Unpacking Peggy McIntosh

About a year and a half ago, I wrote one of my favorite pieces in the history of this blog – Unpacking the Invisible NPR Tote Bag, which spelled out the ideal of “Urban Progressive Privilege.

I described the phenomenon if “Urban Progressive Privilege” by tracing a line from the document from which the term “White Privilege” sprang – Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by one Peggy McIntosh:

Urban Progressive Privilege is like an invisible weightless NPR tote bag of special permissions, immunities, secret handshakes, Whole Foods gift cards, a virtual echo chamber accompanying everyone who has that privilege, filtering out almost all cognitive dissonance about political, social or moral questions, and a virtual “cone of silence” immunizing them from liability for anything they say or do that contradicts the group’s stated principles.  As we in Human studies work to reveal Urban Progressive Privilege and ask urban progressives to become aware of their power, so one who writes about havingUrban Progressive Privilege must ask, “having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”

It was, to a degree, satire – and, like a lot of satire, it was simultaneously journalism.    Privilege does exist in our society – but social, economic, educational and geographic class at the end of the day count for (I’ll be charitable) every bit as much as race.   Can anyone say that Clarence Thomas is held in lower regard (by people other than Ryan Winkler, anyway) than John Roberts?

I wrote the piece originally because the ideal that “whiteness” – whatever that means, as if a “race” that simultaneously includes Norwegians and Armenians, Slavs and Spaniards, has any actual ethnic meaning – conveys so much privilege by itself that a white house painter in Spooner Wisconsin has social, cultural, financial and legal advantage over Oprah Winfrey or Sarah Jeong is so comically absurd.

So absurd, I thought, that it had to have been written by someone who was so detached by class privilege that they hadn’t the foggiest idea what life was like outside of their class bubble.

Lo and behold, I was right.

William Ray digs into Peggy McIntosh’s knapsack in this brightly illuminating piece in Quillette.

When I say “I was right” – well, I was being modest:

Peggy McIntosh was born Elisabeth Vance Means in 1934. She grew up in Summit, New Jersey where the median income is quadruple the American national average—that is to say that half the incomes there are more than four times the national average, some of them substantially so. McIntosh’s father was Winthrop J. Means, the head of Bell Laboratories electronic switching department during the late 1950s. At that time, Bell Labs were the world leaders in the nascent digital computing revolution. Means personally held—and sold patents on—many very lucrative technologies, including early magnetic Gyro-compass equipment (U.S. Patent #US2615961A) which now helps to guide nuclear missiles and commercial jets, and which keeps satellites in place so you can navigate with your phone and communicate with your Uber driver. Means is also recorded as the inventor of a patent held by Nokia Bell in 1959 known as the Information Storage Arrangement. This device is the direct progenitor of ROM computer memory, and is cited in the latter’s patent filed in 1965 for IBM. So, long before Peggy McIntosh wrote her paper, her family was already having an outsized effect on Western culture.

Elizabeth Vance Means then attended Radcliffe, a renowned finishing school for the daughters of America’s patrician elites, and continued her private education at the University of London (ranked in the top 50 by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings), before completing her English Doctorate at Harvard. Her engagement to Dr. Kenneth McIntosh was announced in the New York Times‘s social register on the same page as the wedding of Chicago’s Mayor Daley. McIntosh’s father, Dr. Rustin McIntosh, was Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics at Columbia University. His mother was President Emeritus of Barnard College, an institution in the opulent Morningside Heights district of Manhattan, famous since 1889 for providing the daughters of the wealthiest Americans with liberal arts degrees…[husband] Kenneth McIntosh was himself a graduate of the Phillips Exeter Academy, which boasted alumni including Daniel Webster, the sons of Presidents Lincoln and Grant, and a number of Rockefeller scions. He later completed his elite education at Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School. By the time of his marriage to Elizabeth, Kenneth McIntosh was a senior resident at the prestigious Brigham Hospital in Boston, founded by millionaire Peter Bent.

In other words, Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite, and has remained ensconced there ever since.

So Peggy McIntosh is the scion – scienne?  Scionette? – of a family that is in the top fraction of the top 1% of people in this country in terms of social, educational (or at least “Educational Affiliation”), financial and cultural stature.

And this leads up to a summation that could soon become a Berg’s 7th Law corollary:

Her ‘experiential’ list enumerating the ways in which she benefits from being born with white skin simply confuses racial privilege with the financial advantages she has always been fortunate enough to enjoy.

And – I’d add, from my position as an observer – it provided cover for the vastly more toxic “Urban Progressive Privilege”.   Ray says nearly as much:

All of which means that pretty much anything you read about ‘white privilege’ is traceable to an ‘experiential’ essay written by a woman who benefitted from massive wealth, a panoply of aristocratic connections, and absolutely no self-awareness whatsoever. This alone calls into question the seriousness and scholarly validity of the derivative works, since they are all the fruit of a poisonous tree. But McIntosh’s hypothesis was eagerly embraced nonetheless, because it served a particular purpose—it helped to mainstream a bitter zero-sum politics of guilt and identity. This dark epistemology has quietly percolated through the universities and the wider culture for two decades now. It has had the effect of draining attention from a massive and growing wealth gap and it has pitted the poor against one another in public spectacles of acrimony and even violence.

“Progressivism” has ended up on the “wrong” side of the class war it has always espoused: they are the patricians, and have been for over a century now.

Idenitymongering – and the firehose of “privilege” allegations that are one of its weapons – is one way of dividing the unruly plebes against each other, as Ray points out:

A school board in British Columbia even thought it would be a good idea to greet its poor and working class white middle school students with this poster reminding them of the guilty burden they bear on account of their skin:

No, it’s not a flyer for a community theater production of “1984”. Yet.

