually measure traditional racism against African Americans by looking at the survey responses of white Americans only. Among whites in the latest General Social Survey (2008), only 4.5% of small-government advocates express the view that “most Blacks/African-Americans have less in-born ability to learn,” compared to 12.3% of those who favor bigger government or take a middle position expressing this racist view (Figure 2). We social scientists sometimes like to express things in relative odds, especially for small percentages. Here the odds of small government whites not expressing racist views (21-to-1 odds) is three times higher than the odds of big-government whites not being racist (7-to-1 odds).

…but that we long-abused white male small-government are, empirically, the least-racist subgroup of all, by a whopping margin:

Figure 3 shows that, among whites, Republican advocates of smaller government are even less racist (1.3% believing that blacks have less in-born ability) than the rest of the general public (11.3% expressing racist views). Thus, in 2008 Republicans who believe that the government in Washington does too much have 10 times higher odds of not expressing racist views on the in-born ability question than the rest of the population (79-to-1 odds v. 7.9-to-1 odds).

How social conservatives who aren’t necessarily small-government – stereotypically southern?

Yep – still half as likely to be a racist as a typical American:

In 2008, only 5.4% of white conservative Republicans expressed racist views on the in-born ability question, compared to 10.3% of the rest of the white population.

An aberration – perhaps caused by all that messianic hopey-changey twaddle?

Nope:

In sixteen surveys from 1977 through 2008 (Figure 4), overall white Republicans were significantly less racist on the in-born ability question than white Democrats (13.3% to 17.3%), and white conservative Republicans were significantly less racist than other white Americans (11.7% to 14.7%), though in most surveys the differences were too small to be significant taken individually — and in the 1993 survey, the relationship was reversed: conservative Republicans were significantly more racist on the racial inheritance question than the rest of the public.

Another traditional racism question — on segregated neighborhoods — was asked on fifteen General Social Surveys from 1972 through 1996. Though the percentage of white Democrats and white Republicans who slightly or strongly agreed that “White people have a right to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods” did not differ significantly in any one survey, overall white Democrats were significantly more likely to support segregated neighborhoods than white Republicans (30.4% to 26.3%).

Quite clearly, the legacy of Nixon’s “southern strategy” – which was never especially racist in its own right – is long dead.

The Dems’ “racism of low expectations” is, in fact, just racism.

Maybe we need some sort of outreach program to, I dunno, judge people by the contents of their hearts rather than the color of their skin.

It’s no secret – I think National Public Radio is a liberal enclave.

So do not a few noted liberals.

Even if I did believe that it was right for government to fund any media, whatever their politics, it wouldn’t be the clubby, sclerotic, gigantistic instition of National Public Radio (or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting).

And there’s some traction for that skepticism in Congress.

And this latest James O’Keefe video won’t help NPR’s case:

In a new video released Tuesday morning by conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe, Schiller and Betsy Liley, NPR’s director of institutional giving, are seen meeting with two men who, unbeknownst to the NPR executives, are posing as members of a Muslim Brotherhood front group. The men, who identified themselves as Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust, met with Schiller and Liley at Café Milano, a well-known Georgetown restaurant, and explained their desire to give to $5 million to NPR because, “the Zionist coverage is quite substantial elsewhere.”

On the tapes, Schiller wastes little time before attacking conservatives. The Republican Party, Schiller says, has been “hijacked by this group.” The man posing as Malik finishes the sentence by adding, “the radical, racist, Islamaphobic, Tea Party people.” Schiller agrees and intensifies the criticism, saying that the Tea Party people aren’t “just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”

Schiller goes on to describe liberals as more intelligent and informed than conservatives. “In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives,” he said.

Watch the video here.

(And I’m waiting for the first lefty apologist to say “it’s only convicted criminal James O’Keefe”.  Go ahead.  Make my day).

For all the barbering over math and science education in this country, we at least have this going for us; kids who really really want a good education in science can find it, eventually, somewhere.  And at least people at all levels are concerned about it.

Social studies, though?  There’s little to no sense of crisis about our kids’ knowledge of our history, culture and government.

There should be.