I grew up a very poor white kid. By which I mean, single-mother-on-welfare-in-Alberta poor. As a child, I remember feeling utterly hopeless about ever making any sort of life for myself. If I were at school in British Columbia today, I would now have to deal with seeing this admonition every morning as well. One wonders why Teresa Downs doesn’t simply step down from her $200,000 a year job and pass it to a person of colour since she acquired it unfairly. Is her public declaration of culpability supposed to be compensation enough? Presumably, like Peggy McIntosh, she has convinced herself that human well-being will be better served by shaming the children of people whose average annual income is around $23,000.

I suggest you read the whole thing; as much as I pullquoted, there is so much more.

The Return Of Eddie Haskell

When we last talked about Ryan WInkler, he was on his way to Belgium, in as much disgrace as the media ever allows a DFL golden child to face, after having called SCOTUS justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom”.   Winkler – who got a degree at Harvard – claimed he wasn’t aware of the history of the term.  But no matter; he took a break.

But he’s baaaaack, and running for Attorney General.

And this oughtta be a great campaign; he’s got the same Twitter smarts as the President seems to have:

Our old friend Chad the Elder of the late, great Fraters stepped up, with results that, if you know Winkler, are utterly predictable:

He wants to be attorney general.

This oughtta be a fun campaign.

(Via Gary Gross)

Heads? Disaster. Tails? Catastrophe

As we noted earlier in the week, the left is just dying to get the NRA out of its way.

And they have been since I started following this issue – in probably 1980.

It seems that lately, the left has taken to a three-tiered strategy for fighting the Second Amendment Human Rights movement:

  1. Lie About Everything.  Everyone from the President to the hapless Heather Martens, and the entire media class in between, has spent the past couple of years relentlessly churning out easily-debunked lies; no, Mr. President, we’re not the most violent nation in the world, and states with tight gun laws aren’t safer.  And it seems to be working – while violent crime in general and gun crime in particular has plummeted over the past 20 years, most people don’t know it.
  2. Refuse To Engage the Second Amendment Human Rights Movement Directly:  They always lose in open, head-to-head debates based on facts.  Always.  There has never in history been an exception, and there never will be.
  3. Appeal to Magic:  The NRA is going to go away!   Someday!  You just gotta believe!

This blog has spent nearly a decade and a half engaging points 1 and 2.  Today, it’s all about the 3.

The National Boogeyman Association:  As I pointed out earlier in the week, the NRA is both vital and irrelevant; while it’s a juggernaut at federal lobbying, it’s mostly a bystanding helper at the state level, where most of the actual legislation happens.   But the left – being a fear-based institution – needs a big, centralized boogeyman.  And for this, the NRA serves their purposes.

And let’s be frank; organizations come and go (although the NRA is, and remains at, a peak of numbers and power).

 Adam Winkler – a UCLA law prof who’s popped up on this blog before, and not as an idiot – wrote an op-ed in the WaPo (reprinted earlier this week in the Strib, Read It And Weep:  The NRA Will Fall.

Before I respond, let me establish something.

Baselines:  When I first started covering the battle for Second Amendment human rights, about 30 years ago, the gun grabber movement used to wave around a Gallup poll showing that 85% of the American people favored gun control.  While that number dropped sharply as the poll got into specifics (even then, near the nadir of the Second Amendment’s fortunes), it showed where The People were at regarding our right to self-defense.

But thirty years later, things have changed; a distinct majority support the right to keep and bear arms.

All by way of saying – peoples’ attitudes change over time.

Changes:  I won’t quote extensively from Winkler’s piece – which is based on the idea that the NRA, and the Second Amendment movement, are doomed by demographics; that Latinos, African-Americans, urbanites and women are much less supportive of the Second Amendment and the NRA than rural white males.

On the one hand?  That may be true – today.  Just as it was true of 85% of the people – thirty years ago.  Attitudes change.  Are they changing for or against the NRA and the Second Amendment?  All evidence is anecdotal; the fact that Minnesota has well over twice as many carry permittees today as were ever forecast before the passage of “Shall Issue” reform might be a hint that the swing might actually be in the NRA’s favor.

Are Latinos more favorable to gun control?  Perhaps.  But Latinos aren’t a monolithic bloc; while Latinos in general vote Democrat, those who’ve been in the US longer than 2-3 generations are much more likely to vote GOP.

Asians, Winkler notes, support gun control – but again, they’re hardly monolithic; Koreans and H’mong are actually fairly likely to be shooters (if not “NRA supporters”).

Women tend to be pro-gun-control. They are also the fastest-growing group of shooters in America today.

How will these changes shake out over two decades?  Will policy be dragged to the left, reflecting these minorities’ left-leaning politics?  Or will they, too, evolve?

I know what I’m working toward.

(Let’s also not forget that most of the anti-gun minorities live in states like California, New York and Illinois, that are already relatively hostile to gun ownership).

Omens:  But let’s say Winkler is right; that minorities, new Americans, women and urbanites’ current attitudes will stay static over time.   It is a fact – noted by the estimable Kevin Williamson – that many of our minorities have vastly different perspectives on the concept of risk and freedom than white, middle class Americans do.

So if New Americans and minorities-who-will-one-day-be-the-majority don’t support the Second Amendment, is that going to be a problem for the NRA?

Who the hell cares?  It’s going to be a problem for the whole idea of “America” as a place built on the ideal of freedom.  And by “freedom”, we mean the traditional American founding interpretation – life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, protection of private property, freedom of speech, conscience, religion, press, assembly, keeping and bearing arms, security in your home, trial by jury with representation, equality before the law, the whole shebang – as opposed to the “freedoms” the Democrat party is pushing these days; the “freedom” from consequences, the “freedom” to force other people to make you free of want, the “freedom” to have government force others to give you stuff at gunpoint and enforce an arbitrary, politically-motivated concept of “fairness”; the freedom to abort your fetus and wave your privates around in public.

If the Second Amendment collapses because a majority of “Americans” don’t understand what it is to be “American” or what “America”, indeed, is, then the demise of the NRA will be the least of our problems, because there will be nothing to prevent the rest of the Constitution, and the freedoms it ostensibly guarantees, from being shredded much, much more comprehensively than it already is.

Ryan Winkler Should Thank George Takei

Because Winkler is no longer the most ineptly, tone-deafly racist commentator in recent American history.

I’ve had the odd chuckle as George “Mr. Sulu” Takei has oozed back into a wry, giggly mainstream prominence.  He can be a funny guy.  And he’s got an interesting story; growing up in an internment camp, building a career in Hollywood at a time when an Asian couldn’t get a break, yadda yadda.

But someone’s gotta slap him:

In a nasty, racist rant captured by a Fox affiliate in Arizona, former Star Trek actor-turned-gay rights activist George Takei lashed out at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, calling him a “clown in black face.”

Here, a man who became famous sitting on a TV set pushing fake buttons and saying “Warp Factor Five, Aye-Aye” and running a snarky but occasionally hilarious Facebook account, gaysplains to one of America’s most accomplished jurists…

…not only using terms that are groaning with racist baggage, but also legally full of Roddenberry dust.  Thomas is, unfortunately for Takei, correct.  The Obergefell decision was, like Roe V. Wade, conjuring up law from nothing – or, worse than nothing, pure emotion.

Back to snarking on Facebook, George.

Smoke On The Water; NARN In The Sky

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show,

  • Peter Johnson will talk about church security
  • Twila Brase will talk about the latest in healthcare freedom and her interview in Dailiy Caller with Ginny Thomas (wife of a certain SCOTUS justice who Ryan Winkler said something really dumb about…)
  • Jon Heyer joins us to talk about his plans in MN 66A – Heather Martens’ district.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

Join us!

The Problem With Ryan Winkler…

…was, paradoxically, only incidentally about Ryan Winkler.

Our Big Game of Telephone:  From the mid-nineties on, when Michele Bachmann was still organizing the Maple River Education Coalition, before she even ran for the State Senate, the late Karl Bremer was dinging on the future Presidential candidate and conservative lighting rod.

And conservatives, in turn, dinged on the irascible Bremer.  I’m not one to speak ill of the dead – but it’s a simple fact that the guy was prone to using imagination when the facts didn’t give him the story he wanted.   For years, finding and pointing out all the logical and factual holes in his peevish tirades was for conservative bloggers what “mending nets” is for Spanish fishermen.  In short – he was like a blogger, only more so.

But if you ask a left-leaning member of the Minnesota Media “elite”, you got a different story; Bremer was lauded as a hero, treated as one of the club, given the secret handshake.  He won an award from the “Society of Professional Journalists” – something like “best digger of documents”.

It was all, every bit of it, related to Bremer’s nearly two-decade-long mania for “covering” / writing about / stalking Michele Bachmann.  The enemy of the Twin Cities’ media’s enemy is the Twin Cities media’s friend.

And had Bremer turned all of that manic energy on Paul Wellstone or Keith Ellison?  Not a single member of the Twin Cities media would have acknowledged his existence, much less pissed on his grave.

Warm, Fuzzy:  With that in mind, take a good read through Doug Grow’s profile of the retiring Representative Ryan Winkler.

Entitled “Why the Legislature will miss Ryan Winkler”, it’s full of assurances, via Pat Garofalo, that Winkler’s big and rapidly-moving mouth was “all business, nothing personal” – which is a fine thing, and mildly reassuring (although mere nonelected proles who encountered Winkler on Twitter had mixed experiences with the lad)…

…and maybe even true, as far as it goes.

But read the article.

You’ll scan it in vain for any mention of Winkler’s “Uncle Tom” jape.  And that’s fine; people make mistakes; to err is human and to forgive divine, yadda yadda.  If every political “opposition researcher” in the world suddenly broke their femurs and spent six months in traction, and the world could forgive politicians their past oopses, the world would be a happier place, and maybe a  little bit better one too.

That might actually be a wonderful thing.

But as I – and quite a few other people – noted when Winkler announced his retirement, Winkler was only the symptom.  The disease?  The Minnesota Media’s double-standard.

Because if Winkler’d been a Republican, you can bet “Uncle Tom” would have popped up in Grow’s epitaph; it’d be carved large on the media’s collective memory of the guy for all eternity.

Winkler has painstakingly avoided ruling out a return to Minnesota politics.  Five will get you twenty that when he does, “Uncle Thomas” will not rate a single inch of copy.

Anywhere.

“Sharp-Tongued”

Ryan Winkler is leaving the House of Representatives.

Winkler spent nine sessions in the Legislature.  During the last five or six of them, his job, coming from an utterly safe seat in Golden Valley, seemed to be “the DFL’s Costco version of Sidney Blumenthal”; to say and do the things that no DFLer in a contested district – or human with an education and a conscience – would dare to say.

Winkler racked up a long, storied history:

…enough that he seemed to be well on the way to becoming Minnesota’s Joe Biden.

Of course, Paul Thissen said what caucus leaders are supposed to say about their hatchet men:

House Minority Leader Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, said he’ll miss Winkler’s “impatience with injustice. He is always willing to take on the tough fights and not back down. He drove the discussion forward about how to make our economy work better for people. His work to raise the minimum wage and improve opportunity for average Minnesotans is a tremendous legacy.”

Um yeah.  When a Minnesotan loses a job to pay for his precious minimum wage hike, we need to say they’ve been “Winklered”.

But this isn’t about my observations.  Look at the adjectives the media uses in describing Winkler’s career; “outspoken” (as in “outspoken advocate on behalf of…” yadda yadda), “sharp-tongued”, “Harvard-Educated”, and the like.