It’s easy to caricature social studies education.  I’ve remarked – mostly seriously – that in my 20 years of having kids in Saint Paul schools the only things they learned about were slavery and civil rights.  It ‘s not entirely accurate – I remember my stepson having to write papers about the Constitution and Leningrad (different papers, naturally) in ninth grade. But as to my two younger ones?  The “social studies” class Bun took last summer (told here, here,here and here) was only the most caricaturish example.

The bad news?  That was the good news.

More bad news? It’s going to get worse.

Karen Effrem, writing at True North, notes that the state is considering watering the state’s social studies standards down still further:

Tragically, the new draft revision of the social studies standards for Minnesota’s public school students will not help to reverse any of these damaging trends.

In fact, the draft is a giant step backwards. Even a cursory perusal shows that the politically correct, liberal, leftist elites are having a field day. They are not just revising and tweaking, as the less than ideal legislation passed in 2003 allowed, but this is a wholesale leftist revision that should be opposed with great vigor.

How bad is it?

Very, very bad:

The Declaration of Independence that first listed the principles of our republic such as God given unalienable rights and self-evident truth and that served as the cornerstone inspiration for our Constitution, is only mentioned twice and then, not after the fifth grade.

· The draft removes the phrases found in the current standards that are found in the Declaration, such as, “unalienable rights” and “self-evident truth” These were kept in the current standards after much struggle and wrangling with then DFL Senate Education Committee Chairman, Steve Kelley, who infamously said (at 31:09) during that contentious process:

I am not sure it is accurate, legally or historically to call the Declaration of Independence a founding document.

Kelley could have been your governor…

It seems as though there is an effort to make sure that students do not understand that our rights are inherent and God-given and not from government.

Ding ding ding.

It’s in government’s interest for The People to believe it’s the source of all things good.

· Use of the word “liberty” has been decreased from 18 incidents in the current standards to only one in the draft. No longer will it be required that students be taught the meaning and importance of the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as some of our unalienable rights. There is no discussion in the standards about the sacrifices so many have made to preserve that liberty. In fact, words like “valor,” “sacrifice,” and “defense” are not used at all.

In other words, the “America Bad!” mien that kids overwhelmingly get today is going to kick in its turbocharger.

· Similarly, use of the word “freedom” has decreased from 13 times in the current standards to 4 times in the draft, all in relation to only racial freedom and equality. There is no discussion of any other kind of freedom discussed in our Constitution or Bill of Rights, such as religious freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc. which are inherent and unalienable, as described in the Declaration of Independence.

Read the whole, depressing, infuriating thing.

And think really hard about calling your legislator.  If it’s one of the smart ones.

The ones that learned their social studies before 1998 or so.

Yesterday, we noted that critics like Kay Hymowitz are noticing young men today are “angry”.  They attribute it to the usual dog’s breakfast of feminist conceits; the young men are a little misogynistic, a little bit childish, a little bit full of inchoate rage over “poliitcal correctness” and changing gender roles.

I pointed out that while those roles are certainly changing today, they are no more jarring to the male sensibility than they were at any time from the 1960’s through the 1980s; I might argue that after three generations of “women’s liberation” and the broad acceptance of what used to be “Feminism’s” goals, young men today aren’t suffering any culture shock that men didn’t have, and much worse, a few decades back.

And we noted a scholarship program for “white” (more than 25% caucasian) males, which the Southern Poverty Law Center will no doubt classify a “hate group” before long.

And at the beginning of it all, we noted that subcultures that are attacked, persecuted, segregated or singled out over the long haul tend to adapt to it, in ways that address immediate-term survival over long-term good.

Why are 20-30-something males ostensibly turning away from dating, mating, and our society’s “courtship ritual” as it’s evolved in recent decades, in a way that their older brothers, uncles and even fathers and grandfathers didn’t?

———-

Back when I was in fifth grade, I had my first male teacher.  Mr. Buchholtz was a big guy, a former football player who’d done a hitch in the Navy in Vietnam.  He was the first male teacher any of us had had.

And he did all sorts of things – showed us how to tackle, how to to do karate kicks, let us play “tackle pomp” and “cops and robbers” and “army”, complete with “guns” we made out of sticks, the whole line-up of things that might have mortified the women who’d taught us through fourth grade, had those women not come up through an educational system that let boys be boys.

And when I said let boys be boys, I meant “let them both exercise those “boy” traits – physicality, aggressiveness, spatial literacy – and learn to control them and use them appropriately.  You could play “cops and robbers”; you couldn’t accost Mary Jo Helmbarger with the toy gun and scare her.

Of course, the classroom itself was pretty well designed for girls, who develop verbally before boys do.  It all evened out.

And that was the system, thirty years ago.  Maybe even twenty-five years ago.

Mr. Bucholtz would be the subject of administrative discipline today, and most likely ostracized by his colleagues.

It was about twenty years ago that the theories of Harvard professor Carol Gilligan started to gain currency.  It was Gilligan’s theory that young girls suffered in school because boys, being more aggressive, were quicker to raise their hands and get attention; that young girls were neglected, and the neglect caused them to suffer – because the education system was just too masculine.  The theory – publicized in countless books by scholars, pop-psychologists and ideological feminists – was that boys’ innate aggression intimidated girls into being quiet and not getting their questions answered in class (among other charges), which in turn beat down young girls’ spirits, which was a form of systemic discrimination that had to be overcome.

And the educational academy reacted immediately.  Schools moved to start clamping down on “boy” things – aggressive play, games like “cops and robbers” and playground football and all the other ways boys have worked off their energy during recess since the dawn of the “sit your butt in the chair and learn what we tell you to learn” model of education.

Now, psychology has known for decades that if you make a person bottle up “who they are”, it’s going to cause psychological damage . It’s one of the reasons schools have bent over backwards, for example, to support gay students; because, they just know, if you make a person deny what they are for long enough, it’s going to cause damage.

Enlightened people would never think of demanding a gay student stop being gay.

But virtually overnight in pedagogical terms, it became the fashion to force boys to do just that; to bottle up who they were.   I’ve been noticing this for almost as long; I remember having this conversation when my stepson was in school, in the early nineties.  In one memorable conversation with a woman who was a teaching assistant at the University of London’s graduate educational psychology program back in 1998, I put that basic premise out there; her response, straight from the textbook of the day, was “yes, boys acting like boys is a pathology that gets in the way of good education”.  Direct quote.

Of course, Carol Gilligan was wrong. Christina Hoff-Summers, in The War On Boys, pointed out that Gilligan’s “research” was not only almost completely exempted from peer review, but Harvard wouldn’t release any of the raw data or methodology that led to her conclusions – which was, in those days before “man-made global warming”, considered pretty bad form.  Hoff-Summers pretty well shredded Gilligan, and the outcomes of the mania that had by this time swept the educational academy…

…but it was really too late.  School became a fairly dismal place for boys.  Especially the boys that couldn’t “go along to get along“.   Acting too much “like a boy” – being too aggressive, not channelling their energy into acceptable forms, which meant “being verbal, not physical” – could get a boy drugged into compliance.  Most outrageously, teachers started demanding  boys get drugged into compliance, and making the system make those demands stick.  In other words, raduates of the least academically-rigourous programs offered at most universities felt themselves empowered to act as practitioners in a field that took graduates of the most rigorous field, but one that even those practitioners know is still only vaguely understood.

Can you imagine what’d happen if science came up with a drug that could suppress a homosexual child’s identity?   The very fact that the idea had been researched would be condemned with vein-bulging fury, to say nothing of the actual act of producing and prescribing the drug.  And the furor would be right.

And yet our education system has been forcing half the student population to be something other than what evolution, brain chemistry and their physiology make them, and being drugged into submission and classified as “special ed”, and plopped onto the failure track  if they don’t go along.

And it’s having an effect.  The number of girls in college increased – from right around to slightly under half in the ’80’s, to closer to an estimated 60% of the population in the very near future.  It’s even more pronounced in the humanities and soft-sciences.   It’s gotten to the point that the mainstream media who trumpeted Gilligan’s “research” twenty years ago are fretting about the lack of men on campuses today.  If 12 years of school have been turned into an ugly ordeal, why should they stretch it out to sixteen years – even assuming that their drug-addled, special-ed sodden academic records allow them to get into a college.