If he’d been a Republican, I’d have looked for adjectives more like “Controversial”, “stridently partisan”, and maybe “gaffe-prone”.   More to the point?  A “sharp-tongued” Republican would be “contibuting to the nasty partisanship” around the Capitol.

But he’s a DFLer in Minnesota.   He was just a character, one that the reporters could always get a cutesy quote from.

Ryan Winkler is the poster child for the Minnesota media’s double standard.

They Know What Matters

Twin Cities’ media all atwitter over over a candidate – GOP, naturally – allegedly hanky-pankying with a realtor.

It’s NEWS, dammit!

Unlike Governor Dayton’s mental health, Rep. Ryan Winkler’s racism, Senator Sandy Pappas’ support for terrorists, Rep. Phyllis Kahn’s attempts at voter suppression (no, not in DFL terms, the real one), the extremely cozy relationship between Governor Dayton and his ex-wife’s attack-PR firm, to say nothing of complicated stuff like the effect DFL tax and wage policy is having on business and jobs around Minnesota.

Nothing to see there.  Move along, peasants.

Because There Aren’t Enough Unemployed Blacks, Latinos And Immigrants In Minneapolis

Minneapolis is now talking about following Seattle’s “lead” in raising the minimum wage to $15/hour.

Council member Alondra Cano tells us she’s working with the U.S. Department of Labor to get a sense of the legal challenges the city could face if officials try to follow Seattle’s lead and raise the minimum wage within its borders.

What do you call three people without a single honest clue about economics between them? I dunno, but this pic says a thousand words. Jacob Frey (Annoying DFL Hipster, South Mpls), Ryan “Uncle Tom” Winkler (Smug Volvocrat, Saint Louis Park) and Alondra Cano (union puppet, Minneapols) grinning at the thought of more unemployed black, Latino and immigrant youth to demigogue.

 

“My office and myself and my constituents are very supportive of the efforts of fast food workers,” Cano tells us. “We’re very happy that a handful of council members are very interested in this topic. There’s a lot of political interest in this, I think people feel that it’s the morally right thing to do, and the right time to do it.”

The most annoying part?  They know it’s a dumb idea. Well, not in as many words – but read this next bit and tell me there isn’t  an “and then a Miracle happens” tucked away here:

But Cano acknowledges that the context in Minneapolis is different than it is in Seattle, where earlier this summer the city council voted to gradually increase the minimum wage in the city to $15 an hour. “Minneapolis is a very competitive and connected environment where if we make any moves that would discourage companies from doing business here, they could move to St. Louis Park, Bloomington, or St. Paul,” Cano says. “Seattle is a hub of the local economy, a lot of companies are locked in and anchored there, so the real question is how do we ensure that people in Minneapolis benefit from this move? If we do this, how many of these jobs would stay in Minneapolis and benefit residents? At this point we’re doing a lot of research.”

They’re doing a “lot of research”.  All of it political.  None of it economical. It’s a payback to the public employee unions, perched on the backs of black, latino and immigrant Minneapolitans.  Who the DFL just knows aren ‘t voting for anyone else…

Attention, Minimum Wage Activists

The free market is providing small business with all sorts of alternatives to “being forced to pay more for something” – in this case, minimum marketable skill – “than they would normally pay”.  In this case, a coffee shop that operates entirely on the honor system

Would it work in, say, Minneapolis?  Of course not.

But could the idea put some people out of work – people who haven’t yet developed a skill worth $8-9 an hour – in places like Watertown?  Mazeppa?  Albert Lea?

Say “Thanks, Uncle Ryan Winkler!”

Ryan Winkler’s War On Women

In the past, I’ve “joked” that anyone with an Ivy League degree should be disqualified from “public service”. 

It’s a “joke” – I keep using the scare quotes, because it’s only barely a joke – because over-educated fools have First Amendment rights, too. 

But to paraphrase Dennis Prager, it takes years of the “finest” education this country offers to make someone as ill-informed as Representative Ryan Winkler, who represents west-metro Saint Louis Park.

Winkler – known to many on and off Capitol Hill as “The Eddie Haskell Of The Legislature” – rocketed to national fame last year by calling Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom”, after which the Harvard-educated legislator pled ignorance that it was considered a racist insult. 

This week?  Big strong Harvard lawyer Ryan Winkler needs to tell those dumb widdle wimmins who watch babies and change bedpans all day how to run their businesses.  This from Twitter on Monday, in re the SCOTUS decision on childcare provider unionization:

@RepRyanWinkler: Union organizing is our best hope for equal pay for women and creating living wage jobs. Five activists on the Supreme Court can’t stop it.

Bear in mind, Winkler is speaking about unionizing daycare and home care providers – people (largely but not entirely women) who have created their own living wage jobs,with pay that varies but is enough to keep a lot of people doing the work for years and years; nobody gets drafted into the daycare business, right? 

Our friend Nancy LaRoche – chair of the 5th CD GOP – took at whack at Winkler’s reasoning.  

In response, Winkler puts on his best Roger Stirling impression in showing those dumb broads their place (emphasis added):

@RepRyanWinkler: @nwlaroche Unions raise wages. Dues are a small fraction of the financial benefit unions provide. Childcare activists are foolish.

I’ll just let that quote rattle around on its own for a bit.  “Childcare activists are foolish”, says the Harvard-trained lawyer. 

Of course, I sat through those hearings, and talked with those providers; the unions provide no “benefit” to providers whatsoever

They don’t “negotiate for better salaries” for the workers, because the workers are contractors working directly for families and patients.  There will be no union rep sitting in on the meetings between parents and the daycare providers!

They don’t “provide” any “training” for the providers that they’re not required by state law to provide themselves already to keep their licenses.

They don’t deal with work conditions, because those are already part of their state licensing conditions. 

In short, Winkler is either utterly ignorant, or lying. 