So the question I’d like to ask Kay Hymowitz – the author of the book Manning Up that I went after yesterday – is “why are you asking why young men are shunning the dating life, when the real question is why do you expect young men who’ve had traditional masculine roles beaten down and treated as pathologies to be overcome  for their entire educational career and  young lives to suddenly turn into Prince Charming when they turn 22?”

As long as we actively suppress, and oppress, boys acting like boys – especially by way of learning how to be responsible boys, and thus responsible men, the way they always have – then Kay Hymowitz’ dating malaise is just the tip of the iceberg.

This has just got to piss Nick Coleman off – and, commensurately, leave Chad the Elder pretty stoked:

That’s a Libyan freedom fighter with a UND Fighting Sioux T-shirt.

Politically-incorrect here; a sign of freedom there.

Just goes to show you – wherever tyranny needs to be toppled, whether in Saint Paul or in the Sahara, North Dakotans, or our clothes, will be there.

Take a culture. Any culture (or sub-culture, really).

Deprive them of choices.  Stuff them into ghettos, literally or figuratively. Punish them just for the simple act of being who they are. Make their identity the subject of scorn and abuse within the larger society.  Actively denigrate their traits, their identity – their being.  Lather, rinse and repeat for a few generations.

What do you get?

Cultural pathologies.   The world’s full of them:

• Russians, with over a thousand years of rule by strongmen and monarchs who used systematic abuse as a fundamental tool of power, have the most exaggerated sense of cultural Stockholm Syndrome imaginable.  It’s been quipped by not a few Russophiles that Russia is generations away from being comfortable with western-style liberal democracy; the peoples’ cultural memory is as utterly tied to abuse as any battered spouse after leaving a thirty year marriage; as awful as it is, they keep finding more of it.
• Jews the world over exhibit all sorts of stereotypical cultural traits – insularity, fatalism, and on and on – that sociologists have linked to the centuries of segregation, pogroms, and mass-murders epic and small that they’ve endured.
• African Americans are still showing the cultural ills bred during 400 years of slavery; the black male, in particular, is still fighting with the marginalization he suffered under slavery, which lives on in far too many black families (and is glorified in way too much of the current popular culture); after 400 years of seeing signs of “uppityness” – education, initiative, individual thought – punished ruthlessly, it’s not hard to see why the culture’d have a hard time recovering in between 47 and 146 years.
• White Trash, too; southern white working-class non-land-owners were treated little better than serfs until the civil war, and not much better after.  Most of the ills that affect the white south – rural crime rates that in places like Louisiana and South Carolina overtop most urban areas, poverty, the Cyrus family, limited regard for education, the general sense of low expectations – trace back to the Antebellum period, where poor non-land-owning Scots-Irish crackers were expected to be cheap labor and foot soldiers.

And now, a full 49% of American society.

We’ll come back to that.

———-

A couple of stories popped up on the radar the other day that led me to a topic I’ve been stewing over writing for quite a while now.

Author Kay Hymowitz is the author of the best-seller Manning Up, which argues that twenty and thirty-somethings today are putting off adulthood, preferring instead to remain in a sort of arrested adolescence she terms “pre-adulthood”.

The Wall Street Journal published excerpts; she got some feedback.  And she wrote about it in the Daily Beast by way of defending her premise:

But a lot of the responses unwittingly proved my point—and another one: Men are really, really angry. Consider: “We’re not STUCK in pre-adulthood, we choose it because there aren’t any desirable American women. They’ve been bred to abuse men.” This fairly typical response that appeared at the Seattle Post Intelligencer website: “Sorry ladies. In the age of PlayStation 3s, 24-hours-a-day sports channels, and free Internet porn, you are now obsolete. All that nagging, whining, and stealing our hard earned cash have finally caught up to you.”

Shocked? I wasn t. During the last few years researching this age group, I’ve stumbled onto a powerful underground current of male bitterness that has nothing to do with outsourcing, the Mancession, or any of the other issues we usually associate with contemporary male discontent.

Hymowitz focused largely on “men as potential mates for women” and the dating lives of the age group, of course, and her observations reflect the scope…:

No, this is bitterness from guys who find the young women they might have hoped to hang out with entitled, dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling—and did I mention gold-digging?…Women may want equality at the conference table and treadmill. But when it comes to sex and dating, they aren’t so sure.

…but I think she missed a much, much bigger point.  Men, especially younger men, are angry – and it’s not just about dating, mating and sex.

She gets ever so close to the real point, too:

So, is this what Susan Faludi famously called the backlash? Is it immaturity, as my own book seems to suggest? Is it the Internet as an escape valve for decades of pent-up rebellion against political correctness? Or, is it just good, old-fashioned misogyny?

(Hymowitz’ theory is it’s a little of all of the above, plus the “men aren’t used to competition” slur, plus a broad upset over dating/mating gender roles, which have changed, partly, for women but not for men, in case you’d rather not read the whole thing).

Hymowitz missed the real story – or perhaps the real story was outside the scope of a book and article whose purpose seemed to be to reassure a generation of jaded younger women that they’re OK, it’s all those guys who have the problem.

There was another bit of news last week that is interesting to juxtapose with Hymowitz, though.

———-

Earlier this week, a Texas non-profit announced it was going to start giving scholarships for white guys.

The “Austin American-Statesmen” reports a Texas nonprofit group called the Former Majority Association for Equality is behind the scholarships.

Texas State University student Colby Bohannan says he launched the group after returning from the Iraq war to find there were college scholarships for women and minorities, but white males were left out.

Bohannan and his friends will start giving out 500-dollar scholarships this summer.

It’s a stretch to call it “racist”; applicants need to be 25 percent Caucasian, so the skinheads who fret about “mud people” aren’t likely to be much assuaged.  It’s certainly politically-incorrect, of course – a point in its favor.  Our self-appointed elites are tittering, of course – not just the giggly bit from the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove, but the inevitable droning jeremiads from the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose stock in trade is finding hatred in every box of Cheerios:

“It looks to me like a simple provocation,” says Mark Potok, who monitors hate groups for the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. “These people have fallen directly into the ever more popular myth of white oppression in America. The reality is that whites, to this day, have enormous privileges in landing scholarships and have real advantages in finding places at good schools.”

Potok says he isn’t impressed by the Former Majority Association for Equality’s avowed benign intentions, pointing out that professional racist David Duke, of the European-American Rights Organization, has used similar anodyne arguments while making a big show of sending money to poor whites in Appalachia. Potok also cited one of Duke’s favorite tracts, racial theorist Wilmot Robertson’s influential and wildly popular 1972 book, The Dispossessed Majority, which argued that the relative population decline of the United States’ white founding stock, compared to rise of non-Caucasians and immigrants, was allowing the nation to fall under the pernicious influence of foreign interests and Jews.

Potok is doing the SPLC’s usual voodoo, finding correlation and claiming causation, and doing a poor job even of that.  Is “White Oppression” an absurd case to try to make?  Sure.

But Potok, Bohannon and Hymowitz all came —-> || <—-that close to hitting an actual point.

Simultaneously!

Are white males oppressed?  Not in any meaningful way.

Are young males of most races angry, and perhaps reacting to that anger detrimentally?  Very likely.

Is it because they face changing gender roles in dating?  Maybe, but then so did my generation.  If anything, the change was more radical thirty years ago. when the entire change in gender models at home, at work and in society was both brand new and being taught as a crash course.   Today, young men express puzzlement that women their age can have sex without guilt just like they (purportedly) do; thirty years ago, it was that women could earn a living without guilt.

But guys in my age bracket, and not a whole lot after, had one huge advantage over today’s young men.

More tomorrow.

Like Muammar Gaddhafi and Hosni “Rico” Mubarak, some of America’s leftists in places like Minneapolis and Madison are having a hard time twigging the fact that they don’t control everything anymore.

“Phoenix Woman” from Mercury Rising, is one of them.  One of her readers is upset that National Public Radio isn’t entirely their personal toy anymore:

The following is from an e-mail received from a reader of MR. Said reader has given me permission to reproduce it here, with spelling edits [I’ll just bet there were – Ed.]:

Just tried to call in to Talk of the Nation while they were doing a program on Wisconsin.

Back in the old days, the show used to allow various comments so long as they were on topic.

Er, no.  NPR programs are always tightly screened, and always have been.

But today, the FIRST thing the screener said was “With a state budget deficit of $2 billion, what should public employees be expected to give?”