He also replied to a shot from MNGOP chair Keith Downey:

@RepRyanWinkler: @KeithSDowney Nobody is forcing anybody to unionize. Why do you oppose letting child care providers vote on whether to collectively bargain?

Because it won’t just be “child care providers?”  Because the unions have been organizing ringers, people who aren’t licensed providers but who will vote to unionize.   All the DFL’s talk about “letting providers vote” is a sham.  Again – either Winkler is ignorant, or he’s lying.

And again to LaRoche

@RepRyanWinkler: @nwlaroche Nothing stops them from running their business, they get to decide on and run a union, and negotiate higher rates. Good deal.

 They already negotiate their rates (and they’re already high; Minnesota has some of the highest daycare costs in the country).  They don’t get to “run” any union; Javier Morillo (of AFSCME) and Elliot Seid (of the SEIU) do.  And while they will have nothing to do with “negotiating” the “rates” that the providers charge, they will be right there collecting those dues, and kicking $2 million a year of them back to the DFL, with Ryan Winkler being a recipient. 

Winkler and the DFL expect you, the voter, especially the female voter who is most likely to be working in home daycare or personal care, are too stupid to know any better. 

On the one hand?  It’s just Eddie Haskell Ryan Winkler.  Nobody who’s political brain isn’t on autopilot – like, apparently, the DFL voters in his district – takes him all that seriously. 

But of the autopilot set?  Winkler is clearly being groomed by the DFL for bigger and better things (or was, until the “Uncle Tom” flap – and the media has buried that story effectively enough for the DFL to start easing Winkler back into the spotlight).

But does the DFL want to identify with this sort of paternalistic sexism? 

I gave myself a chuckle, there.  All sins are forgiven the DFL True Believer. 

Unionization will create not one single daycare job; it will raise no personal care attendant’s pay; it will improve not a single working care provider’s working conditions. Not one.

Walter Hudson smacks Winkler down good.

ABM Flies Above That Circling Fin

SCENE:  In the office of “Governor” Mark Dayton, at the Minnesota State Capital.  Carrie LUCKING, Executive Director of “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, is sitting at a large, mahogany desk.  She is leaning back, feet up on the desk, looking idly upward at the paintings and carvings that decorate the ornate office in the classical romanesque structure. 

Across from her is a larger, more ornate mahogany desk.  The nameplate says “Alida Messinger”; it shows signs of being only intermittently occupied. 

A knock is heard on a door leading to a small closet (off right).  LUCKING barely stirs. 

LUCKING:  What?

GOVERNOR MARK DAYTON (dimly heard through door):  Can I go to the bathroom?

LUCKING:  Go.

(DAYTON opens closet door, walked quickly, shoulders hunched through the door to the left, as Hannah UNDERLING, a staff assistant, walks in)

UNDERLING:  Er, Miss Lucking?  House Minority Leader Daudt is calling for hearings on MNSure.

LUCKING:  Put out a press release calling him “extreme”.

(UNDERLING makes a note). 

That’ll be all. 

(UNDERLING leaves). 

(Time passes.  LUCKING indolently pecks a message into her cell phone, until T. Giles HUMID, a highly trained puppeteer and member of the Governor’s staff, enters the room).

HUMID:  Er, Carrie…

(LUCKING clears her throat)

HUMID:  …er, Miss Lucking?  A group of of Saint Paul school parents are demanding better results from the public schools for their children.

LUCKING (staring idly at the ceiling, twisting her hair):  Put out a call to Keri Miller saying they’re…extreme. 

(HUMID takes a  note, leaves the room).

(There is a knock on the door).

LUCKING:  What?

GOVERNOR DAYTON (voice muffled outside the door):  Can I come in?

LUCKING (Bored):  Yes. 

(DAYTON walks past, stops at LUCKING’s desk)

DAYTON:  Say, uh…

LUCKING:  I’m busy.

DAYTON:  Ok.  (He walks through the closet door again)

(LUCKING, bored, starts folding an origami swan.  It quickly starts resembling a badly-formed paper airplane.  She wads it up and throws it in a trash can that is overflowing with wadded-up pieces of paper)

(Tina FLINT-SMITH, the Governor’s chief of staff and Lieutenant-Governor candidate, enters the room)

FLINT-SMITH:  Carrie, I’m going to be out at a town hall meeting in Cambridge, and I need a term to use to refer to the GOP’s criticism of our budget.

LUCKING:  I’d run with “extreme”.

FLINT-SMITH:  Um…OK.  Do we use that a lot?

LUCKING:  No.

FLINT-SMITH:  Um…OK.  (Leaves the room). 

(More idle time).

(Finally, UNDERLING enters).

UNDERLING:  Ms. Lucking, I got a request from some DFLers from Greater Minnesota.  They need some talking points during upcoming debates.

LUCKING (sounding bored):  DFLers from where?

UNDERLING:  Um, Greater Minnesota?  (LUCKING stares, not compreheding.)  The part outside the Twin Cities Metro.

LUCKING:  Huh.

UNDERLING:  They want to know – what do we call Sheila Kihne?

LUCKING:  Er…hm.  Let me think.  I’d say “too extreme!”

UNDERLING: OK.  How about Jennifer Loon?  The rep whom Kihne is primarying? 

LUCKING:  I think we should call her…too extreme!

UNDERLING (sotto voce while writing): …too extreme.  OK – how about Dave Senjem, from Rochester, the leader of the “moderate” faction of the GOP in the House?

LUCKING (absent-mindedly twirling a piece of thread):  Oh, he’s “too extreme”. 

UNDERLING:  Hmm.  OK.  How about Julie Rosen?   Republicans are constantly complaining she’s too moderate.  What is the message about here?

LUCKING (staring into space):  Too extreme. 

UNDERLING:  And how about Tom Bakk.

LUCKING (visibly bored):  Too extreme. 

UNDERLING:  But he’s actually the DFL’s Senate Majority Leader.