When I tried to say “They’ve ALREADY given sixteen furlough days in the past two years!”, the screener cut me off, saying that they wanted only people who were going to answer their (loaded) question.

It wasn’t a (loaded) question.  The program had already noted the concessions Wisconsin’s unions have made (listen for yourself).  The subject was not “Let’s let Wisconsin union members on the air to bitch about their lives”.  It was “what is it right to ask?”

Talk of the Nation gets dozens, maybe hundreds, of calls an hour.  They put maybe 7-8 on the air in a typical hour.  It’s the screener’s job to make sure those few calls are the ones that make for the best, on-topic radio possible.

A good screener knows that there are four kinds of callers; great ones, average ones, boring one and crazy ones.  Listening to people carping, off-topic, while not addressing the show’s topic is boring and off-topic.

She was quite brusque, too.

Screening is a tough job. And I’m gonna bet that there were more than a few “seminar callers, like the person “Phoenix” is quoting, from Wisconsin.

Also, the screener was a government worker.

NPR: not even Nice Polite Republicans any more.

“Everyone who doesn’t kiss our butts must be a Republican”.

I think I get it now.

I take the occasional bit of flak for not reflexively bagging on Minnesota Public Radio.

Oh, I do think it’s a travesty that the taxpayer is supporting an organization that can easily support itself.  Perhaps in the style to which it is accustomed – the MPR headquarters and broadcast center at the Taj Ma Kling, in downtown Saint Paul, would put most TV stations to shame – but then, most of us are having to pinch pennies these days.

But I think MPR – at least, the News side of it – does a decent job of balancing its coverage of the news.

But National Public Radio?  From Nina Totenberg’s Pauline-Kael-like sense of ideological entitlement to “On The Media’s” preening media elitism to “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”‘s endless George W. Bush jokes (although they at least did have P.J. O’Rourke as a panelist a few times) to the firing of Juan Williams for going trayf on Fox News, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board’s institutional Victorian Vapours that George W. Bush would try to appoint conservatives to their club, there is no sentient, honest person in America who doesn’t know that NPR is a center-left reservation.

Still – they have to try to keep up appearances.

Which, as an MPR News staffer noted on Twitter the other day, gets just a little more difficult when the likes of MoveOn.org leap to your defense.

When House Republicans put the money for public broadcasting on their list of budget cuts two weeks ago, there was barely a peep from either the right or the left. But that changed when MoveOn, a liberal organization that’s a favorite bogeyman for and target of conservatives, jumped into the fray.

MoveOn turned the entry page for its Web site into a petition opposing the proposed cuts and e-mailed its members imploring them to sign the petition.

Public broadcasting executives appreciate the support—to a point. But several who spoke with Adweek wish MoveOn would have stayed quiet. They’re concerned that the group’s support will help opponents paint public broadcasting as a tool of the left wing, rather than a thoughtful, educational and often high-brow approach to news and culture.

“We’re embarrassed,” one exec said.

Well, to be fair, MoveOn’s support didn’t tell anyone anything they didn’t already believe.

As if on cue, Brent Bozell, the founder and president of the Media Research Center, a conservative press watchdog, seemed to confirm public broadcasters’ worst fears. Bozell entered the debate by tweeting: “Earth to media reporters: If PBS and NPR subsidies are being promoted by MoveOn.org, doesn’t that hint at WHOSE media these are?”

Paula Kreger, president and CEO of PBS, disagrees with that sentiment.

“When you look at the breadth of people talking about us right now, they aren’t all left- or right-wing crazy people,” Kreger told Adweek. “MoveOn is out there, but so are others. It’s a stretch to point to them and say, ‘See, they’re all one.’ It’s a polarizing time, and there are some people who look for these opportunities.”

Ms. Kreger:  here in Minnesota, now that we have a Republican majority in the state House and Senate, the Teachers Union is suddenly – as in, with apparent panic – “reaching out” to teachers who happen to be Republicans and/or conservatives – a minority that the union had wasted no time acknowledging, much less listening to, in the previous forty-odd years.  Conservatives – teachers among ’em – got a good chuckle; after decades of what could loosely be called “repression”, suddenly the Union wants conservatives at the table.

Your statement reminds me of this.

But I have a question;  is there actually a conservative group, along the lines of a “MoveOn”, also jumping in to defend NPR’s federal funding?

No?

Why do you suppose that might be?

I’m open to theories.

Dire Straits’ single “Money For Nothing” was one of the iconic songs of the 1980s when it came out in 1985.  Chock full of reference to MTV and the styles of the era, and featuring a video that was fairly bleeding-edge computer animation (albeit very, very stylized) for the time.

It also created a brouhaha; the original, album version included a naughty word; three times, in fact.  “The little f***ot in the earring and the makeup?  Yeah, buddy, that’s his own hair…” and so on.    As songwriter, singer and guitar legend Mark Knopfler said at the time, the entire song was written in the second person, and was a conversation between a couple of delivery guys at a furniture store in New York, commenting on the MTV videos they were watching during the glory days of big new-wave hairdos.

It’s been a quarter century – but the controversy is baaaaaaack:

Classic Dire Straits track Money for Nothing has been banned from public broadcast in Canada – after receiving just one complaint 25 years after its release.

The global hit single came out on the band’s iconic fifth album, Brothers in Arms, in May 1985 and won a Grammy for best rock performance the following year.

But the original version included the word “faggot” referring to homosexuals, and although a cleaned-up edition was made available, Oz-FM in Newfoundland played the first edition in February last year.

The result was a single complaint – but the self-regulating Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has upheld it, and no outlet in the nation can now play Money for Nothing the way Dire Straits intended it to be heard.

The complaint said: “Money for Nothing was aired and included the word ‘faggot’ a total of three times. I am aware of other versions of the song and yet Oz-FM chose to play and not censor the version I am complaining about. As a member of the LGBT community I feel there is no reason for such discriminatory remarks to be played on air.”

And that’s all she wrote – notwithstanding that this is a very, very old rhubarb:

Dire Straits mainman Mark Knopfler has fielded angry reaction to the lyrics since the song first came out. He has pointed out the song is written from the viewpoint of a stupid character who thinks musicians make their “money for nothing” and his stupidity is what leads him to make ignorant statements.

Speaking in 1985 he said: “Apart from the fact that there are stupid gay people as well as stupid other people, it suggests that maybe you have to be direct. I’m in two minds as to whether it’s a good idea to take on characters and write songs that aren’t in the first person.”

Now, I’m not bringing this up because it’s a great case of PC run amok – although it is.

And I’m not bringing it up because it’s a great example of the lunacy of Canadian “Human Rights” law – although, again, it is.

I’m bringing it up because it’s the shape of things to come, if Julius “Seizure” Genachowski and Representative James Clyburn want with all their proposed interventions into the First Amendment – from the “Fairness Doctrine” to “Net Neutrality”; they want, and if not stopped they will get, a system where the First Amendment will be subject to the tastes, whims and tantrums of those who complain the loudest.

Alan Cross of Canadian service ExploreMusic comments: “The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is run by Canada’s private broadcasters. In exchange for the government not meddling, broadcasters have long promised to regulate themselves.

“It’s seen as much preferable to the arrangement in the US where the FCC – a government organization run by political appointees – carries a very heavy hammer when it comes to regulating broadcast content; or in the UK where Ofcom plays a similar role.

“In Canada, if no one complains, the feeling is that there’s no need to censor it. But all it takes is one person making one complaint for the entire apparatus of the CBSC to come to full gallop.

All of the proposals to return the “Fairness Doctrine” involve returning a frightening degree (if you care about free speech) of control over broadcast licensing to pressure from citizens – and not even a lot of them; organization will count for more than numbers, just as it did before 1987.

The little jagoffs with the suits and the Yale ties?  Yeah, buddy – they want control.

The piece is from last week – I was a bit remiss in not linking it back then, and I plead overwork – but Sheila Kihne has been unpacking the unholy alliance of “community organizers” and liberal churches in bringing stifling PC to the parts of Minnesota that actually pay their own way:

The Star Trib today featured another installation of it’s ongoing series on the wannabe martyr of suburban school reform, Eden Prairie Superintendent Melissa Krull. (Michelle Rhee she is not, but she’s sure trying hard to attain the same level of national adoration.) Our good friend Myron Orfield was back too with this Christmas message of goodwill:

From this article.