LUCKING:  Oh.

(Ryan WINKLER walks in)

WINKLER: Hey, I was talking with Colin Peterson. He’s getting a run for his money from Torrey Westrom. How’s about we call him “shortsighted”?

UNDERLING: Really?

WINKLER: What?  You’re gonna say that’s racist, too? 

UNDERLING:  You don’t know…?

WINKLER:  What?  He’s a black lawyer, too? 

UNDERLING:  He’s blind. 

WINKLER:  I don’t get it. 

LUCKING:  He’s too extreme.

UNDERLING:  Right…

LUCKING:  But we must counter him as well.  (Turns toward DAYTON’s closet)  Hey!   Find some Ray Charles glasses and a long white cane!

(Silence from behind DAYTON’s door)

LUCKING:  HEY!

DAYTON:  Ok. 

(And SCENE)

The Hypocrisy Record Books

1988:  Carl Rowan, the WaPo columnist with a long record of vicious attacks on the idea of civilian gun ownership, shoots at a teenager who was in his swimming pool.

2012:  Barack Obama, while claiming the GOP is fighting a “War on Women”, pays his female employees much less than his male staff.

2013:  DFL rep Ryan “Eddie Haskell” Winkler, who routinely attacks the integrity of his opponents on issues of race, calls accomplished jurist Clarence Thomas “Uncle Tom”.

2014:  Media Matters, a George Soros-funded attack-PR firm which has spent years railing against “Right to Work” laws nationwide, brings in the big guns as SEIU tries to unionize MM4A’s underpaid drudge-workers:

Media Matters has retained a law firm whose focus is representing management in labor disputes. It’s forcing its employees into a secret-ballot election, which is the kind of vote card-check proponents like the good folks at Media Matters decry whenever Republicans insist it’s important to maintain.

But the year is still young!

Confronting The History Thief

Question: will the media force Elizabeth Warren – putatively the Democrat second choice after Hillary! – to meet with Cherokee women who’d like to talk with her about her phony claim to being a member of their tribe?

And profiting from it?

(Answer: Sure they will.  When they get done holding Ryan Winkler accountable for turning a SCOTUS justice into Stepin Fetchit).

One Of The “Meta” Tribe

Jon Stewart has his moments – but I’ve never, not once, thought the “Colbert Report” was funny. 

I know – he’s basically satirizing Bill O’Reilly, and that’s something that desperately needs to be done well.  Colbert isn’t it. 

Yesterday, Colbert got into trouble for a “racist” shot at Asian-Americans, exhaustively documented at “The Twitchy“. 

Here was the original tweet:

The worst part is that he and (worst of all) his defenders will say “It wasn’t really Colbert! He was acting the way a conservative host on Faux News, har di har, would act!”.

Except that Colbert and Ryan Winker and Maxine Waters do act that way.  And it’s happening more and more lately – to the point that the lefty noise machine is spending more and more time digging back to find objectionable japes on the right.  The other day, some lefty bobblehead on Twitter tried to tie gun owners to a remark Ted Nugent made…

…in 1990. 

Sorry, guys.  After you’ve dealt with Ryan WInkler in 2013, we’ll talk about Ted Nugent back during the George HW Bush administration.

The Real Problem

Clarence Thomas notes that it’s the white liberals that, in modern times, are the racists, stupid:

The worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, [were] by northern liberal elites, not by the people of Savannah, Georgia,” [said Justice Thomas].  “My sadness is that we are probably today more race and difference-conscious that I was in the 1960s when I went to school,” he said, the Daily Mail reported. “To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah, Georgia, to go to a white school. Rarely did the issue of race come up.”“Differences in race, differences in sex. Somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah. Every person in this room has endured a slight. Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them — left them out. That’s a part of the deal.”

You’ll note that Thomas hasn’t filed a hate crimes lawsuit against Representative Ryan “Uncle Tom” Winkler – or indeed, mentioned the snarkly little fella at all.

Doakes Sunday: I Cried Because I Had No Shoes…No, Wait…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Wendy Davis is running for Governor of Texas.  She’s been trying to play the victim card – grew up poor, lived in a trailer house, worked her way through college and law school, husband left her – but it’s not working.

Turns out she lived in a trailer for about three months, her husband put her through college and Harvard Law School and she divorced him (and he got custody of the kids in a state like Texas, which tells you a lot about her).

Latest thing – she complains that her opponent doesn’t understand what it’s like to overcome adversity.  He hasn’t walked a mile in her shoes.  And now that she’s a candidate, he’s running scared.

The guy’s in a wheelchair.

Reminds me of the other runners complaining that Oscar Pistorius had an unfair advantage because hisaluminum legs didn’t tire.  Excuse Me, The Man Has No Blinking Legs!  And YOU think YOU are the victim here?  Unbelievable.

For Harvard-lawyer Wendy Davis to play the Victim card against a man in a wheelchair, leaves me with just one question:  Why do Democrats hate cripples?

Joe Doakes

 In a year when the two most prominent Harvard Law grads are Ryan “Uncle Tom” Winkler and Wendy “Abortion Barbie” Davis, I think HarvLaw needs to work on its PR.

Worse Than The Problem

Minnesota – the state of 10,000 “progressive” advocacy groups.

And some of those advocacy groups run some very slick, polished, professional PR efforts.  Or – like the Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota, or “Protect” Minnesota –  at least loud and well-funded ones.

And then there’s the Douglas County DFL. 

The DugCo DFL runs a twitter feed that’s always a useful barometer for whatever the left end of the DFL’s intellectual bell curve is “thinking” has been told by the people paid to do their thinking for them. . 

This went out on Twitter the other day:

@dc4DFL: Australia has a Minimum Wage of $16.88 per hour. Minnesota needs to seriously raise ours. #mnleg #stribpol

Wow.  “Seriously”.  That sounds like quite the imperative.

So let’s compare and contrast.

The unemployment rate for Minnesotans aged 16-24 is 11 percent.  Note that in Minnesota (and most of the US), full-time students aren’t considered “in the labor market” in the same sense as someone working for a full-time living. 

And in Australia?   It’s 19% “not fully engaged” (neither working nor studying full-time).  And if you compare apples to apples – drop full-time students from the “work force” – then close to a third of Australians between the ages of 15-24 are neither working nor studying full time. It’s a little under a third if you count only Australians from 20-24. 

Bear in mind (and I say this more for the benefit of people who’d read what the DugCo DFL says seriously than for most of this blog’s audience) Australia’s economy isn’t currently mired in one of the most dismal recessions in their history.  Their growth was hit by the global financial crisis over the past six years – but not like ours. 

So – even in a relatively healthy economy, Australia’s unemployment and underemployment among younger, lower-skilled workers is much higher than in Minnesota. 

Of course, Australia’s high minimum wage is one of the products of the Labour government…

…that was just tossed at the polls two months ago.  While I saw no evidence that the minimum wage was a pivotal issue, an artificially high minimum wage is part and parcel of the whole raft of “progressive” policies that stagnate economies. 

Uncle Ryan Winkler might want to find himself some smarter stenographers.

The Sexist “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”

The party that stood four-square behind Representative Ryan Winkler for calling Justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom“…

…has the vapors over two of the most innocuous jokes…

Nov. 16, 2012: “Poor Susan Rice. She’s the first woman in Washington to get in more trouble opening her mouth for a president than Monica Lewinsky.”

Nov. 18, 2012: “I keep hearing about this fantasy football thing. I don’t get it. My idea of fantasy football is where I am the quarterback and Angela Jolie is the center.”

They’re from Craig “Captain Fishsticks” Westover, an advisor to MNGOP gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson.  And the first one is accurate to a journalistic fault.

And, uh, note the dates.

So they – in this case, “Sam Jasenosky”, who would seem to be an undergrad journalism major (what else) – have been reduced to digging through advisors’ twitter feeds for any sign of political incorrectness to be tortured out of context.

I can hardly wait to see the ABM TV ad next year.

Here’s the fun part, though; ABM are the real sexists:  from yesterday’s post about the GOP candidates:

Julianne Ortman: A genie.

And lest the reader mentally compare Ortman – graduate of U Penn law school and a former adjunct professor George Washington U  to the “Djinn” of Arab mythology, they helpfully included video of Barbara Eden playing a jiggly, bubbleheaded blond piece of eye candy:

 

Because when you’re a Democrat, it’s only sexism if you’re one of the bad guys.

And because that’s what female conservatives are to Carrie Lucking’s little troupe of howler monkeys.

If Paul Wellstone really had all the integrity people said he did, he’d puke.

Winkler Karaoke: “Making Bipartisanship Out Of Nothing At All”

Ryan Winkler (DFL St. Louis Park) is beating the bushes around Minnesota to try to gin up a push for a massive hike in the minimum wage (and cobble together some positive name recognition to try to rescue his rumored ambition to run for Secretary of State after the avalanche of negative publicity he got by calling Justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom” over the summer).

Now, Winkler is from a solid blue district.  He can demand a minimum wage of $20 an hour, and the voters in Saint Louis Park and most of CD5 will applaud and stomp their feet and send him back to Saint Paul with 20 point margins of victory.  Such is life. 

But outstate?  In parts of Minnesota with functioning two-party systems, where the majority don’t work for government?  Especially in parts of the state represented by extremely weak DFLers like Ben Lien?

Winkler, one of the most extreme demigogues in the entire Legislature, needs to try to appear “bipartisan”.

This video was shot by a Winkler staffer at a town hall in Moorhead recently.

So at the start, he says the support for his $9/50/hour minimum wage proposal from a House Select Committee on the minimum wage  is “bipartisan”.

Around the 90 second mark, a Town Hall attendee presses Winkler on the support his proposal is receiving – and whether the Republican members of the Select Committee on the Minimum Wage actually signed off on his presentation.

Winkler quickly answers “no” before moving right along.

No wonder why.  Here’s the presentation Winkler’s making:

Rep Winkler’s Living Wage Presentation

That it’s full of lefty puffery and junk stats about the minimum wage is no surprise.

But forget about the actual facts for a moment. 

Why would Winkler claim “bipartisan support?”  This would lmean the Republicans on the Select Committee –  Representatives Jenifer Loon, Pat Garofalo and Andrea Kieffer – supported his stance, and the points on his presentation.

Sources say Winkler’s repeating the claim at other town hall meetings where – unlike the Moorhead meeting in the video – nobody’s pressing him on the claim.

Pat Garofalo has spoken against Winkler’s proposal in the House.  I talked with Rep. Garofalo – he opposes the $9.50 minimum wage, and has not changed his mind one iota. 

And a source close to Representative Loon tells me that not only does Loon not support the $9.50 minimum wage, but that the DFL, possibly including some DFL members of the Select Committee, might not entirely support Winkler. 

Finally, I talked with Representative Kieffer.  She does not support Winkler’s proposal, and does not approve of the points in the presentation. She’s even written an op-ed on the subject, which has circulated to some local newspapers around the state; it’s below the jump.  It flenses Winkler’s claims about the minimum wage in general.

But here’s the money quote from Kieffer in re the “bipartisanship” of Winkler’s support:

First and foremost, the implication that there is “bipartisan” support for his presentation is disingenuous. During meetings that I attend, I consistently voice my concerns to the data presented, ask for more specifics, and maintain that the committee is focusing on the wrong part of the economic picture.

And Kieffer is right.

So why is Ryan Winkler misrepresenting the Select Committee’s position as “bipartisan” support for his proposal around greater Minnesota, when not only are the Republicans not on board, but even the DFL has qualms?