“This is a big decision for the school board and for the region — whether we’re going to have racially integrated school districts,” Orfield said. ”The implications [if the proposed plan fails] will be that there are a group of white racist parents who can stop integration in schools.”

I try very, very hard not to question intent. I try to believe that people are inherently good. But this statement is really beyond the pale.

But the lines for “the pale” have been pushed out to the point where demigogues like Orfield do believe slandering those who stand in their way is perfectly acceptable.

Read the rest of Sheila’s piece.  She had a great 2010; 2011 should rock.

If you happen to be part of my tiny audience in New Jersey, I’d like to ask that you give Governor Christie a call.  He’s got a miscarriage of justice to fix.

Brian Aitkin was in the process of moving from Colorado to New Jersey.  He was moving a couple of handguns which he’d bought in Colorado.  He was doing everything by the book:

According to testimony [his roommate] later gave at Aitken’s trial, before leaving Colorado Aitken researched and printed out New Jersey and federal gun laws to be sure he moved his firearms legally. Richard Gilbert, Aitken’s trial attorney, says Aitken also called the New Jersey State Police to get advice on how to legally transport his guns, although Burlington County Superior Court Judge James Morley didn’t allow testimony about that phone call at Aitken’s trial.

His mother, a social worker, called the police – erroneously – while worried over his son’s mental state during his divorce, which was at the time going badly (his vile pig ex-wife was withholding visitation with his kid).  The cops turned that into an excuse to search his car, which turned out the legally-stored handguns after a two-hour search.  They arrested him – regardless that he’d stored the guns precisely in accordance with New Jersey’s draconian, fascist gun laws, and that Federal law grants lawful gun owners an exception to state gun laws if they are moving from one location to another.

Unfortunately, Aitkin had a judge even more bigoted against gun owners than the ones in Hennepin County.

The jury never heard about the moving exception, virtually guaranteeing Brian’s conviction.

Yet Judge Morley wouldn’t allow Aitken to claim the exemption for transporting guns between residences. He wouldn’t even let the jury know about it. During deliberations, the jurors asked three times about exceptions to the law, which suggests they weren’t comfortable convicting Aitken. Morley refused to answer them all three times. Gilbert and Nappen, Aitken’s lawyers, say he also should have been protected by a federal law that forbids states from prosecuting gun owners who are transporting guns between residences. Morley would not let Aitken cite that provision either.

Brian Aitken is currently serving seven years in a state prison. Now a website and Facebook page are asking Governor Chris Christie to pardon Aitken.

Gov. Christie has proven a sensible leader and shown political courage in taking on his state’s debt-ridden “Situation.” Here’s hoping that Christie, a former prosecutor, will see that Aitken’s continued imprisonment does nothing to serve the interests of justice.

So all you folks stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps; give the Gov a call.  This has to be fixed.

Paul Schmelzer at the Mindy doesn’t address rumors that the Soros-supported “news” front is about to change its name to “Dump Bradlee Dean” – but he does give lots of Xs and Os to the new “loose mores blow up stores” campaigns at Walmart and the Mall:

Today Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Walmart’s participation, according to a DHS press release. The nation’s largest retailer will have 230 stores participating immediately, with as many as 588 eventually taking part. The Mall of America’s participation was announced last week; it’ll be joined by “the American Hotel & Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, sports and general aviation industries, and state and local fusion centers across the country.”

The expanded campaign, unveiled at a mall ceremony last week, will include print and video advertisements throughout the complex.

So – posting terror warnings in public places is good?

Well, now that it’s a Democrat!  Let’s go back a few years:

During the 2004 elections, Kiffmeyer made national headlines when she decided to post terrorist warning signs at polling places throughout Minnesota urging voters to be wary of people appearing at precincts with “shaved head[s] or short hair” who “smell of unusual herbal/flower water or perfume,” wear baggy clothing or appear to be whispering to themselves.

So when Janet Napolitano tells you to watch out for those crazy neighbors (especially if they’re tax protesters, second amendment people, pro-lifers or Tea Partiers, naturally), it’s a good thing, but when a Republican does it…

…well, we all know how it works, don’t we?