It’s not bipartisan.  It’s not even entirely monopartisan! 

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The Uncommonly Awful Common Core

I’ve been doing radio for a while.  I’ve interviewed a lot of people – Senators, Congresspeople, State Legislators, Governors, candidates for all of the above, Miss Minnesotas, authors, public intellectuals, fake intellectuals, Princesses Kay of the Milky Way, plate-throwers, journalists, bloggers, athletes, coaches – you get the picture.

And almost every time when I walk into an interview, I know more or less what I’m going to hear. 

Now, I don’t normally do a ton of interview prep.  I like to approach a subject from the same perspective that the audience has, from a complete white slate; it’s one of the best bits of interviewing advice Larry King ever gave.  That being said, I’m rarely surprised by what I hear in an interview.  I blog a lot, so I’ve had my mind on a lot of different subjects over the past 12 years. 

But last Saturday was a huge exception.  During the second hour on the NARN, I interviewed Linda Bell and Kirsten Block, from Minnesotans Against Common Core

Now, I figured I was going to hear more talk about national standards.  I oppose them, by the way – I don’t think the federal government should be telling the nation how to educate its children. 

But it’s worse than that.  In fact, it’s so much worse that for one of very, very few times in all of my years of interviewing people, I was actually dumbfounded by what I was hearing.  It was so much worse than I – a cynic who expects nothing good from our national education system – expected that I was nearly speechless. 

Standardized Poltroonery:  If you listen to some of the GOP’s talking heads who’ve come out in support of Common Core, you might think that’s the extent of it; the idea that a national set of standards will help ensure that our children all get a better education (because that worked so well with “No Child Left Behind”).

It’s wrong, of course.  When you nationalize standards, you accede to having them set via a political process, and political processes don’t work any better for allocating expectations in education than they do for allocating resources in an economy. 

That, alone, is reason to fight the Common Core. 

But it gets so much worse than that.

Orwellian:  Indeed, very little about the “Common Core” has much of anything to do with “Core” educational subjects at all. 

From the Fact Sheet at MACC’s website:

  • It’s unconscionably intrusive: National student database – over 400+ data points collected (at a minimum – and likely many more).  Medical Histories?  Religion?  Guns in the house?  Bureaucrats’ impressions of your family life, gathered from mandatory home visits?  On top of the Obamacare Health Insurance Exchanges, the NSA will be the least of most of our privacy concerns. 
  • We’re From Washington, And We’re Here To Get You To Shut The F*** Up:  the program is mandated by the feds.  Parental control? Parental input?  Dream on, peasant. 
  • Richard Trumka Has Always Been A Great Man!:  The curriculae for Common Core programs will be written by bureaucrats – not teachers.  And not just the curriculum specialists who clog your local school systems today – the ones in Washington.  Or the ones that work for the big textbook companies.  Pardon the redundancy. 
  • Shakespeare Out; Ginsburg In:  Western literature will be greatly de-emphasized. 
  • Ryan WInkler Won’t Be The Only Innumerate State Rep:  The math standards are a disaster. 
  • Teaching To The Test Didn’t Work.  Let’s Do More:  One of the worst traits of No Child Left Behind was that it gradually drove teachers and schools to “Teach to the Test” – since the tests were the measure of achievement.  Common Core will be worse – and thus, so will your kids education. 
  • We Had To Pass It To Know What Was In It:  The State of Minnesota’s version of Common Core was adopted by the bureaucracy when the state wanted the federal money that comes with it, four years ago.  Neither Congress nor the Legislature had the foggiest clue what was in it.  They still largely don’t – which is why you see people like Jeb Bush supporting it.

Any school, public, private, charter or home, that gets any shred of federal assistance will be subject to the rules.

Common Core is an abomination, and needs to be repealed. 

I’m a small fish in a small pond – but I will actively work against any and all politicians who don’t condemn and work to repeal the Common Core as it is currently slated for implementation; with the intrusions, the lack of local involvement, the continued centralization of public education (and private and home-schooled education, as well. 

Whatever their party.

Our Innumerate Overlords

When Representative Ryan Winkler talks, people listen.

And then the smart people snicker.

He tweeted this yesterday:

Of course, he had the point of the op-ed all wrong.  Read it for yourself.

The point is that low wages aren’t the sole cause of poverty.  In the great scheme of things, they aren’t even especially important, in and of themselves.

Much more important?  When there is no opportunity to earn higher wages.

How does that happen?

To further address the point, though, I’d like to ask Rep. Winkler (or his defenders) this question:  at what minimum wage hourly rate will poverty disappear?

Put a number on it.

That’s the question I’d like to ask.  In fact, I asked it.

Hopefully we’ll see an answer.

I’m sure we will.

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Narrowly Focused Diversity

The US Senate has one black member – Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Naturally, he wasn’t invited to yesterday’s 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech:

“Senator Scott was not invited to speak at the event,” Greg Blair, a spokesman for the South Carolina lawmaker, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The senator believes today is a day to remember the extraordinary accomplishments and sacrifices of Dr. King, Congressman John Lewis, and an entire generation of black leaders. Today’s anniversary should simply serve as an opportunity to reflect upon how their actions moved our country forward in a remarkable way.”

The event organizers didn’t completely exclude Republicans from the event — former President George W. Bush, for instance, received an invitation, but he couldn’t attend as he is recovering from surgery — but the slate of speakers was filled with names such as former President Clinton, Gov. Martin O’Malley, D-Md., Oprah Winfrey, Jamie Foxx and others.

Showing the lefties a white Republican doesn’t violate the narrative.

A SCOTUS justice?  A Senator like Scott elected the hard way (wonder if Ryan WInkler thinks he’s an “Uncle Tom?)?  A black conservative woman like Condi Rice?

That violates the narrative.

Minnesota Political Haikus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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